Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right. Call the meeting of Arapahoe County Planning Commission of August 18th, 2026 to order. We will call a roll. I am Chair Miller. I'll go ahead. Oh, you want to do it? Yeah, I'll do it for you. Chair Miller. I am here.

Chair Pro Tem, Save. Present. Commissioner Boren.

Present.

Commissioner Howe? Present. Commissioner Coran? Present. Commissioner Saul?

Present.

Commissioner Wolf? Present. We have a quorum.

Hey, thank you very much. All right, good evening, everybody. We're streaming our meeting on the website, arapahoegov.com. Please note the website broadcast is delayed by 20 to 30 seconds. We'll start with approval of the minutes. Does anyone want to make a motion for the minutes?

Chair Miller, this is Commissioner Save. I move to approve the August 4th, 2026 Planning Commission meetings as are presented.

Very good. Thanks. A motion made by Commissioner Save. Is there a second? Commissioner Saul, I'll second. Thank you, Commissioner Saul. All right. We have the second by Commissioner Saul. Any discussion about the minutes? Anybody got any changes? All right. All in favor of accepting the minutes as they are, say aye.

Aye.

Anybody opposed? We're all good. Ayes have it. All right, we're going to move into the study session. Miss Ava, I think you get the floor or Mr. Reynolds.

I'll kick us off and then we'll transition to Ava soon, I promise. So tonight we're talking about transit-oriented communities, which is a project that we are taking on thanks to a state mandate. This project, tonight we'll talk briefly about House Bill 24. 1313, which is also known as transit-oriented communities. We'll go over where the transit stations are and potential transit areas, explain what the housing opportunity goal is as defined in that legislation. If you read the whole bill, you already know exactly what's going on. Thank you for that, if you did. Very impressed. We'll also talk about direction we received from the board previously, and then we'll dig into each of the proposed transit centers. And we have four of those. One is around a Federal Boulevard enclave. So if you go 285 to Federal and go a bit north, west of Federal Boulevard is actually unincorporated. It's sandwiched between Denver and Sheridan. The second area is around the Dry Creek Light Rail Station, the Inverness area. Most of the properties are south of Dry Creek, but there are a few on the north side. There is actually a pedestrian bridge connecting across I-25 to that light rail station. Third area is the Four Square Mile neighborhood, which is near Parker and Mississippi, and it goes south down to ILIF. And finally, a proposed rezone in the Bellevue Enclave, which is I-25 and Bellevue. If you've ever gone to that interchange, there's a Taco Bell and McDonald's and a park and ride lot. Those are unincorporated Arapahoe County sandwiched between Greenwood Village and Denver. We'll talk a bit about what's next and some other discussions we've had with the Board of County Commissioners. So first off is House Bill 241313, and I will go a little bit off the slide to talk about the why of the bill, sort of the motivation from the legislature, and I'm going to hit the snooze button on the your computer is about to restart warning. So, Colorado is experiencing a lot of pressure on housing. Housing prices have increased significantly more than income growth over the past 10, 20 years. And that's created a lot of, basically, some people call it a housing crisis. People in younger generations are having a really hard time affording housing and getting into, say, a permanent home. So I'll offer some of the statistics that the legislature somewhat relied on in developing the legislation. So sorry for the boring list of numbers, but I think it's worthwhile to understand the legislature's motivation. We are a participant in the DRCOG, that is the Denver Regional Council of Governments. It's an organization that helps funnel funding to various local entities. We are a member of the Denver Regional Council of Governments. They performed what's called a housing needs assessment to identify how much housing is needed at what income levels. in unincorporated Arapahoe County just from the year 2020 to 2022. So in a two year time span, the percentage of renters who are cost burdened in our jurisdiction rose from 38%, so roughly one third, to 55%. So half of rental households are cost burdened. And that has a specific definition, and that is they are spending more than 30% of their monthly income on housing costs. So that's like the rent and utilities. So 55% of folks who are renting and unincorporated Arapahoe County in 2022 were housing burdened and fully, uh, 19% of renters spend more than half their income on their place to live. So one in five rental households is spending more than half their income on rent and utilities. So I talked a bit about a supply crunch. So from 2010 to 2020, Colorado's population increased 14.8%, where housing units increased by 12.6%. So we're adding more people than we are providing housing, which if you remember from Econ 101, the rule of supply and demand, the supply is not increasing as much as the demand slash the people moving here are. And our household size is also decreasing in Colorado. In 2021, it hit an all-time low of 2.46 people per household. That means that as more people are coming and forming smaller households, you need more houses for them than if you had three people per household, for example. And construction has improved recently, but we are digging out of a decades-long underbuilding The Great Recession really affected the amount of housing being generated post 2008, and we have not fully recovered. Only in the past couple of years has it started to truly bounce back, but that's not correcting the deficit we built up over the past 15 years. From 2011 to 2022, Colorado incomes increased 24%. That's great news. Home prices increased 105%. So if you look at a line on a graph, the 24%, 105%. So home prices are far outpacing income growth. Same applies to renters. Rents increased 41% versus 24% in income for renters. And One general measure of home affordability is that when you're buying a house, you shouldn't pay more than roughly four times your annual income for the house itself. And in 2022, if you use that metric in Arapahoe County, only three of approximately 15 sectors of our job market can afford that. So those three sectors were mining, management of companies, and information technology. So four to one is the goal. If you look at the average local government wage in Arapahoe County, $63,660, that's 8.21 price to income ratio. If we look at health services, which is our largest employment sector with about 50,000 jobs, the price-to-income ratio is 7.56, whereas the goal is 4 to 1. So there is an affordability problem in Colorado and in Arapahoe County. So those are some of the statistical reasons why the legislature looked at doing this bill and mandating additional housing in a lot of local jurisdictions. And so that's the other why is because as a county we're effectively a subdivision of the state and if the state says that a county must do something, the county must do that thing and therefore we are doing that thing. I'm bringing you up to speed on what we're proposing tonight. So this bill requires us to rezone areas roughly within a quarter mile of transit areas. Transit areas are high frequency bus lines. There are not a ton of those, but we'll show you some examples. and also light rail stations. And by rezoning those transit areas and other areas nearby, we create transit centers as a local jurisdiction. And we must meet what's called a housing opportunity goal established by the state through that rezoning action to create the transit centers. In the transit centers, we must rezone to at least 15 dwelling units per acre, and we'll show pictures later of what that looks like, roughly townhome style density. We must also create an administrative approval process for parcels that are smaller than five acres in area within those transit centers. And finally, we have to implement some affordability strategies and displacement mitigation strategies. And we'll bring those up as we're bringing the rezoning proposals forward. but we've consulted with community resources and other department in the county, and we believe we're meeting the requirements of the state in those areas. So in unincorporated Arapahoe County, several transit stations, Yale, Arapahoe, Bellevue, Dry Creek. County line does roughly touch us. That's the one at Park Meadows Mall. and also Dayton Light Rail Station. That's at Dayton and 225. There was an area that used to be in Greenwood Village that got removed from Greenwood Village and made our jurisdiction a couple of years ago. We did actually rezone that area for higher density development. Then there's the transit corridor areas, which are bus lines that have frequent service. And in Foursquare Mile, those are the ILIF and Quebec bus lines. Parker Future Bus Rapid Transit contributes to an optional transit area in the Foursquare Mile area, and we'll show that in a moment. Finally, the Federal Boulevard bus line. That's creating the need to rezone the Federal Enclave over there by Federal and 285. So this slide shows the transit areas in purple with the high frequency bus lines. This is in four square mile. So you can see it comes down Leedsdale, turning into Parker Road, and then heads south on Quebec. And that's, yeah. Show that with the laser pointer. So here's Quebec. And then the east-west bus line is Iliff. And because of the bus routing south from Quebec, a lot of this area, which is unincorporated, ends up contributing to our housing opportunity goal in the four-square-mile area. And as you'll see in later slides, although a lot of the parcels in Four Square Mile here are contributing to our housing opportunity goal, we're proposing to spread the zoning around to other areas of the unincorporated area. One other thing I'll point out is the green on this map are open space parcels and those did not count against us in terms of calculating our housing goal. So the housing goal housing opportunity goal is calculated by multiplying all the parcels that were not exempt. So all of those purple parcels by 40 dwelling units per acre near those bus lines and near those transit stations. When we do that across the county, we create a goal of almost 25,000 housing units near transit and We looked at the current zoning. We have 5,300 units currently zoned. Some of those areas are single family, which is a much lower density zoning than 40 per acre. So we have a shortfall in unincorporated Arapahoe County of nearly 20,000 units. And that's what's prompting us to bring forward several zoning change proposals in these various areas. And one thing to emphasize is we must provide the zoning for these to meet the housing opportunity goal. But the units don't actually have to be built. We just need to provide the possibility for it. And there are other considerations. It could be that when they start doing the engineering design for a particular site, There's not enough room on the site to accommodate stormwater detention. Maybe the water district that they're in is not able to provide the size of tap that they want. Those are the technical details that would be looked at at the site planning stage. So just because it ends up zoned does not mean it ends up developed. We talked with the board a couple of times and initially the board asked us to focus on the Federal Boulevard area, the Dry Creek area, Foursquare Mile and this year we checked in with the board again to talk about the Bellevue area with Taco Bell, McDonald's and the RTD Park and Ride. and they asked us to include that, which does get us a few more units, and we'll talk about some of the contributions from these areas to our goal a little later. And with that, I will transition to Ava, as promised, to talk about more details about what the proposed zones are in these areas. So, thank you. Yeah, certainly.

Does anybody have any questions for Jason as we go through?

Well, I do.

Well, I mean, I don't want to get lost, though, either.

Yeah, I don't know if this is the time, but since you invited.

Otherwise, we're going to get to the end, and we'll either be well in the air with a bunch of information. Okay.

So I think that you talked about this previously, but for the sake of our new members. Yes. Are the developers, I mean, I know that we're talking now just about providing possibilities, but I think we talked at one point about incentives for developers, because I'm thinking, you know, what developers maybe are not going to even want to do this, even if there's opportunity for it, because they're not going to make as much profit. So could you address that right now?

Sure, so we do have, and this is, I'll first say that this is zoning that allows any, it would allow any type of housing. It could allow market rate, it could also allow affordable housing. And we do have provisions in our code that provide incentives for developers who would like to provide affordable housing. And that is defined in our code as housing for households that are earning 80% or less of area median income, which I want to say is in the $70,000 range for Arapahoe County would be 80% or less of area median income. And if someone is providing a certain amount of their development as affordable housing for people earning that 80% or less, then They can receive density bonuses and some other breaks in our zoning code. This transit-oriented communities doesn't really touch on affordability. It's more about the possibility of housing and there's also some some studies that the legislature cited in the bill that talk about how providing more of a supply of housing does actually help moderate rents. It might not reduce them, but they tend to grow more slowly. So it sort of lowers the heat on that, the description where I talked about how housing costs are so far outpacing income growth.

Thanks for that, Jason. And just to reiterate, I know that this is about providing possibilities, but because of the new folks, I thought it would be good to talk a little bit about the developers and affordability.

Hello, Jason. This was more of a comment I was trying to look for. When I had received the packet in the mail, I had read an article about Colorado experiencing a negative net domestic migration for the first time since 2004. So, I mean, do you, as far as affordable housing and that, I mean, do you... It just came across, I guess, my mind on... you know, a warning on Colorado's future housing demand. Just came across my, you know, thought process, but I'm not sure what you think about that or what statistics are shown.

Yeah, I guess just in the last year or two, in the Denver metro area, for example, rents have declined somewhat, but that's after, you know, years and decades of steady growth. So, you know, in terms of, you know, making things affordable, we've got a lot of distance to cover. So even if we have net out migration or a reduction in Colorado population, having additional zone density can help ameliorate that. Also, it doesn't change our obligation under this particular law.

Thank you. So I, too, want to just piggyback a little bit on this as well. Because we get information from the county every month on growth and household incomes and all this others as well. And I'm not seeing a lot of that in here. I would want to see some of that. Because when I just do a simple reading online, I'm reading where, you know, apartment vacancy rates in Arapahoe County used to be at 5%, and now they're up to about 8%. So we're seeing more and more vacancy already, and we're seeing drops in rental or in rents as well. So we're kind of seeing Colorado adjusting itself out of this. Now, my big question is, I don't remember everything in the act I do, but it's like, There was monies that were being restricted if we didn't do this that was taken out of this, I believe, at one point. But are there not still monies involved in this that if we don't do this, there's a good chance we'll lose some funding from the state or from Dr. Cogg or whoever it is that decides what we get to do? We're losing our home rule on this, aren't we? As a county, we don't have home rule. No, but we're not getting to rule ourselves. I'll rephrase it that way.

Yeah, and I guess to answer the funding question, I'll have to look up the executive orders. But there are executive orders that say if a community does not meet the goals here, they are not eligible for certain funding sources. And I can get you the executive order numbers that were issued by Governor Polis's office.

Okay. And then maybe we'll get into them, but when I was looking through the different pieces here, Sorry, I dropped my packet on the ground as I was trying to get out of my truck and I was all messed up. But when you had counting on what was favorable or unfavorable, in the counting part of it, the favorable part also had people who were considered neutral. And I think that neutral just means I need more information before I have an opinion one way or the other. I think that neutral kind of needs to be pulled out of that, you know, of the favorable side. I think we kind of top loaded favorable by including people who were just considered neutral. So when it comes to numbers, I like numbers. So I'd like to see what some of the numbers were. We're probably, I mean, I don't see where it's going to change a whole lot. We're going to have to change the code because the county wants to keep funding coming in from other places as well. But I think we might be, like, icing this up a little bit too much. That's my opinion. All right. Do I have any other questions in there? I have a question to get answered, all right? Great. I'll transition to Ava.

Good evening, Commissioners. Ava Pehezevsky, Development Review Manager in the Planning Division. Oh, there it goes. You may know me more commonly as the voice in your speaker, but I do exist as a human. So here I am, joined by my colleagues Loretta Daniel and Gretchen Ricehill from the Long Range Planning Group, and they will be also presenting with you. Um, thanks. Uh, and so thank you for the introductions, uh, Jason to this topic. What is going on? I don't know why the screen keeps going black. Okay, here we go. Uh, so, uh, what are we doing here with the rezone? So, uh, some of you who were here a year or two ago may recall, uh, that we brought forward to use some land development code amendments, uh, to create new zone districts. One of which was multifamily residential. The other was mixed use. Those never existed in our land development code before. Uh, so we created them and this would give an avenue for property owners to, uh, be in these zone districts and be allowed, uh, kind of as a use by right to have either a multifamily. or potentially a mixed use project, uh, without having to go through the, uh, very lengthy P U D process. Right? So, uh, so we did this, some of you were here and remember we went through that exercise, the County commissioners approved it. It's in our code. So what we're doing with this legislation, this mandate from the state is as Jason mentioned, we've got certain areas of the County where that the board of County commissioners asked us to focus on. And we're rezoning parcels to one of two zone districts. They would either be a residential multifamily. And again, this allows all forms of multi. It could be a duplex townhome condo apartment, whatever the minimum density is 13 dwelling units per acre. There is a maximum density of 35 dwelling units per acre with a maximum height. of 55 feet this is more of a medium density this is where you see like your your little townhome neighborhoods things like that not giant high rises so medium density think okay and and so multi-family is more appropriate in certain areas uh you know that are maybe closer to lower density areas okay and then we have the mixed use mixed use zone district this allows much higher density a minimum of 35 dwelling units per acre and no maximum, just the floor is 35, right? And then that allows a mix of uses, right? And so you can have ground floor commercial, you can have office, restaurant retail, you know, that medical office, daycare, whatever. uh, maximum height of 75 feet. And so these are more appropriate, you know, near a light rail station, the more urbanized corridors, like a, like a, like a Parker road, I live federal, you know, things like that. And so, um, we also, um, looked in the Inverness office park, which we'll get to next. So again, um, we have two zone districts, multifamily mixed use multifamily is more of a medium density. Mixed use is more of a high density.

Ms. Ava, a quick question to be appropriate right now. How many floors is usually 55 feet, and how many floors is usually 75 feet?

About four to five, right? Four to five or 55? the 55 okay and then what's 75 about five to six yeah right yes okay so thank you for this is the great segue into our next slide just to give you some visuals uh so again multi-family you know when you have 16 units per acre um you've kind of got like a two-story like a townhouse townhome thing going on when you're on the more higher end of the multi-family excuse me the the residential multifamily zone district at 35. It looks like that where you have the three story walk up apartment complex. So that's kind of what we're looking at. And then if you were doing something in mixed use, you know, I'm trying to give you a visual here. And so you see this first one on the right is it's 50 dwelling units per acre. It's about, this one's about three stories, but as you can see, it's got a ground level restaurant, probably has some retail, things like that. And then as you get into the higher densities of 70 units per acre, as you see here, this is a four story mixed use project, you know, with ground floor commercial. So that's just to kind of visualize it roughly. This is, you know, predicated on like 12 foot ceilings, you know. for floors, kind of thing like that. So I am now, we're going to start turning it over to the four work areas that the commissioners asked us to rezone. And I'm going to turn this over right now to Loretta Daniel, our long range planning manager, who's going to walk you through the Federal Boulevard Enclave.

Sure. Sorry, Commissioner Wolfe, I have a quick question. So for the mixed use zone with no maximum density, what's the history behind that? I'm just curious. I don't know if anyone's aware.

Well, there's a maximum height. Oh, okay. And then there are setbacks, and there are landscaping requirements and parking. Well, we don't have parking requirements, but they'll probably provide parking. And so when you factor all that in, the footprint of your building is really dictated by the size of your lot. Right. So that dictates your density. You get the box with the height, your setbacks, and then however many units you can fit in there.

Okay. Thank you. Mm-hmm.

Well, thank you, Dave, for giving me the introduction. So this is the federal enclave, an area which you may not have known is part of unincorporated Arapahoe County. This is 45 acres. The area that is shaded green is the city of Sheridan. And the area which does not have a color, and you can see the area quite clearly, that's the city and county of Denver. So this area is covered quite a bit by the transit area affected by the federal high frequency bus lines. And then also, too, there are the optional areas which for the transit areas, which basically covered the rest of this area over to Knox Court. So the existing zoning consists of some obsolete zone districts, primarily the R4 and the R5, and there's also some PUD, the RPUH as well, too. That's an obsolete zone district. The obsolete zone districts are basically carried over from older codes, so they are not in the current land development code. And the reason for that is probably there are some things like dimensional standards such as setbacks that are different from the zone districts which are currently in the Land Development Code. So these obsolete zone districts, it's kind of not a kind term, but they are not only in the federal area, they're also in Foursquare Mile, Holly Hills, also in Byers. So they're dispersed throughout the county. From a planning perspective, we would like to remove those and bring the zone districts more into compliance as to what is in the code. It is easier for the property owners because it is hard to find these dimensional standards because they are not in the code. The B districts there that you see on the map, those are all the business zone districts, and those are currently in the code. So the proposed zoning is basically just the two zone districts, the residential multifamily and the mixed use. So the commercial districts, the B districts, would convert over to the mixed use. That offers more flexibility for redevelopment, so these won't be single-use districts with the commercial uses. So there are 73 parcels which are proposed to be rezoned to the residential multifamily, which would result in 650 dwelling units. And there are 39 parcels that are proposed to be rezoned to mixed use, which would bring with our calculation 566 dwelling units. So that would be a total of 1,216 dwelling units. Now, the R5, which I'll just go back, covers quite a bit of this area, is a multifamily zone district. So it allows basically all types of multifamily uses up to a density of 22 dwelling units per acre and a height of 50 feet, maximum height of 50 feet. So that coincides quite nicely with the residential multi-family zone district, which you might recall is the 13 to 35. A dwelling units per acre is the density range and a maximum height of 55 feet. The R4 is... Also allows multifamily, but it has a maximum density of 11 dwelling units per acre and a maximum height of 35. So it's a little smaller scale. But you can see from the aerial that some of the uses here that are zone B4, oh, sorry, R4, are fairly large lots. So they could potentially be redeveloped. So we did have two open houses. We had one on February 10th and another one on July 9th. This is a fairly small area. The population is around 600 in this area. We had 21 people for the February 10th open house, and we had 10 people show up for July 9th, as would be expected for a summer open house. So our survey results from the first open house basically were kind of very, they were supportive and neutral, and I appreciate your comment about how folding in the neutral there sort of kind of perhaps does not present the entire picture, however, 31% did not support the rezoning. So there was concerns about views being blocked by potential development, concerns about increased traffic, the narrow road widths and a number of things like that. So we are aware of that. So the focus really though is on Federal Boulevard. So in looking at this area, The uses along Federal Boulevard are aging. There is a vacant parcel. And changing the zone district to mixed use would be helpful to help in the revitalization of some of the properties along that corridor. So I think that's it, all I've got here. So any questions on that?

Just so I can get a little bit of a clarification, this is Commissioner Miller. If somebody is saying that their housing preferences are townhomes and duplexes, townhomes and duplexes won't get us to the number that we're looking for in that area, would it?

Well, it's not the actual number. It's the zoning, and maybe Jason can explain this a little bit better than I can. It's actually having the capability of that zoning, which will provide... the number for the housing opportunity goal.

We're trying to get to 19,000. Certain acreage has to have certain number, and that's why I'm saying, I mean, even if the supportive people are like, yes, as long as it's townhomes and duplexes, Our town homes and duplex is going to get us to our 19,000 number.

Uh, town homes can help with that because the transit centers must have that density of at least 15 dwellings per acre. So that's roughly a town home density. And you know, that helps stem the losses a bit, but that means that if you're at 15 dwelling units per acre on a one acre and say the federal area, You need to have a higher density somewhere else to make up for that if we're to actually build that entire goal. But this is about creating the opportunity for housing, not necessarily building at that density. I understand.

Alright, I'm back again. So now we're going to touch on the second area of our focus, which is the dry. We call it the dry creek area because it's it's focused on the dry creek. Oh, you're not going to restart. No, you're not. Hold on. Let me snooze my computer. IT does this every time we have planning commission. So anyway, so Dry Creek Light Rail Station, right? We have some properties within a half mile of it. It is what we would call the Inverness neighborhood. You may know it as that. It is roughly east of I-25 and south of roughly like Getty's. and Dry Creek and north of County Line Road. It's this area and the color here. The stuff in the blue or teal blue, whatever you want to call it, that's all City of Centennial. We have no jurisdiction over all of that part on the left and the top, that's all City of Centennial. We did a map and you can see, I'm not good with pointers here and I don't know how Jason made the funny light go on. Dry Creek Light Rail Station is right there on your left. It's labeled to the left of I-25. And so we did a half mile buffer. And as you can see, we have some properties DOLA, Department of Local Affairs with the state, does give us leeway in a transit area, an optional transit area to go a little bit outside of it. So we took a couple properties a little bit outside the circle there. But as you can see, most of them, so the vast majority of the parcels there at Inverness are all in a planned unit development. So their zoning is PUD dash mixed use. Not to be confused with our mixed use zone district. They're in a PUD, which means that they have a document that dictates their zoning. Each property has its own zoning PUD. which can be quite tedious, especially for us in staff. When we get a phone call, what can I do on my property? And we have to go find their PUD, the old PUD from the 90s. So anyway, so what we are doing is we're rezoning. It's already zoned in a mixed-use fashion. Mostly everything that's allowed there, you know the restaurants out there, great restaurants, every great steakhouse in South Denver is here. So we have a lot of restaurant. We have retail. We have medical. CU has a medical campus here. A lot of great businesses. All of that would still be allowed in our mixed-use zone district. And then there's some parcels a little bit down south toward Dry Creek, and those are zoned industrial. And then we have some B5 way, way down south touching Dry Creek. And then there's that golf course in green. And that is not part of our rezone. That's the, I think it's called the Inverness Golf Course, right? Yeah. That's not part of our rezone. Nor are, as you know, there's multiple condominium properties out there in Inverness. None of them are part of our rezone. So just keep that in mind. Because we're not rezoning. established neighborhoods, only the things that could be done like these larger parcels. So that's the existing zoning. Just want to put that out there. So this is our proposal. So there's 44 properties. As you can see, doesn't include the golf course, doesn't include any of the residential condos at Inverness, the Vlagio, any of those. And we would rezone them to mixed use. And so this is complicated math. So mixed use allows a minimum, remember that's the floor, of 35 units per acre, okay? But you could give yourself a minimum based on, I think, having a larger parcel, right? There's some funny math. We can get into it with Jason shortly, but we went to the county commissioners in July because we were trying to figure out our math to submit our report to DOLA to show we're doing what we're being asked to. And we can calculate each of those at 100 dwelling units per acre because it's like, oh, I left my – well, this is my computer, so I can't check. But I have the acreage, but the total acreage of this whole rezone – In doing it by 100 drilling units per acre, we could zone it for 20,000 and some change units. Again, these won't all be built. We just have to zone it. Any land developer that wants to build something has to come to the county with a site plan. And planning has standards. Engineering has standards. Traffic, right? All of that. Water. So it doesn't mean all 20,000 will get built. It just means we zone to allow it. So with that, we had an open house in May. We had an online survey as well as paper surveys at the meeting. We got 32%, again, supportive or neutral, Um, and then, um, so 32% didn't hate it. Let's just say that. And then, um, we asked him what, what would be your housing preference out here? Um, and again, just like the federal neighbors, nobody wanted apartments. They just wanted, they would prefer town homes and duplexes, but again, the zoning allows all of it. So that's their preference, but what a developer can build is a different story. So. 68% did not support. But let me just preface that data. We had probably 99% of our turnout at this community meeting was all the condo residents who are not being rezoned came. Because a lot of the property owners out in Inverness are out of state. They're in Texas and New York and wherever. They're big corporate owners. So we notified them, but didn't get any feedback. But of course, so... the vast majority of the people who came were the condo people of neighbors or residents, sorry. Um, and so they were not in support. Um, so I just wanted to give you that data. It wasn't the 68% opposed was, was all from the neighbors, but not necessarily from the property owners who own land out there. So their primary concerns were, um, as can be expected traffic, You know, parking in their communities, lack of infrastructure and water and increased crime. And so just as a note, because we heard so much about traffic, the county has commissioned a consulting traffic engineering firm to do a traffic study out there. to see what that impact would be. We don't have the results yet, they're still working on it. So when we come back to you all at a public hearing, hopefully we'll have that data to share with you. Inverness, should we mention that or? So yeah, there's a lot of, so we did talk with Inverness Water and Sanitation, who's the supplier out here, They don't think they have as much capacity as we're zoning for. So that's a concern. But like again, an individual developer can come in with a site plan and we'll evaluate it and we would send Inverness Water and Sanitation a referral and say, do you have capacity for this project? And so this will be all on a case by case basis. So even though we're zoned for this much, In reality, we may not be able to develop that much, but I just wanted to put that out there. So are there any questions?

Yeah, Commissioner Save. Going back to the PUDs on that page there, a question of clarification. Are these PUDs existing PUDs that have been already granted? And then with this new zoning, does that make them null and void or? How does that work?

It would make them, yes, this new zoning would replace the PUD plans. Okay. But I just, you know, again, I did a whole spreadsheet, and what's allowed in the PUDs mostly is allowed here in the mixed use as well.

Okay, so they wouldn't really be losing anything per se.

They would actually be gaining because a lot of their PUD approvals are for commercial uses. Now they're going to get more allowable land uses with the residential. Okay, thanks.

I have a question. This is Commissioner Wolf. What is the estimated population of this area? Do we know? Existing? Don't know, sorry. No, that's okay. And how many people attended the feedback session?

It was in the staff report. I don't remember the exact number, but it was in the Planning Commission staff report that you received.

Okay, thank you. I was just curious, kind of calculation comparison-wise between the two, like what percent of the people who live there

actually showed up and gave a response, right? Was it a small percent? We sent out to like 400 residents. Okay. 35. 35 attended, right?

Okay, thank you.

But I did get over 100 survey comments. A lot were, again, 68% were not in favor, but a lot of them were from the residential area. Got it.

Okay, thank you.

All right, I think this was a throwback from the other slides, but again, just visualizing density. And we're talking about this Inverness Dry Creek area, right? So here's an example of the Yale Station area. There's a project or a property out there where it's five stories, 74 feet. Well, our mixed use maximum height is 74 feet. So you can kind of visualize what could be built out at Inverness here. This particular property is 50 dwelling units. So that comes out to 106 dwelling units per acre on this particular lot. It's about a half acre lot. Oh, sure.

Can I just ask for a visual clarification? Mm-hmm. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand. So just visually, the building is 50 units. Is that right? Just visually. I mean, is that what this is trying to depict?

It is 50 units, yes.

Okay, so it's depicting 50 units, and you're going to say 106 per acre. So basically it would be two of those buildings? Am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am Like on a half acre lot is what it's really kind of depicting. So if we're going to get to the 106, basically it would be like two of these buildings?

No, that building is 106 dwellings per acre. So you only need one of that building to get 106 dwelling units per acre. In that building there? Yep.

Okay.

And I guess if the apartments were smaller, you could do more units. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can make them as small as you want.

That's the other part. That's the other mystery piece to this whole thing is like, well, you know, yeah. Is that 50 units or can that be also divided and made even more units?

The bottom floor is crucial.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, so it's 50 units times 2.6 people basically, right? It's how you get to the 106, right? Yeah. People? No, we don't multiply by people. We multiply by acreage. Oh, dwelling units. Okay, I was thinking. Got it.

But you can have two people per dwelling unit or more, I suppose, if you had a family.

Maybe another way of saying this is that this picture's 106 dwelling units per acre, given that this building's only on a half acre.

Correct. There we go. That works.

There you go. Thank you.

I just visually, sometimes people don't understand how far or how big something is. I just wanted to help. I don't think I helped.

No, it helped a lot, and we got a great explanation from Commissioner Salve. Thank you. And part of the reason for showing these pictures is that a lot of times it's hard to visualize how many units of housing fit on an acre of land. So we wanted to convey that with pictures as much as we could. Beautiful. Perfect.

All right. I'm now going to turn this over to Gretchen Ricehill, who will be talking about the four-square-mile reason.

Thank you. I work with Loretta Daniel in the long-range planning section. So four-square-mile, as Jason mentioned, is roughly bounded on the north by Mississippi, Parker, ILF on the south, and South Quebec on the west. And that's a rough boundary, as you can see. Four-square-mile is... It has interesting boundaries. Currently, there are 36 different zoning districts in the four square mile area. Yes. And many of those are obsolete. Let's see. So this is a map of the area or the parcels proposed for rezoning. There are a total of 466 parcels that we propose to rezone. Now, although that sounds like a shocking number, keep in mind that 223 of those parcels are actually condominium units. So there's roughly, if you take out the condominium units, we're rezoning roughly 145 parcels, somewhere around there. There are 96 of those that we propose to be rezoned to this MU zone district, and that's depicted here in red, and those are primarily along the commercial corridors of Parker Road, concentrated somewhat on some sections of ILIF, but then also in the southwest corner there where ILIF South Quebec and South Syracuse way come together the RMF the residential multifamily 370 parcels again some of those all of those 323 are condominium units, so 370 total parcels So what does that mean for less than 50 are proposed for rezoning to residential multifamily? I need to mention that we, the long-range section, are in the process of updating the four-square-mile subarea plan. It's a long-range planning document that's used to guide all kinds of investments and planning decisions over the course of generally a 20-year period. The plan was written in 2005, so that's why it's timely that we're working to update that plan. So all of the work that we're doing here, we've vetted with the advisory committee, the Four Square Mile Advisory Committee that we set up to help us guide that. four-square-mile sub-area plan update project. And so they helped us actually create this proposed rezoning map. And let's see. Okay. Yep.

I promised earlier I'd talk a little bit about the four-square mile and the bus routes that go through the four-square mile and create the housing opportunity goal. So countywide, we have 612 acres of transit area based on those bus lines and the light rail stations. And thanks to the bus lines on Quebec and ILIF, and also the routing that I showed, as it winds its way southeast on Syracuse, the bus route creates 527 acres of transit area. So 527 acres of transit area out of 612, that's generating roughly 21,000 units towards our housing opportunity goal in the four square mile area. So that's 86% of our total goal. And as you can see, we are not proposing all of that density here. We're spreading it around some of the other areas. So I just wanted to point that out.

Correct, thank you very much. And then I need to mention too that, so we calculate both the residential multifamily and the mixed use at 35 dwelling units an acre. And again, the math is, somewhat fuzzy, but it actually creates not 8,500 dwelling units as shown on this side, but no, 8,600, a little more than 8,600 units. Gretchen, could I interrupt? Yes, absolutely.

Commissioner Save, Jason, I don't, does that mean a transit unit or the transit area could be near any bus stop? I mean, yeah, because I thought it was supposed to be like a big bus stop. So could you clarify, please?

Yes. If you could go back to slide five, that shows the bus lines in the four square mile area that are contributing. to the Housing Opportunity Goal. There it is. So the bus lines on Quebec and ILIF, and as the Quebec bus line hits the southern end of the area, goes along Syracuse Way, the purple areas are the areas that we used to calculate the Housing Opportunity Goal. And on the right hand side of the slide, you can see the parcels that were used to create that goal. One other element are less frequent bus lines, and there are many less frequent bus lines throughout the four square mile area. And there's also a future bus rapid transit planned along Parker Road. And part of our strategy in looking at areas to rezone was what would the impact be on the neighborhoods? The Parker bus, the future bus rapid transit is a great opportunity to reduce the number of zone districts by creating mixed use pockets in the optional area along the Parker corridor. But yeah, the purple area within unincorporated Arapahoe County is what we use to calculate the housing opportunity goal. And as I said, because of those bus lines, this area is contributing 86% of the total goal.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering about. Since you mentioned the Parker Station, where would that be? Parker and what? Or am I jumping the...

It's actually a linear corridor. It would be a bus route that runs along Parker Road and it's similar in concept to what they're installing on East Colfax Avenue in Denver right now, which it's basically it creates bus stops that work a little more like light rail stations and generally has a dedicated lane for the bus so that the bus does not have to sit in traffic queues. So the buses can operate more frequently and quicker.

Wow.

And there is no timeline on that. It's a future thing.

Okay. But... Okay. Well, since I have the floor, Gretchen, I do have a question on something you said. So up until this point, I thought we were looking at lands that were currently empty. But then when you presented on Four Square Mile, it was rezoning existing condos. You said so... How do you rezone an existing condo? Would it be a scrape off?

Or is it going to be top and on top? That's a great question. And thank you. Need to clarify. So all those condominium units are Club Valencia. And for folks who don't know, Club Valencia has suffered Multiple fires over the past several years and it's my understanding that actually half or more of the building is currently vacant so We felt that it was a good opportunity to put the zoning in place that if the developer wanted to purchase the entire property, which would be a feat. We've got the zoning in place that the property could be redeveloped if need be. So thank you very much.

And it also provides a simpler process forward should the condo homeowners association work things out with their insurance company. And that's been dragging on for months to years.

I just need to make an editorial that that would be a great place for a scrape-off.

And that is the only condominiums that are included in the four square mile area. Wanted to clarify that too. So let me advance here. Okay. We held an open house on June 25th, and I believe we had about 50 to 60 people attend, so it was very well attended. We also then conducted an online survey. And of those responding to the survey, which I have to mention, although we have 50 to 60 people attend the meeting, only 14 people took the time to complete the survey. So take that with a grain of salt. 78% expressed their support for what we were doing. 14% were neutral and seven were were opposed to the proposed rezoning the concerns that they expressed related to traffic and noise Insufficient parking they felt also in insufficient infrastructure they specifically mentioned that they were concerned with Availability or lack thereof of water and then also the loss of their existing character of the neighborhoods. We are hosting a second open house next week August 26th at the Eloise May Library and at that open house we're going to hopefully talk to folks that hadn't been to the previous open house, but we're also gonna be rolling out the final proposed rezoning map. There are, I think, three parcels that we propose to be added to the map. I think it is just three. Let's see. I can take this one if you want. Okay. Bellevue. We all had mentioned that when we met with the Board of County Commissioners a few weeks ago, they asked us, we asked them if we should include the Bellevue, this Bellevue enclave, and they directed us to do so. It consists of five parcels, and they're all zoned planned unit development. And then so we propose that all five of the parcels be rezoned to mixed use. Again, the minimum density is 35 dwelling units an acre with a maximum building height of 75 feet. The total acreage of all of those parcels put together is a little over five acres, so it's not a very big area. And this would yield a rough density between 150 dwelling units an acre and 188, depending upon how we do the math. Because the current PUDs allow building heights of over 75 feet um you know i think maybe i'm going to wait and talk about or i'll let you broach this mux zone district is there okay um so we we do have to take into consideration the fact that planned unit developments both here in this bellevue enclave and then also in the dry creek inverness area There are some properties that are allowed to up to 100 feet. I think there is even one that allows 120 feet, I want to say. So in taking that into consideration, when we talked to the Board of County Commissioners, we suggested creating a new zoning district called MUX, which would allow for a 100-foot height limit. Um, we're gonna, we're gonna get there in a bit. So just keep that in mind. So I don't know who's taking this one.

So, um, again, we have until December 31st to get all this rezoning completed, finalized and reach our housing opportunity goal numbers with department of local affairs. We've got to get a report out by the end of the year. Uh, so, With the potential additional residential density, we think we're going to have enough zone density for 36,765 dwelling units. That meets our goal of that 19,000. And again, that's with our fuzzy math where we're doing it at like 100 units per acre. um, possibilities. Um, so we'll see what Dola says if they'll let it go. Um, and so upcoming, um, just a preview, we'll be bringing this to you all again in October for a public hearing. Uh, we're just finishing up all of our stakeholder meetings and, you know, sending out referrals to the water and sanitation districts and getting their feedback. So, uh, we, we anticipate having our public hearing October 20th with you all. And then we'll go to the County commissioners for final approval on November 24th so that we can get our report out to Dola. And so as Gretchen alluded to, we had some discussions with the county commissioners. We have a lot of PUD zoned parcels. Some of those PUDs allow a taller height than that 75 feet that the mixed use zone has. So we talked to them about that. Again, we've reached out to the property owners. Everyone's been notified. We haven't heard any objections from property owners in this Inverness area about it. But nevertheless, we talked about, we threw out, what if we create a new zone district called MUX? And if you're in Inverness, and if you're in this Bellevue corridor, you could have a 100-foot height limit. Do you want us to explore that, County Commissioners? And they said, yeah, explore that. so um that's something we'll look at but that's uh we just have a lot of workload right now so that's not that's the 2027 thing that's not imminent but we just wanted to put that out on your radar so and with that we're all happy to answer any questions take your comments feedback any questions down here go right ahead

Hi, this is Commissioner Coran. I just had a question on the Dry Creek area and that density, because that does seem to be the most contested area. And so as we go towards the final proposal, if we're already meeting the goal of 19,000, can we reduce that proposed dwelling unit per acre? And I think just when you see those numbers, that might be why some of the residents are looking at it that way, I guess. Or are we being directed to use 100 for that area?

Yes, Commissioner Korn, yeah. So that's just a, it's a number, take it for what it's worth. But the minimum density is 35 per acre. But again, it depends on the parcel size. It depends on whether water's available. It depends if there are traffic study pencils out or do they have to do a bunch of traffic mitigation and maybe they don't want to do all that, so they back away. Drainage issues, there's a multitude of things. So that number, I mean, it's just a number we threw out. But at this point, I don't think we're going to reduce the number of properties being rezoned because it fits in the half mile range. Anyone who lives in that circle can get to the Dry Creek Light Rail Station pedestrian-wise, biking, e-bike, scooter, et cetera.

Okay, thank you. And I do have one other question. You brought up the traffic study. Will that look at just the overall expected number of cars increased based on this, or will it also propose... new roads, or is that something that would be pushed to the developer when they propose a new building?

Yes, that's correct. All traffic impacts caused by a development, the cost must be borne by the developer. So this traffic study that we've commissioned is just to look at how many more vehicle trips might be generated in the Inverness area through this rezoning, potentially. They are subtracting some established properties, like obviously the villas at Bellagio and all the condos that are there. That's that. That's not going to change. It's not even being rezoned anyway. There's a UC Health has a medical campus there. Fairly new. So we're kind of not including that property. Even though it's being rezoned, it's very unlikely it's going to be scraped and built into apartments. So there's a few properties out there that they're going to... just including their traffic data. But no, they are not proposing any projects with this. It's just data for us in planning to know how many more vehicle trips we could potentially see. Thank you.

And I can tag on to that as well, and I'll go to the other microphone to avoid feedback. And one other thing to keep in mind with the Inverness area is that it has those underlying PUDs that allow a variety of commercial and office uses. So the traffic study is not starting from there's no potential for traffic here because office buildings and especially medical offices can generate a lot of traffic. So it's looking at what's the current state under the existing zoning versus what might happen under the residential zoning. And we don't know the answer to that. it could very well turn out that the residential zoning proposal could generate less traffic than is currently possible under the existing planned unit development zonings. But that's part of why we're going through the exercises to understand what that might look like.

So quick question related to the traffic study that we were just talking about. I know for a fact that there's shelled space within that UC Health space that is not built out yet. So when traffic studies, I know you said that there are some things that are excluded, but especially with a lot of office buildings being partially vacant and you don't take those into account, like if they were to build out the rest of what they have going on, wouldn't that increase the traffic?

It would on the ground, but part of that UC Health project was anticipating the total square footage of the development and doing a traffic study based on that. Got it.

It was already done in the past then. Okay, got it. I have one question about the Bellevue location. So I know just to the west of the 5.3 parcels, there are some taller buildings there. Do we know the height of those buildings by chance or how many stories they are?

We can consult Google Street View.

I was just curious if they would be taller or shorter or equal to what's already there.

My guess before checking Street View is that they'd be comparable to some of the buildings, like the apartment buildings that are further west, but the office buildings immediately to the west are likely taller than 75 feet.

Okay. Thank you.

One, with all these renderings, is parking included in that?

So the rendering at Yale Station, that building is actually wrapped around parking, so there is parking in that one. I'm less certain about some of the others.

Did you have one? Yeah, I do. Oh, please go ahead.

Commissioner Save to Jason. Jason, fact check. Did I hear you say that 86 or 87 percent of the net dwelling units are going to be in the four square mile area? Is that what you said?

No. The four square mile area, thanks to the bus routes, it creates a lot of acres of transit area, which means that The overall unincorporated housing opportunity goal, 86% of that goal is coming from the calculations in four square mile area, but we are not proposing to place 86% of the proposed zoning in that area.

Thank you for that clarification. Second question. You mentioned this transit area on Parker Road that's going to look like Colfax. Who are the decision makers in that plan? It can't be just CEDOT.

It's multi-jurisdictional. It involves Denver Regional Council of Governments as well as the Regional Transportation District. I will say they... are working, they're building Colfax. The next one in line is Federal, although the bus rapid transit improvements will not actually get down to Arapahoe County's jurisdiction. That heads east at Dartmouth Avenue, which is north of our jurisdiction. But Federal is next, so I would not anticipate, you know, Any details about that? The Parker Road emerging for the next few years, it would go through a planning process and construction would be even further out and dependent on funding.

And is this a if or a when?

I would say it's an if, depending on funding. But at least the planning could go into place. I'd say that's a when, but the actual development of it is funding dependent.

Thank you.

I just, I'm looking at the Google Street View for Bellevue and the apartments with ground floor retail are one, two, three, four, five, six stories in height. So somewhat comparable to what you're looking at on the screen there. And then the corporate office tower is something like 14 stories tall and would be taller than that, 75 feet.

Okay, thank you. Okay.

Just out of curiosity, does this change anybody's tax basis? I mean rezoning, does it change anything for anybody?

Sure, an answer is no. I'll elaborate just a tiny bit with something that amuses me is Dove Valley. You're familiar with Dove Valley. It's an industrial park. We're very close to it. There are areas of Dove Valley that, despite being zoned for commercial and industrial for decades, are still classified for tax purposes as agricultural because they run cattle on some of those properties.

Interesting.

Anything else? All right, then we're done with this part. Does anybody have any questions or comments for Planning Department on anything?

Please go ahead. Commissioner Save, again, just a comment. I'm very impressed with the Planning Department for all the work that this has been, as well as your attempts to reach out to the different neighborhoods that are affected. So that's very impressive. Thank you.

What announcements do you have for us?

All right. Well, we have a new employee. He's in the back. Zach, you want to stand up? That's Zach Blazek. He's a senior planner, and he's joined us as of last week.

Nice.

And then I don't know if you met our county attorney, assistant county attorney. This is Ruth Goff. Ruthie Goff.

Yeah. Hi. Hi. You didn't have because I got lost and I was late, so I'm sorry.

And she helps out Matt. So, yeah, she's been a real help there. For announcements, September 1st, that's likely to be canceled, our meeting. We don't have anything on the agenda right now, but we'll verify that tomorrow at our staff meeting for the planners. And then on September 15th, we're going to have a water supply element comp plan amendment. And that's all we have.

Study session. Yes, a study session. And then we had talked about training, and I've been discussing that with the attorneys, and we're shooting for an October 6th study session to offer an overview of land use 101, I guess.

Quick question for Molly. Welcome, Zach. Is Zach replacing somebody, or is it a new addition?

Yes. Ernie Rose got the energy specialist, planner specialist, and so he's moved to our energy department, and Zach is stepping in his old position. Okay. Thanks.

You'll still see Ernie from time to time on energy projects. Okay.

So just real quick, Jason, it seems like we have a lot of study sessions but not a lot of work. Is there something trending in the county that we need to be aware of?

Well, I will say through the first six months of the year, we had 130 individual plan reviews in the planning division, which is more than we usually see. For comparison, over the past four years, it's been between 190 and 212 reviews for the entire year. So if we hit even... you know, 213, that's more than any of the last four years. We'll have to see how it progresses. So there's a lot of projects that are in process. And some things that have changed in the land development code for those who may have been here a while, we do have fewer public hearings for some site plans. For example, the Copperleaf Commercial Area, which some of you saw as a rezoning for the King Soopers site over there by Quincy and 470. the individual PAD site plans are all administrative site plan reviews, whereas in the days of yore, those would have been public hearings. So some of it is process efficiencies, but yeah, we will continue to look for warning signs on the development front, interest rates being higher than they have been for many of the past 18 years. certainly seems to be putting a bit of a damper on the housing market as our other macroeconomic factors. But as far as plan reviews, we've been very busy this year. All right, very good. Oh, please go ahead.

Commissioner Save. Oh, yes, the thank you note for Catherine. It's been passed around and just wanted to let the staff know if you'd like to add a thank you, that'd be great.

All right. We're done.

Thank you.