Uh so uh welcome everybody uh to the next installment of our uh bi-monthly community meeting series.

Uh I appreciate everyone investing a Tuesday night uh uh with planning staff and within your neighbors to stay informed about what's going on in the city and what's uh coming up with uh the next schedule dockets.

Uh I'm Paul Stoddard.

I'm the director of planning and zoning uh here in the city of Alexandria.

Uh and we have a pretty busy agenda tonight.

Uh so we'll try to stay on time uh and make sure as always that we reserve time at the end for uh some tooling ed.

Uh with that, let's jump to the next slide.

Uh so I always want to sort of lead with with what we're trying to achieve in this meeting.

And uh right, the premise of this whole series and of course tonight's meeting is to make sure we're sharing information from staff to the community uh about what's going on and what we expect to see coming up uh at upcoming dockets.

Uh as I said, this is our bi-monthly meeting series.

We try to run it every other month and we try to time this uh appropriately with the public hearings so that we're always getting word out about some cases.

Um just joining uh real time in the meeting.

That's of course a great way to stay informed, but it's not your only option.

Uh, if you go down to that web address, Alexandria BA.gov slash planning, you'll be able to navigate to our uh web page for this bi-monthly meeting series.

Uh you'll be able to see the recordings from uh tonight's as well as all the past meetings.

So you can see the video, you can see the slides, you can see the QA.

Uh that all gets posted on the website.

We know folks are leaving living busy lives, uh, and of course they're interested in what's going on in the community, but that doesn't mean they have time in a specific time you meet running.

So this is one of the benefits running in this format is that we can make it available for uh folks when they're available to take the information.

Uh as I said, this is an opportunity to learn about what's going on, uh either ongoing or upcoming with planning initiatives, uh stay informed about the larger development projects as well as infill development, uh and uh any proposed changes to the development regulations.

Uh let's go to the next slide.

Um, is there one with the four part sort of flow chart?

What's that on the next?

There it is.

Um sorry, so this so I know we're going to cover a lot of ground um in today's meeting.

Uh, and so one of the things that always helps me sort of group this stuff organized is to remember how all these different kinds of things are related.

Uh on the far left is where the whole process starts, the small area planning in the SAP process.

That's the visioning process that happens.

Uh, it's a partnership of uh obviously the city council uh as well as the uh the community and city staff uh to identify what is the desired future uh for the for the urban neighborhood for the city uh and to uh write that down in the form of a smaller.

Uh and then once that small area plan, that vision is in place.

Uh uh what then gets crafted is development regulations, the zoning ordinance uh that governs development and investment uh in the city.

Uh and that zoning ordinance uh describes the things like the allowed heights of buildings, the allowed boosts that can take place in the buildings, the setbacks, the open space requirements, etc.

Uh that all goes into zoning ordinance.

Uh once that zoning ordinance is in place, uh uh developers, investors uh can apply for uh permission to build things.

Uh most commonly will apply for what's called the development special use permit, but DSUP.

Uh and that's a specific proposal for specific building.

Program uses, heights, density, uh, open space, uh, all of that gets defined within the DSVP application package.

Uh only if that is approved by city council uh can they proceed to the technical permitting stage.

That's where they draw uh uh refined diagrams for uh the final engineering of the site, uh as well as the design uh and safety of the building.

Uh that goes through a technical review.

Uh and again, that has to match what council approved in the ESP.

It has to match what was approved in the zoning ordinance, and of course, it's in alignment with uh the community council vision of Donald Smaller.

So that's the sort of the thread that connects all the different kinds of things we're going to send.

Uh and if we go back to that agenda slide, uh as thank you.

So as we go through this, uh, we're going to start with long-range planning and update uh and provide an update on the Deep Street maintenance plan.

Uh, then we'll talk through uh development activity, both the larger projects as well as the infill projects.

Uh and then we have a host of uh zoning text amendments that we're going to walk through tonight.

Uh a lot of these are about implementing uh changes that were made uh at the state level with General Assembly when they were in session earlier this calendar year.

Uh but we'll walk you through uh each one of those at the end of the agenda.

Uh and with that, uh oh, I'm sorry, one more thing, uh housekeeping thing.

Housekeeping thing, you may need to hover your mouse over the lower sort of portion of the screen, but if you do, there should be a QA symbol with a question mark that pops up.

As we're going, if you have questions, please do type them into the QA box.

That's where we'll pull questions from the end at the end of the presentation.

What we typically do in these meetings is run through all of the materials and then get to the questions at the end.

That makes sure we get all the information out.

We've had success so far.

We've been able to get to all the questions during the meeting times a lot of.

But with that, I'll turn it over to our first presenter, Jeff Farner.

Hey, good evening, everyone.

Thank you, Paul.