Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

It is now six o'clock.

Good evening and welcome to the June 9th Planning Commission meeting. Please take the roll.

Mills.

Present.

McCombs.

Present.

Sage.

Present.

Juratsky.

Present.

Martin. Here. Underwood.

Present.

Ohana.

Present.

Please stand and join me in the pledge your flag. Never know which one to use. I guess we're going to use that one or that one back then. Pledge.

and to the republic one nation under god indivisible

We've got two sets of minutes to review and approve. Last month, evidently, we didn't approve the April minutes simply because there weren't enough voters who had attended that meeting. Do we have any questions about those minutes now? Are we happy with them? Would somebody like to make a motion to approve the April 14th minutes?

Mr. Chair, I just have quick typos. And I thought there was one grammatical. The typos are on page two in the middle of the page. City Council should have capital letters. And I thought there was one more. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's it. I make a motion to approve the minutes of April 14th with just a couple typos changed.

Okay, do we have a second? Do we have a second for that motion? Mr. Chairman, I second that motion. We have a second. We'll call for a vote.

Mills?

Yes.

McCombs?

Yes.

Sage?

Yes.

Dradsky?

Yes.

Martin? Yes. Underwood? Yes. Ohana?

Yes.

All right. The second set of minutes we have is May 12th. And any questions or comments about those?

Mr. Chair?

Yes.

Okay. Typo on page two. The top of the page, planning commission should be capitalized. And a grammatical on page one. under public hearing, the first paragraph, the last sentence says, as well as the public comments that have been received. And so that's not exactly a sentence. That just needs to be made into a sentence. Other than that, I move that we approve the minutes for May 12th.

Do we have a second for that motion? Mr. Chairman, I second that motion. Thank you, Mr. McCombs. We have a motion. Please call the roll.

Mills.

Epstein.

McCombs.

Yes.

Sage.

Yes.

Dradsky.

Epstein.

Martin. Yes. Underwood. Yes. Ohana.

Yes. Thank you. That's taken care of that. It's the opportunity for public comment. If anybody has anything they'd like to address the commission, it's not in the remainder of our agenda. Please come forward, state your name, and tell us what you'd like to share with us. Yes, sir.

My name is Mark Neihardt. I'm on Ward 2, but I'm speaking on behalf of Smart Growth Anacortes. What we discovered recently is Anacortes doesn't seem to have a full-up tree preservation plan. It has ordinances, it has policy, but it doesn't have a solid plan. Thus, you know, short plats, and I'll refer to the Herringstad one, which has a stand of trees. There's no, I would say definitive document that people can go to, to see exactly how the tree ordinance is. I mean, the developer does come and present a plan, there is a plan, but how that plan is interpreted is a little bit open to administrative decisions rather than a full up, especially in R1 zones review of a tree preservation plan because there is no tree preservation plan to even have a checklist against it. So I would recommend that the planning commission puts together a team or request the council to put together a team to develop a full up best practice tree preservation plan that other cities have been using that is really detailed and codified in ordinances. So there's a specific path to follow.

So 10 years from now, a different planning manager or a different planning department with a- What's the feeling of the commission regarding expanding what was suggested for leaving it the way it is?

Well, we actually have a motion on the table and a second.

Okay. And then I guess we throw it open for a vote.

There's something that technically you, you can't have this friendly amendment, but you can have a friendly amendment if people agree. Um, I guess, Mr. McCombs, I guess it falls in your court.

I don't know that it doesn't need to be this big of an issue. I just don't understand the language of why we would add it. I think it's fine the way it is. So I guess I was looking for clarification. I can live with it with the additional verbiage. That's fine.

Call for a vote.

Please go through the roll call. Mills. Yes.

McCombs.

Yes.

Sage.

Yes.

Cheretsky.

Yes.

Martin. Yes. Underwood.

Yes.

Ohana.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Coleman and other business.

There's no other business. Okay. Update, please. All right, well, good evening, Planning Commission. Thank you for a fun Tuesday evening in city council chambers. So what I'd like to do is just update you on some of the projects that you've been involved in. And I'm going to throw in something else because I've been working on it also. So the May 26th council, the council approved the Shoreline Master Program public participation plan as the planning commission recommended at their May 12th meeting. So... you'd like to know that your work was reviewed. At that May 12th meeting, the Planning Commission also reviewed another item. That one we're postponing to bring to City Council because it's part of five different items that were presented by the mayor that he wanted to be done to address streamlining permitting. So Our goal for that is to bring all five of them to the planning commission at various times and then bring the full packet to the city council for approval, largely because they're all going to be kind of affecting the same areas of the code and they kind of all go together. We haven't figured out logistics, but we might be able to even have just one ordinance that makes all of the changes. But we wanted to tackle them one issue at a time because they are all separate issues. And that just keeps it a lot clearer. So if you review the mayor's executive order 202602, so the second one that he's published since being mayor, Tom Preston- Under for item for there's a three Those are the Those are the five things that the planning Commission are going to be tackling. Tom Preston- One at a time, and that brings us. to the timelines that I was talking about. So you remember at May 12th, I just mentioned, we talked about the SMP public participation plan, and you also talked about executive order 4A. That's the one that we're putting aside for now until we catch up with the other ones. Tonight, we had the Shoreline Master Program open house, which technically was not a planning commission meeting, but some of you were there. Thank you. And then tonight we're talking about the Critical Areas Public Participation Plan. We are having a special meeting on June 30th, I think that was already talked about tonight, to have the Critical Areas open house. So that is already one additional meeting that we're having the planning commission, technically that's not a planning commission meeting, but of course you are welcome to attend. As we discussed, open houses are really a time to mingle and have one-on-one questions and collect information. It's an early status check-in so people can learn about A, what we're trying to do and then give us feedback. feedback in a less formal sort of way. And then we can collect that. We do ask, you know, we do give people the opportunity to put out, you know, write their comments and whatnot and get that into the record. After the June 30th special meeting, July 14th, we'll be diving into those executive order items again. So on that day, we're gonna talk about executive order 4B, 4C, 4D, and 4E. We'll try to, they're all separate issues, so we'll try to feed them one at a time, and that'll be the first read on those, just like we had the first read on the other executive ordinance 4A. And as we go down the timeline, you'll see they'll come up later this summer. Then August 11th, we're gonna have a meeting where we review the critical areas ordinance best available science report. So that's the information that we're having our consultant put together. And we're still working on a contract for some of the additional work. So that's why we don't know a timeline right now. We had them do early work and then we feel like we wanted to have some additional work done. So we need to finish up the contract with that. And that also on August 11th, we're going to have the Shoreline Master Program review of gap analysis. So this is our goal, by the way. These are not hard and fast deadlines, but that's what we're trying to achieve, knowing which meetings we have and knowing when people are available too. So we're going to have some staff out during the summer. So... We're not going to be able to push a lot forward through July and August because of that. But we're doing as much as we can physically get to you. And then interesting, September 15th, we are having a special planning commission meeting. Not because it's an additional one, but it had to be drastically rescheduled because of Labor Day. So Labor Day falls on the Monday. So the city council meeting gets bumped to the Tuesday, which is, I believe, the 8th. Well, it must be the 7th. It must be the 8th. 7th or 8th, I forget. Is it the 7th? That gets pushed to Tuesday, which is the 8th, which... kind of supersedes planning commission, I'm afraid to say. So they'll have their city council meeting here on the 8th. So we're going to move that to the following Tuesday, which is September 15th. So it's a regular planning commission meeting that's rescheduled. So we're calling it a special meeting. On that date, we're gonna have the public hearing for all five of the executive order items for A, B, C, D and E on the 15th. I keep saying we're going to, our goal is to have it work out this way. And then September 29th, we're anticipating an additional planning commission meeting where we'll be talking about the critical area draft amendments first read. October 13th is another regular planning commission meeting. We'll continue working on the critical areas ordinance, potentially having a public hearing on it that day. October 27th, we're anticipating a high likelihood of a special planning commission meeting. That's a Tuesday. It's not Halloween yet, so hopefully that doesn't cramp everybody's plans for that week. The intent there is if we have enough of the critical areas work done, we can resume Shoreline master program work because the Shoreline master program is going to be taking a lot of information out of the critical areas ordinance and putting it into the Shoreline master program. And then November 10th, more Shoreline master program stuff. I didn't include the city council work in this, but I wanted to show how we're planning to use the remaining planning commission meetings. It's almost like comprehensive plan update process all over again, where every meeting gets pretty tight, which is a good thing.

We're keeping you busy.

So if you have any questions about that, let me know. Otherwise, I'll move on to the next part of my report.

I think it's only fair that we have that sort of a schedule because some of these people did not have the blessing of being part of a comprehensive plan completion in the last fall.

Yeah, we'll have a few new people that will get a little bit of experience with what it's like to just have a bunch of meetings and a lot of public hearings too. Yeah. As I mentioned, the council passed the public participation plan. As you know, earlier tonight, we had the SNP open house. I didn't count the number of people, but I would say about 20 to 25 people passed through, maybe more, as people came and went. As I said, I didn't count. It was busy enough where I wasn't idly sitting by counting people, which is a good thing. Also, per the public participation plan, we sent out mailers to everybody within the shoreline jurisdiction. Those went out to tell everybody about not only this open house that we had today, but about the process and where to find information. And it's all pretty. Libby and Anna did a great job putting this together and Everything happens in a very compressed timeframe in the office. There's never enough time. So it's amazing that we're able to do so much with so little time. So thanks, Libby. And thank you to Anna, who was also helping with the open house earlier today. We also sent out emails for the public participation plan to everybody that is part of the SMP listserv. And we put out notices on Facebook. We don't have an Instagram PCED, do we? We have an Instagram PCED also. So we have got both... Facebook and Instagram PCED pages.

And I think that's all I have about that.

One last thing that I wanted to talk about is our letters project. I don't know if anybody watched the city council meeting last night or has been watching social media posts. You probably saw the letters that spell out Anacortes and five and a half foot tall letters down at the Washington State Ferry Terminal. This was a project initially conceived of by, we believe, the Skagit Tourism Bureau. And they found some money to get these letters for all of the cities in Skagit County and then give them to the cities for them to decorate and the concept. And I think some of the money it resolves revolves around the additional tourism coming into town for the big soccer games that are happening in Vancouver and Seattle and trying to find a way for them to Capture some of those travelers coming through and providing letters in each of the jurisdictions gives a nice little activity for people to go and try to visit all of them. So that's what Skagitourism and Magic Skagit is their hashtag, trying to get the word out like, hey, go see all of them in all of the towns. And it's a nice little economic development concept. But it was also a great exercise in cooperation from many organizations and people. And the city's economic development committee was where we organized a bunch of the groups together to figure out who's going to build, install, where we're going to put them. uh, get the art design and all of those, all of the things, the things around these letters. And so last night we thanked all of those people and gave a pretty good presentation. You might want to check that out. I don't, uh, but schedule tourism, um, The Anacortes Arts Festival, the EDASC was involved, was the Chamber of Commerce, of course, the city, the City Council, Economic Development Committee. And of course, those who saw the art, you probably recognize whose art that was that the Anacortes Arts Festival used to wrap them. And then SignDog did the wrapping of the letters. And I'm forgetting to thank other people, but you should at least check it out. It's a little hard to get to because it's down by the ferry line, but it's on port property. The port was a big partner also. They offered the property and did the installation. So it was a lot of work for a lot of people, but they look really cool. You can step back and see Mount Baker and And the Guaymas Channel in the background and, of course, Guaymas Island. It's a really cool little site. So hopefully people will approach them. We're going to put a sign there that gives information about other activities in Guaymas. Anacortes, such as going downtown. We know a lot of people don't necessarily know that we have a downtown because they just go straight to the ferry. That's sort of surprising to people that live here. Like, why would you not know that we've got a lovely downtown? Well, now they do. So we tell them about hiking and outdoor recreation and downtown shopping and some other things and links to the Chamber of Commerce website where they'll be using that information to help help with other marketing ideas and also pushing people to this Magic Skagit website where the whole letters, find all the letters project is. So that sign's coming soon, as soon as we can get some technical problems worked out with getting that printed.

And that is my report. Thank you, Mr. Coleman. And with that, our meeting for June is concluded. We are adjourned at 7.05. Thank you for watching.