Commission meeting for today, June 9th.

We have a number of items on our agenda tonight, so we will try to move through things at a reasonable pace.

I know there's a lot of people who want to comment, so we'll get to that.

The first item on our agenda is a short presentation about the uh City of Peakskill comprehensive plan.

Um I will let Carol introduce this project and then we'll have a short presentation.

Yeah, we wanted to uh thank you, um Chair.

We wanted to come to you today.

We're uh ready to launch the formal process, and we're having an event this Thursday with which the public is invited to join us at the neighborhood center uh from 5 30 to 7 30 to learn more about the plan.

But we wanted to come to the planning commission to make sure that you understood the whole structure of the process and the length of the process.

You of course will be reviewers and making a recommendation to the council, so you will have a formal role in the the uh process overall.

But we're very excited to be here today.

I think this is a monumental moment for uh the city of Peakskill, and we're very happy to to be able to present to you.

Um can we?

I kind of need to go shut that down.

One minute shrink it, yeah.

And Peter Irwin, who is the assistant director of the Department of Planning and Development, is going to make the brief presentation for us this evening.

He's help leading this initiative.

Thank you.

Good evening, planning commission members.

Uh thank you for making room on the agenda tonight.

Um this is the first of several recurring meetings uh where our staff will make presentations to you to keep you apprised of uh the planning effort as well as solicit your feedback in developing a new comprehensive plan for the city of Peakskill.

Uh you you all know this, but the idea that of the comprehensive plan is really that it's your um primary tool by which to evaluate the land use applications that come before you against the city's long-term priorities.

In absence of such a plan over the last several years, you have relied on uh existing planning documents like the LWRP and the DRI and your own expertise and local knowledge.

But this is an opportunity to aggregate all of those planning efforts into a single set of priorities and goals for the city over the next 10 years and uh and a moment to take um input from our community and chart a course moving forward.

Sorry, the primary um consultant that was hired by the city of Peakskill to lead the outreach and planning analysis is interborough community partners, and you can see their team here.

But they have a large group of uh staff and subconsultants behind them, including uh Bureau Hapold for resiliency, um sort of a resiliency overlay on the plan, T.

Y.

Lin, formerly Sam Schwartz Engineering for our traffic and transportation analysis, BJH advisors to focus on housing opportunities and economic development, and the land use law center at Pace University as well.

Uh we talked, I I talked about the idea behind the plan.

Here are the five focus areas that we anticipate exploring with you uh during the planning process.

Land use, uh this is a a smart growth comprehensive plan funded in part by New York State.

So we will introduce smart growth uh land use principles across the the plan.

But the land use section will really focus on um common sense and pragmatic zoning text updates that we can make over the long term.

We also have transportation and traffic safety, which is important to all of our community members.

Um housing.

In that focus area, the consultants will be taking an inventory of existing housing units across Peakskill and identifying opportunities uh for growth and for ways of serving our local residents.

Uh resiliency and sustainability and and finally economic development.

And so we are at the very very beginning of this approximately 18-month to two-year effort.

We have taken the last couple of months to prepare, and what I'm about to show you is how we see the structure of the plan working.

This summer uh we will with the team be analyzing all of the existing planning documents that I mentioned, and then there's an uh projected eight-month uh planning process where consultant team will be evaluating all of the data that residents provide, both quantitative and qualitative along those five focus areas.

And uh finally, uh our team will carry it through uh review and adoption, which the planning commission will be involved in as well, of course.

Uh this is an overview of how we expect to involve our community members.

At the left, um ultimately this plan will be recommended by vote by of the planning commission and adopted by vote of the common council.

So you have a formal uh role here, and then we also have a comprehensive planning committee, uh which I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into on the next slide.

Uh but that is uh a feature of the grants that fund this work and and important to have um named representatives kind of overseeing the work of our of the consultants and staff throughout.

Next, we will also convene thematic working groups.

Uh, these are subject matter experts and residents that have special concern or experience with some of these focus areas.

We'll be doing walking audits of unsafe intersections for the transportation and mobility group.

We will be uh hearing how you know experience um renting and owning in PeakSkill for the housing uh group, and also convene uh business leaders for economic development and our conservation advisory council and other experts for the sustainability and resilience feature.

And then the last category that we've created for for this presentation is community ambassadors.

Anyone who is a stakeholder, a community leader, an organizer in PeakSkill can be a community ambassador, and by signing up for that role, they will receive outreach materials from us and instruction and guidance and training on uh going out to their community with or without staff present, collecting feedback in in any language or uh cultural reference that they have and then bringing that back to us.

And we've already had several uh groups such as uh church congregations and grassroots organizations sign up to be ambassadors for our planning process.

And and so lastly, a closer look at the comprehensive planning committee.

You can think of this as uh an 18-member group comprised of of two subcommittees.

Um there's a six-member steering committee, those officials will be appointed by our staff and our city manager and mayor uh and a common council.

By by rule, that steering committee will include one member of the planning commission as well, so you have that other touch point with us, and um and that member uh has is nominated to be uh Ruth Wells, the vice chair um sitting with us today.

And the other 12 members of the comprehensive planning committee will be selected by a lottery system from our community.

So we already have hundreds of residents of Peakskill that have registered online to be considered to be part of the resident advisory committee.

And we will be selecting from that pool a representative uh 12-member body to bring their experiences, their concerns um and expertise uh to the process as well.

Uh there's a level of transparency, I think, in that where um we really have an opportunity to pull people into the planning process that haven't been engaged with local government before, and uh we believe this model has worked really well in other municipalities very recently with this consulting group.