Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The City Council convened on September 2, 2026, at 5:30 PM to discuss the evening's agenda, future work sessions, and outcomes of the state legislative session. Key decisions included postponing the budget work session to April 20, 2026, and confirming the zoning ordinance rewrite schedule.
I saw a recommended. I saw a recommended adjustment that I fully agree with, but let's get into it. Let's see. So starting at 5 30 tonight, we're getting into the season where we have a lot of proclamations. There they all are. I won't walk through those, just assuming everybody knows their assignments for those. Um regular meeting starts at 6:30. On the consent agenda, we have our VRG ring creases, which are required to show. Then we have the public several public hearings, one on the zoning text amendment, and one on the map amendment. And then of course the budget public hearing. That's all going to take some time, I suspect. And then later on, for the action item, we have the 715 Douglas Avenue. That's the final step. That should go pretty quickly. Not even sure it'll take 10 minutes. And then we have two work sessions. One is on the zoning text amendment and the other is the budget work session. The zoning text amendment, as you guys know, is pretty dense. We're going to stop multiple times along the way during that presentation and ask for some guidance from council as I briefed you guys during our one-on-ones. It's not a firm yes or no, but if we can get generally thumbs up and thumbs down on those items, it'll help us then go ahead and write the ordinance and bring it back to you. If you guys are like a tentative thumbs up or a tentative thumbs down, that's all we need. It'll just allow us to write it. And then we have the budget work session in a second, we'll get to six months, but maybe there's an appetite to move that budget work session to April 20th, because if you look at April 20th, there is only one agenda item. So why go to potentially midnight tonight when we could have one big work session tonight on zoning and another big work session on the 20th, but maybe we'll look at that at the on the 15th. Uh council member Jackson. Yeah, no, I was just gonna say I mean, given that uh we know the ZOR is gonna take a while, I would be open to moving it to the 20th uh for for the budget uh um uh discussion. Okay, Mayor Ashton. Thank you for responding to my uh email and feedback on this because I I didn't see why it made sense to go to midnight, uh given that we have a meeting right now the following week that's 60 minutes, and I was agnostic on budget versus zoning ordinance rewrite. I want to make sure we get everything right, um, so I'm flexible and we'll go along with my colleagues. Agreed. Councilmember Bankright. So uh I I think that does make sense. The old my only question I think this goes to similar what the mayor was saying. Does it make more sense to flip those two? Considering the budget reconciliation happens next week. Um, do we want to see whether there's any adjustments that need to be made in this section of the budget so as to not have reconciliation happening at the same time contemporaneous? Yeah, our challenge on that that's for you and staff to know. I'm I'm just bringing it up to kind of uh triage what needs to happen first. Yeah, if we want to stay on schedule for ZOR, getting the feedback tonight allows us then to write the draft and stay on schedule. Just a thought. Mayor Ashton. So I appreciate the comments on the ZOR. Um, we do have um the I know we had plans to a joint meeting with Gaitesburg for June 29th.