City Council - Special Meeting

I'm here to call this to order. This is the Monday, August 17th, 2026 joint meeting, a special joint meeting of the planning commission, as well as the Santa Barbara city council. Would you please join me in the pledge of allegiance? Very good. Madam Clerk, would you call the roll, please?

Thank you very much. Ms. McAdoo, I noticed that on the agenda we have public comment prior to staff presentation. Was that how we wanted the order we want to do it in? Okay, very good. I have a couple public speaker slips here. Let's say in the next five or six minutes, hands either raised online to do public comment or if anybody wants to submit a public speaker slip. And we have three minutes. Does that timer work? Hot dog. All right. High tech. Very good. Then we will begin with public comment and we'll begin with Rob Fredericks. Three minutes, please. On the agenda items, on item one. Yeah

Thank you. The next speaker is Craig Lewis.

Thank you. Madam Clerk, online speakers?

All right, thank you very much. Are there further public speakers online? No, Mr. Mayor. Okay, with that, we'll go to the staff report. Here's how we're going to work today. Staff will give their presentation. Then we'll go around and we'll give two minutes each for questions for each of the panel members today. Staff is going to note the questions. We're not going to respond to them right away. Then they'll take the bulk of the questions and respond to them once they're all in. So if you have a couple of questions, which is about two minutes worth of questions. then we'll give them to staff.

All right, very good. Thank you both. So as we said before, let's go for a round of questions. We're going to limit it to a couple of minutes each. The staff is going to note down your questions rather than trying to go back and forth with them and then we'll do that and then we'll come back again for deliberation. So try to spend two minutes or less on your questions if you can. Mr. Peterson, you're up.

Okay. Once again, no, we're not responding now. We're going to gather the questions that are going to take notes. Right.

Okay, I'm out of time. And it's also questions at this point in time. We will be coming back for deliberation.

Thank you, Mayor Rouse. I'll just list these. I very much agree with the majority of the questions that have been listed. But I would love for us to take a look, or I'm wondering if we have taken a look at capping certain categories of points earned. So I know Commissioner Wardlow, Mr. Friedman also mentioned, we talked about 15 bicycle units gets you 10%, but also think about 80 bicycle units could get you unlimited density. or bicycle parking, so if certain community benefits and points earned may need to be capped so that we don't end up with those unintended consequences. Yeah, curious if

All right, thank you. Good questions all. I had just a couple quick ones myself. Will there be, out of these efforts, documents produced that are guidelines? For example, if you want to talk to people who are land use consultants, even property agents and whatnot, will they be able to access this information so they can more expeditiously inform their clients of what they're looking at when they come to develop this? Second question is always going to be a touchy one, but since we have a, one of the highest standards of stormwater development, has there been a bang for your buck analysis of wh

I can read that. You were writing feverishly.

Well, very good. That was great. Now, what I'd like to do is we're going to go through and have everybody give a deliberation with a limited time. But first, would you... Give us an illustration. It says initiate a zoning ordinance amendment for the program. Can you tell us exactly what you think, how that's going to be put together before we deliberate and give you our feedback on that? What are the steps that are going to be to go? Obviously, we're not running an ordinance today, but how do you think, how much of a structure is that going to be? Is that going to be building a department to t

All right. Very good. So what I'd like to do is go back to everyone with a five-minute time budget this time. and have you give your feedback and deliberations about what we're doing. And if you can then see if you can answer basically any questions about moving forward, if moving forward is in fact what you think we should be doing. Direction to staff, in other words. You don't want to go first, do you, Mr. Peterson? I can go the other way. Actually, I can start with Ms. Santa Maria. We'll go the other way. Give you a break.

Thank you, Mr. Oz. Yeah, Mr. Peterson, you just got saved by the bell. Okay, well, thank you so much. This is clearly a long time coming, and I think the The goals of this are admirable, but I think we do need to reconcile if what we are aiming to accomplish is actually what this framework, as it's laid out, is actually going to accomplish. There's going to be a lot of amendments, and it's very encouraging to me that all of the majority of the feedback and questions I've heard from all of my colleagues here all sort of point in a very similar direction, that we need more housing, but we need h

Well, you have to thank Mr. Balke for donating his time, I think.

All right. Thank you. Well, I think the phrase of the day was said by Ms. Parenteau, which housing is climate action and whatever we need to do to produce housing is probably the most important thing. And the more granular we get in our rules and regulations, the harder it becomes to actually produce housing. This is a, relatively built-out town, and there isn't a lot of there there when it comes to acreage. There's some adaptive reuse that can be done. There's some remodeling and building that can be done, and there's some vacant city property that we could potentially leverage at some point

Thank you. Thank you to staff. Well done. Nicely done. Good job on the handwriting too. I was pretty impressed.

And just to add to that, I've been cautioned by the city attorney that on this item we shouldn't go into any kind of substance. It should be just a one or two sentence thought, but not into the whys and the wherefores about the subject, because it may in fact be a future agenda item. I don't necessarily think we need to go down the line. Anybody has suggestions about what they'd like to do, please raise your hand and that'd be Ms. Snedd.

Thank you, Mr. Rouse. I'll just list out a few. An overall plan on how, as a city, we plan to meet are RENA numbers, second, identifying a funding source for local housing trust fund, also second, getting together to discuss the plan for our city-owned lots, the former police station, all that. Definitely also second, Mayor Pro Tem's potential hotel moratorium, and then also a vacancy tax for behavioral change or a potential for that. Thank you.

All right. If there are no further comments, I think that's it, and I'd like to... What's that? Oh, a public comment. Is there anyone that would like to open up for a public comment? So I don't have speaker slips.

All right. Then we'll go back to general public comment. Madam Clerk, do we have any submitted speaker requests? There is a gentleman back there I know that tried to turn in a slip. Would you, sir, like to come up and go to the dais right over here, if you would, please, and for three minutes.

Right. And this is certainly about the subject we were on today.

Thank you. Are there further requests to speak publicly at this point in time? Okay. If not, we have none aligned. Is that correct, Madam Clerk? Correct, Mr. Mayor. Okay, then we stand adjourned. Thank you very much.