Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, let's get started. Good evening. Today is May 13th, 2026. The regular meeting of the Murrieta Planning Commission is now called to order. Madam Secretary, would you please do a roll call for determination of a quorum?

We're not on TV, so you didn't have to look pretty tonight.

Yeah, maybe that's why we are on standby.

One second for the secretary here.

Here. Okay, let's move on to the Pledge of Allegiance. I've selected Commissioner Rhodes to lead us off.

Ready? Begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right, this moves us on to the approval of the agenda. Before we do that, Madam Secretary, how many speakers do we have on each of the items? I see we have staff, I see we have some members of the public here, do we have?

We have CASN for both, so we just have one speaker for both items, and that would be CASN.

Okay, and the reason why I'm asking is to entertain a motion to basically switch them if we have people that, switch the items on the agenda if we have people that are planning to speak, rather than keep them here for a while.

Now we have Alan Long for number three.

Okay, then we'll just keep it as is then. Are there any changes to the agenda?

Seeing none.

Okay, call for a motion to approve the agenda. Okay, we have a motion by Commissioner Voychek, I believe, and a second by me. Go ahead and register our votes.

All right.

Motion carries 3-0.

Okay. At this time, it moves us on to public comments. We will take public comments. Any person may address the Planning Commission on any subject pertaining to city business, which does not relate to any item on the agenda or the consent calendar. Normally, no action may be considered or taken by the Planning Commission on any matter not listed on the agenda. Speakers are limited to three minutes. Madam Secretary, do we have any speakers?

Seeing none.

All right, we'll close the public comment section. Let's move on to approval of minutes. We have the approval of minutes for March 25th, 2026 meeting, and also the April 8th regular meeting as presented. We'll go ahead and register our votes. We'll take a motion. Commissioner Wojciech, I'll second.

Motion carries 3, 0.

All right. Well, this moves us on to the public hearing, our first of two public hearings, which is the Residential Objective Design Standards Update, MCA 202600013. Are there any members of the Planning Commission that wishes to abstain or recuse themselves from this item? Seeing none, we'll move on to staff presentation. Mr. Watts.

Good evening, Chairman Brumman and commissioners. Dennis Watts, Senior Planner with the Planning Division. I'll be providing a presentation on her first update to the City's Objective Design Standards, or ODS for short. I also have Ellen Loomis beside me. He's with Placeworks, who is assisting with the update as well. To give you some background on why the Objective Design Standards are in place, over the past several years, the State has passed new legislation to facilitate the production of housing. These bills required local agencies to ministerially approve certain affordable multi-family housing projects without requiring a public hearing. They've also required local agencies to apply only objective standards and eliminate standards that contain discretion. Assembly Bill 2011, which was effective July 1, 2023, was also named the Affordable Housing and High Roads Jobs Act Assembly Bill. That requires local governments to approve certain qualified affordable housing development in zones that allow office, retail, or parking uses as a principally permitted use, such as the city's commercial, office, and innovation zones. And that's with a ministerial by-right process without discretionary review or a public hearing And it also doesn't allow for a requirement for the rezone of a project, as long as that project satisfies specific objective standards. On September 5, 2023, City Council adopted the objective design standards. Those standards were provided through a state grant, which is the LEAP grant. And that provided to the city allowed staff to hire consulting firm place works so they provide a place works. Allen here he was part of the initial adoption and creation of the objective design standards. So just quickly capping over the updates and I'll go into more detail through the next following slides but essentially the objective design standards doesn't include standards for single-family or duplex housing types. There have been a few projects in the process proposing duplex housing and these single storage or single housing structure types. And the development community has noted that the ODS has not set up appropriately to address these types of developments. So this update is looking to add objective design standards for these single family and duplex housing types. The update is also looking to add standards for accessory dwelling unit designs. And it also we're proposing some amendments to adjust and revise based on some problematic standards that the development community has expressed to the city. So the objective design standards has essentially 5 chapters as shown here you have a purpose general standards building types architectural styles and then you have a standards compliance checklist Staff would like to add as part of the recommendation at the end of tonight is to remove Chapter 5 from the ODS. And it's essentially because it's essentially it's a checklist. It's not actual standards or anything like that. So it's more of an implementation tool for the developer and for staff. So this would provide flexibility for staff to be able to make refinements to the checklist without having to go back through another code amendment. We'd like to note that we will still be using the checklist. So here, the current objective design standards are applicable for any multifamily development occurring in the downtown specific plan, the transit-oriented development overlay zone, multifamily zones, commercial, business, and innovation zone. And you can see on the right, you have a exhibit of the map which shows the different colored areas which are essentially the areas that are applicable for the ODS as it stands today. So with the proposal, we're essentially proposing to remove the map. We will be adding these single family zones. Those zones are rural residential, the state residential one, two, and three, and then single family one and two. So I'd like to know even though we're removing the map these ODS would be applicable citywide at this point with this proposal regardless of zone and that's essentially wherever residential could be allowed so it could be based on a residential zone or through one of these assembly bills where it allows a in specific situations of commercial and so on. With that we're looking to rename the document to residential objective design standards. To incorporate the ODS into the previously mentioned zones, the following sections of development code need to be amended to reference the ODS. The ODS has already mentioned in section 16.08.04.0 and 16.16, but it references multifamily and mixed-use residential ODS. So we're just trying to clean it up. So the following sections are section 16.08.03.0 for single-family, 16.08040 for the multifamily, 16.16030, which is the planned residential development section, and then 16.16040, which is your transit development-oriented overlay. Now we shift on to going into a little more detail of the changes related to the single-family and duplex housing types. And I'm going to turn it over to Alan Lewis.

Thank you Dennis can even Commissioners it's a pleasure to be back in Marietta and to revisit work that we did only a few years ago, which we're very proud of and happy to see that the. Development that the city has been reviewing of late has been aligning with the objective design standards, it took a. short drive around town before he came in and saw a couple of the projects, most notably the new one on atoms and very pleased to see the byproduct of our earlier work. That being said, it is appropriate to come back and revisit the design standards that we wrote some three years ago to evaluate and kind of incorporate the type of development that's on the screen here. Namely, that is to say fairly densely packed development of single family, sometimes duplex homes that are being built in multifamily zones. They're fairly high density. When we originally wrote the design, objective design standards three years ago, the thought was that these sites would be developed with kind of stacked flat apartments or condominiums. And what we are seeing in the market, as staff has indicated and communicated to you at the April study session, in fact, what's happening is this kind of development, these kind of single-family and duplex-style developments. I will say that Murrieta is not at all unique in this situation. We're seeing this across the board in the cities we're working on. and working with developing objective design standards and that is from Alisa Viejo on coastal Orange County up to Gondora and kind of the Inland Empire or San Gabriel Valley all the way up to Hesperia in the high desert. We worked in all those cities recently and this is the kind of development that they're seeing. It is a consequence of various kind of factors of kind of the financing and kind of real estate market that is producing this as being the preferred development. And in very few cases when we wrote the original objective design standards four years ago, three years ago with the expectation of fairly high intensity stack flat developments, this was not anticipated. So it's very appropriate to come back and rethink how the objective design standards can apply to this kind of development. So that being said, one of the things that this diagram is kind of a helpful guide to the sort of types of site plan arrangements these new neighborhoods are being built into. There's a variety of different ways in which what's generally a single-family house type, and sometimes there's a shared property or a shared party wall to kind of make some duplexes, but they're still probably being marketed as condos or kind of independent developments. They get combined in a variety of different ways across and different kinds of site plans. And so this diagram, which we've now inserted into the site planning chapter of the ODS, attempts to sort of lay out what we see as the primary site organization or circulation strategies. And so we obviously typically have a neighborhood entry. Oftentimes that ends up being gated because, by and large, all the streets within these neighborhoods tend to be private, although not necessarily. There are sometimes in these communities what we call a residential drive that looks and feels oftentimes like a normal public street but is potentially a little bit more narrow. And then there's a variety of kind of alley conditions and pedestrian paseos. And to give some degree of organization to these site plans and to help city staff direct applicants and how they think about arranging site plans where we're packing in units in this fashion, we thought it appropriate to sort of outline some design standards for these different kinds of street typologies or circulation types. And so, a fairly significant amendment of Chapter 2 of the ODS deals with adding in all this kind of information. So, as I mentioned, we have neighborhood entries. These are pretty straightforward. It's generally the primary entry into the community off of the arterial or the collector of the public street. This is generally where guest parking is accommodated for, you know, guests and future residents. The diagram we have, it's shown that parking is shown behind the gate. Sometimes it's in front of the gate. Sometimes there's no gate. It really depends on the kind of marketing strategy of that individual community. As often as not, there's also residents that face onto those neighborhood entries. Typically what you see when these communities are first coming out of the market, Those units that face directly under the neighborhood entry might be the model units that are being shown. I'll kind of come back to the site plan real quick. Oftentimes, too, what you see at the kind of end of that neighborhood entry is going to be the community clubhouse with a community swimming pool or whatever kind of community-wide resources. And that's generally where the leasing or the kind of sales office is going to be located right all in that entry area as the community is being built out. Then we have residential drives. And so the diagram and the photograph here are pretty good indication of kind of a possibility of what residential drives are. We have tried to write the standards in a way that they really duplicate what you would expect out of a normal public street and a typical subdivision. That is to say, there are sidewalks, there's pedestrian lighting, there are street trees, there's a proper curb, parallel parking is allowed on these residential drives. And we've tried to limit the number of curb cuts that are provided onto a residential drive for garages and driveways into individual homes. We think that kind of magic numbers probably around 40% that if you exceed more than 40% of that frontage being cut up with driveways. it starts to feel like an alley and not like a resident, not like a street that you'd want to walk up and down. So it's okay to have some driveways and curb cuts on a residential drive, but let's try to keep it less than 50%. So the standards are all written to try and produce this particular kind of scenario that you see in the diagram. These would be, in most communities we've seen, as kind of the primary access roadway through the neighborhood. What happens in a lot of these communities that we've seen is that the site plan is then organized with a residential type that's either the duplex or the single family home in which there is a residential alleyway that is dominated by garage doors. This is a space on the left. It's purely for cars. The front door to the home is on the opposite side of the building that faces a residential passage. It's a purely pedestrian passage with landscape. So being that this is somewhat the normative condition we've seen in a lot of communities, we're writing standards for both of these cases. So there's some degree of guidance about how wide a residential alley can be, but also how much landscaping and the width of a pedestrian paseo. We think, based on what we've seen, this is pretty typical. What a lot of developers have been doing should be pretty straightforward, very understandable. The next two typologies for street types that we've introduced is a little bit more nuanced and a little bit different from what most developers are building, although there are examples of this starting to show up in Murrieta and other similar sized communities. And so we call them residential lanes and lane courts. I know these were discussed at the study session in April. But what's happening with the Lane Court, for example, is in the diagram and the kind of photograph you can see is you have somewhere between six and eight single family type units, sometimes duplexes, that are gathered around a common driveway. But it's not just a driveway. It is also where the front door of all these units go to. So the pedestrian, the front door where the doorbell is, where the trick-or-treaters are going to go, and trick-or-treaters is always kind of litmus test for like, do they know where to ring the doorbell to go trick-or-treating? Those are all going to face onto this lane court, which is also a little bit like an alleyway. What happens with this kind of organization on the site plan is it means that rather than having a garage door on one side and the front door on the other, there is a kind of livability kind of byproduct of this in which you have a proper front door with a garage and your front door and the space in the back of the building can be a hundred percent private as a private patio for your barbecue and whatever you want to do in your backyard. And a lot of times these backyards are only about 10 feet deep, so they're not terribly big, but nonetheless, there is a private kind of back of house space for each one of these units. And that, you know, we think does have some advantages and we think developers are seeing that too. It's a lot more efficient from a site planning standpoint for a lot of developers too. They're spending less time or less of the site plan dedicated to circulation. So this is starting to become a very attractive scenario for developers. And we think this actually could work pretty nicely. The photograph on the bottom here, Not that bad of a space, but we think there are two kind of key aspects that ought to be added to the design standards to make this a more attractive living situation for residents who are going to walk out of their front door into this concrete driveway. Number one is we think there ought to be some degree of kind of different non-concrete paving. So imagine if instead of this all being concrete, there was cobblestone, a strip of cobblestone running down the center of that driveway space. and maybe all the water would sort of drain to that cobblestone space. You know, just make it less asphalt or less concrete, enhance the livability. It could be brick paving as well. So we've introduced a standard for decorative paving in here. We think that also when you drive from the residential drive into these spaces, you ought to drive up a little bit. You get a little bit of a hump. So as a motorist, you realize like, okay, I'm coming into a space where there might be kids on a tricycle. And then the other standard is providing some provision for landscaping. So the illustration on the bottom right is very good because they do have some degree of landscaping. It's not just the buildings coming down to concrete, there's landscaping on either side. So eventually over time, the space will feel a bit softer. One other thing we've added in here though is that we think there ought to be a shade tree for, one shade tree for every eight residents. So imagine if the tree in the back there that's behind that first garage, as that grows and gets pretty big, the canopy might overgrow that driveway space, shade it, And then you could start to think, this is actually not a bad place, and it could be an attractive place to live. The garage doors come up, your kids ride out on their tricycles, you meet your neighbors as you're coming and going. You know, you've got your own private backyard space. So this is a scenario that we're seeing a lot of developers build, not just here, but in other communities. And we think with a few additional tweaks to their expectations, we could actually make pretty attractive little kind of neighborhood clusters. So that's the lane court. The residential lane is essentially the same typology, except that in this, instead of being dead ended, This one is a narrow drive that maybe connect kind of loops around and connects two different residential drives. So you could actually pass through a residential lane, but the design standards and expectations are all generally would all be the same for a residential lane typology. And there are examples in Marietta that applications have come through that employ all these different kinds of types circulation types. So we think we're on solid ground to say that developers are already thinking in this direction. Another big component that we've added into, as Dennis has alluded to, is we've included some architectural or kind of design standards, not only for the single family and duplex types that would be populated onto these street types that I just showed you, but also for the ADUs or accessory dwelling units. And what we've done in this case is we really just illustrated a variety of different scenarios by which ADUs are gonna be built in the city generally as additions to existing single-family homes, homes that already exist. Property owners want to build an ADU or kind of add on to their house in some fashion. And so there's a variety of different combinations by which we think are kind of typical. And so these are four of the ones that are illustrated here. I think the two at the top are kind of like the most normative. One is you just build a separate unit in your backyard, and that's your ADU. Another is the same thing, but it's attached to the back of your garage or the back of your house in some fashion. There is also the possibility that you're converting some space or adding a second floor onto your house, and you're accessing the ADU through its own private stair. So on the lower left, you can see there's a little porch to the left of the garage. So on the kind of sidewalk that comes out to the street, that would be the entrance to the ADU. That is, the way we imagine this, that is an internal stair that then goes up to a second floor unit built over the existing garage. One of the key things we've written into the design standards that we're providing here tonight is that any exterior stairs to access an ADU cannot be built within 10 feet of a property line, interior property line. We have found that in other communities that's a big concern because these ADUs are often like pretty darn close to the property line, four or five feet. And if you have an exterior stair that leads to an exterior balcony, that's effectively overlooking the neighboring property's backyard and that's a privacy concern. So we've addressed that by just saying, You're not allowed to build an exterior stair to an ADU if it's within 10 feet of a property line. And so if you want to build that exterior stair and have it overlook your own backyard, by all means, that's your decision. The illustration on the bottom right is one that I understand is actually a pretty common scenario in Murrieta, which is a lot of homes were built originally with three-car garages. So you have a two-car garage door and then a separate one-car garage door, and that one-car space is being converted into an ADU. It's gonna be relatively small and at 300 square foot territory. So for the sake of the document, we called it junior ADUs, but that's a scenario that's emerging as well. So we have all these different scenarios kind of illustrated to give staff some degree of guidance as they're talking to applicants. Other than the standard related to the exterior stairs, and also a provision that when you're kind of touching the existing building, you need to match the style and kind of architectural characteristics of the original home. We really don't say much about design standards otherwise for ADUs. And the main reason for that is that state law kind of covers everything that we're allowed to say. So we do have in the document, we kind of list out all the state applicable state laws that govern the various configurations of ADUs. So Again, gives staff and applicants some degree of guidance to understand where they're supposed to look to figure out what the expectations are for accessory dwelling units. When homeowners want to, you know, add one of these to their existing property. Another major kind of amendment that we're proposing to the to the design standards is a kind of overhaul of the way we expressed architectural styles. The original document we produced in 2003 had a menu of architectural styles that were applicable across the city varied a little bit depending on which district and kind of neighborhood or kind of zoning district, you were within the city. But they were all sort of structured in the same way, where we had pages upon pages of different design standards. And what we found working with different communities is that this kind of exhaustive list gets a little bit challenging for applicants. And it also doesn't scale down to the single family development typology. The pages and pages of styles or standards for each style was written with the expectation we're gonna see the larger multifamily development of 50 plus units. And it just doesn't scale down. So we're proposing a kind of reformatting of the standards with this amendment. So as a broad overview, each style has a page like this that has this kind of diagrammatic image and photograph and a description of what the style is. These have not changed. We have the same styles and the same description in the amendment. What has changed is the way we express the specific standards that an applicant would need to meet. And so we're using Spanish colonial revival as the example here. But what we have done in all the styles is now we have an inventory of you know, effectively six standards that must be met for any building, any scale that wants to call itself Spanish Colonial Revival or Craftsman or American Mercantile or the other styles that are allowed. These specific standards, if you look through them carefully, you will see that starting it off, it regulates roofs. What is the expectations for roofs? Because all buildings have to have a roof. So we can regulate what we should have for roofs. And so in the case of Spanish Colonial Revival, We're saying you have to have a low pitched tile, red clay tile roof or concrete roof, because I think everybody can agree if you don't have that kind of a roof, it's probably not Spanish colonial revival. You have to have a minimum of overhangs associated with the roof. Then we talk about what is the material of the facade of the elevation. All buildings have to have an exterior facade. So what is that going to be in this particular style? In the case of Spanish revival, it's going to be a off white or white stucco finish. Then we deal with windows and doors, and then also other kind of core decorative features. So every one of the styles, we talk about roofs, walls, doors, and windows, the things that all buildings are required. We are very specific about the regulations for those kinds of things. Every building of that particular style must meet this minimum list. Then we have a list that goes on for two pages. of additional decorative details that each style might consider employing. And this is a menu of options and it scales up based on the size of the development or the individual building. So if it's a single family project, single family detached dwelling, it only has to meet the minimum standards. But once it becomes a 10 unit building or an 11 unit building or development that has multiple buildings across the site, it has to start adding on more of these decorative features. So it's a menu of a kind of high degree of choice, but one that scales up appropriately as the development scales or the building itself skills. And so we have found as we've kind of worked through this whole question of regulating style architectural styles and an objective fashion. And we think that this is a much more efficient way by which applicants developers and city staff can kind of navigate the kind of questions of how they're applying architectural style. And like I said, still provides a high degree of individual choice amongst architects as they sort of deploy their aesthetic predilections and kind of standard building techniques. So as you can see, they're all sort of quite a long list. And I will note, we kind of took pains to make sure each of the styles is all equal. So you don't are not going to work. We're trying to be careful that we're not kind of creating an incentive by which all applicants are going to kind of gravitate to one style because you're going to say, oh, that one's much easier to meet because there's only three things and the other styles have five. They should all be pretty equal. So it's really more a choice of how the development is going to be marketed and which one of the styles is appropriate in which part of the city. So to speak about where styles align in the city, I'll turn the presentation back over to Dennis.

Yes, thank you.

So as shown on the screen here, this is table 1.1 in the ODS, and the red essentially shows the changes. So the architectural styles essentially stay the same for most of it, a couple notable. So with the new zones, the single-family zones, which are located essentially near the top of the table, you have the Mission Spanish Colonial Revival, you have the Craftsman Revival, the Tuscan and the farmhouse and that's for both the single family and then your single family, your state residential and rural residential. I do want to note that we are also proposing the changes for the MF3 and MF4 to add the modern in and then you can see under building types we've added accessory dwelling units to all the residential zones where ADUs are allowed. Another set of amendments was essentially due to the development community feedback as they were proposing projects. They've expressed some challenges. One of them specifically here is there was a distance separation requirement between structures on the same lot. So if it's a single story structure, it would be a 10 foot distance separation. If it's a two story structure, you'd have a 15 foot. And then if it was a three story structure, you'd have a 20 foot separation between. They've expressed that there's challenges meeting the density based on these distance separation requirements. So we're looking to change the standard to five feet. And essentially there may be a building and fire code requirements that could cause them to extend that separation. But as far as the ODS applies, the minimum standard would be five feet. And then the second one is the parking lot finger planter. Right now it's set at nine feet. We've, We're changing that down to five feet, and that's an interior dimension. And you can see on the bottom for that one, you can see the bottom image. You have parking spaces, and essentially maybe a break after four or five or ten parking spaces, you have a finger planter. Usually those finger planters are at the end of a parking aisle or a drive aisle, so that's where those would apply. And then real quick, on the funding and schedule, so as mentioned before, so the funding is through Southern California Association of Governments, or SCAG, and that was through a REAP grant. So this allowed the city to hire a consulting firm in this place, Placeworks, and that's to assist in the updating the ODS document, and that's at no cost to the city. So with all grants, comes with some caveats. Here, the funding ends July 1. So what we're trying to do is just propose this amendment here. We're going to propose to go to city council on June 2, hopefully with the second reading on June 16. And why are we proposing these modifications? So in summary, it's in compliance with state law. which includes facilitating housing development and creating objective standards. Second, staff has received feedback from the development community on some areas where they've raised concerns and challenges meeting the standard. So we've tried to address some of those. And then third here, staff has received internal feedback from staff on some areas that needed some cleaning up. And then last, creating some certainty for the development community and a minimum standard for staff, which helps speed up the development review process. With that, in closing, staff recommends the Planning Commission receive the staff presentation, adopt the resolution, recommending to the City Council approval of the amendments as noted in the staff report, with the addition of removing Chapter 5 from the ODS. And staff is available for any questions you might have.

Thank you, Mr. Watts, for your presentation at this point in time. I'll open it up to comments from the dais here. Go to Commissioner Wojciech first, because I believe it was three years ago when we had a project that looked somewhat like a, as you termed it, prison. Yes. And so this kind of brought us to this point to make things look a little bit nicer. So here we are. No more housing developments that look like prisons, right?

Yep.

Okay.

Just a couple questions real quick. The design standard style, does the city have any discretion to implement one of the styles in a particular area because there's too much of that style already there in the surrounding areas? Can it dictate, hey, we need you to do this style instead of these other approved styles?

It would just be what's available. So, no, we wouldn't be able to say there's too much of this.

Okay. And then on this distance separation went from 10 to 20 feet, depending now it's down to five. Was there, is there any room to kind of cut the middle ground and just keep everything maybe at 10?

If, if that's, if that's something that you feel is important, I think some of that through the review is, you know, what are you, what's happening with this space in between, you know, is it become a walkway? Is it landscape? You know, it, And I think what the development community was kind of expressing is there's a lot of kind of dead area that's being provided out of that. So it's making it difficult for the density. But it can be something that could be adjusted.

I know in some cases we're doing it to meet density standards. But in those situations where we don't need to meet that standard for that particular project, if we can maybe expand it a little bit. My first house I lived in was pretty close to my neighbor and I could hear their toilet flush all the time. I mean, it was that close. So anyway, I don't have any further questions.

Mr. Rose.

I had a couple of questions. If you could go back to chart or page 11. So on this, uh, picture, the bottom right, do the people who live in that unit own that property, own the land?

I would say in this image, it's most likely that they might. But the way we've written the standards, we're not sort of saying that the property has, the land has to be owned outright or not.

Okay, so we're silent on.

Yeah, exactly.

What about HOAs and requirements that HOAs may have to maintain that property?

I would say that would be dependent on the individual HOAs. I think the scenarios that I have seen across the region would suggest that these residential drives are private streets, so the entirety of them the asphalt, the curbs, the lighting, everything would be maintained by the HOA.

Okay. And what about the height limits? I thought I saw in one of the slides four stories were the limit?

Yeah, there's a couple of restrictions on height. One is what you have in your baseline zoning, so the different districts have a height limit established by the zoning, and we're obviously not touching that. But for some of the architectural styles, we do have a height limit. So certain styles really don't make sense after three stories like the farmhouse style. Imagine a four or five story farmhouse farmhouse is going to look pretty ridiculous. Craftsman architecture also starts to look a little bit stretched when it gets beyond three stories. So with craftsmen, we do allow it to go up to four stories, but only a portion. A fragment can be four stories. I think the new development on atoms is a really excellent example of that kind of balancing it. And that whole list, this kind of inventory of kind of the maximum height per style was something that we had worked through when we did the original ODS document three years ago. So some of the styles can are essentially unlimited in height, like a modern building, a tall building in a modern style, but Craftsmen, farmhouse tend to want to be more in the three-story territory.

When I read through this, it seemed to me that we were focused on style, but not like the quality of the materials.

Well, I would say when we kind of rethought through the way the styles standards were written, there is some quite a bit of expectation about materiality and kind of the quality of materials expressed through the styles. in the way those are written. So for example, on Spanish Revival, we're very specific about it being either a red clay tile or a concrete tile roof material. So on those minimum things, we do get pretty specific on the quality of materials. But also, I'm being hyper-specific. We don't want to specify individual products, obviously. So we're trying to be specific while also making sure that we're open to new changes material technologies. I think last time we did this was in the height of the pandemic and people were finding it very challenging to get certain kind of materials because of supply chain constraints. So there's all sorts of factors that we have to think about.

I have one final question. I asked this last meeting. The HOA requirements are superseded by all of this. So if an HOA had some kind of requirement about an ADU or something, all those requirements that an HOA would have don't hold up.

I think I'll defer to city staff on your kind of application of HOAs versus city standards. Can you clarify the question?

Sure. So if I live in a community that has an HOA and it has requirements not to build ADUs, you can't, it's like too bad.

Yeah, it is an interesting one. I mean, through the state, it has mentioned that ADUs are, but I know there's a recent court case, whether it's been taken fully to the final judgment and so on, but there was a court case recently where a HOA did stop an ADU that was taken to court, and and the courts essentially sided with them. But as far as designs and so on, yes, the city's standards would apply first. So if the HOA had something different, that could be something that they have, but ultimately the city standards would apply first.

First. Okay, thank you.

Just as a follow-up, Mr. Early, do you have any idea where that, is right now. I know it's kind of, I think this came up in our workshop, if I recall, that somebody's successful, at least for the time being, an HOA is successful, but it's still not fully litigated.

Yeah, I don't know this particular lawsuit status, but there are a number of pending bills that are expanding most of the laws related to housing that have been affecting cities specifically to HOAs, both in In the housing and in the landscaping and in the water and all of these things that have previously been applying to cities, they're starting to expand to HOAs. But generally speaking, the supremacy rules will always apply, the federal government, then the state governments, then ours, then the HOAs. So nobody lower on that chain can do something that's prohibited by somebody higher on that chain. So as was mentioned, the HOAs can't add an additional design style, allow somebody to redesign their house in a way that's inconsistent with what our standards are. But to the extent that there's a HOA wants to prohibit something that we allow, as long as the state doesn't prohibit them from prohibiting it, which then they can do so. But as I said, that's rapidly changing. Every year, the HOAs are getting pinned down with more and more of these restrictions.

So to be determined for the most part.

I think it's going to be very difficult for an HOA to prohibit an otherwise lawful ADU in the future.

Right. The only thing, a couple things here I'd comment, I recall from the workshop there, in each of the areas or zones, correct me if I'm wrong, but for example, where this came up is the downtown historic area. Builders are basically given a choice of, let's say, four different types of architectural styles. So they can pick one. While they may say, well, hey, we like the craftsmen, it works, and whether or not there's plenty of the same, Design standards there they can still pick it as long as it's it fits within those those ones that are the options for Either the type of project it is or the type of zone. It's in That is correct, okay, so that kind of answers that Just to clarify when you say removing chapter 5. What is chapter 5 I?

Yes, good question. So chapter five, it's essentially, it's a checklist of all the standards in chapters one through four. And really it's just, it's a checklist for staff to be able to go through. When we receive a project to review, we go through the checklist and we start on page one of the checklist and look at the first standard that it states and we just see, does the project meet that? And it's a yes or a no, what page is it on? So it's a checklist, it's not standards by itself, it's just a checklist of the standards.

I'm just looking in the staff report what pages that all is contained.

Yeah, we just realized that we adopted it when we adopted the standards and we'd like to have the flexibility to be able to update the checklist whenever we would like to.

As opposed to coming back? Every time. Every time. Just to update the checklist.

So it starts on page 206. Okay, 206, okay.

I'll note, Chair, while you find that reference, that that's what we're finding in other communities. They're adopting the standards, or they're adopting it through an ordinance, and then they're generally giving, as part of the adoption, staff the authority to produce whatever kind of user manuals and checklists that might facilitate development without necessarily coming back to amending the ordinance.

Okay. Got it. Found it. And then also... You mentioned the garage conversion, so you gave the four different, or I'm sorry, the four different type of ADUs, one of them being a garage conversion, and you brought up the one on the junior ADU down at the bottom there that's converting a third car into an ADU. Is there a restriction to say, hey, I want to create, I want to convert the two car, not the one car, or take all three into an ADU?

You could do convert the two. I mean, the main part will be is you need to still provide parking spaces. So, you know, it just depends on the driveway and can you get the parking space for that. So you could have the eight out of the three car, it could be the two car essentially and convert that.

And basically we're subject to state law, so we don't really have the ability to dictate who can have which ADUs. State law says that they can have essentially all of these on one lot. You can have four with a primary residence. You can have four units on your lot. You can have an attached ADU, a detached like it shows here, and then one that's like a junior ADU or the garage conversion.

Well, that's what I'm getting at is worst case scenario here is, you know, we, you know, Here's maybe best case scenario, right? Here's what you're showing is a single car garage ADU. But the worst case is that somebody could basically essentially eliminate all the garage space. Could they not? Correct. Yeah, that's my point. And so they could make it where there is no garage parking. And if each of the neighbors did that, then obviously there'd be either driveway parking or more street parking because it would push everybody out of the garage and into the streets.

Yeah, we just have that requirement that there's the parking that's eliminated that's on the driveway.

Which brings me to my last thing, which is that I also wanted to ask about the distance separation. So it was between 10 and 20 feet And and so the proposal to take it all the way down to 5 feet, which creates more density and eventually more conversions and and whatnot makes things a little bit more crowded. So if there's flexibility in that 5 feet, give me the upside of bringing it to 5 feet. What's the benefit to the city?

Well, again, these are, this requirement is based on structures on the same lot. So you have these, with these multi-family zones where they're trying to get the single story or keep single story. So the single family structure, single unit structure next to a duplex or two unit structure. With that requirement, it just made them do the 10 foot separation. So the upside here in reducing it is it does allow them to get the units a little bit closer to each other. It does allow them to get to the density a little bit easier and maybe even make other areas like your common open space and your kind of amenity areas more clustered where it's maybe a bigger area that's more usable. Right now they might be using it all up and try to create this distance separation requirement.

And I would add Jared it doesn't increase the density so it's the density is what the density is density of the zone. This provides more flexibility for the development community we've had a number of projects, trying to utilize the existing ODS and struggling to make a project work in specific zones, namely our multifamily to zone. which we rezone a large swath of the city in the general plan update in 2020. We've had a number of developers struggle to try to make their proposed projects work, and as Alan kind of went through these different typologies, this is what we're seeing. So I would say we really need to have that five-foot separation between less dense developments, and I would say with single-family and duplex-style developments, I could see keeping a larger standard for buildings that have three or more units say that you need a 10 foot setback maybe between those buildings. But the five foot we really need it between on those projects. We went over an example in the workshop. I know not everybody was here last month, but. There was a developer who proposed a project where it's basically duplexes and single units, but it's in the multifamily zone. And when someone proposes something like that, we really do need that five foot to make it work. Otherwise, they can't make it comply with the objective standards. And the liability to the city is, if that's the only project they can build because of insurance and fire code and all the other things that Alan was kind of alluding to, we get into a pickle there, right? Because we're creating standards that then they can't build a project in. So we're trying to provide a little more flexibility there in a way to make it so we don't get sued on a project as well, I would say.

So what you're saying is that you need the five foot on some but not all. But But the way that it's written would just make it five for everything. So so it would seem to me just off the top of my head is that it probably needs to be dialed down a little bit more specifically for some of the projects that you're talking about, as opposed to making five feet. for everything as opposed to five feet for just the some projects that you need. Just my gut feeling.

I think that's fair. Like I said, we could look at maybe having the five foot between single family and duplex style structures and write it to say structures with three or more units need to be 10 feet away from each other. Something like that would work.

Question. A developer wants to put in a single family housing project. Under the current rules, the distance separation can be 10 to 20 feet, correct, or?

It could be more, it depends on the zone. This, what we're really kind of getting at is, as Dennis was talking about in the presentation, is when the developer's proposing more of like a condo-style development, where the buildings are all really close together. In a traditional single-family neighborhood, there's much larger setbacks, and those are currently in the code. So a traditional single-family neighborhood, like most of us probably live in, or we own a home, There are larger setbacks. There's a 20-foot front. There might be a 10-foot side. So the buildings might be 20 feet apart, right? And that's just built into the base zone and with standard single-family development in the city. And that's a lot of the way the city's developed. What we're seeing is a product type we've never seen before. And people are building these units, basically they're condo units, where people really only own their airspace. So we're trying to come up with a way to make those buildings work. but then understand that they're gonna be much closer together than a traditional single family neighborhood.

Okay, thanks for the clarifications. I thought I was also applying to these larger single family projects as well.

I would say like if developers coming in to build a subdivision and they're just gonna do a typical single family lot subdivision, they're basically only gonna use the architectural styles in here. and they're gonna use basically the base zone and build whatever it is, 7,000 square foot lots, 6,000 square foot lots, 10 foot side yards, 20 foot front yards, the traditional neighborhoods. And that's what we'll see, and this won't make it so they can build something different.

Okay. I do like, though, the conversation about giving us some flexibility using the five foot in certain circumstances and the 10 feet and others.

Okay. Now we'll take public testimony. Madam Secretary, do we have any public comments starting with proponents, then opponents, and then those that are neutral?

Yes, we have Cassin Klein.

Okay, and just for the record, we're starting the public hearing at 6.57.

Could you blow up the rural residential, please? Yeah, please.

I can't zoom in.

Sorry. And I can't squint anymore. Good evening. Just some housekeeping. If all of you could please speak up and or speak into your microphones, it's very difficult for us to hear you all back there. I'm concerned with custom homes. rural residential, state residential, one acre lots and two and a half acre lots that seem to be, if I understand this correctly, getting lumped in with all of the other with multi-family and single for the other smaller lot single family uh... as you know someone who grew up with parents building multiple custom homes on on large lots uh... you know my parents like having the ability to choose their their style and so uh... i think i think we definitely need to go back and and consider adopting additional architectural styles with that. And I have some questions that came up with some of these. Is Mission Revival the same as Spanish Revival or Spanish Colonial? Is Pueblo Revival and Mediterranean? Those all seem to be Spanish themes to me. Does that all get lumped in? Or if someone wants to come in and build one of those types on a single-family rural residential, Are they precluded from doing that? Is a ranch style the same as modern farmhouse? I would hate to think that one of our founding fathers, Tex McAllister, would not be able to build his ranch style house, which is down at the corner of Hayes and Guava. A couple others, barn dominiums are very popular right now, and those are multi-million dollar homes on large lots. French country, cottage, industrial, contemporary, mid-century, modern, Victorian. Those are all questions that I have that I think that maybe we've missed the mark on. And no criticism of staff. It's very easy for all of us to get wrapped up in the state mandates, multifamily, and those things. That's really what we're trying to address. But I would hate to see us ice out somebody, and we still have a lot of rural residential land and opportunities for custom homes, and, you know, Typically, the people in that socioeconomic level don't like being dictated and put in a box. So I'm hopeful that we can revisit that given the deadline that we're up against. And maybe that's something that we can do and then revisit so that we don't lose that funding. But it's something that we definitely, if nothing else, need to make a recommendation, in my opinion, back to city council to consider. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mr. Klein. Any additional speakers?

Next we have Dan Long. Alan Long.

Good evening, Mr. Long.

Thank you, Chairman and Commissioners. I just want to commend you all up there. As I'm listening to this presentation and I'm thinking of my questions, I'm like, oh, what about this? All of you actually echoed what I was thinking. So it's a pleasure to be represented by you. And thank you for your concern and those questions. I'm going to commend staff as well, putting this together. One thing I do want to point out, there's a little bit of a disconnect. I'm somewhat in tune with the community. I've heard you speak and voice your concerns. I've heard council speak and voice your concerns about high density. And We're proposing tonight to make it less restrictive on a setback so that we can accommodate higher density. That's your choice. That's not anybody making you do that. That's a choice. It's not the state coming down and there might be some repercussions if you don't meet your numbers, but that's your choice. Last meeting, you heard in a workshop to... possibly consider in the future a type of residence that doesn't even exist today because a property owner who wants to build apartments can't afford the insurance or doesn't want to pay for the insurance. I'm going to bring that full circle to what Kasten said. You're putting the rural residential residents in a box here, and I have seen very, very little to accommodate them. We pay those high fire rates. We're trying to figure things out. but yet you make it more and more restrictive, especially the next item you're going to hear about, is going to be more restrictive. So maybe some development standards and architectural guidelines that deal specifically with the rural residential areas, and maybe some effort and input in how we could be accommodated to build. Because you assume, even in the slide, you assume a flat, square, or rectangular lot. When you talk about setbacks and all these things, most rural residential areas are not square rectangular lots. nor are they flat. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Long. Any other speakers?

Seeing none.

Okay. All right. Then we'll go ahead and close the public hearing at 7.03. Okay. Staff, you heard the speakers.

Yes. So I guess responding to Mr. Long as far as the maybe the potential disconnect of the multifamily. Yeah, I could see how, you know, it could be read that way. And I think it's more of a they've expressed the challenge that they can't meet the density that's allowed by that zone with their we're at their product type. So what, yeah, we are trying to create more flexibility and that is kind of in a result of just trying to eliminate the potential situation of being sued by the state saying you've created standards that are making it difficult to build in that zone.

Mr. Chairman, can I just, just to add some more color to that comment, as we've been working with the, developers who are working in the zones where this would apply, what they're trying to do is facilitate detached, or not detached, but attached two-unit projects where they can get fire insurance. And so what it's actually doing is that this will help lower, at least under the current circumstances, the number of units that developers are actually not wanting to build, if that makes sense. So they know they can't get insurance for the higher density, you know, six-pack, nine-pack, you know, attached unit buildings. And so what the feedback that was mentioned earlier is that this reduced setback helps them deliver a more, a product that is more aligned with home ownership as opposed to a rental project. So that's something to consider. It's a tough call to make, but at least what we're seeing in the market right now is that reduced setback helps a home ownership product versus a rental product.

Okay, that was one of the concerns. What about the... Go ahead.

So I just want to make sure I understand. It's one thing to say we need to... shrink the distance to comply with the law. And it's another to say we need to shrink the distance to comply with what developers want. I'm trying to differentiate between the two. When is it that we have to shrink it to comply with law versus a request from a developer? Because that's what I, I like the resolution to say we will comply with California law. and shrink the distance accordingly. But if they're just going to unilaterally say, we want you to shrink the distance, but it's not to comply with anything, then I'd just say, no, you're not going to get that. I guess that's what I'm trying. I'm trying to get the best of both worlds here.

If I could help a little bit, too. What we're seeing on that is

We're seeing developers propose more density bonus projects where they're trying to get around our regulations, which is more affordable housing. And we've seen a trend where a number of developers have come in recently where they're like, well, since we can't meet your standards, we're just going to do a density bonus project. which is really odd, and that's really the only reason why they're proposing to do it. And as our director, Chantarangsu, alluded to, these are projects where they're trying to build for sale product types, and the code was really designed for, at least the way we adopted the ODS, was really more on the rental side. So we're actually getting for sale projects, but then they're like, we can't meet your standards, so we're gonna do affordable housing. which is strange, but that's what we're seeing. So we're trying to find a way to allow them to build basically what they're asking to do and get for sale product types in some of those areas, which is what we're hearing folks want to see. It's in the multifamily zones. instead of apartment buildings. In some cases, these folks can't build, they essentially can't build these for sale product types if we don't provide a little more flexibility. The only thing we're going to see there is rental apartment buildings.

And just to add, I guess, is the way the standard is currently drafted, what it does incentivize is you build a bigger building with more units attached. That way you don't have so much separation requirements between buildings. So in turn, what you're trying to do is offer this smaller product, which is your single family structure next to a duplex structure or something like that, but as you create more structures, you have more distance separation requirements out of it.

We did bring this up at the DAG. I want to say it came up last year at the DAG meeting, and then again this spring. There have been members of the DAG who've said we should provide more flexibility in the ODS, so something we've been hearing from the development community on the regular.

So one other comment, you probably may not find this a surprise, but state law almost, at least in this case right now, is not intersecting with what the market wants to

If someone's trying to meet density, but we want to keep distance, can we just tell them they got to go higher? Throw another story on to meet their density requirement? Is that an alternative? You could, yeah.

I mean, they can go and do the bigger product, which is your six units, eight units, or a 40-unit building project. But that's where I think they're saying they're having trouble with the fire insurance. So they're trying to do the smaller building size, which has less units in it. That way it's more marketable as far as from the fire insurance side. And then in turn, you have your distance separation issue, which, you know, the more structures, even though it's a single unit or two unit, you have to have that separation. You'd have that same separation if it was a 40 unit building.

Because these are my words, not staff's words, but hearing that if they don't get their density based on the current distance, then they're extorting the city by saying we're going to go for our density bonus. And so I'm thinking, okay, well, if you want to do that, great, but we'll just make you build up and not out.

They might be able to get around that, but the density bonus law as well, Commissioner. Unfortunately, the density bonus law kind of is like a get out of jail free card. So as soon as they play that card, they start wavering and exempting and incentivizing out of standards, which can be problematic if we're trying to get a certain product type. So it's good to see it kind of from both sides. I understand what some of the speakers are saying, but you also have to think about it like the way the developers are playing the game, so.

I think I heard you say in this was, you know, by cutting the distance down to five feet, that one of the things that they, they would do is maybe give up some common area space or some greenbelt space or some other type of common space in the development that was maybe larger that would, that would shrink in order to accommodate this. So there still is wiggle room for them to basically build the project at, you know, you know take for example between a five and ten foot space they would just maybe lose a little bit more like a Tot lot or It wouldn't be quite as big or something else within the project Did I hear you correctly?

Yeah, I was just saying you know just kind of surmising of when you look at a site plan if you're You have to meet certain requirements. You know your setbacks your density. There's open space requirements you know and making amenities so when you start having a 10-foot separation, you might have a walkway and landscaping, and that might be able to qualify as your common open space area. Well, what is that really getting you? But if you could shrink that down and it still meets the purpose of the site plan, that extra area potentially could go toward maybe a larger amenity area, a larger common open space area. It lets them kind of cluster the structures together a little bit more. Sometimes it does come at a, you know, a negative aspect of, you know, putting buildings too close and windows and so on. But it does create the potential. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but it does create a potential where you could have a more usable common open space, amenity area, you know, those type of elements.

Okay. So any other questions on the distance separation? Okay. So could you address the design standards on the custom homes in rural residential? I know we gave a selection. It looked like when we had it up on the screen, there was four different options there. And there were some questions about what do each of those design standards mean in those areas. And then I guess out of all the design standards that we have, what ones, conversely, what aren't allowed in rural residentials?

So what's not allowed is probably a lot of those that Mr. Klein had mentioned as far as the Victorian colonial. So you just have essentially four that are there, which is that mission, Spanish colonial revival, your craftsmen, your Tuscan and farmhouse. So the two speakers did bring up a good point about, you know, there is that potential that, you know, you do remove the ability to have some of those on the larger lot. So it could be commissions per view to maybe whether you take out on the rural residential or the larger lot. So maybe it's the rural residential or the estate residential one. I think the only concern staff might have is just with the number of housing bills that are changing each year. Is there something that starts happening where now there's some type of housing that gets allowed through the rural or residential or something like that. So we just wanted to cover ourself in case something like that happened. So we could take this out. We could push some of the development. I guess to address the architectural aspect, you'd have to look at either exempting out those zones or maybe having an application, like a development plan application, if you're going to do something other than the architectural designs that are listed in the ODS.

So, Chairman, I would caution the Commission on going too far, because the thing is, we don't want to have lots that don't have standards that apply to them. So, what I would pitch, I think something we could entertain and we could make the change when we go to Council would be one home on one lot in the RR and a state residential one could be exempt from the architectural requirement, but any other obviously any other existing requirements still apply. But I would caution it, taking an entire zone out of the standards is not a good idea, in part because of what Dennis was alluding to. If the state passes a law that allows some kind of residential development in our residential zones, we wanna have standards that apply. We don't wanna be in a situation where, as Commissioner Wojciech has talked about many times, we get an undesirable architectural design somewhere on the west side that we don't wanna see, right? So, but to the speaker's points, I totally understand what the speakers are getting at and that makes sense. I think what we could recommend is on, For one house on one lot in RR in a state residential, architectural style is not a requirement. And so they could pick the style that they wanna do. We can review that. That gives those homeowners, those property owners with those larger lots flexibility that they're looking for. I think that makes sense. I wouldn't take them out of the zones. I think that's creating some kind of strange loophole where you're gonna get somebody out there that's gonna come in and propose something, on multiple lots that's gonna be a problem. And we wanna head that off. So this way, if someone's coming in and they're doing a subdivision, yeah, they've gotta do architectural, some kind of architectural style. And they're probably gonna be doing a development plan with the subdivision anyway, so we're probably covered there. So it's really gonna, it would help mom and pop. And the developer's still gonna have to do some kind of architecture.

It's the mom and pop you know the the single residents on a on a piece of property they want to put something that seemingly would fit but I know we're running up against the clock here so is that something that by putting. what you just described as an amendment in there could happen before this takes to council on June 2nd.

We could add that in. If you remember the last time we added some notes there in that notes column, I think as staff we could add that in and cover that aspect, which would provide that flexibility for those mom and pops on the one-off, one lots.

Okay, which brings us back to the distance. I'll be honest with you. I'm not super convinced on the five feet. It bothers me.

I agree. I'll just say what I said before. I just want to make sure that the density we impose complies with the law. But if we can impose 10 to 20 feet, then we still do. I don't know how you write down a resolution.

Well, I wouldn't want it to go less than 10, to be honest with you.

So if it's helpful to avoid the whole question of law versus density here, the issue isn't so much that the state is saying you have to provide X number or so many feet or anything like that. The fundamental issue for us as local cities is the requirements that we can't impose a standard that would render a project unfeasible, which is a loaded word with no clear definition, but which every housing developer will throw at you. And HCD has taken a very, very favorable approach to the developers when it comes to defining what is unfeasible. Basically, you heard the complaints about fire insurance rates, and as soon as they start saying that our requirement makes it the project unfeasible, it makes it too expensive, we can't build what's behind this build, that's when HCD comes after us as cities, and we've seen it happen here in Marietta, and we've seen it happen in our other jurisdictions as well. So that's kind of what part of what we're trying to protect against is a requirement that makes these projects not pencil out, and while that doesn't seem right, How they use it, that's the tool that they're using.

How about if we have it that it's 10 feet unless it makes the project unfeasible, and then the minimum would be 5 feet? and then let them fight the fight with staff, what makes it unfeasible?

I'd say I wouldn't recommend doing that, because we do have ministerial reviews. So we don't really have subjectivity. That's a big part of why we're doing objective standards. It needs to be clear. It shouldn't be nebulous. So yeah, I don't think that's a good approach for the objective standards.

Then my approach would be, if we want to make an objective, let's just say 10 feet. Rather than five. Yeah. You'll be all right with 10 feet.

I just want to clarify something. Is it the lot line that's the five feet?

There's no lot line on this example. These are all, from my understanding, these are all for projects that are all built on a single lot. So we're talking about your traditional apartment complex, but instead of apartment buildings, you've got single family and duplexes all scattered around on a single lot, large lot, but yes.

So it would be the wall of one duplex next to another five feet from the next seat is from, yeah.

Yeah.

It's an alternative project designed to the traditional apartment buildings. Right, so it's from unit to unit. Correct, but smaller units, single and duplex units, not multi-story units.

So the staff put the examples light up. So in these examples, we have developers currently struggling with trying to make it work with the current standards that have it at 10 feet, and they're looking to get the units closer together. But these are basically airspace units. There's not a property line there. They're just trying to get the units as close together as they can in order to meet our required density. And all of these projects that we've seen, they're struggling just to meet the minimum density. They're not trying to do more units. They're trying to do the bottom of the zone. just get to the bottom number and they're struggling to do it and they're trying to build a nice product type too I would say they're not trying to build units that people don't want to buy they're trying to build for sale units that meet the market demand that Alan was talking about and those are of a certain size with a typically like a two-car garage and it gets tough to make it work with our current standards and your traditional multi-lot development

that most of the city is currently built on, that kind of development would still have the same standards, same setbacks. If it's 10 feet side backs, you're a minimum 20 feet apart, so.

That doesn't change. Oh, go ahead, sorry. I was just saying that doesn't change. On the exhibit there, so like the top left, you can see there's a space between the, I guess on the top of the drive on the left-hand side, you have two units, and so these are two stories, so the setback, right now would be 15 feet since you're two stories. So that's what we're kind of considering here. A lot of the ones that they're building, you know, that you have a garage, um, essentially a garage and an entry on your bottom floor. And then, and then essentially you go to the second floor, it's your kitchen, your living area, and then your third floor is bedrooms and so on. So you have situations where it's a three story. So now that would change to 15 feet, um, essentially. And that's what the current standard is for some of these, uh, You know, it's a single unit, but it could be three stories high. So now the setback is 20 feet on those situations.

At the last meeting, there was a picture of a unit, a single family unit next to a duplex. Well, the duplex has zero. Right. They butt right together and we're allowing that.

Correct, because they're airspace units, so they could build like a triplex, they could build a quadplex, they could build a duplex, and right, there's no, they're just airspace between the, you know, there's just a wall. In this case, we're talking about then the distance separation between those two buildings. In the example we showed at the workshop, There's a developer looking to build essentially like a single family unit, and then a duplex, then a single family unit, and then a duplex. And right now, the standard is they have to have ten feet between each one. It's making it exceedingly difficult for them to build that product type, and they're looking to reduce it. We've heard this from numerous developers, and like I said, it's come up at the development advisory group. It's something that we've heard from folks, so it's something that. We think does make sense when you look at these product types we're not going to see this all over the city we're really going to see this only in the multi family areas. So it's kind of like, as I alluded to earlier, do we want to see apartment buildings or do we want to see for sale units we want to see these for sale unit types, these are the flexibility and the standards they need to build these product types.

But I'm just thinking how loud they could have two duplexes together and then have space on each side. So you'd have four units with no space.

I guess that would be a fourplex.

Right. Yeah.

So I can build a fourplex, but then they have to be 10 feet from the next fourplex in the current standards.

Commissioner, I think the distinction, it's not distance separation between units, but it's more distance separation between structures.

Structures, okay.

So it could be a two-unit structure, a three-unit structure, or a single-unit structure.

If I may, it seems to me that I think the... Mr. Staley kind of alluded to a kind of idea that maybe it's a sliding scale, that it's five feet for this sort of two-story, single-family style structures, but it might increase to 10 feet if it gets to be a three-story building, and then once it's into a four-story building, maybe it goes back to the 15 feet as originally written. So we're not opening the doors so that somebody wants to build a kind of complex that looks like one of these illustrations, but they're a collection of 20-unit buildings and they only have the five-foot separation. That's not the intent, obviously. So maybe we could kind of look at that sort of like having a sliding scale. And the other piece to note on this is that building and fire code still come into play. So there is going to be, by building and fire codes, a desire to have a certain separation between two walls if both of those walls have windows. So some of these units where they get really, really close to each other, only one of the units has windows into that side yard because they can't buy fire codes with windows on the other one. And that's just a kind of like layout development choice that developers have to kind of figure out as they design the inside of these units. But I would think doing some sort of sliding scale as the buildings get taller makes a high degree of sense to me.

Okay, any other questions? Okay, looking for a motion. Mr. Wojciech.

I'll make a motion to adopt the recommendation by staff, with the exceptions removing Chapter 5 from the ODS, setting the distance separation at 10 feet, and exempting rural residential and the state residential from the ODS for a single-family home. I think that covers it.

Just clarify, one home on one lot. One home on one lot. When someone's developing one home on one lot.

I will second that motion.

I can read the recommendation for the commission. The recommendation is that the Planning Commission receive the staff presentation, adopt a resolution recommending the City Council file a notice of exemption, finding the project is exempt from CEQA, and adopt an ordinance that includes the final revised residential objective design standards and code amendment related to the Development Code Chapters 16.08 and 16.16 entitled An ordinance of the City Council of the City of Marietta, California, amending Title 16 of the Marietta Municipal Code to revise the City's Development Code, Chapters 16.08 and 16.16, to amend the Multifamily Residential and Mixed-Use Residential Objective Design Standards. With the additional items, Vice Chair Voychek-Voyce. Thank you.

Motion carries 3, 0.

Gives staff time to change out here and we're going to move on to agenda item number 3 or next one is the reintroduction of the hillside ordinance updates. Stand by for technical issues. Okay, we're good. Okay, we're going to go move forward with the public hearing a second public hearing reintroduction of the hillside ordinance updates. DCA 2021 dash 2396 to amend them your development code. Are there any members of the planning commission that wishes to abstain or recuse themselves from the site. Nobody. Seeing them, we'll move on to staff presentation.

Yeah, tonight we have Chris Tracy, Senior Planner, and Deputy Director Jared Ramaya in the well.

Just holding on on the PowerPoint.

The suspense is killing me.

All right, there we go. All right. So thank you, Carl, for the introduction. My name's Chris Tracy. I'm a senior planner here in our advanced planning division here at the city. Today I'll be providing a presentation on our Hillside updates with a recommended action. First of all, I'm gonna provide some background on how we got here. The city council adopted the general plan back in 1994, following incorporation of the city in 1991. At that time, it was determined that all development would utilize Riverside County's ordinance, number 348, until the city had its own development code. September 1997, the city began that process. Early 1998, the city implemented these new development code standards. inclusive of these standards were parameters covering hillside development, other than some minor updates in 2003 the hillside development standards have remained relatively unchanged since that time. should be noted that since 2022 staff has worked to modernize the hillside development regulations. These were often viewed as being subjective and inconsistent. Staff was tasked at one of the Council workshops back in 2022 to work on this topic. So between 2022 and 2026, the Council conducted a series of workshops to comprehensively review and update the Hillside regulations and related sections of the Municipal Code. So if you remember, back on June 28, 2023, I was here before the Planning Commission And we had a public hearing on this item with the Development Code Amendment presented as it relates to Hillside Development. Today I'll be just providing a comparison of what was presented in 2023 versus what is presented today. We're gonna reintroduce these standards. So why are we proposing these modifications? We've had inconsistent standards applied throughout hillside areas of the city. We've had application errors over time. Per the city council's direction back in 2022, these regulations really should have applied to hillside areas, not on a citywide basis. We've had process delays with some applications that otherwise would align with the general plan. And as I mentioned, this has been a council directive at that 2022 goal setting workshop. So the overall goal with these updates has been to provide a concise and accurate information for everyone that's involved with hillside development review. Some key modifications as provided in the ordinance. So first of all, we're establishing a formal GIS base map, a hillside overlay map, and we're placing the average slope calculation with a GIS analysis As an alternative to that a developer applicant can provide a CAD based solution if they choose so. we're also clarifying retaining wall standards specific to hillside areas only and i'll get into that a little bit later in the presentation. We have some minor granny updates landscaping updates and building height standard updates, we also have hillside enhance hillside design guidelines and fire safety consistency. And the goal here is to improve project predictability and provide code clarity. So on your screen here, this is the 2023 version of the proposed hillside area overlay map. And I'm going to contrast that with what's here today. So based on workshop feedback, we did add in specific plans with a disclaimer for someone to reference that document if they have POTENTIAL HILLSIDE DEVELOPMENT CRITERIA IN THAT SPECIFIC PLAN. AND THESE AREAS WOULD BE REALLY AREAS LIKE GRILL RANCH AND COPPER CANYON ON THE WEST SIDE. THOSE ARE KIND OF THE PRIMARY ONES. BUT SOME OF THE OTHER ONES DO HAVE SOME HILLSIDE CRITERIA AS WELL. SO NEXT TO THE WORKSHOP COLLABORATION PROCESS, COUNCIL DIRECTED STAFF TO REMOVE THE PROMINENT ROUGELINES MAPS. WE DETERMINED THAT THE ROUGELINE CRITERIA CAN BE EVALUATED WITHOUT HAVING A MAP IN PLACE. go forward as proposed there. The next set of criteria that's new is developed versus undeveloped criteria as it relates to hillside criteria. The workshop process identified a need to better define what developed and undeveloped properties were within hillside areas. The workshops identified a need to clarify which improvements may be exempt. Staff did collaborate with engineering staff and also building and safety staff to help develop this table, which I'll go through next. We did create this hopefully streamlined, easy to follow criteria table. And then the associated review standards are hopefully easy to follow as well. So kind of walking through this table, it's broken into three portions. We have undeveloped natural kind of on the left side. In the middle, we have both undeveloped and developed criteria. And then on the right side, we had developed. So in communications with building safety and also with engineering, Projects involving less than 50 cubic yards of disturbance in disturbed areas would be exempt from a hillside development permit. And these would be typically reviewed at an administrative level. That means a plan check type of process through what's called a fine grading and drainage type of review. The lower portion of this table here describes what developed classifications could be. So evidence along those lines could include prior grading permits, building permits, certificate of occupancies, and similar records. So we'd use that evidence to see if a customer is saying, oh, no, my property's been developed. Here's my record on that in the past. There's no permit history, which could happen here. It would be then referred to the director for determination with aerial photography. If there's a disagreement from there, then we would elevate it to the Planning Commission for final determination. And this kind of follows the same process with some of our other permits at a director's level determination. The lower criteria here describes when a grading permit would be required. And then the final part of this table, I'll just go through here. The upper row describes what qualifies for fine grading and drainage review. This refers back to the city's grading standards, which are in Chapter 15. It's a little bit technical. I won't get into all that. The middle portion speaks to ADUs and accessory structures. And just to note, if a proposed structure is 1,000 square feet and over, it does require a development plan permit citywide. In this case, if you're in a hillside area, a development plan permit is the same thing as a hillside development permit. So we just wanted to make sure that criteria was the same there. So also what has changed since 2023 is It was determined by the Council that the retaining wall regulation should be a separate project. There's a lot of numerous variables associated with retaining walls citywide. However, the Council did direct staff to proceed with the proposed retaining wall updates as they relate specifically to hillside areas. The updated standards are intended to balance flexibility through clearly defined design options while maintaining sufficient specificity particularly regarding retaining wall designs. So we do have a new retaining wall table for people to follow. Hopefully this is a streamlined process. The first criteria here, this is mainly carry over from what's in the code currently today. It just talks about front setbacks, line of sight criteria, and then up to a six foot threshold. So What's new here is we did add a new section here with over six feet. So if someone needs to go over six feet in a hillside area, which is a likely scenario, there is a waiver modification process that we're building in here. This mirrors what we have for a regular freestanding wall on a city-wide basis. So again, it would go to the director, and then they'd have to show some findings on why it's needed, and there couldn't be a health and safety issue, obviously. So if, and the rest of this is just mainly carryover criteria. On your screen here are just some examples of different types of retaining walls. The council wanted to have images in the code that were, that spoke to the public on what they could do. These are just different options, I should say. They're not mandates, just different options for someone to select from. And then also we did update updated graphics throughout the code as well, leveraging AI technology for that. And then with that, in closing, staff recommends the following actions. Find that the proposed actions consistent with public resource code section 21,000. This is pursuant to section 15162 of CEQA. Second, receive public comments. And third, adopt a resolution, Attachment 1, recommending that the City Council introduce in place on a first reading in ordinance for the Title 16 updates reflective of Attachment 2A and Attachment 3, Exhibit B. And as noted here on the screen, as part of the recommendation, and I also would like to read into the record, the Hillside overlay exhibit had the old map on there, I have provided you the new maps. I just want to read into the record. The ordinance should be reflective of that moving forward. And with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions. And we do have engineering staff here to also answer questions as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. At this time, I'll open it up to my colleagues for questions. I'll start with Mr. Rose. Commissioner Rose, would you like to start?

Is this a new requirement, a change? So if someone wants to build a 30-foot retaining wall, this would apply, but if it was built before, this doesn't apply now?

So we currently have, we do have retaining wall standards currently in our hillside areas of the city. We just, it's limited to six feet in height. So we needed to have an off ramp for someone to build. If they wanted to go higher in those areas, you can do this provided you have, you know, some of these designs. That's what the council wanted. And there's a process to be reviewed by the director. This is the same process that we have for freestanding walls if someone needs to deviate and go higher. So we just mirrored that same sort of thing. And as long as there's no public health and safety issues, that's kind of where we landed.

Thank you.

Commissioner Wojciech. So, Chris, on the new map, the orange areas are considered hillside. And...

out which is what we're addressing tonight so the rest of the city are you guys going to come back later with different standards for that or how's that going to work the only thing that the council wants to deal with on a citywide basis from the feedback from this workshop process has been dealing with retaining walls on a citywide basis but that it's that in itself is a bigger project so we're not going to be dealing with that right now um On this map, it was suggested by the public, hey, we need to have specific plans also noted in here. So if someone lives in one of those specific plan communities, say a ranch or a copper canyon, there's full site criteria in those specific plans already baked in. So it's its own zoning code, essentially, in those areas.

And when applicants come with a new specific plan, we're going to need to update the map every time.

And then... I think there was a reference that the wall has to be earth tones. Is there a condition on what type of block to be used?

It's just different design options. It's supposed to, right now, the code actually speaks to it blending in kind of with the surrounding environment. We did provide different options for someone to select from. That was the direction of council. They wanted to provide flexibility, but also provide some guidance. So it's kind of that balance.

Okay.

Thank you.

You alluded that council wants to look at different wall standards or maintenance or what was the other part of the thing that we're not adopting tonight, what their goals are that came up?

Mainly on the retaining wall criteria, they wanted to sidelight that as a separate project because it was kind of a bigger topic citywide. For example, in our business park area, we might have something that might be different than a residential area or in a commercial area. So it's kind of a bigger project in itself. So that was kind of the main thing. Really the other stuff was just a lot of carryover from before. The develop versus undevelop is new. That came up as part of the workshop process with public input. They felt that it was important that we define kind of how that how that worked in hillside areas. So, you know, we created this table. Hopefully it's easy for someone to follow on where they would land and what bucket.

Okay, so I'm going to go back in time. When I look at the Again, it's always bothered me. We get off the Interstate 15 freeway at Mira Hot Springs and we look at this big wall, this big monstrosity that probably would have been part of the hillside had it been applied at the time, but we got this big, essentially an ugly wall. And it has foliage that is starting to grow. But is there anything in this proposed change that would make any requirement to keep that wall maintained? Meaning, you know, they can't just shut off the water and the plants stop growing on that wall?

I mean, they're supposed to be maintaining their property on...

Supposed to be, that's my point. Is there anything in the...

We do have an example for someone if they want to put vines. It's not on, I don't have the image on here, but that's another option with like a keystone wall. They might have vines that are growing in between like rosemary or something. No, no, I totally get it.

So Chairman, that condition, that project has conditions that require them to maintain the landscaping on that property. And that goes with typical developments that we have in the city that have development plans that they have to maintain the landscaping.

But there is no, but there is no ordinance. So if somebody, they build the wall, they put whatever on it and, um, you know, they have to maintain it. It's, it's, it's project by project as opposed to an overall municipal code that that could be part of this ordinance. Um, this ordinance doesn't address it is, is what I'm saying.

Chairman, I love the idea is what you're not seeing in front of you is conditions of approval.

Right.

Every time we have a project, we apply conditions of approval that prior to grading and then post is ongoing conditions of approval. So you shall maintain the colors, the design, the fencing, the painting, the irrigation, the wall colors. All of that is put in there. as a condition of approval. I don't think we'd see that language here in this type of presentation and report, but maybe that's something we need to take forward with the city council is to show them an example of how our typical projects are conditioned so that we can address these should an HOA or should an individual property owner not maintain their property in the fashion that we expected it.

And the only reason I bring it up is I think at a prior meeting, I think I had asked you, hey, Are they required? And at the time, you didn't know if there was a requirement in that particular project had that. So now you're saying that there is, which I'm glad. And I've seen them plant some plants there. Where I'm going with this is putting in the landscaped wall, if you will, and then there's no maintenance of it. We can have this standard, but if there's... we give people the option to basically choose different types of blocks and a living wall, so to speak. And then there's nothing to basically back it up and, and, and maintain it. Then that becomes that we've only done half the job. You see what I'm saying?

And chair, um, what council wants staff to bring back was preempted by that wall. That that was a shock value for the whole community to this day. The beneficial news is that we have a bond that is required so that if they don't finish that wall in the first three to five years, then there are other things that the city can do. We have been spending a lot of time with the terraces on how they're going to do a better job on that wall. It is going to be a green screen, but lessons learned. City Council does not ever want that to happen again. And so part of what I think we'll come back with in that separate Attempt is more space in front of the wall so they can accommodate larger plantings of trees and landscaping I don't think we're gonna lie upon the green screen I think we're gonna have a multitude approach through landscaping on how to do a better job on screening these elements, but But you're spot-on. I do like those comments, and it's very important to the city that we have a strong aesthetic value And also looking

It was the February 13th City Council meeting in the workshop there. You mentioned developed and undeveloped, but in those notes actually had disturbed and undisturbed. What's the difference there? And is that clarified in this ordinance? What is disturbed versus undisturbed?

I think we just went to develop versus undeveloped. I mean, it kind of means, it's a similar definition, I guess.

I guess my point is, is if we want clarity with this, because here's my experience, and of course, I've been here for over 30 years, but what happens is somebody We basically pass an ordinance or we set a condition. And then years later, people that deal with this, they go on, they retire, they move on. Somebody else comes in now, acquires the property, and then it's been left to interpretation by the staff that's there. Well, geez, what did they mean at the time? This really wasn't addressed. So the lack of clarity causes ambiguity somewhere down the line, five years, 10 years down the road. So I'm just going by what I read and what the council had was disturbed or undisturbed, or it said undisturbed, it didn't say disturbed, but this only addressed developed or undeveloped.

When I read this, and that's a good point, when I read this, A property owner that presents themselves to develop a little bit more of their property. The origin of that property might have been when we were the county of Riverside, right? And so what we'll be asking them is to demonstrate how that was legally disturbed. Typically, that would have been through a grading plan permit, either through the county or the city. We do have the benefit of Google and near maps and other things that we can look back in time. I think we're not going to try to be punitive with homeowners. We're just going to try to get down to how do we develop the right part of the project and how do we make sure that there wasn't something unpermitted? What I mean by that is, was there a wetland? Was there some sensitive habitat? Was there something where if they had come in for a permit, we would have asked more questions about that. But I think It can be difficult sometimes for applicants to find old records. I think that's going to be the nuance with some folks. Definitely, we're going to work closely with mom and pops and other folks to develop their properties. But what I see is that it's either an area that was never touched, it's habitat or ungraded. Other than that, we'll look for some history of how that was legally cleared. Now, even in a property, you can have 100-foot fire clearing around your property. You can clear the vegetation. So there's some things that don't need permit history. Those are things that are just a matter of law. But maybe we need to condense the verbiage so it's more consistent with what you outlined.

I mean, you kind of defined what you think, which is a good definition, what you think is a difference between disturbed and undisturbed. My point is five years, ten years down the road, somebody has a different definition, unless it's codified in this ordinance, then it's up to, then we're right back to square one where why we're doing this in the first place is because of multi different versions of interpretation on things. So I think the best that we can kind of lock it down is what I'm thinking.

I think for the disturbed or developed classification, where we land on that is, do we have grading permits for the site? Do we have building permits? Is there a certificate of occupancy? Is there records along those lines that show an area of the site, oh, okay, this was already approved for a grading. This is the parameters of that. When someone comes in for a fine grading permit, they'll have a site exhibit or a grading permit. They'll be going through Rick's review with a grading plan permit We'll have we'll have plans on file that will show that the limits of that disturbance typically that's you know and if we don't have that evidence the alternative is We have old area you can get historic aerials and that would be presented to the director to make a determination if You know was there what was there at that point in time does it appear to be you know disturbed in a functional manner and So that's kind of where the delta is.

Again, that's kind of a lot of work to try and go back and try and research and try and determine as if something was, it's either clearly defined.

The problem is this, is the county has really bad records that we've inherited. So we're going to have to have this kind of review process. It's not perfect, but we're trying to throw criteria in there that would be used for evidence.

Okay, and then last question before we go on to the public hearing here. This map, is this our first official version of the map for the hillside ordinance that has been changed over time?

Yes, so it would be codified in Chapter 1624. 0.100. So this will be the first time we have it actually in our municipal code. In the past, it's been kind of referenced as something on file with the department. That's what led to a lot of confusion in the past on what that record looked like.

And has that map changed over time, you know, just at the staff level or just based on what we've kind of determined in-house? Have we done in-house modifications to the map or has there been some official, hey, this is the map, but it's never gone in front of a governing board to actually adopt.

No, it hasn't changed officially. The major change has been the addition of the specific plans back into the map exhibit with that disclaimer. That was suggested through the workshop process. So that's what's before you for consideration.

So we've had the general plan, but no overlay.

We've had no overlay and that's led to confusion on applicability and where where the hillside areas of the city are and where they're not.

Which is why we're here. With that any any other questions is now OK we'll go ahead and move on to the public hearing public hearing started at 7.55. With that madam secretary do we have any speakers I think I saw a few in queue here.

Yes, we have Cassin Klein.

Mr. Klein, please come forward.

First of all, I cannot acknowledge and compliment staff enough. over the course of the past five years, and what staff has done, and particularly Christopher. I don't want to burn too much of my time. I can't express to you and the public enough appreciation for what staff has done. Before I get into what I've presented for you. And how we got here was a project that I was brought on board with, it got into litigation after it was approved by Planning Commission, it was appealed to City Council, which is how we discovered, we the city discovered this situation. And so one of the things that I would absolutely like to see is on the 25% that we add decimal point zero zero zero, because in the course of of that potential litigation, one of the questions that we asked Bob Mailing was, what is the best practice in engineering when it's say 24.51%? Do you round up or not? And he didn't have an answer. And so that, from our council's perspective, created some question. And so to make it abundantly clear in the code, I think that we need to go ahead and say that it's 25.000 and maybe even go to the extent of if it's below that, we don't round up. Something else... I think that the map needs to be adopted into the general plan like our land use map is. When I do due diligence for projects, the first thing I do is I go to the land use map and then I go to the code. So this way we can ensure that we're not missing it. Whoever's doing due diligence can cross-reference those things. Now let me get into this. The staff report talks about... Establish more objective and internally consistent development standards, improve administrative consistency and project predictability. And then I have highlighted in the executive summary, we're often criticized being subjective and inconsistent. And that is very accurate. That's part of the reason why we're here. And that brings me to the point where page 14 of the ordinance, you see that I've highlighted C, D, and E, and G, and underlined, talking about the word encourage. which is not objective, that is subjective, and I can tell you from experience, and Chair, following up on the comments you just made about who is here in five years, I would even say I have found in my experience, depending on, and not just in this jurisdiction, in every jurisdiction, depending on which planner I'm dealing with, that subjectivity or that encouragement may vary. So if I may continue. You may, I'll give you another minute. Thank you. And the reason why I wrote this down for you all to consider is I knew I would run out of time, but to me, look, this is comprehensive, it's convoluted, but I wanted to focus on this because, and I believe staff is trying to do that, right? We're trying to be as objective as possible, but when we use these words, encourage, and what my memo says has been my real life experience, right? It becomes a process, parallelization, you end up having multiple meetings, you end up having a director's hearing, where if we take these things out some way and make it more objective, that needs to be done. So thank you for the additional time, I appreciate it. And again, Christopher and staff, I can't, look, As often as I've come up here and passionately criticized, it's equal with my compliments to staff tonight. And I really wanna, I think I've made that point. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, they've been working on this for years and working very hard. We appreciate it. Okay, next speaker. Mr. Long.

Alan Long.

Is he in the queue?

Thank you, Chair. Commissioners, I echo what Kasten said, and I won't go on and on to waste my time, but I appreciate staff's efforts. None of what I say is directed at them. I will respectfully disagree with one statement, because I think it's very misleading, is that the code and the general plan wasn't meant to be citywide, and it wasn't meant to apply to certain parts of the city. That's inaccurate. The general plan references it. The previous code says it's throughout the city. That code was adopted by previous council, so therefore they also thought it was throughout the city. There's been potential litigation because it was and wasn't applied throughout the city. It was absolutely a code that applied throughout the city, which brings me to my point of equitability here. You're taking everybody out of this. You're creating this map and asking to codify it to apply this code now to a very select group of individuals, which I'm a part of. All I've asked for from day one is equitability. I want to be like everybody else. If the code applies to everybody else, then so be it. I'll be in it. If not, and I'm disturbed because I've heard from you, I've heard from council that they don't want to prevent anybody from building. They've agreed that my property has been disturbed, so therefore this shouldn't apply in the same way. But yet it does and is. If you play this out, if you look at what's being presented to you, they have classified disturbed and undisturbed areas. And they say, essentially, if you have a permit or you can prove that your land has been disturbed, it doesn't apply. Well, that has some inherent issues in and of itself because back in the 1950s, the Los Alamos Hills area was an agricultural area. It's stated in our general plan and the history, and you didn't need an ag grading permit to grade on top of some of those hilltops that had avocado groves. I've tried to find past permits in the county, at the county building, and anything past 1980, it's a needle in a haystack. You're not going to find it in the basement. If you play this out, say I do have a permit. The way this is written, it says, okay, your permitted area is called developed, disturbed, and this doesn't apply. But other parts of your property, it might apply if you don't have proof of a permit. But let's just say, for the sake of the matter, I do have proof. And I say, I want to build an ADU or a building or something on the other part of my property, and it's been disturbed. Here's my permit. They said, good. It doesn't apply until... You move 50 cubic yards of dirt. Then the hillside grading ordinance applies. That's what this says. I can't even build a BMX track in 50 cubic yards of dirt. So essentially it applies to me. Chairman, if I may.

Yeah, I'll allow you extra time just like I did, Mr. Klein.

Thank you, sir. I have been on that side of the dais. I've been on that side of the counter as a city employee. I've been a lifelong resident here who's built my own home. and a business owner that started it from scratch right here in Marietta. And I can say, without equivocation, unless you provide more clarity, I'm going to be up here, or my kids are gonna be up here, or my grandkids are gonna be up here, defending and trying to justify being able to build on their property because this is ambiguous. For the very same reason the staff said they needed a map, I need a map that says I'm disturbed. Shade me a different color. Say I'm disturbing the map. That's clarity. They can look at the map and say, this is the disturbed land. I offered a simple solution the first time I spoke here. I've gone to every single meeting that's been going on since 2022, missed one meeting. I've been to every single one, pleaded, gave my input. If you need a map... So do we. My solution was take us out of the map. That was a simple solution. MSHCP solved most of the preservation of land we're talking about anyway. This is a very, very few people it applies to. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Madam Secretary, do we have any more speakers?

Seeing none.

Okay. None. Closes the chair. Oh, okay.

I'm sorry. We have Dan Long.

Good evening.

I'd like to echo what my previous commenters mentioned. Staff has done a fantastic job. I've also been on the other side of the desk here, and I know this is not an easy task. I've worked for numerous jurisdictions as a city planner, as well as a private developer and landowner myself, and I know the hillside gradients is always a very challenging task to bring on. I brought you some pictures there. I had no idea that was going to come up today. I apologize. I took those today, as well as some of those from Google Earth. I'll speak to that in just a moment. We'll circle back around to that. I think staff has done a very good job on the height standards. I think we can check that box. That's been solved. I think they've done a very good job of adding clarity to that. We have some cleanup items in the ordinance. I think the staff's done a very good job on that. One of the items I do have some heartache with is the GIS model. I even heard a reference to AI today. Everyone wants to talk about AI. It's going to solve all the world's problems. But I've dealt with AI, and I'm telling you right now, it's garbage in, garbage out. Same thing with GIS. I have 4.6 acres that I personally own that's inside that building. hillside area that's highlighted as orange. And about one acre of that is dead flat, but yet it's highlighted as orange that I applied to. I would love to build on that flat acre, but here's the problem. I'm on septic. It doesn't perk there. Where it does perk is where it's a hilly area. So there's some real challenges with this map and how you actually apply it. You can say, oh, you're in the hillside area building the flat area. Well, OK, now I'm going to have to build a pump for my septic system. It becomes really challenging with how you apply the regulations when you really start drilling down into the details here. So I'd really like to encourage there's some kind of appeal process for a record of survey to prove that you're not within this sloped area. I think there's solutions that we can do to that to give some flexibility to staff to say, you know what, you can go ahead and build in that area because you're not technically in a sloped area. So I'd like to see that added in there. We mentioned some of the exemptions. As the previous speaker mentioned, I agree with that completely. I would like to go on the record on some of these parcels. My property, 28640 Callahan Road, APN 900-060-010, is developed with a single-family home that was done in 1980, predates the city. That is a disturbed lot. 37250, Mason Road, 900-060-026, also built with a single-family home well ahead of the city incorporation. I've got... I'll let my brother speak to his house. It's at 37210 in Mason, also built with a single-family home. It has been disturbed. My neighbor... Address 28701 Los Alamos Heights Road. Five separate APNs, 900-060-009, 057-058, 056 and 054. If I may continue. Yeah, I'll give you another minute just like I did the other speakers. Those five parcels are all disturbed with a single family home, water wells, water tanks, agricultural roads, and numerous other outcropping buildings that are built well ahead of city incorporation dating back to the 1960s. You're not going to find those permits, but I'm telling you right now, for the record, those lots are developed and disturbed, and I'd like to see if those are exempt from the standards of the hillside grain urns. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Madam Secretary, any other speakers before we close the public hearing? Okay. See you then. All right. 8.09 p.m., close the public hearing. Questions for staff, any of my colleagues here, based upon what we've heard? Or staff, would you like to respond?

I'd be interested to hear what staff has to say.

Yeah, so if you're under 25%, those splatter areas that they mentioned, It's not in the hillside area. You're just in an area for review, essentially. So if you've got a flatter area of the site, it's 15% or whatever. It's not a hillside. Yeah, so between 25 and 50, but I think... It's 25 and 50 and 15 over.

There was mention about an appeal process. I believe there's already one in place, correct? Because it would come to staff and the commission and ultimately to the council if there's a disagreement about interpretation or what have you, is that an acronym?

Yeah, so for, that speaks to, yeah, the undeveloped developed process, that table we just kind of went through. So if your site, and the reason is there's varying topography through a site, right? You might have flat areas, you're going to have some steeper areas. So really, the hillside area applies to those steeper areas, 25% and greater. And say if someone wants to come in, and they want to grade some of that, that's kind of where this would apply. If the flatterers, the flatterers wouldn't really apply.

Okay.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. The other question, more of a statement, there was this comment about the word encourage. And my interpretation is that word is in the purpose of the ordinance. And whenever, I mean, as an attorney, whenever I'm writing something, When you say purpose, you use words like that, and then the actual ordinance says, this is the nuts and bolts. This is where, yes, it shall occur. Am I misreading how you were using that?

It's a preamble. It's currently in the code today.

It's like precatory language.

Right.

Okay.

That's what I thought. Okay. We could work with the city attorney to refine that further if needed.

I just see it all the time. This is our desire. That's why you put the purpose in. And then this is the result of our purpose, which is the actual ordinance. Okay.

Yeah, and not to split hairs, but I think the point is good that the state law is telling us that if we don't have objective language, we don't have it. So I think that was the point was we want to make sure that as we're talking about something, there's a checkbox routine. Like, you know, what happens if someone can't find a record from 1955 in the county? What do we do? I think those are good comments for us to focus on.

I just wanted to add one thing too. We can't really exempt individual properties here. We haven't even adopted an ordinance yet, right? So got to get there first and got to get to the council, get an ordinance adopted, and then people can submit projects and we can start figuring out which ones are developed and which ones are not developed, right? But can't do that yet. We got to get through the ordinance first.

And from what I heard, the council does want to address the rest of the city, but that's coming later.

Just for retaining wall updates.

Retaining walls, yeah. Okay. That's a separate project.

Yeah, not for the hillside. It only applies according to what's on the map is what you're saying.

It's only on the map. And it's a drill down to the 25% areas within that map because there is going to be undulation throughout a site. Not an entire site will be all 25%. You'll have variables.

And the map is citywide. The map applies citywide. So it would be codified in the development code, but applies citywide.

So on page 285 of the ordinance, there's a table that explains what is a hillside and what is not.

And the map goes further. Not only is it citywide, it goes into our sphere of influence. We have an area in that.

Okay, some of the other concerns here that were brought up here about the, you know, putting the map in the general plan. What are your thoughts about that?

I can take that one, Chair. I don't think that's a good idea. This is the standards for the hillside area are within the development code. They're expressly as what Chris has drafted and the tables are in the development code. It doesn't really belong in the general plan. It belongs in the development code. So that would be staff's opinion on that.

OK. Again we we've gone back and forth versus developed and developed disturbed and disturbed I'm just going by what the council's direction was in the last very last workshop was to define that term and so I'm just I'm struggling with that because I don't think that we've defined that term. To provide more clarity, and their direction is basically to us, all of us, is to have clarity, so that way we're not left to interpret things either now or at a later time.

Essentially, the table has that, but we can add another definition to clarify that further.

Well, that's where I'm going. I think it probably needs more work in order to have that clearly defined. Any other concerns or questions?

Chair, there was one comment by one of our speakers about a percentage, 25%. A similar comment was made by Mayor Pro Tem Holladay. He wanted to make sure it was exact, that it was 25 and nothing else. And I think the rounding up comment that we heard, that's a good one. I think that's consistent with the chair, that he didn't want there to be inconsistencies on the approach. So we'll make sure as part of the recommendation today, we follow up on that and make sure that's crystal clear to the city council.

By adding in .000?

Well I do, I was told just keep it 25. But if it's 25 or 25.000, I think it's the same thing. We just want a four.

Lack of clarity, this is exactly my point. 25 to you versus 25.000 could mean the same, but then it could be different.

Chair, there is no other place in our code that stretches out decimal places like that, and there's really an infinite number of decimal places you can do. I think what the director here is trying to convey is that if we add the additional language that was suggested also by Mr. Klein, that there's no rounding up involved, that 25 is your cap. I think that accomplishes the same thing. Adding the decimals to me adds confusion because that's inconsistent with how we do any other numerical minimum or maximum. Okay, so the number is the number, but we can add that clarity that there shall be no rounding.

About the rounding issue? Yeah, and that would be in table 1624-2, just for the record.

I'm still not clear on the disturbed and undisturbed. That's because there's nothing to reference it, because there's nothing in the staff report.

We have So in the table, it has criteria for what is a disturbed situation with permits, building certificate of occupancy, things like that.

The table that was shown in the presentation is directly from the ordinance. And it puts the word developed in quotes. You could add in the following section of definitions, developed and referenced back to the table if you want an additional definition. level of pointing to it, but the table does put developed in quotes and tells you the very specific evidence that's required to show that something is developed. Grading permits and records, building permits, certificates of occupancy, approved grading plans. And then it goes on to say that there are some, if you don't have a permit history, these are additional things that can show your property is developed.

So is there anything to define like what one of the speakers brought up here about agricultural property. In what you just described is that there was a structure built on the site, meaning there was, there was development in a true sense of a building as opposed to disturbed where there's ground move but maybe for another purpose other than building a structure.

It does, but it's subject to a director determination based on other extrinsic evidence such as aerial photography or other photography that might be involved. The point is there is a burden upon the property owner to somehow demonstrate that this property was disturbed in a lawful manner in the past and The example you gave, if there's evidence of that, then the director would have what he needs to make that determination. If there is no evidence of that, then I think the point is we can't simply exempt properties because somebody says, you know, sometime in 1852, somebody did something on this property. But that path is there to make that determination if such evidence does exist. and that Director of Determination is appealable to both the, to the Planning Commission.

I don't know. I still think it needs more clarity.

Could the Chair articulate how to make it more clear?

Well, I think maybe addressing agricultural property, I just think it needs a little bit more clarity on that point.

Chair, the trick with agriculture, because I did work with the County of San Diego, and we did go back to 1955 when the original zoning ordinance was founded. We had a good relationship with the Farm Bureau, who was a strong advocate for farmers, because there was often times where we couldn't find any records But through aerials, we did find like we saw orchards and row crops quite readily. The trick with that is that over time, if the farm is not continued, that does revert to natural biology. So we do have to be careful there that under the California Environmental Quality Act, we have to make strong judgments on that one. But if it's a farm... That is some information that we can consider, but we do have to be careful on the length of time when that use was in effect versus what today's baseline would be. But I'm trying to figure out how to drill down a little bit more, but I think what we have is, was it legally impacted by a grading permit or building permit? Is it cleared because you were directed through an abatement or other 100-foot field model zone around your habitable structure? I think we have to be careful not to augment too many options for people because then I think it would cause staff to not have the best judgment. But at the same time, mom and pops, we do try to go to the nth degree. What you need to hear, Chair, is some definitive pathway for how we would judge and look at these types of permits. But maybe as part of your recommendation, that is what you can direct us to do on the way to City Council.

Anybody else.

I just have wouldn't the director make that determination. If somebody has a question.

Yes that that's the whole issue is who's the director at the time and you know we've seen things where decisions have been made and nothing on any staff or anything like that it's just I can think of situations where things were the intent was put in place 20 years ago. Fast forward five, ten years, people didn't work there. And for lack of clarity, you know, having to do the back research, it just becomes problematic for the people sitting in the driver's seat at the time. And things get misinterpreted.

One suggestion, unless staff is, if this is a pressing issue, can we table let you guys massage that and bring it back?

Well. That's going to be my motion is that it goes back and massage it and bring it back.

Yeah, I'm thinking, I wanted to ask the chair if you might consider that the commission could make their recommendation and have it be separate from staff's recommendation, if you're looking for clarity on that, but still move the item forward. I know everybody's been patient, but we've been working on this a long time. We're talking about one aspect of the ordinance. We'd like to move this project forward to council. We've spent a lot of time on this. I think we have property owners that would like this to be put to bed. So if there's a way to maybe have a commission recommendation, and if that's separate from staff's recommendation, I think that's okay. Do you want to make that motion?

Yeah. You go ahead and make a motion. My recommendation is to move it back to staff. So I'm going to make a motion that we move it back to staff and have everything that we've spoken about tonight be clarified, and especially, again, the direction of what council gave us, which was the disturbed and undisturbed.

I'll second that.

It's not the motion. It was not to adopt it. The motion was to send it back to staff.

But it says to adopt the recommended action as amended, but they're not doing any of the recommended actions at all.

Yes.

And Chair, just while we're waiting, we typically would want to come back in two weeks, date certain. We may need additional time for that, so we're not sure if we could come back in two weeks on this item.

I think it's been like how many years.

Yeah, so we'll need to re-notice it in that case.

Correct. Still says motion to adopt as amended on the floor. Yeah, but it's not the recommended action.

It's a motion to adopt what was amended on the floor.

So a yes vote would send it back?

Correct.

Okay.

Mr. Chair, if I could just interject a suggestion. If you continue it to a date certain, like June 10th is probably a reasonable amount of time for us to put our heads together and come up with some ideas for you rather than having to go through and re-notice it. Okay, sir.

We can do June 24th would be the next one.

Worst case is it comes off.

Or we can re-notice it, yeah. Apologize, I wasn't aware there was a conflict.

We'll bring it back first available, Chair.

Okay. I've registered my vote.

Okay. Motion carries unanimously as amended on the floor.

Okay. This concludes our second public hearing so now we're going to move on to city planner comments.

This is a good one tonight, Chair. I appreciate everybody's input. Very interesting items. We'll do our best to bring these back, the second one back to you as soon as we can, address your concerns, and appreciate the time of the commission, and I wish Commissioner LaPaglia well. He just came down sick today, so I wish him well, and I hope he's doing well. And with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Chair.

Okay, with that, Mr. City Attorney.

Nothing to add, thank you.

Okay, planning commission.

Just want to thank staff for their diligent work. Okay, Chris.

Again, I'm sorry, but I know you've been working on this for years, probably longer than we've been up here as well, too many of us. So it's been a long, arduous process. I mean, you're working with a long history of the city and the records that we have and everything like that.

We're looking forward to the 35th birthday for the city coming up.

Yes. No problem. I do have a question just as a matter of protocol. So you mentioned, it's been thrown around here, director's hearings. So how does that kind of Obviously, it's a lower level. Are we notified when directors hearings happen or decisions are been made or anything like that? So we kind of have a maybe a global overall understanding of what's happening maybe below us. I mean, we can obviously watch the council meetings and stuff what happens above us. But when decisions are getting made on certain permitting issues or those type of things like that, is there a mechanism to where we can be noticed?

As it currently, so we're talking in general, not about any specific. Yeah, just in general. No, we don't typically notice. We would, if something requires a notice in the code, we would notice it according to what's in the code. But typically, director's decisions are not communicated to the planning commission.

So do we, I'm just, if they're not noticed, do we have the authority to ask for something? If somebody asked for an appeal, either the applicant, it would come to us, obviously. But if we wanted to appeal something, do we have that authority to do that? I'm just curious.

Chair, I don't believe that's in the code.

That's not in the code.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Yes, it is.

We'll look into it and get back to you. I can't say offhand. It's a little different for the council than it would be for the planning commission item, so we have to make sure we separate that. But if the question is, as I understand it, is can you appeal a director's decision Correct. Can you be the appellant? And if you are the appellant, does that affect your ability to sit on the appeal board as the appellant? So that's different from calling something up. We can look into that issue for you and get you a detailed response.

Yeah, there's different things that have gone through like, you know, massage establishments, those type of things like that. And I'm not saying that you know, there's any negative decision. I just was wondering as a matter of protocol because I was involved in that process when I worked at the PD. But if a decision was made by a director and then, you know, for whatever reason, just in theory, a planning commission says, oh, well, hey, we'd like to hear that, whether it's not an appeal from the person wanting to appeal to the planning commission. How would we know that, that that occurred if we're not told of Director's hearing see what I'm saying.

Yeah, I'll get you a detailed response, but I think there's two different ways you need to look at it one is the Commission exercising jurisdiction over it which is as a body you're taking correct versus as a Resident being the appellant appealing a decision Those are two different things and two different processes and what's available or not available and how impacts you will be different so I'll send the entire commission a review of that.

Yeah, just was curious, just for educational purposes to see how that worked. Okay. All right. Sounds good. With that, no other further business. Do we have a consensus to adjourn? All right. We will adjourn. It is now 8.32 p.m.