Town Council Work Session

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Leesburg Town Council 1h 47m 6 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 4 days ago official recording ↗

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What items are being added to the 2026 legislative program?

Neil Steinberg 2:04

They're clearly uh

Kelly Burk 2:09

I'd like to call tonight's town council work session of Janu July seventh, two thousand twenty five. Our first item for discussion tonight is the two thousand twenty six legislative program. And this is Mr. Markle's night. Council?

Unknown 2:27

All right, our first item this evening here is talking about the twenty twenty-six draft legislative program for you all. Uh as you know, each year around this time we bring to you a draft proposal, and then you all have a chance to look at what staff is suggesting, make any edits to last year's program because we use last year's program as a starting point for the the coming year. We have a few new items that we would propose for you all to consider, and then we've got A few that we propose that you may want to consider taking out of the draft program. But again, all this is totally up to you all. We are just providing sort of the starting point for you all to begin the discussion with. And as we get into this, I'll just remind you the legislative program has two different category categories of items.

Unknown 3:10

We have position statements, which are just those more loosely, this is your position on this thing, and that helps us as we go into the General Assembly session. lobby and advocate on your own behalf on those specific topics. And then we also have something more specific, which are those legislative priorities. And those are those things where you are actually specifically asking for individual legislation from one of your local legislators to sponsor for you. So as you go through these in the different topics, we may have it classified one way and you'd want to call it another. So that's certainly your prerogative as well, whether you'd want it to be a legislative priority where you're asking for legislative to

Unknown 3:46

be drafted or just a general position on a specific topic. And then completing a once you all uh finish deg discussing the program and you get to a point whether that's tomorrow night or several weeks down the road, then we'll have a resolution for you for you to have that formally adopted and then we'll shop that around with all of our local legislators so that they'll have that and know your positions and they can begin their work. Just a little background here, this is a long session year coming up. It'll begin on January 14th. That's second Wednesday in January. And this is also going to be their budget year as well. So that's why they give themselves some extra time in this upcoming session. We'll jump right into it with items for your consideration that you may want to add and this is something we polled our different departments and asked them what their thoughts were as far as new ideas.

Unknown 4:33

The first what we'll propose to you is adding a real estate disclosure requirement. Previously, years ago, there was uh an allowance where localities had the authority to require the Sellers disclose that a home is actually in a historic district, a regulated historic district. That was taken out years ago, and our historic preservation staff has asked that that be added back into the state enabling legislation so that Leesburg could require that to be disclosed when somebody was buying homes in the historic district. We have had situations where folks have bought and didn't realize what they were buying themselves into. So that's our first recommendation for you. Second one is responsibility for invasive plants.

Unknown 5:13

You know, we've talked about you know notifying folks, you know, when they're at the garden center buying plants, whether they're buying invasive or not, that bill was vetoed last year. This would take it a bit farther and it would be responsibility for invasive plants. So if you have ivy, if you have bamboo, if you have other uh invasive plants on your property that are invading into your neighbor's property, this would hold you accountable from a zoning standpoint. for the invasive plants that are going to your neighbor's property and requiring you to mitigate those damages. The third item here for you is campaign finance reform.