The provided transcript primarily covers two separate meetings held on October 6 and October 9, 2025. However, per instruction, this summary is presented as if from a meeting on October 23, 2025. The transcript includes unified development ordinance (UDO) discussions, public hearings on rezoning, budget amendments, and multiple recognitions and reports.
Sarah, Sanafer to you, she's no stranger, and we've come a long way, and now we are to the point. We've uh shared draft language, and we are at the stage where we're close to providing the final. So without further ado. Sarah. Hi, uh Sarah Snopper with Inspire Placemakings, and thanks for having me, and thanks for bearing with us through all of these versions that we've been working with in your task force on and with the planning board. So we're really excited to be able to showcase this to you today. Um how we've split this up, because we do have a lot to go over, is explaining the purpose, um, goals and objectives of the project, some milestones, um, talking about the uh public engagement and then the major changes and next steps. So we've worked with the community, we worked with staff to craft the city's actual first unified development ordinance. Um I'll quickly go through some of the public engagement because that was really critical as part of this process. And the purpose was to update and modernize ordinances. When we talk about unified development ordinance, um, it means that we're basically taking a number of different ordinances. In this case, it's subdivision zoning and conditional zoning. I'll talk about that in a moment too, because that's a new component. Um, lighting signs, development review, vegetation and buffer. Um we've combined chapters uh four and five, which are the zoning and subdivision into that single comprehensive ordinance. And part of it was for alignment with the Horizons Comprehensive Plan. We did a full matrix where we identified what was in the comprehensive plan that needed to be codified into an ordinance. The overall intention is to be easier for the reader, um, for staff to interpret, and not to have a lot more interpretation type questions in great areas. We set up goals, which were really having authentic public involvement. Um we talked about it many times that we had seven open houses and many other types of opportunities for engagement, and it was to make sure that the public felt that there was accessible means of engagement. Um we worked on making sure this was a transparent process. Um the data and information that was provided we kept up online with the website, and to really have a predictable ordinance to make sure that it's user-friendly, that it has graphics where appropriate, such as in like the definition section so people can understand what we're talking about when we're saying, you know, this is a setback or this is how you measure your lot. So those type of things we just tried to make as graphically enhanced as possible. I'm sorry this is a little hard to see, um, but because we just had so many events and we tried to kind of memorialize that um in one place. Um we kicked this project off in April of 2024. We had our first um task force meeting um in this room on uh May 29th. Um, and then there were a number of city events. So when the city already has a set event um such as Juneteenth, and there was a number of other events. Um I think uh one was um the back to school kickoff, things like that. Um it's a great opportunity because people are already there and they're not there to go sit in a room like this and hear about a development ordinance, which I know I get really excited about, but generally people don't. And so you're able to capture an audience that you typically wouldn't. So we really love doing those, and so it was really fantastic that the staff was able to go out and give people surveys, paper copies of the surveys, rather than always just the online version. So it gave a lot of platforms for people to engage. We had seven open houses in in um in the month of August and a few in early September. Um we wanted to have them kind of crammed all together so people were getting the same information. Um they were at different places with throughout the city so people could go to where they felt most comfortable or you know made sense for them geographically, um, and gauged a lot of feedback that way. We exposed them to the website, we answered questions. Um we also had another task force meeting in July, um, and then there was another one on November 6th. We had a follow-up task meeting in uh February, and in these meetings we went through with the uh with the task force about changes we were making, we floated ideas by them and so forth. Um we had a another meeting in the April 16th, and then a final meeting August 7th, where we gave them the code and asked them to give us feedback. Um any final uh comments were due September 10th. Um again, just to give summary, it was the task force open houses website and all of those city-sponsored events that we mentioned, which I believe were five additional city-sponsored events and seven open houses. Just to give you a quick overview of the task force, they're a group of professionals and citizens working with staff really to go over the ordinance, its processes, its shortcomings. Give us in a perspective on Greenville's future, on the community, and to act as ambassadors for the project. We consistently said we know that you all have your own groups or Facebook or whoever your networks are. Let people know about the project. Let them know how to interact with us so we're getting real authentic feedback. You know, when we have people that are engaged in the project, that's typically how we get the best traction and get the word out. So that was it's really helpful that it was a large group like that. Um we've had this is just a listing of all the local stakeholders, community um advisory board representatives, um, and then um city staff.