Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good morning. Sorry. Good evening. And welcome to I have a echo. Okay. Thank you. Good evening, and welcome to the October 8 city of plan city of Bellevue planning commission meeting. Evening, mister Zimmerman, this is for your first notice. You're not allowed to block the camera with your sign. For my second notice, you will be out of this meeting. Okay? This evening meeting is held via hybrid format with both in person and virtual option via Zoom. Tonight's meeting will provide an opportunity for public comment during the oral communication portion of the agenda. All written comments have been submitted prior to eleven a. M.

Today, Wednesday, October 8, and will be summarized into the record. We have three study sessions item tonight. The first study session item is an introduction to the two neighborhood area plans that we will updating next year as a part of the great neighborhood program, Eastgate and Factorio. The second study session item is our discussion about housing opportunities in mixed use areas, also known as HOMA. And a third study session item is an update on the affordable housing strategy. While the Planning Commission does not make a recommendation on this, we may ask to make recommendation on actions that follow the strategy in this plan. Okay. Let us move forward with the roll call. Commissioner Ferris? Maybe.

Commissioner Goppel, it's absent. Commissioner Kennedy? Present. Commissioner Nilchian? Here. Commissioner Belavesses?

I'm here.

Council liaison, deputy mayor Malakutian?

Here.

And I'm I'm chair Hon Lu. I want to recognize that commissioner Ferris has submitted her resignation from the planning commission effective the end of the November. The city will be posting a vacancy later this week, and I encourage all who are interested in serving the Bellevue community to apply. I have something written down that I need to read for you, and I write it down because I don't wanna cry. Chair Fairest, you were always in my chair.

Carolyn, you have been such a special mix of brilliance, empathy and calm strengths. Your leadership has always been thoughtful, kind and deeply rooted in compassion. You have shown all of us that planning is really about people, not just building and coats. We will miss you so much on the commission, but Hopeling is really lucky to have you. Thank you for everything you have done. Your heart and impact will stay with us. Thank you. Can I get a motion to approve tonight's agenda?

I move to approve tonight's agenda. Is there a second?

Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any reports from deputy mayor Momalakotian?

Yeah. Thank you so much. I don't have anything prepped, but I also want to start with saying how amazing you have been. I think when you joined, I was the maybe the chair of the planning

You were right after.

Right after. Or so. Am or so. And what what like, there are many aspect of how amazing you are. I think some of them being mentioned, your compassion, your experience, especially in housing, your kindness, your strategic thinking, how balanced you are.

But maybe the most important thing is how much you want to learn new stuff. Like, you have all of the experience, but you were still willing to learn new stuff, and that's very unique. I have learned a lot a lot from you. You are going to be missed, and it's going to be very hard to find anyone that can be close to you in all of those attributes that you

bring to the table. So thank you as your co plan planning commissioner and as a a friend.

I really appreciate you. And whatever you do next, I'm sure it's going to be as meaningful and adding value to the community that you are always doing that. So thank you. Two updates. Yes. World Cup twenty twenty six. Do you know how many weeks do we have to that, anyone?

It's in June then.

That's not how many weeks, though?

Six plus three, nine Thirty Thirty

five weeks and one day. There are three countries. Of course, we are one of them. It's going to be in Seattle, but, of course, we believe Light Trail would be open and is a great opportunity for us to show Bellevue, hopefully, some match day programming. And the city is doing their best. I think we still need a loss of prep. We are not there. How we move people, traffic, congestion, and all of those kind of hopefully, we do a stuff that is going to be there forever. All of the infrastructure improvement that do is going to be a kind of long lasting. The other so yesterday, we had a loss of debrief on that.

So if you are interested, go and watch them. The other thing that was very important and I'm sure was new for me was our hazard mitigation plan, how we are prepping our city for some future natural hazard. I didn't know we have we are prepping for volcano. Apparently, we are. I didn't know we are prepping ourself for dam failure.

Apparently, we are. I knew about some harsh weather or wild or fire or earthquakes, but there are some stuff that I didn't even know we are going to we hopefully not, but we may face. So that was the main two things that we received, and I talk about the minimum sentencing for repeat offenders. We have some tweak to that. And last night, we now that's going to be an ordinance, and we approve that as a as a body. So any question on any of those topic or any general quest great. Thank you, chair.

Thanks.

Now we're gonna go ask staff liaison Kate Ness to provide us any update about the meeting schedule or any update that you have.

Sure. The schedule is current through the end of the year in your packet. I'm working with staff on agenda items through the first quarter of next year. So I hope to add at least January topics to your next meeting so you'll have an idea of what's coming up. I also wanted to mention that I'm going to be sending out a survey to get your feedback on how the year has gone for the planning commission and any ideas for improvement.

I'll be sending that soon. I got a draft today. And I'll be presenting the results of the survey at the retreat. So your participation is very appreciated. The other topics for the retreat are, the overview of development in the city that you have usually at your annual retreat, and this year, an overview of the city demographics by our city demographer. We

start with the oral and written communication. The total time for oral communication is thirty minutes. The speaker will be show up, allow two to three minutes to speak. Staff liaison Kate Ness will call on speakers in order in which they have registered, either online or in person. If anyone from public has missed the 05:30PM registration deadline, you may well provide public comments if there is a remaining time.

Please use the raise hand function in the Zoom. There are rules adopted by city council limiting the topic about which the public may speak during our meeting. Under Ordinance 6,752, the public may only speak during public comment about subject matters that are related to the City of Bellevue government and are within the power and duties of the Planning Commission. Additional information about the rules, you can find in the ordinance 6,752. Kate, would you provide a summary of the written communication that we received?

Sure. So in addition to the 14 comments that I forwarded to you since the packet was published last week, I have received four comments this afternoon. One person said they would be providing oral comment, but I don't see them on the list. So that person wrote to support HOMA but had a couple of changes that they requested. Another comment was in support of option a for HOMA. A third opposed the amendment requiring the first 20 per 5% of the amenity points to come from affordable housing. And the fourth comment, I believe you have a copy of in front of you.

Mhmm. K.

Any questions? Okay. Thank you. We have total thirty minutes for oral communication before our scheduled business meeting. Each speaker will have three minutes to speak. As we mentioned earlier, topic are limited to matter that we are related to the city of Bellevue government and within power on duty of the Planning Commission. We're going with the speakers who haven't spoken last session, first because we have a limited time. Kate, I will let you to start over.

We have 12 speakers registered or signed up. Everyone oops. Said that they were speaking on Houma except for one person, so I could let that person go first. Okay. That is Oh, yes.

It's I'm getting a lot of reverb, and so I am afraid it's too loud. The first person the person that's not speaking on Ooma is Leslie Geller. Can you raise your hand? Alright. And, that will be followed by Leila, Kadamy, who is also online.

Let me

Alright. Leslie, can you hear me?

You bet.

Okay. Go ahead.

Okay. Hello, commissioners. I'm commenting tonight, following up on a letter that I sent on Monday evening about the primarily Eastgate, a little bit about the Factoria neighborhood area plans for NAP. So I live in Eastgate for over thirty one years, and I'm also president and secretary of the Eastgate Community Association. I've been involved with the Eastgate NAP actually starting in July, and I've sent out communications to my list about it.

My comment to Naid is specifically on the neighborhood scan that happened on October 4 last Saturday morning. Unfortunately, staff scheduled them at exactly the same time, Eastgate and Victoria, so we had to choose. I chose Eastgate, and the ECA VP chose Victoria. I asked two different times about why they were simultaneously scheduled, and I was told both times that it was most convenient for staff to do it that way. And frankly, I think the convenience aspect should be on the side of residence, who the staff wants to talk to.

So I arrived, I think, just before the 10AM start time, and I was completely shocked to see almost 80% of the people there were high schoolers. I have never seen this before in any city events. High schoolers certainly don't get involved in East Gay Community Association events since we've been doing them for six years. I learned after asking that the students were essentially bribed to go on the scan. They received extra credit at school as well as volunteer hours.

They hung together. They weren't interested, in the reason for the walk. Let's see. When I let's see. I asked how come there were all the students.

The staff were super excited about all of the students, and, the rationale is, well, they're 16 now, but in 2044, they'll be in their mid thirties, and they should have a say in the direction of Eastgate, which I don't know that any of them even live in Eastgate because on the sign up, I saw other neighborhoods. The other thing I learned was that anybody who lives, works, plays, goes to school in these neighborhoods is given equal weight in the NAP, and I vehemently disagree with that.

Thanks.

Our next speaker is, Leila Kadame. Can you raise your hand, please? Can you hear me?

I can. Alright. Go ahead. Good evening, commissioners. My name is Leila Kademi. I'm an attorney at Hillis Clark Martin and Peterson. I'm here this evening to provide feedback on the current HOMA draft on behalf of several clients who own property in mixed use areas. HOMA should remove outdated barriers and give developers flexibility to build more residential dwelling units in areas well suited for growth. We support the renew the removal of the limit on the number of structures per acre and the limit on dwelling units per acre. These changes will increase housing supply and bring the city closer to reaching its housing targets.

Please make sure the zoning standards align with the building code standards and typical building types. Allow mezzanines and partially buried floors not to count against FAR. We urge you to remove suburban standards like impervious surface and lot coverage. The recent Wilburton changes eliminated these provisions, and you should do the same in HOMA. Please provide adequate flexibility for ground level commercial and active use requirements and recognize that some of these areas do not have a do not have meaningful foot traffic.

Finally, please be very thoughtful about mandatory affordability requirements. It's difficult to get the balance right in legislation that spans so much of the city. We urge your continued support for a practical approach to incorporating affordable units, and where a site includes both townhome units and apartments to allow consolidation of affordable units in the apartment building. This flexibility will encourage a mix of different housing types. Bellevue needs more housing, and HOMA is a critical step towards making that happen. We appreciate your consideration of these comments. Thank you.

Thanks.

The next speaker is Ruth Lipscomb, who is virtual. Can you raise your hand? Thank you. And that will be followed by Ed Rittenhouse, who is here in person. Can you hear me, Ruth?

Yes. I can.

Alright. Go ahead. Good evening,

deputy mayor Valiquette and planning commissioners and city staff. Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight. My name is Ruth Lipscomb, and I'm a member of the Newport Community Coalition. I'm here to share my enthusiastic support of a Bold HOMA plan to allow housing in Bellevue's mixed use areas. I've lived in the Newport Shores neighborhood of Bellevue for over thirty years now, and during that time, two related things have happened near me.

Housing has gotten wildly expensive, and our neighborhood shopping area in Newport Hills has become a ghost town. I used to shop there often in the nineteen nineties, but not anymore. These aren't localized problems, of course. Housing is wildly expensive across our region, and the city has many underutilized strip malls. I understand why those smaller centers are derelict and frankly, they're sad.

The surrounding density no longer provides enough customers for most businesses. And we all know why housing is so expensive. There's just not enough of it at the right price close to jobs. You can help solve both these problems of promoting housing and reinvigorating neighborhood centers by adopting a forward looking home plan. Allowing plentiful housing can make it feasible for site owners to reimagine and reinvent their properties into neighborhood treasures.

A bustling, vibrant, and walkable shopping and living center in Newport Hills with community focused amenities will truly be an asset for all of us. My daughter recently moved close to Kelsey Creek Center, and it would be wonderful if there were more housing options next to that area too. Please adopt a bold HOMA plan that includes both market rate and affordable housing. For the Newport Hills Shopping Center, having three to five stories of housing makes perfect sense so that there's room to have both abundant open space and a town center feel. It's also very important to me that you don't impose requirements that make it infeasible to develop this and other comparable properties.

We all know that no one develops land if they lose money, so a generous HOMA plan can create a win win win win for the city, for a developer, for future new neighbors who will live there, and for the wider neighborhood. Please do everything you can to make sure projects can be built soon and built in a way that attracts a variety of businesses that are accessible by foot from the surrounding areas, including from East Trail, and that can be community gathering spaces for families, friends, and public events. Thank you for making sure everyone who works in Bellevue can live here and enjoy all that Bellevue has to offer. Thank you.

Thanks. Our next speaker is Edmund Rittenhouse followed by Sean Torsten who is virtual.

Hey. Excuse me. I signed up long before, Ed. Do you see me on the list somewhere?

No. I don't see any of these.

Can I get added? Or

In words and then people, so you cannot answer. Alright. Your microphone. Go ahead.

Dear planning commissions, I'm greatly concerned with the proposed changes to the HOMA. I live in the Newport Hills area, and the increased building height changes to the HOMA that would allow 60 foot tall buildings and the and additional heights and levels to the housing around there is not appropriate for this or other similar mixed use areas. The existing buildings are currently three stories and have maxed out their parking lot capacities such that now the parking areas on the roads are also filled up. The thought of a 50 plus percent increase in those mixed use housing areas is totally unacceptable without a huge upgrade to the existing parking and the streets that the shopping areas rely on. Additionally, the extra floors of units and people will increase the poor commuting that currently exists within the area.

The nineteen sixties street designs are already not capable of adequately supporting the morning and evening commutes. The additional height and people will only make the commuting mess worse. Please do not approve the HOMA revision.

Thanks. The next speaker is Sean Thorson,

I think,

and that will be followed by Alex Zimmerman. Sean, can you hear me?

I can. Can you hear me?

Yes.

K. Great. Well, good evening, commissioners and deputy mayor Melakousian. My name is Sean Thorson, director of acquisitions for American Capital Group. We're a Bellevue based multifamily real estate developer and owner with nearly forty years in this city. Our company has major multifamily projects across the city of Bellevue. I wanna begin by thanking city staff for their dedication to this code update and the planning commission for the opportunity to speak tonight. I'm here to express my strong support for the proposed changes, particularly HOMA option a, and to underscore that this change is greatly needed across the city, provided we implement it thoughtfully. A key consideration is that no two sites are alike. Each has unique variables, such as size, configuration, and surrounding uses that can significantly impact feasibility.

For that reason, flexibility and less restrictive design standards are essential if we wanna maximize the number of sites in mixed use areas that can benefit from your efforts. There are, however, a few areas where the current draft goes too far. One is building coverage and impervious surface limits. Capping building coverage at 65% makes development on sites under two acres nearly impossible. For properties of this size, impervious coverage must be closer to 80% to allow projects to be financially viable.

We have a site that's been that's been preparing for years in anticipation of this code update, and this single restriction would prevent it from moving forward. Two, mandatory retail requirements. Not every site in the city is suited for retail. When a location could support viable retail leasing, developers will build it voluntarily. However, requiring retail in locations where market demand is insufficient turns it into a financial drain on the residential portion of the project.

This needs a common sense approach that considers differences across sites. I recognize there are other smaller issues in this code that can be refined over time, but these two restrictions, if left unchanged, could have irreversible negative impacts on the ability to develop our mixed use areas. Addressing them now will unlock opportunities for projects that are ready to proceed immediately, including one of ours. Thank you for your time, your commitment to this challenging work, and the opportunity to speak tonight.

Thanks. Our next speaker is Alex Zimmerman followed by Saikara Mimi.

Thank you. I'm so sorry, guys. I disabled men. I need to find something. Please. What is I can sit down comfortable. This is problem. Mhmm. Oh, this is very good. I can sit down comfortable. Yeah. I'm not too much sure. Yeah. I need more little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. Oh, disabled man is not very good condition. Oh, right now is a month later. Yeah. Thank you very much for patience. Yeah. Oops.

Go ahead.

Yep. Don't worry. You have my

Your time has started.

Yep. Yep. Oh, here. Good. Yeah. My name, Alex Zimmerman. I don't know. People know about me too much or not enough. Yeah. And so I like you guys. And exactly, I love very much new new chair Kanbu. You know what this means? She's a brilliant. She have too many shiny corner. You know what this mean? Like, mm-mm. Muslim terrorist, Nazi anti Semite, crazy crazy yeah. Crazy. What is crazy? I forgot my memory.

Not so good. Oh, crazy female dog. And what is very important, she absolutely copy her from mayor Robinson. So because mayor Robinson right now is a pure criminal right now. Yeah. She will be in court, I guarantee you. Yeah. For election, what is we have. Okay. I'm so sorry. Yeah. So and she have a very good partner. Mo ammad Mohammad is Iranian Muslim terrorist, number one, mayor Robertson. Yeah.

I'll make it Can we pause the time? What? Mister Alex Zimmerman, if you cannot talk about the agenda item

No. I don't talk about agenda item. I talk about

Did you

hear belong what is belong to your

About order than six seven two five. It should be in the agenda.

Exactly. This your rules, You're supposed to be talking about something, what is belong to

We let the can we let the time go? Okay. Continue.

Yeah. Yeah. I can speak. Oh, good. You're very nice people. You know rules sometimes. So situation, what is we have right now is this co committee, very unique. You know what this mean? Mhmm. Is is this controlled by a local council. You know what this mean? And the local council, for my understanding, is a pure criminal. And the one from problem, what is we have right now, is a camera, but is never show us faces. And I complained to police about this dozen time. Officially, they give me a number of complaint.

Yeah. And I talk about this to manager, to co to government. You know what has been there's nothing changing across street. There's no no normal camera what is can show people faces. It's okay. For me, it's okay. I spoke every day everywhere, so I'm not too much care about this. Yeah. But freedom of speech, very important, guys. Is this a point what is we have? When you cannot see faces, it's not so good. Yeah. I have experience with Seattle. Consul warriors, you know what it's been, for four year, never show people faces. It's very interesting.

You know what it's mean? It's mean Nazi gets top of fascist everywhere in King County because King County, number one fascist county in America, number one in Trump list, one from 500. Yeah. So we were Trump. We were new American revolution. Stand up, slave in happy cow. We need stop and says Bandita.

Your time is over.

Yeah. Thank you very much. No. Yeah. Yeah. Second by second.

Are you Next speaker is Saj Karamini followed by Anne Rittenhouse.

Yeah. I don't see her in the room at this moment. Do you wanna go to the next one?

Yes. Anne Rittenhouse is our next speaker followed by Jack McCullough. Thank you.

This past year, the city has quickly made one housing decision after another. Middle housing, DADUs, lot splits, co living, etcetera. Each of these changes will increase density, eliminate parking, reduce tree canopies, and create both none, both known and even more scary unknown complications for current residents and the entire city. Until we understand what the implications will be with all of these recent changes, HOMA just doesn't make any sense. HOMA's trying to use a one size fits all approach that just doesn't work.

The mixed use areas, properties in the city are very different from each other. Specifically, as you as you have heard many times, the Newport Hills area that this Houma will impact sits on the crest of a hill. Residents moving to Newport Hills are condemned to use a car. This is partially due to this the steep topography of the area and the limit of only two streets to get off the hill, but it's also due to the lack of public transportation, lack of safe sidewalks, lack of say and lack of safe bus lanes to get you on and off the hill. I know because I'm a resident, and I'm a both an avid walker and a biker.

But I have to use my car to get off the hill to go to the library, to my doctor, to the y, to work, to the community club, to the numerous numerous other establishments that I frequent. Many times in the past ten years and again during the recent comp plan work, the Newport Hills residents have come together to oppose any upzoning of the commercial district. And it's unconscionable that we have to do it again. The fact is that additional increased density that this HOMA would allow on this site is not consistent with the character of Newport Hills, nor can it be supported by our limited 1960s era infrastructure, and it will certainly not provide, affordable housing. Do not drink the Kool Aid being offered by special interests, developers, and even city staff.

I urge you to stop the gross overdevelopment of the Newport Hills neighborhood center that this HOMA would allow. It's complete overkill, especially in light of the other housing changes that has been have been passed this year. Redevelopment Redevelopment done thoughtfully that blends with the existing multifamily housing will not only enhance our neighborhood, but it will also be genuinely welcomed by the residents. Thank you.

Thanks. Next speaker is Jack McCullough followed by Sandra Velstar. Can you hear me?

I can hear you now. Can you hear me?

Yes. Go ahead.

Okay. Thank you very much. Council member Malakushin, madam chair, commission members, my name is Jack McCullough. I spoke to you last month about HOMA on behalf of a bunch of downtown stakeholders, and I wanted to speak tonight to reemphasize two particular points. Number one, many of you may have recalled ten years ago, we did the grand bargain in Seattle where we effectively imposed, a mandatory affordability program in the city that was married with an up zone of large portions of the city.

And it is a process that, although everyone wasn't happy with it, has worked. And we've raised over $350,000,000 in the past decade as a result of that. And HOMA, I'm happy to report, is actually largely predicated on the same concept. Right? You're upzoning large portions of the city.

You're going to be requiring affordable housing, and the upzones will lead to an increased residential capacity across Bellevue. So it's a it's a win win, except in the downtown. The downtown is will be suffering from, new mandatory housing tax and will not receive any up zone. There's no increase in capacity, in density. There's no relaxation of any of the development rules downtown, and that's fundamental unfair.

And we ask you to take the downtown out of this and revisit it carefully to make sure that there's equity in how the downtown is treated. Number two, I made a point last month that there has not really been outreach of any kind to the downtown stakeholders. There's a group of two or three dozen major owners and developers downtown who have built millions of square feet, thousands of residential units, and permitted more in the last thirty years. They're the lifeblood of downtown, and no one's talked

to them.

I've spoken to all of them since last month, at least about 15 of them, let's say, and, they're very interested in hearing from the city. And so as I promised last month, I said I would put together a list, which I've sent to you. It's in your packet of the names and organizations that they represent and their contact information. I would strongly encourage the city to reach out to this group. They're desperately they're eager to hear from the city.

They wanna hear about the proposal. They wanna discuss the proposal, its pros and cons, and so far, no one has spoken to them. So as one of your, directions tonight, I would encourage you to ask city staff to make that outreach. We're here to try to facilitate that if possible, but it needs to come from the city. I appreciate your time and look forward to completion of this process. Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Our next speaker is Sandra Vollstar, who is here in person, followed by Kevin Wallace, is also in person.

Good evening, commissioners and deputy mayor. My name is Senator Volstar. I'm I live in Newport Hills, and I am here today to express my strong support for the HOMA project. I'm hopeful that having people living above the shops will enable the return of interesting and useful shops to our neighborhood for the benefit of the entire neighborhood. You might remember me from my comments from a few weeks ago about flower shops and bakeries, so I don't I won't repeat the same story. But I am here today to ensure we keep focus on that vision that through HOMA, we will create lively and interesting places that are sort of unique in Seattle than

Sorry.

We didn't have a timer. We're just gonna go unmute. Imagine we did it, but just continue. I apologize.

Okay. No worries. Thanks. So, again, I am here today to ensure we we keep our eyes focused on that vision that will create lively and interesting places in our neighborhoods by making small family owned shops viable right in our own neighborhoods. But that said, I do hope that the commission members will ask some pointed questions during the study session about the proposal to reduce the requirement for retail frontage from 100 to 50%.

I'm curious, like, do we understand why 100% is considered infeasible? And 50%, like, why? Where does this number come from? Why not 70 or 80? What kinds of buildings will we actually end up with at fifty, eighty, or a 100%?

It would be helpful to see clear examples of that so that we understand what outcomes we are legislating. One concern I have, for example, is maybe at 50%, we might end up with a lot of townhomes or residents only gyms that do not really serve the neighborhood. And in my opinion, it would be better to have, buildings with storefronts and maybe have residents get membership discounts at existing gyms like the Newport Hills swim and tennis club. And if townhomes are allowed, could we maybe require that one out of three have a storefront? That would, I think, certainly make for a much more interesting and unique landscape or streetscape, and it would also be supportive of small family owned shops.

And talking about small family owned shops, I'm curious how many flower shops and bakery shoot we actually expect at this 50% store frontage or 80 or 100. I mentioned my little hometown has three of each. Right? But I'm reasonable person. I'm happy to settle for two in in Newport Hills.

And finally, I was also wondering if we could explore, connecting the Houma areas directly through adjacent lots by, pathways for walking and rolling. Because right now, they're often fenced off, which I think is a little. It's kind of ridiculous, like a have a neighborhood center fenced off from the the adjacent apartment lot. So, yeah, I almost wanna say commissioners tear down this wall. But, yeah, that that's my comments. Thank you for your time.

Next speaker is Kevin Wallace followed by Jody Alberts. And based on the time, I think Jody Alberts will be the last speaker.

You. The comprehensive plan calls for the creation of 14,500 housing units in downtown between 2019 and 2044. Through 2026, less than 300 units per year will have been produced in downtown. So for the next seventeen years, we will need to average 700, more than double. That will not happen with the land use codes as it is today, and the current draft HOMA only makes it worse.

HOMA proposes a new mandatory fee for affordable housing without providing any material benefit to offset the cost. My request is that you allow payment of the fee as an amenity option but not mandated. But if you decide to mandate this additional burden, at the very least, take the opportunity to apply the same benefits you and the council authorized in the Wilburton Luca, such as eliminating the requirements for build to line, trigger height, and visitor parking for all buildings, and floor plate limits and step backs in mid rise buildings. All of these things are currently allowed by the Wilburton Luca, but not downtown, and all of the other changes the chamber suggests are consistent with or even more restrictive than the Wilburton Luca. So making these changes would provide at least some level of incentive to offset the mandatory affordable housing fee.

The staff memo indicates that changes should be left for yet another land use code process, but yet staff proposes to change the rules for step backs, floor plate averaging, and parking. So why are some code changes appropriate for HOMA and others not? We can't afford to wait any longer. I appreciate that staff has restored the ability to count the affordable housing bonus points for the FAR exemption and the additional development flexibility. So now we're back to status quo, what was already enacted in the IOC.

So that's great, but my recommendation is to make the buy in proportionate. So if you provide one square foot of affordable housing for every five square feet of benefit you get, and then to also allow payment of a fee in lieu so that the opportunity is available to more than just apartment buildings. I'd like to see the additional height flexibility increase from 25 feet to 30 feet in the perimeter areas and to allow an additional 60 feet in other areas. This change is not out of scale with the wedding cake in downtown and would provide much more on-site affordable housing or millions in affordable housing fees on a voluntary incentive basis. Finally, the agenda memo says that stakeholders requested that the Wilburton open space requirement be adopted into downtown to replace the 10% outdoor plaza requirement.

Open space and outdoor plaza are not the same thing. Changing the requirement to 7% open space as defined in the citywide code is acceptable. Changing to 7% outdoor plaza is not. The preference remains for you to just eliminate the requirement altogether by removing the trigger height requirement, but at the very least, change it from outdoor plaza to open space. The time is now for the planning commission to consider all of these issues and improve the downtown land use code so that we can achieve the housing goals. Please ask staff to provide you alternatives that allow you to vote on whether the chamber's recommendations are acceptable or not. Thank you. And thank you, commissioner Farris. Appreciate your time.

Thanks. Here is Jody Alberts.

Kate, how many more speakers signed up for us? There were two additional speakers. If anybody wants to take motion to extend, I'd be open to that. But if you are not, I'm still open to.

I I don't see either of them here. Thank you.

K. Okay.

Good evening. My name is Jody Alberts, and I'm with the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce speaking behalf of the plush committee this evening. So first, I'd like to thank staff specifically for some recent dialogue that we had on the HOMA ordinance, and so we appreciate that thoughtful discussion and their commitment to continue refining the draft in the weeks ahead. As you consider the next step for HONA HOMA, excuse me, there are really two distinct paths that the commission can take as as we see them. The first is you can choose to stay consistent with the IOC.

So to keep things very, very simple, make the necessary technical right corrections to the code, which we outlined in the the memo that we sent over, and move forward without the affordability provisions. That approach would address immediate inconsistencies and ensure predictability while allowing housing projects already in the pipeline to move forward. However, alternatively, the commission can choose to pursue the broader affordability conversation, which is some of the stakeholders this evening, mister Kim Wallace and others support as as do we. And this this would choose to pursue the broader affordability conversation and opening up the downtown code more comprehensively to fix the long standing issues that have made housing really difficult to build in downtown. These pop up time and time again, and this is probably a really good time to fix some of those long standing issues.

And if the goal is to discuss affordability provisions, the framework must also be calibrated to make development more feasible, otherwise the code will work against its own objectives. In either case, the chamber and plush committee are ready to work alongside staff and the commission to ensure the final product results in a code that truly supports housing. The memo that we submitted to the commission and staff outlines practical test revisions, many drawn directly from the Wilburton Luca that were agreed upon by several different stakeholders coming to the table. That simplify the code, reduce cost, and delay, and ensure consistency across Bellevue's key growth corridors. And so carrying those standards forward is essential if we want downtown to remain a place where housing is actually deliverable.

So this is obviously a pivotal moment to align intent with implementation. We encourage you to decide which path you want to take, either a limited update on the IOC or a broader affordability reform that tackles downtown's deeper co challenges and to build from there. So thank you very much.

Thanks. Chair, there is one other person who is present. Yes. They spoke at the last meeting on HOMA.

Okay. I'm I'm open if anybody wants to take out. Okay. Our first study session item is an overview of the neighborhood area planning process for the East Gadon Factory and neighborhood. Council initiated comprehensive planned amendment of the East Gaden Factory neighborhood area plan on 08/04/2025.

The planning commission will reviewing the updates to these plan next year. Okay. Try me to pronounce everybody's last name correctly. We have Tara Johnson, planning director and Justin Pangabee Ben Justin, I'm sorry. And Zach Locken, both senior planner in the community development, department, will provide a presentation on the Eastgate And Factorio neighborhood plan updates. I'm sorry for my bad pronunciation, Justin.

Good evening. Deputy mayor, Chuk Kangloo, planning commissioners. Staff's happy to be here this evening. We're continuing work on the great neighborhoods program. Commission did a lot of work on, crossroads in Newport, which are just wrapping up with city council.

And as you may recall, the great neighborhoods program, which was initiated by council in 2018, is really focused on a community driven process to develop neighborhood area plans. So the plans really reflect community values and vision and really inform future growth and, of course, implement some of the policy guidance within volume one. So tonight, we're here for information only. We just launched this effort with city council in the in August. And so we're gonna be providing planning commission with an overview on our overall process, talk a little bit about our approach with engagement for both the Eastgate and Factoria neighborhood area plans.

So we'll start off, provide some background on the process, also talk about the scope, which are very similar to what, what we had and developed for both Crossroads and Newport. We'll talk about our approach with community engagement and then conclude with next steps on the process. So with that, I'll turn things over to Justin.

Great. Thank you so much, Tara. So, Tara touched upon a little bit about the comprehensive plan. I want to provide a little bit more background here. So Bellevue's comprehensive plan is the city's guiding policy document for how the city grows and develops over the next twenty years.

So the document is divided into two volumes. Tara mentioned volume one being, citywide policies around topics such as transportation, sustainability, parks and open space, just to name a few, and that was updated with council adoption of the comprehensive plan periodic update, in 2024. Meanwhile, volume two focuses on neighborhood specific goals and policies, implementing citywide policies at the local level, ensuring that Bellevue grows in a way that achieves both city goals as well as neighborhood specific needs. Next slide, please. And so the primary goal, or objective of the Great Neighborhoods program is to develop neighborhood plans in our comprehensive plan that are relevant, community driven, and reflective of both citywide and local priorities.

This planning process is done, collaboratively with community members who live, work, play, and study in these communities to ensure their input shapes the outcomes throughout the entirety of the process. Neighborhood area plans contain goals and policies consistent with the city's values and vision for the future, and so these policies really provide an opportunity to really kind of localize the community vision and define clear outcomes of what the community wants to achieve. So it's essentially a guide for decision making for where the community wants to be over the ten to twenty years and informs how the city may go about implementing those policies through things like new programs, new partnerships, new regulations. Next slide. So so this has been a program that has been going on for quite a while.

So in 2018, the city council initiated this program to update all of 16 or all of Bellevue 16 neighborhood areas, many of which have not been updated comprehensively for several decades. And so what's important to note about these neighborhood areas is that they often constitute multiple smaller neighborhoods or communities, which really stresses the importance of these plans in really strengthening social and physical connections all throughout the community. We completed neighborhood plans for Northeast And Northwest Bellevue in 2021 and are taking Crossroads and Newport to council for action later this month. Eastgate and Factorio, which you see in orange on the map to the right, are being updated in this iteration. And just to kind of look ahead over the next few years, later in 2026, we will initiate updates to Lake Hills and Westlake Sammamish, which you see in green, and then in 2027, initiating updates to West Bellevue and Woodridge, which you see in purple.

As an ongoing initiative, we continually improve so that in subsequent years, we're building upon past successes and also responding to new challenges that we are facing so that these neighborhood plans can be more, meaningful vehicles for neighborhood change. So for Newport and Crossroads, for example, the scope was expanded to consider, for example, property owner initiated land use map changes, as well as providing a, urban design framework for improving the look and feel of public spaces within these communities. We also continue to improve upon community engagement, and so the team continues to work on fostering new relationships, maintaining existing relationships, iterating and innovating on previous tools, as well as identifying gaps in participation so that we work towards getting more equitable participation in the planning process. Next slide. And so the neighborhood area planning process is divided into four phases, discover, define, refine, and adopt.

In the discover phase, which we are currently in, staff is in the process of identifying community values and priorities and really sharing our understanding of issues and existing conditions that inform the planning process and, kind of conveying that our understanding to communities for them to also weigh in. So to date, we've had a project kickoff, which provided community with an opportunity to reflect on neighborhood level data across the different sections of the plan and to identify what they see as opportunities and challenges to address through neighborhood area planning. We also had an active presence in the community, and we have given presentations to interested groups. We've had a tabling presence at community events, and we have, in this past weekend, have even done walks out into Eastgate and Victoria neighborhoods. As we look ahead to 2026, staff will engage community to identify and affirm the key policy and visioning elements that should be included in the draft plan.

In the refine phase, staff will have complete draft plans for community to review and provide feedback on, And the plans that go to the planning commission and to counsel for review in the adopt phase will address how this feedback is incorporated into those final draft plans. Next slide. And so I'll turn it over to Zach to talk a little bit more about the different scope items for neighborhood area plans.

Thank you, Justin. Good evening, commissioners. The scope of neighborhood area planning touches on three major areas. The first is a full update to the neighborhood area plan, including neighborhood area boundaries and policies to be consistent with and supplement citywide policies in volume one of the comprehensive plan around topics such as land use, transportation, parks, and climate environment. The second is urban design, which broadly refers to the practice of designing the physical environment of a community and within the context of neighborhood area planning, refers to strategies to improve the design and function of neighborhood public spaces so they are safe, welcoming, and inviting for the community.

The third is land use, which sets the direction for future growth as reflected in the comprehensive plan's future land use map whose designations broadly describe the buildings and uses that are envisioned for each type of land use. Neighborhood area plans are organized into sub sections that provide updated policy direction for enhancing different neighborhood assets. Each subsection includes an overarching goal and related policies that align with the overall vision statement for the neighborhood. Neighborhood identity is the first encompassing unique features and landmarks that make each neighborhood area recognizable, neighborhood history and heritage, and the different communities that add to the vibrancy and diversity of the area. Policies in this section will be developed to identify and strengthen the physical and cultural elements that should anchor the neighborhood as it evolves to meet the needs of residents, businesses, and services that call these places home.

Mixed use centers and neighborhood centers provide goods, services, and amenities and housing opportunities for the community. Mixed use centers, due to their proximity to transportation options, are places that draw regional activity. Eastgate and Factoria are mixed use unique mixed use centers in their own right, with Factoria being a notable employment center with proximity to future light rail stop, and Eastgate being anchored by a park and ride, Bellevue College, affordable housing, and human services providers, and commercial and mixed use development. East Case also has a neighborhood center to the south of I 90 with retail and services for those living nearby. Policies in this section help support the continued evolution of these centers as places that are convenient to get to, attractive to be in, and have unique offerings for the communities to access and enjoy.

Community gathering spaces include both indoor and outdoor spaces, like parks or community centers, intended to support different types of events and social interactions. They are meant to be inviting places for Eastgate and Factories' diverse communities to gather. Policies in the sections will be developed to identify partnerships and opportunities for developing, enhancing, and connecting people to gathering spaces within their community. Next is mobility and access, and this is a key element for neighborhood area planning because it is how people safely and conveniently move around the neighborhood to get to daily needs. Policies in this section can inform future capital improvements around streets, sidewalks, bicycle facilities, and trails, future development patterns that are more fine grained and walkable, and collaboration opportunities with transit providers as new light rail and bus services transform how people get around both the city and the region.

And lastly is environment, which encompasses all the natural elements such as trees, streams, wetlands, nat nature trails, and open spaces that foster connections to nature, support local wildlife, improve people's health, and contributes to Bellevue's identity as a city in a park. Policies in this section will be developed to support and expand the neighborhood's capacity to contribute to the health of a larger ecosystem as a resource to be enjoyed for future generations to come. The scope of urban design includes identifying strategies for improving how public spaces are used by the community. They're both policies and illustrations. The neighborhood area plan provides a conceptual framework guiding how the city invests in public space improvements to create a cohesive, connected, and well functioning physical environment.

The community will be engaged with urban design through interactive workshops and activities that will get them to write, draw, and imagine the types of spaces they want to see in their neighborhood. The resulting outcome will be concept plans that identify at a high level where new or enhanced opportunities may exist. The concept map on this slide from the Newport neighborhood area plan explore strategies for developing and enhancing gathering spaces by identifying general locations for potential parks, environmental assets like lakes, streams so they are better integrated and accessed by the community and connections between spaces through better streets, trails, and pathways. The concept map on this slide is a complementary graphic to the gathering spaces map on the previous slide that identifies new enhanced opportunities for neighborhood connectivity, which includes opportunities for better walking and biking connections, improving sidewalks and crossings, improved access to bus stops, and wayfinding signs to help the community members more easily navigate around the neighborhood. And lastly, we have land use.

The scope of land use sets the direction for future growth at the neighborhood area level, including adjustments to the future land use map. Eastgate and Factoria communities are communities that will continue to transform through regional transportation investments such as light rail and redevelopment opportunities. Updates are focused on ensuring that the changes in land use align with the change conditions as a result of these investments, community needs, and citywide growth strategies. The land use scope also provides the opportunity for the city to consider map changes by property owners towards the creation and strengthening of third places, which we define here as pulse as places outside of home or work where people can connect and build community. Third places are at the heart of neighborhood area planning because of how they contribute positively to community, livability, and neighborhood identity, and so they are an important criteria when considering any property owner initiated map changes that are included as part of the neighborhood great neighborhoods work program.

And as a note, there were no privately initiated land use map changes as of the September 15 deadline. Therefore, these will not be in scope for this round of neighborhood area planning. And I'll hand it back over to Justin.

Thanks, Zach. So we'll wrap up our slide deck to cover, some of our community engagement, strategies and approaches. So community engagement is at the heart of neighborhood area planning and one that undergoes, as as I mentioned, continuous improvement as we learn year after year. Eastgate and Victoria, as we compare it to our other neighborhood areas, are unique in its diversity of residents, businesses, faith communities, human services, educational institutions, so you kinda can kind of go on and on in terms of the diversity of communities there, and all their voices are pivotal in creating a plan that represents these communities. So staff's approach focuses on equitable, consistent, and inclusive engagement, and this means staff being proactive, connecting with communities that typically do not engage with traditional forms of outreach.

And so staff offer both in person and online, forms of engagement and also priority, prioritize opportunities for for meeting community where they are at by attending meetings, hosting events, and, tabling in the neighborhood. The project team also works closely with our cultural outreach assistants on our community engagement team, as well as community leaders to identify opportunities to connect with voices that we hear less from in the process and seek out ways to adapt engagement materials in a manner that resonates with those groups. And finally, staff aim for interactive, accessible, and fun ways to participate. The images on the right, which are coming out of our Crossroads and Newport engagement process, really highlights the use of tactile activities to make engagement approachable regardless of age or ability, and so we really strive for engagement to be something that families, friends, and neighbors do together so that they are in conversation about what matters to them when they think about the future of their neighborhood. Next slide.

And so I just want to end our presentation just highlighting some of our progress in phase one. We launched back in August and have done quite a bit of engagement already. So since launching with council in August, the project team held several events to introduce the planning process to the community. Staff held an in person kickoff at South Bellevue Community Center, on September 4, that drew in 56 participants to contribute to one or both of the neighborhood area plans. And so as I had mentioned maybe couple slides before, participants had an opportunity to review maps, data, and key terminology associated with the neighborhood area plans and provide an opportunity for them to reflect upon what our existing qualities of places in their neighborhood and how that might be better enhanced or improved in the future.

Around this time frame, we also distributed mailed questionnaires to all households in Eastgate and Factorio with an opportunity to weigh in on ways of strengthening neighborhood identity, enhancing gathering spaces, and improving mobility. And so the deadline for submitting those mailed questionnaires was actually this past Friday, so we're in the process of collecting the next few or the last few. And, over the next few weeks, we'll be summarizing the inputs we learned from that. This past weekend, we, held neighborhood scans that drew in residents and students in Eastgate and Victoria to participate in what, maybe what some people consider a walk audit of the neighborhood where they had an opportunity to document through writing and photography things they liked about spaces in the community today and ways to improve the experience and quality of those spaces in the future. So the picture on the right highlights one of the tools that we use as part of the walk.

We did photo captions that described kind of different descriptors of things that people saw, that they liked, that they want to see improved, and they match that up with things they saw in their community. So that provides us more, I think, visually rich feedback in terms of, like, how are we connecting the qualities to the places that are there today or in the future. And then I will just mention that we are continuing to do engagement, and we are really focusing on communities that we typically hear less from the planning process. And as to highlight an example, after hearing feedback from city council when we launched regarding the importance of engaging businesses, we updated our engagement plan to do targeted outreach with businesses. So some things that we have done, we've sent out mailers to over 900, addresses in the Eastgate in Victoria, in terms of, different types of businesses.

We are doing business walks in collaboration with our our our our cultural and economic development team. And in November, we are hosting a listening session so that business owners and operators can connect with the planning team. So that's kind of an example of how we are hoping to get more kind of specific feedback and to really learn what their needs are in terms of improving the environment where people live, work, and play. And, we are also continuing to actively engage with Bellevue School District and Bellevue College and having for student voices in the conversation as as as key community members as well and to understand what matters to them in their community. Next slide. And so that wraps up our slide deck. So thank you so much. I will turn it over to chair Conlon.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I can go around, and we ask question. We can start with one round first with two questions or even no comment. Commissioner Ferris, switch him down here. It's on me. You're picking

on me.

Intentional. I just really have one question and one comment. This is probably super obvious. But on the neighborhood that you put up there in terms of the neighborhoods, and you told about that next year, you're going to be doing the other ones. Somerset, Cougar Ridge, and Bridle Trails were not included. Is that future future? Okay. So someday.

Okay. Yeah. Post twenty seven, twenty eight. Okay. All right.

And just a couple of quick comments. We heard from a couple of folks that having the high schoolers attend these scans were they didn't think was appropriate. And I, for one, think it's fantastic. I love the the thought of engaging with students that either live or live by the area. And getting their perspective, I think, is really, really critical.

I also really appreciate, Justin, when you're talking about engaging with business. Because as you're going through this, I'm immediately thinking, especially in Victoria and Eastgate, which is so business focused, you making that extra effort to reach out to the businesses would be great. I'd be curious, talking to businesses, what would be the most effective? Because probably sending an email or a letter may or may not be very effective. So I think it would be interesting to hear their feedback on how to get them really engaged.

Yeah. And I would also like to add, in thinking about what are maybe some unique needs when we're engaging with businesses, some things that we're doing, like what our business listening session is doing in the morning, so before businesses operate, to hopefully attract more attention that way. Again, our cultural and economic development team are in the process of updating their economic development plan. They are actively engaging with businesses, and that is also part of how we're also leveraging some of their, relationships and, connections that they're making to hopefully also kind of have them see the importance of neighborhood area planning and supporting the success of their businesses as well. So, yeah, it definitely is in terms of the messaging, in terms of even how we are timing some of these events so that it is conducive for their participation.

Great. And, again, I would just suggest that maybe you ask a a few of those folks to say what is the most effective way to be able to reach those businesses. So thank you for your work.

Thanks. Commissioner Kennedy?

Yeah. Thank you for the presentation and kind of echoing several of the things that commissioner Ferris went through. I love that you've done community walks or scans. I think that's so helpful. Tours of the actual community for the community to think about spaces and really be involved in the environment that you're thinking about, I think, is an incredibly helpful exercise.

So just thank you for doing that. I I love it. I hope we do more of it. Echoing comments that we've received that raise concerns regarding robust and diverse engagement in these community sessions would just encourage and and ask that we continue to think about a variety of ways, and to your point, times of day and places to make sure that people who otherwise wouldn't be able to go can go. Right?

If I'm a single working mom, I've gotta have evenings. Right? And so just thinking about that in a conscious manner to make sure that those communities that otherwise don't get engaged get engaged. And and I hear that in what you're seeing, so just continue. Thank you.

I also think it's wonderful that we had youth involved, in those meetings. As long as it's not at the exclusion of others and everyone gets to listen and be heard and and so making sure that those events are diverse and and robust will will do that. I know we're at the beginning, and and that's fantastic. Last thought was really appreciate that this is being coordinated with the economic development work and plan. I think that's incredibly effective and really appreciate the outreach to to businesses to better understand how we can support the continuation of small local businesses and medium businesses, and particular in those neighborhoods is is so important.

So really, really appreciate that engagement. Thanks.

Thanks. Commissioner Nguyen.

Thank you. Hi. And thank you all for the presentation. I'd like to start off by also expressing my support for both commissioner Kennedy and commissioner Farris said. You know, I I think it's great and a a nice maybe change to see so many youth come out and voice their opinion on the city and what they'd like to see. So I guess my question is, can you talk a little bit more about your plan to continue to engage young people in the area? Know Bellevue College is right there, so it's particularly important for these plans. What is your plan to continue to keep that momentum?

Yeah. I could speak to a little bit of that. So as part of our early relationship building, our team, think, did a great job of connecting with with with, I think, key staff in schools. And often, that's kind of really kind of the first kind of barrier is, like, how do you get kind of to the door? So we have had some great successes in terms of being able to leverage some kind of existing back to school activities.

So we tabled at TAI curriculum night. We've had several teachers at Newport High School that were super enthusiastic about civic engagement and knowing that Newport High School sits in the heart of Victoria, having their students engage in the process and really connecting it back to what they learned. So I as you mentioned, I think it is continued engagement with with with students and also just showing them kind of, like, how is their input actually making an impact in the plan. So it is our intent to be able to circle back with kind of the same kind of youth that we're seeing kind of right at the onset just so that we are making sure that, like, they understand the value of planning, and they are actually seeing their voice being incorporated into kind of how we are thinking about the future of those communities.

Great. Yeah. I I couldn't agree more, and thank you for the work that you're doing to to engage young people.

Thank you. Commissioner Valensis.

Thanks, Justin, everyone. I wanna plus one, the comment about high school students being engaged for this. I have no comments about the presentation. It was very clear. I do have two notes. The first one is sorry. I blacked out for a second. I have a question before. How how was your experience of walking this area, which is not a very pedestrian oriented area? So I just wanna hear your your thoughts about that.

Yeah. And and me and Zach led separate walks, so maybe I could start off with Eastgate. And so I think it was interesting being able to kind of connect some of the things that we were, like, seeing, like, in on maps in terms of, like, seeing, like, on a map a lack of sidewalk infrastructure, for example, and then going out into these neighborhoods and having participants actually, like, recognizing that, photographing that, documenting that on their on their sheets. So I think it was, I think, a really illuminating kind of experience. And I think what was really interesting from from the walk in Eastgate was there are a number of families, so parents who are participating with their kids, and a lot of the parents were also starting to kind of connect the dots as well in terms of, like, hey.

I never really thought about this being a challenge in terms of getting from point a to point b. So I think it was a very, I think, illuminating experience for staff and for folks who are participating. And, like, we can only choose one route, so, like, our hope is that, like, we do have the scans available on engaging Bellevue so that we are inviting folks that if they have time in their day and wanna participate, that feedback is super valuable and super rich for us.

Great. Thank you. The oh.

Yeah. I will just add, you know, specifically in in Factoria. We know we walked on Factoria Boulevard, which is a a main thoroughfare, and, you know, some of the the right of way there and pedestrian environment has a lot of challenges. And, again, not only informative for us, you know, we've kind of been able to talk about a lot of these things, but especially for students and community members, you know, comparing some of these areas where we have perhaps a narrow sideway traffic going right by next to us. But then there's a couple spots farther down to the north and then on the backside of the mall where we have wider sidewalks. We have tree lined streets. You know, we have a vegetated buffer between traffic and just kind of having a conversation like,

how does this feel? How do you

feel in this area? Are you more likely to wanna walk somewhere if this is the feeling compared to on a narrow sidewalk with fast traffic? And so we can kind of get them, you know, to understand what they can be advocating for and what we're prioritizing in the plan and how that might impact their connectivity and access around the community.

That's great. Thank you. And I hope you can invite more staff to go on these walks so that we can see the challenges of, pedestrian infrastructure, right, in in the city. The the other comment I have now sorry. I I lost my train of thought earlier, is we keep hearing this and receiving these letters of lack of engagement.

And from what we've talked before with staff is on one end, hear engagement is being done diligently. On the other hand, we keep receiving these letters. People are, very surprised that they haven't been contacted before, and I can't believe we didn't hear from you, but we I only heard because I belong to this neighborhood association order. How can we this is a rhetorical question. No need to answer right now, but we need to find a way to to make sure people know that these things are happening so that we don't keep receiving the same comments over and over because it doesn't really make much sense. I'm pretty sure there's an email list. I'm sure this is posted on the website, but we should somehow solve this. I don't know if there's anything

I think, as Justin said, our focus is really we do a lot of work on continuous improvement, so trying to reassess what went well, what we could improve upon. And so we talked about, you know, several techniques, tabling, going to community associations, going to folks where they are. Justin and Zach are gonna be tabling at Bellevue College next week. So just finding all of those opportunities, and then our cultural outreach assistance also help us form those connections. I think I was at the Factoria event, and I talked to a few parents that attended.

They had no idea things we did events like this or activities like this, so they were engaged. So it's encouraging them. So even even you as a planning commissioner talking to your neighbors, spreading the word, or activities that you do, that's helpful too.

Oh, great. Thank you. But I have no more comments.

Should we oh, it's my turn, but we can ask if you wanna second round. Thank you so much. I think I wanna say we have 14 staffs on Saturday on-site, just in on a Saturday. Our staff are working. I was there.

I had a chance to stop by in both locations, and, obviously it was really tangible that this is not my first time attending these community meetings and usually it's like ten-fifteen people. We have like 90 people and some of them were like youth and it was so exciting to see their energy, and they took the pictures, and they were like wanted to upload immediately on the sides. Like, it was interesting to see their energy, and I appreciate the efforts and the relationship that you all built. And as I thought I was mentioning that there's, like, parents that were just like, we want to be involved, how we can evolve. I think that was a really good connection that the parents didn't know about that until they drop off their kids or pick up their kids.

And that was really good. I just bring two items. One of them I just want we have a balance ratio between because we have in the statistic, as Deputy Mayor knows about that, Scoot data means like when we just collect information from one group of people, are basically we cannot generalize it to that bigger group of the people because it's just from one side of the thing. I understand having the use is really important, but I believe we don't collect the information about age or anything. I'm wondering if we can have that data, then we can at least understand that, oh, okay, we outreach to 200 youth or 500 youth.

Maybe this is a moment to come up with elderly population who maybe don't have a good mobility and we cannot outreach to them, how we can approach them. Or a single mom who has two jobs and they cannot attend any of those meetings. If we can just be careful about our data won't be as skewed towards the group of people who don't have a digital barrier, who have a good high mobility and have access. I want to see that one, we will be able to be careful. But I love that.

I don't want to underestimate the energy and how fun was it because I was there. It was so fun. I highly recommend to come. And then the other one was about retail and shops and small businesses or businesses. If we can be the same about those, like have small, medium size and large, we have couple of large businesses. We just reach out to all of those. That'd be good, too, if you guys can target them. Don't go just only a small business and just ignore big businesses or just medium sized businesses. And you guys all have it. Go, Justin.

Yeah. And I should clarify, for our business listening session, our list includes businesses of all sizes.

Okay. Good. Thank you. Thank you. It'd be good to have that category if we know what we only heard from, for example, small businesses or we only heard about medium. Then we will find out maybe we don't approach them correctly or maybe it's not a correct time to reach out to them, something like that. I think that was one, two yep. That was my comment. Should we go second round or we're good? Anyone second round? Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Chair, I wonder if we're the next topic's gonna be pretty heavy. You wanna break now? Quick break now.

Oh, yeah. Let's have a break. What time is it? Like, six. Should we come back? Fifty five?

That's short.

Okay. Fifty fifty three. Okay. We see you here at fifty three. The Planning Commission last heard about HOMO on May 14 when we declined to set a public hearing.

The goal of this study session is to provide information to the Planning Commission on a draft LUCA and gather feedback. Staff will provide an overview of the land use code and zoning changes proposed through the LUCA project. After the study session, the Planning Commission will be asked to direct the staff to schedule a required planning hearing. Christina Galinsk, Code and Policy Planning Manager Matthew Menard, Senior Planner in the development services department and Robbie Speller, sorry if I pronounced your last name wrongly, senior attorney in the city attorney office will provide a presentation on HOMA. Sorry, I'm getting tired.

Thank you, Chair Khan Liu. Deputy mayor Malikutian and planning commissioners, good evening. We are here this tonight with our fourth study session on the HOMA Luka. We have about three discrete components, so could provide a good opportunity to break up some comment between, which will help kind of prompt you there. So since we last spoke in September, there were a lot of concerns related to downtown.

Since that time, we have had a really productive meeting with downtown stakeholders to find identify a number of items which we can commit to updating with the the next draft and also clarifying those that we see as best suited for the upcoming downtown livability two point o. So while you haven't seen all of those updates yet in the draft attached tonight, Matthew will be walking through what you anticipate to come. We feel like there's pretty good clarity around these topics and how we can incorporate them. We see them as sensible updates to give more flexibility while maintaining HOMA's intent. We also, as previously noted, council gave us direction earlier in the summer to incorporate consolidated nonconforming use provisions within HOMA.

So we had a bit of a crunch to get that draft along. We have that language ready for you all, and so have a bit of a two parter presentation this evening. In the latter half, Robbie Sepler will be joining us to walk through those more technical components. So with that out of the way to keep things moving, I will pass to Matthew.

Hopefully, I'm close enough to the microphone here that people can hear me. So as Christina mentioned, we have a two or three parter for you tonight depending on how you wanna break it up. I know we broke the last meeting up around sort of general HOMA topics and then downtown. We can certainly do that again tonight. The presentation is, formatted in a way that we can take a pause.

I'll probably jump to schedule and then back to downtown, if that works for everyone, and then, we will talk about nonconforming language at the end of the presentation. So we can take a pause after general Houma, and we can take a pause after downtown for more comments. And then we'll take a final pause after nonconforming language as well. So we are asking for a public hearing this evening. We were here in October to also ask for a public hearing at that time. Planning Commission had a few more topics that they wanted to talk about. So a relatively brief presentation this evening. We're not gonna go as deep into HOMA. You've already seen that presentation a few times now. We're really gonna focus on what we talked about at the last meeting.

That doesn't mean that we need to be limited to these topics. I know there was some public comment this evening, so if you do wanna talk about anything beyond these topics, certainly feel free to do so. But we did want to make our presentation relatively short knowing that you had three items on your agenda this evening. So the first topic that Planning Commission wanted to dig more deeply into was the economics of option a, which is the mandatory affordable housing program. As a reminder, this is a program that would require all developments over 10 units in the HOMA area to provide at least 10% affordable housing and 80% AMI, and then sort of wall are falling down from there, so less affordability or less units for higher levels of affordability.

It also provides a four to one bonus for that affordable housing. So for every square foot of affordable housing you provide, you get four square feet of market rate housing exempt from FAR. So a big density bonus included in that. It also includes a fee in lieu option and a commercial fee. It is essentially the same as what we proposed in Wilburton, so making sure there is consistency across the city.

This does not apply to downtown. I wanna make that very clear. So our economic analysis analyzed three prototypes and three market areas. So, basically, a low rise, mid rise, and high rise development in our what we'll call low rent, mid rent, and high rent areas in Bellevue, not to say that there's a true low rent area in Bellevue comparative to other areas in Bellevue. We have found through this economic analysis that there are generally poor development conditions right now. Construction is expensive. Interest rates are high. There's a lot of economic uncertainty, especially with tariffs seeming to change day to day at this point. So it's a tough market for development. We are with all of our LUCAs, especially when we talk about housing, looking out into the future.

So what could those conditions look like in three, five, ten years? You know, these are long time frame plans. As we've mentioned in previous meetings and as you'll hear a little bit later this evening, we do have a ten year target for affordable housing at 5,700 units. So, I mean, we're really looking at that ten year time frame. We do think option a is the best way and the most effective way to get to that targeted unit count based on past experience in Bellevue and in the region.

We have found that through option a, there are minor impacts to feasibility. If we include the four to one bonus, when the market is better, so when you are basically earning money on every square foot, the bonus actually increases feasibility with those affordable housing requirements. So in the end, developers will come out ahead based on the package that we have provided here. And just some examples of that, I'm gonna toss it to Christina to explain residual land value. She's much better at it than I am, and then I'll walk through these charts.

So residual land value is a market feasibility assessment assessment tool that allows for, at a pretty high planning level, to control essentially control for the cost of site acquisition. So it looks for the estimated value that is left over available for site acquisition. So holding holding conditions like the characteristics of a project and its its value constant. So if you see a positive residual land value, that generally indicates that there is some amount of availability to acquire a site. Ideally, it should be greater than what it might cost to acquire a site.

There are many different ways that individual developers will look at feasibility, have individual requirements for feasibility, but it's kind of a planning level red face test to say, okay. Our our project's roughly penciling out, knowing that things can vary quite a bit, for individual project characteristics.

Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. So what you can see here in these two charts, you see a lot of red, which indicates poor feasibility. You see one set of positive feasibility, which is that low rise building type. The big difference between low rise and the other two building types is the type of parking that was analyzed with the low rise type. So surface parking was used as sort of the frame of analysis for low rise, where mid rise and high rise use structured parking. In the economic analysis with the low rise parking, it was about 1% of total development costs. When you use structured parking, it jumped to 20%. So, that is the biggest cost driver of, what you're seeing here is parking.

Obviously, high interest rates, you know, economic uncertainty that I mentioned earlier, also large cost drivers. Another big driver is rents. You know? How much you can charge for rent changes this dramatically. So rents increase, these numbers go up as you would expect.

I really wanted to show you too the difference here between the two with the bonus and without the bonus. So as you can see on the top chart with low rise where the numbers are positive, without any affordable housing required, the residual land value is about a $111 per square foot. When you include that 10% requirement, which also gives that four to one bonus, you'll get a lot more floor area out of it. The residual land value goes up. So we are seeing an economic benefit to developers through this option a program with that bonus.

If you exclude that bonus, the the affordable housing requirement does cause that residual land value to drop by about $20 a square foot. And you can sort of see there in the negatives as well is that the bonus is actually creating a much larger difference between the no affordable housing required and the requirement when the numbers are negative because you are adding a negative number for every square foot you add. So every time you add a square foot of market rate through that bonus, you're adding more negative to that. So a small difference for the requirement without the bonus and economic benefit for those projects that are feasible with the bonus. Obviously, it's gonna take some time for market conditions to be correct to make a lot of these projects feasible.

What we're hearing from development, some areas right now, seven stories is feasible, five stories potentially in our lower rent areas. We're hearing a lot about townhomes, which you can see reflected here. So the next topic that planning commission wanted to discuss was the transition standards. We are not proposing any changes to these from the last meeting. So as a reminder, the proposed requirements are a 25 foot setback for any property abutting a residential district.

So that'll basically be any district that was included in the middle housing updates. Those districts all do have at least a five foot side setback and a 20 foot set rear setback. So at least 30 feet from each building essentially would be that setback when we talk about transition area. There were some concerns with very tall buildings being too close to the property line even with that 25 foot setback plus the residential setback. So we are proposing a 15 foot step back for buildings over 80 feet.

That aligns us with building code to try not to interfere with wood frame buildings. Right now, that's essentially the limit of what you can build for wood frame and building height. Wood frame construction very much relies on vertical wood structures to be constructed. So when you add a step back into them, it makes building that wood frame much more difficult, and we'll we'll likely just encourage developers to push the building back an extra 15 feet if we were to drop that lower. What we've heard from stakeholders, especially from affordable housing stakeholders, is things like step backs, and these step backs can have a large impact on unit yield, which can have an impact on, their fine their funding essentially.

They need to hit a certain unit yield to get funding, and if they don't hit that, they're not gonna get funding. So the more we push these transition standards, the more we're impacting housing negatively, the more units we're gonna lose, and potentially the more 100% affordable projects we're going to lose, which is why we have not changed anything between the two strike drafts. There are also limited areas. You can see in red there are the areas that are going to be over that seven story height limit. So over the mid rise into the high rise, the red area is a 110 feet, and the really dark red is the 16 story area.

The 16 story area generally does not abut any residential districts. We have proposed a step down in the South End of Factorio there where it does abut residential districts to mitigate that condition. Otherwise, there are some limited districts where the 110 foot district does abut residential districts. You can see them there adjacent to Factoria, so just to the East of Factoria. Eastgate Plaza, which is South Of I 90, the large block of Red, and then around Crossroads, specifically that sort of corner at the Southwest West Corner of Crossroads.

And I have provided some examples of those areas of what the existing condition looks like there to kind of demonstrate why we think 25 feet is appropriate and sort of what it would look like on the ground. So what we see in a lot of these areas is what you can see on the screen here. This is East Cape Plaza. So you have, these this row of houses directly adjacent to the commercial development, which right now is quite low, low slung. But you do have this vegetated buffer with these very tall trees.

I mean, can see those two fir trees behind there are probably 80 to 100 feet tall. With the updates to the tree code and our protection for large and landmark trees, those trees would likely be maintained through any development. So by maintaining that 25 foot setback and requiring a setback, we do think there's an appropriate buffer and visual buffer as well between a lot of these areas already and what would be built on the site. This is an example that we that I found that doesn't have that buffer. So you can see in the aerial to the sort of north end, there is a multifamily residential development that does have that trade buffer.

But just to south of that where the the red dot is, there is this residential sort of three story building. You can see at the very right side of that image that abuts directly to the neighboring office building's parking lot. What we would see with the transition standards that this lot were to be redeveloped is that parking lot would not be allowed to be pushed right up to the property line as it is currently. They would have to provide 25 feet of a vegetative buffer in that area. So we again, we think that's an improvement to the existing condition.

Also, on these some of these smaller sites with the vegetative buffer and our parking requirements and some of the restrictions on-site, we also don't necessarily think you're gonna get that 120 or a 110 foot building height out of them. And the more we push these step backs and setbacks on these smaller parcels like you can see in this image, the the less likely we're gonna see redevelopment into residential on these parcels. And the final one I will provide for you here is adjacent to Crossroads. So that is that southwestern corner of the Crossroads Mall area that I was mentioning. In the top right of the area, you can see the very edge of the Crossroads Mall.

So this is across the street where you have these single family homes adjacent to another sort of strip mall type development. Again, you see the similar conditions to what's in Eastgate with a large vegetated buffer with large trees. So we think with the proposed transition standards, our current tree code, with the maintenance of these areas, you're not gonna see the large impacts on neighboring residential that you would see if it was just a 110 foot building that was sort of smacked there with no buffer. So we do think that the proposal is appropriate to both balance impacts to the neighbors as well as try to encourage redevelopment and housing on these parcels, but certainly welcome any planning commission input on that. We also, with transition areas, had some questions about the wedding cake and why the wedding cake was not necessarily applied to all areas of the city.

As you can see in the image, that is a diagram of the wedding cake. What we're seeing through Houma is very similar to that diagram. So in our higher density areas, you'll see a jump from 35 feet to a 110 feet and then up to a 160 feet, which is gonna be the top off of the the HOMA districts. So we do think it is a similar philosophy and approach in those areas where there is sort of that wedding cake build through the future land use map. We don't think this sort of wedding cake approach is appropriate in our lower density and lower height areas or for single parcels, so very narrow areas in Houma.

There's just no way of doing a wedding cake without putting a sort of a lot of step backs, which makes building expensive and, again, redevelopment much, much less likely. And as soon as you get to lower heights, you can see here going from 35 to, you know, 70 feet or 50 or 60 feet, that sort of is the wedding cake. That's the first step. So that's really the lower density districts, what we're seeing in Houma. We were asked to discuss encouraging a few uses.

Third places, indoor bike parking, and then specifically stacked flats. So we are already encouraging third places through HOMA, so we have not made any changes here. But we are encouraging third places through FAR exemptions for affordable commercial space, which we would hope to be dedicated to local and small businesses, which are often third places, and those requirements for pedestrian oriented uses. So, as you heard through the public comment, we are requiring either 50 or 66% of the street frontage to be pedestrian oriented uses in many of our neighborhood, our larger center districts. So it doesn't include the oil b districts, which are a little bit more isolated, but it does include all the districts that are in neighborhood centers.

What that would require is that the building is pushed up to backup sidewalk. Comer proposes that it's within 10 feet of the backup sidewalk to allow four street cafes and things like that, and provides a use that people would come in and out of. So, that would include third places like restaurants, bars, as well as other uses that, people can do their day to day needs with. So grocery stores, medical offices, gyms, that would have to be open to the public. I know we did have a comment about resident only gyms that would not count as a pedestrian oriented use.

Those pedestrian oriented uses also are required to have doors out onto the sidewalk there to further encourage businesses that bring people in and out of those businesses rather than being isolated either in the back as they are now sort of back of the parcel behind large parking lots or around the back of a new building. I do want to clarify just based on the comment we had. We do currently require in many of these areas that a 100% of the Ground Floor be retail or some sort of commercial use. It's not linked to the street frontage. It's just whatever the size of the building is.

The whole Ground Floor has to be commercial use. So this is a change from that. We did try to balance the need for these neighborhood centers to remain neighborhood centers with these commercial uses. We've heard desire from every stakeholder that these uses be those uses that bring people in and out and are close to the sidewalk. I think you saw that through the Newport, area plan as well, is that that's one of the policies in there is to push those uses to back up sidewalk.

And we should try to find that balance right between needing those neighborhood centers. And what we've heard consistently from the development community and stakeholders is that our retail requirements are so high that it's preventing redevelopment and is also leaving a lot of vacant space. So making sure that we have sidewalk facing with doors, third places, retail uses, medical uses that serve the neighborhood with the ability for development to be flexible, so setting that floor in a way that makes sure that space can be used and also leaves space on-site for parking to be wrapped around the back for open spaces, for things like that. So that's how we're addressing third places through HOMA. Certainly happy to discuss that as well.

We are also adding requirements for indoor and outdoor bike parking, so we don't feel that we need to give an exemption for this as we're already requiring it. So that's something that's being added through HOMA. It has been added in other sections of the code as well as Wilburton, I believe, added it more recently. So using that language to make sure that we're requiring both indoor bike parking for long term bike parking for residents and outdoor bike parking for those retail uses, for example. So we think the requirement is sufficient to get the bike parking we're looking for without providing any sort of incentive.

We do also exempt structured parking from FAR, so if that bike parking were to be put in the structured parking, it would not count towards FAR in the first place as well. We are trying to encourage all housing types through this. That would include stacked flats. All of our form standards are amenable to stacked flats. We haven't heard a whole lot of interest from the development community around stacked flats.

Really, what we're hearing is that the building code is the biggest impediment, unfortunately, to stacked flats. It's not something we can change right now. The way the state building code is administered, we can't be less restrictive than the state building code. So potentially something for the state to change or some future code updates when we have that ability to do so, but we do certainly want to encourage all housing types through HOMA as is in the comp plan sort of providing that diversity of housing types. Right now, as I already mentioned, what we're hearing is that the row house style is more, desirable style for development, than the sort of stacked flat style.

And I let me just talk about the schedule quickly before we take a pause for questions. We are again asking for a public hearing. That does not mean you would have to make a decision or a recommendation on HOMA at that time. We can have study sessions after that. The public hearing would likely be in early December if you were to, make that motion to schedule the public hearing, and we will certainly provide you with a full strike draft including the nonconforming language prior to the public hearing. We are required to do so, and that public hearing is public notice as well. So it gives the community another chance for input on HOMA. And with that, Cher, I can turn it back to you for questions and comments.

Thank you. I think we can go round only two items, and let's not make a decision. Keep what you wanted. We can do, like, a nodding vote if anything needs to be changed, if it's okay. I have a list. Commissioner Farris, not me. Not me.

I just really have one question, and it's probably super obvious to everybody else. Would you mind going back to slide eight? Those the setbacks. We got a 25 foot setback, and that's if it's right next to the residential area. And then five to 20 foot set can you distinguish between those bolts one and two?

Yes. Absolutely. So that 25 foot setback would apply on the mixed use property, so on their side of the property line. And then currently under the land use residential side. Yeah. On the residential side, you have a five a minimum of five foot setback on side setbacks and a minimum of a 20 foot setback on a rear setback. So you're just sort of adding that on to the total setback area between the buildings.

Got it. Okay. And then bullet three, the 15 foot setback, is that because I remember the discussion this last time we talked about how the building was gonna set back once it's over 80 feet, or is this the whole building is set back?

Nope. So they'd be able to build at 25 feet, they could build 80 feet, and then you'd go 15 and then back.

Because that because it's not very clear on this bullet point, but that's what I remembered. I wanna make sure that was right. That's all I had. Thank you.

Thank you. Commissioner Kennedy?

Should have been ready. This is the similar order as last time.

Apparently.

Thank you. Thank you. That was really helpful. Okay. So so two questions. One was just we've received a lot of comments on the HOMA, on all on all sides of of almost every issue. And so I'm wondering if you can help us to better understand how this compares to other cities. So if we were to look at what you've proposed here, would that compare to neighboring cities? And, you know, maybe highlighting, are we continuing to incentivize development while we continue to protect our tree canopy and our setbacks, etcetera?

Yes. I can talk about that specifically related to affordable housing. Our friends at Arch have nicely provided me a very long list of what our neighboring communities are doing in relation to mandatory affordable housing, if I can find the beginning of it here. But the sort of general overview is that our program is equivalent to or less restrictive than many neighboring communities are. Currently, right, we don't have any mandatory outside of Wilburton, which is generally different than what the rest of the East Side is doing.

Most of the East Side communities do have some sort of mandatory affordability requirements through their land use code. I will sort of run through the ones I have here. So BOFA requires between 510% affordable units at 60 to 70% area median income. So, again, a little bit lower on the AMI, but, consistent with the amount of affordability being required. Isequois requires seven to 15% at 50 to 70, percent AMI.

So, again, just a little bit more aggressive than what we are looking for through Austrian a. Kenmore is requiring 25% at 50 to 80% AMI, so much more aggressive than what we're proposing through option a. Kirkland is requiring 10 to 15% at 50% AMI, so, again, much more aggressive than what we are proposing. We have specifically heard from the development community to not emulate Kirkland's model, and it is significantly impacting development feasibility. Redmond is at 10 to 15% at 50 to 80% AMI depending on where you're located in the city.

I will note also that a lot of these are sort of I know the camera can't see this, but there's a large chart where there's sort of distinct standards for different areas. We are trying to standardize ours to make it, easier for the development community to understand and get through the application process rather than doing it by a sort of spot by spot location on how much affordability we're going to require. And to finish, Sammamish is requiring 10% only in their town center at 80% AMI, so consistent with what we are proposing through home.

Okay. That's really helpful. I found that really helpful. Thank you. Tried to scramble to take notes. It's a lot of information. So thanks. And that that has to do with the affordability pieces of this. Of course, there's a variety of other piece of of it that we've received comments. Do you have a sense for some of the other restrictions where we've received a lot of comments, kind of impervious surfaces, even the retail percentage that you were going through? Do you have a sense for how that compares in neighboring cities?

It's gonna vary greatly, especially impervious surface coverage. Ours, I believe, through HOMA, there is so right right now under the code, we have two sets of impervious standards. One is for buildings, which is much lower, and then one is just for impervious surface in general, which is gonna be higher. We are proposing eliminating the building lot coverage is what we call it in the land use code to only regulate by impervious surface. Those generally range between 6585% of the lot area.

That is proposed to encourage more building and less parking lot on these lots. If you allow small buildings and a lot of impervious, you're gonna end up with a lot of surface parking lots, which is not the condition that we wanna see. We do wanna balance, you the need for buildings and impervious surface with environmental concerns and sort of neighborhood fuel concerns. Right? So if you pave a whole lot, that runoff water has to go somewhere.

Often, it ends up running off into city drains and is not slowed down sufficiently. There are going to be standards both from the city and the state that are gonna require some water retention, that will be built in. But we wanna make sure that there is also some area for greenscaping and potential sort of landscaping around these areas. So by having a little bit required, we think that we achieve that goal. We have heard from a few development entities that 85% or 65% is too low and is hampering development.

So that is something we have heard. It's something we've heard throughout the process that the regulations right now are much too restrictive, so we have tried to open those up. But it's certainly something we could discuss the planning commission could discuss if they would like to. There's no reason that we necessarily have to restrict development by impervious surface. We are proposing to remove a lot of the other development centers that would restrict development, specifically setbacks. So sort of in exchange for not having setbacks, having some of these impervious surface requirements does allow for or require some sort of green space or some sort of natural space to not be asphalt or concrete or building.

Got it. Okay. That's really helpful. And and that was one question. So I'm I'm just gonna quickly quickly go to the next. And it also has to do with asphalt parking lots. Appears to be kind of one of the key economic drivers that's putting us in the red. Appreciated the slide and the response to the request for that economic drill drill down. Really, thank you for for bringing that in. And I think it it highlighted what poor economic conditions we have for development right now.

And and so what I was wondering, if a lot of the drivers for that red is parking, can you can you just remind us where we are with the timing for the state changes that will lower those parking requirements, do would you anticipate that once that change occurs, we would see some of the red getting a little bit better. How do we think about that?

Yeah. So we did lower our parking requirements for residential through middle housing, which was also proposed through HOMA. Middle housing finished before HOMA did. So those have been lowered to one space per unit. There is a new state law that we must complete by January 2027 that requires that we require no more than half a space per unit and two spaces per thousand square feet of commercial.

There are some exceptions to that with very small units or small commercial spaces where we can't require any parking. So what we're seeing and what we've heard from the development community is right now lenders are specifically driving the minimum parking amount. We've heard that in Bellevue. Lenders are not going to lend a developer to build their development at less than one space per unit. So I don't anticipate unless, I will say, unless they're in sort of high transit area, so right next to a light rail station where we've been told they might go down to 0.75 for lending.

So we don't anticipate huge changes to what's actually built on the ground through the state law at this time just because there is that demand from for parking from residents, and banks generally work pretty conservatively to make sure that they get the money that they put out coming back to them. So I don't expect that calculus to change anytime soon.

Okay.

With the state parking updates, we do wanna make sure that we do a robust process to see where it may be appropriate for us to deviate from that state requirement and potentially go beyond the state requirement, which is going to require a huge process from us. Parking is often our hot button issue. So making sure that that is the focus and has its own airtime is very important. By the time we finish HOMA at this point, we are looking probably at no earlier than 2026 for final adoption. So we also don't think the sort of six to eight month lag time between the two adoptions is going to necessarily negatively impact development that much.

It's just not that much time in the sort of development scheme of things. So we think it's appropriate to address those in their own land use code amendment to make sure that we follow the the right process.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks. Commissioner Nietzsche?

Yeah. Thank you. And first of all, thank you for your explanation about parking. That was one of my questions at the last meeting where Homa came up, so that this explanation was was very beneficial for me. And also for getting back on our comments about third places and indoor bike parking, those were also things that I was interested in. So thank you for for your explanation. I guess my main question is, and we had a commenter about this, you addressed it a little bit in your in your presentation. Can you talk me through a little bit on how you reached the numbers for Frontage and just kind of run me through what HOMA does in regards to that and how you see that actually playing out?

Yeah. So I'll use Newport Hills Shopping Center as an example. It's in the neighborhood business district. Right now, the entire Ground Floor of in the neighborhood business district has to be commercial uses, which we've been told and in in neighborhood business, you can then add one floor of residential, and that's all you can get out of your development. So what we've been told is that is much too much requirement, especially for retail in these areas, especially these areas that aren't such high density areas.

We're seeing vacancies in these retail areas throughout the city, but specifically these sort of older shopping centers that are potentially ripe for redevelopment. So in those discussions with developers and based on what we saw through the comprehensive plan and our neighborhood area planning processes, there are a clear desire to maintain these areas as these neighborhood centers, which you've heard this evening. Yeah. And we sympathize with that very much and think that's very important. We've heard that loud and clear.

So to make sure that these areas are vibrant and also more walkable, which is consistent with our comprehensive plan, I'm trying to, instead of making the whole Ground floor of a building be retail, pushing that retail to the back of the street. So activating these streetscapes and encouraging these uses that are gonna have people coming in and out of them, not necessarily with a car as well. That also allows at the back of sites, again, a site like Newport Hills Shopping Center where you have a larger site at the back of site, you can build a residential only building, which may be more desirable for certain building types. We've heard about townhomes. It's more desirable for townhomes.

It's also potentially more desirable for apartment buildings not to have to have that retail element on the Ground Floor. Even in dense areas like Seattle, you don't necessarily have to have that retail element on the Ground Floor. The 50 so in our lower density districts, which is going to be NB and CB, we're proposing 50% of the street frontage, and then the higher density districts are proposing 66% of the street frontage. Really, we're trying to find that balance between what we're proposing for density, so how many more people we're gonna bring in, and trying to set that floor of the retail at a level that can be supportable. We don't want empty spaces, essentially.

Right? You don't want vacant storefronts and allowing the sort of development market to go up from there if it's appropriate to have that demand, but making sure that at least some retailers provide it. What we really don't wanna see in these areas is, you know, New Port Hill Shopping Center turn into a field of townhomes with no retail because we've lost the whole point of that neighborhood center. Right? So trying to balance those two things as well as balancing, especially on some of these smaller sites, making sure that we're not requiring so much street frontage that you can't provide any open space or you can't punch a driveway through for things like garbage collection and parking around the back.

Through HOMA, we are requiring that the parking be to the side or the back of the building, so we have to provide some access to that parking. We think the condition we have now in a lot of shopping centers with the building all the way at the back of the site with large parking lots up front is, we'll say, an old school way of doing planning and development, and we'd like to sort of flip that script again for that vibrancy and that walkability and getting these third places that people can walk in and out. So we are trying to find that balance between the two things. We think we've done a relatively good job of that. I will say, you know, there's no guarantee either way that we'll get more or less retail or, you know, what we're calling pedestrian oriented uses on these sites for an area like Newport, which has a very large mall right now just with some vacancies.

But if you take the whole square footage of the mall, you'll probably see a smaller square footage of that commercial than you have currently, and you'll see that in a lot of these strip malls, I think. We've just heard the demand isn't there. Hopefully, as these areas develop and get more housing, we'll also see the demand for more more of these uses, and more of these uses will be provided. But we're really just setting the floor and hoping to see as much as sort of the market can bear.

Great. Thank you. That was a fantastic explanation. And, yeah, it's a it's a, you know, difficult thing to balance there. So I'm, you know, very sympathetic to your having to pick a number and go with it. I guess my only follow-up question to that is, what is it in comparison? And I'm putting you on the spot for this so you don't need an answer. But comparing to neighboring cities, is it what are the frontage requirements for for that? And are we higher? Are we lower? Do you have you looked at that at all?

It's gonna vary greatly. It's gonna be lower, right, than somewhere like Seattle. Yeah. They're gonna have a much higher density. A lot of places have also required instead of these pedestrian oriented uses, they'll require the whole front inch to be something like that, but they'll also allow for live work units.

So you'll end up with residential on the ground floor anyway, which is really what we didn't wanna see is to include something like live work or the lobbies of buildings as these uses, and then you end up without the the element that we the sort of pedestrian orange juice that we wanna see anyway. So it's you know, we think it's appropriate, right, for these sort of mid we'll say mid density off you know, some of these areas are quite low density in comparison, falling between the Seattle level of everything has to be some sort of ground floor commercial able use in the sort of neighborhood centers to the more suburban communities, which are gonna require very little, if any, outside of their town center areas. Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Commissioner Villavasas.

That's a very eloquent explanation. I have a couple of questions. On on this slide, we're saying that this applies the the 20 foot setback applies to the areas in red. Right?

The 25 foot setback applies to any colored area that is adjacent to any yellow or orange area. So it's not just the areas in red. Any building, would have a setback if it is directly adjacent to a a residential district regardless of heights. The red areas there would step back would also be required.

So I'm looking specifically at the area of Victoria that is in front of the mall that has, like, that serrated profile. Yeah. Have you looked at that zooming in to see what the 20 foot setback around all the perimeter of those lots does? Is are those lots wide enough to support that setback, or is that gonna render those properties unusable?

So this is an example of exactly that. This is in that serrated area. So at the bottom where that red dot is, you can see the residential building. The building to the west there, sort of the left with the white roof is a current office building. Mhmm. Using Google Earth to measure that lot, it's about a 175 feet wide. You can see by requiring that setback, we are totally removing an entire row of parking that they'd be able to put on the site. So we are certainly impacting the ability for them to redevelop their site. We are forcing parking to go somewhere else. With a 110 foot building, parking is going in somewhere else anyway because there's obviously not enough site area.

So you're on these smaller lots, you're probably pushing it. You may be limiting the building size, which is not necessarily a negative, especially in these a 110 foot parcels. Right now, as you know, with building code, you're likely to see those seven story buildings anyway. You're probably not gonna see much over that unless it's mass timber. These sites are probably gonna not be mass timber just based on their location and their size.

So we don't think we're negatively impacting with 25 foot too badly. When we start seeing sites that have a double setback and small sites, you're probably going to see more of that. Those are relatively limited and sort of isolated spots. There was a a Walgreens sort of the north end of town that had that condition where we were really squeezing the building, and you're gonna have to be creative, basically, as a developer and architect. Anytime we take site area away and require a step back, things like that, we are, you know, impacting their ability to develop, but we think it's sort of trying to find that balance between the two.

Does it make sense to pair that provision with an alternative to, say, limit building heights you could potentially take over that space that you're not allowing to evolve because of the setback, but allow to do, like, a three story or compatible high building so that in the case where it just renders your property undevelopable on undevelopable, you could still do something there. And and that's without zooming in and looking at it, but it's just like the feeling I got from that profile. It seems like you might be running into some some issues preventing development in some of these properties.

Yeah. And it's certainly something we've heard from stakeholders as well is a request to eliminate the setback if the adjacent buildings were no taller than the what was allowed for the adjacent residential district. So it's certainly something we could look at and be amenable to.

Okay.

Our concern is a lot of our concerns are now with some of those standards is we are hyper encouraging townhomes, which is not necessarily a negative, but I do just wanna make that clear. But the more we do that, the more we're gonna see townhomes rather than apartment buildings.

But maybe that's the right place for the townhome. Right? Yeah. Okay. The second one is bike parking. And every time bike parking is great. I think it it should be required or at least incentivized. But, something that would be good to see is not only the requirement to provide bike parking bike parking as a chunk of area within a building, which is sometimes is difficult to call it, similar to the trash management, that kind of stuff. Right? But you can optimize that program. Essentially, you could you could provide bike parking in each apartment unit. Is that me? Sorry.

No. It's fine.

You could you could have each, resident bring their bike up into their unit and have a dedicated bike space inside their unit, and that eliminates the area by just providing a little bit of area for sorry. Is that sure it's on me? Oh. Providing, each unit a small space within each unit, providing each owner with the small space in each unit to provide, to to park their bike. That is a way in which you could, alleviate the the requirement in terms of area needed for bike parking just by simply distributing the requirement across all units.

That may or may not be the best option for a given prey, but having the option is usually a good thing. So that's that's my comment about that. Besides that, I I don't have any any other comments right now.

Can someone entertain a motion to extend the meeting to 10:15 or something like that?

Chair, I would like to make the motion that we extend our meeting until 10:30.

Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Thank you. I think I have I love the bike suggestion. I do live in the building with the bike storage, and people don't do that because they get stolen. People leave the door open, they forget to lock, and then somebody comes and stole your parking. Then, basically, do your bike. Then, basically, most of people, including me, I bike inside my unit.

I bring it inside my unit. I put it in my unit. Then it's, like, really interesting, like, how many people in the buildings they use it, and we are a 164 units. I barely see, like, five or six, and I think it's just occupied two parking lot spot. But that was a great point. I love that. Can you bring Slide 11? I think it was Factorio.

Yes.

Oh, I'm sorry. Crossroad.

Yep.

You were talking about all those trees are gonna go be under tree canopies? Like, how? They're not significant trees. None of those trees are significant. Then

So we we've updated our significant tree definition so that all trees that are greater than six inches in diameter at roughly four and a half feet above ground meet that significant category. And so when you're going forward to develop, you get credit for retaining those trees. So, like, those tall trees behind the building, for sure, will be significant trees that you can earn.

The one on the west side of the crossroad, you mean, on the 100 which one are you referring to? I'm just talking about on the left picture. I just wanna see which one is significant because that's crossroad. That's like a

I we don't have, like, individual tree data, but, you know, a six inch diameter is like this, the trunk. So just eyeballing it, like, those mature evergreens are gonna be well over even probably landmark territory.

So Is this the same one as it? Did you guys just change it, or this is the one that Yeah. This is not the one that we worked on it, the significant tree that we

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our updated standards for significant landmark trees. That was we adopted that code last summer.

Okay.

Yeah. I will walk around Crossroad and get back to you about that.

Lots of big mature trees. And, you know, we can't guarantee there is flexibility to remove trees, but it's extremely likely a lot of those mature trees around the perimeter are gonna be prime options for retention. We'll earn a lot of credit in the retention.

Okay. That was my only question, and I think we can go to the downtown area. Favorite part.

Alright. Yeah. So we did meet with stakeholders, as was mentioned by public comment, around downtown. They reached out to us to set up a meeting. We did have that meeting about two weeks ago.

There were some points of agreement between us and the stakeholders. There's agreement on the $13 fee and the four to one bonus being generally fair. As you heard from public comment, there was a request to alter the outdoor plaza requirements to be consistent with the Wilburton open space requirements. So right now, to cross our trigger height, so basically to get a taller building, you have to provide 10% what we call outdoor plaza in the downtown. What we found through analyzing some of the existing applications is that requirement was actually requiring that developments provide more amenity incentive points than they needed to get the to the max FAR in building height.

So it it essentially rendered the affordable housing portion of the amenity incentive bonus pointless. So lowering that requirement and also allowing developers to count more things in that requirement, so not just outdoor plaza, but things like streetscaping and landscaping, alleviates that concern. We did hear from public comment that they wanna make sure that it is open space and not outdoor plaza for that 7%. We totally agree with that. We think that's totally fair.

So in the next strike draft, we will make that update to be consistent with Wilburton to make sure that the bonuses we're providing for affordable housing are actually bonuses and are not sort of being overridden by these outdoor plaza requirements. There was a request to alter the flexible development standard requirement back to what was required with the intern ordinance. So through HOMA, we're proposing that you would have to provide point five FAR affordable housing to provide some development flexibility in the perimeter overlay. So that's some additional building height, some step back reductions, and some lot coverage increases. The IOC proposed that you have to provide point five FAR of, basically, exempt space.

So for every one square foot of affordable housing, you get four square feet of exempt space. So it would essentially be point one FAR of affordable housing and point four FAR of that exempt market rate space. We agree with that as well, and we think that's fair. That's what we did through the IOC, so we're happy to make that changes that change. There are requests for several form standard changes throughout downtown.

We do think these are more appropriate to be discussed through downtown livability two point o, which we plan on starting after HOMA is completed. We think a lot of the form standards, as more major ones that are not just minor tweaks, they need their own outreach and input process, and they need to be focused on more. We appreciate our downtown stakeholders, but there are more stakeholders related to downtown than just the development community, like our residents and the neighboring residents as well. So we wanna make sure that that outreach is sufficient as we're if we make large scale changes to downtown livability or to downtown code through downtown livability, it's on our work plan. It's been discussed with council.

So we do have that list that you you are also provided of recommended changes, and that's certainly something that we will discuss through that downtown livability process after HOMA is completed, which will give us more time to also analyze what those changes might do to what downtown looks like, what downtown feels like, and just the code in general. So we do want to request that those stay separated into downtown livability two point o. As was mentioned at the last planning commission meeting, there was some ask to allow the same square foot of affordable housing to count towards the amenity incentive points and the exempt FAR. So, basically, that one square foot of affordable housing, you'd get four amenity incentive points, and you'd be able to exempt four square feet of market rate development up to 50% of the base FAR in the district. So that gives you a huge density bonus as well as an amenity incentive bonus for providing affordable housing.

There were a couple of comments that say there were no density increases through this program. This is a massive density increase of up to 50% of the base FAR. A lot of the districts, for example, Downtown Mixed Use District has a base FAR of four 5.4. So you're looking at over two FAR potentially of exempt market rate development. So that is, I think we think a quite large, bonus we're giving right now.

That bonus is at one to 2.5 square feet and is then capped at one FAR. So there is a lot of benefit we are providing through this change. We also don't agree that this is a mandatory program. It is still an incentive based program. We are, holding the line, I'll say, and we are still recommending that that first 25% of affordable housing be, or amenity incentive points be affordable housing rather than the recommended or, once they recommend, the requested, may or sort of optional program suggested by the stakeholders.

We through our economic analysis with downtown, we do think for future projects that, at least the fee in lieu at $13 a square foot is actually slightly less expensive for developers than providing the open space on-site or paying the, just over $38 per square foot fee in lieu. So, in future, it is potentially a money saver as well for this development. So we do think this is a a fair exchange that we are asking, between exchanging that open space and towards affordable housing, to try to meet some of those affordable housing goals or at least get some funding to meet those affordable housing goals. We did discuss with you all last time and with stakeholders about exempting pipeline projects, so those projects that are in the application process from these changes. That is something we have to discuss with council.

It's something that council had done through the Wilburton process, and we will we are committing to discussing that with council again through this process too. We know it's difficult if we start changing standards in the middle of these very large scale processes, so making sure that we cover that with council too. That's all I have for downtown. So happy to answer any questions on that.

Okay. Same Ferris. Mhmm. Commissioner Ferris. So we So

I have to give you huge congratulations. I literally had, like, six or seven questions. And as you went down your list, you checked off, like, all of my questions with a couple of minor exceptions. Right. So there was a comment tonight earlier about allowing affordable units to be in just the apartment part of a development and not necessarily in townhomes. I tend to agree with that just just but what are your thoughts on that?

So different project, but we are I'm currently working with Ravi on an affordable housing director's role, which is required basically through what we adopted with the Wilburton code. The way that is written and, Robbie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the land use code also has some provisions for this. The affordable units have to be in proportion to the market rate units on-site. So if you had, say, 15 for sale townhomes and then you had 75 for rental units, the affordable units would have to be in proportion to those two. So if you have 10%, basically, one and a half for sale affordable units and then seven and a half rentals.

I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm having a harder time getting my head around affordability when you come to home ownership. The I mean, the delta between what you'd anyway, I think that's hugely problematic. So I would, I guess, encourage you to go back and do a lot of math around that. It's different on apartments. Those are a little bit more transient in nature. Anyway, I would I would like to see you, like, put a little bit more effort on really doing analysis on that one.

Just a note on that one. And because it is part of the director's role, it would be separate from the HOMA process. It would be through that director's role process, which we are currently working on.

Okay. So in other words, you don't have to address it right today. Correct. We can still move forward to HOMA, and you'll still look at it. Okay. Let's see if there's anything else here. I I went just again. Obviously, you had this meeting with stakeholders. I'm not sure exactly who the stakeholders were. But in an earlier comment, supposedly, you're given this list of all of these owners, developers, and supposedly, haven't heard from you. Something's not lining up.

Yeah. So the stakeholder meeting we held a few weeks ago is organized by Plush, so that's the chamber's land use group. There may be other stakeholders that would like to meet with us. I would encourage them to reach out to us like did to set up a meeting. There's certainly a list out there. So I

think we can point out there were names on that list that were in that meeting. I did not. I did see a

couple of those. Okay.

Let's see. So great.

I think that's all I have for now. Thanks.

Thanks, commissioner Kennedy.

Gosh. I wasn't ready. Hold on.

Do want me to go to next? I can come back to you.

No. That's okay. Thank you. So so this question kind of bridges both topics that you've just gone through and following up on commissioner Ferris' question regarding outreach. So to better understand and place the comments that we've received, I know that we do not have a comprehensive red line for today to review.

Appreciated walking you rocking through the schedule and how we think about, our potential for voting on moving toward an an open hearing, open meeting. We would be doing that on the new revised red line that we are yet to receive but will receive prior to that meeting, which will include the edits that were just discussed, for instance, with downtown.

Yes. So when we hold a public hearing, we have to notice that public hearing. So we'll have to have a complete strike draft that includes everything you would make a recommendation on when that notice goes out, but we'd hope to have another draft of the strike draft in a in a few weeks. With the changes proposed through the downtown meeting a couple weeks ago and the short turnaround and some of the nonconforming language that you're going to hear about, it's gotten complicated to change the strike draft. So we wanted to make sure that before we release the next draft, we had all of our ducks in a row to, release a draft that meets our our quality standard and was not confusing people when we made very quick turnaround changes. So we should have a new draft shortly, but there just wasn't enough time between the two meetings to get all of those things together.

Okay. And just just I know you said this earlier, but I just wanna just get make sure we have a finer point on it, which is to the extent there are stakeholders who have submitted comments that are concerned that their requests or clarifications that that they've put through in in a couple different study sessions now, are not currently represented, they will have an opportunity to review that red line and to provide additional comments at the public hearing to bring in those changes. And we'll we'll also get the chance to review our our edits as a planning commission or or getting in as we talk about here. Okay.

And certainly, with a public hearing, we have to take all comment on the item as well, so with no time limit, essentially. So they will all also get to make another set of comments. And if planning commission did wanna hold future study sessions after that public hearing, they could do so as well. And, obviously, those are all open for comment as well. So Okay. Certainly more opportunities for engagement, and, again, encourage anyone that wants to talk to me about specifics to to reach out.

Reach out.

I have not turned down any meetings, and I don't plan on doing so.

And to be not sleep. To be

a bit more specific on dates too, our earliest opportunity to hold the public hearing that's scheduled today would be December 10. So that notice would be going out probably the week of Thanksgiving. So, you know, the absolute latest we would be able to get that full public draft out would be, you know, late November. We anticipate we're gonna be able to have a fully updated draft circulating well before that point. So, you know, there will be that official notice with the official updated draft, but we are gonna be getting it out there even in advance of that.

So those stakeholders will have the opportunity for a few weeks to be able to reach out on that offer. Watch out for your your Thanksgiving holiday. That's really helpful. I do think we've received comments that provide really detailed red lines and very clear specific changes in language. You mentioned you you, met with the Plesh group and the downtown some of the downtown stakeholders. Just would would welcome and look forward to seeing how we weighed that and and and what comes up in this red line in addition to all of the other stakeholders' comments and our comments here. So thank you for walking that through. It's kind of a confusing timeline, so thanks.

It's the first round of your public hearing. It's good. Good questions. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Good questions. Commissioner Niltia?

Yeah. Thank you. Like commissioner Farah said, you guys did a great job of answering basically every question that I had. I had just kind of a a general point and then a a broader question to follow-up on it. You know, I think going through the HOMA process, my priority, and I I know the priority of of a lot of people, has been to kinda find that equilibrium point of, you know, we want affordable housing, and we also want to create an environment that encourages as much development and new units of housing as possible.

And I know these changes that you've made have been to try to find that equilibrium. My broad question is, what effect do you think these changes as a whole will have on development in downtown and moving us towards that that kind of goal of affordable housing and and building new units?

Yeah. So, I mean, the anticipated effect is to in in all likelihood, produces a small amount of funding for affordable housing in Bellevue. What we've seen through the existing, program, which is that, one to 2.5 FAR exemption capping out at one FAR, is very low utilization. I think we've had a a handful of developments, probably less than that. A couple of developments use it in the past.

What we saw through the IOC, which we upped that bonus to to one to four, was much better utilization. About 5% of the units in those projects were affordable. We're always sort trying to push towards that 10% number as you can see. So trying to get a little bit more out of that. If you look at the amenity incentive program and the numbers we're looking at, we're looking at probably a couple units or a few $100,000 per project.

So relatively small on the grand scheme of things, but a good way to make sure that every project provides a little bit towards affordable housing in downtown. Different from what we're proposing in other places where we're looking at mandatory programs, we're certainly not proposing that here. In terms of development feasibility, based on our economic analysis, we think it's a a small money saver for future projects. So I don't think we're impacting development feasibility in a negative way, certainly. And with that four to one bonus with the ability to go up to 50% FAR exempt.

We think that's quite a large bonus for development. So we're hoping that they sort of synergize together to increase residential development feasibility in downtown while providing the city with what will likely be a decent amount of funding towards affordable housing. Great.

Thank you very much.

Commissioner Velavises.

Thanks again for the very clear presentation. I have a couple of comments and questions. First one is in the agenda, and then you mentioned it again today, there seems to be a general agreement about the fee in loop between different stakeholders, including four four market developers and nonprofit developers. Is that is that correct?

I have not heard any comments really from the nonprofit development side of things on the fee in lieu. What I've heard from the stakeholder group is that the $13 seems fair. It's consistent with what what happened in Wilburton.

Great. Great.

So I have so they say that no plan survives its first contact with reality. Right? And, I wanna focus on a sentence from one of the letters that we received from McCullough Hill. It says, if the city wants more affordable housing, you should collaborate directly with the developers that created, asking what tools, incentives, and flexibilities would encourage the desired outcomes. These developers, they probably have a couple hundred years of experience altogether working on this.

And I think the feedback they're providing in the letters that we have received is is pretty precise, and and it could be very helpful. So I would encourage you to discuss with them these items. As you said, you're not rejecting any meetings, which is which is great. There's a letter out there providing some contact information. I would encourage you to reach out and say, let's let's meet up and let's go through these items because they're the ones with the boots on the ground.

They're the ones that are paying for this and making it happen. And, ultimately, that's the outcome that we need. We need these buildings to be built and these housing units to be produced. So I would encourage you to talk with them and and address those concerns. On the plush letter, I would like to highlight a couple things.

I think, generally, most of the items are requesting clarity, which seems to make sense. There was one that was a little bit of a stretch asking for, open space to become to this plaza. Maybe that's not, the right approach in that in that case, but I wanted to to highlight, two or three items here. They talked about, I guess, a final decision. I suppose that's final development, and there's some background to that.

They said there's some decision here that has been taking a long time and is causing a lot of trouble. There's one about, pet relief areas. And the point is not the pet relief on itself is just that there's no clarity on the quote, and that starts to drag the process. Right? Same with, outdoor plays outdoor plaza criteria, which apparently, it's a little bit vague and is becoming so these things, when we don't have clarity, it's like having a traffic light that is turning brown.

Like, are you are you stopping? Are you going? Like, what what's going on? So so at some point, it's better to have, like, a, something that is not ideal that is very clear so you know what you need to do rather than having something that still needs to be interpreted. And it's gonna drag on your time. It's gonna drag on your staff's time. It's gonna drag on the developer's time. It's just gonna stop and delay development. And that's as we know, it's a huge increase to cost because time is money. So ever since I joined the planning commission, we've talked about looking for clarity in the code that is evident clarity.

And, I would encourage you to just really look deep into this to make sure there's no there's no room for I mean, every code has room for interpretation, but but it's it's as clear as possible and avoid this this these types of, issues. Besides that, I agree with, Jesse Clauson's comment about nonconforming codes, but I think we're gonna talk about that later. Okay? Yeah. That's that's that's it.

Thank you. I think I have two comments. One is, like, Matt, when you said there are some development on the pipeline, I'm curious about a number. I'm I'm wondering if a council will be curious about a number too. Like, it's, like, 20 permit that we have it under down the pipeline or it's only five that we want to exception have exception.

I'm just curious if you guys can come up with the data specifically for council in Downtown 2 because they wanted to know if they're dealing with, like, 20 or they're dealing with only eight or two. I can count around ten, eleven by my only walking in downtown area, but I'm sure it's more than that. And I think about the the plaza or open space, I personally think some open space are not useful. Maybe you're like too much talking about open space, but like for example, the South Lincoln has the retail community area food bank that food what is it? Food food what do you call it?

Forgot. I'm sorry. I'm losing my second language. They have, like, a food area and then thank you. Food course. And then mostly, like, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is just packed. It just build that third place. Like, I see people are sitting and playing a game and boards and stuff. Like, tons of youth are sitting there every weekends and they're playing games because it's a nice area to grab a coffee and just hang out and play. And it's really create a third area that we are looking for it.

And there's like Avenue and residential area that it's a windy big open space and people just smoke cigarette there. And none of the retails are only two retails area is now occupied, maybe a change, but I just want to say how are what is our perception from the third place and opener space can play really in the community differently because that's like a indoor covered area with couple retails. It's really more attractive for some people compared to the big open space that nine months of the year, we cannot use that. It's pretty windy. I really suggest to walk on 100.

It's like a wind tunnel that's hot rises. Swear it is horrible. And then the pet area, that was another thing. I think the other thing that came to my mind was pet area and roof, green roof. We do have a green roof, it's just turned to, I don't know what to call it, I can give a tour to you if you want it specifically and it's costly, no one's gonna use it, it's ugly, I even feel it's the fire hazard now when it's getting warm because we can't because the HOA does not take care of it.

And as just was a rooftop when they started selling the units and now it's not, it's nothing. Then I don't know if we can have something about who's maintaining the rooftop, that'd be interesting or is it even the rooftop is a good thing. That's another thing that I really by living in a downtown, this other thing and the pet relief area is the same. Like, it's in the really muddy wet area that I don't think if it's in hygiene. But those are my comments. Should we go second round or we are good?

I have a couple more comments.

Okay. Go ahead. Is it anyone else?

Okay. So Rooftops

Green. Well,

I'm not sure right now if there's something in the language of the code that encourages or allows it, but there are cities like Bangkok that allowed and encouraged the use of rooftop decks for public use, so with bars or restaurants or activities like that. We have such an amazing, surroundings. Like, if you've ever been to Ascent, like, you have the Mount Rainier, and you have the lakes on one side. You have the cascades on the other one. You have the sun.

Like, this could be a really interesting approach if you somehow encourage or allow commercial uses on the top, which could be part of the amenity incentive system. And the the other comment I had is is echoing some of the comments that we've heard. And I mentioned this about certainty, eliminating, vague language from the code. But the other one is consistency. And I think, generally, a lot of people are happy with Wilburton.

And there's there's this, plea for making sure that the downtown code is consistent with Wilburton. I know they're different, so we have to look at them separately. But but it's a good, fallback to just always check and make sure that we're we're approaching it the same way. So I would also suggest that we use that as a as a as a baseline, at least, to check check against this. That's that's all I have.

I think a lot of these things that we're talking about, especially when we're encouraging especially when we're starting to talk about commercial, are things that we're gonna look at through downtown livability two point o, especially with Wilburton consistency as well and making sure that the code is clear. So I do wanna put that out there. These are probably not things we're gonna look at HOMA through HOMA, especially when it relates to commercial uses, but it's things that we can start to look at, with downtime mobility two point o, as we move into that project after home is complete, and we do a real deep dive, with a real microscope on the downtown code.

Is there a reason, or is it do you think this is gonna have unintended consequence against developing that could happen now by delaying this portion of the work?

It depends on who you ask, I would say. I mean, we've seen significant amounts of development under the current downtown code. There are certainly a list of things that development community would like to see changed in the downtown code, and we're certainly amenable to looking at that list. I think with the scope of Houma, which is we're really targeted downtown, and that's sort of the way it's been scoped since the beginning that the downtown updates were very minor. And the way we've done outreach and sort of looking at HOMA is very minor changes to downtown.

It's not around form standards, so we haven't done the same outreach we would do if we were changing large scale form standards around downtown or changing a lot of standards of amenities people use. So we just wanna make sure that we are doing the appropriate outreach and doing the appropriate scope for what we've told people we are gonna do with HOMA, especially as we have already committed to doing that really detailed update through downtown livability two point o, and that's been on the slate for a while now. So at this point, really, what's holding up downtown livability two point o is is Houma. I will transition probably pretty quickly into downtown right after we finish this, but we can't do both at the same time.

Thank you.

I I did have a follow-up. Perfect. Sure. We can stay until eleven, but go ahead.

Hopefully hopefully, my follow-up is not two hours long. Just just to just to create clarity on on kinda what we just talked about around what is happening with Downtown 2 earlier, it sounded like the potential for consolidating affordable units within one development to to apartments rather than having the percentage split that we have proposed or in place right now between other types of housing is a possible revision we can do through Downtown 2. The Wilburton updates that have been highlighted by commenters and were brought up by commissioner Villavasys could happen in in Downtown 2. These are revisions that will be possible even with the nonconforming provisions that I'm sure you cannot wait to start talking about and our HOMA. You will have the opportunity to to make these changes, and we will be able to reserve the comments we've received to include and consider in that process.

Is is that what I just heard you say? I just want to make sure.

Partially. So the affordable housing standards they're not standards, but sort of some of the rules around affordable housing are in the affordable housing director's role, which is a separate document that's pointed to by the land use code. Ravi has been working on that diligently for the last, what, couple months now. We had a comment period on that where we did receive several comments from well, one of the main commenters was plush. So the same group that we heard from downtown stakeholders, that's where that rule for the split would be located.

So it would have to be a change to that director's rule. That has not been signed by the directors yet, so that is still open for potential change in final drafting. So we're still working through that process as we speak. I don't know if we have a timeline on that yet, Robbie, but some probably sometime around the end of this year is when we're looking at adopting that director's rule. Also trying to make the rules between the land use code and the NFT code as consistent as possible through that.

So Okay. That would not be addressed through downtown livability two point o, but a lot of the standards and clarity and potential simplifications of the downtown code would be down through downtown livability two point o, looking at some of those Wilburton standards as well. I do wanna note, you know, Wilburton has its own plan. Downtown has its own plan. So those are two separate entities.

Anytime we write the land use code, it has to be consistent with the adopted plan for that area. So it's not necessary necessarily that we can just take Wilburton and put it on downtown because those plans are not the same. So K. We'll have to analyze that too as we move through downtown livability two point o, which we also haven't done that analysis to sort of move that stuff around through Houma as well. So that gives us more time to look at those types of things and where we can find those overlapping standards that can be consistent that are also consistent with our planning documents, which were required by law to be consistent with when we write the code.

Okay. Thank you. And then I I separately just had a quick question that I also following on to prior prior comments. There were several comments from affordable housing advocates talking about support for the proposals. When commissioner Villaisis was asking about, have you done outreach to, particularly developers that are nonprofits? I took that as meaning developers who are working on affordable housing. But I just wanted to could you repeat your response? You were saying we have done that outreach. We've spoken with them, and they are happy with this fee in lieu of and the provisions here. Reading comments, it does seem like that

Yeah. So

case, but I Well, we've heard I heard differently. I just wanted to make sure.

Yeah. So we've heard a lot from the affordable housing community on option a specifically and in support of that. We haven't heard so much from the affordable housing community on this fee in lieu, just generally because these projects will be market rate developers providing this fee in lieu. So it's not necessarily something that the affordable housing community is gonna get involved in as much as they would get involved in a mandatory program or a 100% affordable projects outside of downtown. So

Thank you. Any more questions? Okay. I think we are ready for the third part, and then we have another study if you guys can do faster. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. We have only one hour left.

Understood, chair. I mean, I know you are all here tonight at 09:00 to talk about nonconforming things, so I will be quick. I'm Robbie Suppler. I'm an assistant city attorney. I advise the

code and

policy division, these fine folks right here. And we're gonna go on a journey today to talk about nonconforming. So let's talk about what we mean by these terms so we're kind of on the same page as we get started. So nonconforming uses, what are they? They're uses that were allowed when they're established but now are prohibited. And why is that? It's because council changed their mind at some at some point in history. Here's an example. This is from Seattle. Have you ever been to the Volunteer Park Cafe?

It's a wonderful place to get a bite. It is completely surrounded by residential uses with no other cafes in sight, so kind of an example of what in many jurisdictions could be viewed as a nonconforming use. Nonconforming structures, the theme is similar. They're a structure that was allowed when they were built but now does not conform to current codes. And why is that? It's, again, the council with their planning commissions have changed the rules. They've changed the zoning. They've changed the design standards. They want a different outcome. And you can see that in this photo here.

This is from Linwood. This is in their light rail link area. And on the right, you see what was there before, the Anytime Fitness kinda strip mall. And on the left, a new apartment building. You can kinda see the difference in policy that the city is trying to achieve. So, you know, the the example of the nonconforming structure would be what's on the right that was built under a prior code in a different era and is nonconforming. Same story with nonconforming sites. Here's the example. This is from Seattle. This is the Othello Link Station.

You see a brand new or relatively new apartment building in the lower right, and the rest, you kinda see large surface parking. Not exactly the sites that you probably are would develop under the current code, but were sites that were historically that was the way they were developed, more car centric with less pedestrian oriented kind of development. So that's what makes some of those sites or in many jurisdictions, what would make them nonconforming sites. So that was the background. Let's get to why I'm even talking about this to you at 09:00 at night.

So on June 17, which is the day that council adopted the Wilburton Luca, they gave staff some direction. So the concern that they expressed was that from their perspective, the city's nonconforming provisions are not working well for phased development under something called a master development plan, which is we abbreviate as an MDP. So the direction that they gave to us is that through HOMA, they want us to look at our nonconforming provisions and propose amendments to ensure that future phases of an MDP are not inadvertently or prematurely treated as nonconforming and that we basically make it so that we're not requiring investment until it's really necessary for for some reason. So as we got go to this, I think you need to know, we have seven current provisions in our land use code relating to nonconforming. That is a lot.

That is somewhat redundant, and we are proposing to try to consolidate them down into, at least one provision that would be more consistently applied across the city. So breaking down the council direction, there's kinda two things we're gonna look at, two key issues. The first is when must future phases make improvements to come into compliance with the code? And when that's triggered, that's the second question. When that's triggered, when they need to come into compliance with code, what level of investment are we gonna require them to make?

How much improvements are we gonna require them to make? So we'll take these in turn. So here we are under current code. So we're talking about the question about when will future phases, when will they be triggered to have to make improvements? So let's take this example of a two phase project under an MDP.

We've got phase one on the left, phase two on the right. So under our current code, and I'm using that kind of broadly, again, we have seven different provisions, but, generally, this is what would be applied, is that improvements in phase two would only be required during the construction of phase one if there was a change in phase two during during the construction of phase one. So the biggest example of that is a change if there's a transfer of floor area ratio or FAR from a future phase to the phase under construction. So this is done to make a bigger building in an earlier phase. And so under our current code, if you were to transfer transfer unused FAR from phase two, it's basically development capacity from phase two that was not being used.

If you want to transfer that to phase one for use there, that would be considered a change under our code, and you would have to make improvements to phase two to bring it into compliance with the code. I think, mister Villavessi, as you mentioned, the Fana decision, that is essentially it. That is that was that was what results from that. So oh, yeah. Happy to take plenty of questions here at the end.

It's dense. I'm gonna try to lay it out for you here before we get there. So what we're proposing here is to that would change the answer a little bit. So under what's proposed, we'd be consolidating our seven nonconforming sections into the nonconforming code that we just adopted through Wilburton. And some of you here on the commission heard me last time when I came and spoke to you similarly at a late hour about the Wilburton nonconforming code.

So under the proposal here, what would happen is that the phase two improvements would only be required during the construction of phase one if the value of the change was more than a, basically, a quarter million dollars. That number is funky. The reason it's funky is it was set during the BellRed the initial BellRed code and has been adjusted buffer inflation since then. So as the commissioners and deputy mayor with remember during the Wilburton discussion, we created the Wilburton nonconforming code based on BellRed. So that's where that that number's coming from.

But then the second part of the change here would be that a change triggering improvements doesn't include transfer FAR so long as no more than 50% of the available FAR is transferred. In In other words, if as long as you leave 50% on phase two, you don't need to make improvements to phase two, but you could transfer it all as long as you make some improvements to phase two. And let's get into that. Why 50%? So let's start with the photo.

We've seen this. This is from Lin Wood. The kind of idea is is that if you took the nonconforming structure on the right and you transferred all of its development capacity away, everything that wasn't used, it's never gonna be redeveloped. It's never going to get the nice big sidewalks, the street trees, the frontage, the active uses, everything that appears to be what Linwood wants in that new building. If we keep 50% there or alternatively consider it as a trigger of when improvements are required, we're going to allow a significant transfer of development capacity to a future phase without requiring improvements.

But we're also then going to encourage improvements by retaining a good amount of development capacity on the future phase. So it's either going to be enough, hopefully, to let it redevelop sometime in the future, or the developer can choose to transfer it all and just make some improvements in phase two at the time of the transfer. And so in that way, it kind of provides a choose your own adventure of figuring out how you want to phase it and when you want to trigger making those requirements or making those improvements on that future phase. And this is definitely a number we would love some input on the commission from tonight during during questions and comments. So in summary for the first key issue, when must future phases make improvements to conform to current code?

We're going to we're proposing to allow the transfer of up to 50% of FAR from a future phase without requiring any improvements. And we're also gonna apply the Wilburton nonconforming codes trigger, higher trigger for requiring improvements in the first place. That's that roughly quarter million dollar number. So moving on to the second key issue. So we've talked about when should future phases have to make improvements.

Now we're gonna talk about what level of investment should be required at that time. So you're triggered. You gotta make improvements. How much money do you have to spend? So under our current code, if you have to make improvements in phase two, if there's that trigger, you've got to spend whatever amount of money is needed to bring phase two completely into compliance with the code.

So it's it's whatever would whatever resources, whatever investment is required to bring phase two fully up to what the code would require. What we're proposing to change is that there'd be a cap on the level of investment. It would be equal to 20% of the value of the proposed change. So by way of example, if the change you were proposing on phase two during the construction of phase one was worth a million dollars, you would have to spend $200,000 on improvements to phase two. And once you reach that amount, going through the required list of improvements, you could stop until such time as you are required to make further improvements through a subsequent change.

So in summary, we would be capping the level of investment required on future phases to match what we're currently doing in Wilburton and also in BellRed. So the summary of major changes are we're going to allow the transfer of up to 50% of floor area ratio for a future phase without requiring improvements, And we're gonna consolidate the city's seven nonconforming provisions into the Wilburton nonconforming code, which provides a higher threshold for triggering improvements, and it also provides a cap on the required level of investment. And with that, I would love to answer questions and also love to hear your comments.

I'm going to round. Can you keep to two question, and your follow-up question is your second question? Just want to be sure we are staying on the track. I see the next presentation team are waiting there for last three hours. Commissioner Ferris.

A couple quick comments. If we got a really dense subject like this, don't do it at 09:00 at night. Also, slide numbers so that we can refer back. So, anyway, those are couple quick comments. I have three questions. I'll only do one. And this is actually pretty straightforward. How many times does it when it's a phased development, are they transferring far? Does it happen, like, all the time, just some of the times, few times? How often is that used?

You know, I don't have

clear statistics for you on that. It's really a developer's option about whatever the assembly and whatever the project limit they they put together is. I don't think it's unusual for FAR to be transferred.

So it's it's pretty common?

If do my colleagues here have a further further grasp? I'd in talking to land use, I think it it happens relatively frequently, but I don't have an exact number for you.

K.

Yeah. And you'll see it more common in sort of a higher density development areas where you have these larger sites. So especially downtown where the issue has arisen, and it arose enough in downtown where it was important for Wilburton to work it into the code and important enough for council to direct us to work this into this code as well.

I don't know if that's correct, but I think Meera and Mari Flack, they were one of those phase two phases that they transferred afar, if I remember correctly. K. Commissioner Kennedy?

Thank you for the presentation. My one question is on the last part, the second bullet here on the on the summary of major changes, can you explain one more time the 20% applies to what value?

It applies to the value of the change to the future phase. So it's if you have the two phase example here

Yeah.

If you're if phase one is under active construction, that's the first to develop. If you're doing something to phase two that is worth more than the trigger amount, you would then

But now not and and and now it doesn't conform with the code. So you're saying I'm gonna do something different than I had originally proposed in my development that now doesn't conform with the code. The value of that total development cost.

For the for the chain for the change would be it would be capped at 20%. So if the value of the change, if you had to build at a parking parking lot to be on phase two for use in phase one Yep. If that value was worth a million dollars for that change on phase two, you would then have to pay $200,000 worth of improvements to phase two. So that's the 20%.

Okay.

So it's based on

Bring it up to the new code.

Exactly.

Make the change to your phase two.

Yep. So it'd be Okay. The way and the the contrast, again, is currently under our current code is if there's any change to a future phase, you have to spend whatever is needed to bring it completely up to

You get it. Okay. And this is the redact so it's an 80% reduction.

Correct. And then the only thing I would add is there's a for each land use district, there is a sequence of improvements you look at first, so we try to prioritize the most important improvements until the money runs out.

Commissioner Ninja?

Yeah. I I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about how that 20% number was was reached. I know you mentioned Wilburton, but I wasn't here for that. So how did how did we arrive at that 20%?

Absolutely. So the history of the 20% is it's present in the BellRed nonconforming code, and then that was adopted into the the Wilburton for application there. The reason for the 20% is really to, lower that investment in improvements whenever it, whenever it's triggered. So, essentially, it operates to provide a longer, more gradual transition to news new code than other numbers. So I wasn't around when BellRed was adopted, so I don't know exactly why 20% was there. But I do know from the Wilburton discussion, the idea was let's pick a number. Let's find a number that would provide that nice gradual transition, a little bit more runway.

Okay. That makes sense. Does it so there's no one special number. It's just 20% seemed like a good number to okay.

And what had been used before Right. In the city. Okay.

Thanks. And, Villavicas.

Thank you.

Thanks. That was very clear except the 20%. I wanna I wanna make sure I understand this right. So the the first part of the transfer of of AR, let's suppose phase one, that side has a capacity of 100,000 square feet. And let's suppose phase two has a capacity of 50,000 square feet. What you're saying is you can develop phase one, the 100,000 square feet plus 50% so you could develop up to a 125,000. Right? And leave those other 25,000, like, for phase two. Right? Mhmm.

Okay. So that's the item number one. Now when do you need to when does the 20% kick in? I I didn't understand that. Is if you choose to, say, provide parking for phase one in the property of phase two, or is when if you decide to transfer instead of 50%, you decide to transfer 60% or more? What how how does the triggering happen? I'm

Right. So under the proposal, there's first a threshold that would need to be crossed in order to trigger the the requirement at all to make improvements. So that trigger is that odd number, the $242,000.

Yeah.

So you would look at what you're doing with phase two. And if the values of the chain of whatever change you were doing exceeded that amount, then you would have

to make improvements. It's something I'm choosing to do. So I'm developing phase one, and I say, I wanna put some parking spots here, and those are 241,000. So I don't need to do anything else. Right?

Correct. In that example. Yep. There would not be it would not have triggered the need to do any improvements on phase two. But if you if it was $250,000 was the cost of the parking spots, it would trigger.

You would have to make improvements, but the you would be capped at 20% of that value of the change. So in the example, if you was if you were doing 200 let's make it even 300 just to make it clear from the trigger height trigger amount. If you're building a parking lot that costs $300,000 on phase two, That would exceed the trigger height. You would need to make improvements, but then the amount of money you would have to spend would be 20% of 300,000. And I'm just realizing that I gave a number that I don't know how to easily do that math in my head.

$6,068,000.

60,000? I am blessed to be here at this table with people who do math things.

You do many work.

This is easy. I'm like, okay.

But then By spending those 300,000 in that improvement, are you not already, like, reaching your your required investment, or is that 60,000 on top of the 300,000?

So the what you're doing is you're building the parking lot in that example, but that's not necessarily the what the code wants you to do. Like, I think the code, what we brought talk about bringing it fully into performance is we're talking sidewalk with. We're talking street trees. We're talking

active uses. You choose to build this parking lot to serve phase one, and you choose to build it in the property for two, and the parking lot exceeds $242,000, then you need to spend certain amount of money doing improvements like sidewalks and planting trees and doing this stuff. Yep. That's that's 20% of what? Of the total value of improvements that's calculated for that lot? Yep.

Okay.

Yep. That's it. And, certainly, they could design it in a way that might be able to help double count to reduce that further.

Yeah. It's kind of functionally, like, we wanna allow people to make some adjustments that might be helpful along the way in a future phase, but we also wanna be nudging people towards at consistency with the code, but we don't wanna push them all the way over. So yeah.

It sounds reasonable to me. I think it would be good to get input from the development community because they're looking at these numbers every day. And they might say, hey. This is good, but is these numbers, they need to be tweaked so that they they help. But I I really like the the approach that allows for something and then incentivizes the rest. That's that's all. That's all from from

my end.

Add my comments. If you want to go to second round, I can skip mine. No? Are you I don't have any comments. Do does anybody needs the second round?

I have to

Do you need go for

it. Yeah.

Just a really quick question. So just so I'm understanding the the trigger number here correctly, is it if let's say I wanted to do a change of, like, adding in a parking lot that's gonna cost a $150,000, and then several months later, I add in some other thing that's not a parking lot, completely different, but takes it above that trigger amount. Is it cumulative, or is it per change?

So as drafted and also what's currently in both Wilburton and in Bell Red is we look at a three year horizon. So we'll be looking at the past three years. So they could you could do it slowly over time, but if in a three year period you exceed the trigger height, then we require improvement.

Delta of the change. Right? It's basically a delta of the change. That's the thing. The 20% of the delta of the change. Yeah.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

And thank you. And and so if you propose no change at all, no trigger. So, like, your your agreed upon phase two can go forth and prosper. You do not have to conform with the revised code because you are not asking for a change. Correct.

Period. Yep.

Just thank you. Thank you. I have one question to ask. Sorry. What was the motivation of this? Because we have so many phase one and phase two projects that the phase two is transferring or we have so many phase two has not been built. What is the motivation? What is really the reason that we are going to do this? I'm a little bit curious about that if you have any information or data about it.

Well, the the purpose of a oh, thank you. The purpose of a nonconforming code in general is to make sure that the policy decisions that you and council all participate in eventually get a get a get to be applied to all development within the city. So the purpose here is to figure out the right pacing for to require that transition. So through the Wilburton Luca, there was a lot of discussion that, you know, the BellRed approach made the most sense. So that's why we're proposing consolidating into that approach to provide that gradual pathway to eventually make sure that all all phases and all future development will eventually get to where we're we want want them to be under our current code.

And does that mean, for example, it might there was a phase one has been built in downtown right now. And then with the change that we are doing there, phase two will fall into the new code. That's why they might use this regulation or no. It's not really the case here. So Hope I asked my question correctly.

Right. I think that the the immediate question we're answering is what happens when you make a change to a future phase while constructing that first phase.

Okay.

That's kind of the main question. If you're concerned if, like, they build phase one and then ten years later come back for phase two, you know, they think there's different things that will come into play, like vested rights and different different things that guarantee what set of rules will apply to the code under development.

Yeah.

One more question. So what we're talking about is you transfer 50%, and you decide to make some improvements. And those improvements exceed that value, then it triggers it triggers the improvements. But is there a scenario in which you might choose, for example, to transfer 80%? What happens there?

Yep. So to be absolutely clear, nothing in the proposed code would prohibit the transfer of a 100% of the unused FAR from a future phase to the current phase. If they do if you transfer more than 50, you would just be required to make some improvements. Some or all? You would be required to you would trigger the need to do improvements assuming the value of half of the FAR was more than the trigger amount, which is likely.

Mhmm.

And then that would be the amount of improvements you'd have to do. That's where the 20% cap comes in. Mhmm. So you would look at the value of the Okay. Of the of the amount.

I don't wanna dead horse. I just wanna make sure it's it's it's clear. So the we're talking if if I transfer 50% on this and I decide to build something on phase two, that's gonna trigger some improvements. But I don't wanna build anything on phase two yet, but I wanna transfer 80%. Mhmm. How do we calculate the value of improvements that are required?

Right. So 50% transfer doesn't count as a change. Yeah. So we'll be looking at that 30%

So you do a 30% of improvements?

Well, so yeah. So be because if you in your example, it was a you're transferring 80%. So 80 minus 50 is 30. So we're looking at the value of that 30%. That would likely exceed the trigger amount of $242,000. And then we would look at that value Do we take the 20% of that value of what you have to spend?

Even though that is not being built on phase two. You're just using more. Okay.

But it would be it would count as a change to phase two because you're taking more than 50%. Okay. That that's

the So that's included within the change? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Like, the magnitude of the change is informing the magnitude of the degree to which you have to bring that nonconforming site towards compliance.

K. So far if they are transferring in addition to 50%, it's considered a change to phase two.

Okay. Mhmm.

Great. But I guess the the other question is it would be good to have a example, like like a real, like, step by step example so that we will understand this better and and This is helpful. Thank you.

Quick comment. This is really con complicated, but you did an amazing job explaining it. So thank you.

Thank you all for your your patience, and I look forward to coming back at a future 09:00 for a detailed example of this.

We can bring you at ten. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Okay. I think do we need a break, or should we go powerhouse?

Like to make a motion, however, that we the planning commission director staff.

Sorry. I was going to say, can someone entertain the motion? Are we all ready? Just let me ask that question. Are we all ready to have a public hearing? Having public hearing does not mean that we're gonna go suggest or recommend to the council. We can have another study. Although we have December timeline for this item, we don't, then we are good. Okay. Can I have the motion?

I would like to move that we direct staff to schedule a public hearing for housing opportunities in mixed use areas land use code amendment.

Can I get the second?

Second.

Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Thank you. Finally, I could turn this around.

Okay. The final study session item is the updated affordable housing strategy. In 2024, the council initiated an update to the city's existing affordable housing strategy to implement new policy direction from the comprehensive plan and reflect current needs and market condition. Council also approved a new affordable housing target to build or preserve 5,700 in ten years. Bianca Sego, office of housing director, and Hannah Bon Miller, a senior planner in office of housing, will provide this update. Thank you. Thanks for being patient with us.

No

worries. Happy to be here. We'll keep this brief and exciting for you. Happy to report on progress on the affordable housing strategy.

Well, good evening, commissioners. I feel like we actually had the perfect setup with the previous two items. I heard a lot of discussion about affordable housing. And really now the briefing tonight is to get you thinking about what's next. You have all of this work on your plate that you're doing really meaningful, great job on.

And the affordable housing strategy that we're updating right now is really thinking about what is next for the city to continue to address housing affordability issues. And just wanna say, I'm really glad to be here tonight with a couple of new commissioners. I know that several other folks, on the commission have heard this background a little bit more, but for your benefit, I will, dive a little bit into some of the background very quickly. I promise I will get you here out by twelve, 10:30.

Not twelve.

So again, today, we'll go a little bit into that overview of what the affordable housing strategy is. But really today is to share a progress update with you, both on the engagement that we've done in our phase one and phase two work, but also where we are in terms of the overall project goals and our draft strategies and actions that we're, beginning to prioritize right now. Our hope is to bring a draft a full draft strategy to our city council in January. We do have a study session with them on October 31, where we'll be presenting an update to them. So, the affordable housing strategy update launched last November.

Our council initiated this work plan, that, is been undertaken over the course of about a year. We're really in the final stretch of this work. We've been working really hard over the course of 2025 on this project, and we're in the final couple of stages right now. Where we are is we have draft strategies and actions that we're working to prioritize and refine through, our final rounds of engagement, before we bring that recommendation to counsel. So again, for the benefit of some newer commissioners, just a reminder that the affordable housing strategy is a functional plan or a strategic plan of our comprehensive plan.

So this is a near term planning document. We're looking at the next seven years for affordable housing implementation. And the work within this plan, is really driven by the policy guidance that you all established in the comprehensive plan update. And so while, this is an informational briefing for you and the planning commission does not formally recommend, the affordable housing strategy, it does go directly to our council for consideration, you all informed, the policy guidance that's driving these conversations, And many of the implementation, actions will be coming back to you for further consideration and refinement. So we do want to make sure that you're involved, aware of this process.

While you won't be signing off on the document, you are you've had a stamp on it, and you will continue to in implementation. The affordable housing strategy, it's also a little bit of a misnomer. While it is very much focused on that income restricted affordable housing, it is not exclusive to it. We are also thinking about other housing priorities at the city, like housing equity, housing stability, and overall supply. As we know, they have a very, big impact on affordability and accessibility in our community.

Already hit that bullet point there, so I'll just go to the last one on this slide, which is that as planners, we love to say we don't want our plan to sit on the shelf. The goal of the strategy is really for implementation and that the implementation steps within the action plan of this strategy document will inform work programs of individual departments within the city. We are also thinking about how to prioritize those implementation steps. We've identified a lot of work, and we know that we can only take on a portion of it at the time. So that's going to be key to our implementation efforts.

So as as I mentioned, we've been busy working in 2025 engaging with the community. And for this project, we've really identified three overarching engagement objectives, as well as three different constituencies that we are targeting our engagement to in slightly different ways. So one of the key parts of the affordable housing strategy is to make sure there's a foundation of information about housing and housing affordability in the city. There's lots of different levels of understanding, and we want to make sure that there's a foundation that people can access. So if they want to participate in this process, they can do so from an informed, grounded approach.

We also want to make sure there's opportunities for everyone to have input on the plan. That includes our residents and community members, but also folks who, participate in Bellevue through work, play, or study as well. And then finally, within the housing work, we have new policy guidance, around making sure the, engagement we do is with diverse and representative voices. And so these three objectives really do, feed into these different constituency groups that we've identified, And we have been targeting our engagement slightly different to our organizational partners, those with lived experience, and, the general public. Our first piece of engagement was primarily focused on engaging the general public through those informational and educational events.

We had some really great turnout for some maybe less usual events that we see at the city. So in March, we held a short film festival showcasing different small creator housing stories. We also held a resource fair and housing one hundred one event. We also got to engage our YouthLink members through a board game at their youth involvement conference in the spring. So through, a variety of different events in our phase one, we were able to connect with over 300 people through, in person or virtual engagements, and over 25 organizations.

And, the actual feedback we collected was through housing stories, film reflections, and other inputs, through these events. And we took all of that information, and we have published a phase one engagement report that really showcased what we heard. Just some highlights are that, a lot of about, belonging in the city, and belonging meaning that, you know, you not only do you feel like you belong in your home, but also you belong in your community and neighborhood. And some specific things that came out of those conversations were the importance of aging in place, not necessarily your home that you're in right now, but being able to stay in your community, as well as inclusive design that let lets all, folks of all abilities and stages of life to be able to benefit from neighborhoods. In phase two, we targeted our engagement a little bit more focusing in on our organizational partners and those, with lived experience of, being impacted by housing issues.

So we did this in two ways. For our organizational partners, we sent out a survey to them to help get input on how we should assess our different actions. A couple of themes that came out of that unsurprisingly was reducing cost is a big priority for our organizational partners really drove that point home. But some other things that came out of that were, some comments about improving navigation for community members trying to access housing resources from our community based organizations, as well as a lot of comments about how we balance some really hard trade offs in this work. We know we can't do it all.

We know there are some conflicting issues. And so thinking about how to balance those trade offs, we really heard about the importance of leaning on values for those decisions, because if you try and just weigh all of the details, you really can't balance all of those items. To reach folks with lived experience, we actually put together a pilot community facilitator program. So we recruited and hired nine community facilitators to engage, community members in listening sessions across, the Bellevue community. And so this is really based on the understanding that city staff, we're not going to be able to go to every place that people are.

And even if we could, we might not be the best person to be having the conversations to be able to hear what people have to say. So using the community facilitators' existing connections, they were able to host listening sessions and reach over 150 community members who we would likely not otherwise be able to hear from. And again, some key themes in these conversations were really around the difficulties to access affordable housing and housing affordable to them, as well as the information barriers and the challenges of navigating a complex and often fragmented affordable housing system. And so we do wanna briefly touch on, our goals and draft strategies with you all as well, because our project goals are really derived from the work that you all did last year. We pulled our five overarching goal areas from the housing element of the comprehensive plan.