Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Welcome everyone. I call the March 18, 2026 planning commission meeting to order. The main purpose of tonight's meeting is to hold study sessions on the transfer development price LCIP project, the housing action plan development update, and the downtown sub area plan update. Before we move on to agenda items, I'd like to acknowledge our hybrid meeting format. City of both is providing the option to attend this meeting either in person or remotely via Zoom. For those participating via Zoom, the chat and question functions are not available for use to ensure compliance with the Open Public Meetings Act. We have a public comment agenda item at the beginning of the meeting. Please limit all comments to 3 minutes. Please note that the city of Buffalo does not tolerate verbal harassment. Remember this during your comments. Public comment will be allowed both in person and via Zoom. Those wishing to comment via Zoom were asked to submit an online form by 3 p.m. today. People wishing to submit written comments were also asked to submit those comments by 3 p.m. Email was encouraged as well and will be acknowledged. Those in attendance may also make comments and have been asked to indicate their desire to comment on the sign-in sheets. The Imagine Baffle notice, city website, and tonight's agenda all provided information to the public for providing comments. Video of this meeting will be streamed live as well as recorded and available for later viewing on the city's YouTube channel. A call-in number was provided on the meeting agenda for members of the public who wish to call in by phone to listen to the me listen live to the meeting. For phone callers during staff presentations, staff will make every effort to specify which materials they're referencing so that everyone can follow along. this point we'll take a moment to acknowledge the attendance of the commissioners. Commissioner Jones

here. Commissioner Westerbeck here. Commissioner Lever here. Commissioner Robson here.

Commissioner Sills is absent and excused. And Commissioner Gustoson is absent and excused. Also attending we have uh community development dire deputy director gates Cameron Calvin senior planning Ray Sosa senior planning Jacqueline Samson planner and Morgan Shup director of Eco Northwest before we begin I'd like to reiterate some meeting guidelines for all meeting attendees. Please speak clearly and pause frequently. State your name each time before speaking. Mute your microphone when not speaking. And if you are streaming the live video feed, please turn the sound off as there is delay. For commissioners, at specific breaks in the presentation, I'll be calling on members who wish to speak or ask a question. If you want to speak, please indicate this by raising your hand and I will call on you as I see you. This will help avoid the problem of having two people speaking at the same time. Identify yourself before you ask a question. Make a motion, second a motion, or participate in debate. Please mute your microphone when not speaking. First item on the agenda is public comment. The city has accepted visitor comment in writing as well as accepted signin sheets for those who wish to speak at tonight's meeting. Since there is no one in the audience, I expect we have no comments there. Uh have we received any email comments?

No email comments were received. Uh there is one member in the audience uh Zoom in and the Zoom uh waiting room that if they would like to indicate a desire to speak, they could press the raise hand function and we can panel them in. We'll wait a moment for that. It does not look like they want to speak tonight. All right. Thank you. So, there are no public comments. With that, we'll move on to approval of the February 6th minutes. Is there a motion to approve the February 6th minutes? Commissioner Robson. Motion to approve. Is there a second? Second.

Uh Commissioner Lever is seconded. Uh any comments on the minutes? Seeing none, all in favor of approval of se February 6 minutes indicator saying I. I.

Minutes are approved unanimously. Uh that moves us on to our primary agenda item, the study session. Our first study session will be regarding the uh transportation impact fee and municipal code title 17 updates. No, that's wrong notes. I pulled up the wrong agenda. Our first item, come on. First item will be transfer development rights, the LC LIP project.

Hi everyone. Um it's good to be back. Um my name is Jaclyn Samson. I'm a planner here in community development. And today I'm joined with Morgan Shook who is a director at Eco Northwest. And today um we will be discussing the TDR or transfer development rights and lo um elip or landscape conservation and local infrastructure program study. Um so let me just keep on moving. So council action today. Um no action required. Um the planning commission will be briefed by city staff, the Washington State Department of Commerce and Eco Northwest on their transfer development rights and LC club feasibility analysis. Um so these are some discussion questions we have today um just to guide some um the conversations we'll have after the presentation, but also feel free to ask any other questions that you may have um on the study. So now I'm just going to turn it over to Morgan.

Great. Thank you very much, Jacqueline. Uh again, Morgan Shook. I'm a director of Echo Northwest, but I would say in this capacity, I am wearing the hat of a lead technical team um uh that uh is providing assistance to the city of both via a grant uh from the Department of Commerce. Um and so uh the city was um I would say recruited and had a conversation uh on trying to align the state's interest in advancing the transfer of development rights program that exists throughout the state and it's consistent with the growth management act and trying to sort of conserve our uh rural and working landscapes uh but at the same time support city's efforts to um um grow their urban places. Um that uh effort is joined uh with an evaluation of the Elklip program. So the landscape conservation local infrastructure program for short uh that was created in 2011 and is now paired with TDR. And so tonight uh um meeting is really to do twofold I think. One is to educate you on what I always say are probably two of the more you know um I want to say complicated but sort of have multiple moving pieces. We're going be talking both about transfer development rights as well as tax and increment finance. So we'll getting into the details, but I'll try to give you also the the cliff notes working version of that. Um and then the second piece is we're looking for advice and guidance from you as we entertain our study areas and try to think about some of those uh tensions within the program that we're going to be addressing going forward. So um let's go ahead and go to the next slide. So our just quick rough outline tonight um uh is uh to to make sure that we um spend a little time I think first just uh realizing what is being asked of the city here. Um so there at this

feasibility study um as a commitment from the city to do a robust uh and thorough effort to evaluate the use of TDR and LCIP in the city. Um and then uh to provide staff time uh engagement both with the planning commission and the council on the findings of that. There's no um condition as part of that feasibility study for the city to take any uh action on the land use code or create an ordinance. Um but think of it as basically the study is really trying to find the best case option for the city to to do so uh and take advantage of both programs. um at the end if there is a path what we'll be doing is giving the city sort of a guide a guide a guideway to sort of implementation and so so all to say is like the feasibility study will take you to that answer but we'll also if the conditions are right show you how you can easily make the sort of mechanisms and and maneuvers and actually to create the program um so I think it's important to kind of start there here a little bit about what is the project and what is actually being funded by commerce so today then I think uh we really want to talk about those two tools and then talk about that outcome. So I let's go to the next slide and just get right into the kind of the 101 parts of this. What is transfer development rights? At its essence, it's exactly what it says. We are trying to take a development entitlement in one place and transfer it to another. Um, this has been used historically both in the affordable housing as well as historic preservation to kind of allow properties to sell their air rights and transfer that density to other projects and giving them project income. Um, but in the sort of rural landscape conservation context, what we're really talking about it is at much larger geographic scale. We are trying to um transfer development rights that exist within our resource and working lands in

rural areas and transfer those rights into our urban places. Um and so creating these sort of mechanisms both at sort of a conservation like what lands should be conserved to what lands are we trying to sort of incent additional growth and so that's um that's TDR in a nutshell. The complication piece of that from a from the city's perspective is how do you design codes and policies that create incentives um for people to basically um go out and buy these development rights? Um and I think you guys probably aren't um um you've been already uh having done your affordable housing and housing action plan know quite a bit about a lot about sort of incentive zoning, inclusionary housing. A lot of the same things are uh in play here, right? You're trying to design prices and performance within your code that then give incentives for developers to go do something, right? In that case, it might be to build or perform for affordable housing. In this case, what we're trying to do is design those codes for people to go out and buy development rights in rural areas. So um I think with that we want to also start the fact and acknowledge that the city already has a transfer on rights program in a very much more limited sense. I think that is uh more analogous to the way uh affordable housing or historic preservation has used um transfer development program. And so in the con Canyon Park area, a specific site um owned by Sound Transit has been given the ability to sell excess development rights to certain properties within um um the Canyon Park area. So if we look at here um going back to 2020 all the way to 2026, right? Um there's anou uh between Sound Transit for preserving uh roughly u a quarter

million square feet of excess floor area for the sale as part of TDR uh to the to date. Sound Transit has not actually chosen to s sell any of those development rights. Um but the idea here really is to sort of because that site was not upzoned and providing more capacity to do um um uh other public policies priorities with the city um that ability of on that site exist. And so if you go to the next slide here right is simply um the graphical representation of the city's current TDR program. So, the future transit bus site, right, can transfer additional capacity in 1,00 foot increments to receiving areas within the Canyon Park sub area plan. Okay. So, I think that's good to kind of just start there because what we're now going to be talking about is a much more regional program where um sites will be able to receive like so they'll still receiving areas there like in Canyon Park, but they will be able to receive credits, development rights from um um um sending sites, what they call basically those places that can sell development rights within Snowomish County, King County, and Pierce County. Let's go to the next slide. Okay, so that's TDR in a nutshell and you guys are have some familiarity as a city already. What the state legislature did in 2011 was allowed uh um qualifying cities basically city I think above I want to say 10,000 in population at the time um in Pierce uh Snomish and King County to access a tax increment um financing program known as LCIP uh on the condition that they pair that with a TDR program. And this is kind of where these two things meet. If you create a TDR program that meets the rules of

Elcl, you then have access to incremental property tax revenues from the county that the land use sits in. And both is a very novel case because you have portions of your city there both within King County as well as Snomish County. So this would be wherever the re receiving sites are that you draw your boundaries around, you would receive that incremental portion of property tax from that county. And the purpose of the LCIP was really to say um we know that creating successful urban places isn't just about putting more people and employees everywhere. We know we have to build the fe the physical ecosystem that supports them through better roads um uh bike lanes, mobility investments, parks, open spaces, right? We have to and that you know as we all learned is is is very expensive and um cities are always faced with a der of resources for building out that capital and so here think of it as elip was offered as an incentive to help further the growth management goals of conserving rural lands. So v visav tdr programs visav additional funding for infrastructure. So you can see this is how sort of the additional incentive to create robust TDR programs has been uh uh offered through a partnership um uh with these three counties. Great. Um so what portion of that property tax do you have access to? And so what you see in these sort of like concentric circles here is think of it as basically uh the inner circle is basically the world that would exist today. The outer circle is the additional property taxes that happen from growth that have been facilitated with by TDR. And so in a world there, you see all those new

property taxes in that outer ring. What elk does is say, well, we're just the county is basically only aortioning a portion of that incremental taxes. So basically schools, the state schools, other local uh taxing jurisdictions like the library, they don't participate in this. So they they keep their incremental property taxes. But the county is offering 75% of their incremental property taxes. So that little light blue area with the arrow, that's the portion that the county would be steering towards um a jurisdiction uh for participating. So to date uh there is only one city that has created Elcla program that's the city of Seattle. Um their transfer development rights and infrastructure area is basically South Lake Union in downtown. And so think of it as kind of the perfect storm of doing the reszone in advance of what was 10 years of absolutely historic growth. Um and the city has retired all of its allocated um development rights during that time and I think uh they are uh nine years into it and they're and I think they've received I'm going to get this wrong um I want to say about 9 $10 million worth of infrastructure dollars during that time and they get to run that for another 15 years going forward. So in the end they'll probably collect somewhere in the range of $40 million in infrastructure dollars. it just to give you sort of a sense of kind of the scale that we're talking about for some of these programs. All right, let's go to the next slide. So, what can you do with the L club monies? And of all the tax increment laws that are on the books, LCUP offers us one of the more flexible arrangements. Uh you get to do all the kind of classic nuts and bolts infrastructure pieces with respect to transportation, utility, open spaces. Um, you can also do infrastructure that supports affordable housing projects,

but not the vertical piece of that itself. But the key piece also with LCIP is you get to be able to have some flexibility to use those dollars for operations and maintenance and security. So to the extent that there are public safety and or sort of maintenance pieces, LC Club will offers you that ability to help maintain those those those investments within within the areas that you're building. Okay. So, um, let's focus on that part on the right. And so, the central question we're trying to entertain here is how many development rights can we retire, right, within the code given how much development we think may happen within the city's urban places over 25 years and the revenue potential. Um, and we're trying to figure that out. And the reason we had to figure out the number is the state law in 2011 um directed PSRC to allocate all the regions development rights to the eligible cities on an activity unit basis. And so the city the PSRC does this planning where they convert residential and employees into these activity units and that's what they're allocating um to the region uh to measure sort of growth going forward. And so uh both's allocation was 365. And one of the reasons we think both is a great um candidate is because at the time um in 2011 I don't think both was anticipating the level of planning for the level of growth that they've seen and are anticipating going forward. So think of it as basically your allocation is relatively less than probably what the growth that the city's going to get. So, so think of it as basically it's a pretty good opportunity for you to get that 365. And the reason that that 365 is important is that 75% of the county's property tax, you get a percentage of that depending on how many of that 365

you choose to accept. So, if you choose to accept all 365, you get 100% of the county's allocation or incremental property tax. If you choose 50% so roughly 180 um then you'd only get 50% of that potential dollars. And the reason this is mattered like think of this as like a performance measure um for uh the city and the county. So the county is saying we're giving you some scarce resources in our property tax. We want to make sure that you've designed a program that can actually meet the allocation we've given you. And so that's kind of why this sort of key feature of the program is there. Okay, let's go to the next slide. Um the additional um performance measure that the county had was they also didn't want folks simply just to kind of create programs and then kind of forget about them, right? Because we know these programs need a level of maintenance and care over time. And so what they did is they built in some performance thresholds um at uh basically starting your 25 years of potential revenue once you hit 25% of your credit allocation. So once you start that, you can run it for 25 years, but then there's these thresholds that check in at 50, 75, and and then the last remaining years just to make sure you've done this. Um, I would say those feel like really rigid sort of thresholds. Um, but I think the counties in their uh under in their work understand this and there's some flexibility around trying to make sure that, you know, that just they want to see basically um, hey, your program seems like a little stale. you know, perhaps we can kind of revamp things to kind of get the TDR moving back in place. So, think of it as sort of a a little bit of a carrot and stick, but I think their interest is in making sure that those programs work correctly, but also they don't want to simply just write cities blank checks for that incremental property tax without sort of making sure that there's performance on the development right side. Okay. So, um uh just to kind of summarize, right, what do the parties

get out of this, right? So, cities, right? they get a very flexible source of funding for capital, right? That supports their infill and urban growth strategies, right? Helps create more resilient communities if we can build out the things that we know we need to build out in these places when we do our sort of um long range and short range planning. And the county's right, their interest is really supporting market-based conservation um you know, and not seeing um the dissipation of some of those working lands and sort of those rural areas. um one because of the environmental benefits of of of of either food production or resource production or water quality. Um but also right it's expensive for the county to service those areas with respect to public facilities and public services. And so they don't really want to see a lot of demand in those areas. And so the the tradeoff for that that um uh incremental property tax dollars is is the is the sort of gambit that they've offered as part of the program. Okay. So, I'm going to pause because that was a lot of information talking both about TDR and about tax increment finance. So, I just want to make sure I kind of uh at least I would say summarize it, right? What does this project have to do? We have to find a way to transfer rights, development rights in rural areas to areas in both. And if we can figure out how to do that at scale, we'll be a we'll be able to allow uh the city to access a new stream of revenue to build infrastructure in your area. So that that's the quick cliffnotes piece, but I'll pause and take any kind of any uh in-depth questions you might have.

Commissioners, questions? Commissioner West. Mr. Westb, I've got one. Excuse me. I was trying to wrap my head around um how uh the 365 credits is um translated. Um it's an abstract number. So I'm trying to understand how that is there a way to understand. Yep. That exactly. So the mechanism, right? So how do we do this? Um so right now in King Well and what it equals like Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So uh just to kind of give you some highle math. So, right now, um, King County does a lot of tracking of the sale of their development rights, and I can't remember the exact number, but let's say a credit, a development right is selling for about $30,000. And so, from the city's perspective, what do we what are we saying? We're saying if you develop or go out and buy this development right, what are we translating that entitlement into our urban areas? And so the way the math works out that we'll be doing is to figure out like an exchange ratio. And so you could cities will put this typically in a unit of analysis that they do their regulation whether that's in height um additional stories uh dwelling units right per acre uh additional F. And so the exchange rate will be calibrated as okay in downtown Seattle it's like oh I get 5,000 square ft of additional space above my base zoning for every development right I buy and so that's the number we'll be trying to figure out here in both if you take that $30,000 credit what is it really mean in terms of either kind of think of it as there's two sides of that equation revenue maximizing kinds of things like additional scale height or cost reduction pieces right well could wave X, Y or Z or give you some variance here that reduces the cost of the program that you would be willing to sort of like buy yourself down out of. In the end, right, the incentive works as basically saying to the developer, if you buy a dollar worth of development rights, I need to find a way to give you $2 worth of value through my incentive structure. And that's the same thing, I think, with like affordable housing programs, right? you're trying to think about the cost of it, but give something that sort of that um you know hopefully sort of uh um offsets that cost and then is that somehow someone's is it

flexible then depending on whether it's extra height or um F or something like that? How that's translated to the 365 like oh that's if it's square footage it's you know roughly this ratio so you're going to you're now down to 360 to use or something like that. use 5,000. I'm just trying to understand how that's tracked. Um, you know, because if it's sort of subjective per project, I'm just curious about uh how how we're tracking that and getting to that, you know, if we commit to 365, for example. How how who's tracking, you know?

Yeah. So, the county and the city will be doing annual reporting as part of that process. And so say like so say you we do the math and we say great we feel like we can design incentive and regulator regular regulatory structures that can retire 365 units. So like simple like the simple math would be like what if we figured out the exchange rate was 1,000 square ft per you know development rate. So basically we'd have to figure out like well we got to figure out a way to place 365,000 additional square feet of development capacity to get to those 365 credits. And so uh there is a process right that within the sort of TDR administration that certifies kind of the fact that a development right was purchased and there was one placed and the city will be doing that kind of annual reporting with the county to sort of track that over time. And so are they going to be figuring it out like as a um like with the city of Seattle, was it a ratio they figured out like um and then they've just plugged in for the next 25 years

or um is it sort of they they go a little bit on each project is different and how they chip away at those 365. I'm just trying to understand how that's I realize it would be it would be carefully um watched and and uh and uh tallied. But um just that you know if if you commit to them how how uh how they how do you know it's 5,000 or 10,000 or sorry not 10,000 365. So how do you how do you use a credit? Like you said it's a if you determine it's 1,000 square feet per whatever. Yeah. Um has that already been figured out? the the city will figure that out. So the city Okay. So it might be different for Everett than it is for both.

Exactly. Yeah. And and even within both within zones, right? You can think in one zone it may be 5,000. In another zone it might be 10,000. In another zone you might be going to a different metric like dwelling. It's a little squishy. Yes. It's it's squishy. You set it in your code much like you have like in the code. That's key to know. So it will be sort of laid down somewhere. Yeah. So things like think of it as basically if you choose to incentivize it in your land use code it's going to live in the land use code. Okay. Some cities have entertained using I didn't know that part. Got it. Exactly. Some cities have entertained using like the multif family property tax exemption. Right. So it won't be in the code necessarily. It'll be like oh it'll be it'll be in the code in the sense of like

um if you participate in the 8year MFT program and buy you know uh a credit we will give you 5,000 additional square footage. Right? So like the terms of the of the arrangement are spelled out there. So it will be figured out if we adopt this idea and Okay. Yep. I asked partly because we we've had fee and loo programs for years and I wanted to to inquire well I did inquire about one years ago for um I can't remember if it was public open space or parking whatever and uh the planners very you know politely said well we haven't really figured out the ratio yet because no one had done it. So now and I understand better that if we went down this road we would have to establish what those ratios were.

Yeah. and and cities, right? Think of it as you're constantly trying every sort of when the world turns on you, every development or economic cycle, right? You're trying to then go back and refigure um you're trying to generally when you design these things, um you know, um lock the things that move together, you know, with respect to kind of costs and revenues so that like as the economy turns like the thing doesn't spin on its axis and it's just kind of moving up and down. Um and but that's a challenging thing to do with the dynamism of prices and your language code is pretty static, right? And so so we're always trying to think about like well what area we should error on this side of sort of uncertainty, right? Because we really want this to kind of happen. But those are the things that we work out with staff on the technical side.

So it could be five or 10 years in we we need to tweak it a little bit. They're going too fast or they're not going fast enough for something like that. Exactly. That goes back to the the threshold why why the thresholds are there because like say some like something like I don't know, we figure out AI and the robots build all our housing, right? Kind of thing. Like, well, maybe we need to go back and refigure refigure what it costs to sort of access this additional square footage or something like that. Thank you. Yeah, Commissioner Jones and Commissioner Lever.

Thank you, Commissioner Jones. Uh, this is very exciting. So, it's nice to see a market-based approach to this. Um, you mentioned that the city already has a program TDR program in Canyon Park and in the report it said as of February 2026 there have not been any TDR transactions. Do you know why? Because I think that's relevant for I don't know why. My understanding and you'll I don't know if Christian might want to my my understanding is Sound Trans has not chosen to sort of offer these rights for sale yet. uh but I don't know with respect to sort of what's happening on the buyer side but

yeah we're we're looking to see uh they're we're anticipating that they will be available in the near future um we've got a bit of a learning curve to to catch up to what was developed um but with the project just breaking ground um we're we're anticipating opportunities with that program uh in the next year or two.

Yeah, that's that's great. um because I think it will be important as part of this analysis to understand the reasons why because that while it's not exactly the same program, it may influence the way the program is designed. And it gets a little bit to I think uh Commissioner Westerbeck's point, which I'm glad he asked um because now I understand what what we're allowed to do a little bit better. But it is it is going to be important for this to be transparent and that more than transparent actually market it to developers. So there needs to be a very active program to get the word out and to incentivize and encourage folks. Um the second question I had again relates to progress and you like you said there's this 25% then 10 years it's 50%. Um, are you going to look at our comprehensive plan and try to give us a sense of what's realistic? Because we do have growth targets and we have designated areas where we're expecting a certain amount of growth. It seems like we could,

you know, of course there'll be some error, right? Some uncertainty, but it seems like we could sort of come up with some estimates of what that should be.

Yes. Um, so yeah. So, so to your first question, um, just to follow on is, yeah, the market analysis is data, but it's also some engagement, right? Understanding kind of what people are doing, talking to folks doing development, understanding kind of the issues. And so, whatever is proposed, right, you want it to be feel like an incentive and that that there's a real sort of, you know, desire amongst people doing development to go like, "Oh, wow. This is actually a really good deal. We should do this TDR program. I got to go figure out how to buy development rights." Now um uh the the the the second question um with respect to how do we figure out what the right pieces I think is the central thing that we're trying to do and and I'll just kind of tease this slide here right one of the first pieces um is to think about scale right what places are do we want to try to be receiving areas um how much growth are you planning in those areas what are some different ideas around kind of a low, medium, high for growth, whatever their sense of like which of those projects will develop intensely enough that they will actually want to buy credits and given that sort of scale like how many credits. We're actually trying to do that math um uh to figure that out like because like sure we can look at the planning targets and horizons but in the end we got to look at the areas we got to look at the sites that are likely to redevelop figure out like well what intensity that you will develop what's the code say by right what's the incentive piece okay if that incentive piece if the you know if it's like um you know the exchange rate is 10,000 square feet per right well that means this project only needs 20,000 so they need you need two, right? And we think there's only 10 of those projects in this area. So that's 20 development rights. So that's the kind of math we're trying to figure out is to get you close to say like given the areas we're

looking at, given the code and incentive options to implement it, um well, how many rights are there, right? Because maybe it doesn't make sense to say, yeah, take all 365, even though there's an incentive to try to maximize that, but maybe it's something closer to different. But those are the that's that kind of trade-off. Um if you go back a slide here or two maybe. Sorry, one more. Yeah, this balance, right? Um how much revenue can you get relative to how many credits can you realistically place? I mean that's the that's the program design perspective.

No, thank you. Um so it sounds like this is a first conversation and then you'll come back with some of that analysis done because we have a lot of that information. It's just for someone to crunch the numbers basically and give us some idea. Um my last question is really really pretty simple. Uh you said there's a lot of flexibility with how you use the infrastructure dollars. Does that also include uh EV charging infrastructure as well? I would think so. Um I have to go back and look at the exact um pieces but but typically I would fall within a transportation related improvements. Um, it's it's deep within the wax of of kind of the administrative code of all the specifics, but it's pretty expansive in terms of the legislation. Y,

thank you, Commissioner Lever here. Thank you so much. I just want to first say thank you for the presentation. I really appreciated having the visual aid to a very uh heavy heavy topic. So, thank you. That was super helpful. Uh, my question is around the coordination between counties. you touched on it the fact that the city does uh have the two counties right uh when it comes to implementation like what does that really look like the coordination and setting the race like how does that really

yeah know that's that's a really good question so to participate one of the conditions to participate in elip is that the city u will have to participate in what they call the regional tdr u um um partnership which is just a partnership between stomish and pierce county that says that the if the city is going to particip in El Club through TDR, it has to accept development rights from any of those three counties. Like so that's the kind of the first kind of piece of the partnership. Um the second piece of the partnership is um the counties may want to engage the city in some type of interlocal agreement just to kind of think of it as basically used the elip law as a framework to basically spell out the arrangement of the agreement like you know well maybe maybe the county would be willing to start earlier than the 20% right or maybe they would like to sort of talk think about the changes at the threshold periods so there there could be a part where both depending on where the elip program is designed whether in just Snowish side just the King County side or both um there might be some engagement both with both counties just to spell out the terms of the revenue sharing on the property taxes so that that's the the nature that I mean the counties then see themselves as partners um I would say uh in this process with the city because they have a very strong vested interest in advancing their conservation so I would say they want to design a program that where the city is successful because if you're successful then the county is successful. So that's that's I think the the the nature of that partnership.

Okay. Couple couple of questions. Uh so what happens if milestones are not met? If mileston's not met, technically the county has the the right to sort of terminate the revenue sharing. But this is where the ILA comes in because I think that like I said, the county wants the city to be successful and understands that the market doesn't work necessarily in these clean 5yearc um and so so one of the things they'll want to be able to do is like talk about sort of what happens at those times perhaps if a threshold is in that what happens in that space. So could the city could conceivably I'll say overshoot its goal, not meet it. Y

and then have the development but not the revenue that goes with it. Um absent an agreement that addresses that. If I'm understanding that right, they you could have the inverse. You could overshoot your development rights, but you would then if you if you make all the thresholds, you get

you get performance if you if you undershoot. Yeah. If you undershoot it. Yeah. You can think of it as a situation where you say we'll take 365 but then you get to year 10 and you're not at 50% and you're like oh well we thought we designed a program but we didn't get there. Yeah. So from a technical sense that the the the there is the prospect of the revenue sharing ending but this is kind of where the ILA and the partnership with the county come in. Okay. Is there a provision to okay we take 365 and in x number of years things look different the AI robots take over or covid hits again or whatever

and suddenly those goals don't seem realistic is there provision for adjusting those goals down the road that is a good question I don't think so because I think the se city of Seattle is in a situation where they're on the other side of that they actually took a smaller number and shot through that within 10 years and so they kind of think of it as left a bunch of money on the table um because they didn't like set that number high enough. Um but I don't necessarily think the inverse is true. I think once you specify in your ordinance that you're sponsoring what your ratio of selected one that one stays in place unless I guess there's an agreement to supersede that which the county could always do with the city. Okay. Yeah.

Thank you.

Mhm. Other questions, comments? Okay. Well, let me let me go on here with our kind of two pieces. So, so our our project, right, is basically to think of um um where do you need the infrastructure, right? And and and then within those areas, how can you retire development rights? Because what you have to do incla a local infrastructure project area. And this is where LCIP differs from the state's other tax increment finance law is you can draw pretty expansive non-ontiguous or multiple LIPAS um as long as you don't exceed 25% of the um u value of real property within your city. So you can imagine like that's probably for most cities that's probably every place that they're trying to do intense urban infill. And so uh the nice thing about that right then is that you know you can because one of the things you have to do is you can only build projects within your LIPA. So even if there's a nexus like oh we got to improve this street light over this intersection over here um because we have to serve all the growth here that doesn't count. You have to the projects have to be physically within your LIPA. So when we design and so two things of that nexus right your projects have to be there but within those lipos are also the places where you're designated u um receiving areas that can take um development rights. So those are the two things that have to kind of go. So one of let's go to the next slide. So what we're doing here then is to working with staff is to define um study areas that we are trying to do that analysis in. So think of it as the market analysis, the forward projection, the regulatory incentive work and this is a place here for feedback, right? And then these are also the areas potentially where we'd want to be building in, you know,

investing in infrastructure using those tax increment finance dollars. And so um our initial thinking here is both the can the existing Canyon Park um sub area, the North Creek uh northeast 195th Street area as well as the city's downtown. And I know right you've had multiple planning efforts and sub area efforts that have entertained incentives and getting larger than the sort of just the base zoning on the condition of doing things like affordable housing. And so here right we're trying not to compete with those things but trying to find opportunities either within that existing code or potentially new areas right within those sub areas the zones to kind of replicate that level of incentive lift. Okay. Um we kind of covered a little bit of this already. I jumped around, but this is simply the the sort of the regional map of of the agricultural and forest lands in King and Snowomish counties. Um again, you have to uh be willing to accept any of those developmental rights, but both does have some discretion uh potentially by policy to sort of, you know, uh work within those counties to maybe prioritize areas that might be important to the city like like, hey, we get all our um fresh vegetables from, you know, the the Snowomish River Valley, so maybe we want to prioritize lands in that area. There are some trade-offs with that, but but but I think the first thing is just to know that you have to kind of take all those, but there are some maneuvers you could do to say like we really want our conservation efforts focused in a certain spot. Okay, great. So, um, so going forward here, we're doing a bunch of work right now to look at those study areas to basically get to that point of like, well, how many TDR credits could we realistically accept and what would be the revenue implications of doing that and how can we spend how can we design um an infrastructure spending plan um

that uh helps us at the margins, right, do more investment in those areas than we would otherwise without those dollars. And so those are the things that we're kind of working on today. So I think our questions are really at this point are those the right areas, right? Or what guidance would you give to think about those areas or the other efforts that you you have in the city now that you kind of know a little bit about the dual nature of just like hey we have to figure out a way to incentivize the purchase of these things within the code. But then if we can do that we can also have additional dollars to spend in those areas to kind of do investments. Okay. So, um again, no action required. Um planning question has been briefed by staff.

Commissioner Westbeck, did you have a question? Uh yeah, maybe I'm just slow. I want to try and tease something out. Um transfer development rights like you talked about earlier often like used for extra height F um uh very often building land use related things. Whereas what the L elip can fund, it says transportation, utility, public spaces, affordable housing, historic preservation. Is this using TDR to get the things that Elclipip offers or is it in addition to traditional TDR things like they're related to taller buildings or more F or something? It seems like there's two different pots of opportunity there. And are they are they supposed to both be in there?

Yeah. So think of it as just a TDR program on its own without elk, right? Delivers the public benefits that that don't necessarily happen locally, right? Yeah. Like they preserve kind of your working lands from the places where you're getting the farmers markets or your water quality, you know, resource base or recreation areas, right? So TDR on its own is trying to deliver those set of sort of environmental and other kind of public benefits. The packaging of it with LCIP basically for the city is to say great, you get all that stuff, but now we're also going to send you money. The county is going to send you money to go build stuff within your city to support that additional growth that we're transferring in there. So that but I mean if we if we go forward with this um this is about elip and money but um because someone if if we're does this still mean that they're going to someone could come and say hey we we want you know the code only allows us to go 60 ft but we want to go an extra story and do a more traditional or mult multif family tax exemption or something. Are those just in another pot entirely? Or is this supposed to be amended to this or attached to it as two options? Because then there wouldn't necessarily be money attached to it and could have credits attached to it, those 365 credits. So, I'm trying to understand if those are the are those co-equal or is that just a whole separate program because we already have it in our code? Uh, or does it start to use up those 365 credits or am I just muddling the two together? They shouldn't be.

Um, I don't know. Um, okay. But I let Let me kind of I think I know what you're getting at. So you have your code today right that says okay let's just for example like okay by right you can build three F here and then with an incentive you can build to five an additional 1 and a half F on the condition that you provide affordable housing and we'll let you use the MFT program to do that

great so you could have that arrangement that exists today so what what what does TD what could TDR do if you were doing that well what you could say is like well um what if we gave you another F on top of that five that goes from five to six on the condition that you do TDR, right? And so go buy that development, right? You get that additional F, but you you got to do your affordable housing first, but then if you can want to get to that additional density and the market makes sense, we've given you a pathway to do that. Is that drawing on LCIP funds or is that just No, that's just that's just the developer, right? Right. A traditional TDR, which we're used to. Okay. That's what I'm trying to understand cuz it's like we have one but are we going to be chipping away at those 365? No.

No. So your existing one is simply the only program you have now is basically on a specific site that's owned by Sound Transit. I remember it took a long time for Yeah. Exactly. So the analogy there is basically saying well instead of monetizing the value of development rights in resource lands transit to monetize the rights on their property. Right. Right. And and they can transfer that. But point being, if someone's using that that program, they're not they're not drawing on the on the the credits. Exactly. These are two different programs. Two different things. That's all I wanted to know. Yep. They're not They're not comingled. Okay. Yep. It's just a new different one. Exactly. Got it. Yep. Now I understand. Like I said, a little thing. No, no, I was muddling through there with you, Commissioner Jones.

Uh I just had one question related to the last slide. I think it was the last slide. Um you said that in terms of the eligible areas, the sending areas, right, which could be the different counties, you had a note that said we should carefully consider the implications. Yes. What is that referring or just some examples of things considering?

Exly. So the what that means is the really only practical way you have to prioritize that is to give it a stronger incentive, right? So like so to make it concrete like say there was an area in the snowomish or river valley wherever it might be. He says like great well we really wanted like I know we have to take everybody but we really want people to buy development rights here and the way you would do that is through your code. So instead you know what the code is trying to do is say hey we'll give you $2 for if you spend a dollar on development rights and so what you have to do in this case is like we'll give you $3 for every dollar that you spend on development rights there to give you an additional incentive. So what that means, right, is basically instead of the exchange rate being 5,000 square ft for every development you buy, it's 10,000 square ft, which you know, if you thought about sort of like there's a fixed pie of that of those total credits you can get to, just means that there's one less credit you you're going to get out of private prioritization. too. In a world where like you think it's really easy to get the 365, like that's probably not a big trade-off, but if it's going to be challenging to get 365, you'll be like, well, do we really want to prioritize that? I mean, it's really important, but we also really like the money that comes with Elip. Maybe we want to prioritize that. So, that's the that's the the implication, I think, the practical implication we're talking about is is uh you just have to spend a lot to prioritize that relative to the infrastructure dollars you may get.

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for for that explanation. And then I just wanted to give an encou some encouragement or maybe suggestion that when we look at the receiving areas certainly align with everything we've been talking about for several years. Um it would be interesting to understand how it aligns with the um priorities for our capital infrastructure plans whe transportation, utilities, etc. as we think about the in the infrastructure potential infrastructure revenue we might get because with those priorities we had to we really did have to prioritize. We had to like drop some things and include some things and it might be nice to know what could we include that we don't have in there. We have a lot of areas that for example have we have disconnected bike paths

um things like that. It would be lovely to know or we have um uh bike paths that are not up to the standards that we would want for safety and things like that. It it would be nice as part of the analysis to understand that.

Yes. Uh and and we are we're s we've sat down initially with the city's public works and parks department to sort of basically understand this. Um just for for your perspective the way cities have done this of kind of two bookends. Um the city of Seattle was very much along that line like hey um we want to prior within our infrastructure spending plan that you have to develop we and that's flexible. You can change that over time but what they basically says we want to correct these bikeways these greenways downtown. So we're going to take our elip dollars and we're going to spend them on these projects to hopefully help complete some of these missing links. Um, other cities have basically said, "Okay, well, given the nature of the money we're coming in, you know, we're going to treat it just like the real estate excise tax, right? It's another capital restricted funding source. It's just going to go into, you know, our capital fund." And now we just have more money to do more projects, right, that are within that area. And so those are kind of just two ways that I think cities approach this and thinking about it.

Commissioner Liver, um, thank you. I have a question around like the outreach component and the feedback. So how does that really look like particularly for the rural areas like how is the I guess like their input being incorporated into this process to then potentially identify what are some of those priority areas that will come forward?

Yeah. So well well um our uh we have a a colleague who spent many years working in transfer development rights skip and and so one of the things you don't have to worry about because of this is the counties themselves handle a lot of the outreach to all the the sending sites and they're working with property owners just to make sure that they know about the program and so you have a partner uh in the county built in to help do that sort of education like oh now the city of both is participating. So our project won't be doing a lot of outreach to to those like sending sites, but we will have a conversation both with staff and with you again about sort of like well is there things we want to change here to prioritize this because it's not so much engagement with those necessarily as at least in this piece. But like think of it as if you do want to like prioritize certain areas. One of the things you might want to then do is work with the county, right, to say like, great, well, we want these people to know that, you know, they are priority area and so developers that are looking to place development rights, they should go talk to people who live in this area or these people should let them know, right, that like this is a priority area for both. So that engagement won't happen in this project, but if that is a sort of direction that you want to take it, that is a necessary thing you would want to do going forward is to do that education between the buyers in and the development community here uh as well as the those uh sending areas that you might be willing to prioritize them. Does that make sense?

Yes. Thank you. And then for that I have a follow-up question. So when it comes to providing feedback in terms of the areas that are being selected, uh what is the best way for for us to really understand whether or not those areas make sense and is it like relying on the other bodies of work that we have seen and and the other piece is how do we make sure that the voices that we assume have been heard in other spaces are actually being incorporated into the fabric. Uh because sometimes that does not happen. So some there's some gaps and I

want to recognize those and having said that as we potentially build this program how do we make sure that we understand where those gaps are and what is feasible for us to close and then what are the other areas that we need to potentially advocate for capacity so that the input is incorporated in the design.

Okay. No, that's a that's that's really good feedback and I think Jacqueline that's something we can think about a little bit when we think about the sending areas. One of the things that is also part of this grant with respect to the infrastructure spending and design is to look through sort of an equity based focus on it just to make sure that like hey um you know the Pon regional council has to done a sort of disparities uh mapping process. And so when we think about the projects themselves, particularly the investments, are we investing in a way that is actually trying to also address any sort of disperate sort of treatment or um or vulnerable populations within the area? So I think it is basically the dollars that you're spending for infrastructure, can elap be directed in a way that also furthers the city's goals around making it a more equitable place. So, so we're in that case we're not doing a whole lot of engagement, but we are relying on the past work that the city has done to make sure that we're guiding that process as part of this feasibility study. Other comments?

All right. Well, thank you very much. We'll look forward to hearing more about this. Thank you for the question. Intriguing. So, thank you for the questions and the advice. Appreciate it. Thanks, Morgan. Great presentation. great uh job of take making something some somewhat complicated pretty clear for us. Yeah, thank you.

All right, our next study session item is the housing action plan engagement update. Yeah, it's been a bit been a minute.

Welcome Um, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Hopefully I don't run into issues. Wonderful. Noious this time. Great. Um, I have some notes here, so I'm going to be reading through it because otherwise I'm going to go all over the place. So, forgive me while I'm looking at the screen and looking at my notes. Um, but as I said, good afternoon P. Good evening, planning commission. It's great to see you all again. It's been a while and really excited tonight to talk about the housing action plan update. So, I will be giving some brief updates on where the work we've been doing since we spoke last time and where the direction that we're going in. So, no action is required tonight. Tonight, I've just given a status update including next steps and asking the commission to consider the following questions on the next slide for discussion tonight. I can present brief as I said to allow us to have the majority of time for discussion. I won't read through all these slides um but these are the questions that I'm posing from to the commission tonight. Um you can also find these questions in your packet for reference as I go through my presentation. So the housing action plan is an update to the 2018 housing strategy. For reference, here's a timeline of the housing action plan efforts. Work began in September of 2024 with staff looking at the prior plan, current housing efforts, and taking guidance from the comp plan update which wrapped up at the end of that year. Staff then presented a trap housing goals and objectives in January of 2025 which serves as a h housing action plan. The house's guiding document. We heard from both the council and planning commission the importance of conducting community engagement throughout the creation of the housing action plan. Staff then began the process of finding and hiring an engagement consultant. Burke was ultimately selected in midsummer and after onboarding began full community engagement in early fall of last year. The first engagement wrapped up at the end of last year and the feedback closed from the community is now being used to create the first full draft of the

housing action plan which is expected in May or June. The full draft of the housing action plan will go up for discussion with city council and planning commission during this time followed by a summer blitz of community engagement in which the community will have a chance to review and comment on the full draft housing action plan. So the housing action plan has three components to it. the plan update itself, which is what I just described, and the updates to the middle housing and affordable housing codes. The middle housing code work wrapped up in December of last year, as you may remember, and the affordable housing code route was updated for the first time December as well. On the affordable housing code work, staff is working on a second, more comprehensive update now, and we will bring that to the planning commission to the council for discussion when we are ready. All these efforts are to align both of recent state housing mandates and ensure BAL has much needed affordable housing for all individuals in our community. Not pictured here and not applicable to this body, but important to mention nonetheless is the update to the multif family tax exemption aka the MFT program which staff is now working on and hoping to complete by the end of July of this year. Paired with the code updates addressing the affordability challenges are a core component of the housing action plan efforts. Staff collected feedback from the community at public events, our online engagement platform, engage both potho and through targeted focus groups in which residents voluntarily signed up to speak with staff. The feedback collected at these events and focus groups was helping staff shape that housing action plan from reorganizing priorities to emphasizing priorities that align with that align the most with the community's concerns and hopes. I won't go through all the key takeaways that I've heard at these focus groups and through public feedback, but some that I want to highlight um that stood out to me and that will be interest to the commission relate to home sizes. Um hearing that we want to have a diversity of home sizes for individuals at all stages of their life. That we want to make it easier for existing homeowners to build ADUs and DADUs in their properties. um looking at

creating full complete walkable communities to create those homes to for those homes to be publicly um publicly accessible by public transit um and where individuals can live without the need for a vehicle. And looking at increasing streamlined tenant protections for our renters, making sure that our tenant protections are easy to understand and easy to follow for everyone involved from the tenant to the landlord and everyone in between. For further detail, including a takeaways from these efforts, you can look at the attachments in the agenda packet tonight. Next step, to recap, staff is now working on applying the feedback received to update the housing action plan, which we expect to publish by June, just in time for a second round of engagement in the summer. Staff will present a draft to the staff will present a full draft to the council and planning commission during this time as well. As I mentioned, staff is also looking at introducing new land incentives as well as re revising the multif family the MFT program as part of a second update to the affordable housing code. In conclusion, no action is required tonight. Given what I have presented tonight and what was included in your packet, I pose the following questions for discussion tonight. Commissioners, Commissioner Jones,

thank you so much for this presentation and for the continued work and also um big congratulations for the extensive outreach. I mean with a with the exception of a few groups, a couple groups and lessons learned which are always going to happen. Um it just it really appears to be a pretty thorough effort. Um I have you one of the questions you have is about the goals and objectives and should anything be included or not. I just wanted to ask about uh I noticed that there wasn't a goal relative to um sort of a balance or between owner occupied versus rental occupied priorities um and especially um one that's informed by community input to guide choices. We've talked about this a little bit

um before and I know it it stems more from the affordable housing part, but the affordable housing is part of the overall housing action plan. Um and so curious about that goal. Also, it seemed as if in the feedback um folks brought up this need for human scale, green space and that balance between development which we need and green space, human size sc human human scale uh development etc. So I didn't see a goal related to that aspect and how it blends in. Um I have a couple other questions but maybe maybe we could sure address those.

Yeah. So to address the second question um that is something we can definitely consider adding to the draft goals and objectives. Um we definitely want to be careful on how we word smith it because we want to we don't want to make the implication that the growth that we're seeing now is not human skill. Um but we do want to recognize that um then some of the and I don't want to steal my colleague Cameron's done there but in the downtown plan we heard a lot in the downtown focus um groups I hear a lot about making sure that our buildings in downtown and citywide of course um are built at this human scale. So we all to say I think it's definitely a great suggestion something I'm interested in adding I would have to work with my staff to make sure that we are worth smitting in a way that does not hamper growth or direct growth to be in a way that doesn't help us meet our housing targets

agreed absolutely agreed I think I think a lot of care is needed there but it will be I think the city will be responsive to the feedback they're getting if we ask for feedback and we get feedback like this we need to be responsive to it um especially with such a thorough community outreach um program. Uh are there in terms of additional groups I think you asked about that. Are there additional groups that you might want to be talking with? It seemed as if it seems as if we need more input from seniors.

Um it didn't seem as if we there are some issues that came up that are relevant to seniors, but it didn't seem as if we had enough feedback from that group. And then uh are there any groups that you could meet with that focus on affordable housing? I didn't notice that in the focus group. So maybe you did meet with some um because that seems to be another area as well. And then the last thing I just wanted to mention was um cuz you asked for any other programs or incentives not listed. I don't necessarily I can't necessarily point a whole list, but I'm sure you're probably familiar with Sideline Institute and I was wondering if you've been following some of their programs because they have been comparing and contrasting the the policies and incentives that say Portland, Oregon has used compared to Seattle and what's been working, what hasn't been working and I would just encourage you to look at and and and look at some of that benchmarking I guess.

Thank you. Yeah, definitely want to reach out to more of the senior community and more to the renter community. Um, also while balancing the communities that we haven't heard from much that we want to also um reach out to that includes some young individuals under 35 and renters um and renters under 35 and also the youth or I guess the 18 and over um college student population that are going to be coming of age and be looking for housing as well. Um, and so wanting to find a balance where we're hearing from all these groups and making sure that not one group is over represented in engagement. Um, because I want to make sure that the feedback is truly cohesive, that we're getting that and not lopsided to one group.

Other questions, comments? Commissioner Lever. Um, thank you, Commissioner Lever. Also, thank you so much for the presentation and I been lucky enough to be able to participate in some of your activities. So, thank you so much for that. Good to have you.

Yeah, thank you. I want to preface my comment by acknowledging how difficult it is to do outreach and engagement and how difficult it is to capture feedback when we know it exists but is not given to us unless it's time to say yes or no to something. So, I want to make sure that's uh really clear. uh when it comes to the engagement component, I often see you know the numbers may not be statistically significant for the size of our city and the recommendations that come forward are more are go beyond that focus group. That's another kind of way of hearing, but it's just so comprehensive and methodic that I really um wonder how you are going to go back to those that did come to those events or even when it is like at the fairs that were just like walking by. So that the feedback their feedback is kind of a reiterate that they was heard because I do see this huge disconnect and almost that mistrust of well I am saying something and it may not translate into what I thought it was going to say and then I often times think but what is it that you're saying like cuz it's it's just so abstract when it comes to a focus group of this caliber when there's no recommendation per se but it's more like vision driven. So with the consultant that you are working with, can you tell us more about the next steps in terms of feedback loops and also whether or not there are collaborations which you already identified here in terms of really going to places where people are already and where they may be more prone to share their feedback like um school meetings or the senior center or other places like how is that going to look like for the next iteration?

Great questions. Uh so for the first one, closing the loop has been something that we're prioritizing throughout this engagement process from the very beginning before we even uh created the idea of the focus groups before we even created our engagement plans. We knew that closing the loop was something that we had to do because as you said correctly that if we're not going back to the community after we got their feedback, that creates a cycle of mistrust. Um and so when we closed it, so when we closed the focus groups, I sent out an email to our participants letting them know that here's a packet, here's all the feedback that we heard. Um please go through it. And I got a lot of good responses from that email saying, "Thank you for sending this. Um, can I see through the notes? Um, when can I see the presentation?" Um, and so that's a good strategy for how we close individual engagement efforts. And then when it comes to the entire plan itself, we're going to be working with our communications folks up upstairs on the fourth floor um to get the word out that the plan is at this stage, that we are closing the um that we're almost closing, that we're almost uh getting to adoption, that all this feedback that we shared has helped us shape this plan. We're working on working communications teams to really get the word out um so that people aren't forgetting that this effort has happened. And then to your second question about where are we going to be in the summer um our engagement consultants have are finding events that we can be at to table uh to get to get more eyeballs on our engagement. And we're also thinking about more unique ways to get um the word out and get more feedback from people whether that be attending individual um organizations to present to their members or going to apartment communities to have a I guess pop-up planner I should say to just be there and talk about the housing action plan. Um we're figuring that out. Um the engagement consultants helping us staff that as needed.

Yes.

Um may I commissioner Lever? Thank you so much. uh that actually like prompted me to provide some suggestions or ideas that I have. So when it comes to like social media, I have seen that often times when there's something that's put out there in terms of this is what we heard and people reacting to it. It will be great to see how the information can be shared more like post just to see what kind of feedback you get and incorporate as part of the feedback because as unfortunately where we see a lot of the negative comments sometimes and we definitely want to capture that so we can mitigate their fears through the implementation process and the other one is around the feedback component. I remember that email. So, thank you for that. And then I just thought perhaps it will be helpful for really reaching out to the target population through the the entire process and reminding them, hey, there's an item tonight.

So, they could also, you know, be another like outlet to remind them that they can actually be part of this forum and perhaps they will be um maybe that they just needed that extra email to see that there was something on the agenda that we already know piqu their interest. So, maybe something to consider.

Great feedback. Thank you. Uh so that that also reminded me to ask about uh the fact that you you you didn't have very good representation from the student population, the college student population. Um and it sounded as if the consultant was maybe approaching them during a break or something like that, a school break. Uh if the next feedback sessions are going to happen in the summer, that's also going to be a problem. Uh and so some of the ways to get good feedback from students, a representative group of students, there are certain professors, for example, who teach policy courses. They would probably love to have you know someone from your team come or the consultant team come to a class session and conduct sort of a focus group with 38 48 students, right? um or the residence hall residential halls even though it only represents a very small portion of the students still their resident hall coordinators their directors will probably be happy to entertain something in the evening with the students and then the last thing is there is student government and the student government has you know they meet regularly you have to plan ahead to get on their agenda but they are the student government for the campus and Cascadia has an equivalent one to both Those would be good bodies to go in front of and get feedback from students.

I appreciate the feedback definitely when looking to student government. One of them members of a student government from UD Boss was one of our participants and he mentioned the same ideas and so our staff is working our engagement consultants are working to um get those connections going. we understanding that yes, the school calendar does present some unique challenges. Um, but we can figure out ways to still get the input from them.

I do think that's an important demographic to reach out to. I I do recall quite some time ago, we looked at some demographic data in the Country Village area and there was a distinct dip in the number of people in their 20s around because it's just very tough. And I can tell you, we raised three children in both. They're all in their 30s now. They don't live here. None of their friends live here. It's It's just not affordable for that group. And you know, if you want a well-rounded community, you want those people here. So, thank you. Keep reaching out. I appreciate it. We'll do. Commissioner Westb.

All right. I've got some comments. First of all, um really thorough. Um went I read through this today. Um great list of goals and objectives. A lot of the things I would bring up are in here. Um, but I want to drill down on some a little bit. Um, as someone who who um has pushing been pushing for both to be a more friendly place for particularly smaller developers and there's a heavy focus on that both at the the state level, county level, city level now at all levels like with middle housing and then all the the the state laws that have been put into place. There's a heavy emphasis um and a prioritization of you know infill smaller sites and stuff. In my experience as a professional doing this work, um, uh, I feel like our development services and planning departments need to have start having really maybe tough conversations with public works about the costs around infrastructure, frontage improvements, utility exactions, things like that that um are causing small projects to not pencil out. I mean, I personally have projects that are just dying on the vine because um they can make a building pencil out, which is really hard to do for 8 10 6 12 units. It's way harder than 60 or 600. Um, and then you have to do an outsized amount of of um, sidewalks are great, but like, oh, you got to do new sewer and you've got to rebuild the ADA sidewalks or the ADA ramps and you've got to do all this wonderful stuff that everybody wants, but it just kills the project. And so it's like, yeah, we we all love that stuff, but can we meet you halfway? And that's in here. It's, you know, it's brought up in um um, what is it? foster affordable housing development. Um, and where is it? Affordable housing for all was uh, sorry, I was looking I was making notes from this, but um, it's in here. Um,

uh, more housing types. We're getting help from, um, things like, um, the, as far as like buildings themselves, smaller elevators this year that just passed. It's going to take a few years till we get those, but not having to fit a a stretcher in is going to make uh, smaller elevators more feasible. scissor stairs, single stair buildings. That was done a few years ago. We're going to finally codify that it sounds like as a city, our building officials into that. Um, that's going to make make uh as far as the building code aspects go, not land use, make the buildings more more affordable to build. So, that's like cool. The building itself is going to get a little more affordable. But then we have a role as a city saying, um, okay, could we get you by here? you know, is it is it within the nexus of proportionality and all the you know, the lawful terms that we use to say um like there was a project I know it's pretty high profile among staff with Mr. Buffard up on on West Hill about the amount of um frontage and improvements you'd have to do to do a few units in in his back lot. And I think it's a really good test case for um did we are we asking too much because a lot of these projects again just to reiterate will pencil out if they don't have to do substantial amounts of public infrastructure work. And so that's also where something like LCIP comes in. I think it's really exciting because some of these projects would float. we'd have six, eight new u maybe even um affordable or or naturally more affordable market rate rental places or or even even homes with the new condo condo laws going into effect and everything that people could buy, maybe even accessible. So, we're seeing some excitement there. But um they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got to do $250,000 in um new new sewer lining um and maybe the sewer is fine um or good enough and um uh trees and sidewalks and street lights and benches and all this wonderful

stuff. Again, it's everybody wants it, but the project just died. Just don't get anything. They're just not going to do it. So that's where public works, they have high standards. They want what the the city engineering details asked for. They're great. They make a wonderful built environment, but they're very expensive. So, I think we need to re-evaluate like, do we want the housing? Do we have to hit all our house housing targets? What's holding us back? What's the new hurdle? Zoning was the hurdle. Uh now I think a lot of these things that are outside the um the the project itself beyond the building uh in the in the public realm that we have to do as part of a project are really holding back projects now and it's sort of the elephant in the room. Um, I don't think the city even, you know, sees a lot of these after until after they don't see them anymore after preapp because people see see I can't afford that. And and to our credit as a city, you know, we had people come and say, oh, they couldn't afford the furniture improvements for like dads and adus and stuff. A Mac was one of them a few years ago. And we changed the changed the codes to make those more attainable to build. And so we really we really have risen to the occasion when we needed to. So, I don't want to beat that one too hard, but that's just something I'm seeing that's already um very evident that our goals and aspirations and plans for the number of units we want to build um and the all the wonderful development regulations we've changed and zoning and stuff are starting to butt heads with what we require in the public realm and how much it costs to build. it's already expensive, really expensive to build housing, but then when you have to do a whole bunch of of stuff that's connected to it, even as as wonderful as it is, um we just have to really start to look at that. Um I brought this up before and we have MFTTE, but um Sighteline to speak

about sighteline like uh Commissioner Jones brought up uh wrote a lot about funded inclusionary zoning that that's one of the ways we're going to get deed restricted housing in both. um you developers aren't really probably going to do it on purp um voluntarily the way we've got it set up in both which is admirable. You know, we we use a carrot rather than stick and I don't think the stick's going to work either because once again developers just aren't going to do it on smaller projects which is what we're pushing unless they find that they can get incentivized to not lose money on those units because right now most inclusionary zoning projects um just don't work. um you have to have a really big project and even then there's there's it's always the the people paying market rate who are incentivizing the non-market rate units. You might be able to do that on a 200 300 unit project but not a 20 unit or 10 unit. Um and certainly not for sale. Um they just they don't pencil out and Arch has been doing numbers on that stuff too and and um it's it's pretty challenging. So, um I would say again maybe maybe it's an LCIP thing or something like that that what we start to look at funded inclusionary zoning. Um I think you'd find this these lot of these infill projects be a lot more u palatable to small developers if they knew that they weren't going to if they were going to be made whole on offering reduced rental costs um because they just again they're not going to start the project otherwise. Um and um that was my last point is that um I mean we we could commit whole hog whole hog to the the elip uh transfer development rights program and say all right what kind of wonderful fairy dust can we sprinkle on some of these projects um like oh my gosh we we uh we got to do the 60 foot of bike lane like at Mr. Buffard's project uh and it's going to be $250,000 or something like that or more. Um but we really would like we really like those those units. So maybe we say, hey,

you know, you got uh that project needed uh was was allowed to have more units. So maybe we'd say, hey, if you'll do nine units, which are allowed and not three, then we'll help you pitch in. We'll pitch in uh like they would with a tax increment financing project or something, but on a smaller scale, we'll help you pay for all that infrastructure so we can have the infrastructure and the bike lane and your nine units. But, you know, you got to hit the minimum or the maximum or whatever. And then we'll we'll make that that project feasible for you by um paying for the the furniture improvements, which seemed like there's two ways to do French improvements through history. And people in the civic realm should should correct me, but city of Seattle and a lot of cities traditionally um would have they wouldn't have done um impact fees and stuff like that. They would build sidewalks. they would build sewers, water systems and everything and tax the people in mass as a city. Um, and then you would go buy the lot from a private person and you put a building on it and your, you know, your sidewalks are built by the city, whatever. Whereas we say developers, you build it all and then we'll own it when you're done. Um, and so it adds to the cost of the project. So, I think um we're pretty far down the road of developer paying for it all, but we might need to find some hybrid if we really want to meet our housing goals and say, "Hey, is there some way we can come in as a city and help defay some of those costs for the really expensive and yet wonderful public realm that we need to build?" Because if we just rely on developers to always do it, um we're going to we're not going to see it in the in the uh the volume and the numbers that we want. Sorry it took so long, but I've been thinking a lot about this. I've just been seeing projects die and it's really discouraging and I think this is going to come to a head soon.

Commissioner Jones,

this is just a quick addendum to what Commissioner West said. So, um, the people who live in both right now love the love the fact that we do have wonderful amenities and we design in a certain way that maintains aesthetics and envir, you know, values the environment and things like that. So, I think it is something that's valuable to the people who live here and I imagine it's valuable to people who want to live here as well. I can't imagine it isn't. And in my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is if the pie stays the same in terms of the amount of dollars available, those growth targets and the affordable housing and the middle housing just isn't going to happen. But there this sounds like by a by having the potential to have extra infrastructure infrastructure funding we could actually grow the pie if the city is able to support some of these costs. I think that's an such an exciting idea in targeted areas tied to affordable housing or affordable adjacent housing that those types of goals. So it's really interesting and it potentially could be very creative. Um, so it's it's just an exciting opportunity for the city.

Chair, if I could respond real quick. Yeah, just to the last couple comments. Um, so the the the El Clip program does while it does provide a revenue source, it it is limited. Um, and it does rely on uh what's within the capital facility plan in the comp plan, what's within that project list that we went through and prioritized. um the the dollars, you know, over time they might add up to a good amount, but it's it's incremental yearbyear. Um so it's definitely not a huge pot of money that can I don't I don't want anyone to think that it's it's, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars. Uh it it will support filling in holes uh in in transportation projects that the city is going to seek out to do. Um, but then I do want to remind you of the transportation impact fee adjustments and the the one chart that uh Boyd brought up that showed, okay, if we do this transportation impact fee reduction, it creates a gap. So that there already is a gap in the city funded, you know, long-term plan that that we felt that we could adjust and and kind of work through that. Um, we see the Elip program as an opportunity to maybe fill a few of those holes, but it's definitely just a few small holes with um with some projects in in those designated areas that we want to make sure are sort of high targets for the the largest number of units to get the largest amount of of benefit. That's something that we'll work through with Morgan to make sure we can come with, you know, when we when we talk about lipas and where the the those areas will be, what could be an example case because we want to make sure we come with a a good example of here's what a project actually could look like. Here's what it would look like for number of units. Here's what the costs would be for them to actually pay for the units out there in the in the counties. Um and

and so there's still a cost to that that would be added on for the for the developer to get the extra units to then, you know, go into the into the the opportunity for the funding in the future. Um but it to offset all development of public infrastructure would be really would be impossible. Uh just just to put it bluntly. Um so thank you Commissioner Lever.

Thank you Commissioner Lever here. I um have a an idea I suppose and I don't I'm okay let me just have the idea. So when it comes to affordable housing and again like that seems to have such a negative connotation in the community in terms of like oh these scary people who are coming or need the affordable housing when it comes to making it work for the developers really understanding who are those potential home buyers or even renters. I was kind of curious and you don't have to answer the question right now, but when it comes to uh city employees or um teachers, u firefighters and so on, like how do are they I mean is everyone able to live here? Like I just remember that there are other cities where you can't really live in the city that you work because it's too expensive. And if so, how can we develop a program that it is target for employees that we definitely want to make sure that they're part of the makeup of the city and that can become a tenant right away. So then, you know, and and then I was thinking, okay, from my housing experience, we see the waiting list for the housing programs and the f that are funded federally, they're like thousands and thousands of people, right? but you have a very specific criteria and you know who's in the waiting list and if we actually knew that oh scarlet is in the waiting list she's not so scary maybe kind of gaining that momentum that we need to when the projects do come forward or when we need to make those like hard decisions that we actually have that audience that said I've been in the wait list for the last 5 years and I'm really looking forward to moving in there and have you explored anything like that in terms of home ownership for employees

very kind I know you to think of us as city employees, but I will say so you're jumping a few steps ahead. Um, but once an affordable housing unit is created, we partner with ARCH to market the unit, administer the unit, administer the covenant of that unit. And from my conversation with ARCH, the way I understand how they um select applicants to live in those units, they have a criteria that they each applicant has to submit. Um, an application each applicant has to submit, the application is graded on a criteria. One of the criterias is does that person live in the community that they are applying for an affordable housing unit. Um so in your example of a city employee they work in the community. Oh sorry they do they work in the community they're applying for a unit in. So city employee example they if they were applying for a unit here in Basel and they work for Basel that would give them an extra point in the application. Um, and this application is graded through several metrics that I'm not 100% familiar with, but it's basically meant that the highest the highest scoring applicants will get priority in the um, in the affordable housing unit.

Thank you for that. And I actually like thinking more on the design piece of it because when it comes to the engagement component and similar to what you shared earlier like I have heard many stories where like oh I wish my children could live here and or even my own story which I shared like I feel like I got lucky that my home is just the tiniest one. I'm like how did I find this? It's just literally like I don't I think we're the smallest one. it has to be that I was you know were able to move in and I we do have we know that there's this need but we just have this idea of who that may be and then when it comes to the feedback you know you have 25 people which is again like it's not it's not statistically significant for the city relevant very relevant and we have other um avenues where we get feedback but it still feels so foreign to the to people and then when I think about captive audience I really like I don't know how many employees we have here or how many teachers we have like there's actually like a captive audience that we could tap into and really design for as you create it. So by the time you get to the implementation piece, that's called the whole human center design component come into place. And I really think, you know, as I'm looking at the buildings go up and I don't want to get all dark over here with the state of the world, but I'm like if you know anything like we we need to just build these resilience communities and it would be wonderful that we really took under consideration the people who are working here like you know the yoga teachers that I know that are driving from like god knows where uh like far cuz I'm like oh you come all the way you know for just like a class. So I really I really think that we we we have an opportunity to do things slightly different that are outside the scope of the regular um so that we can get the feedback that we know it exists and then have that population that will help us mitigate the nimism that we know it exists. So

makes sense. I understand what you're getting at and yeah I definitely appreciate the feedback. Thank you. And I'd like to pick up a little bit on what Commissioner Westerbeck said. You know, on its face, having the developer pay for the improvements in front of their development seems simple and right and easy and yeah, let's do that. But I I bet all of us could point to segments of sidewalk or development that are disconnected from anything and quite likely will be a very long time till they get connected. Was that the best use of those dollars?

And you know, should we prioritize certain areas? And you know, I've been skeptical of fee in Lou in other instances, but looking at a reasonable fee, having a designated source and okay, have that money go to that may make a lot more sense and it just might be time to to reexamine that. You know, we've got experience doing it this way. Is it the best way? Let's take a look. So, I'd suggest we consider that. Any other comments on this topic, Commissioner West?

No, I agree. Just to pick up on that, like um a couple of the cases I've seen, there really should be like a a sidewalk connection, that's actually pretty affordable. But then to do like a full road section rebuild just for 60 ft like you're talking about, like, oh, that is that's a pretty poor use of money. Like the one I was talking about, again, I'll bring it up the one with Mr. Buffart's project. um uh to get into the weeds a tiny bit, but I think you'll understand this. It's a it's like a mile long road or something like that. And we as a planning commission helped put in place the the bike plan that has a very aspirational section road section there. Um and it would require realignment and tearing out of some really nice sidewalks from 2021 that were put in for a housing development there. Um that so it's sort of hipbone connects to leg bone. So they were gonna have to do a significant amount of rework that was it's only five work five years old just because it's in the manual

and this is how it's done. That's 60 feet. But the crazy thing to me is and this is not the only instances of this is this could happen all over the city. You'd be as commissioner um Kieran said um you'd be redoing this 60 ft to be the the beautiful Lamborghini but um that particular road has a whole bunch of developments done in the last 10 or 15 years. No one's gonna redevelop those for 50, 60, 70, 80 years. So those are never going to get the bike lane until the city does it. And it's just ridiculous to think that we're going to connect up that whole mile. So I think there's place like that all over the city where we have to, like you said, have a more logical standard applied. Can we put in the sidewalk? Can we get the housing? And we can like you say you got to contribute to fee and loo or you have to to meet the the you have to to build to the maximum number of units so we get the most benefit out of that out of this since you're not going to build the bike lane or whatever. So I think some of these conversations could be had. So sorry to beat a dead horse there but I really think that is a very good point. Could I ask for just a point of clarification for staff? So um and we definitely would need to bring public works into the conversation around any strategies around uh the right of way. Um, but are are is is the conversation here looking at inclusion of strategies within the housing action plan that look at how it inter how affordable housing projects interface with the public rightway or is this any housing? Because there's a there's a significant difference when we're talking about market rate traditional development types that are not providing any affordable housing units, deedestricted affordable units or those that do provide deed restricted affordable units that are that are achieving the income ban goals which have which are very very high within our 0 to 30 30 to 50 to 80%

bands. we're not going to have a problem achieving the above 80% in the next 20 years. Staff are not worried about uh achieving the maybe 1500 units in that in that realm. Um it's really that focus on those that do have deed restrictions below 80%. So if that's kind of where this is going, we can we can definitely circle back include public works on what what opportunities might be uh might be there. Again, strategies are definitely just that. They're not binding. It's it's not in the comp plan, but it's ways for us to to make sure we can see what's plausible. What What are some opportunities we could seek out? Is it for finding additional, you know, grant resources for projects that we can apply towards rightway improvements to to really cut that pain um for for a project. Um, but just wanted to make sure we were we were clear on kind of where this was going. All housing um or affordable housing, those that include deed restricted affordable housing units.

Commissioner Robson, this is um this is highly irregular. Um I need to excuse myself from the meeting. Uh so are we are you guys good with a quorum right now? We are not taking any action. Okay. So, we're solid. I'm sorry. I need to We are fine. Four. Four is is quum. So, be Okay. Good. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Dr. Mike. Thank you.

I'll speak to that just briefly since I partly brought it up. I would think we'd start with deed restricted, but that when there is conversation around um again I'm going to bring up Mr. Bard's project just because it's such a glaring example when it does look like you're doing really extraordinary maybe beyond nexus and proportionality. I know that can always be argued um for a nondeed restrictor project that we would have a opportunity to have a conversation about that and say would we rather put a condition on this like yeah you can do 80% and up but you can't just do three you've got to do do nine or something like I mentioned so we might have some sort of new program we say yeah it's not deed restricted but we can see like no one is going to to build that um that frontage improvement on your street for maybe decades So, can we stop it at the sidewalk? But in exchange, you have to you can't do um a minimum. You've got to really put some more housing into the into the um the project. So, I know it's a wishy-washy answer, but I would think we could get to that in time. Um, but at first it would be one of the examples I think of is someone might like myself might say, I want to do 10 units here on this project and I'm downtown. Um, and I really would like to do 60 80% AMI, but what's killing me is I can't afford to put in the lights and the sidewalks and the street trees, and I can't reline the sewer, and I can't do all the stuff that's outside my property. Um, because it's just makes the makes the project not work at 80% AMI, 60% AMI. But if the city could find a way to do that on themselves, I'll bring you 10 deed restricted units. And I know we find other ways to do that. multi family tax exemption and extra um height and so forth. Sometimes those things just aren't feasible. So instead of be like you guys great if I could just worry

about building the building and making a walkway out to the sidewalk and then you guys worry about the rest of it kind of like we would have done 100 years ago. So maybe I'm again saying the same thing in a different way, but that'd be amazing. The developer be like I got it. I got you 10 units at 70% AMI. I'm going to build them right there. We got an agreement with you guys to build the sidewalks and put in the street lights. Let's go build. Commissioner Jones.

Uh my feedback is is that we should start looking at this in or at least exploring it in terms of the deed restricted affordable units. Um I go back to the comment that the consultant from Eco Northwest said. He said that, you know, there are a couple different ways that you could go about looking at this infrastructure funding. And I know you're not you're not suggesting this would be the only source of funding. There might be other grants, etc. But just using that example of well, you could just say, okay, your overall capital infrastructure budget increased. Well, that might lead to projects that were never even on there that have nothing to do with the affordable housing. Or you could do something that was more targeted. I think it'd be interesting to look at something that's more targeted for affordable housing that takes some of the costs off the developer to incentivize that type of um uh project moving forward. So, I think it I don't know if it will pencil out, but I think it would be interesting to look at. Commissioner Lever

and and then um complementing that I kind of think of the scenarios like if we really look at okay what is the demand that we know exists because we know it happens and then it it's easy to start with those that you can really like target and ask right I now I'm like really curious to know how many of the city staff live here and how many of them would like to live here or any of the other um you know people who work in in in the city because I mean I would love to be ble to work where I live and and then if that is the case like how can we really better understand what that that look like and then how can even the city support those efforts so that we can really start somewhere with scenarios that are very that could be really an incentive because you have that target population and again that almost like building that waiting list

just one more quick note and I think we all realize this but just Because people can only afford a deed deed restricted affordable housing project or or to live in one of those doesn't mean that they also don't want accessible bike lanes.

Um and in the long long term they don't want to have to deal with sewers that collapsed in 5 years because they weren't upgraded and things like that. So I do think we we also want the folks in those developments to have similar assets that the rest of the population has those over 80. And if the only way to make that happen is from another, you know, making the pie bigger in terms of funding, then let's try to figure out how to do that though. Commissioner West here.

Oh, real quick. Um I did want to give the city a little props. We did this what 15 years ago or something. I've benefited had projects benefit from the the um Horse Creek drainage um district, whatever we call it. You have to pay into it, so there's a cost. But the cool thing is the city went in and they did this massive infrastructure project, which meant a little projects like I've been doing have to do really infeasible on-site storm water detention and treatment, which would have again killed most of the projects I've been involved with here and elsewhere. Um, so being able to pay, you know, 25 grand or whatever for a small project and just um go into that that city provided system. Granted, that was a massive infrastructure project. I'm sure, you know, but that's just an example of like, hey, we'll we'll we'll do some heavy lifting. You pay into the system, but it facilitates you getting this done and all you have to do is pipe over to it. That was a real help. And it's I think it's helped, you know, more than just myself downtown. I think that that whole horse creek system, assuming it's worked out for the city, has been a real boon. So, we've done it before. We've done a version of this where we kind of did some of the heavy lifting of the city and then people could buy into it.

All right. Well, you got a lot of feedback. Definitely lot to appreciate it. Thank you all so much. Well, thank you for your presentation. You clearly stimulated a lot of thought from us. So, uh, we we do appreciate you coming and look forward to seeing you again soon. Look forward to it. Have a good night. Thank you, Senior Pera. Appreciate it. So, our final study session item for today is the downtown sub area plan update. Welcome.

Good to see you all again. I'll get the PowerPoint pulled up here. Okay. Um, so my update tonight will be very similar to the last presentation, but focus a little more on our recent um, engagement work on the downtown uh, sub area plan update and just some uh, a brief summary of kind of what we've been hearing um, from participants and uh, how that'll inform the plan development. So just in terms of general updates on the project, I know it's been a while since we've been before you all with an update on this particular project. Um we are still in the uh inventorying existing conditions and kind of visioning phase really focusing on the engagement work. um which is really where a bulk of the information um informing the plan, you know, comes from. Um and so our goal is to have a lot of that uh wrapped up over the next couple of months and an initial draft for review in July, so shortly after we have a draft of the housing action plan available. And then very similar to that project, doing a bigger push over the summer. um to you know make people aware of the plan, give them an opportunity to review and get more feedback from the community on uh you know did we hit the mark or or what gaps do we need to fill.

So, um, one of the accomplishments over the past couple of months is, um, we recruited, um, and formed an ambassador workg group for this project, very similar to, um, the advisory committee we formed for the climate action plan. It's a community-driven group um, of uh, people that voluntarily uh, applied to serve as ambassadors. Um so the main purpose of this group is to provide ongoing input on the plan itself and our engagement approach to the broader community as well as to help us help connect us um with each of their um networks. So this opportunity was widely promoted across all the city's communication channels um on our website and engage both listerve social media um we worked with Burke um to do in-person tableabling at the library and other locations um around downtown as well as to do some door-todoor outreach handing out flyers um to different downtown businesses and apartment buildings to solicit interest. And then as as part of this recruitment process as well, um Burke identified a number of initial stakeholders and conduct conducted um 10 interviews uh the summary of which I included in your packet. Uh the main purpose of those interviews were to establish new partnerships, um gather initial input on uh downtown topics and priorities, and then to also ask these participants if they would be willing to serve on the ambassador group as well.

And so we did uh receive a a large amount of interest um in in this group. We received over 40 plus applications um which exceeded our initial goal of about 10 to 15 participants. Um so uh due to the high level of interest we ended up selecting about 24 participants and uh the criteria that um our consultant used to narrow that list down was affiliation to downtown. So whether they live live, work, um visit or study here in both, their availability and ability to attend uh the scheduled meetings and then ability to represent and engage diverse communities in downtown. So the uh we held their first meeting uh last month which was uh great success. At the first meeting, we did a walking tour of downtown. We provided them all with a brief orientation and then a bulk of the meeting was spent walking around downtown and identifying areas um or common challenges throughout downtown through a photo voice tour um where the ambassadors were encouraged to uh take photos um and provide notes uh regarding them whether they're uh you know pros or cons or opportunity areas within downtown. So, we got a lot of great photos um from that first meeting. I've included a couple of those up on your screen here. And so what we did with all of those photos that were collected by the ambassador group was compiled them into kind of common themes um and topic areas and collages and brought those back um during the second

meeting to kind of share share out some key themes that we saw that came out of those. Um and building off of that, we held their second meeting um just last week. And so that meeting focused on um breaking up into small groups and really diving into a couple of the key topic areas in a bit more detail. So we focused the those conversations around housing and development, transportation and mobility, and then public space and activation because those were some common themes that we saw come out of the photos. And then in addition to the ambassador workg group, we've been doing some public work versions of these same um walking tours of downtown. Um so it provides an opportunity for other residents to um explore downtown with city staff, discuss what's working, uh you know, what could be better and what we need to address in the plan. Um, so I've included a map of kind of the key locations that we've tried to hit on these walking tours, including um, City Hall, Festival Street, Main Street, uh, Triangle Junction and Both Way, Park at Both Landing, and then some of the more recent development along 102nd and 104th Street. So, our first discovery walk um was on Saturday. Uh yes, Chair Kieran was there. Um it was a pretty good turnout considering the weather. Um we had about 15 participants. um both long-term residents as well as some newer ones um that mentioned that um this was a great opportunity to meet some neighbors, learn more about

downtown um which was good to see and um so got to hear a lot of good feedback on that walking tour as well. We are going to be hosting a second uh public walk tomorrow evening. Um, so we tried to provide kind of one on Saturday um, for those that work during the week and then provide another option on a weekday evening. So that'll be tomorrow night from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. Um, we have had a large amount of interest thus far. We have about 40 registrants on the engaged bathl website for that event tomorrow. And then our social media posts um have been getting a lot of traction with over 200 likes and over 100 comments um with a varying degree of um feedback on you know common issues that um people see downtown or things that they would like to see downtown. Um, so we are working with our communications team to pull those uh like you mentioned earlier and kind of factor that into our feedback um as well as as we're kind of assembling all of this feedback that we're getting in these different avenues.

City Hall. Yes. Um so we'll meet at city hall at 6:00. We'll start here. Um given sun the limited sunlight, we'll probably just give a brief um welcome and introduction and then start our walk and then um kind of go from there. Great.

Awesome. Looking forward to seeing youall there. Um so to summarize some of the common themes that we've been hearing um both on the public walks and from the ambassador group um in those small group discussions last week were I think things that we have heard um during previous engagement processes and I think ones that were highlighted during our housing conversation tonight as well um that there are is some public concern around some of the pace and direction of recent development downtown. Um people aren't a huge fan of the larger block apartment buildings. And so I think one of the key questions that we'll have to wrestle with as part of the downtown plan is um you know with the anticipated growth, how do we retain that charm of downtown um while accommodating future growth? Um, so I think that'll be something that we dig into a little more um down the line and we are looking at um having a public workshop or sharet um around the time that the draft plan comes out. So we'll have an opportunity then to really dig into um design elements um and ways that we could update the code to really make sure that's reflected in in future development. Um there's concerns around, you know, affordability and displacement. Um and then uh common comments around you know the num number of vacant uh lots or underutilized properties throughout downtown which create some uh connectivity issues uh particularly between say the main street area and both way or between

um Main Street and UDub both just different hubs of activity um that are kind I disconnected because of that. In terms of transportation, mobility, um there parking has come up a lot. There's a perceived lack of parking downtown. Um it seems like that is due to a combination of factors, both um capacity in specific areas, but also making people aware of available parking. Um, so some things that we heard in the small groups were that, you know, the city hall garage is a great asset, but it's unclear um, you know, what spots are reserved for city staff, what hours they're unavailable to the public, what hours the um, garage itself is open. And so just making that uh the public more aware that you know we have substantial parking here available that is close by a number of um restaurants and other locations. Um as well as the other parking locations throughout downtown. Um but part of it also is our street parking and we've heard um that there is some uh spillover from residential parking, people overstaying uh or staying in parking places uh and a lack of enforcement. Um so it's kind of multiple factors that are contributing to that. Um people really highlighted the that they love the access to trails um and green space downtown um but that there are some pockets or gaps in our existing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. I think more so on the um bicycle infrastructure side in

particular. Um so there are some planned improvements along both way that are coming as well as Beardsley Boulevard. Um but you know really identifying those additional areas where we need to improve those connections. Um crossings came up a lot and um public safety. So I um a number of areas where people have identified that um safety improvements are needed and then um I mentioned some of the connectivity issues as well and then public space inactivation. Um we've heard a lot that awareness about the um multiple privately owned public spaces that are downtown are not wellnown. And so really thinking about, okay, how do we um advertise that better and utilize these spaces that are already existing and that, you know, developers have put um money into. U making sure that those are utilized spaces um that people know about. Um, as I mentioned, people noted that access to nature is important and so how do we retain that um as downtown continues to grow? Um, common theme of wanting to expand uh public art and really using that as a way to help activate our downtown. Um I think similar to prior engagement feed fe feedback on main street uh pedestrianization has been mixed. So I don't know if we've come away with any new takeaways there in particular. Um and then a lot of great suggestions for um additional

improvements um to activate those spaces uh Main Street as well as uh Triangle Junction and some of the other main areas of downtown. So in terms of next steps for the project, um we will be continuing to work with the ambassador workg group and community members to finish the existing conditions inventory um identifying those key challenges and opportunities and then begin brainstorming policy solutions and then we will come back um with a draft plan around July um which is also when we are looking to host a uh public workshop or sharet to dig into some of these topics in a bit more detail and get that feedback um uh on the draft plan as well. And then uh we plan on returning to plan commission in June uh when we when we have that draft available. Um and then we'll do a big push over the summer. um to raise awareness about the draft and gather additional feedback and then come back in the fall for uh the final review and adoption process. So with that, I will turn it over to you all for any questions.

Commissioner comments and then Oh, sorry. You go first.

Commissioner Lever. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the engagement that's um that's been put into this effort and I really uh I'm so happy to see the response rate as well. Uh my comment was around the other programming that currently exists. So I've seen other things that are uh like the pop-up shops and other other things. So how how does that coordination look like in terms of um kind of getting even the feedback of existing like even the businesses that like I think you I saw the the focus group that you had but there's so many other I guess target populations as well. How are they engaging this process?

Yeah that's a good question. Um so we are kind of receiving feedback through a variety of avenues. there's a lot of overlap across multiple projects like you mentioned. So, um the pop shops work, our housing action plan as well as the downtown plan specifically. Um so, we have been working with Burke and our consultants to um make sure that we identify those overlaps where they are and how we can fold that, you know, feedback into this plan. Um and then uh for this project in particular um as part of uh Burke's stakeholder engagement process um identifying those different categories like local businesses um and and other groups they've um made sure to reach out to them directly. So, as part of the ambassador workg groupoup recruitment, but um in addition, some of those one-on-one interviews, um other door-todoor outreach, and then we're getting broader feedback at the in-person events which kind of collect a a wider array of um participants of feedback.

Mr. Westerbe,

thanks. Um, first of all, love the ambassador work group. It's great. Some people are some names are recognized at least on the interviewee list. So, fantastic effort. I'm excited to uh hopefully I remember my calendar goes off to tomorrow night. I can jump out of work and and get over there to walk with you guys. But, uh, fantastic. So, thank you. Just excited to see that. Just wanted to say congratulations on getting that going and getting some great feedback. Um, I do look forward to getting to the policy. I know I emailed uh uh deputy um director Gates about the wait Gates. Did I say that right? Gets there we go. Gets I know we had that discussion once trying to get his name right for anybody who's watching the video. Um about that because I've uh you know me I'm laser focused on what what's it going to take to get the built environment we are seeking in downtown. So, I've got a lot of comments around like um design guidelines and and uh regulations and so forth as they, you know, pertain to how we build and what the shape of things are uh that guides how how we build in downtown. So, I'm excited to to dig into that when the time comes. Um so, that's all just uh eager to uh eager to see this progress and I'm glad we're getting a lot of feedback from a wide variety of people on this. Appreciate your work, Cameron. Well, I did take the walking tour and I'm going to recognize Cameron for the miserable conditions. It was a nasty day, but we solded on. So, it was good and it it was interesting to hear some of the comments. Um, you know, we'd be standing in front of public open space and people had no idea. So, you know, it's clearly an issue. Um, you know, parking is also most definitely an issue. And we should recognize most of both is not within walking distance of downtown. That's that's just a reality.

I mean, I'm 2 miles away and it's I'll walk occasionally, but not all the time. It's it's a long way. Um, there are real consistent comments both, you know, pretty much any public uh social media you look at, it comes up. And you know, there are some things we could probably do. Construction parking. I I have experience with large construction projects and you can require the contractor to have a parking plan and you could designate a place over there where they can park and not grab city streets in front of their job. Uh that, you know, and I'm sure it would require some action to be able to do that, but that is a very specific step you could take to address. The city does do that. Yeah,

we have to we have to do it for every project, just so you know. Well, okay. But you do see people for sure. I'm just saying I I've had to make multiple parking plans for projects. So Well, then let's move to the other issue of enforcement. There we go. Which, you know, also clearly doesn't happen. I mean, you know that the I, you know, there are challenges with enforcement. Everybody wants enforcement, but nobody wants to be enforced upon. But we're going to have to bite the bullet and deal with that. So, you know, that's definitely something that has to be done. So, but again, thanks for being out there.

Yeah, no problem. Um, yeah, you mentioned construction parking. I know for the Alexen development in particular, uh, we we partnered with them on, um, utilizing, you know, the paved area and city lots because, you know, a lot of vehicles in and out of that area and staging that needed to happen. Um so yeah it is something that we try to work with developers on um to make uh as least disturbing as possible. Um during that process I'll make two more comments on walkability. Uh I I do walk my dog downtown a lot and the lights on both way default don't walk and if you're walking and you miss you know if you don't push the button before the cycle ends you're waiting a full cycle and that gives a message that the the cars get the priority they're more important I think that should be looked at and the other thing that I've experienced is almost a death trap is the right on red B 522 2527. If there's a bus there and you're crossing, people whip through that right on red and it's it's a risk.

Let me echo. I having lived downtown now for 11 years, I've had so many close calls with right on red and also people doing left turns from the turn lane and and in right into crosswalks. So se city of Seattle now has the no uh right turn on red. uh we should we should consider that because it's just a huge safety issue. So, I'm just going to have to concur with that cuz I walk all over the place downtown and it's a massive problem and I think we have to deal with wash dot with the the timing, right? But I spend good considerable time of my week feels like waiting for those lights to I know see commissioner Jones walking around downtown too and yeah they uh that's a great point like the default I mean let's face it sorry it's on the public record I jaywalk all the time even across 522 527 because there'll be no cars for an eighth of a mile and you're just hanging out waiting forever so I just walk across.

Don't have to run just walk across. So that's a problem. But I don't know how recalcit wash has been to work with us on on light timing. I've heard from council members that that's very difficult prospect, but I feel like it's worth having a summit between both and washed out on that issue. Thanks for reminding me about that. Uh, it's just I'm just going to put a plug in for that pedestrian bike bridge over 522 using some city property.

So, you've heard a couple personal issues raised uh along with trying to be general on it. Uh, any other commissioner comments? All right. Well, thank you for coming to us with this. uh thanks for uh your outreach and the feedback you're getting. So we look forward to hearing more from you. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.

All right, that brings our study sessions to a close. Next item is reports from members. Have anything? I'll say one thing. Uh per our bylaws, article 4, section two, elections of officers is the first regular meeting in May and even years. So that's this May. I will not be chair next goound. So I mean I really enjoy it. I have a lot of fun with it, but I think I've done a number of terms and I should let other people take a turn. uh be willing more than willing to help or more than willing to keep my mouth shut. Whatever the next chair chooses, but uh kind of plant that seed so you all can think about that coming. Any other reports from members reports from staff? Uh just a couple real quick. Uh I do want to point out so at the March 10th uh council meeting uh they did hold there was a a staff briefing from public works on the transportation safety plan. very informative, might touch on a couple of the points that that were made just recently. Um, and definitely can can be it'll be instructive in the work that we do in the downtown as well as other other projects. Uh moving forward, uh at that same meeting, uh council did pass a resolution to forego independent uh study of the the private amendment request uh and incorporate it within the Canyon Park broader uh since it was just immediately adjacent incorporated with the Canyon Park sub area work that'll start uh it's scoped to start at the end of this year. Uh and then finally we did have a study session on updating title 22 the landmark preservation codes. Uh we will bring that to planning commission after we have a chance to sit down with the landmark preservation

board themselves and and go through through that. Um that was that meeting. Uh our next upcoming meeting is April 1st uh where we'll do a tree code update kickoff u study session. So that's the only planned item that that evening, but should be a good good discussion to get going after the UFMP adoption. So that's it from staff. There wasn't a lot of discussion at the last meeting about the town houses on 100th and we talked about getting some feedback on that. Did you have any updates there? Uh all comments have been forwarded to to the the appropriate staff whether it's transportation engineering within the public works uh review division uh or with the planner. So they are they are part of the record uh if they were submitted within the public comment period. We tend to incorporate them with with any um we send them on to any any developer just so that they're aware of those questions. Um and we'll and we do respond back to individuals as best as possible with information on what the development standards are, what the the mitigations that are already built into the code would require uh for uh transportation, you know, generally is transportation uh related in this one in this case um concerns. So

a number of commissioners did express an interest in hearing feedback on that. So if you could give us an update at some future meeting, appreciate that. All right. Uh, there being no further business, is there a motion to adjurnn? Motion. This is Commissioner Jones. Motion to adjurnn. All right. Second. Motion to adjurnn. Seconded. All right. All in favor? I. I. All right. Uh, meeting is adjourned at 8:14. Our next meeting will be April 1st. Uh, no fooling on that one.