Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

That's

it. Some older adults are afraid to exercise because they're afraid to fall and that fear factor is huge. So we work with that fear factor in creating security, we help people to gain confidence, we teach people how to move, we teach people safely how to move.

I vacuum and I dust and I wash dishes and I wake leaves, have jillions of weeds. I'm able to bend easily and I think the exercise keeps my body planned so I can do these things.

Make sure you're breathing, okay? Don't hold your breath.

We have the greatest instructions and she explains the exercises, what they do for our bodies and she's emphasizing stretching to keep us from falling. All these exercises help. I never use weights for my life and I'm using these little one pounders but they do the job for me. I think I've lost a couple inches since I've been going to this class.

Nice and tall.

I've met a lot of nice, super people there, people who are interested in keeping fit. You need it to keep your body healthy and to keep your blood circulating.

Double your lift.

It becomes a habit. The first few times it's an effort but after once you get it in the habit and you feel better for the day.

I'd like to call the planning commission meeting of 04/08/2026 to order. Please join me in the salute to the flag.

Ready to begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty to justice for all.

So the fact that the secondment? Roll

call, please. Yes sir.

Commissioner Vu is absent. Commissioner Brothers? Here. Commissioner Escona?

Here.

Commissioner James is absent. Vice chair Hebner? Here. And chair Langer? Here. We have a quorum, sir.

Are there any supplemental communications tonight? No, sir. Zoom participants wishing to address the Planning Commission can indicate through the chat feature which item you would to speak on and click on the raised hand icon to let the administrator know which know you, you wish to speak. Anyone in the audience wishing to speak must fill out and submit a blue speaker card. The planning commission can take no action on this date unless the item is.

Anyone wishing to speak on items not on tonight's agenda may do so during public comments. Speakers on items scheduled for public hearing or non public hearing items will be invited to speak when those items are heard. All public comments are allowed up to three minutes to speak. And because I know we have some public commenters that are here at this time, I'd like to adjust the agenda to move public comment to the first item before consent.

Thank you, sir. Yes. We So have three residents I'd like to to call up. The first is Laura Hadley.

Good evening. I'm sorry.

I was misunderstood what this meeting was for, but I do just want to address some of my concerns. My concern with this is the Newland entrance. There is not enough space for two cars to go through. If you were coming in off of Newland, there's a couple different items. There is a flower bed that's on the right hand side with a curb, and that curb jets out where the veterinarian is to the point where I have an SUV and I drove through that and only my car could get through that.

So if you have someone entering that apartment complex and exiting it, only one car can get through at a time. So that inhibits the flow of traffic. Two, the vet is, that's where he takes his deliveries on his property right there. So if he has a delivery truck there, you're not going be able to get through. Three is the owner of the land that where the old coffee shop used to be, he used to have that it was stationed off.

He used to have concrete pillars there with chain link. Now I don't know if the owner can bring that back or not. I don't know what the city ordinance is. But there is an empty building there right now, and if that were to be leased right now and a shop were to open up there, that is also going to inhibit the flow of traffic. And traffic on Newland already gets backed up.

My house backs to that strip mall, so of course I'm concerned. But I also try and go out off of Newland and Rembrandt, and during rush hour traffic, that traffic is backed up way past Rembrandt, and it takes me a good several minutes to get across. So if you have cars trying to get into that entrance and traffic is being impeded because they're trying to get in and out, then you're going to have a backup on Newland and it could cause more traffic. So those are my concerns. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Thank you.

Carl Romek?

You know, I've been looking up things about this. And if this guy goes a 100% low income and we're a half a mile from a bus station. He does not have to have any parking. He can go three stories up higher, and he can have unlimited units. How come nobody's ever talked about that? I mean, that's crazy. No parking. You're gonna have a six story building. Nobody ever comments? You know?

And on top of that, you know, I mean, six stories and unlimited, you know, I mean, is he going a 100%? Is he going a 100%?

No. So if you have questions, we can try to answer them at the end of this, but this is your three minutes to speak.

Yeah. Another thing is if you notice there isn't hardly anybody here because nobody's been notified. And part of the lie is you're supposed to notify us. And every time we get notified by the city, they send us a notice in the mail. Nobody received that. How come? I mean, we can't get any answers. We asked to have a town hall meeting. They were you guys council refused to give it to us. We asked for more time to talk.

He told us we're having three meetings. You can have nine minutes. I mean, that's the kind of answers we're getting. No answers. You know? I mean, everybody I've talked to that that knows that this thing is going up, they all think that somebody's getting paid to make it happen. I mean, why else would you put a giant building up against the against the neighborhood? I mean and and put it in a zone. Why don't you zone it for houses? You know, zone one is for houses.

Zone two is for duplexes. That wouldn't affect anybody. But you're gonna you realize how it's gonna mess the schools up if you have that many people. The schools, it's gonna mess the the parks. It's gonna mess everything up. I mean, it's So

you have twenty seconds left.

It's crazy. I mean, that's insane to put that up there.

Val Fox.

Good evening. I'm gonna read tonight because I got too emotional last time. I'm here to object to the Warner project. It's zoned as commercial. It needs to stay commercial. It's where businesses should be along Warner to propose a 72 unit apartment complex that backs up to a residential community that has existed for greater than sixty years, the residents deserve better than what you're proposing. Their privacy would be invaded. Our residential community attached to it would be invaded. Tamara Elementary School, Fulton Middle School, and Fountain Valley High School would all be impacted. Then there's the traffic.

I'm sure we're going to hear about how they conducted a traffic survey and how it would not impact our community. I'm here to tell you it will impact all of us within a square mile on any given morning driving eastbound on Warner for the South 405 on ramp across Magnolia. The traffic on Warner backs up way past Newland. That's a half a mile. The timeline for this is six to 9AM in the afternoon evening from three to 7PM going westbound on Warner.

It backs up all the way over the top of the freeway down to Bouchard. This is all before the boomers project hasn't even started, and I know you have to do that one because it's part of the arena. This is not part of the arena. That is going to add another 800 units plus at Magnolia and Warner to even consider this project as shameful and irresponsible. Irresponsible.

Well, I'm not gonna get into the parking issue because you guys don't seem to think that that's part of the problem, but it will spill over into the tract, and there are students riding bikes and walking. I went and parked in a beach chair on two two different days, the fourth 04/01 and 04/02. There was a minimum of 600 cars crossing Newland going eastbound on Warner. I stopped at 600 because it's ridiculous. Then going into the school on Ross from Warner into the Tamura Track on 42, between 07:30 and eight, there was 57 cars of parents dropping students off and then having to come back out onto Warner from Ross.

I'm guessing the only way those of you on this committee would understand the impact this project would be proposed in one of our tracks is let's tear down and rezone some of the property in your tract of homes and see how outraged you would be. It has nothing to do with Rina, and it needs to stop. And commissioner Brothers, you said, wouldn't I rather have 72 units instead of ADUs? No. I would not. Thank you.

I have no additional request to speak.

I believe did someone left a comment card on the Oh. On the side there.

Thank you, Lisa. Pat Neal.

As you could tell, most of us are outraged by the proposition that this might go through. Part of the issue is and for clarity, let me find out from all of you As of the last meeting, this project has been declined. Is that correct?

Ma'am, we're not going to we can't do dialogue during the public comment. If you'd like to continue.

Okay. Here's the deal. We have all gotten together and have done an enormous amount of research on this project. If this gentleman gets this property, once he owns it, he will then be eligible to do many, many things that were never planned on, that were never discussed in the meeting as far as parking, the height of the structure, the number of people. And because there are bus stops there that also qualifies him for certain grants and things, and he can just do some extraordinary things like this monstrosity across the street where Silkeys was.

I don't know how it started, but I'm sure it never intended to look like that. But we are very, very opposed. It will be detrimental to the whole neighborhood, the schools, the parks, everything around it. This man had commercial property for thirty five years, never did a darn thing with it. He never painted it, never got it to code, never fixed one thing. And the property would be more valuable commercial with a little bit of effort, and the city of Fountain Valley would stand to get a lot more revenues from that if he was just made to own up to his responsibility and take care of his property. Thank you.

Okay. Are there any other no.

Alright. And do we have any requests on Zoom? Alright. I'll I'll just comment now that we have an item of unfinished business later on the agenda. There's no public comment on that because it was already considered at the last commission meeting.

We'll talk about that, but my understanding was that the planning I was not present, but my understanding is that the the vote of the commissioners was to return with a denial, of the project, and that will be, voted on today with basically the denial resolution, that was requested by the planning commission at the last meeting. So that will be voted on, but it's not a public hearing, and I don't expect that there will be substantive discussion of that item at that time. But, of course, members of the public are welcome to stay for that and the rest of our agenda. All right. Onto our consent calendar.

We have on the consent calendar the 03/25/2026 Planning Commission meeting minutes. Can I get a motion for item one? Move the item.

Second. All

right. I have a motion from Vice Chair Huber and a second from Commissioner Brothers. Roll call, please.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes.

Alright. On to public hearings. Before we start, I must note that it is customary for commissioners to visit applicant sites. Unless any commissioner has further disclosure states statements at this time, it may be stated that no contact has was made during the visit with the applicant, his or her agents, or neighbors of the proposed project. Our first public hearing item is code amendment twenty six zero three, objective design standards, a code amendment to amend the Fountain Valley Municipal Code sections twenty one eighteen one three zero to establish citywide objective design standards for single family residential, multifamily residential, and residential mixed use projects. I will now open the public hearing. Staff report, please.

Yes, sir. And just to go back to the last item, the minutes, I believe the chair was not at that meeting. So you'd be abstaining from that vote. Correct?

If that's your advice that I can't vote.

Yes, you approve I believe

so minutes if I wasn't there.

Yeah. Yeah. You need to. Alright.

I've changed my vote too.

Thank you sir. Okay. So again we have before you chair and commissioners objective design standards So I'd like to give you some context in terms of why we're going through this process. Basically, the state over so many years through legislative acts is taking away discretionary review of projects and pushing forward more ministerial actions. Discretionary reviews when the item comes before the planning commission or the city council, and you can decide on the merits of it, of of each of those applications and vote in favor or deny the project.

The state is, in their, wisdom, trying to increase the number of homes in California and also the speed at which they get approved. And so they are trying to push for more projects to become ministerial over time, not have to go through discretionary review, public hearings, and that process. So for example, you have SB 35 requires jurisdictions that are not meeting their housing goals to approve multifamily projects through a streamlined streamlined ministerial process without discretionary hearings so long as a project complies with objective design standards. AB twenty eleven opens the door to housing commercial zones and requires by right sequel exempt approval for qualifying projects that meet objective design standards. SB nine, which you heard an ordinance for a few months ago, allows for lot splits and additional homes on single family properties.

Again, they have to meet objective design standards if they did that. There's current legislation AB twelve oh six where cities would have to, if it's passed, allow certain developments by right with strict timelines if they meet these preapproved plans that the state wants us to come up with. So we'd have to have state preapproved plans. And if the developer met those preapproved plans, it would be ministerial, streamlined, and go through. Again, we can only apply objective design standards to those.

Just last night, had this item had come through the planning commission. The city council heard for first reading. The state had passed a law says if one of our opportunity sites in the housing element, if they come in with 20% affordable, then that is ministerial. It does not have to go through discretionary review. Again, in that case, all we could do is subject them to objective design standards.

We can have a discussion of what we want this architecture and this and that. That was more of just they have to meet certain design standards. So given given that focus by the state, number of cities have gone through this process, are going through this process, and many others that haven't already are considering going through this process. What the city of Fountain Valley did is after we adopted our general plan and housing element, we worked with Placeworks on a number of implementation items. This was on the list of things we wanted to get done to ensure that we have these in place in case any ministerial buy back projects come before you or come before the city.

So we worked again with Placeworks. Alan Loomis has been working with us. We met with them. We had we started with information meetings kind of telling communicating what the issues we see in the community are. We had some old, I think, design standards that were maybe, like, thirty years old that really don't pertain to what we see now.

They took our feedback and their expertise and came back with design guidelines, iterative process. Our staff made comments back and forth, and we ended up with the document before you. The concept here is to adopt them by reference in the municipal code, but have them not part of the municipal code so that, they could be amended, in the future if needed, more easily than having to go through an ordinance process. So that's my not so brief background on the issue. I'd like to turn it over to Alan Loomis who will walk you through the actual design guidelines themselves.

Real quick before the staff report, can you go back to that first bill that you mentioned? I think it was a senate bill.

35.

SB 35. Yes.

So what read to me again SB 35.

So that's a complex bill, but basically it it says you have this say eight year housing element cycle and then they pro say you have 800 units as part of your arena. If you're in year four and only 50 of them have been built 50 units have been built, there's some mechanisms by which there could be nondiscretionary review.

Okay. So in our case where we have a housing element that's approved, the chances that this could affect us, you would say, are fairly minimum. Correct?

I wouldn't say that necessarily. I couldn't I couldn't say that, as a response. We are in, what, year five, of the cycle with 8,000, almost 9,000 units required. So, we if you prorate each year, but, you know, divide eight or 48, 32, whatever the number is by eight, and you get an average number of units per year. We're behind that even though we've approved so many units. So there is an opportunity for some of that to occur. So I couldn't say that with any level of confidence.

Yeah. Because I'm just trying to get an idea of, you know, what's the risk level here.

A lot of these bills require certain they have expectations of the development community and some of them, such as prevailing wage and other things, which they don't necessarily take use these bills because of obstacles that they may see, but there there is the opportunity for them to do it.

All right. Thank you. Thank

you, Director, Chair, members of the Planning Commission, if I may. I have a relatively brief presentation that goes over the highlights of the full document, which is in the staff report. So I'll go through that and then be happy to entertain questions and discussion.

Could you start by introducing yourself?

Oh, yes. Sorry. My name is Alan Loomis, Principal of Room Design with PlaceWorks. As the director mentioned, PlaceWorks was originally contracted by the city to develop the general plan, and this work that you're seeing tonight was one of the implementation items and tasks that came out of that work. So I'm kind of wrapping up the tail end of our contract and our scope of work with the city with this project or kind of component. So yeah. Thank you for the reminder. Let's see. Mouse is not working. Let's try.

That is also not working. There we go. Okay. So as I said, a kind of brief over presentation of the overall document. I'm going to cover in the first two kind of numbers one and two here on the table of contents a little bit of the context that Omar gave you earlier.

Just kind of repeat that. Then I'll go into the kind of key features of the design standards document that we've prepared for the City Of Fountain Valley, where it applies. I'll cover the organization of that document and then again just hit on some of the highlights and then kind of end with the municipal code amendments that's part of the action and then end with the recommendation. So again, going back to the kind of preview that the director gave you relative to objective design standards, there is a in the government state government code, there is this definition of what objective design standards are. And so you can read it here.

Don't need to read it for you. But what it essentially means is that any sort of language that has kind of moments of ambiguity that allows for a planner at the counter and a developer or a citizen to have an argument about what the intent of that language is is something that should be struck out when we think about objective design standards. So a kind of reasonable example of that would be to say windows should be recessed or you should have overhanging eaves. Well, what does that mean? That's very ambiguous what that intention is.

But if I said the window shall be recessed by a minimum of two inches or the eaves should overhang by a minimum of 12 inches, there's no argument about what the intention is there. Somebody can pull out a ruler or a scale and they can measure and say, yes, you've met that standard or you haven't. So you can cascade that kind of intention across all measure of different kind of design possibilities. And that's what we're struggling across the board or kind of through this trying to figure out how do we define all those kind of design criteria, what's really important to define and put them into this document so that there are objective, clear criteria with metrics for thinking about these these kinds of design issues. So that's the mandate by the state laws, to have standards that are not something one can argue with, that are clear and unambiguous.

And there's a variety of different ways of kind of getting at that. So as mentioned, what this really means is that when it comes to these qualifying affordable projects, if they've come with the right amount of balance of affordability or the prevailing wage, depending on what state builder is sort of exercising their kind of entitlements through, The city and not just Fountain Valley, but any city in the state of California is limited to approving or denying these projects on the basis of these objective design standards. As mentioned, this really means that, like those entitlements or those approvals of those projects do not come in front of the Planning Commission, the City Council, or some sort of design review body empowered by the city. It's really done effectively at the counter by city staff. So the overall intention of this document is to make the requirements predictable and easy to understand for citizens, applicants, and city staff alike, you know, so that all the expectations are clearly laid out about what's expected.

So again, what this is doing in the interest the state's interest in kind of expediting housing production is really sort of going after the fact that historically, cities throughout California have used a discretionary design review process to determine whether projects are meeting city's expectations, housing development in particular. And I think the poster child of this when these laws came through is the city of Santa Barbara. As you probably might expect, Santa Barbara has pretty high design expectations, and there are stories of housing development in the city of Santa Barbara having to go through 35 different hearings over two years in order to get the project approved. And, you know, so unfortunately, Barbara being a bad actor in this regard means the rest of the state has to sort of follow suit. Although I would say Santa Barbara is probably not the only bad actor in this respect.

So as mentioned, this really gets at now the state saying these qualifying affordable development housing developments now must go through a ministerial process reviewed at a staff level only, not subject to any sort of planning commission or discretionary review. And so one of the consequences of that is this language that we have relied on for many, many years in planning practice of design guidelines that say should are encouraged to do this wherever possible. That kind of language really needs to be struck out of our design standards documents when we apply them to these kinds of projects because it's just it's not enforceable. An applicant could say, you said should, I choose not to. And there's really nothing the city can do about that.

So one way to think about what this documented design standards are going to do for you as a city is they are, in a sense, your sort of ball work against these affordable developments coming through and exercising their ministerial approval rights. They are the primary tool that city staff is going to be able to use to get quality design out of these developments because you, a planning commission, and the community are not going be able to review these projects. So this document coming in as a new feature to your kind of landscape of municipal laws is really that kind of protection. And while the state has said you must have these kinds of things in place and you must exercise objective design standards when you're approving qualifying projects, they have not said exactly what you're supposed to include in them. So you do have local control over how you construct these design standards, what you put into them and what you ultimately say and your expectations are for laying out what you think the community design quality should be.

So the key features of the document that we've produced for Fountain Valley are: number one, as the director indicated, it is a freestanding document, you know, with color photographs, and it sits outside of the municipal code. It is referenced and empowered by a code amendment that's proposed, but this lives outside of the municipal code. A couple of reasons for that. One, it allows us to give a lot more rich illustrations than would be otherwise possible in a kind of typical municipal code. And second, as the director indicated, it makes it a lot easier to amend this document in the future.

We have prepared these kinds of design standards for multiple communities in Southern California, and we are in the process of amending at least two of them that we have worked on before because the city has worked with them for a year and a half, and so we've got some edits we want to make. We've discovered new things that we need to address, and so we're going through an amendment process with a couple of communities that we've already done this work for. I think that's important to say because this work as a practice across the state is brand new. There's not a lot of kind of benchmarks or good practices to roll off of. So the work that we're doing and developing objective design standards statewide is maybe two years old.

So the what works and what doesn't work is all sort of an evolving practice, and we're kind of collectively learning as cities apply this in different contexts. So it's important that this document can be easily amended if needed. The document you have in front of you is going to cover design standards for single family development, multifamily development, broken and kind of discussed in detail with the three different bullets, and then we cover mixed use developments as well. So the standards apply for all new construction and also substantive renovation of new developments. And we've defined that really as the demolition or rebuilding of more than 50% of the exterior envelope of a project.

So routine maintenance of somebody's home, adding on a porch or changing out their windows or a condo association that needs to upgrade their commons facility, that kind of work would be exempt from these design standards. This is really aimed at new construction or things that appear to be new construction. They also apply on top of any existing zoning standards that exist underlying zone where the project is proposed. So the limitations on overall height, density, etcetera, that apply today in your zoning code, this does not override those considerations. It is a supplement, if you will, and kind of additional layer.

Also important to say that all the other kinds of codes that exist in the city, the building code, the fire code, etcetera, those also still apply. So this is just one more layer of regulations that an architect and an applicant would have to work their way through to bring a project forward to the city. I will note also on the applicability, I don't have it on the slides, but it is written up in the sort of discussion, there are provisions for relief from some of these standards under specific kinds of circumstances because these standards are intended to be citywide. There are a variety of different kind of conditions that you can imagine where an applicant might typically come forward for a variance. Let's say their site is up against a drainage canal or a power line easement that kind of cuts the site off and makes it very weird.

Those are the kinds of sites that typically come forward to you for a variance. So we've offered those sites a certain measure of relief that's described in applicability. So there are some relief valves. It's not a completely it's not a total straightjacket. So as I mentioned, the document covers single family, multifamily, mixed use, including a kind of definition of purpose that Chapter one of the purpose describes is where you'll find those kind of deviations or the ability to have some predefined deviations.

The other thing we include in Chapter one is these two tables, which are important because there's a lot of standards in this document. Not all of those standards are going to necessarily apply to all projects. They're in some ways, at the kind of far right hand of this column really geared towards the very large scale development, multistory, 7,500, 200 unit scale development. They're not appropriate for smaller scale types of projects that maybe are only 50 units. And so we have in Chapter one, we have this definition of small, medium and large development governed by the lot size or the size of the development footprint, the height and the overall number of units.

And then you can see on the table on the right, some standards apply to small development, a little bit more to medium development and then one extra one that applies to the sort of large development. So there is this kind of matrix where we recognize that everything applies. It's not a one size fits all set of standards. Moving on to single family. And here in the presentation, I'm going give you the attractive looking graphics and not all the text that goes with it.

But of course, there's lots of text that goes here. So we address single family design characteristics. And so we cover things like the overall massing of the development, the size of the 2nd Floor and what kind of scale of a footprint that has. We cover material variation, essentially saying like on the street facade, you should have two materials. And then for any sort of roofline that gets exceptionally large, then we want to have like that roofline being broken up.

So there's some kind of modulation of the roofline. We also have some language in here. That's the text that's on the far right about trying to offset windows where so that, you know, if you're developing a new house, you're not having your window directly face your neighbors where you're sort of seeing straight into their their living room, their bedroom, bathroom, that there's this language about offsetting those windows. So that direct view is mitigated. In the multifamily chapter, we have quite a bit of discussion about site planning and how to organize a site that involves multiple buildings.

So that's what the diagram on the left is trying to indicate or illustrate the various kinds of standards. Ideas about that site being broken up into potentially smaller lots, subdivided with actual public streets, subdivided with private streets for kind of alleyways or kind of driveway courts, etcetera. And then relative to all those nonpublic street type possibilities, we've kind of described some design standards for how are you going to construct a private street? Should have a sidewalk and pedestrian lighting and trees on a private street, what you should how you should address the issue of just pure auto courts and how pedestrian passages that are, you know, kind of landscape paseos. All that stuff is kind of defined in the site planning section for the multifamily development.

We have quite a bit of discussion on open space. And so in this case, what we're looking at is not the kind of straight how much open space is measured by square foot a development is required to provide per number of units, but how do they distribute that open space? What do they do with that square footage? And so you can see we have a table where depending on how many units is being proposed in the project, they have to provide a variety of different, what we call, either major amenities or minor amenities. So you can see if it's a small scale project that's under 20 units, they basically have to provide one major amenity.

But if they get up to 31 to 50 units, now they have to provide either two major amenities or one major amenity and two minor amenities. So there's this kind of menu of options. Now what is a major amenity or a minor amenity? Those are all defined in the document. So you can see the column on the right is the kind of precise language about what is a major amenity.

So for example, letter D here is that a major amenity is a swimming pool with a minimum dimension of 15 by 30 feet or an equal surface area of water. So we kind of give very precise measurable definitions for what each of these items are. The intent of this is to provide a kind of menu option that allows a developer to really kind of rightsize the sort of menu of amenities that they're providing to their the community and their kind of target demographic as they develop this. So the intent is to really offer a lot of possibilities but have all those possibilities precisely kind of keyed off of precise metrics. So there isn't an argument about how big a dog park should be, for example, which would be considered a minor amenity.

A big chunk of the multifamily standards address this topic of mass and scale. So this is where a lot of kind of interest in larger scale development in communities tends to go towards, so it has to do with modulating the roofline in different ways. So there's a series of different options for how to do that when buildings exceed three stories. So those are the two illustrations on the left. So one of those is you have an actual setback, the upper floor, that 4th Floor would be pushed back from the street facade or the primary facade.

Another option is you could have some degree of roofline variation, and all that is measured and could be kind of keyed off of the applicant's drawings. Horizontal modulation, so this has to do with how much in and out a building has to sort of break up what might otherwise just be a long, flat facade. So that's all measured based on the width of the facade or how long it gets and how much modulation a building is required to have, how deep is that recess or that projection. There are some other design elements that are also addressed relative to unique sort of site planning features. So a discussion about buildings set on corner sites of kind of two major roads, how do they address that corner architecturally or pull back and have some sort of landscape in front of that.

So all of this is kind of defined in the mass and scale section. We dive down into dealing with materials and details. So what kind of mix what's the percentage mix of building materials that's expected? How many different kinds of window types? So we say you should have at least two different window types, so you're not just getting one window frame repeated 700 times across the building, but there's a mix and match.

And going to this other problem I mentioned about the recess of windows defining that windows should have a minimum recess. On mixed use development, we break this into vertical mixed use and horizontal mixed use. So vertical mixed use is obviously where you have residents over some sort of commercial or retail space versus horizontal mixed use, which is a residential building and a commercial building sitting on the lot and maybe they're sharing some form of parking structure or parking lot. So it's sort of two different kind of challenges. On the vertical mixed use, it's really about the access points into the building, having separate access for the commercial versus the residential.

And then on the horizontal mixed use, it has to do more with kind of the disposition of those individual buildings. This section is comparatively light on a number of design metrics in comparison to what we wrote for the multifamily. And the reason for that is part of our earlier work on the implementation program of the general plan, we actually wrote fairly detailed design standards that were embedded into the zoning code. So the zoning code today already includes quite a few design standards and kind of metrics Like you've seen I just showed you for the multifamily, that's already exists for mixed use development and the mixed use zones within the municipal code as part of earlier work that we did. Last, there's a set of definitions to define all those architectural terms that are not already included in the municipal code.

Part of the whole package of adopting the design standards, as mentioned earlier, is that there is a specific amendment to the municipal code, Section two thousand one hundred eighteen point three zero one hundred thirty. The text of that's in the staff report. And so what that really does is just say that the design standards are the tool that would be used to evaluate these qualifying projects. And so it's a fairly strategic amendment to the municipal code that then empowers this document by reference. So that is part of the overall actions of adopting the municipal code.

I will say that is actually very typical of many of our other clients municipalities in terms of how they do this. So finally, the staff recommendation, and I'll give it on behalf of Omar and the planning team, is that the Planning Commission adopt Resolution 20 six-four recommending the city of council approve a notice of exemption in accordance to California Environmental Quality Act and approve Code Amendment 20 six-three to implement and adopt residential mixed use objective design standards. And with that, I'm happy to entertain any questions.

Questions from the

commissioners? So just to be clear, let's say a qualifying project does come to city staff and it's evaluated against these design standards. If it's found that that project does not meet the standards, that's now the city's kind of mechanism for being able to approve or deny a project. Is that correct?

Correct. So in the scenario, you said somebody comes forward with a project that does not meet the objective design standards as laid out in this document or however it gets amended. The city staff would have a basis for denying the project. Probably what they probably most likely end up doing is saying your project is incomplete because you haven't met all the design standards. Go back and redesign it to meet the standards. So the applicant will have multiple bites of the apple till they meet the standards.

Yeah. And then my my next question, like the part two of that for Omar is, if we're using this document as a mechanism to kind of bypass the discretionary process where we would go through things like public hearings, How is the public going to be kept aware that these projects are coming into play? Like how is the community going to know, hey, this is happening. This is potentially coming to your neighborhood if we're on the one hand trying to streamline a process, but on the other hand, you know, we can't be losing part of our civic duty, which is keeping the community informed of changes that are impacting them. So

first, I would say that this is not trying to bypass the system. It is being responsive to legislation that is requiring the projects to be ministerial. In terms of public input into the process, I think that is part of what the state is trying to eliminate specifically. So they are trying to eliminate CEQUA barriers, a little trying to limble it eliminate what they would probably call nimbyism to try to prevent a project. So that if it already is adopted in your general plan and housing element and you've said this is gonna meet our arena, then why do you need to go through this process?

You've already told the community you're going through this. That's my take on what the state's saying. That's not me saying it. So we try to keep the public informed through various measures. We would still do that, but there would not be a public notice that goes out. We would still post any projects that may be coming through to the city on our website and whatnot, but there would be no public notice for administrative projects. But, again, that's a separate issue from approving the design guidelines.

Just one other clarifying question. So if if project did not meet the objective design standards, if I understand correctly, the other option is they could, like, basically apply for a regular conditional use permit without the objective design standards, then they'd have to come to

Yeah, I think that I believe that is kind of written into the way the ordinance and the standards have been drafted that there is an option for an applicant to come forward through a kind of discretionary review process on their own volition. You can't require them. But the analogy we've given in many other communities is, you know, let's suppose an architect developer hired Frank Gehry to design their affordable housing development. You might very well want to entertain that project. Developer is gonna say, there's no way Frank Gehry is gonna meet all this kind of stuff. So they say, we'll come forward, and we'll make our case in a public hearing. But can't use that analogy anymore because Frank Gehry, unfortunately, you know, did pass away at nearly the age of 100 in December. So

Just to add to what what this again, it's an iterative process. So if we get an application, we would and they don't meet the design guidelines, they would receive a letter comment letter from the project manager, the planner that would detail what they're deficient on, and then they'd have a chance to resubmit the application. And at some point, if they just say we're not gonna meet it, then we would deny it. But normally, what happens is they would come in, we would make comments on what they're deficient on, then they would address those deficiencies over time, and then they try to get to a place where they do meet and are in a position to be approved.

Commissioner Brothers.

Thank you. So if a developer comes in, they're not in the arena process, and they meet all these design standards, do they get ministerial approved?

It's not just for opportunity sites within the housing element. If they meet a state required or state this legislation that has passed as the ones that I mentioned to you in my introductory remarks, if there's a state legislation that puts them in a ministerial process of any sort, not just related to the housing element, but any ministerial process by state law, then this would apply. It would apply? If there is a if they are subject to ministerial process through the state through state law.

K.

So maybe this is a question that you can't answer off the top of your head, but are there ministerial processes with that override zoning?

So the way they override zoning is generally no. But what happens is they may come in for state density bonus, and then they depending on the percent affordable units that they provide, then they can ask for waivers and concessions. Concessions.

Okay. But if you're let's just say you're zone commercial and you wanna build a you wanna change the zone, this process doesn't allow you to just change the

state laws. So there is there are provisions in state law that allow you to convert commercial, industrial properties that meet certain criteria to convert those into residential regardless of what the zoning is. Again, that's why there's a need for this document because there is a lot of the state is trying to bypass your zoning in many different ways. One is to convert non residentially zoned land into residential property.

Yes, I'll just jump in and say those laws I don't want to say it's AB twelve oh six, quite frankly, I get all these state laws confused what does what. But there were two laws that were passed that address that sort of enable developers or builders to build housing on commercial and industrial zone property and bypass zone change. Sort of two provisions on those. One of those laws require a developer to actually pay their contractors prevailing wage, which is one reason that law has not been extensively used. But both of them make reference that the city's criteria for approving those projects or reviewing those projects should be objective design standards.

So in the absence of having anything other than zoning, a project like that could come in and be effectively whatever it wants to be. So that's, as Omar said, one of the reasons to get objective design standards on the books is it does give you some bulwark against sort of the bad actors of the development world.

So essentially, what I'm hearing is the state has passed this law. There's nothing that we can do about it except implement these very stringent design standards as a way of saying, okay, somebody can't just come in and build whatever they want. They have to adhere to these very, very specific guidelines we've laid out as our only our last line of defense from

just Yes. That's a fairly good effective accrued but very effective summary.

Okay. It's a series of laws that have taken effect over time and there's a continuing stream of legislation that is in the same vein. So that there is a continued push to make projects ministerial and there will be more and more legislation in that direction.

Other questions here?

You had mentioned that you were working with a couple of cities, one or two, I don't know, with amendments. What kind of amendments are you seeing?

The two that we've worked on most recently are for communities in the Inland Empire where we wrote design standards that were really geared towards kind of like larger scale developments, apartments stacked on top of apartments. And what they're seeing come through is kind of the three story townhome development and sites that were zoned for multifamily. The sites are actually zoned for more density, more units than the developers are proposing. But given the current state of the housing market and those regional markets, what they're seeing is effectively kind of like very, very compact single family detached or sometimes duplex development. So they've come back and said that was a problem we didn't anticipate five years or four years ago when we did this work.

So we're adding these kind of modules, if you will, to address single family development on multifamily zones. Like I said, very, very but very, very compact, like three foot building, separation between the buildings in some cases. So it's a kind of phenomena we really didn't anticipate three or four years ago when we did the work with those cities, especially in those markets.

And then if this is adopted and it goes forward, how often can we amend it? Or does that come back to us when it needs an amendment? Does it go to the city council? What's the process for that? Because I imagine the state's gonna keep sending things down and they it will have to be amended.

So, again, I think the amendment process would be if we didn't foresee some circumstance and we wanted to add some provisions or if some of the provisions in here we're finding are obstacles that we didn't necessarily need to have, but that we could work with developers on. So I think those are generally the two criteria we're looking at. And so if we identify something that we didn't foresee or if something is not working necessarily and it's being an obstacle unnecessarily, we would bring those amendments to the Planning Commission and City Council for adoption. The the nice thing that we're we're how we're doing this is that we just don't have to go through the full ordinance process where we have to go through two readings and take thirty days to take effect and all that sort of stuff. It's just a resolution of approval and takes back immediately.

And I will just note, you know, we at PlaceWorks, we're doing this work, as I mentioned, across Southern California, in fact, up and down the state. So we're talking to multiple cities about what problems they're encountering. And if if we were to find out from, you know, a a city in South LA County that that they've suddenly run into a kind of major issue is something we wrote that was very similar to what we presented in Fountain Valley, we'd pick up the phone to Omar and say, like, this is an issue. You probably ought to entertain an amendment to get in front of this. So, you know, we have ongoing relationships with communities we work for. I'm always happy to come back and fine tune the work that we've put in front of you.

Did you have another question? Thank you.

So from, like, an administrative perspective, let's say we do approve this and we want to make an amendment to it, that could objectively be done within one planning commission meeting. Correct?

Yes. It would have to go to the city council, but we would bring it before you. If it was you either be city staff that would be bringing this before you or planning commissioner city council could direct staff to make some changes if they believe those are necessary. We'd bring that before you for consideration and recommendation to the city council, and then we take you to city council for approval.

Sorry. I have a few questions. So we didn't really talk about what the standard is for objective standards because I wanna clarify because the point was brought up about these are stringent standards, but I think that's we can't be unlimitedly stringent. Right? Like, we can't we can't say, like, you have to have a 500 foot setback on all your on all your housing or, you know, things that are so what what is the actual standard that we have to follow for the objective standards so that they're not effectively pretextual?

Yeah. There's there's the state did give some guidance to how to implement objective design standards when these laws were first passed. And so there is, on the one hand, a kind of very clear measurable dimensional thing. You can pick up a scale and measure it. As I mentioned at the beginning, that would be your overhang your eaves must overhang a minimum of 12 inches as opposed to saying under a design guideline scenario, you might say your eaves should overhang to provide a shadow relief on a building.

That's very vague. What does that mean? Eve shall be minimum of 12 inches is something you can directly measure. There is also something else that I haven't seen too many cities employ, but it has to do with you could use like various kinds of performance metrics. Where you see that most commonly in zoning law is things like relative to noise and odors.

So you might have a performance metric for a car wash, let's say, since they're not allowed to produce X noise exceeding a certain number of decibels as measured at a certain distance away from the property. That's a performance metric that really isn't embedded in the design per se. We have found it somewhat challenging to try and use performance metrics in developing design standards. And then the other tool that we use quite frequently and extensively in this document and the work we've done in other communities is to provide a menu. And so the illustration I gave of the amenities is a menu.

This is we tell you there is a table, you would have to adhere to the table. And then the menu, you get as an applicant, you get to pick from. Although each one of those things in the menu, we've tried to be as precise as possible. I would say one of the reasons we like doing menus is it allows a certain degree of design flexibility by applicants so that they can kind of rightsize their project to their kind of development pro form a, their kind of market, their kind of aesthetic, the way they're marketing the project. Frankly, I think it also I'm a former city staffer, and I think it opens up the door for city staff to be able to steer applicants in a certain direction.

Say, yeah, in this menu, know you could do A and B, but we think for this site, B and F would have been a better choice. So it allows some degree of agency still amongst city staff to be able to help talk to applicants about what's the right choice. The other thing that it does that I think is also kind of important is it puts a much higher burden, we think, on applicants who want to say to a city, we're going to do an affordable project, and we're going to request waivers and concessions. They can't say we want a waiver and concession out of a menu list because they would have to go through each one of those menu items and say, we can't meet that, we can't meet that, we can't meet that, we can't meet that. And that's a pretty we think a fairly high burden.

So by providing this menu list, we think that applicants will be always have an option to be able to sort of pick something without having to say it's impossible for us to make our project work. And then finally, with the menu option, it also ensures, like I said, with design flexibility, hopefully, it means that not every project that comes forward in the city is going to look exactly the same. There will be some diversity. You won't get cookie cutter buildings stamped out up and down the city.

If I may add just briefly, so we had two projects that came before you fairly recently, multifamily projects. And what you see in this document isn't dissimilar from how staff review the projects and made comments on them. So we look for quality design, step backs, architectural features. We look for amenities that would be a value to the residents there and whatnot. So what this is kind of formalizing what we do naturally as planners for discretionary permits.

It's not dissimilar at all to what actually occurs now. But that would be called subjective because we're making you it's not formalized in some document with clear, you know, metrics. But we we do this now. We just don't have it formalized in the the zoning code.

So the the question I'm trying to get at is what standard does the state provide us in setting our objective standards? So I I mean, I understand the structure of what you did, provide flexibility. These are also, like, seem like pretty sensible, reasonable approaches that somebody could build to. But what what is that standard? I mean, you you mentioned we could have an you minimum overhang of 12 inches. What what stops us from saying, I want a 128 inch overhang minimum for all windows in in all projects?

I'm going to say there really isn't anything in the state guidance related to how to construct objective design standards that would prevent you from writing an ordinance, you know, a standard that's that kind of outrageous.

I would get to I would point you to the housing element. And we so there's no I don't think any limitations in state law per se. However, there are limitations in the city creating we couldn't use this to create undue obstacles to to housing. So if something you know, we created some, you know, huge step back or, you know, whatever requirement in this document that prevented developments from occurring because it's outrageous, I don't think that would be legally defensible to do. We couldn't create some obstacle to development in a design guideline. It had to be something that would be in line with what you normally see and it wouldn't create the obstacle.

Yes. And I will note that we took a lot of pains as we wrote this to make sure we weren't duplicating things that are already in the zoning code like setbacks from front property line or overall building height. This is related to if you will, the development code as it exists today creates a box in which a building can live. And these standards are intended to sort of shape that box and give it more form and kind of definition.

Yes, think actually functionally the answer to your question is that if you adopted objective design standards, which precluded the development, let's say that you said no single family house can be taller than six feet above ground level, that ultimately you'll litigate it, but a developer can legitimately say that precludes any project, and therefore, your design standards are invalid. But there isn't the state, God bless them, has never said, Okay, well, here's what you have to

do. Yes. I mean, I think it would be if the state came down and said, here's the universal statewide design standards, I think everybody would recoil even

more. Let's not give the state any ideas. I think we're good We right have some discretion here.

Yes. But that being said, I think, you know, to the extent that any cities, you know, Santa Barbara, let's say, sort of oversteps their bounds, you know, I can imagine like the boundaries of what's acceptable probably be decided through some court case and best of my knowledge that

Or unfortunately HUD. So I mean, you're the state will come down and chat with you about the same way they did about Arena.

And so you mentioned this is sort of new, but have any of the objective design standards by any of the cities that you're that you've worked with or to your knowledge have any of those been challenged?

No, not that I'm aware of, no.

Okay.

And

Yeah. And I haven't heard of any that with cities that are not our clients either, so

And how similar are these that you're proposing for Fountain Valley? How similar or how different are they from other cities? It sounds like you have experience in a lot of

different cities.

Yeah, very similar. And I think one of the benefits that we've had in working with somewhat similar language and kind of structures in other communities is that the language that we've kind of pulled from has been vetted by multiple city staffs across the state. So every time we present it, we have another city staff using ChatGPT or just their good sense and saying this language you wrote is not really clear. It's not objective. I think we should refine it that way and kind of so we reiterate from that perspective.

It also means that the work that we've done has also been vetted by multiple developers. Development community has seen the work that we've done. So we recently about a year ago, worked with the city of Tustin, and the design standards we wrote for them are fairly similar, especially in the multifamily section to what we've proposed here. Those design standards were reviewed by all the major developers active in Tustin, including the Irvine company, who provided fairly detailed comments on it. So we do continue to iterate this work and bring forward kind of what we think are the best practices as we've kind of vetted that with different communities in different cities, always kind of calibrating what we're doing for the community we're working in.

Yes. As an example, and I think that you did them, if I recall. I won't mention the city, but it's a city in Inland Empire that is very Western oriented. And they required that the design standard reflect their Western style. Now it didn't have any impact on the ability to develop, but it took into account what that community felt was important. So to the extent that there's something unique about the community, certainly, standards can take that into account.

Yeah. And For example, like Santa Barbara coming back to them, they have their design standards that they've recently adopted, it's not her work, has fairly detailed design standards for doing Spanish mission revival architecture.

And just to be clear, it doesn't look like you copied and pasted the Western style.

No, no. The document we've produced for Found Valley is style neutral. It doesn't sort of try and regulate styles or can or have ambitions to turn you into a western town, sort of outpost the Knott's Berry Farm or San Clemente.

We we can talk about if we want that to be the first revision. I have a question about the applicability to existing single family. So the way I read it, it appears there's some applicability of the objective design standards if it's a 50%.

Effectively for new construction or a substantive remodel, which we defined as demolishing more than 50% of the exterior walls and roof.

Okay. So that would apply just like if somebody is doing a pretty significant remodel to their

Yeah, or if they purchase a site and they knock the house down and they want to build a new house then yeah, the single family.

And so part of this was trying to get to you know we have infill development and so you have a community that's one level one story and somebody wants to put a two story which we're seeing a lot of, you know, we wanted to put in some standards in here so that we could control for that infill and and that McMansionization and those types of things that may occur over time. So that those are looked at as well because that's one of the issues that we've seen. So I think that's why we pointed out like the windows if you put you know windows facing each other and those types of things that become common issues. That's why those are trying to be addressed in here as well.

Yes. So the standard written on that particular circumstance is that the 2nd Floor shall be no more than 70% the area of the 1st Floor. So building won't be able to just extrude straight up as two stories. They'll have to be some portion of the building. 30% will have to be pulled back in some fashion. So it's the language we wrote to address that circumstance.

Okay. Well, maybe that's something for discussion. It's like because I I had that's sort of an aside, and, a lot of this was, seemed to be focused more on the larger developments. And and I understand too for, for new single family, but I'm, you know, curious I mean, is the 50% is it 50% or is it forty percent?

Fifty. I

have to go

back and check.

50%. Yeah.

50%.

That's what I thought it was too. I mean, that common in other cities?

That's a metric that has been used in other cities that I'm familiar with. The other way to approach that is using like a kind of gross square footage of an addition, for example. So again, you want to use some sort of standard that's very clear and measurable. When an applicant submits their plans to account or kind of draft plans they're talking about doing a project, Planner needs to say, okay, well, if you're going to knock down a subset of more than 50% of the building envelope to do your addition, the design standards will come into play or if you're going to do a brand new construction. And we've worked in other communities where we did that metric, as I said, based on square footage, X amount of square feet being added to the street side of the property or X amount being added overall.

And that square footage number becomes the trigger. I think the challenge with that metric is house sizes vary. And so a 200 square foot addition on a house in one part of town might be a very substantive addition to the front of the house and then another community that might be like a tiny little add on because the house is already quite large.

I'm looking at Stephen back there, but I think the most common thing we see is residents coming into the city buying a home, demolishing the entire thing, maybe leaving one wall up for certain reasons and then building a new home there. And so it's pretty common and maybe an ADU. So I think that's the most common circumstance we see. We don't really see we may you know, you're taking down a small portion of it to expand or do some room addition, but really what we're seeing majority of the projects are demoing the entire thing and then building up a new unit. And then

what for those kinds of exist I mean, just under the existing rules, what are the standards that are applicable to that? So if somebody wants to either leave up one wall or knock down the whole thing and build I mean, we've all seen these things in

the community. We're just using the whatever's in the zoning code. So right now, that's what's happening occurring now, and that's what we're just using the base zoning code for that now.

Okay. But we don't I mean, we don't have a I guess we're not gonna know tonight for because I'm asking on the fly how how these objective standards compared to what's in the code.

Again, they add on to the code. They're not meant to replace. So setbacks, height regulations, anything that is a development standard is not being impacted here. This is in addition to it in terms of the design of the new home. So it doesn't it shouldn't conflict with anything in the in the zoning code. It just adds on the layer of of design to the development standards.

Yeah. So essentially, it's supplemental. It's not a replacement.

Yes. Remember, you're talking about design standards, not development standards. So what this subject matter really is, is the design of the project, not the development standard, is underlying in the existing code.

But the existing code does have some things that affect like directly affect the design, right?

Like Yes. So

we'll probably our next step is probably to go through the zoning code and see if we have those encourages or should and whatnot and probably replace those or remove those over time if those are still there. Because, you know, for ministerial projects, those aren't enforceable. For discretionary print projects, we could still use them, but we'll need to go through and and kind of check that verbiage in the in the municipal code as well.

Question over here.

Yeah. Some of these design standards sound actually very familiar to me. I think they've been in place for a long and practiced for a long time, whether they're part of the zoning code or the design standards.

So part of what happened is Alan came up, developed. He met with us. We told him some of the issues we're seeing in town in terms of new development, in terms of infill development, and he created these standards with that in mind, and then staff reviewed it based on what projects they're seeing. So, you know, they would review that single family section with some of the projects that we've seen come into town either, you know, single homes or larger developments with those in mind, seeing how they would kind of impact those. So we we went through that process of, of viewing these, objective design standards against, what we normally see day to day.

Okay. I mean, well, we can come back to this in a sec. I'm a little bit uncomfortable, that we might be impacting people's home remodels with this. I I don't like, when I when I think about the objectives design standards and what we're trying to do and we we had this whole discussion upfront about state law and how we're trying to get in front of that because the state is imposing these mandates and essentially what you're telling us is if we don't have objective design standards then there is no standard and someone might come in and do whatever they want. And I think when we're talking about multifamily, new single family, mixed use, I think that's a real concern that that we hear from the community.

I think it's a different kind of concern if we're taking this as an opportunity to add add new requirements to the things that people are doing if they're if they're changing they're doing a remodel of their home.

It it applies applies to them because they are ministerial. They are sync one offs in terms of just this one home, but they are ministerial in Asia. So it would we've taken the since we're going through this process, and we do have issues related to infill. So they are subject to it. But as commissioner brothers stated, again, they're very similar to what we have in place already.

Yeah. And I guess case in point, if somebody's remodeling their house, they don't come before the planning commission.

They don't work.

So there are methodologies in place where this is already happening.

Sure. But my point is that we're adding a whole bunch of new requirements for them. Potentially. The

point is well taken, as I said at the very beginning, the first page of the Chapter two on single family says it applies to new construction or the remodel of existing homes that demolish more than 50% of the exterior envelope. So I would argue from my kind of practice in other communities that if you're knocking down more than 50% of an existing house that is not a modest remodel that is, you know, you're not remodeling an interior bathroom or putting out a bedroom in your backyard. It's a pretty substantive reconstruction of an existing house. So we try to craft it to try to exclude those sort of modest remodels.

Yeah. And I I my point here is just that it's a difference in kind of the standards that we're putting together when you when you talk about not new construction, but remodels to existing single family homes where, people may have plans, people are people have a certain understanding of their flexibility in this city with what they can do, and we're we're not just reaching then into new, not yet constructed multifamily developments or even single family developments or mixed use. You're now talking about people that already live here, what they were thinking about doing with their home. We're gonna change that. My concern is doing that part of it, just like that one element of it, without a little bit more consideration and deliberation.

One of the things that maybe you can look at it from the flip side, that let's say you want to remodel your house today, there aren't those standards. You're going to go to planning department, and planning department is going to exercise their discretion and look at what the code is and say, no, we're not going to let you do that. And there's really no potential for them appealing it. At least with design standards, they can go in and say, okay, now we know what the rules are because right now they're the reason for design standards is the rules are generally potentially ambiguous and purely within the discretion of staff that this might be a positive move for somebody who wants to remodel 50% of their house.

Maybe. But we don't have that information.

Right. And I'll just add that if you look at the single family section, it's it's pretty modest in nature. There's not anything that is, you know, would would be a major issue for any new homes that are coming in or major remodels. It's pretty standard. Even I think the most impactful is probably the upper story massing, but that's already something that's part of the municipal code. So it's not really a thing. It's not significantly changing anything in my opinion, but I understand your concerns and that this is different than what we talked about in the beginning of the conversation.

So I'll save my other thoughts on that for the discussion portion. Do we have any other questions for staff before we go to public comment? Do we have any members of the public who wish to speak?

I have no request to speak, sir. Okay.

Good. Then I will close the public hearing. Discussion from commissioners.

I'm sorry. I got confused there. Are are we still talking about that that unit on 8550 Warner?

No. No.

No. That's not today at all?

Public comment was at the beginning of the meeting. And so that will be the next item on the agenda, but there will not be public comment for that item.

Commissioner Brothers? As I stated, a lot of these design standards have been in place for a long time. So let's say you're thinking about remodeling your house. If you've come to City Hall, you already know what a lot of these are. They aren't being changed.

They've they've always been in place. As was stated, it's a administrative process. You can't challenge it because there's no nothing specific. This is specific and it can be challenged. But as far as the the roofline and the frontage setbacks and materials, that's been in place for a long time. So if you're thinking about doing a flat roof out on a box, that's been out the window for a long time.

Yeah. So that that's helpful. And my the hesitation I have is that I don't know because we didn't do a side by side on the existing fit, you know, like for for single family in particular, we're talking about if you're doing a major renovation, these are not gonna apply. Where are we taking a subjective standard and that we already had and turning it into an objective one? And where are we introducing brand new standards that we never had before?

And if we're going to introduce brand new standards that we never had before in the in this particular case, I'm where it's single family and it's existing, I'm more concerned that we'd be deliberative about and just eyes wide open about what are those what are those new things that we're imposing. So to to the extent it's what you said, then if I saw that I'd I'd shake my head and put it on my head and say yes. My concern is that we haven't I I just I don't have that information here, and as we had the discussion, that became apparent to me.

I guess along this thread, so how often do we get these kind of requests for these major types of renovations? Like, it something common? Is it something uncommon?

I mean, the somebody purchasing a home, demoing it in its entirety and rebuilding, I'm guessing we see once every week or two weeks, something like that. Maybe two weeks? Less than that? So maybe once a month, something like that? There you go.

So maybe knowing the frequency of these requests.

I mean, that says to me that it's this isn't a something that never happens.

This is

definitely yeah. So I I'm generally supportive of everything here, but I would be, and maybe I could figure out how to I could make a motion on this if anyone's even interested is I I would be interested to see where we're adding objective design standards, how those are either making objectives subjective standards or where we're adding completely new things. And I think it probably warrants some discussion if we're saying that we don't want people to be able to make the McMansions anymore. Like, think that's a like, if that's a discussion that the planning commission's gonna have, I think we should actually have that discussion, and hear from people about that. I wouldn't want it to be something that, we vote on this today and we did that, and we didn't even realize that that's what what we were doing.

And just to clarify, the my comment wasn't to say we're prohibiting McMansions. My comment was to say that we have areas where we just have single story homes, and somebody will come in and propose a two story home. So we have a lot of infill development like that, which occurs, with those one a month type of, applications. And so we just wanna ensure, say, for example, that you don't necessarily get to oversee in somebody's backyard or, you know, you you prevent some of these things from infill that you have. But if you look at the section for single family, I mean, one page just talks about materials and colors and whatnot.

I mean, I don't think they're, again, very you know, it's it's it's not very prohibitive. I I think architects deal with all this stuff pretty easily. It's not very prohibitive in any nature.

And either Omar or Alan can comment. There's also and I haven't read the documents, I don't know specifically what the language is, but there's the potential for request for waivers. So that somebody that for a good reason was really unhappy because it didn't fit what they were planning can ask for a waiver. And if it's not onerous, then presumably it would be granted.

So, I think it's important for the city that we get the objective design standards in place so that we don't end up in this situation that we're trying to avoid on the other 95% of what this document is is intended to do. I'd like to propose if the and and I'll ask I'll ask our director if this could be possible is if we were could we adopt this along with the direction to staff to come back and explain the, like, how the objective design standards for single family renovations or are different than what's already in the code? And then if we wanna propose an amendment to that, that we could take you know, that you could bring our tests and the the council that we could amend it.

Based on this conversation, I was going to, do that anyway. So what we'll do is if the planning commission recommends city council approval at some point in the near future, we'll provide something to planning commission either through a study session or agenda item or some documentation kinda detailing out what specifically for single family, what the standards are now and what changes would be occurring.

Okay. So is there other discussion?

I guess the only other thing that concerns me is I understand why we're doing this, and I understand the intent of this as a supplemental material that's going to help us retain some degree of control in the face of, you know, this state mandate, this law that, you know, now exists on the book and we have to be compliant to it. So this is our way of being compliant, but still being able to say, okay, well, we're going to impose these standards that need to be followed if you're going to bring a new project in the city. My biggest concern is since this is transitioning to this ministerial process and we're not going through the public hearings and we're not going through that noticing period, my biggest concern is again the transparency and the accountability. And if these projects are coming through and they're qualifying for this process, how do I know? Like how do I know is this going to go up in my backyard or is this going to go up next to my parents house?

Like how are we going to know and have that transparency with how our community is changing? Like I understand why we're doing this but how can we better handle that transparency and change control?

Sure. We can look at that. We haven't had any applications that take what was normally at or is normally a discretionary permit and made it ministerial yet. But essentially, that ship has sailed so that if we received one today, say, a 20% affordable project for one of our opportunity sites, we would have to consider it administratively, and we wouldn't have any objective design standards to protect us. So that would be today if it came in.

So what this is doing is just adding codifying some standards for design because that project could come in today. Right? Like, state law already requires us to process certain types of projects ministerially even if our zoning code says they're discretionary. So that that's already in place. But this is just trying to protect us if that does occur in the future, if an application comes in the future.

The we'll have to consider internally as a city, you know, once we do receive one of those applications, how if we can, you know, provide documentation to the community that we do that. That'll be a separate issue since it's not it won't be a public notice. And we're you know, we would be we could not notice that as a administrative item. And that's

to be clear because I I think I saw this. The the law says it can't be a public notice.

Right. We it's not a public hearing. It's not a public publicly considered, so it wouldn't be a public notice. Even if you took administrate so even if the the state has some guidelines and if you try to take a by right project to city council for consideration, you cannot have a public hearing on it. And they would only consider the merits of whether or not it meets the code or not. So if an application comes in today, we would be required to that meets one of the state criteria we would be required to process administratively. This is just adding on design guidelines in case it does occur in the future.

I want to follow-up on that. So if you're given notice about what's going in, let's say next door to you, and you have no recourse, what's the point?

At least you know what to expect, you know, managing expectations. I don't want to be surprised by, you know, and I live in a condo community, so nothing can go up in my backyard, but still, you know, it's just that, you know, that good faith transparency and communication, wanting to know here's how our community is growing and developing and making sure that, you know, the people that are, you know, elected in making those decisions are held accountable, you know, for that. You know, just that good faith of knowing that, you know, our community is developing in a responsible way, and, you know, we want people to just be aware that these things are happening.

I mean, from the city's perspective, I don't think we would want the public to not know. We would want to want them to know. And if they're gonna see something coming up, we'd want them to know that we were prevented from going through a certain process by state law. And so we would probably put on information after the fact anyway to let them know or through that process to let them know what is occurring and why it's occurring because that communication would be important for the city. But it would not be something that we could notice to the community and they could provide input into that process.

Yeah. So it's like, it's great that we have the public hearing process, but if that's gonna be taken away, then the next best thing we can do is at least put the information out there. That just the point that I'm making is it shouldn't be this closed door thing where these things are happening administratively and nobody is aware. I mean, I think it would be in our interest to at least raise that level of awareness and transparency because then it shows like, hey, we're being compliant. We're doing all the things we're supposed to be doing.

This is why, you know, we're not having a public hearing because people will be upset. But at the same time, at least going forward and saying like, we're sorry, we can't do this, but we're at least telling you this is happening. So then you don't get that perception that, oh, these things are happening behind closed doors and what if there's, you know, other things going on just to kinda keep that good faith.

So would it be something staff could look into about what like you said something earlier about maybe you could put something on the website or, like, pending applications. Is that something you could look into about what the city's allowed to do?

Yeah. I mean, I think our goal is always to communicate with the public and to let inform them of what's occurring. And so we will go through that and see what we could do, what would be responsible and legally approved for us to do in terms of communication with the public if we did receive one of these application. Yeah.

Are you currently doing that with ADUs?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Any other discussion? Alright. So I'd like to propose a motion first to approve I'm gonna get a approve the code amendment as proposed by staff but also direct staff to do two additional things. One is to look into what our options are for, for public notification of applications that are subject to the objective standards. And then two is a presentation to the planning commission on the existing standards for single family either complete renovations on a single on a single property or, the greater than 50%, like whatever we have and how that compares to, what is now in the objective design or what if this passes, what would be in the objective design standards.

So, if we're comfortable with that, great. And if we wanna propose amendments through the amendment process that would also be part of this code if adopted, then we could propose those changes.

And on the first of the two, when you said public notification, that was more just public information that could be shared through the process?

Lowercase n. Yeah. Yes. Public information sharing. Yeah. That's a motion.

I'll go ahead and second.

Alright. I made the motion. The second from Vice Chair Huebner. We get a vote. I'll do a

roll call on this one. Commissioner Weathers?

Yes.

Commissioner Escona?

Yes.

Vice Chair Huebner? Yes. Chair Langer? Yes. Motion passes four-zero.

Alright. Moving along. We have no new business and on unfinished business we have, for those who hung around 8550 Warner Avenue project Parkside Fountain Valley general plan amendment number 23 dash o one. I'll let you read the rest. Staff report, please.

So I'll give this one unless Steven wants to add anything. So on March 25, your last meeting, the Planning Commission considered a general plan amendment, zoning code amendment, precise plan and CUP. There was no resolution for approval or denial provided the Planning Commission directed staff to come back on a four-one vote to deny the precise plan in CUP and recommend denial of the remaining entitlements to the city council. So those are the resolutions provided to you this evening, and we're looking for a vote consistent with that.

And I think it's pretty obvious, but there can be no substantive discussion of the project without re noticing a public hearing.

With that in mind, do we have any questions for staff? Alright. So I think we can move into a vote then. I would just like to make one comment out of the vote that I'm going to abstain. I was not present at the public hearing at the last meeting. So I'm just explaining that due to that reason I haven't considered the project. I'll just be abstaining from this vote. And with that, can we get a roll call vote?

I need a motion and a second motion.

Alright. Apologies. Can I get a motion?

I'll move the item.

I'll second.

K. Alright.

Got a motion from vice chair Humira and a second from commissioner Oscona. Vote, please.

Commissioner Brothers?

No. Because I have questions on some of the comments leading you to believe those were comments made during the public hearing, and I don't recall that they were.

Commissioner Miskohner?

Yes.

Vice chair Humner?

Yes.

Chair Langer? Abstain. So motion passes two one one.

Alright. And we already had public comment. So I will move on to comments from staff. Are there any comments from staff? No, sir. Are there any comments from commissioners? Alright. Hearing none, I will now adjourn to the next planning commission meeting scheduled for 04/22/2026 at 6PM. Thank you, and good night.

Die. The festival is a dual celebration of both the harvest moon and recognition of the young child.

The twenty twenty five Fountain Valley Mayors Ball is underway,

and everyone is dressed in their finest to honor mayor Ted Bowie and the rest of council. Cheers.

So thank you for coming to support our community tonight. We have a long tradition of annually honoring the mayor and city council of Fountain Valley, and we thank them for supporting our business community.

We're here to celebrate the leadership that Ted Bui has demonstrated during his year as mayor. But I know Ted, and Ted would agree that in any community, when talking about leadership, it's a team effort.

The Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce is hosting this gala, bringing together businesses and the community while celebrating city leadership.

Ted, thank you for your friendship, for your loyalty, and for your passion, and more importantly, for your heart. The heart that wants to serve and the heart that wants to do what's right. And always seeking the privilege before himself.

When I look around in this room, I see the heart of Fountain Valley. People who believe in hard works, in community, and in one another. Tonight is about you. It's a night to celebrate all of us as a team, among council member, among staff, among stakeholders in this community. It's about selling everyone and what we have accomplished for the year, and we want to lay down to keep people up to speed what we have done throughout the years.

This year, we celebrate grand opening for Amazon Fresh, the UPS Store, Lady Bell Medical Spa, and of course, food long coffee and tea. Each ribbon cutting was more than a ceremony. It was a reminder that success in violent begins with the people who believe in community.

It's a good chance to interact with the with the community. We always try to do what we can to figure out what they're interested in, what will make their life better as a resident of Fountain Valley. So it's a great it's a great time. Looks like we

got a full house today.

This is a tradition that I can say that our our city fathers and mothers taught us to continue. This is a long tradition of celebrating the team of the council, but also the city staff. This is an opportunity for us to get together once a year as a council, really celebrate each other, celebrate our accomplishments together as a team, and it's always a lot of fun. It also kinda brings back our sort of prom memories from back in the day, so it's it's also a little bit of that, which we really enjoy.

There's a sit down dinner and entertainment after cocktail hour.

Tonight, we have the Fountain Valley High School drumline that's going to be a part of our entertainment. We're very excited about that to bring in the youth of our community and making sure that they are a part of of what we're trying to accomplish here, that's build and grow a stronger Fountain Valley.

Okay. Here we go. Do it.

Are we ready? Okay. 001292. As

part of the fundraising, they hold a raffle for a diamond necklace opportunity courtesy of Mimi's Jewelry.

Alright. The

theme this year, Year of the Rose. Alright.

A suggestion was made that the necklace there's an annual tradition of a necklace being a part part of the raffle, that it be a rose. And it just called to the committee to say, the year of the rose, that's such a neat theme. You know, it's floral. It's about growing. It's about, you know, the things we want to see flourishing and things happening in Fountain Valley. As you all know, it takes, love and support from your family to be an elected official, and Rose has done that and we

It's also, I think, a little bit of homage to the first lady, Rose Bowie, Mayor Ted Bowie's wife. So there's a theme there. It's a fun choice that the Chamber of Commerce kinda comes up with, I think, year after year.

This fundraising event helps local organizations in the community.

Last year, the chamber of commerce started a new tradition, and that was to support a nonprofit in the community chosen by the mayor. And this year, we have continued that tradition to reap to provide some of our proceeds to the three organizations that mayor Bowie has selected, and that is the Fountain Valley Schools Foundation. The Rotary Club of Fountain Valley, and the Women's Club of Fountain Valley. The

amount of effort that you put in this year, nobody can second guess that. The the caring and heart you have for our city and truly trying to do what you think is best for our city, That's important. You can't ask for anything more than that. Oh, it's just fun every year to celebrate a great year. Mayor Bui worked so hard this year. It's really an honor of the mayor. And, you know, it's just good to be able to support him and thank him for all the hours he put in this year.

Ted's a special friend of mine. And Fountain Valley, as all of you know, is a very, very special place. Fountain Valley is special because they do have a unbelievable city council that works together. They have a great city staff. And as demonstrated with so many people here today, you're all champions. Because a lot of you are involved in service organizations and nonprofits. Fountain Valley is a wonderful wonderful community and a large portion because of leadership of Ted Bowie. So I wanna make sure I was here for the mayor. He leaves with enthusiasm and his strength of personality. I'm proud to call him my friend. He's involved in almost every one of these nonprofit organizations that really make up a difference in a community.

So tonight, as we as we celebrate, let's remember what unite us. Our pride, our compassion, and our shared belief that this city will always be a nice place to live.

Here's to the mayor and council for another great year.

Thank you for joining us here this morning, whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur, a local business owner, someone just starting out, someone exploring starting a business, or a supporter of small business growth in our community.

The Fountain Valley Small Business Conference is officially underway, and the city is hosting this half day event, bringing together industry leaders along with the business community.

We're here

to help you one on one, grow your business with consultants. We are all business owners ourselves, here to help you do the exact same thing that we're doing.

We have over 5,000 businesses here in Fountain Valley, and it's a great opportunity for those that are kind of looking to go to the next level, to get expertise. Perhaps it's funding, maybe it's some AI strategies, some marketing.

There are four breakout sessions for attendees to take part in, featuring everything from financial tips to marketing with AI.

I'm very proud of the support that our city gives to small businesses. As a small business owner myself, and also a member of the Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce, it just it's good to bring us all together and to let the business community know they can actually be very successful here. It's a a huge welcoming that we're trying to give to all those small businesses.

What classifies a business as a small business?

That's a really funny question. Anything I think the number's like under like 26,000,000 in revenue or something like that. Just so I tell you the small business.

The chamber and SBDC also play a large role in making this a successful event. The small business development center offers help to business owners and are leading the workshops here.

There is no cost. It is not a free service, so we're funded by the small business administration and the state of California so that we don't charge anybody fees at the other side. We provide training and consulting to businesses that wanna grow, people that wanna start a business, and any anywhere in between.

When we talk about preparing loan applications, all lenders are gonna ask for a business plan and financial projections.

Nobody knows that all these resources exist, and everybody says, what does the government do for small business? We're one of those things the government does. They give us funding to support businesses with, you know, a consultant, a mentor, and all those things that they're needed to grow.

The Fountain Valley Chamber is excited for this opportunity to connect as well.

It's important because small businesses are the backbone of the community, the backbone of the city, and the backbone of America. And if the business succeed, we all succeed and the community succeed and all the citizens succeed.

Those attending are also thankful to have this event as an added resource.

I think it is great because the format they have, they have opportunities for people to network. Also, they've got food. Food is what brings people. And so it's a very good environment, very casual. Anyone can talk to anyone.

I could tell you the attendance makes makes it all worth it. Right? You got people here, which is more important than anything. Because right now, attendance is hard to get at a lot of events. So you can see how needed it is in the community. Very well organized. The food is great. People are awesome.

For more on upcoming City of Fountain Valley events, log on to their website. Reporting in Fountain Valley, I'm Jacqueline Twag.

Welcome to Fountain Valley, where we're rounding the bases toward a healthier, more vibrant, and connected future. A strong community starts with health, activity, and safety, making our first base Fitness Valley. From a world class sports park to unveiling new wellness programs, we're investing in spaces that prioritize citywide health. That's why we're going to bat for the heart of our emergency services, Fire Station one. This year, we're aiming to fund renovations that update the station and serve our growing community.

In 2026, we're starting our new in house ambulance program that will deliver faster, cost effective, and more reliable emergency responses. Staying ready is important to us, so we're committed to keeping Fountain Valley healthy, prepared, and strong, both physically and operationally.

Second base is Foodie Valley, where we're celebrating our exceptional restaurants that bring our people together. I'm here at

the new

Kua Restaurant, which serves Chinese dishes with a Vietnamese backdrop.

Fountain Valley's restaurant scene is on a winning streak with 25 new restaurants opening over the past year. We love seeing new flavors and dining experiences thrive across the city and are always proud to highlight the diverse mix that makes Fountain Valley a true foodie destination.

Sliding into third base, we make our way to Friendly Valley, made up of our welcoming neighborhoods and community spaces. From the Euclid and Hial development to the 16800 Magnolia Street project to here at Slater Apartments, we are building thoughtfully intentionally.

Here in Fountain Valley, we're playing the long game, investing in developments that bring people together, strengthen community, and improve quality of life for residents today and for years to come.

Rounding third and heading home, let's talk about resilience. Forever Valley is our commitment to planning, safety, and infrastructure, keeping Fountain Valley strong, resilient, and ready for generations to come. This ensures we remain a community where services are reliable, streets are secure, and neighbors look out for one another. Stepping up to the plate for neighbors at

the Fountain Valley Police Department's You Are Not Alone program keeps seniors safe, supported, and connected through friendly calls and visits. Because in Fountain Valley, we look out for each other.

As a team, we always bring our a game, and we're committed to building a city that's healthy, connected, welcoming, and built to last. This is our Fountain Valley. This is Forever Valley.

Alright. Good morning and thank you for your patience everyone. On behalf of the Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce, I'd like to welcome you to our twenty twenty five legislative breakfast. We're honored to have you with us today as we gather for an important and timely conversation on the future of our community, our business, and our region. This annual event is a cornerstone of the chamber's mission to connect local businesses with the elected leaders who help shape the policies that impact our daily lives.

It's an opportunity for open dialogue, shared ideas, and mutual understanding. We are especially grateful to be joined this morning by a distinguished panel of public servants who have each demonstrated deep commitment for serving people of Fountain Valley and Orange County. We have congressman Derek Tran representing us from federal level And he's working to ensure that our voices are heard in Washington DC. We have state senator Tony Strickland. He's bringing years of experience and leadership to Sacramento on issues that matter most in our region.

We have Orange County supervisor Janet Nguyen, a long standing advocate for our community at the county level, and Assemblyman Tree Ta. Representing us in the state assembly with focus on economic growth and community safety. And of course, we have mayor Ted Bui. A passionate leader and champion for our city of Fountain Valley. And to each of you thank you for being here and for your ongoing service.

We know that the challenges facing our local businesses from inflation and workforce shortages to housing and infrastructure require thoughtful collaborative thoughts. And that's what today is about, bringing government and business together in the room working towards a common ground. And before we start our program, I would like to mention some VIPs. We have city council, we've got Glenn Grandis. Kim Constantine, Patrick Harper, and Jim Canine.

And from the school board, we have the president Sandra Crandall. We have Dennis Cole, and we have Ashley Ramirez. And then also from the city, we have our city manager, Maggie Lee. Alright.

Now,

we're gonna if I could get everyone to please stand for the pledge of allegiance. Alright. Right hand over your heart and repeat after me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you everyone. And with that, I would like to bring up our chair, Debbie Kelly.

Thank you. Good morning everyone. My name is Debbie Kelly and I work for Republic Services and I have the pleasure of being the chair of our board this year. I wanted to just take a few minutes to thank our sponsors, thank all of you for being here. I think Mike did a great introduction saying the importance of having these types of events so we have access to our legislators and hear what's going on in their different jurisdictions they help us cover.

To start off, I want to thank our major sponsor Hyundai. And we have our silver sponsors, Republic Services, Memorial Care, and SoCal Gas. Thank you. And then our breakfast this morning was provided by Wendy's here in Fountain Valley. Right?

Two very fun events we have coming up. One on August 18, we're having our angels game night. We have great seats for $25. Your ticket comes with field level seats, a hat, and a and a and a and a hat. We have a fun tailgate party before that under the a, and then go in and watch the game.

So highly encourage everyone to come. It's a great night out, great way to network with other folks in the community. And then on September 12, legislators and libations, it's a private it's a more intimate event with the legislators. It's being hosted by John Etheridge and his wife Carla at their home, and we have done that every year, that's a really nice setting to get some more one on one time with the legislators. Alright. Great. With that, I'm gonna pass it back to am I introducing Andre? Yes? Okay. I'd like to introduce Andre Ramirez. He is our moderator for this event this morning.

Thank you, Gabby.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining. Due to the time, we're just gonna jump right into it. So really excited. Thank you all to the elected officials that, taking their time here. It is really exciting that when you think about it, we have all levels of government here represented from our local level all the way to the federal level. So, when they say all politics is local, this is it. This is where things get done. So we, again, thank them very much for for coming out this morning. We're gonna jump right into it.

So we were gonna do a little bit of introduction, and give you guys, I'm gonna say thirty seconds. That really means sixty seconds. So, we'll start with congressman Tran of of just opening remarks, and, again, really trying to keep it short so we could jump into the questions. Before we do that, congressman, I would like to point out, there are three by five cards. If you guys have questions, please, complete those questions. You could leave them anonymous and then hand them to mister Garfalo here. Dave, raise your hand. Thank you. And, if you do that by 08:05, that would be great, and then we'll we'll go through some of those questions for the legislators.

Congressman. Great. Good morning. Thank you, Andre. Thank you so much for having me here today. Let me first start off by acknowledging a tremendous loss for our community, fire chief Bill McQuaid. I'm I was very lucky to have been able to meet him and work with him on some of the projects in Fountain Valley. And I've met a lot of public servants in this job, but Bill was truly the best of the best. When he visited my office in DC a few months ago, he was so warm and welcoming. It was clear how committed he was to his job and to the city of Fountain Valley, and I'm gonna miss him very much.

I also wanna thank everyone at Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce for your leadership in welcoming me here today. Before I was in congress, I owned a small business, and many of you know it was a pharmacy that I co ran with my wife. I was also a practicing attorney, and I had my own small law firm. And I know firsthand how hard it is for small businesses to get their loans, to file for tax credit, and even just find time to build your business while also taking care of their children or aging parents. When I was elected, I fought to get the spot on small business committee, not just because of my personal background, but because our district is so rich with small businesses.

I wanted our local restaurants, groceries, nail salons, and so much more to have direct line to Congress. And that's why I'm here today. I'm not here to talk. I'm here to listen. I want to know what you need and how I can help. I know you hear a lot of noise in Washington, and believe me, I'm sick of it too. But what really cuts through is all and all that matters, really, is hearing from you. When I talk about what's happening on the ground in my district, it's much easier to get people to listen, because it's not just an abstract thing, but it's real life. So I'm happy to take questions, and I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much.

Senator Strickland.

Hi. My name is Tony Strickland. I'm state senator representing the coast of Orange County and parts of LA. I also wanna echo the the prayers going to fire chief McQuaid's family and everybody here in Fountain Valley. He was a tremendous leader in our community, and I wanna echo the comments of the congressman. I'm going back up to Sacramento. In fact, those of you that don't know, I did serve when I was younger at a different part of California, and I served ten years. And I've been out for a while, and then I went to local government in Huntington Beach. The reason why I went back to Sacramento is I I say I wanna bring common sense to a place that has no common sense. I wanna make California golden again.

And what I mean by that is if you look at California, we we look outside here today and the weather and how beautiful we live. Just the other day, my wife and I said, where were we gonna go on vacation? I said, well, everybody in the world comes here because we live we actually live in an oasis. But, unfortunately, it's the first time in California history since the gold rush that we're losing population. More people are leaving.

Think about that. People are leaving the oasis, the best weather in the entire world, to go to the middle of the desert of Texas, the humidity of Tennessee and North Carolina and Florida. They're going to the cold weather up in Montana and Idaho. And the reason is because, one thing, policy is coming out of the Sacramento and California government. And so I'm going back up there to try to bring common sense and get back to the basics.

What What I mean by back to the basics is making sure public safety is the number one priority. I'm the strongest voice up in Sacramento currently on making sure that we fully fund proposition 36, the initiative that passed 70% of the voters in all 58 counties. They, quite frankly, right now is a slap in the face. We haven't fully funded an initiative that passed by 70% in all 58 counties. That's a shame because we need to make we need to make crime illegal again in California to make sure people are safe. I'm I'm also fighting to eliminate waste. Think about it. Ten years ago when I was a legislature, little over ten years ago, the entire state budget was 98,000,000,000. It has tripled in the last ten years. We tripled the budget when we were losing population.

You would think if we tripled the budget, we'd have amazing services, but we still have a homeless situation that's out of control across the state of California. We we still have a crumbling infrastructure that we need to invest in. And so I think we need to get back to the basics and and fund things that are good for all Californians and that represent all California. And so that's why I wanna go back to Sacramento. That's why I'm honored to be in Sacramento. And as was said, all politics is local. And I want you to know that you have access into my office. Zach where's Zach? Zach is here. He's my field rep.

When I'm up in Sacramento, Monday through Thursday, he's here in the community. If you ever need anything, please contact him. Or, for example, over the weekend, if there's an emergency, you need to get in touch with me. If you want one of you to write it down, I know it's on in the camera, my cell phone number is (805) 573-4196. You can always text me and call me over the weekend. And if there's an emergency, I wanna make sure that you know you have accessibility to your local state center, and it's an honor to be here today. Thank you so much

for hosting this forum. Thank you, senator.

Assemblyman and then supervisor, and then if we can keep it briefer as we go. Thank you.

Thank you so much, supervisor. Hello, everyone. I am Senator Manchu Ta, and I'd like to echo that other speaker already mentioned about our five gs. That's a loss for our community. And I really I really want to I really want to join you all to continue to honor our five gs.

I had a great opportunity great opportunity to partner with Fund Valley for the last two and a half years. And I and I have to tell you the truth or the right idea for my bills for the last two and a half year came from Fund Valley, and I really, really appreciate that. So we have a few bill, and I'm going to give you an update that came from the idea from department head, from the leadership of of the man city council of Fund Valley. So we had a great opportunity, the great partnership, my office and and and then the city. We work together, and we try to improve the life, not only the constituent in my district, but the whole California.

So we all know that many issue that we continue to fight in Sacramento affordability, affordability issue, homelessness and many, many other issue. And I think that a few months ago, some council member of of Fund Valley went up to Sacramento and also witness some hearing. It's a lot of, you know, a lot of issue. And I continue I think I continue to work with Fund Valley and the business committee. We need to continue to improve the circumstance.

I believe that by working together, we need to make some difference. And we had a great partnership for the last two point five years. I continue to be your voice in Sacramento. I believe that we still have an opportunity to fight. But as long as we work together, we're to make a difference not only in the city but in the state as well. So thank you so much.

Supervisor Wang.

Thank you. Good morning. So I get to say I'm the rose between the thorns. Now they're not going to like me. No, it's Ashley. Good morning, and thank you for having me again. I think this is my fifteenth time here. It's been fifteen years since I've represented the city of Fountain Valley in one of the capacity that I've been elected to. It's actually been very great to be back at the county. We have been extremely busy in the last almost seven months now, a little over seven months.

I wanted to just kind of give you an update. The county just passed our budget, our $10,500,000,000 Just in perspective, when I was at the Board of Supervisors ten years ago, we were at $6,500,000,000 budget. So the county has increased its budget from $6,500,000,000 to $10,500,000,000 in the ten years that I've left. Some of the committees that I am currently assigned to and sit on is one is South Coast Air Quality Management District. Within that, I'm also on the Technology Committee and the Climate Change Committee as well.

One thing that you might have heard a month ago was that we actually, for the first time in over thirty years, killed a recommendation, a rule making, from the staff's recommendation. It is unheard of, but we were able to get enough votes to making sure that that rulemaking did not pass. And what that is is actually forcing every house, every business building in the Southern California area, which is four counties, San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Orange County, which affects 17,000,000 people to have to turn all of your furnaces into electric. And this is where I always want to make sure that what we do at the county level, we looked at the small businesses. Because the small business, you are the backbone of our local economy.

And that rulemaking itself, had it passed, would have cost an individual who has a home let's just say if you own your home that was built prior to this in the '70s, you would have to rip out half of your house to rewire your house just for the electric. It's not the furnace itself that's in a few thousand dollars more than your regular gas, but it's ripping out your house. Now you have apartment. A lot of our seniors own apartments and homes for their income for their retirement. And so we're talking about a house could cost roughly, at minimum, dollars 30,000 to potentially $100,000 just to put in a new electric furnace.

That does include businesses. That does include commercial buildings, you name it. So that's one. The other one that we actually a week ago was also had been able to allow the Port Of Long Beach and Los Angeles an opportunity to have the discussion and negotiation with AQMD. It's huge because that's the largest port in our country.

And if the port has to eventually start scaling down or not being able to accomplish zero emission as they've been already supposed to, it will be devastating for our local economy, the supply, and the supply chain. So we were able to, last meeting, receive enough votes again under my motion again is to be able to pause and allow the Port Of Long Beach, which is supported by both mayors of Long Beach and Los Angeles. I don't usually agree with them on most of everything, but this one is to allow them that courtesy to be able to have that discussion and conversation with AQMD, because if not, we are going to pretty much have our supply chain go upside down in this country, especially in California. I'm on the Orange County Fire Authority. I was able to join the fire authority in the possession of Chief McQuay.

It was extremely emotional. And I want to thank the city of Fountain Valley. When we passed by the city hall, it was so emotional for us. I mean, everybody came out to honor a man that has not only served as our fire chief, but grew up in our community in the city of Fountain Valley and went through the rank. For seventeen years, he served in this city. This is his only fire department. He graduated over at the Santa Ana College. And what's really neat is as we were in the procession passing by the freeways and the bridges, you can see the salute. One was the Santa Ana College where he came from. It was so emotional.

Every time we were going by these salutes or the city, there's residents in the city standing on the street with American flags saluting as these cars are going by. So it was so emotional, but this is what Fountain Valley is known

to

be. We come back together. We've always been together, but we as a community come together as a family. And it truly showed this last week when that happened. And so I'm on the Orange County Fire Authority as a board member.

I'm also vice chair of Lechtenham Public Affairs Committee. I'm on the Budget Finance Committee and the Capital Improvement Committee. I'm on OCTA as well. OCTA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and we've been working with the city in terms of your streets and roads and some of your capital improvement. I'm on Cal Othma Commission to Address Homelessness, Orange County Sanitation District, Orange County Emergency Management Council in Orange County South Orange County Watershed Management Area Executive Committee as well.

And just to also a couple of things I want to highlight in terms of from the county's perspective, I'm going to hand it over is that the county is going to be spending in the next seven years over a couple $100,000,000 in our flood channels in my district, just in the first Supervisor District. We're going to be spending $140,000,000 just a flood channel. That doesn't include our parks or our library. The library itself in Fountain Valley will receive $3,000,000 investment in terms of remodeling. We're also going to put in $13,500,000 just for Miles Square Park.

And working with the city, we also gave the city four more acres at Miles Square Park in the last negotiation. And we paused the negotiation in December. And I got to tell you, you have staff, and especially a mayor, who doesn't take no for an answer. We gave them 10 acres, and he kept on digging, where we end up giving the city four more acres. And please give a big round of applause to the mayor and your city staff for doing that.

And with that, I'm going to hand it over to the mayor.

Thank you, supervisor.

Thank you all. Good morning, everyone. First of all, it has been a lot lost to the city, not only Bill McQuade, but we have other great leadership in the city, such as Mr. Ed Arnold. As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, we recognized the house and brokers on a going in into the Sports Center.

We we renamed that street to be called the Ed Onno Way. In additions to mister Ed, we also lost a former chief, mister Kevin Chow. So he was a great chief to my understanding. Fortunately, I was not here when he served, but I've heard a lot of people say that he was a great chief for this city. So we we this year was it's been really rough.

We we have lost a lot of great people. So once again, my name is Ted Bui, mayor of Fire and Valley. And I also wanna take this opportunity to thank the Fire and Valley Chamber of Commerce for hosting the Legislative Breakfast. And there's a lot of work behind the scene, planning the outreach, sponsoring. So thank you for the hard work that you guys do for

the

city, you know, for for this event. We have our former president, which is Mike Horhardt. And he has contributed his time, his dedications tremendously for this community. Fortunately, some of you may know and some of you may not know, but he has a greater opportunity. You know? And his New Ventures store, I'm I'm hearing it's gonna go out to Las Vegas. So best wishes to you. But remember, Fatima is always here for you if you have decided to come back. Alright? So I wanna thank you for that.

I wanna thank you to the elected official to make their time to be here to answer any questions that it's important to our community. And I also wanna thank, you know, you as a guest, our honored guest, being here today, you're here because you care for the community. You wanna hear. You wanna see what's coming. What can how can you get above? How can or an artificial make some change for this community. So I wanna thank you for being here as well. So once again, I welcome everyone, and let's begin.

Thank you, Mayor Bui. Thank you, everybody. Last call for the three by five cards, and then I'll grab those moment. And then first question is to Congressman Tran. So congratulations. This is your first term. What is a goal and a piece of legislation you would have passed if there is one thing that you could have passed or maybe one active thing that is currently taking up a lot of time?

Thank you for that question. Look, I think there are a lot of pieces of legislations that I want to focus on in Congress. But the reality is knowing that there's a party dynamic where I am working across the aisle getting some bipartisanship work done. I'm proud to have introduced several bills that have passed the House already from the small business committee that I sit on. Some of them includes the plain language bill, which requires all contracting be done in just plain, simple English.

And forget the legalese, right? Then there's also the small business and career tech access. Think I there's a lot of small businesses out there that are using these career tech pathways in their workforce. And I believe that is something that we need to strengthen. So that is also a bipartisan bill that I got passed through the House. One of a a very important issue to me as a veteran, you know, when I saw the mass layoffs of terminations of veterans from our federal workplace, I introduced the bill to reinstate these veterans who were fired without cause.