The Raleigh City Council held a public comment session on September 9, 2025, where 18 speakers addressed a variety of topics including land use and development, public safety, city services, and international affairs. No formal council discussions or votes occurred during the public comment period.
Welcome to the public comment period. We have eighteen folks signed up for this evening, so we'll be doing three minutes each, and I will start uh with Lisa Hewitt. Good evening. I'm here tonight because I oppose the Planning Commission's approval of the West Street Tower. That approval was based on selective policy emphasis, a disregard for neighborhood protections, and a failure to provide meaningful public benefit. Let's begin with neighborhood transitions. This site is a designated neighborhood transition zone formally codified in February twenty twenty four and creates specific requirements for new development to be compatible with existing residential areas. Transition zones are clearly defined and protected throughout the UDO, the comprehensive plan, and the EDOT. These policies exist specifically to buffer neighborhoods from intense development like this. It's bonkers that staff completely omitted this from their analysis. But that claim falls apart under scrutiny. The so-called step down, it's a mirage. The height decreases north to south, not east to west where the neighborhood sits. Plus, the site's topography erases any step-down illusion. This isn't a transition, it's a 360-foot wall looming just 167 feet from historic homes. So I ask, how are we weighing policy consistency here? Are we just counting which policies are convenient for a project and ignoring the ones that aren't? If you objectively compare the applicable zoning guidance, it's clear this rezoning violates the intent and spirit of multiple city policies designed to protect neighborhoods from exactly this type of overreach. Perhaps it's a convergence of unintended consequences when the realities on the ground necessitate a reexamination of following a short list of policies. Next we have Octavia Rainey. Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to say at the last city council meeting, I did not discuss what I should have discussed, but I am going to tonight. Saying it was a solar diaper. Now, by being a fan housing investigator with 50 years of experience, if this is a soil diaper, I want you to show me a sore diaper. When you open up somebody's pocketbook, a sore diaper smells. You had on gloves. When you was filling in my pocketbook, it should have felt wet. When I questioned her, why are you detaining my pocketbook? She didn't say a word, a word. She called the supervisor down from wherever he was. So when he got down there, you know the first thing he said to me? Well, you got to take your soil diaper out. And I said, unleash my pocketbook right now. Unlease it. I do not have a saw diaper in my pocketbook. Give me my pocketbook right now. I said, I want it right now. So you better call the police because I want my pocketbook. Because I knew it was no sort of diaper in it. I am an Fairhouse investigator. So I knew that was wrong. It was wrong. So he said to me, he said, You got to take your store diaper out. I said, You do better go ahead on and call the police because they ain't taking out Jack Doody Squat and give me my pocketbook. And I was not playing. I was ready to go to jail. I was not playing. But when I came in here, you would have never known it because I didn't act like it. So he said, and I said, I don't understand it. She got on gloves.