Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, we'll call the meeting to order. First agenda item is the approval of the minutes from January 22nd. Is there a motion?

I'll move to approve the minutes. This is Commissioner Karras.

Is there a second?

Commissioner Kelly seconds.

Great, it's been moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Seeing as none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries. Is there any public comment? It appears we have nobody in the audience. Is there anyone online? All right. Well, that makes it simple. Action items. First item we have is a public hearing. 2026 housekeeping and text amendments. And I'll turn it over to Kyle.

Thank you, commissioners. For the record, Kyle Collins, senior planner. Give me one second, and I'm going to share my screen.

All right.

So as the chair pointed out, this is the time and place set for a hearing on file number 247-26-0007-TA concerning housekeeping amendments to correct minor code errors identified by staff, other county departments, and the public. And staff will outline the hearing procedures that will be followed. Please note that you can find the full record for all the materials associated with this project at the website on the screen. I'll show this again at the end of my presentation so everybody can reference it. The Commission will hear oral testimony, receive written testimony, and consider the testimony submitted at this hearing. The hearing is also being recorded. The Commission may make a decision on this matter today, continue the public hearing to a date certain, or leave the written record open for a specified period of time. The hearing will be conducted in the following order. Staff representing Deschutes County as the applicant will give a brief report on the issue, and we will then take testimony from any agencies or interested persons present. And then following testimony, the commission can request staff to answer any additional questions. Please note that this is a hybrid public hearing with both in-person and remote participation. We don't have any in-person participants, but if anyone happens to show up, we have blue forms on the side of the room to fill out and submit to staff. After your name is called, please come up to one of the tables in front of the room before beginning your testimony. Before starting your testimony, please provide your first and last name, as well as your mailing address. For any remote participants, if you wish to testify, you must be logged into Zoom or have called in using the Zoom dial-in option. When the chair asks if anyone would like to testify, you will need to use the raise hand feature to notify the commission. To do this, you need to press the raise hand button on your computer, or if you've called in, please dial star nine. Please note that in addition to any oral testimony, if anyone has written testimony to submit, please hand it to me after your testimony. If you're participating remotely, you can submit your written testimony via email to the email address shown on the screen here. Please note that the chair and staff are responsible for conducting an orderly hearing. Any testimony or behavior which is inappropriate will be addressed and may result in that member of the public being removed from the hearing. Questions to and from the chair may be entertained at any time at the chair's discretion. Cross-examination of people testifying will not be allowed. However, if any person wishes to ask a question of another person during that person's testimony, please direct your question to the chair after being recognized. The chair is free to decide whether or not to ask such questions of the person testifying. Prior to commencement of the hearing, any party may challenge the qualifications of any commissioner for conflict of interest, and this challenge must be documented with specific reasons supported by facts. Should any commissioner be challenged, the member may disqualify himself or herself, withdraw from the hearing, or make a statement on the record of their capacity to hear and decide the issue. At this time, do any members of the commission need to set forth any information that may be perceived as conflict of interest?

Does any commissioner have anything to disclose? And if so, please state the nature of same and whether you can proceed.

I see none. Does any party wish to challenge any commissioner, the member of the hearings body in this case, based on conflicts of interest?

Anything online? No. As no challenges are presented, the hearing is now open. Staff will proceed with a brief report.

There, as the commissioners have already gone through this in their previous meeting at the work session, I'll try to be relatively brief, but of course, feel free to stop me at any point if you have questions as these come up. Some general background, the Commission has gone through this several times before, almost all of you, I think, at this point. We go through periodic rounds of housekeeping amendments. These are just general amendments intended to clean up our development code. So it corrects errors or restates omissions in portions of our code and reflects any updates to state or federal law that we need to incorporate locally. And impact wise, there's just minor changes to permitted uses or use standards. Generally, these are things that are in alignment with state statutes or federal standards. And so we're not changing any specific things that require an acknowledgement of state statutes or administrative rules or any land use goals that might apply to these. Because again, these are just matching standards or correcting errors. On the screen you'll see a full list of all the code sections in the Deschutes County Code that are affected by this proposal. I'm not going to go through each one of these line by line just to give you a general overview of everything that's being amended. And then next I'll go through each kind of the broad categories of what's being proposed here. The first set of amendments, these are Scribner's errors or reference errors. As I stated earlier, these are things that have just gotten out of alignment within our code over time. So we've had to change some internal references primarily to make sure that everything connects appropriately or things like punctuation errors, things of that nature that are corrected just via a Scribner's scratch out and replace. The next sets of amendments all deal with changes to state law. The first of these is House Bill 2809, which was passed in 2021, allows the temporary establishment of RVs as temporary dwelling units following natural disasters on individual properties. Previously, that use was allowed for a window of 24 months. However, a bill that passed in 2023, House Bill 2898, extended that approval window for an additional two years. And so this new set of – or excuse me, an additional three years, and this new set of standards just matches state law and our local code. So now if an emergency is declared via natural disaster on a property and someone wants to establish an RV on that site to live in temporarily, they can do so provided they go through this process. For a maximum duration of 5 years. The next changes to state law, some portions of the Oregon revised statutes notes that local governments can't oppose any type of limit on the length of occupancy for recreational vehicles, provided that they're in a manufactured dwelling park, a mobile home park or recreational park. We had a portion of our code that actually did restrict durations of occupancy within recreational vehicle parts to no more than 30 days in any 60-day period. Obviously, that's out of alignment with state statute, and so we're striking that provision from our code just to remain in compliance. Next set of amendments deal with the most recent set of housekeeping amendments, not the current ones, but the previous ones that we passed back in 2024. And it specifically deals with residential homes and facilities across the county. Residential homes and facilities are establishments within usually single family dwellings or occasionally larger residential developments, but it's intended to provide care for members of the community in the specifically licensed facilities that are run at homes. State law allows and requires residential facilities and homes in certain areas that already allow residential uses. So the previous set of housekeeping amendments was intended to ensure we were allowing these in all the places that were mandated. But through that exercise, we actually unintentionally excluded certain zones that would have previously allowed residential facilities, which are the larger uses that allow these particular treatment facilities. And so we've removed all the chapter specific references in this current round of housekeeping amendments in favor of just a one size fits all table that shows all the zones where these are allowed and the specific standards where they are allowed. The hope is that, one, we've corrected those previous omissions that we didn't mean to put in place, and also just to make the code more readable and usable for members of the public. Next set of text amendments deals with another previous, very recent set of text amendments dealing with temporary hardship dwellings. This, Planning Commission might remember this, we went through a previous set of amendments to conform our local code with state law and how we review hardship dwellings across multiple areas of the county. During that process, it came up very late that our Title 19 zones, which are a very small set of subzones surrounding the city of Bend needed to also be updated to conform with state law but it was late enough in the process we were unable to shoehorn that particular set of amendments into the code and so this basically just is a follow-up to that previous set of amendments and outlines the conditions under which hardship dwellings are allowed within those Title 19 zones. The next set deals with an update to federal law that actually occurred back in 2012. It's called the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, otherwise known as the Spectrum Act. And this act addressed multiple issues, but the one under discussion here today deals with wireless telecommunications facilities and trying to reduce local land use barriers or building barriers to establishing wireless telecom facilities across the U.S. And specifically, Section 6409A of the Spectrum Act prohibits local jurisdictions from denying what are described as eligible facilities requests. And basically, in a nutshell, that is the co-location of things like transmitters on pre-existing cell towers across the county. So if there's a pre-existing cell tower, it's not being proposed to be extended in some way, but another company wants to co-locate their antennas on those particular towers, they're allowed to do so and we're required to approve those facilities under a relatively quick timeframe. We don't have the ability to actually deny those requests. We already currently do this as a matter of practice across the street. This just codifies those specific standards in our code to make sure that everyone understands that we're in compliance with federal law and that they have a specific approval window and timeline that they can move through provided they are one of these eligible facilities. Another follow-up to that is we also previously didn't have specific standards outlining telecommunication facilities and Title 19 areas as outlined under the Spectrum Act. So this adds in a whole new section of code just covering exactly what I just talked about, those co-locations and eligible facilities requests for those Title 19 zones. Finally, the next big set of amendments that I'll go through deals with what I'll just describe as miscellaneous amendments. These aren't necessarily things that are Scribner's errors, but things that do need to be corrected within our code just to reduce general confusion. So the first is there's some confusion within our Title 19 zones as to who the appropriate review body is for both quasi-judicial and legislative matters. I mentioned this in the work session, but there's multiple references within the Title 19 area of the Deschutes County Code to the Planning Commission, But that's currently defined in Title 19 areas as the Planning Commission of the Bend Urban Area. That was previously a review body, much like yourself, that would have undertaken reviews of things like quasi-judicial and legislative matters just in those zones. However, the Planning Commission of the Bend Urban Area is no longer a functional review body and hasn't been for quite some time. And this has just been sort of a relic of previous review processes that's been sitting around in our code. And because of that specific definition, it's unclear in those areas who might be the appropriate review body. It's never come up before in the past because we've largely avoided Title 19. It doesn't come up very frequently within our review processes, but it was something that did need to be corrected ultimately. So to correct that, we've chosen to replace all references to planning commission within Title 19 to planning director or hearings body. This matches all the language we currently use in our Title 18 areas just to match across all areas of our zoning code. And given the defunct status of the Planning Commission of the Bend Urban Area, the definition has been completely removed from Title 19. I want to point out Commissioner Stockham during the work session brought up there were some other references to the Bend Urban Area Planning Commission. We've added in specifically Deschutes County Planning Commission to all those additional references just to make it abundantly clear that when we say Planning Commission, regardless of what zone you're in, we're talking about the Deschutes County Planning Commission. And finally, that's the full scope of the amendments here today. I'll talk about any public and agency comments. We haven't received any with the exception of one from our senior transportation planner from agencies, reviewed all of the proposed amendments for compliance with the transportation planning rule, and found that given the limited impacts for all these amendments, there aren't intended to be any TPR impacts given that there's no changing traffic patterns associated with any of these code amendments. There haven't been any formal public comments received to date, unless they're here tonight, obviously. And then finally, I'll just move on to next steps. At the conclusion of the hearing, you obviously have the same options that you always have at these hearings. You can continue it to a date and time certain. You can close the hearing tonight, but leave the written record open to a date certain. You can close the hearing and set a date for deliberations. Or finally, you can close the hearing tonight and commence deliberations. And with that, I will take any questions that you might have.

Anybody? All right. Don't see anybody in the audience, and I assume there's no one signed up. Is there anybody online? All right. I would entertain a motion. I guess my personal preference would be to close the hearing and commence deliberations, but I would welcome a motion from anyone on what you want to do.

This is Commissioner Altman, and that is exactly what I was going to do, is to say move to close the public hearing and commence deliberations tonight.

Is there a second?

I second that, Commissioner Stockham.

It's been moved and seconded to close the hearing and commence deliberations. Is there any discussion?

I think it's pretty straightforward what's on the table and what's being proposed, and we have no comments from the public. It doesn't seem like there's really anything that we would need to leave the record open for. It sounds pretty straightforward to me.

Any other comments? All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. All right. Deliberations are open. What's that?

Did Tony go away? I don't see Tony.

I don't see him. Seems like it's been dropping in and out. There's been four participants since...

Deliberations are open. Anybody have any comments? Or motions?

I motion to accept the amendments as Kyle proposed.

And forward to the Board of Commissioners with a do pass recommendation?

Yes.

Perfect. Is there a second?

I'll second, Commissioner Altman.

All right. Is there any discussion? All right. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Motion carries. That was quick and easy.

Thank you, Commissioners.

So we'll forward those to the Board of Commissioners with a do adopt recommendation. Sounds good. With that.

I just want to make sure Tony didn't go away and wants to talk.

It doesn't appear that Commissioner Williams is still online. Okay. With that, I'd open it up for staff comments. Kyle, you're up first, if you've got anything.

I don't have anything major. I can chime in, though, with things that might pop up as our planning manager speaks.

I am here. I got kicked out for a minute, so I had to come in under a different account. This is Tony Williams, South County Commissioner. So I did miss a few minutes.

Okay. Well, what you missed was is that we held a public hearing in record time and we deliberated on it and we passed a motion to move it on to the Board of Commissioners with a due pass recommendation. And so we are now commencing with staff and planning commission comments. Did you have anything else you'd like to add since you missed most of the discussion?

I would have recommended as well to take the staff recommendations to the county commissioners. I just, I had a glitch and had to figure it out.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. So you concur with what we decided to do then? Correct. Perfect. All right. We're back to Will.

Go ahead. For the record, Will Groves, your planning manager. So I wanted to give you a little kind of forecast of what's coming for your year coming up here. We've got your next meeting, which would be scheduled for the 26th. That one's canceled. Nicole is going to speak here in a moment to March 12th. She's been putting together a panel for water. panel for y'all and has got some exciting speakers lined up for that. And also here to get some feedback and get your questions about that as we work to set that up about a month from now. Coming in March 26 and April 9, we've got the CDD annual work plan. So, you know, of course, we come to you every year with what we did last year and what we're proposing to do next year. And that's on the way to the board and definitely looking for input on that. Coming out further kind of in the late spring, early summer, looking to do a child care text amendment. So the rules at the state level become more permissive in some ways with where and how you can allow child care centers. I'm likely going to try to visit that. Certainly at any time in this, the legislature is in motion. Things that are exciting opportunities that come out of the legislature and those things generally move to the front of the line as they can create opportunities. new opportunities for development at Deschutes County. Some of the things that are, I think, the most interesting that are out there, there's an opportunity for farm-based businesses. So it's sort of an expanded farm stand opportunity that's being discussed. I think that's the one that is most likely to make it through in some way and require some sort of local adoption. So we'll keep you posted on how that moves forward. I'm sure Peter's got a other things you'd like to talk about in that vein. As we come into July, starting to think about the Terrebonne community plan update. We're looking to do a Terrebonne tour, maybe even the planning commission retreat. sometimes have a meeting where we just talk about the planning commission itself, you know, what's going well, what you'd like to see worked on, what you'd like to do in the future. So that gets us into the middle of the summer. Coming through summer, we'll continue to be working on Terrebonne, that community plan update. We're anticipating the Sisters Urban Growth Boundary Expansion application to be coming, and it'll be passing through this body. We've got a list of text amendments from the work plan. Of course, the legislative, any housekeeping that comes out of that. And keeping an eye, of course, on the comprehensive plan. You know, that's back before the state courts. And the extent that that gets remanded, you know, long-range staff will be working on that. We're also keeping our eye on cluster and planned unit developments. Those are those opportunities that we have in our code to allow higher density development in return for leaving open space. And one of the things that we anticipate learning from some of the most recent cases, including Maybe destiny court, but certainly the comprehensive plan is to what extent that our code is in alignment with state requirements. And to the extent that we learn that we're out of alignment, we may have to do some patches to allow that. Another thing I want to acknowledge is that we're going through – I think we're going to see fewer planning commission meetings in the – I think we're going to see more gaps in the near future. This is because we've had one staff member coming out of family leave. We've had two staff members going into family leave here in relatively short order. And so definitely looking to bring you content, and especially where we can bring you content that takes – limited engagement, things like panels, but definitely by the time we're in mid-summer, the Terrebonne community plan will be in full swing. So trying to pick a balance between bringing you good quality content and also just recognizing that we're... We've got people coming and going, and we're spending a lot of energy right now getting the Terrebonne community plan engagement set up so that that runs smoothly and that we've got all the right people involved. So just kind of a heads up that there may be gaps or thinner content than you're used to, but on the upside, hopefully no late nights. Great. Thank you.

Nicole? Nicole?

Thank you. So yeah, just some updates on specific projects. So the comp plan, just wanted to give an update on that. Oral argument before the Land Use Board of Appeals is scheduled for February 18th next week. So hoping to get a decision in the next couple months or so. I think in the past we had discussed an urban reserve plan. light code project that we received a DLCD grant for. This was intended to look at the area within a mile or so of Ben's UGB and look at ways that we could greater kind of preserve land for future urban scale development once UGB expands. we realized that cluster development is a large component of that. So in coordination with the board, we decided to pause that project until this summer, until we have more certainty on the future of clustering and our code. So just wanted to kind of give you an update on that since I think it's been a while since we've discussed it. But eventually will be a topic that the Planning Commission will potentially discuss. Tara Bonn, we're continuing preliminary work. Tanya's leading that project. So doing some background research and looking at our community engagement strategy. We're planning for the first open house this spring. So we'll shoot the planning commission an email once that date is finalized in case you'd like to attend. Other than that, I think you may remember we applied for a larger $100,000 grant to support that project from DLCD. We didn't receive any funds at that time, but DLCD did come back and said, hey, we've got $15,000 if you want it to support your community engagement work. So that's helpful, I think, just to... Add to, you know, a traditional approach by allowing for us to do a couple of potential community-wide mailings, maybe pay for some online software to support online engagements and things like that. So working on finalizing the grant contract with DLCV, but that was kind of a nice welcome surprise. Other than that, water panel. This is, of course, a topic that could have many different lenses. The Planning Commission has had a couple different panels in the past, and we saw this one as an opportunity to kind of give a moment in time update. So this panel we've been coordinating with Oregon Water Resources Department. So they're planning to provide essentially a snapshot of the water year that we're currently in, as well as discussing some of the monitoring and conservation tools that they have available. And we'll also have Central Oregon Irrigation District who will present on their piping projects and the status of those. We were, you know, again kind of just trying to coordinate a panel, because again that a water panel could have just so many different reaches to it. No pun intended. So in the future, if there's a desire for kind of more specific topics in water we can discuss that as well. If you'd like to see it kind of additional panelists in the future on different panels. But for this evening, we were just curious if you had any specific questions you'd like the panelists to answer or any kind of facets of those specific topics that you'd like discussed. And because we were finalizing the date pretty much up until this meeting, we realized we're not giving you much of a heads up. So if you wanted to also provide your thoughts via email, you're more than welcome to do that.

So you've got two people coming?

We'll have potentially three. So it'll be the water master for the Deschutes Basin from OWRD and the Central Oregon Regional Manager. So Jeremy Giffen and Caroline Suffett. And then from Central Oregon Irrigation District, it'll potentially be Craig Correll or another representative from COID.

So any thoughts towards somebody like Ken Light or some of the guys from any of the private, partly I was getting at is anybody that was involved in some of the water studies that are, like I think Ken Light has a, Long background in water resources department, but also now is in private practice and involved in that big study that came out here a year or two ago. Or somebody like Tim DeBoot, the rangeland specialist, specifically in juniper trees. and could talk extensively on water use of the junipers and how they've impacted maybe the groundwater in Central Oregon.

Yeah, that's very helpful feedback. I think for this panel, because I think you could fill an hour and a half. That's kind of the timing that we try to shoot for with a panel. I think it'd be so easy to dive into that even with just one speaker. So we were kind of trying to balance the timing. So I think that's why we were hoping to have OWRD and CYD for this specific panel and then potentially have additional future water panels. But we can, I've taken notes on those two names and we can explore those, I think, in the future.

It'd be also interesting to have somebody that could talk on the impact of the HCP.

Mm-hmm.

and kind of where that's at and what's going on and and maybe the maybe irrigation district can cover some of that but i mean that has a significant impact on water resources great may i ask a question yes go ahead um is this going to be something that

you would broadcast to the public to invite their questions or comments ahead of time also? I mean, separate from the meeting, but say, hey, this is going to be happening. And if you have any questions, submit them ahead of time.

I think that's a good question. I think we are planning to follow our standard format, which is that it's, of course, live stream to the public is available to view it. But I think just due to staff resources, I don't think that we're able to produce like kind of the scale of like a water report like we did in the past at this time. We could potentially work with our public information officer just to do kind of a standard press release. But I'm curious, Peter, if you had other thoughts.

Yeah, thank you. Good evening, just for the Peter Gutowski, Community Development Director. We anticipated this might be a quick question. There's so much interest in a variety of topics. As Chair Cyrus noted, the accordion can stretch pretty far given the interest, the years of collaboration, the multitude of areas of interest. In the past, we haven't You know, essentially run these panels, um, you know, through a hearings process, it gets complicated. Um, and and so just echoing Nicole's remarks, you know, we, I think we, in the past, we've, we've acknowledged that there is a panel. Uh, we certainly let the board of county commissioners. Now, I think you may recall the last time we had a panel off the top of my head, but I, I recall the last 1. I think we had commissioner to sit in for a little while and I would expect that to occur again. So it does get a little tricky, but it's really, I think, meant to be educational, empowering the commission as a citizen involvement arm for you to engage. And it's not as if the panel is one and done. There's follow-up questions or comments that may occur, and we can do the best we can to capture any follow-up questions or comments that elicit additional feedback and make that available in a prominent location on our website. But we're just not, again, to come back to it, we're not really structured. And I think we would worry that it wouldn't take too much to have members of the public with their interest dictate the tenor of the panel, whereas really this panel, as long as this commission, and I see Commissioner Hochamp's hand up too, we really want you to inform what you would like it to discuss, knowing that there is a sweet spot of about 90 minutes that includes Q&A. if we front load it that way we can note it in the packet i and we will have a cover memorandum that explains the intent and purpose for the panel future panels that would you dive potentially into other topics but that's how i would structure kind of the expectations so that it's in air quotes relatively seamless commissioner hovkamp oh can you hear me okay

Yes, yeah, go ahead. Okay, thank you. Respectfully, staff's comments about the breadth of interest in this topic out there. I guess I'm still a bit concerned that with a limited panel like that, limited participation in the panel, that it will inevitably, create the impression in the public that we're narrowing the participation in the perspective that's provided by that panel. So again, staff has anticipated probably this comment and this concern, but thinking about a number of conservation organizations, NGOs that have expertise and depth on this topic. You could think of the same organizations that I could. And then individuals, advocates, experts in the community that have focused and are published in different media outlets extensively on water conservation, water-related topics. I don't know, I guess I'm of two minds. I guess staff is open to further, you've already commented on this, but I am concerned about the limited participation and potentially biased perspective on that panel, I suppose. Maybe it's an overblown concern, but it's on my mind. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Commissioner Williams. Commissioner Hofkamp, thank you for your comments. I understand them. I respect where you're coming from. Where I'm coming from is a commissioner who represents basically the entire South County where Only the small incorporated area of Lapine in Oregon Water Wonderland are on water districts. We don't have irrigation districts. We're basically the Deschutes is coming from us. Yet my community of 100 properties has had 25 wells dry up in the last five years and at least three have had to be dug twice. So something where, and we're shallow wells. We very well are. We're not Terrebonne where they're 500, 1,000 feet, but we're not on water districts. We're not on community water. And, you know, not this time, but letting this water topic as a well owner be a subject of a future water panel, I think is very important.

Anybody else? Oh, Will.

If I might, I think that, you know, in the past when we've done water panels, we've really had an aspiration to think very broadly about water topics in the county. And you can imagine that there are, you know, are dozens of people who could talk to you for three hours on their particular feelings about particular water issues. And so what really I think maybe we had led you a bit astray on with the notion of water panel, which would previously been really broad ranging and trying to get, you know, a big group of people here. This is really an opportunity where we've got kind of two groups that have basically a standing road show. You know, hey, it's a weird water year. Let's talk about it. And COID, we're doing a lot of piping. So I would say that this is more of a, was designed as more of a special topics in water with the idea that this would be of ongoing interest. And I think to the The comments that you've made, certainly we want to see a variety of these over time, you know, as we've got people available. So to the extent you've got feedback, you've gotten you've got feedback about who you'd like to see in the future. We'd be happy to bring them along. But I just wanted to make sure that this was, you know, the two things that I think we conceived of this as not being and not to be ahead of you, because certainly, you know, we want to get your direction on this was one that it wasn't kind of a come one, come all water panel. And two, that the, you know, it was more kind of a special topics thing. And also just acknowledging that, you know, there's certainly, you can imagine just some of the controversial matters that have come up in water topics that, you know, if it was perceived as, hey, we're going to talk about all these things, it could get pretty wide ranging. And this, this speaker series wasn't designed to contain that. Great.

Commissioner Karras. So, I don't know how many of you guys have read the report that Nicole mentioned, but seven-ish years ago when I joined the commission, there was a water panel. Actually, it was probably almost eight years ago. I mean, it was like right, one of the first things we did was a series of water talks that went on for a while, and there was this wonderful report produced summarizing all the information that came out of that. So my suggestion would be to make that report easily available to everybody who's currently on the commission, but also to members of the public who are interested. I'm not sure what the best way to communicate that is. It may go a long way to address Commissioner Hobakamp's concern about, you know, things looking too narrow. Because if you look at this in the context of what we've been up to the last eight years or so, you guys are right. We have taken this really broad approach and people just tuning in may not have that context. But I think we could share that pretty easily and people might find that report to be like really informative and useful.

Good points. In fact, I was on one of those panels. Oh, yeah, you were. And I would agree that there's a lot of people that we'd all like to hear from, and maybe this should be at least a two-panel discussion. or a two-night process with, have a little more diversity. And I mean, Water Resource Congress, or excuse me, DRC and some of those folks, it's water policy versus experts, et cetera, that, you know, we just as well hear a broader range of folks, you know, pros and cons of the piping versus just the pros. I mean, the ones, for example, you know, environmental impacts, water impacts, I mean, I'll get you a list of some of my things I'd love for them to address. And I've encouraged each commissioner to put together a list of questions that you'd like them to address. See what this panel can come up with. And it might give us some ideas on an additional panel on those that, the questions we didn't get answered. Yeah.

I can chime in a little bit here because I was actually the one that put together the last time I went through this water panel, including the one that Chair Cyrus was a part of, which was back in 2022. And we have a full list. I mean, obviously, they're four years old at this point, but we have a full list of all the presentations that were included as a part of those panels. So we have everybody from OWRD representatives to Kate Fitzpatrick from Shoots River Conservancy to USGS. There's a pretty broad range there and more than happy to obviously re-provide that to the commissioners for the ones that weren't here especially. That would be helpful. Since I was on it, but I never saw the report. Yeah, there's quite a few of them, including City of Bend water officials, Michael Bietner, who deals more on the urban side of where the city itself gets its water from and projects that they had in the pipeline at that point. So happy to pass that along again.

I think the report was from the one in 2018, right? Yeah, there's been multiple.

That was just the most recent ones.

Yeah, I mean, I thought both would be good to make available for people to peruse.

Yeah, that'd be a great starting point.

Yeah, I can follow up with an email, just again, inviting any questions that you have, if they come up after the meeting, and then I'll send out the report. And I think we could include it as an attachment to the Planning Commission packet as well, just in case community members would like to view it.

Great, thank you. Any other questions?

I got one. What's the deadline you'd like the questions or input for ODA, Verity, and COAD by, besides sooner than later?

That's a great question. I would say, let's see, two weeks before the 12th, since we'll be having kind of a coordination meeting with them. So if you could get comments to us by end of the month, by let's say, Friday, February 27th, that'd be great. And then we can kind of prepare the panel and then potentially, you know, include some of those questions in the packet. So community members, if they're interested, can see the information that was requested as well.

Great. Will do. And if it would be possible to get the other summaries to us prior to that, then that might spur some questions, and that'd be a good starting point on where we'd be in the process.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'll distribute that information tomorrow. So I'll send out the email to the Planning Commission by tomorrow.

Great. Thank you. Peter?

Thank you. A couple updates. I wanted to let everyone know that Chair Cyrus has been reappointed for a second term that will start on July 1st for four years. I sent an email to the Planning Commission just for your own information about the recruitment for Commissioner Karras' seat, which is in the Redmond-Tarabon area, for anyone who might be listening. Commissioner Karras terms out. This is her second term. So that recruitment is open for approximately one month. It closes on March 5th. And I anticipate coordinating with the chair of the planning commission and the vice chair of the planning commission as both Commissioner Karras and Commissioner Altman. I think Commissioner Hofkamp. I think you also have previously participated. Commissioner Williams. I think you guys have all participated in interviews where you will be matched up with a commissioner. County Commissioner, given that there's three, I will be the third person that conducts those interviews on a particular morning or afternoon. Those will be for the finalists. uh with the commissioners uh to narrow down uh the finalists but expect as i look now back to the chair and the vice chair of the planning commission i can anticipate us having interviews um sometime in april And then ideally, the board ultimately, of course, makes the decision that happening in May. And of course, that seat isn't filled until July, but it would allow that where the commissioner appointed representative to be able to watch or participate in person or remotely to see how this commission functions. So more to come, but that is in process. Then I just wanted to, Will mentioned one of the potential bills that could inform the work of this planning commission later this year. I just wanted to highlight three bills in this short session. You may be tracking this just in the news. So I want to give you, it is House Bill 4153. This pertains to farm stores. It would change state laws. It pertains to farm stands. It would allow counties to approve farm stores on exclusive farm use zone property. This is... been very controversial in the legislature. The board is a priority. We're monitoring it, but the board is not directly engaged. It's not a number one priority. It is in the House Committee on Agricultural Land Use and Natural Resources and Water. It's had hearings on February 4th, and on February 9th, and its work session is on February 16th. But a lot of interest, Commissioner Cyrus, you may be familiar just in the many hats you wear just with the Deschutes County Farm Bureau, but there's a lot of interest in helping farmers with agritourism, removes the incidental and subordinate test that is currently in place when we think about agritourism, and with farm stands. to again help. I think there's a lot of testimony advocating for this to help supplement income for farmers. On the other hand, there's concerns about the impacts that a farm store could have on adjoining farm properties. I'm just relaying what the lobbyists mentioned this morning at our legislative update, the impact that that could have in terms of raising the cost of farmland. So it is generating a lot of testimony, I gather. There's been over 200 people that wanted to testify. There's been some glitches with the online system at the state. But this is one that has a lot of interest. And you may recall last year there was a rulemaking effort that was tackling farm stands that was before the Land Conservation and Development Commission went through rulemaking. It ended up being problematic and it ultimately was, I think this is the right term, the governor decided to suspend the rulemaking because of just the controversy and the complexity that generated. So maybe I'll pause there. I don't, you know, Chair Cyrus, I don't know if you've been tracking that. It wasn't necessarily inviting input, but I know that you may in your familiarity, of course, with the Farm Bureau be tracking this legislation, but just wanted to make this, bring this to the commission's attention.

Yeah, I've been watching that one. It's interesting to see where it goes.

Yeah. Okay, so that's House Bill 4153. House Bill 4082 is interesting. It's in the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness. The Dash 2 amendments passed today. This is interesting. It could affect Deschutes County tangentially, not so much with the Planning Commission, but it would allow as an option – Cities to amend their urban growth boundary to identify land that could be used for manufactured home parks, for affordable housing for the older population that have incomes that are not more than 120% of the area median income. um so this generated a lot of interest obviously went through a dash 2 amendment but uh clearly addressing some of the needs of affordable housing so um this this definitely has some momentum and um more to come there but i thought you might be interested in in that one so what's the definition of older It is defined in statute. I was just curious. Over 40 or over 70? It will point you to the bill. It's not one that we're engaged in, but I think statutorily it's trying to address a certain subset of our... Yeah, probably 50, as Commissioner Kelly was...

Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, an interesting pilot project yet again. The last one that I wanted to bring your attention to this, this one, of course, is controversial. This is Senate Bill 1578. It is in the Senate Committee on Housing Development. They had a public hearing on February 10th, a work session today. I didn't track what came out of that. This has a section that does not pertain to Deschutes County. The other two do, would potentially. The first one pertains to sparsely populated counties. It would allow... counties to allow for up to 50 acres to be rezoned and residentially developed up to five units per acre. So it's an Eastern Oregon bill that would spur some economic development opportunities. Sections four and five, however, do not pertain to that particular provision. They pertain to ADUs, accessory dwelling units. And as proposed in section four, accessory dwelling units would be permissible on exclusive farm use zone properties that have a non-farm dwelling. Deschutes County is, if not the first, the second county that approves more non-farm dwellings in the state just due to our high desert environment and the ability to demonstrate that there are areas on farm zone properties that are not suitable for farming that can accommodate a non-farm dwelling. Section 5 expands the accessory dwelling unit uh which is currently set at 900 you will call it 900 square feet of livable floor area to 2500 square feet okay so this one uh very controversial um uh i think uh all three of those sections but it's a bill that we're monitoring in part because to my knowledge deschutes county has approved more accessory dwelling units as allowed under state law today in rural residential exception areas. And as I mentioned, we have, over the years, have approved many non-farm dwellings. So, you know, obviously if it would pass, there would be opportunities to take advantage of an ADU. So I will keep you posted on all of this. This is a short session, so, you know, These bills have to move quickly to pass out of the respective subcommittees to go to the other chamber for reciprocal hearings and ultimately deliberations. And if there's differences, they have to get reconciled. So there's a lot that has to occur. But if anything, it's giving you an indication of the types of land use topics that are being contemplated now. And we're certainly hearing in the next regular session, which is in 27, there's an expectation that we'll see more bills that have ever been submitted. We're talking about 3,000 to 4,000 bills. So this is just kind of a teaser of what's likely to come as the state is facing a significant economic development and housing challenges, not to mention issues pertaining to natural resources. So that's all I had. Thought I would perk your interest there on a Thursday evening, but thanks for your time. Great. Thank you.

I have a question. There's nothing in there related to land use of data centers or things like that.

No, not at this time. There's some legislation that deals with energy, the energy siting and FSEC, Energy Facility Siting Council, as it pertains to siting significant energy or projects that would, like data centers or whatnot. We don't see those here, so I haven't been... really given it much of my intention. But yes, no, no, at this point, but in 2027, there's certainly I think a lot will be on the table. And just to just to button this up, in the short session, legislators are limited to the number of bills they can introduce. So it's capped. In the regular session, there isn't that cap. And so one of the reasons why you could see so many bills. So

Yeah, they're limited to two per person, but then the committee bills, there's no limits. Any other questions? All right. Commissioner Williams. Do you have any comments?

No, I apologize for my bleep. That's why I've, uh, often zoomed in recently with no camera. I've had some computer issues, but, uh, very interested to follow the, uh, house bill and Senate bills coming up. And I appreciate that we had a hundred percent attendance today. I think that's fantastic.

Yeah. Thank you. Mr. Hofkamp.

Just a couple, please brief. Uh, did I hear, uh, um, Will mention that the February 26th meeting is canceled.

That's correct.

Thank you. And then just a brief editorial comment. First of all, thanks to CDD Director Gutowski for updating us on the legislation outlook for the short session. Understand the short session is short and limited bills and so forth. I'm always struck by The good intentions, at least superficially for some bills that curtail or qualify moderate some of the statewide land use system, whether it's for older populations, specialized populations, ADUs and so forth. But I do understand why advocates that organizations and individuals that support our statewide land use system talk about it dying slowly or maybe rapidly of a thousand cuts. and that one person's crisis is another person's crisis from the other direction. In addition to housing crises, I suppose we might also highlight the crisis of preservation of agricultural and rural lands and open spaces and the challenges of sprawl to infrastructure and services. So I just wish... that we had as much effort and attention, well intentioned as well, to shoring up, preserving and strengthening the great statewide land use system that we have as equal to some of the efforts to chip away at it. Anyway, that's all I have. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Commissioner Stockkamp.

Only comment, I think, on the March 12th meeting. The short session will be over, so look forward to the update from you playing Dr. Gutowski. Thanks for a good meeting. Commissioner Karras.

Not much for me. Great meeting, everybody.

Commissioner Kelly.

I have one question to Will. I used to love the Friday updates, and I don't want to put any more on your plate, but I I love the update you gave today just because it kind of gets my little appetizer kind of in my head about what's ahead. And I didn't know if you ever wanted to bring back that Friday update. I would read it.

Good. I was wondering if it had an audience.

It did. And I just have kind of noticed it's gone by the wayside. But I've also had a hard time with my email. So I think I've got the email. Like, I think I've got it figured out now. And I can be consistently, you know, checking it. So I did appreciate those. But I also don't want to add more to your plate.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Know in practice, I rely heavily on director good house keys update that he makes to the board, which I then propagate. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Sometimes that's occurred by Friday and sometimes not. And when it has I do to play forward it and sometimes when it's too late. I forget on Monday because my calendar reminders on the Friday as well. So I'll take a note to ensure that you get those on a regular basis.

What it does is it spurs me to then, like, look at some of the past meetings the board has had and maybe listen to them or just kind of understand what they're going through alongside what we're going through.

I'm glad to know that it helps and I'll make sure you get it.

Great. Thank you. Commissioner Ullman.

Thank you.

Great. And I'd just like to thank everybody for a great meeting. And we got done in just under an hour. So with that, meeting's adjourned.

Thank you.