Okay, good evening, everyone.

Welcome to the April 8th work session of the Chapel Hill Town Council.

We are pleased to have you join us.

On our agenda for this evening, we have three items.

First, there will be an update from our economic development team.

Second, we'll be discussing our rewriting our rules, the town's land use management ordinance rewrite.

And third, there will be an update regarding planning for the extraterritorial jurisdiction 15501 in Southern Chapel Hill.

Affectionately known as Weston.

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind our audience that the format of a work session is slightly different than our regular meetings.

Work sessions are an opportunity for the council to dive more deeply into specific topics.

They're more conversational, less formal, and we don't vote.

Anything that would need a formal vote, we'll come back to the business meeting.

Finally, we value public input and do want to hear from you on these topics.

So there'll be opportunities for the public to speak at upcoming business meetings.

Our next regular meeting will take place next Wednesday, April 15th at 6 p.m.

in town hall.

And another good way to give us your input is by emailing Mayor and Council at Chapel Hill NC.gov.

So with all that said, we'll move on to item number one, economic development with David Putnam and Sarah Park.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Can you all hear me okay?

Yes.

Great.

My name is David Putnam.

I'm your economic development director, and got the full team here.

So we're going to do a quick round of intros for them.

Small but mighty.

Small and my need.

Hi everyone, the evening.

I'm Sarah Potter.

I'm the Partnership Manager.

I'm Sarah Grace Acker.

I'm the marketing and communications coordinator for economic development.

So we are a small but mighty team.

And we're here to share with you all some of the work that we've been doing this year.

And also have a discussion with you guys to better understand how we're aligning with your strategic priorities and how we can look at our program of work for 2027.

So to start off, just some uh I guess setting the stage.

I'm going to do some kind of grounding slides first, and then we're going to get into some more kind of like content for the department.

At that time, I'll take a pause after each major slide that we cover, and then I'll ask for questions or comments from y'all at each section, and then we can move on from there.

Just to you know, help the flow of the discussion really prosper, and then we don't lose any train of thought as we're shifting from subject to subject.

Um, because we understand that this could be a nice discussion with some really exciting information.

So to kick us off, this is our first grounding uh slide.

It's really symbolic and representative of you guys setting your strategic priorities, helps inform our work and guide our work.

So it's really one of our core grounding uh principles for the department.

Um so the priorities that you guys have set for this council cycle are complete community, environmental resiliency, housing, and organizational and fiscal sustainability.

And those icons that you see are important.

You'll see those throughout the slide in the presentation, um, and they'll flash under each of the economic development subjects that we'll be talking about, and then you can see how the things that we're working on connect directly to your strategic goals and priorities, which is important for our work.

And then some other grounding principles.

Um, these are professional grounding principles.

This is the economic development profession unilaterally professionals in our network care about generating revenue and growing the tax base, um, creating high quality jobs in the communities that we serve, and then attracting new investment in the community.

Um those two grounding slides are really important because if we can't connect what we're doing to either of those things, it's not appropriate for us to do that.

And if you're not careful, economic development can be sort of a catch-all subject, um, which is really dangerous territory because then you can experience mission drift and you get off track, and then you're not able to you know really accomplish what your community is trying to set up and do.

So, filtering a lot of what we do from from that high level, um, we've developed these five strategic priorities for the department.

So we have product and posture, and product and posture is really what is our product that we have, where are we selling, what is our recognition and our brand and how are we marketing ourselves locally, regionally, across the state and nationally.

Community partnership, I like to say that the team, you know, economic development is the ultimate team sport.

We can go farther together than we can independently.

And that's why it's a core strategic priority for our department.

Business vitality, that's our existing business support function.

It's the most arguably one of the most important things that we do.

And that's why we have a whole person that's dedicated to exclusively business vitality work.

Real estate and active projects is where we spend a lot of our time focusing on things that you guys have entitled or made policy decisions on.