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DSAC Minutes 06/04/2025 1 MINUTES OF THE COLLIER COUNTY DEVELOPMENT SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING Naples, Florida June 4, 2025 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, the Collier County Development Services Advisory Committee and Collier County, having conducted business herein, met on this date at 3:00 PM in REGULAR SESSION at the Collier County Growth Management Community Department Building, Conference Room #609/610, 2800 N. Horseshoe Dr., Naples, Florida, 34102 with the following members present: Chairman: William J. Varian Vice Chairman: Blair Foley Clay Booker (Excused) James Boughton (Excused) Jeffrey Curl (Excused) Laura Spurgeon DeJohn John English Marco Espinar (Excused) Norm Gentry (Excused) Nicholas Kouloheras Mark McLean Chris Mitchell Robert Mulhere Hannah Roberts–AHAC–Non-Voting Jeremy Sterk Mario Valle The following County staff were in attendance Mike Bosi – Director, Zoning Division Christopher Mason – Director, Community Planning & Resiliency Division, GMCD Jaime Cook – Director, Development Review Division, GMCD and Linda Blackledge Michael Stark – Director, Operations & Regulatory Management Division, GMCD John McCormick – Director, Building Review & Permitting Division, GMCD Thomas Iandimarino – Director, Code Enforcement, GMCD Claudia Vargas – Project Manager I, Engineering & Project Management, PUD Cormac Giblin – Director, Housing Policy & Economic Development Division Lorraine Lantz – Manager, Transportation Planning, Transportation Management Services James French – Department Head, GMCD Heather Cartwright-Yilmaz – Management Analyst-Staff Liaison, GMCD Captain Bryan Horbal, North Collier Fire Review 2 Any person who decides to appeal a decision of This Board you will need a record of the proceedings pertaining thereto, and therefore may need to ensure that a verbatim record of the proceedings is made, which record includes the testimony and evidence upon which the appeal is to be based, neither Collier County nor This Board shall be responsible for providing this record. 1. CALL TO ORDER– Chairman Chairman Varian Development Service Advisory Committee, Wednesday, 6th June 2025 was called to order at 3:00 PM 2. APPROVAL OF AGENDA Blair Foley motioned to amend the Agenda moving New Business item D to A Robert Mulhere seconded Motion passed unanimously 3. APPROVAL OF MINUTES Chris Mitchell motioned to approve the minutes Mario Valle seconded Minutes approved unanimously 4. PUBLIC SPEAKERS None 5. STAFF ANNOUNCEMENTS a. Zoning Division – [Mike Bosi, Director] • We have a couple petitions going to the Board on the 10th, two more on the 24th, and two more on the 8th. • Planning commission is canceled the entire month of June. We're only in one meeting in July, one meeting in August. • We have seven petitions that we're going to be dealing with. • Two to three requests per week related to pre-application meetings for entitlement. • The real estate market's a little bit more elongated than it was a couple years ago. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing for this market, but we're holding tight and going to concentrate on the projects that we do have in hand and providing you guys exceptional service to make sure you can get your performance bonuses. b. Community Planning & Resiliency Division – [Christopher Mason, Director] • We have FEMA's auditing firm ISO in the house tomorrow to go through our three year verification cycle visit for our CRS program. We submitted all of our data and information a month ahead of time. This should be a simple walkthrough and look around the County at some open space, some active projects to show what we're doing is above board and correct. And we're hoping to keep that over $9 million that we saved in the community. • We're gearing up for hurricane season and happy to be on our way out of the drought. 3 Chairman Varian Could you have Heather send us out the link to the most current FEMA webmaps? The link on the website is broken. Christopher Mason We'll provide you with a link for the FEMA Map Service center and how you get to that particular set of maps. c. Housing Policy & Economic Development – [Cormac Giblin, Director] • We have the housing plan LDC adoption hearing for the LDC amendments. They lost last tranche of those changes. The comp plan was approved I think a couple years ago. This is implementing LDC regulations. Those are on the Board's agenda for Tuesday. Mark McLean There's a new Live Local sitting on the governor's desk. Are there changes we should be aware of. Cormac Giblin The major change in that is that it would allow Live Local to be used in commercial and industrial sections of PUD’s where previously it was unclear and our Board had taken a position against it. If the governor signs that, it would be allowed. Mark McLean Are we going to stay in Collier county with RMF 16 like our underlying zoning? Cormac Giblin The new law doesn't provide any additional direction on that. It would be a local decision on whether RMF 16 continues to be the appropriate, most similar land use category that we can go to. Mark McLean So that's something you'll visit or is it something the Board can visit. Cormac Giblin They already made the decision to go with RMF 16. d. Development Review Division – [Jaime Cook, Director] • Staffing updates. We're losing Kyle and our inspections team. His last day is next Friday. We have hired an engineer to replace Josh's old position, and he has started. Chairman Varian, to your question from last meeting. Lisa and I were looking at the engineering reviews that are loading on remodel permits. As I mentioned to you, to try to make sure if it was on a ground floor, there was no additional impervious being added. But we're going to look at why they're auto loading on everything and see if there's something we can do to. 4 We've reached out to Kirsten, and she's going to see if she can help us figure out why those are loading on just basic remodels and some of these multifamily condos. e. Operations Support & Regulatory Management Division – [Michael Stark, Director] • The Department received 4,696 permit applications with 52 related to Hurricane Ian and 17 related to Hurricane Milton. • Zoning front desk team resolved 918 survey conditions, processed 42 short term vacation rentals and hosted 43 pre-application meetings, welcomed 1,015 customers to the business center and 192 customers at the satellite offices. • Last month we talked about the number of phone calls that were coming in and dropped calls. We were able to lower that down now to 5653 phone calls with roughly about only about 570 drop calls here or there. • Average turnaround time for intake staff, which includes verifying submittals and generating default reviews and inspections, remains less than one day. • The department overall including Paradise Sports Complex, Domestic Animal Services and Parks, has 623.5 positions with 49 of those in various stages of the hiring pipeline. Many of these positions have opened due to promotional opportunities. • Stephanie, our HR manager and Sandra Delgado, working with Emilio Vasquez from the CBIA hosted our first of many recruitment events. That was positive news. • We are taking a look at lessons learned from that event and reaching out a little bit earlier, maybe taking a look at other locations throughout the County and timing as well. It was at 6pm and unfortunately didn't have anyone RSVP to the event. But we are looking at maybe making this a department wide recruiting event and taking a look at some other options with maybe combining forces with some other agencies. We also have our internship program. • And last update would be for Mr. Jason Badge from our technology team, we're making progress on the fee study with the intent to roll out these changes next fiscal year as soon as we have a little bit more concrete results from that. • We're in the information gathering process at this point and the City View software team has been working the weekends so that we don't interrupt any regular business during the week. Chairman Varian Are you looking into getting rid of the subcontractor paper submittal? Michael Stark That is correct. Chairman Varian Would you to consider allowing us to change it on the portal before any inspections are done, because we might have to make an adjustment right up to the last point. I'm having that problem right now with subs not being able to meet our deadlines causing us to change that sub even though no inspections have happened yet. Getting rid of the paper, you know. 5 Michael Stark And that's our goal. f. Building Review & Permitting Division – [John McCormick, Director] • We're in the information gathering process at this point and the City View software team has been working the weekends so that we don't interrupt any regular business during the week. • Our permit inspections are pretty steady right now and we are in the middle of a fee study. We got a consultant onboard to help us with how we charge for things and hopefully help our financial situation because we've lost money the last two years, and have dipped into the reserves. • There's a lot of reasons for that. We're trying to work on our efficiency on the back end, but the fact of the matter is we're charging rates that we’ve had 10 years. • I think we're close to hiring a plumbing chief who was an internal candidate but we still have a lot of openings. • Structural we lost a couple other guys to retirement inspectors. • We still have open reviewers. In the interim, I've asked Chris in Resiliency talking to Jamie about them helping us out with the floodplain reviews we traditionally did within our group. We transferred some of those individuals under their wing because they're the experts with when it comes to FEMA related issues and floodplain. Chairman Varian I got a correction letter on electrical, perfectly fine, submitted it back in and then they came back and said, oh, by the way, there's one more item. I'm surprised they didn't catch it because it was a simple little item. I'm starting to see a little bit of that come back now. So now that second review is a third review. I don't like it. John McCormick My design team doesn't either. But I apologize. Maybe, they are not paying enough paying attention. There's really no excuse for that. Call me directly if you have a problem. Nicholas Kouloheras • What's the timing of that? John McCormick • I'd like to get that in in August, so we can institute it for next year October 1st in front of the Board. We're looking ahead, saying, we’re out of money halfway through the year. • A lot of its inefficiency. I think I mentioned this last time, that we need to restructure. • What some other Counties do that charge for things we normally don't charge for. • You know, we have a lot of inefficiencies and things we haven't been charging for. So that might be part of this fee study. g. Collier County Fire Review – [Michael Cruz, Captain] No Report 6 h. North Collier Fire Review – [Bryan Horbel, Captain] • I am proud to announce that we had 200 more plan reviews this month. So I'm glad we added those two extra Reviewers. • We had a total of 820 permits in for review last month and the previous month. We weren't able to make it, but we had 818 the month prior. So two busy months for our team with still a two day turnaround for our permits. That's pretty impressive. • Plan review numbers for Planning permits were 79 for the month of May and we had a total of 1400 new construction inspections. • We have 9 total projects just in North Collier district that are currently on a TCO awaiting paperwork or whatever the issues, but waiting for COs. Chairman Varian How you doing on your inspection side as far as Same next day, next day, Captain Horbel • Next day. And we're getting ready to bring in 3 more people because we have some retirements coming up. We're trying to fill some positions before they become vacant. • We are 100 up to date on our existing building inspections. i. Code Enforcement Division – [Thomas Iandimarino, Director] • Ford?? Association of Code Enforcement is our accrediting agency that supports Code Enforcement in and we are having a face fundamentals class here in Naples in July. It took some effort coordinating the State to come down and teach but we're going to be able to have 11 of our staff in that class. It is $650 per person and the amount of money we're saving on traveling per diem to not send them out is about 8 to $12,000, depending on which hotel they stay in. • We're hosting it up at Heritage Bay with a total of 35 from other parts of the State including our 11. j. Public Utilities Department – [Claudia Vargas] No updates. k. Transportation Management Services, Transportation Engineering – [Lorraine Lantz, Manager] • Mike Sawyer was here a couple months ago about Access Management. We have that going forward to the Board of County Commissioners for the July 8 board meeting • FDOT is having a public hearing for their I-75, their PD&E project on I-75 from Gold Gate Parkway to Corkscrew Road. • The DDI (Divergent Diamond Interchange) at I-75 and Immokalee has a meeting August 14th at North Collier Regional Park. It's their PD&E public hearing and basically their kickoff as it moves to design and construction. • We're having our public meeting for the Golden Gate Parkway corridor congestion study August 21st at the Golden Gate Community Center. • The Tiger Complete Street grant project has been completed. The 20 miles of sidewalks, etc. 7 6. NEW BUSINESS a. Group Housing Updates LDCA Josephine Medina, Planner III, GMCD Good afternoon, Josey Medina, with the LDC section. I want to make sure that it was reported that the LDR subcommittee did recommend approval without any changes. I don't think that was updated within your packet. Chairman Varian motioned to approve the amendment Blair Foley seconded Motion passed unanimously b. Mailed Notice Rural Agricultural Zoned Land LDCA Richard Henderlong, Planner III, GMCD This is a Board directed item that has been brought to the Subcommittee. We did an analysis of six different parcels on mailed notice distances and determined that on page 8 of Exhibit C the column of varying distances all the way from a quarter mile, half mile up to 3 quarters mile and a mile. The subcommittee made the recommendation that they'd like to see a half mile be the new standard for rural agricultural land that's being rezoned and conditional uses. He noted that the Board is maintaining a one-mile notification distance while the subcommittee voted to approve a one-half mile notification distance. Robert Mulhere He understood that only nine people were notified on a recent rezone off of Sabal Palm Road and people had showed up saying the notification was inadequate. He said the subcommittee saw that the difference between one-half mile and a mile notification was pretty significant in costs. He motioned to stay with the subcommittee’s recommendation and approved the amendment to one-half mile. Mark McLean seconded the motion. Motion passed unanimously c. Solar Facilities and Electrical Substations LDCA Jem Frantz, RVI, Planning and Landscape Architecture • This is a privately initiated LDC amendment. I have a Power Point presentation with some changes that occurred from between the DSAC LDR Subcommittee recommendation and today. • The existing LDC does not address solar facilities, and chapter 163 was amended recently to allow solar facilities in all ag districts and ag land use categories • It does include some limitations on the types of ordinances or the types of items that can be included in ordinances by Counties. We've tried to stay limited to what the Statute allows, but we did also incorporate a few changes that address typical or regular comments that we get during staff reviews. • We've worked with staff to narrow these issues and provide language that both staff and the applicant agree on. 8 Tal Berman, Renewable Developer with FPL • He discussed what a solar facility is, what FPL has been doing in the State of Florida, and what we're proposing here. • FPL to date has 108 solar sites across the state of Florida. In Collier County, we have one operational solar site that's the Immokalee Solar Energy Center. It was operational in 2022. Currently we have two additional solar sites under construction about 1 mile west of Immokalee. • Each of these sites is 74.5 megawatts. So, what that equates to is around 15,000 homes for each site. • The intent of these images is to show that each one of these 74.5-megawatt site is developed on agriculturally zoned properties, typically around 450 to 500 acres, larger farmlands. These solar panels are put on previously farmed land. We're taking the crops that were there, removing them and putting in solar panels. • The piles are driven down into the ground. Photovoltaic panels are placed on top of the piles. These are very low impact, low to the ground, when tilted at max height they are approximately seven feet high on previously farmed lands. What FPL has been doing is to avoid wetlands and native vegetative habitats and look for previous farmed crops for solar installations. The properties are primarily owned by FPL. Jem Frantz • The other portion of the amendment addresses electric substations. Similarly, the existing regulations are not consistent with state law. The changes have been in place for a couple of years. They are working through implementation with state law. It will allow for electric substations on a lot of the land uses throughout the county but with a few exceptions. There are specific standards for landscaping. An overview of the request to comments was summarized by adding new definitions, new sections, updating list of uses in Essential Services section and Agricultural District, and added exemptions and alternative standards from SDP requirements. • Changes were made based on staff’s recommendations received after a meeting and are outlined in the handout. He addressed the changes from staff regarding grammatical correctness and revision to standards for not producing glare for airport or vehicular traffic. Laura Spurgeon DeJohn • Electric substation is being defined to include accessory administration or maintenance buildings. An administration building is not an accessory to a substation but a primary use. Is an administration building for the operation of an electric substation subordinate or accessory to the equipment that is considered an essential service? Where it’s listed as an essential service, the electric substations will now include accessories and related uses. Related uses are not subordinate. They could be an administration building. She asked for clarification. 9 Jem Frantz • They started the language according to the state statue. They will double check it. It’s not their intention to have an administration building where employees come and have offices but rather related to the operation of the substation. There needs to be some clarification. Mr. McClean • He noted the subcommittee talked about it. There is a storing of energy that can be sizeable batteries. The underlying zoning district has a two-story maximum building height and the underlying zoning restrictions would control where and how high to build a battery storage building. Laura Spurgeon DeJohn • She has been discussing use conflicts rather than dimensional criteria, where essential service infrastructure is needed and an administration building within a neighborhood is not needed. • The statute identifies administration buildings as the State law allows. But we need to determine what the State is defining as an administration building, a primary or accessory use • Her recommendation was to move it forward with language referencing administration buildings to be specific to accessories, not just related use and that administration buildings are unmanned. • She moved it forward subject to adjustments to the language regarding administration buildings and to define the limitations on the administration buildings being referenced in the code. Laura Spurgeon DeJohn motioned to approve with adjustments to the language and defining limitations on administration buildings Mark McLean seconded Motion passed unanimously d. Culvert Alternate in County Right of Way (ROW) Jaime Cook • On the last page of your agenda packets, there is some information from Jeff Curl. What I believe he is looking for is for the ability to install a French drain system across the driveway portion of the right of way. Code only allows for asphalt, concrete and pavers. So this would be a change. • We had been working through the DSAC subcommittee for the right of way manual updates and we can schedule a follow up meeting with them if this is something that you guys would like to explore as a Committee. Unless Lori has any serious recurring concerns, I'll reach out to those subcommittee members and see if we can schedule a meeting and have that discussion. 7. OLD BUSINESS None 10 8. COMMITTEE MEMBER COMMENTS None 9. ADJOURN There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned at 3:47 p.m.