Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Alright. Alright. We are recording. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the, Thursday, 04/23/2026, meeting of Land Use Environment Committee. I'm Robert Vanderpool, your chair. Introduce yourselves. Clark Gilman, committee member.

Robert Behrendt, member of the committee.

Alright. Do we have a do we can I get approval of the agenda?

I would move to approve the agenda as published.

I'll second it. Alright. We yeah. We need a we need to can I get a modified agenda for the two items so we could flip the affordable housing and the downtown commercial? Absolutely. Our friend consultant friends. They'll have to sweep

through it.

Yeah. I would move to approve the agenda reversing the order of items six b and six a so that we discuss the downtown commercial vacancy study first. Thank you. Alright.

So move or second.

Okay. Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Alright. We have an agenda. Do we have anyone signed up for public comment currently? Check. Alright.

Anyone else have anyone online? Did you wanna provide public comment?

I'm just reading this.

Okay. Thank you. No problem. Alright. Can I get a, approval of minutes? Hello?

I move to approve the minutes from the last meeting.

Thank you. Good. I would second that motion.

Alright. Let's get some ayes. Aye.

Nay.

Alright. On to the first item, discussion of downtown commercial vacancy study.

Good evening. Jenica Machado, economic development director. Tonight, we're bringing forward the Downtown Olympia vacancy study for your discussion. The observed vacancy in downtown has raised some interest to better understand the downtown market and the potential development and occupancy barriers. As council may recall, I was there just a few days ago to talk about Olympia Strong, and in that plan included an initiative that had intended to activate vacant spaces.

And when I had come into this role, I had heard that that effort ultimately didn't gain, enough momentum to move forward. So rather than immediately developing a new action without a clear understanding of the problem, we felt it was important to take a step back and have a better understanding of what is actually driving vacancy in downtown, and this question led to this study. So we engaged Leland Consulting Group through a competitive process. And since October, they've conducted field work, stakeholder interviews, and data analysis. The goal was to provide a data driven understanding of vacancy and to identify practical actionable strategies the city could consider.

Importantly, this work also recognizes the strong connection between and vibrancy. At this stage, we're not asking for adoption of specific programs or funding decisions. Instead, we're looking for your guidance. Are there specific strategies or ideas you'd like to see us prioritize moving forward and or what you may have concerns about or are not interested in pursuing. And this feedback will help us prioritize next steps. And so with that, I'll turn over to our consultants, Chris and Jennifer from Leland Consulting Group to walk you through the findings and recommendations. Thank you.

Thank you, Jenica. Good evening, everybody. My name is Chris Zajas. I am president and principal of Leland Consulting Group. We've had the pleasure of working with Jenica and the rest of the city team since, I guess, late fall, beginning of the year mainly, to study this issue of vacancy in Downtown Olympia.

Leland Consulting Group is a real estate economics and urban planning advisory firm. We're based in Portland, so just a little bit down the road. Work all over the Pacific Northwest and and really the Western United States on urban issues, public private partnerships, and mixed use development. With me tonight is, Jennifer Shuck. Jennifer was my lead analyst on the project, and, she and I will have a presentation that we'll walk you through tonight that hits on the process and the key findings of our research, and and then we'll have plenty of time for q and a.

So to kick us off, the purpose of the project, as Jenica introduced, was really to answer some persistent questions that we know have been coming up in Olympia and really to provide a data driven base to have an informed conversation about what to do about it. So some of those questions are are quantitative of, like, what is the extent of vacancy? Where are vacancies? Are they, different for different types of buildings in different parts of downtown, and, really, what are the root causes of vacancy, and what can we as a city do about it. We did a little bit of benchmarking to compare you to peer cities to put some context to it.

And as Jenica mentioned, we did a lot of outreach, and so there's a lot of, perception and input and perception type input that we integrated into our understanding of, what's going on. And then finally, we have some recommendations on things that we can do in the near term to improve, conditions downtown. Our scope took us through a lot of, both tech technical and and qualitative steps. We did two site visits, which included a full, inventory of real estate throughout downtown, putting that into GIS and doing some data modeling based off of that. We held a number of meetings with city staff to understand the lay of the land and to reality check some of our what we were hearing and and what we're finding.

Interviewed a lot of stakeholders, which included real estate professionals, business owners, property owners, and other stakeholders. We did some market analysis and peer review of other cities to benchmark Olympia against similar cities, did a deep dive of some of your regulatory policies that were raised as issues that we, wanted to do a deeper dive and understand if those were potentially barriers. And then included in the report, we have some recommendations and, funding strategies that the city can look at employing to, alleviate the issue. So the I'm gonna hit a few of the key takeaways that we found, and then we'll divot we'll dive into detail of some of the interesting findings that we had. First of all, Olympia is not an outlier in terms of its downtown situation.

Your vacancy rates, pedestrian foot traffic, you're on par and and recovering from COVID, similar to other cities. So that was a positive finding, that was good to see. We also this came out a lot in our interviews. City has done a lot to improve its permitting process, and the development community and the developers that we talked to, mentioned that without even being prompted. So, again, that's another positive momentum, that we found.

There are a lot of challenges, of course, that are economic and market related. A lot of those are outside the city's control. You know, the regional economy, the national economy, construction costs, those are things the city can't control. But that there are some things that we'll touch on in this presentation and that are in our report that we think that Citi can implement relatively immediately that will improve, economic opportunities. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Jennifer. And I'm sorry, Jennifer. I didn't give you a chance to introduce yourself. We'll start in on some of the technical findings that we have. So over to you, Jennifer.

Yeah. I'm Jennifer. I was the lead analyst on this project and, had a really great time exploring Olympia and learning more about the city and and meeting a lot of great folks who, contributed to this report. So I'm gonna talk about the reason we're all here, which is vacancy. So as Chris said, one of the big questions was where are the vacant spaces?

And we did, you know, an on-site analysis of downtown to figure out where are the vacant spaces, what type of vacancy are these. So we wanted to differentiate short term vacancy, places that are just turning over, maybe it's taking four or six months to get a new tenant, but it's being actively marketed versus long term vacancy, the the places that you probably think of when you think of vacancy in Downtown Olympia, the ones that are just, you know, they've been empty for a long time and there there really hasn't been any movement on them. And then they can see in those newer mixed use buildings, those ground floor spaces in the buildings that have been built since 2016. We also in this map, we included some surface parking lots because surface, you know, parking is important in Downtown Olympia. There's no parking garage, you know, parking is needed to support the businesses.

But at the same time, if you have a block where there is quite a bit of vacant space and a surface parking lot, it can feel like that area is not as active, not as vibrant. So we wanted to get a sense of where those were as well. And then also, the city wanted to know, you know, are are city owned properties contributing to the vacancy challenges? And so in the pink outlines, those are the city owned properties. And really just that one kinda old firehouse is the only vacant city owned property in downtown.

So the city owned properties are not contributing significantly to this problem. How much space is vacant? So most of the vacant space are is retail spaces, especially when we're talking about, like, Ground Floor. Obviously, there is more vacant office space on the upper floors of some buildings. But about 16% of the vacant retail space was built since 2016.

So the the bigger issue is in the older buildings rather than the newer buildings, though that doesn't mean that they're, you know obviously, there still is ground floor vacancy in those newer buildings, and we'll talk about that as well. And about 66% of those spaces are longer term vacant. So that's a pretty significant challenge. Dining, so these are more like purpose built restaurant spaces. A lot of those are in the a lot of the vacant dining spaces are in those newer built buildings.

And then in terms of the office, 57% of office is long term vacant. So let's talk about each one of those categories. Ground floor vacancy and mixed use buildings. A lot of times these are not purpose built spaces. They're built out as shells.

They're not sized for one specific type of business. And the when they get a tenant, the, you know, the owner does tenant improvements. Tenant improvement costs have risen substantially alongside just construction costs in general. And so usually small businesses can't afford them outright. So what the owners do is they amortize the cost of those tenant improvements over the duration of the lease.

And what we found was that tenant improvement costs are so high right now that that is requiring a much longer term lease of around, you know, seven or more years, which is much longer than, you know, small businesses would typically want and what landlords would want to give a small business that isn't, like, very proven. So it just really narrows the the pool of, you know, who can lease those spaces. This isn't a problem that's unique to Olympia. I'm sure you all heard that the state just passed a rule that requires cities to really strictly limit how much ground floor retail space that they're allowed to require because vacant ground floor retail space in new mixed use buildings is such a persistent issue. Now I'm gonna go into this a little bit more later, but Olympia is actually pretty good with requirements for ground floor retail.

They're only it's only required in very specific areas of downtown, and the ground floor uses are pretty flexible. But I just wanted to note that this is one of those issues that's not just in Olympia. It's kind of everywhere. In historic retail buildings, we're, you know these are much larger spaces. They're not ideal layouts for modern retail.

A lot of the historic spaces are, you know, narrow width wise and then very deep. And the challenge with that is most businesses want kind of more front of house space, more window space, and don't really need that extra back of house space, which means that, you know, businesses end up paying for space that they can't really use very well. And some of these spaces have not been well maintained. There may be a need for modernization. And then once you hit a specific threshold of those modernizations and renovations, especially if you're talking about a change of use on top of that, it can trigger high along with high construction cost, it can trigger things like energy code requirements and building code requirements like fire safety systems.

So it's just it's just very expensive. It's kind of the the long and the short of it. Office is a challenge nationwide. Since the pandemic, there's been a big shift to remote work as you all are very familiar with because that's a big challenge with the state office space, mostly near the capital, but also throughout Downtown Olympia. And there isn't really a near term replacement industry that is going to fill the space that the state offices previously filled.

And then older class b and c buildings are also really expensive to upgrade similar to the historic buildings that I was just talking about. We heard from one real estate professional that it could cost around $600 per square foot to take a class b or c building and make it into a highly competitive class a building, which is about the same as building from scratch. So that's a huge cost. Olympia is already seeing some conversion of office to residential, which is great. And, you know, supporting and enabling that will be, you know, a big boom to downtown.

But just it can result in increased vehicle trips, which can trigger regulations, additional which have additional costs. Just to kinda hit on what I was talking about with the near term growth sectors, this is from, the employment security department. It's the Pacific Mountain Region, which includes Thurston County as well as Grays Harbor, Lewis, and a couple other counties. But it's looking at the the top growth industries from 2023 to 2033. These are projections.

They're not set in stone, but this is what the state thinks is likely for this region. And so the top growth sector is education or or sorry, is government. But as you know, a lot of the government jobs increasingly are remote, so those are not likely to significantly absorb the vacant office space in Olympia right now. Education and health services, a lot of those jobs are not office using jobs. Same with leisure leisure and hospitality.

And then professional and business services are office using, but it's still only about 2,100 jobs for the region. So this is just a long way of saying, you know, those those offices are vacant and that is going to be a persistent challenge and figuring out what to do with them whether that's office to residential conversion. There's just nothing that's going to absorb that space in the long term or sorry, in the short term. Hopefully, in the long term. Along with that, there's visitor we did some visitor analysis.

So we used a tool called placer.ai, which the city also has access to, that uses anonymous cell phone tracking data to understand really where people are going downtown, how many people are, you know, visiting downtown, and how that's changed over time. So this is just showing weekly out of market visits to Downtown Olympia from 2019 to 2025. Out of market visits are visits made by people who don't live or work downtown. So these are, you know, people coming in to shop or go, you know, see a play or enjoy Downtown Olympia. And what we found is that visits are still slightly down from 2019, but not significantly.

Mostly, there's been a pretty strong recovery. And events like Capitol Lake Fair do, you know, drive traffic downtown. One thing that that we know that the Olympia Downtown Alliance is doing really well as well is that events that are bringing people into businesses intentionally can have a really big effect on the economic vitality of downtown. We wanted to compare Downtown Olympia to downtowns and peer cities. So we looked at Bellingham, Edmonds, and then Salem, Oregon because it's a another capital city in the region.

In 2020, downtown visits to Olympia decreased by 44%. So that was a pretty big drop. As of 2025, weekly visits are still on average down about 2% from 2019, but we're really talking about, like, a couple thousand visits per week. And when we look at Bellingham and Edmonds, those cities, their downtowns have recovered as far as average weekly visits, but they're still within, like, 1,500 visits of 2019. So the difference between Olympia and, you know, Bellingham and Edmonds is not very big at all.

And when we look at Salem, visits are still down 11% in Salem. So Olympia is outperforming that by quite a bit. So what we when we looked at this data, it really showed us that Olympia is not an outlier. Downtowns are struggling right now, which isn't to say that, you know, you shouldn't work to make downtown even better, but it's just kind of a nice thing to know that that Olympia is, you know, not unique in its struggles. We also wanted to look at where visitors go.

We heard from a lot of folks that there were some areas of the city that seemed, you know, more or less vibrant. We heard that the the area north of the transit center is somewhere where, you know, it's a little bit, I don't wanna say dead, but, know, a little bit less traffic. The area around the children's museum, we heard the children's museum being described as an island. We heard that when you step outside city hall, you can see a lot of vacancy. And the way that this hexagon map works, you know, the red hexagons are where there's the most traffic, then orange, yellow, green, and then purple's where there's the least.

And so when we looked at this map, we you know, it really bore out what we heard from stakeholders, what we saw when we were in Olympia. And that area along 4th And 5th between Columbia and Jefferson is really the hot spot for visitors. And so one of the things that we were thinking about is how you take the visitors that are already going to that area and get them to, you know, wander through downtown to some of those areas that are a little bit less vibrant. I'm gonna hand it back to Chris to talk about public safety.

Yeah.

So, we know public safety is a is a hot topic and and a very, kind of one of first

Can I

ask a question?

Absolutely. Yeah. Go ahead.

Hi, Chris. This this is Jay Burney, city manager. Can you, I just had a question about the prior slide.

Yes.

So I'm just, Jennifer, when you talk about, like, the hands on children's museum, that can we talk maybe about the difference about where do visitors go? Because their visitor data says something different. Okay. You know, their visitor data shows hundreds of thousands of visitors per year. You know, they're here on a regular basis kinda updating the council about visitation in state, out of state. And so when I see that, it doesn't the dots don't connect. I mean, we we know it's a very busy children's museum. It's one of the best in the state. So I'm just I'm trying to reconcile that.

Yeah. I mean, I it it does show, like, that yellow is about a 109,000 to 211,000 visits. So, I mean, it's not that there's nobody going there. It's more that, you know, this is the only business

The only spot.

In that hexagon Okay. Where people are going. So it's not attracting as much traffic. So you have, like, this kind of the purple that's surrounding it. So I think that's what's going on. Not that the children's museum isn't getting a lot of visits. It's the area around the children's museum.

Okay, Jennifer. Thank you. That that helps a lot. I just wanna make sure I'm I'm just what I'm hearing just kinda matches up. That makes sense. Thank you.

Yeah. Hey.

Yeah. So I'm gonna talk just briefly about public safety. We know that's a a topic that a lot of people raise questions about, about crime, about, homelessness on the streets and the and the the turn effect that might have. So we took a look at that. You know, we're not we're not in our scope.

We're not able to solve all of the world's problems, but we wanted to see how this how it plays out on the ground in Downtown Olympia and the extent to which it's, again, an outlier and which way it's trending. So, using some of the really good police data that we got we got from the city, we're able to I'd, summarize, you know, what kinds of crimes occur and where they occur. So downtown on this chart is the dark blue. The rest of the city is in green, and, you know, so it shows that, most crime in the city does not happen downtown. It happens elsewhere.

That's partially because downtown is a smaller part of the city than the whole, but it also indicates that you know, it just puts things in perspective. Most of the crimes are are vehicle crimes or, burglary or theft crimes, as opposed to violent or person to person crimes. Which way it's trending on the next slide is, somewhat trending down, which is good. So that it's a little bit of a spaghetti chart, but the the main and the there's more detail in our report. But the main, the main takeaways are this since since 2021, commercial burglaries are down quite a bit, 43%, auto thefts down by 50%.

So there has been some real positive momentum, and we see this in a lot of communities where the perception lingers longer than the the reality, and and this might be one of those cases. Next slide, Jennifer. Homelessness is one of the is not a crime, of course, but it's one of the more visible issues that comes up and and creates a perception of safety risks some for some visitors. Again, this is one of those similar to some of the market and cost considerations that Jennifer has raised where it's not this is a much bigger issue than downtown. It's much it goes beyond what Olympia alone can solve, and so we just wanted to acknowledge that.

And it's not something that is going to be solved in the near term. And so for that reason, we don't rec we don't have any specific recommendations that we're gonna identify for addressing the homelessness crisis in Olympia. Again, that's not our area of expertise, and that's not the scope of the project, but you can go to the next slide. But what in an indirect way, from some of the more antisocial behavior kinds of things that sometimes happen, on the streets, creating more vibrancy and filling vacant ground floor spaces can have an indirect impact on a block by block basis of creating vibrancy and more more safety. More eyes on the street is a very true, part of urban urban planning and and urban reality.

And so the idea being, filling vacant spaces, addressing some of the other issues that we're talking about will have indirect impacts, by creating more vibrant streets, more blocks that are activated and have, which which will deter, the undesirable behaviors that you sometimes see and that you hear a lot about. I wanted to touch on parking. This is another area where I'm not a parking expert, but we do know how important parking is. And a few points that I wanted to make was, first of all, we looked at the parking data that the city provided to us. That dash line on the chart is the 85%, mark, which in the parking world, that's considered full occupancy, and these are for the on street parking.

And what you see is that it it does fill up essentially in the evenings later on the week. That is likely due to a couple of factors. One, there's no enforcement in the evenings. But two, that's also when restaurants are busier and potentially when downtown residents might be parking on the street overnight. On the weekends, which is the next slide, where enforcement doesn't happen, there are some hot spots, and we see quite a bit of activity, particularly, in Saturdays after three.

What this tells us is that there are, potentially, a parking problem or potentially demand for more parking, solutions. And to the final slide here, Jennifer, the question we got asked several times was, do we need a parking garage? Because we know it's been talked about for many, many years. And as a as someone who visits a lot of downtowns around the country, but especially around the Northwest, I think Olympia is kinda unique in that you don't have a downtown parking garage. You don't have, like, that place that a visitor from out of town goes to to park their car.

What our conclusion on this is, I don't think we have enough information to definitively say, yep. You need a parking garage to solve your parking problems, and that's gonna enhance vitality downtown. What I think we can say is that there's enough demand, enough activity happening currently that it's certainly worthy of further discussion. It's not it's not a case where, nope. You absolutely don't need a garage.

You should just shelve that and don't bother thinking about it. I would say, especially as we think about the longer term and ongoing revitalization and infill development where some of those private parkings surface parking lots will ideally get developed into, you know, retail and mixed use and housing development. And so that supply will eventually go away and will need to be replaced in some form. And so I think in that taking that longer term view, it's definitely worth continuing the discussion and analysis around, where if, where, how, how much, how expensive a parking structure ought to be. And I can hand it back to Jennifer to get a little bit into the policy side of things.

Yeah. So where we start when we think about policy is what do the city's existing plans, where you've done all this visioning and outreach, say about downtown? So, from the 2045 comprehensive plan, downtown is a popular destination that contributes to Olympia's economic vibrancy. The city wants to support a safe and active downtown, improve economic and social health of the area, and promote small business resiliency. And that's just good good benchmarking to see, like, as we look at the regulations, do they support those goals?

One thing, that Chris mentioned earlier is that the planning staff have made a lot of progress in improving the application process, particularly for tenant improvements in recent years. They set a target of sixty day permit approvals, and 96% of permits issued between 2020 and 2025 were issued within sixty days with an average of twenty days, which is much faster than a lot of the jurisdictions that we work in. So good job to the permitting staff. And they shared with us the survey data about the online permitting system, and we grouped the responses into the system's good, the system's, you know, okay, but here are some things that it could do better, The system's confusing, and then other, which is things like, I'm an architect, which does don't really have value judgment. And for the issued permits, those surveys found that over half of folks found the online permitting system to be a good system.

They liked it. And just 7% found it confusing. Of all the closed permits, which includes both the issued and the denied permits, still about half said that the system is good. But there were, you know, 11%, which is slight slightly higher percentage of folks who found it confusing. So there may be some need for, like, further, you know, education or outreach.

But still, when you're talking about asking people, you know, how did you like this online system, which are never perfect, having, you know, half of people say that they liked it is is a win, I think. Street improvements, this was something that we came across that really surprised us, honestly. So Olympia has a requirement that when there's a change of use or a new development that's expected to generate more than 20 additional trips on a street with a low pavement rating, there's a need for half half street pavement either repaving or rebuilding. And that's expensive requirement. And so we went digging to see, is this just something we've ourselves never come across, or is this something that's unique among other cities?

So we looked at Lacey, Burien, Bothell, Bremerton, Bellingham, Spokane, and then again Salem, Oregon to see, you know, of these pure cities, does this stand out? And we found that it did. Other cities have, you know, frontage improvements, sidewalk improvements, but really only very limited cases where street improvements are required. And that's usually if it's like, you know, a development on a gravel street or a a development that would cross multiple blocks and they need to create a through connection. Salem had, I would say, closest to this, but on an arterial, which most of these downtown streets are, it is triggered by a thousand additional trips, whereas Olympia is 20.

So, you know, our feeling is that downtown should be the easiest place to to invest in, to develop in, to you know, especially when you're talking about historic buildings that need these, you know, significant upgrades. And so we just this was something that we came across that we really felt could use a a rethinking. And especially because on this map, you can see the the red and the black segments are the areas with low pavement ratings. And then we looked at industrial buildings, warehouses, and surface parking lots, essentially the places that are most likely to see either adaptive reuse or redevelopment in the future. So these are like, you know, the if these are these places are the future of Downtown Olympia, essentially.

And especially when you talk about industrial and warehouse conversions, those are the places that become the, you know, flex space, craft industrial space, the the kinds of spaces that really cater to entrepreneurs and creative businesses and the eclectic business mix that downtown is known for. So we just really wanted to to highlight that this was something we came across that's really unusual to Olympia that could be a really big additional barrier to adaptive reuse and redevelopment. I told you I'd circle back to it. So in Olympia, ground floor retail requirements really do follow best practices. So the type a pedestrian oriented streets shown in red in this map are the only places where ground floor active space is required.

It's not a lot of the downtown. It's not most of the streets. On the yellow, those b pedestrian oriented streets, there are some, you know, facade requirements, but you don't need to have commercial space on the ground floor. So even with Washington's new law, this probably would still be allowed. And looking at the code, a lot of different uses are allowed in those ground floor spaces more than in a lot of cities that we've looked at.

The one use that the city could consider to just even further increase that flexibility would be live workspace, which is becoming more popular, and it kind of threads the needle between, you know, an active commercial space and a residential space. We heard a lot about impact in building fees, but Olympias really don't stand out as being, you know, overly high. Olympias transportation impact fee is actually lower than the state average, and there's an additional discount for downtown services. And then building permits are on par with leases. So from what we heard, our feeling is that when you take the other things, just the high construction costs, the, you know, state requirements that Olympia doesn't have control over, like state energy code, and then, you know, things like those street improvement requirements when they apply that this just is, like, another fee that people, you know, think of as contributing to the high cost of construction, but that on their own, these are not overly high compared to peer cities.

So I'm gonna jump into some of our key findings and recommendations. So you wanna know the major drivers of vacancy. That's why you hired us. So for historic retail, commercial, warehouse, and industrial spaces, the large spaces, the need for expensive upgrades to meet energy and fire safety standards when the spaces are, you know, upgraded or rehabilitated or there's a change of use, and then also that street improvement requirement when you're doing those adaptive reuse projects. For newer ground floor retail space, the high cost of tenant improvements, which requires longer leases to amortize, and the higher rent per square foot are really limiting the tenant pool, which can mean that it takes longer to find a good tenant.

And then office, there's that state shift to remote work, the high cost of improving those class b and c office spaces, and then the the lack of growth in the near term for office using industries. So our recommendations for vacancy first, as I said, eliminate that requirement for half street improvements in downtown and create a plan for evaluating and improving downtown streets in a holistic way. And in our report, we have some sources potential funding sources associated with that. So we're not just telling you to do things that are expensive that you can't afford. And then cultivate ongoing relationships with downtown businesses, property owners, and organizations.

We heard from some of the stakeholders that, you know, some of those relationships aren't as strong as they could be. There's been some turnover at the city, and just cultivating those relationships will help kind of bridge that gap. Continuing to support community events that highlight local businesses, increasing transparency for city policies, fees, regulations, and other information. Developers really like to be certain before they even approach the permit desk. And so things like the street improvements, you know, the the map of pavement ratings isn't public.

They wouldn't be able to know that reaching out to the city, whether they're on a street that might trigger that. There's not a directory of staff on the city website, so they might not know who to reach out to. You know, we heard some great ideas from city staff about education and, like, pamphlets around what it you know, what are the requirements for historic buildings. So, yeah, that would definitely help. And then exploring a low interest loan program for new equipment.

This is something that Seattle has. Other cities have kind of shied away from it because of Washington's gift of public fund rules. So we say explore because we don't we're not lawyers, and we don't wanna tell you what to do. But they're doing it in Seattle, and we think it would be a really helpful thing for mitigating some of the cost of tenant improvements. And then considering allowing live work units on the Ground Floor on type a pedestrian oriented streets. I'll hand it back to Chris to talk about vibrancy.

Yeah. Before we get to q and a, there are a few additional maybe non directly vacant building related things that we wanted to make note of since we did get so much time to get familiar with downtown. So Jennifer mentioned kind of that building connections with the business community and and property owners. Internally, some cities have, identified a staff position as as what they call an ombudsman, either for downtown or for small businesses. And that's, beyond just, like, a permit facilitator, but actually someone who can help navigate everything from business licensing to zoning questions to, funding tools and small business assistance.

Having that kind of one stop advocate who may also be able to address political barriers or or other barriers within city hall if a business is having trouble getting something done, that role can be really, really helpful and help send a signal about being open for business and being really supportive of the downtown, business environment. Sidewalks, I wanted to put in a word about about sidewalks. We noted walking around that a lot of the sidewalks are, in pretty bad shape, and that just creates a visual, blight on the on the city. And it's, you know, obviously very expensive, and our understanding is that the city this summer is embarking on a sidewalk analysis. As a general rule, we would say, you know, having a longer term strategy to regularly fund and and maintain downtown sidewalks, potentially with the assistance of adjacent property owners is really important.

Facade improvement program, a lot of cities implement that. Sometimes in $5,000 worth of paint that has a bigger visual impact on vibrancy than, you know, a multimillion dollar mixed use project. And there are a lot of programs in place with other cities around Washington where there are grants or matching loan programs to provide to do external improvements like awnings, paint, windows, and and stuff like that. And that can go again a long way towards the vibrancy side of things. As I mentioned earlier, continue to look at the needs for a parking garage, I would say, especially especially over the long term as those vacant lots ideally start redeveloping.

Finally, last slide. Streeteries. So Streeteries are they're sometimes called parklets, but these are the sidewalk or the parking space dining that we saw a lot of during the pandemic, where restaurants would take over a parking spot and put a patio out in the street. I when we visited, we were kind of we were both struck by how that there really weren't any of those in Downtown Olympia, and yet we see them in cities all over the country in all with all types of climate. It's not a rainy thing.

And as we dug into it, we found that there's really not a streamlined program to facilitate that, kind of, investment for businesses and restaurants downtown. It's a great way to create a pretty vibrant street scene. And, particularly, I would say in Olympia where a lot of your sidewalks are so narrow where you can't do sidewalk dining. And so we have some recommendations in our report on ways to model that program and really make it more robust. Finally, a downtown plan update.

Your last downtown plan was in 2017, so nine years ago. A lot has changed since then. Most, downtowns, we recommend update their plans every ten years because of the market's always changing. You know, we had COVID. We have now a much greater work from home office market.

Retail is continuing to evolve. And but the real value is all of these topics that Jennifer and I have been talking about, sidewalks, parking, the code, the the impact fees, and the the half street improvements. All of that really ought to be tied together under a unified strategy, which is what what a downtown plan should do is provide that unified vision that all of these other tools and strategies and policies are are aligned and supportive. And so we'd recommend beginning the process of budgeting and planning for that in the next few years. And then finally, Jennifer touched on the city owned properties.

While we don't think that they're a a significant contributor to the vacancy environment, they are a a significant asset that you control that can you through targeted development and public private partnerships, can achieve certain objectives because you are the landowner, and you can, set the agenda for what those properties would redevelop as and get them back on the tax rolls to contribute to the economy. So developing a strategy of what to do with those would be an additional step. And with that, thank you for letting us go just a little bit long on the presentation. We're here for as long as you need us for q and a. Thank you.

I'm happy to go back to slides if needed. I just figured for q and a, we could take the presentation down.

Thank you so much. Clark, Paul, do you guys have anything that you wanna there's a lot.

There is a lot. Yeah.

I I'll I'll jump in. I've got I've made some notes. I read the plan of in the last couple of days. And regarding the homeless, you you said that homelessness isn't a driver of vacancy. And I I realized that a lot of places have homeless issues and have different strategies in dealing with them. I think our our our homeless problem is worse than most cities in the in the area. And but I was wondering what empirical data you used to make a pretty bold statement that it isn't the driver of vacancy.

I think

I just wanted to know what what what your criteria was for making that statement. Hey. And if it isn't, that that's great. I I'm I'm not arguing, but I wanted to know what if it if this is a data driven pronouncement.

Yeah. Jennifer, before you jump in, I I would say I would say it's not a data driven pronouncement, and and maybe pronouncement isn't even the right thing. What I would say is it's it's an indirect influence on vacancy. And from the perspective we tried to go into this analysis with the perspective of giving recommendations that the city could actually take action on that would move the needle on vacancy and the which is why we focused on kind of the cost of rehabilitation and some of those other issues because those are those are low hanging fruit that really will make it easier to invest businesses in downtown and as you invest in and that we think are is a real barrier to businesses locating downtown today. I think certainly the perceptions of safety and homelessness are also a maybe keeping certain businesses away.

I didn't mean to imply that that's not also true. We just wanted to focus on these are the aspects of the of the situation that we can definitely, give you some tangible recommendations to to move forward with.

Yeah. And to oh, sorry.

Go ahead. Go ahead.

I was gonna say and to just kinda piggyback on what Chris said, like, I don't think we we wanted to say that it was not a driver of vacancy, but rather that if we're talking about the the main drivers of vacancy that it you know, if we're looking at, like, top three or five, it's not one of the main ones. It but it you know, not to say that it doesn't have an impact.

Yeah. And I would say, like, empirically, you know, we didn't because it's it's probably an impossible, statistical, request, but we didn't, do any kind of, we looked at what are the, you know, general drivers of vacancy, but we didn't rank or quantify what, you know, what percentage of the vacancy is this is this particular issue contributing to the to the larger situation. We but we wanted to identify what are the ones that we think are addressable in a process such as this, and and that's where we ended up focusing a lot of our effort. We didn't wanna get too distracted on things that we that we know are important issues, but that we don't have practical recommendations to provide from a real estate point of view, which is our area of focus.

The the other thing, you you did some market comparables, but and this is just a personal sense that I have about about vacancy in Olympia. Olympia is about as vacant as it's been for twenty years in my view. I I don't I don't I I'm not one who thinks, oh, you know, downtown looks terrible. It's honestly, I think it's always had about the amount of vacancy that it's had. It's just my own perception.

But one thing I was kind of looking for in the report is whether our vacancy rate is worse than than others. And you didn't you didn't really quite say that. You you you compared us on market rate to several other jurisdictions and whatnot. But I I just wanted to ask the question, are are we really that much worse? I even like Salem, I'm familiar with Salem.

The the downtown is so much different than our downtown. It's much more retail oriented. It's it hasn't the malls haven't stripped all of the retail out of Downtown Salem, for instance. You know? So I just wanted I I I do realize it's comparing apples and oranges, comparing these cities, but my sense is that it I I thought your your study was quite good and that you pointed out that these are historic buildings that are just harder to rent in in many cases, that that it wasn't the type of space people were looking for.

And so redevelopment was, you know, kind of implied here that that we're gonna have to go in that direction. You identified some barriers, but I did wanna just ask in the general way. Was did did was your perception was that that Olympia had a worse vacancy rate than most?

Could I

just ask that question?

I would say, in our perception, I would say no. I don't think so. But one of the things that's challenging with vacancy, especially when you're talking about spaces that are, like, vacant in the shorter term versus the longer term. A lot of the sources for looking at vacancy are really not accurate. So, like, we looked at vacancy like, office vacancy in Olympia from CoStar, which is, the source that everybody uses, and it showed really low office vacancy.

And we said, well, we know that that's not the case because we know that a lot of the state offices but because of the way leases work and and because of the way data works, it can be really hard to get that. So that was one of the reasons why we we decided to kind of do that inventory on foot in Olympia to see, you know, what is where are the vacant spaces? Let's get this as accurate as possible. And we weren't able to do that in other cities. So we we did initially, like, look at some of that data from CoStar, but we felt that we couldn't really trust it.

And so from our experience, I would say of, like, you know, traveling around, doing work in lots of cities in the Northwest and the Mountain West, I I don't it didn't seem to me that Olympia had more vacancy than other places that I've I've seen, but that's I know that's not, like, the hard data that you're necessarily looking for.

Yeah. And then I I would just I I I I I wanna double up on what Jennifer said about the quality of data. Like, it's really easy. It's very tempting, I would say, to take, say, a national dataset like CoStar, and I hope no one in from CoStar is listening to just, like, compare one city to the other and put them all side by side. But the because real estate data is all is voluntarily uploaded to their system by brokers, and brokers are inherently gonna be a little more protective about that and then and in smaller markets like Olympia even more so.

The the the call if you ever see a, you know, a side by side comparison that's using kind of that stuff, like, I'm immediately very, very skeptical. And but what we did do so sort of as the as the corollary or the the flip to that since we couldn't look at straight up vacancies and compare them side by side because that would have really required, you know, a full walking tour of every downtown to verify it. The placer data, the cell phone data that tracks visitor page you know, visitor activity is sort of a proxy for you know, visitors are presumably visiting active occupied spaces. And so if that's trending up or trending down, that that's a good benchmark for how overall business activity is going on, which is really what they can see as a measure of. And so that was why we that is why we saw that.

And I'm not surprised that you're kinda wondering, well, why isn't there this this side by side of the other? It's because the we wouldn't be able to rely on the data.

And, you know, I I just have a have a third thing that's more of a comment than a than a comment on on your report. What I have seen in downtown is that there's been a surge of foot traffic, particularly on on the weekends. A lot of people do come to Olympia, just kind of wander around and whatnot. And I think the city needs see and the city myself as a city council member needs to do a better job of coming up with ideas to manage, get that though, that flow of people to get them into our retail and, you know, to areas where they can spend money through walking walking strategies and and getting people to move around from the farmer's market, from the children's museum to to the retail areas and and and and restaurants and whatnot. The the second thing is is and I don't fault you with this.

The Plum Street the the the county courthouse is about ready to move into the city from kind of up on the hill. And my experience with county courthouses is that lawyers like to have offices close to courthouses. And that I think over time, we're going to see a migration of professional services into into the part of downtown that is around city hall is is essentially what what that is. And and I think we, a city, need to prepare for that. But, anyway, thank thank you.

I I found it an interesting study, and I thought there was a good a good amount of useful data there. Thank you.

You're welcome. Great. It's good to hear.

Thank you, Paul. Clark?

First, I I really appreciate your work as as you suggested as a a starting document for the next update of our downtown plan. But I I think you highlighted a lot of areas. The the street is an example, something we experimented first with parklets and then with the streeteries during the pandemic. And it's that's certainly worth taking another run at. And I I I think about Ballard where there's blocks that have sort of sheds, that have have enclosed those those parklets.

And, so I so those that that whole host of your recommendations, I I think I hope Jenica's wheels are turning, and she's thinking, yeah. We could be talking to people about these these, suggestions. I I I I wanted to offer broadly my my take on downtown. I have, the word revitalization is super challenging to me because it assumes that there's not vitality that there once was. And, I started hanging around downtown about 1980, and I don't believe there's ever been a time where there's been as much parking on the street, as many retail and restaurant options, as many cultural venues.

And and I'm especially proud that coming out of COVID, we had a net increase in the number of retail and restaurant establishments. People took a chance to invest even coming right out of COVID. So, so I I see that we certainly wanna continue to work on vitality. We wanna change as best practices change, but I don't think this is an urban renewal project by any stretch. And and I'm I get frustrated by that frame because it's an easy frame to fall in if you go talk to people on the corner and they say, yeah.

What a blighted helpful. You're like, well, compared to what? So I anyhow, I so I that that's the frame that I start with. And I think I I think more narrowly about the vacancy issue that there are two two scenarios that we've had a lot of conversation with a lot of conversation about over the last decade. The certainly, this the mixed use buildings that have been built since 2016, which as you put in your report, we had the same direct line from one of the developers that I built this building assuming zero tenancy in the ground floor pedestal that you forced me to make retail with doors opening to the street.

And if they built the building to pencil out that way, then it's it's all kind of magic math about what is the required rental rate, what's a reasonable tenant build out allowance. So so I I don't think it's related to current construction costs or to coming out of COVID because we've been having that conversation since 2016. I do think that it it would make a lot of sense as we have two buildings where we did take a much more flexible approach. On the views on 5th, we have a walk up, some storefronts, some street facing apartments. And on the the Annie's flats and Annie's lots, we we allowed a different mix and a different approach.

And I I think even revisiting the buildings that we have that have been sitting with vacant cores and saying, what can we do together? Are there other uses? You know, how do we get at it? So I I I would love for us to try to address those vacant retail pedestals on the mixed use buildings. And then the the other place we've had a lot of conversation has been legacy buildings that have been vacant for most of my adult life and that owners are sitting on in a speculative manner hoping that someday something will dramatically change, and it'll make sense to redevelop that street corner.

And we've done very modest things like, may we put art displays in your windows? Could somebody do a pop up event or a six month rent? But I I think that's another scenario that more specifically than broadly we keep we wanna do all the vitality work and keep generally encouraging more adaptive reuse, more new buildings. But but those have been the two thorns in vacancy conversations, and those those legacy buildings on key corners are the ones that bring up the question of a vacancy tax or some sort of an a negative incentive to try to encourage, utilization of those buildings as they are even if they're not gonna be developed in the near term. So so that's that's two areas aside from this broader downtown strategy update that, that I'm interested in putting some attention in.

And the the last thing I wanted to comment on is the street improvements. I both understand the the frustration of the cost, and I'm also one of the things I'm most proud about is we have a vigilant pavement preservation program in this city that was hard fought working with the large utilities. And we have recent experience with one of the new buildings not having a great contractor do trenching across our street and leaving us with, an obstacle course to get through a a central entrance into downtown. So there's there's somewhere we meet in the middle about we do have, an expectation that that that that's a that that is a cost of development, especially if you're running new utilities and you're trenching the road up. And so I I just that so I I see a competing interest there that we're we're very proud of our pavement preservation work.

And and, also, we've been trying to be more flexible about frontage improvements in adaptive reuse, especially if it's from a warehouse or industrial sort of use. So so I anyhow, thank you for a pretty exciting report. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Thank you. You know, I there are recommendations that I really like and I'm excited about. Other ones, I'm less excited about, but that's how it is usually. I do like the idea of coming back around to the downtown plan because it it it is becoming apparent that it is beyond it is more than one thing. Mhmm.

I I appreciate the the thoughts around the public expectations around street improvements. You know, I was just out by the views on 5th the other day talking with some folks that witnessed, at Lake Fair last year that that that terrible crash where those two people got killed, and they wonder about speeding, and they were under about things. And so I I think that this is a potential thought process about downtown and multimodal and not just resurfacing and thinking about how do we, make downtown safe and accessible for all folks. Mhmm. Under that thought process, I think that if we are going to do a further study in the near future, that we have to include residents of downtown and not just businesses of downtown.

Because we just need to be able to get a holistic look at it. Mhmm. I think that I think when I was thinking about the parking issue, I think about the ratio of how many people live downtown and walk to places and people who travel into downtown? And what does what does the future look like for the city in the sense of do we create a space where it is more self sufficient by population, or does it rely on people coming into town? Which is you have to have a little bit of both.

Right? And so I I I I think about that quite often. I think about, businesses that were downtown and then left downtown as people did ask. Right? Or like Miso, who was at the mall and decided to come downtown. Right? I wonder about biz about, we talked about retail space scale a little bit in here, especially historical buildings. Mhmm. And I wonder about, how do you how do we program around of scaling that? Right?

How do we do the how do we get the get to the point where we can actually scale sizing to the needs of those businesses? Because, I've talked to a few small businesses downtown that were like, a friend of mine has a barbershop they love, and then they left downtown. And they wanted a bigger space, but the cost ratio was not the same for the bigger space because of the improvements, because of other things. And so those are things I think we should continue to explore. I wonder about the facade thing, and it what are the what are what do other cities do around trade offs?

Because if we're going to invest in a facade upgrade or use Mhmm. You either or or use, like, our parking district dollars to do that, Is there a way to keep the price locked for a while for the small business as a result of the city doing that investment? Right? Are there things that we could do to ensure long term cost prices from from from rising underneath businesses, which is a a real concern I hear. Mhmm.

I wonder you know, I I the Omnibudsman is interesting. I think the, some people have the idea of, like, a nightmare as something that you would have a per that would fill in some of this the nocturnal nightlife in the city because, you know, when I think about the eyes in the street, I do think about the fact that you can come down at at 08:00, 08:30 at night downtown, and the restaurants are going, but the retail's closed. Mhmm. That is something that has been not this it wasn't as much like this for the pandemic, and it's kinda transitioned. And I'm I'm curious about how can we ensure that they're open later or other services are around later?

Right? Because if we're thinking about a city, we think about the twenty four hourness of a place. Right? Let's see. Night hours, talked about that. I love the parklets. I love I've been a fan of the idea of even piloting, pedestrian streets. This has been something I've been very curious about for a long time.

Yes. You

have. Particularly on streets that are low have low traffic volume, so you don't get as because we we we see a lot more foot traffic immediately when we do when, like, the ODA does this downtown for for festivals and events. Right? I I think but when I'm also thinking about the downtown planning, I think about those islands and connecting them a little bit more better. Right?

I mean, if you run into a you know, if you're just visiting Olympia or you're you don't come downtown, but on the weekends and you run into a spot where there is a gap, right, the tear in the fabric, people will get get in their cars and drive to the next location, or they'll leave. And we want people to continually spend as much time downtown as Mhmm. Possible. Businesses of the past. I think that there are other other things I'm curious about, and I've had folks in the public reach out.

I think that's why a bigger process is super important because, I've heard the ideas of, could you create a retail land trust downtown to offset the market costs? That's an interesting idea. I don't know how you would establish such

a thing,

but I think that's something that is of of interest, right, as an alternative to the carrot and stick maneuver of giving money to lower the cost or charging people a tax. What is the what is something else, right Mhmm. Outside the carrot stick. But yeah. And I think that I I ultimately, I believe we need to, perhaps do a bigger planning around this.

Mhmm. Right? Perhaps look at a deeper study, including the residents, downtown. And I think, when I even even with the parking garage, which I'm not the biggest fan of, is, you know, with, with the county coming downtown Mhmm. As Paul has mentioned, they're gonna be building a parking garage or reusing one of the the two others that are in Southeast Southeast downtown.

Mhmm. Right? It's a bit of a distance from where the heat map is right now, but I wonder how much that will affect in the future in in connecting up the hubs. Right? I get you know, you get the convention center built, but there's nothing between the convention center and that, like, you know, heat map area. And I get concerned that you're just gonna see a lot of quick trips back and forth by car. Right? Mhmm. And so outside of street improvements, I do think about multimodal. I think about having conversations with interseed transit.

I think about asking residents in the area, do that live close to downtown. Do you drive to downtown? Right? If you're just on the East Side or you're just on the West Side, do you drive down there? Do you take the bus? Do you walk? Like, how do or you ride the bike? How do we how do we think about that? So some of it is transportation related. But, yeah, that's that's kind of my universal thoughts around that. And, I guess, to Clark's point where you said compared to what, I wrote down, compared to Robocop Detroit City, their vision of a Okay.

Down. Yeah.

But, like, I do think that we have to try to do what we can to balance these things. Right? And I and and it is good it's a good reminder to see that we haven't done a plan since 2016. Right? And things have changed, and I wanna make sure that we're we're doing a holistic approach at this.

Yeah. Go ahead.

Just a couple of thoughts. One is I really I I double quoted it, Clark. I really appreciate the your comment around how we throw around revitalization as a term and really being careful about how we present downtown. Right? Because at the same point in time that we wanna help downtown continue to grow, our message about the current state of downtown is really important, right, and how we talk about it.

So I I just wrote that down because I think we need to continue to talk about how we talk about it. It's really important, and and you made me really think about that. Some of things like the facade improvements, I want to point out that the ODA, through some partnerships with us during COVID, did some of this work and, found it to be super helpful. So they did have people take advantage of, I need a few thousand dollars to update my facade update my facade. So I I do think there's more conversation needs to happen with ODA around some of this as well. And then, the residents piece definitely is an update to the larger downtown strategy. We need to engage the residents in this because they have a different they have, obviously, a very unique perspective about what they're looking for

Mhmm.

In downtown and what it looks like to be improved. So because I I feel the same way. I, I I'm downtown a lot. There there definitely are vacancies in key places, But on the weekends, it's hopping. Right? And on and on a lot of weeknights, it's hopping. So it's it's really about, how do we get some key locations in a different place? And I think if we did that, it would make a huge difference to how people see things. Anyway, just a couple thoughts. Mhmm.

I I just to follow-up on a couple of your ideas. First, if there's any journalists listening, council member Vanderpool was talking about a night mayor a mayor to serve in the evening as an ombudsperson and not that downtown is a nightmare.

So just Hey. Just to make sure specific language.

But that doesn't show up tomorrow in the newspaper. But I wanted to to to underscore and agree on your your question about thinking about the street network as part of this downtown strategy that I think that decoupling 4th And 5th into two way streets and having a section of 5th as a pedestrian mall should be a specific consideration within the update of the downtown strategy, that it's it's been a long term public works transportation piece of the the the transportation plan, but I I think that considering it in downtown vitality economic development sort of terms would would be a really useful look.

So I agree.

Yeah. We didn't say it in our report, but the conversion of the one ways to two ways is a 100% supportive of something like that.

Any other thoughts? Go ahead. So I

was just gonna say into to the points you all made about, you know, there are a lot of visitors to Downtown Olympia. I told Jenica this when we started the project, but when I told some friends from Portland and some colleagues, oh, I'm doing a vacancy study in Olympia, they were like, Olympia? But Olympia is so cool. You know, I had a lot of friends tell me, oh, I was just in Olympia last weekend. Like, I I went to a restaurant. I went to a concert. So I think, you know, we went into this excited to learn more, but really with the view of Downtown Olympia is a great place. And we we don't wanna we didn't wanna lose sight of that in our in our report.

Yeah. And and I'll add to that that when we our first site visit was December maybe, and so things were kind of in holiday shopping season mode, but and it was a pouring down rainy day, gloomy. But downtown was hopping even in the afternoon. All the street spots were full. Restaurants were open. Stores were open. Bistro lights were strung across the street. Like, it it was like, I walked away really impressed, frankly. And and, again, having seen lots of downtowns, like, it by no means would I walk away thinking, well, that's a dead downtown or that's there's no vitality. It's this is very much a how do we take something that's great and make it better and and not, you know, fix something that's broken.

Yeah.

Well, Jennifer, I'm glad you received those reflections from people because we are the original Portlandia.

My wife grew my wife grew up in Olympia, so I know all about the what's what's going Yep.

Yep. Go ahead, Tim. Oh, I just wanna make

a couple comments, specifically the fringe improvements and impact fees, because there's a lot of there's discussion report about a change of use. I just wanna add to that where down in the downtown quarry, you have a lot of the downtown shops. A change of use, we have a a very large bucket called downtown services retail, which basically encompass, you know, a restaurant, a bookstore, any other type of retail. So if you change out those uses to one of those, there's really no trigger for for improvements or for impact fees. Where we do run into some challenges sometimes are the vacant industrial spaces, especially north of state.

And in the office spaces is is what the report identifies we have, you know, some vacant office because a retail use is a higher trip generator than either a warehouse or an office. And so if if a business moves into a warehouse, then oftentimes it can trip for improvements. It can trip, fairly large impact fees. Because even though our impact fees downtown are reasonable, the difference between those uses is quite quite a bit. And so, those can be some challenges, and and I know, in talking with Mark Russell, our public works director, if if we're directed to really look at some of the reports recommendations in terms of how we apply fringe improvements, we could certainly do that.

We just need to know it's a policy question. Right? If private development doesn't do the street improvements, then who gets to do it? It's it's the city as a capital project like we did on Franklin. So it's a trade off. But in a few years ago, we did change the engineering design standards to create some triggers for exempting smaller TIs. So if you don't exceed a certain assessed value, then you don't have to do anything. But once you get to a larger TI, then you trigger trigger potentially the whole thing. You may have to put in a bulb out or something like that. And so if if the council's direction is to look at those things, we can certainly

do that.

Remind us where we ended up at with with the North Of State Street that was called the Artisan Creator District.

Creative District?

Creative District, and we we talked specifically about adaptive reuse and lower cost conversion of some of that former machine shops. I I think that Did we did we ever change policy about frontage improvement requirements, or

we have not? We have not. I think that's the word we can look at. Yeah.

Because we've run into that several times with Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's

Yeah. So

it helps with the hands on island that they were describing.

Right. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. Exactly. Yeah. That area in particular. Mhmm.

One thing I was surprised by reading this was that those frontage improvements kicked in at such a low increased traffic level. Twenty twenty additional trips did not seem like that many to me for us for the requirement of a significant investment, I I assume. And, you know, what what was going through my mind is is could the could that number be adjusted? You know? Because we do wanna have great streets.

We don't want people to tear up our streets and leave us holding the bag, but that that threshold seemed very low to me to require that kind of an investment.

Yeah. I think as Jennifer showed that it is low relative to to other cities. And I think one of the other things that's a challenge with the policy as it is is the when you do trigger those changes, it sort of it sort of, it's hit and miss depending on where in downtown you are and the condition of the street at the time that you're proposing a project. So the same the same you know, like, the transportation impact fee is the same everywhere. But if you happen to be doing a significant project on a street that by no fault of your own has a low pavement standard, you'll have a much higher impact fee than you would if you were on a fronting a street that had recently been redone or for whatever reason.

And so it creates kind of a nonlevel playing field that I think probably plays out a little bit on where you're seeing buildings get redeveloped and others not.

We

we could possibly look at more functional sorts of triggers, like what sort what level of utility replacement or disruption of the street Mhmm. Happen and because I and I because I I guess I'd push back a little bit on the knot level playing field because there's this whole continuum from a greenfield piece of vacant land to, you know, an infill block in the center of downtown, and and those all have different utility and frontage sorts of you know, there's a whole continuum of those costs that I think you come in eyes open with Yeah. Where it is you're you're seeking to develop. But but if if there's a way that we could more narrowly be addressing the specific impacts of the development, it'd be great. And this

is a redevelopment. This isn't a business moving in.

That can trigger it also. Okay.

Because that's to me, age use.

That's age of use too. Yeah. You can have a warehouse where someone wants to put in a thrift shop. And so it it comes in for a tenant improvement. Yeah. And we run the formula, and it could result in impact fees as well as potentially, you know, new sidewalk depend depending upon the location.

I think this is a question we have to ask if we do a bigger study. Mhmm. Right? Because it do we put

it on the owner of the property,

or do we put it on the new business coming in? Because they're usually they're not always the same person. Right. Right? And, I think that that is a a difficulty I've heard from several small businesses is that, you know, they they have they own a like, they don't own the property, and so they're working with the the landlord around or their or the owner of the building.

And it's never it's not always a good relationship. Sometimes it's it is a good relationship, and sometimes it feels like the costs are being put on them Mhmm. From the improvements. Sure. And so it's, like, it's one of those difficulties where I've noticed the businesses just observing it that own their own building seem to be handling this wave of of increases much better than those that are renting it. Right? And and I I think about that stability question. Right? It's the same reason why, I guess, another thing that I would wanna look at is is we have a lot of rentals downtown. I know this is state law, but, like, we don't have people who own their homes downtown as much.

Right? There is no condos being built. Right? And so these are things that I I I I get a little concerned about is living and owning downtown, right, being there long term. So yeah.

I'm not grokking yet. Do what? I I I didn't quite understand. Are you saying that you would have liked to include Yeah. Possibilities for homeownership?

Yeah. Homeownership and and and routes for businesses to be able to, purchase their space and own their own space. Right? Because Yeah. That creates all the that that creates all, like, generational investment, right, versus the the rental economy going up and down and sideways and left and right, right, and trying to trying to catch up with the times. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Any other thoughts? Any other thoughts, Paul? I saw you went on mute.

No. No. No. I'm I'm fine. I I someone was just walking by here.

Oh, okay.

Jennica, do you have any reactions to the report or conversation you're willing to share tonight?

I mean, in general, I appreciate all

the work that Chris and Jennifer did. I think that the list of recommendations, there are quite a few that are really easy to implement on our end and others that we I I think are worth having that discussion internally and understand what would it take to implement, what are the impacts because I I think that if it's a policy direction that the city's interested in, could make a difference in, kind of moving the needle for some chronic vacancies downtown.

Cool.

I do have one one thing I I I wanted to just add. Thank you for exploring the whole issue of the the vacancy tax. I I thought I thought that was important. Something that's been part of the discussion here in the city, but I I do think you made a good recommendation. It would be, oh, a difficult policy to implement.

And implementing it only in downtown versus the citywide, I don't I don't think this makes a lot of sense. We do have a couple of properties that are problem properties, and I'd hate to see that implemented citywide for a couple of bad actors, I guess. You know? But I just I just wanted to to

I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you. We, yeah, we did we did wanna kinda put it put it out there on the record that is kind of as as advisers and economists, we we do not recommend a vacancy tax. And I think for all the reasons you stated, it would be it would be difficult and very controversial and probably a big distraction from a lot of other things that you could be doing that will be more effective at on triggering.

Also, one of the areas where Olympia is certainly not an outsider an outlier is having long term persistently vacant properties that with disinterested property owners that you just can't seem to do anything with. Every city has those, and there's only so much you can do. And at some point, you have to kind of have faith that if you're working strongly and and creating great vitality all around it, eventually, that will have a a peer pressure effect, a market effect, well well, things will change over time. And and we know that the city has limited resources, and so we wanted to make sure that we focus on the things that we thought would have the most leverage in the near term with the with the least amount of heartache along the way. So thank you for that comment.

Mhmm.

Chris, I actually have a follow-up to that. Do you think that do you think this may be something that we would put on the Omnibudsman to to do to to communicate stronger with some of those vacant long term property owners?

Absolutely. Sorry. Continue. Yeah. I would say two things. One, it could be the ombudsman's role or if you have a downtown economic development manager, looking at Jennica or

or, you know,

a role like that, that could be more of their role, someone who's and the ombudsman is more of kind of the the business assistance, business incubation advocacy perspective. They could be the same person depending on how much you have to do. But so the answer is yes and maybe.

I have to interject that we've had long and very direct conversations over years with the persistent key corners, but they're they're good people in the community, good organizations who have the reasons for sitting and speculating and waiting for whatever other redevelopment near them to happen. But Yeah. But I but we it's it's not that we haven't had direct conversation and relationship about those. It's it's just that the conditions haven't been where they've been willing to either turn on the utilities for the current situation or redevelop. So

Yeah. But I go ahead, Jay.

I was saying, in fact, you know, one of those long term vacant spaces, you know, they've held on to it because for a period of time, they thought they might turn into another use for their operations.

Mhmm.

And, they've now gotten to a place

where they don't they think they don't wanna do that.

And so they're they've kinda started conversation with Jennica and I about, hey. We think we wanna get in the market and maybe start talking more with the city about, and working with Jenica more about finding a use for the space. And so that's that's a really good development that just happened here in the last few months on on one particular piece of property. And I think as Jenica continues in her role to to talk to some of the other significant property owner vacancies, their downtown, and learn more about what they're looking to do and and how we might be able to help as a partner and what this looks like, we might learn more.

So, one of the recommendations in there was the idea, or it discusses the idea of it looked at the cost of demolition for buildings, right, and and how much we charge for for demolition in an old building. And I I when I think about that, I also think about how we we have a a tax incentive in state created around affordability if someone wants to sell property and and and and housing. But I'm wondering, like, what other tools there are, right, outside of locality tax to really be like, yeah. Let's let's let's help you offset this property and turn into something else. Right?

Mhmm. That is a question because sometimes it becomes so expensive for them to knock the building down that they just don't do it. Right? And they sit on it. And, I also wanna get us out of the world of I wanna protect the city as much as possible from a speculative market where we are right now.

So Mhmm. Mhmm.

Yep. Alright. That's it. Got everything. Yep. Just Thank you, folks.

Thank you very much for having us. It's been a pleasure working. We'll see you, next month at the council meeting.

Thank you so Thank you. Alright. The next item is discuss affordable housing versus ejaculation. Every meeting, create a new plan. What's that? Every meeting, we create a new plan. We we lately, we are. Yeah. It's hard. We'll get them all done.

For the official record, I'm Jacinda Stelchis, housing manager. I'm here this evening, late afternoon, to talk about our affordable housing emergency declaration and have a very brief presentation for you all. Mostly just an update on how it's going, some lessons learned, you know, identifying kind of, like, what we've been what we've been doing with this thing. Thank you. So the affordable housing emergency declaration was officially adopted in December '24 through ordinance seven four one four, and it's really intended to address the lack of affordable housing or the lack of supply of affordable housing.

So through this ordinance, you all declared the lack of affordable housing supply as a public health emergency. And part of the a few things, I guess, if you need to kind of lead to this place, housing staff had been having a lot of conversations with our affordable housing developers in the community, our local developers. Many of those are nonprofit housing developers. And really hearing from them, you know, we need more strategies. We're trying really hard.

We know there's a lack of supply, and it's just very, very expensive to to build new affordable housing. So part of this came from those conversations and their direct ask of, like, what what else could the city do? How can we work with them better? Is also in response around the same time, you know, our comp plan, comprehensive plan, was getting started, and Thurston Regional Planning Council had worked with all of the local jurisdictions to really lay out our housing target goals. So recognizing that, you know, we're already kind of in a place where we are experiencing a lack of supply.

And we also have some numbers that we have now officially built into our comprehensive plan around need and really looking at, you know, like, 14,000 more units needed in Olympia, around 55,000 in Thurston County. And not all of those, 14,000, will be needed or projected to be needed for low income households, but a good percentage of those, you know, around a little over half. And then also acknowledging more regional planning council work, the housing needs assessment that was around 2021. And specific to Olympia, that body of work really identified that there are about 7,600 Olympia households that are cost burden housing cost burden. So that means they're spending more than 30% of their income on their housing expenses, and that's, you know, income that they're not able to spend on other very important things.

So all of those have come together in terms of the need for, an emergency declaration as a way to address this. Next slide.

I need

just to ask 7,600. That's that's about half

of our households, isn't it? Yeah. Okay. Just double checking, mate.

Does that math?

Yeah. And we are I mean, I think, you know, you all know, we are a primarily renter community. Mhmm. So when we're talking about primarily renting, who don't maybe have as much control over their rent or their their costs, you know, and then we add on the large number that are cost burdened. So moving on to our strategies.

Through this declaration, we identified six strategies to help increase the affordable housing supply. So some of them are very simple. I will say simple, but more upfront. Some are a little bit more complex. So prioritizing housing, affordable housing so that I should pause for for those who may be watching or for those that don't know.

We, as a city, define affordable housing, again, as the household does not pay more than 30% of their income on their housing costs, rent or mortgage plus utilities. And then this declaration as well as all of our other affordable housing incentives, which we will touch on a little bit, are really directed at creating opportunities for low income individuals. So those are individuals or households whose income is not more than 80% of the area median income. So as we're we're talking about that, this is or these strategies, these are the parameters. Affordable housing is prioritized in our permitting process.

So this is, you know, me and the planners as something comes in, we're communicating, is this affordable housing? Yes. Okay. It goes to the top of the queue. The planners have been amazing and wonderful, and we saw from the last presentation as well that they are working fast. So that is going great. Access to specialized staff assistance. A lot of the times when we're talking about affordable housing and nonprofits, you know, the there's this a little bit of a Tetris game of, like, how to make it work. This is the land that they might have access to for one reason or another. What can they do there?

How can they maximize what they can do and still make it pencil in terms of cost? So this is also someone in our current planning, Nicole Floyd, primarily right now that is really just, like, sitting down with folks, developers, and, like, really looking at the property and, like, you can do this or you could do that or here's something to think about. And that I think will probably continue to expand as we have, like, more middle housing now is adopted as well. This third one, waive or defer city requirements. So this gives Jay or his designee the ability to really evaluate a project, an affordable housing project, and talk with directors and make some decisions about can we waive or adjust some of our city requirements to make it possible.

Mhmm. The fourth one is the permit fee grant. So this is only permit fees. So there's usually a permit fee, and there's also a permit review fee. This is just applying to the permit fees. The fifth one is the infrastructure assistance grant. Again, this is applying to infrastructure and drinking and wastewater. And then in a setting aside a small amount Mhmm. Out of those utilities to make available for developers to address infrastructure. And then the last one is a $10.33 tax exchange transaction.

This is a little bit more complex. Haven't had any kind of well, I wouldn't say we haven't had interest, but haven't had, like, a a project that we've done yet. But this is available essentially if yeah.

What's the hang up on it?

Oh, what is the hang up? You

want me to start with what it is?

Yeah. Because I that may and everyone I know what

it is. That might help. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So what this is is essentially with willing participants of existing affordable housing, whether it's subsidized or naturally occurring. If they are at a point where that property is at risk of not being affordable for one reason or another, The owner wants to sell. They don't wanna be in the business anymore.

Or there's, you know, a tax credit period that's expiring that the existing property owner and the city, if they're both willing, could, work together in in this tax exchange transaction and work with a nonprofit or, essentially, like a buyer who would wanna take over that property, keep it affordable. The city essentially declares imminent domain. We act as this in between where we're kind of holding holding the property, selling it to the developer that's interested in continuing the affordability, And then the property owner, the original property owner, gets us benefit, capital gains benefit, some extended time to essentially, like, instead of paying capital gains, they get to have some time and some money on hand to, like, invest in another residential or similar property. I don't wanna go too far into what's the holdup, but there are certainly properties that have come up. But you need to have both.

Right? You need to have the property. You need to have a willing property owner. You also need to have someone that is in a place that they can operate it long term, and that's been we we have a handful of local affordable housing developers. We need more. So there's been, like, interest, but it's like, how do we make it how do we realistically make it work?

I'll do a follow-up. Have we seen any interest in this being applied to, like, manufactured housing? Because they're they're they're an example of, affordable housing, low income, usually senior, and their interest in, you know, getting because I know I I was I wasn't sure if it applies to more housing units. Right? Like that.

It might be something I need to talk with Michael Young or Mark Weber about. I don't know if it applies, or how

Yeah. Yeah.

Apply. Okay. Typically, they're typically, they're applied to larger projects. And what what you didn't quite say is the the buyer oh, every everyone needs to kind of be in agreement on the the the tax and the tax incentive, who who receives it, and at how much. And these are kind of complicated transactions sometimes.

Yes.

That's worth exploring. It would it would be easier path if it was an all rental manufactured home community as opposed to an all individually owned units. Mhmm.

I think the other and and I can look into it, but I think the other thing that potentially could come up with that one is I've worked or understood this transaction or incentive in the context of, like, the current property owner is expected to invest in a similar type Mhmm. Property or ownership or or yeah. Property, basically. So I think, you know, when it comes to manufactured home communities, if they're being sold, I'm not sure how many would be interested owners would be interested in, like, similar, you know, purchasing another manufactured home community, essentially.

Just a lot more apartment complexes in the world.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

But certainly something I can talk with legal about.

Cool. Next

slide.

So it's also worth mentioning again that, not again, but eligibility. When we're talking about these six strategies, all units of a project must be affordable to low income households. Again, affordable defined as a housing cost or no greater than 30% of the household's income, and low income household being defined as that household's annual gross income does not exceed 80% of the area median family income. HUD will be updating that AMI number in a few weeks, or at least that's what they said. They're a little behind.

So that $1.16 a 116,700 as a median family income will likely increase a bit. But that's why you have seen this number for a little while because HUD has not updated their data quite yet. And then also any project that is, taking advantage of any of these strategies is subject to a twenty four year or, excuse me, a twenty five year affordability period, and then that a covenant is executed and that runs with the land. So it's a a way to make sure that the affordability continues for a a decent amount of time. Thank you.

So, again, this the strategies were adopted in late twenty twenty four. I entered 2025 excited to spend lots of time on it, and then we had some structure changes. But much of 2025 was spent implementing the six strategies, trying to get, the news out that there is this declaration, what it's about, and, of course, the the work continues. So this is just kind of a a high level timeline. I do wanna call out, you know, what happened last year is really looking at, like, trying to control cost too.

Right? So what can we do internally as staff to get the work at the word out and let our developers know and kind of spread the word without a big price tag attached with, like,

a a

full, like, marketing campaign. All of, you know, housing's work comes out of Home Fund, and the the side of it associated with the housing team is really quite limited in terms of, like, funding that's available that isn't staff costs. So this is trying to get creative with how do we get it out there with with the resources that we have and capacity. One oh, sorry. Next slide.

One of the things that was done was working with our communications team on a signature graphic. I always forget what what it's called, but a signature graphic that can be used similar to, like, when Anastasia comes and presents to you all on CDBG. There's a a specific graphic kind of associated with that movement or that initiative. So this is up on our housing web page as well as a frequently asked or not frequently asked questions, an incentive document that kinda shows everything that we offer. And just a a visual to certainly, like, you know, this doesn't just represent ADUs and that kind of stuff.

But we're we're looking for something that illustrated a little bit of, like, middle housing as affordable as well. Go ahead. Next slide, please. So participation. This is really, like, to date.

So I will also say that affordable housing projects, and we'll get it a little bit more into this, are are different than market rate, and there's a lot of a lot of moving pieces. So the most success has really been in just, like, prioritizing projects as I came in, and that was one of the things that the developers were really outspoken about with and we talked about, like, perception versus reality already, but, like, it takes too long to get through permitting. So, really, they're, like, prioritized permitting and access to staff assistance to help them, like, figure out when stuff is, reviewed and sent back and stuff needs to change. These things have been the most successful, and I think, like, the the easiest to kinda implement as well. So we've had five projects since it was passed, in various stages, that have been prioritized in the permitting process.

So some of them are, like, all the way through. Some, again, are, like, in the process now, but that represents about 538 units.

So so that's been in that that's been in the last two years. When when when you said when it was passed, what what time frame does this

Yeah. So the declaration was passed the declaration was passed December 2024. So this is essentially January 25, through current through today. And these 538 units are, homeownership and rental.

Mhmm.

Four projects have, access staff assistance. One project has, we've waived some a city requirement or city, code. One is currently engaging with the permit fee, grant. We have not had any yet with the infrastructure grant. It is a fairly small amount, so that might explain that a bit. And then as I said before, we haven't had any with the $10.33 exchange.

Mhmm.

And I I will take a moment. The waived city requirements, I think there was a lot of conversation about, like, those are will likely be things that are, EDS, environmental design and development standards.

Beautiful. Engineering. Engineering.

Oh, you're so close. You're

the most. You're the most.

Oh, and thank you. Yes. I like, my mind thinks of SIPA and NEPA. Engineering. Thank you.

So I think we envisioned that that that's where we would see most of these things. And so this specific requirement is actually one that we or waived requirement is one that we made for habitats on 3900 Boulevard project, which you all know was also a former city site that was sold to them at a very low cost for development. And as home ownership, they approached us and had said, you know, like, it doesn't make sense for some of the other incentives to have this, like, indefinite period. So the declaration strategies are limited to twenty five years, but some of our other development incentives, like the impact fees, are essentially written in our code as in perpetuity. I mean, if it if things ever change, if there's ever any unit that is not affordable, then it triggers repayment of those impact fees in full.

So this city waive city requirement was a really a great learning opportunity too with Habitat and saying, like, that doesn't make sense for homeownership. You know, they we are selling the homes. There are some, like, things in place that we would try to encourage and incentivize or resell to affordable. But, ultimately, like, there may be a time in perpetuity that a home that has benefited from our incentives turns over to someone that is not in that 80% AMI. So so our where we kinda landed is a twenty five year affordability period versus, like, a Yeah.

Indefinite.

And if they and if they and I it's okay if I asked. If they were if they're going beyond twenty five years, that's perfectly fine too.

Yes. Mhmm.

Yeah. Because it's very common for them to read much longer than

that. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

They were just more worried about, how our code was written, you know, didn't want the homeowners to be repaying that. Like, if one one of the 112 units were just be sold, then, like, the whole impact fees were repaid. So that's really where that city requirement Wave City requirement came in, which was not Ed's, but we may see Ed's. Next slide. And after I sent my presentation, I realized, you know, I should have also put a picture in here of Habitat's project that has started, which I can share with you all if you have if you don't drive by or haven't seen it, but they have broken ground on 3900 Boulevard.

This is, the Gibson. This is adaptive reuse over on 505 or over on Union at 505 Union. Commercial to residential adaptive reuse, 65 units. This is a private local developer. So we so that's always for me. Like, I like to see that. It's not just our nonprofit housing developers. Again, priority in the permitting queue. Many, I would I would even go as far as to say, like, all of them so far, and I would imagine the trend will continue as we're talking about trying to decrease costs. Like, the the incentives are being layered.

So they're taking advantage of the affordable housing declaration incentives. They're taking advantage of when they're in an MFPE zone. Mhmm. They you know, that is also available, and this developer did that as well, the twelve year. Also, the 80% exemption of impact fees, both transportation and park impact fees, the 50% reduction of the city general facility charges, and then to connect to water.

And then LOT, Clean Water Alliance also has their program. As an aside, that has been very successful in every year since they have it was a pilot program. It's permanent now. Olympia has drawn all of our pool and borrowed from the share pool and asked other jurisdictions if we could have some of theirs. So I've I've put a a plug in that we would love more in Olympia, the lot funding. And then this this project, of course, because it's benefiting by the declaration and other incentives will serve 80% area family median income.

I I'd like to just ask a question, and and I'd I'd this this is directed to Jay. Jay, using this as an example, would would these exemptions have been granted without the declaration of the emergency?

Yeah. And I think I think just

in a

I'm I'm just what I'm just real what I'm just kinda getting at is is is is the emergency really the driver on this, or are these incentives that the city is using and encouraging with or without this emergency? I I that that's just my kind of my question.

Yeah. So the the incentives that Deshindav was talking about, the twelve year MFTE, the 80% exemption of impact fees, the 50% reduction in lot, those are all incentives that we always have. They're they're not necessarily part of the emergency declaration. What what this project did use as part of that emergency declaration is priority in the permitting queue. So they were able to jump to the top of the permitting queue and get, staff staff time and energy on their permit ahead of other projects in the queue.

And if you talk to developers, and Tim can speak to this, time in development queue, time is money. Right? So being able to get moved to the top of the permit queue and get through that process faster gets them to breaking ground faster, which cuts their soft cost of getting from a to b. And so I think that's really of most of the things that are here. I'll say the and then the other one I'll highlight, customer Barron, that this waiver of a requirement that, Tim was able to do because the emergency declaration allowed him to around Habitat's project is another example of something he could not have done without this emergency declaration.

We would have had to come to council and go through a process to to change everything up front before we could say yes, which probably would have killed it. So it's kind of a

yes and no. You know?

Well, I just yeah. That that helps a lot. And and and and thank you. I'll I'll try not to interrupt until this is this is all over, but I did. That was one thing I really wanted to really understand. Thank you.

Well, just to add, the developer here was wanting to do this project, but didn't really decide it was the right time until they understood all the incentives and how they could use them. And that really is what helped the project move forward.

Yeah. Thank thank you, Tim. And I think great great question. And I think, you know, I'll take a moment to also I won't make us go back in slides. But since the declaration has passed, staff has put effort into really and continued effort, which we'll see in the next few slides.

Again, trying to make some of these things more known. There's, you know, an incentive, fact sheet and, with examples of projects that have used these things. It's on the website. It comes up in conversations. Housing staff engages in the site plan review committee, so the preconference, discussions.

And we did have, fairly recently, developer, again, a private developer that came in, was talking had a vision, was kinda trying to work through some questions, and housing staff was able to usually, we just kind of, you know, at the end, we we plug our incentives. And it's like, if you decide to go affordable, we have all these great things. And and sometimes we hear more and sometimes we don't. This specific developer, did reach out and said, actually, like, this could make a difference And being able to layer these things, these different incentives, and have that priority in the permitting queue, for the specific developer, it it seems like this we'll see. But it seems like this one, like, might actually change from a market rate vision to an affordable vision because of the exemptions making it now pencil as affordable and being able to, like, layer on top of some of our other code, like, density bonuses and stuff.

So it's, I would say it's hard to say in some cases. And, also, we have seen, you know, some interest in now that we have several incentives, more of an attitude of, like, this might this might work, or I'll consider I'll consider affordable housing more, or at least, like, this specific developer of the Gibson has reached out to me a few times looking for other projects. I don't know if it'll happen, but he is very excited and like, oh, I'd like I think maybe I'll do another one Good. Which would be great if you did.

Mhmm. I'd like to add to this. I think what's very important, and you were just saying, is that, one of the criticisms, one of the feedbacks I've heard from the public is to ensure that and this is why it's in there, is ensuring that the things that we're guaranteeing to developers guarantees affordability. Right? And that's why the covenant is there Mhmm. For twenty five years. Yep. Is to say, we're gonna give you these things, but you have to guarantee it's gonna be locked in. Mhmm. Right? And I think that is that is a thing that the public has some of the biggest critics of some of our programming said that's what we gotta put in there.

Yep. So

Well, yeah. And if they don't,

then they have to pay up the orders at the beginning. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or impact fees and connection fees. Yep.

Alright. Next slide. So I think at this point, some good lessons learned, and I imagine, you know, like, in the scheme of affordable housing, this is still pretty new. Many affordable housing projects, like getting through the permitting phase or figuring out how to make it pencil, whatever they're going to build, you know, that's there's much more much more that comes after that. So lessons learned have really been around, like, coordination internally.

You know, like, how do we work together, housing staff and planning staff? What does that mean in, you know, engineers as well as current planners? What does that look like? What do we need from each other? How do we educate each other about the planning process and what affordable housing is and, like, the timeline and and the the things that can come up, which have come up in this last year, and figuring out ways to, like, you know, improve processes and and, like, become more more efficient and really finessing, like, at what point do we need the developers to engage in these things that it's, like, really working ideally on everyone's time frame.

And then coordination with the external partners, the developer included. Again, those five projects, I think I think at least three, maybe four of them all have some sort of state or federal funding in them too. So, you know, they're moving along really great and policy changes at a higher level, and they've had to shift. So it's also, like, a staff learning. How do we shift with them and still, like, kinda keep them on track, but also understanding that, like, we've prioritized them in the permitting process, and they've stalled.

And this is why. But but the city can say, like, we, you know, we are trying our best, and we the planners have worked really fast and hard. And and now, you know, they're figuring the developers are figuring out how to shift their funding or how to fill a gap that has has come up for one reason or another. So, again, you know, really just coordination and communication. Sorry.

I kinda jumped into that third bullet there. Next next slide. So next steps. The current declaration, again, was adopted in December, but there was a good conversation at council around wouldn't it be nice if we don't have all these declarations that need to be, reviewed annually or, like, frequently to kind of decide if it's still needed to all come in December? Mhmm. So there was budget. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a very proactive conversation around, let's have this one be reconsidered in June. So that is coming up.

So it expires. The current declaration public emergency declaration expires June 30. So you all will see this at council. I think this should actually say June 3 instead of second, so my apologize or apologies. You'll see it at council with the question of of do we do you all want to renew that declaration June 3, assuming you all do.

Housing staff recommends that you do, but assuming that you do, I am really excited and looking forward to as we are bringing on a housing director in a month or so, creating some capacity so I can shift my work that has been very heavily centered in trying to manage and manage a staff and and do this and kind of step into a little bit of director roles and, like, shift a little bit more back to how do we get this out there again, and how do we make it work, and how do we make it better. So that, I think, hopefully, as soon as this summer, can start doing that. This idea of attracting so so part of this also yes. Yes. You had talked about, like, how do we

Yeah. I

yeah. We need more developers. So incentives are part of a piece to attract new developers, and this is also a conversation happening at the regional level, at the regional housing council. How do we, as a region, attract more developers? And so I am hopeful that we can have some some great work regionally in sharing Olympia's incentives, but, hopefully, our partners' incentives as well.

And just, again, identifying more opportunities to collaborate with external partners to bring awareness and and and more developers, evaluating successes and failures, and identifying process improvements. Around number four, Jenica and I have also talked, you know, like, there there's some overlap, and I know she talked with you all recently. There's some overlap with this this work and other housing work in, like, Olympia Strong and how and even, you know, like, in the vacancy study, like, so so much overlap. So she and I have also talked about, like, are there is there economic development funding that maybe we can use to help get the word out more? And how do we pair that with, like, an economic development lens and a housing lens?

So we're having creative conversations internally about how, like, just teams work better to achieve multiple goals with the resources that we have, which has been really fun. And questions?

Yeah, Jay. Not a question. I just wanna

just add a few things

to kinda wrap up here. One is, you know, when I started to debrief with the team around this, it's easy to kinda look at five projects, right, and say, well, we had we didn't have a lot that went through. Right? But then you look at 538 units, and that's not insignificant. Right? So they're they're larger projects that have come through this emergency declaration. Two projects in particular I wanna highlight. One, as we just talked about, is the waiving of a requirement that the that the policy allowed us to do for Habitat's project that that Tim and I rather work with. I had a meeting with Habitat, and within a week, we addressed it. Right? Tim was able to address it, and that that let loose all of their their permits.

Mhmm.

And so they could break ground in spring. And if they didn't break ground in spring Yep. I don't know if this project would have continued. I mean, that's the message that we received. So the flexibility, even if it's just one project, it it was worth it.

It was

worth it to me. And then the Jacinda kinda sold this one short, I think, a little bit.

Uh-huh.

The Gibson. There was a lot of staff work with the housing team and that developer around adaptive reuse to get him to a place of feeling comfortable and confident to do it. And his that conversation around with them, prioritizing it in the queue along with all of incentives, got him from a place to say, I'm gonna do this project. I think it's his first affordable housing project. Yes. It is. It is. And it's it's our only adaptive reuse that we have going on. So we now have a showcase of how this can work for other developers Mhmm. In our community.

So I wanna leave you with this. I think year one was about pulling this together and seeing how it could work. And I think what we've demonstrated as as a staff team is there's some real possibilities for how this can continue to be expanded, and we're just at the beginnings of how we sell this program. And I fully support extending this emergency after the June 3 expiration date because I do believe, we've had some early success, and we can only get better.

Well, I, know, I think that this I'm glad it's being successful and continue to be successful. And I'd be curious to see why I get there were so many questions we had when we came up with this. Right, Jay? We had these, like, long conversations about whether or not would we run out of money, right Yeah. To fund it. Right? And it seems like that's not the thing that you know, it it's the thing that people are taking advantage of quite yet. Right? Yep. That that may be a good, bad problem future to have, to have so many developments.

And I like the idea of thinking of of of re getting private developers to reconsider just doing for market projects. Right? I also think of when we're talking about attracting more developers, I wanna specify because some people get nervous about this. Right? Some people will be like, oh, no. You're gonna get a Seattle developer. They're gonna have an expensive Seattle project. This is not for that type of development. This is for this is for 80% below area median income. And I also think about the possibility of some of this added together to help with the smaller infill projects in the city that we definitely need.

Right? Not just adapt to reuse, but it's the last year, kept saying this term, four people in a van, you know, the builder that wants to be a developer, but can't it's not penciling out. They're not but they wanna do that. Right? There's a couple of smaller builders that are starting to try to look to become developers in the community.

I know I talked to the folks at Bicycle a while ago, and they were they're newer, and they're trying to work with the land trust on some stuff. Like, this creates an opportunity, I think, to be able to grow that a little bit more even within the community itself. So I'm very I'm very excited and proud of this work. I'm I'm hopeful that we'll, once we have the housing director on board, we can think of what else we can do with this. Mhmm. So yeah.

Tim? Yeah. I just wanted to kinda reflect back on the when this ordinance was adopted back in December 2024 and recall what was going on then. Were going through a significant budget year for 2025. We've completely reorganized our department. Mhmm. We had a reduction in force, and so expectation was do it faster with fewer people.

Yes.

And and the housing director left the city. Mhmm. And so despite all that, we've made a lot of progress. You know, we issue 6,000 permits a year total. So to really work with staff on how to prioritize took some work. We had to build a system to do that. Jacinda's done a great job complimenting the planners, but I think she's not she needs to take some credit for this. I mean, just this is her leadership through this whole process, working with people like Nicole Floyd to provide, you that direction to staff and training to make it work is really what made it happen. And I'm looking forward to hiring the housing director too because now Jacinda can start doing her actual work. She's been covering the housing director, helping cover it for a year now, year and

a half.

So, I'm looking forward to next year, and I'm I'm I'm supportive of moving this forward for renewal because I think we have it all in place. We just need to continue to move in it forward and improve it better as we, have that opportunity with new projects.

Any other comment thoughts, Paul, Clark? Just

to echo everything y'all just said that I I I also have an interest. We've talked broadly about planning and development, having more external communication, sort of more marketing and branding, right, of the opportunities that we have. And I I think you're helping to push that work in this with this specific niche of affordable housing. I just so I I'm I'm also super proud of the work, and I and I understand, you know, Paul's question about was how much of of what's been offered so far is specific to the emergency ordinance? And I I would flip it around and say because of the efforts that the emergency ordinance structured for us, we were better able to sell other incentives that we've had on the books that that were able to be bundled or stacked or whatever the phrase was you used to how they put all the pieces together.

So I I'm really excited to renew this and to just to imagine how these how these begin to be not year to year emergencies and and become policies and practices of the city.

Yeah. Thank you. I I support this, and, you know, I I just wanna make that really clear. If there's something that makes me uncomfortable, it's the use of the term emergency when we aren't

when

the public might perceive that we're not acting enough as an emergency. You know, we we we passed an emergency, but I I just wanna make sure there's meat on the bones. And and how we communicate this is really important to me too. And I guess how I would communicate this is that we just have granted the the you know, Tim and and Jay and and all of and Jacinda and all the city staff the ability to streamline the permits and and, you know, make some special accommodations if it's if it's meeting the low income housing crisis. I I I I'm I'm just really what's important to me is to just frame this to the public.

So I have no hesitancy in granting this authority or voting for this, but it is important that we continue to convince the public that we're meeting this challenge of of of of of the housing emergency and and the actions we're taking to do so. And I just wanted to make sure I understood it so that I could communicate that with people that I see all the time and and and and literally ask these questions. We have several emergencies that we've declared. And if we're not good at communicating what we're doing with these emergencies, people the the the term emergency uses loses its value with the public, and I'm really sensitive to that. But but I support this policy.

Go ahead, Jay.

Yeah. I just wanna I really appreciate what you said there, council member Barron, and around the use of the word emergency. And I think going back to 2024, there's a couple things at play. You know? One is we looked at housing needs assessment and had conversations with council about where we were. There's just there's really a sense of the council at the time that we're falling behind on our ability to build affordable housing, and and we need to take it serious, and and declaring an emergency does that. And so I think there was that piece of it at the time. The other thing that's, it's kind of a legalese to it is the emergency portion of this is what allows the waiver. It allows Tim and I the authority to waive council ordinances. And if you don't term it that way, then we could get in trouble.

So I think what we did is we ran this kind of as a pilot the first year, and and Jacinda had one of her bullets was kind of assessing kinda what worked well, what didn't. And just to your comment, one of the things that that we can look at as we as we think about this in the future is whether or not this is just kind of an affordable affordable housing process, or is it still an emergency? If and if if it's just part of our regular process, can we talk to the attorneys about how what we do and how we talk about this, which is really what I'm hearing you say? So we'll we'll I took that note, and I think that's something we can think about as we continue to move forward about just how we market it and how we talk about it. So, anyway, I'll offer that.

Thank

you, Paul. I mean, I I also wrote that down. Comms director. Right? We're gonna have to be comms director. And I'm hoping that comms director will help. And then

You're knocking on the door.

Yep. I'm just hoping. I'm hoping it'll help you out with that because Yeah. Yeah. Right? That person's got a long list when they say it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have plenty to to report on. And then, permanence, wrote down too. As Jay just said that, you know, what how do we how do we ensure if a program is successful that it isn't just something that accounts us to renew a few years. Yep. Mhmm. Mhmm. So anything

else? No? Do we need to make a recommendation to council?

I don't think we do. It's a discussion. It's listed.

You know? It it does, but I think it would be helpful if you're willing to make a motion to recommend the extension to the council. Let's do it. What do you

think, Paul? You're still up. You wanna make such a motion?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I I move that we recommend to the council another two year extension, to the emergency declaration.

Second. Oh, Jacinda has a little technical. Discussion.

We we set the June you all decided on June because it was passed in December. If I recall correctly, and I'd have to go back to the ordinance, but I think the language in the ordinance is that each June so on an annual basis, it will come back. I and I am yes.

But if you wanna if you wanna make a motion to extend it two years amend the ordinance. Then we can amend the ordinance as part of bringing it forward to council to reflect that.

Let's have a discussion real quick. How how far ahead do we wanna go with this? How are we thinking?

Well, I I think I think we should do a minimum of two years. I I just I just don't think it's, we need to grant enough time to see if we can get some more momentum going, and I don't think one year is as adequate to do that. And I don't have a distrust in in our our our city implementing this program. So I just wanted to avoid having to vote on this every year when when I think that a two year extension is is appropriate personally.

Great. So I'll stand by my second of the recommendation to recommend it to counsel with a a two year rather than a one year timeline. It's great.

Alright. I think it's Mice. Hi. Hi. Hey. Cool. There we got it. Thank you. Alright. Alright. Now we are at reports and updates. Tim, I think you have an item. Yeah. A couple of things. First, just to

for the next meeting, which is, well, scheduled for May 28. Mhmm. But you have three items. You have the sidewalk repair policy coming to you, from public works. We have miscellaneous code amendments. The Joyce Phillips will be presenting. It'll be her last meeting. She's, like, resigning the next day. Retiring. But, anyway, she has she has this new planning commission now, and so it's ready to move forward to city council. It's really a collection of code changes that implements both state law and some other tweaks to our code to make it easier to read. And then we have a update from Chris and Lenza on the housing related to the twenty twenty six legislative session date. Those are three items currently.

A lot a lot

of items. A lot of items.

And I wanna mention to that, Paul and I potentially are gonna be at an event at 05:30. I think it's scheduled for 05:30?

It's it's scheduled for five to seven is is what it's yeah. Five to seven. And I I would I would really appreciate either a modification of the time or if we could move it for a week, but or or something to that effect. If if that's not possible, we'll just have to leave early, I guess. But

I think we'll

We, yeah, we could look to to moving it.

How's everyone's schedule for the week after?

Joyce won't be here the week after.

Oh, that's true. Right. Well yeah. Right. Yeah. We gotta have we gotta have Joyce. We did it earlier. Is that okay?

I well, yeah, I'd I'd need to check availability of the other staff. But Okay. The twenty first?

The twenty first, I'm presenting at the enterprise for activity event.

How about we take away this request to try to reschedule and then let Tim do some work, and then we can get some

we can maybe Tim can

put some dates out there and some people will follow you when he gets a chance to look at calendar.

Terrific. Does that work? Terrific. Okay.

That's my update.

Now the other

the other update is, the the last meeting we talked about doing a roundtable on the tenant update to purchase conversation. Mhmm. And so, Crystal Linzen was

able

to meet with, council member Vanderpool and I get some feedback. And so we're here tonight to give kind of a scope of what that can look like. And I think, Jacinda, you're gonna cover that.

Yes. Alright. So anyway So I apologize because I I brought hard copies that I can send the proposal as well, because I don't think it was in the packet No. Since it's, like, a good good, report out, I guess, is what we call it. Mhmm. And too. So yes. So there was a discussion when Krista came to Landius last time around tenant opportunity to purchase. There was a desire from this committee to have a little bit more stakeholder engagement, And then there was some follow-up on, like, what, you know, what are what objectives are we kinda looking at? Who might we engage with?

So Krista put together a very kinda high level potential scope, including some dates, which I won't go over all of them, May and June, one and a half to two hours, stakeholders that were identified, Northwest Community Development Corporation, the Thurston Housing and Land Trust, and then some individuals that have have worked in this arena that Chris has talked with and and are just available and and interested in this. So really wanting to make sure as staff moves forward that we're kind of bringing forward something that that meets your guys' objectives on what you're you're looking for. So I think the the goals that we had talked about, the three potential goals or maybe our goals are all three, Are we really looking to identify ways that the city could support transitions to or excuse me. The goals are to look at the ways that city could support transitions to tenant ownership, potentially looking at designing with our stakeholders TOPA or TOFO policy and or and or the current landscape and roles under such a a policy? Excuse me.

So is this even feasible? So really engaging those stakeholders to have these conversations about, like, what supports do they need? Do we are we looking to them to, like, actively design policy with us? Are we looking to just kinda make sure that we're aware of the landscape and the roles or or all three? And this next scope of work is fairly hefty for one and a half to two hours.

So we really are looking for some guidance from you all in terms of, like, a, you know, in person stakeholder kind of conversation, where you want us to focus. Are you wanting us to possible topics. You know? Are we wanting to focus on that system capacity and roles, financial resources, policy approaches and logistics, or or other, or I would imagine, like, a few of these. But I think for, like, a one and a half to two hour time frame, probably trying to tackle all of these is is gonna be a bit much.

So Krista was hoping to be here and couldn't make it today, but we wanna make sure that we were responsive and got something in front of you all. And I can take it back to her so we can continue working on what that engagement looks like and have clear expectations for our stakeholders and ourselves and make sure that we are meeting your all's expectations as well.

I wanna start by saying I appreciate having a broad scope that we can narrow it down. That makes it a lot easier rather than scratching our heads and saying, what are we gonna ask? We need to send Paul a copy at one point Mhmm. So that he knows what we're talking about. When does she need this from the individual members?

There's really no timeline. I mean, we could set something. I mean, there's no definitive date. There's some dates here, but but we'll we'll in other words, changing your regular meeting, we need to figure out how the two are gonna work, you know Yeah. Together. So we that's one thing. But I think feedback and say, maybe a week or so.

Yeah. I think, I should have printed out one I think maybe you have the schedule because, you know, the there's a few, times that were in front of you for for discussion. Yes. And then ultimately and I don't know if it's, like, made on the calendar, like, a a recommendation that would ultimately go to council. So wanting to make sure that we have time for the stakeholder before we have the recommendation. So we might have to push push back later dates if we get, like

Oh, well, what's the tentative date for a policy to go to council? Now I'm now I'm hearing you.

Yeah. Yeah. I I think

We have well, we scheduled to have a recommendation in in July July, so we may need to push that

out. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think if you all are interested in in pushing that July date, that that may be needed, I guess, is what I'm

So can I give just a a quick initial given the the that I know each of the people and they already have engaged in these conversations, that the first three goals, I think, are I don't know that there's value in in having a set of very specific questions that you're try to answer? If that's like

That's fine.

I think it's kinda trying to put words in the mouths of the folks who are working on this every day.

Well So My other my other thought is, the presentation that is made based on what we are recommending so far Mhmm. Probably guide the conversation.

Yes.

Absolutely. To get their to get their feedback on and and, you know, I do think there's two sides to that. Right? I do think that there is, in the presentation, the idea the ideas that are in there, they're

like, great.

Or not sure if that'll even help us. Right? Or what else are we missing

Right.

Is kind of a a very broad thing. But some of the people on here I mean, a couple years ago, Paul Knox presented to us and presented a huge list of stuff. Right? So

And Miles has been working specifically on this for years. Yep.

And so some of these folks had you know, they they live and breathe this. So I think that, I guess, the presentation itself has to be the thing that sets the conversation rather than questions, I guess. Yeah. And I'm sure that these go along that.

Well, I I think they're super useful for for the staff and for the facilitator.

Mhmm.

I just just in terms of whether we should choose certain ones of these questions, I I think that Robert's idea about if it is, even if it's just based on our last staff presentation deck that we had about tenant opportunity to purchase and manufactured housing preservation, to just let this panel react and have a conversation based on that as

With these goals in mind. Absolutely. Yeah. Right?

Yeah.

And so and then let it let it be a more free flowing conversation and that we could facilitate.

Yeah. Yeah. Questions are only if they run out of ideas, but these people will never run

out of ideas. Cool. From our side, we could we

could hold on. These are this is a great framework of things we wanna understand. And if we're not getting them, we can prompt. Yes. We can prompt. But I but I just don't know about choosing

a few of these to be Yeah.

Like, conversational.

And I guess from staff's perspective, you know, we are when Krista came last time with the slide deck

Yeah.

She has, as she always does, because she's just wonderful, engaging with the folks that she knows are doing the work or interested. So so that has been happening already. Mhmm. So we're just wanting to make sure, you know, if we're, like, kind of setting aside some some special time or some very focused time that we are getting from those stakeholders and we're able to pass on to them, you know, what what more are we hoping to get from, like, an in person? Is it just a free flowing kind of conversation to, you know, further discuss ideas, or is there something specific that you all want to dive deeper into with them now that they're, like, in front of us knowing that Krista has engaged and and use it you know, has, like, gone to them and said, we're interested in doing this.

What what do you recommend? Where are you all going? What are your strategies? How could you what role could you play? So those conversations are happening.

With that said, I think that about the slide deck that we had, but I also think of all the other stuff we threw at last time, which was quite a deep conversation. And then and there are aspects of that I don't think that that are that were addition to that. Like Mhmm. Like, the community opportunity purchase was something that got lit that expanded upon greatly, it felt like Yeah. In that conversation.

I well, I mean, it's like, as policymakers, I think of what what do what are the I wanna make sure that we meet my intention is to make sure that we get all the information we need outside of the staff writing the policy to know what else parts of this do we do we need to emphasize. Right? What are the things that are going to be the most effective for these partners, the community that work in these in these areas? Right? Like, you know, we just talked about the success of the, affordable housing emergency, and we wanna know what are the thing to me, I think the most critical thing is to know what aspects and I think that these the titles are very important.

Right? System capacity, financial resources, policy approach, logistics. Those are all extremely important topics in my mind, around that.

Yeah. Mhmm.

Do you have any Clark, Paul, any other thoughts? I don't wanna be the only one that's, sucking up the room.

No. I I I think it's true. I just I I I just had hesitation about narrowing it and choosing a few questions, but you're right. This is what we this is what we we wanna be able to fill out this framework in conversation.

Mhmm.

And I I respect that that we've had consultation with these people, but I I also believe there's a a power in spending an hour or two around the table that could prompt some some proposals or solutions that we might not get by having people review our our work so far. Well,

I you know, as I just look at some of these things on the back, you know, there's this this under this other in particular, there's this question about how they see the city's role in supporting, know, 10 opportunity to purchase. And and what what what do they see as the city's role in helping facilitate this and getting their feedback about, if we're gonna craft policy, how do you see the city engaging this that you think could be a value add that would actually get us to a place where this is real. Right? And using their collective expertise about where other cities have gone and done. So I see, you know, as we set the slideshow of the presentation, and there's what we've what we're trying to to do, and then we're really bringing them, the experts, to the table to help us craft policy.

And maybe somewhere in there, there's a there's a way to get at some questions that prompt that that, even the first goal is about how does the city

support transition to tenant ownership. What's that look like, and

what are your ideas for us?

Yeah. Yeah.

There's a con there's an hour long conversation right there. Yeah. So, anyway Yeah. I I think if that's kinda what you're thinking, I think we could take that as a staff and craft something out of this. Yes.

I have one other follow-up question for you. When Krista came last, there was a robust conversation. And the presentation was around Topo and Encopa as well as rent to own. And we had presented that as kind of, do you all are you interested in both? Is there one that there's more interest?

So there's also a question of, do you envision this gathering of stakeholders to also do you wanna talk more with stakeholders around the rent to own piece as well? And would that fit? Like, it it seems like a a lot. Yeah. So I think, you know, like, if there's an an interest in having a similar conversation around rent to own Mhmm.

There would be slightly different stakeholders. It is a slightly different conversation. There are probably fewer stakeholders. And, you know, Krista has been interacting with them, but wanted there was another question that she wanted to make sure we threw out there. If you all wanted both conversations at once or to focus right now on the tenant opportunity to purchase and and

My instinct is to stay on tenant opportunity purchase and community opportunity purchase.

I think the homeownership work will continue, and and rent to own as an element of of ways to foster more opportunities for homeownership is super important. But this is this is already its own, you know, full nonprofit state legislation. There's like

Yeah. Yeah.

There's there's a a lot of activity going on about if we're just looking at manufactured homes and multifamily.

Yeah. So And and in my mind, there's there's I'm glad Jay talked about city's role in this. Right? Because, we don't have a lot of money sitting around.

Yeah.

Right? And so how do we get the systems correct so that, it's easiest for them to do this? Mhmm. Right? Mhmm. And I think of if we did have money somewhere Mhmm. Sitting around for something like this as a grant, I think of we would want it to get the most impact. So that's apartment buildings, that's manufacture housing parks, that's groups of hundreds of people rather than one or two examples, which are very important. Those models are important, but that feels like a legal framework. We're talking about modeling something. And and scale. Yeah. Mhmm. Scale. Mhmm.

K.

Hey. It's not gonna break Christa's heart. No.

Okay. We we can figure this out. Yeah. I think we can put

something together for

you. Excellent. Any other questions? Any other thoughts?

Alright. Will be doing some doodle polling.

Yeah. Two meetings.

I I've yeah.

That's that's a common thing these days. I have one last item. Did you have any more items?

I was just gonna ask a follow-up. In terms of scheduling a meeting, what how early in the afternoon could could this

group go? I get up at 02:30, but I can I can leave earlier if I need to? Like, I can get can be here at 02:00 if I need to.

Okay. And I I can I can make an earlier a a date?

Earlier would be meet at two. That would be that would be great. 02:30 rather. You know?

Yeah. Day stays the same.

We'll start over. Well, that's what was thinking for that.

Just for this one. For this one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If we could meet at, like, 02:00.

Then, yeah, then they then we can still have the the I think most of council will be at that event.

So Yeah. At 05:00. So

Yeah. Yeah. So let's see. Okay. So then the it comes to the table. Focus on the the roundtable as a separate Mhmm. We'll we'll look for dates for that too. Thanks. Yeah. I'll connect with you with everybody on scheduling. Cool.

My last item, I just wanna bring this to the top topic. I meet with the planning commission quite often. The planning commissioners, like the the the chair and the vice chair. Not as an unscheduled meeting that no one knows about, but just the the chair and the vice chair. And, one of the things that that came up, and I think it could be a point of conversation, is, there's there's they always have an interest in, you know, presenting when they see the same information as us, coming to our meetings and presenting their thoughts themselves.

They've they've have volunteered this several times. They have an interest in even like, some of their discussions can evolve into things like we do. And so I think whether it's up up to my my, council mates here, if they're interested in allowing that more, they're interested in presenting letters or coming or being more involved. And because they they get a check-in by a lot of the stuff we do, and they're very interested in ensuring, their conversation gets to us. I think that's important because they come up with things that we don't even think of.

Right? And, we don't have to make that, like, a policy change, but I just wanna make that as a recommendation that they're they would love to be more involved in that and as a and essentially even having the ability to even talk about their priorities to us. Right? Mhmm. Maybe even later in the year, we'll do our work plan. Because there are ideas and things that they would like to prioritize that I wish that that I think are great ideas. Sometimes I don't hear about them, and I just think it would be cool to to have a better tightened relationship. I don't know if my councilmates have any thoughts on that, but I just wanna bring that up. It's it's a consistent conversation that we have.

I think it would be excellent. And we we had more of a practice a few years ago of planning land use I'm I'm sorry. Planning Commission, Mike ped, utility advisory committee coming to present letters both to committees and at, like, at our CFP hearing, we would have each one stay to read their letter and answer questions. So this this lines up with community livability's work on how to reinvigorate the boards and commissions is the

first the highest concern they had was of just being a sounding board for staff and not having any policy impact. So Okay. Well, I could think of several times over the last year that you've had the planning commission chair come and be part of your conversations, right, around a policy choice. And I think when something's already been presented to planning commission by staff and then it's coming forward to land use committee and whether it has a recommendation or not, I do think there's opportunities to invite the planning commission chair and let them be part of it. And you can ask them questions about their deliberation that they had Mhmm.

As it might help you form policy, particularly if there's a, I don't think it happens a lot, but it can, where there's a disconnect between planning commission recommendation and a staff recommendation. I think especially when that's the case, it would make sense for you to have the planning commission part of your conversation so you can hear all sides of the conversation before you make a decision. So So

I'm gonna I'm gonna contact them, planning commission, and even Deepak just to see and, leave an open invitation for them to come by Great. To our meetings. Not voting members, obviously. That would require a lot of other changes, to to sit in and and discuss with us items.

I I do we not have a regularly scheduled, once a year, twice a year check-in with the planning commission and land use. I mean, I'd I'd I'd be fine with something like that. Just a a formal check-in on on some periodic basis. But I I I I want to concur with with Clark's comments. I think more interaction is better than than less.

And I think seamless operations between these committees of jurisdictions is really important.

Good. Sounds good. We can we

can sort it out. Okay.

Yep. Do you need me to contact them, or do you want staff to contact them? I think since they reached out

to you, you can have a follow-up, and then we can

you could talk to Tim, and we'll what next looks like.

Cool. I I agree with Jay that Tim will know when there's an issue that was difficult a difficult decision or they're strong. You know, when when it's only a handful of issues each year that come that way.

Right.

Yeah. I'll give them a yellow flag and when they're

They

it down can the middle

of the table.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Now if there's nothing else to report, I would like to adjourn the meeting. Any other thoughts? No? Cool. Done. That's adjourned. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, folks. Thank you. Do not run away. I mean, just Yep. I know you do.

I wasn't run