No, we don't know, that's one of the things.

Welcome to the April 24th, 2025 Land Use Public Safety and Community Development Committee meeting.

We will begin with a Pledge of Allegiance.

Thank you.

The first item on our agenda is approval of the April 10th, 2025 minute.

Minutes.

Motion to approve the minutes.

I will second.

All those in favor.

That's two zero.

Councilmember Kazemchak let us know ahead of time that she would be absent today.

On to our workshop.

We have two budget presentations today, and we will be hearing from planning, and then we will be hearing from permits and code enforcement.

So let's begin with our planning department and our deputy director, Gabrielle Collard.

Welcome.

There we go.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for having us.

This is always like the most intense time of the year, I think, probably for our budget folks, more so than the rest of us our departments, but it's also kind of one of the most rewarding times of the year.

This is the second opportunity I've had to present the budget for the planning department.

And it is such an interesting time to pull together all of the work we've done and really share with the community and the council all of the successes and our plans for the future.

So it is kind of it's a scary time, it's very intense, but it's also a really cool opportunity for us to personally reflect on the work we've done.

So I'm very glad to be here.

And joining me today, I'm lucky to have uh my team of folks with me.

Uh we have Christina Martinkaski, who is our division manager for historic preservation planning.

Christina Rodrick, who is a new division manager for current planning.

She started with us on March 10th.

Uh so a little bit into her seventh week, yep.

Brings extensive experience in uh administering development review process, zoning, and legislative drafting.

So she's going to be a great asset for us.

We also have Kerrian Eiler, our office manager with us, who has uh been instrumental in getting our budget together for this year.

And then Brandon Mark is joining us from the Outer Banks.

He said he is watching remotely.

Um he is on vacation this week, but he is our division manager of community planning and urban design, and he has contributed extensively uh to the materials we'll cover today.

So with that, I think we started.

So one of the big things that we focused on in the past fiscal year, and we continue to focus on, is really our departmental infrastructure and our organization.

Um just like building a house, our foundation is really the firm basis from which everything above it can be successful and stable.

So we've taken a lot of time to really focus on what will serve us now but serve us moving into the future.

Uh the biggest success we had in that area is our department reorganization.

Uh, we created the position of division manager of historic preservation planning, divesting the historic preservation responsibilities from the division manager of community planning and urban design.

This uh had two really, really um impactful results.

One, it grew our historic preservation planning staff by one position, uh, which is needed just to support the daily workload, but also to focus on some of the larger projects that we'll get into discussing uh later in the presentation.

Uh, this also had the equally as important um advantage of, as I said, divesting the responsibilities of historic preservation planning from community planning or or otherwise our comprehensive planning functions.

Uh the historic preservation process is um intense.

It is regimented, and a lot of the division manager's roles and responsibilities while managing that was tied up with that ongoing responsibility.

Uh, now that we have free uh Brandon's capacity up, he can focus extensively on community planning and urban design with the two uh current uh planners we have working in the areas of the urban design and transportation planning.

So that's a huge, um a huge win.

We also published our first annual work plan, uh, which has been an incredible guide for us.

It conveys a unified work plan not only for us internally to make sure we all know that the music we're dancing to, but also um to the council and to the public provides uh our vision for where we're working and is great for transparency.

Lastly, uh was our open gov implementation efforts.

Uh we have all of our zoning board of appeals applications online.

We have the vast majority of our historic preservation uh applications online, including tax credits, which has been a big win for this year, and um several of our development review or current planning applications.

Our work moving into the next year will be on wrapping those up.

So uh what I wanted to do in addition to kind of focusing on our our overall organizational um efforts in the past year was then to just jump into the different functional areas of the planning department and some of the the successes we've had.

In the areas of community planning and urban design, we did it renew our approval for our sustainability sustainable communities designation with the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

That approval was granted in 2024, and this program provides the city and its community partners with access to important financing programs, including in the areas of facade improvements for commercial properties, but also makes our community partners eligible for tax credits and incentives through state programs like the low-income housing tax credit uh program.

So, by being a designated sustainable community, developers who are looking to establish low-income housing tax credit projects can actually score higher in their competitive financing process because of our designation.

And furtherance of our resolution we signed in 2021 regarding Vision Zero Action Plan and our commitment to eliminating uh death and serious injuries on our transportation system.

We have selected a consultant's work with us to prepare a vision zero action plan or Safe Streets for All.

That's the abbreviation up there.