Date: October 2, 2025
The Housing, Health, and Education Committee convened to discuss four main agenda items: the Climate Emergency Action Plan (CEAP) update, a developer comment on affordable housing incentives and the MPDU/ADU programs, a review of the Moderately Priced Dwelling Units (MPDU) Housing Fund, and proposed changes to Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) regulations. The meeting included staff presentations, a developer guest, several public comments, and robust council discussion, particularly around the use of MPDU funds and ADU parking and size requirements. The committee did not take formal votes but provided direction for further staff work.
Okay, we're gonna get started. I call to order the October second housing, health and education committee meeting. We'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Let's go forward. So first of all, just a reminder of what the CEAP is. It is a joint city county plan for the Frederick community. This includes everyone in the community. So it's not just government operations, which we've already we've already done, both the city and the county have each done their own government operations plans. This builds on the efforts of the climate emergency mobilization work group, the hazard mitigation and climate adaptation plan, the city climate action plan for government operations, Livable Frederick, and lots of other other plans. Now one thing I will note is that throughout the plan, you'll see some things that are, you know, specific to the city, and um then they'll see some things that are specific to the county. So um just pointing that particular part out. The this is to meet our standards within the region. So the local plan needs to meet the standards to be included in those regional plans. The greenhouse gas emissions are must be calculated by sector, and there needs to be a climate risk and vulnerability assessment, which is included, and there must be a resilience component. I'm gonna ask you. I I never do this, but if you could move back from the microphone just a tiny bit. I know exactly. Yeah, you're it's just all that better. Okay, thank you. So it also has to include a resilience component, and then the uh Metropolitan Washington Council of Government's uh climate action plan was the first regional plan to meet the Paris Agreement, and even though the federal government is not a part of that any longer, the state and region are still part of the Paris Agreement, so we are still complying with that. Uh so continued the city and county goals our city and county goals are to meet 50% greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. And this was a resolution that was passed by both city and county separately. Um you can see that to the right there. Our CEAP aligns with the goals of Maryland's climate pathway, and it builds on community wide and jurisdictional efforts uh to align with our state, regional, and international standards. And you might recall the climate report that the um work group released several years ago. So this definitely builds on those actions, and we're just putting data to that and um moving forward with providing those, we're continuing to provide those actions in here, but we're putting some data behind it. So uh to give you a little bit of background about how we got the community involved. We had 18 in-person public engagement sessions all throughout the city and county. There was a real quick what was what was that over the course of time frame? Time frame. What was that over the course of? Uh, I think we had three months. Okay. Yeah. Uh, and then we had six technical working group sessions made up of citizens, industry experts, and staff. We, if folks couldn't attend any of our um sessions, they could do a survey, and we had over 650 responses for that. And we also had 40 responses during our public input once the um draft report was released. So we're that's what we're still we're incorporating all those public responses right now. So here are the CEAP goals. Um so beyond greenhouse gas emissions, that's you know, kind of what we're looking at. The climate action, of course, means creating healthier communities, and we want to create those communities for everybody for people who are walking, biking, even if you're driving a car, um, you know, taking bus and train riders. We want to make a healthy community for everybody. We want to cultivate new and existing green spaces, so taking those parks that we have and sort of making them even better, and then as new parks come into the system, um, looking at those spaces to continue to provide those benefits. And of course, tackling cost and other barriers. That's the one of the major things we see is that cost is is one of the biggest barriers to you know adopting some of these practices. So trying to figure out ways that that folks can do it, uh finding them grant funds, the little few grant funds that are available right now, trying to to sort of work on those, as well as being good community partners, expanding our technical uh resources of technical advice. Um, that's why we're partnering with the county as we pull together all of our partners, um, we can we have a bigger group of people to pull from to help other folks out, and also it's things like planning to protect against the impacts of heat and flood flood risks. I'll get into that in a little bit, and of course, preparing for population increases.