Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the 03/23/2026 meeting of the County Planning Commission. Madam chair, would you please call the roll?

Clerk. Yes. Members, Corona Zabaniano, Devlin,

here.

Rockenstein, here.

Virga, here.

And Borja?

Here.

And with those members present, we do have a quorum.

Awesome. Can you all please join me in doing the pledge of allegiance?

To the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you all. Madam Clerk can we please read the meeting announcement.

Absolutely the county fosters public engagement during the meeting and encourages public participation civility and the use of courteous language. The commission does not condone the use of profanity, vulgar language, gestures or other inappropriate behavior, including personal attacks or threats directed toward any meeting participant. Seating may be limited and available on a first come first served basis. To make an in person public comment, please complete a speaker request form and provide it to the clerk. Each individual will be invited to the podium to make a comment.

Members of the public may send a written comment which is distributed to commission members and filed in the record. Contact information is optional and should include the meeting date and time agenda and off agenda item number to be sent as followed. E mail a comment to boardclerk@sackcounty.gov mail a comment to 708th Street Suite 2450, Sacramento, California 95814. And that concludes the announcement.

Thank you, madam clerk. Can you please read item number one?

Item number one is PLMP twenty twenty five-two thirty nine is the 2,030 general plan annual report for the year 2025. This item is countywide and the environmental document is nonapplicable.

Checking. Oh, perfect. Excellent. All right. Good evening, commissioners. My name is Nathan Sedifeen. I'll be presenting on the general plan annual report for calendar year 2025. We'll be reporting from planning and environmental review. As a note, state law requires us to report on general plan implementation to the governor's office of land use and climate innovation. Additionally, are also required by state law to report on our housing element and regional housing needs allocation or rena progress each year.

So, the general plan annual report encompasses our implementation for the reporting year and we report on one general plan element per year. Before we dive in, I'd like to mention that I'm joined by Director Todd Smith and staff from our Office of Economic Development, Crystal Bethke, Director of Economic Development, and Jared Vong, Senior Economic Development and Marketing Specialist who will be presenting on the economic development implementation today. Here's a brief agenda of what we'll be presenting. First, we'll give a general overview of general plan implementation for 2025. There are a lot of general plan related activities that have taken place over the past year, and we'll briefly touch on each of these.

Next, we'll discuss the economic development element as part of our progress report on a single general plan element each year, as we mentioned previously. Third, we'll go over our housing statistics over the past year, which includes our progress towards our arena. And lastly, we'll cover our upcoming work plan for 2026. So, first, we'll be doing a snapshot of our overall general plan implementation. We've undertaken a lot of general plan related activities over 2025, four of which we'll touch upon briefly.

In the interest of time, if anyone has any questions on these or any non housing or economic development items, I can take them now or at the end of the presentation. First is a brief progress report on the environmental justice element. Various county departments have completed and continuous numerous environmental justice related projects and activities in 2025. We held our annual stakeholder meeting in January 2026 and had great participation both in person and online and engaged in a very productive conversation. Multiple departments from across the county actually presented on their progress for the environmental justice element.

Next, we'll discuss progress on infill. In 2025, we onboarded our new infill coordinator who kick started work on the infill program, established our infill developer council, and we'll be bringing forward several projects to the hearing body later this year. As you likely recall, this infill work was initiated through a workshop in January as well. For our work on the climate action plan or CAP, 2025 was the inaugural year for CAP implementation. Work included the 2024 greenhouse gas inventory report and data development on the urban forest management plan.

I want to note that the CAP is a countywide effort with multiple agencies involved. What we have in the annual report is only a snapshot of what planning has done and doesn't it cap capsulate a full cap report. The sustainability manager will bring a full cap implementation report in late summer twenty twenty six. Lastly, planning undertook a lot of work on state legislation to ensure that the county is compliant with key mandates. Staff, for example, are working on several general plan related mandates, including AB 98 truck routes, SB fourteen twenty five open space element compliance, the local hazard mitigation plan, and safety element compliance, and last but not least, several zoning code amendment packages to implement recent changes in state law.

As I mentioned earlier, for this year's annual report, we selected the economic development element for multiple reasons, one of which was the recent completion of the economic development strategic plan in November 2025. Implementation measures within the economic development element can be bucketed into four main categories, One of which is revitalizing commercial areas, another is attracting and retaining businesses, supporting local arts and culture, and last but not least, conducting outreach which includes outreach to local businesses. These categories encompass a total of 59 implementation measures, all of which are completed or currently in progress. There are four main implementation agencies for this element. However, do want to note that, in reality, all departments are involved to some degree in facilitating economic development within the county.

Granted, here are some of the agencies who are tasked with implementing the economic development element that was the rhyme, sorry through its implementation measures, most being assigned to the Office of Economic Development and Planning and Environmental Review. Next, I will hand it off to Jared Vong from the Office of Economic Development to describe their efforts through 2025.

Good evening, planning commissioners. My name is Jerry Vong and I'm a senior economic development specialist with the Sacramento County's Office of Economic Development, also known as OED. And as Nathan stated, OED and under implementing agencies have completed 36 out of the 59 measures. However, I would like to note that even though we completed these measures, economic development is much more than hitting milestones and goals. A lot of the implementation measures are going to be continuous, and some of the 23 in progress will remain ongoing as well.

Because in order to hit those four main goals stated earlier, we have to continue evolving and supporting our county with an emphasis on the unincorporated communities. And with this slide, you will see a lot of the great work that OED performed in 2025 calendar year. The first questions that come to mind are how does OED get these results and why? In broad terms, economic development is about business attraction, retention and expansion to provide the community with the cliche saying of a great place to live, work and play. OED has four divisions that works towards these goals, but the two most relevant divisions, business development and business assistance, support those goals the most.

Business development is the larger scale of business support. OED provides site selection services by working with developers, and businesses find sites that best fit not only our county requirements, but also their needs when it comes to infrastructure and certain site specifications such as clear, clear heights or dock requirements they may have. This support that OED provided has led to eight industrial projects with significant investment in jobs and capital investment back to the county. The business development team does a great job of supporting new businesses and expansions into our county, but the business assistance team comprised of our small business liaison and business environmental resource center, also known as BERC, provide business support to the heart of our communities, which are our small businesses and entrepreneurs. The Business Assistance Team supports our commercial supports our commercial corridors and small businesses by providing resources, permitting assistance, or sustainability guidance.

For example, one of the six thirty seven business requests that OED supported was with an entrepreneur who only spoke Cantonese in the South Sacramento environmental justice area. Fortunately for her, I speak broken Cantonese, And somehow, I was able to guide her, on how to apply for a business adviser through our Sac Valley Small Business Development Center, and also how to apply for a business license through our county processes as well too whenever she's ready for her sustainable chicken coop ideas to hit the market. And, you know, now she may not become a billionaire, or maybe she will, but without that assistance and connection, she would not have even had the opportunity to try. And let me tell you, I love my parents, but my parents have never left me a voicemail saying how grateful they were. So this was this was really good that I can use that against them.

In addition to just providing technical assistance for our commercial corridors and small businesses, safe and clean business environments are critical to supporting local businesses. Business owners have a lot under plates already, and safety and stable business environment should not be one of those problems. OED coordinates with the district attorney's office to offer the business watch program. The business watch program brings together OED, DA's office, sheriff, highway patrol, county supervisor staff, businesses, and other relevant agencies to address issues relating to vandalism, trespassing, and other and other public safety concerns. There are nine different business watches located throughout the county, five of them being in the environmental justice areas, and then 97 business watch meetings were held last calendar year.

The business watch program provides direct access to resources for business owners and has led to less vacancies, public safety concerns, and access to services for our most vulnerable communities. There have been several business watches that have dissolved over the years because the areas had either improved or they sometimes led to the creation of property business improvement districts or PBITS. Not every business is able to attend these business watch meetings based on their schedule and that is why it's also important for OED to conduct on-site business site visits. Seven thirteen site visits were performed last year. These site visits are either coordinated by our department directly or with local chambers of commerce, PBIDS, or utility partners. These site visits allow OED to survey the business community see

Oh, to survey the business community, see

how how business climate is, what challenges they have faced, and connecting them with resources. So not only is providing technical support important, but providing safe and clean environments is all part of the bigger picture of commercial corridor support. I mentioned a lot about collaboration with other agencies or business community members, and that's because partnerships are important. OED would love to be everywhere at once, but we can't be everywhere. And sometimes we aren't wanted everywhere.

We don't take that personal. Being a government agency has its reputation, and that is where we can rely on our local chambers and community based organizations to perform outreach. For instance, we partnered with 15 community based organizations to deliver nearly 2,000,000 recovery funding through the American Rescue Plan Act for ongoing COVID nineteen recovery efforts. And through our Cultural Arts Rewards program, we delivered 336,000 in grants to 69 local arts and cultural nonprofit organizations. OED also partners with other organizations such as the California Capital Financial Development Corporation to host 34 training seminars and workshops.

Partnerships are vital in supporting our local arts and culture and conducting outreach, especially in communities that have historically been underserved. Now I've talked a lot about how and what we have done to implement the 36 economic development measures we accomplished. However, how do we move forward with the remaining 23 economic development measures? With the recent approval of our Economic Development Strategic Plan or EDSP at the 2025, you can see that it aligns with our remaining measures. So how do these three elements here listed resources, communication and partnerships apply to the general plan and other accounting priorities such as environmental justice and climate action plan?

The resource element is about continuing and advancing our business development and business assistance services by continuing to attract growing industries in our priority sectors and supporting and revitalizing commercial areas in coordination with the county's info coordinator and community development departments. OOD performed great work last year, we hope to make even further progress on the implementation measures. And in order to do that, to provide more resources for businesses, it ties directly with the communication element. When our consultant HRNA was performing interviews with our focus groups, some of the common points that came up was about how OOD was doing the great work, but there were still many that do not know of the services and the resources that we offer. OOD will expand our efforts to perform more outreach as outlined by the general plan and the EDSP by increasing our social media presence, coordinating with the county's public information office, and continuing to perform site visits and community meetings.

Like I mentioned before, economic development cannot happen in silos, and the resources and outreach needs to be coordinated effort through our partnerships in order to ensure that OED is reaching underserved communities, supporting site readiness, and promoting arts and culture to increase the quality of life in our county. These three elements lay out the framework on how OED will work towards accomplishing the remaining economic development measures outlined in the general plan. And I will now turn it back to Nathan for the housing element.

All right. Thank you, Jared, so much for that portion of the presentation. Economic development is, as you can see, the heart of the county. And we really wanted to highlight for this year for our report. Excuse me one second while I adjust.

So, we've given an overview of our general plan implementation. So, next, we're moving on to our discussion about the housing element, which will encompass most of this presentation. We'll be talking a lot policy in these slides, but in reality, we're showing both policy and action, facilitating more housing and showing how that housing is actually being built. We want to show what's actually being done as a result of the policies we implement. For most of this presentation, we'll be talking about RINA production, key housing programs, grant awards and funding, and affordable housing production.

I do want to point out, you'll notice we have some photos of some housing projects displayed here. These are projects that are exemplary of housing element implementation. So next, we'll show how housing production has increased over the years as a result of these policies. This table shows our overall residential unit production in our current housing element cycle compared to our allocated arena. Please note that these numbers are for issued number of permits which the state requires us to submit.

This does not represent the number of units that have been built per se, but rather the resulting housing units that are being permitted due to the strides we were making to facilitate more housing. Also, as you might be aware, the county does not construct housing but is responsible for implementing the policy measures within the housing element to make it easier for housing to be built. The permit numbers, therefore, reflect these efforts. You can see that over the years, we've continued to see sustained production in the low or very low income units and also for the extremely low income category that we're now required to report on for 2025. This has been possible with projects that have received funding such as Project Homekey and through projects like Madison Square Apartments and other subsidized low income housing.

This slide will show our arena production, whereas on the next slide, we'll show how production compares to other jurisdictions in the region. So, last year, the Board actually was interested in seeing how the County compared to other jurisdictions in meeting its RINA needs. So, these two charts that you see here compare different aspects of how County met its RINA in 2024 compared to other jurisdictions. I want to note that this is information available on the HCD dashboard and 2024 is the most recent year available as we have not submitted our '25 numbers just yet. The first chart is comparison of the overall RINA overall met between jurisdictions, while the second chart is a comparison of lower income arena only.

Let's start with the first chart. You'll notice that Sacramento County looks like it's trailing behind in terms of the percentage met of its overall arena, but this is because other jurisdictions were attributed a much smaller arena than we were. The City Of Lincoln, for example, is leading all other compared jurisdictions, but they were allocated a fewer number of units, and we are actually outpacing them in terms of sheer number of units permitted. Additionally, the arena production for other jurisdictions is heavily comprised of above moderate income units. From the table we showed in the previous slide, I'll go back for your reference, you can see that over the years, we focused on lower income units arguably more than many of the other jurisdictions compared here.

As part of our housing element, there are many policy programs that are intended to facilitate housing production. In this slide, you'll see that we've made progress on a lot of housing element programs over the past year. Some of these programs are completed in 2025, including, for example, a housing element amendment to formally incorporate our rezone efforts, as some of you might recall, that we worked back on in 2024. We also have an impact fee offset program, which is a three year pilot program that offsets certain development impact fees for projects providing low income housing. And we also have pre application meeting subsidies with the purpose of increasing the frequency and decreasing the waiting time while waiving the planning fees for affordable housing projects.

And lastly, we had as a last example, we have an update to title 22 in the county code to reduce application fees and streamline processing timelines for subdivision maps and map extensions. Other projects that you see here have been initiated and we anticipate them coming to the Board and the commission in 2026. Sorry, my hand I'm a little bit of a waiver, so my hands bumped at the mic. A general timeline for some of these involves holding a workshop by the end of the year. We'll be inviting, the board to provide feedback.

And if, the commission requests it, we can do that for the commission. Here are the state and federal grants we have been awarded over the past year. These amount to $2,700,000 in funding administered by the federal department of housing and urban development, and more than $4,500,000 administered by the state Department of Housing community development. Some of these grants are intended to actually facilitate the development of housing while others are federal state grants for planning activities. The first of which is pathways to reducing obstacles to housing or pro housing, which provides funding for local jurisdictions to identify and remove barriers to affordable housing production.

Next, we have the permanent local housing allocation or PLHA program, which is administered by HCD. This will be used to construct new and preserve existing affordable housing development, provide down payment assistance for first time low income homebuyers, and provide operating subsidies for emergency shelters for unhoused individuals. Please note that these funds are meant to span multiple years and are intended are not intended, excuse me, to fulfill the funding needs for all planning activities. We wanted to highlight some new innovative and exemplary housing projects that have received entitlements or have been constructed in the county over the past year to ease housing production. These projects include San Juan, which is an effort that involve coordination between both the county and the city of Sacramento.

We also have conversion projects, which are an interesting set of case studies like Madison Square Studios, which is funded by Project Homekey. We also have Olson Street, Parktown Circle, and the Angle Road conversion. And lastly, Beach Hill is a ground up affordable housing project that's now open. This was made affordable based on the affordable housing ordinance density bonus. All in all, these projects exhibit the progress we have made and are the result of the funding we have sourced.

Additionally, these are some of the projects we have identified and you can read through the others in our general plan annual report. Next is our affordable housing pipeline. I want to note that this is not Arena, from 2025. This is actually just meant to show more of a holistic view of housing, that is in review or under construction or has been constructed. Beyond what we're counting for Arena, there are a lot of units that are in the pipeline that will hopefully be constructed within the next two to five years.

And again, this is just another slide that we want to show the effort from our various streamlining efforts. And then, we want to show that there is indeed progress being made of these projects. We were able to inventory eight seventy one affordable units out of the nine seventy shown here. So, now that we've listed a few growth strategies from the general plan, one of the others we have in progress are our new growth areas. So, we have newly approved plans such as the West Jackson Highway Master Plan, which is approved in June 2025 and is located in the southeastern most part of the urban policy area in Number 11, as you can see on the map.

And we have two new plans that have been newly initiated and rebranded out of Grand Park. And there are also a lot of new units that are anticipated to be in the pipeline as result of these master plans. For example, the pending plans have a total of 29,687 units, whereas the total units from approved master plans is 70,959 units. We saw even more growth in these areas in 2025, but we to see more to come in the future. More specific information about our master plans is available on Page 24 of the annual report.

And now we're reaching the end. We're going to be talking about we talked a lot about 2025, but next, we'll discuss our work plan for 2026. In sum, it's gonna be a busy year. So we have a lot in the works for housing. We're planning on bringing workshop, for example, to the board on the affordable housing ordinance later this year.

For infill, we are assembling the infill developer council, which will inform other projects such as the North Wye Avenue specific plan in North Highlands. For the CAP, we close to completing a tree canopy analysis in the environmental justice communities, which will lead to our urban forest management plan. As for EJ, this year, we intend to increase our stakeholder outreach to gain more focused feedback on the environmental justice element, and we'll keep working on a project taking place in North Highlands called Blueprint for Belonging, which is funded by the Engage, Empower, Implement grant administered by SACOG. And then for legislation, we have several general plan amendments in the works to keep up with continual state legislation, The key one being AB 98 as we hope to have our baseline modeling of existing truck traffic complete in the early part of this year and hope to start community engagement with some preliminary truck route alternatives by the end of the year. And then lastly, for our zoning code, the zoning administration team, excuse me, plans to come up come before you with multiple zoning code amendments this year, making 2026 one of the most productive zoning code amendment years since before 2019.

So, as you might have surmised, all these activities cost money, including through the assessment of building permit fees. An upcoming community development fee update will evaluate this fee and the projected workload. However, even with the potential increased fee, additional resources are necessary to fully implement the general plan, mandated element specific updates, and for a comprehensive general plan update. In future years, we will need to do a full element update, do full element updates, plural, excuse me, and cap implementation. And these efforts will amount to 7,000,000 to $10,000,000 So we have one recommendation from the commission tonight, which is receive and file the 2025 annual report.

We will be presenting this report to the board tomorrow after which if we get approval we will send to the office of land use of climate innovation and the department of housing community development. And that is it. I'm available for questions.

Thank you, mister Seraphine. Of course. And thank you to your staff that presented. Do we have any questions from the folks over at the dais?

All

right. Since you guys worked so hard in preparing this, might just have a couple of questions if you don't mind. Really appreciate and it's a very thorough work. Can you go back to the slide on the RHNA housing? Yes. Please.

And this is for the RINA table?

The RINA table, yes.

One moment please.

If we were to put a heat map as to where all of the extremely low, very low and lower income housing that were units up to date, maybe in the last twenty four months, if you were to juxtapose that or superimpose that to all five of the districts, where would you say that the majority of those housing have been either constructed or located?

That's an excellent question. I'll take one stab at this and I'll leave it to my leadership as well. They might they have a lot of experience with the building patterns and and permit patterns throughout the county. We As we're putting this information together, that's not something we necessarily do, but we can provide some information for. I'll throw it over to my go for it.

So it's a great question and it's definitely something we could actually try to pull together to have a more definitive answer for you. Jacob Dahl, by the way, Senior Planner with Long Range Planning. I can tell you probably with recent trends we've seen from entitlements coming in, I think most of the projects we've seeing was probably in the South Sacramento and Vineyard area with some other probably opened up more Arden Arcade, Carmichael, where there are more infill projects coming in. But a good amount of these units come from the San Juan apartments projects on Stockton Boulevard, mutual housing, Cornerstone, Habitat for Humanity projects, and those are all along that Stockton Boulevard area. So that's primarily where we've seen a lot of these projects come in and there's several different factors for that which we can get into if you like.

But that's probably what the heat map would show would be in those areas.

Commissioner Borja, Todd Smith, just to add a few more points for your consideration. Slide number 14 shows a couple of examples, I think six, And some of those are the ones that Jacob mentioned. I do want to note though that the Beach Hill Apartments project, the lower right one is in Orangevale, which would be District 4. And then one that's not on here, but it's in the vineyard community is Terracina at Wildhawk. That one is out in, I believe it's District 5, if I'm not mistaken.

It's in between two and 5. Yes. Right, right. Thank you. Does this sound like we have some sort of geographic kind of spread and that it's not just located in one specific area or neighborhood and it sounds like there's opportunities or at least for different building projects in different areas of the county. So that's that's really good. Going back to the PLHA, that's the first time homebuyers assistance. Right? And that's administered through OED or is that how how could how could one apply for that? Does do they have to go through SHRA?

Do they have to go through OED? Do they have to go

through accounting? How does that work?

Jacob, do you want to take this question?

Yes. So, the PLHA funds for our multifamily rental assistance and first time homebuyer program are administered by SHRA. So those are already existing programs that PLHA helps supplement. So if there was a homebuyer or a potential homebuyer who was interested in that, they can go to SHRA's website and be able to find information on there to work through the program.

Understood. Understood. Thank you. And then my other question

to the gentleman who presented about

the Burke, really appreciate it. Thank you. For the BRC, how do you balance or what's the approach, you know, the business environmental resource center? Right? So you're trying to balance sustainability and then trying to alleviate the fees. I'm a like a middle scale or like a mid sized project, but I I the state's requiring me to have either electric vehicles or a number of electric vehicle charging stations as a scenario. Right? How does one approach your organization to say, hey, we wanna be able to comply, but these chargers are are a little pricier?

Yeah. No. That's a great question because actually that's a project that or projects that we usually do actually get contacted for is, you know, that we have a potentially an apartment complex, right, that's looking to install chargers. But feasibility wise, they're like, hey, these cost a lot, right? That's where we actually utilize our partnerships, especially with SMUD, right?

They have a lot of incentives that and grant programs that many are not even aware of. And that's where we're able to kind of connect and convene that information over to them. So that way we can hopefully make this project that essentially wasn't feasible at first a reality for them. And we did actually have a and as part of our sustainable business program, there was a apartment complex that did come in requesting to how can we make this happen, because we see that EV chargers are becoming a trend and we need that here, especially in multi family units. So, that's one of our bigger projects that we've actually have tackled before. Alright.

Awesome, sir. And then, just one other question, creating economies of scale, Congresswoman Matsui just recently announced a couple of million dollars of investment in that downtown yards arena. I'm assuming that our partners over at either the local chambers or like Greater Sacramento or Environment and GSEC, right, are trying to do that. Can you just share with us a little bit about what role does your office play into maybe triangulating all these resources from other partners to say, either it's congressional earmarks or state earmarks that we have a potential project that could be a good candidate for this and then we can kind of pull all of these different sources of funding together to kind of create a bigger project. How does that how does that kind of work?

Does that go through your office, the supervisor's office, or to the county?

Yeah. No. Well, we do always, you know, we do know of potential projects that we would highly recommend. We do work with, you know, our district supervisors if that's within their districts, of course. But, you know, ultimately, it does come back to connecting with our partners, especially with G Sec. They are well, they're one of our partners that we, you know, that we work with very closely, especially when new projects are coming in. So, usually we coordinate with all of them. We're really more of the conveners at that level and then we would submit it if needed.

All right. Awesome. Thank you. And I really appreciate your story about the Cantonese and their families. Does your office provide different language services or is that something?

Yeah. Well, we have two, maybe two or three native Spanish speakers actually. So Spanish is a huge language that we can support in office. But we do, that's again where we utilize our partnerships, especially at, like, our small business development centers that can have translators, we usually connect them with them. So for instance, my business adviser one, my Cantonese isn't that good to fully guide them through the whole planning process of it. But once they're assigned an advisor, they're typically if they have a language barrier, we can find a translator. And I don't want to say the exact number of languages that they support, but it's it's at least in the double digits for sure.

Alright. Thank you. And sorry, one last other question. I really appreciate the slide about BizWatch. How does that work with the homeless outreach team?

Yeah. No. That's actually directly with our homeless outreach team. So, our sheriff's department, we have our homeless outreach team. They actually do attend these meetings. And sometimes even during those business watch meetings, if they notice, you know, potentially some trespassing or vandalism or one of the businesses have mentioned, like, hey, we've seen this person here a few times. That's actually where they have a direct link to the homeless outreach teams to be able to go out and handle that almost immediately. Sometimes even right after the business watch meeting. If not, after that, they'll still follow-up with with them too.

Alright.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Any any members of the commission like to have any other questions? Alright. I I do I do believe that we do have a a staff recommendation towards the end of the presentation. Like to entertain a motion.

This yes. It has

been received and appreciate filed. It. Really appreciate the rest of the staff for working hard on this and I hope that your presentation, heard either tomorrow or next week to the board of supervisors go well. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. Okay. We're ready for item number two.

And item number two is PLMP 2020Three-oneOne-six809Fleming tentative parcel map. This is a tentative parcel map as well as a special development permit and a design review. The property is located at 6809 Fleming Avenue, approximately four thirty five feet east of the intersection of Stockton Boulevard and Fleming Avenue in the South Sacramento community and the environmental document is a mitigated negative declaration.

The laser beam is the top button? There it is. Okay.

It's me.

Thank you. Nate Dobreneck with planning environmental review. Thank you. I'm joined today by the property owner in the blue shirt, Prem Singh, and seasoned agent, Richard Rosenovich, his lovely wife. Project today is 23 PLNP 232202300101, the 6809 Fleming tentative parcel map.

In a nutshell, this is a request by a property owner to divide an existing single 1.5 acre lot into four new lots. What's a little unusual is that you're going to the Planning Commission for this, which is usually for a discretionary project to be handled lower, the subdivision review committee. That's going to be completely explained in relation to its proximity to Stockton Boulevard, the Stockton Boulevard, NPA, and the special development permit because of Florin Creek. Let's get into it. So we are at 6808 Fleming Avenue, just about 04:35 feet or so east of Stockton Boulevard, and we are in the South Sacramento community.

It's a standard rectangular lot, existing home, garage, and three driveways on this one lot connecting to Fleming Avenue. The northern portion of the lot is overrun by the one hundred year floodplain for Florin Creek. Florin Creek is a channelized creek. It does have an existing bike path on the south side and with an existing metal fence already at the boundary line. Interestingly enough, the property crosses over that bike path, over the creek, all the way to the fence line of the thing.

So there's a huge easement over the north portion of this property for both the existing creek, the bikeway and obviously there's a flood zone, and we'll get into that in a moment. In fact, about 47% of this lot, just about half, is covered by the floodway. The context, this is going to be important here, is that that area and we'll call it light brown, beige, is the RD5 zoning district, the subject properties there in the center with that red hash mark. Southeast and west are all suburban residential. And then to the north, have that Florin Creek, as we talked about.

What's interesting is this area in pink right here. You see there's a big pocket of general commercial, and that's where we're going to be talking about in a moment here. Go to the next slide. And that is the result of the Stockton Boulevard neighborhood preservation Area. Back when this policy was implemented, back when the county was doing special planning areas, neighborhood preservation areas, This area had a big lumberyard and there was also a heavy equipment rental operation.

So some of those compatibilities were being considered. And so an area of here was 24 parcels just under a square mile on both sides of Stockton Boulevard, which captured in what's called the Stockton Boulevard Neighborhood Preservation Area. The main goal was to ensure that businesses, like where the NPA calls heavy commercial lumber yards, noisy operators, don't get too close to homes and vice versa, homes aren't coming in too close to the businesses. So basic in a nutshell, 75 foot setback from commercial to residential and 25 from residential to any adjacent commercial. This particular property is surrounded by residential on all sides.

That little strip right here, that is a residential property. So we're just bound by the standard development requirements. Going forward, this lot was it's a legacy lot. It was created back in the day. That's why there's no street improvements on there.

It's one of the last little pockets of these legacy properties out here in Fleming Avenue. Everything else has been suburbanized for the most part. Twenty six years ago, they built a home in the detached garage, and, there was a code violation that was remedied a couple of years ago. The entitlement request is to have a tentative parcel map to divide that 1.5 acre lot into four new lots. And because of that floodway, again, 47% is covered by that, it's really hard to make all of those lots fit.

We do have lot development standards, setback standards, minimum rear, front, side yards, all that. And so in this case, this is where a special development permit is particularly appropriate. So we have one road serving four lots. The rule in suburban style is one road serving two lots. So it's double that. Two of the lots are a little narrower, 45 versus 52 feet. And then a minimum yard setback, the existing house, if in its arrangement, would have a modest setback. The other three proposed lots would have a 25 foot yard setback. The NPA does require development plan review. Essentially, it means an exhaustive review by staff level in going through this, And then a design review to comply with our countywide design guidelines, which essentially is lot compatibility.

The environmental review was an initial study mitigated negative declaration. We received the one standard boilerplate letter from the Water Quality Control Board. And then included in your packet was the six page handwritten letter. We did provide a response to that and tried to follow-up with that author twice by certified mail, no response was received. Overall, as is typical, with mitigation measures, would be less than significant impacts.

For example, four trees proposed for removal, a couple of them are ornamental. And then mitigation would require an additional 25% tree canopy planting because it is in the South Sacramento environmental justice community. So this is the gist of it all, is the tentative parcel map. This is colorized to make it pop and be a little bit easier. That bright blue area to the right represents the flood plain, so no development would be occurring in there.

And then we have one existing, two, three, four proposed. And again, then the, if I can flip this over, proposed Premendo Lane for right here would provide the access point. Some small things to note. Existing garage would be demoed because it's on the property line. They could possibly rebuild.

However, there's also enough room if they want to take access over here. They could maybe build a new garage on that side, 25 foot yard setbacks for the backyards on the properties. We did go to the South Sacramento SeaPank. I did not have a quorum, but the two members there basically expressed general support. They did note that the Stockton Boulevard MPA does have a 40 foot height limit, so technically you could build a 40 foot home and that might be some privacy concerns.

I'll let the applicant or agent speak to their if they have any plans drawn up for those homes in the future, General support for that. And then the design review advisory committee did meet on this item in August 2024, and they did recommend that it be found in substantial compliance with the design guidelines. So overall, we do have that constraint of the Florin Creek Floodway impacting creating the special development permit. The tree canopy, we've already talked about that. And there's many aspects relating to complete streets.

Therefore, the improvements along Fleming would get an attached sidewalk per standard suburban style, so it wouldn't match with any other future development out there. Special development we've talked about, and that last item can be struck. That was a previous iteration, so that would be an errata on that. Overall, staff is recommending approval. And tonight, we're asking the Planning Commission to take the following actions here: Determining that the environmental analysis prepared pursuant to CEQA is adequate and complete and adopt that negative declaration approve the tentative parcel map subject to the findings and conditions approve the development plan review, also subject to findings and conditions and approve the special development permit for those three listed items subject to the findings and conditions find the project in substantial compliance with the county wide design guidelines, and adopt the mitigation, monitoring, and reporting program.

I'm gonna go back to the tentative parcel map. And I know we have the agent here, mister Richard Rosenblatt, if you could speak, but I'm available for any questions should you have some. Thank you.

Thank you, mister Starmak. Do we have any questions for staff

at this time?

Yeah. Commissioner Dublin.

Thank you. This is a

great map.

Could you maybe just kind of speak to since we are, call it, flood plain adjacent here.

Where does the in the event

of a one hundred year flood, which seems to be happening more frequently, where does the water kind of eventually kind of flow and drain?

That's a good question. So two where's the little the creek flows upwards, north being to the right on this map. So normally, you know, all the things the channel flows down here is a trapezoidal channel, typical one you see throughout the county right here. So this blue line represents the extent of the mapped one hundred year flood plain. So that would be the no build area. So that is the anticipated, area that would flood in a hundred year flood should the waters rise in Morrison Creek. I'm sorry, Florin Creek.

And does the does the grading plan include any sort of elevated pad? Are they raising I

don't believe so. We should ask the agent on that. I do know that this little area because the the road has to come in to fire department standards, then you have the hammerhead turnaround. So this little piece right there, they have to accommodate for that because that would be displacing it a little bit as they raise it up to build that asphalt base. And so they have to work out something during the finer level review with water resources for that particular small nuance. But overall, I think the agent should direct that. He's very seasoned in a lot of these developments. Alright.

Any other questions?

I do.

Mr. Rothenstein?

I took a little tour out there. And just to confirm, two of the three driveways will be removed and that will just be the one which is this new lane. And that's on the left of the current existing house.

Yes. The what's per correct. There's a proposed Primindo Lane, 20 foot wide, that would reach the deep lot. Right? 432. Number this middle one here, that's needs to go away. Mhmm.

And

then this one is an optional one. The applicant recently, so we did modify one of those conditions of approval. I appreciate the close read. Because this garage has to go away, the preference would be typically to bring in everybody off of one, sort of the branch and twig model there. However, mister Rosamovich, in consultation with our engineering group, said if you do put a garage in here, it can only be 13 and a half feet wide because of setbacks and whatnot. We we'll talk about it at that time when you come in for that permit, and so they'll make that decision later. But that is an open option to have two on this lot.

Okay. Thank you for the clarification. Mhmm.

K. Looks like we don't have any further questions at this time.

Alright. Thank you. Care for the agent to come up or Yeah.

Would like to invite the applicant that would like to address the commission.

I

do need to be sworn, Mr. Burke.

That is correct. I that's case. You swear that the testimony you are about to give to this board is the truth so help you God? And if you do not swear, do you affirm?

I do. Thank you. Good evening, Mr. Chairman, members of the Planning Commission. My name is Richard Rosenovich. I'm with Erie West Engineers. We are representing the property owner and also the project engineers. We have read the staff report. We concur with their analysis and approve the or I should say we concur with the conditions of recommended conditions of approval. I respectfully ask that you approve the project as submitted. If you have any questions I' try to answer them.

Thank you sir. We did have a question from commissioner if you can explain or at least state us with flood plain. Are there any plans for either grading or sorry, Mr. Dunloplan, I don't want to butcher your question here.

Yes. Think you got it. Yes. So I mean given just that its proximity

to the floodplain, particularly that one lot. I guess, as an engineer, you've gone out there and looked at it. I mean, feeling confident that in the event that it exceeds perhaps, albeit somewhat minor, that floodplain, you know, we're gonna flood this house. Is there any plan to, like, elevate that pad at all? Or how does it factor into your equation as you look at this from an engineering standpoint?

Well, so what happens is once this map is approved, the property owner is planning on building out four lots. He's engaged with a building designer architect to come up with some plans. And the next phase would be to submit those for your develop development plan review. And at the same time, we'll be doing improvement plans for the frontage on Fleming, the Private Drive. The improvement plans are going to be reviewed extensively by all the various departments.

But in your particular case, water resources has set rules. Then you also have floodplain management. So the finished floor of the units that will be built there need to be a minimum of two feet above the one hundred year floodplain. So all that's taken into account. There will be some grading, minor grading. I don't see a substantial grading. And also on the fire department lane, some of that may be in the floodplain as long as the water doesn't raise in the drive of itself a foot above the paved area, it's acceptable. And

while I have you, what is the kind of what do you foresee as the kind of use of the flood plain? I mean, we're not gonna be building in there but is it gonna be landscaped? Is it just gonna be kind of a urban nature area?

Well, actually there won't be any landscaping. Our original plan was to use some of that area for community garden for those individuals that live on that private lane. But we ran into some into some challenging discrepancies, so we said, fine. We'll just go ahead and assign that remaining portion to Lot Number 4. Having said that, there will be a maintenance agreement for the private road and some of that open area along with we've got a small setback and a planner along the I believe it yeah, the West Side. So that'll be all incorporated in the homeowners agreement.

Okay. Thank you.

I should say maintenance agreement. It's not going to be a homeowners association. It'll be an agreement.

Yes. Thank you.

Any other questions from the commissioners? Alright. Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Appreciate it. Madam clerk, do we have any other public comments?

We have not received any additional public comments.

Okay. Do we have any comments from the dais?

No comments.

Okay. I'd like to entertain for a motion.

Move to approve the staff recommendation.

I'll go ahead and second it. Okay. We have a motion by Commissioner Rockefstein and a second by Commissioner Berger.

And that item passes with all members present voting yes.

All right. Thank you very much. Okay. That concludes our contestant items for the agenda. We are now under miscellaneous. Item number three. Madam Clerk.

Item number three is the election of chair and vice chair.

I'm here to see if there are any public comments on this item or Mr. Berg what would be the procedures for this?

There would need to be a vote.

The nomination. Nomination, you can do

it one by one. You can do the chair and vice chair together.

Well, I'm happy to nominate commissioner Borja for chair.

Okay. Second.

Thank you. And

do we want to do them one by one or would you like to nominate a vice chair as well at this time?

Well, we have to do

one by Okay.

We'll do

one by one. I see where it's going. We'll do one by one.

Nominated. Alright.

And that was the nomination by Deblan and or and a second by Rockenstein. Okay. And that item passes with all members present voting yes. Thank

you for your trust in me fellow commissioners. Really appreciate it. Very honored. With that said, I'd like to nominate, commissioner Devlin for vice chair. May I have a second? I'll second it.

And that item passes with all members present voting yes.

Congratulations vice chair devalon.

Thank you.

We are now ready for item number four planning director's report. Mr. Smith.

Alright commissioners good evening, Todd Smith. Just a few quick items for you. First, a little bit of administrative business you will see next month some new power points kember and team have been working on some new formats to make things more exciting for you so you' see some changes visually the general plan annual report was one that's in the new format but some of the more routine projects you'll see have a little more flare, if you will. We're looking forward to those rolling out. Second, I just want to mention upcoming agendas.

Think we briefly talked about this beforehand, they are looking a little bit light. But I don't want to discourage you from showing up because we have a number of big items that are coming later in the year. The general plan annual report talked about a number of zoning code amendment packages. I think Wendy Hartman might have mentioned these a couple of meetings ago. So next meeting, the first one in April, we're actually doing a workshop on the 2023 zoning code amendment package.

And then we have a whole host of other ones that are coming later in the year. So a lot of zoning code work this year, 2026, to get through. But real quick, we just want to touch on, I think the April 27, we have two items. And then in May, we've got one, two, three, four items. June, one, two, three, four, four items on the first one in June.

So they're relatively manageable for lack of a better term. But we do have a lot of work coming that are more policy driven, more zoning code amendment packages like I said. But some of the typical development projects are slowing down. And that's all I've got for tonight.

Alright. Thank you, Director Smith. I'm ready for item number five.

Item number five is miscellaneous scheduling items and the only thing I have is that I will be sending out the attendance poll for April. If you have any conflicts just let me know.

Thank you madam clerk. Do we have any public comments for item six?

We do not have any public comments.

Okay. Barring any objections, we're gonna be closing our meeting at 06:26 this evening. Thank you so much.