Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to our development review streamlining work group meeting.

This is, I believe, our fourth meeting.

Thank you for your attendance and your indulgence on getting this meeting started.

Wanted to start off with attendance, which we have about, as I may have mentioned before recording started, about 10 of our members here.

Today we're going to discuss an update on the development review charette that was provided to developers back in February to be exact, February 24th, 2026.

And I am prepared to put the uh presentation in the chat for those who still do not have their copy of it.

If I may, I'd like to turn over the meeting to uh one of your work group members, uh, which is Mr.

Marcus Monroe.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

And uh thank you, Ms.

Hightire for the introduction.

And so just the level set and didn't have it as a formal presentation.

It was just really talking points, and I'll just sort of clarify where we are in the process and then just open it up for dialogue.

Um Ms.

Hatter, I only had about maybe like five to 10 minutes of talking points, and then we can I can let you drive us from there.

Is that sound good?

That is fine with me.

This is going to be more of a uh a little bit more informal uh meeting.

We'll talk about the recommendations uh or the status of the development community charette, and then um start formulating some solid recommendations during this meeting, if that's okay with everyone for the work group.

So just uh um back us up to a few months ago.

So we we had brought on four graduate students in January of this year from the University of Maryland's master of community planning, and some of them also minored in um real estate development.

And so they were starting to already look at the development review process as they've semester project.

And then uh concurrently, there was a um push by um then chairman and then the county of Zec to do a development charette that took place on um I believe February 25th.

So those two things sort of culminated around the same time.

And then what we asked the grass students to do is take the feedback that they received during that session, and then also subsequently have follow-up with um some folks even on this call.

If there was any questions, maybe some things that they didn't quite understand.

Um, and so what we end up getting was a uh over 200 lines of individual once you once we collected all the comments from the meeting, emails, um, everything put together, it culminated into about over 200 individual lines of Excel, like lines of comments.

So at that point, that was a lot of information, and then um they even got feedback uh from ourselves on sort of how to understand it and translate it.

And so ultimately what they ended up doing was um they actually just wrapped up about a week and a half ago before graduation, and then um where we are in the process is that we were packaging that as a presentation to follow to the county executives team where requested a briefing.

And so that is in the middle being um scheduled with Calvin Hawkins.

So we would, you know, timeline-wise, we would try to do that early next week, and then I believe as I understand it, then we would put the information out to the community once we've had a chance to brief the county executives team.

So, first and foremost, I just wanted to sort of share where we are in the process and what and how it all came together.

So, what what sort of the effort was pretty straightforward?

We asked them to look at the current development review process, right?

Um, and everything they heard um around supporting housing instruction, economic development, small business growth.

There are a lot of wants and interests from the comments, but at the end of the day, it just wanted to frame the current system as basically lengthy.

The feedback we were hearing is lengthy, it's complex, it's unpredictable, and it's costly.

And um, in order to do that and understand where to make improvements, we actually need to do research, look at the code, ask questions where they needed to, and then translate that into sort of buckets, right?

And they looked at zoning, basically all the comments aligned pretty much with zoning subdivision, site plans, final plats, and permitting.

And we had to give them some guardrails, so they didn't look at master planning and they didn't look at enforcement.

So that's another level set to say that.

We did have to give them some guardrails as a short amount of time.

Um and what they ended up doing was mapping it across sort of state, regional, county, municipal, all the quasi-government entities, and just trying to see what the um what the information they were seeking then was telling them as far as a story, right?

And the and the biggest high-level finding was that the current development review process was sort of burdened by six reoccurring problems in their view, what they were hearing is that the process was complex, it was leaking lengthy timelines, um, poor intra and interagency coordination, um, manual workflows in some instances in the complicated and evolving regulatory environment and downstream effect um have an you know basically the downstream effect on that is sort of slowing how we can do housing and development.

Um I want to pause there and just sort of so I'm not just blapping a bunch of words of everybody, besides I'll pause to see if that any initial question so far, and everybody's tracking um laying out the story.

Okay.

Thank you for that, Mr.

Munro.

Are there any questions uh based on what uh Mr.

Munro was mentioning questions, comments?

Uh I see Mr.

Smith has his hand raised.

Go ahead, Mr.

Smith.

Thank you.

Mr.

Smith, you're still on mute.

Um about that.