Planning Commission - workshop

Thank you. So it was a little, like I said, I think the charts are good. I just think it's definitely one of

down and take the training we had and then to add that training because yeah maybe that meeting wouldn't have been quite as exciting if we'd done it we had a similar scenario with aac also where we had two new people we did the training which is you know the normal and there ended up only being three people at that hearing and two of them were new so they were a little deer in the headlines um do you know as commissioner coronado or neely coming So normally, if they have reached out to Wendy, normally Wendy doesn't set up their name tags. So that probably means that. It's 631, so just wondering. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, we might have to keep going.

I'm happy to open the meeting. What about Andrew? He's 9th place taught here.

So my guess is then he probably reached out to the clerk's office and indicated that he wasn't able to make it. That's normally what that means. If they don't put his name tag.

But I would assume that the name tag is missing. He's not going to show up tonight. But thank you to everybody who did. I don't see any reason not to just get started. Because the new people are here.

The learnies are here.

Welcome, everybody. I appreciate everyone showing up. Before we do this, I'm very committed to running these meetings am hoping to get out of here in 90 minutes. But most importantly, I want to make sure everybody has a chance to share their thoughts, ask questions, and get some input in here. But before we do that, Sherry and I talked. And one of the things I thought was really a good point she made is that we don't know that much about each other. And I would love to hear one thing as a little icebreaker from each person here. We'll just go around the room, and I will start. One thing that people wouldn't necessarily know about you a second to think about it. Here's something people don't know about me. I have a degree in theology, a master's in theology. I share that with the wife of Council Member Peters, who also has a degree in theology, and of course Council Member Amanda Henderson is a professor of theology, and she obviously has a much higher degree than me. But that's just a little tidbit about my background. You might not have known. Let's go to Sherry. Tell us something we wouldn't know about

offer your favorite place to go on vacation it doesn't have to be anything too serious uh let's see probably there's so many things you don't know and you don't want to know so okay so when i when i got my undergrad degree my degree is in housing which is very odd because nobody has a degree in housing i mean very few there were people my major, but just a few.

They shut it down after you graduated?

No. It was in the College of Human Sciences. So anyway, it's very diverse in that it covered a lot of different aspects of housing from construction to demographics to you name it. So anyway, it's kind of

I got a degree in civil engineering from the University of Kansas back in the 70s, and I needed a copy of my diploma about seven years ago. And I called, and they said, oh, it's real simple. Just give us your student ID number. Then we can just call it up.

You sent in that parchment, I'm sure.

How about you, Jared? Yeah, the one that I normally throw out is up into six of the seven columns.

OK. That's a lofty goal.

That's pretty good right now.

The best job I've ever had is I drove a Zamboni for a couple of years.

Oh my gosh, on ice rinks. Drove a Zamboni. Is that what they call it? It's hard.

I won a full-ride scholarship in one day to college. I went to meet with them. We could get out of class to go out on the college presentations, and the presenter pulled me aside and said, if you apply today, I know you'll be accepted, and I'm pretty sure you'll get a full-ride scholarship. So my parents excused me from class, and I faxed in my application and my essay, and yeah, college was paid for. Sorry.

And finally, Vice Chair.

Yeah, so the one that I, kind of my go-to, I'm a state certified pyrotechnics display operator. Licensed by the state to shoot firework shows, which we didn't have any this year because ours were canceled because of fire bans, but

OK. All right. Well, I'm going to turn this over to our wonderful staff who've made this presentation.

Jared, I guess, is going to do this one. Go ahead. All right. Thank you very much. Before you this evening, we're going to talk about High Commission Development Review Process Overview. On the agenda, foundational documents, so really what ends up giving us the guidance and authority. final approval authority development review process permitting review process and then continuous improvement so foundational documents so you know typically we think about the comprehensive plan but there's more than just that so there's community excuse me the It seems like the little wording after that died off. So yeah, but we do have more. We have the charter. We have a number of other documents as well. But foundational documents in a nutshell focus on community character, ensures equity, promotes sustainable growth. gives community voice, and are there for public safety as well. So for instance, the comprehensive plan is kind of the one that we look to the most with this group. And it was adopted in 2019 by the city council, of course, with input from a vast number of outreach residents, commissions, et cetera. And it has the community's goals. So Littleton's core values from this document include passion for and commitment to local history, the outdoors, being inclusive, being a model community, civic involvement, integrity, quality, and safety. So that's what this document really adheres to. So along with the comprehensive plan, there was also a map that was created. So that is the future land use map. So in certain meetings, we will reference the future land use map, or what some of us affectionately call the FLUC. So that map is different from the zoning map. So when the comprehensive plan was adopted, this map which laid out kind of the general guidelines for the future, what people saw for a 20-year horizon out, they had a lot of character areas on that map. So then move on to the zoning map. And the zoning map, which was created in conjunction with the ULUC a couple of years later, actually pared down the number of zoning districts. So the number of character areas is different from the number of zone districts. And sometimes we talk about that. Here are those two maps side by side. Yeah, and so the, The only thing that is a little different about the zoning map, which looks contrary to my last statement but isn't, is that there looks to be more zoning districts, but those are because of the planned overlay districts, so the PLOs. So that is if there was a different document that was approved, we often call them PDs or planned developments. If that was approved before the zoning map, You know, they have their own regulations for that area and they are shaded or provide a different color on the map. Or sometimes you'll see it with a little PLO behind the zone district. So that means that you have the underlying zoning, but you also have.

We asked questions during the presentation. So on the PLOs, during this whole process we talked about hoping to be able to place those out eventually or to incorporate those into the bigger zoning districts that we established and is that still on the radar or is that just we wait until something happens with the property

PLOs is, you know, you still have that document that provides additional regulations. But wherever that is silent, then the underlying zone compliance. So if your PD document says you have a max height of 35 feet but it doesn't say anything about the setbacks, well the zone district would govern on the setbacks. So that's how we're interpreting it now. But some of the ways that you do see us addressing PLOs is through MDPs, so the Master Development Plan. Because one of the things that an MDP can do is get you to that base zoning, so remove the PD. The only other way under the current code to remove the PD would be to do a rezone. which is a little more intensive. But sometimes if you're taking away the PD, you may not like what's under there anyway. So you might want to change it. So those are the two ways to remove a PD in our current code.

One piece of clarification that we actually don't allow you to do a PLO or PD

Exactly. There are also some very stringent amendment provisions. Amendments are really kind of discouraged under the current code because they'd rather get you to that new ULUC-based zoning. But there are a few of those provisions. at one point in time there was a 20 year fade out on these existing PDs and PLOs that didn't make the final cut I could do a little more digging on that but not to my knowledge I don't see I don't recall an amortization period it was before you were here no but like in my reading of it I haven't run across an amortization period but yeah thank you I think that's probably what Commissioner Allman was referring to as well.

I know it was talked about at some point, but I'm not sure it was ever adopted No, because I think it's just extremely it's gonna be very complicated I'm not sure what the process would be to do that Unless they discuss with the city attorney's office

amortization periods are really hard to implement we tried it with a sign code in another municipality and the economy changed and it didn't quite have the buy-in at once so they can be a little challenging at times but to continue on the foundational documents then we have the ULUC adopted in 2021 so I took a couple steps of that we have. And then to the right is a snip of our land use matrix or land use table. So you can kind of see the different zone districts and then the different uses. The A's are accessory. The C's are conditional. The C-S is conditional with standards. The P is permitted or P-S permitted with standards. And then the dash is just prohibited on that. Also, Envision Littleton Transportation Master Plan, which they're going to go through an update on that here in the future. Littleton StormWire Criteria Manual, which was stopped in 2022. And then we do have the Littleton Engineering Design Standards, which was adopted in 2025, or LEDS. Final approval authority. So this is something I often get questions on. So there are a number of things that ULUC did through that whole process and the comprehensive plan, et cetera, is the city, whether that be city council, et cetera, through that process came to the conclusion that maybe not every item, some items could be approved administratively. So it gives staff a number of administrative approval authorities. So those are abbreviated. major plan amendment, minor plan amendment, master sign plan, administrative plat, final plat, and then technical correction plat. Now the ones with asterisks, like the major plan amendment, those are items that can be bumped up to, you know, staff can say, oh, this is a really big amendment. We can bump that up to planning commission. So then items that the planning commission sees. whether they be conceptual or detailed, because we do have kind of two different varieties there. Preliminary plat, vacation plat, Certificates of appropriateness, certificate of demolition, certificate of economic hardship. And what appeals adjustments commission sees, variances, they actually do see appeals as well, but we haven't really had many of those. So predominantly it's variances. Then city council. So rezoning. So that's something that was previously recommended. the Planning Commission. Then Amendment to the Future Land Use and Character Map Amendment or FLUC. Code Text Amendments. Those come through you first and then go to City Council. Vacations of Streets and Easements. Annexations, once again seen by Planning Commission. Designation of Historic Landmarks and Districts. Now that's an item that would be seen previously by HPC rather than Planning Commission. development review process. So first we have a pre-application meeting. That's the really kind of first step. We normally get, you know, maybe an inquiry first or something and then we say, hey, this is great. Why don't you do a pre-application meeting? And the pre-application meetings do, we bring in fire district and a number of other entities to provide early comments on an item. Then before you can make a full application, depending, there are some you know, it depends on what you're applying for, but most of the time you'd have to do a neighborhood meeting. So then number two, you do application submittal and we would send quasi judicial notice out at that time. So that means that all of you would get notified if it's something that will come before you in the future. Number three, then we do reviews and revisions. So that's just kind of going back and forth. We get the plans in, we do a review, we send comments back to the applicant. Oftentimes, there may be a meeting after that to discuss any changes, et cetera. Then we would get another round of review in until we're really ready for an approval. And I'd like to get plans really close to complete. So we try not to bring you approvals with conditions. So normally, they're pretty complete. And then if it goes to the planning commission, we get it scheduled for that public hearing. Um, I also forgot to mention that there's also after the first round of review, there's a second neighborhood meeting as well, uh, for most things. So then, uh, if it goes before planning commission, we get that public hearing schedule. We bring you the documents, et cetera, and have the public hearing in the meeting. If it's a staff administered approval, then instead of, uh, bringing it to, you know, planning commission, we would ultimately finalize the plan. on that approval. And then after that we turn it over to our friends in the building division and they typically do the permitting and oversee the construction, etc. So we get involved a little bit in that still because we want to make sure that the site plan is being adhered to. So we'll do some inspections as planning and of course engineering. Our engineering friends get involved for sure. Pre-application meeting. Kind of went through some of these, but largely what we really want them to be focused on is collaboration, being comprehensive, trying to provide as much information as possible, clarity, and then making sure that the applicant comes out with a solid contact, a project manager for them to work with moving forward. Neighborhood meetings, meetings organized and run by the applicant. First meeting is required before the pre-application and the first submittal. the pre-application of the first submittal. The second meeting is required between first and second submittals. Now the caveat there is that the inclusionary housing ordinance, if you are building housing above five units and you are complying with that ordinance rather than providing the fee in lieu because you can do either one. You can either build the units or pay the fee in lieu. If you're building the units, one of the incentives is to And then notices are sent via postcard, which are typically done by the city. And then it's placed on the development activity list on the website. Applications middle. So key application documents. This is oftentimes where we see the site plan with the, you know, this is also what all of you end up getting to see at like a master development plan review, something of that nature. Typical ones are site plan, photometric, make sure that the lighting complies, landscape plans, plots oftentimes, final civil engineering plans, transportation impact study, drainage reports.

So one thing, kind of real purpose of this slide, is we want to really emphasize the comprehensive nature of what we're looking at. We really do take a lot of pride in ensuring that the standards that are set

are met through this process.

And so it's not just a really quick look at a site plan. These are really highly technical documents. And our team does a really good job of making sure that that character set within those standards are met, especially when it comes to the civil engineering drawings.

Those are quite technical and take some time to put together and take some time to review as well. Let's see. Review and revisions. This is, as I mentioned, I'll just make this real quick, is we get the application in, check it for, make sure it's a complete application so they have all the documents that we indicated prior, and get it under review. And we send it out to a number of different entities. And as I mentioned, this is really where that quasi-judicial notice comes into play as well. And then once the review is complete, the project manager combines all the comments and sends them back out to the applicant. So this is kind of that round robin of staff comments received, plans are updated, the resubmittal process, all the way to approval readiness. And oftentimes our normal process is about three rounds of review on occasion. round you start to incur more fees because we we expect yeah you'd be making those adjustments based on the comments so continuous improvement we absolutely understand that any process can be improved upon in 2022 the city initiated process improvement efforts so and then in 2023 implementation of that effort we are working on implementation. So we're making changes to things such as the intake process, really getting some internal SOPs, et cetera, finalized. We've got a lot of that type of work to do. And internally, we also changed the way the community development department rather than having them split time with public works. And then the process had a number of stakeholders, 35 internal and 30 external. And yeah, the goals were, you know, understand what challenges the development community has or staff has, and then identify the root causes and then try to focus on working on them to make the process smoother. I guess I'll jump ahead a little bit on this, but we're really working on the completeness Matt and our CBO, Tim Steinwander, have come on board. Development activity list updates. So we've made a number of changes there, including adding the neighborhood meetings to the DAO. And then SOP development, we have a lot of these. Talk about code interpretations, how surety is collected and held. Working on updating our pre-construction meeting agendas and what would go over there. And then also project closeout. And staff remains committed to working on all these items and moving our process into the future. Any questions on that?

I was really disappointed when the office was shut down, except for two days a week for four hours at a time. And I'm going to give you a couple of reasons why. Oftentimes, if you flunk an inspection and you don't understand what the inspector was up to or what he wanted, if you could come over here, you used to be able to come over here and catch him at 2.30 or 3, get an answer to that, maybe call your sub up and get the sub over there and call it in the next day. Otherwise, it just... Am I doing that? And that was the way it was in Lakewood, Arvada, Denver. It was always open. And it disappoints me to see that office is closed all the time. Not all the time, but 32 of the 40 hours a week.

We did a four-month comprehensive analysis about the number of people who were actually coming into the office, when they were coming in, what their purpose was coming in for. And it turned out that... our permit tech individuals were spending a lot of time really focusing on things outside of kind of what they would normally work on. As we've gone through the process improvement work, one of the things that we really wanted to focus on is making sure that they are doing comprehensive completeness checks and verifying what comes in as good. we needed to make a decision on what was the balance and operational effectiveness with that. I'm going to make up a number here, but it's more than doubled, if not tripled, the number of building inspections we're doing because we're doing all 100% of them in-house now. And so our inspectors actually aren't in the office during those times. They're actually out in the field 8 AM to almost 5 PM every day because of the number. at this point. Because there's just so many inspections going on at this point. We did a trial of it. We actually heard a lot of positive feedback, right? Being able to make an appointment and come in and say, hey, and actually have the answer that you needed available right at that moment instead of somebody having to go walk back and do research and kind of sitting around. We've actually heard a ton of really positive feedback about it. So I appreciate the comment. I appreciate the perspective for sure.

Is there a chance that you could make another day, four hours?

Yeah, I mean, we're open. We're open to it. We just haven't seen the need for it, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I mean, we, every. Well, I'm just talking about my past experience. Yeah, sure.

I can, and I will tell you that if you have questions for our inspectors, like you said, the incidents where you, you know, you had a question about a missed inspection. Missed inspection, yes. Our policy is that if you are going to flunk an inspection, you actually have a conversation with the contractor. You provide that information and a phone number to be able to contact them. So we don't just flunk it and leave. You will know when we leave what was wrong. If we can give you perspective on how to fix it quickly, oftentimes because of the number of inspections, we potentially could be something where we would take a photo to verify that work was done potentially. So, you know, we're very proactive. We don't, we're not, you know, you know. Too bad you didn't get it. See you later. We work really closely with our contractors. And we've had a lot of really positive feedback about that shift to specifically with doing all of our inspections in-house with cross-training instead of kind of moving some of those to third parties where it's been really positive. Good.

And another question, too. Why the two neighborhood meetings? If the process is set up, it's there, and if the applicant is following the process, is it going to change because the neighbor doesn't like something? Is that the idea? But if it followed the rules, would the neighbors really have anything to say about it?

So that's a great question, something that we talk about. internally quite a bit, because sometimes there's a lot of good work that comes out of a neighborhood meeting. The developer will get insight into something that they may not have had before. Oftentimes, in my experience, people come not just to hear about the project, but maybe to provide some insight. I'll be honest, most of the time it's not. there is quite a bit of good information that comes back. Now, that being said, I do think that we have also had really good experience with the IHO requirements and dropping those neighborhood meetings down to one because of that incentive. And those projects still seem to move along at a good speed. The public, the comments I've had be informed, they can still come to, you know, the public hearing here at the end of it, depending on if it goes to Planning Commission. So, you know, amenable to that, to hearing out those ideas.

One of the really important things that I think came out of the work with EOUC, at least one of the foundational things is the concept of community character. And so a big piece of that is making sure that, you know, the community is involved in these processes. And so I think that was a really important piece of that, the development of that code to say, hey, we, you know, we, as these projects do come forward, we want to make sure that the community has those opportunities to see what's happening and provide feedback.

Yeah.

Now, I think you have an important question about, you know, hey, do we make them change stuff, right? I think the code is the code is the code, right? So we have standards. We have very clear standards set in there in relation to a lot of things. And so, you know, you know, oftentimes change is hard in any community, especially when some of these projects that come in have high impacts in some of the areas that may not have as much development historically. And so, but we do feel that the community voice is important.

We also, if you meet the code, that's absolutely correct. That's kind of the final word on it. However, I will say that oftentimes the developers want to be good neighbors and they will, if If it's a reasonable request, et cetera, they'll contemplate it and be like, oh, yeah, we could buffer this a little stronger with a few more trees to make sure, say, headlights didn't spill over onto the neighbor's property or something like that. I've seen a number of successes there.

We've seen some developers have three or more meetings by choice. The question Rob is asking is about what we require. And I take heart with the idea that we I've had success with IHO projects not being any worse than other projects or having a single meeting. I believe the incentive structure is there. And they avail themselves of it for reasons of, I'm just going to say I think that one of the good things about that incentive process is that it removes one sort of another burden from getting something done. All of these things take time. And in addition to resources, staff resources, resources from the applicant. And if we're not getting better outcomes from two versus one, maybe we should just require one. But, of course, encourage developers who want to connect with the neighborhood or discuss questions about community character or whatever their issues are. They're welcome to. We don't restrain people from having community meetings to talk about their project. It's really a question of what do we mandate? And maybe that's, I don't know who or where we make the decision of what the number is, but it sounds like one has been fine. For some of the other projects, they're not small. Well, I pushed this off into the weeds.

Sorry. No, this is something that we talk, as staff, about quite a bit. So the one place I will say that we really struggle is the code isn't Well, the code is fairly clear, but there is some room for interpretation. So when it comes to master development plans that are conceptual, because technically you're doing two processes. You're doing the master development plan conceptual, which you all see, and then you come back with a site plan, which is administratively approved, but technically each process takes two neighborhood meetings. So you're at four. Maybe you're getting rid of one with an IHO removal, right? You're still at three. Now, Matt is absolutely correct. Community character is very important to the code, to residents, to this entire group. However, we may want to get your insights as to whether three is an appropriate number. Three to four is an appropriate number for an MDP conception.

If the concept of neighborhood meetings was something that the Planning Commission was wanting to look at as a potential ULUC update, that would be up to you guys to prioritize that.

Make those recommendations. I think allowing people to have them is one thing.

efficient and less burdensome process. My sense is a later stage meeting with the community is probably better after they've had conversations with staff. The code, as you say, is the code is the code. And the further along the project is to conform to what we know is legal and allowed, the better that meeting is going to be because it's going to be a conversation more closely tied to what's actually being proposed. You do them earlier. The thing changes. They come and talk to you, and they're like, oh, we can't put this kind of thing in here. It's a completely different project. You have to have another meeting. So I would just, in my personal view, it's a little bit later stage, and maybe not between the pre-app and the first and middle, but after the first and middle, if you were to I don't know about you guys.

I feel like the two is not unreasonable. I feel like we've already minimized the amount of public input. Not minimized. We don't have a lot of public input. A lot of people don't really know how or take the time or interest in giving public input. And sometimes in their community, they're much more interested in what's going on. They want to know what's going on. And I think From a developer's perspective, sometimes it's a benefit both ways for them to go in there and tell people this one thing that we're going to do and then meet again. If you go back and look at the notes from community meetings, a lot of times the second meetings or even the first meeting is more robust than the first. So I think it depends.

I think this lends something. What you're saying, too, is almost, it's a little bit in keeping in maybe these early, well, it seems to me that the concept and the, I don't know, maybe the fear of early on, that seems to be what comes out of some of these early meetings rather than like, okay, let's just wait. Let's get a better idea and a better conceptual plan and drawings and mock-ups or whatever that we can actually show to people so that we get a better picture in front of them rather than just being like, than some of the fear that some of that early stuff I think can raise. I guess the other question I would have on this that might make it be beneficial for both parties would be we have this Boulevard Blueprint open house online, right? Like this just, you know, it's a web form. Here's the pictures. Here's what's happening. Do you want to post a comment and leave it? Do we give our developers the option to host an online neighborhood meeting so that they could do that instead that would give people more opportunity to look over it, you know, read into it when they want on their hours, and then also maybe lessen some of the burden in terms of what the developer has to coordinate, you know, and also allow the developer to better communicate their plans to people.

We were doing that. You were doing that during the pandemic. I mean, that's the only way we had meetings. So there were third-night bird meetings online.

So the code doesn't require them in person.

Yeah. It does not?

It does not. Now, so I think there's two different aspects here. I think what you bring up is having a website or something that the developer would put out that The code definitely doesn't require that.

Could you use that in place of a neighborhood meeting? Because I think neighborhood meetings tend to be like it's a Zoom call or it's in person, right? Versus like, hey, we're hosting this online neighborhood meeting feedback website thing rather than, you know.

Yeah, so current code, no. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't look into potentially bringing back some thoughts on that.

Yeah, and I think just to be clear, like, there will be an opportunity, I think, within the next presentation to talk a little bit about kind of work planning, right? So, you know, we don't have to make this decision now. But I do think that from the concept of something to think about as it relates to this is, you know, what are we looking for? So, you know, if you do one later and the project's fully developed, then you're really just informing. You're not seeking feedback. Yeah, not that late, but. So if you're doing it early, so I think the intent of the two neighborhood meetings is you're doing one before you apply, and you are seeking feedback from the community. You want to hear what they think. What are they seeing? What are they feeling? And then they take that feedback, and then they develop plans. And then they submit, we review, and then they do another neighborhood meeting. And at that second neighborhood meeting is really an opportunity for them to show what changed, or if they addressed anything. What feedback? Correct. And so I think that that's the kind of process, right? If the intent is really just informing them about what you're doing, that's a different communication strategy.

And I think some developers will avail themselves of that, regardless of whether we mandate or not, maybe multiple of those. But the question is, what do we mandate and what's useful? One of the things that I think gives a lot of citizens a false understanding about the development process is that things are not controlled by the city code, that somehow neighborhood meetings are you can browbeat someone into changing a project. And that's not how we work, and that's not how council expects the land use code and zoning to work in the city. They expect it to conform to the laws and be guided by that code. And these meetings are essentially to, one, maybe educate the community. They are informational. So my question is always, do we really need two? I mean, I think one would probably suffice. Of course, we encourage people who want to do big projects and understand what the community wants. But what the community wants is primarily expressed through its code and zoning districts. Yes, so that's how I see it. And that's why I think reducing the neighborhood meeting requirements to one is probably preferred to multiple.

I'm a proponent of fewer meetings.

What?

I'm a proponent of fewer meetings, and I like the idea of some sort of a website that we go to. I mean, I love the project websites that the city sends out about anything where you can zoom in and you can take some time to think and reflect and leave comments along the way. And so if there was an alternative, maybe it's not called a meeting, but it's like a feedback.

I don't want to put additional burdens, but I want to give people more options. And this would give neighborhood residents and developer, something like that would give neighborhood residents and developers a more flexible option or a different option. It might be more difficult for them. It might be less difficult. I honestly don't know. I mean, these might be part of the presentation and educational materials that they're putting together for presentations at this meeting and at council meetings and for you guys anyway. And to be able to share those and invite people to respond in their own time, I think, would be smart. But I think that would be a good way to just another option. And we could just allow that instead of a neighborhood meeting, this online format forum for feedback rather than just saying you have to have a Zoom call or you have to book the meeting at the library.

Here's a question for Seth. Fill me in here. Do these requirements for meetings apply to everything but single-family homes, or are they triggered by a certain size or parcel size? By project type.

So if your single-family home does not require a site plan process, the single-family home would not have to go through this. However, for instance, in, well, let me, so MDPs, of course. Like a three-unit townhouse. Depends on what zone district they're in. If they're in MFR, I don't believe so. But if they're in anything else. They require conditional use. Yeah, no, because only a duplex requires a conditional use, or is allowed as conditional use in SLR. And so that would take two neighborhood meetings.

Right, so even a duplex and a single family.

So a single family attached to duplex doesn't require site plan these days? It would.

Yeah, so it's currently, that's only what depends on the zone district.

In a single family, in a SLR zone district, it would, yes. Single family is almost the only thing that, if you're starting from scratch, right, that doesn't require a site plan.

So small residential generally does, except for single family homes, single units.

You have simplified that, though, haven't you, the SDP process? The site plan process? Yeah. Yeah, it's all administrative. Yeah, but I heard rumors that it's not as extensive as it was in 22. Is that true?

We are continuing to try to streamline it, but the nuts and bolts of the process are still there. The code hasn't changed in relation to that.

45 minutes into the time zone. I'm happy to entertain other questions for Director Knight and Jared Chipman. Or we can move on to the next thing. What's the beat?

It sounded like the next thing is some other ULUC codes, which I feel like we're bordering on anyway. Before we start talking about topics that you have planned to talk about with us.

Just a comment question. So based on, we just talked about some potential future process or changes. So where do we incorporate those then for future discussion?

I think we're going to come up on that discussion here in just a minute.

Okay. Okay. Sorry. Let us get to the topic here.

Okay. Now we're going to go to the ULEC amendments part of this conversation. No, we won't.

colleagues in IT for having that already. We greatly appreciate their efforts. ULUC updates and plan commission operation discussion. So agenda, 2026 year to date overview, three year outlook, ULUC update topics, and then operations discussion or procedures discussion. So some of you might see this as somewhat similar. We had somewhat of a similar conversation in February. But with new people on, we want to bring it back to the forefront and also provide them with that kind of year-to-date overview. So this is a part of the city's mission. So community development is dedicated to building a sound, resilient, and neighborly community by providing excellent customer service, effective outreach, and responsible and effective use of resources. So our acronym for this is FORWARD. Focused, objective, results oriented, well informed, adaptable, respectful, and dependable. And then off to the left is the city's four values. So inclusion, respect, integrity, and first rate service. This is just a little bit about the department. So Matt, being the director, has his face front and center there. And it branches off from there. Who goes to the top there, Jared? So Jessica Simley is our development engineering manager, playing manager. Then we have Denise as business operation manager. Tim Steinwander is the chief billing official. And then Jeremy Kovenchik is our co-compliance manager. And then the great thing about this graphic is you get to see everybody else. So, for instance, my team is a team of six. Rachel, Jesse, Sarah, Andrea, Zerreen, and Terry. And Jessica has a team of two there. And so I won't dive into absolutely everybody's roles, but I think that's a pretty good overview of the department. We have a team of 30 people. It's a pretty good group. Great group. So key projects and strategies are prioritized. So a lot of this is built off of City Council's Horizon 2027 strategic plan. So we have several initiatives within that strategic plan. Initiative 13, develop Littleton Boulevard economic slash redevelopment plan. So we have the Blueprint Boulevard plan underway. That's kind of the terminology we're going to use instead of the longer name of Wilton Boulevard sub area plan. And yeah, we're more than happy to have everybody's involvement. I know that some of you sit on the state court working group, so we appreciate that. And you're going to get some info on that here in the future. Initiative 27, complete and implement a citywide historic preservation plan to increase the level of service to historic preservation. So we have not launched that planning effort currently. We've been doing some other historic preservation efforts in preparation for the potential for a future historic survey plan. So for instance, or excuse me, for the historic preservation plan. So we have completed the historic survey plan. So that really talks about where, focuses on where we should be doing some surveying in the future. And so we're looking to do some, Notable accomplishments, the kickoff of Blueprint Boulevard, ULUC updates. We had the EV and gas station ULUC updates this year. We had a number of updates last year as well, but I was really trying to focus on 2026 and not bore you with what I already spoke about earlier in 2025. Then upcoming agenda items, additional ULUC updates, and quasi-judicial items, such as they are. So three-year outlook, we've kind of looked at this bit from time to time. But Q1, Q2, we did the EV and fuel station updates. We're working on Littleton Boulevard sub-area plan, that blueprint boulevard throughout 2026 and most of 2027. We've also been engaged with our, you know, our manual, etc. And then we're looking into some non-conformities and some other targeted ULUC updates. I'll dive into those in the future. And then we have a number of other initiatives that we'd like to see in coming years. So targeted ULUC topics. Staff ULUC update priorities. So some of the things that the planning staff have got together and talked about are updating downtown standards, working on height as an update because we have some challenges there with the way the code is written. There are a couple conflicting items there. So we want to touch up height. That actually came through in variance as well. It was further brought to our attention by variance. Nonconformities, ADUs in accordance with the three compliance with the 3a ballot initiative some tree updates then we have another public works item equal spaces hpc has been discussing some potential text amendments as well so the way that works just for your knowledge is that this is kind of an interesting one hpc would make a recommendation to the planning commission to make a recommendation to city council when it comes to a text amendment. So a number of meetings on those. And then legislative updates as they come to us. So a large amount of our text amendments last year were complying with IMPACT ON THE ULUC, BUT NOWHERE NEAR AS MANY AS IN THE YEAR BEFORE. PREVIOUSLY WHEN WE TALKED WITH THE PLANNING COMMISSION ABOUT THEIR PRIORITIES, I PROVIDED A SHORT LIST, AND THIS IS KIND OF WHAT I REALLY WANT THE CONVERSATION TO REVOLVE AROUND, ARE THESE THINGS STILL ON THE PLANNING COMMISSION'S, IS PLANNING COMMISSION STILL INTERESTED IN THESE THINGS, ARE THERE OTHER PRIORITIES? standards and sustainability standards. And I'm going to pause there before the last slide because I think this is largely a topic of conversation, and then the last slide's kind of a different topic of conversation on the procedural basis of the Planning Commission.

Thank you for that. It's germane to your questions, but it looks like Bob has got some documents here to share.

with the both of you for lunch two or three weeks ago about the possibility of simplifying the code, running it through AI. There's just, and I gave you that little brief thing that my brother-in-law and I did in two hours. We ran it through Copilot and found all kinds of redundancies and inconsistencies. Is there any thought given to doing that? Just not changing anything, just streamlining it, getting, you know, like, just refer back to, you know, a hierarchy standard and instead of duplicating the measurements in several different places, put everything in one place. Is there any thought of that happening? We are very interested in making the code as easy to read as possible.

So whether that be... It's not easy. No, I don't disagree. For us, I mean, I do have your documentation that you provided.

And excuse me. And I can send it to you electronically, too. I should have done that. I'm sorry.

No worries. Happy to have it both ways. To me, even if we run it through AI, AI is still kind of that first glance at it, right? of doing the cross-checking ourselves, making sure that things are lining up and that we don't make a new inconsistency that we would need to touch up. But yeah, we've taken the approach of trying to do smaller targeted items based on workload. the code more holistically. Yeah, there's a lot there, right?

So the code is... Maybe we just take it in chunks. We do like chapter 910, okay? And work that through and make it more workable. I mean, it is really difficult when you get into this code and it refers you back to somewhere here. It should be more concise. And you shouldn't... And I'm not talking about changing any standards or anything at all. I'm just talking about making it more usable.

I think we totally agree that there's a lot of opportunity to simplify it. You know, putting my community development hat on that I get to wear, the director hat on, from a work loading standpoint, it's a huge lift. It is. It's a monster. You know, when you're talking about some of these priorities that we have, you know, that have already been established within the city council strategic plan, we just really need to be cognizant of kind of that level of prioritization. We do think that there's an opportunity to have a conversation with council about, as we go into their next strategic plan discussion, about a code update, right? I think there's a lot of interest in a comp plan update or a comp plan update. I don't even know if it's a re-update at this point. And just from a staffing standpoint, these are big projects. And we don't have a big staff to be able to run these. Talking about burden on developers, we have a very robust city right now. People want to be building here. we've got a lot of growth opportunities in relation to some of these. And so I will provide, I want to make sure that it gets on the record that we're leaving space to make sure we're providing that level of service to our developers. Our, you know, and so I'm very cognizant of though these opportunities. And I said, I think I want to make sure that the, those are making it into those discussions with council as it relates to those priorities. So I appreciate that. I just want to be really transparent, too. It's easy when we talk about these kind of updating, it's easier to kind of group these into a bulk of here's a few that we think are really, really important. I agree. So I think that's kind of where we're at in trying to really consolidate. That's what we're really interested to hear from you. What are those priorities? The ones on the staff updates, those are, I think, some of these are really, really critical to making sure that we're keeping to move some of these things forward that we're hearing daily.

But the other ones are really important to us, too. You're in Chapter 9, and then you've got to go into Chapter 10 to You got different ways. They got the measurements here and the measurements here and the measurements here and whatever. So now I want to talk about photometrics, which is up here, the lighting standards. All right. I am going to give you guys. The green dots are pictures of the lights in my bedrooms. Okay, three bedrooms. And as you can see, this apartment building is about 150 feet away. And it's just blowing right in there. My next door neighbor's house was built in 45. She's got one of those farmhouse lights out back that lights up the whole backyard, my backyard and the neighbor's backyard on the other side. And then across the street, I've got another one where there's a non-compliant light, and she lights it on, and you can see it lights the whole backyard, the whole street, and right back into my bedroom window, all right? So I just took a little walk around. I just walked around the block. So on the other side, on the blue dots, like picture number one, is the other side of the apartment building that you were seeing. The north side of the apartment building was shining in my bedrooms, okay? This is the south side sitting on the other side of Powers, you know, again, probably 100 feet away, all right? Now, then you come, and you've got people that put lights around their house. Picture number two, that's one of my neighbors, good guy, love it, but, you know, Okay, number three, this is a new building, and it had to comply with the dark sky compliant, but you can see they have got the Costco lights hanging all over, and the back side of the building's got more of them, all right? Matter of fact, almost every building downtown that has a second or third floor deck has lights like that, and oftentimes they're on all night and not just at Christmas time. Okay, then you've got four, picture number four, on Curtis Street, and basically people just want some security lights. And I'm standing across the street on all of these I've pictured. So we've got a 50, 60 foot right-of-way plus. So five, six, and then seven, this is on Powers right there between Nevada and Primps. Why do I bring this up? don't have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is why are we doing photometric studies when they are not enforceable? tell you what downtown Littleton doesn't want it dark sky compliant and these are rules that are not enforceable basically once the CEOs out people can do whatever they want in their house I don't think we can go around tell somebody's house was built in the 50s and the 20s that they can't have lights out to light up their backyard even if it goes over the fence so I You know, if we're going to simplify things, why do we have this in the code if it's not enforceable?

It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I do think there are actually some enforceable provisions within that, specifically the ones that have, you know, some of the site plans in the village you have that have come in, kind of, you know, post-code changes. And so... We do have a code compliance team that can look into those. I mean, they're great. They're fantastic. We have an opportunity to take photos and things like that. We can work through some of those things.

these windows that show through guess what those would not even show up in a photometric study because they're interior lights and yet this is apartment building and the hallways need to be lit there's a door with a you know an escape on one side and the lights are on all night long and I'm a hundred and fifty feet north of that and it just comes in all night long yeah I think we you know I

Certainly dark sky compliance is something that from a community, I think we've heard as a community value, right? And so how that's actually applied through the code, I think is code to read in relation to that um i think that's probably why to some extent that's up there right i i do think that what we've heard and what i have seen practically in a lot of the application of this and the development within portions of the city is that you know if if we don't apply those standards then somebody can put giant lights you know if you if you're putting a multi-family building it'd be you know an mfr that's adjacent to a single-family residential district and there's no standards, then you're just blowing light into some of those, and we're essentially saying it's okay. And again, from a policy standpoint, I think we want to make sure that how the code reads and the standards align with kind of those community character and community values that they hold. So how we enforce those codes, I think that's a whole different discussion. We need to be making sure that those things aren't happening. It's hard if the farmers let my grandma have one in her backyard, loved it, You know, I love to sit back there and watch the books attack it.

If we start making these people comply, I mean, all hell's going to break loose.

I don't think that we should be trying to do something retroactive, especially on residential properties. But I think moving forward, and I say this as somebody who is very into both space and birds and bees and, you know, migratory, and all of these things that are affected by light, right? Dark sky compliance is also more than just it looks bright, right? There's temperature, there's the way it downlights rather than uplights, there's, you know, so there's a lot of factors that go into dark sky rather than just, you know, what it looks like to the human eye in terms of brightness. So there's a big effect that I think that we're not, you know, that maybe is, you know, not immediately visible when you look at these photos and stuff. But again, like we're saying, if we don't have some kind of standard that, you know, when somebody goes and puts in, you know, a new parking lot for, you know, a business or whatever, they're going to put in, you know, maybe they're going to put in this cheap light that's, you know, the bright orange or whatever that's really bad for a know local you know you know native pollinators and native birds and that kind of thing that can really be disruptive and so again i don't think this is something that we should be trying to retroactively enforce on any kind of residential property i do think that going forward like even on residential property we should be talking about um Permanent like or installed lighting like permanent installed lighting right like not like okay I'm gonna get a little LED light string from Costco and put it out because just the the lumens on that Really just isn't there right as opposed to something that's attached to your house where you get a lot of lumens you get a very Cold temperature let that light spectrum right that can really you know and you're firing it straight up into the sky which has a big difference so I do think that going forward we should be trying to enforce lighting and dark sky standards across all of our buildings for any kind of attached or permanent lighting versus, you know, kind of some aftermarket lighting. Like, we're not going to go after people and be like, oh, your Christmas lights are too bright or whatever, you know. The street lighting is currently exempt. So, I mean... We should get that under... I think that that would be a big benefit to try to enact going forward is that street lighting needs to be... Oh, street lighting, sorry. Street lighting.

Yeah. If I may offer a synthesis of what I'm hearing to guide you guys. I share Bob's concern that our lighting code is elaborate, complicated, and probably burdensome to many projects, but difficult to work with. And it's not clear at first read how it works. I believe that it would be useful for our city land use code to have a very clear sort of understandable approach to lighting that has some things like lumen spill, the amount of light that can go off 50 feet off your property line, but basic guidelines that say installed lighting should be dark site compliant. But we generally don't have a really elaborate set of rules about it, just a kind of clear approach. That might be a way to streamline it. I'm a big believer in removing some of the burdens for you guys, having to interpret. I've seen lighting plans. You have to have a special sensibility to even understand what you're looking at in those. That's just another set of plan sets after you review. This just adds layers of cost to us, to the builders, et cetera. Simplifying those rules and making them kind of understandable describable in a few paragraphs would probably be helpful and produce almost as good outcomes as we're getting now. Because as Bob says, once you've built it, all kinds of stuff happens. And maybe if they're simple enough, if the ideas we write are simple enough, people will, yeah, you're not allowed to put anything over like 400 lumens out on a problem. If you just know, don't do that. If someone puts one of those in, we can easily go and say, hey, it's really clear. We don't allow that level of brightness. But right now, there's all kinds of conditionalities and measurement points.

So what I'm hearing is that lighting still seems to be one of those priorities you guys would like to tackle.

It sounds like it still needs some work. Lighting is a whole field of expertise. It's not just something you can write down. I mean, it's very complex. And there are people who are lighting engineers specifically, and that's becoming more and more the norm. I wonder how much are we getting mixed together here. Code, which of course we work on code, but code enforcement versus the role of the planning commission. I don't know how we could retroactively go back and

We should retroactively go back and fix things. But I do think that going forward we should, yes, a simple set of standards. And the other thing would be, like, is if it doesn't work for you, then yes, then you need to bring in your lighting engineer, right? Then you need to come and do a lighting review. But if you can say it's all down lighting, it's dark sky compliant, and it's under 2,000 lumens per... you know, for fixture, check, right? Then it's done, right? If you want something different, right, then you need, then you're going to need some kind of additional review.

That makes great sense.

And then I think that, yeah, that would just, you know, who wants an additional review? Who wants to spend the time and money on that? Okay, we're going to go with 2000, you know, lumen, dark sky compliant, downward

This is obviously some concern for the commission.

What temporary uses are we talking about?

Temporary use standards for things such as carnivals and even something such as like a I don't know that we need a lot more. But for instance, certain things take a conditional temporary use. But it does not lay out what that is. What is the conditional? So from piecing the things together, I've come to the conclusion that they want you to have a conditional use permit, which would come before planning commission, which we feel is

When I think of temporary uses, when you talk about some of that stuff, it makes me think of pop-up markets and pop-up restaurants and that kind of thing. And those can be real enablers for small businesses. That's not a planning commission. Well, no, but if it requires a temporary use permit, that's the question. Is that the kind of thing? I don't know if that falls under what you're talking about here when you say temporary uses in the section of code that needs to be updated for temporary uses, if that would impact those kinds of uses, right? If so, I can, yeah.

Like you're thinking the farmer's market they do on Nevada.

Not so much that. More like a private. Yeah, either. Yeah, like, yeah, private property. So like, if you think of like a vacant lot, right? If somebody's got like a vacant lot, you could, you know, bring in a couple trailers and set up like a, you know, like the bar box at Aspen Grove. If somebody wanted to do that on an empty lot in downtown Littleton, what would that take? Right? If somebody wanted to set up like an outdoor restaurant on that empty lot for the summer to try out a concept.

I don't know. I've seen that done in Breckenridge.

Yeah. So, but again, I don't know if that's, if that falls under this temporary uses and that's something that we'd have to get, you know, a permit for versus saying like something like that. Again, that feels like it would be like, okay, you know, what's your basic fire plan or whatever in your.

Can I maybe provide some clarification on kind of what we're looking for here? So we, over the next period of, let's say, a year, right, year to year and a half, you know, we will kind of take a bite out of this apple, right? We will kind of figure out which items we're going to prioritize from the standpoint of bringing code amendments forward. There are some of the ones on the left there which are, you know, we've put some work into moving forward and will likely bring some policy options for you forward as it relates to those through study session. Likely those items will be a part of a joint study session with you and city council so that we can discuss those. Hey, here's the kind of policy things we want to talk about. You know, plan a commission. Do you agree with this? Council, do you agree with this? So that we're all kind of aligned as we develop final recommendations for bringing a code amendment forward. That way we don't have to go through, you know, kind of multiple iterations. We can really make clear policy decisions at that point. And then with the kind of other ones, it's very similar. So we don't want to start spending a ton of time on some of these things if they're not prioritized or not important to the commission, right? If you look at this and say, yeah, lighting clearly based on what I heard, it seems important. You know, so, you know, temporary uses, it's like, well, is that, you know, are there other items on this list that you guys think are, maybe that's not super critical at this point. Maybe we'd like to focus more on transition standards. you know, our sustainability standards over that because that is a much more community-focused or the commission feels that that is more important. So I think we're trying to get clarity from you guys on, hey, what's the next kind of tranche of opportunities?

Right. None of those in this list were particularly exciting to me. Temporary uses I really think should be staff decisions. Temporary is not lasting that long. It's not. I've heard, I do think, let's lay out some of my recommendations. One is that we look at parking questions remain much bigger in this code base as an issue than something like transition standards.

I put transition standards on there for the last three or so years because when we have a, So an apartment complex come in, and it's going to be four stories, and there are single family houses right behind it. We had always talked about there should be some kind of transition from a higher density, more high rise, mid rise, to lower density use. And so I don't want to back off of that. I feel like the intent of that was not. I think the intent that we discussed never went into the standards. They're really weak. Um, so that's when I've been, I brought up, I have brought up for a few years because we've had issues with standards, but you don't think they're adequate.

No, absolutely not. And that's something that we can do a study session on as well to go over those standards to talk about, um, yeah, like hearing a renewed interest or a current interest ongoing. Um, Yeah, that's something that we can generate a study session and have a presentation on and just lay out what they all are so that everybody's on the same page. Then you can make a more informed decision whether or not you want to move forward with changes or not.

I mean, I don't think it's a huge ongoing project or anything, but yes, even a study session to say, what the heck were we saying? What did these mean? Where do we apply these and when? Because it's like, you ever look at it we've had we had some projects where those standards were they were supposed to come into play and it was very confusing to the staff as well as the Commission I know that the Commission turned down a project because there wasn't clear standards around that at one point which caused kind of a hubbub so that's kind of a lingering that's a lingering topic I don't feel like we've ever really resolved

Well, I would say, before we unpack that one, it would be nice to get that articulated, what the current situation is. And then let's discuss what ideas we have for improving them and see if that's something we want to go for. I don't know if we're going to have to have a whole study session.

I just Yeah, I want to help. Patrick said something I feel like I have been harping on a like every time it keeps coming up and I keep saying it about a parking plan or because on some level I you know, I wondered, is it is this beyond the scope of planning commission, but it's also part of code it's part of land use right and every single project anywhere like within the bounds of you know mainland littleton as it were parking always comes up right and it would be nice to have a parking plan right you know and we can look at cities that have eliminated parking minimums and and look at how they've adopted parking plans and factor that into the buildings and the projects going forward so that we can answer those questions up front, so we can address the concerns that keep coming up at every single project about parking.

So it's within the Planning Commission's realm to talk about that parking section of the table, or the parking section of the code, absolutely. To build a separate parking plan for a certain area,

some parking items that may you know may need a representative I don't know exactly what the status is on that yeah so I think for the project downtown part of that is the curbside parking management plan study and so I know I believe the Commission is a stakeholder in the in that project and so You know, so that's their focus is really kind of looking at just historically or holistically the kind of downtown areas that relates to kind of curb size and parking management. But that's really just focused on that area. It's not focused on. And I think what I'm hearing you say is that Is it aligns with the overall development standards for specific buildings, right, that potentially are coming in, evaluating what those parking maximums or minimums should be depending on the specific zone district? That's what I'm hearing you say.

No, I think it is. I mean, it's more than that too, right? Because, you know, the curbside parking management for Project Downtown is great and all. We are going to hit the exact same thing with Littleton Boulevard. exact same thing so why are we not looking at a more comprehensive I think it is curbside parking management that applies not just to downtown but to like you know or or or or something that's phased that says when parking reaches 80 occupancy on during peak business hours then the so that we have a plan in place to say, hey, look, downtown on-street parking is super valuable. We're going to start charging for it. But we're not going to do that on Littleton Boulevard yet because assuming we get parking, then We don't need that much parking on that. We don't need to reserve that much parking on those streets. There's plenty of parking on those streets. But when it hits 80%, then we're going to start charging for it. Then we're going to start permitting it, right? So that there's an action plan associated with when do we start to kick in some of these changes in terms of our street parking. How does that affect or influence local businesses? Because again, we don't force a new business in downtown to provide parking because it would ruin the aesthetics of downtown to have to scrape one of the buildings to replace it with a parking lot to meet those parking minimums, right? We talk a lot too about the character in that mid-century modern on Littleton Boulevard. But even then, there's a few spots that have massive parking spaces, but a lot of that was smaller, right? And again, you want to start bulldozing those bungalows to provide parking for new businesses, or do you want to figure out something? How is the city going to accommodate on-street parking for businesses and residents?

Yeah, so there's... As a part of Blue Bear Boulevard, there is a transportation component to that. So that's really looking at the opportunities for Littleton Boulevard and what that cross-section might look like, reducing it to single lane potentially with on-street parking, bike lanes, things like that. So I think there's an opportunity to look at just strictly what the opportunities on that corridor are as a part of that project. Also from the land use component, um, you know, are there opportunities to, to modify the parking requirements for those specific zone disadvantages? So I think there's that. I think the second thing is it relates to kind of overall citywide parking management plan. Um, you know, that really falls under the operations of the maintenance piece of our public works team. And so they're, they're really focused on, And again, this is something that would be talked about through the next kind of strategic plan. Is that something that the city council wants to focus resources on to really push forward kind of overall holistically through the city? Like how do we actually look and manage this? But my understanding of those conversations would largely kind of live within the public works realm. So I'm not saying that you would not be a stakeholder in that. I'm guessing the commission would likely be a stakeholder in that as it relates to the land use and how those are approached in those areas. But largely managed by probably that department, is my guess. I'm guessing at this point, just based on the conversations.

I think there's two things we're saying. One is we should proceed to look at ULUC code amendments around parking, too. My comment on that was parking should be better scaled to the size of the thing. Right now, we have a duplex requires two parking spots, even if it's an 800 square, two small 800 square units. It has the same parking requirements of a 4,000 square foot single family home. These are the parking is right now scaled to bedrooms are scaled to the unit. So give a three day building in six parking spaces, if you have a triplex, it's just the scaling. So that that kind of code changes in the OEC would be good. But to Aaron's point, perhaps this goes to something later in this conversation is that one of the things I think we should consider as a commission is making a set of recommendations around big policy questions. Like maybe we should have a memo at the end of the year saying, council, we think the city should adopt a robust parking approach wherever it lives within the staff's world. But that's just something we don't necessarily control her to do it. But that's something that in the overall land use question we think would be valuable. And that's what I think. I'm trying to get us to figure out what are those things we want to do. Promote big picture ideas. A parking plan is going to be a very big, it's going to be an earthquake in Littleton. It's going to be a big political issue. So we would want to make sure that we as a commission are really backing that idea. And I think we would. But that's the kind of stuff that I think we've got to figure out how to do from what's within our role. And we're not going to be managing or describing or designing it. We're going to only be saying we think it's a good idea. And I think that's what you're saying, and I think most of us agree. But that's going to have to go to council, and you have to have that conversation.

When I went to one of the talks at the planning conference last year, there was somebody talking about when you make changes or when you eliminate parking minimums, that you need to have a parking plan in place. So there's a certain amount of what we're wanting to do and things that would be beneficial to small businesses and smaller houses. But Not all of that that's going to be impacted by the changes that we have purview over is going to spill outside of our realm. So how do we get that coordinated with somebody from a larger parking plan perspective if we want to make changes to the code for parking?

I think it's a great idea and something that we can discuss with city council when we have that joint study session here this fall. I think it would be great to have a conversation around what their expectations are around that. What are the things that you guys, I mean, I imagine they would probably have some interest in understanding where you think that the opportunity for them to think about as they develop that next strategic plan.

Other question, so like regarding some of the staff ULUC updates, the non-conformities, the ADUs, is that, are we planning study sessions and stuff to go over those and talk about what precisely is like non-conformant and if we have things that we think need to be addressed in that? Okay.

Absolutely. Yes. Yep. Well, we have a couple of people building out a plan for the rest of the fall and Q1 of 2027 and maybe beyond as well. But we have divvied up the projects. So I've left a little space in case I got some direction here this evening as well. But the plan is to bring back STI sessions and have those conversations about more specific topics.

Right. Okay. Well, I was just wondering specifically where it just says kind of non-conformities or, you know, ADUs. Because, and this is specific, I just, I went down to just... looking into things out of curiosity. There's some inconsistencies in the code, and there's some curiosities in the code, I guess, regarding, in my opinion, regarding short-term rentals. And I don't know if that falls under this sort of more broad umbrella of...

It does not. I believe short-term rental is a section outside of Title X, outside the UO.

No, I mean, it is, but it isn't. Right? Like, I mean, there's the... If you look at the... the land use codes, right? And short-term rentals, right? You are allowed to have a short-term rental in an attached, detached, or contained accessory dwelling unit, which is, we don't have contained accessory dwelling units anymore. So that's out of, that's out of date, right? But then you go back to the, the title three about short-term rentals, right? And that's kind of in conflict with what's being spelled out here in terms of, you know, you know, 10, one,

Yeah, I think there's an opportunity again. I think the short-term rental conversation is a highly political conversation. And I think that we just need to be really clear on kind of what council's expectations are around that and the direction that they want to go. So again, I think that's a really good conversation to have with council as it relates to this. Yeah, it's just, yeah.

Because it feels like it's a little inconsistent internally and there's, yeah, like I'm not, you know, I don't think there's a major overhaul here, but there's just a, There's some kind of inconsistencies between what, you know, you know, Title 10, Chapter 1. Yeah, I found the section is right versus what Chapter 3 says, you know, or Title 3 says so.

here to copy paste the specific things that you want Jared to think about or have his team consider and share that just so that they know everybody because we're not going to have time probably to go over every single thing no no I'm sorry I didn't mean to it was just sort of a question about whether or not that would be part of that in the UIC that is contradictory let's flag it so you can take a look at that as possible So as I understand it, you're going to do a lot of work coming up with a big set of changes, and we're going to present a big package of ULUC updates in one ordinance approval process?

So it's my intent to not have it in one ordinance. So in the past, we've had a number of large updates in a single ordinance, and that makes things A little cumbersome is a great term. I was going to say unwieldy. But yes. So what we would prefer to do is still try to keep things, for the most part, running on the same timeline, but have some different ordinances. So if one thing got tripped up, it didn't trip the entire package up. That's our intent.

We should be breaking these into the smallest possible chunks for review and approval by council. It's hard to review big packages. Segmented ordinances rather than mega.

You can stir up the pot on something that you've got like three quarters of it is good and then one quarter of it, the whole thing gets thrown out. 100%. So let's just take it in quarters and the one that they want thrown out, we'll throw out.

Or amend. You would have the ability to do that as well.

I think that the legislative compliance and the 3A compliance and stuff that really is cut and dried, so to speak, should be just moved, fast-tracked, and let's get this. We don't need study sessions on it. I think you could share it with us before it's done. And if you have any questions or amendments to just write to us.

We have a public process that we have to do with each of these. And so we do want to make sure that our has an opportunity to review those changes. And so we don't want to do that multiple times. That actually can create a ton of work. So we'd like to group as much as we can at one time with those. So we want to make sure that we're keeping moving forward on a schedule, but we can't. It's really time consuming to break these off into chunks and continue to go through this. You actually make it hard for the community to really focus sometimes, especially with all of the stuff we're pushing out with our other big projects.

You could still do the presentation of all these things to the community for input review, but when they're actually written into how they're presented to council, they could be under separate ordinances. Yeah, we just want to take the code changes all the time. The process has changed just

packaging of it for final yeah and simpler to not do a big omnibus bill so to speak yeah yeah and our intent too is to start bringing back study sessions on a few of these at a time not bringing every one of these to a single study session that's not so because we we have some folks that um that are So I think you'll see a little different approach. And hopefully you'll like it. And if not, we'll take feedback.

Real quick, what's equal space in conjunction with Public Works?

Yeah, so that's something that Public Works has been working on. It's basically that an ordinance that would require a new, larger development. I'll be honest. I don't know all the parameters, but to have Yeah, to have equal trash and recycling.

Yeah, so it's commercial and multifamily residential requires them to have equal space for both trash and recycle. So, yeah.

Okay. Audrey and I weren't here for this previous stuff, so could you tell me what, we've already talked about most of them, but what's this landscaping and coordinating with the building code? What's...

Yeah, so that's something that we haven't talked too much about with Planning Commission, but our friends in the building department are interested in possibly doing some coordination and really looking at building code and ULUC and seeing if or where there's any conflicts and getting those updated. And then the landscaping is just kind of a carte blanche section. I mean, there's There's a landscaping section, a green space section within Title I. But then each, kind of going back to your redundancy part, each chapter two, three, four, and five, so the neighborhood, the CM districts, CM and NC, IPs, and downtown each have their separate section. So we're interested in looking at some of those. You're interested in looking at that. I don't know if that's a big... Excuse me. That was not necessarily for this time around, but that was something that was brought up. I mean, we are interested to look at it. It just may not be this time.

Well, we did some of... Personally, landscaping is... There are so many other pressing changes in the OEC. In terms of hierarchy, that would not be high on mine. I think we have an elaborate landscaping set of requirements now. Again, I think it's probably too elaborate and complicated and onerous. But my view is any changes we make should be in an attempt to simplify and clarify so that people understand. It's easy to understand what the intent of the code is, the intent of the city's ideas around it, and reduce it, simplify, make it less burdensome for you guys to deal with in terms of interpreting people's presentations and applications and for us to review.

So the one thing I want to say about landscaping is I think this came up. because when we were talking about the tree update, right, is because there's a lot of flexibility in the downtown landscaping requirements that Littleton Boulevard doesn't get, right? And I think that that's something that, you know, so I don't know that I think that that's high priority because I do think that's something that maybe we think about and talk about as part of the, you know, the Boulevard, you know, plan. right but enabling that more flexible landscape option or applying that same kind of flexibility that we give to downtown renovations to places on littleton boulevard right um you know to better make use of you know or potentially you know historic reuse or reuse of some of those spaces without overburdening them with landscape requirements or with really stiff landscape requirements.

So that applies to setbacks, parking. I mean, I agree. I agree. Yeah. Okay.

So yeah, but again, I think I would, I would push that off a little bit because I do think that's a conversation that makes sense to have. part of the the Littleton Boulevard conversation right and then ideally what we get out of that conversation is something that maybe we take back and apply at a broader level to say we're going to apply these kinds of flexible landscape requirements to you know to commercial developments throughout the city not just downtown anymore it's going to be in more places across the city so so we do

off at this time on. That being said, I completely agree that Blueprint has the potential to highlight some other code items that we'll want to change in the future as well. So some of the things that I've been interested in adding, I've actually held off because I want to see what comes out of that planning process first.

It seems landscaping, too, is kind of a subset of sustainability and a lot of the environmental issues, you know, one that can be the environmental impact, yes.

Sorry, if I may, we do have one of the things about the sustainability standards bonuses or incentives. That's kind of what that was alluding to, is that section of it. Yep, leads is one of them. Yeah, sometimes there are a few landscaping items in there, but there's also a number of internal building things, too.

I generally agree with a lot of what's been said. I think parking, for me, is a big one. I agree. I'm assuming you guys are just looking for our list of priorities in order.

Yeah, so I'm just looking to take in.

Well, parking is not on the list. I'm curious about the coordination with the building code. And I wonder if that's something we really want to take on. But I do think, to Bob's point, I have friends who build in Littleton and find it really challenging. And so I would love to make things easier for development. And so if that would help, I'm curious about that.

I think the point of that really is just the building code gets updated. much more frequently than the ULUC does necessarily. So we just want to make sure that as those new safety standards are coming in through the building code, that our land use code doesn't conflict with those and create a situation where we're actually putting ourselves in a position to have to make life safety policy decisions. So they should always be in lockstep.

yeah and they're not usually big changes they're usually very small if i'm a classic example that we have is around a pool you're required to fence right um so in the building code that's four foot fence in the uouc that's five foot fence so do we have to go with the building code no we don't have to we can we require higher fence in that case Does the community feel it necessary to have a taller fence around the pool than what the building code is? Those are the types of things that we run into from time to time. And it's kind of like.

That's one of those things that I think shouldn't be in the . You should have to build your homes have to be built according to the codes. Applicable to the type of building residential is.

And it can be moved. I mean, that's the piece.

So there's not one reference here and another over there.

I'm curious about that.

Pardon? And you guys have to look at what the fence is in the plan and see if it's, you got to look at the building code to see if that. That is actually a great question.

It's the kind of inconsistency that drives us all crazy. 100%. It's a burden. Sometimes the difference is if there's a preference from the community on type of fence, style of fence, something like that. Sometimes that's where it comes into play. In this case, it's also height.

Speaking of height, my one comment on ULUC amendments around height is right now we have a 30-foot height limit in residential areas. And I don't know what height you have it in your list of priorities to address. But I've seen a project where they're in one of the floodplain areas, and they have to raise the building up three or four feet to get above the topographical line of the water. But they don't get a commensurate. They can't build a 30-foot building from the height of their base floor above the floodplain. And I feel like we should have that kind of flexibility in the code. It should be 30 feet from the required minimum height baseline of the house instead of just, because you want, over time, you want all of the buildings on that street.

Yeah, so resident, 100%. So there's options for that. It's also like stepped grade, right? So you get buildings that are, You have severe grade, right? You're limiting height based on specific average grade and things like that that could create some challenges around needing variances. We had one come through like that. So there's an opportunity there.

As long as they're building state 30 feet above there, that should just be something in the code. That was something I wanted to see addressed. The other thing was I see a lot of lot size irregularities and discontinuities in table 10-4-2.2. Things like, here's an example. In single lot residential, a duplex townhome or twin home can be in a minimum lot of 3,100 square feet, 3,125. You put a duplex side by side. And it has to have a 30-foot width. So there's a minimum 30 feet. Then you want a stacked duplex. Suddenly, you have to have a much bigger yard. A stacked duplex, which is where they're on top of each other, has to have a 5,000 square foot minimum. And it has to have a 50% wider frontage, even though a stacked duplex is less wide. There's a lot of stuff in here. There's stuff in this table particularly that's, I think, really unfriendly to getting homes built that are in this format. And they just don't. My feeling is if we have single lot residential and we have a minimum lot size of 3125 for what are a duplex, then that should just be the minimum lot size for all of the forms in that except maybe cottage court because those are particularly tight. Simplifying that table and regularizing it so that you could just describe easily to somebody, well, in Littleton, you know, the minimum lot size is 3,100 square feet and you have to have a 25 foot frontage or something like that. And then we just do the table. We have a lot of variation there that doesn't make sense.

I remember there was a meeting as it was just getting wrapped up, and it was down at Graceful Cafe, and I said, Brett, we're getting this wrapped up, but we haven't done what we were supposed to. It was supposed to become smaller and more concise. He said, yeah, I know. Everybody just keeps adding on. I said, well, then how come it's over? He says, well, my contract's done, and you guys are going to have to sort it out later. Here we are, five years later, sorting it out. Sorry, guys.

Well, I mean, apropos of that, one of the things, I want to kind of let us, are we kind of, have we done enough on the, have we done enough for you guys in terms of the ULUC details that you wanted to get from us? A sense of priorities. I'll summarize what I thought were some of the things in a memo to you, just so you can see what.

that are in the weeds, I'll just email you. I mean, we actually talked about it a couple weeks ago. No sense bringing it up here.

Sounds good. I want to turn us over for whatever few minutes, maybe spend 15 minutes talking about ideas we have about this board's operations commission and maybe some priorities or ideas. All right.

trying to do something. And, you know, that's the biggest reason I'm here.

I call that reducing burdens on everybody. And I think we want a code that's understandable by average citizens. We want a code that's understandable by our city council members as well. And us. And we want it to be easy to work with for the staff. We have a lot of, it's a thicket right now. And that brings me to one of the bigger issues. You guys have hinted somewhat or suggested that there's maybe two things happening right now. I love this two things thing. One is we're doing the immediate changes to work on the code that we have. We want to be thinking, I think, one of the things I would like to suggest to council is that we consider a substantial review. I don't think it's going to be possible with this code to kind of make it smaller. It was not designed that way. And I think it might be worth investigating a long-term reconsideration of what kind of code we work with. There's lean code projects. There are forms-based code systems. And maybe that's a task force that's set up specifically to work over the next few years on creating a truly simplified and clear language code. And that's a bigger, long-term process, separate from the amendment process we're talking about today. But I think it would be a worthwhile investment. We've had this code for five years. And it is getting bigger all the time, whether it's tree plants. It's only gotten more cumbersome, really. And I'm not sure it's delivering the outcomes that we want it to do to meet our comp plan goals. And so I'm just putting that idea out there. where there's nothing to do or action item other than maybe. The other thing is, Sherry and I talked, and I talked to Craig about this. It would be good for the commission, I think, to have a better coordination about our calendar with you guys. I don't think most of us have a sense of what's coming in August or September. I think you mentioned we're probably going to have the other meeting in July canceled. But I think we would welcome a better sort of, three-month horizon timeline of the meetings and what's on that agenda. And even if they're hearing, and if there are hearings, especially big hearings with really cumbersome 400-page packets, I think it would be helpful to be notified that that's coming up. Maybe this is even before it's quasi-digital. And point us to the DAO entry so we can look at the documents and kind of familiarize ourselves with it.

So we can maybe tip you off that something big's coming, but we can't. So please do not do that.

So just a better sense of the calendar. And I would like to work with you so that we're all on the same page about what that could look like. It doesn't have to be very tentative, but just a general picture of that.

Yeah, I think we can work with you on that. I think one of the biggest challenges with the applications that we get in relation to some of this quasi-judicial is We don't control their timeline.

The timeline is not ours. That's theirs.

And oftentimes they say, hey, we'd like to shoot for this date. And we've just got to be really careful publishing anything out there as it relates to that because they change. Absolutely. When I say daily, it might be more than that.

I see. I understand. We know. We've seen that happen many times where something was literally going to be on our next meeting and then it's bop. just how it happens. That's fine. In talking to commissioners, we have an interest in just being more connected with have a study session, joint session with them. That's a positive thing for us. The other thing is Bob has mentioned this to you, and I've probably mentioned it. I think that when we don't have hearings, we don't have a quasi-digital meeting or a specific hearing, I would like us to have a study session. That would be once a month. And it sounds like we have plenty of topics for them just in this process. But I don't think we want to wait. It's been two months where we haven't had a study session. And that's an important thing for us to be doing. And I think it's something I would like to see us utilize as much as possible. I understand their staffing constraints. They can be short. They don't have to be huge things. If there's nothing on your agenda, we are more than happy to

lead our own conversation. Yeah, and I think we just got to be really careful about that too, just to be clear. So, you know, if there is going to be a discussion, it has to be an agendized item and it requires a staff communication and it requires a presentation. All that stuff has to be prepared.

Does it require a presentation though?

Traditionally, yes. Traditionally, we want to have something for the, really, if it's just a general, even if it's one or two slides, you know, just from that standpoint, we want to make

focused you know it's we traditionally do not recommend just having a general discussion about something if there's you know I guess I guess I'm thinking sorry when we talk about presentations I guess what I'm thinking is you know the slide before this with a list of topics to discuss that's it like that's literally you could have a slide that basically says landscaping, right? And we can sit here and we can talk about landscaping, how it applies to, you know, not that we're going to do that because it's a lower priority, we already agreed, but again, this is something that because I think sometimes too, some of the things that are coming up even just among the discussion when we started talking about lighting, right, is that we have ideas, we, you know, there's some explanation to say like, hey, how can we change this? What could apply? What's, you know, And that's just more of the, it's more of a working group than it is a presentation, right? Where we would want somebody with us, maybe who's familiar with that section of the code and let's, you know, play with red lines in it. Well, we could change this section in this section to meet this. lighting so that we're not just sitting here and giving you guys action items that you have to take back. It's a back and forth discussion about here's what's changing. Here's what needs to go in there instead. Here's what this is connected to so that we can work to actually address those rather than just giving you guys action items to go research and go fix that we would bring some of that research to the table. But again, the presentation is, you know, the agenda is lighting standards, and the presentation is lighting standards, right?

Maybe that cut and paste the table. We took that list of priorities that you have for the staff and then the ones that we identified tonight, and the staff just went ahead and got pieces ready, and then we had a gap in our schedule. We just pulled down from whatever that next priority is.

So I completely understand that we have had a bit of a lull, no doubt about that. So from a staff perspective, there's been a lot of work going on. We've had a lot of applications, et cetera. That being said, though, what we talked about in February was being able to pivot somewhat to code updates throughout the rest of the year. So do I think that we'll have them completely ready by the end of 2026? No, I think early 2027 is probably more realistic. But as part of that, I'm more than happy to work with the staff because we're already taking this on and to build out that calendar to be able to bring back some much more... topics. Now, like you said, it will still be time. We may need to put something, we may need to reorganize something. But for me, as staff, I think it's a lot more helpful to the conversation or more beneficial if I can get you all either red lines or sections to talk about, right? Because otherwise, I go in there and I sit and I'm just frantically, but there might be, once again, like a conflict here, a conflict there. So if I can do some of that work beforehand, that's what I would rather be able to bring to you. Now, if you've looked at it and said, oh, we should tackle this part too, happy to have that conversation, but at least it provides a little more of that framework on a topic. And I think, yeah, and you can tell me at the end of a few months here, I think you're going to see a lot more of that.

everything pulled together and then tossed it out and said, what do you think? Or if there's, along the way, it sounds like along the way he'll be running some stuff by us before.

Yeah, so we have tried a number of different tactics when it's come to ULUC updates. And what we have come to better understand is that the Planning Commission likes to see things at least once, maybe twice, before it gets to a public hearing, right? Because we want... I appreciate the question. So that is one of the takeaways that we've picked up here in the last couple years. And that's what my team plans on building. Because in the past, that was not always the case. Sometimes it would just be a text amendment brought before you in a public hearing. That's not really fair either. But yeah. And it's also, as Matt indicated, as the director indicated, there's a public aspect to this too. We'd like The more the public knows, the better we're going to be off here. So last year, because of some of the items being legislative, we took those things separately. And we took a little different approaches based on the scope. So this year, we're trying to bring things separately, but at a concurrent timeline. So that's a little bit, so like your study sessions may only have, say, three text amendment items that we want to talk, or like sections, small sections, not whole chapters, that we want to talk about. And then the next one, you'd have the next set, right? But at the end of the day, we'd like to try to get them all passed. Once again, as we discussed prior to, if one gets toxic or needs to be amended, we can pull that one, but there will That's our goal. Does that sound, I mean, or does the planning commission sound amenable to that plan? I'm good.

Yeah, I think that would be a really good use of some of these empty time slots to use those as the study sessions to review, you know, here's what we've got so far, so it's not like we get super far down one path and then everybody's like, wait, hang on, this is toxic, or, you know, this doesn't make any sense at all, right?

and we're getting paid so much, you know, we don't want to be missing these meetings.

I think traditionally we want to bring really clear, structured policy questions to you, right? So we want you guys, if there's specific information you have related to parking, let's say, right? We don't want to just put a parking thing up here and say, let's talk about parking. What we want to do is say, hey, so here are a couple of potential bites of the apple that we can take as it relates to parking. Here are the three things, and here's the policy questions. We want to know where you are related to that. And then we have those discussions about those specific things so that we can take that back and actually make those code amendments. So we really research to share.

I appreciate that, but I also feel like that limits our ability to bring ideas to you.

Yeah, and I think what we're hoping to do is through that, it doesn't mean that it's only, hey, here's only three things, right? You can say, hey, we would like to look and talk about some of these things. The challenge is really, like, if we just want to talk about parking in general and have an open forum, it's really hard to do that in a study session. We just really need to be, from a staff resourcing perspective, we need to have a lot of clarity and structure so that we can move these things forward. We don't have a lot of space in our time to be able to sit and kind of stew in some of these things. So if you have specific things around parking that you guys are in, that you think are really, as an example, as parking. feel free to send them to us. Say, hey, I really like what Lakewood does as it relates to this. I really like what Golden does as it relates to this. And so that we can kind of pull some of that information to work on some of those things. And then we can bring those and have discussions around them. Hey, here's what we've heard. We really like this. We really like this. Great. We can take those as it relates to those specific items and move forward with that. And then as we develop that final code language, we'll come to you and say, hey, here's what we heard. Here's what we wrote. give us your feedback, right? And then we can finalize that and then move back to kind of a final version.

I think that's hard to do. If we're individually sending in comments or our idea, and we're not sharing with each other because it seems like we can't, we feel like we can't on email or whatever. Yeah, it makes it very difficult to coordinate our thoughts and or, and I'm not talking about, you know,

quasi-judicial of breaking the rule step I'm talking about.

Yeah, we want to talk about parking standards and blah, blah, blah. Well, also, Aaron, I was thinking, these are areas, but if those ideas are only coming to you, from one person.

And I'll defer to Jared on how his staff want to approach that. Like, you know, they've done a great job historically in pulling those together. Again, I'm not saying it's like these are the only three you talk about. But there has to be like, you know, parking is a very wide, vast, you know, and so having.

And it has a number of different opinions. Yeah.

And so if there are, you know, if there are specific parts of that, and I think you took some good notes on relation to that, that specific one, but. It's not just a big open, hey, we want to talk about parking today. That's a really hard thing to write a staff communication on. It's really hard to be prepared for us to show up late to actually have those discussions.

What I think would be helpful for us is for us to have these specific targeted study sessions that we're already going to have.

But maybe there's one thing I would like to suggest that we have.

that it be understood that those could include 20 minutes or half an hour at the end for a conversation among us about other things that maybe were not on that topic list, that are more big picture things. And also, I mean, I believe that I can work with you, Jared, in this calendar in identifying things that maybe aren't a two hour meeting, that we have only an hour of stuff, that we could fit a little bit more of an open-ended conversation about. I think that's an important. My view is that one of our, not my view, I mean the planning commission is, our comp plan says we're supposed to take the lead in the following general areas. ensuring the recommendations for the council are reflective of plan goals, policies, and priority action strategies. And we need to have some time to talk about what those parking plan is a long-term priority action strategy, really. And when we don't have study sessions or we have study sessions that are completely focused on a really material object, there is no time for us as a commission to have those conversations. And I don't believe we'll have a lot of these, but I would like to have a little bit more space in that. And I think I'll work with you both in figuring out if there's even possibilities in the calendar about that.

But just be aware that... I think we'll just... We want to go back and talk to the clerk and our city attorneys to kind of understand, like, what the opportunity is there for that. There's a very... You know, we just want to make sure that the public knows what's being discussed, I think, from our transparency.

That's why I want to work closer with Jared about the calendar so that it is properly noticed and that we all, I want to make sure my commissioners know what we might be talking about. We might be talking about a memo, an interview memo from the commission itself to council. Could be something like that. And we would have a chance to talk about what we might want to put in that. It doesn't have to be a huge meeting. And the other thing is, people like Bob, he's got a lot of free time. No, I'm just kidding. But if we were to pick a topic, let's just say lot size, or have a conversation about minimum lot size, sort of a broad open ended, before we get into code level questions about it. We could probably find a ULI person or a person up in the Denver area who's worked on this legislatively and have them come in as a guest speaker and present on it. I mean, that could be the presentation. It doesn't have to be staff that comes up with a slide show and the presentation.

We could volunteer to send that. I think we can have that conversation. I think traditionally, it does still require a significant amount of staff time to prepare that, to meet with them, to help develop and coordinate the presentation, the staff communication. Make sure that... Bob or I or people... Yeah, and I think that's just not the role, right? That's not Bob's role to do that. And so, you know, making sure that that's really, really clear and those roles and responsibilities are being honored through that. And so I just, I think we're open to having conversations about bringing in people to have those conversations and figure what that is, if there's something the commission is specifically looking to discuss, if there are... We don't have a topic for any of these things yet.

I was just throwing that as an idea. How do we get the public involved?

In the conversation. I mean, you know, okay, so seven of us plus two of you, if the nine of us come to a consensus, how are we going to know whether Pam's sitting over there and her friends, whether they think it's a good idea? Yeah. At what point in time do we bring the public in? Because I don't want to get too far down any road without getting some public input.

Yeah, so historically, we have posted the red lines for review by the public. So we've been talking about a few different tactics as to make that more effective. There's also, of course, the public hearing, but that is at the very end of the process, which is very late in the game. That's kind of what I'm trying to avoid.

Let's get their input before at the end of the dog and pony show.

I think it varies completely depending on what the question is, right? And so I think some of the smaller ULUC amendments that aren't these big policy questions, I think we traditionally have gone the more, hey, here's a legislative update that we're required to do. We don't have big public engagements around those because they're largely public. you know, I think what we learned, uh, you know, last year with some of the housing stuff discussion is that, um, you know, more robust public engagement is probably, um, a really good idea. And I think, and, and, and something that we have as a staff have continued to advocate for. And so I think, um, when you talk about ULC, UEC updates and things like that, um, uh, creating space for the public engagement stuff is not a small amount of time. It is a huge staff lift. It requires the majority of the team to be available and present and meet and write and communicate and all that stuff on top of all the other really good work that we do. And we have some new communication tools as well. And we plan on working with our communications to roll that out. But ultimately, the commission will be asked to make recommendations, right? So if you have a recommendation, that is your role to say, hey, as commissioners who have a specific skill set and background, this is what we want. This is what we've heard from the community. This is what the comp plan, we believe it says, is what we hear from council. And taking all of that and making a recommendation. And then we work to present that to the community in a way that's transparent. And then they give feedback.

All right, well, it's 8.40. I don't want to keep this any longer than absolutely necessary tonight. Thanks for this.

May I make a couple announcements? Go ahead. Okay, just before the true adjournment. One, in October, late October, there's a state APA, American Planning Association, conference. Traditionally, we have offered attend that conference. So I'll send out some more details about that in the coming days because not only are you maybe curious about what that all entails, but there are also some people missing. I wanted to put that on your radar. If you're interested, please let me know. Yeah, absolutely. It's in Keystone. It's like LADOC. like that. I'll get you the info. Two, the reason that the next Planning Commission meeting is canceled is we're having a Blueprint Boulevard event. We're working on that with the Strategic Working Group. It will be primarily focused on the Strategic Working Group and City Council, but the timing doesn't really work out to have both. Yes, that's it. Where's the location? I take that back. I think it might be at the library. More info will be coming. All right.

And then the joint session. Yeah, so we're still working to schedule the joint study session with Planning Commission and City Council. So I think that will be this fall sometime, October, November time frame. So we'll

Thank you, everybody, for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Good to have a conversation. Thank you both. It's great to get all this info. And we will work on that calendar and share it so people know what August and September are looking like.