The Chesapeake City Council convened for a work session at 5:00 p.m. followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. on January 23, 2024, in the City Hall Council Chamber. The work session included presentations on the Greenbrier Area Plan and child care regulations. The regular meeting addressed appeals, consent items, library funding, a façade improvement grant, citizen comments, appointments to boards and commissions, and new business including an industrial waterfront study and a directive for lobbyist disclosure.
I want to welcome everyone to our January 23rd, 2024 Council Work Session. I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Manager at this time. Thank you, Ms. Mayor. And I'm immediately going to turn it over to Mr. McNamara for an update on the Greenbrier Area Plan. Good evening, everyone. Very excited to bring our consultants to you tonight. We're going to be discussing the air Greenborough Area Plan. We're about two-thirds of the way through here. So we've got about six months to go, and we'd like to propose some initial concepts for your feedback. So I'm going to turn things over to Brad Barnett from Cooper Robertson and Devin Cipson from Kimley Horn. Thank you, Jimmy. Good evening, everyone. Devin Simpson from Kimley Horn. So as Jimmy said, we met with you all back in May and we gave you a little bit of an update where we were in the plan. So we're here tonight to give you an update and show you some of our exhibits and get your feedback with where we are today. So we're about a year in, we've got about six months left. We've gotten through our existing conditions analysis, our market analysis, and we've begun to develop land use scenarios. And that's what we're here to get your thoughts on tonight. Along this time, we've done a ton of community engagement. We had over 50 hours of engagement with the community. So this included public surveys, community meetings. We've had several stakeholder meetings, both with internal city departments and external with residents, different folks in the business community as well. So we've had a lot of really good feedback that's helped inform what you'll see here tonight, which is really a blend of this feedback that we've received, our existing conditions review, and our market forecast analysis. So he is with Cooper Robertson, our urban design firm, and he's gonna walk you through the scenarios that you'll see here tonight. Good evening. It's good to be with you all. Uh again, my name is Brad Barnett. Um I'm gonna go through this at a pretty high level. Um I'm sure you'll have questions and feedback, and so we're happy to go into into more detail on anything after we go through these slides. Um, what we're gonna go through is what we're calling the preferred um land use scenario. Um the way that we developed this was, as Devin said, really built on the engagement process to date as well as the analysis that our team has been working on together with the city. Um to begin this work, we developed um three categories uh to inform uh the overall categories that we'd focus on. The first being areas to preserve. These are areas primarily single family residential areas or other areas that are functioning well today, where we did not anticipate significant changes coming to those areas from a land use perspective. The second category we're calling enhanced, those are areas where they're still functioning well today. There may be opportunities for public realm improvements like sidewalks or street trees or other minor improvements to these areas, but we still believe that they're functioning more or less the way they uh can in the future from a land use perspective. And then the last category, the ones that you see um in color on this map are areas called transform. These are the areas where we see the most opportunity for um substantial land use change in the future to achieve some of the goals that we've heard from the community to date. And that's where we're gonna focus our our um effort um right now. So I'm gonna go through each of these again at a very high level. Happy to come back and answer questions or hear feedback on these. Um the first is um what we're calling the health village. So we're located right now on Battlefield next to the regional hospital. Um, and this one really builds on the success of the hospital as a regional asset. We envision the opportunity for more medical focused mixed use around the hospital, including more ground floor retail restaurants and other things to serve visitors and employees of the hospital. Um we also see this as an opportunity for a lot of um age-targeted and senior housing, again, because of the synergies with the hospital function itself and the opportunities there. And then on the east side of battlefield, we see an opportunity for more housing with active retail on the ground floors and parks and other amenities that can serve the the neighborhood residents in the surrounding neighborhoods.