October 27, 2027

Machine-generated transcript — may contain errors.

Good evening. It is October 27. We are having a discussion session to talk about neighborhood design guidelines. And so on a crane is here to give us a presentation.

Oh, you want me to share it? All right, well, we're going to go over very briefly the neighborhood design guidelines. So the actual draft document was included in the packets that you got earlier. So this is just an opportunity for you all to provide any comments that you have.

So briefly, I'll touch on why we're here. So we're continuing to implement the late in tomorrow, 2040 comprehensive plan that we adopted. There are a couple of items under the key results for housing that touch on architectural design, neighborhood character. There was really strong feedback provided from residents that they want to protect their neighborhood neighborhoods and enhance that character element.

So Ryan's going to touch on how the actual zoning code is going to be amended or proposed to be amended to address those items, but tonight first we're going to do a discussion session that incorporates the recommendations for the architectural review board to utilize outside of the code. So the Architecture Review Board is established within our Code of Ordinances, and it requires that all exterior modifications to a property that are going to impact the appearance are reviewed and approved by the Architecture Review Board. And then underneath that, we actually outline exceptions that establish an administrative approval process that allows the city manager or designee to act on behalf of the Architecture Review Board for certain types of projects. And these are more of the minor projects you're retaining while you're smaller additions, et cetera.

In order to help through that process of the larger projects that go before the architecture view board, as well as the smaller ones that go through our administrative process, we use architectural guidelines. So the ARB adopts those and they outline kind of what we are looking for as far as materials, maybe the design, the massing, anything that impacts exterior appearance. And these are adopted by the ARB. They're not codified by the city council, so that provides some flexibility to the ARB when they're actually carrying out their charge that's outlined within our code of ordinances.

Right now, we have a variety of those documents. Some are in short one-page forms. Some are a little bit longer on the website, but they cover anything from driveway and paving materials up to the actual garages or massings of a building. So what we're proposing to do is move from those kind of small one-off documents of guidelines and create a full neighborhood design guideline document.

And that was what was included in your packet. The first part of that document outlines our general guidelines. So these are applicable to all residentially zoned properties, and they cover a lot of what we have today. So our paving materials, retaining walls, fences, screening.

And then we've added some newer items related to lighting, roof materials, and sustainability that came directly out of feedback from the comprehensive plan as well as feedback from various discussions. So the general guidelines apply to all the properties that are zoned in a residential district. I'll mention that we also do have urban design and overlay districts that cover some of our residential neighborhoods. that might have more restrictive or more prescriptive standards within those.

So these general guidelines are really used to fill the gaps when there's a property that is not already governed by a codified set of regulations. And then the second section of this guidelines document is our neighborhood typology, and this is where we've identified specific neighborhoods. We did an inventory of walked all the streets, looked at all the different houses and categories and kind of looked for patterns of prevailing character. So this is where there are specific areas we want to call out even more prescriptive guidelines to guide the design and development and approval of construction there.

And we go into floor area ratio, massing, composition, height, architectural details, materials and windows, garages and accessories, site features and then again for neighborhood typology if there is a codified regulation so some of what Ryan will cover might be kind of parallel to what we have tonight so he'll cover the codified regulations or the urban design districts those would supersede anything within this document that's adopted by the ARB. So briefly, this is the map of the neighborhood typology. So all of the grayed out parcels, those are the parcels that are residentially zoned but are not assigned a neighborhood typology. These are areas where that first section, the general guidelines will apply and then some of them, many of the grayed-out areas that are actually used for residential are also covered by an urban design district.

And then for the remaining five typologies, they're assigned to various neighborhoods that had similar patterns. A lot of that relates back to the size of lots. So similar to our zoning-based zoning districts for residential, the first one, R1, that includes a lot of our typology A neighborhoods. It tends to be the lots that are a little bit larger or a little bit wider.

So in the table on the screen, you can see the average lot width and average lot area. for the different typologies. So as we go from A to D, we get towards our more dense area. And then we also have a type E, which is covering some of our multifamily district areas.

So lower density multifamily districts that are not currently covered by urban design districts, or if there were some other prevailing characters that we wanted to identify within this guidelines that maybe aren't covered by an urban design district that touches that area. So I don't think that it's worth everybody's time to go page by page through this document. So that's kind of the overview of how everything is oriented. Now I have all of the pages of the documents.

So if there are comments or areas that you guys want to discuss and provide some feedback, we can flip through those now. We don't have to go in any specific order, so if anybody wants to chime in and has any specific questions about a particular page or... I'm curious about what plan commission and what architectural review board said, I guess. It was well-received, and as always, there was a lot of comments about the extensive and professional work that you all did in identifying what is character and going through the neighborhoods and the differences in the different neighborhoods.

It was overall very supportive. Again, these are guidelines for the ARB. There were comments about questions about what we really should be looking for, things like with driveways. Ribbon driveways are suggested to be prohibited, as are the asphalt driveways, yet we see them everywhere and some people commented that there's some beautiful ribbon driveways do we really want that done so there were comments like that um but the overall substance um there wasn't a lot of um there's good discussion um but there's a lot of support for for what you're presenting to us um do i remember what else was there besides the driveways and some of the um I don't know, you probably remember better than I did some of the comments.

I can flip through later, but that's kind of it. It was very, very well received, and there were some of the more minute things about whether we want to allow that or not as a design aspect. And also remember, as guidelines, what always comes to mind, we have a house, 48 Arundel, where the guidelines talk about the amount of primary material that has to be used, and it's an old 1928 house or something, and they're putting a very modern addition on the back that's all glass and steel. And to my surprise, everybody on the board was thrilled that we were taking this leap into something new and different.

And that's not something that would necessarily have been in the Architectural Review Board guidelines to follow. Right. That's cool. Thanks for sharing that.

I was trying to figure out if I could, and I don't know our code well enough to figure out what the, or the current guidelines. Like I noticed it looks like we're not, we didn't change anything on the driveway, like the driveway thing. We're not, we're still don't want asphalt or whatever. And on fencing, like, is there anything that is actually different?

strictly like clearly allowed that wasn't before like aluminum and metal fencing not really all right right we haven't really changed much in terms of that we did add a few provisions um for let's see for the general introduction here. One of the things that we heard from the comprehensive plan and also have heard from people presenting and interactions with Architecture Review Board is there is a desire overall to have buildings that are very context sensitive, so have some sort of connection to the neighborhood. But we've also been hearing more and more that we want to support people's personal preferences and tastes when they choose to invest and improve their homes. So we did add some intentional language, and really the point of calling out the different sections and the typologies is to help people understand what it would mean to be context sensitive.

So we even added specific language to say that we're not intentionally prohibiting somebody from straying. We don't want you to mimic directly the design of your neighbor necessarily, but we want you to pay attention to the massing and proportions of the houses in your neighborhood when you're designing that or the roof lines or how can you make your home integrate when it might be a different style or material than the neighbor, but it can still have a connection to it. And that was the reason for adding in a lot of the pictures that call out how homes that are in neighborhoods right now don't all look identical, but there's kind of some undertone of theme that you can call out. And so that's new to the architectural guidelines.

Right now it's pretty black and white of we have a one pager that tells you what type of material we want for retaining walls. But we never really got into this whole what is that undertone of design and how can you be intentional? And then that also hopefully will allow architects to present background on their design that shows the intention behind it rather than I'm just building this box. Yeah.

And then my last question, like in the example that's on the screen now, the there's the no box has the has three homes and it talks about I'm trying to figure out which home in this picture is the no. Because... Yeah, that's a good point. It actually seems like the one on the right is the no because of the roof.

Right. The one in the middle is the no because the bottom, the floor. Yes. Is that right?

Okay. The one in middle would be... So because we're working towards what the infill is. So that's a good I'll add some context so that everybody can understand.

But the idea is that the infill one should be kind of connecting the dots. So the red line is showing you how the The eaves, the base of the gutter line of the roof in the middle is above the median of the homes on either side. That green bar is where you'd find the average. Not the top of the roof but the bottom of the roof.

Right. We're looking at how we have those roof lines relate to each other. Then on the entry level, the green line is showing you how you're looking at the average of the finished floor height of the homes on each other side. And the home in the middle is proposed to be significantly above kind of those averages.

So that's what we're identifying there is how do you align those, regardless of the very different type of roof that each of the house might have chosen to use. I'm really glad you asked that question because I thought all three of them were wrong and I couldn't figure out why. Yeah, that's very good feedback. Good feedback.

So we'll add some more notes there. Thank you. That's all I have for now. So I thought this was a great document.

I think I was on the plan commission ARB 20 years ago. I don't think we had anything like this. I understood the zoning side, the ARB side was more mystical. And I think a lot of people who used to appear in front of the ARB always thought, well, at the end of the day, it's kind of like what the people on the board like or don't like, or they it's attractive to them.

But I, so I think having these very detailed thought out guidelines is, is really very helpful and we'll, and will reduce objections about how the ARP works. The one comment I had is I think, you know, I had a resident who complained that their area didn't seem to be included in there. And I think you pointed out that that's because they're already in an urban design district. And I thought it was worth your mentioning your comment that that might be a future project is going back to some of these other areas that have urban design districts and try to modify those Yeah, absolutely.

So Ryan will cover all the residential based zonings here later tonight. Once that is adopted, we'll have modified all of our base zoning districts. And so then the next step will be to look at our overlay and urban design districts and see how we can update those as well. It's my one final comment.

I always find it very helpful in documents when you identify areas by the names of their subdivisions, because I tend to think in those terms. It's much easier for me to figure out where everything is if I'm just looking at the streets. So to see this broken up this way, I think it's also very helpful. That's all I got.

Thanks. I guess a couple of things in no particular, or I guess there is an order. Is there a way of being able to see what's, if anything's new? I was able to read through it, but it was unclear to me.

Are we changing things? Are we adding things? Or is this just a codification and effect of what we're already seeing? So this is for the most part, aside from the introduction.

So this fence material section and our retaining walls and driveways, for the most part everything else is new. Now, most of that has been derived from either language that we've had and enforced in an urban design district that we wish we had language to enforce something similar in a different neighborhood or from discussions that our ARB and planning commission have had when, you know, or when applicants are, are here presenting or during plant. So we didn't just pull it out of nowhere. Um, a large, large, large portion of it was from the neighborhood inventory that we did.

So that's where we kind of tallied one and every now we have a map with every parcel that identifies the roof type of that, the primary materials, the driveway, the setbacks, all of that. And so we kind of collated all of that information about our existing character and then looked for the patterns and figured out ways to establish how do we reinforce those patterns so the so the general driveway paving retaining walls basically up until we get to the glossary was that right that's pretty much a coalition of existing documents and then the rest of it is all new language okay yeah um I guess the second question is there's a lot of, and maybe it's the lawyer in me, but there's a lot like we encourage this. We would prefer not this. Is the intent to just make these guidelines that people can read and if they don't follow them, go do what they want?

Or is the intention to make them like you must do that? Well, a little bit of both because we have the provision in our code that requires architecture review board approval of exterior modification. So essentially what these guidelines when they are be adopted, this is they're saying these these this is what we're looking for in the design of buildings and in these various neighborhoods. They should address and follow these standards, but it allows them with their discretion to.

to still evaluate on a case-by-case basis a proposal. So they can provide essentially a waiver, but we're saying if you're going to go through our administrative process, you must meet this because we've already established that process. So it provides a little bit more flexibility because it's adopted by the ARB as a way of them outlining how they're going to meet their goals for protecting character and evaluating projects, but it is not as stringent as a must when it's codified by the city council. Okay.

I can add one thing to that. It seems that having been on the ARB now for a little bit of time and learning from everybody there, this is a lot of things that would be brought up around the table, you know, those front steps going up or just seem too high and to be have the tools then to identify it, I think, makes it easier for the ARB to be more uniform in how they treat things and to communicate better with each other and with the people who are presenting their plans. I guess my only other thing, and it's a comment I've made before is like, I'm all for us continuing to like update things and change things and decided we want wood here and don't want PVC here. But fundamentally until we're ready to like have code enforcement go out and find folks that are, that are not meeting them.

I don't know if making a bunch of new raw laws help a whole lot. Like if, if somebody's putting a fence up and they go get permit, like I neighbor did, there was great. They, I, I, called the office, they filled me in. The fence was going to be this high.

They went and got permitted, fitted all the code. I just continue to be concerned that as we keep adding additional design features and additional issues like this, but we're not ready to have people that are actively or proactively looking for code enforcement, we have to be careful we don't make these so stringent that people just don't bother to come and get a permit to even do them. And I know some of these have to go to ARB and get approved, but I'm thinking just if I want to put a new fence in, i'm supposed to go to the city but that doesn't mean people do it and if we're again if we're not going to enforce that actively i want to be careful we're not creating places where more people just skirt around the rules so i know it's a larger discussion than just this but that's my only thing as we start to let's call it clamp down a bit more on some of the things we do and don't want for non-arb related improvements Yeah, first, this is an incredible amount of work and an incredible amount of information. It was so impressive reading through this.

I like that you really address like the roof lines and like the finished floor because I think that was probably the biggest thing that I saw when I was on the ARB that houses were kind of getting all out of alignment for that. So thank you for addressing that. I also do, I just think this is like to your point, just make it so much more useful for people that are building and for the people that are reviewing this to have, you know, houses that they can reference. I know a lot of times builders would come up and throw up houses all over the city and be like, look, this is, you know, this does fit.

And we're like, well, that's over, you know, and so this, I think will just, you know, help everything just make sense and be easier for everybody. So I think this is fantastic. So great work. Yeah, I agree.

I think that the time and energy that you spent taking an inventory of every single house in the community is phenomenal. I think that will serve us going forward. So thank you for doing all that work. And I know that this I brought my comprehensive plan with me.

And so I mean, this is like a direct output of that planning process. So I appreciate the follow through on all of that. I also wonder if you've gotten, I mean, my impression of this is that it's guidelines for the ARB. It's not ordinances that we're putting into place.

So we're not talking about like passing laws here, which, but I wonder to Kami's point, have you talked to architects? Have you shown this to builders to find out what they're like what their response is to this document? Are they finding it helpful? What's the pulse?

So we didn't host any sort of direct forum for them. It is still public, but we've shared it with people who frequently come to our meetings and then also sent it out to the listservs from the comprehensive plan. So people that we interacted with there, neighborhood trustees, It's been in the same folder document that you would access when you use the QR code on the signs that Ryan placed for the second part of the meeting. So it's been out there pretty generally, but we haven't hosted a specific meeting for any of the architects to provide feedback.

Okay. Well, it just seems like it sort of demystifies a lot of what the ARB does. And I appreciate it. I appreciate all the pictures and the graphics.

And once you can articulate the no column, it would be even better for people like me. So thank you very much. We also do have some... I was reading this...

And I have some grammatical things that I can give to you. Yeah, you can share that with us too. Sorry. No problem.

Thank you. And I also just in the – Ryan, who you've heard from a lot and will hear more from, and Hobie downstairs in the office as well as Jim Arsenault is on the planning commission. They also did a lot of the inventory work. So this was not – I didn't do this my own.

Very much supported by the staff that we have. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, thank you for everybody's comments. Ana, kudos to you for all this work.

I have a bug in my throat or something. But I also wanted to just ask you because you really call out You really call out floor area ratio in this document. So do you imagine that, you know, because I think massing, you know, in talking about this and making sure, because a lot of this comes up with new builds, you know, and so giving our ARB a little bit more, just more, I guess, more to just lean on when they're talking to applicants. Yeah.

So do you feel like them talking about floor area ratio may come up more to demonstrate, oh, this, you know, and for that matter, maybe ARB could lean on the fact that, you know, the massing of this building based on the floor area ratio is point, you know, 0.2 or 0.5 when the rest of the neighborhood's 0.4. I mean, I know that you say that floor area ratio is just 1%. one part of the whole kind of look at a project. But I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, it will be. This is one that we've gone back and forth. I have a few slides of them just in case it came up. We decided not to put floor ratio in the codified documents that Ryan's going to go over.

That really is because it is just one evaluation tool. In the glossary, we included a little bit of a diagram that I added after the discussion with the architecture review board about floor ratio and how do you make that more approachable for somebody reading this document. I think it's important to look at this and how these two boxes on the end both have a floor ratio of two, but they have a very different mass and feel to them, a four-story building versus a two-story building. that's where all the other regulations will come in part.

But we felt looking at the history of floor ratio, so I've shown this before, but for our typologies here, if we look at the diagram, it shows you the floor ratio by typology versus year built. And you can see, I mean, things were just... They're bigger now. Everything that gets built is a lot bigger now.

And so instead of just only saying we're going to cap you at square footage, we put more emphasis on some of the other mechanisms for aligning your massing because we don't want to necessarily halt all investment or um our development of property in the city so that's where the flexibility of this is but bringing it into the guidelines will hopefully have that be another discussion point so if a structure really feels out of character we now have the floor ratio data of all the neighborhoods so that will be another element that staff can look at where does this where does this proposed structure fit in with the the rest of that neighborhood where does it fit in with the typology And then how does it fit in, in terms of the rest of the design elements of that massing? Yeah, I just think it might, like you said, I think it might be another helpful tool to be able to point to when, you know, everybody at ARB is saying like, it just feels so big or the neighbors say it feels so big. And you can point to the fact, well, it is that big because compared to the rest of the houses, the massing is that much bigger. So, but yes, Ana, thank you so much for all your hard work and Ryan.

And that was so nice of Jim to- volunteer his time as well. So that's great. He got clabbered up in part. I bet he did.

That's great. So thank you very much. Sure. We, I guess have about two minutes before our regular meeting will start.

Good evening, everybody. It's seven o'clock, so we will get started. It's our October 27th Clayton City Council meeting. If the city clerk could call the roll.

Council Member Buse here. Council Member Patel here. Council Member Gary Feder here. Council Member Jeffery Yorg here.

Council Member Waldman here. Council Member Betsy Meyland-Smith here. Mayor McAndrew here. City Manager David Gipson here.

City Attorney May here. Thank you. um the first part of our meeting is called our open forum portion of our meeting so if anybody would like to address us on something that we have control over but that is not on the agenda tonight so if you would like to speak on an agenda item just wait for that agenda item to come up if you do wish to speak on an Agenda item we do have a somewhat new procedure here you have to fill out a speaker card which are located right outside the door And then you can bring the speaker card up when you come out to speak. And there is a three minute time limit for speakers.

If there's nobody that wants to talk to us about something that's not on the agenda. And then I'll remind, I know there's a few people online. You also are welcome to speak on an agenda item or now if you wish to speak now, feel free to raise your hand. If you wish to speak during an agenda item, you also you'll just have to say your name for the record.

And there's also a three-minute time limit. Seeing nobody approaching now, we will get started with the regular part of our meeting. We are going to talk about some new zoning regulations in Clayton. I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication.

Thank you, Mayor. We have Ryan Helley here from the Planning and Development Services Department that will present both of the items under the public hearing this evening. All right. For those in the audience or online who may not have met me before, my name is Ryan Helly and I work in the Plane Development Service Division here with the City of Clayton.

What we're going to go over this evening is a text amendment for potential adoption of a unified development code for our residential zoning districts here in Clayton. I am going to, if this will work for me. Awesome. I'll kind of give a brief summary of the comprehensive plan findings, how we got to this point, kind of go over what the unified development code is, give an overview of our zoning sections and then infill guidelines, which is gonna be a new addition to our zoning sections.

For those here on the council, this might be some stuff that you've seen before. This is an evolution of previous discussions, but I'm still going to touch on quite a few of these items because we probably have members of the community who are seeing this for the first time or maybe second time. So coming out of the Clayton 2040 Comprehensive Plan, there was really consistent feedback from residents regarding how they feel about their neighborhoods and what they want their neighborhoods to look like. People are very proud and very supportive of the existing character of their neighborhoods.

And they want to make sure that the regulations that govern what those neighborhood looks like are reinforcing that existing character. Residents overall, they're not opposed to development within Clayton. However, they do want to make sure new development is context sensitive for those neighborhoods. That resulted in those key results that you see here on the screen, one largely pointing towards addressing lot size and setbacks, one pointing towards infill design guidelines.

And this is generally just evolved into a broader examination of our zoning districts, where they're working, where they're not working, where we can maybe make some improvements. And that's how we've come forward with this text amendment today. We'll try this way. There we go.

So this is going to take the form of a unified development code. For those on the council, you may have seen this whenever we did the non-residential and commercial zoning regulations. For those who maybe aren't as familiar, right now, a lot of our regulations, they take a paragraph form. You're going to go to the zoning district you're looking for, and you're going to read in a paragraph form the maximum height is, the minimum setback is.

And what that does is that creates a lot of repetitive language across all the zoning districts because you're repeating the same things just exchanging out little bits of information. What Unified Development Code is gonna do is it's gonna consolidate a lot of that information into sort of a chart format So instead of reading the paragraph form, what you're going to do is you're going to come to a chart that's for your dimensional or your use regulations. Find your zoning district, find the item that you're looking for, and it's all going to be in more consolidated format. How much does that change the format?

At the bottom here, I have a little bit of an example of what this looks like. So under our existing residential zoning regulations, we have about 95 sections, about 35,000 words. To cover what I consider to be more information, we're looking at, it says 12, it's probably about 13 sections now. It's about 3,300 words.

Same information, maybe a little bit more information, but you're able just to consolidate so much of that repetitive language. So now I'm going to go over the kind of changes that we're looking like for folks here on the council. I'd like to cover all of these changes and then jump to any questions or discussions at the end if there's stuff that you want to clarify. So the first section that we're looking at under our zoning regulations, that's your purpose statements.

That's going to identify what all of those zoning districts are and sort of give a brief description of them. The only modifications we're looking at here are we're kind of cleaning up the language a little bit for our multifamily districts. They're a little bit wordy. So just consolidating that a little bit.

And then in the R1 district, that's our least dense residential district. Just clarifying that that's low density single family residential use there. The next section, applicability, probably the least interesting section that you will look at in this. It just says that these are the regulations that apply across the various zoning districts.

So let's get into our dimensional regulations. So this chart that you see on the right is an extract from these proposed regulations. It's not the entire dimensional regulations, but I wanted you to have a visual of how this format is going to look. Now, there's a variety of changes I want to call to your attention.

In these dimensional regulations, this is where you're going to look at how tall can the building be? How far set back does it have to be? We're looking at revising the R5 minimum lot width from 50 feet to 40 feet, and that's just to be consistent with the lots through there today. Right now, the R3 district, which allows single-family and duplexes, it has a dwelling unit density requirement ratio related to the lot area.

Right now, it pencils out the same as their minimum lot area, so we're kind of duplicating that regulation, and those dwelling unit ratios are really only effective once you get to higher densities. So it's really not doing anything for this zoning district, and so we'll save the ink on the page, and we can pull that out of there. also clarifying some language around front yard fencing kind of in two ways one is procedurally one is adding maybe a new procedure for some folks so right now if you want to build a fence in your front yard there's some clear language but if you want to make any modifications it's not totally clear what you're supposed to do so we're just cleaning that language up and folks can go to the architecture view board to navigate that process The process that we're adding is an administrative process for some folks that may find themselves residing on a corner. When you're on a corner, you might think of, you know, you have your front yard on one side and even though you have a street on the other side, you might think about as your side yard.

For the regulations, that actually turns out to operate as a front yard as well. We call that a secondary front yard. And for a lot of folks that might be in neighborhoods where fences in their side yards are really common, they suddenly, if they need to make a repair, they want to put up a new fence or something, they might have to navigate a process that we'd like to provide something a little bit more administrative for. So that's becoming available to folks as well.

And then the last one I really want to call out to you, it refers to some smaller accessory structures. So right now, any accessory structure that could be a garage, a pergola, whatever it may be, it needs to have a five foot setback from your side and rear property line. We have a lot of legacy structures in Clayton that do not meet that setback. We looked at a variety of different options and following discussion with the architecture review board, we landed on a three foot setback for accessory structures that are no taller than one story and 12 feet and that are no bigger than 700 square feet.

So that would be something like a small garage that can have a reduced setback of three feet from those property lines that does not allow any additional encroachments. So your roof overhangs can extend into that setback. Let's pivot over to the use regulations, the next section. And this is going to be what you can do on a property.

Since these are residential zoning districts, it's largely your residential uses, but there are some other items that are called out because you do have a variety of non-residential institutions, supportive other uses that are in that district. So some changes that you'll see here, it's largely format, but height encroachments, which were previously in the use regulations, height is a dimension. So we just move that over to the dimensional regulations. Office uses were previously allowed in R4.

There's no offices that are currently present in R4. We don't think there's any reason to think that those properties would be supportive of offices, so we're proposing removing office uses from R4. In R6, presently restaurants are allowed. That's largely the Morelands area.

Any of those restaurants that you might see near the Morelands neighborhood, those are not in the R6 district. There's presently no restaurants in the R6 District. So we're proposing removing that as a permitted use from that neighborhood. institutional uses, so think of it like church, schools, education uses, university.

Right now those regulations are kind of scattered throughout the zoning district regulations, and so we're consolidating those into a single section under the use regulations. And then the last one I want to bring to your attention has to do with parking lots or structures. So right now parking lots are permitted as a primary use in residential neighborhoods. They can be within 500 feet of any non-residential district.

which is actually a couple blocks once you start measuring it out. We found that that was probably not going to be appropriate in most circumstances. We didn't want to completely get rid of that regulation, but what we're proposing is that if you're proposing a parking lot as the primary use, it has to be adjacent to the non-residential use or the other use that it's supporting. So let's jump over to our infill design guidelines.

So this is going to be a combination of new material and material that's inspired by effective policies used in the urban design districts. For those that are familiar with our urban design districts, those are sort of a layer on top of the base zoning that might apply some additional regulations. We find that regardless of whether new development occurs inside or outside of an urban design district, there may still be elements related to design that we want to apply to that new development. So I'll walk you through these sections here.

So the first is the purpose statement, and the purpose of this is just to ensure that residential infill development is consistent with the quality and character of existing structures in those residential zoning districts. This is gonna apply to the R1, R2, R3, and R5 districts. And it's because those are the districts that have generally not seen their buildable area maximized. Those are largely your single family or duplex areas with the exception of R5.

R5 is largely the High Point-Dumont area. Moving into some of these other sections that get more into the nitty gritty. So the first is building a height scale and massing. This is largely inspired by effective tools from the urban design district, but it's more concise and consolidated.

And what this is gonna do is try to bring the massing and height of new homes more in line with their surroundings. Similarly, the next section, finished floor elevation. What we're talking about here is think about, you know, your front door, your front porch is going to be a certain height above the ground. A new house that goes in, you know, they might be in line, they might be six feet above where their neighbors are at.

That definitely impacts the perception of new homes. So what we're doing here is we're encouraging folks to sort of be in line with what the surrounding homes are showing. Next section being basement exposure limit. So right now our height regulations, it refers to height in two ways.

One is the amount of feet tall that a structure is. Next is the number of stories. If you have what technically qualifies as a basement, but the vast majority of it shows on the front facade, it might still technically not count as a story, but it might visually add another floor to the height of a home which can change the perception of that home. So what we've done is inspired by what some of our neighboring communities are doing, we're proposing a basement exposure limit.

If 50% or more of that basement facade on the front of a house is exposed, then it's gonna count as a story in terms of the height calculation. Next section being dormers. This section is going to limit dormers no more than 50% of the width of a facade. Again, inspired by a lot of our neighboring communities just to make sure that whenever we're adding half stories that it's not becoming a dominant feature on the home that sort of projects the height even more.

A similar sort of element is the projection section. And so projections are going to be things like your bay windows, your cantilevers, you know, cantilevered room of such. These features all over the place on old Clayton homes and they're a wonderful feature. The forms of those projections have evolved into sort of a different path on newer homes and they're not something that members of the Architecture View Board or neighbors have always loved.

So the language in that section is sort of trying to bring designs back into the traditional pattern of those projections that are on older homes in Clayton. Brian, is there a next, or are you still on the same? Oh, I'm just going off on page. Don't even pay attention.

I'm so sorry, guys. You're good. I just wanted to make sure. I'm just going on my list.

It's in front of me. Okay. The next section being garage width and location. So this is another one that's inspired by the urban design districts as well.

Right now in the urban design districts, if you're familiar with those, they're tied to a lot coverage component. We're not necessarily pulling that portion in, but we do want to reinforce that there are certain garage patterns that are common in Clayton, largely being clear entry or detached front garages where they are present tend to be very limited. So we just want to reinforce that character. And then the last section in the infill guidelines is the architectural design section.

This language is almost directly pulled from the urban design districts. And this just highlights several key points, but I'm kind of referring to as talking points or thought points for the architecture review board or for designers to consider the size of windows on a property or solid void ratios or the amount of detailing. Just something that folks can kind of pivot around and see as a discussion point. All right, so I know I just ran through a lot of sections there.

Is there any particular point that you guys would like to go back and discuss on these? I can say in presenting the Planning Commission and everything else is this captures so many of the things that come up in the houses if a design is shown. And where is their angst? Where is something not fitting in?

It's the same things we talked about earlier. It's the very things you talk about here. How do you make it fit in? And by putting it into, by clarifying, consolidating, and capturing on some of those design things that do come before the Planning Commission and ARB, this will make it a lot clearer.

And I think, again, support the character that We heard so much that people want to continue. Thank you. I have two questions. The section on applicability, which was maybe just the previous slide or yeah.

Can you explain why R4 is not in that? Why that section doesn't apply to R4? Yeah, so the zoning districts that we've called out here are districts that have not had their buildable area maximized. So R4 is probably maybe one of the most unique geographically in terms of where it's located.

It's scattered about quite a bit. I would say those patterns aren't always consistent, but generally the buildable area of those sites are maximized. They're all the way to their setbacks. They're all they way to their maximum height.

There's probably some exceptions somewhere, but that's not really an area where these particular guidelines we think would be effective. And R4 is Low density multifamily or it was medium, middle? Yeah, I have it up right now. And for everybody's like just I just find it.

It's like there's an area of low R4 across from the high school. So like that. Okay. What about like the demand or is that R5?

That's all right. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

um all right so the point being applicability is the applicability section specifically about setbacks or green space or what i'm i don't maybe i just don't know understand what applicability yeah the applicability is saying that all of these things don't apply to r4 This section is basically saying, hey, everything that you're going to read from now on, it applies to these specific zoning districts. So if somebody was in an R4 or an R6 district, they would not be subject to these requirements. Okay. All right.

Thank you. And then one of the, I think, goals or objectives that we identified in the comprehensive plan and you highlighted it at the beginning is incentivizing like the maintenance and renovation of existing buildings versus demolition and building new. And I suspect we haven't yet identified any ways to do that, or is there something in here that addresses that? That'll actually be in what I'm calling residential part two.

We're going to be taking a look at that essentially once this kind of concludes the December through February or March arc is kind of what we're eyeing for that residential part two. Great. Thank you. That's all I had.

Thanks for all the work. This is great. I think your use discussion talked about universities and colleges, which are a little bit hybrid between being a, Residential in nature and also in some ways commercial. So I'm wondering, as you know, we had a lot of discussion a couple years ago about Washington University purchasing property from Concordia and then using it for...

sports facilities. And at the time, the thinking was that we really were not, as a city, particularly well equipped to address through zoning that type of facility. And so we went through at least the steps for creating sort of a sports-oriented usage by a university. And of course, then it got withdrawn, the plan got withdrawn.

Probably won't happen again, but I'm just curious whether That's an issue since we could happen again, could have a university, again, trying to greatly expand its sports facilities and generally in a residential area. Are we thinking about how else we might tackle that in the future so we don't have to do it when the plan is submitted or talked about? I would say that that particular issue is kind of a different beast. It's not something that would really cover in these regulations.

I wish I had better, you know, information on that. But that discussion that went on at that time has kind of receded. There's different things that are going on in those sites now, and that's not something that we would really cover in this particular endeavor. Male Speaker 1 Well, maybe a future item.

Maybe. Male Speaker 1 Maybe. Male Speaker 2 I guess my only question, you know, kind of what Gary is saying is obviously we've got a large piece of font bond that we don't know what they're going to do with. Is there anything that we should be thinking about on the institutional section about parcels like that?

Not that there's many of them in town, but in terms of what we may want to see on them going forward. And is that something that we should work into these zoning updates now? I don't think that those would necessarily need to go into these zoning updates now, because I would actually say the biggest thing that we're doing here is largely changing the formatting. There's some things we're tweaking around the edges.

There's the infill aspects that are geared towards residential developments. In terms of those institutional uses, we know who those folks are. We're in regular conversation with those folks. We can kind of anticipate what's coming to some degree.

If there comes about something that we think is gonna be significant, we have procedures we'll walk through at that time. A good example being whenever we walked through the overlay district on the South 40, which was an effective tool. That doesn't mean that that's the tool necessarily used all the time in the future, but this work here really is focusing on the existing regulations, residential infill, university uses are kind of a different beast. thanks um i just had a question about like how this relates to like you know the neighborhood design guidelines that we just went through just like one supersede the other and just like you know your you know ceiling heights and roof lines and things like that yeah so think of the think of these as sort of different different layers um a layered cake perhaps and so your uh your architectural guidelines, like Ana just talked about, that's going to be at your highest level.

Those are going to be the most flexible. That's more of the guiding principle. These infill design guidelines, they're very specific, like they're quantifiable to a different degree. In architectural guidelines, we might point people towards different, you know, stylized trends or something, or we may say, hey, we want you to fall within this sort of band of something.

Whereas in the infill requirements, we're going to say you need to be within one foot of the average finished floor height. You need to be within such and such height of your neighbor. You can only use these tools to increase your height. The infill guidelines that we're codifying are much more specific and quantifiable.

Okay. That's good. And then I'm assuming like within some of these areas, there are some like non-conforming properties and things like that. How...

How does that work like in the future? Like if I, you know, choose to knock down a house, do they then just go to these new regulations? If like their house already had a, you know, was at a certain setback that was non-conforming, you know, moving forward, does it adjust to all these? Yeah, so we're not proposing anything that we think is going to create any new nonconformities.

And for properties that may already be nonconforming, nothing for them is going to change with this process. Generally, the purpose of nonconforming sections in a land use code is that eventually over time, properties come into conformance. And usually whenever you have new construction, that's the time those properties do come into that conformance. No, that makes sense.

And then just lastly, you know, you have like schools listed with a lot of these guidelines. And I guess I was under the understanding that like our schools did not have to follow the setbacks and things like that. Is that wrong? I would say that that's complicated and I defer to legal counsel.

We have, we have, you know, processing procedures that we follow. Like we're going through site plane review with the school district on different items. Now that procedure looks a little bit different, but you know, on our end, we're, we're still trying to hold folks to the requirements that we have. Yes.

Cause I know, you know, we have Glenridge and Merrimack in the future, you know, being renovated. And so I just didn't know, will these guys, you know, rule of supply or probably not. Does it matter whether it's a public school versus a private school? It does.

I will say we have a partner that strives to comply with our regulations. So it's important to put regulations in place that we would like to see them follow, and they do their best to do that. Obviously, they have site constraints, and there may be things that are... close there may be some variations here or there um but for the most part the school district here does a very good job trying to comply with our regulations so i would urge you to continue to include it here continue to ask for the setbacks that we think are best for those particular areas and they're going to do the best to comply with those okay but they don't have to is that right in the end it's very difficult to force your zoning regulations on a public school district Yeah, because I just, you know, in these neighborhoods, like their setbacks, they are, you know, within the property of the residential setbacks and it looks great.

And so I was kind of worried about moving forward how that looks, but I'm happy to hear they're somewhat compliant. So thanks. I just have a clarifying question, I guess. When we were talking about the zones that were excluded and you said they've reached their...

maximized they've maximized their buildable buildable area so to kami's point if you're in you know whatever zone was excluded now i can't probably r4 or six r4 and you i mean are we assuming that nobody's going to tear down a structure in r4 and try to rebuild It's going to depend on where R4 is. So R4 is a little bit scattered. Like I can think of off the top of my head, R4 properties that I know folks would like to tear down and redevelop. That being said, those properties are in a context of an area where that structure is probably the smallest or the least dense.

And so that's what kind of changes about a neighborhood like R4 is that infill takes on a different context. That's an area where maybe the new construction or moving to maximize the buildable area is probably more appropriate compared to the districts that we've called out here. Okay. Not sure I entirely understand.

That might be just the operator error. I think the idea is that, and maybe to make sure I'm not making a wrong assumption, that the properties in those areas are basically already built out as far as they can be the setback whatever and so if someone is going to like tear one down we don't want to make them have a really different footprint than the buildings around them like it like it's actually appropriate for that for a new build on that property to have a similar um Massing. Massing and setback and all of that as the stuff that's there because that's like the existing condition. Or context.

So these regulations and the infill design guidelines are designed to lessen the impact of a new structure in terms of its size and presentation. Whereas if you went to maybe the R4 or the R6 district, which is already built out, that size component is not really going to be the factor. Okay, so we're basically just talking... Okay, I get it now.

And I also want to say that I appreciate the renderings here because I think... Like the words are one thing, but being able to visually tell what you're talking about when you have like a single story home next to like a humongous tall one. It just is really, it really was helpful for me. So thank you.

My only other question was similar to what I asked earlier. And I have this question for the next thing that you're going to present too, which is you guys did a really good job of posting for community input or, you know, just like informing people. I'm wondering if you got any feedback from residents or builders about some of these changes. You know, I always hear back from residents in terms of questions.

I didn't get any strong feedback in terms of like, you know, I want you to add this or I want you to, you know, take away this particular piece. You know, nobody typically, you know, if they have something that they would like to pass on, send it to me and we can send it to the planning commission or the council. Nobody provided me anything like that. So I've had questions, but nothing, you know, that I would say was strongly oppositional or supportive either direction.

Yeah, I mean, I had a few questions that it was more just clarification, just understanding. I think when people see zoning changes, it makes them nervous. And I did definitely get some clarifying questions. And once people got the answers, they were like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

So, yeah. um ryan thank you so much i think you that was a very clear presentation i really appreciate that hopefully um people in the audience and people online um understood the presentation um i also i really appreciate the charts i think that's such a great way for people to access information quickly so i think that i think it's great that you guys are transitioning to the uniform development code. I think that will be great for everybody going forward. Does anybody in the audience have any questions or comments, or if there's anybody else?

Oh, more than a comment. Yep. From the PCARB, it's funny, one of the concerns we had was the change in the setback for small garages and things, whether it should be, there was some discussion of one foot back would kind of fit with what was in the neighborhoods, and people wanted to be able to get back in cleaner and weed and everything else and so from the five it went to three something else that comes up that hopefully will be addressed in future work is you know what you see in here the minimum lot widths and to encourage um not not to not to encourage um subdividing lots anymore and things like that but one of the concerns is can we regulate consolidating lots um And how do we do that? Something else is with existing properties, a lot of this is dealing with redevelopment.

But what about concern with keeping green space and ensuring our canopy? We have a canopy goal in some of the neighborhoods that I think it's 47% or something. We were down at 37%. And now in the last few years, we're down at...

We continue to drop pretty precipitously on canopy, which all affects heat and water and everything else that So it's not just a green thing, it's actually how our neighborhoods feel and actually the temperature in Clayton. So as this goes forward, this is great, great work, and hopefully we can figure out how to address these bigger issues that are also out there, as I said, as well as keeping investing in current structures versus always tearing down and starting over. Thank you. Any other comments from the audience?

Any other comments from The Council? Seeing none, Council Member Buse. I will close the public hearing first. Is there a hand?

Jeff, do you want to come on up? That's OK. Just state your name for the record. Sure.

It's Jeff Leonard. I apologize that I missed all the lead-up meetings. That would have been helpful. But in reviewing in preparation for today, I did have one question about R2 and maintaining the historic character of the neighborhood.

I live in one of those homes that looks like a single home, but it's actually a duplex. And from what I understand, it sounds like if somebody wants to renovate a duplex, that's fine. But if somebody tears it down, it no longer can be – no longer could be a duplex. Did I understand that correctly?

Then I've got a question. So presently in the R2 district, if there are duplexes that are present, those can be renovated or maintained. If somebody was to tear it down and do something single family, they would not be able to revert back to a duplex necessarily. Would you rebuild the duplex?

Like you couldn't rebuild it. Like if you wanted to rebuild, like if Jeff wanted to take his house down and rebuild it as a duplex, is that a possibility or no? Generally, no. So there's a line in the language of nonconformities that has something, it's something like the acts of God or whatever, like if there was a particular disaster, the effect of the property.

Generally, no. In past examples where people have run into that challenge, most commonly folks who have, like, people have wanted to, say, rebuild a garage or something that didn't meet their requirements. We usually direct those folks maybe to take a look at the Board of Adjustment process. But if they just, you know...

if you want to, it'd be the same thing as any other non-permitted use. If you had, you know, an office, you know, use that was in a residential district and you stopped that use, you couldn't necessarily go restart that use. There has been discussion on that, especially after the comprehensive plan and talking pretty heavy sentiment for diversity in our housing stuff. And so why do we allow duplexes to remain?

And for a while, Until relatively recently, we didn't allow people to do a substantial investment to maintain their duplexes. There's always been a move towards single family and we do need to address that at some point. Do we want to continue that or start recognizing the values that duplexes bring neighborhoods where they're existing? Yeah, I would only bring this up again.

I know this is really late in the game and I think this is awesome work. I really do. I think it's all moving in the right direction. I bring this up in the context of the 2040 planning because we did spend quite a bit of time talking about how do we provide housing options for a wide range of people.

And I know personally, living in Davis Place, being in that duplex provides an entry point that I think is more economical and than other single family homes. And so I think it does provide a diversity for the community. And it is also of the historic nature of that neighborhood. I mean, there are a lot embedded all throughout and you don't really notice it, but they really are duplexes.

So It seems odd to me that in moving forward, we're saying if those are torn down, you can never go back or somebody couldn't tear down their single family home and put in a historic in context duplex. It is of the historical nature of the neighborhood, and it does provide a way to have be an inviting place for people to come into Clayton. That was my only point. Thank you.

Thank you. And I was just going to say, so I'm familiar with Jeff's duplex and it is lovely. And I live in Davis Place. We have great duplexes.

So my recollection is what the change was. It used to be that if you certainly could maintain your duplex, but if you wanted, for example, to add space on your family room, extend it out or in any way, basically add on to it, that was not allowed. You would lose your nonconformity. And I think we eliminated that provision.

So now the provision is simply if you take the building down entirely and it's a duplex, you can't rebuild it. So whether that's the right policy, but actually, so it did move, it became a little more accommodating to duplexes when we changed it a couple of years ago, whether it's accommodating enough, that's still an open issue. I know some, I think some of us, I would speak for myself. I like, I am in favor of allowing new development of duplexes in the parts of the city where it's like part of the existing context in particular.

And so I want to be, or I guess clarify what we're voting on tonight is not making any changes to that system. guideline, right? Correct. We're not proposing any changes to the regulations regarding duplexes in the R2 district.

Right. And so we might still want to do that at some point when we establish a maximum lot width and do all kinds of other great stuff. But yeah. Thank you.

Thanks for bringing it up. Council Member Buse? I am. I introduced bill number 7180, amending chapter 405 to adopt a unified development code establishing definitions and regulations for residential zoning, adopting residential infill design guidelines, and amending the official Clayton zoning map to reflect the zoning district nomenclature and regulations to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

that would be great first reading our second reading excuse me uh uh an ordinance amended this clayton zoning map and amending chapter four or five clayton city code to adopt a unified developmental code establishing definitions residential inbuilt all those in favor aye aye any opposed I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7180 on the day of its introduction. Second. All those in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? The vote passes seven to zero. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce bill number 7180, amending chapter 405 to adopt a unified development code establishing definitions and regulations for residential zoning, adopting residential infill design guidelines.

amending the official clayton zoning map to reflect the zoning district nomenclature and regulations to be read for the second time by title only second any discussion mr city attorney this is the second reading of an ordinance amending the clayton zoning map and amending chapter 405 of the clayton city code to adopt a unified development code establishing definitions regulations and district boundaries for residential zoning districts and adopting residential infill design guidelines Council Member Buse? Aye. Council Member Patel? Aye.

Council member Gary Feder? Aye. Councilmember Yorg? Councilmember Waldman?

Aye. Councilmember Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew?

Aye. All right, the next item on our agenda, Ryan is going to talk to us again. It is rezoning some portions of South Brentwood Boulevard. I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication.

Right. So kind of tangential to what we just talked about, whenever we were going through the comprehensive planning process and sort of evaluating a lot of these zoning districts, their effectiveness, where there might be some space that isn't functioning the way that ideally should, we looked at the R7 district. So the R7 district is pretty limited in scope. It's four parcels on South Brentwood Boulevard across from the tennis courts over at Shaw Park.

It's considered the high-density residential zoning district. And we were taking a look at this zoning. We found that a lot of the regulations of R7 did not match what those buildings were actually looking like. So they didn't necessarily meet the setbacks or certain coverage requirements, different elements.

There's kind of two ways that you can approach that. You can either amend that zoning district or you can rezone it to a more conforming zoning district. And so the different nonconformities that we were looking at, issues with density, issues with impervious coverage, building coverage, which believe it or not, those are two different regulations. Canopy coverage and setbacks.

What we found is that if we revised what R7 looked like, it was going to end up looking like what a lot of M3 is. M3 is the zoning district you're going to find in a lot of downtown that's the high-density mixed-use district. And so as we were looking at the options that we wanted to consider, we thought rather than amend this, it may be more appropriate just to rezone from R7 to M3. We want to consider the nonconformities.

So right now we have the challenge of nonconformities that we just talked about with R7. Would M3 propose any nonconformities? The only nonconformity that would come up is that in M3, it's either required to be a mixed use building or you have to have a minimum amount of dwelling unit density. 250 South Brentwood would not meet that requirement.

That being said, that would not compel anything of this property. It would be considered legal nonconforming. The only challenge that somebody might run into in that circumstance is if they wanted to purchase two condos and consolidate those. And that's a process that might have more challenge to navigate.

But we would go from the variety of nonconformities to the singular lesser nonconformity. When looking at R7 and comparing it to that surrounding area, we found is that R7, the goal of that is high density in terms of residential. M3 looks at high density, but rather in terms of mixed use. The surrounding parcels are zoned M3 with a couple of PUDs thrown in there.

Surrounding parcels also have residential, but there's a variety of office retail restaurants and others. Given that these parcels were located downtown, we didn't necessarily see any issue with those uses You know, being permitted on these properties. That being said, I don't think any of those uses are necessarily likely to make their way to these properties. Just to clarify there, it's three residential structures, all of which have sort of an ownership component that is a, I would say, a barrier for new development happening in that site.

But generally, if we're looking at these regulations, we found, yes, these sites are generally compatible with that M3 district. So what does our comp plan and our future land use map say about that? The comp plan shows this area in the central business district character area, which is meant to promote that high density mixed use area. The future land use map shows these parcels at mixed use, which supports the rezoning of those sites.

So kind of the conclusion that we came to was that right now, this zoning district isn't necessarily operating best for these sites. Modifying R7 is largely going to duplicate a lot of aspects for M3, surrounding parcels being M3 and surrounding compatible uses in M3. We figured we'd rather just kind of go the direction of rezoning to M3. This was considered at the Planning Commission on October 5th, and they did vote to recommend approval to the Council.

So our recommendation to you tonight is to consider rezoning these parcels from R7 to M3. Thank you, Ryan. Are there any comments from the council? If I remember correctly, we did have one resident from 250 South Brentwood come and speak and make sure that it was not going to affect their rights, their property rights, things like that.

And do you know if there are people who have consolidated their ownership there? Is that an issue? And the building's aware that we're doing this and You haven't heard anything? Or where do we stand on that?

Yeah, so residents of these properties have been notified. We've sent out letters and we've posted on that site. We've definitely had residents reach out. Again, kind of what we've discussed before, I've gotten a lot of clarifying questions.

I haven't had any residents come with any sort of strong support or opposition either way. Largely clarifying aspects. In terms of consolidation of units, I say that occasionally. I wouldn't say it's a terribly common thing that I see.

Sometimes they do go through the process of amending their condominium subdivision plat. Sometimes they'll just, you know, they'll buy both units and they'll renovate and they won't amend the condo plat, which doesn't necessarily impact anything on our end. It's more up to them to assess if that impacts their condo association. But I wouldn't say it's something I see terribly common.

Thanks. Looks good to me. Any comments over here? Any comments or questions from the audience?

Comments or questions online? Seeing none, I will close the public hearing. Council Member Buse. I introduce bill number 7181 rezoning for 200, 230, 230A and 250 South Brentwood Boulevard from R7 district to M3 district and repealing the R7 high density multifamily dwelling district to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

The first reading of an ordinance providing for the rezoning of certain property located at 200, 230, 230A, and 250 South Brentwood Boulevard from the R7 District to the M3 District and repealing the R7 Zoning District classification. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

Aye. I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of Bill No. 7181 on the day of its introduction. Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The vote passes 7-0.

Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce bill number 7181 rezoning for 200, 230, 230A and 250 South Brentwood Boulevard from R7 district to M3 district and repealing the R7 high density multifamily dwelling district to be read for the second time by title only. Second. Any discussion?

Mr. City Attorney. Thank you, Mayor. This is the second reading of Bill number 7181, an ordinance providing for the rezoning of certain property located at 200, 230, 230A, and 250 South Brentwood Boulevard from the R7 District to the M3 District and repealing the R7 Zoning District classification.

Council Member Buse? Aye. Council Member Patel? Aye.

Council member Gary Feder? Aye. Councilmember Yorg? Aye.

Councilmember Waldman? Aye. CouncilMember Manley-Smith? Aye.

Mayor McAndrew? Aye. Thank you. The next item on our agenda is our consent agenda, which just includes our minutes from October 8th.

I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the audience or from the council? Council Member Buse. Okay.

I move to approve the consent agenda. Second. Question? Yes.

It should be October 13th. Oh, I had it wrong. Got it. The minutes from do we need to do anything or can I just So the, it is the minutes from October 13th, not October 8th.

Do you have, you made a motion to approve the consent agenda? Yes. Any discussion? Council Member Buse?

Aye. Council Member Patel? Aye. Council member Gary Feder?

Aye. Councilmember Jeffery Yorg? Aye. Councilmember Waldman?

Aye. CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew?

Aye. Thank you. We don't have any old business. The first item on part of our new business is we are going to have further discussion and possibly some policy direction related to automated license plate recognition technology.

So just for everybody's benefit and information, we will have Chief Smith and perhaps our city manager discuss talk to us and give us a presentation on the current status of our LPR flock in the city. I think at that point, if the council has any questions for the chief or David, you can ask questions, just clarifying questions, and then I'm happy to provide then time for the audience if you have comments. um as i mentioned you just need to fill out a speaker card um there's the three minute time limit but at that time then we'll have time for public comment and then after that um if council we can have further discussion on any um policy directions we have to make or would like to make pretty good thanks for having me again Thanks for being here, Chief. Good evening.

First thing, I do have a handout for you all. During the last meeting, there were questions about the network audit we performed, and if you recall, FLOC introduced a program where we can limit searches of our network by offenses. And I showed you the offenses we eliminated, but I didn't show you the ones we allowed. A question came up, and there's 49 possible offenses, and it's just too much to put on a PowerPoint, so...

Okay, so take one and pass it around. So you have an idea what we allow, what we don't allow. I think I have enough for each council member. I'm not sure if there's enough for everybody else there.

And if you have questions about that, please let me know. But I also want to go back to that meeting because there were some questions about that number right there, the number of searches on our network statewide. In that audit we did, 28-day audit between August 26th and September 22nd, there were 41,999 searches on our network. We recently did an audit between, a network audit between September 28th and October 25th, which saw a big reduction, a 37% reduction in searches of our network, went down to 26,430.

I can only assume that maybe the governor's executive order, which came out shortly before our meeting, maybe drove some agencies to be more precise in their searches to restrict who has access to their system and what type of searches they can perform. As you remember, we actually reduced who can search our network here in Clayton PD. And I'll go a little further into the details about that. I think there were some questions about that audit.

In September, the September audit, The Missouri Highway Patrol was the biggest, had the most searches of our network. And when I'm saying they searched our network, they probably searched every network they share with, right? And in September, they had nearly 4,300 searches. And in October, it went down to under 2,300 searches.

So 47% decrease. Same with Kansas City PD. And these are the biggest searches of our network here. Kansas City PD went down from nearly 4,500 to under 1,500, 68% decrease.

St. Louis County PD had a decrease. O'Fallon, Missouri had actually an increase, a substantial increase. Jefferson County decreased as well as Springfield.

Maryland Heights had a big increase and Wentzville had a big increase. And what they were searching... In September, the most searches conducted were for wanted and warrants, wanted people and warrants. That was over 6,500 searches, and that went down to 3,700 in October.

Drugs, narcotics was still a big search, but it still was reduced. And you can see the list going down there. The one thing I'll point out with that offense-based sharing, We took out traffic offenses. So other agencies are no longer able to search our network for traffic offenses.

And I guess nine got in there before that was changed in this time period. But we had in the prior audit, we had 20 or 2800 searches of our network from outside agencies looking for traffic infractions. Now it's nine. It should be zero going forward.

So it gives you an idea where we're at with these searches of our network. Also, I want to point out, all these searches are network. You can look at September's on the left, October's on the right. even back in September, Kansas City PD searched us nearly 4,500 times.

Eighty-nine percent of searches, they had a specific license plate they were looking for, okay? And that's actually increased. If you look on the right side, 95% of their searches in October were looking for a specific license plate. And I guess the point being is when they're doing these searches, they know who they're looking for.

They know the specific vehicle. If the concern is they're harvesting data and they're doing broad searches, that's not really happening here. Again, it's similar. This table here shows the offenses and the plates they're looking for, the percentage of plates.

So again, vast majority of searches involve a specific license plate. Can I just ask a quick question? Sure. If it's not license plate, what are they searching then?

So they're probably doing, I'm going to give you an example. Okay. Yeah. But so if you, if you know that like a hit and run case, leave and see an accident, we know that it's a black, black Dodge Durango.

That's why I drive. If it's a black Dodge Durango, that's what they're going to search. They're going to put in their black SUV. I think I showed you how we did it with our Homicide.

We knew in 2023, we knew that we were looking for a white Chrysler 300. They're going search white Chrysler sedan, a broad search like that. Okay, thank you. Chief, can I ask just on your list?

I think you've addressed it previously. I think a couple of areas that have created particular concern are immigration related and also reproductive rights, that broad topic. Now, that's not on the list. And I think it's because we we have blockers or something that prevent us from.

Sure. Yeah. So we if so. If an agency put in there, you can free text in the search.

They put in there anything to do with abortion, reproductive rights, those kind of terms, or immigration, it would be blocked. And those are actually categories here. Immigration is a fence type that's blocked on here as well. So yeah, they shouldn't be able to, if they're completing it accurately, the search fields, they shouldn't able to search our network for those.

So those would be zero? It should be zero. Yes, that's correct. If I could just say like when someone searches the network, right?

They're not saying I want to search Clayton. They're saying I want to everything that I have access to. They can do that or they can actually go in there and check boxes and just do agencies nearby. But yeah, so I'm guessing with the Missouri Highway Patrol, they might be doing the whole state.

Yeah. But for our purposes, we may just do a refined search of agencies within five square miles. It just depends what the offense is. Okay.

And I guess where I was going with that is the idea that if somebody... does a search and says st louis county which would include us and then they type in a license plate and say their reason is immigration i believe it just means we we believe that flock is not serving them up our data that's correct versus like they know that we got unchecked or something do you know i'm sorry i'm not following you like um Like, it's not like they say I'm searching for immigration and then they get a list of which networks they can search. It's like they make the search and they say, do you understand the difference? The results don't say Clayton is excluded because Clayton doesn't want you to know immigration information.

Yes. You're just saying the list just doesn't include us and everybody moves on. That's correct. Right.

And if they say it's actually like a missing person instead of immigration, we have no, I mean, we don't have a way to validate that today. Sure. Right. Yeah.

But, you know, with the case number, though, right. They have to have a case number. Right. They're supposed to have a case.

Number would have to be like it would have to be an identifiable case. Sure. They should have some type of some reference number or search reason. I think I believe it's still allowed to search.

Like if you don't have a case number, it's something just happens. You can type in a description of it. There should be some way to track that. So also, I want to address a few things and provisions that we can include in a formal policy for your consideration tonight.

Camera locations and future deployments, you know, our camera locations were selected strategically, and they're based on, you know, major access points to our city, crime locations and neighborhood partnerships. You know, crime locations, you know, car thefts and car break-ins have greatly reduced over the last five years. We've had these LPR systems for five years now, but if you go back and look at the crime patterns from four or five years ago, and we do that, we create crime maps, and you can see where we put the license plate cameras, it makes sense, right? That we put them in areas where we have a high volume of crime.

Also, we have our neighborhood partnerships. We've talked about the Hillcrest Neighborhood Partnership, where those weren't just put there... by our direction. It was in consultation with the Hillcrest trustees.

But right now, we have no plan to expand the program. We don't feel that we need more cameras at this time, and we propose that any future expansion would be brought to the City Council for approval. Also, we're going to make it clear, any unauthorized or improper use of the system is subject to disciplinary action under our current policies, existing policies we already have. So...

And then all future sharing, future sharing will not include the 287G agencies that we discussed. I do want to point this out. I'm going to give you a case synopsis because this is going to tie into one of the models that were the alternate models we're going to discuss tonight. You're probably familiar with this case.

This happened on October 14th on Interstate I-17 at Midland Boulevard, just about four miles north of here. That's Alyssa Wilson. She was driving southbound on 170 at 7, possibly 7 p.m. on the 14th.

when she was shot traveling on 170. She was on her way to Boo at the zoo to meet a friend when she was shot. Reports came in for a car that was crashed against the center median. Officers and paramedics responded.

They found that Alyssa had been fatally wounded. The major K squad of Greater St. Louis was activated. On that major K squad activation was Detective Sergeant Stephanie Powers of the Clayton Police Department.

She supervises our criminal investigations division, which includes our five detectives and our three SROs. She has a leadership role in the major case squad. She is a report officer, meaning that she assigns the leads to the detectives and she has to approve the report. So we after this investigation was over.

She gave us a briefing on the case and our staff a briefing and some of the things they learned. Also, the information I'm sharing with you is found in a public record, a criminal complaint from the federal government. The suspects in this case were also charged with federal firearms charges as well as the state charges for homicide. In that case, the major case squad was activated.

There were no known suspects who wanted to harm Alyssa. So at first, the first day, there were no immediate leads when the first few hours of investigation. Detectives started canvassing the area where the shooting occurred. A private business along 170 actually captured the shooting.

They had surveillance video pointing in the direction of 170. The surveillance video also has sound. You can see the subject get out, appears to bring a firearm out, a rifle, and shoot towards another car on 170. The sound, and you can hear the sound of a gunshot happen.

Shortly after that gunshot happens, Alyssa's car crashes into the median. So based off that image there, and this is an image from the federal charging documents. Actually, the Post Dispatch shared these images as well. Based off that image, the detectives knew they were looking for a Buick Enclave.

They searched the flock cameras in the area. Before and after the shooting, they find a Buick Enclave that matches that description of the surveillance video. It has an Oklahoma plate. This image right here comes from St.

Charles Rock Road and Brown Road, which is close proximity where a shooting occurred. This is before the shooting. They had images of that vehicle leaving after the shooting. And so based off the flock search of a Buick Enclave, like you asked about doing a search without a plate, this is what they did.

They searched for a Buick Enclave and they found it. Shortly after the shooting, the license plate is no longer findable. They can't find the license plate, leading the detectives to believe that the plate was taken off the car and replaced by a different plate. However, prior to the shooting, they had daytime images of this Buick Enclave with the Oklahoma plate it had during the time of the shooting.

You can't see it on there, but there's a circle around there. That's a decal of an Arkansas Razorback. Okay, the questions come up in the past. Why does Flock have the ability to recognize decals or bumper stickers?

It's for cases like this when somebody changes the license plate. So based, like I said, the license plate was removed. However, investigators are still able to track this vehicle because of that decal. They're tracking a Buick Enclave with an Arkansas Razorback decal.

That led them over to Caseyville, Illinois, a different LPR system over there, tracked the vehicle to the Days Inn Motel in Caseyville. They found the vehicle on the lot with a different Oklahoma license plate and that Arkansas Razorback decal. Um, the suspect Willie Herndon was arrested at that at that hotel. I can't get into the details of all the investigation but you know, based off their observations and speaking to Willie, this wouldn't have been the last shooting with them.

In fact, they were able to track. This vehicle, Willie's vehicle and the shell casings found at the scene to a shooting on I-55 prior to the Overland shooting. He actually shot at a vehicle at I-55 in Bates in South St. Louis City.

So this is the second shooting he did on the interstate. And all indications say that it wouldn't be the last. So again, this shows how the system is used, how the decal aspect is a practical application for investigations, how that came into play. And it's going to be a model I'm going to talk about for sharing here.

So I'm going to give you four LPR network sharing alternatives to what we do now. Actually, I'm going to show you the current model plus three alternatives. So currently, we share statewide. We have 200 agencies that we authorize sharing with.

During the last audit, only 163 of the 200 actually searched our network. That means there's 37 agencies that didn't do any searches last month. or this past month, the past 28 days, that resulted in the 26,000 searches we discussed already. One of the alternative models we're looking at is the six counties of the major K-squad.

We, and I'll get deeper into each of these models as we go on, but looking at the six counties of include 58 agencies that we share the flock system with. Of those 58, in the past 28 days, 49 of them have conducted searches, resulting in about 9,500 searches. If we reduce that down, another alternative model could be St. Louis County plus the three counties that touch St.

Louis County, St. Charles County, Franklin County, and Jefferson County. That reduces us down to 51 agencies that we share with, and 43 of those agencies conducted searches of our network, resulting in about 8,700 searches. And then finally, We could reduce it down just to St.

Louis County agencies only, which would bring it down to 35 agencies with 32 that actually used the system last month, approximately 5,300 searches. As you can see there, there's not a lot of agencies in the major K-Squad region. We're talking about Warren County and Lincoln County, not a whole lot of agencies there. So it doesn't really reduce the amount of agencies involved by taking those counties out.

Just a real quick question. Does it say how many, or do you have information on how many hits they got? No. So right now, Flock does not give us information on successful returns.

Like if somebody searches a plate and they search our network, it doesn't tell us whether that actually returned a hit in our area. It wouldn't notify you guys though? No. Okay.

We could. I mean, it's a lot of work. Well, actually we can't. When they do the audits, when we do the audits we can't see the Blyson plate they're searching.

I think there was talk at one time, Floxen, to tell you how if searches of our network result in any successful hits but that's not occurring right now. I'm just asking because I thought it was like if they're searching for a hit and then they find it in Clayton then you guys are notified because then the whole point is like you're trying to find that They could tell us. So if they're doing an investigation and maybe the car is not wanted yet and they're doing a search, they can find track that car and and find it in Clayton possibly. Right.

However, the car is in the computer as wanted. If they like that Buick Enclave, I imagine they put that once they got that plate, they put it as wanted for a murder right away. But the plate was taken off there. As soon as they found that, they probably put it in the system.

Had they traveled through Clayton, it would have notified our officers through their in-car computer that a car wanted for murder is in your town. But when they're doing – do you follow me? Do you follow me? Yes and no.

They have to tag it and say, we want the police to be aware that it's traveling through. Yeah, it automatically notifies. It's the difference between the two main parts of the LPR system. You have the notification part.

So when a car travels through, like a stolen car hits one of our license plate cameras, within about 30 seconds, it's telling police cars on the street that you have a stolen car traveling through Clayton. the part we're looking at here is investigators doing searches of our of our network okay no that does make sense okay for a car that's not identified yet as right they're trying to narrow it down yeah and we would never know that happens um but we wouldn't have to be in the system as wanted for them to access the information yeah okay Chief, when you say here St. Louis County only, does that mean the St. Louis County Police Department only?

I'll get there. I was wondering about municipalities within the county. Sure. Yeah, I'll get there I'm not gonna I don't have every municipality listed here probably wouldn't fit on a slide very well but I have like the ones that had the most activity going on.

So if you look at the statewide, again, looking at 200 authorized organizations, 163 actually conducted searches the last 28 days, 37 no recorded searches, around 26,000 searches total. If you look at... So statewide... This is what we have right now.

I already showed you these stats. You have the top, the agencies doing the most searches are going to be the bigger agencies, like you would suspect. Missouri Highway Patrol, the Kansas City Police Department, St. Louis County PD.

O'Fallon, Missouri is actually a significantly sized municipality. Jefferson County, Springfield PD, Lee's Summit, Maryland Heights PD. So even though we're looking statewide, some of the biggest searches are occurring right in our metro area here. Do you know which of those are 287 agreements?

We haven't limited those yet. This doesn't take that into account. So I believe Missouri Highway Patrol, yeah, has a 287 agreement. I'm not sure where Christian County is at.

It's directly south of Greene County, which is where Springfield's at. It would be Ozark and NICVA. Okay. Thank you.

Just curious. All right. So when I talk about, again, the Major Case Squad, we play a big role in the Major Case Squad. I talked about Sergeant Power's role there, but also Lieutenant Abel is the Chief Deputy Commander of the Missouri side of the river.

So he oversees every investigation that happens in Missouri. Also, our detectives are called out to numerous Major Case Squad investigations every year throughout the six-county region, which is St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County, Franklin County, Lincoln County, and Warren County.

When When there's an activation like our Major Case Squad activation in 2023, we had detectives from all over the area involved in it, including the Highway Patrol, St. Charles County. So you're getting, you know, there's a practical reason to share with these agencies. We're getting called out to those counties to help them out.

They're getting called to us to help us out or our neighbors. So with that one, again, there's 58 agencies that we already share with 49. Actually, so let me take that back. This would this right now we haven't excluded the 287 agreements.

If we include the 287 departments, we would have 58 authorized organizations that we would share with. So right now there's probably a few more than 58. And then you'll see that the biggest agencies in the six-county region would be St. Louis County PD doing the searches here, St.

Louis CountyPD, O'Fallon, Maryland Heights, Wentzville, Arnold, St. Charles City, Florissant, Overland, Bridgeton, and University City PD. Can I just make sure, I want to like validate a data point. So when you presented to us the last time and we had the 4,000 or 40,000 number of external searches, We, in a similar timeframe in Clayton had 19 searches.

So I can, yeah. Is that still accurate? So here's what that shows. So that was on our transparency portal, which at the time we hadn't activated.

Those were not actual searches because I was kind of perplexed too by that. It was, those are search sessions. I'm not sure why Flock does this. But on the transparency portal, they display search sessions, which means a detective could be doing multiple searches for the same case.

And so, for instance, you remember we released video a couple weeks ago of four cars in a caravan going up Aberdeen. The one was stolen from us the night before. That case, between the car that was stolen the morning before and then the four cars cruising through the neighborhood and then coming back again later in the morning, that generated a couple dozen searches. So we actually, in the last 28 days, we've had between 80 and 90 searches of the flock system.

Like I said, just a couple of stolen cars coming back two different times that generated a lot of searches from our detectives trying to track those cars down. Okay, that's helpful. Yeah. Because I was just thinking even like looking at U City, for example, like if we had 19 and they had 233, it's like what's going on?

Now, if we had 80 to 90 and how much bigger are they than us? I don't know. Whatever we can talk about. They do have higher crime rate there.

In fact, they just had a shooting homicide within the last two days. So they do experience more robberies and car thefts there. It's significantly larger too. It is.

By population and size. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

And then an alternative could also be the four-county region. That would just remove Warren County and Lincoln County here, so we'd have St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson, and Franklin Counties.

It doesn't really make significant changes to the searches on our system. We go down to 51 organizations that we have agreements with right now, and this would, again, exclude the 287 agencies as well here. And then again, it's gonna be the same agencies that are, because the other two counties, Lincoln County and Warren County don't have big agencies there. They don't have a whole lot of agencies at all.

And then if you did St. Louis County only, you would bring it down to 35 authorized organizations and 5,300 searches total. So now you don't have some of the agencies in St. Charles County, the bigger agencies, or Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.

You had O'Fallon and St. Charles City doing a lot of searches. Now these are the top 10 agencies in the St. Louis County performing searches on our network and probably every network in St.

Louis County. And just to make sure I understand, a search is not what you were paying. It wasn't any search, including... If they're looking for the white car and haven't said it's wanted, you're including that in the search too?

That's right. Okay. Yep, yep. So if you look on the right side there again, it shows the number of searches that have plates in them.

So like St. Louis County PD, I believe that says 85. Yeah, so St. Louis CountyPD, 85% of their searches include plates.

And so they do have 15% that don't. And they're probably just like that, that major case squad investigation, they probably have cases like that we know we're looking for a specific make and model, we just don't have the plate. So that's what that's where the other 15% might might come from. And just so the number 35 means that within St.

Louis County, there are 35 agencies who have flock camera systems and do not have 287G agreements. That's correct. That's how you got to that number, right? Thank you.

I will say one thing that's interesting as you look through these models, and we're kind of focusing on the number of searches, but actually the search reasons themselves. When you cut out the state of Missouri and Kansas City, and then you go to a more localized pattern here, the wanted and warrant number drops dramatically. So that's by far the top one when you look at statewide searches. And when you start to get more localized like this, you can see that wanted is not even on that list, and you're getting into very specific incidents themselves.

So it's just something worth pointing out. Um, I'm noticing that St. Louis city is not on here. That's correct.

Yeah. So Salem city has their, they have a different system. They use Genentech and they are not a part of the flock sharing system. Interesting.

So since you brought that up, so how do we, um, I, I believe that we still partner with them and they partner with us to like search. for vehicles. Can you talk about that? They have something called the real-time crime center at their headquarters.

So they have like detectives and civilian analysts who are constantly monitoring all the surveillance cameras they have fed in there. Not only do they have surveillance cameras in downtown, you see them, right? They have the police logo and they have the flashing light down by the soccer stadium or the enterprise center. Those are all over the place in different neighborhoods.

So they have access to those cameras, but they also have access to private cameras. They have access to Bush Stadium's cameras or the corporations in downtown or the neighborhood associations. So they have analysts there watching surveillance videos, but they're also seeing notifications from their LPR system popping up. And what they do is they radio the police officers, hey, we had a hit, an LPR hit for a car wanted for a carjacking.

It's north on Grand at Arsenal, that kind of thing. So there's people there around the clock. So what we'd have to do is call them and say, hey, we just had this happen in Clayton. The car fled us, just like it did those four stolen cars.

Mm-hmm. that fled north on Skinker. If we wanted to identify those cars on the city's LPRs, we'd tell them, hey, at this time, four cars ran from us. They went north on Skinker from the Forest Park Parkway and they would give us whatever information they had.

So it'd be through a phone call typically. Yeah, and like in that example, can you share whether we did that or we would typically do that? Yeah, we would. In that example, those four cars when they came back, none of them had plates on the car.

Yeah. So I'm guessing they're getting familiar that that's a way to round it, to show up, and they know that we can't pursue them. And so that video that we share on social media, Um, that happened, I think more towards, uh, Dartford and Aberdeen. And we had an officer about a block away who had encountered the four cars.

As soon as he encountered them, they took off. They went to Skinkerman North. That happened around, I think two, my memory serves me correctly, 2 45 AM at, uh, around 4.30 a.m., sometime between 4.30 and 5, those four cars came back again into the DeMond neighborhood. Our officer found them, I think, around DeMond and North Roseberry.

And again, he tried to pull them over. They all took off. They went northbound on Skinker again, and they had no plates. Thanks.

So, again, here's just a bar graph showing you the amount of agencies under these four models. Currently, again, we have 200 authorized agencies we share with. With the six counties, the major K-squad counties that we participate with, the agencies we participate in the major K-quad with, we could have 58 agencies. authorized sharing agreements.

If we just include the four counties, the St. Louis County and the other three counties that touch us, touch St. Louis County, that would just go down to 51. And then if we did St.

Louis County only, we would have 35 agencies. Chief question for you. How do we deal with the Illinois counties? Like obviously we sit on like the border of two.

So why wouldn't we be including St. Madison County and St. Clair County is part of the analysis because people could easily just float across the river. You make a good point.

That is something we could share with when the scrutiny happened uh the easy thing to do was to share um only state flock had a really easy toggle to say we only want to share statewide instead of going across uh you know interstate uh we would have to individually like reach out to those uh illinois counties and like we did in the past and um ask for sharing agreements i mean it's something we could explore it would make sense i will say is i don't think flock has a a big footprint over in the illinois side They are using other type systems like the Genentech San Luis City is using. I just asked for the obvious reason because while it's great you share with Kansas City, I think more than likely if we're going to think about narrowing this down to a regional pool, it would only make sense to make sure the region is actually fully covered. To the extent FLOC allows for that. If it does, we quite often recover stolen cars on the other side of the river.

Yeah, that's true. Thanks. So when you were talking about the finding the white vehicle in Caseyville, you mentioned that they're on a different LPR system. And so what investigative tactics did the major case squad use to identify that?

I'm guess I don't know to give you an answer, but I could tell you some of the resources out there. There is in, you know, the St. Louis City has the real-time crime center. In St.

Louis County, we have the, they call it the RIC unit. It's the Regional Intelligence and Information Center, St. Louis County runs. And they have access to various database, not just FLOC, but they have their own.

I'm sure they have access to St. Louis City and maybe even others throughout the region. So then we will hit up the RIC unit as well, or it's similar to the real-time Crime Center for access. So presumably like the major case squad is working this murder.

They identify a plate they want to search. they put it in flock because a number of people on the major case squad have access to flock, but then they also have other tools they can use to like find information and other systems. Yeah. So whether it's like something they have direct access to or they call or whatever they do.

So, so the, the, the, The Major Case Squad actually has several counties in Illinois as well. So they typically don't call Clayton officers to go out to a Belleville investigation. However, because of that, we have people crossing the bridge who are involved in these crimes. We do share information.

We work together. And so we could reach out to the agencies over there. And then there's also, in this case, you saw that I mentioned that I got a lot of the information I shared was public document from federal charging documents. The FBI was involved in this investigation as well.

They came in because they have pretty strict prosecution standards on gun crime. So that's just something to add on to the murder charge. And so the FBI would have access to the networks over there as well. Can you say a little bit more about...

what it means to be the major case squad. Like part of me was thinking, imagining a situation like something really big happens and the major case squad is activated. But like, is it, I mean, are they all, like how many cases are they working at a time or how often? What's the- So in just- To give you a heads up, the next edition of City Views will have a summary of the Major Case Squad for you.

Oh, cool. So you can read that on December 1st. So the Major Case Squad is made up of investigators from agencies within that six-county... the six-county region I mentioned.

It's not a separate organization where these guys... It's a separate organization that comes in and what they do full-time. Our five detectives plus Sergeant Powers are members, and they could be activated anywhere. So when we had our homicide investigation, I'm going to...

kind of give you an understanding. I know that we had investigators from, you know, Richmond Heights here, Ladue, St. Charles City, Chesterfield. So everybody tries to donate one body to that investigation so they have enough detectives to track down the leads because it's so important to go and have people, you know, hit those leads right away before they go cold.

Yeah. And so am I getting close? Yeah, that's really helpful. So it's like if it's in our area, it gets activated.

Whatever the criteria is, it gets activated and the other agencies that are part of the network say, oh, I've got somebody I can send to help. And so a group comes together and figures out how to attack the investigation, how to approach the investigation. There is a yes, there is a senior investigator. Detective, he's usually a commander, would be the deputy commander of the investigation who would lead it.

Jack Gable's role at one time was a deputy commander. He did about a dozen. And he had some really high profile. You remember the shooting that happened on I-170 in Olivet back in 2019?

He investigated that. You had the double homicide at Brentwood and then on Delmar. You remember that one that happened in 2020? Jack was the lead investigator for that one as well.

So because of his success rate at these investigations, they actually made him the chief deputy commander. So he oversees every investigation that happens in the state of Missouri. And then again, so then we have, you know, like I said, detective powers is a part of that hierarchy as well. And then I'm on the board, executive board of the Major Case Squad.

Yeah. So like, um, like, is there a major case squad case every day or every week or multiple a day or a couple of months? Or you can go, I can go to their website and pull it up. It's probably on our side of the river.

You know, some, sometimes it might be some years it might be seven or eight. Sometimes it's a dozen. Okay. So it's a small number.

Like it's a very, it's a big deal. Like, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And then on the other side of the river, they actually, I think they've been having more on the other side river. One thing to point out is if there's a homicide in unincorporated St. Louis County, St. Louis County PD is going to handle that.

They don't call it the major case squad. They have a pretty healthy sized crimes against persons staff. Same as the St. Louis City PD.

St. Louis CityPD actually is a part of the major case squad and in fact, in our 2023 homicide investigation, they sent somebody to help out, but they also have a homicide unit that just they handle their own. They don't need help. Thank you.

Maybe we could just take some time to see if there's anybody that I know we have a couple people that would like to talk to us. Chief, is that maybe a good time to give you a little bit of a break? Sure. So I've got two speaker cards.

And again, if you haven't dropped it off, you can come up when you come up and you can give it to our city clerk. But I'll just start with just because I have two up here, just a reminder, you come up to the podium, make sure that the light is green, and then just state your name and our city clerk will keep track of the three minute time limit. So I have Cleopatra Benos. Yeah, so that it's on if you see a green light.

Okay. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for the presentation. And I've appreciated the receptiveness that the Clayton Police Department has had for the variety of concerns that the Clayton community has had.

I do want to highlight a couple of key cases and situations that have come up that I think still address some of the concerns that i have um so for example a woman in st john's county in florida attested to the board of commissioners um in that area that in a 30-day period her license plate was tracked over 150 times even though she herself admitted that she's more of a homebody and a stay-at-home mother isn't leaving the house a ton and of those times um she was able to request her own data so this is how she was reviewing this. Over 7% of the time, the cameras for Flock had misidentified her license plate. So I think a large concern as someone who's not planning on committing a major crime is that my car or my license plate could be misidentified in these hundreds and thousands of searches due to the frequency of error rates for these searches. Additionally, in the United States v.

Kyle, a federal criminal case in Oklahoma, a judge did recently state a decision that the access to continuously updated location history for all vehicles in a certain area of the ALPR system within a network was a form of indiscriminate mass surveillance. And specifically in this case, the officer didn't request a warrant in relation to the month long search history. So again, serious concerns that I think need to be addressed. regarding privacy and rights of law-abiding Clayton citizens and community members.

So again, while I appreciate the department's receptiveness to our concerns, there's still a lot more concerns at hand. As of now, since we're still sharing to hundreds of groups, I strongly urge that if we are not going to cancel the FLOC contract at this time to strictly limit the sharing of this data into the relevant St. Louis County in order to make sure that the searches are more likely to be relevant. Additional notes I had, I guess, was a question on, again, our ability to audit these external searches.

So if an officer in another area was to in relatively bad faith put in uh oh this is a search for a minor infraction but they're actually tracking someone's movements how would that be enforced how would we know especially for these areas as we've mentioned that still don't actually have to put in a case number we should not be sharing with any areas that don't require a legitimate case number for search how on earth would we be able to genuinely audit that data then uh thank you thank you Steve Burrows. Thank you for your service and thank you for this opportunity. I'm Steve Burrows. My wife and I live up on Bemiston Avenue in Old Town Clayton.

We are strong supporters of the flock LPR cameras in our city. As noted on the police website, these cameras have been very effective in terms of a tool for the Clayton PD to catch the bad guys. We have all heard about some abuses, but according to the St. Louis American newspaper, there's been a total of four in the state of Missouri through September 30th of this year.

That's four. And there's been none, zero, in Clayton. Why is that? Well, it's because our police department, under the leadership of Chief Smith, has implemented controls long before the current flock debate as to who can access the data, what's needed to access the data, how long the data is served, audits of who's accessing the data.

And importantly, if someone abuses the system, it's my understanding you're fired. Not a hand slap, you're fired. That's a pretty good deterrent, I think. Of course, there's a balance between crime investigation and privacy.

I get that. But with the policies that Clayton PD has in place, I would have more privacy concerns with other data platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, TikTok, Nextdoor, Snapchat, Amazon. and any other platform you're signed into, because these platforms know more about you, what you buy, eat, drink, dine, read, shop, your shoe size, and who knows what else, than any Flock camera will ever know. Flock gets a picture of the rear end of your car.

That's it. And if you're not a criminal, no worries. Move on. But if you are, Flock gives our police a nearly real-time heads up so that they can intervene.

So I urge you guys to not let a few bad apples in other jurisdictions cause this council to remove or overregulate a crime-fighting tool in our city and make an already tough job of policing even tougher. And for those who have decided that their contribution to this dialogue is to vandalize our flock cameras, shame on you. Thank you very much. Charles Brennan.

I'm kind of, first, thank you very much for your attention to this matter and for taking a look at this issue. And I appreciate the comments of Steve and the chief and others weighing in on this. This is what it's all about. Before I share my thoughts, I do want to remind some of you who may have followed the news that when it comes to civil liberties, I once got a traffic ticket in Moline Acres and And then I challenged it, went all the way to the Supreme Court of Missouri and won.

And in fact, the ACLU filed an amicus brief in favor of my case. So I'm very concerned about civil liberties in this country. But at the same time, recently, We have seen flock cameras being very helpful solving crimes in our area. Most recently, when there was an escapee from the St.

Louis City Jail just about two weeks ago, it was flock cameras that found this man who was a sex offender and a dangerous felon. And also recently, there was someone who is accused of arson on a Cahokia Heights spa and surveillance cameras led to his arrest as well. Crime is down in the United States. People have different theories as to why I suggest it's possible with the preponderance of cameras throughout the United States that many people, criminals who are smart, have decided to change their behaviors to our benefit.

There are some places that don't have any of these flock cameras. One of them is Pima County, Arizona, where Nancy Guthrie was abducted. And of course, we presume that that poor woman, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, is dead. Many people have said, wow, what if flock cameras were available in her neighborhood when she was taken away?

And just think of all the missing persons, whether they're elderly who have dementia or little children who who could be found much easier than the current resources that we have if we had cameras, flat cameras. Should someone who abuses the system be punished? I think if a police officer abuses the system, that person should be fired. I think also at the same time, we have recently in the city of St.

Louis a car accident driven by police officers, went into a bar, right? Who knows what happened there. We didn't say to the police officers, hey, you can't use your police cars anymore. We decided, okay, we're going to punish the offenders.

And I see I'm just about out of time. So I thank you for yours. Have a good evening. Peter Smith.

Three, two, one. Thank you, Mayor McAndrew and members of the City Council. I support automated license plate recognition cameras in Clayton because they're proven to protect our residents, businesses, and neighborhoods. These cameras help police locate stolen vehicles, identify suspects, connect crimes across jurisdictions, and investigate cases that might otherwise remain unsolved.

Recently, license plate reader technology helped locate and arrest a Texas man and his wife who were charged with shooting and killing a young woman on nearby Interstate 170. Without this technology, who knows how many others would have been harmed? We have compelling examples here in Clayton too. Just last year, several women reported being followed and feeling unsafe in Shaw Park.

Police used the flock cameras to identify the suspect's vehicle, track its repeated visits to another county park, and arrest the man. He was charged with three counts of first-degree harassment. This is compelling evidence of the technology enabling our officers to identify suspects and protect our community. Privacy must also be taken seriously.

The Clayton Police Department has strengthened safeguards, including requiring a report number for searches, restricting access, and limiting routine data retention to just seven days. No facial recognition technology is used. Under Chief Smith's capable leadership, our police department has given us every reason to trust its responsible use of law enforcement tools. I am confident it will use this technology with the same care and professionalism.

We should not have to choose between public safety and individual privacy. With appropriate oversight, transparency, and accountability, we can protect both. I urge the council to support the continued use of these cameras and give our officers effective tools to investigate crimes and keep Clayton safe. Thank you.

Is there anyone else that would like to make a comment? Sarah Ringwallach? Should I wait or should I start? You can start it.

My name is Sarah Ranguala. I live in Byron, a place in the Moorlands. And I saw an article a couple weeks ago about how Google had... cut down like hundreds of thousands of trees in Finland to build a data center without permission.

And that reminded me of this issue because, like I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the issue that I have is not with people locally abusing the system, but flock itself abusing the system. And that has not really been a part of this discussion in a way that I think it should. I think this example with Google, and there's been plenty of examples in the past of companies, particularly big ones, taking advantage of their size, of their income to just not follow laws because the fines and the slap on the wrist for violations of laws are worth it to them. And this feels like, Flock feels like they could very much take advantage of all the information that they're gathering on us throughout the country.

for a financial gain. And I would like to see that discussion, I think happening a little bit more. Um, but the conversation last, last time was kind of like, what can we do? And I think the, you know, the answer is we, we tell fuck that we're not going to use you or we need stricter, um, reassurances that that's not going to happen.

Um, I had another thought and I can't remember what it was. sorry okay I do want to echo though what was said that if this is something that we continue to do I would very much like to see counties or agencies or anybody that does deal with ICE or have 287G agreements not be included because the results the consequences of that you know is a matter of life and death and I would like for our city as much as possible to not be a part of that thank you thank you Natalie Dowd. Natalie Dowd, I live in Ward 2. Each and every time that I tell someone that I have put up anti-surveillance flyers, their first and sometimes only question is whether I hide my face when I do this.

Whether I worry about the cameras seeing my face. They intuitively know that expressing opinions against these cameras is inherently risky, and that in itself is a demonstration that freedom of speech is being suppressed by AI surveillance. Police Chief Mark Smith has been asked to keep our community as low crime as possible. That is his role.

As chief, he ultimately decides what tools he wants the police department to use and asks for approval from the council if those tools are expensive. It is not his job to decide if more costly items will be approved. That task belongs to the city council. It is not his to decide what morals and character the city of Clayton wants to project.

That is also a task of the city council. The city council has to figure out what values the people of Clayton have, and what image that we as a city want. When we allow AI cameras to surveil our perimeter, What image are we projecting? When we know that these cameras provide information directly to cities with ICE contracts, which Clayton values are we displaying?

Some of Clayton's residents have voiced concerns about free speech and federal overreach. Clayton has offered nothing in response to these fears beyond a toggle switch that can't be audited. Some of Clayton's residents have voiced concerns about the chaos and violence of ICE with all their human rights abuses, and the response is, what about car theft? What does that say about Clayton?

What does it say about Clayton when the cars in a predominantly white population are placed above the safety and very lives of black and brown people? As I and others have pointed out previously, we do not have control of the images those cameras are taking. They are being fed into a destructive system that openly abuses the most vulnerable among us and quietly abuses everyone else. The only solution that is safe and trustworthy is to not produce these images in the first place.

I urge this council to cancel the flock contract without delay and put forth legislation banning the use of AI surveillance in Clayton. Is there anyone else in the audience or online that would like to make a public comment? Seeing none. I guess, I don't know if anybody, I guess the next step, if there's any other questions from the council for Chief Smith or for David.

I just wanted to revisit the city being separate from our system real quick, because I think it's when we're talking about sharing and the goal is to solve crimes and we're talking about even extending over the river, that's like a big hunk of neighboring land. And if those Stolen cars fled to the city. That's sort of like a black hole in our system, but somehow we're still able to collaborate with them to solve crimes. Did they like just a procedural question about how they operate?

Did did they share with other agencies that have the same system like Genentech or whatever you said it was Genentech? Is there a sharing mechanism there? I'm not certain of that. And so if, I mean, is their idea, I mean, this is, you're just going to have to sort of guess, I guess your professional opinion that they're the way they operate is that crimes only happen in St.

Louis and we will solve crimes only within the boundaries of our city. I think it's a matter of they've had these LPRs for fixed LPRs from Genentech for over 10 years. So Flock, 10 years ago, Salem City made a decision to invest in LPR technology a while back. Flock wasn't even a company back then.

So Flock found a market for smaller agencies that didn't have the resources to put up the cameras, to maintain the cameras, to connect them to the network. It's a turnkey service. That's how they sold it. So they can come to us.

Our IT people don't have to get involved. Our public works people don't have go into a bucket truck and install the cameras. Whereas in St. Louis City, they have that capability to do it all in-house.

And so I think they, they went with the Genentech system a decade ago and they just continue to use that. They didn't feel the need to change to flock or any other system. I'm just interested in like the, the four options that you've proposed. Um, Just to revisit some of what the residents have said, I'm not concerned about the way the Clayton Police Department handles the data.

I have full faith and trust in how you have managed this process and put the guidelines in place for our officers. I just think it's interesting. In your opinion, do you think them being on this other system... inhibits their ability to solve crimes.

Like I'm just trying to get at like the necessary piece of sharing at all. I mean, if we're able to collaborate with them and if we have, when there's a major case, you know, representatives from the different neighboring agencies, that can access the system as part of their role in the major case squad. They can access the county police or, you know, or if we have a representative that can access the Clayton Police or if somebody can call us. I'm just, it just calls that into question for me.

Well, so for us, you know, we find that the people who are stealing our cars or doing the shopliftings at Walgreens or CVS are not Clayton residents. They're fleeing elsewhere. And so the sharing helps us track them down. Quicker, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Do we like, I mean, I'm ready to say what I want in policy.

And so I don't know. I think if there are, I think if there, I think I would like to think about what Chifa has provided us with some sharing alternatives tonight. So yes, I'd be curious to hear what everybody's thoughts are on that. And I'm hoping we can come to some consensus sooner rather than later.

A couple of short questions. What is the term of our contract block? The years? We have two years left.

It was a five-year contract. Have you had any false positives where you had a wrong license plate that you went after, that it was misreading? Not that I can think of. If we did, it didn't result in any major consequences.

When you say a false positive... Yeah, this is a worry. When somebody is tagged and they shouldn't be, there's a false reading of a plate. One thing that could happen, and not just a license plate reader, it could be somebody calling out a plate, running a plate, is if an officer sees a car traveling with a broken vent window, it's a sign that somebody broke that window to steal the car.

That was common with the Kias and Hyundais. If the car gets recovered... And the agency where the report was taken fails to take it out of the region system. It's still showing as hot.

So that's a possibility, an administrative error that could happen. I don't know that that's happened with the flock system here in town. You don't know of anyone who stopped who wasn't in a car that was at one point hot? That was a misreading by the flock system?

I'm not aware of any. If it did, it didn't result in any major consequences. One of the things is, in our policy, our officers, before they take enforcement action, are supposed to validate that that car is still wanted, and so they'll look at it in the region system, make sure it matches up, that plate matches to that car, it was recently stolen, and before they take action on there. And then I think we all agree with Betsy that we have full faith in you and the department And the sharing issue, and we are sharing with Flock.

I mean, because they obviously are the center of this, the hub of it. What is, and I know they've told us that everything gets deleted. Is there any audit capability? Do they give us any assurances?

So the state of Missouri and the governor's executive order mandated like a certificate from your LPR provider that they delete the data. So as soon as that happened, FLOC reached out to the Missouri agencies and provided us a certificate. Certificate. Yeah.

Because it's deleted in the next days and not sold. That's right. Does it say it's not sold to? I can't remember what it is.

I could share with you after the meeting. I got to look at it again. It was immediately after that happened. Okay.

As far as this to audit, do we have any auditability aside from that? Of outside agencies? Of how the data is used by FLOC? Or I think that was the question.

Yeah. By Clio. So with our data, we have a seven-day retention period. It should be deleted after seven days.

And FLOC tells us we own the data. We do it with what we want. Yeah. Chief, I think what you were asked to do by the council, I think at the last meeting there was concern about sharing.

It seems to me you've come up with four alternatives, which is based on the premise that there is benefit in reducing the number of folks with whom we share. I find that sort of counterintuitive because I would think that from the standpoint of Clayton and Clayton's ability to resolve something that happens in the city of Clayton, probably the wider the net, the better. So in many ways, I think I have a hard time understanding the rationale for simply saying let's stop giving let's stop sharing with x or y with the exception of for example 287g which i think i personally think is highly objectionable i think everybody on the council thinks it's object i understand that rationale it seems to me frankly sort of simple-minded to say okay well if we're going to reduce the number of people we share with we can either have this group or that group I don't understand what the rationale is for any of that other than reducing the number. Now, if there are organizations or entities whose policies are inconsistent with ours, which is city of Ellisville, which is adopted 287G.

I get that specifically in the area of immigration, but to me, my ultimate question is reflected in some of the comments of the people here tonight. My question is what can we do to further balance the issue of protecting data while at the same time maximizing the ability of our police department to keep our residents safe? And that to me is the task at hand. And I think you, since the beginning of the year, you've made numerous measures or taken measures in our own police department and dealing with flock to try to deal with these things.

And I think... I think if we have a policy statement, it ought to be first of all, we agree with everything the police department has done so far. It probably would indicate that we have great objection to 287 , but to just sort of come up with this idea that let's just cut out some entities for no reason other than it's just too many hits, that to me doesn't make any sense. And I think I've asked you this question before.

If we adopt one of these policies, whether it's eliminating the state agencies or eliminating outside counties, I'm sure it's rhetorical, but... It seems to me it obviously has a potential limit on the effectiveness of the Clayton Police Department to resolve a crime. And that I find very concerning. And so I don't understand the rationale for any of your alternatives other than you were asked to come up with alternatives to somehow reduce the number of shares.

That, to me, is not a rationale for doing this. And I have a real problem if... If we took our criteria, our philosophy, here are the things that we, the Clayton Police Department have done to protect data. And then whether it's what you've done internally with limiting with your own staff who has access to it, you've taken numerous measures.

If we find there are other cities or counties that are not willing to take those same steps, Well, then I understand excluding them. It's the same reason to exclude 287G agencies. But to exclude them simply because they're outside of St. Louis County and that'll bring our number down from X to Y, I'd hate to explain that to one of my residents, that that's why we're doing this.

Would you like to ask that question of one of your colleagues who actually has the concern instead of voicing the rhetorical? I do have a concern. That's not the issue. No, like I can tell you why I think limiting sharing, like what the risks are of not limiting sharing.

Like when you're dealing with... So my career has been in IT and a big portion of it with the federal government. Like I've had a clearance and stuff, right? And in both of those, like...

in fields of work, there are really foundational principles and guidelines when it comes to information and risk assessment. And so when you think about who has access to information and what type of information is being Created, retained and who has access to it. You think about what like the principle of least privilege and who really has the appropriate clearance, like has been vetted and a valid need to know the information. So I had a top secret clearance.

I never got access to top secret information because I never needed it. OK, and so like these are just really foundational things. And when you look at risk and you assess risk, it is very common to assess risk on like a grid of impact and likelihood of occurrence, like like if something bad happens, like we know. We know bad things have happened to real people because of abuse of the flock system.

And it has happened in St. Louis County and St. Charles County. Like undoubtedly, the people who were disciplined for harassing, stalking, assaulting, whatever they did in those jurisdictions, undoubtedly, performed searches that like read our data because we still are sharing data with those organizations.

And so we know that this can occur and does occur. Limiting who we share with does reduce the likelihood of it occurring. Like that is why you limit access to information, right? it like absolutely just lowers the likelihood.

And I just, you know, we've had presentations at this council from flock themselves and from the chief. And chief, I have the utmost respect for you. And you've been really responsive to this even before we started discussing it in public meetings and hearing from the public about it. And we haven't heard from the ACLU or a number of other organizations that have done like deep research and data gathering on the ways that this technology has been used to harm people.

And so our job as the city council is to balance the benefit of the tool as an investigative tool for our department and to balance that benefit with the risk and establish a policy that we are comfortable with, and that we feel like we can stand behind and be proud of, and also feel like contributes to the safety of both the people who live in Clayton and pass through Clayton and all of that. What's really important to me from the presentation tonight is that you gave some really great examples of how our officers work together and collaborate with agencies like across the region to solve crime. And flock is one of the tools that is used there, but it isn't the only one. And most of our like major cases have like flock is one piece of the puzzle and there are many others.

And so those other pieces are available to us. And so I just feel really confident that we could limit our sharing to only St. Louis County agencies that have flock that are not 287G. I mean, I actually think we could probably go smaller.

Like the examples of crimes, the high profile crimes that have been solved here did not involve like hits on flock outside of St. Louis County. And so, and furthermore, if there is a major case squad case, like which happens 10 times a year or less, like very high profile, we can dedicate resources to it. Like either someone from our department who's on that case can do the searches or Like they can ask us to do it and we'll do it.

Like we'll do it right away. We don't need, like if there is a case that has activated the major case squad, I absolutely expect us to be searching all available like information to support that. And I don't think anything we've talked about as it relates to limiting sharing prevents that from happening or even really slows it down much. I mean, feel free to.

Yeah, I would say if every department took that approach, it would be very cumbersome to ask Clayton, Ladue, U City, Brentwood, Maplewood, Webster Groves, hey, search your cameras for us. We have this suspect plate in place. It would probably slow the investigation down to a crawl if we had to reach out individually to each agency. Yeah, but I'm saying we would still like, like, I don't know, my personal suggestion, like, which I think would be a, like, compromise is that we share within St.

Louis County, who are not 287 G agreement agencies, right? And then we do the same stuff we do with St. Louis City and with Caseyville and everywhere else that isn't one of the 35 with a flock camera. And we like do the other forms of investigative tactics.

I just think that sounds really reasonable. I didn't hear anything tonight that made me think it would have prevented us from solving a major crime. that has occurred not just in Clayton, but even in the larger region. And so that's where I'm sitting right now.

That is like the... maximum that I would want to openly share. And just to reiterate, that doesn't mean we don't work together. It doesn't mean we do searches and collaborate.

I think a lot of this is focused on who's searching our stuff. What are we searching? Because I think that's the biggest benefit that we have. It's like, we're trying to solve crimes.

Our police force, we want to help Clayton residents. We want to keep our, where are we searching? And like, what are the benefits that we're getting? So, I mean, it's going to be any crime involved in a vehicle.

We're going to try to, you know, ascertain the identity of the vehicle. If we, all we know is a, the make and model. A lot of times it's a lot of times it'S something as simple as a hit and run as a leave the scene accident, which is in the, in the scale of crime. It's not the, a high-level crime.

However, it is a matter of convenience to our residents. When your car gets damaged and there's $5,000 in damage, you want that person responsible to take care of that. But when you do that, are you casting that huge net? Sure.

You are. Yeah, a lot of times. If you have a specific plate... You will.

But if it's just a make and model, you probably want to limit that because it gets really, you get a lot of return, you know, a lot of images returned to you. But as far as vehicles, you know, we had a burglary in Clayton Gardens last year, and we did use the flock cameras to track the suspect down to the O'Fallon, Missouri area. So it's not just St. Louis County.

I think, you know, like the example I said with the major case squad, if we had, if an agency experienced a murder, had to reach out to every agency would flock and get cumbersome. Same thing happens with any crime that leaves St. Louis County. If we had an idea that the suspects may have left, and we're trying to develop a pattern where they're going, and they went to St.

Charles County or Jefferson County, it would become cumbersome for our officers to reach out to those individual departments and ask them to search for us. I'm not suggesting that you can't still search St. Charles County if St. Charles County chooses to share with us.

Sure. I'm talking about St. Charles County, not... Right.

Well, that's why I'm just kind of, you know, cause like we had 42,000 searches on our system when we went out, we only did 19. And so again, it's like, if we want this as a tool for our Clayton police and we don't want everyone looking at our stuff, I just think we need to see what is the benefit for us to search and then limit what we're not searching. And like, cause I agree with you, Becky. I do think the more numbers, the more ways you can abuse it.

Like that's just numbers. And so I, but I don't want to hinder us, but I just think that we're, people are using our data more than we're using other people's data. And to clarify, and I'm sorry for the confusion there that I, you know, went back. Right.

It was not. Yeah. It was third sessions in which, you know, it's not anywhere near 42,000. It's probably closer to 90.

Okay. Right. So I just think that discrepancy should be taken into consideration when we're kind of figuring out who we want to share data with. Because again, it's a tool that we want you guys to be able to use.

We just don't want to be abused. Anybody else over here thoughts on limiting it to St. Louis County or the major case squad? So, um, kind of thought a lot about this.

I, I would, I would acknowledge though that while there's four options, there's actually more than that, right? Like there's always the option to get rid of it. There's options to expand it. Like we're looking at four, but I don't necessarily think we need to narrow ourselves to four.

I mean, those are the four that chief presented, but in theory we could have more if we want to talk about it now. Um, In my mind, I think there's a fundamental question, right, is just how we think about privacy full stop. And if that is the main and only thing we should be concerned about, then I think you need to get rid of the cameras because all the stuff people have said, like there is some sacrifice of privacy by having cameras, ring cameras, the stuff that the city has where they see, like it. So if we're not that far and we're willing to accept some level of loss of privacy for some level of safety, and Becky, this is kind of what you were getting at, is there is a, again, so that to me is kind of a threshold question.

And I'm not ready to say there's some level of privacy i think that is a balance you have to strike and i'm willing to have that philosophy so then you get to the question of like to becky's point like how do you weigh that and i think that's where all of us have to make that decision as to what's the weight and i think there's a for every for every place you share with there is some level of Better way to save crime and loss of privacy if you want to do this teeter-totter. And the less places you share with, better privacy is theoretically protected, but some percentage of crime is going to be harder to solve. And I agree with Gary on the sense that if the goal of using it is purely to solve crime, then you might as well have it as wide a net as possible because that's what its goal is and that's what we're trying to do. So, but I do think there's this balance of if I'm going to get a quarter of a percent more likely to solve a crime to open it up to the entire United States.

I don't know if we're willing to make that sacrifice. But on the flip side, if narrowing it all the way down to St. Louis County means that we're going to have 10 to 15 to 20% less likely to solve crimes, I don't know for money to go that way either because I think it teeters you the other way. There's no way to fully know what the numbers are.

And that's where, and I think the challenge is, so then you get to the second question in my mind, it's like, okay, who are we sharing with? And like, what's the cost to us by... costs both in money, but costs both in privacy and everything else that we're going to share with. And in my mind, I am somewhere in the middle where I don't think there's much value with sharing it to the entire country if you want to take it to the extreme.

But I do think there's more value or more upside, if you want to use that phrase, to sharing with the metro area than just St. Louis County. Because I think with the region becoming more and more spread out, I think narrowing it to St. Louis County, I think you're – in my mind, you're sacrificing too much of the crime-fighting ability on that teeter-totter.

You know, I think – and then I think like, okay, if you get deep in that part, like what the third factor is just like – Um, how do you think about the abuses? How do you think about like those, all those real concerns people are raising? And I just come back to separating the, the behaviors that we keep hearing from folks that are a problem from the behaviors of flock. I think if, if the behaviors are flock or concern, then we just need to get rid of flock.

If the behaviors are really all these other things, things we've heard, that's a personnel problem. And I think we've dealt with it pretty well. I think as somebody else has mentioned, if you hear about them in other agencies, you cut those agencies off or if you find out they don't have the infrastructure that we have, you deal with it that way. You don't necessarily deal with it by taking a tool away because people are using it badly.

You deal with the actors, not the system. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. So I guess the I agree with Gary philosophically, but I do think with Becky as well, there's a teeter totter of a fact that we need to kind of be thinking about here. And our job is to decide because that's what we're elected to do.

Right. It's like, what, what are we willing to give up in exchange for what benefit are we getting? And I think that's the hard part was probably a lot of us feel that numbers a little differently, but in my mind, I think there's a, level of giving up in exchange for the benefit of the regional use of it that I'm sitting here today generally okay with. So.

I think we're making the assumption that like, if we stop sharing statewide, that the state is going to stop sharing with us. Is that what, I mean, I feel like we're saying that I don't think that. I mean, I don't think... I mean, it feels like...

I mean, I'm not saying that. I think that's what your assumption is, is we're going to decrease safety. And that's, I think, sort of what you were getting at a little bit, Gary, is that by limiting what we're sharing, we're decreasing the safety of our residents. And I think that it's not...

what we're by limiting sharing we're not limiting searching i mean we're saying our police is using the tool effectively and so and so we are comfortable with the way that our police is using it we're not entirely sure we're not able to manage the policies of every of every um agency that accesses our system. And so we're going to try to limit the agencies that access our system so as to reduce the opportunity for people to abuse it. So I just wanted to make sure that we're clear because it sounds like a little bit in the conversation that there's concern that if we're not sharing, that it automatically means that the folks that we're not sharing with are then not- Could you clarify too? So for instance, when we reduced the total sharing network, down to just the state of Missouri, we can still search a plate outside of the state of Missouri in the public system, correct?

Right. So if we cut off everybody in the state of Missouri except for maybe the six counties, so Springfield's cut off, we still have a sharing agreement with Springfield where we can access their data. What would happen is we go into the system and we don't check the box that says share with Springfield. And so they, I mean, would they do a tit for tat?

I don't know. But we would still have access until they turn it off. It's not an automatic reciprocal block. That's correct.

Right. That's how I understood it to be. I just wanted to clarify that for the rest of my colleagues. I think that one thing that was really interesting meaningful to me is the difference between the searches before and after the governor's policy.

And so to me, that indicates that like when the policy came out, Maybe people were using the system in a way that prior to that, that wasn't compliant with the policy. And now they are because when we know better, we're doing better. And so I also think that as we sort of continue down this road and understand the effectiveness of the system, and how we're using it and how other people are using it, we do need to continue to moderate how we use it and how other are able to use our system because we're learning and we're understanding more the implications of what FLOC may or may not be doing with the data, what other agencies may or may not doing the data. So I do think it's really prudent for us to continue to have these conversations.

And I think that What my understanding of what we're doing, you know, I keep saying I'm like new to this whole process is that even if we put together an ordinance or put, you know, you continue to put together policies or directives for your officers and we put structure around it, if you say and. three months or something like, look guys, we are really hurting here. Like we are struggling to solve crimes. We are not able to access X, Y, or Z.

And we need to, you know, sort of rethink the limits that we have put on this. I would rather have that conversation than to say in three months, like, oh shoot, we did not limit this and look at what has happened as a result, like this horrible crime thing happen, you know, like, you know, so I think that as we're thinking about it and I, I really do appreciate the work that you've done on this. I think we need to be, we need, we need to be looking at that balance that you talked about. But also hopefully with the knowledge that we can come back and say, oh, we overshot on this and we need to we need to rebalance.

So I feel like we're all sort of willing to compromise with the caveat that if it hinders your ability to do your job or your officer's ability to do their job, then we can revisit it because nobody is asking for us to make Clayton less safe. I just, I think that's I would just ask the chief again, of these four alternatives, which of these we've all talked about would have, I think, protect as much data as possible, but have the most limited impact on the effectiveness of our police department to solve crimes? I would ask you which of these four, because frankly, I much more value your opinion than I do any of my colleagues, at least when it comes to public safety. I had a feeling this might happen.

So my canned response was I'd like the broadest ability to search while making the council feel comfortable with the technology, right? I would just like to add that the decision that we make when we make it does not actually change technology. what our department can do and has access to is that right that is not what we're doing if a council member expressing opinions on this i'd like to know your answer to that barry i've done a lot of you're being really disrespectful hold on hold on hold on chief go ahead go ahead i was gonna say like i said i think um you know we're trying to have the broadest um search possibilities with, like I said, trying to make you guys feel comfortable with technology. So going into it, I thought having the six major K-Squad counties would give us that because if you look at it, when you take out Warren and Lincoln County, there's not that many agencies.

It doesn't really reduce the amount of searches on our network. And I do feel like St. Charles County is a growing population. We are seeing war crime going back and forth across the bridge.

And for them to have the ability to search our cameras might help them with an investigation that comes our way. That's where I was at. That's why I created that model. So the major case squad, that's what you're saying?

The six counties, yeah. Okay. If I can chime in. Everyone has said, I'm not going to repeat everything that has been said.

I also agree with Mr. Burrows, I think it was Mr. Burrows who commented that we're already doing TikTok and everything else. There's a lot of privacy compromises we're doing every day.

That doesn't mean we need to always do more. It seems like if we, and we've talked about this before, if we limit the collection of data, which I think the city has done by you placing the cameras just on the perimeters, and then any neighborhoods who decide to participate can share with us, and if we we're careful on that. And any expansion of that, I assume would come back to this console. If I want to.

Yeah. I mentioned that in the first slide, I think one of the first slides and right now we don't see the need for it. Um, uh, but if, if we decided to, it probably would create a new contract that you would have to approve anyway, just like the last. So if we have, if we collect limit limited data collection to where it is targeted and specific, um, And then the limited sharing.

I agree with all those comments and all the fundamental ways in which we all have to protect ourselves in everything we do. And it seems that there is some agreement around the table that the 287G districts we would not be sharing with. St. Louis County seems to be where it's been most helpful to us and most relevant to what we're doing.

And the third thing is that the holding flock accountable, whatever that That letter they had to give you, there should be a reassurance of deletion, which they keep telling us whether it actually happens or not in that Internet world. I don't know. But also express statements that it's not sold or transferred to third parties. Same thing that every time you open up a site on the Internet now, it's by law that you have to check those things.

If they at least say that in writing, whether it's true or not, at least there's something concrete there for us to hold on to. And then the contract will be back if something happens, whether we need more jurisdiction or more sharing, or if something happens where a flock is abused, that would come back to us as well. And so we've got a two-year contract to deal with that. And I think that sounds like where everybody is kind of coalescing.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think, Chief, it definitely seems clear to me, please interrupt me if I'm incorrect about we clearly do not want to share with 287G communities that there would be no expansion of the flock contract or flock system, I guess, outside of what we have now unless you were to come to us in a public meeting. And then it really comes down, I think, it sounds like I know, Gary, you have some concerns, but limiting sharing. So I think we – it seems to me thinking about either the major case squad or St.

Louis County. I sincerely appreciate Chief's opinion, but I do think that there is – No. Oh, no, no. Okay.

No, but I, you know, I think thinking about, but if I think if people are uncomfortable with that, then we can start with sharing with just St. Louis County agencies, knowing full well that our officers can search other you know, the other six counties around us. I think hearing from the chief that if that has been problematic for our department, we could expand, you know, our sharing again to, you know, the major case squad counties. I'm hoping if anybody, I'm just trying to kind of collect us a little bit to see what the temperature is in the room.

It seems to me that perhaps Betsy and Becky, I don't know, maybe Kami is thinking about keeping it just to St. Louis County. I'm just trying kind of build some consensus in the room to see where we are so that we're not all sitting here and, you know. Okay.

Jeff, I don't know how you feel about that. You'd rather go broader? Yep. Okay.

So Councilman Waldman, do you have thoughts on going broader versus just St. Louis County? And your recommendation would be to go broader? Yeah, I would.

Like I said, if agencies outside the county may need data in Clayton for their investigation, somebody might pass through one of our cameras on Clayton Road and that would help other agencies to keep Clayton safe as well. If there is an individual who's involved in a crime in other parts of this region comes through Clayton, we can help find them. But they could still contact you if there was a specific concern, if they were on Clayton. Yeah.

And if they put someone, if they put a plate on the hot list and it comes through Clayton, we will be alerted. Right. So that we can follow up on it and inform them if we choose to do that. Sure.

To assist in their investigation. If it's actually wanted, the cameras will still notify our officers. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, now that makes sense. That's really important. Yeah, so then I would go with what you're talking about.

I do want to throw out there though, the audits I do think need to be at least made public to us. I think that if there is any abuse that is noted, that should be told to the public and everything because I think true transparency is really important with all of this and i think that's the biggest concern that we're all having is are you talking about like a network audits like outside agencies yeah and yet just so the more information that we have the better and i do think um instead of you know not that you've done this because there's no abuse reported but if there was abuse i do i would not want that just being held within the department i would want that to be told to us and that's something we can include in the policy i just think that the transparency sure and putting our residents' mind at ease about potential abuses or abuses that happen is really important. So we have that webpage, and part of FLOC offers a transparency portal. We didn't publish that right away because we were waiting for this discussion, but it is up and running.

It shows the agencies we share with now. which 200 of them. And so if that's reduced, it'll show that. But part of it is you can see a network audit of our system in there.

It doesn't tell you which, obviously it doesn't tell you plates are run, but it tells you what our officers are running plates for. That's great. And I know Council Member Waldman, you last time we talked brought up the idea of like oversight. Like an oversight.

Kind of this idea, right? So I'm like wary of the word audit because I don't know what we all think that means, but... the information you were able to share with us tonight was really helpful. And so what I would really like is to establish a regular cadence where you're sharing with us, particularly like once we implement these changes, what happens, right?

So whether that's quarterly or monthly at first and then later reduced, or I don't know, I would want it to be at least quarterly because I think it'll provide us the opportunity to check in with you and find out like, what are you finding? And are you hearing backlash from other agencies? And is it Is it actually like hurting our ability to work with people or investigate and solve crimes? Like, I want to know that.

But I don't want to just assume that it's going to happen and not do anything. And then I also want to be able to see, do the searches really go down? And by how much? Yeah.

Yeah. um so am i so i would be correct then that a majority of us on the council believes that restricting sharing to st louis county it sounds like there's at least four of you um i do have concerns about not including st charles county but i believe that you know you will be able to share with us you know after a time period that if you are hearing concerns from again, especially maybe officers working in our major K SWAT that it's inhibiting our ability to, again, I know there's other ways that we get the information, but I want our officers to be able to easily collaborate and work with other agencies. So to that end, I think I've kind of voiced a lot of the policies that we've kind of talked about tonight. I think restricting it to St.

Louis County for now with, you know, some input from you in three or four months to hear how things are going would be helpful. Mayor, may I say, I realize I'm in obviously the minority here, but I think it's really a bad sign for our community which holds itself out as being sort of a leader in the community, in the region, not just in St. Louis County, but in the region. And we're going to adopt a policy.

It's not so much who we're including St. Louis County but who we're excluding as you just related to St. Charles County to suggest that there will be no sort of kind of pushback on this I don't know why St. Charles County might not, if we adopt this policy, decide two months from now that, hey, Clayton only wants to deal with St.

Louis County, so we'll adopt an ordinance and we're only going to deal with St.-Charles County. I think it's a terrible message for us as a community to send, aside from being impractical, and I think at the end of the day, not what our Our chief believes is best in terms of protecting our citizens. So if that's the direction we go, I will continue to oppose it. And I just want to point out too, this is one of many, many tools in law enforcement.

It's not like... But I would agree. I would agree with Gary. Yeah.

To Betsy's question earlier, am I assuming that we're going to get cut off by folks? Yeah. Because I think honestly we will. And I think that's going to make the city...

less safe at some percentage. And as I said earlier, I think when you cut off regional partners I think not only do you make Clayton less safe, you also run the risk of, for lack of a better phrase, annoying those other elected officials when, as the leader of St. Louis County in many respects, we're going to need them. And I don't think this necessarily goes to good intergovernmental cooperation to make people feel better.

We are cutting them off. It's all a balance. There are many cities who have stopped FWOC totally, some continuing it fully. I just think it's naive to not assume they're not going to start cutting you off and have bad feelings.

And I think it's naive I think we'll evaluate that going forward. But I think for now, we will limit sharing to St. Louis County because there's a majority of us that would like to do that. We will continue to evaluate this going forward.

I will also say there is a lot of legislation that will percolate into Jefferson City in the next six or eight months that could vastly affect how flock is treated in Missouri. So this is a very, it is technology that is changing all the time. So I don't think this will be the end of discussions about flock. No, not at all, because what we'll actually do is we're going to draft this as a policy and we're going to bring it to the council at the next meeting in the form of a resolution.

So the first meeting in November, you'll see this again at November 10th, I believe is the date. It'll be on in resolution form. So it'll be all those items we talked about this evening. It would also restrict that sharing to just St.

Louis County in the meantime. we're not going to make any adjustment to what we're doing until that policy is passed so there's one more opportunity for discussion on all of this but we will draft it with all of the provisions that were talked about this evening and then once the council uh makes a decision on that policy then we'll actually take that action so but that's our timeline we'll have we'll be able to turn this around quickly and talk about it again in a couple of weeks Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chief, very much for all your time and work with us.

And thanks, everybody, for coming and talking to us about your thoughts on the issue. We appreciate it. We do have a few more agenda items. You're welcome to stay.

So the next item on our agenda is a contract with RevTELUS Financial Consultants to do our fire authority study. Yes, Mayor, this ordinance approves a contract with Raptellus for consulting services related to a fire authority feasibility study. The Fire Authority Steering Committee issued a request for proposals or RFP for consulting services for the project and six firms submitted proposals. The 10-member steering committee reviewed and evaluated the submittals, and based on the evaluation and subsequent interviews, the steering committee selected Raptellus Consultants Incorporated, and the attached agreement has a not-to-exceed amount of $274,977.

The study will take approximately nine months to complete, and there will be several decision points along the way that could result in a modified scope and total fee. Per the existing intergovernmental agreements, the city of Clayton will be reimbursed in equal proportions by the partner cities of Maplewood, Richmond Heights, University City, Shrewsbury, Olivet, and Webster Groves. The total cost to the city of Claydon will not exceed $40,000, and staff recommends approval of the ordinance. Thank you.

I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council? My only question is, I know we talked about this before, but I know the document itself, when it talks about a fire authority feasibility study, and then when it talks about the scope of the study, it's just a blank attachment. I know there is one, but is there some kind of summary?

I would have a hard time at this point if someone said, hey, I know you guys are doing this. What's that study going to be? I mean, what are you doing? Is there something that we can point to that actually, I'm sure there's a document.

It's the same scope that we had attached to the intergovernmental agreement back when we approved that with the partner cities. So it will be attached to the ordinance. I can tell you that it's pretty much unchanged from what you had seen previously, but I'm happy to send that out again to the council so that you have that. I think that would be helpful.

So at least we know what it is, the studies. Absolutely. Yeah, and I will say, because I sit on the steering committee, the steering committee was unanimous in choosing this particular entity. So...

I have no problem with what we're doing. No, but it was a good... Yeah, and they do intend to... Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd take a look at that, but it's...

They seem to be studying everything related to fire departments. Anything you could possibly imagine. Council Member Buse. I introduce Bill No.

7182, approving a contract with Raphtalus Financial Consultants Incorporated for consulting services related to a fire authority feasibility study to be read for the first time by title only. Second. Any discussion? Mr.

City Attorney. Yes, Mayor. This is the first reading of Bill No. 7192, an ordinance approving a professional services agreement with Raphtalas Financial Consultants Incorparated for a fire authority feasability study.

All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Council Member Buse.

I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7182 on the day of its introduction. Second. All those in favor. Aye.

Opposed. The vote passes seven to zero. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce Bill No.

7182, approving a contract with Raftelis Financial Consultants Incorporated for consulting services related to a fire authority feasibility study to be read for the second time by title only. Second. Any discussion? Mr.

City Attorney. Yes, Mayor. This is the second reading of Bill No. 7192, an ordinance approving a professional services agreement with Raftelist Financial Consultants Incorparated for a fire authority feasability study.

Council Member Buse. Aye. Council Member Patel. Aye.

Council Members Gary Feder. Aye. Council member Jeffery Yorg. Aye.

Council members Waldman. Aye. Councilmember Betsy Meyland-Smith. Aye.

Mayor McAndrew. Aye. The next item on our agenda is a collective bargaining agreement with our police. Yes, the bargaining representatives have met, discussed and agreed upon a successor collective bargaining agreement which contains a resolution of the issues that affect the wages and terms and conditions of the union members' employment.

The police union members have ratified this agreement and it is being presented to the City Council for approval. The agreement has a term of three years ending on September 30th, 2029. Key provisions are an updated salary structure, updated provisions related to the use of medical marijuana. The city has further agreed to update the general orders related to secondary employment for utility company security services.

We have agreed to further discussions about long-term disability benefits within the pension plan, subject to participation by the represented fire employees, I should say. And the city has agreed to the provision of a post-employment health plan, or PEP, to be funded with unused sick and vacation time. Staff recommends approval of the ordinance. Thank you.

I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council? I would just say for the record piece that all of us have spent a lot of time talking about this and we've got a good, at least I've got a good sense of where we're at. So if we don't have a lot of questions now, at least I don't, it's not because we haven't talked about it before.

Yep. And I'll just thank everybody that worked hard to get this together. So, David, thank you for all your time and to our legal counsel and, of course, to all the representatives chief. Thank you for all the work.

I know it's a lot of work for them to get together as well. The union representative. So thank you. I introduce bill number 7183, authorizing the city manager to enter into a successor collective bargaining agreement with the Eastern Missouri Coalition of Police, Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 15, to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

Yes, Mayor. This is first reading of bill number 7184. Bill number 7183. An ordinance approving a collective bargaining agreement with All those in favor?

Aye. Aye. Any opposed? I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7183 on the day of this introduction.

Second. All those in favor. Aye. Opposed?

The vote passes seven to zero. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce Bill No. 7183, authorizing the City Manager to enter into a successor collective bargaining agreement with the Eastern Missouri Coalition of Police, Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 15, to be read for the second time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

Yes, Mayor. This is the second reading of Bill No. 7193, an ordinance approving a collective bargaining agreement with Eastern Missouri Coalition of police, Fraternal order of police, Lodge 15. Council Member Buse?

Aye. Council Member Patel? Aye. Council member Gary Feder?

Aye. Councilmember Yorg? Aye. Councilmember Waldman?

Aye. CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew?

Aye. The last item on our agenda is talking about our new economic incentive policy. Yes, and Mr. Gary Carter, our Director of Economic Development is here this evening to give a brief overview of the economic incentive policies, and he'll be able to answer any questions you have as well.

Good evening. So this kind of represents culmination of several months of work that the Economic Development Committee has put into this policy before you tonight. So it was sent out in advance. I also sent today oversight on my part.

When we were developing this policy, there was also a desire for more compelling policy. language that usually exceeded a municipal policy. So that was put together in a cover letter that the committee included in the recommendation with this policy, this cover letter also that the mayor and myself would sign as it is sent out to prospective companies or developers we are trying to attract to Clayton. The policy is really built on these four pillars here that are both found within the Clayton 2040 plan and also the economic development plan.

policy that was put together in 25, basically revenue diversification, node activation both in downtown and across the other commercial areas in Clayton, supporting local enterprise entrepreneurs and environmental resilience. It's predicated on a but-for analysis similar to what we've done in the past with the other incentive projects that have come to us previously. This mandates more of an open book, completely going through all their numbers. It does allow for staff to do it and or in conjunction with a financial advisor retained by the city also.

So basically, we are looking at their internal rate of return, the IRR, that they're asking for. It covers both options for development projects, both those that are going through the base zoning mean they need no adjustment to their zoning. They would be required to provide benefits under Table 2 and Section 405, just like a PUD process, and then also satisfy that but-for analysis. And then for those projects going through the PUD process will be required to fulfill the benefits matching their required variances from the existing zoning and also satisfying the but-for example.

In addition to the 405 table, there are an additional two criteria that a developer can meet in order to proceed through the process. The first one is strategic parcel consolidation. So if you go back to the 2040 plan, we talk about those shallow lots like along Clayton Road, for example, that are rather hard to develop as they are now. It doesn't necessarily it doesn't satisfy anything for the the PUD process, but it does allow the city council to consider that.

So they could apply their strategic opportunity overlay, which is the next section. Basically, that stems from. Previous. incentive policy work where we didn't afford that opportunity in some other communities for the council to make a strategic decision on behalf of the residents and apply the policy for what they best feel serves the community.

Basically, it's a strategic wild card for the city council. if we're looking at projects that don't necessarily tick the boxes within this policy, but they feel that it will make a huge impact for the community. It allows them to simply move the project forward. The policy also contains compliance audits and clawbacks.

Clawbacks are taking back some of the abatement or sales tax reimbursements for non-performance. And it also does address that you may have multiple layering of incentives, like some of our existing projects have CIDs and tax abatement. So it allows that, but with the distinction that each tool has to define a separate, as a distinct gap within their pro forma. It also addresses the same consumer emphasis areas in the meeting of physical space for small retailers too, carrying the same criteria of if it is in a consumer emphasis area that it has to be occupied within six months.

The last section, the tenant registry, it is a goal of the EDC to provide try to develop a list to make it easier for developers to identify retailers because sometimes we hear from property owners, well, I can't find anyone. So it is a hope of the EDC to develop a list of qualified entrepreneurs in the retail or restaurant business who could meet the criteria that the developer is looking for. But it doesn't, doesn't exclude the developer from the responsibility having to commit that six months. This slide here is just telling you who's responsible for what economic development would enforce the financial agreements of the annual audits and the contractual callbacks and the planning and building department would have sole responsibility over the zoning permits, PUD conditions and code enforcement.

Um, and then, but ultimately at the end of the day, no matter what I myself David or on a say, it's only city council that can approve the incentive request. And basically, it is the scope of all incentives allowed by state statute whether it be property tax abatement. special districts with a CID or a transportation development district or sales tax reimbursement, which is in a couple different chapters. But basically, refunding some portion of net new sales tax back to the development project.

I won't go through this. I think you've extensively gone through this in the past. This is just a restatement of that table in Chapter 405, identifying the priority benefits compared to the standard benefits. That was my very brief presentation.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thanks, Gary. And thanks for, you know, this has gone through the economic, I mean, there was a subcommittee that looked at this a lot. And then it obviously went to the more, you know, the broader community or the broader committee more recently.

So appreciate you kind of leading the subcommittee through this. So does anybody have any thoughts or comments? questions about the policy. Again, the idea is that we can take this and, you know, really be able to inform developers just that, you know, again, we're open for business, but we're open for with the caveat that these are the things that we want.

So really being clear on if you're interested in coming here and if you need an incentive, like they've got to really show that it's financially necessary, which is, you know, I think Gary, you've made very clear that if they can show that and show that they're providing our community with something that we want based on the comprehensive plan, that we'd consider an incentive in order to get them here. So I think that's a lot of what this resolution, kind of what we're trying to capture here. Yeah, thanks for your work on this. And I'll be honest, opening this up, preparing for tonight's meeting, I thought it was a lot.

And I wish we had had a council work session or something to talk about it. Nothing in here strikes me as problematic. It just, maybe it's on me. Maybe it's on me that it surprised me that it came.

I wish we had time to kind of digest it. I have questions like, Do we have any projections on what type of interest this might generate, or do we have any goals, or do we know what a budgetary effect we might be looking at? Bigger questions like that. I don't know if you have any response to those types of worries.

So maybe one at a time. Okay. Budgetary impact. Do we anticipate if...

They all kind of tie together. How many people do we anticipate? How much interest do you think this might generate? So let me back up.

What the ultimate goal was, I think at least on my part, was if as we talk to the development community, and as costs have escalated, particularly construction costs and difficulty of financing in certain stances, as those have increased, you know, Clayton's reputation has kind of preceded itself in that community in that they didn't have much interest in participating in incentive discussions to help projects get up. And, you know, this policy doesn't take away any review of staff or doesn't make any guarantees and certainly doesn't tie your hands at all in the way that incentives are granted or not granted. But it is at the base of marketing piece to kind of signal to the broader community development community that Clayton is interested in development. And just as the mayor said, not just to get development, but to trade it for things that this community through the 2040 plan has decided they wanted as a group.

Speaking about the financial impact, you know, It just depends on the number of projects that we do get. Hopefully, we do get a lot of projects. Hopefully, the World News Center is developed and some of the other sites. empty green down by centene and all that other stuff is developed it's just a case-by-case basis and it depends on what we're giving up if it's the case of a cid or a transportation development district it really doesn't hit the city books at all if it is you know a sales tax reimbursement then it is losing some portion of net new sales taxes that you otherwise didn't have um or if it's real estate tax abatement is some kind of abatement of net new sales taxes.

So it's not really eating into the current situation, but would be giving some portion of future revenue up. We always, when we do our financial analysis, you know, we're always talking internally though about, you know, if it is a huge residential project for, Say, you know, how is that going to impact police and fire responses? Do we need to be looking at that before we start giving 100% abatement or something like that? But I don't know of a really good way to give you an exact number of financial impact responses.

Right. I just wonder what type of projections we have. We hope this does. Yes, I'm very familiar that we've talked for a long time about incentivizing more development.

Something else that... Does anyone... Maybe I should know this too. What municipalities around us offer these types of incentives?

Who might be in our... Yeah, I would say most if not all. I don't know how many have... put together a policy that's as detailed as this is or really have that marketing piece.

But I think all of them and the development community knows this. They're probably willing to talk about incentives when they go in with a project. Yeah, and I apologize. Maybe I wasn't very clear.

This isn't suggesting any new... incentives or anything like that in fact everything that was covered in that slide about sales tax reimbursements or property taxes we've basically done in some shape yeah this is merely saying it's adding the layer on that we will we will talk to you about that but in order for us to talk to you about, that here are the list of things that we want from the discussion Right. It's being more affirmative and telling people the way you're interested in inviting them in. And again, nothing in here stands out to me is problematic.

It's well written. It's including the things that we've identified as priorities. I do think that it's always hard to to analyze the but-for. We can't do this but-for.

I think every developer, many developers will say that putting together their financials. But if we can hire our own... financial advisor on that. Is that something that we pay?

Well, I guess we negotiate that. We would typically on the larger development deals, we enter into a funding agreement to pay for bond attorney, staff attorney or city attorney time and stuff like that. So that would just be one of the included services, much like a traffic study would be with Matt and Public Works. And this is a city council resolution.

So it's just something that's putting together where we stand as a council for you to go out and to propose. That's correct. All right. Thank you.

Thanks. I'm on the committee, in the subcommittee, so I've seen this. And just for maybe context, we did... I can't remember if it was like after 2040 or during or before, but we had like a...

Two page thing about how we like a policy that we had passed about incentives and the committee did have access to that as sort of like a initial informing document. And so I think of this as. like you've described, like marketing or trying to have something that we can be more public and hopefully clear about combining that incentive policy with the goals of the comprehensive plan in a way that hopefully might trigger some change. interest right so um i don't have any other further questions interested to hear what everybody else thinks and i can imagine it's a lot to take in i am on the committee and i can appreciate susan's comment if you're not on the committee it's a lot of but i think it does reflect since the committee started a sense that you know as a city we need to be I guess I've used the word more than once, aggressive about our efforts to fill a lot of empty spaces in our community and that we need to be more proactive.

And I think not only in this document, but also in the letter, which we haven't talked about, which the committee worked on, which would come from the mayor and Gary as sort of a cover letter. I really, I think what it says is not only are we open for business, but some of these tools with incentives that you might have in the past asked us about, and we would say, oh yeah, we might be able to do that. Now we're being much more out front about saying, we know all these things are out there. We're willing to consider all of them.

So ask us about it, but don't figure it's a guarantee because you're going to have to do something in return. So I think the letter together with the document itself not only sent out to people across the country who might be interested in coming here, but letting our current property owners know that we are doing this so that they feel like they have something to work with if people come to them and are interested in buying the property and ask what can Clayton do for me? You know, this very much says go talk to Gary Carter. And so I think that's all very positive and we need to be doing that.

And I think these are both steps in the right direction. um recognize that it's past my witching hour um but i will say a couple things um there's a couple issues i would have with the letter um in terms of who's included and who's not but i think the the bigger two points i would raise is there is a level of frustration that i have that we are getting what is a a governing document in some respects, or at least a resolution about how we want to attach economic development. And while I give full faith in the committee, because I know the members and those of the board that are on it, it is definitely a level of frustration that we didn't have time to actually sit down and talk through it and as a group be able to be like, well, why did the committee choose this? Why did the committee choose that?

Let's think about this. I also will say that What heightens that frustration is that it was added to the agenda when we knew we had a zoning presentation and a flock conversation. So we are sitting here going to talk about a solution, about creating an economic development policy at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night. Like it didn't have to happen tonight.

It could have happened when we had less agenda two weeks ago. It could have happen afterwards because I think what it's going to come across as if it's approved is that we are pushing it through almost at the dead of night because we want to get it done. So it reads fine. I don't have a problem with it, but I can't vote for it without having more time for all of us to talk about it.

So. I agree with that, but I did have a question. It seems like these are all just for new developments. Is this not within existing retail spaces that are empty?

That is correct. Those are for new development. The committee is now in the process of taking up existing space incentives, which will necessarily need to be different than what's included in that document there. Okay.

And just, yeah, just a big overhaul of it is it's basically like a PUD requirement, but instead of being able to be rezoned, you just get incentives? Yes. Now, so this is for development, whether it's going through the rezoning process or if it's built on a parcel that fits the project as proposed. Totally separate from zoning.

Yeah. No, I know, but like the PUD process is the same, like where you have to, in order to be able to do that, you have to go through these things. You have to have public benefits for a PUD. That's right.

And this says you have to have public benefit to get incentives. whether it's using base zoning or PUD, either way, you have to give public benefits to get incentives. Correct. Yeah.

I kind of wish I did have a little bit more time. You always have the ability to postpone these things if you'd like. I feel like... I'm a little confused about it, but I like the direction it's going.

But... Yeah. I think... Maybe similarly, I would like to have more discussion.

I came in tonight knowing that we were going to be here late and like really had a bunch of Diet Coke before I came to try to sustain myself through this. But because this is really important to me and I took some time with the comprehensive plan too, because my issues are not necessarily with the structure of the economic incentive policy. Um, although maybe with more time I would develop some issues with it. I don't know.

Um, but actually I don't love the letter and I, and the reason why I don't love is because it feels like a blanket, you know, like we're just throwing it out to the, um, to the And one of the things that I was really focused on or hopeful for with the comprehensive plan is that we would be really strategic with how we designed particularly our special business district. And so similarly to what Ana described with going through and taking an inventory of all of our housing stock and being able to say, okay, This is what this neighborhood looks like, and this is what we want in this neighborhood. I don't know if we've done this. Maybe we haven't.

I'm missing the boat on it. But to really take an inventory of what exists downtown and to say, in this block, we really would like a retail focus, or in this block, And, you know, no, whatever it is like to really look at the makeup of our downtown area. And then instead of just blanket, you know, say to the world, we're open to business, like actually seek out what we want in those areas and, and maybe. as part of this create a smoother path for folks who have what we really want and be really intentional about pursuing it so that we're not just waiting for people to come to us.

I mean, that would be, that's a great problem, right? If we had a lot of people coming to us, but, um, And maybe doing both things at once. But really, I would like to see a very strategic effort from the Economic Development Committee or department to say... ideally, this is what we would have in these areas.

And we would incentivize I mean, this is a blanket for all of business, but we would we would particularly incentivize this in this spot. That to me feels like helps us to avoid being overrun by offices and hotels, and gives us a real clear vision of what we want our business district to look like. So I mean, can I, maybe it's just simple. I hope I'm not cutting you off.

I was like, can we just make a motion to just table this so that we can have that discussion and have my discussion and have Susan's discussion? Yeah. In a weird sort of passive aggressive sort of way. say like we couldn't like i don't you know you know the way these things fall is you know the the economic development committee didn't pass this until relatively recently so we couldn't do it like two weeks ago when we had a quieter meeting that's just the way these things go but so just to answer that but i will say but my point or other things could have been moved not really i don't think what it's quickly but there's a lot of things we have a lot of things moving And we're going to have long meetings, and I'm sorry for that, but that's just the way it goes.

But I am happy to have this discussion another time. There's no reason to rush this through. I would second a motion to table it. I move that we table the strategic economic incentive policy.

Second. All those in favor? Aye. Right.

Sounds good. We have come to the end of our meeting. Thank you, everybody. I know it was a long one and I will take a motion to adjourn quickly.

I have two things real quick. Yeah. I've been getting a lot of questions about lighting, both from the community and elected officials and everyone else. Lindsay Vielwald, our communications manager, sent out an email today.

Open that email when you get a chance. There's a letter that will be in CityViews that comes out in December that hits mailboxes. And it basically has an update on all of the lighting, both the citywide project and the White Island median restoration. So there's timelines in there, all sorts of things.

So take a look at that. um, information. And I know that we're getting that question kind of all over town. Um, so we're, we're trying to explain just what that process looks like and when that will be done.

Um, secondly, the legal services RFQ, I've got the submittals in hand. I'd like one member of the city council to participate in that process. It needs to be somebody with availability over the next couple of weeks, uh, to review those and then sit in on the interview process. So I in that process along with the mayor and I and a couple members of staff I'm willing I am not able to so and you said you're not necessarily just somebody we'd be speaking to what we want as a city council from Our city attorney, right?

So you've had some experience working with one and you can think about. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I'll just go by seniority. So if Gary, you are interested in participating.

I'm willing. So I will just do that. Just go make it easy and go by seniority and the records show that I also volunteered to I have a question on the lighting. It'll be the alternate.

The alternate. Why don't we... I think I'll take a motion to adjourn. It is on the lighting.

I'm sorry. The letter that's going out in City News. We're getting questions yesterday. You have it.

It was sent to you today. We don't have to wait for it. That's correct. You have that information in hand.

That's why I was trying to let you know. It's there. I move to adjourn. Second...

All those in favor. Aye. Aye.