The Chesapeake City Council held a regular meeting on August 19, 2025, convening at 6:30 PM in the City Hall Council Chamber. The meeting began with an invocation and Pledge of Allegiance led by Council Member Les Smith, Jr., followed by roll call. Seven members were present; Vice Mayor John M. de Triquet and Council Member Patricia Y. “Pat” King were excused. The council approved the agenda and minutes, then proceeded through a series of public hearings and business items, including adoption of the Greenbrier Area Plan, a hotel proffer modification, a rezoning to agricultural, two child care conditional use permits, a zoning text amendment to increase density in the urban overlay district, and an appeal remand. The meeting concluded with a closed session at 7:34 PM, reconvening at 7:55 PM, and adjourning at 7:57 PM.
Yeah, we'll go ahead and start our work session. Welcome everyone to our uh work session tonight, uh, August 19, 2025. Tonight we're here to talk about is one of our rules of uh procedures regarding the number of speakers on agenda items. You know, there are as we're all aware, times when we have a very full agenda and a number of speakers, and so I think what we're looking for is a recommendation to bring back to count or for us to bring to council to actually vote on as to how to deal with uh situations where you have a number of speakers that may prevent us from finishing an agenda or keeping those who are here for an item, maybe a simple item having to stay for two or three hours and then maybe having their items cons um continued. So I think the issue is how do we deal when we have with when we have too many speakers for the time allotted. Uh Ms. Ritter, I think you have something you've been thinking about, so you want to put that out there? I think I made this suggestion previously. We have a protocol that we follow with non-agenda speakers, two out of our three meetings every month. And it has to do with an allotted number of time, uh amount of time, and how the speaking is divided. And at the if there are more than six speakers in the allotted 30 minutes, speaking time is reduced to three, and I don't need a prompt out there, thank you. Um speaking time is reduced to three minutes, but every signed up speaker is allowed their three minutes. So my suggestion has been that the council choose a number at which point if there are X I'm not you know, I'm just throwing a number out there, it's not necessarily my suggestion, that if there are ten speakers on one item, or fifteen, it's up to council to make that decision. Then the time is reduced for all speakers to three minutes, and if you have more than i let's say that's a determinant of X, if your determinant is Y, whatever number that may be, the time would be reduced to two minutes. But it follows the same exact process that we already follow with non-agenda speakers. So I think that's a fair way to do it. It allows everyone speaking time, but I know it doesn't sound maybe correct to the public, but even if you're s I I've watched over the years, people who are here and sign up to speak, when it reaches a certain point, they leave and they take away their opportunity to speak because they can't be here for five hours. They might have brought children. Um there are all sorts of reasons. People tune out from home. So I I think this would be fair, it would allow everyone to speak, and we know the number of speakers who've signed up, so that would start with speaker one. Um now, whether or not the council wants to, as we do now, extend more time to the applicant that we can, you know, we can still build that in because that's in there now. They get 10 minutes, is that correct? That is correct. And every other speaker five. Correct. So I I think that's a good to me. That's a good starting point. Any thoughts on Dr. Dr. Ward? Yeah. My concern, because we have had this discussion before. My concern is the applicants getting 10 minutes. And maybe have a number of applicants as we did with the council meeting, there were isn't there were more applicants than we normally have, or we didn't have at the first meeting, and you were talking about a recent meeting. And if they get 10 minutes as they normally do, and you have eight applicants, you know, eight people speaking on behalf of the applicants or the application or the event, whatever, or the professionals, then that really makes it cuts down on the three-minute people who are the public, and that's the situation too when we do this, we need to try to be a fair at least. And we've always said I've been here 19 years ago. I I I thought we had reduced it to only one speaker representing the applicant. Yes, we have yeah, we only accept the applicant that's listed on there. But the last time we reduced the speaker times, we also reduced the applicant to five minutes. Right. And they were fine with that. Yeah. And we and I think we should do that as well. Whatever we reduce it to you reduce it to the to the one applicant. Yeah. I agree. Uh, one applicant representative. Let me go to Mr. Bunn.