Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Recording in progress.

Calling to order the February 19, 2026 meeting of the Planning Commission. The meeting is held in person at the Fairfax Women's Club, 46 Park Road, Fairfax. It is also being held virtually on Zoom and is broadcast on Channel 27 and 99 and live streamed on the town's website. Can we have a roll call?

Beffer?

Here.

Jansen?

Here.

Kelly? Here. Absent. Newton? Here. Petrone?

Here.

Chair Swift?

Here. We have an approval of the agenda. Any changes to the agenda?

I was wondering if we could poll the audience and see who's here for the JADU ADU. item that we had agreed to agendize first but if these folks are only here for the two applications maybe we could move the adu jd adu to after the two applications

But that also doesn't address anybody that might be on Zoom as well.

Right. But I figure if you're on Zoom, it's going to be less of a burden to sit through the two items than it would be to sit through the JADU item if you're just here for the two Planning Commission approvals.

So let me ask the rest of the Commission, too, if they're willing to poll the audience and then potentially change the agenda.

Fine with me. That sounds fine. It's fine with me as well. I just want to note that I assume most people are here about the retail ordinance as opposed to the two actual applications.

Okay, is anyone here to speak to the ADU, JADU item one on the agenda? All right, thanks.

No, you're item two. Actually, you're six. No, you're 66. Yeah, no, they're not here for that one.

If that's the case, I would move to approve the agenda with the reorganization so that we take 202 Tamalpais Road first, 66 Creek Road second, the amendments to the town code relating to ADUs and JADUs third, and the amendments to the town code relating to the formula business and drive-through facilities fourth.

Second.

Beffer?

Yes.

Jansen?

Yes.

Newton? Yes. Petrone? Yes. Chair Swift? Yes.

So with that, we're going to go to item two, which is now item one.

Okay, so this is a project at 202 Tamalpais Road and involves the construction of a 425 square foot bedroom and full bathroom addition connected with a short hallway to an existing 475 square foot A-frame studio unit. The project constitutes a 50% remodel, expanding the existing A-frame because the A-frame is so small, right? The addition is just a bedroom and a bath. The area where the addition is proposed is level, so the only excavation will be for the new foundation. The area where the construction will take place is stable due to the retaining wall that's been built behind the structure and around the south side of the building. Therefore, although the site is in the landslide hazard zone and the project is a 50% remodel, staff made the determination that the project requires the approval of a conditional use permit and not a hill area residential development permit. The site's pretty well established and it shares the driveway and parking with 200 Tamalpais. So the project also requires the approval of a parking variance. The town code requires that a one bedroom residents have two parking spaces with one of them covered. And it requires a guest parking space if you do a 50% remodel. It's not really possible on this property because they share a driveway with 200 Tamalpais. It's all intertwined. It was all built by the gentleman who owned the house up the hill. So the request to expand the A-frame with a bedroom and a bathroom is supposed to get a parking variance. We can make the findings for both the required conditional use permit and for the parking variance because they are going to have two spaces for the one bedroom that they're adding. It's not clear to me, but you can ask the applicant. There are three spaces. There's two spaces for 200, and there's one space that's kind of up for grabs. I think it went in when the ADU was built at 200. It was at a time when they were required to provide parking for ADUs. If they did it today, they wouldn't have to provide that space. So I'm hoping that one space can kind of be shared, and I think it can be. There's really nowhere else to put a parking space. So the applicant indicated that there will be no new exterior lighting, but one color elevation shows two light fixtures that appear to be dark sky compliant on either side of the sliding glass door to the bedroom. But we've included your standard condition for requiring dark sky lighting in the building permit in the resolution. And the proposed addition exterior will use a combination of horizontal composite wood siding for the hallway area to match that of the existing A-frame portion of the structure. The bedroom portion will use perpendicular composite wood siding. And there are varied window sizes and locations. The hallway and the bedroom will both have flat roofs, but they've been stepped with the hallway roof at a lower elevation than the bedroom roof. Vertical siding will be painted gray, the horizontal siding off-white, and the door and window flashing will be dark gray to match the existing windows and door in the A-frame portion of the building. The west side of the addition will be constructed flush with the existing retaining wall that runs behind both the structures at 200 and 202 Tamalpais Road and around the south side of 202 Tamalpais. So based on our ability to make the required findings, We're recommending that you approve application 2601 by adopting resolution 202603. And we have some corrections to talk about in the staff report. I think we had text corrections that I'm going to run through real quickly. Yes, on page two, the first paragraph, one, two, three, the fourth line, it's supposed to be 200 Tamil Pious, not 100. So we're gonna make that correction to the staff report. Also on page five, the second to the last paragraph, it should be the 2010 to the 2030 Fairfax General Plan, not the 2031 Fairfax General Plan. And we'll correct the resolution number under attachments in the staff report and in the title of the resolution. I don't know how all that happened. And then in condition 20, The dark sky under number 20 should be capitalized. The D and the S in the dark sky should be capitalized. And again, in the last paragraph on page five, after the now, therefore, be it resolved, it should be the 2010 to the 2030 Fairfax General Plan. I must have been having brain cramps or something. That concludes our report.

Any questions for staff?

I have one question. So all the parking, there's five parking stalls shown. None of them are on the property in question. Two of them are basically under the other house. The other three are in what's called the common right-of-way easement. Can you explain how that matches with what the code requires? How should I interpret that? Because basically all five are on the honor property.

That's correct. But so when this gentleman built these buildings, he was supposed to record a document that set forth the easements, identifying which parking spaces were for 200 and which ones were for 202. And I can't find that it got recorded. So I thought we included a condition that they're going to have to record that before they get a building permit to do this addition. but it's a very steep site. And I mean, to build additional parking for either of the units at this point, it would be very disruptive to the road. You'd have to excavate basically a tunnel kind of, and since it's a one bedroom and the state only allows two adults, we can restrict it to two adults per bedroom. Potentially, hopefully there will only be two people ever living there and they are providing the two required. They just don't have the guest space that's required.

Well, there's a shared gas space. No, I understand the constraints, but... It's an existing situation. Right, but it's just the concern is all five are on another property. That's correct. So there's something that needs to be recorded in some form.

Yes, that's right. And it should have been recorded back when this happened.

But is that in the resolution?

It's not in there?

Yes, it's in paragraph 22. Okay.

Okay, I think I put it in there, but these days, I don't know. Might have dreamed it.

Any other questions for staff?

I got a real quick one. I assume because it wasn't in the staff report, we got no comments from neighbors, right? Specifically from 200. No. They're right next door.

No.

Do you know anything? Have they been consulted about this plan at all? No.

this owner that owns this A-frame actually built the big addition on the one next door. So they know each other.

Sure. So they're good friends.

You know, he and his wife have been staying in the A-frame.

Okay.

Right.

I see.

Yeah.

We'll have open time, public time. We'll talk about it.

Thank you. That's all for me.

Any other questions for staff? I had a quick question. Um, And it's in the reso where we mentioned that the applicant is responsible for any damage to the roads. But in this one, we don't address the need to video the roads. Do we... Are we selective with that as opposed to the project or?

No, that comes from public works. And it may be that the new public works director didn't mention anything like that. I mean, you can add it back in.

Well, I think. Probably it might be something for staff to address since we do have a new public works director to get her input on that.

If that's, well, we send the plans to her, right. And she has a chance to review everything. But it can't hurt to add it back in. If you, if you feel that it's important.

Okay. We can talk about that.

I mean, it's not, they're not, so I don't, you can check with the applicant, but based on how you have to go up so many stairs to get to this construction area, I don't think you can ask them if the foundation is going to be done by hand. I don't think maybe they're going to have a huge, you know, I'm not sure the construction vehicles that would come out to a normal site are going to be coming out on the road and have the potential to damage it. But you can ask the applicant that. He's a seasoned contractor, and he'll be able to tell you if that's something you should include or not. She didn't, there were no comments. She said, I have no concerns with this project. So that's what we went with.

Sorry, any on Zoom? Oh, sorry. No other questions for staff? Then does the applicant wish to make a comment on this? Mm-hmm.

Cool. Thank you. Hi. Yeah, I've lived here in Fairfax for 32 or 33 years. How are you? Known Linda for a pretty long time. Yeah. Anyways, so parking. Absolutely right. All of the parking is on 200. There's a shared driveway there. where you get up from the road to the parking that's actually on 202 so those two things are required to get off the road and then get up there so some of it's on 200 and some of it's on 202 and for sure it's a it's a really steep awkward you know situation but it works really well um All of my neighbors are like, yay, go. And I do know my neighbors at 200. In fact, I'm doing a little bit of repair work at their house right now because I built it, fortunately and unfortunately. Public Works, totally happy to talk to Public Works. I'm actually meeting with Public Works around the corner there. There's another neighbor who has a retaining wall that's falling over, and I am helping them all resolve those issues. It's kind of what I do in the neighborhood and have been doing that for years and years. Anyways, would love it if you guys would approve it. And let me know if you have any more questions.

Does anyone have questions for the applicant?

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Yeah.

I'm going to open this up to public comment. Does anyone have public comments about this application?

Seeing none, any on Zoom? I see no hands on Zoom.

Closing public comments, I'm going to bring it back to the Commission.

Any comments, a motion? We forgot to ask the applicant about the heavy trucks question about the video.

Do you want to bring it back up to ask that?

No. My assumption is that if planning public works had thought that that was appropriate, they would have included it. And maybe we should just ask staff to remind public works that that's an option. I will do that. Yep.

Any other comments? Do we have a motion?

I'll make a motion. Sorry, a motion to approve resolution 2026-01 of the Fairfax Planning Commission approving a conditional use permit, parking variance and design review permit for a bedroom and full bathroom addition to the existing studio residence at 202 Tamalpais Road with including some corrections noted by staff during the staff presentation.

And I will second with the clarification that it's going to be renumbered resolution 202603.

And I had a comment on the reso before we take a vote on it on page.

You have to ask for a friendly amendment to do that.

Question for staff is page three on the reso. There's number six and number eight. Are they?

Yeah, that's a duplicate. I don't know how that happened. Which one do you like better? We could take out eight or we can take, I want to take out eight. No, they're a little bit different, though. One's telling them that we're going to be red-tagged if you're constructing based on plans that have been altered without approval, and the other one is advising them that the planning director can approve certain changes if they're not significant. I wonder if we should just, in number eight, if we remove the last part. That says any construction based on job plans that have been altered. Would that make more sense than six covers the changes, right? That you'll be red tagged and it won't be a repeat in number eight. Would that be, understand what I'm saying?

Can you repeat that?

Okay. So number six is saying any changes or modifications will require the approval of the Planning Commission. Any construction based on plans that have been altered without the benefit of an approved modification will result in the job being immediately stopped and red-tagged. In number eight, we're trying to say that the planning director does have some authority. Like if they come in and, you know, they want to make a window smaller or something for some reason, we don't necessarily bring it back to you guys. So we're trying to say two different things and I don't know how they got so similar.

Can we leave them the way they are?

That's fine with me. I just wanted to clarify that they seem to be duplicative to They differ slightly. All right.

Friendly amendment denied.

But now that I'm reading them, I really think it would be better to take the second sentence in number eight and delete it. Any construction based on job plans that have been altered without the benefit of an approved modification will result in the job being immediately stopped and red-tagged. That's what number six says.

Yeah, but that's, first off, it's not the second sentence. It's the third sentence.

Okay.

It also is specifically referencing the application number 2601 and the fact that it could be modified. I would almost delete the second sentence of six if you want to delete something that's technically, I mean, you know, that's why I think you should leave them all the way they are because it's awkward, but it's fine. Okay.

Motion stands as it was.

We have a roll call vote. Petrone?

Yes.

Jansen?

Yes.

Pfeffer?

Yes.

Newton?

Yes.

Chair Swift?

Yes. The application, it's gonna be a long night. The application's been approved and there is a 10-day appeal process and staff in the planning department can provide information on that. Thank you. So going on to item two, which is item three. Can we have the staff report on Tamalpais?

Okay. So this is for 66 Creek Road, and it's construction of a 254-square-foot garage addition at the front of the residence. The garage has a sloped roof and is 15 feet in height at its tallest point. The siding and roof of the new garage will match the horizontal siding and roof of the existing house. The town in the recent past approved a JADU, permit for the conversion of the existing carport to a jadu and that's necessitating the need for a garage in front of that so um the town code requires that properties in the rd 5.5-7 zone be a minimum of 60 feet wide this is not 60 feet wide and the section goes on to state that if the or if the site doesn't meet the requirements then any changes modifications or new construction will require a conditional use permit from the planning commission The code also requires that new structures maintain a combined side yard setback of 15 feet. The west side of the new garage, along with the east side of the existing residence, maintains a combined side yard setback of only 12 feet. Therefore, the project requires the approval of a combined side yard setback variance.

Construction of the garage will bring the property into compliance with the covered parking requirements once the ADU is built in the carport.

site's not located within a quarter mile of any known northern spotted owl nesting site two light fixtures are proposed on each side of the garage door so we've included in the resolution that the plan the planning commission standard dark sky condition requiring that all exterior light fixtures comply with the dark sky lighting standards building the garage within the required setback of 15 feet will not require the removal of any trees. The height of the structure is similar to or less than that of surrounding homes, and the structure will comply with the minimum side yard setbacks and the combined front and rear setback. Therefore, we're able to make the findings to recommend approval of the conditional use permit and the variance, and we're recommending that you approve the project by adopting resolution number 2026-04. That's a correction to the last page of the staff report, and I should go through the other corrections. So we're going to add the application number on the first page of the project in the opening square that lists all the basic information, address and the date and everything. We left it off under the action that's being considered. And then on page three, the first paragraph, we're going to change ADU to JADU in the second sentence. And then... Oh my God, what did I do here? We're going to correct the reso number on the last page under attachments. I'm going to correct the reso number on the first page of the resolution to 20-26-04. Oh, and we're going to correct the planning director's name on the last page of the resolution. Okay, and then we're going to eliminate, we're recommending that you eliminate condition 19. Why are we doing that? No, we don't want to eliminate that. We don't want to eliminate 19. I'm not sure why I said that. We want to correct under 18. We want to correct dark sky and capitalize the D and the S and put them together. Yeah, leave 19 in. And then under now, therefore, be it resolved, the first sentence should read, The approval of the conditional use permit and the combined side yard setback variance to build a garage to replace the covered parking lost when converting the existing carport to a junior accessory dwelling unit are not contrary to the policies contained in the 2010-2030 Fairfax General Plan or the regulations contained in the Fairfax Town Code. That would conclude our report.

Any questions for staff?

I have one. In the table, the FAR is listed as no change. But if I look at the plans, it seems like there's more concrete pavement. Oh, sorry. I'm misreading that. Yep. I answered my own question. Thank you.

OK. Thank you. Thank you for answering my question. Any other questions for staff?

I have a couple of questions on the reso. And you can just let me know if you corrected those in your report. Page 2, at the top, should be 2010-2030. Yes. General plan. I had a question on page 3a. It references the project sponsor.

Yeah, that's like standard language. I don't know. Okay. That's fine. Okay. I mean, I'm wondering if they're using sponsor because sometimes it's the contractor, but sometimes the property owner acts as the project manager. I mean, you could say project manager, I guess.

Page four, number eight. Yes. It talks about conditions placed by outside agencies or any town department. maybe eliminated by that entity provided written notifications to the planning department. But we also have a similar item number 17 on page five under miscellaneous that seems to be the same.

Yeah, they are the same. Do you want to eliminate 17?

Whichever one you want to. Eliminate if it's a duplication.

I think.

I'm just wondering. 17.

No, I would keep them both. Just this is, you know, number eight is just factually about the conditions, whether or not they're effective. And 17 is governing the conduct of the applicant.

I mean, all of these, this is like standard language that we've been using for a long time. I haven't retyped this or anything. So, and it was developed literally, I don't know, back in 1980, 89, but with the, with the, the building department, the planning director and the public works, they came up with all these conditions.

And that's fine. I'm just seeing some differences in these versus what we've had before, before. Um,

may have something to do with your current planning department being down to one employee again.

Hi, everyone. In paragraph 19, should that be resolution 202604 now? Yes, thank you. It should.

I was going to delete it, so I didn't catch that. Yeah, it shouldn't be deleted.

Through the chair, I'll move to approve. Oh, duh.

It's contagious. I'm sorry. so no more questions for staff does the applicant wish to come up and speak to the project is the applicant here you don't have to but if you want to come up does commission have any questions for the applicant okay thank you um Going to open this to public comments. Does anyone have public comments on this application?

Any on Zoom? I see no hands on Zoom, Chair Swift.

So I'm going to close public comment and bring it back to the Commission for discussion and a possible motion.

Commissioner Newton? I'm sorry I jumped the gun earlier, but now I would like to move to approve resolution 202604 of the Fairfax Planning Commission approving application number 2602 for a conditional use permit and a combined side yard setback variance. to construct a 254 square foot garage at 66 Creek Road with the changes that we've discussed regarding the corrections on the resolution that was posted, the planning director's name, the dark sky capitalization, the language after the now therefore be it resolved, the change in paragraph 19, the references to the general plan,

Do we have a second?

I will second.

Do we have a roll call, please?

Seconded that? Okay. All right. Petrone? Yes. Jansen? Yes. Beffer? Yes. Newton?

Yes.

Chair Swift?

Yes.

Motion passes.

So the motion carries. There is a 10-day appeal process that information on the appeal process can be gathered from the planning department. Thank you. Now we're going to have item one, public hearing considering recommendation to the town council to amend chapter 17.048 to comply with recent changes in state law. Can we have a staff report, please?

Yes, thank you, Chair Swift and planning commissioners. This is a continued public hearing from January 15th, 2026. So I'll try to keep the intro brief and just get right into the changes. So there is numerous state laws that were passed this past year, and they kind of gave us a short timeframe to update the ADU code. So we did kind of adopt an urgency ordinance as kind of a placeholder, which kind of takes a little bit of the pressure off of us to kind of hurry up and adopt this. So essentially since the last, at the last meeting, There was two primary issues. One was the Planning Commission felt that there needed to be a definition of an interior usable, livable space. and the model ordinance that was kind of provided by the state and by our attorneys didn't really have anything like that. They kind of had a definition of livable space and usable space, but they didn't really kind of combine the two concepts. So we added in that term, which we think helps with the readability of the ordinance because they really rely on that interior livable space to kind of determine how large ADUs can be now. It's, In the past, you used to be able to just kind of draw a box around the exterior of the ADU and do a simple calculation. Now you have to subtract out all of the equipment and closets and garages. So it makes it for a more complicated calculation on how large ADUs can be. And then the second one, which is kind of a... there are numerous numbering errors that occurred in the red line document. And so I think what the, but I went back and compared the clean version of the document, which is what you'll actually be adopting is pretty clean. There's not any mistakes in it that I could find. So I think all of the mistakes actually occurred in the translation between the, the old code and the new code. And there was a lot of formatting issues, especially with the numbering, the numbering got all kind of, It didn't translate across, and so it kind of made a lot of numbering mistakes in the redline version of the code. So what I did is I kind of just took, I just kind of handed it. I didn't use the compare document feature because that just wasn't working, so I had to kind of hand... comb through the code and independently highlight and underline and redline everything. So I think I got most of it corrected, but I think Mimi found a few mistakes that I still had kind of lingering behind. But just to be clear, you're just adopting the resolution with the clean version. You're not actually adopting the redlined version of the code. We're not recommending that they adopt the red line version of the code. The red line is just for illustration purposes only. You're not actually adopting that because it's complete replacement. You're just throwing out this chapter and you're putting in the whole new chapter. So just to go through the changes, the And these are all the changes, the collective changes that were made from the version of the code that the HCD had us do in 2025. So these are all the changes that were made for the 20, that are being made for the 2026 version of the code. So in this particular case, I'm assuming, we're kind of assuming the urgency ordinance doesn't exist just for the purposes of this exercise, because we just want to compare what was done in 2025 to what is being done in 2026. And just that's kind of an easier way to understand what the changes were to state law over the past year. So the first change is adding a definition of director because that term is kind of used throughout and there just needs to be a term so that everybody knows what the director is. Is it the town manager? Is it the planning director? Is it the public works director? What is the director? So that was added. The second one, as I mentioned before, is we added a definition of interior livable space, and we also added a parenthesis that basically clarifies that a junior ADU size is based on interior livable space. Then there was a whole bunch of changes under the approval section because HCD has a very specific language that they require to be used for the approval process for ADUs. And it tightens down some of the timelines. For example, we have to make a determination for completeness in 15 days, which is pretty tight versus the typical 30 days. There's also some Fairfax specific language in here. That has been carried across. There's an amnesty program for people that have built an ADU a long time ago but never got permits for. They can kind of come back in after the fact and get permits without a penalty, which is as long as they can pay the fees. And then there's also a 50% discount as part of the incentive program to encourage people to do that. And then also the change that the council – Wanted to see made in here is to have it expire on January 1st, 2036. And so then there's all these are changes to the process. They also introduced this concept of classes. So there's class one and class two ADUs. Then they have definitions about how all of those classes work. This was a significant change. They changed when an ADU can be permitted is if it's on a lot with a single family home. So it's not so dependent on the zoning district anymore. It's just if it's related to a single family home or not. Some clarifications in here that it's based on interior livable space. The class two, and also then the other distinction to understand is the class. And this isn't a new distinction, but it's... It's just that they organized it into Class 1 and Class 2, but the Class 1 are all of the ADUs that are processed ministerially with a very strict development standards. And then the Class 2 ADUs are locally regulated, and those are the ones that we can apply our design standards to. So that's the distinction that, and we had that distinction in 2025. So that's, it's really not any different. It's just the way that HCD wants to have them organized now. Hoping my voice holds out here. There are some changes to the, rental term that no ADU may be rented for a term that is shorter than 31 days. And that's been tightened down. It was different in the previous year where it was no ADU or JADU may be rented for a term that is shorter than 31 days. And it's changed to no ADU built after January 1st, 2020 may be rented for a term that is shorter than 31 days. So they're kind of changing what can be rented when and for how long. There was a change to the occupancy requirements for JADUs. The JADUs previously had an owner occupancy requirement that was eliminated. It still exists if the JADU shares sanitary facilities with the ADU, then the owner occupancy requirement applies. But if they have separate sanitary facilities, then the owner does not need to occupy either one of the structures. The... Other change, which was based on a state law related to emergencies, was timing on their certificates of occupancy. So hypothetically, if a house, if an entire property got wiped out by a flood, fire, storm, what have you, the state law, if there was a declaration of an emergency declared by the governor, Then the property owner could build the ADU first, and then they could occupy the ADU while they built the primary dwelling. And so you wouldn't have to have the right, I mean, currently you have to have a house before you can have an ADU. This would allow you to kind of flip that around in an emergency situation. And then we didn't, There were not any not very many changes to the kind of the development standards that the that are unique to Fairfax and that those are represented in the ordinance. Under G, specific requirements. And there's some language added in here that kind of recognizes that whole class thing that came up with so that the following requirements apply only to class to. And so there's some. It's relatively unchanged, except for we added some language related to that interior livable space definition that we created. And then there's an addition, there's a change to the setback where there's no longer a setback required For an ADU, if it's constructed in the same location to the same dimensions as an existing structure. For example, if there was a garage built too close to the property line, they could convert that garage into an ADU without having to go through any extra variance processing. There was also some, I think I inadvertently deleted... One of the open space requirements. So we want to have a minimum open space total requirement that doesn't allow the open space to fall below 50%. This is G5. And then we also want to have a minimum open space usable requirement. that no ADU on a lot subject to this subdivision may cause the open space to fall below 300 square feet per unit. And so I think that one of those was inadvertently eliminated in the January draft. So that was added back in. So it's not new from 2025. It's just keeping them both from 2025. Then that's pretty much it there. There were some changes to fees. Impact fees changed for J-80Us. And the definition, of course, now relates to interior livable space. So any ADU or JADU that is less than 750 square feet is not required to pay an impact fee. And then an ADU or JADU that is less than 500 square feet does not need to pay school fees, which really isn't our thing, but we are required to put it in our code. And then the school districts would not be allowed to charge a fee for units that are smaller than 500 or smaller than 500 square feet. And then also adding kind of references to JADU. Have we gotten to our fire thing yet? And then the Oh, then there's a new language related to direct utility connections. It's required for separate conveyance of an and a separate conveyance is allowed under this code. So the requirement for a separate utility connection in some cases. And then there's some new language related to non-conforming zoning conditions, just to make sure that it's referencing ADUs and JADUs. And then, oh, then under fire sprinklers, which I think I have to go back for that. Oh, here it is. So under G3, I believe it is, or is it? No, F3. So this applies to all ADUs, is that fire sprinklers are required in an ADU or JADU if sprinklers are required in the primary residence. So that's new language that they had us add. And then also, HCD had an addendum that they recently adopted to pick up another change, which under B under this category is the construction of an ADU or JADU, which needs to be added to my code, does not trigger a requirement for fire sprinklers to be installed in the existing primary dwelling. So anyway, so I hope that was helpful. I know that's a lot of kind of changes, so... Um, and then I think, uh, and then. Mimi did take the time and go through and I think she identified some more numbering changes and I, I didn't have a chance to look at this today, but I don't know if commissioner Newton, if you wanted to walk us through this, or or if we wanted to.

Well, thank you. I have a number of questions about what you've just said before I do that. Okay. Okay.

So are you done with that report? Yeah, that's my report.

So I think if you're happy with what this looks like, we can advance it on to the next. Council would just make a recommendation. If you think it needs more work, then we can continue it.

Questions for staff?

Yeah, so what you're saying is we will be putting a clean copy of what we will be recommending to the council that they adopt in as an attachment to the resolution that we would adopt to move this forward. Correct? Right.

Basically you'd be adopting the planning commission resolution, whatever it is to 2026. Oh, Oh, oh two. And the only attachment to that resolution would be the clean version of the, um, of the code.

Okay. I'm going to ask you to speak closer to your mic for the rest of the evening because you sometimes get a little far away and sometimes it's hard to pick you up. But I heard that. Um, now I assume, gosh, I sound like a lawyer. I assume you think it's important that the council and the public I have identified for them the changes to either the existing code today or the version that was in play in 2025, right? Correct. So that would require a red line, not just talking through it all, correct?

Well, it's also in the staff report. That's how we generally prefer to do it and how our attorneys recommend that we do it is we put it in a detailed staff report and we don't rely on a red line document.

Well, I think... You know, I don't know how the other commissioners feel, but personally, I think this would be a morass to try to understand without being able to look at a red line as to what you're talking about. I don't know. How do you go? Well, we can get into that when we talk because these are still questions. I have a lot of questions for my fellow commissioners about some of the recommendations here. that I guess I'll hold off on until after we hear public comment on this, because I really think it's a dialogue that we all need to have as commissioners. Thanks. Any other questions for staff?

Yeah, I have one. In the resolution, it talks about the height of the structure. And I am in the wrong version here. And it references, I think, legal grade. What does that mean? Yeah, the height is measured from existing legal grade. Is that defined somewhere in the structure? What page? Oh, sorry. That is page 7 of the Clean Amendment, item F. So that's 2F on page 7, item 2F, F2F. For the purpose of this subsection, height is measured from the existing legal grade or the level of the lower floor, whichever is lower, that's clean. What is existing legal grade?

Yeah, I would have to check. It should be something that's in our definition section of the overall zoning code. And if it's not, then it would be a miss. So it would be something we'd have to add in if it's not in there. Okay, thank you.

Any other questions for staff for me?

It would be in the relatively recent updates. It might be in there.

My questions, you mentioned the minimum open space. And that was in the original. That was in the prior code. It was left, and just to clarify, it was left, right, it was left out of our January staff report. But the only change that was made to what was in there in 2025 was you did the paren total.

Correct.

That's part of the red line.

Yeah. And that is one thing that was kind of whacked out that we want to add back in because it's not in the urgency ordinance. So we want to get that back into the code.

Okay. The question or the comment about the fire sprinklers. So that was not in what we had in January. And it's actually not in this one, but that was one of the recommendations I made in the January meeting to add in that, since that was part of the legislation this year, to change that to say that neither an ADU nor a JADU would then force the primary residents to have a sprinkler. So in the January one, it just mentioned the ADU. It didn't mention the JADU. So I don't believe that's not in what we have before us. So that would be something we would need to change. Yep.

To go forward. Yeah, that's one that was missed by just about everybody. It's not in the urgency ordinance. It's not in the HCD handbook. It's not anywhere. So everybody's kind of realizing that was a little glitch.

And I wanted to thank staff for correcting the rental term back to what it was previously. Any other questions for staff? I'm going to open this up to public comment. Does anyone have public comments on this item?

Good evening. Todd Greenberg, downtown Fairfax. I believe in some of the prior presentations, there is a comparison. of some sort of what different towns were doing. Since effects is small and we have less staff, it might be really helpful if prior to moving this forward so that it doesn't become a ongoing iterative process. If there was a request made to each other Marin and other relevant jurisdictions as to what they've done. And a comparison matrix table was put together so we could see what we were doing versus what other jurisdictions had done rather than just, uh, thinking of things as we go along, and it might make it easier for staff, even though it is a collative process to obtain that. But I'm thinking that some other planning departments might be helpful in some way or might have already done this work, which would make it really easy. And that's my primary comment. That being said, though, there are a couple things. I haven't made my way through this entirely, but I'm going to just point out one thing that's a concern. Two things that are a concern. If we're adding a definition of director, is there any consideration for when the director is unavailable or incapacitated on who else would make that decision? There should be a second named. Additionally, can I finish here? I have one more thing. What about seniors who might, it talks about short-term rentals no longer permitted in any JADU. Fairfax has a lot of seniors, and Marin County is the grayest of all counties, all 58 counties in California. I don't know if any of you have friends or family members that are getting old, but it's quite a challenge when that happens. And there's all kinds of different needs that occur. And given changing rent laws, it might be – limiting on families in terms of being able to care for their elders if they weren't able to have a contractual arrangement on a short term rental basis for their small room for a caregiver there. Just a thought. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments from the public in the room?

Deb London, I just would like to encourage you when you're going through all this stuff to please keep an eye toward making this process simple. When property owners decide to make an ADU on their property, they do not do it lightly. And they're spending lots and lots and lots and lots of money. And it's doing nothing but this town a favor by providing what is already a low-income town housing for seniors, disabled, for everyone, young adults, new families. So please make this a straightforward, simple process. Thank you. Thank you.

If no other comments from the room, I'll open it up to Zoom. Is anyone on Zoom with public comments for this item?

And I just would like to take a moment through the chair to remind our Zoom audience that if you'd like to speak on this item, raise your hand. There's a raise hand icon in the bottom center of your screen, and now would be the time. And I see no hands raised, Chair Swift.

Thank you. So I'm going to close public comment and bring it back to the commission for comments and discussion. Commissioner Newton.

Thanks. I've got a lot of nitpicky edits that I'm going to hold off on. But I wanted to chat about a couple more bigger policy type questions with you guys before we get into that. So just bear with me. When we talk about the definition of interior livable space on, you know, I'm just using my red line. So this is page two of the red line. There is an existing definition of living area in this section that's almost identical to interior livable space, except it specifically says that it doesn't include a garage or any accessory structure. So I'm assuming that's the difference, that the interior livable space may include a garage and obviously may include an accessory structure. Is that right?

Yeah, I think that captures it. Yeah.

One of the questions that came up last month that I was thinking about is the concerns that Commissioner Pfeffer raised regarding having a deadline 10 years from now. when the incentive program would inspire expire and how do you encourage people, uh, not to just wait to the end of that time period to seek the, uh, permission for their unit and avoid paying the tax in the interim. So I don't know how you guys feel, but I like the idea of a sliding scale, increasing the tax over the 10 year period. Start with like year two, 10%, year three, 20%. You're, you know, so the longer you wait, the higher your, your, you're going to be paying that tax even if it's not going to be at 100% until 2036. So it's just my idea, and I don't know what you guys think.

Two great thoughts. I think I've been mulling about the same ones. So starting with the later one, I noticed also the expiration date for the amnesty program. And the thing that I believe was missing is that it only applies to existing ADUs, which means they have to be built and in operation before January 1, 2026. Because otherwise, the current expedition list is 2036. So I could build one next year and ride it out for a nice year. So that is the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. So I think the amnesty program is intended for those units that already exist, meaning constructed before 2026. And then you can argue how long you want to run it. I would recommend... to put the cutoff at the end of the housing cycle, because what you're trying to do is bring them in the fold. It's no use to bring them in after the housing cycle closes. So I believe that 2032, is that when we have a new cycle? Whatever the right date is.

So those are my thoughts in the same way, just put two dates in. Can I make a clarification on that? Yeah. I think that the... The way that the amnesty program works is that it does apply to all ADUs, the discount. So if you come in for just a new ADU, then you currently qualify for this 50% discount. Correct. And that expires in 2036. The other part of it is if you have an illegal ADU, you qualify for the discount, and also you don't get assessed penalties. Correct. So that's kind of the difference. And that also expires in 2036. Okay. So it kind of captures all ADUs as part of the incentive program. It's not just the old or new. It's just all ADUs get the 50% discount.

Okay. Yeah, but still then is it useful to make that window past the current housing cycle? That would be so when 2036 is past that, which I don't think serves anything. But that would be for consideration. Um, the other element that I would like to bring up, um, let me see. What was that? Where were we? Um, um, uh, sorry. My notes are somewhere. I know they're somewhere. There's three documents in here. So there, uh, Oh, that's the livable area. Um, I'm surprised to not see the term conditioned space that is often used and that you could also say it is habitable. But then in a second part of it, where it is a livable area, it talks about an attic. I do not understand how an attic could be a livable space. And of course, you're getting into The vague area, which would be a walk-in closet, that is habitable space normally. So what I often see when the building code is used is the conditioned space. So your living room is, your kitchen is, your walk-in closet is, your garage is not. If your basement is, say, eight foot tall and is conditioned, yes, it is. But if it is a crawl space, it's not. Again, suggestion, it's one way to do it, but I think there is some, still some, and you can use different terms, it doesn't matter, but it is still ambiguous. And then the samples given don't help because they're only samples. So it's not inclusive. those are my thoughts about the same two topics for discussion.

So would that be just replacing the word habitable with conditioned? Is that your suggestion?

Well, we currently have three items, right? Living area, livable space, and interior livable space. Having all three of them by itself doesn't really help, but I think they're all mentioned in the code. That's why they are mentioned here. But then the, so the living area is referenced from the interior livable space. Basically what it says, the interior livable space is defined as habitable area, sea living area. So the definition is under living area, which is fine. But then there it says it includes, or does not include a garage or an accessory structure, but it does include basement and attics. An attic, well, it could be. If it is tall enough, you make it a sleeping platform. But if it's just the space above your roof where the rats live, then I don't think so. What I mean is it's still a little fuzzy, so it needs a little bit more work. And a conditioned space is often used because the conditioned spaces is where you are, where you live, where you access the things you need to live, like a walk-in closet or your kitchen cabinets. But it does not include an attic or a garage or the shed in the yard or a call space. But it does include your wine cellar. So it's a simple word. That's what I would recommend.

so question for staff these definitions did they all come out of hcd come out of the state come out of the legislation yes these are all in the model code except for the interior livable space which we added well you said the model code but is the model code the one that was developed

Yeah, I prefer local. These are all in the handbook, the HCD handbook, if you'd rather use that. These are all in the HCD handbook, these definitions.

So these are the definitions that HCD wants used.

Correct. And I think the... rule is that they would like for us just to use their stuff but if we come up with our own language then they'll review it and and and if it's consistent and still does the same accomplishes the same things they'll be okay with it that leads to a follow-up question does hdc then not define these terms if they use them themselves

These are the terms that they use. Oh, these are the ones they use. Yes.

Interesting. Can we be a little bit more careful about what we're talking about here? We're looking at the definition section of our code. And we're looking at the pre-2025 version definition. which has all these definitions, including livable space and living area and multifamily lot and natural person, that we're not changing. The only two that we're changing or proposing to include in our recommendation to the town council to change is director and interior livable space.

Correct.

But you're saying all of these other definitions are in the HCV handbook?

Yep. From previous years. They've carried them through.

Okay. Okay. And, but interior livable space was not, and you recommend that we add it. Well, I think, I think that came from the commission at the last meeting. No, I think at the last meeting, what happened was we started looking at a PowerPoint and And the first thing on the PowerPoint was we're going to change some definitions. And the one that we were looking at on the PowerPoint said interior livable space. And I said, that's not on this red line that I'm looking at. It hadn't been included. So I disagree that this was a planning commission incentive. I think it came from the planning department recommending that we add it. Right.

Yeah, I think basically in the HCD handbook, they use the word interior livable space and they don't define it. I would speculate that they're counting on the fact that they define livable space and they define living area and they don't really need to define interior livable space. So I think just for clarity purposes, it was just decided it'd be better just to add that definition.

sorry i was going to say that's right that's um in the hcd language they use interior livable space um as a not defined term and i think the planning department said we should have a definition for it since we use it um and the change is uh like a dozen times or so um Just my thoughts on this specific issue is I like the idea of bringing in the term condition space. Just a quick search. It does seem to be used in various different elements of California law, like the energy guidelines and things like that. Okay.

the latest observation that makes sense. So if interior livable space is brought in by the HTC, then that makes sense that it is talking about livable space. The interior words just added, but then the reference is wrong here because then in the code language we're looking at, it should say the interior have also space with an area that you see living or see livable space. It should not say see living area because that is... Not the same. And the living area is the weird one where you have the attic. So on a very simple level, I would change that. Don't reference living area or reference livable space because that's what it says. And that term by itself is still a little bit fake, but at least it's then consistent with the HDC. And then if we want... we could add the conditioned space element in our definition of interior livable space. So you're pretty consistent.

If we added it to the livable space definition, it would be referenced if we add the reference to livable space in the interior livable space definition. You couldn't have conditioned exterior livable space. I guess you could, like have an outdoor kitchen or something. You could. So, yeah, if we added it to livable space, so we said a conditioned space in a dwelling...

I would keep the word that it's habitable and conditioned.

So a conditioned space in a dwelling intended for human habitation, including living, sleeping, eating, cooking, or sanitation, just adding conditioned before space.

Yeah. Seems like a...

Do any of the other commissioners have thoughts on the fee increase?

Yeah. unsurprisingly, I've been thinking about this one as well. And first, I very much like the idea of tying it to the housing cycle. I think that makes sense. You know, who knows what the policy overall is going to be. And the time that that's getting developed is when we're developing the plans for the next housing cycle. So I would recommend making that edit. And then for the amnesty element, I think there are two different issues driving it. So I think we do include newly built units because the 50% reduction in the fee is to encourage people to build them. during this housing cycle when Fairfax needs units built. And I think the issue for the existing ADUs and JDUs should, you know, This section about the processing fee and the approvals just needs to be built out, I think, to separate those two as a concept, because I think at any point in time during this housing cycle, we would want the new ADU or JADU to get that 50% reduction or whatever the program happens to be at the time. For the non-permitted ADU or JADUs, I was thinking You know, just in terms of giving people notice, I think just approving it here, having the town code amended isn't really enough. And I wouldn't do a sliding scale, but what I would do is say, you know, you have one year from when the town sends you a notice that we believe you have an unpermitted unit to do it. Otherwise, you're out of the incentive program. Because... That gives them time to research, and maybe one year isn't the right period of time. But I think it's whenever they should have known that this opportunity is available and it's going to run out. So I don't know. I'm happy to think more and listen to other people's thoughts on how that should work. But I think it's really just... a matter of notice. And I guess I will hold on the other issues for now. But for me, that's a very important point because especially as is, we don't want people to have the right to start the process right before the end of the housing cycle. We don't get the units and we don't get the fees. And I guess related to

have another point on the impact fees if we're going to talk about that uh later um i mean i don't want to talk you guys out of your sliding scale idea but i just want to mention that this particular section is was specifically requested fairly animately by the town council so what you may recommend something but it is might be unlikely to survive

I remember the discussion at the town council meeting and it was, it was more about the program continuing to exist. I don't, to me, there wasn't discussion, uh, that I recall on the point of how do we avoid abuse of this extension? I know they were very specific that they wanted it to be because it was going to expire a lot sooner. I think, right. It was, um, It was 2026 or 2027 because they bumped it 10 years.

So you specifically want to recommend separating out, potentially separating them out?

Yeah, just because I think the incentive program for new units makes sense. But right now, just avoiding financial penalties is just – tucked in there, and that doesn't apply to new units, but getting amnesty for avoiding financial penalties for operating an ADU for 20 years, which uses town resources and deprives the town. It's not just benign in that the town receives money allocated from the state and the federal government, oftentimes based on counts of how many dwelling units are in the town and how many households and things like that. And so the more of these things that are underreported, it's not just local tax revenue from the businesses, it's we're not getting the amount of resources we could or should from the state. It's a big deal. But And maybe this is more of a question, but since I've been talking about fees, I'll just add it in now. For the impact fees, waiving them for schools with the size of a unit. I know a kid living in a space smaller than that. The idea is that if you have a small JADU, it's not going to be families there. And that's why they're not paying the school impact fee, because there's no impact. You don't need more. resources if you have 480 use that are senior citizens versus if you have 400 more units that have two or three year one kid for the school and I don't know if that's a something that other towns have considered. I don't know how common getting rid of school impact fees is.

Oh, this isn't from the town. That's specifically from the state. And that's where footage is? Where they came up with that square footage, I do not know. But, yeah, that comes from the state, yeah. Okay.

So going back to the timing from 2010, to coinciding with the housing element. The housing element runs through 2030 or beyond?

2031.

2031. So we're in 2026 now. So that gives, and to be able to count a JADU or ADU, it has to be a occupancy permit, right?

Correct.

So it's not just going and getting a permit to either construct an accessory dwelling unit, or getting a permit to make one come into code, it's having the occupancy permit issued, which is a change the state has made over the years because I think initially it was you issue a permit, you count it. right but a bit more fun for us right yeah so that gives people five years to construct an adu and jdu which at times isn't a lot of time anymore um So I don't know that if we're looking at tying this into the end of the housing element, that it's worthwhile to put in any penalties between when they come in with a permit to when the, I mean, I agree with tying this to the housing element and making that recommendation, but I don't know that I would considering the timeframe.

Are you speaking about newly constructed ones or existing ones that are getting legalized? Both. Does it take five years or a long period to legalize an existing unit?

I guess it can depend on what the unit looks like. And that's also stating that that unit may or may not have been rented out for any period of time as well. It could have been something that, you know, they didn't rent out. So... they may not be getting that advantage from it. Or having the issue of going out and noticing somebody saying that you've got an illegal unit here, which I don't think we do either. So, I mean, I think it's a good idea to tie it, to try and make the recommendation to tie it to the housing, the end of the housing element, but Beyond that, I wouldn't look at penalties.

So then how do you avoid the issue of this means everybody who is going to legalize the unit at the end of this year because this is when the program expired before decides they're just going to wait until December 31, 2035?

Well, and that's assuming that you're going to have people coming in now at the end of the expiration of the current amnesty doing that.

Right. But so then they, at some point they would be paying a penalty. Um, the time period to avoid paying that and getting it legalized is expiring.

Just my thoughts on that issue. Um, And I would recommend changing, because we haven't done it, the recommendation to add the JADU into the fire sprinkler statement, which would be in section 17.048.010, paren F, paren 3, paren B. Sorry. Could you do that slower?

Or tell me what page you're on. I don't.

So. In the non.

Wait a minute. Don't. I'm sorry.

Just give me that header right now. Seven of the morning.

Deep. Fire sprinklers. OK.

Thanks. Which is exhibit 1, page 7, the non-redlined exhibit 1. It's paren 3, paren b. Changing it from the construction of an ADU does not trigger a requirement. for fire sprinklers to be installed in the existing primary dwelling to the construction of an ADU or a JADU does not trigger a requirement for fire sprinklers to be installed in the existing primary dwelling. So it's just adding for clarification that it also applies to the JADU.

So that's item 3B, you want to add ADU and JADU.

Add the JADU in there, yeah.

Or JADU, just like in the paragraph A. I have a whole slew of other issues that are... Probably kind of nitpicky.

Commissioner Newton, before we get into the small stuff, I'd like to make one more statement. That's regarding the definitions. Having listened to all the items, I think we should keep the change simple. And the thought here is that... The thing that I now better understand is the living area. Livable space, they all relate to the HCD's definitions, and the living component by itself is a little odd. So instead of adding, although I suggested it myself, the conditioned space, I think the only thing we should do, we cannot redefine all those things. That's not wise to do. And so one should not do that. I think the only thing that we need to change is the reference from interior livable space should not be to living area, but should be to livable space. Then by themselves, they're all quite consistent. And the oddball about the ethics is in the living area, and we'll leave that because that's none of our concern. So that would be, because otherwise we have to redefine all three of them. And I think that's not what we should be doing. That would be my recommendation there. Sorry for interrupting.

No, I wanted to wait for this fun part until the end. One of the reasons why I think it's really important to have a red line that shows two different sets of changes is because some of the changes that the town council made on the emergency ordinance, I'm gonna recommend they undo. And I hope the plank director's following me here. You listening? I want to see when we send something up to the council, I want them to have, here's what you guys did to the preexisting ordinance, the 2025 version of our code, and here's our recommendations for how we think you should change that. So I feel like we have to have two layers of of a red line. I think we can't just say, oh, here's the clean copy, have a nice day. I think we have to have a red line that shows them what they did, and then another, maybe just with highlighter or something, that shows changes that the planning commission is recommending, not only to things they didn't change, but things they did change. Because I think some of the changes were unwise. And I'm going to kind of launch into it a little here just to explain to you guys what I'm talking about. So. The first one is in paragraph A under accessory dwelling units purpose. And this is just to point out that here the reference to the California government code has this GOV apostrophe T abbreviation. This comes up all the time throughout this section when we are referencing the government code. It's a perfectly good abbreviation of the word government. Occasionally, in the urgency ordinance that was adopted, GOVT is crossed out and the word government is spelled out. I wanna undo that. I wanna go back to having all the citations reflected consistently throughout this ordinance. Another thing that comes up, and you can see down under definitions under C, Can you say what page you're on? I'm in the red line. So I'm going to stick to this one. I'm sorry. I'm on page one of the red line under 17-048-010-C definitions. Very first page probably of the clean and the red line. There's a section symbol there. Section symbols are used throughout here. So when the town council deleted the section symbol and wrote the word section, I want to undo that because, again, I want to have consistent... citations and there's far more of the symbols and the GOV apostrophe T's than there are of the government or the section when the word is spelled out. So this is more efficient if we're going to be consistent. So when we get to these red lines...

Okay, so just so I'm clear with those, so that's currently shown like that in this version, but what you're saying is since it wasn't in the urgency ordinance that we need to go back and point that out to them?

No, I'm not saying that yet. Nothing that I've said so far requires any change to our red lines. I'm just pointing out how some of these citations are written so when we get to where... they've been changed, we can put them back into a consistent format. It's a formatting thing.

Okay.

Right? But the ordinance needs to have clean formatting because it's an ordinance. I know I'm crazy. The other thing on that first paragraph A under purpose, look at that little tiny S after J-A-D-U. That's a lowercase S. I'm gonna come back to that. Okay, on the next page we have the red interior livable space definition that we've been talking about and the addition of the parenthetical based on interior livable space after the paragraph A under junior accessory dwelling unit or JADU. And just so we're clear, when we go to the town council, I want these to be highlighted differently than the director change is highlighted because these changes are our recommendations to the town council to change something that they did. You may say, why do we need to do that? Because I feel like we need a chronological evaluation of what was in place in 2025, what's in place today under the emergency ordinance, and what we are recommending the town council put in place after they adopt a new ordinance. So I wanna see that change in time. Okay, next I'm going to the page three of the red line under D approvals. D has not changed a number, so it's weird that that is red line, that D. But what we have done here is you started using the term subsection, and everywhere, so under D1, ministerial ADU and building permits required, we say, we reference subsection two and three below, and I would like to discuss with the town council, the term subsection has come up a couple times, it appears in the Council's urgency ordinance where they change the word division to subsection. But when you read the entire section, division comes up 99 of the time and subsection only comes up where the town council has decided to change division to subsection so i am going to recommend that wherever there is a reference to a subsection we change it to division so here under the end of this paragraph d1 i would have said the town will review and approve permit applications in accordance with And here's the change. Divisions D2 and D3. And I put the D in there because that's also uniformly how we cite the divisions with the letter and the number, not just the number. Does that sound okay to you guys? Not nearly. Okay.

So do we want to talk first about the concept of having two different red lines to go to the council?

Maybe as... It doesn't have to be two different red lines. You could take a red line and highlight the part that is different. Okay.

So my quick thought on that is... Ideally, we wouldn't be receiving something that was an emergency ordinance that was done by the council. This would have, had time permitted, come to us first, and we could have taken the existing code and made changes to it, redlined it and sent that forward to the council. But we're in a sitch and we're in a situation where that didn't happen. So now. And let me ask a question of staff. So the redlined versions that and the changes in this were these part of a template that was given to us to use that was given to other jurisdictions or no the attorneys just gave us the clean version so we staff we created the red line version to be able to show that but the clean version included the changes that you had that you are referring to then correct

What I heard was, let's just use these definitions, because we got three definitions that are changing under this red line. One of them, my recollection, is in the January red line. I can confirm that in a second. Where's the January red line? Yeah. So director was included in our January red line. So that means that that was a change that the town council made. The interior living space is not in that red line. So that would be a recommendation from the planning commission to the town council that they include that new interior livable space definition as we've tweaked it in the the ordinance that they adopt.

OK, so going back to the concept of this coming to us first, and we would have done all this, and we would have had the existing ordinance and a red line version to show the council the changes that were being made to our existing ordinance. But now the question is, do we want to have like two types, two different red lines to identify what the council did versus at this point in time, you know, traditionally we would just take the existing ordinance ordinance and make changes to it. So what we're doing here is still going back to what was in place in 2025.

Yeah, I mean, I think the approach that's with this current red lines is that we're I guess in a way we're pretending like the urgency ordinance doesn't exist. Correct. Because it's going to be superseded anyway, and we're just showing, okay, here's what the rules were last year, and here's what they're going to be moving forward with, and then just taking the urgency ordinance out of the equation. Because it's going to be hard for a lot of people to track the whole three-step thing. And we never would have adopted the urgency ordinance anyway if we would have had time. It was just literally an emergency.

So if we're looking at this from the point of view of forgetting that there was this urgency ordinance that was put in place and we're taking what was existing in 2025 and making changes to that,

I get a whole different red line. I'm happy to do that. If you guys think that's just the way we should go. I question whether or not it, If like if I was on the council, I'd want to know, hey, didn't I just approve this? Why is this one different? And I, you know, obviously, oh, yeah, there are some changes that the planning commission is recommending. What are they? Oh, let's go through it and talk about it, as opposed to having a document that shows me what those are. So that's just my way I work. But I'm open.

Because I think that the other aspect of that is that the time that that would take on our existing staff to do that and present that. But that's just me.

Through the chair, forgive me if I'm oversimplifying, but I assume the planning director will give a staff report to town council, right? When it comes to bringing this, if we recommend moving it up to them, couldn't he just sort of have a slide that dictates which specific elements that they created in the emergency ordinance? We suggest changing as a way to just quickly cover things that we amended without having to go through and create a whole nother red line document.

Through the chair, can I make this more complicated? Thank you. So. I like Commissioner Newton's point of having a clean and a clear chronology. And I may be making the silly decision to hope that people are reading the staff reports and what it says in there about what's attached. Because if I was doing this for work, I would... tell somebody, run a red line of the clean version marked from the version town council adopted, a clean version marked from the 2025 version, and a red line of the version the town council adopted marked from the 2025 version. So you have first what the town council did, and then you have, and here's what we're doing against what the town council did, but here's what we're doing if the urgency ordinance didn't exist, and that's just marked from the 2025 version. But know the balancing of that is are people going to see three different ones and not follow how it's labeled i assume it can be in the staff report and then to your point commissioner petroni it is a lot more time intensive to include a extra um red line, like trying to show more information on an existing red line of these documents, but it is two minutes to just run one mark from a different doc, like changing which two documents are being compared. So I think just on burdening on our planning department, it is less of a burden to run more. Right.

I agree with that. But just to note that the first time that we did the compare, everything got sort of all jumbled up.

So this morning I went over to the planning department because I thought it would take five minutes to do what Commissioner Pfeffer is talking about. The problem is that the word programs we're using change the formatting every time you try to run the compare thing. And it was impossible to do that today. And for me. You know, I don't have my own computer. I just have the iPad. I can't do it on that. So I think there is a burden because I think, you know, our town attorney should be running these programs with her updated word programs and take two minutes to do it because that's how long it took when I was an active attorney. And... And so it's a little frustrating because I'm doing this by hand now and I don't like that. But it's just, there may not be things that are so urgent that we need to show, well, here's the difference between a lowercase F and a capital F that the planning commission is recommending be changed, you know, like who cares, right? Like in that way, I'm okay with just doing the comparison of what we're going to recommend this look like to the 2025 version. And if the town council sees something funky in that red line that they have a question about, they can ask the planning director. I'm okay with that. I still kind of want to go through some of these sort of thematic things like the word division and seven section and stuff like that with you guys. Cause I'm not done. The other point is because of these formatting difficulties with the word program, doing a red line without losing things, the January thing, the 2026 red line, in my view, does not accurately reflect the changes the town council made So I don't feel like the public has had an accurate sort of visual of the changes. We've heard from the planning department, the planning director. We've heard from the town manager at the council meeting when they adopted the urgency ordinance. We've had a meeting last month, and we're here again. But the visual, because that to me is what is missing, that it's an accurate visual that shows the totality of the changes. For example, I'll go back to another. Here's one. Let's look at this one, you guys. So this is in G, specific ADU requirements, kind of towards the end. We got a long list of about 10 or 11 things. Okay, in the red line, it's on page 12. And under item... one maximum size, there's paragraphs A, B, and C. You guys see this? In paragraph C, at the bottom, I mean, it looks like the only change here is to a reference to division G, which used to be division F. But in reality, the town council changed that last line from 850 square feet of interior livable space to 800 square feet of interior livable space. And that is not reflected on this red line. And that's a problem, okay? You go down a little bit longer, down a little lower under lot coverage, okay? This red line does not reflect that the town council changed 35% to 50%. So again, I feel like we need red lines that actually reflect what's changed, right? So I'm okay with just doing one red line that shows all the changes we're going to recommend between the 2025 version of this ordinance and the one we are hoping the town council will adopt. But I want to be sure we have an accurate red line accompanying it.

If I may. So I heard something earlier that Maybe it's underlying this whole problem. If I heard correctly from the director, you received from the town council the final version, the clean version. That means you're recreating the red lines. Is that correct?

Yeah, correct. They have to be hand-coded in. So there's lots of errors that occur when you're hand-coding it.

That is where the problem is because typically if you have either multiple iterations of a Word document or multiple people working on it, you turn on tracking and it will do exactly that. It will color-code it, follow it. But that means the originator needs to do that. What's happened here, if you retroactively try to recreate, that's first a lot of time. It's wasted time. And it, of course, will cause errors because you're basically doing it manually on a computer. So I think the solution to this is that... I mean, the town council works on the document that she would turn on tracking and save both versions. Because the clean one is nothing else than where you accept all changes, and then poof, you lose the data.

I've had this issue with other jurisdictions as well. Attorneys, generally speaking, just like to, especially if they're replacing an entire chapter of a zoning code, they just want to give the clean version resolution, and basically the resolution or ordinance says, take out this chapter, throw it away, and replace it with this, and they don't want to mess with the red lines. And the town probably doesn't want to pay the town attorney to do that either, so it is kind of left to... the planning staff to create the red lines if we want to have that visual assistance. So we're not going to knock the town attorney into doing that work. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

So in working with attorneys, I think what you're describing is correct, but that's the final product. This is a draft in progress. So I exchange with our attorneys, our drafts, and tracking is on. They will not issue it that way. That is correct. They will not like to do that. But I think that's maybe the misunderstanding. We are forging this to become something, but it's not yet issued. Maybe it's worth having another discussion. I don't know. But that's the underlying problem, because we're never going to solve that if your department is going to have to manually recreate that. That is absurd.

And I think we did, and... I think like with the formula business, I think they did give us somewhat of a redline version, so we're a little bit in better shape there. So I think you'll see when we get to that that we do have a strikeout in addition. But unfortunately, we did not get this particular thing in that.

So what went to the council in January? Did they not get a redline version, or did they just get the final version?

They did not get a redline version.

Okay.

They got a very detailed staff report that outlined all the changes, but they did not get the red lines.

And one of the problems with that is they missed a lot. Okay. And if you go to the last page, last paragraph, last site of this whole thing, you know, This, again, it doesn't accurately reflect the red line between this version and the one from January. In the middle of this paragraph where you see divisions A through G11, it used to say divisions A through G2C2 of this section. It's been changed to G11, but there's been renumbering of paragraph G, so this should probably actually be G12. So the failure to properly track the changes leads to a substantive error in the citation. Instead of G12, we have G11. because of all of the trail of breadcrumbs you have to follow to figure out what the correct citation is. So again, I mean, I don't want to do this again, personally. But all right, I'm going to keep going because there's other stuff in here, you guys. And this is just going to take way too much time if I just keep... All right, so under approvals, de-approvals, ministerial processing. Number three, process and timing. Completeness, determination, process, paragraph two. The A3A1 above is really D3A1 above. I should go back up. Under paragraph two under this section, processing fee, the end of the paragraph, it says the processing fee is determined by the planning and building services director and approved by the town council by resolution. We might as well just say director there since we added the definition. I'm going to go over on my red line to the paragraph five deemed complete. I want to change all of these to division D3A instead of the subsection A3 references. Down to the bottom of that page under the paragraph D, denial. Again, subsection A3C above needs to change to division D3C above. Under E, classes, class one statutorily regulated, class one ADUs and JADUs approved under government code. That should be a section symbol, 66.323. None of this redlining is accurate. I don't understand any of it. That second sentence that's not redlined, actually had been changed from division to subsection, and I think it needs to go back to division. All these references to subsection should be division under E classes 1A, converted on lot with single family, uh, Uh, like some of these just, uh, it's just silly. Um, okay. Under number four at the bottom under converted on lot with single family Cal government code. There's another example of how it's usually written. Um, there's a bunch of stuff that hasn't been redlined in that paragraph B that should be redlined. We're adding the based on interior livable space. Let me just keep going here. So this is paragraph eight. E2, Class 2, locally regulated. Here's where they switched the GOV positive ET to government. And I guess what I could do is just give the staff all of these little tweaky little changes of... subsection to division and, oh, this was paragraph E, it should be paragraph F kind of stuff. On that Class 2 locally regulated paragraph, Class 2 ADUs are approved under government code 66.314 to 66.322. except for class one ADUs approved under this section above all ADUs are subject to the standard set forth in F and G below. Now division G by its terms is not applicable to all ADUs. So if we're saying all ADUs are subject to G, but then you get to G and it doesn't apply to all ADUs, that seems inconsistent. So my recommendation is to change this last sentence to say, except for class one ADUs approved under division E1 above all ADUs, are subject to the standards as set forth in divisions F and G. Can I ask a question of staff?

Town Council changed the amnesty timeframe, correct?

Correct.

So is that reflected in what we have before us?

Yes.

So what we have before us then isn't the 2025 code, right?

They changed it again this year.

Last year, they changed it, and then they changed it this year to push it out to- Right, so the push out this year, is this in what we got in this month's staff report?

Yes, the push out was to 2036.

That's reflected in what we have before us. I believe that is then the red line. So what we have before us is not the 2025 code, not the original code. What we have before us is the emergency ordinance, correct?

No, what you have, what's attached to the resolution is what you would be adopting, which is the 2026 resolution. recommended code that you'd be sending to the council.

Okay. Let me ask.

The red line version shows the changes from the 2025 code to the 2026 code.

So let me ask this again, the exhibit one.

So you are not seeing anything in the urgency ordinance in here, right?

But I thought you just said that what we have before us.

Is all the state mandated changes.

But where was the change that the council made with the emergency ordinance to push it out to 2036?

Well, they put that in the urgency ordinance and we're also putting it in this document.

So is it redlined in this document?

Yes, it is on page three under D approvals, paragraph two, processing fee. And it references the incentive program expiring on January 1, 2036, paragraph D.

Yes, this is the mental gymnastics. See, that's why I personally think it's easier just to not even think about the urgency ordinance. It was done. We had to do it. It was like a belt and suspenders. What I think makes it easier to consider is just look back at 2025, what was done last year. And what are we changing it to this year? Because if you start throwing the urgency ordinance in there, you have to track three different things. It's like trying to juggle four balls.

But it's probably me. But I thought you just said that what we have is the changes that the council made within the urgency ordinance.

What you have is all of the state mandated ADU changes combined with local adjustments that we've made in the past in 2024 and 2025, combined with minor edits that they came up with when they were adopting the urgency ordinance.

So we have the urgency ordinance in here.

Some of it is in here. Some of the components of the urgency ordinance are in here, yes.

The January red line that we got last month, as I understood it, showed the difference between the emergency ordinance and the previous version of the code. So there's your red line, but it actually is missing some stuff. But it's as good as... I think we're going to have in terms of what it should have to code. And now we're going to get to a new red line, hopefully, that will just show the difference between the ordinance that existed a year ago and what we are going to recommend that the council adopt today. Mm-hmm. And that means if there's part of that emergency ordinance that you don't like, we can take it out and recommend that the council take it out. And that's exactly what I'm doing by saying, I don't like how they change division to subsection, or I don't like how they change GOV apostrophe T to government. I want them to undo those things. But, you know, they might not even notice that they did any of them. No, they're not going to notice. Frank will notice.

So the council didn't have a red line version. So what we have is the existing 2025 red line to include some of what the council verbally did. Okay.

May I make a recommendation? I think we've established that after the fact, manual LED lighting is not going to be perfect. We do have a consolidated Exhibit 1 that is what's recommended. We found some high-level things. And in the interest of time, I think we need to move on.

And I could, if we wanted to take a cleaner redline version to the council and Mimi was willing, we'd be happy to work with Mimi and correct everything in that redline version so that it's up to date.

I think I'm the last person that can help you. Because I think, no, really. I think that what you need is somebody with an updated word program. Maybe commissioner Pfeffer has one.

I just, it's not perfect. If you sent me the word versions I could, but I downloaded the town municipal code. You could do that in word. So I just copied that this section. And then I just, from the attachments converted the PDF to word and ran a red line and it's catching Mimi's changes. The only issue is it doesn't, you know, converting PDF to word gives you a bunch of formatting issues, but this is a, this is a two seconds.

And that's what the formatting issues is what takes all day to clean up.

Well, if I, if you, if you have the version that you saved into the attachments as word and not as PDF, then that would not happen. I know it happens.

Well, it happens with a very outdated version of these paths and they all lead to the same. No, it happens with a very outdated version.

Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't work. I've trust me. I've been down this. I've spent I've spent days formatting these types of things and.

The laptop has an old version, but we're supposed to have new versions. We both tried and it didn't do it.

Of Microsoft Word, right? Of Office. There's like software that is just specifically for redlining that is not Word. It's a third-party software. Right, yes.

So our limited technological expertise is standing in the way here. So I'm just saying if we want to have really super clean red line documents moving forward, we just need to build in a lot extra time to create these files. So happy to do it. It's just going to slow everything down.

Well, in terms of moving forward tonight, I... again, we'll make an offer to sit down with the planning staff and go through my like totally ADHD notes here where I look at every period and every semicolon and try to figure out how this progressed. Because there are a couple things that I had questions about like the change of the 800 square feet to 850 to 800 and the change in the total lot coverage from 35 to 50. Do you recall having those discussions about those changes in those numbers with the town council?

I'd have to go back. I don't remember what the staff report said offhand. I'd have to go back and look.

And whether that was based on new legislation or changes that.

Yeah.

Because I can't believe that. I can't believe the council made those changes.

I think the 800, 850 was a change in state legislation. I have to go back and look. It might not have been adequately displayed in red line.

The 35 to 50% is explained in this staff report.

Yeah. Okay.

It's more flexible. Which still raises a question, but.

All right. I think I've exhausted myself. Just you?

So where does that leave us, though? I mean, do we go with what we have in front of us and make the recommended changes and try in the future not to run into this situation with the council?

I think you're dreaming.

I think it's perfectly acceptable to forward a recommendation with a recommendation that the council get as clean a version of this document as possible. I mean, we can make changes between planning commission and council. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't have to match exactly. Editorial changes are automatic to make. Even after the code's adopted, you can make editorial changes. So that's not an issue. Now, if there's substantive changes...

mimi's identified a couple then those should be corrected before we have the council do a first reading and i would like that jdu portion to be put in under fire sprinklers yep so and i think commissioner jansen's recommendation on the reference to the livable space as opposed to living area is a good one. And I don't know that we reached a consensus on the fee issue. I tend to agree with Commissioner Pfeffer And I don't care if the council rejects our recommendation. I actually think we should make, if we feel that way, and I do, a recommendation to them that they step those fees up over time and not just have them hit on 2036. Okay, let me ask. Let me just be clear about that. These are not like penalties. These are process fees, right? That we're talking about. This is the whole penalty stuff is separate. Right. This is these these process fees won't kick in until 2036.

So let me ask, break that into two sections. One, how does the commission feel about changing the timeframe from 2036 back to matching the timeframe of our housing element? So 2031 as a recommendation to the council.

I'd be in favor of that. I'd be in favor of that. Same.

Yeah, me as well.

I think I was... I mean, what you guys are talking about is kicking the 100% of the fees back from 2036 to 2031. And I was thinking of sort of gradual progression of fees over time might suggest... you know, 50% at 2031 and 100% at 2036, if you're going to do it that way. So, right. But the first question is whether you want to change

the timeframe totally to 2031. That's the first question.

No, I don't want to change the a hundred percent that the council pushed it back to. And, you know, it's a little psychological, you know, they, they chose that deadline. I don't want to just tell them, Oh, that's a stupid deadline. I think it's an okay deadline, but I'd like to see a little, some milestones as we get there.

Commissioner Pfeffer.

I would like to have the 100% fees kick in at 2032, I guess. So to step it, well, no, 2032. So for until the end of 2027, you get the 50% fees. And then the next year it's 60%, 70%, 80%. And then for the last year of this housing cycle, it's 90%. And then

So you are agreeing to match these to the end of the housing cycle, not 2036?

Yes, that would be my preference.

That's the part? Okay. So we seem to be in agreement to that.

We're making progress. I don't think we are in agreement. I think you and the guys are in agreement. Well, that's the majority right now.

Maybe, if I may.

Where I was going with the second part of that is, if the majority is in agreement to recommending 2031 to match the housing element, the next question is, do you want to discuss graduating those percentages?

I would say unnecessarily complicated.

Commissioner Petroni?

I mean, I think it makes sense from a sort of high level, right, to want to incentivize folks to come to the table as quickly as possible, right, with money. That said, I think I ultimately would defer to planning staff and counsel as to what they think sort of works best with their processes. So I guess that's a long way of saying undecided.

That's not allowed.

Just while you were speaking about thinking about how it affects the planning staff, I realized we probably want to avoid a lot of arguments about who caused the delay between a December submission and a January submission. And it has a real impact in fees. So I think it's cleaner to have that you have the discount or you don't. So that is a not graduating the.

So it seems like the boys, the guys, are in agreement that no graduating of the fees and recommending also that they match it to the housing element for 2031. Yeah, I think planning staff have that direction.

Is there anything else we're missing here?

So where does that leave us? Are we making a recommendation or is this coming back?

Well, you tell me. So I would prefer a recommendation to move it forward, but...

Well, would you guys agree with the nature of the generic changes that I'm talking about of changing where it says government to GOVT and where it says subsection to division and trying to keep the citations as consistent as possible and And then, you know, obviously correcting some of the errors that I identified, like the G11 on the last page, the G12 and things like that. I'm just assuming that all of that and I could sit down with the planning director at some point in the next week or so and kind of go through it with them.

I would absolutely support that. Yeah, I think you have made it very abundantly clear that there's a lot of loose ends.

And would the planning staff be acceptable to that?

Yeah, that'd be fine. Okay. And we have a little bit of extra time too, because the April meeting I think is April 15th. So we have some time to do it.

Do they not have a March meeting?

Oh, we wouldn't be able to make the March meeting.

Okay. So we're making a motion. Do we have a motion going forward?

I will attempt to do that. Let me go to the right page here. Where is it? So this is 202601, is that correct? I'm losing my numbers here. Oh, it should be 02, right?

Is it? Hold on, let me double check. This is, this is.

And the other,

Applications were 3 and 4.

Right. Tamalpais was 202,603 and Creek Road was 202,604.

So this would be 02 then.

Tenolima took 2020.

Okay. Motion to approve resolution number 2026-02. of the Fairfax Planning Commission recommending the Town Council to adopt an ordinance to update regulations amending Chapter 17.048, the Residential Accessory Dwelling Units and Junior Accessory Dwelling Units of the Town of Fairfax Town Code and finding the action to be statuary exempt from CEQA under Public Resources Code. Section 21080.17. That was a little stumbly. The recommendations include the discussed items regarding the incentive expiration date. They include recommendations regarding the definition of the interior livable space, and they include the very long list of both formatting and definitions in the code, including discrepancies between the Exhibit 1 and the red lines as indicated by Commissioner Newton. And I believe those are the ones.

And I would add to that adding JADUs in that sentence under fire sprinklers.

Correct. Plus the JADUs added in the fire sprinklers. Yes.

I'll second.

Okay. Ready? Okay.

Patroni?

Yes.

Jansen?

Yes.

Pfeffer?

No.

Okay. Newton?

Yes.

Chair Swift?

Yes. Motion carries. So that's four to one to pass it on to the council. Correct? OK. Anyone want a break? Five minute break? Let's do a five minute break. OK. Are we ready to continue? Can I have the staff report, please?

Sure. Thank you, Chair Swift and plenty of commissioners. Oh, OK. Thanks. Jump the gun. .

Contagious. Staff report, please.

Okay. So I will begin the staff report. And I think that you... It might be important for the audience to pay attention to this first couple slide because it's a bit of bad news. We are here to kind of introduce a change to the formula business ordinance and also consider the banning of drive-thrus. And so the bad news is that The current Fairfax Town Code does nothing to ban chain stores or restaurants. It's completely irrelevant. And this is due to some recent court cases. And first off, the language of the Fairfax Code, which we'll get into a little bit later, doesn't ban chain restaurants. It simply requires the application of a conditional use permit. So I think there's a misconception that formula businesses are banned, and that is just simply not the case. And it is, in fact, our code, due to recent court cases, is unenforceable. So I'll explain why that is here in a minute. So here's a potential scenario which could occur under the current code. There is some case law that's called the Park at Cross Creek LLC versus the City of Malibu. And in that particular court case, there was a, I can't remember whether it was a Pete's or a Starbucks, but I think it was a Starbucks that was in a particular business. And then a Pete's wanted to move in and they wanted them to get a new conditional use permit because it was a different business. So in that particular case, they, the, uh... malibu turned down the new formula business uh... and then they went to court and then the court said no you can't do that that cd condition use permits run with the land so if you have an existing land use in a particular location and a new land use that's a similar type wants to move in uh... then that would simply be permitted with a building permit you wouldn't be allowed to require them to get a formula business license for that so in this particular case uh... let's say hypothetically you have a business called Bob's Coffee in town, that could simply become a Starbucks with only a building permit. You could require a sign permit, design review. So this is a real scenario that could occur under our code tomorrow if Starbucks came in. And you could also, they could also put in a drive-through without, that would require a design review if they added a drive-through. So the other bit of bad news is that we potentially could require a formula business license if, for example, it was vacant space, so there wasn't an existing use in place, and let's say a formula business wanted to come in, then we could require that formula business to apply for a conditional use permit, which is our process for a formula business. It would come to the Planning Commission for a conditional use permit. Where we have some issues or where our attorneys have identified issues with the current code is that the findings that would need to be made to approve or deny a formula business are extremely subjective and would probably not stand up in court. Um, and the reason for that is there's been a number of cases where kind of equal protection clause, you have to treat all businesses equally. You can't kind of pick on a use just because it's a formula business. Um, so like, for example, in this case, maybe if a Barnes and Noble wanted to come in, um, And or if it was a coffee shop going to a Barnes & Noble or if it was a vacant space going to Barnes & Noble, you would take them through the formula business process and you would have to evaluate them based on the criteria that's in the code, which is kind of these very subjective findings which may not stand up in court. So anyway, so there's kind of two big problems with our current code. And so... The point of today's meeting is just to kind of propose an initial solution that our town attorney's office has come up with as kind of a starting point. And they think that this approach would work and kind of survive a court challenge. So we would... recommend the consideration of two resolutions. First would be to adopt an ordinance to replace the formula business regulations. And then the second one, which is related, but you don't necessarily have to adopt both of these. But we would also suggest that you prohibit the establishment of new drive-through facilities. And there's numerous reasons to um, prohibit drive-thrus. One is that they are commonly associated with formula businesses and like a, like a new Starbucks will probably not locate without a drive-thru. A McDonald's would not locate without a drive-thru. Um, most coffee places these days would not locate without a drive-thru. They might get a, like, I don't know, there's some like blue bottle and others that just will move in, but a Starbucks, you definitely will not get without a drive-thru. The, um, The current framework, as I've already alluded to, is that there's a conditional use permit required and there's findings which are focused on community character considerations. Then I mentioned the court case and then the equal protection. So the current ordinance has three parts. There's a purpose statement, which is solid. There's no reason to change this. The definitions, the way that the definitions are written is basically they could apply to basically any business in town because any business in town would probably have a logo, a common uniform. And so it's kind of the definition of what is a formula business or a formula restaurant is problematic because it basically captures all businesses in town more or less. So that we would suggest that be changed to be more precise. The other problem is the, so here are the conditional use permit findings. And as I mentioned, they're very discretionary and they may violate the equal protection laws. So those are the problems with it. So what has been proposed by the town attorney is to replace The conditional use permit with a formula retail zoning clearance subject to objective criteria, which is basically if it's new tenant space or adding 500 square feet or more, and it's in a commercial zone and does not create an over-concentration based on specific caps. And then there'd also be updates to the definitions of formula retail. And it would establish district-specific caps on the number of formula retail to avoid over-concentration. And it would provide transferability of successor businesses in the same category. So basically, if you had, again, that K would kind of capture that concept of if there's a coffee shop, you could replace it with another coffee shop. A bookstore could be replaced with another bookstore. So you'd always kind of be able to have that transition. And then, yeah. Yeah, sure. Sorry, I'm also losing my voice. So this would align with case law. The ministerial clearance would align with objective standards. You'd avoid establishment-specific risks. The definitions would clearly define what is a formula business. You'd also recommend a change to a numeric threshold to avoid sweeping businesses that merely have a logo. And then you'd allow some locations paired with standardized features. So the benefits of a CAP system, while this does allow some formula businesses to come in, which I realize is controversial in Fairfax, is that... it would be simple to attract and administer And basically kind of once you hit that number, you could simply say no to any future, any additional formula businesses, because you could kind of say, well, we only have allowances for five. So once we hit that number, we're done. Whereas if you don't have that, if you have if you have a cap of zero, then that's where you kind of run into problems with maybe not being legally defensible because you're not treating all properties owners equally. Because you'd basically be saying, well, you can locate because you're just this type of bookstore, but you can't locate because you're another type of bookstore. So you kind of get into this whole equal protection. But the kind of the threshold, it's kind of a saturation and getting a diversity of land uses so you can, it's easier to justify with a cap system. And also the proposed ordinance would ensure that the entitlement kind of runs with the land versus with the owner of the business. So here are the details of the proposal. There'd be a formula retail zoning clearance. It'd be required for all new or expanded formula businesses. With the threshold at 500 square feet, it would exempt certain land uses. And so one thing we're going to want to talk about is what do we want to exempt, if anything. And then the planning director could issue that. You'd want to have the second component is that over concentration control. That's where you have the caps in each zoning district. It'd be transferable to a new owner, even if the owner was a different formula business. And you'd update the definitions. One of the definitions is what is a formula retail? And you'd have like, well, if it has the proposal is six or more locations anywhere in the world. Other definitions, Codes that we've looked at have that number is different. Like I think San Francisco is 11 and then Sebastopol is 25. So kind of that number can kind of float. The advantage with it being lower is that it would kind of capture people. more businesses. However, you might also capture businesses that are kind of just regional that maybe you want to have that business in town. So anyway, so it's just that number is very flexible. There's also some clarified terms, which we can look at here in a minute. And then there's appeals. So the other suggestion would be to ban drive-thrus. They're typically associated with formula businesses. Many, if not most, formula restaurants specifically would be unlikely to open a new location without a drive-thru. Drive-thrus also have negative impacts, air pollution due to idling cars, traffic congestion due to long queues of cars, conflicts with pedestrian bicycles. And currently, they're allowed by right with design review in town. And we don't have any development standards. A lot of codes have development standards related to drive-thrus like queuing and menu boards. And the current town code does not have any of those provisions. So here is just an example, maybe a worst-case scenario, of what a drive-through restaurant could look like. A large parking lot, so lots of runoff from stormwater. Long queues of cars, which conflict with pedestrian traffic. not a lot of green space. And the other interesting thing about this image is just from having reviewed many fast food restaurants in my career, this clearly went through a pretty extensive design review process. It has landscaping, like the shrubs are screening the parking spaces. They obviously had to plant trees. They had to put in their ADA parking spaces. They had to have queuing for their drive-through. The menu board is a certain distance from the drive-through window. All of these things are just typical standards you'd have for a drive-through. So this would be kind of what you'd get if you had a well-designed... This is actually a well-designed drive-thru restaurant. So anyway, personally, I don't think drive-thrus fit very well into Fairfax. You have one drive-thru coffee shop, which seems to work okay, but I wouldn't suggest leaving the door open for additional drive-thrus. So the way to... Implement this would be to add a definition of drive-through facility, then just ban them in all districts, which is a little bit tedious because you have to go into each commercial district and add sentences in each to do that. And then just to note that existing drive-throughs or the drive-through would be allowed to continue as a legal non-conforming use. And so, as far as discussion questions, and we can kind of I'm just going to go through this because I'm sure we're going to want to have questions and public comment, but we can maybe go back through these to kind of. Have guide commissioner inquiries later, but. I would suggest these would be the decision points is first of all, do you want to consider banning drive-thrus or just continue to leave the code as it is now? And, um, and, uh, you know, allow them if, if, if drive-thru were to come in, some people love, love drive-thrus. So, um, the other decision point would be with the, how you define a formula business is six locations worldwide, the appropriate number. Do we want to have that be nationwide, regional? Should that number be higher or lower? You know, again, I think they picked that number to be kind of a low number. So we could investigate that further if the commission felt that was necessary. Also, the formula business ordinance exempts certain businesses that wouldn't even be considered formula businesses at all. Or the ordinance wouldn't apply to them. And so the current proposal for exemptions would be supermarkets and grocery stores, drugstores and pharmacy uses, financial services, resale offices, movie theaters, mail, courier and delivery services, medical offices, etc. I think this is another area where the code could be pretty flexible. We could have no exemptions and anything that's a chain would just be on the list. Or we could take one or two of these off of here. It would be up to the commission on whether you wanted to subject these to the formula business ordinance or not. Then there's kind of a district by district. As you'll notice in the code, there's that table. In fact, I should have that table first. Okay, so here's the table. This is what I'll just phrase this because I know there's going to be a lot of controversy around this table. because it obviously allows a significant number of formula businesses. This is what our town attorney's office believes is the lowest we can go. And so anyway, so, I mean, we could push back on that, but I'm just saying, this is, this is, these are the numbers that they gave me. So don't shoot the messenger. Okay. That's all I'm saying is, um, the, um, And so there's the breakdown of each of these zones. The first one is the commercial service zone, which is actually only one business now, which is Ace Hardware and takes up the whole zone. And it's a formula business, by the way. So the idea is that you would... allow two formula businesses in there. So like hypothetically, if Ace Hardware wanted to dedicate part of their space to another use, then maybe that could be another formula business. Like, I don't know, you know, a car parts store or something. So anyway, so the idea is that you could expand that a little bit with another formula business, but no more than that. The central commercial zone is, which includes Bolinas, Broadway, Bank Street, and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, portions of it. The suggestion is to allow for five formula businesses total in there. There's already, I believe, one, which is the 7-Eleven. I don't think there's anything more than that. And the other district is that... Highway Commercial Zone, which is some Sir Francis Drake includes Fairfax Market area and also the area over by Good Earth. And the suggestion there would be to also allow for five formula businesses. And then the CL Zone, which is just these three locations in town. One is Tenalima. Another is 95 Broadway, which is School Street. And the third one is Deer Park Villa. And so the idea is just to, since those tend to be near residential neighborhoods, we think that should be the most restrictive. And so maybe just one formula business for all of the CL zones. Anyway, that is the... starting proposal, I guess I would say. And I'm open for questions.

Could you put that table back up with the different zones and the numbers there? Thanks. And so CL Limited Commercial, you said there's three, the Deer Park and the School Street and... Tenolima. Tenolima. So that would be one for the total of the three zones, right? Okay. And at our last discussion on this, Commissioner Petroni recommended that really we want to limit the formula businesses in the downtown area. So, you know, really the central commercial, I think, is that what you were thinking? Um, which seems to be the opposite of what you're telling me, the town attorney is recommending. Uh, and I initially had kind of like raised an eyebrow, uh, But the more I thought about it, the more I kind of tended to agree with you that the downtown is where we want to keep it quirky. Right. You know, I don't know.

And I would say to that point, I would say we. that'd be one area that we could push back on the town attorney's office. And just if we wanted to pick a smaller number and just to say, Hey, you, we really think that this is worth considering protecting this area and increasing the number in other areas. You know, maybe, maybe that would still fly. We could, cause what basically we could, cause the, folks that put this ordinance together i think they've done these in other jurisdictions and so they kind of know what kind of stands the legal test and so we would kind of send our recommendation back out to them and see if if maybe they could consider a different different mix that would not get us into legal hot water

If I could piggyback off of that question, did they give you any info on their methodology for coming to these numbers? Like, for example, is it number of parcels within a certain zoning code? We should add a certain percentage of allowed chains? Or is it just sort of...

They just kind of... gave us that came up with the number and gave it to us so i mean that would be another way we could push back is like how can we rationalize lower numbers like is there a way can we do some data analysis to kind of justify that we don't need that this many because we have you know yeah and specifically towards you know either a lower number it sounds like zero isn't on the table but a lower number in the town center in the cc zone um

I know we're in a new landscape now, but there are examples of towns and cities that specifically say no downtown, but yes, in other places. Like Sebastopol, I think, for example, specifically has the downtown area. Oh, I'm sorry about that. sebastopol specifically has uh a ban of retail stores downtown but allows it in other zones i assume would legal counsel sort of tell us this is a new era now sebastopol is probably looking at amending theirs as well or do you think that's something sebastopol is looking i mean since i live in sebastopol so i kind of know what they're doing there but the um

They are a little bit different because they have their downtown core, but they also have very large areas where they don't restrict chains at all. So if you get into the shopping centers, they have shopping centers on both ends of town and That's where all the chains can go. There's no restriction, although they do ban drive-thrus, I will say, or do drive-thrus. And then, of course, there's the Barlow, which does their own thing. So they have gotten away with not having any, and I don't know if that's because of the fact that they have those outlying areas or just that they haven't been challenged yet. And they did have a little Caesar sneak in recently. It was apparently a mistake.

Any other questions for staff?

Go ahead. What is the reason for exceptions? Why?

Well, that's a good question, is just because the town would like to have those uses and doesn't want to put any restrictions on them.

So, yeah, because once you adopt this, it is administerial, so you are unable to allow certain things to... Outside of that, whatever the number is that you come up with or however you define it.

Correct. Correct. So basically we would just be counting. And so if we had fewer exemptions and we, you know, we can get, you know, grocery store, drugstore, you know, coffee shop. And then once we got to five, it would be.

Right. But that maybe that's good. Right. Maybe that's what we want. You'd fill up the bucket faster, I guess, if you didn't have the options. Yeah, of course, we'll get into that in discussions, but I'll creep into that. It's question time. All right.

Do we know of any ordinances that have caps that have beaten challenges? Like where there's maybe a limit that's too high But, you know, that's a basis to look at. Oh, San Francisco, they had a limit of 20, but that's however many per parcel. And, you know, that's something to look at for us. For me also, would 17-03-2, would conditional use permit separately still exist? Apply here or does this exempt them from that process too?

Oh, yeah. They would just be subject to this clearance process.

Okay. So because my understanding of the old ordinance is that it says – it said or says you need to get a conditional use permit in addition to the findings required under the conditional use permit. You also need these –

wishy-washy findings a through f um uh it'll help residents avoid the need to drive out of town stuff like that um yeah now if it was a use it was a land use that required a conditional use permit for another reason so okay so yeah i guess that's my but i think most retail uses though are generally permitted in commercial zones so

Well, I guess in this case, it would be like for your example of Fairfax Lumber Ace Hardware, having multiple different units on the same lot is something that gets you dinged and often needing a conditional use for rent. And so that would apply here. Did the town attorneys weigh in on what happens if you're at the cap and our local Fairfax market gets bought by Albertsons or Kroger's or something. And then all of a sudden they're above the cap.

Well, that's where the transferability provision would kick in is that if you had an existing kind of that, that's the thing that that court case specifically addressed is that if you have an existing grocery store, then another grocery store could kind of move in there. It wouldn't matter whether it's formula or otherwise.

Well, I mean, so not.

It's kind of a workaround. Even if the grocery store isn't a chain, you could have another grocery store move in there that is a chain, and you couldn't really stop that because that kind of entitlement runs with the land.

But for purposes of this ordinance, would it tick up against the cap? No.

Yeah, if it was already at the cap, it could probably move in, but would it count towards the cap? Yeah, that is a good question. I can look into that. I don't really know.

And then for businesses that do have like a limited conditional use, sort of the same question of, if you later become a formula business for places that have a duration and they need to reapply and things like that, can you have it kick in then? So if we have some business that says you need to reapply every 20 or 30 years because of some environmental issue, can you at that time reassess the formula business question? We can grant conditional use permits. We can put in conditions like that.

Like we're granting this for a... Yeah, I think what we're hearing is that once you grant the conditional use, once you grant the formula business permissions for that parcel, it kind of, it's almost like a sort of a CUP because it runs with the land.

Okay. And last question for me to avoid, I'm sure the town wants to talk about this more than just this one meeting and one town council meeting. And so can we use this? Have you talked about with the attorneys for putting in an effective date? Can we have so that we can have this relate back to this period. So somebody can't buy a property now and then start developing it for a formula business that would not otherwise be permitted because say it's, um, we decide to only limit the one in the zone that, uh, captures seven 11 and then they get another one and they say, well, it wasn't formally adopted until March, uh, or April or whatever. Um, can you have it? Yeah.

You probably be subject to that until the ordinance gets adopted. I don't think you can.

Well, I'm thinking specifically for like the, any sort of rent regulations that, They say it relates back now, and this is also sort of the issue with the permit penalty waiver for JADUs of you don't want to adopt this now. Ordinances go into effect 30 days after adoption or things like that, and then have people jump the gun and buy properties now to try and squeeze in property. a formula business that would otherwise be banned before the ordinance is effective. And in those provisions, like I know four places that have adopted any sort of, rent stabilization, and even for the statewide one, it says, you know, this, it applies to whatever rent you had in effect as of blank date when we first started talking about this. If you can get the sway in on having something like that of this applies to the amount of formula businesses in existence in the town as of February of 2026.

Yeah, I think you could put a date in there. It could be the date that the ordinance was adopted.

But I'm saying those other statutes have dates before it was adopted, sometimes up to a year. Yeah, like refer to tonight so we can say, oh, we are going to limit it to one in the commercial zone.

Yeah, you can't take away a land use entitlement until you actually adopt the zoning statute.

But do you want us to ask the attorney?

Yeah, I want you to ask the attorney. Yeah, we can run by the attorney. Sure.

Any other questions before I go?

Yeah, I have a follow-up on one of the questions and one of the answers I heard that doesn't add up in my brain. This is relating to whether or not a subsequent use count towards the cap. If I understood correctly, you could have, say, a local restaurant that then sells its property to a formula business, and then the formula business restaurant can go in there because the other restaurant was also a restaurant. If that's true, the entire ordinance is pointless. There is no limit. That makes no sense. I believe the, what's it called, the zoning, the formula restaurant zoning exemption or whatever, however it was called, what used to be the COP, that runs with the land. So the original local restaurant doesn't have that. The land doesn't have it. So you cannot replace a non-formula restaurant with a formula restaurant. Because as I said, if that was true, the ordinance would be... Yeah, I see what you're saying, yeah. So I believe that's not possible.

Yeah, so maybe...

Okay, I can... We should probably get that clear, because otherwise it doesn't work. Okay. Sorry, that was my...

So I'm going to save most of my comments to the discussion and after we hear from the public. But I did have a couple questions for you. We have a drive-thru in town. Yes. It originally was a photo shop. Yeah. then became the Java Hut. There was the potential to put an ATM there. So that is a drive-through. Did anybody reach out to the owner of the Java Hut to invite them to this and inform them of what was being discussed?

No, but we can. Like I said, this is the beginning and it would not, I mean...

I mean, I don't think... We're not banning... We're not going to do anything tonight.

We're not banning the drive-ahead no matter what we do. It's an existing use. It would be legal non-conforming.

But it's going to be non-conforming, just like other businesses where we've made changes are now legal non-conforming. And we've gone through that discussion previously. before. So as we move forward with this, and certainly in my view, we're not going to come to any decisions or any recommendations tonight, but we should be going out to the one drive-through we have. And I don't know if he'd count the car wash. No, that's not. But if we had, well, I mean, we can discuss and we will what a drive-through is. In what the staff report says, it's a very limited thing in targeting certain things. But drive-throughs can be anything, just as we had before the Java HUD, it was Photoshop, right? Photomat. So definitely, we need to reach out to the owner of that for future meetings. And you said that drive-throughs could be approved by right? Is that what you said?

Currently, yeah.

Why? Do we have drive-throughs allowed in our zoning areas? We don't have to look, but, you know, I mean, some of ours. They're not prohibited.

I mean, there's, you don't have a definition, so there would be no way to say.

Well, we could, we could argue that point. Um, cause I looked at, um, what's allowed in all the areas. And in some cases I didn't see anything that would even relate to a drive-through, but that, that was my other question. Um,

well then if then if they're already banned then let's make it um so it's very clear well nobody said that they were already banned right i'm just um just saying well it works it's a little old-fashioned it has this huge list of permitted uses and and the understanding is if it's not listed as a permitted use it's not permitted And then there's a list of conditional uses that have to get a conditional use permit from you. So if you're not listed as a permitted use, then you're not allowed, right? And I'd have to go back and check, but I'm pretty sure our drive-thru coffee place, they're operating under a use permit. But it was a long time ago when they had the cart, right, before it turned into the building.

This goes back to the discussion point, but with our existing... formula business ordinance, you know part of the reason for the CUP is to allow We had the flexibility to Allow businesses that it was felt was needed for the town whether it be a UPS business Or an ATM or a bank So that was the you know some flexibility in there. But those are... But I'll get into that more in the discussion phase after public comment. Those are the only questions I had right now. Can I jump in and have another...

Commissioner Newton. One of the questions that was asked at our last meeting was whether you had a list of the formula businesses in town. And as we've talked this evening, you've referenced a couple, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven. UPS. What I'd like to know is, do all the formula businesses currently in Fairfax have CUPs? And are any like, like Ace Hardware grandfathered in that they didn't need a CUP? I don't even understand how that works.

Fairfax lumber was initially not an ACE hardware. I think it became an ACE to survive. So it, you know, it, it's still Fairfax lumber, but now it's also ACE.

It does not have a CUP is what you're telling me. So it's a grandfathered in basically, uh, Formula business. Do we have, again, do we have a list? Can you tell me how many formula businesses exist? How many of them have CUPs?

I think I can, but I can't, but I don't know if I'm going to be right or not. The 7-Eleven is operating under a use permit because they come back every 10 years and try to stay open all night and we tell them no. Okay, so I know that as a, I think the UPS store came in right when our attorney said this law case, this lawsuit means you can't regulate the UPS store. So it is not under a use permit, right? And the Ace Hardware, I just explained, you know, it's been a hardware store before the town even incorporated. And they just to survive had to become in whatever, however the partnership works with Ace Hardware. That name is now associated. It's not operating at our use permit. So the only use permit, I think, is 7-Eleven.

So it's kind of a dynamic thing in terms of You know, sometimes I'm formula, sometimes I'm not, right? And if you get a static cap, you know, these questions that, like, Commissioner Jansen was asking about, well, it's a local grocery store, and then it's a chain grocery store, and how are you going to... How are you going to really manage it with a cap if a Fairfax Lumber goes Ace Hardware? We want Fairfax Lumber to stay alive. We want to keep those local businesses going. If they have to make a deal with the retail and we can't require a CUP but we've got a cap and now they're the one that takes it over the limit, it seems very difficult.

Any other questions for staff. If not I'm going to open it up to public comment. Come on up you have 3 minutes.

I'm going to go first sense. This meeting running long has my laptop battery running low. Okay, so overall, before I get cut off, I hope you'll indulge me just a little bit. I have got some succinct notes. But this seems to be Fairfax legal billing run amok. This seems to be a problem that should not be the top priority, that the town attorney who is on track to bill over a million dollars this year is creating to facilitate formula retail going in at School Street Plaza, in my opinion, and I think many others. How much is it going to cost this town in your time, in staff time, and legal billing time to work through all of the various permutations here? I want you to just think about that as I... boot up or not boot up but go into the pdf and hopefully it'll last for a little bit on the humorous side of things these numbers there's 13 formula retail being proposed here how many of those are going to get taken up by school street plaza's development now I think there's four Disneyland's in the world. Can Disneyland move into Fairfax under these rules? I'm with the commissioner. A CUP is a better way to maintain this. Now, if I can read some of this here, do you see also on a top level? It seems like we're relying upon one case here. The town attorney is relying upon one very narrow case with the CUP being determined to run with the land. She's utilizing that one case to say, hey, we need to revamp our CUP process. I'm not convinced whatsoever. This is opening up the door to formula retail and it's seeding your power to to actually control what goes on in Fairfax. I'm against providing ministerial rubber stamp approval at one person's discretion on what happens to Fairfax. Do CUPs have to run with the land in California? Was that the only case of the appeal of an initiative in Malibu? I just mentioned that. I've got to scroll down here. Pardon me. Please indulge me. Next comment coming up momentarily.

And can you wrap it up? Because we've got other folks in line.

Okay. I think it's a cheaper way to do this than to pay the attorney. Why are caps allowed for formula businesses but not for for most formula, mostly market rate buildings, wouldn't they be considered formula businesses? Why shouldn't we include market rate housing formula businesses in the definition of formula businesses and thus prohibit developments such as 243 units, school street Plaza being built by a rinse and repeat developer with over $1 billion in funding that uses the brand Mill Creek residential on all of its developments. Why are they getting an exemption from this? There would not ever be a drive-through permitted through a pedestrian pathway. Why is that wording in there? It's a false statement. You wouldn't allow driving through a pedestrian pathway. It doesn't make any sense. How does this affect the existing CUP for the current coffee? We talked about this already.

Okay, I'm going to have to cut you off so we can hear the other folks.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Todd is incredible. He is so astute. Deborah London. I am, of course, my husband and I own a small business here in town, the Coffee Roastery. Some of you may know, some may not. I'm speaking tonight to strongly oppose this revamp of formula business unless it staunchly supports and protects small businesses, and I'm not sure that it does. It feels a little slippery here and there, and I don't like that. This is a very small town, 7,500, and the businesses that are here are struggling. I think that 5,000 square feet in that lousy Mill Creek potential build-out, that needs to be eliminated. There is so much pressure and anxiety around the businesses surviving in this teeny tiny little town. And I think it's very important, not just Java Hut, thank you, Commissioner, but all small businesses in this town need to be notified in writing as to what is going on and being proposed here. with these ordinances. And I think the number, I wish that thing was back up there, the number for, not even the 13, the five in the central commercial zone, that needs to read zero. And you've redlined so many things in this language that protected small businesses. And A8, I think a lot of those need to get put back in. The cap system is controversial. A lot of damage can be done with just one, one business. And I don't want to name names, but I'm going to. And I'm sorry, Mark and Al, but when Good Earth went in, a lot of businesses were affected. They sell everything. They left no meat on the bone for anybody else. Not fair. Not cool. That should have been more regulated. And I agree, Mimi. I think we should list every formula business that is already in town, and it needs to be subtracted from those 13 businesses that are coming in here. And I think six is a good number for the... to delineate whether or not something is a formula business. And I think that there needs to be a lot of pushback on 13.

And I vehemently

oppose changing from a CUP. I think that is a really bad idea to put all the power in the hands of one or two people. And it hides the process. All of a sudden, it is an invisible process because no one can see what's going on in town. So, and let's see, do you know there's like another rumor of a pizza and yet another coffee shop coming into the weigh station? There's a lot of coffee in this town. We feel it. There's no room for another coffee at Mill Creek, weigh station, formula business. No one will survive. This will put incredible pressure on the few that do manage, we do manage to survive together. And we're all good together, but to start adding more is not a good idea. And it dilutes our customer base and risks turning our little town into a modernist strip rather than a diverse, vibrant community that I thought we all valued. Let's see, what else? Sorry, I'm probably over my... You are, if you can wrap it up. Thank you, appreciate it. Allowing chains or formula businesses would only accelerate this problem of sharing very little customer base. 7,500, and that includes everyone, not just the people with money in their pocket.

Those are a lot fewer.

And these formula businesses will... You know, their pricing power that local businesses simply cannot match. Many of us could be forced to close with our closer. The unique character of this town disappears. So our ordinance is not about protecting businesses, about protecting the heart and soul of our community. We need a mixed balance, blah, blah, blah. I sincerely hope this is an effort to further protect businesses. Small businesses and not a punitive move or an attempt to smooth the road for Mill Creek Plaza.

Okay. Thanks, Deb.

Thank you. Oh, just one really quickly. You know, Healdsburg had a map. They recently visited this and they had a map. And I believe in their downtown commercial zone, zero. They protected the businesses there. I would encourage you to look at theirs. Thank you.

Lingxian, I also am opposed to encouraging chain businesses to come into town. I would like for that not to happen. So, thanks. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Morgan Hall from Moss Lane here in town. And First of all, I don't think Fairfax needs or wants what is being suggested in this ordinance. And if it should pass, the citizens of this town would go ballistic. It would be reminded of the controversy created by School Street. Thanks. The new ordinance would not protect businesses in this town any better than the existing code, which was enacted in 1973. It's been ongoing for 50 years. I've had to deal with it. It's very onerous to get an approval for a chain store in this town. It's pretty rugged. I think the inclusion of drive-throughs with this whole matter of formula businesses is just misleading. People generally agree that there's a problem with drive-thrus, pollution, and all that kind of thing. And it's sort of a no-brainer to them. There's an attempt in the wording of this thing to associate a no-brainer with the chain store rules. I think that's trick.

Can you wrap it up, Morgan?

You wonder what is driving this whole thing and who stands to benefit. And it's not people who have space in this town who want to take advantage of filling up their space with chain stores because there isn't any existing space. However, School Street will have 7,500 square feet of commercial space. And they're going to also have 245 residential units And I think they're going to have a hard time making their nut with the residential units because they're small. They're going to be overpriced. So the only way that School Street is going to make its investment is by leasing out 7,500 square feet to jade stores. It's pretty obvious.

Okay, Morgan, thank you. Through the chair, just before our next guest steps up, I would like to point out that I have turned on the words on the screen. So if you can't hear, you can see it there. And also just know that if you see your words on the screen, they are going into the transcript. So even if we don't hear you, not everyone hears you completely in the room, you will be heard on the video later and you're in the transcript. So I just wanted, I heard a couple of people worried about that earlier and I just want to set that at rest.

Mark Bell, Fairfax. So the way some of these subsections are written, Facebook can move in here and set up a campus. There are so many words in here with so many exceptions that virtually anybody can move in. And we know that when you have local money stay in a community, it has six times the power than when you ship it out of town. So when you have chain stores, basically what you're doing is you're sucking $5 out of the community instead of having $6 to be spread about it. I think the previous town council and obviously the majority have already sucked tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Fairfax's tax base. We don't need any more. UPS has been there, what, a couple years now? And all of a sudden now it's an issue? Why wasn't there an issue two years ago? Why wasn't this brought up earlier? Where was the red flag? So we're depending on our attorney, the attorney who for, for smart meters and 5G, spent an additional $150,000 in legal fees. And when PGE showed up and said, we're putting in smart meters starting in two weeks, oh, well, you know, we can't really defend the ordinance that I made a fortune off of and my company, BBK, did. What other ordinances? Tree ordinance never enforced. PGE came in and cut down trees that had nothing to do with wires. What happened with that? Nothing. She has a track record of nothing, of unenforceable ordinances. We need to hire a real attorney. We need to hire a real attorney. I know a real attorney who is in this field. I'm sure there are others. We need to hire an attorney who is working for not only the town council, but also works for the people who live in this town and work in this town. Because it's been made clear to us that the town attorney does not work for the people of this town. We have been told this. We see Brown Act violation after Brown Act violation. We see in transparency when supposedly there is transparency, but it's not. We see our tax dollars going to pad her a million dollars, I believe Todd said, for her part-time job because she also is the attorney for Pleasant Hill. We need a real attorney. This is a real serious issue. Do we really want to become Fresno? Do we really want to become, what, Manteca? Do we really want to become Rohnert Park? Because that's where this ordinance, the way the new ordinance is worded, that's where we're going. Because they don't care. The attorney doesn't care. She could care less about us. And it really makes the residents of this town wonder if anybody in the town government cares about us.

Thanks, Mark.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Connie Sigmund Thaler. I've been a resident of town for 42 or three years now. I don't have, obviously, anything written down, no specifications, no nothing. But as a town resident, I agree with everything that has been said. We love Fairfax for a reason. I was out in Point Reyes just the other day and I told somebody, oh, I live in Fairfax. And they said, oh, we love Fairfax. And, you know, I wanted to stop them and say, why do you love Fairfax? And, you know, they love Fairfax. Not that they're going to come out and say we love Fairfax because there's no McDonald's there. But they love Fairfax because of the way the town is and the way we are. Um, and the, and the businesses that we have here, you know, there's not too many revolution nines around culture shock is gone, but there's a few runner ups, you know, there's just, there's other towns just don't have those and we do. And, um, you know, this, I urge the planning commission to really, to retain power, to retain your power, because giving it over to this ordinance or whatever you call this thing here is, as was mentioned earlier, turning it over to a kind of a behind the scenes secret, non-public, all of a sudden we have, you know, a Mickey D in town and we all know it's been driven by school street plaza. That's, that's not a secret. You know, we all know that the retail there, these people want something that's going to, you know, the profit is the bottom line for them. And so we need to fight against that. And, and we need to, as was mentioned earlier by the woman who runs the roastery, you know, This is a small town, and, you know, I try to shop local as much as I can. Obviously, I can't buy everything here, but we need to support the town. We need to support each other. And I couldn't agree with the last gentleman more. You know, the town attorney is, she's not working for us. She doesn't. she, I don't know. She's continually trying to justify her position. I don't, I don't, her, her, or her unbelievable, uh, salary. Um, she really does need to go. And, uh, I don't know how to get somebody like that out, but, um, maybe you guys have some ideas. Um, I don't even know how she got in there, frankly, but, um, but, uh, This is a discussion that, I don't know, maybe needs to go before the voters. I'm not really sure how that works, but this can't be something driven by the town attorney because she hasn't done too many favors for us lately. That's for sure. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And I really pity you guys having to come every month and stay until midnight because I bet you every planning commission meeting is just like this, huh?

Any comments, public comments on zoom?

I do have hands online chair swift and the 1st is Kirsten Kirsten. Please go ahead.

Hello, can you hear me? Okay.

We can. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Kirsten Asher, resident for 30 years here. This is a very special town, as you all know, for a reason. And I'm just looking at all of you, you know, virtually here. And I'd like to urge you to not give your power away to our town attorney and her whims. I like to offer you also another perspective. I mean, I'm sure you've all heard the matrix reference. And will you take the blue pill or the red pill? That is a very, very important question, actually, as metaphorical as it is. Our town attorney proposed this. I'd like you to all consider not to swallow her pill. Her concern was about a lawsuit she saw in Malibu. And, you know, I understand being concerned about a lawsuit. That's one thing. But then allowing in or proposing the allowance of 13 chain stores because of this concern is obfuscation. It makes no sense to all of a sudden be creating new laws allowing 13 chain stores because she is fearful of chain stores. It makes no sense. It smacks of a lawyer giving themselves more work to do to secure their job. As a citizen of Fairfax who moved here for the quaint character and small personal businesses that we love so much, I'm weighing the idea of a town that may be quote unquote sued versus opening up 13 spots for chain stores. Please research this CAP proposal with another lawyer. That's what I'd like to suggest is just like a strategy. Get a second opinion to see if this is indeed true, if it's true that our current ordinances are weak. I really would like a second opinion. Study Healdsburg and other towns who have staved off chainsaws. They are all there for you to research and learn from. And I strongly oppose this ridiculous power grab from the town lawyer. I'm tired of her unending chipping away of our Fairfax character through her supposed fears, which is just another way to give herself more billable hours. I suggest that our management needs to be investigated for misrepresentation of our citizens. So many things are about what they want versus what the citizens want. Our town government should reflect the citizens who live here, not reflect the desires of a few town officials. Please, please don't do this to Fairfax. Thank you.

Thank you, Kirsten. Next is Molly. Molly, please go ahead.

Hi, can you hear me?

We can. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, I am very grateful for the people that were able to stay there. Unfortunately, I'm sorry we left early, but we just couldn't keep staying. Everybody that spoke is totally stating how I feel. I've been a resident of Fairfax for 41 years, and I can't imagine living in a better spot and The fact that there would possibly be. There's already this huge change coming with the school street Plaza. I can't imagine having new retail shops in there. It just would destroy our small town community here, which we fought so hard for for so long. I grew up in San Francisco and we would come to Fairfax. It's always been a wonderful little town and I just. Everybody else was so much more eloquent than I can be now, but please, please, please take care of our town and let me know how I can help to take care of our town. That's why I was there tonight. Thank you.

Thank you. And we do have one more hand here. Mina, Mina, please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. I'm Mina with the Fairfax Chamber of Commerce. I'm here to advocate for prioritizing locally owned businesses. Locally owned businesses are not just part of Fairfax's identity. They are the foundation of our economic ecosystem. They reinvest locally, sponsor events, support schools, and create the character that draws people downtown, as Mark was saying. Fairfax is not a high traffic, high volume retail market. Our downtown works because it's distinct. If we lose that distinction, we lose our competitive advantage. Most of our locally owned businesses operate on thin margins. They do not have centralized purchasing power, national marketing budgets, or corporate backing. Competing directly with multi-location operators, particularly those with scale advantages, can materially affect the viability of small businesses in a market as small as Fairfax. We don't compete on volume. would compete on uniqueness. The ordinance you adopt will shape the business mix over time. These changes may not feel dramatic in a single year, but gradually the shift during vacancy cycles or property turnover can alter downtown in ways that are difficult to reverse. So from a Chamber's perspective, downtown protection matters, guardrails against over-concentration matters, clear enforceable rules matter. But most Above all, preserving meaningful opportunity for locally owned businesses matters most. It's about being intentional about the kind of downtown Fairfax wants to sustain for the long term. And I know you all feel the same way too. So I appreciate you taking this on. And I would definitely limit the number of chains and include the number of chains that are already existing so we can, you know, cover our butts and also do the right thing. So thank you.

Thank you. And I just would like to do a last call out that this is the last opportunity to talk. If you'd like to talk on this, please raise your hand at this time. And I see no more hands raised.

So with that, I'm going to close the public hearing and bring it back. through discussion with the commission. But before I give it to my commissioners, I just wanted to say that we had stopped our process of looking at formula businesses. We didn't do it with UPS. I think we did it with 7-Eleven. I mean, the cannabis... We did it with that. We did it with the brewery before this one that came in after Iron Springs. And what we had worked, part of that was... allowing businesses to come in that might have been chains, but were needed for the town, that were a benefit for town to provide services. But then we were told because of a case, the Park case, that our ordinance might not be defensible. And our ordinance does have some loose information in it. So we have been trying to get to a place where we could address formula businesses and in a manner that supports our community and is a Fairfax fit. So we've been asking for something. We're starting this process now. So with that, I'm going to ask my commissioners for their comments, and then I'll end up with mine afterwards.

I'll jump in. I'm curious about, I mean, fundamentally, I think we should try to strengthen our formula business ordinance. I think that's what Sebastopol has been doing. And I think that what we have heard are some options for approaching it from a different perspective than what we currently are looking at. And that's why the cap idea has come in. Um, you know, the last time we kind of looked at, uh, trying to identify appropriate businesses for specific downtown districts like CC and CH. Maybe five or 10 years ago, we got so bogged down with the long list that the planner Neil was telling us about of the businesses that are specifically listed and trying to change that and potentially putting some of our long-time businesses in a situation that we're talking about with Java if we go with a ban on the drive-through. And we had quite a few people come to us and really express concern about that similar to what we're hearing tonight in the sense of concern about, you know, taking what somebody has kind of assumed they have a right to do and making it a nonconforming use by our, our actions. I have, uh, I have less interest in banning drive-throughs than I do in exploring approaches to strengthening the formula business ordinance that we currently have in such a way that we can potentially minimize the risk that we have that somebody will challenge our ordinance and, you know, get their chain store in despite what we have on the books. Um, one of the issues that came up in the court decision was, or, or I guess, uh, we've talked about was the transferability of the CUP to another business that comes in. And if a coffee shop is operating there and a Starbucks comes in, well, the coffee shop didn't have a CUP because it wasn't a formula business. A Starbucks comes in, it's gonna need one I don't know. The other thing is for School Street, what we heard was a recommendation that all three CL zones have a total of one. formula business was the recommendation so it's hard for me to imagine there's some nefarious plot to open the doors wide to formula retail in that spot if what they're recommending is one um The other question I have, and we heard from some folks at last month's hearing about, oh, we need to have pharmacies. And this is what you were saying. Why would we have any exceptions? I didn't hear anybody tonight indicate whether or not they would be willing to have an exception for some of the businesses that you know, we're in sore need of, like a pharmacy. And I would like the public to come back when we, because we're not going to finish this tonight. We're going to keep talking about this. But I would like to hear from the public more about, you know, if there was an exception to formula business ordinance, what kind of businesses, or should there be zero exceptions? So I'd really be interested in public input on that. Those are my thoughts.

I think in general, when I was reading this alternate way of organizing it, I ended in the conclusion that it actually doesn't limit anything. And I was a little surprised by that. To give an example, the number of exemptions in here They allow every possible commercial use except one, and that's restaurants. If you read it carefully, it is unbelievable. It is supermarket, grocery stores, drug stores, including allowing retail goods in addition to prescription, any kind of retail goods, banks, professional services, accounting, legal consultants, insurance, real estate, brokerage, advertising agencies, public relations agencies. computer and data processing services, I can be here reading for, there is almost nothing in the commercial world that's not listed here except restaurants. This makes absolutely no sense. This is not a proposal to regulate chains. This is a proposal to allow them. They're exempt.

Yeah, I think that would be... A discussion point is like the exemptions. We could get rid of all of the exemptions if you wanted to.

No, but I am flabbergasted that this is proposed. How can you propose to regulate something and then exempt almost everything on the planet? That makes no sense to me. And unless the purpose was to do that, but then except for restaurants, right? If the policy would be, we wanna protect the restaurants, but the rest is open, then this makes sense. So I think this is text that came from somewhere else, but that's not applicable to Fairfax. And the tendency of that, I see a little bit in other sections of this, um so i think what uh commissioner newton proposed to start with what we have and see if we can make that stronger is much better than this cookie cutter thing that comes from an unknown source so that's my two cents um

I think first I just wanted to thank Steph for the presentation. I thought it was a very helpful set of slides, I think, in relation to what we got last month. The zoning maps and the table, I think, was just helpful as we digest all of this. I think my biggest takeaway is if indeed the decision is to change the approach to a cap system, I would love to push back with our town attorney. And I don't know what our process is like in terms of getting second opinions, but there are other towns and cities in California that are restricting within certain zones, formula businesses, right? The cap is zero for specific zones. If other town attorneys think it's difficult.

I think I can provide some. uh, information on that. Cause as, uh, I just did a quick research of Healdsburg cause I wasn't super familiar with that. So it appears that both Healdsburg and Spassburg kind of have a similar approach where, um, Healdsburg, uh, Doesn't allow any formula businesses around the perimeter of the, if you're familiar with Hillsburg, they have this town Plaza, which is like a square. So, anything that faces that. Town Plaza cannot be formula business, but everywhere else it's permitted. So they just restricted in that very limited area. And then they allowed everywhere else. And Sebastopol's a little bit more restrictive than that. They restricted in the downtown area, which is still a pretty limited area. And then they allowed everywhere else. So that's kind of like where they kind of just picked an area where really just going to focus on this, no formula businesses. And so I think what's proposed here is just well, we're already small, and we can't go to zero, so let's just allow a limited number. But I think there is some room to try to push back on that.

And just to make sure that I'm understanding what you just said, so these Healdsburg and Sebastopol, these examples, don't have a cap system. They just say no in this small area, outright yes everywhere else.

Yes, and they might have use permits. In some of those areas, but they're not saying no, they're just saying you need a use permit. And then it gets approved and just kind of like, we require a use permit, but our. But what I tried to emphasize on the other slide is you can't use a use permit as a de facto denial. So it's like you can't just arbitrarily say yes, no, yes, no, yes, or no. You have to make findings, and they have to make sense, and they have to be based on analysis, data, rational thinking.

That's helpful. Thank you. And then I think my only other comment for now is on drive-thrus. I do think it is very much worthwhile pursuing a ban on drive-thrus. I think from an urban planning perspective, precisely because we are a small town with a limited amount of commercial zones, you know, we don't have far-flung commercial areas that are mainly a shopping plaza or things like that. Precisely because of that, we want to maintain walkability everywhere right we don't want to have it i mean everybody wants a walkable downtown but we also want a walkable area around supermarkets a walkable area around you know even 7-eleven and so i personally um you know banning drive-thrus is something other towns have done i think fairfax should absolutely do it i would be in favor of that those are my comments for now and on that last topic i'd i'd

I'd kind of like to get a feeling from all the commissioners on the drive-through issue because, I mean, I think it would be a good idea, but if there's not interest in moving it forward, then that'd be a lot less work for me. So, anyway.

I can respond to that. I was initially thinking, well, let's start with that because that's low-hanging fruit in the sense that I agree and I think it would be a bad idea. Not about the ones we have, but... it's already congested. It is a function that doesn't fit in a small town like this. So I would be in favor of that as long as it's protected, what's there.

Okay. So, Commissioner Pfeffer?

Yeah, thanks. First, on the drive-through point, I agree, you know, caveat on not doing, not... hurting the Java Hut, but I don't think we'd need any more drive-throughs if we had a cap system that was at one. It seems fine for me. I think this is a point I asked last time, and it's sort of noted in here, but I think the attorneys, I assume they thought it's more efficient to just cut and paste as opposed to keeping our ordinance as is as much as possible and just adding in things that will make it so that it's not dinged by Malibu. And I did a very quick search and it's a nine-year-old case and it's got 76 citations already. So it seems to be pretty well relied on, but it also seems to be pretty limited to the issue of conditional use permits running with the land and the transferability issue. And I very much appreciate Commissioner Jansen's follow-up from your response to one of my questions about the transferability if a business later becomes a formula business. Because if... this is also transferable in a way that we're not limiting, then it has the same problem that the existing ordinance does, I guess. And it says right now in the new language that it's transferable to this business of the same type so long as they don't expand by more than 500 square feet. And so if... it says a formula business clearances. So I guess is the point then that somehow only a space that already has a formula business clearance would be able to transfer that, but a restaurant that does not have a formula business clearance could not transfer to.

I think that's the idea. Yeah.

But they could just, but I guess that for me, That's just a legal structuring problem. You're just giving somebody extra work to structure it so that the business ownership stays in the same entity. If you can just sell it to – if I just create Revolution 9 LLC and it keeps its ownership, it owns the business now, and then I just sell the shares or the membership interest in Revolution 9 LLC to – whatever big store, retailer, whatever, the business is the same and they're just going to change their branding. I guess those rules, it seems like, would still apply regardless. And so we're not really getting anything by... limiting it, unless we somehow are able to limit the ability for chain retailers to buy out our local businesses. I think it is a very good idea if we are Making any changes to the ordinance, I think something we absolutely should do is write, as of right now, these are the formula businesses. Because to your point about the current language being able to be broadly interpreted, anybody could then say, I was a formula business, and so I can transfer to a formula business. We want something in here that says, no, it's the town's understanding that it's only these four or five businesses that are formula businesses. And so you can't make that argument. One of the other comments was about, you know, national developers buying property and just converting them to cookie cutter or what have you. I think it's unclear to me whether or not that, like, luxury rental, whatever person that's in 17 different towns across the Bay Area would be captured as a formula business. It's a business. And so I would hope it would be captured, but I think we want to make sure that we know for certain one way or the other. So I guess I'm just sort of giving my impressions on what this ordinance should do. I'm the same understanding as Commissioner Newton. Nothing's happening either way right now, and we're going to need to develop this further. I appreciate the public skepticism of, why are we making changes now? From my quick research, it seems like there was a treatise published in 2025 that started including this as an issue. So I suspect that's why a lot of this activity started coming up from law firms in 2025, who are just reading land use law treatises.

Well, this was, just to be clear, this was requested by the council. The town council requested this work. It's not coming from the attorney. It's coming from the town council members.

And I assume the town council was doing that because they were hearing from members of the community that said... We couldn't enforce what we had now. So similar to what I had said, that we couldn't enforce it and they wanted something, the community wanted something that would be sustainable. And we've been pushing for that since, I don't know, the last two or three years. So that's why you're hearing it from...

I just want to be clear. We got directed by the council. It's not a conspiracy by the town attorney. So, okay.

I appreciate that clarification. I guess my point is for the next round of comments coming in from the public. If you're finding other sources that say. this is enforceable as is, that would be very helpful also for us because right now we need to, what everybody wants up here and to speaking is an enforceable formula retail ordinance. I am skeptical that just deleting ours and replacing it without some thought is that helpful. But we need to find a path to get something and we need to know with some basis of support that it's going to be able to be enforced. And if that's people's, You live in Healdsburg or you live in Sebastopol and they're saying this. I have a friend who lives in Atascadero and they just did this. Sending that along because it's not in this. Many, many, many cases in states, of course, are not published. So people are not going to find out about them except for word of mouth because they're not meant to be relied on. But you can sort of informally use the guidance.

And the next time this comes back, I can do a summary of what other... jurisdictions have done and how it's enforceable, more or less. Because they all have attorneys and they've I mean, especially Healdsburg is going to get a lot of pressure to have chain restaurants.

Sorry, one final point I wanted to say. Also, from what I was reading, it seems like one of the major issues that courts are looking on generally for this sort of use restriction is having objective findings that apply to everybody. So it seems to me it would be a lot easier to enforce a zero restriction than a two because if you say we find it harmful to the town center planning area to have anything blah blah blah blah blah and you just force it universally you're applying the same standard to everybody sort of when you get to pick and choose uh you get in trouble okay you want to go i particularly like that last argument um

Because if you say you allow two, then what happens if you're the third? You're being unequally, right? So that creates a problem by itself.

Yep.

Okay. So I read the Park case because that's the only one that has been brought up as the basis for what we're doing. And in the Park case, it says, CUPs run with the land. We knew that, right? But there was a lot of other elements to the Park case. There were developers wanting to build shopping centers, and there was a petition to put that to the vote, and part of that was, and I think it passed, and I think part of that was every time A developer came in to do something like that. That had to go to a vote of the people. So it wasn't just formula businesses and CUPs. It had broader ramifications and issues with it. What we have... from our attorney seems to be cookie cutter, if you will. And what we got and what I hear is, well, I'll pass this through and see if it's okay with the attorney. What I want to know is what is the basis for what the attorneys came up with, be it The numbers, why did they pick those numbers? And anything that they put in there, what was the reasoning behind it? Was it based on some court case somewhere that could be similar to our situation here? You know, we talk about Healdsburg and they've cut out, you know, a certain area, but Healdsburg is also surrounded by by shopping centers, right? So what fits one place may not fit Fairfax. And we're certainly not looking at this, I don't think, from necessarily that perspective. I don't know what San Anselmo would do if a 7-Eleven or something When in there, they may not have anything, but it would be good to look at other communities to see if they've tackled this. So wanting to have an understanding of why we're getting what we're getting from the town attorneys. And I certainly have concerns with the numbers they came up with. You know, we had one draft last month. We've got something different this time. We've also got drive-thrus. And in the staff report, the drive-thrus talked about... assuming that the drive-thru was going to be a Burger King. It was going to be a restaurant. And the staff report talked about, you know, all the detrimental effects of fast food restaurants, right? And making the assumption that anything that's a drive-thru is going to be of that type. I mean, we could have a drive-thru car wash. I mean, we may not. I mean, there are other things for drive-thrus. I don't know that Starbucks has ever had one. So I would like to put the drive-thru issue off on the table and just look at before us the formula business issue. And then if you've done research, I mean, I've looked at the Park case, so if you could share what you found, I'd love to see it.

Well, if I may, just on your point on finding out the sources from the town attorney, and I just want to say, to be clear, I trust the town attorney, but if there are people here who want a second opinion, we heard that referenced, you've got to, you can ask, email and call and pester the town council to, on a one project basis, go out and price from a different law firm how much would it cost to get a memo on this topic, on the enforceability of our current ordinance and different avenues that would be permissible and enforceable. And you can just say, give us your estimate for, I mean, I, I assume there's probably a public bidding process for attorneys even on something like this, but we're asking our town attorney to refer out to a different reputable attorney to write the memo. It's going to be costly because even like a five page opinion saying that stock shares are valid costs like 20 grand these days. But it's, If it's a concern, it's a worthwhile use of money if we get something actually enforceable out of it.

But I think to that point, though, and I understand the comments from the community, but I think we need to start with, I would like to start with just an understanding of why we have what's before us. You know, what's the basis of it? What's the rationale for that? And that would help us, I think, overall.

Yeah, no, I agree, but... To me, that's our attorney coming up with a memo either way. And so if we're going to have a second one, why not only have the second one instead of getting one from our attorney and then a second opinion on that?

I mean, I think what we've seen, in looking at Malibu, this is how Malibu... worked on addressing the issue was you know what we learned from the the staff report is that these proposals are coming from the attorneys looking at other jurisdictions trying to react to the decision to strengthen their ability to keep retail formula businesses out of their communities or limit the number in their communities. I think it, it's just looking at the different approaches. And even though we are different from Sebastopol, I like what they've done in terms of strengthening their language around transferability. Like who is the same type of business? What does that mean? And so I, You know, we're not Sebastopol. We're not going to have an area outside of downtown that's more conducive to having retail. You know, we're just not we don't have shopping malls around us. but i think we could look very carefully at the zones and say zero if we wanted to put a zero in the cc you know and then maybe open it up as you get further away from from the downtown uh And then again, if people feel like there's types of businesses that they want to encourage here, regardless of whether or not their formula, people need to come and tell us that. Like we heard last month that pharmacy was one that somebody felt strongly about. So, you know, I encourage the public to let us know if there are types where, yeah, I don't care if it's a formula business, please let them in. I don't know. That's my thoughts. Oh, I do know. Yeah. So you had a whole list of things you wanted us to tell you what we thought about. And I think we've talked about a lot about, on this list of, you know, things you wanted us to address.

Um, I never got an answer in my drive-thrus by the way.

Right. And I was just going to get that. I am reluctant to ban drive-thrus, but I think it's cause I'm a boomer. Um, I don't know why that's just like the car hop idea. I don't know. And, uh, And because I think the effect on our one drive-through is something that I am very reluctant to push. I think we talked about most of the other stuff.

So to be continued.

Did you hear from everybody about drive-throughs?

Oh, I said I'm all for, but for the impact on Java Hut. To me, it's like if they're... Okay, so I'm counting three, two, it stays on the table. Well, if you talk to them and they say they're going to come to the meetings and put up a big fuss because they really do think it impacts them, I would be a, let's not waste our energy. Oh, okay.

Yeah, and I think they should have been invited, but I think we've got more than enough. I mean, drive-thrus right now aren't an issue in town.

Yes, but when that drive-thru Starbucks opens up on Francis Drake Drive, I told you so.

And I'll pay you five bucks. But I don't think, I mean, we've got enough on our plate. I don't think I want to be concerned and work on drive-thrus and go through the thing with drive-thrus when they're not an issue now, where formula businesses and the ability to manage those is. And that's what we've been working, trying to get before us. I would want to focus on that.

If I may amend to that, I think the reason the drive-thrus are in there is because a number of formula businesses that would be most threatening to local restaurants operate in a drive-thru fashion. So there is a secondary purpose for that resolution. That's how I see it.

Yeah, my understanding from the planning director at our January meeting is he said his understanding From his planning sources. A lot of those types of formula businesses will not consider a location if they can't have a drive-thru. It just affects the commercial outcome for them.

We haven't had any coming to us now, and it would be a formula business that we'd be dealing with regardless. So I'm sticking with let's focus on formula businesses first.

We could say no drive-through restaurants.

Java Hudson has food.

Yeah, but if we went with the kind of Sebastopol language... Let me find it, I've got it here. They actually say like, Oh, a coffee shop is a coffee shop. It's not a restaurant. Okay, they say type of business has the same meaning as this term is commonly used and is intended to be narrower than the land use classifications used elsewhere in this title. Similar types of businesses offer substantially similar goods and services. For example, a coffee shop would be the same type of business as another coffee shop, but a fast food restaurant would be a different type of business than a coffee shop. Sebastian Pohl. Love it.

So do we have enough to work on?

Yeah, I think this is good. This is a good start.

If I may ask, since this is a public hearing item and not a discussion item where we're considering a recommendation to the town council, do we need a motion saying that we don't want to recommend something to the town council?

I think we're tabling it.

Yeah.

Or if you want to continue it.

They can continue it to a set date or they can continue it off calendar, right?

I mean, if you wanted to just keep talking about it next month, I mean, I don't know if we necessarily have anything. I don't think this is going to be final by then, but maybe we have enough. Like I can get back to you on what some of these different towns are doing, where they came up with the numbers. I can try to get some answers. And if we can't get it together by next month, we'll just have to re-agendize it.

I'll move to Continue this item to a date to be determined by the planning director.

Second.

want to do a roll call. You want a roll call. The journey.

Yes.

Jansen? Yes. Pfeffer? Yes. Newton? Yes. Chair Swift?

Yes. So we have no discussion items scheduled. So we're going to go to the minutes of the 5 January meeting.

I have a couple of comments.

I just need to find where I wrote them. And I had corrections, but I'm having to look for them.

i know there was a misspelling of commissioner patroni's name on that's approval of agenda the motion that's where it is okay yeah i don't know what you were saying all right

While you're looking for yours, I found my list. So Commissioner Baylor was a remote attendee. So when we had the listing of who attended, If we could change participating remotely due to illness to Commissioner Baila. Oh, please add change to participating remotely due to illness. Commissioner Baila disclosed that there was no one 18 years older present in the room from which he was participating. So we cover that. On motions and seconds, can we use a slash instead of a dash between the two names? Because it's confusing and can look like it's a compound name. Page two, you had Wesson Lane listed. I think that was supposed to be Walsh Lane.

Where was that?

Also, you addressed comments neighboring property owners were concerned about A, B, and C, but we also had public comments from folks that were not neighbors on that item. So I'd like to change that to public comment included and be more general. Okay. Page four, the fifth paragraph, and I'll send these to you. There was a spelling error change T to two, T-O, the fifth paragraph on page four. Page four, the seventh paragraph. was talking about the formula business item, I believe, not the ADUJDU.

Where was that? I was still.

Page four, the seventh paragraph.

What's your change on the seventh paragraph? I'm sorry.

The seventh paragraph was under the ADUJDU topic, and it was really, I think, relevant to the formula business.

Oh, I see.

So you want it removed. Yeah.

OK. Then we had two sections on minutes. So the bottom of page five says minutes, and I think it should be titled minutes of the November 20th, 25 meeting. And And it should say, motion second, Newton Patroni move to approve the minutes with the following corrections identified by me. Page two, change the vote on 76, Frustruck, to Commissioner Kelly, recused. Page three, Commissioner comments changed second sentence in the first bullet to read the safety element. A commissioner thanks the staff for completing and uploading the safety element in addition to updating the general plan in the Fairfax library. It was noted that neither the budget nor Fairfax code had been updated at the library. Because I think what's in there says that I mentioned that the budget had been updated. And minutes were added also at the bottom of page six, so that can be deleted.

Well, if you could hold on, because I have comments on some of the same stuff you're commenting on. So before Linda decides what she's going to do about all these instructions.

Resigning as the minutes clerk.

I think, Linda, one of the places where I was just watching you get confused was Cindy was reading. what her comments about the prior minutes had been that had not been included in the minutes. So you were looking for where she was reading, and she was reading something that needs to go in there that's not in there. Okay, so the thing that she raised that I noticed as well was this minutes coming up twice so on the first time it comes up, it says I moved and Commissioner petroni seconded my motion. to approve the minutes with the changes indicated by Commissioner Swift. So that was where she read you, here were the changes that I was making, okay? So... Right there is where you would insert all the stuff she just said. Okay. But then you get down to the second place where the minutes comes up. And this time it says motion Jansen second Kelly. So now I don't know. Oh, but this is to approve the minutes from September 18. So maybe these two references to the minutes both occurred at the November meeting and they, no, wait a minute.

I think we only had one set of minutes at the, to approve at the, so yeah, it was just copying, I think.

Yeah, I think that that needs to come out. I can't explain how these things happen. Now, the other thing was on page four in the

indented paragraph that starts the grace period for ADUs and JADU. Do you see that? It should say the grace period for ADUs and JADUs, plural, should be limited, comma, otherwise, and then take out the semicolon. Otherwise, there is no incentive, blah, blah, blah. You see what I'm saying? And then the only one, I don't know if you heard me, was Commissioner Petroni's name was spelled wrong in the very motion to approve the agenda on the page one.

That last comment is appreciated on this side of the aisle. Thank you for that. I also, just going through right now, I caught it. It was misspelled on the very last page as well.

Oh, my God.

In the same way, though. And so there's consistency in some respect. Yeah. Yeah. She's had a lot of years of practice, I guess.

Now, if my name is in those notes, then that's wrong because I wasn't at the meeting.

Well, I think that's the reference to the minutes at the bottom. I think that was the minutes that you're going to delete from the September 18.

Do we have a motion on the minutes?

I'll move to approve the minutes with the corrections that we've discussed.

I'll second.

All in favor?

Yes.

I abstain. Jansen, I abstain. Everyone else, yes.

I wasn't here, so I can't say yes or no.

You don't have to. No, we were approving the minutes. And I have heard that it doesn't matter if you weren't here. It's fine either way. Ooh, ooh, ooh. I have a commissioner's comment.

Do we have a planning director's report?

No. All right. Go for it. i want to take the opportunity to thank commissioner bella for his service as a commissioner and let him know that i'm sorry we didn't get a chance to uh you know have a final planning commission meeting where we would have had a parade and all that But, yeah, it's really much appreciated the hard work and his input. And we didn't see eye to eye on everything, but I really, really respected his opinions and appreciated his perspective.

Thank you.

Any other commissioner comments, questions? No.

All right. So do I have a motion to adjourn?