Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the May 19th meeting of the Everett Planning Commission. Ayanna, would you please call the roll? Vice Chair Chatters? Here. Commissioner Ballard?

Here.

Commissioner Finch?

Here.

Commissioner Sullivan? Here. Commissioner Welch?

Here.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to read the land acknowledgement. We acknowledge the original inhabitants of this place, the people and their successors, the Tulalip tribes. Since time immemorial, they have hunted, fished, gathered on, and taken care of these lands and waters. We respect their sovereignty, their right to self-determination, and honor their sacred spiritual connection with the land and water. We will strive to be honest about our past mistakes and bring about a future that includes their people, stories, and voices to form a more just and equitable society. We're now going to move on to the approval of the meeting minutes. Commissioners, do you have any corrections to offer to the March 17th, 2026 meeting minutes? Okay. Seeing no corrections, are there any objections to approving the minutes as presented? All right. With that, the minutes from March 17th are approved. And of course, we were on hiatus for April, so there are no meeting minutes for that. And we're now ready to move on to commissioner reports and comments. I haven't seen you for a while. Anybody got reports, comments? No T to spell? Okay. We'll hand it over to you, York. Mm-hmm.

Cannot say the same for staff. Got a few notes to run through. Good to see you all. Good evening. I'm York Stevens-Wadgett, Planning Director. We've got Frank Hong, Special Projects Manager for Housing with us. And Alysanne, Long Range Planning Manager, is in the room rounding it out. Ayanna Thompson running the equipment today. Since we last met in March, two of the pieces of work that came through this body were adopted by the council. The critical area regulations periodic update was adopted without council amendments. It becomes effective on June 1st. It was a good consideration process by the council, had some good questions and discussion there. I think they touched on a lot of the similar things that you did and benefited a lot from, we had put about eight meetings into it, I think. So from a lot of the diligent work that the planning commission did and the questions you asked and everything. There were still comments kind of on both sides of it, similar to the ones that you heard. There were some concerns about the size of the stream buffers and the amount of uh land that would be uh dedicated to preservation of those ecological functions on one side and then on the other side there was concern that the buffers were too small to fully protect the streams and their ecological functions um the council wound up going with the recommendation which seemed like an appropriate middle ground We are meeting with the Tulalip tribes and may bring in fish and wildlife into that. There were some future work items that we were going to look at and that were identified in some of the staff reports there and then also just continuing to work on the big picture of meeting that no net loss standard. including both development-related critical area regulations as well as other work the city does to uplift and restore our natural areas. So meeting with the Tulalip tribes, I think it's next week, and we'll continue to do that. Also working with any developers who have active projects that may be near critical areas to either adjust those projects or, if they're ready for it, get the projects vested before that June 1 delayed effective date. The other one that recently came out of the Planning Commission was Manufactured Housing Communities, and that one was adopted a couple weeks ago by the Council. I don't believe there were any amendments to what came out of the Planning Commission for that one either. Plenty of thanks and praise for the Planning Commission's work on that as well. That would be effective in a couple of days. I think we had a regular effective, so 15 to 20 days after its adoption by the Council. uh so that catches us up with past uh activities by the council i'll run through some of the many active projects that we have we are really hopping right now um you may have heard some of these in the in the news annexation we are looking at the city's designated urban growth area otherwise known as our future annexation area to the south We are preparing to do a study on the fiscal impacts and resource implications and fiscal impact to governments, agencies and individuals and businesses, both in the city and in the annexation area. are starting to have conversations with the county and starting to really put pen to paper on all of the mechanics of that annexation at a pretty fast pace. There is a state sales tax credit that will go to cities who annex over 2,000 people, and it's a tenth of a percent for 2,000, and there's two-tenths of a percent for 10,000 people or more. And so there's a real important and maybe essential fiscal incentive to get this done within the next year or two is when that tax incentive expires. So that's one of the real reasons, but also this is an area that has been intended for annexation since 1991, at least. And the county has done a great job preparing for annexation, doing some of the sub-area planning work and obviously with light rail coming a lot of that work has been turbocharged in recent years.

Do you guys know what method you're going to use yet to do the annexation?

looking at an interlocal agreement method or interlocal agreement method where the county and the city would negotiate a framework for the annexation, including the area, any transfers of facilities or property and things like that. um not sure there's there are some special districts in there south county fire two water and sewer districts a library district i think those are the four other than the city and the county governments that are involved there are different ways that we can structure that including uh contracting back for service so it's not a given that the city will take over all of those services but it is possible that interlocal agreement method annexation, I think it is still called technically the island method of annexation. So you need to have at least 60% of the annexed area must be contiguous to the city. So somewhat of the city limits have to somewhat hug the annexation area. With the jagged boundaries around Silver Lake, that's not too difficult. Pretty much the only thing that wouldn't work would be only Mariner west of I-5. You would need to bring in at least something east of I-5 to get to that 60%, I think. Portion west of I-5 sits at around 50%.

Could you remind me of what you said the tax incentive expiration is?

I think it's July 1 of 2028, I believe. Thank you.

You have to have it completely completed by then.

And the... That July middle of the year date is very important. So we're looking at either this next July 2027 or the 2028. Those are you wouldn't want to annex and bring in all of those service cost responsibilities without that sales tax or having to wait even six months for it. So if we can get it done by July of 2027, we can start to get that tax incentive right away. If you were to do it in August of 27, you'd have to wait 11 months to get it in the middle of the next year. So really looking at those two dates. At this moment, we are driving towards the first one, July of 2027, which is an aggressive timeline for a large annexation area. But I believe that we're ready and I believe we've got all the pieces put together and so far have not unturned, turned up, not turned up any real problems or red flags. We will do a public engagement process with this. There is planning implications, zoning. For example, we need to set post-annexation zoning for the area. We've started to look at that already, and most of the county zones map pretty cleanly to city zones. A little bit less so the farther east you go, the more different types of single-family zoning that you get around Silverfurs and the farther east in that annexation area. The farther west, it's a lot of what we would have as UR4, UR7, MU7, that kind of a thing. So I would expect we will continue those discussions. I don't know for sure if a pre-annexation zoning comes through the Planning Commission or if it does when it does, but we'll figure that out and we'll bring it to you either informally or formally. within the next year or so. There's a boundary review board process that needs to allow for up to 120 days if someone were to invoke the jurisdiction of the boundary review board. So we want to back up from any deadline that amount of time, four months, July, March. So we want to have this thing pretty much settled by spring of next year or the year after is our backup plan. So all hot off the presses and still in the works. But it's something that we're working on. So I wanted to share with that. Any other questions on that at the moment? Okay. I'll give updates on probably most of these, each one of these meetings. Multifamily tax exemption, you'll hear all about that next. We're working on pre-approved plans. So we've talked about that in these chambers for years and council and many stakeholders are very interested in it. We have four plans in the works for small houses. I think they're all detached. You could call them DADUs, detached ADUs, or you could call them small houses. They're under 1,000 square feet. All four of them. And we're using our residential basics program. So we already had a method if you're building a housing development where you're repeating the same style 50 times, you get your basic approved and then you can just repeat that one. So we already had the infrastructure for that and are using it for these pre-approved plans. And hopefully within a couple weeks to a couple months we'll be able to roll that out to the public and folks will be able to choose one of the designs and know that there's a faster path to permitting. We also hope to build on those four in the initial pilot and actually make it available to any architect or anyone with plans that would like to make them available and maybe get a little marketing boost. Still figuring it out what that long-term plan looks like, but wanted to get a pilot off the ground. Working on land divisions. So there was a bill called lot splitting out of the legislature. That is a pretty narrow use case where you can split one lot one time into two as an administrative process and That New lot could be sold before the improvements are built. I think that's the main value of it. We already have a very streamlined process for short plots, for example. So we don't have public hearings and hearing examiners and all the other stuff that lot splits provide for other cities. But we do require that you build the utilities and the landscaping and the driveways and things like that before you can complete it. The use case that the lot split is trying to help with is, let's say you own a large backyard and you're willing to sell it for development, but you don't want to be all tied up in the whole process. And so you can just sell it, create a boundary there, and now you're out of it. And the infrastructure would be conditioned on the building permit. So you're not going to miss any of that same infrastructure and access and all those sorts of things just gets deferred a little bit later in the process. We're trying to make sure that there are no unintended consequences with that. You don't wind up with a townhouse foundation that's an inch over the line the wrong way or something because we thought it was going to be this way. But when you actually start pouring concrete, it winds up that way. Also want to make sure that we're not missing any of the infrastructure pieces that go into a development. But also with the state bill, you still have to meet minimum lot size. We didn't change our minimum lot sizes in the periodic update. 5,000 to 7,000, I think, is the range of minimum lot sizes. So that lot split narrowly defined would not help most parcels in Everett. So we're trying to go a step further, and it actually occurs to staff that with the way that we've structured our development regulations after the periodic update, you can build many, many units on one lot, whether you land divide them or not. In the past, up until probably accessory dwelling units and that sort of thing started to proliferate, Pretty much the only way you could add density to an area, add housing units to an area, was through a land division. So there's all kinds of process associated with it to make sure that it's an okay thing to have X number of new homes in an area. You can build all of those homes in that area without going through a land division process now. That didn't used to be the case. So we're starting to reorient to thinking of the land divisions as just a simple real estate transaction and maybe go all the way up to a full short plat with that lot split kind of a mindset. pair that with the unit lot land division, which allows you to have smaller individual lots than the minimum lot size, as long as you have the setbacks around the outside of the parent lot. That's a process that we've had for years. That could then get you to a real small lot, simple land division where You could, I don't know if you really want to do six or eight of these because it just, the complexity goes up the bigger that you get. But if somebody wanted to subdivide their lot into three and then just have three parcels of raw land that later are conditioned to build out the infrastructure, that doesn't seem to be a problem. And again, all of these actual physical dwelling units can occur whether or not it's a land division. We have, you can't build a building without adequate water supply. You can't build a building without electrical and access and all of that. So over time, basically land divisions have gotten to be less of a controlling factor in development.

Are we waiting for rules from Commerce on any of that, or is the bill basically the rules?

They did provide a fact sheet. I'm not sure if they're doing any more technical assistance, but there is a fact sheet on Commerce's website for both unit lot land divisions, which is instructive, as well as lot splits. Um, but we're, we're full steam ahead. And, uh, if things go well, we would seek to bring this to the planning commission in June, uh, for a briefing, uh, trying to get that done as, as soon as possible. So excited for that. Cause that is, uh, the kind of the other half of facilitating middle housing and allowing that middle housing to be ownership and a fee simple model, which seems to be the right way to go. So stay tuned for more on that. We also have the permit processing ordinance that's been kind of drafted and hanging out for way too long. We're already, this is Senate Bill 5290's required updates to our permit process. We've been working to the process as if it had been adopted already. This is the timelines and partial refunds if you don't meet those timelines and everything. So we We worked to that already, but we need to get it into the code book and would expect that. I'm not sure that we'll bring that to the Planning Commission because it's very procedural. But I like to bring things, if possible, to this commission because you always have good feedback. So we'll see. And then Allison's working with the Historic Commission on updating our Historic Resources Chapter 19.29. And I think as soon as they get to a place with the Historical Commission, we'll start to bring that to the Planning Commission as well. taking a look at our overlays and the process of how they get designated and everything, and overlays and registers and general cleanup. I call it a periodic update to that whole chapter, which hasn't changed in a long time. Under recurring projects, we did a process for specific amendment requests, also known as docket. We did put out public notice and had, I think, a 45-day or so intake period. We did not get any applications for a specific amendment request. You remember working through those with the periodic updates. This is the first one we've done since then. We do have or will have some city initiated. This is the once a year that you can change the comprehensive plan and also an opportunity to do another round of housekeeping on the development regulations. So our permit staff, every time they see something unclear or that needs fixing, we note it and we'll collect all of those and bring another housekeeping to you. That will be over the summer. Subarea planning, Casino Road community planning, we're soft launching it, and you'll hear more about that today. Downtown Everett Association is undertaking a planning process for Downtown Everett, part strategic plan, part, I'm not sure what the other parts are, but we'll be there to help and support that effort. And then coming soon will be some work on tree canopy. We're in reviewing proposals received after requests for proposals. Parks got a $350,000 grant for looking at our tree canopy. Some of that is going to be about trees on parkland. Some of that is going to be improving our landscaping chapter with respect to trees, trying to get better species locations, more... get down to the real details on utility spacing. And as we grow denser and closer together, those conflicts arise and we need to do better than just a blanket standard of stay 10 feet away, because that usually means you just don't get a tree there. So what is it that we can do? And we'll have some consultant experts to help with that, whether it's species or maintenance or root barriers or those types of countermeasures. So you'll hear more about that in the coming months. That will be maybe a nine month to 16 month program piece of work. I think that's it. That's all we're working on right now. Next month's meeting, MFTE Part 2, Transportation Improvement Program. First one since the periodic update, so working off of the transportation element project list for the first time, and then hopefully land divisions and 5290 permit processing.

Okay. That's it? Nothing else? That was a lot. Does anyone have questions?

I have a couple questions. Any updates on the Park District? I know that was a project that staff and my colleagues were very much supportive of. Anything new happening there?

Nothing that I've heard.

Yeah, for the most part, EHA has been undergoing some transitions and leadership with Sarah now being the new executive director. The team has changed a lot. As for Park District, the the public housing third is also dealing with some financial issues as well. And my understanding, the only action that they're working towards is demolition of the site. They are pursuing funding for that right now. It is competitive funding. So, you know, that's hopefully they'll get that, but that's sort of where it is at the moment.

Okay, great. And then also, I think it's been maybe years now, but we talked about the commercial component of the Riverside development. I think we reviewed the chicken and pickle concept. Any update there on the commercial space?

Did I hear something?

Yeah, the chicken and pickle is no longer viable. Spoke with Eric, who's the president of Shelter. They are exploring other ventures, but at this time, I'm not aware of what's coming in. Okay, great.

I hesitate to even say it because it might have been a rumor. I thought I heard something about a grocer again, but I know they're working hard to get some.

Sorry, I might not have been here when we were discussing that originally. Can you give me like the two second version on what it is you're talking about?

So the Riverside area where the new multifamily buildings are being built, there's a commercial component to that overall development, as well as a park component.

Right next to those big apartments that they built?

It's fairly central, but west of the apartment buildings. And... They came before us, wanted to change the use from a theater to a more activated restaurant and activity type of business, which I think they received support for. But I was just curious. It's gone on anywhere. Then finally, the stadium. I may have been absent if it came in front of the planning commission, but... It seems like a pretty important project for Everett as a whole. Any plan to at least brief the Planning Commission on this proposed stadium and what kind of impact it might have on the urban landscape?

I will ask the project team working on that. I've only had limited touch points to it, but it does seem reasonable to bring the Planning Commission into that. I'll pass it off.

I have one that I just thought of. Do you have any fun insights or anything news on the Everett mall since top golf might be pulling out or has pulled out?

I don't. I know what I read in the paper, and I've seen that in our permit software, which is that they're exploring a apartment building on the south end next to the future 100th Street and looking at a storage building more to the interior between the mall and the freeway. That was reported in a couple news reports, and I think they have a pre-app for one or both components, maybe this week, maybe next week.

Yeah, I do know they have submitted for pre-app. It's been in the media, and so the information's out there.

That's all I've heard. I hear from our economic development folks that they do have a master plan, and this is one piece of it, I think. But I'll see if I can get some more on that, too. You work on the, you made, you made a comment on the 5290. Maybe it went over. I didn't catch it. So there was a requirement, I believe, to make a report by March. with the stats. I know that several of the cities actually have it up on their websites, on their reporting. Is that what you're saying hasn't been done yet? No, we do. That's an example of what we do. What hasn't been done is changing our code to adopt the timelines and some of the other requirements in there. So there's a maximum of 90 days for there were some choices for jurisdictions to make, like, if you didn't need a public hearing permit must be delivered within 90 days and pause when the applicant is doing work on their side and everything. So we work to all of that. So we as if it's already in our code, but we have not actually gotten around to adjusting our title 15 yet. So that's what we've drafted it. It's been like a year. But the report was made. The report was made two or three cycles already now. And it should be up on the web. It should be. I didn't notice it, but I didn't look hard for it. I'll ask Kelsey, land use manager, and we'll send out a link to that. It's very, I will say from what I've heard from Kelsey is the way that they've defined the reportable permits is it's like land divisions and a couple other things but it misses a lot of really important permits. So I think from what I've heard it's not going to be the most useful report. We will look at ways to make our own reporting system that adds a little bit more value, but at least the way that the RCW is written and commerce has interpreted it. What I've heard is that it's not going to capture a lot of our important permit types. And I don't know, for a fact, my understanding is that Commerce was really looking at maybe how they were structuring or requesting the information. Because the reports coming out weren't very usable for the public or from my perspective as well. So they were confusing, I guess, more than saying they weren't useful. They were confusing. So we didn't quite understand what was in and what was out. And it was the groupings were odd. Yes, I've heard a lot of grumblings about the spreadsheet, the basic spreadsheet that the state gives. I think they're on a second or third version. We've gone very streamlined over the years with our processes and A lot of our projects go straight to building permits. I think that's one of the classes of permits that's not in there. But that's one of the most important, maybe the most important. So how long a design modification or development regulation modification takes, that's a relatively small piece of a project. And we don't do that many land divisions and everything. So you could have a 200 unit apartment project and go straight to building permits. You won't see that on there, even though it's really important. doing a lot of work. There is actually much more. It wasn't on this sheet, but we're doing a lot of work with our tracking, our information, our communications, and just our, we'll call it the permit processing side of the house right now. And I'm trying to find a way to articulate that or bring it to you, but suffice it to say, we're doing a lot of work there, as we always do.

Additional questions, commissioners? I continue to be amazed at what you're able to accomplish with the small team you have so thank you. Okay, so I think we're ready to move on to our next agenda item, which is the multifamily tax exemption program briefing.

Good evening, Commissioners. Frank Hong, Housing Policy and Development Lead. I'm here tonight to present to you about our multifamily tax exemption expansion and update. York and I have spent an exhaustive amount of time on this subject, and we find it fascinating. So I hope that tonight's two-hour discussion won't put you all to sleep.

My heart just jumped.

How do I move this forward? It's not moving. Yeah, so tonight we'll cover MFT background, our proposed changes, some of the findings that came out of our study and next steps. To recap, the multifamily tax exemption program is a state authorized program that supports new house and construction by providing a temporary property tax exemption on the newly built residential portion of the qualifying project. The program has been in existence since 1999. And over that course, we've had it's led to over 3,700 units of new housing in the city of Everton. Now, we, as a city have very limited resources to support a new construction of housing activity. And so the program has been instrumental in that work. The current program offers an 812 and 20 year tax exemption option where the 8 years essentially does not have a set aside for affordable housing, but the 12 and 20 year do as shown on the screen. And as of 2025, we have 12 projects still in the program, roughly about exactly 1,472 total units. And so, yeah, I mean, it's been instrumental in terms of supporting new housing construction in Everett. The last time MFT came before this commission was in 2021 when the planning commission reviewed the housing development incentives program. And since that time, only five years roughly ago, we're proposing significant changes to help make this program even more user-friendly. We are doing a lot of different updates in this revision, but I'm just going to highlight some of the key ones that may have some additional conversations around it. For the most part, when the state created the MFT program, the minimum eligibility was four units. When we did our 21 revision, we set the standard at 16 units. Looking back into that study, it was assumed that there would be an enormous amount of MFT projects and there was some concern of staff capacity to process and handle these cases. And so that was sort of the rationale on setting it at 16 units. Staff is proposing to reduce it back down to four, consistent with Commerce's state regulation. And when I looked at all the other various MFT programs in Washington, us and one other city were the outlier that had it above four. So pretty much everybody else has set it at four units. We're also looking to clarify the use of this MFTE program right now in the ordinance. It specifies a building. So essentially it has to be one contiguous building. And so we are going to specify it as both detached and attached, which commerce has been operating under that definition. We are also going to, Since MFT was started initially, it was really a program to help spur higher density development around transit-oriented areas. But since then, other initiatives such as middle housing have developed. have been prioritized. And so we look at MFT program as a possible way to also support middle housing as well. And so one of the proposals is to expand their residential target area, essentially the boundary of where the MFT program can be used to include the NR and you are four zones. So essentially, we are including all residential zones within Everett We are also incorporating changes from House Bill 1494 that was passed last year and that included many different things from compliance to some additional Yeah, there was just a lot of just different changes. Most of them were minor, again, mainly around the compliance issue, such as a fee scale. There are some also further clarification in terms of addressing one of the concerns of what happens when a tenant's income exceeds the income limit of the unit. So House Bill 1494 addressed that by allowing a resident to stay in that unit up to 150% of the designated income limit. So again, they're trying to... not disrupt anyone's lives and so and so and uh we've been having to deal with that situation so we're glad that there is some resolution to that and again there's some other changes and so we'll be incorporating all of those in 1494. um we'll also be improving the utilization MFT has many sections that are intended for homeownership, but no one really uses it for homeownership because it doesn't practically make sense where, again, the tax exemption benefit in a multifamily case, the developer builds the building, then they will benefit from a tax exemption for a set period after. On a homeownership basis, when a developer builds a product, they're selling it off, and so they don't really reap any benefits from the MFT program. the regulations have been updated over time. So you try to figure out how to encourage that more. I don't know if this will do anything different, but right now it's set at 80% AMI essentially makes it unfeasible to do homeownership. So I'm proposing to increase it from 80 to 115, something similar to what we're doing on the inclusionary housing side to see if that has any interest. But again, we've been struggling to figure out how to drive more homeownership opportunities here in Everton. And so we're looking at all the tools in our tool bag. And as I mentioned, again, we're doing a lot of just updating of compliance language, both in the ordinance, but as well as in our own administrative guidance and how we will, um, oversee these properties. So those are really the main crux of the changes. And I'll go next into, oh, sorry. So this next slide shows the map in terms of where the existing program is in the lighter shade of yellow. And the brown is the expansion area. And I know it's a little difficult to see. So the next slide, we broke it up into sort of half Everett, North Everett, and then South Everett. But as you can see, again, expanding it across most of the NR and UR4 zones. And now the next section, I'll go into some of the findings of our studies. Partially when we have to expand the RTA, the residential target area, we have to do some financial analysis as well as anti-displacement analysis. And so that's what these findings will show. When we looked at how we can model the projected impact of when we expand it to the NR and the UR4 area, what's the likely development impact? we looked at uh what's happened uh over the past seven years uh in the development activity so in the ur4 zone there was only six projects that equaled out to about 155 units since 2019 looking specifically at 4 to 15 units, which are sort of that subset of the additional amounts as we lower from 16 units to 4. We saw that there was only three projects in the former UR3, UR4, and B zones that accounted to 19 units. So there again, a lot of these smaller projects, just we have not seen a lot of these over the years. And so maybe the MFTE program can help incentivize development of middle housing further. During the Everett 2044 comp plan update, York did a land use analysis across all the different zones and we looked at where NR zones and UR4 zones, the capacity for additional units and they total roughly 8,154 units. So we do project that, I think that's out of 90,000 units that these two additional zones should see more middle housing development. This slide just summarizes our 2025 MFT program. As I mentioned, we have 12 projects, roughly 1,500 units. As I mentioned, the MFT program has been instrumental in encouraging housing development. It's led to construction investment costs of over $340 million here in Everett. Uh, the totality of the program over the past 26 years or so, it's led to over 850Million dollars in construction activity. So again, MFT program has been great in that respect. Um, I mean, those are just some of the key numbers that I just wanted to demonstrate in terms of how instrumental MFT program has been for Everett. Um, here show some of the, um. in terms of from a developer's perspective, the tax exemption benefits for a property and the main number, roughly on average, the MFT program contributes about 10% of a development project's cost. Why is it flying through? And when we looked at the study, so we did a lot of, calculations and methodologies to isolate and identify what that impact would be for the City of Everett residents and basing it off of our 2025 projects. in the MFT program. And so that tax shift is roughly about $1.3 million. And what that tax shift means is that, again, the MFT program is not a waiver. It's a temporary redistribution of the tax load onto the remaining taxpaying properties. And so for Everett, that equals out to about, again, $1.3 million. If we're looking at an average typical average single family home value of $537,200, that tax shift for every homeowner is roughly about $25.78 is what folks are paying right now. When you look at what you actually pay in a property tax average, it's roughly about $4,700 a year. So that $25 is a fraction of your average property tax bill. In order to project, again, where the expansion would lead to in terms of additional development, it was challenging because, again, the former zones in R1, et cetera, did not allow for additional larger projects. So it's really sort of groundbreaking in terms of what we're trying to figure out here in projecting. So again, we looked at some of the historical numbers. We used the land use capacity analysis. And we roughly came up with a range of anywhere between 15 to 100 units is what we're projecting a year as a result of this expansion, as a result of the comp plan update and all that that's permitting the additional growth. And so. roughly that comes down to two cents per unit on the first year, 30 cents to $2, depending again on how many units we see. Again, based off of a ratio of roughly $4,700 of annual average property tax, it's six thousandths of 1% in terms of roughly how much that will impact the average property. But again, it's not just an annual because every year if we expect anywhere from 1500 units, we're just looking at a since the program has an eight and 12 year, uh, duration, we just simplified instead of 10 year. So over the next 10 years, assuming anywhere between 150 and a thousand units, you, the average property owner might see roughly an increase in $3 to $20, uh, at the 10 year peak. And then after that, that first year project will tail off. And so that's sort of where the limit is here in terms of financial impact. And, um, yeah so really in terms of anti displacement, as I mentioned, we required to look into that as well. The nr and ur forage zones show minimal displacement risk, I mean there's low renter concentration in those areas limited investor speculation. And really no centralized clusters of vulnerable populations, and so a lot of our analysis is looking at very minimal impacts in this area. MIDDLE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IS, AS I MENTIONED, VERY SMALL SCALE AND INCREMENTAL AT THIS TIME. AND AGAIN, NOT CONCENTRATED. THERE'S ALSO RELOCATION ASSISTANCE BUILT INTO THE MFTE PROGRAM. OTHER EFFORTS THAT WE'RE DOING ALSO FOCUS ON PRESERVATION AND ADDRESSING DISPLACEMENT AS YORK MENTIONED EARLIER, RECENT ADOPTION OF THE MH MANUFACTURED HOME COMMUNITY ZONE. In short, overall, we see that the expansion will advance additional housing supply and diversity among our neighborhoods while maintaining low displacement risks. So it aligns with our 2044 housing goals and objectives. Summarizing, again, Citi has established the policy framework and supports to implement the MFT incentives. As I mentioned earlier, the original projection from 21 was had some concerns with capacity issues, but we have not seen those concerns arise. And so we feel that this expansion will not place a huge significant burden on staff to implement this expansion. Also, by doing this, MFT traditionally has been more a development tool for the multifamily and larger developers. And so now this tool is also available for small property owners who want to, again, develop a four-unit quadplex or something along those sizes on their properties. The proposed changes would produce housing across all income levels. The cost of incentives, as we reviewed, is minimal and not anticipated to adversely affect or burden the city or the taxpayer. And as I mentioned, the city has the capacity to administer and expand this incentive. As for next steps, we plan to, well, here we are today doing the Planning Commission briefing. As York mentioned, we'll come back a second time. uh we'll go to the city council's parks and built environment committee uh scheduled on June 10th and the first reading at Council on the 24th um so yeah that is uh into my presentation and I'm here to ask address any questions you may have thank you commissioner's questions two questions uh one is can you provide an example of the home ownership concept that you briefly discussed at the beginning of your set Homeownership concept. Oh, you mean just like how the program could support it or incentivize it?

Yeah. How does it apply to homeownership?

So right now, the 20-year program, for example, if you set aside 25% for affordable housing, you'll get 20 years of tax exemption on a homeownership product. But I'm speaking with developers and others. Again, it just does not make financial sense. The 12-year program also has an ownership product. But just because the developer doesn't benefit, they don't really see any incentive of doing it. I mean, I guess in the sense of high housing costs right now, we were thinking, well, you can sort of market that to the potential purchaser saying that again, you'll have a certain amount of tax exemption after that. But so far again, just have not seen it heavily used throughout the state. It's very few cases. How do you keep it affordable? ownership. So there's a covenant then that will be placed on it for that remaining time. And yeah, it runs with the property.

Almost exclusively, I think statewide is mission driven developers who would do it. Sure.

Yep. Guess three questions. Sorry, that was one.

But even mission driven developers, I mean, oftentimes, those are nonprofits that are already exempt from the property taxes. So again, they don't use it either.

So yeah. So second question, any 20 year projects in the MFTE program?

Not one. Yeah, since 1999, there's not been one 20-year.

Again, it shows how it just has not been a good incentive. It's not sufficient to make it pencil. And then finally, so I think the MFT program is what makes certain projects possible in the city, given the cost to develop these projects. Has anybody looked at the net outcome of the continuation of the MFT program offset by the changes in the potential taxes? an ongoing operating cost that landlords might face. I'm thinking of changes to Ever Transit, how that might impact sales tax, changes in utility tax rates. Then we need to look at kind of the overall net effect. I have a sense that while this is good, we're probably not keeping up on a balanced basis relative to increase in costs elsewhere.

Well, I'm sorry, what was the question? Like, how does it compare with all the other tax increases that are coming up?

How does it all net out? So if you're developing a building today, right, compared to, you know, pick another date in the past, are we creating ongoing disincentives? Is the MFT program keeping up with the increases in other costs and taxes that developers and property owners are facing? That's my question.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of how to quantify that. I mean, I guess that's sort of over the years to the proportion of how much set aside affordable units has changed as the program has evolved. Because when I was looking at some of the earlier ones, again, the AMIs were higher to try to balance all that out. So I think the program has been trying to figure that out to meet some of those rising costs that developers face.

Is there a mathematical way that it has? I mean, really like you're saying this is,

I think you sort of hit on spot. This is one tool of many, and this is where we struggle with right now as a city that doesn't have. So I've been trying to work on other types of resources to support development, grants, other things. And again, right now with housing construction costs, I mean, we have developers in the room that can speak to this. But yeah, just the whole industry itself, labor, construction, all that stuff is far outpaced some of the benefits that have gone into this. I also wanted to touch on your point earlier when you asked about the 20-year. No one has used the 20-year. The program also has extensions that, for the most part, you can grant automatically. Oddly, no one's also ever asked for an extension either. And I was just looking at that recently while a couple of the projects tapered off of the program.

Is it possible for a program participant, if they age out of the initial term and there's a lapse, could they reenter? Is that possible?

I'm not aware of that. I think it has to be continuous before it expires.

Probably, yeah. We do ask for deeper affordability for the extension too. I hear the logic that the... You kind of get 8 years of a tax exemption for just building a building. To give another 12 years just to continue to operate it similar, I guess you get the 12 years for adding that affordability. So you got 4 more years of tax exemption for a certain affordability level. We're asking for a little bit more to get an additional another 12 years.

Well, it would be just a continuation of what they are. And I guess when we had those discussions, because the eight-year does not have a set-aside, so they would have to provide some. That's where we were figuring out the trade-offs. But again, even the 12-year projects are not asked for.

I think it goes from 60% and 80% AMI to like 50% AMI. So to get the additional, which is something that we could look at, I think that was a voluntary piece that we had.

I think that's worth looking at. I mean, Mr. Hong, to your point, this is a tool. I think it's an effective tool. At least it's proven to be an effective tool. I think that expanding where this can be applied and reducing the thresholds to using this is great. I fear it's probably still not keeping up, but I think it's important that this tool remain available to developers.

And I don't, other than the reduced affordability or the relaxed affordability, I think we did last time, for the most part, this is just changing the eligibility, but it's not, it's still eight years or 12 years. So the actual incentive remains the same to a given building. We're just broadening which developments would qualify. So I guess we can probably agree with Commissioner Sullivan that it does not because it didn't really change, but everything else certainly got more expensive.

Are there more eight years or more 12-year ones?

Right now, there's more 12 than eight. There are more 12, which means there is an affordability component. I think it's eight 12-years and four eight-years.

Has the affordability component been here for a long time? I don't remember if you said how long it's been part of the program.

Yes, there's always been a affordability requirement. I don't know if the percentage changed, but I know the AMI changed because, for example, like the Riverfront project several years ago, they're at 115 AMI and 100 was the standard then. And I think in 21, then it changed to 60 and 80. It's like a 20% of the 20% at each of them. And those are sort of at the limits, because even though Riverfront was at 115 and 100 because of the softer market right now, I mean, they've gone down to 80% too, for the most part.

Okay. So I wasn't sure if that was like a deterrent or if it was kind of neutral. It sounds like it's not the biggest factor. I'll be honest with you. This is really challenging to follow as in layman's terms. I'm like trying to completely understand. I'm happy it helps.

Yeah, and I guess you were trying to simplify it. You did great. The main numbers, it's $0.02 per unit in terms of additional cost per an average taxpayer.

So just to walk me through this. So I'm a developer, and I'm going to develop over four units or more. because it's 16, but we're lowering it to four, right? So I'm going to develop four units. I'm going to develop eight townhouses like the ones across from Silver Lake. Those are going to be sold off to be owned. this tax credit follows that or it just stays with the builder so it's i guess i'm trying to understand are you selling is it because you're trying to sell these you gotta help me out here i don't even know what i'm asking for at this point would not qualify because you're just telling them the ownership ones were which is complicated nobody's quite cracked that um

pretty much all of these are going to be rentals. So if you build eight townhouses and rent them for eight years, you can get the tax break or 12 years with the affordability.

Um, okay. Just to clarify this. So the eight year programs is only for rentals, uh, for multifamily apartment buildings, the 12 year, you can do rental or ownership. And then if you do the 12 year, you also have to set aside 20% for affordable housing. Uh, so roughly one unit, um,

So would that be if I'm a developer and I'm trying to just keep some of the – like this is so – when you're not somebody who works in any of this, this is very confusing for just an average person who owns their home. I'm like really trying to connect the dots right now. But I think I'm following what you're saying. So for the most part, these are apartments. We're talking about apartments. Apartments are not generally owned by an individual. Correct. Correct.

And for the ownership, again, where it falls short of the program is that because the developers not benefit from the tax exemption, it's whoever buys the property. They have very little reason to utilize the MFT program, especially even to set aside something for affordable housing, or it just doesn't benefit them at all. Other than maybe they could try to use it as a marketing tool, but I've not really seen that. Okay. All right.

Well, great. Keep up the good work. Yeah.

So I guess, yeah, to make it work for the ownership for the 12-year, you would need to probably sell or give or whatever two of the units to a community land trust to manage the affordability of. Then you would have the tax exemption for all the units, but you'd have to find a way to capture that from the first purchaser.

So we do leave that as an option. It's just ridiculous to try to do.

Based on developers, yeah. Nobody has done it. Or not nobody, but essentially 99% of people.

Yeah, if somebody can figure it out, good for them. But it is there. It's just not very attainable, the current structure of how things work.

That was actually going to be my question. I would love to see an actual example of where someone has been able to utilize the ownership aspect of this. anywhere. Ivy doesn't have to be here. But I would love to see that example to understand how that worked. How it will work.

And then I think, again, it's mainly maybe like a seal. It was some unique sort of scope of product.

And then my other question would be if if if by some wonderful miracle, this all of a sudden does crack open the code to being able to utilize it to increase homeownership. You mentioned that program extensions are available. Is that available for folks who own the units? Or is that only, you could only apply for these extensions if you're managing property under this program?

I'm sorry, available to the owner or the manager, you said?

Would it be available if this program worked for the purpose of creating those homeownership opportunities and the homeowner can benefit from that? You mentioned that this program can be extended. Is that option available only to folks who are managing property as rentals? Or is that also open to folks who would be owners themselves under this program?

Yeah, that's a good question. I...

believe it's only the rentals but i'll look into that and get an answer back to you thank you additional questions commissioners okay thank you for trying to make sense of this for those of us lay people trying to follow along with the pretty complex uh complex uh program um we so feel your pain So if that briefing is complete, I think we're ready for our next agenda item, which is the council request on inclusionary zoning.

Yes.

Oh, my goodness sakes. Now, Ishmael, you did say. Okay. All right. You can change your mind, please. And in fact, thank you for reminding me, Ayanna, please, if you are ready. I always love to hear from you.

Ismail Mohammed. I'm a small middle housing developer in Everett. First of all, I want to thank the Planning Commission and the staff. Amazing work. I've been here with different group of people, but in the last seven years, I've seen a lot of progress. Everett is ahead of the curve. Thank you. Frank has been, and Yorick too, Every time I've called or talked to, they are always there. MFTE, you know, has been my pet peeve, like ADU. This program, since it was 16, and, you know, I was, why is it 16? You need to go down, not more. What's going to happen with this four is the more middle housing is going to develop in rental areas. We still need to crack the ownership part of it. What I learned from commerce is that I'm right now also a member of community advisory team with the Department of Commerce. So one way, the only way we can do this ownership part is a community land trust because they have to manage it for the next 15 years or 10 years or that. So it's not benefiting the developer. So nobody has built those because now I have to join hands with CLT and agency who is going to be managing those units or whatever units. So I'm not benefiting out of it. So why am I going to do it? But as you said that we need to crack this and get some more ideas. One idea could be that for you to consider is the benefit of the reduction in the property tax can be given to the developer as a bonus to be used somehow, some way as a credit to be used in the future. So he sees the incentive to build something where he's getting some credit towards Something. I'm gonna come up with a program. I'm gonna sum up. This is, I'm gonna make it as a personal agenda. So I'm gonna come up with some kind of idea that we can all work towards it. Because otherwise a builder is not gonna build it. Developer, why would he do that? And the ownership is not gonna be expanding in that area. Then comes to the pre-approved plans. Amazing, four of those plans which are going on the website. The permit department is working very hard to put this on the website June 1st, and it's gonna go. And out of those four plans, one of them is my plan, which I have worked on as a basic plan. But that is the building plan. We need to keep in mind that that is a building plan. Still, there are two other departments that need to approve where this plan is going to go into. So it means that planning and public works come into play. Now, if planning and public works take the same amount of time, then it does not serve the purpose those pre-approved plans are built for. It means that the whole idea is to have that pre-approved plans so it can expedite the process and the builder or developer shortens the financial cost or burden and expedite it. So I would, I want definitely, and they are working on some way, there means the permit department to sync with the, planning and public works that if an application comes in before even it comes in we need to kind of sort out is it in the right way or not so that's thank you again for working towards that Market conditions are changing. As planning commissioner one year said, it's all over the place. Interest rates has gone up, not down. Uncertainty looms over us. I don't know for how long. But it doesn't mean we need to stop. We need to keep going. That's all. Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Mr. Mohamed. Do we have additional folks online who wish to offer public comment? We do not. Okay, thank you. Anyone else in the gallery who wishes to offer comment? Don't be shy. Now's your chance. Please step to the mic and state your name if you would like to speak.

My name is Angela Muhammad.

Akbar Mohammed, thank you, everyone. I just had one thought. I was I was listening this from 16 to four, which my brother Ismail was very happy. I was even thinking if you can go down from reduce less than four, one, two, three, like, you know, if you have one unit, you get hypothetically, I'm just saying you get two year benefit. You have two units, you get four-year benefits. You have three units, six years, and four units, eight years, something like that. So in this way, developers will build more units, a smaller amount, but it may be a catch for them. That's it. Thank you. Sure.

Unfortunately, we can't do that. The state sets the minimum eligibility, which is four units, and so the cities cannot. Okay.

Thank you. Okay. Commissioners, did you have any final thoughts after those comments?

Are you looking for anything from us or is this just a brief right now?

I believe it's just a brief. So I'm not sure why are we coming back to commission next month?

I believe we're going to ask for a recommendation next month. So we'll answer that.

To the council, yes. So that's after the input from the council on what they're looking or before they go to the first reading?

Before the council, I'm not sure if the committee meeting is before planning commission. I believe the committee meeting was the built-in.

Committee meeting is June 10th, parks and built environment and then council first reading on the 24th.

Then planning commission is in between that on the 19th, I think. You would bring back whatever the committee... If we get feedback from the committee, we'll let you know for sure. And then we'll come back with answers to the questions that we will do some research on. We'll see if we hear anything else. and i believe we'll schedule a public hearing and get you some feedback from the public on it the only hesitancy i have is that normally procedural and fiscal uh topics don't need to go to the planning commission um like i said i whenever it's possible and fits the schedule i like love to get your input um so i i'm i'm thinking that we'll go that route um but it's but it's not 100 sure but i appreciate your input and it's a good warm-up for the council.

I mean, basically, I don't see any negative from what it just gives everybody more options. It doesn't mean they're ever going to use them. I think going down to four is going to be really good because if four units, then you're not commercial. So I think you'll see a lot more from that aspect alone than maybe the change of AMI. So I think, I mean, it's just more options. I don't see a negative that comes down to it.

I forgot to mention, there was an also another house bill 1491 that requires some changes to the MFT program. So we will be back again in two years time to do another revision of this of anything. You know, right now, again, we don't have a strong indication of what that projected forecast is. But again, if there was suddenly unforeseen circumstances, again, we'll be back shortly, that we can make revisions to this.

So it sounds like the next time we come together, we may be able to offer a resolution to the council on this. So if commissioners have feedback, they can provide it to you. And then if there's additional feedback from the built environment committee, you'll let us know. And maybe the resolution, I know, I see there's, there's a proposed resolution. So some of that language would potentially change. Well, I guess a proposed ordinance, but ours would be a resolution. Right. um so some of the language would potentially change based on other feedback it sounds like okay all right not expecting it i mean i think this is the version that we were we were anticipating to bring to the to the council but when every time you read it you notice another thing or two new line yes yeah okay thank you um i think we're ready to move on to in the council request on inclusionary zoning

Okay, so this one comes back from the housekeeping ordinance and before that the periodic update. So in the Everett 2044 periodic update, we adopted inclusionary zoning requirement for two areas in South Everett around the two light rail areas. Uh, coming light rail stations, uh, then as part of the housekeeping ordinance, in addition to a whole bunch of other stuff that we were fixing, we had, um. Spotted and received feedback that the ownership product, which this applied to would be very difficult and faces different. financial structure than rental projects. And so we proposed and the council adopted a relaxing of the income, the relaxing of the income requirement for ownership product to 100% area median income from 60 to 80% that it was before. And then also reduced the fee-in-lieu alternative compliance path for ownership product from $15 per gross square foot of the building to $9 per gross square foot. A lot of math behind it that sought to establish parity so that it was a similar kind of impact to the feasibility of a project for ownership and rental. During the Council's deliberations, there was a proposed amendment that was brought up and had a little bit of discussion, but needed more time to look into. And that proposal was to condition the reduced fee in lieu at least, if not maybe the reduced affordability rate for ownership product, to having a first-time homebuyer program and limiting it in cases where a dwelling unit was demolished, a habitable dwelling unit was demolished as part of that project. um staff had some concerns about it and and argued not to adopt that amendment at the moment nor to slow down the housekeeping ordinance to continue working with it this is all back in march i think it was so the council instead by consensus agreed to ask the planning commission to review that concept It was mostly one council member and had the opportunity to meet with them last week and got a little bit of clarification on it. And I think what she was after is It was a little bit different than how it was in that first council meeting. The first council meeting was about the ownership fee in lieu and the ownership affordability rate. And later, fleshing out what some of the question was, it was perhaps more about... the fee-in-lieu period for owner or rental that either that you would have to perform, i.e. provide the units that are affordable and not pay a fee-in-lieu if the demolition of a habitable dwelling was part of the project and if there was no first-time, I guess you could only have a first-time homebuyer if there was an ownership product. Since the agenda came out, had more conversations and brought up the fact that we're doing a sub area planning effort on Casino Road, and we have always expected to review the inclusionary zoning The numbers mainly. We were dealing with a whole lot of issues when we did the periodic update. Same thing with housekeeping. We're always dealing with a lot of issues. I'm not sure when we would expect things to get totally calm to spend a lot of time on a topic, but we may have some consultant support and new information and all of that to bring to it. So we'd always expected to look at inclusionary zoning and make sure that it's aligned with our needs and our goals as part of that sub-area planning effort. And the council member thought that that would be a good venue to review that proposal. So that conversation happened after the agenda came out. So I thought I would... Let you know what this is all about if it wasn't clear from the memo, which was a very brief memo, but that we don't necessarily need to get to a recommendation back to the Council or complete this agenda item today. If it's okay with you, we can incorporate this work into a review of the inclusionary zoning program as part of the Casino Road Community Plan work that I will brief you on after this item. If you have any feedback, questions, thoughts, happy to take them now as well.

Commissioner's thoughts on holding on this and rolling it into the casino road community.

I always thought that was the plan.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

I do have a couple real quick questions, though, about it. So the fee-in-lieu, do we have a balance on our fee-in-lieu fund?

It's not been used yet, neither for performance nor for fee-in-lieu. But there are two projects in process that may trigger it. And then who's standard for first time home buyer are we using?

HUD or? That would be one of the questions to figure out. There's a lot of difference in qualifications on which agency. It considers you a first-time homebuyer. Right.

And how to visit a set-aside percent that must go to such buyers or what. So that's some of the work that I think was being referred for us to work out. Staff can do a little bit of legwork on that first.

Everybody has their own little world that they decide to call you a first-time homebuyer.

Right, right.

yeah commissioners is that the consensus that this should we should look at this more holistically rather than just again because we already did look at this piece uh separately so and if it needs another look sounds like holistically is the way to go okay thank you shall we roll into the casino road i think we're ready for the next agenda item

Sam, who's leading this project, is on her way up. I want to preface this by this is early. This is preliminary. We really want this to be community-led and centered. We have a lot of conversations to have. We also want to get started and sometimes a good way to get started is to put stuff out there for folks to respond to, but know that we have a lot of pending conversations and engagement with the community. So take all of this as a first pencil draft just to get something out there because I have perceived since we've been talking about this since the periodic update that not everybody necessarily knows what a subarea plan is, what it could be, what we intend to do, what the geography is, and any of that. So I am a little bit worried that the lack of information is more damaging than the potential of it seeming like we're launching forward quickly. We take all of this as our initial thoughts and work, but all of it is just to set us up for a robust engagement process to come, including the scoping piece of this, which is what are the priorities we're going to work on and all that. We want to hear it from the community. What is the geography we're looking at? There's also some grants that we're looking at applying to.

Grants that we're going to be working on?

Yes, grants that we are looking at applying to, partnerships with organizations, partnerships with agencies. All of that is in play at the same time.

We are juggling with many balls. Yes.

But we are also eager to start talking about it. So we figured this is a good time to let you know what we think we know so far and hear what input and feedback you have now. And this will be a recurring conversation for the next year, at least I would expect.

You're not on the screen.

Yeah, it's up there.

That one's just not on. Oh, that one's not behaving? Okay.

Okay. Uh, in every 2044 comprehensive plan, uh, there was a set of centers designated, uh, Metro ever at being the regional growth center. And then we had 4 community hubs, uh, casino evergreen station area is 1 of them, uh, airport and evergreen. Uh, North Broadway around the colleges in the hospital, and then 41st and Colby are the 4 community hubs, each of which as an action, uh, calls for us to develop a subarea plan for them. Casino and Evergreen is the first one that we are tackling. These are all also, we will look to get these designated as countywide growth centers, which gets access to priority transportation funding and has a set of policies and goals that we need to work to that's very consistent with what we're looking for here.

And the bullet points come straight out of the comp plan as to what I set out community hubs as. There are a whole host more, but those were just the key ones that we're starting with right now as to why we're doing this. Go to the next slide.

Oh, there's the map out of the comp plan, and blue is the community hub color.

So as we're putting this together, the biggest part is to engage the community and to build sustainable partnerships because, as Frank has alluded to and others, we can't build housing. We can't encourage economic development. We can't do it by ourselves. And so to have... Those partnerships that are actually on the ground working in that area is huge. We want to leverage our opportunities with light rail. We want to protect and proactively work with the community to make sure that they still have places that they want to live in in that community. It is their home. It is where they want to be and prevent displacement. There are a variety of sites there that are opportunity sites for redevelopment. When we were doing the comp plan, obviously Fred Meyer was a key anchor. Well, guess what? It's not. So now we have an opportunity site versus a key anchor. And so now what are we going to do there? And to build on what we have done in the comp plan and to make sure that we are moving forward with the community to get this work done. So like we did with the comp plan where we held the pen, this is still us holding the pen. It is not us driving the vehicle and setting the map and the destinations and everything.

Also really important to reflect, we've done a lot of planning work in recent years in this area, and this is an opportunity to gather all of those, refresh, compile, repackage, and advance. We'll click through a couple of these. In 2022, LISC had worked through a contract with Kaiser and had done some great work organizing stakeholders into two planning documents, the Casino Road Economic Work Plan, We had the Park Recreation and Open Space Plan notable because of the finding of park deficit in this area and an overarching policy priority on improving park and green space access.

And this is one of the grants that we are going after right now is $125,000 grant from the Park and Recreation Department. organization of some sort in Washington. It is a funded grant and it can be used for the development of plans for parks. And since we know that this is an under parked area and a community that is underserved in a whole host of other areas, we are building on that information to apply for that grant.

Casino Road affordable housing work plan was completed in 2024. Our comprehensive plan, of course, recently completed South Everett economic development strategy. That was a broader area than casino road neighborhood specific. It was all of South Everett, including Mariner. But a lot of the findings and recommendations are very. are very germane to the neighborhood. Vision Zero Everett, we put these two in the mix, the park plan and the Vision Zero, because transportation, mobility, and safety, and park and green space access were things that we heard a lot of from the community in the periodic update process and

that now this is another grant area that we're going to be leading is the evergreen corridor study for the con many of you may have seen the corridor study was done for snohomish and lynwood along 99 we have 1.7 million dollars to work on that we are going to be leading that effort through planning not through public works on the study. Our new senior planner is coming in and that will be her key project starting in mid-July, early August. She's coming from FTA, so has huge knowledge of all of this information.

Yeah, so two big grants and work programs focused on Evergreen Way specifically, which is obviously a key corridor relating to that neighborhood. And then worked with Sound Transit. This was a Federal Transit Administration grant, worked with Sound Transit, Community Transit, Linwood, Snohomish County.

That's it.

Maybe not some community transit. I can't remember. And developed a model code partnership. This was to align planning efforts between all the station areas along the Everett Link extension line and developed a set of model transit-oriented development policies, regulations, and anti-displacement toolkit. And it was informed by the things that we were working on in the comprehensive plan and best practices from around the country, case studies and all that. So this is a great opportunity to apply it. So where is this neighborhood, or where is this subarea plan about? We think of it in three different geographies. There is the study area, which is where we'll collect data and information and inventories. There's the plan area, which is what the subarea plan will cover. And then within that is going to be a designated center. A designated center has connection to our development regulations and will trigger things like minimum building height and no parking required. There's a couple other things like that. three geographies, the study area, no lines on that. It's gonna be fairly big. We'll collect census data. A lot of that was already collected through those earlier planning processes, traffic safety information, park information, and all of that. So something like a broader Casino Road community or South Everett might be the study area. Maybe it differs based on what we're looking at, housing versus transportation. The plan area, those lines, just an example for discussion. This is the boundary for what the plan is about. I think pretty much every sub area plan draws a boundary and says this plan is about this place. If there are policies, we're not sure. In fact, we're leaning against having different goals and policies in the sub area plan compared to the broader comprehensive plan. This would be the extent of zoning changes that we might propose or enact with the plan. We're going to look at doing street plans, which are future right-of-way plans for many of the streets in whatever the boundary winds up being. Same for park planning and specific maybe even location acquisition targets or even park designs. and try to consider natural features and boundaries as much as possible. And then again, just an example for discussion, that red line could be the designated center. So mixed use center is the term in our development regulations. inside and just by right now only metro everett is a mixed-use center when delineated and identified a mixed-use center gets these treatments no parking required no drive-throughs auto sales or adult use businesses allowed we allow light industrial um not warehouse but light industrial um in our mu zone i believe

It's for businesses that do some sales and assembly slash manufacturing, a combination of those kinds of things so that they can be able to sell as well as assemble or do whatever. So if you are a boat upholsterer and you do small upholstery projects, you can do that as well as sell life preservers or other things.

Those are allowed in the MU zone. In centers, they would be limited to 5,000 square feet, so they'd have to be very small. Minimum building height of three floors, more bike parking, some a little bit more pedestrian-oriented sign standards. There is a categorical exemption under the State Environmental Policy Act that's a streamlined environmental review process within the center for up to 200 units or mixed use any size. And then you get 25% off traffic impact fees, which is a pretty big ticket for development. So think of all of those things. And when we get to that part, probably towards the end of this process, does it make sense for this parcel to have those incentives or regulations? If so, it should be inside the red line. And if it doesn't make sense, it shouldn't be inside the red line. And we can look at changing those as well as part of the process. We expect to deliver a data and inventory report partway through the process. There will be the plan, the subarea plan document. There will be an ordinance adjusting the development regulations to delineate the center, maybe to make zoning changes, maybe to change other development regulations. We focused, we did not focus a lot of attention on Casino Road area in the periodic update because we were doing this sub-area planning effort. So there are places that are going to be footsteps away from light rail that are our lowest zoning category right now. One of the things that we probably want to look at through this and many other things. We'll produce a comment report like we did for the periodic update with everything that we heard throughout the process and some sort of a SEPA document.

Sure. The plan's going to include a wide range of topic areas, as we've gone through a lot of them already, very similar to what we saw in the comp plan, but we will be hitting those on a more fine-grained area. Probably the biggest one is catalyst projects and programs is different. where we will be looking very site specific. We will be also looking at financial frameworks for doing those as well. What are the tools that are in the state of Washington toolbox? How can we implement those? Who should be the key implementers and some of that information? So those are it from a document point of view at this point.

Looking to identify street plans, we had a development recently that was on Casino Road that had frontage improvements required, and the frontage improvements interacted with a pull-out bus stop in a... PB, Harmon Zuckerman, In a way, and it would have been nice to know. I don't believe we could tell someone is a city right now we know what Casino Road right of way is going to look like in 20 years. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Probably not in its optimized configuration for connecting a community to to light rail stations. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, For So we just had to work with what we had. It would be fantastic if, and we're looking at the yellow highlighted streets or maybe a reasonable set that we would say, what we know today, we expect the right of way, this number of lanes, this width of bike lanes and sidewalks and all of that. so that as development happens, it can both contribute to it, get our frontage improvements and everything aligned to it, and then we can also be positioned to go for grants and all of that. Sound Transit has a walk-bike access to light rail stations fund that they're working through project lists and all of that. So this is, again, that boundary of what the plan covers should be about our extent of where we do things like these street plans.

And this is probably a good place to point out that FTA just announced a new TOD grant application. It's due in the middle of July. We are in the process of putting all of this information in a row to make sure as we go forward with it to look at it. There's some caveats in the grant application that only One network can be done throughout the process. And so if Snohomish County decides to go for it for the southern stations, it's only one of us that's going to get it. Or we have to join forces and do that separate together and then potentially pare down. It does have a 20% match. So that's part of the other consideration as to what we have to do. So that's us in a nutshell at the moment.

So like I said, we're doing a lot of organizing this process. Wanted to get some of this in front of you early. Much more to come.

This is going to be fun. I've been looking forward to this since the comp plan.

Are you guys excited?

I can see the excitement. Okay, comments, questions before we wrap up for the day.

What's the schedule on the roadshow when you're out in the community?

We're already in the community, but one of the things that we are very conscious of in this community is that we have to do it in a manner that the community feels safe because of what is going on, forces beyond our control, and how we do it very transparently but under the radar. So we will be piggybacking on a lot of other people's stuff we won't be doing big meetings we will be doing lots of little sort of micro events with different organizations and piggyback on when people are coming together a couple weeks ago i attended a session at the villages Interestingly enough, they had three people stationed at the outside gate and three people stationed at the inside gate in yellow vests, making sure that everybody felt safe and comfortable coming in and being there. And it was conducted primarily in Spanish, of which I do not speak, but I could get the gist of plenty of it. And I did have Alberto there to translate as needed, but we're going to get all of their comments from that. So using those types of activities where we might not be the lead But we are there to get the information. We'll continue to do and work with other organizations to do likewise. And if there is evidently like every other Thursday is food bank day and that's a good day to go and table and just sort of get people's ideas as they're standing in line and And there's usually a decent line, especially right now as services have been cut. And so what we're trying to do is to take care of that type of outreach and build on the connections we have in the community to use those and use community people as our advocates and conversions.

Additional questions, commissioners? All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. You guys do amazing work with a very small team. And as I said before, I just continue to be appreciative and impressed. So thank you. We're adjourned.