Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening and thank you for joining our September 15th, 2026 regular planning commission meeting. As a reminder, items will be taken in the order that they are listed on the agenda. Before we start, I'd like to go over briefly our public comment procedures for the meeting and for those who may be joining us for the first time. Public comments on the approval of minutes, consent items, matters of commission interest, and items not on the agenda will be taken during item number three during this evening's agenda. Comments on other agenda items will be taken only when that item is called. In-person speakers will be called first, followed by virtual attendees. In-person speakers, please fill out your speaker's card located in front of council chambers and bring it to staff. That would be over here to your left. Those joining virtually, please use the raise your hand feature on Zoom to speak. If you're joining via teleconference by phone, you may raise your hand by dialing star nine and star six to unmute your microphone when prompted. please only raise your hand at the time when the item that you are speaking on has been called. Each speaker is allotted three minutes, but that time may be adjusted depending on the number of speakers that we have. For in-person speakers, there is a light on the podium to let you know how much time you have left and a buzzer when the time is up. For virtual speakers, the time will show on the screen. Lastly, we know that each person brings different perspectives to the discussion, and we want to be sure everyone has a chance to be heard without interruption. Planning Commission welcomes comments on items within our purview. Any speaker whose comments are not on topic under the Commission's purview will be warned and then removed if necessary. Thank you for your attention and consideration during this process. I will now turn over to staff for roll call.

Commissioner Arusa-Cruz?

Here.

Commissioner Cornejo?

Here.

Commissioner Cernogorats?

Here.

Commissioner Hunter?

Here.

Commissioner Robinson?

Here.

Vice Chair Finch.

Here.

And Chair Koch. Here. I am Sue Exline. I am the Assistant Community Development Director and liaison to the commission. Other staff in attendance are Eleanor Ignacio, our Assistant City Attorney. And I just wanted to let everyone know she is the attorney that is now sitting in this chair permanently. So we're very excited to have her as part of the team. Jeff Schwab is our Community Development Director. He'll be here this evening. Evelyn Garcia, Associate Planner. And Christina Mateo, Administrative Secretary and Meeting Host.

The next item on the agenda is notification of meeting participation by teleconference due to just cause pursuant to Government Code 5495383. Do we have any remote participants this evening? We do not. Thank you. We'll move on to the next item on the agenda, item number three for public comments. At this time, we'll take public comments from those joining us in person and through Zoom. As a reminder, your public comments should be on topics within the Planning Commission's purview. If you've joined us in person, please fill out your speaker's card and bring it to the staff. If you've logged in via Zoom through your computer, please click the raised hand button now. If you've dialed in, please enter star nine and star six to unmute your microphone when prompted. If you have dialed in, you may begin speaking once you are called on. In order to see how many speakers we have for general public comment, I ask everyone who wishes to speak on an item not on the agenda, please complete your speaker's card or raise your hand on Zoom now.

There are no comments.

Thank you. So if there's no objection, I'll close public comment period. Next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the August 18th, 2026 special meeting. Is there a motion to approve draft minutes of August 18th, 2026?

So moved. I'll second that.

Commissioner Rusacruz.

Yes.

Commissioner Cornejo.

Yes.

Commissioner Sonagor-Batz?

Yes.

Commissioner Hunter?

Yes.

Commissioner Robinson?

Yes.

Vice Chair Finch?

Yes.

And Chair Koch? Yes. The motion passes 7-0.

The next item on the agenda is the consent calendar. There are no items on tonight's consent calendar, so we will move on to public hearing item 6A. A planned community permit for exterior building modifications to an existing office building, which is located in the Main Street Historic District. The subject property is non-contributing building within the locally designated Historic District. Do commissioners have any ex parte communications about this project? Now Ms. Evelyn Garcia, associate planner, will give us a presentation on this project.

Yes, thank you, Chair Koch. Good evening, commissioners and members of the public. My name is Evelyn Garcia, associate planner, and we are here this evening to review the proposed project located at 1991 Broadway. So here's a quick outline of this evening's presentation. I'll begin with an overview of the site, provide some background information, go over the proposed project, and lastly provide the staff recommendation. So again, the project is located at 1991 Broadway. The site is currently developed with an existing three-story office building and is located within the Main Street Historic District in the downtown, within the downtown Precise Plan area. As shown in the image, the site has frontages along Broadway, Main Street, and Walnut Street. While the site is located within the historic district, the existing building itself is not considered a contributing historic resource. However, the project is still subject to review by a qualified architect or architectural historian, as well as the city's Historic Resources Advisory Committee. and Planning Commission to evaluate its potential impacts on the historic district and to review the exterior modifications to the existing building within the downtown area. The project was presented to the HRAC at their August 13 hearing and recommended approval of the project to the Planning Commission. The second step in this process is final action by the Planning Commission, which is why we are here this evening. So the proposed project includes exterior modifications to the existing building along with improvements to the site. The building improvements include enclosing the existing breezeway entries along Broadway and Walnut Street with new glass doors, adding new awnings, and repainting the building in a color similar in tone to the existing. And the site improvements include new hardscape, landscaping, metal fencing, and lighting along Broadway and Walnut Street frontages. Here is a Broadway street elevation. The proposed improvements here include removing the existing paneling, metal fence and gate at the breezeway entrance. These would be replaced with an enclosed entryway featuring a frameless glass door and metal awning. And canvas awnings are proposed above the ground floor windows to the west of the new entryway. This is a continuation of the Broadway elevation. New landscaping planters and seating area are also proposed along this Broadway frontage. Here's the main street elevation. Work here is limited to repainting only. And here's the Walnut Street elevation along this portion of the building that is set back from the street within the rear courtyard area. The project proposes removing the existing paneling and canopy at the breezeway entrance and replacing them with frameless glass doors and a new metal awning. Any canvas awning is proposed at the entry located right outside the courtyard area there. So the project is required to be evaluated under the Secretary of Interior Standards to ensure that the proposed work is compatible with the district's historic character and that it would not adversely impact the historic district or its historic resources, even though the existing building is non-contributing. As described in the staff materials, the project will not cause a substantial adverse change to the historic district because the project WOULD NOT DEMOLISH, DESTROY, RELOCATE OR ALTER A CONTRIBUTING HISTORIC RESOURCE WITHIN THE DISTRICT AND THE PROPOSED MODIFICATIONS DO NOT AFFECT THE DISTRICT'S HISTORIC INTEGRITY. The project approval is also based on the permit approval criteria of the historic preservation ordinance and is subject to these findings. Finding A and B are not applicable to the project because the property is not a historic landmark. Under finding B, the project does not adversely affect the character of the district because the existing building does not possess character defining features that convey the district historic significance of the historic district. And so the planned community permit is also required, and this is to allow modifications to the existing office building in conformance with the applicable downtown precise plan regulations, standards, and guidelines. And the approval is based on these two findings. The project proposes minor modifications to the existing building and is designed to comply with the DTPP requirements with no deviations requested. And overall, the proposed changes would enhance the existing building and create a more inviting and visually engaging entrance along that Broadway frontage. Staff agrees with the required historic criteria and the planned community permit findings that these findings can be met for the project. And so with that, staff recommends to adopt the resolution approving the project at 1991 Broadway. This concludes task presentation, and I'm open for questions. Thank you. And the applicant is also available to answer questions as well.

Thank you, Ms. Garcia. Any clarifying questions from commissioners?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a clarifying question. I know along the Broadway frontage of this particular building, the proposed improvements include awnings made out of, I think, canvas. And I'm just curious, what are the maintenance requirements for using non-permanent materials on that side?

Yeah, for canvas or the awnings would just be required to be maintained if they become destroyed or dilapidated over time with flame retardant material.

Got it. Great. And my other question is about the conditions and approval. I did note that in this particular section within DTPP, the requirements from ground floor visibility in the windows is 20 feet, unobstructed view within the building. And both from your presentation, if you walk around the site today, there are blinds on every single window. I know there were some standards related to, I guess, visibility and accessibility. And I'm just wondering, is there a plan ON THE APPLICANT OR FROM THIS APPLICATION TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE AND BRING IT TO COMPLIANCE?

YEAH, SO THE CONDITION IS APPLIED ON THE PROJECT TO ADDRESS THAT REQUIREMENT WITHIN THE PLAN, AND SO AS A CONDITION OF APPROVAL, THE APPLICANT IS REQUIRED TO COMPLY, BUT CERTAINLY, YOU KNOW, AND THEY'VE ALSO BEEN MADE AWARE OF THAT REQUIREMENT, AND SO THE HOPE IS THAT IT WILL BE

Right. I understand, you know, sometimes depending on the tenant, you know, there may be some privacy concerns. I'm not actually sure who current tenant is, but if it's a legal firm, I can understand how they need to have, you know, secure documents, private, whichever it may be. So, you know, I'm curious whether staff is able to work with the applicant to, you know, find some mitigating feature that would satisfy both parties in this case, because in case, I don't know what it may be. But yeah, just asking.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's a fair point. And we're happy to work with the applicant. And if they have any concerns, we can work through those.

Great. And my last question is about when this building was first entitled in the 90s, it had three trees on the main street frontage within the sidewalk. And then due to the age of the trees, they have been removed since. And I'm wondering if this is a time that, as part of this upgrade, it could be something that we can bring back green scape improvements along that frontage on this particular property. I don't know if there was a maintenance agreement at the time. This is early 90s, so it's 30 years ago. I don't know who keeps documents that long or whether this is something that we can implement because certainly the public would enjoy having some shade on that side because currently it's quite bare.

Yeah, so I think it's a valid point on kind of what the old plans or documents say. And doing a search, I'm happy to look into it further. But of course, with the applicant here, we can share kind of what our vision and our goals are and see if they're open for it to be considered.

Thank you, yeah. I mean, as a person who walks that particular section, I think it would be much appreciated by the public, and perhaps it could be a mitigating feature for the lack of visibility inside the building itself.

Yeah. Would you like to hear a response from the applicant? Yeah.

Yeah? If there is one, that's great.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I'm so sorry. I jumped the gun.

My fault. Apologies.

Okay. Yeah, it'll be a quick presentation.

I can save my questions until then. You can just address them in the presentation. Sure. No problem.

Any other commissioners have clarifying questions?

Oh.

No? Then I believe we're ready for our applicant presentation. Welcome.

Thank you. So good evening, commissioners and all the public. Thank you for your time this evening and for the thoughtful guidance that you've already given to this application. My name is Brittany Liang. I'm here on behalf of DivCo West, the new owner of 1991 Broadway, along with our talented designers from Studio G Architects. And we may have site landscape on Zoom as well. And we appreciate the opportunity here to share how we believe 1991 Broadway can again be a meaningful and active contributor to this evolving area of downtown. So as Evelyn mentioned, we're grateful to be here before you at the commission with unanimous recommendation and actually a thoughtful comment from the city's historic resources advisory committee. 1991 Broadway has now been part of the city for nearly three decades. It's a solid, well-built office building, but if you've walked past it recently, you know it doesn't currently quite invite you in, and in many ways it essentially does the opposite. And the facade hasn't been given the love and attention we believe it deserves in quite some time. So to that end, we have an immediate goal for us to make the building more appealing and timeless.

If we could go to the next slide.

To refresh and elevate the exterior so that it contributes positively to the streetscape, rather than fading into the background. For us and our designers, this means appropriate new facade colors, sensitive new lighting, new awnings, new landscape and hardscape improvements along Broadway and Walnut, and leading into a reimagined tenant courtyard. To be clear, this isn't about erasing what's already here, but it's about lifting it up. So related at our recent historic resources hearing, Vice Chair Babbitt remarked on the transition of our proposed facade color and the adjacent building along Main Street, which was helpful feedback. We've taken that to heart and the transition here now that we're proposing is more subtle. So very appreciative of Vice Chair Babbitt's comment.

We can go to the next slide.

And this was also in Evelyn's presentation. We've incorporated feedback from planning staff as well to further activate the corner of Broadway and Main Street. Our design team took inspiration from the 1900 Broadway development and their proposed plaza to further beautify and activate this corner of downtown Redwood City. And also important is the critical reimagining of the true front door of 1991 Broadway. For the last too many years, the unfortunate functional lobby has been the literal back of the building off of Walnut Street. We have a little... arrow that points you to the entrance. While the public facing Broadway entry condition has been a dark and unhappy open breezeway guarded by tall iron fencing.

We can go to the next one.

So we believe this building and its important corner deserve better. So as described in the staff report, and with your support, hopefully, we'll replace the existing Arch Stucco Breezeway in its entirety with a new, warm, welcoming, connected, and well-lit enclosed lobby, which reaches out to Broadway and announces itself as the building's true front entrance with an architecturally appropriate new canopy. In short, we're hoping to create a new and obvious front door for public and tenant benefit in a building that hasn't had one for decades. Taken together, we see these improvements are meaningful on behalf of a building that already belongs to Redwood City, but which will be a much better neighbor, more attractive, more transparent, more active, and more generous to the people that will enjoy it every day. And to answer some of the questions, we do, as part of our scope, are planning to remove the existing blinds, all on the first floor entirely. We are planning to replace them with kind of a manual MECO shade that will have an openness to it, just because we do have tenants there, so we would like for them to be able to protect from solar heat gain and glare and things like that, but that is part of our proposed scope. We did look at Main Street. There are some smaller planters currently along Main Street, and we can work with staff on kind of plan for moving forward and what we can do within our property line as well and I know there was a question on timing for our project so hoping with your support we would ideally like to submit for the city building review later this month and then get started with construction January of 2027 circles and yes any other questions

Commissioner Hunter.

Yeah, I have one that I just noticed during the presentation. In the staff report, figures four and five, I don't know if we can bring those up, It's the Broadway frontage, and figure four is the existing, and it has a couple large street trees, and then figure five doesn't show any trees there. Is that just an error in the drawing, or are you actually removing the existing?

We are not removing any of the existing trees as part of our project. We do know the development across the street may have some implications of the street trees, but as part of our project, we aren't touching the street trees. It was more so we could see the facade, which is why the trees were left off in the rendering.

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions? I have a comment.

Okay.

Oh, should I just go?

Okay. I'm just curious, so I know you said the goal is for construction to begin in January 2027. When would it all be finalized, or what's the goal?

For construction completion? Yeah. Hopefully May, June 2027. The same year? Yes.

Oh.

Thank you. Commissioner Sirgonarets.

Thank you. I want to thank the applicant for the presentation and also the thoughtful updating of this particular building. I do think it will be an improvement and also about complying with the visibility into the main floor. I think having it a little bit more active than currently certainly would help and appreciate your efforts to work with staff to address those issues. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other clarifying comments or questions? I just have one, just a couple of brief comments. Thank you for being here. And I think this is going to be a great project. I live not quite across the street, but almost on Main Street. Sort of to piggyback what Commissioner Savonaritz said, I think it might be really nice to see if the possibility exists to add a couple of new planters on Main Street. Having new lighting would be fantastic because it does get very dark. That's a really dark corner after dark. And probably my biggest question is I know that the city has its guidelines, but just to hear from you, what construction mitigation things are you planning on doing? So hopefully it wouldn't have a negative effect on the restaurants on the street or the residents that use that as a path every day.

So kind of our largest scope for the exterior will be the painting. So we are planning to erect scaffolding for the painting portion of it. The general contractors that we will be using is also slated to do the development across the street. So they're going to be actively kind of monitoring dust on both projects and kind of throughout this whole corner. We do, our ground floor is active with three tenants, so we are already going to be doing a lot of protection and containment throughout the process through demolition and construction. And yeah, that's kind of our plan.

That's great. Good to hear. Thank you so much. I will now open the public hearing in order to see, do we have any guest speakers? I see no speakers. Ms. Exline, do we have any speakers via Zoom? No, there are no hands raised. Thank you. If there's no objection, I will close the public hearing and open for committee discussion. by Stuart Finch.

Yes, I just wanted to thank staff and the applicant for, well, staff for pushing for and the applicant for implementing the seating on Main Street, or Broadway, sorry. I think that'll be great and really help with the space currently is a bit of a vacuum, especially like after hours. So I think that that's really great. I also, I didn't know that the entrance wasn't there. I thought that was the entrance. So I think moving the entrance to the front would also be great for kind of just getting more foot traffic on that corner, you know, as people are coming and going from the building. So that's, yeah, really great to hear that the new entrance looks much better than the gates. So that's great. So yeah, thank you very much for doing that. And yeah, I'm in favor of the staff recommendation because we have that positive referral from the HRAC and I think it looks good.

Any other clarifying questions or comments from Commissioner Shikotovitz?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't want to repeat myself. I think it's a wonderful update. Looking actually at the Broadway site, I saw 1991. I thought that was the year it was built. Turns out it's the address. So I'm not actually sure when this was built, but it does form a very visible address, and I know that with a new pedestrian-friendly and clear entryway there, we will be losing that number. So I'm just encouraging the applicant to have visibility so that people know which building this is. Not necessarily to engrave the facade or the big column right next to it, but in some ways so that the public knows that this is the address. I'm not sure if there's plans for signage for that. But thanks again.

No other comments? Questions? Okay. Would someone like to make a motion to adopt the resolution approving the project at 1991 Broadway?

I would like to make a motion to adopt this resolution approving the project at 1991 Broadway.

Second.

Commissioner Abruzzo-Cruz?

Yes.

Commissioner Cornejo? Yes. Commissioner Cernogoretz?

Yes.

Commissioner Hunter?

Yes.

Commissioner Robinson?

Yes.

Vice Chair Finch? Yes. And Chair Koch? Yes. The motion passes seven to zero.

Thank you again. Moving along to item 6B on our agenda. A request for recommending the city council on zoning code amendments that establish article 60 objective design standards for residential and mixed use developments with additional amendments to section 3.3 zoning maps. Section 30.18 improvements on parking and loading facilities and article 32 affecting all developments. And Mr. Schwab is going to give us a presentation for the city.

Good evening, Chair Koch, members of the Commission, Jeff Schwab, Community Development Director. Pleased to be before you tonight after our study session in June and with a recommendation from the Architectural Advisory Committee to move forward. Next slide. Quick overview of the presentation. We'll go over a few questions for you to consider, review the ordinance revisions that have been made since the June study session, talk about some additional recommendations made by the Architectural Advisory Committee, and conclude with staff recommendation. Next slide. So here are the two questions that you should consider as you're thinking about this ordinance. Does the ordinance adequately address the goals and policies and programs of the general plan? And do the proposed ordinance revisions capture the recommendations from the joint session held on June 2nd? Next slide. Quick overview of the ordinance. As Chair Koch noted, there are three articles that are being modified or added. Article 3.3 is really a cleanup. Old Article 60, which we're replacing with the objective standards, really had a few paragraphs of language about zoning maps, which should have really been in Article 3.3, so we've just moved them all together. So that's just cleanup. And then we'll talk about the amendments to the parking and the supplementary provisions which affect all development, not just residential and mixed use. And then Article 60 focuses on residential and mixed use projects.

Next slide.

As I mentioned, the zoning maps, boundary maps, is just a consolidation and cleanup of some existing text. The parking standards were moved from the objective standards because they really do apply to all types of development, not just residential and mixed use. And they address two new things since the study session, one of them being how to deal with design of parking garages that may be at the ground level in the floodplain. you didn't get to see, 705 Veterans because it was a streamlined ministerial review. But Veterans Boulevard is an example of an area that as it develops and redevelops, ground floor uses will not be allowed because they're in the floodplain. So all of the habitable spaces will be elevated. So this particular section will address design for garages that will be along the street frontages. So the idea is to do some nice landscaping, potentially some artwork, some other architectural treatments to help make that a little bit more pedestrian friendly for folks walking. And then as the commission suggested at the study session, we've also added parking garage exiting standards to help the sight lines so that pedestrians feel a bit safer and can see oncoming cars and cars can see oncoming pedestrians. Moving to the supplementary provisions that are Article 32, we had lighting standards in the original draft, but we moved them to this section because they do apply, again, to all development. We, based on comments, lowered the color temperatures of the lights so that they're warmer. And we specified, instead of minimum, we specified maximum temperatures so that it doesn't get too bright. The gateway standards, again, apply to all development and they were just moved, no changes. And then we had a number of comments on bird-friendly design. and initially thought that that might be something that needed to come back. But they suggested we take a look at Cal Green standards, and we did. And we generally incorporated those new standards based on Cal Green as a new section. And this would affect development that is on, I think of it as the Bay side of 101. Next slide. So then within the Objective Design Standards Ordinance, the new Article 60 that affects residential and mixed-use projects only, one of the comments we had from the Architectural Advisory Committee is some of the graphics were a bit traditional in nature, so we gave some examples of some more contemporary designs. The architectural advisory committee also recommended we delete the two acre minimum block size and say that blocks just generally need to be broken up, so we did that. The commission suggested that we incorporate minimum tree size, spacing, and tree well standards, so those have been included. On the open space standards, we had comments about the fact that the 1% threshold was probably too high. We also had comments about that if you had, I think it was based on 20 units in each increment Not each increment of 20, but each, you know, if you just went over at 21 or 22, you'd trigger two amenities, and that might be too much on a project that was just slightly over threshold. So those standards were removed, and we basically said one amenity for each 20 units. So you'd have to have 40 units to have the second amenity. And we did similar work on the common facilities within multifamily developments, talked about that this was a list of options that you could use. In the outdoor spaces, we said that community development director, I could make some flexible decisions on combining some of the amenities or switching it up as long as they generally fell in alignment. And then we did retain that there were comments that we should potentially remove the personal storage standard from multifamily development, and we did not do that. Staff did not recommend that we continue to do that. But we are noting that any project that meets our affordable housing requirements would qualify for a density bonus, and then they could exercise waivers. So they could either reduce or eliminate this standard. if they meet our affordable housing requirements. And we did also broaden it so that the storage could be, instead of a closet off of a balcony, if there was no balcony, it could be in the garage or some other part of the building. And then finally, the noise and vibration standards were sort of intermixed and we just separated them so that it was clear which ones were the noise and which ones were the vibration. Next slide. Within the standards for smaller projects, the four or fewer projects, we heard a lot of comments, probably most of the comments came in this section. There were too many standards or that they were apparently a little bit more strict than for the multifamily. In part, I think I noted last time, these were based on the residential design guide, which is the tool that we kind of use now, but it isn't adopted, it's sort of a guide. And I think it's important to note that for these smaller projects, they need a little bit clearer direction. When you're dealing with a larger multifamily project, you're usually dealing with a whole fleet of professionals, engineers and architects and such. When you're dealing with the smaller projects, you need to be a bit more descriptive in what you want so that they understand. So they are a little bit more detailed. One of the, I think, Commissioner questions was, you know, we said that the lower density zoning rules could apply, and this clarifies that it's at the applicant's choice. It isn't, you know, something that staff will say you need to use this or this. The applicant can choose to follow the higher density standard or the lower density standard if they're developing at a lower density. We did delete a number of standards to simplify it. For example, the window by the front door, there was a lot of talk about whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. So we'll let that be the applicant's choice. We deleted the corner building element on small projects. We also clarified the two material requirement, a primary and a secondary. We also turned many of these standards into guidelines like the roof pitch, the materials and spacing and separation requirements. They're now guidelines and suggestions. We allowed for horizontal window proportions. hopper windows on and windows and even generally horizontal windows and we adjusted and clarified a few other standards and then finally in this section there were townhome standards that were repeated in the multifamily thing and it said if you had three or more townhomes you had to go to that section so we just moved them all into one section and just put the reference here next slide The Architectural Advisory Committee held their hearing about a month ago, I think in August, and they reviewed this and they made a few additional recommendations which have been incorporated. All the guidelines now show an italicized text so that they're clearly identified as guidelines. They did add some windowsill guidelines. And some of those were standards that were made into guidelines. They amended the window proportion standard to allow the horizontal windows and make the post separation of the windows or grouped windows a guideline. They clarified that building corner towers really shouldn't happen in small multi-family projects of five units or six units. So we just pick 10 units or more before you incorporate a tower as an option. It is one of multiple options that an architect or developer could choose. And again, we eliminated the transparent window by the entry door. I did it in the one section, but I didn't do it in the other, so they caught me. So that was a good catch. And then also clarified that the siting materials were primary and secondary. Next slide. And that was the sum of the changes. So we're recommending tonight that you hold the public hearing and you provide a recommendation on the proposed objective design standards ordinance to the city council. Happy to answer any clarifying questions.

Thank you, Mr. Schwab. Any commissioners have clarifying questions? Commissioner Hunter.

Okay, thank you. And thanks for the presentation and all the work again. I have one clarifying question as a carryover from the meeting in June. And it has to do with missing middle housing. And I'm referring to my Bible of missing middle housing here. And two of the favored types of missing middle housing is housing that's built around interior courtyards. One is cottage courts where there are small bungalows that are oriented around a small shared court. And then there's also courtyard buildings, which would be a medium-sized building also oriented around a courtyard. And I'm wondering if these standards, the facade standards might, preclude some of these courtyard designs. So in both 60.4 and 60.5, so basically that covers all housing, it requires a principal building to occupy at least 50% of the available street frontage. And I'm wondering if that might conflict with a project that wants to use a courtyard concept.

I don't think so because I'm thinking of courtyards where they're usually shared with, sometimes it's a common driveway that goes to garages that is the courtyard and it has multiple purposes, vehicle parking and playing and things like that. So I think you would have building on either side and that probably could equal the 50%. In the worst case situation, if it wasn't working out, there's always the discretionary path if they want to go there. We don't typically see a lot of projects go with this style. And in larger projects, I think you're going to see the parking probably enter one side of the building, go under or around or the back, and then the frontage will probably be intact, even though there may be a courtyard in the center. So I don't think it would preclude it.

Okay. I may come back to this in my comments later because this is more for clarifying questions here. But I do hear your answer that you don't think it would, in most cases anyway.

I think it largely could work because I don't think the driveway doesn't have to be that wide, probably two car passing. So it could be 20 feet. And so most of the lots would allow for building on either side of that 20 feet. So I think you could easily come to 50% of the lot width.

Thank you.

Commissioner Segonowitz.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I do have following on questions about parking and pedestrian access. I forget whether surface parking lots are strictly forbidden or they're either covered in garages or for multi-story building is also either underground or overground garages. Can one build a surface parking lot, I guess?

Yeah, it requires the parking be off of, if it's a corner lot off the side street, not the primary street, it needs to be behind the building to the degree that's possible. But at some point, there probably will be some access to the street, right?

Right.

And so there are also some standards about separating parking areas from the street, some minimum landscaping requirements that have been enhanced, if you will, so that we can screen it, if you will.

Mm-hmm. Great. I did see that one of them, there was a change in terms of this, I guess, parking barrier that prevents a car from intruding onto the sidewalk, for example, if it's parked off public right away. And I guess it was eliminated. Engineering is required for approval for that. Is there a reason, just curious, why engineering was taken out versus having it just in the plans?

It can't be discretionary. It has to be objective. So that was why it was taken out.

And the next follow up is that, you know, for some of these buildings we've seen on like really long lots, there is a driveway that goes into multiple garages. And then when pedestrians have to access that, you know, they can either use the same driveway. I just want to make sure that there's some guidelines or standards that separate the modes for access. You drive a car in one way, and I guess you enter the buildings from different ways. I know we've approved some multi-townhouses like that, that the pedestrians will go on one side of the lot and get into their front doors, and then the cars will go on the other side so they don't have to conflict with each other. Is that part of a standard now, or is that...

I think it's a best practice. Usually you want to separate the modes of transportation to the degree you can. I think you can do that in a couple of ways. The one that you described where you put one to the side of the other or you designate the pavement differently if they are the same. I've seen in some really smaller projects where they'll use asphalt for the driveway and a paver material for the pedestrian way so that it distinguishes. But they actually may be in the same plane to allow for fire access because of the height of the building.

Right, right, got it. Okay, I just wanted to make sure that this is maybe, I don't know if it's a guideline or a standard of whether we'd be allowed to implement these types of things. If we have, for example, share the same space, that can be a couple of inches apart or require, you know, stamped concrete or some way to designate that this is a pedestrian path. And I just want to point staff to the PROWAG guidelines. I think it's a, there's a national, standard or at least guidelines that are called pro-wagon and addresses a specific issue. And the second question I have is just a clarifying question about where does the floodplain conditions end? You mentioned that we changed the garage standards. How far does the floodplain come? Does it come to 101 or El Camino?

I should have brought the map. I didn't, but I think generally Veterans Boulevard is the extent it does include like the Convention Way area, Price. So it's mostly on the Veterans to 101 side. There may be a few areas like along Redwood Creek where it would creep in further. Got it. Thank you so much.

Commissioner Cornejo.

Yeah. Thank you. It looks like you've really incorporated a lot of the input that we've shared through the process. I'm just a little bit unclear on the storage part. Were you saying that the storage is not going to be on the balcony and it could be moved? I'm not sure if we can go through that part in a in a simpler way for me.

Sure. Yeah. So the standard basically said you need to provide 80 square feet of storage per unit. The typical way that it's done if there are balconies is they put a closet off the balcony. That's one way. But it could also be if you have a parking garage under the building, you could potentially create a room or closet with multiple closets within the closet, so to speak, so everybody has their own personal space. Or you might create some kind of a general storage for people's boxes and things that aren't of value that they can just generally store. So there's a lot of different ways you could do it. They could also do it within the unit, but that's more expensive space typically because it's conditioned. It's insulated and it's heated and cooled versus a closet that's off a balcony that's probably just ventilated.

Got it. Yeah. And the reason I asked is just because, I mean, with housing, then we end up with our balconies full of like clutter and we're not really sure like in apartments. I know in my apartment complex, there's some people have some small storages, but we don't really, um, that's something that we lack. with adding more housing, I think.

Yeah. I mean, there is a little bit of a tug of war here. I mean, housing is important, and you don't want to make it too expensive. But on the other hand, if you don't provide it, you see it sometimes. And so what we're trying to do with these standards is to encourage it. And, you know, understanding that there are ways around it, you know, if somebody really doesn't want to do it. And we do see that on a lot of affordable projects. They will say, we can't afford to do this. We really want to do the housing above everything else. And we're going to waive out of that standard. And they can.

Got it. Okay. Thank you.

Just a couple of clarifying questions. A small one. I noticed that on page 11, there's a modification to Article 32.9 that is proposed that modifies the standard to 125 square feet per unit of open space as the requirement. But later, 63.B actually links to Article 32.9, but it links back to the municipal code, which has the old version. So I just want to very briefly clarify. When reading references to Article 32.9 in this reference, irregardless of the link, it's referencing the modified, updated version in the document, correct? Or is it actually linking back to the municipal code?

We will make sure that it matches the standard that you've adopted. But yeah, I understand what you're saying. I think the... The code that was recently adopted hasn't necessarily been put online yet. And we did try to take precautions. Eleanor caught one that I missed. I almost overwrote one section and we had to move the bird-friendly design somewhere else. But we will check that to make sure that it's consistent throughout.

Makes sense. My assumption was that it was in a document. I just wanted to be double sure. The other question I had was in regards to the discretionary process for projects that MOSTLY MEET THE OBJECTIVE DESIGN STANDARDS, BUT THEY MAY DEVIATE ON ONLY ONE SMALL STANDARD. SO MAYBE THEY HAVE ONE FEWER AMENITY THAN IS STRICTLY REQUIRED, BUT THEY MEET EVERY OTHER STANDARD. THAT PROJECT WOULD NOT QUALIFY FOR MINISTERIAL REVIEW UNDER OBJECTIVE DESIGN STANDARDS AND WOULD HAVE TO COME UP FOR DISCRETIONARY REVIEW. IN THAT PROCESS, WOULD THE ENTIRETY OF THE DEVELOPMENT ESSENTIALLY BE UP FOR DISCRETIONARY REVIEW OR ONLY THE PORTION THAT IS NOT IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE OBJECTIVE DESIGN STANDARDS?

That's a good question. I think you need to comply in order to achieve ministerial approval. So it would kick it into discretionary review. And then the second part of the question is, would it open up all of the things? I think the focus would be in the staff report on, well, if I'm not doing this particular thing, how can I make it and meet the spirit and intent of it in some other way? So let's say maybe instead of a second amenity, because they can't meet that, that they would do an enhanced first amenity, something of that nature. Or they would provide something in lieu, maybe more common space inside the building for the tenants. Gotcha.

Makes sense. The reason why I ask is I just want to understand the incentive structure for a developer in terms of if they're not able to meet one portion, is there still incentive to meet the rest of the document, or is it kind of an all-or-nothing deal where you either meet all of it, and then you can go through a review, or you meet most of it, but you don't get any of the benefits, and so it's kind of like, well, what does the incentive structure look like? Thank you. That's my questions.

vice-chair Finch.

If an affordable housing project does come through and uses a waiver on some of these standards, are they still able to use the ministerial review process? Yes. Okay, thank you.

That would be the other way to do it. If they're an affordable project that meets our affordable housing requirements, not even totally affordable, they both could use waivers.

Okay, great, thanks.

Any other questions? No? Okay. Well, thank you, Mr. Schwab. We appreciate your presentation. I will now open the public hearing. If you are logged in on Zoom and want to participate virtually, please raise your hand at this time. If you are here in person, your name will be called. I will call in person speakers first, and the staff liaison will call on Zoom speakers. So we do have one speaker this evening, Lexi Mendoza. Welcome.

I'm too short. Okay. Hi, good evening commissioners. I'm Lexi Mendoza. I'm the environmental associate with Green Foothills. And I'm here today to express our support for the bird friendly guidelines and the lighting regulations of the objective design standards. Bird collisions with glass and other infrastructure are a significant source of human cause mortality in birds. Studies have found that more than 1 billion birds collide with buildings in North America alone annually. This happens due to windows reflecting surrounding vegetation and sky, which confuses the birds and cause them to try to fly through them. Several cities in the region have already implemented bird safe design in their cities. Some include Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, Cupertino, and most recently in June of 2026, San Mateo County joined that list. This growing list of cities really demonstrates a regional trend towards adopting practical, implementable bird standards that help reduce bird collisions. We also support the current lighting standards set in the objective design standards. Research has found that light pollution negatively impacts both humans and wildlife, disrupting our natural circadian rhythms and which can impact our health. It's important to implement effective standards that decrease exposure to light pollution and reduce potential harmful impacts to our health. We submitted a comment letter along with several of our partners demonstrating our support of these standards, and we ask and urge Planning Commission to recommend the current standards to Redwood City City Council. Thank you for your time to listening to my comment. Thank you.

Ms. Exline, do we have any virtual participants?

Give it just one more second. No, there are no hands raised.

Thank you. So if there's no objection, I will close the public hearing and open for commissioner discussion. Commissioner Sirconovitz.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a few comments, but I think I'll just start with a few. Mr. Schwab, if you can join us on the podium. I realize I did not ask questions. I mean, some of them involve questions, so maybe it's easier this way. First one related to the speaker that we have about the lighting standards. Of course, these are objective standards that we're developing for housing production. Is that right?

That was the original intent, but these will apply, the Burt's friendly design, building design standards would apply to all development.

Great, okay, and then so, question, will it also apply on city-owned streetlights that are close to sensitive habitat, like closer to the meter 101 or the bay?

No, this only affects private development.

Got it. So the lighting standards are either on commercial or industrial.

Yeah, that would be a different municipal code.

Gotcha. Okay. Clear. All right. The other comments I have, and part of the discussion here, is that I really appreciate the staff taking all of our input from the last session. I forget how long ago it was, and really diligently incorporating those changes into the code. And one thing I wanted to just note is that For the landscaping in the parking lots, I think it's section 3018B4C. The tree size requirement is inconsistent between different sections, so the minimum requirement is 24-inch box, but for parking, it says 15-gallon trees, so I'm just curious if we can maintain the same size as a requirement for both, unless there's either technical or other reasons to require a smaller tree in parking lots.

I think you could require the larger size tree. I mean, there's two schools of thought on the size, right? The smaller containers sometimes adapt better and grow faster. But I think between a 15 gallon and a 24 inch box, I think either one would probably adapt pretty well.

Got it. Yeah, I just want to make sure, because in those high traffic areas, especially when larger vehicles are involved, I know the code currently requires a six-inch curb surrounding the tree well to protect the landscaping, but, you know, people go in and out, and just I think consistency would help in this particular case. And then the second part is that I also appreciate in, I guess, Section 335A that, you know, we have addressed the tree grates issue, and I really... I had to actually search some of the alternatives you please proposed in the code and I think they were all wonderful So I want to thank you for that Do we have any other comments Commissioner hunter, okay.

Well, thank you again. And I think my overall comment is is going to be just about the same as it was three months ago, which is very positive reviews of the process here. And I note that the intent of the standards for single family up to fourplex developments is to And I'm just gonna quote from this because I think it's very good. Encouraging high quality housing that respects the established scale and character of neighborhoods while promoting infill development to increase housing opportunities in a vibrant, walkable public realm. And I think these standards do an outstanding job of balancing those two goals. And so congratulations to you and to the staff. And there's probably many ways you could have approached that and achieved that, but I think you've done a masterful job in doing that. So I'm very excited about these standards. I do have the one specific comment, and it goes back to my earlier question, and I'm not gonna recommend putting this in the motion or anything like that, but I would encourage you, maybe before it goes to the council, to evaluate whether the courtyard type of missing middle housing might be affected by this or if there might be a way to put in... And it has to do with the facade frontage. At least 50% of the street-facing facade has to... or at least 50% of the street-facing property has to be the primary building. And if you could evaluate and maybe ensure that these aren't gonna preclude that kind of development, I think that would be appreciated. I understand that there's not many projects in the proposed courtyard buildings or courtyard, you know, cottage, bungalow kind of courtyards, but I think they'd be kind of cool if they were and I certainly wouldn't want to, I would not want to discourage those.

I think we can do a test diagram to show what that, that hopefully show that it's feasible. I do think, you know, ultimately it's going to depend on the lot width too. Right. You know, and, and, and, you know, assuming you're going to do a courtyard, you got to have probably more than a 50 foot wide lot to do it anyway. Right. So, but we'll, we'll do a little testing with that and see what comes out of it. And if it, If it isn't feasible, maybe we could also add some language to the standard saying for, you know, courtyard design, you know, this can be varied or something.

That'd be great. Thank you.

Commissioner Russo-Cruz.

Yeah, actually, I have a follow-up question on Commissioner Hunter's comment about the cottages, cottages at particular arrangement. In case it was, for example, affordable housing that did not require any parking on site, as a waiver for this particular design standard. There are forms that include just a pedestrian pathway that goes into four or five units that are either corridors or casitas. And it's something I think that we have existing on either Arch or Birch Street currently. And I'm curious, would these particular design standards, would they preclude such a construction?

No, if parking's not required, should have no trouble doing the frontage.

Well, it still has to be 50% frontage, you know, facing the street, you know, I don't know.

Yeah, no, I don't think it would.

Great, thank you.

Commissioner Arruza-Cruz.

Thank you.

So I've got a few comments, although I guess piggybacking on the discussion on courtyards, I think the frontage and facade design centers might contribute to some difficulty, but I think more likely the setback requirements would be a big blocker to courtyards because the front and rear and side setbacks would basically force the courtyards to be very boxed in and unfeasible in many instances. So I think I would... be interested to see if there's any modification to the setback requirements for courtyard projects to make them feasible, because I think those would be, for many of those projects, the big impediment, in addition to the facade issues that you mentioned. Okay. I have a few comments. In my defense, I only had three minutes last time. But I did want to say, so on the open space requirements, I am thankful that there has been some updates there. So it's been updated so that now it is a 150 square footage per unit requirement that scales linearly per unit. I think that that is fairly reasonable because it no longer has those sharp discontinuities in required space. I do have concerns about the 150 per unit not scaling for larger developments, which I'll get to in a second. But in general, I think that that linear scaling is an improvement over the previous. Every 50, you suddenly have that big increment in the required open space. But... I was rather surprised to see that the open space amenity requirement was actually more than doubled, where instead of one open space amenity per 50 units, the current draft actually now has one open space amenity per 20 units. So it still has those sharp discontinuities where every 20 you kind of go up one amenity that you have to add, which I think is going to produce a lot of developments that are 19, 39, 59, always kind of trying to be nearest and last threshold. But I also think that for larger developments, the requirement as listed may actually be frankly very infeasible if not borderline impossible and as a kind of Benchmark actually tried to find three recent multifamily developments of reasonable density, like on the higher end of density in Redwood City, Indigo Apartments, Highwater Apartments, and the Marston. And I looked at, based off of what they have online and information available, roughly how many activated open space amenities do they have versus given their unit counts, what is the requirement? And how close or far away would they have been under the objective design standards? And the Delta was... really large. So especially indigo apartments, we'll start with that. At 463 units, it would need 23 separate activated open space amenities. The actual number of amenities seems to be roughly between four and eight, depending on how you count it. So an 18,000 square feet sun deck, outdoor workout space, open air cabana lounge, and courtyard with grills. So it's nowhere close to the 23 requirement. And on the open space requirement, it would have 57,875 square feet total. If we are very, if we give them, it's hard to say exactly how much they currently have, but 18,000 square feet plus a bunch of other open space amenities, we're going to round up to 25,000. So they're halfway there. High water apartment, 350 units, 17 open space amenities, they have one. And the Marston comes closest at 196 units, so nine open space amenities. It gets a bit closer, it has four open space amenities, but still less than halfway there. So I'm a little worried that open space amenities are pretty like they do have an outsized impact on the floor plan and the actual design of the building and as listed it seems to me that past 200 or even possibly 100 units the requirement of having separate open space amenities every 20 units starts to become rather difficult at very high densities so i'm very concerned about that impact on the high end of um larger developments. I'm curious if I'm misreading the requirement right now and it's quite possible that my numbers are a little bit off and these apartments do have more amenities than I'm giving them credit for, but how do we count an amenity? Can you count a very large amenity multiple times depending on how you slice it?

So the way I would see this is that you could have larger and smaller amenity spaces, right? And if they're separate, you know, it's probably going to say, well, that's just a small separate space. But in a larger area, you could have several of the features in an open space amenity within one larger space, right? Mm-hmm. So I think you could have, I'm trying to think of a good example, you might have an outdoor sitting area, but you might also have a fire pit or an adjacent hot tub or a bocce ball or shuffleboard or something like that on the rooftop deck. So there may be ways to incorporate multiple amenities within one space. But what I'm hearing is that in some of the tests that you've done, understanding that precisely would be hard to know if they did it, maybe what we need to do is try to create a little bit more flexibility. And I have to do that with caution, because we have to be objective. We can't say, well, we think this is OK. So I can noodle how to try to do that and see if we can incorporate that, if that's what the rest of the commission wants, in the recommendations. And the other way to measure it is that the open space amenities have to be consistent with the size of the space that's required, right? And then you amenitize it with some of these features, right?

Yeah. I think my concerns are primarily so that the 150 per unit starts to scale poorly at really high unit counts. And I think for that, some either tiered rates where you get, you need to, it's the full rate for the first 50 or so. These numbers are like rough and not necessarily the exact recommendation, but something like first 50 for 150. And then for the next 100, it's a tiered rate. So it becomes half that. And then after that, it's half of that. Or again, the actual exact numbers are kind of, up in the air, but kind of if we use existing developments as our baseline of what seems to be feasible for those higher unit counts. I want to make sure that these objective design centers are usable for even higher unit count developments and they're not just primarily for smaller developments that can leverage them, but anything bigger just becomes infeasible because of things like the open space standard. So either tiered rates or something that's based off of the net habitable floor area as opposed to and that would scale up kind of with the floor area perhaps a bit more um cleanly so those are two possibilities in terms of the directions we could go there. And then as for like, I'm still going back and forth as to whether or not we should have a requirement that specifically calls out the number of amenities, open space amenities in terms of that being how we portion the space versus just saying, this is how we count the space. and then it's kind of up to you flexibility wise how you do it. And the reason why I say that is I think for again at scale, there's many developments that will benefit from a smaller number of larger amenities as opposed to a larger number of smaller amenities. And right now I worry this pushes towards the latter. where you're incentivized to split up your amenities more so you can count them in more different ways to meet the requirement. And again, I think Indigo Apartment is a good example. They have one enormous 18,000 square foot sun deck, and I think that is to many residents' preference versus a bunch of smaller spaces throughout the building. So it's just a question of we should have the requirement, but there should be flexibility in how it's met. Moving on to the other common area facility requirements. So there is a requirement of having one common space amenity also per 20 units, which is on top of the open space amenity requirement, which again, at higher unit counts, I think is going to start scaling a little bit sub optimally. So for Indigo Apartments, There's 23 active and open space amenities that we required. And I'm using Indigo just because it's a large development with lots of units. It will require 23 more common open space requirements on top of that. So 43 total amenities. Indigo does not come close to that number, and I'm not sure it would make sense for them to, because there's literally more amenities that would be required than are listed as possibilities. So they would have to have lots of duplicate amenities. So my concern is twofold. One, feasibility just, it seems for bigger developments, that's a lot of amenities that we start to require. But also, I think that because the list is so limited, At the high end, it could actually end up creating fewer, less varied amenities, because I've seen lots of developments that have really interesting and increasingly common amenities, such as, especially post-COVID, conference rooms, co-working spaces, and offices for tenants. I've also seen game rooms. I've seen movie theaters, none of which would qualify under the listed common space requirements. So by having the strict list, a lot of developments are just going to not... go out of their way to try something different. They're just going to stick to the list. And I think from a scaling perspective, I have the same issue of does Indigo need to take its gym and split it up into lots of tiny gyms throughout the development? Is that preferable to having one larger gym just making the one open space amenity even larger? But I'm also worried that at the more affordable end of the spectrum, and I don't necessarily mean deed restricted affordable here. I just mean not necessarily targeting super high end luxury. Having this strict requirement on so many common space amenities is also sort of implicitly saying in our objective design standards, if you're making a new building, we expect it to be targeting high-end or luxury. We expect it to have lots of amenities, and we don't have the space for... Because all these cost money, right? Those end up being higher rents, and I want to make sure that market rate developments that aren't necessarily tied... targeting the very top of the range also are able to go through objective design standards. I'm not sure there is necessarily a lot of evidence that many of the newer developments are lacking in amenities as well. So I worry that we're trying to solve a problem with these requirements that isn't necessarily all that common. And in doing so, we're creating problems at both the high end and the more affordable end of the spectrum for market rate projects. Okay, I have a few other comments, but I'm gonna just kind of stop there to give other people a chance to speak.

Go ahead.

Vice Chair Finch.

Yeah, I just wanted to kind of responding to that. Yeah, in terms of for, like, larger developments, you know, maybe the tiering thing that he suggested would, it could also kind of help smooth out that, like, you know, where it's creating those harsh, cutoffs at 19 and 39. And so if we're tiering it where first it's 20, then it's 60, and then it's 100 or whatever, you would probably still be incentivized to add more units because it doesn't scale linearly with the amenities. So that could also help with that other problem there. And then, or sorry, did anyone else want to build off of that? Otherwise, okay, yes, go ahead.

Yeah, I just want to comment. I think these are very thoughtful comments from Commissioner Cruz. And generally speaking, I wasn't even clear as to particular additions the amenities would add. I think the open space, square foot space square footage requirements are probably the highest on my priority, personally, speaking in terms of just having, allowing people to have open space, especially if it's clustered in a large area, being a single area that allows for, as Commissioner Cruz said, a lot of different ways you can implement it and different options rather than cannibalizing into tiny little spaces. And I think as a person who lives in a tightly packed multi-story family apartment, the first thing I want to be looking for is open space area I can go out and breathe and I don't know, take rest and sit under a tree. So the amenities part for me, I think I'm much more amenable to changing or reducing the requirement.

Yes, okay, so now I'll go ahead and do my normal comments. I mean, I will say one kind of very radical idea is we could just not have any requirements for open space, and I do think that the market would still incentivize people to have open space, especially in the the higher end buildings and I mean it could be a trade-off that the developer makes where you know maybe the units are cheaper and you utilize city you know public open spaces rather than constructing private ones and the rent is a little bit cheaper or if it's a higher end development they do provide things like gyms and pools and the rent is obviously a little bit higher but anyway I that's that's a little radical so we don't have to do that but um So my other comments, I wanted to say thank you really for adding the garage exit standards. When I first read it, I didn't realize that had been applied to just all developments rather than just the residential and mixed use. So thank you for that, for hearing that feedback. And I do... In terms of the open space and the amenities, I like the piece that was added for the common open space for recreation and leisure, adding the community development director may approve the variations and combinations. So I think that that's great. I would also love to see that applied to the other amenity list, which I believe was the outdoor amenity. YEAH, THE OTHER COMMON AREA FACILITY REQUIREMENTS CURRENTLY DOESN'T HAVE THAT ADDITION, SO I THINK IT'D BE GREAT TO ADD THAT THERE AS WELL TO PROVIDE THE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR WITH A LITTLE BIT OF DISCRETION THERE. AND... Yeah, I am kind of in favor of giving those smaller, like the single family home, those much smaller projects a lot of, or I understand the argument for kind of giving them a little bit more direction in terms of what they should be doing because they don't have those large teams behind them. I'm still pretty in favor of letting homeowners do, for the most part, what they want. But I understand that there had been some concerns from residents, and we had established some standards as a city previously. And so I appreciate that the standards here have kind of been reduced a little bit, and some things have been changed to guidelines rather than standards. So I think that's a good compromise on the smaller development side. So yeah, overall, I think it's a lot of great changes. Thanks.

Do we have any other commissioner comments?

No?

Commissioner Cruz.

Sorry, this will be my last set of comments. But one thing that I did want to also briefly comment on is the standards around facade articulation. So one thing that I did want to comment there is I think that there has been... I think when it comes to facade articulation, oftentimes the problem that we're trying to solve around buildings that don't have sufficient massing and not enough visual interest or visual diversity in the facade, it makes sense to have standards around that. But there has been some more conversation around how facade articulation is kind of If we have it be the only tool in our toolbox, we oftentimes force all developments to essentially adopt a design language that is rooted in complexity instead of simplicity. And we're also trying to solve the problem via facade articulation, which is a pretty expensive way to solve the problem for certain types of developments. Developers oftentimes are concerned about the fact that excess facade articulation requirements can end up adding more spots for water intrusion. It can... change the floor plan pretty significantly in ways that can drive up construction costs. It can make insulating the building more difficult. It, again, locks architects into a design language rooted in complexity. And oftentimes, I don't think it's necessarily always the case that the resulting building is necessarily more aesthetic than it would have been otherwise, because sometimes I've seen some very lovely buildings that incorporate facade articulation and look great. I've also seen lots of buildings where it looks a little bit artificial and like it exists primarily to meet a design standard because, well, oftentimes that is exactly what is going on. And some cities have been starting to adopt standards around ornamentation in addition to facade articulation, where facade articulation is allowed as a way, means of ensuring that there's that visual design language that is not like super samey and doesn't break up the massing, but there's also... the ability to use standards around ornamentation. So specifically, Berkeley had a design standard recently introduced. This was for the Berkeley BART station area ODS. This was introduced by Planning Commissioner Alpha Tu that added an ornamentation standard. I can read the standards for every quote. In lieu of meeting the major or minor break requirements, ornamentation must be provided such that it covers 5% of the area of the building facade. Ornamentation is defined as any exterior articulation such as projections, recesses, columns, banding, fins, decorative... Molding, trim, artistic inlays or reliefs, cornices or sculptures with a minimum depth of 8 inches or decorative tiles or murals. Ornamentation shall not include built-up stucco, trim, or molding. And the reason why I mentioned this ornamentation standard is I think it would be interesting for us to explore alternatives to facade articulation as... other ways of adding that visual interest to our developments that don't necessarily, we don't always need to reach for facade articulation. I think that there's certain buildings that might benefit from a much simpler facade that offer orientation instead of facade articulation. Not always. I think there are instances where facade articulation should be utilized and I certainly don't necessarily think that we should say no facade articulation for buildings even if the frontage is like 400, et cetera, feet. Having, I think, reasonable alternatives could help out. And I will also just use this opportunity to note that oftentimes these buildings feel like they're pretty imposing and large and kind of not structureless, but monotonous in terms of their construction, not because the facade is lacking, but because Our stair requirements oftentimes basically mandate the double-loaded corridor be the only reasonable way of doing it. So I'm just gonna use this as an opportunity to note that I would love to have a study session on single-stair reform, and this is related because breaking up the massing oftentimes is required because of the building structure is so large and imposing because of the double-loaded corridor, but that's not a requirement. That is a form that is oftentimes the only reasonable form that can be reached for. Okay, that wraps my case.

Any other comments or questions?

I'm sorry, I finally did a deep dive on exactly all the open space recreation amenities. And for example, for a pool, it requires three shade trees around the perimeter. What if the pool is on the top floor of a building? Is the requirement there? I do agree with Commissioner Kruse that some of these do tend to be very lux in spirit and I do also share the worry that maybe we are designing for a different market segment that may preclude some other construction from happening.

I could offer some suggestions based on what I've heard and then you can maybe decide what direction you want to take. I think I pretty clearly understand that maybe the metric where we went from percentages to unit count, that may not scale. So maybe as an initial step, we turn them both into guidelines, the interior and exterior amenities, instead of making them rigid standards. That way we could experiment with it a bit and see how it plays out and we can always come back. I've always envisioned that we would adopt these, we would find things that may not work or that may need fine tuning and that gives us the opportunity to test it for a bit and see how it goes without being too rigid. I do think most of these larger residential projects because they will largely meet the affordable housing ordinance requirements could also wave out of these standards. I mean, I think these were intended in one regard as this is kind of what the city would like to see. It was staff's vision initially that what we're seeing is a lot of projects don't have to pay park fees, especially affordable projects, right? And the need for open space is great, but the amount of open space was reduced. And so this was a way to sort of try to balance that out again, but the metrics may not be quite on par. So I'd suggest that maybe you consider recommending that those two elements be guidelines rather than standards. and maybe the unit thing could be tiered a bit more. And I think we could accommodate that, as I think Commissioner Finch suggested, some initial requirement and then further gaps, bigger gaps for larger projects. The ornamentation as an alternative is interesting. I mean, you said that pretty quick, but it does... I'm gonna have to take fast speaking class. I think that could be listed as another alternative, because we say you can do these things, but then pick three or the five or whatever it is. We could put ornamentation in as an additional alternative. Maybe for... buildings that aren't over a certain length, too, or something like that, maybe 400 feet. So I think we try to break up every couple hundred, and then there's a smaller break in between. So I think the larger ones, it's probably appropriate because you're going to get some big, blocky-looking building. It's also, and admittedly, I just want to say, it's very hard to prescribe design by standard. And that's why this is a really tough exercise. And we tried to create a lot of flexibility, but we've come up with some other great ideas. So I would suggest we add ornamentation, similar language to maybe what Berkeley did as an alternative.

I would have to hear you or read what you stated from Berkeley because you did speak that very quickly.

Yes, sorry. I'm happy to list it a little bit more slowly. So this is section 2.2.5 of the North Berkeley BART station area ODS. This is an amendment from Alfred Chu. And I quote, In lieu of meeting the major or minor break requirements, ornamentation must be provided such that it covers 5% of the area of the building facade. Ornamentation is defined as any exterior articulations such as projections, recesses, columns, banding, fins, decorative molding, trim, artistic inlays or reliefs, cornices or sculptures with a minimal... minimum depth of eight inches or decorative tiles or murals. Ornamentation shall not include built up stucco, trim or molding, also known as My handwriting is not the best.

It's the foam stuff. The foam-covered stuff. Whatever that's called.

So that's the ornamentation standard that AlphaTru recommended. I'm not saying we necessarily adopt exactly that language, but it's a good starting point to an ornamentation standard, and I think the idea there is that I think for large developments, like every 400 or so, still having some mass-breaking makes sense, but having an option for you can either do the facade articulation that is more frequent every 100 something, I think it's 120, I forget the exact number, but somewhere in that range, or ornamentation as an alternative I think could allow for a more varied design language and more flexibility on architect's part. And it's a less expensive way of meeting that visible interest.

Mr. Finch.

Yeah, I also missed the ornamentation part, and that is a very specific plan that you found for North Berkeley, Bart. But that is a... Yeah, I think that would be really cool. I mean, I think of the Fox Theater building has a lot of really cool kind of exterior ornamentation, and I think that would be a great alternative. I... So... You'd mentioned that, you know, you had kind of thought that the affordable housing projects, you know, they would kind of end up using waivers anyway. Commissioner Rusacruz mentioned, like, not deed-restricted affordable, but just kind of lower market segment, like not luxury apartments. Like, in that case, would they be able to use the waivers or no?

So any project that meets the city's affordability requirements... qualifies for density bonus and essentially unlimited waivers. So when you're recommending this, keep in mind that this is largely suggestive of what we'd like to see. Developers, for the most part, will be able to not have to meet most of these if they choose not to. I think it would be disingenuous, though, if they come up here and say, I'm not meeting any standards, right? But you still would have a hard time saying no to the project because of the state laws. You essentially would probably have to approve it.

I don't even know if we've had any projects like this that have come in and it's not deed-restricted affordable, but it's just not targeting the luxury segment. Maybe it's just 20 percent cheaper than that. Have we had any projects like that and did they use the density bonus piece or did they just have all the units just priced a little bit lower?

Well, I think, you know, it's hard for us to really know what the developer's market segment's going to be. I mean, you know, sometimes you can maybe just tell by the look and feel of the project, but, you know, they're probably done their research, and they probably figure, I could rent these units for X, right? And, you know, this is my segment, and I think that's where I'm going. So I don't know that we really know, but... I'm just going to say 100 unit project that meets the affordable requirements, maybe some of the units in the project are affordable, then they get the waivers, right? And in theory, those waivers are making the units affordable, right? That's how the law is structured. If it's a project that pays fees, you know, and that's only small projects that can pay fees, they're not able to use the waiver if they pay the fee.

I do have a point about this. I mean, certainly, yeah, you can add a couple of units or whatever the ordinance requires, but I think it penalizes on... unintentionally the missing middle. Like if you only have a 10 unit apartment or four unit complex, having, I forget, one or two, it's like a really big, to make a couple of them affordable, to be able to avoid some of these design standards, it becomes a much tougher sell versus if you have 100, sure, you still have a few affordable housing units in there. So anyway, I do share this concern that perhaps we're pinching the available space, design space on the lower end scale.

And yeah, I guess just to round it out, yeah, I guess I understand and I think that was a good perspective from staff in terms of like, you know, kind of the aspirational, you know, what we want out of the project. I would I think I'd be interested in in turning the amenities into guidelines and then maybe just seeing what projects come up with and like if they're you know suggesting if the projects come in with kind of an amount amenities that we Think is good as a city and then you know, maybe yes circling back and you know six months or a year and then and then maybe maybe we make them standards if we really see that developers are just like well, you know, we're not doing anything or whatever and

Commissioner Robinson.

Yes. Well, thank you. A lot of information to absorb. And I had actually not anticipated these types of guidelines being used for the very large projects, but I appreciate your clarification on the affordable aspect and them being able to waive out. So I was thinking more of these as the... like maybe less than 100 unit projects. But regardless, I actually have strong opinions about the methodology or going for guidelines versus standards on open space and amenities. Our city has lost its bowling alley, its miniature golf, its Malibu Speedway. If you look at the parks, they are exceptionally monetized by the city. But have you seen the turf at the end of the summer? Because they're heavily, heavily used. And if we are anticipating continuing to grow our city's population without new park space, I feel like the new residents need some sort of small amenities. And if the formula needs to be tinkered with or we do come up with some other methodology to come with it, I would still feel better about it being part of the the standard versus a guideline. But I'm happy to hear more from the city on how you would apply a guideline versus a standard.

So typically, on a guideline, we would say, this is what we'd like to see happen. And we would push for it at a staff level to see if we could get it. And then the developer may push back and say, well, in this instance, this is why I can't do it. And then we would explain that as the project came forward, saying, this is why it doesn't meet the intended guideline. and here's what the developer's proposing in lieu or alternatively or why it doesn't work. And I think we could make a little bit more of a point of doing that on the projects that come forward. I don't know if six months is going to be enough. How many projects are we going to get in six months? We might want to look at it maybe in a year or depending on how many projects have come through. In general, that's how a guideline would work. The guideline is also conveying what we'd like to see happen. And then we're going to hear back why, maybe as some of you have articulated, why it may not be feasible or why it doesn't make sense or could I count it this way? So we'll learn a lot about... how the developers would react to that type of a requirement without having to say, well, geez, I can't make the standard, therefore I have to go through discretionary review in order to vary if I didn't qualify for a waiver. So there's a lot of built-in flexibility in this ordinance. The smaller projects can go discretionary. They probably have more flexibility in design than a larger project. And the larger projects are probably going to qualify for waivers. So either way, we're going to find out a lot about what works and what doesn't work in this process. A lot of these standards, not all, and maybe not the ones we talked about here tonight, are hybrids of what other cities have done. They didn't all just come out of thin air, but some of them were influenced by staff, particularly the open space and amenity ones where we thought, geez, we're finding a lot of projects that don't have anything in it. They're just bare bones. And while housing is important and there's a need for it, there's also the other side of it where can I make a buck and can I just get away with not doing it? So try to balance the two.

And did I hear you mention that many applicants are able to waive out of park fees?

Under the city's parks ordinance, lower income units pay zero. Moderate income units pay 50%. Okay. So.

Thank you.

Commissioners to go to rents.

Yeah, I do agree with Commissioner Robertson that 100% we have really lack of available open spaces. Publicly funded, of course, parks in downtown core, especially, but in the rest of the part of the city as well. But I do take a point. I do think that having square footage is great, but prescribing amenities, and I'm going to take a pool as an example. Like, Weber City doesn't have a single public pool at this time. I mean, there are plans to do so, but 80,000 people have no pool to go to. And then if Shifting the burden to a private developer to provide pools so that 100 residents who live there have access to pool is great. They can choose that voluntarily to do so, but to fulfill something that publicly the city should be providing for its residents or would be nice to provide, I feel like shifts a lot of the burden on that segment. They may not decide to use that particular amenity, but it does feel like a little bit of a big ask to provide that.

Yeah, I guess I would also prefer to see those be public amenities, I guess, but in the context of a lot of developments are not paying the park fees, and that's something we can't fix here. I kind of point taken that we want some, and also with the context of a lot of developments, we're not providing any kind of amenities. I also kind of point taken on that. I guess maybe we could do the opposite where, yeah, we could have them stay as standards and then kind of see where projects are coming in and saying like, well, we can't do it because of this. And then we could circle back the other way instead of raising them. We could see about tinkering with them a little bit more in the other direction. That could also make sense.

Commissioner Robinson.

I was just going to say, my thinking is literally small families having birthday parties and having to sign up in a long wait list and not have a park bench at Red Morton or Stafford Park to throw a small birthday party for their kid. So when I'm thinking of rebuilding these new units, it would be nice if they just had a small rec room or kitchen or something just for a small group gathering. Because I actually, my observation was, I was really shocked at the turf conditions. And it's nothing to do with the city staff. It's heavily, heavily used in many of our parks. And it's great. I mean, I'm happy to see people outdoors and the parks are full. It just makes me contemplate, how are we going to accommodate so many more people in the community? I mean, we are a success when it comes to housing and everything happening on Courthouse Square. But I like your idea, Dylan, that Commissioner Finch, that we could look at it either way and evaluate it again in the future and just see what makes the most sense.

Is there a possibility of splitting amenities and open space, making one a guideline and sort of one an option? And the reason I say this is because Years ago, a good friend of mine who lives and works in downtown Oakland was telling me about this new place she moved into. And I said, well, that sounds great. Are you close to a park? And she just looked at me and said, no, poor people don't get trees. That has stuck with me for over 30 years. And I think that's exactly what Commissioner Robinson is sort of alluding to. It's really nice to have a pool, but I think it's really great to be able to have trees, some grass, someplace they could just sit and not have to walk halfway across town or drive somewhere or get on a waiting list and not be able to have anything outside. I don't know if those two are tied together, open space and amenities, or if that might be a consideration.

They're not tied together. They're two different sections in the code. One is the open space amenities and one is the sort of interior building amenities. So you could separate the one being a guideline, one being a standard. I think the underlying requirement for the open space is the square footage. So everybody's going to have to provide that amount. And then the question is, do you want anything in it besides landscaping? And then on the interior stuff, the idea was that if you're having a building of a certain size, it would be nice to have something that you can go to to do, whether it's a rec room or a... a dog washing thing or a bike repair room or something that helps make the place feel like a place, right?

I guess just a small comment, but I would support splitting out the amenities and making those into guidelines and keeping the open space requirement in terms of per, like the square footage as a requirement. I'd still be interested in seeing tiering for those larger developments, but at the same time as we're kind of having a discussion, it's not like most of those larger developments would qualify for density bonus and waive the requirement anyway. But I would be supportive of splitting it out and having the amenities specifically be guidelines instead of requirements and then keeping the requirement for open space.

That's sort of what I was thinking. If that were a possibility, I would very much be in favor of that.

I just want to be clear. The open space requirement isn't changing with this. It is baked into the code already. I want to say it's 125 square feet per unit, but I may be off a few square feet. But that's a requirement regardless. And I think in the last zoning code amendments you made it equal because in the mixed use districts it was one thing and in the other residential districts it was something larger. So now it's all been reduced or equalized at I think this 125 square foot per unit level or whatever the number is. And so that's there no matter what. Then the question really that these standards are getting to is what do you want in it? in that space, the open space. And are we gonna leave that up to the developer and make this a guideline, or are we gonna say, really, we want you to have at least one amenity for 20 units and then some tiering after that? And then potentially recognizing that maybe the current standard is a bit off for large projects. Then we're going to see developers say, hey, that doesn't make sense. And I can waive that because I'm a large project. I'm going to incorporate affordable housing in my project. And therefore, I'm just not going to do it. And then we'll know. Then we'll figure out what the right number should be.

I just want to clarify, like a common driveway is not considered affordable. public open space, right? That's correct.

Okay, so it will be dedicated for- No circulation areas of parking would count. Gotcha, okay, great.

Yeah. I want to look back to Commissioner Kruse's suggestion about ornamentation. I don't know if we need to formally do an amendment or whatever else, but I would like to include that because I do think that there is aging of particular design standards. You can see 5 over 1s with segmentation and different coloring, and you're like, okay, this was built in 2005. And allowing some more artistic things would be done. I know it would cost money, but to do some things that make it unique I think would be very much a step in the right direction. So I don't know if we want to implement that. Do I need to make a motion to, or whatever, recommend this ordinance from going forward towards the commission, towards the council, but also include some of these stated parts?

Yeah, that would be helpful is that if somebody would make the motion to say, you know, adopt the ordinance with these additional recommendations, similar to what the Architectural Advisory Committee did. You know, they came through and said, looks good, but we think you need to do this, this, this, and this. And, you know, they were probably a little simpler than what we've talked about tonight. Yeah.

So... Okay. Well, I don't know if I want to make the motion because I will probably, like, butcher it. So maybe I'll let Commissioner Cruz make the motion. Okay.

Okay, so just to make sure that we're all sort of in agreement as to what the motion is going to be. I'm not making the motion, I am stating what I plan to make as the motion. So I plan to make a motion to recommend to City Council the adoption of the OBJECTIVE DESIGN STANDARDS WITH THE RECOMMENDATION FOR THE ADDITION OF AN ORNAMENTATION STANDARD AS AN ADDITIONAL OPTION ALONGSIDE FACADE ARTICULATION FOR OUR MULTIFAMILY DEVELOPMENTS AND THE CONVERSION OF THE OPEN SPACE AND COMMON SPACE AMENITY REQUIREMENTS INTO GUIDELINES. THIS IS NOT THE MOTION. THIS IS THE PROPOSAL. Okay, then that is the motion that I make. Do I need to state it again? I probably need to state it again.

So just to clarify, your motion is to adopt a resolution consistent with staff's recommendation. Is it not working?

I think you had it on and you turned it off.

Oh, it's on.

Oh, the light is just off.

I'll try to speak louder. Can you folks hear me? Okay, perfect. So it's basically to adopt a resolution consistent with staff's recommended ordinance with the edits that an ornamentation standard will be an alternative to articulation. and that the open space amenities provision will become a guideline instead of a standard.

Is that right? Open space and common space.

Okay, and common space.

Open space and common space? Or open space and amenities?

uh... so it's opens sorry there's there's one requirement is the open space amenities and then we're talking about the other amenities uh... that are listed under a separate section which is the common space amenities the things inside the building versus the things outside the building yeah they're technically separate amendments in the design standards well i said there's a dismay for discussion before we can option could could we may be

specify where these things are in the proposal. I mean, I've got my page open to page 20. I mean, we have all these numbering, but page 22, which is open space standards, and I thought that's what we were talking about. There's open space requirements, number one. I think that's what Commissioner Robinson was mostly talking about. Which is basically that all these developments are subject to what's already in the code. And then number two, B2, which is common open space for recreation and leisure. And this is with a list of eight amenities. That's what I'm looking at, but am I looking at the same thing that other people are?

Can we pull this up somewhere where we can all look at it at the same time? There's a...

It's in this so what commissioner hunters referring to is the red line. Version. Not the not that resolution that that's why the page number does get a total tax. But I just want to make sure we're all working off the same dog. Yeah, so we're we'll see if we can bring it up from the staff report is an attachment.

Right I mean. I think we're talking about Article 60, Section 60.2. Thank you.

60.3. I'm looking at 60.3B. B, that's correct.

And then it's 2, Section 2. Yes. Right.

Or Section 1 and 2.

Yeah. Yes, but I think the conversion from a requirement to just a general guideline would be specifically for 2. Correct. Okay. And then there is a... We also discussed the other amenities that are inside the building. That is a separate section. So Section G? Yes. It's Section G. Section G. On page 29. Okay.

page 29 of the red line version.

Sorry, I think that discussion got a little bit muddy because we talked about both some of the exterior amendments and some of the interior amendments as well.

So both of these as guidelines?

That is the motion I plan to propose, but happy to discuss, happy to, is that a motion that is acceptable to the other commissioners for me to make?

I am not comfortable with it turning into guidelines. First of all, it's all very confusing. And then second of all, for me, it's really important that, especially fresh out of COVID, that we have these open space and other amenities as a requirement because if, not that I want another COVID, but just thinking when we were all stuck in our either our little apartments or houses or whatever. I would want requirements. I would want the, I understand that developers can waive and there's ways around it, but I would feel more comfortable as this being a requirement than a guideline.

Are we having further discussion? May I?

Commissioner Hunter?

Oh no, I'm sorry.

Commissioner Robinson.

Yeah, I mean, I'm up the same position. That's why I've been kind of quiet here tonight, but this was more of a sensitive issue. There are costs to building, but there are costs to building poorly and poorly impacting a city where you pack people in and there's nowhere to go and nothing to do or it's way too expensive. You know, I've been in the area 30 years, and I have seen especially low-income families lose everything. The roller rink, it was so shabby, but it was a great place, you know, for families to throw a kid's birthday party. And I don't know what's left. I mean, I don't have kids. I don't live in an apartment. I walk the dog to the parks and I see what's going on there. So that's why if you hear me passionate about this, that's why. And then, yeah, so that's where I feel strongly about it remaining a standard.

Just kind of Adding onto, it just triggered my thought about when we have a lot of families living in cramped in apartment units, like one bedroom or things of that kind. And then we have the kids playing where the garages are or in parking lots or in just no real outdoor space. So I feel like we're kind of going backwards in not making open space a requirement. So I'm actually a little bit trying to process on how we're moving backwards instead of moving forward in this department or in this space. So that's why I wouldn't be able to support it into a guideline, which I understand what a guideline means. Thank you for explaining that and trying to follow all this, but that's where I'm at.

I do agree with that, and I think even three months ago when this came up, I specifically brought up, because in my neighborhood, kids just play in the driveway, and there's cars moving in and out in the garages, so open space is paramount in this particular case, but the way we're structuring it is like, okay, it will be available for luxury apartments, but then over 30 years, this will become naturally affordable by age, and then you cannot change a building after it's been built, so sure, 30 years down the line, if we make these requirements, it will eventually become affordable for for the larger community, you may start at a higher price point just because it costs more to do this. So I'm okay to do things to make sure at least 30 yards on the line, those kids will be able to have a space to do it.

And this is what I just asked, but you did say that the open space requirement is already permanently in the building code?

It's in the zoning code. So the amount of open space doesn't change with this new standard. It's what goes in the open space. And what we're saying is that the open space should be amenitized and then we came up with a metric of how much. And I think what I've heard is that the metric for how much is maybe the most problematic part. And that's why I think there's been some discussion is could that be a guideline? On the other hand, if you left it as a standard, the larger projects will tell us why they can't do it and the smaller projects will probably have more flexibility to do it because they're just smaller and there's more room on the site typically. but ultimately it's your choice on how you wanna approach this. Again, I think that in, All practicality, you can get out of the requirement through a waiver, you can get out of the requirement through discretionary review, but then that gives you a little bit of teeth if they go that route to say, well, okay, if you're not going to do this, how about doing something else? Almost like what you did on the commercial project before us. You said, hey, we'd like to see some more vegetation or we like this, but can you do this better?

Just really quickly, could we scroll up to section B? I think that's most of what we're talking about. So this is section G there. It's page 22. Yeah. Yeah. So B1 there is the one that, that's just a statement of the conditions. I mean, we have no discretion on that, right? It's just that all developments will comply with the requirements of the city's open space requirements, right?

In the residential districts.

Right, right, right. Yeah, okay. And then two, and it extends into the next page, is I think what we're debating about whether those should be guidelines or standards. Correct. Okay.

So, yeah, maybe perhaps, I do, I like, we do have the addition of the community development director may approve variations, so maybe that could give us enough leeway for, like, lower, non-luxury, You know, you could kind of downsize maybe some of these amenities a little bit, make them work more for like smaller or just like less expensive projects. I'd again be in favor of adding that same language to the Section G. But yeah, perhaps we could just tinker with the unit increment or the tiering there and combine with the flexibility from the Community Development Director. Maybe that would get us kind of close to what we wanted.

I think that makes sense. So the motion would essentially keep the requirements as is, but add a recommendation to have more flexibility on the common space, the non-open space, the common space requirements, potentially. The one in Section G? Section G, yes. Okay.

And would we like to propose specific language for changing the unit amounts, or maybe just say we're in favor of changing it somehow? I guess, yeah, I don't know. What would be? Does it need to be specific and enumerable?

That's what I'm asking.

I mean, I think the metrics that Commissioner Rosa Cruz said indicate that we need to tier a bit. And so I'd say let's try 20. I liked your numbers, 20, 60, maybe 120. are the tiers for incorporating one of these amenities. I think there will be some projects that just do it anyway, and this will be suggestive because the list is there, plus there's the flexibility that I would have then to say, yeah, that looks good for this size of project, or you can mix and match a bit. And I think then we can test it and see if that works. So I'd say if you want to make a recommendation on unit size, start with the 20, then go to 60, and then do 120, and then increments of that thereafter.

Yeah, that seems good. I think that sounds great. So I'm going to, oh, go ahead.

I was going to say, while we're doing this, if we're making one giant motion, can I add in to standardize the size of trees to be planted to be 24-inch blocks in the parking lots as well so it matches all the other sections?

And should we also add the community development director discretion to section G as well as part of the motion or just as feedback?

I think part of the motion. Oh, sorry, part of the motion. So we're going to do the same thresholds again for the 20, 60, and 120 for the interior amenities and the same language for the community development director applied to both section B2 and G of 60.3.

That sounds good to me.

And then in the parking section, just so we're all clear where that is, that's 30.18, that the trees within the parking lot should be the 24-inch box too. And I can find the right number, but I think at least we have the general area and the location in parking lots. And then that leaves us with the ornamentation. Yes. As an alternative to the smaller scale articulation of buildings. Let's see if I can find that.

Is it page 35 in the red line version, Jeff? 35. Section 60.4.

That is the smaller projects and I don't think it occurs in the smaller projects. I think it's in 60.5. Same concept, but 60.5. Subsection 6 is the front and street side facade planes, step backs, balconies, towers, variety of view forms, primary building design. Sorry, I'm trying to find the right number here. Facade offsets, exception 5 on page 45. The facade plane shall not exceed 120 feet. And then you do the articulation. And in lieu of that articulation, you can do ornamentation. So page 45, 60.5C5. Too many sections. And I think it would also repeat potentially in the mixed use section, 60.6. There's something similar there, just to be consistent. 60.6. Maybe it doesn't. 60.6D. Yes, that's it. So we're going to add ornamentation to 60.6 D and 60.5 C5. As an alternative to the articulation, you can use the ornamentation with similar language as to what was found in the North Berkeley specific plan amendment. And you can email that to me, just so I know. I will.

Excuse me, Madam Chair.

Commissioner Robinson, yes.

I appreciate he's going to email it to you, but we have not seen this in writing.

Well, he did read it into the record.

He spoke it very quickly. And can somebody explain to me the difference between ornamentation versus articulation?

So articulation is generally in and out. And so you're breaking up a blank wall of the building by creating an inset or a projection. And so it's saying for every 120 feet, you should have this projection that's at least a minimum size, width, and depth. And what the ornamentation standard does is says in lieu of that, that shifting of the facade planes, you can make it more decorative. You can add the cornice. Well, maybe cornice was exempt, right? You can add a mural, an inset tile work, some other decorative feature to the building to give it variety.

Okay, and if we make this motion and it passes, what are the next steps? Because what we have been presented has been reviewed by our architectural advisory committee and endorsed by them. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay, so then what would the next steps be after that?

Well, the next step typically would be going to council unless you think that you need the architectural advisories committee weigh in on these changes.

So for me, a change from articulation to ornamentation and adoption of that, my position would be it would be. And they're not even here tonight for this type of change. So thank you.

Do we have any more comments, questions, conversation?

Not on my end. I just want to double check that. So you had an extra recommendation for the tree planters? I want to make sure that's included in the...

Yes. As mentioned by Mr. Schwab, I forget which page that was on.

I'm looking for a number now. So the minimum tree size for newly planted trees is 24 inch box and 60.3. A. A5, which is street trees. And now I'm trying to find out where the parking lots are.

Yeah, it's in 3018B4C, which is the parking. Sorry. It's a parking.

It's in the parking. It's in the parking section, yeah.

So it's just for the parking trees. They should just match all the, I mean, everywhere else we ask, we ask for 24-inch boxes. So we should ask the same here.

Okay.

Commissioner Hunter. So this is for Commissioner Robinson. So are you saying that you would not support this if it includes the ornamentation section without HRAC review?

You know, at this time, I have not enough information to make that change. I appreciate you read it, and my preference would be that, yes, absolutely, our colleagues on the Architectural Advisory Committee would weigh in on that type of change because it will be something that we will see when we drive around town on the buildings that are being put up.

I hear what you're saying, and I would recommend that we not do that. We do not make that change either. It seems like a pretty small change that we can come back to later. As you say, a lot of this will be in six months, you'll see what's worked and what hasn't. And that is a very good point about the AAs. If it's important enough... that we want to do this, then the AAC probably should weigh in. So I think I would concur with that and say I would rather not have that particular change.

How does this affect in terms of timeline to be able to pass these objective standards, like if it has to go back to AAC and then go back to us and then go back again to the city council?

It takes several more months. And we probably won't make it before the end of the year. And this is a housing element implementation measure that was called for by the end of the year.

I mean, I understand Commissioner Robinson's concerns here. I think what we're being added is another option. We're not eliminating something. So in my opinion, I think it's an alternative avenue for applicant to meet an objective standard that has been used elsewhere in the state.

Yes, just in terms of staff time, I would not be in favor of sending this back to AAC and then back to us. If we don't want to include it today, I would prefer it be included in an update in a year or whenever this comes back. But yeah, I wouldn't like to increase the turnaround time of this initial version.

And I would trust that the city council will make those changes or send it back if they're unhappy with it as well?

They could, yes.

Yes.

Or they could, you know, the other option is they could direct us to do an additional amendment to follow on, right?

Shall I make the motion?

Sorry, could I just ask through the chair? When do you think that this would come back? When do you think is the next time we would see this?

So if it moves forward, the council will hear this on October 26th. It would take effect in early December. And then I would say we want to test it for a year, so maybe just a little bit more than a year and come back in the following January and see. Or we could, you know, first we could send you a memo to say, hey, there haven't been any projects. It's not time to come back, right? Or we could say we've had five projects and here's how they turned out, right, in regards to this. I suspect, because we do zoning code cleanup, try to do it every year or two, we will find a handful of other things that we think need to be amended or changed, and that would be another time to do it. Okay.

Yeah, I would either be in favor of doing the ornamentation today or waiting for one of those routine, maybe the zoning code cleanup or the next time that we see this. But yeah, I wouldn't be in favor of increasing the cycle of this version now.

Commissioner Cruz?

Oh, I was just going to make the motion, but I've got a comment. I was going to make the motion.

I have one final comment just for myself. I agree with Commissioner Finch. I think a year is a good amount of time for us to try a lot of these things that we'd like to turn and turn them into recommendations. I don't think that we have the time and I don't think it would be sensible to send something back and I absolutely understand what you're saying and I agree with you, which is why I would prefer to see that portion left as it is, and we know City Council will do what they will do with it. So if they feel that they need to send it back or have an amendment, we can trust that they will do that. But I would prefer that we do not include that in our motion.

Might I suggest that one thing you might want to recommend is that the ordinance return for review in, say, a year to a year and a half from its adoption. And that way I think everybody's on notice that we're coming back.

So just to clarify, you recommend not including the ornamentation ordinance in today? Okay, makes sense. So I would like to make a motion to recommend to city council the adoption of the objective design standards with a recommendation for an update, a potential update to the tiering of the open space requirement, but leave, otherwise leave as is. ADD LANGUAGE TO 60.3G, MIRRORING 60.3B, ALLOWING FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR TO DISCRETION TO APPROVE VARIATIONS OR COMBINATIONS OF AMENITIES AND MAKE THE REQUESTED CHANGES TO THE COMMISSIONER INCLUDED FOR THE PLANTERS IN THE PARKING.

A discussion.

Do we have discussion on the motion?

Yeah, I do. I mean, thank you for making the motion. It's great. But I do want to say that, actually, we are wholesale implementing de novo the new objective standards. So now is the time to include anything that we would like to do. Relying on city council to come and provide detailed, policy-driven recommendations about objective standards for buildings and built environment, I think, putting a lot of burden on them to really read 300 pages of standards and come up with something themselves. I mean, I think it's wonderful that they do. I just think now is the time to implement these type of things. And like many of the other parts, we're going to implement them, wait for a year, see how that works, and then change them in response to that. And I think leaving it as is, I think, is a missed opportunity to be able to allow a lot more choices for the developers to change design styles so they don't look like cookie cutter buildings for the last 20 years. So I think this is a good time to do it. and then change and then see how it works and then come back to it in a year rather than not change and then see how it works and come back in a year.

Thank you. Would you like to revise your motion?

Yes, I would like to revise the motion to include the ornamentation alternative as well based off of Commissioner Snigar's comments.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN IN TERMS OF WHAT I'M TRYING TO ADVOCATE FOR? YES. TO INCLUDE THE ORNAMENTATION REQUIREMENTS, ORNAMENTATION OPTION AS WRITTEN IN THE QUOTED TEXT BY COMMISSIONER CRUZ FROM NORTH BERKELEY BART STATION DESIGN STANDARDS. We're putting that into motion as the other amendments to the text of the objective design standards. So there's a section, and we're going to find the section. I forget which part. So we're going to enumerate those two sections.

Through the chair? I think it would be helpful to be very clear about which specific sections we're amending. That way, the mover and then anyone who wants to second understands exactly what the motion is.

So I think we had 60.5. That's what I was going to ask.

Are you able to just read those back to us so we can? Sure, be more clear.

Do you want to see them again, or do you want to just for us to read them? It's 60, I have 60.5 C5 as one section, so that is on page.

Five.

What page?

Bottom of page 45. 45, okay. As an option, right?

So that's the facade offsets, again, as an option. I'll turn it, thank you for bringing it up. And then.

60.6 D. D, yeah. As an option. And that's the bottom of page 57, or the second half of page 57. And actually on page 57, you can see the offsets. I think that helps describe it. So in that long part of the building, there's a small break. And then if the building was the total length, there's the big break. That's the deeper recess. And what we're saying is that we would eliminate the small recess in favor of some other type of building decoration ornamentation.

As an option. As an option, yeah.

They could do this or they could do ornamentation on the longer part of that building.

So to clarify, the current motion is to adopt a resolution recommending the ordinance as presented to you with the following additions. 160.3B2, the increments will be 20, 60, and 120 per amenity. And the same subsection G will have the additional language of the community development director may approve variations and combinations of amenities without the need for further discretionary review. And it'll also have the same increments of 20, 60, 120. In addition to the ornamentation subsections that we just talked about, 60.5C5, 60.6D, section 30.18 will have, this is the part that I want to be clear, everything will move to 24-inch boxes?

That's correct. Yeah, correct. Section 30.18B4C.

Right, okay. So I think that, Commissioner, is that the motion that you have on the floor?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

And I'm so sorry, could you just read the ornamentation text one more time? Sure.

Sure, happily. So the text of the standard is, and this is the Berkeley standard. I think we can edit the standard before it goes up for city council review. But the exact wording is, in lieu of meeting the major or minor break requirements, ornamentation must be provided such that it covers 5% of the area of the building facade. Ornamentation is defined as any exterior articulation such as projections, recesses, columns, banding, fins, decorative molding, trim, artistic inlays or reliefs, cornices, or sculptures with a minimum depth of eight inches or decorative tiles or murals. Ornamentation shall not include built-up stucco trim or molding.

Thank you. And just for clarification, the one word that I caught in there is that minor and major breaks, and I think you're only proposing the minor breaks.

Yes, yes. I've only proposed, that is the tax of the Berkeley standard, but for Redwood City standards, I'm proposing only the minor breaks.

Commissioner Robinson.

So what are we doing with the ornamentation right now that you just mentioned? I couldn't hear everything you said. So this is part of the... Is this part of the recommendation that we're making to the change or we're sending to the council with an option for them to consider?

Oh, no. It's a change. Change in our...

Okay. So you're putting it in the motion to include the change to include ornamentation?

Correct.

Okay. And the UC Berkeley standard?

Only for minor articulation, not major articulation, as we discussed, because it's in that section for minor articulations. For like setbacks, they're like, I forget, one or two feet when the wall just changes the plane by one or two feet, and that's it.

Can you say that again? About the setbacks?

Sorry, it's not a setback. My gosh. Mr. Schwab, if you can help me out.

Could you show the image one more time too, Christina, while we're...

So in this section, section two that's on the slide there in the bottom of page 57, it talks about the facade plane. That's the large flat wall, if you will. And what it's calling for is that you can't have a large flat wall that's more than 60 feet in length without breaking it with a vertical recess or an indent, if you will, or a projection outward that isn't at least four feet wide by 12 inches deep. so you would have a notch in the building essentially and that's what that picture is showing and what I The motion is on the table for discussion is instead of doing that notch, they can do other forms of ornamentation on that building wall to help break it up in a different way through the treatments that were mentioned in there. But if the building is really all that long, the full length of the building there, the major break is still required, the deeper recess that's shown more to the right of that image. Does that help?

Through the chair, I also want to clarify that there hasn't been a second on the motion. So if and when you get to the voting part, that there hasn't been a second to the commissioner's motion. Thank you.

Thank you. I think we just wanted to make sure everyone was clear on what it was we were going to be voting on. Thank you.

And then, Eleanor, just one other thing to clarify was I think Commissioner Rizacruz mentioned the return review in a year to year and a half. If you still want that or not.

Yes.

Understood. Thank you.

Okay, do we want to read it from top to bottom one more time? Please.

So this is about one of the other aspects of it here. And this is just clarifying, I don't know, I think we need to clarify what we mean about the 2061-20. To tell me tell me how that works.

Yeah, so so I think so I think I I talked about tearing and then commissioner Finch recommended that 2061 20 the idea there is that instead of a strict every 20 standard, it's more of a tiered standard that scales.

I think we need to make it more clear them because I don't understand exactly where that where the numbers are so does that mean be what they would be one amenity at 20 units, a second amenity at 60 or at 80.

I think we didn't actually, so I'll actually ask Commissioner Finch in terms of, because for the tiered requirement, is it, did you intend for, I think this one was actually frankly a little.

I mean, this is getting into the weeds. No, no, it's more for going to the weeds. I honestly don't understand what it would mean in practice. Yeah.

I was thinking, yeah, 20 is the first, 60 is the second, 120 is the third. Maybe we actually add one more for a fourth, I don't know, whatever the next number, maybe 240 or something.

Okay, so the 60 and the 120 aren't increments. It's actually, you know, at a total of 20, and then at a total of 60, and then at a total of 120. Yes. Okay, so, you know, however this gets written up, that needs to be clear. Yes.

And to clarify, just to make sure, I think you've mentioned something else is that there are projects that are over 120 units. So you may want to say for each additional 120 units or for 200, you know, whatever the next number is.

Or maybe every additional 60 units because we went from 60 to 120. So then 120 to 180 to 240 units.

Yeah, I think after the 120, it should just be like any further increments of the same amount. Of 60. Yeah.

Okay. So we can say increments of 60 then after the 20. Yeah. So 20 and then increments of 60 after that.

Well, no. 20 and then an increment of 40 that gets you to 60. Yes. And then every increment of 60.

Got it.

Sounds good. I think I already made the first motion, so we just need the second.

I will second the motion on hand.

Further discussion?

Made and seconded, then you call for further discussion. OK. Thank you. I just want to make sure I'm not out of order.

Yes, you can have your discussion now.

Yes, right. Motion on the floor, duly seconded, and then any further discussion. So I will support the motion. I found the process just a little bit frustrating because I believe we did a study section with the Architectural Advisory Committee. And I think when we're making changes like this of certain substance at the last it would be really helpful to have the more advanced notice. I mean, we're all on the same email. And so, and also when we are speaking about changes and we are reading. I'm wearing two hearing aids, so I can hear you, but you're speaking very quickly. So it's helpful for just, you know, I think this is a good example of how we can do better as a committee in the future. But I think we've come to a very good result here. And I appreciate having my concerns being heard about quality of life in the city and unintended consequences. And that's my primary concern with this motion is just having unintended consequences. But I think we've arrived at a very good point and I'll be very supportive of it. So thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Robinson. Commissioner Cornejo.

I just want to say I'm not wearing hearing aids and I have a hard time. It's hard for me too to understand just all the lingo and language that's happening and I think it's in good practice to assume that we are not all understanding what you're saying and to try to like slow down and really communicate with your colleagues in a very simple format just because If we don't understand what's happening, like if people are watching this meeting, unless you're really familiar with the terms, we can't really communicate this to the public. And that's actually one of our biggest downfalls in government is that things are very complex to follow. And then that's why we end up with policies that are not helpful to any of us. So just a heads up going. And thank you so much for your patience. actually explain some of the things was really helpful.

Thank you, Commissioner Cornejo. And I agree completely. It's very difficult sometimes not being a city planner, not being an architect, having some difficulty with some of the construction things. So I think that might just be a good thought for everybody. Just kind of keep that in mind. And if you don't understand, never be afraid to ask a question like you're doing now. Thank you, both of you.

Yeah, I mean, in spirit of discussion, I just do have a question, actually, maybe for the city, our attorney representative here. If we wanted to bring up, you know, some changes on the email, as Commissioner Robinson suggested, I was always under the impression I shouldn't email my commissioners because that was going to be a violation of some kind of a Brown Act. What would be an avenue for us to be able to give advance notice to to each other prior to the meeting as potential changes or what we want to propose on items on the agenda.

So under the Brown Act, the meeting occurs when a majority of the commission discusses, hears, or receives information from one another related to a matter that's coming before them. If there was, in this instance, a particular provision that Commissioner Cruz wanted to share, that's something I think you could consider speaking with staff about so that they could THERE'S A REQUIREMENT THAT WE CAN'T PROVIDE THE FULL COMMISSION WITH MATERIALS ONCE THE 72 HOURS BEFORE THE MEETING PASSES, SO AN OPTION COULD BE TO that a copy of this would be at the dais for everybody so that you could have a copy and could read it if that was something. So there are some options. I would suggest if there's interest or questions like that, that reaching out to the liaison would be a good way to... to think through options because they're very creative and have wonderful options to kind of make sure that everyone has a full way to speak to each other.

Thank you. I just want to note, I appreciate the feedback, and I do apologize if I spoke too quickly. And in the future, I will definitely try to bring some of these items. I can't email other commissioners, but I can email staff ahead of time and at least try to include them in physical materials in the future. So I'll definitely try to do that in the future for more clarity of communication on my part. And apologies if I was not communicating clearly enough.

Do we have any more discussion? Okay.

Commissioner Arusa Cruz.

Yes.

Commissioner Cornejo.

Yes.

Commissioner Sunagoretz.

Yes.

Commissioner Hunter.

Yes.

Commissioner Robinson.

Yes.

Vice Chair Finch.

Yes.

And Chair Koch. Yes, the motion passes 7 to 0.

Thank you, everyone, for that high spirited discussion. I'm glad we got to the end of it. And thank you again, Mr. Schwab. That was incredibly helpful for us. Yes. Appreciate your patience. Thank you. So moving on on the agenda, we come to item number seven, appointments to the Architectural Advisory Committee and Historic Resources Advisory Committee. At the Special Planning Commission meeting of August 18th, 2026, the Planning Commission interviewed applicants for the vacant seats on the Architectural Advisory Committee and Historic Resources Advisory Committee. We also received one applicant's response via email. At this time, the Planning Commission will have a roll call vote to appoint applicants to one full term seat on Architectural Advisory Committee to expire May 30th, 2030, and two vacant seats on Historic Resources Advisory to expire May 31st, 2029. Before we take a vote, I'd like to open the public hearing in order to see if we have any speakers. Ms. Exline, do we have anyone online?

We do have one online.

Okay.

Rona Gundrum.

Good evening, commissioners and staff. I am a member of the Transportation Advisory Committee. However, my comments here are as a 38-year resident of Redwood Shores. I would like to endorse the following candidates for the AAC and HRC. For AAC, Niles Tanaka-Subo. I've worked with Niles for many years when I served on my HOA board, and he was the RSOA Modifications Secretary. Together we worked on HOA community-wide modification projects and homeowner applications. Niles was always very thoughtful and deliberate in his role, balancing the desire of the applicants with the surrounding environment, as well as the HOA and greater Redwood Shores community, using an architect's eye and knowledge to create cohesive outcomes. He's done the same in his current role on the ACC with Redwood City citywide development projects. There are several city development projects in the works and several coming up, including the controversial Redwood Life project in Redwood Shores. The Redwood Life project will require someone who is able to balance developer, community, and city interests. Niles' experience with the other shore projects, knowledge of the conditions of the shores, understanding of the shore's community as a shore's resident, and proven ability to balance developer and community needs, along with his architect's eye, makes Niles an invaluable asset for the AAC. for historic resources committee i strongly endorse glenn babbitt's candidacy i've been at several council meetings where mr babbitt has presented for the hrc and also offered personal public comments on a wide range of projects and topics His knowledge and passion in this area are unparalleled. In my opinion, Mr. Babbitt is a rare gem and an invaluable asset for the city. I'd also like to support Ms. Figueroa's candidacy as she also is shown to be very thoughtful and passionate in her work on the committee. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you, Ms. Gundrum. If there's no objection, I can close the public comment.

Thank you. So staff are recommending that the Planning Commission appoint an applicant to the Architectural Advisory Committee's one full-term seat. Two applicants were interviewed, Laird Benian and Niles Tanaka-Subo. The roll call is to collect votes from the commissioners on the appointment to that committee to determine which candidate will be appointed to the one available full-term seat. When I call the commissioner's name, please let me know your selection for the vacant position. I'll tally the vote and then inform the commission on who is appointed. So Commissioner Russo-Cruz.

Niles Tanaka-Tsubo.

Commissioner Cornejo.

Niles and how do you say his last name?

Tanaka-Tsubo.

Tanaka-Tsubo.

Commissioner Sonagoretz.

Laird Benyon.

Commissioner Hunter.

Niles Tanaka-Subo.

Commissioner Robinson.

Niles Tanaka-Subo.

Chair Finch. Niles Tanaka-Subo. And Chair Koch. Niles Tanaka-Subo. Niles Tanaka-Subo has been appointed to the AAC.

Through the chair, could I say something? Okay, yeah, I just wanted to say I also was really impressed by Léard Binion's application as well, and I hope that he reapplies in the future. Thanks.

So for the HRAC, staffer... Would it be possible to put the names up on our screens? Yes. If not, it's okay.

I think Christina is seeing if she can make that happen. Thank you. Okay, so for HRE staff are recommending that the Planning Commission appoint two applicants to the Historic Resource Advisory Committee's two full-term seats. We have three applicants that were interviewed, Glenn Babbitt, Suema Figueroa, and Carmen Pinto. She submitted the written answers to the questions via email to the commission. So the item is now to collect the votes from the commissioners on the appointments to that committee to determine which candidates will be appointed to the two available full-term seats. When I call the commissioner's name, please let me know your two selections for the vacant positions. I'll tally the vote and then inform the commission on who is appointed. Commissioner Arusa Cruz.

Glenn Babbitt and Suayma Figueroa.

Commissioner Cornejo.

Wait, are we? Oh, two, right? Oh, two. Glenn and Suayma Figueroa.

Commissioner Senegarets.

Glenn Babbitt and Suayma Figueroa.

Commissioner Hunter.

Glen Babbitt and Swyma Figueroa.

Commissioner Robinson.

Glen Babbitt, Swyma, Figueroa.

Vice Chair Finch.

Glen Babbitt and Swyma Figueroa.

Chair Koch. Glen Babbitt and Swyma Figueroa. Glen Babbitt and Swyma Figueroa have been appointed to the HRAC.

Thank you, everyone. And thank you to all who applied and interviewed for the committee. Congratulations to those that have been selected. And the next step is your liaison will be reaching out to you with an update regarding your meeting and your next appointment. Matters of committee interest. Ms. Exline, do we have any matters?

I just wanted to share that we will be canceling the next Planning Commission meeting, and the next meeting will be October 20th. We have a couple items that are potentially scheduled for that day, and then I think we are booked through the rest of the year, so all other commission hearings will happen. Right now they're scheduled through December 1st. So just to kind of give you a quick heads up on the rest of the calendar for the year.

Is there a November 3rd meeting? Is there a what? November 3rd meeting.

THERE IS ONLY ONE MEETING IN NOVEMBER. IT'S SCHEDULED FOR NOVEMBER 17th. THE MEETING IS COMING UP ON OCTOBER 20th, NOVEMBER 17th AND DECEMBER 1st. THAT'S WHAT'S ON THE CALENDAR. THANK YOU.

DO WE HAVE ANY MATTERS OF INTEREST OR ANY COMMISSION UPDATES?

I JUST WANTED TO SAY I'M NOT GOING TO BE HERE ON OCTOBER 20th SO I WILL BE OBSENT.

THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME KNOW. THANK YOU.

If there are no other commission updates, then that concludes the items on tonight's agenda. The next planning commission is scheduled for Tuesday, October 20th, 2026. Meeting adjourned.