Good evening, Rockwell.

Today is Wednesday, August 13th, 2025.

This is meeting number 10-25 of the City of Rockville Planning Commission.

I'm Jamie Espinosa, Chair of the Planning Commission.

I'm joined in chambers tonight by Commissioners Cheyenne Salo Dean, Commissioner Susan Pittman, Commissioner Eric Fulton, and Commissioner Mong San.

Tonight's meeting is being conducted in person and virtually by WebEx.

Tonight's agenda includes a work session, then this will be followed by regularly scheduled commission items.

Our first agenda item is our third work session on the zoning ordinance rewrite uses and parking.

Over to Mr.

Wasserlach for any staff briefing.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, members of the commission.

As you stated, this is our third in a series of work sessions on the zoning ordinance rewrite project.

And our deputy zoning manager Holly Simmons is here to present on parking and uses, which is essentially a duplicate of the mayor and council's work session that was held on August 4th.

And then we will give you an update on the council's direction on the process changes that you've already considered and made a recommendation to the mayor and council.

And so with that, I will turn it over to Holly.

Thank you, Mr.

Wazlack, and good evening, Mr.

Chair members of the Planning Commission.

As Mr.

Wazilak said, I am Holly Simmons, the deputy zoning manager, and I will be going over some information with you this evening related to our zoning ordinance rewrite and comprehensive app amendments, specifically focusing on uses and parking for the beginning of the presentation.

All right, we are in business.

So for this presentation, we are going to go briefly over the project timeline.

You all have seen this before, so it'll be just kind of a brief touch there, land uses, parking, and then an update on review processes and the direction that we've received from Mayor and Council.

So as you all are aware, the project kicked off back in 2023.

We went through a number of phases and began drafting the zoning ordinance back in January.

We've been before you two times previously for work sessions on processes back in April and zones and our comprehensive map amendment in May.

And we'll have one more work session in October before the public release of the draft zoning ordinance and map in December, followed by our adoption process, which we're anticipating to wrap up in late spring of 2026.

So to start out, our first topic is uses.

Within this section, I'm going to go over some kind of key concepts, some terms and definitions to understand there an overview of how uses are regulated.

I'll also our anticipated outcomes of the changes that we are proposing, and then go into actual proposals, recommendations to modernize our use regulations.

I'll go over kind of the umbrella recommendation with a couple of notable changes, one or two within each recommendation, which is intended really to illustrate what those recommendations will accomplish.

So first, starting out with our overview of how uses are regulated.

This is one of the primary functions of our zoning ordinance regulating uses.

So really, when we're regulating uses, we're identifying where different activities can be located within the city and under what conditions.

So you see a number of different terms on in bullet points on this slide.

I'll go through each of these points again so we have a bit of a common understanding.

The first is uses.

So uses are the different activities or land uses that are allowed within different zones.

These can be addressed at a really high level, if you're able to see my cursor.

High level being residential and retail and sales on this slide.

And then they can be broken down at a more granular granular level, which you see housed under those broader uses.

These are all actual uses which are proposed to be contained within the zoning ordinance.

All of the uses along with the zones are listed in what we call a use table.

And this is basically a matrix that includes our uses, which are listed along the left-hand side, the zones along the top, and then what we call use permissions within the cells in pink.

And those use permissions, each zone within the city permits certain uses while either prohibiting or restricting others.

These are generally answering the question of can this use occur in this location.

So we have four use permissions within our zoning ordinance.

We have uses which are permitted.

They're allowed by right anywhere within the zone.

Conditional use permission, which is permitted in the zone, but it needs to comply with certain criteria or conditions.

For example, there may be limitations for each individual use on the size or setbacks within a particular zone.

Special exceptions are intended to be more impactful uses, and they also have conditions associated with them, but they need to go through an additional process before the Board of Appeals for approval prior to any site plan, project plan approval that they may require.

Conditions are requirements for a specific use within a zone.

So generally, these are answering the question of how can this occur here.

So there may be again special setbacks, height restrictions, design requirements, safety requirements, operational requirements, etc.

So before we get into the specific recommendations for modernizing our use regulations, I did want to go over our anticipated benefits of regul of making these changes.

We're anticipating that the recommendations will make our regulations more consistent, allowing for easier interpretation and regulation, reduce complexity and increase accessibility and ease of understanding.

We're anticipating that this in some instances will streamline approvals while still ensuring that impacts of these uses are addressed.

We're anticipating that it will increase equity and also certainly support plan goals and policies and the mayor and council's priorities.