Affordable Housing Task Force - Regular Meeting

OK, this is open forum as an opportunity for members of the public to address the task force on subject matter that is not on their meeting agenda and within their jurisdiction. Public comments during open forum are limited to three minutes per person. Task force chair may limit public comment during open forum. Do we have any public comment in the room? Seeing none, do we have any online?

No public comment.

All right, so we'll close open forum. Move on to agenda items number 2, 26-1032, staff recommending the task force receive a presentation on the county's traffic impact fee offset program and engage in discussion.

OK, so I will get that item started, but I've got to get to sharing. So give me just a moment. do i have did you allow that again okay so we're all starting out okay did it not work okay okay there we go Okay, sorry about that. We'll make it nice and big.

Okay.

Oh, this is Anna's. Hold on. Wrong one. I apologize.

I will get there, so the first one we're going to look at is the traffic impact the offset in the PowerPoint so I'm trying to get it get it up sorry. Okay, here we go. Jesus. Okay. That's okay. I'm good. Okay. All right. So as we discussed last time, I gave you guys kind of homework. Hope you had some time to do some reading on our B-14 policy and our traffic impact fee procedures that help us move through that program. With me today is Zach Oates. He is with the Department of Transportation. He also oversees the program kind of with us. The money comes from grant funding from his department. And he is also on the task, not the task force, but the traffic impact review committee for the projects that do get approved that move forward to the board. So he's here to assist with any more technical traffic, I guess, related program questions. Yeah. All right. So our agenda today is obviously going to be mostly to review the Board of Supervisors policy. That one really feeds into the procedures. They just further explain all of it. So we're going to look at the background, the definitions, the policy, and the procedures that are outlined in the B-14 policy. So to give you guys a little bit of a background, at least for this, the board policy was established in 2007. The board authorized up to $1 million per year for the traffic impact fee offset program. It is a potential incentive process for developing affordable housing in our unincorporated area of El Dorado County. Currently we do allocations twice a year. So we do, we open up what we call rounds in January and in July. Applicants are required to restrict rent rates and or the sales price for income qualified tenants for a minimum number of years through a buyer's occupancy and resale restriction agreement that we record against the property. And we conduct annual compliance monitoring for all of the applicants that are approved by the board through this program. So, and just so you all know any questions on any of these slides at any time, I could read through it and then at the end, we can probably have a discussion on each step. So do you guys have any questions so far in any of the background itself of how it was established or why. Okay perfect. Moving on then definition, so one of the sections in the board policy. We are going to, I guess, update or make sure that we are defining terms to what today what HCD HUD uses. So we'll look at income limits and all of each individual one so low, lower, moderate. we will define the qualifying households, affordable rent and ownership housing, define what those are, affordable sales price and deed restrictions. We are going to be removing secondary dwelling units from the definitions and we'll get to that slide further down the road and why we'll be deleting it. So question I guess for all of you would be, does it sound like we are missing any kind of definitions for people participating in this program?

I'm wondering if, so what we know is that 120% of area median income works from the sort of philosophical perspective. But if someone wants to buy a home, it's really not the workforce price. And so places like Tahoe, for example, when we do bonus units up there, they look at like regional differences as sort of like AMI and even some jurisdictions, it's like 250% of AMI. What you're trying to get at is workforce housing, right? You're trying to get at a price point in which it's not top of the market. And so I'm just wondering, just again, for ideas, to think about maybe there is a tier that still gets you some HCD maybe points to it. Cause I think you can do what moderate above moderate.

Yeah.

Cause anyway, or, or something that I think is higher than one 20 so that it can maybe make it pencil and more sensical for a developer to do a four cell product that maybe they're sell at one 50 or something and get some sort of, you know, incentive program. And then that gets you to the missing middle.

Okay.

Not that people want to crack. Am I right?

Yeah. Okay.

And when you talk deed restrictor, are you talking for sale only? Are you also on the rental? Are you doing a covenant then? Okay, an affordability covenant then?

Yep.

Okay.

But I do think the real missing piece is that missing metal piece and the home ownership side of that and that entry piece because it's very hard to make that work. But you know developers, if anything, are creative and if there's an incentive, where you get more density or there's xyz or you know blah blah blah at you, you know you start having more pieces to make something work a little bit better so. then if you if the offsets are part of it because it follows the priorities of the county in terms of these are the things we want to incentivize then it just becomes part of the package of pieces to make it work anyone else okay all right

Moving on. So the current policy. So I have two slides for this just to pre-warn you. So I'm going to go over what the current policy is. And then the next slide is more of like the discussion slide where we kind of already, Zach and I and Rob met and we kind of are going to propose a few things to look at and some questions. So the current policy states developers obviously are offered these rounds in July and January. So two times a year. They are for rental and for ownership projects with five or more units. We make these applications competitive when they come in, especially, obviously, if we get one or more. We're looking at established site control developer capacity. Who does it benefit? Very low, low or moderate income households. How many county housing element goals are we meeting or which ones are they meeting?

uh their geographic distribution goals of the affordable housing um which i will i think we can you explain that one because it's a little um you guys went into that on one of them that geographic because it's not location right yeah i think i think there's kind of two ways to think i mean again i'm zach oates i'm a civil engineer with department of transportation manage the traffic impact fee program and work on the transportation planning side of things um so yeah i think there's kind of two two different ways to look at that it is uh at the unincorporated areas of the west slope as a whole are we kind of spreading out the affordable housing projects so that they're not all centralized and focused in one distinct geographic area but also within the site plan and this is perhaps more applicable to some of the the larger apartment style projects but within each development are they localized within one area are they spread out throughout the site as well thank you

And then what services and infrastructures do they already have in place for this project and the ability to obtain a building permit within two years of the approval through the TIF offset program. Which also includes so they have a two year like kind of piece of paper promise to come in and get a building permit if for some unknown reasons things happen. That are out of their control like governmental delays or funding issues or anything they are allowed to come in up to three times for. one year extension so that actually gives them five years to fulfill the tiff obligation of you know here's my ticket when i pull my building permit and we get the offset so okay so now here's the more fun discussion page so these are kind of potential changes to the policy so we'll kind of talk about maybe each one as we get through it so right now we're offering the application period like twice a year so we're thinking with streamlined projects should we be doing this three times a year, you know every four months we offer this.

How many applications are coming in per year approximately?

It depends in the prior years, because we didn't have streamlined projects really they just flowed through when they came in, I would say we got maybe one or two each application round, but now we're having sometimes up to three. in an application round, we do have people that ask us outside of those rounds because of their timelines and their funding sources. So in the past, the prior housing unit analyst would allow people to apply outside of the rounds because they were the only one that had come in for the whole prior year. So it's been a little sporadic, but there's been a lot of interest in these developers coming to our county to want to build affordable housing right now. So and they're using the streamlined processes. And so I know that speeds up, you know, their building permit timeline as well and project approval.

So the two round process, Jennifer, was that created just for administrative advantage and competition within a round for applications that were coming in?

I believe so. I mean, I'm assuming, but like I said, only one application would probably come in. So most of them just went to the board and were approved at that time.

Yeah, I think maybe this is Rob Peters. I was going to say, historically, I think, too, yeah, just that there's work pre and post in trying to ensure that we can do all of that while still processing the actual whatever applications may be subject for award, getting those to the board and doing all those paperwork and things. But we're just seeing that we don't want the timeframes to be an impediment for somebody to be able to submit.

So if you submit or have a round in January, when would an applicant be able to receive an award? Or I guess an award letter or however you guys structure it.

So I actually have a timeline. It's further down in the slides, which I can't.

If you're looking at like tax credit applications and stuff, you would need these before you would be submitting tax because there's like three rounds of 4% a year and two rounds of 9%. Yeah. And so if you had, as a developer, you'd want those awards before you'd be submitting for an application so that you could show those as committed funds.

Yeah.

And so I think your timing, you'd want to try to back into that so you could make that work for the developers on that side of it.

So let me ask this question, because I'm trying to understand, like, with this program, it says the language where it's

Because you probably don't do very many single-family.

There's some, but the majority of it's... All of the awards we get are rental. Yeah, we have not done any single-family.

So that's why I think you'd want to try to target those dates.

So maybe clarification from your guys on interpretation, since you're talking... We have had people come in that want to apply before they even have a project with planning. No planning application, we have nothing in front of us. They're intending to apply with planning, but they're like needing, like you're saying, this amount of money to help pencil the project, right? This funding. Our policy, the first sentence on page three of the board policy states, residential developers who are developing five or more units or homeowners who are well not the secondary dwelling units are going to come out but developing five or more units so how would you define like do we need to change that terminology then because are they actually developing because we you know you know what i'm trying rob

Yeah, so the question I think is, should we be considering these applications in advance of somebody submitting a formal application to the county? Or should, you know, so preemptively, so when they're putting their financing together before submitting to us, or should, you know, is the threshold more appropriate once they have an application in and then, or is that too late?

I guess that's- Personally, I think it's after the application's in, because you got to have entitlements before you can even show up at the table.

Right. For any of the funding.

For anything, yeah. And so then you have to define... At that point, you're going to know how many units, what your deal structure is proposed to be. So... Everything. Yeah. But I think, you know, I'm also curious what hasn't been said. I'm digging through the materials. Do you have, like, stats? So it's been in effect for roughly 19 years. So just doing the math. And I know it was set up for roughly 20 years. So it's been around now for some time. So... as you've been saying, it's mostly rental units. So how many, you know, how much has been used of the set aside dollars? Okay, good. And then I guess I'm also wondering too, like, you know, because it seems to be silent on, you know, whether or not you could, um,

know roll it or i know i know it's like not really cash but at the same time you're already on bullet number three on this slide okay good all right good all right maybe maybe that's your um that's your segue yeah so i was just gonna say so i mean i think if you guys agree offering these instead of just the two rounds a year obviously with the streamlined policies in place it kind of needs to be a little more often as as the projects are kind of rolling in the door and i think either every three months or every four months

But you also need a filter you don't want to give it to everybody right, and you have to see like if they're qualified like you know, because you can do a competitive, you can do your own preliminary scoring or like well tax credit. yeah and that's basically have to say don't don't give us just bs and you've never done this before, and you want to tie up all these. You know reservations you want to be like here we're really you know we're solid we're solid group here to solve proposal. this is how competitive we are. We need your piece to be even more competitive.

And we do ask for a pro forma when they submit these applications.

I was going to say, I think that's your point you were just making is even more justification to maybe refine beyond they are developing units to maybe state clearly that a formal application is required because if somebody comes in and they're awarded an offset by the board that ties up half million dollars in offsets when we've got a million dollars a year to award and then they never move forward. Half million is tied up for a few years until their award expires or they withdraw or

Well, just like the state, you do these conditional commitments, which are good enough to go compete for funding. So you write it strong enough so you're like, you know, we pledge this to you if you do X, Y, Z like you promised. But, hey, if everything falls apart, you know, we can take this money back and, you know, put it back on the pot. But that way you give them enough running room to go compete and try to make it happen.

Yeah. Okay.

Does developer capacity cover that when it's part of the competitive application process?

It's more, in my opinion, I don't know if I'm 100% right, but I believe it's more set up of, are they an established affordable housing developer? Are they, we do have a few market rate developers that have tried to dip their toes into affordable housing, which like, so we look at that. And I think that's kind of part of the developer capacity. Can they handle this and the reporting and everything? And do they have the funding and the time? And do they know they have to have a prevailing wage? Because there's more restrictions on these types of builds than there is on just market rate. And correct me if I'm wrong.

No, I think that's well said. It's definitely something that we've considered on past applications. If they've got the experience and the knowledge on how to move these types of projects forward and once built to remain in compliance. And if we have two competing projects and someone is brand new and trying to do it on their own and somebody else has the experience and proven successful projects, that certainly weighs on those recommendations that we make to the CAO and ultimately to the board. Yeah.

I'm also wondering if you have like a wait list then. So say, you know, first place drops out because they don't get their funding. And then the second, you know, I'm just wondering if that's something you want to institute too. It's just a thought about just sort of.

Or if you had past projects that have been doing these extensions and I'll say they run out of extensions or they'd say we can't do this anymore. And they give up their award of six, seven or a thousand.

We have had projects in the past that have expired and then they come back and reapply. Used every bit of extension that is available to them and had to come back in and reapply and was re-awarded. But again, we're starting to see more projects come in during each cycle to make those a little more competitive. What is the length of extension? The original award is valid for two years, and then they can come in, they can request annual extensions up to three more years. So it's a long time to tie up funding. Yes.

So maybe maybe I could speak a little bit too. So traditionally, you know, this program has been around for a while and most of these projects would have historically gone through a discretionary approval. And so our discretionary approvals are good for 24 months and then have the ability to extend up to 36 months. So this aligns with some of those older sort of or those more discretionary time frames that we would have. And so I think it comes from that. These timeframes. So if you got a design review approved a discretionary design review for a multifamily or, you know, type of project you have two years to initiate construction of that project and submit your building permits. And so I think these sort of align with some of those timeframes.

And so, I mean, that being said, like, also, I mean, because the board is looking for some of your guys's feedback on this from all your aspects of where you all come from so i mean if if we were following this old design review you know process where two years and you get those extensions and you follow that path now things are more streamlined do you think we should shorten those time frames get them building faster if we can or you know like give them an award for up to one year to pull the permit once their project's approved um i think with building permits though don't they have it's really quick

Yeah, you can't pull building permits if you don't have your funding stuff.

Yeah, but I mean, I'm just, I mean, usually we like to see that in the performa to see that they're getting that funding. I don't know, and I'm obviously not a professional in affordable housing developing per se, but I know some funding awards from HD can take two years just to get the standard agreement signed so you can get your check.

The only funding that they would receive on the form of housing that would trigger any timeframe would be the tax credits. You got to start construction within 180 days. I mean, they could have HCD funding. They could be there for years before you actually pull a permit.

I was just gonna add to, the county is initiated and underway on community design standards and guidelines, and those address the streamlined ministerial projects for the state. And so those, if they are determined to be eligible in those programs and meet our standards, can go directly to building permits. So we're sort of in that timeframe of looking at, are these programs all matching up? Are they making sense? Once you submit a building permit, you have a year to issue it, and then you have, you know, or is it two years to issue it and one year to construct it or one year to issue it, two years to construct it. So there's a lot of timeframes we're considering, but yeah, we're just trying to get some thoughts on, you know, in the, in the sense of the projects you've seen and the things that you've seen, are these timings making sense for the use of funds?

No matter what is the, the lack of enough affordable housing subsidy period. So you're competing at the state level, which really is something no one can predict because you're in there with the rest of the state. So yeah, you know, sometimes it can take 12 years to get all your funding together, especially if you own the land. So, you know, it can take that long just because, you know, and real estate's in a cycle. So, you know, but it seems like you have built-in flexibility, but it seems as though what you have with streamlining though, is you've opened the door really wide. So now it's the revolving door, right? So you've got a lot more people walking through that need to be able to process and be able to go past, you know, to compete essentially in funding. And that's where you have to be creative about, you know, how you can continue to give awards out and keep people in the game because technically speaking, it's not like the county's writing big checks for all these little projects. So all these little projects in the rural part of El Dorado County have to go get a whole bunch of money to make things work. So, you know, um, Anyway, so I think that's really the challenge. So instead of making like the eye of the needle so narrow where the best of the best unicorns are the only ones that can pass through, you may want to be thinking about other ways to sort of let more through and then you play the odds game, right? Because you'll see which ones are maybe closer to transit who meet this priority or blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. But because you want to be able to give your audience customers, your developers, you know, as much opportunity to compete.

Well, I think they've done that with the five-year, basically a five-year term, and you've said that some have expired it and then came back and applied and started the cycle over again. So I think that goes back to they got site control, they've maintained it, and they're just trying to get the funding. As we've all said, it's very difficult sometimes, and it could take year after year after year.

And then maybe the county could grow this pot.

You know, maybe a million dollars a year isn't enough.

Well, there'd be a nice thing, too, and I guess you're going to talk about it later, is how the roll over the end awarded so that instead of a million dollars, you have a million and a half, or if you've got other projects that are not flowing out.

Or if you didn't hit 20 million in your initial allocation, put all that money back into the next 20 years, you know. But now it's 40 years, or 40 million. Just saying, it's going to help.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, So maybe to put a bow on that point of the original two year award with three one year extensions. Is that something that you think is still appropriate or would recommend any changes to that.

Given the understanding that I like the fact that, as Rob said, it mirrors the entitlement process and that approval process. So I think that five year period.

OK, well, yeah, I was just going to add one other thing to consider is that the discretionary projects are, you know, one one bucket. We're starting to see a lot more of the streamlined ministerial projects that operate on very different timelines come along.

But that's just getting an entitlement process. That's not even the funding. Even though they're fast-tracked to get their permits and everything else, doesn't mean they still got to get the money. Doesn't mean they have a project that's financed.

And it gets extremely complex, too, because depending on the funding that the project does have under some of the streamlined programs, they don't expire necessarily. So they can last a long time. So, yeah, there's a lot of nuances.

What you're saying, too, is everyone's going to go after a lot of density that doesn't actually pencil. Right.

So if you're all of a sudden like, oh, I can do 150 units on four stories on a half an acre.

You're like, oh, but I can't make the numbers work because it's, you know, the level of building is too expensive. So, you know, there is going to be this sort of market force that's going to work that you're going to start to see and you'll see patterns. But I think you being flexible, but also growing the pot. It's not like we only have this, you know, these five gold shillings that we're going to, you know,

So maybe this is a good segue for me to kind of provide a little more background on the pot of money.

The bullet number three that you've been... Money always is interesting.

So the way that we sort of fund these offsets is when we put together and do the studies to create our traffic impact fee program, and we do that in Nexus. We essentially, we use grant funds for three separate things. One is to cover the cost of what we call external trips, our vehicle trips that pass through the county, not for any attraction or development within the county, say from City of Folsom up to South Lake Tahoe. They're touching Highway 50. They might be coming up from Amador and using county roads affecting our traffic operation levels, but not for any new development. So we can't charge new development for those impacts. We also use it to provide general offsets to different fee categories within the county to bring the costs of fees down And then we also use it for this affordable housing offset program. And so when we when we do the nexus, we set aside, you know, $20 million. Our nexus are typically for approximately 20 years. And then we use it for this affordable housing offset program. And so when we when we do the nexus, we set aside, you know, $20 million. Our nexus are typically for approximately 20 years. and say we're gonna need $20 million applied towards our projects within the TIF program. We're gonna need $20 million in grant funds to backfill the $20 million in fees we're not gonna collect from these affordable housing projects. So when we get projects within the fee program that are eligible for grants and we apply and we're successful, that brings down the total amount of fees that we need to collect by whatever the value of that grant is. And then that grant money gets applied to the project that was able to acquire those grant funds. So it is not so much that we get a grant and we get a grant for $10 million and we put $1 million in a fund and we use $9 million for the project. When we go through Caltrans and the state or the FHWA and the feds, they're looking at our project cost estimates and every penny that we say we're going to use of that grant money needs to be uh applied to those projects um so hopefully that didn't confuse anybody more than than the topic already is um but it it is you know very high level it is it is not that we have a fund with money sitting in it that we Dave Kuntz, Transfer funds into the fee program from it is that when grants are acquired that brings down the total amount of fees that we need to collect for the from these affordable housing projects, can I ask where the grants are coming from, then what yeah yeah so there are different state and federal programs. Right now, when we do our five-year major updates to the fee program, we have a workshop with the board where we kind of give an update on the state of the grant funding world. It's not as rosy as it used to be. But we assume that we're going to have projects that are eligible for CMAQ funding, which is the Congestion Mitigation Air Quality Program. We've got urban surface transportation block grants. Those are both federal programs. Then from the state, we have surface transportation improvement programs. And then another block grant program that our transportation commission is able to award money from. So there's four or five different grant funding programs that we assume projects within the fee program are eligible for. Bottom line, they're either coming from the state or the feds, though.

So no CDBG funding?

For our other capital improvement program projects, probably. But projects within the fee program, the traffic impact fee program, that increase roadway capacity, thereby increasing vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas emissions, that limits the types of funding programs that we are able to.

CDBG would have to be used for a specific project, too.

So something I'm thinking about here. So what you're saying is essentially the department is whole because you charge, let's just call it, $500 fees. You collect it no matter what, whether it's an affordable housing project or market. Well, I mean, just a number, right?

Roughly.

I have a few zeros.

$50,000. No. Anyway. But essentially, it's not like you've set aside funding for this. It's really only because you have these pretty much dedicated grant pots that come every year to the county that offset what you're giving to affordable housing. So then from a proclamation standpoint, it looks like it's a million dollars worth of grant money that we are assigning to this purpose, even though we can't bank it or whatever, because you need to have the cost and then use the grant dollars for it. When I think about statewide programs and some of the state laws that have recently passed and the work I do up in Tahoe, where your traffic mitigation comes from is you guys get to assign sort of traffic impacts to new development, right, for all the reasons that you do. But under state law, affordable housing is not a VMT-triggering housing use. So under state law, it's actually VMT-neutral. And I don't remember what bill number. Do you remember the bill number? No. Are you right? Are you tracking me? Yeah, because I use this. I use this in Tahoe. So on one hand, you're saying, hey, we're going to use all this grant money because we're charging... Fifty thousand dollars per unit for this thing. But in fact. State law says you don't even have to charge $50,000 for these units. It's actually zero.

It's actually, I mean, you can choose to do it this way. Sure, and there's an important distinction here, I think.

Okay, but maybe we stretch our minds to think that that could be the possibility too. Like that's the offset is that, I mean, granted, I know that we do these reports and the consultants say all these units should charge this much money and these impacts. It's very math, right? It's very algorithm driven. It's not reality driven, you know? Your affordable housing household doesn't necessarily have five cars. They're not doing seven trips a day, right? Okay, so, but you understand my perspective, yes.

One further point of clarity. The TIF program is not meant to address VMT. It is meant to address level of service.

But VMT replaced it, right? Under CEQA, there is no level of service.

When it comes to our general plan consistency, we have two different voter initiatives that were, the original Measure Y was approved in 1998, that said level of service will be the metric that our general plan will analyze. And again, predating VMT. In 2016, Measure E was passed that said level of service is the metric and new development shall cover all costs to, you know, for improvement projects that are needed as a result of their traffic level of service impacts. The development has to meet both standards.

Yeah, I was going to say we have to analyze for CEQA.

We have the CEQA VMT aspect that has to be addressed in any environmental documents, but for general plan consistency and consistency with those voter initiatives, we've got to address level of service.

Which then gives you the ability to charge the TIF fee. Yes. But I'm just telling you, around the state, that is how they're doing it in other places. In Tahoe, there is no VMT fee for affordable housing, but if you're building market rate housing, there is. So which was the offset to this?

I don't know if we are the only, but we are certainly one of the few, if not the only, with a voter initiative, Measure E, that has those requirements.

So Zach, just to put a...

Quick clarity for me. If you go to the next slide, there's an example there.

Oh.

So you got to, I think in that example, there's a million, $48 million, $48,000 in offsets. So what you're saying is if there is grant money and there's no guarantee that we're going to have grant money in any given year for this project, it would come from that grant money. It's not coming from anywhere else within the county, a general fund or anything else.

Correct.

has there historically in the 19 years of this program, have we had years where the grant money was not there? where there was more requests in this program than there was available granting and funding.

So I would say the answer is probably no. The grant money doesn't come on a year-to-year basis. The way the programs work is they'll run calls for project cycles that are usually every other year, every three years, sometimes every five years. And so as an example, I was just looking at the numbers. currently within the fee program we adopted our nexus in june of last year in 2025 uh right now we've got 29 29 million dollars in grant money um that are that is applied towards those those projects within the fee program so you might say great we're already past our 20 million dollars however as i mentioned earlier those cover the cost of those external trips and the other general offsets that the board has directed us to apply for the fees so we can't

but not purely affordable housing money. It's for those three programs that you described at the outset. Okay.

Yeah, I would just say it's a bit of a balancing act. I think when we presented recently at an affordable housing request to the board, there was somewhere along the lines of four and a half million over the 20 years that have been used. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was approximately the number.

Less than five for the total 19.

Yeah, since 07 to now. you know, less than five have been formally used. So we've been able to carry that cost so far. But yeah, these are all why we're being asked to look at it and take comments and consider, is this the right way to put it together?

And to clarify, out of those five projects that were awarded, most of those people who came into, the developers that came in to apply, would expire and come in and reapply. So they cycled through depending on the year they first started, you know, probably because of funding issues or building or whatever is happening. Or some just dropped off, maybe their project was not approved. So it wasn't because we denied them. There was only one recently that we had just had denied at the board. And it was, I want to say mostly for developer capacity was the reason.

So has there been a year that we've gone over the million dollars?

Yes, so that's part of like that rollover notice that's in the procedure.

It's in the policy that yeah, I believe it's not going backwards. There we go.

That example was the Eldorado Haven Haven project that was approved and exceeded that $1,000,000.

for the for that year yeah so um part of like one of the bullets sorry i found the back button um part of like that bullet number three that we were just getting into is the rollover of award unawarded offsets on a year-to-year basis so that was put in here that every year that no awards were made which there was a chunk of years in this program where no awards were made um that that did build um you know like 14 years though

Like 14 years then?

Yeah. So are the grant funds banked then for the years not used?

So that's what I was trying to describe. The grant funds are not banked in that we have an account with $14 million. That does not exist. That's not how the offset program operates. We do have those $14 million were applied to projects within the fee program to bring the costs down based on

And your grant your grants are on a rolling so sensitive portable wasn't used any use it and those other two out layers you were talking about the non.

We use. Up to what what we calculate those amounts are we don't we don't apply more grants to those others, based on not using so that word did the portable go though so. The grant funds for the affordable housing are only used if there is an award, if that makes sense. So if we go 20 years without awarding any affordable housing offsets, that essentially reduces the amount of grant funding we need by $20 million.

But then you've absorbed it in all these other categories. So the 20 million is absorbed every year by the county's department for other reasons or other eligible uses.

Within the fee program, it's absorbed by the external share trips and the general offsets that are applied to the various land uses on the West Slope.

Can you remind me what the – Use it or lose it.

Essentially.

Can you remind me how the general offset is currently – Yeah. Jiggered?

Yes, I can't. right so we've got three different zones uh for the fee program zone i'm going to go backwards we have zones a b and c zone c is essentially the eldorado hills community region zone b is sort of the highway 50 corridor that goes from essentially bass lake road up highway 50 including cameron park shingle springs diamond springs all the way up to plasterville not the city of Placerville, but the Placerville community region, along Highway 50 there. And then Zone A is, I call it kind of the horseshoe. It kind of wraps around the north side of the county, around the Highway 50 corridor, down to the southern part of the county.

It does touch into, I think, Taho? Myers?

We get up basically to the summit, essentially. It doesn't go into the Taho Basin. It's all west slope? It's all west slope, yeah.

So it wraps around everything B and C? Yes, yep.

Okay, so A, B, and C, what's the most productive? What's the most generating?

So Zone C has the highest fees. It has the most number of projects. And I'm gonna get back to your offset question. It's okay. Zone C, El Dorado Hills Community Region is where the majority of our growth has occurred. It is where the demand seems to exist the most. Zone B follows once different land use inventories fill up in El Dorado Hills. uh you're doing that too loud with my hands uh the the development wants to you know keep it as close to sort of uh the west end of the county as possible um so as a result of that our fees are highest in el dorado hills and zone c then zone b and zone a uh are offsets so for residential uh offsets the only zone that gets an offset is zone a the more rural areas and that offset is 45 so for every dollar uh uh PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Anyone pulling a building permit to build a house up in Georgetown or down along the Amador county line somewhere. Those people are only paying 55 cents of every dollar and we use grant funds to fill in that other 45% or part of this fund. No, that's separate PB, Harmon Zuckerman, General offsets. One of the three things are grant funds are used for so separate from the 20 million on the affordable. Okay.

And is there, I'm sorry, is there affordability on that, or is it just any residential? Any permit. Then why don't we just have the fee set at 45%?

Because Measure E, the motor initiative, says that new development shall pay for its fair share used with other state and federal funds, not general fund, not road fund, not new taxes on the El Dorado County residents. It's gotta be a new development with any supplemented state and federal grants. Okay, so real quick, just to finish off. So in zone A, residential fees are offset 45%, non-residential fees are offset 75%. And that sounds crazy high, but we have hardly any growth projected in those rural areas. And so the very simple way to calculate the fee schedule is total cost of projects divided by the growth, the number of new units. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, And so while zone a doesn't have any projects directly within its boundaries. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, The trips that generate from zone a are driving up the highway 50 and they're touching the Ponderosa interchange and the Cameron Park interchange and the Bass Lake interchange and all the interchange, all of our high dollar projects. And so their fees are high because the total cost of projects is high, but they also have little growth. And so you're dividing a big number by a little number. So their fees are high. So the board has directed these offsets to help bring those fees down for folks building houses or businesses in that area. Zone B does not have any residential offset. It's non-residential offset is 25%. In Zone C, El Dorado Hills, again, no residential offset, but a 35% offset for non-residential uses.

Thank you. I couldn't even tell you where we're going to go next. It's just a lot. I think I'm going to go to bullet two because we haven't actually touched on that at all real quick. In there, it does say the actual policy says that we would give a TIF offset for anyone coming in the door with a project that has five or more units. There's been some discussion around that. Is that too much? I know I talked with Rob a little bit. Some people can come in. They can do... You know duplexes you know two units in each and that's only four units on one single parcel I don't know if I said that correctly rob to correct me if i'm wrong, but um.

I think we were just talking about, yes, five is typically what is associated with our subdivision ordinance, as an example. So you go from a parcel map to a subdivision at five units. So as we're looking to potentially make changes, does five units make sense? Or would a duplex project or a triplex project in a multifamily zone benefit from this?

I see ADUs in your future, right?

So ADUs used to be in this program, and then we no longer charge the fees, and so we.

So even like an SB9, so 10 units. So if you did, because you got larger sites here.

Well, it's five or more.

Right, so five or more. So I'm just wondering if someone has a, let's call it a five-acre house, site with a house, and they could build maybe up to 10 units under SB9. But they could be, they might be ADUs, but they're really individual houses, right? that they could possibly put on there on one residential lot.

But that's still five or more units.

Right, right, right. So I'm just thinking that is what you're getting. That may be what you're going to get in your future. So it's not going to be your traditional LIHTC.

But if they are legitimate ADUs, they are exempt from the TIF program, period, because they're affordable by design in this county. Oh, okay, okay. So that's another slide. So we'll skip over that slide later. But basically, the whole ADU program.

I want to add something to that, though, because if we get to an SB9 situation, right, where you're allowed to convert a single family to a duplex, Then you have the ad use the ad user covered because they're not charged here. I guess that is what we're trying to get to is like do we do we want to do any kind of offset for somebody that's trying to build a duplex in an SP nine type of scenario which would remove that from five to two as an example. I guess that's the kind of question we're asking. Does it make sense to reduce the number?

One might think people in Zone C might see an advantage on a large site that they could build, you know, X number of houses and get a TIF off site because they're all considered ADUs, but they're 1,200 square foot luxury units. Just saying that it's not uncommon that that might occur given current circumstances today.

I would say we don't have a lot of experience in SB nine, but we certainly haven't seen any come in that we're proposing deed restriction either.

Correct. But you don't need a deed restriction to get an offset if it's an ad. You do. Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh, only, okay.

Yeah. So I think that's the, we haven't seen that scenario play out here. Got it, got it.

So I was going to talk about this later, but one of the things that intrigued me in talking with some of the affordable builders that I work with is that the the years that you require the deed restriction on are less than many other community programs. There's eligibility even if it's just a 10 year restriction. I think what we'd be willing to maybe compromise on is bumping up the length of time that a deed restriction would have in favor of really opening up this ordinance. Like why have a number of unit requirement at all

So I can speak to that. So if I go back to this. So this whole program was set to have a minimum of 20 year for deed restrictions for sale and for rentals. And that was back before HCD came in with their minimum requirements of 45 years for sale and 55 for rentals. If we do have a project that does come in that has funding from HCD, we match our deed restriction to match theirs so that it flows together for the whole entire performa. So a lot of our deed restrictions have been set to 55 years.

For multifamily.

For multifamily, yeah. And then for sale, if they go through our streamlined process as well, we would deed restrict those for 45 years.

But I think to just get a clarification, I think you're saying that You'd be willing to consider longer terms if the if the program expanded.

I mean, you know, obviously that that is what's driving a lot of this is Hcd. But even before those changes, I think most of the people who build at least affordable housing was looking at that closer to fifty-ish year restriction scenario.

you know i think this was a product product of our business policy 19 19 years yeah yeah so i mean are um or do you know of other counties or cities that are restricting longer than that like because i haven't really

the 45 to 55 i mean i've heard of projects that have offered that yeah okay um and i'm not i'm just saying your your timelines are still so low in this document that let's just because that's what most people are doing anyway that 45 55 and i think it was originally and i think obviously zach and i were not here when this policy went to the board in 2007 but i think we deciphered that the reason they did that was because the um you guys do a mid is it

was the 20-year cycle every five years it's updated so i think they also think hud also for a long time but used to 20-year-old single family was it okay so yeah i think the originally the the 20-year lifespan of the of this program was kind of tied to the 20-year planning horizon that in that we use with our tiff program and the nexus that's adopted for that so i think that's where that 20-year program originated

I think basically every jurisdiction or even state program for rental.

Now yeah yeah I think we just match that yeah that's what i'm saying is let's match what people are doing anyway and look at you know. Maybe in exchange for that we can open up things by saying hey if you're building a affordable unit, even if it's one and you're going to restrict it for 45 or 55 years 45 I guess for. yeah. why not offer this program to that? Which then also goes to your arena numbers. Exactly.

Yeah, I agree with that because if you're going to commit to de-district it, you should get some level of incentive.

Now, it's not going to also create more workload, but you guys are saying basically everybody that's coming in and asking for a TIP offset has been rental projects, which is probably 30, 40 plus units or more. And all the ADUs are already exempt from a TIP fee. Correct.

So, however, you could get smaller mom and pop.

So we're like, I'm going to build this unit and maybe that's maybe that's something to if you're one of the ad user, not the user.

No, but I mean, I don't know what you're saying there, but you're building a unit, you know, I mean, like a real, you know, house or real additional because you've got multifamily zoning.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is if they're already offering the ADUs automatically get an exemption from it, that does not take anywhere into the TIF fees. What if you just added single family that do a deed restricted into that category so it doesn't take out of the million dollar one?

The grant money.

Right. How many ADUs units do you guys do?

Because they have to be deed-restricted ADUs, right?

No, they're not deed-restricted.

Well, we did. So when this program first opened, we did have deed-restricted ADUs.

I don't doubt, though.

Well, they actually still have their covenant recorded against the property. I think there's probably 20 of them at least, and that's at least. That came through the program, right, 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11, until, what was it, 2017? I believe it was 2017. um sorry i am that is that's the slide so yeah so um board action in 2017 through the tiff program got rid of it and said they're supposed to be affordable by design we want to just permanently waive tiff it's offset by his grant funds they don't need to apply we're assuming that somebody living in there is going to be their child their grandma their aunt someone who needs that housing so that's why we're going to remove this whole section from it

Um, so almost, I think what we're talking about is you use the single family into that exemption, like the ADUs and the JDUs. As long as it's under a certain size, like under 2000 square feet.

But you're saying to restrict.

We're trying to open up your definition of this exemption to enable more housing units to qualify for the exemption rather than the grant.

And basically the TIP program would be just a rental program, not a single family program. I think that's what we're all saying, right?

It may encourage people to build it.

We're taking all comments. We'll have to certainly confer with a lot of folks related to the TIP fee program. So we are here to take feedback.

You can also look back the last 19 years and you haven't done any single family projects.

I mean, no one's come in and applied for it.

Not that you see many anywhere. Right, I know. But that would be a hell of a way to incentivize it is to say, hey, if you're willing to build a single family house and deed restrict it for 45 years, then you get an automatic exemption.

When I think that's what we're trying to do through and almost like what is going to get into with the nexus right if i'm not mistaken it well if they're willing to build the units, give the units and maybe the week yeah so. Okay.

For myself. Okay, you didn't need to know what I was saying before. But, um, so basically ADUs currently are exempt under the TIF program. And what you guys are suggesting is allow an exemption for deed restricted single family.

Mm hmm. That's quote unquote affordable by design, I think it has to take them out of this program.

I think it would have to be okay yeah it would that that's a that's that's a suggestion for the county staff team I think i'll just leave it at that for now.

yeah. So. i'm.

Yeah, I would just add that bold is a good way to describe it. Based on our voter initiatives, I think there would be some there could be some strong opposition to that. We would certainly have to look into it.

It'd be one way to meet state RENA requirements in a way that maybe some El Dorado County voters would prefer. And maybe disperse some development for that side of it.

Basically, I wouldn't say workforce, but I mean, it's that 120% in moderate income projects for a single family, basically.

What I can say, too, though, I think one of the There's pros and cons to every bold policy. And I think I've checked in with some other jurisdictions. I think deed restricting for sale homes has, I think, historically been challenging. You're dealing with not just one project, you're dealing with property owners and also people don't have the same understanding. for for sale products. So they think that they can sell, but they barely make anything. So there's a lot more implementation on the jurisdiction side.

He does it now on the home program or CBG when you do down payment assistance programs, first time home buyer programs, housing rehab type programs. So this would be just kind of continuation of that. And it's not like we're saying there's going to be 200 units going to come online next year that's going to take advantage of this TIF fee reduction and get it waived. because in listening to you guys, there's not many single families that are moving forward on an annual basis, which is substantially less than what you're even getting on the rental side.

Yeah, for all the reasons you just gave, plus the fact that, I mean, it really is two different financial skill sets, building affordable and building market rate. I don't think even this will generate many.

But it could do some, maybe, because there's still the push from HCD on the Cal Home program and some of the other single-family programs to get some of those products out there.

We'll certainly take note of that and look into it. My initial concern as I'm trying to think of any major red flags that might wave is that with ADUs, they are not the sole structure on the property. We're still collecting TIF from the primary dwelling. If we're waiving, essentially, or exempting, I should say, the TIF from any single family dwelling, that could pose an issue with fully funding a fee program that that accounts for impacts of new development on the county's road. So I find that hard to believe based on the scale that I think we would see, you know, if a whole community was going to come through.

Yeah, I totally understand where you're going from.

I think you'd be surprised to see more than 10, 15 units.

Yeah, I think it'll be single digits. Yeah.

Okay, so for, sorry, I'm watching time too, because Anna does have some Nexus updates for you guys too. So just to get through this slide, we've kind of already jumped to some others real quick. So high level, like we've all kind of thought, yes, accepting applications a few times more a year is wanted. So I see yeses.

So that the announcement of the award is in time for like a tax credit rounds and stuff. I mean, not have it due at the same, because I know the process takes probably a couple of months, right?

So we can either just accept them when the projects come in. If they want it, like we'll send them a thing. Hey, reach out.

And it's just whenever the project comes in, we do it like that versus having a... Because there's five different... Just for context, right now we have windows that opened up in January. So we're about to open one and the awards are about three months later. So it takes about three months from submission of application to presenting to the board any recommendations.

Yeah. So that's this. It's almost one of the last slides. So like we do a pre submission. We host a meeting to tell them walking through it. We give them two weeks to submit their applications we review it and it takes us about three weeks to review the whole application talk to the committee and make the recommendation to the cao and then after that we have to actually prepare the board item which takes us time and it takes time once we launch it to like you know go through a whole approval process it's very long with the board um and then you have your date um up there in front of the board to hear the item we started on the housing ordinance figuring out ways we can move up that board approval time because it's also an issue on And we're limited on how many board dates there are in a month. And yeah.

Does it have to go to the board? That's such a public process for something like this. Like many awards, especially at the state level, they don't all have to. It could be very.

Like a finance committee or something like that.

Yeah. There's like a, you know, so that it's.

Is there any authority like. Less. For the development director or like for Karen to make.

I think certainly if this. If you all wanted to make a recommendation that there be a lower level of approval, we can float that for sure.

I agree strongly with that. A lot of these projects are still going to have to go, I mean, not only just for their approvals, but for other funding requests. But to bring this one down to a lower level, I think would be huge.

Yes. And not to mention, let's just say you're getting a whole bunch of streamlined projects that are not going through a public process. You announce this as public process, and people are like, whoa, Holloway, wait. And of course, they don't have their funding yet. But all of a sudden, you've just set a little storm

Basically, you just reduce two months of time off this.

Yeah.

It would be a five-week process, if anything, instead of, what is that, almost three months.

Well, and I would say that this also just, you know, we're talking very specifically now about this TIF program, but we are also tasked with looking at ways to streamline and give incentives. And so this is all, and make strategy recommendations. This is all in that same process.

Vote right right it's truly what you what you want to be is again because the historical or these are rental that you're going for tax credits everyone's competing right. You want to give your you know your candidates the best opportunity and be as flexible because as quick as possible yep because 100% of your commitments are not going to end up in 100% funded projects, so you know it's an odds game. So it's about just kind of giving your people the best odds of success and then being flexible. Rather than putting them through the gauntlet because every little T has to be crossed and then, oop, oop, nope, got to do it again. You know, like, you don't need all that. Like, that could be at the end, quite honestly, after more is kind of developed because... quite honestly, when you're really at the entitlement stage, you don't have all the details. And then I think if you want the swan song, it's after the project's funded, then you could do the whole, hey, look, it's all great because we helped.

All right. My next question was going to be, or next slide, which is the last slide, basically just for the questions or recommendations, but I feel like we've kind of

I have one more, actually, if that's okay. Yeah, that's fine. Is just looking at the, and maybe I'm not understanding it, but the offset levels for very low, low, and moderate.

With the affordability length and all that?

Yeah. How many of the grants that you've given out, how many or what percentage, however it is best to frame it, have gone to the moderate level? And, you know, I don't necessarily want to give that up, but I wonder if both for the affordable builders and for the county, if it might not be better to put more into the low and maybe even the very low if we're going to increase the year length anyway, even if that comes at the cost of reducing the moderate programs.

I would say the projects that have applied over the last couple of years lean more heavily towards being split between a very low and a low. There have been, I think this might be one of the few examples.

higher income but i mean the moderate is the manager's unit i mean the rest of it's all low and very low and extremely low yeah yeah i feel like there's one i can't remember which one off the top of my head that did have some moderate we had a manager's unit that we allowed a restriction at 120 percent am right yeah for just the manager's unit but they said that they would realize any affordable project's going to have 60 below on ami that's the only way they're going to be able to

And so it seems like that would be the trigger for me where they should get the full offset would be at that 60%. Right. That's kind of what I was thinking.

So adjusting these to be more, yeah, there's also, you know, more and more we're seeing the grant opportunities to find lower.

Versus you have it at 50% now. Is that the situation? You have the 100% offset at 50% of AMI. To me, the 100% of the offset should be if you're a qualified tax credit deal. You can be 80%. It's an average. So you can be 80, 60, 50, 30, 15, whatever it is. But don't limit it to just that exact unit. Because if you qualify and you're going to win, be 100%, get 100% offset. Because that's considered 100% low income. But the reality is no one's building moderate income apartments. It doesn't finance.

That's why, I mean. Right. And maybe not even put those tiers of years on it, like affordability, just 45 for single families.

45 years and make it just for low and very low, but it's 100%.

But then if you're building, yeah, basically if you're building an affordable by design single family house or ADU or whatever, essentially you get to pass go, you know, by signing, I guess, by the way, are they signing a deed restriction for those units?

Okay.

They're signing a deed restriction. They're building five ADUs on their property and none of them have to pay a TIF fee.

Well, that's not part of this program though.

No, but that, that seems to be part of the greater program.

Right, right. Strategy.

And so then, but I think reducing it, we kind of said, don't put the five units or more limit on it. Just say, however.

Well, don't put the affordability length, doing the different splits like they got on this chart. Just do it. It's 100%, 55 years for rental, and it's 100% if you're 8% lower.

Yeah.

Agreed.

So no affordability length anymore. It's just set by 55 years for rental and 45 for ownership.

Whatever we want to set it up at a high cap. You could get an ownership. Someone could build something in the future.

So we're trying to better align with different funding programs.

We just talked about pulling all the home ownership out of it.

Oh, well, I just we talked about that. I don't know that that idea.

So you're saying if you restrict for 55 years, you just get 100% offset as long as you're under a certain AMI or are you saying just no matter what your AMI is, as long as it's under it's over below 80% 80.

Okay.

Make sure I'm following. Yeah, they're left simple.

Even if it was 75 at 80 and 100 at 60, maybe I'd be okay with.

But I think 100% at 80. The majority of projects you're going to see are all 60% AMI.

You can't do 100% 80%.

You're going to have one manager's unit out of every project there. And the rest are all going to be 60% and below. Right. The 30% AMI. The four levels.

Right. So that's why, I mean, yeah.

Yeah, understood. Yeah, those are good comments. Thank you.

That's all I have.

Jennifer, I think the one bullet we didn't really circle back on, and maybe I missed it, was do we carry resources over? If there's unspent money, do we carry it over to another year? You had that as a second bullet, I think, on that.

Yeah, the rollover of unawarded offsets? Yeah.

I think, as long as there's flexibility in whatever the revisions of the policy are for the board to approve additional funding beyond the 1,000,000. I'm not sure we need to revise. I wouldn't recommend revising it to be, and we'll carry over up to $3,000,000, because obviously, as Zach said, there's not a pot of money that It is always sitting there at the same amount of money. Okay, another concept I would throw out, though, is just from a dollar cost averaging and inflation perspective. 20 years ago a $1,000,000 is not the same as it is today. So I don't know if we can add in an escalator in there that that or some kind of board approval for an occasional escalation to the amount of money that could be set aside. building today obviously is not the same. So the incentive, if we're really trying to push incentives, and incentivize the builders with something that tracks at least inflation or building costs.

It's a point well taken. The difficulty is that while the cost to build affordable housing has gone up, the availability of grant funds for projects within our TIF program has gone down. And so that's a tough.

So would it make more sense then, because that's a really good point, would it make more sense maybe to keep the annual limit, no rollover, but maybe it's $2 million a year are available.

And then it becomes more competitive. I mean, because we could run out of that based on the first two applications, and then we're quiet for eight months. So it wouldn't be awarded.

But remember, not 100% of all the awards are going to get funded. Right. Because we're still in this game of roulette, right? Like, we don't know what, you know, we're going to play the odds.

And isn't it $1 million a year not getting rolled over right now?

Currently, the policy says $1 million, $20 million over 20 years, meaning $1 million a year averaged out. Whatever is not awarded can be rolled over to subsequent years.

Okay, I misread the current policy slide.

So I think that's probably my fault that that bullet point was in there. There had been some confusion with recent board items about that issue, the issue of the pot of money. But you said it could be rolled over.

Yes. Okay, I misunderstood.

It can currently be rolled over.

It only indicates one year, though, right?

Currently? I believe the way it's worded is that funds that are unawarded may be rolled over to the following year.

To me, that's a prioritization, right? Because like what this is, is gap filling, right? Like at the end of the day, you're like, okay, what funds have to be spent before year end before we lose them or something like that, right? Like could you set it, could they go into a lockbox or something like that? Because what would it... just in my brain, simple math, $19 million would have been allocated during this 19-year period, of which $5 million has been actually out the door. So then $15 million has then been absorbed into all these other categories used to pay whatever however you do the accounting but not for the affordable housing in which it was prioritized so which I understand the money's gone now but maybe going forward could there be the priority that we have to hold on to these funds and that you know that that it does become a priority because as we said you know originally if you set out for a million dollars a year you didn't hit it right because you're at five million at the end of 19 years so my mind it's How do you get you know? How do you hold on to that because it was set up because what happened is sending you know department a needed had a shortfall?

They got I guess if they don't want to roll it I think going back to this point is maybe we raise that to two million a year You know you may not reach that But then you kind of make up for those points where we don't have yours.

Or why are we tying it to yours at all? If we know about what the total pot is, the program will be in effect until that pot runs out or until more money into it. Exactly. But they don't keep that pot separate, though.

If they could. No, because the money that's acquired is programmed to individual projects. So we can't receive, for instance, on our Ponderosa Interchange project, we got $15 million in step funds. We can't only use $14 million and then take that $1 million and reprogram it to affordable housing. It's bringing down the cost of that project relative to the TIF program. essentially saying that's $14 million in TIF money that no longer needs to be collected, some of which will come from these affordable housing offsets. But it is not that we can take that awarded grant money programmed for an individual project and redirect that.

So what you're saying is if you've got a $15 million project, like you're saying, out of respect, it offsets the total TIF fees that everybody pays in?

It reduces, yeah, essentially if, you know, for, again, for round numbers, if our fee program is $100 million and we get a grant for $15 million, now we only need to collect $85 million in fees. So that $15 million, we use it for our external trips, we use it for the general offsets, and we use it to cover the fees from these affordable housing projects.

That sounds like a Kelly knife. So why not just treat affordable housing the same way you treat The other offset. Well, ideally, but the other offset program and just say we have this much in grant funding, we're going to reduce This much money out of the program so that affordable housing that meets the requirements. We've already talked about don't pay the tip fee.

And not put a million dollar number on it or any number on it.

There's automatically worded is what you're saying.

I mean, yeah, I mean, it's almost like that's, I mean, state law doesn't dictate that. But there are a lot of jurisdictions. Yeah, that are just like, if you're de restricted, affordable housing, these fees don't apply to you. Period.

Yeah, certainly something that we can note and discuss internally and maybe bring bring back to the board.

Yeah, we certainly have a lot to discuss with our folks. You know, you know, the board wanted this type of feedback and have you all look at it. And so we really appreciate all the comments and, you know, can't guarantee that every one of them is going to make it to the end game. But we're willing to, you know, the idea was that we would be here listening and taking your feedback and trying to bring those back to the, you know, our bosses and the decision makers so they can consider them.

So with that said, I think Brandon can do, I think we'll close this and do some public comment. Okay, we'll close this, then we'll move.

Oh yeah, that's right, public comment. So is there any public comment on agenda item number two, 26-1032, on the presentation on the TIF fees? Any comment in the room?

Yes, I would make a little pitch for, as you mentioned, there is a real lack of moderate income housing. And in your discussions about TIF fees, I noticed you essentially said, let's not allow moderate income proposals 80 to 120 to be considered eligible for even a modified TIF. And I would ask you to reconsider that, because there are efforts to try and do infill moderate housing by design, and oftentimes using conventional financing, donated land, and land trust plots. In fact, we're working on one right now. And others are trying to do these things, because again, it's very difficult to put together moderate income housing infill. So I would ask, it might just be the tipping point, if that you reconsider that. So that's my comment.

Any comments online?

No comment.

So what are we going to do about the 80% to 120%? Should we look at that in the single family?

I hear what you're saying, and I think we covered it in our discussion about the single family generally, that there are other ways outside of this program that I think would be better. So not trying to dismiss that as a product at all. I just think that there are even better ways to cover it and maximize the funding for the more light-headed style.

I tend to think it falls under this affordable by design sort of context, which to me is a market approach. City of Sacramento did it very well where, you know, you get an offset because you're not building the big 10,000 square foot home in El Dorado Hills. If you're building, you know, three 2,000 square foot homes or something that kind of hits that.

So I want to just clarify what we talked about on the single family proposal was to have a deed restricted to have the tip fee exemption. But basically that would go up to 120%. Because CalHome, I know, does 120% one of the state programs for single family developments and projects. So what we asked was for them to consider the single family be exemption if they did a deed restricted. And I think the discussion was, maybe we didn't make it clear, was that it would go up to 120% on the single family. It would not be part of the TIF program.

It would be similar to the ADU treatment.

Right, exactly.

If that's logical. It would kind of, as our- Again, I'll just restate my concern that there are significant general plan consistency issues with not charging single family new development for their share of impacts. Okay. Something we can certainly look into and discuss, but that's the initial concern on that. Okay.

all right let's move on to agenda item number 326-1033 staff recommending the task force receive an update on the affordable housing ordinance they're going to be you jennifer or rob um actually uh anna and i will probably cover that she's going to go through some slides okay we need probably the slides to be up

Wow.

Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. As mentioned before, my name is Anna Kwan. I'm a senior planner for El Dorado County, and I'm going to share an update on the affordable housing fee that was discussed last month. Next. During the Housing Task Force meeting last month on May 13th, staff was charged to interview consultants about the industry standard and best practice methodologies for conducting affordable housing fees. Staff has interviewed consultants and would like to provide updates to the task force, which will inform next steps. Next. Next. The experts that we consulted confirmed that staff did share the industry standard for proposed affordable housing fee nexus methodology, in which new market rate development generates the need for additional services and staffing, and that a percentage of the new employees would need affordable housing. The number of affordable housing units and corresponding costs to develop these units are then determined from this analysis, and a cost per square foot is derived for each prototype that's analyzed. A maximum justifiable fee is derived, then feasibility analysis is conducted to see what the market is able to support, and policymakers then determine what the actual fees would be based on what is financially and politically supportable. We would like to provide some points of clarification based on our conversation with economic experts this past month. We recall that Chris had stated that the jurisdiction rarely, if ever, pays 100% of the cost of the units. That is correct. That's not a surprise. This analysis assesses what market rate developers, not the jurisdiction, is responsible for. For example, in a jurisdiction where there is an inclusionary housing policy, This analysis addresses the in lieu fees that the market rate developers would be responsible for if they did not provide the required affordable units. The maximum justifiable fee would then represent an in lieu fee that is 100% of the cost of the units required. Again, rarely does a jurisdiction use the maximum justifiable fee as their actual fee. The maximum justifiable fee is the upper limit that just jurisdictions cannot surpass when considering such fees, and it provides a legally defensible maximum threshold to be used during the fee discussion of what is financially and politically supportable. I think per Jeff's question last time about whether we can use a different term for maximum justifiable fee, this could certainly be considered or we could provide explanations, context to help people understand this term. So our conversations along with review of nearby jurisdictions, existing or proposed nexus studies confirmed that this methodology is the industry standard used throughout Sacramento region. and in the state. The principle is that while market rate housing does address some of the housing shortfall for certain income categories, most of them on the higher end of the spectrum, new housing does lead to more aggregate demand for services and new housing. Some task force members also pointed out that there are people who provide services who don't necessarily live in the same jurisdiction where they work and that this should be considered in the analysis. We did ask economic experts about this question and their response is that the assumptions of the nexus analysis would consider these factors and questions. However, they did recommend that the county consider these factors from an economic viability basis. They shared that community's best function when a significant portion of the workforce is housed within a certain distance of housing. A question that was asked earlier too was whether a certain figure like $1 million or $2 million could be projected for the affordable housing fund each year to be predictable for affordable housing developers, and whether the fees could actually be derived from this policy goal amount. The economists share that this would not be realistic since we can't predict the market rate development that comes in. They did share that we could consider the fees from a local funding contribution approach to help affordable housing projects receive necessary gap financing and break ground. One thing that we did do was we reviewed the Placer County Draft Nexus Study in relation to the questions posed by the task force members. And so what they studied was they reviewed 20 affordable housing projects in El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, and Sacramento counties that were awarded state or federal tax credits. in 2024 and 2025, they saw that the cost per unit varied. It went from as low as $430,000 in Sacramento to, not surprising, $866,000 in South Lake Tahoe. The average percentage of contribution made by local governments also varied from no contribution to as much as 44% of project costs. Among the 20 projects, the weighted average of local contribution was 6% among projects that receive local funding local government funding the weighted average increases to 11%. And in its analysis plaster county provided the just the maximum justifiable and luffy as well as reduce fees at 611 20 and 44% local contribution. Next. In conversations with economic consultants and with county council, staff has learned that while the non-residential fees would continue to be subject to Mitigation Fee Act, residential impact fees would result in increased risk compared to inclusionary in lieu fees that are part of an inclusionary housing program. They have recommended that we return to considering an inclusionary housing program approach with in lieu fees, exemptions, and alternative methods of compliance rather than residential impact fees in the wake of recent court rulings. Next. As staff considered next steps, we reviewed the county's housing element implementation measures that pertain to the work that we're doing right now. Implementation measure HO 37 states that The county shall develop an affordable housing ordinance that will encourage and assist the development of housing that is affordable to extremely low, very low and moderate income households by considering a variety of housing policy tools, including inclusionary housing. Staff has also returned to the affordable housing report that economic firm BAE conducted for the county in 2022. The report includes an abbreviated financial feasibility analysis conducted for two missing middle prototype developments, acknowledged by the authors to be relatively uncommon in the county, These included a small lot, single family residential development. It's a 20 unit development on a three acre site with an average unit size of 1800 square feet and a garden style walk-up multifamily development, 50 units on a 2.5 acre site with an average unit size of 950 square feet. The feasibility analysis found that both developments were feasible when developed at market rate, but infeasible when a 10% inclusionary requirement at 80% area median income was applied. The financial feasibility analysis scope was limited to analyzing missing middle prototypes that are less common in the county. In forthcoming efforts, this county could and would like to consider, county staff would like to consider prototypes that do occur and or are anticipated in the county in the near future. We also took a look at the resolution of intent, which was approved by the board of supervisors on November 4th, 2025. There were task force members that were there at that meeting. the resolution of intent charged the task force and staff to develop a mandatory affordable housing fee and alternatives to the mandatory affordable housing fee given the information that we've learned since in our coordination with experts staff proposes that we reconsider establishing a reasonable and effective inclusionary housing program in the county which would include returning to the Board of Supervisors to potentially amend the resolution of intent to include said inclusionary housing program within LUFI's and other alternative methods of compliance. We would continue to conduct research on how the nearby and other jurisdictions have, you know, practiced and established their inclusionary housing programs and in LUFI's and we would study what the best practices are in creating such programs. And then the next slide is just questions and discussion.

Yeah, I guess I just wanted to add, you know, we have been heading down this path and we've been learning a lot on our side of the table. We, you know, our wants to be creative and be, you know, find creative ways to get this done have led us to... One of the other duties that we have as staff, which is to bring forward as legally defensible as a program as we can to our decision makers. And so sort of all the directions are pointing to sort of while you're trying to do this fee under the Mitigation Fee Act, that risk assessment is much higher in that category or lane than doing it under the inclusionary program. scenario or framework which uses the county's police powers and is a different scenario. Now, one of the things that we've also been looking at is how folks set the thresholds for actual construction of units versus when they take in fees or not. And so we're just kind of bringing it back up because in each of these discussions we were having, everybody was, you know, the feedback we were getting was You really might want to second guess or take another look and see if there's a way where you can, you know, be in the construct of an inclusionary housing policy. But, you know, knowing that you have a lot of policy level decisions about how you structure that. And so we're just here to bring it back up. I know that, you know, that was a and I'll be, you know, when I first came and sat in this chair, you know, that was a word that we weren't that folks weren't wanting to discuss. And we and we were looking at the BAE report and it was saying, you know, use incentive-based and not traditional programs. And so, you know, we're just kind of bringing it back up because we want to make sure that our, you know, staff recommendations align with the task force recommendations to where they can. But we also, again, have to bring forward something that is as legally defensible as we can. And so there's just, you know, Anna and I have been getting a lot of feedback, you know, that, hey, maybe it's time to have that discussion again and just, you know, bring that topic up again.

I'm just laughing, so I'm waiting for others to say things.

so the plaster county one is a not an inclusionary and loopy correct it is it is they said a build a requirement i think it's 100 units or is it i believe yeah yeah so anything from eight to 100 units had only pays the fee but then anybody or 99 but anybody 100 or over gets this inclusionary policy and so you know we and we're looking at other examples we you know we Up to and including our board chair.

The board didn't want the language either. They have an inclusionary policy. That's what we've been going...

Well, to get us to the same place without having to do the other box, you know, and again, you know, staff is trying to been, you know, being creative and stuff, too.

And then in sort of, you know, in our discussions, it's sort of, you know, hey, second, you know, take a second look at this. If you're heading down the right path, only for these risk assessment and only because of the challenges that are happening out there in the world. And And again, I think when we... And when you say challenges out there...

I mean, legal challenges against... Yeah, so are you saying that there's a lot of legal challenges on the impact fee side? Are you saying that from the BIA side?

I thought that was, well, inclusion areas. I don't know about a housing impact.

That's what I was a little confused about. I mean, that these consultants were saying that there's more of a legal impact for...

potential for the- Under a fee established under the Mitigation Fee Act, City Council Chambers, As opposed to a fee that would be there's more risk of in that scenario, then, in the scenario where you're under the framework of inclusionary housing, which is a different set of tools that the county can use under their police powers.

City Council Chambers, Have you had a chance to talk to county council about that. City Council Chambers, We have and what did they say.

City Council Chambers, The the the response was similar. And again, we're here to, we were tasked with going in and talking to the experts, right? And so we're trying to figure out, what's our next step? with this information and we agree, you know, we even up into and including the board chair saying, we're trying to get, we know money's the thing that, you know, is one of the biggest hurdles and gap financing funding is, you know, one of the keys to getting these projects delivered. And so we, you know, how do we grow that in the most, and Ann and I are trying to do it in the most, you know, risk averse way. And so it seems like, and I don't think a lot of these other jurisdictions are doing it in that way. I'm sure that they've had a lot of discussions too. You don't see a lot of them and that's where we were creating under the mitigation fee. And what we're finding is because of the, probably the conversations that they had with their consultants and councils is because the way that you are more defensible and in a better place is under this other framework. So I guess we're here delivering that response that we were receiving in our conversations and just opening it up to a conversation of, If there are examples that folks know of that are working well, we're happy to continue to look at that. But in this exercise of reaching out, we were talking about a scope. And it was like, hey, go look at the scope with some experts and see if you're on the right path. The responses we were getting was, this isn't based in the inclination. You would be better served by being in that lane. And so that is what we're coming back with.

I think the challenge that we had initially, one of them was that... Even though. The customary practice is inclusionary housing, even though it's more legally defensible than some of these other structures. It actually doesn't produce the housing that people want right like it becomes in some ways, a stumbling block or you know the inability to make the deal pencil so, then you have no development. because the inclusionary housing renders it infeasible, but you get to defend yourself against it and say on paper, we've got policies, but then in practice, you don't have deals, you don't have money because people can't get out of the starting gate. So I think we had some of these conversations early on to think, Are there other ways we might be able to think about this? Because one of the things we know, because you've heard it from all of us and everyone, that in order for El Dorado County, just like any other jurisdiction, just like South Lake Tahoe did, you've got to invest in affordable housing, and it's expensive. And when you're competing against the whole state, you know, the reason why a San Francisco or Sacramento or others is because they have considerable money to prioritize some other projects. Here in Placer, excuse me, in El Dorado, you don't have that depth, you don't have that bench of cash reserves, you know, you got a couple hundred thousand in your trust fund, which came out from inclusionary housing. Yet, because the premise is not producing the results everyone wants to see, you have a framework that says we want affordable housing, but we've made it so hard for market rate housing to come out of the gate. We can't get the affordable housing. We're hoping that market rate housing is going to fund. And since we don't have any money, we can't compete and give affordable housing developers any funds to go and compete for tax credits because we can't come up with 6%. or 5% or 1% even, right? So then you can't get any housing built. So then when you look at your real numbers over the last 20 years, you look at your 60% of AMI and below, and your numbers are sort of not where you want them to be, right? Because that's your deepest bench of affordable housing, and that's also the most expensive. So... I guess what we're all sort of saying is maybe the same thing that even though inclusionary on the face value looks like it like we all agree to the concept and the premise of it. But I think when you look at the fact or the track record, it hasn't actually effectuated the kind of housing people really wanted to see. You might get a few good projects. And the producers that work are going to be in your in your El Dorado Hills, right? Because the market rate can offset the loss of low income units. But that's only going to happen in certain places. It's not going to happen in your least, you know, in your rural areas or in your, you know, up in Tahoe, because those markets can't work. So then, you know, so I guess What we want to just say is maybe can we go back to just, or at least I would like to say that what we are trying to come up with is a way that you can, in some ways, encourage more of the housing that you want without saying up front, they have to pay this big toll. They got to pay whatever millions of dollars they know that they can't make from the get-go. So then all of a sudden their project is dead. It doesn't work. So you want to be able to say you want projects to come in and then find a way that you can balance it so that you can get what you need, whether it's dollars and an affordable housing fee or land or something, where then it starts to get you towards the journey of affordable housing. But it's not a one for one. And I think that's the reality. I think a market rate developer is not going to be building the sufficient number of affordable housing units that the county needs.

Okay.

And I think what we were hearing was you want to build your affordable housing trust fund. What you do is set the build requirement high enough to where A lot of the projects are going to use this alternative method by paying the fee. So you can build that, but at some point, you have to establish this. Because we even explored, well, is there any that have this but have no build requirement, right? Where it's just the options are there. And I think what we found was, or at least what the response we got back was that there aren't any good examples of that. But jurisdictions have set the build requirement to where the fee is what's being paid for, let's say, the largest portion of the projects that are being developed. And then only those that are large enough to pencil for actual delivery of units are the ones where that cap is set. And so that's a policy decision of where that line and we would have to look at through the you know the fiscal analysis and again i'm this is my my best take on it but that we would have to look at what what is what kind of a project does pencil or does work and that's where you set that as to and that's where you're looking at much larger scale like well that's where the prototypes would come into play so we're looking at certain sizes and then yeah and saying maybe it is 100 or 200 units or something i don't know but you know but then everybody between whatever we set it at three, and with exceptions for the right. You know that that's kind of the the recommendations that we were to be giving. So you'd be creating your the fund to help and and and build fees much more than we are now to get some more the pot of money up to help with those gap financing and not requiring every, uh, you know, duplex to build a unit or something like that, but then trying to find these, um, these policy levels where you can live with the fee, uh, for, you know, 90% of the projects, but then you'd be asking for some sort of delivery of fiat at some threshold. And, and I mean, that's just the, again, the feedback we were getting and, and, you know, and not, not, and, um, both Anna and I were like, whoa, you know, we're kind of getting back to where she and I started in this discussion. But again, just trying to bring it up and make sure we're understanding because it is my responsibility to try to find the program that works best, but also we are highly litigious county. And so risk assessment is a big part of what we look at. And so I just, this is the information we're giving back to you all based on the discussions we were having, you know.

I think... I think it was more, I think, in the discussions, it was more about framework, the legal framework under which we operate. And so a lot of it could look similar. Like Placer County, they don't charge from 8 to 99 units. They don't charge them an exorbitant amount. It's less than $3 per square foot. And so that's for most of the projects that they see, but anything over $100. then they would require inclusionary and there's a percentage, I believe it's 10%, 10%. And I believe that even with that option, there's still an equivalency process where the developer can elect, you know, we don't actually want to provide the 10% because we think that there's an alternative method that's better. So there are options. And I thought we were thinking that with the task force, collaboration and coordination, we could come to creating a legally defensible inclusionary program that can still basically not inhibit housing production, as you're saying, Mia. That's what we're thinking. It's just the framework. Because the thing is to the economists and county council, It wasn't like this totally puts the kibosh on a reasonable fee. It's just more of the framework under which we operate. They weren't saying, oh, we don't like all these elements. They were just saying.

Basically, it would be an inclusionary in lieu fee instead of a housing affordability fee, even though we have the language that a lot of people don't like and inclusionary in there. That's what I'm kind of sensing from this discussion. And I don't know how that would go over a lot of your clients.

Listen, if that's where it ended up, I think we would be okay. The political process that I've seen play out to get there has been difficult. And I think it might be even more so here than in most places.

In terms of getting to an inclusionary policy that people can accept.

That is workable and... Yes, exactly.

And, you know, full disclosure, we would have to, again, go back and have a discussion with, similarly to what we're having now with the board to say, you know, they could say, wait, we don't want to pursue this at all. And we just want to get incentives. They want, you know, so again, we're just, we're trying to make sure we're truthing out all the scenarios. And, you know, I can say in the few discussions that we had, no one said, hey, you guys are right on track. I'll just say it that way, you know.

Just for clarity, who is giving you the feedback? Is it county council?

We're having discussions with consultants that prepare feasibility studies. We've discussed internally with not only council, but our super, you know, executives. And so there's no, we don't have an answer yet. We're just, we were asked to go ask some questions. We're coming back with the responses that we were given.

Specifically, who did you ask the questions to?

City Council Chambers, I mean I would. City Council Chambers, Economists that are on our approved. City Council Chambers, We have a request for qualifications list. City Council Chambers, For the county for that for folks that have been qualified to do business, and you know, so we were reaching out to those firms, because we, we have a you know we know them to be qualified to do these types of analysis, where the firm's located.

City Council Chambers, Are they in sacramento Los Angeles.

Yeah, they're local.

Local firms, yeah. I mean, I don't want to go too, but even to this person, because they're very preliminary discussions. I don't want to put anybody on the hook, but I, you know, we are trying to reach out as was sort of identified, like, hey, you know, go talk to some of these folks and see where, you know, you're coming up to.

I'm just always cautious about bias when you're, especially when you're talking to a consultant. And so that weighs in for me.

Well, again, so I could not prepare this economic analysis.

So we're going to have to require over, you know, rely on what I think also your statement to the you talk to County Council, and they're worried about the defensibility about having a just a housing ordinance.

The the yeah, the well, the the statements that we received was that putting PB, Harmon Zuckerman, A program under the context of the in lieu fee framework or the is is more legally defensible than putting it under the.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Yes, that goes back to my point where I just brought up is we kind of, I don't want to say disguise this but just rename it and hold our nose as we talking about it calling it in loop fee. it's more of a terminology and a structure that we could use for the same basis that we started, that we've had all this discussion for. Is that something that we, I think that's what we're kind of looking at now.

For me, the semantics are more, not so much the in lieu fee name, it's the maximum and justifiable justification that the consultants will use to come up with the fee number. They use that number to suggest that any single-family builder would also just construct affordable housing units. That's not how it works, as I mentioned in the previous item. Different skill sets. And so it creates this... scenario where you get a lot of people who don't understand who are now, you know, demanding this unworkable fee and it puts the board in a difficult situation. Because, you know, if I'm just reading the plain letters, you know, on the page, then, you know, I understand where the, you know, upset people are coming from.

Right.

So that's where I get frustrated with a lot of this. Look, from a framework perspective, I had hoped to find something a little bit more creative too. But if this is where we land, I'd be happy to point to some examples of what other places are working on or have worked on that I think landed an acceptable place. And I wouldn't have an objection to it. But I still come back to your point earlier, Mira, Is it gonna get units built? Probably not.

And that goes back to our whole start is we don't get units built, you're not gonna have a fund. So it's this give and take point that we have to try to mitigate.

Can I ask what the difference between establishing a fee under the Mitigation Fee Act and say a large percentage of projects within the county paying a, let's maybe just even for sake of a similar fee, My understanding, and maybe this is where I need to make sure I'm understanding your direction, was that our goal was to expand our trust fund to help with those gap financing pieces. And so do we feel like that this program would or wouldn't do that same thing? I guess we sort of under, or my understanding, I'll speak for myself, was that you're still building a pot of money that would help in this gap financing scenario with those, you know, the fees that are paid by, let's call them 90% of the projects, and that this targeted amount, whatever that threshold is, and that's where the big... PB, Harmon Zuckerman, discussion is going to be about what is that appropriate spot and where is it, you know, but um you know that. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Those would be more of the exception than the folks that might opt and then there's other and like Anna said folks could. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Give land and all those other incentive type things that we were talking about, but I guess i'm just trying to understand. Between those two, if say the fee were developed and it was reasonably similar, is there a real difference between the money that would be generated from the two different approaches?

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, I don't think so. But I think what Jeff was saying is his concern is if we do the in loopy this maximum amount could be this huge you would PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Even though we would not be using that.

But even though that wouldn't be your recommendation as staff. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, It's out there. I understand.

Yeah, we know we we understand your concerns about that statement.

Right. I don't think, look, as a philosophy, I would actually prefer the in lieu fee over the impact fee. I don't like the idea of there being a housing impact fee. I think that is, you know, philosophically, I would be opposed to that. I think we were looking at other, you know, more creative ideas.

And I would just like to say that part of this, too, was we are still going to look for other creative ways to make to recommend strategies to build affordable housing outside of this you know, this lane. So certainly all the things we've talked about, about creative financing and other ways to incentivize doesn't have any process right now for any of their large developments coming through on this.

say that again the county right now doesn't have a process to have any of this we already have the 500 fee well and that was only through a development agreement right that's only yeah so we do not have case by case so this was to start that discussion and then as you said expand into other avenues that we can figure out how to provide the financial incentives and i'll acknowledge you know there was a lot of conversations about you know the traditional way of doing this might not be where

you land and we tried to, again, try to find other ways to get there and we'll continue to do so. But again, the feedback we were getting was you're going to find yourself with some massage.

So what is your recommendation then how we are proceeding forward?

Because it sounds like... Well, I think our recommendation was, well, first we wanted to We would certainly have to go back and discuss with the board this approach. And again, they might say we're not interested or they might say, yeah, go ahead and spend the money to figure out what the fee would be. And then we'll look at what the right because it will be a policy decision based on potentially what types of prototypes pencil or don't.

And your presentation to the board would be similar to what you just did to us. Basically, the discussion that you've talked to county council and also the financial consultants. And I think it's basically boiling down to a legal defensible position.

That is a key factor. I mean, not that we don't want to. I mean, not to say that you can't.

I don't think I heard anything else besides that.

I think that's the most important priority because it seems like that's where you can stand behind. Even though we know historically it doesn't produce the housing in practicality that it Teases that agree, agree, agree.

So let me get there isn't the market rate housing to produce the amount of fun.

And then the price point to absorb all the costs, the tiff, the infrastructure, because the one thing that you know, we've been sitting here now for more than a year. What I remember when we first came to this was that a lot of these sites were large scale, you know, 3,000 homes, right, on El Dorado Hills. And, you know, these were not little infill sites where you can build 20 condos. These were large scale holdings where people wanted to develop. And then the county's position of, well, what do we need to extract from them to make sure that we don't get pummeled by the impact of this site, right? So we understand that dynamic. But when you set up and you say, well, you must build 15% inclusionary, you know, developer A just says, well, there goes my pro forma, right? And so what happens when you look at the impact in all of your consultants is that it's pay on day one. Even though the impacts are over 50 years, it's pay on day one, right? And that's the problem. because you can't pay on day one and still make a project pencil. When the impacts are derived by a 50 year future, look, right? But yet county says, because I can, I'm going to demand all that today, right? So then I'm going to tell you that that's not the way to get the gas and the gasoline, or excuse me, the tank to get the engine to run, right? So what you have to do is you have to prime the pump to some degree. And so what it seemed to be, at least in my view, what was universally needed in every one of these prospective sites, you can't quite figure out, was major infrastructure needed to be dealt with to make these sites feasible, whether it's a new road, whether it's the electricity, whether it's the water, sewer, et cetera. And that's where the county then comes in with, okay, we'll do an infrastructure district. You know, we'll use the future tax revenues to pay for all this infrastructure. And that's where I brought up the whole notion of that's how you build in your affordable housing. And that's how you lessen the impact on day one for Mr. Developer who's trying to make his 20-year deal pencil. But he can't come out of the gate if he's got to build 15% or some astronomical in lieu fee number day one before he even puts a shovel in the ground. So that's the issue. So what we're trying to be creative about is can we defer some of that? Can we find can we look at how we bring that in through future tax revenues? How we bond? I like my TIF is tax increment financing. Can we do that? Because now we know instead of this vacant piece of, you know, 500 acres of open space will now be a new town of 5000 new homes. And now the tax increments going to be X. You've got something to work with there. But if you don't let them come out of the gate because you're going to say you must build us 20% affordable or turn over $30 million, they're going to say we can't make it work. So rather than just sort of say this is the principled strategy that lawyers can stand behind that hasn't actually worked. Let's find a different way to say, here's El Dorado. Here's what we know. Here are the conditions on the ground. Here's what developers need to move the needle. What do they need? They need support. They need financing support. They need streamlining. And you want to say yes to that because you're going to see this huge tax revenue come from 5,000 new homes. And then you're going to say, we're going to be smart about it because we're going to set aside this money for affordable housing, for infrastructure for the next 50 years. And then you could bond for it and you could be strategic instead of one off. Every single project has to pay the piper. Every single project is treated the exact same way. regardless of small, large, medium, needs, whatever. So in my brain, if you can look at it, the reason why no one's doing it is because no one's doing it this way. No one has this team. No one's thinking about this in the long run. All they can say is, we can demand it now. We can ask for the money now. We've got to ask for everything we possibly can. And we don't care if it bankrupts the development. because we have the ability to ask for this. So what we're trying to say is we also see that there's not a lot of housing going on. So how do we move the needle so that we can incentivize and say we're business friendly? The sign is open. We're going to do planning. We're going to support you. We're going to do this because we see the bigger picture of a financing district, right? Of the ability to plan for growth, plan for the new tax revenue and how to reinvest that in a smarter and better way. Just saying. rather than stand behind inclusionary housing being bulletproof.

Well, and we've been trying, I mean, we haven't just, we've been looking into how those financing districts try to understand how they work. A lot of them, you know, a lot of the feedback we've been getting is that some of those, you know, are constrained to the boundary of the district. And so then the use of the money is only within that and other things. So we're not... Yeah, we've certainly been trying to investigate that as well. I'm trying to, you know, I guess it was that on top of the, you know, it was more about on this piece, the fee and whether or not establishing the fee under the mitigation fee act was the right move forward.

I guess one question that I have is So I think that when we were in discussions last month, nobody had an issue with the fee that was, you know, politically and financially, like, fiscally supportable by the market and by the leaders. And now what we've learned is that we just have to do it under the auspices of inclusionary housing program, which may include that build requirement. Because before, I think, you know, when last month, we were just talking about a fee, we're just talking about a fee. But I think the the new factor that has come in from our conversations with county council and experts is now the, the need for a build requirement in order, you know, for us to utilize police power. Right. And so I guess one question to the task force, I guess one thing that we're looking for is recommendations because the, housing element measure basically says that we shall develop an affordable housing ordinance to assist affordable, basically to encourage and assist the development of affordable housing by considering a variety of housing policy tools, including inclusionary housing. I think that everybody who has looked at this year's worth of task force meetings can say that we've really thoroughly looked at this topic, right? It's not just, we don't want to do it because we don't, but we've given a lot of thought. And so I think, am I hearing that, is this even a direction that the task force wants to go, right? I think that's one thing that we're looking for too, because it says here in our implementation measure, but you guys are the experts in your various realms. And that's what we would like to know, because if we want to do a fee in the county, because of legal liability, I think the wisest path is to do it under inclusionary housing law. And so the thing is, if we do a fee, that's where we're going. But there's also other options. Should we do a fee? We don't have, as Chris mentioned and referred to, we don't have a fund for any kind of gap financing right now. So we're just juggling these things. And so we invite feedback on all of these different things.

I wanted to add one thing, and this is, I think, an important consideration is, you know, it's by no means, and we are sort of at our time, and I apologize for that, is county council saying don't do this or don't do that. They don't do that. We have conversations, and they outline, you know, the risk of the decisions that we're going. So I just wanted to make sure that we're not, like, being seen as pointing fingers at them or any of that. This is discussions we're having where we're trying to understand all the nuance and

and and bring forward you know the recommendations that are best for the county when the county council says that that's more harder to defend not legally defensible what does supervisors typically do i mean would they go against that kind of recommendation

Oh, I don't know that I want to opine on what the supervisors may or may not do. I guess I'm just saying that, you know, we make our decisions with that information. And so we're, we're just reporting back on the conversations we had. And again, we're trying to look for some, you know, if it's, if the task force is still like, hey, we don't think you need to go there, we can continue to have those conversations and

You know, every and, you know, sort of get some other examples from around the state of words and how people are phrasing it and how people are doing it. I think we all agree that options were kind of what we were thinking initially. So you could choose inclusionary if you want. You can choose to fee out in this way or you can choose to set up a district and fee out in this way or whatever. But I think, you know, everything's on the table. So I don't think it. I just think it's, if inclusionary is the only way to get at the housing, I think that's where I'm reacting, saying I think that that's not necessarily gonna yield a lot of units. So, but if that's the guise in which these things all hang, okay. But I think it's so paramount to say that you have to be flexible in how people approach that.

Yeah, and when we're talking about alternative ways of getting there, we could say, you know, instead of this, producing a financing district that does this long-term is better. And so that is a alternative means of getting there. That's certainly something that we can, you know, those are the types of strategies that we could continue to explore for sure. And again, on Anna's slide, you know, one of the, you know, we're going to continue to look at other districts jurisdictions. If there are specific ones that we're not, we've kind of kept our, uh, our lens a little bit in the SACOG region, right? Just because those are easy comparators. But if there are others, we're willing to look wherever.

Just proposed it for the new NBL stadium that they're proposing for major leagues in West Sac. So there you go. That's part of it.

And one thing I feel to share earlier is I know that our time is almost up. I think both our Council and also the economic experts were saying, you have to give. The participants as much flexibility as you possibly can, because the thing is, you can't expect that everybody would just build right I don't think that's.

what we said from day one.

And so they're basically saying you do it under the legal framework of inclusionary housing, but you give as much flexibility where exemptions are appropriate. You provide exemptions, alternatives. And so both of them said that. And so I don't think that changes. So it would be inclusionary umbrella, but with a lot of options. And I think creativity could be definitely considered in terms of, all right, you don't want to pay this fee. You don't want to do this build, but you create some kind of tax increment financing district where appropriate, like, you know, in some of the wealthier areas, and you show that that works out in your pro forma. And so I think that we can definitely entertain these ideas.

So real quick, I just want to restate, I think, from a philosophical perspective, if those are my two options, I have a slightly less of an objection to inclusionary than I would to an impact fee. But I think that there are better options. You'd mentioned one concern being that the housing would have to be in the district, the finance district. Is there anything stopping you from having a county-wide finance district? And could we, right, and could we treat it kind of like CFDs where some projects annex in, others may not because they have other options?

Yeah, you can 100% do that. You can even use your ABC zones and say zone A, zone B, and then anything. Anything new. And then what's really cool is you basically say, you know, here's, you know, once you establish the district, here's what we live with now in terms of our tax revenue. And anything above that becomes increment that then we can essentially use to finance different things, whether it's a new coffee shop opening up or whether it's a new, you know what I mean? So you've got...

So is that discussions they need to be having with, like, the tax collector on that side of it for these...

Possibly. I know many of the board, you know, I've had multiple, you know, up in the Tahoe area, multiple conversations with the Myers folks and, you know, hospitality. And again, build back hotels into that. So building new hotels will absolutely kick off new tax revenues, will absolutely kick off new TOT. I mean, you start to just, it gives you reasons to say yes to everybody.

You know, come on in, built. We're a friendly county.

You know, we got this for you. Come on in, you know, because we want these projects because you're going to increase your revenues. So anytime you say yes to all this new stuff, it means your tax revenues. You have a baseline of what you've operated under. Anything on top of that is this ability to fight. And the reason why no one does it is because we lost redevelopment. Everyone's had bad feelings. Everything's been so boo-hoo-hoo. But, you know, the reality is you've got to move forward. And... tax increment if you're going to do big land deals and you got to do infrastructure it's the only way to finance the infrastructure and all this stuff needs infrastructure and if you're going to be smart about it you're going to think about you know smart ways to land plan and cut trees and fire risk and all that good stuff making sure you have reservoirs etc etc rather than fragmented you can be working together and thinking about all of this rather than this guy's only doing traffic You know, like you have a reason then to have it all come together because it's going to be the pop that the entire county gets to benefit from.

I think one thing that we could consider while being mindful of our time, is we could consider, I think maybe in this, just to kind of close the loop, is we could consider if the task force would support and recommend this going back to the board and rethinking the resolution of intent to consider an inclusionary program that provides a lot of flexibility. As Chris had mentioned, I believe i think last time when it was discussed before the board um i think we could do a better job of fleshing out in in order for inclusionary to work we want a lot of flexibility for the participants right and so development standards perhaps some flexibility there um but we could consider going back to the board um to kind of set up the framework And then presenting it to them to change the roi and then start working on this effort and then, in the meantime. invite different experts, you know economic fiscal experts to kind of learn what is actually working in different communities, now that we have you know folks with connections. We could certainly do that and kind of use that towards our alternative strategies.

My request, if you're going to go back and reopen that ROI, or resolution of intent, would be to specify that if they want a inclusionary policy, that a fee is, an in lieu fee is a by-right option, and it would be the intent to set it competitively to the rest of the region. So we just get that over with right here at the beginning.

Yeah, and I certainly wasn't thinking countywide districts, so that was a new wrinkle that I have.

There's no limitation that you can't do that. You just have to plan for it and show your, I mean, you've already done your general planning and all of that.

I think that we can definitely discuss in the future. I know that for the EIFDs, I think that you have to vote, right? It has to be a two-thirds.

Not anymore.

Not anymore? Okay, well, maybe we'll have more to research.

It could be your board.

Well, as we stated in our to do's, we'll continue to look at other jurisdictions, continue to take your feedback. And, you know, we're not like jumping into board next month. And we're just again, we've got lots of comments here to consider and continue to. And this is all helpful as we try to continue to refine and understand where we want to land. Ultimately, we don't intend to, you know, prolong your guys's we appreciate you guys being here but we are trying to be very mindful and thoughtful about how we're trying to move forward and and come up with something that uh so is your intent then to start putting this on the calendar for the board and then our next meeting maybe we have a further discussion of how this would work and the way you described it it's almost like we're changing it's like it doesn't seem like i thought it was so flexible that this is already kind of incorporated in what we're I just think we weren't very specific about that term wasn't being used.

And we just want to make sure that- But it doesn't mean you can't do it. So we need to look at the- It can still be called an affordable housing fee, but really the framework is. So I think you wait until you have more of a baked cake.

Right, right.

So that it's like, hey, here's how we, you know, here are the buckets.

I'll say it this way. I don't even know if we could get to a Board of Supervisors meeting until July or August anyways because of the calendars. So we're not like jumping straight out there. We're just, again, we wanted to express the feedback we were receiving, kind of broach the topic. Again, I know you have, we've discussed it quite a bit.

But if you want to do something innovative, don't talk to county council first.

Any county council. Any council. You know, yeah.

Okay, quick story on County Council. The foundation did a $50 grant to El Dorado County to, it's an auxiliary service, it was the senior center down in El Dorado Hills, for a microphone. Took the county six months to accept it. It had to go through risk management, and then back to County Council, then went back to risk management, then back to County Council. and then to the board for approval. Afterwards, I called, who was the CEO then? Don Ashton, and asked him to raise the limit of grants that they could approve without going through that process, because that was ridiculous. So yeah, don't get into the weeds.

But this is a, I mean, so as much as I like the sentiment, there's a certain thing that, you know, as staff, we certainly have to check all our boxes.

A lot of this, of course, isn't just, but I think, you know, the universe of possibilities have not been exhausted yet. And don't predetermine because of legal reasons to choose one path over another when it seems like you're still in the learning stage and building options. Yeah.

No, thank you, I think that eventually we will need to return to the board, because the language says that. The component one is establish a mandatory fee, and so I think that we eventually do need to go back, but I think me at her your Council let's make sure we understand what we're doing, and then we can go back with a better understanding we accept yeah all right.

I appreciate, again, all of your times. We really appreciate all of you being here, and we are taking all of this very seriously, and all of the feedback we're getting, we're really trying to truth it out, and to the degree we can, bring something that you all can support and be behind, and that will be successful in the end, right?

Yeah.

All right, any other questions from the board so the interest of time, a public comment there's nobody in the room, so a public comment online there's right by online okay okay. All right, so close the agenda number two or three our next meetings in July, and on the date but it's all scheduled. To have a nothing for June.

We're in June. That shows that I am retired.

If you want to meet in June.

I believe July the 8th. July 8th.

Next week is July 8th.

Cut into any vacations around the 4th of July.

Is everybody here July 8th that week? I'll be back by then. May 8th. Okay, okay there's four.

Okay, okay so we'll send out our normal emails to all right, you know attendance we're adjourned Thank you, thank you.