Human Rights Commission - Regular Meeting

About this. Should

I go over it again? I'd like a motion for the minutes. Motion made by council member or commissioner Geary. Second by commissioner McDonald. All in favor, aye.

That was unanimous. Moving on to our first agenda item 25 dash one three one zero presentation from Scott Lynn on outdoor lighting and dark sky initiatives.

There we go. All right. Thank you for your patience and finally getting this presentation. I apologize for the connections we had when I was traveling for work, but I'm very excited to be here and talk about this topic with you because I live near Ontario. You might be surprised to learn that the lighting that's part of La Crosse's buildings and streets has a big impact on the area where I live. Light pollution can actually travel that far. So I wanna talk to you tonight about how the entire area can actually benefit from better outdoor lighting. And I have a few hats. I work for Mead and Hunt, a consulting firm in Madison, Wisconsin part time. I'm also an electrical contractor, master electrician, which I do totally pro bono for this purpose.

Purpose. And I'm the president of the Kickapoo Valley Dark Sky Initiative, which is established for the purpose of creating a dark sky park at Wildcat Mountain State Park, the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, and a Mississippi Valley Conservancy property at Tunnelville Cliffs. And I'm gonna talk about that in just a minute. So this image is from satellite images of light, and you'll see it progresses starting from twenty sixteen through twenty twenty two. And what you'll notice, the blue on this image is the minimum requirement to be a dark sky park.

Every other color on this map is too bright. So the blue is the darkest part of this map, and you'll see what happens from 2016 to 2020. It essentially stays unchanged. It's a huge change from 2020 to 2022, and the reason for that is in that time period, a lot of lights were changed from high pressure sodium lights to LEDs, and typically very blue LEDs, very white LEDs, And because of that and that scatter in the atmosphere, that's why that image changes like that. But it only tells part of the story.

If you look at this chart, the satellite image you just looked at is on the right hand side of that chart, and you can see it shows in the Ontario area where I live that satellite showed the light the sky got 12% brighter. But because we were trying to establish this dark sky park, we were taking ground measurements at the same time, and the ground measurements there got 54% brighter. And I wasn't taking these measurements, and I thought these measurements were incorrect actually because I had worked for two years with Alliant Energy to install warmer street lights in Ontario. We installed 3,000 Kelvin instead of 4,000 Kelvin. It's literally the only place in their entire system between Wisconsin and Iowa that has those warmer lights, and I thought I was a hero.

They reduced the amount of light coming out of those fixtures by 50% because now all the light was going down instead of having some of that light going up. And still, our sky got 54% brighter. The other thing I noticed in this chart is that in La Farge, which is about 18 miles south of Ontario, not quite 18 miles south of Ontario, There, the street lights have been changed to 4,000 Kelvin over the same time period, and the sky got 67% brighter, which is really remarkable to think about, but that's what the numbers showed. But again, I really didn't believe the numbers. So I found this study out of Chelan County, Washington, and it exactly parallels the situation we had at home here.

There, the county was replacing all of their street and roadway lighting with LEDs. They invited the National Park Service to come in and do a study because they knew when they changed these lights out to zero up light LEDs, 3,000 Kelvin primarily, they knew the sky would get darker. They wanted to document it. So the National Park Service came in before they made the changes and after they made the change, and the result is that the sky there also got 60% brighter to everybody's surprise. But the physics of it is really pretty clear.

The physics is that blue light in those LED sources scatters in the atmosphere exactly the same way the blue light from the sun scatters during the day and why our sky is blue during the day. The Rayleigh scattering is what it's called. And the thing that people I've been doing lighting design for thirty years. A lot of the assumptions we made about what would happen when we change from high pressure sodium sources, which are very, very warm, very red in color, very yellow in color, to these LEDs turned out to be wrong in practice. Assumptions about that if we lowered the lumens by 50%, that that would offset the blue scattering was incorrect.

So when fixtures were first introduced as LEDs, they were really only available at these color temperatures, 4,000, even 5,000 Kelvin, 5,700 Kelvin. The headlights on most cars now are 5,500 Kelvin for a point of reference. If you see headlights coming at you on the road, most of them are 5,500 Kelvin. And it was all driven by energy efficiency. That was the goal. But warmer color temperatures weren't even really available. I wanna give some basic definitions for you. This is the only definitions you really need. A lumen is how much light is coming out of a fixture. How many lumens is the amount of light coming out of the fixture?

And we used to think about this kind of in watts, like a 60 watt light bulb. But in in LED terms, we really need to think about it in terms of lumens because watts really we have no point of reference anymore when you talk about watts, when you talk about LEDs. And then correlated color temperature, I've been throwing around terms like 3,000 k and 4,000 k. That's strictly the color of the light. It has nothing to do with the quantity of light.

It's only the color of the light, and that's measured in degrees Kelvin. And the higher the number, the more blue it contains. The lower the number, the less blue it contains. And then the last term is a zero up light or a u zero fixture. And a zero up light fixture, I brought one with me tonight, but a zero up light fixture means that if you think about down being zero and going 90 degrees from that, no light is emitted up above 90 degrees.

So all the light is 90 degrees and below. And it also has a stipulation for a zero up light fixture that there's a minimal amount of light between eighty five and ninety degrees because that's a really key thing. That slice between eighty five and ninety, because it's going almost purely horizontal to the atmosphere, contributes also to scatter and sky glow. As soon as that light leaves the fixture, it begins to scatter in the atmosphere. So here's some just points of reference for you to get an idea of lumens, what an incandescent light bulb put out, and what an LED at 1,800 Kelvin, which is a very warm color temperature, how many watts it takes to generate those same lumens.

So color temperature during the day. Typically, during the daytime, 5,500 Kelvin to 6,500 Kelvin during the day. And then as the sun goes down, that light is traveling through more of the atmosphere, that blue light gets scattered away. Right? And so now the temperature gets warmer. And this is the way the world has been. The light we have at night has been getting warmer towards sunset, and then, of course, it was dark. And that's the way we've all evolved. All the species evolved over millennia with that rhythm. And it wasn't until the late eighteen hundreds, of course, when we started introducing artificial light that we started having light at night that was anything other than starlight and moonlight.

And so the lights that we're trying to encourage use of and which are now readily available, we're trying to minimize the amount of blue that we're putting into the the night landscape. Obviously, we're trying to minimize the amount of total, but we're gonna have light at night. There's no way we're not gonna have light at night. But we're try and minimize the amount of blue to minimize that amount of scatter. So I apologize for how dense this is, but I don't really expect you to interpret it now, but I wanna make it available if you wanna see it for later.

So this is just to give you an idea of the impact of going from one color temperature to another. And so right now, I'm only installing eighteen hundred and twenty two hundred Kelvin fixtures. That's all I'm installing. And the reason for that is you look at the huge jump even going between 1,800 to 2,200 Kelvin, the big jump in sky glow that happens there. And then you get to these higher color temperatures, you can see the immense difference in sky glow contribution because of that blue light content.

So this is an example project. I've done many installations. I'm guessing wall mounted fixtures somewhere around 85 or 90 wall mounted fixtures and working with municipalities like Cashion, La Farge, Westby. We've installed now close to 80 street lights at much warmer color temperatures, 2,200 Kelvin. This happens to be the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. If any of you have been out there, this is the visitor center. And I retrofitted all the lights there to 1,800 Kelvin. That's a zero up light fixture. It happens to be that fixture that I have sitting over there. And you can see what that color looks like and what the light looks like at five watts.

Unless you're an astronomer, why would you really wanna care about this? And we're not going to go into detail on all these, but the research really continues to accumulate. And so there are definitely negative impacts on wildlife and the ecosystems in general. The impact on insects, the impact on bird migration. There's impacts on human health that are better documented every year. Energy use and climate change. The energy we're using at night for street lights and for lights in our homes, generally speaking, unless you've got batteries, not solar. And wind energy is available less at night as well. So most of the light we're using at night is generated by sources that are having an impact on climate change. Personal safety.

Many people are surprised by this one. I'm gonna show you a slide in a couple about why that's true. And then the night sky heritage, really, just the fact that, again, we've grown up as a species, we've grown up with that night sky being visible to us. Luckily, I still have a lot of it visible to me in Ontario, but we've rapidly lost that connection to night and to darkness. So Travis Longcor is a researcher that's done a lot of work, both his own research and then aggregating research done by others on animal impacts of artificial light at night.

And this is a quote from a book by Ed Yong called An Immense World, and I would highly recommend that book. There's one chapter. The last chapter happens to be on light and noise at night, but the first 12 are fabulous as well. It's just all about how other species interact with the world compared to us. Our vision, our hearing, our senses compared to them.

And so there's many times we just don't realize the impact we're having, and light at night is one of those things. So talking about energy use, the amount of wasted money that we spend on on wasted light. This is not light that is necessary to do things. This is light that's going to the sky. Like the parking lot lights out here that are big spherical balls, I will tell you that more than 50% of that light is going up. Going above 90 degrees. To what purpose? Right? That's an example of that wasted energy right there. So there's really a simple path to do it better.

And the first thing is shielding. Color temperature, I've talked about a lot already. The amount of light, that's an important part. And then timing, shutting it off. So this is an example of useful light versus total light coming out of a fixture. It happens to be a street light. So in this case, the useful light would be the street and maybe a sidewalk adjacent to it, but not the lawns, not the front of the houses, certainly not the sky. Right? So how much light is really needed? What's the target of trying to do So the goal is to try and make sure the light that we install goes to the areas we want to light and only the areas we want to light.

And in terms of reflected light here, this goes to the point of intensity. So in the summertime, the reflection off the ground is not huge. But obviously in the winter, when we have a good snow year, if you're a skier, I love to ski. We have a good snow year and the ground is white, 90 of that light goes back to the sky that's bounced off the ground. So if we have too much light to begin with, in the winter especially, that light's getting reflected to the atmosphere.

So this is a personal safety one that I talked about. If you see the guy who's standing at the gate in the bottom photo, he's standing at the gate in the top photo as well. But the camera couldn't see it, and if we were there, we wouldn't see it either because our eyes are really contrast detectors, and we have a source that's so bright into our eyes, we lose the ability to see the darker areas. Think about when you're driving your car at night. The headlights are lighting up what's right in front of you, but you're blind to what's in the dark around you.

Right? So it's really key when you're doing outdoor lighting, especially, to make sure you have the right amount of contrast. If you have a perfectly uniform lighting design, again, a skiing reference, think about a cloudy day on a ski hill, it's hard to pick out any little ripple. Right? You don't want perfectly uniform lighting, but you do not want this kind of contrast. You wanna get really close in terms of how uniform the light is. And if you do that, you don't need as much light either. So it's a real benefit to safety to have more uniform lighting. So I'm just going to quickly go through this. This is the same slide presented before, but this shows the increase as opposed to the relative amount.

This is actually the increase in Sky Glow from the sources that are listed as baseline. So if you look at a 5,000 Kelvin fixture, which are still sold today, many, many fixtures are still sold at 5,000 Kelvin. And look at the increase, 250% increase from an 1,800 k fixture. So sometimes when I talk to people about using these warmer sources at 1,800 Kelvin, if you're familiar with high pressure sodium, what that looks like, you think, well, I don't want that. I don't want that, you know, washed out color.

Because the color rendering index of high pressure sodium is like 21. Here is an 1,800 k LED. Color rendering index of this is 80. And I've done a lot of security camera testing with multiple manufacturers, multiple models of security cameras with this color temperature, and we get great performance. It's very easy to get good security camera performance even at 1,800 Kelvin, which is the lowest full spectrum LED available today.

You can buy other things like direct emission amber, which have horrible color rendering and aren't as efficacious. They use more energy. But if you want to get any kind of full spectrum, this is as warm as you can get today. And then 2,200 Kelvin is what I really think is a sweet spot. 2,200 Kelvin, the efficacy of that compared to the efficacy of 4,000 is very comparable.

And the SkyGlow impact is so much lower. And you can see the color rendering difference between those two sources. If color rendering is important to you, and it is in many applications, there is some application for color rendering importance. So this is one example in Ontario, the fire station. In this case, that building of the top photos before had incandescent lights on it, had high pressure sodium lights on it, had 5,000 k LEDs, all in the same building on three sides of that building.

They're a mixture. Can kinda maybe you can pick out what's what by that top picture. And I approached the village about changing those out, buying the fixtures at cost, my labor for free. They agreed to do that, and I intentionally left the light levels identical to what they were before. Even though they're too high, they're much higher than what the Illuminating Engineering Society standard is for that kind of location. I left them that way because I didn't want people to get the idea that because the color changed, that that's why, you know, the light was gonna go down. Right? So that's not the case at all, but I put dimmers in all of them. And eventually, I hope to go back to the village and say, hey. Let's let's put those down to the standard.

But right now, that's what we did. But we increased uniformity by 35% by changing from a fixture that had lenses on the front and was throwing light out all directions to a light like I have with me, which only lens on the bottom and individual LED elements, and we could get much better uniformity on the ground by doing that. And you can see the payback was two years. Now that's my labor for free. But payback is still, I think, something less than three years even if I charge them the going rate from electrician. Skyglow reduction, 93%. 75% energy savings. Identical light on the ground. Here's another example. This was actually installed by the director of public works in La Farge.

It's their fire station, their ambulance building. They had high pressure sodium lights on the building, and he changed these out. And in this instance, when I did the calculations for him, I said, you should set these fixtures at their highest output level to match what you have now in the parking lot with the same idea I had in Ontario. But he asked me to sell them dimmers, and I did. He installed the fixtures, I said, Wayne, where'd you set those to? He said, I set them to the minimum. He said, we have plenty of light, absolutely plenty of light. So those are set to five watts. If he had matched what he had before, they'd be set to 35 watts each, seven times the amount of light to match what they had before. And it's a wonderful installation.

You go look at it. It's a it's a great, great spot. This again is the Tickapoo Valley Reserve. This is the front of the building where we lit the parking lot and the sidewalks at 1,800 Kelvin. The bollard lights, those three foot high bollard lights are behind that sign. Those were 5,000 Kelvin LEDs. They were fairly recently purchased, and so I I used photographic film to reduce that color temperature to 2,700 Kelvin. And then a volunteer made a a three d printed shield for those lights to reduce the to get rid the uplight on those lights. But all the rest of the lights that have been installed are installed at 1,800 k. So what I wanna mention to you here is I know La Crosse owns some streetlights.

I don't know the number of streetlights you own, but Focus on Energy has incentives for roadway lighting. Where I live, we're considered in a rural ZIP code. I'm positive La Crosse probably isn't a rural ZIP code, but besides that, they still have incentives available. They just aren't as high for nonrural ZIP codes. And now we have 2,200 k product that's listed and qualified for these incentives.

That's a new thing just this year. I was at a street and air lighting conference in October, which I think is why maybe I couldn't be here then. But in any case, I talked to multiple manufacturers, and I'm working with them also to get their new 2,200 k products qualified for these incentives. So I expect in 2026, there'll be even more manufacturers that have product available to qualify for the incentives. So I think I don't know the timeline exactly for your streetlight retrofits.

Maybe 2019, they started. 2020, they started. So they're five years years old now or approaching five years for some of the early installations. Lefarge that I just mentioned just retrofit their first generation 4,000 ks LEDs to two two hundred ks LEDs. And they're getting like 18% better energy out of that and reducing sky glow by like 50% by doing that.

So those LEDs are starting to age out. With these incentives, these fixtures are very, very inexpensive. They happen to also be listed on the DOT qualified list, and so they have a ten year warranty. So it's it's really a no brainer for these municipalities I'm talking about to install these fixtures because they're inexpensive. They pay for themselves long before the warranty goes out.

So I would encourage you to look into that, and I'm happy to help you look into that if you'd like me to. So that's all I have to talk to you tonight, but I'll I'll make myself available anytime you wanna approach me about how we can do things in lacrosse differently. Like I said, I I work as an engineer, but I do all this dark sky work pro bono. So just let me know how I can help you, and I'm happy to assist in that way. If you have any questions now, if there's time, I can certainly take those.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions from commissioners?

Yeah. Thank you so much for this information and for doing it pro bono. That's awesome. So when you've seen especially, like, thinking about street lights, if they're I don't know the right terms yet. If they're trying to

Limit upglow. Is that what

you Are are they usually adding something to it or replacing some part of it?

Replacing the whole head, usually. Okay. Yep. And and the vast majority of streetlights that are sold now, I'd say 99.9% of them are zero up light design. Oh. So as long as they're mounted parallel to the ground, they will be zero up light. So the color temperature and the amount of light is really the critical things for street lighting.

Have you noticed anecdotally around lacrosse? Does it seem like we have a lot that have already eliminated that up go?

Or Hard to I what I what I said just a second ago, I should correct by saying other than decorative lights. So you do have a lot of decorative lights, and those are not zero up light fixtures. That's one of the biggest problems. The normal, what we call a cobra head street light, if you think just kind of a utilitarian street light, those are almost all zero up light. The decorative ones are the ones that are really an issue. Yeah.

Councilmember Gottam.

So I'm going to piggyback on to your comments. So the decorative black poles and silver poles that we have in La Crosse, is there a way for us to modify those without because they're not that old. And so I would think that in our current budgetary constraints that we couldn't go out and just say, oh, let's buy all new poles. But if we have poles in place, what can we do to the existing poles to come to start in this direction? Because, I mean, your presentation was amazing.

Thank you. I mean, I think I'll say a couple things. I'm again, because I'm happy to help you do this. It really depends on case by case basis, manufacturer model number, those kind of details. And then I can talk to the manufacturer about whether they have any retrofits available to do that. Also, depending again on the age of these, because these focus incentives are available, and if we switch those heads to a zero up light head instead of having light kind of going everywhere, we can also reduce the amount of light coming out of them because we don't need to waste that light and save energy as well. So I can do those payback calculations for you, and maybe it's not in you know, maybe it doesn't work out in terms of payback, but I can do all those detailed calculations for you if I know what the existing fixtures are.

Awesome. Thank you. Any other questions? I do have one. Sometimes, the way science and and research works is we solve for one problem and in solving for that problem, we then create another problem unintentionally. So are there any harms that we know of as we force light to go down that would that we should be thinking about that could have a negative impact?

That's a great question. I don't know of any. I've not seen any research that would indicate that. In general speaking, what we're doing is we're if you think about it this way is we're keeping the same amount of light going down that was going down before. We aren't increasing that. We're just eliminating the light that was going up.

It's a good way to put that. Thank you. Yes.

Just a quick note. You mentioned a book by Ed. What was the name of the book?

Ed Yong. It's An Immense World, A N Immense World.

Thank you.

It's a great book. Won a no, not what he went for is first book. So yeah, it's a great book.

Yes?

Do you know of any towns of a similar size to La Crosse who underwent this transition?

That are making the change to the warmer color temperatures? Yeah. I know from talking to a manufacturer representative that Anaheim, California, with their decorative fixtures, used to use 3,000 Kelvin, and now they're down to 1,900 Kelvin, for example. I don't know the size of the community. There's a community North Of Boston that, four years ago, changed all their street lights out to 2,200 Kelvin.

And that's what we're doing in we're processing doing in Westby, in La Farge, in Viola. They've done a test in Cashton, which I hope we'll some more in Cashion. And I will say that the lighting industry is well aware now that this is a problem, and so products are rapidly coming onto the market. Cooper Lighting was the first to market, I think, and that's been that project in Massachusetts was probably four years ago now with a Cooper product. That's what we happen to be installing in these other communities. But other manufacturers are now catching up and producing warmer products. So I expect that we'll see more and more installations of these.

Thank you. Commissioner Stein.

Just for clarification, when you say the decorative lighting, is that the sidewalk or the pedestrian lighting as opposed to more of like, the illuminating the street? Or what it what is the deck the decorative?

Yeah. When I say decorative, that's a catch all phrase. It does the pole height could be anywhere from 10 feet to 30 feet and still be decorative. It's really the head style that's mounted on top of that pole. If if you think about kind of a utilitarian streetlight with that curved top on it, then the lens is just flat on the bottom, anything that isn't like that, in my view, would be considered a decorative fixture. So we've got any kind of a lantern style or even if the light even if the light is mostly on the top, some of that light also gets scattered. So

Alright. Thank you. Well, I know you said you had an example of a light that you wanted to show us.

I could. If you want me to, I can plug that in somewhere. Maybe there's an outlet in here. Could show you. There isn't one.

Okay. Well, it's the same color temperature as what I showed you on the screen, but I and I'm happy to bring more, and I have more fixtures that I could demonstrate for you. Oh, sorry.

People like mine can't

hear you. Sorry. Looking up at the ceiling, the bulbs above us are probably 3,000 Kelvin, maybe 3,500 Kelvin. They're warmer than 4,000, I would say. And I used to bring around fixtures and ask people what color they like best.

And invariably, because we're indoors in a very highly lit area, they would pick a bluer LED color. But when I show these people the same fixture outdoors, their answer changes at night. So when you see this in this environment and you go, wow, that is really gold, keep in mind that if you saw it outside, I think your reaction would be different. I the buildings that I've retrofit, these fixtures are selectable eighteen, twenty two, and 2,700 Kelvin. And I was willing to risk my labor in selling things at cost because they were adjustable.

And I fully expected some percentage of the people I install these for to say, oh, I need something more white. And so I installed them all at 1,800 Kelvin. Nobody has asked me to increase the color temperature, not a single person. Even locations where I thought against white vinyl siding, They would say, oh, that's nope. So when I turn this on, just keep that experience in mind. So I'm gonna start out at 1,800 Kelvin. This is what I'm installing. And it won't shine in eyes your if I can avoid it because it's pretty bright even. You can see that color. And then 2,200 Kelvin.

This is 2,200 Kelvin. That's the difference between 1,822. And this light, by IAS definition, is white light. That's the lowest color temperature by IAS, Illuminated Engineering Society definition, that's considered white. Everything else is considered non white light. So amber, 1,800 Kelvin, 2,000 Kelvin. And then if I show you 2,700 Kelvin, which is still much warmer than anything you're seeing installed outdoors right now, this is 2,700 Kelvin. And every time I increase that, the Skygo impact goes up and pretty dramatically.

Awesome. Thank you. Any other questions? Commissioner

Walker?

You mentioned incentives and that rose up codes would have more incentives than perhaps urban. But can you speak to more what that encompasses? What do you mean by the incentives? Focus

on energy uses an agency and most incentives issuing agencies across The United States and Canada use an organization called Design Lights Consortium to test fixtures and test them for energy efficiency and quality and so forth. And in Wisconsin, Focus on Energy uses DLC qualified products, and then they create a list of products that qualify for these incentives. And the incentives are, in this case, are roadway lighting incentives. And so if the lighting is used for roads, for example, the fixtures we're putting in these small communities around me, those fixtures, because they're on the DOT qualified list, they're also very price competitive. Those fixtures are $211 I think, as a list price to start with to buy them.

With the rural percentage of that, that fixture cost drops to $67 a fixture. And that $67 includes an additional 22 because I'm having people put dimmers on all these so they can adjust them. So in the case, the base incentive, I think, for that fixture is $90. So if you have streetlights and you and you are under that amount of light output, because the incentive varies by the amount of light that the fixture puts out, then that that fixture would be eligible for a $90 incentive, for example, as a base case. But there's a 50% bonus added on to that for rural communities.

Gotcha. Well, thank you very much, Scott. We definitely appreciate this. For those that are online as well as folks that are attending today, if this hasn't been said, one of the reasons that this presentation is important to us is because we're looking at essentially working on a light ordinance for our city, to help, obviously, with, like, the dark skies and, address light pollution and various things in the city of La Crosse. So we just thank you for the work that you're doing, and thank you for coming here today to talk to us and help enlighten us because I think this is very informative. And it answered some of the questions that many of us had, especially the definitions. So thank you.

You're welcome. And I can I helped the city of Eau Claire with their ordinance, which just went into effect October 1? And so if you need any assistance with an ordinance as well, I can help you with that. So alright.

Thank you very much. You. Forgive me, I didn't ask if anybody had questions online. So if you do, speak now. Alright. Seeing none, we'll move on. Alright. Moving on to our next agenda item, twenty five zero one four three, update on the zoning and subdivision code project.

So So Jen and I put this on the agenda today to sort of, again, keep you updated, get your input, that sort of thing. I'm to trying figure out where to begin here. So we I will get into this a little bit more. We are getting into the second phase of our community engagement, bringing forth sort of the general ideas we have of how we're gonna approach our zoning code. We had two public input meetings last Wednesday, one during the noon hour and then one in the evening.

And we did get some, you know, 30 people at the midday one, about 15 people at the evening one, but we did have some good conversations and good feedback. This is kicking off our second route of engagement. We'll be going into the neighborhood associations and meetings starting next week. And so what Jen and I, wanted to do was sort of give this presentation to all of you to get your feedback on what we're proposing to do, but also to get your feedback on maybe some things that maybe weren't clear, questions, things that we may need to be aware of as we move into going into the neighborhoods to have these discussions. So it's sort of twofold that we're looking at from all of you on this sort of effort.

Does that make sense? Okay. Okay. So real quick, here's our presentation. Again, just for a real brief sort of overview, we are updating our zoning code. It is forty five years old. It is very outdated. We have spent time adding amendments and adding additions onto it and making amendments to it. But essentially, the core base of our zoning districts and what permitted uses are in there is 45 years old. It is very outdated.

It's very the use of punctuation or lack thereof has made it interpretation of certain things five different ways. It can be. It's very hard to amend. It is very hard to enforce in some cases. It is very hard for the public to understand.

So that is one of the main goals, is just trying to update and modernize our code. The second major goal is to make it in conformance with our comprehensive plan, and primarily the goals that we heard from there. The larger goals that came from our comp plan, or at least initiatives that are related to the zoning code, have to deal with housing and with sort of ease of development. So what is zoning? Zoning really tells you what you can and can't do with your property, and then it has all these parameters that are associated with it: building setback, lot sizes, heights, number of dwelling units.

Here is our current zoning and how it works. Generally, zoning is divided up into residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, conservancy, and even, like, government uses like public, semi public, things of that nature, and institutions. Again, this project is sort of an update, an evaluation of our current zoning code. We are also doing our subdivision ordinance, which is related to how we subdivide land by taking a larger parcel and subdividing it into smaller ones. That process, again, is outdated.

We aren't looking to change a lot of the criteria, more of just understanding and making it clear for the public of when the process applies and what documents and processes you have to take. Again, goal is to craft a more user friendly code, align with our needs and policies in our comp plan, and then make it generally easier to understand. So we're currently here in our phase three. We are in the beginning of creating or in codifying or we're the process of creating what our code is going to look like. So we haven't gotten to the mud or sticks yet of, like, reducing we're this setback from 25 feet to whatever the new setback would be.

It's really looking at how we've assessed all of the current information and feedback we've gathered, and then how we want to approach that into creating our zoning districts. And I'll get more into that in a minute. So in terms of community engagement, Housing Week, we had over 300 people participate through that. There were seven events. We've had eight seventy five people participate through our survey.

And we've had 80 plus participants through all of our neighborhood presentations that we've given so far. So we've had a lot of community engagement, I think, on a topic that can be interesting, but is also a little bit boring as well, to be honest. And again, the bigger picture is we're trying to be in compliant with our comp plan, which is on the left, and then what we've heard from our housing study, and we've also incorporated our downtown twenty forty plan. But there's other plans too that we're referencing, like our Highway 53 quarter plan as well in terms of how we are approaching what we're proposing to do. So our approach.

Based on the assessments, like, with our consulting, the consultants that we hired, the gentleman is Mike Lam. He's a technical person really writing the code. Like, he's that's his expertise. He's driven around the entire city and taken a lot of pictures. And what he's derived from that is that there are different parts of the city that have different characteristics, not just in its form, but also in its land use and the way it's shaped.

So there like, for instance, if you go to the North Side, there is a lot of smaller lots. There was a lot of times in the past where lots were divided in half, and you can see two houses on very small lots. You don't really see that as often on the South Side, but that occurred a lot on the North Side. And so the idea is understanding that that was the character of that neighborhood. There were smaller houses, smaller lots, the architecture and the form is much different as you go further south, and then also as you go further east to the Bluffs.

It's just much different in different parts of the city. Part of his evaluation was understanding that from, you know, going around the city. It is different in other places. So what he also is deriving from that is, like, there's a need to protect that in some fashion by whatever new development that occurs within either these residential districts or what he has defined as the character type in these corridors. So he's also identified, like, if you're going down George Street, you can clearly tell there's a row of homes, then there's clearly these, like, commercial notes, like at George And Gillette.

George And Gillette? Yes. Right? There's those commercial nodes. So it's understanding what is currently there now, especially along Highway 53, right?

There's clearly these rows of homes, and then you have these commercial nodes, which is reinforced by Highway 53 plan. And then as you're going down the commercial characters through Morbin Cooley and South Avenue and the downtown, it's really sort of, again, understanding not just the residential character, but the character and makeup and different styles of commercial that you find along these major corridors we have in the city. And then also recognizing the commercial that you find in some of the neighborhoods as well. So then it's also understanding the approach then is trying to preserve that through form based standards in some fashion. So any new development that goes in neighborhoods or in these areas is trying to protect that through form based, which is essentially better design standards than we currently have.

Design standards that we have now, I would say, are broadly interpreted to just be general design standards of how they fit. There are some standards that do reference having to fit into the neighborhood, but it is very vague, it can be interpreted different ways. So the idea is to create these standards that more clearly state that it must fit into the neighborhood or or core commercial corridor or wherever it is that it's going in. We haven't got to that point yet on how we're doing that, but that's that's that's the theory or the direction that we're looking to take. The other part of the approach then is to develop more mixed use type districts that more easily allow for a combination of commercial and residential zoning districts.

We do allow that, but it's very limited. You can do that in commercial zoning, but it is very limited. It's very much retail and upper floor residential. It is limited. There's other ways people have figured out how to do or proposing to do mixed use developments like that, that they don't fit into our existing zoning districts and they have to apply for special zoning.

And that has been sort of an issue as well and not very easy for development. So it's developing those zoning districts that allow that. Again, then generally updating our design standards that we currently have in place to further establish more foreign based standards. And then we also are looking to update some of our sign regulations. And again, that's more what we had the direction from our city attorney's office to take our zoning, our sign code, which is in a different section, and incorporate it into zoning, as as many cities do that.

And it's also that's also regulated and administered by department, so it just made sense to them. The only standards that we're looking to change is anything some things related to off premise signs to make them more in conformance with any state or federal code that has changed regarding off premise signage like billboards, specifically electronic billboards. At this time, we haven't entertained any ideas of changing specific standards on a local level, but people have come and approached the city and us for that purpose. So any questions on that so far, on the approach? And I'll get a little bit more into that.

Okay. So here's a good example then of what we were talking about on the North Side and sort of preserving character. And our consultant has sort of described this as ingrained. So as you can see in the top left, you see the longer lots up there, where you have the house on Avon Street and then the garage is in the back on the alley. And then you can clearly see to the lot to the south there on the top left, just North Of North Street, where that lot that used to be a longer lot, it was divided in half, and you can clearly two houses there.

Does everybody see that? So that has occurred quite a bit on the North Side. And, ultimately, in many ways, and you can see that again, I think, to the to the right of that alley in the Northeast corner, where you can clearly see those parcels have been realigned or re subdivided to make allow for more housing there as well. And then as you look North South Of North Street, again, you can see where, again, that parcel was chopped in half for two homes and that occurred on both sides, right? So this a good this is a really good example of how, those corner lots, they were subdivided for more houses.

And that has occurred a lot on the North Side. But what that also did, in a lot of ways, was make those houses nonconforming because they do not meet our minimum lot size. So it does kind of can restrict existing property owners from making substantial improvements throughout its lifetime because they're non conforming. So part the direction we're trying to take is establishing a way to preserve that character, to allow for lots to be subdivided into smaller lots in that way because that has occurred everywhere. This is something that Eau Claire has actually looked at when they were updating their zoning code, and they actually looked at subdividing all of their corner lots.

And I believe that they also did an analysis of all their corner lots. They said if every lot was able to do this, they were creating like six hundred? Six hundred more parcels that could have a single family home on. Now, I'm not saying that would occur here, but I'm just saying there's this opportunity in an area where that's already occurred for smaller homes, you know, to subdivide lots to create more additional small homes. And so what we've called this sort of this end grain sort of, like, zoning to where we would allow that to occur because this is a character of the North Side.

It's having those smaller homes like that, and and it's already occurred. Any questions on that? Okay. So here's sort of the approach that we have proposed for zoning districts, and this is sort of what we're taking to the neighborhood to get their input on. On the left is all the existing zoning districts. So as you can see, we have two agricultural districts. We have a one and E A. We have then R 1 through R 6 and W R. Those are our seven residential zoning districts that we currently have. We have T And D as a special zoning district, and then we have three commercial zoning districts, C one, two, and three.

And I'll go back to I'll go back to the other in a minute. But on the left hand side, we have two industrial zoning districts. In one two, we have a public utility district, which I don't think we have anything zoned at. I don't even know what's allowed on that. We also have a parking lot district, and we don't have any parcels on that. We have planned development, which is another special zoning district. We have public, semi public, where you're gonna find your larger institutions and government buildings and schools, mostly. We have a conservancy district, which is, like, protecting our bluff line and our marsh. And then there's a couple other overlay districts there. So that's kind of currently what we have.

So going back to what we're proposing to do, is we're proposing to combine the two agricultural districts into one. We don't really have the agricultural district is more like farmland. We don't have any of that in the city of La Crosse. And there's typically, in the land use patterns that we had here, anybody looking to annex into the city of La Crosse from a rural area, it's not gonna be annexed as farmland. They're looking to annex it in to subdivide it into housing or parcels and get city water.

And so there was no need to really separate those out. They couldn't be combined into one to reduce least two to one to reduce the number of zoning district. The biggest thing that we're looking to do is combine single family residents and special residents into one zoning district with the discussion of whether or not to also add R4. So R1 is single family homes, R2 can allow single family and duplexes, R3 is single family, duplex and triplex, and R4 allows up to a four unit. By combining those together into one, it would allow all three of those uses and maybe the fourth one, which is four units, to be all permitted in one zoning district and not have them separated out that way.

This is in conformance with what we've heard through our comp plan, where there was many of the feedback much of the feedback we've gotten from our neighborhood presentations and committee input sessions was the addition of density into their neighborhood would be allowed or permitted, but they really wanted better design standards. They wanted better design than the things that they've been getting now. And so that's what we are moving forward with and proposing. If we are able to design and have better form based standards to ensure that better design is the neighborhoods, then that's what we are proposing to do for our project here. Additionally, too, this allows for additional density and units to be created in the neighborhoods, whether it's subdividing of a lot, whether it's taking an existing house and being converted to a duplex or a triplex.

What it's also going to do is allow many of these buildings that are already in R1 single family, that are already duplexes and triplex, to be considered conforming and nonconforming anymore. And so that is the direction that we're looking to take as it means to help produce additional units in neighborhoods. So that is probably the biggest thing that we're taking to the neighborhood to get comment on. Additionally, and I get comments for that in a second, that R4 and R5, we are looking to which is where your larger apartment buildings are and density would be a separate zoning district or combined into sort of mixed residential or mixed use residential. So there would be these opportunities to have some commercial space, or it would just be straight apartment buildings.

Washburn Residential would go away. T and D would be kept because state statutes requires us to have T and D, but we would change that to actually be more resemble more of what T and D was supposed to be. It was supposed to resemble larger developments, like we're talking 30 acres, like large developments of land for that. So historically, we would make that a memorial conformance of what it was intended to be used for. We would then create different commercial zoning districts.

We'd have sort of a neighborhood mixed use. That's going to be where you can find your neighborhood businesses with residential up above. Maybe it's that corner store. There's a lot of buildings still in the La Crosse that you find that were formerly commercial commercial buildings that have been converted to residents. That would be where you could redo those.

That's like your Rannison. That's like your Pop Art, those places that market in 16th, those types of businesses. We would kinda redo downtown, downtown mixed use, and the downtown Main Street area to sort of preserve and protect those areas a little more and then help facilitate and ensure that any sort of design around that does downtown core would, again, through form based standards and character, you know, based form based standards would ensure that it is compatible and consistent with what the downtown is. And then we'd have our commercial corridors, which is along your major state highways and things of that nature. We, again, we haven't flushed out how all those are gonna look for the standards yet, but that's kind of what we're looking at doing.

We combine both of our industrial districts into one and only have one zoning district. We do I think we're required to have a public utility district, but we don't really have anything zoned out right now. We get rid of parking lot. We don't have any of that now. That was intended to allow for, like, surface parking lots to exist on their own, and I don't that's not desirable in the city anywhere.

We have conservancy be kept as it is, but I think we would add additional. The intent would be to add additional language in there to preserve and protect our marshland more so than what it is now, and then everything else would be kept. Those are the sort of the larger things that we'd be bring to the neighborhood to begin discussions of how that would work. Any questions on that? I know I threw a lot at you.

Any questions from commissioners? I have a couple.

Yeah.

Alright. So the first thing is going back, so when I'm looking at r one, r two, r three, r four, another one. So when we move to, let's say, if it's neighborhood residential for all of those, essentially, we're combining that under one title, basically. Right?

Yes.

Are there any concerns that you can think of with doing that?

Well, I mean, there's gonna be concerns with anything we do. Do you have something specific? Or

Well, when I first started this question when you were talking, I was very specific in my head, but out loud, it is not. Yeah. But but I guess one of the the concerns I had, if you can go back

Yeah.

Was with so

while you're thinking of that, Mara

Yeah.

Go ahead. What I can say is I can at least maybe convey some things we've heard so far, and then we'll go from there. So one concern somebody brought up was, like, adding this is adding additional dense potentially could be adding additional density into our single family neighborhoods. And that was the concern that they had. And my response was, it would. It could. Yes. It could allow for a lot of these homes to be made into duplexes or triplexes, depending on how big their existing houses are. What I would say to that is that's occurring already. There's many homes that are already duplexes.

And many people, I think, aren't even aware that they are duplexes. And I was showing this picture earlier And I can tell you in each of those four pictures, at least one of those houses in each picture is a duplex. And if you can tell me which one it is, then that's awesome. But I think this is a good example of how character based development and form based development occurs and how we are intending to try to make it to where you wouldn't even know that was a duplex or a triplex. That was how we are that's how one thing that we are trying to ensure that we do if new development gets built is like that, where you can't tell.

I think there's a lot of ways you can tell that's clearly a duplex, clearly a triplex, and that's what we're going to try to avoid. So I think we can help alleviate at least the visual aspect of how that would look. People are concerned overall with densities. Like, we're adding more units into these single family neighborhoods. And one thing that Jed and I have been looking at is sort of data to support either way.

And what we know through census data is that families are smaller. That typical four person family, it's not that anymore. It's like two point something. It's two to three, somewhere in there. And so while we may be increasing the density of units, we may not necessarily be increasing the number of people because that family of four may now be two families of two, and they need places to live.

We're losing people and families to other outside of the city. And so that's one thing that we're trying to relay to people is that we need places for people to live. We do not have the ability to grow outside of our city very easily into our townships. And also, too, by annexing large pieces of land in our city, that's cost more roads. It's going to be more public infrastructure that we have to put in to maintain to do that.

At some point, if you do that enough, too, it's going to be another police station, fire station, and additional parks and all that stuff that you have to maintain. And by having more people and more dense of an urban center, you can alleviate those additional costs that come with public services. It doesn't mean there wouldn't be an increase on some of the services, but you're not providing additional roads you have to plow, that you have to repave, that you have to pay for additional personnel to go out and police for safety and protection. You're not having another park that you have to maintain because now all the people out there need a park that's close to them. So that's kind of how cities work.

And so that's been something that we've been trying to address in some fashion, that we need units, not necessarily ones you find in 24 to 50 unit apartment buildings. We're talking about that missing middle. This is our way to sort of help try to provide missing middle type housing that we don't have, and we don't have a lot of place to put it.

Well, before you go to the Neighborhood Association, make sure you look at this recording and say what you just said to all of them. Commissioner Rohan?

Okay. Concerning density, do we have a sense of what else that would impact? And I'm thinking of on North Side with already the small lots, I'm thinking of like parking. So if it's already a small lot, you're not adding garages or things like that. But you're adding density. So and it might be a privileged thing thinking there's vehicles that are gonna be added when there's like public transit and all that. But what else do we have a sense of what else is gonna impact the So influx of

there's two things there you said, parking and then like lot size, right? So will adjust the lot size thing. That came up too. Somebody asked, well, mean, if I can if you're also considering reducing lot size, but then you're also now allowing for that smaller lot to be a triplex

Or just already small neighborhoods with small lots.

Right. So that, I believe, was a comment that we heard to address. And so there was discussion from ourselves and our consultants of like, there still may need to be sort of a some sort of unit per square foot density thing, where, like, yes, we're allowing for those smaller lots to occur, but perhaps it's too small to be allowed for triplex at that point. So that is something that we have heard and are going to address in some fashion in the future about potentially having, like, yes, I depending on the lot size may still be only what you can may still dictate how many units you can have. We don't know what that'll be yet, but we heard that comment and are looking to address that in some way.

Because I agree. I think if you have a little small lots and you're trying to cram a triplex on there, that may be trying to fit too much on a lot. And so and then you get to the parking part of it too, in addition to that. So we heard that, and we're going to look and see how we can address that in some fashion. Now parking is another animal altogether.

I think we have already sort of taken the route that we are leaving parking up to developers in some fashion to determine how many parking spaces they want to provide or not. I think if people are looking to and again, it gets back to our whole defense that we had said in the first place, where if people are looking to provide additional units and they want to make it marketable, they're going to have to figure out how to do the parking. Order if they want to rely on the street, we as a city have already said, you know, that's know, because right now, a 24 unit could get built, and they can rely on the street if they want to. Right? So I think we were still trying to take that approach here.

I think too, though, that if the more we're trying to promote less car usage. So I think if we're able to provide the opportunity for more units in sort of our inner parts of the city, our more desirable neighbor neighborhoods like Washburn, Downtown, and the ones that are closer to and I mean desirable because of their proximity to everything within the city. I don't mean the ones that are further out are not desirable. Just meant their desirability because of their proximity to everything, because they're essentially located to the universities, the downtown, to parks, and all of that, then that can better promote less dependency on cars. And so if we're able to provide more units that way to make them more proximity to more services, people can determine whether they need an extra car or not.

I mean, we did that. And I would add to favor. I live 16th in Maine. I live in Gena. I live close to everything, and we were able to reduce it down to one car. And so I think having that location and that proximity can help, again, support the less dependency on cars and the less need to have all of them. That was kind of the same mentality we had when we got rid of those ordinances and those requirements. However, I will also say that people have brought that up. People have suggested that we bring back some sort of parking requirement, and we are evaluating that based on the amount of comments that we've heard. And it's still on the table.

And we said that when we got rid of specifically the residential component. We said, let's see how this goes. And when during the public comment period of our zoning code update, if we still feel that there has been a substantial response that that needs to come back in some way, then we'll reevaluate at that time. So thank you for the comment. Yeah.

Commissioner Hubert's Herbie. Herbie. Herbie. Nope.

Say

it. Like, have you ever heard of bees? Heard of bees.

Heard of bees. Okay. Heard of bees.

I remember in our ADU conversations, we talked a lot about having please correct me because I have a horrible memory.

About

having whoever owned the property had to live there for, like, a certain percentage of the year, right, in one of the units?

What we required was that one of them had to be owner occupied.

Yes. The time frame. Owner occupied. Yep. Okay. Has that been part of this conversation at all? I think

one person might have said it, but we haven't heard that with this yet. But, again, we've only had we've only said this to two meetings. Sure. Sure. Sure.

Yeah. I'll be the second person. I think that and not speaking on my behalf necessarily, but I do think that's maybe fear is too strong a word. But I think people are comforted maybe in knowing that if there are gonna be, especially, like, tri's or quads in their neighborhood Yeah. Knowing that an owner might live there might instill a sense of, like, they're gonna have a little more ownership or pride literal ownership or pride in taking care of things.

Just thought. Thank you.

I will say I just read a letter earlier today that was sent to my office that actually mentioned that as well of, like, needing to have more owner occupied, homes and figuring out ways in which we can address that as a city, to I mean, there's always this kind of, so to speak, or battle between renters and homeowners. And, usually, it's the homeowners that are mad at the renters. But figuring out how can we strike a balance as we're doing our rezoning to ensure that that is you know, maybe there are certain districts where they're more owner homeowner occupied.

Yeah. I that has been sort of feedback we've gotten since long as I worked here. Mhmm. Or, you know, how do we continue to increase the amount of owner occupied housing that we have. I do know through data that just it's a lot harder for people to there's there's more people that aren't interested in owning a home.

But then those that do, it's hard for them to do that now with interest rates and just the cost and and housing costs have just shot up. So it's just much harder to own a home. And so what we've also found, though, and this has recently been discussed through the planning kind of world, is by allowing for, like, ADUs or a duplex to occur or even maybe more than that in density, it does allow for this income producing component for homeowners to, like, work into their pro form a. So they go to a bank or lending service are saying, I wanna buy this house. I can't do it, but I know that I can make this into a second unit.

I now have this income coming in that'll help me pay that mortgage. And so there is this sort of opportunity for homeownership through providing an additional rental unit. Now, I'm not saying that's gonna always happen, but there is still that possibility to occur through what we're trying to do.

Alright. Council member Jansen, I see you online with your hand up.

Thank you, mayor. Tim, could you address, there's a scenario in my neighborhood in particular, and I've heard other residents concerned about this. So if a landlord currently owns two lots and, they're looking to already working to acquire an additional lot all in a row, would are there, I guess, regulations in place to protect them from combining that all into one big lot?

Well so if I had let just make sure I understand your, your example, Councilmember Chancellor, they have two or three lots and all of them have a single family home on it. Right. Can can they combine it all into one? They can't just ask to have it all combined into one because that would have three primary buildings on one lot. Now, for them to do that, they'd have to tear down at least two of them first, and then they could combine it all into one lot.

If they wanted to tear them all down and build something bigger, then they could, but then zoning would dictate, like, what it depends on what they want to do after that point. If they wanted to build something bigger, like a 10 plex or whatever it is, zoning would dictate than what they could do, and a zoning may have to occur. Did did that

So I guess the concern is that if you tore those three single family homes down, which based on observation, they're not being cared for. And then we have them tear down, and we have a they may would say a triplex, but each unit has, like, three or four bedrooms.

So are we talking about our current code or what we're proposing?

What you're proposing.

So okay. So some of that we haven't gotten into the weeds yet to to sort of, like, regulate how that would work. But if I had three lots that are zoned R1 and I had single family homes on my turmoil down and I wanted to build a triplex, the new zoning district would allow that to occur. The idea, though, is that they would still have to meet all of our design standards. And the idea is that we would have more stricter character based standards in place to ensure the design is compatible with everything that's around there.

They would still have to deal with storm water. But in terms of how many bedrooms they could have and we're getting to the whole unrelated kind of aspect, we haven't gotten to those weeds yet on how, if anything, would change or not change, Barb. And so at this point, feedback on that would be great in terms of if you had actual thoughts on that.

I do. And many people in my district do.

So I would tell them, please, if you have thoughts, email them to me. I'll make sure we get them into the conversation. If you're anybody in your district that has feedback as well, please either tell them to send it to you to send to me or direct them to our website, which is forlacrosse.org. And you you can leave all the feedback there, and it goes directly to our consultants as well. So please I mean, we want their comments because we wanna hear we wanna hear that stuff.

Wouldn't, I mean, to that point, if a property owner did decide to do that, like, tear those three buildings out, wouldn't they have to get approval, like, through your like, city planning or

Not anymore.

Not anymore. Okay.

What see but see, this is where I, the planner, Barb and, again, we I don't know if we can make people do this. But if if somebody had three lots with a single family home on it, they wanted to build a triplex or something like that, what I would do is advocate for them to build to not build a triplex, because to me, that's actually I mean, if they're looking for multifamily, what I look for them to do is build a duplex on each one of those lots so that we have six units, and I would make them follow what that picture is so that there is they couldn't even tell they were duplex. That's what I, as a planner, would be advocating for them to do and talk them out of building a triplex in place of three parcels. To me, that's I would I would advocate for them to do that and and talk them into how to do that and the process that would work and tell them that would work more. They get more units.

They could you know what I mean? That's what and maybe even talk with our block grant programs about whether there's any funding for that and programs. To me, that's a better use of the land. If they're looking for adding units or whatever it is, that's what I would talk them into doing, because I think we get a better product than some triplex. But I know that was just an example, Barb, but I think we could work with them for better design and and and better rental or or multifamily product on those lots. And I think we could do that talking them through, like, what we're looking to establish for character based standards and and things of that nature. So

But would that change in sorry. Oh, no. Barb, councilmember Jansen, go ahead.

I just wanna point out that in my particular neighborhood, we've not had that experience. So we have sideways motels, basically, is what they look like. We have really out of place duplexes that have four bedrooms. And so I I just think there needs to be something to protect and also to alleviate that concern for those that are living around and dealing with the consequences of those types of buildings?

Yes. Heard. Heard. Heard. And again, Barb, I think, again, that's what I'm trying to point out through our our form based thing, is to have better standards where you're not going to get those sideways and motile things, like stuff like you see in this picture here where, again, if you can tell me which one's a duplex, you'll you'll you'll get a high five from me. So

It might have two doors, but Commissioner Stead.

Just to clarify, you you briefly mentioned the the relatedness, ordinance. That's not something that's discussed as part of this rezoning, or is it?

It is being discussed as part of the zoning code update. It is. It's part of that in terms of the unrelated rule. And it's only being discussed because as of now, yes, there is a rule in place, but it's very hard to enforce because we could get somebody telling us, I see six cars there. I think there's six people living there. And inspectors can go by and count six cars, and they can go knock on the door, but if they're not let in, they can't do anything about it. There's no real way for them to really find out. Or you get the, oh, that's my cousin, or that's my brother. He's just staying here, whatever it all is. It's very, very hard for them to actually determine that that's actually occurring and hard to enforce.

And so we're trying to figure out what other cities are dealing with that to still limit the number of individuals. I don't know. So I'm not saying that anything's being changed. What I'm saying, though, is we're trying to figure out a better way to like, what other tools do we have the city to assist with limiting sort of these, like as Barb was saying, like a six bedroom house occurring somewhere.

Well, I I would say maybe that's a point of discussion that either this commission or other parts of city government should be having because it's also limiting the ability of people to decide how they want to form their families. You have, like, let's say you have two single mothers and their kids and they wanna pool their resources and buy a home together and share, you know, cooking and childcare and all that kind of stuff, like, we're denying that in the ordinance right now. We don't allow cooperative housing.

No, we wouldn't be denying that example. They could do that with that example because that would be considered two people.

Them and their kids?

Mhmm. Unrelated is other than you're considered unrelated if it's not blood, marriage, or legal guardianship.

Uh-huh.

So if I have two single mothers and their kids, that's considered two people.

But still, you could have okay. So let's say you have a number of couples that want to, you know, get together and pool their resources and set up some kind of intentional community cooperative housing type situation, and we don't allow that right now.

So that's a good question. No, we don't. But that is being discussed because we did have conversations with member many of the REACH Center and other organizations that deal with housing for the low and moderate income and those dealing with housing for those experiencing homelessness and trying to determine, like, what house like, and then those like the Salvation Army. And so we're trying to we were understanding sort of a lot of the roadblocks that they had in terms of trying to provide that type of housing, and that has come like cooperative housing has been in discussion, how rooming houses aren't used as much as they are, and like even shelters, because just the way that the Salvation Army is on a large parcel of land, their own commercial, but the way they have their makeup of units, it doesn't allow for them either to even expand on their existing footprint where they're at. And so are we that is part of the discussion.

So yes, you're right. We it's not easy at the moment, but we are addressing that to figure out how to have different types of housing. We just haven't got to that yet. We're we're getting there. We still have a ways to go. So thank you.

Commissioner Magda? Okay. Commissioner.

We'll get there.

Herdomy, you say.

Herdomy. Herdomy. Herdomy. Yeah. Just a more philosophical question. I'm sure you run into this with, like, every part of your job. Mhmm. So we have needs as a city. Then Sorry? We have needs as a city. Needs as a city. Wants and needs. And then we have neighborhoods or streets or groups of people who don't want that in a certain area. I'm sure you go into these things. You're like, we need more housing. People are like, great. But not here. Right? How do you navigate that? And how can we, as supposed representatives of our neighborhood who are gonna go back and be at meetings and have these conversations with people? How can we help to stay the course of what Lacrosse needs and not what 29th Street needs?

Well, yeah, we do hear that a lot. I think what then is part of our responsibility is to sort of really then get what is the actual issue. Right? What is it what is your concerns with this or not so that we can hear, like, those concerns directly rather than just this blanket. We don't want that here.

Like, what what is it that you're concerned with so that we can address that in some way? And then, ultimately, yes, I think I think that's sort of our responsibility is to to get that and then for us to have a response in some fashion. And then it just depends then on, like, are we hearing that across the board, or are we just hearing that from a couple voices? And then, again, we go back to our comp plan. Our comp plan has said that, you know, there is actually language in there about recommending, evaluating, getting rid of single family homes and having more of a density, a lower density type zoning district on the low end.

Our future land use model that we have in there actually supports that. And then, ultimately, as we keep going through this process, it's gonna be up to the council if that if they feel like because that's what we make our recommendations, you know, about how we wanna do this or not. But I think our goal is to continue with community input and keep hearing that. And if we hear it across the board, then, obviously, I think we need to change it in some way. But we have to also make sure we're hearing the right concerns and address that in some way. Right? And so that's part of what this is. Like, this isn't like this is what we're doing. This is like this is what we're like to do. Let's get the feedback from it to continue this discussion so that we can keep moving forward.

And if it's whatever it is, then we will we can adjust or pivot if we need to.

Awesome. Thank you, commissioner Herderby's. Before I call on this next person, is this individual a commissioner or just A resident. Okay. Yes. Alright. Travis?

Yes. Just wondering, are we aware of any other cities going through this process? And if so, what were the lessons learned?

Well, I can tell you as the mayor, I've talked to several mayors that have either just gone through the process of rezoning or are currently in the process of writing new zoning codes. And there's many of many of lessons that many of them have talked about. But I'll let you respond to that directly.

Yeah. So we there is several around Wisconsin, and we kinda stick to Wisconsin a little bit. But we know that Eau Claire Eau Claire. Right? Eau Claire just did their update. And then was it Middleton? Middleton also as well. That kind of the more the ones that more recently, within the last year, have updated their zoning codes. And so we've talked with them. We looked at them for formats.

Think, and in fact, there was a planning conference here in La Crosse, statewide planning conference in La Crosse that we gave a panel discussion on. It was me and individuals from them talking about zoning code updates. And their biggest lesson was to really just continue having conversations with members of the community about what you're looking to do and and have those conversations, but also to make sure that you are in conformance with your comprehensive plan that you do that you have as well. So it's just re referring to those, using those as references or guiding through it was really what it was. But the continued engagement and continued conversations is a big part of it.

And so, again, that's why I I tell everybody go to our website for lacrosse.org. We developed this huge platform online for people to provide input. We have all this stuff on there and all the past things and to keep you informed of what we're doing and what this all means and for you to provide input. But this is a very common step that cities do after they adopt their comprehensive plan, which we did in 2023. The next step is to then update your zoning code.

And right after we finish this process, we're gonna realize that there's some things that we're gonna have to change because they might not

It does. So I I that was funny that you say that because I think that's just typical. Right? So at this panel that I was at, the the individual from Middleton had said that theirs has been in place for a year now, and they're already coming back a year you know, after that year with a new bunch of changes. And they said it wasn't anything substantial.

What it was is just words here and there, punctuation that allowed for interpretation or something that wasn't what they intended. So it was just mostly coming back and going, oh, well, that didn't work. Not not because the intent didn't work, but just because what we were trying to achieve, people found sort of a loophole just because of the language or something like that. And so it was things like that. So, yeah, we'll probably be coming back a year afterwards with things that we wanted to just amend to just make it more clearer for the public and and easier to administer.

Commissioners? Councilwoman McGaughney?

I'll just make the comment that I was born in the Blue House with the gold peak.

Shut up. Really?

Yep. Just so you know. So

that's a duplex. Wow. That's so much. But what would your opinion be? I mean, that to me I don't know if Barb's still on, but in the bottom right picture, the house on the right, that's a duplex. To me, that is a better character based design for a duplex than some of the ones that you do see that fits in there. And our goal is to have design like that. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. I mean, the two doors in the front kind of give it away, but other than that, that is not your traditional type you see lately. True.

The house to the north of that is also a duplex, and that's a nice block. I don't know why I keep track of it, but I think because maybe I was born there.

Councilmember Jansen, I see you jump back on. Were you gonna say something?

Yes. I was just gonna say that I don't have problems with duplexes. I think, though, that there are particular neighborhoods that we need to be a little bit more aware. And I think the neighborhood I live in particular, because it's so close to campus, you experience bigger issues, especially if it's a a duplex or a triplex, and then you have, you know, all these extra bedrooms. So and and, obviously, there are other issues that come sometimes when you add so many people to one particular building.

But, you know, there are other issues that we need to address as far as holding people accountable and landlords accountable as well.

Right.

But absolutely no problem when it looks like actually a house. I'm just looking for some extra precautions so that we can avoid, some of the things that are currently in some of these neighborhoods.

Thank you, Barb. Council president Dickinson.

Deputy director Ackland, I wanna make sure that there is discussion and thought about floodplain and all the houses and the restrictions that we have being in the floodplain. I'm hoping that would be part of this zoning description so that people aren't caught unawares of all the different restrictions we have in Mhmm. Improvements and things like that.

So that's come up as a bit Oops. Sorry.

Go ahead.

Well, just so that it's accessible and easy to find instead of, oops, I tried to do something, and now I can't do it, or I'm hoping to do an improvement, and now I can't.

Okay. Yes. The floodplain has come up quite a bit, particularly with the north side. And my computer just died on me, so I apologize for that. But there's been a lot of comments on the floodplain and how this project can assist with floodplain issues.

And what we've said is anything that we can do on a local level to ease that burden is definitely going to be occur. But there is a lot of things on a state and federal level that we can't change as as part of this project, but anything on a local level has been like, that's heard and looking to see what we can do for that. I and I think one of those things might be, like, you know, people's houses that are so high up from others. Like, what can we so anything on anything on a local level that we can change, yes. I don't know what that is yet.

That's sort of the weed part we haven't got to. And so, again, and even and so council president Dickinson, the joint meeting that we have, the planning commission and the council, our consultants are looking to have another one of those, probably March at some point. I will have to figure out. We'll have to get together and figure that out, but to really then start presenting, like, those weeds to the council, and the planning commission to have more discussions like we did before before they start going out to the public. And so I'm just giving you a heads up for that, but that's sort of the next steps.

The next steps after this is to us, Jenna, and I are gonna go out and have this discussion more so with the neighborhood associations, and then give that feedback to them, and then they'll start writing more of the weeds of the code and what we changed. And then starting in, like, March, late March, April, somewhere around there, is really start getting that out to the public of here's the weeds that we're looking to do with all these different sections, and I envisioning it's gonna be in different components. There's a whole lot of different components to the zoning code, and so, that's sort of the tentative plan now.

Well, if you wanna put down March 9, that's our normal council planning for March March 9.

Okay. I'll get with the clerk and see

if Yeah. Because we

were talking about doing it outside of your council planning session because then we can maybe have it at the Black River Beach Center, or I don't have to submit another piece of legislation to change change that. But but we can we can talk. We'll talk.

Perfect. Thanks.

Any

other comments or questions? Alright. Seeing none, thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you guys at your neighborhood meetings, and we'll be there. And if you have any thoughts, again, consider this. Make sure of that. Please let me know at your origin and o.

Commissioner Geary.

Thank you, mister mayor. When we had that first presentation, I should have brought this up on the update date on the outdoor lighting. Yes. Well, what's the next step? Our committee, what I'm hearing, is in favor of pursuing it. And do we make a recommendation? Does it go to a city committee? Like the gentleman said, he'll get paybacks and maybe just put in your long range planning as you're replacing stuff, you'll go to that type of lighting or if the payback's good, you might go to it quicker because the payback's good. But what what what is our role here?

Yeah. So cool. You can jump in too if you want to. But my understanding is that we allow that presentation to happen so we can have so we can be more informed. Right. And then we're gonna bring back the lighter ordinance that we brought for that was brought forth what?

We had some examples of things. I I think there's been a desire to have an actual lighting ordinance both on a private side and a public side. We don't really have standards, like an overall uniform lighting standard ordinance for the city. It's piecemeal, and then really on private property, that's very minimal. And, like, if I just want to put a light up on my garage, I can just pretty much put up almost anything I want.

New developments, they have some lighting standards, but we don't also really you know, we don't really have anything uniform. And so the idea when you're creating policy like this is to have that education piece. So he mister Lin being here was sort of this education of, like, the dark skies initiative and lighting standards and stuff. I found it to be very educational, to be honest. And so I'm going to he already agreed that he would be able to help with providing a model or a draft one that he's worked on with others for us to at least use as a starting point to have that discussion.

I envision that I will have to include our engineering and public works department quite a bit if we're gonna have standards for our outdoor lighting. I'm assuming they're gonna weigh in quite a bit on that. And then also, I'm going to just have there's gonna be some community engagement of some sort in terms of lighting and explaining what that means for at least the public side in terms of, like, pedestrian lighting and street lighting and things like that. But that's something we can discuss more. But, again, it's sort of that policy part of it that we're drafting that we've done in the past as a commission, like, for ADUs and Airbnbs and parking and things of that nature.

So the staff's gonna do some work, and then they're gonna bring it back to us, and then we're gonna chime in, and then we're gonna do community sessions. And

We just haven't been working on it quite as much because of the zoning code thing's been quite a lot going on at the moment, but it's on it's on Jen and I will continue to push that through too.

Alright. Alright. Last agenda item, neighborhood updates, concerns, and celebrations. Anything? Councilmember Goggin.

I have one for Wednesday, November 19 at 6PM. We were having a neighborhood lighting at the Harry G. Olsen Senior Center on La Crosse's North Side. We have a member who was diagnosed earlier this year with ALS, and it's progressing very quickly. And this celebration is in honor of her and in honor of the Northside in general.

So I invite everyone online in this room and the public to come to Harriet J. Olson on Wednesday, November 19. It's going to be pretty, pretty cool. We had a local business who donated their boom truck and labor to light the tree, and then we had a member who donated a thousand dollars for all the lights. And I will tell you, it's glorious. So, again, it's a celebration, and we'd we'd love to see you all there.

What time is it, Abby? Again?

The lighting that we're gonna throw the lights at 6PM.

6PM. Okay. Yep. Anyone else? Alright. Don't feel bad, but next time, come with some celebrations and community events and all that jazz. Alright. See you now, and we will adjourn this meeting. Thank you all very much.