Planning Commission Work Session   1/24/2023

As if that's a bad thing?

Yes, okay, cool.

Someone sent an email to, like, five of us, and the one that was addressed to him was khebab at charlottesville.gov, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.

Apologies.

Hello, everyone.

No one steps somewhere.

He's very angry at me.

Yeah, so as we were noting, one planning commissioner, and there he is.

I'm sure he will get here as soon as he can.

Let's see.

Do I have a bit to start us off?

Welcome, everyone.

Thank you for coming.

I got a letter from you.

I got a letter from you, Mr. Freeze.

Yes.

Yes.

The letter, I was, I don't remember.

Memo, got it.

All right.

Good evening, everybody.

So first off, I know we are trying out a new room set up.

We thought we'd try this just to be more of a conversational environment.

Staff here at the table, you guys facing each other, see how it works in terms of work sessions.

So let us know your feelings after the meeting.

So this evening we have three items.

We're aiming for one hour apiece, critical slopes, floodplain ordinance, and entrance corridor design review.

For the first and last item, critical slopes and ERV, this is our second time discussing these items within the context of the zoning rewrite.

We also spoke about these back at the beginning of August, and based on the feedback of those meetings and what we've heard from the general public,

and staff discussions.

We're bringing back some additional thoughts for your feedback and guidance as we prepare drafting of the next module, the development standards module, where these things will come into play.

So we're not aiming to make any decisions on these items tonight.

We're really, again, looking for you guys' feedback.

And I'd refer you to the three questions I posed at the end of the memo, in particular, that question around

Is there additional data or information that we can provide that will help as we move into assessing actual draft ordinance language later on?

Just in terms of updates and process, we are still anticipating release of Module 1 by the end of next week.

So that, again, is the zoning districts, the zoning map, the land use table, those items.

At that point, I'm just going to pause.

So the deliverable for tonight is just a conversation.

Just a chat about these things.

So the next thing you guys will see will be actual draft ordinance language, which we would be discussing at your work session at the end of March?

Am I getting that date right?

Module 2 is end of March, right?

So that's where we are in the process.

and what I didn't notice.

So floodplain is not something we've talked about in the context of zoning rewrite in the past.

It's an issue of interest both on commission and in the public and something that staff has been looking at in the context of some other planning work.

So we're bringing that forward for you guys as well tonight.

So that's everything I got for context.

Good?

All right.

So I'm going to dive into critical slopes.

I hope everyone had a chance to read the memo.

So I'm generally not going to repeat what's in the memo.

I'm just going to kind of build off of there.

But generally, as you guys are very familiar, the critical slope ordinance prevents disturbance of certain steeply sloped areas, except by a waiver that is granted by a city council, often accompanied by a set of conditions.

The initial proposal from the zoning approach report that was issued back in June suggested that we were going to roll the critical slopes provisions into our general water protection ordinances and make them more of an administrative review with a set of associated standards.

But based on feedback we got from you all in August and what we've heard otherwise, we started revisiting.

We had some discussions among staff and are proposing to revisit that approach.

As we've dug into these questions, looked at what analysis might be necessary to look at this issue and assess the level of potential interest and therefore the amount of community engagement that would be necessary to move forward with this stuff,

We're proposing at this point a two-phase approach where we would tweak the existing critical slope program but largely leave it intact as it exists today and then look ahead to a larger, more comprehensive look at our environmental regulations for kind of a separate project following the zoning rewrite.

In terms of tweaking it, we'd be looking at retaining it, but also simplifying and clarifying what's there today.

And then for the long term, looking at something that might likely include the concept of looking at expanding our stream buffer program from what it is today.

Two.

Three.

Three streams.

Yeah.

Meadow, Morris, Rivanna.

Yeah, everyone can catch those.

All right.

So when I look back at the ordinance, I'm sorry, in the memo that I wrote, I identified five general issues that we've identified with the Critical Slopes Ordinance.

I think number one and five are pretty self-explanatory as written, but I'm happy to dive into those as you like.

I'm content to let you finish.

Why don't I just run through this.

I'm not intending to talk for a long time.

I want to get into discussion.

So the fifth item is just clarifying some discrepancies between the subdivision ordinance and zoning ordinance with regard to critical slopes.

But the real meat of it is in what I identified in that list as items two, three, and four.

So I'm going to talk about those in a little more detail.

So the first thing to understand when we look at the critical slopes ordinance is that the question that's being asked, the question of whether the land area on a given lot that is steeply sloped, that is defined as a critical slope, whether that's available for development, right?

That's an early threshold question that a developer needs to answer kind of at the beginning of their project as they understand what can they do with a given piece of property.

Then as one moves through the design and permitting process, they dig in deeper into the technical review, a lot of the things that we think of as coming up as part of the site plan review, stormwater questions and stuff like that.

So one of the challenges that we perceive within the critical slope ordinance is that it kind of straddles both of those worlds, right?

It's an initial threshold question.

in the opinion and the discretionary review of the Planning Commission City Council, is this portion of this lot available for development?

Should my design incorporate it?

But the answer to that question may be dependent on more technical questions, criteria that would come up later in my design process.

So that's kind of the first issue.

Then what comes right off of that then is,

What is, how do we, the decision to grant the waiver, right?

As it's built into the zone arts today, that is either a finding one or a finding two.

So if you remember finding two is the one that basically looks at the question of, there's essentially no choice but to use the critical slope area because otherwise there isn't a building site available on the property.

Effectively a hardship standard, exactly right.

Finding number one is the one where we're asking a balancing question, right?

Does some form of public benefit of developing that site outweigh the inherent public benefit of the critical slope as it exists in its undisturbed state?

So in practice, my observation, and I think those others of staff who have been involved, is that oftentimes we've taken into account the broader public benefits of a proposed project, right?

the provision of a fire station or affordable housing and the like.

In reading the ordinance though, the ordinance, while not perfectly clear on this point, seems to be pointing us in the direction of that we really should be comparing the environmental benefits of the proposed project against the environmental benefits of the slope as it exists today.

And so one of the areas really we need clarity on is which of those two are we aiming at?

When I look at it, honestly, there's also the potential of there being a little bit of both, right?

So we come back to the question of where in the process this is occurring, it's occurring at the beginning.

We can also look at this from the perspective of saying

the proposed benefit of this, whatever it is, the proposed use outweighs, but what we want to do at that point is look at in comparison to the specific environmental benefits of the specific slope in question.

understanding that not all critical slopes are created equal.

And that's where the value of a discretionary view potentially comes into play, right?

Is this an intact forested slope stretching down to the Ravana River?

Or is it a man-made slope in the middle of a site with, you know, parking and an otherwise disturbed site on either side of it, right?

So I guess what I'm suggesting is one

when we look at weighing this, weighing it in that way might be an answer that kind of splits that difference particularly if we then also have a standard set of requirements that could be attached to a critical slope related to those technical items that I talked about that come later in the design process.

Can I ask a really high level question?

I am basically at the end.

Sure.

It's sort of on that point.

What is special about a critical slope of 25% or more that is different from an area near Shreem that is not as sloped, like 20% grade?

Is it...

do you want?

Sure.

So depending on what guidance material you look at when it comes to responsible site design, there's always you should avoid steep slopes because of the added threat of sediment control if it's not properly done.

I can't tell you the difference.

You just identified it.

It's 5%.

One's 20%.

One's 25%.

To me,

What's always confused me is the, I don't have a city come in front of me, but it says something along those outweigh the environmental benefits of this critical slope.

We don't have like cliff dwelling bats or anything like that that live in critical slopes, so I've never understood implicitly what that was, which is probably why a lot of our conversations we've had many times go towards construction, which goes to the next order of operations.

So very generally, very, very generally,

It's more valuable to have forest along the river at 19% than it is to have an arbitrary hill somewhere else that's not near the river at 27%.

Very general.

Yeah.

I mean, as far as where that line is drawn, you have to draw the line somewhere.

So we're really thinking about the danger of disturbing the slope and not

I think that's where maybe the two things crossed because when in the practical aspect of it when we come before you with these things is protecting the slope from a road zone patrol standpoint but the

What describes the critical slopes that we're talking about is it's got to be within 200 feet of a water body, greater than 25 percent, and contiguous.

So if it's contiguous, you can have critical slopes that's 1,200 feet from the water body as long as that stretches down to the water body.

So we're not, again, I think the code is written to protect the environmental

And that's not to say that the, there's an ancillary benefit to protecting critical slopes that arrives from, you know, that when you protect those slopes you're also picking up trees, habitat area and those types of things.

Well, but it doesn't exist anymore on slopes than on flat places.

Right.

And so that's part of the reason when we were discussing what's the next step and this idea of a more comprehensive look at our environmental regulations, particularly those in relation to water quality in our streams and rivers.

We think a buffer ordinance explicitly would be protecting habitat value along the waterway regardless of the slope of that land.

Okay.

To that end, about your 25 percent, depending on what documents you look at, 15 is thrown out there, 20, 25, these are advisory slips.

25 is about the least steep you get before people have concerns with it.

But, and similarly, a lot of places that have, and this is not in Virginia, this is general practice, that have stream buffer protections, they're usually extended if they're adjacent to the slope.

And so that's how you capture it because that does link the two together.

You're having erosion into a sensitive area.

Have you said your business?

Let's go around just to get where people are on this.

If you would let me digress just a little bit.

The last couple of critical slope reviews we did didn't have the usual technical guidance in them, so we had to make the decision based on our fire station process.

We had to make a decision based on our belief that the need to disturb that critical slope was outweighed by the public need to have a new fire station in place.

And I forget what the other one was, but there was another one like that, and we had to make the decision about the benefit of the guidance from the engineers and the benefit of the mitigation, these critical slope disturbance mitigation

advice that we get from the typical staff court.

So I'm going to just push back a little bit and say that

It was not clearly specific.

The mitigation suggestions that are typically in the staff report were not in the fire report, and it was not in the

The kinds of things that Jack and the engineers typically suggest we do to protect against drainage and to protect against erosion and things like that, that wasn't there.

That's actually the point I was maybe not making as clearly as possible around that decision of the land use decision versus the technical analysis.

The work

that Jack does in terms of looking at the proposed stormwater mitigation erosion is all stuff that happens during the site plan review process today, right, which is later in the process.

That's a point Jack has made over again.

So if we, again, the fire station is going to happen, but yes, use that as an example.

Yeah, I might let you answer that specifically.

Sure.

Yes.

This is all very complicated.

But if you were to submit a preliminary plan requesting this, regardless of whether you all approve it or not, well, you'd have to approve it to get to us.

And they submit a final plan.

We, whether it's in critical slopes or not, apply state regulations to that plan.

And so it was confusing for me under the old method was a lot of times we present you with this.

I mean, it's a waiver process, right?

The idea is that you're not supposed to be able to build on this.

It's restricted.

So if you're doing a waiver, it felt to me as a lot of times we were providing waivers because I was providing assurances that we were going to do these things.

That's complicated because we do that for every project, right?

So why have this extra thing if, you know, I could tell you the developers think we're doing a good job by the rate that they complain about all of our inspections and everything else.

So the question becomes,

It's sort of a process issue because we can't, we don't have the authority, our authority to enforce a road set patrol and storm our regulation comes from the state.

And so if we go beyond that we're supposed to have approval from the State Water Control Board to enforce those things.

So it got to be concerning to me to come in here and provide requirements above and beyond that outside of that process.

I don't know that there's there's you can you can call somebody say oh that's not in accordance to gray area it's and it's project by project but that's where it comes and for me I was kind of reading the code it was what the public benefit part is what confused me because we I'd come here and you guys say is this going to protect sediment and I'd say what I always say we always try to protect sediment and resources

and then it gets approved because I said we're going to do a good job and then it's confusing what is the public benefit we're providing right because it sounds like environmental public benefits is what the focus is that's my expertise I have as I've said before I don't have a metric to say three affordable units or one fire station is equivalent to some public benefit environmental benefit and so I think that a little bit got lost in translation which is why we shifted because of

NDS need to get a little more involved in weighing that public benefit and here we are still deciding is which is the question for you is and maybe you're not the appropriate people because it's already in city code but the question is what are we supposed to be doing what is the public benefit that we're addressing to clarify this process because what I'd rather do is tell them here's our concerns here's a condition or two of course we're going to apply that in the future and then they can roll that into

what we determine is the public benefit they're weighing that again.

I'll try to work with it.

The fire station would not have been approved had it not been for the greater public benefit.

but the greater overall public benefit.

So as we're trying to understand public benefit, I think we need to remember that South Brook Street would not have been approved had we not believed that that was for the greater public benefit.

Not the environmental public benefit, all the mitigation stuff, but because we need a more affordable housing,

We needed to help CHRA get that built and get the light to credits and we needed a new fire station so that we can get larger apparatuses in and out of it.

And to be clear on the fire station, and this is the other confusing thing that really goes more to the applicants.

They always say they, it says, we have an application that says address if you want to do finding one or finding two.

They always fill out both, which is weird because it's got to be one or the other.

Maybe it can be both.

They always fill out both.

and then there's the six conditions which aren't aimed at either one.

For the fire station they said finding two.

If you remember the critical sort of circled the fire station, I looked at it and said you can't do anything with this parcel of disturbing some of that.

And so I recommended to, I believe Dan or whoever the planner was, I concur with the applicant's findings under finding two, which I had never done before because nobody had clearly ever identified this was under finding two and we never had one that actually you couldn't access the property without disturbing Steve's loaves.

I want to not monopolize this, but I want to ask one more question, and then I think I should just let other people go.

Finding two.

Do we really need it?

Because finding one really helped.

Finding two, pretty much, unless we're looking at a takings issue, why does finding two even exist?

Because I think we should go back to the public benefit question because at the end of the day, granting a waiver like that should always be in the public benefit and not because a developer can't do something with the property without disturbing a critical slope and taking out a lot of trees and disturbing the streams.

I'm sorry, guys.

So, I'm going to open with a piggyback on Mr. Mitchell's question about public good.

And it occurs to me that, you know, we are, the context of the ordinance seems to, you know, they say not limited to basically environmental.

giving the very strong impression that we're talking about the world of environmental.

If we adjust this ordinance for a broader reading of the public good, whatever that means, how do we go about quantifying that and qualifying it and finding the quality of it?

Because it seems to me that that is...

that without something fairly robust, what we're essentially inviting developers to do is get an entire bus of trial lawyers to come roaring right down the middle of the downtown mall on this issue, right?

Because if we start saying no critical waiver for X and we have some sort of fuzzy about what the public good is, have we given thought?

Is there thought on

How do you quantify this?

Do we need to have an a priori scoring system in place that we can point to and defend?

What if that doesn't work and we all look at it and say, well, that doesn't work, we're not going to do it anyway?

So I'm going to start by saying that's a good question.

That's a good question, right?

But I'm also going to say, hey, that's part of our discretionary review process to begin with, right?

I mean, if we could quantify it exactly, then we could just put it straight in the ordinance and leave aside the need for a waiver.

So it comes with the task.

But it's not a free-for-all.

All of your decisions are based fundamentally on the comprehensive plan.

Actually, that's what you guys are looking to.

So do we memorialize that in the ordinance very deliberately in considering a waiver and we rewrite that from soup to nuts?

Potentially.

I'm just going to, if then, or if this condition then, I wouldn't want to get an if then statements because every site is going to be different.

And I think what we have to remember is what the ordinance is asking you to do is a comparative decision.

I think what we haven't done as much of to date is really assessing what is the value of the particular critical slope that is in play in this particular project.

Well, and I guess my question to that is, and you believe this in your remarks, is that making differentiations in these also adds to that.

And I certainly wouldn't be looking for a rigid metric, but just sort of some sort of guidance as to, okay, this is a, and not for sort of a general case, it's different, but we have a situation where

Well, this critical slope is awful, but we're building 600 affordable units on it.

But it's awful.

Well, I mean, the consequences of granting this waiver have secondary impacts, aesthetic, environmental, otherwise, but the Planning Commission and then Council decides, you know what, you know,

We're making an omelette here, there are going to be broken eggs and that's the way it's going to be.

The precedent question, right?

To what degree does each decision establish precedent?

And we defend ourselves by hiding behind the ordinance line which we need to.

But you also have the comprehensive plan to hide behind and say, you know, we identified very clearly in this comprehensive plan that affordable housing is a major priority.

If this project were

say just beating the bare minimum of our inclusionary zoning ordinance, you could very easily make the argument this is a high quality environment, it's not outweighed by an effectively standard development project in this location.

And one of the things also to be careful of is nothing about what we're talking about changes the fact that we can't attach a condition to a project that mandates additional affordable housing under critical slopes.

There's no rational nexus between

intrusion into an intact critical slope and the provision of affordable housing.

Because we don't have a handle to do that.

Then you get into the negotiation and you can't really do that.

But back to Mr. Mitchell's point, all right, not to argue with my example,

Boy, we've got to have a firehouse here.

We've got to do X to this critical slope.

And there's also, part of your decision is also going to relate to what is the degree of mitigation being offered.

And I don't necessarily even mean what we're talking about in terms of the

the stormwater erosion and sediment control stuff, which I think we're going to try and standardize as a set of conditions.

And this is something that's suggested by the existing ordinance.

Well, we could see this fire station outweighing, or this affordable housing project outweighing the value of the site if this area in particular is preserved, because this is the most critical of the critical slope.

or if the intrusion is limited to this degree or if some other action is taken.

I guess I'm just sort of stumbling around trying to figure out if we're going to explicitly broaden this in the ordinance to include public good, capital P, capital G. What are the balancers in there and how do we memorialize any of it?

Well, and then, I mean, frankly, the other option here is that you don't have a waiver with the exception of a finding two scenario.

I think what you're describing is kind of the position we're in right now because I don't know if, I'm still not clear if we should have been, not me, if the group should have been evaluating public benefits beyond environmental or not.

I'm still, I don't know who's supposed to make that determination.

I'm not a lawyer.

But I will say we're taking the feedback and the comment and we'll continue that thought and say what are there additional things that we can do to shape that conversation on what is a public benefit in the way that needs to be done for this waiver.

Thank you.

I think, yeah, until we can include that language under a capital P, public good, that's why it's good that it's discretionary.

So thanks for keeping that that way.

I had a question on looking at the environmental benefits from preserving the critical slopes.

We don't just look at water.

We're using that to look at tree canopy, habitat loss, all that kind of stuff.

That's honestly, that's the issue we want to look at on a more long-term basis.

Because from our perspective, the habitat on a slope of greater than 25 degrees is not inherently more valuable than on a slope of less than 25 degrees.

We have a strong interest in preserving trees and habitat, particularly along our stream corridors because there's incredible value there to preserving habitat and trees along those corridors.

So we think that we should be exploring a more robust buffer type program that would need to recognize and have built into it a differentiation between existing natural buffer areas versus already developed sites.

And we would need to treat those within the ordinance differently.

But what we quickly came to the conclusion as we started this conversation and we started talking about the mapping we would do, the analysis we would do, and the level of community interest on this topic and therefore the level of community engagement we would need to do, that this is outside of the scope of what we can accomplish within this zoning rewrite that we are aiming to complete in a timely manner.

So it necessarily would be a project that we would pick up at a future date.

In some cases.

Yeah.

I know we've, I mean, we have used it in some projects.

I can't remember the name of it, but there was a part of stream restoration to be included where we kind of left the site off.

You know, you leave it better than the way it is now.

1613 Grove.

and I guess my last question is about the getting into the man-made slopes and the natural slopes and if just you know how do we

So my answer is that that's something that falls on staff.

We need to, in our process of consulting with our colleagues and other departments, be able to provide you some guidance on in terms of what the quality is of that existing slope environment, man-made or natural, what have you.

Now, the term natural slope is a little confusing because if you were to go look at the Rivanna, those aren't quite man-made, but if you were to go back there a thousand years ago and look at the Rivanna, it probably wouldn't look like that either.

So that's, but man-made slopes are less relevant because they probably were made in the last hundred years, which means they probably don't have a hundred-year oak tree growing on them, right, or another part of the functioning environment like

along the Rivanna or along one of our stream channels.

That being said, the way that we use this to capture other environmental issues like trees and things, which might be growing on those slopes that have been undeveloped for 70 years because they're slopes next to a road, it closes the door on our ability to use this for other things, as you are alluding to.

It seems to me until we have the buffer ordinance in place and we have these enhancements that we can add to the natural resources or sorry the

by other avenues that we can add to enhance and preserve natural resources.

We want to look at ways to, you know, you're asking us how do we beef up or I guess I don't know if you had, if staff had recommendations on beefing up and clarifying critical slopes.

I think what we're proposing is essentially status quo with just bringing more clarity to the existing ordinance

and then, you know, what we bring into the staff reports of the administration of preparing you guys to make that decision, preparing council to make that decision and for you guys to advise council.

Thanks.

Ms.

I have, I guess, maybe I just want to start with a very, like, broad question

because it sounds like what Mr. Dawson is saying is if a critical slope waiver is granted to an applicant, he and his team through site plan review are going to ensure that that project meet all stormwater requirements, right?

So is there ever a point in which a slope

and that threshold in which that just can't be mitigated like it's a cliff and there's nothing you could do.

Put it another way, there's always some measure that can be done to address stormwater and so like what are we trying to do if it can always be remedied

If a developer sees a yield to be made on a piece of property, they can figure out how to do it, regardless of what's going on there.

And that's sometimes we go back and forth about the best methods, or this is unlikely to work, or you don't have enough room here, or whatever it is, especially when they start trying to avoid critical slopes, and they sort of box themselves.

And sometimes when they start designing how they're going to get access down there, or build this access road, or build the pond, or whatever it is.

But that's kind of the problem, is that we do these for all sites.

Yeah, you can protect any site.

Can I, a couple points on this.

One, actually I think, just correct me if I'm wrong, anybody, but we, the critical soap ordinance was adopted before we moved into the state stormwater program?

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's part of your answer right there.

But the.

It's a good point.

Well, it just suggests that when we adopted the Critical Slopes Ordinance, it was in the absence of the program that Jack is talking about, right?

But that's not a reason to necessarily can it.

In some respects, what we're saying by having it is that as a matter of policy, the city prefers the natural

By having that ordinance, by saying that these slopes cannot be disturbed.

We're effectively saying, yes, well, you could engineer that.

And the steeper the slope and the less space, the more expensive that solution is.

But the fact of the matter is anyone

with the money and the resources could do it, but we're saying that leaving that aside, the policy preference of the city would be

Stormwater and erosion along our waterways on steep slopes is addressed via a natural method as opposed to an engineered solution.

We don't want to continue to underground streams and things like that or move away from that.

But maybe that should be more like explicit because it sounds like we're using, I think you said critical slopes as a standard or something, but it's like

for big retaining walls that are inhumane and relying on a purely environment, like we're using the wrong metric to evaluate it if we're saying

Those are my thoughts.

Thank you.

I don't know what to add.

I mean, I think we kind of talked ourselves into a little bit of a box.

I mean, ideally, to me, it seems like the critical slope process doesn't need to exist.

Like, we need to have a buffer ordinance.

We need to have a tree protection ordinance that, you know, does a better job.

We need to, you know, if habitat's important, we need to have, you know, something for that.

And the slopes are just arbitrary.

But I guess since that's our only tool,

I don't know what to tell you.

I do feel like we probably need to, our review needs to focus on environmental issues as opposed to, you know, development or affordable housing and things like that.

Although the temptation, I mean, my temptation would also be to say, well, okay, this person's going to bring in a whole bunch of affordable housing, you know, put it wherever.

No, I think we need to clean it up, and it does need to be environmentally focused in our review, at least while we still have this ordinance in place.

I took it as a comment.

Well, I don't know if it was because of what you said or just because I thought of it, but there's a link between maybe, James, what you said about we prefer a natural approach to stormwater management.

We also then are sort of talking about the character of Charlottesville.

Charlottesville is hilly.

It has steep slopes, unless Rory can flatten out the whole thing.

Mr. Stolzenberg, I heard your name.

Yeah, I mean, what I think is we need to put the retractable bollards back in the CIP to stop Phil's bus full of lawyers from driving down the mall.

Can't have that.

To Carl's point, I think that is way too absolute.

I think to say that we can't redevelop South Street and, you know, everyone there has to stay in their kind of, you know, obsolete and, like,

should be improved homes because it's near a slope, and to come up with some engineering solution that completely mitigates the benefit might cost hundreds of thousands.

I mean, I don't know that it did, but if you're in a situation like that or worse, to say that, you know, we just have to freeze the status quo, regardless of the non-environmental public benefit seems extreme.

It does seem to me that there are two very different classes of reasons we've granted these things.

With South First Street, there may have been real impacts on that stream, but there was a very clear public benefit.

With 1613 Grove, I think even Jack agreed that the post condition would be better for the environment.

It seems to me that maybe there's a way

where you get a waiver on environmental grounds that there's an environmental benefit that outweighs the risks or damage from the disturbance.

And that could probably be a staff waiver because you guys are more qualified to determine that than us.

And then maybe you come to this discretionary process to weigh those more, you know, nebulous or, you know,

touchy-feely public benefits of shriveling hundreds of new homes, some amount of affordable homes.

Is that worth it for the city versus these slopes?

I can see that being less, being more of a discretionary process for council.

And then, yeah, so, I mean, 1613 Grove, I think, was an easy one because the stream's in bad condition.

whatever.

It seems to me the one thing beyond just the general ESC requirements that Jack would be imposing otherwise is on-site water treatment.

And that's kind of what we got with Azalea, where they could have done it and not had on-site water treatment.

And they said, we're going to do 110% of the water, or also Belmont condos, or whatever they call it nowadays, where

And those are good examples of where it was easier at least for me to say there's some public benefit here because that's, I was considering mentioning this earlier when we were talking about these buffers, but we in theory, like something we could go to the Water Control Board with and change our code, right now if you build in Charlottesville as in the whole state except maybe the Chesapeake Bay area and other locality and positions, if you go to Amaral County, go to Greene County, anywhere, you are

allowed to buy nutrient credits, right?

And that's not great for the city.

Water quality is a much bigger problem than a local problem.

Yeah, and so it's troubling here.

We still have creeks here in our urban area.

It'd be nice if we treated some water here and then just said, these are urban streams.

We're going to forsake these poor things, and we'll plant trees out where there's already trees or something, but an easement around a forest.

It's possible to say,

would have to go for the Water Control Board.

If you develop in these areas, whether it's critical soaps, you disturb a critical soaps, you have to do X.

Treat 120%.

I was comfortable giving those recommendations because in both those instances the developer said, we're going to do this.

And all I did was try and turn that into language where it comes back, both me and the engineer who submitted the plays know exactly what it means.

There's not a discrepancy about, oh, I thought it was pre-20% loading, whatever it is.

We just smooth out that language.

It would be possible to roll that into a more comprehensive program if you're disturbing sleep slopes.

and you don't have a public benefit outweighing it, you must do X. That would, in theory, be possible.

But we'd have to get the state approval.

Yeah, so I guess my hope was that

by saying you could go you could still go through this critical slow process like we have now and you don't have that ability to get that automatic approval and then kind of giving you this other avenue where if you do have these clear environmental benefit that you can skip that whole thing.

I mean if we could word the ordinance clearly enough that

I also wonder, this is something that we haven't really talked about and we need to look into, but can we, if it's a condition, can we take more of a stance that on-site water treatment is one of the standard conditions and we're not changing the ordinance to reflect that and therefore maybe don't need State Water Control Board approval, but we have it as a standard condition that we're going to mandate on steep slopes

Yeah, I guess, see, that's where I'm

seeing a problem.

I'm saying if you have that and there's an environmental benefit, there shouldn't be any more that you need to do.

You shouldn't need to prove your non-environmental benefits or go through this arduous counsel process.

You just get it automatically.

and then there also needs to be cases where you have a public benefit and you don't have on-site water treatment.

Or for your standard condition, are you still imagining that goes for a discretionary process?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess part of the problem again then is like sometimes you think maybe it's possible, maybe not.

until you do all the engineering.

I know.

And now you're hitting on one of the challenges we have in this ordinance where we're talking about a fundamental threshold question of use of land, but then we're talking about a design

Yeah.

Or even you can treat 100%, but then it's denied by discretionary review for any other reason, right?

Yeah.

In terms of the natural value of slopes for Charlottesville's character, we spent a lot of time, two weeks ago, talking about how slopes, especially on roads, are very bad for people with disabilities.

And while they don't violate the strict language of the law to have steep slopes, you're violating the spirit of the law by having slopes greater than 5% on sidewalks.

Well, sometimes we are.

Are roads exempt from critical slopes?

I think roads are considered part of the infrastructure that's exempt from critical slopes.

Point A and point B, the

Yeah, but that's only if the critical, only if the area of the critical slope is only the area of the road.

But this gets, this, they're competing contrary interests because if I want to flatten out a road, I got to put slopes somewhere else, right?

And so if you, that's, if you're going to make, take a hilly place and smooth out a road, you're creating more slopes.

Yeah, or a retaining wall.

And I guess my vote would be for retaining walls where possible, which wasn't my vote two weeks ago, but I thought about it a lot.

And I mean, that was also stick, whatever, that's its own thing for lots of reasons.

But in general, like, if we could have said from the beginning, we're just going to put a retaining wall there, and it's going to be fine, and it was on a street that didn't have problems bringing in Phil, that would have clearly been preferable, I think.

So speaking of the road exemption, a couple weeks ago we were threatened essentially by a developer to say, if you don't give this to us, we're gonna build a road which will be exempt.

By building the road which will be exempt, we will pipe the stream and then there won't be a stream and so there will be no critical slopes on either side.

And at that point, we'll be able to build the rest by right.

Is that an accurate interpretation of the ordinance?

Well, because you can't build a road.

Who's going to build a road with no lots?

Well, they had some lots.

It was already platted.

Incredulous to me.

I don't know.

No.

No.

But I don't think that road was the standard anyway, so it had to be the standard.

You can't build a 10-foot wide road because someone platted in 1847, and then say we've eliminated the, then you need to subdivide that or whatever method it is to remove that lot, and then now you're recreating lots over the critical area, and

It's unlikely that it would have gone like that.

I didn't hear the presentation.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what they said.

Shakti said it out loud, actually.

Good things.

Thank you.

I found the memo extraordinarily helpful, especially the background and understanding why we've gotten this thing and what it's done over time.

The perspective that it was in place because there was no state program to do this work makes perfect sense to me.

The ability to have that

We're going to make it more expensive and hard to do the steep land.

It made sense because we had easy land to make that tradeoff.

Now we don't.

Time has passed and that land is built up now.

So we don't have that same kind of power that we did then.

to the practical concern of how do we actually do this balancing all the issues of the city.

I agree from a sort of a rational planning perspective that limiting it to environmental

is a very smart move just in terms of being able to do it and do it predictably.

I really like the idea of shunting that kind of process off to a more reliable staff process.

What really opened my eyes to this was the South 1st Street project, which we almost killed all that federal high tech funding because this process was so complicated and difficult.

And that made me worry, what else isn't even happening because this process is in place to kill additional projects.

I would like this process to not harm the public, and I would like to have some clear idea of a benefit to the public.

Just as more specific, you see harm in terms of?

Killing good projects.

I feel like we

That's, we just grant waivers that they're not killed.

In four years, I don't know that y'all have ever denied a critical slope waiver.

So we, I mean, we threw the data in the memo, and we know that over the last four years, there have been 16, I think it was 16 approvals, two withdrawals, and one that's still pending.

Yep, okay.

What I always want to note with that kind of data is sometimes a 95% approval rating is perfectly appropriate because what we're not able to count is how many projects did not come forward.

We only have part of the data picture with that number.

It's important to understand that that's with the approval rating, but how many projects turned aside, how many projects didn't materialize just by virtue of the fact that the critical slopes waiver existed as a requirement.

at least one of those withdrawals ray on was a denial by us and then a thinking they're going to get denied.

And to me, you know, the standard of does this ordinance of teeth is less are we granting the waivers and more, you know, how good were the mitigations we required.

I see we are four minutes over on this topic.

I just wanted to follow up on what Liz said.

So currently critical slopes are not subject to public hearing.

Right, that's correct, yeah.

So that has been a comment that's come up.

That's something that I'm going to look into whether there's any reason it could not be, but that's something you guys, I mean, just kind of quickly, what's your sense?

My preference would be to keep it as is.

The reason that I would go that way is because

I'd kind of go the other way.

I mean, if the folks are weighing in in the beginning, if they're going to weigh in on the critical slope where we can just kind of pull them to weigh in then instead of weighing in in the beginning.

It's almost the same thing.

But they're weighing in when we have a chance to talk to staff and listen to the developer.

Sorry.

One issue is that

whether the public weighs in or not, we still don't have a clear tool by which to evaluate.

And sometimes I think what we hear about are the tree protection.

You know, I think, I don't know.

I am barely on Mr. Mitchell's side of this.

And to sort of piggyback on what you said, that you get feedback about things that are still under this larger environmental issue that really isn't the critical slope piece.

And secondly, that you get the same, I'm not sure how illuminating it is to the commissioners to have the public comment in the nature of a public hearing in that

I mean I find the written input on these you know voluminous and fine and I don't want to be in the situation where you have a concentrated group show up and give the perception of a very heavy opposition to something or a very heavy approval to something that isn't quite on and it just seems to me that you're adding a position where you have

yet another inflection point for that sort of, you know, I just sort of see them in sequence.

I mean, how many public hearings do you have about, you know, particularly on the very technical matters, particularly since, again, you weigh, you know, the public weighs in vociferously and repeatedly and sometimes with great eloquence and sometimes not.

I think that is a good point.

I don't know that it's persuaded me, so I'm probably still on camp.

I don't think it matters very much either way, unless it imposes some harsh notice requirements or expensive notice requirements.

I find that on many projects, though not all, the public input is pretextual at best and often on things that are not related to our standards of review, like traffic.

got that a lot in the Belmont condos and it's seen as critical slopes.

I think maybe the biggest problem with the process is that it's seen as this like a decision, like a rezoning or an SUP on the project itself and not about the slopes.

And I mean, I guess there's some validity to that if public benefits are non-environmental and I

I think maybe that's a reason to kind of split those cases off into a sort of slightly separate thing or thinking about it separately or differently.

But in some ways, you know, I think people want it to be a veto point like a rezoning for projects they don't like regardless of slope impacts.

Sorry, I interrupted you as you were closing us out.

Oh, just my thoughts on this.

If it's an environmental benefit, I don't think it's necessary to be a public hearing.

If there is an environmental harm, but there are other public benefits, I certainly see some value of hearing the public.

No, I agree.

And I mean, your idea of breaking the thing up so that there's staff reviews the environmental stuff and if they do public benefit, I mean, that makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Yes.

The one last thing I'd add is the county has a similar system of critical slopes and called preserved and managed slopes.

And then sometimes they change preserved to managed.

That's, I guess, the man made versus whatever.

But it seems to work decently well over there.

I don't hear a ton of complaints.

And so maybe, you know, consult with them about what they're up to.

Great.

I'm Andrea Henry I'm the city's water resources protection administrator so I do stormwater operations side not so much involved with development and I also do a lot of master planning work associated with

So, first of all, nobody is supposed to know anything about floor plans here.

I got a lot of great questions prior to this meeting, and so it's great that everybody's trying to do due diligence.

What I'm trying to do here tonight is just create a playing field, right?

So, we're going to go over some basics.

We're going to

feel out the box that is, you know, development in the floodplain and, you know, the hope is that you guys can provide feedback and the city staff, ask targeted questions and I can answer those and we can all sort of move towards looking at ordinance revisions.

You're not supposed to know anything, yeah.

Okay, and so the lens we are looking through this

We call it floodplain management as flood resilience because what we're working on right now internally is a flood resilience plan for the city.

And this is sort of under the umbrella of the climate adaptation and resilience that we're working on.

We need to be resilient against conditions we have now, of course, but also in the future.

So kind of going through what's going to happen in the presentation, we're going to have a quick class in floodplain nomenclature.

Everybody's going to pass with flying colors.

We're going to talk about why we should even regulate development in the floodplain.

What's the risk?

What are we talking about here?

We're going to talk about some different tools for resilience, flood resilience in general.

that also apply to floodplain management.

And then we're going to look at some examples.

These are examples from the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

They've been doing this for 20 plus years.

And I love how they lay things out because they kind of take an approach of this is the basic, here's the better, here's the absolute best in terms of risk management.

And then we'll briefly just talk about there are some benefits to doing better.

Okay, so we applied for this grant to do a flood resilience plan.

Started working on it this summer.

This is mostly an internal city staff effort at this point.

We're going to take a phased approach.

So right now, internal stakeholders, internal discussion, and then eventually it will be more public facing where we'll have some community engagement.

We had to talk very briefly about what resilience is.

We can kind of look at this as a two-prong approach.

One is mitigation.

What are we doing physically to remove the risk and adaptation?

How can we respond and recover from the events that will occur?

So, you know, we can look at mitigation sometimes as, you know, these huge infrastructure projects, right?

So that's Floodwall Park in Richmond.

And then we can look at adaptation as something like, you know, if we have a trail system in a floodplain or in a floodway, having information available to folks that may use that trail to get them out of harm's way.

So the flood's still there, but we're doing something to reduce risk.

Okay, and so this is kind of where Charlottesville is in the picture of the Rivanna watershed, which is what we look at when we're looking at our floodplains in the city.

And so you can see here, just in terms of scale, Charlottesville is a small portion of the overall watershed, but we do have a great deal coming through and around Charlottesville.

infrastructure projects like giant retention ponds, detention ponds probably aren't going to work on a scale in Charlottesville to effectively reduce risk.

So we really look at, okay, what are the programmatic type things we can do to reduce risk in the city, such as our development ordinance.

Okay, so this is our one-on-one class real quick.

FEMA, there is a national flood insurance program.

This started in the late 70s, and they said, hey communities, if you come in and you adopt a minimum standard for floodplain development and floodplains, we will make insurance available to your community members, whether they live in the floodplain or not.

The whole community can get flood insurance.

Lots of localities signed on to this.

but these are minimum standards and so they even say in federal code that you can be more restrictive, it is allowed and it's even encouraged.

Okay, so these are the designations that FEMA, you'll see on a FEMA floodplain map and these are important to talk about because

what you can do development-wise in a floodplain is different depending on what section of floodplain you are in.

And you absolutely are not able to build anything in a floodway, right?

Okay, so, and then they differentiate between Zone A and Zone AE floodplains.

We're not even gonna get into that here.

Zone A is sort of, I think of that as like the Bob Rossing of floodplains, right?

So you're not doing it based on a model or a detailed study.

It's sort of a picture on a map to provide guidance.

Fortunately, we have very little of that in the city now, and with the new flood insurance study that's being done, that will be removed.

with a detailed study, so you can just wipe Zone A out of your lexicon now.

We don't have to deal with it.

This 1% annual chance flood hazard area, that's what commonly people will call a 100-year flood claim.

and an engineer may slap my hand for that, but we're all friends here.

This is a safe place.

We can call it a 100-year floodplain, okay?

The .2% annual chance flood hazard area, that's what people sometimes refer to as a 500-year event, and we do not regulate to that.

So we're looking at floodway, 100% floodplain.

And this is just how it plays out in a regulatory theme of math.

These are all the designations you would see in a plan view.

And then this is sort of the cross-section profile version.

And so this is a good one to look at to figure out, okay, what is this floodway thing?

What is it even supposed to mean?

So what I probably should have pointed out on that first slide when we're looking at the definition of all these different things,

for floodway, for zone A, for zone AE, it designates all of that as high risk.

So this is not a risk definition.

It's not as if you put one foot into the floodway, high risk, emergency, you take one foot out of the floodway, everything's good.

This is not a definition of risk.

It's really meant to look at

accumulative effects of development over time.

So what FEMA does when they're developing floodplains, they say, okay, we're going to designate a floodway.

And what that's meant to do, we don't want anybody to develop in a floodplain in a way that is going to cause the water surface elevation of that 100-year event to rise more than a foot.

But how do you determine that if you're doing parcel by parcel development, right?

So they kind of do it for you, preemptively.

and so they say the floodway is the area where if you had encroached that would up to that point you would have raised the water surface elevation one foot so as long as you don't build in the floodway you're not going to meet you're not going to yet exceed that minimum standard but it is not a definition of risk

Okay, and so this is where we have regulatory floodplain in the city.

So some of the standard players are there, the ones you would expect, the Rivanna, Meadow Creek, Morris Creek, those are our big ones.

Rock Creek, which is in the southern portion of the city

That's been a detailed study area since 2005.

And then I put pictures up of these two because these are not designations that we as community members use.

This is a FEMA designation and it doesn't necessarily tell you where it is.

This 5th Street Creek, it feeds into Rock Creek.

It runs parallel to 5th Street, the 5th Street corridor.

and it's just a little bitty section of stream there.

And then North Fork Meadow Creek is running to Emmett before you hit Barracks right there.

So these are the areas that we're talking about when we're talking about floodplain tonight.

Okay, risk assessment.

So when we talk about risk, what's the risk, who's at risk, why?

So everybody passed flood claim 101, congratulations, we're under risk.

Okay, so FEMA put together this dashboard for us to discuss the new flood insurance study that hopefully is going to open for public comment this spring.

This is sort of their dashboard, very concise way of looking at risk here in the city.

And so some things I'll point out, we're not going to go over every one of these squares,

But we do have claims that have occurred in the city of Charlottesville for properties that have experienced flood damage.

Almost half of those properties are outside of the floodplain, so we have flood risk even outside of the floodplain.

Flood damage has occurred, however, our 100-year 1% annual exceedance event has not.

Some of these claims, you'll see this number 13 RL properties,

that stands for repetitive loss.

That means these are properties that experience significant damage more than once in a 10 year period.

So there are properties that have frequent damage.

So it says draft high hazard.

Yeah, if you want to go back.

So they do an assessment, and I wish I could tell you exactly where these properties are.

All we've seen are pretty high-level maps at this point and not profiles, and so it's hard to zone in.

And we don't have GIS layers.

That would be really helpful to be able to layer on our data to see, okay, what are these properties that are getting added?

We don't have that yet.

But what they're saying is we're going to be adding 200-plus

Absolutely.

going over a foot.

Well, what is that?

That is a FEMA regulatory standard.

So when we talked about we partner with the National Flood Insurance Program, they tell us what minimum standards are for development in floodplain.

One of those minimum standards is that you cannot encroach on the floodplain

in a way that increases the water surface elevation of the 100-year event over one foot.

I don't understand that.

Okay, so if your floodplain is this wide, and then you make it this wide, the water's going up.

Yeah.

Or the bathtub example.

Exactly.

And so a lot of times when we're doing development flood plans, we think about one house at a time, you know, and so maybe you can't see that effect.

So is that saying if you built like 30-foot walls at the edge of the floodway,

Yes, correct.

It would be, in theory, that's sort of what this illustrates.

You're not allowed to do anything in the floodplain that causes the floodwaters in a hundred-year storm to go overflow.

So what FEMA does is they do a little hydraulic exercise to say, we've already figured out this, if you do anything here, you're going to be.

Okay.

But if you were to build

So that's also the standard for like getting a fill permit, right, like a LOMRF, that it won't cause it to go up over a foot?

So in that case, is it automatically granted because it's not in the floodway?

You still have to do that analysis and you have to elevate it up above that one foot.

It depends on the scale.

But that's your point is that the minimum standard is that you can't do anything that causes it to go up one foot.

Solved question.

What is the better and best foot difference?

And does that increase our flood way?

It can.

It can.

And that's where you have, it depends on the scale, but typically you have to do a no adverse impact.

The reason that the state floodplain management association has been working on this for 20 years is that there are some gaps in minimum standards.

So it doesn't completely make sense.

It doesn't seem like our minimum standards cover every base in terms of no adverse impact or property to property impact because it doesn't.

Okay.

Oh, wait, went back.

There we go.

Okay, so talking again about this, you know, 100-year floodplain flood event picture, the reason engineers don't like to use this 100-year nomenclature is because it indicates falsely this is something that could only happen every 100 years.

Where in theory, you could have back-to-back

100-year events because it's a statistical thing.

There's a 1% chance every single year that this could occur.

So getting into the statistics muck is a mess.

I'm going to try to stay above that.

But I'm going to throw in some statistics here to sort of paint a bigger picture.

Protect against these huge events like we see in the picture, right, or like what's happening in California right now.

The actuality is, as we saw in that dashboard, is that we do have flooding in and out of the floodplain, whether we have a 100-year event or not, and that statistically, very small amounts of water

can cause very expensive damage to property.

So these are statistics from FEMA.

One inch of water in somebody's home can cause $25K in damage.

Now imagine you don't have flood insurance.

Then your regular insurance is not going to cover that.

If you own a home with a 30-year mortgage, if you plan on being there and paying off that mortgage in four years, you have a one in four chance during that time of flooding if you reside in a floodplain.

So this is not a scenario where I'm not going to live here 100 years, I'm okay, right?

Would it the mortgage...

That's a great question.

If you have a federally-backed mortgage and you live in a floodplain, you're required to have flood insurance.

Okay, and so this is our inventory, just doing a quick GIS look at, okay, well, this is the who of the flood, of risk, right?

So the who of the floodplain.

Okay, so by parcel type, most of what we have in our floodplain is developed, right?

So that's something to consider.

A lot of times we think of

You know, these are only cases of new development, but what about what's already developed?

So whatever, you know, when we think about ordinance, we need to think about that scenario as well.

When we look at, okay, the developed parcels in the floodplain, a good portion of these are, you know, from a plan view, they are in the floodplain, but the structure itself is not.

Quick aside to that, they make you sign a form that says, I understand a portion of my dirt is in the floodplain, and I am

I am absolving everyone of all responsibility as my patio furniture floats away.

Just a mortgage broker.

Okay.

Is it 22?

Thank you for that.

And then the small one at the bottom is just to show that overwhelmingly we're talking about residential properties here.

Isn't that still displacing water?

No, I mean, it's not a loophole so much as we're going to talk about that in a minute.

I'd like to put more context around that.

Okay, so now let's talk about impacts.

So we talked about the who's.

What is the risk?

What is the threat here?

So we, during our flood resilience planning, we've

had a team of folks in departments and divisions across the city that have had a series of workshops to talk through questions like this.

What are the threats and consequences of flooding?

Because for somebody that's operating CAT, it might be much different than it is for somebody that's concerned about our pipes and our inlets and things like that.

And these are things that we came up with and then we kind of added to based on

literature that's out there, right?

But there's some obvious ones, right?

The big ones are, okay, somebody could get injured.

Somebody could lose their life.

It could be a homeowner.

It could be somebody driving their vehicle.

Overwhelmingly, that's the case where it's people in vehicles trying to cross roads.

It could be your first responder.

So it's kind of the worst case impact.

We have roads that are overtopped.

We have infrastructure

That's a huge one.

And then there are other ones that kind of goes down from there, right?

Where you have erosion of waterways, you get gunk in the floodplain because water's going where it doesn't normally go and people are storing things there.

Degraded aquatic environments, if those are streams that people use for recreation, that's lost for a while.

You have interruptions to critical sectors, talking about road closures, things like that.

Debris, cleanup, that's huge.

And then, you know, on a smaller scale, you know, is that water able to go back, right, where we need it to be?

So you can get standing water in icing conditions, that's very small scale stuff.

And then we talk about the indirect impacts, what happens after, right?

And it's really important to point out, and there's a lot of literature to confirm this, that

Indirect impacts, the economic impacts of flood events or hazardous natural hazards in general do have disparate effects on people depending on their income and depending on other factors that affect social vulnerability.

I think that would be really useful information to have.

Most of what we have on income and factors like this is done at the census tract level.

Yeah, so we're definitely, so we have identified a need for this kind of data, at least on a neighborhood scale, if not on a household scale, through many of the planning efforts that we've undertaken across the city, not just to do with stormwater.

When you're trying to prioritize projects, when you're trying to do master planning for about anything, when you're trying to apply for grants to do projects, this is data that is really valuable.

And again, most of what we receive is census tract, which can be deceiving because it's too big.

So we're looking for ways to, you know, it might be using data that we already have, but figuring out how to put it together and then, you know, what data is missing to come up with something that is scaled for our community.

And yeah, there's a grant opportunity right now that we're going to apply for.

I think it's through the Park Service, which seems a little random.

It seems like the number of parcels, too, is small enough that maybe you could just go ask everybody.

Door to door.

How many of them are getting property tax relief?

Thank you.

Yeah, we have sort of the immediate health effects, but there are certainly...

So I am going to use the rest of this time to talk through some examples of things that we can do to the development ordinance to make it more restrictive.

And I am using a roadmap provided by the Association of State Plug Plain Managers.

These are two documents that I can provide you guys.

I really like them.

they're both about 100 pages each, but they're pretty high level and they're well organized.

This first one talks generally about all of the tools that you can use for floodplain management.

And I listed them out here because they also overlap tools we could use for flood resiliency in general and that we will talk about in our flood resiliency plan.

So the mapping itself, education and outreach, we saw there's signs on the trail,

Planning, but the regulations and development, that's what we're talking about today.

Mitigation, infrastructure, those are things, infrastructure is a segment of mitigation, right?

It could also be something like buying out properties.

And then our emergency response.

And then we talk about in both of these documents, again, the basic, the better, and then there's no adverse impact, which is kind of a hard line of development and flip things.

Okay, so I just wanted to revisit this one more time, because we're going to start talking about things, and we're going to talk about the flood fringe, which is that area of the floodplain that is not the floodway on the sides, and the floodway, because different development standards, depending on where you are.

Okay.

Alright, so first we're going to tackle new development in floodplains.

There are basically two

So these are kind of heavy hitters in terms of making things more restrictive, and that is these here.

We're talking about free board and we're talking about encroachment.

So first we're going to live on the flood fringe, so this is out of the flood way.

Our current standard is that you have to be one foot, your finished floor elevation has to be one foot above your base flood elevation.

That's your hundred year water surface elevation, base flood elevation, same thing.

This is the one area where we're already more restrictive than the minimum, because the minimum says you just have to be at the base flood elevation, and we say one foot above.

And then for non-residential properties, we say, you know, there are quite a bit of flood-proofing things you have to do.

We can be more restrictive based on that code section.

We can say you need two feet of

Freeboard, 3 foot, whatever, 2.5, 2.7.

You get the idea.

We're just being more restrictive in terms of requiring more freeboard.

The most restrictive thing you can do is, of course, say you can't develop in the floodplain period.

I want to segue just a little bit off on a tangent here because I've heard a lot about, wait, that's what Albemarle County does.

And I want to clarify something because that's not quite true.

but I understand why people think that way because you go to their code of ordinances, there's this nice table and it talks about habitable structures and there's a big N when it says develop in the floodplain.

But what this is referring to is they cannot develop by right in the floodplain.

Not that they can't at all.

If they go through the process of doing the fill, getting the LOMRF,

there's a good chance that they can develop in the floodplain.

So really our ordinances are not much different.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

Which is essentially what ours does, too.

I believe they do, yes.

Well, you said that's essentially what ours does, too.

So how does, and maybe you'll get there.

Maybe we'll get there when we start talking.

So not much.

So there is this special use permit.

The other option besides fill is just like build on stilts, right?

Without a LMRF?

And so then is it by right?

Okay.

Now that's a good question.

Is it by right?

I think nothing is by right in the county.

I think even if you did, and I'm kind of out of my lane here, right?

I've never touched on that, but a lot of it is not mitigation, it's saying, this is one of many slides about how we can improve the standards, but like this slide,

The minimum standard, in the country, nowhere are you allowed to build a finished floor of a habitable structure underneath that footprint, at least at the footprint elevation.

We require one foot, we could require two or three feet, of course if we require ten feet and everybody's bringing a gazillion dump trucks to fill, we're complicating things even further, but we don't

do very much from an engineering standpoint.

We analyze, we say, looks like you've triggered this, you have to say no adverse impacts that show, that demonstrate hydrology, you're not going above the flood.

I actually want to just check, is everybody understanding that we think the floodplain is a three-dimensional space that you can get out of the floodplain by going up or going away?

Okay, so that's when we're developing in the flood fringe.

We're talking about freeboard.

When we're trying to develop in the floodway, we're talking about encroachments.

The way we define, and so this is really more of a definition of floodway than a development in the floodway discussion, right?

Because we have defined our floodway as FEMA has defined it, which is that you can have this maximum encroachment of one feet.

We can make that more restrictive.

We can say, no, the maximum encroachment is half a foot.

0.75 feet.

You get the picture.

Less than one foot, right?

So that's not saying that we're allowing development in the floodway right now?

Right.

Right.

This is more of how we're going to define the floodway as a city.

Do you guys have a map of what that would look like?

Like how big would the floodway be if it was a full conveyance floodway?

I have been telling the public, and perhaps I've been incorrect, that we can't just ban development in the 100-year floodplain.

I mean, no.

People do that.

It depends on what we have the appetite for.

Someone already owns a parcel.

Because that's a great segue into the next discussion which is redevelopment in the floodplains.

We've got to consider the fact that there are people already living in floodplains, right?

Patrick, if you want to go to the next one.

Okay, so this is what we say now about redevelopment.

We talk a lot about substantial improvements.

Everything sort of hinges on the substantial improvement thing, which is essentially, if you're going to make an improvement, it defines as substantial if it is 50% of the market value, current market value of the home.

So what we say now is,

In the flood fringe, that's that part that's not the floodway, you can't do substantial improvement unless you have met our code, right?

Unless that freeboard requirement is there and the building code is met.

But we don't really talk about substantial improvement, the frequency, right, of substantial improvement.

Because what if you had a home that was significantly damaged one year, right?

But it was a little bit under that substantial improvement definition, right?

And they rebuilt.

And then the next year, there was significant damage again.

That's kind of an indication that maybe that's not a great place for a home to be, at least how it's

built now.

So something that we could do that would be more restrictive is to take a cumulative look at that substantial improvement definition and say maybe it's a 10-year period.

Yeah, it's just a monetary, really, definition.

It could be, you know, rebuilding because you just want something.

It could be rebuilding because there was damage.

Is this an active problem?

I mean, we don't really... Is it an active problem?

Like, do we have lots of cases a year where we're looking at substantial improvement?

No.

We're running on a common theme in this category, right?

It's a general no.

Just to clarify, that would mean if someone currently has a house two feet above the base flood elevation in the fringe, we have a really big flood, the first floor gets washed out, they have to tear it down.

No, they have to say they have to elevate it out.

Exactly, yeah, because probably there's nothing you could do that would, yeah.

Yeah, so to Jack's point, it really isn't about, oh, I want to add, you know, an addition.

It's like if there's a flood event that has impacts, you can't redo it, right?

Right.

And so these are the sort of implications that we want to consider when we're considering the floodplain workers.

How does this affect people that already reside here?

Okay, so floodways, again, we're talking about this encroachment thing.

Okay, what we say here is there is no substantial improvement, period, unless you can show this no adverse impact, right?

And so this is something we're going to talk about in the next few slides, no adverse impact.

no adverse impact is kind of everything that you've been referring to, right?

Well, you know, taking up volume and velocity and erosive conditions, it's very general here.

Something to think about is just to take that no adverse impact out of our organs and just say no substantial improvement in a floodway because I think we know that anything that you're gonna do in a floodway is probably gonna have an impact.

I mean, that's the whole definition of

being outside of a floodway, so why do we want to open this door to analysis and back and forth when we really know we don't want development in a floodway to begin with?

So that's something to consider.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I was going to wait, but, like, there, I guess maybe part of the problem is, like, there are a bunch of things in the floodway now that are bad to have in the floodway, and that could cause, like, serious environmental problems if and when they get flooded.

Like, I don't know, a whole bunch of cars sitting in a parking lot of a body shop.

where you might want to have an incentive to make that use go away and move somewhere else.

And that would almost enshrine that use.

Okay, and then Phil.

This is where that no adverse impact really comes into play because we talk about cumulative impact, right?

So right now in the flood fringe we say you can put fill there, the minimum necessary, and it has to have some sort of certification to say that everything's up to snuff, right?

The house is not going to slide off of the slope.

There are things you can do to make this more restrictive.

One is compensatory storage.

If you fill here, you have to dig a hole over here.

And that's kind of to Liz's point about the cumulative effect of building in the flood plant, at some point it is going to make a difference.

And that would be where if we enact something like this, then the engineering department would say, hey, we look at the cops.

Something else we may want to look at is dry land access, right?

Just because you put your home on fill, it doesn't mean it's accessible.

and flooding conditions, right?

So how are emergency vehicles going to get to you?

So adding a dry land access requirement to make sure that you can get out or somebody can get to you should this event occur.

And we can also look at more specific requirements for fill.

So right now we say unique certification.

If we want to take more responsibility in defining what that certification say, there are things we could do to have, you know, more detailed

definitions of what acceptable fill is.

And these are just some examples here, but you could have a minimum compaction, maximum slope there.

We could also say you can't put fill in the floodplain.

Everything has to be pierced, pilings, flow-through, crawl space, because we do not want that volume taken with fill.

for filling in the floodplain and having an adverse impact on the natural function of the floodplain itself.

So piers are still allowed in the no-fill situation?

But if you said no-fill in the flood way,

And could you still build a bridge across to Pantops?

I mean, I guess it's not exactly Phil.

What?

A private bridge?

No, you are.

If you build a bridge, the city county would have to show that there's no adverse effect.

Under the current rule.

That's an interesting question.

I've never encountered that, not being a bridge builder or a bridge engine.

There's got to be a way around that.

But yeah, I mean, it's not like the ravine is so large, like we're building

Yeah, so yeah, I guess we're in like public project space thought process now, right?

Suspension Bridge, always knows.

That's going to be costly, right?

So typically... Even the regular bridge is so costly, it'll probably never get funded.

So typically what you would do, you would design the bridge or the culvert system, you would have a hydraulic model that showed the impact, and then you would have a LOMAR that you submit to FEMA to revise the regulatory floodplain.

If it's already, if the rise

I think expansion is on public property.

Okay, we're good.

That's why it's great.

Parks, floodplains are symbiotic partners.

I love it.

If it's a case where it's on private property, so what we would do when I worked in Austin is we would try to get easement on those properties prior to even sending the railroad.

But it's going to be pretty hard.

And then, okay, so talking about fill in the floodplain or floodway, it's allowed.

It's allowed.

We just have this demonstrate no adverse impact thing, which, again, we really believe that you can put stuff in the floodway and have no adverse impact.

If we don't believe that's true, we should probably take that as a qualifier and just say no fill in the floodway.

Okay, this is Wordy.

So now we're going to talk through MAP revision processes.

So if you guys saw that presentation that we gave to Council, I'm sure you remember every presentation we've seen, right, in the last year.

We talked about, you know, the LOMAR process.

Anybody can apply for a MAP revision.

Yes, go for it.

You do all the right stuff.

We can consider it.

But here's the thing.

Here's the thing about that process.

Right now, what we say on our code, that's that first, that top square there, is that we're kind of implying that, you know, you need to notify FEMA by applying for a conditional letter of map provision.

So first, we are saying, look, if you're intending to develop this property,

The process is this conditional letter, which includes the development on it.

But we mostly just talk about going to FEMA.

What I like better is, I came from Austin, so it seems random, but it's not random to me, and I'm familiar with it.

I kind of like the way that Austin talks about it, because they say, hey, look, you have to have the community, the city's endorsement for this, so you have to come to us first.

And then,

we can go and forward this information to FEMA for an evaluation should we agree and support what you've submitted.

And that actually is more aligned, what Austin is saying is more aligned with what federal code says the process is.

They say we are the CEOs, we administrators of this ordinance, right, we're the CEOs of the community.

So we're really ultimately responsible here for what

our floodway and floodplain designations are because we have to do the floodplain management.

So I think regardless, this isn't really a more restrictive

argument here, and this is more definition, right?

We want to make sure we're aligned with federal code.

We want things to come to us first.

There's nothing wrong with this first thing of going to FEMA.

Lots of people want to participate.

Lots of communities want to participate in the flood insurance program.

They want that insurance for their residents.

But they may not have the staff to review these things.

And they may say, FEMA, I want you to look at it.

And that's perfectly acceptable.

But that's not what we want.

We want to do this.

We're the CEOs.

We have the staff.

We have the expertise.

We want it to come through us first.

So I think that we need to clarify that in our ordinance.

And I love that the City of Austin also has a whole appendix talking about here is the process.

Here's what we need to see, depending on what scenario you're in.

So we're just making it easier for our own projects.

So how would that work given that lots of our floodplains are shared with the county?

Both.

Okay, we can go to the next one.

Okay.

The other thing is, as much as we might like to bend a federal agency to our will, right, we need to be realistic.

So if we want to be empowered as a locality,

What can we do?

First, we do want to see things first.

We want to weigh in first and decide if we support it or if we don't.

But here's something else we can do, and this is in our current ordinance.

We can identify local flood hazard areas.

Essentially, that's our own floodplain floodway that we designate.

And we can identify these and we can say our floodplain development ordinance applies to this.

We can't change insurance.

Insurance is always going to be regulated by FEMA, and FEMA is regulatory floodplain.

As an example of that, so where I was in the Boston area, it was very common where there were formerly ponds or wetlands that had been filled and neighborhoods developed on top, those areas continued to flood because water continues to go to the low point.

Exactly.

So we already have that option.

Now big asterisk here, it does have to be approved by council.

We can't just a staff say this is what it is now.

So one example of making our floodplain development ordinance more restrictive through this avenue, we can say we like the 2005 FEMA study.

We really agree with the methodology there, and that's what we want to develop too.

Going to most restrictive, this is kind of calling every example of what some other communities do into one example, right?

But some communities say, we want to look at fully developed conditions across the watershed.

We want to look at climate-influenced storm events for our floodplains.

Now we haven't seen a lot of that yet, but I wonder if it's coming.

We can say we want our floodplains to cover more areas, so all streams with contributing drainage areas over 60 acres.

That's made up.

But you see what I'm saying?

We can define it in a way that makes sense to us and our community.

But we'd have to create those models.

For that most restrictive, yes.

talks about this a bit tonight, so it's interesting to see it through the lens of floodplain management and flood resiliency, because mostly, when we're talking about floodplains, we're talking about moderating flooding, right?

But there are natural floodplain functions, things that help us maintain water quality, they recharge groundwater.

When you have big flood events, if you have that flood bench, that flood fringe, that's a natural place for sediment to drop out and deposit,

That's why people farmed there, right?

Because over time, right, there's like really fertile soil associated with that floodplain function.

It can reduce erosion, and of course, you know, it can provide habitat.

So if we're going to look through the context of zoning, what we have right now is in our water protection ordinance, which is exactly what you guys have already spoken to tonight, that 100-foot stream buffer that applies to Morris Creek

If we want it to be more restrictive,

I wonder, would it make a difference if this was in a zoning overlay versus a water protection?

I don't know.

I don't have a question to that.

So that's the first thing.

Do we want that to be part of a development?

Yes.

And then we could look at all kinds of different things.

If we want, as part of our development standards to be improving natural function, we can look at, well, maybe we expand the minimum setback for what we already have.

Maybe we have a setback that's not just a hard minimum.

Maybe it's based on something.

Maybe it's based on the flow you see through that floodplain or the contributing drainage area.

Maybe it's based on an erosion hazard analysis, right?

So what does that stream make look like already?

If it's in great shape and it's sort of...

you know it's not set to change over time maybe you don't need as much of a setback as you would need if you see something that's very eroded and likely to erode in the future we could also look at kind of what we talked about the critical environmental features right where we talked about our local flood hazard areas so that's kind of overlapping with the last slide so there are lots of things to consider here

And the good news here is that more restrictive ordinance does have benefits.

A big one, the most direct benefit, is that we can participate in the community rating system.

This is something that's done through FEMA.

So this says you can participate

if you do things above and beyond what you have to do as part of the National Flood Insurance Program.

And if you participate, and based on what level of participation you have, we will give you a reduction in insurance premiums.

So that's great, right, because one of our tools is education and outreach.

So we want to tell people in the floodplain, out of the floodplain,

Blood insurance might be a good thing for you.

And by the way, we've done all this work and your premium, you're going to get a 35% discount because we've done all of these things here.

So we've made it affordable for you.

So that's a very direct benefit.

Another benefit is sort of this local empowerment option, right, where we want first say,

where we want something tailored to our community specifically and our needs.

Of course, we're long-term reducing cost associated with damage from these events if we have less there.

Zero.

We don't participate right now.

And now, there are probably some things we do now that we could be participating right now.

It might not be high on the chart, but certainly having a more restrictive ordinance gets us up there.

So there's a lot to consider here, and that's kind of all I wanted to do tonight, is to show you that there's a lot to consider to pique your interest.

If I do my job well, maybe you'll ask me back.

specific recommendations about how we can achieve this.

Because, you know, besides what I presented here, there are also considerations for, you know, the development community folks that live in floodplains and staff, right?

We are a little bit over time, but this is a big, complicated issue.

I've got just a

This was great.

I mean, I kept up with you, which is remarkable.

I think I would certainly be leaning towards a more restrictive embrace of the ordinance or vision so that we can start moving towards class one in the community ratings.

So to that end, why wouldn't we require a waiver for anything that's going to be built in the

Just do that now.

You've got to have a waiver.

You've got to have a waiver.

Mm-hmm.

on the front, it's simple.

On the implementing the ordinance, it might be more difficult because I think

Again, I think getting there, I mean, yeah, we can't do it today, but I think we ought to be able to iterate our way to a more restrictive ordinance.

Thank you.

Mr. D'Oronzio.

So a couple of data questions.

The $141,000 in paid claims, what was the period of time for that?

But we only have 90 policies to date.

Right.

And we have 600 properties.

I wasn't looking at it in terms of the events.

I was thinking in terms of purely the finances.

Okay.

So we've got 600 parcels.

Can we interpolate them on the FLUM?

Okay.

Yes.

All right.

So if we would expand a limited flood hazard area with some sort of restrictions on it,

There's really nothing stopping the city from providing a self-insurance model or the city doing a self-insurance model if we designate things that way, right?

Yeah.

Right.

But, of course, what we haven't discussed here is that that program is in trouble in three or four different directions.

And it's not going to get fixed soon because it's going to require congressional action to fix it.

and that's not going to happen in the next two years.

But, okay, and then so I was asking about the self-insurance for a, I mean, there's nothing really to stop us.

Okay, and then do we,

Where are we with, do we have stilted properties in the city?

I can think of a few.

Yeah, I'm thinking a few of them down along.

At Blue House on Nassau.

That's right.

There's one in Willemills.

And there's one in Willemills, yeah.

Okay.

Riverside.

Yeah, I'm also in favor of more restrictive.

I think one thing we vaguely touched upon is habitat also.

And I'd like to hear more, like, there's a quick way to kind of summarize.

You know, we have a lot of the floodplain right now that's kind of along the Ibanez and our

we have the urban Rivanna corridor plan too and it seems like the more restrictive this is it kind of feeds into the goals of the urban or how does that measure the urban Rivanna corridor plan is one thing to keep in kind of consideration when you look at this again and I was hoping if Steve Gaines is here to briefly touch upon the

It would be interesting to continue the conversation and see what increasing that one foot to two or whatever we want to do does.

How much area does it impact?

Would we then have a takings issue if we stopped development in some of these parcels?

The way I look at this is also it could be like, you know, we have like three different buckets of developed parcels, undeveloped parcels, and then kind of the habitat wildlife impact.

And when we get new applications, we can, they can fall into these different categories, I suppose.

Would we want to make a distinction between the 1% and the 500-year floodplain?

How does that?

critical buildings, schools, hospitals, things like that.

They may have some regulations to say, we want you even out of the 500.

We don't have that.

I think that's my biggest concern also on building in the flood plain, get my terms right.

If a person wants to go build a mound and build a house on top or put stilts, whatever.

So I think it makes a lot of sense to have a waiver or entity process in place

and then you're good to go.

Yeah, you guys just said what I was concerned about, which was, yeah, you've got a homeowner there that's got a house that, you know, it's all they've got, and it gets damaged, and they lose everything.

Just make sure that we don't make it so restrictive that we can.

I mean, a buyout program sounds like a great way to get people out of the floodplain, which maybe that is what we should do over time, is how do we compensate people to get them out of that area?

Well, I would counter that, maybe a program to do building

and one potential adverse effect would be the loss of a historic building in a national registered district like Willen Mills, you know, comes to mind.

I think it's reasonable to plan for larger rain events as climate change progresses.

to me the most obvious and unobjectionable way to do that is to increase freeboard requirements.

I don't really see any downside to saying your front door needs to be three feet above the floodplain instead of one.

It doesn't seem like it really has much negative impact on or is very difficult to comply with even.

I'm more skeptical about or, well, I think ultimately we need to make a choice about

what we want the floodplain to be, whether we want it to be a sort of managed urban floodplain where we have people live in it, or whether we should really let it return to wilderness and do an organized managed retreat and not let people live in the floodplain or rebuild their houses after they've been flooded.

And I think anywhere in between is kind of diluting ourselves by saying we're going to let this sort of thing happen over and over just as long as you're not living in a new apartment.

And it doesn't seem like you get any advantage by restricting to single-family homes or whatever.

Certainly no advantage of everything being a one story building versus a five story building because the people in the top four stories are certainly have lots of free board for their floors and I think a lot of obviously there's one particular thing happening now that none of this will probably happen in time to matter for but that's driving a lot of again pretextual

talk about the floodplain because they don't like the idea of tall buildings, but doesn't entirely have that much to do with it.

I think before I would be willing to restrict fill in the floodplain, I'd like to have much better understanding of what the effects of that fill are.

Like, is it downstream effects from the water moving faster?

Is it upstream effects from the water backing up?

What are the things that are downstream?

I mean, there are parts of the Rivanna where the things downstream, like, there isn't much.

Maureen, one thing, just in direct response to the, you know, whether we should do this or that in the floodplain, keep in mind, too, that the ordinance and controls are only one tool, right?

There's infrastructure, there's

things that could be done to try to prevent that incident from happening, not just respond to it like a seawall or something like that.

Yeah.

And I mean, similarly, like you would imagine that Phil would if if I'm, you know, at the in the 500 foot floodplain maybe and someone over here is

in the floodplain is trying to put in a bunch of fill, I would intuitively think, but I'm not an engineer and don't know about any of this stuff, that that would help me, right?

That I would be less likely to have the Rivena flood my house because there's this big berm in the way that almost acts as a levy.

I don't know.

I mean, I think these things are complicated, right?

I think it's easy to say, to make, you know, sweeping, let's not do anything there.

I'm afraid of unintended consequences.

In particular, I'm afraid of locking in all the really bad land uses we have in the floodplain, especially on river or road.

where we want that stuff to change.

And ideally, I mean, if we had a ton of money, a couple hundred million dollars, we could probably buy it all and, you know, return it to a natural state.

We don't at the moment.

Stamp schools are always making us pay for things.

But it would be a lot better to have, you know, no habitable space in the ground floor and then a building with floors above rather than, you know, a lot of expensive business or whatever happening on the ground floor, in the floodplain, in the floodway.

And that's kind of what you could be incentivizing locking in if you

As for me, I get a wandering email with a lot of questions and confusion, and I'm moderately less confused, although I'm not entirely there yet.

A big one, because of an application we've seen recently, is parking.

Parking is so much land use.

It takes up so much space.

And I'm not convinced that the best use of the floodplain is to fill it in for surface parking.

If there's a way to treat different land uses differently, to give different priority, I think that would be a helpful way to think about it.

Something I've seen in other places is

parking under the structure and then the structure itself is elevated.

It comes into play where the standard is, if I remember correctly, the minimum fill necessary.

What is the definition of minimum fill necessary?

I have a perspective on it.

That's a good point.

And that falls into the, do we want to be a little more detailed in what we mean by that?

And there is no, I believe, Rory, you mentioned the, and I'm not sure what you're talking about, where they store all these cars, so I'm sure somewhere on River Road, there is no environmental consideration of flooding.

Like, you made Newton a good point.

We don't want to sweep 100 cars full of oil and fuel and everything into the river, but there is no consideration for environmental impacts of that outside of, you can't put treatment plants in a floodplain, you can't put, out of those regulated things, there is no floodplain.

Also, one more thing I didn't mention, but, like, if zero-ease hike goes forward before any of this stuff happens,

whatever not on our plate right now is there a way to get like a note or require like a notification from the landlord to a renter to say hey you're only one foot above the floodplain like consider getting a flood rider on your rental insurance?

Yeah, so that would be something in the toolkit to explore as part of the education and outreach.

Is this a voluntary partnership?

I have one more thing.

I love your image of different scores.

That's very exciting to me.

Yeah, there's a whole booklet that explains the task and the points.

I would hope there was a reasonable path forward where we could win big points for low cost.

It's a beautiful thing.

Do we have anything more on this matter?

Thank you all very much.

Thank you guys.

I would like to talk about design quality.

Entrance corridors?

MR. That's a good assumption.

Mr. Robert, are you caught up on Jeff's presentation?

MR. Yes.

Mr. Priest will start us.

All right.

All right.

Good evening once again.

So as I was saying a minute ago, I'm starting from the perspective that everybody was attentive for Jeff's presentation last time, so I don't need to go into a detailed discussion of what is the entrance corridor, what is that design review process.

We've been over that.

And everyone's read the memo that you guys already received, so I'm going to

I think the cost comes with a design review process.

I just acknowledge that there is an additional cost, whatever that might be, and however great or small people may feel that is, I think it does exist.

And then recognizing that in our comprehensive plan while we are looking to accommodate additional density of new housing units throughout the city, we are also saying, I'm going to quote from the memo from the comprehensive plan, working to celebrate the unique cultural and historical identity of the city.

and the entrance corridor review process is one of those places where we have as a tool that we can potentially use towards that goal.

Now in our approach document we did talk about the possibility of rolling entrance corridor standards into the underlying zoning in some fashion but we heard some concern about that idea when we last spoke about this at the beginning of August about that there's more

nuance and value in the design review discussions that would be lost in that scenario.

So where we are right now is I've got a list in your memo of eight different items that are both a combination of specific recommendations and things for you guys to discuss and consider.

And I'm just going to walk through these.

So number one was the existing entrance corridor design review exempts single family homes.

And my proposal at this point

was to expand that to up to four units.

I'm not married to that number.

I picked that number because it represents our general residential district within the comprehensive plan on the land use map.

All right, so the general residential was three units with fourth as a bonus for retention of the existing structure.

How many general residential parcels are there in entrance doors?

Great question.

We'll make a note of that and have that.

I think that makes sense.

It basically keeps the same

The purpose of the existing entrance corridor does not apply to single family, I believe, right?

And recognizing on, again, a very general level that that additional process cost weighs more heavily on a smaller unit project than a larger unit project on a per unit basis.

So I want to clarify on number two.

I noted remove the landscaping and lighting standards.

What I mean simply was that if you look at the existing ordinance as it's written, those are pretty generic standards and the types of standards that we're likely to be including on a citywide basis anyway.

I'm not suggesting that there is no design review for landscaping and lighting.

There would still be that design review would still happen.

The guidelines for that would exist within the design guidelines.

One of the things I'm going to keep coming back to is that what exists in the design guidelines versus what exists in the ordinance.

So landscaping and lighting, there would be design, there would be a section of the design guidelines or portions of the design guidelines to speak to that issue and it would be part of the review.

Do you want me to wait or do you want me to ask?

No, go ahead.

So what does that mean?

I think we're moving more in the direction of respecting the uniqueness of every corridor because each corridor, as we have today and as I expect it would exist in the future, the entrance corridor design guidelines are meant to be specified to the individual corridor and so the landscaping and lighting would be tied to the individual corridor.

Similarly, signage, I would just shift it over, any specific standards within the entrance corridor review relative to signage would shift over to the sign section of the overall zoning ordinance.

The other advantage we're getting here, we're now putting it within the ordinance, we don't have to look all over the place to find sign standards, landscaping standards, they are all consolidated in one part of the ordinance.

Number four is the submittal requirements would go into the design guideline document.

That's something we're looking at doing for the overall ordinance is that submittal requirements, if you're submitting for a special plan, you're submitting for a site plan, what you're required to submit is going to move out of the zoning ordinance itself and into some form of

of guidance document or document on the staff level.

Really just get so that when we need to make a change to what needs to be submitted, we don't have to make an ordinance amendment to do so.

So for example, we're getting ready to have a digital building permit, I'm sorry,

Our overall permitting system is going to go digital.

We're going to go to digital submissions.

Our ordinance says you have to submit paper.

Right.

And it will require, would right now require an ordinance amendment to change that.

So number five is, this is just a broader issue of we need to bring clarity to this review process.

When does it occur and how does it relate to the other review processes that we're engaged in?

That's just something, frankly, that we have to do.

I don't know that there's much to talk about on that except that we have to do it.

Okay, number six is a big one.

So this was the idea of switching the ERB role, who does the design review from the Planning Commission to the BAR.

I want to clarify that I realize in writing this again out the door that I didn't complete this section in that our staff's recommendation at this point is that this stay with Planning Commission, despite the wording of the first sentence.

What we looked at is, in general, we think both entities, BAR and Planning Commission, are actually, in many respects, equally, have equal capacity and ability to provide this role in the ERB.

What we see is that the BAR represents, we believe, generally a higher intensity of review.

The projects that come to BAR tend to go through more rounds of review.

and we think that the entrance corridor process shouldn't necessarily go through that same level of intensity.

The Planning Commission has tended to be more of a one and done type of review and that that would be what we would suggest for the entrance corridor.

I will continue to recommend that the ERP go to the bar because I think they have a temperament that's better than ours to do this stuff.

But I think if you go to the bar and Jeff can just coach those guys that we're going to do a one and done review of this because your job is to appreciate the aesthetics and see if the aesthetics of this thing marry to that corridor in Charlottesville.

What do you think, Carl?

Yeah, I mean, I think the guidelines are clear that, you know, it's got to be a, you know, a simpler review.

We have, I think we've overstepped a couple times or started to overstep a couple times in the conservation districts, which I would compare to the entrance corridor as, you know, supposed to be kind of like BAR light.

but those also are historic related I think it needs to be clear that the entrance corridor review is not a review for preservation it's a review for new design and yeah just make sure the guidelines are clear so it's yeah I think the VR can do it but we just need to be

Our scope needs to be clarified.

Sorry, I said that three times.

I think you should stay with the Planning Commission.

I know we talk about advocating responsibility, but I think that

for the same reasons that you mentioned were capable of evaluating the guidelines on their merit and it sort of speaks to this ethos I have of us as a commission being able to use the vocabulary of design as we move through the rezoning process.

I don't think we're going to be happy with the results if it goes to the

I just don't think it should.

I think it will be a longer process that will not benefit the community or the developers.

I was going to say I think it makes sense to go to the BAR.

If staff's concern is that we do it faster with the one and done, that could just be because the guidelines are simpler.

And if they follow those guidelines, maybe they could do that.

The other thing is we can always take it back, right?

Council's got to give it to the BAR, and they've got to take it away from the BAR.

But it would definitely be a statement.

I oppose giving it to the BAR, not only because I think the BAR lost all of its legitimacy this week, but also, but actually because

The composition of the BAR, I think, doesn't quite make sense for it, for this.

I mean, unless you're going to change the composition of the BAR, you have things like residents and owners of property, or actually, sorry, just owners of property in architectural control districts, which have nothing to do, are different places than entrance corridors.

laypeople who have no architectural knowledge or ability and it's unclear why we put them there except that we think property owners are more important than residents or others who should care about the aesthetic values of our community.

I think Commissioner Russell brought up a very good point the other day that the more I thought about it really got to me as much as I hate to admit it.

By having ECRB in our role, ERB,

whatever reason, we are forced to get into that aesthetic mindset of thinking about what it means for something to look good.

Team keeping.

Yeah, which I think when we give things, if we were to give this to BAR, it would be out of sight, out of mind, and we could pretend it never exists, and people get dragged through these brutal processes at BAR where everyone bike sheds,

I don't know if that's a software term.

I guess it is maybe.

Bike shedding is when you argue over the color of the bike shed rather than how to build it or actually building it.

And you get bogged down in these really long discussions of minutiae.

And the BAR has a strong tendency to do that.

And I think that won't change

But yeah, as much as I hate it, I think there is value even to me of that, particularly for these large projects like gallery

and the upcoming thing on JPA of really thinking about, you know, what it means to have the massing and height that we've set and how to make that, you know, fit in.

And I do think it's possible for that to happen.

To follow on with Commissioner Stolzenberg, I mean, his comments about getting down deep into the weeds, et cetera, and the minutiae and the tenancy.

I mean, I think that this is a clear example of only Nixon could go to China, right?

But I think that when

But more so, I think I'm generally in line with Commissioner Russell and Stolzenberg that it stays here for the reasons that they've stated.

I also think that the culture of the institution of the BAR in terms of its intensity, I think it is

Highly unlikely that you're going to see the abrupt cultural change that would need to happen that would not lead to a whole bunch of frustration for people making application to it.

The expectation is that you go into the meeting and by the end of the meeting this has been sorted out and you go walking out of there.

And I think that needs to continue to be the expectation on these things.

Is this going to work or isn't it?

Any more issues about BAR versus PC?

Actually, I guess I should say something.

I understand criticisms of the BAR.

I understand criticisms of the PC.

I'm not clear how much of the problems are the persons and how much is the structure.

I think a lot of the structure.

We're very nice.

They're very nice.

But my sense of the structure is very broken and out of date.

So I'm less convinced

today than I was yesterday, that the BAR is the right solution.

And maybe there's a third solution I'm not thinking of.

Cornice, but Cornice isn't everything.

That's right.

I mean, we have to create the zoning, or we review the creation of the zoning code.

We're going to be looking at form massing, and, you know, I have imagined there's going to be some form-based stuff that's going to sneak its way in there at some point.

How is new development, denser development in existing residential going to happen?

In fact, on that note, I think it's very important that form and massing and all that are part of the zoning ordinance and not these things that are privileged to

where we're just arbitrarily deciding them willy-nilly.

In fact, I would probably go so far as to say that these aesthetic reviews should not be able to modify the envelope rather than the appearance.

You can change the appearance of massing, but you shouldn't be able to say, oh, it's too big.

Okay, so another big one was this broader notion.

So we have 12 designated entrance corridors.

I broadly broke these down into three types of entrance corridors, one being kind of your big, if you will, big box, automobile-oriented retail districts, your Route 29 North, Emmett Street Barracks.

one being smaller scale commercial districts like Preston or East High where you have more individual businesses and another one being kind of a residential corridor.

Now, you know, I didn't do anything scientific.

I looked at the 12 corridors and I saw three different types.

And the only reason I bring them up is that if there was an interest in considering reducing the number of entrance corridors,

it might be helpful to look at it in terms of those three types.

It's interesting, I did look at the county's map for entrance corridors, and it's amazingly extensive.

Most of them were illegal until recently.

Counties are only allowed to have entrance corridors on

Arterial designated roads, and a lot of them, like Avon Street, were not designated as arterial materials.

Okay, interesting.

I didn't know that part, but I mean, it was pretty, the map's pretty extensive.

I mean, it includes Route 64, 250, 29, all your major roads coming in, as well as roads like Avon Hydraulic,

We don't exactly match up.

We mostly match up, but we don't exactly match up.

Am I getting that right?

Well, exactly.

I know you can't.

Right.

True.

But McIntyre is in the interest of her.

In ours?

I see a utility in categorizing them.

Your categorization seems just dandy to me, but I haven't given it three minutes of thought as to whether there's another blinding flash of the obvious to how to do it.

I think that's right.

I think do we need to reduce the number?

So the entrance corridors are under the state enabling legislation for them.

They essentially are meant to be routes leading to areas of historical value.

Yeah, I guess my only question is, is that they have the character leading to, I mean, are they, have they, has traffic and behavior changed to the extent that, ah, that one really doesn't count anymore?

I mean, does Avon really count if you can't get there from 64 and you're coming in from 20?

Does that mean, does it still, yeah, I mean, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

I think, in some respects, the

The question to me also comes to kind of outcome as well.

When it was interesting, you know, you shared in an email which one's kind of broadly of those categories you might keep or get rid of.

If I were looking at what's the level of impact we have in terms of an outcome on Route 29 North, maybe pretty limited as opposed to

the outcome might be really significant on Preston.

Now, I think you looked at it from a different perspective.

I don't want to steal your thunder.

But from my perspective, you were thinking more about what's the impact on the project, right?

And if they're generally going to be smaller scale projects on Avon Street, the impact is higher on them, whereas your Route 29 can more readily absorb that cost.