City Council - workshop

If you don't mind, you can go back and then we'll walk you through this one. So I'm in the online team, so I'm going to sit here. Can I go through this one? Yeah.

Thank you. I was going to call you now to get that over with, but I wouldn't have heard it, and I felt you needed to do it, and I felt that was important.

But I know that it's important to know that we want to do that. You know, I'm a girl. I'm a girl. Did you happen to Yeah. Okay. Yeah, after the meeting. Sounds great. All right. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. You bet. How are you doing? Thanks. How are you doing? Not a fever, Sam? What? I'm going to give him a hard time. He got too much salt here. There's a little bit of chlorine going on. Is the light on? One of these days we'll go with them.

One of these days. and outline what you're doing. But we were all very confused.

So I was like, well, I don't want to see it. Maybe we can do it. We ended up just standing over here. I'm so sorry. I mean, we are working with the administration. So yeah, if you want, that's what I'm gonna do. So you should come, and then you can do it directly, and then you can do it ourselves, and then you can come on your own. Yeah. I didn't have that. I didn't realize that you had that part. We have our client channel. We love you, and we also have to save the money for you. where we want to kind of start hanging out. I don't know. I know they've been just taking my game. They've been very careful with that. They're very resistant. But from here on ahead, I think we've got that environment.

All right. We're coming up on time here. I'm going to say I'm going to give us an extra three minutes just because I got to use the restroom. So we'll get going in like three minutes.

It's good to be a kid. And anywhere we can get the freaking heat turned off in here?

That's Jason's. No, I'm not either.

It's comfortable.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, looks like everybody is here. We'll give a second to settle in and we'll get this show started. We can go ahead and start rolling tape if we already haven't. And I'd like to welcome everybody to City Grants Pass workshop on September 14th. looking across the dais it looks like we got everybody but one no Joel so we're just one down that we do have a quorum so we'll just go ahead and get started first on the agenda today's workshop is interviews for historical building and sites Commission candidates and do we have a list of those how come I'm not seeing my list okay so we have two candidates today and so is it Jody sorry Jody come on up Jody I apologize I was trying to read three things at the same time Didn't want to put your name, but so this is an interview for the Historical Building and Sites Commission. Council has your application in hand. And if you want to go ahead and start out by just introducing yourself and giving us a little bit of a little bit of background and why you want to become a committee member. And then we'll if you're not opposed to it, we'll ask a few questions. OK, so we'll let you you have the mic.

Thank you. I actually had learned about the openings. I have actually served two different times with the Josephine County Historical Society and am currently past president of the society. And the history of Grants Pass in Josephine County fascinates me. I didn't grow up in a family that knew a lot about their community. And over the years, I've had an opportunity to participate. And it's just the more I get to know, the more I learn, the better I like it. being kind of watching, actually I've now attended a couple of the historical building and sites committee or commission meetings and it's fascinating what they get to do and actually the support of the staff and I would hope to be able to make a contribution in that way to my community. Perfect. Not sure what else to say.

No, you're fine. And if you don't mind, we'll we'll throw a few questions at you. So I'll bring it to council for some questions. I got Kathleen.

I just had a general question. Is it necessary for this individual or these individuals that run for this committee to have a building downtown? I thought that was kind of one of the requirements.

This is Brad. So there are a few different types of categories for members of HBSC. And yes, one of those categories is a business owner, but there is another category that is just for historical society members. And I believe that's what Jody is applying under. And then we have others that for you know, architectural and historical specialists, and so there's a few different categories, but this particular one is for members of the Historical Society.

Okay, yeah, good, because I did read that on both of the candidates, that they were both part of the Historical Society. So, maybe that's my question, is what have you learned from the Historical Society in regards to our downtown?

There's so much, actually there's several books out and stuff. One of our volunteers that's been with us forever and keeps contributing and contributing, Joan Momsen, she constantly will go out at different times and take pictures of the buildings and stuff and then write them up and put them together in a book. that can be sold at the society. There was here about two years ago a young lady named Taylor who worked with the society and put together a book about downtown and the spirits that inhabit some of the buildings downtown. And the Historical Society did a couple of walking tours last year. um around town to introduce people to the buildings and um maybe somebody that might still be residing there that from years ago and so just the the fact that the city at one time was mostly wood and pretty much burnt down and that's why we have so much brick because because that's so uh something that can withstand and wouldn't cause a fire like it had been. And I, as a history player too, I'm not a history player for, I don't represent somebody who lived in the city, but I represent learning, somebody who was born in Oregon and who lived here until she was like 95 years old and the things that happened to them and to happen to people in that over the years, and just even the founding, but how this Grants Pass grew. So it's just...

So that was one of the more interesting things that you discovered about our downtown buildings?

Yeah, and well, and then watching, too, it's kind of like, it's like the Chuck King Jeweler building. It was a jewelry store. Now it's going to be a restaurant. Over in behind, on G Street, behind the main, where the Grants Master Museum and stuff like that was, that was, there was like a, a whole hotel that was there, and the type of people that it drew. One of my friends, Molly Means, she was telling me that when she first moved here, across Fifth Street on G, upstairs, that they still had what they called the cribs there. And she went in and she saw them.

at that time so just some of the history and how we have grown with it and dealing with it and how it's it's changed our town too further questions i got victoria hi thanks for coming and thanks for applying could you just describe for us what you see as the role of the historic building and sites commission

Well, actually, that's one of the things I've really kind of reaffirmed it from attending the short time of going to the meetings I have because it's like keeping Grants Pass Grants Pass, keeping the buildings in a way that people expect now to see when they come to Grants Pass and go downtown and walk in our historic district, participate in our First Friday Art Night or Art Along the Road. the flavor of Grants Pass needs to stay the way it is but still promote our businesses and help our businesses make a living too. I've participated for several years with the Grants Pass Josephine County Chamber of Commerce and I've seen over the years just one of the things that I really am thrilled with personally is that like with the wine stroll I've gone to a wine stroll every year downtown. And it used to be people would go down and there was, you know, not, they wouldn't draw a big crowd, but they'd come down and they'd drink some wine and walk around town and then they were gone. People are going into our businesses now and buying things, supporting our businesses and keeping us alive.

Thank you. All right, further questions? I got Eric.

Thank you for volunteering and coming by and applying for this. If you're selected as a HBSC commissioner, what are your goals you would like to accomplish during your term?

Well, one of the things that over the years is that we need to attract businesses that keep our downtown alive, that give us the flavor of drawing people in. I'd like to see variety down there. There's been some years that have been less variety than other varieties. But that's the thing. But still, keeping the flavor of Grants Pass in our history alive down there.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any further questions? Joel. Joel, when did you slip in? I called you absent earlier. I apologize.

Well, I'm always absent. Whether it's in mind, soul, or body.

Well, you go ahead with questions, Joel. Thank you. Okay.

uh... thank you for applying and you've already hinted at a little bit but i'd like you to address it squarely uh... what is your desired future condition for our downtown and what is the role of the historic commission in achieving that desired condition well one of the things just i mean keeping the the buildings themselves with the historical facades and stuff that's that's one thing

having a, I like to see, like we have, I've started shopping in the shoe store down there. I've been, actually, I've done that for a while now. But also having the museum right next door. Then having antique shops. At one time, and I had mentioned this kind of at my interview with the commission, is that we had a ton of antique stores, an overwhelming amount. So variety is something that can... get us going and keeping us alive. There's a lot of restaurants down there now. And maybe a little bit more variety would be nicer too. So, sad thing to see. When my family moved up here, My mom had an eye for jewelry. She always, I mean, she could look at a diamond and see if there was a flaw in it. And there was multiple jewelry stores and they're becoming less and less. And we had jewelers that were really, we could go to and depend on. And something variety like that. As well as just keeping the history alive down there, the buildings and not letting them go into such disrepair that they have to be torn down. Thank you.

Further questions? I got Kathleen.

Hi, Ian. So I just wanted to ask you quickly, what do you see as the most important issue of preservation that confronts us in the next few years?

There again, the buildings themselves. Well, for one thing, and keeping that without having it, things changed and stuff, like when I, at the interview time, there was a discussion on a particular sign for a business coming up, and keeping the flavor of Grants Pass so that it doesn't look, we have these big fancy signs all over the place, and it overwhelms the history of Grants Pass. So we need to keep, help keep the buildings like there's places like and so I know it's not downtown but it's like what used to be rogue roasters or even like what you what is now US Bank it's constantly having the windows broken and stuff, and so having, keeping that, keeping the downtown from looking run down and out of repair. U.S. Bank went, I'm in a banker, so I'm not doing anything negative about U.S. Bank, because they stepped up and it was really updated their building and like that kind of, so.

Are you saying like keep the buildings intact?

Correct, yeah, yeah, from, so that they don't just kind of crumble and fall apart, so.

Do you see any barriers to that in the future? Next few years, anything that we have to, that you want to tackle as a project to keep things preserved?

I don't know so much on that. One of the things I just was thinking of too is, and I had mentioned it when I was at the commission, was that getting a better relationship with the historical society and the downtown. Because when we did the walking tours last year for the Ghost Walk and stuff, people were having a blast, but it wasn't a relationship with the businesses themselves. And so we had a couple of our people that were, the owner came out and it's like they didn't even know what was going on. So building that flavor of history may be a little bit more than what we have now. Any further questions?

Indra.

Yes, Jodi, I just wanted to thank you for stepping up and applying for the position. Thank you.

All right, any further questions from councillors? Rob.

How do you see the balance between historic preservation and economic development? Do you see those as potentially being adversarial, or how would you look at that?

No, I don't. I don't see them as adversarial at all. It's just that we need to find a way to also support when we have these businesses that go in and shoe stores, clothing stores. If they can't make money and make a living at that, and it costs them more to run their business than they can draw in and have people come in and purchase from them, we need to find a way to help them downtown and just, I guess in a way, signage is one thing that comes to mind too is that how do we help them understand the right signage to draw people and when we have, the city does an incredible job. They've taken over Art Along the Road and that is huge. I live on J Street and I can hear that. during the week and there's always tons of people. And then the coolest thing of all about it is that on Sunday after it's over with, I can walk down, I walk down there and there's people walking down and they can see the buildings. Of course the buildings are closed then but there's, it's like, and all that, that ghost wall there on the Owl parking lot. Keeping that flavor and that's something different for people to come and to draw people to our area, so. Commerce is not something that... It's something we need. We need to have that, and we need those people to make money. So what we can do and what the city is helping to do, too, is a great way of going.

Thank you. Any further questions? All right, Jody, I'll give you a minute to kind of sum up why you want to be on the commission, and then we'll let you sit.

Okay. Okay, I actually wanna be on the commission to help bring more of the information to the Historical Society Board, because I'm remaining on the Historical Society Board, and I keep bragging to them that I get to come and tell them more about what's going on with that, and also to, I've seen over the years different things happen that maybe we could've used a little bit more common sense on, And just talking things out and keeping them up in the public eye. I just want people to love our city. So that's, I guess, the bottom line. Because it's incredible. I come from a family of non-volunteers. And being able to walk downtown and participate in these different functions.

Very good. Thank you. Thank you for your time and thank you for applying.

All right, next interview we have is this with Andreas Bleck. Come on up. You got a minute or two, introduce yourself and give us a little spiel why you want to be on the commission.

Excuse me a second, Clint, before we get started. I need to recuse myself for a perceived and likely conflict of interest. Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Rob. You have the floor, sir.

All right. Thank you. Good morning, councillors. Name is Andreas Blake, resident of Josephine County for 18 years now. I became interested in the historical society and also the downtown buildings when I moved here. It was something that attracted me, was the uniqueness of the downtown and the historic perspective that it has. It convinced me that this was the place to move to, and not only move to, but also invest. As maybe some of you know, I own multiple properties here in the downtown, both in historic and outside the historic district. And I would like to be a part of those that make the decisions and control the trajectory of how the historical character of Grants Pass continues to go. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. I'll bring it back to council for any questions for Andreas. Joel.

Thank you for applying, Andreas. I appreciate it and respect who you are. What is your relationship to past actions on the historic commission for the downtown area? How do you feel about it? And how does that affect how you serve in the future?

Okay, I think since you're the liaison to the board, I think I know exactly what you're referring to. About a year ago, I had interaction with the Historical Board, Historical Sites and Buildings Commission. I'm sorry, it's a commission. in that I made a minor modification to a facade, not a facade, but to an awning on the front of a building that I own downtown near 6th and G. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit out of breath here, because I was running. So, yeah, so a little bit of interaction there. I went ahead and did what I thought was very minimal and did some upgrades and some maintenance to an awning that needed attention. And it was put to my attention that I needed to get approval from the historical board. And when I was made notice of that, I went ahead and went through the whole procedure, got the permits and got the approval. and in fact got accolades from the board for doing what I was doing, but I think what you're referring to is my oversight of not understanding exactly what the board's authority is and isn't, but it all worked out in the end, and I think once the project is done, it'll be a tremendous improvement and asset to the downtown.

And so if appointed, how does that affect your role and how you act as a team member with the rest of the commission?

Okay, and this is my motivation for applying for this position is when going through the process, the permitting, the approval and all that, I felt that it took a long time. As we know, government grinds at a very, very slow pace. My... motivated me to apply for this position was I wanted to see the process go faster. Because removing an awning and painting, which is a part of the project, is painting to match the awning, is a seasonal type of thing. You can't paint in the summertime, that really doesn't work very well, because it's direct sunlight in the middle of the day, and the wintertime doesn't work either. So I'm trying to work around the seasons, per se, kind of like a farmer does, this project is now taking much much longer than I'd hoped or expected so my my desire is to help facilitate find ways that this board can either approve or not approve but to make the things go faster perfect next we get Rick Thank You Andre what do you think is the most important skill for a commissioner to have in the on the committee I think I think the best skill is something tough I'll tell the story when I came here to grants pass first in 2008 there was something there and I can't put my finger on it, but the historic character of Grants Pass had something unique. That's what I would like to do is to be a part of that having the city, having the downtown have and continue to have that uniqueness about it. And I think the fact that I was able to see it or is what attracted me to here is that skill that I'd like to bring to this board.

Thank you.

All right, next question to Eric.

Thank you for coming in and applying, volunteering your time. Question I have is regarding to what Joel was asking about the awnings. What was the reason that you needed to change the awnings to begin with? I mean, were they,

uh... were you trying to uh... what was the reason of the the reason is uh... specifically i know that the city had a program in the past where they would maintain the trees on sixth street and i i believe that's gone away significantly and the trees are being trimmed and taken care of like they should uh... the reason for doing the repairs to the awning is because the trees were maintained the leaves and the branches were destroying the awning and they became tattered and weathered. So that's what motivated me to do that.

Okay, thank you. One more question that I asked the previous applicant. If you're selected to the HBSC as commissioner, what are your goals that you would like to accomplish during your term?

As I mentioned earlier to Councillor King, my objective is to streamline and expedite things. Time is money, time, it hurts when a project is started and then not finished in a timely manner. When there's revisions, I know the code, the statutes typically say that you have up to so much time for a board or a commission to make a decision. I'd like to turn that around and say, hey, how's the fastest that we can get to a decision for this applicant? Whether it's a yes, so that they can move forward with the fantastic idea they have, or no, so that they can retool it and come right back, maybe a week later, maybe even a few days, as fast as possible, is what I'd like to see. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up, we've got Kathleen.

Hi, Andreas. Thanks for coming. How do you see the relationship between historic preservation and the economic development?

Well, I see they go hand in hand. As I mentioned earlier, that I have multiple buildings here in downtown Grants Pass, also in the historic district. It's important because as a landlord, I see my tenants as partners. When my partners succeed, I succeed. When they don't succeed, I don't succeed. Success is when we have traffic. Traffic brings customers, customers bring money, we succeed. If we have something that's unique, and special like we have here in Grants Pass, and we preserve it and even return those older buildings to look like they did previously, it's a win-win. My partners win, I win, the city wins.

Perfect. Next, Seth.

Yeah, thanks for replying, Andreas. And I do agree with the speeding things up. I like that point. I guess in the next five to 10 years, what do you think is the most important piece of preservation for the historic district specifically? Obviously, culturally things change, but what would you focus on for downtown?

Hmm. Don't know if it's an issue with the historic character of the downtown, but I think parking is something that we need to preserve. Just like the historic character of downtown Grants Pass, if we don't have off-street parking for customers, for visitors, it's gonna hamper the economic vitality of the downtown. So I would say the most important would be to preserve the parking as best we can.

OK. Anybody else have any questions? Joel.

So, Andreas, the commission decided not to recommend your your candidacy for the commission uh... which they don't make that decision that the council does uh... as we move forward anytime there's a change it produces conflict uh... whether it's a change in personnel a change in subject matter a change in an awning whatever it is you know uh... so as you move forward uh... how do you anticipate if appointed to the Commission working with the Commission that Didn't recommend you for being on on their board That's a tough question, but yeah, but I know you've thought about it.

No well Can you rephrase that so you're asking what's the okay?

So just recognizing that the Commission didn't I recommend you be appointed. If you are appointed, which you very well could be, you're going to be working with a commission that didn't recommend you as a team. So as you move forward with that, how do you feel about that, and how is that going to work out from your perspective?

Okay, let me answer that in this manner. At the interview, I was not present when the HBSC made their recommendation. So I don't know what the temperature of the room was. I don't know why they chose to not give me the recommendation. I have a hunch it may have something to do with that they don't know about me and weren't able to ask me. Maybe there's some misunderstandings. I don't know, but if that's the case, I would, if appointed, the first meeting, I would like to ask them what their concerns were and find out what those specifically were and address them and find out if that's something that I can improve on to be a better player along with them. Or maybe it's just a simple misunderstanding and it's just talking it through and it's like, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, we'll come on board and let's go team. Thank you. Perfect.

Rise above and conquer.

Anybody else? All right. I'll give you a minute or two exit.

You know, just let us just sum it up why you want to be on the commission and then we'll let you sit. Thank you.

Great, thanks. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to serve. As many of you know, I've served in different capacities on boards and commissions here in Grants Pass and in Josephine County. I look forward to being a part of this, maybe partly for selfish reasons, but also for fulfillment in that what brought me here to Josephine County or to Grants Pass was the historic character of the downtown. Being a landlord and property owner downtown gives me a unique perspective on what can and can't be done in terms of what's economically viable so that the businesses that we have here that are successful can continue to be successful and maybe attract more businesses because of the unique character that Grants Pass has. I look forward to serving on this board for that reason and also because of my construction background. I've been in development and construction for quite a few years in my life and I think having that perspective being a board member will help as an asset to help make decisions on what's what's what's even viable I know the code sometimes says this but sometimes it's not economically viable or sometimes you want to do this and the code doesn't allow it I think I bring a perspective that's unique to this board and I appreciate your

openness to giving me this opportunity to speak here today and I look forward to serving on the board if appointed thank you very good thank you very much thanks all right so on Wednesday night's agenda we will readdress the historical buildings and sites Commission and as a governing body you will be have the opportunity to appoint a It looks like we have two openings, so there's two open spots that we can discuss in further detail on Wednesday night. Any questions on that so far?

Nope, all right, moving on to next on our agenda for the workshop is Washington Midland Redevelopment Plan.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'm Dana Pierce, Second Amok Development. And today we're gonna be getting a presentation from our consultants, Jason Graff from First 40 Feet and Chris from Leland, Chris Zahas from Leland Consulting. They've been working on our Washington Midland Redevelopment Opportunity Plan. And it does sound like they're already online. We're gonna bring them up here and they'll be able to provide the presentation for you.

Great, thanks, Dana.

Oh, can you hear us okay? Yes, we can hear you. I guess you must be able to.

How about us?

We can hear you, yeah.

Perfect. Oh, good, okay. We'll take it. That's a good start.

Right now, we're gonna see if we can pull up your... Do you want me to share?

And let me see if that works. I think that's gonna be best.

That way, yeah, if you can share the presentation from your screen.

And I'm gonna go full screen on that. So just one second here.

Wonderful, thank you. And just, I guess, a reminder, we've been progressing forward with the redevelopment opportunity plan, and we're going to be looking at the preferred plan at this point. Go ahead, Jason.

Great. Thanks, Dana. I'm Jason Graff. It's great to see you all. Well, I can't see you all, but it's great to be in your presence again today. Just a reminder, I'm a project manager from First 40 Feet out of Portland. We're super excited to be working at Grants Pass. It's been a great nine months or so working in the community, working with city staff, meeting a lot of great folks, and this is really a huge opportunity, I think, in North Grants Pass for the URA to stimulate and invigorate some investment in a great neighborhood along a fairly busy corridor, and so we're excited to be a part of it. Chris Zahas is here. He's also a consultant in Portland. We live, I don't know, maybe less than a half mile apart, so we're kind of neighbors. But we're really excited to be here. This is our opportunity to sort of share with you The preferred redevelopment framework plan and the site, again, is that image on the right. This is all what we're looking to envision the future for. And we're asking for some direction today around what we might see as a really viable redevelopment scenario. Not exactly what it would be, but sort of indicators based on market, based on what we've heard from local developers, based on what we've heard is a desirable type of development from the community as well as your vision, city council, and staff for this site in North Grants Pass. We're going to share with you what we've been learning, some of our technical analysis around potential traffic impacts, about what the market is telling us about development feasibility. And then we're going to make some kind of broad sort of recommendations, steps to follow to invigorate this site, get some of your feedback on priorities around the types of development that you might want to try to leverage Some of that will be market driven. Some of that will be values driven. So we're excited to have that conversation with you. And in the end, we're really looking for some direction from you all. that will then allow us to develop the full plan, which we'll have a month and a half or so to vet through with you all further. So this is kind of the first step into what we're seeing as potentially a great opportunity for redevelopment on the Washington and Midlands site. And so we're going to look at some of those preferred uses. We're going to look at some of the infrastructure improvements that are going to be important to stimulate development. Some of that is Improvements to Bunnell Avenue and Franklin Boulevard, just sort of how you circulate around the redevelopment area. Also below ground, how those utility upgrades can then be put in place so that future development can tap into that. These are all important early moves that are going to get this site kind of primed and ready for redevelopment. There's some regulatory conditions too that we want to explore with you all. And then we want to look at sort of what the market's telling us in terms of what early development might look like, what tends to be feasible in a very difficult market to build new things. So we'll talk a bit about the struggles of that. The urban renewal area is obviously a tool to help stimulate investment And also quality investment. I think this is a good opportunity for us to pause and say, hey, what does great new development in North Grant Pass look like? How does it contribute to the neighborhood? What are the types of commercial uses that can strengthen what it means to live in this area of town? And I think those value pieces are just as important as stimulating the market, because I think we want things that we all love and cherish. And we've heard that from a neighborhood perspective, but also new businesses coming in and investment in the community. I think quality development is something we can all really strive for. And we'll talk a little bit about what that process might be for recruiting a future developer down the road. So hopefully a lot of good food for thought today. This is our schedule. You can see, whoa, we've moved from the colored spectrum here into September. We are kind of landing on moving toward the draft plan, which is, hey, this is the general development scenario. These are the steps that the renewal area might go through to stimulate development on the site. We met with you all at the end of June, early July, in which case we had our community engagement, which we explored three different development scenarios for the site. And so we learned a lot from that public meeting. We were actually able to have a conversation with you all right after that, so there was a sense of generally where the community was landing on the types of development that would be valuable there. We've had additional follow-up interviews with developers, Chris in particular and his team, and we had a whole range of additional stakeholder interviews as a part of that community workshop, and then a few additional meetings that you all asked us to explore, one of those being the school district and what the potential impact of future development at Washington and Midland might have on the elementary and middle school close by. So we were able to have that conversation as well as talk to the Oregon Department of Transportation about sort of access management and traffic overall in the neighborhood. sort of two hot topics that you asked us to dig into and we did. And we'll share with you our findings around once we had a kind of preferred development scenario, how well that would perform in the market. And again, sort of the costs of infrastructure and how the city might be a partner and player. We'll go through all those steps, share with you what we learned and then our recommendations today. So any questions on schedule?

Nope, I think we're good.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. So just preferred plan at a glance. It's always getting good sense. We really landed on, we had three scenarios. One was more office commercial driven with a smaller percentage of housing. The second option was like the perfect bowl of porridge where we had Just the right amount of commercial, just the right amount of housing. We were talking about extending Franklin Boulevard, which you see that street on the top of the image extending through to Highway 99. And then we had our third option, which said, hey, let's really lean in on housing as a big driver because there's a strong need for that in the community. And so with those three in place, I think the community was looking at kind of a balance of commercial and housing. AS WE LOOKED AT WHAT THE URA WOULD DO TO STIMULATE INVESTMENT, BUILDING FRANKLIN BOULEVARD, FOR INSTANCE, FROM WASHINGTON TO HIGHWAY 99, WASN'T YIELDING A LOT OF INVESTMENT REDEVELOPMENT, AND SO THAT COST OF INFRASTRUCTURE WE FELT LIKE WASN'T A GREAT BALANCE WITH MARKET POTENTIAL. AND SO PULLING THAT PIECE AWAY FROM THE INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENT LENDED US TO continue to focus on housing, which is the real near-term market potential here, still preserving the Highway 99 corridor for commercial, which is a great location for that. So I think we've got a good sort of market reality sense of where the potential here and balancing that with some of the infrastructure costs that the urban renewal area can help contribute to so that we're getting investment that's market-driven, that still sees long-term success in commercial and office, but really leaning in on the near-term opportunities around housing. So you see housing-led as the preferred option here. Commercial use is again focused on 99, strengthening some of the existing uses that are already onsite. We'll talk a bit about how we're going to look to sort of recalibrate parking that is owned by the city in converting that over to and share it with private development so they have a whole building and parking scenario. The improvements then are really leaning toward Bunnell Avenue, so making that a complete street. Today it's only partially improved, as well as that segment of Franklin Boulevard from Bunnell to Washington. And the goal here is to create that great infrastructure that promotes a good public realm. We've heard a lot about walking and biking as kind of a natural thing that happens in the neighborhoods around here. As we improve streets for development, we want to continue to improve those facilities for walk, bike, and driving. So this street would have on-street parking on both sides, two lanes of traffic. sidewalks, setbacks for street trees, and lighting. And I think that quality of investment is really important, not only from a neighborhood perspective, but encouraging quality development in the neighborhood. And then we'll look at some of the moves around zoning and parcelization that can help organize the properties here in a way that you can get those out to the development community. At the same time, you can strengthen the existing uses that are already in the project area. So if anyone has a question, please jump in. Dana, you can yell at me and stop me at any moment. I'm happy to take any questions. This gives you a sense of sort of the 3D view of as we pass.

Hey, Jason, can you pause for a minute? I think we do have a question. Hold on one second. Great. Go ahead, Victoria.

Yeah, you defined the term a little bit, the term stakeholders, and you mentioned schools, ODOT, which and then traffic which I'm sure kind of included this is my question did that traffic study in question include asking the the residents and if so how many responded and what was their general feedback to you sure

The community neighborhood response occurred in two different engagement opportunities. One was the community workshop one, where we said, hey, what are your hopes and dreams for development on this property? What are the things that are working now? What are the things that are challenges? We certainly heard a bit about traffic and traffic speed on Washington Boulevard in that first meeting. We talked about things. as enhancements in the preliminary concepts to the same broader community group about enhancing intersections with crossings and curb extensions, rebuilding Bunnell and Franklin as full streets. There was support for that. The city manager actually did have a camera put out on Washington just to sort of look at. drive-by traffic and speeds and didn't notice any major sort of negative impact currently happening in the district. We also heard some concerns from the community about all this additional housing that that might create additional traffic impacts on the neighborhood. In contrast to having more commercial development, residential development actually tends to have less traffic impacts. So the scenario that we're looking at now is likely to have lower traffic numbers than if we were to enhance the site with more commercial and retail. So we met also with each building owner on the site. And so we've had an opportunity to talk to not only people who live around the periphery in two different occasions, engagement one and engagement two. But our stakeholders, we had a broad list of interested parties, all included people who were on the site as well as developers. And our stakeholder list that you can get from the city, so I'm not going to go through every name on that list, but we had roughly around 15 or 20 people that we we targeted for engagement at engagement one and engagement two, as well as having those public meetings. So sorry for that long-winded answer. I'm happy to answer any additional question around who we heard from.

Yeah, the first, I was at the first community meeting, but you said the second outreach. Can you refresh my memory of how that, what that was and what the response was back specifically from the people who live, not the business owners within the site, but the residents around the area?

Yeah, so June 18th was the second round. We met at the AllCare meeting facility during that engagement session. Some of those topics around traffic came up again. I think I mentioned that concern about additional housing units generating more traffic, vehicular traffic in the district. I think there's also, there were some voice concerns about the intersection of Midland and Highway 99, the difficulty of crossing over. 6th Street and Highway 99 in that location. So those topics, you know, continue to be on people's minds. In that conversation June 18th, we were at least in the June 18th meeting able to talk about curb extensions and ways to calm traffic along Washington Boulevard and then confirm that some of these improvements to bundle and Franklin are intended to benefit both walking, biking, and driving into the redevelopment area. So I think some of the things we heard from our first meeting continued into June 18th and we're hoping that that 18th meeting, some of the solutions around traffic calming, that those were having a positive impact in terms of people's minds. I think the Oregon Department of Transportation conversation was enlightening because they are considering a signal at Midland and Highway 99. It's not eminent, but it's definitely on the radar, both from a traffic safety perspective, and I think for this project area, and in particular the urban renewal area, having a signal at this location is gonna strengthen your commercial opportunities in a big way here, which is why we've sort of explored that opportunity a little bit more in this scenario. You're seeing an image here of a larger commercial footprint at the corner of Midland and Washington, and some of that is directly attainable to what that future signal might offer in terms of safer access, but also improved development potential on the site.

Thank you. And then my last question for now is, and I want to make sure I understood you, there was talk, you said, about taking Franklin out to to 99, but it wasn't financially feasible? Is that what I heard you say? And if so, why wasn't it financially feasible? And if I misheard you, then you can help me out on what you meant.

Sure. Given the the market for development, which housing is really strong here, commercial tends to be one of the more difficult. Visibility, because this is a one-way street, all that traffic is southbound. The redevelopment opportunity next to the Dairy Queen tend to be not as highly visible as the southern end. So Franklin Boulevard, ideally, was considered as a great way to extend commercial development along Franklin Boulevard between Highway 99 and Washington Street. So there's a cost to rebuild from scratch that road segment. And the amount of sort of development yield around commercial development, which has a much longer sort of arc for potential investment, it felt like that that might be an additional cost. It isn't going to yield a lot of development opportunity in the next 5, 10, 15 years. If we don't build the connection of Franklin between Washington and 6th Street, Highway 99, it's still a great corridor for commercial. So we just weren't seeing that additional cost of that infrastructure yielding a significant amount of new either commercial or housing development than if we didn't do the improvements. We felt like we're going to get as much or maybe stimulate more particular if housing becomes the development of choice here extending Franklin Boulevard wouldn't wouldn't really be necessary to do that and we think the yield if we were to do it wouldn't wouldn't be substantial so that was the rationale okay so for commercial it wouldn't yield the price would kind of be too high for the benefit for the foreseeable future but you do see that with housing is that

I just summed that up.

Yeah, I think that's a fair, yeah, that's a fair characterization, yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, and I would add to that, Jason, just that the, in our market analysis, the demand for the commercial isn't really there strongly. And so, even if you built it, they wouldn't come, if you will. So, it was, it would be a big investment potentially that would, as Jason said, potentially take a long time to yield new development coming its way.

But in either scenario, commercial or housing, extending Franklin out to 199 would alleviate traffic on Washington, would it not?

Nope. Not necessarily. It might increase traffic in the neighborhood. Oh, I see.

Because there's a connection? I see.

Yeah, and presumably with a signal at Midland, that would be sort of the major traffic reliever in that Franklin connection through the site to 99 would have to be a right turn in, right turn out only, which would limit its usefulness for a lot of through traffic.

Oregon Department of Transportation was also less excited about that connection. It doesn't mean that, you know, I mean, an interconnected street network is a positive thing. And from a neighborhood perspective, being able to walk from Washington Boulevard to the commercial uses on Highway 99, 6th Street is beneficial and is a good thing. But sometimes the highway folks would rather have less connections than more. So they have some priorities that are slightly different than maybe

And if we didn't say it, there is a pedestrian connection. That is a part of the plan.

Yeah, we are looking at easement and creating a walkthrough between Washington and 99. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. Kathleen, did you have a question?

Yeah, I do. I saw in your literature that one of the concerns of the neighborhood is density. And as I look at this visual of how your plan lays out the housing, it looks pretty full. I know that in our community we've already built and have in process of building already 160 workforce housing. So when I look at this visual it feels like having those multi-family apartments right on the street up front on the corner as really crowded and doesn't fit the neighborhood very well. From my perspective, I think single-family townhomes are the way to go to fit into that neighborhood. So what would you say about that reconsideration?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a strong value statement. So it's important for us to hear that from the decision makers. So thank you for that in particular. You know, housing is a need. This is an area that is close to a commercial corridor, so it's kind of a transition between intensely sort of auto-oriented commercial development and the existing neighborhoods. This area, which we like to call the Idaho shape because it's the area between Bunnell and Washington Boulevard, it's kind of shaped like Idaho. That's where you're seeing the tall buildings in the lower left of that Idaho shape. But given that housing is a need here, as we look at market feasibility, multifamily around affordable does tend to have the easiest path toward development. In any scenario where you own and leverage land for development, investment in that land is a really good indicator to stimulate more investment. So starting with a project, will tends to create the momentum that brings in other projects. Now, in this instance, we think there's an opportunity to incorporate multifamily housing. This is a great location because it's close to schools, it's close to a commercial corridor, as well as townhome and ownership opportunities. So there's kind of a great sweet spot of being able to tap into both markets. Because of this proximity to the commercial corridor and the fact that it's sort of in between the traditional single family I think multifamily is going to add additional benefit to the community by adding housing at a little higher density. It will have a positive effect on the commercial development adjacent to along the corridor. The site was as a hospital use before, so you know, maybe multifamily isn't a huge stretch separation from what used to be there before. On the opposite side of Washington in the southwest corner where you see the multifamily is a wooded undeveloped area and a creek wetland is cutting through there. You'll see that we've earmarked building setbacks and common open space at the corner and that reflects the park that's just diagonal to that. So it does create kind of a sense of arrival at Midland and Washington. And these are elements of a future development plan that, because the city owns, can influence sort of how development engages the street. Setbacks are good when you have a taller building here. And then where you see the townhomes up at Franklin, those are directly opposite than the single-family homes across the street and where the Boys and Girls Club will be going in the upper left-hand corner. We've tried to, because I'm hearing you about scale and impact on the neighborhood, trying to orient the uses where they're kind of complementary to their neighbor across the street. And that sort of lended to where you see buildings oriented today. But I certainly hear you about the townhomes and wanting to address a certain scale that you might feel is really most appropriate. We're kind of opening the door here for a broader kind of market perspective about what development might be, but definitely hear you that concerns about quality and compatibility are important to consider, and we're hoping that we're trying to find that kind of sweet spot of doing that.

Well, even if you continue to have this much multifamily apartments, my eye tells me those fit better in the back and the single family town homes fit better in the front because, or closer to the street because of the neighborhood. They're all single family houses there and to put these, how many stories are these?

These would be up to four stories. Four stories, yeah, that's huge.

To put in a single family corner. So anyway, my eye tells me they would look better reversed.

Yeah, and I hear you and I think that's a really, logical direction to go into. Part of where we get hamstrung is Bunnell Avenue, where you see it coming into Midland here, creates a lot of setback from Washington Boulevard. Part of it is just the nature of what you can fit. If we were to put the multifamily on the other side of Bunnell, we don't have enough land area to have parking to serve that. And that was one of the big measures here. We know that you're in the CFEC area, which is an acronym about basically not requiring you to allow parking. But as we talk to developers in the community, they're saying 1.5 spaces per unit is really what's important in Grants Pass. And so we wanted to make sure that we could hit those models of what local developers are seeing the need for, parking associated with buildings. And in this instance, to have multifamily housing, we need a fairly significant area to be able to park that out, which is why you're seeing multifamily in this location, trying to address some of those neighborhood concerns by utilizing setbacks and creating common open space that allow these buildings to set back and have less impact. We're going to do a little more work in terms of the rendering, and not like it's a sell job, but just to give you a sense of what this scale feels like on the street, we'll be doing a little bit of additional work on that. I know that's not going to solve this conversation. But we do feel it's important to think about setbacks and quality development. So we will be looking into that. But thank you for walking us through your thoughts on this. I think you've got some sound reasoning here. We're looking at balancing a couple of different perspectives here.

Thank you. OK, you guys continue. Thank you.

OK, great.

Oh, sorry, hold on one second. We got another question. Okay, Indra?

Yes, thank you. I had a question on the retail property on 6th and Midland. So part of that is excluded property. Has that changed?

Yeah, that is correct. That is still excluded property. That, as well as the blue building just above that, and the one above that, so Dr. Heidinger's office, yes, those are outside of what the Urban Renewal Agency and the city have ownership of. A portion of that commercial building on Midland, a portion of that property is owned by the city, and given the potential for a future signal here, we're recommending that some of that property could be made available to that corner property owner. That could be a larger commercial site that could take advantage of that location at Signal. So that is something that the plan is recommending and considering.

So in that case, though, we would need to wait and have that whole property that the city owns just sit vacant until that property owner maybe decided to sell and they might not even sell to the city or a developer that does that. So my question is that blank piece of land that the property owns, could that not also be houses? And then just that corner is commercial already, stay commercial?

You have that option. A couple of different things that could happen. The city could continue to own that parcel. We showed a previous iteration that had townhomes on that site. So if you carved that grocery in half to basically what the size of the building is today, townhomes could be then developed along Bunnell Avenue. The plan could absolutely go in that direction. We could continue to have that site available for housing. Or as maybe you're mentioning, it could be a smaller commercial pad site. As we look at the market and how robust commercial is, it hasn't been great along the corridor. So there are certainly options. I think we can look at earmarking that sliver of the city property to maybe encourage commercial development, because that may be a tool to do that, or continue to keep it in the city's purview as either commercial or some housing. I think we have the options to look at all three of those scenarios.

Yeah, and Jason, I'll add, one of the reasons, we did talk to some commercial developers and a grocery operator, and the reason was, heard so strongly from the community that we would love to have a grocery in this part of town. Couldn't it go there? The current site that has the old pink building there, the building's about 10,000 square feet. What we heard was that would be too small for a grocer. And so if this idea of someday we could have a grocery store on this corner, the site would need to be a little bit bigger. And that's why we said, well, then let's maybe hold this city piece on Bunnell in reserve in case that opportunity for a grocery store materializes. At some point in time we can say it's never gonna happen, let's develop it as housing. But for the sake of this concept that we have on the screen, we said let's hold that one in reserve for that flexibility should that grocery opportunity materialize because that would be such a win for the neighborhood. And I think Jason mentioned this earlier, the idea of a signal at Midland and Six would, right now there's not a grocer waiting in the wing to come fill this space. And there's really no retailers waiting in the wings to locate along here. But putting a signal there definitely is additive in terms of enhancing this as a place where if that opportunity were to come along, the signal is,

definite asset so so and I agree with the previous counselor that spoke at four stories to me is ginormous I mean I would go for two or three but if we did fewer on the multifamily we could use that parcel to to then do additional homes that's a possibility correct yes thank you yeah

Okay, so I'm just going to have to reiterate what we're discussing because I want to let these guys get through their presentation here. I think some of the questions are poignant, but we as a council need to understand that these guys are giving you a concept. nothing is written in stone this will all have to go through their giving that from their research in their development they're giving you the what they believe is the best fit for this area from all the research and interviews and everything that they've done so but again you're not agreeing to build a four-story apartment complex today we're just allowing these guys to download all the information and research and development idea that they've actually come up with. Some of your questions are very poignant, but we're only a quarter of the way through this presentation, so is there any pertinent questions still?

Well, I just have a question for you, Clint. I mean, it seems like, I think I heard earlier, they do also want to kind of hear our ideas of where to go forward as well, so they know. So I think that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah, no, I think your questions are pointed at this point, but I'm kind of like, let's give these guys a little bandwidth to get through the presentation. Some of the questions might be answered when we get more meat on the bone here. And again, I just want to reiterate, because some of your questions kind of led me to believe that you were feeling that we're going to make a huge decision today. This is all conceptual. This is a piece of clay on a turning wheel that we're kind of molding as we go. And the fact that... the community came out and said that they wanted, and you guys correct me at any statement that I'm saying here, that the community was really apt to have some kind of grocery store there, even though we don't own that piece of property. That's not kind of playing into the scenario at this time. We're, as a city, asking these guys to say, hey, if you had this whole piece of property, how would we develop it to the best of our ability to fit well within the community from your community feedback and so forth and so forth. There will be probably, if you get a grand scheme of a grand idea of a concept plan, and then you're like, hey, this corner is apt for a retail grocery store, so-ma, so-ma, blah, blah, blah, and we don't own that piece of property, it's gonna be in the wind, and now that people that own that piece of property might wanna jump on board and help out with us to develop this out. But we are still at our conceptual stage, and I'm gonna shut my mouth now and let you guys continue.

Thank you. These are all great questions. So you're right. Let's get through this, and then I think we come back. So if it's a more protracted conversation, we'll put a pin in it, and we'll engage it. And I can move pretty quickly through here. I think we've hit a lot of these topics as we went through. We're just trying to give some confirmation on some of the additional conversations we had. You'll see the first one here, traffic access and findings. So that development summary you saw, To reaffirm what Clint's saying, it's a fantasy. It is what we're seeing from a market perspective. It's what we're seeing from a zoning perspective, types of zones that you might put in place here. But it is just one picture at a moment in time. Investors, developers are all going to come back with other visions. We're trying to sort of calibrate what what we should establish from a regulatory perspective, how we should manage traffic and those other things, given this kind of potential scenario. But there are a variety of different ways for development to evolve over time. And these conversations are great. So thank you. We plugged in the numbers from a high-level traffic planning analysis to look at how much traffic might be generated from 25, 28,000 square feet of new commercial, these number of housing units. And so what we're seeing is not a major impact on Washington or Midland in particular. And that even with the existing no signal at 99 and Midland, that this development project is not going to be stimulating a high traffic impact. Although any future development will go through a full TRAFFIC IMPACT ASSESSMENT AND ANALYSIS STUDY WILL ALSO GO THROUGH UM ITERATIONS WITH THE OREGON DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION WE'RE JUST SAYING FROM A HIGH LEVEL WE'RE NOT SEEING THINGS THAT WOULD TRIGGER 100 EATING A SIGNAL AT MIDLAND AND WASHINGTON WOULD NEED TO ADD ADDITIONAL LANE CAPACITY I.E MAYBE AN ADDITIONAL TURN LANE ON ANY STREETS WHETHER IT'S SIXTH AND MIDLAND OR Washington and Midland, there aren't that level of impact from a traffic perspective to stimulate a lot of additional improvements around the project area. And then from the school district side, meeting with Tim Sweeney and his partner over there, what we're seeing in terms of impact on the schools in proximity to this site is they do have additional capacity. What they're seeing is in-migration of students in one part of the city to other parts of the city versus seeing a lot of additional population, a lot of students coming from outside of Josephine County or Grants Pass in particular. So the schools in our proximity, the elementary school and the middle school, do have additional capacity when they look at this amount of development, 189 new units. projecting how much of that, from their perspective, would be family-owned, knowing a lot of these are apartments or smaller townhomes. They didn't have a concern with this development triggering any concerns about enrollment at the two schools. They are looking into the future, 2030, 2035, of seeing additional growth in population in grants pass, but they're saying that that's kind of a threshold citywide that might have some impacts on the schools, but This particular site to these specific schools are not a concern, at least what we've heard so far from the school district. Just thinking about practicalities here as an urban renewal area and tax increment financing, you have the ability to do some improvements which are going to be needed on this site in terms of making Bonnell Avenue a working street. for walking, biking, and driving, as well as Franklin. And the utilities then that would serve development, kind of your mainline water lines, your storm sewer, those do need improvements. And so that's an initial cost that typically the urban renewal can help fund. It's not like you have to build it all and then they come. You can build some of it and you can negotiate costs. with future developers in terms of their contribution. But typically to stimulate investment, developers want to know that you've got a plan to rebuild Bunnell and Franklin to create those mainline utilities that the developers can then tap into. And if you can agree on those commitments, then it's just a matter of timing and financing. The brown areas are typically what you're going to see from the developer. They're going to be building their their development types within those kind of tan areas, and then they'll be building some sidewalk improvements, not the whole street, but just the frontage, and then tapping their utilities into the main line of the city. So that's just sort of generally how the distribution between improvements typically might happen between shared public improvements and developer improvements. I'm going to hand this over to Chris, because as we look at our initial costs on the infrastructure and I'll just set the stage for what those infrastructure costs might be. Chris has sort of looked at typically what are relationships when you're trying to stimulate development, what might the city consider contributing to and then what might you expect from a developer. So he's going to talk a little bit about that situation. We did run cost numbers on rebuilding below-grade infrastructure, the utilities that would serve development, as well as the surface area of Bunnell and Franklin. And so you see that number total is about $2.09 million. One of the biggest costs is the stormwater line. And you'll see that green dashed diagonal on the right of the image. Unfortunately, when the hospital was here, the parking lot was on the Franklin frontage. and Bunnell. And so they just ran the stormwater right diagonally through that parking lot. Well, if the future sees different types of development, we're going to need to move that line. So that's why you see that red solid line down Bunnell. That's a replacement of that stormwater. That's kind of a major first cost that would need to happen, as well as upgrades to water line, extending the water line. and a few other utilities. And so then that cost, you see $2.09 million for the basic infrastructure. And then that might be parsed portion of that, bulk of that money potentially in the city or URA's hands. And Chris, I don't know if you want to elaborate at all on this. You'll be taking this information to the next, well, two slides from now, but I'll go ahead and just pause for a moment if you have something to add.

Yeah, I mean, the main, some of the main guiding principles that I'll talk about in a minute, a lot of the, the intent here is that we're preparing sort of shovel-ready development sites for developers that the city, the Urban Oil Agency would put out through RFQs. And so having that shared district infrastructure, kind of fixing some of the leftover issues from the hospital site, getting those out of the way creates that framework that then the developers can buy a parcel and develop on it. All of what we would call the onsite work, the parking lots, the pathways, the things that are sort of part of a development are not really included in these numbers. Those are assumed that those would be a developer's responsibility. They build the parking, the street trees. If there's a little pathway between the town homes, again, those would all be part of the development. cost assumptions. These costs are really the things that the city could step up to incentivize and prepare it. The one in purple, the private frontages, that is basically sidewalks in front of parcels. That is a public right-of-way improvement that a developer would normally be expected to do and it's also assumed inside our development feasibility analysis.

The other big piece here, and you all may not be fully aware of this, but the majority of the site is under what's called a planned unit development. And a lot of the existing buildings are owned. You'll see those number ones at the top of the page, parcel A, parcel B. The building is privately owned, but the parking is owned by the city. And as a part of this effort, doing a replatting and a subdivision plan would allow for those publicly owned parking lots to then become part of these buildings and then a new site. So that improves the viability of existing businesses in the project area as well as the senior housing projects. So we think that's an important thing to establish those new subdivision lines so that existing properties and businesses can be more whole and function better and have more value. and then at the same time create sites for development, whether it's multifamily or townhome. And so there's some work to just get those legal boundaries set up so that you have viable development sites and you've got existing uses that are certainly more whole and those arrangements need to be set up, as well as the right-of-way for Bunnell Avenue and Franklin. So those are what we're calling a parcelization plan survey and title work is gonna be important to do, as well as the infrastructure work that we saw. And that'll coincide with zoning changes as well, which I'll jump into the next slide. What you'll see here is sort of patchwork of zoning. The pink-red is your general commercial, and then the orange is your residential R4. And with the parcels up the middle there where you'll see a dashed outline where it says split zones, it's really important that we not have two zones on a potential future parcel, but create contiguous single zones for those. Given that we're projecting as housing is an important future development, then along Bunnell, we're seeing shifting from general commercial along the Bunnell frontage to residential zoning. And where we have townhomes, the R4 zone works really well in terms of the amount of density and allowed building heights. If we're to do multifamily, R4 won't allow for enough capacity rezoning to R5 would be necessary to do multifamily. So we have a recommendation for keeping R4 where it works with townhomes, cleaning up properties that have split zones to meet the residential zone, and then consider R5, which is a little additional density in that residential zone to adding that to the district. We also then, and Chris will jump into this, we started looking at, given these different products, multi-family apartments, town homes, market rate apartments, we then sort of looked at what is the cost to build these units, are there gaps in terms of what the local community can pay in terms of rents, the cost of construction, because the city OWNS THIS SITE, CHRIS IS GOING TO TALK ABOUT THIS, IT'S GOING TO TRIGGER ADDITIONAL COSTS IN TERMS OF CONSTRUCTION BECAUSE THE BUREAU, THE BULLY IS GOING TO REQUIRE, YOU KNOW, HIGHER WAGES THAN FOR CONTRACTORS AND CONSTRUCTION WORKERS WHO WILL BE WORKING ON THE SITE. THAT HAS SOME IMPACT ON THE OVERALL COST. SO THINGS ARE GOING TO COST A LITTLE BIT MORE WITH THE CITY AS A CONTRIBUTOR. THE GOAL IS TO LOOK AT WHERE ARE THE GAPS AND WHAT ROLE THE URBAN RENEWAL AGENCY can play to fill those grants and other programs. What types of development already has access to federal grants and a number of opportunities for development. This is what we learned in our conversations with developers. And so Chris can kind of walk us through the different scenarios of whether it's an ownership or market rate or potential of affordable product.

Yeah, so we did a market analysis and we did a lot of developer interviews to get a handle on what the market is for sales prices on townhomes, rents on apartments, and construction costs on development. And so we put that into what we call a pro forma, a financial feasibility model to understand those three core residential products. What are the gaps? How big are they? And then we'll get to in a moment, what can we do about it? So on the left, the green is those affordable apartments, that big apartment building. We heard from developers that affordable apartments, because rents are capped, don't pencil, they require subsidy. But the upshot to this one is there is state tax credit funding to fill those gaps. So in a way, these are feasible in that they would not require city subsidy if an affordable developer came to the project for 50 to 100 units, they could then apply to the state for affordable housing money that would fill that gap. So what's showing on the screen, the 35 to $46,000 a unit financing gap is wiped out by the state subsidy. On the market rate side, on market rate apartments or ownership townhomes, which would also not be income-restricted, those, there is no go-to state funding, so those gaps would need to be filled locally, either through urban renewal or some other source. And so we identified those gaps. One of the challenges with the market rate units, which Jason touched on, was BOLI, which is fear of labor and industries. If you've heard the term prevailing wages, that requires higher pay scales for construction. The state is pretty rigorous at making any public-private project subject to those higher rates if the city's investment is over a certain threshold. And what we assume is that with all the infrastructure work that we're putting into the streets that we just showed on the previous slides, that this would definitely trigger that requirement. Affordable housing is exempt, so it doesn't apply to that, but the difference on the market rate is that it adds about 15 to 20% to what a private development project and grants pass would be. And that pretty much explains on the townhomes 100% of the gap. If it weren't for that prevailing wage construction costs, the townhomes would probably pencil in terms of financial feasibility. And then the market rate apartments on the right, So that would be similar to the affordable apartments except that they would be market rate, not income restricted. The gaps on that are pretty significant, upwards of $65,000 a unit. And we are gonna dig a little deeper into that because we think that's probably not a high leverage use of your limited urban renewal funds. And then one last comment on the townhomes. The townhomes are that, Gap per unit is, you can kind of think of it as a modular number in terms of it would scale up or down depending on how many town homes we put into the plan. That gap per unit's not really, there's not significant efficiencies or inefficiencies relative to the scale. Great, thanks Chris. Thanks Jason. Yeah.

So, as we think about near-term path, and Chris will hop in here too, I mean, if we're just looking at it as a market.

Hey, Jason, we've got a quick question if you could.

Yeah, absolutely. If I can pause. Thank you. Go ahead.

So, on the market rate housing, when we talked about the gap and, you know, the way you're perceiving it is that you want to be careful of the limited URA funding. Is that assuming that we'd be looking, a developer would be looking for basically cash incentive because possibly the most valuable assistance we can provide here is the land. So that doesn't necessarily affect, we'll call it URA funding because we've already got the land. So could you please clarify when you said limited URA funding could prevent the market rate housing, but again, we have other ways that we can incentivize. Could you elaborate on that?

That's right. And we assume, we actually assume free land in that calculation. So it's a gap above and beyond the land contribution.

Thank you.

The land contribution, however, related to BOLI is exempt from that prevailing wage conversation, but there's enough other city investment that it still would be triggered. But yes, the free land or land for a dollar is a huge incentive and a huge benefit. On the market rate apartments, the issue is the gap between What you can get in rents and what it costs to build is so big that even free land isn't enough to shrink it. The townhomes gap can shrink quite a bit depending on what the sale price is for the townhomes. We modeled anywhere from 315 to $330,000. We were hesitant to model much higher than that because then the gap between a townhome and a single family home starts to shrink and then you're starting, if that gap is too narrow, then people are inclined to just stretch their budgets a little bit and go to a single family home. So we wanted to make sure that the town homes were priced significantly below a detached single family home in order to be attractive.

Thank you.

And these gaps, these aren't necessarily, we'll talk about it in a couple slides. There are other sources of you know, grants and state funding out there that we're putting together sort of a toolkit that could also be brought to bear to help reduce some of these gaps. It's not to say that city needs to come up with every last penny of it.

Perfect. Thank you, guys.

Go ahead. Yep, you're welcome. Okay.

Thanks, Clint. Yeah, so near-term path, I think, if we're looking at it from a market perspective, affordable housing, is going to have less impact on URA dollars as it is able to tap into sources of both federal funding and you have local developers who are doing these types of projects. This number of the 50 units is really ideal in terms of what we've heard from local developers. So that's sort of how we landed on these buildings that can produce up to 50 units in a building. Those tend to be the projects that are most marketable and are penciling locally. So that was kind of the reason for that size. If we start looking into the future, what early development opportunities might be, it's clearly affordable housing. It might be an option. And as Chris mentioned, there may be some ways to fill the gap so that townhomes can also be built. We're also seeing those built locally too. So I think those are two different products to begin to tap into. As we come back to development sequence and sort of what needs to happen on the Washington and Midland properties to begin to have development occur, We've talked a bit about parcelization and subdivision being important so that we're getting the land area distributed into the right parcel sizes, that we're distributing some of that parking land to existing buildings to make them whole so that work would need to happen in coordination with some zoning adjustments. You saw those split zone areas that need to go to a single zone and then considering a range of residential areas DENSITIES GIVEN THE TWO DIFFERENT PRODUCTS TOWN HOME VERSUS MULTI-FAMILY SO THOSE ARE CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE ZONING SIDE COMMERCIAL IS ALL GENERAL COMMERCIAL IS ALL WORKING REALLY WELL ALONG SIXTH STREET HIGHWAY 99 NO ISSUES THERE THEN IT'S SORT OF A MARKET YOU KNOW WHAT GIVEN A commitment, let's say, of the URA to Bundle Avenue improvements, not that you build it, but that you're committed to work toward that infrastructure, is a great way then to let the development community know, hey, we're going to use URA to help stimulate investment here. We're committed to some public infrastructure improvements. And that allows you, as well as the fact that you've created new parcels and some zoning changes, to start reaching out to the development community. So that's what you see testing the market there. And two, Chris can talk a bit about the process of how you do that in terms of selecting teams. Is it a single developer for multiple parcels? Is it a townhome developer versus a multifamily developer? Those are all considerations. A lot of that comes through once you've had conversations with developers through outreach. Once you select a team, then you really begin to coordinate sort of the the responsibilities around infrastructure improvements. So the city would likely do some initial work from the engineering side, meaning what is the design of an improved bundle in Franklin? What's required to build that out? What's required to build out the mainline utilities? And then what is the cost estimate for that? So once you have those construction documents, which means you can start handing those over to a contractor to build, you understand the cost for that, you've got a process to build those improvements, then you can use that to negotiate with your developers. You're showing good faith effort in moving toward this $2 million investment in infrastructure, and that allows you then through developer offerings to identify what you might be able to recoup back in terms of either developer building portions of that right-of-way and or other opportunities to recoup some of those costs the goal is obviously that you're getting more development in the community that's increasing the tax base and ultimately that will help me maintain those public improvements and then chris can talk about number five here about maintaining city control and any agreement you have you know keeping ownership until you know construction has begun before before you do handoff to a private developer through some type of agreement. So, Chris, I don't know if you want to elaborate on this, and we can certainly take a few questions too.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory. We've seen examples in the past where cities have done a public-private partnership developer RFQ process, and developer takes on the land, and then the project flounders, but the city no longer controls the site and takes them years to get it back. And so this is just a having a clawback provision, if you will, to make sure that the city can always, if the developer's not performing, if they're taking too long, they can get the property back easily, you can put that into your contract. And then secondly, the city keeping ownership until the developer's ready to get their building permit, that also prevents that from happening and that also is a great benefit to the developer because they don't, it's an additional incentive or financial BENEFIT BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE HOLDING COSTS. THEY'RE NOT PAYING A BANK LOAN TO HOLD THE LAND FOR THE YEAR OF PLANNING AND ENGINEERING THAT THEY'RE DOING BEFORE THEY PULL THEIR BUILDING PERMITS.

NEW SPEAKER ANY QUESTIONS ON YOUR END, CLIN?

NEW SPEAKER I DON'T SEE ANY AT THIS POINT, SO YOU GUYS CONTINUE.

THANK YOU. NEW SPEAKER OKAY, GREAT. CHRIS CAN HOP IN HERE AS WELL AS THE FINANCES. SO THIS IS THE DIFFERENT BUCKETS, WHETHER IT'S SITE INFRASTRUCTURE OR YOU SEE THE ACTUAL development and then incentives. So I'll let you, Chris.

Yeah, so this is that toolkit I told you about. We don't need to go into detail on any of these. But in addition to the tax increment financing you have in urban renewal, there are tools and strategies out there. Some of them are competitive and you have to go to the state. The Housing Infrastructure Finance Program is one that Grants Pass has used in the past on other projects. We'll see what the legislature comes up with their next session. So keeping an eye on these, putting together a compelling application, that's going to be key to making it happen. The tax credits that go with the affordable housing, those are done by the developer, not the city. But again, having that partnership would, again, further make that project competitive. So a little more detail on each of these will be, I think, in our final report. But the idea is that we're We're using TIF as a leverage, not that it's the only money that you have to put into a project, but you can use it as a local match to pull in other resources to expand the capacity to fund the project.

All right, we did generate a question, so you guys want to pause one sec? Great. Absolutely.

I just had one question that I wondered about. You know, the housing market is kind of cyclical here in Grants Pass, and a lot of it depends on other people migrating here, especially from California. At least it used to. Right now, it's a buyer's market. And there's properties for sale, but there's not a lot selling. How do we account for that in this project? We just go with the cycles or do we even consider it or what do we do?

That's a really good question. Part of what I would do is in the number two on the previous slide, the test the market is before you just go out and put the property on the market is you do some targeted interviews with developers, the types of developers that you would like to have come there, the types that you think would come there, and you ask those questions directly of them, because they know better than anybody. Might include realtors, maybe appraisers or lenders as well, people that are gonna have a good pulse on things. And if you don't like what you hear, you can certainly slow the process down. That said, it's also really hard to time the market because this process is gonna take several years even because there is planning, there's the site improvements and the utility work that needs to be done. This planning stage I think can move forward quickly. Anyway, hopefully that helps answer your question. Thank you, go ahead. Yeah, I guess one other guiding principle is, one of the reasons why the plan includes multiple types of housing is so that it's not, all your eggs aren't in one basket, that you can either be tapping into multiple market opportunities simultaneously so the whole project gets done quicker, or if one of them, say the rental market's in the tank but townhome and ownership is maybe stronger, there's still a piece of the project that can move forward and the momentum is there. Both of those can work kind of in tandem.

So Clint, this is the end. And I've just sort of highlighted a few questions here. And I know we touched on some of the housing discussions about affordable market rates, scale, those types of things. But yeah, this is a good moment, I think, to take on any number of questions or offer additional feedback to us. You see kind of the general questions here. Feel free to read through those. And then we're open to whatever, wherever the discussion needs to go.

OK. Sounds good. Thank you. Give counsel a few seconds to digest, and then we might come up with a question or two here.

Looks like we got one, so go ahead, Rob.

Hi. You touched on this today, but just to, I guess, maybe get a little bigger view. On page 28 of your market analysis report that you gave us a few months back, it says retail development has been limited, this is about Grants Pass, limited over the last decade with most deliveries absorbed by the market. However, recent negative absorption has relieved previously tight market conditions, which basically means that, due to excess vacancies, there's not really a demand for additional supply. you know, commercial and retail specifically. So, I mean, that's your own report. And you did kind of say that again today. So I'm just wondering, you know, how you reconcile adding additional retail space in that corridor when we've already got vacancies up and down the corridor and retail has been flat for a decade, according to your report. What makes you think that this retail will be different?

Some of it has to do with location. I think projecting future signal at Midland and Washington is a strong asset, meaning not every commercial site in the community is equal. Some are far better for larger scale, middle scale, smaller scale development. I think what comes together in this location in particular is the visibility and access to 6th. With Midland, you also have access to 7th. So it's got an improved access, a signal would add additional value because now you're stopping and improving term movements and ways to get in and out of that commercial site. By moving from A 10,000 square foot building to something larger adds additional value as you don't always have the opportunity for 20,000 square feet equally up and down the corridor. So yes, there is a glut of commercial out there, but it's not all equal. And I think this site has some positive attributes that certain products might might actually be attainable here and desirable, partially because of that signal, that location, proximity to an existing neighborhood and schools. So you have sort of broader factors that are contributing to why someone might want to invest in this location versus 100, 200 other sites around the city.

Yeah, and I might be even a little more blunt. I would say we did not, I am not saying that grocery store at that location is feasible or there's market demand for it what we're um so it's it's definitely a more aspirational element of our plan um grounded in the the community the community feedback we heard in that there is there's a real desire it's a food desert in this part of town there's a real desire to make a grocery store happen and if that were to happen this would be a very logical place um if it weren't for that i There is, you're right, there's ample retail all around Grants Pass, and I don't see it happening on its own. We did reach out to a grocery operator, and their take was like, yeah, probably not something I would do, but they gave us some good input on the program side of it. So I think it's a fair comment, absolutely, and I don't want to... leave the impression that we're saying that site is feasible today as a grocery store. It would probably take further analysis and be part of an additional kind of city incentivized effort to recruit an operator to put a grocery store there. Because it's such a prominent corner and it's such a need in the community, we didn't want our plan to preclude it by using up the portion of the site where a grocery store there would no longer work.

Thank you for the clarification. And I wasn't just referring to a grocery store, but because your market analysis said retail in general. And actually, in your report, there's actually other parts of town for retail that are more desirable than this. So, yeah, I realize this is more desirable than some, but it's also, according to your your report, it's less desirable than others. But the follow-up question I guess I have to that, and I know that I think I touched on this last week, Jason, and I don't really remember getting an answer. So the way most, I think, and I was very impressed with your list of stakeholders. Brad emailed that list to council over the weekend. And it was very, it was comprehensive, it was pretty comprehensive. It actually lacked, frankly it lacked retailers, but it only had a grocery operator, but it did, it lacked retailers. So, and we all know in the last several years, you know, up and down I-5 we see Amazon trucks everywhere and retail's hurting because of it. But the, where, So where I was going with that, let me just... It'll come to me again, sorry. Let me put that together and I'll ask it in a better form in just a minute, thank you. Sure, sounds good.

Any further questions? Rick.

Thank you for the presentation. You indicated 15 to 20% extra cost for BOLI?

Yes.

Is there any mechanism that allows an exception to that, like phasing?

Not really. The only exception that's hard and true is affordable housing is exempt. We have found that Boley, how to put this, they have been very strict in their interpretation of it. And dividing up the project into multiple phases and stuff, they will look at it as the entirety of the project. They will look at what's been done in prior phases and still count that as a combined project. So it's certainly worth exploring. The process is the city or the city in partnership with the selected developer would approach BOLI and request what's called a letter of determination. And you basically get, it's an opinion letter essentially that says they look at your project and they make a judgment. And that would give some... some certainty, although even those letters can be clawed back in the future if they change their determination. So it's honestly one of the biggest hurdles to getting public-private partnerships and infill development going in, particularly in Oregon's smaller and rural towns. It's not as big an issue in Portland because our prevailing wages are already at that higher rate, but in smaller markets where costs are typically a little bit lower, it really is a deal killer for a lot of projects. At least what we've heard is there are no easy outs.

Thank you, I expected that answer. One more question. If the signalization on 6th Street were to move forward, would the cost of that be upon the developer?

Great question. ODOT is, I mean, if it's warranted, let's say number of accidents, then that is going to lean into ODOT's purview. If it's because, let's say, a larger commercial development wanted to go there and that's going to trigger infrastructure improvements, i.e. the light, then yeah, then I think it's pushing into the private development realm and maybe city as partner. So it could go either way. But likely if it's led by private development, then that's going to be a cost that they're going to incur.

Yeah, obviously it would be great if it was an ODOT project and they picked up the tab.

So as urban renewal funds, are they eligible for singleization?

I believe they would be.

Yeah, I think you... You could argue that. I mean, it's certainly within the boundaries of the district. Okay.

Thank you.

All right. Further questions? Kathleen?

So, I guess I'm addressing the getting around BOLI topic. If we put in single-family housing with local developers, could we get around that?

Really? And I'm not a ... I'm not a lawyer, but they will look at the entirety of the project, so the entire site, the land that you sell to developers, and what they're going to count against that. Basically there's a $750,000 limit, so you can subsidize a project up to $750,000 and it's exempt, in addition to giving the land away. So it's in reality more than $750,000. But all of that infrastructure work, the 1.9 million that we outlined, the cost of this consulting contract, the first 40 feet has to do this plan, all of that would be considered part of the greater project and would be triggered. The only thing that is explicitly exempt is if the housing is affordable housing and is not part of any kind of a mixed use project within that individual parcel.

Oh, so it's the mixed use that's triggering it.

No, it's not that. What's triggering it is the mixed, what I'm saying is mixed use will sort of poison the well of an affordable project. An affordable project is exempt, but if the affordable has, say, ground floor retail, they will make the entire project subject to the BOLI wages. And again, this would need to be all verified with follow-up conversations with BOLI, but once you have a developer in place, but it's, I think it's safely conservative and healthily conservative to make those assumptions of the higher cost now, because based on the track record, their stated policies, the amount of infrastructure investment that the city is forecast to be putting in based on the plan would very much trigger that those higher wages, regardless of what kind of housing is built other than affordable housing.

All right. Further questions? I got Rob.

Yeah. So, last week, Jason, you mentioned that, you know, this project is likely, you know, be done in phases. It could be two, three, four, five years out before maybe it's completed, maybe even more. And so there's no way to know who would be on council at that time. But the way I look at this, and again, I have no idea if I'm gonna be involved in ultimate decision making here, but the, you know, All the reports that we've gotten over the last number of years, we're roughly 4,000 housing units behind here. Or we're going to need 4,000 housing units by 2040 or something like that. We've all seemed to agree that housing is really critical in Grants Pass, which is why, generally, councils are probably going to be willing to help find ways to incentivize that. My question would be, I know like in my case, I don't believe that additional retail is any kind of, is extremely important for Grants Pass. I don't think lack of retail is an existential threat. As a matter of fact, we have a glut of retail. As a result, I personally wouldn't be in favor of incentivizing retail. Basically, I'd be more looking for a level playing field for retail, if somebody can find a way to compete with the market, then they can find a way to compete and that's great for them. But as far as the city incentivizing that, I personally would be against that. So I guess my question is, is if the city was going to incentivize parts of this, would it be on a parcel by parcel basis? So in other words, the retail segments could be excluded from incentivization where the residential segments could be incentivized?

I think to come back to that question about incentivizing around the commercial development the plan isn't isn't offering that the only mention about incentive for commercial would be that the city might consider a portion of that property east of bundle and I can go back on the image here just so we can kind of see what we're talking about A portion of Bunnell Avenue, it might be actually better in this zoning map here. Sorry. I apologize for bouncing around. Actually, let's do this. I'm showing you the aerial of the existing site here. And there's the commercial property, 10,000 square foot building, the pink building that's been vacant for a long time. You see that in the lower right. And you'll see that patched rectangular grassy area. That's city-owned property. And this is where... if the city might offer that grassy area to a commercial use, allowing then that corner to be a larger parcel. That would be sort of the only what I would call incentive that the URA might consider. The idea is to keep it as general commercial, which it is today. It's a less valuable site as a sliver for commercial in the city landholding than if it were a more larger contiguous site. So that was kind of the consideration here. It could just stay in city ownership, and I think Victoria or Andra talked about this, that sliver that you see there would certainly be enough for townhome development there and you just keep the smaller existing commercial site that's outside of your ownership there. So I think that's what, but there is no incentives really for commercial development anywhere in the project area because all the commercial properties already have access to 6th Street and they already have access to existing utilities. So the only parcels that are suffering a bit are those interior parcels along Bunnell, if that makes sense, because the infrastructure is not complete. But all the commercial property has access and infrastructure.

Thank you for that clarification. And then I just declare, and you may have already answered it, but so any incentivization would be looked at on a parcel-by-parcel basis because it's all different types of development, right? So it would all be... Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.

You're right. Beyond just the initial infrastructure, which is going to benefit everyone. But yes, then there's additional conversations around those gaps based on your developer and product type.

Exactly. You would be issuing... an RFQ at some point as an agency, you'd say, we have site A ready for development. You put out a request for proposals or qualifications from developers. When you do that, you as an organization will have more conversations like this and say, well, do we want to incentivize it? What specifically do we want? If it's affordable, what kind of affordable? If it's market rate or workforce, what kind of market rate or workforce? And you can set those, terms at the time of disposition and through the public-private partnership negotiation at that time. So there'll be lots more conversations as you get down the road to development. We envisioned at least two development offerings in this plan based on what we heard from affordable housing developers and market rate developers, which was basically, they don't wanna mix. So if there's an affordable site, that needs to be a carved out single site. And you can do an offering on that for the market rate sites, say the townhomes. There could be one or more on that one just because the townhomes can be more incrementally developed over multiple phases because you can just build them four or eight at a time as the market can absorb it.

So last week Jason mentioned that, and I'm not exactly sure what he based this on because this is such a high level view right now. As Clint said, it's basically clay on the wheel. And this is, you know, you're asking us for the just general, general acceptance of this concept basically of getting some of it ready so that we can have discussions with developers. But what you meant, Last week somehow it was mentioned that it seemed as though there was quite a bit of parking, or quite a bit of the land was gonna be targeted for parking, quite a bit more than I think the Allenwood project. And I'm just wondering what you based that on, because it sounded good to me, but I'm just wondering what actually you based that on, the amount of parking that was penciled in.

Yeah, it was based on conversations with developers and trying to reach a threshold of 1.5 spaces per unit. So the image you're looking at here, those two multifamily buildings, that's 100 units, so that's 150 spaces. And we got about 1.4 with the surface parking lot that you see in the drawing here, some additional on-street parking up to maybe 9,000. spaces might be needed to augment and get to that 1.5. Obviously, there's no requirement to build that much parking. We're just trying to be sensitive to what we think the local market is likely to want and to see if that would fit. This is all sort of, Rob, kind of a test fit to see what are the logical size of townhome units and apartment units and then what actually kind of fits in the land area that we have available to us.

And we heard that that 1.5 number, we heard consistently, consistently, consistently, whether we were talking to a market rate developer or an affordable housing developer, they all pretty much have the same number in mind as it needs to have this much parking because our tenants are going to have that many cars. And we wanted to have that parking really met on site so that to the neighboring impacts that there wouldn't be parkings going into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Thank you.

All right. Any further questions from counselors? All right. Seeing none, so I'm going to throw it back to you, Jason and Chris. Do you guys have any more questions, or are you seeking any more specific insight from us?

I think we can we can circle back up talking with Bradley and Dana based on what we what we heard today But just to let you know, we're the kind of the recommendations you're seeing here We're not seeing a huge deviation from that. You know, I was definitely wanting some confirmation that yes a Reparcelization plan makes sense considering some zoning changes. These would be in the plan They aren't they're not saying you have to commit to these but these would be the recommendations. So I I didn't hear any major red flags here. There may be some, and follow-up with staff could indicate that, but I think what we've heard today is that the information we've generated and the recommendations, we can start moving into our draft plan. Some of the specifics of implementation, or at least tools, let's say, for incentivizing development won't be 100%. This is the package but it's it's more of these are the opportunities and things to consider so I'm I'm gonna be optimistic that I think we've got general okay with the direction we're going in, which will allow us to proceed to a draft document, and which point that will go in front of this council again for review before we get to adoption. So there's still another step here, and if there's any additional questions about that process, yeah, now's a good time for us to talk about that.

I don't see any attention or I don't see any appetite for further questions at this moment in time.

It was a large, full-breath lunch that we just ingested from you guys. The information was great. I think there was some poignant questions during the process. I would advise council if they do come up with any questions in the near future that they could direct them directly to Brad who can pass them on to you But I do feel I don't see anybody jumping up on the top of their chair wanting to have any more discussion or any more questions. So on that note, I would thank you for your presentation and your time. And then, again, advice council if they have any questions in the near future or comments to direct them directly to Brad who can pass them on to you guys. And we will see you at the next step.

Excellent. Thank you, Clint. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone. Have a good afternoon. Bye-bye.

All right, and then again counselors if you do have any questions concerns or Any statements in regards to this or how the plan lays out towards the next future? Direct them directly to Brad and Then we'll go from there. It sounds like the next step is that they'll go into a preliminary draft And then we will have further discussions on that so assured that your voice will definitely continue to be heard on this topic and with that we will go into the next item on the agenda which is reviewing the i-5 sign code overlay that was previously within our code Thank You mayor members of the council good afternoon so this next item was

came out of the appeal that you had recently for the Dutch Bros and Les Schwab project. As you may recall, they had a signed appeal for requesting a sign at 100 feet. And during your first hearing on that project, staff presented to you that there was previously in Grants Pass an overlay. It was repealed in 2005. But a couple of the counselors kind of expressed some interest in maybe revisiting what would that look like. So that's what this is. It's just kind of to get some of your thoughts going. This easily could be continued again as you'll see at the end with a couple of the staff comments. So there's really two subject and summary items here. A discussion about a potential new commercial sign overlay at I-5 at the two interchanges. And then, I guess these should have been flipped, but an overview of the current sign code and a review of the past one that was repealed. And there's kind of those two main goals for city goals that it relates to. So that was the July 1st meeting that I just mentioned a minute ago where council requested a workshop. And the language that was repealed is there on the screen. And that actually is the entire ordinance, believe it or not. So there wasn't a lot to it. Maybe we're going the wrong direction. We're becoming too verbose over time. But this is the language that was in there. It basically says here is an overlay zone around each of these, exit 55 and exit 58. Each of the parcels gets one additional freestanding sign. And that parcel and sign must be located within 1500 feet of the interstate fog line, which is basically that white edge of the lane closest to the commercial property. And then the maximum height was 100 feet above grade or 35 feet above the level of Interstate 5, whichever is less. And then it gave the developers 250 square feet. So that's what was in place. And then in 2005, that was repealed. And we went back to what we have today, which is there is no special allowances for the I-5 interchanges, they are subject to the same rules as all the other commercial properties in town. So what we're gonna talk about today is the potential for what would that look like if you decided you wanted to basically treat those commercial properties at the interchanges differently in terms of what they can do for signs. So here's the current regulation. It's in the municipal code nine and it says you can have one free standing sign per street frontage up to 25 foot of height and 100 square feet sign area. So important point there, per street frontage. So if you're on a corner lot, then you would actually be allowed today to have two. We have a few parcels in town that actually have three streets on them. Technically they would be allowed three. So the sign, a couple of recent sign code appeals to this ordinance that is at the top of the screen there. The Applebee's and the IHOP you're familiar with, that came through, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago, and that allowed for a 100 foot tall sign with two cabinets totaling 400 square feet. And then the most recent one was the Dutch Bros and the Les Schwab, that's same height, 100 feet, with two sign cabinets, and that was 350 square feet per side. Those numbers were requested of us. Those weren't given to them. So one important thing that we have to remember when we're talking about these areas is ODOT. So Oregon Department of Transportation does have some sign rules. And their sign rules don't just apply to their right of way. If it's visible from their right of way, then they also have some regulations. They don't have near as many, but they do have some. They also talk about outdoor advertising signs. We're not necessarily talking about those today, but that's an important part of ODOT's regulations. And you can think of those as billboards or other similar things. Basically, if somebody pays somebody else to put something on the sign. Most of the signs that we see are not that. They are just advertising whatever business is on the property, but they do have a lot more rules when it comes to outdoor advertising signs. I didn't hear in your first meeting that's what you were interested in talking about today, so we really didn't go into that, but I just wanted to point that out. And then ORS 377 talks about signs visible to the traveling public and there's basically a coordination that happens between the municipalities or the counties and ODOT. There are some signs that are prohibited. These are also prohibited in the city, so it's kind of replication. Basically, you can't have a sign that prevents any kind of view of traffic control signs, no flashing or revolving or moving lights. This is a fun one. You can't, in ODOT's rules, you can't put a sign on a tree. And you're not able to withstand, the sign has to be able to stand more than 20 pounds per square foot for wind. Here are the signs that ODOT, some of the regulations ODOT has for, again, private signs that are visible from, but most of these apply to the billboard type signs, 48 feet long, 14 foot high. That height is not the pole height, that's just the sign itself. So these are very, very large. And then there's some spacing requirements. They have a 500 foot minimum space between signs on the same side of I-5. And there's no minimum spacing from the interchange if you're inside city limits. So here is, you've seen this before, here's the Dutchboro Les Schwab example. This is at 100 feet, coming in off the I-5, just to kind of get a sense for what that looks like. Here it is further down I-5, there in the bottom left corner, you can see at that 100 foot mark, you can see the Best Western sign here. And the majority at exit 55, this is, where the majority of the commercial properties would be on the left. There are actually none on the right that are zoned commercial. So as far as what would the new overlay actually say and what would it look like? This could be anything. Again, the city council has complete purview over commercial sign code. There really are no other, other than the ones I just mentioned from ODOT, there really are no other federal or state guidelines. But these are just examples. We've got two. One is at 1,000 feet from the fog line, and then the next slide is at 1,500 feet. Hopefully you can see these blue outlined parcels here. So this is 1,000 feet basically taking, and this is approximate, but from the fog line of I-5, and if they have commercial zoning. Our assumption was that this would only apply to commercially zoned property, not to industrial, not to residential. commercial so that's why you see only the red ones highlighted there so those there's about eight tax slots there I think and that's you know most of these are built out this is your Holiday Inn your Best Western your Elmer's your Dutch Bros the chick-fil-a that's coming through the permitting process right now It doesn't extend to WinCo. If you went to 1,500 feet, you're bringing in a lot more. It would include the WinCo. And a 1,500 foot, I think, brings it to like 15 or 16 tax lots. So that would be taking basically what the last ordinance in 2005. This was 1,500. It's a little bit larger. That's what that would look like. If you move up to exit 58, there's a lot more tax lots that are impacted at the 1,000 feet. I think there's about 25 to 27 at this one. And this is your Hampton Inns, your La Quinta, the Diamond, the McDonald's, you know them all. 1,500 feet, expands it even further. And again, this one does bring in a couple of parcels on the north side of I-5, the Met One. They are zoned commercial. And then there's another parcel there on the north side of I-5. So there is one that's shown red here. That's public right-of-way, so that one would not be eligible. So today the purpose in the muni code of the sign ordinance is here on this slide. I won't read all these, but this is pretty typical for what you see in other municipalities, protect health and welfare. A lot of these have to do with livability, trying to balance livability and growth and economic development. That's kind of the, overarching goal here of what sign ordinances are trying to do. There's aesthetics involved, but there's also the bottom line of those private businesses and trying to market their products. So this is a hodgepodge of purpose statements here that you can look at or you can keep, but we wanted to show them to you so you can see what is currently in the code. You did ask what are some of the other sign codes around freeways in Southern Oregon. The only two that we looked at that actually have separate freeway sign overlays that are different than the other commercial signs are Medford and Ashland. Medford's has a maximum height of 50 feet and 250 square foot sign area, and then Ashland's, and that's only at their exit 19, you know, the northern, the northerly one, they actually have a mean sea level regulation in theirs. They don't put a height, but it ends up being probably about 75 to 80 feet. And it's a smaller sign area, though, in Ashland, so it's only 100 square feet. So here are a few considerations, if you will, for lack of a better word, for the council as you kind of think through this this new potential policy. Sign size limits. What would you see as the maximum size of a sign? Height limits. Should there or should there not be digital reader boards? I will say that ODOT, that is one area that I think they probably would come back to and say no because of the ability to program these digital reader boards. It's just crazy anymore what you can program them to do. And I think in general, they have found them to be a distraction and a little tougher to regulate. But that doesn't mean that you couldn't still talk about it. The overlay boundary itself, what do you think is a reasonable distance and area to cover with an ordinance like this? Should it be limited to the commercial zoning district? Do you want to limit it to the two I-5 interchanges or should it be other areas, right? In the old overlay, they actually wasn't just at the interchanges. It was anywhere along I-5. As you well know, we're a little unusual in terms of the number of residential properties, the residential zoned properties that we have close to our interchanges. many communities you know it's it's it's a little bit more commercial or industrial that you find around some of those but so that's something to bear in mind in terms of light impacts and glare and things like that that could be happening towards residences and then finally balancing of the skyline aesthetics versus your economic development goals as i mentioned there's there's you know this is the the reason that you are in the seats you're in. You get to make these tough calls based on what you think your constituents are looking for. So in terms of next steps, we've got four listed here. You could direct staff to proceed with some kind of formal sign code amendment to actually do a formal draft of something. That would need to go probably to, well, actually, I take that back. The planning commission reviews development code amendments, but they don't review muni code amendments. And right now, the sign code is only in the municipal code. So this would come back to you. B, request additional community input. You could go broader with this discussion. As you know, right now, it's only taking place at the council level. you could set it for another workshop or take no action. So that's what staff has for you.

Perfect. Thanks, Brad. Any questions? I don't see any questions. Just kidding, guys. I got Rick, Victoria, Kathleen, Seth. So go ahead, Rick.

Thank you, Brad. On the south interchange, I see the limitation because of the trees and topography and so forth, and the limitation number of parcels. But when you go to the north interchange, you cited quite a few parcels would be eligible distance-wise. But again, the topography falls off quite fast. Do you have any gut feeling if there's a 100-foot height, how many of those parcels might actually consider taking the opportunity for a 100-foot sign?

So staff did take a brief look at that. So at exit 58 at the north interchange, the approximate elevation of I-5 is about 1,170 feet. The Hampton Inn is at 1,130 feet. The mobile gas station is at 1,120. So the elevation difference between I-5 and kind of those is like 45 to 60 feet elevation difference. But as you point out, it's a little more gradual. And there's a lot more visibility there. To get to the heart of your question, I don't know. you have in sign regulation, blanketing is a term that they use and that's where somebody puts out 100 and somebody puts out 100 and pretty soon you've lost your ability to really get the impact from the interstate because they're blanketing the signs.

With the city's contour map, would we be able to come up with a rough figure of the potential impact of signs?

You know what I'm saying? When you say impact, you mean like the height?

Now, how many people would be eligible for a sign? Because I think most of us are not for, we're okay maybe with a few signs, but if we're talking about, I'm just throwing a figure out there, 20 or 50 signs, we're not going to go there. So I didn't know if we took the city contour map and the elevation of the freeway, if we could come up with a rough figure of how many of those parcels could actually consider if we passed such a code.

Sure. Yeah, we didn't look at the elevation piece. What you see behind me are the number if you went with 1,000 feet from I-5. All of these going even south of Diamond would technically be eligible if you strictly went with the distance.

True, but it doesn't show whether the sign would be effective or not.

Correct. No, it does not.

Okay, thank you.

Yep. Victoria, further questions?

Yeah, thank you. Is it possible to have different overlay at each exit, making it larger at 55 and maybe shorter at 58, since there is more visibility? whether it be the 1,000 or 1,500 or maybe even some other number?

Sure, sure, you could.

Okay, and, okay, thank you.

Further questions, Kathleen?

So when we look at this municipal code list that you gave us, number seven, it says achieve these purposes consistent with state and federal constitutional limits. I thought you said there weren't any.

What I was referring to was the actual standards of design of the sign. But there are still First Amendment free speech issues when it comes to sign regulations that would definitely apply. So I think that's what this is referring to.

Oh, okay, thank you.

Yeah.

Further questions, Seth?

Yeah, this is probably a hard question to answer, but do you know roughly since 2005 how many people have appealed this that are currently existing?

I know in the last seven years, my time here, these two that I put before were the only two. We did have Hampton Inn that appealed, and I believe In-N-Out. But remember that in both of those cases, well, not In-N-Out, but the other ones, there was already a poll there. They just swapped out the signs. So we do get a fair number of sign appeals, but they're not within the I-5 area necessarily. Most of the ones that have come through are in other parts of town.

Yeah, and then I don't know, do you know the rough costs for someone to put in a sign like this? I mean, I would assume it's more prohibitive if it's already a developed parcel versus undeveloped, right? Like the Dutch Bros Bond? I would assume. So somebody that's already existing may not be as enticed to do it. I don't know if you know like 50,000, 100,000, I don't know.

Commercial signs are very, very expensive. Yeah, I couldn't tell you exactly, but well over 100,000 for the new Dutch Bros Les Schwab one.

Yeah, and you've got to kind of think, too, like on the exit over by the Red Lion, I mean, who's going to take down an old sign and put up another one, an extra 100 feet? That's going to be double the cost of what a new one is. Any further questions? Okay, thanks, Brad. So basically what I would start with is does the council have an appetite to implement – or re-engage a freeway overlay zone? You have a question?

Yeah, or a comment.

Basically, I'm just trying to gauge, are we even having this discussion to go forward and do this, or are we just going to say no? You guys want to continue the discussion of putting back in place an overlay?

Yeah, I would probably need more information, but I saw a lot of people who are interested, so maybe there's the answer.

I do feel that there's enough counselors that want to pursue this conversation, so then what I'll do is bring it back to council for further discussion. And all I'm trying to do is kind of pinpoint our focus, and so we're not getting way off in the weeds, because you do have an overlay that was on our books back up to 2005. It's a template to go off of, a pretty kind of easy discussion. So at this point, I'll bring it back to council for full discussion. Seth, and then Victoria. Seth?

Yeah, I would say one thing I'd like to see is the Chamber of Commerce input, if possible. And I don't know exactly what that'll look like, but I think even if they could reach out to some of their members that are in those areas, that'd be helpful.

All right, Victoria?

Yeah, possibly what I was going to say before was maybe additional community input as well. So that might be something to look for when we're putting this together.

If you decide to, correct me if I say anything wrong here, Brad, if you decide to implement an overlay into a muni code, it would definitely be in front of the public's purview before it was adopted within a public meeting.

Okay. Any further discussion, Indra?

Yes, the reason I asked for this is because of the appeal that came forth, and I just thought we should not be picking and choosing what businesses to give the exceptions to, because as they come forth, some people like some businesses more than others, and I didn't want it to be a subjective thing. I wanted it to be objective. So in my view, because we already approved 100 foot with a 400 foot square foot per side, that's where I would go. I think it should be open as an overlay to anyone that wants to do it now. And then, you know, looking at the, what's it called, the 1,500 or 1,000, from the fog line, the 15 seems far to me. I mean, like that would incorporate a lot of inward businesses. So I would be leaning towards a thousand personally, but I could go with either.

Okay, further discussion, and then could I ask you to put back up slide 15, signed policy considerations?

The list of questions that you had kind of put up there. Since we are going forward with discussing this, it gives them a little more guardrails, thank you. Okay, further discussion, I had Rob, and then Victoria, Rob?

Yeah, I'm in agreement with what Andrew just said. You know, when we had the purpose of the sign code, and down at number six was improve the ability of business owners to identify their businesses, the community to enhance commerce, it's funny that that to me is number six. As a business owner, to me that should probably be number one, is that that would be the whole purpose of a sign, and then it would be up to the city to kind of make sure we clean it up. But I had somebody from the tourism committee come to me and say, well, you know, today, you know, we don't really need big signs. Everybody's on their phone. There's so many other ways to identify businesses and so forth. And my response to her was that if we've got businesses, and retail businesses are definitely an endangered species right now, but if we've got businesses that are willing to spend $150,000 or more for a sign and they feel it's going to positively impact their business, who am I to argue with that? I mean, if that's the way they want to market their business, I would have to agree with them. Whether or not we allow it is something else, but if they feel it's cost-effective, then I'm going to side with their opinion there. And I would mention, as I did to her, I know several people who regularly go to the Creswell Bakery now, and the only way they ever found out about it was not off their phone. It was off the billboards that were on I-5. And they passed by a dozen times before they ever went in, but they eventually did go in, and the way they saw it was a large sign off I-5. So in that case, it helped that retail business. So I'm not going to argue with businesses who feel it would be a good use of their money to put up a sign. So I'm definitely in favor of, and I'm more in favor of Eliminating it to the interchanges only, not necessarily all along the road. And whether or not it's 1,000 or 1,500 feet, I'm not sure of yet, but I'm definitely in favor of the concept.

Yeah, I mean, you guys have to admit, we have a unique situation with our two I-5 interchanges that come off of I-5. The trees, the landscaping, and the topography having I-5 up so high. We're in a unique situation, and so I believe this is a very good conversation to have going forward with this overlay. So these questions were put up by staff to kind of maybe focus you guys in on directing staff on doing an overlay I'm not stopping discussion I'm just pointing that that's why I put that up there so our discussion going forward should be kind of giving them some tailoring to bring back a overlay for us to approve later so further discussion I got Joel Rick Rob and Victoria I'm ready I did have Victoria first sorry go ahead I would agree that it should be limited to the two I-5 interchanges and I think

The topography warrants different overlay boundaries for each of the exits. And I think we do have to balance aesthetics. But it seems to me like exit 58 would be a much smaller area where the signs would be able to be a certain height than exit 55. And it's because of the topography. I would disagree that when people put in for a reconsideration that it has something to do with whether or not you like a business, it had to do with topography and the sign being able to be seen. So that's what I think we should focus on is just not... like or dislike of businesses, but just about any business should be able to get a sign where people can see them, and the geography is going to determine what that height and size is, not like or dislike of businesses. So I think it's going to need to be different for each exit, it just seems to me.

Joel, further discussion? I was just going to go ahead and make a motion, but if there's more discussion, I'll hold back.

I think you have a little bit more discussion, so we'll come back around to you. Rick, and then Rob. Rick?

I like the comments that have been made by Rob, Indra, and Victoria, but also when I look up there, I would not be in favor of reader boards, and I would like to see if there's a mechanism where we could put two businesses on a single pole to help hold down the proliferation of poles. Thank you.

Rob?

Yeah, the digital reader boards, I'm completely against, and they'd probably be really problematic from an ODOT perspective as well.

Can't do them with ODOT.

Yeah, it's just, and from, you know, the night sky, the whole thing, completely against that. But I guess doing this policy will actually ensure that we would not be playing favorites with different businesses. But yeah, the... probably a 400 square foot sign, just like the one that was just put up, to me makes sense. As far as the height limits, I'm not 100% sure on that. It was, I guess, determined on the south end that 100 foot was what made sense as of today, and we already had a exhibition of how they determined that, and that seems reasonable. As far as what the limits should be on the north end, I'm not sure how we would determine that.

Yep, okay, thank you. Further discussion, Indra?

My feeling on the height limit is that, I mean, I don't know that a business on the north end would put up a hundred foot sign if they didn't need to at the cost. They would put up whatever, they needed to as a business. So I don't know that we have to make a difference. I wouldn't want to see huge signs up there in the sky, but I would think the business wouldn't want that either if they could get away with a smaller or shorter sign. Just depends on what the topography of the area they're wanting to put it in is.

Okay, so it looks like council wants to direct you to go forward with an overlay policy. Question to council is, do you want to do separate boundaries between the two? Okay, first question, do you want to limit this overlay to the I-5 corridor? Okay, second question, do you want to have different criteria for the different exits? Okay, so it got a majority. There was a couple of nods on no, but there's a majority of that. Okay, with that question followed, would the Previous overlay was 1,500 feet off of the I-5 fog line. For the south exit, it looked like that would be more feasible to get everybody on Parkway. But for the north exit, it didn't seem to be as it was a little bit too grandiose. So maybe we go with a 1,500 on the south and 1,000 on the north? OK. Are you following, Brad? I'm trying to get through this. OK. OK, cool. digital reader boards I think that's kind of a no-go because I could argue all day long that ODOT would shut us down on that because of their flashing lights ordinance but then again you look at some of the truck stops and they've got the reader boards but we don't have any gas stations I don't think it would we don't want to promote that so unless you guys want to go through that I'd say no reader boards limit it to commercial zoning district I think that's a yes on that. And then limited to the two I-5 interchanges, we already did that. And then I think we've already gone through the argument of the last one, balancing the skyline. And this overlay, if to put, and correct me if I say anything wrong here, This overlay, if it's put in place, this is an opportunity for a business to, in that area, to go with a larger sign, just like the example that we just saw with Dutch Brothers and Les Schwabs. Because of the tree canopy, they felt it prudent to push to go a little bit higher so they could have the visibility off I-5. This doesn't mandate that all these people can change it. It just gives them the opportunity in those two areas. Joel.

So the other thing of consideration and I don't have a position on the way or other but has to do with the skyline aesthetics versus economic development goals I saw in one of the I don't know it was Medford or Ashland or one of the in the presentation where there was a distance between signs And that would So we could consider that. If your business couldn't put up a sign because your neighboring business could up a sign, then you probably could share it like Les Schwab and Dutch Brothers are doing. And I don't know if we want to consider that as an additional direction or not.

I've got mixed feelings on it. Does Joel's idea have any legs? Indra?

One thing to consider with that, I'm not opposed, but if two companies or three go into together, you could have more that can afford to do those signs. So that's something to think about as well. And I do have a question. With the overlay, I'm assuming that businesses could still appeal if they wanted to, right? Okay.

Yes.

Kathleen.

I think Joel has a good idea there. I think that we could add that to the list, that businesses could go in together to afford their signs.

I don't think we're denying the businesses to go together, but I believe if you put a minimum distance between signs, you have businesses that their property lines touch, then you're excluding one business versus the other because the one business has the money, like ExxonMobil or Chevron versus whoever goes into Denny's. If you get a mom-and-pop store that goes into there, do they have the resources to compete with their neighbor because their neighbor put it up and the city council put a minimum distance between the signs? I think that would...

basically negate the whole overlay in my i'm putting my developer's hat on when i'm saying this question so okay any further discussion okay so the next thing is brad do you have direction we do i think we'll go ahead and draft something based on today's conversation um i think there's a couple of research things that you asked for we'll probably put it into a memo form and forward it on

Okay, and then once the memo form comes forth, if there is no objections, then how does it actually get implemented?

Right, then we would set a public hearing date and advertise that.

Okay, perfect. I just wanted you to explain it so we understand that the public will be involved before it actually gets in place.

Yep.

Okay, cool. All right, thank you very much.

Moving on, next on the agenda is city manager salary structure.

Yeah, and staff doesn't have a presentation for this. This is council-driven, and we wanted to remain that. But what we did do is Aaron sent out an email last week, and so on your dais there's just a copy of that information there.

Okay, so since this is council driven, you have some recommended talking points on the dais here.

So I'm gonna say let's give a three to five minute break here and then we can start full discussion on that, okay?

Okay, we're not excluding Rick. He'll be back in a second, but we'll just go ahead and get started here.

So this was a request to council to have a discussion in regards to taking the city manager's salary to either keep it within the non-bargaining salary structure or to take it out to be independent.

Mayor, we're still in recess.

Can we come back in?

Never mind, I think he's back.

Oh, okay, cool. Sorry, guys, I guess we did go to commercial break. I was just like, I just needed time to go to the bathroom. So anyways, you guys had got some talking points here that was provided to you. Anybody, this is completely council-driven, so I would bring it back to council for who wants to start discussion or even have discussion.

Kathleen?

So from my standpoint, the whole issue was to have executive flexibility, to have executive distinction, because he is our only employee, or the city manager position is our only employee. So it made sense to me that we would take it out of the non-bargaining salary structure. Seth?

Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, I think we talked about this, I don't know, it's been a while now, but it seemed like most people were on board with separating him out, so I'm okay with that. I don't, you know.

Anybody else? Rob.

I think that whatever we decide, it has to be basically personality neutral. So, you know, when we're doing a resolution or anything, it can't be with the particular organization holder of that office in mind because it could be different in a year or five years or whatever. The point that I've made before is that what we've discovered, and it's obvious, that every bargaining group ends up affecting every other bargaining group, including the non-bargaining group. Unions leapfrog each other or they try to equal each other. We then end up with the rising salaries of union people, which end up bumping up against the non-bargaining. And the point is that every bargaining group and non-bargaining group affect each other. We don't have, as a council, a single employee that doesn't have a major conflict of interest. Every single time we discuss a union contract, because they eventually, maybe not that year, but within three or four years, they affect the non-bargaining, and then they affect the manager's salary as well. So we need to have at least one employee that is actually our employee and working with council without any conflict of interest because we don't have that now. That would be to me the main reason that I would want to see this divided out. Also, I believe that actually for effective purposes, The manager's position now is already divided out because it has benefits that nobody else has, pure and simple. Anytime we've looked at our manager's salary on any kind of compensation list, whether it's comparing it to other cities or comparing it internally, it basically never even mentions his 8% deferred comp. That's an extra $16,000 over and above what his listed salary always is. So it's already, our manager is already getting benefits and is already different than the rest of that bargaining group. That was defined by prior councils and the manager himself. So for that reason, that's the way it already is. So to have it be, we'll say the benefits of being in the STEP system and also the benefits of being independent, I mean, that doesn't seem reasonable to me because Again, for that reason, he's already divided out, and I think we should actually just make that distinction more clear and official, and make sure that it's very clear to everybody that our manager will be separate for those reasons.

Further discussion, questions? Indra?

I will go ahead and motion to move the city manager outside of the non-bargaining salary schedule. Looks like most are in favor.

I agree with you on your interpretation, so there is a motion on the table to take city manager's salary outside of the non-bargaining salary schedule. With a second from Kathleen, any further discussion?

Okay, we'll go into a vote. Indra? Yes. Joel?

Yes.

Rob. Yes. Rick.

Yes. Eric. Yes.

Victoria. Yes. Kathleen. Yes. Seth.

Yes.

Okay.

So council has made a decision to take the city manager out of the non-bargaining salary structure. And I assume I would leave it to you. Is there any other stuff that we need to address now that we've done that?

because the evaluation everything else is still it's outside of this process so we'll make the proper salary adjustment which will come back to council with a resolution all right thank you very much

With that, we are at the end of the agenda. So you guys all have your packets for Wednesday night. I would ask for questions or comments.

You have been distributed on the dais today an updated schedule or agenda for Wednesday night's meeting. So I would see what is different. 2D was added to the agenda resolution authorizing city manager to enter into the contract for Allenwood Village Public Infrastructure Project. Okay, so there was an item added to the council actions. If you had any questions on it, let's know. Anybody?

It would be in the packet that you got today.

Okay, so Rob's question was, is the added agenda item, the materials for that, that should have been included in what you got on the dais today. Okay, with that being said, is there anybody, any councilor that has any questions, comments, or concerns about Wednesday night's meeting and the updated agenda in front of you? Victoria.

Are we just going to general agenda now? I'll wait if not.

One last call. Anybody have any questions, concerns in regards to Wednesday night's meeting, the packet that you previously received, and or the updated agenda for that meeting? Seeing none, we'll go into discussion in regards to the future calendar. Victoria.

Yes on the memo request I Know that we talked about this in agenda setting and I went back to my notes and I didn't see it So I wanted to just know a little bit of an update of when we are going to be discussing exclusion zones Expansion again, I'm sorry. I didn't have that in my notes and I couldn't remember I knew about it but on the back of the

Future agenda that should be on the dais for you today, it is listed under memo requests, but we don't have a date certain because I believe that staff is still researching that.

Well, I think part of the conversation was Stephanie has been inundated, and so we did give her in that meeting that you're talking about a little bit more time, but she has it on her things to do.

As soon as possible. As soon as possible it will come out.

Okay, thank you.

Further questions, comments in regards to future calendar? Kathleen.

So I was under the impression that we were going to get a memo or an executive session before the invocation.

That came out this morning?

This morning. Yeah, it should be in your email box. Thank you.

And then I had one more question. Sure. With the... logistics company for the salary structure. Did we include the pay equity piece? Because I know that was something that was important to all of us in their evaluating. Did we include that in the contract?

I don't know the particulars of the contract, but we can get that information to you guys.

Because I think the pay equity piece was pretty important.

I think it partially is inherent due to the legal limitation, but Stephanie, can you recommend?

I think there is some level of inherent comparison among the non-bargaining. So anybody in there, there will be some aspect of that because we'll be grouping like positions. It won't address pay equity with any other, with any of the bargaining units, though, because they won't be looking at what the bargaining units are. That would be a much more extensive.

No, but just the non-bargaining.

Yeah, within the non-bargaining, there will be some level of it, and we will also take a hard look at it to verify where everyone is placed with pay equity in mind once we have their recommended salaries.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Anybody else? All right, seeing none, this workshop is adjourned. And thank you for your participation.