Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

The commission is the final decision-making body for these applications, unless appealed to the city council. The commission also serves as the recommending body for the city council for major subdivisions, rezoning, conditional development permits, zoning ordinance amendments, general plan amendments, and environmental reviews associated with those projects. Staff in our city's planning division are responsible for processing development applications, as well as for both implementing and amending the general plan, zoning ordinances, and related policies in order to further the goals of the city. We encourage your active participation, whether you are an applicant or interested member of the public, and there will be an opportunity to speak publicly for each specific item, as well as for general public comment. Before I call the roll, I just want to give an update to tonight's agenda in terms of the order. I'm planning on calling items H1 and 2 before item G1. in the interest of the time of those people specifically interested in items H1 and 2, because I think item G1 will take the longest of all items on the agenda. So if you are interested, then be aware that I will be calling items F and then H and then G. With that, I'll call the roll. Vice Chair Beruzzi. Here. Commissioner Erick. Present. Commissioner Ferrick. Here. Commissioner Headlee.

Here.

Commissioner Schindler. Here, with less screech. Commissioner Sillin. Present. And I am Chair Silverstein, and I am present. So we have all seven commissioners in chambers, which is a quorum. The next item on our agenda is reports and announcements. Ms. Sandmeier, are there any staff reports and announcements this evening?

Yeah, good evening, Chair Silverstein and commissioners. So there's a couple items on tomorrow's city council meeting that may be of interest. There's the second reading of the new ADU ordinance. There's a public hearing on the proposed fiscal year 26-27 budget and capital improvement plan. And then there's a public hearing for the 68 Willow subdivision project. And that concludes my updates, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Do any commissioners have any questions or reports or announcements of their own? Seeing none, we can move to general public comment. Mr. Pruder, can you deal with public comment? Thank you.

Thank you and good evening, Chair Silverstein, paneling commissioners and members of the public, Matt Pruder, associate planner. At this time, if any member of the public in the council chambers wishes to provide a public comment on the general public comment at this time, please return a comment card from the back table to me. If you are joining via Zoom, please press the hand icon, or if you're calling in by phone, please press star nine on your phone's keypad. This will be the final call for public comment on the general public comment. And I'm seeing no comments at this time or requests for comments. So, excuse me, seeing no further hands or comment cards, Chair Silverstein, you may continue with the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now move to item E1, the consent calendar. Item E1 is the approval of minutes from the April 27th, May 4th, and May 18th Planning Commission meetings. Mr. Pruder, can you please call for public comment for item E1?

Thank you, Chair Silverstein. Again, it's an opportunity for members of the public on item E1. You may provide me the comment card, raise your hand if you're on Zoom or press star nine on your telephone keypad. And again, this is the final call for item E1 and I'm not seeing any hands raised or comment cards. So Chair Silverstein, you may continue with the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you. Do any commissioners wish to pull item E1 or any items within the consent calendar from the consent calendar? Seeing none, I will call a vote. All in favor of approving the consent calendar, raise your hand, please. All opposed? Great. We have six yes votes and one abstention. The motion passes. I will now move to item F1 on public hearing. Item F1 is regarding a use permit at 1024 Sevier Avenue. Mr. Pruder, can you please open public comment for item F1?

Yes, again, public comment opportunity here for item F1. If any members of the public wish to speak on the item, please provide me the comment card or press the hand icon on Zoom or press star nine on your keypad for your telephone. And at this time, I'm not seeing any. This is the final call for public comment for item F1. And with that, Chair Silverstein, you may proceed with the meeting. Thank you.

I would like to move to continue item F1 to a future meeting. Do I have a second? I'll second that. We're seeing a motion and a second. All in favor of continuing item F1, please raise your hand. Motion passes unanimously. We can now move to item F2 regarding a use permit at 763 College Avenue. At this public hearing, the commission may consider and adopt a resolution to approve a use permit to demolish an existing single-story single-family residence and detached garage and construct a new two-story single-family residence with an attached garage on a substandard lot with regard to width in the R1U zoning district. The project would include an accessory dwelling unit, which is a permitted use and not subject to discretionary review. The commission may also determine this action is categorically exempt under CEQA guidelines section 15303's class three exemption for new construction or conversion of small structures. Mr. Pruder, sorry, Mr. Ball, I believe you're the staff lead on this project. Are there any updates to the staff report?

Good evening chair and members of the planning commission. Since publication, we did receive one public comment and it has been distributed to each of you.

Is there any presentation or would the applicant like to make any remarks before we discuss the item?

Yeah, we do have the applicant here, but he's not going to present anything.

Great. Do any commissioners have any clarifying questions before we move to public comment? Commissioner Sillin.

Thank you. My residence is located within 500 feet of this residence. Therefore, I will be recusing myself from this item.

Thank you, Commissioner Solon. Do any other commissioners have clarifying questions? Mr. Pruder, could you please open public comment for item F2?

Thank you again, Chair Silverstein. At this time, this is the public comment opportunity for item F2. This will be the last call for the public comment period. We do have one hand raised by Zoom, and we have no comment cards. So I'm happy to start that now. And with that, we have our first and only at the moment public commenter. And if you just give me a moment, I will set up the timer here. A person by the name of Tracy Van Lichten. I'm going to allow you to speak in a moment. Let me just arrange for the timer. One moment. Okay. At this time, I'm going to allow you to speak. You'll have three minutes to speak. You don't need to, but if you'd like, you may provide your name and or city and jurisdiction where you live, and you'll have three minutes this time. Thank you.

Hello. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can. Okay.

Yes. I live in 805 College, which is directly next door to the applicant's property that he seeks to develop. My objection, you should have gotten the written comment that I emailed, in particular has to do with the size of the basement. It's a very small lot, and there is a very large coast redwood tree that's probably the height of a four-story building. within a very short distance of where they intend to put this extremely large basement. And the city arborist report notes that it would cause at least moderate damage, possibly damaging 25% of the root structure of this four-story coast redwood tree which I attached a photo for you to see. It's in a very unique location. It is literally on the property line between our two homes. In fact, the fence is built... with the tree in the middle of the fence. This giant coast redwood sits five feet from our house. And if he damages 25% of the root structure, which the city arborist points out is a strong possibility, it's going to fall over. It is going to fall over on my house, not on his house. And like I said, five feet away, this could take out our entire side of our house. And it's five feet from our kitchen and family room, which is where everyone spends the majority of the time when they're home. So I do not think he should be given permission to build anything. Such a large basement when we all of us who live in Menlo Park know every year the water saturation from the rain, the high winds we get. If any tree like a redwood has a weakened root structure, it's going to come down. So that is my objection. I think this should not be ruled on tonight. There needs to be further study, but I do not think he should be allowed to build a large basement that takes out 25% of the root structure of this tree, unless he wants to make a request to remove the tree. If he removes the tree, then we won't have that issue. But it should not be allowed to build this kind of basement. And it's not just the basement. It has a driveway along the side. So presumably he's going to take a bulldozer to dig up the old driveway and put a new one down, which could also damage the root structure if he's using a backhoe to pull out the old concrete from the existing driveway. Okay.

Thank you for your public comment. And seeing no further hands raised or comment cards, Chair Silverstein, you may continue with this item. Thank you.

Thank you. Let's bring it to commission discussion. Do any commissioners have anything they'd like to say about this item? Commissioner Nurick.

Yeah, thanks. Through this, Chair, I have a question for staff. Is it common for staff to recommend approving a project with 25% damage to a tree such as this?

Um, yes. So we, if the, if the city Arborist does recommend approval, um, we do typically follow, we follow their guidelines. Um, and in the Arborist report, it does mention a 10 to 25% root loss potential.

Okay. I'm assuming the city arborist isn't here, but I would be interested to understand why removal of this tree was not proposed. 25% seems like the upper bound, and I'm not an arborist, so I don't know whether the tree is likely to fall down or not, but it does seem seem like a risk that we should be quite careful about. And so I'm wondering why we wouldn't remove the tree.

As a quick follow-up, the arborist report notes 19 different trees on the property. Every single one that is scheduled to be kept, the 16 that are scheduled to be kept, all have an estimated root loss between 10% and 25%. So I don't know, and this is kind of an add-on question maybe for staff or the arborist who I believe is not here, Is that just kind of standard? Is there anything more granular than 10-25%? Is that just what we generally expect with any form of construction? Or is there something that we would consider to be unique about the circumstances here?

Through the Chair, I wouldn't say it's unique. So the city arborist obviously reviews comprehensively the arborist report and the plans. And in this case, they've signed off on the proposal. But there are numerous protection measures within the arborist report, including it looks like an exploratory trench is required for construction of the sidewalk. And also in the vicinity of tree number nine. So there's multiple protection measures.

Vice Chair Beruzzi.

Yeah, just to follow up on this. So it looks like there's an arborist that will be inspecting the process at various points. Is that a city arborist or an arborist that the applicant hires? And I'm wondering specifically where the liability lies if these, I mean, we know that somebody can't, it's not like there's gonna be somebody constantly onsite during the entire construction process to monitor that roots larger than one inch aren't damaged. What happens if, you know, somebody accidentally cuts critical roots or like, how do we ascertain that's happened? What happens then? I'm just curious about that.

Yeah. Thank you for your question. So the project arborist hired by the applicant will do onsite monitoring in addition to the city arborist at multiple points throughout the construction. So if there are any major red flags that come up or critical routes that are cut, then that would be raised to me as the project planner. And then Jillian as the city arborist would also come in and address that matter.

So just to follow up, I haven't been on planning commission as long as some of these other folks, but I don't remember seeing anything with quite this level of red flagging. Maybe I'm alone on the dais and I'm just wondering if this is common and if this is something that our arborist routinely does, you know, that we have constructions that are this complicated that have this many trees that could potentially be damaged beyond a point where they are viable. And like, just as a team, the city is very confident in our ability to like mitigate any potential damage. damage and eliminate the risks that the neighbor is quite understandably worried about? Like, is this something that happens on an annual basis or is this somewhat unusual?

Yeah, I would say it's quite common for new development, for new two-story development when you're demoing the entire site. Commonly, there are going to be plenty of existing large trees.

Follow-up question for Steph. Is there a world in which one, during the excavation process, could determine the actual amount of root damage that then had occurred? So as I understand it, 10% to 25% is an estimate from the arbust. You look at the tree, obviously you haven't seen the underground root structure. And so that's an estimate we have. And then as the building process occurs, in theory, you could... realize that actually there's going to be 40% root damage or there's going to be 5% root damage. And the reality versus the estimate might have pretty strong bearing on whether or not the tree stays healthy. And so what does that process look like? I mean, I understand there are the various provisions and they need to audit it, but like what happens if it turns out that the excavation as planned isn't feasible without doing more damage to the root structure?

Um, yeah, so it would depend if there's, if they start work and it looks like it would damage an existing heritage tree beyond, um, you know, what's, what's acceptable and what's described in the arborist report, then I think, um, a redesign would potentially be necessary. Um, and there's also penalties within, um, the heritage tree ordinance for anyone who damages a tree. So there are penalties in place if that happens. It's something that would be followed up on, and obviously there's building inspections and inspections by the city arborist.

Thank you.

Commissioner Schindler. Thank you, Chair. Do we need...

Sorry, through the chair, I'll take a look right now.

I'm hesitant. How's that? It's a little bit better? Okay, there is a reference in the project description letter from the applicant to, it's on page 73 of the packet. It's where the revisions to the proposed revisions in response to neighbor feedback are alluded to. There's a mention of a street tree that was intended to be kept, but then the driveway apron was widened in response to concerns about adequate parking. And it's unclear to me whether that street tree that's right there at the edge of the driveway is going to be left there or not. The letter makes it sound like a decision was made to remove it, but my reading of the plans is that it's still in there. What did I miss?

Yes. So initially there was a plan to remove the street tree, but that permit was rescinded by the applicant.

So the plans are correct. The tree stays.

That's correct. The tree is staying.

Great. That's what I was going to hope for anyways. Mr. Pruder, do you want me to, that seems to work. I was just offering to test. Okay.

Through the chair. Sorry. I noticed there was a different volume feature for the ceiling speakers. And so we all learn, um, I was at full blast. So I brought that down and I think that feedback issues completely resolved now. Thank you. Thank you.

So does that mean the driveway modifications that have been arranged with the neighbor are not as described?

Sorry, which modifications are you referring to?

In the design refinements made in good faith update to the project description letter, which is 73 in the packet, it describes The driveway apron has been widened to better accommodate a two-car garage and facilitate off-street parking for the homeowners.

And it's in the project description letter?

Yes. So the project description letter from the, I believe this is the architect, and then it enumerates the house-by-house neighbor outreach summary. And then following the neighbor outreach summary, there's a description with a letter, I believe, entitled Design Refinements Made in Good Faith.

It's yeah so so initially there, there was a plan to remove a heritage tree and widen the driveway apron. But since the tree is staying there going with the original driveway design, which is not widened.

Commissioner for is that answer your question.

yeah that does answer my question um below let me ask a follow-up question then we got some feedback from neighbors or some concerns about parking and concern that there was not going to be sufficient off on-site parking for everybody um was that did this change to the design of the driveway and materially impact how many off-street parking spaces they now have

So the applicant is providing two off-street parking spaces, but they are within a half mile of the Caltrain station, so they are exempt from providing any parking officially.

And the city rules precluding anybody living there from parking on the street overnight would still apply, right?

That's correct.

And the applicant's aware of those rules?

yes okay thanks commissioner eric i remain somewhat concerned about the tree situation and think this is on the upper bounds but Ultimately, I think I'm comfortable trusting the arborist report and the control measures that are in place. So I don't want to curb any further discussion, but I will make a motion to approve this project as per the staff report.

Excuse me, I will second the motion.

Before I call about, I also want to remind my fellow commissioners and members of the public that the reason why this project is before us in the first place is because their lot width is 50 feet and not 65 feet. If it were, even with all of the potential on street parking issues or potential tree roots, this would not even be eligible to come before the planning commission and would only be subject to building permits and not use permits. And as such, I am similarly comfortable voting on the item. Seeing no further, Commissioner Farrick.

Thanks, just a real quick add-on to your comments. Similarly, have some concerns about the tree, but having some experience with the arborist, I know they're very cautious and conservative and care a lot about heritage trees. So I think the tree will remain in in good care and monitoring. But more importantly, as the chair just said, we wouldn't see this if the lot were slightly bigger and actually the amount of square feet that is being built and the setbacks all are very much within compliance of city zoning regulations, setbacks, heights, et cetera, et cetera. So there's really not, you know, and then with ADU rules that they are, that does not count. You know, it's by right. So everything kind of fits. The tree is, of course, a concern, but luckily we have a very deep care and have arborists that are very professional in nature. Since none of us are tree experts, it would be really difficult to have that to be a reason to not approve if the arborist hadn't flagged it as a concern of theirs.

Commissioner Hathaway.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm appreciating everyone's desire to retain heritage trees in particular, including the arborist and the applicant. And I'm wondering if there might be something we could do around like a condition of approval, something like, For the next five years, there's an annual inspection that the applicant pays for to assess the health of the redwood tree. Because it's not just during the construction process that it could be a problem. It's every winter thereafter. Because trees don't often die immediately. It's kind of a slow death over time. So I wonder, like, I would feel a little bit more comfortable if there were some additional care around the tree so that the neighbor could feel safe.

confident that is not just going to tip over on their house so i guess i'm curious if others on this commission would be open to something like that i don't dislike well i certainly don't dislike the intent of the idea i don't think i dislike the idea itself i'm worried about the precedent that we set around like i mentioned there are 16 trees that are remaining all 16 of those are projected to have a 10% to 25% potential root loss, as estimated by the arborist report. And we're singling out one, which I think is not unreasonable because it's large, it's on the property line, and we want to make sure that it's in good care. But are we setting ourselves up to have everyone inspect every tree every year as a function of coming before the planning commission? That's one of the things that I'd be toiling with. Commissioner Bruzee.

I also worry that if we do this and we set a precedent of incurring prohibitive or large expenses every year for all the trees that people might be more tempted to just remove them preemptively. At some point, somebody's going to do the math and say, well, it's cheaper for me just not to have it. And I can make some case that I need to remove it for development, which is what a lot of people do. So I guess I'm not sure. The thing that comforts me is that these folks don't want the trees falling on their house either. So they do have a natural incentive to protect themselves and their property by doing reasonable care of the trees. So I'm hopeful that whoever buys this property will take care of the trees.

At this time, we do have a motion and a second. I will call a vote on the motion by Commissioner Eric, Vice Chair Beruzzi. Yes. Commissioner Eric. Yes. Commissioner Farrick. Yes. Commissioner Headley. Yes. Commissioner Schindler. Yes. And I vote yes, which passes six yeses and one recusal. I will close item F two and now move to item H one regarding a use permit revision at 2245 AV Avenue. At this public hearing, the commission may consider and adopt a resolution to approve a use permit revision to amend the use permit for an existing school within the public facilities zoning district. The requested changes include expanding the enrollment age for the summer program to include students three and four years in age without changing the total enrollment number, increasing the maximum allowable number of year round staff from 68 to 73 employees, and modifying the allowable events onsite to reduce meetings of the board of trustees from 12 to six annually and hold a fall and winter concert. The most recent use permit approval was in 2019. The commission may also determine this action is categorically exempt under CEQA guidelines section 15314, class 14 exemption for minor additions to schools. Mr. Pruder, I believe you're the staff owner. Are there any updates to the staff report on this project?

Good evening again, Chair Silverstein, Planning Commissioners, members of the public, Matt Pruitt, Associate Planner. We have no updates for this project. However, I'd like to note that the applicant team is represented by the head of the school, Jen Bonin, who's here in person in the council chambers this evening. And she would like to make some brief introductory remarks. And I have no presentation. So if you'd like, we can transition to her. And I'm also available for any questions following that. Thank you. Perfect. Yes.

If you'd like to make any remarks, please feel free to do so.

And I just quickly just wanted to comment on our proposal. So currently right now, during the school year, we have three-year-olds through fifth grade on campus. And so what we're asking for is for our summer program to include three and four-year-olds. There's a real need within the community to have summer programming for those young, young, cute little kids that are on our campus. And what's great is it will also be open to the community. So I know that there's a lot of community members that have expressed interest that don't come to our school during the school year, but would like to utilize the summer programming. So we definitely love to include those wonderful children. Also in addition, we'd like to increase our faculty and staff by five. I think we found, especially this year when we had the lockdown, that there's a real need. Our campus is wide open. There's lots of buildings. And when we had to go into a lockdown and make sure that we had supervision for the children throughout the campus, we were in a real kind of scurry for that. in addition we want to make sure that we're providing a top-notch education and the individualized instruction that the students need and then finally we just also want to make sure that we're looking at our events i think that we have found over time that our events have changed especially since with covid i think looking at the different the number of events so we'd like to have them more in broader categories so for example community events parent events, school events. So they're just some broader categories. We're not asking for more events, but just more flexibility under those categories. So if things do change down the road, we can just, you know, make sure that perhaps we have a book fair. Maybe in the future we have something else that it's a Kindle book read instead of a book fair. So just the title of it. And that's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you. Do any commissioners have any clarifying questions for staff or the applicant? Commissioner Schindler.

Thank you, Chair. I just have a very small clarifying question for staff. With regard to the... road markings and signage that are referred to as part of the request to the school. Is it standard for schools to be responsible for signage and road markings near their facilities?

Thank you for the question, Commissioner Schindler. I would initially just like to preface this with the fact that there have been some discussions on road safety with the applicant team and the transportation division and public works as well. And there have been some ongoing discussions on some safety features. And there were a bit of kind of iterative discussions that led to some thoughts about improving the roadway conditions and other kind of factors that are outside the scope of this project. I will say, however, there was more focus on the level crossing that's right in front of the parking lot. And so the transportation division had requested that one of the crosswalk signs, which is in more of a disrepair state, be replaced. Just one of the signs. That is technically, I believe, very close to the public right-of-way, and it might be in the public right-of-way. And usually, my understanding from transportation is is that signage and other features that are adjacent to a property may be, you know, there may be some collaboration to request replacement or improvements. But I believe that's something that transportation has mainly worked with the applicant team on. And the other item I would say is in the past, other signage onsite has been required in the vicinity of the parking lot and the driveway. We do have an earlier condition that was satisfied that required a no left turn. I think at certain times, like during peak hour times on the parking lot, from the parking lot onto AV Avenue. And that was requested of the applicant team a few years back as another condition for another approval. And that was fulfilled and satisfied.

Thank you for all of that detail. The takeaway that I have is that on-site signage and traffic directions are the responsibility of the school and anything that is near the boundary of public right-of-way and the school site is a joint decision and a collaboration between the city and the school or the school district.

That is my understanding. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you.

Commissioner Sila.

Thank you. I have a question for the applicant. There's the project description letter mentions outreach to neighbors. And it sounds like even though the outreach was about these changes, the response if critical at all was regarding like just general circulation issues. I was hoping you could just elaborate on that a little bit more.

Yeah. So I think it's more just the traffic along Evie Avenue is the concern from the neighbors. We had a recent neighborhood meeting. We have quarterly neighborhood meetings and we had a recent one. And I think every time we meet, They bring up just traffic and not necessarily us, but they recognize that it's kind of a three-way from Sand Hill into Menlo. There's lots of schools within the area as well. So I think it's just general traffic. You know, can speed bumps go in? Can more traffic signage go in? So it's just something they bring up all the time. So yeah. I think if there's any way that we could partner to think about ways to reduce or probably slow traffic more than anything would be helpful for everyone.

Okay, thank you. And how are these quarterly meetings? Are they, like, noticed somehow to nearby neighbors?

Yeah, we send out mailings to about, I think, 165 or so. It's in a certain radius that they're sent out. So we do send those out, and I keep attendance, and we have three to four households on average that attend. Great, thank you. Yeah.

Seeing no further clarifying questions. Mr. Ball, can you please open public comment for this item.

If you're joining remotely, please click the hand icon or if you're calling in press star nine on your keypad staff will call on speakers and unmute you for those here in person, please complete a speaker card at the back of the room and hand it to me. I'm not seeing any raised hands and I don't have any comment cards. So chair Silverstein, you may continue.

Thank you. I also would like to call the applicant back up for a combination of clarifying question, but also gets into my thoughts of the matter to some extent. One of the things I like to think about on the planning commission is how, to what extent we can be proactive as opposed to purely reactive. And I understand that you have identified a need to hire exactly five more staff and therefore you want to have an application, you know, you want to have a use permit in order to do so. But that also means the next time you want to hire a single additional person, you're either not allowed or you have to come back before the planning commission. The same applies for having two fall events or a fall, a winter and a spring event. And so my question to you, which I will then bring to the commission is to what extent would we be able to future proof this use permit to whatever extent we are comfortable doing so to ensure that within the boundaries that everyone feels to be reasonable, we are future proofing the use permit and we give you the leeway in order to have the events and the staff that you need to run the school in the summer and the school year.

Thank you. That's a great question. You know, I think for us, I think if events could be just, again, a broad category, because before it was so prescriptive, you can have one back to school night, one book fair. And again, you know, if it's not prescriptive, it's like you can have 20 events, boom. And then we, you know, and there's obviously we can't have them at midnight. You know, there's guidelines within that. I think that would be really helpful. I think we're cushioning the staffing, thinking about we're in enrollment at 320, and so that feels good for us, knowing the staffing piece. The other complex piece, and I'm not sure if you all are aware of this, but before we go through any type of approval, before I can come to you, I need to get approval from the school district because they actually own the property. So the school district, I went to them twice to get approval from them to be able to come to you. With this, they had to sign the application. So just so you are aware of that, if we wanted to say we have 500 kids, I can agree to that tonight. Nor would I want to, but just so you know.

Does that imply that anything we approve in terms of staffing or events is beyond the scope of this specific enumerated application, you would then need to go back to the school board to get approval on?

That's my understanding.

Okay. Thank you for the context. Commissioner Sillin.

Thank you. Yeah, I just have a quick follow-up question to the chair. How much does, maybe could you speak to how much does, you know, when you make a decision, like we want to hire more staff or change these events, like, How much does having to come before the planning commission factor in your decision whether to make that change or not? And how much is it having to go before the school and how much of it is just the actual thing?

Does that make sense?

Maybe another way of asking is if... let's just say, and I'm not suggesting we do this whatsoever, but hypothetically, if there was no use permit at all, how much more changes would you be making on a regular basis versus you are now because you're somewhat having to come get approval each time?

Yeah, I don't think we would be. You know, again, this is my first year. So, you know, for us, I think going through the process is good, if that makes sense. But I don't think we're going to be like, you know, oh, this changed, that changed. But I'm still learning the school, to be honest with you. So, you know, maybe I'll see you next school year. I don't know. Right. With something else that pops up. So I can't promise I won't see you in school. you know, five years from now type of thing, if that's what you're asking. Is that kind of what you're trying to get to?

Yeah, no, just wondering how much of an impediment is it to making these changes if you're like, oh, we want to hire another person, but we have to, you know, get approval from the client commission, let's just hold off until we have a few more things or, you know, stuff like that.

I mean, it's time and money, right? Because of the application fee, and so there's the time. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but...

I think you are, to some extent. I'll move on. And one other question I had is, so in response to Chair Silverstein's question about where you would like more flexibility, you mentioned events not being category-specific, and then you also mentioned cushioning staffing. Did I hear you correctly? Yeah.

Yeah, but I think that we've done that. I think I've been doing some projection and some forward thinking. I think what you're alluding to, like, you know, I don't want to micromanage and say, oh, I need two staff because of this. I'm actually thinking about the future and my programming and what we'll need and thinking, again, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but five additional staff will think about the safety and security, number one, top priority, and also then thinking about the programming for our students.

Thank you. Okay, thanks. Commissioner Farrick.

Thanks. Thank you. Nice to meet you. And I hope I'm glad to hear you had a great first year. Thanks. And thank you for continuing on with the quarterly meetings. And it's actually, even though it might be discouraging to go to a lot of trouble for three to four families, it's a great signal that things are going pretty smoothly. And I think I remember, so I used to be on the commission years ago and there was like all these neighbor problems and just stuff that was going on. And I think the quarterly meetings came about at that time. to kind of like proactively address some things. So I'm really glad to hear how well everything's run. It sounds like, you know, you're like kind of co-identifying some traffic concerns that are good for everybody. So, you know, and thank you. That was helpful context too. So I guess I don't mean to short circuit things, but I'm delighted with how things are going. This project, the proposal seems quite reasonable. Sounds like you have built in some, some level of future proofing to the extent that your board was comfortable with and um i'm you know just will be delighted to support it thanks thank you anything else

Feel free to take a seat. We can call you up if needed. Commissioner Sillin. Thank you.

Yeah, through the chair, I just want to ask staff, I guess, well, first question is, do we have the ability tonight as a planning commission to change the use permit requirements, for example, as pertaining to events, or is tonight just about approve the proposal or not? And then based on that answer, I might have a follow-up question.

Thank you for the question, Commissioner Sillin. Based on the specific language and information provided in the notice that we sent out, we wouldn't be able to in this meeting allow, that wouldn't be possible because the notice very specifically identified the intent of increasing the staff, the specific types of meeting and event changes, and then the age requirement change. And anything changing that would require this project to be continued or have to change the project altogether.

Thank you. Well, I will say, going into this item, my thought, as perhaps other commissioners had a similar thought, was, gee, it sure must be kind of I would imagine a little bit annoying having to get planning commission permission to change one event to another type or having to request lowering the boards of trustees meetings. by six and then having two new ones and having to get essentially approval for that and having to pay fees. Since it seems like we don't have the ability to future proof any of that, I would just say, I wish we did. And perhaps at some future point we could consider that. But in the meantime, I'm happy to support this proposal. It seems totally reasonable to me.

I would like to double-click a little bit more on that thread. Are we legally required to give notice to the very specific change that is being proposed of 68 to 73, or... In theory, if we had, would we have been able to give notice of increasing staffing and changing the nature of the event schedule for the school, which would have given the commission the ability without coming back and having a further public notice? I understand that if someone is okay with 73 and therefore is not making a public comment and not coming to a public meeting, but would not be okay with 74, that that's where the violation occurs, and that makes sense to me. But to Commissioner Sillin's point, did we tie our own hands behind our back in this regard? Or did we have to do that?

We tend to draft the agenda items so they're sufficiently clear what is the action that is going to be taken. So we try to be specific because it's better to be more specific so that people know exactly what's going to happen. You can always adopt conditions of approval that are related to what is agendized. So if you have some conditions of approval related to these events or the staffing, you could do that. But we tend to prefer being more specific. I understand you're kind of suggesting like if we just said just related to events or like you're kind of maybe more of a broader agenda item, which would enable a larger or a different kind of action is maybe what you're asking. Or maybe I've misunderstood.

No, I mean, I was going to. To some extent, an extreme by just making it as vague as possible. I recognize that we want to be somewhat specific. However, the response of wanting to be as specific as possible, yet we can always make conditions of approval, implies that the Planning Commission only has the ability to be more restrictive. And we, by definition, never have the ability to be less restrictive or more permissive. If we wanted to, we could increase this from 68 to 69. That would be permissible initially. under this because we're making a more restrictive change, which doesn't violate things, at least as I understand your response. Or we could say you're allowed to do this, but only if you tailor the hours more narrowly than we originally defined it. But we are never allowed to be more permissive on any of these permits or whenever something like this comes in. And I don't necessarily agree with that philosophy of like the purpose of the planning commission and also the benefit that we can potentially have on the community. And so I guess my question is like, I understand that we want to be as specific. I understand we want to be specific, but I would push back on needing to be as specific as possible because that does force our hand to some extent and it doesn't allow for the conversation on the dais to be creative in any way to deviate from the very narrow bounds of what notice was given without delaying the process even further. And it's my expectation that we don't want to do that either. So that's my feedback. There's not a specific response unless you want to give one, but that is formal feedback that I'd like to be heard on the philosophy of the notice that we give Commissioner Sillin. Actually, I'm going to go to Commissioner Headley who hasn't been able to talk yet. Sorry.

Well, I haven't spoken, I think partly because of the specificity of the proposal made it so clear, like the notes I had made to myself is that I don't have any concerns with what they are proposing. Like it just seems... normal, appropriate, like, let's just proceed. So part of me is like, this is only my second meeting, so I'm a little bit like, okay, if it's costing time and money, why don't we just make a motion and say yes?

In theory, we could save time and money in the future by having this conversation, but I appreciate the point. Commissioner Sillin.

I hear you. I do have one more question for staff to share. I was wondering if... Could the applicant have asked the commission to consider amending the use permit terms and would that have significantly affected the fee and cost of this process if tonight's hearing was about here's the request for these things, specific changes to our number of events and employees, and also could we, for example, change the event categorization to be more broad.

And thank you for the question, Commissioner Sloan. I think generally, at least to start as a response, the applicant is at liberty to request modifications to the conditions of approval. In this specific request that's been provided that you're reading and reviewing tonight, there were three different conditions that currently exist that are receiving a modification through this request. And so any of the conditions that were project specific from previous approvals in the conditions of approval now could receive that treatment. They could be, I wouldn't necessarily say broader, but could offer a higher threshold or perhaps a different set of guidelines. So you could have more events of a certain category during the year, more frequency of events, more students, more staff, for some examples. And then there are other items about The nature of like pickup and drop off times and when traffic is acceptable for the school. So there are a lot of those things where I think given the nature of the request and given our way of reviewing it through sequel. We have to look carefully at the legal ramifications of some of the requests and obviously if there is a certain threshold for how high of a change, it might be Maybe something more significant beyond just exempting it as we have with this project request. So I think there are a few different parameters we have to think about when we factor that in. But there's definitely a possibility the applicant could have come forward with a more just higher threshold or maybe more of a range of requests, different types of requests. But I think, again, in a legal sense, there would probably be an importance in making sure we're specific on what these different changes would be. Okay, thank you.

It sounds like what I'm taking away from that is once we impose certain conditions on a project, going back and taking kind of a step back and reconsidering the conditions as a whole for an applicant would be more time and cost versus just changing the number of employees or whatever. And I understand... you know, for a school that might not be something they would even want to deal with potentially if there's SQL involved and all that stuff. So, yeah, I think it's just something I will personally consider in the future when... thinking about conditions of approval for future projects, that this is sort of a downstream effect that we may not consider. But in the meantime, I will yield to others.

I'm happy to make a motion.

Commissioner Farrick as well. Thank you. I'd like to make a motion to adopt a use permit revision for Phillipsbrook School at 2245 Avey Avenue. I'll second.

And before we vote, I would like to express my appreciation for having additional child care options in our community, particularly for children in that younger age group. I think it, across the board, just makes it a better city, whether they're school year options or summer options. So I am appreciative.

With a motion and a second, I will call the vote. Yes. Commissioner Eric. Yes. Commissioner Ferrick. Yes. Commissioner Headley. Yes. Commissioner Schindler. Yes. Commissioner Sillin.

Yes.

And I vote yes. The motion passes unanimously and we can move to item H2 regarding the development agreement annual review at 500 El Camino Real. At this public hearing, the commission shall review of the property owner's good faith compliance with the terms of the development agreement for the period of April 2025 to March 2026 for the Middle Plaza at 500 El Camino Real project. Review of the development agreement does not qualify as a project under CEQA. Ms. Sandmeier, are there any updates to the staff report on this project?

There are no updates, but I'm happy to answer any questions. I believe the representative from Stanford is available online. Yes, hello.

Do any commissioners have any clarifying questions before we take public comment? Seeing none, Mr. Ball, can you please open public comment for this item?

Thank you, Chair Silverstein. At this time, if any member of the public in the council chambers wishes to provide a public comment, please provide me with a comment card from the back table. If you're joining via Zoom, please press the hand icon, or if calling in, please press star nine on your keypad, and we will be notified of your desire to speak. This will be the final call for public comment. I'm not seeing any hands. So Chair Silverstein, you may continue.

Thank you. We can bring it to commission discussion. Do any commissioners have anything they'd like to say? Commissioner Beruzzi.

I have some questions for staff. First of all, I was digging into the development agreement, and I wanted to understand a little bit more about the funding for the crossing. So this hasn't in any way like expired or something, has it? I remember back when the development agreement was initially discussed, there was some talk about maybe if we don't build the crossing within X amount of time, like perhaps this doesn't happen this contribution, but I'm not seeing that in the development agreement. And I just want to understand, I'm not so good at the legalese reading. So maybe you can just confirm my understanding. Thanks.

Yes. So the initial term for the development agreement is 10 years. So that would end in 2027. There is a provision that if the city makes substantial progress towards the crossing, then it's continued for another five years. And then the city would get the payment from Stanford, which I think the current amount is 6.34 million. So that's section 1.24 of the DA, and it's discussed on page 2 of the staff report.

Can you also explain the interaction between, I think this is likely to be moot given the cost estimates we've seen of the undercrossing, but the interaction between undercrossing funding and school foundation funding?

The foundation funding would just be, I think the way it's written is if the Stanford didn't, if their share of the under-crossing was less than $5 million or the adjusted amount, then there would be a payment towards the school. But the current estimate is, of course, way more than $6 million, so.

One more question. So there's this public plaza that Stanford has developed. And I'm curious about how has that been activated? So have there been community events there? I feel like that was discussed a little bit when the development agreement was being hashed out. And I'm wondering if things are happening there. And if they're not, could they be? And does the applicant have suggestions or things that they have up their sleeve? Or are there ways that members of the community could apply to have events there? I'd be curious about that.

I believe there have been some events. The applicant may be able to speak to that some more. I know there's also public seating and those kind of things in the plaza.

I'm happy to chime in if that works. We have had some coffee cart open events to the public and some programming for the public. And we're actually looking to do additional programming in the plaza, even more so this summer with some music that's open for the community, a flower market for the community, potentially food trucks. Our property management team is putting together an agenda and schedule now, but we have done a few events and we're looking to do more to really encourage activation on the plaza.

Thanks. That's great to hear. How would we find out about those events? Are you going to publicize them through the city?

We would love to work with the city and publicize them that way. We're finalizing the agenda actually in the next few weeks.

Thank you. Commissioner Headley.

I'm not sure if this is a question for staff, but it seems like In talking to city council, there was some discussion about whether or not, you know, with all the different priorities the city's considering for capital improvements, that funding the undercrossing was a question mark. And maybe it's being discussed tomorrow night. But it seems really important that city council know that the $6 million plus is potentially not going to be available to the city if we don't continue to prioritize making this project happen. And I guess I'm wondering, how do we convey the... importance of this to city council? Like what's the best way to do that? Is that something we do as a commission or is that staff or is that us as individuals going to, you know, tomorrow's budget meeting to discuss?

I'll let Steph answer it before I do. As an individual, you're very welcome to go before any city council meeting and item to make your public comment. In the city council meeting agenda, there is a section for commission reports where if the commission were Again, this needs to get backed into an agenda item or a report that we end up actually devising. In theory, there is a formal mechanism for the Planning Commission to officially make a report to the City Council. But in order to do so, we would need to vote on that. In order to vote on it, we would need that to be on the agenda in the first place. And so there's somewhat of a chicken and egg situation. problem there. So as an individual, very welcome to. Staff, I'll let you guys answer whether or not you plan to bring up this topic either tomorrow or at a future city council meeting. And then for reports, we're theoretically able to do so and depends on the circumstances.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the plans are for tomorrow. I know this has come to City Council many times with the discussion on the funding. The undercrossing went, there was a discussion at City Council on January 27th. And then most recently, April 28th, where City Council approved an amendment to the MOU with Caltrain to advance the design process. And so there is discussion. The city council is aware of it.

Commissioner Schindler. Thank you. Ms. Ann Myhre just referenced the place I was going to ask for a more detailed explanation since the Commission is concerned about the sequencing of events related to funding. What it says here is that we essentially submitted a grant application in May which, if awarded, would secure the funding needed to construct the project. And by the conditions of that, if we come up with our share of the money to whatever the numeric requirement is in here, then that qualifies us for the what is now 6.3 match from Stanford. So my question was approximately how long does a review of an application like that take? Is it numbered in months or in years?

That's a good question. I'm not sure about this specifically. I can look into it and get back to the commission if that's helpful.

I am curious, but I don't think that it changes my support for this recommendation or not. And since I've got my mic on, I appreciate the detailed update about everything going on with the undercrossing and the sort of amalgamation of all the different moving pieces that are synthesized together here. because I've seen and followed bits and pieces of it, but hadn't put them all together as cleanly as it is here. So I am appreciative of that picture, though it is not a deciding criteria tonight.

Commissioner Sillin.

Thank you. Through the chair, I just had a quick question for the applicant about the office building. So I recall that I think even at the previous review of the agreement that building 200 was unoccupied, we continue to get applications here for office space large and small. So I'm just wondering if this is reflective of current market conditions or if there's just something more specific to the space going on that's not reflective of broader market conditions.

Yeah, we're still actively working on leasing the 200 El Camino building. It's still currently sits vacant, but we're actively pursuing tenants. We have interest, but we haven't found the right sweet spot just yet due to our size. We're either too big, too small. It's like a nursery rhyme. So we're working on a strategy moving forward to attract some smaller tenants.

A Goldilocks applicant, if you will. Okay, thank you. I don't have any other questions. As far as the development agreement seems pretty straightforward that the conditions are being met, and I would be happy to approve it. Commissioner Schindler.

Thank you. Through the chair to the applicant, the last time that we reviewed the development agreement, we heard about the status of the eight BMR units, that they were occupied, and the number of families that were on the wait list was of interest to the Planning Commission just because it helps us with broader context and understanding for affordable housing and BMR units in the city and also for understanding just the process of applications and waits and so on. Do you happen to know the status of the wait list for those BMR units at this point a year later?

I don't have an updated number top of hand, but I will gladly reach out to our FSH team and circle back to you on that one.

Thank you. It's always just an interesting metric for us to keep an eye on, as well as that percent occupancy on the residential space, which I think was 98% from my notes last year. Pretty good. And then my final question through the chair to the applicant is regarding the very recent, like within the last couple of weeks, repainting of the exterior. And I was wondering if that was strictly an aesthetic decision or if there was a functional reason for repainting it.

It was both, um, aesthetic in that we are hoping to attract tenants to the 200 building and received several comments from prospective tenants. In addition to tenant commentary in the retail building at 500, uh, trying to incentivize more people to enjoy the Plaza, uh, in addition to wear and tear on site. And the desire to match the original proposed, um, paint guidelines for the city.

Thank you. Not that it matters, but I think it looks lovely. I like the new uniform color.

I'm glad to hear it.

Commissioner Selin. I'd like to make a motion to approve staff's recommendation that the Sorry, I'm having trouble wording this. Make a motion to approve the Development Agreement Annual Review Report.

We have a motion and a second from Commissioner Headlee. I will call the vote. Seeing no further discussion, Vice Chair Baruzzi? Yes. Commissioner Erick? Yes. Commissioner Farrick? Yes. Commissioner Headlee?

Yes.

Commissioner Schindler?

Yes.

Commissioner Sillin? Yes. And I vote yes, which passes unanimously. Perfect, moving on to item G1 regarding a study session on Senate Bill 9 and zoning ordinance and subdivision ordinance amendments. At this public hearing, the commission may consider and provide feedback on potential amendments to the city's regulations for urban lot splits and two unit housing developments, chapters 15.31 and 16.77 of the municipal code for compliance with state law of Senate bills nine and 450 and potential options to streamline the development review process in single family zones. This item was continued from the April 27th meeting. And I believe Mr. Chan is the staff lead on this project. Are there any updates to the staff report?

Thank you, Chair Silverstein. Earlier today, staff provided a table summary of some single-family zoning parcels for your reference this evening that is at the dais and also at the back table.

Thank you. Before we move to public comment, are there any clarifying questions from the Commission on this item? Commissioner Erick.

Yes, through the chair, I have a clarifying question for staff. I just want to make sure that I'm understanding our zoning code properly in terms of floor area limits. So if staff could confirm that my understanding is correct, I would appreciate it. For single-family homes for lots under 5,000 square feet, there is no defined limit, and that's currently the floor area limit is set by the Planning Commission. For lots between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet, the floor area limit is a flat 2,800 square feet. And for lots above 7,000 square feet, the floor area limit is 2,800 square feet plus 25% of the difference between 7,000 square feet and the area of that lot. And so, for instance, for a lot of 8,000 square feet, 8,000 is... 1,000 more than 7,000 and 25% of that is 250. So the floor area limit for an 8,000 square foot lot would be 2,800 plus 250, which is 3,050 square feet. I'm happy to repeat any of that, but I would love if staff could confirm that that's true.

So we do have on our city website a zoning district summary sheet. It unfortunately doesn't lay out all of the different FALs for the single family zoning districts side by side. I can look them up one by one and tell you, but I don't feel confident confirming just off the top of my head for you what those are. There are six single family zoning districts, and I'm happy to go through each of them.

Okay, thank you. Any further clarifying questions? I just have one clarifying question on process. Is it my understanding correct that we're having the study session now, we'll provide feedback to staff, staff will incorporate said feedback into a formal recommendation, which would then come to the Planning Commission again, which would eventually go to the City Council for formal approval?

That is correct. That's the anticipated next steps. Staff does also have a presentation this evening, which is kind of a shortened version, maybe 75% of the last presentation, if you'd like to receive it this evening.

I think that'd be great just to follow up clarifying question on my previous one. Uh, are there any specific, I know that part of what we're discussing is compliance with California state law. Is there any formal deadline for which we are required to comply that we're meeting up against or is that relatively far in the future where it's functionally not as relevant?

So as the commissioner is aware, our SB9 ordinance is already out of date in text, given new legislative changes. So it is our intent in which to update this as soon as possible. I'll look to the city attorney's office if there's some other hard date that we can provide at this time.

As far as I know, we don't have anything from HCD yet, but we've been defaulting to the state standards to some, you know, where it is not compliant with our ordinance for now. So-

Fair, but there's no, you need to make sure that your city municipal code is in compliance by the state or else there are other ramifications. Great. Commissioner Sillin.

Thank you. I had a question about attachment H, which outlines the inconsistencies between existing standard and... I guess, what is required by SB 450. And so, for example, 2J talks about paved area for driveway and uncovered parking, what percentage is supposed to be of the front yard setback. And then the table shows that it's inconsistent. And then the notes say remove inconsistency. Single family zones do not uniformly have front yard paving and landscaping standards. So I just want to clarify, does that mean that we're going to be just completely removing this requirement from all zoning codes, or is it that we're going to fall back to whatever the requirement is of the underlying single-family zone, which may change depending on the zones?

Thank you for that question. So in consistent standards, we have to remove and then we need to put something back in their place if we'd like to do something that is locally specific in terms of, for example, that landscaping. For most single family zones, there isn't a landscaping requirement. So by defaulting to the underlying zone, then effectively there's none.

Got it. Okay, thanks. So when it says inconsistent, that means the inconsistency is between our SB9 requirement and the underlying zoning. It's not an inconsistency between, for example, R1S and R1U. Is that correct?

That's correct. The inconsistency is noting the changes that have occurred since the SB450 that say that you cannot apply any standards that are not uniform to the rest of the zoning district.

And sorry, just to clarify, when it says uniform, does that mean, for example, if we wanted to have a front yard paving landscaping requirement, it would need to be the same across all single family zones? Or could we have a different one, like say 30% for R1S, 40% for R1U? And then if you're doing an SB9 project, you would just, that's what you would be subject to.

I can offer an interpretation. So you can't apply any standard to an SB9 project that is not applied uniformly to the underlying zone. In the past, SB9 unit was a little bit more restrictive, and so the new rule is just any rule that you apply to an SB9 unit has to be applied uniformly to the underlying zone. Does that answer the question a little bit?

Yes, it does. Thank you. Commissioner Headley.

Yeah, I have a question about our intent tonight. Staff had asked us to look at three pieces. And I really have a question about the third piece, which was provide feedback regarding our interest in exploring the development of objective residential design standards. And I'm wondering... Is that like a full-blown discussion we're planning on having tonight? And the feedback that you shared, Commissioner Schindler was helpful from Redwood City and Palo Alto. Or are we just going to kind of at a high level, like, yes, we think we want to do this, go away and come back and make some recommendations to us, please.

I would suggest for the purposes of the study session this evening, we can keep it rather high level. We can take the planning commission's feedback, package it back to you in minutes, and then also we will need to bring the planning commission's feedback to the city council for guidance on scope, budgeting, timeline, all those other things. Thank you for the question.

Mr. Chan, do you want to go ahead with that staff report? Yes. Thank you.

So I'll ask the clerk to please pull up the presentation.

While we're waiting administratively, is it possible to turn on the air circulation fan in the ventilation system?

Yes, give me one moment.

Matthew we go to the display settings at the top, I think we should be able to do the pull down to do to the left of it, we can do view full screen. Are now on this page to the to the far right at the top. I'm so at the top with the display settings. In the top header in the middle. Okay, thank you so much. So as the Chair introduced our study session this evening on June 8 is a continuation of our April 27 study session. Next slide. So study sessions are a great opportunity for the planning commissioners and the public to be able to provide some preliminary feedback with the comments that staff will collect to help inform future review and consideration of amendments to our Menlo Park Municipal Code. The primary purpose of our future SB9 ordinance updates is to make sure that we have our municipal code up to date with state law, specifically Senate Bills 9 and 450, or SB9 and SB450. And staff does believe this to be an item for near-term action. The secondary purpose is to consider potential options to streamline the development review process for single-family dwellings and single-family zoning districts, such as potentially removing the use permit requirements for substandard lots, as well as the FAL or floor area limit establishment for lots which are less than 5,000 square feet in area. The Planning Commission's feedback this evening on the development review process for the single-family units will be shared with the City Council, as I mentioned, at a future date for then the City Council to provide direction and guidance for staff. Next slide, please. So as a quick overview, SB 9 was signed into law in 2021 and it became effective in 2022. The intent of the law is to help increase housing supply by making it easier for property owners in single family zones to develop additional housing, specifically more modestly priced homes and encouraging the construction of smaller homes on smaller lots. The law requires local governments to allow certain developments to be processed ministerially. And this means that if the proposal meets certain objective requirements, which are clear and measurable standards, then staff must approve it without discretionary review or public hearings. SB 9 amended the government code to require the ministerial review of a couple things, of housing development with no more than two primary units in a single family zone, also referred to as SB 9 units or two unit housing developments, as well as the subdivision of a parcel in a single family zone into two parcels, also referred to as an SB 9 lot split or urban lot split or both of those items that I just mentioned. Sb nine facilitates the creation of up to four units or two units maximum per newly created lot on a lot area that is typically used for one single family house I like to think of this as doing more with less or more housing opportunity with the same amount of land. Next slide please. SB 9 and Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, are also known as secondary dwelling units. They are commonly discussed in similar circles, but staff would like to point out that they work complementarily, but they're not the same thing. Both the SB 9 ordinance as well as the ADU ordinance work to provide a menu of options to help develop a mix of housing types to address different local housing needs. The SB9 development path provides an option for larger units and more primary units with ownership opportunity, while ADU regulations focus on constructing new housing units that would remain secondary in nature to an existing or proposed main residence on a lot. Regarding ADUs, the following items apply. For parcels that are not created through an urban lot split, general ADU regulations dictate the number of developable ADUs. And for parcels that were created through an urban lot split, consistent with SB 9, a local agency is not required to permit more than two dwelling units of any kind, primary or ADU, on a single family zone parcel. Sb nine and summary can be used to add new units to an existing parcel divide an existing house into multiple units or divide a parcel and also add units at the same time next slide please. Since the city's March 2023 adoption of formal SB9 regulations, the city has processed five urban lot split applications and is currently in the process of reviewing six active urban lot split applications. In consideration of all SB9 projects processed to date with and without urban lot splits, There have been 14 single-family zone lots with 14 primary residents that have redeveloped or are in the process of redeveloping into 25 single-family zone lots with 47 residences, which is comprised of 32 primary units as well as 15 ADUs. Next slide. Three years after SB 9 went into effect, in 2025, Senate Bill 450 or SB 450 went into effect. And SB 450 had the intent of modifying as well as strengthening SB 9. There are three main highlights for SB 450 that I'd like to point the Commission to this evening. First, SB 450 adds language which prevents a local agency from imposing objective zoning, subdivision, and or design standards on SB 9 development if they do not apply uniformly to development within the underlying zone. As a result, some jurisdictions have amended their local SB 9 ordinance to default to the standards of the underlying zone. Alternatively, a local agency can also consider amending the single family zone itself if they want to adopt objective standards that could be more permissive or less restrictive than what is currently allowed by SB 9. Second, SB 450 makes various changes to application processing timelines. SB 450 adds language that requires the local agency to consider and approve or deny an SB 9 application and an urban lot split within 60 calendar days after receipt of a complete application. Additionally, SB 450 adds language that if the local agency denies an SB 9 application or urban lot split application, and this would need to be due to very specific adverse impacts on public health and safety, it would be responsible for returning to the applicant a full set of comments, as well as a list of items that are defective or deficient, and a description of how the application could be remedied. Third, SB 450 does a cleanup for some unnecessary language regarding SB 9 projects, which includes the demolition of more than 25% of the existing exterior structural walls. Prior to SB 450, SB 9 required that proposed development would not include projects that have demolition of more than 25% of the existing exterior structural walls to qualify for ministerial approval. SB 450 removes this threshold and maintains the tenant protections of SB 9, as SB 9 is not applicable to any housing that has been occupied by a tenant within the past three years, regardless of the extent of proposed demolition. Next slide, please. This slide is a summary of an excerpt from Table 1 in the original April 27 staff report. It's attachment H in tonight's staff report. And this provides an overview of the state required basic development standards for SB 9 development. At a minimum, the city must abide by these development standards. The city can also explore enacting more permissive or less restrictive standards if they so choose. Next slide, please. So with the enactment of SB 450, most of the city's existing SB 9 development standards that are codified in Municipal Code Chapter 16.77, those are no longer consistent with state law as they include requirements that do not apply uniformly to other single-family zones. In other words, most of the city's existing SB 9 development standards are less permissive or more restrictive than other single-family zoning standards and thereby are not enforceable at this time. The SB9 ordinance update effort has two main categories of next steps, which staff seeks Planning Commission feedback for this evening. And these categories, as we mentioned a few moments ago, are the consistent standards as well as the inconsistent standards. For consistent standards where existing SB 9 standards remain consistent with state law, they could be allowed to remain, and the Planning Commission may consider providing feedback to explore a more permissive or less restrictive standard. For inconsistent standards, as I mentioned, those would be removed as they're no longer enforceable, but the Planning Commission can provide additional feedback, and I'll talk about that in just a moment.

Next slide.

So while the inconsistent standards will be removed, the Planning Commission could consider incorporating the intent behind their original adoption. And these could be intense, such as promoting privacy between neighboring structures, reducing over massing with limited articulation, supporting high-quality design and neighborhood compatibility through potential development of some objective residential design standards that could apply uniformly to all single-family zones, especially as it relates to development on smaller lots and the proximity of development to neighboring structures, which could come about as a result of SB 9 applications. It is possible to explore the development of tiered standards that apply to varying lot sizes, for example, standards that apply to zero to 5000 square feet lots 5001 to 10,000 and so on. That we could also look at blanket standards blanket standards that apply uniformly to all single family lots such as obscure glazing or screening for privacy, which has been previously mentioned that other planning Commission meetings. The Planning Commission is requested to provide this feedback regarding the potential development of these objective development standards. And just staff would like to note that this would be in a separate process independent of the SB9 ordinance update. The Commission's feedback would be shared with the City Council to then provide a direction to staff for next steps. Next slide, please. So having given a summary of the primary intent of tonight's study session, I'd like to talk now about the secondary intent. The secondary intent is to consider potential options to streamline the housing development review process for single-family zones. There has been community interest over the years in modifying the use permit requirements for development on substandard lots. The use permit process in Assam is a discretionary process that requires a public hearing for development projects. similar to a design review. Complementary to the intent of SB 9 and SB 450 to streamline housing development in single-family zones, staff has preliminarily identified two use permit requirements or use permit triggers for discussion. The first option is to consider removing the use permit requirement for development on substandard lots. And the second option is to consider removing use permit requirements for establishing the FAL or the floor area limit for lots which are 5,000 square feet or less. Next slide, please. So tonight's study session provides an opportunity for the Planning Commission, as well as the public, to provide some preliminary feedback. Staff will collect these comments to inform our future review and consideration of these amendments to our municipal code. As a reminder, the primary purpose for this evening is to update the SB9 ordinance for consistency, and then we also talk about that secondary intent as well. There are some additional questions and items for the Planning Commission to consider that are shown in your staff report, and we can pull them up on the slides if helpful. In sum, the Planning Commission is requested to provide feedback for the existing SB 9 development standards, as well as desirable next steps. Specifically, are there basic SB 9 development standards that could be explored with the intent of being more permissive or less restrictive than state law? That's an option. The second request this evening is for the Planning Commission to provide feedback on interest to modify or remove the use permit requirements for development on substandard lots and FAL establishment for lots which are less than 5,000 square feet in area. And this would be through a separate process than SB9 ordinance update. And the third is to provide feedback regarding the interest to develop some objective residential design standards that would apply uniformly to all single family zones. With that, I'll pause the presentation and we are available for your questions. Thank you.

Are there any further clarifying questions before we move to public comment? Mr. Ball, can you please open public comment for this item? Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Silverstein. At this time, if any member of the public in the council chambers wishes to provide a public comment on this item, please provide me with your comment card from the back of the table. If you are joining via Zoom, please press the hand icon, or if calling in, please press star nine on your keypad, and we will be notified of your desire to speak. This will be the final call for public comment. Give me one moment while I check. OK, it looks like we don't have any public comments. So we can move on.

Great, we can move to commission discussion. Before I ask for any specific comments, I wanted to make a note of procedure. We had a conversation last December about, we had a study session about ADUs that then we kind of talked about generally what we wanted. And then that came before the planning commission in terms of a formal recommendation, which then went to city council. And as part of that discussion, there was a little bit of, ambiguity on the level of formality to which those recommendations came and I think there was some question on why wasn't my recommendation considered versus another one and who agreed to what and so If any commissioner feels strongly to formalize their recommendation to staff about this process, then I would encourage them to make a motion that we can vote on. That motion would purely be a formal recommendation to staff that we think you should incorporate X, Y, and Z in terms of either a floor limit for less than 5,000 square feet or anything there. And so that is a mechanism that we can use in order to make our recommendations official as opposed to colloquial.

Can I jump in? I looked up the definition of an action in the Brown Act, and it is a collective decision of the majority of the board made on a order, motion, resolution, or ordinance. So in this case, I might recommend actually that we frame the... If you want a way to organize the recommendations, basically, you want a way to... Some way to formalize, I might recommend doing a straw poll as opposed to a formal vote, because I do think when looking at the definition of an action, if there is a motion and a vote, I think we might be, when I looked it up after we spoke, that we might be outside the scope of that based on how it's agendized. So I think a straw poll like, hey, you know, a non-binding show of hands is, could be okay, but not a formal vote.

Fair. If any commissioner feels strongly that they would like their recommendation or piece of feedback to be heeded more stringently, then feel free to ask for a straw poll among the commission in order to ensure that we as a collective body generally, although not structurally, support said recommendation. Commissioner Sillin.

Thank you. So if we go that route, do we need some sort of commitment from staff that based upon the straw poll, it will be included in the minutes or what have you?

Anything can be included in the minutes, and we can ensure that staff would not be able to guarantee that anything we recommend would therefore be incorporated into the next round of recommendations. Although I'm assuming they would hope to, but I don't know if that would be a formal commitment.

Well, I guess when you're talking about, um, the ADU example and what the issue was there, I mean, from what I think I'm referring to, maybe the staff report that summarized the previous meeting and said like, okay, these are the things that commissioners wanted and, um, So the straw poll is meant to enshrine certain things in that list, perhaps?

Yeah, the straw poll is meant to ensure that there is not ambiguity as to the level of interest that commissioners have on any specific item. If someone says something as a recommendation, it might be interpreted as staff as something very strongly that is generally agreed upon, or it might not be. And so this is a mechanism for us to gather general support across the body. Okay, that makes sense.

Commissioner Schindler. Thank you. Just as a related procedural question, can you tell us how detailed the meeting, which form of note taking will be used to document this conversation? Obviously, sometimes there are near verbatim notes and sometimes there are summarized notes.

Staff anticipates this will be a summary version style notes.

Okay, thank you for clarifying that. In that case, I really appreciate the acknowledgement of how one would bring something to a headline and the level of support indicated for it.

Great. I'm happy to open the floor to any commissioner comments. I think in terms of structural, as per the staff report, I think we can generally go in the direction of SB9 and then permit streamlining and then objective design standards as per the three things we want to talk about. But if anyone wants to kick us off, feel free to do so. Commissioner Sillin, thank you.

Thank you. Okay, so I guess my general comment on SB 9 and this new update from the legislature is that, you know, in the staff report, it mentioned SB 9 was passed by the legislature to encourage people to build more homes. The kind of background from that, from the legislature, this isn't a direct quote, but the California legislature has deemed that California is in a housing crisis. has a housing shortage currently. And so it's a statewide priority to build more housing of different kinds in different places. Um, and so I personally agree with that position. And I think that, um, while when we talk about Rena goals and, um, big numbers in regards to arena goals. Often it's tempting to think of, you know, bigger buildings as the way out of our housing shortage. But on the other hand, bigger buildings and we, you know, the other thing is, um, We just reviewed downtown and found out that we're expecting negative square feet downtown. I saw another report that Palo Alto has, in their downtown, approved like five new housing units in the past eight years. So there's just been very little building going on historically for decades. And so... if we put all of our arena units in one tower, it'd be a huge tower. But even if it was a number of towers, that's a big change to the community. Something like SB9, I believe, is a way to add more housing units in a more relatively gentle fashion. I don't think if you own a single-family home and you're next in one of these lots, you might not agree with that position. But as a general sense, we're talking about projects that... If you take a lot and you look at how much square footage is allowed on there right now, SB9 is not materially... It's not saying you can do triple that, you can build something three times its height. It's generally saying you can build something about that size, but instead of one housing unit, it can be two, three, or four. And so I think that... we as a city should be receptive to those types of projects as a way to slowly increase density around the city rather than having big proposals that put it all in one place. And we may still see those proposals. I'm not saying this will make them go away, but I'm just saying this could be another way to show our commitment to adding more housing in the city in a number of different ways. And I'm encouraged by the staff data, even between the previous meeting when we continued this item and this meeting, there have been two new SB9 projects. It looks like even before we're updating the ordinance to be in compliance with state law, there are people taking us up on SB9 projects. Um, and we're seeing something like a three X increase in housing units on a given lot versus what you would build if it was just, you know, the way it is now a single family home lot. Um, so yeah, in general, I just wanted to state that I'm supportive of SB nine projects. I think they're generally a positive thing. And what I would like to speak about tonight with other commissioners is how, as the staff report mentions, how can we potentially be more flexible than what the state minimums are oftentimes the state law says you know this is the minimum but you can go over that and i think here we have an opportunity to do that as a city to sort of lean into this uh type of construction um and i have some ideas but i'll let others speak before we get into the details thank you

I will follow up with that just to reiterate that when we talked about ADUs and updating our ADU ordinance, the staff recommendation, and this is my opinion, was relatively conservative. And there was conversation around getting more creative on ADUs as a mechanism for And I believe it was Commissioner Schindler who mentioned all the tools in our toolbox that we have. And a lot of that conversation was centered around how ADUs are perhaps not the right tool. And it was very explicit in that meeting that SB9 was a primary tool for what we were talking about. And there was a lot of justification on why we might want to be conservative with ADUs. And that justification was very explicitly SB9 exists. Lot splits are the reason we can go use that avenue as the mechanism in order to increase density to Commissioner Sillin's point, not with big single projects, but throughout Menlo Park. And I want to remind the commission that like, that's what we've told ourselves is SB nine is the opportunity we have in order to do that. And I hope we don't squander it. Okay.

Thank you. Since everyone is speechless, I, uh, through the chair, we'll ask a couple of questions for staff if that's okay. Yes. Um, thank you. So, uh, Mr. Chan, yeah, I was just hoping you could give us a bit more background on the projects that have come in thus far. And yeah, full disclosure, we did correspond over email regarding this, but I think it would benefit the rest of the commission and the public to hear some of this information. which is not always available. Not every homeowner is going to come to the city saying, here's exactly what I plan to do with these units. But yeah, I think, again, going back to what I said, my desire would be to see every single person taking advantage of SB9 doing the maximum number of units, which would be four. And I think... Primary units would generally be in the long run more beneficial from a housing unit perspective because the homeowner gets more flexibility with those. They could... rent them, sell them, whatever. Whereas if you're doing, let's say, two primary homes, two ADUs, you would have less ability to do anything with the ADUs separately. So my question is, yeah, what information can you give us as to the intent of homeowners that are applying for SB9 projects? What are they planning on doing with the units once they're built? And if there's any color you could give us to... why folks are opting for the configurations that we're seeing. For example, it looks like most of them are not doing a condo map, which tells me they're not, at least it seems like they're not intending to sell each unit separately. If it's more than one unit on a lot, yeah, I'll leave it at that.

Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Silin, and thank you for your advanced coordination and communication for these questions. So some of the things that we corresponded about, you asked about the intent for some of these SB9-related applications. So generally, when applicants come to the counter, they don't usually tell us everything, which is not unsurprising. In terms of if I had to break it down into two buckets of people that pursue SB9, it's usually in the intent for multi-generational housing or extra rental income. So those are the big two buckets. And if I had to say in terms of how much of each, I think it's about 50-50 in terms of interest that is expressed when people come, whether or not those plans, desires, needs change over time, that frequently does happen. But yeah, that's the general sense I did discuss with other of my colleagues today, and they also agreed. In terms of why, for example, when we look at the approved and active projects overview, why there's only two of those projects on that list, which have four primary units, those projects came in before the SB 450 update. when there were some more strict standards. So that might be a reason why those people developed into the primary unit organization in terms of why there are more ADUs than primary units. I think generally people have a better grasp of the ADU ordinance laws, SB 9 and developing primary units. That's something that is, I think, less spoken about, less popular in normal discourse. Of course, we hope to change that with our SB 9 ordinance update and incentivize different housing types for different needs.

Thank you. So I wanted to add a little bit more color to my sort of thinking on SB 9. A while back, I was looking into SB 9 as sort of an investment opportunity when it was just a new law. I thought, oh, it'd be great to look for opportunities to add homes in this kind of small scale way. The main issues that I ran into exploring up and down the peninsula is that... So first of all, buying a home, a single family home, tearing it down, demolishing it rather, turning it into two... is still very expensive. So if you're looking at it from a rental perspective, it's often not going to be financially feasible to do that, meaning purchase the home, turn into two, and rent out The second one, you do have to be an owner-occupant of the first one, but even if you didn't, it still wouldn't really make sense given the rents and the purchase price. In order to sell it, at least at the time, many cities did not allow condo mapping at all. For example, Redwood City or Mountain View. I think it's great that we in Menlo Park have made it a ministerial process to get the condo map since we do have... For example, on my street partridge, there are two lots where, um, and I live on one where the homes are Baptist condos, meaning it's one lot. It's R2. There are two detached homes on the lot. Each person owns their home, um, and they're sold separately. Um, so some cities don't, don't allow that, but Menlo park does. So then, um, You know, I think we, especially since we have those types of housing units already in Menlo Park, ICSB 9 is sort of encouraging that type of housing to continue. One example I gave is Harvard Avenue. If you look at our zoning map, it's R2, sort of, there's one block where it's R2 halfway down the street. And then I'm not sure what the historic reason is, but we just stopped halfway down the rest of the street as R2. R1 so that is an example where you might look at those R1 homes and say oh well there's already these other R2 kind of two homes on one lot situations why don't we just continue that down to the end of the street that I think are interesting and so yeah the other thing that starts playing into this is sort of risk and so even if you could sell the homes and you don't have to rent them the question becomes, if I buy a single-family home, Why would I, instead of building one, build two, given that even with SP450, the total amount of square footage I get is pretty much the same. All the other development standards are the same. So essentially, you could have one big house or two small ones. And we know, at least in Menlo Park, people are definitely buying up one big one. So especially as you get further away from these R2 streets, I think... I'm guessing, and that might explain some of the data we're seeing with regards to condo mapping. And Mr. Chan saying a lot of these are kind of multi-generational opportunities, because if you're sort of thinking of this from like a speculative standpoint, it still becomes kind of risky. If you're on an entire street full of single family homes, you take that risk of building two instead of one, it's going to cost you more. You have to do two electricity connections, sewer, water, all those different things. You might need a longer driveway. There's just a lot of other things that come into play. Potentially fees go up. And so in order for that to be worth it, you would need to know that you can for sure sell that second home. And there might be a question of like, well, if it's the only one on the street, people might not like that. So what I would recommend want us to consider is what can we do given those constraints? What can we do to still encourage people in the face of all those things to build the two homes instead of the one big one? And I think it really comes down to... well, money, and in this case money would be square footage. So I believe previously I've shared the article about cities like Portland, for example, where you actually get a little bit more square footage the more units you build. So that's one option we could consider. There's building coverage, there's FAR, and then there's height. Those are all different things where we could give the property owner a little bit more as an incentive for building the additional unit or units so that they're more encouraged to build those additional units versus just a bigger single family home versus what was there previously. I think other things we could look at would be fees and I don't have a good understanding of what our fees are for a single family home, demolish, build a new single family home versus single family home, demolish, build two. But if there is a big difference, that could be an opportunity for us to, again, either reduce the difference or even flip it so that building two is more favorable. So those are just some general ideas to throw out. Curious what other commissioners think.

Vice Chair Baruzzi.

Yeah, one thing that, just to piggyback off that, I've also been looking at Portland to try to understand more about ways to incentivize the development of multiple smaller properties on a piece of land. And I actually sent an article about that to Ms. Sandmeier earlier today. I think that that's something we should explore, like additional floor area allowance for somebody who's willing to build multiple smaller units with an SB9. I think that seems, yeah, I would plus one that. The other thing I was going to inquire about, but I think I've already got my answer, is the owner occupancy requirement. It really seems as though the state law is pretty ironclad on that. Is that accurate to the staff?

Thank you, Vice Chair Peruzzi. So one of the basic requirements for SB 9, SB 450 is that parcel owners must occupy one of the units as their principal residence for a minimum of three years from the date of the urban lot split approval. And that is also ensured by a signed affidavit, which we require upon application submission.

Yeah, that was my understanding as well. So I'll just say that I don't think it's within our purview tonight, but we do see a lot of what I would say are investor redevelopments in our city. We had one earlier this evening, I think, or at least it was somebody who's come with many of these developments through the city. We see a lot of Thomas James homes. And I think it's a little bit strange and regrettable that that's totally allowable and fine, that people can sort of speculate, to use a negative loaded term, on single-family homes and rebuild them with relative ease. And in fact, they can get so good at it that they can get them through planning faster than an individual architect who's not as accustomed to our processes. it becomes much more complicated for somebody to take the same lot and rebuild it with two homes or four. I just find that regrettable. And I think just as a policy matter, our city might, again, want to explore down the road other ways of adding gentle density that don't depend on SB 9 or the ADU laws.

What are the interactions of construction time with owner occupancy? If I split my lot and it takes two years to construct whatever is new, do I now have a one year remaining to occupy that or do I have three years remaining?

I would believe that that owner occupancy requirement would come after your certificate of occupancy when you can actually go into the unit. Does that answer your question? If that's the correct answer, it does.

I was just reading back the specific text that you outlined. It said three years from the date of the lot split itself, and I wasn't sure if that started the clock.

I'll look to our city attorney's office in case there's some more information about the timeframe for that. Commissioner Schindler might have more context.

And if I may piggyback on questions for the city attorney, just following up on threads that have already been laid out. I'm curious with regard to owner occupancy, what the state's interpretation of a less restrictive or more permissive version of that would be. So if we chose to be less restrictive and more permissive, which is our theme for tonight, with that requirement, what do we think the state would, what would that be in the eyes of the state?

I think that you can't for this one. I think that this is a requirement by state law that would preempt local ordinances. So I could look into it a little bit more, but my read is that this is a sort of baseline requirement. It's not something that's, it's not one of the lists. It's one of the items that's allowed in a local ordinance necessarily. But I'm still looking into the timing question.

Okay.

And then one other thing I wanted to add to the conversation, while I agree with most everything that Commissioner Sillin mentioned, is another potential vector of permissibility is And I want to ask if this is even possible, but one of the thoughts in my head is, can we eliminate any side setbacks between the properties being split? So if I have an existing parcel and I want to build two townhomes on them that share a wall... I would not be able to encroach on either neighbor on either side, but I would be able to, because I own both of those, I would be able to eliminate any required setback between those two parcels, which would de facto create a townhouse problem. structure. Obviously, anyone buying into that would know what they're getting themselves into after the lot split. And so I want to add that to our discussion, assuming that that would be allowable as one of the avenues that we can be more permissible than the state minimum requirements.

Thank you chair silverstein um so that is actually already, thank you for bringing that up that's actually one of already the basic as as be nine as before 50 state standards so taking a look at table one in this would be the April 27 staff report so on. On page five of that report in that table it's towards the second to bottom bro i'll just read it because I believe you'll. shed some light on to the question proposed housing may include connected structures as long as they comply with building code safety standards and are sufficient to allow separate conveyance of primary dwellings, so it is possible for them to be connected.

When you say possible, that means that regardless of what we do, that is objectively possible as per any SB 9 lot split per state law.

That's a basic state standard. Thank you. Thank you for the clarification.

Commissioner Eric. Thank you, Chair. I agree with most everything that has been said by my commissioners so far, and I just want to add some thoughts. Staff, I think, asked for feedback along three dimensions, and I'll try and follow that, although these are somewhat interrelated. It might bleed a little bit. In terms of the feedback regarding SB9, I think all of the things that staff has proposed to bring us into compliance are obviously good. I would be following up on some other comments in favor of adjusting the way we do floor area limits. So I sort of asked this in my clarifying question, but just to repeat currently under 5,000 square feet, there's no limit that has to be done by a use permit on a case-by-case basis with planning commission. From 5,000 to 7,000 square feet, there's a flat number, and then it scales sort of beyond 7,000 square feet. I would be in favor of basically using that same mechanism to Set a floor area limit below 5000 square feet. So the way it works above 7000 square feet is you get 25% of the difference between 7000 and whatever your lot is. And so I would suggest that we do the same below 5000 square feet. So if your lot was 4000 square feet. The difference between 5,000 and 4,001,000 and 25% of that is 250. So your floor area limit would be 2,800 square feet. Minus 250 and I think that uses existing city. Processes and the reason I like that in addition to. I think giving a greater floor area limit is that, and this will be a theme throughout my comments, I think providing certainty in this process in the form of that, in the form of ministerial approvals where conditional approvals would have been true before, I think is good. So I would be in favor of doing that. Uh, citywide as it pertains to SB nine. And I think some of the comments made by other commissioners, I think we could use that same mechanism. Um, to incentivize, for instance, four units instead of two. Uh, and so. I would be in favor of setting that floor area limit for lots under 5,000 square feet within the city, but essentially reducing the floor area limit by less if you build more than two units on your SB9 lot. So instead of taking 25% away from the difference, you could take 10% away from the difference in order to incentivize the type of housing I think we want to see. I will also note that in addition to I think this suggestion around floor area limits, I think we should consider making changes for lots under 5,000 square feet to other barriers to development like setbacks like the daylight plane and other elements like that. I think there's an opportunity to follow some of the homework that the state has already done with regards to these things in particular setbacks. So I think under a certain number of square feet, I would say 5,000, we could look at a four foot rear and side setbacks that the state specifies for SB nine and potentially look at a sliding front setback. That's not a flat 20 feet, but it's instead something like 15% of the depth of the lot. Uh, because I don't want it to be the case that we. Um, decide to increase the floor area limit, but then that actually doesn't matter because you run into all of these other zoning blockers. Um, and I think all of those dimensions, this would be my feedback to staff are all of those levers are available to us. both citywide, but also in the context of SB 9 to incentivize the type of housing that we want to see if we're being more permissive than state law. Okay, those are my comments, I think, on point one that staff brought up. Point two, I believe, was around substandard lots. We have talked about this, or we have asked about it a lot on planning commission. And so I think I'll speak for me that, you know, I think I have somewhat strong feelings on this matter, but we have not had a chance to talk about it robustly because of the Brown Act. So I like to, through the chair, ask staff questions. If I am a planning commissioner that would like to see us effectively remove the concept of substandard lots from our city code. you as staff see a lot more development applications day-to-day than me. You live in this. You are entrusted by everyone in our city to hold a professional opinion about using that experience. What are the best reasons, in your opinion, why we should not remove the concept of substandard lots?

And...

Potentially a different variant of that question, which you can answer in addition to or as well, is what are the difficulties that you would foresee if we did that in the work that you do that we do not see and we're not experts in?

Thank you, Commissioner Eric. That's a big question. I will give my, I guess, personal, professional opinion for this. In terms of looking at ways to streamline housing development, we've identified these preliminary two options. There are options. There could be more options, but these are the two that we've seen and heard from time and time again. Also, the substandard lots use permit, that's the most common type of application this body sees. So we're looking at different ways that we could streamline the development review process. If there's something that could be made from a discretionary process to a ministerial process, generally that requires... results in a quicker timeframe, which is sometimes cheaper to develop. So overall supporting housing production. These are some of themes that we also echoed in the housing element. So we're following some of these different things that we've laid out in our general plan as like tidbits of different ways that we could make more housing in different types for different needs. in terms of like if we got rid of the substandard lots use permit requirement what would be the immediate ripple effect well i think sometimes you hear in these commission meetings this discretionary review process a very valuable forum for neighbors to be able to come review the plans and talk about their different feedback whether it be privacy massing aesthetics So it would remove that forum and turn it into a ministerial process. So that is something that should be weighed. Thank you.

That's a helpful answer.

I am wondering, other than the difference in how use permit versus building permit for two-story single-family residences are treated, what other mechanisms throughout Menlo Park planning differentiates a standard versus a substandard lot. So if the concept of some standard didn't exist, is it purely these discretionary reviews that we're talking about? Or are there other downstream ramifications that we don't even necessarily have visibility to if there wasn't such a thing as a lot minimum, for example?

The main difference is the requirement for a use permit. We actually have on the planning division website, if you'd like to take a look, it's under the guidelines and ordinance excerpts. It's literally a flowchart that says, when is a use permit required for single family development? So that is a common flowchart. If someone didn't have a project that didn't need to go through that discretionary review process, then it would be straight to building permit.

I'm familiar with that flowchart, but I guess I was wondering, is there anything else that is not on that flowchart that someone might say, oh, your lot is substandard, therefore this random thing that we didn't think about or that doesn't necessarily come before planning has to be considered? Or is it purely this is the scope of which substandard lots get applied?

Yeah. So substandard lots is one topic. There's also nonconforming structures. So that could be an avenue. There could also be instances where someone's requesting a variance. So those are the other two types I can think of off the top of my head.

Thank you.

Sorry, I'm just gonna go for it.

Thank you. Okay. I'll just state simply that I am strongly in favor of removing the concept of substandard lots from our zoning code. I defer to staff on the most expedient mechanism to do that. But I'm in favor of that for two reasons. First, the amount of extra time that it takes for staff, this commission, residents to... deal with substandard lots is substantial. And we hear all the time how bandwidth constrained staff is in working on projects for our city. And I am deeply sympathetic to that concern. This commission, for as long as I've been on it, has made it a practice of effectively applying our zoning standards uniformly to substandard lots and not treating them so differently than non-substandard lots for reasons of fairness. And I think codifying that in our zoning code would both be more clear for everyone and also would save a substantial amount of time, which our city needs desperately. The second reason is just an equity issue. I think it's unfair to effectively punish people who have smaller lots and And it is, you know, for those who are listening in for the first time, I'll, you know, maybe two of you, there are a lot of substandard lots in our city. The language makes it seems like this is an exception, but almost, you know, certainly greater than 50% of the lots in my neighborhood are definitely substandard, probably more than that. And so I think we're effectively just punishing and requiring more time for those lots and, I will say here, and again, I want to be careful how I say this, because I don't think anyone who holds a different opinion than mine is necessarily holding a different opinion for this reason. But I think over time, we have asked why this zoning ordinance exists. And I think there are probably several different reasons. But I think if you look into the history of zoning codes in our country, and in California in particular, zoning laws around smaller lots have a pretty documented history of being fairly racist in nature, or at least desiring to keep certain people out of certain areas. I think it's impossible to know whether Menlo Park and when this was created had that intent or not, but I think it's pretty clear in my eyes that that's something that was very common and whether or not we looked at that in the specific, if we were even following the zoning codes of surrounding cities or best practices at the time, um, that would have incorporated, I think some fairly regressive and regrettable zoning, um, Practice. So I am strongly in favor of removing substandard lots. That's point two that staff asked for. Point three, which I'll be quick on, is design standards. I have less of a strong opinion on taking up design standards. I think certainty is good. And if other commissioners or the city wants to do that, I'm certainly open to it. I don't think I do believe strongly that we should not make it a condition of removing substandard lots. The city can take that up whenever it wants, and if we want to, we should, but I don't think it's right to make a robust design standard process, a condition of the substandard lot change, you know, in this chicken and egg problem of we don't have time to review the substandard lot policy, but we also don't have time to review our things, then we'd be adding, I don't know, a chicken and egg and a farmer to that. And so I don't think we should do that. But if we want to consider design standards separately, then I have no issue there. I would be very curious as to how my other commissioners feel about all of this. I wanted to run through it just in the interest of getting thoughts out there. Thanks.

Commissioner Headley.

Yeah, this was super helpful. And through the chair, I was actually curious, Commissioner Eric, if you had an opinion on the floor area, the FAL piece on section two, maybe you said it, but I missed it. Can you repeat again your view on that?

Sorry, can you... Let's see.

So for that second option, my notes here are that staff wanted us to consider removing the permit requirements for substandard lots, which you addressed by saying let's just not have substandard lots. And they also had number two was the floor area limit establishment for lots less than 5,000. Yes, so I...

I would be in favor, for instance, of establishing a four area limit for lots less than 5,000 square feet. That is 2,800 square feet minus 25% of the difference between 5,000 square feet in the area of that lot citywide. And then I would be interested in exploring variance to that as a way of incentivizing four units instead of two on SB9 lots.

Commissioner Solon.

Thank you. Um, so, uh, I do want to voice my agreement with, um, most things commissioner just proposed specifically with regards to substandard lots. I'm definitely on board with removing that. I think where I come at it from is, yeah, just my history of being a planning commissioner. It seems like, um, And this is very anecdotal. I would love to hear data from staff. And I would actually recommend that when staff brings this item to council, it would be great to have data on how many substandard lots applications have come before planning commission, let's say for the past three years per year. And how many of those were approved versus denied? And how many of those even had public comment? Because my sense is we are approving just about every single one. And then a lot of them don't have any public comment. They kind of just come in and they come and go. And yeah, another data point could be how many of them meet our zoning standards? Because it seems like... developers and homeowners are not using that as an opportunity to propose something outside of our usual requirements with regards to setbacks and heights and things like that. So it's pretty much just a regular project is what it seems to me, with some exceptions. So, yeah, I'm on board with that. And with far under 5 000 square feet or fal i'm sorry i'm not using the right one um i'm on board with that proposal as well um i think with development standards i really appreciate uh commissioner schindler sharing the examples from redwood city and palo alto i was living in redwood city when they started gathering the information for that it was interesting to see the outcome of it um My interpretation of those was that the Redwood City one was, while interesting, it kind of just seemed like general guidelines, please, if you could, whereas Palo Alto's were very specific. And my understanding is for SB9 especially, we have to have objective design standards that are clear-cut. It's not something where you could sort of not be sure what what we're requiring so if we do do design standards i would definitely favor that type where it's fairly specific i appreciated the amount of detail in palo alto's design standards i wonder what it would take to get to that point i believe they have a whole separate like architectural review board that might have worked on those i'm not sure but um I'll say this, I appreciate consistency and I like when... I think one of the things you notice when you go to Europe, old towns, there's just sort of a consistency of elements throughout a city block. I think on one hand, especially in Los Angeles, there is something Californian to the fact of one block having all kinds of different architecture on it. But I would personally say that aesthetically, when I go through certain neighborhoods in Palo Alto, it is really nice how they all have, you know, certain elements that are shared. And so I can see maybe based on those design standards, how they got there. So I would love to see that. I agree with Commissioner Eric, though, that would seem like a huge undertaking and I would definitely not make that a top priority by any means. And so I just had a few questions for staff. the chair regarding some of these things. So regarding substandard lots, well, first of all, Mr. Chan, I heard you say that these are the most common type of applications you see. I was hoping you could clarify if I heard that correctly and what you meant by that. Is that just amongst new construction, single-family home construction, or in general. And yeah, I was just hoping for a little more color as to how much staff time this takes up. And yeah, we do often hear, you know, in council priority setting, there's always limitation on staff time. So I'd be curious to know how much staff time would be freed up by some of these changes. And for members of the public, like right now, homes, and I don't know if this is related to substandard lots or not, they get a notice that there's a proposed project near them. Would that type of process, does that process exist if it's not a substandard lot that requires a hearing? And if not, let's say a neighbor has somebody, I guess how does staff deal today with projects that don't require a hearing from planning commission and a neighbor has a concern and they're not able to resolve it with the applicant? Is there some sort of city staff pathway for those things? I would just be curious.

Thank you, Commissioner Sillin. I'll point to some information that we gathered in our April 27 staff report that might be able to shed some light. So when I said this is the most common type of application, it certainly seems like this is the most common type of use permit applications that the Planning Commission sees. Certainly, you see other things like even tonight, the development review agreement and all types of other projects, including this one. But in terms of use permits, the development of two-story homes on substandard lots is the most common. Taking a look at page seven of the staff report, and I'm referring to that because that's where I have the numbers written down. In 2024, there were 19 public hearings for use permit applications for development of two-story homes on substandard lots. In 2025, there were 18, I think. So I think you could generally say between 15 to 20 of these types of applications per year. And then with regard to the establishment of the FAL for lots less than 5,000 square feet, we had three in the last two years, two in one year and then one in the second year. In terms of noticing, so for projects that don't require discretionary review, there is still a section of our municipal code, it's chapter 16.85, which is notices for single-family residential development, which requires staff to provide a courtesy notice for any type of demolition, new construction, and remodels with additions, and this is done to all contiguous properties. So like any time, for example, you submit a building permit application for one of these Scopes of Works, your contiguous neighbors would get notified as a courtesy. If sometimes issues arise between neighbors, we encourage them to discuss and usually there's a good resolution that comes out of it. And if there isn't, ultimately it is a ministerial process. So if they meet the building code requirements, zoning code requirements, then staff is obligated to approve the application.

Okay, thank you. I will yield to other commissioners. I just want to make a quick note that my math shows that only about 4% of parcels, based on the data sent to us by Mr. Chan before the meeting, roughly 4% of parcels, single family parcels, are under 5,000 square feet. So that kind of... echoes why we might not see as many of those applications before plan commission versus substandard lots of which there are much more as a percentage.

Just as a note, we might see more applications for less than 5,000 square feet if we had more certain development regulations for developers.

Commissioner or Vice Chair Beruzzi.

I wanted to dig into design standards a little bit because Probably a number of us have anecdata about how long the review process can take in Menlo Park sometimes, and I'm sure other cities have similar, you know, but I'm not saying this is unique to Menlo Park, but if one has a friend who's been trying to go through redevelopment, one probably has a friend who said, oh my gosh, it just takes forever. And it seems like it's been two years now, yada, yada, yada. Is there a universe in which our adopting objective design standards could streamline that process for staff? So I'm curious if somebody's substantially, significantly redeveloping their property, whether or not it's coming to planning. I feel like there's probably typically a lot of back and forth with our planning department. Is that in part because we don't have objective design standards?

Thank you for the question, Commissioner Beruzzi. I can speak from my own personal experience having worked in different cities, also as a staff planner and contract planner. I would say the review times in Menlo Park, they're actually much quicker, believe it or not, than other jurisdictions that I've worked in, either in San Mateo County or Marin County. Also serving as a contract planner for different municipalities in the Los Angeles region. I think when you hear anecdotes of like processing time being extended, a lot of the times applicants fail to mention that once the city issues some corrections, it's on their own as on their time schedule to return feedback. And that includes their independent coordination with their project teams. So city staff, we have a responsibility with the Permit Streamlining Act. When you submit something, we review and get you comments back within 30 days generally. Usually it's less than that. Sometimes it takes up to the 30 days, but we always hit that mark. But then from day 31 onward, sometimes that could be one month, two months, six months, a year from the time applicants respond. But then when they respond again, it's another 30-day clock for us to get comments back. So I would say that the comments that are division from planning, building, other divisions, they're not anything above and beyond what other municipalities would do. They're not anything like, I would say, especially onerous or anything, but it just takes, development takes time and people are motivated to work at different speeds is what I found in my experience.

Thank you, and that's helpful context, and I hope I didn't, I certainly didn't mean to imply that our division is uniquely not good at this. But I am curious about whether or not some of those back and forth processes could be curtailed if we had objective design standards. I realize this is a qualitative question, but you know, For to our city planners multiple how much of the going back and forth that you do is partly because we haven't adopted really clear standards as opposed to just other things that would probably still be happening regardless.

My honest response is that I think those back and forth, they would happen regardless. Right now, we don't have these objective design standards and we're at the timelines we're at, which can vary greatly from one project to another. But I think in terms of like how much... time could the development of objective design standards add or remove from the development timeframe. It just depends how extensive those standards are. For example, if it's like one standard, like privacy glazing on Windows, that's something we can easily check for. But if it's like a whole list of things, That can also add to an applicant's development time to prepare their project according to those standards, revise them. So, I mean, typically if there's more rules on the books, then it takes longer to develop an application. You can also see it another way. If there's more rules and it's very clear, it also can give you a framework to develop your project. I think it varies greatly from person to person how they like to develop their application and the methods that they work at.

Okay, thanks.

Commissioner Schindler. Thank you, Chair. I'm going to try and structure my feedback aligned with the structure that staff asked for feedback in following the lead of Commissioner Eric. And So starting with SB 9, then talking about the two components of substandard lots, and then talking about objective design standards. So process-wise, I would be strongly in favor of the next step being draft SB9 ordinance language rather than another study session. Both of those options were mentioned in the staff report. My reason for that is that I do think there's... public value in getting these ordinances updated. I know there's not necessarily an HCD-driven thing. There's not necessarily a legal requirement. But as we all are hopeful for, and has been eloquently said here by many commissioners and is felt by myself, We want more of this. And so one of the ways we can get more of this is to make it very transparent as to what it means to use SB9 and how to do it cleanly and clearly and how to understand it and think about it. So the SAF report even says that today we aren't enforcing the things that are posted on our website as SB9 regulations. But how confusing would that be if this were something that you were thinking about and you had engaged an architect and a developer to help you think about? And then you're like, wait, what? So I'm starting with that because I also would like to see some some a couple of places where we explicitly find ways to be more permissive or less restrictive than the language already is. And before I go into those, I will say that I have read through all the places where it says we're going to. remove the inconsistency and I don't have any concerns specific to that. Like Commissioner Eric and others, Increasing the FAL was one of the top ones, was my top one. I simply made a note of a sliding scale. I'm not sure I followed the nuance of what Commissioner Eric laid out, but I appreciate sort of the calculation of it. And my only concern is just, is there some point on the bottom of that sliding scale where it starts to intersect with some of the other restrictions? I like the consistency in that it works up and it works down on a sliding scale. So I would like staff to think about numbers and scalability and growth and curves and so on and so forth. I noted when I wrote out that having a sliding scale for increasing FAL would be my top thing, I presumed that... When you run the numbers, you'll think about what the impact is on some of the other factors that were considered, whether it's height or setbacks, and that we would have to potentially develop modifications on those as well. So if there were a straw poll going on right now, I would also put a vote under the increasing FAL and then potentially the subsequent metrics that go along with that. I had also noted if there were a way to reduce the owner requirement, but we've discussed that and there isn't. I also noted that Further reducing parking. As it stands today, our language is less restrictive. Sorry, our SB9 language is less restrictive, and the table lays it out as not requiring to be changed. But I asked myself for each of these elements, could we be even more permissive? And so a consideration perhaps is only one parking place per primary unit. That's just an example, but there may be other more creative ways of being more permissive with parking. Okay, I think that was it as it related to SB9. Okay, we talked about not another study session. As it relates to substandard lots, I appreciate the... emphatic discussion about should they even exist, I am primarily focused on should the processes that we are required to have for substandard lots continue, which is, I believe, more similar to what the question that the staff is putting before us. And if by removing these processes, which I'm generally supportive of, It turns out we no longer even need that label in our dictionary. Great. But I prefer to get rid of the process first. Chair Silverstein said something about what is that one random thing that we didn't even think about related to the definition of substandard? And rather than looking under every cushion to find all of those, I would rather just simply get rid of the primary amount, like the biggest chunk of work that's caused by having the definition and see if it dies on the vine afterwards. Having the definition dies on the vine. So along those lines, I have unqualified support for what's been proposed about establishing an FAL for lots under 5,000 square feet. The 56% makes complete sense to me. As it was proposed, I'm not fluent enough in what Chair Eric was talking about in terms of a sliding scale as a different opinion, but setting some kind of specific calculation, whether it's the 56% or something slightly nuanced, I'm 100% supportive of. Regarding needing a use permit for developing a second floor and substandard lot, I have qualified support for, because I do think I want to see some version of a shortlist user permit, or sorry, design standard conversation happen. Because most of the time that people come in here, this commission is... really like supportive and genuine in hearing the concerns of the neighbors. I think this, this commission has extended itself time and time again to listen to and acknowledge and validate privacy concerns or concerns about trees, um, or concerns about, you know, um, uh, privacy, what's the word that you used to know? Like, Vegetation. The screening. Thank you. And to say that all of that goes away as a thing that the city has a role in feels... I want to talk about it before we get rid of that completely. Not as a subjective thing, not as a discretionary thing that we do, but as something that could be in objective design standards. And that's part of the reason that I circulate it. So I'll sort of take that into the discussion about objective residential design standards. So to specifically respond to Saf's question, I absolutely think this is something that should... be put before city council as a worthwhile project for prioritization of time and resources. Based on my time on the planning commission, gut is that we'll come up with a list of like five things. I don't think we need something like the documents that, um, were shared with, with all of you, um, from Palo Alto, for example, like I think Palo Alto document that talks about the fact you can only have, if everybody else on your block has a covered porch, you have to have a covered porch too.

And

That's a step too far. You can only have two bay windows on an elevation facing the public street. I don't think that's I don't like that. I don't think that's what we should be doing for Menlo Park. But there are some pretty specific guidelines in here about windows on staircases, which we've heard a million times, right? And screening, right? Vegetative, using plants as screening. And it's explicit. It's spelled out in here. What kind of plants, how often you have, like... How much value would it create if two neighbors who live next to each other and had privacy concerns could refer to this and use this as a dialogue? Or if city staff could refer to these things and simply say, this is what's required under certain circumstances to ensure privacy between two houses. We'll talk about, we don't have to get into Redwood City one, but I agree with the, I'm sorry, I think it was you, Commissioner Sillin, who said they were very vague. And they are. But I also think they could be tremendous. Something like that would be a different marketing project for the city. I think it would be fantastically valuable if that were published someplace and people could be like, oh, I now understand why. And they could have a more productive conversation before they get to city staff with their architect. This is what modulation could look like. The other interesting thing that I came across in thinking about these objective design standards was, I don't know if folks here are familiar with zoning in Lorelei Manor, but we actually already have a section of our city that has some of these very, very tightly regulated objective design standards about exactly how big your gable can be and how long your horizontal wall length on the second floor can be without a certain amount of modulation. And in these parcels, you can't have a window on the second floor with a sill height under five feet without having some kind of opaque glass. So there's already ambiguity in our zoning code that I think we have an opportunity to straighten out. or at least make consistent, straighten out value judgment, but make it consistent, right? So I would like to see this put before city council as a worthwhile project to invest in. And I would like to see some of that conversation happen before we completely get rid of direct discretionary review of the substandard lots. But I think that's an objective to get to. And I would like to get there quickly.

long-winded sorry commissioner sillen thank you no i really appreciate um that direction because yeah i think you said what i maybe was thinking which is yes the palo alto version is extremely intricate and specific on certain things but i did immediately notice when i opened that document that they had things regarding you know um privacy windows in certain situations. If two homes are basically right along the setbacks, right next to each other, there's different things you do for privacy versus if they're really far away. I would definitely be open to considering some basic things for that. I'm guessing staff would be well equipped to give some suggestions based on what we've seen from homeowners. And yeah, I think it does come down to just knowing what to expect, both for the applicant and the neighbors. If it's sort of well-defined, that's a lot better than every time there needing to be a discussion. And of course, you could argue about how to define it. You could define it in a way that favors the applicant. You could define a way that favors the neighbors. But I do think if we had decisions pre-made essentially for some of these things that that could be good so i would definitely support that um if it's okay with everyone else i'd like to go back to sb9 and ask to have some questions

It's okay with me.

Thank you. So, yeah, going back to some of the things I was talking about that might deter someone from building two units or, in other words, incentivize them to go for two, three, or four versus one. I was wondering if Steph could comment on... fees and what the fees would look like city fees for if someone purchases a single family home lot with an existing home Scenario A, they submit an application, demolish it, build a single-family home. Scenario 2, they submit an application, demolish it, and build, let's just say, no-lot split, two homes via SB9, but the same square footage in both scenarios. Total square footage. Can staff comment on, like, would there be any additional fees simply because... it's two and it's versus one. And what roughly would that difference be either in percentage or dollar amounts?

Thank you for that question, Commissioner Sitalin. So in terms of like general planning and building fees, those would be the same regardless of your units and your makeup. Like planning application fees, those are done on a deposit and cost recovery basis. So it's really just dependent on the amount of time staff spends processing your application. And in terms of building permit fees, those are standard and established by our master fee schedule. So they would just scale as you develop. I'll turn to this. I'll also defer to the city attorney's office who may have some additional information for some other fees.

Sorry, you'll defer to what? Could you repeat that last sentence?

I'm going to defer to our city attorney's office that may have some additional comment on other fees. Oh, okay. Okay.

I think this is good unless you have specific questions about other fees.

Sorry, I think I need to be reading between the lines of my line of questioning somehow out of order.

No, no, no, I'm just, I would echo what, yeah, building permit application fees and there are potentially, you know, other Quimby Act fees, for example, that apply and this is something that is with the council's direction.

Understood. Yeah, I think maybe what I'm referring to are perhaps, if I'm remembering correctly, could be Quimby Act fees. So, for example, there is an article written a couple years ago about an SB9 project in Sunnyvale where the homeowner abandoned it because... in Sunnyvale by asking to build a second unit that basically treated as a new housing unit that didn't exist before, which required a parks and loo fee. And at the time in Sunnyvale, that was like a hundred grand. And if they had just made an ADU, which is what the homeowner ended up doing, that fee didn't exist. So do we have any parks, low income housing impact fees, like things like that that specifically apply to a new unit rather than when you're just doing, you know, take one away, add one more versus take one away, add two more. So you have one net new unit. Does that make sense?

Can you rephrase your question?

Do we have, so again, taking my scenario A versus B, same square footage, one project scenario A has one big single family home. Scenario two has two smaller homes that have the same total square footage. Are there any impact fees that get triggered for the second scenario? that wouldn't get triggered in the first. Any additional fees or an increase in fees? For example, parks, BMR, housing and loot fee, things like that.

SB9 is silent on these fees. So it might have to be, it might be context specific. So I can look into it now, but it is silent on those fees and it might just depend on the kind of project. I can't think that, uh, I don't think that like a housing, like, you know, just depend. I don't have the list of all the fees that could potentially apply, but we can't, you know, uh, But I will look at the language to see, but my understanding is it's silent on those fees.

Yeah, sorry, I'm just asking. So this is under the background of wanting to not have a situation where someone has a single-family lot and they choose to build a single-family home instead of two homes. two single family homes, one instead of two, simply because if you build one, the fees are much lower than if you build two. So I was suggesting that we as a commission could consider asking staff to study making those fees equal. And so I'm wondering if that is actually true that you would pay more in fees in that second scenario.

That's what I'm wondering. Thank you, Commissioner Salan, for the additional explanation and background. So if you were to develop, for example, two primary units on one lot, the cost between developing, like... two new primary units without lot split plus one ADU, they would be the same. We don't use SB9, SB450 to develop one unit, but if you develop two units or three units, they're the same general fees for planning and building. In terms of utility hookups and all those types of separate things that sometimes add cost to a project, those are requirements that come from the different utility providers So it's sometimes they allow units to share connections that could reduce fees, but sometimes they are strict about maintaining separate connections. So that's sometimes where we see differences in fees as well.

Okay. And so, so we don't have any per unit fees is maybe what I'm asking. It's all based on square footage. Yeah.

It's not like a one primary unit fee, one ADU fee, not like, yeah.

Got it. OK. Yeah, in that case, I guess the only option we would be looking at if we were to consider this path would be lowering our city fees in anticipation that the homeowner's going to have to pay additional, like a second sewer connection fee or something. So we lower some other fee to compensate for that. But I don't know if that's realistic. So then the other question I want to ask is about condo mapping. So again, that I think is a good incentive for someone considering an SB9 project if they could know that they could submit a condo map, which would allow them to essentially sell each primary unit separately. Am I understanding correctly that when Menlo Park adopted its SB9 ordinance originally. That was already made a ministerial process, the submittal and approval of that map. Is that correct? Or do we currently have some sort of discretionary approval process for that? Even for the two projects that we have in the pipeline right now that are condo mapped?

I believe it's a ministerial process.

Okay, great. So then it sounds like what I'm hearing from other commissioners as well as building coverage and FAR slash FAL are kind of the main levers we're looking at. And so there was one case that I wanted to ask about that I think already gives sort of a bonus to someone doing an SB9 project. And that would be... And so this is a question for staff to make sure I'm looking at this correctly. So hypothetically, I have a 10,000 square foot single family home lot. My understanding is if I just build one home on that lot, I would have approximately 35%. floor area coverage, so 3,500 square feet, and roughly the same amount of building coverage for just one home. So 10,000 square feet, one home, 3,500 square feet maximum. If I split that lot into two 5,000 square foot lots, based on our current development standards, for each 5,000 square foot lot, I would get 2,800 square feet. floor area, which if I build on each of those 5,000 square foot lots, the full size home that I'm allowed, I would have 5,600 square feet of floor area. So is that correct? That if I have a 10,000 square foot lot, I'll get 3,500 square feet. But if I split into two, I would get 5,600 square feet, which is roughly 2,000 square feet more or a 57% bonus, if you will.

Thanks for that question. Without doing the math right now, but just looking at the R1U FAL descriptions, I chose R1U because that's the largest percentage of single-family zone parcels that we have. I believe you're correct.

Okay, thank you. So yeah, what I would propose, similar to what Commissioner Eric proposed for the under 5,000 square feet sort of calculation, basing that on what we're already doing, if you go over 7,000, I would say if considering a bonus for encouraging multiple units, I think we could treat this as sort of the base case, which is that today, without the commission doing anything, if you had a 10,000 square foot lot and split it into two, you would essentially get 57% extra floor area. That does change if your original lot is bigger or smaller. This is sort of the best case you could get. So If you have a 20,000 square foot lot and you split it into two 10,000 square foot lots, you would not get this 50 plus percent bonus. But if we sort of treat this as our best case scenario, we could just consider applying something like this to all the other lot sizes for an SB9 project. So something like, regardless of how big your lot is, if you... Build one unit, you get what we have today in our zoning code. If you split it into two or if you simply just choose to build multiple units, you could get as much as 50% bonus on FAL. And that would, I think... Also should come with some sort of bonus on building coverage. And that's something that I hope staff would be able to assist with. And we could consider, for example, having tiers. If you do four, you get the most. If you do two, you get a little bit less. And if you do one, you get what you get today. But I would offer up something like that. Curious what others think.

I guess height is another one. I think that would be a lot more contentious.

So I'm choosing to not consider that as an incentive at this time.

Commissioner Farrakh, do you have any comments?

Sure, thanks. So similar format. SB 9, I'd probably a bit of an outlier in that I'd prefer to have Menlo Park operate consistently with state standards rather than try to craft more permissive standards. I don't believe the effort to do that would have a potential to move the needle all that much. Spending months crafting that might not be the best use of time given the greater interest we've seen in ADUs and the challenges with splitting the majority of our properties that are already so small. So, you know, I think one easier solve might be to have the planning staff that at the desk, you know, make sure that they're really marketing it when potential applicants come forward to make sure they know that they do have this potential to add much more. square footage and housing if they take advantage of existing SB 9 rules. With respect to substandard lots, I would like to remove the use permit requirements for substandard lots and I just would want the consistency that remains with the setbacks and the requirements and that there's a mechanism for neighbor concerns to be elevated, such as through an appeal of a staff decision. It would make for a faster, more predictable process for everybody involved and save quite a bit on staff time, as has been discussed. In the event a homeowner proposes a variance or really non-complying project, then I think we should retain discretionary review. And then third, with respect to design guidelines, I do think this would be well worth it. They go hand in hand. As Commissioner Schindler was discussing, I think it would be worth it. It would remove inconsistent planning commissioner viewpoints on design. It would set a consistent expectation across projects that don't need to come here at all. And most of them wouldn't in the future state where there's no substandard lots and there's clear design guidelines. And it would ultimately create a faster, more predictable process, though I realize it will take some time to develop them. But luckily, we have some great examples that were sent to us. Thank you, Commissioner Schindler, from Palo Alto and Redwood City that may have a nice menu of things that we think are really appropriate, given the um issues that we now have seen for you know many many projects um and then those that we might not want you know that we don't need that level of specificity so i think those two you know substandard lots and design guidelines would be very worth moving forward with. I've been doing a lot of listening on SB 9 tonight, and I still, well, I think there might be merit in making some more permissive. I just don't know that I'm convinced that it's worth the time and effort for the number of potential splits we might get in comparison to the other two things that we could do. So those are my thoughts.

Thank you. I'm going to ask for something a little unconventional. Staff, is it at all possible for me to share my screen in the Zoom?

As long as we have a copy for the public, I don't know how it would work logistically, but anything you want to look at, we'd need...

I would love to share what I would share to the public. And in fact, I sent something to staff ahead of time. I don't know if they could pull it up. I also would love to diagram out what Chair Eric was talking about in regards to the 25% decrease as you get below 5,000 square feet in terms of floor area limit. It's nice to visualize these types of things. So I do have a chart that would outline what we currently have and then what we could potentially have in terms of that. I also have something else in terms of substandard lots that I think would provide interesting additional context to the commission as well as any member of the public in terms of specifically where in Menlo Park our substandard lots are concentrated. So if staff wants to bring that up, that'd be great. Although I will add that the chart of visualizing the floor area limits is something that I put together right now and is not available to staff. Obviously I can make it available to the public whenever or right after the meeting or any, yeah.

Whatever you reference should be sent to staff. So this usually comes up when someone's gone to a site visit and taken a picture, and they pull up the picture at the meeting. So it's not out of the norm to have something that you want to share, but staff, we need to have a copy. Usually, ideally, a hard copy to put even as a gesture to put it in chambers. But it's how... You want to work it here, that's up to staff how it's going to work logistically, but we would need a copy to staff for sure.

Okay, so staff does have a copy. There's an HTML file that I put in the Dropbox that we talked about. If you would be able to open up, that would be great. And then I just emailed staff a simple image of a chart that would outline the floor area limits. While we're potentially pulling that up, it's 10.10. Can I call for a five-minute recess? Any objections? Great. So recessed.

yeah uh

We're going to send it to you.

No one else here?

Thank you.

No, no.

Okay. Should we bring us back? Okay, welcome back to the Planning Commission meeting. Mr. Ball, were you able to promote me to present? Yes. Okay, let me see if this wants to work. I see that I am able, I'm promoted, but I'm unable to share my screen. If that's a feature that is supposed to be available to me, it's not. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, okay, we got this. Okay, so I wanted to share a map that has been shared with city staff and they will make available to the public. I downloaded all 10,000 plus lots, 10,336 lots in Menlo Park. They're all classified by different zoning districts and Then for lot area, the specific Menlo Park GIS data has the lot area. And for lot width and length, I had to triangulate that using some math on the geocoordinates. So this is not necessarily 100% objective, but it's pretty darn good and represents, to me, what is a great visualization of substandard lots within Menlo Park. And I wanted to highlight the fact that to what Commissioner Eric mentioned on substandard being an equity issue. Substandard lots are not evenly distributed throughout Menlo Park. And so all lots in gray are non-residential, either commercial or public facilities. And then all lots in either green or red are residential lots. And as you can see, there are a lot of lots that are substandard. And so any given lot has the area and the width and the depth and everything. And based on that, I'm categorizing things as being substandard relative to the zoning code. And so hopefully, people can see that if you look at the top right, we have Council District 1 has 92% substandard and then 75% and all the way down to Council District 5. which has 25% of their lots being substandard. And I found this useful. If anyone else finds it useful, it'll be made available to the public. Go ahead and you can play around with this information. And then the second thing that I wanted to just share is what Commissioner Eric was talking about regarding floor area limits and lot area. So what we have right now in blue is currently in the municipal code. If you're between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet, your allowable lot area is 2,800. And that is objective. And then as you go up in terms of lot area, you get 25% of that for your total area. And that scales linearly at a four to one ratio. Below 5,000, we don't allow anything objectively, and it's based on the planning commission's discretion to approve theoretically whatever we want. The proposal, which I very much agree with, would be to apply that same scale downward from 5000. So that any given lot would know objectively exactly what they would be able to build on. As you get smaller, obviously, you get larger ratios of total lot area to floor area limits to Commissioner Eric's point. you might run into places where setbacks front, back, or side might prevent one from capitalizing on that entire allowable area. So there's a world in which we might want to discuss reducing those relative to lot size as well. But for anyone who might have been confused on what we were talking about in terms of scaling, this is the way that I'm at least visualizing this. Great. Okay. I think I can stop sharing unless anyone has. Actually, before I stop, does anyone have any questions about this, either of these two things that I presented? Beautiful. Commissioner Sullen.

Maybe more just a comment that we received the data table earlier today from Mr. Chan outlining what percentage of parcels in a district don't meet the minimum lot area, which essentially makes them substandard. And my question was, which, in addition to that, what percentage of parcels don't meet the requirements of the width or the depth? And Mr. Chan said that would require some more calculation. And I believe what we just saw presented by you was some rough estimate of that. And it seems like I mean, even here, we're looking at certain districts where more than 50% of lots are substandard, just based on area. But if you factor in the width and depth, that really drives the numbers up even further. Is that a fair assessment?

That is a fair assessment. I have that number. I have all of the data. I have shared it with staff. I'm not going to show it on the screen because I don't know to what extent they want to make all of this massive data set. Available to public and I don't necessarily want to open that kind of words if they don't want to. But yes, I do have for every single lot exactly what the width and length is comparing it to the zoning district, you would be able to categorize whether or not it is substandard and if it's substandard based on area or width or length, for example.

Through the chair, if I could just add that we haven't been able to independently verify this through our GIS data. And there are some nuances, how width and depth are measured for lots that, you know, aren't a perfect rectangle. So I just wanted to note that. But we'll add all this information to the minutes for members of the public who would like to see it.

Yeah, none of the data that I'm presenting is considered official or a statement of fact by the city. Yes, Commissioner Headlee.

All right, well, I too have been listening a lot tonight and want to address the questions that staff had put forward. So I am also supportive of moving forward with SB 9, that language to make sure that that's clear for everyone. Jumping to the third piece, I'm also supportive of developing objective residential design standards. I think there would be a lot of good work to do there. And I like the idea of it being like simple and clear and something that everyone can leverage. With regard to the middle one, substandard lots and the floor area limit, I feel like you all have done a really good job of convincing me about, well, both, let's see. With regard to substandard lots, I feel like you had a really good point about the racist history. And also I feel like you had a really good point about, maybe not removing it entirely from the books, but not enforcing it, I think as staff recommended. So I'm kind of landing there, like let's go with what they recommend in terms of not having it come to us just because it's substandard. I'm supportive of that. And then maybe over time we remove the substandard idea entirely and write some historical wrongs. I'm supportive with that as a plan. And I was generally supportive of the floor area limit proposal. And I like how it's been developed in this discussion. So I like the ratios and the scheme that you just showed us. That seems to be a really good way to go. So that's where I'm at with what we're talking about tonight.

Thank you. I realized that I hadn't necessarily formally opined on those three elements. Very in favor, I guess, going in order of the three different topics. Regarding SB 9, I'm very in favor of updating our code. I would like to make a proposal regarding a topic that's been identified, but not necessarily figured out a solution for, which is a density bonus for building two units instead of one on each of those splits. So by splitting the lot, you're already getting an additional unit because we're splitting one into two. But any given homeowner has the potential ability to build two units on each of those without giving a density bonus, as Commissioner Sillin identified. Without giving a density bonus, you are essentially trading two small houses for one big house. And we've seen in Menlo Park that one big house often sells at a premium, and there is very little incentive. And two little houses are potentially more expensive to build in the first place. So you are disincentivizing the incremental housing units. My proposal would be keeping on the same theme of 25% to give the 25% as a total floor area bonus to building two units on any given one of those units. And so in theory, if you are splitting a lot that would originally give you 5,000 or that would originally give you 2,800 square feet of square footage, then you would be able to do... 1,400 on each of those under a non-bonus circumstance. And then if you were given an additional 25% allowance, that would move each of those individual units up to 1,750, which, at least when I was looking at that example, seems not unreasonable, 1,400 square foot. houses, a two bedroom and a 1750 house is a three bedroom and that sounded more appealing. So I would love for staff to at least when we come back to potentially vote on this more officially come up with both explore the 25% bonus, but also if potentially that doesn't work, like figure out what concrete bonus we could give as an incentive for someone to build two units on the split lot as opposed to just one. And I very much believe that we do need that incentive because building two units is much more complicated and I don't think anyone's going to take advantage of that. Regarding substandard lots, I disagree with what Commissioner Headley just mentioned on, like, why don't we do the small thing now and then maybe the big thing later when we have the opportunity to do the big thing. And I... don't have confidence that we would end up revisiting this ever in the future. And furthermore, to the conversation that I had with staff earlier today, if literally the only mechanism that substandard lots do come into play are whether or not we're requiring them to come to a use permit, then Essentially, we're talking about the exact same thing in terms of the ramification. I would posit that the removal of the concept of something lots is much cleaner when someone goes to the municipal code and looks at a zoning district and sees that there's a lot minimum and says you cannot have a lot that's less than 70 feet wide. And then they hear that SP9 is a thing, but then they might think that it's actually not applicable to them because the lot would be too small or anything. I think that by having that in our code, but then telling people that we don't enforce it is... sending a mixed message, and it's also expecting a certain level of education on the nuances behind what it is considered to be substandard. I mean, even the term substandard is a parlance that we are very familiar with, and the general community is not. I think that people know that lot minimum, we have minimum area, minimum length, and minimum width is a thing that people might be able to speak in. And if we have that codified in our municipal code, That is very concrete language. And even if, in theory, someone might find out down the road that it's not enforced or doesn't matter, the code is still there. And if someone was just using that as a reference point, that would be the anchor. Regarding the second point on substandard lots or streamlining is establishing a four area limit of less than 5,000 square feet. I agree with having a 25% decrease scaled downward linearly. I think that's relatively elegant and obviously very consistent with what we've already established with larger lots. And I think it works relatively well. And then the last thing in terms of design standards, I don't have very strong preferences. I think that design standards can be utilized to excellent effect and could provide a great opportunity to the city to beautify it and establish some level of consistency. I have some trepidation around the length of time it would take for us to get there and the amount of collaboration we would need between the commission staff, city council, and the public who I very well know have a lot of strong opinions about this. And when it comes to design anything, then we would want as much feedback, which is much more subjective in nature. And I hope that we would take any process there with care, but with care takes a lot of time. And I want to make sure that A, we're decoupling these two work streams, but also that time has an opportunity cost. And I'm not at the point yet where I would be willing to say that it's certainly not worth it. It very well could be, but... I hope that we can at least recognize that the process we would be asking ourselves to do, similar to the conversation we had around SB 79 and having our own custom zoning plan, the process that we'd be asking ourselves to undertake for developing objective design standards is an arduous one. And I think that we should... Certainly explore it, but do so with some caution that the juice might not be worth the squeeze there. And those are my comments. Yes, so Commissioner Celan, if you have something to add, then I'd very much love to hear it. But as Commissioner, as Vice Chair Bruese mentioned, one of the things that I would love to get out of this meeting is for a lot of the elements that we've been talking about in terms of formal recommendations on both SB9 and substandard lots and potentially design standards, if there are any commissioners that would like staff to formally incorporate and for us to get on the unofficial record our level of interest in those different areas that we should do a straw poll in order to establish our level of interest in seeing those elements back before the commission in a much more structured manner that came from staff and was able to be thought through more prudently and carefully than we are necessarily able to do today during this meeting. Commissioner Sloan.

Thanks. I just have one quick comment, and then the second thing I want to do is actually propose a list of things to vote on. Straw poll on. With respect to SB 9, I'm just reminded of the meeting we had about downtown zoning, which was... essentially led by developer who wanted to see change. The developer paid out of pocket to work with staff on a number of, um, changes and us here on the commission expressed concern that, you know, we were caught by surprise and this wasn't being led by the city and we weren't sure what to, what to make of it. Um, and then on the other hand we have sort of, um, some of the stuff with SB nine, I mean, like what kind of bonus to give or should we give a Dynacity bonus and do the fees matter? I mean, I think that is a case where I would really like to hear from some developers. So I just wanted to throw out to staff that it would be great to have, I don't know, some sort of Perhaps developer committee of developers that often do work in Menlo Park that could chime in on things that would actually move the needle versus wouldn't. Or perhaps people submitting SB9 project applications and then rescinding them because it doesn't work the way they expected. Just some sort of information from the real world would be helpful. really helpful in terms of helping us make our decision I'm not saying that we have to do anything the developers say and we don't have to believe that those are the real things they care about but I think it would be very helpful to have that information in some form and I know for the housing element there was some sort of roundtable between staff and developers that was then, you know, that drove some of the recommendations. So I would love to see that. So that being said, yeah, I just wanted to suggest for this straw polling, I made a quick list of what I heard people mention, so I'll just throw that to you and you can use it or not. So for SB 9, I think we should probably consider just the general idea of removing the inconsistencies for SB 450. Then it seems like I heard a number of people mention that they would be open to some sort of bonus for building multiple units for FAR, FAL. Specifically, I heard the chair mention a 25% just kind of blanket bonus. I had suggested another way to calculate it, which is using the example of taking a 10,000 square foot lot and splitting it into two 5,000 square foot lots. And that gets you roughly a 50, let's just say a 50% bonus on FAL today based on how our zoning code is written. And just using that as a kind of a blanket bonus across the board. So this could be two different straw votes potentially, or we could just kind of leave it more open-ended for staff to look into. Then we have removing substandard lots. We have removing the under 5K FAR, or sorry, adding a specific FAR for lots under 5,000 square feet based on Commissioner Eric's proposal. And then I think I suggest we vote separately on objective design standards for specifically focusing on privacy because at least I think myself and Commissioner Schindler felt like there was some room there to maybe add something quicker versus perhaps we need a separate straw vote on whether we want to consider an overall list of objective design standards kind of focusing on Maybe aesthetics and, you know, like Steph said, giving people more confidence when they're applying that they know what we're expecting. So that's the list I have as a suggestion of a list of things to struggle on.

I would like to add to this draw vote the concept of keeping our substandard, our lot limits on the books, but just removing the use permit requirement, which was mentioned in addition to that. So there are different ways that we could go about implementing that. Would anyone else like to add any requests to elements that we will hopefully very quickly raise our hands for?

Commissioner Eric. I would not like to add, but I would just like to request another summary. If we could just enumerate. If you have a list going, I could talk it through one more time. That would be helpful.

So for SB9, there is removing all the inconsistencies that staff recommended. I didn't hear any objections to that, but let's make that. Sure. So for SB9, Everyone generally agrees that we should remove the inconsistencies. Yes, that is a requirement, so let's do it. But also in theory, we could go beyond that or we could deviate slightly and figure it out or massage things. But we don't want to because that's what we want to do. Great. For SB9, there's been talk around having a density bonus if a developer was to add two units per parcel as opposed to just one. The way that SB9 is written, that is not required. And the way that Menlo Park could potentially implement it would not necessarily give you a density bonus. And instead, you would just have to allocate your total square footage across the two units regardless of that. On a straw poll basis, raise your hand if you would be interested in staff exploring having a density bonus for developers to add two units to a split parcel as opposed to one. And we have five and a face.

Yeah, I mean, interesting idea, right? And so I'm trying to decide if it's different than or adjacent to the next thing that's on the list.

Okay, fair. So, yes. So that was... Between five and six people would like to explore that. For substandard lots, there was a suggestion on removing the concept of substandard lots entirely, and I will just...

Sorry, so we're missing the concept of an FAL bonus that's regardless of number of units. So any of the implementations... of SB9, right? Lot split, non-lot split, one unit, two. There was this concept of dialing up incremental.

Fair. That's a good point. I think that a lot of that ends up materializing just the way that our default lots are, but we could very well have an FAL bonus that would be independent of... number of units. If you are SB9ing your property, I think one potential complication of that is that we will now and for the rest of time need to record which lots are SB9 lots versus none. So if you have a lot that's 7,000 square feet and their neighbor that is 14,000 and the neighbor splits it into two 7,000s, now you have a different floor area limits for the different lots because of the mechanism that one came about. That's not to say that's a bad thing, but it's a complication.

I don't know how to do it, but it's the concept of reward for flexibility. The idea was that it was a sliding scale, not necessarily tied to any particular SB9 implementation.

Great. So please raise your hand if you would be interested in staff exploring the concept of adding FAL bonuses for splitting your lot, regardless of the size that it ends up being and regardless of how many units that you end up putting on said lot.

Sorry, I just want to clarify that SB9, you don't have to split your lot.

Utilizing SB9.

Utilizing SB9. Sorry, I'm using lot split interchangeably in my mind, but yes, a lot split is not required. that is six people are interested in that. Okay, so regarding substandard lots, yes, please.

Sorry, can you just pop in for a little context, too? I think part of my reluctance on that isn't, it's just that I'm not sure there seems to be an obsession with a lot of square feet, and I live on a 5,000 square foot lot in a 1,200 square foot house, and there is definitely not room for two of them. So, you know, like I, it's just hard to imagine that there would be like the ability to go more than 2,800 square feet in total. So that's basically two of what I have right now. And we divide it into 2,500 square foot parcels, even though that's kind of infeasible on most of our, You know, on the map that you put like almost all of those substandard lots would be really difficult to do this on. And I think there's already so much privacy pressure and a lot of this. I don't think having more square foot is the answer. I think having more clarity on what's a what's a what's possible would move the needle more than, hey, you can jam 8,000 square foot on this 6,000 square foot lot. Isn't that awesome? Go. That's not going to create a community. It's going to materially change Menlo Park in not necessarily ways that I think are smart planning principles. So that's the context. I like the amount of allowed and I like that little chart that you came up with. That makes sense because that would be what's allowed on a size of a parcel that's more suitable. So bonuses really don't make sense. I think that chart makes sense.

Yeah. I think for me the most relevant thing that we've looked at in terms of exhibits for this question is the list of the 13 projects that have already utilized SB 9, all of which are, the smallest of which is 9,300 square feet. So I think In general, we're talking about larger properties that are being split, at least for now. And the motivation is to give people extra square feet. There's some benefit for taking a large piece and splitting it, whether it's building two units or taking it and splitting it or whatever configuration, because there are 75 of them of doing SB, not 75, there's... Lots of configurations, right? Giving people a motivation to utilize this in a way that feels like it works for them.

And sorry, if I can, through the chair, answer that. That's what Commissioner Sillin articulated earlier, demonstrated there's already that bonus inherent in the way that it would be if they did a lot split there's already maybe it's not even required to do a lot split is the um how there's the different like you get 2800 square feet now in like if you had a 10 000 square foot lot and you could split it you'd have the ability to get more square feet than if you just built one big house so it's already there That's true. In some numeric cases.

Part of the reason it's there is because 5,000 is still 2,800, whereas 7,000 was also 2,800. So if you had a 14,000 square foot lot and you divide it into 7,000, then you're still getting the exact same as the 10,000 divided by two and it's somewhat nuanced. But I think the point is well made and I appreciate it.

Really quickly, I don't want to belabor this, but what I found convincing, and I'll actually send it through the staff later, was this neat article juxtaposing Portland zoning changes versus Minneapolis and the ways in which Portland used FAL incentives to incentivize more smaller units on a parcel of land has made a big difference. So both Portland and Minneapolis outlawed single-family zoning citywide. But in Minneapolis, the size building you could build on a lot stayed the same, regardless of how many kitchens it had. And in Portland, it didn't. They said you can have 2,500 square feet if you're just building one. You can have 3,000 if you're building two. You can have 3,500, et cetera. There's a chart. But what they've seen then is instead of what we're seeing a lot of in Menlo Park right now, which is people shell out for a single family lot and they tend to just build the biggest single family house plus ADU that they can, what they're seeing of is a lot more multifamily missing middle housing in Portland. And that's not necessarily materialized in Minneapolis. And I know the economics in the Bay Area are different from both of the cities, but I'm just very persuaded by the potential, which is why I'm interested in seeing what we could possibly do.

Great. So moving away from SB9 and onto topic number two of substandard lots, I think there were two conversations. One was around removing the concept of substandard lots entirely, which is, for anyone unfamiliar, every single residential zoning district in Benelow Park has a minimum area width and length. And this would theoretically remove those minimums so that any given lot would be treated the same. Those minimums today are not legally enforced as actual minimums because SB 9 exists and you're allowed to have, I mean, a lot of us live in a lot that is considered substandard. And the differentiation, as we've talked about, is on the use permit side. The The flip side of that proposal would be to potentially remove the use permit requirement for substandard lots, but keep substandard lots as the concept because changing them would be a bigger change. And so for, raise your hand if you would be interested in staff coming back with a recommendation to remove substandard lots entirely. And I have five people interested. And if you would be interested in keeping substandard lots, but just removing the use permit requirement for them regarding building a two-story single family house, I have. Yeah, absolutely.

Can I ask a question on that to the chair, to staff? If we went with that option and removed the use permit, requirement but kept the substandard lots language in our zoning code, do you expect that that would achieve our goal of reducing the staff time required for applications that would have been substandard in the current world?

As I understand, that's going to be treated functionally it's the exact same.

My understanding is the same as yours, but I would very much like to confirm that.

Yeah, I'll reiterate my point on, I don't like the fact that it would be in our code, and if someone goes to it, but I made that point.

Thank you for the question. We're thinking about that concept of whether or not just removing the definition or amending the process that comes with the definition. So I do believe we'll look into this further, but I do believe we have to still keep those minimums because there's still the subdivision ordinance and basic metrics that we need people to design their lots to. But the process that comes from that, that is what we could look into modifying and streamlining.

Can you go into a lot more detail on what was just talked about?

Right. So there are still like basic zoning metrics that we can't just tell someone like the minimum lot area is zero. Like there's still basic parameters and anything that is substandard to that would be substandard. But it's the process that comes in that substandard section that really has the most effect and is what we recommend could be streamlined.

I have a follow-up question. I would like to move that we extend this meeting to 11.30. Yeah. Well, I just don't want to have to go through the motion again. I would love to... Okay, 11.15. Second. All in favor? Okay, great. So in today's world, we have a lot minimum area and minimum length and minimum width. And if I live in a lot that's less than that, How do you figure, I mean, you mentioned that there are these various procedures that are required in terms of the lot minimum, but how does that function with a lot that is not, that is below the minimum and potentially in all three respects. And if we're not enforcing that, then what, I mean, could we change the minimum to 1200 for every parcel, which is the minimum for SB nine or like, yeah. Under what circumstances would, would the minimums ever be enforced?

When you create a new parcel, even outside of SB9, so SB9 aside, you would still have the minimum lot parcels for that district.

So if I have a big estate and I want to create a new parcel on that, I would have to meet the minimum for that?

Correct. Any new parcels have to meet zoning code today.

Okay. That's fair. Can I amend the concept of removing or minimum lots entirely to changing the minimum lot size in all Menlo Park zoning districts to be 1,200 square feet, which is the minimum per SB9's requirement. Essentially, if someone wants to create a lot that's up to 1,200 square feet, we can't prevent them from doing so. As I understand it. And maybe we can have a general width length ratio that would allow for a roughly rectangular 1200 square foot lot to exist.

I feel like the feedback we just heard from staff was that getting rid of the use permit requirement associated with this definition is gets rid of the process and the staff effort that we as the planning commission see. And I don't know what we don't see. And I don't know like where else it ends up being used if there's something related to subdivision. So, I mean, we can stop all anything that we want, but I just feel like if we're really doing this to sort of make things easier for people who don't have to go through the process, let's just prevent the process.

Yeah, you're not wrong. I'm stubborn. And for me, I'm really doing this to improve our municipal code when like an extra five minutes here, potentially saving something down the road 30 years from now when people look at these weird lot minimums that are not enforced and are antiquated. From my perspective, if we have the opportunity to fix it, we might as well fix it and measure twice and cut once. But everyone is very welcome to disagree with me. I could be on a useless mission.

And I would, if I may, I mean, we can discuss all we want here with the SB nine ordinance and substandard lot process, but you know, any, we can't, that would be a big undertaking. It is also in the subdivision map back and the subdivision ordinance. So there's a lot of downstream impacts that would need to be evaluated. That would be beyond the scope of coming back to, based on this particular item. So you're free to discuss.

And that context would be changing any form of minimum lot area width or length in any zoning district would require essentially what you just mentioned.

I would, of course, defer to staff. But again, I think what I'm saying is that it might be outside of the scope to evaluate all of the downstream impacts. You could try to hook it to an SB9 ordinance or sort of the substandard CUP process. I don't see how, I would have to look more into the zoning ordinance, but I think that the lift would be outside the scope of the item here.

Fair.

Yeah.

Commissioner Soler.

Is the word substandard something that is sort of a universally used word or is that like a Menlo Park specific thing? And I'm wondering if we could change it to something like below minimum or, you know.

I would, of course, also defer to planners, but I do think most cities have a version of something like this is a lot that's not quite, it doesn't fit what's a standard lot. But you know, you are just from a land use perspective, I think, you know, cities true to try to try to find ways to solve that issue. It's not like it's not a Menlo Park thing necessarily. But of course, I would also, again, defer to the actual planners, but I do see it in other cities. It's not uncommon.

Okay, so continue with this drop hole. For those of us who would be interested in only removing the use permit requirement, but keeping the formal lot limits on the books, please raise your hand. And I have seven people interested in that. The next topic was establishing a floor area ratio for lots below 7,000 square feet, which does not exist today. 5,000 square feet? Sorry, 5,000. I have 5,000 written here. I just can't read it. For those of us who would be interested in establishing that in the first place, please raise your hand. And we have all seven people interested. And then specifically those who would be interested in exploring or implementing the 25% scale downward that Commissioner Eric mentioned at the beginning, please raise your hand. And we have six people interested in that.

I'm not quite sure. I'm just super clear on the concept, so I'm fine.

Yeah, this is all casual. That's why I'm not mentioning any names or anything. Okay, on to design standards. I know that Commissioner Solon, you mentioned privacy. I actually don't have full notes on design standards. If anyone on the commission wants to recommend any design standards that they want staff to use, research, incorporate, essentially bring back to the commission for a further discussion on this topic. I would love for anyone to propose anything as part of a straw poll if they'd like to.

Are you asking for what concept, a design? My read of the SAP report is that they asked us whether or not we should recommend that city council direct staff to investigate design standards. And so I think

And given staff's recommendation at the top of the item that we would prefer things to stay high level regarding that, I guess I will ask for a straw poll of those who are interested in staff going down this path of establishing design standards, regardless of what those end up looking like or the specific mechanisms of them. Please raise your hand. And I have five people in that.

I would be happy to add my vote if we stipulate that it is not a condition of changing the process for substandard lots, as described earlier. That it is a parallel process.

Would anyone want it to be a condition? where we would only be implementing the substandard lot changes if it went along with design standards. I know that's been discussed. I don't know if anyone's interested in that as opposed to precluding them from being tied together.

It's something that I will be looking into, but I'm not prepared to commit to that either way right now. I don't know what the design standard process might look like and what impact it might have on some of the other things. But I will definitely, I see a clear linkage. And I wouldn't want the linkage not, I would like the linkage discussed.

Fair. So if, for example, if we ask the question of people who are interested in design standards, if and only if they were not coupled with any substandard lots, that would be an example of something you wouldn't necessarily raise your hand for.

Yeah.

Commissioner Farrick.

I was going to suggest that we consider adding a word to the design standard exploration and that to keep it high level and objective, focused on key areas of concern or something like that. So it's clear we're not saying embark on a three-year ginormous process that's extensive and controversial, but rather specific, focused, objective, consistent. That would get me to raise my hand. There you go.

Yeah, I don't have like a specific number, you know, like this setback or this type of window. But in general, I was proposing we narrow that focus to commonly seen issues with respect to privacy. Because, yeah, with recent state laws, like you can put an ADU in the rear of your lot. That was impossible before. You know, you have a lot more people go to second story homes. You have SB 9, et cetera.

So that's what I was proposing.

perhaps you're going to do a tier of, do we want them at all? And then do we want them narrowly focused? Do we want them broadly focused?

So as pointed out in the staff report, there are two elements from the original SB9 regulations that we had in the city that were inconsistent, but they were things that could have been addressed by a design standard. So they were front yard paving and landscaping. So we're talking about percentage of, of space that is permeable versus landscape versus developed. And then we did have design and materials in there. So I would say that because we were taking them, they were originally part of an SB9 discussion. They would be things we would want to at least put into consideration for the design standards. And that was part of, I mean, I think that was context and staff report also.

I believe there's also daylight playing a was different.

I don't think it was a design standard. I think that's an element, but I don't know if we would consider that to be designed as opposed to objective. OK. OK. Did this conversation fulfill everyone's needs for the design standards recommendation to staff, or would anyone like to do a further straw poll?

I think just for clarity for staff, for them to know whether it sounds like we have consensus with a focus design standard, but that there's not consensus with a big, broad effort.

Yes, I'm happy to put that on the record. Thank you, Commissioner Farrick.

And Commissioner, I just think they should read the tube. They'll listen to that. They'll listen to the meeting. They will look at the documents that were circulated the Palo Alto version and the Redwood City version or at some point that'll go into the equation.

So great. Can we just do a straw vote with some language, if that's okay, so everyone's clear?

Yes, would you like to ask for a straw vote of language that you're looking for?

Oh, a straw vote that we support studying design standards narrowly focused to issues of privacy, especially those raised by SB9, ADUs, and larger homes.

Those interested, please raise your hand.

please propose a broader version.

I thought we had it from what Commissioner Farrick said. I did too.

Okay, I would just like it restated then if that's okay.

I don't remember the exact word, but a more focused design, objective design standards that would be consistent across the city, but that are... very specifically focused on the key areas that are, you know, typically of concern that we see over and over. So I know that's a long-winded, but it's sort of like privacy is one, sometimes, you know, setbacks, screening, the daylight plane, those sorts of things.

For those interested in a focused and relatively tailored exploration into design standards across Menlo Park, please raise your hand. We have six people who are interested. Okay. I believe that concludes our study session on SP9 and substandard lots and design standards. Does anyone else have anything left to say on this before I close the item?

Great. Chair Silverstein, just one question before my notes. I'm so sorry. I just want to make sure I'm writing this down correctly. quickly for your straw poll. So I wrote down the question that I want to make sure I'm clear on for your straw poll is, do we pursue the substandard lots process adjustments in a parallel path to the design standards consideration? I don't, I'm not sure I heard if there was a consensus or not.

Well, there was certainly not consensus. I guess we did not do an explicit straw poll on those two elements. So I will ask it. For those who are interested in exploring the removal of use permits for substandard lots and explicitly having that decoupled from any design standards, please raise your hand. Yeah, as in that would not be a prerequisite for, that design standards would not be a prerequisite for your interest in removing this. That's fine. So I believe we had five people interested in that.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'm going to close item G1 and move us to informational items.

I was just going to quickly add that all of this is a non-binding discussion so that staff will explore when we come back with an ordinance.

Yes. Ms. Handmeyer, does staff have any informational items they'd like to share?

Yes. So we have two single family use permits on the June 22nd agenda, as well as a small multifamily development agenda. And then June 13 would be the next meeting after that. And we're still finalizing the agenda for that one. That concludes my updates. Thank you.

Do any commissioners have any questions on that or informational items they'd like to bring up on their own? I noted this the last meeting, but I'll be absent for the June 22nd meeting. I will also be absent for the June 22nd meeting. And with that, I'm going to adjourn the meeting at 1111. Thank you, everyone.