Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

So just to make you aware, we've used this before and the mics were loud enough. Like, for example, if the chair were to ask a question Mhmm. The speakers were loud enough to go into the phone and for them to hear and be able to respond. If for whatever reason that's not the case, you may need to re

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We're gonna get started at 06:35 today as we're waiting for one of our commissioners who is going to be a little bit late. So thank you for your patience, and thank you for joining us. Alright. We're all here, so we'll get started. The regular meeting of the Oakley Planning Commission is called to order. Roll call. Vice chair Price. Here. Commissioner Harvey.

Here.

Commissioner Olavaros.

Here.

Commissioner Chuco? Present. And I am chair Verdusco present. Next, if you are able to, please stand and join us for the pledge of allegiance.

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. So just for everybody's awareness, city attorney Tuan Anvou is attending this evening's meeting remotely via telephone in case anybody has any questions or for any clarifications. Agenda item number two, public comments. At this time, public comments will be heard for items not on the agenda. I do not have public speaker cards submitted.

To submit a public speaker comment, please complete a speaker card located in the lobby and submit to the city clerk. The time limit to speak is three minutes. The time limit is monitored by the timer located in front of the chair seat. When one minute remains on the timer, it will beep once, and the light will turn yellow as a reminder to complete comments before your time expires. Alright. Now we move on to the consent calendar, agenda item number three. Item 3.1, minutes from the regular planning commission meeting held 08/05/2025. Is there any discussion or would someone like to make a motion to approve the consent calendar?

I'd like to make a motion to approve the consent calendar as read.

I second.

Alright. I have a first and a second. Therefore, I'll call for a vote. All in favor of approving the consent calendar, aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. No oppose or abstentions. The motion passes unanimously. Now we move on to public hearings.

Item 4.1, housing element rezone general plan amendments and rezoning. General plan amendment 2025 dash zero zero four RZ2025Dash004. Director Ken Strelow. Thank you very much, and good evening, chair Verdusco, vice chair price, and members of the planning commission. Jose is gonna set this up so that anyone watching the streaming can can view this presentation as well. So I'll just wait for

him to get that set up, and then we'll begin. Ready to go. Thank you, Jose. Yeah. So the item before the planning commission tonight is for the housing element rezone, GPA twenty twenty five dash zero zero four, and r z 2025 dash zero zero four.

For a quick summary of the housing element rezone, the city of Oakley is initiating a general plan amendment and rezoning application to implement policy action 1.1 of the city of Oakley housing element, sixth cycle, which spans from the years 2023 to 2031, otherwise referred to as the housing element. A few terms that'll be used in this presentation. GPA is the general plan amendment. That's the type of entitlements that are being requested for recommendation by the planning commission to the city council. RZ is for the rezone, another type of entitlement.

RHNA pronounced as RHNA is the regional housing needs allocation. HCD is the state department of housing Community Development, and AHO refers to the affordable housing overlay district. Hopefully, that covers most of them. If other ones come up, we're happy to explain throughout the presentation. So as part of the general plan amendment, the proposed project description included these three actions, and I'll try to I'm not gonna read through them word for word, but I'll summarize them.

The first one is, is to create a new land use designation in the actual City Of Oakley general plan that would accommodate the housing that is required for the city to implement per the state of California. The second one includes approval of amendments to the actual general plan land use designation on the identified sites that we'll go over in this presentation and those would be amended to the designation that is also being proposed as part of this entitlement. And the third action is approval of one of the parcels to amend it from a split designation of residential high and commercial to be completely commercial. As part of the rezone entitlement, similar to how we have to create a general plan designation, land use designation, we also need to create a zoning district. That zoning district is proposed to be called M Dash 30.

It's a multiple family residential district. And the method in which we will do that is to amend the existing multifamily residential district ordinance in the zoning code. The second one is approval of a rezone from of seven parcels, and they have zoning of M 9 and M 12 District, and those that would be to rezone those to the M 30 District. And then finally, an approval of a rezone to nine sites that are identified to have the affordable housing overlay district added to them. So it's not a change to the base zoning of those.

It would just be the addition of the affordable housing overlay. And I'll get a look. I'll get more into the details of that a little bit here in the presentation. There have been a couple of site modifications to the project description since the notice was posted. The notice went out some time ago because we need to publish it in the paper as well as mail it to all owners of property within 500 feet of every single project site's boundaries.

We also send it to a list of approximately 60 outside agencies. So it's been out there for a little bit, a few weeks now since we sent it to the paper. And there are a couple of modifications that have occurred. There was one site called Site 15. It was identified by the city council, and and staff was directed to include it in the housing rezone. The APN was accidentally left off off of the project description. However, the, the residents that live within for the property owners within 500 feet of that site were included in the noticing. The staff proceeded with the project as if the site was included. So that was just an oversight. Site 15 is a part of this request.

The other one is the M 30 District. There were some back and forth whether we wanted to create a brand new section of the zoning code or amend the existing section. I think we may have originally described it as we are going to create a brand new section. Ultimately, we decided to amend it. This does not change what the M 30 District contains either way it contained the same the same use allowances the same density allowance is development regulations, etcetera.

And then finally one of the sites that we will talk about Site 11. It's a little bit unique. It's the site with the split designation on it. It's being proposed to be redesignated to commercial. So as it currently exists, it's mostly multifamily.

And there's a corner of it that is commercial. So the proposal would be to redesignate the entire site as commercial in order to prepare it for the A H 0, the affordable housing overlay District. However, HCD only allows the A H 0 District to go on commercially zoned properties. And the way that's worded is zoned not designated. So in order to be safe, we're recommending that this site along with the designation of commercial also be rezoned to commercial.

It's currently planned unit District P 1 District. And there is timing required with the implementation just like with the original housing element certification, which ultimately happened on May 24. There's rezoning of adequate sites to the best of our knowledge is required to be done by 01/31/2026. If it is not done by then, the city's housing element could be found to be out of compliance with state law opening up the city to builders remedy applications which are essentially, they're essentially a path for developers to propose housing on any designated part, any parcel of any land use designation. They do not have to abide by the general plan.

And we must process them. So a little bit of background on the housing element itself. The housing element is one of the seven mandatory elements of the general plan. It exists as a separate It's included in the general plans adopted separately because it's on a eight year cycle. And state law does require updates to the housing element every eight years.

So 2023 was our last update. In Rina, the regional housing needs allocation, it's a state mandated process that determines the total number of housing units broken down by income category that the city must plan for throughout the eight year cycle of the general plan. In the past, the city used an affordable housing overlay to accommodate Rina. And when I say accommodate Rina, I wanna clarify that the city of Oakley as a jurisdiction does not build affordable housing. We are required to plan for the density the state requires for affordable housing to be feasible.

And so what the way we achieve that is through some cities do inclusionary housing where they may require every single development to have a certain percentage of housing. Oakley is not do that. We had a lot of good success with our a h o in the past. There was even a study that named the city of Oakley as a positive example of using an a h o. And that was how we were going to proceed with the twenty twenty three two thousand and thirty one housing element.

We got really close. We adopted the city council adopted the housing element. We sent it to HCD because they're required to certify it before it becomes valid. And just before they were going to do that, a court case dropped where it was Martinez versus Clovis in 2023, and it essentially said that the the city of Clovis' AHO was not valid. They could not use the AHO to accommodate their arena.

HCD kind of pumped the brakes on certifying any housing elements that used AHO. Our May 31 deadline was fast approaching, and the city went back to the city staff went back to the city council with an alternative. Should the AHO not be permitted to be used by HCD in the future? At the time we were going to do our rezone that we would have an alternative to just do a flat out rezone of properties. HCD accepted that.

The city council adopted the housing element and HCD after that certified it, with a pretty quick turnaround. And this is just a summary of of kind of the overall arena just to give a little bit of background. So overall, when you consider all income categories for this cycle of the housing element, 1,058 dwelling units are required to be planned for or zone for accommodated. 440 of those are should are required to meet the lower income level. HCD defines lower income.

So you'll hear Rina units, lower income units for the purposes of the housing element rezone exercise. We mean that to mean lower income units. So part of these 444 units even though Rina covers above moderate income levels as well. When when we're talking about it in this context, we're talking about the lower income. And lower incomes further broken down into low income, very low income, and extremely low income.

Extremely low income is is basically half I believe of the or there's a very yeah. Very low income and extremely low income. So I think extremely low income is half of of one of the categories. And the table there shows you. So the three columns on the left side of the table. Are the units that are required to be? Planned for in the housing element rezone. We have no problem with moderate and above moderate income housing. Then there's a method so. When we say plan for affordable housing, what that means is we need to find sites.

We need to either rezone them or place the affordable housing overlay zone on them. And there needs to be enough acreage that when we run through the arena capacity calculations, we can we can accommodate those 440 units. And the way that's done is HCD through working with HCD, they have determined that the city of Oakley has found that 24 dwelling units per acre is a feasible density that we can use to calculate Rina capacity. It's kind of based on some of the previous projects such as community for better housing that have been done at around that density. However, there are capacity reductions that are built into the calculations.

One of them is if a site is non vacant. So let's say you have a one acre site with a house already existing. That sites total capacity. So if it was one acre and 24 units per acre would be how we would calculate it if it has a house we need to reduce that by 25%. Also, if the site has a underlying commercial zoning. It also needs to be reduced by 25%. And those are not stacked. They're not compounded. So it would be 25% from the maximum density. Twice or 50% of the total maximum density.

Based on 24 units. And there's an example there at the bottom so an existing ajo site could accommodate 40 Rina affordable units. It would be reduced to 30 units if it was only non vacant or only commercially zoned and would be reduced to 20 units if both of those applied. And this this just goes and talks about the alternative to the rezone solution. I talked about this a little bit earlier and it was if we could still use the a h o.

Then we would. And we can still use the a h o. It must be placed on commercially zoned sites. It sounds counterintuitive, but the reason for that is the a h o is an overlay so it doesn't take over the zoning for a site. It only provides for an optional development zoning regulations.

And if we were to place it on residential sites, let's say at six to or, you know, five and a half to 9.6 dwelling units per acre, it would not require the development at the density the state is asking for. Someone could just say, I don't wanna use the AHO. I'd rather develop it at this density, It makes it much tougher for h c d to accept our housing element as complete. So h c d's guidances will still they say will still allow the a h o. It can only accommodate up to half of your total lower income units or 220 units in this case, and it can only be placed on commercially zoned properties.

On June 10, the city count city staff held a council with the work or I'm sorry. A work session with the city council as part of the regular city council meeting. The meet the work session was noticed in the paper. We talked about potential sites that were identified in the housing element. So you'll see you'll see a phrase existing AHO and candidate AHO and what that's referring to is how our adopted housing element identifies the sites because there are sites that are currently zoned with the AHO on them.

However, they may not be applicable due to the new guidance from HCD. So there are sites the housing element included as candidate AHO sites. In other words, candidate sites to satisfy RENA that have not been acted upon yet. So we discussed the existing AHO sites, the candidate AHO sites, and then staff proposed some new sites because even with all of those in place based on sites that we had to eliminate based on guidance from HCD, we were not reaching our arena affordable unit capacity. So additional sites had to be identified.

Some of the candidate sites as staff proposed and some new sites at the city council suggested during the meeting are included in this recommendation tonight. And now we're going to get into the sites that are being proposed. I've split them up. So the first grouping of sites is are the sites that are proposed to have the general plan land use designation changed on them to residential multiple family and then have the zoning put on them for M 30 District. And the first one are sites one Through four.

They're located next to Cypress self storage on East Cypress Road, just east of that. They're on, East Cypress Road and Van Pelt Lane. These are identified in the housing element now. They currently have the affordable housing overlay district on them. However, they're residentially, or they are residentially zoned so that that can remain. The underlying general plan designations residential high, so that will need to change. We'll need to rezone that to M 30. The a h o is not applicable, and then the city council directed staff to include these as a rezone as rezone sites. So rezone to M30. They do have a reduction of capacity because they are non vacant.

So there's a 25% reduction of capacity and you can see there where it says total acres and potential units and then the reduction is the number in parentheses and then finally the potential units counted towards lower income arena is the total potential units minus the reduction. Site 5 is just south of the East Cypress Road and Sellers Avenue intersection. It's the red site up there, the red outline site. This site is also an existing ajo. It's addressed as I think it's sixty three eighty one sellers.

This one is also was also directed by the city council to be a rezone site. That site's about two acres. Site 14, which is directly to the west to Site 5. This was a candidate AHO site. So it is identified in the housing element.

However, it did not have the a h o placed on it in the previous housing element cycle. So this one's a bit larger, 2.8 acres and, this one was also directed by council for the staff was directed to proceed or to pursue the M 30 district on this site as well. And finally, Site 15. This is the site we mentioned earlier in the modifications. This site is on the Northeast Corner Of Rose Avenue and West Cypress Road.

It's just over three acres in size. This was one of the sites that was brought up and discussed during the work session. Council directed staff to pursue this site for the M 30 zone. And now we'll go over the sites proposed for the affordable housing overlay district. And I think this is a good time to mention something I probably should have brought up right at the beginning, but in this exercise part of what staff was looking for in addition to some of the sites that were previously identified were sites that were of a size where a manageable multiple family development could take place.

So what we wanted to do is avoid really large sites where there would be hundreds and hundreds of units that may become difficult to manage or to upkeep and instead do something that we've heard at least from affordable housing developers both profit and nonprofit are more feasible to build and manage and that's typically anywhere from we've heard between 60 to a 120 units ideally, but it can range below and above that. So we were looking at sites a little bit over an acre to maybe a couple acres in most or maybe a couple sites slightly larger, but that was kind of the goal when we were looking at sites. So now the affordable housing overlay sites Site 6 And 7 are right there on Cypress Road and Main Street on the Northwest Corner. Site 7 is tiny. It's just a little sliver down there in the corner and it's the one on the top left.

So the ones on the bottom right those were sites one through four and these are just images that we crop from other documents so. Those sites one through four are still showing on there, but this is for sites six and seven. This one is proposed and was staff was directed by the city council to pursue the affordable housing overlay district on that site. Because there is an existing structure on it and it's underlying commercial, it does receive a 50% reduction in Rina capacity. And just to clarify when I say Rina capacity that doesn't mean how many affordable units can be built on the site.

It means how many affordable units HCD will allow us to say we've planned for on the site. So someone could come in and build zero affordable units or they could max out the affordable units, use a density bonus agreement. It it just depends what what will be developed. Or they could just come in and do commercial because it's commercial site. Site 11 is located across the street from Diamond Hills.

It's on Empire And Neroli Road on the Southwest Corner. And this is the unique site that we said would also be recommended to be rezoned. The plan is to redesignate it to commercial, completely commercial, rezone it to commercial, and then place the affordable housing overlay district on it. And I put a couple of stars there or asterisk next to the reduced capacity in the total units and I'll get that to that right at the end of the presentation. There's been some changes to this site that we need to quickly discuss with the planning commission and provide an update on.

Sites twelve and thirteen are on Main Street and Rose Avenue where Rose Avenue connects in the Main Street on either side. These sites are part of the downtown specific plan. They're in the downtown support area. They're designated commercial downtown. These sites are were directed by the city council to pursue the A H 0 District. And Site 16 And 17 there's a house on these sites. They're on the same kinda general site when you're just looking at it from the ground or from above of Laurel Ridge Church. And on Laurel Road, just off of Laurel Road as you're approaching the highway. And these are a couple of adjacent site. They're right next to each other.

This was a site that was brought up during the work session, so it's a recommended site, and the city council's direction to staff was to pursue the AHO district. And then finally Sites 18 And 19. These are two sites south of the United States Postal Service office on either side of 7th Street. And these are also these are also recommended sites that were discussed and directed by the city council to pursue for the a h o during the work session. So a quick analysis here.

The housing element requires the city to plan for at least 440 lower income Rina units. As proposed, the city would plan for 440. That's actually not right. I was doing some late tweaks to this and that number should be four fifty seven. This would satisfy Oakley's completion of policy action 1.1 which is to rezone adequate sites to accommodate the city's arena.

And even these sites that we're selecting are subject to HCDs approval. And we'll get into that in a couple slides here and we're almost done. And then for the general plan amendments, this is just a summary of the findings. In the case of the general plan amendments related to creating the designation, that designation is required in order to establish the base to do the housing element rezone at least for the residentially designated properties pursuant to the policy action in the housing element. Also, implementation of policy action 1.1 would basically result in implementing the housing element and the rezone which is required to be done by the end of next January.

And then adoption of the general plan amendments carries out the goals and policies of the general plan, the housing element by bringing the city into compliance, the housing element, and accommodating for our lower income arena established by HCD. For the rezones, each of the rezonings re is required as well to implement policy action 1.1, and that includes both the rezones to M 30 and the A H 0 District over or the affordable housing overlay. And then, the rezoning specific to the M 30 sites will result in substantial capacity with a slight buffer to satisfy the minimum of 440 lower income Rina units the city is required to plan for. And since the housing element is an adopted element of the general plan, actions taken to implement the housing element are found to be consistent with the general plan. There's something called AFFH, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.

And this is kind of a subjective oversight the HCD has on the city's actions and housing element in general. And essentially what it says is that when planning for affordable housing or anything really that's related to the housing element, cities can't just kinda try to tuck it off somewhere in a corner and forget about it. It needs to be they need to be in areas where there's shared resources various income levels things like that. So we did our best to achieve that. And the end result is that the distribution of the sites goes through three different income level census tracks within the city.

We try to find sites close to Main Street where possible where there's access to grocery stores, transit and other commercial services. That was important as well. And for that reason a couple areas. There's also a disadvantage community in Oakley. So some of the sites that were in or adjacent to that way back before we even got to the work session were sort of eliminated and those were like on Bridgehead Road and things like that in the area where our largest multifamily project already exists.

In addition to that, there's this thing called the access to opportunity. It's in that last built in that last bullet. So the idea is with the site selection that's kind of throughout the city On areas of major transit when possible or Main Street walkable to services grocery and transit. We feel like we've achieved a good balance of where the affordable housing overlay could theoretically go and the rezoning sites could theoretically go and again a lot of these sites were already identified in the housing element. So there is the addition of sites such as the 440 West Cypress.

The sites next to Laurel Ridge Church and there's only a couple sites that were added that weren't originally included in the housing element. And as far as the California Environmental Quality Act goes, there's been a recent amendment to the California Environmental Quality Act, and one of those amendments was that actions that are part of implementing a certified housing element are exempt from CEQUA. So we believe that this entire rezone process is exempt from CEQUA. We've checked with our city attorney on that and they they agree with that. And as I mentioned earlier, there's an update that I wanted to go over to the total arena capacity.

So in the staff report, it's indicated there would be a total capacity based on what's being suggested of 462 units. We found that that estimate was based on-site 11 being a candidate for the rezone. And because Site 11 is vacant and not commercial, the rezone option would have provided for the maximum number of units, based on 24 units per acre. However, the direction of the city council was to include that as an affordable housing overlay site. And we failed to make that adjustment to the total arena number because then it would receive a 25% reduction.

For having an underlying commercial zone. However, also since the work session the owners of that project have come in to try to take care of something that's been in the works for many many years and that is there is a ban there's right of way where Neroli Road used to go between the site and the railroad tracks. And since Neroli Road was reconfigured, it now runs north of the site and connects to Empire. And so that right of way back there was of no more use to the city. They had to go through some utility abandonments.

Anyways, they've finally gone through that process with the city to abandon that right away and it adds about an acre of land to that property that was not originally calculated. So we redid the calculations this afternoon and found that after factoring everything out, the total difference in projected units is five less than than the four sixty two. So the new number of, units based on what's being proposed would be 457. And again, that's not units to be built. It's not units that are required to be built.

It's units the city is required to accommodate to plan for based on the calculations and the formula as we use. And then, since some of these documents were done before this amendment, this adjustment was done, staff will need to update the city council documents when we take them to the city council to to show this change. So So they may be slightly different than what's proposed to you in your staff report. That completes my presentation. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

This is the recommendation. We've simplified the recommendation, to just, recommend the city council. Approve the general plan amendment and the ordinance or approve adopt a resolution and the ordinance for the general plan amendment and rezoning, as modified and and recommended by the planning commission. Thank you very much.

Thank you, director Strelow. At At this time, are there any questions from the planning commission? Commissioner Oliveros?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Kenneth, for the information. I I just wanted to clarify for Site 11, off of Empire and also Empire, not vampire. Empire. And then you mentioned 16 And 17 that are going to be now zoned for commercial. Is there a plan, and this is probably ahead of ahead of it. I'm getting ahead of myself, but an economic plan that, hopefully, it's not used again for, like, gas stations? Just curious. Or if that's something that we could just take a note of for future reference because I know once we sing commercials, like, that's where my head goes to is, gas stations.

So just a note on that. And then my other just a clarification. Once the the city meets what the state is asking us to do, does do we have to wait another eight years to go through the whole, like, tracking of, like, how much more affordable housing we're gonna go through again? Is that kind of how we're gonna how how it plans out?

Yeah. So for your first question, there's only one site, that would have commercial Added to it and that would be Site 11. All the other ones already have commercial designations and zoning's. There is no there's no relation between, any specific type of commercial uses in this exercise. We do have ordinances that speak to gas stations and a couple of the other uses that have been hot topics over the last few years.

As far as the cycle, yeah, the way it works is as we update the the housing element, New numbers come in from a bag and HCD takes a look at those numbers. They look at the populations across the counties and then they disseminate the units. So they essentially assign the RENE units to each jurisdiction accordingly. And our our job for that cycle is to go through the exercise of accommodating that number of of RENE units. So it does kinda repeat and it will depend on our population at that time, how many units we've achieved by that time, etcetera. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. And then one more question. And I don't wanna assume, but if there were, for example, most folks that are renting some of the affordable housing for, those that are homeowners that are paying Melarus taxes, for example, do those folks also pay Melarus, or are the homeowners paying more on those taxes to offset whatever that may look like?

It's a good question. I don't know if I have all the answers to that. I do know that, you know, with affordable housing, there's a lot of tax incentives and things like that. The the units are typically required to be deed restricted affordable for fifty five years. So that that would require them to be rented or or whatever may be sold at affordable rate and held on to for that for that number of years.

Any assessments to the property would would still apply. There could be I mean, it's really kinda getting into the weeds. There could be things that an affordable housing developer that's requesting a density bonus can request the City Council waive. Typically that's something like parking requirements or height restrictions things of those natures, but they can really request anything and then it's a negotiation on what would be done there. So yeah, nothing would change with the assessment. So a new development would still be subject to all of the lighting and landscaping assessments the fire district assessments, the p six police tax assessment, etcetera.

K. Thank you.

Any other questions from the Planning Commission? Alright. At this time, I will open the public hearing and receive comments from the public. I have three public speaker cards. First public speaker card is Robert Fieros, who wishes to speak.

As a reminder, you have three minutes, and then when the light comes on, that indicates you have one minute left. Alright. Good evening, mister Fieros.

Good evening. Robert Fieros here. I just wanted to comment on the time that we got the notice. It was, like, on a Wednesday, and then Thursday, they're open for questions, the planning. And Friday is, like, either by appointment or they're closed.

And then Monday was a holiday, so we just had another day just to try and figure out what was going on in our area. And my other question is, Tostrelo, is that once you get all this figured out, will there be a map of all these zones that you are proposing? And that's all I gotta say for for tonight. But thank you. Thank you, mister Fieros. Mister Strela, will can you speak to that, please?

Yeah. So the question on will there be, I believe yes if there will be a map. Yeah. So what we'll do is assuming all assuming this goes through whether it's as proposed or otherwise, the zoning map will be amended to show, likely show where the affordable housing overlay and m 30 zones would exist. The general plan map, it's not typical that the general plan map in the general plan itself is amended every time there's a land use designation change.

However, we do have the electronic maps online of the GIS and everything like that. And yes, those will be updated, once everything is done and it goes through the process, the ordinances are posted and published and and all of that. So with with the general plan, land use designation once the resolutions adopted, it's good to go. With the rezoning that requires adoption of an ordinance, so there's a first reading, a second reading, whether they're waived or not, they still occur at meetings. And, and then there's a thirty day publishing period before the ordinance is effective. So it'd just be a waiting period with the rezoning, but the general plan could be done, quicker.

Thank you, director Shilo. And to the gentleman's first question about sort of getting the late notice on what was going on in the area, how how long was the notice?

Notices are required to be mailed out ten days prior to a meeting. Okay. Yeah. And they're also published. Well, depending on the entitlement, it may be published. In this case, it it has two different entitlements that require publishing, and that's the general plan amendment and the rezone. So they're published. They're on the city website. They're posted throughout the city here at City Hall at the library. I think Delta Vista Middle School and.

Believe there's there may be one other let that may be it. And then other than that. We mail them. We mail them out to owners of property within. 500 feet of the boundary, so. Each property that you saw up here, we do a boundary around it. I did a 500 foot buffer from that boundary all the way around it, not from the middle of the site, but from the external boundary. And then if you're if you're a, property owner of record for any of those parcels that that touches, whether you're completely in the area or just partially, we we got your address from the county assessor's office and mailed you a notice. Thank you, director Schulo.

Next person is Michael Taze. Didn't indicate if we do you wish to speak? Good evening, mister Tays. My concern is the

same day that Rob was speaking about the late notice that we received. We thought the other thing I was wondering, you're saying 24 homes per acre. That's pretty high. I mean, I understand affordable housing and everything. I've gone through this before when the past mayors and planning commission was here. The thing I see problems with it is the Oaks, I think, so Oaks apartment behind Reilly's over there. There's 725 units in that unit right there. Four stories high. I don't think we need four story high buildings inside of our in in our city. We didn't know our city become apartment complex either. You go to Antioch, go down to Sycamore, you see what happened down there. I moved in that area in 1985, brand new, spanking brand new everything. Look what it is right now. And that's exactly what's gonna happen. It'll be right here.

You bring all these houses in, why don't we just tell the developer, you know what, put affordable housing where you're at right there? Not in twenty four twenty four units per acre. That's a lot of houses, a lot of apartments. I mean, I feel sorry for the the the people that have to do this here, but we're displacing people that live in that area to bring in all this right here. I've gone through redevelopment agencies in Pittsburgh. My grandparents out there, and it took them fifty years to do what Pittsburgh was doing, and they're still not done. But I understand that if we don't do affordable housing, we're not funded by the state, and that's what's going on here. All our agriculture property is gone. We wanna condense all these homes in one area, and that's not right. I mean, people got, you know, million dollar houses here.

You might see we don't have, but there's million dollar houses in this area. And what are these people gonna do? They're gonna leave, and the income ratio is gonna go down. We keep saying the income ratio isn't here. I moved this down here in 2001. I think there's 13,000 people here. I think we're about 30 right now. Where did all these people come from? They weren't born here. They come from other peep other places, affordable housing. They're moving on here from San Ramon, Fremont, wherever it is because it's affordable here. So you sell over there for million dollars, $2,000,000, and come out here and buy a $500,000 house. The money's here. You build, we will they will come. It's a nice area. Crime's down, and that's the main thing we have to worry about. 24 homes in one acre is a lot of lot of lot of homes here. Thank you very much. Thank you, mister Tase.

Alright. Next public speaker is Nancy Baltzel. Who wishes to speak? Good afternoon, miss Baltzel, and my apologies if I'm mispronouncing that.

You know, you did get better than most. I also got my notice late. I live in Downtown Old Oakley next to mister Aaron Meadows' property there. And I know his is zoned commercial, but you we're talking about P 1, a house that sits on the corner. Well, hoping that isn't my house.

And I'm wondering if you can give me which side of the street it's on. Whether because it's I live on the corner of 5th And Star. It's the house was built a hundred and fifteen years ago, and it was the old blacksmith shop. And my family has lived there since 1953, and I will not give it up without a fight. Okay?

Okay. Mister Schuler, can we confirm that if that's the property that she's that's

in question? There was one house that was zoned commercial on the corner?

We're gonna pull up the presentation real quick to take a look. I don't believe that property is included. Thank you. I hope not.

I don't like being ugly.

You said you lived in the downtown

Old 5th And Star? Call Old Town Oakley down

5th And Star, I believe. Right?

5th And Star. Yes.

Uh-huh. The sites in Downtown Oakley include Rose Avenue and Main Street, Sites 12 And 13, and then Sites 18 And 19, which are proposed for the affordable housing.

And where is 18 And 19 at?

18 And 19 are south of the post service. Those are just vacant vineyard sites. Okay. No other sites in the your house is not included as a Right. Site.

It's a

good thing. A few years ago, this happened to me also. So that's why I'm I'm very con I was concerned. They tried to take it a few years ago when my mom and dad were living there. So just being concerned. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Alright. That is all the public speaker cards that I have. So I will close the public hearing and call for deliberation.

What are we thinking?

Would any commissioner like to make a motion to adopt the resolution? Any more questions?

Yeah. I mean, I I have a few more questions, and and pardon my my ignorance here. On on the part, director Kenneth, when you mentioned nonvacant, for some of those sites. Does this mean that we're gonna wait until residents leave, or we're just saying we need to we need this land at this moment to do all the rezoning? I'm just I wanna just clarify what that means.

And I I it might be a good time to clarify. The city is not taking any property. Ownership remains the same. There there is no requirement to build affordable housing. We met we've met with three, I think three property owners contacted us and once we explained kind of everything that's going on, all three of them, I wouldn't say they were pro project, but they definitely did not oppose it.

They they understood what was going on. So as an example, let's say you owned a property that's let's let's say you own can you go to Site 5 or one of those please? And then bring it up. So here's an example. So Site 5 is is the site that's located on Sellers Avenue just south of East Cypress Road.

It currently has residential medium designation, so it's zoned and designated for residential development at a maximum density of, I think, 9.6 dwelling units per acre. The affordable housing actions or the rezoning that we're looking at tonight would redesignate the site to a designation that HCD right if HCD were to look at this site right now and say, that's great. They'd say that's great. You've designated this site. However, the density is not high enough.

We're not accepting it. Your housing element is not in compliance with state law. So we need to find sites and that's why we've we've proposed some of the ones already identified as affordable housing overlay sites because that affordable housing overlay site already allows this site to start out at a base density at 24 dwelling units per acre. Because the affordable housing overlay cannot be placed on residentially designated properties, it's being proposed for the rezone. That rezone would essentially take what's currently allowed to be 24 dwelling units per acre and set a density range of 20 to 30.

So the one negative to the property owner is if they really had their heart set on developing at precisely 9.6 dwelling units per acre or less, they may be required if they were to develop it with that. To do then But again, as one of the speakers brought up, we do have examples of projects in the city that are very large. And they have created some issues that we've dealt with various reasons and we're not looking to repeat that. So we're looking at smaller sites, more manageable sites. Again, that's the goal here.

Thank you, director.

Alright. Would any with all of that said go ahead. Commissioner Price.

I'm thinking back a couple years ago where we had city meetings where the citizens got together and looked at all the parcels in Oakley to designate housing for those areas. And this is where this whole plan originated at. And I can remember being at one of those meetings. I know there were several that were held before this whole project was put together. Could you add a little to that?

Sure. Yeah. What vice chair Price is referring to are public workshops that were held for the actual housing element itself. And, you know, when we're when we're working with the housing element, I would say that the the most interest that we see in a housing element is where's the housing gonna go. And you know, people come out for various reasons.

We had a couple of work sessions on that. I know at least one of them was held down at the recreation center and we did do a big exercise with our consultants where we showed those that attended and it was pretty well attended. We showed those who attended where the current AHO sites are. So those are the ones called existing AHO that are remnants from the previous housing element. And then where we were proposing additional ones.

We got a lot of good feedback at those meetings. And from those meetings we actually eliminated a couple of sites. So we eliminated the sites over by the hotel on Bridgehead. We eliminated some larger sites on O'Hara and Carpenter. And we eliminated the site next to on the Southwest Corner of O'Hara And Laurel next to elementary school.

So those sites were removed. There was a lot of outspoken comments about why those sites were not good sites. And then eventually as we moved closer and closer towards kind of the vision for what type of sites we wanted that kind of matched with staff's direction as well. Are those what you're referring to, vice chair? Thank you.

Any other questions? Commissioner Chuko?

More of a comment. So, director Strylo, first of all, thank you so much for a very detailed presentation. But I think it's it's very important for, like, everyone who is present and the audience to, understand and correct me if I'm wrong, but we're not, like, necessarily voting right now to say, hey. There's gonna be, like, 457 units built here. This is merely to make sure that we are showing the adequate supply, right, to the state of the sites that could potentially be used in future or maybe not used. Correct?

100% correct. The planning commission accident advisory role to the city council on all general plan amendments and rezoning. So tonight's hearing is to receive the planning commission's recommendation on what's being proposed. We are targeting, I believe the October 14 city council meeting should this go through tonight, for their their for their hearing on on the matter. We still need to finalize that date, but for those of you listening or in the audience, that would be kind of the target date we're looking at.

And then as far as the the number of units, even if this were even if all these were to be approved, it doesn't guarantee one affordable unit will be built. Right. Right. If there's also a thing called a no net loss, that I I wanted to talk about during my presentation, somehow I missed it. And that is, if any of these sites are to be.

If any of the sites are rezoned or have the ajo and they're be they're developed in a manner that does not. Provide the same number that we're assuming in the capacity for lower income. We lose that capacity. So let's say a site has a arena capacity of, we'll just say, 20 affordable units, 20 lower income units, and it's an a h o site, and it has a commercial designation and zoning, and a developer comes in and goes, that's great, but I'm building commercial. We lose those 20 units.

We have a hundred and eighty days to find a replacement for those so long as the number of units that we still have remaining plus the number of units that may have been built in the cycle don't exceed four forty.

Thank you. That that is actually a very good point. And and just again, you know, for the sake of information because information is good and it's good to educate everyone. Right? So what would happen if we don't meet the housing element? Say, it comes January 31 and say we all decide, you know what? Yeah. We don't wanna do this. We're against all of this. We're just gonna vote all nay on this. What would actually happen? What are the repercussions of this for our city? Yeah.

So we did see an example of what could happen for that. Many cities have seen much worse. There's a thing called the builder's remedy, and it's a name for some a bill that's been in place law that's been in place for many many years. We just haven't seen it exercised much. And, essentially, if a housing element is found to not be in compliance with state law, it can open up the city to what's called builder's remedy applications.

And what a builder's remedy application is is it allows a a landowner or a developer to pick a piece of property in a city. Could be light industrial, could be low density residential, could be in the middle of a neighborhood with 40,000 square foot lots, and they can come in and say, we're building housing there because you guys don't have a certified housing element and it's out of compliance. They don't have to abide by the density in the general plan. They have objective standards on the density they can build and so forth. So it really puts us in a position where it opens up our entire city.

And I'm not trying to say this to be scary. We've received these applications already when we didn't get our housing element adopted by 01/31/2023. They're way out in East Oakley and the density is very similar to what's already out there. But, yeah, it could open up the city to that. That's a scary prospect. Also, the housing element's out of compliance, HCD could kind of put an injunction on building permits, and that's not just for new houses. That could be for commercial, the shed in your backyard, your pool, etcetera.

No further questions. Director Stirilla, thank you so much.

Commissioner Olivares?

Yeah. I just want to, piggyback on what, commissioner Price mentioned, about having a meeting again. Is there an opportunity to kind of bring the community and have this conversation come up again? I know there's concerned residents here that, you know, have questions about everything that's happening. I know we have visibility, but I'm just is it too much to ask to kind of revisit and and look at what potentially could be?

We've got I feel like we've done that. I feel like we did that when we when we had the housing element originally created. It's been in place for several years now. We had the opportunity at the work work session with the council. We now have the opportunity with the planning commission. There will be another opportunity at the city council meeting. We've received direction from the council on which sites to select and pursue. So, yeah, in my opinion, we're past that stage.

Any other questions or comments from commissioners? Alright. So I'll repeat the question. Would any commissioner like to make a motion to adopt the resolution as presented?

I would like to make a motion to adopt the resolution 4.1 housing element rezone.

Second. Alright. I have a first and a second. Therefore, I will call for a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. No opposed or abstentions, the motion passes unanimously. Alright. Regular calendar items, there are none. Item number six, reports from staff members. Does staff have any reports for us?

Yeah. Thank you. Just a quick one. I just wanted to remind remind the the commission for those of you that may be, having your terms expire that we are still accepting planning commissioner applications, and this is for all those in the audience and that may be listening. I know there's tons of people listening to the stream right now. And, the deadline to get those applications submitted is Thursday, September 11 at 5PM. The city council will hold interviews at the September 23 meeting. So if you've applied already, good luck. And if you haven't and still want to, there's still time.

Now will they be conducting the interviews and selecting that night?

It's typically how they do Yeah. Normally, they'll they'll do the interviews. Those that haven't been interviewed will go outside into our meeting room over there so they can't, you know, listen and then try to counter points or whatever. But if you have already conducted your interview, I I believe they allow you to stay in the room and listen to the following interviews.

Thank you, director Stilo. Are there any report agenda item 6.2. Are there any reports from commissioners? Are there any requests for future agendas? Alright. There being no further business, this meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.