The Chesapeake City Council held a work session from 5:00 p.m. to 5:46 p.m. and a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. on April 16, 2024. The work session covered updates to the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area boundary, a budget request from the Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways Foundation, and a discussion on eliminating the farm equipment personal property tax. The regular meeting featured proclamations, a contested zoning case for Lake Thrasher Landing, several conditional use permits, a street closure, and new business items.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the work session. We have a number of items on the schedule and Mr. Manager. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. Uh, first up is Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act boundary revisions, and I'll turn it over to Planning Director McNamara. Good evening, everyone. We intend on providing an agenda item for action coming up. And before we provide that agenda at item uh for the upcoming meetings, we want to take a moment to introduce you to uh the Chesapeake Bay and some of the boundary revisions that we're uh proposing. So, with that being said, I'll turn it over to Ethan Hoare, who's our C BPA planner. Good afternoon, Council. Um, so what we have prepared for you, planning staff has been working on uh boundary visions to not only the CBPA overlay district but also the intensely developed area district. Um and we also intend on introducing the coastal resiliency provisions that are going to be coming online here on a state level uh very soon. So when we're looking at these boundary modifications, uh the CBPA district itself received uh its most recent addition in 2018, but has not gone through a comprehensive review of that district since 2003. As part of this modification, we are proposing to add 742 acres of land into the district. We are also proposing to remove 1,030 acres from the district for a net decrease of 287 acres. Uh some of the things we're looking at when we're going through these boundary modifications are RPA delineation confirmations. I have a couple examples of those, but basically what that is a third-party consultant professional wetlands scientist will conduct a field uh study and prepare a report on a privately owned piece of property. That consultant will then submit that report to our on staff professional wetlands delineator and the public works department. Um that staff member will review the delineation and either work with the consultant to remedy it and revise it to get it to where it can be confirmed, but once it is accurate, they will confirm it. Um and then what we do as a city is we uh request the GIS files from the consultant and update our RPA layer and our mapping software to be field accurate so that citizens and staff can utilize a field accurate rather than an estimated um depiction of that buffer on that privately owned parcel. So that is the main kind of piece that we use. Those come in multiple times a year. We probably get about 10 of them a year and implement those. The other big piece that we used is uh site-specific survey data for stormwater conveyances and drainage system evaluation. So we look at neighborhoods that may already have BMPs that are functioning as stormwater quality controls. We look at uh culverts that pass under roads and and see what their elevation is to see if there's tidal continuation there, things of that nature. And then we also utilize standard desktop review resources such as the National Wetlands Inventory Mapping, uh, most recent topographic information and LIDAR, USGS quadrangle maps, and aerial imagery. So this is kind of an example of one of those uh on-site RPA delineation confirmations. The overall plan is on the left side and an expanded view. Really, what we're looking at is on the right. You can see the light blue, the dark blue, and the purple, the light purple there in the center of the the image on the right are all pockets of wetlands. However, the only wetlands that are regulated by the C BPA ordinance are the pink ones. Um, and then you'll see that the consultant has gone in there and buffered a field accurate 100 foot buffer around those pink wetlands. So that would be confirmed by our public work staff, and then we would request those GIS files that are GPS accurate, and we would update our um RPA layer to field accurately map that. But what hasn't been done is the collection of these RPA delineation confirmations over the years have not been implemented to update our CBPA district as a whole to reflect where these water bodies are confirmed to be. So another kind of the opposite of that previous example. Here's an example where in this patch of trees behind the um small subdivision there off of Harling Court. We had shown a perennial stream to be moving through there. A wetlands consultant went out there, determined that it was not a perennial stream, so it would not require uh to be regulated by the C BPA ordinance. So we update our maps, and this is an example of an area that we're we're proposing to remove from the CBPA district to to get away from that um unnecessary regulation. So the largest piece of property that we're proposing to add is actually St. Julian's Creek Annex. It is not located currently in the CBPA overlay district. It's approximately 400 acres, uh, 480 acres. It's federally owned by the Navy and currently as a federally owned piece of property, it's out of the jurisdiction of CBPA regulations on a local level as well as a state level. So adding adding this piece of property into the CBPA overlay district isn't gonna if if the Navy wants to do a project there, they don't need C BPA approval or review for anything that they're doing. However, planning staff feels like it's beneficial foresight to include this land area as it as it has a bunch of um creeks and streams that run through it. If the property was to ever change hands, it's gonna need to be regulated by the CBPA ordinance as it's um tidally influenced water there right on the Elizabeth River. So that was that's kind of the basis for the CBPA district modifications.