Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

This webinar is being transcribed and summarized.

Good evening and welcome to this August 6th meeting of the Bloomington Planning Commission. The Planning Commission advises the City Council on development proposals, development standards, long-range planning, and transportation issues. Some items before the Planning Commission are study items. We have two of those this evening, three of those this evening. and where we will not take formal action. And some of them are public hearings. We have none of those this evening, but if you are here for a public hearing, we do encourage you to testify here in chambers or with the instructions that are on your screen for other meetings where we have those. Some of the items to the planning commission has, some of the items before us, the planning commission has final decision making authority. Other items are the city council has the final decision making authority and the planning commission acts in an advisory role. The Planning Commission is made up of seven volunteer residents of the city of Bloomington. Each commissioner has been appointed to serve a three-year term with a two-term limit. We have five commissioners here tonight, so we do have a quorum. Our first order of business this evening is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please stand if you are able.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America

All right, we will begin tonight with item number one, which is the swearing in of one of our newly appointed planning commissioners. Commissioner Madeline Summers, if you wouldn't mind joining me down at the dais for your swearing in. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I'm Madeline Summers.

I'm Madeline Summers.

Do solemnly swear.

Do solemnly swear.

That I will support the Constitution of the United States.

That I will support the Constitution of the United States.

And of the state of Minnesota.

And of the state of Minnesota.

And faithfully discharge the duties of the office. And faithfully discharge the duties.

And faithfully discharge the duties.

Of the office of the Planning Commission.

Of the Office of the Planning Commission.

Of the City of Bloomington.

Of the City of Bloomington.

In the County of Hennepin.

In the County of Hennepin.

And the State of Minnesota.

And the State of Minnesota.

To the best of my judgment and ability.

To the best of my judgment and ability.

Congratulations and welcome to another three year term. All right. Moving right along into item two this evening, or I guess, Ooh, I forgot. We just redid these agendas for the, um, more compliant with other members of the public. Uh, so item two point or 2.1 is a development review. One-on-one study item presented by planning manager, Nick Johnson.

thank you acting chair cunningham so this item is really just intended for educational and discussion purposes i know you're very familiar with one phase of development review we're going to talk about four different phases this evening but i also don't want to make the assumption that people know every intricacy or every nuance or in the weed aspect of what we do here at the city of bloomington when we're reviewing development projects So please, I would encourage you to ask any question that comes to you, something that you've been wondering about, about projects in the city or elsewhere, and kind of get a sense of how we conduct our operations and how we do our business internal, mostly within a couple departments, but really across the full organization are involved in this effort as we go through it. So feel free to stop me if need be. Yeah, let's get going. Hopefully, I'll strike the right balance in terms of in the weeds level of depth. Maybe the mouse. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is our agenda. These are the things we're gonna talk about here. We're gonna talk about foundations of development review. So really what is the background information that's informing the city and its efforts to exercise these responsibilities. We're gonna talk about the review process itself and then at the very end, just briefly talk about things that staff is contemplating of how to improve our process, ways to make it more accessible to the public, make it more transparent or more clear. So first, this might be strange to bring up, but why do we do this work? Why do we plan? I thought it'd be inappropriate to not kind of discuss that just very first principle of why do we go to the effort of developing these complex land use policies and code requirements and all those things. And really, it's primarily for two reasons. When I share this with staff, it's like, why does zoning exist? First of all, it exists because private sites are served by public infrastructure, right? And so every site is served by a road, a sewer pipe, a water pipe, stormwater. There's all these different elements of the city, and you can think about it even just in other types of infrastructure like parks or other facilities that serve the community. EFFECTIVELY, WE HAVE ZONING BECAUSE WE HAVE TO ENSURE THAT ANY NEW PROJECTS ARE ABLE TO BE SERVED BY THIS INFRASTRUCTURE EFFECTIVELY WITHOUT COMPROMISING ITS USE FOR EXISTING PROPERTIES NEAR IT. SO EVERY PIPE HAS A CERTAIN DIAMETER OR CAPACITY. EVERY ROAD, ALTHOUGH SOME WOULD HAVE DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT WHAT THE TRUE CAPACITY SHOULD OR COULD BE, HAS A CERTAIN CAPACITY. WE NEED A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PARKS. The reason zoning and land use regulation to an extent exists is just to help ensure that we have adequate public infrastructure. So that's number one. The second piece, which really connects with our next cycle of the comprehensive plan is really that the cities need tools and regulatory mechanisms to kind of change and evolve and chart their new future over time. They need ways to set a new vision. Ultimately that starts with planning efforts like the comprehensive plan It comes down into it funnels down into regulations and code requirements, which also inform development review. Right. And there's other things like capital expenditures or capital investments and certain things that the city does. But, you know, it's it's useful for every person in member of the planning commission, but also planners and other folks involved in development just to kind of have that. maybe pedantic discussion about why we do this in the first place there's certain cities that have really reduced or limited the ways that they regulate land use and that has different benefits or consequences but just a just a way to start the conversation or kind of set the table of just why do we do this work and finally as it relates tonight development review is kind of the furthest thing downstream of that bigger question if that makes sense okay so um what does about effective development review look like um it's not on the slide but what i would first say is just and this is pretty important to the staff who work here is that we're in a relationship with the public right our capital with the public is trust right and so in order to make them feel uh maybe that they're listened to or that they're actually getting a true audience and that um its representatives are representing them effectively and working on their behalf, even if they don't agree with some of the decisions of what the code says or the comp plan says or those things, and some of them might do that, at the end of the day, they still know that staff who are reviewing projects and plans are doing so in an ethical and transparent manner. I think that's really important. So we're in a relationship, and a relationship is based on trust, and the trust is built over exercising this process in an effective and consistent way over time and not missing everything. Of course, we're human. We're not computers. We are going to miss certain things. That does happen. But it's really important that we're trying to maintain and uphold and build more trust with the public. BUT IN TERMS OF JUST ONE OF THE KEY BULLETS OF WHAT EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT REVIEW LOOKS LIKE, IT'S CONFIRMING COMPLIANCE WITH STATE LAW, THE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN, OTHER LAND USE POLICIES, AND THE CITY CODE. IT'S ENSURING THAT THERE'S ADEQUATE INFRASTRUCTURE, LIKE I TALKED ABOUT, TO SERVE DEVELOPMENT. AND IT'S UPHOLDING TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE PUBLIC, AND IT'S ALSO EXECUTING AN EFFICIENT PROCESS. So something that's been a particular point of emphasis for the city of Bloomington the last few years is trying to identify ways to streamline the review and approval process, not in a way that compromises the accuracy or the effectiveness of that process, but just lowers procedural barriers, rather, to development. Development is very expensive. I'll get into some of that a little bit later. But it's really difficult to get a project from point A all the way to point Z at the end of the road. It's hard enough as it is. So thinking about ways to make sure that we're having just enough review to effectively complete the process. So, again, building the foundations, what gives us the right to establish zoning regulations and to plan and do those things, it's under statute. So Minnesota statute gives municipalities the right to do planning and enact zoning. And so all of that authority rests in Minnesota statute. So I wanted to point that out first. I should have added to at the beginning that Kevin Tosky with legal is on this call, too, if you have questions of that nature. He's very knowledgeable about statute. And Brian Hanson and Julie Long, I believe, are on the call if you have any questions related to engineering, transportation, public works, those things. The next thing I want to point out in Minnesota statute that's fundamental in development review has to do with the agency action deadline. And some of this will maybe repeat some information that you all got in your onboarding and orientation, so forgive me, especially members who got it more recently. But them's the breaks. So state statute, Minnesota law, requires that development applications be processed generally in 60 days. Cities have the right to extend that deadline if they have substantive reasons, and they have to do so in writing to 120 days. And so within 120 days, municipalities have to make a decision about a development application, either approval or denial, one way or the other. The applicant has the right to extend that timeline further if they're still working through issues that have not been resolved within that timeline and they think they can revise their plans to get in compliance or gain approval. Sometimes the applicant will extend that deadline. But it's really important to understand, and that's why we front-loaded into a lot of our staff report documents, is always kind of what is the status of the agency action timeline. And it happens a little less so here at Planning Commission, but at City Council, if items are continued, that's the first thing that you'll notice that the city attorney will ask about is kind of what is the status of their deadline. How much time do we have as the city to make a decision? Also in state law is a lot of the baseline public hearing requirements Okay, so it talks about different types of actions that cities can take and it establishes that there must be a public hearing for these Application types and that's comprehensive plan adoption and amendments city code amendments rezoning conditional use permits and variances kind of The reason I say kind of is that the statute could be a little more clear about kind of a yes or no test, but the statute basically says yes, have a public hearing according to city code procedures. Bloomington does have a public hearing requirement for variances, but not to get too far in the weeds, but the language could be a little more clear on variances. So I'm adding it in the kind of category. Okay. The one thing I'll note about state law, so everything in the city code has to meet or can exceed state law. We can't be less than state law. So it's a meet or exceed test. And state law requires a public notice boundary for all these application types of 350 feet sent out to all property owners. I'll talk about what our procedures are. Maybe I've spoken about it in the past. But we exceed those requirements. I'll get into that detail later. So every city, at least cities, should outline their development review procedures very clearly in their city code. And for Bloomington, it's in the city code section 2150201. There's also a similar chapter or section in the platting and subdivision chapter of city code that outlines these procedures. But what we're trying to do with this table is be super clear about who the decision maker is for every application type, whether or not there's a public hearing requirement, whether or not there's a notice requirement, and who the reviewers are effectively for all these application types. So this is a very long table. This on your screen before you is just a snippet. of this table but every application type that is referenced in the zoning code is represented in this table and identifies who is responsible and the timeline and the hearing requirement and the notice boundary and those things one thing that used to be represented in this table was the application fee those have all gotten moved to appendix a of the city code but every application type also has a fee that the private applicant has to pay in order to get review and that's collected TO MAKE UP FOR ALL OF THE EXPENSE THAT THE CITY HAS INCURRED THROUGH THE REVIEW OF THAT APPLICATION. SO, YEAH. DID YOU ALL UNDERSTAND THOSE ACRONYMS? DRC, PC, CC, AND S FOR STAFF. GOOD DEAL. ALL RIGHT. DISCRETION. I'M GOING TO SPEND LESS TIME TALKING ABOUT THIS ONE BECAUSE WE TALKED ABOUT IT A LOT AT THE PLANNING COMMISSION ALREADY. But the main thing of takeaway of this piece is that every application type the city is either acting in a Legislative function or quasi judicial function legislating is just like it sounds like we're writing the new rules For the city and so the city has much more discretion for those things and that includes the comprehensive plan the zoning and subdivision ordinance Especially and that includes the zoning map is effectively legislating when you make zoning map amendments The other application types are all quasi-judicial for the most part. The plan developments kind of fall a little bit in between because it is subject to findings, but you are granting flexibility that's rooted in code. So technically it's quasi-judicial, but we'll talk about kind of who the reviewers are of these different application types in a second. But yeah, the rest of these are quasi-judicial. They're subject to specific findings of fact. It's a yes or no test. The city has less discretion, has some discretion to add conditions or make certain actions, but it has a little less discretion in comparison to the legislative application types. And all the way down to that that orange triangle at the top that's the least amount of discretion we have is really site plan review and building permits and that's effectively mostly being carried out on an administrative staff level. So we'll talk about that here in a second. But, yeah. So review at the city of Bloomington is primarily carried out by four groups or four parties. It's the city staff, the development review committee, it might seem odd to label that differently because that is a assemblage of city staff, but we'll kind of get into their formal function here in a minute. The planning commission and the city council. And again, the planning commission is responsible for making most of those, well, I get into that in a second here, so let me not get ahead of myself. Other external agencies are also involved in development review. So it's really important to highlight that, that the city is not the only entity that has regulations that must be abided by for land disturbing activity or other construction activity or other use types. So the most frequent and common one is local watershed districts. They regulate stormwater management. THEIR BOUNDARIES DO NOT FOLLOW MUNICIPAL BOUNDARIES. IT FOLLOWS WATERSHEDS, SO IT CAN BE A LITTLE BIT CONFUSING. IN BLOOMINGTON, FOR EXAMPLE, THERE'S FOUR WATERSHEDS. AND SO WHAT THE PERMITTING REQUIREMENTS ARE AND WHAT THAT REVIEW PROCESS LOOKS LIKE JUST DEPENDS ON WHICH WATERSHED THEY'RE LOCATED IN. Other external agencies might be at the state level or Hennepin County, for example. There's a lot of county roadways in Bloomington, like Penn Avenue, like France, like Old Shakopee, like Portland. So these all have access or right-of-way construction requirements that would have to be reviewed by an outside agency. The state has certain elements of development review as well, like MPCA, Minnesota Pollution Control, Minnesota Department of Health regulates water. There's other components at the state level that can come into play depending. There's also the Environmental Quality Board, which handles environmental review. Technically, cities are typically the responsible government units to execute that review, but they're kind of a host agency where environmental review is posted and kind of exercised in compliance with state rules and laws around that. Okay, city staff is pretty self-explanatory, so I'm not going to go into that in further detail, in so much as what I would say is that we pull in all the entities that we need to review the application, depending on the nature of the application. And we have a formal permitting software. It's called CityView that we use. And basically when applications come in, reviews are broadly assigned to all the different staff teams who are needing to review that based on what is happening with the application. So that all happens on an online system. The other thing I would say too is that there is, and this has grown in recent years with the streamlining ordinance, but there is some applications that are really just administrative. They will go through all four of the sequences of development review that I'll describe here in a minute. But at the end of the day, there is no other reviewer or entity other than staff and DRC sometimes in those particular situations. So I just want to identify. And for the application types that have the ability to be approved administratively, those roles or positions are identified in city code. Planning manager is one of them, the city engineer, the community development director. These are all positions that on different application types are As long as they meet certain criteria of typically scale, like number of units, size of building, those kinds of things, and no variances or flexibility are being requested, those can be approved administratively. The next group we'll talk about is the Development Review Committee, DRC. So you hear staff say DRC a lot, and that's one of our problems. That's one of our problems in this world is that we use too many acronyms, and our language is inaccessible. So keep that in mind. You can call me on that in the future. if you like. But DRC is a longstanding preliminary review entity at the City of Bloomington. It's been established for a very long time. It meets according to a regular schedule on Tuesday mornings. Applicants submit their preliminary application by a certain time and they can have it reviewed. So when we were trying to engage with small business community and trying to lower barriers and, you know, provide more resources for emerging developers, we created this video a couple years ago, and I'm going to try and play it, and I hope the technology works. We'll see.

Are you interested in starting a new business in Bloomington, or are you completing a large industrial or commercial project? If so, I'm here to introduce you to the City's Development Review Committee, or as we like to call it, DRC. I'm Barb Wolf, Assistant Port Authority Administrator, serving as a liaison to our business community. I'm here with some of my colleagues to introduce you to the DRC and what it's all about. The DRC ensures new developments and construction projects are safe and meet all city code requirements prior to the issuance of a building permit. To help you navigate what can sometimes be a complex or lengthy process, the DRC aims to create an accessible, collaborative, and efficient environment for applicants to learn everything they need to do to move their project forward. Let's meet DRC Chair Brian Hanson. Brian, can you tell us a little more about how the DRC works?

Sure. Hey, everybody. The DRC brings together representatives from all parts of the city that are involved in reviewing development applications and proposals. Those staff members include building and inspection, engineering, planning, utilities, fire, and police. The goal of the DRC is to make sure that all projects conform with building guidelines as well as fire and life safety requirements associated with the project.

The staff meets about twice a month to review development or building applications and hold meetings with applicants to address their questions. Our goal is to provide clear and complete feedback and speedy service to developers and new business owners in our community. There is no cost or application fee to request feedback on a project from the DRC. And this is Mike Centenario. He's a planning supervisor in our planning division. Mike, can you tell us a little bit about how a project gets reviewed in the DRC?

It all starts with a pre-application review. We ask that folks meet with staff to outline their ideas and what they're proposing. We recommend that they provide as much detail as possible, like plans or technical data. That way staff can do as best we can in providing feedback.

And that's a wrap. We hope this gives you a better picture of what the DRC does and how we can help you with your development projects. Bloomington City Staff's goal is to make this process as clear and collaborative as possible. We know that your development and business activity is essential to sustaining and building a desirable and vibrant community, and we're here to work with you. If you have any questions about development or construction activity, don't hesitate to reach out to our planning and building inspection divisions. Thanks for watching, and we look forward to working with you.

Okay, thank you for watching the video. I hope it was informative. It's probably hard to make that one a little spicy or enthralling, but I think it outlines the procedure very well. The last thing I guess I'll say about DRC is that one of the most frequent compliments we get about our process is about DRC from the development community. And the reason being is that some cities are a little bit less kind of established in terms of their procedures around preliminary review. And the pitfalls that that can create for development is that if one particular department or entity is not consulted during the pre-application review, it can create big headaches or problems later on in the process if there's a significant conflict with fire code. for example, that can really derail or put a wrench in the process. So we get a lot of good feedback about this process. I think it works very effectively. And as shared in the video, there's no cost to go through it. So in terms of just barriers, it's really intended to get people to know what all the potential review comments are and kind of what they're in for before they've spent money on architects and engineers and those kinds of things. So I'll move on here. So we've already talked about this a little bit, so I'm not going to spend too much time here. But again, Planning Commission and City Council are the two other review entities when it comes to development. And Planning Commission is primarily responsible to be the decision maker on quasi-judicial issues. uh actions most of them um and i said most because of that plan development uh wrinkle and then they are you are all our advisory on legislative actions so you're making recommendations to the city council on actions that are more legislative in nature and then the city council is the final decision maker on legislative actions comp plan amendments city code amendments rezoning plan developments Okay, getting into the actual process now. There's four stages of this process. No matter how big or small or kind of weird or eclectic a project may or may not be, they all go through this four-stage process. And so, as shared in the previous video, it really starts at the pre-application phase. It moves on to the formal development application phase. Then it gets on to permitting and then construction. You all, of course, are most familiar with the formal development application stage. That's the stage at which you see applications and where you exercise your duties and responsibilities in this four-step process. So pre-application, this typically starts with just a phone call or a visit to city hall or some type of contact connection from some property owner or developer or business owner to city staff. Planning staff is probably the most frequent recipient of these contacts, although they do go to other teams and departments depending on kind of who they are and what role they serve in the city. For example, it's very common for environmental health who works on food to work with restaurants as they're coming in, or that might be an initial point of contact. Or someone might contact building and inspections because that's where they think the process starts. So most often it comes into planning. There is plenty of folks who don't have an idea what planning does or what it is, and that's okay. But that's how it starts typically. Going from there, there's typically a pre-application DRC review. If a project is very straightforward and wouldn't benefit from that full team process, if it really only affects maybe two or three teams, again, this is folks in planning, and, you know, Brian Hanson in engineering is part of that, and Laura McCarthy, the fire marshal. Sometimes projects do not go to DRC if there's no benefit to do so. We don't want to add an extra process where it's not needed. One point I want to make about the pre-application process is that special studies, what am I talking about? Traffic studies, environmental review, you would associate those more with the formal development application review stage. But the reason that they're more in pre-application is because we won't accept a formal development application in some cases until those studies are complete. So if the city engineer or the planning manager or someone else determines that a parking study is needed, for example, or if the environmental review threshold is triggered at the pre-application stage, we explain to the applicant that this has to be done prior to and as part of the formal development application submittal. So some of this work is happening during the pre-application phase. And then getting to the submission, again, we have – this is super boring, so I probably shouldn't go into depth about it, but we have electronic plan review. When I started doing this professionally, everything was on paper. Poor Kinko's, they've lost a lot of business. but it has really improved the efficiency of our review on our end of things, and it's really reduced the cost. And frankly, from a sustainability standpoint, it's just a lot of unnecessary paper. And so everything is, most cities are moving to an electronic plan review using softwares like Bluebeam or others, kind of advanced PDF software to take measurements and do those things. So heading on from pre-DRC, the last point I'll make about, or not pre-DRC, pre-application, is that some projects don't make it out of pre-application. Some decide, you know what, I've gotten this whole list of review comments. This is a little bit more rigorous or difficult than I thought it was going to be, or it didn't meet my expectations for some reason. So it's just going to end there. And one comment I should make about the full or broader process is that you notice that I didn't put any timelines around it. Whereas the formal development application stage is consistently six, eight, ten weeks long. The pre-application stage can be very long, not because there's active work happening all throughout that, but it just has to do with their process, getting their financing in place. There's a number of different reasons that might drag out that pre-application process, or maybe they don't apply for a year from their first point of contact. It just really depends. So in this case, we have an application that wants to go forward. They go through the application submission process. A point I want to make about plans. So the plans that you're seeing in your packets, we don't often talk about this, but they represent effectively an 80% complete civil plan, meaning the design work that those professionals are doing, and they're done by licensed professionals. That was in the report a little bit in terms of the professional engineer license or architectural license. But the plans you're seeing at the stage of entitlements or zoning approvals is 80% civil is what's typical and a 40% architectural plan. And what that means is just there is so much more extensive architectural design work that is yet to be done that they wait to do until after they have their zoning approvals because it is so expensive, frankly. For the purposes of this discussion, it's not a statistically significant survey by any means, but I talked with three developers who completed large-scale multifamily projects in Bloomington more recently. So these are more rigorous, larger-scale development projects, so I do want to put that caveat on it. But I asked them to just talk with me about kind of the cost of preparing plans and materials and all the aspects of leading up to a formal development application up to this point. And the range that they all, and I talked to them independently, they weren't aware that I was contacting others, but... The range that they consistently reported on is that it costs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 to get to the stage of a formal development application for a large-scale development like a multifamily, like some of the multifamily projects you've seen in the last couple years. So architectural plans, again, then getting it to that full scale of a project of that type can cost up to a million dollars, believe it or not. So I don't say this to kind of scare you or I'm not trying to influence your decision making in any way. I just think it is, if we're going to talk about what the rigors of development and what this process actually looks like, this is an element that I think sometimes gets left out of the conversation. The next stage that staff does, we've received this application, okay, and we do a completeness review on it. Oftentimes, it's not uncommon that an application does not have all the required elements that we need for review. Under state law, this is in the same section as that agency action timeline. We have 15 business days to review an application for completeness. ALL DEVELOPMENT APPLICATIONS HAVE FOUR BASIC COMPONENTS. ONE IS AN APPLICATION FORM THAT HAS THE SIGNATURE OR AUTHORIZATION OF THE PROPERTY OWNER. ONE IS A PROJECT DESCRIPTION. THAT'S THE NARRATIVE THAT YOU SEE IN YOUR PACKETS KIND OF DESCRIBING THE INTENT AND KEY POINTS ABOUT THE PROJECT. THE THIRD POINT IS THE PLANS. I SPOKE ABOUT THAT. AND THE FOURTH THING IS THE APPLICATION FEES HAVE TO BE SATISFIED. THOSE ARE THE CORE ELEMENTS OF A COMPLETE APPLICATION. AND THEN WE CAN MOVE FORWARD. So once we have a complete application, then we have the ability to schedule the item. We line it up with an upcoming planning commission and or city council meeting if that's necessary. Unless, again, if it's an administrative application, we wouldn't do that. And then we start to prepare the public hearing notices. And so we establish what meeting it's going to. We start to prepare those notices and we get them out in the mail or we publish them in the Sun Current website. in order to make sure that we're complying with state law and our city code in terms of our notification requirements. So in addition to the notification piece, the analysis is really initiated once the application is complete. That's when we're getting all of the different staff departments to review plans, come up with their review comments. All of those review comments ultimately is what is entered into the staff report. That's what you see in the formal staff report. And that's also what informs the conditions of approval. and so all of these different members of city staff are reviewing the project for different lanes of responsibility like fire code building code zoning code food engineering again which is public infrastructure utilities police has a public safety component our parks and rec do track and review developments as well although more more so in the policy realm but um Yeah, all of that gets cobbled together. We prepare your agenda packets, and then we have the public meeting here in the chambers, typically, and that involves public hearings. And then you all deliberate. You take all this information you've received, including the information received from the public, and then you take action, typically. either for quasi-judicial or for legislative action. So this is the phase I should probably move on because this is the phase you're most familiar with, so I should probably keep moving here. Permitting, so the applicant feels really good because they got approval for their project, but their timeline or their process is not nearly close to over, unfortunately, for them. So as I mentioned, the architectural plans for larger scale projects, there's a significant amount of design work that's still yet to be done, including some additional civil design. And one of the things that informs a lot of the design work is the conditions, meeting the conditions of approval. So every civil plan, every utility plan, every signage and striping plan, the landscape plan, they all have to be approved by staff entities after the fact. So the version that you see very rarely, I would say, is the version you see in the packet, the final, final version, because there's little tweaks that are made. If you move a sewer pipe over here to satisfy engineering's comment, I can't have a tree there anymore. And so it's a very collaborative and iterative process on the design side that the private applicant is responsible for executing. But there's always changes between permitting or between the approval phase and as part of the review of the permit. Once they satisfy all those things and they have demonstrated compliance with the building code and the fire code and then they've paid all their fees, there's building permit fees, there's SACs, there's park dedications, there's different types of fees that have to be satisfied. There's SAC at the Metropolitan Council, there's those things. Once all those things are ready to go, the plans are stamped approved, the city is ready to issue the building permit. So they pay their last fee, we issue the building permit to them, and then they can start construction. One point I want to make is, I've gotten this question from the public a couple times, is that folks are allowed to install erosion control or start to mobilize before a permit is issued. And so, you know, some folks will express concern, you know, this just got approved, why are they setting stuff up on site? They haven't got through your review process. That's true. They are allowed to do that while they have an active building permit under review. It's just kind of getting the stage set, really. But they're not allowed to do active construction work, break ground, build things effectively. I meant to mention that at the beginning is that there's many different types of permits. Sometimes a project will all just be under one large building permit, effectively. There's some sub-permits to that. But other times, because the design is iterative and their arc design is trailing a little bit behind their civil design, sometimes what they'll do is apply for a grading permit to start. So that allows them to grade the site out. If they have a utility permit, then they can start to install utilities. And then effectively, they're kind of just still doing the finishing touches on the building itself. In terms of other types of sub permits, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, these are all components that are under the purview of the building official and their inspectors. And so those would all be reviewing with the complete architectural set of plans. It will make your head spin all the details. And if you've ever seen a full set of construction plans, it's a lot. And it's even hard to keep it all straight. So many details. So construction, the permit's out the door. This is when people are moving earth, they're building buildings, they're framing, they're pouring foundations, they're doing finishes, they're doing all the things that ultimately results in a development project. And this is managed by our building and inspection staff. Again, there's a whole assortment of different inspections for large scale projects that have to be completed on a routine basis. This is where we take questions or concerns about construction hours or things not being done correctly, or sometimes there's modest neighborhood or property line trespass. For example, a piece of equipment fell over here. These things happen, and our building and inspection staff works really hard at trying to resolve those things and fix them as quickly as they can. But inevitably, I guess my main point here, it's very difficult to build large-scale projects without there being some of these kind of MINOR EXTERNALITIES I GUESS I WOULD SAY THROUGH THE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS. IDEALLY THE GENERAL CONTRACTOR IS DOING A REALLY EFFECTIVE JOB OF MANAGING THE CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITY AROUND ADJACENT PROPERTIES SO THAT THEY'RE NOT IMPACTED. THAT'S REALLY THE KEY. AND IT'S OUR BUILDING AND INSPECTION STAFF TO MAKE SURE THAT THEY'RE FOLLOWING THOSE PRACTICES. I'm sorry, there's some weird stuff on this slide that doesn't belong there. I don't know how that got there. Apparently I was doing this too late right before the meeting, forgive me. But yeah, let's move on. Well, I'll say this about construction. Once the project has gone through all the inspections and is complete, what they're trying to get is called the certificate of occupancy. So some of our conditions, forgive me about that last slide. But what they're trying to get is the certificate of occupancy. It's called the C of O. If you look at our staff reports, sometimes a condition will say C of O. What that means is that that has to be resolved prior to people occupying the building for whatever the use is. It might be multifamily as homes. It might be a business opening up. It might be a whole variety of things. The point is that the certificate of occupancy is their legal right to be occupying the building according to what occupancy they applied for and what the building is under the building code. So that is the general sequence. And again, regardless of who the approval entity is, All projects pretty much go through that four sequence or stage process in order to do development. So it's rigorous. It takes time. It's costly. And at the same time, we're trying to strike the right balance by not creating regulatory barriers to make it impossible to proceed through this process. And we're trying to lower barriers, too, to make it more accessible and bring more activity as well. If you're trying to get more jobs or more housing or more of those things, the more difficult you make the process to get through, the more difficult it's going to be ultimately to get that done. So staff understands that. We recognize that. We're just trying to reach a balance point of ensuring health, safety, welfare, and compliance with these things while not making it overly rigorous. Robert's raising his hand. I don't know how you want to handle that.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Commissioner Coleman, you had a question?

Thank you, Chair. So I was wondering about after something is, say, approved by the city council, how long in general do they have to, for example, begin construction before they would have to come back and reapply?

Thank you.

Mr. Johnson, would you?

Chair, Commissioner Coleman, thank you for that really important question. So good question. Development approvals do have an expiration date. And if they do not start, if they don't get their building permit within two years typically is the typical time frame. It does vary a little bit from application type to application type. BUT TYPICALLY IT'S TWO YEARS FROM WHEN THEY GET THEIR DEVELOPMENT APPROVAL, THEY NEED TO SECURE A BUILDING PERMIT. THERE IS A COUPLE PROVISIONS WITHIN THE CITY CODE THAT ALLOW THEM TO SEEK AN EXTENSION. IN FACT, THERE'S ALLOWED TO SEE UP TO TWO ONE-YEAR EXTENSIONS. SO IN THE LONGEST CASE SCENARIO, IT COULD BE FOUR YEARS IN BETWEEN THE APPROVAL AND GETTING THE BUILDING PERMIT IF THEY WENT THROUGH THE PROCESS TO GET THE EXTENSIONS.

And follow up? Of course, Commissioner Coleman. I'm thinking of a few different projects that seem to be in that stage. Yes. Like Penn Lake City Homes, Penn and 80th or whatever it is. The next phase of Bloomington Central Station and South Town. Do you know like the status of each of those three offhand?

I do.

Mr. Johnson?

Chair, Commissioner Coleman, Penn Lake City Homes is still active, but will be expired very soon. So I anticipate that approval to be expired. And if they want to proceed with any development on that activity, or on that site rather, they would have to go back through the public hearing and development review process. THIS IS REALLY IN THE WEEDS, BUT THEY DO, ON THAT PARTICULAR SITE, THEY HAD AN ACTIVE GRADING PERMIT, AND SO IT'S UNDER THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE BUILDING OFFICIAL DURING THAT TIME. ONCE THE DEVELOPMENT APPROVALS EXPIRE, IT ACTUALLY WOULD TRANSITION BACK TO JUST TYPICAL PROPERTY MAINTENANCE CODE ENFORCEMENT AND THOSE THINGS. BUT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A USEFUL EDUCATIONAL POINT. So the other projects, BCS5 is expired. They'll have to go back through the process. South Town is not expired. Yep.

And then so like with Penn Lake City Homes, the zoning requirements have changed. So if it expires, they would have to meet the new standards, right? That's correct. It's basically completely started over?

You're starting over from scratch at that point.

Thank you.

All right. I don't know.

I apologize, sir. This is a study session only. If you have public comment.

I'm happy to talk to him after the meeting.

Yeah, you can stick around afterwards, speak to Planning Manager Johnson, or reach out via an email or telephone call to the Planning Department.

Oh, okay. I just wanted to talk in person about it.

At the end of this meeting, and I would assume the next two items will be relatively quick, Mr. Johnson can speak with you. Thank you.

Do you know about how much longer it will be?

Not entirely sure. Mr. Johnson, any, yes? 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

20 to 30 minutes. Yep. Thank you. Yeah, I'll try and go quick here on these next ones. But, no, I just want to talk about public notification. Of issues or questions we get from the public, this is one of the biggest issues or questions we get about is, is the city doing its public notification effectively or meeting state law or city code or, you know, those things. Yeah. I do want to talk through this a little bit. So in terms of timing, sometimes we get questions from the public, you know, why did you not notify me when this was at the pre-application stage of review? Totally legitimate question. I have empathy for that idea. It makes sense to me. It's a very sensical question to ask. The reason that we don't do that is threefold. One is because of the point I made that not all applications that go through pre-app review ultimately decide to pursue formal development application. And so rightly or wrongly, we don't want to make folks concerned or excited or whatever the case may be without knowing that they are going forward with a formal application, if that makes sense. The second piece of that is that we have typically when the city sends a notice to residents, it's because we're advertising a hearing, a public meeting where they can come, listen, learn, and testify, provide public testimony. At the pre-application stage, there's no hearing. There's no hearing date or meeting date yet been established. So the nature of the notification, if done so at that time, would just be, I guess, an awareness letter or a notification that they are been through preliminary review effectively. And then the final piece of that is that, I guess there's a fourth piece I'll say at the end, but the other piece of that is that we haven't collected any fees at this point. And so notice takes money. It takes public money to perform public notice. There's postage, there's publication fees from the newspaper. There's those things. And so if we were proactively noticing projects, not that it's so, you know, over the course of a year, it would be, you know, not an insignificant amount of money. But on an individual application basis, it might not be a significant amount of money to do so. But it would be at the expense of the public. The public, in effect, would be paying for that above and beyond notice because we have not collected any application fee at that point. the last point i'll make about it is that it's not required under state law and i hate to hide behind that it's not my intent to you know use that as a shield but effectively state law is what dictates what notice requirements are at the minimum level All cities, most cities that I'm aware of follow that. You can exceed state law requirements, and some cities do have requirements around neighborhood meetings for applications. I will say that. But even those that do, most of them do so at the point at which a formal application is filed, not for a pre-application stage. So just a little bit of piece about the timing. The other thing, I mean, I mentioned the timeline of pre-application can vary greatly. Sometimes we don't hear from folks for a year and a half. So you can imagine the kind of complexity of providing those notices to the public without any expectation or understanding about when things are going to happen. So getting just to the broader strokes of public notice, there's our legal responsibilities. There's noticing it in the paper. And both of these things have to be done 10 days before the hearing. It has to be published in the paper. And residents within a certain boundary, again, state requires 350 feet. Bloomington does 500. have to be sent a notice, typically a letter, although we've started doing a postcard, which is a good innovation. And that is our legal, meeting our legal requirements under state law and city code is noticing in the paper and doing a boundary notice to adjacent property owners. the additional forms of notice that the city does is that for larger scale projects or projects that meet certain criteria we will put a physical sign on the property so that neighbors when they're driving by they can see that sign and understand that something is happening here that's a picture of the sign on the slide it says land use proposal for more information go to the planning's website which includes all of our contact information and links to our kind of development review resources The other thing that we do is that we I'll show you a snippet of our development map For folks who are interested in development activity in the city in general You can always check click on our online interactive development map takes you through a number of different Like stages of the projects In addition to that is like is just being transparent and giving them tools to access information so on our online permit portal Again, it's a little bit technical or wonky, but you can search addresses in our permit portal, and all of that information is public at the development application stage. We also have e-subscribe, so oftentimes folks will want to know, how do I just get the planning commission or the city council packet sent to me for every single meeting? And the way to do that is to e-subscribe, is you will just get a link, and you can sign up for all the city's advisory boards and commissions online. Get as many of them as you want, just like other public agencies, and that will just auto-generate you a link to the packet every time for folks who want to know what's going on. So again, that gets back to building trust. So this is the development map. This is what it looks like. On this map, it gives you the location of the project. It gives you basic information about the project. It gives you the address. It gives you the case file number. It gives you a link to our portal page so that you can download plans and documents if you like. And then the four categories that our projects are listed under are under review, approved projects, under construction, and completed projects. So if you like, you literally can follow projects through the full spectrum of under review, through approval, through construction and completion on our development map. We make changes to it frequently and we try and keep it as up to date as possible. So this is kind of where I wrap up, and forgive me if this went longer than it needed to go. I just wasn't sure on the right level of detail. But improvement ideas, I would just say that the main ways that cities are improving, the ways that they handle their development review process, now I'm not talking about the regulations to actually adjust the review process. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how do we communicate and how do we make it easier. So as I mentioned before, planning and community development professionals are really bad at making our language accessible and just kind of walking people who haven't been through the process before, making sure that they're comfortable and knowledgeable and understanding about what they're doing. So that's definitely one way is just making sure that the way we communicate and our materials are accessible. The other thing that we're trying to do is just we're trying to overhaul our website. And for those of you who have been responsible for a website, you know the second that you publish it, it's out of date five minutes later. So that's the challenge is constantly refreshing things and making sure that it's providing the most up-to-date information. But I would say that we are trending in a positive direction, that we are making it more accessible and more kind of intuitive. That's the word I guess I'd use is like, you know, clicking on the things that residents and businesses want. It was previously organized and maybe a way a planner would want, but planner is not the audience of the city's planning website, right? So that's what we need. That's kind of the humility we need to attack it with. And that's what we need to be cognizant of and how we communicate with and just making it much more easy for folks to get information. This is part of a broader effort at the city to get in compliance with ADA. So all public agencies have to be in compliance with ADA document accessibility by April of next year. And so you're going to see more and more changes to our packets, to our public-facing documents and our websites and all of those things. Yeah, I guess that's what I would say about that. So if you have other ideas, I welcome them. But with that, I think that's the completion of my presentation. I'm happy to take any questions you have.

Excellent. Commissioner Coleman, any other questions?

I mean, if you're asking for ideas, two things that I've seen on the internet that relate to increasing the visibility about this kind of stuff is I think in Vancouver, they do a resident review at a similar stage to what we would do like the uh the DRC where like people can give like a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative like uh feedback on a project like early on in the process um not super sure how it works but um that's an idea that I've seen floated around and then there's something that they do in I believe in Switzerland where if there's like a building that they're going to build they like put out these tripods that have like a stick that shows you like kind of like the rough outline of a building just so that you can see like in real life like looking at it it's like oh so that's where that's the kind of stuff like that mountain would be blocked or maybe not so that it's not just like um on a thing on your phone you can look at it in real life and be like like there's like the little tripod outlining the and maybe it's like you know 20 feet up so you can kind of see the outline of the building in real life so those are things that i've seen on the internet that could be ideas

Thank you. And if I may speak to that. I appreciate that. And I think that tools like this will only increase with better technology, right? And so I think that's an interesting idea. The only thing I'll say, and some of this is kind of back and forth with the public a little bit about why not inform me at the preliminary review stage to an extent. is that it's not because we don't want public feedback. It's just that these two things are intention, making a review process not overly burdensome or so rigorous that it can't proceed through the process at an efficient pace. Those things are intention with more and more public feedback and public notice. I don't know where the right balance point is, and it doesn't always have to be intention, I guess, but some of it is intention, and I don't want to dismiss or forget that piece.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Any further questions, comments? Commissioner Summers.

Thank you, Chair. A couple of times this year, this past year, I saw applications come through that had the marks of AI on them. So a curiosity I have from your perspective or from the staff perspective is, is how has AI technology impacted the application process? And have you seen any information that in kind of that pre-application phase that seemed incorrect or false?

Mr. Johnson?

Thank you. Commissioner Summers, yes, we have. And it's more common in the written narratives or written documents that we see, although we have seen some architectural plans that are kind of stock or AI-generated plans. And the way that we would catch it is that it's not like the scale, the dimensions of the buildings are not matching up with what we're seeing on our civil plans, right? That's very rare. That hasn't happened very much. But I guess the bigger usage of it at this point is probably in the space of the project descriptions or written documents. As I mentioned before, you know, civil plans have to be prepared by a licensed civil engineer. So you can't really fake that. They have a license number. They have dates. On them, they have version numbers and all of those things. Same with the architectural plans. In the example I mentioned for an architectural plan, it was more of a concept plan of what would be developed on a site. So at that stage, you know, you're not issuing a building permit. You don't need all their licensure information yet at that point. But, yeah, it's a challenge, and I think more and more, coming at it from the opposite end, more and more cities are contemplating its usage or deployment in development review. I guess all I would say about that at this point, not that we've done extensive tests or research on it, but the ones that we have done have missed things in our code and maybe don't understand all the nuances between the different departments of, again, served by public infrastructure. like, hey, this meets your zoning code perfectly, doesn't work with our utility department or whatever the case may be. So, yeah, the more basic questions maybe someday, but I would say not yet.

One thing to add, just as someone who works for a private land developer, civil site plans, architectural renderings, things like that, people use AI as kind of an idea checker THERE'S SOFTWARES THAT ARE JUST, HERE'S A PIECE OF DIRT FROM A GIS SYSTEM. HOW CAN I, WHAT ARE THE SETBACKS IN THE CODE? HOW DO I PUT THE MAXIMUM BUILDING HERE? BUT TO KIND OF ECHO OFF WHAT PLANNING MANAGER JOHNSON SAID, you still need stamped sealed drawings and former chair Cookton is a licensed professional engineer and he has the pinky ring to prove it and when you are stamping and signing drawings you also need to carry a large amount of errors and omissions insurance and there's also an ethical code of conduct and so I think that that's hopefully a good stop gap on non-human or non-professional generated plans. ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? I'M SO USED TO SAYING THANK YOU, CHAIR, AFTER I FINISH A BOGUS STATEMENT. ALL RIGHT. NO FURTHER QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS OR ANYTHING? THANK YOU FOR THAT VERY INFORMATIVE AND THOROUGH REVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. IT'S ALWAYS GOOD FOR US TO GET A REFRESHER ON IT AND FOR THE THOUSANDS WATCHING AT HOME TO to learn more about how buildings or how development is done in the city. We'll move on to item 2.2, which is our annual review of rules and procedures. And Mr. Johnson, I believe you also have the staff report for this one.

i do think you uh... acting chair cunningham so this is just an annual kind of business item or housecleaning that were required to do under our rules of procedure uh... we're gonna talk about expert take on uh... contacts and conflicts of interest uh... briefly uh... But so in the city code, it states that each commission has to develop a rule as a procedure. It really is the outline or roadmap for how you conduct your meetings, where you conduct them, what times, the officers who manage your meetings, and the procedures that really govern how you conduct your meetings. There's obviously a lot of rules around how you conduct your public hearings and your meetings and those things. So everybody has to have it. Just to note that the city council ultimately is the one entity responsible for approving your rules of procedure if there are any amendments. But the planning commission rules require that you review them every year. And that's what that slide says. So forgive me. In August, so effectively at some point in August, you have to have an organizational meeting. And those are the items we're taking care of right now in addition to the future item of the election of officers. So here's the agenda. Again, ex parte conflicts and conflicts of interest, and then we'll just open it up to you to see if there's any aspect of the rules of procedure that are concerning or problematic or need review from your standpoint. So ex parte contacts. I hate to read directly off the slide, but it's the most fast and effective way. Ex parte contacts are communications from applicants or interested parties or interested members of the public with commissioners outside of the public record. In the interest of keeping all Commission discussion on the application within the public record and to avoid the perception of undue influence, ex parte contacts on matters before the Commission should be avoided. When ex parte contacts occur, they should be disclosed prior to the Commission's discussion of a given item. So, obviously, you're all community members. People know you serve on the planning commission. You might actually live near a project of interest or see someone at the grocery store, and they might ask you a question about a particular project. Most of this is kind of just innocent chatter or just, hey, what's going on? But if you feel like people are trying to provide you information that is relevant to the record, I think that's where your kind of spidey senses have to go up here a little bit, or if an applicant is reaching out to you to share information that's not reflected in their materials, that's also problematic. So I think the spirit of this one is just making sure that you're conducting all your business at your scheduled meetings and out in the open and out in public. Same concept or theory of staff trying to be really effective and transparent and accurate in our development review. You doing all of your business out in the public helps build that relationship of trust with the public so that they know that you're working on their behalf in good faith and not kind of being swayed or influenced with any kind of conversations or information that's happening outside of the meeting, if that makes sense. it's all out in the open is there any questions about that pretty clear veterans all right um conflicts of interest we talk about three basic layers of conflict classic contra conflict um hard to make a decision conflict and perception conflicts but the rules uh note that conflicts of interest arise from any actual or potential benefits that a commissioner spouse family member person living in the household might directly or indirectly obtain from a planning decision. A commissioner may consult with the planning manager or city attorney to determine whether an actual or potential conflict of interest exists. Commissioners shall disclose any conflicts of interest in a matter before the commission, shall abstain completely from direct or indirect participation in any matter in which they have a conflict, and shall leave any chamber when such matter is under deliberation. I want to highlight the idea about abstaining from direct or indirect participation. Talking to your fellow commissioner about something that you have a conflict in is indirect participation, just to make that clear. So it's not just about not participating in the live meeting. It's really trying to guard, keep yourself from that application entirely. The direct conflict is when you have that financial benefit for you or a family member, someone in your household. The other ones are harder. That one's the easy one to understand, and most people don't have questions about that. It's the ones around, it makes, I have a conflict that makes it hard for me to make an objective decision. Or there's a issue of perception that I am in cahoots with the applicant or I am biased in some way that's not going to allow me to participate and fulfill my duties. Those are the two that are not under law necessarily conflicts. Most often time you can participate. But we encourage you to talk through it with myself or Kevin Tosky. And Kevin is online. Kevin, I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that basic description.

No, I just wanted to thanks Nick, um, commissioners and chair, um, just come to us early. If you think you have an issue with any financial or other conflict of interest, um, it's always easy to talk them out on the front end. Just have a short, quick discussion. Um, it's come up over the past couple of years, uh, on the planning commission, but also on a couple other commissions. So it does come up. Um, Yeah, and we can talk about it like the week before or whatever and just kind of figure things out. It's much easier to do that than if you show up at the meeting and tell us you think you have a conflict, because then we have to figure out, you know, do we still have a quorum and do different calculations like that. So if you know of something coming up that you think causes an issue, just let Nick know and we can talk it through. So that's all. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Toski. One thing I'll add on that is City staff is extremely helpful if you think you have a conflict. For example, an applicant's legal representation is someone you know. I've asked that question before. Always better to ask, err on the side of caution, keep the public trust. Thank you, Mr. Johnson.

So here's where we would just open the discussion up to you all. But just to make clear that you do have to make a formal motion to adopt the rules on an annual basis. And I have that motion available if you want to do that. But first, I guess just where Kevin and I stand ready to take any questions you might have or if you want to suggest any amendments. I guess I'd ask last that the most recent amendments to this document was last year. We did go through a number of amendments at quite great granular length, but that doesn't mean that maybe we missed something or maybe there's something that's of interest to you. So I open it up for your direction.

Yeah. Commissioners, any proposed amendments having read through the packet, any thoughts, discussion topics? Commissioner Munster.

I just have a question. With commission terms expiring on June 30th, why do we wait until August for the organizational meeting?

Mr. Johnson.

It's a fair question. I don't know the answer to that, frankly. I think, for starters, maybe it allows the new commissioners to get their legs underneath them and not have to kind of contend with those procedural requirements right in the beginning. But I don't know the history behind that, to be frank. I know someone who could probably tell me, and I'd probably reach out to them.

Commissioner Munster.

And just fair enough. I wasn't proposing a change. I was just curious as to if there was a reason.

I had one proposed change on item 3.3 letter G. We went round and round on this last year. So if I am outnumbered, I am happy to withdraw this. But At the end of the first sentence which reads, prior to the beginning of the hearing, the chair may establish a time limit for public testimony. We typically do three minutes, sometimes five minutes. We already have the 11 o'clock, you know, end of the meeting. like we'll be done at 11 and we'll continue items forward. I would propose to put in a no less than three minute, in that sense with no less than three minutes, just so that folks that are preparing at home to testify publicly have a guardrail of how long the chair will give them to speak. Thoughts on that? Commissioner Munster.

I'm certainly not opposed to that. Personally, I would be more in favor of just setting a time instead of it being flexible, depending on what the agenda looks like, how many people show up. Just simply put a time in the rules, whether it's three minutes or five minutes or whatever that number is.

Thank you. Mr. Johnson or Mr. Tosky. Yeah. I apologize for not, it's my own suggestion. I didn't do any research into the code or laws. Are we required to have this flexibility by some sort of ordinance or code or anything along those lines?

Yeah, Kevin, you can step in if I err, but no, you are not. You're not required to identify what the specific time amount is. My quick reaction is I don't think that your proposed amendment causes any harm or creates any problems. To the point that Commissioner Munster made, the only thing I would share with that, and this is more related to the previous chairs, but when there is a lower attendance situation at city council, they typically granted more time when there was not a competition or a lack of time to fight for, for lack of a better term. So that's why they didn't want a specific number in there is because they wanted the ability or the authority to extend that as opposed to just three minutes, whether there's one person in the chambers or a 50 person in the chambers.

Yeah, chair and commissioners. I think, you know, the only thing, the only emphasis I have is that it has to be clear in policy or announced to the public at the meeting and then uniformly enforced. So you see that language about, um, uniformly enforcing the rules and that in the rest of the text of that subsection. So, um, as long as it's clear, I mean, you could put no less than three minutes or have the actual time limit in the rules. As long as we're clear about enforcing it, it's fine.

I would be comfortable, I'll get to you in just a second Commissioner Coleman, I'd be comfortable with a minimum amount of time allotted per member of the public that is taking time out of their day to come speak. I don't know if I'd want to have a cap or a hard setting purely because sometimes you do have a few very passionate individuals that want to make sure their voice is heard. Commissioner Coleman, I think you had a thought as well.

Yeah, I do think having a minimum, like I'm thinking of LA where sometimes the amount of time people get is like 30 seconds. And in a city like Bloomington, I don't think we'll ever have that issue unless we're hosting in a different location. Like I know sometimes in the past, you have to bring things into the theater because there's so many people. I don't think that that's very likely, so I think that a three minute minimum makes sense. Just to make sure that there isn't, I mean, I'm not saying that there is gonna be shenanigans relating to it, but I think consistency makes sense. Mr. Johnson.

If I may, and again, I don't want to sway the outcome. I only, just because it's a recent example, the city council had a public comment period recently on Nine Mile Creek. It's a project of significant interest. They had a one-hour public comment period where they allowed speakers up to 30 speakers up to two minutes. I think the projects that I can think of in the past that had that number of speakers is very rare. And so, again, your proposed language wouldn't give me any pause in any way, only in so much as I can think back to the Target application many years ago. I think that there was over 50 or 70, a very high number of So, again, I have no problem there. Just only referencing this more recent example at the city council level where they set a two-minute limit.

So just putting that data point out there. Understood. I'm just thinking through the thought process of my suggestion. Sorry, I'm dragging this item out, everybody. I'll get just one second, Commissioner White. I... Mr. Tosky, this is more of a question for you. We want these rules and procedures to be very black and white, granular, clear and concise, correct?

Yeah, Chair, Commissioner's correct. If there is the flexibility that's in code now, like it's up to the chair at the meeting to announce what the time limit will be for that hearing and then just so everybody all knows, hey, it's gonna be three, four minutes or whatever it might be for this item. You just have to be clear about that. Now, if it's in code with a specific number or a minimum, just that's what the number is then, so.

Commissioner White?

Thank you, Chair. I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate the intent behind both suggestions from Commissioner Monster and from yourself about offering clarity for the audience. I do have just concerns about the unknown and needing to manage our time efficiently and make sure that the maximum number of voices are heard. So part of me prefers to just leave it to the discretion of the chair, but I understand some of the potential frustration with that. I think that if we do put something and I think it should be a minimum not a maximum just as you said for sort of planning purposes but it does I will just say it does make me a little nervous to commit to that with unknown agendas unknown issues in the future so.

Good point. Commissioner Summers.

Thank you chair. I think this is a question for staff. What And you might not know off the top of your head, but my interest would be to keep this text aligned with similar text for participating in city council hearings. I know that there's a little bit of a difference there, but my hope would be that someone who is coming to the planning commission to voice their opinion if something is going on to the city council they might also be going to the city council meeting so this could potentially for newer folks be a place where they are practicing interacting with our city government and at a time when they might be really charged up in some way about something happening in their neighborhood or in bloomington so making sure that it's not different that they're showing up to city council and it seems really different than what happened at planning commission. So I'm wondering, do you know the city council?

Yeah, thank you. And Kevin, if you, I don't have the city council's rules of procedure in front of me, but what I would say generally is that they allow a speaker to have five minutes and one opportunity to testify they don't allow speakers to go up multiple times under any circumstance and generally they allow five minutes but as i mentioned before there is special circumstances where they have changed that time but their standard public testimony rule is five minutes one one time so it is different but the procedures are all effectively the same beyond that

Commissioner Coleman? If we want to, oh, Mr. Toskey, please go first.

Sorry, yeah, Chair and Commissioners, I looked up the council rules just to make sure they're all on the same page here. But the council rules say that people have to address the council no more than three minutes unless a longer period of time is permitted by the presiding officer or by a vote of the council and is uniformly enforced. So it's kind of a minimum rule. or sorry, a maximum of no more than three minutes unless the mayor says longer, so.

Thank you, Mr. Tosky. Which was actually kind of what I was thinking of, setting a typical as opposed to a minimum so that people can expect maybe three minutes and say they can prepare for three minutes and then if it happens on the day, you just explain like, hey, because there's so many people, I'm going to, you know, use the chair's ability to reduce it or to expand it, just so that people have something to expect, but not necessarily be locked into it.

Yeah, I know I'm not supposed to have too many opinions as chair, but now I'm feeling like I shouldn't have brought this up and I've wasted 10 minutes of everyone's time. I think that the way it's written right now, and I know we went round and round on this last year, and we're just going to maybe end up at the same spot. But I think that our typical is three minutes. People that have seen the more contentious hearings, it's almost always three minutes. Since I've been on the commission, it's always been three for larger groups. And the ability at the end to authorize additional testimony, we just had it last week or last meeting about a month ago now. But I think that maybe just keeping it as is, keeping it in line with as close to in line with the city council rules as we have it written I think that I'd be comfortable with it I'd be comfortable with drawing my suggestion I guess if unless someone else feels strongly seeing no strong opinions I formally withdraw that idea thank you all for your time so as mr. Johnson stated if there's no other sections of the rules and procedures that were updated last year there is a We do need to make a motion on this tonight if Mr. Johnson could pull that up. Commissioner Munster.

I move to adopt the Planning Commission rules of procedure as presented with no amendments. Second.

We have a motion and a second to adopt the Planning Commission rules and procedures as presented. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? That motion passes 6-0. Moving on to item 2.3 this evening is the Planning Commission Election of Officers, which I believe, Mr. Johnson, you're also quarterbacking that one.

I am. Thank you, Acting Chair Cunningham. So it's our annual election of officers. Let me share this slide here again. Not many slides, I promise. If I could figure this out here. Oh, I can't figure it out. Okay. So again, this is in your rules of procedure, but annually at your organizational meeting, you need to pick three officials. You need to pick the chair, the vice chair, and the secretary. So those are the three actions we'll ask you to make in that subsequent order. The first two of these actions are performed through a secret ballot, and you vote for who your chair will be. So you should have ballots in front of you. If you don't have a ballot in front of you, let me know, or let Shante or Serena know. But last year, the way, I'll make a quite stipular, a quick change to how we did it last year. So last year, we actually asked people to formally nominate themselves for these positions. After reviewing prior years and reviewing the rules of procedure, you actually don't have to formally nominate yourself, just to be clear. The way that this process has been handled previously is that we first would ask if there are any members who do not want to serve as chair. And that way your fellow commissioners know not to vote for you because you have clearly expressed that you do not want to act as chair. And we would do the same process for vice chair. In other words, you'd be unwilling to serve in the position. If you're neutral, maybe the door's open a little bit, but yeah, express your unwillingness. In addition to that, though, we, and also in past years, have been open to people expressing themselves if they want to serve in a particular position. So it kind of goes both ways. But I say that all to mean that you can vote for someone, if you want, who hasn't verbally expressed an interest to serve in that position so long as they haven't expressed an unwillingness to serve in that position. Does that make sense? I made a mockery of that. I'm sorry. Don't vote for people who say, I will not serve in that position or I don't want to.

Commissioner White.

So just to clarify, thank you, Chair, we don't require a formal nomination either by the individual or by anyone else.

You do not.

Everyone is given the opportunity to say that they do not wish to be considered and would not serve before the ballot is cast. Or you can say that you are interested in serving, but you're not required to. You can also say nothing. You can say nothing. And you can vote for anyone for the office as long as they have not specifically said they would not serve in advance.

That's correct. Explain that much better than I did.

It has to be one of us, right?

Correct.

You said anyone. It would be in poor taste to elect Commissioner Linnaeus in absentia.

um those are your relationships to manage i guess yes all right it says from its membership she's a member yeah it's not at the public meeting so i hesitate to it's a study item and um she has not spoken to me about i guess i would just share she has not spoken to me about this particular opportunity she spoke to me at length at the end of the last meeting about this um

She said that she had a long enough career as a diplomat and does not want to be the chair of any formal commission. In as many words. I'll kick us off. I'm acting chair right now as vice chair last year. I'm fine being chair. It's not something I need to do or strive to be. As you guys can see, I do it a little differently than Chair Cookton or Chair Albrecht, who was before him. I also travel for work. So I do make the requirements to be here as much as possible. I try to be at every meeting. But I can't have a perfect attendance like Phil did even when he was in Detroit. I mean, he called in. And so just if you guys would like to elect me chair, just make sure that whoever is also comfortable being vice chair is comfortable pinch hitting for call it 10% of meetings. My goal this year. Commissioner Issa, any thoughts on your electoral prospects? Yeah, thank you.

I would just say, we're just talking about chair right now, just to be clear. This is a sequence and the first action is just talking about chair. And just as a reminder, you don't have to speak. You can speak either way or the other.

Thank you. No, I'm not interested in chair. I am interested in vice chair. So I just want to throw that out there.

Sounds good. Thank you. Commissioner White.

Please do not vote for me for chair. I will not accept.

Thank you. Commissioner Munster.

I am fine if so elected, but I'm not particularly striving for either.

Commissioner Summers.

I would prefer not to serve as chair this year, but would be open to it in the future.

Commissioner Coleman.

I would like to stay my opposition for now due to being the lowest in seniority. So thank you.

All right. Forgive me.

Thank you for doing that. And now you can vote. You can vote for chair. We're voting for the position of chair. So write down the name of the person that you want to serve as chair of the planning commission. And then planning intern Serena Erickson will collect your ballots as you are complete. And then I will review the results. And then Secretary Brown will announce the results.

The Planning Commissioner Chair for the calendar year of 2026 to 2027 is Kevin Cunningham.

Thank you all for the confidence. I hope it's not misplaced. We'll move on to Vice Chair, where I don't have to say anything. Commissioner Issa, would you like to share any thoughts on if you're interested in being Vice Chair or not?

Yeah, thank you, Chair Cunningham. Yeah, I am interested in becoming vice chair, so thank you.

Commissioner White.

Please do not vote for me for vice chair. I will not accept.

Thank you.

Commissioner Munster.

Again, I have no particular interest one way or the other, but I'm not opposed.

Thank you. Commissioner Summers.

I would prefer not this year but in the future leadership I could handle but not this year.

And Commissioner Coleman. I again am not interested in being vice chair due to being the lowest in seniority.

Thank you all for your honest opinions. You may now write your vote

Yep, you have a ballot in front of you. Please write down the commissioner that you would like to serve as vice chair. And again, Serena Erickson will collect your ballots and we'll follow the same process. Thank you.

The Planning Commission Vice Chair for the calendar year of 2026 to 2027 is Abdi Isay.

All right, thank you, Chair Cunningham, and congratulations to you and Vice Chair Isay. We'll move on to the third appointment, and that is the appointment of the Planning Commission Secretary. So there's a suggested language there on the screen, and staff recommends Shante Brown. It's actually an appointment by the Planning Commission Chair and a voice vote.

All right. We'll put the pens down, everybody. I move to appoint Shante Brown to be the Secretary of the Planning Commission for the 2026-2027 calendar year. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? That motion passes 6-0. Congratulations, Ms. Brown.

Thank you, guys. Okay, thank you so much.

Moving on to item three. There you go. Point one, we are considering the Planning Commission meeting synopsis for what date? July 9th. July 9th. Thank you, Planning Manager Johnson. We had five out of six commissioners present, and I would entertain a motion to approve the draft planning commission meeting synopsis as posted in the packet.

Second.

So moved.

So moved. Second.

We have a motion and a second to approve the July 9th planning commission meeting synopsis. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain?

Abstain.

Apologies for saying that we only had one commissioner absent. We did have two. That motion passes 4-0 with two abstinations. Last but not least on our agenda tonight is the regular policy and issues update from planning manager Johnson.

Thank you, Chair Cunningham. So just previewing upcoming meetings. August 20th meeting, there'll be two public hearings. There's a conditional use permit for a cannabis manufacturing and indoor agriculture cultivation facility located at 9130 Grand Avenue South. And then the second item on that agenda is a public hearing for the James Avenue detached townhomes. So it's a rezoning final site and building plans, a type three plat for a nine unit detached townhome. Villa lot development at 9025 and 9033 James Avenue South. Previewing the September 3rd meeting, there are three public hearings scheduled. One is a privately initiated city code amendment to allow sports training facilities as a permitted use. IN THE FD2 ZONING DISTRICT. AND THE SECOND PUBLIC HEARING WILL BE THE ANNUAL MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES ORDINANCE CLEANUP ITEMS AND THIRD PUBLIC HEARING THE ANNUAL MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES ORDINANCE MINOR POLICY ITEMS. WE'RE SEPARATING THOSE OUT INTO TWO SEPARATE HEARINGS FOR PROCEDURAL REASONS. The only other agenda or update which I shared before the meeting was just that the Minnesota State Planning Conference, Minnesota APA chapter conference is in Mankato in October of this year. I'll send you those dates for potential training opportunity. And follow up with me if you have any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Any questions for staff? Commissioner Coleman.

Thank you, Chair. I have been very busy this week. So Planning Manager Johnson, could you share what the City Council action on the townhomes that we recommended approval at the last meeting of the Planning Commission?

I can. Chair Cunningham, Commissioner Coleman. So there was a fair amount of discussion at the council level about that case. And there was some discussion around making some design changes to that project. So the applicant has taken that direction. They did formally postpone consideration of that application until the August 31st city council meeting. They did hold the public hearing and close the hearing. So they're bringing that item will go back to the city council on August 31st.

I only I literally just watched the video of the like the actual vote. I didn't watch any of the rest of it. From what I understand, the thing that the council is asking for is for them to proceed without a rezoning. Is that correct?

Yeah, Chair, Commissioner Coleman, I think that that was reflected in the formal motion technically, but I think it was for the applicant's consideration of potential as it informed potential design changes. One council member was indicating a desire or support behind potentially some of these new missing middle housing lots or I should say use types so I think you know every design or every development review process as we discussed tonight is iterative so I'm sure they'll take some feedback from the city council and make it's their private decision on what to bring back for their subsequent discussion or action.

Did the council say that R3 was inappropriate for the site or did they just heavily nudge towards Something that doesn't something that is within our one. Yeah.

Yeah chair Commissioner Coleman again I don't want to be in the position of speaking for the council and so much as I was an observer, of course But I'm to your specific question. I don't think there was expressed words said that r3 was inappropriate for the site I think most of the feedback was on the specific development. But again, I don't want to speak for the City Council. I

And I'm not trying to throw my new chair powers around, but since it's still an ongoing development application, I think it might be best to not comment on it too heavily in a public forum.

I would agree with that, and Kevin Tosky would be the correct person to provide more further guidance if needed. If not, but yeah, I agree with that statement.

But we will certainly, if you could make a note to keep us updated on that and any other applications that go from us to city council, that would be. It's always great to hear about the work we do here, the recommendations we make here. becoming final decisions of the city council. Any other questions for staff? Coleman?

I do want to mention that in our rules of procedure, it says that the chair can make a written or in-person statement to the council attached to that. I wonder if the commission would be interested in doing that. Because I think that I... I felt pretty strongly at the last meeting about R3 being an appropriate use of that site and if the council does not agree then I think that making our voice more heard isn't a bad thing and in a way that the planning commission rules of procedure allows.

I would be open to any discussion on that. Thanks for voicing your opinion, Commissioner Coleman. Specifically from those that were at the meeting. So apologies, Commissioner Summers and White. Commissioner Munster.

I would be of the position that the vote of the commission reflects its position.

Noted.

Again, it's your business. It's your decision to make as a body. All I can say is staff who present these applications before them, we certainly do try to capture and communicate what the actions of the commission are as clearly and thoroughly as possible. And that's very highly reflected in the staff report, I would say as well. And we also attach the meeting minutes from your draft, the draft meeting minutes from your meetings if they have not yet been adopted yet. So just a couple points there, procedural points.

All right. With, I guess, Commissioner Coleman, did that satisfy your curiosity? I tend to agree with Commissioner Munster that our vote, which I think was unanimous on all of those, 5-0. is a pretty strong recommendation from us. There were no findings against our opinion, and I did watch the city council meeting. I don't always watch, but I watched that one, made it through the public hearing for the Oak Savannah development at Nine Mile Creek to get to the end of there. I think that our vote was a pretty strong, resounding approval of densifying those lots that have been guided that way for as long as they had been. But anything else you'd like to add, Commissioner Coleman? No, it's all right. Thank you.

All right. Any further questions, comments, discussion?

With that, we will close this August 6th meeting of the Bloomington Planning Commission. Good night.