March 21st meeting of the Campbell Planning Commission to order our first order of business is approval of the minutes from the March 7th 2025 Planning Commission meeting.

Do I have a motion on the minutes?

So moved by Commissioner Parsley.

Do you have a second?

Seconded by Commissioner Risberg.

So we have a motion and a second on the minutes.

Do we have any discussion?

All right, seeing no discussion on the minutes, we'll now move forward with the vote.

All those in favor on all those post.

All right.

So the minutes pass.

Next up is the chair's announcements.

Well, first of all, uh, we have Bill Germany here with us today and the planning director.

So that's my first announcement.

And then my uh second announcement is that I believe that we're gonna take our items today out of order.

So the comprehensive neighborhood planning committee will go before um zoning committee today as we go through, um, just to give staff a little bit more time.

Next up is the planning director or acting planning director.

Okay, I have only one announcement, and that's that one item that came before the uh planning commission also was in front of the city council this week, and there was a decision.

So that was 560 Randolph, similar use determination.

Planning commission had affirmed the zoning administrator decision on that, that the uh use was similar to uh public works yard and city council reversed that.

They granted the appeal uh unanimously, five zero vote.

And um, I'm sure your next question is what's the next steps?

And I honestly do not know at least what the next steps are.

So we'll we'll see about that.

That's it for my announcements.

All right.

Um, and then as I mentioned, we're gonna take items out of order today.

So Tony is with us next um from comprehensive neighborhood.

Oh, please meet Commissioner Riceberg.

I just wanted to um make a comment that I appreciate the follow-up on a decision that we made, what happened with City Council and uh sometimes I'd wonder often what what happened with the rest of the story.

And so it's uh appreciate that.

So uh thank you, Commissioner Risberg.

I agree.

Um I don't know if you want to introduce uh the item with us today, or if you want Tony to just take it.

Go ahead.

All right, please.

Uh morning, Commissioners.

Uh I'm here today with uh the Mississippi River uh critical area zoning study.

Uh this is something that you have heard before about a year ago.

Um, but we took a step back because of the amount of time and kind of our restarting the process.

And so here it is again.

Uh so for a little reminder, so the Mississippi River uh corridor critical area is a joint state and regional and local program that provides a coordinated land use planning and zoning regulations uh along the Mississippi River and the Seventh County Metro area.

Uh so if you look to the map on your guys' left, uh those are the communities uh that have to adopt Merca provisions.

Uh so Merca was uh originally designated in 1976 through executive order.

Um the purpose of it is to protect the river's natural cultural and resources.

Um and these resources are protected through development standards uh that are then administered through uh local government land use plans and zoning work since so why are we here today?

Uh we're here because the state uh adopted new rules in 2017, um, and then in 2019 they developed a model ordinance uh for local municipalities to uh follow.

Um and in this model ordinance, uh there's specific zoning code provisions, definitions, and regulations that the local units of government are required to adopt to comply with Merka rules.

Uh there is optional language uh that is uh supposed to provide better resource protection uh than the minimum MERCA standards uh that we could adopt if we wanted to.

Um so how does uh uh old Merka to new MERCA?

Uh well then within the new Merka, there's stronger and more robust standards uh for river protection.

So this includes things like more height limits and protections of views, uh more detail in the variations of geological form, natural resources and development history on the corridor, and then close regulation of taller buildings through a conditional use of permit process that has specific conditions that need to be met within the Merca over significance.

So how does Merka work?

So Merca requires us to divide to create these six overlay districts around the river.

And then within each of these districts, there's a minimum setback from the river, which is shown the chart here.

And then a minimum setback from the bluff.

And then there is height restrictions within each of those districts, which are also shown in this chart.

There's vegetation management standards within Merca.

So if you remove vegetation within the Merca area, you have to replace it a lot of times with these standards.

There's also standards related to land alteration and stormwater management, and then standards related to subdivisions and land development standards that are specific to Merca.