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It's just okay, got it.

Yeah, sorry, technology.

Okay, so we're going to talk about some background to the Board of Architectural Review and the Design Guidelines Committee.

Then we're going to go over the proposed drafts and what the proposed updates are.

And then we'll go over the timeline for the community engagement process and the adoption of the updated guidelines.

And then at the end, we'll have the time for questions and discussion.

So some background to the Board of Architectural Review or BAR.

We have three locally regulated historic districts the old historic Alexandria district, the Parker Gray district, and then individually listed 100 year old buildings.

And in Alexandria, any alteration to a building that's within a locally regulated historic district requires approval from the BAR.

And the BAR consists of seven members.

Some alterations to buildings in this director require approval from the BAR at a public hearing, and some require approval from staff through the administrative proof process.

Hello, welcome in.

So just to give you an idea of some of the numbers here.

In the past year, we had 556 total cases go to the BAR, and 418 of those were approved administratively, and the rest of those went to the public hearing.

The design guidelines that the BAR uses are a set of design standards and principles as opposed to a set of best remote policies that are used to provide information to applicants on required approvals and preservation best practices.

When someone does an alteration to a building in the historic district streams.

The design guidelines also provide guidance to the board and to city staff for reviewing the appropriateness of different alterations.

The BAR design guidelines committee was formed to update the original preservation design guidelines that were adopted back in 1993.

The guidelines from 1993 have several issues that we're trying to improve.

The existing guidelines are not searchable, and they don't contain high quality graphics, they're not ADA accessible, they contain many outdated references, and there's a high use of technical language.

So we have a new format that we're using to make it more user-friendly and readable, better graphics, and then using language that's that's clear and easy to understand.

There also are some minor updates to the guidelines themselves and different review levels in some areas when necessary.

But overall, this is not a complete reimagining of the guidelines.

This is really just putting them in an updated format.

In 2012, the BAR adopted the Parker Gray Residential Reference Guide, and this is a set of design guidelines specifically for the Parker Gray District.

I don't think I question.

Yes.

Should we district questions?

Sorry, Robin.

Who is on the committee design guidelines committee?

Is that a committee of the bar or committee of staff or a mixed committee?

Um, okay, sure, I'll talk about that now.

So the the design guidelines committee was established in 2019, and the committee consists partially of members that are also on the BAR, um, but there are also some members who are not.

So the members of the committee are appointed by the BAR.

Okay.

Yes, so um staff facilitates, but we don't have to.

Yeah, so staff is not on the committee, we are just the liaisons to the committee.

Okay.

So the goal of the committee is to update those guidelines to replace the 1993 guidelines, focusing mainly on the format.

And the design guidelines committee has meetings that are held about once a month or so, which are open to the public but do not take public comment.

Um, these meetings of the design guidelines committee are announced through e-news as well as put on the city calendar.

So far, the design guidelines committee has adopted a new format for the design guidelines.

And the committee um has created 10 chapters that have been adopted by the BAR.

Eleven chapters are currently under review, which we're going to talk about tonight.

And then we have about 12 more to review after this.

And the next set of chapters will also undergo a similar public review to the process that we're going through tonight.

Our goal is to finish adopting all of the updated chapters by some point in early next year.

These images show an example of what our current design guidelines look like.

So the image on the left is the set of 1993 guidelines, just showing an example of what a chapter looks like.

You can see there, there are some hand drawn drawings, and it's just some plain text with uh not a lot of other graphics involved.

The image on the right is from the Parker Gray residential reference guide, which is from 2012.

Um, this is um a set of design guidelines for the Parker Gray district, which talks about different alterations in what level of reviewers required for those alterations, but it doesn't get into much detail about the guidelines themselves.

This image is an example of what the new updated design guidelines look like and what the format is.

So the new format uses color coding to talk about different VAR review levels that are required using some of the same sections as before, such as an introduction guidelines, and then additional information.

The new format also uses some higher quality photos and diagrams, and then there are some updates to a language that is used, which um will come up throughout the updates as well.

So in the new guidelines, some some of the review levels use terms such as street facing and non-street facing, which is different than some of the other terms that were used in the previous guidelines, such as side and rear.

And um also some of the updated guidelines differentiate between early buildings and late buildings.

So in the historic districts, early buildings are any building that is that is built before the year 1932, and a later building is any building that is built after 1931.

Now I'm going to talk about some of the proposed drafts that we have.