Undergone with liberty and justice for all the planning and zoning commission is an advisory board to city council on zoning map amendments, preliminary and final development plans, and plotting of property under consideration.

In such cases, city council will receive recommendations from the commission.

In other cases, the commission has the decision making responsibility.

Is there anyone that would like to speak on a matter that's not on the agenda?

Hearing none.

May I have a motion to approve the rules.

So moved.

Everyone say aye to say yes.

No, same sign.

Okay.

First item for review is case 2025-33 ADM.

Administrative review downtown overlay district code amendment.

This is a request for review and recommendation of approval to city council for an amendment to section 1143.18 DD Downtown District Overlay District to remove historic downtown advisory commission, also referred to as HTAC.

The applicant is the city of Powell.

Mr.

Stane.

Good evening, Commission, and thank you for the introduction.

Before I dive into the presentation, there are a couple faces joined over here that you're probably not familiar with, so I wanted to introduce them because they'll be helping with some of tonight's discussion.

So to my left here is Jacob Bond.

He's our zoning inspector.

So he's the one who's out in the field a lot.

He identifies code violations, he works on a lot of the permitting.

So you probably see him driving around, see him at different sites, kind of see him bouncing around in areas of the city.

So he's going to be helping us with the enforcement discussion that we're going to have on the zoning code rewrite later on this evening.

Seated in the audience to my left over here is Steve Reynolds.

He is the city's architectural advisor who has been supporting HDAC primarily, working with staff on a lot of the architectural reviews over the last several years.

So he is available for this first case that we're going to be talking about, which is in regards to the downtown district overlay.

So with that, I want to provide a little bit of background.

As you all have as you all know, we've had a lot of different evaluations and reviews of our guidelines, the zoning code, really looking at a lot of our policies and how that's going to set the community up for growth over the next 20 years.

Cohesive across all of downtown, but those properties themselves are not historically eligible by the state or federal guidelines, whatever we may use there.

So actually, late last year, I think it was November last year, we had kicked off a property survey of downtown with a historic preservationist to take a look into the history of all of the properties downtown and really determine you know which properties are considered historic or could be.

Is there enough of a cluster or an area that could be designated a local historic district?

And now that we have the results of that, we've shared uh a little bit of that at development committee and others, but this is really us taking the next step with that information.

And I'll go through a little bit for you all because I know not everybody has been in touch with that.

That's specific part of our evaluation process.

So I think one of the big things that survey revealed is that the entire downtown would not be eligible for a historic district.

There is a portion that would classify, there's a portion of properties, and even within that district, there are very specific ones that are actually historic versus ones that may fall within the district, but again, they either don't meet the age, they don't meet the uh same time period in which most of the the buildings were constructed.

There's a lot of those other factors there.

So really the purpose of this code amendment is to discuss kind of what is that pathway forward when it comes to regulating and you know preserving historic properties downtown.

Um the code amendment that is before you all tonight is a recommendation that removes the HDAC board as a commission for the city, and instead would set up planning and zoning to handle all of the reviews across the city.

So all within downtown, all historic.

And I'll talk a little bit about how we're looking to support that process through updating the guidelines and updating the zoning code itself.

So a little bit on the survey, you know, we were looking at using the state historic preservation offices guidelines, you know, looking at the downtown district and really inventorying all those properties.

I'm not going to go through all of the bullet points you have here.

These are some of the takeaways that are from that report, which we have.

Like I said, we had shared that as at the development committee.

But what the two things that I want to highlight here are what you see in the dark blue, that is the downtown district that we know it today.

That's what's been established since 2005 as you know, the downtown residence, downtown business district.

What you see within the light blue, that is the results of the survey for historic properties.

So that light blue portion is the part of downtown that would be eligible for a local historic district status.

And even within that, there are some things that we can evaluate.

You know, there's some ongoing uh demolition requests, there's active proposals, there's other things that we can factor in to refine that boundary.

But this was, you know, just from the historic preservationists looking at this.

These are the properties, and this is the area that they would say would fall within a historic district or could if the city chooses to establish that.

Even within that, as I mentioned, there are some properties that are contributing and some that are not.

So this graphic really what it starts to do is break down even further how finite we can have some of these properties and how we can set up the proper guidelines to protect these historic structures and also allow for you know modernization, infill development, new opportunities within the downtown district.

So what you see here is those dark blue areas, those are properties that are considered contributing or are potentially historic.

The gray properties are ones that may be within that boundary, but they themselves are not historic.

That that could be a couple things.

Some of them are vacant lots, or some of them, again, those structures just don't meet the criteria for what would be considered historic.