My apologies for gossiping up here.

So the Loudon County Board of Zoning Appeals is now in session.

We have no hearings tonight.

We're here for an educational session, and thank you all for giving up your evening to come and tell us what you can or what we need to know so that we can do a better job.

The reason that we wanted to come before you this evening is to give you a preview of the online zoning ordinance that we'll be launching in the next few weeks.

So we wanted to just as a courtesy let you see what the zoning ordinance is going to be looking like.

It's basically the PDFs that are currently on the county website that have been converted into this more user-friendly format.

So what I'm going to do is give you an overview of the home page, and then Teresa and I will both just walk you through the main menu across the top of the page.

So beginning with the navigation welcome message, we have an opportunity to view the zoning ordinance or view an informational video.

And the video, it's a few minutes long, but it's really to orient new users.

And it'll basically be walking the new user through the system the way Teresa and I are doing this evening.

So the main zoning ordinance is divided across four navigation tabs.

We begin with zoning districts and land uses, and that is just a quick navigation tool that will take you to chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, and chapter five.

The second tab is our development standards, and that's all of like parking, lighting, open space, and chapter eight, the signs.

The third tab, we have natural resources and attainable housing, and lastly, all of the administration and procedures, such as the definitions, the Board of Zoning Appeals, Planning Commission, that type of board and commission regulations, and then land development fees, acronyms, and abbreviations.

So those are four tabs where you can jump right into the zoning ordinance.

Scrolling down, there's a zoning toolkit, and that allows the user to go take just a quick link to the zoning maps, which we will look at.

A tool that is called land use lookup, a variety of development calculators and landmark, which we're all familiar with.

Scrolling down, we have Smart Search, and this is all about a GIS data.

You can do search my land, and that will take you to an interactive zoning map.

Provide a district summary to generate a list of uses that are allowed in a zoning district.

This link is what's my zoning, and that's an existing tool where a user can enter their address or a parcel number, and it'll tell you what your zoning is.

And then GIS download is just an opportunity for downloading actual GIS data to use outside of this zoning tool.

Another way to access the actual chapters of the zoning ordinance is just to use these chapter tiles.

It's really just an attractive way to link directly to the zoning ordinance.

Next, I would like to just go straight to the ordinance by uh clicking on the view.

You'll see the table of contents along the left side of the screen, and whatever section you select, that will appear on the right side of the screen.

And Teresa will also go through and show you some of the features there.

We mostly know we mostly know how to use a search tool, but we'll do it.

You can search a single term, just like animal.

And what this is going to do is search the entire zoning ordinance for every instance of animal.

And if you want to click on one of these headers, it'll take you to the full text, which usually at the top you'll you'll notice as you search the definitions from chapter 12 appear first.

But you can go down to any of the headers and see the full text of any time that term is used.

If you want to be a little more complex, if you want animals but not kennels, I really like that not search feature because it'll just bring back the terms that don't include Kennel.

And like any other search tool, if you want a specific phrase, you can uh enclose that phrase in quotation marks.

One thing this tool has is a way to instead of search the entire zoning ordinance, you can search only by a chapter or narrow it down even to a section.

So for instance, if I only wanted the use specific standards for animals, I could narrow it down to just a chapter four because I know that's where the use standards are.

So it's a pretty good search tool rather than flipping the pages of your hundred-page zoning ordinance binder from previous years.

The next thing I will show you is land use lookup, and I think this will be very helpful for users because what this tool tells us is where is a specific use permitted throughout the county.

What I like about these tools is there's always instructions at the top, so you can select read more, and as a reminder, you have the written instructions there.

But for this evening, if you know the term, like data center, that's a term we use frequently.

So I'm gonna go ahead and enter data center, and at the bottom, the results will show me where a data center is permitted in the county.

You'll see that data centers are special exceptions in these zoning districts.

We can click on OP, for example, and it'll take us directly to the OP regulations.

We can also select view on the map, and then we can see the zoning districts on the map.

C L I G I I P-H-I-O-P and P D R D P.

Those are our highlighted the with the different colors on the map.

So I think that's a really good visual tool to represent the zoning districts.

And one thing we'd like to stress to everyone is this tool doesn't show entitlements.

So if there is a proffer for a rezoning, it's not going to do these specific parcel-based entitlements.

This tool is supportive of the zoning ordinance, and so it presents information at the zoning district level.

So if a user wants to find specific information about a per a property and what approvals are on that property, they would still need to go to landmark.

If we don't know you know the exact use, we can go to this left side and select a category.

Why don't I do industrial?

Industrial, and only the uses that are in the industrial category will pop up, and you can see there, there's data center, and then we have the same results, just two different ways to search where within the county is a particular use allowed.

So at this point, I'm going to ask Ms.

Miller to talk about the calculators.

There we go.

And the zoning ordinance.

Okay.