Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, this meeting is now called to order. Welcome to the June 15th, 2026 Planning Commission meeting. We'll begin with the roll call. Casey, will you please call the roll?

Yes. Chair Tweeten? Here. Vice Chair Daniel Garcia? Here. Commissioner Berger is excused this evening. Commissioner Rafael Garcia?

Here.

Commissioner Grubb?

Here.

Commissioner Ibrahimovic? Here. Commissioner Najati?

Here.

Commissioner Saro? Present. And Commissioner Talius? Here. And Chair, we have quorum.

Great. Our first order of business approval tonight's agenda. Before we approve the agenda today, I request a friendly revision to move staff announcements after our business items. And so, do I have a motion? Can the motion maker please? Yeah. Is there a motion with modifications? Great. And second, I've been moved by Aaron and seconded by Zainab to approve the agenda for the June 15th Planning Commission meeting with revisions to move staff announcements after business items. All those in favor say aye. Any opposed say nay. Any abstentions? Okay, the agenda has been approved as revised. Moving on to approval of the minutes from the May 4th, 2026 Planning Commission meeting. Is there a motion? So moved.

Seconded.

It's been moved by Daniel and seconded by Zainab to approve the minutes for the May 4th, 2026 Planning Commission meeting. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed, say nay. Any abstentions?

I want to hear. Raphael.

Jason. Raphael and Jason abstain. The minutes are approved. Move on to public comment. This portion of the meeting is an opportunity for members of the audience to speak on any items related to city business, including items on the agenda, except those items for which the commission held a public hearing but has not yet completed its deliberations and issued a recommendation to city council, or where the speaker promotes or opposes the candidate for public office or ballot measure. Comments on all topics will be allowed during this portion of the meeting tonight. I will identify two or three speakers, and when your name is called, the host will unmute the microphone. You'll then need to unmute your microphone before you start speaking. Comments will be limited to three minutes, and staff or one of the commissioners will share a countdown clock. We'll interrupt you and ask you to quickly finish. Your comments extend beyond three minutes. To my knowledge, no one has signed up this evening, but if someone would like to give a public comment, please hit the raise hand option. Okay, doesn't look like anyone is here for public comment. So we will move on to business items. Tonight's business item 6A is a briefing about the Downtown Vacancy Study. Jenica Machado, City of Olympia's Director of Economic Development, will be introducing this topic tonight. Jenica is joined by Chris Zaha and Jennifer Such, both of Leland Consulting Group, who prepared the Downtown Vacancy Study. Jenica, would you like to begin?

Yes, thank you. Good evening. Happy to be here with you all. Tonight, we're bringing forward the downtown Olympia vacancy study for discussion. The observed vacancy in parts of downtown has raised interest to better understand the downtown market and potential development and occupancy barriers. The city's Olympia strong plan included an initiative intended to activate vacant spaces. And before I had gotten on board, there was efforts around that. And ultimately, they didn't really gain momentum to move forward. So rather than immediately developing a new action without a clear understanding of the problem, we thought it was important to take a step back and more deeply understand what is actually driving vacancy in downtown. That question led us to this study. We engaged Leland Consulting Group through a competitive process. And since November, they've conducted field work, stakeholder interviews, and data analysis. the goal was to provide a data-driven understanding of vacancy and identify practical actionable strategies the city could consider importantly this work also recognizes the strong connection between vacancy and vibrancy we presented to land use and environment committee and also at city council in may so we're here this evening to provide an overview of the study and subsequent recommendations And we'll have time at the end for Q&A. So with that, I'll turn it over to Chris and Jennifer with the Leland Consulting Group. Thank you.

Thank you, Jenica. Good evening, everybody. My name is Chris Zahas. I am principal and president of Leland Consulting Group. We're a real estate economics and urban planning firm. We're based in Portland, just down I-5. But we work across the Northwest and across the United States on a wide range of urban planning and real estate projects ranging from downtown plans and redevelopment studies up to comprehensive plans and citywide housing strategies. With me tonight is Jennifer Shook, who will be powering the PowerPoint and co-presenting with me. I wanted to start the presentation, you can move forward, Jennifer. With, Jenica kind of gave a good introduction to the project, but we framed the project and actually the RFP that the city issued framed it for us in terms of the questions that are circulating around the community to make sure that we're answering the pertinent questions that you have. And those are really, what is the extent and location of vacancies around downtown? Just a straight up data exercise, because it's actually kind of hard to quantify and grasp the magnitude. But really importantly, what are the root causes or the main drivers of that vacancy? And is Olympia an outlier relative to other cities, its peers? Is there something unique going on in Olympia that's different than we experience in other places? And so that gets at perceptions. Is the perception and the reality in alignment? And then, again, in conclusion, what are the strategies? What are the things that we as a city can do to change this dynamic? So our scope of work, next slide, Jennifer. We did a lot of different things to gather the research. It's not just a desktop research exercise. We did several site visits, including one where we fully walked the downtown and took an inventory of everything, every ground floor space that we could see, in part because desktop data resources from a real estate point of view, which is largely CoStar, which is a commercial real estate data provider, is usually really incomplete, even in big cities, but especially so in smaller to medium sized cities. So we really needed to ground truth that on the ground. We met with a bunch of staff and both in groups and individually to understand city policy and code better. We interviewed a number of stakeholders in the community, including business owners, real estate brokers, and others to kind of understand the economics and the dynamics on the ground. We did prepare that data collection, including a lot of GIS mapping to show how that data plays out physically and geographically. We did market research. We looked at best practices and did some comparative analysis to peer cities to get at that question of is Olympia different than others. Especially with Jennifer's help, we did dig into some of the city policies and we have some comments on that on areas that might be ripe for further investigation. And that's borne out in our recommendations and conclusions at the end. So, Quick takeaways and then Jennifer will take over and hit on some of the research highlights. So first off, off the bat, Olympia is not an outlier. A lot of the trends that we see in downtown related to vacancy and other factors is similar and in some ways better recovering post pandemic in Olympia than other cities. A lot of work has been done when we talked to, when we interviewed developers and And people in the development community, they actually had a lot of positive comments about the city and City Hall and the process, especially related to changes that have been made in recent years. As planners and economists, we note, and this is important, that a lot of the factors that drive vacancy or make it difficult to occupy space are outside of the city's control. These are things that are macroeconomic related, whether it's interest rates and just general retail demand, but also things like construction costs and such that make development and redevelopment in a historic downtown difficult. That said, there's good news. There are some things, some low-hanging fruit that we'll talk about that we think can improve the situation. And then we have some other steps that we recommend for further work down the road. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Jennifer, who will present the next kind of the key findings and data.

Yeah, so big question, where are the vacant spaces? Like Chris said, we did an on-the-ground survey of ground floor vacancies, and we looked at what types of vacancies these are. So are they short-term? You know, is this just a business that's turning over? Maybe it's taking... a little extra time to turn over, but it hasn't been vacant for very long. Long-term vacancies, which are the buildings that you're probably thinking of when you think of the vacancy study, the ones you walk by every day and think, gosh, nothing's been here for a while. And then newer mixed-use buildings where there's some ground floor retail vacancies. We also, in this map, included surface parking lots because While parking is something that's important downtown, it serves the businesses, surface lots can also exacerbate that feeling of vacancy. So if you have a block where when you look down it, you see a couple vacant retail spaces and then a surface parking lot, it can feel like there's not a lot of activity. And then we also heard from Jennica that the city owns a lot of properties downtown and There was a question of whether those properties are contributing to downtown vacancy and those are mostly occupied so. they're they're not a big contributor to downtown vacancy but we'll talk a little bit more about this in the recommendations. So how much space is vacant 16% of the vacant retail space has been built since 2016 so that's that newer newer spaces and mixed use buildings. about two thirds of the vacant space by square footage is long-term vacant. So that is, you know, indicating that that's a really persistent problem. Dining is interesting because some retail spaces can be dining spaces, but then there's also some, you know, more purpose-built dining spaces. And a lot of those were built since 2016 and have higher vacancy. And then 57% of the office was long-term vacant and that you know, is a significant challenge in downtown Olympia. There are different reasons for different types of spaces to be vacant. So as far as ground floor vacancy in new mixed-use buildings, a lot of these are not purpose-built spaces, so they need to be, you know, built out for a specific use when a tenant is interested in renting. And the high tenant improvement costs mean that, you know, Usually what happens with these new buildings is the owner will, instead of just having the tenant pay for those tenant improvements, amortize that over the course of the space lease. And so what we heard was that from local real estate professionals is that the cost of tenant improvements means that amortizing those costs are requiring a longer term lease, you know, something even in the space of seven to 10 years. which is risky both for, you know, a local small business and for the landlord. And so those long lease terms, the high rents associated with newer buildings narrows the tenant pool. This isn't a unique problem to Olympia. I'm sure if you've been to other cities recently, I know, you know, just living in Portland, this is a huge challenge here as well. But, you know, the state of Washington just, passed a law that really limits where ground floor retail can be required. And so I looked into Olympia's regulations and I'll talk a little bit more about those later. But Olympia's ground floor retail requirements are already pretty limited and very flexible compared to a lot of other cities. So this is potentially one of those challenges that, you know, increased vitality and some of the changes that we're going to talk about later. can help, but it is like bigger than in a lot of ways what the city can address. And then vacancy and historic retail buildings. A lot of these are larger spaces. They don't necessarily have an ideal layout for modern retail. And what we mean by that is a lot of them are kind of narrow, but then very deep. And when you think about modern retail, the successful spaces, You want a lot of your merchandise up front in the window spaces, letting people see what you have going on in your store. And so a lot of that back of house space gets wasted and you're still paying for that space. So it's this kind of mismatch. On top of that, some of the historic spaces have not been well maintained and they need some significant modernizations. And that renovations and adaptive reuse are expensive due to high construction costs. And there are also some state and local requirements that can add to that cost. Office is, as I'm sure you know, is a challenge nationwide. But in Olympia, the state shift to remote work has really had an outsized impact on downtown Olympia. And there isn't really an obvious near-term replacement industry. By that, I mean an industry that's going to come in and take over the square footage that the state is vacating. Also, a lot of those buildings are older class B and C buildings, which are expensive to upgrade. There is some conversion of office to residential already happening in Olympia, which is fantastic. But that can result in increased vehicle trips, which can lead to additional impact fees and other costs. When I talk about there not being an obvious growth sector, so this is from the state of Washington and its estimates for the Pacific Mountain region, which includes Thurston County, as well as some other neighboring counties. So this isn't just about downtown Olympia or just Olympia, but this is what the state expects the top growing sectors are likely to be between 2023 and 2033. Professional and business services is office using. It's expected to grow by about 11%, which is 2100 jobs. But again, not all of these jobs are going to be in downtown Olympia. So that's probably not enough to, you know, completely take over that state space. Education and health services is mostly not really office using. Maybe some in the education services, but usually health care is in medical space. Leisure and hospitality, again, that's not going to be office using. And then government is potentially office using. But as we know, you know, that's kind of at the root of the problem to begin with. So that's just kind of That doesn't mean that there couldn't be an industry that comes in and takes up a bunch of office space in downtown Olympia, but just based on the current trends, there's nothing obvious. We did some visitor analysis. We used Placer AI, which is an anonymized cell phone tracking service, to see how visits to downtown Olympia have changed over time and how that compares some peer cities so um this is weekly visits to downtown olympia from people who don't live or work in downtown um and you can see their events during the year like capital lake fair that draw a bunch of visitors um and the you know the start of the coven 19 pandemic there was a significant reduction in visits to downtown olympia as i'm sure you all are familiar with um it's uh visits weekly visits are still down on average slightly from 2019, but have mostly recovered. This isn't a chart that shows, you know, a real downturn with no recovery. And these events do drive foot traffic to downtown. So we compared average weekly visits by year from 2019 to 2025 for Olympia and Peer Cities. And In 2020, downtown visits in Olympia decreased by 44%, which was a really big drop off. And as of 2025, visits to downtown were just down 2% from 2019. So you've recovered the vast majority of that drop. Salem has not, as you can see in this chart. Visits are still down 11% over 2019 in downtown Salem. And then Bellingham and Edmonds, Visits are up slightly versus pre-pandemic, but both when we're talking about that still being down 2% in Olympia, being up very slightly. And it's all a matter of 2,000 people. It's not a huge difference between Olympia's recovery versus Bellingham's recovery. So Olympia is really on par with peer cities and outperforming Salem. We wanted to see where visitors go because we'd heard about some key areas where vacancies were apparent. The area north of the Transit Center was one that we heard from some stakeholders. The area around the Children's Museum, so while the Children's Museum itself is a big draw for downtown Olympia, it's kind of on its own island. And then we did hear, you know, when you walk out of City Hall, you see lot of vacancies and so this uh hexagon map really kind of bears that out um the uh area along fourth and fifth between columbia and jefferson is that hot spot for visitors um and you can see uh with the i guess red is the most visitors purple is the least um you can see like, especially around that children's museum, there is that kind of island where there's not a lot of activity going on. And so drawing more activity, finding ways to bring people to those areas can help a lot with downtown, uh, vacancy and vibrancy. I'm going to hand it back to Chris to talk a little bit about parking.

Yeah. Um, so we, as part of our study, we looked at parking data and we got a lot of good information, um, from the city directly. Uh, the, As you may be aware, Public Works targets an 85% occupancy target. That's typically what is considered a fully occupied parking space or a parking block face. And you can see in the evenings, many of those blocks do fill up to that level, which also coincides with the time when parking enforcement ends after 5. So when there's free parking, people use more of it. And Tuesday and Friday evenings tend to be the busier nights of the week. We also map that geographically using the same data, or the city does, showing where those hot spots are within downtown. This is a weekend map showing where Saturdays at 3, again, when parking is not enforced on the weekends, where those busier... parts of downtown are and elsewhere in our report, we kind of correlate that with where vacancies are and stuff. The next slide, I think the question a lot of people asked us about is, do we need a parking garage? We've been talking about a parking garage for 30 years or longer since the 70s. And I would say as a visitor, as an outsider, Olympia is one of the few downtowns of its size that I've worked in that does not have a municipal garage or a significant one. And so what we did is we kind of wavered on this question because basically what we did see, because we're usually, as good urbanists and planners, we're typically very skeptical of parking. We need more parking. Every city says they need more parking, but it's really rare that they do. And it can be a very expensive proposition and can have a lot of negative externalities in addition to its benefits. But what we did see is not a clear cut, absolutely no way you don't need parking. I think the utilization rates do show that there are busy times of the week. And as we think towards the future, where some of those surface parking lots ideally will redevelop in the future and become mixed use buildings or housing or other uses, that that supply is gonna need to be made up somewhere. And so basically what our conclusion here is, there's probably enough there there that it definitely merits some deeper study, whether that's a single municipal garage or some other solution, we do feel that there's enough questions still lingering in our minds that that's worthy of a further discussion.

Chris, are you willing to take a question real quick? Absolutely. Sorry, Greg. No, no, no.

Absolutely. Let's make this a conversation. So if you have questions, feel free to interrupt.

Hi, Chris. How does that relate to the current amount of parking downtown? So I think right now, downtown parking makes up about half of downtown's land use. So why, if half is a pretty big number, if half of our downtown is currently surface parking, why is that not enough? And what would a parking garage change?

Couple things. One, I guess, kind of looking to those heat maps that Jennifer showed, the Where in downtown the parking is relative to where the destinations are, there may be a mismatch. I don't believe we went down to that level of granularity. The second thing I would say, again, kind of, this is more anecdotal, and this is more of my first impression, although I've been to Olympia many times, my impression coming in when we went for our site visit was the... You come into downtown and a lot of downtowns that you go to, there's some clear signage and wayfinding to say, hey, come in off I-5, go here and you park here and get out and walk. And it doesn't really exist in Olympia. And a lot of that surface parking is private parking lots. Some are publicly available, some are leased. But as a visitor to downtowns, private parking lots, I think, are sometimes... Not scary, but they're kind of like, am I going to get towed? Am I going to use the machine right to get my ticket? It's not as simple and easy as a lot of city garages are. And what it can lead to is a lot of circling the block looking for a convenient space. So that's the part where I think there's definitely some nuance, whether the supply is in the right location for where the demand is. And then I would layer on, there's this sort of welcoming wayfinding visitor ease that a garage can sometimes be a much better solution than sort of a non-standardized mix of public and private off-street lots.

And I think just as Chris said too, like, you know, as, you know, ideally some of those surface parking lots will develop in the future and just kind of having a plan for addressing that is, you know, can be helpful. So, you know, kind of getting ahead of that and trying to figure out where the city is going. And again, for us, like Chris said, it wasn't a clear cut yes or no. It was more of like a, you know, this is probably worth looking into.

Yeah. And it's, and it's, this is one of the few, if, only studies i've been doing this for 25 years where i've actually said i think you might want to look at parking because nine times out of ten it's um you know like i said everybody complains about parking but is the problem really there i'm very cautious about suggesting even like looking deeper at it because parking is so incredibly expensive to construct and um i think a real cost benefit analysis would need to be a part of that like is it worth is it a good use of limited public money, you know, if it's, well, if it's below ground, it's astronomical, but even above ground parking can be, you know, 25, $35,000 per stall. That's a lot of money that could go a lot of different places if it were put to other uses. And so that's where I think, you know, a real more comprehensive look at things would be merited.

You have a sense of like what the, called a walk shed, like an access shed to a parking garage would be? Is that gonna serve the whole downtown or is it just gonna serve a local area?

I think it could serve a good chunk of downtown if it's well located. That heat map that Jennifer showed shows a fairly, other than the children's museum area, which is sort of off on its own island and has plenty of surface parking already. So that core of downtown, It's a fairly compact area and pretty walkable, so I could see that lending itself to a single garage, park once, and go from there point of view. But I'm also cognizant of how big does it need to be, how much street frontage a garage can... There are some good examples of really well-done ones, and there's a lot more examples of really ugly parking garages that have huge garage entrances that break up the retail frontage that aren't safe or friendly for pedestrians. And so it would need to be done really well. I probably would not suggest putting it right on the main street. It would want to be in those one or two blocks away that aren't your prime retail streets, but are very close to it.

Can I ask a question as well? Did you get feedback from business owners that one of the largest hindrances for them was the availability of parking or were there larger market forces outside of their direct control that were affecting their business?

I think what we heard from a lot of stakeholders is that, you know, they'd heard the city talk about parking a lot, but they hadn't seen anything necessarily done on it. So they were just kind of like, are we getting parking? Are we not getting parking? It was not like a clear cut, again, from their perspective, like this is what's killing my business or this is what's great for my business. It was more like, we keep hearing about a parking garage. We don't really know what's going on. So yeah, that was, I think, some of the feedback we got.

Yeah, I would concur. To answer your question directly, we did not hear, wow, my business is struggling because my customers can't find convenient parking. And I would say that's true. Every time we came to town, we found parking relatively quickly within a block or two of where we wanted to go. It's not that difficult. Even in December when it was kind of high shopping season, it wasn't that bad. But that's kind of more to that forward looking of as downtown ideally builds out and fills out, we might want to have a strategy to provide that supply and convenience.

Sorry, I just want to double check. Jennifer, so you said the stakeholders you talked to, you guys, did you only talk to the 10 people that are in the appendix or were there other individuals you spoke with?

Those were, other than folks at the city, that's who we talked to. Yeah. Thanks. And then,

The question, we love parking or don't love parking. I was wondering, cause I read the report and then I saw the recommendation for the parking garage. And like, I wasn't quite sure how you got there because I felt like there was like this undertone if you read the report, cause you mentioned like usage is highest when parking enforcement isn't happening. And so there's kind of like this undertone of like, you should extend parking enforcement, like say it. But like when I read it, I was kind of like reading between the lines. So I'm kind of wondering like, If people feel like parking is an issue, but realistically parking isn't an issue when you have to pay for it during the daytime, because I never have problems during the daytime, except on Saturdays trying to find parking. I'm wondering why that didn't end up as a recommendation at the end.

Extending the parking enforcement time?

Yeah, I think...

I think in my mind, and I probably should have said it more explicitly, like if you're going to look at, if you're going to do a parking study to figure out if you need a parking garage, part of that parking study would ideally be like, are there other things you can do other than a parking garage? If that makes sense, like would extended enforcement mean that you don't need a parking garage? That kind of thing.

And I think I would caveat that. We're not parking consultants. We're economic consultants. So we know enough to be dangerous about parking, but that's sort of where we stop and say, well, there's maybe a little bit of smoke here that probably an expert in parking ought to take a deeper look at. And you're right. It's not just do we need a garage or not, but are there other strategies, parking management strategies, like extending the hours of enforcement that could help? better utilize the parking that we have and, you know, spread things out more efficiently.

And then, sorry, so I just wanted to, because we've been talking back and forth a lot. So the smoke that you saw was the sunblocks hitting over 85% usage when parking, you know, later in the evening. And people kind of talking about, like the city has talked about parking, but like, we don't really know what they're doing. Those are like the, are there other things

I would say the only other thing would be, again, kind of the anecdotal, the lack of wayfinding and a parking management wayfinding system for visitors that we see in a lot of other successful downtowns.

Yeah, I would agree with you definitely on the wayfinding because I think I lived here for several years before I realized that there were free lots on the weekends. And I was just like, well, this is great. Park by Interstate Transit.

Aaron, you have a question? Yeah. Chris, I know you just said you guys are not parking experts, but this might be enough of a hybrid question. We'll see. It has to do with what we're talking about. Do we have enough information to be able to say or not whether parking, whether paid parking is deterring customers for business owners? Or is that, do we not have enough information?

Don't know. I would say, no, we don't have enough information and out short of like a community wide survey of some sort, that would be really hard to get. You know, you almost have to survey the community at large and find out, you know, do you go downtown? Why don't you? And hopefully out of that, you'd hear answers that because it costs money to park there and that's a deal breaker for me or whatever. But so it'd be sort of, several layers of effort and outreach and survey to get at that answer. But like Jennifer said, we didn't really hear that in talking to the business owners. And if that were the case, I think the business owners would have an incentive to tell us, and they didn't really say that directly. So I don't suspect that's an issue. In my experience working in other cities, if the downtown has Great restaurants and good stores and events and activities. People find a reason to go there. Parking isn't going to keep them away.

Is that good? Did I see your hand raise?

I think I was just going to clarify as there were kind of discussions on different types of recommendations was just, and Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but the parking was not found to be a key driver and Leland is not making recommendations on parking aside from there could be opportunity to explore this through additional research, but no specific recommendations on what to do.

That's accurate, yeah. I got one more question before moving on.

Daniel first and then Aaron, then we can move on to the next piece.

Chris, you mentioned doing a community survey. So the Olympia Downtown Alliance, the ODA, they do do an annual vibrancy survey, and they do ask that question of what is stopping you from going downtown. I don't know if it's exactly worded that way, but they do find that The responses are usually more about cleanliness and public safety and perception of crime. I'm just wondering if you saw that vibrancy survey and if you incorporate that into your results.

I think we did. I'm going to defer that to Jennifer, though.

I don't think we actually got the survey results from that. We did see the survey that Experience Olympia did. I don't remember.

And Desiree was someone that you were able to chat. Yes, we did talk to Desiree.

Sorry, who is Desiree? Just for people that are watching.

Executive Director at the ODA.

I think that just to kind of finish up that question of like the question of a community survey, like the ODA already does that survey annually.

That's great. So that would be a good, and what you're saying is that it kind of corroborates that it's the other issues of safety and perceptions that are keeping people away to the extent people are staying away. It's not so much the parking.

Yeah, that's pretty much where my question, my next question was headed, was if 10 business owners you spoke to had anything to do with, or had anything to say about safety and crime

Yes, we did hear a fair amount about that. We heard actually from kind of divergent opinions or perceptions. Some people we spoke with, you know, were at their wits end and were ready to leave or shut down because they were tired of dealing with some of the issues. Others had a feeling that it's Yes, it's an issue, but it's really not, you know, again, if you have like good stores and good restaurants, people are still coming anyway. And we looked at crime data. Some of that's in the report that the police department provided and actually crime rates are going down. And, you know, so there's perception and then there's actual true safety impacts are improving considerably. And I guess I'll say one other point, and you can jump in, Jennifer, is that this is definitely one of those areas that's bigger than the city. The homeless crisis is something that we know there's lots and lots of resources being brought to bear to alleviate it, but it's something much bigger than Olympia, bigger than Portland, bigger than even the state of Washington or other states. So that's an area where Definitely, I think things can be done, but in terms of kind of the objective we laid out in our study of what are some quick wins or easier, accomplishable things that the city can do in shorter order, that's not on that short list.

I will say, too, something that was interesting looking at the Experience Olympia survey is that it seems like people who are visiting Olympia from, you know, 50 plus miles away are not saying are not as like afraid like they they're not seeing downtown as as I guess full of crime as some of the people who are coming from more locally um and so some of what we heard from folks is that there may be kind of a holdover perception problem of like things are getting better, but people remember it being worse. I'm not saying that that's entirely what's happening. I'm just, it was interesting to see that difference between folks who are coming from other places saying, no, Olympia was great. You know, downtown Olympia is, I didn't feel afraid in downtown Olympia. Whereas people coming from, you know, a little bit closer are, you know, maybe expressing that they're hesitant to go downtown for those reasons. So it was just, kind of an interesting thing that we saw.

And that's a dynamic that resonates with our situation here in Portland, where we have a lot of the same issues, just on a larger scale. As the outsiders come and visit, I'm like, man, it's great. The food's great. The downtown's nice. There's some good stores. And we had a great time. And the locals still complain like it's 2021 or something. And those perceptions are really hard to change, or they're slow to change. But the actual on the ground experience is definitely improving. And again, as outsiders, people that don't live in Olympia, we came in. Granted, it was December, which is probably like the best time to visit downtown where all the stores are lit up and the string lights are out and stuff. But I walked away on that first trip in December and been like, dang, Olympia is really good. It's You know, I don't know what they're complaining about because downtown feels really vibrant. There were people out on the sidewalks. The stores were lit up. Shops were open. It was quite vibrant and active relative to a lot of other places that we have worked in.

Oh, that's interesting. Thanks.

Yeah, you're welcome. Jennifer, yeah, you continue on with the rest. All right, good to continue. Yeah. Yeah, go for it.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the policy and regulatory environment in Olympia and how that can affect downtown. So just starting off, I just wanted to kind of talk about what it says about downtown in the 2045 comp plan, because that's kind of the city's vision for how to approach different parts of the city. And so in the 2045 comp plan, it says that downtown is is a popular destination that contributes to Olympia's economic vibrancy, and that some of the goals were to support a safe and active downtown, improve the economic and social health, and promote small business resiliency. So as I was going through the policies and regulations, just kind of using that as a background to understand, do the policies do these things? One thing that we did see is that the permitting process has improved significantly recently, especially with those tenant improvement permits, which is a lot of what you would see for the adaptive reuse or the renovation or improvements to spaces downtown. The planning staff have made a lot of progress in improving this process. 96% of issued permits were issued within their 60-day goal, like they set a goal of 60 days for permit turnaround. And actually on average, those were issued within 20 days. So that's great. That's really fast. And they have been doing surveys using their online application system to see how people found the permitting process. And so for issued permits, more than half of folks said that the the permitting process was good. There were, I, you know, we kind of classified them as good needs improvement, confusing or other, other being things that were like, I'm an architect with no other, you know, context. So, you know, not very helpful, but another 32% kind of said it was, you know, generally good, but maybe need some improvement. And just 7% of folks thought it was confusing for permits that were closed. So those, may or may not have been issued. There was a slightly higher percentage of people who found it confusing, but still half of folks thought it was good. So maybe some room for improvement, but really people seem to understand the system. They're getting their permits quickly. This is all great news. Street improvements. Something that we ran into as we were looking at Olympia's regulatory environment is that 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 can trigger half street repaving. So this isn't just like, you know, your normal frontage improvements, your sidewalks, street trees, that kind of thing. This is a full half street repaving. And that's on streets where, The pavement rating is below 60. And so, you know, Chris and I were pretty surprised because we hadn't come across that really in the past. So we dug into it and looked at a bunch of peer cities all over Washington and then also Salem, Oregon. And the closest we could find was a similar thing in Salem, but the trigger was a thousand additional trips compared to 20. So it was just something that we saw as potentially a barrier, one, because it's expensive, two, because you don't necessarily know what the pavement rating is on the street where your property is. So it can be something that's a surprise that developers or business owners or property owners aren't expecting. And then also in this map, it's showing where there are surface parking lots, industrial buildings and warehouse buildings. So the most common change of use trigger that results in this is a warehouse or an industrial building to downtown services. And so these are your future opportunities for development and redevelopment. And especially in the northern part of the city, there's a lot of these surface parking lots and warehouses and industrial spaces are on these streets with low pavement ratings. And that's going to be really challenging as you're going forward in the future. It adds a lot of expense to the project. It adds a lot of time to the project. And it can end up being a big challenge for downtown in the future. Ground floor retail requirements. I know there's a lot of interest in talking about this. This map shows the A pedestrian oriented streets and the B pedestrian oriented streets. So the A streets are in red. Those are the ones where ground floor retail is required. On the B streets, there's some frontage requirements that make it attractive to pedestrians, but it doesn't require ground floor retail or commercial space. Um, so, you know, even based on the, you know, the city's new, the, sorry, the state's new rules where pedestrian or sorry, where, um, retail space can only be required on, I think it's 20% of streets. Um, I don't know if this is exactly 20% or if it's in the threshold, but it's, you know, within the spirit of what the state is looking for. It is that best practice of saying, these are the key streets and this is where we want retail. Um, I also looked at the uses that are allowed. I keep saying retail, but it really is a wide variety of uses that are allowed in these spaces. Office, retail, even some small manufacturing and assembly is allowed if it's not something noxious. The one use that isn't allowed in these areas is live work. If you wanted to expand that, that could be a possibility. Yeah, the city is not doing anything crazy like requiring retail or commercial on every single street in downtown. And you're not too limited in your uses, so that's good. Impact in building fees. So we heard a lot about fees. Olympia's transportation impact fees per trip are below state average. And actually, there's a discount in downtown. So we didn't see that the impact fees were a huge deal. And then building permit fees are in line with LACI. So again, you know, not out of sync with pure cities. I think when you're talking about downtown development or redevelopment, as you know, you have the high tenant improvement costs and the high cost of meeting state energy code requirements and all those costs, I think sometimes it can feel like, oh, and now there's an impact fee on top of that, and it kind of all compounds, but the impact fees and the building permit fees are not the primary barriers.

Do you have questions, Dana?

Yeah, I just had a question on the slide before. I was wondering, when I was reading this, the pure cities thing, sorry, the one after this, with the traffic and the permit fees, So I noticed that you had like Tumwater in the transportation impact fee table, but then, or graph, and then the building permits that you compared us to Lacey. And so I'm wondering like building permit fee-wise, like how do we compare to Lacey and similar, or how do we, for building permit fees, how do we compare to Tumwater and for transportation impact fee, how do we compare to Lacey? Because like a lot of times when I hear it, it's people like, oh, I'm going to

go to lacy instead because like yeah lower but i don't know if that's actually true so i was wondering like how did you end up choosing um just realizing now i didn't put lacy in the first chart um uh i i think generally olympia is not significantly higher than the other uh cities when it comes to transportation impact apiece um It is higher than Tumwater. I don't want to say that it's higher than Lacey because I'm trying to remember and I'm not sure. But I can look into that and let you know. Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, the exercise here was sort of a testing the thesis. Like, we're looking at what are the common barriers to investment? Some cities, like Bothell there, like Our impact fees are way higher than they are in comparable cities. Or we hear it's so much easier to just pick up out of downtown and move to Lacey. And what we're seeing here is that we're sort of disproving that as the cause for disinvestment. Well, the fees aren't the problem. So it's other stuff at play. And that's good. It's a little bit of a process of elimination and also kind of quashing some common grumblings that you might hear, you know, you can sort of distinguish the noise from the chatter of, you know, kind of what's real, what's not.

Which is interesting. I know, it's just interesting because, like, when I think of, like, development and, like, where you can develop, like, I don't see, I understand the concept of, like, why we compare to, like, are we outside of, like, the state average, but to me, like, we're not competing with admins involved. Like, they're interesting comparators, but, like, You know, I don't really see it, like the incomes at Edmonds and Bothell, from what I recall, are like much higher, for example, than like Olympia. So like, we're not, if you're a business and you're an open restaurant, like, you're not probably going to choose Olympia. Like we're mostly competing in my mind against Tumwater and Lacey and unincorporated Thurston County. So that's why I was just, when I saw it, I was like, oh, it would have been nice to have Lacey on the transportation impact fee in particular. But thank you for your explanation.

OK, so I'm going to move on to some key findings and recommendations. So again, when we're talking about the major drivers of vacancy, so in the historic retail, commercial, warehouse, industrial buildings, a lot of these are larger spaces. There's a need for expensive upgrades to meet energy and fire safety standards, which is not something that's within the city's purview. Those are state requirements. And then the change of use trigger can cause change of use can trigger those costly street improvements on top of the other fees and costs. And then newer ground floor retail spaces, the high cost of tenant improvements require longer leases to amortize. They have a higher rent per square foot. And it can be challenging to find the right tenant. And then Office space, there's the state shift to remote work, the high cost of improving class B and C spaces, and then near-term growth for office using industries is not likely to be sufficient for filling that space. So our recommendations for vacancy, the first is evaluating that requirement for half street improvements and creating a plan for evaluating and improving downtown streets. Chris going to quote always likes to say that downtown should be the easiest place to do business. And so that half street requirement, which is really kind of out of sync with pure cities makes downtown a really challenging place to do business, especially when you're talking about those adaptive reuse. projects. So looking at that and then cultivating ongoing relationships with downtown businesses, property owners and organizations. I know the city's already doing some of that and just, you know, continuing to build on the work that you're doing. Supporting community events that highlight local businesses and include temporary activation of vacant spaces. Increasing transparency for city policies, fees, regulations and other information. There were some things like, for instance, the pavement rating map I know is something that's not available to the public. That was something that we had to request from the city and developers always want certainty and always want information. So making sure that the information they need to do business with the city and to know what they're going to be required to do is available and easy to understand is really helpful. Exploring opportunities for a low interest loan program for new equipment. I know there are some challenges with the state's gift of public funds law. There is a program in Seattle that does that. That's something for the city to kind of work with your attorney on if there's interest in that to make sure that that's legal. But Seattle's program is successful. There are other programs in other states that we work in that have worked really well. And then again, considering allowing live work units on the ground floor where ground floor commercial space is required. I'm going to hand it over to Chris to talk about vibrancy.

Yeah, and there's a lot of overlap of what's vacancy, what's vibrancy. But in terms of vibrancy programmatically, some cities have designated what we'd call a downtown ombudsman. So somebody who's not just like a permit expediter within the permit department, but actually somebody who helps with business licensing, helps connect to downtown organizations or the broker community or other things. If you're considering investing downtown as a developer or as a business owner, you've got somebody in city hall who can help you navigate, but also help break log jams if you're running into an issue in some way. And it just kind of gets to the comment that Jennifer quoted me on of making downtown the easiest place in Olympia to do business. Having an advocate in City Hall can be helpful, and there's several cities that have a role like that. We didn't talk much in our presentation, but prioritizing downtown for sidewalk repair, our understanding is that that's something the city is going to be looking at this summer, but we noticed that a lot of the downtown sidewalks are in poor condition, and that does leave an a negative impression and certainly can create some accessibility challenges. But it's also something that's not very efficiently done on a property owner by property owner basis. It really screams out for a comprehensive strategy. And to the extent that there's a citywide capital investment program for sidewalks, our advice would be to prioritize downtown in that spending program, because it's really an important, it's the most important neighborhood in the city. Um, facade programs. I'm sorry, was there a question before we go on?

Dittoing downtown is the best neighborhood in the city. And I'm sure a local group called the CNA will not like that comment.

Facade improvement programs have been done in a lot of cities, including those in Washington. It's typically a grant or more often a matching grant program to do exterior improvements to a building. It's really in the spirit of two things. One, $5,000 of paint can have a bigger impact on vibrancy than a million-dollar installation or an improvement somewhere downtown. So Like, it's just sort of a tactical, low-cost way to really improve the condition of properties. Secondly, it's an incentive that can be applied to existing business owners. So while we definitely are focusing a lot of our conversation on filling empty spaces, spaces where somebody isn't there yet, we shouldn't forget that there's a lot of businesses that are already there that also need some love and a facade improvement program can be very helpful, especially for smaller entrepreneurs that don't have a lot of money or, as Jennifer said, don't have a lot of ability to amortize expensive improvements in their lease. So we talked quite a bit about a parking garage. So we just leave it there. Continue to explore the need. Don't necessarily table it, but keep thinking about it. Do a parking study. And onto the last slide, Jennifer. Streeteries. So streeteries or parklets, the little sidewalk or parking space dining programs. One of the, this really came from me and my impression when I came to downtown Olympia was, where's all the sidewalk dining? Well, on your sidewalks, you have pretty narrow sidewalks throughout most of downtown. So that makes sense why you don't have that. But during the pandemic, Olympia and a lot of other cities had lots of taking over parking spaces and letting restaurants put seating out in the street for a variety of reasons that we talk about in the report. That's really not, that didn't stick around in Olympia in the same way that it's become a permanent fixture in a lot of other cities. And it's a, again, a low cost way to create some real vibrancy and activity on the street, especially, and I would say, including in the winter months. Here in Portland, we have a big culture of outside dining, even in the winter. Restaurants will sometimes put heaters out there. They'll put lighting out there. And they're covered from the rain. And it could be a real relatively low-cost way to, again, create that vibrancy so not everything is happening indoors. But you can see it. You see people. And that creates a sense of safety and vibrancy. Certainly a benefit for restaurants.

Yes. Just as a part of that, sometimes there's a barrier to entry. It assumes you have to patronize a business and we want people just enjoying downtown in general, not necessarily having to spend money, but if they want to, they can. As part of that, did you look into, I think they're called parklets, where they convert parking spots into microparks, where just a public collecting space, kind of smaller than a plaza, and then more people feel comfortable using the space downtown.

money in downtown that's great i think there's room for both um or a need for both so probably a restaurant that's you know bringing food out they're going to want some dedicated space for their patrons at the same time for like in blocks where there might be food trucks or cafes things that where there might be a bunch of smaller um vendors that maybe wouldn't be able to justify the need for their own dedicated space you could have more shared spaces um, as well as just attractive places for people to linger. I think the, to the extent that there are shared or, or kind of public, you know, quasi public spaces, um, management and maintenance would need to be a part of that program. You know, who's going to keep them up? Who's going to maintain them? Are there going to be flowers and plantings and whose responsibility will it be to, um, maintain those? Those are not barriers, but those are all parts of the process that would, um, Josh Triplett, need to be considered. So like here in Portland. I know we have both kinds. There are some that are dedicated by the restaurants, they pay a fee to the city to lock up that parking space for the year. And then there are some that are more Josh Triplett, publicly shared and anybody can use them. My next bullet there, not done yet, Jennifer. The next one there is really, I think, one of the most important ones, which is a budget and plan for a future downtown plan update. So your last downtown plan was 2016, 2017? I can't remember. 2017. 2017. So it's almost 10 years old. The world has changed since then. And most... healthy downtowns, a 10-year cycle to update the plan is a really good cadence and something that we typically see and would recommend. So that's first off. But then secondly, a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about are sort of individual solutions to a larger problem or to a larger strategy, but they shouldn't be tackled in isolation and silos. They really should all be done in support of a common shared vision for downtown. And I think whether that's parking, whether it's the parklets or the streeteries or it's code updates and ground floor retail, incentive programs and facades, all of those are things that are typically thought about and strategized and prioritized in a downtown plan. And so I think given all the changes with state office use, retail evolution, COVID, and the new cost environment, it makes tons of sense to me that cities start thinking about setting aside a budget to do a comprehensive downtown plan update in the next year or two that would have a robust engagement effort, both to the business and downtown owner community, but also to the city at large and citizens at large people who live elsewhere in Olympia, but downtown is their downtown too. So we wanted to make sure that we made that note because that's really, I think the risk of tackling a lot of the ideas in isolation is that you sort of lose the forest for the trees. And that's really the role of a downtown plan. And then finally, Jennifer mentioned that There are quite a few city owned properties. They're not necessarily contributing to vacancy. Most of them are occupied, but they are a great opportunity for the city to leverage its assets for a purpose driven objective, whether that's creating housing opportunities or incubating a certain kind of activity or retail. And so having a kind of looking at those as a portfolio and as a resource for, you know, creating vibrancy and a certain desired type of activity, that would be a great strategy to put into effect. So those aren't necessarily in any kind of priority order, but that kind of captures all of our core recommendations. Just to close, we really enjoyed getting to meet the stakeholders that we got to meet. And Jenica and her team at the city were instrumental and very helpful in getting us the data that we needed to put into the report. And if you took the time to read the report, you'll know there's lots and lots of data tables and charts and maps that go along with it. And then we also delivered to Jenica, I believe we did Jennifer, a kind of more of an inventory data set that goes along with those maps. So with any remaining time we have, we're happy to answer additional questions for you.

Great. Thank you. Zainab, we have questions?

I was wondering, the stakeholders that are in the appendix, how did you determine that those were the individuals you were going to talk to?

So we worked with, with Jenica and others at the city to kind of identify folks that we should talk to. And some of those, the people that we talked to originally had, you know, you should talk to this person as well. So that was

Yeah, it's a collaborative effort, but we typically take the lead of our client to identify, you know, these are the people that you need to hear from. And usually we want to hear from people with diverse perspectives, which we definitely did. And yeah, and again, in talking to people like at the ODA, you know, we've people that are also access points for additional perspectives and for information.

And there were other people who we, we reached out to and weren't able to like schedule an interview with. So, you know, unfortunately.

I have a follow-up question to that, but can you just like run down, I have the list right here. I was trying to figure out like some of these, some of these names like Kidder Matthews, like I know who they are. Can you just like run down and like, tell me like who like is MPH Holdings? Is that,

A real estate firm or like? Yeah, that is a real estate and property management firm. Sorry, I think NPH, they previously owned property downtown, but don't any longer.

Okay. And then the Rance Group is the same thing? The Rance Group, yeah, they're a real estate firm. Okay. And then Kidder Matthews is real estate. And I'm guessing Olympic Rental and Landlord Services, that's a property management firm?

Yes, and they recently did an adaptive reuse project in downtown. So we talked to them a lot about their experience doing that.

And then they're also downtown property owners and downtown business owners. Sorry, what businesses do they own?

The Olympic Rental and Landlord Services.

Their office is downtown.

Okay. I was just wondering if this is more for you, Jennifer, because, like, they took really from you. So, like, there's two sides. There's, like, properties that are vacant and, like, remain vacant for, like, a really long time. But then there's properties that become vacant. Like, I'm thinking, like, Wayside is closing soon. I guess, like, why didn't you guys, like, suggest talking to people who have businesses that are recently closed to understand, like, clearly they made the investments, they were able to open, but there are barriers to them staying open. Because I think, like, that's, I guess, why, why not them?

It wasn't a deliberate decision to exclude anybody.

Okay, so it just wasn't, like, thought about, is what I'm hearing.

Okay. I think when we had looked at who we were chatting with, it seemed like a comprehensive group of people to talk with at the time.

Yeah. And given the constraints we had on time and budget to put to that, we had to make choices. And so that's why talking to people like Desiree at the Downtown Alliance was sort of a, would hopefully give us a perspective on a range of voices without having to spend the time talking to, you know, doing dozens. If there was a downtown plan, I think that's where a much more robust outreach effort could take place. But our focus here was really trying to get, one, get a handle on the real estate side first. And so that's reflected in where we started.

Okay, Rafael, first question.

Thank you for the presentation kind of going over the study. I guess with sidewalks being such a hot topic and you recommended as a vibrancy recommendation for prioritizing downtown sidewalk repairs, have you all been able to say within that study overlay, because you mentioned using GIS, overlay the sidewalk defects from a condition inventory against the vacancy map? kind of show whether the poor sidewalk condition correlates spatially, I guess, with those long-term vacancies?

That's a really good question. We did not. We did not. I don't believe, Jennifer, we got or looked at sidewalk condition in our mapping, but that is a That would be very easy now that the city has our GIS layers with the vacancy data. It would be very easy to drop the sidewalk layer on, assuming it's also in GIS.

I'm taking note on that. We'll follow up on that. That's something we can definitely produce.

On the question of stakeholders, why not talk to businesses that have moved out of downtown? So for example, there's a restaurant called Equal Latin, which used to be right here on the corner, right next to Well Lady. I believe that they're still open, but now just operate outside of downtown. Why not talk to business owners that have moved out of downtown?

Again, I think it's a question of capacity, but those would be great additional questions interviews to do.

I ask, I direct that question to Jenica on the city, because I just, I hear you, Chris, on like capacity-wise, but Jenica, I guess like in prioritizing stakeholders, that feels like an obvious one to me. Why would you not want to talk to somebody that just recently moved out of the city after operating downtown for years?

Sure. I mean, that's a great suggestion. It was not thought of at the time to include that. And so again, not a deliberate choice to not include anybody.

Similar question, why not talk to residents? So the city has a designated list of city recognized neighborhood associations. Was the downtown neighborhood association contacted?

I don't believe so. Our focus for this was really, we've talked about like the resident voice and as we've kind of talked about looking to put forward a downtown strategy that looked like a good place for incorporating the resident voice. And we hope to push that forward.

So residential get contacted during the downtown strategy, which is not for this.

we're able to move the downtown strategy forward that would be um a priority in terms of stakeholders certainly can i switch gears to ask the question i noticed you recommended a reduction in some bonding requirements did you identify specific ones um that was related to the streetery program so the streetery program in olympia right now requires You know, if a private business wants to get a parking space and put, you know, restaurants and whatever, they have to bond for a specific amount. And that's not a common requirement in a lot of cities, and it can be kind of daunting. So that was just that specific one was what we were referring to.

Some of that has to do with right-of-way obstruction requirements. So if you're doing a temporary use permit that includes sidewalk or parking spaces, the temporary permit also requires the right-of-way obstruction, which is where the bond cost will come in for the most part. During the pandemic, some of that was adjusted and revised, but a lot of it's still in code. So we would have to do some code amendments I think when we're talking about the temporary permits, that's on the work plan, temporary permits and food truck uses. Those have been on the back burner, I hate to say, just based on staff capacity. But that is something that we are looking at, at least in the near future. But when you look at street areas, in particular in downtown, There are some examples where some of the restaurants have actually basically worked with the city to purchase the parking spaces. They'll end up with like street cafe space where the sidewalk used to be. And then they had to bulb out into where the parking spaces were. And so you lose parking spaces when you do that. So that's been the process and continues to be the process for permanent like sidewalk cafes. type C. So a lot of that's per code. There are ways that we could potentially revise that though. But again, it does. If you go that route, you are potentially, and under current requirements, you are potentially losing street parking spaces. So that's something to consider as well.

Other questions?

Dana? The vacancy tax. So I was wondering, because I've only heard of Bellevue. So in your research, what other cities have had a vacancy tax? Or none?

There aren't a lot of cities that have a commercial vacancy tax. A residential vacancy tax is more common. And I think a lot of the reason that a lot of cities don't have vacancy tax. I know Chris can probably speak more to this is that, you know, in a lot of cases, and I would say in the case of Olympia, it doesn't really get to the, the reasons why vacancy exists. It doesn't really help reduce those barriers. So it's, yeah, that's,

Yeah, so we definitely would not recommend it, but I think even if... I would say one of the reasons to not recommend it is even regardless of what your perception is of long-term vacant landlords and such, the process of administering it and the political... I would say the political turmoil that it would probably generate to implement such a program is probably not worth the political energy that you've got. There's a lot lower hanging fruit to work on. And beyond just the economic reality, which is that no rational landlord is sitting on vacant space they would much rather be earning revenue off of it. And there's other reasons at play that are driving that. And so that's where we focus our energy. And we think that kind of in terms of policy changes, there's a lot lower hanging fruit that city could be working on.

Sorry, you mentioned the residential vacancy tax. That's the first time I've ever heard. Does it work the same way as a commercial vacancy tax? Like who has this? I know.

Well, New York City is about to have one.

New York City is about to have it. San Francisco has it. I know I was actually just talking to somebody who worked on the Oregon coast with some cities that are considering it as well. There's kind of two different ones. One is like attacks on property that's like derelict, like properties that are causing a problem in the neighborhood. Another version is you could have a tax on like seasonal homes that are vacant for most of the year or a tax on, you know, rental units that are vacant for some period of time or longer. And yeah, I would say.

Neither of which are probably really an issue in Olympia.

Yeah.

But where we do the, We have seen, I think it's easier to argue, and I think there's more of a case to be made that in certain situations, especially resort communities that have a lot of second homes and a labor workforce housing issue related to that, that there's a strong nexus and a rationale for generating revenue to support affordable housing development related to that dynamic. But in an area like Olympia, that's really not a vacation home market, that doesn't really come into play.

You don't want a beautiful home along Henderson?

When we were in Olympia in December, I told Jenica that I'm getting convinced to move.

The secret's getting out. It's a nice city.

As somebody who grew up in Portland in the 80s and 90s, I've always said that Olympia is what Portland was back in the late 80s. Totally.

I think it's a smaller, seriously, a lot of the issues that are affecting your downtown, a lot of the comments that we heard, just everything is like Portland, just on a smaller, smaller scale and maybe five years behind us or something a little bit temporal as well, but very, very similar.

I don't necessarily say that to somebody who grew up in Olympia.

And my wife grew up in Olympia in the, in the nineties. And so she's told me all about the, you know, the heyday and the music scene and like, You know, I've been there a zillion times. So, I mean, it's got a great history and it didn't really we didn't really talk about it. But, you know, continuing to tell that story is really, really important because I think. Especially to like I'm just making this up on the fly, but like to a Portlander, Olympia would make an awesome like two day getaway. And I think most Portlanders have no idea what's there. The waterfront, the restaurants, the music scene, the falls, the wildlife, just boating, whatever. There's like a million reasons why it'd be a perfect little getaway. And I think especially as fuel costs are going up and people aren't flying as much, there's a huge opportunity there. You know, the Explorer Olympia and others could be using to generate some additional tourism.

I'll just put it on YouTube video where you're going to do a little commercial.

Totally. Raphael has his hand up. Go ahead, Raphael.

You mentioned the facade improvement program recommendation. I know studies fixing driver's table kind of identifies like large spaces, expensive energy and fire upgrades, high tenant improvement costs and such. I know none of that kind of is addressed with the facade grant. So have you all kind of like identified any evidence that a facade program reduces? They see rates in similar, I guess, markets that are comparable to Olympia as opposed to like markets, I guess, where the primary problem is, let's say, deferred maintenance or otherwise viable spaces.

Yeah. Salem has a very robust facade improvement program. One that that's one I'm most familiar with. You know, I wouldn't say that it is that any facade improvement programs are in place to directly or singularly address vacancies. It's sort of one tool in the toolbox to reduce that cost barrier to occupying or continuing to occupy or occupying a vacant space. So, you know, a dollar that goes into the facade is a dollar that you don't have to put into the facade that you can now put into the interior or that you can put into equipment and other things. And so it's really more of a toolbox approach and having as many tools in Washington state with some of the constitutional limitations on public money going into private projects, your toolbox is kind of small. And so any tool that you can find a way to thread that needle is worthy of putting into place. And so we talk about a few examples across Washington where there are facade programs. I think also facade programs are good in that they typically are pretty low budget. So it could be $5,000. So it's not a you know, it's not a huge expenditure. It could be $50,000 too. It could be a lot more, but they, they have been done on very kind of micro levels, which to make it really equitable for, you know, undercapitalized and smaller businesses.

And I think one of the big benefits of them is that they show an investment in community. Like if you see that they're like people sprucing up the exterior of their building, if you're like a developer or investor or a business owner and you look at downtown Olympia and you see that it's, it's a real like, Oh, people care here. People care about their community. They care about their businesses. This is some somewhere that I can feel good about, you know, putting my money, putting my investment.

Yeah. And when, and I don't think we went into so much detail in the report, but if you were to put in place a facade program, I would recommend, doing a little bit of prioritization of creating like some target districts or target blocks to, so that you don't end up with, Oh, one shop over here did it. And then another one, three blocks and around the corner did one. And then another one on the other side of downtown where you don't really see the, the snowball effect. And so, you know, working, and this would be, you know, Jenica or somebody else's job, like somebody's, we've got a bucket of money and go out and market it and sell it to the business and property owners to deploy it in as concentrated an effort as you can. And maybe you move that concentration focus area, target area around every year or two. But you want to get, there is a risk of spreading money too thinly. And so where you can double and triple and quadruple the impact um, all the better. And I guess that goes a little bit to some of the safety perceptions and vacancy perceptions as well, especially with some of the long-term land, long-term vacancy issues, um, creating a lot there, there is a real dynamic of kind of peer pressure or, you know, that happens in a downtown environment. So when your neighbors start doing improvements to your prop, their properties, you feel a little pressure to improve your property. And if you don't, then you start getting a lot of door knocks by other investors that say, wow, this is a block where values are going up because people are investing, and this one's not. I could pick that up and do something with it. And so that's really the indirect way to get at some of those long-term, quote unquote, deadbeat types of vacant spaces is by working around them. rather than necessarily spending all your energy trying to push that rock uphill.

No, I appreciate that. It's just helpful to kind of, I guess, have that comparable, say, like city or town with a similar budget, similar size, that a program like this actually has worked, I guess.

Yeah, so I know we mentioned, I mentioned Salem. I think in the report we mentioned Spokane, Tacoma, and I think Seattle also has a facade program. They're all a little bit different. But yeah, even like $50,000, $100,000 a year of a budget can go a long way if you're doing fairly small grants. You could do five to 10 a year. And if you did five or 10 storefront improvements or facade improvements across downtown every single year, That would get noticed.

Just going to say real quick, another comparable that was actually brought up during the neighborhood centers report was city of Beaverton. And one of the things that they mentioned in the city of Beaverton revitalization was they have a similar facade and basically street improvement program. So that might be another good comparable for us to look at.

I was going to say Beaverton. Quick look at that, and I got really excited about it, and then realized the difference in the state law makes some of that not applicable in Washington.

I will say, though, we did talk to, I worked on the Neighborhood Centers project and talked to some folks in Beaverton for that, and They said it's like the easiest ask of their city council every year or every time it's like up for renewal. It's like, yeah, of course we're gonna do that. So when it's successful, it can be like really politically supported and great for the city.

So I guess I have a couple of questions about the employment statistics. One, the information employment sector, Is there any indication about what's driving the kind of astronomical growth in downtown Olympia of that as a macro forces, like it as a whole is growing and you're seeing that and so it's being reflected in smaller communities? I believe it's regional data. Am I correct, Jennifer? What was that?

I believe it's regional data. Is that correct, Jennifer?

I'm just, I was going to ask what was that? Which, I just figured, were you looking at?

The jobs in downtown Olympia, excluding the port, 2013 to 2013. Oh, in the report.

Okay, in the report. I don't think we really dug into that. I think a lot of times those information jobs are remote, so it could be about, it could be related to that. they're not always like office driving uses. So I don't think we dug that much into it.

And so is that, I guess, they're not digging into it. Is that true across the board? Because like you're, you made several comments about the state pulling back their jobs in downtown, but the public administration jobs are up also pretty extensively from.

Yeah. So some of that data, so that data comes from, which is census based. And it can be tricky because sometimes things like will be basically the, the location that paychecks get mailed from. So if like the state jobs are remote, it's still going to say, you know, if the pay stubs are being sent from the state capital, it's still going to say that's where they're coming from. So there is a little bit of kind of a question mark with some of that data.

like healthcare authorities based in Olympia, but yes, statewide.

So as far as a useful table for downtown employment data, it's pretty low.

Yeah. I mean, I think the purpose of looking at it was to see like what office using industries and what types of retail might be like the growth industries. I think that was why we wanted to take a look at those. But knowing the context that we knew about the public sector jobs and the kind of squishiness with the remote work, you know, that was kind of how we looked at that.

Make this the last question, then we'll let folks go. Um, so the Olympia Transit Center was highlighted as like one of the most highly trafficked areas. And also there was note that like empty parking lots can contribute to like a perception of vacancy. So I was just wondering if there's any more like discussion or thoughts to upzoning the transit center area and why that was not really talked about in favor of a parking garage. Like why not improve the transit center and make that like a real like transit hub? Like, why the focus? Like, that didn't seem like that got a lot of airtime, but the parking garage did get a ton. Why not? That area seems right for reinvestment. Why not? Why not talk about it?

Yeah, I think that would be a great conversation to have in the downtown planning process, kind of identifying, because it is definitely an opportunity area. There's Not, you know, there's a lot of land available. It obviously is the transit hub. It's got great access. So, you know, from the perspective of our focus on kind of looking at vacancy, it didn't, or activating vacant spaces, it didn't, yeah, we didn't spend a lot of page time talking about that. But I think that would be a great topic for the plan, for the downtown plan update.

Are those parking lots next to it not considered vacant?

Yeah, so, I mean, I think, you know, we tried to highlight...

There's nothing directly behind the transit center that, like, fenced up and are, like, not used.

Yeah, so that's what we tried to highlight with, like, you know, that hexagon map that showed, like, the transit center is really busy, but the area behind it is really a dead area, and we heard that from stakeholders and, you know, kind of understanding that, and some of the maps that we looked at looking at you know, redevelopment opportunities and where the vacant spaces are. I think we tried to highlight, you know, we didn't dig into any one specific parking lot, but just kind of understanding where parking lots are contributing to that feeling of vacancy. And I think that's definitely one area where they are. But I think that we weren't really making we wanted to look at what the barriers are to development and redevelopment generally, but we didn't like look at specific catalyst sites. And as Chris said, I think that would be something that a downtown plan would do really well. So parking lots are not considered vacant. Right, they're not considered vacant, but they were something that we highlighted as like, if you have a lot of vacancy and a surface parking lot that can feel more vacant than it would otherwise.

I guess understanding, though, the barriers to development, if the transit center has a lot of people coming out, coming in and out of it every single day, why is that area behind it so dead? Like, what were the barriers to making those lots behind the transit center? Like, what was the barrier there?

Yeah, I mean, I think anecdotally we heard in some of our interviews that there's that safety perception of the transit center and... the people that hang around it during the day is sort of a deterrent to visitors and others. And so I think I think that perception dynamic is definitely there. And we heard that in some of our interviews.

Did you talk to the people that are actually using the transit center though? Because like, there's a lot of people coming in and out. So like, clearly, there's people who are using it.

That area behind the transit center is also where those street improvements would be required.

for a lot of that area's warehouse as you're going between that and port and then that's when we see that issue that i that was highlighted of the change of use and what that triggers with the half street improvement um and the challenges that that creates the development on those lots is difficult um two of the

Two of the lots are actually owned by the City of Olympia. So, I mean, that's part of the City of Olympia inventory. The other portion is owned by a lot directly. And then I know for a fact that there are wells in that area, which also contributes to some of the challenges for that.

Um, you know, it's like the city on parking lots, like, does the city think that that's the best economic use of that space right next to a transit center? That's one of the biggest draws to bring people downtown.

Sure. The challenge there though, if I may, part of that has to do with, um, development. The city is, has very finite funds for redevelopment, but at the same time, um, might have future plans, um, or would like to have future plans for that use.

I guess I'm just, I hear you Casey, I'm just saying that I don't feel like that conversation, that little tidbit you just told me, that would be great to have seen in the report. So that's all I'm kind of calling out.

And I think the consultants would have said it, and I would tend to agree, that's something that would definitely be part of a downtown plan update, but it's not necessarily within the scope of work of the vacancy study or for vacant business space that's already developed. So I think that's kind of the the fine line between vacancy study and downtown plan. So I hear what you're saying and I think we would definitely be looking at those lots and redevelopment and utilization of that transit center in the future and would definitely be a priority for the downtown plan.

We'd love to see it. Great. I think we'll wrap up the business item there and thank you to Chris and Jennifer and Jennica for joining us.

Thank you for having us. Thank you so much.

It was a great conversation.

Okay. Have a good night. Thank you. Can we get on to staff reports?

Staff announcements? Staff announcements. Yeah. All right. We'll try to get through this pretty quick. So first, the Planning Commission, as well as some of the other advisory committees, are in a bit of a reset on the 2045 Conflict Update. With that in mind, City Council has also been looking at an assessment on the number of advisory committees and their respective scope of work. Majority of the advisory chairs and vice chairs, including from the Planning Commission here, have been involved in this work and this conversation. Next week, on Wednesday, June 24th, the Community Livability and Public Safety Committee, Subcommittee of Council, We'll hold a meeting where advisory committee chairs and vice chairs will discuss with members of City Council the mission, scope of work, and future work plan coordination of those advisory committees. Planning Commission is a required body under state law, so we don't anticipate major changes to the makeup and mission of this group. However, we are hoping to better align our work plan with City Council and City Council subcommittees. Your chair and vice chair as well, as myself, will keep you apprised of that work going forward. It is possible that you might see some of our advisory committees merge. You might see some of those committees go away or realignment of that scope of work for those advisory committees. So most of the advisory committees are at least starting to be aware of this conversation that's been ongoing for several months. Like I said, not necessarily a huge impact to this group, But if some of those advisory committees do realign or change their scope of work, some of that might actually fall on this group instead. So just be aware of that. I would open it to your chair and vice chair if they have any comments on that before I get to my next announcement. Also open to questions.

If you're going to make us do more work, can we at least get air conditioning?

I started the meeting by saying I did everything I could. I think what I needed to do was come in at like 3 o'clock and close the blinds. So I do apologize. It's a little roasty in here. I'm sorry. Keeping everyone locked in. So folks at home, if you've got an AC, you're ahead of the game. So next, I wanted to address the number of meetings that have been canceled this year. I do apologize for that, and I do want to say that is definitely not typical. As mentioned already, council, many of our committees, and even staff, such as myself, are in a bit of a reset following the Olympia 2045 comp plan update. That was about five years of this is all we're doing kind of work. Now you're getting ready for the downtown plan, right? Apparently. And PMP, yep, so. Major focus on that. This has led to a lot of work happening at the staff and other committee levels. It hasn't necessarily reached your level. That isn't to say that those things aren't coming your way. It's just taking a little bit of time as we're actually doing an inventory of what our comp plan requires and changes, as well as I would say the last two, three legislative sessions. have been really housing intensive. So we're still catching up with a lot of our OMCs there. You saw some of that with the recent 2026 code amendment updates, particularly as it had to do with lot splitting. That was one of the things that you saw in that. That being said, I'm anticipating our schedule picking up again in the near future. Again, sorry, we're kind of cramming things into the summer, fall months. I knew you would not be pleased with that, Zainab. I'm sorry. So just a quick rundown of some of those topics that are coming up. Home-based business code amendments, while small commercial use code amendments should be coming very soon. My colleague David Getther is leading those efforts. Just to kind of clarify the difference between that, home-based business code amendments, that's very much in residential areas. We do allow some home-based type businesses. A lot of times you'll see it in small home-based like childcare or elder care. Small commercial use code amendments, that's actually coming more directly from the neighborhood centers update. So really looking at kind of the transition zoning areas, how can we increase commercial opportunities? That also has some result from the not past, but discussed over the last few years, legislative work around like corner shops, kind of neighborhood convenience stores, things of that nature. So we are working on some small commercial use code amendments that should at least be briefed on here in the near future. You'll also see another, I would say, technical amendment coming to OMC Chapter 17 related to subdivisions. That's kind of the last work that Joyce was working on before she retired. Really, we're just looking at streamlining the entire subdivision chapter. It's very, I would say, siloed in kind of how we approach some of our subdivision requirements. So we're really trying to streamline that, make it more approachable, and we're trying to reduce a lot of the repetitive nature of that chapter. So you should see that in the near future. That will definitely come before you folks. It will be a riveting discussion. We're also looking at parking requirement updates. We have some state laws that have changed in the last year. So I'm going through the Department of Commerce checklist. We've already done that portion of it. You'll likely see the table in 1838 be highly revised and hopefully condensed. So right now it's very individualized based on use type. The state law really narrows it to a broad commercial type. broad residential type, and then kind of everything else. So you'll see, I would imagine a pretty significant change to that parking table in the near future.

Is that the, on the work plan, we have commercial parking, is that wrapped into that?

Yes. So again, as part of the 2026 update, we already revised the parking minimums for the downtown planning area to a minimum of zero. So we don't require commercial parking there. It's in there. Commercial too? Yep. So in the downtown planning area, not citywide. When we look at the parking requirements update, I imagine part of that discussion will be looking at parking minimums citywide. So outside of the downtown planning area. I didn't realize the zero got in for commercial as well as residential. Yes. Is that update shooting for next year? Or go to council tomorrow? Or which parking, the commercial larger citywide commercial parking area? So we'll look at the parking updates and the state requirements. We'll have to meet, I believe we have until December or through, I think it's like January 31st for some of the parking requirements. We'll at least start the discussion on the citywide parking minimums. So if we don't make it by that January 31st, I'd at least like to bring some policy options to council to consider for future amendments. But we have some state mandated requirement updates that we will meet. And then I think it's worth starting some of that discussion to make a recommendation to council citywide. You are still awaiting the updated critical area ordinance. That is my bad. Still working through some of the technicalities there. And then the 2027-2032 capital facilities plan, as you see every year, you'll be seeing that very soon. I believe we'll release the first draft of that at the end of July. So At our July meetings, we'll probably start establishing our capital facilities plan finance. So they're not all due by the end of the calendar year, but you'll likely receive briefings on some of them, if not most of them, by January. So all that is to say, if you're wondering why we've been canceling meetings, it's just we haven't gotten those things ready and packaged for your review and discussion yet. But we definitely have a ton on the horizon. So Again, apologies if we cram a lot in at the end, but I know those topics are. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Every year.

Every year. So that's what I have for each year.

Real quick before we finish out, does anyone need a quick break? Probably try to keep it to the next half hour to be done.

Half hour?

Hopefully faster. I don't want to overpromise. There's three things, another topic. Okay, people just need hydration. Moving on to reports. Does anyone have anything to report on such as meetings, relevant book or article?

Strong Town Fund. Strong Towns, a national gathering. Strong Towns is a national nonprofit that works to build stronger towns. I was able to get a scholarship to go. I met a lot of planners, but also just people in various governments all over the country and just people who are advocates who just want stronger towns and are wanting good ideas. So you will probably hear me say a lot over the next couple of months, well, I was at strong towns and present to you hopefully what I think is a good idea.

Another report. Other topics. The last meeting, if you recall back in time, We were working on a sidewalk repair policy letter after the briefing. If people had a chance to look at that and have comments on it, this would be a great time for questions, comments. I think he's bringing it up. I'll start with one piece as I was working on it. The prioritization is challenging, but part of the challenging part is that we have such large need and relatively low amount of funds towards it. And so I think we had a lot of bullet points, but just as writing it, I was like, we're trying to prioritize maybe too small an effort, but making that effort larger is also challenging. So that was kind of one of my takeaways in thinking about it. If other people have specific comments on wording in here, happy to change it and update it. Or if there's anything in addition, go ahead, Casey.

I did have one follow-up when we were talking about the investigate whether neighborhood matching grants would be eligible for dialogue maintenance. I did check in on that. It would be eligible. It's really challenging. I actually kind of went back to some of the discussion we just had around the bond. Basically, if you have a neighborhood that has volunteers that are working on it, they have to go through the same licensing and bonding to do the work. That's where the challenge is. So some neighborhoods have applied to do that. It's the bonding and insurance that makes that basically infeasible overall. So it's not to say that we can't do that. It just might have some other, there might be some other things we have to work through, particularly around liability and safety and insurance. So we need to identify where the concrete workers live and those neighborhoods. Yeah. So I did just want to clarify that it is possible. It's just not necessarily the most feasible route.

Does that cover like anything concrete or is it, I don't know, like vegetation management?

I don't think it involves vegetation management. I think it comes back to the right-of-way obstruction permitting. The ROW permits, the bonding is something like $2 million. You have to have guarantees around that. So If you look at the right-of-way obstruction permit and what it takes to do that type of work, it is not a light undertaking. So it's not to say that we can't, but there are some barriers to making that feasible. I did just want to at least bring that back to the table.

I don't have a comment or letter. I just have a question. Greg, you said that there's more information at the May meeting. Was the takeaway supposed to be the funding table?

Yeah, they just had more. Particularly to some of the comments, I think towards the end we were talking about maintenance comes, maybe should come before some of these things, but they had a little more built out, I think the six-year plan was in there. And that came up in the Land Use and Environment Committee meeting about making sure that money was going into sidewalks and active transportation and that. Not a real project.

Okay. Under site prioritization, I agree with everything that was already stated. Maybe just add one more bullet to the conversation we just had about the downtown vacancy study. I like the comments about how downtown does kind of need a concerted policy and a concerted kind of like plan. So just wondering if we just like referenced back to that and was like see comments made by was a Leland consulting group that downtown needs a dedicated plan and that should be worked into a future downtown strategy update um question for you this is more like point of order type thing I thought that when we write letters we're only allowed to include things that happened in the discussion like like

It's part of the discussion of the motion. So like this is information coming in after that fact.

So I had a, may I go for it? Yeah. So I kind of had a conversation with Greg about this. We're not necessarily, and I would actually recommend that we could have a comment letter that's not a formal motion because we're not coming on a formal policy recommendation yet. We're asking council to consider these items as they form a policy. That policy will probably come back through the Utility and Advisory Committee and Planning Commission in the future. So we don't have formal policy that we're voting on and recommending or recommending amendments to or anything like that. This is kind of like the formative discussion that you're saying to City Council that you've had this briefing, you've identified these as talking points, and Council should consider this as they form their actual priorities and policies on how we fund sidewalk repair in the future. So I would say that this is a fairly informal letter. I don't think it needs a vote because you're not voting on formal policy. This is very much conversational and saying, these are our considerations that I think are important to the community. So in that approach, it is a little different than what we've done in the past. I think council has kind of asked the advisory committees to take more active role and shaping policy earlier. And I think that's been part of the conversation with, um, um, clips and the advisory role as well as that. A lot of times when, when this body has gotten, um, policies, they're pretty well formed, um, and it can be difficult to, to kind of change the direction of that. So I think this is the early point where you say council, we would like at least this is a bare minimum consideration.

So because this isn't a formal comment letter, we're not like, like on a specific, like we voted on a motion, that's like we voted on this.

Yeah, and I actually, again, spoke with Greg about this. I don't think this comment letter necessarily needs a, I would recommend not voting on this. Keep this more informal and conversational. Because again, there's not an actual policy amendment recommendation yet. This is very much exactly what an advisory committee is. It's advising on the future policy. Okay.

Cool. A little fix in my mind, but there's the informal recommendation letter along with a more formal recommendation.

Yeah. So, like, you don't have something that's coming through our briefing. We're not holding a public hearing on this. Like, public hearing where the public has said, we agree with this policy, we disagree with this, you need to consider this, that, and the other. That is a formal action. You will vote on a comment letter or a recommendation letter. So this is very much an informal comment letter versus a policy recommendation letter to council. Unusual, not something I've seen in the couple years that I've been doing this. Breaking the ground. Yeah, I think council has been asking, some of our members of council have been asking for this. So that's where we're at.

Point of order addressed. Other comments or discussion items people want to bring up?

Raphael? Maybe just looking at the who pays section, I see kind of like the first and second rationales, maybe potentially an option to add like a third rationale in there around liability alignment, I guess. And that can be open discussion on what that specifically, I guess, would entail.

Like liability for the bonding type requirements or liability for a broken sidewalk?

More on the side of the assignment of repair responsibility, that alignment.

So having the entity doing the repairs, the entity is ultimately responsible for, I don't actually know how that plays out in the code currently, because the responsibility to repair is for the homeowner, but I don't know if they carry liability for the sidewalk in front of their house.

Yes. Yeah, I think there is liability that would be assigned to that. In terms of the repair, again, that's coming to the contractor. The contractor would have their own liability insurance for the work. But in terms of if you've got a sidewalk and disrepair, I think there is liability for that property owner if they were aware that there was basically a panel that was elevated and somebody tripped and hurt themselves. Yes, there is a liability concern in civil court for that property owner. And I think Is that what you're getting at?

Yeah, that was kind of what I was getting at because I think there's room of at least discussion in that realm. I don't know the details of it built into the regulatory side, but at least that's a conversational piece to it, I guess.

I think that's going to be under state law, though. I don't think we assign liability at the municipal code level. I think that's going to be through RCW and WAC. I'd have to look into that, though. I'm not entirely sure. I'm fairly certain it's going to be RCW. Do you have something more specific to note on this? I'm not sure I'm capturing kind of what you'd like to have said here.

I guess it's more just on the conversation of Assigning the repair responsibility specifically to line, I guess, maybe that's more of discussion from like the city legal side. And kind of more so just, I guess, liability in the sense of the defects and what would happen, say, if there's like an incident because of it type of a thing.

Like the is changing. Well, is taking on repair responsibility for the sidewalks like creating more liability for the city.

Right in that sense.

I'm sorry, my concern with mapping them.

No, no legal action. So that's just an open ended type of comment, I guess.

I think particularly for these letters, just bringing up questions is really helpful as well.

For everyone to consider. Is that note sufficient for you to kind of revise that? Yes.

Anyone else? I know everyone in the room is melting.

Is there discussion on incentives? For example, the city did take over sidewalk repair in this instance. For property owners who didn't want to wait until the city repaired their sidewalk, is there an incentive that remains for them to take on that work. Yeah. Not a reduction of property taxes necessarily, but some other.

I missed the meeting, so I was just wondering. Yeah, no, there is nothing concrete like that. There is some discussion in the Land Use Environment Committee on essentially like what order different things would get taken. They're talking about whether the city would have capacity to kind of like know address address people asking for the sidewalk to be fixed and that i would say the discussion uh quickly got complicated on like how you do that how you'd have the capacity to do that and then or how you like maintain the capacity to do that what order people would go in and things like that so um i think the discussion has been had but with prioritizing the most uh pedestrian trips right right if you're gonna nations you're gonna have a plan and prioritize it then you would be trying to like do that plan and not keep some capacity for requests. We do have a, I forget what it's called for the city, but there's like a way to report things.

Real quick before we forget. Daniel, is it okay to suppose removing this last highlighted bullet about the vacancy study correlation? Because I think but you're saying you've got the policy recommendation pretty soon.

I think the vacancy study tie-in, I think that's still an open question. The piece I was wanting to focus on was a concerted downtown sidewalk repair policy for the entire area. So I actually just drafted up something. I'm going to, you know, this to you and Greg right now, Casey, if that's okay. Yeah, please.

Yeah.

Casey, can you back up again?

Yes. In case you just contact him. Email? Yes. So the email. No personal emails. I'll go back. Sorry. How could you?

I'll never forgive you. I put it in the public record request right now. They'll get back to you.

We'll put it in the public letter.

So the part where, that doesn't, Greg, this is more like word finessing, where I think you should pull up, and I apologize, I somehow did not miss, I saw the email to say, like, oh, look at the May meeting, but somehow I missed the actual draft letter, so I'm sorry. To pull up the points, about uh like sidewalks being public infrastructure because i like as we are talking like i feel like we're kind of starting to like get away from that point a little bit because like our whole point was like sidewalks are part of the transportation network the city is responsible for maintaining the transportation network like that was kind of like our starting point i feel like as we're starting to like because i saw the one where it was like you know i didn't remember recall i don't have my notes from the last meeting about the us coming to the conclusion that the middle ground might be point of sale. We discussed it, but I don't feel like we really came to- Yeah, I don't think that- As broadly worded as it seems in here. And so I just want to make sure, because I was like, well, and then we talked about liability, and I was like, well, we're starting to get away from our first point, which was it's a part of the transportation network. It should be the same way that we deal with asphalt and roadways. So maybe pulling that up would help a little bit.

Do you have what you need to work there? Do you need me to know? I've got it. I'm just going to go here. So this is what Daniel sent to me. We don't have to kind of settle on this. We can discuss this further. I don't know. I mean, because we've got time when it comes to the sidewalk affair. We're still in an early stage. So don't feel like you have to commit to this tonight. Sorry, Greg.

No, I'm personally, I don't feel like it needs to be perfect. Yeah. It's supposed to be like an informal commenty letter. I think it'd be better to like get it out there sooner rather than try to.

Yeah, we discussed it in the land use environment committee with the points in it. And then I think it's going to a study session next. Yeah, I think we'll get to that study session that we still have some ideas that we've talked about. Yeah, so I would intend to take this and clean up a little bit and be done.

Is there any mention of a public safety risk? sidewalk disrepair in this letter? I'd just say that as someone who had a concussion 10 months ago tripping on the sidewalk in the city.

Very good. Yeah, maybe I'll put that in with the liability part or as part of that.

Yeah, if you're elderly or you're using a wheelchair on even sidewalks, I think there's basic accessibility and public safety concerns. I know that came up as part of the discussion one time in depth because we actually had a planning commissioner who was visually impaired and it was a legitimate challenge for that person.

Yeah, it didn't come through. I'll make sure.

It wasn't maybe quite straightforward as a statement, but the comment about prioritizing the repair over necessarily filling out all of the accessibility elements of it I think speaks to that because the repair is itself an accessibility element. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. I think that was part of by challenge when I was reading. We had kind of at the end a strongly worded piece of like maintenance comes before kind of everything else. I think it easily bleeds into like if you're bringing it up to like your engineering design standards making it accessible and so that like boundary may not be as bright as we'd like it to be.

Take the last thing you want. broken sidewalk with a two-foot length that they then have to go down the street to avoid.

Well, I mean, my street has, like, sidewalks, which is kind of rare in our neighborhood, but they don't have ramps in a lot of places, and, like, I've seen multiple people in, like, roll up to a cliff and be, like, backtrack and go down someone's driveway and go on the street for a while, which is super sad. Yeah. I'll back in the public right away. Not seeing any hands online? No hands in the room? I'll do a little cleanup and send it along to the study session. I suspect we will hear lots more about it.

Yeah. We'll send that to you. When that's ready, I'll I'll send that on to Michelle to include in her staff report packet for that study session, but also make sure that you folks are tracking that letter as well. Thank you.

Great. Of the other topics, there's currently scheduled a meeting on July 6th. This comes right after the holiday weekend. What do people think about canceling that meeting? I don't think we're campacked with topics, so it's a tough Monday, maybe.

I don't want to be here after the long weekend.

I think we can keep up with what we have coming down the pike if we cancel July 6th.

We do have one agenda item. I'll double check with David. I think it'll be a straightforward process. I don't think he's scheduled for land use or council. I meant to do that before this meeting. I apologize for that. but I believe it's a tentative schedule anyway, so I think we'll be okay. I'll make sure it's good. So if we cancel the July 6th, that means our next meeting would actually be on July 20th. The only other hiccup there is it might not necessarily be me facilitating that meeting. So it might be other staff, so we'll figure something out. If you don't see me for that meeting, don't be surprised. I don't know if it really matters, but it might be my colleague. And if you aren't aware, Joyce has retired, so it won't be Joyce either. It will either be David or possibly one of my other colleagues in the planning department. Yeah, we're looking at some continuity planning there.

Anyways, news to come. We'll see. Yeah, so we'll update everyone on that. But I think I lean towards when I saw it was after the long weekend.

I think for the public, we've tended to cancel meetings after a long weekend as well. Especially, we definitely don't schedule anything like public hearings or any sort of major decisions. Did you say that Joyce has retired officially? She has retired officially, yes. Have we missed the retirement party? No. No, there was, there was, uh, one held at city hall. I'm sorry. Uh, I thought. I think you should. I heard about it.

I didn't hear about it. There was even like a card sent out for like, we normally sign, you know, and believe us and Casey.

I am the worst. I will say that Joyce did not want to make it a big deal. So, um, Yeah, I thought that was in line with her. All right. I apologize that there wasn't a lot more to do about that. Her name is on a plaque outside. If you'd like to see it. So canceling the six then? I'll send notice out.

Make sure it's not going to like break anybody's schedule. But I think that's, I lean that way.

It would be briefing only. I know that. I think we can cancel that one too.

And then for the, I know we have, do people have like one last chance for any survey results for the OPC retreat?

Yeah, if you haven't responded to the survey in the email for the retreat, please do so. I think at this point, just based on our timeline, we're really looking at the end of August at best and probably into the September, early September to mid-September timeline for that retreat.

So who hasn't answered yet, Casey?

So I wish I knew. It doesn't actually show me. It won't show me the results. It only shows the vote. It might be a user error in that sense. In the past, we've used a different service. I try to use what we have internally and I regret it already. That being said, take a look at the I would say the first to first through third week of September, honestly, just based on planning capacity, that's, that's probably what we're looking at. So, uh, your last chance to weigh in, then we'll pin that down. So that's, that's about where we're lining up. So also, um, please start thinking about some of those topics. So when we meet again, I'll ask for some of those topics so that we can start, um, doing outreach to the community to have guest speakers. So, um, That was, yeah, I think your chair and vice chair did most of that late work last year. So I'm hoping to help facilitate that a little bit better this year. So with topics, just let us know as soon as possible.

OK, so the topics. Then I think we're at medium rare. Medium, pre-cooked in here. Does everyone think cool online? Next next meeting TBD. 20th at the earliest. And so then the meeting is adjourned at 847 PM. Thank you.

Thanks for your discussion tonight folks. Bye.

Good evening.

We want to know what temperature it is.