Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

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

Margaret Bunyal. Here. Erin Jacobson.

Here.

Gina Medea.

Here.

Julia Nolan. Scott Reiser. Here. Angela Rosman. Here. Rodney Rutherford.

Here. All right. Thank you. And I believe now is the time in our meeting for comments from the audience. If you would like to give comments, either approach the podium or raise your hand on Zoom. To indicate that you'd like to give comments. We'll have one more time to give comments at the end of the meeting But this is the first one would anyone like to give public comment? No, all right Next we have no special presentations and we have a study session on the totem lake southern industrial sub area plan phase one visioning process I

All right. Thank you, Chair Jacobson. I'm going to ask our admin team to help me share the screen here. So we're bringing this item back to Planning Commission tonight for a continued discussion that was started at your last meeting. At the last meeting, we had the group from Blocks Hub here to talk more about the visioning process. But at that meeting, I think based on a lot of the planning commissioners questions and then follow up conversations that staff has had with the chair and the vice chair, What we're trying to do tonight is bring you a little bit more background information about how we got here and what are some options and requirements moving forward. Tonight I'm gonna do a high level review of some of the background of what's been studied in this area so far, especially in the context of the comprehensive plan, and then what the currently adopted policies in the comprehensive plan would kind of have us doing next. And then we'll also put that in context with the adopted planning work program. So we're gonna tag team it here tonight. I'm gonna ask Martha and Adam to weigh in or jump in where I've maybe missed something. hopefully we can answer a lot of Planning Commission questions that come up as we go through it so I'll jump in and wanted to really start with the evolution of how we got from the community initiated amendment request for the parmac parcels to the concept of a sub area plan for the whole southern industrial sub area so As I mentioned, doing a sub area plan for the southern industrial sub area or the CIS as we've been calling it, and yes, we do need a better name. That is an adopted task on the 2026-2028 planning work program. Because of budget constraints, we did on this adopted work program split the work up into two phases, one taking place this year for the visioning work that you heard about at your last meeting, and then another task to be started in 2027 for a sub area plan. It all started back in 2022 when we received a community initiated amendment request for five parcels in the sub area known as the Parmac property. So there's one property owner that owns all five of those parcels. They're highlighted on the screen or outlined. This was submitted in 2022 and all of the community initiated amendment requests that we received in 2022, we decided we're going to be studied in context with the comprehensive plan update because that is the time that we also started working on that full periodic update of the comp plan. During our review of this community-initiated amendment request, it's always a two-phase review. We bring it to Planning Commission for a recommendation of should this move forward? Is there enough here to justify further study? We call that phase one of the car review. Then Council makes the decision on whether or not to move it on to phase two upon Planning Commission's recommendation. Planning Commission did recommend to move forward the study of this car, but also recommended that we expand the study area from just the five Parmac parcels to the full southern industrial sub area and council accepted that recommendation from the Planning Commission and staff was directed to continue study, but of the full sub area. The outcome of that was that we didn't end up making a final decision on rezoning the sub area, anything in the sub area yet, but the comp plan did include a policy that directs a sub area plan. And the policy is pretty specific about that plan needing to proceed rezones. So that's a little bit more detail about how we got to where we are. This is just another couple other different maps of the subarea and the PARMAC request. The specific PARMAC request, I just thought it might be helpful to remind you. What we got was kind of a very, very rough draft development proposal. The request was this is what we want to do. We want to construct six mixed-use buildings. to accommodate approximately 1,200 residential units and 30,000 square feet of amenity and commercial space. So we want the zoning that would do that. The request did make specific asks for height in the area and the request for height was to increase the height allowance up to 150 feet for certain portions of the Parmac property and then to sort of transition down to 75 feet as you approach the lower density residential zoning to the west. So that was the request as it originally came in. We thought it might be helpful to review what the southern industrial subarea, the CIS, allows in terms of housing today under existing zoning. So there's a few different zones that are included within the southern industrial subarea, the Totem Lake 10C, 10D, and 10E zones. The map SNP that you see on the right-hand side is from our capacity analysis, and there's a few different colors that I can explain. Sorry, they're colors, so I hope that if you can't see colors well that I can describe it a little bit. Oh, the mouse is working. Okay, so the purple parcels here are the PARMAC properties. We colored them differently because we modeled them differently in our capacity analysis because we had a request for a specific number of housing units. We modeled that exact number of housing units that were requested in our capacity analysis. For the other zones, we have the Totem Lake 10C zone up here. Existing housing allowances in that zone is that we only allow housing in the TL10Z zone within the housing incentive area, and that housing incentive area is outlined here. It does include a parcel here that's not shown in the same color. That isn't shown because that property recently redeveloped with townhomes. So we didn't model it for any additional capacity because it's not going to redevelop anytime soon. So that's why it's not shown in color on this map. Other things to know about housing allowances in the 10C zone. It the height limit is up to 65 feet but 35 feet or sorry 30 feet where it's adjoining low density residential and that's I think within 100 feet of that low density residential zone is our definition of adjoining And then it also requires some step backs essentially from 1 16th up here to the north and it has an affordable housing requirement In the 10D zones, which are the blue areas here, you see west of the CKC, the PARMAC properties are also zoned 10D. Housing, again, is only allowed within the housing incentive area. So that's this green dashed outline here. So only a portion of the area. And in that area, housing is currently allowed to go up to 65 feet of height, but only 30 feet where it adjoins low density residential. And it has an affordable housing requirement adopted already. In the 10E zone, which is actually this green and goldenrod areas, so this is 120th Ave north-south here, the housing allowances are a little bit more... They allow more housing. But only on properties that are adjacent to the CKC. That is quite a few of the properties in this zone because this is the CKC. So most of the properties, at least in the western portion of the 10E zone, are adjacent to the CKC and allow housing. The allowed height is up to 80 feet. We do have... sort of a mixed use requirement, but it's very flexible. There's no minimum amount of another use that you have to have included. So down here on these parcels is where the Toll Brothers Townhome project is currently under construction. And to meet that existing mixed use requirement, they have a pretty small accessory commercial building. I can't remember how many square feet exactly, but it's pretty small. 1,000 square feet of commercial and then the number of townhomes approved there is 120 so They're using those existing housing allowances and there is an affordable housing requirement adopted there as well. I uh... one of the options that we talked about a little bit when we were reviewing the community initiated amendment request in terms of options for what we adopted at the time that we were studying the comprehensive plan was the option to simply as something that could be an incremental step in terms of allowing more housing in this area something we did discuss at the time was simply increasing or expanding the housing incentive areas so in the 10c and 10d zones if we just expanded these boxes to cover the whole area it would expand the housing allowances to all the parcels in that zone and that's something that could have been an incremental step Before if there was were questions about increasing height or density you could just expand existing housing allowances that Lie on some parcels to the rest of the parcels Planning Commission did recommend that but that that didn't end up going through in the final comprehensive plan adoption But it was a recommendation at the time. I Wanted to also talk a little bit about the capacity analysis. So the capacity analysis was performed for the comprehensive plan and the capacity analysis studied not only what zoned capacity existed based on today's build-out with existing zoning, but we also modeled future growth and what that could look like with potential up zones. And so... For that, I won't talk through all the numbers here, but we looked at the existing housing capacity on the Parmac site and then on the other parcels within the 10C, 10D, and 10E zones, and then we modeled housing. With up zones, what additional capacity might we expect? So for the Parmac site, like I mentioned before, we just modeled the maximum that was requested under the community initiated amendment request. That was 1200 units. And for the other parcels, we assumed an up zone that would be about 60 dwelling units per acre. That could be a four to five story kind of mid-rise building. Um, one thing I did want to point out in terms of what we modeled was that based on some, um, decisions that were made during the station area plan, for example, we didn't model additional housing on the portion of the 10E zone that is right up next to 405. So at the time that we were studying it, that was aligned with decisions made for the station area plan that restricted residential right next to the highway. So yeah. In terms of our modeling, we modeled additional capacity in the 10E zone where it adjoined the CKC and on the west side of 120th, but just modeled additional office capacity for the 10E zone where those parcels abut the highway. We have a few more slides with background, but I just wanted to pause and ask if there's any questions about what we've walked through so far.

Quick question on the additional capacity. I imagine that's with, you know, potentially it could be either the housing number or the employment number or some mix of those two, not all of that together. Right. Okay.

Any further questions? Commissioner Reiser.

So the additional capacity

Employment capacity is that if it is built out to its fullest Yes, and then assuming some some amount of up zone so in for employment capacity is It's a little different than housing capacity. We have an assumed square footage of building per employee that we'd expect to be generated. And so we calculate that. What we do for modeling is we assume a higher floor area ratio for the site. Even if we don't regulate FAR, that's what we use to model how big might the building be to get how many square feet it might be to get to how many employees it might accommodate.

It just seems like such a large number for 10E East Up Zone as compared to the Goodwill site.

And the Goodwill site was modeled because we had a specific request there. We didn't model a lot of additional employment capacity there because the car request for the Goodwill was primarily residential. And the employment capacity there would actually go down because the Goodwill use actually has quite a bit more employees than we might expect.

I didn't factor that. I was thinking, but there's retail on the Bottom floor, eight seemed very low, but you're subtracting. Great. I understand now.

Good question.

Commissioner Buñuel and then Vice Chairman Day.

Refresh my memory. Do we have mandated employment capacity that we have? We do. To meet in addition to housing? Mm-hmm. Okay.

And based on our existing for 2024... Sorry, 2044, our employment target was, I think, 26,490 more employees than we had existing in 2018.

Vice Chairman Dahlia?

I just want to make sure I capture this correctly. So for the capacity potential in the areas that are not the PARMAC, you said it was 60 dwelling units per acre was the assumption?

That's what we modeled, yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Any more questions on this slide? All right, continue.

Okay, thank you. All right, so wanted to talk a little bit about, so we modeled that capacity, and it's a model, so we're not doing super site-specific analysis. We're taking approximate units per acre, and we're making educated assumptions. But what we do is we feed that additional capacity. We fed it into our supplemental environmental impact statement that we did for the comprehensive plan and to see what happens to the city if we add more houses here, more jobs there. and look at the distribution, those numbers got fed into the transportation analysis that was done for the transportation strategic plan update. They're also getting fed into what got adopted in the capacity analysis is getting fed into the water and sewer system plan update. So we use these numbers in a few different ways. But for the supplemental environmental impact statement, that studied no action, so what happens with no changes, and then it also studied this high-end action of what happens if we do add capacity in all the areas where we're guessing we might upzone. That comprehensive plan supplemental environmental impact statement, it studies a non-project action and I wanted to take a moment just to explain the difference for folks that might not be familiar. Non-project action SEPA covers broader actions like citywide comp plan updates, like some of our broader zoning standard amendments. Non-project action SEPAs don't necessarily Negate the need for a project to undergo a project level SEPA Analysis when they are they actually know exactly what they're gonna build on the exact site So in many cases and what we would expect at this point based on what we adopted In the comprehensive plan the supplemental environmental The SEIS if you don't mind me Shortening it It's probably sufficient to change the zoning there, but we'd expect any large developments to have to do project level SEPA still. The project level SEPA would be looking at what happens if we, it would be looking in more detail at things like each intersection around the site that might be impacted. It would be looking a little bit closer at utility impacts. And it would be generating what potential mitigations would be required for any impacts. So project level SEPA is also done alongside our concurrency review, which is a traffic review. And that's the process through which we usually get to what transportation improvements are gonna be needed specific to that site. We don't get to that level of detail with the non-project SEPA that we do for like the comp plan. So I just wanted to distinguish between the two a little bit. Are there any questions about that?

Mr. Brunel.

Again, my memory isn't serving me, but when you're doing the project SEPA, Is there a distance level as far as impacts? Is there a limit or is it just based on what the traffic study shows or whatever? Am I making sense? I mean, could the development particularly have an impact a mile away or is it limited to a certain circumference around the property?

Yeah, I can start with that and then I invite Adam and Martha to correct me if they hear anything wrong. So it depends. It's case by case because every intersection kind of, it all ties together differently. And so in my experience, our traffic engineers are typically working with the applicant's traffic engineer who's preparing their study to identify what intersections need to be included in their analysis. There's not a set radius. It depends what the network looks like around that specific site.

Vice Chair Medea.

I'll probably have more questions on this later when more information is shared. So there's the project level SEPA. I think when we go through the corresponding policies that relate to this effort, there's more questions around that might come up. So I'll be circling back to that.

Bookmark.

Any more questions on this?

All right, thank you. So that gets us to, in the story that we're following along tonight, right? We got that initial CAR request. We expanded the study area. We did the non-project level SEPA analysis that folded in the additional capacity that we were studying for that site. And that, to turn a long story short, that got us to the adopted plans and the Totem Lake Neighborhood Business District plan. And so there's a couple goals and policies that relate specifically to the southern industrial sub area. I will not read these to you, but. I heard an interest expressed in the last meeting to kind of have these on screen for Planning Commission to discuss. So I have them here for you to reference as you talk tonight. What I did want to do is have Martha talk a little bit about this policy, specifically policy TL 33.1. is the policy that directs a sub area plan and it includes a very detailed list of the objectives for the sub area plan and also some things that should be included in a sub area plan. What Martha is going to talk about a little bit is the portions of this policy of the sub area plan that's been directed, what portions of that we think we've already either completed or started making progress on with the visioning work in phase one.

Yes, thank you, Alison, and good evening. So as you all heard a couple weeks ago, for phase one, we've been focused on visioning for the area, and we've partnered with BloxHub, the group from Denmark, through a grant that we received. And this work has touched on many elements in this comp plan policy and requirements for the sub area plan. And I've starred the elements that we've begun to advance through phase one. And this phase was focused on the exploration and outreach in the area and learning more about how the area functions today, what's working well, what isn't working well, We did quite a bit of outreach to businesses in the area, knocking on their doors, and learned what types of uses are out there today, what businesses are there, what buildings exist there. through our collaboration with blocks hub we came and in workshops with stakeholders we came up with some creative ideas to retain those existing businesses and buildings and also make the area more sustainable and activate the ckc which are all listed in this policy we also learned a lot about the identity of the area and how people view it and experience it, which all kind of helps paint the picture to eventually create a new name for the area, which is explicitly listed here for the subarea plan. And the Blocks Hub team and the Nordic experts that we were working with also developed design concepts for the nine ideas that you all heard about a couple weeks ago. And all of those ideas advance these policies that I've starred, but they aren't mutually exclusive with adding housing to this area, so both could be included in a future sub-area plan. But they give us a good starting point for many of these elements that are focused on Retaining existing businesses and buildings, but also potentially adding housing and then activating the CKC Adding pedestrian connections making it more livable those sorts of requirements And those ideas could be implemented in the next phase of the sub area plan Thank you, and we can come back to this as well I think I have just a couple more slides

So these are a few more, another goal and policies that relate to potential residential use in the area. Again, I just have them on the screen for us to reference if commission wants to use this slide as a landing point. And then wanted to talk a little bit about what the process would be to rezone the area. And so, as I mentioned previously, and as we have talked quite a bit about, the intent of the policy that was adopted in the comp plan is that the subarea plan should proceed any zoning changes in the area, though it's not uncommon that we might be working on those things at the same time, such as we did in the station area. We were working on the station area plan while we were also getting the rezones ready, and they all Were adopted around the same time In fact, the sub area plan was adopted at the same meeting that the first rezones were so that can happen as well and We think that If the rezones don't exceed the capacity that was studied in the comp plan SEIS, we don't think we'd need additional SEPA review. We think it would be covered by the comp plan SEIS, similar to what we did for the Juanita rezones. These are a little bit more, these could be a little bit more extensive. It's a bigger area, but that's our opinion as of right now. Increasing capacity beyond what we studied in the EIS would probably require some additional SEPA review either through, and that would probably be through a supplemental, another supplemental environmental impact statement. And then beyond that, it'd be the typical rezone process. So that's a planning commission public hearing and council adoption. And then again, just noting, it's important to remember that future projects would likely still require that project level SEPA review. Lastly, this is my last slide, just wanted to note, we've talked a lot about the question of how much housing in this area. And just for the planning commission's information, wanted to note a few other projects that are on the adopted work program that have the potential to increase housing capacity in other areas of the city. And a lot of these are state mandates that were passed after we adopted the comp plan. So they're kind of new in the context of this policy that was adopted at least. And so a few of the tasks that we wanted to highlight were, of course, expanding housing opportunities for faith-based properties. We didn't model additional capacity on faith-based properties in the comp plan EIS or capacity analysis. We assumed they would keep on being their existing use and wouldn't develop housing. So that's housing capacity. That wasn't factored into the comp plan analysis. The next one is implementation of Senate bill 6026. This is actually a pretty big one that just passed this last session What it requires us to do is for any Zones in the city commercial or mixed-use zones where we don't currently allow residential zoning. We have to allow residential uses so the biggest piece that we can think of for this. There's a few little areas of Totem Lake over on the east side of the highway, but there are a few large properties in the station area where the allowed heights are the tallest, next to 405, so properties that are allowed to go up to 150 and 250 square feet. Those parcels closest to 405 currently do not allow residential uses, but with implementation of this state bill, will be required to open them up to residential. So that will add quite a bit of residential capacity for those areas. Um, it doesn't mean they'll get developed, but it adds to the capacity. Um, the next is the neighborhood center zone consolidation project. Um, with that, um, as we consolidate and try to standardize that zoning, they'll likely be some areas that get more housing capacity and that task description also, um, It says that we should explore removing land aggregation or minimum parcel size requirements. So in some cases, those might be hindering or restricting capacity. We would be looking at opening those up. And then also the task description says to consider increasing nearby housing densities. So there's some potential there. And lastly, the implementation of the TOD bill that had not passed when we adopted the comp plan. And so we'll be required to implement minimum densities and minimum FAR allowances around transit stops, which would include the future K-line stops. So that covers some areas of the city that we haven't talked about yet. And I think that's the last slide I had, but happy to toggle around anywhere you want to go.

Thank you. Questions or comments? Commissioner Bunyal.

I know, just too chatty. Sorry to harp on targets, but I'm wondering where housing versus employment targets. If we increase housing in, I'm gonna call it, to me it's the Parmac area. How do you balance when you're housing When you're changing zoning and your housing targets are detrimental to your employment targets, how do you decide what to do? So say this area allows lots more housing and it makes the employment targets go way down. how do you choose or how do you weigh which is more important? And then also, what are the expectations as far as employment and probably not much for housing currently with the comp plan in this area? I'm just wondering how much any changes the subarea plan does would affect existing assumptions. Does that make sense?

I think we'll start answering and you tell me if it makes sense. So the land capacity analysis is challenging because we're having to make some assumptions about what mix we expect to see in areas that include allowances for both housing and commercial or any other type of use that would generate employees. we're making assumptions and they might not bear out the way we assume. Just like we might have properties that allow for housing that underdevelop what we assume was going to get developed. So one of the things that, one of the tasks that we have adopted on the work program for this year is to do another land capacity analysis ahead of our required progress report to the state for the comp plan. At the five year mark, and this is a new requirement from the state, at the five year mark after we adopt our comp plan periodic update, we're required to give the state a progress report. We're proposing to do another full land capacity analysis to check our assumptions and see Are things happening the way we thought? Maybe not as quickly, but for some of those sites where we might have assumed a certain mix, the land capacity analysis will give us a chance to look at that. We could also model different assumptions. So the office environment has kind of continued to trend down perhaps. So we might make different assumptions in 2028 when we start working on that next land capacity analysis than we did in 2022, 2023 when we were doing the last one.

So I'm kind of comparing, I think, capacity with existing zoning. So say in this Parmac area, we rezone and there's a potential of 1,200 more housing units. But because allowing those housing units, we see a net decrease in what The employment targets would be, do we have to reevaluate the city to make that up somewhere else? Because we have a quota we have to meet. And so if one area is being detrimentally affected, do we have to consider that? I mean, it seems like, gosh, you know, unintended or intended consequences are unintended. It just has sort of this leapfrog effect.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. If we saw employment decreasing in one area, we'd look for other areas where there's capacity for it. We did meet our capacity needs. We show we have enough employment capacity as well right now, and things will continue to change. So when we redo that capacity analysis, we'll check in on both housing and employment and see – If all of a sudden we're short on our targets, we'll have to see, is there somewhere else that we might look at changing? And I don't know if Adam.

Yeah, thanks, Ellie. The only thing I was going to mention, Ellie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we have excess, some excess capacity, both in housing and in employment. For housing, not necessarily in all the income brackets, but I think we have excess overall housing capacity, right? So the potential to build more housing than what our targets required. And we have more capacity than we are required to have for employment as well. So there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of room for taking capacity away, right? Especially I think when it comes to employment, probably not as much for housing. So we have a little bit of room to work with. And again, yeah, in a couple of years we'll revisit our capacity analysis. We also, right, there's also assumptions that go into that, that we can also, um, take into account when we do our future capacity analysis. For instance, a trend recently in recent years has been that more employees, at least during sort of the tech boom part of our history, more employees getting packed into square footage than used to occur, right? Employment densities, I think, generally speaking, are higher now than they were historically. So again, when we look at do we have enough zone capacity to accommodate our employee targets, we can also think about are we seeing trends in Kirkland that might make us change our sense of how much square footage we need to accommodate the number of employees that we're supposed to accommodate. So if that makes sense.

And because capacity is meant to look on a big macro scale, not down to the parcel and the neighborhood level. So even if you detrimentally decrease employment or housing in this area by rezoning, you still look at the whole city. You still might not be have a deficit somewhere. So, okay.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

Other questions or comments? Vice Chair Medeo.

Okay, so I'm just going to make sure I got this straight. So there were a lot of assumptions that went into the SEIS, fed into the transportation, water, sewer, et cetera, and that it probably doesn't necessarily negate the need to undergo a project-level SEPA, right? But, you know, okay, but a project, sorry, yeah, so a project-level SEPA might be needed. So I think about the car request, and like Michaels and Goodwill, part of the challenge is just the sheer time to execute against it, but we made a deliberate choice to fold it into our comp plan work. We have that policy now that provides some guidance, and we had that pretty energizing presentation last week from Blocks Hub. So I believe we can probably walk and chew gum at the same time. I don't want to lose the opportunity to make some progress in this space. So given that, based on the assumptions that we have, I would love to... consider how we continue to accelerate this, save space for this while working on several of the other project work program items that you talked about. Like the time in my view is now to not let this squander. Not that that's our fault, right? But to figure out how we can work within this policy to gain some real traction. So is there anything we haven't done that we need to revisit to be mindful of this policy while still moving forward in a meaningful way?

A couple initial thoughts, and I want to hear what Adam and Martha think about this as well, but a couple initial thoughts. One, we need to, the policy right now includes some specific things that would require some budget for us to study. So if we continue as this policy dictates, a lot of the things that aren't starred, so the fiscal impacts and community benefits analysis, looking at transportation in the area, looking at infrastructure in the area, those are likely things that we would need to go out of house and need some budget to study. So that's one of the things that would help us keep moving forward. It's one of the reasons that we split the phasing on this project in the first place. But I think it's worth noting that we also haven't talked to council about this policy yet since it's been adopted. And so we do plan to talk to council. We're scheduled tentatively to go to their August 7th, 5th, thank you, August 5th meeting to report out from phase one. And I think that will be a good opportunity to revisit this policy and get some direction from them on that will help us scope that next step of the sub area plan. So I think that's an important next step that we have in front of us.

that would absolutely be important. Again, just speaking for myself, I think given that there were some number of projections in there that if the direction going forward was, yeah, to continue to explore in this space, I would say let's stick to those projections, not try to increase them and elongate and potentially invite even further work to be done.

I have quite a few questions, but I want to let all of you go first. All right. So you talked about that there's some specific requirements that require budget. Can you kind of expand on what those requirements are and whether they're things we normally do as part of a rezoning process?

Yeah. So I think they're the things that I just mentioned that I think we need to know, and we do this a lot in our initial conversations with council about some of these bigger projects is scope the project. So I think as staff, we would need to know a little bit more about fiscal impacts and community benefits. There was a fiscal impact and community benefits study done for the station area plan prior to those rezones that was a pretty heavy lift and it did require an outside consultant. Transportation analysis is something we would need to go out for and would require budget. Some of the analysis of This area's share of targets and some of the incentives and requirements for affordable housing We might be able to do with our in-house resources and arch And again, I think around the infrastructure necessary, that's another thing that might require outside consultation I want to make sure Adam weighs in if I've got anything. Okay. Yeah, so those are those are kind of the big ones and

Um, okay. And then you talked about, we need to hear from council what the scope of this project would be, but we already have it in the work program as a, as taking one year. Is that what, what are we assuming for the scope to, to estimate that one year? Like would that grow to a longer project if we were looking at a larger amount of housing in this area?

Potentially, yeah. Because some of this subarea plan, I think the way that the subarea plan is scoped in terms of it taking a year, it assumes we're not having to do additional non-project SEPA review. If we expanded the housing capacity we were looking at there or the employment capacity, I think it would probably trigger additional environmental review and that I wouldn't confidently say we could get additional environmental analysis and a subarea plan done in a year.

Okay, but if we kept to the amount that we studied as part of the comp plan SEIS, would that require more than the year if we're also doing the sub-area plan and all of these other analyses?

It's a tough question, because a lot of times the stationary plan was supposed to take two years, and it took four. Sometimes the more we study things, the more questions we develop. And sometimes the more study we want to do, and we just kind of dig deeper. Doing a subarea plan in a year is ambitious. If we stayed tightly focused and have the resources to bear and can contract pretty quickly for that outside help, I do think it's possible, but it would have to remain pretty focused and the scope would have to remain pretty tight. And then it would also... How many touches does Planning Commission and Council need to make feel good about making informed decisions? That's another thing that is always a variable in timing of our projects.

Okay, thank you. I want to pause. I have more questions, but I want to give another opportunity if anyone has questions. Commissioner Rosman.

Not exactly questions, but thinking back to the block sub presentation last time, I think the strongest feeling I was feeling was actually jealousy, that they're able to come from a place where it seems like things move faster and i feel like i talked to a couple of them afterward and it seemed like they didn't really have great answers as to like why they're able to move faster i think it's probably a lot of systemic stuff but like i think with this whole conversation i just really want to make sure we, we move things along and that like things happen. And like, we got to see some really cool examples and I really want to see really cool stuff happen in Kirkland. So whether that's a year long process or if it gets longer, like I think longer is okay as long as there's like action with it. So, um, you know, I think there's a lot of opportunity in this area and I think we've gotten a lot of ideas. Um, But, yeah, let's, like, do the thing. And, you know, and then I would love to see in a couple years, like, be able to, like, send a blocks up, like, hey, look at all this cool stuff that was, like, inspired from that report. So, but, like, let's make it happen is the big one. I don't know if I have much else than that right now.

Anyone else? Commissioner Rutherford?

I guess what I'm sensing, especially based on Commissioner Rosman and what I also tend to think is like, how can we sharpen our focus on what we're doing now so we don't draw it out? And, you know, I'd love to see us get into the habit of, you know, we make some initial changes now and maybe we come back to it later. I don't know how that really ends up playing out in the real world of planning, but I think that's a muscle that we need to figure out how can we just put something in place in this direction and then evaluate it and make smaller changes rather than trying to plan everything up front.

Any other comments? Commissioner Rutherford?

Right, sir. yeah the comment I would make is I really liked the in the presentation the repurposing of the buildings I don't know if that will meet our you know projected numbers just because it it was great cool concepts and from a sustainability standpoint that is definitely what we should be doing But I think it's a challenge to staff. How can you make these numbers fit into that type of process?

I want to plus one to those comments. One of my first reactions to the presentation was I'm very skeptical that we would meet the same amount of housing that we studied in the comprehensive plan SEIS. If we in a sub area plan, if we do something more along the lines of what they were talking about with only adding one floor of housing on top. Am I right in thinking that that that would represent more of a vision of significantly less housing than what we studied?

I think if we limited ourselves to thinking of just the existing buildings that are there today with no expansion of their footprint and they're just adding one story yeah it wouldn't it wouldn't meet what we studied, but I think that what. What we'd like how we're thinking about the work that's been done in the ideas that were presented by blocks of it, are there pieces of a puzzle and so. I think we'd agree, very unlikely that all the buildings in that area are going to adaptively reuse the warehouse structure and convert to that housing. But it's an idea that some of them might implement. It's something we'd love to put out there to inspire people. But there's also a lot of area out there that is parking lots and not buildings right now. So I think there's a lot of ways to get there. The 1,200 units studied on the PARMAC properties is pretty dense, especially at the heights that they were requesting. But for the rest of the area, we studied, like I said, we modeled about 60 units per acre, which is not, it seems like that could fit well with some of the ideas that were presented. So I don't think we're envisioning some of the ideas presented as the only solution or the complete solution.

Okay, thank you. I think in terms of making sure that the sub area plan does not explode in length of time and scope, it seems to me that council really does need to say up front what they're looking for. And it's really odd to me that we would commit to doing this project without having already decided what that would look like. So that feels like a question that council really should answer before we start the phase two. In terms of process, you talked a bit about sub-area plan. We also from time to time do the planned action ordinances. Can you talk a little bit more about what the difference between those are? in terms of what they enable but also in terms of what impacts they study?

Sure, and so planned action ordinance is another type of SEPA action, and if you'll allow me, I'm sorry, if you all made me give you a dollar for every time I said station area plan, you drained me, yeah. But we adopted a planned action ordinance in the station area, and a planned action ordinance can only be adopted in conjunction with a comp plan or a sub-area plan adoption, so it has to tie into an existing plan or one that you're actively working on. And what it does is essentially it does project level SEPA analysis for a broader area. And so it does require a lot more work than a non-project SEPA. But what it does is it is more detailed modeling and analysis of specific project impacts such that you can model traffic is is a good example to use because it's usually what people ask about you can model. specific trips for the full area that you're studying for your planned action and you can identify all of the improvements that might be needed to mitigate the impacts being generated from those additional trips being placed on the network. So what you end up with is adoption of a planned action ordinance that has completed the project level SEPA and what it does is it really streamlines development down the road because as long as The development proposed, when you get to those construction permits, as long as it falls under the thresholds studied in the planned action ordinance, it doesn't have to do project-level SEPA review, which means it's a lot quicker for them. A lot of the work is already done. That saves time because it also means that there's no SEPA appeal they might be vulnerable to. So it saves time and therefore money, which is why we did it in the station area plan. It was really intended as one of the main incentives that we spent time and resources on. And we added that planned action ordinance to the station area scope after we received a pretty big grant from the State Department of Commerce. So it wasn't in the original plan, but when we got a $150,000 grant, we added that planned action ordinance in as a portion of it.

Okay, thank you. And so if we were to do a planned action ordinance, it would have to be along with a sub-area plan. And so that would almost certainly extend the process and increase the cost and likely require more budget.

We'd have to look at it a little bit more, but I was looking at the RCWs on it today, and it can be in conjunction with a comprehensive plan. So we'd probably want to check with experts in the field, but I think it could be that the work we've done in the comprehensive plan could serve as that requirement to be in conjunction with a plan that the city's adopted.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, Chair Jacobson, the only other thing I was going to add is that in thinking about the planned action ordinance we did for the stationary plan, it was very heavily dependent, maybe even less on the actual sub area plan, less on the stationary plan, more on the EIS that we did, right? Like the EIS that we did for the stationary plan gave us a huge level of detail. on the mitigation measures that we needed to incorporate into the planned action ordinance. So the planned action ordinance for the stationary plan includes very granular mitigation measures, like widen sidewalks along this stretch of street, put a mini roundabout here, add a right turn lane here. So I think that's a lot of the work that would need to go into doing a planned action ordinance for something like the CIS if we were anticipating a good amount of growth in it. Okay, I think that makes sense.

So that honestly just makes me wonder more, like what exactly is the difference of a sub-area plan versus a planned action ordinance? Because it sounds like the planned action ordinance is a lot more specific on what the impacts are and what the solutions to that are, whereas the sub-area plan feels very high in the clouds and not very specific.

Yeah, there's probably a good degree of overlap, but I think that... Again, Martha and Ali should jump in if they feel like I'm not describing this correctly. But for me, a planned action ordinance is primarily about mitigating environmental impacts, you know, as sort of loosely defined by SEPA. The sub area plan is more about how do you create a complete community right, which is a little bit different than mitigating environmental impact, so a sub area plan is going to be about. How are people getting to open is there adequate open space right that's not really an environmental impact issue that's more about just what makes a good community, how are people getting around by bike and by foot. The aesthetics of the area right sufficient infrastructure like those are not necessarily environmental impact issues, the plan to action ordinances. this project is causing significant impacts, too much traffic, air pollution, excessive levels of noise, whatever it ends up being, stormwater pollution, how do you mitigate those things?

So a planned action ordinance is more how do you mitigate or slash enable something to happen, whereas the sub-area plan is a process where we decide what we want to happen.

Yeah, a planned action ordinance mitigating environmental impacts, I would say more specifically. Mitigating impacts identified in an environmental impact statement. Exactly, yeah.

Okay, thank you. I guess for me it feels like a planned action ordinance is better suited for addressing, and this is more commentary, is better suited for addressing the specific impacts. When members of the public come to us with concerns, it feels like a better tool for addressing those concerns. Whereas a sub-area plan, especially if we're worried about this dragging out, it seems like saying we want a sub area plan is saying we want to commit to something and still not know what we're going to do and not even potentially address these specific concerns. And so it's, but this policy requires the sub area plan. And so would we, would we have to amend this policy to, to, uh, do a planned action ordinance and zoning changes, but not create a sub area plan?

Yes, I think so. It would need it because the sub-area plan is specifically called out in the policy. I guess the one maybe clarification I want to make is that It's not, you know, one of the big fundamental questions that you consider when you're doing something like a planned action ordinance is how much growth happens. We often use the subarea plan as the vehicle to figure out how much growth happens, right? So when we did the stationary plan, we looked at a bunch of different growth alternatives. So it's not to say that you can't do that without a subarea plan, but a subarea plan sometimes is a good vehicle to consider different growth options. I mean, you can also do that in EIS as well, but it's, It's sort of weird to do an EIS without a plan to study, at least at program level one.

Okay, thank you. I mean, I guess for me, it really feels like, I mean, I look at trying to create a sub-area plan, even for the maximum amount that we've already studied in the comprehensive plan EIS. I think Allison, the words you used were like, it'd be tight to get it done in one year. Um, and so, I mean, I hear that and that's that knowing Kirkland, the Kirkland process, uh, that feels one year feels a bit unrealistic, but it's, but it feels especially unrealistic if we haven't even decided how much we're going to allow. Um, and so I, I guess I'm, I'm curious what options are there for, uh, reducing that uncertainty does it basically just boil down to council needs to come to a decision and Give direction to the Commission and staff.

I Think that's the first first step I Yeah, I mean, I think there's some other, and this would be larger reevaluations of this policy, but, you know, I just sidebarred over here. There's other options to consider more of an incremental step to, if the focus is on some action now, You know if the policy was amended it could be considered to just increase the housing incentive areas again, so there's But again it all kind of comes back to the policy And I do think that the big next step is talking to council and getting some some more direction and so if the if in terms of trying to understand what direction council might give would

you'd be more certain about getting it done in a year if the direction was to just expand the housing incentive area and allow Heights to know more than is currently allowed.

That certainly narrows the scope. That's pretty specific. But I mean, specificity in any direction would enable us to take a better guess at the time needed.

Okay.

And I think, I'll say too, I think a lot of the questions that Planning Commission is raising are great questions that will also help council think through what direction to give, because I think you're asking a lot of really good questions.

The other thing I'd add too is that, I mean, it's possible that, again, looking at this policy that we have baked into the comprehensive plan, right, as you guys know, it's very incremental in nature, right? It's as you do studies, you understand the area better. then you launch into a sort of a sub-area planning process. So, I mean, it's possible that, again, just following the outlines and the framework of the policy, that council would say, hey, per the existing policy, we need to do a real estate market study first, right, before we even think about how much growth is appropriate in that area. So I just wanted to, you know, highlight that as something that would, that council might be expecting that would conform to the existing policy that we have in the comp plan.

Okay. And so in order to do that market study first, like that will take time. And so that would take, what, minimum six months to put out a request for a consultant, find a consultant, get them to do their work, bring it back to us and council, and then we would have to do the sub-area plan. I'm skeptical we could then do the sub-area plan in the remaining six months of that one-year project. That feels very certain that it's longer than it's currently written down for.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think, you know, the market study could be done concurrently with what we usually do at the beginning of a subarea plan, which is to collect existing information about the area beyond what we've already done as part of the block sub work. So, I mean, there is some potential for overlap as well.

Okay, so really it's ultimately down to how council wants to proceed. Okay, thanks. That's just about all of my questions. Anyone else have questions or comments? Commissioner Rosman.

Does the city have money for that consultant? Did we have that clarity, like that's for sure money earmarked for this study? Is this all for sure, like that piece is certain, or is that still up in the air budget?

Yes. Yeah. Thanks, Commissioner Rosman. Still completely up in the air. We're just in the early stages of launching into our budget discussions. That will start internally and then end up with council. So really undefined right now, the budget that is going to be requested for this work.

And on that point, as I remember, I think from talking with you previously, you've mentioned that the The current request is, at least right now, planned to be around $50,000 to $75,000. The previous request before we did the visioning work was $200,000, and that city council rejected the $200,000. We're asking for $50,000 to $75,000 this year. If council does not give that money, how would that impact the project? Would we just have to delay it until council gives the money?

Yeah, good questions. I guess, and just a technical clarification, I think the previous budget was not rejected by city council. I think it was not forwarded by the city manager's office to the council in the context of other budget priorities. So I just wanted to make that clear. The current budget that we're asking for is a little bit in flux right now. We are having internal discussions about it. So probably too early to say the precise budget amounts. I think it's changing a little bit potentially. Yeah, in terms of like, to what extent can the work be advanced? I mean, I just want to recognize that, again, the way that we traditionally do really hairy, tricky sub-area plans with a lot of growth is to get outside consultant assistance. And there are definitely some tasks here where we would absolutely need consultant assistance, like the real estate market study. I don't think anybody in the city could really do that type of work. Could staff do a sub-area plan that is a you know, that plans for growth sort of on the lower side of the spectrum, like, that is a possibility, actually. Like, we probably have the staff expertise to do an in-house sub-area plan with maybe some really focused consultant assistance. So I don't want to rule out, you know, staff being able to do a sub-area plan without a big budget ask, although that is the way that we traditionally do. We've traditionally done sub-area plans here. So I think it's a possibility that we could do a lot of the work in-house if we need to, and we prioritize work tasks appropriately.

Okay, thank you. More questions or comments? Vice Chair Medea.

I'm not trying to be silly, but I think about the Runstead Institute, right, like this economic analysis thing. Can we get an intern there that can at least get the ball rolling? All right. Sorry.

I love that. That's a great idea. We do have an intern program. We actually have an intern hired already, but, like, that is possibly something that we could do, right? So there's just different – I don't want to make it sound like – If we don't get sufficient budget for this, like all bets are off, I think we could think creatively about how to use what we have to advance the project as much as possible.

And then is it fair to say as well that in addition to some of the benefits that Chair Jacobson mentioned on the planned action ordinance being kind of, while it may be a little bit more intensive up front, The impact in terms of proactively addressing potential community concerns is a plus, but wouldn't also that be a great carrot for a developer, knowing that down the line, once they get those details finalized, the permitting process is much quicker?

Yes, that is true, and when we've, for the station area plan, here's my other dollar, we have gotten really good feedback from the development community that we do have a planned action ordinance adopted, so it is recognized as a good incentive.

Any more questions or comments for this item? All right. Thank you. I believe next on the agenda is administrative reports and planning commission discussion.

All right. So just a quick public meeting or your calendar update. We currently do not have anything scheduled for your July 9th meeting. It sounds like we might be canceling that unless there's any Okay, so we'll be canceling your July 9th meeting. So we'll send that cancellation out to you soon. Your meeting after that will be July 23rd. We are scheduled to bring you the public hearing for the Housing on Faith Owned Land project. So you directed us to bring that straight to hearing. We're going to do that. Thank you for that direction. We're making really good progress on the draft code for that. And we're also vetting it with some... outside folks from arch and from the affordable housing development community with the faith-based community so we've gotten a lot of good input from them and feel like it's going to be pretty well vetted that's going to be on july 23rd that meeting is going to be virtual for all of you because council chambers will be getting its update of the av system so you can do it from home Staff will be here at City Hall available if there's any members of the public that want to join us in person. And so members of the public wishing to make public comment can do it virtually by joining the Zoom meeting like they always do. We will also have staff here at City Hall if they want to come in person. They won't speak to you face-to-face, but there will be the technology available for them to make comment from City Hall as well. And then we have items scheduled for both of your August meetings as of right now. The urban forest management plan update briefing, your second one on that. We're taking that to council here in a few weeks. And then it looks like tentatively scheduling the public hearing for the parking cleanup project following the quick action ordinance to implement 5184. It looks like we're going to schedule that for August 27th. And that's it for me. I'm going to throw it to Adam if there's any council actions we wanted to report on. I don't think we talked about the vote. I don't think we did.

It's hard to remember what we talked about at the last city council meeting when city council happened. Yeah, at the last city council meeting, there was the discussion about increasing the square footage threshold for the affordable housing requirement in the lower density zones. What? Oh, okay, sorry. From 22,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet. What ended up happening is that there were three city council members in attendance and it was a split vote. On three members thought that voted for keeping the exemption threshold of 2000 square feet three voted for increasing it to 2500 square feet. Typical parliamentary procedure is that when that happens, the vote fails the motion fails right to increase to 2500 square feet, we have a slight. idiosyncrasy and this in the council's rules and procedures that say that says that when there's a split vote. The vote actually returns then to city council at a future date for an additional vote when all the members are present. So what's happening right now is that we're in the process of figuring out when all the city council members are going to be present. So we'll be continuing this item basically again to a future meeting for a vote with all the members of the council. That issue of should the threshold be changed from 2,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet is still not completely resolved.

Okay. Thank you.

Adam bought me some time to remember the one other item from that last council meeting I wanted to report on which is that council did adopt the lot splitting Amendments as recommended by Planning Commission And then if I could just take a moment of staff privilege Wanted to acknowledge Commissioner Rosman's last meeting and and on behalf of staff just really think Commissioner Rosman for all your very hard work over the years many of them as chair through a lot of really tough and challenging projects We've loved working with you and just really appreciate your collaboration and questions and challenges to staff. But we're going to miss you.

I want to plus one those comments. Commissioner Rosman, you have dealt with a lot of tough issues in your time on the Planning Commission. And I know you've dealt with a lot of vitriol as well that you shouldn't have had to put up with. But I really appreciate all the work you've done on the commission. And I do not know what we would have done without you. And I don't know what we're going to do without you. Anyone else have discussion? All right.

I guess. Thanks. I don't know. I feel like I should say something if this is my last official meeting as planning commission. It's kind of wild to think about it. When I joined commission, I had a toddler and now I have a kid headed to middle school. And, you know, it's been a lot of hours and a lot of time and, you know, none of us do this unless we care deeply about the future of our city this is a lot of volunteer hours and a lot a lot of intense work and a lot of emotions and i've really appreciated serving with all of you both the commission and staff and as you all know like especially when it comes to housing this is one of my passions and something that i am you know, committed to with my day job, with my eight years here, with just like existing as a person in Kirkland. So I am also here as you need me for advice, thoughts. I'm not going to be coming to every meeting, but I'm happy to occasionally come weigh in as needed. And yeah, I'm just grateful to be in a city that like cares about having a solid future and one that like really is looking forward to like, how do we make it the best city for everybody? Not just the people that were fortunate enough to buy in when things were a lot more affordable. So thanks to all of you. And I'm going to miss being here, but I am also not going to miss losing my Thursday nights. So thank you. And I'm sure I will see you all around.

All right, that brings us to the last part of our meeting, comments from the audience. If you would like to speak, please either raise your hand on Zoom or approach the podium. You'll have three minutes to speak. Anyone want to give public comment? No? All right. And with that, I will adjourn this meeting.