It's six o'clock, and um I would like to um call this workshop to order, and we will begin with a pledge of allegiance led by councilwoman Helsley to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible liberty and justice for all.

Mr.

Johnson, will you please call the role?

Councilman Adams.

Here, Councilman DeBarta Laban.

Here, Vice Mayor Fugit.

Here, Councilman Grant, Councilwoman Fugit, or Councilwoman Helsley.

Here, Councilman Honeycutt.

Councilman Lloyd.

Here, Councilwoman Parker, Councilman Thomas.

Seven members present, Vice Mayor.

Thank you.

Um thank you so much for to uh the planning uh commission staff to come tell us all about planning.

You get to be the first workshop of this new city council.

So and one of the things that we all know and you know all too well there's a lot more land use stuff that city council deals with than the average citizen would think we deal with.

The average person that runs for office thinks they will deal with.

So um so thought it'd be really nice to get all that's coming up, and Amy, I appreciate you um being the first one up and meeting me a month or so ago and pulling this together so quickly.

So I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

And we are honored to be the first on your agenda for these workshops.

So I you all know me, but Amy Brooks, Knoxville Knox County Planning.

I have brought several of my colleagues here today, um, and I will introduce them.

So we have Jesse Hellman Hillman, she is our principal planner, and she takes the lead on a lot of the city rezonings and plan amendments.

This is also um, I'll just quickly say this is the team that will be um primarily working on the comprehensive plan update as well.

Um, it'll include a lot of other staff members as well, but this will be um part of our core team.

Um, Michelle Porte, who you all also know, she's our planning services manager, and Allie Ketron, she is our um strategic planning communication and planning manager.

So for today, I'm gonna give you all an overview of who we are.

Um this will probably be familiar to quite a few of you, um, but I think it's really important to help set the context, and then we'll go over the planning process and talk more in depth about rezonings and plan amendments and special use reviews.

You all don't see those on a day-to-day basis, but um they sometimes do get appealed to this body, so we want to make sure that we cover those as well.

Um and we'll talk about how we keep the community informed about the application and the requests that come before the planning commission, and then we'll we'll briefly start to talk about the comprehensive plan update that's coming up.

So here on the screen you see our mission.

Um, our customers are the citizens, elected officials, businesses of Knoxville and Knox County, and we work really hard to treat them all with respect and make sure that they receive high quality service from all of our staff members.

Um, one of our primary goals is to ensure that we provide objective and impartial advice and follow a code of ethics that's established by the American Planning Association.

Um internally, we maintain a high standard for all of our employees.

Um professional development is expected, um, and we're always looking for ways to improve what we do and how we how we do it.

Um those last two bullets there.

Um I really do want to highlight that our role is to provide you all uh and the planning commission and other boards and commissions that we serve to the objective advice and make sure that we're serving as an information resource to you all as well as the broader community.

So we have three core areas within our agency.

We have our planning services division, which is our largest group.

Um those are the staff members that you all will probably you interact probably most often with if you are calling our office to inquire about a rezoning or a plan amendment.

Those are the names that you see on your staff reports that come before this body.

We also have our information services team.

Um this staff conducts research and reporting, they do our GIS mapping, and they provide information via our website, uh handle all of our social media as well as our newsletters, and then we have our transportation division.

This this division serves uh primarily our Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization or TPO as it's called here locally.

And it also serves not just the city of Knoxville, Knox County, but Anderson Blunt, Loudon Rhone, and parts of Sevier.

So we work really closely with the city administration.

And this highlights some of the main departments that we work with most frequently, engineering, housing, neighbor development.

We do assist CAT with administration of their grants and helping out with special projects.

We did assist them with their most recent plan updates.

We work really closely with plans review inspection on a daily basis.

And if you all want us to dive into more detail about that, we'd be happy to do that.

But of course, policy sustainability and of course urban design and development.

Amy, yes.

Council members, um a lot of questions you may have may get answered as we go through this.

So if you might want to just jot them down and let's see if we can hold our questions kind of till you get through all the presentation.

Okay.

I interrupted you to tell everybody not to interrupt you.

That's fine.

That's fine.