The Chesapeake City Council held a Work Session at 5:15 p.m. and a Regular Meeting at 6:30 p.m. on September 23, 2025, at City Hall. The Work Session featured an update on the Comprehensive Plan. The Regular Meeting included approvals for cable franchise agreements, funding for the Cuffee Community Center Pool, board appointments, and public comment on council transparency and city affairs.
Well, welcome everyone to our City Council work session, September 23rd, 2025. Mr. Manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So today we're going to give you an update on the comprehensive plan. This is sort of preview of coming attractions. We'll be spending some time at your retreat in October diving into specific topics related to the comprehensive plan, but we wanted to use this opportunity to give you and the community an update on where things stand today. So turn it over to planning director Jimmy McDamare. Good evening, everyone. So this has been a quite a journey. Two and a half years later, we are here before you tonight to talk about the plan that has been specifically built on the foundation of public engagement and good information that we received along the way. So we've been uh uh engaging with all these groups along the way. So my goal this evening is to actually walk you through some of the engagement to date to give you an understanding of our approach and making sure that we thoroughly vetted uh the recommendations of the plan. We also talk about some of the features of the plan, and then we'll briefly touch on the topics in each of the chapters and some of the big takeaways. Uh so please feel free to engage with me along the way. It's gonna be a lot of information, and we do seek your guidance uh uh as we prepare for uh planning commission in October. So our existing comp plan was adopted in 2014, it has been updated several times since that original adoption. Things have changed quite drastically uh since 2014, and it was time for a full update. Our goal for this update from the start was to make the plan a plan that was easy to read. It had to have graphics, images, and uh and streamlined text that gave clear guidance. We wanted policy statements that were easy to find and easy to reference. We also wanted to make clear how our other planning documents fit into the larger comprehensive plan that we've done over the past couple years. We also knew that technological advancements and improvements in just about every field need to be incorporated. So now I'll walk you through the public engagement and how we got to where we are today. Oh yeah, we knew from the beginning that our methods to had to account for broad responses on specific topics and more detailed information on uh from a conversational standpoint. We broke things down into several categories. Community meetings where we go out into the community and interact with citizens in an open house format, surveys where we asked specific questions about topics that came up throughout the community meetings, focus groups where we met with a variety of stakeholders regarding specific topical subjects and specifically the seven focus areas, geographic focus groups where we went to different areas throughout the city and we sought uh information on how the different policies that were being proposed would affect those areas of the sit of the city differently. And then pop-up events across the city to meet people where they were at and to spread awareness and engagement with people who might not historically have been engaged. And then, of course, our city boards, commissioned and committees to keep them apprised of topics uh that specifically affect their groups. So engagement came in ways, and we wanted to make sure from the start that we were always top of mind and not going away. We wanted to make sure that this was something that was continually heard throughout our process. So in fall of 2023, we took our we began our community kickoff meetings with a simple premise. What were citizens looking for when they were looking to create an exceptional future? We had a series of five geographically dispersed open houses and had a great response. We filed that winter with a survey regarding green space, uh, which was a topic that we heard a lot about during our open houses. A survey had over 500 responses and gave us great information. During the winter, we began putting together a diverse pool of stakeholders that would provide us input in each of the seven focus areas. These seven uh stakeholder groups would meet at least five times a group for a total of close to about 40 meetings. In spring 2024, the stakeholder groups, the stakeholder groups got to work working through policies for each of the focus areas. We sent out two surveys to the public that focused on the appropriateness of density, and another that focused on citizens' desires for third places, which are places besides worker home where citizens go to engage, relax, or recreate. Again, we had an outstanding response to both surveys with nearly 1,500 and nearly 800 responses respectively. It was also during this time that we took the work that we had completed on the focus area stakeholder groups out to the geographic stakeholder groups. This allowed us to weigh how the different policies would impact the different areas of the city. With all this input, we went back to the city at large for the next round of community meetings to share policies and share perspectives on each of those policies. Later that summer, we were back out with a survey into people's perspectives on housing, collecting over a thousand responses on this topic. That fall, we turned our attention to character districts across the city and how this very important policy would impact the impact the city. We again hosted five community meetings across the city. Going into the winter, we had one final community survey where we asked people's thoughts on what gave a place character, and again, over 600 responses for that survey. So as the calendar changed into 2025, we put our heads down and began to work with the document development.