Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining us on this sunny Thursday. I would like to call the March 26 planning policy commission meeting to order at 6 32 PM. Today's meeting is a hybrid meeting. The planning policy commission is in person, but staff or members of the public may be attending virtually or in person staff. Do we have a quorum this evening?

Yes, we do.

Excellent. We will now move on to minutes. In our packet, we had our first item of business tonight, which is approval of our minutes. We want to take action to approve them from the March 12th PPC meeting. PPC, are there any corrections to the minutes from the March 12th meeting? Head shakes, all right. Hearing none, the minutes are approved. We will get into our next item of business, which is public comment. For this meeting, we're holding general public comment at this time for all general topics being discussed by the commission. Staff, has anybody signed up to make public comment?

No, they have not.

All right. Then I will skip our guidelines for that for now. And we'll move on to our next item on the agenda. which will be our Title 18 clarifying amendments for residential use definitions and daycare standards. Kate Keeney, our principal planner, and Yeyi Chen, our associate planner, will be presenting tonight. Kate and Yeyi, please go ahead.

Hold on just one moment.

You're rolling right along with those intros, so sorry to put you on the spot so quickly.

I'm just trying to get my PowerPoint to open up so we can start the presentation. We call it the beach ball where it just keeps rolling there. So hold on one second. I'm not sure why it's not coming. Sorry about that. WebEx just failed, so give me just one moment.

Yeah, no worries. In the meantime, I might approach to tilt the TVR direction a little bit if you don't mind.

Here we go. Sorry about the wait. And is everyone seeing the PowerPoint now? Thank you.

Again, my name is Kate Kaney. I'm sorry for the delay. I'm the city's principal planner, and I am here today with my colleague, Yi Chen, to continue the review of the clarifying code amendments that the commission's been reviewing over the past two meetings. As always, as you're listening to our proposals, these are some considerations we have for you. We would like you to think of what does the code say now? Are you understanding that? Why are we proposing the amendments? And are the proposed changes clear? Do you think any other changes might be helpful? This slide gives you a sense of where we are in this process of review. Tonight, March 26, we are going through the last new briefing for you. And tonight, once again, it's an informational briefing. It's your opportunity to ask questions. There's no action requested. The meeting following this on the 9th of April, we will bring all of the amendments back to you that you've seen. Some may have changed a little bit. We will share that based on the input we get from you or that we have gotten from you. So now I am going to go ahead and hand over the mic to Yi Chen to present the new proposal.

Good evening commission. My name is Yi Chen and I'm an associate planner of the city. And I'm here tonight with a couple of simple and short code amendments for you all. And please feel free to ask me questions as I present. So our first amendment tonight will be M definitions and we're proposing to repeal the definition of multifamily residential. The reason for this change is because we have currently two multifamily definitions within the IMC. The first one being multifamily residential and the second one being dwelling multifamily. With the implementation of middle housing into our land use code, we currently have dwelling middle housing is defined as two to four units. In addition to dwelling multifamily as five plus units. So with these new definitions, the multifamily residential definition is now outdated and the amendment aims to decrease confusion while navigating our land use code. Any questions before I move on to the next proposal? All right, so then our second amendment is going to be increasing clarity by adding references to definitions. We are proposing to add references to the definition specifically for daycare center, daycare center family, in addition to adult family home. The reason for this change is because the land use code currently does not provide direct references to the definitions for each of these uses. And this is important because the definitions outline the number of individuals that can be under care in addition to applicable state regulations. Okay, thank you. And this is pretty important for applicants to know as they're going through the process. In addition to this proposed amendment, we're also asking for a minor wording update pertaining to family daycare center criteria. This change will be updating terminology from family childcare center to family daycare center for cohesion within the whole code section. The goal of this amendment is to provide clear navigation through the code for the specific uses I've just described. Any questions before I move on?

Yes.

Just a quick, hopefully easy one. So when I was looking at the code, they said that you could have six residents in an adult daycare. Does that include the carers in addition to the people being taken care of when they stay? And is that like for people who are living there overnight? Is that the definition of a resident? I'm just curious.

From the research and looking at the definition, the six person limit is limited to the individuals under care. So caregivers aren't accounted for. Moving on to the next one. all right so our next proposed amendment in relation to the last slide but slightly different will be for daycare center standards and we are proposing to add in a new provision pertaining to traffic impact fee waivers the reasons for this change is because of since march 2nd 2026 city council has adopted ordinance number 3134 which offers options of 80 and 100 traffic impact fee waivers for early learning facilities which are applicable to daycare center uses So just a little bit of background for all of you guys. For the ordinance, the 80% reduction will automatically apply for all early learning facility uses. But if the 100% fee waiver is chosen, the facility is required to record a covenant with the city to outline how the enrollment requirement will be met. in addition to what the 20% waived impact fee is in case it needs to be repaid. And part of what the covenant needs to outline is the state subsidized childcare enrollment needs to be at minimum 25%, and it needs to be verified by DCYF. This amendment will provide necessary guidance on when the covenant should be recorded with the city in the case the 100% impact fee waiver is being requested. Any questions on that one?

Questions? I have one on that one. Okay. I guess a couple, actually. Are operators informed about the timing of covenant records, meaning are they flagged up front to know when they need to apply so they can plan for that? Because I know it's between the building permit and, I think, the certificate of occupancy. Yes. So, like, are they... it's very clear to them, like they need to do that.

This will be the goal for this amendment specifically for when operators are doing their research for their building permit application, that the traffic impact fee waivers will be upfront in the code. So then they can prepare and let us know. But there will hopefully be a lot of conversation with operators through the building process just to confirm.

Awesome. And then one follow up is, does the covenant expire if the property is sold and it's not used as a daycare?

yes okay any other questions okay thank you thank you all right and then our last proposed amendment will be the removal of daycare operation or yeah, daycare operation references from the home business standards section. And we are proposing to omit a sentence that outlines outside storage or display requirements for daycare operations. And the specific sentence we're asking to omit is play equipment for daycare operations is considered outdoor storage display. The reasons for this change is because this is a residual language that was originally there because daycare operations were originally a part of our home business standards section of the code, but it is no longer applicable since the daycare operation use has since been moved to a different section within the IMC. All right, this about wraps up my proposed code amendments for tonight. Can I ask if any commissions have any questions for me?

I'm seeing a lot of head shakes. I do have kind of one, I guess, kind of follow-up, comment would be regarding the dwelling unit definition. Are there any permits, covenants, or prior approvals with the old definition that we would need to consider how to resolve those with this update?

Per my research, it seems like the definition for multifamily residential is the only kind of residual point that might have been overlooked during the implementation of middle housing and tour code. So I think we're good on that.

Awesome. Cool.

Any other questions, comments? Just a point of clarification following up on Jesse's question. So I'm assuming that once a project is sort of vested and the permit is approved, that they're kind of grandfathered under the existing code at that time, not necessarily having to change anything based on these code changes.

Oh, yes.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you all so much.

So I will just go over a couple more slides and let you know next steps in our process. I believe the commission has seen this slide before. I'm just letting you know what we will be doing over the next quarter. And that is, again, on April 9th to review all of the code amendments. And then there will be a public hearing that will be in May. And we will be asking you for your recommendation at that time. So council action still anticipated in June. lastly um i know he asked you if you had any final questions we wanted to ask you one more time just in case uh before closing out any other comments going once going twice i think we're all set do you get what you need from us yes thank you so much thank you so much

Excellent. That will take us to our second item of regular business tonight, which is to discuss the Promoting Building Investment in Issaquah 2026-2027 Work Plan. So we're now going to have Kristin Leeson, our planning manager, to present tonight. Kristin, when you are set up and ready, you may steal the show.

There we go.

Thank you. Yep, Kristen Leeson, planning manager. So I've told you this a few times, but I thought I'd present it to you all as well. We're selling our plan.

Oops, that didn't happen.

There we go. So yes, we are on a mission to promote building, particularly housing investments in Issaquah. and so we have come up with ways that hopefully will work to do that and we're just looking for your feedback tonight we have presented this to council it's also been presented to the master builders association and now it's you guys because you are the first step to getting these things approved so there are a lot of factors in development and the easiest one to see is land use regulations right We don't have control over construction costs. We don't have control over the market, taxes, tariffs, land costs. We can't control those things. So we are focused right now on the land use regulations to do with those what we can to help the process and also on partnerships with our builders, our developers, our legislators to make these things happen. So we're going to be proactive with our builder outreach and community participation. um or community perception i'm sorry so our goal is to create momentum in building and change our perceptions but right now there's not necessarily a positive perception about how we how permitting is and how development is here in the city so we need to get the positive stories out there and let people know so our economic development and housing manager is out there meeting one-on-one with developers finding specific contacts with these people. We're starting to have roundtable discussions with different developers in the Master Builders Association in the area. And we're getting our success stories out there, making sure when we get projects completed on time or help them do it under budget or within budget, that kind of thing, we want to get those success stories out there. We also want to build more relationships and, whoops. There we go. So we're going specifically to some of the larger home builders, some of the smaller ones as well, but since our focus is on Central Issaquah, we are working for some of the bigger developers. But our goal is we want to increase volume, so we want to improve speed at which we get these things permitted, predictability, and ironically flexibility at the same time, clarity and design support. We want to just help walk them through the process. there we go so we the council had a retreat on January 31st and they identified things that they want to focus on this year and most of it was housing also transportation but mostly housing as I mentioned we've also talked with different home builders in the area different developers who came up with the list for us as well about three pages long and Staff, every time we go through projects, we identify things that need to be fixed, or we talk with developers, and developers say, this is hard, or this doesn't make sense. And we go, oh, you're right, it doesn't. Maybe we can re-look at that. And also from when we did our Title 18 update, we had a whiteboard, and there were things, items that were too big to address at the time that we said we would try and get back to later. So some of those are on our list as well. I'm not going to go through all of these, but I think they were 19 things on the council list we're proposing to do most of those and one has already been done it's the tree code and i'll go through these a little bit later um in a little bit more detail the home builders they had two lists a primary list a secondary list they had 27 things total and again we're doing most of those we already allow binding site plans we don't need to address that secondary list i think there were seven things we're only not proposing to do one which is to transfer from parcel base to district zone based parking Our Title 18 up board, we had our Title 18 up board, white board, we have nine different items on here that we're trying to do, but we have a list of about 27 or something like that, 17 that we're not, that we just can't get to yet. So, and then we also have our non-code updates. Everything else that you guys are going to see, we have the track, we're required to do our shoreline master program update by the end of 2027. We have wildfire regulations that we're going to have to get put into place soon. Our comprehensive plan updates. We have regional growth center recertification coming through you all. Legislative updates. They keep coming out with new updates, and we keep having to get those done. We wanted to start neighborhood plans. I don't think that's going to happen. We also have big projects that at some point I'd like to go through these with you all to see what your decisions, what effect they have on the ground. I was thinking about that today. I'd like to go through some of those with you some time. Maybe even do a tour. We'll talk about it later. But we have current projects. So we have nine, I think, different projects coming up in High Street and Issaquah. We have our Trailhead TOD, which is hoping to break ground in June. We have the Issaquah High School. We have some multifamily conversions, commercial multifamily conversions. We have different townhomes going up all over the place. And Costco is putting in a new fuel station. So there's a lot going on. The council asked for it and I wasn't sure where to throw it in, but they said, what are Bothell and Woodinville doing that's so right? Why are they getting so much development right now and we're not? And Bothell needed to increase their zoning and their capacity because they didn't have enough to meet their growth targets, their housing growth targets that have been assigned to them. So excuse me, so about 75% of their land was zoned for single family. And they've gone in and they've rezoned a lot of that. They have set minimums as to what they can develop on these properties. And it may go up to 25 units minimum and up to 80% maximum. They removed all of their parking requirements. And now they're re-looking at it going, Huh, whoops, now they're talking about putting maximums on there. So they created a very simple development bonus program. We have one, but ours is complicated. It's kind of convoluted. So we're going to fix that. They also, though, I think one of the biggest pieces is that land is the most expensive piece of development. And they had four parcels of land from one and a half to two acres each. Two of those they've already negotiated, given away, and those have been developed. One's mixed use. One is affordable housing. They have two other properties about the same size that are being cleaned up right now. They were contaminated, and those are also being cleaned up. And then they will start negotiations for those properties. We simply don't have those properties right now. The other one that they wanted to look at was Woodinville, and quite frankly, they've done nothing to change their code in about 15 years, so they've just gotten lucky, and the market found them. They have a lot of green space, and that we don't have, green fields that we don't have, and so they've just been discovered, and it's pretty, and as we keep pointing out, they have wine, so it doesn't hurt. So here's where we're going. We have decided to focus on Central Issaquah because that's where, as you know, for years we've wanted our growth to go. So here is, I'm gonna go over these, but these are 17 items that we are going to address. 14 of these will be coming through you. so in the first actually second quarter the ones that we've already talked about that we've already started are outdoor amenity space requirements step back requirements and self-certification of adu so the third one won't be coming to you but what that is is pre-approved plans that the building you know it's certified by architects that the building works the building works the way it is it has all the required ada so forth things that it needs it would still have to get land use approval it's whole programming go on to a website pick the one you want say this is it i want to put it on this parcel and then you have to go through the land use process step back requirements we have um we currently require depending on where you are that you step back your building anywhere between the fourth floor and above you know fourth floor and sixth floor or something like that and uh developers say that this is more expensive So we're looking at how to adjust that and have been talking to people to make it a little less expensive. But the purpose of the step-back requirements is to make it more pedestrian friendly and also to allow more light to come through on those streets so that you don't get a canyon effect. So we want them. We just don't know how to make it work with the developers. The other one, I'm going backwards here, outdoor amenity space requirements. We currently, you may recall, we did an amendment for outdoor amenity space requirements. And if you have 22 units or more, you're required to do 100 square feet of outdoor common amenity space, 48 square feet per unit with the unit, and then an additional 400 square feet. And we changed it, and every unit had to have this 48 square feet attached to it. And we came back and we said, OK, we'll reduce that. You can do just 50% of your units have the 48 square feet. Now you're going to keep that same amount, 148 square feet for every unit, but the rest of those can all be into a common space to hopefully make it easier. But they're still saying, eh, not enough. And a developer pointed out to me the other day that with what he wants to put on a site and the size of the site, it would take the open space amenity as more than half of the site, and he wouldn't be able to do the development. So clearly there's an issue there. So we're going to take a look at that. That's our next meeting. These were just other things that are other annual updates that we're working on right now that you already know about. So I won't talk about those because you've seen them all. After that is floor area ratio. Same developer I was just talking about can go in. We have a maximum height, maximum FAR floor area ratio of two in one of our zones. And the, I do this wrong every time. Oh, but the height, so two FAR, but the height is 65 feet. Well, he can hit that max FAR at two stories, or at 40 feet rather than 65 feet. So he's really not getting to use the full site to its highest and best use. So we're going to go back and look at some of our floor area ratios to make sure that developers are actually being able to use them the way we want to be able to use them. We're not talking about increasing height though at this time. that doesn't increase density the way far does uh state mandated parking requirements is a bill i think it's 5184 we haven't done those yet we promised that we would get all those are due by 2027 2028 we said we'd get them done now natural context areas and transparent transparency requirements we have transparency requirements that In central Issaquah, if you are on a street and you are a multi-family development, the 40% of your facade on that street side has to be transparent starting above six feet so that people can't see in your windows. You could use curtains, but that's our rule. That also says that if you're retail, 70% of the facade that faces the street has to be transparent. And if you're next to a natural context area, which is like a wetland or something like that, 50% of it has to be transparent. And again, we have found with developers that is very difficult to do, so we're going to look at that. The last one is to allow multifamily in urban village commercial slash retail development. It may get bigger than this, but right now all we're proposing to do is to allow multifamily there. That came up during Title 18. Q4. Where do you see your schedule when I show it to you at the end? Q4. One is to provide flexibility. So our architectural design standards currently say, here's the intent and you must include every single one of these items to get approved. What it should probably say is, here's the intent, and to meet the intent, you need to pick three or four of these items. And then that'll make this pencil out more for the developers, which is what we're going for as long as they still meet the intent and hit the character of what we're looking for. Variances and departures will kind of do the same thing. Three block corridors, we currently require, they used to be 40 foot minimum. We've taken them down to a 10 foot minimum. What they do is they go, We have blocks that are 1,000 feet long, especially in central Issaquah. The idea is to get blocks that are anywhere between 250 and 300 feet long. So you use three-block corridors instead of doing a whole street. And that way, pedestrians, when they're walking, it's easier to go. But some of these, we just kind of mapped them out and said, you just have to do it. And, you know, if you hit that 250, 300 foot mark and it's not working everywhere because you might have a three-block corridor that goes to another building that's not going anywhere or you might have a three-block corridor that's going to an alley and you don't want those. So we need to revisit that to make it more practical for people to do.

Although we still want the smaller block sizes, we just need to find out a more practical way to do it.

The last one that you all will not see is peer review. We take, we have to take things like critical area studies geotechnical reports, landscape reviews. We have to take those all out to peer reviewers because we don't have it in-house. We need to figure out. And that's getting pretty costly for developers, particularly the smaller developers. So we need to figure out how to reduce that cost. I can slow down if you guys have any questions so far. Sorry.

Commissioner Adair?

had a question about the transparency standards if you don't mind going back yeah so when this is being explained i'm kind of confused so somebody's doing a multi-family unit right on a street they have to have 40 of the street frontage as windows or is it that they need something windows over a certain height i'm i was just confused it's 40 has to be windows and doors

But the ground floor level, that doesn't start until six feet or above where that counts. Okay. Because...

So it doesn't count on the ground floor. It counts basically on the first, the second story going up.

It starts on the first story, but not at your feet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, start about right here.

Okay, at about six feet. And so they're having problems because it means that we can, everyone can stare into somebody's house.

Right, that was the intent of the six feet.

With an example of that, sorry guys to keep talking. be the townhomes on Newport Ave, right? Like how they have windows going into their garages right now?

That is exactly one of the examples, yes.

Okay, thanks. I was wondering about that.

And then we had a recent one with natural context areas too, and they were doing townhomes and very, very difficult to get that 50% in there. Yeah.

Mr. Altner. I had a question about the through-block connectors. I may have misunderstood, but I thought you said we had narrowed those down to 10 feet? The width of the connector.

So it was supposed to be 40 feet, and we've narrowed that down to 10 feet, hoping that that would help and provide more land for development and so forth. But it's still not helping, because the placement of these can be really, really odd.

And 10 feet sounds more like an alley than a connector. The generosity isn't there.

It's true. It's true. All right, moving into 2027, we have found in Central Issaquah, there are critical areas there, and there are wetlands that you wouldn't know are there because they're paved over. We are finding that with Trailhead right now in that its entire parking lot is sitting over a wetland, but we still want people to be able to develop. So what do you do if you want to protect the wetland and mitigate and revive, I'm not using the right words here, revive that wetland, but still allow development to happen there. So we're trying to figure out ways to sort of come to a compromise there where you still get the wetland back, you improve the wetland and you protect it, but you still allow for the development. We also work, as you know, the climate action plan. is being updated right now. So as a part of that, we're going to try and find more options for developers to meet sustainable development standards than what we use right now. Pretty high standards.

Question about that. Does that include LEED Platinum being reviewed?

Yes.

Good.

We also require a retail or office use on the ground floor of parking structures. because you don't want to stare at blank walls. You don't really want to stare at parking structures. But as you can see from the picture on the slide, they're getting better looking. And it's really, you require developers to put in these, and they only have to be 25 foot deep. So you require them to put in these 25 foot deep storefronts that really nobody wants, and they sit there vacant, and it's going to be less attractive than an attractive garage. So again, something to revisit. We don't have answers to any of these yet. thinking through things. Then you may remember that we did our Eco Northwest report. And what they did, I don't know if you remember that or not. I'm not sure most of you were here when we talked about it. We asked Eco Northwest, a consultant, to implement three of our housing action plan strategies. One was to expand inclusionary zoning. two was to help us increase the diversity of housing and three was to help us mitigate for development for condominiums that one is really a state issue they keep passing laws but there's liability in building condominiums because anything happens and the developer can get sued within the first four years and they just they can't get insurers to cover them so that's kind of more at a state level however inclusionary zoning and the diversity of housing, we've kind of solved for the diversity of housing. We allow it. But we'd still like to get some of that in other zones. So what we're going to do are the consultant said you need to redo inclusionary zoning, redo your development bonus program, and consider using multifamily tax exemptions. And adjust those levers so that they are just right and developers good. That is the sweet spot. I will come in and I will do this. And you will get affordable housing. So that's our goal there. Last, you won't see either one of these. One is to right-size our impact fees, which our transportation impact fee in particular is relatively high compared to other cities. And also the potential use of AI to aid in permitting. We have a one-person committee who's looking into that. Bellevue's just started it, but they're using it for very, very simple things. It hasn't made a huge difference from what I understand so far, but it's new. So we'll see. Those are the last of the amendments, but do you all have any more questions about those?

Questions, comments?

It's a lot. Yeah, so look at this. So these are all your public hearings, and in between, these are just the public hearings, so in between each of these, you will see them, you will talk about them, we will bring them back again, and then you'll have the public hearings. And so I'm just putting this up here to let you know it's going to be busy. So try to be here for the meetings. And if you can't be here, then watch it or come in and talk to us afterwards because it's a lot. But you can do it. We did Title 18. We can do this. I promise. OK. So that's it. And then I just had, do you have any questions?

So there we go.

I have a couple comments, um, general comments on this one. One is, um, lot going on here. Very cool to see. I'm excited after kind of a slower last six months or so, uh, we'll be busy for sure. Um, one thing that might be helpful as I'm thinking about is, you know, I'm looking at, you know, summarizing this as you guys had some meetings with some developers, you listen to their feedback and this is kind of like the next step of that, like proposals based on what they've shared. And I think at first, glance, putting my community member hat on, you're like, whoa, what are they doing? You're like, is this a good thing? It seems like it. We want development, we want growth, we've been planning for it, and it hasn't happened in the way we thought. And so it makes sense that we're trying to figure out how to make it work. But I think from a community member perspective, you're like, this seems like a big shift. So my suggestion to try and help kind of bridge that gap a little bit and be offer some transparency to the public in an easy-to-understand way that's like, oh, this is why this development is happening, would be to somehow categorize some of those changes with labels or tags. And what comes to mind for me is essentially you're answering the question, why are we doing this? If somebody from the community member was like, why are we doing this certain change? there would be a very easy answer that said, this will help increase units or this will help lower costs for development or this will help increase efficiency in the processes to get permits or get things done, whatever it may be. But there's some way that we can kind of like, make a, kind of funnel it down to a tag or label that's like, this is why these changes are happening, it might be good for the community to easily understand. And it's not, because I think a lot of people, their red flags will go up and be like, wait, but what about the environment? Or what about the parking? Or they'll start to question more about like, are we going too far in the other direction? We're talking about pulling levers and stuff. As best we can, we always try and pull all the levers at once in a beautiful partnership, which is an incredibly hard thing to do. But I think just having that transparency to say, this is why we're pulling this developer level and our city staff levers is to try and make it better for the community.

So it's funny you bring that up, because we actually just had a conversation about this with the group yesterday. And it also kind of came up at council as well because at council we were talking about character. And I think we need to take a step back too and say we have these plans and we have these visions and every single neighborhood in central Issaquah, because there are seven different neighborhoods in central Issaquah, they each have their own vision. And so we're trying, what we're doing is trying to make all this happen within those visions and the character, character's not the right word these days, but I'm sorry, that's what I'm using right now, I know. Within the, you know, what we want it to look like, we're trying to make sure that this all happens within that, so we were talking about, you know, putting up there, here's the vision for this area, here's why we're making this change, here's how we will meet it, but we're also talking about pros and cons, because you're right, there will be negatives. So yes, we're going to do this, and here's what we'll get from it. Here's what we might have to, here's what we might not get out of that. I think that's a really good point, and I like the idea of sort of the labels.

Yeah, something, you know, I think compromise is a word that comes to mind. It's like, at the end of the day, no one's going to get everything they want, so it's like finding the right compromise that everyone's willing to make to get know the ultimate outcome and we're fortunate that you guys do a great job of juggling all of those uh things but i know um trying to represent our ppc work with the staff and you know represent the community it's just kind of that helping find that peculiar balance uh commissioner adair

And just along those lines going forward, I think what would help me is I'm just going to say I'm very skeptical of for-profit corporations and how we can make sure we're balancing their needs with the community's needs and desires to live in a nice place. So the more hard examples, like the more concrete examples, the better for me. Like seeing something about, for example, the 40% transparency and then knowing that the result was the Newport where you're looking in the garage, yeah. OK, I understand now why that's a problem. That would be very helpful. And also, one of the things that raises my skepticism alarm, for lack of a better word, is when I read things like, oh, they're saying paint is more expensive and a different color, right? That immediately, I would like to see an example of like, oh, so this is kind of what the cost differential would be, and this is why they're saying this is expensive. And just to answer me, because I'm not out here building a 200 unit apartment, maybe the paint color does really add up. So something along those lines. And I want to be informed, and I want to know what we're talking about. I also want to get affordable housing in and more housing. I want it to look good and be nice.

Commissioner Holden?

Yeah, I mean, just following that thread, having been on the developer side and the homeowner side, et cetera, there's a sense out there, I believe, the public is very suspicious of developers. They think they come in and they do stuff and then they leave and what's left is for the community to figure out. I think that's something that needs to be addressed in the sort of public expectations and communications process. I just wanted to respond to the paint question because when we built our house, had a number of different paint colors that we wanted. Blues in the bathrooms, and more sort of peachy white in bedrooms. And we were told, if the painter can't go out and buy 30 gallons of one paint, and he's got to do this, and this, and this, and he's got to keep track of it, that that adds, perceptibly at least, to their costs. It's not a big number, and I think some of the requests from developers sort of fall into that category as well. It would be great if X would lower our cost by 20%. Well, yeah, but there's costs to be paid by the community for that in terms of blank walls or whatever the issue is. So I think, you know, You're walking a fine line by having developer round tables and trying to meet what they believe are essential requirements so that they can build and at the same time protect the community from being perceived as falling over for the developers. It's a tough balance. Commissioner Matthews.

I actually had kind of the same comment about when one of the questions or one of their comments was about the natural context area and how you had that glazing facing the natural context and how that'd be too expensive. And I kind of had the same feeling. It's like, okay, if I bought or rented a place that was against the woods, I would like to have a view of that area. You know, that's makes it appealing to me. So I'm not sure why, So I was under the same impression. It's like, oh, they're just kind of throw one over on you that it's more expensive, but we don't have an example that tells me to increase their cost by 15%, 20%, or whatever it is. So it would be nice to actually get physical concrete numbers or examples for some of these really things that I think would actually benefit a community that they'd like to remove or have us reanalyze. Thanks.

Any other questions?

I'll just add one more thing on the AI thing. I know we're a couple years out from it, but it's a hot topic. It's moving very fast. I would just suggest to that one person that's working on it currently, just think about what specific problem that they're trying to solve, right? So is it like, consistency of review? Is it the speed of the review? Is it staff capacity and what they're trying to basically keep up, if you will? I think hopefully Bellevue's experience, I know it's new, but hopefully they'll be able to glean some things over time by the time we get around to it. But that's one thing I see currently with my day job being in the IT tech areas. Everyone's like, throw AI at it, and they don't really think about why or what they're throwing it at. So I think you got to start with like, what's the problem and kind of peel back the layers before you go like, let's just AI. So anyway, anecdotal. Any other questions or comments? Commissioner Zachroff.

I'll also comment on the AI implementation. Last year, I had a lot of meetings about that, and I believe Kelowna BC has implemented AI, and it takes them now 10 days for simple permit processes. It was already a year ago, it was taking them 10 days to go through simple permits with AI. So hopefully we can... get there and I'm actually this was also something I was talking about and I'm so glad to hear that a lot of things that was were very important to me like a year ago that we now work on them including the AI so thank you for that on that note I am a big proponent of AIs I think it does have its benefits you just gotta figure out what they are cool any last comments anything for Kristin

You get what you need from us for now?

I did. Thank you. Awesome.

All right. Well, that takes us to our next item on the agenda, which is reports. City Council updates. Is there anything to update us on?

I don't have any updates today.

No updates. All right. Any other business besides that?

No, but I really am starting to think harder about the tour. Either a tour, yeah, or somehow a tour here. But if you all are up for it, maybe we can go do that sometime. Yeah. Okay.

We'll have a good field trip tour. Yeah.

What's that? Oh, okay. Yes, yes, only.

It's been about... I think it's been about a year or so from our last field trip when we did the middle housing walking tour, which was a lot of fun to see.

Are you thinking of Mine Hill? Ah, yes. Eventually, that will be 20 new homes back there in a cluster development. But the two homes that are on the street right now will stay there. They may be torn down at some point, but yeah.

All right, any further business from the commission? All good? All right, if there's nothing else, then we will adjourn this meeting at 7.19 p.m. Thank you very much.