Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

We are beginning the meeting shortly. We will be conducting tonight's meeting in person, as well as in a virtual setting using zoom. Members of the public may view and listen to the reading tonight on wave channel 18 and online through the city's YouTube channel. If you would like to participate in live public comment via the zoom platform, please refer to the agenda for instructions. Here Eric Johnson will begin the meeting momentarily.

All right, seeing at six o'clock, I call the meeting, call the May 20, 2026 city of Lincoln planning commission meeting to order a roll call, please.

Commissioner Gilbert here. Commissioner Hutchinson here. Commissioner Jackson here. Commissioner Jerry Johnson here. Chair Eric Johnson here. And vice chair Manning is absent with notification.

Correct. And with that, we have a quorum for tonight. So item number three, pledge of allegiance. We'll have commissioner Jerry Johnson to please lead us on that tonight.

I mean, it was so dark light.

Thank you for leading us on that item number four agenda modifications do we have any agenda modifications this evening. Being none. We will move on to item number five, public comment on non-agenda items within the subject matter jurisdiction of the commission. Citizens may address the planning commission on any item on the agenda when the item is considered. Citizens wishing to speak may request to speak by raising your hand. When requested to do so, this is an opportunity to speak on non-agenda items. Please limit your comments to three minutes. Secretary, do we have any hands raised online or do we have anyone in the chambers that wishes to speak?

I do not see any hands raised online, I did not receive any cards with anybody in the room, but would like to make public comment. There are no hands raised in the room.

Thank you move on to item number six informational items and disclosures, so I just want to do a little caveat here there's a little adjustment in the agenda, so this would be. If we have any informational items from our fellow commissioners and traditionally it was asking about any ex parte communications so that it's not titled that anymore, but this is where that would go. If you had anything to share, do any of my fellow commissioners have any information items to share? I'll start it. Okay.

None for me.

For me. And none for me as well. Item number seven, consent. All matters on the consent agenda are considered routine business and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a request to remove a specific item for separate action is received. Any items removed will be considered after the remainder of the consent agenda. Do any of my colleagues wish to remove an item from the consent agenda? We have one item.

Move approval of the consent calendar.

Second.

Sorry, Chair Johnson, before we take that motion, may you ask if the public, if there's any comments, please?

Yes, yes. Before I take the motion, is there any public comment on the consent agenda item?

I do not see any hands raised in the room and there's no hands raised online.

Okay, it's all entertained. Chairman, I'll make the motion again.

And I will second again.

Thank you. Do I have a motion and a second? Roll call, or we'll do voice.

You do a voice call?

Yeah. So all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? All right. So I believe all of them are ayes. We have five of us here tonight. So five, zero, zero, one. One.

Yeah.

Perfect. brings us to item number eight, public hearings. So item eight, a consideration of a design review application for the construction and operation of a new still building measuring 100 feet by 135 feet to be used as a storage hanger at the Lincoln regional airport known as Lincoln skyways hanger. And Mr. Mel Pablonis, Planning Manager, will give the staff report tonight. So please, Mel.

Good evening, Commissioners. Mel Pablonis, Planning Manager. Just a brief PowerPoint presentation summarizing. I got ahead of myself here with my PowerPoint on this proposed project. Thank you all. So this is a simple project. Under a design review permit application for a proposed construction and operation of a hangar within the city of Lincoln Airport. It's about 13,500 square feet within the airport that the city operates and owns. And the applicant for the project is BPM Rentals, represented by Byron Maynard. He is in the the chambers today. No comments have been received thus far. And if you have any questions for myself or the applicant, let me know after my presentation. Just a brief overview. The airport is right here. The project is right where the tip of that yellow flag is. I'm going to win the airport city Lincoln airport as subject to the airport is regulated under Lincoln regional airport mash plan. Property itself extends kind of rectangular there's another exhibit in the staff report it goes all the way down down about right here and it's about three and a half acres total in size, the portion where the the building will be will be right here. It's the property itself, similar to the other properties in the area, is a zone industrial plan development, both land use designation and zoning designation. And as I mentioned in the staff report, it's surrounded by existing buildings, hangar buildings, and other uses that are currently within the airport. Some photos to the side. This is along Flatline Drive, looking west. This is the property right here, a portion of the property that will be built. Looking south, looking east, should I say, of the property. Again, the property. This is along the airport area. Looking southeast of the property, again, the property is right there. And looking south of the property, that's the property, the portion of the property that will be built upon. In total, the project would encompass about less than an acre of impact. And that consists of the building pad, which is where the building is going to be, which is outlined in that blue area. There is connections to existing services such as sewer, water, fire, water lines. Drainage will be all along here, will all be extended. So in total, those are accounted for as part of the 0.97 acre impacted area. There's also a staging area for construction while they're building the hangar right there. Flatline Drive will be the main access off of here. There's another site plan that shows of the property in green, which is the lease area that the applicant will be leasing from the city. And that lease area is about 200 feet by 150 feet. The actual building would be 135 by 100 feet. Here's a floor plan of the building. It's 135 feet by 100 feet. It'll be divided into two hangars by a firewall right here in the middle. So each area is going to be about six or seven feet by 100 feet. And again, it will be served by water, sewer, drainage, power. The building will be about 32 foot tall, maximum height, about 22 feet tall to the eaves. And it will match the existing buildings that are out there. And this is a sample of the rendering of the building. This is facing the west, and there will be two roll-up doors on this side of the building. It's a simple project analyzed by staff for consistency with the general plan, zoning ordinance, as well as the Lincoln Airport master plan or LRAM requirements. The design review board committee board reviewed the project back on back on the 25th of November last year and recommended approval to your commission. There's a SQL component to this. So since there was an EIR that was adopted for the master plan that was adopted back in, or certified back in 2008. So similar to other projects that came after that, back two years ago, there were some buildings that was built and went through the same process as this one is. We did an addendum to that EIR and that's attached to your document. And for NEPA, given that there's an airport component to this, and we have to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. In this case, under NEPA, it was determined that it complies for a category called exclusion. Similar to exemption, but under NEPA, it's called exclusion. And that's also attached to your staff report. That said, the Planning Commission, staff recommends the Planning Commission adopt the proposed addendum to the EIR for this project, as well as deeming the project to qualify for a categorical exclusion pursuant to NEPA and adopt resolution approving design review application PLN25-00025 for the proposed Lincoln Skyways hangar based on the conditions of approval applied to the project. The applicants is here if you want, if you have any questions for them. If you have any questions for myself, let me know as well.

Thank you, Mel. Do any of my colleagues have any questions, please?

Back to the last slide, please. So could you just explain for the public edification what NEPA stands for? I don't like acronyms that are untrained.

Yeah, it stands for National Environmental Policy Act. Thank you. The equivalent to that in California is the California Environmental Quality Act.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Do we have any other questions? Go ahead.

No, I thought the purpose back in 2008 was the purpose of the master environmental review of the airport area was so that we wouldn't have to go through this kind of exercise for individual projects. What went wrong?

Oh, it's always been, at least this one and the previous one, I think it was the Ed Su project. It does require a design review process still. It needs to go through that process. It's pretty low key, but there is a process that it has to go through. and the plan commission actually is tasked as the the authority to review that and as long as it matches the the requirements of the the l-ramp um it it's basically it's another practice of of checklist but it there was a discretionary component to this which is the designer view application you know it's a prepab steel building on uh

City-owned property. I'm an ardent conservationist, but this is carrying it a bit far. Okay. Anyway, it's done.

Any other comments or questions at this time? All right. Before I open up public hearing, I just wanted to give the applicant an opportunity if they had anything they'd like to share or speak to.

Appreciate the consideration on this. We're out of space. Our business is out of space. And we're attracting aircraft from all the Western states to come to Lincoln to have their aircraft serviced. So the big thing that differentiates us from any other airport is that at Lincoln Airport, you can get tail to spinner restoration of an aircraft. So we can do airframe maintenance, heavy airframe maintenance. whatever that aircraft needs. We do belly in jobs, we do wing repairs, we do fabrications, modifications, full on maintenance on the power plant, propeller upgrades, panel changes. But here's the thing, not only can we do that in our maintenance shop, we have a full upholstery shop that can do the whole interior. And then in addition to that, we have a paint shop next to us, and we have an avionics shop. So literally, you can take an aircraft and roll it from hangar to hangar and get it restored, rather than at most every other airport, you have to reposition the aircraft. So one airport may have an avionics shop, or they may have a maintenance shop, or they may have a paint shop. But then if you need something else done, you've got to fly to another airport. Or every time you have to move that airplane, you have to get it flight worthy. And that slows the project way down. So we're getting business from, in fact, most of my business comes from out of town. But the problem is that I need more space. We're doing aircraft sales as well. We're doing aircraft rentals. And I've got every hangar stuffed. And then the only alternative is to leave it on the ramp. Well, some customers don't want their multi-million dollar aircraft sitting on the ramp. especially when we have inclement weather. Like just this last weekend, the winds, unbelievable. And I don't sleep well when it blows that hard because I'm worried about some poor customer's airplane getting damaged. And we've had it happen. We've had out there at the airport, we've had dumpsters roll into aircraft from the wind. We've had aircraft, the tail hooks on the aircraft ripped out because they start flying on the chains in the heavy winds. And then it... bangs the aircraft up. So this is something that we need to evolve to the next level. That's what it's all about. And if you hear my voice, it's because all that wind, I was out there at the airport all weekend monitoring things, and I was sucking in all that dust, all that pollen. Highly allergic to it. Any other questions?

Excellent. Questions for the applicant at this time? All right. Thank you.

All right. Appreciate it.

Thanks. All right, so with that, I will now open the public hearing. Citizens wishing to speak on this item may request to speak by raising their hand when requested to do so. Please limit your comments to three minutes. Secretary, do we have any hands raised online or anyone in the chambers that wishes to speak?

Chair Eric Johnson, I do not see any hands raised online. I did not receive any comment cards before the meeting. And I do not see any hands raised in the room.

Okay. Thank you. So with that, I'll now close public hearing and bring it back to my colleagues. Does anyone have any additional comments or questions?

If none. Chair, I'll move that we approve this item.

Second the motion.

All right. We have a motion and a second. Roll call, please.

So we are seeing that commissioner Gilbert that you motion to as stated, you move adopt as stated on the agenda. Okay. So that's two parts in there. It's going to be all in one vote. And who's second, I'm sorry.

Uh, Jerry Johnson Johnson.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, roll call vote. Commissioner Gilbert. Yes. Commissioner Jerry Johnson. Yes. Commissioner Hutchinson. Yes. Commissioner Jackson. Yes. And chair Eric Johnson.

Yes. So the motion passes 5 0 0 1. Congratulations. All right, moving on to number, item number nine, general business, 9A, open space discussion by our city manager, Sean Scully, please.

Hello, good evening Planning Commission, and thank you for having me tonight. Before I get started, I was going to get up and actually make a public comment on Byron's project, but it occurred to me that's probably inappropriate. But thank you for approving that. And I actually agree with Commissioner Johnson. It occurs to me that it's sort of silly to have a design review on a metal building on an airport. I think that way back in the first lease that I did out there, I remember Mel said, well, you know, I think it probably needs to go to, the process seems to indicate it needs to go through design review. There's no carve out for it. And I remember we debated that a little bit. All right, well, what's the worst that could happen? I suppose if they were going to put up a pink building with weird signs, you guys would probably say no. So, anywho, that's why I'm here. I'm here to talk about open space tonight. Thank you very much to the Planning Commission for allowing me to speak. chat with you about this. So to give a teeny little bit of context and I'll get into the meat and really it's just to receive a little bit of feedback now or in the future from the planning commission. So about a year and a half ago during a strategic planning session where the city council sort of outlined some of the things they want to try to tackle over a year to two year period. aside from a laundry list of other matters, one of the things that was brought up was, from some of our newer city council members, was to get a better understanding about the concept of open space in Lincoln, the policies associated with open space in Lincoln, and then what that really looks like moving forward. And I think we'll get to this as part of the normal discussion tonight, but the nature of development pre-Lincoln Sun City Lincoln Hills and post Sun City Lincoln Hills is very different. Different models, different business models for our development partners, certainly different pricing these days. And so the projects that people like Michaela and Mel and the team are working on look different, feel different, are different than they were in those days. And So the council kind of had this broad thought that we'd really like to learn a little bit more about how we decide to apply open space in Lincoln and maybe get a little bit more nuanced as it relates to what things may look like moving forward. Because one of the things that's kind of interesting is when I was hired here, open space as a concept had its own sort of lore created around it in Lincoln. one of the things that a lot of electeds told me when I was hired is like, well, you know, we have an open space requirement. We have a 40% open space requirement. It's pretty great. We have that. And, you know, we're semi-unique in that sense. Um, and, uh, and I thought it was pretty cool too. Um, one of the things that, um, is, uh, the, the people that were the driving forces of the general plan back in 2000, early, mid 2000s, and then completed in 2008, um, had right, which has resulted in what Lincoln has become aesthetically today, is what I kind of like to call a de-urbanization of the community in the sense that what I always tell people is if you drive up 65 and you don't know anything about South Placer, you drive through Roseville on 65, and then something happens and you're in Rockland. And it's really just an invisible line that happens. And then once you pass like the UC Davis building, then all of a sudden the feeling changes real quick. And that space in between there and about the high school and then north of there has a different aesthetic feeling to me completely than everywhere to the south. And it is beautiful. either intentionally or unintentionally, has come to define what Lincoln feels and our vibe, for lack of better term, compared to our neighbors to the south and even south of that. And so it's a, it has been a resounding success from that perspective. The question is, we are now in a very different world because something exists today that did not exist at that time, which is the Placer County Conservation Program, which has changed the nature of open space and how we plan for that and acquire it significantly. And that's compared to our general plan, a relatively recent creation. So I did a bunch of research on it, consulted with a lot of the folks that work here that actually have to apply it and found a few little interesting tidbits. The first is, is that we actually don't have a requirement. That's a misnomer. We have a policy in the general plan that states, and I'm going to read it here, that the city shall establish a mitigation fee for habitat preservation and replacement within the village areas. The inclusion of 40% open space could, not shall, provide adequate mitigation for habitat. There are other sections of the general plan that speak more generally to open space and where it makes sense and things like that. But as it relates to hard and fast rules, it was clear that at least the language that's in the general plan kind of foresaw that we have a lot of habitat in Lincoln because of our topography and the way that the community is set up that would require mitigation. And so we really should make sure that we're setting aside enough of our projects to mitigate those areas, which is required really anyway under a variety of state and federal laws. So nonetheless, it has become a really important part of what the staff use when they're either working on full master village plans or even some individual projects to make sure that we're accounting for that acreage. Then more recently, the discussion has sort of shifted into I guess to quote, I think I'm sort of quoting one of our council members that all open space is not created equal. So the best example of really amazing open space, that's actually a value and an amenity to the community is of course, Sun City Lincoln Hills. And the reason for that is that the topography of that project sort of required it in a way. So it made sense. And they kind of got both things. They had to do it, but they also made it so that it was a tremendous value to the nature of that project. And as projects have come forward since that time, some are on flatland, some are far west, some are far east, some are nowhere near any kind of natural waterway system. We've noticed that the application of open space has become more super diverse and not always a value add. The other thing that's occurred, and this is less of a planning issue and more of a me problem, is that open space is really expensive to maintain, and increasingly so. And so the conversation kind of morphed into, hey, maybe we should take a look at whether what the sort of rough language that we have in our guiding documents is enough or whether there's some ways that we can kind of create additional subsequent policy documents to guide people like our planners as they're applying those standards to projects. It's always better to have something written down when you're speaking with developers. So I think what would be easiest just to start is for those commissioners that haven't been around forever to show you kind of an open space map that we've created of what we, this isn't definitive because, you know, Lincoln's always growing, but this is a pretty good representation of sort of what we have today. You have, so we have hundreds and hundreds of acres of open space in Lincoln. And you can see by the map there that they take all different forms. Many of them run along natural logical systems of creek systems and waterways. Some of them are in areas that are natural low-lying spots that catch storm runoff. And some of them are on slopes and hills. The other component, as I mentioned a moment ago, that's changed a little bit is that the development community now has a different tool to address Species habitat preservation and mitigation and that's through the plastic any conservation program. So yeah What we find and there's a few folks in the community here tonight that I'm sure we'll have something to say about this is that the advantage to using the PCCP for most developers is that that they can go through an alternate process to receive what's called a 404 permit and which used to have to be done through the Army Corps of Engineers. And sometimes those processes, many times those processes took years and many years, lots of money. And there wasn't a definitive timeline for when it was going to get done. And if you talk to Phil or Tony or anyone out there that does a lot of work in Lincoln, one thing that drives development crazy is a lack of confidence in a timeline of when something's going to get done. So Platt County and the city of Lincoln, Come up with this pretty cool concept of creating an alternate path they receive approvals from those regulatory bodies to act sort of as their agent essentially. In reviewing those requests and they're able to get people through the process in a more expeditious manner because it's managed locally here and. I could go into a lot more detail about that, but I think we can kind of just leave that for now. But what that's done is that it's given developers an alternative to find ways to meet their obligations, and it may not be met in Lincoln as a jurisdiction. So if you look at the Platt County Conservation Program plan, it is related to Lincoln, but it's about preservation of habitat and space outside of Lincoln as well. In fact, most of the preservation that PCCP has done at this, almost all of it has been done outside of our city limits, which was by design, right? The idea was this area where our general plan encompasses is where we intend to develop. Preservation should occur there outside of that. And you see that model with Central Valley Farmland Trust, and a variety of other similar kinds of organizations that exist around the state. So about a couple months ago, a month ago, the city council held a workshop and had a discussion about open space generally, and then we had this more broad conversation about there's some good incentive to want to see open space preservation and open space dedication occurring within Lincoln and part of projects because it has become definitive on some level of what our development looks like in many cases. Sometimes it's been really well applied, other times not so much, and sometimes not at all. So Generally the discussion went as follows, and then I'm just going to kind of leave it for you with questions and any kind of thoughts you may have. The council's feelings about it were that we want, of course, the development community will have PCP as an option, but we believe that there is advantages in finding ways to incentivize careful, thoughtful, and amenitized, to the extent you can, open space within Lincoln projects so that we get the benefit of those open spaces. And if you just give me one moment, I have notes that they had a couple of ideas that they have me researching at the moment, and I wanted to share some of those with you. So in some cases, you have, depending on the nature of the project, you may have open space that's sort of cordoned into one area of a development. um perhaps it's flat uh perhaps it's really just grassland that has some sensitive species in there and um and so what you end up having is a subdivision with a piece of vacant land that may look nice some types of sometimes of the year but that's really all it is is land and then you have other ones like in sun city lincoln hills there's a lot of 12 bridges examples of this where you have open space interspersed with development trails that run through those and they become super amenities to the community. And so a lot of the things that they discussed really, I think, kind of strike most of us, would strike most of us as kind of common sense. But the idea was the 40% number that is located in the general plan was a bellwether to say, hey, you're gonna need to mitigate lots of stuff because there's lots of sensitive habitat here. 40% is probably where you're gonna need to be. Well, the question is in certain projects, if somebody wants to develop and incorporate those into their plans, should we get hung up on the exact percentage amount or should we be hung up on the nature and quality of the actual open space area? So some of the terms that were brought up is whether there's ways to incentivize development to apply open space within our projects in ways that we think are cool or novel. And what does the development community get as an incentive to make that happen? So I'm just going to go down the list. Not all of these are applicable, but I'll give you a full view. Greenbelts. Paseos, active use open space. So really trying to active, not all of our open space has traditionally had trail availability, but it should. Community amenities associated with open space. And we've talked with the development community a lot about this. We're not talking about extracting money for developers to do some sort of grand thing along open space. We're talking about simple stuff, places for people to have picnics, places for people to sit and contemplate the world's problems. those kinds of things. Trading open space for other types of cool community amenities that may be open space related, but may not be smaller standards versus bigger projects. So it's easy to apply these in massive master plans, a little bit more difficult for staff to apply some of these standards when you have a small 50 unit project. Most importantly, I hear this a lot at planning commissions because I do watch periodically, connectivity between open space areas in between projects. We have dead ends that make no sense. It's frustrating to trail walkers and nature folks. And then on the incentive side, exploring what's the incentive for the developer to do a little bit more? Perhaps if the amount that they're setting aside is reduced on some sort of small incremental basis, you can open up additional opportunities for them to add a little bit of development to their project, density changes, workforce housing kind of things, stuff that kind of gives us a little bit more variety in our development portfolio. I don't know where this policy ends up at the end of the day, but my thought is that it may not be ironclad, but what it would be really helpful, I think for me at least, would be to have both the Planning Commission and the City Council at some point give an opinion about, you know, I'm talking simple, one sheet of some desires that could be traded for things that the development community wants so that we can level up the next round of open space. My concern is, from my seat is that when you have alternatives like the PCCP, which is a really super important tool, you may run the risk that outside of just certain ravine areas, developers choose to just take another route to address open space or mitigation versus doing some of that here, which I think there's some value to that. So, I could go on and on about it, but I'm really here to hear more about your series of thoughts and they're all welcome and certainly no judgment associated with them, but that's I could have given you a much longer presentation, but I think you all kind of get it. You see this, you know, month in and month out as you see projects come along. So I'm more interested in your perspective and questions.

All right. Well, thank you for sharing that and appreciate you bringing this topic to us. Yeah, as you mentioned, we talk about this often on the Planning Commission. So it's great. This is being brought up. Just a point of clarification is public comment welcomed or I guess, you know, part of the discussion. There's no like formality with it.

You can take public comment on informational items.

Oh, yeah. Excellent. Well, I guess I'll start up here. Does any of my colleagues have any questions or comments?

I think you said it. You hit it on the head. When you come into Lincoln, Lincoln feels different. And I think it's because we've always kept this in mind is that we want that open space. I'm afraid that if we go down the PCPP route or anything like that, open space is going to be in Placer County. It's not going to be here in Lincoln. So I almost feel like the 40% should be mandatory, but I know it's not. And I'm sure that there was probably back in 2008 when going through the general plan, there was probably a lot of consternation about that. But this is why people move here, is they move here because of the open space, because it looks and feels different. And it is urban, but it's rural at the same time. And so I just, this PCPP, it screams Placer County, it does not scream Lincoln.

I think it's still, our 40% makes Lincoln small town Lincoln. I can also appreciate the open space issue. I live in Lincoln Hills, and yes, our open space issue is a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous amenity. However, it's been 27 years. And the open space management program 27 years ago is not the one today. And I certainly understand cost benefit analysis, because we're right in the middle of that in our own area. So it's a conundrum, definitely, and an awful lot of information to chew on. I have to agree with my colleague, Tim. I'd hate to see the PCCP take over and suddenly we become much more of a cement area. But I'm always open to compromise and mitigation as to what's going to work best for our city.

Commissioner Gilbert.

I'm going to share a little bit of history with you because my perspective on this is quite different buddy who's looking at Very much because I live here.

I chose to move here.

I came from a community where I live for 31 years. It was the most successful master plan community in America. In fact, there were eight of them when mine was started called Foster City. The other seven all went bankrupt, were then rescued by someone. There are successful communities today. Foster City had a unique setup, and I'm going to share information with you. We had a five-member city council and a five-member planning commission. The five members of the Planning Commission for most of the time that we were adopting the long-term plans was made up of four architects, everywhere from an individual up to people working for very large architectural and a woman who was an urban planner. We had it good. We had people with professional credentials, to help plan out the city. And I served on the city council there for a couple terms. And I want to tell you that the most successful, and it's a bedroom community, eventually we got in a lot of commercial. Visa's world headquarters in four tall buildings, a 26-story building right in the middle, tallest building at the time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But we put all of that on one side of the main drag. The tunnels was in there and several other things. And we lived on this side. Within the area where we lived, we had a lagoon system. It was the water runoff system for what had been a farm at one time. We built a big dam. federal standards levy system. They've spent about $25 million redoing it a couple times since I left. And in that area, we built a project called the Islands. And it had the highest density of anything ever built in the city of Foster City. Two and three story condominium homes. garage on the first floor, living in whatever, on the second and third floor. The day it opened up on the market with the highest density in Foster City, it sold out, the first island. There were three little islands that they built. And because it was planned by a very, very, Well known and with a great reputation firm didn't feel like you were In an area where the highest density. In fact, they did things back in those days. By putting garage door openers and every unit. going through the cost of it, even though most homes didn't have it, to get the cars off the street so that you would get the feel of open space. And they did a whole bunch of other things I won't bore you with. But they created a project where those homes in a $60,000 community were all quickly up to $80,000. And now that the average home in that community is $2 million, they're well above the $2 million, even though it's the most dense thing in the area. So when I came to Lincoln, and I eventually, after serving on the board at Lincoln Hills, I ran for the city council, and I read 40% open space. Boy, that seems very high, but that's the way they want to do it, so that's the program. And then as I started thinking about it, here I lived in Foster City, which didn't have it, but they had a lagoon system. And so it was forced on them to have, you know, you don't have to call that open space, but, you know, you could take, if you had a home on the water, you could have a boat and you could sail, no motors allowed, but you could sail around the community. You could sail to the Safeway. You could sail to the restaurant. Very unique. And now, I listened to what you share with us today is this evening and I'm very, very much in favor of us exploring this because I think the fact that we're stuck at 40% doesn't mean we're getting the best deal for us. Or for the developers or for the people that are going to move to this community in the future. So I really think we need to take a good look at it and see if there aren't some something some ideas and some concepts that can continue to give that feel Probably a lot less land not being used. And the other thing I need to share with you is A lot of you know I was an executive in a very large banking firm, and I had lending limits. So I know a lot about commercial loans and real estate loans, et cetera. And I am saddened by the fact that it's so difficult for a young couple today to open up living in a home which they own. I'd love to see us do as a society, do the things we need. Of course, interest rates need to come down, but, you know, when I bought my home, one of my homes I paid 6% for, which is what the market is today. I also bought one at 3%. But, you know, I figured out a way at 6%, but the cost of the home was not that high that I couldn't afford the payments, along with all the other people that moved in. So I think from our perspective, we need to also consider if we could do some kind of creative things with open space that would allow a little better density. which in turn would lower the price, we might find another 10 or 15 or 20% of the population could afford to buy homes in our community. And the future growth of this community is paramount to our success. We can't stop. We need the next 50, 60,000 people, whatever, that are going to Live us here live here as our neighbors. So that's a long, long story, but it covers 45 years of being in public service. And I think we need to look at this with with an open mind. and hope that we can come up with some creative ideas that make us all here on the council and the planning commission say, yes, this is the right thing for our community. So I charge you with the responsibility of making sure that we turn over every leaf and we come up with the best possible plan for our town.

I'll add that to my list. Thanks, Commissioner Gilbert. Commissioner Johnson.

Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts. One to start with, Sean, back in the day when the general plan was being put together, there was not a conversation that I recall anyway about coulds and shoulds as opposed to musts and have-tos. I think it was taken for granted. It was just a polite conversation that you say you should have 40% open space, but in everybody's mind, it wasn't an option. It was certainly in their minds a requirement. Another thought that I had was that that 40% grew in large part because of the success of the Dell web community and how attractive that was facing everybody as we're going through the general plan process. And it wasn't by accident. The Lincoln Hills did not look like Lincoln Hills does now. And much of that open space, Greg McKenzie and his crew created it, modified it, improved upon it. And they did that knowing that there would be a financial return. And they were right about that. And so while you say that there is a lack of quality, I don't know, you didn't say lack of quality open space, but there is a lot of open space out there that isn't on its face terribly attractive, but could be made so. And the developers get a, very reasonable return on their investment when they do that, I think. So that's kind of the other side of that. You were right to bring up the interconnectedness. I think there's a tremendous value to that. And that has to be considered as part of that open space. And we can't forget that open space includes parks and low income housing, affordable housing needs parks adjacent to them. It's not a matter of having open space necessarily, but parks are valuable to other developments other than higher middle income housing. I guess I'd leave it there. You have a challenge.

Yeah. I share a lot of sentiments. I'll kind of say a few comments, but I want to make sure we get any, anyone here in the chambers that wants to, anyone that wants to come up and share some thoughts on open space or the discussion, please come. Don't mind just stating your name for the record and please. Oh.

We're on now. There we go.

Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Johnson and your fellow colleagues, commissioners, Phil Rodriguez with Lewis Group of Companies. We are the developer of Liberty at Lincoln, also known as the Village 7 Specific Plan. It's well underway. I'm not going to give you as much history as Peter just gave, so I don't want to take up too much of your time. But the history behind our creation of 40% open space within that specific plan was the, you know, the recommendation and the guidance from the city of Lincoln at the time and the formation of the general plan. And we were tracking that along and how do we accomplish that? Well, one way we did that is we preserved a lot of natural open space that had wetland and species habitat. And the purpose for that was to minimize the expense we would have to go through with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to offset the impacts to those habitat areas. What that means is you have to go preserve land elsewhere, you have to go buy bank credits, and it gets very costly. So the idea was how do we take advantage of a natural amenity that exists today which was Ingram Slough running through the property. How do we expand it? Utilization of the existing 100-year floodplain. We don't want to build in a floodplain. How do we back our way into 40% open space? And accounting for parks and linear parkways that connect neighborhoods to the natural open space corridors and the trails. And so that's how we accomplished that. But what I'll share with you is it took us, for the most part, 15 years to get our permits from the federal government and the state. And at the end of the day, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service still required us to have off-site mitigation and preservation. which means we had to go find land elsewhere. Thankfully, the city of Lincoln stepped up, and we purchased the conservation easement from the city in the northern portion of the city's wastewater treatment plant, littered with wetlands in the same watershed. It made sense. We convinced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to allow us to do that. Well, that came at a cost. It wasn't free. We had to appraise that, and there was a cost to do that, and the entire project was born on that. So if you take that acreage, that off-site directly adjacent preserve, and you add it to the 40% open space that's in the specific plan, we're nearly 50% open space. Yeah, it's outside the specific plan. And today, moving forward with other developments within the project and the fact that there's a PCCP, we're trying to take advantage of the expedited permitting aspect of that in consultation with the PCCP. We don't want this preserve. We don't want this. We call them preserves. They call them not of high value wetlands. And so and they're isolated in a lot of places. So the idea would be is we will play the game with the PCCP, take advantage of the expedited permitting, but in that create a design network. where we're manufacturing trail corridors that you wouldn't, if we were just to preserve open space, you probably wouldn't have that connectivity. Thankfully, and the basic 515 acres of the 700 acre specific plan, we took advantage of the creek corridor where there's no creek corridor In other parts, there's Auburn Ravine to the north. We can put a trail corridor along that. But we need to create trail connectivity throughout. So those are the little elements we're trying to accomplish. And what I'll recommend, what I'll suggest, is that when it comes to 40% open space, use it as a guide, but create a series of principles. What is you're trying to accomplish? And lay that in front of the development community to enable that to occur. to get what you're looking for, which is that connectivity, the natural open space feel. And the other side of it, too, is to minimize what today we have are open space areas that are fire hazards. And so we're trying to balance. It's a big balancing act we're trying to accomplish. So those are just some ideas to us about you. And I'm happy to answer questions. And I promised I wouldn't talk as long as.

No worries.

Our timer is pretty quiet this evening, but that was a little bit over three minutes.

Okay, so we're going with three minutes on public comments. Tony, please. Thanks, Phil.

Good evening, Chairman Tony Frazier with Frazier Design Group. This is an interesting topic, and I have a history pre-general plan, the web era, so we, you know, involved in the design of the trenches all the way to recent developments. And really, you have to look at it sometimes, you know, when we started Lincoln Hills, I don't think anybody told me what to do with open space. The city planner, developers, even the owners, they didn't come back and say, well, carve this, do this, do that. We worked with the topography. We worked what's natural. It was very expensive to build here, so we have to compromise here. So we let the design drive itself to create a good community. Lakes were not there. I created lakes. I created opportunity. People drive and say, this is a nice lower golf course. But it was a hill before. What you appreciate today wasn't exactly the same thing, but we made it this way. And nobody told us. It was basically end results. Take it to another extreme. If we take Sud B, for example, you want to create open space and opportunity, then you lose your commercial. You can't do that in that area. We have areas within, like Village 1, You have landowners like Epic Area. About 70% of that land became open space. It wasn't dictated by city. It was dictated by Auburn Ravine. We couldn't develop that area. So by saying it has to be, it shall be, et cetera, you can take any land and say you want to do 40% open space. It's not going to be the development that you want. But you want to allow creativity. When we did Lincoln Crossing, it had a ditch going from east to west. That's all it was. And even we had a proof-tending map when SunCal bought it. And we had channels going through. We looked at it and said, I don't like the design. We want to create lakes. We want to create opportunities. But also worked with a city that we didn't lose land to develop. So we were able to densify some areas, but then we isolated bigger areas to create more open space. And now people fight about us thinking this is a wetland, we want to preserve it. It wasn't wetland, we created it. So the bottom line is that really we have to allow creativity, allow the project kind of drive using the natural, we always say, opportunities, constraints. So you look at, and also cost-benefit, because a lot of people will say PCCP. We need to remember, too, that the land you're developing on, not just open space, you're paying a fee for building on the land that doesn't have wetlands. So you're paying a fee for everything. And then on top of that, you're paying a fee for the wetlands, and then you're creating the habitat. So the fee, fee, fee. So I wish we don't have to do all of that. Probably would be more money for other things as well. But again, the bottom line is that we need to let the... Creativity and really the end result of what you're trying to achieve, these are driving factor more than, is it 40% and 70%? As I said, some land may end up mostly open space because you cannot change it with the topography or the creek. but some other land to be valuable for more than, you know, might be 60, 40 or 70, 30, 70, 20, doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you need connectivity trails, which another problem because we create open space, but we cannot put trails in them because we're forbidden. by agencies. So if we can have some flexibility, we can have better trails going through the open space as well instead of being next to the roads. But again, it's working with a plan or working with a project that's kind of creating making sense projects and then open space that you can be proud of without thinking it's 40, it's 60, it's 70. So I appreciate it.

Thank you, Tony. Do we have anyone else in the chambers that would like to share a comment? Any thoughts? How about online? Do we have anybody?

There are no hands raised online.

Okay. I guess, is there any other discussion from my colleagues on this?

No, I didn't expect that everybody was going to come with technical suggestions. That's why we have these folks. But what I'm intending on doing is I wanted to just kind of test the waters a minute. And what I'm going to do is we'll put pen to paper. And like I said, and I think you kind of heard, We want the creative people to be creative, but sometimes it's useful to have at least some soft guidelines that help push things in the direction that you've all kind of discussed tonight. So nice to hear, at least on some level, that getting hung up on percentage is one thing, but quality matters even more than that. And so that's sort of what we're going to try to design, and I'll commit to running it back through here Planet Commission could make their edits or additions, and then we'll run it up the flagpole after that. And then hopefully the goal is that one last thing that I didn't mention is it's a really important time to do this, weirdly, because if you think about it, If you look at Lincoln's total general plan, the slopey and hilly areas of Lincoln that were tapped for development are mostly developed now. The vast majority of the remainder of the landmass that we have to develop over the next 20, 30, 40 years is flat for the most part. And so the applicability of this will be very, very different than Sun City. And so a little bit more guidance for staff is always super helpful when we're trying to put together projects we think that you'll be happy with. That's right. A lot of parks. And Commissioner Johnson made a really good point, and I wish I would have mentioned it, that parks are super important here, too, because there's actually a lot of things that qualify as open space. There can be buildings in open space. Community centers, for example, are specifically called out. So this amenity component is important, too. And next time I come back, you'll be able to shoot some holes in me because you'll have something to review and like or not like. Please, yeah, jump in.

So just to kind of touch a little bit on the PCCP, because I think she's getting painted as the devil in this picture right now. PCCP was something that the city opted to join in. We did not have to do it. That decision was made a few years ago to where expedited permit process is helpful for the developer i mean i've heard sun city was a nightmare to try to get through phil and you know the lewis team took 15 years to get things going um and things are expensive as you as we all know and i've seen the back end of what these environmental permits cost for you know 80 acres you're paying 2.3 million for converting the land and We do have open space and most of the time that is considered something that is untouched, but if you're doing any kind of modifications in there, it may be considered conversion potentially to where applicants are charged fees for that conversion as well. So it all adds up, but you know, we do have a project that's probably going to be coming your way soon. That PCCP actually kind of forced to create triple the open space than what was actually required by the specific plan. Tony probably thinks it's the bane of his existence, but it does, you know, increase the open space for that project by almost 20 acres. So there is a give and take with it. And just, we're also trying to navigate, you know, the affordable housing crisis and trying to get all these things. So. The open space is great, but there's so many other things to consider as well. And like Peter mentioned of being able to, you know, maybe bump up density for more actual land that could be available for open space, but we just have to be more comfortable with those housing types.

Thank you. Great discussion. Thanks for bringing that. I didn't share too many comments, but it's because I agree with a lot of what's been said, so I'm not gonna rehash a lot of it. Just real quickly, some of the important things for me are the trails, connectivity.

I like looking at the different amenities that qualify for open space.

And then also, you know, looking strategically at how we're using it. You know, like it was brought up, we have some beautiful developments and some open space now. And going forward, we have some flat land areas. So just kind of getting creative and thinking about some of that. So I'm glad that topic's coming up and looking forward to more discussions and some things that we can shoot some holes through, you know, Sean with his plans coming up. So looking forward to that. So thank you. We'll move on to item number 10 informational items from the staff director reports. Does the staff have any information, informational items?

Now, we don't have any additional informational items, although the tracker is in front of you. We are moving forward with just a brief comment, an update to our master fee schedule, which is going to the city council next Tuesday. It does have a 60-day adoption period after that resolution is passed, hopefully on Tuesday. This is the year where we do a full evaluation of all fees, not just a CPI index, and so we've been working with a consultant on that, and the building community has been very happy. You'll notice there have been no comments about it, that there has not been any significant increase in fees, and in some instances there have been significant decreases, but we are continuing to to remain a full cost recovery department to ensure that we are paying our own way and that development is paying its way as it continues throughout the city and besides that you do have the tracker in front of you if you have additional questions i'm happy to answer them thanks for those items does anyone have any questions or comments at this time

All right, thank you for the information. Item number 11, commissioner comments. I'll start at my right. If there's any commissioner comments. All right. And I don't have any either. So we'll move to the next point of adjournment. We're now adjourned. Chair Johnson, just if I could introduce myself. Apologies for that.

It was my fault.

I should have introduced him. I've been a transition and city attorney recently. I'm Josh Frinsky from White Brenner. You might be more familiar with Douglas White, who's been here before. Look forward to maybe seeing you more. And I know we're still getting our workflow in order with staff, but look forward to working with staff and introducing myself as well. And you'll probably find me working with planning and public works departments mostly. So thank you for having me and look forward to working with you more.

It's great to have an entire stable of attorneys that we can reach out to for assistance and with all the varied things that the city has going on.

Good. Well, welcome. Thank you. I look forward to working with you. And thanks for catching me before I hit the gavel.

That's right. I was a little tardy today. No worries. Plead forgiveness. No worries.

So with that, we'll go to item number 12, adjournment. We're now adjourned.

Thank you. He got a little younger.