City Council - Regular Meeting

Being here, today is lucky number 22 of our 60 day public comment period that runs through October 24th. So we're right in the middle of it and we've got still 38 more days for residents to share their feedback on the second phase of zone in between the administration and council. And I know we've had a number of folks in the room have already taken the survey and I think about a number of events. We will talk more about the engagement both here tonight, but also engagement into the future, just to make sure that folks have every opportunity to weigh in on what we have before us here. We'll get into the substance of this here in a little bit, but I do want to make sure I thank folks who helped to make tonight's public hearing possible. Certainly to our host of the King Arts Complex, it's great to be here on the historic Near East side. We actually We have new leadership recently here at the King Art Center with Corey Favor, who took over as executive director, who's a good friend of many folks up here today. And I certainly want to thank him and Javon Collins and his entire executive team for making space for us. It's great to be here on the Near East Side and certainly on a topic that I think has a lot to do with how neighborhoods develop uh the good the bad and the ugly and about how we can do better in the future and how our land use policies shape how neighborhoods change and evolve over time and i think the nary side has uh both some of the the brightness and some of the scars from some of the choices that we've made certainly in past generations and how we should learn from those I want to thank my two colleagues that are here with me as well. Councilor who continues to think that perfect attendance at every zone and event. So council member, thank you for being here. Council member Ross, we are in, I believe, district seven, your district, so thank you for being here tonight with us. I know you have another event here later on, but I know you're going to stick around with us throughout this as long as you can. I want to thank our zoning team as well who's here. I know we have two presenters, but I know we have a number of different folks that are in the room as well. That zoning team is led by project manager, Louis Taba, and our chief zoning official, Shannon Pine. Thank you both for being here, being at our previous hearing, but also tonight, but also your continued engagement. Certainly also want to thank all the council staff, Kevin McCain from our legislative research office, Annie McDonald, and Ariel Garrett from my staff for helping to make today work. We have our fine folks from CTV in the back, making sure that folks who are not able to physically be present with us here tonight can access this event online and also can be accessible later on. As I mentioned, this is streaming on City of Columbus' CTV and on council social media pages. And a record of this event would be uploaded to the YouTube channel for the City of Columbus for folks that just couldn't get enough of tonight and want to go back and make sure that they get their money's worth from tonight's effort. So want to make sure that folks have an opportunity to review that if in fact you're interested. When we launched the first phase of Zone In two years ago, we promised that updating our zoning code that dated back to the 1950s should not be defined by red lines and red tape. And two years later, we know that that initiative works. While housing permits have fallen across the country, Columbus has defied that national trend. We've actually seen an increase in the amount of housing that is actually being constructed here in Columbus. One of the highest rates as compared to the top 50 cities by size across the country. And this increase in housing units is not for just no reason. It's about helping to stabilize housing costs in Columbus. I don't know about you, but there's not a lot of things that are getting cheaper these days. On the way over, I think I winced a couple times when I saw the price of the pump on the way here, and housing is no different. Yet, here in Columbus, we're actually seeing housing costs begin to stabilize because we've seen more increases and actual housing units come online. which is now having a direct impact on the cost that people are paying for rent, the cost that people are paying for houses, or condos, or any type of housing. And I'm very excited to see the fruits of the labor from two years ago come to fruition. This was and is one of our main goals, is to help make sure that folks in Columbus can afford a roof over their heads, and while It may sound unusual. Our land use and zoning policies have a lot to do with whether or not that happens, because it dictates about where things can go, how big they can be, how much housing can be built, and where it can be built. And that does not mean that we're going to allow folks to build whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. But thinking about having a code that is more defined about what the priorities are for our residents here in 2026, and all the way heading towards 2056, rather than say 1956, I think is something that we all, whether or not we agree or disagree about some of the details, on something that we should strive for. this is uh this next phase of zoning is significantly larger that first phase only focused on four percent of the city those were our main corridors so think about things like high street or lane avenue or broad street this next phase is significantly larger this is over 40 of the city Now you will see here tonight, one of the main focuses of this hearing is to talk about the zoning districts. So the actual things that people are allowed to do in this 40 plus percent of the city. Those new zoning districts are very different compared to what was proposed in the first phase of Zone N. And you heard about some of the reasons why for that. But the current system, as currently constructed, forces many small businesses to seek a variance, to go through a council process that can add up to 12 months on a process. It makes folks that are building affordable housing in our community jump through red tape after hoop, after hoop, after hoop, in order to bring those housing units online. These are wasted costs and wasted time that eventually get passed down to tenants and homeowners that then end up paying for those at the end of the day. We want to change that dynamic. Again, this is not about just letting folks build whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, but it's about having clear rules. Clear rules of the road about what is allowed to be built, and just as importantly, is actually having high quality design standards. Prior to the first phase of Zone In, there were no design standards built into our zoning code. That was something that was needed to be achieved through negotiation by project by project with folks in neighborhoods with builders. And rather than having that process which can drag on for months if not years, let's make sure that we have those design elements built into the code on the front end. So those that are building our community know what the expectations are. And those in the room here tonight and those outside of this room know what those expectations should be for their neighborhood. And have an opportunity to weigh in on what those design standards should look like. We can build a predictable, vibrant streetscapes and bring true mixed-use neighborhoods in Columbus where it's just as easy to find a childcare center, a grocery store, and housing on the exact same block. That is what the power of land use policies can do. One of the things we strive for in the first phase of Zone In was to make sure that, again, whether folks liked the answers or didn't like the answers, that folks had the opportunity to ask their questions. And that those questions ultimately shaped the feedback of what ultimately came before council. This is about making decisions together. This isn't just the administration, this isn't just council, this is the whole city of Columbus. Because again, if we have not done this comprehensively in 70 years, we should try the best we possibly can to make sure that we do this work together. To make sure that as the years and decades goes by, that the work that folks are doing this year on this phase pays that dividends to make sure that again, more of our neighborhoods look like what they aspire to be. And I don't know if my council colleagues probably hear the same thing. People want things like the coffee shop. They want things like the childcare center. They want things like the grocery store. They want things like job centers that are easily accessible to their neighborhoods. So we are here back again with this second phase, with this public comment period. The first phase was shaped by that comment period. We made dozens and dozens of changes, both to the map. We'll talk about a little bit of that here tonight, but also the zoning districts themselves. And every single comment that folks make, whether or not that's through the survey process or here tonight, folks from our planning division are going to go back and look at every single one of those. My council colleagues may have strained a bit when they saw the Excel spreadsheet that was given to them a couple years ago, because it was hard to figure out how do you put 8,000 public comments in one place for them to have access to. And funny enough, Excel is actually the best way to do it. But these comments do not go unread. These are important. and had led led towards important changes we made over a hundred critical adjustments during that uh official phase uh to that to the first phase of zone in and we certainly expect for that to happen in this phase as well um we are expanding as i mentioned beyond just those corridors to over 40 percent of the city so this is still about housing but it's also about the future of columbus things like commercial centers things like retail things like industrial To make sure that we have a better understanding of those as our city grows. What does that growth look like? Where should that growth go? What kind of intensity should that grow? What uses should be allowed within those areas? And I think that is something that we have a unique opportunity here tonight to really shape the future of Columbus holistically. Rather than just having an argument about one individual project, let's take this on together as a whole community. Think about what this looks like in your neighborhood, in your area of town, and in the whole city. So appreciate folks being here tonight. Thank you for letting me set the stage a little bit for what we're going to be talking about here. And know that this is not your only bite of the apple. Again, we will be having two additional public hearings once the public comment period concludes. There's multiple different events that are going on. Council members are hosting nights at the zoning gallery that is hosted downtown. There's free parking. So folks want to come down there with one of the nice and rich accounts members there. But you also can make an appointment with a planner. So if you want to sit down with somebody in our planning department and kick the tires on this individually, you can do that. That is how far we're going to make sure that folks have the opportunity to ask their questions and get them answered. So I appreciate folks working towards trying to bring their ideas and their talents together, again, to help us make policy that will make Columbus look like the future that I think we all hope it will be. So with that, I'd love to pause and just see if either one of my council colleagues have anything to say on the front end.

Nothing much, because I know we have a ton to talk about today, but for those of you who live in District 7, we actually will be having a zone-in gallery date coming up September the 24th from 5 to 7 p.m. that I am inviting all of the area commissioners in District 7, so if you're an area commissioner that's here in District 7, you are welcome to come. We will have some more. Those dates will be given as we get closer to them, but the next date for District 7 is September the 24th, 5 to 7, and then we have another one in October

District two, we're a ways away, but my area commission and civic meeting at the gallery is not October 8th. So, hey, if this one doesn't work, you can come on down to the one for district two. But I'm just really excited to look out and see so many people here who want to be engaged in this process because we get such good feedback. I think we're up to having made, what was it, over 1,900 changes or something like that. It's an astronomical number of changes that we've made because of feedback from the community. So thank you all for being here tonight. We look forward to hearing your questions and hopefully can give you a good answer.

I also just want to acknowledge we had a number of events at the gallery that were postponed and that is because literally air conditioning went out in the conference room and with the heat spell we've had we did not think it was a great idea to put folks in a room that was 95 plus degrees so those events are going to be rescheduled so folks will still have every opportunity again if they want to go individually with a planner or go on a night with a council member we just wanted to be safe and not literally 90 degrees and a sweat box with folks as exciting as zoning is I thought that was probably better to put those on but uh with that again thanks for folks for coming so i'm going to turn the floor over now to our zone in team our project manager louis teva and our chief zoning official shannon pine

Thank you council members. So here we are phase two. This is the second public hearing. Phase two is economic and housing opportunity. I don't know how many people were involved in phase one, but phase one was completed in 2024. And we're here to talk today about the zone in districts. What are the exact districts that we're proposing in phase two? So, why did Columbus zone in? Well, as Councilmember Doran said, Columbus is growing and it's growing fast. The city and region have added tens of thousands of residents in recent years and projections show continued growth in the years and decades ahead. Jobs are expanding, new industries are emerging, and more people are choosing Columbus as their home. But growth also creates specific pressures and presents certain challenges. When housing supply falls behind demand, costs rise, choices shrink, and families struggle to find homes that fit their needs and their budget. I bought my house in the early 2000s. I was able to afford my house as a beginner house, as a starter house. But I see a lot of the people who I work with who are younger, who are in their 30s and late 20s, and they're really struggling to afford a house in Columbus when there are two professionals making a good salary. So we have to think about that. Employers also feel the strain when workers can't find housing close to jobs. And zoning is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure that growth strengthens rather than strains our quality of life. Updated zoning regulations can create more housing in more places, reduce commute times by connecting homes to jobs, support multiple modes of transit and walkable neighborhoods, and make development more predictable and transparent. These impacts are already visible and being felt every single day as a result of our city's outdated zoning code. longer commutes higher rents fewer affordable options and concerns about how change happens in our neighborhoods an updating zoning code will help to create a future where columbus remains affordable competitive and welcoming to all so phase two economic and housing opportunity we have four specific priorities based off of what we're seeing We want to leverage additional corridors to create more housing. Phase one focused on our primary corridors, but there's lots of corridors that were not involved in phase one, such as Hilliard Rome Road, Henderson Road, other roads like that. We have to reduce, grow the local economy and support neighborhood investment by modernizing employment focused sites and supporting small businesses. We want to connect housing jobs and transportation and promote high quality development with a zoning code that is fair and easy to understand.

Thank you.

So our first public hearing was on August 27th. At that point in time, we talked about our code and map overview. We talked about the project goals of Zone In. We talked about what is zoning, the old code versus the new code, phase one review, Columbus Growth Strategy that set the policy framework for phase two, community engagement, code highlights, overview of the map, and the fall timeline. If you missed that, I recommend that you go to YouTube and you watch it. It provides good background. Public hearing number two, what we're going to be covering today, we're going to be talking about additional code highlights more in depth. We're going to do a map overview. We're going to do a code overview. And we're going to talk about district standards for our new districts. Mixed use, we have three new mixed use districts as part of phase two. Office and institutional, we have three of those districts. And we have three industrial districts. We'll talk about our timeline, engagement opportunities, and then we'll talk about our website. What I have there is a map of phase one. We're not gonna spend too long on it, but what you see on that map are six mixed use districts. That is what was adopted by council in 2024. They're our most intense districts. They focused on the corridors. They provided 140 miles of updated zoning. And they're our most intense districts. We had a housing capacity analysis at the end of phase one that said we could do an 88,000 additional units based off of current market over a 10 year period. And what we're trying to do now is address the commercial zoning districts, the industrial zoning districts, and our institutional zoning districts. And so when you look at the phase two map, You will see some of our new nine districts. But you will also see that we have our phase one districts in there as well, because we took the six from phase one, the nine from phase two. So phase two has a total of 15 zoning districts. So we're gonna talk a little bit about code highlights. We wanna set the stage by talking about some definitions, make sure we're all on the same page, because zoning can be pretty technical, and we wanna make sure people understand what we're talking about. First thing we're gonna talk about is a setback. That's probably the most easy thing for people to understand. That's the distance by which a structure, parking area, or other development feature is separated from a parcel line or right of way. So very typically, you'll see your building has to be 25 feet back from the setback line. or the right of way line. All districts have minimum and maximum setbacks in the zoning code. We do have contextual and minimum maximum setbacks in some of our zoning districts so that if the existing buildings are set back a certain way from the property lines, that we can react to that and make sure that new development kind of matches that contextual setback. Facade zone, excuse me, facade zone, area between the minimum and maximum setback lines where a certain percentage of a building facade must be placed or above. So previously we just had setbacks. We said your building has to have a minimum setback of 25 feet, but then the building could go really far back, right? They could put parking in front and not make it very pedestrian friendly. So the facade zone says you have a certain area where the facade of the building has to go and it's pulling the buildings closer to the property lines. And those vary by district. And then a step back, this is a recess in the upper stories of a building from the lower stories. So it is required in all phase one districts and we propose it in some of our new mixed use districts. Basically what this is saying is if you're abutting a residential district, if you're above 35 feet, your building has to step back further so that it's more compatible. This is a big change from our old zoning code where the step back used to be from the primary road, which used to push the height of the building towards the residential. We want to turn that around and put it from the residential property lines.

I'm going to talk about a couple other highlights of the code. OpenSpace, it's proposed in our new NAC, IMX, COI, ROI, CMP, and IU districts. And we're going to go into the districts in a little bit more detail after we do these background slides. It is already required in our CAC and RAC phase one districts. And the way that open space is determined is either by a square footage per unit or a site percentage. So for like industrial sites, we're looking at the acreage of the site and that's how we're determining what the percentage open space would be required. Whereas a apartment or multi-unit residential development would be the square feet per unit. landscaping it's proposed in all of our new phase two districts and it's required in all of our phase one districts within the setback area there is a certain percentage of the area that needs to be landscaped and we have figures throughout the code that tell you which district requires what type how much landscaping There's also other landscaping that I did not particularly mention, but parking lot trees are still required. I will be getting in the next slide into some residential requirements. A residential landscape buffer is proposed in the NAC, IMX, COI, ROI, CMP, IU, IL, and IH districts, everything except EMX. uh because that's a smaller scale district it's already required in four of our six phase one districts uh minimally it is five feet wide five feet tall and 75 percent opaque screen with shrubs and you can add a fence in there if you would like but for our more intense districts that buffer area increases to 20 feet wide with eight evergreens per 100 feet And just wanted to point out that the industrial districts and the commercial districts in Title 33 now do not have such a buffer area. Really, it's just the minimum four feet wide, five feet tall. Basically, whatever parking lot screening requirements are, that's the only buffer that we're seeing in Title 33. Unit trees, this is something that is required in Title 33 and we've carried over into Title 34 for the CAC and RAC districts in phase one. We're adding EMX, NAC, COI and ROI to that and that requires one tree per five units for the first 50 units. We did increase that from phase one. It used to just be one tree per 10 units but we're doing the one per five for the first 50 and then you can go to the one per 10. And then a parking lot buffer, this is new to our mixed use districts. It is requiring a minimum eight foot wide, 40% landscape buffer between your parking lot and your building entrance, just so that those parking spaces aren't going right up to the sidewalk. You've probably been seeing the situation where the car is hanging over the sidewalk. There's not much room to actually get by the cars. So this gives a little bit of separation. It gives an opportunity to have a sidewalk within a landscape buffer area.

These are a lot of the standards that we're currently seeing that we negotiate on a site by site negotiation. So we're trying to bake them into the code. So here I wanted to talk a little bit about the map. So we want to talk about the map for a second and just show you how some of the districts are laid out. This is gonna be tricky with just the touch screen.

Is this the touch screen?

Oh, there we go. Could we switch to the laptop, sorry. Are we good? Yes, okay. So here we see...

All right. So it's going to be tricky to show regard. I'll just. Oh, OK. So here we go. This is the layout of these districts. You can see something that we intentionally did in this phase was you'll see this light kind of purple right here in this area. The map is very light purple. That's industrial light. And the dark purple is industrial heavy. One thing we tried to do was make sure that our industrial districts, our heavy industrial districts did not interact with residential districts as much as possible. We used industrial light as a buffer between industrial heavy and the residential districts to avoid more noxious uses. Currently a lot of this is just a mix of heavy and light industrial. you can see where we have our mixed use districts or kind of our lower intensity mixed use districts are like this light yellow this darker brown here like near where it says tanglewood plaza sort of mixed use two zoning districts we have the downtown district when you pull out you can see more or less the overall layout of the city and how we have these zoning districts a lot of mixed use along the primary corridors these blue colors are our regional Office and institutional like this dark blue color right here You can see it right there This lighter blue color is a community office and institutional that we can talk about in a minute as well And then we have some areas that are urban core throughout the city and some of our more important heavy industrial or our apologies heavy employment areas this very light blue color here this is our campus districts which applies to most of our institutional uses and So this map is online, and it's part of the survey, and I recommend everybody explore it. You can go by and look at your individual parcels. You can put in an address, and it will pull up what the individual zoning is. And we're looking for feedback on this map from the community.

Please switch back to the presentation, please. Thank you.

All right.

Give our technology a moment to get caught up with us. Yes. There we go. So just to, I'm not gonna go into detail on every single district. We are going to give a high level description of all of the new districts. But I just wanted to highlight on the emerging mixed use district. It seems to be one of the districts that a lot of people are excited about because it is, bringing some opportunity to our collector streets that are predominantly zoned residential and a lot of them already have mixed uses. A lot of these corridors, these collector streets have been down zoned through the years. And there's a big presence of pizza shops and corner stores and coffee shops along a lot of these streets. And it also gives folks an opportunity, we do a lot of council variances for a beauty salon or a massage therapy studio in a house. Some of those retail uses aren't allowed as home occupations. So if you think about live work units, it does give an opportunity to try to see what else could happen on these busier streets that there's usually COTA presence and lots of pedestrians. So the emerging mixed use district, it's within walkable areas of the city. And the code layout, it shows the facade zone that we talked about and the setback requirements. It's divided into the building placement category, which is basically where can my building go. And this district does not have an open space requirement because it is usually a smaller parcel. And this district is a little bit different from the other mixed use districts in that it has a building size restriction to try to preserve homes and have more of a house scale development pattern so that if somebody wants to redevelop a parcel, it's not going to be this big, long, 200-foot apartment building on this street that's mainly single and two unit dwellings. The height of this district is 35 feet, three stories maximum. That is one thing that we heard in phase one that folks were interested in a three story district where it seemed appropriate to place it. And It does also require, let me get back into some of the other requirements, design standards for transparency requirements. They're a little bit less intense than the other districts because most of these houses are not built to the standards of the commercial buildings with the transparency. But we're really excited about this district because it seems to really open the door on really maybe getting some vacant houses online to a more productive use. And there is a use table also with all of the districts that, all of the mixed use districts are, oops, sorry, I switched. Thank you. So you can really tell exactly what uses are allowed. In each district, A is allowed, NA is not allowed. An SP means it needs a special permit from the Board of Zoning Adjustment. Those are uses that currently need special permits from the Board of Zoning Adjustment. And in general, the EMX district allows most of what was allowed in the UGN one or the UGN two district, I'm sorry. So very small scale commercial, but it does give a lot of different housing opportunities.

So. So that was just kind of showing E. M. X. and kind of how the code is laid out, but we handed out and hopefully you all have is a chart very similar to this. You can see this in the gallery as well, which kind of distills all that information from all the different pages into one chart with all of the principal standards for all of the districts. We have it divided into mixed use urban on the left. You can see that emerging mixed use. industrial mixed use and neighborhood activity center are the new districts. So we have mixed use urban and then mixed use suburban. If you turn the page over, you can see that we have our business and institutional campuses, which focuses on our employment areas and employment uses, and then our industrial warehouse. All the business and institutional campus in an industrial warehouse districts are new. So I'll go over the mixed-use districts. The first one, as Shannon said, was EMX. Predominantly walkable districts include building design standards with a three-story maximum height. IMX is an interesting one. This is industrial mixed-use district. It also is a predominantly walkable district with attached and detached buildings. It's located near industrial areas where we've mapped it out in many locations which are kind of older industrial built along rail spurs that really aren't as vibrant as they used to be. And perhaps that would be better served if someone would like to do residential on those areas they could or some low intensity commercial. And we include building design standards on that with a five-story maximum height. A neighborhood activity center district, that's one of our suburban districts. It's very similar to the urban center, but I apologize for the urban general one, but it's more suburban. So it's auto-oriented with detached and some attached low-rise buildings located around existing commercial, allowing opportunities to transform into a mixed-use and walkable environment. It includes building design standards with a four-story maximum height. We want to make sure that we have different districts from different parts of the city. Not everything is going to be urban. We recognize that lots of areas are more suburban in nature, so some of these reflect that. So here we have, if you look at the charts, you can see the different standards on the left. So an emerging mixed use, we won't go over all these cuz we don't wanna bore you too much. I think we have about ten minutes, but principal building height is three stories, you can see it there. We do not have an affordability bonus, so three story is the max. We talk about footprint, we talk about those upper story step backs. We don't have any in the EMX cuz it's only three stories. You have front setbacks, five feet to 25 feet, rear setbacks. We talk about the facade zone. So where does the building have to be? How much of the building has to be in the facade zone? We talk about setbacks between multiple buildings. We talk about open space, which this area doesn't have required. Ground floor facade transparency. That means how much, how many windows do you have to have on the ground floor? How much parking and then bicycle parking spaces. So that's EMX. And we have in the code, we have images that kind of show what the intent is. And you can see that in the top right, which is something our previous code didn't have. It was all just text based. Industrial mixed use, this is what I was talking about, principal building height, these older industrial areas, five story max, we have an affordability bonus. So if you have a certain amount of affordable housing units and meet the CRA program, you can have two story of additional height. We talk about step back, so you can see that we have a 20-foot step back, and then the other standards related to setbacks. Facade zone, open space, you have to have 25 square feet minimum per unit, and then bicycle parking spaces, etc. Neighborhood activity center, you can see the graphic there. If you start looking at the images, you can see how they start changing from urban to maybe suburban in some nature. So this is four stories. It also does not have an affordability bonus. These lower slung mixed use districts don't have affordability bonuses. Building footprint and all that information I won't bore you, but you can look all that up in the code to get an idea. This has more suburban standards, more suburban setbacks to reflect where it's located. And then as Shannon indicated, we have the mixed use tables. This shows all of the nine mixed use districts between phase one and phase two. And this is where you can really see what's permitted. Do we allow commercial greater than or retail greater than 2,500 square feet or does it have to be less? Can it be over 50,000 square feet or does it have to be less? That gives you that kind of indication. Talks about industrial uses, what's allowed and what's not. In this area, a lot of that's not allowed. Food and beverage establishments, etc. With that, I'll pass it over to Shannon. He'll talk about the other remaining districts.

Yes, I will be focusing on the office and institutional districts and the industrial districts. So the COI, community office institutional, is also predominantly auto-oriented. It's utilized for office and industrial parks that are typically on cul-de-sacs and that do not have a presence on a primary corridor. The ROI, Regional Office Institutional District, is also auto-oriented and is office and institutional areas. It's mid or high rise, medium to large buildings, and they typically are on our primary corridors. And it does include building design standards with a 10-story maximum height, whereas the COI is a little bit lighter on the design standards and caps out at five stories. The CMP campus district is for single or multiple use buildings in an educational office or institutional complex. They range in heights and scales for the buildings. and can include an accessory, residential, commercial, or industrial uses. Building design standards are only required within a certain distance from the public street frontage, and heights are unlimited once you get back from the setback area a certain distance, and step backs do apply in that district as well. The COI and the ROI both have a residential unit allowance that is a little, is something new that we're introducing into the code this year. We have done some with our consultant team have found out that Class A office typically wants to be in a mixed use environment. And the way the city developed over the years is most of the office is off by itself and in an office park. And a lot of those are not successful because there's not a mixed use presence there. So what we're introducing is the possibility of allowing some residential to happen on some of these office developments. If you have a site that's less than two acres, residential will be allowed by right. If you are between 2 and 10 acres, you need to have 200 square feet of your office or employment use for every one unit that you would want to place on that property. And that is capped out if you have a 20,000 square foot office building, then you can build more residential by rate. For sites that are over 10 acres, these are the ones that we really want to reserve for our employment generating companies and industries. So we will require the ratio of one unit per 200 square feet of employment use. There would not be a cap out. And as Lewis went over with the charts, the COI caps out at five stories. There is not a height bonus with these two districts and the upper story step backs and side setbacks and open space requirements are all listed in the chart. And facade zone, this is a district that does require a building within the facade zone. There is open space of 5%. And the ground floor transparency is a little bit lower in this district because it doesn't interface on pedestrian corridors for the most part. Next up, we have the Regional Office and Institutional District. It has the same exact residential unit allowance. This district caps out at 10 stories, 125 feet. There is not a height bonus. And the upper step backs do apply. Front setbacks are 10 to 30 feet. And side, rear, and side street setbacks all apply. And it does have a larger facade zone requirement because these are larger buildings. We wanna make sure that there aren't large gaps along the road as we want the building to occupy a lot of the frontage of the site. And the open space for this is also 5%. The ground floor transparency is 40% in this district as well. then finally in our campus district the residential unit allowance here is the the units are allowed as an accessory to the primary function of the overall campus so if ohio state needs to build more dorms or apartments for researchers that sort of thing that that's going to be allowed outright in as an accessory use to the district There are the step back supply, the facade zone in the campus district is flexible. So if a building is going to be within the facade zone, then that does trigger certain building design standards. But if you think about a campus development, there might be a building that's 300 feet away from Lane Avenue, we'll say, if it's Ohio State, and nobody's gonna see it unless they're within the campus. So that's where we're giving those large campus developers a little bit more flexibility. And a lot of these campuses have their own design standards that they are building their buildings with. And then also the campus district, since these are larger parcels, 10% minimum open space requirement. And also the transparency for those buildings that are sitting along the street frontage. And then the use tables for office and institutional laid out the same as the mixed use, just not as many columns to have to look through. The COI district is a little different than the ROI in that it does allow some light industrial, but no outside storage. And then the campus district allows those industrial uses that are supporting that overall campus. So if you think about Ohio State, they've got their own maintenance garage and construction storage for their facilities, food service. I mean, they're like a small city. Yeah, there's like four pages of the uses for this. And then in the industrial districts, we have the industrial urban district. This is in industrial areas that are near urban mixed use corridors. It does allow only light industrial and no outside storage and includes building design standards with a 60 foot maximum building height. The IL Industrial Light District is in industrial areas that are within a suburban context and they're usually medium or large parcels. It allows light or general industrial and manufacturing uses and outside storage with a required distance separation from residentially zoned property. And it includes increased setbacks with 60 feet maximum building height. And then the IH Industrial Heavy District, it's also in a suburban context on medium and large parcels. It allows all the categories of industrial and manufacturing uses and outside storage with required distance separation. It does not allow as many commercial uses as the IU or the IL district does because we really want to reserve this district for our heavy industrial users. It includes increased setbacks with 60 feet maximum building height, and that height is allowed to be unlimited once you get 100 feet away from all the property lines. The step backs do still apply. And then the design standards for the industrial urban are, since they're interfacing with mixed use buildings, there are some design standards because these buildings are potentially across the street from residential or mixed use buildings. So there is a facade zone requirement. There are transparency requirements. The setbacks are smaller in this district and yeah, 60 foot maximum height. Transparency is required at 40% and open space is 5% of the lot size. And then in the industrial light, this is also a 60 foot maximum height. There are no facade zone requirements in this district because the setbacks are bigger. There's also no open space requirements because those setbacks are so large. So that is giving the opportunity because the setback areas must be landscape, we're still getting some green space out of these developments. No facade zone, no open space, and the minimum separation does apply from residential and from other non-residential districts. And then industrial heavy, 60 feet at your setback. You can go taller when you're within your parcel. And the front setbacks are deeper. The rear and side setbacks are larger. There's the residential buffer requirement in both this district, actually all of the industrial districts if they have that residential And then there's a 600 foot required distance separation for any heavy industrial use within a residential district. And I think that's the use tables. There's four pages of those laid out the same way as the other districts. So pretty clear, a lot easier than our current Title 33 where you have to go district by district to look at lists of uses and it's much easier when you're looking at categories of uses and seeing you can do a quick comparison of what is allowed where. Yeah.

So a lot of those standards come from input from our consultants, input from the community, and also from decades of doing site negotiations through planning and development review. And moving forward, we have our fall timeline here. So we are currently in the six day public comment period. We have mailed out 205,000 property owner notifications. Those go out to property owners of properties that are going to be rezoned and property owners that are within 125 feet of those properties. And as well as renters and tenants of those properties and those within 125 feet. The mailer encourages them, lets them know that there is a rezoning going on and that we encourage them to visit the website, fill out the survey, visit us at the gallery and provide public comment. We have our two primary ways of gathering information is our map survey and our code survey. You can find those on our website. When you leave here today, you'll see we have a one pager that provides additional engagement opportunities. We have a webinar coming up. um and we haven't asked me anything on reddit we also have two additional public hearings after this and on there is a qr code that will take you to our website and has um that has our survey our survey on it so please fill out the survey visit our website visit us at the gallery we have a gallery downtown as we indicated earlier where we'll give you a tour and explain everything in the code you can come individually or as a group And we have stakeholder interviews and we have scheduled events at the gallery. After the 60 day public comment period, we're gonna look at all the information we received, all the community input we received, and make any necessary potential changes to the map. previously last year when we did the growth strategy based off of community input we made over 19 000 changes to the map so we do take community input seriously we will look at all the comments we will look at all the map feedback that we get the map allows you to indicate whether or not you support a district or you prefer another district The code also allows you to make comments on any aspect, mixed use districts, industrial. You can say, I don't think the 25 foot setback is appropriate, etc. After that then, we will make any necessary changes. We'll have two public hearings. The first one will be on what we heard during the public comment period, and the final one will be the final presentation. And we hope to get adoption by council before the end of the year. This is our website, this is what it looks like. Please visit the website by scanning the QR code or googling just zone in Columbus. And then take the survey there as well and get any additional information.

Janet, who said that zoning districts can't be fun on a Wednesday night? Thank you both for going through those. And again, I think it's important when we talk about folks understand the substance of these things, right? So again, I appreciate everyone bearing with us, because the goal here is to make sure that if you hear something here tonight that stirs a question, that you ask that question and get that answered. What we're trying to do is simplify a zoning code that, again, goes back 70 years, and there's been lots and lots of Band-Aids over the years. We're trying to start fresh and anew that makes sense, but at the same time, as you've just seen, it can get very technical very fast, but we want to make sure that we're trying to make this as accessible as we can for folks about what is being proposed, which does not mean that development will happen tomorrow or ever. But if it does happen what the rules of the road will be if in fact the development comes to that specific parcel so I do want to pause and see if either one of my council colleagues have any questions for Shannon or Lewis before I ask a few and then get us to public comment Great, cool. So a couple things, I think we, just to sort of underline, I think a couple of things. So Shane, I think you mentioned about the trade off in some of the industrial districts about setbacks versus open space. So I think oftentimes folks hear open space and think that's great. I want more open space within an area. That's something that's very desirable and something that in the residential districts are very clear. You mentioned that there's a trade-off here when we talk about the setbacks. Can you talk about that tension between open space versus setbacks and why the proposal has more focus on setbacks as opposed to open space requirements?

Absolutely. In an industrial development, you might have something that you really don't want folks wandering around. It could be dangerous. It could be if it's a salvage yard or something like that. So we thought that by increasing the setbacks and requiring landscaping along the public streets, it was a better use of adding some green space. Some of our industrial districts only required a 25 foot setback from a street and didn't really require much in a way of setback from rear or side. So by incorporating these larger setback areas and requiring the landscaping on top of it, and the residential buffer areas where those didn't exist, we thought that that was a good trade off.

Again, if I'm in the audience, I'm trying to interpret exactly what that means. You say we're almost getting both right, because the setback itself is operating as an open space, but also the setback is pushing whatever that use may or may not be further away from potentially the residential areas around. So you're still accomplishing the goal of having that open space, but also with that setback, again, you're pushing those uses further away. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, that's correct. Thanks.

And Shannon, I think you talked about this when we talk about sort of Class A office space. One, can we say what that is? Because some folks may not know what that means. But also, when we talk about different encouraging different uses within Columbus about when we talk about a focus on economic development, talk about commercial and industrial. Why does something like that matter for a city like Columbus? When we talk about land use is land use, but also at the same time, we're also trying to encourage or discourage certain things from happening in certain places. And I think when we talk about things very specifically like Class A office space, why does that matter?

Class A office.

That's the most attractive office space. It probably usually has the most high-paying jobs. It's very important for the economy of Columbus. What we're seeing is in a lot of our areas, what used to be Class A office is no longer Class A office, right? And so it provides fewer high-paying jobs. It provides less economic opportunity. And so we looked at the map of what we had as office currently, and we did a analysis of the viability of those office uses. And what we're hearing from all of our office users is that Class A office, as Shannon said, wants to be in a mixed use environment. So how do we open up some of these office spaces to be mixed use? How do we encourage them to be class A office? And how do we help breathe new life into them without losing all of the office users in those sites? Because as we know, it's very important for our income tax to support our city's services. It helps with our affordable housing programs. So how do we make these more viable? How do we attract more investment in these sites? One site that came to mind when we were thinking about this was off of Tuttle Crossing. There was an old IBM site. It had five office buildings. And I think one of them was at maybe 70%, one was at like 50%, and the other three were vacant. That's not generating any income. They were dated. They couldn't find people to use these sites. So they were just kind of sitting there and they weren't a benefit to the community. The developer came in and said, we have a lot of parking on this site. We could do residential. We could do residential. People could live near these offices. They could work in these offices. They have parking and it would be more vibrant. And the city negotiated that process and it's moving forward and I think it's going to be quite successful. So that's the idea in a lot of the ROI and COI, is how do we allow a certain amount of residential units to go in at a ratio that protects the office uses so we don't lose all of our office to just housing.

And again, just to emphasize the point, for a city whose primary form of revenue is income tax, we obviously want to encourage there to be jobs not only for our residents to earn a living at, but also to make sure that we're able to gather that income tax, make sure we're able to pay for things like Picking up the trash and the recycling and paving the roads. One thing I want to ask about, and we'll talk about residential here in a second. We've talked a lot about industrial and sort of manufacturing and commercial here tonight. That's I think one of the biggest differences in this phase as compared to the first phase. Columbus is like a lot of other cities across the country where if you go back to say the 1920s and 1930s, maybe there was not as thoughtful. not as much thought about where certain kinds of uses should go um you know i i think of growing up you know in northwest ohio and seeing you know a smokestack you know down the street from someone's house right and unfortunately we have areas of columbus that because of decisions that were made by people in rooms 50, 60, 70 years ago that folks lived through, versions of that here in Columbus. So we talk about, I think, when people hear industrial or manufacturing, certainly people want jobs and want to make sure they can make a living. But at the same time, I think that can oftentimes make people a little bit nervous about what this might mean for their neighborhood. So can you talk a little bit about the different approach that the new zoning codes of Title 34 takes to this? And I think you highlighted about those buffers and certainly the step downs as compared to maybe something that is currently in the code, which does not, at least from my view, have as much of a thoughtful sort of review around where when these things are built, where should they go and what should be the safeguards for neighbors nearby?

I mean, I think there's two things, and Shannon, jump in. One is going to be the location of how we mapped out these things, and the other thing are going to be the design standards that help mitigate some of those interactions. When we mapped out the industrial areas of the city, currently, there's a lot of different manufacturing districts throughout the city of Columbus. It's kind of a hodgepodge. As you said, it's kind of come in, and they've rezoned one to a heavy manufacturing, or there's another manufacturing here. and a lot of it has interactions with residential areas it wasn't well thought out it wasn't well planned it was there's a rail spur here let's do industrial and in a lot of instances when we did our tours of the city when we're looking at areas of the city you'll have a single family house right across from a lay down yard with a chain link fence and heavy equipment and machinery And so when we looked at all of the manufacturing districts, we purposefully located, as I said, we'd use the industrial light as a buffer. We said anywhere that there's an interaction between industrial right now and residential, we'll put industrial light. and then we isolated the industrial heavy to be surrounded by industrial light and then in other areas of the city like on the far on the southeast side around rickenbacker airport and stuff we have a lot of industrial light we have some industrial heavy down there but where it interacts with the residential communities we want to have design standards we want to have more stringent uses so that over time these areas improve and there's more compatibility between the residential and the industrial nearby The one other district that we were talking about as well was the IMX, like I said. The IMX is where we have a lot of just no longer vibrant industrial uses. A lot of this is on the south side. We have it in Milo Grogan and other areas of the city. Right now, if somebody wants to come in and do residential on a vacant lot, they would have to go through a rezoning process. They'd probably have to go get a council variance. They'd have to negotiate the site design standards. All these things, the community might support it, the city would support it, but they have to go through this convoluted, expensive process to do residential. We met with the community. We talked about where they could support IMX in their community, and we've mapped it out so that over time, these can change. There'll be less negative impacts on the community. Other things like industrial urban, that's still vibrant, but it is in these older 1950s boundaries of the city. So there, it's giving good entry level jobs to residents in the community. A lot of the people in the community work at these locations. So let's just do design standards that improve that compatibility with the nearby residential.

And then I would just add that in the 50s, walking was important so that's why you do see a lot of these historic neighborhoods that have houses that are zoned M because M kind of was it allowed everything and that of course doesn't make sense today and the M district also It allows all commercial uses and all industrial, so it's kind of hard to predict what actually would go in some of these. And M is the largest percentage of the districts that we have in Title 33 now for the industrial districts. some warehouse or other research lab wanted to locate somewhere, there might be a shopping center. And that's just not always the best way to try to figure out where we want to focus these types of uses. So this approach I think makes a lot more sense. categorizing these M districts and not kind of like M is everything, M1 is just the heavy and M2 is just the light. It just doesn't seem to be working anymore. So we're excited for this approach.

Turning back to housing, I'm going to ask one last question, then I know Councilman Ross has a question before we go to public comment. So I think, Louis, you mentioned this very briefly, but again, I know we've talked a lot about the economic development side of things from zoning, but I don't want us to get lost in the need for housing in Columbus and what this code means. So in phase one, we talked about, we had experts that looked at the proposed changes. We were very excited to say we went from, potentially 6,000 new housing units on those properties. And with the rezoning that we went through, seeing tens of thousands of more potentially coming online. If I remember correctly, we're talking about close to 100,000, right? So in this case, we're talking about a much larger percentage of the city. We're talking about over 40%. So I know the city had experts look at what is currently the zoning, what could we expect in the next ten years. With these proposed changes, what should the city potentially expect to see the number of housing units be built in the areas that are zoned for residential?

They looked at the current zoning in this 40% area of the city, and based off of market analysis over a 10-year projection, there could have been 33,000 units. I'm sorry, 13,000 units. Thank you. As I was saying it, I was like, that's not right. But after, if with the adoption of Phase 2, that number would jump to 119,000 units in the city.

that's so significant when we talk about just the supply and demand of what additional units coming along means for just housing costs for folks in Columbus. And as I started the public hearing talking about, we're already seeing the impact of phase one with just new housing units coming along, helping to stabilize those costs and in some cases start to lower them. That is just a massive opportunity where we've seen other cities across the country, whether or not it's Austin or Minneapolis, similar zoning efforts to modernize. They've seen also housing costs begin to stabilize and in some cases start to come down. So I didn't want us to gloss over that number here tonight. But I did want to recognize Council Member Ross, who I think has a question as well.

Just one question I'm interested in the emerging mixed use district and when you talk about specs for walkability specs for how you determine whether or not you're going to recommend this particular district in an area is that current state or is that aspirational. I ask that just because particularly in District 7, you've got underserved communities that maybe could be walkable, but for lack of investment or infrastructure are not. And are we considering what that could look like and then pairing that with investment in those neighborhoods so that we could potentially get there if there was an opportunity to do that?

So when we looked at how we did our mapping, a lot of the districts were defined by what is existing there right now. What are the parcel sizes? What is the recommended land use? And as we were looking at, one of the things was transit. What were these corridors served by transit? The EMX usually is on a transit corridor served by a regular bus line, and it's usually house scale. You did say EMX, correct? Yes, okay, house scale. And the idea is along a lot of these corridors, how do we open it up to smaller scale neighborhood type commercial uses? You know, we know right now that if someone wants to do like a single chair barbershop or if someone wants to do a small daycare, they have to go through a council. They have to go through a variance process, a council variance process, and that can take a long time. And a lot of these a lot of these are supported by the community and they're supported by the city. But it's just this onerous process that drags things out and makes things very expensive. And so the idea there is how do we open these up but still protect the house scale and so we put limits on that to try and make sure that the house scale would stay intact but we could open it up to some walkability and commercial uses i think as we do all of this when we have a united growth strategy when we have a fresh zoning districts in place. It allows us to look at our maps at our city and say, okay, where can we do kind of other kinds of policy initiatives to support, uh, you know, small businesses in the community or where where can we put infrastructure improvements based off of this? So it really is The zoning and the growth strategy, it's all part of a larger idea of planning for the city, helping neighborhood investment, guiding neighborhood investment, and making it walkable and more flexibility in uses.

obviously now current state, there are places and spaces within the city where this district makes sense already, but that we could be using the recommendation of this district to kind of drive future investment in places where we think this could benefit.

Okay, thank you. When we go through the next phase and do the growth strategy updates for that next phase, I'm sure we'll be looking at that.

I think it's such an excellent point because right now what we have is sort of a system, whether or not we're talking about the capital budget or otherwise, that's sort of driven by development, by what people have decided to propose. Versus the inverse of this is where the city is saying, here's what we would like to see generally in these places. rather than letting you folks in development community, I think, drive that bus. It's more of the city now and the residents being able to say, no, we think these are generally the things that are acceptable within these areas. Here's what we would like to see more investment, which I think is a much more proactive way to go about this versus being just very reactive, which is unfortunately just when you have a code that's seven years old, just how it sort of goes. Well, with that, we are going to move on to public testimony here tonight. If you have not signed up and you'd like to ask a question or make a comment, Kevin McCain from our legislative research office in the back. Kevin, if you want to raise your hand. If you'd like to get a speaker slip in, he can take those from you. But I'm going to go ahead and start calling folks up. I apologize if I get your name wrong. If you would mind just correcting the record. And I preemptively apologize about that. I'll do my best with someone whose name is a little funny from time to time. I know how it feels. But if you want to let us know if you're representing an organization. We're not putting limits on folks' time to speak, but we do ask you to try and keep your comments as much to maybe three-ish minutes if you can. We'll be Midwestern polite about it just to make sure that we have an opportunity for everyone to weigh in tonight. But again, on a topic like this, we want to make sure that no one's rushed and has an opportunity to weigh in. And also to make sure, I will play a little bit of an MC here whether or not council has sort of a response or a comment or whether or not our team from the administration would like to follow up on that. If we can't answer your question tonight or if there is more follow up, we'll make sure that we do have your contact information and we'll be sure to get back with you as soon as we can about whatever that might be. So our first public speaker is Ms. Deborah Link. Ms. Link, welcome to council out on the near east side. This is a beautiful complex.

And I read through the 274 pages, so I based my statement off that.

Okay, good evening. Columbus is changing in its zoning code for the first time in 70 years. It's in multiple times tonight. I'm concerned more about the details of this draft. There are many provisions that favor development interests while eliminating protections and certainty for the citizens who already live here. First, the scale of phase two is enormous. It covers approximately 40% of the city, more than 70,000 parcels with changes of this magnitude. We need a zoning document that is exceptionally clear, specific and responsible. Second, definitions matters. When definitions are vague, they create too much flexibility in how rules are applied, particularly when major development decisions can have significant financial consequences for neighborhoods in the city. One example I'm focusing on is the definition of data center. The definition in the draft, the facility dedicated to the storage of a computer and information technology systems and associated with components for the storage, retrieval, and transmittal of electronic information. All data centers are not the same. There are hyperscale data centers, many here in Columbus. There are co-location facilities, edge data centers, and enterprise data centers. These facilities are dramatically different in sizes, energy demands, noise impacts, water usage, and infrastructure needs. Yes, this draft provides more detailed guidance for an apartment development than for these increasingly intrusive centers. It's a very large concern of mine. Even more concerning, under the proposed definitions, I might be wrong, I might have read it wrong, A, where was I? I shouldn't ad lib. Even more concerning, under these proposed definition, a hyperscale data center could be permitted in heavy industrial uses zone areas as written. Some of these industrial areas are only miles from residential neighborhoods. We need clear standards addressing where data centers can be located, how large they can be, and what protections must be in place for surrounding communities. These data centers deserve appropriate security and emergency planning considerations. Third, I want to address tax abatements. Columbus has suffered enough tax abatements for data centers and apartment developments are not producing the public benefit to justify the revenue the city has given up for gives up for 15 years or more. Finally, there is the affordable housing height bonus. I was deeply concerned about this program. A program of this importance should have clear, transparent standards, not outcomes that depend on negotiations between the city and developers. Residents deserve to know what qualifies, where it applies, and there should be limits. There's no limits. We need a better definition of affordable housing that does not unintentionally restrict where people can afford to live or contribute to unequal opportunities across Columbus. Give support directly to people, not the developers. Imagine what over $88 million in tax abatement given to developers over the years could have done if given directly to the people in the systems that support them. I love the city of Columbus. I want it to grow responsibly with transparency and balance with the needs of the people who already call this city home.

thank you for listening thank you for all the tremendous amount of work you have done i appreciate your time thank you miss link um i think one thing you and i agree crystal clear honestly but love the city and wanted to thrive and have i think a better set of rules moving forward because i think the frustration that i have that i know you also have had is when we get into i think individual project by projects negotiations about think the inequities that that come out because I think as Councilman Ross's question around this is that we have not had a lot of central land use planning across the city it's been haphazard at best is sort of my assessment while zoning I think is an important response to that it's really something that again I think is fair to be detailed and transparent and certainly want to turn it over to lewis or shannon if there's i know you had lots of questions and comments within there and i think i want to make sure that our team responds to to those uh probably in writing so make sure that we're we're using the same language back and forth uh but i don't know if shannon or lewis if there's anything specifically that came out Sure. I think one thing that, and I want to ask Louis this, because when we talk about transitioning from Title 33, which is the old zoning code, to the new zoning code, Shannon mentions the old zoning district is just end manufacturing, right? So virtually anything, anything at all, from a junkyard to a grocery store to housing to literally anything can go in those. so when we talk about that actually um has more areas of the city that's zoned in that as compared to the heavy manufacturing so i want to turn that over to louis to talk i think a little bit about um sort of the philosophy from a placement standpoint of when we say heavy manufacturing is is allowed within these areas and the things that are allowed within it but then also My understanding is that they're actually we have shrunk the area of the city that heavy manufacturing would be allowed in. So actually, under the current proposal, this is more restrictive than what our old zoning code would have had. But certainly want to turn over the technical experts about about that.

So one thing we did through the growth strategy process and and zoning right now, we're doing our districts has reduced the amount of we reduce the amount of industrial in the city, I think overall by about 10%. and we opened it up to additional districts. Now, for data centers, when we did our mapping, like I said, we looked at everything that was manufacturing, and we took that philosophy of putting the heavy industrial away from the residential, right? And over time, they'll move over into the, over time, it's a long game, they'll move from the light industrial right now it's just kind of smorgasbord of everything right you just have manufacturing as shannon said you might have manufacturing that a dentist data center is allowed in right up against residential right and because currently data centers are allowed in the m and the m1 districts By moving the heavy industrial uses farther away from the residential areas and by turning all that area that is currently a mix of heavy and light industrial that interacts with the residential community into the light industrial, we've lowered the amount of area that data centers can be done as a primary use from about 14% of the city to about 7% of the city. So we've reduced the locations where data centers can go by about 50%. And the idea is just like with our other heavy industrial uses to move it away from residential to create some predictability about where it can go on the map as opposed to right now it's just kind of all over the place. Restricted to those areas of the city where they are farthest away from residential uses and any incompatible uses.

I make just sort of on this topic I think generally is that just to sort of level set a little bit about the difference between like sort of land use and I think a lot of other topics that are associated with with heavy industrial or other types of things right so you know zoning is all about like what can go there it doesn't ask questions over water consumption or electricity consumption. I think on this particular topic, Council Member Weitsch, one of my colleagues, is really leaning in about what is the city's investment responsibility as far as if companies are gonna locate certain types of facilities in Columbus, what should they owe to make sure that they're covering their costs? Because at the end of the day, whether or not something like a data center or say Anheuser-Busch big brewery, right off 270, both of them use a fair amount of water. And again, the question is, the ratepayers should not be picking up the infrastructure tab for those things, right? So I think we have, this is one of those conversations where we're talking about where does the placement of things go, and I think there's a really fair question to ask, especially when we get to things like light commercial, I'm sorry, light industrial and industrial, what that looks like for folks, and I think it's important to see on the map where those things are. um but there's lots of other uh i think policy questions that would live outside of the zoning code that also deserve a fair hearing and i think we've got folks uh currently at council and city hall that are thinking through those things um because you know i think these are topics when we're talking about the growth of the city we should not ignore you know what those what the impacts of those things will be on residents and again i'd much rather be having this conversation in 2026, again, rather than 1926, where we're putting all these uses next to folks and not asking any questions about whether or not that is good or bad for folks. I think when you talk about shrinking those areas, there would be an argument to say isn't that cutting it against the ability to create jobs and all those kinds of things, but I think that is a worthy sacrifice for us to say we don't want those things to be right next to someone's house. But again, I appreciate the comments and we are gonna do our best

are we is there going to be in the zoning flow like with the design of the apartments and stuff are you going to have specifics in this code about what is going to be allowable what size I know people are fatigued. 70% of America is fatigued with the size of these things. Are you going to put that in this space like you did with all the apartments for those industrial areas?

So under the current code, and I'll let Louis comment, and again, just to let folks know, if we have a little bit of a back and forth, I'm going to need folks to come back to the microphone because this is getting streamed. All good. So I think just to repeat the question was just about sort of in the industrial category, are there additional restrictions in the place? And to be very clear, most, I think on this particular topic, most of the data centers are not within the city of Columbus. There is one data center campus that's on southwest, what? South High Street, I'm sort of across from the Racino that's down. Most of these facilities that exist are outside of the city of Columbus. They're certainly serviced by, say, the Department of Water and Power, which, again, I think there are worthy policy questions to be asked here. But I want to sort of back over to Louis. So, again, the height restrictions, the setbacks, all these things are agnostic about what the entity is. These are whether or not it's a facility manufacturing plant or a data center, these are also things we want to apply to everyone because we are concerned around what the impact of folks nearby would be. So Louis, I don't know if you have anything to add on that.

Just to echo what you said, the design standards that would apply to any industrial heavy use in the industrial district would apply to data centers, whether that's landscaping, screening, setbacks, heights.

Distance separation.

Distance separation, important thing is distance separation. Heavy industrial uses have to be 600 feet from any residential district.

Moving on to our next public speaker, Annalisa Rocha. Welcome back to council, and you're bouncing between city hall and over here, so thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thank you. I lost my car in the City Hall garage and everything on my way here. So it's been quite a like four to whatever time it is now for me. But thank you so much, Council President Pro Tem Dorans and other members of Council for the opportunity to speak here today. My name is Annalisa Rocca and I serve as the Central Ohio Regional Director for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund. I'm also a Columbus resident of District 8. The OEC Action Fund's mission is to protect the environment and health of all Ohio communities and empower our communities to thrive in harmony with the environment. I'm here today to speak specifically about how data centers are referred to in the proposed zoning code. The proposed code uses one very broad definition for a data center, despite the fact that these facilities can vary enormously in size, scale, and impact. data centers we've had in central ohio for decades are fundamentally different from the hyperscale facilities being built and proposed today in 2014 the average data center was about 50 000 square feet by 2030 the average size is going to be about 300 000 square feet and it's important to note that that's just the average prometheus in new albany is proposed at 900 000 square feet when the construction will be completed Also by 2030, 96% of the proposed data centers will be hyperscale centers. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as 75,000 to 100,000 homes, and that's similar to the size of the city of Dayton. It also, a data center can demand up to five million gallons of water in a single day, equivalent to the size of the city of Dublin. HB 15 expanded opportunities for data centers to use behind the meter generation, including natural gas fire generation located at or near these facilities. As a result, approving a large data center can also mean bringing substantial new air emissions and other environmental and public health impacts into the surrounding community. These are not minor industrial uses. They can have major implications on our water resources, energy grid, land use, and surrounding neighborhoods. Yet under the proposed zoning code, all data centers are classified in the same heavy industrial users category. Meaning facilities of vastly different sizes and impacts will all have the same ability to develop by right in those areas. This is a problem, and it undermines the work that this council has already been doing. Council has spent months working to understand and develop appropriate policies for data centers. This zoning code should not get ahead of that process or inadvertently make those efforts harder. Communities deserve a meaningful say in how these facilities are built. For that reason, we asked Council to remove the data center references from this zoning code until Council has completed its work to define and regulate data centers through the legislative process that was already started. At minimum, hyperscale data centers must be treated as a different class from any other industrial facilities for zoning purposes. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you. Louis Shannon, I don't know if you have any comments.

We are aware that Council Member Weish's office is actively meeting on this as we speak, and any guidance that we receive regarding this, we can make changes to this code if need be.

I think the biggest point that I've taken, I think, from some of the engagement we've had in this particular topic both here tonight and I think prior to this meeting is, you know, I think an acknowledgment that is a fairly broad definition that's in there and I think the other aspect of this, I think, and I think Ms. Link and both of you have mentioned is that the size and scale of these things, like, really matter. And, you know, for example, there are a number of, you know, many of the office towers downtown have a floor that is essentially operating as a data center. There's many, you know, there are universities within the city that have a building that you would never know that that's a data center. And I think not only are the policy questions that I think I mentioned earlier about, you know, the consumption of resources that, again, is a policy choice that's sort of outside of the zoning code. questions that should be asked and i think answered by both residents and elected leaders i think it's it's worthy for folks to start to i think work at a definition to see how and why and where particularly for saying that we are shrinking the areas of the city in which these could be located in to begin with so from a reality of standpoint of you know one of the reasons why these facilities locate where they locate because they need a massive amount of land to be built when you're talking about something that is that large. I would actually be very interested to see from an analysis standpoint of how many of these areas in Columbus that are currently proposed to be heavy manufacturing, these would even fit in. Which I think is a question when we think about what are we defining and allowing within these areas. I think that's something that I want to have a little homework on with our department, just to think through the areas that have been proposed in these areas, sort of from a definitional standpoint, like where would those things sort of land? And again, I think our office is continuing to work with Council Member Weish, I think, on the policy items that his office has been working through for some time.

I've been working very closely with Council Member Weish, and I'd be happy to work with your office as well on those zoning definitions.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

public comment period when we know a lot but we don't know everything regarding these things so we're hearing this feedback and i get lost in the parking garage every day as well so and another reason why we need a more modern industrial zoning code because data center is not defined in title 33 when the first one was proposed we're like what is it so

Which, again, I think is also a point about when we talk about modernizing the code to that point, Shannon, is that under 33 and M, they can go, right? There's no thought process around this because literally anything can go there.

Production and basket weaving, but nothing about data centers. So that's what-

So allow me to repeat that. Our current code allows, regulates things like basket weaving, but not things that power the economy in the 21st century. So we talk about things being 70 years old. Here we are. Hopefully everyone's enjoying my stand-up comedy tonight. Our next speaker is Anete Canseco. Canseco. Thank you. I was like, I am going to get 60% of the way there, so thank you for being kind.

All right. Well, um... There we go. Good evening, Council President Pro Tem Doran, City Council, and city staff. On behalf of the Affordable Housing Alliance, thank you for your ongoing work to advance Zone N, a necessary component in a broader affordable housing strategy. We've spoken about the glaring faults of the current zoning code before. At 72 years old, it is at least 62 years past its shelf life. Written when zoning was used to segregate and exclude, that purpose remains embedded in the heart of our laws today. Also, its structural inability to grow at the times, like basket weaving, means that new ideas are judged by old standards and are forced to navigate a system that is designed to fail dumb and to fail us. This means that Columbus's record job growth is hindered by a housing market that is leaving people behind. Just as our people are trying to return to Ohio, Coming back home to escape the staggering cost of coastal housing markets, our zoning laws are engineered to reproduce those failures from which they flee. Our housing shortage, accelerated by this antiquated zoning code, is not the only reason why housing is more expensive than it should be, but is by far the easiest one to fix. Our research shows that reforms like this are overwhelmingly popular, carrying the support of at least 82% of our residents. And not only does it cause next to nothing to modernize our systems, it also positions us to receive competitive grants created under the new Road to Housing Act that can chip away at the harder stuff. With this face focused on housing and economic prosperity, Ahako was thankful to see that the draft contains many nationally proven tools that fit our needs. Concepts like re-event the strip that revives emptying strip malls and converts them to places where small businesses and residents can both thrive. The live work play model that creates spaces where jobs, amenities, and culture all are within an easy walk. and continuing its focus on equitable transit-oriented design, which helps ensure that those who can no longer drive still feel included in our city. As revisions are considered to this draft, we see further opportunities to incrementally advance these shared goals. We hope to create more places where housing can be interspersed with jobs so people can spend less time and money getting to work and getting lost in garages and more time at home with their families. AHACA respectfully requests that the residential-only option in the COI and ROI districts be expanded from two acres to at least five acres. Not only will this help meet our housing needs, but it will boost local revenues by creating more work-from-home spaces that advance our economy and gives young workers a place to lay down roots in our city. AHACO ALSO SUPPORTS EXPANDING AFFORDABLE HOUSING INCENTIVES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE HIGH BONUS INTO THE EMERGING MIXED USE AND NEIGHBORHOOD ACTIVITY CENTER DISTRICTS. Once again, we share our thanks to the city's clear attempts to center housing affordability in the zoning reform conversation. Columbus continues to be a national leader, not only because of Zone In, but because of how this work is intertwined with funding programs and diverse consumer protections that reinforce approaches to lower our housing burdens. Thank you for your time and consideration this evening.

Thank you very much for those comments. I know I could see Lewis shaking his head a little bit, so I think we got a couple of actionable things and I'm going to make sure that we follow up with the team about.

Yeah, we've heard these comments. We're going to do additional research and look into some of these requests and see how it maps out and hot pencils and works out. So thank you.

Our next speaker is Miss Kathy Cohen Becker.

All right. Good evening. Thank you for your time and opportunity to testify today. My name is Kathy Becker. I'm the board president of Save Ohio Parks. We started that in 2023 after the state passed a law kick-starting fracking of our state parks and public lands. And the reason I'm here is just this year, the commission that oversees this approved over 15,000 acres, mostly in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area and Salt Fork State Park for fracking. That's over three times what they had approved in the previous three years combined. And going on comments by some state legislators, we believe this is for gas to power data centers. Annalisa mentioned House Bill 15 last year that really incentivizes data centers, and it says large energy users, but they had in mind data centers, to fast track approval for major gas plants to provide their energy behind the meter. It allows this in as little as 60 days with no public notice, no public information session, no public hearing, no community consultation, and it's just approved by the state. And this is happening. So this happened where I now live in Hilliard. You all may know about this, but last year Amazon and AEP did exactly this. Fast-track approval for the largest fracked gas fuel cell project in North America to power an Amazon data center there. And the state had approved it and gave it an air permit before most residents who live right there had any idea what was happening. And Hilliard's not the only place. There are 12 of these major, large, behind-the-meter gas plants. There's four of them in the New Albany Business Park, or there will be four. The fourth one is up for a hearing in October. to power the Prometheus data center there. They total 1150 megawatts of power. They would produce a combined about 8.3 million pounds of greenhouse gas every year, which is almost as much as the city of Columbus. There's three of them, totaling 786 megawatts to PowerEdge Connect's data centers in the New Albany Business Park. The Fairfield Energy Center near Millersport right next to Buckeye Lake is 1350 megawatts, emitting about 6.6 million pounds, almost as much, about as much as the city of Pittsburgh. The Asheville Energy Center, 800 megawatts, that's about a half hour south of Columbus. For an Edge Connect Center there, it is slated to go right next to children's soccer fields and on top of the village aquifer, about 4 million tons of GHGs per year. And then of course there's the Feds are pushing the Ports Energy Center at the site of the Ports Muscatius Diffusion Plant. It would be the largest gas plant in the country at 9,200 megawatts. It could emit as much as the city of New York City. So you can see these are very large gas plants that these facilities are putting in. So what are the takeaways for Columbus and how does that apply here? Well, first, the first thing to know is if a data center does go in somewhere in Columbus, that data center can fast track a major gas plant, a very large one, without any consultation with the community. About half of these have gone on this fast track, others have had public hearings, but they're still moving very quickly and they do get approved. And they get permitted with an air permit with these kinds of emissions. And so if that happens, we worked very hard to get Clean Energy Columbus to get a very strong climate action plan. I personally worked very hard on that with some of the people here in this room in 2019, 2021. And I'm very proud of that plan. I constantly hold up what Columbus is doing. as a model for the nation. A gas plant like that would just wipe out Clean Energy Columbus. The one in Hilliard wiped out their city-wide aggregation program five times over all the carbon they had saved over the years of that program. The other issue is the particle pollution, fine particulate matter. These gas plants emit PM2.5, which is small enough, a 30th of the width of a human hair. It gets breathed in. It gets into the bloodstream, the lungs, the brain, the heart. It causes all kinds of medical problems and premature deaths. It's blamed in 8 million deaths per year around the world for air pollution. And these gas plants do emit that. And they emit that that spreads for miles around one of these gas plants. So in terms of zone in phase two, data centers would be permitted, well, would be relegated to heavy industrial, which is, it is the right place, but even the setback of 600 feet, that's about a tenth of a mile. And these kinds of emissions go miles. Like, this really just doesn't have a place in a crowded city. And it would be in an area, some of the heavy industrial areas I'm seeing on the map are next to residential areas. Some of those residential areas might not be City of Columbus. It might be, say, Lincoln Village and Prairie Township or, you know, other jurisdictions. But there are residents right there that would be deeply affected if this happened. So, let's see, what else would I want to say about that? The other thing I've heard is this idea that, well, there aren't any data centers coming to Columbus, it's not really an issue here. But it could be if a future council were to annex land in, and that's how they're getting built in a lot of other jurisdictions, the village or the city annexes land in. That could happen, or some of these areas have, like where I live on the northwest side, there is heavy industrial, but there's a lot of big buildings there. There are warehouses, but those could be bought and turned into a data center. And once a data center is in, it can bring in one of these gas plants. And that would be just a disaster for our climate, for our environment, for our health, for the people, for the community. And the community could very well just have no say over this. So I would echo calls for a moratorium of some sort or taking data centers out or having a special commission to look at data centers because I agree with the previous speakers that there are many different kinds and they're not well defined here. Because this risk is just too great and it's happening, you know, mostly these communities this is happening to are mostly in central Ohio. And I just, I do not want to see that happen in Columbus. I think that's the high points of my testimony, but you have the written and happy to answer any questions if you have any.

Thank you, Kathy. I appreciate it. I did want to ask one follow-up question to the team on this particular point. So currently, if a property is annexed into the city, and again, this is a little bit different because when an annexation happens, it's currently under Title 33, not Title 34, which you heard talking about here tonight. So could you just lay out like sort of how that currently works, which I would assume is sort of how we would probably approach this in Title 34, because I think Kathy's point about, as I said earlier, I'm interested in seeing generally where in the areas that are zoned for heavy industrial right now where this question could even really practically be asked. But I think it's a worthy question when we talk about annexation. That is certainly a way in which lots more open land could come in. And there is sort of a process currently under code, but we have not undertaken what that would look like in the future.

Currently, annexation, which is per the Ohio Revised Code, it actually doesn't live in a city code, but our code does address what happens when land is annexed into Columbus and it is zoned in the most restrictive residential district, our rural district. so anyone who wants to do anything but a farm or five acre lots resident single unit residential development or something like a church or a school would have to go through a rezoning process which involves the area commission going to the development commission and getting approval by city council and as and also staff reviewing it that we would be looking at any uh if it's on the growth strategy, what land use recommendation is, and also getting other feedback from other city reviewing agencies.

And one thing that the growth strategy does, as Shannon said, right now it goes to rural residential. If we look at the growth strategy map, that's what I was looking at right now, is we have kind of set land use policy for when land becomes annexed into the city of Columbus. We'd have to do a little further digging, but I don't believe that we did much heavy industrial as a recommended land use on the perimeter of the city. But we could follow up with that for

The speaker to come before council is Ms. Kathy Green.

GOOD EVENING, COUNCIL PRESIDENT PROTEM DORANS, COUNCIL MEMBER AND CITY STAFF. MY NAME IS CATHY GREEN. I LIVE ON COLUMBUS' SOUTH SIDE. I'M HERE TO TALK ABOUT VIBRANT STREETSCAPES AND TO THAT END TO ASK YOU TO ADD USE SPECIFIC DEVELOPMENT STANDARDS FOR ELECTRIC SUBSTATIONS IN MIXED USE ZONING DISTRICTS AS PART OF THE CURRENT ZONE IN PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD. This isn't a hypothetical concern. AEP, we are doing power tonight I think, AEP has acquired a full city block on East Livingston Avenue between Champion and Oakwood for a substation and site clearing is expected to begin soon. Whatever standards are or aren't in our code when they create their final plans will shape what our neighborhood lives with for decades. I'd rather council act now than react after the fact. There's already a model for this. The city has recently proposed use specific standards for wireless communication facilities, cell towers and related equipment, recognizing that a use can be broadly appropriate in a district while still needing tailored rules around setback screening and siting to be compatible with its surroundings. Electric substations deserve the same treatment. Right now our code allows this use in mixed-use districts without any comparable standards even though a substation is in practice a fenced industrial equipment yard that runs continuously and hums audibly. I want to address the legal question directly because it's sometimes raised as a reason not to act. Ohio Revised Code 4905.65 governs local regulation of electric utility facilities specifically. It does not prohibit local regulation. It says a local regulation may reasonably restrict the construction location or use of a public utility facility, and it expressly preserves the city's authority to require permits under reasonable regulations. Justice counsel found room to regulate wireless facilities within federal and state constraints. Columbus has the same authority here. SO I'D ASK COUNCIL TO WORK WITH STAFF TO FOLD SUBSTATION SPECIFIC STANDARDS INTO THE CURRENT ZONE IN COMMENT PERIOD, INCLUDING FIRST, SETBACKS FROM PUBLIC SIDEWALKS, RESIDENTIAL ENTRANCES, ADJACENT USES. SECOND, MANDATORY SCREENING, MASONRY WALLS, FENCING WITH LANDSCAPE BUFFERS ARE EQUIVALENT. THIRD, NOISE STANDARDS OR SETBACK DISTANCES THAT ACCOUNT FOR CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMER HUM. FOURTH, LIGHTING STANDARDS THAT PREVENT SECURITY LIGHTING FROM SPILLING ONTO NEIGHBORING PROPERTIES. AND FIFTH, A MAINTAINED LANDSCAPE BUFFER, NOT A ONE-TIME INSTALLATION LEFT TO DECLINE. I'M NOT ASKING COUNCIL TO STOP THIS PROJECT OR MAKE IT HARDER TO SERVE THE AREA WITH RELIABLE POWER. GIVING THE EAST LIVINGSTON TIMELINE, I'D ASK THAT THIS BE TAKEN UP PROMPTLY AND THAT THE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION FACILITY STANDARDS BE TREATED AS THE STARTING TEMPLATE RATHER THAN STARTING FROM SCRATCH. again this is mixed use means residences alongside commercial facilities so this would be an important important to the neighbors on livingston avenue and the merchants association thank you for your time i'm happy to answer questions

Thank you, Mr. Green. This is one of my favorite things in these hearings, where someone brings something I had not thought about whatsoever and very actionable advice and questions to be had. So thank you. We will follow up. And I think that this is very worthy, especially when we have a template from the telecommunications Code to look at so thank you. That is very very helpful and why we do these so our next speaker come before council is Courtney Theron and

All right. Good evening, President Pro Tem Dorans. I'm Courtney Thrain, Executive Director of the German Village Society. German Village understands that our 11-county region is growing and that our region needs housing. German Village is growing, too. Between 2010 and 2020, our population increased 11%. Housing units increased 6%. Now, we're one of the densest neighborhoods in the city, at over 9,400 people per square mile. And with that, 42% of our residents are renters. That growth occurred while the village remained one of the city's most recognizable and economically viable historic neighborhoods. Growth and preservation are not mutually exclusive. The German Village Commission demonstrated for decades that preservation does not mean freezing a neighborhood in time. Commissioners work with applicants to allow investment and change while respecting the guidelines. That's why zone in phase two raises important questions. The proposed EMX classification permits up to three stories by right, UGN 1 permits up to four. Yet properties within the village remain subject to historic review in the COA process. So what does by right actually mean in German village? If a building's proposed height massing setbacks or design are inconsistent with the German Village guidelines, currently the guidelines would prevail. The city is undertaking a historic preservation modernization initiative to examine our code, policies, guidelines, and processes. including how housing production and preservation can coexist. That work is not yet finished. So we ask, why propose new zoning entitlements that cut across the fabric of the village before the city completes this assessment of the preservation system with which those entitlements must interact? And what specific problem in the village is this rezoning intended to solve? The village is super dense, and it's adding more residents. Its commission works with applicants to accommodate thoughtful development. The commission process allows something zoning alone cannot, meaningful consideration of an individual property, its surroundings, and the character of the city's densest, most historic neighborhoods that benefits the city and its public schools. We are not asking the village to stop growing. We asked the city to clearly explain one how these two regulatory systems will work together to what these zoning classifications are intended to accomplish within the village and three whether these changes should be proposed before the modernization initiative is complete. German Village has successfully evolved for generations. Let's make sure the decisions we make today allow it to continue to do so for generations to come. Thank you.

And one, I appreciate the engagement of the society, both during phase one and now. The historic preservation modernization effort obviously came out of phase one. I think that was a question that was asked by many residents in German Village of, hey, we're talking about this significant change in zoning. What about preservation? To be very candid, we didn't have a good answer, which is why we're going down that pathway, I think, now. One in which I don't think any of us should presuppose what the answer should be because I think it should be a lot of engagement both with residents and also thinking about what is the future of the neighborhood. I think balancing everything that you just very well articulated. So I think we have a number of things to respond to. I don't know if the team has anything that they'd like to share at this point that comes to mind.

um just wanted to um as with the first phase the design standards of the architectural review commissions do prevail they these projects will have to get certificate a certificate of appropriateness so there's there is a check and checks and balances in place I think in looking at placing the EMX district versus the UGN one district came to that house scale. There were a lot of lots that if we would have put them in EMX, they would not have met the the maximum size that's allowed for that district so we would have we we we didn't have an in-between district between the emx and the ugn one that that could possibly work um and The uses that we're proposing are similar. A lot of the corridors where we're placing the UGN-1, there's already a big presence of commercial uses. So we're in effect removing nonconformities for a lot of your small businesses and your boundaries. where they can rebuild if they need to and not have to go through a variance process. So I think that was probably where our thought process was on the districts that we chose for German Village. If you wanted to add anything.

Just to echo what Shannon said, I mean, the COA process still reigns supreme in the historic districts. I think it comes down to a matter of loosening up some of the uses that currently exist. So yeah, if the German village feels that the design is inappropriate or the size of the massing, they can control that. But in instances where the use might be appropriate through the new zoning district, it would avoid someone having to get a variance and go through a lengthy variance process. So you still control the look and feel of the building, the COA process, nothing can get built. You control demolitions in the area. But it would just remove an additional lengthy process of having to get a variance for something that ultimately you look at the corridors, a lot of that exists in place right now. So that's the thought process with that.

Okay. Appreciate it. Next speaker to come for council is Josh Brown.

Well, thank you for the warm-up, because I live in right next to one of these districts. My name is Josh, and I live at the corner of Mitoff and City Park, so, in Marion Village, and my backyard ends at Nursery Lane. the boundary of the German village historic district. Directly across the alley is where they have a UGN-1 perspective building there. It's right next to the Ohio Poverty Law Center, a professional office that's quiet in the neighborhood, but the building doesn't need to be torn down for the zoning to change. UGN-1 could allow that same building to remain while happening inside could, could not, could change considerably. The law office and a restaurant bar are very different neighbors when only an alley separates one from my backyard. I already know that increased activity there, what it feels like that parking lot hosts the German village maker's market eight Sundays a year. I enjoy having it there. Uh, but on those Sundays parking gets tight enough that most of us just don't leave our homes. Eight Sundays a year is manageable. Every evening indefinitely is a different neighborhood. That also my concern with the EMX, greater intensity with less required off street parking in a neighborhood of narrow streets and already tarp parking deserves more scrutiny. I've heard reassurances tonight that the German Village historic preservation protections aren't going anywhere, but historic review and zoning are not the same. Historic guidelines protect what the building looks like, where zoning determines how it can be used. The German Village deserves both, and with the city's historic preservation modernization initiatives already underway, I don't understand why we need to increase the underlying zoning intensity inside a German Village before we know what that process will recommend. I want to be clear, I bought my house knowing commercial property sat right behind it, and I'm not opposed to new housing or reasonable redevelopment. High Street and Parsons Avenue already have been rezoned substantially within walking distance of German Village. There needs to be a transition somewhere, and that boundary of one of the nation's most remarkable preserved historic neighborhoods seems like a very reasonable place to do that. So I'm asking you to keep the zoning here or I'm asking you to keep the existing zoning here or establish maybe a genuine lower intensity transition. Columbus can build housing and commercial capacity in many places. It cannot build another German village.

Thank you. Any comment from staff?

It's the same comments that I made before, that there's a lot of commercial uses in these areas already, and they wouldn't be able to keep succeeding if we keep the zoning barriers in place.

Our next speaker is Juana Houston.

Good evening. My name is Juana Hostin, and I reside in the Far East area of Columbus. I am also co-president of the B.R.E.A.D. organization. Establishing tree guidelines as part of this Title 34 is absolutely appropriate and timely during this Zone In Phase 2 review. As Columbus is growing and challenged to meet the safe, affordable housing need for residents, regulations must be in place for development not only in planting new trees, but protecting large, mature trees. We know that Columbus cannot reach its goal of a 40% tree canopy by the year 2050 without protecting the trees we have. Protecting our trees will help the city attain many of the objectives stated in the draft. Trees contribute to the safety, attractiveness, and sustainability of our communities. Large mature trees promote public health. They filter the air, reducing serious breathing problems. They reduce excessive heat, which causes heat stress, heat stroke, and even fatalities. Adding tree protections will incorporate sustainability practices and ensure climate resilience by lowering high air temperatures, reducing flooding, and cleaning our polluted air from places like these large data centers. Trees promote economic growth and the creation of jobs. When people move to Columbus for jobs, they are looking for neighborhoods with lots of trees to live in and play. Given the vital contribution of trees to these stated objectives, I am frankly puzzled that trees are mentioned only as landscaping on the six pages at the end of the draft proposal. There is definitely tree canopy overlap in zoning regulations, planning, development, and public health. Many other cities around Ohio and the country, including Austin, Texas that was mentioned earlier, have been able to figure out how to grow and protect their tree canopy. per the Columbus private tree code research report written by the consultant selected and paid for by the city page sixteen states quote typically private tree regulations are integrated under environmental requirements or site development standards making the zoning code a suitable and logical home for these regulations end quote protection of Existing trees is already long overdue. In 2021, the mayor and city council approved a plan which included the establishment and implementation of regulations to protect existing trees. Yet nothing has been implemented for private property. 70% of Columbus's trees are on private property. While we recognize the need for zoning efficiencies and streamlining, it is unconscionable that with the additional incentives and opportunities to protect trees that Zone M presents, that it does not include protection of existing trees. In conclusion, we support the zone-in process only if it incorporates a comprehensive approach that includes the protection of existing trees because, as experts agree, simply planting new trees is not enough to grow our sorely inadequate tree canopy. Since this mixed-use phase covers about 40% of the city, we cannot postpone any tree protections. We cannot wait until the next phase or after all of the zone-in phases are completed. Our health, our environment, and the city's climate sustainability require the city's attention now. This is not an either-or situation. It is a both-and. We can and we must have both safe and affordable housing, which include tree plantings and protections for all residents. This is especially true for those residents in disinvested neighborhoods. I asked the city to have the foresight and the courage, but put the health of its residents over the developers want for less regulations. Since trees protect us, we need to protect trees. Thank you.

Thank you and appreciate being here tonight and certainly folks in bread to be at our last public hearing as well. I think since our last year and I've met with the team for the administration and challenged them on this topic about whether or not it's something within the zoning code or whether or not something outside of the zoning code around tree preservation. I'm not an expert in exactly how to go about doing that, but I do want you all to know that is something that since our last public hearing that we have met on and I've asked the team to really lean into this to see what we can do here. And again, whether or not that is something that is within this phase of zone in or legislation that goes alongside of it we mentioned earlier the historical preservation work was something that was born out of that first phase i sort of viewed this in a very similar way of if it's not something that's going to be included here whether or not there's something that can go along with it and that can address some of these issues because i take your points well and certainly understand We've had this discussion before about not being able to plant yourself out of that canopy just from literally the time that it takes for those trees mature and do the things we need them to do, right? Which is help to clean the air, help to end the peat island effects within urban areas. So, I just want you and the folks in . This is something that we've met on and I've asked the administration team to really lean into it. Thank you. Our last speaker is Rich Wagner. Rich Wagner, welcome to council.

Hello. Even. Thanks for having me tonight. This is my first time meeting with you and it's ad libbed. So I was by the gallery yesterday and kind of got my first overview of what's going on here. And it was kind of enlightening. So I have three things I want to touch on. Again, my name is Rich Wagner. I'm a representative of the Center for Disability Empowerment. It's located here in Columbus. My first question would be talking about all the housing that's going on. Lewis, you were talking about over 119,000 units going in. My first question would be, and at the next meeting I'll have more questions about it, but how many of those would be considered affordable housing and more important, accessible housing? We get, at our office, we get these calls every day. And the 811 program is I'll just say it out loud, it's a joke. It's got a waiting list that's two years old, two years long. So accessible housing is a concern within our office. So that's a big concern within our organization. But looking at the information that I saw over at the gallery, with all the facilities that are going up, talking about parking within the facilities that are going up. From what I saw over there, the units that they're talking about building the housing and that would require possibly like homes with shops and restaurants, the existing housing, those existing or those potential buildings under the old code would have 100 units with required parking of 150 parking spaces. Now we go down with 100 units to 100 parking spaces, which would limit parking. When you're bringing in all these new residents, but you're cutting down the parking, where are people supposed to park when you're talking about bringing in all these new residents? I didn't hear one word about parking tonight, but I heard a lot of foot traffic parking and walking. But I think it's sad to assume that all these people coming into this new project, which I think is great, that they're not going to have cars. So you're limiting the parking. I see that they're limiting the parking, but thousands and thousands of people are coming in. So for my community, which already has an issue with parking, it's going to create more problems for the disabled community with finding parking. Even if they're living there, trying to access parking or deal with parking at all, or somebody trying to come in to the community to visit the community, access parking. uh... uh... thirdly bus routes with the layout communities the layout districts where or how many of them the bus lines with the new districts that you that are being talked about where do those those thirty you know the thirty line the thirty nine existing bus lines where do they go in regards to all the outlaying

uh districts that you guys are talking about um you're you're you're presenting in in this phase too sure um so if i can make a couple comments and i'm gonna throw it back over to our technical folks uh who know some of these details a little bit better than me i mean one of the things i would say generally around from accessibility for new housing development to happen under the zone in I think one of the biggest changes that was made in the first phase, which carries over to this phase, is that prior to that phase, ground floor residential was not permitted in the vast majority of the city for any multi-family development. That was removed for a variety of reasons, including many of the first floor, if you go to some of the apartment complexes that are built, either in downtown or outside downtown, you'll see these commercial spaces that are vacant because they're not really large enough for a tenant really to be able to afford the space and do something in. So why would we have that sort of restriction when the marketplace doesn't really support it? We are hopeful is that those ground floor units actually are more accessible for folks because many of these buildings, if you go under that four-story limit, don't have to have an elevator, right? So we're at least having some additional units that are being built that are accessible from the ground floor. That is just a small change. I'm not saying that that is, certainly that is a drop in the bucket as we talk about from an accessibility standpoint. But that was certainly something from the first phase that carries over here, just about bringing more units online that at least are a little bit more accessible than the previous code, which restricted those, I think, outright. This is also an area where not everything is accomplished through the zoning, but I do want to throw it over our technical experts to see the thoughts that they have, and particularly with regard to spaces that are reserved for folks that have a disability for parking purposes.

mobility is obviously a challenge for folks getting access to either we're talking about the businesses or whether or not you're talking about the housing itself the building code addresses ada requirements for the most part and also dictates the ada parking requirements so if yes parking is reduced but if parking is proposed they still do need to meet the ada parking requirements

away, Parky.

And our Division of Mobility and Parking Services, they are endorsing this market-driven parking approach. The Division of Traffic Management is one of the reviewing agencies when site plans are considered for approval process. And if it is determined that the parking is not When they do their review, they'll require parking studies. And the developer will have to mitigate their, whatever it is that's causing the problem, whether they are providing additional bicycle parking or car share passes or what have you. It is built into Title 43 of the city codes, that engineering code. Nothing has changed with that approach.

So if I could add to it.

Part of the reason that we're moving to a market-based approach is that a lot of these parking minimums that currently exist in the code, they were developed a long time ago. And when we started zoning, I was part of a team that went out and we did parking counts. We'd go out to these new developments that had been developed that had received a parking variance to have reduced parking from what the code stated. And we would count how many empty parking spaces there were. You asked about affordable units. Parking is quite expensive. It takes up land. It takes a lot of materials. It's expensive to do parking. And I remember I was in charge of looking at three specific developments. One was an assisted living facility. They must have had 80 parking spaces. The code said they had to have it. I assume they didn't want to go through a variance process. I never saw more than five cars parked there at a time. No, no, no, I get that. No, that's just an example. But the code said you have to have it, right? So, you know, that was a large area of their development that wasn't being used that could be used for units. And the more units you have, it's kind of supply and demand. That's what we're trying to do here with the zoning code is If you have less supply, there's a lot less new construction and startups happening right now. Supply goes down, cost goes up, and it becomes more difficult to buy the kind of housing you want. You have less housing choices. It's harder for younger professionals to buy their first houses. So part of it is increasing supply to help unlock some potential accessibility, affordability, I'm sorry. And then not just the assisted living facility, but other sites that had received parking variances that reduced their number of parking spaces by 50 to 60 spots, we would go out and count them and there would be like 80 or 90 empty spaces, always. And so what we're trying to do is say, and another part of it is also small businesses. A lot of small businesses, a lot of older businesses in older areas of the city where historically there wasn't parking, someone would try to put in a new business at those locations and they had to get a parking variance in many of these instances. And that's cost prohibited. So a lot of what we've seen in phase one are small businesses, mom and pop businesses, small storefronts taking advantage of the no parking minimum. And to be honest, most developments are still going to park their site. They're not going to want to develop a development that has zero parking. Many times they can't get financing for it and it's not feasible. But what we are saying is you know what you're essential what you need to function for your development let's allow it to be market driven and then as shannon said when we do see instances where something's just not adding up they're talking about an insane amount of units and no parking which we haven't seen yet then there would be an additional study and an additional review to see what kind of mitigate mitigation could take place and then they do have to do that so it's not that we're not It's not that we're trying to have zero parking in all these places. We're just trying to let the market decide so we don't have an arbitrary number that raises up costs, takes up a lot of land, and makes housing more expensive. So that's with the parking, the minimum. The buses, you asked about buses. When we did our map, when we mapped it out, one of the main things we looked at was almost all of the areas that we have for additional density in the corridors are on a regular bus route. we looked and we made sure that they were along regular bus routes so that someone could live there without needing a car if they didn't want a car and they would have access to transit. And then it is kind of a chicken and egg situation where the more you need more density to support bus lines and bus lines help support more density so this process is about looking at corridors it's looking at additional secondary quarters where there is bus transit trying to put some density some flexibility on there making the parking be more based on a market analysis than on just standards and unlocking some of the uses i think that might be

on bus routes.

But phase two, when it gets out into the further density of the city, it looks like it's blocks from bus routes.

That's a fair point, and I think this is, again, going back to some of these things are sort of built on top of one another. So when you talk about the further route, as Lewis mentioned, that first phase really focused on those corridors where there is existing good COTA access, and especially with LinkUS now being implemented, we're seeing increasing amount of both the frequency of COTA, even before the bus rapid transit lines are being built out, which is a positive, I think, for everyone. But that's really where we wanted to focus as much of that density as we possibly could for a variety of reasons, right? Cuz it needs to go somewhere. You've heard me say it a lot where we shouldn't just let people build whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. We're not talking about a 16 story tower next to a single family house. But we do need some 16 story towers to go somewhere. And it makes sense to push those towards the corridor, particularly for a variety of reasons, including you don't have that sort of impact on the neighborhood next door. But also at the same time, you have things like connected to transit. Is every part of the city that we eventually rezone gonna be on one of those bus lines? No, I mean, I think the accessibility gaps you're talking about are real. That's something that COTA, which is not part of the City of Columbus, but one of our key partners as we think about how do we build far more overlapping systems about how do we have neighborhood development that's just not you do your thing and then I do my thing and then we sort of go home and see what happens. I mean, there are clearly going to be areas that are just going to be more accessible because of that. That doesn't make it good or okay, that's just the reality of where I think different government entities are choosing to place their resources. And I think zone in, when you look at where we're saying the densest development should go, are closer to those bus routes that have good frequency. um it doesn't solve for an issue of a city and this is a broad philosophical point so i apologize for going there but when you talk about a city that is over 220 square miles because how we've grown out with suburban sprawl that is why it's been so difficult for coded service our city and our region in a meaningful way right because i think to lewis's point if you don't have that that density from a housing standpoint you know who's using that that bus route so you oftentimes hear people criticize coda for seeing an empty bus Well, they're trying to do their best by servicing a footprint that is just as spread out as spread out can be. And I think the consequence of that is it's really expensive to provide that service. It's really expensive to provide that service when folks don't have access to it. Whereas I think the opposite of what we're trying to do here, particularly in areas that we are up zoning now, to say no, this is where we want a lot more density, which again is hopefully to help stabilize those housing costs. But to say to partners like CODA, This is where we need you to put more accessibility, more transit, more frequency. Because we know you can't do it over 220 square miles. There's just probably not enough funding out there from a public standpoint to support those operations across the entire city and across the entire region. But we can and should say, where should we spend those resources that may have the highest and best use for folks within these areas? And ultimately, I think that's where we come to the conclusion of where do we provide the most density? Where do we up zone the most? As opposed to areas where we're saying, hey, you may be able to have an extra story here as compared to the current height limit. Whereas we're seeing in many other places you go up to five, six, or seven, or eight, or ten stories as compared to previously it was two. That's not a perfect answer and, you know, I don't intend it to be, but it's one in which this is about sort of, I think, changing the development patterns we've had here in a long time where we need to stop this, just the expectation that we just grow out and out and out and out. We need to start growing up a lot in certain areas and also just be thoughtful about what does that gentle density look like out there. And that's going to look like that's going to look different for different people and in different neighborhoods. And that's OK. Some people are going to like it. Some people aren't going to like it. But at the end of the day, the city is going to change. It's going to grow. And I think the only thing that we can do is about think about what are the guardrails we want to put around that? What are the rules of the road we want to put in place? And that then can tell whether or not the city's capital budget or partners like COTA. Here's where we think we need to put your skin in the game to here to stop, you know, everyone, you know, the old left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. So again, I acknowledge that's not a perfect answer, but I think that's what we're trying to get towards here. Appreciate you being here tonight. And again, I think this is the whole point of public hearings like this is for us to hear feedback like that for our team. I think really to chew over about what is possible within a code. Not everything is possible as we've talked about here tonight, but we should be thinking about what is possible. And if it's not possible within a zoning code, what is possible outside of the zoning code that can help to, I think, address some of these things. So thank you for going to the gallery. Appreciate you going down there and then taking the extra step to be here tonight. So thank you. um that is our uh thanks rich that he is our final public speaker here tonight so again i want to extend my deep appreciation to king arts complex for hosting us here tonight on on the nearest side thanks to both my colleagues uh councilman dafgar and councilman ross were able to join us here uh this evening uh also all our public speakers i think a lot of our public speakers have very actionable both questions and comments that my expectation is this team takes back and we have lots of meetings between now and i'll start with the next year in a little bit to really think about what potential changes can be made, I think, to address as many of these things as we can. I think my goal as a zoning chair, again, is to try to be very upfront and transparent throughout this whole process about what we're doing, why we're doing it, but also what we can incorporate from a public feedback standpoint, and sort of what we also can't. And if we can't, then what are the next steps on that particular topic? So the materials that you all received here tonight are all available on the website. So if you go to columbus.gov slash zoning update, all those materials are there. As Lewis mentioned earlier, the biggest tool for folks to provide feedback is that survey that's on the website. So I would certainly encourage people to continue to engage with council, myself, and anyone else. But also that is the way in which we are gathering specific feedback. So if you've got a specific parcel, I don't like the zoning district on this parcel. That's the best way for us to clearly understand what that feedback looks like so we can consider changes moving forward. we have a as i mentioned earlier a number of different gallery nights with individual council members so if you're interested please check out the city council facebook page or instagram page all those there will be listed if you want to come to one of those nights with a council member and share your feedback directly with them in addition to using that survey The easiest way to get a hold of me ever is just my email address. It's just radorns at columbus.gov. That is, again, just the most accessible way to get a hold of me. I know we've got a couple of folks that we're going to make sure we try and follow up with, but if you feel like you didn't get your question answered here tonight and you haven't heard from us, please make sure you just reach out and we'll make sure that whether it's coming from council or the administration team or combined, that we will do our best just to address those topics with the acknowledgement of, as you heard tonight, I think we still have some things to work on. And I think that's okay. That's part of what this deliberative process is all about. Our next public hearing is actually going to be on November 5th at 6 PM. That's going to be back in council chambers. So our first two of our hearings have been out in the community. We're going to go back to council chambers as we start to unveil what that public feedback looks like. then ultimately the changes that we make, and then ultimately what comes before council. Every piece of legislation that comes to council evolves over time, and I fully expect this one to as well. As I mentioned, our public comment period goes through October 24th. Certainly folks are welcome to contact and engage with us before that next public hearing in November. This is an ongoing thing, but also certainly happy to engage with folks up to that public comment period, but certainly afterwards as well. um to really make sure we're getting this right um but again thank you for everyone for spending their evening with us and laughing at my bad jokes and i appreciate everyone's engagement and we are going to close out the year so have a good night everyone