The Arlington City Council met in special session on April 8, 2025, beginning at 10:45 a.m. in the Council Briefing Room. The meeting opened with an executive session from 10:48 a.m. to 3:03 p.m. to discuss legal matters regarding out-of-jurisdiction housing finance corporation transactions, the potential sale/lease/exchange of real property at 106 Stadium Drive, council appointees’ performance reviews, and offers of incentives to business prospects. The open session reconvened at 3:16 p.m. and adjourned at 5:24 p.m. The council received presentations and discussed the Innovate Arlington comprehensive plan update, the Arlington Police Department (APD) 2024 annual report, the council priority on leveraging technology, collection of fees for hazardous material incidents, homelessness strategies, panhandling solutions, a cemetery ordinance, appointments to boards and commissions, a status update on nuisance unfinished structures, a legislative update, and external committee reports.
Okay, we're gonna go ahead and call the work session to order with the city council. What time is it now? It is April 8th. And for sure to be CA Government Code. Okay. We'll call the afternoon session back to order. We're going to move on down to discuss workforce or work session items. Three point one. John. All right. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I am here this afternoon to uh help introduce the MIG team with an update on the comprehensive plan, a lot of the work that's been going on over the past uh few months. We're going to dive right into it. Forty-five minutes, and we got a long presentation here. Um, but just wanted to extend my thanks to all the council members that attended any of the workshops over the past few weeks. Um, that was a great success, and we anticipate to have an even bigger success in the upcoming workshops later this year. But without further ado, I'm going to hop back and hand it over to Jay Rankins with MIG principal in charge to open the presentation. Great. Thanks, John. Uh hey everybody. Um thanks for having us back. Um, I'm also gonna be uh joined by D'Angelos uh from NAO, uh, who's one of our key partners on this project? Uh they helped us with the trends report that's in draft form right now, and he'll give you some highlights of that uh effort. Uh so what we wanted to cover, uh a little bit about public engagement, uh, what our overall plan is, uh, which I think I shared with you when we uh initially spoke with you, but just a reminder there, as well as some key takeaways from some of the things that we've done so far. Uh we wanted to then give you some highlights of uh some of those key deliverables, so the existing conditions atlas uh and that trends report, um, as I said, is in draft form. Uh and then we wanted to make sure that we have plenty of time uh to actually hear from you on a few key questions uh around uh development that is needed, uh different places that you think should be focused on as far as investment moving forward, um, whether that be public or private, um, and how we make Arlington even better place moving forward. Um, and then there's a little bit at the tail end about um sort of how we're gonna use that input that we're gathering from uh different stakeholders, from you all, from the community uh through our next phase, and we'll highlight a few of those things as well. Uh so the public engagement, um, I I think this is a review for you all, but in essence, we're talking about a two-year process overall. Uh, we've now been you know, most of the way through phase one, which is baseline visioning, uh, but that extends into uh the first part of the summer. Uh we will then uh actually starting probably later this month, uh, be uh working on phase two, uh, which is planned development. So that's where we start to get into there's been a lot of sort of uh documentation of what's on the ground today, what the trends have been and some projections looking out, but uh really using the community's vision to begin to articulate different uh scenarios uh for how the city can guide growth, how the city can invest moving forward, and what the pros and cons of those different uh types of investments are, whether that be in public facilities, uh the public right-of-way, um, in neighborhoods, in our commercial areas, or a combination of all of those. Um, and then um, as I think you're all aware, uh 2026 is really devoted to the drafting of the plan and then making sure that we have a really robust, adequate um uh public review process. Um, and so through that, our main uh outreach tools are articulated at the bottom here. Um, so an outreach toolkit for use by uh staff and uh volunteers, community workshops, uh pop-up events, focus groups, community open houses, and community questionnaires. Phase one engagement so far has included uh five steering committee meetings. Uh we have a great steering committee uh who's meeting on average, probably every six to eight weeks uh throughout the entire process. Uh so they're providing input on themselves. They're also representing uh different groups, organizations, neighborhoods uh through the process. Uh, we're also getting input from stakeholder interviews. Uh, we've conducted uh nine of those so far, but we have them scheduled throughout the process as well as focus groups. And then uh there is a community questionnaire where we'll hit this at the end again, but uh this is live uh through the end of April. Uh we have uh quite a few responses so far. Um I think over 400, over 300, excuse me. Over 300 responses. Thank you, John. Um, but we hope to you know break that 400, maybe 500 mark. So if you all haven't filled that out, we'd encourage you to or promote it to other folks, that'd be great. Those six workshops John just talked about, where we had over 200 participants across those uh six different workshops, uh, and then pop-ups uh will be coming up here soon. Um the first is gonna be at a cultural groceries or a couple of cultural grocery stores. So some of the emerging themes, and these are just topical right now, uh, but different partnerships have been mentioned, um, taking advantage of those that exist already, or maybe establishing new partnerships, uh, public transportation and making sure that Arlington continues to be on the cutting edge of providing you know multimodal options, uh redevelopment opportunities, small business support, connections between destinations, uh, so that there's the sort of this thought that there's a lot of great pieces of Arlington, but um, in not all scenarios, are they really well connected to each other?