Kirkland Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

I am calling this meeting of the Planning Commission to order. We'll start with a roll call.

Margaret Bunyal. Here. Tanu Sharik Chaudhary. Aaron Jacobson. Here. Gina Medea.

Here.

Here. Julia Nullen.

Here.

Scott Reiser. Rodney Rutherford.

Here. Thank you. And a quick note, Gina, I think there's like a five-second delay, so if the conversation isn't flowing right, that would be why. So we will go on to items from the audience. Is there anyone from the audience who would like to speak? I'm seeing no one in the room and no one in the Zoom room, so we will move on. Today we have a study session for the urban forest management plan update.

All right, thank you, Chair Jacobson. So tonight we're coming to you for your second briefing on the Urban Forest Management Plan update. Not asking for any big decisions tonight, but do want to get your feedback on some of the draft vision and goals. We visited Council with this information a couple weeks ago, and Anna can share about that.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Anna to walk you through it.

Thanks for coming. We can go ahead and start the slideshow. prepared a slideshow a little bit different than what we set up for council. So if you've watched the council meeting, uh, I just didn't want it to be repetitive. Uh, the memo was very similar though. So with the memo, um, it was very thick. I'm aware that I gave you another five credit class on trees. Um, you're welcome. Uh, but we won't, we won't be going over all of that today, but if you do have questions, don't hesitate to ask. And I'm going to stop a lot throughout this presentation. So how can I... We're gonna give it a second here. That's okay. It's not, yeah, yeah. Gina, do you have any issues with being on the presentation? Okay. So goal number one is Gina. OK, so this is not the I need to be able to scroll forward.

OK, perfect.

So today what we'll focus on first is the community tree survey that went out in May. And then we'll get into the vision statement and guiding principles that we've developed with community input and council. And then I'll be talking about the research in context with the goals that we developed as kind of our background basis for what we'll use moving forward. And if we have time, we do have some example layouts that sneak preview just came out this week. So with the community tree survey, we sent it out in May and June. We had touch points with our email listservs. We reached out to the community networks, the neighborhoods, master builders, a bunch of different groups. We reached out to some of the youth organizations as well. Just we wanted to get a wide breadth of information And we had about 600 respondents. That doesn't sound a lot when you compare it to 90,000, but when it comes to a survey, that is quite a few respondents back. Most of those respondents, they had knowledge of trees or they had been impacted by trees in the community or permitting processes. So that does have a little bit of influence on what we were hearing. There was definitely a split opinion between people who were very adamant about private property rights and their ability to develop and people who want to protect trees as a community resource. There was also a lot of opinions about what I can do on my land versus what other people should do on their land. So there was quite some dichotomies to work through there. but we did have a canopy cover came out as a very high goal, high priority. And we did receive a lot of recommendations. There was a perceived unfairness between private property tree removals and development tree removals. And that perception is not unreal. We acknowledge that when a home or a property develops, that is a time where trees do get removed at a higher rate. But in that 50 year time span before it develops again is that opportunity to create canopy. And so that's where that difference occurs is that everyone develops at some point and the need to be able to develop has to be there. And so we wanted to just acknowledge that that is a thing. But when we're talking about managing across the whole city, we have to look at space and time. so just something to think about as we move forward with these 20-year goals and projections and then we yeah we had a lot of requests to increase resources for public tree canopy both in parks and on streets and right-of-ways and there were a lot of very specific requests directed towards the city and we will be putting the raw data up on the web page for people to look at as they you know as they would like to. 600 different comments is a lot to go through. So tonight, just wanna clarify that the urban forest management plan is a 20-year plan. This is something that is in parallel with our comprehensive plan. And so a lot of what we're developing right now is not at the small scale of action items. That'll happen next, but the 20-year plan is something that needs to be flexible in time as opportunities change, as funding changes, So just kind of keep that in mind as we go. And this is, to me, a great example of the perfect balance where everything really rides on that vision statement and the goals and how we input into this whole plan. But those alternatives for action at the very top, those are what we do last after we've made decisions on everything else. And tonight we'll just be dealing with the bottom of the triangle, that real foundation. So with that, the vision statement. Our last plan, the vision statement was maintain 40% canopy cover. And that was about it. There wasn't a lot to really go off of. There's a lot of great stuff in that plan, but it really didn't have a basis. And so this vision statement was developed using council's input, using the 2044 comprehensive plan and some of our industry work. And I won't read the whole thing to you. I'm sure you guys have all read it like three, four times already, but there's some bold, language that we thought was important. Vital green infrastructure, shared stewardship of the trees, resilience, urban biodiversity, and health and well-being of the community. Those are key components to put into this vision statement. And then the draft guiding principles. These are what we are pulling from the comprehensive plan and council's goals and a lot of industry standards to help us guide every decision we're making. Does it fit back into one of these guiding principles? Ecological resilience is a big one. Livable communities. I'm sure these words are ringing bells. Transparency and equilibrium. That's where we fit. We fit basically the balance of housing, community, higher density, and urban forestry. We don't want one to water down the other, but we want to make sure that we're acknowledging that there are competing priorities, even with the sustainability master plan or the PROS plan or all these other plans we developed, that urban forestry is a component to that and needs to work in partnership with it somehow. And then science, technology, and innovation, that's something that has really stood well in the city, that we're trying to implement all those best management practices the best we can. So before we move into the goals, does anyone have questions about that or comments they'd like to make?

Commissioner Nolan?

Yeah, so just on the question of kind of developers, I was wondering what the requirements are for developers when they remove trees. Is it kind of a one-to-one replacement or something else? And does it vary by development type? Because I could see that, for instance, if you're taking, you know, a... a gigantic single family lot and then putting four new houses on it, there just may flat out not be the space to put as many trees. With a follow-up question being then for the people who then purchase the properties, what is their requirement for maintaining the trees? And I ask at least in part as there's been some fury in my neighborhood of at least a few people who brand new houses who have promptly taken the trees that the developers put in and chucked them down the ravine, which was not probably the city's goal.

Please don't tell us what those addresses are. Well, first off, just to clarify that those questions I would classify as very higher technical. So anything that we're talking that's code related, or if we're wanting to discuss changes in code, or how well the code's working, that is way farther down the line than what we're addressing now in the urban forest management plan. But a quick answer is with development, all of our tree related removals and retentions are based on how many credits, tree credits, and I'm putting that in quotes because different sizes of the trees have different values. uh how many are required for the site and with that in some cases we can't retain all the trees we would have replacement and if we can't replace because there's no room for one reason or another properties aren't all the same size or shape then there's other other options down the road and so That is a long conversation, but we have all of that in the code. And right now, what we're doing is in implementing the code, we're figuring out what's working and what's not so that in the future, we can tweak it to help make change. But those are good questions. Oh, yeah, well, and then, so for anyone that's not developing, we have allowances for tree removals every year. So someone can take out a regulated tree, and depending on the size of their property, there's a couple different types, you know, amounts that they could take out. If there was a high-risk tree, they could take it out, or if your tree actually died, you can send a photo in and have, you know, be able to take it out without, that's actually just a notification. And so there are different options. It's not that no one can touch the trees on their property. But yeah, when properties change hands, that is something that is interesting and difficult to monitor. Yeah. Did I answer your question well enough for the moment? Yes, thank you. OK. Any other comments on the vision statement? OK. So I want to just get straight into the goals. We have five goals that we developed, and this is for the urban forest management plan. And despite all of these goals, I want to treat them equally. It seems to be that the first goal always seems to be the most important, and everyone spends all the time on it. And so I changed it. So the first goal is now instead of 40% canopy cover, we put it as to build and protect a healthy and resilient forest as it adapts, recovers and grows through increasing urban development and climatic stresses. And that's that thought, as you recall, when we talked about climate change, And then you add on top of it, urban climates, heat island effects, and then on top of that, development impacts or just, you know, or management impacts. There's a lot that can go into trees. And so one of the pieces of data that we are working with that we'll use for the future is the tree inventory that we have. So with public, this is just public works trees. And if you notice on the top bar is 18,000 is the number of trees at the top. And then on the bottom, we have the different size categories. And so that first bar less than six, those aren't even regulated trees yet. So in someone's private property, those aren't trees that count. And then at the top two is 26 to 36 and over 36, those are landmark trees. And so if you look at the numbers, you know, there's a lot less larger trees in the city and that's actually how it should be. If we think about in the future, we wanna have the new trees that we're planting, we wanna increase that bar. We wanna have a lot more new trees that can then move and increase in diameter in the future. And in 20 years, you can have a tree go from six inches all the way to 26 inches if it's really healthy, really fast growing. That's something that can happen in the times period of this plan. you also have a lot of trees die. That's a fact of life. Even with the best care and management, you always have some mortality. And if you look at the bottom where we have the orange and yellow, those are the dead and critical poor condition trees. It's great that there's not a lot of them in our public works region. But when I say not a lot, that's by percent. If you look at the actual numbers, there's 1,500 trees less than six inches that are dead and or dying. That's a lot for one arborist to handle. And so we want to decrease that over time. And we have a similar thing for parks. Scott, you got a question. Oh, sorry.

This slide is so intriguing because the less than six inches. So are those new plantings, especially in construction sites? And how come there's so few excellent? And it's funny, the under six inch, there's more excellent than any other category. And there's quite a few dead.

I can answer those questions. A lot of it has to do with we paid a consultant to do the work and to get to an excellent rating, the tree has to look perfect for that individual. So when in doubt, fair to good is where they go. With the less than six inches, we would acknowledge that there are a lot of trees that stay small. You know, so then I've got a picture coming up of that, you know, great example where that tree, you know, a dogwood, for example, will never become a landmark tree. And so I don't have the data on that. We can pull that data, though, to figure out what trees have the potential to go big versus they're going to stay small. And that would be something that would help guide management decisions in the future.

Are there so many dead in the less than six inches? Because when you go in, especially for a reforesting plan, you expect only half to make it?

I think there's multiple reasons to that. Yeah, this is just right away. So this is street trees, which is a really difficult environment in the first place. But yeah, I can imagine there's a combination of new trees that were planted and not well cared for. That happens. And then there's also just, there's a lot of small trees on the side of, you know, on the streets. So, you know, old dogwoods, old trees that, you know, finally, you know, finally are dying off. So there's a couple reasons that could explain that. I don't have exact answers for you on them. But we do have the data to be able to find that. There's your example of the small tree. So this, for example, is a dogwood planted in a streetscape. It will always be pruned by cars. The Public Works Department will never have to prune those branches. But, you know, the paint will. So, but just a good example of right tree, right place or trying, what is this tree trying to accomplish? Are we trying to create shade? Because a dogwood won't do that. You know, what's the goal with this one? And why was a small tree planted instead of, say, the larger tree in the background? We have trees that die. Here's another example, Scott. This tree was Houghton Park and it was growing great and green and it just bellied up and died in May of last year. It had full leaf out the month before. And when we inspected it, we noticed it was planted poorly. It had roots that were growing in a circle and strangled it. And it had been backed into probably over 20 years ago. by something, you know, a car, whatever. And those injuries impacted it and it expressed its displeasure in about a month. So these things happen and these are part of what our inventory are that our staff have to manage. And then we have examples here of a tree, this is just right outside, where it's in a very small planting space, which in itself isn't the problem, but the lack of irrigation on a couple hot, dry days and a few summers in a row, and this tree is dying back. So there's a lot of issues that the city has to manage for, which is why we're developing this plan. The other thing for this goal is talking about tree species diversity. And when you look at the inventory that we had done, there's 200 types of trees that are in this inventory, which people are like, that's amazing, that's great. What great diversity. But when you look at what the... top 50% of the trees are, there's only nine species. So that's over 15,000, almost 17,000 trees are represented by just these nine species. And when we talked about climate readiness, three of those species are identified in green as climate ready species that would last. The other ones would be climate ready if we don't have quite as big of a change, if we replicate like Oregon. Fortunately, in our right of way, we don't have a lot of trees that are not climate ready, just flat out not. But when you look at these species, Douglas fir, Western red cedar, big leaf maple, those are all our natives. So if we have increase in insects or diseases in our native trees, it's gonna be a big impact on our urban forest. And then you include that Norway maple is one of those trees that it's now an invasive species. We probably don't want to be planting it till we understand the root systems a little better. Nobody likes flowering pears, so those are out, you know, we don't want to plant those anymore. Which means we had three species left in our inventory. So we want to diversify, we want to increase the number of trees we're planting that represent different species. So goal two, maximize the benefits urban forests can provide as an essential community asset and leverage these benefits to pursue the goals of other city strategic plans. Can you fix that? Oh, okay. So those are things like, you know, here's a map from King Conservation District of areas in our city with low canopy cover that have high stormwater reduction potential. Let's work with it. When we're doing stormwater projects, we know the areas that need a lot of assistance. Alternatively, we have, the low canopy cover and high heat island reduction potential. You can see some of the similarities when we look in that upper right hand corner where Kingsgate is and Evergreen Hospital and then the lower area which is downtown here. The goal is to put more trees in these areas where they can help create those benefits. And so working with those plans, the climate action plan, the stormwater management plan, working together. And when we talk about these plans and putting trees where they can maximize benefits, there's different scales. We have that citywide scale, but then we also have the neighborhood scale. And this is a great example. Someone put it together on LinkedIn and it's like the same, think 30% canopy cover, the same canopy cover in three different neighborhoods and how it's distributed and who benefits and who's not benefiting in each situation. And so we want to be thinking about that on the smaller scale as well. And our 20 year objectives will address those situations. Goal three. build and maintain an average canopy cover of 40%. It's kind of our golden rule. It's been in our comprehensive plan. It was in our last plan. It's possible to do. What we're gonna do this year is rather than looking at neighborhood to neighborhood, we wanna look at the land use and figure out how to create canopy cover in each land use area. Not every land use area can support 3% tree canopy cover. That doesn't make much sense at all. But we can increase canopy cover in certain areas that aren't meeting what we'd like or not meeting the goals. And if you look on the left hand side, this is our land use and the pink and purple i'm sorry they kind of blend together, but you know you look at Center mixed use development, it only has 18% canopy cover. Whereas residential, which is really most of the city is 39% canopy cover that residential really. really holds what our city's canopy cover is gonna be. And so if we're increasing there across that whole city, it's a lot of trees, but also it's how we get that 40% canopy cover. With that though, we don't wanna ignore the fact that different land use areas also aren't equal. So if we look on the right hand side, These are neighborhood and urban centers. And if you look up to the north, you know, North Juanita and Kingsgate have very low canopy cover relative to other neighborhood and community centers. You know, so, you know, you look down at North Rose Hill, it's got 25%. Well, a lot of these ones with the higher canopy cover also have parks covered. inside them, and so there's a balance there. But we want to be looking at that distribution so that it's more equal over the next 20 years. And this is the baseline of how we'll measure it. Okay, so goal four is to build public programs to educate and empower community members to participate in diverse urban forestry engagement opportunities and to increase community connectivity and understanding of Kirkland's urban forest. and that really is to just expand the opportunity not everybody loves to go plant trees or rip out blackberry and we understand that but everyone does have the ability to connect with urban trees and so we just gotta as a city we wanna find more ways to engage engage the community. And then goal five, last but not least in my mind, is to build programmatic capacity to maintain and grow Kirkland's urban forestry assets in a safe, efficient, and sustainable manner. And when I say assets, it's not just the equipment. it's the trees themselves. And to always be remembering that trees are an asset that appreciate over time rather than depreciate. And so creating the system where we can have trees grow and provide benefits in the future. And goals four and five, they're difficult to create measurements with, but what we're gonna do is work with our industry standards. So many of you might already know of the Tree City USA program. Kirkland's been a part of Tree City USA for over 20 years. It's the minimum standard. Really, if any city starts celebrating Arbor Day, they're gonna meet Tree City USA standards. But there's other standards that we can work towards. We get growth awards every two years. And when you look at goal four with community engagement, we've got celebration, the community framework, and then urban and community forestry society has community engagement. And those set standards for communities to work with and grow with. And when we look at Goal 5, Tree City USA, we've got management and investment, the growth awards, we've got building the team, performing the work, leadership and management. And those all have baselines that we can work with. So that's how we'll measure those. So with that, those are our five goals and some of the ways we're going to set the standard, use those metrics so that in 20 years we can look back and see how we're growing. Do you have any questions or comments about that? Oh, this is easy.

Commissioner Nolan.

Yeah, so this probably goes to the earlier, the packet, and feel free to, if you're going to get to this, tell me, we'll get to it later. But I was curious, it looked like in certain neighborhoods we're seeing, most of them we're seeing the canopy cover decreasing, but in a couple, I think there was one where we're actually seeing it increase. And to me, at least the obvious thing for decreasing is increased density, although, you know, could be wrong there, but I'm curious. if there are theories for that beyond the super obvious one. And in the case where it's increasing, where that's obviously a great thing, if there's the question to as to what we're attributing to the increase.

Yeah, so I provided a discussion in the council presentation that showed some of the areas where tree canopy increased. And what happens in a lot of communities is those trees that are like 10 to 20 inches diameter, Well, they're growing. And so when you have these groves of trees, and we are measuring our canopy every five to 10 years, and in a five-year period, when you have, say, a big leaf maple that's growing a foot a year in its branches and not being pruned back, That's where we're seeing a lot of increases in those groves, especially in like the low density backyards where groves are shared. We were seeing a lot of increase there, which is really cool. Decreases, yes, we have attrition. So like when I was showing the picture of the tree that had died back from drought, Not dead yet, but it's died back. That tree would not show as much canopy. And so we have had some of that. I can see it in parking lots especially. And then we do have those sections with development. Ironically, have you all been up to Big Fin Hill Park where the Beaver Dam is at? And the flooding... It's amazing, but that was, I learned about it through looking at the tree canopy map. Because I was like, what's going on in the park? And then I learned about, you know, the whole, the swamp there. And you can see the snags of the trees, you know. So that's, so there's also some natural things that we can attribute it to. It's not all bad. But yeah.

Yeah. Vice Chair Medeo.

Thank you, and you may have answered one of my questions when you were answering Commissioner Nolan about measuring the trees every five years because in these goals that you outlined to talk about this being a 20 year process 20 year kind of vision, etc, but do we have interim checkpoints to just gauge how we're progressing.

That's a great question. We will be building those in. So for example, with canopy cover, there's enough... error in the data. So when you think about satellite coverage and measuring, you know, the satellites measuring canopy and how that canopy overlays across our other maps, there's a natural variation. And so most GIS folks that I've talked to have said that, you know, 3% is minimum. So if we're saying our canopy is 39%, Technically that's between you know 36 and 42 you know so there's some error there. And so, if we measure it, for example, with canopy we don't it's not investing. in like annual increments doesn't really make a lot of sense. Even five-year increments is about as close as I would be comfortable saying that there's some sort of trend or change. And so, but yeah, we do have increments and we'll be building those into the five-year work plans. So for example, in 10 years, we'll want to be reassessing how our trees are growing in the inventory and what that looks like.

And then if I may, while my mic is still open, I'll just like to say I do like the citywide goal and the differences based on land use. I think that makes sense. And then this might be too early as well to understand because we're at the bottom part of the triangle that's inverted. But I imagine there's some budget implications at some point and that that's part of some other broader effort. And then I'd be super curious to understand if especially with the private property. And not that I'm glad it was in there. I guess I might say I'm not surprised that your survey responses kind of honed in on that tension between private property and developers and all that stuff. But since we recognize that there is a role for private property owners to play. Has there been any thought given to how we might incentivize that right behavior? I mean, there's some of us that are the tree augers and others that are like, you know, get off my lawn. I'm going to cut my tree. How do we motivate and incentivize the behavior that we'd like to see?

Again, great questions. So with the 20-year plan, we're not going to identify budget specifically because, as you can imagine, as times change, budgets ebb and flow. Our goal is to help, for example, in Goal 5 with having our staff, increasing our staff capacity. We might not be able to do that right now, but what we can do is be ready to be able to do that and to be able to justify it. One of the conversations I've had with a number of different staff members in different departments is, well, we know we need more people, but how do you justify how many people? You can't just say, I need double the people. You need to be able to justify that. Why? And so we do have that ability and that's going to go in the plan in some of those five year metrics to help, you know, build that that layout because there's always going to be decisions, you know, that, you know, if when it comes to budget, just because you need something doesn't mean you're highest on the priority list. And but we can do a better job of justifying what we need. And a great example is with 40% canopy cover as a goal, if we need a certain amount of budget to get there, then the choice needs to be made of, well, what do we wanna choose? Do we wanna choose to have decreased percentage versus something else? So being able to create the story so that that choice can be made with information and education is really what we can do. To address the private property, I had a smile on my face as soon as you said that, because that's a huge part of not only community engagement, but as far as building the quality urban forest is to help build those programs for incentivizing tree retention, helping community members where we can to take care of their trees. We heard a lot about people wanting to do the right thing, but either not knowing how or not having the finances to do it. Not everybody can hire an arborist every year to come in and do the work. And so that's a gap we've identified. And then what we can do in the urban forest management plan is create in those 20 year goals, a pathway to be able to bridge that gap when the opportunities are available. So for example, if there's a grant opportunity that comes up, we'll be able to be ready to apply for that and be able, you know, hopefully be able to staff implementation and that, from my experience just in the few years i've been here that seems to be one of the gaps is a lot of people have great ideas and they want to do work we just don't have the staff to make it happen successfully so we'll you know those are things we want to work on um yeah thank you and i'm glad i made you smile so i feel fulfilled commissioner nolan

Kind of just doubling back around to the arborist costs, which I'm feeling keenly as I'm hiring arborists yet again. And one of the things I've noticed is that it always seems to cost at minimum $3,000 to get arborist work done, which makes sense when you figure that they have to get out an entire crew and there's a certain amount of cost just inherently to mobilizing it. But I was wondering if there's been any thoughts or conversations within the city about the potential for maybe even just like pooling some of these costs of saying, hey, we're going to have teams of arborists in this neighborhood. So if you just need... minor branch clearing or whatever, you can have this with other people on the same streets, maybe. So instead of spending $3,000 to get a couple of, you know, a bit of crown clearing, you could spend $1,000 because you're splitting it three ways with like you and the people up your street who are also getting some crown clearing gun or, you know, just something along those lines. And I say this too, having like, I work at PSC and I've seen like the costs that our tree crews get. And again, they're vastly lower than what you get as a private person, which again, makes sense. I'm not faulting arborists because the economics of scale are very different, but I keep thinking, you know, if I could get in many cases, the same work done for a third of what I'm paying, I would be a delighted and be much more inclined to actually get the work done on a frequent basis. Yeah.

I think that's a great idea. And that would be something that would fall into a potential five-year work plan idea. But I'm writing that down because the way to make something like that happen from the city's perspective, so city crews can't go onto private property. I mean, you can see how that would be problematic. Nor would we want to recommend one company over another. However, if there was a partnership with a nonprofit organization that did something like that, that would be something that, you know, the city could then support, you know, in partnership with. But that would take, you know, that as you can see, that would take a little bit of work to identify. But it's not that's not unfeasible. It just takes the right and basically the right nonprofit. I don't know of one out there. I know of tree planter ones, but that doesn't mean it won't exist in the next 20 years. And that's yeah.

Commissioner Buñuel.

Well, you know, Public Works, but the city can do recommendations because Public Works does have contractor recommendations. Like I had a stormwater issue and I got a nice list of people that have been pre-screened and maybe you couldn't really necessarily push one contractor over another, but you could have a very exhaustive list that shows that the city has worked with this contractor and you can choose from this list. And that takes a lot of the guesswork out because I was going to say, The roofers that come by that have to be working on your neighbors and say, do you need your roof done too? Because I happen to be in the neighbor and so-and-so is having their roof done too. I had an arbor, someone claiming to be an arborist that was in the neighborhood and did I need... to have the same services that my neighbor did. And it was just like, so yeah, so there's a lot of scammers out there.

No, that's a, you make a good point. And the way I would classify that is the difference is vetting versus a recommendation. And so one of the ways we could do a vetting process and city of Seattle does this is they have arborist companies apply and they have to meet a certain set of standards. And you, we could even add in a, you have to take a class to understand Kirkland's tree code, you know, therefore we know, but what that doesn't mean is that the city saying, oh, we recommend this company. They do great work. You know, we, we, we wouldn't be able to say that, but we would, that is something that has come to mind and is in, again, one of those things that would be a five year, work plan idea is to set up something like that. That's basically a vetted list where we know this company has a certified arborist on staff, which we require in our code and they have taken our, you know, requirements class or something to that effect. That's about as far, I think, as we could go. But you're right, that is a better step than the individual with the chainsaw that seems to be all around and knocks on doors and takes down trees. You know, that's not necessarily an arborist or, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah. Any other questions? Okay. Are you all comfortable with where we're going with this? All right. Well, so in theory, we were gonna have a draft urban forest management plan for you, but that it takes a bit of work and there's been a lot of coordination with different groups. We're gonna be back to planning commission in December. where we'll have the urban forest management plan before adoption so that you can take a look at it. We'll also have that work plan, that six-year work plan drafted out so you can see what the difference between the 20 years and what we see as feasible given the budgets we have in the next five years. There's a big difference there. And just because it's something that isn't on the five-year work plan this go-round, remember there's four different iterations of work plans in this that we'll go through with this urban forest management plan. And I'll give you guys a sneak peek of, we have a pretty brilliant designer on an intern and he is working with developing some simple ways to look at our urban forest management plan and to be able to read through it. And, you know, we'll have things like this where with goal, you know, with a goal we'll have, why is it important to Kirkland? You know, what is Kirkland status? And then we'll be looking at those 20 year objectives and the metrics associated with them. So you get first eyes on it. And that's all I have.

All right. Next, we don't have any public hearings, and so we move on to reading and or approval of minutes. Is there a motion to approve the minutes from April 9th, April 23rd, and May 14th, 2026?

I'll motion to approve.

Second. Thank you. That's Commissioner Nolan motioning and Commissioner Reiser seconding. All those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed? All those abstaining? Motion carries. Next, we have administrative reports and planning commission discussion. Allison.

All right. Thank you. So just a quick public meeting calendar update, kind of a preview for your next meeting, because it is a bigger one. I expect it to take longer than an hour. But I wanted to give you a heads up so you can start thinking about it. And it will be a larger packet. So heads up, large packet. um the first item on that one is going to be a public hearing for the parking code amendments that are a cleanup code amendment so if you remember earlier this year we passed a quick action ordinance to make the state's parking requirement minimums go into effect sooner rather than later with the promise that we would come back with all the code work to clean up basically removing the now obsolete parking requirements from every single zone in the city that's been a boatload of work that staff has been working really diligently on. It is a lot of pages of code amendments. What we're going to do in that staff memo, just so you don't see the packet and the page count and be like, ah, What we're going to do is in the staff memo for that one, we're going to point you to the sections of code that we think are most important for you to look at. And that's going to be a section where we're combining all of the requirements. And if you don't make it through all 700 pages of all the strikethroughs where we're removing parking code amendments, staff does feel very confident that we've caught them also. That's one of your items, and there will be a public hearing on that. The next will be a public hearing on the housing density bonuses on faith-owned lands project. So we touched base with council one last time at their previous meeting and got their clearance to go ahead and bring it to public hearing. That is a short section of code amendments adding a new chapter. a new section to our affordable housing chapter. So we're really excited to bring that forward to you for a public hearing. And then lastly, you'll get your first briefing on the neighborhood stores and services projects. So this is looking at the potential to expand allowances for home-based businesses or home occupations as we've called them. And then also look at the concept of expanding small-scale commercial uses into residential areas, so low density residential areas. and that will be uh that will be your august 27th meeting that meeting will be in this room again um so similar setup and we'll let you know if anything changes but council chambers is still expected to be under construction at that point so plan on being back in here and you will have your new planning commissioner in attendance at that one and that's it from your chair does it before we go to items from the audience does anyone have anything they'd like to talk about

Okay. So my neighbors all came to me and said a survey went out on the home occupation. I didn't see it. So how do we access it?

We can what I can do is we have a Web page up and it's gone out. The link to it has gone out in a press release. And then also it was mentioned in the city's weekly newsletter, I think, starting last week. So what we can do is send out the commission a link to the project Web page for that. And it has a link to the survey and some more background information. Great. I'd like that. Yes. Thank you for the comment. That's a good, good note for us.

anything else giving time for vice chairman to respond given the delay i'm good but thank you uh and all right and with that we move on to comments from the audience um this is the time in our meeting where anyone from the public can come and give public comment for up to three minutes um those in the room or on zoom um if you're on zoom please raise your hand and we will move you to the panelist section And if you're in the room and would like to give public comment, please take a seat at one of the tables. Seeing none, that closes our items from the audience. And the last item on our agenda is adjournment. So this meeting is adjourned.

Bye, y'all. Thank you, Anna.