We're I went ahead and turned the mic on and the camera on so we can go ahead and call the Plaintiff's
Commission meeting to order. Okay. I will go ahead and call the January 26th administrative meeting
of Plaintiff's Commission to order. So Jackie if you can call the meeting please. Sure. David Bush.
Here. Margaret Clements. Here. Tom Enright-Rando. Here. Scott Farris. Here. Rudy Fields. Here.
David Henry. Here.
Jeff Morris. Here. Julie Thomas. Here. Bill Vande. VandeVinciz. Okay. So we have eight people and a
quorum. Thank you Jackie. So number one on the administrative business tonight is the housing inventory
discussion. And I'll quickly just introduce this topic. So we've talked a little bit during the County
Development Ordinance
drafting process and then it's been brought up again as part of the some of the discussions as we look
to County Development Ordinance and something that the GIS Division has come up with. John Beaton has
come up with this sort of less a pipeline of housing coming down but more of an inventory of existing
housing and I thought it was really interesting to this discussion.
I have in here a few topics underneath item number one, but I asked John if he would be able to kind
of walk us through what he's created and how it might be helpful. So I'll let John take it away. Okay.
Yeah, sure. And if there's a mouse as well. Yeah, everybody. Jeff, daycare. Jeff and I have the same
daycare. As Jackie mentioned, I'm the GIS coordinator. This is a project that we've been working on
for a bit of time.
And what this is doing is pulling data, our parcel data, and our parcel data is the geometry of parcels
in Monroe County, but then there's also qualitative data within those parcels.
And this qualitative data comes from our assessor's office and our auditor's office primarily. This
is like who's the owner of the property, where the property's located, as well as how the property's
classified. And that property's classified by our assessor's office using what's called a property class
code. So we have different types of property class codes. My house, for instance, I live in a single-family
house in Sherwood Oaks. It's coded as 510. And that means I live in a single-family residence in a property
that's under one acre in size.
We have about 65,000 parcels in Monroe County. Don't quote me on that, we have around that many. We're
consistently kind of trying to keep them up, keep them and make sure that everything's good. It's a
lot of data though. So what we've done is we've broken these parcels out in terms of how they're utilized
at different types of incorporated areas. We've also done this for Bloomington, looking at different
neighborhoods for Bloomington. One of the reasons for this is just trying to get a better idea of kind of
what our neighborhoods are like and what our communities are like. So what I'll do is just click on,
I'll click on Bloomington to start with just because it's a little bit easier to see. Now hopefully
everything's gonna work here. The parcel should show up in a second. What we're gonna do is get a breakdown
here on the far left that's gonna be showing the property class type. So single family dwellings, condos,
commercial housing, commercial tax exempt government property, and every computer
they look a little bit weird. And so we have an average acreage here too. You're not seeing it, but
I can expand this to see best and see what these tables look like. And you're going to get the total
number of property classes, so single-family dwellings. And this includes property class codes 510,
511, 512, 513, and 514. And what that means is those are all single-family residences, but some of them
might be larger acreages. But what I wanted to do is try to combine them just because it makes it a
little bit easier for visualization purposes.
Condos, commercial housing, those are houses that the assessor has been notified that these are rentals,
essentially, apartments, et cetera. One of the reasons why we included the address points for this was
to show a distinction between the 483 parcels that are apartments and the 16,514 address points within
those, right, because it's different numbers. So that's just kind of an overview of the table. So now
if we click on these data,
what it's gonna do is isolate the parcels that are single family dwellings, isolate the parcels that
are commercial, isolate the parcels that are vacant residential. On the top right here, we have a composition
of housing for incorporated areas. And so for Bloomington, for instance, 53% of the housing within those
are single family dwelling, 20% are condos, 3.45% are residential vacant. And again, it's just the way
these screens kind of
are projecting 15.5 4 percent are commercial housing. So those are rental houses. Can I interrupt with
a question. I'm sorry. If someone rents out their house as an Airbnb would that be considered a residential.
Single family dwelling or would it be considered commercial if it's like
a certain percent of the time or do you just automatically say residential? This is one of the reasons
why this project started. I'm going to pick on myself because I live in Sherwood Oaks and I know my
neighborhood very well. My house, I'm a single family house. The house across the street from mine was
purchased by a realtor, turned into a Airbnb. Airbnb failed, turned into a rental. Rental stopped, now
it's back to an Airbnb again. Airbnbs are not tracked across the board.
whatsoever and that's because it's taxed I believe it's monitored at a state level and sort of a local
level. That one is noticed or identified as commercial housing. However the property directly south
of my house which has been a rental for five years is single-family residential. And I believe this
is a voluntary process that the owners have to notify the inspector about. However that same data
we've been able to acquire some data from the city. And this is from the city's open data portal for
rentals within the city. And so we were able to take that information to get an idea of what's a rental
property or where has a rental permit been issued in the city and do these correlate with being a commercial
housing or not. And sometimes those two data sets don't really articulate very well. So in other words,
it's really up to how it's feed in at the assessor's office to determine
Whether it's well maybe they've run it nine months of the year but the other three months they live
in it. You know how do they. Yeah. How it's keyed in. And of course they have to pay in keeper's tax
if they're redeeming. Okay. Correct. It's categorized over there as producing revenue. Yeah. And the
data is all over the place it's not consistent across the board and there's a lot of gaps. So John's
doing an amazing job with creating kind of these incremental steps to show kind of the housing stock
but there's a lot of
collaboration that needs to urge to get a you know very high level confident data. And we've noticed
lots of different areas where things aren't being classified correctly. But that's not our or that's
not John's responsibility but we have had these conversations with the auditor and assessor.
Yeah, since we have a little stopping point. Could you define residential vacant for me? Yeah, so that's
a code from the assessor's office. And what that means is that property has been zoned, I believe, as
residential, but it's not occupied currently. And I believe that's what that means. Now, could that
also mean that the lot has no structure on it, but it's zoned residential? I believe so. OK.
And I think that's just all about the assessing aspect of it. If it's a vacant property it can be assessed
lower than if there's a nice livable structure. Okay. And then one other thing is we're not integrating
zoning zoning data. So like it'd be interesting to start incorporating that to see like okay in this
zone what's vacant. So like all I'm getting at is the inconsistency between some collaboration that
produces data that
isn't reflective but this is this is pretty close. I'm just saying like some of that might say residential
vacant but honestly. It could be zoned something differently. It could be zoned something differently
than a residential use and it's just that disconnect between where we're getting the information and
what else. Sure but it doesn't. You can't. Relates to it. You can't say that that's a vacant apartment
or something. I would assume residential vacant would mean there's vacant structures. Okay that's what
I thought. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm a data guy. So because we're hearing about inconsistencies and disconnects, what's your confidence
level on how accurate this information is? I would say my confidence level with the codes from the assessor's
office is high beyond the property class codes, more so than some other data. Is that 75% or 80%?
I mean, I'm not going to... I mean, off the cuff, I would say I'm 85% to 90% confident.
I think they're going out and monitoring this annually. That's where a lot of revenue comes in. So I
think their data is good. I think the parcel data in terms of the geometry of it, some of that is a
little bit weird sometimes, but again, we're consistently kind of refining this in our auditor's office.
So this is, and I can take any time you guys have a question, just like blur it out. I'm confident in
these things. So this is Monroe County data now with all of our parcels. And again, it's broken down
the same way. So we have single family dwellings in Monroe County,
Again so this is just the corporate boundaries of Monroe County now including Helensville Bloomington
or Steinsville. To do this what I did was a inner buffer essentially so we're not getting things that
are directly on the boundary of Monroe County and Helensville. So an inner buffer of like 10 feet. So
it's just we're not we're not we're not double-counting parcels essentially. So these are single-family
dwellings. These are residential vacant properties so there's 3,536
Residential vacant properties, again, average acreage or total acreage average acreage may not address
points. Agricultural vacant. Agricultural condos. Tax exempt government property, so this is stuff like
Division of National Forest and Morgan Monroe State Park. Commercial housing. Two-family dwellings,
so those are duplexes. Commercial properties, which would be things like Cook, you know, any type of
Facility like that other taxes and properties and these can be. You know, I'm not really sure what other
taxes and properties are. We have a lot of churches. Well, churches are tax exempt religious properties.
So that's a whole different. Oh, that's a different. Yeah. And so I think this could be like, like parks.
It's like more land trust things like things of that nature.
The tax-exempt religious properties we have a lot in the city, more so than the county. Commercial vacant,
industrial, and these can be things like quarries and stuff like that. Industrial vacants, which I'm
guessing are quarries that aren't occupied anymore. On the industrial, or actually the residential vacancy.
And I guess my main point here is this is what the assessor's classifying, and that's what the use is.
The zoning may have changed, so that's where we really need planning to get involved to see kind of
or is that all residential zone in these residential vacants are the same. So I hope that clarifies
some of what needs to be kind of some of the next steps so we can relate it to more planning purposes.
Okay. Thanks John. Yeah. So essentially this is what we have going on for this. And again this is it's
a broad kind of look at parcels within these different corporate areas. When you break it down into
the city within neighborhoods it gets a little bit more
I don't want to say interesting it's more interesting for me because I live in the city and it's where
I kind of spend most of my time. But it's just a it's a way to kind of look at how our community and
our county is composed in terms of our usage of parcels. And again this is just housing. This is just
looking at the types of residential facilities.
So we have 71.36% are single family dwellings, single's housing, 15% vacant residential condos, commercial
housing, two family dwellings, and the other would be things like triplexes. Commercial housing includes
hotels and motels, cool. Yes. Okay.
that's a motel and a hotel I think would just be a commercial. Just commercial. Yeah. Because I don't
think that's considered housing. Got it. Yeah. Thank you. So these commercial housing structures don't
are not qualified by the number of units. These are well I mean we could look at commercial housing
with address points and that's where we're going to get that. So what you could have is like a I'm trying
to think here.
Like an apartment complex could be one. Say there's an apartment complex in Dill County. That'd be one
parcel. Yes. But there could be 600 address points within that. Exactly. Yeah. And so that's where we
have it in the table. So if you want to look at commercial housing here what I'll do is expand this.
And part of this was I was spending a lot of time working with MCCSC as part of a redistricting project
they're doing. We're looking at balancing socioeconomic status across schools.
And apartments to me versus single family dwellings, apartments signify kind of potentially a lower
socioeconomic status than a single family dwelling if you're a property owner. And if you were just
talking about parcels, you could have 60 parcels that were single family dwellings in a school zone
and one apartment, but that apartment could have 300 addresses, right? So it's a way to kind of, I guess,
better kind of quantify numbers of people or usage. So,
I'll just expand this so we can look at commercial housing. We have 1121 commercial housing parcels
in Mineral County, and out of those, there's 1196 address points. So most of these are not, to me, looking
like apartments are large kind of structures like that. But these questions, as long as maybe someone
can follow up, we can address to the assessment office. We have a good
level of understanding, but a lot of this is kind of us actually digging into some more of the data.
Most people are used to like a parcel view where they click on it and they get that pop-up of that limited
data. All of this is kind of more behind the scenes and as John continues to kind of try to create that
data visualization and make it where people can use it, we need to follow up with the assessors to make
sure we're providing you with accurate feedback.
just want to make sure that, you know, like we're going to do our best, but there's still a level of
learning to take place in this. If you had, if you'd run across, for example, and I don't know that
this exists, but if you had run across, for example, a PUD zoned area and it had both housing and commercial
structures in it, whether they're vacant or not, if they're not, but if they're not built out, how,
how would it show up here?
But yeah, good question. I'm not, I mean, we'd have to look at that. Yeah. Okay. I'm not necessarily
sure. I haven't been looking at the zoning aspect on it. Okay. But so for example, if a, if a PUD existed
and it was already plotted and there were, you know, 50 lots, 25 of them had houses, but 25 didn't,
you would expect to see 25 residential dwellings and 25 vacant residential lots.
And if we know where one is, we can zoom in and see what it looks like. That's my assumption too. So
this is a work in progress, clearly. It is, yeah. And this took a lot of, what we had to do for this
was a number of processes, but it was essentially combining parcels together and then also
kind of aggregating them based on those property class codes. So. Here's like a PUD.
That's residential vacant. That's Harrisburg P&E where it's supposed to be two fluxes. So vacant, flathead.
What's the class? Residential vacant. So it's just class but it's one. But that would be like what's
allowed there is like 24. It's the type of information. Yeah. Forecasting. Yeah. Why wouldn't that be
drawn out?
It's not. It's not. It's not. Well, is it planet? No, that's auditor. The auditor would be drawing out
the individual parcels. Correct. It says planet, but it's not. Yeah. So again, there's, we're talking
about multiple elected offices all working in collaboration to create a dashboard that we can have a
high level of competence on. And this is just kind of one of the first steps to get there.
be like this is allowed to have quite a few. Hunter properties. Commercial. Can you scroll up and see
if it says Plattening? Yeah, right down just a little bit. It says view right there. Yeah. That should
bring you a plat. Yeah. So then you can kind of see how many lots are permitted. OK. I won't know unless
I look at the BUD document exactly. Exactly. OK.
So essentially with your assessment, if they don't have address points, which we wouldn't give address
points until they either flat or develop, then there's no way to know the number within that parcel
of what would be allowed. OK, yeah, we just know the number of parcels. Unless these are already posted
the drawn out from the parcel layer, then it would show each individual parcel, so there could be a
disconnect.
there of how the management has went from being approved through the planning process. Like Weskin on
3rd is say 350. There's no subdivision. There's one parcel with 350. But there's a plant in the city
that has like we were just looking at like 40 some parcels associated all single-family dwelling and
there's only two parcels built out.
So what I'm saying is there might just be a little disconnect of how that gets entered into that. So.
Yeah it's fine. It's just I think some of this could be addressed in the open gov as we were talking
about other processes that involved the auditor's office and other areas. We had a sidebar conversation
about annexation and making sure that
things are going through all the proper processes and authority chains and Jackie was nice enough to
incorporate a workflow in our outlook to make sure that we're not missing some of those steps. And this
could be something that could be built out like that as well. But I leave that to you like I did last
time. Thank you John. Yes. Yeah.
I'm sorry, go ahead. I've spoken way too much. You've got a lot of data here. What's your schedule for
keeping the data fresh? What's your reload time? Sure. Well, this data, we're not the ones producing
this data. However, we are the ones who aggregate the data together. And that occurs every evening at
like 2 AM. So I utilize it's called SQL Server, which is basically a database management software. And
we run a script that basically is
building these flows essentially every evening so. From the assessment. From the assessment. Yeah. So
that's awesome. Resources for keeping it fresh in the future. Is it just you or is it. Oh it's we have
myself and GIS technician but then our technology technological services department technical services
department PSD is very like.
responsible as well. But a lot of this was built out also from us working with some different kind of
third party vendors to assist us in writing some of the scripts. SQL Server is like a language that
I'm learning but I'm not fluent in it. I'm better at Spanish than I'm at SQL Server. It's just one of
those things. I've traveled there. So it's you know it's just learning a new language. But yeah.
Thank you. One of the biggest thing is the collaboration we have with multiple departments to help
provide the software and that's in collaboration with the Commissioner's Office as well because without
the software we can't build the back end. Yeah. Yeah. Speak to the collaboration. The collaboration.
Well the GIS divisions within the Surveyor's Office. Okay that's you. Yeah and at that time we had very
limited licenses. So we went with the ELA proposal met with the Commissioner's Office. They were.
willing to move in that direction that those funds are overseen by the TSD director and by the okay
of the commissioners. They go ahead and provide us the software so we utilize it. So we've been able
to dig into the data as far as seeing some of the classifications from the assessor's office. We've
also been able to update the data to have more real-time change of sales.
I'm not saying that correctly, but transfers, thank you. Because the assessor only does that once a
year, but the auditor tracks it in real time. And they wanted that for years and years. And it's like,
well, you have this in the LOW database. We'll pull it up. And that's what the community is looking
for, too. And then over time, we brought more departments online. Within the county? Within the county.
Or with the? Well, we work collaboratively with anyone that we can. Sometimes it's hard.
Sometimes it's easy. Yeah and so. Well that's where I'm going when I see Bloomington Ellisville Monroe
County Steinsville etc. Well the county maintains all the parcel data. Yeah so but each there's a lot
of other parts to that and some of it's like the zoning map and we've talked about building out topology
where that geometry is there so if you're like I want to see all of this residential
They'll filter everything else out. But right now those lines don't exist. So we have to create that
topology to make things like that easier. Also, the zoning map is managed by the planning office. The
corporate boundaries is managed by the planning office. The parcel geometry is managed by the auditor's
office. They also manage the wow that helps the backfill the data. And the assessor also manages
gamma data, which is backfill data. That's more the authoritative data. And we need to bring it all
together, share that geometry, and make sure that, like, if we wanted to click on one of those parcels
right now, we know what zone it is too, not just what classification that the assessor has. And it's a big
project, but I think we're making great progress and a lot of this collaboration and build out to occurred
because we became really reliant on Elevate, which was a parcel data viewer we used up until two years
ago and it's beacon now.
But Elevate was going through this process of crashing routinely. And our parcel data internally, we
didn't have this information on. And rather than our office fielding hundreds of calls a day from angry
realtors and people that were saying, why can't I see this? We decided to build this out ourselves.
So we would have that kind of stability and have a resilient infrastructure to kind of move forward.
That's accurate. So.
And it's accurate, it's as accurate as the data itself, right? So if there's an inaccuracy in the data
source, that's going to be reflected here as well. But again, we're consistently cleaning this up and
making sure things are good. So twofold question. The first part of my question is what is the plan
then for incorporating zoning into this, especially for
and our economy outside of also Newington. Is that the next step? We definitely could. And if that's
the direction that people are seeking, that's something we can definitely put on our table. How would
it? I guess I'm kind of thinking of it in two ways. In one way, I think, yes, incorporate it into what
you have. But I'm also thinking maybe not. Maybe it needs to be separate. And then there's sort of that
Venn diagram point where they intersect with one another.
I don't know what that answer is. I don't think that the integrating the zoning into this would be that
challenging. It's basically two layers of data. So you have a zoning layer, which is broken down by
different types of zoning. Then you have parcel data that you just overlay on top of it. Right. But
I think what we're missing are those, you know, the PUD that's never been developed or things like that.
And it seems like
that would make the data more confusing if it's mixed in with this, because the essential office doesn't
track that. That was the goal from the beginning, to find out what has been approved and what has not
come online. And to know, for example, there are 4,500 or more units at Sudbury that have been approved.
And does that show up on the map, that 4,500?
I'm guessing now if you have anyone flag it out. What can we do is when we have those PDZones and then
we can then reference it with the classification as if they're vacant, and then we can start creating
a list where if we're looking for more content, then that's going to allow us to handle it in more bite-sized
pieces. Yeah, but for this one, you wouldn't have that information from the assessor until it's actually embedded.
That's what we might be able to have that topology where the zoning map would be here. We could search
all PUDs and then immediately underneath it have the parcel where it would still tell us if there was
a problem. What is permitted, not what's been approved. It's going to take a lot of work. I think what
I was talking with John before we got here is
you're going to get a lot of feedback and let's just try to work towards that and work with planning
and continue to chip away. And I think there's going to be like in this type of technology six one way
half a dozen the other. But I do think we can achieve the outcome that we're looking for. The other
question I have is related to this project overall. I think the tables are incredibly helpful incredibly
helpful. But I wonder if.
Is there a principle or philosophy behind this that says, let's look at where there are vacant properties
so we can rezone them, or is it just happened to be on a map, but you have the data, the most important
data is on that table? You see what I'm saying? Is the idea to try to influence planning and zoning
decisions based on map, or is it just
Here's a map so you can see where it is while you're looking at the table. Yeah, for me, it
was a visualization and one of the reasons why a lot of this started with the city of Lewington with
neighborhoods and this again is kind of my own kind of ideology and it's because I consistently hear on
NPR and in the B Square Bulletin and Herald Times that there's a housing shortage, and then there's
also a housing crisis. And these two are used interchangeably. And I think one of those is very true.
And I think one of those, I was always kind of like, well, I think we have a lot of houses. And so I
was always kind of trying to figure that out. And looking at the address points, then looking at the
number of houses, that was kind of how I started looking at it. I do think there's these maps and this
data, data should be used to,
shape policy, right? And some influence policy, right? And it's good data, right? But I think for these,
it's more visualizations. And for me, I was really interested in like, well, what's the composition
of Bloomington, right? I'm running these neighborhoods all the time. And when I moved here, I was told,
you know, move to Bryan Park, move to Elm Heights. It's like, we're all, that's where you need to live.
It's a core neighborhood is what people call it. And you look at Bryan Park or Elm Heights, it's like 60%
Rentals. Yeah, you can show that and it's and here it's kind of a little bit difficult. But yeah, we
go to Bloomington and just zoom into like Thryam Park and look at the landscape of landlords when this
loads. It is a lot of data, as I said. This is the other one that this works, right? So these are commercial
housing. And again, this isn't all the commercial housing. These are the
there are landlords who actually report that to our separate office. And then this also was coupled
with Senate Enrolled Act 1, which is going to be defunding local governments. And so there's also a
taxing thing here in terms of doing your part to have a thriving democracy. And that means actually
being responsible as a landowner. So I think I went way too farther with my answer. No, I think it's
fascinating. I think what I would
I would ask is that vacant parcels be differentiated between open land and empty houses. I think that
would be an important differentiation to make. For the county. I don't know. That would be like it would
have to be some of the assessing code if there is. There is a there is a it is in the assessor's code
if there's
If the property is truly vacant versus a house that doesn't have residents in it. Well, I think yeah,
I think that's residential vacancy is what that would be. There's no. I think it's zoned as residential,
but there's no property. We could actually like look at one of these and bring on an area and see what
it looks like. So if I zoom into this guy here and I just want to address that question real quick too
is the goal here is to make a transparent dashboard and.
truly show the housing layout or composition of the county. And unfortunately people are going to take
their odds and narratives and run with it. But the goal is to make this feel like a tool that you can
have confidence on and just be able to bring that transparency. That that is our core mission is to
let the data speak to itself. The only real thing that we have
in there is the data visualization part. But you know we're wanting feedback for that like what kind
of graphs what kind of colors things like that. But like the data as far as the way it's going to be
presented it is just going to be like this is what it is. And as we learn more of like what
vacant residential means that's a great question. Does it means there's a structure on there or does
it just mean no one lives there or does it mean a city.
There was there was at least one yeah I didn't have a base map switcher on this and so I can't see the
areas but yeah again yeah the data like I said the data in here is as good as the source data that we're
pulling from itself. And the building department would be the next goal because if they actually got
permitted to build a structure then we can start filtering it out as far as like vacant with structure
or vacant open land. Sorry I'll stop there. That vacant lot.
It was vacant house for 20 plus years until I purchased it, demoed it, but it was always being taxed
and considered residential until I had to poke the assessor's office, come out and look and make sure
the structure's not going to pay taxes on it again. I'd be pretty proactive to like get it, so I don't
know how. I know people that don't look at their tax bills at all.
Well, I just had a discussion out of the party recently. And they're like, I'm oblivious. I just picked
it up. Oh my god. Yeah, I have. Well, this is really wonderful work. And it's very detailed as far as
what currently exists. And so that has value, especially for the purposes of your dashboard and for
the assessors and the auditor's office. As far as planning is concerned, prospective data
approvals that have not yet come to fruition, like Sudbury Park, the 371 units at Westgate, all of those
types of things. They, by definition, won't show up here because the base map is coordinated with the
other government units. But that's something we're trying to get feedback from so we can build in a workflow.
if we can start identifying them and kind of, we can continue to layer this data. And that is an achievable
goal. It might take some time to identify it all, but. Sure. And like the number of units, like in a
condominium, how many condos, the condominiums, they're 150 or 3,454. Correct. And I can expand this
too. Yeah. And that buildings containing multiple
condos or is that 3,454 individual condominiums? These are 3,454 parcels that have a condo that's classified
as a condo. Most condos would be like a small parcel. But for example, where Charlotte lived over there
by Yacos Little Zagreb that was that called the forge or the mill? Foundry? Yeah, so those were condos
in there. Would they show up as one?
Because it's on one parcel or the number of units inside? One. I see. So this is like a condo that I
slid. So there's basically every, it's almost a one-to-one for condos and address points. It looks like
3,454 condos, 3,513 address points. I see. In the county. And that's city. I see. I see mobile homes
would be off. I know there were six or nine other same points for those.
Can you tell me about the over 10 acres in the county. That was something that you. Sure. Yeah. So I'll
clear this here. And this is one other thing too. So we go to Monroe County and then we go to parcels
over 10 acres in size and go like. Can be something. Don't know where this loads. So these are all there's
one thousand three hundred fifty five parcels coded as vacant agricultural that are over 10 acres in size.
37 commercial, 358 residential vacant, 603 single-family dwellings. Those would be, yeah. And you know,
those address points that you have identified. So if no one is living there, does it show up as an address
point if it's never been occupied? If there's a house on it, there would be an address point. But as
an apartment, I mean.
There's an apartment yeah there's still be an address point for it. That's interesting. And the address
points too for the again it's totally dated together so our address points we have addressing it was
at the county side right so that's uh planning office here those are address points at the Monroe County's
incorporated area then the city of Bloomington has their own dressing and Ellitsville
addresses through Bloomington as well. So we're bringing together address points from the city
of Bloomington, Alexville, and Monroe County, and aggregating this together. And that was my question
about a collaboration. Yep. How is that working? So that's a script I run as well. So I pull data from
the- And they allow you to pull that data? Correct. Yeah. It's public data. So yeah, and I write basically
a model. So yeah. You want to mention the data harvest just a little bit, how the county is, the body
research. Sure. And that's like separate from this,
kind of, but yeah, we as the state of Indiana, the Geographic Information Office has an initiative that
they do every year, and it's called a data harvest. And what they do is they try to bring in core data
sets from the county, and so things like road center lines, address points, and parcel data, along with
things like library boundaries, political boundaries, and things like that, and they aggregate these
at the state level. So we bring these in every year, and part of that process is us, as the GIS Division
and the Surveyor's Office,
we collect data and ship it off to the state but we have to make sure that the schema is accurate at
the state standards. A lot of this is for it's called Next Gen 911 reporting. So it's for dispatch to
make sure that if there's a fire the fire chiefs know where to go or the fire trucks know where to go
and if there's an emergency they know where to go as well. And so that's kind of part of the process
that we needed to do to get these data kind of coming in. And yeah so the
I started in this position in 2022 and it's been a learning experience and it's been super fun as well.
But it's been kind of like when I first started here, it was like, what is going on? Like, how is this
even happening? We had no idea where Ellensville was getting data or Ellensville had no idea how their
addressing even occurred. And the city of Wilmington has been doing it for 20 years basically. So it's
been a really interesting process and we're kind of consistently refining as well. Jackie and I spent
a couple of weeks in December removing kind of
duplicate addresses that, you know, we would randomly have a Bloomington address and then Bloomington
randomly have a Monroe address in their data. And we were having duplicate addresses that we didn't
want to have. I mean, just setting you up for a good census also. For sure. Yeah. So, yeah. Is this
still a beta testing or is this? I would say it's after beta, but it's still kind of, we're always tweaking
stuff. And so we put out data dashboards all the time and we try to
Provide a public service right that's going to be there's so much data out there we're trying to make
this available to the public today I just published a big data dashboard for the American Community
Survey, which is a product of the US census and so it's a five year average of data from 2018 to 2023.
We publish this and we put it on Reddit. We put it on Facebook and one of the best things about this
is feedback we get from the community. That's that's put on Reddit through a county organization. We
did that better for your will because there's a weird policy there. But but anyways, we get feedback
from the community and sometimes it's like this is great, but a lot of times it's like well, this could
be cooler if you guys did that and we get that feedback that constructive criticism or not constructive
criticism. We take it and we go with it. We make our stuff better and so.
I forgot what your question was. Well, I was two-part question. Sure. You answered the first part. OK.
Second part was going to be, is this live yet? And if it is? It is live. It's publicly available. It
has access to it. We don't have it linked to a number of different places, because we wanted to continue
to gather feedback. But it's all public data anyway, so people have access to it. It's just the way
it's being displayed and the way you can filter it is the only thing different. We do have a GIS Division
website that
It's a lot of it's an award-winning website by the way. And the goal is to publish this on our website
so it's an easy place to people to access and to go to. I feel like in the agenda will work if you should.
Yeah. Do you know who's accessing your data? No. I mean do I know how many people are accessing it?
Kind of. And it's lots. I'm more concerned about who's accessing it. Sure. And using the data. Sure.
Yeah, this is this is like public data. And so we do have a number of like firewalls put up in terms
of, you know, malicious actors and stuff like that. And we're consistently trying to kind of build up
our securities and things like that. There's in terms of like parcel data, there's restricted addresses.
And so, for instance,
elected officials, judges, folks working in the Sheriff's Department and things like that can have their
addresses restricted from the public. And that's a process that occurs in the auditor's office. You
have to fill out a form for that. And so that's part of our parcel data that's restricted. Yeah, the
rest of it's public facing and so. And it's a lot of what we're seeing right now is a one way where
we're not having two way connections to it. So you can't change the data. We're just showcasing the
data and then
That's more of a TSD question because a lot of this is on our portal or a ESRI question because a lot
of it would be on the AGO. But. We can see how many hits within our main website though. And I remember
I presented at the commissioner's office a couple of years ago and it was something like we deployed
our website. I think I deployed it like or created it like in August and presented like in December
and there was something like 30,000 hits. So we get a lot of a lot of hits.
You know, because I deal with this in my own work and, you know, sure, the base data is public, but
you're amassing them in a new and unique way. Is there, what are the controls for privacy? And especially
since that granularity of data is being conglomerated in a new and accessible way,
And is there an internal review board process for the conglomeration of data in this new and accessible
click on a point get all this all this varied information from one point. I mean what are what are we
doing as far as that is concerned. I mean it's like the restricted addresses are the main thing. The
rest of the state has been
available in this format on Elevate and Beacon before I've started. If somebody were to restrict their
address like today, it would be restricted as of tomorrow because we need the daily upload and so it
would automatically block that. Crime machine would get back if I wanted to. So I just am wondering
about that aspect of it.
should we consider whether or not the average citizen can have their data restricted as well, not just
public officials? I've reviewed this, and I think that's a state-level policy, I believe. There's definitely
a form at the auditor's office, and we've actually had people who had their address restricted that
have called me and then had a
had wanted it to be unrestricted. And so I think former sheriffs or stuff like that, or sheriff's deputies
that were worried because their address wasn't showing up on Beacon or on our parcel data viewer and
their house was for sale and it was having some type of impact on their ability to sell their property.
But yeah, that was one of the issues that we kind of tackled right away was understanding about that
restricted addresses. And again, this all goes back to our reliance on a vendor's software that wasn't working
And then we have to deploy something ourselves internally and then starting to understand all the different
ramifications of that. Yeah. I used to run analysis division in my prior life. So I have some understanding
about these crazy databases and being buried in data. One thing that we've always tried to do is provide
trends analysis and assessments of whatever. Like in this area we're seeing. Sure. In this area we're
seeing this.
And so a top level, I'm not going to call an executive summary, but some sort of a, this is what we're
seeing, the current trends, and these are assessments of these particular categories. Something like
that would be very helpful from a big picture standpoint. Is that something that you generate, you have
a generator in there for? I do, and we have multiple dashboards. I do have one that's like a value analysis
dashboard that basically can go into parcel data, looking at
assessments and sales going back to 2020. So you can see like in 2020 how many sales were there. What
is the correlation between assessments and and sales at different spatial extents. So as you zoom in
zoom out you can see well this parcel is sold for one dollar and it's assessed at one dollar right.
That's that's kind of what you want to see with assessing sales. Maybe I'm not sure if that's what you
want to see but you can see that with our data. And so we do we do have multiple dashboards.
One of the things we've been working on lately is trying to bring multiple dashboards. And so this is
the data dashboard, but we've been trying to bring multiple data dashboards into a single site so people
don't have to have 15 URLs to follow to do things. So I think it's a great idea to kind of combine multiple
kinds of... We built a portal at a national level, but we broke them up into categories, very top level,
and with a few of the little fancy charts,
Sir, and with all right there. Yeah, but you didn't have to drill down to 19 levels of detail.
This is right. This is something I'll fall is a cool jacket by. Of course, yeah, let's go on. Are you
showing the beacon site? I'll see. Everything we're discussing and showing is. Available on the beacon
site. The goal here is to get a sense of how you guys.
for how the planning department could utilize this data and we can kind of build it out in a more functional,
usable way. So there's great conversations and if we're creating a dashboard that's meant for planning
and Jackie's working with the Planning Commission directs Jackie to do something, John's gonna work
with him and we can build it out to those goals and objectives. But on the other side of things, all
of this data is already out there. It's already available.
And that's just kind of how it has been since I've been with the county for 20 years. And so this is
like an example of multiple dashboards in one site. And so this is that American Community Survey data
I was talking about. And so this is looking at total housing units. It's a core plus map. And so the
darker colors represent more of something. The lighter colors represent less. But the data here is so rich.
or complex, I should say, as you zoom in on one of these. This is Block Route 1, and this is in Bloomington.
You get the total housing units. And again, this is based on the census and based on the American Community
Survey. The vacant housing units, the occupied housing units, owner-occupied, rent-or-occupied, median
year of the structure that was built, the median number of rooms, average household size, etc. So there's
tons of data in here.
And again, we just we just published this today. And so this is just housing, but we have education,
we have the economy. And then the other cool thing about this is because the data is so robust, you
can actually just isolate things. And so I'm pointing to my layers here and say I just want to look
at the vacant housing units. Do you want to talk about census blocks a little bit as how you're able
to view it and kind of what that block is? So this is the block group. The census
aggregates data in three levels, three spatial levels, census blocks, which are the smallest, census
block groups, which are kind of a combination of blocks, and then census tracts, which are a combination
of block groups. And so this is at the block group level. That's the most granular level of data you
can get American Community Survey data at.
But yeah, what this does is it breaks down data based on whatever category you want. And so this is
looking at vacant housing units. And so, for instance, this census tract here has 373 vacant housing
units within it. This is block group one, census tract 16. You can search by address here as well. That's
happening on thing. I think I'm myself because I don't know my address.
It zooms in. It tells you the census black group you're in. So here's census black group one. It tells
you the total housing units for that census black group. And again, this is just housing. We also have
employment. We have population. So this breaks down types of work. And again, this is the television,
I think, that hasn't been configured to be a computer screen, so it looks a little bit weird.
the economy as well you can look at. But these are kind of examples of things I think we could do with
the housing study that we bring in things like zoning and all the other comments you guys have made.
You want to mention how you've been working with the gentleman at the Polis Center kind of here and
there to kind of bounce some of this off of as far as what they're doing kind of at a state level. So
the Polis Center is a it's a
kind of think tank as part of the IUindie, I forget what it used to be called, IUPUI, and now it's IUindie.
And they've been working on a bigger project. Are you talking about like the eviction stuff? Well, just
in general, how they use this data and how that's kind of been some of the impetus of us wanting to
bring it here at a local level. I might be kind of lost with the whole of this part of it.
the with the ACS. Sorry. Well, I do want to. Yeah, it's been. It's been about one hour. So I do. I really
really appreciate coming and presenting. I think it's a lot of information that we wanted to just share
and have John and John help present that. So that's like an inventory of what we have and we can
think more on some of our questions how maybe planning and or the PIS division can help with that housing
inventory. But we didn't want to lose sight of this and John had created such a great inventory of existing
data that I didn't want to lose that. So. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yes.
Thank you guys. Thank you for being late. Yes. Appreciate you. Thank you.
Okay so moving on to item 1B which is the active development subdivisions in the United Kingdom. Yes
so this is in the packet something that we had created or it was actually a request by the BEDC that
we create something like this. So we had put this together it was pretty relevant pretty recent. So
I just wanted to share this. This is something we're happy to do more frequently.
It just gives you an idea sort of like what we're discussing on an inventory, but it's not quite like
that visualization. So we had given this specifically because the person was looking to possibly locate
here and they wanted to know the types of housing availability, locations, things like that. So we can
do this kind of work anytime and update it.
as we can so it's we just kind of comb through that information it needs to get regularly updated because
things change frequently. And then I'll also note I think this is one C where we last left off was a
discussion of like we had produced basically a dashboard with John's help of you know connecting it
with a survey that other jurisdictions could fill out.
And then also putting those on a map, which we can combine with John's inventory now that that's well
built out. And just having some sort of visualization of, you know, is that the building improvement
level? Has it just been receiving a rezone approval or does it actually have, you know, development
plan approval, things like that? So this is kind of where we left off with our housing inventory discussion,
but I know I'm
providing a lot of information tonight, but just wanting to not leave this off the table. And if you
have ideas or things, if you want to hone in on, you know, some of the discussion about separating out
vacant land versus vacant housing, or, you know, what, you know, even looking at lots that are 10 acres
or greater in size to people want to even know like what there is left.
under the current code to subdivide if they wanted to, as we talk about the sliding scale discussion
later on, or as we have been talking about the sliding scale discussion. So those are the types of things
that we would like feedback from, and you don't have to give it to us immediately. But as you think
about that, I just wanted to bring it back to the table. Does that answer any in the copy? No, this
has been shared in prior
emails and discussions but I'm happy to reshare it if people want to. Any members of the Plaintiff's
Commission have any feedback or would you prefer to bring it up at a later date or email it to staff.
Yes. I'd like to ruminate. Yeah. It's a lot of affirmation. I don't think the hypervent is sent to us
so we can explore it ourselves. Yeah.
Thank you Jay. I guess I had one question and it's just to maintain it. Do you feel like you can build
out a good workflow like an OpenGov or something because you're talking about like the Planning Commission
approval phase to the building department's approval phase when they're issuing an occupation. Just
would be kind of curious of what your thoughts are to build out that workflow.
And not not today just it seems like something I have experience with with kind of creating
that collaboration. But that would be the most important part because that would then kind of keep that
data fresh and hopefully in perpetuity for us. Thank you. Moving on to item number 200 Administrative
Business the CEO Prioritization List and the possible credits. Yes.
So at the last Planned Commission meeting it was discussed of a text amendment that will be going to
the commissioners this year actually this week and next week regarding the size scale amendment. There
was some discussion in a prior administrative meeting about maybe adding to the CDO prioritization list.
So the two things that we have captured from that discussion well three I guess.
One is that there was some concern by some folks of I guess scratching off number one or saying number
one is fully complete as part of the discussion of the 25-year reservation and whether people wanted
to see an addendum added to this list such as researching an additional subdivision type which I'll
note is also already
on the list a potential new subdivision type allowing cluster development in return for open space.
And then there was also another discussion of editing this section of partial plat vacations a subdivision
potentially after that 25 year time period is up for sliding scale whether people wanted to see that
more clearly allowed to resubdivide under a minor or sliding scale and if we need to change the code
to allow that.
So I have this up. I think what we've been doing is as a plan commission voting on changes to this list
and then the ordinance review committee prioritizes the timing of it. So I'm looking today for a majority
vote whether people would like to see items one and or two added to the CDO prioritization list or discussion of it.
I'd also like to talk about Item 1 whether or not we agree or not agree on whether it's substantially
complete or complete. And I suggest we start there first. Any promotion. The motion is that Item 1 on
the CDO tabled items for review and prioritization is complete. Second.
Okay so there's a motion and a second to change item number one under the CDO table items for review
and prioritization to say complete with the ordinance 2026-01. I'll go ahead and call the roll. Margaret
Clements yes. John then right-hand up.
I know. Okay. That bears. Yes. Rudy Fields. Can I not vote. I don't understand it. I just do not understand
it and I don't feel that it's.
It'd be disingenuous for me to vote on something I don't understand. So I assume not vote. Okay.
David Henry. Abstain. Abstain. Can I change my vote. Abstain permit. Okay. Jeff Morris. Yes. Julie Thomas.
Yes. David Bush. Yes. And then trying to change from no to. Yeah. I feel like it's the same thing.
So it still passes the one, two, three, four, five. So it's five to zero to three. And it doesn't mean
that at any point in time the issue can't be raised again. It's just that we're done ruminating over
it now because we've had one conclusion reached at this point and we've got other items that we've not
even talked about yet that have to be addressed.
The one thing the one thing I would add and I think it's important is we need to show progress. Wow.
We need to show progress. And spending a year on a topic and going back and forth on that whether we
have agreement or not agreement but we have a majority in my opinion it's time to move on. We need to
show we've made progress in our discussion. That's just my comment general comment. Thank you Mr. Ferris.
So moving on to the other two items does anybody wish to make a motion on whether we should consider
I'm wondering if, if you can explain the second, I understand the first item, but can you explain the
second? Sure.
So when we were discussing the sliding scale subdivision procedure and the 25 year reservation it was
discussed that people had thought previously that after that 25 year you might be able to conduct like
a minor on that remainder and we had discussed that part of the CDO provisions that we added was to
kind of close that loophole if you will because people were
doing a minor subdivision creating four 11 acre lots and then vacating one of those tracks one at a
time and doing a two lot sliding scale. And so by the end they had eight lots with septic systems. So
if it is of interest to folks to allow that back in to allow people after they've done a minor to do
a sliding scale,
or allow people after they've done a sliding scale and wait 25 years to do a minor or another subsequent
sliding scale without that infrastructure, that's something that we could add in. Okay, so it's just
this particular table. It's not just this table. Thank you. I'm obviously in support. I'm kind of more
curious where my colleagues are. I think this creates some unintentional
outcomes, one of them being, if you just look at like the other part of this where it talks about the
lot sizes and I think one, you have to have what, 40 acres minimum to do the three additional lots?
Yep. I'm going to hold up because it's easier for the visual
Because I've had this conversation. So 40 acres or greater, you can add the additional lots, right?
But that immediately eats into what the parent parcel is going to be. And the way the vacation works
is you can only do a major. So as we're still figuring out the septic sewer thing, they can't do anything
with their property because a major is five lots minimum. And if they can't get a sewer hookup,
they have to have 10 acres. So you'd have to have a minimum of 50 acres in that parent parcel after
25 years to do anything with without maybe going through experience or such. But that's what I think
is what my real concern now is with the sliding scale and you know also
if let's say you have a larger lot and you do something 80 acres or something and you have 50 acres
in that parent parcel you wait the 25 years are we creating the density where we need the infrastructure
as far as allowing them to do another sliding scale. I'm not sure. I think I have no set ideas
or recommendations but I do think it's worth the discussion and I think we can address this in a way that
potentially will allow more, even if it's a minor or something like that's where my confusion was. I
thought through the. Vacation option that you could do a minor, but I was incorrect on that and I just
feel like it's very limited based off of what you have to do for a major that could you go back to the
other table that that is your only option if you choose it. Also, my question is anyone that has done
sliding scale now,
Is this their only option now. So like if someone had a sizable lot went through the sliding scale prior
to the change prior to the issue with septic and sewer hoping that one day they could maybe do a major
and it is in a reasonable area that you know maybe there's consensus with the group that hey that should
be permitted. They can't do that anymore because each lot has to be a minimum of 10 acres. So that's
kind of where my thoughts are.
And you know I'll kind of defer to the group here if you want to kind of hash that up. I really don't
want to go through the same exercise that we did with the sliding scale. But I have to kind of share
my thoughts on the matter too. So that's what I have. Thank you John. Does anybody else have comments.
She's sitting down. Jackie can you pull the two questions back up. Do we have a motion in order or not
to add these to the list.
I'd just like to add something to the discussion. And I think that I stated this at a planned commission
meeting and at the ordinance review committee meeting. And I don't know if everybody agrees or if they
disagree. But we have, you know, first of all, staff, I want to thank you for all the work that you've
done on the CDO and for putting up with us because we are, you know, nine
people not always agreeing with each other. And there there's almost some issues not all of them and
many of them not. But on some issues there is like a fine line between both sides of a point of view.
But I think that we owe it to staff and to our process that we get through the initial agreed upon CDO
prioritization list before we add on to it. Because if we never finish the prioritization list, then
that doesn't speak well of us. If the supplemental CDO prioritization list put the name to something
else or it could be made more clear that
that it's, you know, the CDO prioritization list is something that we as a body agreed about. And if
people willy nilly kind of keep adding to it along the process, it becomes a never ending feedback loop.
So I would call it issues to explore further, but not anything having to do with the CDO. You know,
zoning issues, planning issues to discuss further,
down the road until we get through these 14 completed agreed upon CDO table items for review
and prioritization. I think that the supplemental CDO prioritization list, the title of it bothers me,
the process of it bothers me. I mean, if I wanted to right now, I could conceivably just give you five
more issues that I'd like you to investigate
and the prioritization list just never ends. So I'd like us to have an ending point on what we originally
agreed upon and then entertain like a rolling wish list of zoning and planning discussions for the future,
but not really so tied to the CDO prioritization. Now that's my comment. I don't know how other people
feel about that, but I'd like to see an end to this.
I mean, I know it never ends, but I'd like to see an end to what we agreed upon as a body. Can you go
back to the list and I think I think I counted nine. I may be wrong in my account of which are still
open. Still open.
that one substantially. So that would count as one that's still open. So that would be closed there.
So I think I see nine. I agree with what Margo was saying. I think you've got to take. We need to close
out the CDO discussion. Of what we heard from the public. This was generated from the general public.
Correct. I know that. That's right. We need to close this thing out. That makes perfect sense. And Tron
brings up good points about things that need to be discussed in the future. And I think what you do
is we call it something different.
and we track it as something different. Matter of fact, if Margaret wants to add five things to that
list, let Margaret add five things to that list. Okay, doesn't mean we're going to address them, it's
just that these are just almost brainstorming items or areas of improvement for the CDO. Yeah, it doesn't
mean we stop improving CDO. Well, you want to, as you've always been. Critically analyze aspects of
it, whether they're working or not working. Yes. Especially if you get a lot of variance requests before
making that. But this is a separate item. Yes.
All the items relate to the CDO, so it's a little bit of a naming issue. Yeah, I think we can keep anybody's
brainstorming what they want, ideas as something else, call it something else. And whoever wants to
put something on it, but then it's up to the planning commission and or the ordinance review committee
to say, we really need to get on this item 26. Item 26 is the most important.
I mean, you know, or you all should be adding that to it as well. Yeah. Right. Because, you know, based
on various questions and, you know, it's that, that, you know, staff is going to inform a lot of these.
Yes. So future discussions or something. I think that each consideration and the staff deserves a close
out on this. They've been working on it for years. Yeah. You know, and you've done great. And again, my
lack of understanding if, you know, we close out the CDO and then all of a sudden somebody's got one
of these good ideas that we find on this other list of good ideas. Change the CDO? Yes. Okay. So it's
a dynamic thing. It's not. Yeah. The concerns from the initial passage that were, you know, that came
up among, it came up in our work sessions and it came up in public and,
I'm I could probably think about where most of this came from. Yeah. We probably said publicly that
we were going to take on these comments. Yes. And as a result of their public hearings et cetera. And
so I think that it's it's it's on us to take and address those things first. Sure. One thing I just
wanted to add is we make recommendations. So it moves to the commissioner level for adoption. So I just
wanted to.
make sure that was clear kind of. Also I agree with everyone. I think we could change the name so like
it shows that we're making progress but also leave the flexibility to prioritize what is urgent especially
if we identify things that have unintentional consequences or unintentional impacts or some state legislation
comes down and we just need to jump on it to really you know
protect Monroe County from certain unknowns. I think that's fine. I think the ORC could discuss some
of that prioritization and I also think if it's needs to be brought to the full planning commission
that. Just call it future topics for ORC discussion. That's what I would call it. Yes that's exactly
what it is.
And I think we need to continue to prioritize it. I think we leave it, you know, I'm sure staff see
something we need to address quickly. They'll read it. But to continually have it all over what's more
important is not a good use of anyone's time. I think we get this CDO list done for my opinion. OK,
so we've got several people that I think are saying the same thing here. Would somebody be willing to
make a motion on this? I would like to move that we
complete the CDO tabled items for review and prioritization. And as far as new discussions and new topics
for our consideration that we come up with, that we come up with a different list and a list of issues,
future issues to discuss, something else, but let's close out to CDO tabled items for review
and prioritization. That's a motion, second.
In that motion, for the way that people add to that list, do we want it to come from the Planning Commission
admin or do we want it from ORC? I think Planning Commission admin or ORC and staff for a majority vote.
That's good. You want to add that to your motion? Yes, I'd like to add that to my motion. Would you
like to second that? Yes, I second that.
Yeah. So it's been most consecutive to the first address. Continue to address the CDO tabled items which
originated from the public and then come up with a separate list instead of naming it something like
supplemental CDO prioritization list it's going to be titled something such as future topics for planning
commission or ORC consideration.
And those items can be added to that list by a majority vote of the Planning Commission at an administrative
meeting and also can originate from the ORC or staff but voted on at an administrative meeting. A vote
yes is about to approve the separation of these two lists first. John and Amanda. Yeah. Scott Barrett.
Yes. Rudy Fields. Yes.
David Henry. Yes. Jeff Morris. Yes. Julie Thomas. Yes. David Bush. Yes. Warren Clements. Yes. And then
since that was the motion do you want to vote on the majority vote on adding these as the first two
items of that future discussion list. So moved and.
But not necessarily saying these are the most important but that they will be the first items on this
new list. No. —Second. —I move and second to add items number one and two. —We should have a party
number three. Party when we finish the CDO. Number three.
items that we wanted to go on the list on the screen will be added as the first two items not necessarily
prioritized in that order but just added to the list and that we agreed that we're not going
to be continually doing prioritization but that people would continually review and filter out that
list and add it to you know ask staff to bring it forward as text and as necessary. Our vote yes is
able to add these two items to the future discussions.
Pat Fairs. Yes. Bertie Fields. Yes. David Henry. Yes. Jeff Morris. Yes. Julie Thomas. Yes. David Bush.
Yes. Mark Pemmonds. Yes. Tanya Miranda. Yes. Okay the motion is approved unanimously. Okay moving on
to item number three this is the Board Appointments for the Plains Commission and other subcommittees.
a comment and that is that I think in years past we've waited until February based upon who we think
is going to be the representative from the county commissioners and also from the county council until
we know who those people are I think we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves. That's just my comment.
I. — Usually it's the February admin meeting and I don't want us to get a perverse view on this one.
I agree. Plus we spent a lot of time on the earlier discussion. Except maybe the citizen appointee to
the Black Committee. He expressed interest. And that one doesn't really I feel like that's a little
bit of an outlier. We could appoint him now and then figure out the rest on February. I'm just so we
can let him know unless others have thoughts on that. Did we decide that that's that that's
Three people from the Plan Commission and only one resident. Is that what we decided. Because I remember
we talked about this a couple of months ago. And then we lifted it along. We didn't. We did. Yeah. I
think it was if it were between three and five members. And then we could have up to four PC members.
I think we added the flexibility. Got it. So we could add a second citizen abundant labor.
See Jeff. Yeah. I think it is. Okay. All right. I just wanted to refresh my my boggy brain. I would
I would move that we appoint Travis Bixdon to the Platte committee. I'll second. All right. Would that
be the only motion. That's the only one. That's the second. Continue the rest until February and the
meeting. Okay. My second stands. Okay. So the motion is to.
Only appoint Travis Dixon as the Black Many Citizen Appointee and otherwise continue the rest of this
appointment schedule until the February admin meeting. As a reminder everyone that's on here already
continues to serve in their roles until they're appointed others. Let's go up. Yes there's a vote to
approve the motion. So Scott Berks. Yes. Berty Fields. Yes.
David. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
There might be something on the second one that I want to bring up. But this one did go to Platt Committee.
It's a sliding scale subdivision. There was not a whole lot of discussion by the Platt Committee other
than they recommended the same I believe.
And just to show preservation of threes to satisfy the requirements instead of a true street tree waiver.
So it's a subdivision sidewalk waiver and street tree waiver request. That's why it has to go to the
planning commission. So this will be decided at the regular meeting of the planning commission. The
next one is a.
This was a tabled item so we didn't still have a question. I think that we tabled this in December to
give some time to see if the commissioners had any input on this since it is a planned commission authored
request. If there was no consideration. They shouldn't be there looking to get sort
service. It's it's looking like they would need at least one other if not a few. I think they're not
contiguous enough but it's possible it could happen and it would be a long stretch. It's annexation
area you want to be. So so they can't do anything until the court cases are done and then they have
to wait a certain number of years before they can be honest voluntarily or not.
wasn't the one that just went through and they said okay it was. Right. Right. We've been in some email
chains with the city and their legal department and they're still advising people on how to voluntarily
and excel. So all right. So let me because what I heard from my colleagues on this particular property
is they said
I don't know how it could be HD because of the shape of the property and it's only nacre. So we were
just going to go with whatever a one acre lot would normally be in the county as the appropriate zoning.
Is what we. Yeah. Yeah. Like a suburban. Yeah. But because they're still going to free them anyway.
This is just to take it out of something it is not a PED.
It is not part of the PD. It should not be PD. So this is sort of an intermediate point and that's what
we have recommended. But I do think that we need to have a discussion about the other planning station
areas. So should I maybe have
Jeff Copper will reach out to you because we have this on the regular agenda to go for January as a
preliminary hearing. Do you want to see if we need time into February. I would put this on February
for winter if you don't mind. All right. That was the consensus of my colleagues. I was actually pretty.
Okay. And then we can discuss a little bit more with the city and get the answer. It literally came
like less than an hour ago about the annexation. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's see what happens. Okay.
On that note just wanted to point out for annexation the city did have an approval of a voluntary annexation
late last year. And then Ellsville they've been. The annexation area 4. Right. Off of Cory Lane. Right.
And Ellisville has continued to annex just last year at the very end of the year they sent us that they
had annexed for the year 6 parcels totaling 83 acres. One of which was contiguous to other subdivision
areas. In 2024 we had about 7 parcels 171 acres annexed. 23-0. 2022-1 property that was 34 acres that was cut.
I just want to keep going over here. Those are all voluntary annexation. Those are voluntary. Yes. They
don't have to do a physical plan. Can some how is the plan to be like let's just say that one in annexation
area 4 that was
applied to the city they voluntarily annex to the city that can't take place until the annexation laws
are fully adjudicated plus two years. So can they voluntarily dis-annex and say we're at present 100
percent to the property owners. It's one owner. There is I have talked to the legal department about
de-annexation but I'm not
entirely familiar. I think that's the conversation they need to have. Right. I don't want them in the
legal waters. No, but also just please keep in mind that those areas in 3, 4, and 5, once if the waiver
issue is not decided in the favor of the residents, those areas still have a right to judicial review.
So it could restart the court cases again. Right.
I don't know if there's movement towards voluntary now on both Ellisville and city side. Well Ellisville
certainly is looking to what they call a merger as an annexation of the entirety of Richmond Township.
And folks out there need to understand that that means they will be subject to the property taxes may
not change much but they will be subject to a local income tax if they become part of the town of Ellisville.
And on that note the reorganization of Ellisville and
It's sure but the term is reorganization. Right. It's the township. Richland. It's a sizable area. I
kind of broke down the data. I don't want to speculate too much but I think about 15,000 within that
whole area and I think that's parcel base. So it might be more people. There
They're moving forward. They just got their reorganization committee and now they're spinning
up subcommittees. And I guess I'm asking my colleagues here is that worth our planning department's
time to potentially sit on some of the steering committees to make sure some of maybe our ordinances
that we have in that area if this does take place could potentially be built into their area.
It's a large area. It's actually that side of the county the west side kind of kind of this little diagonal
thing is our most car sensitive area in the in the county. And sorry I don't want to volunteer you guys
but I do think if we're able to even be part of a steering committee it could be beneficial and I'm
just kind of curious what my other —
We could yeah you're absolutely right. We could wait a little bit time but they're getting their steering
committees now. We're not picking steering committees. They picked their steering committees and their
their committees already picked who they want to pick. And I'm sure that they know that if they need
to reach out to us they can for assistance or information. But at the same time this is this is premature
I think this
too early and I don't think that we should spend our time on this yet. We don't know the proposal. The
proposal will be out supposedly March or April. The proposal which then has to go to the township board
and the town council for approval. But that has to all be done by June in order for it to be on the
ballot in November at the general election. So I think.
If if your organization the annexation is what it is it's an annexation. It doesn't matter what planning
and zoning we have done. They will be in charge of it. And you know I doubt that they look to us and
say oh can you help us. But it would be storm water. Police. They already managed their own fire. Highway.
All of that would be.
theirs to manage in a very short time. Which is a little. Planning authority too but they'll call it.
Visibly I can't even remember the term they use basically. Conceptional ideas. I've just been paying
attention following the town hall. They got the organization committee. They're looking for folks to
send interest if they want to be part of the steering committee. I guess my point is we really don't
have a say in this matter.
It's going to be up to the voters. And and and because it's an annexation whatever has been done with
county planning doesn't matter. If the if the original township outside of Allesville chooses to be
part of Allesville that's their decision. And that means they're saying go ahead and plan us. It's.
side track, but I wanted to bring that up as part of this discussion. I think it's really important.
It is very important, but it's also not. Sometimes you just have to let go of the wheel and see what
they do. Let them drive into the ditch or drive on the autobahn. I wish everybody could, you know, sometimes
there's people if you don't stay. Well, I will hear the highway rules.
Although the voters at least in that annexation — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Add in a few extra Scrivener's Errors since any time we're taking the Texas Amendment anyways we'd like
to clean up anything we can. So the main change here though that's in addition to the code is under
the environmental constraints overlay section and there's not currently an exception allowed for accessory
structures but there is an exception allowed for the presence or the construction of an initial single
family residence.
So we're getting a lot of folks that want to put in a pool or they want to put in a garage, things like
that. That's totally unbuildable flat area, but they don't meet the other criteria such as continuous
buildable area, which is between one acre, or that they don't have enough of a lot size. Their lot size
isn't big enough in the eco area. So it's meant to more so, I guess, regulate
density in the eco areas, but a lot of the lots have already been legally established, legally created
over decades. And so this is catching a lot of those people that are in older planet subdivisions or
just existing historical lots of record that are. So accessory structures could be a pool,
it could be a deck, it could be a shed. Right. And I appreciate that the exception is. Correct,
she's good. Yeah.
I'm I'm cool with this. I think this is good. It makes people's homes more livable to have those options.
Is what is the 0.25 contiguous buildable area around the red. What if it's on one side of the residence.
It doesn't matter. It's not it doesn't have to be a perfect circle over the residence.
Right. It could be point two five on the west side of the building or something. Right. Right.
So the idea. And this also applies to additions as well. Not just the accessory structure. Right. But
the idea of the continuous buildable areas that many of these lots are on septic systems. And so we're
hoping to still you know that to qualify for the exception the accessory structure or the addition must
be located on flat ground. And if you're taking up some of that flat ground that you have left
That leaves less area in the place of a failed septic to go elsewhere on the line. So we want to make
sure that the septic system if it does fail has another location. So when we did the math we added up
a typical house and the you know 1,750 square feet plus 1,000 square foot addition. We were coming up
with something like 0.17 acres which would leave enough room for what we would say would be a septic system.
which was typically, I think, 40 by 70 feet. So that's the idea behind this, is that you don't want
to, because this is an exception to the one acre, we wanted to have a floor, if you will, that was zero,
so that it wouldn't be taking up the rest of their buildable area for a pool when they need it for a
secondary septic site. So then my next question is this. You came up with 1750 square feet for
and accept your structure. So that's a pretty big sled or barn or whatever it might be or pool. So,
okay, so how? That's necessary. Yeah. That number is, we use the number of the residential storage structure
maximum, but that isn't necessarily an ego. It's just a number that we want to be.
Yeah. That's a pretty big number. A little bit lower. Yeah. Yeah. I just think if you're going to say
the addition can only be 1,000, then I don't know why you wouldn't say that anything you're adding would
be 1,000. It just makes more sense. But there might be a comment. So would you recommend changing that?
I'd recommend checking that. Yeah. Yeah. What do you say, Dave? You have actually, you know,
accessory structures that you utilize. You know right. Yeah. One of my smaller buildings is 24 by 48
which is 1152 so that's. For $1200 maybe. What do you think Rudy. Yeah. I don't know. But you're on
a bigger bigger piece of ground than what we would be talking about here right.
What's that? You're on a bigger piece of ground than what we would be talking about here. Correct. And
he's not in the eco zone either. Right. Right. OK. What do you guys think? Because they could apply
for variance. And let's say they wanted to build the 11 square foot barn. Are you going to show us a
example? They could come for variance to the BZA still. It doesn't mean they can never do it. It just
means the BZA can look at it and say, well, yeah, that does work here.
It seems to me that your point about the size of the addition and the size of the structure being the
same, you know, you got another thousand square feet or whatever would be the... If you're really looking
at runoff, like how much runoff are you creating and the volume of that runoff off of roofs and things
like that. So that's my motion is a thousand.
And just to bring up at the ordinance review committee we brought up a few examples of variances from
just last year. So we looked at an example one that only had by calculation 0.24 acres of buildable
and they needed a side setback variance as well. So anytime you need another variance you're not going
to qualify for the exception. So it goes to BCA anyways. So there was no exception for this which was
an addition.
And then this one was going to enclose kind of a deck area, totally on flat area. They are half an acre,
but that requires two and a half acres. So in this case, the exception would apply. The addition was
150 square feet. This one is a proposed pool. It was located on slopes less than 12%, which was the
requirement, 555 square feet. It would qualify.
And then we had one that ended up getting modified. But it wouldn't have been. Their original proposal
would not have fit because they wanted an accessory structure of 3,456 square feet. They have 1.4 acres
and they also wanted to expand the whole 900 square feet. That roof is pink so it's Barney's dream house.
No he wasn't going to qualify. But that was the variances that we just had for that year.
So I think even if we lowered it, we can do a new estimate of the variance as we're seeing 1,000 square
feet is better than zero. I think a lot of people are seeing to just do like a, and this, the way it's
written right now, it doesn't allow for both 1,000 square foot home addition and 1,000 square foot accessory
structure. It does need some of the flexibility. It needs a footprint for the addition
and they could go two stories. Right. We'll do two thousand. That's right. But it's. It's about land
disturbance an acre. So I got a question and if you want to just give me a ballpark. What type of variances
do we see like the size. Are they typically under a thousand foot. As I was mentioning to the ORC we
did the examples but I could go back further and do like four years.
But we've been seeing it's it varies but we've been seeing people that want to do additions we've been
seeing people that want to do accessory structures because we don't have the exception now we haven't
necessarily done the analysis based on square foot size. And I guess my reason for the question is that
these are variances that tend to get approved and that is higher than a thousand then we're not really
fixing anything here. So but I leave it with the hopes that
serve on the BZA or or you to kind of move this forward in the right direction. These gentlemen are
you know I think that um you know they know more about it than I do and I it makes sense to me if it
makes sense to them and there's a process that can help mitigate a property owner who falls outside
of it so I feel good about it. I think it was a good catch Julie.
Thanks Dave. I would like to go ahead and do the analysis. It doesn't take us very long. I can do the
analysis for the regular meeting to attach it to the text amendments and you can see like all the ones
we did. I'll just do like two years. That sounds great. I just want to make sure we're changing it to
kind of for the reason we're discussing it. Sorry after that. That is our last item I think Jackie.
Is there anything else to go over tonight.
No that's not the full entirety of the that's none of the. I don't think I need to go over anything
else. It's very self-explanatory in the upfront. It's nothing major. So. What is the wireless communications
facilities. Yes. That's that's exempt because of state law. No. This one is let's go over it. It's.
Sorry. This is.
I'm so happy to see this. Site plan or plot plan review. So in order for someone to do a wireless
communication facility they submit to us a site plan showing a lease area. Typically it's a hundred
feet by a hundred feet. It's gravel. And what we're getting a lot of is now people want to do like an
additional cabinet or a generator that's just
Very small within that lease area. We have the we already have the site plan that's going on gravel
and they don't tend to love us when we tell them they need a whole site plan and everyone in the everything
to review it for us too. That's true. And that can happen generated when placed on gravel and so. What
we right now requires. Right. And we would need be requiring that. But there are already state laws
regarding this that we have to
you know, approve them on basically either a very fast grade or they just automatically get approved.
So yeah, I only, this is only for amendments. So news, wireless communication, there's no change. My
concern is the noise factor with the generator. Okay. What is the noise factor of one of those generators
and how close does somebody, because you have to have a fall, you have to have a fall of them. So already
you're so many feet away.
The generator's only coming on during an emergency. Yeah, during a power outage. I don't think that
should be a huge concern. I mean, I don't know. I mean, my neighbor would probably turn on their generator.
Mine comes out automatically. I don't have one. Still, you need one. Generator. Okay, I'm good. See
what sticks? This one didn't stick. It's okay. Good.
I think that was the bulk of the checks and amendments but take a look. If you have any other questions
feel free to reach out. This would go to the regular meeting for preliminary hearings and I'll bring
back the analysis mainly for the equipment there or the accessory structure. Okay. Any other questions.
Thank you.
All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.