Board of appeals.

Um before we get started on tonight's business, I'd like to just give some brief information about the ZBA and the procedures tonight.

It's the responsibility of the zoning board of appeals to authorize on appeal in specific cases a variance from the terms of the city zoning regulations to hear and decide special exceptions to the terms of the zoning regulations to hear and decide appeals of a grieved parties where it is alleged there is an error in any order requirement decision or determination made by an administrative officer in the enforcement of Division One of the land use article of the annexated code of Maryland or any law adopted under that division, which includes the City of Frederick's land management code.

We conduct these responsibilities in accordance with the city's land management code in Maryland State Law.

The members of the board are all volunteers and we're all residents of the city.

The members are appointed by the mayor, and then those appointments are confirmed by the Board of Alderman.

Board uh is uh comprised of uh five voting members.

Uh we need three for uh quorum, um, and we have four members uh with us tonight, so uh we can conduct uh business.

Um the board's also supported in our activities by members of the city staff.

Um joining us uh tonight from the city staff is Ms.

Gabrielle Collard.

She is the division manager of current planning for the planning department here in the city of Frederick.

Um and uh in addition to numerous other uh daily responsibilities, she supports the ZBA in our work um in our activities.

Um under normal circumstances, though I don't think we have any um new business tonight, so I won't run down the whole line of uh of administrative procedures for tonight.

Um we need a simple majority of any members of the board to pass uh any motion.

Um if somebody is going to speak tonight, and I don't know if we will have anybody speaking, um we do have a public comment section on our agenda as uh well as um one case.

Um but uh we do ask for your name and your address uh for the record.

Um that's the reason the reason behind that is because anybody who is aggrieved by one of our decisions has a right to appeal our decisions uh to the circuit court of Maryland.

Um and that's one way that when the judge is reviewing the tape and the recording, it helps them keep track of who happens to be speaking in any one time to make sure that everybody gets recorded as being part of the official record.

Any questions along those lines?

Um let's see here to make sure.

Oh no.

Well, we'll do the swearing of witnesses later.

I always I always feel like that's the right time for the swearing of the witnesses.

Um but seeing no questions, um we will go ahead and move on to item number two.

Item number two on our agenda tonight is general public comment related to zoning in the city of Frederick.

Um and I wondered seeing you here.

Uh um, but this is an opportunity that we're uh anybody who has general comment not related to one of tonight's cases that they'd like to share with us as members of the ZBA.

It's opportunity to do so.

I see a hand waving uh from out there.

So um yes, please.

And for the record, if we could have name and address.

Yeah, Phil LeBlanc, for Clark Place.

Uh been before the board in the about eight months ago or so.

Uh trying to use one of your fantastic procedures known as appealing a uh determination.

Right.

Any case, I thought that since I've been busy, and I know you've been busy that I would give you an update as to what I've been doing.

Okay.

Thank you.

Relative to uh the subject of uh Airbnbs and the numbers of them that are floating around in in town.

Um there's six six avenues that I've been pursuing, uh which includes uh I'm a member of the subgroup for NAC 11 and the work effort that we put together to do a study and try to understand what was going on and how other jurisdictions are dealing with it and made a uh recommendation that not everybody necessarily agreed with, but at least we put it out there saying, you know, Mr.

City, that's that's where NAC 11 is.

Also, I've been attending a lot of uh just regular and official uh mayor and board meetings uh just for the purposes of percolating up the issue periodically to keep it alive and reasonably well.

Um as you may remember back uh like in October, I uh attempted to appeal uh a the STR determination, but was ruled as uh not having standing.

So that moved on to sort of the middle of nowhere.

Uh but my plan is is to give you updates periodically.

Oh, great.

Since I uh keep chafing away and I I think I've retitled my official function as being a investigative heckler of boiling frog issues.

So that's what I uh that's my my newfound uh job in retirement.

Uh in any case, uh along the lines of what we discussed back at that uh at that hearing, or at least afterwards, uh I have submitted uh roughly a hundred uh code complaints.

Uh huh.

Basically, what I did was I looked up all the Airbnbs that I saw advertised on the on the net, tried to find their address and submitted code complaints on same.

And uh been doing that over the last maybe six months or so, and I'm now uh collecting if you want to call it the responses back.

Uh being that the city uh wanted to charge me 150 dollars to get all 100 statuses back, I I decided to do it in chunks of 20 or 10.

So I'm slowly getting getting those code complaints uh information back.

Uh to that end, I've submitted roughly 35 36 PIAs asking for that information and getting it, plus in general, just uh PIA's for things that seem to be of interest to me.

Uh and related to principally the case that you the appeals case I put in a while back.

So just to highlight some of the PIAs, one of the key PIAs was uh it appears that for some reason tourist homes, which is what I was challenging and discussing, in fact, is not or was removed from the uh use table, uh the uh use matrix table, which to me implies that it doesn't exist as a viable allowable type of property.

But yet that same day I did the appeal, you approved a tourist home in the city.

So it just seems to be a little conflict there of some sort, uh, even though yes, the determination would seem to outline what the position is on short-term rentals, but not necessarily tourist homes.