Planning Commission Regular Meeting   4/8/2025

Are we all ready?

Welcome guys to tonight's regular meeting of the Planning Commission.

We will start with commissioners reports.

Hello.

Let me think.

Yes.

Just last week, I was at the TREE commission.

We have a new chair and vice chair and a couple new members.

And I'm always impressed with the depth of knowledge all these people bring to that.

They have some different committees on education, advocacy,

and the one I joined just because I'm on the Planning Commission is the codes.

And there's been some talk about maybe having a work session sometime someday.

It's not imminent, but since there's a lot of talk about critical slope and floodplains and how to better protect them.

So it seems like there's some overlap for a discussion at some point.

And I don't know if

I don't have anything to report.

I had no meetings to report on, but something I consulted on came out in February from Pew Charitable Trust Research.

Small single-stairway apartment buildings have strong safety record.

This is something that I suspected, but I didn't do the research.

They did.

So, two items.

One, the hack.

We are looking at what used to be called most recently the Landlord Risk Reduction Fund plan, which involves providing two prospective landlords for folks with Section 8 vouchers and otherwise that in lieu of deposit, they would have essentially a guarantee from the city

as to wear and tear and damage, this being thought would reduce barriers and sort of provide a degree of certainty and also as a strike against an attack on the stigma of subsidized housing tenants.

This is sort of on a larger scale that we sort of branch that out into a landlord-tenant sort of discussion because we have

A lot of little programs about eviction prevention that are siloed.

in the nonprofit world and in the church world, etc.

And there's sort of this generalized need to pull all of that together and see if the city can provide some unifying, either a unifying program or a unified funding source just to simplify and reduce duplication of effort.

So that's ongoing.

I think I only had one meeting this month, Lou Peck.

First we had a presentation from Cat on the growth of MicroCat, which sounds like it's gotten pretty busy, though fairly expensive still.

It's about $16 per ride as cost.

We also kind of got an update on plans for kind of how Cat itself functions for fixed route.

we also got a presentation from UVA on the Ivy Corridor housing project they have some pretty good-looking buildings I think coming up over there though of course now it sounds like they have paused

planning on capital projects until things shake out with the feds.

So hopefully that moves forward.

We'll add several hundred beds over an IV across from 2117 IV.

One thing that I thought was interesting of that discussion is that they are in discussions with VDOT about how to facilitate pedestrian access across the bridge there.

So they are hoping to widen the sidewalk on the bridge and they're providing a pretty large sidewalk and pedestrian plaza at the corner of Ivey and Copley for the crowds that walk from the parking at JPJ to the football stadium and just sort of generally in the area during big events and unfortunately

They, I think in the end, would have liked to also add a sidewalk on the west side of the street.

But council granted a sidewalk waiver to 2117 under the impression that you could never add a sidewalk on the west side of the bridge because VDOT wouldn't go for it or the bridge couldn't be modified.

And so because there was no plans to continue the sidewalk, why not give them the waiver?

but now there may have been plans to consider the sidewalk if we had continued it to the bridge.

So that's kind of a bummer and I don't know what the lesson is there except you know maybe the Planning Commission could be involved in the sidewalk waiver process.

That's what I got.

Well, from the March BAR meeting, we had two items, basically a work session, but we had an update for 1000 Wortland.

They basically just explained that they're kind of in a box.

They've submitted for their tax credits and they can't change their unit count or their square footages.

So anything that they do to appease the BAR is going to have to be within that kind of tightly constrained box.

And we will continue working with them.

And then we just had a work session on procedure and our bylaws and whatnot.

So nothing that interesting.

And that was it.

Nothing really at this time.

We're not going to have an April work session, but we're prepping for a May work session for sure.

We don't have too much lined up for a May regular meeting at this time, but that can always change, so we'll let you know how that's going.

Now, if we have any matters from the public that are not on the formal agenda, now would be a time, I guess, do we have any public in the room?

Sure.

We can ask our online audience.

If you're interested in speaking for three minutes during matters from the public, this can be about anything that's not on the agenda.

formally for public hearing, then go ahead and raise your hand in the application.

No one's on the phone, but that would be star nine and that would raise your hand in the application.

Chair, I don't see any hands raised here.

One more check on our in-person audience and our virtual audience.

One more check.

All right.

Mr. Chair, I move to approve the consent agenda.

All in favor?

Aye.

Well, that is it until our public hearing at 6 o'clock.

I hate that gavel.

All right, 20 minute break.

Good evening commissioners.

My name is Anthony Warren.

I'm with the City of Charlottesville Office of Community Solutions.

Thank you for this opportunity to discuss before the public the work of the city's Community Development Block Grant and Home Investment Partnership Program.

We have

Before you, a slate of recommendations.

By way of background, we have not received notice from HUD of any funds that we'll be receiving this year.

It could happen anytime between tomorrow and June.

So that will explain a little bit of the background of some of the slides.

By way of background for the public, the city is an entitlement community as designated by HUD and therefore we receive community development block grant funds directly based on population and demographic characteristics of the city.

We receive home investment partnership funds for affordable housing activities on behalf of a consortium.

that involves the City of Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Livona, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson.

We work together as a consortium.

The consortium is managed on our behalf by the staff of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and they manage the

Allocation of funds and direct supervision of programs.

The City of Charlottesville retains the right to approve any and all home-funded activities within the City of Charlottesville with our portion of the shared funds and that is reflected on our recommendations.

Is it possible to go full screen?

If not, it's fine.

So HUD funds are provided to jurisdictions on behalf of the people of Charlottesville by HUD to meet three primary HUD national objectives, regardless of which program they are, to provide the majority of the benefits.

By statute, it's supposed to be 70% or more of the benefits accrued directly to persons of low and moderate income.

or to aid in the prevention and elimination of slums or blight programs developed in the late 60s and early 70s and the language reflects that or to meet a need having a particular urgency so there's some opportunity to kind of respond to

direct needs.

The city focuses largely on affordable housing, economic development, and what are called public services activities.

And we can go into those a little bit more.

We do do some funding for what are called public facilities and infrastructure projects.

So if anybody went to the opening of the Beacon Commercial Kitchen this weekend, unfortunately I had to miss it.

It was a wonderful event.

They ran into an unexpected

Hurdle with some of their connections to the municipal sewer water and gas lines and It resulted in a funding gap and it would have slowed down construction Because we had this money in this opportunity we were able to jump in provide some funds to help them bridge that gap and construction of the connecting lines didn't even have to stop the contractor was able to just bring in the larger lines and the larger connectors and Continue with the pace of construction

that's some of the projects that we work on.

A large part of our work is aimed at providing decent affordable housing either through the acquisition of land, rehabilitation of home ownership for low and moderate income families or residential or rental units or the construction of new

units for these purposes.

I have to say, though, the home funds are usually typically less than $100,000, so they do not fund particular activities.

They're mainly offered by the city to provide gap funding for projects that are already in development and just need a little bit more help to cross the finish line and get to being shovel-ready.

OK, so HUD has a wide variety of regulations to try to make sure that these projects and activities occur honestly, faithfully, and in good time.

With those, city council every year publishes a resolution kind of outlining some of the priorities that they would like to see happen.

And that guides the work of the CDBG and Home Task Force.

That's in the slide.

That's also a council approved resolution, so it's publicly available as well.

If the members of public want to be involved and help guide these priorities, they can just reach out to me and we are going to be hopefully developing a new slate of council priorities shortly.

Next slide, please.

So the CDBJ eligible activities, HUD has a variety of categories that these activities fall in.

And if you can't, if the activity doesn't fall into one of these code categories,

It probably isn't fundable through CDBG.

I will point it out, though, because the city focuses on, to some degree, economic development, but they prioritize housing activities and what are called public services activities.

Why that's important is HUD has a limit set in place.

It's actually in the Code of Federal Regulations, so it's federal law, limiting spending of

more than 15% of an annual allocation on what are called public services activities.

Unfortunately, that's where, unfortunately for the members of the task force, that's where the majority of the applications typically fall.

And so that presents the all volunteer members of the task force with quite a considerable challenge trying to circle that square, if you will.

Next slide, please.

Home is a little bit less defined in some ways and considerably far more defined in other ways.

Again, both of these programs are defined through federal law, Code of Federal Regulations, which has included this slide to show that some of the majority of focus is on homeowner rehabilitation, which we do through partnerships with groups like AHIP, LEAP,

Rental housing acquisition, new construction or rehabilitation.

The city's been very involved in that lately.

Home buyer acquisition or new construction.

Again, the city's been very involved in that.

Or tenant-based rental assistance.

It's a little bit harder to fund sometimes.

And again, the pot of money for a home is not very large.

and that is very short-term assistance.

I believe no more than three months and at a very nominal rate.

So it does not address, in no way could it address, even if we gave all of our home funds, the crisis that we have in looming evictions, for example.

Next slide, please.

So this slide presents an overview of the applications that we received broken down into their appropriate HUD categories.

Because we have not received notice from HUD, we have to use the numbers from last year.

So we start with the numbers that we've already received and we make

The notice of funding availability, we receive the applications, break them down into categories.

So there were two applications for economic development activities, one for public facilities.

The majority of them and the majority of funding requests came through public service programs, and then there was one application that could be considered affordable housing.

And then the three at the bottom are for the home investment partnerships.

And what I like to do is kind of just include a category total of the actual requests so that people can see.

In the second box up at the top, programmatic funding set aside, you see the second line public services cap.

If we were to receive the CDBG funding that we received last year, $438,617, 15% of that would be $65,792 and some odd cents, meaning we can't allocate any more than that to the public services programs.

And you can see that the request came in at $368,236.

So there's a huge gap between the need

and the available funds.

So that was the overview of the applications received.

If it's all right, could I ask a question about the sorting of the applications?

Does the applicant get to state what category they would like to be?

How do those get sorted?

Because I feel like there's a lot of

wiggle room on what could be called economic opportunity.

That's a great question.

Thank you.

So before an entity or an individual is allowed to submit an application, they have to go through a mandatory pre-application workshop, where I walk them through what the different categories are, the kind of activities for each.

Given an opportunity to kind of identify where they think they fall, and then it's my job as the liaison to the task force to go through and double check that with the HUD guidance.

One example of that is that there was an application submitted under the affordable housing category under CDBG for eviction diversion program.

And so I had initially grouped that under the affordable housing.

I've never worked through, I'm relatively new at this, so I've never done that before.

So I went back and checked the HUD guidance and eviction diversion.

even though it's about housing and preserving affordable housing opportunities HUD is very clear that it is a public service activity and they call it a subsistence benefit activity and it's supposed to be limited to no more than three months and a very nominal rate and so the initial list was then resorted to put that under the public services

And then, yeah.

So we work very closely with the HUD staff in Richmond to kind of finalize these and make sure things work.

They are wonderful.

They've been incredibly helpful to us.

But yeah, so they're given an opportunity to say, I think this is one.

Thank you.

Yeah, I guess that's why I was wondering why you wouldn't just pull things out of the public service category, but HUD actually has very strict definitions.

And there's a PDF.

If you Google HUD CDBG matrix codes, you'll either get a very short two-page list that I showed earlier, or you'll get like a 35-page document with all of the categories and the definitions.

It'll tell you if you're trying to build affordable rental

for Unhoused Populations, use this code.

But if you're trying to do it for people with disabilities, use this other code.

So all that stuff's out there.

Well it also ends up being what the use of the funds is for so if the funds end up being used for salary to someone for someone to implement a program then that ends up in public service even though it's something the program would fit in a different category so yeah there's

It's pretty complicated.

So the initial sheet was what I presented after we received all the applications.

This is a sheet that was provided to the members of the CDBG and Home Task Force.

Then I sit back and I answer any questions.

If they have questions for applicants, my job is to go out to the applicants and say,

Task Force would like to know this.

We did that in a couple occasions.

So, on the whole, not knowing, not hearing from HUD, how unusual is it that we haven't heard from HUD at this point?

It's increasingly more likely is what I'm hearing.

This is only my second time kind of really doing this through the whole process.

Keep in mind two years ago we actually had a budget last year.

We were operating under a continuing resolution as we still are.

Right.

And that question comes up a lot and I'm glad you asked that because nobody outside of HUD national leadership or the White House has any idea about where these funding levels are going to come from until there's a large, it's always been a large national press conference and announcement at the White House between HUD national leadership and congressional leadership and the president.

It happened very late last year, and there's no indication of when or if that will happen this year.

So that's a great question.

So in lieu of that, that brings me to the next slide.

How do we handle that?

Well, we start by using the numbers that we received last year, and then the language that goes before council allows it to be prorated if the amount goes up or if the amount goes down.

If the amount goes up significantly, then we are supposed to go back before council and give them an opportunity to say, hey, if we're getting much more money than we were, rather than just prorate that to other people, could we find a new activity?

Or go back to some of the programs that were not recommended for funding.

I would love to have that problem.

If people want to give me that problem and contact their nationally elected representatives, I strongly encourage that.

So after sitting through all the applications and reviewing the evaluation criteria that have been established, the members of the task force try to figure out where to take a very small pot of money so that we can maximize the benefit for the people of Charlottesville who need it most.

And they come up with some initial funding recommendations.

We bring them to you, kind of give it an opportunity to get it out before the members of the public.

These are the recommended funding

Economic development, it was relatively easy to kind of look at those.

Public facilities, Arc of the Piedmont has been funded several times in the past to do infrastructure projects for the Shamrock Group Home, which is an older building.

clients very much in need.

The hardest part then becomes the public service activities because there's such a huge delta between what we're allowed to spend and what there is.

That is the only reason why the majority of those activities were not funded.

None of the three that were recommended for funding received their full requested funds.

Yeah, so between council priorities and the HUD codes and then the cap, there's a bit of a box that we're functioning in.

So, for example, under economic development, city council says, spend $90,000 on that.

Well, we had $75,000 worth of applicants, so we didn't have any tough decisions to make.

The only question was, are these reasonably good applications?

We didn't have to start winnowing.

Same thing with the public facilities and infrastructure.

Well, we had the room to do that.

And then when you got down to the affordable housing piece, similarly, that's not in the

That's not one of the, quote unquote, council priorities.

So there we were.

And again, the problem is with the public services activities, there's just no money.

I would like to point out to the Commission, by the way, as I was speaking earlier, we have an eviction diversion program that was suggested.

We've got the financial capabilities in the IRC also had an eviction diversion element to it.

And it was a very difficult conversation as well because some of these programs were funded through CDBG last year and so the question was if we fund them last year but we don't fund them this year, what's the impact?

And it was a torturous conversation that like the Pacham Shelter Transportation uses microtransit, I believe CAT microtransit, micro CAT in some cases, to move people transitioning from being unhoused to their employment opportunities and back to a safe shelter.

at the end.

It's been incredibly successful.

Could they do much more this year if they were funded?

I believe so.

I honestly do.

Again, it was a very small pot of money and some worthy activities.

So, I mean, those are great questions.

If there's no more questions, the one last thing I would like to

We kind of address the question of how do we work.

In some localities, they wait until they get the public announcement, that press conference of how much money comes in, and then they begin their work of funding and recommending

HUD has a due date by which this plan is due, but they also have a provision that it's no later than 60 days after they actually make the announcement.

So even if you were supposed to turn it in before, if they make the announcement very late, you have an additional 60 days.

That's not a lot of time to go through all the public hearings.

And in a lot of cases, that means that the localities are not in place to give money to their awardees to start on July 1 at the start of the program year.

So when I took up the job, I tried to figure out how do we do this?

How do we do this?

And this slide kind of represents a little bit of how I've tried to address it.

Take the funding recommendations.

Divide them by the total allocation involved and come up with a very precise decimal value.

I believe there are eight on this slide or nine decimal points on this slide, but on the actual spreadsheet, in some cases, it goes much farther.

Then each one has a decimal value that represents the recommended funding level.

Then if you can go to the next slide, please.

Oh, no go back, I'm sorry.

What I do then is I copy that slide over and I reverse the math so that the funding recommendation is a multiple and then that 438,617 becomes an input field and so if I update that new number

The decimal value will be used to convert that.

I have examples where if we received 300,000, it would show you what the reflected value is.

I will say that there's also a small pocket of money that is being left to council to kind of give guidance as to how to do and how to address that because there's a little bit of a delta between what we were awarded last year and the total funding recommendations if you add them up.

And if the task force had had their choice, they would have used that money to fund some of the other public service activities in a heartbeat, but they weren't able to.

So there's some discussion about

Affordable housing activities.

That is something that that money could clearly go to.

Are there worthy activities in the city that could use a little bit more gap funding?

Again, it's not huge in the scope of a construction project, but it could be helpful.

So that is already being considered by council.

Thank you for the opportunity to kind of walk you through a little bit of this, how we're trying to deal with things in the face of uncertainty and difficult times.

Any more questions from the commission?

So I guess we can move into the public hearing.

All right.

So for a public hearing, we'll have the opportunity for our in-person

audience to have the opportunity to speak first and then we'll rotate to our virtual audience and we'll go back and forth as long as we have interested speakers.

Each person will have three minutes in order to speak and note your name and address for the record when you're choosing to speak.

So we will start with our in-person audience.

Do we have anyone who's interested in speaking on this hearing this evening?

All right, I see no one at this moment.

We'll go to our online virtual audience.

And if you are interested in speaking, please raise your hand in the application and we'll call on you.

So we don't have any hands raised there.

I'm gonna try one more time with our in-person.

Great.

I guess we'll see.

So, you know, I was noticing for the CRHA economic opportunities one, a portion of the funds that they were planning on spending, most of it was going to the salaries.

I'm assuming why it had to go in public service, but there was like 15,000 of that.

That was like barrier assistance for people doing workforce development and then incentives for participants.

Are those like,

That's an interesting question.

My initial inclination would be

That would be difficult to do.

Incentives for participation in certain activities is not an eligible activity.

So there's been discussion before of using the funds to pay for child care or vouchers or gift cards or something.

All wonderful ideas, all should be supported, but ineligible activities as per HUD.

I don't know.

So if that's ineligible, then probably not.

Which I think are, I mean, we should have as few barriers to public participation in these programs as possible.

But there have been cases where there were reasons why HUD put those in place, I will say.

But I will follow up on that question and try to look into more.

Great to see.

I don't know how much comments we're going to have.

I guess we can go left to right.

It seems like you all had to really

Russell with the public services category, but in hearing the detailed rules, I understand that more.

And maybe in the, to Roy's question, maybe in those pre-meetings, which I know you're already doing, trying to like

Maybe there are two applications and one is, you know, like maybe there's ways people could break them up or something to try to maximize

the way we can use this money.

I think that's a great suggestion.

Thank you for that.

I don't mean to cut you off at all.

It made me think of one other thing.

In the past, part of the confusion this year, I think, has been that in the past, the city has used CDBG funds to fund an eviction diversion program through CRHA.

The problem with that was that it used CDBG COVID relief funds.

They were initially awarded in 2020 and I believe the program is funded in 2023.

And they have those wrong a little bit.

But the COVID relief money was explicitly authorized by Congress to not have that public services cap because it was supposed to be public services money to get out the door as quickly as possible.

So it was entirely possible for a locality like ourselves to use 100% of that CDBG.

It's called CDBG CV money for public service activities, which the city did.

They gave a ton of money to.

and CRHA funded smoke alarms in some of the public housing through the fire department.

CIC, which is a CDFI, was given a large pot of money to give micro-assistance, $3,000, $4,000 loans to small businesses to help them survive.

But that was all, that did not have the cap.

We've spent that money and the cap now applies to anything going forward.

The task force is still undermanned, under-personnelled, which brings us to some of these are geographic spots.

So Rose Hill neighborhood gets one, Belmont gets one, et cetera.

And some of them are vacant.

And there should be, I think, a point where we sit down, since I think that those

Delineations and decisions were made years and years ago, and the shape of the city and those neighborhoods has changed, that we may want to relook at how that whole thing is organized.

But we did have at least one new person, and terrific.

Now I'm going to try to strong arm them to sign up for more boards because they were a great contributor.

I'm sorry, to follow up on that point, we even had a vacancy in the nonprofit public services seat.

So somebody who works with a nonprofit, that vacancy has been around for about a year and a half, I believe.

So the vacancies, all the information's on the Clerk of Council's webpage.

No.

Is anybody affiliated with a nonprofit organization, community benefit organization?

If their organization were to apply for funding, they would just have to recuse themselves from any discussion or consideration of that.

We had a member who's affiliated with one of the applicants this year recuse herself from that conversation, just got up, went and go get a beverage or whatever it was.

So yeah, we would just follow that.

I will also say that

There's a very firm residency requirement, so within the city of Charlottesville.

And then last question.

You know, I was noticing that we have several housing applications for home, which we had a limited amount of funds for.

And so if there's leftover money on CDBG side, is it possible to like convert those applications to CDBG, the ones that weren't funded?

Short answer is yes.

HUD is very precise about certain things and other things.

They just want to make sure that we follow the process and have local public hearings before a locally elected board.

So that's one of the discussions right now is if any unspent money so far

can help along a affordable housing project, whether it's acquiring land, rehabilitating properties, or constructing new properties.

I believe there's an active discussion on right now with the groups trying to figure out which one.

And again, it's not a lot of money in the scheme of a construction project, but is there one that is close to shovel ready because we have a timeliness concern?

And which one will provide the biggest impact?

And the two projects that were funded for home could very well benefit from those.

They're both rehabilitation of existing projects into affordable rental units, I believe.

Great.

OK.

Do we have a motion?

Mr. D'Oronzio?

Aye.

Mr. Yoder?

Aye.

Ms.

Roker?

Aye.

Yes.

Alright.

So our next public hearing is on a special use permit for 401 Ridge Street.

Yeah.

Hi, Commission.

I'm Ben Kobe.

I am with Planning Staff with Neighborhood Development Services, and before you today is PL 25-0027, which is at 401 Ridge Street.

It's a special use permit evaluation for a general commercial lodging application.

Patrick, could you go to the next slide, please?

It is zoned RC and in the RC zoning district a general commercial lodging use of up to 10 guest rooms is permitted on with a special use permit application approval from City Council, so we are here to evaluate that today and

under the future land use map it's designated as a medium intensity residential use and as I said under the new zoning ordinance a general commercial lodging is allowable given a set of circumstance or rather there's a consideration set outlined in the development code going along the lines of whether or not the proposed use will be harmonious with existing patterns of use.

whether the proposed use in associated public facilities will substantially conform to the comprehensive plan that the proposed use will consider whether it will have potential adverse impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and whether there are any relevant conditions that could be imposed upon the SUP to sort of bring it in line to be harmonious with the area or to reduce any potential impacts

or anything like that.

Um, so as outlined in the staff report, we have not really, um, during our considerations, we have not really seen any, um, issues given that circum or that consideration set.

Um, and it's also worth noting that the, um, the applicant held a community meeting this morning where two individuals were in attendance and they were both in support of the application.

There was a discussion of some traffic concerns in the area, but I believe that to be, or staff believes that to be a wider, a bigger issue than just this commercial lodging use.

So we are recommending approval of this application with no conditions.

Any questions on that?

Does the applicant have anything they'd like to add?

Nope.

Great.

I guess we can start the public hearing.

Sure.

Well, we will.

We do, actually.

We do have some viewing audience at home.

All right.

We will run this public hearing as we did the one prior, just so folks

Folks understand the procedure.

We'll begin with our in-person audience.

We'll ask if there's any speakers and if there is, there's an opportunity for three minutes to speak on this topic.

We will then move to our virtual audience and we will have them have the same opportunity and rotate back and forth as long as there's speakers.

If you're in our virtual audience and you're interested in speaking, please raise your hand in the application.

I'll check with our in-person audience first.

Any interested speakers?

All right, not at this time.

Let's try our virtual audience.

Okay, I'm going to check back to our in-person and then our virtual.

In the public hearing.

Okay, so comments from the Planning Commission.

I guess I'd say it's nice to have a real special use permit application that's actually a special use and we're finally returning the process to what it was meant to be.

Yeah, I mean, this has been a commercial building on and off for the last 30, 28 years anyway.

And I understand that this has been a de facto, been a breakfast outfit.

So traffic impact is already impacted.

The use is already being used.

It's sort of a fait accompli.

I just want to add that we are approving the use, which is up to ten units of guest rooms and I understand that the BAR would review this if they were to add five more guest rooms to the site somewhere.

But I think even with that understanding, I would support this.

I'm okay with that.

I figured that was, yeah.

I move to recommend approval of this application for a special use permit in the RC zone at 401 Ridge Street to permit a commercial general lodging up to ten guest rooms for the use of a bed-and-breakfast with the following condition in the event that any site modifications as outlined in the city's

Sorry, wait, yes.

Alrighty.

Mr. Stolzenberg?

Aye.

Ms.

Roettger?

Aye.

All right, and this will move forward to Council as will CDBG.

I have a question for staff.

There was some discussion about this item in the pre-meeting.

The issue of the cost of sprinkler installation came up.

I know that the fire department offers free smoke detector installation, but I don't think they offer any support on sprinkler installation, which does not matter for single-family detached, but for a small hotel use or a missing middle residential use.

It could matter quite a bit, become very important financially.

I don't know if this is an NDS issue.

I'm sure something could be looked at.

I know that cost of sprinkler installation is a pretty extensive cost.

And usually when a group hits certain thresholds,

that becomes part of the construction costs that are required.

So it's part of the cost of doing business.

I don't know of any situations where there are relief or grant or incentive programs for that specific thing.

Okay.

I do actually have one question for staff that I probably don't need to answer now, but might be helpful to think about in a future staff update or report.

So I was looking back at the December 2023 meeting where the code was approved, and I realized that in the

the disposition of pending items resolution.

It said that pending site plans that have been submitted already have to reach approval by this July in order to continue to qualify under the old ordinance.

And I think it would be great to get an update on how many of those there are, whether they're on track to do that.

I will say a number of the legacy plans are making it to the finish line.

And then I guess, you know, a related question is, you know, are there any that are coming up so tight against the finish line that they're going to like miss it by a couple weeks?

We have, Matt Affleck with Neighborhood Development Services, we have not had any that have had that concern.

We do have some that are, yes, getting near the

that July deadline, I will say the July deadline was to get basically some sort of approval.

It does not trump state regulations, so there's still that five-year on plans that, you know, say you get a preliminary approval in June, you still, you know, you can still pursue your

Mr. Chair, I just point out that today would have been a great day for a major development presentation and public hearing because it is International Be Kind to Lawyers Day.

But we were denied that

All in favor?