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19 November and then it would be referred back to the Planning Board and the Board of County Commissioners in the early part of 2006 for formal review. The last item on the agenda is concerning rural enterprises and being able to promote activity in the rural and agricultural areas of the County. PUBLIC COMMENT: Allan Rosen said that he has been a resident of Orange County for 13 years. Since 2001, he has been on the Affordable Housing Advisory Board and he is developing a conservation neighborhood in Chapel Hill Township. He is speaking on behalf of a local nonprofit called The Village Project. Eight of the nine board members are residents of Orange County and they are a group of environmentally minded professionals with design, planning, and construction expertise. They are very concerned about growth, development, and environmental protection. He spoke about the process of having the first public hearing of the land use element in May. He thinks this is premature. He commended the staff for the outreach meetings. His board prepared two letters, and he distributed them to the County Commissioners. He said that they prepared this letter to strongly urge the County Commissioners not to hold the public hearings on the revision of the land use element until a complete revision is available for public review and comment prior to or coincident with the - publication of the legal advertisement. He summarized the letter, which follows: Re: Public Hearings on the Revision of the Land Use Element Dear Orange County Commissioners Carey, Foushee, Gordon, Halkiotis, and Jacobs: This letter is to strongly urge you not to hold Public Hearings on the revision of the Land Use Element until a complete revision is available for public review and comment prior to, or coincident with, the publication of the Legal Advertisement. According to tonight's agenda, you will be voting on whether or not to include Orange County LUE Update Text Amendments as part of the May 23, 2005 Quarterly Public Hearing. The Action Agenda Item Abstract reads in part, "Amendments, in the form of a complete re-write and reformatting to the Land Use Element are proposed. The purpose is to provide a complete update to the Land Use Element of the County's Comprehensive Plan to address changes that have occurred in the County since the Land Use Element was originally adopted in 1981 (emphasis added)." However, rather than presenting a complete re-write or update of the LUE, only two zoning text amendments are scheduled for public comment. While these amendments describe two of the five recommendations the planning staff presented in its recent outreach sessions, we do not feel that consideration of these amendments is warranted absent the context of the complete re-write or update. To do otherwise would undermine the degree of time and effort that county citizens and the planning department have put into this multi-year effort to comprehensively re-assess the existing LUE. For the past several years the Board of Directors of The Village Project has been following the initiative to update the Land Use Element of the County's Comprehensive Plan. Members of our Board attended the May 14, 2003 Joint Boards and Commissions Meeting and several of the Township meetings in March and April 2004. Additionally, we followed the County planning department's outreach to several county advisory boards early in 2005 and the series of community information sessions conducted in March 2005. Throughout this process the importance and contribution of citizen participation has been stressed, dating back to the Shaping Orange County Task Force and the Comprehensive