Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. We will call the commission meeting of 09/17/2025 to order. Stephanie, if you'll go ahead and please call the roll to establish a quorum.

Commissioner Laney? Here. Commissioner Barcelona?

Here.

Commissioner Hurst? Absent. Commissioner Herrera?

Here.

Commissioner West?

Here.

Commissioner Ross? Present. Commissioner Reynolds?

Here. If you all please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay. Thank you very everyone. The next item on our agenda, we are excited about having now a full commission, with the addition with the filling of a vacancy. And, we have the oath of office administered to our new commissioner, Commissioner Amanda Ross. Welcome, Amanda. Well, not welcome yet. There's still a minute. So Stephanie, did you want to rise and do that here? Sure. What's the best way?

Commissioner Ross, please stand and raise your right hand, and I will read the oath. Once I finish reading, please say I do into the microphone. Yeah. Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the constitution of The United States and the constitution of the state of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that you will bear true faith and allegiance to the constitution of The United States and to constitution of the state of California, that you take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which you are about to enter.

I do.

Congratulations, Commissioner.

All right. Congratulations. Welcome aboard, Commissioner Ross. Good to have you. All right. With that, we're gonna go on to the next item, which is citizen communication. Is there anybody in the audience that would like to address the commission on anything that is not on our agenda tonight? Anything not on the agenda? Hearing and seeing none, we will close the citizen communication. And the next item are the minutes from the last meeting. Commissioners, 08/20/2025. Any concerns or changes to the minutes? Any, objection to establishment or an do I call it? Establishment of a unanimous roll call as a result?

I think I'd have to abstain because I wasn't present.

Because you weren't here? Well, then we'll allow that. Okay. So we'll we'll show it unanimous with one abstention. Thank you, Commissioner Ross. And thank you, Commissioners. Next item is item number one, u s p t 25Dash00145. That's the minutes. Reading the minutes. Okay.

Sorry. SPEC 25 dash zero zero two hundred inclusionary housing workshop, a workshop to provide information on the city's current inclusionary housing ordinance in Folsom Municipal Code FMC chapter 17.104 and explain the planned updates for future consideration. And the project planner is Stephanie Henry. And, Steph, thank you for, watching out for me. Welcome, Stephanie.

Good evening, Chair Reynolds, Commissioners. Stephanie Henry, Housing Manager, Community Development Department. Can you bring up my thank you. Alright. So this evening, we are holding a workshop on inclusionary housing.

The purpose of the workshop is to provide, background on inclusionary housing ordinance, provide specific background on the city of Folsom's inclusionary housing ordinance, discuss some of the challenges we have in implementing the inclusionary housing fee, and share some preliminary findings with all of you regarding an inclusionary feasibility analysis on the fee. And then we'll be receiving comments and answering questions. Inclusionary housing policies are typically adopted by jurisdictions in California and actually throughout The United States to help encourage affordable housing development within communities and make sure that there's a mix of housing for the variety of individuals that live in your community. So in addition to inclusionary housing policies, jurisdictions also use other tools such as affordable housing impact fees, mandatory building requirements, voluntary incentives, development agreements, etcetera. But in the state of California, over 140 jurisdictions actually have inclusionary housing programs.

And this next slide shows you a map that was produced by California Coalition for Rural Housing in 2021 that shows all of the counties, which are represented in green, and all of the cities, which are represented in lavender, that have inclusionary housing policies in the state. To the right of the screen, it zooms into our region, and you can see Folsom highlighted in blue. And there's also Roseville, Davis, West Sacramento are some of the other cities in our region that do have inclusionary housing ordinances. But some of the other jurisdictions do not. So this slide shows you some of the other regional approaches, such as impact fees, land dedication, development agreements, etcetera.

So why do cities adopt inclusionary housing requirements? Well, like I stated before, it's to promote a variety of housing types and especially to ensure that housing for individuals who are low income or very low income have opportunities for housing within the jurisdiction. They also help cities and counties address their state mandates or RINA goals so that you're required to have a certain number of or you're required to have some allocation of sites for affordable housing. And this ensures, with inclusionary, that you have the funding or other means to help produce those affordable units. Another important reason we have inclusionary housing is to ensure that our local workforce, such as teachers, administrative assistants, veterinary technicians, etcetera, actually can find affordable housing within the jurisdiction.

I've provided this slide just to give you an overview of the different income levels. We have the very low income households at the top of the slide. This shows that for a family of four, income of $64,000 is considered very low. For a family of four, dollars 102,000 annually is considered low and $144,000 is considered above moderate, and that's for this specific region. And these numbers are put together by the federal government.

So next, we're going to kind of jump into a discussion of the history of the city's inclusionary housing ordinance. As discussed in the staff report, between 1992 and 2001, the city experienced rapid growth in terms of new single family homes being constructed, a bunch of retail being constructed, and new jobs. However, during this period of rapid growth, there was no affordable housing developments or multifamily developments produced. As a result of this, the city faced a lawsuit in which the city was found out of compliance with state housing law for its failure to provide fair share of affordable housing. As a result, the city entered into a settlement agreement in which we committed to taking on a huge task of rezoning 120 acres of commercial, single family industrial land to multifamily high density.

In addition, we had several ordinance amendments to remove constraints to affordable housing. We adopted a We adopted a housing trust fund ordinance. The housing trust fund is a fund that we have where commercial development pays a fee based on square footage, and it goes directly into that fund to support future affordable housing projects or priorities. We adopted a fee waiver or deferral ordinance to allow affordable housing developers to defer impact fees. Typically, those are paid at time of building permit issuance.

This allows them to defer until certificate of occupancy, which helps with some of their financing. Several zoning code amendments were made. These were to encourage highest allowed densities on sites. Before, we were allowing a lot of the developments to go at the lowest density. So these new policies were put in place to discourage that.

And finally, we adopted the inclusionary housing ordinance. So the 2002 inclusionary housing ordinance that was adopted required that 15% of let me back For all for sale and rental projects, 10 units or more, the requirement was that 15% of the units needed to be constructed for affordable housing, with 10 for very low and 5% for low. The ordinance also did offer some different alternatives, such as land dedication or conversion of market rate to affordable. So some of those other policies were in place at that time. In 2011, amid the housing shortage or the housing recession, the city determined that the inclusionary housing ordinance was actually a constraint on the production of both market rate and affordable housing.

As a result, the city ended up amending the inclusionary housing ordinance in 2013. The amendment, first of all, removed requirements for rental housing. This was due to a court case, Palmer versus the City of LA, which invalidated inclusionary requirements on rental units. The city also reduced the amount of requirement from a 15% on for sale projects to 10% requirement of affordable and flipped the very low and low. So before, it was like 10% for very low and 5% low.

It was flipped to 7% low and 3% very low to add a little bit more flexibility. And then the city also provided or the new ordinance also provided for, in lieu fees as opposed to developing sites. And that in LUFE is established by or is calculated as 1% of the lowest priced home in the subdivision. And now currently, we are in the process of having a NEXUS study prepared to evaluate that current in lieu fee structure of the 1% lowest priced home in the subdivision and determine whether or not we have the appropriate fee and whether or not the calculation method is appropriate as well. So since 2002, we've been pretty successful with our inclusionary housing ordinance in terms of providing for affordable housing throughout the city.

Over 500 units have been constructed. Of those, the majority have been through our inclusionary in lieu fees, three twenty seven units financed from $14,000,000 in these fees. Prior to 2012, most of the inclusionary units were actually not constructed, but they were actual apartments that were converted to condos. So through condo conversions, we have some for sale units, approximately 80 in the city. I believe, during that time period, only five residential units were constructed, and those are duplexes or duets that are in the Willow Springs subdivision.

And since 2019, with the rapid growth of the Folsom Plan area, we've collected over $30,000,000 in these in lieu fees. And our strategy has been to utilize these in lieu fees to provide gap financing to affordable housing developers of multifamily projects. And so this next slide provides a snapshot of how we've been doing with our inclusionary housing fees and the projects that we've supported. To the left, you can see a list of the projects. And then under the affordable units, here in the red, those represent the actual units from the inclusionary housing fee.

As you can see, some of the projects have multiple funding sources, and it just summarizes that three twenty seven units have been developed through the fee and approximately $13,000,000 has been dedicated to these projects through this fee. You also see that we had redevelopment bonds listed on one of the columns. Those fees were part of are no longer available to the city now with the dissolution in 2011 of redevelopment agencies. So the reason we are here tonight is, as I kind of previously stated, we are in the process of conducting a nexus study that's looking at our inclusionary housing fee. The reason for this is that we have a program in our housing element that states it's program H9, and it requires the city to do a study of the inclusionary housing fees, where we're going to evaluate the fee level, funding gaps, and determine whether or not there's any improvements for the fee methodology.

So while we know that the inclusionary housing fees have been successful in helping us produce affordable housing, there have been some hurdles in actually administering these fees. The first hurdle is, as I stated before, the fee is calculated as 1% of the lowest priced home in the subdivision. However, when developers are pulling their first building permits, they're typically pulling building permits for their model homes, so four or five models. They haven't determined yet what the market price is going to be because that's six or seven months down the road. So we've tried to do the best we can with determining what that price is going to be six or seven months down the road, and that requires the developer to provide the city staff with, typically a market analysis.

And so we review that market analysis, look at the actual homes that they're proposing to sell and look at what the market is selling the homes for at this current time and use this as our method to determine the sales price. Sometimes it's the correct sales price. Sometimes it's not quite the correct sales price because the market has shifted depending on how quickly they develop those models. The second unanticipated challenge with the fee structure is that when it was developed as 1% of the lowest price home in the subdivision, Our models were typically that a builder would have five products, typically four or five products in their subdivision. So we were basing it off of the lowest price home out of those five.

In recent years, subdivisions have changed slightly, and we're finding that the developers are building maybe three types of products within the subdivision. Or there's even split zoning. Some of the subdivisions single family zone, some single family high density. So this slide tries to present that illustration. You can see there's let's see.

This area here is the phase of the subdivision. You can see there's three different product types that were included in this subdivision and then two zoning designations. So this wasn't anticipated when we determined that 1% sales price should be utilized. If we went with the strict language of the ordinance as it's currently written, all of these homes would have an inclusionary housing fee based on the $770,000 home price. Luckily, our developers work with us.

And in this case, we had two fees. The single family zoned all the single family zoned sites within the subdivision were charged the $7,700 inclusionary housing fee and the single family had the $9,620 But these are things that make it a little challenging to implement. So as discussed, there is an administrative burden kind of just like working with the developer to go in kind of back and forth sometimes to determine if the market analysis is correct or if we need additional information. This increases our workload. Also, not all market analyses are the same.

Some developers provide very detailed analysis. Some, it's very general. The other challenge is that this fee has to be entered manually into each and every one of our building permits that we issue for single family homes. It's subdivision specific, and it's one of the few non automated fees that we have. So it's prone to clerical errors or inefficiency.

And then the other challenge is or I'd say more of a burden is that in order the way that fee is also set up is that to kind of truth it out, there is a provision that every January staff is to review, the subdivision to ensure that the lowest price home is still relatively the same price. So it tries to capture that fluctuation in the market. If prices go higher, then we evaluate it. And if it's greater than a 10% increase, then we can, update the fee. But since most of these homes are like 600,700 thousand dollars that 10% equates to like $60,000 or $70,000 difference.

So they might increase by $40,000 but we don't get to capture that. And then, like I said, we have to for every single subdivision that still has houses that are selling, we have to review them on this annual basis. All right. So to prepare the NEXUS study, the city engaged with Economic Planning Systems, Incorporated, or EPS. They are calculating the maximum justifiable impact fee using established nexus study methodology.

In this way, this nexus study is going to ensure that the proposed fee is legally defensible, is proportionate to the impact of the new development, and will be compliant with state law. The way in which they do this is that they estimate the affordable unit price based on household income levels and standard financing assumptions. Then they compare these to estimated prices of actual construction costs. And then they identify the gap between those two. So, so far, the study has not been completed prior to this workshop, but we do have some preliminary findings.

As expected, the maximum Nexus based fee is substantially higher than the current in lieu fee. Also, since most of these new homes that will be constructed will be in the Folsom Plan area, there's a very high impact fee burden on residential projects already, dollars 95,000 for a single family for sale unit and $60,000 for the multifamily rental units. Those are the impact fee burdens per unit. We asked them to look at multifamily projects to see if there would be a desire by city council to maybe place impact or an in lieu fee on multifamily projects, especially some of those luxury type of multifamily projects. However, given the current climate due to mix of economic, regulatory, and other market factors, that doesn't really pencil out for us to add additional cost burden to those types of projects.

They looked at our fees across other jurisdictions' fees, comparable fees in the jurisdiction, and we're kind of right in the middle. And they also interviewed a number of developers and found that they actually really like our approach and use it as kind of the goalpost when they're talking to other jurisdictions. On this slide, the consultant had used a prototype of a 2,600 square foot home with a sales price of $860,000 to compare our current fee with those in other jurisdictions in the region. And you can see ours is $8,000 for this particular prototype. It's pretty much in the middle, except for the outlier, which is the city of Davis, but pretty much in the middle of those other fees.

So based on these early findings, our analysis is that, number one, our Aunt Loo Fee has been very successful for multiple projects. Our fee we have developed a lot of housing in the last few years, so our fee is definitely feasible for developers even in this challenging housing market. We seem to be striking the right balance between the affordability goals and preserving the project feasibility. And based on our conversations with the consultant team in an effort to simplify the way we calculate the fee, a fee based on square footage is being recommended. So, what we're proposing to do is continue to work with the consultant team to kind of find that right fee amount, but we'll be focusing on how we simplify this process, how we shift from this 1% of lowest home price to the square footage fee based price, making sure that we still align with other jurisdictions.

And then as we are moving as we are kind of opening up this ordinance, we're also going to be taking a look to see where we can clean up some of the other the language in the ordinance that we have currently. For instance, it still references redevelopment agency, stuff like that. We'd be cleaning it up. So for tonight's action, we're asking for any comments or questions you have or concerns about, the direction we're headed. And, using stakeholder input, workshop feedback, the final analysis from EPS, we're proposing to bring revisions back to you guys with a formal recommendation for you to review and recommend adoption to City Council.

So that's it.

All right. Stephanie, thank you very much for the thorough presentation. As far as timing, then, when would you expect you would come back with something? Do you know?

Well, we are actually hoping to come back to you in October. We're supposed to get the final report from the consultant before the end of this month.

Wow. Okay. Thank you. Commissioners, it's time to ask questions of our staff. Anybody? Commissioner West.

I guess this is just a point of clarification off the first slide, and I think it's always important to emphasize this point. We can zone, we can do things like this impact fee, that kind of thing, but we can't require developers to build affordable housing. We can have these things in where we have this fee option when they decide not to so that we can fund projects to actually implement it later. But we can't say, yeah, in this area nobody can build anything but affordable housing. That's against the law in California, right?

Well, I would think that if we strictly had our inclusionary housing ordinance stated that it was 10% constructed units, then it would be the 10%. But like most of the other jurisdictions, we're offering flexibility because it's very much a burden for single family home developers to develop affordable housing. It's not in their wheelhouse. And we probably get a lot more bang for our buck using the current strategy, which is allowing them to pay in lieu fees and using that for the gap Okay.

Technically, we could say you can't build that at all unless you had 10% affordable housing in there, even though nobody does

Yeah. I mean, other jurisdictions have just to commissioner West, just to add to what Stephanie said, other jurisdictions have taken that approach. But, again, given given kind of the heightened legal scrutiny, and the difficulty that many of the developers have in terms of doing that type of of development, most jurisdictions have kind of moved away from that. And then they offer a variety of options with the goal of of getting, getting funds or facilitating the production of affordable housing. All

right. Thank you.

Commissioner Ross. Thank you, Chair. I had a question. So I was curious about if there was anything in our inclusionary housing ordinance that talked about mixed income development. So we usually end up with market rate housing everywhere.

And then we provide this gap financing option, the city does, to help create affordable housing development. So we're siloing affordable housing in one place and market rate housing in another place. And I'm curious if the city staff have looked at some sort of a way to include all types of income in one development, which I believe requiring developers to do 10% affordable in a project would allow for that. But I understand that that can be difficult. So do we have anything, any ordinance, or anything where we give maybe some sort of benefit for developers that are considering mixing incomes in one project market rate, workforce, and low income projects or housing?

Yeah. We don't have anything specific in the ordinance that encourages that. We do have I think, one multifamily project that is mixed income. That's Bidwell Point. They have 40 market rate units and 100 affordable units. But that's the only one that I know of off the top of my head.

Phil Angeliki's developed

Let's make sure that Commissioner Ross is finished.

Well, I was going to respond to her.

Oh. Yeah. I don't know if we okay. It's a workshop, right? Okay. Yeah, it's a workshop. Go ahead, Commissioner. So,

in 1990 Natoma Station was developed by Phil Angelides as one of these mixed use master plan communities where you had all different levels of affordability within the entire master plan community. That's the only one I really know of in Folsom.

There is another, right next to it's Empire Ranch Road and Iron Point, the condos that are right there.

Mhmm.

But I can't remember the name of the elementary school that it's next to. Madrone? Yes. Yes. Madrone. Yeah, they also have low income and very low income houses

Yeah. In

those we do have five condo projects in the city that are mixed like that. That was part of the condo conversions that occurred between 2002 and 2012.

And I guess in the case of the Bidwell Point example where they did 40 market rate units, that was probably to help their project pencil. Mean, why would an affordable housing developer do that other than that reason? Is there any other reason they'd do that?

Yeah, I'm not certain, but it was one of our first mixed use projects as far as developing in a commercial zone. It's been well received, and I know that even their market rate rents are a little bit on the lower end.

Right. And while I have the floor, I'd also like to make sure for the purpose of the recording and the record that everybody knows that Commissioner Hurst was not in the roll call, but he didn't miss a beat. He got here in time for all the action. So I just want to make sure we say that for the record. Are there other questions for Stephanie? Commissioner Barcelona.

Justin could go first. It's fine.

Had his

hand up before Okay.

All right. Okay. I need some clarity. What is our target for affordable housing in the city at this point in time? A number. What is the number of units that we need to build to be defensible?

From the RHNA standpoint?

Yes.

I probably have a slide that has that. Oh, there you go. So this is our allocation. We have half of our allocation is for lower income between the very low and the low, so 3,000 plus units. And then this slide actually shows how many units have been constructed as of our recent housing element annual report, but we have two more affordable housing projects that currently have broken ground and are not included in these numbers.

How many units will those two generate?

I believe about 170 combined.

Okay.

And this time period lapsed in 2024 or does it lapse in 2028 when we have to redo the housing element?

These are the numbers through 2028. Is just our report out through 2024.

Okay. Have any cities required indemnification from developers against potential lawsuits for the city not complying with an affordable allocation requirement?

Not that I'm aware of. I'm I'm not aware of any city that's that's done something like that. Because the the obligation is on the jurisdiction to provide sufficient sites at appropriately zoned land to accommodate these units. Whether the market actually builds those units a whole another question. So if, for example, if we can demonstrate that we provided the land, we provided the appropriately and it was appropriately zoned, and it it had infrastructure that's serving it or a plan to get infrastructure serving it, then just because the market doesn't build all those units doesn't mean that we are at fault in that situation.

So, I think they they have a concern is if you you have if you don't have sufficient sites, or if you've got other significant constraints to development that you are not actively addressing, that's where you can run afoul of housing element law.

Commissioner Hurst, you had something.

Hi, yes. I have two questions. Earlier you mentioned that with the 1% assessment, the city often relies on a market analysis that's provided by a developer. Understanding that I'm sure there's regular back and forth whenever those are presented to the city. Has the city actively disputed a market analysis that was provided? And if so, how often does that typically happen?

Yeah, we have. I can't say how often on several occasions because it's not I mean, they can provide the market analysis. We can look at Zillow, and we can say, I don't think this is quite right. But we still we truth that out as best we can.

Okay. And then my other question is, understanding that, you know, findings will be official soon from the study that's currently ongoing in the final report, I know the recommendation, it seems like it's to move into the per square foot methodology. But to the extent that I know you had a slide, I think it was before this one, that showed the different jurisdictions in the region. I saw there were yeah, there's some different calculation methods. I guess, at a high level, why the per square foot methodology seeming to be one that is more appealing for the city of Folsom as opposed to some of these other methodologies, such as a per dwelling unit?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's two reasons. The first reason is based on Desmond's review of this based on his review of kind of inclusionary housing and nexus studies, there is a correlation between larger homes and the workforce that's needed to kind of help maintain those homes as in terms of, like, landscaping, house cleaning, pool, etcetera. So once the houses start to get a little larger, typically, the household is not fully maintaining the home. They're hiring some of the individuals who may be lower income.

So that's one reason. And also, that's kind of the direction it seems to be going in the state, and it seems, based on what we've heard from our consultant, that's a legally defensible approach with the NEXUS study. Did you want to add anything, Desmond?

Yeah. Mean, generally what our consultant was saying is that more jurisdictions are moving to this per square foot model rather than and away from kind of a per dwelling unit. Because, again, you could have a dwelling unit that's 1,500 square feet and a dwelling unit that's 3,000 square feet. There's a sizable difference in terms of the economic impact that that home has. There's benefits in some cases.

But there's also, as Stephanie mentioned, what they were showing was that the larger the home, the more likely it is to generate low wage jobs from housekeepers and so forth like that. So they've also believed that the per square foot method is more legally defensible. And you could see those cities, like the city of Sacramento, it's more recently updated their inclusionary housing fee. They did go to a per square foot did go to a per square foot fee.

Yeah. And I'll just add to that. There were some semi recent amendments to the government code sections that deal with nexus studies and the requirements that cities have to follow to pass these kinds of fees. And without going into all the details, basically they have made the process a preference toward the per square foot, and they've made it much easier to get nexus studies approved when it is a per square foot basis. And it's not that you cannot do it on a dwelling unit basis, but the bar is much higher and you have to do much more work to explain and justify how you're getting there. So when they say it's not as legally defensible, it's from a variety of perspectives.

And just to piggyback on what Sari said, so for accessory dwelling units, if we charge impact fees on accessory dwelling units, we're only allowed to charge them when they're over a certain size. And then we have to charge them in proportion based on the relationship of the square footage of the ADU to the primary home. So like Sari said, more and more we're being kind of pushed into this per square footage approach. So it

would be fair to say, to summarize all of what you said here, it's a combination of that's the way the market's moving and state incentives.

It's legal issues and the results of the analysis. Got it.

All right.

Thank you.

Commissioner Ross. I just ask another question. When you were talking about the hurdles for this process, you mentioned that you have to manually enter the fee for each building permit. If you switch to one of these fee calculation methods, would that issue go away? Okay, great.

Yeah, it would because they already add the square footages in for the building permit process each home, because they use it for other calculations, mostly to calculate the actual building plan review fee. But those fees are already entered in. If we had a square footage based fee, it would just automatically populate. You.

I do have a quick question. Is the Palmer case still in effect? And Or I mean, we could we, if we chose to, impose it on high end rentals? We could. So Palmer is not in effect anymore.

Right. There was a more recent case. Think you had it in your chart. $15.00 5. Yeah. That said, no, you absolutely can include it on, rental housing. Okay.

Okay. And our fee is so high, why on rentals? Per unit, 60,000?

That's the impact fees. That's to pay for all the water, the sewer.

By virtue of the fact that there are a lot more people at that density than there are at a residential

The single single family is $95,000 per unit.

Right. 60 is, like, comparatively speaking, seems pretty high per unit.

Yes.

One of the things that we and the consultant have to look at is the total impact fee burden on or the total fee burden on projects. And so when you look at the $60,000 and then you add on top of that an inclusionary housing fee, what they were saying to us is with the $60,000 fee that's already on multifamily development, it's not penciling right now. And then you add another fee on top of that, that just puts a it creates a disincentive to develop multifamily housing. And we actually want to see a variety of housing types throughout the city and especially in the Folsom Plan area. So that was one of the reasons we kind of pulled back and are not recommending that we do an inclusionary housing fee for rental.

We've only seen one market rate multifamily project be developed down there. The other one was an affordable project where the city provided gap financing.

Right. Thank you. Okay. Anything else? Commissioner West?

Just had one question on the square footage calculation. So say we declare this new ordinance, we're saying we're charging $10 a square foot. I'm just making up a number that doesn't make sense just for inflation for the next year, inflation in housing prices. Do we have to revisit that dollar per square foot every year to make sure it doesn't get out of whack with where the market is to where we're not collecting the kind of fees that we would want to based on the cost of the housing?

Yeah. So right now, we have the housing trust fund fee, and we evaluate that annually based on the CPI. So I would imagine that's what we would do with this fee as well.

Okay. Thank you. So a jurisdictions lot use the construction cost index, actually, rather than the consumer price index because construction cost is the indexing mechanism that we can use. And we can, again, automate that so that it's updated every year. Most of our fees are either updated by CPI or the construction cost index each year.

So we have the housing trust fund fee, and also the inclusionary fee goes into the housing trust fund?

Those are actually two different funds. Oh, they are? So we have a housing trust fund and we have the Folsom Housing Fund. Okay.

But two fees for affordable housing, essentially.

Yeah. The housing trust fund is on commercial development, new commercial development. Oh. Hotel storage units.

Oh, okay. All right. Any other questions, Commissioner Hurst?

To sort of follow-up on that train of thought, would there be advantages in a scenario where there's more market volatility to use the per square foot methodology? Would it make it easier to predict fees given that 1% in a region can vary drastically if housing prices are changing over the course of months?

I believe so. Yeah. I mean, we don't know what's going to happen with the market. But, again, then we'd probably be relooking at the fee if housing prices went down drastically because this would even be a large hit on them with the fee that we're going to look at now. We're going to look to have a fair fee, but we can reevaluate it.

Any other questions before we call for public comment? Hearing and seeing none, is there anybody from the audience who would like to address us on this item? Any comments? Come on up. State your name please for the record and your affiliation.

Good evening, Madam Chair and, Commissioners. Vance Girard with the North State Building Industry Association, also known as the BIA, representing more than 500 member companies in the home building industry. Been very fortunate to meet most of you, up there. Some of you are seeing me for the first time. I'm sorry.

I promise I won't be here very often. I would like to thank Stephanie and Desmond for representing the comments that the BIA has made thus far very accurately. This fee structure is something that we really do go to other jurisdictions and hold up as the prime model for success, not only because it is accommodating to our members in the way that they are able to have it swing with the market as a home value goes up. The fee goes up, goes down, fee goes down. But you've also done very successfully here in Folsom with leveraging those dollars into actually becoming, units for people to move into.

So we do have, some pretty serious concerns with changing from the 1% calculation to the per square footage calculation. Staff has been very transparent in that this is very much an administrative concern, logistical issue. And to that, we say rather than change the way the fee is calculated, let's work together to find the best way possible to help you calculate the fee, administer the fee, and move forward in that regard rather than changing to something that, yes, everyone else is doing very largely, but this is an instance where it's really great to be unique because it's working so well. So we're going to continue to work with staff and all of you folks, members of the council, on that approach and we hope we'll have success with that. I'll also say we do have a little bit of concern with the timeline that this has been falling on.

The study not being complete for the initial workshop is somewhat of a concern. You saw that Elk Grove is still completing their affordable housing study. That started long before Folsom started their affordable housing study and theirs still isn't done. So, these are very complex documents, and it's somewhat concerning the speed at which this has been moving. By the time it's out at the end of the month, I believe it's coming back to Planning Commission within two weeks and two weeks is also a very short amount of time to familiarize yourself with a NEXUS study. That is another issue that we have with this process. That being said, please reach out to me at any time if you have questions. We really do want to be a partner in this to make sure that Folsom is getting the housing it needs at all levels. Thank you.

So before you step down, since this is a workshop, think we can ask you a question or have discussion. So have you been successful taking our model to other cities in the region or I can't do they kind of like say say specifically. Okay.

Desmond is very familiar with we did an impact fee study in the region in 2020. We're in the process of updating that study right now. And we may actually have some additional information to share with you on Folsom's current fee burden in terms of we have it broken down by low density residential versus medium density residential. And the swing between those two is actually looking like it's it's quite large. I can't give you the specifics yet, but we're probably going to have ours done about the same timeline that you guys have your study done.

Okay. Anybody else? Commissioner Hurst?

Hi, Vance. To the extent that there's a clear preference here from the builders, would you say that having this current fee structure before we decided to switch to any other alternative is an incentive for builders to build in Folsom? To what extent does that have a deciding effect on someone who wants to develop here?

That's really tough to say because there's a lot of different factors that go into whether or not folks are going to build a community in one city versus another or an unincorporated county. It's everything has to line up, right? It all has to pencil out at the end of it. And I will say over the past five, ten years, we've seen people coming to Folsom because everything has lined up so wonderfully. Is it going to be the breaking point? Hard to say. But if it's working, we'd really rather not change it up and risk any type of additional slowing in the future.

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Jardin.

Thank you.

Appreciate you being here. Another speaker, come on up. Please introduce yourself and your affiliation.

Good evening. My name is Judy Alexander and a citizen who works with low income, very low income housing opportunities here in the city. But I'm just trying to get an understanding here of some figures that I think Stephanie gave us, and I may have these wrong. So you talked about having collected since 2019 dollars 30,000,000 for in lieu fees. And then I believe you said that $13,000,000 had been used.

If that is correct, that is of concern to me when we're lacking housing.

So we actually do have money in our fund currently, and we've just funded Harrington Grove, which is 51 units, And we have not funded another project yet. But we have funding available, approximately $20,000,000 in our housing fund, to fund additional projects.

That's great news. And I'm hoping we can find projects that will be shown to be able to use those funds because I think those people who are sales clerks and busboys and DoorDash drivers really want to live in the communities that they serve. The other numbers, the very low and low income RHNA, which I believe is the state requirements for Folsom. That's the mandate. The mandate, right.

So we got a big mandate. And we haven't completed a whole lot of those units. And it's been my experience that every time the state looks and doesn't see something that they're excited and happy about, they tend to start meddling again. And I think there was a reference that in 2028, we're going to see those numbers go up. And I think there was a report here to city council that intimated that that could happen. So we got some money, and we've got a mandate. How's our level of success looking?

Well, mean, to tell you what I understand is we need builders who are willing to build affordable housing projects. And so we could shout it from the top of every mountain, come on, check us out here in Folsom. We've got available financing. But it takes an awful lot to put a project together, as you probably know.

It does. And the whole state is in the same

You've got to get tax credits. It's a big mosaic of ways they put it together. Stephanie, I'd love for you to comment on that. I think we've got the money and we've got the wherewithal. It's not easy. We want to do it, but we can't build it as a city.

Well, going to ask us. Oh, no. We know. But everybody I know you know.

A lot of cities have the same concern Yeah, and

oh, they do. But as a citizen here and listening to neighbors and expressing concerns about the city finances and about some of these state mandates, people are asking questions. We all just are looking for any way we can make it a better communication. That's all.

Yeah. Thank you. I

would just say we do have conversations often with affordable housing developers that are looking at different sites in the city for potential new affordable housing developments. One of the factors that's going on right now is it's gotten a lot harder to get the tax credit financing over the last year or so. We're hoping that things change on that front. But they're looking at a lot of options, and we're sure we're going to have somebody approach us sometime soon to utilize those funds.

They have But I thank deep you for project all of your attention and help to these issues.

Thank Thank you for being here tonight, Judy. Appreciate you very much. Is there anybody else who'd like to address the Commission on this item number one? Commissioners, any other discussion before we move on to the next item? Okay, we'll close that workshop.

Thank you, Stephanie, for all your hard work on that. Appreciate it. All right, the next item is Number two, SPEC 20 four-seventeen, Objective Development and Design Standards Workshop. This is a workshop for us to provide input on the draft city of Folsom objective development and design standards that are proposed to be adopted as an appendix to the Folsom municipal code. And we have Desmond Perrington for this. Hi, Desmond.

Chair Reynolds, members of the Commission, Desmond Perrington, Planning Manager in the Community Development Department. I'm back before you tonight to talk about the city's work on objective development and design standards. So, as you may recall, there's been a number of changes in state law SB three thirty, SB eight that are increasingly requiring jurisdictions when they do any kind of review of housing development, to have, objective design standards in place. So no longer the use of design guidelines or kind of subjective criteria, but clearly measurable and identifiable standards that, you know, there's no debate or dispute about. And one of the things that the one of the primary reasons why we were doing this is because, as you may recall, back in August of of twenty twenty four, the city adopted a number of amendments to to our general plan to allow for increased building heights, increased density, increased floor area ratio in key areas of the city, which I'll talk about in just a second.

And as part of that, the discussion was about the if we're going to allow this kind of more intensive development in Folsom, what's the mechanism that we can use to ensure that they're well designed and compatible with the surrounding area? And so that tool is really objective design standards, which is why we're here before you tonight. So we're going to walk you through the objective design standards. Opportunity for you to ask questions, raise any issues. And then, like with the inclusionary ordinance, we'll be back, before you ultimately seeking a recommendation get to get this, formally adopted.

So we can no longer use our multifamily guidelines. And in fact, our multifamily guidelines have conflict with some of the the the portions of the zoning code. And and so we need to repeal that and then replace them with these. So there's a number of policies in the general plan that kind of speak to this issue, this kind of this larger issue of what we did changing the land use designations in the targeted areas by creating this what's called an overlay zone that allowed for housing development where it wasn't previously allowed and allowed for greater densities and greater heights. So that's promote town centers as gathering places, promote the revitalization of aging commercial corridors, a range of housing types that serve the needs of all generations, and then, commit to high quality design, and then find a way to kind of integrate older and newer areas of the city.

So the goal of this project was balancing the need to comply with state law but ensuring that we get that kind of high quality of both site and architectural design. So to kind of walk you back through kind of what we had done leading up to this. So before we even got to those amendments in the general plan or before we undertook the objective design standard work, we started in 2022 by reaching out to the community and talking about the places where this kind of more intensive development would be suitable. And then what kinds of design features and key elements were important. And so we actually surveyed the community.

We got 400 responses. We did kind of a design survey. We did a targeted multi family and mixed use residential mixed use housing study where we ultimately presented recommendations to the city council. And that laid the groundwork for everything that we did in terms of the general plan amendments and then for the objective design standards. So we actually, as you can see here, we took examples within the city showed how they could work under with the general plan amendments and with the objective design standards.

This just happens to be at the corner of Riley And Bidwell. This is a vacant site there that was formerly owned by the school district. So again, I just talked about a lot of this. We brought on Opticos Design, which is an architectural firm architectural and planning firm to help us with this. And we wanted objective design standards that were very that were not only detailed but very visual so that, you know, so the general public could understand what we're talking about.

So, again, these are the areas where we focused that we established those minimum densities, the taller height, and allowing for more intensive development. So this is along the East Bidwell Corridor, along the Glen Light Rail Station, around the Iron Point Light Rail Station, and then also in the Folsom Town Center down in the Folsom Plan area. So as you could see, the objective development and design standards, they regulate the physical form and character of both multiunit residential and residential mixed use development. So this is the outline of the document itself. Is not while it's being referenced in our zoning code, it's going to be kind of a standalone document.

And we did that on purpose so that we could make adjustments to it simply through a resolution rather than going through an ordinance process if we find that things need to be fine tuned or if something doesn't work. So that includes an introduction that walks the applicant kind of through what needs to be done. It then talks about the development standards, massing and articulation of the building. We have standards for larger sites. And that's particularly focused on sites where maybe you have a large big box retailer that goes under.

Retail hasn't been successful in that area, and they want to redevelop it with housing or with mixed use there. So it provides a guide for how to deal with that large site. It also has exceptions to the standards. Because we know that, particularly in infill areas, you're always dealing with unique circumstances, like easements, like existing structures, things like that, slopes, and other topographical issues that can really constrain development. Then we have obviously a definition section and a measurement methods section in there as well.

So in that introduction section, it really it's a quick guide for the public as well as for a developer applicant or architect to figure out, Okay, how do these apply to my project? What do I need to do? How does it relate to existing regulations in the zoning code? And what are the procedures I need to follow. We're also preparing a checklist that would go along with this that both the applicant and staff will use to quickly identify how their project is meeting the standards.

And this will be kind of like a roadmap for an architect as they're designing their project. So in terms of development standards, we have site development standards that talk about where the buildable area is, where the building setback is, how far they should be set back from the street, and where they should where their kind of lot line or design area should be. Again, there are development standards also for things like parking, with the idea of focusing parking at the sides or the back and how to treat different types of parking, surface parking versus structured parking. There's other approaches to parking as well that talks about ability to share parking among lots and parcels or among different areas of the project. And again, the goal of this, when we talk about kind of revitalizing commercial corridors, is to try and bring buildings up closer to the street to get more pedestrian activity, to ensure ground floor retail is successful in those areas rather than having you know, you having to walk quite a distance, navigate your way through a parking area to then get to that retailer or get to that housing.

Then we have development standards that really relate to the building itself, not only the setback lines, but where they should build the building and then the overall height. We also have standards for transparency for that ground floor because if you are even if you're not putting commercial uses, there are other ways to activate that ground floor because generally, if you're a pedestrian walking by, you don't want to see blank walls. You don't want to see really small windows. You want to see something that is of interest and that enlivens the street also provides safety because you've got people or activity going on in that building or people looking through those windows. So it talks about larger windows and transparency down at this level.

We also have things that talk about two features that mask the height by incorporating stories within the roofline and tower elements and balconies. There's also standards with regard to open space and the way in which Because as you become denser, that open space becomes really important. In terms of massing and articulation, there are helpful checklists in here that talk about, as your building gets taller or your building gets longer, the different types of design features that are needed to help prevent monolithic design. So things like establishing kind of a top, a middle and a base that are kind of different elements, Looking at facade composition, window fenestration, a variety of materials, the use of balcony and decks, and then avoiding blank wall treatments. So again, this is some examples here.

You've got a base that has different design elements, again, larger windows. And then you've got the middle here. And then you've got features like the tower element of the parapet and so forth that helps differentiate so you don't get one really tall monolithic stucco structure. And again, it looks at symmetry, the use of bays and windows here. And you can see how that's put into practice on an actual building.

We talked about blank wall treatments, the use of artwork, and other things like that to create a more inviting environment. And again, the use of things like balconies, and then, again, those kind of activation at the Ground Floor level. For our larger sites, we've developed what are called large site standards. And these are envisioned to apply in situations like I described earlier. You're looking at really sites that are three acres or larger.

And the idea here is to prevent somebody from building a gigantic structure that's not broken up and that really is kind of really kind of massive and out of scale with the surrounding developments. So the first thing is this kind of step by step process that we walk through the developer or architect kind of looking at the development site, looking at ways to break it up into individual development sites. So rather than doing one large building, they're doing kind of multiple buildings on there with thoroughfares to create new blocks. And then they're adding their open space because there's a 5% open space requirement here. And then they're looking at where their facades go.

So they're fronting the public right of way. And then maybe having parking on the interior. And then different pedestrian passageways through here. Again, taking something that could be pretty monolithic and breaking it down really into more human scale development. And then the last chapters, as we talk about, really go through design constraints.

There are exceptions and exceedances that you can use if you've got things like easements or existing structures that can interfere with development there. And then if there's topography, hillsides, slopes, those kinds of things, there are allowances for that as well. And then ultimately, the idea here would be, because of all the changes with state law where there's very little discretion these days by the commission or by the council to deny a project unless there's a health and safety consideration, projects that comply with these standards would then be handled ministerially. In other words, they would be approved at the staff level if they met these standards. However, if the developer chooses not to meet these standards, or for some reason can't and the exceptions don't work for them, then they could still go through they can elect voluntarily to go through the discretionary process, in which case it would land back with you.

So as I mentioned, the objective design and development standards would be a standalone appendix to the zoning code, which is Title 17 of the Folsom Municipal Code. We will be updating our design review section to make it clear that for projects in these overlay areas where we have a general plan overlay designation that allows for this more intense development, that if they comply with the objective design and development standards, then this would be a ministerial review done by the community development director. And then we would also be, as I mentioned earlier, resending our existing multifamily design guidelines. So we are hoping to bring this forward to you on the fifteenth with council deliberation and action on the twenty eighth. Assuming that they vote to approve it, it would come back for the second reading.

And then it would become be in effect on January 1. So between the twelfth and the first, we would be doing additional outreach to architects. We would develop that kind of guidance form and checklist. And then we're going to be monitoring this to see kind of how successful this is and how it works. Not only did we talk to jurisdictions that have already worked with Opticos to look at how that has worked and kind of lessons learned, We actually did a workshop with the development community, particularly architects and engineers, to get their feedback on this.

We had a much larger and longer and more detailed document. And the feedback we got is there's a number of things that you need to look at and that you may want to simplify. And in particular, we heard from some jurisdictions is that you don't want to make it so detailed that it ends up kind of slowing down the process or puts a really big burden not only on the architect but on staff in terms of verifying everything. So based on that feedback we got, we went back through the document, worked with the consultants, and made a number of revisions to simplify things. So we think that we've struck the right balance here.

And again, we have taken into consideration you know, let me go back a little bit. We've taken into consideration the fact that, in these areas I'm going back to the map here there are existing single family residential neighborhoods in a number of areas. So we've got standards in there that talk about step backs and height reductions and things like that as you're adjacent to existing single family neighborhoods. And then we also have those transparency requirements to try and activate the street along here. So we've tried to kind of balance it all out.

And I know this is kind of a long document, we've thrown a lot at you. But I think we're interested to hear any comments that you have, not only now, but the rest of this month and early next month if you've got comments and questions on this.

All right. It's kind of a dense document. So who wants to any questions for Desmond? Commissioner Ross?

I just wanted to commend staff and the consultant on this document. I've read a lot of these in my career. And this is a very thoroughly thought out document that will, I think, be very easy to use, I hope. Have you guys actually gone and done the measurement methods portion of this document to make sure that it's not too complicated?

Yeah. So we've taken a couple of our own projects forward through this. I think we're going to reach out to the development community and see who might be willing to be a guinea pig, given that they would get through in a much faster timeline, and just to see if we need to make any tweaks. But Jessica and I and Jessica played a huge role in this and was very helpful. We had some really helpful conversations, in particular with the city of Campbell that's been using this for a while.

And they were very helpful to talk to us about areas where it was too detailed and then areas where it wasn't detailed enough. And so we tried to kind of make the changes and balance this out. Because I think we had subzones in here and things like that that we were like and then we had different zoning designations and then different subzones that was it was getting increasingly complicated for us to understand. So we were like, Okay, back to the drawing board. Let's make this uniform.

Again, Jessica was hugely helpful on that. And it's like, how can we simplify this and still achieve our objectives? And so that was very beneficial. I think that we've gotten a better document out of that. We've also we're in the process of also updating our local fire code because we found that there were things in here that conflicted with some of our local amendments to the fire code that was preventing some of the kinds of infill development that we wanted to see. So we're working through that right now as we speak.

Okay. Thank you.

Commissioner Barcelona.

Thank you. Thanks, Desmond. This is great. A couple of questions. What other cities, besides Campbell, have used this document or variations of this document?

Yeah. So specifically for Opticos, a lot of jurisdictions in Marin County, so in Novato, I believe Healdsburg, Campbell, Orenda. And they are currently working with Citrus Heights on developing objective design standards for the redevelopment of the Sunrise Mall. And Auburn has hired them to do something similar. So we talked with the jurisdictions in Marin County, but they had not taken a lot of projects through.

That's why we were kind of focused on Campbell because they had the most experience taking development projects through this.

And then any cities outside of California, perhaps up in Oregon?

I you know, we didn't really tell we were so focused on California that we didn't really talk to them about outside. I know they've done work outside of California. Okay. I

spent the weekend in the Pearl District up in Portland. Yeah. It looks very similar to this. Does the League of California Cities publish a model standard?

I do not believe that they do. And we looked at a lot of jurisdictions to see all the different approaches to objective design standards. Okay. Some were like like we looked at Roseville. It's very kind of it's very basic. And they're definitely objective. But we felt that given the change in height and density that we needed something that was a bit more detailed. And one of the things that appealed to me about having an architectural and planning firm do this is because they were really focused on that architectural detail.

Yeah. That's good. How about walkability standards? Do they factor into this?

They do, but one of the things that we need to look at to really address walkability is the city's standard construction specifications. So we have different street standards in those construction specifications. And I think one of the things I've been talking about with the new public works director is looking at narrower streets. We've also got the roundabout standards and then wider sidewalks to complement kind of what we're doing here. The original plan for East Bidwell talked about actually adding more lanes and widening, which works kind of contrary to this.

The idea is not to reduce the traffic volume, but to slow the traffic volume down a bit so that folks feel more comfortable walking, bicycling, and noticing the retail environment there. So they feel comfortable pulling off and stopping or parking on the street and those

I kinds of

just what I was thinking about is I watched a video about a month ago on Portland's sidewalk elevations and their design standards, and they had it spelled out very distinctly about width of the sidewalks and buffer zones, landscaping to provide a buffer, that sort of thing.

Yeah. And I think that's something that we need to we we do need to look at here. But what we what we didn't want to do was put developers in a situation where they're complying with our objective design standards but then are not in compliance with our standards construction specifications when it came to building the sidewalk and things like that. Okay. So what we have done is referenced the standard construction specifications.

And then, like I said, we're having those discussions with the Public Works Department, with the Fire Department about improving those standards. Because having these objective design standards in place as soon as possible is important because of the legislation. And we don't want to be caught flat footed when a project comes in and then we don't really have any objective design standards to hold them to. Sure.

Okay. And then last question. Since you can develop this to be a ministerial improvement process, can you fold street names into this as well since we had the great Kilraven controversy in the 2025. And Price Walker, it would be nice to have that become ministerial.

Yes. We are looking at that. That's actually part of the overall zoning code update. We're going to be folding that in. That's really not appropriate on the objective design and development standards, but I think everyone's in agreement that the street names should be handled at staff level. Okay. Thanks so much.

So if we adopt well, the intent is we're going to get rid of our current multifamily design standards. But if this document applies only to the bluish purple areas up there, what's the standard going to be in the rest of the city? Or is that not the case? Do I misunderstand that?

No, you're correct. We wanted to start with this because we were upping the height and the density and all of that. But there are not a lot of other areas where we anticipate multifamily development. I think the exception is some of the area along Iron Point here. And then there are we do not have standards for other multifamily development in the Folsom Plan area.

And then there's a couple other multifamily sites up here, again, off of Iron Point. So we wanted to get these done first because we felt that that was the priority. And then if council is supportive of this, the idea would be to get objective design standards for other areas of the city. One of the big concerns is obviously the historic district and also this other area. So we would be looking at developing kind of citywide standards.

They would they would not have the kind of intensity, if you will, or height, if you will, that these are having. But they would put in place objective standards that we could use.

Okay. But in the meantime, if we throw out our existing rules for multifamily citywide and we just allow have this document, I mean, we live in the rest of the city without any standards?

Well, actually, are guidelines. So we can't really so they're guidelines that conflict with our zoning code. And they are significantly out of date. So if a developer comes in with a project that we don't like and it's outside of these areas, they don't have to follow our multifamily lending guideline multifamily design guidelines to begin with. They can just say and we ran into an incident with that where they didn't want to comply with so we as we do today, we kind of work with the developers, and most of the developers are you know, do work with us.

Occasionally, we run into some that don't. But I would say the vast majority work with us. We try to be reasonable and strike a compromise to make sure their project is financially feasible. But also, we get design elements that reflect area or the community or the neighborhood. Generally, that's been pretty successful. So we will continue to do that until such time that we have objective design standards for the rest of the city.

So for the rest of the city, it's okay to be subjective pursuant to state law in the meantime?

Well, if the developer is voluntarily willing to do that, yes. If they are saying, no, we don't want to do that, then we don't have any teeth to hold them.

So it would behoove us maybe in the longer run to have something that does apply citywide?

Yes.

But might not be as intense as the stock? Correct. I gotcha. Are there other questions before I ask some more of mine? No? Okay, thank you. So I just noticed on your the quick code guide, it said it would 10 or more acres instead of three or more acres.

Yeah, we I caught that last night. So I will we will be we caught a couple of different errors in here and my apologies for that.

That's

right. Also our parking standards aren't the parking standards are not correct.

For the Town Center?

This is in section

get to the right section here.

But yeah

I didn't catch that one

while There were talking should have been a reduction in the parking, not the same parking as the

Oh, that one. Yes, I do have that one. Yeah. Okay. Because it made it look like we could approve projects with zero parking, right, that little table that was in there?

Yeah, let me get to that. Bear with me here. Yeah, so

That's page 50 of the document is what I had. 50 of our packet, I'm sorry.

Oh, Okay. Yeah, that's not the

Table 2.04. Yeah. Okay. So that was just a typo of some sort because it does look like the current standards are a certain amount, and this one says you could do it without that amount.

I should have flagged it. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Yeah. So yeah, it says the current standards, but then the reduced parking standards are exactly the same as the So current that to be fixed.

It should say 1.5 spaces per unit for residential would be reduced to one space per unit if they did the things listed above. Or if for commercial retail, it's currently one space per, I believe, 200 or two fifty square feet, that would be reduced to one space per 1,000 square feet if they did the parking techniques like providing for parking passes or a zip car or some kind of shared vehicle, those kinds of things.

Okay, thanks. On the provision that says that we're 70% or more of the surface area of the street facade is modified, then everything would be required. Does that mean I mean, obviously that's a major remodel. So if somebody is doing a major remodel on an existing building, are they going to have to come up to all these standards? Or is it just the standards that are applicable to the facade?

Yeah. One of the things that I should have made clear from the get go is that when you look at this area, much of our zoning for this area is commercial. Right. So we've placed an overlay here. So what that means is that if you have a commercial business and you're doing just fine and you want to expand your business, you are not subject to this.

It's only if you're proposing to do residential or residential mixed use that you would be subject to these guidelines. So yes, if somebody has a residential building and they're doing a concrete rework of that building, then we would be bringing them up to those standards. Now, again, they have an out. If they can't meet these standards, they can go through the typical discretionary process. And then when we can look at it in that manner, given that there may be extenuating circumstances.

Okay. And is 70% something that's got precedent like in state law or in an ordinance we have? Or is that just pulled out of the hat?

I think that's been their we could follow-up with them on that. I think that's been their experience in other jurisdictions. But we can follow-up

on Okay. Because that just seemed like yeah, 70% seemed kind of random. Oh, yeah. Will you remind us about the parking because it's under page 40 of our report parking placement standards. And it says that for the Folsom Plan Area Town Center, zero. So is that because they've got a lot more lax parking? I need to be reminded why that

No, no. This is how close the parking can be to the street, if I'm remembering correctly. So what this means is that in the Folsom Plan area, it doesn't mean that there's zero parking required. It means that they can have they can do things like bringing the parking it's the parking it's like at at the at the Ground Floor Level. Do do you recall, Jessica?

Yeah. I think it's like the side and the rear property lines, especially if it's like a parking, like a structure in that particular area. You can take the structure all the

way to the property line. Like if it's a parking structure, you mean? That type

of thing?

Yeah. Oh, Okay. Yeah? Okay. All right.

So And there's really kind of we looked at three different types of parking. There's your surface parking. That's the least expensive. That's probably going to be the most viable in the short term here. There's tuck under parking, where you have kind of like a small retail frontage. And then it tucks under the rest of the building. The rest of the building kind of cantilevers over that. And then you have a parking structure, which is either standalone or the development is wrapped around it. And you have the parking structure on the interior. So those are kind of the different approaches to doing parking.

When you go out to the suburban areas, the tuck under parking and the structure parking are less common because they're more and subterranean parking are less common because they're more expensive.

Okay. But in this case, it's the setback.

So

that means that because it's going be a town center type look, it can be like a parking structure. Okay, kind of like what Palladio has. But even Palladio, where their parking structure is, there's a setback where there's landscaping and everything. So what is zero? I I don't know.

So doesn't mean that there's not landscaping and a sidewalk and things like that. It just means that up to the property line. So this document refers a lot to design sites. So design sites, in many cases, if you have a small lot, that is your design site. If you have a larger lot, you can have multiple design sites. And that's where buildings would go. What they're talking about is your parking structure can go up to the property line or the design site. That doesn't mean that there's not landscaping. But when you go into urban environments, you'll have the sidewalk, and you'll have a planter strip where there's trees to shade the sidewalk. And then you'll have the building right there.

Right. Okay. I get it. As far as the open space that's required, it said open space is 50 square feet per unit. And that could be applied to the single unit or a combination. So if you gave them 150 foot balcony, and that was all they had on their residence, the rest of that remainder to the 500 could go into pub I mean, like common area open space as Yeah.

Okay. So we didn't want to be overly prescriptive on the open space. So we wanted to give them flexibility, because there's a number of different ways that you can do it. You can do it paseos, hardscaped, balconies, common areas, all that kind of thing. What we wanted to make sure is that there was some common space.

I mean, we're distinctive by nature here. We want to have people have access to some sort of open space. But there's a variety of different ways that they can do it. And a lot of that is dictated by the constraints of the site. So if their ability to satisfy that is through, like, a dog run and balconies, that may be the way they achieve it. Other projects may be able to do a wraparound with a whole interior courtyard area that's planted and has trees and all of that in addition to balconies. But it just so much of it depends on the constraints of the site.

Okay. So it's a provision to give flexibility to how Okay. You deal with the site Got it. All right. There was a lot of mention of, oh, the first was the privacy standards because that was stuff that you're doing in the document in order to protect existing residential, I think, against people staring in their backyards from high rises and stuff. Right?

Yeah. Both for the new residents as well as existing ones. So you don't want to if you're doing a structure that has an L, you don't want to have the windows positioned so you're just looking into somebody else's Okay.

So it does apply within the complex as well that you try to make sure people aren't all looking at each other.

Yeah. They've got some diagrams about the placement of bay windows. So they're offset, and they're not looking Okay. Directly into

I couldn't tell exactly from the document if that was addressed inside. Okay. Then Okay, we already took care of that one. And only the last one is this whole thing about thoroughfares being public. And yet, we're going to require them to be privately owned, essentially, is what it sounds like.

So we've got things for thoroughfares to be public, the civic open space to be public. The common area definition in the document doesn't include public space. It talks about the common areas there for the pleasure of the residents and people who have the businesses there. And then it says, I guess it's the thoroughfares have to be connected to the street to let the public have access. So it just strikes me that we might run into some problems if the public can free flow through these projects. And I guess I just don't need to understand that better.

Yeah, let me clarify a little bit. And Jessica, feel free to jump in if you've got anything to add. But so I need to clarify. So for the 50 square feet that we were talking about earlier, that's actually that's private open space. So that's things like balcony or a common area that's for those tenants or for those residents there.

But then the when we talk about the larger sites and divvying those up, then 5% of that has to be kind of the civic space, where people can come in and gather. So that's different than private open space. So I want to make that clarification. And then with regard to the thoroughfares, they use the term thoroughfares kind of as a generic term for either public or private streets. So, when they take a large site like like we saw earlier and I'll go back to the diagram that's in here.

So this is an existing public street. But they may want to make these private streets. And there may be a variety of reasons for that. They want to make sure that these are maintained because they own the units here and they want the HOA or they want or the developer wants to maintain these. Also, are different standards that we have for private streets versus public streets.

And so you don't need quite as much width. And you create kind of a more intimate environment. So they can opt to do these as public streets. The main purpose of here is this is really kind of carving up the site so that it's more walkable and it's more human scale, as opposed to somebody who's doing a massive development. And you've seen that with the Palladio project.

Many of the streets sorry many of the streets interior to the Palladio are private streets. They have parking that's all really nicely maintained because they have an incentive to keep that to a certain standard as people come and visit that area and patronize those businesses. So it's So

it's up to the property owner about whether they want it to be a public street or Yeah. Okay. But I mean and then could would they be able to put a gate in or like

would discourage that in this type of an environment.

Actually, think they saw there was something in there that said they were

Yeah, believe they're prohibited, but if they're not, we'll make sure that they

They are in there, yeah.

Okay.

It is. But I'm Okay. So we do not want to have anybody with private gates to get into the parking areas or anything like that?

Well, so that's different. I mean, what we're talking about is not having private gates to right here. If you had let's see. If you go back to here, you could have a gate there or a gate here, but we're not talking about gating off this.

You don't want road facing gates.

Yeah, we don't want road facing gates. We could have a gate at the entry so people aren't coming in on the apartment complex who are uninvited. You could have a gate here into the parking area. Those would be permissible. And if that's not clear, then we may need to clarify that. But what we don't want to do is basically bar the public from accessing this. We don't want this to be a whole series of Little Little Little Little fiefdoms, exactly. Yeah.

Okay, I got you. Yeah, you might look at that section because it's the one that says that you there are can't have bars on the windows. You can't have this, that, the other thing. It's so yeah, it's also said no gates or something, I think. I think that might be it. So everybody, thank you for tolerating me. Oh, I have one more just to tease you a little bit. What is human scale development? Is there a definition for that? Because I looked for it in the definitions.

Yeah.

But then I realized it wasn't in the document. It was in your staff report. So I think it's a Desmond

No, I'm not the first one to have used that. That's it's been around as part of kind of the discussion of smart growth. You know, if I had a financing mechanism to recoup money off of that, I would if I had invented it. But, no, it just it means that, you know, when you're when you're walking down a street, you know I mean, just this is an extreme example. When you're, you know, walking down a street in New York, there may be a skyscraper there. But what you're seeing is kind of relatable at at your level. You're not just you're not doing this all the time because there's no interface with the public down at at the bottom. The idea

Making it publicly enjoyable Yeah. Be on

the street. Okay. It's it's and it's just it's more relatable. You can't relate to blank walls.

Right.

And that I think that's one of the cons concerns is if if all you're passing by are are are blank walls, you know, it doesn't you don't feel like there's any relationship between you and that building. It's just it's a blank wall.

I get it. Yeah. Okay. I guess I actually have one more. If for some reason somebody got approved as a mixed use and did have retail approved on the bottom, if the retail wasn't successful, could they convert under this

they residential on the Yeah, I believe they could. Now, what we want to see is active residential uses. And to be honest, in today's retail environment, a lot of mixed use projects with ground floor retail are really struggling. And I think it's going to be a while, before we see, you know, floor retail on residential projects everywhere, where you're more likely to see them as at active intersections. So those those street segments that are that are really busy where you have people frequently walking by.

As an example, Bidwell, Bidwell Point, that that mixed income apartment project that we talked about earlier, they originally had a ground floor retail space right across from Sutter Middle School. They really struggled to fill that space because there wasn't enough foot traffic throughout all hours of the day. And so we worked with them, and they converted that to a live work unit so that somebody could have a personal studio but also live there as well.

Good. I remember that particular project, which is why I asked it. Okay. Very good. All right, thank you very much, everybody, for tolerating that. Any other questions or discussion for Desmond? Thank you, Desmond. Is there anybody from the audience who would like to come up and address the commission on this item? Okay, hearing and seeing none, guess that means the questions have been answered. And all right, I guess does that complete the workshop then, Desmond? Is there anything else you need or any questions you want to ask of us that you might need?

Whoops. No. I think, I I think really that's it. I, you know, I'd I'd no. I think what would be helpful as we have as we contemplate, you know, doing this more in in the city is, you know, is this is this useful? Is it too prescriptive? Is it too detailed? Or does it does it strike the right balance? I think those are the things that that we need to hear from you all as we contemplate, you know, potentially doing this elsewhere. Thank you. Okay. All

right. That concludes the workshop on that item then. And we're going to move on now to the principal planner's report. Jessica.

Hey. Good evening. So, quick report. Our next planning commission meeting is scheduled for October 15. We do have three items expected. One is bringing back the objective development and design standards. The second, potentially bringing back the inclusionary housing ordinance updates. And then we should have a tentative map on Comstock that would be coming in October as well.

Comstock. Comstock. Which one's that?

Is Desmond, do you want to Yeah. So

this is a project just west of Riley Street, not far from Sutter Middle School. There's a street called Comstock. There's a glass company that's at the corner there. And so further down that street, there are a number of vacant parcels. And the city had a triangular piece, and this other party had another odd shaped piece.

The the council gave authorization to to do a swap to make each property a little more developable. So we ended up with rectangles and not a bunch of triangles. And so now they're bringing forward the partial map to do that.

Okay. Very good. And then I think I would like to have you all think about whether it because we did a workshop on a document that's not completely cooked yet on the inclusionary zoning stuff, whether we can take that up as an action item next time or if we need to do it at a future meeting and talk about the semi final document once it's out. So I don't know if that's something that would be of concern. I mean, it comes out for public review, I guess you could argue that you don't need to hear it again before you actually act on it. But I just would like you all to think about whether if that's a concern we need to be concerned with.

Yeah. And that is something that we're looking at. We want to make sure that the public, as well as the development community and affordable housing community, both have opportunities to look at the document. So we'll let you know if this ends up getting pushed to the November meeting rather than the October meeting. But we will hopefully have more information shortly in terms of when the document will be available so we can get that out to folks and then do follow-up meetings if necessary. Necessary.

Terrific. All right. Thank you. Is there anything else under the good of the order? Hearing and seeing none? Oh, I have one. Oh, you do. I'm sorry. Ahead.

Is there any way we could have a study session on traffic impacts in the city, planning for traffic improvements or traffic mitigation? It just seems like our traffic situation is getting worse and worse in this town. And I think as a commission, would be great if we had a sense of where we're going on all of our roadways, particularly interregional access as well.

So we can get a better feel for it other than a one off project by project basis for what what the overall plan is?

Yeah. Let let me reach out to the public works director. We have been doing, you know, behind the scenes a lot of work on her in particular, and then we we've been assisting with that, doing a lot of work to try and get a lot of the infrastructure that was identified in the general plan and the Folsom Plan Area specific plan funded, designed, and in place. So we've been having meetings with SACOG to try to secure funding and getting our projects higher up in the priority list. And yeah, let me talk to her and see if we can get that scheduled.

That would be a very worthwhile thing to do. Yeah. Thank you, commissioner Barcelona. Great idea. Anybody else have anything? Alright. Hearing and seeing none, we are hereby adjourned at 08:23PM.