001order and for those who have joined this is our working session um tonight uh we have two opportunities for public comment so both now and at the end of the meeting so if you'd like to provide a public comment before we talk about we get the presentation on the cip and discuss our work program please feel free to use the raised hand feature to indicate that you'd like to provide a public comment now or if you've dialed in you can press star nine on your phone you can have up to three minutes to address us there we go caller with the phone number ending with nine five five you can press star six to unmute your phone and address the planning commission hi good evening uh commission kirk westfall 3505 charter place um work plan
002discussions are always exciting uh to me anyway um i was happy to see that the buy right site plan um issue is going to council in a couple weeks hooray with regard to um the parking discussions it seems like parking minimums the discussion around parking minimums are being uh grouped with parking maximums and evs and i guess i would advocate for maybe splitting that off since elimination of parking minimums seems pretty popular among many people and could be something that could just be uh taken as its own issue and i think dispatched pretty quickly um but i'm sure there's things i'm not thinking about there um also with regard to the work plan i guess the most important thing to me uh my eyes i could have missed it doesn't even appear on the work
003plan which is the timetable for further tc1 rezonings which um i think are one of the most urgent priorities um so i would advocate for those to be done as quickly as possible um and i guess the second most important uh to me would be and which is mentioned on there without a time table is the elimination of the affordable housing premium uh downtown um let's see a couple other tidbits from here i see the single family zoning discussion is still on there i guess my impression is that that's stalled but there's no timetable associated with it so i guess i was concerned about that and um uh looks like the master plan rfp isn't scheduled to go out until the end of next year i'm assuming that's a budgetary issue but uh if there's
004any more detail that can be said about that that would be wonderful i see drive-throughs are still uh make an appearance on the to-do list in theory uh i would love for there to be no additional drive-throughs in the city so i guess that's i i would advocate for that being taken care of um one thing that 30 more seconds okay thanks uh one thing i i i would advocate that i don't one other thing i don't see on there which i think may be of interest to look into is parking unbundling um if we're gonna be towing around with maximums and so on uh and developers really want to build parking um i would advocate to see if it's legal or possible to be done through premiums and so on is to to force
005developers to unbundle the fees for parking in other words to charge us a meaningful amount for renting a parking space so it doesn't punish the people who don't have cars thanks for your time look forward to the meeting thank you if anyone else would like to provide a public comment before we go into the other business you can use the raised hand feature on zoom to indicate that all right seeing no one um let's talk about capital improvements plans the cip all right so um i'm going to be bringing in a familiar face uh deb gaslin works in our public services area and has been the city's cip maestro for many years i am getting her all set up here hopefully so she can uh share her screen as necessary um so just a reminder
006to set the stage um uh and i think we have a couple of new commissioners so we thought it might be worthwhile to have a brief presentation here at the working session in advance of the public hearing schedule for your next regular meeting for consideration of modifications to the existing cip the capital improvements plan just as a high level refresher is just that it is a five-year plus document depending how you look at it that seeks to identify different categories of public capital investments across a wide variety of areas how they are prioritized and in what order they will be undertaken it identifies likely funding sources for them and as deb is going to provide an overview it goes through a really robust process of not only identifying what projects go on to that list
007but how they are prioritized and funded going forward and this year is like i said a modification of of an existing plan which is sort of um bureaucratic speak for it's a sort of an update to an existing plan versus every other year which is sort of starting anew and sort of really focusing more on the repopulation of those projects and re-prioritizing them potentially so um with that um i'm going to turn over to deb to provide a brief presentation and then answer any questions think about i'll leave it up to dev if she wants to sort of take some questions as she goes or at the end but certainly at the end of this if you have any questions we can entertain those or if there's additional information that would be helpful for you
008we can make sure that we work to get that to you in advance of that consideration in early december take it away okay thank you very much um i'm looking at faces here and i think all of you or almost all of you have been through the cip cycle at least once is that correct i think no i shouldn't wait just knew so for the rest of you you know the information isn't going to be anything new so i am going to you know go through a presentation here in the minute on the process itself how it works so because it will be not new information feel free to jump in with questions or you can wait till the end it's not a terribly long presentation at the end i'll talk about um the hearing
009coming up in a couple of things questions for you guys i know packet date is the 29th i believe but i believe i can have stuff ready before then so we'll talk about whether you might want an unofficial draft earlier and so on but with that i'm going to share my screen here just a second okay and give it just a second to load up here there we go so uh the things i want to hit on tonight are you know how do we organize this thing you know talking about how we divide it into categories and then what the actual process is um where planning commission fits in and where council fits in and then what do we do to manage the cip after it's adopted a little bit about the timeline um i
010do want to hit again on our newer alavant software talk about a little bit about the experiences now that i'm on round two with it and then leave some time for questions at the end so as mr leonard said the capital improvement plan is a five-year plus the sixth year i agree is kind of a beyond sort of thing but it is required by state law that you have a capital improvement plan so it's not optional so how do we organize it and this is not the same as other communities necessarily do but we actually break our plan down by what we call asset categories which we'll talk about a little bit more here in just a minute so who are the players to put this plan that you're going to have at your hearing
011here in a couple weeks well we have a plan that's broken into three different like overarching categories then those are broken down into a total of 13 asset teams or categories in a more refined way we have over 70 people that are involved by the time the plan is complete some more robustly than others but some years it's even more than that in a modification year it tends to be right at that limit and then the city is divided as you know into service units and everyone has some sort of a role in putting together the cip and we really want this to reflect a broad range i've mentioned before that i've worked other places where the plan comes down from the top and not that staff maybe don't have input in those type of
012scenarios or that the public doesn't but it is top down that is not the case here so we have everybody from our public works staff you know the people who keep things physically running our water sewer storm road system our engineering staff systems planning staff which is the unit i'm with we're the long-range technical planners the water and wastewater plant staff because their needs are quite unique of course the planning staff financial staff fire services because the water system comes into play and also fire stations if we need to upgrade them belong in the plan and then parks and recreation staff so that's the inside the city but then also the downtown development authority and the nature area preservation team and targeted um staff where we interact with them so engineering staff from the university
013participate in utilities usually sugat who's the head i've never known what sue's title is but planning overall campus planning aspect so we do invite university staff they do not participate in the prioritization that we'll talk about later because it's our assets but they very actively participate in the project planning itself so i talked about three master groups and those are municipal facilities transportation and utilities and municipal facilities has just three teams within it one is city-owned buildings and that category includes improvements we make to city hall itself like when council chambers were updated a few years ago um heating and cooling changes at city hall things along that line but also as i mentioned the fire stations and then we do use city-owned buildings for the housing commission projects and as you all know with
014the passage of the housing millage that that is getting to be a far more robust part of the city-owned buildings than it's been in the past so you note we added a lot of the projects actually last fall but they're moving along then parks and recreation which i think is sort of self-explanatory and then our solid waste program comes under municipal facilities transportation is by far the biggest of the groups we have municipal airport active transportation is anything that happens in a public right-of-way that doesn't involve automobiles but involves human beings getting around in some other fashion so pedestrian oriented improvements come under that category uh bicycle lanes belong in active transportation crosswalks anything that helps the used to be called non-motorized or other terms but that's the group that encompasses those kind of improvements
015bridges sort of self-explanatory we have 16 bridges to take care of new streets is one of our baby categories as we rarely add a new street in this town perhaps a developer doing a new residential project might propose their streets to be public and we have had that happen i think twice is all in the uh tennis years that i've been here but also if we have a gravel street that people petition to pave that also would fall under new streets um and we actually had one not terribly long ago hollywood is a on the kind of northwesterly part of town and it got to a certain point and is temporarily on hold but that's what new streets is about other transportation is other things that happen in the right of way not involving human
016beings getting around but it would be things like taking care of our signal system [Music] transportation studies we put in this category and anything that's electronic like one of the new projects you'll see is um adding more accessible pedestrian signals like for people with vision difficulties that they can be audio signal instead of just the hand we're all listening or normal to look at so those are the kind of things that fall in other transportation then parking facilities is run through the dda but they are city parking facilities so that's our structures downtown our surface lots most of the surface lots as you know are being proposed for housing commission affordable housing projects but we still have a fair number of surface lots street construction you know near and dear to all of our hearts
017please make our roads better so that's all our paving projects the orange barrel things that you see and then finally transit which is quite small basically for a number of years we've had all the planning and progression on the train station project we have some q jump lanes for buses in there as project but it's a fairly modest size category and the third of the overarching groups was utilities and that's our sanitary sewer system our storm water system which would mean not just our storm pipes but our rain gardens detention basins anything that helps us either handle runoff or improve water quality have through the stormwater system one thing that isn't necessarily familiar to a lot of people but we actually consider our street trees to be part of the storm water system because they
018play such an important role in capturing water and filtering so you will see projects related to the urban forest in storm water and then finally water and in both sanitary sewer and water they would include not only pipe projects but projects at our treatment plants and then of course we wouldn't know how to plan anything if we didn't know how much money we had to spend in each which is everything has to be revenue driven or grant driven but the financial team has staff both from directly from financial services and also because almost everything here runs through public services it's sort of a dual effort to provide those numbers to me so we know what our targets are for each group so how do we make the cheese um and mr leonard had mentioned that
019this is what we call a modification year the only real difference in scope is that in a year like this which are the odd number of years we only look at the first two years of the plan that was previously approved and look at any needed changes to it and that could be a change in the schedule a change in the funding needed or both so the in the full year which is what i'm going to talk about a little more detail regardless is we have to first decide what projects we need and so the first meeting we have in the four years when we have three meetings for each group are to gather the information on what do we need to do and the proposal for a project could come from a citizen or
020some other outside group like we've had you know very s washing all biking and washing washing that would be good walking coalition have suggested plans before obviously the university a number of sources as groups but a lot of them are just plain a citizen who is saying you know hey water quality is not good on my street i think it's time to look at the water main on my street so we have that as a source we also have our master plans as you know that's something that's near and dear to your heart and there's you know the city-wide master plan but we also have a parks master plan you know water sewer storm master plans and so on so if those plans suggest that it's time for this project that's another source for coming
021up with what we might put in the plan and then of course staff knowledge the people that work with these assets every day know what needs to be done like the facilities manager will say you know hey that air conditioner's on its last legs it's time to talk about this upgrade or this street has fallen to a rating of you know 3 on 1 to 10 scale time to pave it so the project needs can come from that and also some of the from the outside groups that we mentioned once we get a list of projects then it's like okay but is it eligible for inclusion in the plan so we have a couple of criteria one of them is that the project should be a hundred thousand dollars or more which um as big
022improvement projects go is quite modest even though it's a lot of money but we do also include any projects that maybe have four years in a row where they're spending twenty five thousand dollars so as the plan looks at it it's still over a hundred thousand dollars we also look at a study if we think it's going to lead to a capital improvement so we could fund say a payment asset management plan knowing that it will help set the path for what roads to pave in what order and then the prioritization step we do not do in these modification years because generally speaking we don't add new projects in the modification year but you will see a small number on your plan and they'll be clearly identified as new and that's basically things that have
023risen either of an emergency nature or in a couple of cases a grant opportunity came up so we were able to do some targeted new development based on an opportunity but if this were a full year we would have had a whole bunch of new projects added and then we're like well how do we decide which ones provide more value to the community so at the second meeting we actually prioritize those needs and we're now using a software model called alavance that has what's called a strategic value scoring model and i'm sorry no matter what i do with this slide at this scale it's just tough to read but we actually set high level uh goal values like in this case you know regulatory and policy compliance physical safety access and mobility coordination with other
024projects and so on so we figure out through a pretty detailed process um and then we go through a process to say which of these carries the most weight and then we have to develop quantifiable ways to decide how to award points and ellevance keeps it fairly simple in that we assign low medium or high desirability and then we choose what sort of curve is it linear is things at the top more important so it's unless you go through the process it's a little hard you know to explain in too much detail but between those two things each goal getting scored for its own particular thing and then the overall weighting comes into play and the project ends up with a score and you know the difference between this and the system we had up
025until last year is that we allowed the asset groups to tailor the scoring and the goals that made the most sense for their asset group like this was the active transportation group and they chose one of the goals of user experience you know why would we be doing these things unless it makes it more comfortable more safe or something for someone to use our streets or some facility so then we could cover everything from like sidewalk gaps how do we score low medium or high if we add a crosswalk if we add a bike lane we set three different levels so that if it did it at all ones that do more than the other would get more points in essence and so while we're going through that prioritization process finance in the background is
026looking hard at current financials um you know what kind of revenue forecasts they have and come up with a funding availability and last fall if you remember we said you know covid presented certain challenges that is considerably better now but um it is still affecting things although to be honest it's affecting scheduling more than dollars at this point um and one thing i just wanted to say briefly that's a little unique right now is um and particularly uh commissioner dish since you're also council member dish the there is a some money coming back through the american rescue plan what people commonly call covid funds but in terms of cip the process wasn't far enough along that i could directly incorporate in here because while there are a whole group of possible ways to spend that
027money some of which are capital there's still a community engagement process and other steps to go through so in terms of timing it just simply did not dovetail to work it directly into the cip but of course if decisions are made odds are they aren't going to affect 22 or 23 anyway but if they do when we follow the timeline you'll see where we could possibly make some adjustments in most cases it's not proposing something new it's just funding from outside sources instead of the sources we planned on but i did want to mention that because it's a little unique this year and then we have to actually take all that information and program it to fit in specific years so we look at the prioritization score obviously no sense doing that if it isn't
028going to affect when we schedule it we look at how many dollars we have available for each year we look at how the projects mesh together because if we're doing a street project the engineers in the street end of the game always go to the utilities engineers and say did the water sewer storm need work on this street because if so we want to mesh them and that can take a higher priority street maybe move it back to utilities have the funds or vice versa so we work hard to minimize disruption to the public by coordinating projects and then staff and contractor capacity is really a challenge right now mostly the contractor capacity for instance we bid uh we have uh replacement of galvanized service leads for instance and the first time it went out
029they got no bids the second time they they got bids but it's like people are busy again and so we also have to keep the amount we're proposed within what's reasonable to accomplish honestly still the funding is the thing that most limits so we take all of that and we produce the cip which is the document that you'll be having up for public hearing so you know we look at whether things fit together we put in the highest priority projects first and we just keep adding projects in a given year until we've hit our funding target and then we just move on to the next fiscal year and keep adjusting back and forth and back and forth uh until everything fits together and we've honored the priorities the funds available and made things work together
030so then i take the raw data that's the plan and i will also always produce for you some reports on you know how does this compare to last time we have more plan you know projects less projects dollars up dollars down a number of statistical reports and prepare the draft plan then we come to the planning commission and under state law planning commissions are the entity approve capital improvement plans not city council the planning commission so this work session like we're holding almost always is part of it and then we move on to the actual public hearing which is what you will be doing um i assume nothing has changed but for december 7th and after going through and asking for whatever revisions at some point uh you know then you'll vote and that becomes
031the approved capital improvement plan then city council still has a super important role but it's just a different role so once your cip plan is approved then it becomes the building block for the capital portion of the city's budget so after your adoption finance takes those numbers plugs them into the capital plan if there are general funds involved administration has to make kind of last-minute adjustments on dollars there and then the bottom line is the plan more or less exactly as you approve it with little tweaks for usually in the area of general funds it becomes what city council uses and then in may the total budget including the capital portion of the budget is voted upon so at that point you've got a plan that you've approved you've got a capital budget based on
032it the council has approved but now all these projects have to get built so a number of years ago the city decided that we needed an oversight group of staff to help keep things moving along and on target so we have the capital projects advancement network just simply called cpan and we monitor kind of from adoption through project implementation uh and that group has people from engineering systems planning public works and finance we meet twice a month more if there's something tricky that comes up like bids that come in really high but we have to make a decision now but generally the twice a month process and then if we need input from somebody other than the standing members of that committee we just roll them in um as far as the timeline we always
033do the kickoff somewhere around labor day and then finance all the way from september to say the middle of october is coming up with those numbers september through october we're holding those process prioritization planning meetings then right now i'm in this step with actually drafting the plan based on the results of that and then we'll be getting the draft to you shortly and i'm going to stop here from like say packet day is i believe the 29th for december 7th but i think probably by the end of the week it may not be exactly the same as what would go in packing there might be a couple little tweaks over the next two weeks or whatever but would it be helpful to have at least the rough draft uh that i could get to mr
034leonard and he could distribute to give you a little longer to look at it than just that shorter time from the pack of the public hearing because i'd be happy to do that i don't know if you can see our faces there's lots of nods yes that would be much appreciated okay and one of the things i do in the modification years is it's you know a little crude but it's been very effective is i color code on the front this is a time change this is a dollar change this is both this is a new project so you will know what to focus in your attention on um so i will gladly do that then you will hold the public hearing and you know it's always december january this year because this modification we're
035able to make the first meeting in december and then city council adopts the budget come may and so for most of you you've seen a plan sheet but it's not you know like sexy looking but it will have like this is city-owned buildings name the project give their prioritization rank then what year we're planning them and how many dollars and we always put it in thousands of dollars so 400 is 400 000 just to keep everything fitting on a page so the plan you'll get will be a multi-page document organized by those asset groups and then we tally up the grand totals for you at the end so that is basically the process and i'm going to get this off and stop my share so we can see each other a little better my mouse
036is being cranky here right is there a way for you oh no i'm doing the dance to see if it's me questions about what might be coming up there we go took a while for you faces to all load back in there and it's telling me my internet connection is unstable which is very uncommon but i think we're good so all right we have you back here too um you all just moved around on my screen uh any questions i know we don't have the the list of projects yet um but uh questions about kind of what you're expecting i know it's getting old hat to most of you so go ahead commissioner lee are you seeing a lot of price and construction inflation just from material pricing and you guys have some level of
037like buffer built in for you know just what we're going to see literally this year next yeah and that's an excellent question prices are definitely going up and i'm sure uh both private and public sector i'm hearing are experiencing that part of it i mean it seems so weird after the times we've been through but there was then a lot of pent up uh work that then everybody's putting out the door at once and it's been interesting so far in our street projects we haven't been seeing as much inflation and paving costs the utilities have been where we've really been seeing things and here's sort of a copic related example in our stormwater system one of the primary things we do for maintenance is rather than replace pipes we line them same is actually true
038for sanitary well a change the city made two or three years ago technically was to change the rosin it's like something that's injected hardens inside the pipe and we change from a styrene base to a non-styrene base rosin and we're finding that with supply chain disruptions we were like in the middle of a job in the swift run watershed and the contractor could not get materials and the job actually went on halt for like two months waiting for a supply to come in so we're seeing a lot of strange supply chain oriented things that definitely affected price onlining also but we you will see a fair number of funding adjustments and that's because we felt we needed to inflate even for 23 not everything but things where we were seeing issues a challenge other questions
039maybe we'll see this when it comes before us my recollection is this time last year i can't remember where we were in the a20 process i know we brought like we talked about a20 and like at one one year it was like it hasn't been passed so kind of are those projects did they get included last year or are we going to see more this year or is it going to wait until next year like what's the status there you will see some new things like solar on city buildings and some more work in that area and that's an area where of the proposals within the american rescue funds there are a number of things that are driven by by two things the a20 and then the vision zero out of the recently adopted transportation
040plan saying if those were identified as this high level goal and we have opportunities from our funds now again by the time all of between council input and public input i don't know what we'll shake out but some of the things that they're there would make significant strides all by themselves but there are additional things happening in here as well as just the general push for new buildings to you know be what's the highest level the platinum it's terrible my mind goes to sleep sometimes on the terminology on that one but um yeah it's starting to be incorporated and have projects that that's their sole purpose i'm thinking by next year we're going to probably see a significant number of new ones missy stouts in particular is very passionate about moving things forward and of
041course also the council past the dark sky ordinance so as we do street light projects those will be meeting the dark skies which is you know it's all part of the same picture so we're making progress never as fast as we would like but you will see some additional work in this even from what was added last fall great i'm i'm heartened to see that the dark skies is also on public property not just the private property since that ordinance was private property so that's that's super heartening and i'm sure that the people who put a lot of time into that will that will make them super happy commissioner lee um are there changes to our cip being made in light of the new infrastructure bill that was passed is there a city focus on
042kind of trying to align some of the funding from what the state and city may receive from that federal level bill too soon yet since it was just passed we've all been aware that it was coming so the beauty of a six-year planning window is that it's not like you're scrambling to come up with projects you're able to take funds and move them faster those who aren't prepared feel like they're on a hamster wheel saying oh what what should i do now that i have money we look at oh good there's money to advance what we've already planned to do in most cases um but there have also been you know the whole uh earmark process sort of returned politically during the course of this past year where we were getting you know from debbie
043dingle's office and others saying suggest some opportunities so whether you score on any of those i don't know but the city has been very actively going after a number of funds like that and when and if they score we can adjust on the fly fairly quickly and again if we're doing nothing more than fund something that was already in the plan you approved and we're just going to get to it sooner we we can't wait to see what that infrastructure bill shakes out knowing how federal processes work they're gonna first have to decide what agencies they're going to push it through um but i caught something in the news and i turned it off because i needed to come and get here um that they were have maybe some idea even as of today what
044michigan might be getting but i wasn't able to hear the details so no this plan didn't know it was coming or know what it means yet but by next fall hopefully we'll see a lot of progress if we get some funds from that source and i expect that we will thank you any other commissioners all right well thank you very much for joining us we'll see you in a couple weeks i guess and look forward to the draft um you said next week yeah maybe even by the end of this week this morning i finished streets which is always my last one to do because it's the one that i've got to make sure all those utilities line up with it so now i'm down to the crunching and report time and so probably even
045by the end of this week i should be able to send it uh to mr leonard who can then get it out to you folks so soon yeah things to read as we're recovering from thanksgiving dinner so yes exactly there you go prime reading material thank you again it's always a pleasure and i'll see you on the 7th great thank you bye-bye all right mr leonard work plan work program um let's start with a little um good news uh can you see our current work plan yes all right is it super zoomed in so it's actually readable um so this is our current adopted plan for the 21 22 fiscal years and [Music] a couple of things in this so just as a reminder the structure of our work program over the last couple years
046has been uh planning work comprehensive planning work in the top and then ordinance work in the next table so um as you just heard capital improvements is going to be something that continues to appear on the planning commission's work program forever and ever and ever and ever and so uh that will remain uh comprehensive planning um [Music] this reflected the last um i would say the last attempt at updating the city's comprehensive plan we got pretty far we were on the verge of executing a contract covet hit unknown funding and it was um it sort of fizzled in short we had identified the creation of a new subcommittee commissioner dish thus far is helping to lead that and i am super grateful for both her and shara mills help in helping to kick me in
047the rear to get this thing going i've just been putting my energies elsewhere and so i'm excited to get this started and then the operations committee is the executive committee which is just for newer commissioners this is a subcommittee that's comprised of the chair the vice chair and the secretary this is um traditionally been used as just helping to schedule petitions at meetings and more recently it has not been eating within a meeting with any frequency but it remains a committee that if for some reason i am not doing a good job and sort of managing some of that information from just an operational perspective it's a forum for us to discuss it for me to receive feedback or take feedback from the commission in that regard switching to ordinance updates this um i i'm
048absolutely blown away by you um and the city council um when we're looking at all of that we've accomplished in a relatively short time it's so satisfying to see all these and that they're done so the sign ordinance has been updated uh electrical vehicle parking has been adopted we are looking at some potential tweaks to that as part of our parking regulations but the framework is there uh solar height exemption and solar accessory structures this were activities to provide flexibility and some area heightened placement and basically solar car ports or solar canopies that wouldn't require site plan the recent adoption of outdoor lighting one of the lexus's signature batch amendments of sort of a series of minor amendments to the udc uh mr jerry hancock's great work with the modification and establishment of the floodplain
049overlay zoning district plan project planned projects where that portion of the code were was struck and instead replaced with a series of trade-offs that incentivize affordable development or sustainable development specifically with high realization of solar renewable energy some city council directed amendments uh review of the c1 and c1ar zoning districts the planning commission forwarder recommendation did not recommend any alterations to those districts and recommendations on site plan review thresholds which you just wrapped up i am a little bit behind in helping you get there as you can see these are originally due to city council by the end of 2020 we got them there by december of 2021 and i think it's a much better package of a proposal ordinance change for that purpose the creation of the transit oriented development district was established and
050accessory dwelling units were modified and expanded so um when um some of these are more more heavy lifts for the planning commission than others um but um pretty remarkable run of getting a lot of things i think um off of your work that you should all be very very proud of um so then i'm just going to go through the rest of this potential future projects i want to highlight this this is just this is sort of a carryover frankly from work programs from history and i have shared a sort of proposed draft for discussion that we can shift to here shortly but as part of that i'm supposing that we strike this table these items have been retained on here for some time they don't seem to have elevated to the high prioritization priority
051status and as is included both on this and the more expanded version of that and the other attachment that we'll be getting to um over the last two to three years the planning commission has been identifying other potential areas for prioritization and so um i um as part of our discussion of this part of the question is um i guess some striking of those older holdover potential projects that don't seem to ever get out of that category and don't seem to get elevated and by way of that do we make the decision that they are no longer priorities for the planning commission so this at the time of adoption this was some of the other potential work program items that have that were raised at different different times i did my best to to be
052faithful to making sure that we're taking good notes at meetings when a commission proposed business or sometimes it's a comment during the context of a particular petition and the like and a more expansive version of that has now been included was emailed to you it's also available in the packet which reflects updates to that through our most recent meetings and what would be valuable for me at this point is your feedback ideas about what you want to see elevated into that table particularly i think of ordinance changes off of the potential list and help a discussion about how to prioritize those um because as you know despite a lot of success and i am optimistic that we're going to get through a lot of them um we'll do better if we do prioritize them i
053think and bite off a couple at a time as opposed to trying to simultaneously take on all of them so i can pull up the draft as provided but i think that's been provided in advance to all of you as well i am ready to answer any questions and take notes um as a reminder this is a working session so we're not going to finalize anything but you the goal here is for you to help me provide the feedback so i can present a product to you that resonates for adoption so effectively what things are on that long list that we might want to elevate and give a timeline to also i think probably if there's something that you feel like was brought up during commission proposed business that you don't see on that longer
054list we might um include those things in there or potentially striking some things on that longer list because we can't just always add we do have to result yeah and i'm also happy to provide a summary if if anybody's interested i think it i've done my best to sort of articulate what items have been added but if you have any questions about any of that let me know commissioner dish thank you so uh how come a20 udc connections is kind of a sub bullet but at the very top of the proposed of the unless i'm missing something because the oh no carbon neutrality duh i'm sorry it's the it's the way i can't see two pages continuously okay so that my editor failed me and putting together this bullet no no no it's the way
055the pages work when when you download from the agenda so i would like uh i i would like us to um i would like us to strongly consider revisiting [Music] premiums in the d1 and d2 zoning districts i would also like under this list of proposed so i'm not saying put that up there i'm just saying that's one thing that i would nominate strongly um and i would like you to um i would like to say that of the solid waste design requirements slash composting requirements i would put that under a20 or rather under carbon neutrality because that is what it serves and i think we have a tendency to think that the energy projects are the projects that are related to carbon neutrality but it is not only the energy projects and that is
056a design feature of new construction that particularly as we get the tc1 developments which are going to be very dense we hope housing along our transit corridors not uh not having it built into their site plan provision for recycling composting and trash is going to be something we regret um down the line so those are my first two things thinking of for me the lead goals on council right now and um yeah so and i'm a little mystified by significant cost burdens for annexation i didn't i don't remember us talking about that and i didn't realize there was a problem with the duvara petition so i wouldn't mind hearing more about that sure i can um provide a just a brief overview of the annexation this was um i think that that item came out
057of a discussion of a proposed annexation of a home that was being considered for a daycare center and once as part of that annexation sort of all that coupled with the fact that it was a daycare center which required a special exception using site plan that triggers all the city's design standards to what was previously a single family home and so what that meant was significant extension of public sidewalks so it was a corn it happened to be a corner lot it was pretty significant extensions of water mains because the city's standard specifications require water mains to be of a certain size that was not provided there and so when you added all of that up that annexation and the proposed child care center just sort of ultimately collapsed under the weight of all of
058the city's expectations so that was i think i would say that that is a comment about to oversimplify do we expect too much of development commissioner gabe randle yeah just to piggyback on that i i um when that was going through i didn't see that problem just with annexation i think that um i think that exacerbates it more but i think that a lot of those themes run through just our expectations of development in general um in terms of you know uh other communities the unless it's like a big development that's adding two or three hundred homes or something like that they sort of expect that the water main has already been upgraded by the municipality and things like that where we as we put that on developers um as as part of the site
059plan review process and so i think and i i don't know that it's just annexation i guess is what i'm saying um it feels like it's bigger than that to me and especially um mr atlanta when you did all those interviews with people uh too it just seemed like that was a theme that wasn't just confined to annexation so i would beg to differ a little bit by the categorization of that and think it's a broader broader issue commissioner so just maybe cleaning up the list a bit i believe orc looked at r2a lots so that's in progress not kind of in the bottom list right um and then a lot of the transportation stuff bicycle parking requirements parking requirements r4c and ev parking isn't that all bundled into what we're going to be reviewing
060for overall parking or do we want to leave those separate for some reason i um yes they are they are bundled with that um i i guess i just kept them in those lists because i don't yet know we don't yet i don't really yet know how eevee parking is or isn't going to be proposed to change as part of the parking so we are so we sort of started with um a pretty broad consideration when we're thinking about the parking regulations we were thinking about minimums we're thinking about maximums we're thinking about ev parking we're thinking about bicycle parking shifts um we did um uh happen to have the opportunity to have our stakeholder dialogue that'll be i think that's posted on our website now if anybody's interested they can go and watch that
061video um i will tell you personally i am starting to sort of probably narrow my focus a little bit i think it it sort of reminds me of the site plan thresholds time i think there's a lot of things that we can do there and it might make sense to take the first step and see that through so um i did choose to keep some of those here in the event that we decide yeah we're making sort of an incremental step with ev parking but it might not be as far as we want to take it long so but i welcome the feedback if if it's important to sort of re-categorize that or we want to make that more clear or we don't want to do that we just we do want to tackle it
062all at once rather than sort of on a more you know incremental approach okay that's helpful like i think all these highlight the bigger the pain points it might be helpful for another round of discussion at our table to like raise them before we decide the scope um that we want to take on before we delegate them down like i'd rather have a broader discussion to understand the trade-offs of going at once or not um so yeah that was like my first clean-up right of things site plan light uh a20 knowing that master the comprehensive plan isn't going to be coming to like the end of next year which is when i would hope that a20 has more incorporation into our comprehensive plan i think it's a priority like we should be waiting another year
063to figure out ways that our ordinance can complement that like we are in a climate emergency um and do on d2 premiums those would be my priorities as the first take other observations questions comments commissioner dish yes i have a question and a comment my comment is that when we think about what we want to tackle with parking i want to emphasize that the the continued existence of parking minimums is impeding projects that we would like to see and impeding the kind of projects that we would like to see which is more affordable so i would want us to make sure that we don't add so much on that we can that we slow that down we know we want that we have a clear signal about that we keep biting up against it and
064the things that we see coming to us so um that's a comment following on commissioner sovay's i think really smart thoughts about let's figure out what's going to be too complicated and you know think about you know taking out the real serious pain points so that we aren't loading everything and then my question is just um i really like what you said about the adu or a20 udc connections commissioner sobe and so i was thinking maybe we should just do that whole first category under carbon neutrality but then i also noticed electrification requirements electrical grid coordination electric heating requirements how much of that are we allowed to do and how much of that are we constrained from doing by state building code regulations um well as we talked about previously there are a lot of
065constraints but um i think that i think when i when i say 820 udc connections it is putting some more time into finding out what are the appropriate nexus what are the appropriate opportunities um as we talked about i i don't think it's as simple as just taking the to-do list from the a20 plan and in in zoning there are building code constraints um there are policy constraints that said we have a lot of sort of frankly the exercise i think at the outset is what are what are the goals in our existing comprehensive plan that align with sustainability and how could the a20 plan um fuel our implementation of those goals rather than establishing the goals so there are barriers it won't be easy but i i see the exercises trying to find what
066are the opportunities for us to use zoning they won't be right now my if i had to guess they're not going to be satisfying they're not going to be as comprehensive and they're not going to go as far as we would all like but that doesn't mean that we can't find ways to improve and move move it in some direction so that's what i mean by it is how do we we've talked about that we we've talked previously about the need to bridge that as a sort of independent policy document of the council and how does it influence our land use policy it's not automatic but it doesn't mean that it doesn't influence it and so it's spending more time on finding the connections to help it to guide our work in advancing the existing
067goals yes so i think i was referencing the first line the first bullet under cardboard and i think that's part of that discussion but i think yeah those are great examples of the ones that are going to be more challenging from a code legislative perspective but i wouldn't say that let's omit them great so maybe we do both the bottom and the top yeah they're they're together that's great i would just highlight while we're talking about this that when we had this discussion at a working session a couple months ago i mean the thing that struck me the things that are in the plan that are fully within our remit which are also on this list are about parking and mixed use and adding housing options and so i think that we could go a
068long way towards things in that top bucket of carbon neutrality that are things that are elsewhere already here um and so if we're going to have to prioritize if that's one of the things that we want to prioritize not saying that there there's just limited time and so and these are things that there's lots a tome of comprehensive planning documents suggesting that we should be cutting parking minimums right and so like that's the easy thing like let's kill lots of birds with one policy change is my two cents on that um [Music] uh well um let's save a lot of birds from habitat loss due to climate change by i think that's the phrase save a lot of words from habitat loss with one stone yes with one policy change commissioner weich and then commissioner
069hammerschmidt uh so to help me to understand whether this is the conversation we're having now or if there's a second round um are we only talking about what's on the proposed list that mr leonard sent or are we talking about things that we believe that are missing from that list that we would like to add to that list i think we can we can be additive we need to we need to then prioritize but we can be additive sure so uh with that permission um where are we uh thinking about or locating a higher housing density within the zoning is that um on our horizon yeah um well i'll tell you where i'm at with it and i don't know if uh concerned dish would like to weigh in so i would say originally i
070envisioned that the news uh single-family zoning and racial equity committee would be sort of a starting point to tackle two questions what have been the sort of what have been the segregationists exclusionary impacts of zoning policy broadly and or specifically in the city and what do we learn from our past mistakes and how do we do better in the future the other piece of that is single-family zoning while often a tool for exclusionary zoning also can have really compromised impacts on a city's sustainability goals and so when the committee was originally added as a new committee it was with the unders it was my intention was both of those are very difficult conversations there's a lot of new research developing about those conversations across the country i think part of it's developing some of that
071research as it relates to our community and providing a space for all of us to learn about both of those things before we start a policy discussion about what should happen based on that so i would say that that goal that committee is intended to be the beginning of that but i i would i would stop it short in my vision of saying that the goal of that committee is to come to some conclusion that says that we should increase density or we shouldn't increase density it is to explore those questions just to sort of elevate the consciousness before we get into our comprehensive planning process that said um i think both of those are big topics and i don't know that tackling both of them at the same time is necessarily the right way
072to go either so um a long-winded way of saying it's there i don't think that i've envisioned it at a specific time frame i think it's the conversation of increasing density in residential districts has to be component of course to the updating the comprehensive plan i don't know if a conversation needs to happen before that as it relates to density i think for sure an exclusionary zoning conversation should happen before the comprehensive plan and outside of the comprehensive plan okay i have a lot of thoughts about that and at whatever time is appropriate i'm happy to disclose those uh to maybe um add to this part of the conversation i am concerned that a potential multi-year conversation about exclusionary zoning will prevent us from making some sustainability um changes in that time sort of the
073argument that you made for the site plan and storm water that if we separated those we would get developments that wouldn't conform to the thing that we wanted to do and the goal of expediting the changes to the plan so if i could use you to quote you back to you in this time i would say um moving uh to smaller lot sizes i mean like our what is it rc one i'm gonna get these wrong until i look them up real quick uh yeah rc uh r1a is a 20 000. minimum lot but r1e is a 4000 minimum lot so if we shifted all of the residential zoning to re1 to say the minimum lot is 4 000 square feet you know could we realize some gains like my property sits on a 10
074000 square foot lot could it be subdivided and could we see some higher density without the sort of coming conversations around neighborhood character or um heights and things like that like we could we could just skip all those conversations because it still sits within our zoning we're just making um the new minimum uh a shift right so almost in the way that we're trying to approach the parking so we've got these parking minimums and now we're going to switch to parking maximums potentially and so that'll give us some gains uh in the kinds of developments that we want to see so i um i think my first sort of emotional reaction uh to this is i i think we will lose the opportunity to gain more density while we have a community-led conversation around exclusionary
075zoning and i might um at the risk of this not being extremely hopeful uh mentioned the um the pines development i can't think of the first name of it i don't know if it concord whatever pines um you know a lot of community members reached out and was like why why did you all allow a site that had 136 acres only to build 56 units of housing right and so then i was like well here's the zoning so you can take a look at that and work that out and i think um i think people have a different uh understanding of it and how it works and i think they're ready at least the communities that i'm talking with um to see higher density so i would strongly advocate um an inclusion of what can
076we do within the udc um now to make higher density adjustments so that we're not mandating it but we're making it possible so that we could have more developments potentially that look like the viridian development where they're putting in a lot of mixed use on that site on those 13 acres to really maximize it and even i don't know if you all watch that presentation even with that high density the housing costs that are going to be realized on those market rate units are still really out of reach for a lot of people i mean with them coming in at 700 000 on on some of the the 2 000 square foot units i i was flabbergasted to see that pricing um and so i i must be i'm i so whatever we can do
077to get to higher density so that we can start to bring down some of these um these uh potential uh costs for housing is something that i would love for us to to move up on our work plan commissioner hammerschmidt a plus on that um but i did have a question about um the conversation we just had about the connections to a20 we several weeks or months ago uh we're talking about like that resource list that's part of the comprehensive plan where do we stand on that were we weren't we supposed to do something for you and should the 820 plan then be considered like a resource or like sort of part of the comprehensive plan going forward so so this was this was a conversation so i that the a20 plan um at its
078adoption had some very specific first of all it wasn't adopted as either a resource document or as a comprehensive plan and it went a step further in fact at the time of adoption there was dialogue at the council table i i don't know that it was reflected in the action i would actually have to go back but it was specifically conceived as not altering the city's land use policy um that was that was part of the discussion of that that no the city's land use policy still governs the land use decisions that we make and so it is it is in a way an independent it is an independent policy and and goal that the city has set and so i i don't say that to say that it's not relevant to land use but
079it is not it doesn't it doesn't give us an automatic connection to say okay let's go ahead and rewrite our udc to what the a20 plan says because that's not the legislative process when for those that have done your orientation with you know you've got the the planning process is open it's wide once you adopt your ordinances that's how you communicate and so right now that a20 is in the sphere of what the city wants to accomplish it's truly not in the sphere of the city's land use policy documents that it has adopted and so the exercise that i'm talking about is to tease out the components of that where there is a connection it's it's i i know that sounds a little bit bureaucratic and sort of detailed but that's i think if to
080do it in in the interim before we go to our comprehensive plan and replicate some of those policies about increasing density in residential areas parking reducing vehicular miles traveled you know electrical grid connections microgrids you name it right until those are ensconced in our land use policies i think the opportunity for us now is to find the pieces of that that actually do connect with our existing land use policies and frankly don't look at the a20 plan as a goal but has an implementation strategy that says hey are our sustainable sustainability framework adopted in 23 as a comprehensive plan says we want to encourage renewable energy so what are the pieces and what are the right ways that we can do this oh the a20 plan has some recommendations that you have that we see
081these development projects coming in we don't feel like it's advancing those goals and it's not as simple obviously of course of us just saying well no unless you do x y or z and so this exercise would be to find um if i want to be clear it wouldn't incorporate everything but it would prioritize a couple pieces out of the a20 as these are implementation steps that actually directly link to previously adopted land use policy let's work on them okay does that help at all yeah it does it helps a lot um so another thing that actually mr westfall brought up that i'm curious about too is the tc1 rezoning and i see that it's on there for um eisenhower and state i'm hoping that after that we look at you know plymouth and stadium
082and do you i mean are you we sort of maybe you can add it to the bottom like is this sort of a let's see how the eisenhower process goes and then decide on like the next street was it an oversight um i would say it's an oversight like i didn't you know i know that that is something that the planning commission specifically talked about is starting with state eisenhower and then looking at other areas um i did like i should have probably i should have added that i probably should have added that as another item um we can prioritize it that's what this discussion is how does it fit in the context of revisiting premiums solid waste single family a20 sustainability that's that's what this whole process is i think that we will have
083a better sense of how the process goes and and how long it takes through this current exercise but it doesn't prevent you from saying no i'd like to elevate washington or plymouth or another corridor more quickly okay and have two minds i want it on the list somewhere so we don't lose it um and then i also really like that the site plan light idea to start tackling that now that we've sort of passed the site plan or moved on from the site plan thresholds commissioner abrams oh you're muted okay thanks um i will add a plus one to premiums in d1 and d2 anything to do with density and affordable housing i'm not quite sure yet what that is um [Music] and i will also i would plus one the site plan light conversation
084um when i look at the list the only the one thing that jumps out at me as being a kind of direct line to density i think if i remember correctly is the r2a lot sizes is that right that was a conversation about reducing the minimum lot size yeah it would enable more a lot more r280 if the lot sizes were reduced it would enable more r2a lots to actually be realized as duplexes because currently very few meet that requirement right and i think just to remind us like uh the description of that zoning category is that it's supposed to be slight like similar to single family homes but slightly more dense um but the minimum lot size is sizes more you know twice what it is in in r1 e right so to commissioner
085weich's point um so anyway so that's on there so i would i would doubt a vote for that um and then i wondered if you could remind us what the joint city council and planning commission meeting was i have a vague recollection of that conversation but i can't remember what the topic was that we were going to discuss yeah i don't know that it was a specific topic i think it came out of um trying to remember i think it was just a recognition that might have been in context with concord pines it might have been more general but just um i think recognizing that the city council is sort of um at times i think struggling with some of the same concepts that the planning commission is how to advance affordability goals how to
086advance sustainability goals what's the future of you know residential zoning look like and those are big um those are big policy decisions big conversations and i think it was um some conversation to whether it's those or other topics just to make sure that the two groups are working on the same page towards the same goals and then i think more broadly in the past those joint meetings had occurred with some frequency i don't know if they were quite annually but they might have been annually um but they tended to be a little bit more topic focused and i don't think we've had one since for five years maybe yeah definitely not in my time which is half of that but yeah definitely not in the last two and a half years um [Music] and then
087i would plus one the tc1 corridors um so i think those are the things i would prioritize and again i guess like like commissioner weiss i'm you know very very interested in anything we can do to increase density and and related to that uh work get more affordable housing um and more attainable housing so if not like technically affordable housing in the kind of um [Music] ami sense just more housing therefore cheaper housing um but but i could use uh some brainstorming about what the tools at our disposal really are at the moment so i'm not sure how to i'm not sure i can like name that as an item for a work program but just as a kind of declared priority i'll put that out there i would i would say relates to our
088discussion just about sort of a cop-out but what are the zoning levers that could advance more affordable housing development right now we have it through our sort of modified area height placement standards if you're providing affordable units you get some flexibility in your setbacks potentially your height in our downtown you get extra height if you are providing affordable units you get of course the the premiums that we're talking about as you provide more affordable units you get more far um but um i think it would just ultimately be exploring you know other aspects of that you know i i think i think i think parking is uh contributes to that as well as we as we look at parking minimums and reducing that cost to development i don't i don't it in a way it
089helps cost but in a way it helps density by providing more physical space potentially for the use of you know a square foot of housing versus a square foot of parking so do do i'm trying to figure out how to ask this question is there any what kind of support could we get as a body for some kind of like uh it's not quite like a literature review but like a kind of scanning of you know recent research and and studies about about this like about these levers like what are people doing what's working what's not working like i think we all individually try as best we can to you know uh educate ourselves and and keep up to date but i also imagine even between us we could share resources maybe in a more
090formal or organized way um so that we could work on this i think in a more kind of focused manner um would be something i think is interesting to think about i don't know where there's room for that you know but yeah one um so we could yes we can definitely work to try to get those resources um actually a great book if you haven't checked out it's called the affordable city it's actually a pretty accessible sort of a compendium of different ways that communities have used different strategies to try to incent affordable units that of course has to be layered over our state legislative framework as well but um that's definitely possible and that could you know that that could be part of this work plan we could potentially look for some outside help
091um but like you said i think we could probably assemble a lot of that you'll also find some of that in the 2015 economic equity and housing affordability analysis that's where some of the recommendations came from is what those you know what those tools what tools have been successful elsewhere which ones can work here and that really informed a lot of the strategies that are in that resource document as well yeah thanks commissioner dish i moved when you spoke i i wondered if is it this might not be the place to discuss this but it seems like some of these things are easier than other things and some of these things might be things that we could hire a labor to to execute whereas others are more policy focused and we would really need to
092do them in-house so you know something like the site plan light sort of the part two of thresholds i think we want to accomplish that um but i don't know if that needs you know in-house um and i wanted to i wanted to emphasize that if we did the udc a20 connection thing among ourselves if that was a if that was a focus that we did and at a joint meeting with council and presented that i think that would be a really productive thing to do so i think a lot of you brought up the things that i had circled on my list as being most compelling one of the things that strikes me in um i think it makes a lot of sense to separate out minimums potentially from the other things just in
093terms of like what is low hanging fruit i also think i mean we know that um establishing like what is the inappropriate maximum so as not to deter development um is the tricky thing but at the same time this is why i would give the plus one maybe this is like the fifth plus one or something to looking to doing some additional tc1 rezoning because that is a we do have maximums in there that will provide more of a natural experiment to see if we've gone through the process of rezoning and we're not getting anything there's something broken about that and it may be and and what i like about looking doing more tc1 rezonings is that it is both helping to provide that experiment of having a parking maximum having i mean we already
094have some parking maximums so i don't but this is this is a much lower parking maximum but it also is inherently based on the corridors that we talked about about building additional residential units and so i feel like that in some ways um focusing on that gets us both this um a little bit more movement towards the down the experience curve with parking maximums but also goes towards the getting more housing choices in the city which there our tome of documents supports so that's why i might make the argument to prioritize that in um in the shorter term just so that we can be making progress on both of those things um uh i do think that again separa i'm cool with separating out some of the transportation things but i want to highlight that
095one of the things once we once we pass the site plan stuff once uh council looks at site plan review thresholds our ev ordinance is gonna be effectively like gutted because if all of that was based a lot of it was based upon site plans that go to council and so um i i do want i i feel like that that links clearly to parking max minimums um and do think that we should probably in short order do something even if it's just a quick fix on that um [Music] i see a connection even though i don't feel like it's been stated maybe this was like the connections that i was drawing between my different things the site things that we do towards site plan light are i think connected to the annexation or the
096inc infrastructure requirements and so i think that that is again kind of killing tuber not not totally the same thing but it um slight plan light might help pave the way to think more generally about what kind of infrastructure we are putting on new developments in the city what kind of um yeah those things um the other things that i have circled on my paper uh i circled r4c because it's high it's it's um filed here under transportation but if we strike parking minimums the the parking part of that is going to be moot what is not moot is that it suffers from the same lot size inconsistencies as r2a does so i think that that's another opportunity to think about about how that lot size minimum is um is accomplished and like maybe maybe
097reducing that lot size minimum or like doing a similar study to what we're doing on r2a again towards increasing density in places that we say density's fine but that somebody three decades ago decided like oh we're going to say we like density but we're going to make it so that you can actually build to the density that the we allow for um [Music] so that i don't think that that's a top priority but i would just want to if we could rename that i think that that might help keep because i don't want to lose that i mean that's actually some of the some of the places that are on transit corridors or that are not on transit quarters but are very walkable r4c the final thing is what in the heck is uncode or
098am i even saying that right i'm so glad you asked this is my um this is my brainstorm that you guys can actually make fun of now but i envisioned it nothing more i don't know if discipline's the right word or what but it would be a comprehensive review of the udc to cut out things only and particularly things that we think are antiquated are no longer necessarily no longer a priority it comes to mind in our recent discussion about at the orc about potential changes to the m1 district versus the m1a district uh one thing that i think of is i don't know that we need an m1 and an m1a zoning district um let's get rid of one i don't know that we need a zoning district that does nothing but supports townhome
099style residential maybe that could be incorporated more broadly into a broader residential district maybe we don't care as much about screening anymore and we care more about deciduous shade trees from a sustainability perspective so when we're talking about buffers right now we require them to screen adjacent land uses maybe that's not as important to us as a fence or a shade tree so going through the code and asking some hard questions about whether or not things still need to be regulated in the way they are towards um maybe some maybe relates to that sort of development expectations that apply to everything but i i think what happens is communities like ours where we've been zoning for probably over 100 years now um we tend to add a lot of things and if you look in
100our udc it still references a lot of language and construct from our first zoning ordinances and that's because it's comfortable it's familiar um and apart from throwing the whole thing out and adopting something totally new i i think it's worthwhile probably to go through and do some hard editing to make sure it still has all the stuff that are important to us and so that's what i envisioned and i just threw a crappy name on it and but that's the exercise that i envisioned uh thank you for explaining that what that was and it wasn't that i had like just fallen asleep at meetings and missed whatever uncode was um and i think that's a fantastic idea i mean in terms of kind of what commissioner abrams was saying about like do we know the
101suite of things uh one of the books that i'd read is called neighborhood defenders and it's kind of looking at um kind of the greater boston area and just numerically like it doesn't make a difference what the ordinance is but the more requirements you have within your zoning code it is more expensive more difficult to re to get anything built and so i think that the cutting things that we don't need um so that we can maybe make ourselves feel a little bit better about putting in the things that we do think that we need like preparing our infrastructure for the future like ev parking right like i think that that would i would love to see that happen so that seems to me like how would you propose doing that it seems similar in
102some ways to the effort that we talked about within the um that commissioner hammerschmidt brought up about the um planning documents and like which ones do we need and which ones do we not refer to anymore is that um i geek out on the udc but i don't know that everybody yeah i mean in short i don't know but i like i would probably start with working with my team and we would probably go through the ordinance and suggest some deletions and then we'd start that conversation with the orc i think it would be kind of a long process because it's a big document but we would i would probably challenge my team to sort of present some potential reductions removals out of that code and then we'd start that conversation with the orc and
103the ordinance revision committee would say yeah i think that's worthwhile to pursue or no i think it's really important we keep that in and hopefully at the end of that process there would be some set and we would obviously just go through the typical process where we'd share it publicly provide public comment you would consider it and ultimately present it to city council for adoption based on any recommendation that you make so um but that said this is about whether or not it ends up on the list and then as we move forward you know we can figure out those details for my vote it wouldn't be the last thing on the list i would move towards the top and then you know i think we just put a whole bunch more things on like
104the perhaps let's consider it than what we could possibly do so we'll have to have those conversations but i think it might be easier if the next iteration is like reorganized based on some of those priorities commissioner sovay i think that the uncode process could feather really well with the site plan lite because we're going to go through the exercise of is it necessary at one level or is it necessary at all and so we can kind of chip those tiers away and almost maybe see what turns all the way into uncode versus site plan light too so i'd actually kind of like pair those but then keep focus again similar to parking let's not fog it down but it takes two years uh keep focused on what the intent for site plan light is
105but also keep notes on the side that could fall into an uncode bucket commissioner give randall i agree i was going to suggest the same thing so um uh i also um like the kind of layering of the ubc you know business with the 820 stuff i think that makes a lot of sense um [Music] uh i also like the pairing um of what commissioner mill says of r2a and r4c because i think we're kind of getting at similar things which is what commissioner white is bringing up is just like how can we make this more amenable with some relatively small moves especially r2a where you could suddenly do duplexes you know in many more places um and so some of these i know that we've ranked them before um in this way it's like
106which ones would be really easy to knock off you know um because i mean maybe the r4c thing is is too too uh tricky um of an issue i don't know but the r2a one seems much more straightforward and and that maybe we could really get something out of that um all these seem to relate to parking in terms of like affordability um i would also i guess just in terms of the the premiums downtown and really revisiting that if if what people are trying to get at is the affordability things i i really question and this is where i think some outside help might be able to direct us building downtown is so expensive it is just so expensive the land is so expensive the building process is so expensive i really question whether
107it really makes sense to focus our affordability downtown and we have these unique opportunities with ann arbor housing commission because they own the land already that's why it works and so if the main focus of the downtown premiums is affordability i don't know this is where i don't know enough it would be helpful i think to get some um outside advice on whether that really makes sense to pair those things or whether it makes sense to bring that into the tc one you know it's on transit you can it's just land is cheaper um things like that so that's some food for thought i guess i i know that you know people have been talking about the premiums and i just want to know sort of in what light you're considering it um because i
108feel like uh again housing commission has these special opportunities but um just in terms of development costs i think it makes more sense in other places to be able to pull off affordable housing i think that that and i love the uncode i really i just i think that's a great idea i can think of five things already you know i just haven't worked with the code to be able to think about how to clean things up and how to get at the goals that we want um uh like you're saying the whole canopy trees in between yeah i mean that's getting at our sustainability goals too you know with heat island effect and things like that so i think and i think we can make it smaller because we can we can do that
109you know so because of that then you have more room and that has all kinds of different um impacts so um yeah i don't know if i help whittle it down at all i feel like i just basically said yes to everything that everybody else was saying too um but i think a lot of these things relate pretty deeply to one another in terms of that they're all really overlapping in a lot of ways and i think these themes of making it more efficient make it easier to get through and trying to figure out how we can make density happen in ways that that makes sense um and and with uh with parking has a huge piece of that so you did add things but since you also volunteered to send the first five uncode
110things to uh plan like planning staff like maybe [Laughter] um i had a thought on premiums but commissioner weich maybe that's what you were okay so i was just going my understanding of among the things that we why we were looking at this is that in the most recent change to premiums which was a couple of years ago it required affordability and we haven't seen uh and could not be fully compensated with payment in lieu and we have not not achieved that and so i don't know if it's as simple as repealing that and going back to what we had before um which had a sustainability option and had an affordability option anyway um but i i think that that's that's the challenge is that we're not we we do require affordability affordable housing and
111we haven't gotten development is that fair okay commissioner weich i just wanted to come back to something that commissioner abram said around um the resourcing um material and then i think mr leonard had a book the affordable city and i wondered um have we looked at the missing middle um content that talks a lot about duplexes townhomes multi dwellings but within the residential zoning areas and i know that there are jurisdictions in michigan that are doing that so macomb county and oakland county are making changes um to make that kind of zoning change uh so that there can be more uh development within the residential zoning without having to create what i believe is in our code these multi-family zoning districts which may not sit within the single family zoning district and one story i've
112received from a neighbor in in the latin lands down community is like they raise their family here but they're sitting in a 3 000 square foot house now for two people and they want to convert it to a duplex and they don't know like is that permissible within the existing zoning and there are just across 7th street um as you head towards lawson a number of duplexes and so and they have not changed the neighborhood character as a matter of fact most people don't even know their duplexes unless you get right up on them and so so that i just want to come back to that that part of the conversation and i know that there are folks who have petitioned um the planning commission who are um urban planners uh within the city right
113now who look at this a lot and may have recommendations for us if we were interested in that so that that work wouldn't automatically shift to staff but i don't know if that's permissible uh without a fee structure like if if there are sort of citizen urban planners who are doing this work already who already have um familiarity with our community and have the bona fides if they if we would be open to receive recommendations from them and like a rfp process where we just write out a description and invite folks to um send in some material so then that way we don't have to rely on staff and then that wouldn't slow staff down on the excellent work that they're already doing uh in the city so just a couple recommendations um to sort
114of piggyback off of what commissioner abrams was saying um i've generally yes you know i'm looking at nine citizen planners and um you can engage other volunteers in carrying out your work it's just your comfort level with that um i will say that oftentimes it still does follow the staff and often there's data that needs to be pulled there needs to be integration but that's not to say that there can't be benefits your and your comments about the missing middle it's great content and you don't need to look far it's lanny is either adopted or looking at language that allows duplexes on corner lots and single-family zones so um yeah that's a great example it's not this is not untested or even new in some ways anything else before we can i um attempt to
115recap go for it i i will i'm yeah yeah so i i've heard a lot of i'm hearing a lot of shared prioritization for revisiting the premiums in the d1 d2 uh the a20 udc nexus and all the mess and opportunity that that will entail and tc1 as a tool beyond the state eisenhower area but making sure that we are prioritizing what comes next after that [Music] and some convergence of increasing density residential density via r2a r4c looking at lot sizes but i'm i am hearing that as perhaps a second tier and site plan light and uncode and the city's overall development requirements as perhaps a second tier um priority um that that those would be in addition to the things that we're already working on the tc one that we're working on now the
116parking that we're looking at now finishing up the site plan review thresholds looking at tc1 height modification that's a separate action than the the rezoning um [Music] am i in the ballpark of what i am hearing i would just add i see commissioner abraham's hand but i think uh commissioner silvay noted that there's some part of r2a that's already under discussion and so that's in the works too so it might be a lower priority but it i mean it is something that we've devoted some rc time to commissioner abrams i was going to basically say the same thing and also just i wondered if um if r2a is a kind of if r2a lot sizes is a discrete thing that we don't think kind of entangles a web of other things the way that some
117of these other thorny issues do um maybe it would be worth elevating it because it's a kind of manageable thing that we can bite off and won't take up too much time but yeah it's one of these kind of quick quick solutions not solution but you know what i mean commissioner dish so i'm wondering if staff take a little bit of time and just evaluate what kind of bang we're likely to get from our buck for these um i do recall you and i had a conversation i think a year ago even possible about the r2a and while i think it would be pretty i think i understood from that conversation and of course you know me sometimes i get fuzzy but it wouldn't be hard to accomplish ever it isn't entirely clear that i
118i mean it feels like for sure we should make it possible build what the thing is zoned for and not make the lot size make that impossible it just seems stupid to have something but valued things are sitting on most of those r2a lots and it may not be likely that we get multi-family housing in place of those already valued things so while it feels like low-hanging fruit and it also feels kind of silly to have sure this is zoned for multi-family but the lot sizes are too small that feels you know like a remnant of something that somebody did um to frustrate deputy if it's practically probably not going to cash out um if staff feels that it is i may be just being a little bit too you know uh i don't know
119real or pessimistic here but i but i'd be interested if staff can if feels that it might have an advice of like what's likely to cash out and is it you know so is it urgent to revisit the d1d2 premiums i've been sort of feeling like it is but then again i don't always bring the context um if staff also doesn't feel like that shout because it's costing a lot to have development right now and yes we should clean that up but maybe you know i don't know so if you there's there are different ways of prioritizing in terms of values and what we ideally think we can accomplish with the things that we're talking about here and then there's prioritizing in terms of what's really likely to produce an end goal that will advance
120something and i'd love to take staff's advice on that because i think that that's where you all really have an edge yeah it it actually has me thinking about how we're presenting this information so the bang for the buck is a difficult question because i i can't predict r2a might be a little bit easier to predict but even with that i don't by by starting that work and ending that work i don't know exactly where it ends up and so it's hard it's hard for me to definitively answer that question of bang for buck i can take i could take i can make an assumption i can make a guess and i think it's a it'd be a pretty educated guess but i would also say that at times at times what i would envision
121to be pretty simple um ordinance changes end up more complex than i anticipate too you know because and that's just that's appropriate it's just part of the appropriate sort of messy policy and and ordinance making um but i think perhaps what it what i'm if not bang for the buck maybe we i need to do a better job in formatting this in such a way of trying to make it clear what we mean by our two-way lot sizes it might not it might be more helpful instead of to say look at our two-way lot sizes but there might be another component of that is to say look at our two ace lot sizes so as to encourage more duplex development in the duplex zoning district that doesn't answer the bang for buck but maybe it
122does a better job of communicating a little bit more detail about what it is we're envisioning and why it's ended up on our work plan where it is um it seems like a cop-out but it seems like a step in that direction towards um you as the planning commission and the public being able to look at that and say oh yeah i think it's really important to get more housing units in the city and this as an opportunity to do that i want to elevate it as opposed to maybe revisiting our screening requirements which might be related to that but it it's not as a direct as this is an opportunity to add a thousand new units or it's probably not that many units but as just a point of clarification or like further extending
123that i think just a simple classification for each of the kind of items that we're looking at that we've moved to the top of the list even whether it's the top tier or the second tier and thinking about how they intersect with either kind of carbon neutrality um and just and that alone because i think that flight plan light is really about affordability of development and then increasing housing supply i think that those kind of three classifications like making sure that we have lots of like activities that are going i think that that's true um uh across our uh in terms of the priorities across those three things i think would be helpful um that that's kind of how we ended up with tc one as a priority because it seemed to advance a lot
124of those goals and maybe that is a way of answering the bank for the buck that it's going to it's going to advance a lot of our goals yeah we're at 901 i want to be respectful of folks time is there any other burning mr leonard do you feel like you've got you're in good shape for when we actually bring this to a future meeting so that we can adopt vote on this as a yes just to be clear to okay so this is when you say fiscal year 22 to 23 what what does fiscal year mean like for the city yeah you know we use these used to be sort of done annually well they are done annually but i i envision there's a lot of work here and so i envisioned sort of
125setting out maybe two years of work for the planning commission and so when we're when i mentioned when i say fiscal year that means uh july 1 ending june 30th of fiscal year 22 and then july 1 ending june 30th of so um the other thing we could do is there's nothing that says it has to be fiscal year we could just change it to good old-fashioned years i was gonna say if we're adopting this at the calendar year at the beginning of 2022 in my mind thinking this is what we're doing during the entirety of 2022 and 2023 because in reality that's what we're actually talking about like that would help me because i get confused i'll check yeah let me check the bylaws to see if there's anything that sort of directs us
126one way or the other but thank you all right um i see no other hands so uh i want to before we close out for the couple of folks who have stuck with us this whole time if you'd like to provide a public comment you are more than welcome to do so now you can use the raised hand feature on zoom going once going twice okay that's it folks i will adjourn journ us and we'll see you no next week is an orc i'm guessing and then we have a fifth tuesday oh we do have a would you have a caller who has raised their hand if you want to accept that absolutely yes you just snuck in color with phone number ending with five three four you can emulate your phone using star six
127and address the planning commission go ahead good evening this is tom stahlberg calling from lowertown in ann arbor i want to make a couple brief comments but not too much detail because there's a lot there uh i'd love to talk about the economics of some of the uh premiums concepts at another time uh there's some things that would be illuminating so i'll probably write that up at some point uh in terms of involvement of citizens uh commissioner white there's a lot of us out here who do try to be involved one of the best ways to have citizens involved is actually in the comprehensive plan process and there's a lot of things that have been talked about on the current work plan that also relate to things that have been in recent work plans where
128it's my personal opinion that additional involvement from the citizens of the city would uh have been better better process uh better outcomes so i'd encourage you in terms of the comprehensive plan update uh to think about you know some of the things that we've done in my opinion have bypassed what would have been required uh to be done through a comprehensive plan update there are some things if we want to go back to a lower town development did not meet the comprehensive plan if it wanted to be purely residential with only a token commercial use we could have provided the comprehensive plan for that area for example it was a very good plan it was embraced by the citizens but it was just thrown away uh similar to some other uh projects where the comprehensive
129plan was not met uh they were voted on anyhow and what could have been done was a revision of the comprehensive plan for that particular area looking at things holistically and looking at what are the community goals there are some things that i may personally like or not like that are policy directions if we do a proper process and the citizens are heard from and citizens participate in the process and the citizens say they want it uh so be it you know i'm not i'm not here to get my way on everything or my opinion and we don't always get everything right either you know even when it's a full citizen participation type process whether it's a2d2 or some other process that we've gone through there's been some really good ones they've been well run
130sometimes they get good results sometimes they don't but i think we really need to focus on going through the process and including the citizens and not just a small group of citizens that have experience in this area like myself and others but abroad we want to make sure that we're doing what ann arbor rights want done i myself i'm personally very much in favor of things like duplex commissioner white what you said sings to me i believe owner occupied duplex is one of the best avenues to new home ownership but that's my opinion and i'd like to before we the planning commission and select individuals say what should be changed i'd like to see the full involvement of the citizens of the city of ann arbor thank you thank you anyone else did i miss
131any other hands i don't see any all right so we are adjourned until december have fun reading the cip and see you then happy thanksgiving you