We are live. Make sure your microphones are on. Good evening. With the planning commission meeting of December 13, 2023, please come to order. We'll have the roll call. in the meeting of December 13th, 2023, please come to order. We'll have the roll call. Mr. Chambers. Here. Ms. Hare, here. Mr. Mayoral. Here. Ms. Wright. Here. Ms. Amy Hay is absent. Thank you. We have a quorum. We do have quorum. Okay. Before we approve the agenda, which is the next item on the agenda to approve it, I'd like to make this note. I'd like to note that the agenda tonight does not include the public hearing for rezoning 23-1031. Patriot Glenn, as was advertised in the handover local. The project has been withdrawn as they are making changes to their application and it will have to go through the review process. That application has not been referred to the Planning Commission by the town council because they're going to review, they're revising it. Anyone here to speak on this matter is welcome to speak at the citizen input Section of the meeting but please understand that the commissioners have not seen any materials or have any facts about this project The applicant may be here to introduce himself I don't know he is here. Oh good. Okay. Oh, that's fine Are you opening citizens input time? One second. First we need to approve the agenda. Having said that, we need to approve the agenda for the evening. You can stay right there. Do I have a motion for that? So I move we approve the agenda submitted. Ms. Hare. Mr. Mayoral. Mr. Mayoral. Mr. Mayoral. Mr. Mayoral. Mr. Right. Now we will go to the citizen input a time of the meeting. This is the time in the meeting that anyone who has something before the commission that is not on the agenda can come forward and speak to the commission. So, please state your name and address for the record. All right. For the record, and that name is Henry Wilton, and I represent Wilson Acquisition, LLC. We have a case before you, hopefully coming next month. We had to go ahead and large the case from what it was previously, because we had to comply with 50% open space. So it'll hopefully become before you, after we get everything in, we had to comply with 50% open space. So it'll hopefully become before you, after we get everything in, we had to redo the traffic study in a couple of other things. I came before you about a year and a half ago to do a comp plan amendment, which all approved. So I'm back for the zoning. All of us taking me a little longer than I expected. But I'm here to answer any questions. It should be that the people may have if I can answer them, I guess. But basically, the presentation will be a full presentation next month. And we'll have everything into the planning staff. Good, thank you. We'll have to wait till next month when we won't. The citizen input is in the discussions. So yeah, but thank you for introducing yourself and we look forward to wait until next month when we won't. The citizen input is in a discussion. So yeah, but thank you for introducing yourself and we look forward to seeing you next month. Thank you, appreciate it. Thank you. Does anybody else have anything for citizen input? Anything that's not on the agenda? Okay. Next we have the presentation of the minutes. The Planning Commission did not have a meeting in November, so the minutes that were circulated are for the work session that was held on October 11, 2023. I have, I propose an amendment to the minutes that were circulated. Registrar does an excellent job with the minutes. She was not at the meeting on October 11th, which was very lengthy, so she did a very good job. But I would like to clarify one thing for the minutes. So I'm just going to read the paragraph, two paragraphs that I'd like to clarify, and I've circulated it to the commission. This is under the land use discussion we had in the work session, and I'm quoting for the minutes. Ms. Raglan presented the proposed land use chapter and commission engaged in robust conversations centered around this Western gateway of town debating neighborhood commercial and residential. They were also findings that the town edge with a 1-2 per acre residential designation was assigned when there was rural and agricultural surrounding the town borders and that has quickly changed. Discussion leaned to traditional neighborhood, fitting more for the western end of town. It revealed that residential was permitted in a neighborhood commercial use area. And this is the change. With the commission split between traditional neighborhood and neighborhood commercial, the commission compromised with a decision to move forward with neighborhood commercial on both sides of 54 at the far west end of town, with the exception of a small parcel on the west side of 54 at the county line, remaining residential. on the west side of 54 at the county line, remaining residential. Note, because the meeting on October 11th was a work session and not a regular meeting, the commission deliberated, but there was no vote on the issues. Decisions were made by consensus in that context. Following the meeting, the chair noted that in situations where there's no consensus on a decision before the body, the rules of order advised maintaining status quo rather than making a substantial change. Accordingly, the land use of the Western Edge of Town has remained residential with the future land use of traditional neighborhood. So with that amendment, is there, or any other changes, are there any other changes or amendments to the amendment? I don't have any other changes. I just wanted to acknowledge we, there was a lot of input in discussion and a lot of back and forth with four members of the commission. And I think revising this is worthwhile to make sure people understand sort of the process and where we landed in the land use. So thank you for the change. If there isn't any other discussion, I'm happy to move to accept the minutes as amended. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Hare. Aye. Mr. Chambers. Aye. Mr. Merrill. Aye. Ms. Wright. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. We now have, do we have any presentations? You have a, but you've got to, I believe we have the Capitol Improvements Plan. Is that the next item? That says public hearings. So I've got presentations on the agenda, but there are none. Oh, there are. There are no presentations. Okay. Public hearings, capital improvement program. So Ms. Amis just want to go grab Ms. Terry Stone. I think she may have got held up. So we may actually need to amend the agenda and switch the public hearings. Okay. There are two public hearings on the agenda, the capital improvement program. Ms. Stone is going to present, but since she's not here quite yet, do we need to make a motion? Or can we just- I believe the chair is a prerogative to rearrange when the presenter can't. Okay. I'm going to- Sorry. Okay. Right. Thank you. Can you hear now? Is that better? Good. Okay, so I'm going to switch the order of our public hearings. So we're going to do the comprehensive plan 2024 first. Okay. And that would be Ms. Raglan. Thank you, Mrs. Wright. The Ms. Cornelius, if you could let me know when my presentation is on the screen, I can get started. Okay. You're now good. Excellent. So, this could be a bit of a lengthy presentation, and I'll try to speak into the mic as much as possible. I hope everyone can hear me with some nods. Wonderful. So I'm very happy to be moving forward with the public hearing for the comprehensive plan update. This has been a process that's taken. I'm really the town a couple of years, and then the folks up here we've been working on for better part of a year at this point. So we're excited to move forward and present this to the public. On the screen right now is the agenda that we're going to walk through tonight. There are some folks who may have been with us through the whole process who have attended the work sessions or some folks who may be watching from home for the first time. So we're briefly going to discuss what is the comprehensive plan? And then with that, what are the guiding principles? And that's really what we use to help us evaluate what makes Ashland, Ashland, and really the heart of the comprehensive plan. We'll walk through the community engagement process as we can't have a comprehensive plan update without speaking to the public, of course. We'll just do some data highlights. And then there's a couple of different ways we could walk through this presentation, but because this is a comprehensive plan update and we really didn't rework the plan, the way that we approach the work sessions is the same way that we're going to approach this presentation tonight. And that's by going chapter by chapter at the highlights, the major changes. There were some policies that were removed and there were some text that was updated. We're not going to walk through every single change tonight. We're just going to talk about the new policies and if anybody does want in-depth information that is in the staff report. So again, we'll talk about new policies, just major changes and updates to the maps, of course. And then following that, we'll have the recommendation at the end of the presentation. and then following that we'll have the recommendation at the end of the presentation. So what is a comprehensive plan? First of all, the document that the state requires every locality to have. And we use it as a policy document. It serves as a decision-making guide for officials. So when we have development applications come before us and UC and staff reports, is this in compliance with the comprehensive plan? This is what we're talking about. This is the major document. What the comprehensive plan does is expresses values and you'll see in Ashland the way that we reflect that is through the guiding principles which I'll talk about next. The document provides guidance, so we use this throughout every decision that the community makes with capital improvements projects, transportation improvements, housing needs, all the decisions that we make, we try to make sure that we use this document, excuse me, this guidance throughout. And with the plan, the way that Ashlyn uses the actions is that we have actual policies, and this is the recommended actions to achieve the desired outcomes. So we just talked about the values for the community, the way that we do done Ashlyn is through the guiding principles. So we have six guiding principles and the way that you can think about these is the first three address character and the second three address what we do with that through new development. And these principles identify the characteristics that define the small town character and acts as a means to connect the policies listed within the comprehensive plan. Excuse me. At the beginning of each chapter, these guiding principles are explained in how they apply to each chapter. Excuse me. The first principle preserves small town character, talks about the walkable streets, quiet safe neighborhoods, churches, landscaping shade trees, second principal, Protect Ashland's unique features, talks about the railroad tracks, the historic train station, Randolph-Macon College, things that are unique in Ashland. Principle three, manage and enhance our green town. Again, this is street trees. The protected wetlands and streams, wildlife and bird habitats, public parks. Four, as we move into development, encourage continued variety in Ashland. So this talks about home styles, unique neighborhoods, diversity of the people, the religions, the cultures, different economic backgrounds, and the variety of businesses. Promote economic vitality, excuse me. Talks about our longstanding businesses, high quality of public landscapes, employment opportunities, and promote high level of government services. These are the things that allow us to respond quickly through emergency services. So when it comes to the update, we are required by the state to review the plan every five years. This is what the Planning Commission is doing. As you can see on the screen, we started this process years ago in 2020. The first iteration of the comp plan was adopted in 2011 and then updated again in 2016. Whoops. But, oops, sorry. The 2024 comp plan will include a formatting refresh with new photographs, updated charts and tables. So, if anyone has taken a look at the actual document, you'll notice that it's not very pretty. But what we're gonna do is send this to consultants, and they're going to refresh it with, again, new photographs and charts. I'm sorry, I'm struggling. Sorry, I'm struggling. Yeah, me, sorry, I'm getting out of breath. I'm not used to talking this fast. Okay, okay. So the community engagement portion has been going on for a while. So we started this process in 2020. We do hope to get it approved in 2024. I guess we can all guess why we might have gotten slowed down mostly due to COVID but also because we had a few staff changes which were brought on also by COVID. And so we had a few starts and stops. We started that again, that community engagement in 2020 and ended up having several virtual sessions, online sessions, trying to garner some public input. We also held some in-person sessions, nicely spaced out and received a decent amount of feedback, but not nearly as much as we did in the previous two updates. And so we were really hopeful to get more. We put out a survey online, shared that information all over town, sent out postcards, trying to get, again, get that feedback. And I think we did eventually get about 70 responses, which again is not a huge amount. And I'm wrong on that. How many responses did we get on the survey? Closer to about 130, 130. Yes, might have been the first round. So we kept the survey open for a few years. And so we started back up when Kerry started thank goodness and reached back out for additional community input held some meetings in December and November. And then this past year, the Planning Commission has been working extremely hard to take all the feedback we received through the surveys and through those community input sessions and have gone chapter by chapter making updates and recommendations. So just to go over some of the survey responses, this is in kind of just a larger overview. I will point out that it seems like most of the respondents, the majority of the respondents were homeowners. If you know anything about our demographics, about 50% of our units are rental. And so we missed out on a large market, I think, or a large portion of the town by not getting those rental inputs. I don't feel it's from a lack of trying. We went out to all the communities. We had meetings all over town, met with, you know, for example, the apartment management, made sure that they had all the information. You ready? Yeah. Okay. I apologize to you to catch my breath. Throughout the community engagement process, like Ms. Amas mentioned, we did have the surveys, and there's a couple different ways we capture that information. So on your screen right now are some examples of just the high level topics that we received. And those are things like housing affordability, less urban sprawl. Was it was a big one, more open space preservation, an increase in tourism. Everyone loves the street trees throughout town and wanting to see more of that in developments. There was a really strong desire, love for the downtown. And there was a request for an increase in infill rather than new development. And when we looked at all the topics, what we thought was really interesting is that a lot of folks had most to say about landscaping and again that street trees. And then when we ranked all the potential topics, folks could comment on, Rainoff making housing was at the bottom of the list not saying it's not important but I was just in everything that they could comment on really wasn't a concern for the community. So in addition to all the community engagement staff did develop some new data and this is updated every year. We also have this a lot of this information is updated through the Ashland by the numbers, which is usually produced annually. So just some high level data overview, the population as of the 2020 census the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the rate of the residents as well. Non-white population, 35.8%, so we have a good variety, a good amount of diversity there. Some interesting things we learned is that the nationalders younger than five have decreased. The nationalders over 65 have increased quite a bit, but this is really a state regional national trend. This is due to the baby boomer population aging. A approximately 25% of the town's housing is multifamily, so in many cases this is apartments. And another 14% of the housing units are classified as mobile home units, so that's quite a fair amount as well into the housing stock. Single family homes, which is just usually detached homes account for 48% of the housing stock. Single family homes, which is just usually detached homes account for 48% of the housing stock. So the other 52% are a variety. And then we'll talk about later when we get to the housing chapter.