Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Please put all electronic devices on silent at this time. Agendas are on the back counter, and if you plan to speak at tonight's meeting, please complete a pink speaker card and return it to a staff member. As a reminder, Planning Commission meetings are broadcast live, replayed on Comcast 14, and available on the city's YouTube channel. I will now call the meeting to order. Jess, may I please have a roll call?

Commissioner Hagler? Here. Commissioner Kriz?

Here.

Commissioner Meish?

Here.

Commissioner Pryor is absent excused. Commissioner Unidad?

Here.

Vice Chair Brashears is absent excused. And Chair Hagan-Jones?

Here. I ask everyone to please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Jess, if you could please begin staff introductions.

Good evening, Jessica Sawyer, Recording Secretary.

Good evening, Joe Speaker, Assistant City Attorney. Good evening, Chair Hagan, Joseph, Commissioners, Greg Bitter, Assistant Development Services Director.

And good evening, Lauren Hawker, Senior Planner.

The public comment period is a time for anyone who would like to address the Commission on any item not on tonight's agenda. When addressing the Commission, please state your name for the record and limit your comments to three minutes. Is there anyone who would like to address the Commission on any item not on tonight's agenda?

Yes. Got it.

Thank you.

for letting me address the committee. My name is James Ferlich. I'm a resident of Roosevelt. I'm over in the Sierra Vista complex. And I've been querying the committee here for several weeks now concerning some affordable housing developments over in my area. And so my questions really start with some concerns of the community of how those developments are going to work. And to state some of the major ones is that When in particular, here comes the police and the racial profiling and my community is going to change. These are a lot of folks. Traffic's horrible. It's going to get worse. You know, the traditional ones and I'm going to miss my neighborhood and that kind of thing. So what I've been looking for is the plan of how this is going to proceed. There's a lot of folks. So if you divide these seats by quadrants, there's 800 or so new developments in southeast Roseville and northeast Roseville. Well, there's 1,500 going into northwest Roseville, and there's some 2,000-plus going into southwest Roseville. I want to know how it works. What's the plan for these folks? Who are the folks going to be? Who's managing the properties? What should my concerns be? What are the ramifications going to be? How's my community going to look after these are developed? So all coming from the future development that's apparently underway at 4950 Uplands. So this will be the third or fourth development within a mile or so of my home. So I'm trying to query the committee and find out what the plan is. So I spoke with Karen Alvroy and Shanti Landon here yesterday, and they told me this was probably the place that I could go to find out what that plan's going to be. Because they looked a little bit... off-center when I said that there's 2,000 coming off of Baseline Road, which is essentially true. There's new units going in over there, and they just simply aren't the same folks that we have been accustomed to. single residences in my area They're all self-sufficient There's not additional need for services and what have you and as I've been told by the police department who have been very responsive by the way that Traditionally these there's no need for concern my issues is that I don't think we've had 2,000 units go in anywhere in Roseville and

Okay, I wanna thank you for your comment. This is for the public comment period. What I would direct you to possibly do is to contact the planning department, perhaps talk to Mr. Bitter after the meeting, and he can probably answer or address your concerns at this point. Okay, very good, thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to offer a comment? Hearing none, I will close the public comment period. Next, we have the consent calendar, which consists of routine items that may be approved under one motion, as recommended in the staff reports. However, since each routine item requires a public hearing, each and every one may be considered separately upon request by the audience, the planning commission, or the staff. Action on the consent calendar shall be considered a public hearing. Tonight's consent calendar consists of one item, the minutes of the March 12, 2026 Planning Commission meeting. Is there anyone on the commission or in the audience who would like to pull an item off the consent calendar for second discussion? Hearing none, may I have a motion to approve the consent calendar as listed? Commissioner Chris has made the motion, and Commissioner Meish has seconded the motion. Roll call, please.

Commissioner Meish?

Aye.

Commissioner Hagler? Yes. Commissioner Unidad? Yes. Commissioner Chris?

Yes.

Chair Haykin-Jones?

Yes. The motion is approved. Thank you. Next on the agenda is requests and presentations. Before we begin, I want to review the meeting procedures. First, we will hear the staff presentation. Then I'll take questions from the commission. Then I will open the public hearing and public comment, and the public will have an opportunity to speak. Then I will close the public comment. Then I will close the public hearing. And then the commission may ask questions of staff. And then finally, the commission will consider this item and make a decision based on the information provided in the report from staff and the testimony presented during tonight's hearing. Item 6.1 is a request to amend Title 19 of the Roseville Municipal Code. For the record, file number PL26-0134. Lauren, may we have your presentation, please?

Yes, thank you. So yeah, my name is Lauren Hawker, and I'm here to talk to you tonight about our proposed amendments to our Accessory Dwelling Unit Ordinance, which is Chapter 19.60 of our zoning ordinance. So to give a little background, Since 2016, state law has been modified pretty much every year regarding ANU. So you've seen me here once a year. You've seen us here once a year to talk through changes. So we've been doing those annual updates, and the first ordinance we ever passed related to this was six pages long. It's now 14 pages long. And then legislation passed this year made two pretty key changes to the regulations for ADUs. And as we were trying to figure out how to fold those into our ordinance yet again, we realized we needed to take a step back and reorganize and streamline and improve the readability of the existing ordinance to do a more holistic reorganization and update to fold those in. So I'm going to go straight into, because I don't want to bury the lead, those two key changes that we've made in our ordinance. They are related to the size of an ADU and the number that are permitted. And again, this is because of state law that was passed in 2025, so it's already in effect. We just need to make sure our ordinance properly reflects those changes so it's clear to everyone. So on ADU size, that used to be based on square footage, and now it's based on interior livable space in terms of the size limitations. And so I have a table up there showing what that means. So interior livable space excludes hallways, storage areas, closets, garages. And so an ADU of this size, the total square feet, and this is based on an application we received actually within the last few months. The total square feet is about 1,400 square feet, which is over the 1,000 square foot size limitation. But now that it's based on interior livable space, it's 860 square feet, so is permitted. So we could start seeing ADUs that are larger than we have seen in the past because of this change in the law. And then in terms of the number permitted, this is not terribly straightforward in the regulations. So fair warning, I'm going to be staying really high level. But if you have questions, feel free to ask and we can get into more of those details. Basically, there are two sections in the government code. One section that talks about ADUs by local ordinance and one section that talks about ADUs that must be permitted. that second section was amended to say that any combination of those units may be permitted or must be permitted and what that means is any or all of those adu types have to be permitted instead of any one of those adu types has to be permitted So this image shows you what I'm talking about. The blue is a house, the gray is a driveway, the black lines a lot, just to orient us. So what this means is that someone is now allowed one junior ADU, shown on there as JADU, one ADU that is within or attached to a single family dwelling. So that's an or, one of those two types. and one detached ADU. And then on top of that, they may have one ADU consistent with our ordinance for ADUs. So that's a total of four ADUs where previously only two would have been permitted, one ADU of any of those types and one junior ADU. Um, so what I want to be clear about is that we do expect to see this used, but not all the time, right? Because you're going to have to have space on your lot for all of this. You're going to have to have the finances to build all of that. You're going to have to want to do all of that. And a lot of people who are building ADUs are genuinely doing it because they're looking to house a family member or they're looking to offset their own mortgage by having somebody on their property that they can rent to. However, being realistic about it, there will be investors. There are going to be property investors who recognize this is an opportunity to have more rentable units on the lot. So we will see this used. We just don't expect to see it being the majority of the projects or the applications we see for ADUs. So, moving on to the rest of the amendments, as I mentioned, reorganized and simplified language in various sections to the extent that we can, given that the regulations have gotten increasingly complex. Instead of having the development standards table, say, how many are permitted since it's become so complicated. We are now proposing just to refer to the ordinance. We added definitions for a separate entrance and a separate exterior entrance. Those are two terms that exist and aren't defined, so these definitions help us improve clarity. And then lastly, in terms of the changes that were made these first ones the next two are related to additional restrictions we're adding is that owner occupancy for a junior edu was previously required for all junior adus but now state law has changed and only requires it if the bathroom is shared between the junior edu and the main house Now, because of these changes making things more permissive, there were two new restrictions we are proposing to add. So the law does allow us to limit the ADU to half the size of the primary dwelling if the ADU is within or attached to the main house. So we have proposed adding that restriction in since we're allowed to and given how permissive the size limitations are now. And then finally, the existing ordinance allows deviation from our development standards with an administrative permit. We are proposing to delete that. So you would no longer be allowed to deviate from the standards. You would just need to comply with the written standards. In terms of outreach and environmental review, we did, of course, publish a public hearing notice in the Press Review and on the ARCONA website. Every time we're doing an ordinance update like this, we go to an ARCONA board meeting. So we were at ARCONA board on March 19th to talk about these changes, as you might expect. We heard some concerns from board members, especially about the number of ADUs permitted, concerns about what happens if you own a property and somebody builds four ADUs on the property next to you, and the impacts that could have on neighbors. So we talked about that, and we acknowledged that, yeah, that could have some impacts on folks, and one reason we're talking to our Kona board is that so people know why this is going on and what that looks like, and they're not surprised in coming to us wondering what's happening. And this project is exempt from CEQA because CEQA only applies to projects that have physical impacts, and this is policy and procedure making. So in conclusion, the proposed changes are to make us consistent with state law or otherwise clarify and improve the readability and understandability, if that's a word today, of our ordinance. So it's consistent with the general plan. And we are recommending that you consider the two findings of fact and recommend that city council approve the ordinance updates. And I'm available for any questions you may have at this time.

Thank you. Thank you. Commissioners, are there any questions for Lauren?

If we don't adopt this, is the city, is the state gonna remove our pro-housing designation or?

Well, I will say they could. And what I will tell you is that HCD is getting much more firmly into the accessory dwelling unit ordinance enforcement arena. State law changed last year also to make it so that not only are there are penalties if you don't submit your updated ordinance to HCD for review, and if they find it's inconsistent with the law and you don't make revisions they can nullify your entire ordinance and then you're just subject to state law with none of the additional standards we have in our ordinance and they did send out letters they've been sending out letters to jurisdictions all up and down the state since that law was passed telling them they need to update their ordinance consistent with these new regulations. We received such a letter. So we've given them a copy of the draft ordinance. They've said, as written, it complies. So yes, there are risks to not adopting it since, again, the law is in effect now. We're just trying to make sure it's clear in our own ordinance.

Thank you.

Can you give me a quick layman difference between a junior ADU and an ADU?

Yeah, a junior ADU, it has to be inside an existing home, and it doesn't require a full kitchen. It's basically, yeah, a mini kitchen or a prep kitchen.

Okay, okay. And then, so we have a single family dwelling. Somebody comes in and develops, by the combination of all this, four ADUs.

does it address anything in regards to the parking and that sort of stuff associated with that there are there that can get messy in these sort of things it can and there are parking impacts from some of this because the law this the laws regarding adus don't allow us to require parking in most instances there are instances like for a detached brand new adu unless it's right near transit, then we can require parking. But most of the time, we can't require parking or replacement parking if they build in a garage.

And one thing I can add to that, Lauren, so that's 100% correct. One thing that I always point out is with the ADU laws, we're talking about laws that are aimed at constructing ADUs. it doesn't take away all the other rules that we have in our municipal code regarding parking impacts or noise or other things so for example if even if there's no on-site parking allowed by law if somebody's parking their car on the street 72 hours it's still in violation of our municipal code so it doesn't eliminate the ability to enforce other aspects but it does eliminate what we can do from a design standpoint and from a from a land use perspective So I just wanted to point that out because I don't want people to feel like ADUs somehow now mean that all fair game happens with regard to. But that's an important aspect of it because that parking is something that we're keeping an eye on.

So I thought I heard you say that state law requires that we make it possible for somebody to have up to three. And then the city has an additional. So we're the ones that are permitting the fourth. How is the fourth different from the three?

That's a great question, and I asked that question on a phone call with HCD. Because I said, I'm going to get asked this question. They're going to say, well, why not just not have an ordinance, and then you're only allowed the ones by the state. And what they said back to me, and I talked about this at length, was that it is their view that if you don't have an ordinance specifying they can only have one more, then they can have as many as they want. That's... I don't...

One very delicate way of addressing that is that the state has given a lot of control to HCD in the implementation of these rules. And like Lauren stated. And interpretation. And interpretation, exactly. A lot of latitude. And now with this new law that requires us to submit the ordinance to them for approval, they have a lot of control over what goes in and what the interpretation is. I can tell you that up and down the state city attorney's offices just like ours are looking at these and we're not all seeing eye to eye with the interpretation that's being rendered by HCD. But at least the way this is structured now, HCD has that regulatory authority to approve that. So we're kind of in this situation where we have to address what they're telling us because that's what the mandates are and we have to then I think at some point in time there will be a true up with all of this and there'll be some kind of reckoning. It's just determining kind of the best way to go about that. But it is something that we're continually monitoring because they have they have very different interpretations than many of the other agencies do. So we're just trying to kind of get an understanding of the landscape and understand exactly what see if we can figure out what to predict and expect from them. But it's definitely something that is proving difficult for sure.

And I appreciate that answer. And what I will say is that generally speaking, our philosophy has been we don't want to be on the bleeding edge of that and be the one who's forging that new territory, right? We don't want to be the ones in a fight with HCD over this stuff. Given that they have that liberal authority, it's our recommendation to you as staff that we just follow in good faith, follow what they are saying. And allow some other entity to be working through some of these issues at the legislative level in other areas.

And also, I want to point out, we regularly, over the last eight ADU ordinance updates we've probably done over the last maybe less than even eight years, we try to allow what the state requires and not a lot more. That's one reason you saw the administrative permit. We're recommending the administrative permit go away. We had that in place to allow unique situations that may pop up. Somebody had designed their site and all of a sudden they need a small five square foot area for their hot water heater or some appurtenance on the building. And we've had that administrative permit in place to allow for these little one-offs. But now that we don't calculate, we have to net out non-livable area. I mean, folks should have plenty of room to do what they need to do in an ADU. They have plenty of options. We can't count the hot water heater area. So we don't feel the need to allow for any variances from that because all these new state laws, I mean, it's very permissible and very liberal on what somebody can do to build an ADU.

And also, for the record, I mean, I know you guys know this, but we have a very robust legislative group who is constantly working with our lobbyists and working through the channels at the state and federal level with regard to this. So we're not just sitting, you know, kind of doing nothing, but we are trying to work through this through the proper channels of addressing it and work very heavily with those lobbyists and trying to. make sure that the impacts of these one-size-fits-all type legislation and understanding what those impacts are in actual jurisdiction. So I just thought that was an important piece to add.

And we work very closely with the California League of Cities to try and impact legislation that's coming forward and try and tweak it and try and make it more clear. Some of this implementation and interpretation by HCD That's something that quite honestly we rail against because it's hard for us to read a piece of legislation knowing that we read it and there's staff members in Sacramento at HCD that it's their interpretation that rules the day, not necessarily the black and white language that the governor signed. And so we're constantly, we work with our lobbyists, we work with California League of Cities to try and get clarity there.

Yeah, and I will say it does help that we – that when we act in good faith and we make sure that our nose is clean and that we're doing what we should and we have pro-housing designation, it does help in those spaces because we are recognized as good-faith actors who are actually pro-housing. And so we don't get as much pushback as some other jurisdiction might.

We're not complaining just to complain.

Right, right.

So I'm going to ask a question that is more designed for members of the public to hear in case. And it's not just pertaining to ADUs, but... It's my understanding that when an applicant comes in and they have complied with all of the state regulations, when they have complied with the city ordinances, and they're following the law, their project complies with all of that, Our decision is basically we need to approve what's there because if we don't, potentially we're setting up the city for a lawsuit because we're violating the law at that point.

Building permit and we're required to approve a building permit that meets all of the permit requirements.

So even though I may not like what my neighbor is doing, if they're following the law, there's really not much I can do about it.

Just one more. Does this in any way allow a transfer of ownership? Or a backwards way of subdividing your property?

No, not exactly. There is a very narrow carve-out for sale of ADUs, but usually it's for non-profits. If it's an affordable housing type site or it's owned by a community land trust, then there are provisions for the sale of an ADU. But otherwise, separate sale is not something that's permitted.

But you can get a separate address.

Yes, for a separate meter and all of that stuff, yeah.

So in regards to one of the findings on safety, coming from a public safety background, when you have two attached ADUs, do they, for public response, do they have separate unique addresses or are they gonna be A and B or how does the numbering system work?

Yeah, usually it's unique addresses. Sometimes we have to use the A and B method because it's an older part of the neighborhood and there aren't you know, street numbers left, right? So you don't want to put a street number in the middle of a block that has nothing to do with the run of the block. So yeah, that's when you see those A and B street addresses.

So the numbers will come first, and if they have to default, it'll go to... As part of the building permit process, we assign street addresses.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll now open the public hearing and public comment period. Is there anyone from the public that would like to come forward and address the commission on this item? Seeing none, I will now close the public comment period. Commissioners, are there any additional questions or comments from staff? I will now close the public hearing. Would anyone like to make a motion?

I'll make the motion. Does the Planning Commission consider the findings of PATH and recommend City Council approve the ordinance amendment to Title 19 of the Roseville Municipal Code? Is there a second?

Do I need a second? I'll second. Commissioner Unidad has made the motion, and Commissioner Meish has seconded the motion. Roll call, please.

Commissioner Kriz?

Yes.

Commissioner Hagler?

Yes.

Commissioner Unidad? Yes. Commissioner Maish?

Yes.

Chair Higgins-Jones?

Yes. The motion is approved. Next on the agenda is the commissioner and staff report. Are there any other reports from staff?

Well, you know, and I'm not going to get it wrong tonight like I did last time, but there will be no meeting on April 9th or May 14th, but we will have a meeting on April 23rd, and it's looking likely we're going to have items for May 28th.

I'd say May 23rd and May 28th. April 23rd and May 28th.

No April 9th. Yeah, the first, so the second, I would say that, I'll change it. The second Tuesday, or second, God, I'm really going to get this messed up. The second Thursday of April and May, no meetings, but the fourth Thursday of April and May, yes. There will be meetings. That's all subject to me correcting that tomorrow. That's all I have for tonight, Chair.

Are there any other questions or comments from the Commission? I have one comment. Please.

I just want to thank the staff for listening to the people and granting their request that the draft PIR be extended. I believe there was an email sent out that it was

Yeah, I meant to bring that up. In fact, I meant to send you an email last week about that, but it was a little hectic. The reason that we extended the review, the comment period, the public comment period for the Phillip Road site draft EIR There was a chapter, one of the chapters in the draft EIR included all of the references that the consultants used, a bunch of journal articles and technical reviews and reports. And there was a small handful, about four or five, where the link apparently was broken. when the gentleman from Adams-Broadwell who spoke last week, when they tried to access those links on the web, the hosting, agency one was a Caltrans link, you couldn't find the document. So there are rules in CEQA that all of that information must be available during the entire 45-day review period. So once we were able to We basically, what we did is we took, we got every one of those 300 reference documents in PDF form and added them onto our website so that they're available on our website instead of just having to rely on the link. We also changed that chapter to let folks know that if they can't find it on the website, they can come on down to the city and we have all the documents and we're happy to sit there and let them read a thousand page geotechnical study that Caltrans prepared in 1983. So, but that is the, there was a small administrative snafu that we've corrected. So April 30th is the final date for the public comment period now.

Thank you. I actually did get asked as to why that was.

I said, I don't know.

Yeah, that's the reason. Okay. May I have a motion to adjourn?

So moved.

Second. Commissioner Unidet has made the motion. Commissioner Mace has seconded the motion. All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned.