Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

The Southern California associate association of governments or SCAG assigns each city with a fair share of housing units, ensuring enough homes are available to people with very low, low, moderate, and above moderate incomes. The city of Fount Valley's fair share allocation was 4,839 units within this planning period, so 2021 to 2029. The general plan land use designation for this site was approved in November 2023 when the general plan update was approved. That is mixed use too. The site was rezoned to mixed use two in December '23, and the mixed use two zone allows up to 75 dwelling units per acre if the property is separate separated by the r one zone by the 405 Freeway as well as 400 feet from any other any other r one zone in the area.

The site is the former boomer site, which has been vacant for a number of years. The project was submitted to the city in March 2024, and the Planning Commission held a study session in May 2025 just last month. So here's an aerial vicinity map of the of the area. In red is the project area. Just point out a few landmarks to the to the east, you see Miles Square Park Immediately north of the site, the 405 Freeway.

At the north of that, you have Vista View Middle School. East of the site, you have Plavin Elementary School, and then south of the site, Temura Elementary School. So now into the project information. The project includes 657 apartment units in two separate buildings outlined here in red, 4,460 square feet of commercial retail uses in the green. The building is 71 and a half feet tall.

It's it's on a project site of 6.8 acres comprised of four parcels. The north and south buildings I'm sorry. The north and South Building has a vehicular access between them over the Orange County Flood Control District property, which is kinda splits the property. There are courtyards and amenities provided for each building. On the Ground Floor, there's fitness uses, barbecue uses, with outdoor seating, gaming courtyard, dog wash, coworking areas.

And on the upper floors, sky lounges, roof decks, pool decks, spas, lounge seating, barbecue areas. And then on the east side of the property, there will be a public dog park provided. This is kind of a closer view of at least the the 1st Floor of the North And South Building. On this, you can see this is the the North Building. Parking structure is located behind the building adjacent to the freeway.

And on the South Building, the parking structure is located behind the building closest to the Fountain Valley Skate Center. And then every floor above that is fairly the same, residential units up to Floor 6. On the 7th Floor, there is a step back. So what a step back is, once you get a certain height, the building shifts back a certain distance, and then it keeps going up. So on the 7th Floor, it shifts back.

And on the North Building sorry, on the North Building, this step back right here averages about 29 feet. On the South Building facing Magnolia on this side, average about 30 feet. And then facing Recreation Circle on the south side here, averaged at about 41 feet. These are some of the elevations of the proposed building. The one on top is the North Building facing the central driveway as you drive in.

There's facade and massing variations applied to this part of the building, recesses, and projections throughout the building. For every 150 feet, there's a two foot and a four foot wide projection or a recess. And every 50 feet, there's a one foot or two foot wide projection or recess. And on the south side I'm sorry. On the bottom of your screen, this is the North Building facing Magnolia Street.

On this elevation, you can see a delineation of the 1st Floor I mean, the the bottom floors and then change material on the on the project. The top is the North Building facing the freeway. There's some vertical landscape elements proposing the building. There's a distinct base, middle area, and top area on this part of the building. And then on the bottom there, this is the South building facing the central driveway.

On the top of the screen, the South building facing the Fountain Valley Skate Center. So this is the the other this is the South Building's parking structure with, again, vertical landscaping elements and a distinct bottom, middle, and top floor. Then on the bottom there, this is a south facing south facing South building facing Recreation Circle. And then this last one is a South building, facing Magnolia. Here's some perspective drawings.

This is the main entrance off of Magnolia, where you can see the horizontal changes in the building across here and then the vertical changes and the different material that's used. This is the North Building facing the freeway. And the main entrance looking at the the South Building of the project. And this is a perspective view of the of the pool area on the South Building. In the mixed use zone, every project is required to provide resident amenities, two amenities for every 50 units.

So on the in the North Building, they're required to provide 14 amenities, and they're providing 14. On the South Building, they're provide they're required to provide 13, and they're providing 16 amenities. And these amenities are things such as barbecue areas, fitness areas, hot tub, the pool, roof decks. And these are some pictures the applicant has provided of other examples of of their projects to kinda give you an idea of what these amenity areas would look like. So this is a fitness area, a sky lounge area, a and a rooftop rooftop pool deck.

Examples of gaming courtyards, fire pits, and lounge seating. An example of a dog wash area and a bike storage area. And this is an example of a coworking lounge that they're providing in the South Building. The the project will provide 980 parking stalls on-site, and 776 is what's required by the state density bonus law parking requirements. So they're providing 204 spaces more than than the minimum required by state density bonus law.

The project is screened from a VMT analysis for the city's transportation impact assessment guidelines. The project is located in a low VMT generating area, and the retail component is less than 50,000 square feet, less than the 50,000 square foot threshold as it's only 4,460 square feet. There was a traffic impact analysis provided for this project that looked at eight intersections. The lowest operating at a level of service c or better in the opening year of the project. Also, all intersections operated at a level of service d or better in the projected $222,000 '50 build out plus the project.

There was also a signal warrant analysis completed for the project, and and there there is a warrant for a signal at Driveway A. Driveway A is the main entrance off of Magnolia Street to the project. The project will generate 3,138 daily trips with 250 in the AM peak hour and 277 in the PM peak hour. This is a drawing of what it would look like with the the signal with the main entrance off of Magnolia here, entrance to the parking structure on the South Building here and here, and then entrance to the North Building parking structure here, and there's also one at the top of the parking structure. The project will provide a dedicated left turn lane into the project going south on Magnolia Street and then north of Magnolia Street, a dedicated right turn pocket to come into the project.

The project is proposed to be built with 78 d restricted low income units, 15% of the base density. And with that, the applicant is therefore permitted to request a density bonus pursuant to to state density bonus law. They're allowed to request one concession and unlimited waivers. They've asked a concession to the Ground Floor nonresidential use and waivers to the height, height modulation, publicly accessible open space, step backs, balconies, floor area ratio, minimum lot size, and street frontage setback. Per state density bonus law, the city must grant a waiver reduction of development standards that would would preclude the construction of the project entitled to the benefits under the state density bonus law unless the city finds so the request of waiver would have a specific adverse impact upon health safety or physical environment, which cannot be mitigated would have an adverse impact on any property listed in the California State Register of Historical Resources or that the waiver would be contrary to state of federal law.

The proposed waivers would not result in a direct physical impact on the environment due to conflict with the regulation adopted for the purpose of avoiding or mitigating an environmental effect. It would not have an adverse impact on property listed in California State Register of Historical Resources or be contrary to state or federal law. The environmental review for the project was processed through an addendum to the general plan EIR per the public resources code 21,000. An addendum to a certified EIR is appropriate where some changes are necessary to the previous serve previously certified EIR, but none of the conditions described in CEQA section one five one six two, such as substantial changes or new information, call for the preparation of a subsequent EIR. The addendum shows that the project would have no additional significant impact, less than significant impact with the application of mitigation from the general plan EIR.

The project would be required to meet certain mitigation measures from the general plan EIR, including mitigation and cultural resources, geology and soils, noise and tribal cultural resources. So in summary, the environmental review for the project was processed through an addendum to the general plan EIR. The project complies with the general plan land use designation for the site and the zoning with concessions and waivers. The precise plan includes a mixed use development with 657 apartment units and 4,460 square feet of retail. It includes 78 deed restricted low income units.

It includes one concession and eight waivers to our code. The project provides 980 parking stalls, which is 204 more than the state density bonus. And a TI traffic impact analysis studied eight nearby intersections, and none none of them were lower than the level of c level of service c in the opening year. And the project will provide a signal at the main entrance of Magnolia Street. So with that, staff recommends adoption of resolution twenty five zero eight, approving the addendum, and adoption of resolution number twenty five zero nine, approving precise plan five eighty.

That concludes my report. I know the applicant is here too. He has a presentation for you too.

Thank you. Do we have any questions or comments from commissioners? I have a couple. So excuse me there will be an opportunity for the public to speak when I call on the public to speak and everyone will stay here as long as it takes everyone will get their opportunity to speak. So could you talk to me about the you mentioned there's a parking certain number of parking spots that exceeds a certain minimum could you explain that again and is are we able to require more parking? What can you explain a little bit more about that issue?

Well, there's a they've applied for a state density bonus law, and with that, they've asked for they've asked the city to apply the state density bonus law parking requirements. So those parking requirements, here we go, come out to 776 required parking stalls, I believe. Sorry. 776 parking stalls. They they have provided more, 204 more than than what's required by the state density bonus law, primarily due to the fact that there's a flood control easement in the middle of the property that allows for parking within that area so that that area is heavily parked with guest parking.

So it's is that state law then that

I

dictates

the

guess that's the maximum we can it's the minimum

If I may, sir. Yes. So Steven is correct. I'll just add that what happens when you have the provision of affordable housing, there are certain sections of state law that kick into play, specifically density bonus law. And those the density bonus provisions of state law allow for some exemptions to local standards when you're providing affordable housing.

So you Steven mentioned the concessions and waivers to some development standards, those are in effect, as well as parking requirements. So that we cannot in our zoning code, if you go to the, title 21 for the zoning and you look up parking, you'll see what our standards are. In this case, we cannot apply those standards which would carry a higher parking requirement. The applicant can use density the minimum standards and state density bonus law, which provide for parking standards based on the size of the unit. And so Steven went through the number of parking spaces that are required.

However, practically speaking, the city and the applicant know that that number of parking spaces wouldn't satisfy the requirement by their leases. So if they try to lease this property up, if they provide just that state density bonus minimum, they won't have enough parking there and and it would be difficult for them to lease it up. It would create issues for the city in terms of overflow parking. And so, one of the things, that we try to work on with the applicant is, provide as much parking as possible, so that, we keep everything within the site and there's no overflow. So, yes, the the state density bonus does kick in.

That is their right to use it and they are going above it. And I'm sure all developers like to just hit the state density bonus minimum, but I think they also understand that they need to lease these up and if they don't have enough parking spaces then they won't have enough people applying for tenancy.

Go ahead.

Oh, so just to be clear, according to the state's density bonus law, the applicant needs to provide around 700 parking spaces, but instead they've worked with the city to provide nine eighty parking spaces. So that's where we get that plus two zero four. So the applicant is actually providing more parking than what the state laws required. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Thank you.

I have a question. So the parking structures are residents only, I assume?

There's resident spaces as well as guest spaces and retail space or spaces for the commercial portion of the project as well.

In the structure? Yes. Do you know how many that is?

I don't have the the the number. It's it's a for the commercial part of the project, it's a small number, in each one. The applicant will probably know exactly where it is. I'm gonna I'm gonna guess it's ten or eleven.

Okay. Thank you.

And I had another question. So you had mentioned about the traffic signal that was proposed, and I was a little unclear between the study session and then what you said and then what I saw in the packet. So will there be a traffic signal? It sounds like the city gets to decide. Is that right? If there will be. And what determines whether or not we're going to have a traffic signal there or whether it's going to be leaving on Magnolia right turn only?

I could ask the our public works staff to speak to this. They probably speak to it better than I can. But from what I understand, the traffic signal is outside of Caltrans' right away, and it's what's within our jurisdiction to decide if the signal would would be there or not.

Could you introduce yourself, please?

Mister chairman, Temo Galvez. I'm the I'm the city deputy director of public works and city engineer. And I believe the applicant has their city traffic or their traffic engineer as well. But high level, through through the traffic study process, a warrant was conducted, all the all the makings of a successful operating traffic signal were conducted. And so the process would be that the applicant along partnering with the city would move forward in with the implementation of design of a traffic signal.

And so the the elements that would be included would be permits with anything of the any of the elements of the traffic signal that would either encroach or get near other right of way. So state right of way or, in this case, the city of Huntington Beach right of way.

So just so I'm clear, is there are there scenarios if this was if this project was approved that this traffic signal would not go in?

Yeah. Maybe I'm not understanding The

intent is to have the traffic signal in place. Correct?

That's correct. The intent is to have the traffic signal in place. There would have to be elements that would be construction prohibitive or prohibitive of some sort for the traffic signal not to go in.

Okay. But nothing anticipated at this point. I I just saw that the way it was worded in written document is that it was planned or anticipated or it might happen, and I wanted to be really clear if that was actually up in the air or maybe you're just hedging a little bit in case something happens, it sounds like?

No. The intent is to move forward with the traffic signal.

Great. Thank you.

Mister chair, if I may, Timo, for the public and for the commissioners, can you kinda go over that warrant process? Like, what are the criteria in the warrant so that So some qualify?

Absolutely. So some of the elements that go into this are a list of items that are that are they they are federal design criteria that are also adopted by the state, and it's the manual and uniform traffic control devices among other things. And so some elements that include volumes, traffic volumes, they include distance from to the next traffic signal, just among other things. And so those things were looked at, and there were elements in there that provided a warranted traffic signal. Engineering judgment goes into it as well.

And so the developers, traffic engineer looked at this through the traffic study as did staff. And so at this point, a traffic signal looks like it's viable, and so that's the plan to move forward with

that. Thank

you. I got a question. So, Timo, I I understand this. This intercession we are proposed is outside of the Caltrain railway. What happened if we imply this at the intercession?

And currently, right now, Caltrain at the Magnolia Northbound, you know, Southbound Opera, they we they don't have any design exception from Caltrain site. So once you boost the you put the interjection traffic signal right there, it may or may not. I think I have answered, but it may or may not have impact to the counter and design criteria can create into the mandatory design exception. Have we looking into that and Caltrans aware about that?

The applicants engineer, traffic engineer has reached out, as I understand, to Caltrans, and they are aware of this traffic signal. And in in the dialogue they've had, there's been no indication that this traffic signal has any elements that that they've made a note that they would be opposed to at this time. But we would be going through the we'd work with them through the proper permitting processes as we as the traffic signal will be near state right away.

Yeah. As far I understand, the requirement is about 300 feet is the if you're less than 400 feet is the design is mandatory design exception from the traffic intersection go to the curb return of the nearest state route facility, which is the Magnolia Stylebar up ramp curb return. So if you do measure from that ECR at the end of curb return to close of that intersection that we proposed at the traffic signal, It's only about 330 feet as far as I remember.

Yeah. We had worked with the state. We'd worked through that process. In my tenure, I've built traffic signals in town that have been pretty close in proximity, including Euclid and Kalama River, which is very close to the the New Hope New Hope, Euclid on on and off ramp at the 405. So we were pretty successful in working with the state to implement that as well. But we we would go through the process and and ensure that all requirements are met and that all these all the design elements are are such that we partner with the state as well as Huntington Beach.

Okay. Yeah. We guys just don't want we have to recirculate our environmental document again because this design exception is not aware of the Caltrain. So as long as the the public work work with the applicant to clarify this issue, I think we should be

We'll work through Okay. That

Thank you.

My only question is, will that traffic signal be synced with the other two signals with Caltrans on top of the hill?

So, yes. So in a in a indirect way, yes. So we we've done that as well. All of the the traffic signals in in town connect to each other through fiber optic, and we have historically synced all traffic signals along all corridors. And what we would do is we'd work from we'd work off of the signal timing at the state signals and ensure that our timing is in sync with that. Although they wouldn't connect directly, we'd ensure that our signal timing parameters are in alignment with with those at the state so that there's minimal disruption and so that the signal timing ultimately provides corridor synchronization.

Thanks.

Any other questions from commissioners? Alright. So I'm gonna call up the applicant. Thank you, staff. And one note as the applicant makes their way up here, if you're interested in speaking, that will come in a little bit. Please fill out a blue speaker card and bring it to the front. If we are, for whatever reason, out of blue speaker cards, there's a white piece of paper and a pen on the podium there, and you can go up and sign up there. So I don't think we're out, but if you need one, we're out. That's what you can do. If you could introduce yourself, please.

Okay. Good evening, chair and commissioners. I'm Matt Turk here on behalf of Holland Partner Group. We're excited to present 16800 Magnolia tonight and are grateful for the city team and the community members who helped to shape this proposal. I'll keep this brief.

Just a quick introduction to our team and a look at how community feedback has helped to guide this project. And we'll conclude with a few renderings. Holland Partner Group has been investing in West Coast communities for over twenty years and has completed 43 projects in California alone. Our team is based just up the road in Long Beach in the Long Beach Airport area, and we're partnered with MVE, a local award winning architect. Holland is fully integrated, which means that we'll build and we'll manage, oops, we'll manage this project in house ensuring quality from start to finish.

The site sits at Magnolia And Recreation Circle in the highlighted area there just off the 405. Many know it as the old Fountain Valley Family Fun Center or Boomers, which was a beloved place that closed during the pandemic and hosted many birthday parties over the years, perhaps some of yours or your kids. It's been vacant since, and we see an opportunity to bring life back to this corner with new homes, local retail, and public amenities. From the start, we've aimed to design something that reflects the values of the community. We conducted outreach to ensure that our neighbors and the community as a whole knew about this project and had an opportunity to ask questions and provide input.

We submitted to you, and for the record, you guys saw this thing here, a summary of our outreach process as well as

a list of

events, sponsorships, and meetings conducted since June 2024. We held an open house to introduce plans. We met with community organizations and held multiple small group and one on one meetings. And we attended and sponsored various community wide events, all with the intent of getting word out about our plans, asking for feedback and giving people the opportunity to ask questions about the project. Our goal in reaching out to the community is to gather feedback that we could incorporate into this project.

Our neighbors and stakeholders live here. They know the area best, so it's important for us that we hear from them. The changes we've made are because we heard from the community and the project is better off for it. The original concept included six eighty two units and two eight story buildings consistent with what's allowed under the state density bonus program. But we heard the community's concerns so we redesigned the project.

We lowered the overall building height from eight stories to seven stories and further reduced the height along Magnolia to six stories. We reduced the total number of units. We broke up the massing. We varied the roof lines. We stepped back the upper floors and we upgraded the exterior building materials and the Paseo for a more walkable and neighborhood feel.

We also redesigned site access to include a new dedicated right turn lane into the property that will ease traffic on Magnolia. The project includes street facing retail, surface parking, and a new public dog park that will activate the corner and invite the community in. And we talked a little bit about parking. The way we think about parking typically in these sorts of developments is the market demand for these is about one stall per bedroom. And so that's how we got to the parking count for this project.

It was one stall per bedroom plus I think we have, before I speak out of turn here, we have 64 stalls available for retail and for guest parking. Many of those surface parking along the Paseo. So that allows anyone from the public to drive in, access the retail, access the dog park without having to go into the parking structure which I know isn't quite as convenient as surface parking. That's how we were thinking through that. We heard loud and clear that circulation and safety at this intersection matter.

So we studied it and based off those studies, the project now includes a new synchronized traffic signal designed to meet the city's high level of service standards and improve safety for everyone. And just a little bit of background on our communication with Caltrans on that issue. We reached out to Caltrans with the city in April 2024 just to let them know what we were thinking about and to ask them for their feedback and and how we should approach this project and to get their feedback on the scoping for the traffic impact analysis. And so when we first reached out to them, our idea instead of adding a traffic signal there was to add a left hand turn and a u-turn at the existing signal on the overpass. Caltrans said no immediately, so we know what a no from Caltrans feels like.

And instead they suggested and the city suggested that we study an intersection at the entrance of the project. And so we incorporated that into the traffic impact analysis and and that's how we've arrived where we're at today. As Stephen mentioned, this is completely outside of Caltrans jurisdiction. It resides in the city's jurisdiction so it's up to Fountain Valley if they want to put this in or not. And so we defer to the city for their choice on how they want to approach that.

And so here's what the redesign looks like, a beautifully landscaped, high quality, Class A residential community with amenities for residents and neighbors alike. We believe this is a smart reuse of a long vacant site and a project the city can be proud of. And so in closing, we appreciate the collaboration from city staff and residents. We're excited about the potential here and look forward to being part of Fountain Valley's bright future. Thank you for your time, and we respectfully ask for your support. We're happy to answer any questions should any come up in public comment. Thank you.

Do we have questions for the applicant?

I have a couple. Sure. So what is the spec on the type of vehicle come on, come in and out from that traffic signal? What is the biggest vehicle we have over there?

I'm sorry, can you repeat that?

So what is type the biggest vehicle we we try to run-in and out that right way?

I'm going to have to defer to our traffic engineer Shane with LLG. Shane led the traffic impact analysis and the studies there.

Hi. Good evening. I'm Shane Green with LLG Engineers. What we ran at S U S U 30. We also ran a large fire truck through it.

What do you know what is the current current rate of the Magnolia Street right now? How many percent of the rate right there?

The slope? I don't know what the slope is of that. But if I had to guess, it's probably around eight would be my would be my guess.

It cannot be a it has to be less than that because you have a sidewalk. You have you have to be ADA compliant. It'll be less than 5%. So

Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, that's designed by the city and Caltrans.

My question is because if we have a large truck and if that rate limit is sit out 5%, 6%, Do we consider gonna be some overturn on truck, on the big truck over there, at the left turn?

No. We have no concern with that. By the time you enter the driveway, it's actually flat. It's at the bottom of that

I mean, the from the left turn from the right way, go out to Magnolia and turn left.

No. We don't have any concern with that. But when we do goes to the actual design phase, that's when the civils will get more involved. Right now, we're looking more plan view, but the civils look more at the slopes and all of that. But it you have to re remember this driveway exists currently, and so there were trucks coming and going from it. So it worked.

Yeah. The current driveway, it says, but there ain't no traffic signal. There is no left turn from the driveway out to Magnolia South.

There is a left turn out. It's two way left turn lane currently.

There's no way to turn.

Under under when Boomers was open, it was a two way left turn lane. You could make a left turnout.

There there is a median there. There is a median.

So South. Just South. So that's why

I'm in lane. Right now, you make them a traffic signal. So consider the truck overturn potential right there. You have a turn.

A left turn out of the driveway is turning onto a flat surface. What? The right turn out would be going up the slope.

You still have the slope, the entire of that going down, right, from the Magnolia. So it's it's have to be some slope the entire of the strip. If you're thinking a crowd in the middle of Centralia Magnolia, but you have to grade the whole thing down. So have to be at least 6% on the slope to climb it up to the top of the bridge.

I I hear you. But right now, we're we're looking at it from a planning standpoint. We do believe it can work. When it moves to the next phase, which is design, you'll have civils involved. The city will be involved. Whoever needs to be involved will make sure that it's designed appropriate and safely.

Yeah. So that's why I say just consider that truck overturn when you you do the final design or whatever and after that. Understood. Second question is, look like on the rendering, we do have the the brick railing still maintain over there next to the right way. Right?

Are you gonna maintain the I assume. Are you gonna maintain the railing next to the I assume you are.

The are talking about the handrail and the sidewalk going

The the overpass? The barrier and of the bridge to the railing. Yes.

Yeah. We're not gonna touch that. We'll leave that in place.

Yes. I saw there on the packet 10 of the agenda. We run the corner side distance from the driveway, go out. So they look on the left turn. Right now, the the way they're running the the car over there is a little bit go beyond into the street. But if you scale the car back to the right way setback, the side visibility of the driver maybe get blocked by that ridge railing.

Yeah. I mean, I think the the normal scheme of things, the way most people drive, as you pull up, you stop, there's no pedestrians, you creep out, and then you make a informed decision whether you can make that right turn movement safely, and then you make that movement. We it's designed off corner site when it really needs it could be designed off stopping site, which is significantly shorter distance, which would meet that requirement.

Yes. It's it can be changed to the, yeah, the the stopping side distance. Yes. You can trim, but it will require a design exception if you if you treat them with the stopping side distance.

Not It require a exception because of that. Yeah. This is a private driveway, so you would only corner site distant we're diving into the weeds, but corner site distance is for public drive public intersections, and this is a private driveway. So stopping side is all that needs to be done. The city asked us to look at both, So we we did look at both.

So right now, we convert them into the traffic signal into the public intercession?

But it's a private roadway. It's still a private roadway. It's not a public street.

But you're running out, you're still looking for the for the car going down from the Magnolia?

Yeah. We did we did run it as corner site though with the more I

saw that. Yes. I saw that. Yeah. But a little bit to me is if you put the the car setback, you will you're just your visibility will block by the the bridge railing to me. Yeah. So my recommend is maybe you on the final design, try to put them setback to where you have an intersection.

The the railing you're referring to is if you were looking to your right. Yes. But what you're referring to is a car making a right turn. With the signal, you're making a left and you're protected. So you really don't need the visibility because you are are No. Stopping the vehicles.

You you did you did you turn the left. You still look for the guy from Magnolia going down way. So you have

to look in Not not if it's protected. Signal's there. It's protected.

Day two. After twenty years of civil

Excuse me. There's only two people that are allowed to talk right now, and they have microphones. Okay. I'm gonna ask everybody to wait their turn to talk.

I think we can, agree that if there's additional studies that need to be done during the during the, you know, plan check phase, we're happy to do it to make sure this is up to everyone's satisfaction.

I I think that that would be benefit not only the public, but benefit for the applicant too because something happened because the sideway visibility got blocked and the guy cannot see the guy another car going downright from Magnolia as when they make a left turn.

Yeah. We're we're happy to look into this further. We did we did study that in the traffic impact analysis, but we're happy to look into that further when we get into plan and we're designing the actual signal.

Sorry. I got one more question. On the on the intersection study for the level of service, I saw we saw we say it's on 2028. The level of service of Magnolia and Warner is still is B or C, if I I don't recall, but we meet the minimum requirement from the CD LOS.

Yeah. The minimum LOS is D, so we're we're substantially below that.

When I read the so when the 04/2005 project, they they they working on 2009. We have a public meeting at the Farm Valley Senior Center and there is the document from project report from four or five project, bring it down in 2009. They stay at the one Magnolia level service at that time, 2009 is already app. So how can they changing it from app to see?

I'm not sure what the lane configurations were back then, but a lot has changed. Co COVID changed a lot of things. You know? People, you know, work from home a lot. You have a lot of hybrid schedules now. You know? Volumes have gone down from then. I mean, we're not in the COVID time anymore, but volumes have gone back up. But they're they're not to where they were. But I I'd have to look at what that study looked at, but our analysis took probably the same exact same approach they took, which would have collected existing counts, looked at cumulative projects in the area, applied an ambient growth to that, and then ran the level service off it.

So I can't speak towards that because, you know, 2009 was quite a while ago, and there might have been some improvements. There's also improvements to the freeway, which could draw people off the local streets as well.

Yeah. Let's not forget that every single freeway overpass in the city has been redesigned. Every single one of those bridges are all new and the traffic patterns all changed, and some of the bridges even gained lanes. So I don't think looking back at 2009 is really the best benchmark for this exercise.

Yeah, that's my question. As far as know, there is only a slightly improvement in the on an right there. They're changing to T intersection. So but thank you very

much for

your answer.

Commissioner Brothers.

Yeah, thank you. And these are sort of scattered but I've been making notes. What school district will this neighborhood be in?

I believe, you know, that is question I was just thinking as I was sitting there, which school this actually feeds into. Is it I think it's the ocean Yeah. It's Ocean View. Thank you. Thank you. Ocean view, in case you didn't hear that.

Okay.

Alright. Question for the audience.

Yeah. They seem to know. So will the roof amenities be open to the public?

The roof amenities will be for the residents. However, residents can bring guests onto the roof amenities

such as the pool. So then are is the project paying a park in lieu fee?

We are. Yes. The park in lieu fee is estimated to be about $5,400,000 to the city. Okay. And there's a school fee that's estimated to be over $4,000,000. And the taxes generated from this project are supposed are estimated to be about 3 and a half million dollars annually.

Okay.

For a full picture there.

Alright. And this is a random question, but are are all the units electric or gas?

Currently, we have electric in the units.

All electric? All electric.

Okay. And in your parking structures, are the parking spaces assigned?

Typically, we'll decide that closer when it we get to lease up. Some of our some of our buildings have assigned parking. Some of them have free parking. Good luck. It's up to our residential team.

Yeah. Okay. Well, good luck with that. Okay. I think that's it.

Commissioner Escoda?

Hi. Parking. It's my understanding that there's two points of entry into the development, the main entrance off Magnolia. Mhmm. And then there's one off of Recreation Circle. There's a North building and a South building, a North parking structure, which from our study session, it looks like there's 466 parking spaces in that one. And in the south one, there's 450.

Mhmm. Yes.

So for the people that park in the North parking structure, are they driving through the retail to get to their structure in the back? Is that the only way they get back there?

I'd say typically they'd be driving through the Paseo. That's gonna be the most direct way to get in there.

Okay.

That's it.

Okay.

How about on this side of the table? Questions over here? Good. I have a question.

Yes, sir.

So how do you decide when you come look at a property like this, how many units to build? So you apparently were proposing something even bigger. It got a little bit smaller. How do you figure that out?

Well, we first look at the zoning to see what's allowed. And then you're often driven to to provide a certain number of units to justify, you know, the price you're having to pay for the land. So, know, in Southern California land is not cheap. So you have to put a large number of units on it to justify the cost. And so when we look at these, the first inclination is to see how many units are allowed and that you can physically fit onto a project.

And so we we probably could have put a few more on than our initial proposal, but our initial proposal was looking to to spread out the the land cost, the site development cost over as many units as possible to make it more economically feasible. After we talked to the city and heard feedback from the community, the the feedback was pretty unanimous. The community wanted smaller projects. They wanted it to be lower. And so we were happy to comply with that and we think it it looks pretty good.

In addition to dropping it one story, Steven was alluding to, he's talking about the step setbacks stepbacks at the upper levels. We we ended up pushing the seventh story back. Steven had the average setbacks. But the idea there was to make it so the perceived height along Magnolia and the major view corridors was a six story building instead of a seven story building. And so the exact unit count, it's not like we go into it and we know exactly what it's gonna be. You do feasibility studies, you do massing studies, you see what you can build. And then as you go down the process and incorporate feedback, you end up with the final proposal which is what we ended up with here.

If I may just add to that conversation. So as everybody knows, as as Steven alluded to as well, this project came about because we needed to meet our arena requirements in terms of providing access to at least 4,839 units in the city. So we had to zone for that many units at least in the city with some surplus. And so the number is actually a little bit higher than that. And and so Holland came forward.

They had this property in hand and we started discussing it with them. We went through a few iterations of the plan. The initial plans had many more units. But, you know, one of the things that I committed to the community when I came on board was we're going to look at least we're going to concentrate on at least three things. One is parking.

So you see additional parking there and then what's required. Design, and I think we alluded to how the design changed over time, especially on the Magnolia frontage and then amenities and you saw the number of amenities on the site as well. And so yes, we are forced to accommodate these many units, but we've worked with this applicant and other applicants that you'll see to try to do it in the best way we can for Fountain Valley. And so and that's how we got to this. We lowered the height with the applicant.

We lowered the number of units. We tried to make it as palatable as possible in the Fountain Valley way so that it's it's more compatible with our community and what our expectations are. And I'm sure, you know, we'll get feedback from the residents about, some of those choices, but what our goal was to do is provide, the best, possible, project to you, for consideration.

I follow-up have question

to that.

Yeah, Vice Chair Huber.

Okay. So I have a follow-up question to that since we're talking about how these number of units are calculated. So correct me if I'm wrong, but in that RINA number, I do believe that there is a significant percentage of housing units that also have to be allocated as the low income or affordable housing. And so please inform me as you are making these calculations, the more units you're able to build, you know, as a developer, the more units you can build, the cost to build the affordable unit goes down. Is that how that math works?

Because it needs to be economically feasible for you to bring these low income units into the community that we need.

Sure. And that's that's the idea behind the state density bonus program. You know, the state has decided that we need more affordable rent restricted units in the way they've incentivized the creationist buying by allowing developers to build a higher number of units in each project as a way of offsetting the the cost to build those affordable units. Or if you think about it another way, the affordable units don't bring as much income in to offset the costs and so they're allowing more market rate units to offset the loss of income, if you will, of the affordable units.

And for this project, that number is approximately 15%. Correct?

It is and it lines up with the city's inclusionary housing ordinance of 15%.

Great. Thank you. I

got one quick question. Since the project is next to the freeway, have we do any study about aerial deposit led from the freeway going to be impacted to the site or anything?

I'm not aware of an air particulate study and I can't speak in detail about what that would have looked like in the general plan EIR. I imagine that was studied as part of it.

Yes. That was we looked at the air pollution in particulate matter as part of the general plan EIR. And then it was further looked at as part of the addendum process. And so that was captured in in those. And I would just want to also mention that we did have a general plan advisory committee.

There may be some members that were that are present here from that committee made up of community members, stakeholders, planning commissioners. And this was one of the two sites that was a distance away from residential that was next to the freeway that the GPAC anticipated putting additional units on. The original adopted zoning allowed for 100 units per acre on this site. Shortly after that, that council brought it down to about 75, but still this is one of two areas of the city where it was anticipated for additional units to meet the RENA obligation.

There was

in the housing element, they so there there were two aspects of it. One was what the city anticipated and you see that the EIR itself anticipated 674 units there, which was close to what they initially came in with what's before you know 657. So the EIR in the city anticipated about this number of units. That's why we had it in the EIR. Separately in the housing element, there's a lower number for the RENA obligation because the methodology with the state HCD, we had to come up with some number of units that they would allow for on that prop or allow us to use for RHNA for that property.

And so we were close to about 600 units for the RHNA on that property, about five eighty five. The state wouldn't accept that even though we pushed for a higher number because we knew that the applicant would be coming in with more units. And so the number in the actual housing element is lower in that table that goes over each opportunity site and the number of units because that's what we could get the state HCD to accommodate or to accept to certify our housing element, but knowing that we anticipated more units over there as the GPAC.

Other questions? Thank you. Alright. Thank you. Alright. I know we have speakers on this item. So as a reminder, when your name is called and ask you to come to the microphone stand, you're gonna have three minutes. I think we're gonna we're have a

clock up Lisa is our timekeeper. Your time will be up there. So if you wanna glance at it as you speak. Sir, I have 26 comment cards at this time. I anticipate a few more coming in. So it'll probably be around thirty if everybody takes their three minutes or about an hour and a half. So we'll start getting through these. And if the planning commission or the public needs to take a break, we can do that in the middle.

And just as a reminder, I see there's more blue cards coming to the front. But if you'd like to speak, please fill out a blue card, bring it to the front. If you can't find a blue card or if we run out at the podium there, there's a white piece of paper you can sign up there. We'll check that at the end too. Then, at the end, we'll also go if there's people on Zoom.

Again, you can raise your hand on Zoom, we'll eventually get to you and call on you as well. I'll also remind everybody because this is a very packed room and I know people have strong feelings one way or the other about the project that everyone will get their turn and we're gonna have one speaker at a time. And if that's gonna be a problem, we're gonna have to pause the meeting and clear the room and then this is gonna take a lot longer. So I ask everybody to be respectful as we go through this process. Get our first speaker please.

Yes, sir. Thank you. First is I believe Val Fox.

Okay. Thank you. Do any of you live in the city of Mountain Valley?

All do.

All of

you do?

Fifty three years.

K. I'm I'm sixty two years. I will I would like to know why we're just now finding out about this project when you guys have already decided about it. This is the first letter I got, and we already have too many people in this city. You've gone from single family housing to now adding ADUs, and now you're letting people use garages as rooms, as not garages.

So that incorporates into more congestion on our city streets, on our residential streets. People don't have driveways to park in because they've used those to to add on to their houses. You you brought up everything but traffic on on this project. I mean, you're now going to add a whole another signal for the entrance off of Magnolia. That's gonna be five signals between Warner and Heil. Half a mile with five signals. Do you know what the traffic is like on Magnolia and Warner now? I just don't understand on your traffic impact, where where is that? You know? Do you do you use these intersections?

I don't think so. 600 plus units for this, there's not gonna be one car per unit. You know there's gonna be two cars per unit, at least. I I just don't understand. And is it solar powered? Is it on an electric grid? Because we're already getting power outages with the electric grid that we have. So where's that where's that transparency? We don't have a small town feel anymore, and I get that there's always progress that has to be done with cities, but this is this is ridiculous. You don't you're taking away our single family housing and a nice community to live in, and you're shoving everything down our throat.

We don't wanna live here anymore, but I will I'll be damned if I'm gonna let you push me out. I've been here, like I said, sixty two years. So the electric the electricity is a problem for me. Water's gonna be a problem for me. I mean, it's already burdened enough for us. What about our fire departments adding all of these? And you brought up a perfect point for a fire truck to get into that center. How's that gonna happen? It just doesn't make any sense. There's not enough policemen to cover the the stuff now.

The sober living houses are a problem. I mean, I I just don't understand why you're asking us to overload with something that we never asked for to begin with. And that's all I have to say.

Peter Pianpiano. Peter Pianpiano.

Hello. Hi.

Hello, sir.

I have a few questions. What is the real benefit to Fountain Valley for having all this density and people coming here into our communities as the previous lady just mentioned. Do you as a group have the right to cancel this project if you decide if the citizens of Fountain Valley decide they don't want it? Can you stop the project?

So, sir, what I'd to do is you have three minutes to speak. What you can do is ask all your questions, and at the end, then the Planning Commission

Oh, okay.

Answer. That way, we're not impeding on your three minutes.

Alright. Good. Yeah. I I saw all of the nice pictures you show, but you don't show the congestion when the freeway backs up and the on ramps to the freeway are slowed down. Where are the cars gonna go?

You have no idea where all the people who want to travel to get to the freeway are coming from, whether it's Huntington Beach or any of the surrounding cities. Just because they're not exact neighbors of ours doesn't mean they're not gonna be coming trying to get onto our freeway. So I I'm disappointed that I didn't know anything other than this last announcement I had about voting on some of these things that you're talking about or the additions. Certainly not the opportunity to vote on people adding houses or changing their garages as the last person just mentioned. I I I don't think the city of Fountain Valley has done enough to question what the state is making demands on us at all.

You're you're not trying to fight the governor. You're not trying to fight the things, the increased taxes that are being levied on us for the $30,000,000,000 that the state is spending on immigration, for example. You know, these are all things that and they we keep giving away a lot of money, which we don't have. We don't have electric power. We're not gonna have enough gasoline for those people who can't afford electric cars.

Where are they gonna get their power from? Where are they gonna get the gas without the refineries? They wanna close down. They don't wanna have refineries. And I sure as hell do not wanna get rid of my gas stove or my gas furnace because I can't afford it. And I'm sure there are many people who can. And there's no mention of what you're going to charge for rent on these units. And there's no question about how many people are going to live in the apartment buildings. Are they gonna be told they can't have more than two or three or six or eight people living in with them? So there's there's just a whole lot of issues. I can't even think of all of them.

Ten seconds, sir. So

I I that that's all I have to say is that I don't think Fountain Valley is a very nice place to live anymore, and I've been here forty years.

Thank you.

Matt Grenier, Windy Circle.

Hi. I just wanna say the nearby neighborhoods to this project are just now recovering from five years of four zero five improvements, which was really dirty and very noisy. And it seems to me if this project requires waivers, concessions, exceptions, eight plus variances, maybe it's not a great fit in the or in the best interest of the neighbors or our community. Traffic was gonna be a nightmare. Another stoplight means seven lights between Warner and Edinger and five between, as she said earlier, Warner and Heil.

They're not synced. They're not synced now, and they certainly won't be synced then if the city and Caltrans aren't on the same wavelength. Last year, we heard it was gonna take four years, excuse me, to complete this project. I do believe these are in the Fountain Valley School District because I think the boundary is Heil. Other side of Heil is Ocean View.

This side of Heil is where we live, and we're in Fountain Valley. The side that faces the freeway looks a lot like a prison to me, and I hope you'll give this more thought and try to keep Phalton Valley a nice place to live. I don't think this project will do that, and the only people to benefit from this is the Holland Partner Group. Thank you.

William Geltman, Oleander Circle. William?

I've heard I I had some questions.

Sir, I'd ask you if you'd like to speak. Please come up to the microphone.

Well, it's difficult for me to get up and down. So I wanna just I'll make it loud enough where you can hear me.

So the the problem, sir, and I appreciate it's difficult for you. There's people that are listening online or on TV. They they can't hear on the TV, guys. If you wanna speak, you get three minutes, and you can do it here. And if you have questions, you can ask them, and we might get a chance to answer them later.

Interested only in how much time it's gonna take and how much noise it's going to

exhibit. Okay. Can

you repeat

the question from people online?

Okay. So the question

is how much time is it going to take to construct the project and how much noise is there going to be? So we can ask after that question. We'll take that down.

Next we have Mai Tran.

Four years.

Heard four years. Hello.

I would like to reflect on what other people in the community has said. When I moved here some twenty seven years ago, it was because of a nice place to live. And as we said, it keep moving from single family home and then ADU and now a seven story double building, four of them all together. And how is it gonna be a nice place to live? What's the traffic's gonna be?

We know how how much traffic is really bad in Magnolia right now. And what the noise gonna be? What's impact on our school? What impact on our sewer system and other services that we have? And just because Holland company pay $4,000,000 for school fee and 4 and a half or so on park fee, you are making these people in this building live in a place with no green space.

They have a little swimming pool maybe. How is that supposed to make it a nice place to live? We here we all of us who've been here a long time have a garden, a backyard to go to, a nice street to go to without much traffic noise and without fighting with traffic. It's bad enough now going out of my house and run into traffic at school starting time and off time. Now you're going to add another 600 or so families to the place.

And I feel that we've been misled. Let me just check my time. We were told that the company has been nice enough to add an extra 200 parking to the minimum requirement. Well, we don't have one car per family. It would be two maybe, even three if you have a child that's school school age and drive. So how are we gonna have these people park all over on the street blocking and just clocking up the place? How are how are we as a city allow that to happen? We look at you all, you represent the city. Fight for us. This is not a nice place to live and we keep adding building that high.

If you need to add building, why seven story? Do you see how many seven stories around here? Two is what we used to, maybe three. And now suddenly, the city decided that it would allow seven story. And you are making these people living in high rise building.

That's not the nice place that we live in. So like somebody has said before, do we have any choice as people of the city, you as our representative to do anything about this or just to accept that it's gonna be seven story? Can it be five story? I know we have to allow for these housing that that we're supposed to have at the city, seven story is So not the I want you to consider that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Fred Neal.

Evening.

My name is Fred Nail. I'm the director of facilities management and construction for the Redondo Beach Unified School District, eighteen years. I'm a resident of Fountain Valley for twenty nine years, homeowner. I don't understand when I keep hearing that we have water shortages, power shortages. Where what's gonna run this place? Number one. Number two, the infrastructure for the city was designed for single family homes, not high density. I think it's a horrible idea, number one. Number two, your development with retail on the 1st Floor. Has anybody seen the failure at Beach Boulevard in Ellis in Maine?

I mean, seriously, look around. I've made some notes because sometimes I don't speak so well, but I got three minutes. Let me see. That's pretty much. I think look look at Beach And Ellis for this kind of design and the negative impact to the city, to to the neighbors. Even now, I get off the freeway every day on Magnolia South coming home from work, and it is backed up almost to the freeway already. And this is without that. I can imagine being backed up onto the 405, not safe. I think the whole thing's a horrible idea. Thank you.

Daryl Posner.

I just wanna start by answering a question that the gentleman answered. How many they're going to build is as many as they can get away with. That's the answer. So I'm sure they're doing studies, but I think the people need to have their own studies done. We heard that the applicant's engineers did studies. I'm not interested in who's getting paid to do a study by somebody who has a dog in the fight. I think the people actually need to have someone do a study. We were talking about, which were great questions, the minimum or maximum you need space between lights and the freeway off ramps or the other lights that are there, 300 feet, 400 feet. Well, we're we're talking, well, they're kinda right in there. We can see how they shifted that entrance just to barely squeeze it in there at the cost of everybody else here.

We already know that Magnolia gets backed up in the afternoons and in the mornings. I mean, back to Slater when you're going north to get on the freeway. That intersection has been a mess since they added the expansion of the freeway and built that new overpass. When people are trying to make a right out of where the car wash is and people are barreling down that steeper hill now coming from that overpass and the freeway now empties, you're in a right hand turn lane. The people that are already in that right hand turn lane are fighting to get in the left to do a U-turn or to go straight.

I I just did at 05:00 my own traffic study. I went out there and I videoed and taped to see all the U turns that are going on there. Now if you think the people that are gonna wait for that light are gonna sit there with that little driveway that you had and not cut through where the car wash is and make that even more dangerous, you're you're kidding yourselves or us or somebody. But this is a very dangerous intersection now. You should fix that problem first. And then fix all the other problems we're talking about, which are things like the infrastructure. When you get that all worked out and you have room to expand, let's have a conversation. But not about a seven story building. Maybe a three or four. But before you get those other things resolved, this should just be tabled.

When you can present to us or we have our own studies done that aren't someone's feeding someone's pocket or has a financial interest in it, and we get the numbers and see what it really looks like, then we can all have a conversation. But this is ridiculous to have people paying other people to do studies when we can all see with our own eyes that it's backing up and it's dangerous. So that's all I have to say.

Amy Omay. Hello.

My name is Amy Omay. I thank you very much for this time to speak in front of you. I grew up in Fountain Valley, born and raised here, went to all Fountain Valley schools. And I do think that and I was fortunate enough when I left, and then I just recently moved back. I bought a home in Fountain Valley because I do still believe it is a nice place to live. It has changed since, but things change, things evolve. But what and I understand the challenge that the we are up against in terms of being able to meet Rina. Okay? That is hard. That is almost put on us.

We gotta find a place to put that. However, I I'm not opposed to mixed use to mixed use development or high density, but I am opposed to lack of planning foresight in anticipation of the potential problems. I understand everyone's talking about traffic. I'm gonna skip that because I think you got enough of that, but I'm gonna talk more about education. The fact that one of the representatives came up and didn't even know what school district this affects, that's my focus. Because the reason I came back was because I have a two and three year old, and they're gonna grow up with this. So I understand, but the courageous, Tamara, and Plavin are all at a 26 to one student to teacher ratio. State average is 21 to one. What is that gonna do to our schools? Our schools are still excellent.

That's why I moved here. But what is that gonna do? What is the impact? And not only to the schools, but to the after school programs, the recreational programs. Granted, there's investment that has been made. I saw the website that shows how much revenue is gonna be generated for the city, but is that enough? Have we really looked at it? I understand that there is a land use policy one point let me see what the number is. 1.6 of school planning in the recent general plan update. This is to coordinate with school districts on facility improvements, expansion, and and contraction planning and activities.

I think there needs to be more transparency in what that actually means to the residents. How is the approach? How is that going to be executed, and how is that going to be implemented? Also, the new elementary school that's planned on policy land use 1.7, that is gonna be near the South Park And Crossings properties, which is by the Costco. Does that mean that students are gonna be redistricted between all the different schools and going to new schools in that case? So that is, I think, more transparency on the matter. How that's gonna be approached is something that the parents would appreciate. It's particularly because my dad still lives in the house. He's the first homeowner from the house I used grow up in, he lives right here. So I know that a lot of my former classmates are also kind of taking on their parents' homes as well.

They're not moving because Mountain Valley has great real estate value, and that's something that we would want to keep up. And it's hard to get in. I'm surprised I got in, honestly, without inheritance. So I would just ask the city to consider educational matters and how that affects our school districts. Thank you.

James Graff.

Thank you. I have one question and that was what was the the level of service on what's the current level of service on Magnolia And Heil or Magnolia And Heil between Warner And Heil? Do we know that answer?

We can ask we can answer questions afterward.

Okay. So that's my one question. And then also, what's gonna be the level of service on the current level of service on Recreation Drive and what it what it's gonna be projected to be. And as this gentleman said, that traffic that's gonna come through there from that southbound exit of the facility, it's gonna be crazy impacted. And then also have there been sewer and, water studies done, and are those available for us to view and make those transparent? And lastly, mister Vu, I like the questions you ask, and I will certainly vote for you again.

Brian Genovese.

Hi. Good evening. Steam planning commissioners and city staff. My name is Brian Genovese, and thank you for, letting me speak tonight. What I've got for you guys is I've got 20 letters in support, of the Holland partner project from various entities in the city from the chamber to those Orange County realtors to community members and business owners in the city. So I'd to submit these for the record so I can hand these in. And you might have some of these already, so I just wanna do that. And thank you guys for your time tonight. I appreciate you guys doing this. Thank you.

John two.

Good evening, commissioners and city staff. My name is John Tu. I'm a local realtor here and a member of the Orange County Realtors. I understand that there's a lot of people who live in the city and love their city. That's very important. And those their concerns must be addressed. But I like to speak on another viewpoint for some people who are young and young families, especially. And I think, you know, the average house in Fountain Valley is 1.3 to 1,400,000. Many young professionals are wanna stay in California, but they can't because they can't afford it. As a realtor, I think it's important that we meet the demands of the market.

So overall, I think this is a good project, you know, if all consider all considerations are met. Thank you for your consideration. Thanks.

Sean Haas.

Good evening. My name is Sean Haas. Thank you for allowing me to speak tonight in front of the commission. I bought a house in a single family house in Fountain Valley three years ago because of the quality of living. And what I'm seeing is that at the beginning of this project, the traffic is gonna start off at a c.

But by 2028, all criteria showed a d, which while we can accept that that's the minimum acceptable level of level of service, that it's a decrease in what we currently have, and it's a decrease from what this project is gonna start with. The I understand the need to build high density housing, but this parcel is small, seven acres, and it's shoehorned up against the freeway. There's only access from two sides. And realistically, Recreation Circle is not a viable way out. It can't handle the flow.

If there is a safety issue such as a fire that causes the evacuation of the North Tower, how are those people going to get out of that very constrained single access only way out from the North Tower through the main drive on to Magnolia? It it doesn't seem like the it this would be a better fit if there was access on four sides and you had better ways onto the arteries. The the number of parking stalls, you you end up with 980 adults. It just if you end up with extra kids and the number of cars that are gonna be trying to fit in there, either you're gonna have to limit somebody by contract. It it just doesn't seem like there's enough capacity, and there's nowhere else for it to go.

There's some public area in South Of Recreation, but people will start jamming those up, and then those won't be available for the commercial property that's there. That's really all I have to say that it looks like there's a level of service issue. Really like strong consideration for how this impacts the community, particularly anybody who's accessing from Magnolia Drive. Thank you for your time.

John Etheridge.

Good Good evening, everybody. Thank you for having me. Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is John Etheridge. I'm a fifty five year resident of Fountain Valley. I left for a few years to go to school and get married, came back, and I bought the house that we live in now for 489,000 in 2000. Now it's worth 1,700,000.0. I raised my three kids in that house. My two of my three kids have now left the state because they can't afford to live in Fountain Valley or Huntington Beach. That's a problem. The state has required that we make some housing that's affordable for young people. We have graduates here in town. Right? I went to Cox School when it was k through eight. I went to Fountain Valley High School, graduated 1985.

This project nobody here in Fountain Valley wants to live in New York City. We we would all agree with that. Everybody feels that. Everybody understands. We don't want high rises everywhere. But we do have a requirement to supply housing for young people. And young people can't buy my $1,700,000 house. They just can't do it. So I wanna I wanna thank the Holland Group for for upgrading the plan to to the aesthetic that they have now. I understand that it's gonna be a difficult decision for our community and for you commissioners to decide whether or not this project makes sense for Fountain Valley.

The Rina numbers unfortunately require that we do something like this. There are the single family homes aren't immediately impacted by the development as it is next to the freeway. It's not right in the middle of somebody's neighborhood where where we have a a school that's been defunct and sold to a developer. So I wanna just encourage you to think about this thing realistically and understand that development is going to be required within our community. I like the development.

I I think I wanna support it. I wanna talk about a couple of things. Just understanding how difficult a decision it is for you guys. There are people in the room clearly on both sides of the issue. There's a lot of people that don't wanna talk about the issue. But kids, graduates that are that are just getting out of school looking for their first home, they wanna live here too. Right? They're it is a nice place to live. I've been here. I'm staying here as long as I can.

I wanna say it's a it's good planning in an extremely difficult situation. So I wanna thank the Holland Group. I know the community is is torn up about it, but I think it's a great development and I love the way it looks. So thanks.

Rod Blankenship.

Hi. It's Rob Blankenship, and I've lived here about fifty years. And my concern is this low cost housing. Does that include suction eights? Or how low does it go or start at?

And then the I know you've heard a lot about it, but we're talking about people coming over the hill on Magnolia off getting off the freeway. When they're coming down, they get a green light and somebody's turning left. You could have a lot of wrecks. I mean, it just doesn't make sense for anybody to turn left across a two or three lane exit and then with people coming down at them. And then if you don't, if you change that light, now you've got Warner Avenue light, then you've got your complex light that they wanna put in, then you got you know, it's so close together.

In the morning, it's gonna take you a half an hour to get from Warner Avenue to the entrance of the freeway just with the lights and the backup of traffic. And it it would almost has to be a right turn only coming out of that complex at both ends. And then they can do their u-turn at the proper place where it's already marked. That and the cost, that's the main issue because like I said, I lived here a lot of years and we're I love Fountain Valley because we have probably the least amount of homeless, we'll put it, and we're proud of that. And if you're talking low cost housing, how low does that go?

I mean, I don't wanna be dealing with people on scooters looking in car windows. You know? I mean, you know, in Section Eights and no third, you just go thrashing. Brand new complex. It's good. We look like garbage in a short time. So, you know, these are things. And then two, on the the level of the buildings, I think seven to stories is too high. I really do. I think maybe five would be basically about level, you know, with the overall scenery of the height of the on ramp and and the rest of the aesthetics of the area.

I don't know. Other than that, it'd be it's a nice idea, but I think there's some definite modifications we need to consider very closely. Thank you.

John George, 2nd Street.

Good evening. My name is John Yergi. I've been a Fountain Valley resident for fifteen years. First off, who was still a member of the Planet Commission when McDonald's vote happened? And was anyone on the commission then?

We can answer your questions at the end.

Oh, okay. Alright. Well, for those who were, good job, because at that time last year, the commission actually voted against the McDonald's project and listened to the concerns of the residents in the area. Unfortunately, our City Council overturned that, and I won't get into that. That was a debacle.

But since they did overturn that, now we've got the McDonald's traffic that's gonna be coming soon, that that's going to increase the traffic problems we already have after the Dutch brothers went in last year. Now this, you know, well, they talk about a traffic study and all that, as a lot of people have talked about already, that coming coming out that intersection, trying to get on the freeway is just gonna get worse. Even if there's a light light or not, if there's light, folks are gonna take that right turn when they get their green light or on red. It's gonna cause gridlock at the next light for the you know, getting on to the on ramp, and it it's it's gonna be a nightmare. So I'd I'd really ask you to consider that.

I understand, and John Etheridge pointed out, you know, hey. There's a need for young folks to be able to afford housing here. So I'm not opposed to affordable housing. I just think that the number of units that that is proposed in this project is too high. It's too many cars.

I know you've got your hands tied with some of these legalities with this bonus density California rule or law. However, you know, one way is talk about a physical impact in the environment, and I think there definitely is a physical impact in the environment no matter what the environmental impact study says is the air pollution from 980 plus cars coming in and out of there and the congestion that it's gonna cause for all the extra cars that are now stuck idling on Magnolia waiting to get onto the freeway. So it's it's gonna cause cause problems. So I ask you to say, say no to the concessions and the eight waivers, force the developers to meet our city codes, which were set for a reason. Even though Sacramento says no, I think it's time Fountain Valley stands up Sacramento.

Yeah. Yes.

And I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

Anna Katsuki.

Good evening, and thank you

for letting us express our opinion on this construction. You know there's a traffic problem. You know that seven stories doesn't fit in Fountain Valley. You know there will be issues there. All of us who live here, you see the traffic, you see the problems. Dutch Brothers on Magnolia has created a problem. You know that. And I'm gonna tell the audience, it doesn't matter, guys. It doesn't matter. The state has a requirement. Our people

And if you could speak into the microphone so you could be heard, we'd appreciate it. There's people watching on TV.

Our people on the planning commission and city council, they're going to follow the state. There are strings. We're puppets. It doesn't matter, guys. I was on the traffic committee here. I was a volunteer. And, you know, you can make statistics work any way you want, just like traffic clicks. You can make it work so it looks like it's not an issue. Developers, you'll make your money and you'll leave and we're stuck with what's left. Realtors, of course you want this. You're gonna make a lot of money. Come on, let's be realistic. Average rent is 22 to 2,600, and so you know that not one or two people are going to live in these places, but more. And there are not enough places for parking there. Let's be realistic, guys.

It's gonna happen, and it doesn't matter what we say. It doesn't matter at all and I'm sorry to say that, but I had neighbors who are going to come. They've given up. They said it's futile. I feel that way. We know the reality. Come on. You know that. We all know that. So it's gonna happen. Doesn't matter what you think or say. They'll make it work the way they want to. I'm glad you had your 20 people that think it's a great idea. John, there's no that young people are gonna move in here. You can't limit who's gonna rent these places, and it's not gonna be just two people.

So I just wish Fountain Valley the best of luck. When I had a chance to buy a house for my daughter because I had other property, it was not in Fountain Valley. Sorry.

Carol Mitchell.

Well,

I've lived here since 1986. My husband and I came up here from Hermosa Beach. We had two children and we decided that Fountain Valley was a better place to raise our children than in Hermosa Beach. Let's face it, it was a party town. But if I really wanted to live in LA County, I would still be there. The problem in LA County is what you're creating here. You're putting too many buildings with too many people. And you're not creating the infrastructure to handle it. And the way you deal with Sacramento is you all get together with the other cities and tell them

to sit on it. Okay.

That's all I can say. The parking is going to be a joke. Where are they going to park if they can't park in their parking structures or the allotted spaces? There's no place to park around there unless they go into the parking lots of the businesses. Nobody wants that. So I just think you guys really got to think about this. Talk to the other cities. Start fighting back like Huntington Beach does. Okay? Start pushing back. Sacramento's out of their minds. Okay? We all live in coastal cities. Okay? Fountain Valley doesn't have its own beach, but it is a coastal city.

We're within a few miles south of us, and we're within seven miles west of us. So come on, figure it out. Don't let this happen.

Michael Hortz.

Alright. Good evening commissioners. I appreciate the opportunity to speak for you guys and the audience here. I'm here to speak in support of our city. We are in a difficult position.

The state is forcing cities to implement their housing goals or meet stiff fines. This project implements the vision of our general plan update, which is our city council approved. I support our city's decision to follow the law and provide these opportunity sites and locations that we as a city decided for ourselves rather than than have the state tell us where to put them. Holland Partner Group presented these plans to our community for input and implemented changes that address concerns. They changed the look of the buildings to make them more appealing.

I appreciate their efforts to do this. While we all wish we could only have single family detached homes in our community, That type of home is not the only type of home we need for our residents. These days, we need all types of homes for our graduates, young families, growing families, and empty nesters. This project addresses all those needs. Thank you for your time.

Vernon Goldwater.

Mister chairman, members of the council, good evening. My name is Vernon Goldwater. I'm a forty seven year resident of the city of Fountain Valley. I am going to approach the subject from a slightly different perspective. I wanna know who's going to bear the costs of this development, whether it's going to be the developer or the city or the taxpayers and the rate payers of this community.

Now and and I would suggest that this council has a duty to inquire about the those cost items. And I'm gonna further suggest that the most likely and fruitful source of information regarding these items is the department heads or the departments that will be affected by this development. An example would be fire prevention. I suggest that there should be a study as to what the current fire department has ex facilities to competently deal with a fire on a seven story, apartment house. If they don't have that, then the cost of getting the necessary equipment to meet the requirements should be incorporated somewhere in here.

And a question in my mind is that the should the developer bear some portion or all of those additional costs to the city? We have other agencies that are not necessarily the city who can affect the rate payer. We have a sewage sewage county sewage agency, And I'm gonna suggest that a in all likelihood, some separate sewage line will have to be utilized to access the sewage treatment facility that's down in South Fountain Valley. Who's gonna bear the cost of that extra sewage line? We have similar matters for who's going to bear the cost of the electors electricity substations that are probably going to be required for this this particular project.

I don't wanna lose my time, so there's a question of liability. If the city is granting all these variances and some catastrophe happens, the city may be a party to any lawsuit that would be brought especially in the light of the granting of variances from standard, building codes matters.

I think that

all of this needs to be reviewed. I think you have a duty to the to the taxpayers of this city to inquire and get all of the expert information you can get

Thank you.

From all

of the agencies. Your time is up. Thank you. Doctor. Manriquez.

Members of the Planning Commission, I'm Doctor. Sal Manriquez. I'm a Fountain Valley resident of 39. I'm a Fountain Valley business owner for thirty six years. This proposed project is a poor design for this site.

This is an urban high density complex in a low density one to two story bedroom community. You are bringing four seven story structures into a bedroom community where the vast majority of structures are one to two story homes. This project brings nearly 5,000 square feet of commercial space when existing commercial real estate and businesses have struggled or failed. Across the street, there are a number of failed businesses. Half a mile south, the existing shopping center has an empty anchor store where Rite Aid used to be at Magnolia And Talbert and has been empty for nearly two years.

The local Westminster Mall has been deserted for five years. So bringing nearly 5,000 square feet of new commercial space which may not fill and is likely to put further downward economic pressure on the existing Fountain Valley businesses. The new residents, their guests, and potential shoppers at this site will add a crush of new traffic as has already been discussed. These streets are already overburdened. We talked about that with the addition of the McDonald's and how it's a safety threat for the kids that are around here.

And that's going to happen as well over here. So if kids get hurt, is there a responsibility on your shoulders because of the decisions that you make? The car line as has been said to get into the North Magnolia, North 405 on ramp already backs up to Warner and like they said sometimes to Slater. This development will aggravate already existing strained safety hazards on our streets. Additionally having two seven story parking structures immediately off the freeway is a safety risk and may in time lead to increased crime and nobody's talked about that.

Creating high density high rises to create sufficient developer profit to make it worth their while to build this is not worth the deteriorating quality of life for neighboring Fountain Valley residents. This proposed urban high density design is poorly designed for the site. Pushing this high density complex through will deteriorate the quality of life of neighboring Fountain Valley residents on several dimensions. Please honor our trust in you, the planning commission, Fountain Valley residents trust in you, the planning commission, to trust us to protect the quality of life in Fountain Valley. This planned project is not in the best interest of Fountain Valley residents.

Honorable answer must vote no on this project.

Elizabeth Hansberg.

Good evening members of the planning commission. This feels very odd, sorry. My name is Elizabeth Hansberg and I'm with an organization called People for Housing Orange County. We're an advocacy organization for affordable homes, first time home buyer homes, workforce housing, and I'm here to support this project. I'm this is a tough crowd.

We have a housing shortage. And the reason that we have a housing shortage is because very often when there is a new development to be considered, folks in the community that surround it are opposed to it. When you multiply that over all the cities across California, we have this crisis of affordability that really stems from a lack of supply. I mean, if if you really dig down, what we're struggling with is a lack of supply in the housing market. There's also no turnover in the housing market because as one of the gentlemen said earlier who was here to support the project, he's not leaving, right?

He's not moving, so there's no churn in the market. And so what that leaves us with is Fountain Valley, a very nice place to live if you're already here. But it's not possible to live here unless unlike the other lady who said she was able to buy a home, she said people are taking over the homes of their parents, right, because they don't have the down payment to buy the single family home that perhaps they want or perhaps they don't want. Right? We don't all have to want the same things.

Having variety in your city is a good thing. So to that end, this project provides more diversity to your housing stock. It expands the supply of housing that is here. It brings with it a host of funding to help fill in the gaps in the city's budget for the infrastructure that you need for police and fire and parks and water and school districts. And, you know, to the lady that was able to buy the home and was worried about the quality of the schools, every single school district in Orange County besides Irvine Unified has declining enrollment.

Why? Because people of childbearing age are moving to Texas or Tennessee and taking their fertility with them. And so we think we have a school problem when really teachers are lay sorry. Teachers are being laid off because we don't have enough kids in the schools to keep them afloat. And no one wants to see the beloved teacher, missus Guerrero, or the teacher of the year from last year, mister Smith, be pink slipped. Right? Everyone's up in arms over the McDonald's, but they're equally up in arms when there's not enough resources I mean, sorry, not enough students to support the schools at the resource level that they currently have. So think globally. Right? Your your housing element process that you went through was not done in a vacuum.

It was done with your own residents. I imagine your planning commission was heavily involved in that process. There is a vision. There is a zoning. This project conforms to it, and you are obligated to move it forward. So

Ten seconds. Well,

you still are.

If I may That's an I

may Excuse me. That's enough from the crowd. Enough.

Crown Valley has always been a polite community, I appreciate it if we remain polite to every speaker. Thank you. About nine more speakers, sir.

Alright. We're gonna take a five minute break, and then we'll resume it. But before we go, again, a reminder to everyone to please be disrespect to please not yes. Thank you.

Please don't be disrespectful.

Please remember to be respectful, especially with those who with whom you disagree. I don't have to remind you to be respectful to people that you agree with. Appreciate everyone's time tonight. I think we're gonna be here for a good while longer talking about all these questions, but I really wanna hear from everybody, and I and I do wanna make sure that no one's spoken over. It makes people nervous. It makes people lose their time. So I'd appreciate that. Next speaker, please. Steven Collins.

Good evening to everyone. I've lived in Fountain Valley for seventeen years. I'm a high school and middle school teacher. I also did some refereeing. Way back in my early college years, I studied architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, which included some suburban development classes as well.

So I'm familiar with a lot of things that have been said and going on. I happen to live over by Slater in Euclid, and anybody who lives in that area can tell you that that is the accident capital of Fountain Valley. And the traffic there is hideous. And I don't know when the last time a traffic study was done, but I can understand why westbound traffic on Slater goes ahead across Euclid only to be stopped by a red light at Los Jardines East. I watched those lights turn red when there's no cars going north or south.

So I start to think about impacts like that. I never heard about any hearings when eminent domain was was issued to take the property across the street to build density housing there. And my only thought was is that's really gonna ruin the traffic. Take a drive along Slater this evening and look at how many cars are parked on the street because the people that live in those units there have an extra car and they have no place to put it. Think about the people that not just living in this development and it's nicely drawn and laid out, but they're gonna have visitors as well. Not

just

one or two cars per unit, but they're gonna have visitors come over for whatever occasion. That's gonna impact all the parking there. One of the questions that some people around me have that aren't gonna be up here, and I hope you address it, is is this written in stone? Is this gonna change? One of the things I learned in marketing classes and when I worked in retail during college is that if you have somebody that complains, there is nine to 16 people that agree with that complaint.

When you get somebody saying nice things about you, there's seven to 10 people that agree with that. Quite a disparity. So when the gentleman walks up here with the the 20 letters of support, great. But also know that for every person that has come up here to speak against it, there's a lot more people that agree with that dissent. There's quite a few things that have gone on in the city that I wasn't able to attend meetings and speak upon. Fortunately, school's done for me, so I'm a teacher without school. I have no class. I get to speak and I get to address this.

10, sir.

Thank you. I hope that you take in consideration. This is too much. Just because the state of California says you can do this

Thank you, sir.

Doesn't mean you should.

Lee Tang.

Good evening. I'm living in the areas that are going to be most impacted by all the projects that you guys are planning for high density housing. The Slater project, the Euclid project, the Magnolia project, already finished Talbert project. So our area is going to be immensely affected by traffic, air quality, people, you name it. I want to go on record saying that I oppose the proposed or the request that the developer is asking for the addendum for the height and the well, just say all of the addendums that the developer is is requesting for for for waivers.

The height especially has is a concern for me. The seven stories is way too high. It's not only just seven stories, but I understand that there's an extra, like, things they put on top of the building that could be an extra 15 feet. Bella Terra, which is not too far from here, they they built a residential commercial buildings I mean, apartment buildings, and those are about three to four stories high. Why are we looking at seven stories in a bedroom community like like this?

This is just way over over the top, for this type of a community and for the area too. I mean, like I said, I am living in the middle of all of these projects impacted by all the traffic that this has already started to bring. When we talk about traffic management, we we're we're already seeing a lot of traffic and being impacted by traffic on Brookhurst and Warner, Magnolia and Warner, Magnolia and Talbert, Brookhurst and Talbert, especially trying to get on and off the freeways. When you have school in session, you have traffic that's backed up on Warner all the way to the school trying to get onto the freeway, and then people trying not people not wanting to to stay in that lane to get onto the freeway. And so they try to cross over at at the the start of the freeway.

I'm glad I I I talked about that, but I wanna also talk about air quality. We have to had to add air purifiers in every one of our rooms. Our patios get dirt and and soot in the patios every day. We're having to sweep that out. It's because of all the diff all the added traffic and congestions and emissions from the the cars from the freeway and increased traffic on Warner.

Another thing I'm concerned about is the volume and capacity ratios and also the amount of people that they're bringing in to this facility because I think their numbers were low when they looked at 2.8 to 2.9 people per unit. So I think a lot of the numbers that they proposed, you need to relook at them because I think that they are very low and they're not correct.

Thank you.

Am Sezen. Pam Sezen. Eric Drummel.

Good evening. Thank you for your time. I'm here to speak to this project, and I oppose this project. I'm one of the younger residents here in that I've only been here twenty eight years. You know, it's a community that I've grown to love. I think I sort of stumbled upon it. And next thing you know, I realized that I found a diamond amongst all the other stones. It seems to me that this project represents the state's desire to increase housing. I get that, but it's like they benefit you. You get more variances, the more units you can shoehorn into this.

And that just doesn't seem right. I think that, you know, the project across the street has lower density than this project per acre. Alright? So what's the next step? What's the next project? Are we gonna keep trying to go higher and higher and higher with each of the last pieces of vacant land we have in the city, that's concerning for me. I think it's concerning for all the residents who are here. I haven't been to a lot of these meetings, but this is one of the most well attended ones I've been to. And I think that speaks to the community who cares about this project. For the lady who was advocating for, she's talking about Irvine.

Irvine's not throwing up seven story buildings in a turtle rock. They aren't doing that. Okay? They're putting them in defined other areas. Let's see. Thank you for putting out this notice. I'm gonna encourage you to put out the notice to every single address in the future. Alright? I think you'll get more buy off from the community, and they'll know more what's going on. And I I would just ask you to do that.

I think that's a a good opportunity for you as commissioners to help the community be aware of what's going on here. So thank you in advance for that. Another question I have, and mister Vu, you know, thank you for bringing some of the issues up regarding the traffic. But, okay, so now we're gonna have a seven story building. How do we fit a fire ladder truck? I mean, you gotta have one. It's a seven story building. Right? Is that been considered in regards to egress and ingress? I'm seeing some nodding heads, so I'm gonna say the answer is probably yes.

So thank you for reviewing that. They're talking about the additional funds that are coming in. Alright. Well, we don't have we were gonna build a fire station. Now we aren't. Why don't you have them pay for that? Okay? Last thing, we elected you to do your jobs. From my view, I think exactly what you need to do is start doing what other cities are nearby doing and get together and fight Sacramento. I work for the state of California. It can be done. Thank you for your time.

Joan Marie Hill. Joan Marie Hill. Oleander Circle.

Good evening. I've been a resident of Fountain Valley since there was strawberries, corn, and dirt.

That's a

long time. Good to see all these people coming out and posing what what I am also probably repeating some of the same complaints. Nice sales presentation with photos. Everybody is missing the boat on this. Why are we here? If our planning commission has already decided, why are we here? Is this done deal? Is it a done deal? Question mark.

We'll answer the questions at the end, ma'am. Pardon me? We'll answer the questions at the end, ma'am.

Okay. Anyone can do the simple math. If we have a one bedroom unit and one stall or a parking place, and the price is gonna be $4,000 a month, and that's what it'll be in four years per unit, you're going to get two professionals working and have one bed or maybe two bed. Maybe they slip in another bed. That means two cars. Right? So what do we do about those two cars? We got one stall. Well, if you look to what is the name of it? Dutch Brothers, they've got a line going down the block now.

You've got the tile company. They'll fill that up real fast. And where's the next place? If I owned one of those units or rented one of those, I would take my girlfriend or boyfriend across the street, drop them off at Aldi or or Smart and Final, get back in the car and go home, leave it there after work, and come home, and the next morning go through the routine because that's the only way you're going to be able to find a parking place. And what does that do for us residents?

How are we gonna shop there? That happens to be one of my favorite spots. It's either that or it's the Spartan final. So my question to you is what the mayor can't do anything, he said. I asked him one day. Can't do anything. It comes from our Sacramento or wherever. They're re where they're demanding these projects redone. But why if Huntington Beach is suing, why are you approving this and might not sue it also so we can cut down on the the ability to park? We can't even park at our own stores. That's my question. Thank you.

Ron Calkins.

Good evening, commissioners. Thank you for allowing me to speak. I'm a thirty year resident plus of Fountain Valley. And the city slogan is it's a nice place to live. Fountain Valley is a community of single family residents, many of the neighbors that we have for lifelong friends.

Fonta Valley consistently boast of a crime rate below the California average. It is a nice place to live. We have a great proximity to the beach, the mountains, and the desert. In fact, the intersection of Magnolia and Warner offers a magnificent view of the San Gabriel Mountains and San Bernardino Mountains. To put a huge high rise unit in there would forever change that view.

I can only imagine the traffic in that where that location is not something that looks good to me at all. And I can appreciate the wants of the Holland partner group to develop that site. It'd be an easy sell and be very lucrative at our expense. It's a beautiful proposal, and you guys have a hard time come up with the right answer. I appreciate that. But I ask that the Planning Commission deny their application as proposed. I'm aware there'd be an increase in revenue to the city. It should not be about the money. It should be doing the right thing. And if it exceeds our budget, then maybe we should redo our budget and live within our means.

I don't know. The Fountain Valley cannot be bought. Please do not allow this project to move forward as it is. And don't be the Planning Commission that the legacy is that we sold out Fountain Valley. And as far as elevation, it should be developed. That site should be developed. And housing would be an excellent place there. But you really gotta consider the the egress and ingress. Like mister Vu said, my business has been in Long Beach. I've been over forty years, and I can only tell you how many trucks I've seen turned over on the freeways. It does not take very much, and he's absolutely correct. It does not take much to flip a truck. With that, I thank you.

Don

Cansino.

Good evening. I'm not gonna sit and, repeat everything that all of my fellow neighbors have heard, but I appreciate the opportunity to at least voice some concerns and bring some additional things that they haven't already brought forward. So I live in the track. Three of my neighbors, we live on the same street. We're all here tonight.

I'm just letting you know, you know, our concerns. We live on the other side of the 405 Freeway. We are closest to Magnolia and Heil. If you've ever tried to make a left hand turn at that intersection, you're usually about 10 to 15 cars deep because it's a yield. And if you wanna go south on Magnolia and you're coming westbound on Heil, you have to sit and wait for the left hand turn.

That's at the bottom of the new hill. So now, the other issue that I wanted to bring to your attention is when you get off the freeway, if you're coming on northbound on the 405 and you get off, you can only make a right hand turn. So you cannot go left to go south on Magnolia. So what people do is they make that right and then they make the illegal u-turn at the bottom of the hill or they go across the double solids. And it's dangerous.

When I'm sitting to make the right hand turn to go to my residence, I watch it almost on a daily basis. So it is concerning when you consider that you're going to add all these additional units. What kind of additional traffic accidents you're going to have? Eighteen months ago, my car was totaled at that intersection because there was a driver that came flying down the hill, ran a red light, hit me, and spun me three times through that intersection. So I really would ask you to question the traffic flow.

I appreciate that they've paid someone to do it, but to be perfectly honest with you, the reality of it is not what he said. It is very congested. When we talk about recreation circle, where they're trying to put all these buildings, You have a skating rink that does not have enough parking. It overflows into the other side. They have security over there to make sure that you don't park in the floor and decor parking side.

You have a line at Dutch Brothers that puts Disneyland to shame. Okay? They give away bracelets and it backs up traffic onto the 405. Fountain Valley is a phenomenal detour that people know. And in order to avoid all the traffic on the 405 Freeway, they use our city to cut through.

And it still happens because the 405 even with expansion is still stopped. So I would ask you to consider that. And then another point too is when you're on Magnolia, there is another set of apartment buildings that's across the street directly from where this is gonna be located. There is a left hand turn there. You can't make a left hand turn or U-turn Monday through Friday from 3PM to seven because of the traffic. So that sign wouldn't be there if traffic wasn't already an issue. So I would ask you to consider all of that. Thank you. John

Gentleman.

Well, my name is John Junkman. I've lived in Fountain Valley a little while. I didn't report what I was hearing. I like everybody being opposed to this thing. A little bit of my history. I was born 09/01/1949 in Fountain Valley. I still live next door to the house I was born in. My mom and dad didn't make it to the hospital. They went the next day. So I know a little bit about Fountain Valley. And you guys are you guys, we're getting we're getting past the point of this is a nice place to live. It's getting terrible. You just did it across the street. Now you wanna do it with this project,

which is a viewable picture. There's a couple of things missing in that picture when you guys had it designed. You need to show about 200 more cars on there Yeah.

Yeah. To start with. But it's terrible. And I'm getting tired of I'm gonna leave. We're not gonna leave. I'm 75 years old. I'm not gonna leave. I live in a house right next door to the house I was born. My family was raised here. I went to Fountain Valley well, it's Talbert Elementary School. I graduated from Fountain Valley High School, first graduating class. So I know a little bit. I know all the farmers running it. But this stuff that you guys are putting in Fountain Valley right now is totally ridiculous. And you did it across the street.

You're not taking any account for traffic. Parking, they're bragging about how many extra parking spaces they put. There's that place is still not gonna have enough parking. Right. Now I heard a rumor that you're gonna do the same thing over here on Euclid And Warner. A project is on the table now that you guys are looking at. You're gonna build a big high rise over there. You guys are ruining Fountain Valley. You're making me sick to my stomach and my family and everybody up and all these people here. And you're gonna

do it over on Warner And Euclid.

Anybody gonna say there's something going on over there or not? You guys have not heard

nothing about that. Right? Zero?

Give me a break.

I'll bet anybody up there

any money, you know what I'm Julie Ingram? Julie Ingram?

Yes.

Hi. My name is Julie Ingram, and I actually wasn't going to speak, but I don't want, like other folks before me, I don't wanna talk about, the congestion, but I wanna address or have asking that you consider the danger to pedestrians because with this 657 unit apartments, I'm guessing it's I don't know. Is there gonna be one, two, three bedroom apartments? How many people will be in those apartments? With the congestion and traffic being what it is to right now and what it will be when this thing is built, has there been any consideration to the danger to the folks that are living there, that are gonna live there.

Because if there's not enough parking for their cars, they're gonna be parking them like the woman said, either at Smart And Final parking Lot or over at Floor And Decor or maybe by Winchelles or who knows where they'll be parking their cars. But people be be walking from there to this apartment. And with there being so much traffic and road rage, I'm concerned for the pedestrians. And the reason this is near and

dear to my heart is because we have two visually impaired sons that like sorry. We they can't drive, so they walk. And they like to walk to,

you know, Starbucks or to the Dutch brothers against my, you know, better judgment because I hate the fact that they're there. Anyway, I'm just concerned for their safety, and I'm concerned for all the people that will be there'll be more pedestrians in that Warner Magnolia Intersection. And if you're gonna do this, if this is already a done deal, then you need to look out for the the people that will be walking. And I'm concerned for the children, you know, walking to school. And, if people are gonna be speeding so that they don't miss the light, I just will they be looking out for the kids?

Will they be looking out for my boys? Well or that's all I want to say. Thank you.

Natalie Tran.

Good

evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with keeping Fountain Valley a nice place to live or, you know, that providing young people with the opportunity to purchase home or affordable housing. And I can certainly understand the state mandate and your obligation to meet it. However, you asked for community input, and I hope that you are listening with an open heart and mind this evening.

Tonight, the community has spoken. If you listen to some of the issues that were raised here, like traffic, environmental, parking, infrastructure, education, social services, public health, community safety, and most recently, a vulnerable population within their community, both short term and long term. What you are hearing is the long term impact that the residents will have to bear, the hardships that they will have to experience as the result of this project. And there is no price tag for that if you listen to the narratives that have been communicated this evening. Based on the information that has been provided today, it's very clear that there's been a lack of research, preparation, knowledge of local context, anticipation of issues that may arise, and solutions to solve those issues.

And most importantly, it's really the lack of long term investment in our community. The underlying issues that the residents of Fountain Valley are communicating is the negative impact that they will have to bear both short term and long term. The impact that will affect the quality of life, their engagement with the community, the investment in the community that they will have as a couple have mentioned about relocation. I encourage all of us to be thoughtful, table the project, do our due diligence, conduct the proper research, come up with a better plan, address the concerns that have been raised here today, and make it work for all of the residents. This project as designed is not the right fit for Fountain Valley.

Esteemed commissioners, I trust and have confidence that you will do the right thing by listening to the voice of the community this evening. We are what make Fountain Valley. Thank you.

Sir, have no additional request to speak in person. We had one person on Zoom that I was aware of. They had to leave. Lisa, are there any other Okay. So we can close the public hearing at this time

if you like.

Let just ask because I wanna make sure. Is there anybody that wanted to speak who hasn't had a chance to speak in the audience? Alright. With that, I will close the public hearing. Something I'd like to do do we have staff somewhere?

There we go. Let

me ask a couple of

questions because we had we had a couple of questions. If if you could come up, Steven.

I'm sorry. Did take some notes too regarding questions and comments that came up so I can go through some of the Sure.

If you wanna go first. Sure.

I can go first. So during that the the one of the and I I kinda try to categorize them, but, you know, we started with the arena and that's why this property was rezoned. Nobody in the community had a thought of rezoning this property to what it is now before the arena obligation from the state. And so one of the questions that came up is, well, why don't you fight the state? And so we did fight the the Rina process when it came up before our regional body, SCAG, the Southern California Association of Governments, a bunch of cities as you desired.

We did that. We fought the state and the courts sided with the state. We believe that the process was flawed and that this was there are many problems with the with the process. But the courts slightly agreed with us, but they said what the state did and what's CAG is doing stands. So we did fight, Sacramento on it and we did lose that fight. We do have a neighboring city that is fighting, Sacramento. They did that the last housing cycle and lost. They continue continue to fight Sacramento. And if they were winning any of these cases and when it goes to court, then we would follow suit. But they're not winning any cases currently.

They they keep losing them and so we don't have a model that we can fight Sacramento or get together with. There's there's no model to fight them on this yet. The comments came up about this already being a done deal. That came up a few times. That isn't the case. The this is an entitlement is being presented before the Planning Commission. We did have a study session on this a few weeks ago. And so it was presented to the community that's online as well. There is a project, another project that we had a study session on that will be going to Planning Commission at their next meeting. That was the Euclid and Heil project.

We had a study session on that. It has been out in the community for many, many for a long time, for at least a year. They've had just like this project, they had public outreach and we've been transparent regarding that as well. Then it comes to infrastructure and what has been looked at. So through this process, all the utility school districts, everybody has an opportunity to look at this project.

So electricity, water, all the providing agencies, sanitation, they've all looked at this. They are comfortable in providing resources and infrastructure to this and utility services to this project. You know, there's 657 units as part of this project. That doesn't mean that that many people filling those apartments are coming from outside the region or outside California. It's what is happening now and what the Rina process did was look at natural growth, is very, very small.

Most of the 49, 84,000 plus almost 5,000 units are because of existing over concentration, overcrowding in units. And so what you have really going on is, as one person mentioned, people kids growing up, over crowding conditions moving into these units. And so you're not bringing people more people in. These people are already using water and electricity. The new units are actually and this is not me advocating for a project, but these units are normally more water efficient.

So I have a house built in the 1970s. These houses are going be much more water efficient and efficient with electricity and gas than say my house built fifty years ago is. And so they tend to be or excuse me, less consuming of utilities. Fire, police, they've they've looked at these projects. They ensure that it is designed to their standards so that they can provide service that their fire trucks, police can get in and out, that they have the resources to to serve the projects as well.

Getting out of the building, those types of things, evacuations, all of those things have been addressed through these processes. Each department has had extensive review of these of this project and so those have been looked at. So you can be assured that each department is is reviewing these applications. So I'm I'm keeping traffic and and those things to the end, I'm gonna let our traffic engineers address those issues. The issues of rents came up.

So the rents will be market rate except for those 15% that are affordable. Affordable is lower income according to the calculations at the moment. So this year, that's about a if it's a family of four, that's about a $130,000 a year that they're making. So it's kind of workforce housing at this time. It's not very low or extremely low. It's people making over a $100,000 probably depending on the family size, probably between a 100 and a 130, 140 as incomes go up. So by the time, say this is built, that's probably going to go up by another $1,015,000 dollars. We don't anticipate any Section eight. Section eight has to be accepted by the landlord. Don't believe Section eight will be necessarily brought in here.

You're just looking at 15% of units that will be dedicated for affordable housing for at least a fifty five year period. It doesn't need Section eight to make it affordable. Number of people per unit. So in a single family home, as many of or all of you probably live in, the city can't control the number of people living in a house. You can have ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty people living in a single family home.

Sometimes you've probably seen that. The courts have told us we can't control those types of things unless it's a boarding house or some other type of situation. So in a single family home, we can't control the number of people. In an apartment building, multi family project, which you normally have is a lease agreement that gives the landlord some control of the number of units that the city itself does not have. And so there is a little bit of difference in that. I'm going let the have time for the project and noise. Noise has been looked at. The timing of the project and the phasing, I'll let the applicant discuss. Noise, that's been looked at and addressed through the SQL document, through the EIR and the addendum. Generally, the most noise that will occur is through that construction process.

In this case, don't have too many homes really in the general vicinity. It's mostly retail. And then you have a street and then you have some residential across to the major arterial and different city. So most the noise is usually from construction on these projects. Retail.

So there was much more retail required as part of this project from the mixed use zoning. It got reduced to 5,000 square feet which is a minor amount because of the concerns that you've raised with other mixed use projects. Mixed use projects have had varying degrees of success, mostly not successful and we can point to a lot of examples of not successful retail. So as a economic development professional as well, you know, we work with the applicant. We wanted more retail obviously for the sales tax revenue that comes from it, but this isn't a good retail site necessarily for say twenty, thirty, 40,000 square feet of retail.

That's why the city accepted a much lower 5,000. With the Dock Park, I was hoping you could have some sort of retail use maybe that plays with the Dock Park and has some types of uses that may play against that. You have a lot of residents living there, so they could use that retail as well. 5,000 square feet isn't really a lot of retail space. The retail vacancy rate in the city is 1.8% right now.

That's nearly I mean, it's 98.2% of your retail space is is occupied. There are some sites that are challenges and we're working on those, but you barely have any vacant retail sites. And so it is a strong retail market and we think we're hopeful that that can be absorbed. So we don't think, you know, we looked at other examples and you know, I think somebody pointed to the HB and Beach and Ellis and so we're cognizant of that. We know the, you know, some of the challenges with mixed use and so we've looked at that.

Variances. So there's no technical variances for this. What again is allowed is waivers and concessions because to provide affordable housing. So you have land costs, you have construction costs, you have insurance, you have all those things that a developer has to pay. And so in this case, the market rate units would be subsidizing the affordable units.

What the applicant many times need is and what state code requires us that we do is allow some waivers and concessions to allow that affordability to happen so that development standards don't there's not a government constraint to the provision of that affordable housing by some standard that we have. And so that's why it allows for those waivers and concessions. Will this project change over time? If it significantly changes, if the there's changes, significant changes to number of units or if there's any really any changes to number of units or major changes, then that would come before the Planning Commission. This is this should be what you see.

There might be minor tweaks when you get to a building plan check and again to the building codes. Some of the floor plans may change a little bit or get altered because of some, you know, mechanical equipment or something they have to provide. But otherwise, it should be pretty close to what you see out there if it is approved. And I think that covers most of it. I I I know we'll have a lot of questions about traffic and circulation, so I'll save those for the for the experts on that. Thank you, sir.

Did you want to invite someone come

up? Yep. I believe we have our engineering team if you want to come up. So, Tim, you heard about the, I believe, LOS, the level of service for the different existing and and future and some of the issues with the light, if you can kinda go over those, I think.

Yeah. For sure. And and and the applicant's traffic engineer might also speak to the as they were the engineer of record, but we worked with the applicant's traffic engineer to ensure that the existing traffic counts and their analysis looked at this conservatively so that the current year and the out years and their impacts were addressed. So we were we were satisfied that their methodology was was appropriate. And they also did on-site circulation as well analysis.

Did we talk about water and sewer? Do we I I believe I saw that in the report, but could you could somebody talk about what was looked at in terms of the availability of water at the site electricity sewer service?

Are is the applicant's engineer here to speak to that?

So those were addressed in So those were addressed in the sequel document. They didn't come in the EIR, but if you wanna go into specifics about the sand district, sanitation district reviewed it for service and then also looked at the water. But I don't if the applicant has any technical expertise.

I'm not necessarily I just wanna they were studied and there was adequate?

They were addressed.

Yes, sir.

Yeah. Were there other well, we have staff up here. Do you have other questions?

I got one question of Timo. So used to be Boomer is over there and we don't require a shower along the freeway. Right now, it's become a resident area. The Caltrain know we have to put the shower in there. They have to put shower in there.

I I don't maybe the applicant did you did your traffic engineer? Is he here to speak to those elements?

So to we did do a sound study on the on the project. And one of the reasons that we designed the project like we did was to shield the residences from the 405 using the parking garage. That was that was really the the initial design idea there. So if you look at the plans, you have the parking

Can come up to the microphone? I think we're gonna hold on. Thanks. So

if you look at the design, you have the the the building is oriented to put all of the residences away from the 405 as our our starting point. And even with the South Building, we oriented the garage toward the 405. So again, we could orient the residences away from that to minimize sound.

But have have that been coordinate with Caltrans? They have they been aware about that or have they raised any question or anything?

We started coordinating with Caltrans in April 2024. We showed them the site plan. We're as we said earlier, we started asking them about intersections. So they've seen this for well over a year now, and they've never commented on the sound from the 04/2005.

Okay. Thanks. And I

oh, I had a follow-up question to that. So in addition to the study that shows the impact of noise by kind of buffering the residences from the impact of the 405 by putting the parking garage alongside the freeway. Does that study also include things like, you know, air quality, road dust, you know, you can assume that the parking garage is going to block all of those things from affecting the residents as well. But is that also include included with that noise study?

The majority of the environmental types of studies have been included in the addendum to the or talk about air quality, that sort of thing.

Can you talk about if the project were to be approved, what the schedule would be for construction?

Sure. So, I mean, that's not set in stone. Just to give everyone an idea of the path moving forward. So should the project be approved today, the next step would be to to launch into design drawings. And so that's a a fairly detailed and long process.

That could be six to twelve months just putting together the drawings required to to meet the city standards for the level of detail. And then once we submit those, we anticipate that could take, you know, ten to fourteen months just in going through plan check to meet the city standards and make sure we've furthered furthered the sorry. Furthered the drawings to a state where you would consider them ready for construction and to a level of detail that addresses all of the city's concerns. And so then once you get through that process, you'd be issued a building permit. And then once you have the building permit, you would start construction.

And we think that each of these buildings would take between two and three years to complete. And the way we anticipate the construction going is you would start one and then you would start the other while the first one is going so you don't have to have two separate crews on-site. So imagine you could have the concrete crew on one, shift to the other one, and then kind of roll it through. So we minimize the number of actual construction workers on the site and also reduce the amount of traffic that you would have if you had two completely separate crews, constructing at the same time.

Okay. So you're saying roughly, you think it would be two years to break ground from

it could easily be two years to break ground. It's it's hard to say for sure. There's a lot that goes into that but that's that's a realistic assumption.

And then you're saying your your plan would be to stagger the construction between the two towers over what's the total time frame from break ground to people are moving in the second tower?

Yeah. I mean, you're it depends on how you stagger it. Let's say you stagger it for about a year between breaking ground between the two. You would probably be in the thirty five to forty five month range from top to bottom for both buildings.

Okay. So you're talking about 2027 potentially construction start and then sometime 2030, 2031 for for it to be actually being occupied.

Yes. Yeah. It's a long process. There's a lot that goes into it, as you all know.

Thank you. Alright. Do we before we go to discussion, do we have any other questions for for staff or the applicant or anybody. We're not gonna be taking any more comments from the public. The time for public comment has ended. This is only now gonna be a discussion amongst us up here. Okay. General discussion. Vice chair Lopez.

Well, I was gonna answer a lot of questions, but director Databoy took care of all of them pretty much. But there was a few other things that I kind of just want to touch on. Yes, we have a beautiful community. We do. It is wonderful. I've lived here fifty three years. I know some of you who've lived here longer than me. Yeah, I get it. So the general plan started back in 2018. So this is not really a surprise.

When the state came down and made the mandate to make more housing, we had to put a commission together. And that was done in 2018. And again, we're transparent. We had people from the community that were on that PAC committee. So there are really no surprises. I know some of you are coming up and saying, where did this all happen? How did it happen? It's been going on for quite a while. This plan was improved in 2023 with with, I think, seven opportunity sites, and Boomers was one of them. And even the gentleman mentioned the one over off Ohio and Warner, that was another site.

And we are transparent about that. All these sites, everybody knows where they're at. It's not like we're hiding them. It's there. So Boomers, it's that's the right site for the size building that's going there. If you take away let's say you take away 400 units. Where are you gonna put those 400 units now? In my backyard? There's an ADU. There's an ADU on the other side of the wall in my backyard.

So I'm telling you, then our number of 4,800 has now gone down that we're supposed to reach. So the state is mandating all of this. The state controls all of this. It's not us. A woman mentioned about the ADUs and the junior suites in the in the garage. That wasn't us. We didn't come up with that. That was the state. You know, we try to regulate it as much as we can. I'm sure you've all done your homework and you know that you can build an ADU in your front yard up to the sidewalk. Right?

No.

Oh, well, that's what I'm saying. You guys need to you need to research that. It's the state. We don't come up with these plans, but we come up we try to regulate as much as possible to keep that from happening. We're trying our best. We're doing what we can to have control. So again, every we don't just decide, hey, we're just gonna build a building right here. There's a lot of research that goes into it. There's a lot of planning. It goes through the police department. It goes through the fire department. They all have to they have to approve it. Plans just don't go automatically get approved. It is a long process. It is.

You know, they take in consideration the size of the fire trucks. How are they gonna get in? The sprinkler systems, all that stuff. The infrastructure, it's been looked at. They don't just decide, hey, we're just gonna go ahead and hook into this line and we're gonna go. There is a study that's been done. So again, we try our best. These seven sites that we've come up with, they're the best sites that we think that are gonna keep the traffic out. But all the cities around us are doing the same thing. It's not just us, it's the entire state of California.

Santa Ana's doing it, has to do it. Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, you know, you drive over towards Good Shepherd, you got those those new condos that were built there. Huntington Beach put those there because they know they have to. It just, you know, we're doing the best we can. But the traffic situation, yeah, the traffic's horrible. I agree 100%. I have to drive to that intersection every day. I have to go to work. You know, someone mentioned, do we all live here? Yes. We all live here. We live in this city. Everything you get impacted with, we get impacted with. Dutch Brothers, you and I have talked. You live in my neighborhood.

We talked about McDonald's. We talked about Dutch Brothers. You know, it's gotta happen. And it's unfortunate. Yeah. I love my bedroom community, but, you know, it's progress. It's the state. We do what we can. That's all I gotta say.

Who else? Commissioner Hubernier.

So one of the comments that stood out to me the most was somebody came up and said that this is good planning in a difficult situation. And I think that really drives home exactly how difficult it is to be up here. Where on the one hand, I grew up here in Fountain Valley. I graduated from Fountain Valley High School. In fact, the young lady who came and spoke was my classmate at Cox Elementary.

And so I understand how fantastic this community is and how devoted everyone is to this community because look, you're still here. It's 09:00 at night. You've been sitting through, you know, coming up on several hours of public comment and discussion and testimony. And you're here because you care. And we're here because we care.

And we're faced with a very difficult decision because on one hand, we have the mandates from the state. We have decisions that have been made. And these decisions were made before some of us were planning commissioners. And we made the decision to apply for the planning commission anyway. And so we knew this wasn't going to be easy.

But at the same time, we believe so strongly in this community that we want to make an impact. And we want to find a balance that's going to allow our community to grow and allow us to control as much as we can how our community grows and develops. Because bottom line is the development is inevitable. This isn't just happening in a vacuum. This is a process that's been going on for years and it's going to keep happening.

And if we try to fight it, and we have, we lost. And if we try to fight it again, who pays for it? We do, the taxpayer. And is that a good way to spend our taxpayer dollars trying to fight something where instead we could turn it around and say, balance? How can we grow?

How can we continue to embrace what makes this community so wonderful? How can we allow new families to come in? You know, when I bought my condo last year, I was looking for two years and I got lucky. And where I live, the parking is awful. I can't have people over at my house because there's nowhere to park.

So I get it. I mean, you know, because these are real lived in concerns. And at the same time, if we try to dig in our heels and say, well, we want to oppose these changes because there's all of these things that I don't like. Well, the perfect project doesn't exist. And what we have to try to do is find that balance between what's being mandated, things we cannot control, and look at what we can.

And with a site like this, there's really nowhere else in the city a project like this can be built because it's big. You know, it's a huge project. And if we were to try to build this somewhere else, if we were to try to put this somewhere where, hey, you know, there's four different ways on arterial streets we can get into this project. This room would probably be, you know, filled with even more angry people. So, you know, I have to give a shout out to city staff because they're the ones that are really doing all the heavy lifting to make sure that everything is getting checked and double checked in terms of can our infrastructure handle this?

Can our public safety and our public works handle this? You know, how is this going to impact our school system? What kind of revenue is this gonna bring into the city? You know, I've I've been making a tally of all of these different concerns and so much of that work, that invisible work is being done by city staff. And I think that, you know, there's not enough credit given to them.

They work very, very hard because a project like this isn't just coming from nowhere. There's a lot of people that are involved to make sure that it's going to be built the right way. And so, you know, in closing, I wanna say again, you know, thank you to everyone that's still here. Thank you for coming in and speaking and making your voices heard. And we're going to take all of your comments into consideration and figure out what is the best way that we can move forward together.

Commissioner Ville? All right. I gave my statement. So this is very hard decision for me since the McDonald's project last Valentine's twenty twenty four. This one is another time I see a crowded filling our hole.

That's been a lot of our residents really care about CD. I really thankful that all of Perth received a letter about the event today. I received one, two. This might make more transparent. The last time we're talking about the sober home living, that's some only a few people received a few people didn't receive it.

So go back to the project. The reason I raised a lot of question about the technical, the engineering in this area about traffic because I want when this project even we move forward or move backward, the applicant and our city staff really work to work together to get all of the issue resolved by the public agency. I really care about our city to make sure that nothing will be impacted and happen if the incident because about we miss something, we didn't wait in some area of the design that can trigger some impact. So the more question I ask is not about I want to attack or I want want to to downsize any effort of the applicant or about CDI. I know they're working really hard.

I read almost I think I can tell, I read about 80% of 10 packet upload online. It's more than a thousand something page. So like Viger Lopez say before, this one is this project, it has been notified to public. I think since last year. I've been going to Farm Valley Recreation Center for their public meeting.

I meet with applicant in our city hall together with our deputy manager to discuss about the impact and how they can improve. So this is not a new project that nobody know. And I think this this project is in line with the city vision for move forward on general plan. And I really want to assure everybody that our planning commissioner in here really care about the pro of our city. We have been expressed so many times that if this one is out of our control, we cannot handle any housing and then Sacramento will go down and plan the design for us.

What we do is we try to raise a lot of common a lot of our concern, so we will mitigate the problem. So that's all I want to say. And thanks a lot for everybody coming. Thanks, applicant. Thank you, city staff to work together. Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, do you mind if I throw a few comments in?

Did you fill out a blue card?

I signed the list.

Did you see that smile? How can you how can you deny that?

Yeah. Was there

something you wanted to talk about?

Well, a couple of things to note. First, very informally, the comments on sue Sacramento, fight Sacramento. Again, this is a very smart commission. It's been unsuccessful. The ones who've come close enough, you you mentioned Huntington Beach and that, they are charter cities. I know this city has started thinking about charter. A charter city is a home rule city. You write your own constitution. You are not a charter city, so you are a 100% beholden to state law. That is why the state has such a stranglehold on everything that's done.

So why is some cities into litigation more and some not? Are they charter cities? Are they general law cities? Big distinction. Secondly, there's some folks commented, oh, if you approve this, liability. You will have zero liability. State law is very clear. Your job is to look at land use approvals. You are immune from a grant and there's an accident or what have you. Your risk is beyond zero.

It's negative zero. One thing too that you have to understand your position in what you're doing. And it's, again, correctly noted. This started 2023. Your city council, this planning commission, GPAC, got together and looked and said, where are sites that are suitable to handle little development and big development.

Well, this is one of the big development sites as is the one coming up next meeting, Heil. This and the zoning were put into place then. The place to say no, no how, no way was two years ago. You are now implementing. You you have to pay attention to what is before you.

You are approving a precise plan. That is a very specific land use entitlement under your municipal code. You have to make findings that are in that resolution. All of the studies, all of the sewer, firemen, what have you, the findings in those resolutions are the confirmation that your staff has dutifully looked at it. You don't take what a developer give you and just say, close enough.

They peer review it. They vet it. So it isn't just Mikey eat this cereal. This is tested information. This staff got to a point of belief that they could bring to you a project with a resolution that makes all the positive findings. You're not pick and whim. You're not saying, what's my gut tell me? What's the man behind the green curtain? You are doing a very methodical paper trail, if you will, on each of those findings to say, we can make the findings that support an approval. If you couldn't, you'd be denying it.

The fact that your staff on all levels, traffic to whatever, feels comfortable putting their reputation on the line to you all saying this is suitable for approval carries

a

lot of weight. But, again, you are looking at it not in the abstract, very procedurally. Housing element general plan, rezoning, now your precise plan review, that resolution that lays out all the findings, that's where you are. This isn't whim. This isn't wasn't my gut tell me. Property owners have rights too as much as that sometimes is is a tough thing. They're coming and saying, we've looked at your code. We've looked at your general plan. We think our project fits it. We are maybe there's other Cinderella slippers, but our project as presented fits it.

Your staff has said, yep, looks like it. Yeah. There could be a million other ways to do it, but what they are presenting based on their recommendation is that it works. So this is much a a technical legal science finding as it is social attitude, do the neighbors like it, what have you. We have to have substance to our decision making. Whim will get us a loss. Demonstrable science, we're heroes, sort of maybe. That's it.

Commissioner Brothers.

Thank you. Just a few comments. I want to thank everybody for coming or sending correspondence on this subject tonight. One thing, if the developer used the assessor's role to mail letters and there's an error in the name, which is one of our commissioners here, you need to talk to the assessor's office. You may not have the title to your house that you think you do.

So thank you all for coming. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I plead with everyone to be courteous to everyone, whether you agree with their opinion or not. It's their right to speak. And so thank you all for coming. And stay tuned. This won't the end of development in Fountain Valley, sad to say.

Okay, I'll speak. So first of all, thank you to everyone. It's after 09:00. Appreciate you all staying here, the the few who did for over three hours to see this process unfold and to speak your mind and to give us a lot to think about tonight. I I understand that there's a lot of strong feelings about this.

Like vice chair Lopez pointed out, we all do live in Fountain in Fountain Valley. That's a requirement of being on the planning commission. And also as vice chair Lopez pointed out, there's a number of sites around the city that are slated for development under our housing element. And I wanna talk a little bit about the housing element, but I do wanna point out that in one way or another, basically everyone in the city is going to have one of these kinds of developments of some greater or lesser density, like pretty close to them. It's not that big of a town.

So everyone is impacted, and that's a real thing. So I think we glossed over a little bit. We got some really good history about the the rules that are in place and the arena numbers. We have to build 4,800 new housing units in the city over the next few years. But just backing up of what goes why why are we cooperating?

What's going on? So the the state sets these targets, and the way it works is you have to adopt a housing element to your general plan. And the housing element says where you've identified opportunities for these 4,800 units to go. And some of this has been touched on different points, but I just wanna try to bring it all together. So one approach that many cities around the state have done is to just not adopt a compliant housing element or to adopt a housing element that wasn't compliant.

So that's the that's the fight the state version of it. Fountain Valley is actually one of the relatively few that submitted its housing element on time, which was a very wise choice of the city council to go through that process and and adopt that housing element before the deadline back in 2023. And the reason for that is that there's really serious teeth now into what happens if you don't adopt a housing element. If you don't adopt a housing element, there's something called the builder's remedy. And the builder's remedy means that as long as you include a certain amount of affordable housing in a prospective project, you can build whatever you want.

And the community has no say whatsoever about any of the details, any of those elements, only ministerial approvals allowed. So that was what the city wisely avoided and it's real. The day that the city of Santa Monica lapsed their deadline for submitting a compliant housing element, they got over a dozen builders remedy projects. So this is happening up and down the state for for cities that are playing with fire. And again, the city has wisely avoided that. So where does that leave us? Well, now as part of that compliant plan, we had to identify these different sites. And it's difficult. Somebody pointed out the city's pretty well built out. It's difficult to find sites to do it.

And as was also pointed out, we tried to argue the numbers and say, that's too many. We're already built out. How are we supposed to build 4,800 homes? They say, I don't care and we'll let somebody else figure it out for you if you don't do it yourself. So they identified sites. I think it's a smart plan given the very limited options that we have to deal with. And somebody it's it's on the city's website. You should check it out. But there's a number of these sites. It's been mentioned a couple of times that the project at Euclid and Ohio will be coming in two weeks and that's another one.

And that's a lot closer to to existing single family residents too. So it gets it gets harder, not easier. But when we get to this point in the process, we do we do have we do get to consider the project and we look at it and we look at the the impacts of it. But we, to some extent, have limited discretion because this is within the framework that was adopted in the housing element and there was this programmatic ER for the city that looked at the impacts of what the theoretical version of this project is and now we have the actual version of the project and then basically fits within that to the extent that it's gonna be very difficult for us to say no. So one thing I like to talk about is what's our job here as us on on the planning commission and you know our our council talked about this a little bit but to some extent we're judges.

We don't make the rules. We have to look at each project that comes before us and see does it fit within the rules. And sometimes that means making decisions that that we don't necessarily like. It would be so much easier and in a different way gratifying to channel your righteous anger tonight and to turn down the project and like we get cheers and like you folks would be happy. But the things that's gonna happen is that the developers are gonna sue the city and I think, I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure based on everything that I know and Fred, I've been advised that we would lose.

And so we would spend a bunch of money and maybe it would happen a little bit later. But at the end of the day, the project's gonna happen because we can't adopt a housing element that's meant to comply with state law and then when it comes time to actually approve the project that fits within the housing element that the council adopted, then deny the project just because we don't wanna actually do the thing. So that's a little bit of context for this. I don't expect that anything anyone up here tonight is going to persuade anyone who is gonna feel the impact of the project that this is a good thing for them. But I will say we all are in this together for better and maybe maybe probably to some extent for the worse.

And we have a we do have a difficult role to play here, but it's a a role that we need to do properly or there's even worse consequences that can await the city if we don't. So on that perhaps sobering note, I will entertain a motion.

Actually, can I make one comment really quick?

Yes, please.

Just to piggyback on everything that you guys said. Thank you to city staff for all the time and work you've put into your presentation and to the developer, the Holland Group, for listening to the residents and working with the city and them to put your project together. I would encourage the Holland Group and any other developer coming through to continue with your community with the residents to keep them aware or more aware of what's going on. I've been here, born and raised fifty three years, and I recently got involved last summer because I didn't know any of this was happening. So I started doing my research and applied to be on the commission in January and was appointed by the city council.

And on that, I just encourage you to stay diligent and aware, do your research, and also attend the city council meetings because there's a lot more going on in our city that you probably need to be aware of. So it is a nice place to live and I'm glad to be part of it and be proactive more than reactive which is why I applied to this position. And thank you all for coming and sharing your views and opinions.

And if anyone would like to make a motion, I'll entertain that at this time.

I'll make a motion to approve. Both