Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. And I call the July 15th, 2026 planning commission meeting to order. The main purpose of tonight's meeting is to hold a study session on the city's work towards inclusion and communication and hear presentations on the bike parking code, the electric vehicle code and the city's tree retention and landscaping project. Before we move on to the agenda, I'd like to acknowledge our hybrid meeting format. The City of Bothell provides the option to attend this meeting either in person or remotely via Zoom. For those participating in Zoom, please note that the chat and question functions are disabled to comply with the Open Public Meeting Act. Public comment is allowed both in person and via Zoom. Those commenting will be limited to three minutes. The city does not tolerate verbal harassment. Please remember this during your comments. Zoom commenters and written submissions were required by 3 p.m. today. Written comments received by 3 p.m. have been distributed to all commissioners and are included in the record. This meeting is being streamed live and the live recorded for later viewing on the city's YouTube channel. A call-in number is provided for anyone listening by phone. Staff will make every effort to specify materials during presentations for those joining by audio. At this time, I will take a roll call for commissioners. Commissioner Kiernan? Present. Commissioner Morales is absent and excused. Commissioner Westerbeck? Here. Commissioner Lever? Here. Commissioner Sills is absent and excused. Commissioner Gustafson?

Here, thank you.

Okay. In addition, community development staff attending tonight include Deputy Director Christian Goetz, Planner Jacqueline Sampson, Community Engagement Manager Mason Lavera, DEI Manager Gabby Cogna, Planner Eric Jasiewski, Civic Spark Fellow Jay Huckins, and Senior Planner Cameron Coleman. For all attendees, speak clearly and pause frequently. State your name before speaking. Mute your microphone when not speaking. If you are watching the live stream, please mute it due to audio delay. For commissioners, I will call on members wishing to speak at designated points during the presentation. Please raise your hand to indicate you wish to speak. Identify yourself before asking a question, making a motion, seconding, or speaking in debate. Keep microphones muted when not speaking. We will begin today with public comment. Written comments submitted by 3 p.m. have been forwarded to commissioners. There were not any for today. We will call on those in the audience, or we would, to provide public comment first. For Zoom commenters, we will call on you next. If you are in the virtual audience, please indicate your desire to speak by using the raise hand function and staff will panel you in. All commenters will be limited to three minutes. Is there anybody signed up or... in the audience wishing to speak besides our presentations today?

There's no one in the audience and there's no one in the Zoom audience wishing to speak.

Okay. So hearing that there's no one who wishes to speak today, we will move on. Next is approval for the July 1st minutes. Are there any corrections to the minutes?

No. Okay.

Hearing none, the chair will entertain a motion to approve the July 1st minutes as written. Is there a motion? Wonderful. Thank you.

Commissioner Kiernan, I move to approve the minutes as submitted.

Thank you, Commissioner Kiernan. Is there a second? Commissioner Leber, second. It has been moved and seconded to approve the July 1st minutes as written. Is there any discussion? Okay. Hearing none, those in favor say aye. Okay, all opposed to say no. The motion carries and the minutes are approved. Great. The first study session this evening is presented by Planner Jocelyn Sampson, Jacqueline Sampson, I'm so sorry. Community Engagement Manager Mason Libera and DEI Coordinator Gabby Cunha.

Hi everyone today. Um, we are here. Um, my name is Jacqueline Sampson. I'm a plan to work community development. I am joined with Mason Lovera, who's a community engagement manager, as well as Gabby Kuhn, who's the DEI coordinator here, coordinator here in the city. We are here to present on inclusion and communication in the city. At request from Planning Commission, we were requested to give more information on just communication within the city, how marginalized populations are reached out to. And so we're here today to just give you all the information and hopefully answer any other questions that you may have. There is no action today. The purpose for the study session is just to provide the Planning Commission information on communication with marginalized communities in the city. So I will pass it off to Mason.

Great. Thank you, Jacqueline. Hello, commissioners. Pleasure to be here tonight and tell you a little bit more about how we communicate and engage with our community. So I'll start with an overview. Overall, we proactively connect with the community to keep folks informed about the work that happens at the city, right? And we work to also engage them in helping us shape what the future of Bothell looks like. And we do that through a couple different ways. For keeping them informed, we communicate across a variety of channels, namely our social media platforms. We also have an email marketing program, so we directly email folks. We have print newsletters that get mailed across the entire community. And we also have in-person experiences, right, where folks can come and learn more about the city, as well as share their feedback and provide input to help shape policy and decision-making that you all do. So this work is informed by the City Council's 2040 vision, which really serves as that overall roadmap for everything that happens at the city. And for the communications and engagement team, we take a look at that holistically and make sure that all the messages we share out with the community, as well as the opportunities we provide for the community to engage with us, are really aligned with that vision and providing the information needed at the city to execute the vision. And the communications and engagement team has been busy this last year. We're a relatively new team for the city and we're continuing to grow. And we're focused on making sure we're modernizing the ways that the city communicates and engages with folks because we know how different things are today. So with that, I'll turn it over for any questions.

Thank you so much. This is very exciting. Can you help me better understand who is the team and then what does that really look like? And I do see that the diversity and inclusion coordinator, Gabby, is here. Help me understand the way that it is organized. So I think I realize lately they've been providing or have a better understanding of how the feedback that I can provide can really be related to the operation. knowing how challenging outreach and engagement is and then tracking all of that. What does the FTE look like? How many positions? Who do you report to? Just help me understand.

absolutely that's a great question so the team is structured as follows there's myself the communications and engagement manager and then there are three folks on our team we have an engagement coordinator their role is really to work across the entire city and connect with folks like jaclyn to find out hey what's going on in your department how are things happening how can we help support you right we also have a digital content coordinator role which is currently being recruited for this position is mainly responsible for all of our social media our email and our website channels So they take the information that myself and our engagement coordinator coordinate with all the city, and they put it out on those channels in ways that make sense, that are easy to understand, and are fun, right? Because we want people to actually pay attention to what we communicate. The third position we have is a website specialist. They're really focused on the back-end management of all those digital platforms. We also, as a city, have a cross-departmental engagement team, which has 16 members representing all departments at the city. And we meet once a month to talk about, hey, at the highest level, what are we doing as a whole city and then break it down and look at how are things going in your department can you collaborate with another department and then how can this centralized team help support that work yes commissioner karen yeah commissioner karen here

So what have you found to be particularly effective and does it vary by topic? Are there certain things that you use for one topic and something else you use for something else?

Absolutely. So what you're saying in a lingo for the industry is called channel segmentation. So what you're talking about is, hey, how do you figure out what messages resonate in which areas? One of the things that we do is we take something that we need to communicate on behalf of the city, right? So in this case, it could be something that the community development department is working on. And we'll say, okay, what is the message that we need to get out? Now, how do we tell it in different ways that make sense for the different channels we have? and the audiences that we know we connect with on those channels. A great example of this is for social media. Instead of just taking the same content, which we call copy, and putting it across all of our channels in the same way, we actually tell the story a little bit differently. So we have activated a Reddit account for the city, which is a great platform for us to reach folks who don't engage elsewhere because we can post in the community subreddit. And we do that and we share that information in a very different way than we might on Instagram where we're doing a short form video, which could very well be Jacqueline hanging out with a selfie cam, right? Talking about what the planning commission might be up to. So we take information and we tell the story very differently to make sure it resonates with the folks that engage with us in those different areas.

Yes, Commissioner Lever.

Thank you. Thank you for that answer and the other one on the organization. So I have a question around, like, the feedback that you do get and then the audiences that you engage to your different departments and your different channels. Sitting in this role, like, I've seen so much feedback being gathered, and oftentimes because we're asking about specific plans or initiatives, yet it might be, There's that correlation, but it's not always so obvious. So what are the ways in which you kind of look at the feedback that you're generating and the activation or lack thereof to kind of really inform the different audiences of things that they may not be aware of through the feedback that you're receiving? because it's the same message, some people may get it, other people, it's just not receiving it, and that's a lot of work, so what I'm hearing in terms of your current infrastructure, there's a lot of outputs, right, in making sure that you are developing and creating, but how do you actually analyze everything that is getting out and what you're receiving, and how does that interplay with the coordinator of diversity, equity, and inclusion around targeted outreach, underserved populations, and yeah, that's sort of.

Yeah, absolutely. So we have an engagement toolkit at the city, which is really a roadmap for how anyone who works at the city can begin to work on communications and engagement or manage it themselves if they are. As a team, we actually work very closely with Gabby and with many others on staff to ensure that all of our communications and engagement programming has the best output that it can and also results in the best input for the city, right? And that can be very challenging because, as you know, cities are in many lines of business. We do so many different things. We're not a retail brand that sells just shoes, right? We represent so many different areas of expertise and infrastructure that it can be very challenging to communicate all of those in one place. So when we work across the entire city, we're really listening to make sure that If something going on in community development can be tied together with something also happening in public works, do we collaborate and tell that story in a way that would make sense to someone who doesn't work at the city and doesn't understand maybe the fine detail and difference between the two, right? We also make sure and we integrate a lot of best practices into all of our content. to ensure that the messaging we put out is digestible and understandable for a variety of audiences to make sure it's as accessible as possible. And that's something that's very important to us. Now, the second part of your question was that two-way street, right? How do we engage? So across all of our channels, we oftentimes lead with a call to action, the CTA, which is, hey, have questions about this or have an opinion. Here's how you can share it back to the city, right? And we take that information and anytime we get a question or a comment on social media, we look at that comment or a question and we try to answer it on that platform so anyone else who may have the same question or comment can see the response. And then we take that and we make sure to let the other folks in the city know who are our points of contact for that area. Hey, we got a question about this. This is actually a great thing that we might want to expand on. Can you tell us more so we can do a follow-up post or send a follow-up email about that project or program?

Commissioner Westerbach.

Do you have a form of communication you found to be the most effective or the one that gets you the most results? I'm just curious about that.

Absolutely. You know, social media is the topic du jour, right? Everyone likes to lean on it, but the problem is that it's also a volume game. Everyone is on social media. And I'm sure you, if you are on any platforms, yourself have experienced the fatigue that can come with that. And so I'm answering your question in a roundabout way, which is to say we're constantly analyzing all the different ways we communicate and looking at what makes sense. So I mentioned Reddit earlier, and Reddit's been a really effective platform for us. We found that there's a pretty diverse audience who are active on Reddit. and a large swath of our community who are active on Reddit. So when we post about something like a road closure, but also an upcoming event, and also, hey, did you know there's a new building coming downtown? All those things can reach folks who traditionally wouldn't necessarily see it because our other digital platforms, like traditional social media like Facebook, Instagram, the algorithms tend to discriminate, if you will, against information that might be boring, quote unquote, right? So the solution to that is actually the nature of why we have a digital content coordinator, which that role is entirely dedicated to providing that storytelling in really creative ways. If you look at Washdot as a good example, they do a great job with their social media, right? Because they are having fun with it, and that's entirely where we're going with our platforms.

There was a hand raised.

Yes, I had my hand, if that's okay. Can you hear me?

Yes, of course, go on.

Okay, perfect. I just wanna follow up on the earlier commissioner's question too, about how do we specifically do outreach to marginalized members of our community? I'll talk a little bit more about it. Oh, here, perfect. So one of the core tenants of the outreach that we do here is understanding that equitable access to our services is a foundational part of how we provide good service. to our entire community. And so we incorporate equity into everything that we do. So when we think about the tools that Mason had mentioned earlier, the communications plans, we have a ton of different resource guides that we provide to all of our departments, including our communications team, about how do we make sure that the messages that we're sending to our communities are ones that really uphold our values and part of our values being having a really welcoming community and building the beloved community in Bothell. And so we're very intentional about ensuring that our communications team, not only the communications staff that work in executive, but also the communications team that is embedded in all of our departments meets quite regularly with me as part of my role. And then they also bring various projects to me as well. We have a staff committee called the Dive-In Committee that's made up of staff from almost all of our different departments. And they quite frequently will bring a variety of projects to me so that I can share them with my connections. And one of the things that we found really successful in doing community engagement is understanding that equity work in general can only move at the speed of trust. And so as we work in our community, a key aspect of really good high quality community engagement for us is doing things like a Lunar New Year festival with the library or Hispanic Heritage Month event with a youth group, because those kind of one-off activities really bring a wealth of trust and goodwill in our community that helps us make connections that we can continue to rely on. And so those events we really see as major civic education opportunities to let people know that there are connections that are at the city, and if they ever have questions or if they want to share feedback, they can reach out directly to city staff. Very oftentimes, I might be the only staff member that a community member knows, and so they'll reach out to me directly to ask something about their sewer maintenance. And while I don't know anything about sewer maintenance, I do know the folks of the city and I know the mechanisms in the city for who I can connect them with. So we really see that those really intangible relationships are one of our best tools. And we try to maintain those as best as possible through really building trust in the community. Part of that is guided by our diversity, equity, and inclusion belonging roadmap. are the current plan we're working off of, which you can find on our website at buffalo.gov backslash DEI. Part of that plan is the 2023 through 2026 roadmap. We're currently in the process of building the next iteration of that, and we'll continue to do that throughout the rest of this year. But it really provides a look into the tangible steps and action items that the city can take to create a more equitable environment. It's divided into five different goal areas, some of which are more internal and staff-focused, because we know that we're also one of the really large employers in the city of Bothell and in our community. And so it's also really important that our staff feel like they have equitable opportunity here. And so we really try to make our diversity, equity and inclusion program very action oriented. There are also several initiatives that the program is currently working on that you won't find in the DEI roadmap. One of the major reasons that it's called a roadmap is because we hope that it stays responsive. And like Google Maps, if it tells you that a road's closed, you don't just charge ahead. When we go through our DEI initiatives and we find that something isn't really what our community wants or it's not what our community needs and we're hearing that from our community, we adjust. And we adjust based on budget and stock capacity, too. So... We haven't had too many changes in the DEI roadmap that have delayed projects, but we have had a lot added to it that wasn't originally in that when we were thinking about this roadmap in 2022. And so we've been able to stay really flexible. In your packet, I included some of the initiatives that I thought were most relevant to this group. So some of that is Our language access plan has had a lot of work done on it. And we do a lot of outreach and training with our staff related to language access and ensuring that they know how to use interpretation and translation resources that are available to them. We just rolled out a new program for city staff related to bilingual pay so that we can not only recruit a really diverse workforce, but that we can best serve our community. So when you walk into City Hall, you're more likely to encounter somebody who speaks the language that you speak. And then we also, this last year, created the DEI Advisory Committee. So it functions a little bit like a board and commission, though it is not a council board or commission. It actually advises staff directly. And that's a group of 14 individuals who represent various identities in our community and have the opportunity to give a ton of feedback on projects throughout the city. So all of our departments have come and just like I'm doing here, they've presented to the DEI Advisory Committee. They've asked for questions, they've gotten feedback. And then as we continue going through planning initiatives, those big plans are brought to the DEI Advisory Committee. So for example, One of our departments, the police department is currently exploring body-worn cameras and that's being brought to our DEI advisory committee so that we can have an opportunity to give some feedback. And the hope is that that's really a two-way street so that members of the DEI advisory committee will go out and share that with the communities that they feel most connected with in Bothell. So that was a lot of monologuing. So please let me know if you have any questions. I am always happy to answer any questions that you might have about our budding DEI program.

Commissioner Lever.

Thank you. That's super helpful. I have two questions that are more like technical. So when it comes to the communications and the DEI and the technology, where are you with AI? And then how are you using it or leveraging or planning on using it? Do you have a... policy in place, knowing that it's kind of here to stay, and how does that impact your day-to-day? And then the other one is around the accessibility, I think, as I was listening to this. For the web accessibility deadline, to make sure that the websites, I know the deadline was extended to make sure that it complies with the Title II of ADA. Is that under your shop? And if so, how is that one going in terms of the review that needed to happen?

Gabby, do you want to start with?

Sure, I can start. Yeah, so the city does have a generative AI use policy that was finalized, I believe, last year. I did have the opportunity to look through that policy, and one of the things that was called out in that policy is an understanding that AI has been known to repeat stereotypes and just, sorry, I'm coming off of a microphone. It's been known to repeat stereotypes and harmful biases that we've seen that humans carry and have built into AI because of its core AI is built by humans. And so, There is part of our policy is an understanding that city staff at the end of the day are responsible for reviewing anything that they use AI to create and that they're viewing it with an equity mindset to understand and look for any duplicated biases or anything that might come out of using programs trained on historically biased material. So we did try to build equity into that policy as much as possible. And I'll hand it over to Mason to talk about AI in communications work.

Thanks, Gabby. So we employ AI in a variety of ways that are really helpful for us, but we have also been in consultation with Gabby and others at the city to make sure that we're doing that thoughtically and responsibly. And one of the things that AI can be really beneficial for, especially when it comes to communications or engagement, is taking technical or complex language and simplifying it. So to be as accessible and digestible as possible with our content and our communications and our messaging, we try to make sure we're talking about city operations and updates in plain language. So it's digestible for folks at varying levels of English proficiency, right? The thing that's important about AI is you don't want to use AI to translate documents because it's not certified to do so responsibly. So we don't do that. But we also have a shared model here where we're a small team for communications and engagement and we work with every department. So sometimes we'll be working with a traffic engineer, for instance, so someone who's very technically minded and brilliant at what they do, but they're not necessarily a communications professional. That's what they have us for, right? So we may get complex technical information from a traffic engineer, and we can use AI to help assist us in putting it in plain language. So not only do we understand it, but then we can make sure that the messaging we're providing to the community about whatever the work is is also digestible by them. But in order to be responsible, we make sure that that gets reviewed by the original source to ensure it is accurate and compliant. So that's one example of how we might use AI. We also use it from a productivity standpoint. It's very helpful for helping draft content, for helping revise or amalgamate content. And we talk a lot about the use of AI in our cross-departmental engagement team. So folks like Jacqueline, who sits on that committee, is also hearing about how we as the communications and engagement team are using it, and then they can implement it in their work as well.

And for the compliance with the other.

I can follow up on that part. I'll start and then write, I'll hand it back to Mason. So we actually don't hold ADA compliance under the DEI umbrella. Our philosophy for diversity, equity, and inclusion is really that it is a cultural shift in mindset and that that shift in mindset doesn't do it's best through a compliance lens. And so we actually hold compliance for ADA in our HR department, which is separate from our diversity, equity and inclusion program. That said, part of my workload is around building a culture of inclusion and accessibility in the city of Bothell. And so I have consulted on some of the aspects around ADA or some of the aspects around disability inclusion and really meaningful disability inclusion that goes beyond just the bare minimum of legally compliant, but really what it looks like to build a community where disabled folks are welcomed and included and can participate fully in their government and their community. And so we talk a lot about that through like the cultural lens, but then through the actual compliance lens, I typically hand that over to our ADA coordinator and Mason's team to work through some of the new updates to the ADA or the new enforcement and compliance dates.

Great, and thank you, Commissioner. I know you asked about the WCAG compliance, right, which is our web accessibility mandate from the Department of Justice. So at the city, we've been talking about this for a while now and ensuring that we are compliant. It is a complex body of policy, right? And so the way that it applies to us is kind of twofold. So there's products that we produce ourselves that we need to make sure are compliant, so that certain digital content, PDFs, for example. But then there are platforms we utilize like our website, like Engage Bothell, which are actually third-party vendor systems. So we need to make sure that we're communicating and connecting with them to see how are they going to become compliant, right, because we don't actually manage compliance. the system that we may communicate on. So fortunately the vendors that we use we've been in early contact with and we're not the only public agency dealing with this right so they've been ahead of the ship and there's a lot of work happening with those platforms to make sure they are compliant. We've been our website platform and Engage Bothell are also already compliant with the current guidelines. The tricky part for us then is for our staff we have many folks who are utilizing those platforms helping manage the content on those platforms and so The platform itself may be compliant, but we need to make sure that the inputs we provide are also compliant, which is where we've been developing the guidance. We're going to be sharing internally at the city to help folks across all departments. Make sure that when they're using these platforms, we can ensure the integrity of their compliance.

Okay, well, I. Thank you. This has been really, really elucidating. I have a few questions. This is such a great, rich subject area that, yeah, I just have a few things I wanted to kind of sink my teeth into. I was wondering... You guys have done a great job in outreach online and through the mail. How do you reach out more to people who are homebound, non-mobile, or less present in the community online?

I'm going to have Gabby answer that, but I'm going to share some context from the communication side. And I'm sure, Gabby, you'll have your input. We absolutely recognize that our entire community is not in a vacuum. We're not siloed, right? We don't have one platform that reaches everybody. So of course, when we throw something up on social media that does really well, that's great. And we can look at those numbers and say, that's a lot of reach. But we don't necessarily know exactly who those folks are. And we absolutely know that we're not reaching everyone in the community. So we take a holistic approach at making sure that we don't just communicate on our own channels, things that we directly manage, but we work with our community-based organizations to be ambassadors. Because oftentimes we know that folks in the community, especially if they're less connected, right, may have a connection point with a church or a religious organization or a service organization or a provider. Or even a recreation group, right? And so we try to maintain really strong relationships with different community-based organizations. And when we have a large initiative, we do outreach with them to say, can you please share this? Because we want to hear from your folks about this project, this initiative. And this is something that we work really closely with the Community Development Department on. Gabby, anything to add on that?

No, I think this just really harkens back to the importance of those really strong relationships in our community and actually working with trusted community leaders far more than if information is coming directly from city staff members. We know that the webs that we've built in the community of folks that know that we will take their feedback seriously and then will advocate for us. So when we do something like a survey or we're looking for feedback, Just like Mason said, the service providers that we have in our community do a really great job of spreading the word. We do very targeted community-specific outreach to those service providers, and we work really closely with our human services coordinator, Anand, who is also within the executive department, and he has a huge list of service providers in the Bothell community who are able to reach folks that we might not otherwise be able to engage with for those reasons.

And then I'll go over community engagement within community development. Basically, community engagement is very important within the long-range planning efforts within the city. We try to do a variety of different outreach methods in order to get feedback on different projects coming from different residents or people that are come into Bothell. We do that through both in-person as well as virtual. Some virtual examples, we have our Engage Bothell website that we have different surveys on there, different ways for people to give feedback by making an account on that platform. We've also had different focus groups where People can meet both virtually. We've also had focus groups in person where people can have input on different projects. For example, for a housing action plan, we've had different focus groups targeting different populations going from students to the elderly to homeowners just to make sure that we can get a large range of opinions on the housing action plan. We've tabled at different community events as well. For example, the Chai Holi event over in the downtown park here in Papel, as well as different events at UW Bothell. We've tabled at like Sustainamania, different environmental programs as well. So trying to really meet where the people are is very important to us. in order to get that feedback on different long-range projects. Another thing we've been doing is downtown discovery walks to gather place-based feedback, giving tours around downtown. So we really want to prioritize that engagement with historically underrepresented people and marginalized people by being able to create a large range of engagement activities and ways for people to connect and to get their voice out, whether that is online or us meeting them where they're at. Yeah, there's no action required today. The purpose of this study session was just to provide the planning commission information on communication with marginalized communities in the city. And that's it.

Well, thank you so very much. And I really enjoy all the content that's out there. And I have the opportunity to go to some of your tabling events and everything. So that is really wonderful. And I am just so pleased to hear that you do have a robust communications team. And hopefully that will continue to get bigger because we are communicating all the time on our phone. So thank you so much.

If I may just ask a few more questions. I was wondering how do you guys measure success? Do you have certain benchmarks when you're communicating for a certain percentage of representation through your outreach or what do those assessment benchmarks look like?

Just harkening back to a question I was asked when I was interviewing for this job. As a team, I think we've installed a really good policy on this, which is the numbers are one part of the story, but they're not the whole. And what I mean by that is we measure success by looking at analytics. So the hard data, right? the quantitative data that we can gather about our different channels, and that might tell us something. But we as communicators are intuitive enough to know that we don't reach everyone in the community, right? We look very closely at the qualitative feedback that we're able to gather from folks in the community, such as those community-based organizations. So a good example of this, when we have an in-person event and folks show up, we will often ask like, oh, great, how'd you hear about it, right? Oh, what made you come out today? And we log that mentally, but we actually do track that feedback because what we're trying to understand is how are we actually connecting with people and are the messages that we're sharing out reaching a representative body of our community? And that's so hard to identify just by looking at the numbers, right? So it's a combination of analyzing performance of social media posts, right? Or open rate of an email campaign that we've done. But matching that and benchmarking it with the feedback that we're getting from staff and from attendees And looking at where the gaps are, is there overlap that we can maybe lean into? And actually getting on Reddit was beyond just being a good best practice, was the result of understanding we need to change our social media strategy to match how the community is changing the ways they engage on those platforms, right?

Along those lines, I was really intrigued by what Gabby said about building webs. And can you tell me a little bit more about how you establish some of those connections with, you know, churches or people who may not be able to be online, very often the marginalized people or those who are not represented is because they don't, aren't comfortable in public or can't come to, can't use the regular channels of communication. So I was really interested to hear, I'd be interested to hear more about building these webs to get input from those populations who have a harder time connecting with our government. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. Those webs start really organically and sometimes a little boringly. I think philosophy really started out of our proclamation process, which I don't know how familiar folks are in the audience with the idea of proclamations. But we realized very, very early on that our equity or our community and cultural proclamations were best done when they were written by the community members that really had those lived experiences and so we started going out in the community and actually asking for them to take part in writing those proclamations and from there we started developing these like very um specific touch points for community members that we might not otherwise engage with so we were really intentional we went out and we found folks that represented those identities and not just like community members, but folks that were associated with some sort of community organization that was related to advocacy or related to that cultural experience. And so in using what is kind of a boring government process and turning it into a civic education and engagement activity, we started building trust in the community. And then from there, they just go out. So we try really hard not to work with the same the same cultural group twice for a proclamation. And so then we've been able to build kind of a rolodex of folks who are active in our community, who have specific identities that we want represented in the feedback that we're looking to. to bring in and then we touch base with them really regularly. So we have, I have calendar reminders set up and our team has calendar reminders set up that is like, hey, if you haven't heard from somebody in a couple months, check in with them, send them an email, ask what kind of projects they're working on. And so really that person to person connection, meeting folks for coffee, I think in the first six months that I started working with the city, I was meeting people for coffee, like, multiple times a week just to really put that human interaction into place so that they knew that they have somebody at the city that they could ask their questions to. And even if I didn't have the answer, I'd be able to find the answer. And once you have, you know, five or six folks in the community who really trust you and have worked with you, they'll start vouching for you and saying, hey, actually, I know I heard you're working on this project. Have you considered this perspective? I know somebody in the community who might be interested. So it really is like very person to person. It's slow going work, but we found that it's really, really meaningful in getting trusted, lasting, mutually beneficial relationships in our community. that can be sustained over multiple years and new employees. One of the things that can be really difficult sometimes for an organization is when one person makes a ton of relationships in the community, but those relationships are really reliant on that one person being in that one role. And so we try as much as possible to share those relationships with multiple staff members so that that web can stay really strong, even if a staff member leaves or if a community member leaves the city. I hope that answered your question.

Yeah, absolutely. That was really helpful. Commissioner Gustafson.

Hi, Sarah Gustafson here. I'm grateful for a lot of things. First of all, I'm grateful for the very substantive questions that my fellow commissioners are asking, because these questions have really allowed us to see how well this work has been going. If we take a moment to reflect on what's happening here, Coordinator Gabby, Manager Mason, Senior Planner Jaclyn, the work you've been describing, building trust through these cultural events, letting equity move at the speed of trust, using new tools like Reddit and AI, but taking accountability for them. This is just what Bothell needs. Gratefulness to everyone. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Grafterson. I just have a few more quick notes that I really, I feel like, as Commissioner Grafterson said, getting the answers to would just go on further to highlight the great works you guys are doing. You talk about a culture of inclusion, which is fantastic. It's very impermeable and For a lot of people, it's just pie in the sky, Baba. Like, oh, those are beautiful words. What does that mean? And I really pick up, you know, through the documentation I've seen, through so many events and some of the things you're doing to reach out to cultural inclusion is phenomenal. But, of course, cultural isn't our only... isn't the only marginalized populations we're trying to draw in. And some of... There are so many other... less colorful populations, such as the mentally ill, those people who are homeless, that it can be harder to host a party around. And what efforts are you making out? Can you talk to me more about creating a culture of inclusion in our city when, I mean, it sounds insurmountable, but I know you guys have techniques in process already.

Well, the good news is those challenges are things that we work on, right? And we've made progress on. Gabby, did you want to jump in with something?

Oh, you can go if you guys have to say first.

Sure. Well, you know, when we talk about communications, something that you may be painting with your question is a lot of it say, hey, good news, this is happening, or we want your feedback on this. But there's also many times that we have to communicate urgently or quickly with the community, and we know we can't reach everyone. Especially when you're talking about folks who may be dealing with different levels of access to information or who may be unhoused. Those can be very challenging folks to reach, right? Because we don't necessarily know how they engage with us. A print mailer isn't going to make it to them, right? We don't know what their access to social media may be. So we don't ignore the fact that, again, the web of ambassadorship in our community through relationships is a really important communications tool and a listening tool. And I feel strongly that the work that we've done and the partnership we have with Gabby and with Anand, we talk very regularly about how can we make sure that we both have our eyes and ears in different corners of the community and that we recognize that not everyone has the same level of access to engage with us, right? So that's a philosophical approach that we take in the way that we communicate. And I think that a lot of the relationship building that Gabby's been speaking to has helped make progress in that area. Gabby?

Yeah, that's almost exactly what I was going to say. Our human services program is really a major way that we do that. So we very regularly, we have a monthly human services forum that our human services coordinator leads. And that brings in leaders of human services organizations throughout the entire King and Snohomish County area serving Bothell residents. I think at our last human services forum, we had like 70 plus leaders of human services organizations at those. And those are the folks that are working directly with our community members day to day. So at the city, we aren't doing that one-to-one work of providing services, but they are. And so we do have these scheduled touch points with them where they're learning about projects. They are, you know, they're giving the feedback that they're hearing out in the community back to the city. So we have kind of this closed loop that we have with folks that are actually the ones that are serving folks at organizations for folks that are experiencing food and housing insecurity, who need emergency funding. So for any of our organizations, they are actively participating in engagement with the city already. And that's been incredibly crucial when we think about some of these big plans that we want their feedback on, but we don't know where to get it. We are working directly with the organizations that are supporting them. We also specifically when we think about disability advocacy, we have really close relationships with our disability advocacy and activism and support programs in the city of Bothell. We work very closely with Kindering, the Alyssa Burnett Center, and Together We Shine. And so they've been really, really, really strong partners with us. We actually, I co-teach a class at the Alyssa Burnett Center quarterly. They have a disability self-advocacy class that we're heavily involved in. And so we really do try to ensure that when we think about a culture of inclusion, we're thinking about all different aspects of the human experience, whether that be class, race, ability, origin of birth, like so many different aspects. so many different lived experiences experience marginalization in different ways and they overlap in very different ways. And so we try to be incredibly considerate of all the different ways that we can best reach out to our city and make sure that everybody feels included and is heard.

Thank you. That's a really helpful to know about. Along those same lines, as part of the DEI office, you know, I keep reflecting back to this event, and I believe it was a federal way just a couple weeks ago, between the police and the mentally ill man. How... Do you work at all with law enforcement? And I believe that at one point law enforcement had a PACE officer or a crisis intervention team member, but I haven't heard anything about that recently. Do you work with a crisis intervention team member and do you work with law enforcement at all?

I do. So the Bothell Police Department is when we think about the one of the departments within our city government that I help advise, serve, train, consult with. I do work with them quite heavily. I'm working on projects with them right now. And we talk a lot about training and recruitment for law enforcement officers. And so, yes, I do absolutely work with them quite heavily. And then we do have a regional crisis response team. And that is, it serves multiple cities within our region, but it does work with the Basel Police Department quite heavily. I've worked with them on projects here and there, but they're oftentimes out in the field. And so I don't work with them, I would say like routinely, but I have worked with them before. I know their names, I know like who they are and have interacted with them. but I don't work with them on a day-to-day basis.

Thank you. Commissioner Lever, did you have a comment you'd like to make?

Yeah, thank you. I guess the one thing that I'd like maybe like offer a suggestion, I know oftentimes we talk about community and who might not be at the table, who is the community, and there's a lot of that up that comes our way through the different presentations, and it always seems to come from different sources or points. So even as we are discussing today what it means to communicate, like really sort of having that one template that can be incorporated in every document that we receive just to really remind us of who is it that we're talking about. Because even as you're mentioning sort of like the own house and others, even we know that we may not know exactly how many own house may be within our city, but there are some data points that we can reference to and rather than, and I think it'll be super helpful for us to always remember who is not at the table, but we want to really honor their presence through the data points that you do have, and try to standardize that so that it's almost like you're drilling it to us, because we always talk about, okay, who is not at the table, and to your point, some people may respond to one particular initiative, but not the other, and the more that we understand who's not really, who do we need and is not there, and then who is way too much in there, that will be super helpful. And I think if we could just have something that could be standard and that will help us really understand the who, will be a helpful tool. Thank you.

Commissioners, further comments, questions? Well, I know that this has been very, very beneficial towards me. Very, very appreciative of everything you've helped us understand today. And again, we look forward to hearing more from you. Don't be strangers to the commission. We're always interested in what you're hearing from all aspects of community.

Excellent. Thank you, Commissioner. I appreciate it.

Okay. Again, thank you to Planner Sampson, Manager Lavera, and Coordinator Cunha. The next is an update on the bike parking code from Planner Eric Jaszewski. Thank you, Planner Jaszewski.

Thank you, Chair and Commissioners. If you can just bear with me, I just have to open my presentation. Thank you. Okay, yes, hello commissioners. I'm Eric Jasiewski, the Long Range Planner with the Community Development Department. And I am here presenting on draft proposed bike parking standards. No action is required today. This is simply a study session on staff's preliminary proposal and discussion among commissioners, questions, and the like. The goal of this code update project is to ensure optimal bike parking standards are applied for new development or redevelopment. In my presentation, I'll be walking you through the background information, some data points, the draft proposed code amendments, and opening it up for Planning Commission discussion at the end. First, some background. In December, 2024, the comprehensive plan update was adopted and it incorporated a lot of new policies and information. One of those policies was to emphasize travel by non-auto modes, including biking, walking, and transit, and additionally requiring new development where applicable to incorporate appropriate design features such as bicycle and micro mobility parking. In 2025, mid-2025, the Planning Commission and City Council heard and City Council approved the repeal of motor vehicle parking minimums as an implementation action from the Comp Plan Update. At the same time, that ordinance established initial bike parking standards in the code. Since the initial bike parking standards were adopted, this was about, I believe, June, mid 2025, the department has received multiple project applications and observed that the standards resulted in quite large quantities of bicycle parking being required. So the community development department proposed revisiting the existing bike parking standards with planning commission in May, where we held an initial study session to get your preliminary feedback. We heard a variety of comments and questions, and I hope that these summarize at least the major points we heard from Planning Commission to collect Bothell-specific data on bike parking usage, that proximity to bike facilities and transit stations is important, focusing on the quality of bike parking and the accessibility of bike parking, among many other areas of interest listed here. One of those requests from Planning Commission involved collecting some basic local data. So since May, we conducted a survey to sample bike parking information using telephone and observational methods. For the survey, we sampled a wide variety of land uses, both in downtown and suburban areas of the city. More information on this data is in attachment two of the staff report, but summarized here for long-term bike parking, We observed for residential uses that around 20% of residents use any existing long-term bike parking, or said another way, about 25% of the dwelling units utilized bike parking spaces. For non-residential uses, this could be commercial, civic, Recreation, things like that, maybe not in this case recreation, but office is another example. We observed quite a wide range, the bounds of which were between zero of those long term spaces were used and up to 15% were used. Again, for more information on which land uses had which, you can look at attachment to. For short-term bike parking, this observation involved driving around the city and trying to find bike racks that were visible from the street or a publicly accessible area. Where I found bike racks in those locations, I logged the land use and found that between none and one bike was parked there at this specific point in time. So pretty low in my opinion. Okay, the proposed draft amendments. After reviewing the background information, best practices, other jurisdictions' approaches, and the data staff prepared, staff prepared some draft proposed code amendments for your consideration today. Something to keep in mind before I dive into the proposed changes is about the existing code. It applies bike parking as required for any occupancy permit of a new or enlarged buildings. That would be a new construction situation or for a change of use in any existing building. The current code is somewhat limited. There's a list of four land uses in there that have to provide bike parking. That would be multifamily housing, commercial uses, office uses, and attended off-street parking uses. That would be a paid parking garage situation. Besides that, no other uses are required to provide bike parking in today's code. So the first proposed change for your consideration is the applicability of the regulations. Staff is proposing to require the provision of bike parking for any proposal within a quarter mile walking distance of an existing bike facility or a planned bike facility or a bus rapid transit high capacity transit station. That would be like the stride line on 522. And you can see a map of those facilities on the right side of this slide. There's bus stops. Most of the very thick lines are proposed or planned bike facilities and some of the less bold lines, thinner lines are existing. Next, the proposed code would apply bike parking rules to additional land use types, such as, or including those, excuse me, additional land use types as listed here. For example, dormitories, government services, industrial uses, health and social services, and so on. None of these are currently required to provide bike parking today. While the regulations would be broadened, as mentioned previously, they would also incorporate recognition of special cases. First, there would be reductions allowed for step housing, which is defined as supportive housing, transitional housing, emergency housing, and housing for people with disabilities, recognizing that those situations may have less demand for bicycle parking. Also, deviations would be allowed to the proposed quantities as long as an applicant submitted sufficient evidence that they could provide less bike parking than required. Next, exemptions. The proposed draft code would establish certain land uses to be exempt from providing bike parking. single unit housing, that'd be single family housing or a townhouse, senior housing, vehicle oriented uses like a gas station or a auto maintenance shop, parks, golf courses. Although I have ridden my bike to a golf course and played golf, but not a common activity, so. food trucks, outdoor dining, other exemptions in the proposal, agricultural uses, utilities, transportation facilities, mortuaries and cemeteries, essential public facilities, and fire and police stations. Other special cases that are in the proposal is when there are large mixed-use developments. These would have bike parking quantities determined by the director based on the specific mix of uses, context, location, things like that. And any land uses, I tried to be exhaustive in the proposed code, but if there's anything that's not in there, those would be, again, determined by the Community Development Director, looking at similar land uses and intensities and characteristics. Lastly, the proposal would eliminate an existing exemption. This is something we heard from Planning Commission in May. The current exemption allows, The current regulation exempts small buildings under 2,500 square feet from providing bike parking. We heard that there may be small uses that should have a space or two, so we propose to delete that exemption based on Planning Commission's feedback. Okay, so first the quantity requirements. This is, I know, kind of a lot of text and numbers and things. So at the end, I'm happy to walk you through any of these specific cases. But the proposal would generally reduce the required or the proposal would reduce the required amount for multifamily residential shown here. It would also clarify the amount required for co-living units, as that's not currently listed in the use, maybe multifamily in the current code. Affordable housing would be required to provide one and a half times the residential quantity, understanding that potentially people may rely more on their bikes in those types of land uses. Again, supportive transitional housing, emergency housing, housing for people with disabilities would be permitted for half the residential quantities in the first two rows, depending on whether that step housing is as a co-living or a multi-family type building. In any case, two spaces would be required regardless of what these calculations result in. Next list of uses would apply long-term bike parking requirements to non-residential uses based on the proportion of employees. So in the proposal, we established one bike parking space per 20 employees or staff. This is different than what's common in other places where it's based on the square footage. We thought this was a little bit more straightforward and easier to understand. For those uses here that are currently regulated, so there's kind of some uses added and some uses that currently have to provide bike parking. Those currently regulated here, which is specifically retail, eating and drinking establishments, the requirements proposed would generally be lower than today. For office use, which is currently regulated, it would actually result in a little bit more bike parking required, making an assumption of square footage per employee. Some added uses that would now be required to provide bike parking, business and personal service, recreation, culture, and entertainment, and industrial. Last quantity slide, so thank you for bearing with me here. These are all new uses that would be proposed to be added into the code. Once again, the long-term space is based on the number of employees. And short-term parking standards are established as well, of course. And I would say in these cases and the ones previously, they all sort of result in a lesser or sort of a lower end compared to other jurisdictions' parking requirements. So it's kind of a recognition of, again, that basic data collection we did around Bothell, seeing that... bicycle use at non-residential locations is limited. Another comment we heard from Planning Commission in May is to focus on quality over quantity. So we added regulations to that end, specifically making sure that these bike parking spaces are easy to access by people with different abilities. Specifically, you shouldn't have to lift your bike very high or over your head in order to use the spaces. or ascend stairs with your bike, for example. Also, the bike or any bike racks must fully support bikes, making them easier to use. And then the regulations include guidance or recommendations to include, but this is not required. Again, what we heard from planning commission bicycle supportive amenities, such as showers, lockers, repair stations. Another component of the bike parking discussion we've had centers around some added regulatory flexibility. The proposal would eliminate a requirement that short-term bike parking has to be within 50 feet of front entrances, recognizing that that is challenging and can lead to some unusual spaces in front areas. So we are still retaining it as a qualitative requirement, but not a quantitative requirement, the first bullet point. Also allowing reductions if there's any on-street bike parking, of course, then they would be able to net out any short-term bike parking requirement that they had to provide. Some short-term spaces can be located in required recreation space or open spaces, limited, I think it's about 10% of the open space. Also adding another permitted type of long-term bike parking as lockers. We see these quite prodigiously around transit stations, for example. And this could be lockers within a building, for example, not necessarily just on the street like this example. Also, We would allow netting out of your requirements if you provide bike parking in the unit. Now, this has some qualifiers, and there needs to be a very clear space for the bike in the unit. And, again, you cannot just say, oh, they'll climb some stairs, carry it up, and maneuver by foot. by the bins to get it in there. So there has to be a very easy pathway to maneuver the bike, elevator if it's on a second floor, for example. And lastly, we would allow for the conversion of existing vehicle parking if an applicant chose to go that way. Other kind of various changes, recognizing and accommodating other personal micromobility devices such as scooters in the requirements, making sure that those can be accommodated. We heard about safety and how to incorporate that. One of the things we found is can add a requirement to prohibit blocking pedestrian routes when they lock the bike up. Also a note just sort of about kind of code minutiae. We are proposing to kind of centralize all the bike parking in this section and delete what's in the downtown bike parking standards. Those downtown standards are a bit more stringent. So again, just for your awareness. And there's just other kind of general code cleanup and improvements and fine tuning and things. Okay. I do want to go through, like, I did some calculations on various land uses and projects so that we can translate, like, these percentages into the real world, but maybe I'll pause and take some questions on what I've presented so far.

Commissioners? Yes, Commissioner Gannon.

A couple of thoughts. I'm not sure about exempting parks. A lot of people ride to parks. I think there should be some facility there. Food trucks. I understand an individual food truck, but if we go and have a food truck pod in this corner here, I think there should certainly be something accommodating there. Whoops. So there's that. Do you look at pooled facilities? For instance, if businesses on Main Street had a rack, could that serve them all?

I mean, there would not be a limitation. We would not prohibit that, I guess. And, you know, I think there's one of the proposed standards says you have to provide short-term bike parking near the front entrance. Again, there's no foot distance. And then combined with another regulation we're adding is that you can net out existing or if you want to install on street bike parking. So we will look maybe again, Main Street example is the next door business have a on street space like that would be fine to net out. And now maybe that's such a small use. They don't have to provide the frontage.

So, okay. Yes. And are you looking to somehow address the rental e-bikes and scooters? You do see them scattered about.

Not in this proposal. I believe there is some work by the Public Works Department on a micromobility strategy, and I think that that may address that. I'm not super sure.

Okay. And finally, you talk about quarter-mile walking distance as far as the applicability. That seems a little short for a bicycle. Riding a quarter-mile on a bike is really nothing, so you might look at broadening that out a little bit. And I do think bicycle use is changing with the rise of e-bikes. And I'll just say, based on personal experience, I walk by the Henry Park Middle School every day with my dog. And for a long time, there were very few bikes there, much to my disappointment. But I've noted in the last year or so, increasing numbers of e-bikes. So I think you may see some changes. Things may be different in a couple of years than they are now as they come. Prices come down. They're more and more in use. So I'd say keep your eyes on that. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner. And I appreciate the feedback, and I'll take that back to the team. I do want to follow up on just one of your comments, if that's all right. On the quarter mile or half mile radius, let me just show you the map that I had. So I wanted to have it for this meeting, but I couldn't quite figure it out yet. I figured it out today, but it wasn't in time. So I wanted to sort of draw that quarter mile around these facilities because I have a hunch that it may be, covering almost the whole city. Extremely small pockets maybe of like a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill, at the end of a street might not be covered by that quarter mile walk to a planned bike facility. But if we're talking about half mile, Again, I want to do this mapping exercise, but I have a feeling we're talking about that's just going to blanket the whole city now. So my follow-up question is, what do you think about maybe just striking this applicability and just saying it's not limited if we were talking about a half mile? Let's just make it simple.

I always like simple. clarify is that being it's more about use and building type occupancy type instead of distance because you've got the list you know all the places that applies is it sort of saying we'll just leave it with that or just omit the one quarter mile yeah so so under what I've we have prepared for you today there would be the first question to an applicant is is your site within a quarter mile walking distance of these they say no okay

no bike parking, you're good. They say yes, then yes. What's your land use? If it's here, here's your requirement. So yeah, if the commission is supportive of Commissioner Kiernan's approach, then we can strike that first step and again, just be simply land use based requirement.

Sounds good to me. Thank you.

Sounds good to me too.

Looks like we have, yeah, broad agreement there. Commissioner Lavender.

Thank you, and thank you so much for the sample that you provided for the survey.

That was amazing.

Thank you. I have a question, and I believe you shared some data on, like, forecasting on, like, usage. So when I think about both, and I still... See still pretty much like maybe still suburbia. But we're moving more into an urban area. What are the forecasting for like bike use? Because we know that right now, maybe we're not using them as much, but with the e-bikes and population trending changes. What does that look like? Do you have any? Remember you kind of share something around that do you think the bike usage is going to increase in both? Oh, it's gonna remain the same Overall, I'm pretty supportive of what you presented over here and I really it makes sense But yeah seeing your survey results and what I see I don't think we're packing much so And that's one of my discussion questions at the end I think is

And I've sort of been consider we've been considering this through the process is do it. And this is something we do is planners is are do we think about today's conditions and plan for that or do we think about how the city wants to be in 20 years and plan for that so that's kind of a question for the commission now. I will say I'm not aware of any bicycling use forecasts that the city is prepared. I do know that the bike plan. contains a vision statement that is pretty strong and you know visions bicycling is a major mode of transportation in the city so anything else I want to say I think we also know that you know in regards to short-term bike parking you saw not too much usage that I think that kind of speaks to that people maybe don't use their bikes so much for basic transportation, going shopping, and things like that. But there is some significant residential bicycle ownership. And I did pull data from Strava, which essentially records mostly recreational bicycle usage. And obviously, we have the Burke-Gillen Trail. We have the North Creek Trail. So I would say... You know, quite a notable use of recreational bicycling in the city. I'm sorry, I don't have any specific numbers, but that's sort of my information.

Commissioner Westerbeck.

First of all, is there more presentation or should we just do comments now? There's more on talking about the quantities. Okay.

I'll just make general comments. First of all, I thought the code we had was pretty, you know, maybe a little heavy. And so I had been a critic of this. But I've commuted on and off for, gosh, since the 80s. So, yeah. Much like Chair Kiernan, probably almost every job I've had I've commuted at least during the nicer months. So. At the same time, I also manage some apartments and things like that. So I see the long-term parking being the really important one. Everybody's got a bike and they want a place to put it, even if they don't ride it very often. And then more and more I'm seeing they are the more difficult bikes to move, e-bikes and things like that. So I'm really, I read through everything. I think this is a massive just sea change improvement. And I think it's a great starting point. I think if we do see, like my wife works at a high school, And as Chair Caron said, at the high school, there's so many more kids riding e-bikes now. I mean, they're mostly trying not to pedal. They're just basically scooters for them. But nonetheless, they're doing that instead of getting driven or whatever. So that's pretty cool. And so they're wrestling with that at the schools, I think. But everybody's got a place to put their bike. So the long-term, I'm putting the emphasis on the long-term storage for multifamily and places where people want to store their bikes, I think is really key. I'm glad we're We're kind of focusing on that. Yeah, short term makes sense to me. And I think it's just like any code. In a few years, if we see a lot of uptake of e-bikes or even analog normal bikes, we just tweak the code a little bit and say, oh, we actually finally might need some more racks. So I think it's a great place to start. I think it's going to help with my developer hat on. Projects get done. And, you know, maybe the bike rooms would be a little more easy to provide for the long-term parking or inside the unit or whatever. So overall, I'm just really thrilled. I read every word of this. It's fantastic. I thought it was a really good overhaul. So I appreciate the work a lot and that you guys have been so responsive as well.

If I could just ask, for something like an office building, what does long-term parking look like versus short-term parking if people don't live there?

Right. I'm sorry, I didn't include nice photos like I did in May, but the long-term parking for, well, I'll speak to City Hall because I bike here, actually. So down in the parking garage, as you enter over there, there's just a cyclone fence cage with a little padlock on it. And then some metal racks you can lock your bike to. So that's what I've seen as sort of the basic approach is just in the parking garage, you know, secured space. It can be a storage room, like let's say a restaurant, auxiliary space for the long term again. Some examples. And then short term is that simple sort of U-rack or something like that by the front door or near the frontage, the front sidewalk, whatever. for just visitors or guests.

So what I'm hearing is the level of security long-term will have more security versus the short term. Is that what I'm hearing?

That's correct. And yeah, assuming, you know, people leave their bikes there for longer, they want more security.

I actually just had one more question. It was, I'd love to hear the thinking around not mandating parking for parks. That really surprised me, but I'm sure there's something I'm overlooking there.

I would say it was less common in reviewing other jurisdictions' codes. Another factor we considered is know typically parks are publicly owned and you know the city Parks Department or the King County Parks Department would factor in and probably include some level of bike parking regardless so it's something we can add certainly if that's the Commission's wish we just didn't see it as as a significant need but

Um, just from my perspective, it seems like of all the places in our community. A park is is where we would see a lot of people riding their bikes to as we've been discussing that recreation biking is, um. is, uh, we have a lot of it in this community and a park seems like a great place to take a rest to, um, you know, get some water and, um, for, for people who are riding their bike. So it makes sense to me that we would at least mandate some parking, um, for bikes. Uh, it seems like, you know, good starting place and ending place for people taking, um, bike rides with their family and riding to community events and stuff like that.

So that's,

That was my only other comment. Commissioner Westbrook, did you have a...

Okay.

Okay, so... Commissioner Gustafson.

Hi, Sarah Gustafson here. Before I make my point, I'm honestly curious, has anyone else here tried to bike or bike commute as a resident of one of those big downtown apartment buildings? I have, but I don't want to assume that my experience is universal before jumping in. Okay, I will go ahead. On the code, I raised this last session and I didn't see it reflected yet, so I'll put it on the record. When I lived downtown for nine months in 2023, 2024, and tried to bike around the city, my apartment's bike parking was full, but it was full of underused bikes that barely ever moved, so I often had nowhere to lock my bike. Right now, we're putting real thought into car parking management, the same problem we see on our streets where parking with no enforcement means cars sit indefinitely. Let's consider that in relation to bikes. This code builds the spaces but says nothing about parking management, no responsible party, no process for clearing abandoned or unused bikes, a space that's permanently occupied. HAB-Masyn Moyer- isn't really a space, so that I have some more thoughts, but i'd like to see how that lands, thank you.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- back. I'll just concur because I know Commissioner Gustafson and I chatted about that because I would have loved to have provided you space that I didn't have any. But I can see into some of those garages and see that some of them just sit forever. So I think it's a key issue. I mean, maybe this is getting really into the weeds. Part of that management would be they would assign spots or something like that and then manage them. in some way, but I don't know if that's going to be the purview of the city where they encourage the apartment ownership to do that sort of management. So I can't say I know a code. That would cover that right now, but I, I hear you because. I was going to say a few minutes ago sort of relates. I worked at the university Washington for about a year and I rode my bike again during the warmer months, but they had so many people as who worked at the University of Washington all over because they've got buildings everywhere. And this is in Seattle, not the bottle. They were. There was almost a crisis. They were frantically trying to find money to build more secure bike parking because people were coming and going daily. And I could see that in 5, 10, 20 years, those apartments might be more like that. Like you say, Sarah, that each space is precious. So we might get there eventually. We're not there now, but we might get there eventually. So that management issue might come up.

Thank you, Commissioner Resterbeck, for all those comments and for remembering when I tried to rent bike parking space from you. I think there's some simple solutions here. For example, if a bike could be tagged and if it isn't moved in a week or two weeks, then the bike could be impounded or... Ideally, there would be a warning first to the person, but I think there's some low-tech solutions that could happen to make sure that these spaces that we're pushing so hard for actually do what they're supposed to do. Also, another thing I wanted to bring up was my building was built in 2016 and seemed to have no distinction between short and long-term parkings. So what we see is zero demand in the survey might be just zero supply. And do we know what surveyed sites predate the latest standards? Maybe what I saw wasn't universal. So yes, those two questions. Can we do easy solutions here? what is the difference between where I was in newer buildings?

So regarding your, I hear that comment, Commissioner Gustafson, definitely. If I can clarify in your first question, are you referring to short-term sort of bike parking in the frontage or the long-term like locked secured space or both?

Either or, because where I was, it was just long lines of cramped bikes, many of which were dusty, and there was no distinction.

Okay. I will take that comment and discuss it internally. I would say, at least as it pertains to the proposed code before you today, If you wish to increase the amount of residential bike parking, that's an option available to you, would be one way of addressing that comment.

You know, thank you for that. I do think it would be the same as the parking issue that we encounter on our streets, where the more we give, the more people use it. And the real issue is not about how many parking spaces we provide, it's how we manage them.

I hear that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Westbrook, just to chime in there, I know the building you're talking about, Commissioner Gustafson, and I have to think now I'm thinking about those racks. They're double height. They're not secure. You have to use your lock. I don't think the new code would even allow them anymore as long-term secure parking. So not that it's a moot point at all because it's going to exist. It's not going to probably change it. But I think that with the new code, the short term, that wouldn't necessarily be short term parking and it wouldn't probably comply with the long term requirements. So that's where I think this code could be an upgrade, probably is an upgrade. But then it also begs the question, say there's room for 100 bikes or something. Is it like a storage unit almost in some buildings where they'd say, yeah, you're assigned spot A13? Um, granted, uh, and maybe that has to be an extra, you know, 50 bucks a month or something like that. And, and, and then maybe that starts to become a, an equity issue. They have to pay more to store their bike or something, but they have to pay for parking spots too. So, I don't know. I'm just trying to think of how you would, um, how would you make it unattractive to leave a bike, um, in a precious spot using this new code? Um, just spitballing a little bit.

Thank you.

Commissioner Gustafson, I don't think I responded to your second question. If you might repeat that for me, please.

Yes, thank you so much. Sarah Gustafson here. My question dovetails with what Commissioner Westerbeck was saying about the difference between new and old ones, new and old buildings. My thought is what buildings were you surveying? And if you were surveying old buildings with older standards, how is that really fair for the data? If you're only surveying the newer buildings with the newer standards, then, and they're still, there's no usage when the bike racks might be state-of-the-art, they might be manageable. That's a different data point. But what I'm suspecting is that my data point holds, which is that some of the problems that we see in the older buildings are going to happen again in the newer buildings unless we really are careful about our code and our management.

Got it.

Sorry.

That's a great question. And I appreciate you taking the data I presented with a grain of salt because it was a very basic survey and definitely not scientific. I'm not submitting it to any journals or anything. So I did try my best in the time I had to take a variety of situations and land uses. So I surveyed new development, new residential mixed-use development downtown, old apartment garden apartments in the Canyon Park area new retail spaces or new retail spaces in North Creek old strip malls so it's the wide variety and again not a multitude but at least a variety of samples here So I hope that gives you a little bit more confidence. I also presented the absolute numbers and not just the percentages in attachment two. So you can draw your own conclusions as to did they provide enough long-term spaces? Did they provide enough short-term spaces? How many? I included the number of employees if that was a commercial use or the number of residents too. I tried to present as objective data as I can. Again, not an amazing graduate research project, but the best I can do here.

Thank you. I mean, it's great. I really appreciate you getting out there on seeing what things are. And this is a good start.

Commissioner Robson here. I think one thing it's important to note regarding parking enforcement is that when we're talking about parking enforcement in the city for cars, we're talking about on city streets and public areas. We actually aren't talking about in people's driveways and people's apartment complexes or any of the other private parking garages. I know apartment building i lived in there was that one jerk who just had his car in the worst place ever and he always parked it there and it collected dust it looked like a greenhouse um but that's a private issue um and i think when we're coming talking about building development these are these are private primarily private um businesses private homes or multi-family homes um and so parking enforcement in those cases is up to the owner is not um up to the city in any way, shape, or form, we can, um, mandate that they, uh, um, I appreciate that we can mandate long-term spaces and short-term spaces. I think that's great and so important. And although I, I, I am, uh, agreeing with staff, I think we might've hit it a little heavy to, um, to begin with, so I appreciate this rolling back on the numbers a little bit. But when it comes to parking enforcement on private property, I think that that's maybe something that is more nuanced and certainly not part of this code that we're working on right now. Unless I'm wrong, in which case, please tell me.

I think you've hit it. I mean, the issue of what happens on private property, especially after development, after we approve occupancy, is a thorny issue. And I'm sure the attorney will want me to stop talking right there. In regards to on-street parking, that is in city purview, certainly, and the management of that is as well. That's Public Works Department, though, as well, so I know the Public Works Director wants me to stop talking on that matter right now as well. So that's all I'll say there.

Yes, Commissioner Grafson.

Hi, Sarah Gustafson here. So my thought is, if we can mandate exactly how many spaces and what type for a private building, can we mandate that the building submit a parking management plan during permitting and construction? How abandoned bikes get identified and cleared? That's not new authority to me. It seems like the same authority that is already in this draft. What are your thoughts on that?

I think we can definitely look into that. You're right that there is precedent for some sort of agreement and things like that post-development. Again, not my area of expertise, but we'll look into that and let you know.

Great. Thank you so much.

Okay. Great feedback and questions and comments. We really appreciate it. Presented some quantities and if those made sense to you, great. You can tune this part out. We wanted to include this just for the people that kind of need to see the reality of the rules. I tried to collect some various types of projects, land uses, and show you how the ratios or the percentages might calculate out for those. So the first example here is a multi-unit, multi-family residential development. This is one that's proposed but not built. And under the old requirement, and in fact the project proposed, 235 long-term spaces for 321 units. and 65 short-term spaces. And so that's, again, what's in the project proposal and represents the old requirement or the existing requirement. Excuse me. The new proposed requirement would result in a bit less here, so 155 long-term spaces and 16 short-term. So food for thought. A small mixed-use development, this one would be in downtown Bothell, it's proposed. And again, I'm sorry I said old requirement, existing requirement, but it would require 24 long-term spaces and six short-term spaces for 1,900 square foot retail and 22 dwelling units. New requirement, quite similar actually, just some fewer short-term spaces. Low-income housing, this is, once again, another proposed development in downtown, 201 units, office space, sort of retail-type social service space. Existing requirement, 180 long-term spaces and 40 short-term. The proposed requirement, really unfortunate wording, 129 spaces and 14 short-term spaces. Dormitory example, this is UW Bothell. They're already constructed. Obviously, our rules won't apply. This is just an example. So existing requirement doesn't apply to dorms whatsoever. Proposed requirement, in this case with 1,400 beds or somewhat to the equivalent of 376 dwelling units, would include 103 bike parking spaces in long-term and 128 short-term. A co-living type space, I don't think there's any like this in Seattle, or I'm sorry, in Bothell, but this one is in Seattle. Sort of efficiency units, very small residential units. This one has 60 sleeping units, bedrooms, whatever you want to call it, no parking. Existing Bothell requirement, if this were to be in Bothell, would apply 30 long-term spaces, six short-term. proposed requirement 15, so cut that in half, and then two short-term in this case. This is in Seattle. Hopefully they have some more bike parking, I think. Various commercial examples here for you. I got the Grazzi Italian restaurant, Bothell Everett Highway on the left, smaller sort of restaurant. Under the existing requirement, if this were to be built today, two long-term spaces, two short-term spaces, proposed requirement, same thing. Safeway on Bothell-Everett Highway as well, larger supermarket example. We're assuming around 20 employees in this supermarket. I don't have that exact data, but with that assumption, existing requirement for long-term for those employees, and then for visitors, shoppers, 10 short-term. the proposal would be fewer long-term spaces, same amount of short-term spaces.

May I interrupt for a second? Commissioner Westerbeck here. I think about places like the Nails and Spa, I know that space, especially with the way we planned towns, you know, like Main Street a hundred years ago, it was just often the building covers the entire property. And so the only place you could do a rack was either carve something out of the store or of the space, which the landlord or the owner is probably not going to want, or put it on the sidewalk. So is that where the flexibility of the code comes in a little bit? Because you don't really want to block sidewalk. You need, what, five feet clear? And if the rack doesn't get used much, does someone want a rack sticking a couple feet out of the sidewalk? So I think there's going to be some interesting situations when you do a change of use. building like that oh yeah you're probably thinking about it but I'm just I'm looking at that going oh where do you put the rack if that was the whole property was edge to edge the building was edge to edge on the property appreciate that comment certainly

Interesting thought process Absolutely, I think this is you know, perhaps why one of that exemption original exemption was in there Maybe you know these very very very small scale uses. So once again, you know Commission if the proposal you think is Not appropriate in any way we would appreciate any of that feedback I think my feedback would be just that the

The director has the discretion probably to waive it, I think, in the code. I only read through it once, so I don't know if it's memorized yet. But I don't know if you'd make that a slightly more robust part of the code saying, you know, in a change of use situation where there is no place to put a bike rack, you know, the deference is given to the applicant or something like that. Or, you know... you can show that there's a municipal provided rack nearby or something like that. I don't know. I don't have a solution, but I would think... Most places are going to have a Safeway, a Grazi, whatever. They're going to have parking spaces they could take over. It's not an issue at all. And I think this is going to be pretty niche. But there's going to be a few that are going to come up through the years, especially with change of use, where you're going to be like, we literally don't have a place to put a bike rack. So I would just hope that they would give that out freely when it was super obvious, the exemption. Thank you. want people to have a bike rack accessible, but where are they going to put it? Maybe they've got parking spots for the Nails Spa. I don't know that property, but they are going to be somewhere. They don't at all.

If I could weigh in, we could look at those zones that have zero foot setbacks. That's where the flexibility would exist. Safeway, this example, does not have zero foot setback. There's plenty of space on that site for them to accommodate a bike rack. We could look at a correlation of how the form adjusts to where racks could be located.

Again, I would love for there to be a rack for, you know, I ride bikes, I get it. And I've been that person looking for a stop sign or something to block a bike to. So I totally sympathize. I've been that person. I'm just sometimes there are going to be some cases, like you said, Christian, in zero lot line or existing condition situations. I've got an adaptive reuse project in another city and the property is literally the building goes edge to edge, corner to corner, and covers the whole property. And so they're not required to put in bike racks, but they would have a hard time. They could put them on the roof, maybe. I don't know where they're going to put them.

Thank you, Commissioner. Yeah, please feel free to stop me if you want to talk about any of these. I'll proceed. Entertainment uses, we got Popkini Stadium over there, 120,000 square foot stadium, 3,500 seats. In this scenario, we're assuming about 35 staff there. Don't look into that number. I don't know exactly how many staff, so just for this game. The existing requirement does not apply to stadiums in Bothell. The proposed requirement would. recreation, culture, entertainment, sports uses, things like that. Two long-term spaces for those 35 potential employees and 70 short-term for the guests. Another entertainment use, this theater is not in Bothell, but I think it looks like your old generic Cineplex, so I included it. About a thousand seats in these types of theaters. We're assuming 50 employees. Current standards don't apply. Proposed standards would provide three long-term spaces for those employees and 20 short-term for moviegoers. Lodging, no requirement today. Proposed requirement, three spaces for those about 50 employees and four short-term spaces if anyone flew in from SeaTac and decided to bike to Bothell, they can park their bike here.

Again, I'm going to chime in. I can speak to that. As someone who's done a lot of bike events, maybe others have too, it sounds like you cycle. I've also stayed at a lot of different hotels and Airbnbs and things like that, but particularly hotels where I was worried about having my bike bolted to the roof of my car or something like that, so I'd bring it in the room or I'd look for – And I know, like, we would go to Whistler, especially in the summer, and they have ski and bike rooms for, you know, the expensive mountain bikes and stuff. I love that. That was great. They had the cage already there. So they were thinking about that 20, 30 years ago. So it would be good when they start building new hotels, be thinking about surprising number of people bringing a bike and they arrive with a car. I imagine you were thinking about maybe that.

Office space, we got good old City Hall on the left. I do know exact numbers for that, or almost exact. 270 parking spaces, 53,000 square feet, and about 148 employees. I have a couple numbers here. So I, in the hypothetical scenario, applied the existing bike parking requirement, which would result in five long-term spaces, three short-term. We do also have bike parking here at City Hall, which I mentioned. went through and counted those 24 long-term racks down in the garage and 18 short-term scattered around the perimeter. The proposed requirement in an office like City Hall would result in seven long-term spaces for those 148 employees and three short-term spaces for office visitors. another good data point on City Hall because you know we know this information I counted in a very pleasant summer day down in the long term spaces spaces we had 20 I'm sorry eight bikes in that long term parking in the tone eight out of 24 and then short term I don't know if I've really ever seen a bike parked in the racks around City Hall maybe there's one but Taking on the right side, we have just kind of your standard office park type office. I think this is actually one in Bothell, Seattle Genetics, so biotech. They have about 500,000 square feet of office space across several buildings and we're estimating about 1,500 employees Existing requirement, 50 spaces for those employees, 25 short-term spaces for whoever wants to visit a biotech office. And the proposed requirement would actually, as I mentioned earlier, be a little more than today, 75. And then same number of short-term spaces. Health and social services, we got the Kaiser Permanente Clinic over in North Creek, I believe. Existing requirement does not apply to any health services. proposal would establish two long-term for those 30 staff and two short-term for someone that injured themselves and wants to bike to the hospital. I have also biked to the hospital, by the way.

I bike with injured people, too.

Yep, that's useful. Education. Again, this is something I think we heard from at least one commissioner on applying some bike parking to schools. And again, no requirement today. This is Bothell High I took as an example. About 1,800 students and about 100 staff, 72 classrooms. Proposal would have five long-term spaces for those teachers and staff, and 72 for short-term for the students to use. Okay, last project example, industrial use. This is not a Bothell, some distribution center, who knows where. Very large, about 1,500 employees in this type of facility. So proposal, I mean, sorry, existing code does not require today. Proposed code would have 75 spaces for those 1,500 employees and two short-term for visitors to the distribution center or storage or other industrial use. Okay. I have some just questions to prompt feedback. Some of this we've talked about. You don't even have to answer these. This is just what we thought maybe would prompt some discussion. I think generally we establish lower quantities and commissioners were talking about well do we plan for today or plan for the future so do you think we should go higher are there other ways that I think Commissioner Gustafson talked about this is is the quality of the facilities and the usage of the facilities other ways we can we can address kind of the quality of bike parking Also, of course, we had some discussion around the exemptions that are proposed and changing that, and perhaps adding more strict regulations around cargo bikes and scooters and things as well. Or any other questions, discussion the Commission wishes to have?

Commissioner Gustafson?

Sarah Gustafson here. I am floating an idea because I am concerned about setting standards and then not out of bad intentions, the standards decreasing over time. I wonder if it's possible to post bike parking procedures near the bikes so that if folks don't see those standards being met, they can flag it to the city. I think it might be easier to monitor whether SOMETHING IS POSTED THERE, IT MIGHT BE EASIER THAN MONITORING ONGOING WHAT THE ACTUAL DAY-TO-DAY IS. THAT MIGHT BE AN IDEA TO THINK ABOUT OR NOT.

I JUST WANT TO CHIME IN THERE. WE CAN NOTIFY THE PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT OF THE COMMENTS AROUND BIKE PARKING MANAGEMENT IN THE RIGHT-OF-WAY AS IT RELATES TO THE RIGHT-OF-WAY WHEN IT DOES COME TO PRIVATE PROPERTY. IT REALLY IS, AS CHAIR ROBSON MENTIONED, IT IS A PRIVATE PROPERTY ISSUE. that we can identify the best practice. We could look at methods to provide education and materials, but it's only as good as the management of that building and the residents in that building to follow that. So we can look into it and we can follow up on these points at the next study session.

Thanks.

Just as a data point, and I'm sure you guys have considered this, but I wanted to float it anyway. The quality of a bike parking spot, I'm sure, has a lot to do with how often... I know. has to do how often people ride their bikes, especially as bikes become almost as expensive as cars. Um, people do not want to park their bikes with a flimsy bike lock where they can't, where they can't see it. Um, where you can just take the parking thing with you and put it in your car and worry about fixing that. I mean, cause I have seen a bike parking spot where it wasn't even bolted to the ground. You could just pick it up and take it with the bike. I know that people have said, I love riding my bike. I don't ride it because I don't want my bike stolen or messed with. And so I do think that if we want people to use our bike parking, we want people to increase their biking. We want to make it a reality, bike parking a reality. We need to consider the quality. What are we going to do to ensure that when people are putting in bike parking, it's usable. It's not theoretical bike parking, but actual bike parking that people feel comfortable using. And I don't know what the answer to that is, but I think it's something maybe we should

reflect on as we consider these codes wish respect to that point and correct me if I'm wrong I did read through about the requirement seemed to pretty thorough about bike rooms, cages, minimum heights, bar to ceiling, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, speaking to my UW experience, those were the only ones that were in demand. I rode my bike the first time, and I used one of those really heavy, I've got this really heavy tempered steel lock, et cetera, et cetera, and I went through the wheels and everything. And still, some of my colleagues who also rode bikes are like, you parked it outside? And there were literally parts out there, because we've all seen this, right? Wheels that weren't locked, so they took everything but the wheel. And I'm literally locking up next to these extra bike parts that were left over from stolen bikes. So I can see why they were freaked out, because there was a lottery to get those caged in the bike room spots. So, again, flogging that horse. I think it's in the code, though, right now. You've got that for the for the long-term spots has to be pretty real long-term.

Yes Yeah, sounds like Commissioner Robson's speak more towards the short-term, right?

You're talking short-term. Yeah, okay Okay, guys could say long-term. It sounds like we've got that locked up pretty good. But yeah short-term locked up Yeah, yeah short-term. I mean, I I think it's a tough one because You know good it's gonna be hard to offer a bike locker a bike room whatever for I'm gonna run in the store for an hour and So because you're not as invested in like, all right, I work here or I live here, so I'm going to get a key and I got a special spot and I'm like invested, you know. So I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. I'm just saying like that sounds like a little tougher not to crack.

Well, that's the end of my presentation. Unless there's other comments, questions, thoughts, I will.

Excellent work.

Yeah, thank you so much. I did want to mention thank you for including the examples and illustrations because I know that commissioners have been asking. And so I just we really appreciate you listening and accommodating that request because it's super it's super helpful. So thank you for that. Thank you.

And once again, thank you for being so responsive to, I'm sure applicants were hounding you a bit as well, but it looks like a really robustly updated bike plan, or bike storage and parking plan. I appreciate it very much.

Our third presentation is from Civic Spark Fellow Jay Huggins and the electric vehicle parking requirements.

And while I pull up these slides for Jay, I'm going to just give an introduction. So Jay is our current Civic Spark Fellow. You may remember Emily from before. She's been doing a lot of work on electric vehicles. And we will run through this. We do have two other items, so I just want to make sure we're... We know we're going to not blast through it, but we were very ambitious with tonight's meeting. We wanted to get it done before the end of the summer and before our recess. With that, I'll hand it over to Jay, and we will work through this, and I will drive the slides for you.

All right. Thank you so much, and thank you for the introduction. Good evening, planning commissioners. So I'm going to talk to you about the electric vehicle code and some potential updates that we could make. So just to be clear, no action required. The purpose of this study session is to provide the Planning Commission with context on city EV code and potential infrastructure standards to be included within BMC 12.16, parking, loading, transit access, and pedestrian circulation. Next slide, please. So this is just the overall agenda. We can go ahead and move on. So just to start with some discussion questions to get your minds active before we dive into the material. This is basically the questions that I would love to hear information from you on. This is basically what we're going to go through tonight within these slides. So overview EV ready requirements for multifamily housing. Should we increase requirements for areas like grocery stores, commercial zones? What should we do about affordable housing? Should we provide any exemptions for that? Which incentives could we use to encourage EV charger installation? then what do we think about level three versus level two chargers could one level three charger sort of work in place of multiple level twos um yeah so some overall definitions so you know what i'm talking about um ev ready parking stalls 208 to 240 volt dedicated branch circuit. They don't have a charger installed yet though, but they have all the conduit ready. And then electric vehicle supply equipment is the electric vehicle charger. And here in the state of Washington has to be able to supply current of 208 to 240 volts. EV capable Not super of interest to us for this presentation, but it is part of the Washington state requirements. Next slide, please. All right, so I'm going to start by just providing some context. Why are we talking about this stuff right now? So the climate action plan was passed in November of this year and or actually 2025. And it outlines different goals that we can use to try to decarbonize transportation. So transportation is our largest polluting sector in Bothell and also in Washington State. So this is of really high interest to the city of Bothell and Washington State and our general community. So I've put here... Sort of where we're at with these, and it was also in the packet in progress. The second one down is currently what we're talking about. Next slide, please. So to provide some context, this is electric vehicle registrations in Washington state up to 2025. So you're seeing a huge growth in battery electric vehicles. A little bit less of adoption for plug-in hybrid, which makes sense. People are going for fully electric. Next slide. This is city of Bothell. Same type of graph, but Bothell almost has an even steeper increase in battery electric vehicles. This is a really great sign. People are interested in driving electric. I'm sure that gas prices has something to do with that as well. And let's see if there's anything else. Yeah, next slide. So Washington state is the 18th largest state, but ranks fourth in number of fully electric vehicles. We're at the forefront here, so we need to be considering how we plan ahead, especially with charging. And there's been a lot of data showing that people are hesitant to buy an electric vehicle if they don't see a charger readily available to them, but people are hesitant to install chargers if they don't see plenty of electric vehicles driving around. So it is kind of a chicken or egg Difficult decision to make so by putting some city regulations we can kind of support this process So This is just looking at City Hall here. We have four charging stations as you may know which is eight charging points and this is the data that we currently have on those stations as of July 8 2026 and I did the math. That's about 18 to 20 sessions a day for that period of time. That's quite a bit. So certain areas will have more, obviously, but I think this is higher than average and a lot of kilowatt hours consumed. So this is showing that demand is super high. There's a lot of need, and there's not necessarily the infrastructure to support that need. We are one agency in Bothell. and we have this much usage. So this is just more evidence we need to be kind of considering the landscape of this as we move forward. So obviously we want to hear from the community. So much of our work is based in community feedback. What do people want? What do they want to see? So we've done a couple surveys. We did some surveys prior to the Climate Action Plan, which is referenced here as well. And then one just this past month in May, which already has, I think, around 130 responses. So it's been very active. And people really prioritize pollution reduction, especially for health reasons. And they think that more charging stations are going to be critical for increasing EV adoption throughout Bothell. In addition, they want to see them mostly at shopping centers, so tying back to grocery stores being top spot for chargers. And you can see the data and how it ranks here in this slide. All right, next slide, please. This is another way that we collected data over the past few months. I believe this went live in February, so we've been getting less and less responses to it over time. But initially, we had a lot of activity. This is an interactive map where people can put where they would like to see a charger. And all of the orange points are where there are existing chargers. I believe they are all public. And then I grabbed some charge hub data, which you can see in the upper corner. Approximately 99 public chargers within city limits are actually ports, that is, so less chargers. Each charger usually has two ports. Um, so not a whole lot of public charging available based on the demand that I showed you as far as that kind of exponential growth trend. Um, but yeah, really interesting way to kind of collect feedback from people. And the majority of these points were, um, convenience store areas, grocery stores. The library was a huge one. Most people want chargers at the library. And yeah, next slide. So getting into the code, these are our current electric vehicle standards for the state of Washington based on the different zoning groups. So tonight we're going to speak mostly about commercial and residential, specifically multifamily housing. So you see that as group R, the line on the bottom. 10% installed, 25% ready, and 10% capable. The majority of other ones are all 10% for each. And yeah, let's move to the next slide. So possible actions kind of got a sneak peek in the discussion questions, but this is based on my research and what we've come up with here at the city, my team. This is kind of what we propose could be a good way to meet the demand that the city has for charging. So increase EV ready percent requirements for multifamily housing, potentially provide exempt for affordable, Increased EV ready or installed for commercial lots. We're going to need to decide which and how much. Allow developers to reduce the amount of EV dedicated stalls if they install a level 3 charger. Reminder that level 3 is the faster charger, so people will have shorter dwell times. and then incentives to encourage developers to install more EV charging, whether that's EV ready, capable, or fully operational.

Next slide, please.

All right. So we're going to just kind of get into the details of each of these topics and reference some survey data as well. So based on our research, It's shown from the surveys that people prefer to charge at home and those who are still driving gas powered vehicles can see themselves charging at home versus elsewhere. And the majority don't have access to charging wherever they're living currently. And then The increase of EV-ready requirements would be for multifamily residential developments, which would include apartments, condominiums, mixed-use residential, but would not include single-family housing or townhomes or things of that nature. It would be for multi-unit developments. Okay, next slide. So really the benefit of increasing EV ready requirements is that you're making it easier for apartment owners to go ahead and install chargers as the need comes about. So we are not the first to be thinking about this. Other jurisdictions in the area have already done this, or they're planning to. Notably, we have King County at 40%. We have Issaquah 30, and they're actually making requirements for existing multifamily as well. So they're needing to go back and retrofit. And then Redmond has, I believe, the highest right now at 90%. And then if you look at any code in Canada, the majority are at 100% EV ready in their multifamily parking spaces. So let's talk about money a little bit. We'll talk about it more later, but Basically, retrofit costs are quite a bit more than if you put the conduit or get yourself ready while you're building the building. It's a hard sell to developers, obviously. They don't want to necessarily spend more money upfront, but it will save time and money in the long run. OK. Next slide. So affordable housing is another consideration in city of Bothell. I know that we're really interested in making affordable housing available. We want that in our downtown. We want people to come and live here as easily as possible. A lot of different kinds of people as well from different areas and backgrounds. And so we don't want to start enforcing code that doesn't consider that reality. So there are some areas that have made exemptions with their electric vehicle code for affordable housing. I know the city of Issaquah is considering this as they move forward with strengthening their EV code. But the majority of state codes, Washington and California included, don't make exemptions for affordable housing. One concern with this is just that we really want to make sure that electric vehicle charger access is for everyone, not just people who can afford to live in buildings that have it. So by exempting affordable housing, you're potentially blocking access to chargers in that location. So some ideas that we've had is like providing technical assistance for those buildings once they're built to then get grant funding to install or During the installation process, we can match that up with their development process and try to provide some services to them so they're able to have chargers, but they're not stuck with the burden up front of those extra costs. So something else I'd love your feedback on as we move forward. Next slide. Okay, more money, the fun part. So... A lot of people are concerned about how much more this is going to cost. So I have broken this down as best as possible to show how much it would be for what it is now for the existing requirement, and then if we raised it to 45% EV ready. And then it shows the cost for building it during construction and then what it would cost to do it as a retrofit afterwards. Electric vehicles are not going anywhere. I can't stress that enough. They're going to keep growing. They're going to continuously get more popular. And there's going to need to be charging for them. It's like a phone. If it doesn't have a charger, it doesn't work. The state code is almost guaranteed to get more stringent, so we're really doing our developments a service if we help them get their infrastructure ready ahead of time. So it is going to be more of an upfront cost for them, but they're going to save money in the long run. So if we raised to 45% for a parking lot with 40 spaces, 18 would be EV ready, and it would cost that $27,000. But if you waited until after the building has already been built, it would be that $72,000. So hopefully that breakdown makes sense. I do have the cost per parking space as well there at the bottom. And then the price increase. from the 25 to the 45 so hopefully that makes sense and is there anything else i wanted to say on that oh i did want to mention that we're also going to be supporting the city by having less permitting and utility considerations over time too retrofit is harder to deal with permitting and the utility is going to come out and have to do a new service request and assessment for the conduit and all that. So there are some efficiency benefits as well to providing enforcement up front.

Okay, next slide.

Great. So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but coming back to commercial public charging. So there was a recent study done by Electric Era, which is a company that helps people install and plan and figure out where to put electric vehicle chargers. And this is some of the data that they showed that EV chargers have seven times the amount of utilization if they are near 11 or more amenities. And grocery stores see the highest median charging sessions per day at 42. So we talked about here at City Hall, we get 18 to 20. Grocery stores are 42. So that is where there needs to be more chargers is basically what the research is showing. So proposing to increase EV code standards for zones that are general commercial, multi-use commercial, multi-use employment and those like grocery stores are within that other amenity types are within those zonings and 53.4 percent of survey respondents want to see additional charging session stations near shopping centers so there's need we are thinking that this can apply to grocery store or or amenity tenants that have parking lots that are 100 stalls or more so as not to put too much of a burden on some smaller local businesses. Yeah, I think that's everything. So here's some examples. There's not too many, but the top is the current existing standards. And then again, Canada leading the way. We are following behind. So they have 15 and 25. And then Vancouver, a little bit lower, fully installed, but higher EV ready. So sort of different approaches, but getting at what we're presenting here as far as targeting these zones where chargers are really needed. And to address concerns that these developments may have as far as taking up too many of their parking spaces with EV charging, this is a proposed solution to that. So instead of having multiple Level 2 chargers, allowing developers to install a level 3 charger instead. So the faster charging will serve more people, more vehicles throughout the day, And so you're still getting high utilization, high amount of charge sessions, but you're not taking up as many spaces. So the amount of level two chargers that could be replaced by a level three charger, there needs to be more research done on that to decide how much that ratio would be. But this is a potential solution for developers as far as a concern of taking up too many parking spaces. Next slide. Okay, so incentives. This would be not regulation necessarily by the city. This would be a way to encourage people to take the actions we want to see and install more EV charging or EV ready. The city of Redmond has an affordable housing and green building incentive program that we appreciate here at City of Bothell and like the setup of. And so this could be a recommendation that we make as far as how we could organize an electric vehicle incentive program. And I would stress that it would probably make the most sense to have it be an incentive that could work for a lot of different sustainable initiatives that we have, like solar or green buildings, energy efficiency upgrades and things like that. We would try to use this same point system so that it's very universal across all of our code, and that's something we've discussed as a team and think would work pretty well. We would need to talk about how many points things would be, what types of incentives we would use. I put a few ideas on the side, and they're controversial, I understand. So we would need to decide expedited permit review and what would balance that out. That's one idea that we have as far as incentives. I think if we do incentives, it would be our recommendation that it would work alongside some sort of code as well. So it would be sort of a dual-fold approach at helping encourage people and require people to install electric vehicle charging. Next slide, please. So in review, we have some gaps that we see. There's growing demand without necessarily any network growth. There's some, but we need more chargers. And then the state code minimums that exist now are unlikely to keep up with the projected charging demand. So this presentation is our first attempt at making some suggestions, some ideas based on research and what other jurisdictions are doing to try to address these gaps. Next slide. And these are the same questions as before. And I'd love to hear your feedback.

Mr. Westerbeck here. Great presentation. I'm really glad we're tackling this. I can't help but think about my experiences. I do occasional small development projects, like four unit size, for the last seven years or so. I just consider EV ready the minimum for all the, granted we're only doing four, five, six, seven parking spots. But it doesn't – I remember talking to my electrician about it back in 2018 or 17. They said it doesn't really cost us much. It's not going to cost us as the buyer much to do it at construction, to have the conduit placed and wire it to each of the – if it's assigned. For example, one building we have – well, actually, the last two buildings, they were assigned parking. And so they're paying for – the energy they use if they use their, you know, assigned spot. And it's easy, and it doesn't actually, you know, we're working with pretty tight budgets, and it didn't have a ton of cost. To me, it's just a no-brainer. We just do it, period. And, yeah, so I'm pro-add more. I think the higher numbers are good. The 45, I was thinking, like, we had 10, 20% and some I'm thinking, well, let's at least double those. And I've talked to people around downtown Bothell here, some other cities, Redmond, because I've actually got a project in Redmond, so I recognize some of that code. And yeah, people live in apartments frequently. They're financially comfortable, but they're like, well, I don't want to I want one, but I don't know that I'm going to be able to charge it consistently. It's like some people have range anxiety. Some people have charger anxiety. So everything you said has resonated with my experience, both building housing as well as talking to people who want to have an EV and are not sure if they can. especially in some of the big buildings like we were talking about with the bike parking. So just a few comments there. So like, yes, yes, on the first couple of questions. And then that was really compelling that you wrote up about, learned about the grocery stores and the strip malls and things like that. So that seems imperative. The affordable housing, I don't know that we should do exceptions. I tend to feel that... I've worked with Habit to Every Humanity a bit on some projects, and they always feel like their clients should have the same benefits that, like you said a minute ago, people with more money have. And so knowing that if it's done at construction, it's not terribly expensive, they should be at least EV ready, a pretty high percentage of those units, so that we want everyone to be eventually adopting electric technology for their cars, I think, as a society, and it fits into our environmental goals in the city so the direction of all this and the really thorough research here is fantastic I'm you know pro increasing these And I'm super sensitive to how it increases project costs, something I talk about with the planning staff and Public Works and everything all the time. But that's why I'm really saying if we can minimize the retrofit and really emphasize. And then in do, I think we'll have to be probably creative about the, I think you've got a good list of kind of a la carte, maybe green points, almost like the energy code does. to incentivize those so that it's not a huge increased cost because they're going to get, you know, a reduction in cost elsewhere on the project. And that's, I think, especially at a time when I think, you know, we've discussed this planning commission multiple times the last couple of years, even market rate housing isn't penciling out very well. So affordables can be really a hard sell. So we might have to get kind of aggressive with, okay, we want you to do the EV ready and we're going to be, you know, really, willing to work with you on our a la carte list of incentives to get these things installed and done. So sort of some random thoughts there, but I really like the direction here, and I'm pro-increasing, because I think you said, like you said, it's here to stay. I mean, everybody I know is trying to, you know, move away from ICE cars and get to EVs.

Thank you for your comments.

Commissioner Kiernan?

Well, I'll second everything Commissioner Westerbeck said. I think having them BEV ready is really important. Again, initial installation versus retrofit is just a huge difference, so we should definitely go that way. And I really like the idea of it being part of a green building application package. and looking at the incentives for that building to be green with this being an important component of it. So I'd be interested in seeing how you go down that path. I wonder how much of a problem there is with turnover. Do people just use them as parking spaces, get there, plug it in, and stay? Kind of like the bicycle question. They take a space but don't use it.

That was one of my notes I forgot to bring up. Thank you.

Yeah. So I don't have a suggestion or a solution, but it's a question I have that I think you should consider and see what other people are doing. And finally, you did mention business benefit. I think restaurants could really benefit from this. People who are driving, they look for a place to charge. And if they can stop and charge, they're going to go in and have something to eat or you know, a cup of coffee or whatever. So I do think it's a benefit to the business that they could really take advantage of. And I think that should be highlighted. You know, I know my son lives in Portland. He has an EV. He comes here. He doesn't always make it, but he's got a restaurant he knows that has a charger and they make a stop there. So, you know, that should be really recognized and highlighted. So thank you for your work on this.

Yeah, thank you. And I can speak to a little bit as far as dwell time. Here at City Hall, it's around three and a half hours, and then people tend to stay an additional hour after their car is done charging. So a lot of fee structures, one similar to what we actually just passed last night in City Council, has an overtime fee so that if you continue to stay there, you start getting charged more money. So that can help turnover continue so people move along. And then to speak to restaurants, fast food chains was very high on the list after grocery stores. People really like to go to fast food places to charge and then eat. And that's another reason why I think potentially encouraging level three chargers in like downtown general commercial could be great because it would have a high turnover and would bring more customers to those downtown areas.

I'm not an EV expert at this point. I remember that not all cars could use the Level 3 originally. Are more cars able to so that the viability of trading one for two L2s is worth it?

Yeah, that's a really great question, actually, and something that I've been considering. I think looking at that sort of exponential growth of battery electric vehicles, those are the ones that can use L3 chargers, the faster chargers. And then there are actually some newer technology coming out now where you can have a hybrid that can use a fast charger. They're more rare, and they're definitely still very expensive. But over time, I imagine they'll get cheaper. In Washington State and City of Bothell, there are more and more cars that can use level three chargers. But that being said, we still need to have plenty of level two chargers because there are plenty of people that have cars that only work with those types of chargers. So we want to make sure we don't leave them behind.

Commissioner Lover, did you?

Yes, I echo everything that I just heard. I really like it. I have a question about the scenario of not making these changes with the demand growing. Is it that then the market will crash because we just don't have enough places to plug it or like how? dark it looks if we don't do this actually because it's almost like okay it sounds like we have to do it and we have to do it now and there's just no other path right and yes to do it but yeah i mean that's a great question i haven't done a whole lot of research into dystopian options but um i think

that likely it would just mean less people want to be here in Bothell. They aren't going to want to come here as much, and I think that's not what we want. People are going to be less likely to live here. I think with the way that the housing market is going and the way that gas prices are going, there's going to be a huge amount of people that are living in multifamily housing who own electric vehicles. And so if the city of Bothell doesn't have that, they're just not going to live here because other places nearby are. are doing this, yeah.

And just to add to that, the growth projections that we know that we talked about around this table, and the work that was completed in 2024. We anticipate that growth of multifamily, and then all of the things that will go with it, mixed-use, commercial, to be coming along as well. So we'd miss out on that opportunity if we delay this idea, at least, and kind of figure it out and identify what the best threshold is.

I would also just add that Likely if we don't do this now, people are going to try to do it later, and that's when the retrofit costs come in and the complicated utility plans and difficult permitting scenarios. So that's kind of why we're trying to think about it early.

Just one thing that I do want to let go the affordability piece I actually do believe that we shouldn't have the exception precisely for that because then it will be something that may create even more of a disadvantage so Yeah, that's my other strong comment

AND THE GOOD THING ABOUT THAT, BECAUSE WE GOT RID OF PARKING MINIMUMS, IT'S THE PARKING, THE PERCENTAGE OF EV STALLS IS BASED ON THE NUMBER OF STALLS PROPOSED. SO WE DON'T IDENTIFY MARKET RATE VERSUS AFFORDABLE, HAVE TO PROVIDE X NUMBER OF STALLS FOR THOSE DIFFERENT USES. SO SOME CITIES DO HAVE THAT AND THEY DO NEED TO, THEY ARE GRAPPLING WITH WHAT TO DO. development decides how many parking stalls total they want to construct. And then these percentages would just look at, okay, you, you put in 50 stalls for however many units you wanted. Here's the percentage that you need to follow. So it wouldn't, it wouldn't have an impact without doing anything.

Okay, seeing no further questions or comments from commissioners. Yeah, Commissioner Westbrook.

Commissioner Westbrook, did you get enough feedback from us?

Yeah, I think that's a really good start. I appreciate your comments on affordable housing. That feels clear. We can move forward that way, discuss with my team. Yeah, I really appreciate your time tonight. I think that's great.

Well, thank you for your very well-researched presentation for us today. It's an exciting avenue for us to begin considering. The green building codes, as some of the commissioners, I think you can see some interest there. So thank you. Thank you for that presentation. Great information. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It was great. I look forward to discussing it further in the future. Thank you. The final study session tonight is an update on the tree code from senior planner Cameron Colvin.

And as I want to take the opportunity as they take their seats, you all know Cameron, I want to introduce Gabriela Gulzarian, who is our new urban forester, Bothell's first urban forester. Very excited to have her join the team. As they kick off the intro, I'm going to pull up the slides and drive from over here.

While Christian is finishing getting the slides pulled up, I can give just a brief intro for this item. I know we're getting late here, so this will be a pretty brief update. Mostly just want to provide you all with an update on the engagement work associated with the tree code updates and how we'll be taking that feedback to inform the draft code that we'll be working on over the August recess and then bringing back to you all later this year. And next slide. And next slide. Okay, so just in terms of status update, as I mentioned, we have finished the first round of engagement, which involved an internal workshop with city staff and subject matter experts across various departments. We also hosted a series of focus group meetings with members of the public, and we'll be utilizing that information to help inform the initial Next slide, please. So our internal workshop we held in May. We had about 25 participants in total, covering staff from community development, public works, parks and recreation, fire and emergency management. Next slide. And then for the focus group meetings, we held two sessions in June, an afternoon session and an evening one to accommodate different schedules. And in order to recruit participants for these focus groups, we did promotion in April and May leading up to those through our various city channels and had signups through Engage Bothell for that. And we ended up having 50 signups in total. Not all of those ended up showing up at our first focus groups, but we had 21 participants in total across the two sessions. And we do have those 50 signups contacts that we'll be keeping in touch with throughout this process. And so once we have draft code developed, we'll be reaching out to them to schedule that second round of focus group with all of those participants. So I wanted to just kind of run through how we went about these workshops and focus groups. So what we did was kind of create a hypothetical development scenario that is fairly typical of what we are seeing here in Bothell and then had participants kind of review a proposed tree retention and site plan for a proposed development using our existing code and seeing how that plays out in this particular scenario to help identify where things are working well, where there are existing challenges, and how we could improve our existing code. So for the development exercise, the example we used was a single-family lot about an acre in size that is proposing to be redeveloped for townhomes. This particular example could accommodate up to 25 units per acre. That would be their max density limit, and they're proposing 20 townhomes, so slightly below that. And then up on your screen here is the hypothetical tree retention plan. So this is typically what we would see during the review process where, as part of the plan set, they're identifying existing trees on site, those that are proposed to be retained on site, and those that would be removed to accommodate the new development. We shared with participants our existing code requirements, definitions for significant trees, and the percentage requirements. and then ask them to kind of work through the table in the bottom right, looking at number of trees retained. Our particular code looks at the total DBH of the site. So tallying up all of the trees and their sizes, it's 20% of that that has to be retained. So you'll see in this example, they did meet that requirement with 22%, that third column there, total DBH retained on site. And then if you go to the next slide, it'll show kind of how that proposed layout would potentially work out. And again, this is hypothetical and made in Canva and not an engineered design. So some of this is not exactly what we would see in a typical plan set, but at least gives people kind of a rough idea of the types of things that might be going through an engineer or architect's mind as they are working on how they could potentially lay out a site while meeting these requirements. A couple other things that we talked about were our existing landscaping requirements. And so we do have buffer requirements, particularly for multifamily developments when adjacent to certain zones. And so that also impacts the number of potential trees that get planted on site as well. Next slide. So as part of the exercise, I also included the section of our code that talks about what criteria should be prioritized as part of that tree retention process. So how do we decide which trees to keep other than just what we can accommodate as part of the proposed development? And so currently, that includes things like continuous overstory, trees located next to streams and other critical areas, trees that maintain or enhance the feathered edge or ridge tops. Trees that are in good health and have the highest likelihood of survival. Those that are incorporated as part of low impact development. And then finally trees located within designated open spaces. And so if you could go back two slides. You will see in this particular scenario that although they met the 20% retention requirement, they did not follow our criteria for the selection of those trees, particularly areas adjacent to critical areas that could provide additional ecological benefit rather than some of the more isolated trees on the northern or eastern coast. sides of the property. And then if you go back forward two or three slides. So we asked participants kind of following the exercise to identify what areas of the code they felt were working well, what challenges are present, and what they think should change. And then on the next couple of slides, I'll just run through what kind of common things we heard, which I think a lot of these do kind of reflect some of the topics that came up during our prior discussion a few months ago. So in terms of what's working well, people really like the critical area protections and that those ensure that trees located in those areas are retained. They like that we have at least a minimum currently that protects some trees on site, and it does create a process for the identification and protection of significant trees. They like existing open space requirements, impervious surface limits, and landscaping requirements, which all kind of work together in addition to our tree retention requirements to increase the amount of green space and trees on site. Next slide. In terms of things that they felt were not working, retention priorities, criteria, particularly in this example. And so that may be one of the areas of the code that we could strengthen. Exemption thresholds. Currently, our code exempts developments that are less than 20,000 square feet. And so just as we see development trends and lots getting smaller and more dense, that might be something worth looking into and refining that. lack of flexibility in this particular example there was frontage improvements and right away dedication with existing trees there and so some flexibility in terms of the sidewalk layout or design could have helped retain some of those additional trees potentially flexing some of the setback or landscaping requirements on the edges of the property could have shifted some of the buildings and also created additional benefits there. Protection during construction and then long-term maintenance. One of the things discussed with the group was just what happens when after the development's complete and that turns over to individual homeowners. You know, after a certain period of time, we get individual requests to come in and remove trees, so we need a clear process for that as we move forward. Next slide. So in response to that, what should change? Updating retention criteria to prioritize viable native contiguous canopy that provides the most ecological value. revising our exemption thresholds to reflect recent development patterns, establishing or providing more flexibility in terms of other design standards where it would result in additional trees preserved, strengthening our existing construction protections, and then clarifying long-term maintenance requirements and a permit process for tree removals not associated with new development. Um, and then just in terms of next steps, as I mentioned, um, we'll be working, taking this feedback, working on an initial draft code to bring back to you all, um, later, uh, in the fall. And we'll also be following up with our focus group participants and, uh, city staff, uh, with that draft as well to get their feedback on it. And I think that is all I had. So with that, I will entertain any questions that you all have.

Commissioner Kunin.

So I really like your what should change slide. I think you hit a number of really important points. So I want to thank you for that and recognize that. Flexibility is a tricky thing. It can be used and it can be abused. But in the example you gave, I could see a lot of value in granting flexibility for preserving those trees close to that buffer and letting some of the other ones go. From an ecological standpoint, having a more concentrated growth is much better than a tree here, a tree there, and one over there. So properly applied flexibility I think would be really useful to get in there. So thank you.

Commissioner Lever.

Thank you so much. This was wonderful. I have a question around the implementation of the plan, so it's wonderful to have you here now, but what are some of the capacity needs that you foresee with the different requirements? Because as the enforcement component will probably add a lot of work for you, what does that implementation look like in terms of the phases of year one when Because this is a lot, and this is wonderful, and I think it's great, but I wonder how ready the city is to enforce it and really be able to implement.

Do you want to take that one, Gabriela? Hiring Gabriella has vastly increased our capacity to start building and fleshing out what an urban forestry program really looks like. But in addition, we'll be partnering with staff in public works and parks as well to really, you know, have a comprehensive program and help implement this stuff. So if anything to add.

Yes, there's also going to be an element of using code compliance and construction inspectors, as well as I hope to have a very physical presence on the ground. I have a lot of experience in operations, so I will be overseeing a lot of the sites myself.

Commissioner Westerbeck.

Commissioner Westerbeck, I have complicated feelings around trees because, of course, I'm building stuff and I have clients who... sometimes want to chop down more trees than I personally do. Yeah. Sometimes I, so I, for example, I want to agree with Commissioner Kiernan on the ecological, you know, function being primary when you can prioritize that and let some other trees go that aren't, you know, as important. I've got, even in my early architectural career, I had a I worked for a firm where they would identify a significant tree and build a project around it. It was actually a really cool project we did in Seattle years ago that was built around this huge fir tree. So I try and think about that in my work. And so that flexibility to me is really important because I've even got a current one right now, and a big company is going to probably buy the lot and take over. And there's this massive tree that the current seller has called the grandfather tree. And I've been trying my damnedest, excuse my language, but to make sure that they know that tree's off limits. But I can't, you know, once the property's theirs, they can do the DBH thing, whatever. So there are shortcomings, obviously, in our code. Like I saw in the example there, they could cluster a whole bunch of 8, 10, 12, 16-inch trees, whatever, to be retained and then take out the big, beautiful tree. So I'm not an arborist, so I don't know, you know, the pros and cons of keeping, you know, eight 16-inch trees versus one 48-inch tree or something like that. But people get really attached to those, and I can see why they want to keep them. So I'm kind of all over the board here, but I like that we're really looking at it. I like that they've hired you, that we're taking a fresh look at it. I'm always concerned that... Prioritizing keeping trees as much as I love trees as much the next person Will impact how much housing we get built because that's our other crisis I think ultimately housing is probably more important than keeping trees, but I don't really want them to fight with each other either So so again, like I said, I've got complicated feelings, but the what should change I can't really disagree with any of those and I've said this many times before as someone who does work in the design and development space, being able to be flexible on sidewalks, the setbacks, and really do a whole new kind of reevaluation of how we allow people to lay out buildings on sites if we decide that it's more important to keep you know, a 48-inch diameter tree or something like that is going to be critical to us balancing, keeping trees, building, you know, keeping, building the number of trees in the forest we have in Bothell while also increasing the number of homes, which is an acute issue. So that's what I always think about when I'm looking at the tree code is can we keep balancing them and prioritize? I would tend to prioritize the significant trees, but Again, not such that we're not going to get 20, 30, 40, 50 homes that we may desperately need. But to get in the weeds here, maybe we let you cut the trees if you're going to do a minimum density of, 20 homes or something like that, or will, will our code allow some flexibility there, but not for, um, us three single family homes that aren't going to contribute as much to the, our affordable housing goals. So, sorry, I don't have like code written out for this, but I think about that too as well. Like what are we getting for that sacrifice? So kind of random, random thoughts there, but those are the things I think about with the tree code is, um, we've got to keep them, but we also have to balance that with, uh, the long-term needs of residents and homes.

I also like that idea that Commissioner Westerbeck mentioned that if you are going to be cutting down these trees, you'd better be building enough homes to accommodate the loss. Along those lines, I'm a little wonder, I'm wondering how this ties into something we had talked about earlier in the year regarding heritage trees and those kinds of things. I didn't see a mention of it, but maybe like obliquely mentioned to it. Can you just touch or tie that in?

yeah that is a probably a bullet point I should have included as well that is still a priority and something that we'll look at as part of this code update is establishing a definition for like you were mentioning grandfather trees or you know very significant trees

Along those lines, do you guys have ideas about where you're headed with that? Like, what would it what would that mean that once we get that heritage tree and kind of thing incorporated into code? How would it affect?

Do you want to take that?

I have a few ideas that I'm brainstorming right now. Right now I have three different types, three different classifications that we can go with. And I'm currently still researching what is optimal and what is used by the surrounding areas, both in Snohomish and King County. So I'm not quite ready to unveil, but it's definitely going to be coming.

We wait with bated breath for the big reveal.

Okay.

A couple things, if I may. I do think the 20,000 square foot minimum could be reduced now, given how many small lots we're seeing developed. And that's something that would probably make my job a little more challenging. But I think that's, to me, back in the days when lots were just much larger and they were gonna have a single house on them and I just don't you know I could see why people get upset and we just come in and take down every single tree and you know developers didn't work that way back in the 60s 70s whatever that's why there's these neighborhoods with all these mature second growth trees you probably know more about this than me but now it's cheaper for them to come in and just take every single tree out and then rebuild from scratch it's faster and easier and more predictable whatever and I know I'm sure storms and stuff were probably an issue but just the way the way development occurs now is so different than it was so we it seems like we used to preserve more trees because it was just easier but now it's easier to take them all out so it's a whole different paradigm too

Okay. Well, thank you so much, and it was lovely to meet you. We look forward to further meetings with you. Do you have everything you need from us for today? Well, thank you so much again for this really great presentation. Yeah, thank you and welcome. That concludes our four study sessions. for the evening. Are there reports from commission members? If you have a report, you can raise your hand. Okay. Seeing none, how about staff? Are there any reports from staff?

Only item from staff. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, September 2nd. We'll have a few items to discuss. Looking forward to seeing you again and enjoy the recess.

Okay. Fantastic. Yes, there will be an August recess. Just as a reminder, so our next session will be September 2nd as stated by Mr. Gates there. If there is no further business I will entertain a motion to adjourn. Is there a motion? Yes.

I move we adjourn. Thank you.

Is there a second?

Commissioner Westerbeck, I second the motion to adjourn. Thank you, Commissioner Westerbeck.

Wow. The motion has been seconded. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Okay. Looks like a universal aye. Thank you so much. I'll see you in September.