Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Everyone, welcome everyone. Let us let's uh say pledges. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Let's This is uh Commissioner Morton and I will do the roll call now. Commissioner Connor Davis here. Commissioner Huxford here. Commissioner Sauls here. Commissioner Jennifer Davis

here. Commissioner Lewowski here. And Commissioner Der here. We are all here. And so, uh, let's go look at our agenda. Okay. Is there any comment in the audience? I see nobody here. Is there anyone online? No, there's not.

Okay. Uh, let's see. Um, we have an agenda or no, we have a minutes from our last meeting. Uh, if you've had a chance to review them, if there's any discrepancies, now would be a good time to point those out. Uh if it's correct and uh we'd like to pass it, we could or we'd like to um I guess put the minutes into the record, we could do I saw no additions, edits. I would approve as written. Commissioner Der seconds. Thank you. We have a mo we have a motion and a second. Uh we will vote. Um all who'd like to pass the minutes say I. I

I. Any nos? Okay. All right. So, next item is uh let's go talk to about the discussion items, which is the 26 sub area plan updates. And real quickly, Christy Schmidt. Um before we do, chair, I'd like to introduce before he starts his presentation, we do have a new staff member here this evening that many of you have not met yet. So, before he gives his debut presentation before the planning commission, I would like to introduce Troy Davis. We are very pleased to have him here. He and I'll let him give a quick little talk about himself. I love talking about myself.

Well, I'm glad to be the third Davis here to join the team. No kidding.

It's really interesting. In my entire life, outside of my family, I've never spent time with another Davis or known another Davis. And so, this is this is exciting. But anyway, um yeah, so I've been a senior planner for about 16 well 15 well 13 years plus some change. Um I previously worked for the city of Duval. I reside in Arlington and so that was quite a commute. So working here at the city of Lake Stevens is a a very nice change of pace. It's very nice to not make a long journey to to get here. Um, I guess a little bit else about me. I started out, uh, in Island County. So, I was living on Woodby Island, uh, working at the offices there in Coupeville. Uh, then I did work for the city of Arlington where I reside for a little while before going to Duvall. And now I'm here. So, I've bounced around a little bit. Um, but, uh, I've learned a lot in all the places I've worked and I'm excited to work here in Lake Stevens with everybody and learn what everybody has to teach me. So that's exciting uh to personal growth there. But uh anyway, other than that, uh personal things, I guess I'm interested in the outdoors. I love to do hiking, biking, kayaking. Anything that involves that, I like to do cooking. I try new recipes. I cook different stuff all the time. Um I don't know, pretty much anything outdoors, photography, landscape photography. I just there's just a lot of things I like to do and about this much time to do it all. So, I might hit up a hobby like once a year. Like I just finished reading a book that I ordered and I checked it on Amazon and a year had passed since I got the book and finished it, but I finished it. So, things are slow, but uh there's a lot of things that I like to do. So, anyway, I'm glad to be here.

Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. And uh yes, thanks for bringing that up. I'm rudely plowing through the agenda here, but uh thanks for introducing yourself and uh welcome aboard Troy and uh we look forward to working with you. Thank you. So, um is it going to be Troy or David that's going to You're gonna have Troy tonight.

All right. I'm excited about it. Right. My screen is shared. That's the good news. Back slot. All right. Oh, upper left. There's a little Oh, this one. Yeah. Okay. There. And you don't have to see all my notes.

All right. So tonight we wanted to touch base on the 2026 docket, specifically the text amendments labeled as T1. A little bit of background on this. So the 2026 annual docket was ratified by city council on February 18th, 2026. This is just information you guys already know. The 2026 docket consists of 20 or sorry almost said 266 proposed amendments. Three are map amendments and three are text amendments. Tonight's focus and overview is on proposed text amendment number one. So what is proposed text amendment number one? So these are technical updates to the city's three adopted sub area plans and part of that is to get alignment with the 2024 comp plan. So an overview of some of these updates. Uh we're updating sub uh sub area maps which includes zoning and boundaries. So these plans were up adopted in 2012 and 2018. So quite a bit of time has passed. Um plans as you know are not stagnant. they grow uh change things circumstances and so we're a little bit overdue for getting that updated. Um associated with that is your text tables and calculations that are associated uh with those maps and our comp plan. So when we have sub areas, you know, we look at um capacity, how much land is owned, what, how much can we accommodate, all those sorts of things. So there's a lot of text and tables and calculations. uh in the sub area plans that will need to be updated accordingly. Uh we also need to account for

milestones that we've met. So um you know sub area plans outline tasks, things that we need to get done and we've done a lot over the last 10 plus years. So that's great news. That means we're implementing our sub area plan. So we just need to update our sub area plan accordingly. Uh we need to make sure it's consistent with other adopted city plans. So uh that includes things like the trails plan. Uh we need to incorporate other minor docket updates from previous years. So uh there have been some minor tweaks I want to say to the 20th corridor sub area plan and we just want to make sure that those get incorporated. Um also we want to evaluate and possibly amend the planned action ordinance. So that's the ordinance that's based on the EIS um which is the environmental evaluation. So those set thresholds uh for development. So they set thresholds for the number of planned housing, the number of commercial square footage, the amount of business park square footage, those sorts of things. And so we might want to take a look at some of those and we'll dive a little bit into that a little bit. And then this is the fun one. So we've just had and thankfully David's bron with legislative stuff than I am, but we just had a Senate bill and as you guys know, the legislature has been extremely active the past few years. They're just throwing stuff at us. It's almost like we can't keep up. We turn around and and something's changed. So this latest doozy is um Senate Bill 6026. And essentially what that is going to do is force cities within the next 18 months provided the governor signs it to allow

residential development in our commercial zones. Now we already do that right on the upper on the upper stories, you know, for vertical mixed use, but this bill is saying we've got to allow it on the ground floor um pretty much up to 60%. we can only limit um ground floor commercial up to about 40%. Um if if the governor decides to sign this bill. So that's going to necessitate some changes. You know, that's going to have a ripple effect um in several different ways in our it'll impact our um permissible uses. It will impact um let's see permissible yeah permiss permissible use tables. it's going to impact our assumptions that we have and our and our growth targets and those sort of things, right? So, um from the state and the county, we've got growth targets for employment numbers and housing and that's all based on what our zoning parameters are. And so, now if we've got to allow resident more residential and our commercial zones, that has an impact on our commercial numbers and employment numbers that we've got to plan for. huge implications that can come from that.

Troy, I've got a quick question just about that. Um, so after it was our last meeting, we were discussing that maybe before, but I was trying to like looking at some comps in this uh Commissioner Connor Davis. Um, sorry. uh looking at uh commercial real estate rental fees um and trying to figure even with this legislation there seems to still be enough of an incentive for commercial developers to maintain that mixed use. Um, you I I don't see many buildings that are being constructed now that are that are, you know, have uh that are all residential without that mixed use on the bottom. Is there much precedent in surrounding municipalities that have had um in I guess zoning where it can can be all residential for them like to opt for that versus a versus mixed use. um tackle that one. So

yeah, we don't have specific data, you know, really um anything other than anecdotal information from other jurisdictions. I would say just looking at it regionwide. When you look at a lot of mixed vertical mixeduse projects, they're able to find tenants or residents for their residential component a lot quicker. you'll see a building that's completely leased out on the residential side and they're still looking for their ground flooror retail. I can tell you when I used to live in Ballard and would drive up Greenwood, like there were all sorts of buildings that were being built and it they get all leased out on the residential side and they would um be trying to find retail tenants and for I don't know if it was that they were overcharging, but generally as the region has grown pretty rapidly and as we've seen a shift towards more online shopping and the general, you know, the way that, you know, local commerce operates, it kind of started to have ripple effect and over the last 10 to 15 years I think that's continued on. It really depends on the quality of the building but I guess the one concern is um you know within a mixeduse zone or within a commercial zone where we allow it um you know trying to reach our employment growth target the ground floor retail is important. I mean, a lot of projects may not go up more than one or two stories and then so it's an incentive for them to be able to do residential above, but if you're not going to require them to do any sort of ground flooror retail or commercial, then we already have a, you know, we had a deficit on our employment land. We had to do some additional reasonable measures as part of the 2024 comp plan where we looked at different ways where we could bump up our employment capacity. were there development code changes that we could do? So, I I guess that's the general concern. Um, and then it would just be really hard to implement. Um, if you're saying, you

know, basically the legislation says you can require ground flooror retail but not for more than 40% of your zone capacity within all of your commercial and mixed use zones. So our commercial district, the CD district is the vast majority of our commercial and mixed use zones. So you know, we could either not require ground floor there and only require it in the little things downtown or in some of our other zones that only take up, you know, 5 or 10% of our zone capacity. We could do it that way. We could try to have like an overlay where we say along 20th you're required to have ground floor but not along 99th or not along you know other parts along SR9 not required in Lake Steven Center. Um, so it just, you know, from a from a implementation and from a tracking perspective, it's going to be really difficult as well. And I think that's something that we would need to work out, assuming that the governor does sign it.

And is there I guess anecdotally from um our legislators, is there any indication of the uh whether or not that bill is going to get in front of the governor at this rate? It's in front of him now. So, it's passed both house I mean the legislative session like what did they whether he would sign it. I'm sorry.

I've you know I've just seen that I think he was intending to sign it but I haven't I it's it I don't know when it's scheduled for that. Um as of today it still hasn't been signed but I know sometimes these things take a couple of weeks and when you have all these different House and Senate bills coming before him that it might take some time. Um but and you know a lot of local jurisdictions did you know they held their support and they actually came out kind of the early iterations of this bill came out against it. Um and then there were some minor tweaks and some potential opportunities for cities to do some kind of quantitative analysis to try to you know justify at the local level why they need some minor tweaks. Yeah.

Um, so I think there still is some opportunities for that, but you know, there's a lot of work involved with that and then that would get in the way of the rest of our work program and um, so we're looking at all of our different options, but um, you know, that's a major one, especially for 20th. Um, kind of tying in the planned action ordinance. we had, you know, the planned action ordinance, which basically shifts your environmental review up to the plan level instead of the project level. So, back in 2012, um, you know, commissioners Jennifer Davis and I think Huxford were both on the planning commission at that time. And so we went through this whole process and adopted an EIS and said that you know the first 500,000 square feet of commercial and office uses and the first 500,000 square ft of retail uses you qualify as a planned action as long as you fall within the boundaries. You don't have to fill out a project specific SEPA checklist and you don't need an individual threshold determination. you get what's called SEIPA planned action certification other than the Costco within the 20th Street Southeast Corridor. You know, they they took out a couple hundred thousand square ft of that 500,000 ft of retail, but we've seen very little office and commercial development along 20th. So, we still have a lot of that. And if we now there's less of an incentive from a zoning perspective for somebody to have that ground floor retail um you know there is the opportunity and that was kind of the impetus for some of the discussion that we want to have related to planned action if it looks like we're going to have more residential within there and we're bumping up the max against that maximum threshold. We basically had allocated a thousand units of residential within the sub area before you had before you had to start doing project level sea review. If we're going

to be seeing a shift towards more residential, should we update the planned action ordinance to reflect that or should we really be pushing continuing to push and trying to incentiv incentivize commercial and retail and office development as much as possible because we do need it from an employment perspective. I mean, I don't know where else we're going to meet our employment growth targets if we don't do it in downtown Lake Stavens, along 20th and along SR9. So, there's just a couple different things to think about and any, you know, we're not asking you to to solve it tonight, but just to to think about that as we move through this process. What's the best way to be dealing with all these things that are very much interchanged? And that's a lot more than I was planning on talking tonight.

And I I do appreciate the thorough response. You're amazing. Yeah. Thank you so much, David. Yes. Thank you, David. Can May may I ask a follow-up question to that? Um,

so we you use the word incentivize the businesses to want to do ground floor commercial or the residential development, whatever that may be. Um, in a past life, I did economic development and there are suites of tools out there that are true incentives. Yeah. Now, what I've not done tonight is done my homework to see if the state of Washington what their packages look like. I know they do incentive packages, but um you know, one way I was thinking about how to be overcome some of this is actually to be proactive, right? So, if you're going out trying to find a residential developer that wants to do multif family, obviously it wouldn't work in single family homes, but you know, how could we actually monetize an incentive to have them do ground floor development, right? So, kind of get both, right? Versus waiting, and I understand that's a pinch point, right? If we're just waiting for development to come, then we don't have any teeth beyond 40% requirement. Um, but do we have anything already developed that we could proactively use to go after some of these development primarily multif family with ground flooror retail?

Sure. U, Christy Schmidt, planning manager, we do, and Dave, you can always speak on this more, but in our sub area section of our code, we do have development incentives for increased height limits. certain things that if the developer does provide, they get an increase, what you'd call a density bonus. So, our intent would be is to go look at those and see what we can do to sweeten the package essentially. So, if you think of any great ideas through our conversations or from other jurisdictions, please let us know. And I would actually, this is um Commissioner Huxford, I would actually look at it the opposite way and say um our governor is going to sign this. There isn't a law that got passed this um session that he won't. However, um it's being challenged throughout the state. Lake Stevens is not the only city that is um um being thrust into some sort of conflict on this. And I would back up the bus and say, uh let's uh slow the roll a little bit. Let's see what evolves from some um referendums that might be being worked on um to lessen the blow to what we have already in 2012 and 2018 structured for what we were going to do. um the cities that we talked about in 2012 and 2018 like Redmond and some of these areas that were building downf flooror retail with um residential above are now struggling. And so for us to follow suit simply because this was passed and be the poster children of doing that I think is um might be not in our best interest.

Yeah. And just to clarify the you know most of you know any changes would be established and kind of the framework would be set throughout the sub area plan potential updates to the sub area plan if we have a defined strategy and a direction that we'd like to go. They would also require zoning changes which we don't need to do in 2026. We would have at least until September of 2027. So if it's passed, it basically give cities 18 months to amend their development code. Uh so that's not anything that needs to occur specifically within 2026, but we would need to have that done um say if the if the governor were to sign it today, it would need to be done by September 18th of 2027. So we would have some additional time to implement it at the code uh level and we would have some potential time to do kind of a kind of a city specific study if we were to propose any alternative there. There is some general language in there that allows cities to kind of explore and do do their own studies. And so um there was some time on that. So, we just we wanted to get some general policy level direction, you know, from the planning commission and then also from the city council as well. We've kind of had this discussion over the last few years. We've kind of kicked the sub areas down the road. We had talked about it back in 2022 and then we had said, "Hey, let's wait until the 2024 periodic update." And then um you know we had included the sub area plan updates to implement the comp plan on last year and then we got bogged down with all of this other code work and so now we've moved it forward to 2026. We just think now is the time to have that larger conversation about just what is the the function and what is the role of our sub areas and given legislative changes and um changes in just development trends you know now is a good time to have that conversation.

And so this is a very high level introduction. Um but we want to continue to have these conversations because the planning commission is you know it's a really has a really important role on the land use side of things and feeding in and providing a different perspective. Um you know when I get up here and speak and live at you know I want to be able to have somebody be like that makes abs absolutely no sense like let's use some common sense. And so, um, yeah, we just wanted to get your input as as early as possible and then we'll continue to get you more specific information as the year plays out.

Great. Thank you. Yeah, one of the interesting projects that I've seen in in Arlington because we're getting a lot of the vertical mixeduse developments and then the commercial portions having such a hard time, you know, getting tenants. Um I can see a lot of those you know becoming occupied uh you know in that sense with you know residences. In fact, there's there's one development in town where they did that, and I don't know if the city uses a development agreement or what because they don't have to, but they they developed a mixeduse building on a corner of two arterials. And they've reserved kind of the the units on the on the high visible corner for strictly commercial use, but they've rented out the um other commercial spaces as residences. And so it's really kind of interesting looking because you have these storefronts, you know, on uh, you know, 67th and 172nd and they are clearly, you know, storefronts. Uh, but they're occupied as residences. And so I don't know what kind of agreement they have in time, you know, as the area develops more to to meet that commercial demand, but it is happening a little bit out there, but it's not too common. most the most common thing is things, you know, sit vacant for a while and slowly slowly start to fill in um with that. So, uh back to overview of the updates. Um so, again, this kind of touched on making associated code changes to title 14. Um obviously with sub area plans, those are policy documents, right? And so our mun municipal code is the implementing uh tool uh to implement those policies. Um and so we have implementing policies in 1438. Um however, we may take a look at those as well to strengthen them to ensure that we're implementing the policies of the the sub area plans.

And then of course there's just other minor text uh corrections. That's supposed to say corrections, not text notifications. Sorry. Cell phone. All right. um on the brain but yes the text corrections as necessary. All right so some deliverables just talking about some kind of action items. Of course this is an overview. This isn't the first and last discussion with planning commissioner city council and it's just to get the wheels turned in and the plant the seeds. Um so we'll have continued discussions with planning commission city council. Uh then um post some direction we'll start drafting some policy amendments for for review. That takes a little bit of time and we'll involve some more staff in that uh handling that. Then of course once we get a draft, you know, kind of baked probably at 80% or so, then we'll send a 60-day notice of adoption to commerce. So, state government likes to have the opportunity to take a look at jurisdictions whenever they make policy changes or uh code amendments uh to their uh governing documents and that they distribute with other agencies too. And that's just to ensure that jurisdictions are following the growth management act and not conflicting with other state requirements um in their proposed amendments. Kind of keep us on track so we don't get run off here. But um SEO issuance of course uh will take a look at the implement uh environmental implications of these code changes or sorry policy changes and possibly associated code changes. Uh we'll hold public hearings of course between before the planning commission and city council regarding these uh to get public input and feedback. uh and then a final ordinance at the and then of course commerce once again likes

to be notified that hey what's what did you adapt at the end of the day so uh that's when we let them know and then of course we got to make updates to the city website that includes um you know besides the documents themselves uploading those updated sub area plans uh to the city website for public viewing um I believe as part of policy and practice that drafts will be available on our website too for the public to easily um take a look at as the work progresses. Uh so project schedule uh the individual steps of this particular code amendment we don't have set in stone. Obviously the uh schedule will follow the overall docket schedule because we have to do these things concurrently with other proposed amendments to the comp plan. Boom. And so I now wanted to kind of dive in a little bit more specific uh to some of these changes that we were talking about. So um this is the downtown sub area plan. And so as part of the 2024 comp plan update um the down boundaries of the downtown sub area were expanded here to the northwest as you can well you can't sorry I apologize you can't really see that well but um I was hoping it'd show up a little better. I was trying not to overwrite the dark dash lines, but there's a it's a little red line that covers this area here. And that was essentially to kind of bring things more into conformance. From my understanding, the zoning in this area was similar to the change. Uh it was it was a mixeduse zoning designation and so it made more sense to blend it in with the uh looks like central business district zoning uh for downtown. Um so it does I think will provide a little bit more flexibility for these land owners

and part of that was to bump up our uh employment capacity to meet our growth targets that the the assumed de development um that would occur under the the kind of the downtown the the pink zoning it used to be kind of a lower density kind of mixeduse neighborhood designation and so we' included that and this is a good example um all of these so the 2026 docket we didn't include any proposed map amendments within the sub areas. All of the map changes that we're saying need to be done to the sub area plans are already reflected in the future land use map. We've just done a really poor job of keeping our sub area plans updated to match our comp plan. And so we want to make those map amendments. We need to expand the boundaries specifically within here and reflect the proper zoning cuz the 2018 sub area plan has not been changed really since 2018. So, it's just an outdated document. And that's the same for all the other sub areas as well. We've had a number of changes in your annual docket, and I can identify a couple of those as Troy moves through the other two sub areas, but this is really the major one for downtown is we need to formally expand the boundary to cover the northwest corner there north of 20th, uh, west of 123rd. Um and that's really the major one for this

that was approved in 2024. That was a 2020 was not updated. Yeah. The the future land this is reflect it's shown properly on our overall comp plan future land use map but it hasn't been incorporated into the sub area yet. And so along with the map amendments there's going to be tables that still have we have zoning by acreage that's going to be outdated and we have general references to the old zoning that need to be updated. So, there's just a bunch of things that we need to clean up to make them consistent with the comp plan.

Yeah, sorry overwhelm there since I didn't know how big the screen was going to be. So, I'll let you

not big enough too much detail here. But I did want to uh illustrate that u as part of the planned action ordinance the sea threshold um determinations that were set for each sub area we do track development you know since these sub areas were planned um because under the sea uh planned action ordinance certain thresholds were set so as Dave was saying earlier if a project comes in they don't have to do sea environmental analysis because it's already been done. The only caveat is is that the total numbers have to stay under the threshold. So, say if we get to a point where all these thresholds are used up for anticipated retail square footage, office square footage, um residential unit, dwelling units, for example, if all those aotments get used up, then any new development coming in after that would have to to do their own sea threshold determination. So, we might take a look, you know, kind of at these thresholds, too. Um, downtown, I mean, I think we're doing okay. Um, Frontier Village, I think we're doing okay. It's really on the 20th Street corridor where uh we're kind of bumping up on some a couple of those uh those numbers. So, at the bottom of these, again, apologies. I learning here. I if I could zoom in, I would. But um at the very bottom of the chart is the remaining capacity. So uh you can see in the um the Lake Stevens Center sub area that we don't have a ton of retail space left. Um but we do have quite a bit of office commercial square footage left. Dwelling units were, you know, getting kind of low, but yeah, we're kind of running up on capacity. we still have

plenty of PMP peak hour trips, you know, for traffic generation to to account for. So, kind of a mixed bag there. Uh the 20th Street sub area plan. Um this again apologize this is even bigger chart so it's a it's even harder to read but we're really bumped up um when we get close to the uh oops sorry I can't even see the screen myself. Uh PM peak hour trips uh we're getting about halfway. We have quite a bit of residential capacity left. Um, gross square footage of retail. Again, we have actually quite a bit of capacity left. Costco, I believe, ate up about 170,000 um of those square feet aotments. So, that took a a good chunk uh there. So, so I say looking at these, you know, depending on again state demands and market realities, you know, we may want to take a kind of a finer look at these thresholds that we've set for these areas as part of the process. So, uh, before I go on and I'll let

Yeah, I was just going to note though the the one the for the 20th Street Southeast Corridor, the actually the residential units is the one thing that we're bumping up against the maximum on. We had allocated 1,000 units of residential back in 2012. Um, and so far we've approved 916 units and we have several hundred units that are in various stages of the development pipeline. And so we are going to exhaust that probably within the next year. So, it's a question given that we still have hundreds of thousands of square feet on the commercial and office sides of things, should some of that capacity be shifted to the residential side? I would also note, I mean, especially for those of you that have been on the commission for a few years, back in 2021, we had bumped up what are called categorical exemption thresholds for SEIPA. So basically it used to be that if you had more than four single family units you had to go through SEIPA. So if you had a five lot short plat you had to do a SEIPA threshold determination for your project. We bumped those thresholds up to 30 detached single family residential single family residential units and 60 multifamily residential units. That was done back in 2021. So we don't have a ton of large sites left um you know that are going to exceed that and there can be an argument made that if you get up to a 60 80 100 unit uh project that you probably should be doing project level SEIPA review. So there's kind of pros and cons to expanding the planned action capacity. Um, and there's already different strategies and incentives in place, including for somebody that say wanted to do a 50-unit apartment building, they wouldn't have to go through project level sea even if they exceeded the

planned action threshold because they're under that 60unit threshold for what's considered infill development. And so there's different ways that we can handle kind of some of these smaller infill projects that may not ne necessitate updates to the planned action ordinance. Um, but it's just something to think about.

Absolutely. And this again is Commissioner Huxford. Um, I'm testing my brain, which I don't want to do right now, but I don't know if those were recommendations necessarily from planning commission. I think those were probably um, conditions that were set forth by city council at that time. So, um I know that there was discussion around those and I'm trying to remember if we actually had approved and sent those on, but there's always been that sort of checks and balances when it comes to the balance of what we are doing to provide housing and economic growth in Lake Stevens. That certainly, you know, takes into account what we're being forced upon by our our state, but but more so is what is actually needed here. And um I think that we've met our thresholds and then some of what we're providing for housing. We've got we've we discussed that at nauseium.

Yeah. And so um this is a different conversation in my opinion because it's giving up very um limited commercial um use that we've coveted that we've held on to and and that we've been very jealous of having because other cities don't. And so that's where I fall on this is let's slow the roll a little bit, see what we have to do. Um but stay true to what we designed those areas to be.

Yeah. And it's been it's been dynamic. I mean for for the I guess maybe there were only three of no four of you on at the time back for the 2022 and the 2023 dockets. You know, if you'll remember down if off of 20th Street just east of the Costco on the east side of SR9 where South Lake Stevens Road connects on through and you hit 97th Drive Southeast. When that was first adopted in 2020 2012, it went to commercial and it was like a culde-sac and it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. So then we changed it back to all residential. Then we had one property owner that didn't get noticed and then we in 2023 we changed that one back. we changed that one back. So, these things are can be in flux and we can update, you know, as long it's in as long as it's included on the docket. Again, we don't have any specific map amendments. We're more doing kind of a sub areaawide assessment, but um you know, if we identify things as part of this effort, which is part of the 2026 docket, and there map amendments are warranted, then we can, you know, docket that for 2027 and look at doing map amendments next year. And so um yeah, conditions continue to change. You know, we obviously our growth targets are primarily for multifamily residential. So it's not a terrible thing, you know, that the most likely use along 20th Street would obviously be multifamily residential. But again, those things are already permitted as part of a as part of a vert vertical mixeduse project. and we really do continue to need that employment land at a very bare minimum on the ground floor. And so we're we're looking at kind of it's very much a balancing act. We're going to have to open back up and all cities are going to have to look at their buildable lands report and their land capacity analysis because all of these things are related. I mean that you can't just make universal zoning changes and be like,

"Okay, let's just hope that we can get to our employment numbers now." You actually have to. The growth management act requires you, you know, either it's probably not, it's not included in this year, but we would potentially need to open up our land use uh element next year to look at it to update that land capacity analysis. So, we're kind of still reacting to a lot of these legislative changes, but um it's good conversations to have just to get some general thoughts and direction from the planning commission and the city council. Uh this is Commissioner Morton. Um it's very enlightening to see these numbers. If you you know put the numbers back. Um the uh it as you can see yeah we've the the plans were that we would have more commercial office retail uh than have has actually been used. Uh clearly those those projections, those goals, those plans were incorrect and uh there's actually more demand for residential than we had expected. So, seems like the right way to go would be to respond to that market need for more residential and adjust these and and designate more of these uh previously uh you know, retail and office space uh areas to residential. And uh and lo and behold, the state comes in and does it for us. So uh uh that's so we'll um we'll move forward uh as we are uh we'll we'll continue to yeah see what you're going to be coming up with but u I think that um this is I think the state is being

responsive to the market needs of uh the people which need places to live and uh uh and on another side note here is uh this 40% number is uh my my mind immediately went to how to get around that and uh and I I can I can imagine that a lot of cities are going to massively increase the mixed use area of their land so they can artificially increase the denominator of that fraction uh so that uh they can continue to um uh reserve or require retail on the first for

oh just change all of their multif family residential to mixed use and yeah in those zones only yep

I can imagine that's that's going to be the response by many se I don't know if that's the right way that will need to do it but that's just my prediction so uh any other comments this is commissioner der I think I would also recommend as commissioner huxer mentioned a more we'll say conservative approach um and that we see you know if this if this is challenged court. Knowing what we know about how the system works in this state, it'll probably be challenged. It'll probably be thrown out on its merits. Um, we will have to make these adjustments. But I I would like to, you know, suggest that we uh take pause and see if we can think through this or if there are other brains out there that have other good ideas. um the idea of the kind of um retail on the on the exposures that senior planner Davis had mentioned and then kind of on the on the backside residential, you know, that may be something perhaps we can explore uh to meet those state requirements but also uh maintaining a um we'll call commercial forward appearance on these arterials.

Yeah. and no and that's that's no good input and we have looked you know as part of we've in past long range work programs we've talked a little bit about you know doing some updates to our mixed juice regulations and right now we generally require vertical mixed use and we had discussed potentially requiring some sort of horizontal mixed use which would take out the ground floor retail component if you allow for standalone residential buildings but then somewhere else on the site you require horizontal mixed juice component. So that would be one potential way to do it in kind of what you're talking about if you have kind of these corners or if you kind of shift the retail to a separate building. Um so that's one way. So yeah, we're going to look at at different options. And I would note the one thing that we had forgotten to include within the staff report and haven't talked about specific to 20th Street is the Everett waterline easement and that just on the south side which is most of the commercial properties just basically splits a lot of those properties in half and you know we've kind of had general guidance on that for several years and finally at the end of 2025 uh we got an interlocal agreement um that was signed by both the city of Everett in city of Lake Stevens. And so that outlines specifically where Heartscape can go, where buildings can go. And so that's already a pretty major development constraint within a major employment area. And so this just kind of makes it a little bit more complicated. And when you're dealing with large-scale residential buildings, which in the interim we can continue to have parking regulations, but each legislative session, there's more and more, you know, desire to kind of either reduce or eliminate parking requirements within multifamily residential developments. um you know, we're we're there's definitely some headwinds to meeting both our our residential and our

employment growth target. So, that's something to keep in mind specific to 20th Street as well. So, would you say that that that agreement on the waterline has that increased the desiraability or the usability for those for the that that swath of land?

I think it's provided more certainty. It used to be we would just have to every project we'd have to basically reach out to Everett. Hey, what do you think about this? Nothing was really either, you know, adopted by resolution or ordinance or codified in either city. And so now we have an agreement that says this is what you can do on the north side of the of the waterline easement. You can have things like parking lots, but you can't have buildings on the south. You know, you can have driveways that cross it. Um you can have landscaping. There's a lot more certainty now, but there definitely is still a huge swath of land really right in the middle of a lot of these properties that you really can't do anything other than do driveways and landscaping now and you know potentially parking, but you can't even do the parking

kind of within the easement and on the south side of the easement because they don't, you know, want to have that all paved so that they, you know, can't get to their, you know, assets and utilities. Well, it's only been in place for a few months, so maybe, you know, we'll we'll see if there's any any increased interest, but

yeah, we continue like we have a pre-application in right now for a project on the south side of 20th and you know, they're dealing with the water line, but and I think they appreciate, you know, that it's we have, you know, as part of the ILA, um, you know, we have maps for every block of 20th Street that says here's what you can do in which area and the interlocal agreement requires us to incorporate that into our into our GIS our geographic information system mapping and so it'll be a lot easier to share that information with applicants. So there's some good that's come out of it. Um just the certainty on the development side.

And just to add along that lines of what David was just talking about that um when Troy came on board, one of his first projects that he had was finishing up finalizing our internal and external developer checklist for the Everett water line the transmission line corridor. So we will have it'll probably actually be posted tomorrow or by Friday. Um, and it will be it's a couple pages. It lists the process on how if you have a project in the Ever Water. It shows a diagram of what you can and cannot do in certain areas just as David has explained. And what that'll do is allow assurity for the developers so they know. And then it outlines a process and a contact at the Everett Waterline um facilities and who we do joint reviews with during the development review process. So, it should help um and be helpful versus more as a hinder as what it had been prior to the interlocal agreement being wrapped up in November.

So, right, Commissioner Morton, can I ask a quick question? This is Commissioner Jennifer Davis. I have a process related question. um if the if this law is signed by the governor uh and it sounds like there might be that might trigger some litigation does in your experience when that something like that happens is does do the courts typically toll the deadline for implementation purposes so I mean if it's if there's going to be litigation on this it could go on for quite a long time

yeah I mean I've seen it where there's been or where even the department of commerce has issued guidance hey given that there is litigation you you know, we're not going to hold you to the September of 2027 deadline just because there's so much uncertainty with this. I would expect that would be worked out like through the rule making process cuz you get these things that are passed at the legislative level through a house bill or a senate bill and then signed by the governor and a lot of times it takes months and months even like how is this actually going to work and how is this actually going to be implemented and there's a whole rule making process. Um, and yeah, there have been plenty of times where periodic updates have been pushed back. I mean, the um, you know, I think the 2015 comp plan, the original due date was like 2011 or 2012, but we were coming out of a recession and so they factored in kind of the common sense thing and they incorporated that into future legislative sessions. Hey, we need to adjust this. And so if if this thing is getting battled out through the you know battled through the courts, I would anticipate there would be something like that. And so we want to be ready for it and um you know maybe have a suite of options and potential implementation options for this. Um but it's something yeah that that we obviously need to to keep apprised of and keep forward momentum on. I have a question. This is Commissioner Luwendowski. Um, does anyone foresee with this sort of um time period that's uncertain that some projects will want to be encouraged to be pushed forward before it's passed or not or like slowed down until there's an answer?

Yeah. I mean, I think it just depends on the property owner. um you know you're generally you're vested to the code in place until the code changed until the effective date of that code. And so if somebody as long as they get you know either they're if they're required to do a land use application or if they're require you know a lot of these projects are just outright permitted. So they would go straight to building permit review to get your building permits in. Then you're vested to the code in place at the time of your complete application submittal. Um, you know, just given that we haven't had, you know, a ton of mixed juice projects. We have one big one here just north of city hall that's working its way through, but that's really the first one in a bed. I mean, there's really not a whole lot of mixeduse projects. And so I would say there may be some people that are just more comfortable and more um interested in standalone residential that they would actually wait it out and wait for us to be required to update our code to be like, "Hey, you can do standalone residential in the mixed juice or in the commercial district now because we just we don't want to have to deal with tenants, you know, commercial tenants. We just want to build a residential building." So that seems the more likely at this point just based off of general development trends, but um yeah, it's really hard to say. Um and you know, 20th Street, you know, we've done all sorts of transportation infrastructure improvements and we've started to see kind of smaller commercial uses start to go in over the last 10 to 15 years, but um it's also limited. you know, we have some larger parcels on the south side of 20th, but then they're split in half by the waterline eastment. And so, we don't have a whole lot of easy sites where somebody's just like chomping at the bit to get in there. Um there's critical

area constraints, there's the waterline easement, there's transportation issues. Um you know, there's certain, you know, lots, you know, properties where access in, especially if you're coming either east or west and wanting to turn left, you're limited. And so there there are definitely a lot of development constraints, specifically along 20th and downtown. Um you know, generally have smaller parcels. We have, you know, a larger commercial shopping center here and we have some smaller properties here, but we don't have a whole lot of things unless you're able to assemble multiple parcels where you can just be like, "Hey, I'm going to do a giant project here." So, um, we really don't have the development environments or the physical environment to really accommodate a lot of huge projects. So, um, we're always going to be more dependent on smaller infill projects. Any other thoughts? All right. Well, um, with that, we'll move into the commissioner reports and and, uh, normally I go right to left. I'm going to go left to right. And for me, Commissioner Norton, I have nothing.

So, Commissioner Dur, no report tonight. Lundowski. Thank you. I was going to say a cool place I went to and I don't really I went and visited the um Adopt a Stream Foundation Center located in Everett um in Molen Park and it was just very um very educational and it was really cool to learn about watershed conservation and all sorts of things. So um I'm happy I went and I learned a lot and I know I can go back there and learn more as needed. Cool. Wanted to share that if you guys haven't been, I do suggest going. Commissioner Davis, uh, nothing for me tonight. Falls. Uh, no report, no comments. Thank you.

And I have nothing.

Um, yeah, just one note on the city council meeting on the 24th, I believe it is. Um, I know there's been recent discussion in the community and u my my role with the Lake Stevens Aqua Fest. uh some concern over the city's continued support of of Aqua Fest. Uh I do encourage for Lake Stevens residents to come out and you know voice you know either side of this uh they're on um the city for I mean I've only been here eight years but uh for a long time the city has provided uh in kind support uh for police officers use of the mill here uh and uh the uh recently the Aquafest learned that there would be a um a bill of roughly $40,000 which is more is north of what Aquafest makes on an annual basis. um strongly encourage people to come out and um discuss what this building is intended for that was checks notes built with taxpayer money um and Aquafest's ability to use it um in a you know arguably the most significant event of the year um in the wake of uh I mean get me might be incorrect here but the there was a combined million plus dollars that was spent in litigate ation between the city and the sewer district. Um, and the city is uh, you know, it takes the conies to say, well, we don't have the money or we want to now start charging Lake Stevens Aquafest for use of this facility and, um, other, you know, arguably what are considered to me norms of, uh, like civic duty of the city itself. Um, so anyways, I inserted my opinion in there, but uh, you know, as as someone that is new to

the city, uh, I remember the first year we were blown away. We're like, my gosh, this is incredible. The Aqua Fest is the real deal. And then it fell to the the um issues of COVID and there's an incredible group of people that have propped it back up, made it into a um a profit generating event um after years of being in the red. Um and last year was the first year in a while where it was pretty amazing to to hear so many people thrilled with what the city residents the the residents of the city were able to accomplish. Um, so continue to support Aqua Fest. Uh, that's residents and the city. Thank you.

Thank you. Great. So, uh, planning director's reports. I think, uh, who's going to fill in for Russ?

Uh, sure. I'll give a real quick update on some items and then Dave is going to provide an update on the step housing that we touched on earlier. So, real quick, just some admin items coming down the pipeline. Oh, Christy Schmidt, planning manager. By the way, if you haven't caught Q, you're supposed to state your name before you speak. So, we do have a quarterly report, the first one of 2026 that's going to be coming before you at the end of April. So, you will be receiving that. And then we do we are working with public works on capital projects this year along with the Lake Stevens School District. So, if you're out and about, you will see a lot of those happening throughout the city. And in addition, one item that we'll be bringing back to you will be the traffic impact fee and methodology that will be coming back before you at your first meeting in April. And I believe Dave is going to give an update on his critical area updates along with step housing and when he anticipates coming back. And with that, I'll turn it over to David.

Yeah. So, just a couple of items before we adjourn on the critical areas ordinance update. So, it's been a probably a little bit over a month or about six weeks since we were before you. Um, we're looking at doing some potential slight tweaks to our stream buffers. Um, we've kind of been following the process, the adoption process for several local jurisdictions and several of them have been challenged at the growth management hearings board, which is where parties can challenge your land use regulations, too. and they've actually uh been remanded back to their city council or their planning commission because they weren't reflecting best available science specifically related to this whole concept of riparian management zones versus stream buffers. Basically having a much larger area adjacent to streams that's based off of the maximum potential tree height. Um we're trying to kind of work through that and provide some additional analysis. And so we're looking at coming back uh before you at one of your April meetings. I'm trying to figure out if we would be ready by that first meeting in April or if it would make more sense to wait until the April 15th meeting um just because we want to make sure that it's a constructive productive meeting. But we're looking at maybe some additional analysis where we have standard stream buffers like we had discussed um and then if certain conditions exist on a site such as there is an in um enough area for um you know pollutants to be treated on site you know from potential storm water that's flowing off. Then we would potentially require them to have larger buffers based off of this site potential tree height. So you might have a standard buffer of 100 ft for a perennial stream that exists for 80 or 90% of the properties in the city. But if you have a certain mix of conditions

on your site and you can't manage your storm water and something is discharged directly into the riparian area, then you would obviously need a bigger area just so there's less of an opportunity or less of a possibility for that to, you know, um, adversely impact the stream and its associated buffer. So, we're working through that. Um, so we'll be coming back before you on that. So, that's on the critical areas ordinance update. I think Christie, did you want to talk at all um the impact fees as far as when that would be coming back before? Yep. No, it'll be coming back before um on April 1st.

Yeah, that one will be ready on April 1st. Okay. So, that one will be on there. Um and then just to conclude, so step housing, so this was a kind of a major part of our work program back in 2025. um planning commission did, you know, great work on that. Um it went to the city council. There were a couple tweaks made to it. And now we have the 2026 legislative session that kind of just threw a hand grenade into that. And basically now um in the next couple of years, we're going to be required to update that again by 2028. Basically, House Bill 2266, which is also awaiting the governor's signature, would basically make it so that you can't require an additional land use process for any sort of step housing. So, that's uh permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, emergency housing, and emergency shelters. You can't require a land use application process that's different than any other type of residential unit. So if you outright permit um you know an apartment building, you would also need to allow that for step housing. So we would have basically about 2 years to update our code. So um yeah, we're looking at that. If that gets signed, then we would we don't have that on this year's work program. It would probably be put on to the 2027 work program, but it would basically require administrative approval, administrative design review approval for any type of step housing. So, um, we'll see what happens with that. Anything else? Great. We have made it to the end of our agenda. As would anyone like to make a motion to adjurnn?

Commissioner Shaw make a motion to adjurnn. Any second? Commissioner Davis, Connor Davis seconds. All in favor? I I we are ajourned. Thank you.