good afternoon and several members of the council my name is Bonita green and I'm here as the president of the inter-neighborhood Council of Durham Inc is here today to address concerns over simplifying codes for more affordable housing or scad for short by its applicant raleigh-based developer James Anthony The Proposal draft of the applicant sponsored text Amendment changes to the Udo are highly technical complex and in many cases obscure in their current form our committee has worked hard to boil down our findings and to keep our recommendations short and to the point over the past four weeks a committee of nine delegates representing inter-neighborhood Council of Durham and their diverse neighborhoods has met 12 times to do a deep dive into the then 85 Plus pages of privately initiated proposed text amendments to the Udo we have created a detailed report that will be shared with each of you it was shared
out this morning our only agenda in reviewing these documents is for the safety and opportunity for Durham residents to live equitably and in harmony with their neighbors today as each of the Durham residents comes to speak following me comes to speak to their specific concerns we ask for your undivided attention and respect for the time and dedication that each individual has brought to this process thank you thank you Miss Greene Mimi Kessler good afternoon welcome to the chamber if you'll state your name you'll have three minutes thank you for being with us my name is Mimi Kessler I live at 1418 Woodland Drive I'm here to talk about the scad Amendments because I want to talk to you before you are contemplating your vote have you read the path section on page 31 of the old version of the January version that's a new version out
yesterday that they proposed to add to the Udo I was shocked to read that the affording affordable housing they proposed only calls for rental units to be affordable for five years and four sale units only for the first sale that means that the first buyer can sell the property the very next day at market rate by definition they need money so it's good for their pockets but how will that Foster generational growth with generational wealth I'm sorry and those in the rental units must move after five years how will that help lower those that in the lower wage jobs to be able to uh to remain in Durham in the long term I don't think that fundamentally solves anything and their premise that building more will bring prices down as a fallacy it is a national campaign by the real
estate industry because it's profitable for them and therefore also profitable for developers and builders EHC and these amendments before you are the local expression of that national movement many other cities are building like crazy and it hasn't solved the housing problem for lower wage renters and buyers not in any City this deal is not good for Durham I ask that you carefully read the email that the Bonita Green reference that you should have received this morning um attached to that is a document that she mentioned which is an in-depth document where we describe significant problems with the proposal in its current form I also want to express my outrage that the inner neighborhood council is not
organized recognized as a legitimate organization to Warrant any time on your agenda which means residents are not legitimately part of the process it is pitiful if you think that residents can possibly address an 87-page document with this kind of complexity in three minutes I ask you please read the report and if you're not willing to listen today I will give my remarks to the clerk and ask that they be read into the record thank you for hearing my plea thank you so much for being with us today Donna Frederick good afternoon welcome to the chamber if you'll state your name you'll have three minutes good to see you good afternoon is Donna Frederick and I live at 603 East Club Boulevard in Durham I'm good afternoon today thanks for having me here for this brief comment um I come before you as a Durham resident for over 30 years
and this scad amendment that we are going to be hearing more about on Monday the 20th um it's very concerning to me it's concerning to all of us who have spent volunteer hours going through it Page by Page my initial question is how many here have actually read it it's very deep it's very long and we took time and actually read it and went through it so my question is how can you possibly get to the point to vote on something that hasn't been read that's number one I'm also very concerned about the equity the equity in which this project was presented to the public it was at most an engagement of Show and Tell like in the school they presented something we watched it there was very little engagement that is not what Durham usually does we have more questions and there's more interrupts also there's developing shows a real
um existing building codes and ordinance which are complicated the way they are they're more complicated this by trying to change it without proper counsel I believe also putting scad proposal is a very elite and a very expensive expensive Venture by driven by proposals that this would create more housing if the population growth in Durham the way it's going this is not true and it's been addressed many times affordable does not necessarily mean more housing it means affordable housing obsoing that residents are also put in infill conversations with building owners without oversight there are dangers and there are things that just don't work we are all the Civic all the citizens have to use is what we're what we're giving and sometimes we need civil engagement to correct that I ask that this be read really and deeply before
making a decision on something that's going to change the lives of Durham for a long time thank you so much thank you so much for being with us today I meant for my next set of cards Stephen Nill Jacqueline Wagstaff and Sherry Zane Rosenthal good afternoon sir welcome to the chamber if you'll state your name you'll have three minutes thank you for being with us um Stephen nil 1021 restoration Drive co-founder of the Leesville Road Coalition vice president of the inner neighborhood Council and an area realtor Madam mayor mayor Pro tem and council at the last Council work session a group led by the Durham Realty Association spoke on affordable housing during that presentation multiple members of this Council professed they were not experts on Development Council asked for information on housing Supply I forwarded data on that to you all the other day and I'm happy to discuss that I'm a realtor so I pulled
it from actual MLS data the presenters acting as experts to then took on the opportunity during a work session to ask for big changes in the comp plan and for you to support the scad amendment one of the speakers a local developer when asked after the meeting confirmed he had not read all of the Anthony Amendment but was told it would be better for him this seems to be the norm in the development community and among those who are now supporting it they haven't read the whole thing it's monstrous right even when it's cut down I did want to reiterate with beneath what Benita said that the Inc as a voice of Durham residents have done a deep dive on this and we've uh we've given it to you today the public and the media these are among the farthest reaching development changes in recent Durham history affordable housing is not its focus no matter what the title as council members have professed not to be experts on development if they haven't read studied or understood any part of it then you
shouldn't vote for it when next week on March 20th the sea changes that will occur almost immediately after a yes vote will be irreversible in the short term subjecting residents in Durham's most vulnerable vulnerable neighborhoods to massive negative changes in the quality of their life from conversations across multiple neighborhoods this this vote more than any other made this year could have the biggest impact on whether some of you will be sitting on the Deus in 2024. thank you very much thank you Mr for being with us next Jacqueline Wagstaff good afternoon thank you for being with us if you'll state your name you'll have three minutes good afternoon Jacqueline Wagstaff live in Durham keep my temperature at 68 degrees just to make sure I'm economically and environmentally safe drive an economical car that saves gas um but I'm here for a different reason although I'm going to speak on this scad on the 20th I'm here to speak about a situation that I ran into on
this week on Tuesday um I happen to be coming down Hillsboro Road and I happen to see the situation that occurred where the truck ran over the man the veteran in the wheelchair and that gave me pause because this was the same man that I saw in January laying on the same street getting assistance from Durham EMS and he was actually trying to crawl back into the street as though he was trying to you know leave this world so when I thought about that I said this is a group of people that lives on Fair on our Hillsborough Road behind the CVS the homeless population in Durham is out of control and I hate to say it but this scared crap it's going to create a bigger homeless population and I hope that this Council in this budget cycle has really looked into the deep dive of
what can we do to try to help some of these home this was a homeless veteran and he's been I don't know how many of you travel Hills by road but they usually sit on that corner coming right up off of 85. and that's unfortunately what happened and to be standing out there on Tuesday and to see our human beings splattered all out on the street nobody should be able to see that but it happened but if the bigger picture is it happened because we have so many people that are in this city with all this great things that are going on all this million dollar development don't even have a roof over their head and they're having to survive in these streets so I'm hoping that in this budget that you really consider doing something that's measurable that can be measured that will help these homeless people because I see them every day I talk to them they approached me if I have anything to give them I give it to them but this is a bigger picture
and on the scad this whole simplifying code for affordability that's a voice that's the title they use and to create this Vision that they're concerned about affordability you have a developer that's making disparages comments about how we can clean up crime and all of these things by displacing people so but I'm not going to get into that but I really want you to look into more money in the homeless population thank you so much former council member uh Wagstaff thank you for being with us Sherry James Rosenthal good afternoon welcome if you'll state your name you'll have three minutes to have you with us let me get this microphone short enough members of council mayor O'Neill I'm sure he's Ann Rosenthal I live at 2205 Wilson Street in Durham going through each provision of this very long private text Amendment and explaining why it's problematic takes a lot more time than rolling out AstroTurf
and platitudes which is what I believe you've been given by Mr Anthony and his team that's why I'm asking you to restore some balance to this process please give an hour to the inter-neighborhood council to go through this proposed ordinance and explain our concerns even that's a tight time frame but I think we could walk you through enough of these amendments that you'll understand their ambiguity the poor drafting that makes it hard to interpret and apply them the ways in which they make it difficult to produce to protect so I protect Durham's tree canopy and cite new shade trees undermining climate resilience just when we should be planting many more trees and accounting for storm water in conscious ways instead of deregulated ways some of these amendments undermine provision of Emergency Services like EMS and firefighting and create problems for solid waste and recycling collection it may interest you to know that most
02 of a unit per resident with its increase in population according to dataworks the problem is that the housing created is too high priced deregulation is not likely to provide housing that's affordable under any definition and the Anthony amendments provide no long-term affordability the harms of deregulation as we grow and get more dents are already being seen in Durham the Anthony amendments would set a terrible precedent using the private text amendment process for something it
was never meant for for wholesale changes to the development ordinance which has never been done before to my knowledge they undermine the comprehensive plan process they would be adopted after an anti-democratic process that's unfairly advantaged a developer from Raleigh and therefore I request that you provide an hour to the inner neighborhood Council to explain the substantive reasons in this very complicated uh proposal that we oppose this private text Amendment and let me add you could do that hour in two different shifts of the council it doesn't have to be official meeting that way you can do it at an officially noticed meeting but if you adopt this without that I think it's premature and you're going to be shocked by the unintended consequences thank you so much for being with us I have exhausted all the cards that have been given to me I understand we do have a speaker on a virtual speaker Madam clerk if you would check in queue would that be Katie Rose
mayor Pro tem Katie Rose is not in the queue all right thank you and that that's all I have then for Citizens matters to be heard it won uh cards and both on our virtual platform uh with that matter mayor I yield back to you thank you mayor Pro tem um for carrying us through our citizens matters I have been in consultation briefly about um scared I do I do want to acknowledge that we have received a lot of emails and as I've said up here discussing it with our attorney and just briefly with our County Manager one of the reasons I believe that Dr Jose Harmon wanted to pull it is because she received an actual printout of the original of Texas Amendment and it's very complex it is very complex and her desire was to be able to have it broken out into a
more understandable format from the staff prior to our getting to the public hearing next week in terms of content and how we break that down um I am I'm a practicing lawyer and I've seen it uh we're not really practicing but I'm gonna I'm an attorney um and uh it is very complex and so I I am going to raise that as it has been stated several times for our council members to consider or not whether we will be ready to proceed on next Monday or whether we talk about it at the end of the work session today a format that would allow for public comment to come in in a way that's a little different than we normally do it because what we have before us I think is a consideration from what I'm hearing that has pretty much never been done before in this format um and and it's it's 87 pages I believe somewhere along that so I do think that
we may need to look at it a little differently in order to get us up to speed and so I just post that for for us to think about what that process can look like that would involve a more extensive hearing or some type of format that would allow for residents to come forward as well as the development Community or Mr Anthony to come forth and see how we can have it so that both sides are able to come in and explain to us what what they're doing and how they want to do it yes ma'am we will hear from Michelle good afternoon everyone Sarah Young planning director in response to there is a lot of community concern about this it is uh accurate statement to say this is the most extensive privately initiated text Amendment I want to address a couple of things I think we could structure this differently you all you know have we could set up a special meeting just to deal with this the amendment has been
broken into Parts in the version that is in your agenda packet so you'll notice there was a change from speakers to mentioned oh it's 87 Pages it's down to 52 that is a virtue of a couple of things that I just want to put out on the record because we get a lot of questions about this that is due to taking out portions that were not being changed the applicants had a lot of text in there that was actually not changing so to streamline the amendment we have removed that because those Those portions should not be in an amendment if they're not changing as well as changing the font and just doing some formatting things to make it more compact we've also organized it into parts so those parts could be discussed individually at the meeting as a way to kind of help compartmentalize and focus on a topic at a time so those are my suggestions we could have a separate meeting but we um we also have chunked it if you will into those parts and could the discussion could follow those
I think also one of the things that may be helpful at least for me I'm sort of a visual person I think I may have raised this I think I might have talked about it with councilman Williams maybe last meeting I'm not sure but the ability to count of uh put it in a context in terms of I don't know that we that I I can speak for me when you talk about developments and what actually that looks like once a developer comes in presents the paperwork and that process what does that look like from a visual standpoint or some type of schematic or something so that we have an understanding whether you're trying to build a a remodel on your house or you're trying to build an Adu or you're trying to build a small apartment complex or large one we're we're from my vantage point when we're talking about this particular document it's in a vacuum so you have to have it to land somewhere so that people can kind of understand
what that structure is where does this amendment fit in this particular scenario is we have a bunch of documents and we used to read new documents but if you don't have a kind of place to land it so that it makes sense it doesn't make sense you're just reading and so for me I needed to make sense in a real sense in a real world sense I think we got a video today from attorney Ross and thought to kind of highlight uh what that what the um in a neighbor in the city neighborhood council is saying about the real effects of some of these amendments um that are are being requested so it helps to kind of uh anchor it and then for us to be able to hear from both sides right um they've expressed an hour to come in and be able to talk um the I'm sure Mr Anthony would like to his group probably would like to have the same amount of time I think it was something this large and this complex you have to do in my mind due diligence
and it doesn't this is not the run of the meal kind of thing that we're doing in this Arena and it will serve us well that we understand it for ourselves individually that the community at large understands it in a context and then we are prepared to see where you vote so I I would like for us to think about it as we go through this meeting but I am suggesting that we do something different for this type of hearing that would accommodate our learning for everybody and then we know that we've done due diligence to move Forth One Way or Another