Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Alright. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for all your patience. It's wonderful to see you guys again. I think I see you guys more often than I see my wife, but it's currently 06:02. We'll go ahead and start tonight's meeting. Let's please take roll.

Commissioner Leidade. Here. Commissioner Calandra. Commissioner Diaz. Present. Commissioner Kreiner.

Here.

Commissioner Schergill.

Present.

Vice Chair Bray? Chair Vang?

Here. Thank you. We'll go ahead and do the pledge of allegiance. Everyone, please stand. Alright.

For everyone's convenience, I'll go ahead and read the procedures for tonight's meeting. This meeting is being conducted in person and electronically. For each matter considered by the commission, there will first be a staff presentation, followed by a presentation for the project applicant. Testimony from the supporters of the project would then be taken followed by testimony from those in opposition. The applicant will have the right to a final rebuttal presentation prior to closing the public hearing.

In accordance with section 13 of article two of the Planning Commission rules and regulations governing length of public debate, all public testimony from those in support and opposition of the project will be limited to three minutes per person. The three lights on the podium next to the microphone will indicate the amount of time remaining for the speaker. The green light will be turned on when the speaker begins. The yellow light will come on with the soft bell ring when one minute is remaining. The speaker should be completing the testimony by the time the red light comes on, but the final bell indicated time has expired.

All in person public testimony must be presented to the commission at the podium. Any testimony that references race, religion, ethnicity, economic status, national origin, or any other classification protected under state or federal law a derogatory manner shall be deemed irrelevant and will not be considered by the commission in making a signed UC terminations. If you challenge these land use matters in court, you may be limited to raising only those issues you or someone else raise an oral or written testimony or before the close of the hearing. We have the agenda. Do we have any changes to the agenda?

Good evening, chair of bank commissioners. Philip Seguess with the planning and development department. Staff has no changes to tonight's agenda.

Awesome. Thank you, sir. Commissioners, do you listen. Do you guys have any comments, questions, any motions to approve the agenda?

Second.

Okay. So we have a motion by commissioner Shogyal, a second by commissioner Diaz. All in favor, aye. Aye. All opposed, say no. Agenda is approved. We'll go ahead and move forward to reports from commissioners. Do we have any? Go ahead, sir.

Yeah. So I would like to request our Fresno community, Beautify Fresno is a great program, great project by Mayor Dyer. So I think Fresno belongs to all of us. So please, wherever it is, let's volunteer, let's keep our parks clean, let's our let's keep

the streets clean, our neighborhoods clean because that does add value to our to our properties. So so please do support Beautify Fresno. And also, would like to add, if anyone is if anyone is having any graffiti problem, anything that has

to do with City of Fresno, please utilize Fresno app or three one one. As a community, we're making City Of Fresno a city of choice. So please utilize all of these, you know, apps, Fresno app, three one one, and Beautify Fresno because Fresno belongs to all of us. Thank you very much.

Awesome. Thank you, sir. Do we have any other comments? I see none. Let's please note too that we have Vice Chair Bray in attendance. We'll move to continue matters. This is continue from January 21. Consideration of rezone application number P2501778.

Oh, I just heard. Good evening, chair and members of the planning commission. I'm Valeria Ramirez with planning and development. And tonight staff brings forth consideration of reason application number P25Dash1778 and development permit application number P25Dash1774. So which was submitted by Galloway and staff would also just like to note that all representatives for the project are present tonight as well.

So here is an aerial image of our project site. It is located on the Southeast Corner of North Cedar Avenue and East Hampton Way. It's approximately 3.96 acres in size and it is a partially developed site with two buildings and a parking lot. The two buildings are currently occupied by a physical therapist office and a law firm. And our proposed project will be developing across three paths.

The proposed project site is designated for office land uses with properties to the North and to the West designated for residential single unit development, and properties to the South and to the East designated for commercial recreation land uses. Development permit application number P25-seventeen74 proposes to construct a senior healthcare facility that will offer community based services and medical services to individuals aged 55 years and older. Development will occur on approximately 1.17 acres of the property and it will serve approximately 100 to 200 patients per day. The patients will not be lodged overnight. And the proposed use adult daycare facilities is a permitted use in the office zone district.

So here is a snippet of the site plan for the proposed development. Aside from construction of the building, development will also consist of parking lot modifications and installation of new landscaping. And here is a rendering of the north and south elevations of the proposed building, and the east and west elevations of the proposed building. And the proposed building is consistent with the development standards of the office Zone District. As previously mentioned, our property is zoned office with some conditions of zoning that were put into place by previously approved rezone application number R648, which prohibits adult daycare facilities among other uses, and the related parcel map number 2000Six-forty3 subdivided our subject property into 10 lots.

And the related site plan review application number SDash06Dash254 or 264, my apologies, approved the development of nine single story office buildings. And rezone application number P25Dash01778 proposes to remove one of the three conditions of zoning on the overall property. And here you could see the rezone boundary in comparison to the project boundary. So the first condition of zoning specifies certain uses as provided that are currently prohibited on the subject property, which includes adult daycare facilities. The second condition of zoning requires that the applicant record an evocation easement recognizing the Fresno Yosemite International Airport.

And the third condition of zoning limits future office buildings to single story construction. And to conclude, staff recommends to the city council adoption of the environmental assessment and approval to of the rezone application and the development permit application. And with that, I open the floor to any questions that you may have.

All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Do we have any questions from or comments from the commission? Go ahead, sir.

Has there been any public comments on this project?

Any public comment?

Yes.

Staff did not receive any public comment.

I see. So nothing negative or positive?

Correct.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Any other questions or comments? Thank you. Appreciate it. Do we have the applicant?

There. Kate Hirsch on behalf of the applicant. And we do have a applicant presentation. Perfect. Okay. Alright. Hopefully, can figure this out. I first just wanna say thank you to the planning commissioners for coming back again this week. We were excited to be here last week and with the power outage. Really appreciate the flexibility that you guys have shown for us and for this project.

It's been a years long project for us in the making, and we are at a critical juncture for our timeline. So really, really appreciate you guys coming back tonight to hear our case. And also just want to start off by saying thank you to Valeria and Rob for all the hard work that they've done to date to get us to where we are tonight. So I'm here on behalf of the applicant. I am from Turner Impact Capital.

We are a social impact investment firm that partners with high quality healthcare operators to help them realize their real estate and facilities needs. And we are proposing to build an up to 20,000 square foot building at this location. Today, I am joined by Nicole Butler, who is the executive director of Welby Health, who is the proposed operator at the site at their existing Fresno facility. Joined by current property owners, Guy Stoppage and Adam Wong, Tara Mortensen from Galloway who is managing our entitlements. And if approved, this would be the second location for WellBe Health in Fresno that we are building for them.

So really excited about the opportunity here and hopeful that I can answer any questions that you guys might have. I wanted to just give you a little bit of the history on the project. So as I mentioned, it's been years long. We identified this site in 2022 and had to get through some state regulations and were able to finally get the property under contract in 2024. Quickly thereafter, we realized that even though the underlying land use is office, which allows for adult daycare use, there were conditions and zonings recorded on this property that prohibited it.

So that's why we're here tonight to have that first step in having that removed so that we can operate this healthcare facility at this location. A little bit about the project and the site. Right now we're showing the site plan. Valeria showed you a more technical plan earlier, but we are proposing to reconfigure the site in order to be able to place our building, our single story building at the corner of Hampton And Cedar. And we are maintaining 167 parking stalls on the site for in support of not only our project but the surrounding buildings that are there and for future development.

I do want to highlight that we are also installing as part of our project 26 EV charging stations. Nicole is going to get a little bit more detailed about the PACE program in case you're not familiar about it, with it, but just high level. A PACE program is a center that offers wraparound whole person services to the elderly and frail seniors in the community who would otherwise qualify for nursing home care. And this is a program that allows them to stay at home living and thriving in their homes and in their communities. A little bit about the building program.

It's designed to have a large day room where participants can congregate and have daily activities including meals, and that's what's highlighted in the pink and reddish color up there. We also, as part of the program, it includes a fully functioning clinic that's for the participants of the PACE program only. That includes eight exam rooms and one dental room. That's in the green. In the light blue is an exercise and rehab space for physical therapy, occupational therapy, and exercise.

And in the purple is what we call the spa area. It includes bathrooms, a salon room with a salon chair chair and sink, shower areas, and laundry facilities. The remainder of the building in the light teal and the yellow is back office and administration space. There it takes a lot of personnel to operate a program like this, so it includes administrative area, break areas, private offices, and a transportation office. These are colored elevations of what the building would look like if approved to be built.

And also wanted to show a rendering of what the building entrance would look like. A lot of times renderings either don't do it justice or look prettier than what it looks like in real life. So I also wanted to share a picture of a WellBe Health that we recently completed with WellBe in San Bernardino that opened its facility about seven months ago. So it's not exactly the same as what this building would look like in Fresno just because of site configuration and constraints, but this is the type and the quality building that we would build and wanted to also include some interior pictures. I also wanted to touch on some of the neighborhood outreach that we've done to date on this project.

So in anticipation of this public process, we reached out to, through a flyer and community mailer to residents and property owners within a thousand feet of our property back in September to give them notice that we were proposing this project and including some information about what the project is and then also what a PACE program is. And then we also held a community meeting in October. And then just to wrap up my portion, I want to talk about our timeline. So our goal is to complete this facility's construction in March 2027, which is about a year from now. And if we're able to do that, then WellBe would open its doors to members of the community by the 2027, so fall twenty twenty seven.

Our hope is today that you guys will approve our project so we can move on to the next step, which is to go to city council. And so that we can maintain our timeline to get our approvals and then our building permits so that we can begin construction at the March. So I will invite Nicole to come up and talk a little bit about the WellBe Health programs. And we are here for any questions that you guys might have. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Nicole Butler. I'm the Executive Director of WellBe here in Fresno. And I've been with the organization for over five years. I opened and launched the first building here in Fresno which was Building 4 for WellBe. Today we have 11 buildings throughout the state of California serving over 2,500 senior participants with wraparound care.

PACE is really designed to keep people out of the hospital and keep people out of skilled nursing facilities, keeping thriving in the community by providing the wraparound care. Primary care services is kind of the hub of everything we do. Our primary care doctors drive nine different IDT members to provide that care throughout their rest of their lives that they're with us. The nine IDT members in addition to the primary care is home care, transportation, physical therapy, occupational therapy, day center, and then a personal care assistant that would work with them on the day center floor. As well as one of our facilitators as we call them.

Just really trying to drive care. So any care is all coordinated through that IDT team. And that includes specialty. So if one of our, we call them participants, needs to go to a specialist we would coordinate that care, provide transportation to them, coordinate the medical records and get those back to the IDT team to effectuate the care that they would need. PACE is very unique.

It's been around since the fifties, but it's like the best hidden secret. We don't classify our care in thousands like you would get from a big HMO or UnitedHealth program. We kind of qualify them in the hundreds because it's very high touch care that we provide. So in order to be successful with that, it's very small. When I say it that we have a thousand participants in Fresno, that's a ginormous PACE program.

Most PACE programs run anywhere from six to 800. So it just tells you that the need that we have here in Fresno County is just exorbitant. A lot of seniors, a lot of care. This PACE program that we built here in Fresno and that we operate today is the fastest PACE the fastest growing PACE organization in the state of California, most likely in the country. So just a very big need here. And so this second building could not come fast enough for us. We just want to continue the care and we will have to cap the care that we provide most likely this year until the new buildings are open. Any questions that you might have about PACE or about WellBe?

Questions?

I do.

Go ahead. Can you

describe if you know what is the difference between PACE and hospice?

So the difference with PACE is you're at the cuff of really needing the extra help. Like you potentially could need skilled nursing facility, but you're not quite at the end of life. So end of life care would be the hospice piece of it where you have an outcome of the rest of your life anywhere from six months to two years. People could join PACE and stay with us for six, seven, eight years and we grow with them. They age with us and we continue to provide the care.

So somebody that's coming in at the, you know, say at the 60, our average age is 72. So somebody coming in their late sixties, early seventies may not need as much care as they would need in their eighties. So they grow into that care. And as they grow old with us, it's like we like to say, is we beef up the care. A good example is that is home care.

So right now somebody in their early to mid sixties may not need help in their home but as they start aging or if they have something that happens to them health wise, we would send a home care aide in there to help them with meals, bathing, washing clothes, light housekeeping, things like that. Those things that they need in order to be able to stay in their community and stay in their homes as long as possible. But we do provide hospice care as well. If you get to that point in your life, we do not disenroll anybody from our program. They would have to want to leave our program. So we try and keep them as long as possible.

You. Commissioner Shrigo, do you want to ask your question in regards to go ahead.

So my question is we have a lot of seniors. They live with their children. They may not speak English. They may speak Punjabi. They may speak Maul. They may speak Spanish. I mean, those are the three three of our top, you know, languages after English. Yeah. Do you have multilingual nurses or doctors or people who could easily communicate with them?

We do. We try and build we call our our IDT teams our we call them pods. In each of our pods, we try and diversify the language in those pods in order to help the participants that are that are part of them. So we have for instance, we have a Spanish speaking pod that the entire team, well, I shouldn't say the entire team, the clinical team all speak Spanish. So their core clinical team would be their PCP, their case manager, which is an RN and their social worker.

All three of them would speak Spanish. Some of their other team members may not speak, or care team may not speak Spanish but we have interpreting services that help with that service. We also have a pod that is not full Hmong population but it's probably 75% Hmong population combined. And then Punjabi is another area that we only only about 3% of our population is Punjabi, but that's definitely an area. We have three Punjabi speaking providers today.

The reason I'm asking because a lot of, like probably a lot of our communities do not know about this program. Because I was actually doing some research on your website. I mean it's covered by Medicare or

Yeah. So how it's worked, it's a three way contract between Department of Health Services, so Medi Cal for the state and then with CMS through through federal. So it's we call it a three way contract. That's the contract we need before we can open. Our funding primarily comes from the state, but but CMS also does fund it.

PACE is driven by CMS but in conjunction with DHCS. It's a very interesting model how it was built. CMS provides the regs on how we operate on a daily basis and DHCS kind of makes sure that we're staying in line with those regs. But somebody could join the program with just Medi Cal and somebody could join the program with Medi Cal and Medicare. Medicare only they would have to supplement the cost of the Medi Cal piece of it, which is costly. So we don't see a lot of that. It's less than 1% of our population.

I see. And then so I heard this company also provides at home care. So for example, let's say there are so here's just an example. There's two elderly probably in their seventies, early seventies, husband and wife. You know, they wanna live, like and, like, they just wanna stay at their own house. So you're like you'll be able to send someone there to to help them. Mhmm. Yeah. Like, cleaning. Like, what what what do you mean by cleaning? Like

So a typical day in a in a PACE participant and that is living in their home, husband and wife per se, they would maybe come to the day center a couple days a week. They'd socialize. They'd come in, have breakfast, maybe see some of their IDT members participate in activities, go home. The days that they don't come in, we would offset that care with we call it a home care aide that would go in, help them with their laundry, help them with light light housekeeping, making sure that their meals are prepped. If they have the ability to do meals on their own they would help prep.

They would also, if for some reason they couldn't shower on their own, they would help them with showering, bathing. Our OT, our rehab team would make sure that their home is safe for them. So they would go in and do home visits, making sure that if they were entering a shower, that they had grab bars, could get in and out, making sure that the home is set up in a safe manner. I don't know about you, but my mom's house is a little cluttered. So we try and keep try and educate the participant for high fall risk or things like that, making sure that they that their home is safe for them to live in.

So I'll give you another good example of something we do. We had a participant a couple weeks ago where her stove went out. And as so that came back to our IDT team. And as the care team, she could no longer derive nutrition because her stove was not working. So it was a simple fix for us. Let's get her stove fixed. If we can't fix it, we'll buy her a new one. That's the uniqueness about PACE. It's like our goal is to remove barriers for somebody to stay in their home as as much as possible. And since we're the health plan and the provider of the care, we can pretty much we have a lot of flexibility on what we can and cannot do.

So Thank you.

Mhmm.

Any other questions or comments?

Can I do the last one?

I'm

sorry. You're good. I can talk about this all day.

From all the residents around the project area, were there any concerns, any questions, any disapproval with the project?

With the at the new site?

Yes.

It's a beautiful building. I mean, the the the drawings don't do it justice. It's it's gonna be a very beautiful building. I think that especially the senior population, we now give them a place to come to. We can a place to come and socialize and get meals and get their health care that's in their neighborhood. Where our existing building right now, a large population is very is within probably two to three miles of of our current building. We obviously, we have people outside of it, but they they enjoy they enjoy that being in their backyard. So I I think especially in the area that it's going in, I think it's gonna be very convenient for a lot of that population that lives over there.

And then I I think the one thing that I'll add is we did send mailers to residents within a thousand feet of the property, and we didn't receive any concerns. We gave them our emails, our phone numbers. We had a community meeting, and there was no opposition to the project.

Got you. So even at the October meeting, did did you guys get a lot of positive feedback from the community?

The only feedback we got was positive.

K. Yeah. And I think speaking from my culture, the Hmong culture, I think there's not a lot of individuals in that facility just because of the cultural norms. Right? Or I think my parents would probably disown me if I ended up sticking them in there too. Right? So that's just speaking from my experience. But any other questions or comments? Thank you. Appreciate it. Mhmm. So we'll go ahead and go to the public. Do we have any individuals who would like to speak in support? Alright. Any individuals who would like to speak in opposition?

All right, I see none. We'll bring it back to the commission. Do we have any additional questions, additional comments, motions from the commission?

I'd like to make a motion to recommend that we take this to the city council and accept the staff's recommendations. I'll second it.

Okay. So we have a motion made by vice chair Bray. We have a second by commissioner Scherger. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed, say no. Motion's approved. Thank you. Alright. Next, we don't have anything under new matters. Any reports from the secretary?

Good evening, chair. We do not have a new report. I would ask, our next meeting is a week from tonight. So please make sure if you're unavailable I know I've already heard from one commissioner, but if you're unavailable for next week to please let Carrie know as soon as possible so we can ensure that we have a quorum. Aside from that, happy January.

Thank you. Went by pretty quickly. Right. Any unscheduled oral communications? I see none. 06:29. Everyone have a wonderful evening. Meeting's adjourned.