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CCPC Minutes 03/06/2025March 6, 2025 Page 1 of 45 TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING OF THE COLLIER COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION Naples, Florida March 6, 2025 LET IT BE REMEMBERED that the Collier County Planning Commission, in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein, met on this date at 3:00 p.m., in REGULAR SESSION in Building "F" of the Government Complex, East Naples, Florida, with the following members present: Joe Schmitt, Chairman Paul Shea, Secretary Randy Sparrazza Michael Petscher Michelle L. McLeod Charles "Chap" Colucci Amy Lockhart, Collier County School Board Representative ABSENT: Chuck Schumacher, Vice Chairman ALSO PRESENT: Raymond V. Bellows, Zoning Manager Mike Bosi, Planning and Zoning Director Heidi Ashton-Cicko, Managing Assistant County Attorney Derek Perry, County Attorney's Office Kevin Summers, Manager - Technical Systems Operations Ashley Eoff, Planning Technician March 6, 2025 Page 2 of 45 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. BOSI: Chair, you have a hot mic. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Thank you. And welcome, everyone, to the March 6th, 2025, Collier County Planning Commission meeting. And I'd ask if we'd all please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. (The Pledge of Allegiance was recited in unison.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: If I could ask Commissioner Shea to take the roll, please. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Chairman Schmitt? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I am here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Vice Chair Schumacher, no. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: He has an excused absence. He sent me a note and had a mandatory property meeting he had to attend. Part of his business. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Secretary Shea is here. Commissioner Sparrazza? COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Commissioner Colucci? COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Commissioner McLeod? COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Commissioner Petscher? COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Ms. Lockhart? MS. LOCKHART: Here. COMMISSIONER SHEA: All present except for Commissioner Schumacher. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Commissioner Schumacher. Very good. We have a quorum. Okay. Any addendum to the agenda? MR. BELLOWS: We have no changes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: No changes, all right. Thank you. All right. The next meeting is March 20th, 2025. Are there any projected absences -- those -- anybody who would be absent at that meeting? And, Ray, how many -- we only have one petition for that? MR. BELLOWS: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. I will not be here. I'm out of town. I mean, if it can be moved -- if we want to convene just for one petition. Is it a -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Push it to the 3rd? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, we could. I mean, I -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: The 3rd is a legit date, right? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I'm looking -- let me look at the calendar. I mean, I don't want to change on my behalf, but I'm thinking for all of us to come for one petition. MR. BOSI: It's -- the petition is the Immokalee Senior Center. It is an amendment to an existing PUD. We have -- we have it advertised for the 20th. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes. MR. BOSI: The only problem that I would -- I could foresee -- we could move it if that's the direction of the Board -- or the Planning Commission -- is that running another ad would be extremely difficult to catch the -- because of the time frame associated with it. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. Well, we'll continue as-is. I'll be absent. So we'll have to let Chuck know he's got the hammer. MR. BOSI: Okay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: On a second note, just so everybody's aware, the Board of County Commissioners -- I'm sure you-all been -- at least have seen or read about the proposed Costco on Collier March 6, 2025 Page 3 of 45 Boulevard. And there was a petition that was going to go before the Hearing Examiner. It involved only two issues, both of which the Hearing Examiner could rule on. One was the separation of the gas station and some other architectural embellishments that they want, and signage. We have the authority to approve those as well if they come to us, but the planning -- the Board, my understanding, has directed staff to bring that to our -- to us to hear and to advise the Board. MR. BOSI: Yes. They -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: What was stated? And, Heidi, I think we have the authority to approve that, and the Board could act as the appellate authority, but they've ask -- they're going to -- they've chose to rule on that themselves? MS. ASHTON-CICKO: Yes. They've directed it to be processed like a PUDA for the insubstantial change, and then there will be the companion distance waiver, which they're -- they've requested a recommendation and requested it go to the BZA. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, I think the public is going to be, unfortunately, probably disappointed because we're not here to hear the petition for the zoning. The zoning's already approved. It was approved in 2011, Hacienda Lakes. And so I know the opposition -- there's strong opposition for the Costco to be there, but they could build today even without these minor deviations. So we'll hear it as a PDA, and I'll so advise the people who come to the meeting that -- they want to get up and talk about traffic, but we're not here to deal with that. So it will be an interesting day. So, Mike, I would ask, when you get a date, please coordinate with me so we can make sure that we set enough time aside for this, because I'm sure it will be well attended. MR. BOSI: Yes. And they're -- just to let the Planning Commission know, there was an estimate of 250 individuals at the neighborhood information meeting, so it is one that's got the public's attention. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: So are we going to have to defer out to the sports park maybe for the meeting or -- MR. BOSI: No, I think we're -- we'll maintain here, and we'll -- we are going to have to be -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Have overflow area. MR. BOSI: -- very aggressive in terms of making sure those overflow areas are going to be sufficient. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: A comment, if I may. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Not knowing if this is at all practical or legal, but in the advertisement for the CCPC meeting, is it applicable to have a statement that says something, just as our chairman did, that this is already approved for zoning, to try to educate the public. They can't come in here with 182 people in line saying it's not zoned properly or whatever. Is there any way to slightly educate the folks so that it doesn't waste their time and doesn't waste the -- MR. BOSI: From talking to the project manager, my principal planner, Sean Sammon, who was at the neighborhood information meeting, the agent for Costco reminded the public three or four times that the use was already allowed, and each time it was met with a resounding "boo." So I'm not sure that a blurb within the advertisement -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Would do. MR. BOSI: -- is going to provide any sort of education. I think they want to believe what they want to believe. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. That's just going to be a matter they'll have to access the public record, the documents, and the staff report will have to make that clear in the staff report. MR. BOSI: Absolutely. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Big bold type. Okay, thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: The unfortunate -- well, it's probably poor use of words "unfortunate," but the public is allowed to come in and register their comments, so... Okay. The approval of minutes, we have minutes from February 6th, 2025. Is there a motion to approve? COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: So motion. March 6, 2025 Page 4 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Second anyone? COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Second. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Aye. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Aye. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Aye. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Aye. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All approved, unanimous. Ray, BCC report. MR. BELLOWS: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I think I stole the thunder for one of them. MR. BELLOWS: Yes, but we still had one other. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. MR. BELLOWS: On February 25th, the Board heard the rezone of a 7.4-acre parcel that rezoned from Agriculture to Estates to allow for a three-lot split, and that was approved on their summary agenda. That's all I have. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: When will they be hearing the petition for the facility that we approved? MR. BOSI: Hope Home? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. MR. BOSI: That was going to be the second meeting, the 22nd of March. The agent, Mr. Yovanovich, requested that that be pushed out to the second meeting in April, and -- which was okay with staff because that was going to be the second of the controversial items that was going to be on the March 22nd hearing. So it's going to be the 22nd of April. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: ***Okay. All right. With that, we'll go to the first public hearing, public petition. This is PL20240006561. That's Sierra Meadows PUDA - Rattlesnake Hammock Road and CR951. And if I could ask all those to rise and take the oath who wish to speak. THE COURT REPORTER: Do you swear or affirm the testimony you will give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? (The speakers were duly sworn and indicated in the affirmative.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any disclosures? MS. LOCKHART: None. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Starting with Amy. Go ahead. MS. LOCKHART: Text materials only. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Chap? COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Text materials only. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Staff materials only. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Staff materials only for me. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Staff material only. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Staff materials only. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Staff material, met with staff, and then visited the site. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. And with that? MS. PASSIDOMO: Good afternoon. Francesca Passidomo, for the record, on behalf of the petitioner, the Morgan Companies. I have a whole team here with me today, and we have a full presentation. In respect of your time, we can summarize by we agree with staff's analysis. This is an approved PUD. We see this as almost a glitch to bring an existing facility into the commonly issued deviation for assisted living facilities. With that, we can go through the presentation if you'd like or answer any questions. March 6, 2025 Page 5 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, I would just ask, since we're here till 5 o'clock anyway. MS. PASSIDOMO: In respect of that time. MR. BELLOWS: Can you stretch it out? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And you're welcome to stay here with us. But just for the record, could -- just highlight what you're asking for on the record, and that way it's -- anybody that's watching will know and understand what you're asking for in regards to the floor area ratio and what you're asking us to vote on. So with that, I mean, you don't have to go into great detail, but I would like just, for the record, the background as to what this involves. Thank you. MS. PASSIDOMO: Absolutely. This is an existing PUD from 1999, Sierra Meadows. We are basically here today because the Discovery Village assisted living facility that was constructed some time ago was constructed utilizing the floor area ratio in the PUD in the code, which is .6, but in order to obtain -- achieve the .6 floor area ratio, it artificially encumbered a lot that is not actually developed. What that did was create a lot that could theoretically never be developed, though that's inconsistent with the intent of the PUD, the activity center, and infill development. So what we're here today to do is essentially allow the floor area ratio to be consistent with deviations issued for PUDs today, which is from .6 in the code to .45. That will allow Discovery Village to remain in its location exactly as it's configured on the lots today but will free up that artificially encumbered lot for development. The development is expected to be commercial. It's expected to be exactly consistent with the PUD allocated square footage. There's significantly more square footage in the PUD than is developed today. We're not asking for any adjustments to uses or anything of that nature. So it's really just the deviation for the floor area ratio. But I wanted you to understand kind of the context. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: So, in a nutshell, there's no change to the existing building. It's just the land that you now want to develop is no longer included in the calculation of the floor area ratio? MS. PASSIDOMO: Ultimately, yes, that's the outcome. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. I'll ask staff a question. But anything else you'd like to add to the record? MS. PASSIDOMO: We respectfully request your recommendation of approval. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Any questions from panel members? (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Staff, we've had discussions over the years about floor area ratio. One of our former colleagues, it was always discussed. And I never really had an issue with the -- was it -- was the issue at one time they thought .45 was too small or too small of a floor area ratio? MR. BOSI: The LDC, when it was codified, .45 was the standard for floor area ratio. But over time and over the last 20 years, we have seen, almost routinely, if we have an ALF being proposed, that ALF is seeking a deviation, but a deviation from a floor area ratio from .45 to .6. So it's one of the things that -- and I would -- and I would think -- and this might be the time that -- asking the Planning Commission to direct staff to amend the LDC to modify the standard for floor area ratios that would be applied to assisted living facilities to the standard of .6 instead of the .45, which seems to be outdated. And like I said, every request that we've had -- and we've never denied that deviation based upon that past practice. If the Planning Commission saw it fit and directed staff -- because we really can't bring an LDC amendment to the table unless we're directed to by the Board of County Commissioners, by the DSAC, by the EAC, or by the Planning Commission. If you directed us to, we could work on an LDC amendment to bring that up to code and, therefore, you could alleviate those deviations from future PUDs. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, the perception was at one time, if the floor area ratio was .6, that the rooms would be too small, that it would be not really conducive to assisted living facility, but we routinely approve these. So I would make a recommendation that we direct staff to bring back an LDC amendment through the next series of LDC amendments to change that, because it's been routine. That almost -- .6 has almost been routine as far as I know. So anybody want to make -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: Where did the .45 come from? MR. BOSI: It was -- when I started here in 2002, that was the standard that was in the LDC. March 6, 2025 Page 6 of 45 COMMISSIONER SHEA: But it came from somewheres. MR. BOSI: It probably came from this research -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: Your only reason you want to change it is because we keep changing it. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Right. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Like, we have no -- what's the basis for it, is my question. MR. BOSI: Well, the basis for a floor area ratio is intensity. So it limits the intensity. So the floor area ratio is whatever your acreage of your PUD is -- if your floor area ratio is 1, whatever that square footage translates, you're allowed to build to that square footage. So anything below 1 says that you will not be able to build on every square foot of your parcel of land. And I think .45 was a -- kind of governor on intensity to make sure than these ALFs were only on less than half of the acreage that could be provided for. And if there was any -- and if there's any vertical aspect to it, it's even on a smaller footprint in terms of, you know, it minimizing its impact. Point 6 would just give them an extra -- an extra allotted amount of square foot to be able to provide for all of the amenities. And I think that's another thing that probably has changed over time. The amount of amenities that were associated with assisted living facilities and how assisted living facilities have changed towards where they have independent living. They have some semi kind of monitored living, and then full -- you know, the full care as well. So because of that, I think the size needs of ALFs have changed as well. So I can't tell you exactly why that it was .45 other than a limited intensity, and that was probably, at the time, what was commonplace throughout various like communities in the state of Florida for assisted living. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. And it had to do with -- and Patrick just put up a slide. But it had to do with size of the buildings, setback allowed, a lot of other things, and I guess, really, what could be built on the allowable space, and it was to try and control the size and mass. But I mean, if we -- I would -- when you come back -- and I would ask we vote on it, or we could direct the vote, but you would have to go through the entire history of that as part of the LDC amendment as well. MR. BOSI: Yeah. That would be part of the writeup that we would establish as part of -- our LDC amendment team would do the research, find out why -- you know, how it was originally established and then the course of time and how -- you know, the number of times it's been utilized to provide the justification for what we're doing. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Mike, is there any value to keeping .45 somehow in the language? MR. BOSI: I don't know if there's any value, because if you go to .6, anything that was developed at .45 is still compliant. So it doesn't create any legal nonconformities. So even having a reference back to .45, I think other than just harkening back to the good ole days, it doesn't really provide a real benefit to the individual reader. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Patrick, did you want to add something? MR. VANASSE: Yeah. For the record, Patrick Vanasse. Just to add a little more color. I started a year after Mike in this county and -- back in 2003. And I recall when we were facing these issues, a lot of times we -- on these projects way back then, we were looking at converting residential to assisted living. And the typical conversion was four-to-one. And when we started -- and I remember we had worked on some projects where we looked at four units to one. How many can you fit in a building if you're going to use a standard size for an ALF unit? And that's how it came up to roughly .6. And eventually, we stopped justifying it through all that detailed mathematics, and it became the standard. So just a little color as to why that .6 kind of became the standard. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: But it really doesn't impact, or does it? That's my question -- the size of the room that you're offering to the patron who is moving into the ALF? The room's the room. MR. VANASSE: That's it. It doesn't -- it doesn't impact the number of rooms and the number of residents and the number of trips generated. It does allow for a little more square footage on the property. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Paul. COMMISSIONER SHEA: So since we have a lot of time, I'd like to look at that slide. So when you talk about floor area ratio -- so if I have a 10-story building, do I count the square footage of all 10 floors? MR. BOSI: Yeah. MR. VANASSE: Yes. And depending on the jurisdictions, there are expectations sometimes for underbuilding parking that doesn't get counted. March 6, 2025 Page 7 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: That's right. Michelle. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I was just going to mention that, too, since Patrick's here and the chart's right here, just explaining that a little bit. MR. VANASSE: So what you have -- and I think the easiest way to look at FAR is to look at graphics, because it otherwise can be a little difficult to handle abstractly. So what you have there is you have examples of a floor area ratio at 1.0, 4.0, and 9.0. The easy one to use is the first one. So 1.0 means that if you've got a property that is, let's say, 10,000 square feet, the size of the property itself, you have a 1.0 ratio. Your building can be 10,000 square feet. What the graphic shows you is the way you stack the 10,000 square feet is up to you. So in some cases you could do one story that encompasses the entire property, or you could do 5,000 square feet on half the property and 5,000 square feet on top of that. So that's a 1.0. And then the other example is you can just kind of extend that logic to the other ones. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So the only thing that would look different of what is constructed on Lot 6, it's probably going to be higher, right? MR. VANASSE: Well, Lot 6 is already constructed. So we're coming in -- so not Lot 6, but Discovery Village, and the FAR would apply to Discovery Village. That's already developed. That's already constructed. It's in place. It's been operating successfully. Lot 6 is encumbered because of the calculation. And it's not going to change anything associated with Lot 6. Lot 6 has always been slated for a commercial tract, commercial development, and there is ample square footage left from a commercial standpoint in that PUD for them to develop. So it's really just correcting that glitch. MS. PASSIDOMO: I'll just -- I just wanted to help you, Michelle. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay, thanks. MS. PASSIDOMO: So this -- the reason that this slide is important hypothetically, as you're going through code changes, is irrespective of the petition in front of you today. The petition in front of you today is really looking at what was built on what property, and it's the property that is the issue, because the denominator of the calculation is not only the -- yeah. Not only the land on which Discovery Village is actually built. So there's no intensification. It exists. But in order to achieve a .45 floor area ratio, they said this vacant lot, we're going to -- we're going to include you in the denominator, but they actually only built on the parcels that you can see the facility constructed on. So if you change floor area ratio and it increases height or it has impacts and you talk about the code changes in the future, I don't think that has any application, and I wanted to try to avoid that discussion today because I don't think that that's relevant to the petition in front of you. The petition in front of you is looking at a deviation exclusively to allow what exists today to exist in the future but only on the properties where it was actually constructed. The outcome is that Lot 6, which is now vacant, can be developed for commercial because that artificial encumbrance including it in the denominator, that no longer applies. And I would just finish with Lot 6 and Lot 7 are the only really vacant properties in Sierra Meadows at this point. There's, I think, 85,000 square feet, something like that, of square footage remaining in the PUD. We expect that Lot 6 will have something like a Starbucks and another retail sort of commercial neighborhood use. So we think that these are compatible, complementary uses. And Patrick can get into all that as you need to. But for the focus today, it -- that larger discussion on what FAR is and intensification, I think, is completely irrelevant because this is built on two lots, and we just want that to be a conforming situation. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: And then one other -- so you're saying that right now it's nonconforming and you just want to -- MS. PASSIDOMO: It's conforming only by encumbering Lot 6 artificially, never allowing Lot 6 to be developed, which is not consistent with the PUD. So in our opinion, this creates a conformity. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. That's clear. Well, how about we -- staff -- do we have anybody second that for staff to come -- look at this as a future LDC amendment? Any seconds? COMMISSIONER SHEA: I second. March 6, 2025 Page 8 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Second. Okay. All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: (No verbal response.) COMMISSIONER SHEA: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Aye. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Aye. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Aye. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any opposed? (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: No. Okay. So staff is directed by us to come back at some future date to look at the FAR. Now, with regards to this, staff report -- Francesca, we're good. But staff report on this? MR. BOSI: Mike Bosi, Planning and Zoning director. Staff has reviewed the petition, as the petitioner said. We feel that the increase to .6 is consistent with past actions. It's already a developed property, and the end result it allows Lot 6 to host some of the commercial uses that were intended to serve the neighboring residential communities within this area. And because of that, we are most certainly supporting the petition and recommending approval. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. I see no other commissioners are showing that they want to speak. So is there any motion from my fellow commissioners? COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Well, yeah. I move we approve the petition as written. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. And a second, anybody? COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Second. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Randy second. All in favor, say aye. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Aye. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Aye. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Aye. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Aye. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any opposed, like sign. (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: No opposition. I do think, though, we ought to go through the entire slide deck just because we're terribly bored. COMMISSIONER SHEA: And they spent a lot of time putting it -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Spent a lot of time putting it up. But anyways, thank you. It's approved as proposed. ***And the next item we're going to go to are the presentations by staff for -- those are now annual requirements, are they not, the training that we're going to go through? MR. BOSI: Not an annual. I mean, it's not an annual requirement. We haven't -- periodically, we've came back when we've had new planning commissioner members, but it happens every other year, so -- but it was specifically requested, especially with three new planning commissioners, and I'm just going to go over the basics of why and where -- what you're here, where the focus should be, how -- some common questions that were submitted to us that were just of, I think, a review for the benefit of the new planning commissioners and kind of brush up with some of the older planning commissioners. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Francesca, you can stay. I mean, I know you really are interested in this. MS. PASSIDOMO: Only if I can go through all of the slides, painfully, one by one. Thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Thank you. I think Patrick is staying here for the Immokalee. MR. VANASSE: Yes. March 6, 2025 Page 9 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Mike, I thought -- I thought it was now an annual requirement for us to do online training. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I thought that, too. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: I thought it was new only. MS. LOCKHART: Sunshine. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Not Sunshine, but other -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Sunshine, ethics, and -- the training that you included here, I thought for -- all appointed and elected officials now have to do it annually. MR. BOSI: I will have to check the statute for that. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Heidi, isn't there now an annual requirement for us to do it either online or otherwise to have to go through the training anyway, both ethics, Sunshine, and its -- what's the third one? MR. BOSI: Planning Commission roles -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. Well, not the rules, but primarily ethics and Sunshine. I've had to do it for other boards. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I know. Me, too. MS. LOCKHART: Yeah, me too. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: But I heard you only have to do it once, and it suffices for all your boards you're on for that year, because I'm on other boards, too. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, anyways, we're going to do it. We've got the time. MR. BOSI: We will review statutes and check to see if that is, indeed, a newer requirement that we -- but that will satisfy it. So with that -- and we are going to lean upon a past presentation that was put together by Mr. Klatzkow and Assistant County Attorney Ms. Askar because they are from the legal department. They will -- you know, it's been vetted, and it has been approved for its content, let's say. And one of the questions that we had -- by the Planning Commission, "Why are we here? Why are we here?" And basically we point to the Florida Statutes as a requirement. Every jurisdiction, every county is required to have a local LPA, land planning agency, and you are the land planning agency for Collier County. Chapter 250, Special Acts of the Florida Legislature was -- enumerates all those rules and responsibilities, which we'll go through as part of this -- as part of this presentation, as well as the local Code of Laws and Ordinances, Section 2-1156 to 2-1164. And I'm not going to read everything here to you, but basically, here's the statute that says, 163.3174, the governing body of each local government, individually or a combination, as provided for in 163.3171 shall designate and, by ordinance, establish a local LPA, local planning agency, unless otherwise established by law, notwithstanding any special act to the contrary, local planning agencies or equivalent agencies that first review zoning and comprehensive plan amendments in each municipality and county shall include a representative of the school district, Ms. Lockhart, appointed by the school board as a nonvoting member to the planning agency or equivalent agency to attend those meetings. Basically, so this is -- this is the statute saying we need to have an LPA and we need a member of the school district, and that member of the school district, harkens back to the early aughts of this millennial when we were incorporating school concurrency within the process of local government, and that's where -- Tom Eastman was the first representative from the school district, and Ms. Lockhart has taken over since then. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Hey, Mike. MR. BOSI: Yes. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Back to the slide you were on. What does this last sentence mean? I assume that means the governing body being the County Commissioners? MR. BOSI: Correct. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Okay. MR. BOSI: The governing body may designate itself as a local LPA pursuant to the subsection -- COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Well, if they didn't want us, they can do it themselves, correct? MR. BOSI: They could do it themselves, but I think in wisdom, they recognize that there is a definite March 6, 2025 Page 10 of 45 benefit of having a Planning Commission vet the issues prior to it getting to the Board of County Commissioners just so they're -- a better understanding of where the public stands, of where -- the issues that the Planning Commission raise, some of the -- and they really do rely upon the Planning Commission to provide for the additional conditions of approval, the additional measures of compatibility to be able to -- when they hear it, they have a -- there's very little times are they adding additional components. But it is acting upon the areas that you have asked -- you have asked the Board to pay special attention to in respect to, you know, what needs to be included within those recommendations of approval. So specifically, you have the general responsibility -- this is responsibilities from the statute. The LPA have the general responsibility for conducting the Comprehensive Planning program, which is our Growth Management Plan, specifically related to any amendments that you think are appropriate to the Growth Management Plan, and it is within your purview to make a recommendation to the Board of County Commissioners that you feel that an area needs to be looked at, reviewed from a GMP perspective through that lens. Also, monitoring the effectiveness of the Comprehensive Plan. The number of -- I mean, it is one of the things the Planning Commission could arrive upon. I think what we did today was another example of the Planning Commission recognizing that here is an issue related to floor area ratio that's been -- that's been requested to be changed from what our standard is to a higher standard over the past 15 years, 20 years. Why don't we just make that the standard; therefore, we're not going to have to -- the applicant community is not going to have to request it. So identifying planning issues that are pertinent to the community is one of the -- one of the main issues that you have outside of reviewing the individual petitions that you're -- that are before you as well. Like I said, review and propose development regulations, Land Development Code and amendments, and making recommendations making sure that those LDC amendments that come before you are consistent with the -- with the Growth Management Plan and the Growth Management Plan amendments that have motivated those LDC amendments to be brought forward. Perform other functions and duties, responsibilities assigned by the Board in general by special law. Asking you to take a step out and review a petition that normally would have went to the HEX, but they've wanted the Planning Commission's recommendation, and they wanted you to have the first crack at sorting through the public commentary and finding out where the issues were and where the fault -- where the fault lines are. Those are things that they especially will task of the Planning Commission. And this is now just a procedural requirement, you know, all of your meetings are open to the public and shall, you know, be part of the public records. And this is -- gets -- related to function, powers, and duties. One of -- another thing just to -- one of the activities that used to be a very diligent and demanded activity was a process called the EAR report, and the EAR report was an Evaluation and Appraisal Report of our Comprehensive Plan, and those are required every seven years. And it is -- staff goes out, analyzes all of the elements of the Comprehensive Plan, will make some suggestions that we think is appropriate for modifications -- change, modifications, update, make sure everything's current, in current -- aligned with the statutes. The Planning Commission's role is to oversee that, is to make sure staff did their job, and then to look at what those suggestions were, and then to build upon those suggestions in terms of telling the Board of County Commissioners, this is where our -- or this is where our Growth Management Plan maybe needs to be shored up a little bit, whether it be the Conservation and Coastal Management Element, maybe it's the Future Land Use Element, maybe it's the Transportation Element, the Economic Element, the Property Rights Element. There's a number of different areas. And a lot of those elements, the Planning Commission's not going to deal with. You touch a lot with the Housing Element, touch a lot with the Future Land Use Element, the CCME, and the Transportation Element, but there are some other elements that are out there like the Economic Development Element that every now and then does come into your guys' purview. And you can see from the rest, perform any other duties which may lawfully be assigned to you. That is one of those things, like I said, the Board just recently did. Another of different -- suggesting different policy suggestions for the Board to consider, that's within your purview. Any time you can tell staff, if you hear a March 6, 2025 Page 11 of 45 petition and it -- and it encroaches upon a policy issue that you think that maybe needs to be updated or looked at, it's within your purview to say to staff, "We want a recommendation related to this issue to be studied further by staff and be brought back to the Planning Commission and the Board for consideration for an amendment." So it does -- you -- it gives you the position of a driver's seat to say things that you feel that are LDC or are GMP are not meeting the needs of the current environment from a petition review standpoint, from an ask of what the development industry is asking for, if you feel there's some areas that we have need to update or we need to put more focus upon, is absolutely within your purview. I think one of the -- that case has happened a -- one or two times, and it's come from one of our newer members, Ms. McLeod, when she has asked about are there any plans for conversion of septic to sewer in some of these areas that we've dealt with before. And recommendations can come from the Planning Commission to say, "We think this is an area or this is a concept that needs to be further explored and addressed by staff" and then reviewed by the Planning Commission and ultimately out for the Board to consider some modifications, whether it be in the Land Development Code or whether it be in the Growth Management Plan. Again, this gets back to the local -- the local codes of law, and a lot of its repeating of what the state statute says. You know, preparing the GMP element, reviewing LDC and LDC amendments, hearing -- making recommendations related to text changes to the GMP and the LDC. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So can I ask questions throughout or -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, go ahead. MR. BOSI: It's pretty informal. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So we do do an annual meeting -- I mean, an annual report? We do annual. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: We do the AUIR. MR. BOSI: The AUIR is our annual report on the capital improvement program and the needs of the community to meet the demands of our Concurrency Management System, yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Staff prepares the AUIR, and part of that is the CIE, the Capital Improvement Element, where they discuss all of the -- what do you call it? MR. BOSI: The new construction to be able to handle the expected growth in the five-year period. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, and all of the demands on public services we review. Everything -- and the AUIR typically covers everything from water, sewer, trash, EMS. MR. BOSI: Even -- even our inland beaches and -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes. MR. BOSI: Beach renourishment as well. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: When do we do that report? MR. BOSI: You reviewed it in November. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. All right. MR. BOSI: It was one of your first -- one of your first items that you guys heard. It was -- it was where we -- we had our Transportation Planning, we had our Utilities, we had our -- the Sheriff's Office. It was all the capital improvement programs that we were going to be providing over the next five and 10 years. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And in the past, some of those meetings we spent over two days reviewing. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: The last couple years they've been pretty perfunctory. Really, they have. But it's something we can look at again coming up again when they do the annual report. If those areas -- you want to cover in detail, I mean, we can cover that in detail. Typically, the rest of the staff -- and we're talking the constitutional officers and -- are all at our beck and call to review each of the elements. MR. BOSI: Correct. And the Board of County Commissioners -- and maybe they were acting upon the Planning Commission's recommendation, because you remember in our capital improvement program, we were somewhat $635 million short of our $2.5 billion program. And it was to review the shortfall and identify a means to close that gap. The Board of County Commissioners approved the AUIR, didn't spend a lot of time talking about, but then asked for a specific workshop to dig into the AUIR in much more specificity, get into the levels of service that are standard -- that are set, and those level-of-service dictate how much we build, because transportation, March 6, 2025 Page 12 of 45 utilities, public -- or libraries, EMS, fire response time, Sheriff response time, EMS response time, parks and recreation, school district, all of those have certain levels of service that we are required to build to, and if we think we're providing too much or too little, modifications to those levels of service will dictate and will change what those outputs are in the five- or 10-year period. And another important point, I think we try to call this out to you before you guys take any action on items. You also -- we used to have a separate advisory board, the EAC, Environmental Advisory Council. That's been rolled into the Planning Commission with two individual members who are representatives from the environmental community -- or from environmental disciplines sitting on the Planning Commission to help with that role. But that's a more recent activity in terms of -- I think that was 2012/13 where the EAC got rolled into the Planning Commission as well. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. That was a primarily staff recommendation, and then the Board of County Commissioners. It was just very laborious for, especially -- it was more the development community were very -- it was costly, and it was very time consuming and, typically, to go through EAC, Planning Commission, and the Board it could be 15 to 20 months trying to go through that process. And so that was an attempt to try and streamline it a little bit. MR. BOSI: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Paul. COMMISSIONER SHEA: So getting back to the Growth Management Plan, the original plan is over 20 years old or whatever. Other than the individual petitions that we approved that are Growth Management Plan amendments, does the staff have, and the Planning Commission have the obligation to look at this 25-year-old plan and say, we need to update the overall plan? Not just -- not just petition by petition. MR. BOSI: Yes, we do. And the last time we did that was 2021. The Growth Management Plan is 20 -- or 36 years old. It is -- EAR reports have been done every seven years since it's been adopted. The reason why we had the Rural Lands Stewardship Area and the reason we have the Rural Fringe Mixed-Use District was in 1997 we did an Evaluation and Appraisal Report, and the State of Florida said we weren't doing an adequate job of protecting agricultural land to the conversion of nonagricultural land, and we weren't doing an adequate job of protecting the environment. And from that 1997 EAR report, we had a 1990 final order, and that final order said, "Collier County, you're not allowed to amend your Growth Management Plan until you address these issues related to the premature conversion." It was roughly about 280,000 acres of land that was zoned at one to five. And if we built out at one to five, from an environmental standpoint that would be very tough and a negative situation. But from a cost standpoint, a cost of service standpoint, that would be a tremendous burden upon the county. One of the things that I say during the AUIR and the CIE is the primary -- one of the primary components of cost of providing service is distance, and the more distance you have your houses from each other, the more cost it provides [sic] to provide services. So you can think of a fire station. A fire station in the urbanized area, at our old levels of service, was one fire station for about 11,500 residents. Well, in the urbanized area, you can have that in a relatively close proximity, and it doesn't affect the response time because there's enough houses in close proximity to where that fire station is. When you get out to the Estates, that same level of 11,500 people, you might be in a -- you might be in a 12-mile radius that that's going to cover, and then it starts negatively affecting their ability to respond. So that's just one example. Another one of the things that we discovered when we were -- we were working on the East of 951 Study back in '05 and '06 was the extension of water and sewer to the Estates lots east of 951. The price tag on that, in 2005 and 2006, was $122,000 per lot. And if you would extrapolate that now, the cost would be well, probably, over $200,000. But the only reason I call that out is to show the relationship between distance and providing of services. So when you have sprawl -- and I don't want to say that the Estates are sprawl, but when you have -- when you have large lot zoning like one unit per two and a quarter acres, providing services to those individuals can be -- is costly, and we actually have, within our response times within our EMS and with our fire districts, the rural area has a higher response time. Their level of service is 16 minutes or, you know, 15 minutes, wherein the urbanized March 6, 2025 Page 13 of 45 area it's eight, and that has everything to do with the footprint that those stations are able to cover. But another thing I wanted to point out that -- what it also does -- we have within our Codes of Laws it says, for the Planning Commission to move forward, you need a quorum, and the quorum is always four. So you need four. And for -- when you have four individual members, you would need a simple majority for that to pass. Obviously that would be 3-1. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Four in person. Four in person, right? MR. BOSI: Four -- and we have clarified that it has to be in person now, yes. Also, this is a bit dated, community development. That means -- that means growth management. Myself, my staff, I'm the professional staff for the Planning Commission. Ray is your official liaison, but we are your staff. We are the ones who carry out the -- if there was a study that you wanted to perform, we would be the entity that would -- that would carry that out based upon whatever direction or whatever issue that you were seeking that you felt was necessary that you guys felt was -- needed to be picked up and analyzed in relationship to the planning, zoning, and development of the county. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Does that have to be approved by the Chair before it's carried out by staff? MR. BOSI: The majority of the Planning Commission. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Typically, if there's something we want them to do, we would -- we would -- just like we did for the LDC, we discuss, bring it up for a motion, and vote as a majority vote to direct staff. MR. BOSI: If a simple majority of the Planning Commission wants us to go out and evaluate the benefits of street trees, we would -- if we added that benefit, we'd go out, and we'd tackle that in the most capable way that we could. Additional functions, duties, respons- -- it's the -- you know, Comprehensive Planning is the responsibility of the Planning Commission. Also hear land use to make recommendations, approval or deny to the BCC. Those are within your rezones. Certain rezones -- or certain conditional uses come to you. Those are the conditional uses that do require the EAC. So if it is a conditional use that rises to the threshold where there is environmental issues associated with it and the EAC is involved, you will hear those conditional uses as well. Also, any -- reviewing any code amendments for the compliance with the GMP but also reviewing any GMP language is another component. And I'll also get into the issue of the difference between quasi-judicial and legislative. The quasi-judicial is your rezoning, your conditional uses, your land-use petitions for the most part. LDC amendments, Growth Management Plan amendments, those are your legislative. Different standard of review, different standard of criteria for how those would be reviewed and how they're approved. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. MR. BOSI: No, go ahead. And please -- and this is as -- this is for you more so than for me, so whatever, if you ever want to interrupt and question, just -- as long as the Chair would agree with that. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, please. I mean, this is informal, so, yeah. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I get asked in the community a lot some -- whatever's coming up, does that have to go before the Planning Commission or not, and sometimes I know and sometimes I don't. And I don't know what comes before HELOCS [sic] versus us, and things like that. So can you kind of explain that? MR. BOSI: Sure. Anything that adds a land use or adds intensity is something that is going to be evaluated by the Planning Commission: A PUD, a PUD amendment, a rezone, a Growth Management Plan amendment, a conditional use that requires EAC. All of those are the -- are your traditional type of petitions that would be reviewed. The HEX, the majority of his petitions are boat dock extensions and variances. Variances, we always say, are very local. Variances affect the properties for the most part that are adjoining that property that's seeking a variance; whereas, a PUD rezone or a GMP amendment can affect the entire county or can affect a neighborhood, and because of that, that status is elevated to the Planning Commission where we have -- we have a seven-member body and -- that will be able to hear and make deliberations and make recommendations to the Board of County Commissioners. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Just to reiterate, Michelle, that -- what was it, Mike, 2008 or '09 when we finally got the HEX approved? It was before that. March 6, 2025 Page 14 of 45 MR. BOSI: I believe the HEX, '11 -- I think it was '11. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, I was gone from staff by that time. We pushed for it for a couple of years. My years on staff, I can recall simple variances. I mean, a side yard encroachment, which the HEX handles today, those would go all the way to the Board of County Commissioners. And it was -- we would be in here, meetings till, you know, all hours of the day and into the evening over a 2-foot encroachment or whatever, and those were handled by the BCC, which just became -- I mean, to the point of "We've got to do something about this," and the HEX now handles that. As Mike said, it's typically just two neighboring properties. Ray does send to us -- and, Mike, we get what the HEX is going to hear, and if there's something we think we ought to pull from the HEX, we have the authority to do that. I remember even here with boat docks extensions, we would go for an hour and a half, two hours on a boat dock extension because of riparian rights because of a neighbor, and I can't move my boat. And I mean, it would -- now fortunately some of those are handled by the HEX. MR. BOSI: And what I would say is that is a -- I think that's an advent because of the growth of this county. I mean, we're close to 415,000 permanent population. The amount of -- the items that go before the Planning Commission and the Board have been elevated to more of a substantial quality. And not to diminish the importance of a boat dock extension or a variance, but they are very local. They really affect the adjoining -- the two adjoining neighbors to the property or the individuals who maybe use that -- a specific waterway. Most jurisdictions of our size, you know, will have a Planning Commission, a Hearing Examiner, as well as a Board of County Commissioners which divides up the petitions in a way that's more efficient. And I think the advent of the Hearing Examiner was one of the wiser decisions this county did make, because it really has allowed the Planning Commission to spend the time on the issues that are most important to the community and allow the HEX to hear and dispense of the areas [sic]. We'll go through two boat dock extensions and a variance in 45 minutes through the -- through the Hearing Examiner. Most of the time there's not a lot of public involvement, so it's straight, what are the criteria? What's being done? So what comes before the Planning Commission is anything that's going to add a land use, an amendment to a PUD, a new PUD, a rezoning, a Growth Management Plan amendment, or a Land Development Code amendment. Those are all the things you guys will hear, as well as eventually EAR reports, because we will have to do another EAR report here in 2028, which we'll have to start in 2026, just how comprehensive they can be. But like I said, I think it is one of the more advantageous decisions this county did make. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Paul -- before I go to Paul, Mike, if anybody appeals the HEX ruling, does that come to us, or does that go to the Board? MR. BOSI: It goes to the Board, and the only one who can -- it's really -- we've had this issue. The only one who can appeal a HEX decision to the Board of County Commissioners is you have to be a party. And the only two parties within a HEX decision is the applicant and the county. So if you have adjoining property owners that object to a HEX decision, they can't appeal to the BZA. They have to appeal to the Circuit Court. That's per the rules. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: That was the -- actually, a godsend, because we were -- we would be dealing with, I can remember, back -- or side yard encroachments or whatever, and it would -- it would be five-, six-hours meeting, public involved, everything. And it was extremely laborious. And now that's -- I didn't realize that. So the appeal would just go to the Court. So if it's neighboring property -- MR. BOSI: If it's a neighboring property owner that objects, they would object to the Circuit Court. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Circuit Court. Paul? MR. BOSI: And so -- oh, I'm sorry. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Since we have another hour. MR. BOSI: Yeah. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Can we stay -- yeah. I've been around for a while here, and I still get March 6, 2025 Page 15 of 45 confused with that quasi-judicial and legislative. I understand legislative's setting policy. MR. BOSI: Yeah. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Quasi-judicial is implementing it or interpreting it. Can you give me some examples of what we see that would be legislative? MR. BOSI: It's funny -- I didn't ask you to ask that question. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: You did. MR. BOSI: Troy, I need -- I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to show you another thing I prepared just because I thought that question would come up. So today you heard the Sierra Meadows Planned Unit Development, and it requested to go from .45 to .6. Every staff report that you guys get for a PUD amendment, a rezoning, a GMP -- not the GMP amendment, because this is -- we're talking only quasi-judicial -- a rezoning, a PUD, or a PUD amendment, whenever you get one of those, you're going to have the staff report, and that staff report talks about, okay, what's your requested action? It starts off, this tells you what they're looking to do in general, and then it gives you a context of here's the location, here's the general description. Here's your surrounding land uses. Here's your Growth Management Plan consistency. Here's your staff analysis where you get into your environmental, your transportation, utility, your zoning. All these have value. But what you're looking at is when you go, the things that I have highlighted, those are your quasi-judicial criteria. These are the things that make it quasi-judicial. These are the check boxes that need to be checked so that you can confirm that we're not running afoul of any one of these evaluations. If you're going to make a recommendation, you're making a recommendation because you feel that all of these have been satisfied, or if you're going to suggest a condition, an additional condition, an additional buffer, higher wall, more enhanced landscaping, lower the height, that you would -- you could point to -- why would you think? Well, I think it's going to have a negative effect upon adjoining property owners, and you can point to the criteria. I could read every single one of them. They are in your staff report. Whether the proposed change will meet -- be consistent with the goals, objectives, policies, Future Land Use Map, and the GMP element. That's a pretty wide standard. But those are the things that you would cite to say whether -- if you wanted to impose an additional condition or, more importantly, if you get to an area where -- and it has been before where the Planning Commission felt that the petition wasn't supportable. Well -- and the County Attorney will ask you, you know, can you state your reasons why that you're recommending denial. If you want to recommend denial and you feel that the Planning -- or the petition did not meet any one of the either rezone findings, existing land-use pattern, creation of isolated district, boundaries illogically drawn. Does the passage of time make the rezoning necessary? Adversely influence living conditions of a neighborhood; that is -- that's a good one to think of because that's subjective. One of the things about compatibility -- and I always tell, what's compatibility to me, what's compatibility to Ray, what's compatibility to Joe, what's compatible to Mi -- is inherent within the individual experiences that I've had within my life. What I think's appropriate and compatible is very subjective. So if you cite that and you say, "Well, I think that it creates too much of a traffic concern or that it's too much of a visual impact upon your adjacent property owner," no matter how good their lawyers may be, they can't argue with that's your determination. That's your determination of compatibility. So if you feel that a project is not meeting the muster, fall back upon -- fall back upon that that -- you feel that it is going to negatively adverse the impacts of the existing neighborhood. And you are very well protected in that because you can defend it. You can defend it and say, I think it's going to have this effect upon the neighborhood, and that's a criteria that a rezoning has to pass. And in my mind, it didn't. So whenever you're going through a review and if you feel -- don't feel like the material that was submitted to you and what you've heard from the public, that the petition doesn't meet the merits and you want to deny that petition, look through these and pick one of those, and that's what you would be able to defend that position on. Every single one of your rezones will have these criteria. You'll have your rezone criteria, and then we also have -- which is 17, or 18, which is just, you know, other factors of your criteria that the Board of County Commissioners they'll deem important to protecting public health and safety and welfare. And then you've got March 6, 2025 Page 16 of 45 your PUD findings. So these are all -- those are your quasi-judicial -- those are your quasi-judicial criteria. So there's no more mystery. Legislative, LDC amendments, and GMP amendments, those are legislative. Everything else that you hear, there's a set list of criteria. One of the things I was talking to the Chair about, about the -- you know, the potential Costco petitions coming to you -- and I was speaking to some of the folks that weren't supportive of it. I said, put your focus upon what the criteria are within each one of those applications, and that's where you have to put your focus of how you feel or doesn't feel it's meeting those criteria, because that's the only justification. That's competent -- that's competent evidence that the Planning Commission will be forced to evaluate. But if you just get up and say, "I don't like it because I don't like it," that's just a statement of a statement that doesn't have a lot of weight or factor or bearing upon, you know, the decision-making or the process. So I'm glad you asked that question because I had -- I really wanted to highlight these are the things, every time that you have your staff report, the quasi-judicial nature is called out within the rezone findings and the PUD findings. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Give me an example of a legislative act that we would -- something legislative. MR. BOSI: Growth Management Plan amendment that you had for a specific affordable housing project. Small-scale GMP. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Small-scale GMP Plan amendment -- MR. BOSI: Small-scale GMP Plan amendment. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: -- or LDC amendment are -- MR. BOSI: LDC amendments that you're going to be reviewing, those are legislative as well. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Okay. MR. BOSI: Now, the LDC amendments have a special twist to them. The LDC amendments are not -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: You said "amendments." You're talking about what we're going to hear this afternoon? MR. BOSI: What you're going to hear after 5:05. Now, those have a special unique aspect to them. Not only are they legislative, but they're not just -- they're not -- they are inspired by the GMP amendments that were associated, because the way that the LDC works is -- and this is another question that we're going to get into. The way that the LDC works and the GMP, the GMP is your highest regulatory documents. Your goals, objectives, and policies. What your county wants to be. It's aspirational. This is what we'd like to see. This is the end that we'd like to see. The LDC is the route to get you there. So when you review an LDC amendment, it's legislative, but it's inspired and it's tied back to the GMP amendments that have -- that were reviewed by the Planning Commission and ultimately passed by the Board of County Commissioners. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Mike, before you leave this, I'd just highlight for my colleagues that typically if you are going to vote no -- and I know the County Attorney will sometimes ask just for the record. But this is where you could fall back on. MR. BOSI: Absolutely. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: These criteria. And basically say, "This is the reason why I'm voting no." COMMISSIONER McLEOD: And, Chair, too, something that I learned when I was on City Council, that the Florida League of Cities teaches on quasi-judicial matters, it's considered -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- it's considered a hearing, and you can only make a decision based on the facts presented -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Correct. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- based on the -- if you had a roomful of people that are angry or unhappy, that should not persuade us in making that decision. It has to be the facts. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Correct. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. Which I thought was a really enlightening thing when I learned that, that this is a -- that's a hearing, like a court, and the judge only listens to facts. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I mean, we have had cases here in the past, everybody wore a red T-shirt. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Right. March 6, 2025 Page 17 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And we're against this. Well, thank you very much, but we have to have a reason. We have to base our -- we have to base it on the LDC or basically on the GMP. And compatibility is a strong one. I mean, it really is. MR. BOSI: It really is. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I mean, the most recent one was the drug -- the Hope, David Lawrence Center. MR. BOSI: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I mean, that -- that bordered -- even my view of it, it was -- bordered on compatibility, but again, it was an existing facility. So it's -- it's a tough -- tough call. MR. BOSI: Yeah. And like I said, each one of these, whether they're rezone findings, whether they're PUD findings, those are the criteria. Those are what -- that's what makes it quasi-judicial. Those are the areas. That's the do of what's being asked right there. Does it meet -- all the materials, does -- the Environmental Impact Statement? Does the Traffic Impact Statement? Does all of the PUD that was provided for, the buffering, how it attends to its surrounding land uses, all of that is evaluated, and evaluated based upon those criteria, and if you feel that it doesn't meet one of those criterias, those are what you would call -- and it never -- it doesn't hurt to let the applicant know, "I don't think that your -- I think that there is some compatibility issues. You're going to have to do a little bit more so I feel that you've satisfied this criteria. Not that -- I don't dislike the project or I like the project. I'm concerned that the project as presented would not satisfy this criteria, and therefore, until I get to that comfort level, I'm not going to be able to support it," and that's when the applicant will do their best to try to find a solution to get you towards where you can feel that that criteria, then, has been satisfied. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And, Mike, the last part of this, of course, quasi-judicial will include a recommendation -- a review of the County Attorney -- MR. BOSI: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: -- as part of the staff report. MR. BOSI: Yes. So back to the PowerPoint. Like I said, setting policy, creating new law, and then implementing policy and interpreting, applying it to existing law and a specific scenario. If you're looking at criteria, as I noted, it's quasi-judicial. If you're creating legislative [sic], such as an LDC amendment, it's legislative. Thank you, Troy. And here's some further ones. Mr. Klatzkow got a little creative on this one. Quasi-judicial equals semi or resembling. Judicial is defined "of or relating to the courts of law." So a quasi-judicial is somewhat like a court proceeding, as you mentioned, Michelle. Hearing the term "quasi-judicial." Proceedings, this is denied. Similar to a court proceeding, witnesses testify, both lay and expert, cross-examination's allowed, which I think you've seen that before. The right to be represented by counsel. Must follow due process standards. There are two ways that you can -- there's two ways that staff is obligated to make sure that when we make a recommendation of approval to the Planning Commission and to the Board of County Commissioners, that it meets the substantive test, that it meets the criteria of the quasi-judicial review, but also that it follows the due process; that the sign was posted in the correct time before it was coming forward, the newspaper advertisement was posted on the clerk's website. All of the procedural steps that are required were attended to because even -- you can have the best -- you could have the best application widely supported by the community. If it's approved but it's found out that you skipped a step, that invalidates your approval, and you have to go -- it doesn't -- it doesn't mean that you can't eventually get there again, but then you have to go and start the whole process over again. So that's where that procedural due process is. And the County Attorney makes sure that we -- if we're making a recommendation to you, that the procedural due process steps have been attended to in the proper format. Yeah, the notice of hearing, opportunity for interested parties to be heard. Full disclosure within with the decision-making based upon, you know, competent substantial evidence. The differences from a court proceeding less -- less formally, generally. They are. I mean, we have cross-examinations, but it's -- and it can March 6, 2025 Page 18 of 45 feel at times like a courtroom, but it's not quite that rigid. No real formal rules of evidence, and the Board may freely interject and ask questions like we always do. Most land-use decisions -- I would agree, most land-use decisions are quasi-judicial. Variance, rezoning, development orders, conditionals uses, those are your quasi-judicial actions. It's the LDC amendments and GMP amendments that are legislative. Like I said, due process, notice, opportunity to be heard, allow evidence to be presented, witnesses to be -- subject to cross-examination, fair and impartial, unbiased decision-making, based on fact, and formal rules of evidence don't apply, but basic due process must be observed, as I've said. Burden of proof is on the applicant that they've satisfied the LDC and the GMP, and then if they can establish that, then it shifts to those seeking denial of an application. If you oppose it -- you can't oppose it just because you don't like it. There has to be substantial competent evidence as to why you're opposing it. There's two ways you oppose it. Substantial because of -- you feel that the contents of it didn't meet the criteria that's contained within it, or the procedural due process. That's you forgot a step, and we're going to call you out on it, and we're going to make you go back and follow that step, and we're going to invalidate any approval you had, and you're going to have to go back through the process. You may still be successful, but we're going to slow you down for a bit and make you spend a lot more money. That's basically the option. I think we already talked about this substantial competent evidence. Ex parte communications occurs where a board member communicates directing or indirectly with a person or party connected with the matter before the board. Includes writing, oral communications, or site visits. That's why we have our disclosures. And it's only applicable to your quasi-judicial. That's why we always say, had staff material, staff meeting, call with the applicant, or site visit. Those are the type of things that you have to disclose that you've had some awareness and exposure to the petition, and if you had direct communication with the applicant, it's not -- it's not illegal. It's not frowned upon, but you just have to disclose that you've had that conversation. MS. LOCKHART: Mike, I have a question about that. At times, as an employee of the school district, I will meet with -- prior to their applications. They may be talking about a large development out east, and they may say, "Well, we're going to meet with you and evaluate for whether we need school sites." Is that -- because it's prior to an application submittal, is that considered something that I would need to disclose? MR. BOSI: No, because I think what you're doing is you're applying the school concurrency rules and -- MS. LOCKHART: Okay. MR. BOSI: And every one of our rezoning petitions have to -- has to, you know, indicate the number of units that are going to be on, what impact they're going to have to the school district. So them talking to you about the need for schools or what does their application trigger is them just doing the due diligence with staff. You know, you have an -- you have a unique situation where you're a nonvoting member of the Planning Commission, but you're also a fully functioning member of the school district staff, and you apply school concurrency to each one of these individual petitions. So you're just an extension of that staff process that's required of the application process. MS. LOCKHART: Thank you. MR. BOSI: Yeah. And the other rule, the Jennings rule, elected officials may not discuss zoning matters outside of a public hearing. That does make your job a lot harder. You just can't call up individual members of the Planning Commission and have conversations about -- even if it's not a project specific or it's just about maybe the direction you want the -- you'd like to see the Planning Commission go or some areas you think that we need to pick up, that has to be done in the public forum in the -- in the Sunshine. And it's why it's -- and I also have an email that was generously shared with me from Mr. Perry from the County Attorney's Office, and it's Mr. Klatzkow, and it's a 20-minute refresher on the Sunshine course. I will send that out to all of the Planning Commission members. COMMISSIONER SHEA: We got it. It was in our package. MR. BOSI: But not -- I don't think it was -- this one's a YouTube video. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Oh. MR. BOSI: Yes. So you can -- March 6, 2025 Page 19 of 45 COMMISSIONER SHEA: Pull it up. MR. BOSI: You have the -- you have the language that talks about the Sunshine and the rules and restrictions, and then you have Jeff providing you a narrative to how to actually apply it. And I will send that out to each one of the Planning Commission members just in case you have an insomnia one day and want to look through it. COMMISSIONER SHEA: We've got time now. MR. BOSI: And then legislative, I think we've already beat this up a bit. Comprehensive Planning amendment, large-scale, small-scale amendments, text amendments, district designations, LDC amendments. And, like I said, zoning ordinance, adoption of amendments, that's LDC amendments. These are your legislative. Once again, due process requirements, notice of hearings, opportunity to be heard, and that dates back to the statutes of how many days that our notices have to be provided for, and also no disclosures are allowed during -- or required for your legislative because it is legislative. You're creating a new regulation or new law. Also, here's another component. You don't really get into much of this. But Bert Harris was a provision that was enacted by the State Legislature basically to protect individuals from governments changing the underlying rules of what they can do with their property after they've provided -- after they've already purchased a property. So if you purchased your property to build a home on an acre lot and it was zoned RSF-1 and then somewhere along the line that jurisdiction changed that zoning to R -- you know, to say, a one to two -- or one unit per two-acre ratio, you could then take that jurisdiction to court and say, "You've taken the useful right of what I intended to do is build a single house on my property in a legal conforming way, and now you've made my property undersized and unable to support a house. You have to provide just compensation to me or allow me to build that house, because when I purchased my land, the intended -- and what was allowed by code was one unit per one acre. You've subsequently changed the rules. I know -- I can't go forward with that. You subsequently have taken a right that was associated with my property away from me. And based upon that, you have to provide just compensation." It's the same principle that's associated with any time that a county or a city has to utilize eminent domain. Eminent domain is -- for the most part is utilized for road construction. And if you take a significant portion of a person's property from them and take away their useful -- the useful allowances that could be developed on that property, you have to provide just compensation to that property owner for what you've taken from them. And the concept of fairness is something that always the cities and the counties and their legal staff makes sure that we're keenly attuned to because we want to be fair, and we want to be just, and if we take someone's property by one of our actions, we have to provide for the compensation for what we've taken from those individuals, and that's basically the Bert Harris claim. One of the things that you heard -- and the recommendation was go back -- and there's a golf course conversion. The golf course conversion, you said, you guys went a little bit too far. We are still going to the Board of County Commissioners. We're going to the Board of County Commissioners next Tuesday, and we're saying, "This is what we devised is the most Bert Harris defendable petition, but the Planning Commission said we went too far. They want us to go back. And here's what they want us to amend." We're seeking direction from the Board. Do you want us to go back and amend it as directed by the Board of -- or by the Planning Commission, or do you want to move forward with what you had already said, "Make this the most Bert Harris defendable?" And they'll make an evaluation. And whatever they say as staff -- I don't have an opinion -- they tell me what they -- what for us to do, what our next step is. And if it is, go back, modify it, we've got the notes, and specifically, Chairman Schmitt provided us the details of what he thought really should be kept into the amendment and what should be pulled out of the amendment. We can go back and make that change and bring it back to you, but we need direction from the Board of County Commissioners, because what they told me at the Board meeting a year and a half ago, "Make it as Bert Harris defendable as possible." And so what we did was that minimum, and we only required one additional neighborhood information meeting and having a buffer requirement, but having a buffer requirement that the Board of County Commissioners can waive if they felt it was appropriate. March 6, 2025 Page 20 of 45 The Planning Commission wanted a little bit more than that, and I understood that, and we will bring that back to you. But I'm seeking -- I need the direction from the Board how they want to move forward. So that's a good example of things that are inspired by the Bert Harris claims because we were -- we did lose a lawsuit to the Links of Naples that we said the golf course conversion would apply to, and the court system reviewed the record and found that we incorrectly applied that -- that direction to them, and because of that, we ended up into a settlement agreement with that property owner to provide for what we had taken, because the golf course conversion amendment was adopted in 2017. The Links of Naples -- the owner of the Links of Naples was -- had owned that property prior to that -- that ordinance being adopted. Prior to the golf course amendment -- conversion amendment, a rezone from a golf course to another use of like any rezone, any other rezone, and you would just follow the same process of rezoning, buffers, setbacks, all those or -- would be associated as part of it. What they're saying is the golf course conversion process was -- added additional steps that no other land use has to, and they're right. And because of that, we ended up having to settle on it because of the -- because of the concepts of Bert Harris and what we've imposed upon them after they had already purchased the property. And then finally, one of the things that this county has maintained, and not all other counties have maintained, and that's concurrency. And you say, "What's concurrency?" Well, talking back to the AUIR/CIE, the capital improvement program that handled the five- and 10-year populations that we expect. Concurrency means that when a development order -- when a Site Development Plan is approved or a plat is approved, concurrency gets applied. We have to check, are there enough capacities? Is there enough volume on the road system that this project's going to affect? Is there sufficient capacity within our solid waste, within our wastewater, within our potable water? Are there enough parks to be able to handle the additional demands? Are the schools adequate to be able to handle the demands? And then we have our Category B facilities which aren't part of the Concurrency Management System. It's a cursory review that's applied, but it's our roads, our waters, our stormwater, our utilities, our schools, and our parks. So those are the five components that make up concurrency. When it gets to the rezoning process, we do, like, a courtesy. We give them a heads-up. You may have some issues related to capacity on Immokalee Road. If you don't have enough capacity, there's going to have to be -- and we can't stop it, we used to be able to stop -- we used to be able to stop development if there wasn't enough capacity. The legislature had adopted rules related to proportionate share, and what they say is, as long as that applicant pays his proportionate share of whatever improvement is needed to fix the deficiency, that application and that development can move forward. You can't stop them. So the county is then on the hook trying to figure out how are we going to make up the rest of the money or the rest of the bill to provide for that -- or to provide for that improvement. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Even if their development causes -- causes the issue? MR. BOSI: Yes, yes. If their development puts the -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: It's forcing everybody else to have to help. MR. BOSI: Say there's forty trips left on Golden Gate Parkway, a segment where a project is being proposed, and that -- that project is going to add 100 trips, we say, "Well, hold out. You're going to have issues with concurrency," and their -- and the -- or their attorney and Transportation will look at it and say, "Okay, what's needed to remedy this deficiency?" And here's the project that's going to be needed. It's 150 -- or $150,000 or $200,000 of improvements. Your project counts for about 5 percent of the overall projects within this segment, so you owe us the 5 percent of that project, and then you're allowed to move forward. Then it's our obligation to figure out how we're going to get the rest of that 95 percent of that project to move forward. It's one of those provisions of the statutes that really does favor the development community and -- but we're -- we are a creature of the state, so we follow the regulations of the statutes, and the statute says that that's how we are to apply our concurrency, and that's how we can, you know, adjust for if we have concurrency issues, and that's how we move forward. It's similar, just the same type of the arrangement I just described, kind of boiling it down to speaking -- and that's the overall presentation. I also have a -- I also have a -- questions that are related to -- and March 6, 2025 Page 21 of 45 I'm not sure -- I thought I had them saved right here, and I can't see it. Give me a second and I can pull them up. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: That's my -- that's my document I think, the training ideas. MR. BOSI: That -- thank you. That is your document. So Michelle sent me something I thought would be useful for us to -- and I -- are you -- we're an hour and a half in. Are you okay? THE COURT REPORTER: Yes. MR. BOSI: I have a tendency -- I can talk fast. I'm sorry. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Oh. And, Mike, we've covered most of these. MR. BOSI: Yes. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I wanted to look at -- and specifically ask the Chair, too, about, like, order of procedures and things like that. MR. BOSI: Sure. And I think you're right, we did, we covered a lot of these areas. You know, the LDC, the Future Land Use Element, what's legislative, what's judicial, what's quasi-judicial, zoning, the GMP. The findings that you have to make, I think we talked about that. One of the things that's interesting, the different boards that interact, and they interact in a very tangential way. They don't really directly interact. A good example would be -- so the LDC amendments that are before you, it started with a review from staff, and then after staff reviewed it and put it to the public-hearing process, it starts with the Development Services Advisory Council, which is DSAC. That's members of the development community. They review that, make some recommendations to the full DSAC membership, and they make recommendations. And their perspective is from the builder. So they're going to have a different focus than what -- the Planning Commission, and their recommendation is independent of the Planning Commission. We'll let you know what it is, but for the most part you -- I think most of the Planning Commission members say, "Well, that's DSAC's recommendation from their perspective as local builders. We're looking at it from the LPA side of the shop or the EAC's side of the shop, so that's really" -- that's -- each one has their -- kind of their lane or their focus in terms of where they put their attention to. Your AHAC is another one where -- the housing amendments that are coming before you had a recommendation from AHAC as well because we took it to that body. Sometimes -- but a lot of times the rest of the LDC amendments that we have normally don't deal with housing, so we're not going to have to -- we won't bring them to the AHAC. The one area -- your Coastal Advisory Council, that's an area you really won't interact with. We don't interact with a lot -- our Community Planning and Resiliency group does a lot, because one of the things that we're doing as the coastal resiliency -- even though it's on pause now because the feds have run -- I think we ran into a budgetary issue, and I think it's -- but they're expecting a 12- to 18-month pause. But the Coastal Advisory Council is another one, but you really don't -- you don't really cross that path. Hearing Examiner's another one. It's either -- it's a binary -- it's a binary route. It's either going to go to the Hearing Examiner or it's going to go to the Planning Commission. The majority of them go to the Hearing Examiner because they're a low level of interest. Any time that we have a HEX petition that's of great public interest, that -- one of the commissioners can always send it to the Planning Commission for either being the decision-maker, or they can do it and ask you to be an advisory role, which they're doing it for, I think, the Costco. And then the Board of Zoning Appeals is the Board of County Commissioners, but that's the -- that would be the body that's going to hear a variance petition if the variance petition rose to that level or some -- or if there's an appeal, the BZA will hear an appeal of a decision that was made from the -- from the Hearing Examiner. When new matters go before the county, the state, and the feds, almost every petition that you have will have either a portion of state, Florida South Water Management District, or the feds will be looking at it from a wetland and wildlife protection standpoint. U.S. Fish and Wildlife is one of the normal agencies that's in it. But the statutes -- the Florida Statute says, "We can't condition any of our approvals upon requiring an applicant to show -- or satisfy the state and federal permitting process." Now, when we get to preconstruction meetings before they actually go out and turn dirt, that's when we're allowed to ask that they show us that they have their federal and state permits, but for your part, you will March 6, 2025 Page 22 of 45 not -- and our Growth Management Plan, basically, on environmental issues, on wetland issues, we defer to the state and the feds on it, because they have the expertise. We don't have the expertise on staff, so those bodies and those entities basically really don't intertwine with the work that you guys do. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Mike, I want to make a statement there, because I could probably go into great detail about the federal review process. But the -- of the complications I'll call it or the conflating of the term "preserves" when we had that in one petition. There are preserves required by the LDC, so much land to be set aside for protected or listed species as determined by the county, but then with the federal government -- I'll try to do a two-minute tutorial -- under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers are the implementing entity to enforce the wetlands and wetland protection, but then there's the state Environmental ERP, the environmental review or environmental -- MR. BOSI: Resource permit. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: -- resource permit. Thank you. I forgot the terminology. That's stormwater and drainage. That's the state. The feds deal with wetland and wetland impacts. And then under the Endangered Species Act, under the 404 permit process, Clean Water Act. They go out and ask for consultation. And that's where you get endangered species, Section 7, consultation, from U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and that's where you get into panther habitat and all those other types of things. Typically, as Mike said, because of the expense of the ERP and the federal permitting process, an applicant typically does not go through that process before the rezoning. Some do, but it's expensive. So they want some certainty first that they can get the property rezoned, and then they'll go through the ERP or -- and the federal permit. But at the same time, to meet the county's requirements, they have to identify listed species, listed species habitat. So that's why in our packets we'll have a pretty detailed environmental report from one of the environmental consultants. And there's two or three that we pretty much hear from in the county. So -- but Mike said is -- but we cannot position our state -- our vote because -- and deny because they don't have a federal permit. And sometimes you'll have an attorney come in here and say, "But they don't have a federal permit." Fine. It's irrelevant. And that's -- but the fact is they'll never proceed without the federal permit, so -- but that's -- that's where the state and the feds -- and the state and the feds interact, especially with the wetland impacts, and -- but pretty much drainage or wetland. And as far as the state, you will often hear the public say, "Well, they're going to put water on my property." Well, that's an encroachment. They legally cannot do that. So that's part of the state process. What else have we got before we take a break? COMMISSIONER McLEOD: We do need a break. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes. We'll take a break. Let's take a break. We'll convene and at -- Mike, we're going to go over these couple of questions, and then we'll go right into the LDC. So let's take a 20-minute break. Thanks. (A brief recess was had from 4:32 p.m. to 4:50 p.m.) MR. BOSI: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. Thank you. Before the break, we had a couple more issues that Mike was going to cover. MR. BOSI: Sure. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: So go ahead, Mike. MR. BOSI: Once again, Mike Bosi, Zoning Director. And there's a couple terms -- we had put down "density" and "intensity." Pretty easy. Density refers to the residential development on a parcel of land, and it's usually expressed by number of -- number of units per acre. That's your density and how it's expressed, obviously. One unit per acre is considered relatively low density. Fourteen or 16 units an acre is considered higher density, multifamily density. Intensity is associated with your commercial or your industrial type of development, and that's associated with the square footage of the overall facilities. What you find is the trip generation associated between residential density is much different than the intensities and the trip generation that's associated with commercial intensities. Your commercial intensities have a much higher trip attraction than your residential developments have for density generation. March 6, 2025 Page 23 of 45 Your residential properties generate trips. Your commercial properties attract trips. So whenever -- and what you're going to get into when we talk about the affordable housing initiatives and some of the initiatives that have bypassed the public-hearing process, that's because we've got commercial that's been deemed consistent by policy. It's not within your activity centers. That's where our GMP says we need -- that's where our commercial should be is along 41, or it's along Pine Ridge Road, or it's along any one of our main thoroughfares. And those properties that have been deemed consistent by policy, we're proposing that you can skip the public-hearing process because we want to eliminate the NIMBY-ism and still have justification, and why we have the justification is because the amount of trips that that commercial would have attracted would be much higher than the amount of trips that the residential project, even at 16 units an acre, would generate; therefore, it's considered a downzoning and not needing the public hearing. That's what justifies. And that's the whole concept -- that was the principle behind the Live Local Act, which was introduced two years ago that allows for jurisdictions for commercial and industrial lands to skip the public-hearing process and go straight to development -- go straight to site development is because the residential will have lesser -- be lesser of a trip generation and consumption from a water and utilities standpoint. Deviations are what are provided for within your PUDs. If you don't have a PUD and you've got a straight rezoning property, that deviation's called a variance. It's simply -- it's a numerical reduction from a numerical standard. It's -- if you've got a 15-foot-wide setback and your property for -- your pool is going to encroach three feet upon it, you would seek a variance. If you were in a PUD and you didn't want -- and the standard for, say, your multifamily was 25 feet for a multifamily development setback but you wanted to propose something different, that would be a deviation. So anything in a PUD, variances are termed "deviations." If it's a straight zoning, it's a variance, and most variances, as we talked about, go to the HEX. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Mike, can I ask -- MR. BOSI: Yes. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- one of my questions before we -- before we run out of time? MR. BOSI: Sure. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. One of the questions is, what needs to be included in a motion? Like, when we make motions, what needs to go in them? MR. BOSI: When you make a motion, it would -- if it's, say, a recommendation of approval, it can simply be, "I'd like to make a motion of approval," and look at the PL number for that petition type. I make a recommendation for PL No. 200 -- or 202300018849. And if there were any conditions that were talked about or if you want to impose any conditions, you would like say, "I would like to make a motion of approval with the conditions we've described." And normally at that time either staff or the Chair would say here's the -- "Here's the things that I've jotted down that we have talked about and we've agreed upon, sort of, that these are the additional conditions of approval that we want to impose." COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Do you have to call out that petition number? MR. BOSI: It helps. If you call -- if you read the number in, it becomes more formal, and it just helps the record. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I see. Okay. And then the other question that I had, I see that this board runs a little differently. Like, in the city, when speakers would come and speak for their allotted times, it wasn't really proper to ask them any questions, but I see that we do that here, which I really like. So I just wanted to clarify. So when somebody comes to speak, can we ask them questions? Do you like to see that? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Absolutely. We typically have. We try and avoid a cross-examination, because it's -- again, it's not a court of law. We typically ask questions to either clarify what they're trying to tell us, or sometimes we will say to them -- to clarify to them what may be the issue they're trying to get at or just state a matter of fact. They may be arguing about traffic when we have to say, "Well, that's very good, but the item you're talking about, this project is already vested, has vested rights," or some other type of response to the speaker. But more out of courtesy than anything else, or -- and typically when we stop the public from speaking, it's hopefully to clarify an issue with the folks up here at the dais. So it's been common practice as long as I've been either with county staff or on the Planning Commission. March 6, 2025 Page 24 of 45 MR. BOSI: And I would say the way that it normally happens, if you did want to ask -- it's -- and it always good -- sometimes I forget even up here, give deference to the Chair. "Chair, could we bring him back up?" or "Chair, could we allow him to speak a little bit longer?" And because Joe -- the Chair will -- Mr. Schmitt will kind of help run the court -- you know, the pace and the direction of the meeting, and it's always best to, you know, just make sure we get their concurrence with the Chair that he thinks that's something that's appropriate or not. So really, I mean, that's really the end of my tutorial. Like I said, I'll send out the video that Jeff had put together related to the Sunshine Law. Any questions anything that you guys would have on some of the other materials, you could email me, give me a call, whatever, set up a Zoom call, and we can go over. But any other questions that you may have? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: The only other one you might cover -- I certainly know the answer -- but the -- on the bottom, the difference between the FLUE, the GMP, because that's important, I think, for some of the new folks. MR. BOSI: Yes. And so within the -- we have the Growth Management Plan, and that's our Comprehensive Plan. Within the Comprehensive Plan, a number of different elements, Transportation Element, Future Land Use Element, Coastal and Conservation -- and Conservation and Coastal Management Element, Economic Element. Each one of them -- there's no one that has more weight or the other. Each one of those has goals, objectives, and policies. The most extensive is the Future Land Use Element. That's the one you basically deal with, for the most part. It describes densities; it describes commercial intensities; the arrangement of how our land uses are provided for; where the preservation, the conservation areas are; where the individual subdistricts -- one of the things that was asked -- and here's maybe one last thing that I could put up -- was how many individual subdistricts are there within our Growth Management Plan? And let me get there. So this is our Growth Management Plan, and we could spend a good half hour, hour talking about all these different colors and the districts and things that are within there. Things that I would point out, this area that's in green, this area that's here, this red -- or this orangish area, all of these areas, any of these areas that are green, those are basically protected from development. About two-thirds of our county is set aside from development. So our job is to be the most efficient in terms of how we utilize our -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: You said that backwards. Two-thirds of our county is protected against development. MR. BOSI: Yes, I'm sorry. Thank you. And one-third is open for development, so our task is to make sure we're effectively utilizing that one-third as effectively as we can. But the question becomes, how many subdistricts do we have? So the answers to that question is in this table here. Right now there's 81 individual subdistricts that are within our Growth Management Plan, and a lot of those are -- that were initiated from staff, but a lot of those were initiated from the private development. Small -- one of the things that has changed -- before, if you amended the Growth Management Plan, we only had a set number of cycles, and if you amended the Growth Management Plan, it was always four sets of hearings: One set with the Planning Commission, one set at transmittal, one set with the Planning Commission, and one set with the Board of County Commissioners. The petition went to the State of Florida, they provided commentary, and then you had an adoption hearing. Well, about 2011 the Community Planning Act changed how the state participates in local governments and county matters, loosened it up a bit. They created a provision for small-scale amendments. It used to be limited to 10 acres -- five acres. Then they increased it to 10 acres. Now it's 50 acres. Anything below 50 acres only requires one set of hearings in front of the Board of Commissioners and the Planning Commission. Anything larger than that -- or if it's just a GMP amendment that affects the entire county, it requires the four -- the four rounds of hearings. But we have 81 individual subdistricts. That's one of the reasons why our Growth Management Plan, our Comprehensive Plan is extremely complicated and extremely nuanced in the sense of how things work and how they're arranged for. A lot of these individual subdistricts can be as small as five or 10 acres, so those five or 10 acres, that March 6, 2025 Page 25 of 45 subdistrict really gets to the nitty gritty. It's almost -- it's almost like a PUD as here's what can go there, here's the allowance, here's the density or the intensity that's associated with it. But the individual subdistricts are what allow for those PUDs to find alignment with the GMP, and it's been -- like we said, it's been modified numerous times over the years. And I will say that our private development -- the private development industry does do a good job of trying to identify deficiencies within our land-use arrangement in terms of -- in trying to promote modifications to the GMP for things that maybe we need to promote -- do a better job of providing for. But I would say that's kind of one of the last things that I would leave you with. The GMP is a living document. The people -- the regulatory status, like I said, it's the top of -- it's the top of the chain in terms of what the rules and regulations are for the county, and everything else falls from that GMP, and the Land Development Code is something that is supposed to be the do of how you get to where the GMP is hoping that you can get to. So with that... COMMISSIONER SHEA: How does the subdistrict get established? Does the -- do you decide that we need a subdistrict? Does an applicant, a developer decide he needs one? MR. BOSI: Sometimes it's the county staff or the Planning Commission or the Board of County Commissioners will initiate a review of a specific item that will create a subdistrict. The majority of times it's an applicant will submit a small-scale amendment application to the GMP. There's statutory requirements in terms of what the justification is for that subdistrict to be approved, reviewed by staff for sufficiency and for compliance with state statutes, heard by the Planning Commission, recommended to the Board, and if the Board approves it, that subdistrict gets created. It's kind of -- it's similar to that old Schoolhouse Rock, you know, how does a bill get implemented? It starts off as an idea, it's initiated by a sponsor, and that sponsor takes it to the wide body, the wide body reviews it, and if they approve it, that's how that bill becomes a law. That's how that subdistrict becomes a component of our GMP. I think I've showed my age with Schoolhouse Rock, but that's okay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. And with that, that's it? MR. BOSI: That's it. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: No other questions? We'll take a two-minute break in place because we have to start at 5:05. So with that, take a two-minute break. Thanks. (A brief recess was had from 5:04 p.m. to 5:05 p.m.) MR. BOSI: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Thank you. And welcome to the 5:05 Planning Commission. For the record, this is a hearing to review two LDC amendments. They're going to be presented by staff. It is a nonjudicial, so it is open for discussion and subject that -- no disclosures necessary. So with that, we'll proceed. Mr. Bosi. MR. BOSI: Mike Bosi, Planning and Zoning director. And before I turn it over to Eric Johnson, our LDC manager, who's going to run you through both the housing and then with the assistance of the Neighborhood Company, the Immokalee Area Master Plan -- or LDC amendment changes, I just wanted to go over real quick three, four, five minutes, what inspired these amendments. So these LDC amendments that you're seeing are related to GMP amendments that the Board of County Commissioners adopted in March of 2024. So I'm just going to just briefly carry the overview of what the -- of what the amendments are calling for, and that's at a 30,000-foot level, and then Eric will take you through the details, and he'll get down into the weeds. And sometimes when you get into the weeds, it can be a little confusing. I just wanted to start with the GMP amendments to say, here's the big do. This is what these are supposed to try to promote. And the first talks about we had an existing subdistrict within our Urban Mixed-Use District and that was -- it was Commercial Mixed-Use Subdistrict. Well, we modified that to call it the Commercial Mixed-Use By-Right Subdistrict because one of the amendments that the Board provided for, directions, was they wanted to provide for by-right affordable housing to be able to eliminate the public hearings, to eliminate the NIMBY-ism, to help promote the March 6, 2025 Page 26 of 45 provision of affordable housing. And one of the -- one of the components talks about for C-1 through C-3 zoning categories, which the existing subdistrict was geared to, you can have mixed use, but you can have that mixed use not only a commercial aspect, but you could have by-right affordable housing as long as those units were all comprised of affordable housing. Within the C-1 through C-3 zoning districts, we allow up to 16 units per acre as part of that mixed -- the mixed use by right related to -- as long as the affordable -- the components are providing affordable housing. You get the benefit of skipping -- of skipping the public-hearing process if you're providing the affordable housing. That's the give. That the benefit, and that's the justification for having the proposal be approved without a public hearing. And it talks about also the C-4 and C-5 have the same opportunities. And as I have it highlighted, all residential units must be housing that's affordable, and that's going to be a component that's carried forward with -- into our mixed-use residential provisions within the LDC. Another -- or a subdistrict was created from these amendments were the conversion of commercial by-right subdistrict. And what that means is, once again, your activity centers is where the GMP says our commercial should be, but we've got a lot of leftover older commercial that's out there, and that -- that commercial that's out there that's not in the activity centers that's been deemed consistent by policy, those are eligible to skip the public-hearing process if they provide for all their units as residential. Now, the end target for that goal is going to be users that -- or developers that are affordable housing providers. Most for-market providers aren't going to be able to provide 100 percent housing that's affordable because they don't utilize tax credits. They don't use subsidies. These are for your Habitats, your McDowell Partners. McDowell Partners is one of the -- one of the providers for affordable housing. They did Ekos on Santa Barbara. They're doing the Ekos on Collier, which are 100 percent affordable projects allocated from 100 percent, 80 percent, 60 percent, and 50 percent. So they really do hit levels of need that most of our for-profit providers are going to provide for affordable housing, but those are allocated to 80 and 100 percent of AMI. So we've got a different end user and different target in terms of where we're trying to affect. We have another provision. It was a strategic opportunity site, but that's only a GMP site provision. That's a floating zone that says when you've got a lot of opportunities like Creekside Commerce Park that has become the Arthrex Commerce Park, we want to allow for high-density residential opportunities with affordable housing to be developed within those high employment areas because of that link between where people live and work, and when you're able to shrink that -- the time frame or the distance between that, you improve the transportation system by better land-use planning by having a percentage of those workers that are going to be occupying those jobs live within close proximity in terms of where those jobs are located. Transit-oriented development section, this section is one where -- so the private development industry has been telling us for all -- for many years, "Well, you've got to let the private side take care of this affordable housing shortage. We're going to -- we can do it, but there's too much regulations, and always making us provide for affordable housing is not always the right solution." So this provision provides for if you're on a transit route and you're proposing a development that's going to provide for a dedicated CAT transit stop, bus stop, and 50 percent of your units are provided or within a quarter mile, an attainable walking distance that -- the literature has said a quarter mile -- people were willing to walk a quarter mile to a half mile to -- you know, to access transit. If half of those units are within that quarter mile of that bus stop, you're allowed -- you're eligible for 13 units an acre, and that doesn't have to be affordable housing. Now, you're eligible to add 12 additional units through the affordable housing density bonus program to get up to 25 units if you'd like, but from a market-rate perspective if they want to put -- if they wanted to have their transit-oriented development on a CAT system, the first 13 units aren't required to be affordable housing. They're just required to be in a compact way, and what that compact -- in a compact manner, and that has relationship to what they can command from a rental standpoint. If you have to have 50 percent of your units within a quarter mile of your -- of that transit stop, you can't have lavish amenities within your 13 units an acre. You're going to have to -- you're going to have to put them in a more efficient manner, and that should have a much more attainable price from an affordable standpoint. But they also are allowed to stack up in affordable housing of 12 additional units. Eventually they get to March 6, 2025 Page 27 of 45 25 units, and that would be another one you'll see the specifics of that. And like I say, sometimes you can get lost in some of the specifics of the LDC. But I just wanted to kind of give the overview of why we're doing this, what's inspiring us to provide for this. And then finally, it talks about our mixed-use center -- mixed-use activity center subdistricts and our interchange activity subdistricts. They both are activity centers. Our interchange activity centers are more intense. Those are the ones where you've got a link on -- an on-ramp and an off-ramp with I-75. That's where the interchange comes in. A good example would be Collier Boulevard and I-75. That's an interchange activity center, and you can see there's some -- obviously, there's some construction work that is going on as well. Pine Ridge Road's another one where we have a -- and it's created a little bit more of a stir within our news media about the concept of bringing a diverging diamond to Collier County and how we're going to be able to manage that and the difficulties and the non-difficulties of that. But basically what they're saying, so in an activity center, our GMP says 16 units an acre, you're eligible for it. It doesn't have to be -- it could be market rate. You're eligible to ask for 16 units an acre. But we're saying you can ask for 25 units an acre, but we have an arrangement for -- if you want to get to that additional nine units, there is an arrangement how we want you to stack that density in terms of how you select from your low, your very low, your median, and then your gap in terms of your income levels. Those specifics will be spelled out within the LDC provisions that Eric is going over. And that is basically the overview of the GMP amendments, and it's because of those GMP amendments that this is -- we are now getting our LDC in line to implement those. And this is what our -- this is what the housing LDC amendments are to do, to implement what's already been allowed for within our GMP. And with that, Mr. Johnson. MR. JOHNSON: Thank you. Good evening. Eric Johnson, LDC planning manager. Let me just queue up. So the reason why we're meeting tonight regarding Items 9B and 9C, these are LDC amendments, and they're changing the list of permitted uses. Anytime you're changing the list of permitted use in a zoning district, that requires a nighttime hearing. And we say that any time after 5 o'clock is, you know, a nighttime hearing. So that's why you're here, and I thank you guys for making yourselves available. Like Mike said, we're -- this is the Community Housing Plan initiatives. The next amendment, which is on 9C, that's the Immokalee Overlay, that is changing the list of permitted uses and creating all of these development standards. So I just want to let you know that this item was advertised on our county's website. It's a lot cheaper to do it that way than in the Naples Daily News. I have a PowerPoint presentation that I'd like to give you. So with a little bit of background, like adding on that what Mike was mentioning, back in 2017, the Urban Land Institute, ULI, gave a panel report and concluded that Collier County has an affordable housing problem, and they recommended six core strategies. That was to increase supply; maintain supply; regulate and govern; enhance transportation options; enhance wages; and engage, market, and educate. In 2017, the Board of County Commissioners accepted the CHP, as we know it; Community Housing Plan, CHP. And then the year after, the Board directed staff to begin the implementation of the CHP. That same year the Board directed staff to move forward with preparing GMP and LDC amendments to address the five initiatives identified in the CHP. And I'll go over those five initiatives in the next slide, so if you'll just hang on. In 2019, the Board approved an LDC amendment to increase the affordable housing density bonus from 8 DUs per acre to 12 DUs per acre. In 2021, the Board approved another LDC amendment. And then 2023, the Board approved the GMP amendment to allow affordable housing by right in certain commercial zoning districts, and it had a sunset date. So that sunset date was 2023, okay. I'm sorry. It started in 2023, and so we have to count five years beyond that, so we've got to move quick. The five CHP initiatives, there were five of them. You'll see them up on your screen. We already took care of No. 1 and No. 4 with those ordinances that you see at the end of the sentences, and tonight we hope to address No. 2, No. 3, and No. 5. Number 2, Initiative No. 2, we are looking to expand the allowance for commercial districts to redevelop March 6, 2025 Page 28 of 45 with a residential use a mixed-use development in residential and commercial by right, permitted by right, when providing for housing that is affordable. Initiative No. 3, increasing density within activity centers from 16 dwelling units per acre to 25 dwelling units per acre when providing for housing that is affordable. And Initiative No. 5, increasing density opportunities along bus transit lines in connection with transit-oriented development, TOD. This LDC amendment, lots of pages associated with it, and there are numerous sections that are being amended. We're also proposing new sections, and they're underlined on the screen. So you could see that. We're looking to change the affordable housing density bonus table, which is in Chapter 2.06. This is in the existing code. And this -- the changes that are here before you tonight were championed by staff, most importantly by Cormac Giblin. I think he perhaps was directed by the Board to make this more workable. You could see that some of the densities would change, increasing them. And you'll see the two rows with the two arrows, the moderate is being divided into moderate and median. And just so you know, the median income in Collier County last year was $104,300. The changes to this table were endorsed by the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee last year. The Mixed Income Housing Program criteria, this is the new Chapter 2.07 that's in your packet. The intent is to incentivize development that provides a mix of housing affordability. Mixed income commitment must be recorded by developer by agreement, ordinance, or other type of land-use restriction, recording in the public records. Affordable units must be intermixed, not segregated from the market-rate units. And it also speaks to "the ratio of bedrooms per affordable unit shall be greater than or equal to that which is in the market units." Affordable units committed for 30 years from the initial sale date or rent. For rentals, you need income verification, and that shall be submitted annually. And then no unit that is committed as affordable through this program shall be rented, sold, conveyed, or leased with the option to a household whose income has not been verified. In a nutshell, you'll notice then in all those zoning districts the C-1, C-2, C-3, C-4, and C-5, we have new entries that are underlined with blue. It's permitted by right for residential only provided that it provides affordable housing, and that has to be all affordable housing. It's unlike the affordable housing density bonus that's in 2.06. That doesn't have to be all affordable housing, but this program, all the units have to be affordable. And so a developer or property owner could propose that in the C-1, C-2, and C-3 zoning districts by right. Also in the C-1, C-2, and C-3 zoning districts by right you could do a mixed-use project with affordable housing. You could also do it by right in the C-4 and C-5. All right. So you have -- you have the different commercial zoning districts, you have a list of permitted uses. The list of permitted uses says you could do residential only in the C-1, C-2, and C-3, and then you could do mixed use with affordable in the C-1, C-2, C-3, C-4, and C-5. I know that's a lot of letters and numbers and such, but hang in there. And then in C-1, C-2, and C-3, you could do mixed use, and it doesn't have to have an affordable housing component. That requires a conditional use. And for anyone who doesn't know the difference between a conditional use and permitted by right, permitted by right means you don't have to go before a public hearing. You don't have to meet with the Planning Commission. You don't have to go before the Board of County Commissioners, whereas if you're doing something in connection with Chapter 2.06, you have to go to the Board of County Commissioner -- Commission and get their approval. So to the development community, it's better for them to go by right, if that makes any sense. Now, housing that is affordable in the C-1 through the C-5 zoning districts, like I just said, allows up to 16 dwelling units per acre. It's applicable as residential only in the C-1 through C-3 or as mixed use in the C-1 through C-5. In the packet that you have, it has all of the development standards, and all units must be affordable in concert with the following percentages. And that chart that you have up on the screen is broken down by those columns that says, "The percentage of affordable units for sale" or "the percentage of affordable units for rent." So we care about what's being proposed as for sale versus for rent, and so you can see the minimums and the maximums that are associated with each column and the income levels -- the corresponding income levels in that leftmost column. March 6, 2025 Page 29 of 45 Housing that is affordable in the mixed-use activity center in the interchange activity center, allowed as a residential only or as -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I'm going to stop you a minute because I want to go back. Just so folks are clear, this is in a commercial zoned C-1 through C-3 -- or C-1 through C-5. Once this is passed, I'll be able to -- I as a -- if I were a developer, I could come in and ask for an affordable housing project and convert the commercial to residential by right. MR. JOHNSON: By right. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Because I -- and has -- after reading all this, but -- clearly understand it. But with that, there's a drawback, of course, that we lose the commercial to the benefit of affordable housing, so -- but that's a decision now going to be made by the developer and coming to staff? MR. JOHNSON: That's correct. There's truth to what you say, and that would -- the losing of the commercial, you could make the case that it's really in the C-1, C-2, and C-3 -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Right. MR. JOHNSON: -- because that's where you could do a residential only. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Residential only, right. MR. JOHNSON: You can't do the residential only in the C-4 or C-5, but you can do the mixed use in the C-4 and C-5. And mixed use means residential and commercial or nonresidential. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. I just want to make sure -- the public really needs to understand that there is an impact to this because now there's no rezoning hearing. MR. JOHNSON: That's correct. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And -- which is a good thing in a lot of ways because it's fast, and it's able to get through the process. But at the same time, folks need to be aware that the housing project's going to be developed where they once thought was a commercial development. And, Cormac, this goes way back. MR. GIBLIN: Mr. Schmitt, Cormac Giblin, your director of Housing Policy and Economic Development. I just wanted to touch on the question you were just asking to say basically the state has preempted us for this with the Live Local Act. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Oh, yeah. MR. GIBLIN: So right now, anything that is zoned C-1 through C-5 can turn to residential automatically with no public hearing. So essentially, it can happen today already. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Right. And that was the last piece. Live Local is already happening. But the one -- with that, the only site that I know of has yet to happen. Collier Boulevard was on Live Local out near Henderson Creek, but that's gone nowhere. MR. GIBLIN: Thus far, there's been one development that has received site development approval for the Live Local Act. It's the property that the county owns, and then we went out for our ITN with a partner developer. They've moving forward. They're getting their other permits in order right now. There is another one that's in the application process right now a little further down on 41. But you're right, there have only been two actual submittals. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, I mean, it's good. And this goes back, with the increase in density, probably 15 or 20 years. When you talked about density in this county, people -- their heads exploded when you talked about anything more than six or 10 units an acre, and now we're twice that, which is the only way you could build affordable housing is high density in this county, I mean, from a cost perspective. MR. GIBLIN: And Mike touched on it as well earlier when he was giving the preamble. Not all the units in all of these programs need to be 100 percent affordable. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Correct. MR. GIBLIN: And so what that does -- and you're seeing it in the market today, I feel, we're seeing that we're attacking the supply side as well. So whether or not they're restricted to be affordable, we're having an impact in the market, and we're seeing that today in prices. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Michelle, go ahead. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So this ordinance was really very confusing for me. I've taken a lot of March 6, 2025 Page 30 of 45 time to try to understand it. And so based on this last question, from what I understand, when you build something with 100 percent affordability, that's by right, but when you increase density, then it's a rezone. Because I asked, okay, so that NC Square project that came before us at the last meeting, that's not 100 percent affordable. It was just an increase in affordable housing. So then that becomes a rezone, not something by right. MR. GIBLIN: The only ones that are by right -- COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Right. MR. GIBLIN: -- are the commercial conversion, the topic that Eric's on right now. All the rest will require a rezone. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, because NC Square was already a housing development. There's a commercial component of that on the -- the eastern side of that was commercial, but it's still going to be developed commercial. Because Rich said that, and I was puzzled because I didn't think it would be by right. And he said if this had passed -- COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Yeah. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I thought -- didn't Rich say that if these LDC amendments were in place, he wouldn't be here today? That was at the last meeting. But it would still require a rezoning. MR. BOSI: It would require -- it would require a rezoning. It would not have required a GMP amendment -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Oh, thank you. MR. BOSI: -- because the chart hadn't been updated. The chart -- the 2.06 that Eric went over, that's what hasn't been updated. This -- when we update that, we'll eliminate a need for a lot of those GMP amendments, because those GMP amendments were getting toward where our LDC hadn't been updated yet to, to basically chase the GMP amendments that have already been approved. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: That's right. He came in with GMP amendment and rezoning. Okay. Thank you. MR. JOHNSON: I think, actually, this was the chart that he showed. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes, he did. MR. JOHNSON: All right. So this slide was associate -- is associated with 4.02.40, Section -- proposed Section 4.02.40. This slide is associated with proposed Section 4.02.41, and this would require a Planned Unit Development or PUD amendment. So this is allowed as a residential-only or a mixed-use project. It increases -- oh, I think I already read this. So this fulfills the Community Housing Plan initiative No. 3, all right. That's what Section 4.02.41 does. Maybe I didn't read it, but at least it's on the screen. This is associated with LDC Section 4.02.42, TOD, transit-oriented development. It fulfills Community Housing Plan Initiative No. 5. This, like the other one, would require a PUD. Allows for higher density multifamily projects that front on existing and proposed CAT fixed routes. That's the public transportation that we have here in Collier County. The baseline TOD, transit-oriented development, is a maximum of 13 dwelling units per acre. TODs with housing that is affordable, you could add up another 12 dwelling units per acre for a maximum of 25 dwelling units per acre. So that is a lot different than the way it used to be, like what Commissioner Schmitt mentioned before. PUD required units must be multifamily only. You can't have any single-family dwellings. The design standards -- and I think Mike talked to this a little bit before. Half of the units must be within a quarter-mile radius of a CAT stop, shelter, or station. The setbacks. The front setback would be 10 feet, the maximum setback would be 25 feet, and then the side or rear setbacks are based on building height. The units that are for sale -- and this is kind of confusing, and I'll read it very slowly. Of the first nine dwelling units above 13 dwelling units per acre, at least two-thirds of the units must be sold to households at or below the low- and/or moderate-income levels. The final three dwelling units per acre bonus density, at least two-thirds shall be sold to households at any of the income levels identified within the chart in LDC Section 2.07.02.A, as in "Alpha." And then for rent, two-thirds of the units above 13 dwelling units per acre must be made available to households at or below the low- and/or very, very low-income level households. March 6, 2025 Page 31 of 45 What to take away from this is that we're really trying to zero in on the lower/median income families, those households with the lower -- low and very low. So that concludes my presentation. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer. I have a slide here for ease of reading if you are so inclined to recommend something. But the dream team is here to answer questions. We have Mike, we have me, Cormac, and Michele Mosca. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Chap. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Public speakers? COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Yeah. As is my habit, I usually try to get to what I consider to be the bottom line. All right. Here's my question. If the petition is approved as written, is the intention the developers would be not-for-profit? Because for-profit developers couldn't make money. Is that -- is that right? MR. JOHNSON: Mr. Commissioner, I would -- I would say -- I would characterize it more like we're trying to promote affordable housing, and so we're allowing higher densities so that way a developer can make it financially sufficient for them. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Financially feasible. MR. JOHNSON: We're not eliminating profits. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. We don't deal in profit from the standpoint of the developer. We're dealing with what's allowed by right or through a rezoning. But typically, the feasibility is by the developer who will look at it and see what the cost breakdown would be for construction and everything else that make it, quote, profitable. But that's not our point. I don't know if that answered your question. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Well, I mean, so any developer -- I mean, the intention is any developer that wants to could come to you and build a -- start a project, and if they thought they could econom- -- it was economically feasible for them to do it, great. So it's not the intention to bar -- MR. JOHNSON: No. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: No. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: -- anybody. MR. JOHNSON: No. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: This is going to be more of allowing more favorable -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Incentivize. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, so incentivize and allow a more favorable land development code to promote affordable housing. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: That part I understand. MR. GIBLIN: Yeah. The Board of County -- you and the Board of County Commissioners over the past, say, five years have heard countless petitions that combined Growth Management Plan amendments and new PUDs in exchange for extra density -- COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Yes. MR. GIBLIN: -- of which a portion would be affordable. This -- COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Many. MR. GIBLIN: -- is following some of that same model, and I'll say that none of those have been non-profit developments. Those have all been for-profit developers that have decided to, in exchange for the extra density, include some affordable units. I believe that that same model would follow most of these amendments. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Mike? COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: What would be the increase in density on a one-acre parcel of C-1? What would be the maximum allowage of affordable housing that could be built on a one-acre parcel of C-1? MR. BOSI: Sixteen units an acre. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Sixteen units per acre. And does that -- that changes if it's a C-3? No, it's 16 units per acre. MR. BOSI: No. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. So this just gives more rights to a developer if they wanted to buy a commercial piece of property that could possibly potentially be cheaper than a residential piece of property and just bypass any Board of County Commission. I know it's already a Live Local Act, which I'm not really in March 6, 2025 Page 32 of 45 favor of anyways, but I just want to confirm that's what -- MR. GIBLIN: And also in our own code for decades we've had the commercial version that allows you to ask for that 16 units per acre. What this does is allow you to bypass the public hearing to do that. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: All right. Okay. That's my only question. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Michelle. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Jamie, did you have something to add? MR. FRENCH: He answered it. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: He just answered it. Thank you. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. In the ordinance it talks about income verification for rental units. Can you explain how you verify income for sold units? MR. GIBLIN: Income verification and PUD monitoring, affordability monitoring is handled by our colleagues over in the Community and Human Services division, but I can tell you, on a thumbnail sketch, they look at a household's tax returns. If the tax returns are insufficient, they'll look at bank records. They'll look at verification of employment and those sorts of things. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Right. So a rental unit, to make sure it remains an affordable resident, you do the annual income verifications. That's rentals. So on houses that you sell -- or that are sold, then you do that verification at the beginning. And what if, like, the very next day after closing they get a big promotion, now they're out of the -- you never do any more verifications after that, right? MR. GIBLIN: Correct. Once the unit is sold -- their income is verified before sale. Once it's sold, a 30-year deed restriction is recorded against that property. Now, if they hit the lottery the next day and they choose to stay in that unit, that's fine for them. But if and when the title ever changes on that property, before the next 30 years, the county will recoup the penalty for the units no longer being affordable. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So let's say that this person buys a house, five years later they got -- they're going to sell, and so -- and they've made their -- it's appreciated by $50,000. So do they get to sell, take the -- they take all the profit? And then do they have a requirement to sell to someone who's a qualified person? MR. GIBLIN: They have a couple options. Number one, they could sell to another qualifying family who -- that gets qualified, they are also low-income or moderate income, they're allowed to sell to them. If they decide to sell it on the open market, there's a shared appreciation formula in our Land Development Code that we -- we share in those profits. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So kind of like the Habitat for Humanity model. MR. GIBLIN: Yeah. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: And so -- but they also have, interesting, that -- and I don't know if we could have this provision, too, but that when you sell it, you have to sell it to an owner -- it has to be owner occupied, which helps to eliminate, like, investors trying to -- MR. GIBLIN: Once the clause is met, the initial deed restriction is met, we no longer have any author- -- you know, we can no longer restrict how that home is used. Let's say they pay us off. We can't say, but it needs to be owned forever. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. And I'm sorry, I missed the part. So can they sell to anyone? MR. GIBLIN: If they choose to share the profits with the county, and then those funds then get recycled back into the county to then go to programs to create more housing. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. And then I have other questions as it relates to Housing Trust Fund, but should I ask them now? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Well, the Housing Trust Fund isn't part of this, but -- COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Well, it's in the ordinance on Page 21 and -- which made me have four questions related to that. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. Well, go ahead. I mean, Cormac can answer them. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Yeah. For the Housing Trust Fund, my four questions: How much is in the Housing Trust Fund right now, how is it funded, what is the history of its distribution, and what can it be used for? March 6, 2025 Page 33 of 45 MR. GIBLIN: Sure. There are -- actually, the county has a couple -- a few different Affordable Housing Trust Funds. All of the affordable housing funding or the lion's share of it, again, is handled by our colleagues over in Community and Human Services. They are our grants department. They hold annual application cycles. They will make monies available to developers or -- non-profit developers, for-profit developers to help buy down the costs of their projects. They also make direct assistance to low-income, moderate-income homebuyers or renters with down payment assistance, rental assistance. So the steward -- the stewards of those funds are in Community and Human Services and in a couple other county divisions. The workforce housing land -- or I'm sorry -- the Affordable Housing Trust Fund right now has about $1.7 million in it, of which about $900 [sic] is already committed. So they -- and they're holding an application cycle. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Nine hundred or 9,000? MR. GIBLIN: Nine hundred thousand. Yes, I'm sorry. Yes. So those are obligations that are already out there. They're holding an application cycle right now. Like I mentioned, they hold one once a year. So I'm not sure how they're -- what they've gotten in in applications. And then the other funds are used in various ways with soft loans to developers, bridge loans, those sort of things, but I cannot get -- I don't know the details of exactly where they've gone and how much is left today. That's what I know. I know enough to be dangerous about them. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Where does that pot of money come from? MR. GIBLIN: It comes from these payoffs, is one source, when properties turn over and they have to pay those penalties. Also, the Board budgets in their budget every year, they have for the past few years, monies to go towards these activities. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Amy. Michelle, have you got any more? COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I was just going to say -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Go ahead. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- so we are using the monies, right? It's not just -- MR. GIBLIN: I had a conversation last night and this morning with Kristi Sonntag, who's the director of that division, and she said yes, they are using it. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. Thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: But the key with Habitat, though, they -- they hold a mortgage. They hold a third or whatever. So they're a little bit different. MR. GIBLIN: They hold a first, second, and third. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit more control from that standpoint. Amy. MS. LOCKHART: A couple questions. Since it's bypassing the hearing process, it goes through site plan review, and there are criteria, and you measure what the impacts are. And I guess I'm wearing my staff hat for the school district. We don't normally review commercial development applications that come in for site plan or plat, so that would be a concern for us to understand the impact over time, immediate impact and impact -- or projected impact that you might have numbers of what you potentially think might go through conversions -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Good point. MS. LOCKHART: -- and how we can be prepared for that. MR. GIBLIN: Yeah. One of the requirements of this program is, to use it, you must submit, what is it, an adequate public facilities report that will look at all public infrastructure and services to confirm that the post uses are less of a strain on the county than the pre uses. MS. LOCKHART: Could we make sure that the school district is on that form, that analysis? I just want to be sure. MR. BOSI: Yes. MS. LOCKHART: Okay, thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Mike. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: And what happens if it doesn't? March 6, 2025 Page 34 of 45 MR. GIBLIN: Well, then they would not be able to use the program as written. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Why not? Because they're just taking a -- I'm just going to use the example of eight acres of C-1 and -- that's in an RFMUD, and they just want to put 128 units there. What would possibly stop them? MR. GIBLIN: The -- COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Because it's by right now, right? MR. GIBLIN: Well, no. It's by right if you submit that public adequate facilities -- it is a letter, Mike, or study? MR. BOSI: It's an analysis -- MR. GIBLIN: Analysis. MR. BOSI: -- of your Category A facilities. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: So this LDC would be, like, countywide. Like, same for the RFMUD, same for the RLSA, as long as it's commercial property, correct? MR. BOSI: If it -- no. There -- if there is any C-1 through -- if there's any commercial properties that are in the Rural Fringe Mixed-Use District, which it was an agricultural zoning district -- COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Yeah, but there is one. MR. BOSI: So if it's an existing commercial property that's zoned, consistent by policy it would be eligible for this program. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. COMMISSIONER SHEA: What happened with the PUDs? Is that what you were talking about? If you have a commercial section of a PUD -- MR. BOSI: No. COMMISSIONER SHEA: -- you can't make that conversion. The county had decided that, right? MR. BOSI: That is -- Live Local couldn't be applied to PUDs. A PUD would not be one that is found consistent by policy. It's a -- it would have to be a straight commercial zoning property that -- that was developed prior to the adoption of our plan in 1989. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: That's yet to be challenged though. MR. BOSI: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yeah. Michelle. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Yes. Maybe if we could just take a couple more minutes to look at -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Sure. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- the two charts that are in here. One is on Page 19. And I had Mike explain this to me, and it made so much more sense after he went through it. And so I thought for the benefit of everyone to go through that chart to really understand what's going on here. And the other chart is on page, I think, 37. 19 -- 19, the first one. That one. And give, like, a hypothetical. MR. GIBLIN: So this chart has been in our LDC, I believe, for a couple decades now. What we're doing -- as we do periodically, you saw on one of the slides earlier, we made some updates to it three or four years ago. Every few years we need to revisit it as market conditions change. I'll go through some of the changes first and then how you use it. The main change we've done here is add a new category right in the middle, the one called "median," and median would be incomes between 80 and 100 percent of the county's median income. We see that as a response to market conditions, a response to Board of County Commissioners' actions where, again, all of the recent approvals that the Board have done, they've designated units to be at that 100 percent level. Until now, we did not have a mechanism to allow that through our code. So we're creating that new category. We're also adjusting some of the numbers. As Eric said earlier, our goal through this -- one of the goals through this is to try to incentivize some of the lower and very lower levels. So you'll see that some of the numbers are increased in the low end, and some of the ones on the high end are not increased. In fact, they're maybe decreased. So that's the way the chart -- the chart on the left side are household income levels; gap, moderate, March 6, 2025 Page 35 of 45 median, low, very low. Along the top is what percentage of the development do you designate to hit that target. And so if you -- if you were a developer and you wanted -- and you came to the county and said that you wanted to build a development that included, let's say, 20 percent of the units at low income, you would go -- take low, go across the 20 percent, and you would get -- you would be entitled to ask for a density bonus of eight units per acre. So your base density, for the most part in the county is four units to the acre. You can add an affordable housing density bonus of eight, meaning you can build out at 12 if 20 percent of the units are affordable at that low-income level. Now, you can mix and match. You can say, "I'd like to do 20 percent at low and another 10 percent at cap," and you can run the numbers. And then you go to eight plus one, and so it's nine plus four. You know, you can get to 13. So you can -- a developer can choose to -- which income levels they serve based on what ultimate density they'd like to hit and also what percentage of the development they are willing to restrict as affordable. Obviously, the lower incomes that you target, the less total percentage you need to set aside, or if you are -- conversely, if you are targeting higher incomes, you would need to set aside a far greater percentage of the property. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: So if I'm a developer and I want to make 50 percent affordable at the median income, I can add eight -- no, no, seven -- MR. GIBLIN: Seven. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- to the -- MR. GIBLIN: Base. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- whatever I have -- to the base. MR. GIBLIN: Correct. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: And you could go -- yeah. Because we hear mostly 30 percent coming before us, but you can go all the way up, right? MR. GIBLIN: Sure. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Yeah, okay. MR. GIBLIN: And then that would be part of your application to the Board of County Commissioners. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Any then the other chart on -- CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Go ahead. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: -- Page 37. MR. GIBLIN: That chart takes that same concept and tries to simplify it in certain situations. So this chart is applicable only in the interchange and activity center provision and the transit-oriented design provision that are new to this -- to this amendment. It takes that same concept, providing greater densities towards proper -- or projects that skew to lower incomes. And we're saying that you must at least include -- let's take -- the far right one is rental. In a rental development, you must at least include 34 percent of the units at less than 50 percent, and then you can -- you know, a combination up to 100 percent for the remainder -- remaining 66 percent. It -- that's the same concept as the complicated chart, but it does it a little bit easier for those new provisions that we're creating. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: And I thought it was interesting that there's the chart for rental and then the charts for the sale, which are completely different. MR. GIBLIN: They are, and the reason for that is that once you get -- on the rental side, once you start getting above 100 percent median income up to 120, 140, that's at market rate or above market rate. So we wouldn't want to be providing an incentive to a developer that is something that they could just achieve in the market -- free market anyway. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. I see no other questions. Oh, Charles. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: If successful, do you have any guesstimate or feel for how many units you think this would add? MR. GIBLIN: I can tell you based on history in the calendar year 2023 -- COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Right. March 6, 2025 Page 36 of 45 MR. GIBLIN: -- the Board zoned over 1,000 new affordable housing units. In 2024, we zoned over -- almost 700 new affordable housing units, using many of the same concepts that these new programs are based on. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Yep. MR. GIBLIN: You know, most of those Comp Plan and Growth Management Plan amendments came in looking for between 20 and 25 units per acre. They were looking to set aside 30 percent of their units, with 70 percent market rate. Those same concepts are baked into what we've done here. And so if that's history, I mean, we could be looking at 1,000 units a year. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Until we run out of -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: Development. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: -- developable space. All right. I see no other questions. Anything further from staff? MR. JOHNSON: Nothing further. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Do we have any public -- comments from the public? Anybody signed up to be a registered speaker? MS. EOFF: No, Mr. Chairman. We have no registered speakers for this. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. MR. BOSI: I did receive an email from Mr. Rich Yovanovich. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: We couldn't get through the day. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: We couldn't get through the day without -- MR. BOSI: Yes. Comments on the -- from him related to our housing initiatives: Add median to 2.07.01.A. It is in 2.07.01.B, and I don't disagree that that's a useful comment. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. MR. BOSI: He doesn't understand how 2.07 works. That would be me having to kind of maybe have a phone call with him. I can talk to that. And then you've got, "Clarify the height is zoned height." I don't think that's an inappropriate suggestion, because we do say maximum height, but it just says maximum height. It would be zoned height. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Zoned height. MR. BOSI: So that's a change that we most -- we certainly can make. And that the requirement -- that 34 percent requirement related to 4.02.04.D, the chart we're talking about, that 34 percent has to be dedicated to 50 percent or less. He felt that there was no market viability for that. That's where I get to. Some of these programs were developed for for-profit developers. Some of these programs had your affordable housing providers that utilized tax credits and other subsidies. So that -- he may be right, but the intended audience or developer for this wasn't a for-profit developer. This was a component that really kind of tried to focus upon the dedicated affordable housing provider that provides 100 percent of their units and they could reach down because of the way that they subsidize and the way that they fund their programs. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. MR. BOSI: But I was obligated, and I told him I would put those comments on the record. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. Okay. I see no other comments, so I close the public hearing, then, on this. It's just legislative in nature anyways. And any discussion or comments from the Board members? (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Then do I hear a proposal? COMMISSIONER SHEA: I move we accept and approve the -- as recommended, I think with the one change. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Subject to the change. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Subject to the one change of Mr. Yovanovich -- MR. BOSI: Clarifying it's zoned height. March 6, 2025 Page 37 of 45 COMMISSIONER SHEA: -- clarifying that it's zoned height. MR. BOSI: Yes. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: I'll second that. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All in favor, signify by saying aye. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Aye. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Aye. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Aye. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any opposed, like sign. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Nay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. One objection. So it's 6-1 -- COMMISSIONER SHEA: 5-1. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: 5-1, sorry. I'm confused. So five for; one against. Okay, thank you. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: The last time I voted no on something, I was asked to give a reason. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: You have to -- that was -- that was for a zoning action. But this is legislative. If Mike wants to give a reason, he certainly can. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Yeah. I just think that the potential for a developer to build something that doesn't conform to the community is astronomical, and there would be nobody to petition that or object to that. So that's -- for that reason, I voted nay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. And -- yeah. It's -- I mean, it's a good point. This sort of was my -- I sort of implied that when I was talking about the rezoning. But as Cormac -- or as was pointed out, they can already do this under the Live Local as well, so... All right. With that, let's take a -- let's take a five-minute break as we change stages here for the next LDC amendment, then, because I know they've got to boot up some stuff on the screen and everything. So thank you. We'll take 10 minutes. (A brief recess was had from 5:59 p.m. to 6:08 p.m.) COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Chair, you have a live mic. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Thank you, Eric. Next petition, please. MR. JOHNSON: Thank you, Mr. Chair. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: ***LDC amendment proposal. MR. JOHNSON: Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the record, Eric Johnson. This is Item No. 9C, as in "Charlie." This is the Immokalee Urban Area Overlay District. And, again, I just wanted to point out that we advertised this on the county's website. It works very well. We're pleased with that. And this is a PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to hand the reins over to Rachel Hansen, who is going to give the presentation for this, but I will be on hand for questions. Rachel, you want to go ahead and -- MR. VANASSE: I'll come in first. MR. JOHNSON: Or Pat Vanasse. MR. VANASSE: I'll come in first. Thank you. For the record, Patrick Vanasse with the Neighborhood Company. I will provide an intro and turn things over to Rachel. Rachel has worked a lot more than me on the nitty-gritty of drafting the language; however, I've been associated with some of the zoning and planning initiatives in Immokalee for over 15 years. So this amendment is close to my heart. I'm so happy to see it come to fruition and finally move forward. So just to give a little bit of background. Planning initiatives in Immokalee started back in 1965, and at that time the Immokalee Area Planning Commission was established, and there was a recognition that Immokalee was rural and was different than coastal Collier County, and it was also removed geographically from the rest of coastal Collier. So the Planning Commission was to deal with zoning issues out there. Also, in around 2000, the CRA, the Community Redevelopment Agency, was established, and the focus March 6, 2025 Page 38 of 45 was on rehabilitation, conservation, and redevelopment. So the CRA got to work and, as part of their initiative and their efforts, they petitioned and pushed forward for a master plan that -- and it's interesting that you guys were talking about the levels of Comp Plan or Growth Management Plan and then the LDC and subdistricts. But the Immokalee Area Master Plan is its own master plan that sits within the Growth Management Plan, and it's been around for a while. But I was lucky enough in the 2007/2008 time frame to work with the team that was tasked with updating the Immokalee Area Master Plan. The intent was to really create regulations that were specific to the nature of Immokalee. Again, it's not like coastal Collier. It is different. The demographics are different. The conditions are different out there. And it was really to create a plan that was more responsive to their needs and to their conditions out there. So we worked extensively on that plan. Unfortunately, it was during an election cycle. Due to some politics, I think the plan got shelved for a while and wasn't adopted, but one thing that was adopted and was used by the CRA were these form based guidelines. The idea with the form based guidelines was to look at Main Street, their downtown core, and to make recommendations as to the type of development they wanted to see to start really directing people when it came to certain architectural guidelines and certain architectural styles. The decision was made at that time that this should not be part of the code. It should be prescriptive. It should be more of a suggestion, and the reason is that Immokalee, while different and wanting some of their own standards, there's also a need for redevelopment. And when you have mom-and-pop shops that maybe don't have the financial means to revamp their buildings completely, the guidelines are a softer approach where you can say, "We'd really like to see this kind of improvement, but at least it's not prescribed. It doesn't prevent a business owner from starting a business." So that was the idea behind it. And fast forward to 2019, the county picked up the master plan that was in draft format. They pushed it forward. They made some subjective changes to it. And a lot of the stuff that had been drafted initially did stay in there. And it was adopted, and Immokalee finally got their updated Immokalee Area Master Plan. As part of this process that we have in planning is these goals, objectives, and policies called for certain things that have to be changed in our Land Development Code after that. So we were hired by the county to update the Land Development Code associated with Immokalee, and we were happy to do so. I was happy to be able to kind of bring this full circle and finally get this adoption. So we -- once we were hired by the county, we worked very closely with Eric and the staff, and we've gone through over a year process where we had a lot of stakeholder involvement, and we drafted the amendments. But we've had a lot of input from your county staff and a lot of iterations and some adjustments and changes to make sure that we have consistency throughout the entire document, consistency with other regulations in the Land Development Code. So what we did initially was assess the existing conditions on the ground. We also looked at the last 10 to 15 years of development in Immokalee and code enforcement in Immokalee, and we looked at what were the friction points, what went well, what was challenging for some of the residents or some of the businesses, and we identified the priorities that we should be looking at as part of this update. From a public input standpoint, we had multiple meetings with the CRA and with your review staff. We've also -- we also held a few public workshops. As you know, sometimes it's a little difficult to get working people out to these workshops. So one of the things that we did is we made sure that we did a lot of one-on-one meetings. We asked the CRA to give us a list of development entities that had done some work -- or commercial entities that had done some work in Immokalee, and also community leaders, to ensure that at the very least we had 20 -- 20-some people that we could interview and talk to one-on-one. We did get some decent turnouts at the public workshops, but we -- when you do something like this, you really hope to have, you know, a few hundred people, and I think -- I can't remember exactly the numbers, but, you know, it was more in the maybe 30, 40 kind of range. But we took all that information, we summarized that in a white paper, and then we identified the priorities and the things that really needed to be addressed and the things that the community thought were priorities. So I'm going to walk you through those priorities, and then I'll turn things over to Rachel, and she can March 6, 2025 Page 39 of 45 kind of provide some more details. One of the things that came up over and over was the code requirements associated with the landscaping, buffering, vegetation requirements. As you know, Immokalee is a lot more agricultural. Demographics are different. So the idea was to balance -- we don't want to eliminate landscaping requirements. Part of the mission of the CRA is to redevelop and embellish things. So it was finding a fine balance where some of the landscaping that could very expensive and detrimental to business when they're trying to start up, those -- how can we alleviate and create a little more flexibility to still keep some greenery, still keep some buffering but maybe make it a little more flexible and in some cases reduce some of those onerous requirements. So we addressed that. Fencing and walls was something that came up on several projects and a lot of the comments we had. The architectural standards and the site design standards, we had a lot of comments on that also. One of the good ways to find out where that friction was, we looked at some of the rezones that occurred. We looked at the variances, and we saw where people were seeking those variances or those deviations, and we targeted those design standards. Off-street parking was another one. Immokalee is a lot more focused on pedestrians or -- I don't know if "focus" is the right word, but we have a lot more pedestrians and cyclists in Immokalee than we do in coastal Collier, and there have been several initiatives by the county to look at safety issues, to look at pedestrian conditions. And also what we realize is we need to reduce the parking standards because our codes typically, not just Collier County but across this country, typically over-park commercial uses. So we start off at a base where, in most of Collier County, most uses are over-parked, but then if you look at Immokalee, we have a lot more bike and pedestrian activity, and we have more on-street parking, so it made a lot of sense to provide a little relief on those parking requirements. There was a question about how many subdistricts we have. So to add more layers to the complexity of land use and zoning in Collier County, we have the Immokalee Area Master Plan that's kind of a subset of your Growth Management Plan. But within the zoning and the overlay that's before you today, we have multiple zoning subdistricts that deal with some areas of Immokalee a little differently. So we inherited multiple zoning districts -- subdistricts, and we set forth to look at can we consolidate some of those or even maybe eliminate some of them? And what we found out, unfortunately, is we were only able to consolidate two subdistricts into one. We had to create a new one because the Immokalee Area Master Plan called for a new subdistrict right by the airport, and the idea is that airport is growing. We want to promote some commercial and industrial uses close to the airport to be able to support that -- that airport in the long term and make sure that it is successful. Another thing that came up was the extension -- the loop road of State Road 29. This has been a long time coming. Discussions about that loop road started when I got to Collier County in 2000 -- 2003, and it's finally coming to fruition, and the county's worked really hard to make it happen. So this is very -- very good use for the county. But one of the things that we were trying to do is to be proactive and look at that loop road and say, there is a bunch of land surrounding this corridor. How can we allow certain uses by right, and what kind of uses do we want close to that corridor? And we were looking, obviously, at goods and freight type of uses, logistical type of uses, and we said, if we can allow those by right, it can stimulate economic development and businesses just to locate right around that corridor. Unfortunately, as we went through this process, the final alignment of the loop road isn't quite done yet. FDOT's still working on some little details, and on top of that, what we realize is a lot of that land surrounding that corridor is in the ag future land-use category which, again, doesn't allow for a ton of uses and doesn't allow for some of the uses that we wanted to do. So again, you need consistency between your Land Development Code and your Comp Plan. So we have evaluated, we have looked at what some of those uses could be. Staff has all that information. I think the idea is once the alignment is finalized and then within maybe a cycle where staff is making updates to the future land use, they could change the future land-use categories around that loop road, and then some of these LDC amendments could be adopted to really support those uses along the corridor. So with that said, those are the priorities. Those are things we looked at. We had some other issues come up and some other concerns and questions and recommendations, but we worked through all those. And I March 6, 2025 Page 40 of 45 will turn things over to Rachel, and she'll give you some more details. Thank you. MS. HANSEN: Good evening. For the record, Rachael Hansen. I am just going to walk through the LDC sections that are being proposed to be amended. If anybody has any questions at any time, feel free to stop me. But the first one is Section 2.03.07, which is where the Immokalee Urban Area Overlay District is located. What we've done there really is to reorder the subdistricts that Pat mentioned. We've updated the maps for each subdistrict, as well as the main overlay map. And the formatting in the location of where all of these subdistricts live within the LDC is consistent with recent amendments to both the Bayshore overlay and the Golden Gate Parkway overlay. We added that Industrial Mixed Use Commercial Overlay Subdistrict. The two subdistricts that were combined were the Farm Market Overlay Subdistrict and the Agribusiness. So now it's cleverly titled the Agribusiness Farm Market Overlay Subdistrict. And that one was mostly because of the geographic proximity and the similar uses and nature of those two subdistricts. All of the permitted, conditional, and prohibited uses that used to live within each individual subdistrict are now conveniently located in one table within that section. And then the deviations section that used to be there has been moved to 4.02.27, which is where all the other site design standards live. And then one thing that was staff direction, mobile food dispensing vehicles are now permitted by right in the Community Facilities zoning district. And then another staff-directed item was that in Section 2.06.01, which is the affordable housing density bonus, that contains the table that you guys were just looking at, that implements the affordable housing density bonus that's permitted by right within the Immokalee Area Master Plan. So really all it did was add language to create an application to utilize that by-right density bonus. So this is just the map as it exists now. You can see where there is that loop road alignment that Pat talked about, but obviously, no subdistrict outlined at this time. All right. So our next section is -- this is really the big one and where the crux of the amendment lives. So 4.02.27 is your architectural and site design standards for the Immokalee Area Urban Overlay. So what this does is it replaces and supersedes Section 5.05.08, which is where your architectural and design standards for the rest of coastal Collier County exist. So, again, it's really just centralizing the development standards for Immokalee all in one location. So if you're trying to do development in the urban -- Immokalee urban area, you don't have to flip back and forth through a whole bunch of LDC sections. So more specifically, in 4.02.27, we have Section B, which is the building and site design standards for the entire overlay. So all of this language comes from the existing LDC 5.05.08, which is, again, your architectural and design standards, but it's modified specifically for Immokalee and utilizes some of the CRAs' central business district form based guidelines that Pat mentioned previously. And one of the big things is the modification of buffer types. So we've created these new Immokalee-specific buffers. So rather than your Type A, B, C, and D, we have I-A, I-B, et cetera. And so again, these are trying to balance -- providing some relief for small business owner's redevelopment while maintaining sufficient landscaping and design. Some of the other changes that were made in that building and site design standards, we have some relief for the vehicular use area landscaping for smaller projects. So currently, if you have more than 10 parking spaces in a row, you have to provide landscape islands. What we've done for Immokalee is that if you have a project that is less than 25 spaces, you can just provide the perimeter buffering rather than the landscape islands, with the thought that for some of these smaller parking lots and smaller businesses, it can be very difficult to irrigate and expensive to irrigate landscape islands within a parking lot. Pat mentioned this before, too, but we've provided for some parking reductions for development that provide bicycle parking. The allowance for chain-link and wood fences forward of the primary facade, so in front yard areas, and then the allowance for murals, and all of that would be subject to CRA review and approval, and there are some criteria within the code for murals. So then we get into some site design standards that are specific to each subdistrict. The Main Street Overlay Subdistrict has the most specific standards, and it incorporates the language that was in the original overlay as well as standards from that form based guidelines. All of the standards from the form based March 6, 2025 Page 41 of 45 guidelines are encouraged rather than prescriptive to be compliant with Senate Bill 250. Because of Senate Bill 250, we can't create standards that are more onerous than what previously existed until -- is it 2026? MR. BOSI: Yeah, October. MS. HANSEN: Yeah, October 1st of 2026. With -- knowing that the -- there is the opportunity to come back in and amend the overlay to make those guidelines prescriptive once the requirements for Senate Bill 250 have expired. For the State Road 29 Commercial Overlay, there were no substantive changes in that one. It was really just incorporating the language of the original overlay but making the formatting consistent with the new location. And then same thing with the Jefferson Avenue Commercial Overlay. It's incorporating that original language and updating the formatting. The Agribusiness and Farm Market Overlay subdistrict, like I said, that's a combination of those two original overlays, and there were no substantive changes. It just incorporates that original language. The Industrial Mixed-Use Commercial Overlay is the new subdistrict that is mandated by the Immokalee Area Master Plan, and the design standards come from that subdistrict within the Immokalee Area Master Plan. The design standards for new mobile home lots, that incorporates that original subdistrict language, and that subdistrict is designed to provide some relief for nonconforming mobile home lots that exist within Immokalee utilizing a Site Improvement Plan process that the county has. And then Section 5.03.02 is where the allowance for the chain-link fences and wood fences forward of the primary facade is implemented. And then between what was in your packet and today, we've had some additional clarifications that were made based on some new input from staff and just in reviewing the language. So Eric is passing out the pages. It's just the pages that have those edits. None of them are substantive changes. It's purely clarification, but I can go through each of them. The first one is a clarification for the Agribusiness and Farm Market Overlay Subdistrict, that the exception for site design standards is only for building design standards; that's consistent with the old overlay language. Previously it -- it made an exception for all design standards, which was never the intent. The second one is to update Option 2 for multistory self-storage to have the same buffer standards as Option 1. Again, that was always the intent. It's just the language was not updated. We've added a clarifying footnote for the planting height of the Type I-C buffer that distinguishes the planting height from the maintenance height. That's pretty typical in the LDC that you'll have a requirement for the height of a shrub or hedge at planting and then a height that it needs to be maintained at. There is, also within that same section on Page 51 and 52, the clarification of applicability of the buffer table in comparison to the specific subdistricts that have their own landscaping standards. On Page 58, we've removed the reference to trees under "foundation plantings." The intent was never to require trees. It was just language that got carried over from the original overlay. And then last but not least, we've clarified some of the language within the Main Street Overlay to be consistent with Senate Bill 250. So we've changed a bunch of "shalls" to "shoulds," so that it's not -- the language is no longer prescriptive. So I know that was a lot of information. Does anyone have any questions? CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I have one question, and I'm looking for the piece now. The one question with regards to your very prescriptive and architectural standards, and I don't recall any place in our -- I'll call it the rest of the county where there's very prescriptive either Spanish, contemporary, or other type. Is that something that the Immokalee area wanted specifically? And I'm looking for the chart. MS. HANSEN: Yeah. So I think what you're referring to is what in the Main Street Overlay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Yes. MS. HANSEN: And that does come out of that form based guidelines document. That was a desire that they have consistent design standards. But again, because of Senate Bill 250, we can't "require." All of those are recommended. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: So it's more of an encouragement, then. MS. HANSEN: Correct. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Again, because I can't think of any place in the county where we specifically require contemporary or Spanish -- or what was the other word used? I'm looking for it in here. March 6, 2025 Page 42 of 45 MS. HANSEN: Oh, yeah, mission style. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Mission style, yeah. MS. HANSEN: Yeah. It's all a recommendation. And the one that was added that was not in that form based guidelines was the contemporary. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And that was just from a mere fact of trying to create some conformity in the -- in any redevelopment in the downtown area? MS. HANSEN: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Thank you. Or Main Street, yes. MS. HANSEN: Yeah, that's correct. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. Michelle. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Rachel, because of your presentation that came to my mind -- THE COURT REPORTER: Can you use your mic. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Sorry. Based on your presentation, something came to my mind which involves, I think, the Main Street type of guidelines. Is there anything in here like the Duwany (phonetic) plan of downtown where it creates a more walkable community specifically on something like this where you've got, like, the main street and -- MS. HANSEN: Sure. So I know that along with the -- some of the encouragement of parking reductions to provide bicycle parking, the CRA has plans -- once State Road 29 and that Main Street is turned over to the county, they do have some plans to address some design of the right-of-way and walkability and things like that. But until it's turned over to the county from the state, there's not a ton that can be done. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Oh, okay. So because 29 is a State Road, we don't have control over that. Okay. MR. VANASSE: Correct. So once 29 goes in, there's going to be some changes to Main Street. The intent is to slow down traffic, allow certain uses along that street, really activate that public realm. So that's going to be forthcoming; however, we have certain provisions that allow some of the buildings to be closer to the right-of-way. We have provisions associated with fenestration, which is the amount of windows and creating that walkable realm, and we also have provisions also allowing some outdoor seating. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Okay. And then one other question. Thank you. And then, Mike, I'm going to need your help on this, because in talking to Mike in preparing for this meeting, again, like I always ask, it's like what's the septic tank situation here. And you said that that's not -- that's really outside of this LDC type of discussion. But what can I recommend to encourage some sort of strategy to help with that in the future? MR. BOSI: I mean, it's most certainly within your purview to be able from a Planning Commission to recommend to the Board of County Commissioners that the Immokalee Water and Sewer District and general-purpose county government coordinate on the development of a long-term plan for the transition from individuals on well and septic to a centralized sewer system. But as I've mentioned before, as of now there are no initiatives in that regard that we've identified through the Immokalee Water and Sewer District or any initiative from the general-purpose county government that is calling for that action. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Can we as a Planning Commission make that recommendation? MR. BOSI: Yes. You can make a recommendation to the Board of County Commissioners, because it's completely separate from this. This is -- this isn't related to that issue. That is an issue of -- COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Right. MR. BOSI: -- of existing facilities that are, you know, well and septic, and that's a coordination. We don't provide that service. It's the Immokalee Water and Sewer District. So we would have to coordinate with the Immokalee Water and Sewer District in developing a strategy for the long-term conversion of those. And a lot of things -- the reason why that is, especially within the Immokalee community, is the cost associated with those normally can be pretty steep, and with the demographic composition of the population, it would be something that we would have to have a long-term plan and make sure that we have identified where we could find some potential grants or subsidation [sic] of that -- of that activity just because of the cost associated with it. But yeah, that -- like I said at the very beginning, those are issues that you as a Planning Commission, if March 6, 2025 Page 43 of 45 you -- if the majority feels that that's an effort that should be at least discussed with the -- with the Board of County Commissioners that needs to be initiated, that could be a suggestion that you make to the Board of County Commissioners. As part of this, but it's separate from it, meaning not directly related to it. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Right. MR. BOSI: But as you were reviewing Immokalee, it was an issue that you brought up and thought it would be well worth at least their contemplation, and then the Board will take it for -- whether they want us to move forward with it or not. MR. VANASSE: Just to piggyback some of those comments. So we were tasked with looking at the Land Development Code and providing updates, but one of the things that we -- the discussions we've had with the CRA is the CRA scope is much broader than just the Land Development Code. And the CRA, as part of their mission, they look at some issues, like you were saying, you know, well, septic. They look at better sidewalks, they look at better lighting, they look at drainage issues, and the CRA is working with, obviously, staff and dealing with the Land Development Code, the Comp Plan, but they're also working with different divisions of the county and getting some grants and making physical improvements in their community. So some of your concerns, also, I would say, make sure you talk to the CRA. They're very active. They have their own redevelopment plan, which is separately, obviously, linked a little bit to the Land Development Code, but they've got their own goals and objectives and policies also associated with their redevelopment plan. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Randy. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Thank you. Rachel, thank you for your presentation. I apologize; I should have asked you this question when you mentioned it. The affordable housing program, if it was in here, I'm sorry, I missed it. How closely does it mirror what we just talked about in the -- it's basically the same, I'm assuming. MR. BOSI: No, it's not the same. They actually have an -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Their own. MR. BOSI: -- affordable housing density program that is by right, that is unique to Immokalee, whereas you are entitled without a -- without a conversion process, without -- if you are in certain zoning -- or certain subdistricts, you are eligible to increase your density if you're providing for affordable housing to a specific amount. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: By right? MR. BOSI: By right. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Okay. MR. BOSI: And they have provided for the -- at least the component of what development standards, recognizing that program. So they've provided for the do of how to implement it within this -- within this LDC amendment. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Okay. So it's even a little more aggressive and helpful for that community -- MR. BOSI: Yes. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: -- correct? MR. BOSI: Based upon the nature of that community and the need for new housing. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: That's what I was hoping for. MS. HANSEN: It is -- special to Immokalee, I believe it's only up to eight units per acre, though -- COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Okay. MS. HANSEN: -- as opposed to the 16 or the 25. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Sixteen to 25. MR. BOSI: Yeah, the by-right has a cap of eight. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Of eight. MS. HANSEN: And it's only for specific future land-use designations within Immokalee. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Thank you. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Paul. COMMISSIONER SHEA: I'll end it with an easy question. I thought I heard you say, and I thought I read in one of the slides, that you're allowing chain-link fence in the front yards. March 6, 2025 Page 44 of 45 MS. HANSEN: So I -- one clarification. This overlay district only applies to commercial zoning. It does not -- it only applies to nonresidential uses. So those -- the chain-link fence would be allowed for commercial uses forward of the primary facade. And the reason behind that is because it exists in Immokalee today, and it's something that was heard from the community that they wanted the ability to have chain-link or wood fencing. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Don't they have to buffer it -- or I thought I read "with landscape bushes." MS. HANSEN: They would still have to comply with all of their perimeter landscaping, yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Mike. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Yeah. I just have a couple questions about the standards. And maybe you already answered it. Maybe it's just recommendations, and maybe this is just the commercial district. There's, like, prohibited roof materials, like the people hanging shingles. MS. HANSEN: That's from the existing -- that from -- that is in Section 5.05.08 currently, that language. That's not new language. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. And paint colors, they can only choose certain paint colors? I'm just concerned with people's right to choose what they want to build their house with. MS. HANSEN: So we -- as far as the paint colors, we've actually expanded the number of colors that you can choose from. Currently, the architectural standards in the LDC limit you to a certain spectrum of color. It's -- there's a worksheet on the county website that you can download that shows you. But we've expanded that to more vibrant colors because that's something that they wanted to see. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: And let's go back to the roof thing real quick. So are you really prohibiting asphalt shingle roofs, or is it already there? MS. HANSEN: That language is already in -- MR. BOSI: It's a prohibition -- within our current zoning -- within our LDC, a commercial building cannot utilize -- COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Oh, so this is just commercial? MR. BOSI: Oh, just commercial. This is only commercial. This does not apply to residential. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: And, Mike, throughout the county, we have some pretty restrictive color standards anyway. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Yeah. Like I said, I didn't know if this was commercial or commercial and residential. MR. BOSI: It's only commercial. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. Perfect then. MR. VANASSE: And just to emphasize, we did our very best to look at all the changes that we were making, making sure that we weren't making anything more onerous, A, because the nature of Immokalee and what we were setting out to do, but B, Collier County has always been very cognizant of if you change the rules, we need to make sure that we're not creating nonconformities or we're not taking people's rights away. So Collier County is always doing a great job doing that. So when we went -- and then on top of that, we have Senate Bill 250 that preempts any jurisdiction in the state from creating regulations that were more -- are more onerous. So we were very careful. And as we went through the review process with DSAC, with your staff, we tried to look at all those. I hope we haven't missed anything, but our intent was completely to make things a little more flexible and not create anything that was more onerous. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Okay. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. I don't hear -- see any more questions from the Board here. So, staff, any closing comments? MS. HANSEN: I do just want to make one clarification that Eric pointed out to me. I misspoke before regarding the mobile food dispensing vehicles. I said they were permitted by right in the Community Facility Zoning District. It's conditional use. That language is correct; I just misspoke. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Do we have any registered public speakers? MS. EOFF: No, we have no registered speakers on this item. JOE SCHMITT, CHAIRMAN March 6, 2025 Page 45 of 45 CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: All right. With that, then we close the public hearing in regards to the LDC amendment, and I turn to my colleagues if there are any recommendations for approval or disapproval, or however you wish to -- open for discussion. Go ahead, Mike. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: I make a motion to approve the -- with -- I will make a motion to approve No. PL20240004278. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Subject to the errata sheet that was submitted? COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Correct. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Okay. Do I hear a second? COMMISSIONER McLEOD: I'll second it. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Michelle, seconded. All in favor, signify by saying aye. COMMISSIONER COLUCCI: Aye. COMMISSIONER SHEA: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Aye. COMMISSIONER SPARRAZZA: Aye. COMMISSIONER PETSCHER: Aye. COMMISSIONER McLEOD: Aye. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: Any opposed, like sign. (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: It passes unanimously. Very good. This was a long process. MR. VANASSE: Yes. CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: It's a long process, because we did the Immokalee Area Master Plan about a year and a half, two years ago, and then this, and we're finally into an LDC amendment. So this is -- this is the implementation steps. So very good. Thank you. And with that, any closing comments? (No response.) CHAIRMAN SCHMITT: I say we adjourn. ******* There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the Chair at 6:48 p.m. COLLIER COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION __________________________________________ These minutes approved by the Board on _____, as presented _________ or as corrected ___________. TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF FORT MYERS COURT REPORTING BY TERRI L. LEWIS, RPR, FPR-C, COURT REPORTER AND NOTARY PUBLIC. JOE SCHMITT CHAIRMAN ____________________________