The Arlington City Council convened in a special session on November 19, 2024, at 1:02 p.m. in the Council Briefing Room. The meeting began with an executive session (adjourned at 1:26 p.m.) and reconvened in open session at 2:01 p.m. The afternoon session included a presentation on the Comprehensive Plan Update, the inaugural Economic Development Annual Report, several informal staff reports, committee reports, and discussions on the Tarrant Appraisal District Board appointment, charter amendments, and evening agenda items. The meeting adjourned at 4:38 p.m.
Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session to order. We'll move on down to the 3.1. Ms. Lopel with the comprehensive plan update. Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Jin Ctopel, your director for Planning and Development Services. At the November 1st Council's full retreat, I provided you a progress report on where we are with the comprehensive plan update project, our public engagement efforts until now, the appointment of the steering committee, the consultant selection, and the anticipated process and timeline. We also started the discussion on what is your vision and what are the biggest opportunities for Arlington. Today, our consultant will facilitate that continuation of that discussion. But before that, I wanted to introduce our project manager, internal project manager for this project, which is our long-range planning manager, John Chapman. Though he's been here with us for a very few months, he's learned a lot in this time frame with the Arlington way. He's met with several of our residents for different projects. And it's not a full speed that he's moving forward. So without further ado, I would like to get John here, and he can introduce the consultant. Mayor and Council, John Chapman. Very happy to be here, very excited for this project. I think the next two years are going to be exciting. We're going to learn a lot about Arlington. So I'm going to keep myself brief. You'll hear a lot from me over the next two years. We have with us Jay Rankins from MIG, who is the principal in charge. So I'll make this brief, and I thank y'all for meeting up with us today. Great. Thanks, John. Thank you, Council and Mayor. Yeah, my name is Jay Rankins. I'm a principal with MIG. I'm also our chief practice officer. MIG is a planning and design firm. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that after I give you an overview of what we're going to talk about today. So the project team introductions. And then we want to talk a little bit about the scope of work. If you have more detail, it's pretty extensive as you can imagine with a comprehensive plan. So I believe you all reviewed that and are familiar through the contract approval process. But if there's any specific questions you have around that, happy to answer that today or at another time. And then I'll try to keep my portion as brief as possible. I'll take my time, but you know, not rush through it. But we also want to hear from you some more. But we want to keep that going. And then we'll finish with some next steps. We are a planning design firm. Actually, pretty familiar with Arlington. We completed the downtown plan for Arlington. That is the current guiding document for downtown. And we've done a lot of work around the Dallas Fort Worth metro area as well. Well, two areas actually, downtowns, uh, one and uh citywide comprehensive plans. Um it was an area of work that in the beginning of my career, which started in around 2003. Um didn't do a whole lot of citywide planning. Um, really wanted to focus more on sort of uh place specific uh kind of sub-area planning.