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City of Charleston JOHN J. TECKLENBURG MAYOR WEST ASHLEY REVITALIZATION COMMISSION NOTICE OF MEETING The regular meeting of the West Ashley Revitalization Commission will be held at 5:30 p.m, May 9, 2018 at Town & Country Inn and Suites, 2008 Savannah Highway, Charleston, SC 29407. AGENDA 1. Welcome & Call to Order Chairman, Councilmember Peter Shahid 2. Approval of Minutes from March 14, 2018 Chairman Shahid and April 11, 2018 3. West Ashley Development Projects Map (update) City Staff 4. Recap of April 11th Meeting and Chairman Shahid Plan West Ashley Implementation (“Top 10”) 5. Plan West Ashley Workgroups (break-out session) Chairman Shahid a. Economic Development b. Green Infrastructure & Sustainability 6. Report from Workgroups Commission Members 7. Public Comment Period 8. Other Business 9. Adjournment Chairman Shahid The next West Ashley Revitalization Commission meeting will be take place at 5:30 p.m., on Wednesday, June 13, 2017. The location will be announced at a later date. In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, people who need alternative formats, ASL (American Sign Language) Interpretation or other accommodation please contact Janet Schumacher at (843) 577-1389 or email to [email protected] three business days prior to the meeting. P.O. Box 652, Charleston, South Carolina 29402 843-577-6970 Minutes from March 14, 2018 and April 11, 2018 WEST ASHLEY REVITALIZATION COMMISSION March 14, 2108 A meeting of the West Ashley Revitalization Commission was held this date at The Schoolhouse, 720 Magnolia Road. Notice of this meeting was sent to all local news media. PRESENT Councilmember Peter Shahid, Chair, Anne Frances Bleecker, Harry Gregorie, Diane Hamilton, Donna Jacobs, Michael Miller, Brantley Moody, Jimmy Palassis, Amy Riley, Charles Smith, Mayor John Tecklenburg, Councilmember Marvin Wagner and Jonathan Zucker. STAFF: Christopher Morgan, Planning Director. Chair Shahid noted City Council approved the implementation portion of the West Ashley Plan at the February 16 meeting unanimously. He sent an email last week to the Commission members including an implementation matrix. He distributed extra copies to the Commission members and the general public Approval of Minutes from January 10, 2018 Ms. Jacobs moved for approval of the minutes. Mr. Smith seconded the motion. The minutes were approved unanimously. Historic Charleston Foundation Award Chair Shahid said the West Ashley Revitalization Commission was cited by the Historic Charleston Foundation for their work and approval of the plan. The award was for recognition of the approval of the plan and the implementation of the plan, which recognized the historic significance of West Ashley. He said he would distribute the details when the Commission will be recognized in May. The City will be celebrating the 350th anniversary of the founding of Charlestowne in April, 2020. Part of the plan included protection of the historical nature of the community in the West Ashley area. Part of the reason they received the award because they have taken recognition of preserving the community and the historical nature and fabric of the community. Plan Implementation: Next Steps Chair Shahid said he mentioned earlier City Council approved the implementation portion, which was what the Commission approved in December, and was now part of the ordinance. He said they now needed to implement so he wanted to have an open discussion about what the Commission needed to do next and where they went from there. Ms. Jacobs thought about the other commissions of the city. Most of those commissions are responsive to the City’s needs and they don’t initiate actions. She questioned whether the Commission wait for the City to tell them what projects they were thinking about or would the Commission initiate things. Based upon the implementation matrix and the ordinance, she thought the Commission was more in the initiation process and proactive than reactive. Ms. Jacobs said there was a lot of discussion early on about forming subcommittees and many people signing up wanting to be involved. Logistically, she thought they would all run screaming to the hills in trying to put so many subcommittees in process because there was no public meeting space West Ashley, nobody wanted to go downtown to a public city office, and they had staff running around doing all they could publically to setup all these meetings. She didn’t think they had the resources for subcommittees. But there were many people who had been engaged in the whole process, attended meetings diligently, signed up for emails and were very involved with Plan West Ashley. The one subcommittee that was formed was the Communications Subcommittee. One thing that was said in every chapter of the plan was “the City and County should development community engagement strategies to improve communication, education, participation for residents around locally important community design and land use issues.” So she saw what the Commission can do was twofold. First, they could get all of those people involved by giving the Communications Subcommittee those persons’ names and start West Ashley Revitalization Commission March 14, 2018 Page 2 building what that strategy might be. They could meet, and start thinking about the engagement strategy while the Commission looked at the matrix. The Commission could then strategize how they were going to make it work and pull in resources from the Communications Subcommittee. Ms. Jacobs continued saying they had these five major headings and within those five headings was the matrix that spoke about immediate goals, long term goals, and near term goals. She felt they needed to jump on that right now, work out all of the logistics of those things and just do the low hanging fruit. They need to logisticize who was going to be in charge of that, like a small executive committee of the Commission who had the time to meet regularly, and insist that they would manage it in the beginning. Ms. Jacobs noted they also don’t really have a list of currently active projects in West Ashley. They have implementation of things to do but some of projects that were already moving along. She questioned how does the Commission dovetailed in those projects and how do they fit within the matrix. Mr. Moody said the issue he had was where do they begin, where does the Planning staff and BAR meeting take over. They weren’t city employees, they weren’t collectively elected and they weren’t in the business of picking the winners and losers. He thought that was illegal for the Commission to do. Nobody there was looking for a lot of meetings so the question was how and when do they meet. Ms. Jacobs suggested they had to have an executive committee that met regularly and pulled everybody in that was needed. But other than their advocacy in the community, he wanted to make sure they didn’t cross the line between the appointed Commission and the City employees. Chair Shahid thought the Commission was charged with taking ownership of the portion of the plan City Council approved. He thought they needed to identify for City Council what they wanted to do and make sure they could do that. There were certain parts of the plan that were “pie in the sky” ideas or long term planning on this. There were moving parts going on in the West Ashley area where some parts were in the jurisdiction of the County and not the City, and some parts of the school district over which the City might not have ultimate jurisdiction. He thought they needed to state their top priority was A, B, or C. Once they did this then they would be looking at the mechanics of what needed to happen with that like those things that might be simple and basic that they might or might not like. As an example, their number one priority was having trees trimmed uniformly along corridors and major highways. They work with the City department that have jurisdiction over forestry and get them to trim trees in a particular way. That wasn’t a long term plan and not an issue that needed a lot of muscle to get done. They would take that and go to the other extreme where they take the long term process of what they wanted to do with I-526 and come up with a recommendation. While they don’t have the authority to do that, if they took the affirmative stance for what they wanted to happen with I-526, they could come up with the recommendation that the extension of I-526 should like a parkway instead of an interstate. That’s not something they had control over but it was something they could make sure got to the forefront and made the state, county and city leaders push that plan a little harder. Chair Shahid felt these were the different categories they could find themselves into, whether category A, B, or C, one was a very a long term outside of their meetings but the other of how they trim trees was immediate and aesthetic, and doesn’t require that much funding. Mr. Zucker preferred to take action now. He thought the idea of finding something that they could all see and feel as immediate would be a great thing for West Ashley. He noted as he just came over the Cosgrove Bridge not only was the traffic horrendous, there was nothing welcoming you to City of Charleston or West Ashley. This was something they could do immediately and relatively inexpensively so that West Ashley residents associated themselves with City of Charleston or with West Ashley. He said this was something everybody should get behind and have that beautification begin but more importantly looking at immediate functional changes or things they could affect by becoming representatives of the West Ashley community on the various transportation discussions, the various review boards or many other things that represented the interest of the community and committees in some way.

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