Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Commissioner Juarez.

Here.

Commissioner Esparza. Here. Commissioner Gill.

Here.

And Chair Hamm. Commissioner McElwain and Nelson are absent this evening.

Introduce Pastor King from New Testament Baptist Church for the invocation.

Our Father, we.

Please join me in a flag salute. Ready?

May be seated.

The next item on the agenda is public comment, and this is a time for citizens to comment on subject matters not on the agenda and that are within the jurisdiction of the Commission. This is also the public's opportunity to request an item from the consent calendar be pulled for discussion purposes or to comment on any item that is on the agenda. Comments related to public hearing items will be heard at the time the item is discussed. A maximum of three minutes is allowed for each speaker. Please begin your comments by stating your name and providing your city of residence. Would anyone like to speak under public comment? Seeing none, the next item on the agenda is consent calendar. However, we do not have anything on the consent calendar, so we'll move on. We had a public hearing, but it isn't, okay. We do not have a public hearing item, but under general business, we have something from the community development department, and it is a finding of general plan consistency in accordance with public resources code section 21151.2 and government code section 65402 for the acquisition of a future elementary school site by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District. The project is located within the future Fargo Village Mixed Use Master Plan area, north of Fargo Avenue, east of 12th Avenue, occupying a 16.44 acre gross area, and it's going to be 14.01 acres. acre net area, and it's going to be portions of assessor parcel numbers 007-010-031-000 and 007-360-018-000. And I'll now request the staff report. Thank you, Chair Hamm and commissioners.

This is a request by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District for a general plan finding of consistency in accordance with public resource code section 21151.2 and government code section 65402 for the acquisition of a future elementary school site. In compliance with the California public resource code, the Pioneer Union Elementary School District provided the city written notice on June 24, 2026, informing the city of its intent to acquire a site within the Fargo Village master plan for the construction of an elementary school, and requesting that the planning commission provide its recommendation regarding the site acquisition within 30 days. The complete text of the section of the public resource code is as follows. To promote the safety of pupils and comprehensive community planning, the governing board of each school district before acquiring title to property for a new school site or for an addition to a present school site shall give the planning commission having jurisdiction notice in writing of the proposed acquisition. The planning commission shall investigate the proposed site and within 30 days after receipt of the notice shall submit to the governing board a written report of the investigation and its recommendations concerning acquisition of the site. The governing board shall not acquire title to the property until the report of the planning commission has been received. If the report does not favor the acquisition of the property for a school site or for an addition to a present school site, the governing board of the school district shall not acquire title to the property until 30 days after the commission's report is received. Furthermore, California government code section 65402 requires a school district prior to acquiring real property to submit the location, purpose, and extent of such acquisition to the planning agency having jurisdiction, the planning commission, for a determination as to conformity with the general plan. Section 65402 further states that the planning agency shall render its report as to conformity with the said adopted general plan or part thereof within 40 days after the matter was submitted. to it or such a longer period of time as may be designated by the legislative body. The project is located within the future Fargo Village Master Plan area north of Fargo, east of 12th Avenue, occupying a 16.44-acre gross, 14.01-acre net portion of APN 007-010031 and 007-6001. Sorry, 360-018. And this shows the location of the school site within the future Fargo Village master plan area outlined in red. And the Fargo Village master plan, planned unit development, and associated tentative subdivision maps, as well as the environmental will, I'm sorry, and development agreement will be presented to the planning commission on a future date. The project site is currently occupied by agricultural uses, mainly vineyards and orchards, but planned for the development of Fargo Village mixed-use development, which proposes a 304-acre mixed-use community proposed to feature a mix of residential, commercial, educational, and recreational uses. The plan includes 926 single-family homes on varying lot sizes, 13.36 acres of apartment units, 7.26 acres of neighborhood commercial development, 12.9 acres of public park space, and a 6.61 acre stormwater retention site, as well as the 4.01 acre school site. The general plan designates the parcels located on 007, 010, 031, and 018. as a combination of low density residential, medium density residential, high density residential, neighborhood commercial, and public facility. The site also contains two floating designations for future educational facilities and open space facilities. The proposed school site is approximately located as outlined in red on the general plan map. Applicable general plan policies and goals include goals L26 and L27. Goal L26, adequate and accessible educational opportunities supporting the needs of Hanford's residents and businesses. Goal 27, appropriate sites for educational facilities to serve projected population growth. And the school sites designation will support the needs of Hanford's residents, providing an appropriate site for an educational facility to serve the projected population growth. Applicable general plan policies include L98 through L100. Policy L98, purpose of educational facilities land use designation, establish the educational facilities land use designation for existing and future public and private schools, kindergarten through college. 99 types of uses in the educational facilities land use designation. Typical uses in the educational facilities land use designation include elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges. The proposed designation will serve an elementary school and located within the Pioneer Union Elementary School District. And policy L100, location of educational facilities designation. Locate the educational facilities designation on existing school facilities and in new areas planned for residential neighborhoods. Where a site is not yet developed, the land use designation is allowed to float on the land use map within a one mile square section in which it is located. Locations along collector streets are preferred for new elementary school districts. The floating future educational facility designation will be designated through a general plan finding of consistency for the future school site to be located within the Fargo Village Master Plan area. The site will be located on the future West Harvest Loop, which is an internal collector. The remaining surrounding streets include local roads West Windsor Drive, Schoolhouse Lane, and West Saffron Street. The Pioneer Union Education School District is seeking to acquire this property to develop an elementary school, and staff has reviewed the request for the acquisition of the site for the purposes of constructing a new school. Staff finds that the proposed acquisition is consistent with the city's general plan related to school siting. And the key requirements for requested action, the public resource code section 211 5.1.2 requires the Planning Commission to investigate the proposed site and to make a recommendation concerning acquisition of the site to the, I'm sorry, by the district to promote the safety of pupils and comprehensive planning. Government Code Section 65402 requires review for conformance with the county's, I'm sorry, city's general plan relative to its purpose, location, and extent. As for CEQA, this... does constitute a project, and the proposed acquisition is a project under CEQA. Staff has reviewed the project to determine the required level of CEQA review. The proposed project is exempt from CEQA under state CEQA guidelines 15061 , the common sense exemption, section 15061 . of the state CEQA guidelines states that a project is exempt from CEQA if the activity is covered by the common sense exemption that CEQA only applies to a project, which would have the potential for causing a significant effect on the environment, where it can be seen with certainty that there is no possibility that the activity in question may have a significant effect on the environment. The activity is not subject to CEQA review. There is no possibility that the proposed acquisition itself will result in a physical change in the environment. The acquisition of the property by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District does not approve any development of the project, nor does it disturb the physical environment. The future development of the site is subject to CEQA review. Therefore, the activity is covered by the common sense exemption. The site's development is contemplated in an EIR, which will be separately presented to the Planning Commission along with the Fargo Village Mixed Use Development. and that is State Clearinghouse number 2024-08-0949. And with that, staff recommends that the Planning Commission adopt Resolution 2026-12, finding the project exempt from California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, pursuant to Section 15061-B3, Common Sense Exemption of Title 14 of the California Code of Regulations, State CEQA Guidelines, And B, find that the acquisition of a future elementary school site by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District is consistent with the city's general plan. I'll invite any questions you may have of staff at this time.

Okay, thank you. Are there any questions from the commission? Do we have something?

I have a recommendation actually. My recommendation is, I know that SQL review is not required for the acquisition, but I know that I live in that area, so that has a BNSF railroad going right next to the property. And as per the California Title 5, PCR 14010, it requires a safety study for any school site which is within 1,500 feet of a railroad easement for any kind of derailment or hazardous cargo and noise vibration. I mean, it's something to consider while moving forward with the development.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

I have a question. So in there, you mentioned that there's going to be a future Fargo Village mix.

Correct.

Do we know when we would get that master plan?

We are still working. There's an associated development agreement, and we're still working out some of the specifics of that. Once that's wrapped up, we will be presenting that to Planning Commission. We anticipate that to be within the next few months.

Okay, and the next question then is would it be better to wait to make a recommendation on on the school plan here? Basically, why vote on that now if we're going to get the whole master plan at a later date?

So we're separating out the acquisition from the actual approval for development. Even with this plan, the school district will likely submit a site plan for staff to review. Schools are able to exempt themselves from... city's typical procedures however in accordance with this government code and the public resources code we have to make this finding within 30 days of the school district's request to um to the planning commission so what we're approving today is the acquisition and finding that consistent with the general plan thank you for answering my question of course any other questions

When I first looked at the agenda, my thought was, since we've had so many public hearings, I was thinking this was going to be a public hearing, and I was going to handle it in that format, but this is not a public hearing item. But I do see we have a couple of representatives out in the audience, and I'm going to give them the opportunity to speak if they would like to present anything either in favor or in opposition to this proposal. I think that microphone's on, is it? The green light on? On the microphone, on the bottom.

Is that working?

Yes.

My name is Matt Smith. Pleasure to be here. I'm with Woodside Homes. I'm the vice president of land acquisition. I've been working on this land acquisition now for several years. And it's a pleasure to be here. I thought I'd just mention a couple things to you about what's been going on at this site and us in general. We have loved our relationship with the city of Hanford. If you think of the railroad tracks right there on the east side, adjacent on the other side of the railroad tracks off of Flint. We built there about 13, 12, 13 years ago when I first came on with Woodside. So we built a beautiful project there. Now we made sure to put up a nice tall block wall to protect against noise. I think the wall might be 12 feet or so. So made sure to protect against noise, and we did an acoustical study at that time to make sure that we were appropriately contemplating the environment. And had a great experience there. Built some larger homes than you might consider. Some people might say, well, you're up against the railroad tracks. We sold really, really well some larger, good-sized homes. From there, we went down and built a project called Hannadale off of Centennial. Those were 12,000 to 15,000 square foot lots. Did really well there and got to see that Hanford had some demand built up and pent up for larger homes and larger lots. Then we went over to 13th Avenue and built two different product lines, a 6,000 square foot and a 5,000 square foot. lot and just sold out of those and this will be our will be our continuation project now we've been working on this for several years this is a little over 300 acres i believe to your uh point uh commissioner uh gil um i believe we might be just outside the 1500 feet to the school. I think that was taken a look at, but we will verify that with you, but I believe it to be just outside the 1,500 feet as the school was interested in that as well as they were thinking about locations. So we have, there's four product lines here, just so you can kind of picture it. There's, we're trying to go after, the intent here is that this would be the nicest or one of the nicest projects in the city of Hanford. That's our intention. So if you can kind of picture what we've done to try to make that happen. A lot of times if you look in normal neighborhoods, you'll just see very gridded out streets, very straight rectangular type of streets. And when we first designed this, we said even though it's not as cost effective, we want to do something different here. And so if you kind of see the looped road around the outside, kind of in the heart of the project, you've got this big looped road around the project. That's not just going to be a pretty area to drive. Yeah, right there that Gabby's showing. It will also be a trail system that's going to walk around this project. And so if you picture, you're probably going to have around a mile of walking trail around this location. We are super excited to promote kind of pedestrian-friendly walking for our residents. And we're not going to be inviting it, but this is not gated, so we would expect probably some people from neighboring communities to walk over and enjoy the trail system as well. So you'll have an extra wide walking path, and then you'll be walking around parks as well. You kind of see the two very large park systems. Now, they may not seem that large physically, In this map, just remember that this is 300 acres. So those are actually very, very large parks. We have a park by our old home, for example, that was a half acre. Just to give some context, these are more like five and six acre parks. These are very large parks. One of the fun things that we love about this project is the connectivity walking to the commercial. So Walter here represents the cellar. And they're going to do some commercial up at the upper left-hand corner of the property. And one of the ways we wanted to connect is everything will be walkable to that commercial location as well. Speaking of walkability, you see that park, the five-acre park? We're also going to connect walkability from that park to the school site. So there's a trail system that goes between those two different product types right there that Gabby's showing that will connect those students who'd like to walk to school. And so we picture... Lots of lack of cars, because we picture people walking to school and kids walking to school. We think that's going to help the environment as far as reducing people having to drive to school. We have over 920 units, single-family residential units, of kids walking to school. We think it'll be fantastic. We could not be more excited about the partnership, too, that we have with Pioneer Union. We've been working with them for years as well. One of the reasons we love Northwest Hanford is because we love Pioneer Union schools. And so we're super excited about having them be a big part of our success. We want to highlight them, and we know that them being there will also help us. We're super excited about Pioneer Union, and we've also partnered with the city to come up with some conditions of approval that say we need to talk and work out how we're going to eventually handle the crossing, the railroad crossing over there, because it'll have to be upgraded at some point in the future. We've taken an active role to say we will help in designing the plans for that future improvement there. It'll be something that a lot of Builders pitch into and are pitching in and helping will be in part contributing to making sure those plans are moving forward in a timely process. We have four product lines here. We're going to build those very large homes that we told you about that we built previously. Those 12,000 to 15,000 square foot lots. But then we're going to cater also to more of the family buyer on some 50s and 60s. And then we're going to cater also to some of those people who are just trying to get into housing. And we have 40-foot wide lots there as well. Those are kind of more in the center of the project. If you can kind of see some of the smaller lots in the middle of the project, yeah, right in there. And so our attempt is to bring all of Hanford in and say, hey, we want everybody to have the opportunity to be a part of what we consider to be the best project in Hanford. We want those who are just starting contemplate housing, and we want those who have had the opportunity to move up and get bigger houses. So anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to hear. But if you have any questions, this is a project I'm incredibly passionate about, and I'd love to answer your questions, or I can go sit down and continue to listen to you. Any questions for me before I sit down?

You gave us quite a bit of information. That was great. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you so much. I have a question, actually. I'm really excited about the project. It looks really good. Oh, thank you.

Is there any connectivity for, like, the sidewalks connecting to the neighboring subdivisions? Or I see there's a boundary, like, kind of homes pushing right close to the property line. Is it, like, is there any sidewalks on the outside of that particular right next to the road?

So I'm not totally, I think I'm understanding what you're saying. And yes, so for example, if you look at the 60 foot wide lots, you'll see kind of that center cul-de-sac on the upper, kind of in the upper side there, 60 foot wide lots, that'll exit out onto the main road there. So you can walk right out of the neighborhood through the back of the cul-de-sac. Through the back of it, it's right down that, I don't know if you're.

Yeah, I can point it. So basically, I'm talking about the, when you go from that site towards the west, I know north is facing the soul. So if you go west and you take right, and is there a sidewalk that is connecting around the property line, or?

Yes. So if I understand correctly, you're asking about the exterior roads. Yes, exterior roads. And so there will be a sidewalk that goes along the exterior of the project as well as landscaping and as well as a block wall. So you'll have all of those access to all of that as well. There's nothing out there right now.

Yeah, this is brand new. There's nothing. No.

I live by that. I know there's a corn cob thing.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, right there. So it sounds like you live fairly nearby here. Yeah. Any other questions that I might be able to answer for you while I'm here?

Maybe that might be later, but I was kind of curious, when you talk about the smaller density housing versus low density housing, we are promoting more, building more homes. Is there any price differences? When we talk about the affordability, how is the difference between that?

We're actually only talking about the school. We're getting a little bit off topic. I understand. We'll catch him in about two months. No problem.

Okay. I'm just excited about the project. Hey, we're excited to come, and we'll tell you all the details about it. But there will be a variety of pricing from probably the high 300s to a million dollars. We'll go into that more in detail when we come back.

I hope you do come back. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Do you want to hear more about that? Awesome.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, I think we've covered a lot of material, but some of it outside of our purview for this meeting. Let's get back to what we're supposed to do for tonight. Are there any other further comments or discussion on this item before we consider voting on this? If there's nothing else, please look at the recommended motion.

I apologize, I don't have the slide with it, but it is in the staff report.

I mean, our first page of it.

I move to adopt resolution number 2026-12, finding the acquisition of the future elementary school site by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District consistent with the general plan and exempt from CEQA pursuant to section 15061. Is there a second?

I second that. Thank you. It's been moved and seconded to adopt Resolution 2026-12, finding the acquisition of the future elementary school site by the Pioneer Union Elementary School District consistent with the general plan and exempt from CEQA pursuant to Section 15061, Section B3. Roll call vote, please.

Commissioner Esparza? Commissioner Gill? Yes. Commissioner Juarez? Yes. And Chair Ham? Yes.

Ordered, and hopefully we'll see you in a few more months, and the school part of the project is approved. We've got the 30-day thing covered.

Thank you. All right.

Thank you.

Bye. See you.

The next item on the agenda is Director's Comments.

I am filling in for Jason, and he did not provide me any updates to give you so i don't have anything today all right we'll move on are there any items from the commissioners anything that we have of interest

Okay, I have a few items. One of them has been, well, let me take care of one item first before that. On Facebook, I saw an interesting item that it looks like something is coming up in August that there's going to be an event. It looks like it might be in the courthouse building, some gaming event. The reason I bring this up because several months ago we approved a golf simulator over there on 7th Street near the train station. And then prior to that, we approved some kind of a computer business up on 10th and Fargo area. And so I was wondering, does this potential gaming thing have to have any approval by us? I'm not sure exactly the details of the gaming thing, but it's set a date and it's coming to Hanford and it looks like it might be put on by some business out of Fresno.

I am not familiar. I haven't heard about the event.

Okay.

If you want to forward me the information, then I can take a look and potentially it's parks.

I'll send that to you. Okay. Thank you.

The other item I want to bring up is the one of our, let me say it in general. In general, we're supposed to make sure that we have good attendance at our meetings. And if we cannot attend, we are supposed to call in and get an excused absence. The vice chair, I believe, has had quite a few absences. I'm not sure if they've all been approved absences. excused absences or not but i would like to have the staff please look at that to see if he has exceeded the number of absences and that we need to potentially look for another vice chair the other reason i bring that up is because all of the other members of the commission are pretty much brand new so if we do vote for a vice chair we're going to need to have a little bit of training for them before they might feel comfortable and taking on that position

Okay, I can discuss next steps with Jason when he returns to the office.

Thank you.

Anything else?