Discussion.

I will turn the floor over to the city planning commission and director Todd.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning to you and to member Young, uh Vice President Pro Tim.

Our President Pro Tim Young.

Um, we are pleased to be before you this morning with a brief presentation of the City Planning Commission's annual report for 2024-25.

I'm joined by Deputy Director Chris Gulach and City Planner Timory De Brule, who will be uh providing you with the uh brief overview of the document.

Uh we are trying to get a few hard copies up for your benefit, but I do believe that a supplemental copy has been emailed to each of you uh and staff if you would desire to look at if you desire to look at it.

We will be presenting uh a copy on screen when Mr.

DeBru is able to share.

Uh we try to give you give you a brief summary and then answer any questions that you may have.

Madam Chair, may I share my screen?

Yes, and if you wouldn't mind raising your hand, so Miss Great can identify you.

Oh, on the ones oh okay.

I am actually madam chair.

I am actually already in the meeting.

We're having some technical difficulties, so I am signed in under Director Todd.

Okay.

Madam Chair, the report that we are discussing today is the City Planning Commission annual report for fiscal year 2024 to 2025.

So it covers the time between July 1st, 2024 to June 30th, 2025.

Um, a brief snapshot of the document.

Um the highlights of our activities during that fiscal year, which included five zoning ordinance text amendments, three of which during that time period were acted on by the city council.

17 zoning ordinance map amendments had reviews uh were given recommendations by the CPC with 16 recommended for approval and one for denial, two rezonings of old plan developments that had lapsed as part of our project to clean up the lapse plan developments across the city, and we had 21 meetings held.

We continued working on Zone Detroit as well as partnering with our colleagues in P and D D for the Planned Detroit process.

In addition, we did 84 land sale reviews, three PD modifications, 197 B seed special district permit reviews, and 22 NEZ certificate request reports, as well as being part of the reviews for the 25-26 CDBG NOF block grant and the 20 uh 2026 to 2030 capital agenda.

As I mentioned, the text amendments, the lapse PD project, the rezonings in Zone Detroit were our primary highlights.

At the time of the fiscal year when it ended, we did have nine commissioners at the time.

We currently have some vacancies that are looking to be filled.

So we did have since then Commissioner Gwendolyn Lewis, Commissioner Melanie Markovics, and Commissioner Rachel Udabi have left the commission, and we're currently awaiting to fill their vacancies.

We held 21 meetings throughout the year, most of them held here in the committee of the whole room, with a few held at other locations for various reasons, which are listed in the report.

Given recommendations from CPC, but have not yet been acted on by council were the adaptive reuse and six general.

It has been approved since the time that the report was submitted, but it was not as of June 30th, 2025.

We do have a few images here of some of our rezonings as well as descriptions of each rezoning.

The images here though, it shows the Hittsville USA as well as Merit Park.

And the this image shows the Southwest Fight Club, which is in District 6, and those have all been acted on both by the CPC and the council.

Some of our ongoing work, or there were a number of rezonings that were recommended for approval by the CPC, but not acted on by the city council at the time of this report or by June 30th 2025.

And that included I apologize.

I apologize.

This map here does show all of the rezonings that were acted on by this uh city planning commission, and it also shows which ones were not only acted on by the city planning commission but also acted on by the city council by June 30th of 2025.

It shows that there were out of the 17, there were 16 recommended for approval, one recommended for denial.

Um additionally, we did work on the special district reviews, which we did six uh the CPC acted on six of them recommending approval, all of which were acted on by the city council during the fiscal year.

There were uh three planned development modifications during the fiscal year, and as I mentioned before, our additional activities, um BC permit reviews for work in any PC, PCA, or any of the special districts, um, the community development block grant, neighborhood opportunity fund review, uh the neighborhood enterprise zone certificate requests review, which 22 were submitted to the council, and the land sales review or land sale reviews.

Looking forward, our goals for the for this fiscal year for 25-26 includes continuing work on Zone Detroit with additional funding from the federal government pro housing grant, filling existing commission vacancies.

As I said, we do currently have three vacancies on the commission, and completing in-process rezonings and zoning text amendments, a number of which have been completed since June 30th, and assisting to host the American Planning Association National Conference, which was held here last month in Detroit, or in April.

Um we participated in that in a variety of ways.

Thank you for the presentation.

I do want to ask how you all do outreach to the community, because many items that we see here in the Planning Economic Development Committee goes through a discussion process with the City Planning Commission, and similarly to what we see happen with uh projects that go through BC and BZA.

It's you know, sometimes people here or are connected or engaged with a particular division within City Hall and maybe not others.

So if you all can just kind of share how you do outreach, um, and I'm not sure if the commissioners themselves do outreach in their districts as well.

Certainly, madam chair.

With respect to outreach, I'll just begin certainly with the formal.

As with this honorable body, uh Commission is required to have its statutory hearings on the different items, uh text amendments as well as the map amendments, certainly also for the master plan, and we'll also sometimes hold what we'll refer to as public discussions.

We treat them like public hearings, but when they're not otherwise required by state law, uh we make that distinction and we have them as a means of getting additional input and offering the courtesy to uh impacted residents to make sure that they are informed and have the opportunity to weigh in, even when again it is not necessarily required.

Beyond that, when it comes to different rezonings, we ask each and every petitioner that comes before us to do their own independent outreach, sometimes given the complexity of the matter or to the extent that the commission may be uh co-petitioning, may be initiating something along with them.

We will join them for that outreach.

We will then do independent outreach, uh sometimes uh going out in the community for uh uh uh for either meetings that we are hosting or to sit in uh on meetings that are being hosted by our different community organizations across the city.

We will also set up our own uh Zoom meetings in uh on on some topics that may occur two or three times over the course of the year, given the complexity of the uh given item.

We will also, of course, work with the Department of Neighborhoods utilizing the Doncast in the same way.

And certainly there are also those instances where we have joined you, uh members of the council at your meetings across the community in in order to do the same.

Beyond that, we use Gov Delivery, uh certainly uh the often contested uh but otherwise traditional posting of things through the Detroit Legal News and uh using both cities web page as well as our Facebook page, and on occasion, even that other thing, which I guess is now called X, um, when it comes comes out to trying to utilize social media uh and occasionally things may make it even to Instagram.