So on Zoom, the interpretation should have started so we can get our meeting kicked off.

I want to thank all of you for coming.

I would also like to acknowledge Councilmember John Chapman who has joined us today.

Thank you for joining us.

So I will be getting us picked off.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Christian Brandt.

I am a planner in the department of planning and zoning in the division of neighborhood planning and community development.

And there

are

staff who I work with peppered throughout the room.

You probably talked to some of them already.

So on the next slide, if you skip this one and go to the

question, would you be able to stand a little bit closer to how just to the owl?

Yeah.

I'll stand closer to the owl.

Okay, so we're gonna get started with a little bit of background.

Um this is the plan launch.

So hopefully some of you are familiar

with

the meat and potatoes of this plan, but I know that some of you might be plugging in for the first.

Um we'll get into the draft plan document.

Um, Jeff Farner, our deputy director will give us a tour of that plan.

We'll have a uh time for about 30 minutes of QA, and then we'll get into return to the open house.

So if you're just now getting here, or if there's more stuff you wanted to do, um, we'll go back to the open house at the end.

You can refill on the uh barbecue that we have from Rocklands and the cake that we have from Mary Beth's, both of which are businesses in the plan area.

Um, and uh we'll be available to answer any questions at the end as well.

So on the next slide, um, we'll go over a little bit of the plan background.

On the next slide is a sort of graphics kind of some of you might have seen this before, it was from an earlier meeting, but really this is this is kind of articulating a little bit about why this plan now.

So on the bottom, you can see the West End development, that's the former landmark mall.

On the top, you can see Old Town, and the arrows are indicating some development pressure emanating from those two locations, and then the yellow is Duke Street in the middle.

Um, like we've sort of mentioned in previous meetings, the planning guidance for the yellow part of Dew Street is pretty old.

It's from 1992.

Um, and we think that based on these two uh pizzas of two sort of nodes of pressure, that there's going to be some interest in um planning happening or development happening in this area, and we want to make sure we have updated guidance so that we get the things we want and not the things we said we wanted in 1992.

Uh and just for reference, uh not to age myself, but I was two years old when that uh when that plan uh was last updated.

So that gives you a sense of sort of what time frame we're talking about here.

Um on the next slide.

Uh this is uh something that some of you might be familiar with, but um, this is our plan area.

You can see that on the uh eastern side, it starts at Alexander Union Station, and within the dotted line, it goes all the way to the intersection with Van Dorne Street.

Um everything inside the dotted line is something that's considered part of the Duke Street land use plan.

Um, and we'll, you know, there's lots of information about all of the sort of ins and outs of what's inside the plan area on all of the tables around, but just to orient ourselves, that's what we're talking about.

On the next slide, we um I know this is a little bit hard to see, but this kind of represents all of the engagement and meetings and work that we've had throughout the plan process.

So to date, this is our 10th community event.

We have one open house.

This is our ninth community meeting.

Uh we've done almost uh a little over 70 pop-ups throughout the quarter starting in June 2025, or rather in April 2025.

We've talked to 250 businesses, which honestly really only scratches the surface.

Um, and then we've engaged with over 4,000 residents in various ways, whether that's online, at a meeting, at a pop-up, you know, um through a survey, something like that.

Um we also have talked to over 100 students who are uh who are enrolled in a few classes we collaborated with at Alexander City High School.

Um on the next slide.

Uh you might be wondering how we got here.

What does all of this work that we've done mean?

So the feedback we collected throughout the process came to us from all of you in lots of different ways, whether it was from an email, the engagement hub, the community poll that we did at the beginning of the process, coming to a meeting, talking to me in office hours, uh, you know, leaving feedback on uh any one of our boards at a meeting or at a pot.

All of that feedback sort of frames the work of the plan.

Um it formed these core plan elements, which we started with the guiding principles.

So, those of you who joined us at Bishop Ireton, it's in September this time of last year, September 25th, actually almost exactly this time.

Um, that really formed the foundation of the type of uh work that we would then do for the rest of the plan.

So half of the guiding principles, we developed land use themes, which we shared with the community in December.

Uh, we worked on the planned districts, which we released in uh February 2026.

You'll see the districts on the large map of the corridor towards the back of the road.

Uh in April, we took all of that feedback plus the feedback that we gathered in the winter in the early spring and turned that into the framework maps.