Afternoon, it is December 2nd. Hope everybody had a nice relaxing, reflective Thanksgiving holiday weekend. We're here as the Planning Housing and Parks Committee for an incentive zoning update with the Planning Department and the chair of the Planning Board. Just wanted to start by thanking the Planning Department for all of their hard work Chair of the Planning Board just wanted to start by thanking the Planning Department for all of their hard work, thank the Planning Board for their efforts. This is a significant undertaking, something that is long overdue. We had a council briefing on this before the holidays and now we're taking this up in our committee. The important thing is that we are looking at this now and we're making sure that the incentives that we are providing are reflective of the community needs and community desires and our broader policy priorities. We haven't looked at it in almost 15 years to make changes. A lot has happened in those 15 years, our racial equity and social justice law, our climate action plan, just to name a couple in addition to the general plan update with thrive 2050. And with those changes, one would assume that there are significant changes to what we are asking and what we are desiring and what we are expecting from different developments that take place in the county and making sure that those requests are actually reflective of what we particularly want in terms of our policy goals, priorities, and the underlying master plans as well. Particularly interested in talking about successful implementation of master plans, what are we actually getting out of these incentives and whether or not they are working the way that we intend and how these changes are going to address that for moving forward. So look forward to a significant conversation. I'll open it up if colleagues have any questions. Just note we have a customer, Juwando and Fondigan Zalas on the committee and we also are joined by Council Member Balkham today as well. With that, let me turn it over to Council staff to introduce this and turn it over to planning to walk us through this conversation and just note that we are scheduled to not complete the efforts today. We'll be back at it next week to further discuss this as well. And ultimately, we don't have legislation that would be required to implement this. We would ultimately want to craft legislation based on the results of this conversation and direction received from the committee. So with that, let me turn it over to Miss Dunne with appreciation for your work and the planning staff's work as well. Thank you and good afternoon. So as the chair has just mentioned, the full council was briefed on this a couple weeks ago and got the background in the history. Yes, the CR zone was first created in 2010 for the white Flint area sector plan. It was modified slightly when we did the zoning ordinance rewrite in 2014. And so currently there are four zones that have under their optional method of development, which is when a project comes forward and is requesting density above a standard method level, which sometimes is referred to as by right, where an applicant could go to DPS to get their approval. If it's above that level, it's called optional method. And in four zones in our county, those apply, and they require public benefits. And that's the CRZone, the CRTZone, which is commercial residential town, the EOFZone, employmentT zone, which is commercial residential town, the EOF zone, employment office zone, and the LSC zone, the Life Sciences Center zone. And this is kind of outlined in the staff report for today a little bit of background even though the committee and the council's little body were briefed on it provided in the staff report for people just picking this up a little bit of that background. And so currently today for the zones that require public benefits, they are as a menu of public benefits, and they're organized under seven categories, and those are listed on the second page of the staff report at the bottom. There's also a zoning map on that page that shows where in the county these different zones are located, and how much of the county exists under these zones. Two other things, just as we're going through this and sometimes the recommendations will touch on this or two other components. One is that in the past couple of master plans for our very dense areas but does dense silver spring what you've seen is what the planning departments refer to is excelled a build density and that is density above the mapped density and it's allowed for certain benefits that are beyond the public benefit menu that we're going to be discussing as part of this update. But just to note that in Bethesda you recognize that as the park impact payment. If you go to the third page of the staff report, there's a graphic there that sort of illustrates the potential for development in the county. You have that standard method at the at the bottom level, which is a relatively low amount of density you get to go straight to the Department of Permitting Services. It does require certain code, what we call requisites. So all development requires that. That is adherence to our Forest Conservation Law, our MPDUU law and various other regulatory Things and they're listed at the bottom of that page in a footnote You have mapped FAR which is floor area ratio a term we use to talk about density To get up to the maximum of that map density You must provide public benefits and then again if you exceed that map density in certain places in our county you're allowed to but that is to Silver Spring and that's excelled to build density. So it's just a graphic there to show the public kind of what all these pieces together sort of mean. What I'll note is that we have a couple of power points here that we have on the side. If there is any time that you want something else explained, you want to see further examples. Planning staff's done a great job. They provided a lot of that for us in a presentation. But rather than providing it as a presentation, we have it as backup. So it will be a very interactive kind of conversation today. And please stop us at any time to comment or to ask for examples. If you turn to the next page in the staff report what you are going to see are three examples. This was a from a request from councilmember Joondo at the full council briefing to see what projects have been approved by our planning board and what public benefits were approved as part of that approval process. And you have three of them here. You have A.V. Wheaton, the Avicett and Bethesda and Centri and German town. We got three from different parts of the county to show sort of what those public benefits were that were provided by those applicants in exchange for the density that they requested. Do you have any questions on this? I'll just say thank you. Councillor Rarov. Yes, thank you, Councillor. For doing this, I appreciate and I was looking at it last night. And it's, I don't know, I would just, whenever appropriate, I would allow maybe to comment. If you saw, I didn't see, there weren't a lot of things that stuck out to me there other than that there, you know, there's a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Are there any trend lines, I guess would be the question that you saw that you think are relevant in either confirm or change or add additional context to your recommendation. Sure, thank you for the question for the record. I'm a tool Sharma with the plan department. I think there's three key points that I would add to the description here. One, you will note that there's a huge range in the FAR that these properties were asking approval for. But that's the project is almost a nine FAR. The Wheaton project is a 1.75 FAR. And the Germantown project is 0.53 FAR. So even with the huge range of FAR, you're still expecting all three projects to provide 100 public benefit points. So the current point system doesn't necessarily scale with that intensity of approval. So that's number one. Number two, I would just sort of add is, the length of the list doesn't equate to the quality of the public benefits. In fact, the shorter lists in Bethesda is probably the one project that has delivered the most impactful public benefits. They entered into a public-private partnership with the county, did a landswap, built a new fire station, and did some very significant public benefits in addition to that. Primarily because the master plan had already taken a proactive step of reducing the larger menu to a smaller menu which aligned better with what was needed in that community. In contrast to that, the Ava Wheaton project has very long list of public benefits, but the quality of those was not as high. In fact, for example, to give you a concrete example, their through block connection was kind of built to the side of a property. It didn't have the best lighting and designed and have a lot of uses opening onto it. And then it became a place of crime and nuisance. Do the degree that the applicant had to come back and ask for that to be closed off to public use. So it went from theoretically being a public benefit to being a public distraction. So the length of the list doesn't equate the benefits, I would just say. And I think I'll leave it there for now. I appreciate that I have a daughter named Ava that served one of her favorite places to drive by, but I'll have to let her know not to be disappointed that the public benefit wasn't as great, but I appreciate that context and it's quality over quantity and also how much housing we're getting is very great. That's not a very representative. I appreciate you lifting up those points. Thank you, Ms. President. Let's continue. Okay. Thank you. And one thing I'll also note for these three examples. The Ava Wheaton was one of the very first projects to come in under the CR zone. And so I think this was also a case of the planners and the community, the applicants, learning how to use that new tool that was being requested to them. So they came with a list of wanting to provide as many public benefits as possible. And the staff were learning how to implement those, you know, that interface. Like how do we request these benefits and what are they actually providing exchange for these benefits. And over time, the staff has obviously learned a great deal about what works the best in the community and how best to implement it. And so that is going to be an ongoing theme when you see this update that the staff has worked with this now for 15 years. And a lot of what's based on these updated recommendations is how to make the system work basically better for the community and the applicant. Before we move on, let me turn it to the council member from wheat. Thank you. I appreciate you saying that I actually was on the planning board and I approved all three projects and I appreciate you saying that because yes, we don't want one of the first one or the first one and as we were working on that one, I remember I was working on the Bethesda master plan. Huge difference. And that actually had an impact on the Bethesda building that you see here. It really got, with that expertise that we were doing, we were building in as we walked. That's why you see now. So I just wanted to say that and thank you for giving that side of the history that is very important detail. Yeah, I think it speaks to the nuance of this as well. We have an overarching policy, but also each of these are individual projects that have their own nuances and their own dynamics and their own time frame. The avisette, for instance, you had the landswap and the public private partnership that created a whole separate mechanism outside of the standard regulatory review process outside of the benefit points Process that allowed for another mechanism to negotiate which Changes the the dynamic of that you're not going to have a landswap public-private partnership on every development review. But it's important to show that, but it's also important to note that and reflect the fact that these are individual cases that are unique and yet should be compared against one another and reflected as such. So I just think it's important to note both. Thank you. If you're turning to the next page of the staff report, put in a paragraph about the project goals. I think it's important to keep in mind why did the Planning Department undertake this in their work program as directed by the council, which was really to take a comprehensive countywide evaluation of this point system and the public benefits. It had been in place for 15 years. And as we all just noted, there was a lot of learning going on that could be applied to this. So in doing so, the planning board presented in the study that was transmitted to council, several overarching goals, which had to do with aligning the current public benefit point system or whatever is proposed moving forward to align it with evolving county policies and priorities as was noted earlier by the chair. These included the general plan, a climate action plan, and the county's racial equity and social justice law in addition to what's been learned over each successive master plan and sector plan since the zone was adopted. Also to modernize the point system to address any current real estate and building industry practices, you'll hear more about that. We also have staff here that have spent considerable time that have undertaken the analyses that really implement and support that overarching goal, and we'll get to that in a few minutes. In addition to providing clear standards that make it easier to have that benefit implemented, make it very clear that the standards that apply, and then also to coordinate with other legislation that the county has in place, such as the MPDU program and our two farmland programs, the Building Lot Termination Program and the TDR program. So with that to achieve these goals the planning staff and their real estate consultant Hyatt Brown conducted various and wide-ranging qualitative and quantitative analyses for well over a year to get to these recommendations and these included a review of the performance of the policy since 2010, an evaluation of the clarity, quality and practicality of the implementation guidelines that accompany the zoning text that implements this, an assessment of the cost to provide public benefits with a special focus on understanding the cost of providing MPD use for points, a financial feasibility analysis of prototypical standard method and optional method projects to understand the value of incentive density, a study of other successful incentive zoning programs, nationwide bench marking, and finally a comprehensive review of the regulatory processes and neighboring jurisdictions. It's sort of a readers digest version of what was undertaken, but it is extensive. There's an appendix to the staff report appendix, say that tries to get a little bit more detailed about each of those analyses for people that were interested, but it's also quite lengthy, so we just put it as an appendix at the end. But again, we're happy to have any questions about that. Before that, though, maybe I'll just give you what the big takeaways from that are, which were really important because they do form these recommendations, which are there has been uneven development activity across the four zones where public benefits apply. In Montgomery County, we have the largest menu of the discrete defined public benefits compared to other regional and national jurisdictions. Despite the vast menu, under the optional method, we have repeatedly delivered and gotten a handful of public benefits. We don't get all of them. Master plans have prioritized specific public benefits. And it's been a mixed bag about whether we've actually received those benefits when they're recommended in the master plan. The consideration of cost and feasibility were not a determinant in the creation in the master plan. The consideration of cost and feasibility were not a determinant in the creation of the current system. It was really based on lead for neighborhood scorecard, which was new and innovative back in 2010. And then in Montgomery County is unique in that negotiations for the public benefits take place after incentive zoning has already been mapped to a property. And then last, there's a suggestion that we need to have a stronger alignment between the public benefits and the county's policy goals and the recommendations before you are really designed to achieve that so when you look at whether we're achieving the public benefits it tells you whether we're achieving these other basic policy priority goals that the council and the county have set up. So those are the major takeaways and I'm going to pause right there in case you have some questions about it before we get into specific recommendations. Thank you, Councillor Drona. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I thought this would be a good time to ask this question before we get into the specific recommendations. It was mentioned in the staff report and I think planning mentioned that you had some difficulty initially tracking the public benefits. You had to go to multiple places and it wasn't clear. And I think from what I read is that you got there, but that it took a little work in that you have the idea for some sort of like data dashboard or something going forward. Could you just give a little more context into what were the difficulties, why would they happening and how that might be improved going forward? Yeah, thank you for the question. So the interesting thing about the public benefits is they're recorded in two stages of regulatory review. The first time we record them is when the planning board approves the sketch plan for a project, at which phase it's quite early in the development cycle. So the public benefits are discussed at a high level. Some of them might be identified, in some cases just the categories identified, and not the specific public benefits are listed out. Then when an applicant comes back for a site plan, that's really when they are ready to get shovels in the ground and get their building permits after approval from the board, and they have a lot more fine tuned understanding of what they want to include in their project. So each project has two different stages of approval by the board. During those two stages, the public benefits change very often, they change. So there's that, and those are all recorded in planning board resolutions, which are essentially PDFs that are stored onto our website. They're publicly accessible, but they weren't fully sort of mapped per se. So to speak when we started. And then the second thing I would say is like, even with the site plan approval, there'll be many times that a project comes back for an amendment to that site plan. So that amendment can be a large amendment, which does include public benefits, like somebody might come back and say, hey, I know we said we would include a daycare with this building, but we were not able to find a tenant. We need to replace it with retail or some other use. Or it may be something as small as, hey, we need to change the type of bench we are putting outside of building, but it's in the right of way, so I need to come back for an amendment. So oftentimes it wasn't clear to us which of those amendments actually were pertinent to the recording of the public benefit. So what we did, and I want to give a lot of credit here because he came up with the whole architecture of the system. We went step by step over several months and went through all the sketch plans and site plans and their amendments, identified the latest delivery of public benefits as it was discussed. Then we took it into RGS database, we tagged all those 67 projects and then we put that on the project websites. And now if you want to know that what public benefits this project delivered, all you have to do is go there and click. And it all comes up. You can also search it by master plan. You can search it by equity emphasis areas or equity focus areas or the community equity index areas. So we've already set up the mechanism now to track it much more consistently and accurately and we hope that if the council does move to approve an update to this policy, we would make sure that every time the planning board now approves a site plan, we would update the data hub in real time. So in five years, it would be a matter of minutes and not months to get that data out of fingertips. That's great. So it's not just the issue of what did they agree to initially and then after kicking the tires and we're getting further down the road, because that's more of a point in time. Here's the final agreement. So that's one thing. But then it's like, well, what actually happened, like what got done. And so you're saying this will, you're able to solve both here that not only what they agreed to do, but did it happen? Yeah, we've not done the second part. That's what I thought. Okay. So we're talking about the first part, which is important. What did you agree to do? You know, and blouse that out to the blower doing that. So we can we'll have a better system on that. But then the second part is obviously important too of did it actually happen and under what timeline. And so what's the thought process there? I think that's that's very good question as well. So the what actually gets built gets recorded at the building permit stage with DPS. And we did initially put out a request from our DPS colleagues to get building permit information. They record building permits a little differently than what we do at Secretschplan and Site Plan. For example, if there's a development with 120 townhouses, each of those townhouses has its own building permit. So we might be recording data as a project level. They are literally doing it by building by building, which is how they need to do it for the law. So I think what we will need to do is create a pipeline of information from DPS that ties to the building permit information and collapses those two together. So we get both versions. It's certainly achievable. And I think once we know what we are approving and requiring for public benefits, we can certainly work with them to set that up in place. I don't know, Grace. If you want to add, yeah, I would just suggest my colleagues, maybe that's something we can come back to with deep, I don't think. Again, as long as once we approve whatever we approved, sounds like you're saying you think it would be valuable. I think it would be valuable to residents to know, like not only what was done, but in, in for us to know is accountability mechanism too, to even be able to spot check, like did you do what you say you're gonna do, and no, you can't do it overnight, but I think you're right, it would need to be connected to DPS. Yeah, let's schedule a conversation in the new year with DPS and planning to talk about the process for that. I mean, I think, you know, with case studies, you know, like we have here to say, you know, here are examples. I don't think we're going to be able to look at everything that's ever happened all at once because that's just too much to bite off. But if we can, you know, think through that work together with council staff planning and DPS staff to come up with, here's the process that we're going to look at it. Let's talk through that. And then here are some examples that that would work. Because it does beg the question, it's a little bit easier when you're talking about a multi-family building. It's a lot harder when you're talking about a townhome community, for instance, where the public benefits are most likely shared assets, community assets, and the buildings are individual buildings. And how is that reflected between DPS and the building permit process versus the public benefits side of things. For instance, if you have a public green space as part of the townhome community, the public green space does not belong. It's not like one one hundred and fourteen of that public green space is being built with one of those hundred fourteen townhomes. It's being built as part of the development, you know, the larger scale projects of which case each of the hundred fourteen townhomes, for instance, gets built. And so to be able to understand how that works and have a process for assessing that I think would be quite helpful to us, but I think a follow-up conversation makes sense. All right, let's continue. Okay, thank you. So we're going to cover three of the recommendations today with the committee and we're going to come back to you in one week with the remaining recommendations that are included in the study. And so the first one actually we're going to do two together because they do work together. It's about streamlining and consolidating the public benefits. So the recommendation is to organize public benefits under four categories. Currently there are seven categories. However, three of those categories are actually public benefits themselves. They have no sub public benefits, so in censors, four categories. But regardless, it is organizing them under different headings, which are complementary and inconsistent with recent policy. And one is housing for all environmental resilience, infrastructure for compact growth, and complete community amenities. And you recognize these from Thrive Montgomery 2050. And then the second recommendation is to consolidate public benefits, streamline them under these four categories and reduce the menu from 36 benefits to 13. And then allow for the implementation of these benefits to occur in tiered options, which we'll go into in a few minutes. So those are the first two recommendations. Like I said, they work together. They are about streamlining for categories and 13 public benefits. And if you turn to the next page in the staff report, the planning staff provided a great graphic that show the always the existing public benefit menu on the left-hand side and then like what the new benefit will be under this proposed recommendation. And the first one housing for all, you can see that dwelling unit makes an MPD you were highlighted and it the proposed new public benefits will be related to MPD use to family size units and to deeper levels of affordability. Yeah, I broadly I think this makes sense. These four categories I appreciate and certainly are major priorities of the county, major priorities of mine, I think major priorities of all of us. Just wondering, could you just talk a little bit about how you came up with the four broad categories? What went into that? Was anything else considered, and how we landed, where we landed. This is coming from less of a, I think, you're wrong, and there's another way I'm suggesting we go and more just in, and let's talk about how we got here and explain the process. Yes, I can attempt. So I think the few things that drove us to where we are today, one was of course, streamlining the menus. So there weren't seven things. There were last things. Then we looked to thrive Montgomery 2050 and climate action plan to see at the highest level what are these plans trying to achieve. So from climate action plan, you know, getting for as far as planning and land use is concerned, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions out of our housing and transportation sector was obviously a very high priority. That led us to come up with this idea of environmental resilience and the benefits under them are indeed greener buildings, greener side design principles, and more use and production of renewable energy so that buildings themselves are contributing less and less greenhouse gas emissions. On the transportation side, that led us to include things within the infrastructure for compact growth, category that would facilitate a greater level of choice and a comparative choice for people when it comes to walking, cycling, or taking transit beyond driving. This is not intended to dissuade people from driving, but to give them comparative choices so that they can have that option available to them. From Thrive Montgomery 2050, we got some key concepts such as corridor focus curate. So the plan is clearly pointing the way to the specific corridors that are intended to have high quality bus rapid transit on them. And so the public benefits are aligned with some of those key ideas to make sure these benefits support the delivery of high quality bus rapid transit. So offsite improvements, the delivery of high-quality bus rapid transit. So off-site improvements, the creation of a street grid. We all know how important that is to take larger parcels and break them up into smaller blocks. So you can have more walkable, more flexible sorts of development. I think the best example of this in the counties, probably Puykin Rose, where they took a 13 acre, 14 acre shopping center on a major corridor and then created a secondary and a tertiary network of streets where people can go in their car or take transit to but once they're there, they're out of their cars, they walk in the biking and it has created a very flexible framework of development for the landowner where they've been able to swap out different uses to meet the market at different times. So those were some of the reasons and then the complete community amenities is also a key idea in thrive and what we really tried to hone in on there was this idea that you would need a mix of uses to facilitate this idea of a complete community, this idea of a 15-minute living environment calibrated to the density of the place. And we also work hand in hand with the Arts and Humanities Commission to make sure that ideas around public art, culture, diversity were all things that were incentivized within the menu. So I hope I'm giving some color to this as to how we arrived at the four categories and some of the benefits that got nested under the categories. Okay, so with that, again, the housing for all shows the benefits that moved from the existing list into the proposed. As you've just heard the environmental resilience, there are several here on the left-hand side in the existing. There were three that are being recommended in the proposed and what I will note for the committee is that several of the ones that are on that left-hand side are incorporated into those three that are being proposed. So they are not necessarily eliminated. They are being incorporated and kind of revised in a different fashion, but they are there. The next one, the Infrastructure for Compact Growth. Again, you'll see it goes from 4 to 3, but it is about making sure that the most important ones of those five, sorry, are included and then you'll see an amendment what's happening with some of the things that are more standard requirements or that are being recommended for removal. And then last, the communities that are several there on the left-hand side going into four on the right-hand side and those again, they incorporate elements and components of those that are getting moved from one side to the other, they're not gone. If you turn to the next page, what you'll see at the top with the pink colors, those are the existing public benefits that are not retained under the new proposed menu. So this crosswalk is about things that are either being requested to be removed because they just aren't efficient or they don't provide the benefit that the community thought they might in the beginning or the planners. Or there are already code requisites in which case if they're code requisites we should just remove those also from the list. And those are listed at the top of the page under Figure 7. If you have any questions about that, I'll pause for a second. Nope. We're good there. And so to get to this crosswalk, the analysis of these public benefits, the planners really did look at what had been occurring and what were requirements so that we weren't getting the transit proximity or the structured parking or the cool roof in particular something that's required, building lot terminations, transformative balance rights, again things that are required. So really trying to make that more streamlined and it's important to note and can turn it to other council staff, but that the features that would no longer be considered public benefits, plans that did account for the cost of building the structured parking or the higher land value that is associated with properties near transit as part of the feasibility analysis that was used to strike a balance between the proposed benefits and the minimum yield on cost that developers must achieve for projects to be successful. So that is it's all incorporated in their feasibility analysis in addition to having looked at what has been done and to set up this new system which kind of these all things are nested together. The next part we're going to talk about is the third recommendation is where they'll move to a FAR based system and so again this is where you're going to see those pieces all fitting together and matching. Don't apologize to the committee. Councillor O'Brien. Again, not really a exact moment to ask this question, but I'll ask it now since we're in between. The, you know, I think I've mentioned this before, you know, the Councillor of President Freetz and I have been on this committee for six years and I think I can, I'll speak for myself. There's still something that I learned, the zoning code or about you know housing policy. Every time we're here even you know when we're not here or meeting with your staff. So I'm trying to think about this from the lens of the public too about how they would understand this topic. Is there, we have one of the best planning departments and best county governments in the country, and we're one of the best counties in the country, obviously. So I know we're often on the cutting edge of things, but can I, if we step back a second, if I'm just a layperson watching this, this type of move away from something like a transit proximity being a I agree with it makes sense because almost everyone can put that on there I think that was everyone does as a public benefit makes sense to me But the next proposal to move towards FAR is this Are we following other big jurisdictions that have already moved in this way? And if so, could you just give some context for someone that was watching and was like, or are we kind of, I think I know the answer to this, but are we kind of catching up? Is there another totally radical approach to public benefit that someone else is taking that maybe you don't agree with or you're not pursuing here, but that exists in the world just to provide, like if I'm asking it from a layperson asking the questions of why is this the right approach when we eventually get to legislation. I think those are the questions I'd want to have some answer in context about. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. And I invite Dawn here to add her sort of national professional experience as well. Just to sort of briefly say, I think some of this is defined by just state laws, what we can or cannot do. So in many jurisdictions in Virginia, you can do a proper based system. We don't have that system set up in our local government. But broadly speaking, you know, we were at the cutting edge when we created this policy. This is one of the oldest policies of its kind in the country, just like our MPDU program is one of the oldest MPDU programs in the country. Over time, many other jurisdictions have implemented similar ideas. When they have done that, very few or any that I know of have actually used points to evaluate public benefits. I think they've all taken a more direct approach. And I'll add Dawn maybe speak to a couple of jurisdictions like Austin, Seattle, and some of the other places we love that. Awesome. Thank you. Sure. And I think as it was mentioned earlier, we did do several case studies on what other jurisdictions were doing. And the tool is correct. Typically you see other jurisdictions using things like FAR because it's a much cleaner approach. It's something that's fairly consistent and something that's very easy for a developer to understand. If I provide this specific benefit, I get this amount of density in return. So that is something I think that is moving toward what other jurisdictions are doing, and also something that's seen as much cleaner and easier to understand for the development community. I think there's also the aspect of certainty. And with the point system before, you had a mixed bag of benefits that got you different levels of points, but that didn't necessarily translate clearly to understanding how much it tends to. You got, and this gives developers, a bit more flexibility and a cleaner way of getting to a certain outcome. And also for the county, also getting to a certain outcome with respect to the specific benefits that they're working to incentivize. So we're kind of, we're innovative catching up to others most people are moving in this direction there's not some other radical approach out there that people are doing that you're aware. Not not that I'm aware of I know that we look specifically at Detroit Seattle and Austin. Detroit's was a bit different but they're in a little bit of a different situation but both Seattle and Austin do use an NFAR based approach. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you very much. I mean, if we think about it, I was just thinking about like the menu of options. If you think about it, a menu of options is just how normal people come at these issues. You go to a restaurant and if they say we have a special and you can do an appetizer and entree or dessert, or you can do two appetizers and an entree or two desserts and an entree, those are your two choices. That's pretty straightforward. Most people are not overwhelmed by that. If you come in and say everything on our menu has a price and the total amount of this special has to be no more than $25 total for this special of this value. It's a much more complicated, is that four appetizers, is that one entre, is that a couple of desserts. There's a lot of things floating around and there's no private business, there's no interaction between a customer and a business that would really ever do that. And yet, that has been the approach often that we've taken that is just so complicated and so challenging. So for me, the way I see this, we can discuss and debate whether we've picked the exact right numbers and whether we've selected the exact right approach with the general framework and thought process is much more analogous to how normal people operate on a regular basis every single day, which is here is a pretty clear set of options. You can choose off of a finite number of those options. You have to have this or this. You have a choice, but not so many choices that we don't really know what we're gonna get out of this. And you don't really know what you're expected to do as a result of this. It's good to hear. Great, that's a good segue into the next part, which really is about how the new system that has four categories, two of which are really designed to give you county-wide public benefits and two categories that are designed to give you really community-based public benefits. And the requirement that an applicant would provide at least one from the category of county-wide benefit and one from the categories that represent the community-based benefit. And then this works in with the tier. So if you'll turn, the tiers is now going to be per public benefit. There will be four tiers. And it's broken down again by the FAR level. So 0.25 FAR, 1 FAR, 1.5 FAR, and then some amount of FAR greater than 1.5 up to the map FAR. And this is about scaling it to the project, right? So this could allow a modestly sized project to pick the very first tier in multiple categories, both a county wide category and a community based category. It provides real opportunity and flexibility for the projects based on their size. If you want, you could ask plenty more details about that, but it really works well with the tiers and then the now this shift to an FAR-based approach, which is the next thing in the staff report. You turn there's figures nine and ten show examples of public benefits that would actually be provided and it gives you what is actually required per tier and then the FA, the equivalent FAR amount you'd get for that. If you were a project that was looking to provide or reach to FAR, you might choose one FAR from Figure 9 and one FAR from Figure 10 and you could hopefully request your approval under that or some other combination or also look for the other categories as well that aren't listed here. But this is to give a sense of what is actually being requested per tier per FAR? Yeah, appreciate that. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that this is a bad idea, but I did want to just flesh it out a little bit this question of the tier four. And there's trade off here, right? On the one hand, the idea is you're taking a big swing to get a significant amount towards a particular policy objective. And that's cumbersome and expensive and should be reflected accordingly. On the other hand, it means that we're bypassing a number of other priority areas that we're not able to do, right? And all of these things are about choices. But I just wanted to talk a little bit about if there are any concerns, for instance, let's say we have a master plan that has four major priorities in it, just like this does. Let's say that in a particular period of time that the master plan is largely being implemented, one of the categories and the tier four options becomes the most obvious, likely benefit that projects are going to move forward with. If all of the projects move forward with that particular benefit, do we lose the ability to get the other three, which a master plan intends to get multiple benefits? So on a case by case basis, it's not an issue at all. Of course, nobody would view it not being a huge win to get up to that tier four for the public benefit. The question would become if everything came forward or most things came forward or the overwhelming majority of things came forward with the same tier four benefit, does that create an issue or could that create an issue? I just, again, I don't have a nest, I'm not necessarily saying it does, but I do think that we need to discuss that of what the impact might be and how we would address that. To make sure that we're, you know, ultimately to the points that were made earlier in the conversation, we started to have earlier that we're gonna, you know, have it another point in time, to make sure that we're getting out of a master plan and we're getting out of the development review process more broadly the type of communities and community benefits that we want and that we think are needed. I think this is your spot on that this is a discussion and a trade-off. There's always I think one of the things we've learned and we were just talking about this today, even driving up here for this working session. It's going to be, one of the keys to success is going to be the ability to easily make changes to this policy as we move forward because no matter what we come up with today there's going to be some angle to it or some outcome of it that we have not fully thought through. For the tier four we internally sort of debated this and discussed this a lot back and forth. It was tied into the financial considerations as well. But I'll just share two points one that we intentionally have kept the tier four to be really, really aspirational. These are incredibly big and expensive things to do, providing 25% MPD use at 60% AMI. That's a big target doing in net zero building, like the United Territory Putex headquarters in Silver Spring, big target, providing a facility like a public theater, or a fire station, or really large libraries, or a school site, or a three acre urban park in a downtown location. These are all really, really big things. So we didn't, we tried to make it so that the opportunities for these would be rare on purpose. So that projects can aspire to deliver them, but not every project will be able to do it. And even if a project is doing a tier 4 public benefit, they're still going to be required to do all the prerequisites. And I think that's really where we get a lot of our bread and butter, good urban planning outcomes, for example, if a project did a theater. They'll still have to do the 12 and a half or 15 percent MPD use because that's a legal requirement. They'll still have to meet the International Green Construction Code and our Building Code of the County, which would push them to be essentially a lead silver plus 21 points type of a building. So they would still have to meet the recommendations of the complete street guidelines and the master plan, which would, I think, all of these projects do a lot, even when they come at .51 FAR right now. And we think that if we can do, because one of the critiques of the system that we heard was that we weren't getting big things with this policy anymore. So the tier four is really intended to be an aspirational option on. And we do it today with affordable housing. If you provide 20% MPD use, you don't have to do any other public benefits. So those were some of the thinking points that led us to do this. And one of the key recommendations that is before you here, too, is that the master plan should have an ability to tailor the menu. So we hope that through the master planning process, we and the community will be working together to really identify those one or two big ticket items that qualify as tier four items that are in that menu for that master plan. I'll use an example that's very familiar like day lighting a piped stream. There's only going to be one or two, maybe one stream within a plan area that needs that type of a treatment, which is very expensive, but we wanna make sure that if somebody rises to the occasion to do that, that they are being recognized for that as taking on that expensive and costly and complicated things. So that's the way. So the response is it's designed to be rare. It's these are unlikely to be most, you know, if we get any, that would be a benefit and we expect them to not happen often so that they're aspirational. Yeah, in Chair Feeson, already here as Chair of the Plain Board, one of the things that came up with the board and what we felt comfortable about this is because we said, like all of the recommendations we've talked about recently, check in, have check-ins. So every four years, we were seeing what's moving along. We won't do it in 11 years and this time we know every four years and then we'll see if we're getting the right public amenities or the wrong or all of one that you're concerned about. So great question to have. Great. Great. Thank you. Great. I'll move along. So what you'll see next we have provided in the staff report Thank you. Great. I'll move along. So what you'll see next, we have provided in the staff report what the actual public benefit is with those tiers, what has to be provided for context. And then we re-added the Ava Wheaton project just again to give context for here's a project here where the public benefits provided. Again, with that caveat that it was early in the system and many public benefits were chosen. And then under the proposed policy, if you move to an FAR based, the applicant is going to request certain things up to the amount of FAR that they're requesting. So they're not necessarily always going to request their map FAR. They will request some amount up to that map def AR. And in this case, it was 1.75. The density being requested. And so planning staff has provided three different scenarios on how that project could come forward to a planning board and request their density if they were coming forward under this new proposed system. Any questions on that? Thanks, sir. And so really today, as we've mentioned, the whole goal was to have the committee at least start to look at these recommendations if you had a feeling that the FAR base was not the appropriate way to be moving or that you definitely didn't want to reduce the number of public benefits. These are things that guidance for staff as the legislation gets crafted. But the details of all of this really will be again something that will be the subject of legislation when it gets introduced. And I tried to explain that in the staff a couple of times just so stakeholders who are following this know that they'll see it written in a zoning text amendment or a bill, depending on what it is. And they'll have that public notice period. They'll have a public hearing. We will go through committee work sessions and we'll go through council sessions. Councilor Fondagotz-Auz. Thank you for also the memo, very detailed. I just wanna highlight one thing under public benefits tier 4, the on page numbers. But I think it's 10. It says, no payment in legal options, which I think that is so important. I mean, you gave example of the daylining of the stream. I can think of at least two master plans that I worked on. The Lietzonsville one, which this was huge, the West Bar one, actually three, in the one in Viralsmille. Huge expense and so important. And I wanted to bring that up because it's key. So thank you. And I agree with everything you have said. I just don't have any questions because you went like you are right on it and I do agree with that FAR recommendations that we are going to cover, which is, you know, as we mentioned earlier, there are four zones to which the public benefit applies. So what are the recommendations for how we treat those four zones moving forward? As was noted earlier, the experience of each one of those is very different in how applicants responded to this system. And so the recommendations for how to treat them moving forward is different. We'll cover that. Another has to do with the optional method projects that require in the Great Seneca Science Overlay Zone and with respect to TBRs and BLTs. And we'll get into all the details of that next time. We've invited the Office of Ag to join us because they're an important stakeholder in that. And then we'll also just cover the ones in some ways. The remaining ones are really more about implementation there and we'll also cover and talk about those as well. They are listed for you at the end of the staff report. If you have any questions, then we'll thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, unless there are any other comments or questions or concerns, appreciate this. It was a good entree. And to these issues, we'll continue next week and take up the balance. And then we'll have to decide best approach and path forward to make these formal changes through the legislative process. I did want to thank Mr. Ali, who is now on our end of things, but was very active and involved on the other side of these issues and intimately involved in this as well. Thank you to the team at planning for all of the work. I know this has been a heavy lift and I really appreciate the work in particular to see what other jurisdictions are doing. I think too often we think that we have all the answers to all of the world's problems and a lot of times the answers exist elsewhere of other jurisdictions who are facing similar challenges and have other ways of doing business and we're making changes and adjusting to reflect the fact that we do need to make some changes and looking at how other jurisdictions are tackling and grappling with these very similar issues is really helpful and I know it takes a lot of work and effort, there's a lot of nuance to those comparisons. So thank you for all of those efforts as well. And with that, we are adjourned.