The Chesapeake City Council held a work session at 5:15 p.m. followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. on May 19, 2026. The work session covered property code enforcement and agritourism site plan review fees. The regular meeting featured a proclamation for National Public Works Week, several public hearing items including a continued rezoning, a withdrawal, approvals, and a continuance, along with new business items on solar farm time extensions and administrative matters.
No, no, no. No, no, no. Welcome everyone to our May nineteenth, uh, twenty twenty six work session. We do have a couple of issues that have been of concern for council in the past. So we'll uh, Mr. Guys, I'll turn it over to you and look forward to hearing the presentation. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, as you stated, both these uh topics are uh requested by counsel for uh information, and then one is uh in uh advance of a uh potential agenda item. So without further ado, we'll uh toss it over to Jay Tate, he'll take us through the two presentations. Okay, I guess this is the night for handoffs. To my um right is Kevin Kemp. He's the deputy um director of development and permits and also the zoning administrator. So he will be doing the first presentation tonight, which is regarding um making a number of the violations in the city, um, go from criminal to a civil penalty, and as previously indicated, that is um been a frequent request of city council. Why are some of these penalties so severe for something that sounds so minor? So um I will turn it over to Kevin at this point. All right, good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, or acting vice mayor, and uh members at council. Thank you for this opportunity to go through this amendment uh proposed amendments with you. We put together a presentation that will hopefully you know clarify what it's all about and and dig into it. So, purpose of this work session. There are three amendments that'll be considered. The first is to the zoning ordinance, then also chapter 14, uh building regulations and chapter 26 floodplain management. Now, what you will get is approximately 150 pages. This is a bulk uh building regulations, and I'm here to assure you that it is not nearly as daunting as you think. And I will walk you through it and try to try to simplify it for you. Uh so as I said, a bulk is in the building regulations, but in all of this, there are only two policy changes, and that is changing certain violations from criminal to civil and increasing the civil fines for all violations. A majority of the amendment is just reorganizing the building regulations, putting them in more a logical uh readable order. I have in there an example, so section 14.1 of the new amendment is where it gives the authority and relates it to the Virginia State Building Code. Prior, this was in the middle of the section, section 1431. So you went through, you know, a whole bunch of building regulations to then get the authority to then have more building regulations. So what this does is it reorders it, gets rid of some duplicate provisions, and you know, it makes it more readable and makes sense. All right, so as Jay mentioned, this has been a concern of this council that the violations, the penalties don't necessarily sync up with the violations, and that criminal uh penalties are wrong for you know, particularly zoning and building violations. Uh, it also is a realization that criminal enforcement uh can affect judicial action. What I mean by that is civil enforcement tends to have a better chance at the courts upholding uh you know our our side on it. It's easier for default judgment. You know, judge may hesitate with a criminal enforcement, he may hesitate if a criminal record is the result. You know, those things could impact things such as security clearances, and we all know you know the nature of a bunch of our residents that could impact their jobs, you know, their lives. So there might be that hesitancy, which makes civil uh more effective. And lastly, civil enforcement is more flexible and uh it's more efficient for our inspectors. Uh, you know, the goal of our ordinances is to come into compliance. They're not punitive, so if you go and you sync that up with the care standard, we want to give our inspectors the best tools to come to that compla uh compliance and the most flexibility. So civil uh gives that. So, currently all building and floodplain management uh violations are criminal as well as most zoning. We're changing those to civil. Uh big reason is that criminal enforcement takes longer and it has a much higher burden of proof. You know, you're dealing with criminal being beyond a reasonable doubt versus civil preponderance of evidence. So, you know, in these cases of zoning and building particularly, criminal is or civil tends to be a better way to go. Uh we put together this chart that shows exactly what the differences are. You know, what you're dealing with, what these changes mean. The biggest difference is in the fines.