Planning & Zoning Commission - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

I'm not sure where I need to do that. I don't see where to go forward or backward.

Try your hair. No. The keys with the arrows on them.

Do you want me to share?

Yes, if you would share your screen, please.

OK. Oh, you can see that and say I can't. I'm sharing. Do you see the full screen? Okay, so you can see that then?

Yeah, just a minute. I'm trying to figure out how to share your screen now on ours here. There we are.

That's a shared screen.

Thank you. Okay, here's what we're going to do. I'll just display it on our end and I will match you as you change the slides on yours.

All right, we're going to figure it out. Perfect. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the August 17th, 2026 PNZ hearing meeting for Cottonwood Planning Zoning. If we could start off with the roll call, Madam Clerk.

Absolutely. Commissioner Kennedy? Present. Commissioner Glasgow?

Present.

Commissioner Hellman? Present. Here. Commissioner Rothrock? Here. Vice Chairman Camilla? Present. And Chairman Garrison?

Present. Thank you very much. And Commissioner Glascott, make sure I don't forget you when you're on the screen. It's easy to not remember you're there. So make sure you chime in if you've got any questions at all, and we'll try and remember to ask specifically. Fair enough. Our first item up is the Pledge of Allegiance. Could everybody stand for the pledge?

Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Once again, thank you all for being here. Informational reports and updates, Ms. Riel.

Good evening, commissioners. I only have one update for you. At the last planning and zoning commission meeting, I had indicated that there was a planning and zoning applicant that was going to be interviewed at the next city council meeting. And I just wanted to let you know that that applicant did withdraw. So there's still a current vacancy for planning and zoning that's being advertised right now.

That's it. Great. Thank you very much. Who will be leading the presentation?

So I'll introduce it. Ryan Bigelow is here to go through the slides. And then we have Elliot Pollack joining us virtually.

Perfect. Thank you very much. All right. Over to our presentation.

So item number five on the agenda is the review and discussion of the recently adopted City of Cottonwood affordable housing plan. Commissioners, this plan was commissioned earlier this year to provide current information on the city's housing market, identify housing needs, and recommend strategies to improving housing opportunities within Cottonwood. And on August 4th, the city council heard and considered this item and they had recommended approval of the plan, which identifies population trends, housing supply, affordability, future housing demand. And then it also includes some recommendations that the city may want to consider in the future to encourage housing. What I wanted to do due to some of the conversations and the projects in the past, I wanted to make sure that you were afforded the opportunity to hear the same presentation that the city council was because if this plan is adopted, which it was, it also applies to the work we do here as well. So with that, I'll kick it over to Elliot Pollack, who's here virtually to give the presentation on the affordable housing study.

Great. Thank you very much. Hopefully the technical aspects of this will work out. My name is Rick Merritt. I'm with Elliott D. Pollack & Company. We're an economic and real estate consulting firm working out of the Phoenix area. we previously uh did a housing study back in 2021 i think uh it was a verde valley housing study uh it was uh promoted by vvreo and it uh encompassed the whole verde valley of clockdale camp verde jerome was involved in it uh sedona we also looked at as well so it was a it was a uh more of a regional study and this is kind of the update for the cottonwood part of it and so i'll go through this uh about 30 some slides to to show you and what we came up with um um hopefully we'll be able to i can't you know there okay never mind okay Hopefully, you can see all these slides as I go along the second slide. The first thing we did was a housing assessment, was basically looking at what the situation was, what the condition was of of the housing market in the cottonwood area and then we launched into a housing strategy we work with ryan bigelow throughout this process and he was obviously very knowledgeable and helpful in putting this study together What is affordable housing? You may hear about it through various names, obviously just affordable housing, attainable housing, workforce housing. There's talk about missing middle housing over the last few years. But the goal is no matter what, that a family or household pays no more than 30 percent of their income on housing, including utilities. When you talk about affordable housing, this is slide number four. This is usually the term that's used to describe housing for low and moderate income families. They typically earn less than 60% of the area median income, which for a family of three in Yavapai County is about $51,500. The housing resources usually come from the state and federal programs. It could be public housing, low-income housing tax credit projects, which you have in the community. Vouchers, which are historically called Section 8 vouchers, which are allocated to households with low moderate incomes and they go out and they find a rental unit and they pay no more than 30 percent of their income on the rent and the federal government then makes up the difference. So when we talk about workforce housing, we're using this term to describe households that earn roughly between 60% and 120% of the area median income. So that's about $51,500 up to over $114,000. for a family of three. And in many cases, these assholes earn too much for federal or state assistance, but they don't often have enough income to afford to rent or purchase a market-rate housing, so they kind of get stuck in the middle. And they're often critical service personnel, teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, people that are really needed to make the economy run a lot of government employees, teachers, things of that nature, as I mentioned. Very critical. We did have focus groups with your community a couple of months ago in May. We did interview local school districts, community college, various businesses throughout the community, and many indicated concern with the availability of housing for those workers, particularly for the educational end of the spectrum. The missing middle is something that we talk about It's really the type of housing between single-family housing and high-rise, mid-rise apartments. We're talking about duplexes, court buildings, townhomes. You do have a fair amount of those types of units in the community already, but it's the type of housing that's really situated for the middle-income households and provides a little bit higher density housing. the type of housing that can be affordable to a wide variety of households that maybe can't afford a single family homes, something like that. So we looked at the demographics of Cottonwood in the early part of our study. You have a rather high median age, but is consistent with that found in Yavapai County. You have a little bit smaller household size. The one thing that really concerned us was on the bottom chart there is we compared your statistics, your age range to what was in existence in 2019. And what you'll see is that the population under 25 years of age has declined by almost 1000 people. 25 to 59 years of age category has increased a little remain basically the same. But we've really seen the growth in your population is 60 years and older. And that has run the median age from 46 in 2019 to 55 in 2024. So a big difference, a big change over just the past five years. It's not something we've seen in any other community across the state that we've worked in. So something to really keep in mind as we move forward throughout this presentation is the change in the age is occurring and it's something you know we compare a lot to what happens in Sedona and they've gone through this process already and what they found is that they're seeing elementary schools closing they're seeing in some cases not enough children to form up little league baseball uh teams and leagues and things like that and so it's something that to really keep an eye on you don't want to turn into another sedona obviously and but something to really keep an eye on as things move forward and if you have any questions that come up i'd be happy to to answer those along the way if things pop up into your mind um sure The median incomes you can see are quite a bit lower than Yavapai County. The median income, the household or homeowner median income is quite a bit lower, almost $20,000 lower. And then the renter median income is very low, below $39,000. We also found that the poverty level in Cottonwood is about 67% higher than the county or the state level. And so the typical renter who makes less than $39,000 a year can only afford a rent of $816 a month. And we'll talk about that. Your population is expected to grow rather slowly over the next 15 years, about 1100 new residents coming to the community. That's what we see from the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity. We think this is very conservative. It doesn't really match up with your permitting activity that we've seen historically over the past 10, 15 years. Here's what I'm talking about is once again, if you have about 1,100 people coming into the community, that's another 600 housing units that are going to be demanded or about 40 per year. But if you look over the past 15 years, your housing permits have averaged 92 units, including 54 single-family homes. So we think this forecast is pretty conservative, and you probably see more growth than what you see here on the forecast charts. So we took a look at the housing market, and as I think everybody knows, the market has been You know, pretty well upset upside down and what we have found for cottonwood is that you have a lot of rent or occupied units quite a bit more than what you find across the other Pike County and fewer owner occupied housing units on a percentage basis. You can see the difference here is quite a bit. Go on to slide 14 and you can see. permits over the past 10 years or so. Pretty consistent single family permitting. The one in 2021, the apartment complex is the Inspiration Apartments, 192 units that came into the community. Beyond that, there have been some other smaller complexes that have been built, but that was the big one in 2021. The Average rent increased from about $1,056 in 2019 to $1,300 in 2025. That's a 24% increase. We haven't seen the big jumps in rent that we have seen in other parts of the state. It's more of a gradual increase, but it is increasing and increasing probably above the... Any kind of inflationary factors that you see across the community. You also see that the red line is the vacancy rate that stands about 4 and a half percent right now, which seems to indicate to us. That's a pretty tight market. We typically. We want to see about a 7% vacancy rate in the apartment market to take care of just turnover of units and those types of things. So we're seeing a little bit of a tight market right now. So you do have some low income tax credit projects across the city. Some of these earlier ones, courtside apartments and Aspen Ridge, their contracts were only 15 years on affordability and they have expired. And we believe those two complexes now are charging market rate rents. And so once again, when you see 305 affordable units, we think 140 of those have been converted to market rate. Those are those two projects, Quartzsite and Aspen Ridge. Their rents are up higher than we normally see for affordable units. Once again, as I mentioned, the type apartment market, four and a half percent vacancy rate, so something to keep an eye on. We think this means that there is room for more apartment development in the community. So what can a typical cottonwood renter afford if the average rent is $1,300 a month with utilities of about $150? The total housing costs would be 1450 or so and the required income for that is about $58,000 to afford those let the average rent and you can see the median household income for the communities 57,000 and once again, the renter median income is less than 39,000. so there's a large segment of the population that is left out of the rental market. We also looked at single family home prices, and this is where you see the impact of COVID more than you did in the rental market. And you can see in 2021, prices jumped, the single family, typical single family jumped by about $80,000, and then followed on with another $25,000, $30,000 in 2022. But now we're seeing things level out some, so it's... A little bit better news now that we're seeing that the slight decline in single family housing, condos and mobile homes also went up in price as well, and those are still going up. But the increase of 145,000 since 2019 once again starts to lead people out of the market. And this just shows where pricing has gone. Once again, the same information that's on the chart, but you can see mobile homes are up and down in price. There's very few of them, very few sales of those types of units. And condos and townhomes are still increasing in price. But once again, there just is a limited inventory of mobile homes and condos and townhomes on the market. So once again, what we did here is take a look at what the median income is of about $48,500 for the typical household in Cottonwood. And that household can afford $183,000 unit. In 2025, there were only 17 sales under $200,000 out of 135 sales. So once again, There just isn't the inventory here in the market that's affordable to the typical household. The numbers here that you see, the interest rate is about 6% where our interest rates are up over 6.5% now. This is actually a pretty optimistic chart that you see on the right there. We did take a look at short-term rentals. uh and you can see um the numbers there uh short-term rentals in in cottonwood are really only about 4% of total units in the city. They make up about 6% of all the short-term rentals in Yavapai County. It's not a huge number. We think for the most part, it's not a particular problem. Of the 288 units, if those were rental units, long-term rental units, we're not sure how many of those would be affordable. It's questionable at this point as to how much of an impact they are. It's a small impact, if at all, at this point. So we looked at the housing gap and the gap is the number of people, number of households that are paying more than 30% of their income on housing. You can see the numbers here. for Cottonwood, for renters, are about consistent with what we see across Yavapai County. And out of those people paying more than 30%, there are 636 households that pay more than 50% of their household income on housing. So there's some big numbers if you're in the rental side of the market, and not a lot of affordable units out there on the rental side. We also looked at homeowners paying more than 30% of their income on housing, and there's about over 1000 households that are paying that right now. Number is a little bit higher than what you find across the county and the state. So maybe a little bit more difficult situation for owners in the area. Owners do have more flexibility to alleviate their housing problem and they can sell their house. They can move on to less expensive housing. They can rent a unit. So they have a little bit more flexibility, but still, there's a lot of people that are burdened by housing. We looked at that. Housing affordability by occupation, and you can see from waiters and waitresses, people that work in restaurants, nursing assistants, construction, laborers, they all elementary school teachers, firefighters. They all make less than. what is required to afford the typical rental unit today. It's only when you get into police and patrol officers, registered nurses, that they are able to afford the typical apartment in Cottonwood today. So affordability is a big problem. We do look at Housing as an economic development issue, for instance, if you don't have enough people in your restaurants and your teachers, pharmacy technicians, paramedics, that's when things really start to fall apart in an economy. So it's really important. to have affordable housing so that people don't have to commute long distances to work and you have enough workers in your community to provide the service that you need particularly for an aging population at this point we looked at future housing demand what what all this means um If things maintain the status quo as they are today and not taking into account inflation for the 607 households that are expected to come to the community over the next 15 years, half of them will probably need rental housing. The next group between 50 and 100,000 dollars, they'll be looking for ownership housing. But once again, some very limited options there. And it's a very small segment of the population that can really afford housing making those making over 100,000 dollars or so.

So what are our initial findings?

Your population has aged rapidly. Growth is almost entirely driven by residents over the age of 60. The labor force participation rate fell to approximately 48% in 2024. This is well below the statewide average, which is about 60%. And once again, we go back to the economic development issue of there being enough workers in the economy to provide the services needed for the population of Cottonwood. And we see this similar situation in Sedona. And so a lot of workers who work in Sedona moved out. They came to Cottonwood. They came to Camp Verde. They came to other parts of the Verde Valley. And unfortunately, now they have to commute into their jobs. So we want to try to eliminate that as much as we can. Your household incomes are well below the county and state averages and poverty is above the county and state averages. Unfortunately, maybe Cottonwood has been discovered as an attractive place to retire. It has an excellent climate most of the time of the year. I assume it's a little hot up there today as it is in Phoenix. And you have lower housing prices compared with many other parts of Yavapai County, particularly those areas on the other side of the mountains on the west side. The home ownership opportunities are limited right now and there's strong demand for subsidized housing. Now, I don't want to paint a particularly negative picture. I mean, those, those slides kind of paint a negative picture, but what you've done is taken significant steps to address affordable housing. I'll go through these real quickly. You'd partnered with experience nonprofit corporations, like housing solutions of Northern Arizona. to help out on some of your programs. You've established a down payment assistance program for residents of the community and an employer assisted down payment assistance program for people who work for the city. Those are all managed by Housing Solutions in Northern Arizona. You've done a lot more than what we see in other communities around the state. 1 of the things you've done is we established a reserve fund for affordable housing. We understand that is roughly from year to years around a 1Million dollars or so that is available to promote affordable housing. We don't see many cities with the reserve fund for housing. The big cities. um you know phoenix and some of the other cities in the metropolitan area you may have those but once again it's something we we rarely see in small cities such as cottonwood you established a home repair program i believe you use block grant program funds for those that program You've adopted an affordable housing section to the zoning code, which is there to provide incentives for developers who want to build affordable housing. You participated in the Oak Wash affordable housing project, which is a conversion of the motel. And you're considering participating in the Cottonwood Cove Workforce Housing Complex, which is a new complex that is being put together by Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona. and we understand you're planning on adopting a pre-approved housing plans, which will help reduce building permits, costs, time to have plans go through a plan check, review, those types of things. I understand that's in the works and it is actually a state requirement that you have that. Once again, you've really taken tremendous steps for a small community to address affordability and I think it's something you really should be proud of at this point. So given that, It makes it difficult to really find some additional programs that you can implement. You're already doing a lot of that. But what our strategies are really aimed at is addressing additional funding at the local level. Can you find additional funding for housing and other sources throughout the city? identify additional sources that may be available to state or federal levels, and perhaps formalize the housing policy and related code amendments, which would bring things up to speed on addressing affordable housing and bring it into conformance with make sure it's legal in terms of what you're doing in terms of the zoning code, things like that. Just real quickly, our recommended actions are to expand affordable funding for affordable housing to see if there's other ways you can generate funding for housing beyond what you've already done. consider the use of the GIPLET, which is a government property lease excise tax. It's one of the few tools that we have available in the state. And what it does is reduces property tax on property, particularly affordable housing properties. It can also be used for a lot of other different types of uses. But in this instance, we're talking about affordable housing. And it can be used for that. The program and can reduce property taxes, which will hopefully reduce rents, continue, expand your partnerships with nonprofit organizations habitat for humanity. Housing solutions in northern Arizona, those types of organizations consider adopting a formal housing policy and ordinance once again, to make things as legal as possible and layout to developers on what your incentives are. What kind of incentives are you going to provide to generate affordable housing? We recommend analyzing amendments to the city zoning code to minimize barriers to affordable housing. Consider establishing community land trust. Once again, this would probably be in conjunction with Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona or Habitat for Humanity, but there are ways in which you can bring home ownership to people through a community land trust. Continue to expand your down payment assistance programs. We also consider reforming the Cottonwood Industrial Development Authority to address affordable housing. We understand the Industrial Development Authority is not in operation anymore, but more and more of these organizations are helping to provide financing for affordable housing, and we think that's one way that the Cottonwood IDEA could help in this instance. We understand you're pursuing the designation of opportunity zones, which would perhaps help bring developers to the community who are interested in building affordable housing. continue to use city-owned land for affordable housing. You're doing that right now with a tax credit project which has been approved by the state. Can you continue to inventory the city-owned land and identify those which may be most suitable for affordable housing? promote the low income tax credit program. Once again, maybe marketing to those developers that are building homes throughout the state and bring them to Cottonwood and show them what you have available. Consider applying for home funds for owner-occupied housing rehabilitation. There's funds that are available each year. Perhaps you could expand your housing rehab program if you can get additional funds from the state housing authority. Lastly, consider establishing an infill incentive program. This could be used. in conjunction with development in your town center, your old town area. Once again, laying out incentives that may be appropriate for affordable housing. And with that, just to tell you who we are, once again, I like the Apollicon Company, Rick Merritt, Danny Cord is my partner who has done work on this project as well, but I'd certainly be happy to um answer any questions you may have go back through anything any questions about the presentation and the study that we prepared for you great thank you very much um commissioners anybody have some questions yes sir uh was verde village included in this study we did look at verde village in terms of of uh We received information from the county assessor on their housing sales and the types of impact that they've seen based on COVID. But technically, since it's outside the town, we didn't address anything more than that. We just looked at what the market is, what's available in the Verde Village and It's there is data in the study about that we didn't provide it in the presentation here.

I think that's too bad because that's a different demographic out there.

Most definitely is yeah most definitely is and the housing is a little bit different. But once again it is an outlet for people looking for housing in the community. and something we recognize when we put the study together and and ryan bigelow really requested we take a look at that aspect of it so it is in the study any other questions for mr merritt yes ma'am

So when you're talking about the increase in people with a median income so low in Cottonwood, and you're talking about the increase in people over 60, are the people over 60 the ones with the low income? I don't know if there's any data that tells you, you know, that whether it's young families that have low income or is it people over 60 who are moving?

Yeah, we did identify in the study, I didn't want to get into it in the presentation. I wanted to keep this as short as I could. But a large percentage of the people that are paying more than 30% of their income on housing are over the age of 65. And a lot of them are on fixed incomes. And as property taxes go up, as the cost of housing maintenance goes up, things like that, they become stressed and start to pay more than 30% of their income on housing. So we identified them in our study as an at-risk population. and something to keep an eye on is probably the i want to say probably the older uh more established population in in cottonwood that's not particularly the new people that are moving here i don't i think it's more uh those people are buying second homes or buying a second or buying a a home to live in, to retire in, coming from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country for that matter. So I think it's the more the established older population in the community that is at risk. And I think when you start to see affordable housing, these tax credit projects that come through the community, some of them should be designated for seniors because there is a real need there.

I have a question.

Go ahead.

You mentioned something about Sedona and us not wanting to be Sedona. We all, I think, are in agreement with that. What type of measures has Sedona... put into play or are planning to put into play if they're losing. I mean, it's primarily Airbnb and whatnot because of short-term rentals, et cetera. So anything they're doing to kind of alleviate that issue?

I don't know. I don't know if I want to say in particular, I don't think there is a tax credit project that was approved a couple of years ago that I think will be opening up soon, a small project of 30, 40 units. They are very active in trying to stop short-term rentals, although it's difficult to do under state law at this point. They had a proposal to put housing out at their amphitheater and part of that could have been moderate income housing. I think that was recently voted down in some election that I read about. So there's a real mixture of opinions in Sedona. I think you're Cottonwood is much different than you've that you've really worked on trying to provide for your affordable housing needs. I don't know that Sedona is taking the same tactic, although they do have, they do have down payment assistance programs and things like that. But that's a much different situation there. And I think you're. roll up the ladder and trying to address it at this point and make sure that your community is functioning well. Thank you.

Mr. Hellman.

So I had another question. So people and I don't know if you have any data on this, but people who are paying more than 50% of their income on housing? Are they renters or homebuyers? homeowners?

They're both in the the numbers that we have from the U.S. Census. So it's both. You know, a lot of times people have you know you get roommates to reduce your rent you uh you know maybe rent a unit that's substandard or a real old mobile home that was built before the hud standards and there's really a safety issue so it's um it's it's really a matter of of uh trying to get those people out of that situation, but there are substantial amount of people, both owners and renters, that pay more than 50% of their income on housing.

Commissioner Kennedy.

Is there any consideration in here for RV residents? We have a lot of people that are living in their RVs. We have lots of RV parks, and a lot of them are residents, not tourists.

We have not addressed that because the data we can get from the census at least doesn't provide that information. But we have heard that situation in other parts of the state and I guess I wouldn't doubt that it's here that people once again are trying to keep their housing expenses down and that's a very good question and something maybe that should be investigated. We just didn't run across it in the data we had.

Well, we have several RV parks in the area that are several hundred units and not all of those people are living in those to reduce their housing costs necessarily. They just choose not to own a home anymore and take care of it because they're older folks.

Okay, okay.

So I'm disappointed that that's not in there. And then I also took a little issue with the the income amount on the service industry. Does that have any consideration for tips because tips are not necessarily a reported income?

Those are numbers we get from the Office of Economic Opportunity at the state. And I would assume they include tips, but to tell you the truth, I can't verify that. That's something we can check out and see if we can find out more about that. That's a really good question for certain of those occupations where tips is a major part of their income, yes.

Okay, that's it. Great. Vice Chair Camillo.

I have no questions, thank you.

Could you, Ryan, could you go back, please, could you go back to, I think it's 16 or 17. We went through everything so fast. No, keep going. Let's go right there. We had talked about the different projects up to, I think we went up to 2025. Yet we have quite a few projects that are coming out of the ground now. And if I remember right, the inspiration project was done using that one. Perfect. The inspiration project was done with I believe the city adopted a process of allowing developers to offset building permit fees with the use of establishing a percentage of units at a less than market rate. to make up for the loss to the city and income from the permitting and if i believe if i'm right inspiration was one of the projects that was done that way i'm trying to think if the one off of birch and maine was also done under that program but i'm kind of wondering One of the things is this is the permits, but I didn't see a slide in here at all. We talked quite a bit about short-term rentals, but I didn't see a slide in here at all that gave a proportion of housing availability or housing units throughout this community on the different styles available, whether it was a home, a trailer, an apartment or a condo duplex or a multifamily, is that anywhere in your study? And if it is, what would be considered an appropriate ratio of housing availability in a community across those spectrums?

Well, if you could turn to slide 20,

It shows the pricing and the number of sales for condos, townhomes, mobile homes. I don't know if you can see that or not. Okay. So that tells you basically what is available. The sales, once again, are very modest. You can see they've really declined in 2025 as prices have gone up and interest rates have gone up as well. So we have...

I guess what I'm trying to get at is we've had several multifamily, very high density projects come through the system this year alone. As I said before, there's a couple that are already coming out of the ground or due to be accepting residents soon. and and the one cry we get from the neighborhoods where these are being proposed specifically is that you know they don't want the high density multi-family you know people are wanting to see more of the typical single-family residential or at least a duplex level housing being made available but it seems that the bulk of what we're seeing come through the permitting process anyway, at least as far as we're concerned, because we tend to do more of the zoning changes, tend to be that very high density multifamily, multigenerational housing. And so I was just wondering if we really have an inventory in the community and if our inventory is normal, or if if we're starting to move away from single family and and move into the range of of you know high density multifamily being our only option uh because in in my opinion you need all types of housings to be a healthy community and and it seems we're just not seeing the single family catch up to the the high density um you're probably right in um

What we're seeing basically across the state is because single family housing is so expensive that we're seeing more and more renter apartment units being built across the state. It's happening here in the Phoenix area and it sounds like it's happening in Cottonwood as well. I don't know if you could turn to slide 13. And that's the one that shows you basically that, you know, you're quite a bit lower on rent or occupied units. Excuse me, you're lower on owner occupied units compared to those out by county and quite a bit higher in rent or occupied units. And some of the renter occupied units will be single family units. I don't have a chart in here that shows the breakdown by type of housing but um and that's something that we could we could get to it's in the report for that matter um so you you do have a lot of renters in your community already and a lot of them will be renting single-family homes mobile homes even condos and townhouses but they're also in apartments I don't, you know, the only thing I can point you to is, if you want to look at what is typical, is look at, you know, what you see across Arizona or across Yavapai County. And you can see that about 25% of Yavapai County occupied housing units are rented. Yeah, you're seeing an influx, probably an influx of apartments, just like we're seeing, because single family housing is more difficult to purchase today with the interest rates that we have. So I don't know if that gives you enough information. But once again, if you have the report, it does provide information on what the breakdown of housing units is by type. once again i think you're a little on the heavy side in terms of rental and apartment units already all right thank you any other questions while we have mr merritt on the line

And we have Ryan up here, helpful. Thank you very much for running the slideshow. If not, I guess that's it. I appreciate you spending your time tonight to work us through this. And there's a lot of information there. And you did a good job of condensing it to a point where we could understand it. But yeah, I think the devil's in the details. And it's going to take a little bit of reading to work our way down through that entire study. But thank you very much for presenting it to us tonight.

thank you for having me it's a pleasure working with the city and with with ryan bigelow he's a great guy to work with and uh hopefully you can keep up the tremendous work you've done already and and really explore other areas where you can uh help the situation even more so i do appreciate it and thank you very much for listening to us all right thank you have a good evening thank you

All right, Ryan, you're off the hook. Thank you very much. Our next item on the agenda is the consent agenda. This is a presentation of the annual general plan report that was provided in your packet. If you have a question or a comment or anything about that report, then staff would be happy to answer it for you. If not, we'd be happy to, since this is a consent agenda, we would be happy to take a motion to approve the annual general plan report as presented. Vice Chair Camillo, would you like to make a motion?

I move to recommend the annual general plan report to the City Council.

Second.

We have a motion. We have a second. Do we have any questions? Commissioner Glasscott, did you have any questions or concerns?

No, sir.

Great. Thank you. Any other questions, comments, concerns? If not, we'll call for a vote. All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed, say nay. I have it, thank you very much. We have a unanimous. The next item up is a public hearing. The way the public hearings work with us is we'll have a presentation on the item. Then the commission will ask questions of the staff on the hearing item. Then we will bring up typically the applicant. In this case Yeah, the applicant to talk about or answer questions give us some highlights of what they're doing Answer also questions from the Commission when the Commission is finished asking their questions. We will call for public The public to come up and and ask questions to us uh you'll have three minutes uh to uh state an opinion or or some questions or comments we can't answer those for you but we when you're done with your time we can bring staff back up who may be able to help you uh get a clarification on a specific question that you had and then at that point we will continue asking questions of either the applicant or the staff Once we're done, we will call for a motion and a vote and move on to our next item. So with that, Ms. Hayden, we'll start off with the public hearing for CUP 26006.

Thank you for that, Chairman Garrison. Tina Hayden with Community Development presenting on the Conditional Use Permit Application for the Project Cottonwood Cove Apartments. First, I'd like to draw attention to the locator map here for the project details slide. You can't see it very well, but I do have a north arrow here just to help you get your bearings. The project is actually composed of three different parcels. We have Cove Parkway here. Again, for your reference, the 260 intersection is just further to the south. So there's two locations on the west side of Cove Parkway and another one on the east side of Cove Parkway. that the applicant is proposing a conversion of a hotel to multifamily residential within the C2 zoning district. It's kind of a little difficult. I cut it off poorly. I apologize. But it is surrounded by C2 zoning on all sides. To the east, this is county jurisdiction. It's a similar zoning of C2-12 there. I'd also like to point out that the aggregate of acreage of these parcels is 1.02 acres. And then the last item I'd like to point out is that Council did approve a development agreement for affordable housing, allowing for modifications from the zoning ordinance requirements. It is subject to conditional use permit approval by the Planning and Zoning Commission. We're just getting right into the existing site views. Again, I'd like to point out the north arrow to help you get your bearings. Here we're looking at street views of Cove Parkway. So on the top image here, we're looking away from the 260 intersection as it goes north and then turns over to Safeway. And then on the bottom image here, we are looking at that 260 intersection right there. Now we're looking at subject site and adjacencies. Again, going to point out the north arrow. The top image here, the 260 intersection, is just off to the left. You can see the adjacent Best Western development there, and Best Western kind of loops around and behind. this property that we're looking at. This is that first larger property that's on the west side of Cove Parkway. There are about 20 units that are going to be, there's currently 20 hotel units that will be converted to the multi-family dwellings there. And then the bottom image, so this is the front of this building, so you can see the rear there. Best Western is behind the property, and you can see that adjacent property that's also part of this project as well. So again on this top image we're moving further away from the 260 intersection. That was the larger property that I was talking about with the 20 units. This here is the six unit building and then further to the right you see the oil chain shop there. This last image here, we are looking at the other side of Cove Parkway at that last property. This is eight units for this site as well. It's a little cut off, but I believe that is Premier Auto off to the right here. Again, this is closer to this 260 on this area here. And then there's an office plaza here to the left. In order for the Commission to approve a conditional use permit, they do have to make findings regarding general findings, compatibility with surrounding uses, and traffic and circulation. We've provided some bullet points summarizing from the staff report. Regarding the general findings, we do say that the adjacent properties are all located within the C2 zoning district. The uses consist of hotels, office plazas, and automotive repair. Regarding the compatibility with surrounding uses, we've determined that adjacent uses are considered more intensive than the proposed residential use. There is an adequate landscape buffering existing between those abutting uses. Lastly, regarding traffic and circulation, each parcel has two-way access to Cove Parkway. And then I'd also like to point out that in the development agreement, City Council approved a parking reduction from 51 stalls down to 37 stalls. We indicated that staff had approved that. That was approved with the development agreement by City Council. If the Commission desires to approve this conditional use permit, staff does propose or recommend five stipulations. I won't read them word for word. I'll just summarize. Stipulation 1 is that the project conforms with the development plans on file. Stipulation 2, that the project adhere to the Code Review Board comments. Stipulation 3, that the project adhere to all applicable sections of the zoning ordinance. Stipulation four, the project conforms with the approved development agreement. And stipulation five is granting an extension for the conditional use permit past the allotted six months, but also requiring that building permits be submitted within 12 months of this approval. That concludes my presentation. I'm ready for any questions you may have. I also have the applicant present for any questions. And then lastly, this is a public hearing process.

Great. Thank you very much. We'll start with you, Commissioner Glasscott. Do you have any questions?

No, I just have. Well, the question I'd have, didn't we approve something like this already by the McDonald's? I thought I'm just curious on what the outcome of that is.

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Glasscott. The same applicant, Devonna McLaughlin, who works with the Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona, did previously bring the Oak Wash Homes project to the Planning and Zoning Commission. I want to say in 2020, 2021, she would be able to confirm those dates, but this is a very similar project to that. It's a hotel conversion to multifamily residential.

And will she be able to share the success of that location?

She is present. If you didn't want to bring that up, have her answer that question.

Well, we'll bring her up right after we get through with with Tina. Sounds good. Any any other questions for staff? No, OK. Commissioner Hellman, you have any questions? Commissioner Kennedy, do you have any questions?

Workforce housing is lower income housing?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Kennedy. I will defer that question to Davana. I would point out that this is affordable housing. I believe the AMI is set between 60% and 100%. But Devonna can definitely clarify all of that for you.

So, okay. Okay.

Commissioner Rothrock, do you have any questions for staff?

No questions. This appears to be something that we need step by step.

All right, before I get to Vice Chair Camilla, there are pink slips. They're actually white at the back of the room. If you do want to come up and talk, please grab a paper and fill it out, and then you can give it to the clerk or give it to us, and we will make sure we call you out. It helps make the process move faster. Sorry, I didn't mention that earlier. Vice Chair Camilla, you have any questions for staff?

Not for staff. I have some for the applicant, though.

Great. Can we bring the applicant up, please? Good evening. If you could state your name for the record, please.

Yeah, absolutely. My name is Davonna McLaughlin. I am the CEO of Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona, the applicant for tonight's hearing, and appreciate an opportunity to answer any questions you might have or give a general overview of the project.

ALL RIGHT. I THINK YOU HEARD ONE THAT WILL BE COMING FROM COMMISSIONER GLASCOTT, WHICH WAS THIS WAS THE SAME TYPE OF A SCENARIO WITH THE APARTMENT THAT WAS NEXT TO MCDONALD'S THAT YOU TOOK OVER AND I THINK IT WAS 22 OR 23, RIGHT? IT WASN'T ALL THAT LONG AGO. BUT YOU'RE THE SAME APPLICANT, SAME ENDEAVOR. HOW IS THAT ONE GOING?

So to answer the first question, yes, we are the owner and we're the developer of, gosh, now I have frozen in my head. Oak Wash. Thank you. The former Verde Valley Inn over there. And so with the CUP to allow us to convert that property to a residential use, we were successful in doing that. a major remodel over there so we added in kitchens we added in a sprinkler system ada accessibility office remodel so it took us about 15 months to get that completed we've been in operation a little about a year and a half at this point serving households experiencing homelessness the project is going very well we leased up very quickly working with community partners such as verde valley homeless coalition catholic charities etc to have referral clients over there. At Oak Wash, rent is based on household income. So we have folks paying as little as $375 a month for studio apartments. That includes all utilities. And then it scales up. So if folks are making a little higher income, then rent would be based on the area median income category that they fall in the Department of Housing publishes unit sizes and AMI rents that we adhere to every year. So we've had steady high occupancy. I'm happy to say some folks have moved out into permanent housing and we've been able to move other folks in based on our wait list. I would argue the property is great. It's exactly what we wanted. Low impact to neighbors, really kind of low visibility, quite frankly, and folks that are able to just live in our community with safe, decent, and affordable housing. We have found that we're serving the population we thought we would serve, which is predominantly folks that are elderly or disabled, many of whom are on fixed incomes. As rents go up and fixed incomes don't, you can see people being priced out of housing. And so that is a lot of the folks that are referred to Oak Wash. About 25 to 30% are employed here in Cottonwood, and then a few folks in Sedona as well. But over half of our tenants are folks on fixed incomes.

So if I remember right and I'll get back to commissioners real quick if I remember right that was sold as a transitional housing project And so how does that differ from what you're proposing tonight?

Yeah It was initially required by our funder which was the Arizona Department of Housing to provide either non-congregate shelter or transitional housing and We never intended non-congregate shelter because we just don't do that. So we intended transitional housing when we built the property. In exploring market demand, market study, all of the stuff that you just learned about, again, what we found is that transitional housing is great in communities with robust permanent housing resources. So it works in places with lots of low-income housing tax credit properties or maybe a housing authority with robust Section 8 or public housing resources that Cottonwood just doesn't have. And so prior to lease up at that property, we got the Department of Housing to allow us to do permanent housing at Oak Wash. So that's what we're doing. So folks can come in. They are determined eligible. We screen for their income and their assets and their household size. We set rent. And then they sign a lease agreement. We abide by Arizona landlord-tenant law. And if folks follow the lease, pay their rent on time, then we can just renew their leases in perpetuity. So it is actually permanent housing, but you're right in thinking that we had initially intended transitional But we were worried about folks just exiting to homelessness 24 months later without a place to go So we got the exception from the Department of Housing At this property Cottonwood Cove. We are intending permanent housing from the get-go We are intending to serve a different population so workforce How are we defining that? It really is households 60% area median income up to 100% area median income. So there's 34 units that we will, that exist now. They're all one bedroom, one bath units. So they're larger than what we have predominantly at Oak Wash. They're beautiful. They have full kitchens. They have a living space. They have patios or balconies. They have a bathroom. They have a very large bedroom and closet. And so we... know that they will be in higher demand than studios, right? One bedrooms are a little bit bigger, a little bit nicer, a little bit more space. And so because we've talked with your staff, with the community, and we understand that the need for affordable housing doesn't just end at that 60% definition that the federal government has of low income, we're proposing to serve higher incomes much, more likely to be folks that are employed in your community, in the service industry, working in office spaces, maybe construction, public safety, teachers. That's kind of that income range that we're intending to serve. Half of the units, so 17 of them, will be limited to folks under 80% of the area median income. The next 10 units will be limited to households under 90% of the area median income. And the final seven will serve households up to 100% of the area median income. So we scale it a little bit to be able to address the housing needs of different employment sectors, different household types. So for example, in a one bedroom unit, we can house households up to three. We're most likely to see one and two person households. So at that 80% AMI limit, we can serve folks at a household of one up to $53,450 a year. And we're proposing rent to be $1,200 a month. That includes utilities. So if you take out the $150 that Elliot Pollack had as his estimate for monthly utilities, you're at $1,050 a month for a one bedroom. We feel like that's reasonable and affordable to that portion of the workforce that would be in that income range. At 90% AMI, you can earn up to $60,120 for a household of one. We're proposing rents at $1,340 a month to start, once again, including utilities, so take those out. It's still pretty affordable. And then up to 100% AMI is $66,800 for a household of one, and we're proposing $1,525 a month for those units. So scaling it a little bit to be able to meet different community needs. Great, I don't know if I answered all your questions. Yes. I think you did.

Thank you very thoroughly. Thank you Commissioner glass Scott. Do you have another question for the applicant?

No, that's very helpful and it's interesting how convenient it was with the first part of the meeting. Thank you Great.

Thank you commissioner Hellman. You have any questions for the applicant? I

I'm assuming utilities does not include internet access, right?

That's correct. So it'll include water, sewer, trash, gas, and electric, but residents can get their own internet service provider for their unit based on their streaming needs or plan needs that they want to get.

And there's no communal gathering spaces or amenities like, I don't know, a place to have a barbecue or to have people over, you know, hang out.

So I don't know if there's an existing outside barbecue area. Between the two larger buildings, there's a nice courtyard space that kind of blocks you from the road and provides a nice little amenity space. And then on the east side of the road on that parcel, There's some open space towards the back. The wash is kind of down there, so we don't want people hanging out down there. But there is some a little bit of more space towards the back away from the road that people can have a little place to hang out.

And are they going to be allowed to have pets?

Yes. We have learned pets are part of the family. We have pets in every property. So, yeah.

Commissioner Kennedy.

I don't have any questions. I have questions for staff after that. For the applicant.

All right, I sure offer up questions.

I share Kamala.

So you answer most of the questions. Thank you. That was good. Time frame to if approved time frame to get this completed. What's

Yeah, so one of the nice things about this project is that I think it will be speedier than anything we've had to do or been able to do in the past. We've learned along the way. So this will be the fourth hotel that we're intending to purchase and then convert into housing. If you had asked me five years ago how many hotels I would own, I would say zero. But it has been an opportunity and a learning process. So the really great thing about this project is that the units are newer. They already have a lot of the amenities we have added to other units in the past, like kitchens, et cetera. So we do have to do a little bit of work. We have to change signage. We have to change like numbering on the units for your addressing standards. We have to add mailboxes and some bike parking. The biggest thing we'll have to do, I hope, knock on wood, is add a sprinkler system to two of the four buildings. We already have a quote for that. So my goal is that we'll purchase this property before the end of the calendar year, have about one or two months worth of renovation and have early in 2027 affordable workforce housing units on the market, which is faster than we can build anything ever amazingly. So that's one of the nice things about this project is I think you'll see the product benefiting your workforce really soon.

And I assume there's an application process.

Oh, for the rental for tenants? Yeah. Yeah. So once we buy it, once we're ready to go and we know kind of our go date, we'll start advertising to the community. We do intend on outreaching. One of the things in our development agreement with the City of Cottonwood that was approved by council is to give a preference priority to City of Cottonwood employees. So letting your HR department know that we're ready for lease up or how people can apply or get on a wait list will be key. Some other major employers. So we did meet with Northern Arizona Health Care to tell them this is coming. Not that they're endorsing it all, but recognizing that they have some large workforce housing needs as well. And so Chamber of Commerce, different places that we can go talk to about this project once we know we're good through regulatory review. We'll be doing that outreach and then have a wait list started so people can start getting on it.

Thank you. I would imagine you're going to phase open this, right?

Probably. I mean, there's two buildings that already have sprinkler systems, so I would think that those can convert sooner than the other two. But we'll just kind of have to see how it works out based on going through building code and any updates to meet that standard and if there's any things about phasing certificates of occupancy on one parcel versus a different versus a different.

And I see that the staff has agreed to downsize your parking requirement, but I'm still counting like 29 spaces. looking at the pictures and i'm curious that and that that was another reason i asked about the oak wash project was um this is going to be a different clientele and i would imagine they're more likely to have at least one if not multiple vehicles uh for each of these units and i'm just kind of wondering how you're expecting to get another eight units in into this area for parking to meet your requirement if are you going to be leasing land from best western for parking because it looks like you have quite a bit of parking outside your front door on at least the south side of your south building

So we're not intending on leasing anything right now. The 37 spaces, thank you, Tina, that are allowed are what is on property right now. So we do have enough for every unit to have one parking space. What we have found at Oak Wash, although I recognize it's a different population, is that there's very little parking demand. So there we have most of our folks don't have vehicles or using public transportation. One of the nice things about the location of this property is that it is still close to public transportation and basic amenities such as grocery store, banking, etc. But it's not on a highway. So it's actually like the best of both worlds as far as proximity, but without having the same traffic that we do see at Oak Wash. So I'm intending and expecting that a percentage of our folks will not have vehicles. It might be a small percentage, and then very much most of them will just have one. So when people lease up with us, we'll ask about their parking and vehicle needs and just make sure that we're not exceeding what we have.

And I guess I did miss all of the parking that's under that blue line. It kind of ran right over the top of it. So this is, to some extent, a walkable project.

I think so. I mean, certainly not the most walkable, right? Like it's not like high density downtown where your grocery store is underneath you. But for Cottonwood, this is a really great location that's close to a lot of places. And it's not that far from Oak Wash. And that's what we see a lot of our tenants there are using public transportation and we're walking. And so I'm really excited about the location of this because it is close to some of those amenities.

all right great any other questioners questions for the applicant well we are still before we bring up the staff all right thank you very much i think you've answered everything thank you very much i appreciate it uh tina could you miss hayden could you come up and it seems like we had a question or two for you mr glascott did you have another question or two no sir great thank you Who's, okay, there we go. Commissioner Kennedy, please.

The addition of the sprinkler system, why do they have to put a sprinkler system in an existing building? Is it because it's apartments?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Kennedy. I wish I had the building official. These are an ORF's fire here to answer that question. It's my understanding that because it's going from an occupancy for a hotel and is being converted to an occupancy for actual dwelling, it does trigger the requirement for sprinklers that we have in our ORF codes.

Change of views.

That's pretty similar use.

Yeah, I would agree.

Building code would define them as two separate uses.

Short term versus long term. That's kind of one of the examples that the previous presentation gave as a cost prohibitive addition. adds a lot to the cost of the project. And then my other question isn't necessarily related to this, but I'm curious as to, we have a lot of large apartment complexes in town, and I wonder if you have a figure on how many apartments we have versus how many are low income apartments. How many of the projects are actually low income projects?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Kennedy. I actually will refer to the affordable housing study that was just presented to you guys. I believe he had a breakdown of the different apartment complexes that were affordable housing projects and then the two that kind of aged out after the 30-year limit. I myself don't have a set number, but I think that should answer you well enough.

Hmm. Okay. Thank you.

Commissioner Rothrock, any final questions for staff?

Not now. Vice Chair Camilla, you have any final questions for staff? Nope. Or applicant.

And Commissioner Glasscott, you're good to go. Yes, sir. All right. I just have one more question. Oh, yes, ma'am.

Did you have any resistance or pushback to this project from any of the neighbors?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Hellman. Two days, I believe, we have heard from one member of the public who was in support of the project. Earlier today, I did speak with another member of the public. She wasn't too keen on the project, but she understands that it's a necessity. So not outright against the project, just not keen.

All right, thank you very much. It's time for the public hearing portion of this hearing. We'll start with, well, I'll turn it over to the vice chair to announce the speakers.

So our first speaker will be Mary Chaquin.

Good evening, ma'am. Could you please state your name for the record?

Commissioners, I'm Mary Shequan. I'm the executive director of the Brody Valley Community Development Organization. I did share with you a letter supporting the project, which was in your packet, so I will not repeat that. I think this is an exciting project. As Davana shared, it meets the missing middle income that we don't have housing for here in Cottonwood and actually in the Brody Valley. You have... many low income, you have many market rate, but there are critical workers here that could pay the 100% AMI or are making that kind of income and can't find a place. I want to share an example with you of someone I've been working with for over a year now. trying to get her a home here in Cottonwood. She's a survivor of domestic violence. She has had to live in a group home or in a communal residence for more than a year because she cannot find a place to live. She makes more money than low-income places do, but she doesn't make enough to pay market rate. Those are the kinds of individuals that I think the community really needs to serve. And it would be exciting for me to see her get into an apartment because she and her son deserve that. I mean, they need to be able to thrive in this community. And she's the kind of individual this project would serve. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Mr.

Rob Harrison.

Please state your name for the record, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and board members. My name is Rob Harrison and I am a neighbor of the project right across the street. I want to commend you guys for doing this type of projects for low income and needy people. And one thing I noticed that I hear a lot about apartments and rentals. I don't hear a lot about housing to purchase tiny homes. Any of those kind of projects would I think would be beneficial to the community as well. But being a neighbor of that, I do have my concerns, which I'd like to voice to you now. As far as the classification of workforce housing, can that be changed at any time? Because I already heard them say that the last project got switched to something else. So what does that process involve if they're going to say this is workforce housing, these are the parameters, but then all of a sudden that's not working out and we're going to do something else? Okay, so being across the street, I want to know what that is, and also what improvements are planned. I'm specifically talking about the east side, which is right across the street from my house. Very tiny piece of property. I bet it might be a third of an acre. Very tight, not much parking. I do have concerns for families and children. are gonna be in that location because it's shared with another two or three businesses where cars are coming in and out, in and out. The parking's all right here. There's a wash. Drop off maybe seven, eight feet. No fencing. Okay, then my road is over here. The Cottonwood Ditch is right across the road. There's nothing preventing children from going and falling in the ditch. Animals are another concern. We have livestock. And there's nothing preventing the dogs or cats or whatever from coming over to our property, chasing our cattle or chickens, whatever. What kind of provisions are going to be for that? Because literally there is no fencing around any of these properties. I think that's pretty much all that I have for you. Just some concerns about the use of the property and what they're going to do as far as improvements to prevent some of these potential problems. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much. Ms. Hayden, could you come up and maybe answer his concerns about, you know, as was stated with the Oak Wash project that went from a transitional to a more permanent style housing project. This project... currently is workforce housing, or at least it was proposed as extents stay. It was a style of workforce housing. So it's kind of staying very similar to what the existing use is now. How, if the applicant, you know, as stated, two, three years down the road decides that the markets have changed to the point that this endeavor isn't working the way they anticipated. What would the process be for them to come back in and ask for a different style of use?

Thank you for that question, Chairman Garrison. On August 4th of this year, City Council adopted a development agreement for affordable housing with the applicant. So it's my understanding that there would have to be an amendment to the development agreement to change anything within that. They do specify workforce housing ranging from the 60% to 100% AMI. So this is not something that can just be changed on a whim. It would have to go back before the city council.

So they are setting a pretty high bar for the applicant to change it in the future. It would not be something just done without some type of public process that would be made available to the public to be able to comment on as well.

correct, it would go before the City Council.

Great. Thank you very much.

Chairman Garrison, if I can also add. So the development agreement that the City Council had approved and that is being entered into is for a duration of 30 years as well. So the commitment is to provide the level of affordability between that 60 and 100% AMI for 30 years.

Great. That's helpful information. Thank you. Any... Looks like Ms. Kennedy has a question. Go ahead, ma'am.

Have you addressed the fencing idea?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Kennedy. These are existing sites. Staff did review for appropriate buffering. There is landscape buffering around each parcel to which it was determined that fence would not be required.

but the existing use probably is not so inclusive of children and if you're creating workforce housing you're going to have more children and the cottonwood ditch is right there thank you for that commissioner kennedy uh looking at our zoning ordinance that's not something we can enforce due to the presence of a certain type of occupant

Right. Any other questions for staff? Yes, sir.

Who's the property owner that would potentially be able to keep the kids out of the ditch?

Thank you for that, Commissioner Rothrock. I believe that is owned by the Cottonwood Ditch Association, of which the late Andy Grissetto was on that association.

Right. Yeah, I would hope that there would be some way to make sure that we don't have a tragedy there because with the clientele that will be in the new buildings, there's much more likelihood of kids being on the loose and things happening.

I would also like to point out that our building official was in attendance at the code review board meeting. He did inform the applicant that we are on the 2024 international building codes. So if there's anything within the building codes that would prescribe that, he would pay attention to that prescriptive detail.

Okay. Any other questions? If not a commissioner home and you have any final thoughts or concerns or or opinions you would like to share with the applicant or staff before we call for a vote.

No thanks.

Commissioner Kennedy you have any final comments.

In addressing the applicant. I think it would be a really great thing if you could put some sort of fencing back there because it is that is a safety issue.

even if it's not addressing our in our zoning great thank you commissioner rothrock no other question commissioner glascott you have any final parting words on this hearing no sir great thank you very much vice chair camilla you have any concerns or comments you want to share i think after mr merritt's presentation it's much needed so uh kind of in line with the plan the city's put together so

kind of ties hand in hand with the presentation we heard.

Great. And I'll agree with that. The timing was perfect. It is part of that housing equation that we talked about during the presentation that isn't necessarily heavy at this point and much needed. I would when i was in the capacity to approve the oak wash project when that came through uh... and At that time, I wasn't a big fan of that project, mostly because of the concerns we're hearing tonight about the children, and in this case, we have an actual ditch, which is, water in Arizona is always an attractive nuisance at the very least, and so it is a concern. That is private property that is not tied directly to this property, so it isn't necessarily your responsibility, but I think you're hearing tonight that there are some concerns about safety, especially with the younger population that you would have in these facilities. The Oak Wash, you know, that was a real big concern because of being next to a five-lane highway. and yet it has proven to be a non-issue since you've opened, which has been really nice to see that that hasn't become a problem there. So I'm expecting that this will be the same but better, I guess, is one way to look at it, of that project. You're going to have a different clientele and a much more... prosperous clientele, I guess. And so I would assume that this probably won't serve as many children as we're thinking it probably might, but you did hear the comments tonight. So hopefully regardless of whether it's in code or not, you have heard what we're concerned about and you will move forward with taking care of some of those concerns as the project evolves. So with that, we will call for a motion.

I move to approve CUP-26-006 to allow multiple family residents within the C2 zoning district based on the findings and subject to the stipulations indicated in the staff report.

Do we have a second? I second. We have a motion and we have a second. Can we do a roll call vote on this since it's a hearing, please?

Okay.

Commissioner Kennedy?

Aye.

Commissioner Garza? Aye.

Oh man, he was right there.

Hi. Hi. Hi.

Hey, there we go. Thank you very much. That mute button can hide. Thank you very much for sticking around. That is unanimous, so we move forward. So good luck, and we look forward to seeing what you do with that project as it evolves. So thank you very much for being here tonight. The next item up is going to be a presentation on land use application process. Ms. Hayden, are you leading this? Perfect. Thank you. Thank you all for being here tonight.

Thank you, Chairman Garrison. Commission, I'm Tina Hayden, your Senior Planner with Community Development. I believe at the last meeting the Commission had requested a run-through on the planning application processes as part of the suggested topics for future meetings. So we've got this presentation put together to go over our processes. This first slide is just showing you kind of a flow through of the steps that we take. The first one being that pre-application process, then followed by the code review process, and then finally the application review process where the applicant would get a decision rendered by either staff or commission or council. Each of these slides, I have a separate slide for each one of these, so I'll just break it down in the following three slides here. So with the pre-application process, this is a one-to-one meeting with the project applicant and planning staff. It is free to the applicant, and we only require that they submit a letter of intent informing on their project. It's typically scheduled within one week of the request. The application comes in, we acknowledge it, and we coordinate schedules to get a meeting set. This assists applicants with determining code requirements, determining that project feasibility, and understanding the required application permits and next steps. The second item in that flow is code review. This is a meeting with the project applicant and their team and then staff from various departments and agencies. It's a $100 fee. The applicant's required to provide a letter of intent and a site plan. I always say it doesn't need to be done by a professional, but we ask that it look professional. It's clean, legible, and has dimensions. We love dimensions. Any other information they're able to give us such as floor plans, elevations, it's just icing on the cake and it helps us give better answers. This is typically scheduled within one week. We actually have every Tuesday morning a standing meeting for code review applicants. This assists applicants with identifying code requirements, those issues and concerns that need to be addressed, and where we would request revisions to the site plan. At one point, our city engineer requested a left turn restricting pork chop be put on the site plan, things like that. And then again, we're informing on the next steps, those required applications. We typically provide those comments within two weeks of the meeting formalized within the permit so that the applicant can access their permit and review all of the comments given to them. The last step in the process is application review with a decision rendered, and that decision is typically approved, approved with conditions, or denied. The very first step here, reviewing and accepting application materials, this is an iterative cycle. So if applicant uploads documents, staff reviews them, If we find that they do not meet sections in the code we request revisions It's typically a one-week turnaround to give everyone time to do that in-depth review and ask for those revisions and then Especially if the applicants on track to attend a commission meeting we give them a reasonable time frame to stay on track for that meeting and before we would have to push them to the following meeting. So it's a cycle in that applicant uploads staff reviews, asks for revisions, and waits on applicants' uploads until we get that project that's teed up and ready for approvals. Fees do vary by application. And we typically require that letter of intent, site plans, elevations, landscape plans, and any other documentations that's necessary to render a decision. Timeline from the application acceptance. Once we've gone through that iterative cycle of all those uploads and reviews, one week for administrative decisions. This gives staff time to get the staff report put together in front of the director. And then for items going to commission and council, one to two months. Some of your projects such as zone changes have specific neighborhood meetings that must take place 30 days before a public hearing. So that's why we have the one to two months. Decisions are based on compliance with code requirements including our new design standards that we just went into effect in April. And then afterwards the notice of action is issued with that decision along with any stipulations that were recommended. The next two slides are going to go over the decision-making authority of all the applications that we process. We're first going to start with the administrative community development. We process the pre-applications, the code review applications, design review. I'll point out that the little asterisk right there indicates a duality and that This can also go before the Planning and Zoning Commission. We look at subdivisions. This includes lot line adjustments, lot combinations, plats. Again, noting that little asterisk that there's some, the code allows for provisions to deviate, but it has to go before Commission and Council. We do also administratively approve certificates of appropriateness and temporary use permits. The next decision-making body is Board of Adjustments. They review variances. Then we also have the Historic Preservation Commission, which reviews those certificates of appropriateness, landmarking, and more. Then we have you guys, Planning and Zoning Commission. You guys review conditional use permits, design reviews, subdivisions, your recommending body for zone changes and general plan amendments. And then lastly, we have the City Council, who has authority on annexations, zone changes, general plan amendments, and appeals made by any board or commission under them. That concludes my presentation. This is a discussion item, so I can sit back, and if you have any questions for me, just call me up.

Commissioner Glasscott, you have any questions for staff?

No, sir.

Great. Thank you. Commissioner Hellman, I see you reaching.

No questions.

Great. Commissioner Kennedy, you have any questions?

So we've had a couple of projects come before us and they were kind of outside. They needed zoning changes because of the densities and the size of the buildings, etc. Is there any discussion with the applicant when they initially come in that maybe they should scale back their expectations as far as that size when they're asking for that big jump?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner.

Specifically the three stories. How's that?

Yes. So at the pre-application level, that's where we're checking for feasibility. The applicant gives us the letter of intent, informs us on what they want to do. we then determine can it be done by code. In the case of the 250 some dwelling units, we never guarantee approvals because this is Commission and Council making those recommendations and decisions. But we look at the code and say if a zone change were to be approved, mathematically, per the densities indicated in the zoning ordinance, you could fit up to 252 units on the property. And I always say up to. because I never want to guarantee that they can get all 250 units on the property because they also have to deal with open space, parking, and circulation and access. So it's still a very, we never guarantee anything.

It just seems unfortunate in both those situations that those developers spent a lot of time, effort, and money on plans. And of course they weren't final design plans, but to get to that place and then they come here and it's, no, that's not going to fly.

I guess Commissioner Kennedy through the chair, if I may. Yes. So during the during the code review process, during the pre application process, we try to be as honest with applicants as possible. Right. Where we think we're going to see challenges, where we may have some findings that we may or may not be able to make. there's a lot of times too where projects change between the time that there is a code review board meeting and when they ultimately come in sometimes the changes are slight sometimes they're a little bit more I say more significant if it's too significant we would ask them to go through the process again just so everybody can have eyes on it and issue new comments there's a lot of times that we don't know the level of opposition that is going to come forward on a project until the notices are sent out signs are posted And unfortunately or fortunately, what we do is we look at projects in conformance with the general plan and in conformance with code. Our conditional use permits have findings that we need to make. Design reviews have findings we need to make. And we take a look at those. We take a look at the situation. We take a look at the information that we know at the time and make our best judgment on those findings. And those findings are what's included in the recommendations to planning and zoning and to city council. It is then up to the Planning and Zoning Commission or City Council at that time to take a look at the information that we're providing, the information that the applicant is providing, and any support and opposition, and then weigh that to make those decisions. We can't prohibit somebody from Asking for a project that may or may not work We can tell somebody that we may not support this and they may wish to proceed it at their own risk And that's a risk that they take to go through a process that's called a discretionary process. It's just that it's discretionary there's no no guarantees that they're going to get a project approved at the end and Trust me, we have lots of conversations with applicants about feasibility of the project, issues, some challenges that we see, but ultimately it's up to them to make the decision on how they want to proceed forward.

Great. That's helpful. Thank you. Commissioner Rothrock, do you have any questions?

No, I don't.

i share camilla you have any questions or comments no i think that's that's helpful um so i do um comments more than questions is um as commissioner kennedy brought up you know we've had two projects come through here through us one is made it to council and was rejected after being approved at this level one was um made it through us, but has not yet been presented to council and may not. I don't know where that one stands currently, but it seems that They both checked all the boxes when it came to a lot of the findings and the recommendations that came out of not only the community plan, but also the study that was presented by Pollock and Associates. It seems that they both have fallen apart at the density level. And so I guess my question is when the project behind Wells Fargo was brought to the council, If I remember right, Vice Chair Coats brought up that she would be more than happy to see a density between two and three, not going as far as three and not as little as two. And I guess my question is, sorry for the long intro, is it in your plans to go back and modify the density levels that would allow a project to be larger than yours level two but not as large as your level three, because it seems like it goes from 12 to 36. It seems like the jump, and I may be wrong on those numbers, but I believe I'm pretty close. And that is a pretty extreme change in density, especially when you've got some of these smaller pieces of property. So it seems like maybe that would help alleviate some of these, these problems or these roadblocks for developers. One of the things I heard also out of the Pollock presentation was trying to figure out how to make government more helpful and remove as much bureaucracy in the process to streamline this process so developers can move through quicker and cheaper and easier, but not necessarily remove the public ability to to hear it and i'm wondering if i know it would lengthen the application process but it seems like we get stuck with the design review portion of a zoning request and it seems like if we if we were to pursue both of those endeavors separately instead of as a joint process because both projects that I mentioned earlier and were mentioned by other commissioners, both fell apart with the design. And the applicants heard that. And I think they... had the ability, whether they chose to or not, they had the ability to go back and listen to those comments and decide whether they wanted to continue to pursue such a high density. In this case, one has not yet, the other did. But it seems like the public gets very upset and very worked up over what they see as an intent to build or develop that isn't necessarily a project that's made it through all of the staff work necessary to get a permit, yet it gets the public worked up to the point that they come out against the project, even though there may be work done between the point of a zoning amendment and the project coming forward for design review that possibly would allow that developer to continue to move that project through knowing that there's going to be some problems when they get to design review instead of being inundated with both those processes at the exact same time.

so chair garrison you covered two topics one is i think it's a good uh topic to take into consideration as we continue to work with the city council on some ways that we could remove housing barriers maybe you're having some i'm just going to use a tweener density maybe we add a third category for a general plan maybe we break up the densities into smaller more manageable ones so it's not such a jump definitely is something that has been done elsewhere and I think is a good solution. And then to your other point, for processing a rezone or a general plan amendment, we don't require design plans. But a lot of times... There is the desire for a developer to want to show a design plan because then it's showing the public how great their project is going to be, right? So it's that missing piece that they're wanting to fill in. um while at the same time there are no design plans either being considered because we didn't ask for it and they weren't submitted or that they chose to submit them there's a lot of times too just from the the business aspect of it where the developer who is coming in let's just put aside maybe he's just is outside the property owner who wants to just up zone his property or change it to commercial. They have no development plans at the time. They just think it would make it easier to market. A much different situation than when you have a developer who is coming in who is potentially buying a piece of property for somebody and they want to see what entitlements they can get because those entitlements mean their insurances. assurances, not insurances, but assurances to be able to build the project for a parcel that they're about to buy. So there's different situations in each of those. But you're right. I think that a lot of people can't separate themselves from the design to the proposal and want to see the design to make them comfortable with the proposal. And sometimes that design just doesn't carry it across the finish line, I guess to say. So...

Thank you. Yeah, that was that was helpful. Yes, ma'am.

In that case, when would the public ever get to see that design? Again, if it's not before planning and zoning?

So that's when we have the challenge, I guess, of what state law did. So if there's a conditional use permit, if they need, if they can only accomplish the density through the additional height, right? So our zoning ordinance allows up to 35 feet, but only two and a half stories. So a lot of times the additional density could only be accomplished through the achievement of obtaining a conditional use permit through the Planning and Zoning Commission. Maybe the design wouldn't be there, but the request to go three stories would come before planning and zoning. If otherwise they comply with all other code requirements, state law says that we have created a process for them to be processed administratively and they would not be seen. If they know about the application, there is the potential that it could still be appealed, but if nobody knows about the application, then... I don't know how they would know how to appeal a project. But that's also why we decided, sorry, that's also why we decided as part of the code and the change in the process requirements for design reviews is that we committed to posting administrative approvals on our website so that there is the ability for the public to be informed about decisions that are being made that aren't coming before a public body.

So, I guess what she's saying to answer your question the way I'm understanding it, if if they say the old Mormon church property, the West got funeral home property, if they were to come in for a zone change. And been approved for a zone change under a stated density. And then they were to then come back and propose a project that project would go through design review unless it fell within the parameters of the zone change that was approved and it would be handled administratively. But if they came back wanting more than the 2 and a half stories more than the 12 units per acre or whatever the, the stipulation was. then that would have to be part of their design review process and that would be public and that would be before us as well is that correct i think i have it that is correct thank you does that make sense yes any other questions for staff on this presentation i i want to thank commissioner glascott No questions. Okay, perfect. Thank you. I didn't want to forget you. I really appreciate the presentation. It's very helpful for us to figure out kind of how this works. I tell you of all the things that I get asked by, uh, the public when they find out you're on these boards or commissions is they want to know how the process works because they don't understand it. Um, I think the paper reached out earlier this year and they did a small article on kind of how the process works. But I think what you put together was great. It would be fantastic if somehow you made it part of the website under the community development. pages so that the public would be able to pull it up or an applicant could pull it up and actually see something they could print out that gave them the map on how to get through the system and the public also to be a little more aware of at what point public comment becomes part of the process. So they make sure they prepare for that. So it'd be handy. You did a great job. Thank you.

I also want to add one of the things that I want to work on are some informational guides to each of these steps as well. So it's a little bit more than what's in these presentations, but it breaks down pre-submittal code review, conditional use permit, rezone, general plan amendment, because each of them are uniquely different with different findings. some have similarities and processing but at least applicants then know oh it's this and this is what i can expect and this is what's required of me so we're working on that as well to be a communication tool and an informational tool for the public great thank you um

All right. With that, I think we've answered or we've asked all our questions. Thank you very much, Ms. Abe, for the presentation. Thank you, Ms. Rael, for the additional comment. The next item up is call to the public. We didn't receive any pink sheets, white sheets. Was there any members of the public who would like to SHARE A COMMENT, A CONCERN, OR A PROBLEM WITH THE COMMISSION? IF NOT, GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE, WE ARE DONE. WE WILL CLOSE PUBLIC COMMENT. THE NEXT ITEM ON OUR AGENDA IS SUGGESTION TOPICS FOR FUTURE MEETINGS. IF YOU LOOKED AT THAT, STAFF PROVIDED A CHART of I think this meeting as well as the next three of some short presentations like this one that they're gonna put together to help inform us and the public of how these processes work. So if there are other things than those that were mentioned, please bring them up here or share them with staff. Did anybody have any other pressing future discussions they would like to see added to an agenda? Commissioner Glascott?

No, sir.

OK, thank you. And I'm not seeing anybody raise their hand except, OK, we have Commissioner Rothrock. Yes, sir.

I imagine you're all aware of what's come down with regard to water in Arizona and how Arizona is about to take a big hit of our ability to get water from the Colorado River. I think it behooves us to get a better insight on how cottonwood is going to be able to continue to grow given some of these parameters. And one thing that I learned is that, well,

I made a chart. Excuse me, Commissioner Rothbach. This is just for suggestions only, not for discussion. Okay.

But I'll chime in. And Mr. Bigelow got away from us. I'm wondering, because this is a comment that comes up from the public every time we have a hearing, especially on high density. Is there the possibility we could get... somebody from the water department or our water manager at some point after we run out of all the other presentations to come in and kind of maybe give us a 15 minute overview of the state of water in the city of cottonwood and whether there are concerns or not on on these uh comments that we get from the public all the time

chair and commission um as far as a future gen item goes i think we could absolutely have um either an update on the water study that the city has been conducting or had conducted recently i'm not sure if it was completed or not but i know that the city council has uh like their uh some of their water attorneys that come and present on that from time to time and give an update and it's pretty exhaustive actually and then we could talk to tom about getting an update on the city's status and how that might be impacted i don't believe the city gets any cap water So that won't be a direct impact, but it will probably have a cascade effect all over the state anyway. So we could definitely put that on for a future agenda item to get an update on the status of water in Cottonwood.

Yeah, I don't know that we need to drag brown brown or, you know, the lawyers down here for that, but it would be helpful to get, you know, 1 of our water, our water employees to maybe just give us a very high level understanding of kind of how that works its way through the process. And when it comes to density and housing, you know, how is that going to affect our budget? water budget. So I think that would be helpful. So thank you. That'd be great if we could add that to the list for a future meeting. If there are no other discussions, I hear, I see two hands going up. Ms. Kennedy.

Yeah, there was a great article that Mr. Whitmire did in in the latest newsletter that the town put out talking about water and availability and build out for the next hundred years. So, I mean, it was a quick short synopsis, but it was great. And it, I think, answered some of those questions that the public brings up to us. So I would recommend that people get that newsletter.

Yeah, maybe we could get Mr. Whitmer to come in and do a

I hate to be that guy, but we can't have discussion on this.

No, that's fine. You heard some recommendations. How's that? Ms. Kennedy, future items.

I had emailed staff today. I wondered on the website, there used to be a spot, and I've asked about this before, where the open building permits were listed. And I've searched several times. I can't find that information. But I kind of took issue in 15 years. We only added 1,100 residents. And in another 15 years, we're only going to add another 1,100 residents. And we keep building and building and building. And I wonder for who. The numbers don't quite jive to me. Because 72 people per year is only probably 50 additional units. And we've added more than that. So I don't know if we can have some sort of a discussion as to what we still have, what building permits have been approved and what are still on the docket.

Yeah, I believe staff is working on keeping a running total forest and and hopefully we'll get that back again in the near future. But I know they're working on it. All right, any other comments or items you would like to see on a future agenda? If not, then we will go ahead and take a motion to adjourn this meeting. Do we have a motion?

I motion to adjourn the meeting.

Do we have a second?

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Aye. Aye.

This is unanimous. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr. Glasgow, for staying throughout the whole meeting. You have a good evening. Thank you.

You too. Bye-bye.