Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

We are going live.

Outside parties.

All set? Okay, thank you, Kelly. So now is the time and place for the City of Cuse Bay Planning Commission July 14, 2026 meeting. And... I guess first we need to take roll call. Yeah? Yes. Okay, so. Here. Jim Berg. Jeff Marin. Yes, please state your name. Pat Terry, here. Derek Windham.

Alicia Lund.

Wait, are you here? I'm here. Okay, perfect. All right, so, and I always have trouble with the... The deal here, but so what we have tonight is there's nothing on the agenda except for public comment and then a presentation. And so I am looking at the public comment and we have one person signed up. And without anything else to do, I'm not missing anything. Am I, ladies? Perfect. Thank you. I will call for public comment. The first person on the list, the only person on the list, and I'm going to, sorry if I mess up your name, is it Mike Panter or Parter?

Parter.

P-O-U-T-E-R. P-O-U-T-E-R?

P-O-W. Okay. My writing is pretty atrocious.

Well, yeah, I thought they got rid of handwriting as a subject matter, but I doubt that was during your time. No offense. All right, Mr. Powder. Technically, you have three minutes.

No worries.

Yeah, I won't be long. I just got on board on this. I looked to see what the meeting was. And it was concerning big boxes. So I thought I'd give my $0.10. I spent many, many years in Seattle. And I'm familiar with Home Depot and Lowe's and stuff like that. And to me, when a Home Depot or Lowe's goes somewhere, it's like a rock in a pond. There's a ripple effect. spreads out, and it's not too good on neighborhoods. On Aurora Avenue, the crime rate is beyond belief. I don't know if you've seen gunfights in the streets and prostitution and stuff like that. You get a lot of that. So these stores can develop a bad area. Up in Everett area, they had a lot of problem there too. So they can bring a bad element. I don't think we'd have that much of a problem here. The other thing when I was looking through some of the paperwork on this, Big box stores consuming a lot of land. I was looking at Walmart here, and Walmart takes about 18 to 20 acres of land from what I believe. I'm not sure. The building footprint's about 180,000 square feet. So it's... The parking lot and infrastructure is roughly three to four times the size of the building. So there's a lot of land it takes up, too. And then it needs all the vehicles that come to it. The traffic, you get 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a day. That's a lot of traffic. That's part of that ripple effect. It affects the whole area. It makes it hard to bring in bike lanes and infrastructure. And it just turns the area into a Carmageddon, in my opinion. So I'm not really in favor of any big boxes You know, I don't think Walmart does us any favors and I've also been on a lot of them strong towns and have looked at a lot of their stuff and Strong towns have done a lot of research on this as to how how much money these big boxes actually bring in and they don't bring in that much and a lot of the employment at big boxes is lower wage and the big boxes suffer from high debt and You know, if you look at the debt of Home Depot, it's in the billions. They have to sell a lot of stuff. They have to keep pumping the product out. They have to eat the competition. They have to aggressively go after the market to keep paying off that debt. Walmart's in a little better shape, but a lot of these big stores have a huge debt. Our local stores don't tend to have that much debt. You know, McKay's and Buy Marts and stuff like that, they tend to be rock solid. Even though they're smaller, they're not... you know, design or whatever, they seem to weather out a lot more difficulties. Also, when big boxes go out of business, which I've seen a lot of them go out of business, those buildings are hard to reuse and the property is hard to reuse. I think we've seen that with the Kmart property that became the whatever, you know, Cascade. It's hard to find a use for these buildings. I think you have to start thinking outside the box, as such, and come up with a better plan to deal with the land. But, you know, I mean, Coos Bay is not Phoenix. You know, we can't keep going out into the desert. We have no desert to go out into. We've only got so much space. And if we put big box stores in here, they rob us of anything else we want to do in the future, too, because we don't have the room. We can't go up and we can't go down. Yep, that's my 10 cents worth. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Powder.

Any other public comment?

The only other person in the public has his eyes closed, so I'll take that as a no.

It's not ours.

So. That being the end of the public comment, now we will go to a presentation by our own Chelsea.

Yes, thank you. I'm just going to work on getting it up on the screen. Well, Kelly's working on that. Just briefly, Council has asked that Planning Commission consider, in light of hearing concerns from two business owners in town that potentially a Home Depot is coming to locate here, whether this problem of big box stores is truly a problem for Coos Bay that warrants further engagement, analysis, and regulations. So that's what staff has set out to do, is look at what are the implications of big box stores, reasons why you might want to restrict them or why you would not want to restrict them. And city council has asked for planning commission's input. And so, let's see if I can get this, yep, we're in business. Get this going. So, Okay, so big box stores, implications for Coos Bay, Oregon. So this is just an overview of the presentation. Going to briefly touch on our local economic landscape, talk about our comprehensive plan, our economic opportunities analysis, and development strategic plan, and how those kind of fit with this conversation. South Coast Development Council, they prepared a trade area retail gap analysis to really do a little bit of a deeper dive into the economics impacts or the questions and opportunities. And so we'll touch on the highlights of that. We also have Lamar Hoyt, sorry, I call him Lamar, not his last name very often. He's here if there are questions he can answer later. We'll touch on what are big box stores, what are the kind of restrictions that communities put in place, give you a little bit of local context, talk about the potential policy tools that are available to regulate, go over arguments for, arguments against restricting, and then just come back to the key considerations. So Coos Bay's economic landscape. We are in a post-timber transition. Since the decline of the timber industry in our area, there's not yet been a single economic driver to fully replace that. Our current planning efforts, just last year the city updated its economic opportunities analysis, also prepared an economic development strategic plan that is intended to guide our economic growth. And then emerging opportunities. Uh, we know that our community partners such as the port, the local tribes, the hospital, those are going to be, um, ones to bring projects to the area. And we'll also foresee new jobs and growth with expansion of our urban growth boundary, um, in the coming years. So our comprehensive plan, the economic opportunities analysis, and the development strategic plan, those are cities, those are documents of the cities. They are meant to be guiding documents. So I just wanted to touch on kind of the vision, the guiding principle. which says by 2045, Coos Bay will be a thriving place where people of all ages choose to live, work, visit, and get involved. The city will support a diverse range of family wage jobs while residents, visitors, and businesses will invest their time, talents, and resources to strengthen the local economy, foster an engaged and welcoming community, and create vibrant shared public spaces. And so in our comprehensive plan, there is an objective that states the city shall support through policy and regulation, new development and redevelopment. And then there are four goals that are outlined in both the plan, the EOA, and the Economic Development Strategic Plan. The number one goal being to strengthen and diversify the local economy. Two, make Coos Bay a destination to invest and work in. Three, align land use and infrastructure with economic priorities. And four, foster strategic partnerships and regional collaboration. So just keeping in mind as we talk about this that this is our current kind of guiding light. Highlighting that trade area retail gap analysis, it's kind of like a food pyramid but an economic food pyramid. You need a variety of industries to make up a healthy, balanced economy. And so the analysis that was done just briefly shows we have a retail gap of approximately $177.4 million. And so there are opportunities out there for certain industries where maybe We're not capturing dollars locally, and we could do better at that. Those industries are in general merchandise, restaurants and bars, building materials and garden supply, clothing and accessories, health and personal care, and specialty retail. Briefly, what are big box stores and what are the types of restrictions that you can put in place? And generally a big box store would be over 40,000 square feet and they could be much, much larger. They have a standard array of services, merchandise. And so you think of the Walmarts, Targets, Home Depots, any store where you go across the country and there's 10 or more of them. And you know, when you walk in there, you kind of have a similar experience. You know what you're going to get. Ways that communities can restrict big box stores where you can put limits on the size like a building square footage or a height. You can limit the overall number of stores in a community. You can set higher level design standards. You can require special use permits and you can impose zoning restrictions like where in the city they could locate or that they can't be in your city at all. So a little local context. Mike Powder touched on this earlier. Walmart would be considered a big box store at about 220,000 square feet. And then you have Fred Meyer's and Cascade. And then there are some other smaller ones like Safeway and Farr's, TJ Maxx. But this just goes to show that we do have some in the area already. So policy tools and options. So this is a list of ways, again, we can regulate. The smiley faces show where the city is already doing something. So the first one, limiting a building size or a cap, you get a partial smiley face because we do have restrictions on height. But we do also have an allowance to make adjustments to that. So it's not a hard set restriction. But a lot of communities in Oregon use this tool to regulate development. Design relay, our review overlay, we also get a kind of half a smiley for that because we have basic design standards for all commercial developments in Coos Bay, but the city just recently repealed our higher level architectural review design standards because they found that that was a barrier to development. Conditional use permit, we are using that as a tool. Developments over 20,000 square feet are required to get a special use permit. They come before planning commission. We look at the community impacts. We look at traffic analysis. So that's something that's done in other communities. We're doing it here. Economic impact studies, you could require a deeper fiscal economic analysis. Every business that wants to come to downtown, you could require that, but it's not something that's being done in Oregon today. It's more prominent in California, but that's a little bit of a bigger impact to development. Zoning district limits. We do currently restrict where these types of retail commercial developments can locate. We're really limited to our commercial zones. So that's something we're doing. Dark store prevention. When... big-box store comes to town sometimes there's a concern that they leave and the building sits vacant and so there is a growing trend to require things like demolition bonds or reuse plans for when they close we're not doing that there's not many if any communities in Oregon doing that yet but I've noted it as a trend you can put a cap on the overall number of types of business developments in town or you could prohibit it. This is not something any communities in Oregon are doing and not something we're doing now. And then last, small business support. The city and their community economic partners, they can provide assistant programs and support strategies which the city currently does through its urban renewal program. And then we have the Downtown Association, South Coast Development Council, the Business Development Corporation, Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, all these other economic partners that are providing support to the smaller businesses. So you can see out of like eight options, the city's already doing five. So pros and cons of each approach. Putting a cap on size or overall total number, that's really simple, it's clear, but you're really gonna limit businesses from coming to town. If the business doesn't fit your box, then it's probably not gonna come. You can restrict the location where they can be in your town. That's very targeted, very targeted approach. It comes with moderate level of legal, political risk. Requiring the special use permit. It provides the city with flexibility, discretion in reviewing and approving. But a con to that is that it increases staff time, time and cost to review and approve and it increases the uncertainty for the business. Design standards gives you a lot of aesthetic control. But again, that's at a Increase to staff time and cost to get these projects reviewed and approved And then you could prohibit it overall, but it gives you a lot of control, but it's a at a high legal political cost risk Sorry, excuse me So this slide is just a slide to show some Oregon case law. And the point is that it's been tried in courts. And what they have found is that yes, cities can regulate big box stores by restricting their size, restricting their location. You can impose design standards. But whatever you're doing to one business needs to be applied across the board to all similar business types. And so if you were to inconsistently apply your regulations or set arbitrary thresholds, anything that's intended to block competition, that would run foul of the law. This slide just shows some examples of other communities similar in size that are regulating big box stores. And what it shows is that they are implementing the size limits, building height size limits. Some of them have design standards. Some of them require conditional use permits. So we are in line with what all these other cities are doing. Reasons why you might wanna restrict a big box store, to help protect the local businesses, to ensure business money stays local, to preserve community character, and to prevent those dark stores, and increase cost of services. Anytime we get a development that's gonna increase a city's cost of services for emergency response, water, sewer, all of that. But that's kind of the price of development. Reasons why you wouldn't wanna restrict big box stores, access to lower priced goods. Usually the big box stores are competitive in pricing and so that's beneficial to your low income households. They do create jobs. There is likely a case where some local existing jobs would be lost, but they're gonna create more jobs. They generate tax revenue, and again, just accessibility and affordability. The bigger box stores tend to be open greater hours, provide more competitive priced products, and then there's a perception. If you are regulating development and it puts out this notice to the world that we're not open for business and so you're limiting potential future development in your community. So are there impacts on downtown and local businesses? Yes and no. Is there a chance if a big box store comes to town that you're gonna displace some of the local businesses? Probably to some extent Is there a big chance that they're going to come to your downtown? Probably not they need are looking for different property than what you would see in your downtown corridor, so probably not going to be a physical big impact of the downtown So kind of summarizing the key considerations for Coos Bay and Whatever the city chooses to do, we have to ensure that it's in line with our comprehensive plan, our EOA and our EDSP. We want to make sure we're balancing access to jobs and uh, affordable goods with the character of our community. We want to be sure we're supporting our partners developments and our UGB expansion. And then if we choose to go any further with this, we just want to make sure we're engaging, um, you know, stakeholders. So this slide, uh, and I should, should reiterate this presentation was to council and they asked that the same presentation be made to planning commission. So this is that presentation and they were given these steps, but where they stopped was that step one, you know, is this a problem? And so they've asked planning commission to consider that. Is this a problem? You know, that needs to be further regulated. And so I will stop there. and open it up for discussion, Planning Commission, to decide to what degree is this a problem, if at all. Lamar is in the audience if you have questions regarding that trade retail gap analysis. And then the goal after tonight is we bring Planning Commission's discussion points back to council at their July 28th meeting, which is a special joint Planning Commission City Council meeting. that I hope you will all attend.

Okay, thank you, Chelsea. So, Planning Commission, open for discussion.

Look at you, Mr. Byrne, you always have something to say. Well, sure. I feel it's kind of my job.

And just a reminder to speak into the microphones, please. All right.

I always thought I could make my voice carry pretty well, but I guess in hearing about this, a couple of things sort of come to mind, just kind of random thoughts. I own a building downtown, kind of a big box, you might say. But I wouldn't mind if there were a few more of them down there that had businesses in them. Right now, we have an empty space. You walk down around downtown Coos Bay, it's full of empty spaces. You put them all together, it wouldn't take too many to get a big box someplace. So I'm not sure who we're protecting. I know that People go out of town to buy things at big box stores because they can get it. And there's more variety. Prices are typically maybe lower. And are these people not being somehow unloyal to their local stores that they didn't go try to buy something there. And then it just becomes kind of a funny conundrum to me. The big box, the only big box I've been involved with a little bit lately was Kmart. Sold that to Cascade. Cascade now decided that wasn't a good business plan. So now I've heard it's been being sold again to another store that takes them. In the meantime, there's been nothing there. And so I think it's a tricky wicket to artificially protect a local business. I mean, that's what the competition's about. And that's, you know, so I guess I'm just, questioning where the urgency, or not the urgency, but where the whose ox is getting gored here, if you will, because it seems to me like when, you know, in other stores, J.C. Penney's was a big box store, and it's just empty, and I worked on that for years, trying to find some other use for that, and it turns out there's just you know, there's not a crying demand for that. So if somebody has a business that can come in and provide jobs and product for the area, I guess I'm having trouble understanding all the reasons why not. And like I say, why we would go to our extra levels to avoid it. I don't understand, for example, why we just mentioned the heights. Why do we care to build a five-story building? I mean, there has to be some reason to have it. But I mean, I'm not sure what the advantage of limiting that is and who thinks it is a good advantage. So anyway, those are just some thoughts.

Thank you, Mr. Berg. Yes.

I actually have a few questions. I would like to start with the information provided from SCDC. The analysis was really interesting. And there was a lot of information about this analysis on the capture rate of dollars staying in the county. And as I thought about my own spending patterns and my own shopping habits, I didn't realize What's a healthy capture rate? Is there a target, and how would restricting or not further restricting big box stores change that? Because we'll never get to 100%. I think about myself. A, I'm a very picky shopper. I will never find everything I want precisely in any community I live in, even if it's New York. At this point, I think the availability of online is so easy. I mean, that's sort of my go-to choice. If I can't find what I want locally or it's so precise that I really need to go looking for it, often if I do need to shop at a big box store for something, I'll just order online because Home Depot delivers everywhere. So from that aspect, I'm like, well, I'm not... what's the target capture rate on a healthy community and a healthy economy? And either restricting or keeping the current restrictions, how will that influence getting to what a healthy capture rate should be?

Lamar, do you want to speak to that or?

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good evening, members of the Commission. To go ahead and start, very simply put, there is no perfect capture rate. It's essentially a combination of different industries all put together. Typically, though, when we look at retail analysis, what we're looking for are certain sectors that are supplying a certain amount of surplus. For an example, if your surplus is in traditional retail, in traditional wholesale, in traditional non-direct stores, then you'll start to notice you have that. And for an example, I think a great example that I would put out is one of the examples when we look here when it comes to shopping is that there are very few places where you can actually go get new clothes. You could go buy used clothes. You can go to T.J. Maxx now, but even T.J. Maxx doesn't sell new clothes. They sell them new to you, but they're discounted. So typically their last seasons are the seasons before that. And so if you wanted to buy something brand new right now, there's no place in this area that you'd be able to go do it. And so that's an example of how you have to try to figure out what is that combination. It's not a matter of, especially in a smaller community, it's not a matter of trying to have X amount of big box stores and X amount of small stores and X amount of medium stores. It's a matter of understanding what needs are you supplying in your community and which ones are you not. And for the ones that you're not, is there an opportunity? Is there a business that is currently in the community that's doing something similar? that we can support and they can grow? Or do we need to try to figure out, well, maybe there is that opportunity to try to bring in someone that could do it? And I actually use Les Schwab as the perfect example of that. If there was not a place to go buy brand new tires, get them installed, get your brakes and all this work done in one spot, we would be trying to find it. And I also use the optometrist. When I first moved here in January of last year, how the optometrist in Walmart had just left, and so for a while they didn't have one. And so we can try to find what's missing in the community, but even though we find what's missing, it's also the matter of preferences. And so we do understand that there are people that like to support their small, locally owned business, and we know that we do need to support them. At the same time, when we have, and I'm just throwing out an example, If you have 10, because it's Home Depot, I'm just using that example. If we have four or five hardware stores that are in our area, those stores are probably already competing against each other. And we can possibly look in our area that there may be maybe five to 10 employees in each of those locations. Now, are those businesses able to hire each of their employees full time? Are they able to provide them benefits and things of that nature? As opposed to knowing that if, again, in comparison, a big box store may be able to offer 40 jobs with at least 25 of them full time with benefits. But it's not only that. It's also the matter of what they're contributing to the community. While these smaller businesses that are already here that we love and want to keep contribute to the community, we also know that Home Depot, for an example, offers other programs into the community as well that support their employees, that support volunteer efforts, as well as infrastructure efforts as well. And then the last point I'd like to make is that when we look at businesses like a Home Depot or a Lowe's, we also have to look at the ancillary services that are being offered. So for an example, you can go to Home Depot and you can rent a truck or you can rent a piece of machinery to go do some work, as opposed to typically in some of the businesses we have here, I don't have that opportunity. I can go to U-Haul and rent a truck. But that's not a comparison against the hardware store. And so it's a matter of we have a lot of people that are doing so many things. And I think it's an opportunity when we look at big box stores to realize that when you have the money, You can try to do everything. But when you are that smaller store, we do, especially in a smaller community, doing something really well is much better than trying to do everything. And I want to support all of our small businesses here. And I want to find the best ways to help make certain that no matter what business comes in, we can keep them successful and keep them in business. But to go, I know that was a lot to say. There is no perfect capture rate. It's all about building the right, it's like a pizza. You got to put the right toppings, you know, in the right proportions in order to make it good.

Does SCDC have a recommendation? Do you have a recommendation?

Currently, SCDC has not done any evaluations in order to compare the current retail mix against other smaller communities in Oregon or nationwide. And so that would actually need to be, if anything, if anything were to be done, I would probably say that'd be the first thing is we have to find other precedents. We have to first find the community that has the same population, that has the same demographics, that has the same industry mix as we do in order to identify what's working. We can identify other communities that have similar populations, that have a different mix, but that doesn't mean that that store is going to do well here. A perfect example is if Cabela's or Bass Pro Shop were to open up over on the South Coast, I believe they would do well. Are they going to take some business from the smaller fishermen's shops? Probably, but they would probably do very well, as opposed to If a, I'm trying to think of just a very grandiose store that, you know, really wouldn't do well, but I'll just, Macy's was a perfect example. Macy's was here, but the reason why Macy's didn't stay here, and this is my opinion because it was gone before I came here, but during the research, it wasn't meeting the needs of the community. The brands that they sold were not the brands that your community wore. You have a lot of people wearing Ariat and Carhartt, and Macy's doesn't sell that. But Fred Meyer does. And so when you look at that opportunity, Fred Meyer is a big box store. I've seen the one in Brookings and the one in Florence and how big they are compared to how big the one we have is. And so they could have came in, done bigger, and been offering more stuff in that location, which meant that more of these smaller businesses would have been impacted. And so it's a matter of trying to figure out what do we have, what do we like, and what are we missing? What are we really leaving the most for? And is there a place in Oregon that does it that would be welcome on the South Coast? And that's the last part, culture. Culture is always going to play a key part in trying to figure out the perfect mix.

Thank you. Anything else for Lamar? Anything else for Lamar while he's standing there?

I'm here for the rest of the night, you know, so.

Well, I have kind of another question. One of the things that kind of occurs to me is that if you're graduating from North Bend High School, Marshall High School, Uh, and now you're going to go to work. Well, if it's like my class, which was about 50 years ago, I hardly, there's nobody here. I mean, everybody had to go somewhere else to work because the timber industry went, you know, and so in other words, you, if you go to work at a, at a cute local store, there's nowhere from there to go. If you go to work for what we'll call a big box or a bigger organization, you may well have the opportunity to train there and go have a career in that industry. Having grown up and lived here all my life, I remember that being the situation. As it turned out, there was still a little bit of the timber industry left at that time. I was able to do that and kind of patch together sort of a working life out of that. But it meant doing other things and not sticking to that. I don't even know if anybody looks at that as a piece of the puzzle to having a kind of a window on the wider world, if you will, than if you, you know, people in our, come to our office and sometimes say, well, you know, I wish you guys weren't even here. I wish there was a cute shop here instead. But we look at the cute shops, and there doesn't seem to be a very good market for cute shops in downtown Coos Bay, as much as we'd all love to go to them. And so sometimes I think that the rationale doesn't take some of these things into consideration when they sort of describe what is or should be.

I absolutely agree. I would say, for an example, many, many moons ago, if you were trying to find big box opportunities in someone's downtown or main street, it was a store like Thalheimer's, Miller's and Rhodes, or a Sears and Roebuck. Again, one that had everything or if they specialize in one particular thing. And so I think to your point, if the city was interested in trying to attract big box downtown, there's an opportunity that they could occupy almost an entire block and even maybe help refurbish the building, keep the tenants in the building and the space they don't use as well. So there are those opportunities. And to your point, I do agree. When you have a smaller store where there is one manager, managing five departments in, we'll just say, 15 to 2,000 square foot, as opposed to now, yes, we do have someone in 50,000 square foot, They have five departments, but they have five managers. And so to your point, yes, with that experience, they can go to Eugene or Portland or even somewhere else nationwide and expand their career. And we want the people that are working at those smaller entities to be able to do the same. But we understand when people get into a job and I've been here 20, 30 years. You know, so there isn't that opportunity for that role to open up for the person that has been here 10 years. And they're ready to be a manager, but there's no place around here that'll hire them to be that manager. So there are advancement opportunities, absolutely. I would even say there's even cross-training opportunities as well. It's also the matter of you may come into a retail opportunity and learn one skill, but then you learn another skill. And sometimes, and I use that for an example with some small stores, everything is in-house.

It's one person that does the books, does the payroll.

They do the hiring, the firing. It's all one person. As opposed to these larger corporations, there's this opportunity for people to get skills outside of their regular position. And so this is not advocacy for big box. And this is not saying that it's a judgment. But I do say it is absolutely a very important conversation. Because there are other factors that I think would need to be looked at before any decision would be made. But most importantly, finding precedence of other localities that are very similar to yours in makeup and in culture, and then try to identify what has worked for them or what hasn't worked for them.

Do we know, is the city of North Bend having the same discussion?

Currently not. So the information that I was able to obtain here, I actually obtained for all of the cities in our service region. At the time, because the conversation on big box was up, I went ahead and actually did the analysis because I wanted there to be some data or some information to be brought to you in order to have something to consider. But should North Bend be interested in having this conversation, we'd be more than happy to go ahead and take their data, do the same analysis. Because again, as the mayor mentioned, I think, a combined effort when it comes to doing something like this. Because if Coos Bay decides that we don't want Big Box and North Bend's like, come on over, then we can realize that Coos Bay may become that bedroom town to North Bend. But if it's a matter of where communally or countywide that it's like, hey, you know what, we want to set these standards, we want to keep this culture here, and we want to find a way to support our small businesses, you know, I think anything that we can do to help, you know, would be

you know on the table and if they decided not to then we would just well I just thank you thank you I was just looking at the Coos Bay Municipal Code and I was looking at a 50,000 square foot building. And the building code for retail development like that would require 800 occupants for that building. Coos Bay Municipal Code would require a parking lot that needs at least 125 parking spaces. So when you're looking at a parking lot that big, you're looking at a five acre lot to develop. I was just wondering if there are any vacant properties in Coos Bay that size that are ripe for development. I'm wondering if we can accommodate in that regard. So I think this initial concern was brought forth about maybe a hardware store going into Cascade. which I imagine could just be handled with a building permit application for a tenant improvement in that existing store. So that's gonna happen whether That's ready to happen. It's needing to happen. That's what's happening in North Bend at the south end of the mall We're redeveloping what we have and I would support that Continue to happen. So I think we're just talking about developing vacant land or maybe you know bulldozing and creating a space that would accommodate this and And so then I was looking at the Coos Bay Municipal Code and we're talking about a new non-residential development greater than 20,000 square feet. Anytime you're in a development process like that, it triggers a type three land use review, something we're already doing. Okay, what's involved in that type three land use review? We're looking at... traffic congestion, traffic impacts. It requires a traffic impact analysis. And so we're going to look at what this size parking lot, we're plugging it into this road. Do we need a traffic signal? How are we going to accommodate the traffic impacts that this development might have? We're already looking at that in Chapter 18 of the Municipal Code. And then we're looking at infrastructure capacity. Chapter 18 of the Municipal Code, in a Type 3 land use review, you're required to look at the capacity of the sewer system. Do we have the capacity for that size building all the way from where it's gonna be installed all the way to the pump station or to the treatment plant? Do we have capacity in our storm water system from that parking lot to the outfall? All that has to be looked at. It's already required to be looked at with the municipal code that we have. And then there was questions about the compatibility with surrounding uses. That's already required to be looked at in chapter 17 of the municipal code. And a type three land use development can't be approved until it's shown and proven that it's not gonna have any adverse effects on these city systems. Pedestrian orientation was another concern. I imagine that North Coos Bay Municipal Code requires that pedestrian access be provided, sidewalks be installed if they're not there already. All these things are already in the Coos Bay City Code. And so I guess I'm left to wonder if Coos Bay Municipal Code already requires that development mitigate for all these potential negative impacts to public services and systems. Then the question or concerns get into some areas kind of outside of my expertise, like capture rates and less tangible aspects of our capitalist system, to me anyway, and subjective opinions about whether you enjoy shopping at these stores or not. So I've always been under the impression that our population base maybe isn't quite there to support a store of this size anyway. So I guess I'm just left to wonder what more. I feel that the Coos Bay Municipal Code is fairly robust on these points. So that's my two cents.

Well, just a thought. In the last reasonable memory that we have, JCPenney went away. Big Lots went away. Kmart went away. There doesn't seem to be too fertile a field for, as you say, whole a ponderous amount of barriers already there that you know how much how much more do we have to fight something that is a very tough time surviving as it is and if it does survive then it does provide some provides all the things that any others play you know jobs variety to find a job expanded things in your own community without driving to Eugene, you know. Anyway, it's, I guess I'm just, it's hard for me to worry about a huge influx of giant stores, you know, covering, you know, the hillsides all around us, which they can't do because they're all forests. I mean, it's just, I think whoever's worried about this, might be worrying about something that may not be as big a fear as it seems.

Colin. Yes, Mr. Mayor. Just some historical perspective. Back in the mid-'90s, you, me, Jim, anybody else The town went crazy over Walmart coming to town. I sat here through several meetings and it went on in the papers for a year and a half. They finally went through the appropriate approvals and it got built 220,000 square feet. People from Gold Beach, Port Orford, Bandon, Powers, Myrtle Point, Coquille, Reedsport, maybe Florence come to this store. It's become a driver, economic driver. We shouldn't have feared it back then, and the businesses have adjusted to it. With regard to the Home Depot, Crescent City has a Home Depot. Brookings, the big Fred Meyer. Gold Beach, nope. Porterford, nope. Bandon, nope. Goose Bay? Nope. However, in 2006, Home Depot spent a million dollars in plans to locate where the big pellet warehouse is located there. I saw the plans. They had everything ready to go. and the financial crisis started to unravel and they pulled the plug on it. 2006, going north, you've got Florence, a small town, big Fred Meyers. Newport, big Fred Meyers, plus a Walmart. So these small towns, ultimately can adjust for a box store. I can tell you that Home Depot has a pretty good picture of people coming to Roseburg or Eugene to purchase stuff that's coming back to Goose Bay because of credit cards. They understand where their Clients are. No other Home Depot, Crescent City, weren't. Coos Bay would be another driver as a box store. So try to limit. We don't have the land, as Jim said, to have a dozen homes. big boxes that destroys our community.

The other one I thought of is the Mill Casino. Boy, did we ever try to make that not happen. And I mean, if you love to gamble or if you don't love to gamble or if you think it's a sin, whatever reason, that parking lot, has an awful lot of cars on it all the time. And they're not just going there. They're not, it's just, but I remember details like, oh, I shouldn't even get into it now, but the point of the story is just extraordinary effort on the part of some of our citizens to just horrified at what that would bring. And maybe it isn't everyone's dream thing, but it certainly is an economic thing and a reason for some people to, apparently, to drive in all those cars, want to come here and do something.

With the amount of traffic that goes through on the 101 daily, yes, Coos Bay, North Bend, Bandon, Freed's Port, there is plenty of opportunity. And again, whatever the community wants, I'm happy to support because at the end of the day, you know, I'm not here to fight for what I want. I'm here to just support the community. But there's opportunity, absolutely.

So I do have a question. I guess a couple questions, thoughts maybe, more than questions. I think that type of comparative analysis would be useful just to have full information. I know we can never have full information. And I understand in the past, decisions were made in different contexts. And to have that, OK, so how did that go when it didn't happen here? to get a little bit of comparison, should that be the next step and should that be what makes sense, right?

And I kind of actually do think this is a worthy conversation to have.

just to evaluate what are our needs in this community now and moving forward. Maybe we do truly have the checks in place already. Maybe, and it is interesting because I keep coming back to what's the opportunity cost lost, and not so much in terms of what's happening in the business now, but now we have a vacancy. It's a lot different filling one spot than it is a big, So the JC Penney building, we're hoping and pulling for it, right? It's been vacant since I moved here in 2022. So there may be additional regulation, like adding a dark store clause or requiring a bond. So that's because we have seen these things happen. that have not improved our community and do not advance the goals. So I do think it was a worthy conversation. I do think an analysis like that certainly would help me to write additional information about what, maybe we're in good shape already in the population. The reality is the population is not gonna support a big-box store. We've got Walmart Everybody shops at Walmart here because that's where there is the shop and they're covered for whatever zone So I don't know how truly to weigh an opportunity cost when it's not just in the moment but long-term Yeah

Okay, Commission, so I'm hearing a couple of things. Ideally, we'd have a deeper analysis that would give us some more input. That does come at a cost, and so the city, not having budgeted for it this year, maybe potentially That's something we consider in the next year. Hearing that there's some acknowledgment that we do have a lot of the regulations currently on the books. So I think really what we're looking for is kind of a consensus from Planning Commission. Do you feel more is needed? I heard the dark store prevention kind of looking at what that would involve could be something. But maybe Vice Chair Terry, if you could help get us to some consensus as where Planning Commission's at. On that would be awesome. And then, as always, appreciate Lamar's expertise.

Thank you so much.

Okay. Well, I think it was Douglas Copeland's book, Generation X, which I'm a member of. The first line said something to the effect of, this person's from Portland, this person's from Boise, and this person's from Portland, Maine. It didn't really matter because all the stores were the same, the strip mall, so it doesn't really matter where you're from. Coos Bay's obviously a little bit unique because we don't have tons of those national chains, as many as other places. But it does feel as though this particular issue is driven, at least from the initial little blurb that we got by some local business owners who, rightfully, would be nervous. I mean, I know that when Planet Fitness went in, it hurt a lot of the local gyms significantly. Most a lot of the private ones were just hanging on by a thread. And there's hardly, which is nice for me, because at least the one that I go to right there, there's nobody there. But what do you do? I share Jim's aversion towards putting regulation and kind of trusting the free market to do what it wants. But at the same time, these larger corporations like Home Depot will come in and if they open a store here, how long is it going to last? They say drive Perry's out of business. And then Home Depot in a decade decides this store is not as profitable as they thought, they can close it. Home Depot does close stores in times of economic turmoil like Jeff was describing earlier. So I kind of do like that idea about the dark store provision. That's something I was not familiar with, but I think that is an interesting concept to explore. At least I'd be one to put that on the list for our recommendations. But what, I mean, are we trying to figure out several key recommendations for the city council or what's the actual goal here?

I think the overall goal is to hear from planning commission, like, is this a problem that we need to do something about? And so just answering that question, you know.

Is this a problem?

Yeah, and beyond that, okay, and here's some considerations. Look at the dark store, maybe do a deeper analysis, but that's separate.

Well, I appreciate Mr. Windham's analysis digging into the municipal code like he did. I do have a question. So if somebody was going to come into the old Kmart Cascade store, and they were going to remodel that, I mean, there's already obviously a lot of space there. I don't know how many acres it is, but it's a huge footprint. What would the steps need to be taken to convert that into, say, a big box store?

Yeah, so, and Kelly, correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're using the existing building footprint, it's just a change of use, and so it's through a building permit, you do your use change of occupancy, and you're essentially occupying the same already developed space. If they needed to expand, depending on how much area they're expanding, that could trigger some additional land use, but...

So, I mean, there's nothing really that we can do much at this point to prevent someone from redeveloping the Cascade building into a big box store.

Correct. I mean, I guess technically it already is a big box store.

It's a big box, yeah. Yes. Right. Okay. This is crazy. I'm sorry. It makes no sense to try and keep out big box stores from our community. As he said, North Bend's open for business. You know, it's nuts. It's just, I think we should just... Well, what's the genesis of this?

I mean, what, I mean... No restrictions. That's my vote. Yeah.

So just a type three land use review, it would come to us, right? Correct. We would have to weigh in on this anyway.

Correct. It would seem to me then that we already have the mechanisms in place to address this issue without implementing more restrictions.

I would like to consider exploring what would a

Lighted property vacant property ordinance, which is a little bit stricter standard than what they had in place And so this is not specific to big-box stores, but if and when a space sits vacant for X amount of time, then we require you to register and pay a fee. If you go into code enforcement issues, you're being fined. Just so you are aware, we now have on the books a little bit more stringent enforcement for just vacant buildings, period. It's not specific to big-box stores. It's not preemptive, right? But we have that.

So what about downtown Coos Bay?

Yeah.

Are we going to start penalizing people?

Well, I think the idea is to keep it for the problem property owners who have buildings and are holding on to them without maintaining them and not trying to get them into use.

Different issues. Yes.

That's the focus of that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Commissioner Marino. Clarify.

Well, I agree with Jeff. I think we've got sufficient hurdles for people that want to do anything around here to go over that we don't need to create any more artificial ones. And what would even be the, what would be the criteria? X number of square feet? Certain products? You know, certain services? I mean, is it, you know, is it, or is it just any kind of businesses of a certain size? I mean, if you wanted to sell bulldozers inside the Kmart store.

You know, you... Would anybody be complaining if they knew a Costco was coming to town? Yes? No? I mean... It's a box store.

I guess the other piece of the puzzle is a box store, well, I don't know what happened with I mean, I sold that property in good faith. But surely they would be happy there for many years. But they must have just changed their idea of...

They're shutting all of their stores down.

They just wanted to... I mean, but... What am I trying to say? But I mean, but typically if a person's going to go in and spend... A company's going to go in and spend the kind of... investment that they have to. They're going to have some pretty good knowledge about whether that's going to be a good market for them or not to be in. And obviously these stores that are gone, at least we talked about a number of them, didn't really have it figured out what they were supposed to be marketing or how here. And they're not here anymore because of that. And so I think we'd be wouldn't be a very good idea for us to put too many hurdles in front of people that think they can come and create a viable business here.

And Lamar has another point he'd like to make.

JUST TO A FOLLOW-UP, TYPICALLY WHEN A BIG BOX STORE LEAVES, IT IS NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN REFILLED BY ANOTHER BOX STORE OR THE BUILDING IS DEMOLISHED AND THEN SOMEBODY REBUILDS. I DID WANT TO GO AHEAD AND POINT OUT THAT TYPICALLY EVEN WHEN A BIG BOX STORE LEAVES, EVEN IF, FOR AN EXAMPLE, WE SAY THAT YOU GET ONE OWNER THAT COMES IN AND THEY SUBDIVIDE THAT BUILDING AND THEY PROVIDE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR FOUR TENANTS, IT'S STILL CONSIDERED A BIG BOX STORE. even though they have multiple tenants in there based on the footprint that you have listed in your mandates. And so I just wanted to kind of put that out there that typically you're not going to find one business that's going to come fill in or backfill a big box store unless it's another big box store or someone that's ready to transition from that medium or larger business into that big box store facility. And so when you think about the hurdles, as you mentioned, in regards to doing this, it's easy when you're putting up against that big box store, like a Lowe's or something like that. But when it's this business owner that's been in the community for 15 years, and now they're ready to transition and now all of a sudden they have to go through all of these extra things it may kind of create something so i just kind of wanted to put that out there that typically big boxers are either refilled or backfilled by other big box stores or they're demolished or again sometimes the building gets subdivided into a smaller use for multiple tenants just to comment just historically kmart sat on that property

out there for what 10 years at least because they had a super super low lease on it their hope was to release it to another big box and capture that income stream that difference that's why it sat empty And they finally let it go. And it was sold within a year. Yeah. But that's why Kmart let that sit. They had such a low lease rate. They were hoping for a beneficial sub-lessee to come in and use that space.

But to... The last piece of that property, which is now, we sold it just in the last year, it was sat there. The whole thing came up to the market together. And it's been only 10 years at least. It's been sitting there with my sign weathering there on it for... all this time until finally it, and its use is not gonna be for any kind, it's an acre, and the parking lot is all, there's plenty of parking. So we could have built a whole acre of store there, it's not gonna be that. It's gonna be a roadway, I guess.

OK, with hearing all of that, then do we want to make a recommendation of do nothing? Yes.

Are we required to come to consensus? Because I don't necessarily feel comfortable with do nothing. I honestly would like a little bit more information. And I don't know that that's a recommendation to do anything other than I still would like to learn a little bit more about the vacancies. basically as a preventative measure. So we have some measures in place that are new. Would that type of measure accomplish anything? What does it look like in other communities? You know, that's still not a recommendation, but that's just a way to, I don't want to say advance the conversation because that seems, I don't want to have a conversation for this sake of having a conversation but if we had additional information we could actually start as new businesses do come in is there a mechanism we have to prevent that beforehand because it would have it would be moving forward only and it would be preventative rather than okay well now we have a problem on our hands which we certainly do now i just

Recognize that maybe we have an opportunity to at least prevent it from getting worse And just a point of order for Commission consensus does not mean that you have to all feel unanimous You just have to have a general agreement on the points All right, well

Based on the discussion that I've heard, somebody can feel free to elaborate or refine what I'm going to say, but I would then make a motion that we recommend the city council, we don't take any action to implement any more controls that already exist.

Second that motion.

All right. We have a vote. All right. I'll vote for that. Aye. Aye. Aye. Jim? Yeah. Oh, I couldn't see your hand.

I will abstain.