Remarks by Hans Buder
91 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 3 of 4
Hans? Yeah. So first of all, it was fantastic working with you, Bob, on this. And I think it was a great experience. I think we achieved a lot. I also wanted to thank Brandon and Chip and Jamie and subsequently Marissa for their openness and you can imagine that this was a departure from the way that things operated for a long time. And they really did come with an attitude that was not defensive. It was an attitude of, yeah, let's do this. And so I just don't think that that's been recognized enough. And I thought that that was extremely helpful. I thought we had great staff work along the…
Yeah, we spent $100,000 for all of this stuff up here, and apparently I'm told we can have meetings if we rearrange the furniture down there. So I think that that's the kind of environment. I don't think that they're going to be pounding down the door to come to the meetings, but there's definitely a handful of people that are in my mind that I would encourage to be there, and I think we could make it more participatory than sort of your average meeting City Council meeting and I think that that that's probably a good way to square the circle. Alessandra?
I would just add that you might not get the same pricing because there's sort of like some economies of scale and mobilization costs and things like that, so.
You talked about community character earlier, and we just had the conversation about the money, but now the community character. So who actually approves the design of this thing? I understand that you're trying to get it to look like what's there, but who's approving what it looks like?
My only thing, I know that we desperately want these stairs, but the only thing that I would say is we also want it to look the way that we want it to look. It currently doesn't have any railings on it, right? And so this is a community where outside we have these crazy handcrafted railings. I'm not saying that we need that on these beach stairs, but the details do matter. And so... You know, it does make me like a little bit nervous that nobody's going to approve what the design of the thing looks like.
No, you know, this is one of a number of areas that we were looking at. And from the very beginning, we knew we wanted to, again, kind of agitate in this area and get something in front of the council. And we had came up with something back in March. And here we are. And so As Brandon said, we basically outlined two different tracks. One was stuff that we considered kind of no brainers. Hey, let's bring that as an urgency ordinance. And then other modifications that we thought were required more discussion or were more sort of material dependent conversations, we thought that those were…
Brandon, I seem to remember having a, Can I say something? Yeah, sorry. I remember having a conversation with you, and I could be misremembering this, but basically, if it's an urgency ordinance, it can truly happen, even though it sort of touches on something that's related to our zoning code. If it's an urgency ordinance, it can go into effect immediately. That's right. Yeah. But if it's a regular ordinance, don't we still have to go through the whole Coastal Commission? If it's Title 17, yes. Right. So it's not... Now versus two months from now, it's now versus a year from now. Right. And…
Well, I was going to say we're just providing direction here, but I'm happy to make a motion. My motion is that we provide direction to staff to come back to us next month with an urgency ordinance with these four components along the lines described here in the staff report.
Go ahead Hans. Well Evan, first of all, I just wanted to, I do have a question here, but I just wanted to say fantastic job. I found that this was like like just a model of a fantastic staff report. And I think there are ideas in here that like you have come up with that are gonna have a big benefit for our city. And so thank you for that. I think it stems from you doing a lot of hard work. This is one of those areas where I'm sure there were other people, but it sounds like you really led the charge. So thank you. My question is, So there's basically two entities that we need to sort of get…
AND SO I'M GOING TO TRY TO, IF WE HAD SOME OF THE THINGS THAT YOU TALKED ABOUT, YOU HAD SOMETHING ABOUT JADUs, ADDING SOME LANGUAGE THERE, YOU HAD SOMETHING ABOUT POTENTIALLY THE HEIGHT LIMIT, LIKE EXAMPLES LIKE THAT WHERE YOU HAVE SOME, YOU'RE PROVIDING SOME ADDITIONAL FLEXIBILITY. But if we held tight on, held firm on, for example, just total square footage limits that are in our existing city code? Like if we did those things in tandem, is it your take that HCD would go along with that?
Well, hold on. Didn't I, I apologize, but didn't I hear when you read your section of the CMC Part G, didn't it talk about volumetric analysis?
So Brandon, I have a kind of question for you. So to summarize, it sounds like we here will be providing council direction to staff to change how staff is applying our current municipal code provisions relating to ADUs. That's right, we will go back to the strict interpretation.
Yes. Meanwhile, you will work on creating an ADU ordinance update basically. Okay.
OK. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight, I know Alessandra just mentioned a concern about kind of shutting down ADU production in general, considering it's part of our housing element. when you go back and you look at Evan's data, especially if you look at like sort of the more recent period, of the 38 ADUs that received a building permit since the January of 2024, only 15 exceeded the square footage limits for the site so 39 of the 22 ADUs that received a building permit since the beginning of 2025 only seven exceeded the square footage limit so that's 32 so I think that gives me some comfort…
Yeah, I think there's a fairness issue again. They were told something and in a lot of cases people have invested thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in architecture and et cetera. And so that does, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem fair.
All right. So I have one. Go ahead. we gave away $100,000 and we're also looking at, you know, historic fees. And so I'm thinking about offsets and I have kind of a crazy idea. We've talked about with the TOT, regardless of what happens with the revenue measure that we've proposed, a lot of you have probably heard this, but they call them OTAs, but like Priceline Expedia, basically our TOT is not collected on the 20% of the hotel room value that kind of goes to Priceline Expedia.
Yeah. And I was talking to Mark Watson at some point and we did some calculations and I think he, he thinks like maybe like, I came up with kind of the same number, like maybe like four or $500,000 a year. And so I'd love to think about that at some point. I mean, obviously, we're having a couple of revenue measures on the ballot. It would have to be, I don't know if I can ask Brian, but I think it might have to be a special election. The thing I wanted to say was, I think I could justify doing a special election if it's going to bring in $400,000 and only cost us whatever it's going to cost…
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.
I had a quick question. The Ashenta Park, that's the one across the, on the east side of the highway, is that right? Correct. Are there any plans to open that to the public at some point?
So from the very beginning, we were sort of told that this was mission impossible. You know, amending a housing element, we were told is not allowed and we proved the doubters wrong. Then they told us you'll never find enough units to put in the plan. And we proved the doubters wrong. Then they told us, well, the state will never sign off on it. And we proved the doubters wrong. And now we hear no property owners will participate. So I know where I'm putting my money. I also wanted to say, you have to think about some of the sources here. You know, never listen to the special interests. When…
I move to approve Resolution 2026-053, and I move to approve Resolution 2026-054, amending the general plan by adopting the six-cycle housing element amendment. My recommendation is you treat those as two motions and vote on them one at a time. I move to approve resolution 2026-053.
And the second one? I move to approve resolution 2026-054, amending the general plan by adopting the six cycle housing element amendment.
So I completely appreciate the sentiment. And I'm normally interested in doing that and having these votes be 4-1 or 5-0. I think you and I have been talking about this for quite a long time. And I think there are things that we can do that don't have to be in the housing element, one. But then second, I think there are You, in fairness, have been talking about some of these things for a while, but the level of detail on some of the things that have been mentioned sort of really kind of just showed up in some ways. Like this conversation is the conversation we should have had kind of over a…
Organize these to make sure we get through the most important ones.
The city administrator one first? What? The city administrator one first? Mm-hmm.