I want to welcome everyone to our August 20th City Council work session and like to call on our city manager to present the items.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

As you know, the comprehensive plan process is well underway, and uh our our staff wanted to give council an update.

There's been a lot of community conversations so far and a lot of work done.

And so before we get too much further, just wanted to give a situation report to council, and I'll turn it over to Director McNamara.

So good evening, everyone, and very excited to be here this evening and sharing our midpoint update for the comprehensive plan.

We want to first start off by saying thank you to all the stakeholders who have taken part in this process to date.

We'll be sharing a lot of the work uh that has been uh has been done so far.

So as an agenda for this evening, uh we'll be focusing on a recap of work completed in 2023 and then turning our focus to what we've been doing this year.

Uh we've had a lot of great input from uh citizens, stakeholder groups so far, and we'll be sharing the work uh through the induct introduction of some of the focus area big ideas uh that are going to be summarized later on this in the presentation.

We'll then talk about next steps and expectations moving forward.

First, the recap.

So in 2023, we began by laying the foundation for the plan.

We conducted our demographics, housing, and market reports.

Uh we worked to develop our branding and engagement plan, and we also looked at best practices from around the country and looked at what gaps may exist within our existing policies.

In June, we took our show uh to the public and hosted a series of five open houses where we asked people's thoughts on the focus areas for the plan.

We didn't stop there, we popped up at various city events like the Holiday Craft Show, Oktoberfest, Black Inc., the Wine Festival, Monster Fest, and more.

We then set forth uh to develop stakeholder committees that represented a diverse range of participants on thoughts, age, jet geographic location, et cetera.

Those seven groups met somewhere between seven to eight times a piece to discuss the topics.

As 2024 began, those stakeholder groups continued to meet and be started to form big ideas, of which we'll be sharing with you in a little bit.

Knowing Chesapeake is a diverse city uh and it's made up of many communities.

We knew that these big ideas and policies would affect different areas of the city in different ways.

So with that, we formed geographic focus groups uh from each of the ten planning areas and met with uh each of those groups to discuss the ideas of each of the focus areas and their perspective on how they would affect their communities.

All along the way, we've done a series of quick surveys uh that focused on green spaces, development patterns, unique neighborhood places, and ongoing housing preferences.

Taking in all this input, uh we have developed new displays and hit the road again for our next series of five summer open houses where we shared both focus area and geographic area perspectives with the public and sought their input on our work to date.

So that's where we're at tonight.

Uh we'd like to share the input that we've received and some of the big ideas that came from that input.

So, as a reminder, uh these policies are not the entirety of what will be in the plan.

Uh they were generated based on consultant feedback, stakeholder community work committee work, and uh the initial public interest.

Prior to bringing the them to the community open houses, we shared these with community leaders from each of the planning areas to get their perspective and to add it to the conversation.

Some of these may be familiar to you, and you may note that they are already in the comprehensive plan.

The fact that you're seeing them here means that we've heard a swell of support and a desire to truly push these initiatives forward above others.

As a reminder, the seven focus areas are listed on the screen, and we'll be going through each one of those in detail.

In connectivity and infrastructure, movement was broken down to two things moving people and moving things.

Moving people, not cars.

Sometimes moving people does require cars, and that's okay.

But the focus is actually on moving the people and how we're going to move them.

So you'll see a lot of key policy overlap uh across many focus areas.

Infrastructure uh comes up in growth management and housing as well.

So walkability continues to be an important repeated point that also shows up in place making and design, and as well as environment resilience and quality of life.

So our next focus area, three big points rise to the top here.

First is business retention and recruitment.

The next focuses on the connection between housing and jobs and the need to keep things in balance by providing adequate affordable housing near employment centers.

You'll hear more about this when we get to the housing focus area.

The next is the need to protect economic development sites.

Sometimes this takes the form of purposeful redevelopment of abandoned and obsolete sites, while other times it's through protecting prime inventory of environment of economic development sites.

Turning our focus to environment and resilience, we heard over and over again about flooding and sea level rise and the need to adapt to these forces through resilient development strategies.

Renewable energy was another topic that came up quite a bit, and the fact that we need to adopt standardized practices for this and the need to lead the way in city spaces.

Another topic that comes up all the time is the need for an urban forest and accomplishing this by protecting existing mature trees and supplementing through reforestation efforts.

Folks have also pushed the need to understand the existing tree inventory to provide a baseline for efforts moving forward.

Our next topic was growth management in rural areas.

There was a base understanding that growth will occur and that in order to properly grow, growth must be directed towards certain areas while directed away from other areas.

Major thing that was heard was the need to balance growth and infrastructure to maintain a high quality of life.

This sometimes means proactive infrastructure investment in areas that are targeted for growth before the growth gets there.

Incentivizing urban development by identifying utility investments to accommodate the growth.

And there was also an understanding that there was a need to maintain urban forms of development through smaller lots and greater densities in certain areas to prevent continued sprawl in other areas.

One of the overriding themes that comes out of this group and continues throughout the plan will be the concept of creating complete complete communities, providing services, open spaces, commercial, various housing options, and mobility options all in one community.

This concept will pop up in our character districts and smart growth principles and other policies related to housing and growth management.

Speaking of housing, it's on everyone's mind of late.