City Council - Special Meeting

Thank you. Thank you.

For the work session, the Wilson City Council for July 13th at 1 p.m. Any counselor concerns? Seeing none, we turn to the work session. Frog Pond East and South. West Hills legislative request.

Good afternoon, thanks for having us again. Christy White, Land Use Counsel for the applicant, West Hills. Mimi Dukas, AKS Engineering, also with West Hills. I don't know how you want to proceed today because the Johnson Economic Report, as I understand, was something that you didn't have last session. It was distributed to you. I can just go through our updated memo responding to some of the questions that came up, or we can... talk about the Johnson Economic Memo. We're here at the will of council to get some of those questions on the record, so up to you to how to proceed.

I understand that, I guess, was there something else that I just got?

Oh, that was my fault. That was just an email attachment.

Could you tell me what it is? I was in a meeting with Washington County mayors.

That seems important. So the only thing it is is an email that's referred to in the memo that you already got. And it's an email from Dan Pauly acknowledging how to calculate open space, which is one of the issues that was on the table. and seems to support our argument on how to interpret the code and interpret open space so that you're not losing acres that could either be developed with housing or developed with open space. So I circled the date of the email and just underlined where he reached his conclusion.

Okay, thank you for that clarification. Yeah, you're welcome. And I also want to thank use providing a different, uh, additional information, uh, for council. And I appreciate West Hills continuing to engage with the city and recognize that from your perspective and that, and that's, uh, and I acknowledge it from my, my perspective, development costs and market conditions have changed since frog pond East code was adopted. At the same time, I, I'm thinking it's important to remember why these standards were originally adopted.

Sure.

And the master plan was intended to create complete neighborhoods with a variety of housing choices and not neighborhoods that necessarily were segregated by housing type. So from my perspective, I feel that my vote on council is to kinda make sure that we're recognizing what the, and protecting what the city's original vision was, because it went through a public process. And one of the things that kinda gives me pause is the scope of the request appears to have evolved since you last came. There appears to be, initially I understood there were two primary policy requests. Latest materials now include additional requests regarding open space and ground floor commercial uses. And from my perspective, before opening a legislative process, I want to understand exactly what the scope would be.

Sure.

So I hope that shapes the conversation a little bit. I have some questions that will probably not be directed to you, but to staff that I'll need additional information, but I can wait to the end.

Okay.

Is there any other introductory comments? Oh, if, go ahead.

I just got the button, so Councilor Scholl.

Following that, my question becomes, wanting to understand the process here. When this originally, and I don't remember all of it, I was sitting on the planning commission, I think when these original discussions were had, there was some negotiations between the planning department and your staff, and we went through this top to bottom in a fairly significant level. And what I'm concerned about is they went back and looked at some of that documentation that came from you, and the mayor has just touched on this, this continues to evolve. And I asked this question last time where there is a waiver process in place and that helps this, when you would put these standards and you set these standards and we go through the public process of approving them, the waiver process there is there to kind of allow you to move about within those standards. Now you're coming back and asking us for legislative change which basically would affect everything across the board in general terms. And so the question is, is that, and I think if I understand correctly, it's due to economic conditions and things have mostly, you know, those are the things that have changed over that time. So the question becomes if we were to proceed down this path and possibly approve it, what's to say you don't come back in another two years and you want to do it again? When there's a waiver process in place there to basically work us through those changes. Yeah, good question.

Thank you.

Councilor Cunningham.

Hi, thanks for joining us again today. Couple of questions about kind of this project overall. How many revisions or changes have you submitted in the process of planning this project with the city?

I think Christie and I are looking at each other because that might be a little bit getting into the land use application itself. Are you talking about, Councillor Cunningham, are you talking about prior to the submittal of the land use application?

I'm just talking about overall from the very beginning of the get-go of the conception of this neighborhood, of this project, trying to get to the idea of how many hurdles, like, how difficult this process has been.

And by this process, do you mean the legislative land use process for the master plan and development code? Or do you mean the quasi judicial land use process? Cause I think we need to stay away from that part of it.

Okay.

But West Hills was involved in the legislative land use process when it was going through the master plan and development code.

Okay. I think a number was mentioned last meeting, but I can't remember what it was off the top of my head. Um, I mean, my questions are pretty limited if I can't ask, you know. I'll hold my questions for now.

I want to acknowledge Councillor Cunningham's frustration because the way this is, there are questions I want to ask that I can't ask because of this. And so I give him grace because I would want, there's some things I wouldn't want to explore, but. we have to respect the processes that are in place now.

Well, and I guess, I guess from the legislative standpoint, we're seeing, we're seeing some challenges right now, not only with, you know, some, some requests on this, but we're seeing some challenges in other areas of the city. And, uh, you know, reading through this, these are, these are pretty prescriptive numbers that were created in this code. These numbers seem to tend towards higher density housing, more attached units, less single family homes. And as we look at these issues, there's other issues out there in the city right now, town center being one of those. High density densification, of residential in our city has been a complaint of our citizenry that we are over-densifying what we have. This is highly prescriptive. I would be interested to know how prescriptive this is compared to other cities and how they take on their codes. I don't know if that's something we can get into here. Thank you. Councillor Shetland.

Thank you. In regards to your question about the Johnson Economic Memo, thank you, and I did have a chance to review it. And if we have time today, so we'll need to kind of get into the meat of things, I wouldn't mind. It is compelling, and the market is always changing, of course. But I really appreciated the information in it, and if we have time and we have other councillors that are interested, I wouldn't mind a high-level review just to make sure that we're hitting all the high points on it, because there is some good information in there. Thank you.

City Council President Berry.

Yeah, so I appreciate you taking your time to come. I would be really interested to hear you summarize what you're bringing to the table today. Um, I I'm an urban planner background, and so I really believe in the process that the city has gone through. Um, so you're going to have to be pretty compelling to sway me. Thank you. Fair enough.

So I think you got your guidance from all members of council and, uh, from our perspectives and take it away.

Okay. Thank you so much again, Christie white for West Hills. Um, in terms of just, um, responding to the introductory remarks, the scope of the amendment request, um, certainly has not grown. The issues have not grown from the very beginning of this process. They definitely grew between memo one and memo two. because what we were trying to do is give you a response to the question about what else is a problem? What are the additional costs that you've incurred? And all of these things are interrelated. So for example, if you don't get an SDC credit for a park and you also have to build ground floor commercial where there's no market, these are layered costs that end up making it financially infeasible. So at the injury of what looks like growing the pie. It certainly from a subject matter hasn't grown, but it has definitely grown between memo one and memo two in hopes that we're being very responsive to the question about costs. Yes, there's a waiver process. I know I can't talk about the waiver process, but if that process was working, we wouldn't be here. So that's all I'll say about that. Is this code more prescriptive than other residential development codes that at least I've worked on for the last 30 years and AKS has worked on? I can say definitively yes. This is extreme in terms of how prescriptive it is and how it is prescriptive based on land area, which causes a number of problems. So those were the initial comments. And so I'll just walk through. some of the housing diversity pieces, which is obviously a big and primary piece that we were concerned about. And some of the questions that came out of this were, well, the code was designed to have a number of entry points for the market so that a number of different types of families and folks in Wilsonville and residents could enter this market at a number of different levels, making it more affordable. what does your diversity do for that? And there was a question about, is a townhome more expensive than a single family? And so what I did here is just re-summarize for you what the townhomes versus single family would look like in terms of numbers, and then the Johnson Economic Study, which we can get into more about how it would really tap out at about 10% of the diversity of units and townhomes with detached ADUs. But that all led us to the point on the second page under number four, which is what is the impact of changing from 60% land area to 60% unit type? What are these unit types and what would their purchase prices be? There you see under 4A in Frog Pond East, there would be three different types of single family detached homes. No more than 60% of them would be detached homes. They have three different lot sizes, three different widths, and three different designs. That leads to three different price points. Those estimated price points are 525, 525,000, 575,000, and for the largest home on the largest lot, 650,000. You would also have the three different kinds of attached townhomes, different lot sizes, square footages, some with ADUs, some without ADUs. Those price points are 475,000, 550,000, and 600,000. So the range of entry points would be 475 estimated at the lowest for the smallest townhome, 650 at the highest for the largest single family detached home. We then went and looked at how that compares And I have to say, I'm not sure Zillow and Redfin are the ultimate data points. I'm not sure. That doesn't seem like it when I look at my house on it. But they have a number of statistics where you can compute the current average home value in Wilsonville. So we looked at Zillow and Redfin and a couple of other sources. and they all came in around 640,000 is what they stated as a data point. I just used that as a comparison to say, well, if the current average home price or value in Wilsonville is 640, how do these attached townhomes and single-family measure up against that and they measure up pretty nicely most of the units are under the current average home value as cited by redfin and zillow so we think with that data and the johnson economic report if you regulated housing diversity by unit type and not by land area you would it would not be to the injury of affordability you would still have multiple entry points and most all below the average home value and that would lead as as mayor o'neill mentioned in your introductory comments you know it we our goal was diversity that we were gonna we weren't gonna have kind of a common looking neighborhood right We believe that you can still deliver diversity if you do it by unit type instead of land area because of these opportunities. The other thing that I think has happened between the date that you adopted this code and now is we've had significant changes in state law. And now there's prohibitions in state law against regulating on the basis of residential design standards. So there's all kinds of things that you can't do now, absolutely prohibited. That was Senate Bill 974, I think. One of which is regulating diversity of floor plan. So that is another change that was pretty significant between 2022 and now. And then in terms of overall numbers, if we regulated by actual unit count, that one acre net acre example would yield 26 total units, 16 would be three different types of single family, and nine would be the attached units, and all would be at 600. different market entry points. So hopefully that answered the question on whether this supports or impacts affordability. Costs, you also asked about the costs and whether they've changed since 2022. What we say here is it's hard for us to know whether the, the costs that the city was considering in 2022 for infrastructure have changed much. I can tell you that since 2022, most of my clients use the Mortenson report to look at increases in construction costs. And since 2022 to present across Oregon, it will vary by jurisdiction. I'm sure about across Oregon construction costs have risen between 25 and 35%. So there's certainly been a significant change in that since 2022. Here were the numbers for the neighborhood park, the Stafford Brisbane roundabout and the 60th and advanced roundabout. We use these because we had them to compare to. And what you see there in the neighborhood park is a total estimate of 2.95 million. Councillor Cunningham asked a question about who's responsible for this park. And the answer is that we are, um, we dedicate the park to the, to public use. Um, we build it, we dedicate the land, we maintain it through an HOA or similar organization. And then the question was what happens at the end of 10 years, the way we're reading the code. and we would be happy to be clarified on this, is that at the end of the 10 years it goes to the public, but we're not seeing that the maintenance carries to the public as well. So we're not sure if the HOA continues to pay for maintenance after the 10 year mark or doesn't. That's also would be very unusual based on the other codes that we have been involved with. The Stafford Brisbane roundabout, this isn't our engineer's estimate, not the city's estimate. of 2.23 million and the 60th and advance 1.73 million. Of course, those are based on proportionate share. We would not be the only developer contributing to that transportation infrastructure. But in Frog Pond East, you also have SDCs generated at 13 million. So you start getting just a subset of these costs at 16.4 million, and that doesn't include supplemental fees or other SDCs or other on-site infrastructure. So I went through that pretty quickly. We laid out as many of the costs as we could and the comparison. In my experience, these costs are extraordinary for the type of development that we would be, prescriptive development path that we would be required to follow here in Frog Pond East. The only reason ground floor commercial is listed here next in the memo is partly because of the cost of it. It's a good idea. There's no question about it from a planning perspective. Having ground floor commercial along a street that you've designated as your commercial corridor is a good idea. What we're seeing in the market makes it very difficult to see how brick and mortar ground floor commercial in the amount that's required here would be successful. So it's really a cost analysis. You're using that land to build out ground floor commercial under the code. It can't be a residential use. And it's possible that you're gonna have vacancies. So it just ended up, it's a cost issue. And two other issues, we already talked about both of these before, the SDC credits, the idea that you're both building a park, dedicating it to the public, improving it and maintaining it and get no SDC credits for it makes it a very expensive park, which of course puts upward pressure on um, housing costs. And so before we asked and we asked again that if, if the council decides that this is worthy of further investigation with staff and, and proposed code amendments, we asked that a code amendment look at SDC credits for this kind of park. And the last one was open space. So we breezed over that last time on open space because it's a little complicated, but I'll just summarize it quickly. So the area required for open space in Frog Pond East is 25% of your gross development area. The gross, that's how you get to the number. How many acres am I gonna have to develop as open space? The gross development area is the entire area of your master plan after excluding BPA easement area. So the way you get to the number is by taking 25% of your gross development area. Then you take that number and say what counts as open space? So the 25% calculation is the area you develop and what the code is currently being interpreted to say is none of that acreage that's open area can be counted in the BPA easement area, which is open area under the code. So it seems a little silly to interpret it like that. And if it is interpreted like that, as I said before, you lose a couple of acres of land that you can neither develop as housing or open area. That can have been the reason. And so we attached our understanding the entire time was that The BPA easement counts as open area because it was planned and designated as open area in the Frog Pond East and South Master Plan. And we should be able to count it as our open area. And there's an email from Dan Pauly agreeing with that early on, which was our operating assumption. So I'm not even sure we need a code amendment on this. We may just need a, okay, we've got two different interpretations going. which one is the right interpretation. And with that, we can turn to the Johnson economic study if there's no questions about that.

I'd like to chime in. There were a lot of questions about process and the master plan and how we got here and honoring that effort that had gone through previously. And I can tell you that Dan Grimberg and I spent a lot of hours in this room talking about this plan, but also a lot of time back in our office trying to test that code and see if it would work. So we have over 40 iterations of how we've done the pushing and pulling, and the code does this, and here are the components that go into it. And how do we make that work? And we raised those concerns through the entire process. And we said, hey, this code is really prescriptive. You've got a lot of levers going on. We're not sure this is going to work. There's the perpetual trope that developers are always trying to maximize their profit. Well, sure, I mean, it's business, but that's not actually the situation. They're trying to get to a project that meets market circumstances. They need to make sure that you can apply for a loan to build the project. that the finances work for it, that there is an end user who will buy these homes so that, again, you can get the capital to build it. All of those things have to work, and they're not working right now. There are no interested home builders in the project because the housing mix is out of sorts. The housing type is just upside down and the infrastructure is too expensive. So it's not about trying to maximize profits. It's trying to reach the threshold of a viable project. And so we went through this code process and we said, hey, concerns, concerns, here's some ideas. There wasn't a lot of response to that. The response was, hey, we've got a waiver process. We've got a waiver process. Developers struggle with the waiver process because it's an uncertain future. It's a lot of investment to put a full land use application together with the uncertainty of will my waiver get approved or not. At least with clear and objective code, You either meet it or you don't. And I have my interpretation of how to read it, and somebody else may. But it's very clear. And you can go through a legal administrative process to get interpretation on clear and objective code. With a waiver process, it's a negotiated process. And so our team was frustrated that, OK, we're telling you concerns with the code. You're saying get through the waiver process. There's a way to deal with this. But we're struggling with the waiver process. We're not getting the negotiated process that we were expecting. And here we are. So we did honor the process. We understand the vision for the master plan. We're hitting density. We're meeting density goals for the overall project. We're hitting diversity goals for the overall project. And we're being told it's not good enough. It's not precise enough. You need to move stuff around. Here we are.

I was just going to say, Mimi, we've got to be a little careful about talking about the specific project.

I understand. Go ahead. Do you want to go to Johnson?

Yeah, I don't know how you want to go through the Johnson report. Maybe there's questions about it.

We could start just at the beginning, and perhaps you could just review each one of the data, the graphs, just to make sure we all have the same understanding, if you have the time, if we have the time to do that.

Just a summary, probably, to cover the key issues.

Sure. Full disclaimer. lawyer, not economist, but I have read this and spoken with the author and I think I understand it. So we asked them, in furtherance of what Mimi just said, it was a, are we crazy? Or have we talked to eight or 10 builders and none of them are picking up on this and are interested in this product mix? So with that, we went to Johnson Economics and said, what is the market in Wilsonville for attached product? What was it? Where does it look like it's trending? And so basically they're, Conclusion is in the first paragraph here that the appropriate share for new attached homes in Wilsonville is nine to 11% of all single family homes. And then they start to describe how they reached that conclusion. And what they did on page two of five is look at the trends right from 2016 through 2025 and looked at attached homes having made up a relatively actually large share of the single family market. And that was due in part to Charbonneau and Villebois. And so over the past 10 years, what they concluded based on the data was that 20% attached homes accounted for 20% of all single family sales. in the city, both in new homes and in existing homes. They then showed that that went up to as high as 38% in 2018, and their analysis was those higher swings were the result of the product in Villabois. So you can see then the two graphs that show a significant increase in attached and then a dive in attached as we get closer to 2025, which is the rest of page two. And then on page three, they looked at other cities around Wilsonville. At Tualatin, Westland, Oregon City, according and used our MLS data and concluded that very few new attached homes were sold between 2016 and 2023, but 24 of the 37 new homes were built in 24 and 25, and that was 18 to 21% of the new home sales in those years in those markets. In the existing home market, the share for attached homes has now declined and is from 6%, well, declined from 6% to 4% over the 10 years. And then they provide comparative charts on those trends in other cities and in Wilsonville. And then they get into the impact of oversupply. So what happened with oversupply was that sellers lowered their prices and because they lowered their prices, we saw more uptick in the sales of some of those attached units. And then what you see here is they had price gains of 11 to 15% and detached homes in Wilsonville gained by 8%. So they concluded that that was a clear indication of oversupply in the market. And then they compared the price trends to the regional trajectory and concluded that it's really about nine to 11% is the current market and the predicted market for attached homes in the city of Wilsonville. If more is required, they might not be built because people don't want to build homes they're sitting on. Capital doesn't like to sit in an empty house that isn't trading. And if they are built and oversupplied, the price will be depressed, which is also disinteresting to capital to come into a market that's showing a 10% attached home and they're required to build 40% of attached homes. So to Mimi's comment, This is trying to fit all of these pieces together, which are a lot of pieces and a lot of levers to pull. And what Johnson Economics is telling us is that if we build more than 10% attached units, we are gonna start running into market problems with those units. And as a result of that, we're not getting builder interest in this particular prescriptive path forward within Frog Pond East and South. So what is the solution? I mean, the other side of that equation is that single family detached does have a strong market, and if we can keep the price point at an affordable level with multiple entry points, and even though you're not required to anymore, provide design diversity with those units, three different lot sizes, front-loaded, back-loaded, three different building footprints, you're still getting diversity, you're meeting density, and you still have the diversity of the attached units. You're just not being forced to overbuild them.

The minimum density provisions prohibit you from doing giant estate lots. Right. So you're going to keep that affordability with the detached homes. YOU'RE JUST GOING TO HAVE A BROADER BUYER PROFILE.

THANK YOU. THAT'S EXACTLY THE TYPE OF OVERVIEW THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR AND GAVE ME A LITTLE BIT MORE DEPTH THAN WHAT I HAD INTERPRETED BY LOOKING AT THE REPORT. I REALLY APPRECIATE THAT. SO THAT SAID, I WANT TO MAKE THIS PROJECT WORK. You've provided a lot of, in my opinion, compelling information. I don't want us to build product that does not sell and does not meet the needs of our community. So in my opinion, the information you're giving us by trying to be as diverse and flexible within what we're asking for, in my opinion, is not unreasonable. Thank you.

Anybody else? Counselor Cunningham.

So can we get clarification on the park situation? Because it sounds like there's still confusion based on the reading of our code. Is there anyone in the room who can provide clarification on that? Apparently not.

And counselor Cunningham for clarification, are you asking about, um, long-term obligations on the park or what are you, what, what is the clarification that you'd like to?

Well, the question that there was, it seems like they're not clear on it. I don't know if anybody up here is clear on exactly how this park is going to be owned, operated and maintained over the next, uh, initially, and then over the next decade or two decades. So it'd be. we would need some clarification on that issue for thinking about that.

Thank you, Councillor Cunningham. My name is Miranda Bachel. I'm the Planning Director for the City of Wilsonville. The master plan calls out specifically this being a neighborhood park and being long-term managed by the HOA, which is consistent with how we've treated neighborhood parks throughout the city. So this would not be like a city-wide plan community park, like the one that's planned in Frog Pond South on Advance Road. That would be a public park, publicly owned and maintained. The neighborhood park would be owned by the neighborhood and maintained by the HOA.

And would it be open to public use?

Yes, technically. I mean, it's primarily going to be used by the surrounding neighborhood, which is the purpose of neighborhood parks. But it is open to the public. We don't gate our neighborhood parks. Okay.

Thank you. The other issue that was brought up during the presentation surrounded ground floor commercial. We have an example of that that has taken place in Villebois. Started out with a wine and beer bar. Very nice, went there several times, enjoyed it. And they couldn't make it in the middle of 2,600 homes. It's now a daycare split in half by a convenience store. And so I know that there was a process that we went through to create and develop this code with our planning commission and things like that. However, I don't see that we have an example of that working in this city. And maybe some of this code doesn't work in reality. And it seems like that's, what's being brought to us today is that the code may have been made with good intentions. It may have been made highly in a highly aspirational fashion, but if it's not working, if it doesn't attract builders to actually build the product, it doesn't create a product that people want to buy in conversations with some realtors that I know attached units, people aren't looking for attached units. They're looking for single family homes. They don't want to share a wall. Um, and so if we have this highly prescriptive, you must have 40, you know, 60% one type and X amount, another type and have a third, even a third type of unit. I mean, I don't see that in, in a lot of developments, um, that are, that are in surrounding areas. The, the one that comes to mind, cause I'm up there a lot at horizon around horizon Christian. Um, That neighborhood that just went in up there, it doesn't seem like it has a real high diversity of housing types. It's a lot of single family homes from what I've observed. If we're creating red tape that's getting in the way of this development, I mean, right now there was an article that came out last month that it's about an average of $130,000 of government red tape getting in the way of affordability of homes. And if we have policies that are creating mandates of housing types that aren't going to be decently profitable, it's just going to drive up the cost of the rest of the housing on top of it. So... Yeah, maybe we went through a public process and planning commission looked at it and this and that. But we have developers sitting in front of us today who are saying that it's unworkable. So when we're hearing that, I heard it during the conversations on the building height task waivers. The developer that was on that task force said that the code for town center was incredibly complex and difficult to work with. So it seems like we have a pattern here of difficult, hard to work with code in our city. And maybe we should consider figuring out how to simplify that and let developers do what they do best and develop things at the highest level they can. So for me, I am with Councilor Shevlin on that we there are some good arguments to be made here to lighten the load. And I think it would help to bring down housing prices and create better affordability. And that's something that this council has stated before was a goal of ours, that we want to ensure that there's affordable housing in Wilsonville for people to live in and to purchase and own homes in this community. So that's where I'm at on it. Thank you. Councillor Cunningham.

Anybody else? City Council President Berry.

Well, I guess I need a little bit more time to consider this, but I still think that having mixed use is a good idea. And I do see like there are some, there's some commercial in Charbonneau that I think is really popular. The bakery over there is well used and they have a hair salon that is well used. Uh, I was in Southeast Portland where there's a mix of homes if a nearby commercial use. And I think I, I do think that we're not just by our planning for today, but we're planning for longterm and that, um, the city tends to be pretty progressive in their planning in, in their visions. So I think some flexibility can probably be worked out, but I overall, I liked the concept of how the plan is.

Anybody else? Councillor Schell.

These changes to make sure that we have a marketable and reasonable process in place to develop this property. In regards to the commercial and residential combination and everything, I have an issue with the discussions about that. Those commercial spaces are there for entrepreneurs and retail businesses to basically adapt to the neighborhood. And in certain cases, I feel it's up to them to do their market studies, do their business plans, and see how that's a fit. into the neighborhood. They need to do the demographics and figure out how those, it's part of the typical franchising type business plan and everything, so they need to understand the neighborhood and all that. What we're doing is we're providing a configuration for that space, you're providing the space, and it's up to those business owners to figure out what's gonna work and what's not. it's somewhat their risk. So I understand that argument, but I feel that that's something that should be considered in the process and everything. But I'm still not opposed to continuing down the path of looking at this further. Because of the changing environment, if we pinned ourselves and you in a corner, then let's talk through it and figure out how we can accommodate on all sides.

Councilor Cunningham.

I think the risk being talked about today is actually building that building. It's creating that space because if somebody comes along and wants to create a business there and then they look at what the rent actually costs and they do look at the demographics and how that neighborhood's whatever the product they're looking to sell and they can't make a business plan that fits that space and that neighborhood, then that building sits empty, which is I think the, the initial risk that we're looking at and discussing today is if our code is created in such a way that forces a builder to put something that ends up being, I mean, maybe at best net neutral or, uh, more likely or possibly a net negative, but we built it just because, we had this aspirational approach and we wanted to, we were bringing feel good governance into policy. I think it's hard to ask anybody that's out there spending their actual money from their business to build something that they are saying, this is not going to work, this is not going to pencil. And to leave that in our code, I mean, how would we feel when How would we feel if West Hills walks away from this project completely and says we're not building anything out there and now we've got a $28 million loan for a wastewater pipe up at Beckman Creek that now we're sitting on this $28 million loan. Nothing's getting built and we're not paying this loan off. That's not going to work well for the city. That's not going to work well for the developers. That's not going to work well for the housing struggles that people are currently facing right now. And I think this bureaucratic red tape that continues to get in the way and add to costs is only going to continue to hurt all of these things at the same time in the ideas of being aspirational and trying to diversify housing types when the developers are sitting here in front of us saying that it's not going to work.

I want us to be careful that we do not compare the retail plan in Charbonneau, I'm sorry, in Bilbois to Town Center. It's a whole different traffic pattern, a whole different set of pairs of feet that are walking through. I mean, it's our retail area in town. We want to add housing. We want to do it wisely. But we also want to bring people in here for specific reasons, to shop and to play, etc. That's different than VILWA. And I certainly hope VILWA's plan works for their mixed use buildings and retail. But in my statements, I'm not wanting us to back away from retail on the ground floor. I still believe that there's a place for that and there are challenges as been noted by my fellow counselors, but I still believe we need to maintain that here because it's just, it's a different area that we're asking people to come to and why we're asking them to come to as opposed to a primarily residential area in Villebois. And I still hope that we can make that work in that area as well. Thank you.

Sure, Councillor Cunningham.

Just to clarify, I wasn't talking about town center. I was talking about the ground floor requirement in this Frog Pond neighborhood. That's where I see the equivalence being a bill of law versus this. It's a very similar development to me.

Councillor Scullin.

And just to clarify, a further clarification on my point based on my statement, I'm not trying to push the full level of risk on the entrepreneur or the retail. I know it's a shared risk throughout and everything, and I understand that we need to consider that at our level and your level, but also I think my point, or actually my point there was is that the business itself needs to take on some of that risk and responsibility also.

So thank you, counselors. Here's some things. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you. It was well done. I have questions for city staff. I have 13. to be exact, which I am not anticipating them to be responded to in this meeting, but it's, I, so I want to let you know where I'm coming from. I'm keeping an open mind. Um, and like you, I'm a, you know, lawyer, although not practicing. So I look at things and I guess a very procedural thought process. So I'll just put some of my questions, um, out there to city staff to take in mind and I'll leave a Senate copy. Really want to have an understanding if city staff is able to clearly identify every code section the applicant is requesting to amend. I also want to be, can we reasonably consider, do we reasonably consider these together? Or should they be evaluated separately? What procedural steps would we be required? In other words, is there more public outreach? Is there planning commission review, council work sessions, hearings, notices? I just want to have a better understanding and education. I would assume other councillors would think that would be helpful. What is our anticipated timeline? And how does that impact the current work of our existing council priorities, staff workload, and the city's budget, if anything? I just want to have that understanding. Would outside consultants be needed or hired, and what would be the estimated cost on that? Are they proposing to reimburse the city for the costs incurred? These are just questions I have. Are there alternatives that could address some concerns without reopening multiple sections of the code? How does each requested amendment relate to the original planning objectives of Frog Pond East? I just want to have staff's perspective, the city's perspective on that. And would changing one section create pressure to revisit other interconnected provisions of the code? And if we initiate a legislative process, how will staff define its scope so the council is considering only those issues it intends to consider? And are there broader policy implications or precedents that councils should understand before deciding whether to initiate a legislative amendment? And those are things that, quite frankly, I don't walk around with gray matter to have those answers. I would appreciate input from staff, from our city attorney, any input that West Hills may have, but that's something that I need to understand. but I'm keeping an open mind. And again, this is my first legislative process as a mayor, so I just want to have those understandings. That's all I have. Anybody else? Councilor Skoll.

I just have one question to add to that.

In your memo,

that says that the city also has some of the highest development fees and supplemental fees in the region, and I'd like to understand what the comparables are to other surrounding areas and everything. It's a pretty bold statement, and I'd like to know who's what and where.

We'll provide that information.

And I also, to take, sorry, take on that, but to feed on that, I would like to have city staff's response to that. Is there a reason for that? Is there some explanation? So just to educate us as a council. But again, from my perspective, I think all of us would like to be flexible and keep an open mind, but that's information we need.

well thank you very much we appreciate it and we'd be happy to provide answers are whatever answer we have to whatever questions are relevant to us to amanda uh... and then i would say that uh... also based on the status of the contract on this property, we don't have lots and lots of time to kind of get our hands around this. So I'm wondering if we could think about a timeline for when we could come back with answers to these questions and a direction. I don't know.

Well, from my perspective, that's really between you and city staff. Okay. I look forward to you guys working out. We understand as a council that, There's some urgency involved, but it's important for us to have those answers to those questions. In all fairness, staff didn't present today. Of course.

I agree.

Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

The City Council will now meet an executive session pursuant to Oregon Revised Statute section 192, 660, subsection 2, paragraph F, Exempt public records to consider information or records that are exempt by law from public inspection in paragraph H. Legal counsel slash litigation to consult with counsel concerning the legal rights and duties of a public body with regard to current litigation or litigation likely to be filed. Members of the public outside of representatives of the news media, please exit council chambers. We will be adjourned for five minutes, resuming at 2 p.m.