Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

This meeting of the Kirkland Planning Commission is called to order. Let's start with a roll call.

Bria Heiser? Here. Aaron Jacobson?

Here.

Gina Medea?

Here.

Scott Reiser?

Here.

Justin Robbins?

Here.

Angela Rosman? Here. Rodney Rutherford?

Here. With that, have a with the majority of the commissioners present, we have a quorum. And now comments to the audience if there's anyone who would like to speak. Seeing none, we will move on to I see there's no special presentations on the agenda, but we do have our study session on the Washington State Housing Codes compliance, our first briefing. Staff would you like to get that started?

We moved on too quickly.

No, we'll queue it up here. Great. Well, we've been talking about housing for quite a while. And now we're gonna get our hands a little bit dirty here when we got a lot of work to do over the next six months or so, seven months, I guess, seven and half months at this point, where we're gonna be talking about about five house bills that passed the state legislature that the city is required to amend our state code to comply with. So I'm gonna have a presentation that's gonna just go over those state requirements, present the staff's recommended approach to the amendments and our approach to public engagement, provide a little bit of next steps preview and then allow for question and feedback from the Planning Commission.

So just a little point in time check here. I know that we have talked a little bit in the comprehensive plan related to implementation and a lot of discussion around code optimization due to the time constraints here and what we really want to achieve with code optimization, that is probably going to be largely left to future code amendments. Not to say that optimization won't naturally occur with these code amendments, but majority of the types of code optimization that has been discussed in your pack attachment two I believe in your packet that was presented to planning commission, I believe, in August of last of this year. We'll be largely left to a future phase. So we're really talking about state compliance over the next seven and a half months or so.

So getting into into it right here, we this is the first bill that that we're going to need to address. This is, of course, the middle housing bill, h HB eleven ten, and it's engrossed substitute housing bill that made some minor adjustments to it, 2321. It's what it's really trying to accomplish here is to require cities to add middle housing types, at least six of the nine that you're seeing here on on this slide at the prescribed minimum densities. Those densities are either between four to six dwelling units per lot, and the numbers depend on its proximity to transit service or the ability for that project to add affordable housing with updates here that staff has identified in attachment one of your packet, which goes through a kind of a gap analysis. We've identified a few areas where our development standards will need to be adjusted.

We'll need to including parking requirements and make some adjustments across our residential zones when it comes to minimum lot sizes. Moving on to the next one, this is House Bill thirteen thirty seven, which discusses accessory dwelling units or allowing more accessory dwelling units in our cities. We largely comply with this, just to let you know. There are adjustments to how we regulate accessory dwelling unit size. We have an accessory structure limits that may not meet the state mandate.

And we have additional development standards related to height, dimensional require some placement requirements on the lot, orientation, and street and parking standards that we'll will need to adjust here. Largely there's a bill sixty fifteen that addresses parking more generally in residential areas. This includes requiring tandem surface parking, lowers the dimensional parking standards that we currently have, and other kinds of, oh yeah, and grass block paver parking, which we do not allow. And we'll

need to

make some adjustments to our nonconformance code related to existing parking, allowing for continued non conforming parking standards. Next bill, this is the design review bill. This is twelve ninety three and it relates to some of our massing regulations, our design regulate regulations that we adopted in our last update of our of our metal housing code amendments that are not really clear or objective. They will need to make some make some adjustments there. This is not to be confused with another task that we have on the books right now, which is being mainly spearheaded by our design review staff related to the design review process, design review board meetings and those will be coming to planning commission I believe sometime in late January or early February.

And lastly, there is the co living bill bill. We what we would call our residential suites here. Cities now are required to allow for this type of use on Lot 6 that allow for six units or greater that these must be, you know, must be allowed as stand alone uses. It sets lower parking standard. The state sets lower parking standards than what we have.

They also have development standards that don't deviate from other multifamily unlike our current code does and sets unit densities. We have some minimum unit density requirements that don't meet the state requirements. There's a sewer connection fee limit that we'll need to adjust. And there's a state now a new state definition for co living that we'll need to adopt. It's a lot of work to do in a short amount of time, and most of the most of these amendments will need to be addressed by 06/30/2025.

It's just a few months away for for for us, especially when we're dealing with, you know, limited number of meetings that we get to have you, especially with all the other state mandated requirements that you'll probably be discussing in the coming year as well. So staff is recommending that we adopt at least the minimum state standards that would be especially for thinking about like the middle housing bill alone it would be adopting at least six of the nine housing types in our residential zones. And then staff will also have to

take into

consideration ramping up for all of these code amendments from an administrative and permitting perspective. We've had a lot of back room discussions recently about what we'll need to do in order to allow for permit wise to ramp up for these new housing types. With these new housing allowances, staff is also recommending that we consider adjusting our inclusionary requirements at this point. Fortunately, we have Arch who has been working with member cities on middle housing updates and have done a lot of a lot of work looking at what inclusionary requirements could look like with these new housing types so we'll be briefing the Planning Commission on their work in a future meeting And as a reminder, this kind of sets a stage. So I would like this to be more of a discussion, a starting point of our discussion of what a future optimization could look like.

So we're going to be talking about a lot of code, looking at a lot of different code, and we'll be discussing probably things that we might want to bike put on a bike rack or something for our future code amendment. So I'd like to have those discussions throughout the next six or seven months or a few meetings that we have with the Planning Commission. So as it comes to public engagement, again, considering the limited time that we have to do this, we want to build on what we've already kind of built out with our comprehensive plan outreach that would be kind of using our housing maybe a more centralized housing web page, kind of elevated closer to the top of our website that would direct people to a mailing list, provide we provide handouts, offer focus groups, and then schedule an open house somewhere in between the first and second code briefing that we would be giving to you. So this is the tentative schedule with transportation with both Planning Commission, Transportation Commission and the City Council. There are a couple of touch points with the planning commission that we could optimize to be a joint study one of them to be a joint study session with the transportation commission, which will have a lot of questions related to street standards and access standards that will be affected by the allowance of new housing types.

There's also a public open house, again, that I've of tentatively put in between the two study sessions and well before the tentative public hearing. This gives us about a window of lag about a month window of lag. Sorry. Again, the adoption has to be prior to June 30 of or prior to technically, prior to, July first of of twenty twenty five. We got a little bit of slippage, but not much.

Here are the the the questions that we had presented present in your meeting packet. We're mainly trying to get your feedback on, you know, staff's approach to amending the code are also how we our approach to our public engagement and if you any of the board members would like some additional information from staff to present or bring to future meetings. And with that, I think that's pretty much my presentation.

All right, sounds good. With that, are there any commissioners that would like to start with questions?

Commissioner Jacobson. Thank you. I guess the first thing is I would be inclined to that we have a joint meeting with the Transportation Commission. I don't want these conversations to be siloed. And building off of that, would it be possible for us to have a joint meeting with the design review board?

I understand that we have different jurisdictions, but when we're talking about changing the design review process, the design guidelines, the planning commission has a piece of that and the design review board has a piece of that, and I I think it'd be better if we could have both of those conversations at the same time in the same room. So I would hope that we could try and figure something out out there. And then going back to the the modifying inclusionary zoning standards, did you say that that was you were intending for that to be part of the compliance phase or the optimization phase?

Right now, we're thinking that it it could be good to start the the discussion at the compliance stage, understanding that there might be again some kind of gap there that we're going to need to fill up in the optimization phase when it comes to adjusting our development standards to really be well suited for these different housing types. So we understand that there might be a little bit of a gap there, but we've had some preliminary discussions with Arch just related to our phased approach already, and they feel pretty confident that they can present an inclusionary update before the Planning Commission even with the code amendment, this version of code amendments.

Okay. I'm not exactly sure how I'm leaning on that. I don't like the idea of having the conversation about the affordability standards separate from the actual development standards related to a lot of my comments. I think we need to have that together, and we shouldn't be separating those conversations.

Adam has maybe a comment to make here if you might want to interject.

Yes. Thanks, Chair Rutherford. Just wanted to mention, one of the challenges with the inclusionary requirements is that under state law, we have to give development allowances to request to get affordable housing set asides in return. So I think op you know, in a perfect world where we didn't have to have to adhere to that rule, we would probably defer inclusionary zoning to the optimization part of middle housing, the second phase of the project. But the big give might be the big give in terms of development allowances might happen as part of phase one.

There's different approaches that we can talk to you can talk to you about later, but one approach is establishing affordable housing set aside that's similar to what we have for the rest of for multifamily housing in our single family zone. So imposing that existing requirement on single family zones, that would also allow us to sort of downsize that in the future if we wanted to. So it's it's hard a lot harder to add inclusionary requirements, and it's a lot easier to reduce them. So we'll look forward to your guidance, but just wanted to make just wanted to make make it clear that we do have to we do have to sort of consider the state requirements around establishing inclusionary zoning.

Okay. I think I might need to talk with you offline about that because I that confuses me in regards to what we did with reconciling the differences between the zoning code caused by the former Houghton Community Council jurisdiction and introducing inclusionary zoning standards through that process.

Yeah. We can I'm happy to talk offline about that too.

Okay. The other thing is I believe I saw somewhere that Arch put out a report kind of geared towards this conversation of afford affordability standards for in preparation for complying with HB eleven ten. And from what I remember, that was mostly geared towards cities that didn't already allow missing middle housing. And so I would hope that if we're going to be getting analysis from Arch that it would be acknowledging that we actually already have given the those development allowances more so than other cities. And so in that conversation, we've already had a phase zero there.

I have other questions, but I can probably send them via email. Thanks.

Commissioner Rosman?

And then my other question is, you know, there are a couple of other bills that have been passed over the last couple of years that do have similar ish deadlines to these that are housing related, maybe not specifically middle housing. But I'm just curious how staff is planning on bringing those to us. $52.90, $10.42, and then I think there's a, like, a condo related, like a, like, under eight I can't remember the number, but under eight unit condo something. I can probably find it if that's helpful, but I don't remember if that has any, like, city requirements. But I know that the other two definitely do.

Yeah, I can jump in there on that. So thing that we're working on right now is sort of a similar gap analysis for all of the legislation that's been passed in the last few years, so we're working on kind of like an audit right now of all the legislative requirements we might be required to comply with in the next couple of years to pick up some of those other bills that you mentioned, and that's certainly something that we can bring to the Planning Commission even if they might not be Planning Commission items, they might not require zoning code amendments, but we can definitely bring them to you just for awareness. Just really quickly on a couple of the ones you mentioned, so for fifty two ninety, that's the permit review bill that requires us to comply with specific deadlines. We've been working on that one for a few months now. Adam's mentioned this a few times at meetings, but one of the things that we're doing on that is working on a permit dashboard that will be publicly available, so offering a lot more transparency into our review timelines in a way that you and the public can easily access, and then we're taking a look at all of those deadlines too and looking at a lot of our internal procedures to make sure that we're gonna be able to comply with those permit review timelines.

Ten forty two is the the bill about allowing conversion of commercial or mixed use into residential. So that that'll be a separate project for us, not not housed within under the umbrella of this kind of middle housing compliance project. So what we're what we're likely going to do with that sort of whole legislative audit is try to figure out which of those projects would require a level of staff time or your time that they would warrant their own line item on the planning work program. So my hope is that when we bring the planning work program to you to begin discussing updating that as we do every year, that we'll have line items reserved for each of those legislative requirements. So more to more to come, but, yes, the the list that Scott just walked through, though it is long, it is not the complete list of of the work that we have to do in the next year or even the next six months.

Vice Chair Heizer?

Okay, Commissioner Jacobson did make a good point about us being head and shoulders above basically every other community in the area with missing middle housing. So that should be addressed before we continue on the density path. Can you go back to the slide? I think it was the first one on eleventen.

Can

you clarify, I believe that we do allow six of the nine housing types in most residential areas, if not all, at this point? Do we have six?

We do allow for them in not completely, in any particular like low density zones have three or two sorry, two of them. And our medium to high density residential zones can either take some of the remaining allowances. Actually, I would say that duplexes, triplexes, and cottages, actually, there's three that low density can take. And then anything above that probably could be taken by our medium and high density residential zones. They just might not meet the unit density requirements.

I think I have to clarify and correct because townhomes would also be included in those low density areas, right? Detached, condo lots?

Yeah, I guess we can call them that if we want to call them duplexes or something. But that's just kind of, I guess, a nuance or some people might argue that because we allow for attached ADUs and those can be separated that we can potentially categorize those as as as a kind of townhouse, but there's a size limits on those and generally townhomes don't come with those size limitations that we would apply to accessory dwelling units.

Okay. So let's say four out of the six are currently allowed in low density residential?

One could potentially argue, I guess Department of Commerce might argue against that because they list that as a distinct kind of ADUs as something distinct as opposed to something that might be considered an attached townhome.

Okay. I just wanted to clarify that. I would be very interested as we go down this to see some options, and I know this isn't a new idea. But right now, I'm looking at this, and we've got to comply with minimum densities. What I'm, I think, asking for here would be option one would be our minimum to comply with state laws. Option two would be somewhere in the middle. And option three would be our most extreme affordability requirements and density.

Well, hopefully we can get you through that. That'll take some level. I mean, we're planning we were hoping for just the minimum, but that was what we were planning on just because it might be a little bit difficult to start asking for a lot of extreme options, especially with only a few touch points with the public. And as we've kind of been learning through the comprehensive plan process that if we start to if we don't have enough dialogue with the public and have enough touch points with the public that as we're starting to introduce things that might require additional analysis and more staff time, we are going to be dealing with multiple bills as we discussed and that's going to stretch our long range staff pretty thin. I won't have a team with me to help me do some of this research.

I will have some staff time, additional staff time to help me with some of the research and I'll have Arch help me with some of the affordable housing stuff, but we're talking about a limited amount of time, a limited number of touch points with with the public. We can do as much as we can to give you as many varieties of options as possible, like many different flavors, we'll we'll call it, of of a minimal really kind of start talking about those, you know, optimized maximum, you know, options like something that would require something like a market rate study that would encompass not just our low density zones but our medium and high density zones, which technically will are being touched right now, but staff would believe that that's really a place where we'd really want to optimize in the future. There's not a lot of market studies that have been done so far related to our medium and high density zones. The state and Puget Sound Regional Council, Arch have all done studies related to middle housing and primarily middle housing as it relates to lower density zones.

Just real quick to clarify a little bit from the perspective of your work program. I, really appreciate the the comment, commissioner Heiser, and getting it at our first our first touch so that we can start thinking about it. So right now, Planning Commission has already last year put a project to optimize middle housing on your work plan and council approved that. And so we'll be and I think what we do plan on doing and hope to do is bringing lots of options forward like Scott mentioned with the latter two, the kind of middle option and sort of maybe a maximum option taking part within the optimizing conversation. I think one of the decisions for Planning Commission and Council when you're looking at your work program is going to be where in the work program does that optimized project fall?

Like, do you want it to try to follow very soon after we finish minimum compliance, or is it something that, you know, gets put a little later in the work program? So that's gonna be one of the questions we ask when we bring the work program to you as well, but I think we're certainly wanting to give you lots of options to consider, and we appreciate that ask. Okay.

Would say I've got two more things. Can I okay?

So

minimum lot size right now, if we're talking about up to six units on one lot, I believe our minimum lot size is 1,800 square feet right now residential. Is that correct?

In our high density residential zones, yes.

Okay. So I would be interested in that minimal compliance approach. The minimal compliance approach, I would be interested in seeing a minimum lot size for the four to six units per lot. The bill seems to be pretty nebulous about what a lot is. There's no square footage on that It as far as I can

is absent that language, yes.

So it's up to really the city to decide what that minimum lot size is. So I think that that could be our don't want to say minimally dense, but on the lower end, our moderate and our extreme. So I think that might be one way we kind of approach that. And the other thing too was, Alison, talking with you and Rodney yesterday, you did say that what we're trying to do with code is really make sure that we are focusing on our neighborhood centers and making sure code gets sorted out there first and really do you remember this conversation?

Was that related to the comp plan update with the council?

No.

Couple things, I guess. So I mean, right now, in terms of the comp plan direction, what we've what we've heard from from Planning Commission and and Council are kind of the the options on the table right now. We're really focusing growth in three areas that we heard a consensus on, and that's existing urban centers, existing neighborhood centers, and then middle housing. And middle housing really is is already allowed in all of our low density residential zones, so that's where we're focusing now for minimum compliance, and then that also be where we're proposing to focus optimizing as well because outside of low density residential areas, we already allow multifamily or multiunit development, so middle housing is really not applicable there.

Mhmm.

Okay. And then just really quick for the benefit of the other commissioners or anyone watching on the on the minimum lot size to clarify a little bit. In our existing low density residential zones, we have a range of of minimum lot sizes now across those zones. So we have, like, for example, a lot of the Norkirk area has minimum lot sizes of 5,000 square feet. Really common minimum lot sizes in the the majority of our low density residential zones throughout the city are 7,200 to 8,500 square feet.

There are areas of the city like Bridle Trails where we have much larger, 12,500 minimum lot size or 35,000. So there's a range of minimum lot sizes right now, and then the 1,801 is a per unit minimum that we have in a lot of those medium and high densities. So there's a big range, and then I think we can do some additional research into the legislation to see what options might be available to local jurisdictions on that minimum lot size question. It's a really good question. Thank you.

Commissioner Medea.

Thank you. Thank you, staff, for the presentation tonight. I have a few questions. So on the six minimum of six of nine design choices or housing types, that's the minimum, right? But are we saying that depending on the area, like sorry, I'm not being very articulate so like a courtyard apartment might make sense in certain areas versus others. So we're not going to preclude ourselves from exploring each of the nine options, are we? Are we only committing to six? And if so, how is that choice made?

Well, one the ideas could be that we would explore all of the housing types and review their relevance. I can imagine that know courtyard apartments and cottage housing could be looked at roughly the same and we might think of them maybe a little bit differently in terms of, you know, what where or what lot configuration they might be trying to conform in. Giving options maybe to developers, let's say for instance if we want to explore all the housing types, we could explore options to adjust standards that would allow for all of these types in many different ways in which could be adapted by a developer given that what type of parcel they're trying to redevelop and where they're trying to redevelop it.

Okay. Thank you for that. And then with regard to ADUs, as you know, like Kirkland's been held up many times as a showcase city that has done middle housing and specifically ADUs well. So I I agree with Commissioner Jacobson that when it comes to continuing the progress in that space, that we have some back and forth with the design review board. I just want to build on that success and not divert it in any way from a negative perspective, but great opportunity there for sure.

What else did I want say? And yes, I appreciate the continued prioritization and need for public engagement as we continue down this optimization and implementation process. Do we have a sense of priority or low hanging fruit? I mean, all of what you presented here is going to be integrated throughout the implementation and optimization plan. So I'm not sure if we're looking at it this way or if there are certain pieces that are the low hanging fruit that we start with. Do you have any way to help us wrap our heads around that?

Well, probably the best way to think about these gaps are things that we need to fill within the next six months. So that's the minimum. That's what we're talking about here. So maybe it is optimal to really look at where we're going to be able to take six, maybe six of those nine in low density, maybe encompass more options in our medium and high density zones, maybe want to split it that way. We may think about what is are there is there validity in having allowing for a single family dwelling to be developed on a multifamily zone site?

Should we just allow for multifamily to be developed on multifamily sites? So maybe there might be ways we can think about how where we want certain types of housing and to what extent maybe four to six, four primarily in many of the lower zones zones and then really optimizing for greater densities in our medium and higher density zones that could probably accommodate most, if not all, of these housing types.

Commissioner Reifser?

When I was reading through the packet, one of the concerns I had, how is the city going to address neighborhoods that have existing homeowners associations and CCNRs? Is there anything that you can do to promote ADUs and some of these housing types in neighborhoods that have not seen that happen yet?

I don't know of a great approach to that. I know that we have been pretty agnostic when it comes to homeowners associations and and when someone seeks a permit in the city, we just process permit. If it's violating a private agreement then that is up to the homeowner. I mean that might be the best approach but at the same time most of any of if there's any homeowners association that prohibits a mental housing type, this law does not apply to those to those We don't we will probably take the same approach in our zoning code that we will be silent on that as we normally have been silent on that in our current middle housing code. So I think our practice would be the same.

Of course, future state legislation might be able to address that, but at this point in time, the state decided not to address those private restrictions.

Okay. And this is just wording. You know, where it says ADUs allowed at least 1,000 square feet.

Mhmm.

What is our, like, largest ADU that you can have?

You you can have a 1,200 square foot ADU. You might not have

an