Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everybody. As we're waiting on a quorum, we expect that the meeting will start at approximately 6.20 or shortly thereafter. Please bear with us. Thank you.

Chairperson Orloff, would you please bring the meeting to order?

All right. We'll bring the Planning Commission regular meeting to order for Thursday, December 11th, 2025. Can I please have a roll call?

Roll call is as follows. Chairperson Orloff?

Present.

Commissioner Epstein?

Present.

Commissioner Lam? Here. We have three commissioners present. We have a quorum.

Thank you. Let it show that both Commissioners Austin Dillon and Commissioner Campbell are out ill tonight. We'll read the land acknowledgement. The City of Roanoke Park acknowledges indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of the land. Let it be acknowledged that the City of Roanoke Park is located within the traditional homeland of the Federated Indians of Greaton Rancheria, comprised of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples. Please rise for the pledge.

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

Item four, public comment. If there's anyone that wishes to speak to the commission on any non-agendized item or consent calendar item, you can do so at this time. Seeing none, we'll move on. Item five, consent calendar. Can I have a motion to approve the draft minutes of the Planning Commission meeting from November 13th?

Motion to approve.

Is there a second? Second. Roll call.

Roll call is as follows. Chairperson Orloff?

Yes.

Commissioner Epstein?

Yes.

Commissioner Lam? Yes. Motion passes with three ayes, zero noes, and two excused absence.

All right, item 6, 6.1, consider amendments to the Rohnert Park Municipal Code to implement housing element programs, comply with state housing law, implement transit-oriented communities policies, and make minor technical amendments and clarifications. PURSUANT TO CERTAIN CEQA GUIDELINES, GOVERNMENT CODES, ET CETERA. THANK YOU. I'M GOING TO INTRODUCE ELLIOTT PICKETT, OUR SENIOR PLANNER. HOW ARE YOU DOING, ELLIOTT? ELLIOTT PICKETT.

THANK YOU, CHAIR. THANK YOU, COMMISSIONERS. NICE TO BE HERE WITH YOU AGAIN TONIGHT. WE'RE HERE PRESENTING ON MUNICIPAL CODE AMENDMENTS TO IMPLEMENT THE HOUSING ELEMENT, AMONG OTHER ITEMS. We'll start with some background, mainly focus on the proposed code amendments, and we'll wrap up with environmental determination, public notes and comments, and recommendation. Staff will be recommending that you conduct the public hearing continued from the 13th of November and consider a resolution recommending amendments to municipal code. We went over more background last time, but just for a high-level overview. In 2023, the City Council adopted the current housing element. In 2024 and 2025, staff were working on proposed amendments to cover a number of topics centered on housing element and state law compliance, but included streamlining and operational improvements, addressing transit-oriented communities policy, and some formatting and cleanup items. In November, the Planning Commission held a hearing, which was continued to today's date. At last month's hearing, we received the following direction from Planning Commission, first being clarifying which were the required versus recommended amendments. These are implemented in the staff report, the new attachment, and in the presentation. We also provided direction on using an administrative path for the eligible by-right projects and adding a notification to Planning Commission and Council for administrative permits, including the new administrative by-right permits and administrative use permits. Those have been implemented in the proposed code amendments brought back to you today. So the new attachment three to the staff report, provides the proposed code amendments in these categories. We will note just off the top, some items are a bit hard to categorize or fall slightly between two of these. So if you have any questions on why something is categorized in a certain way, feel free to ask. First item here in turquoise is state law or housing commitments. These are items that are simply implementing state law, implementing something committed to in the housing element or otherwise required. The recommended improvements cover things like streamlining, clarity, best practices. These are recommended by staff, but not required by state law. And then the items implementing transit-oriented communities. These are items to implement that regional policy. These are recommended to increase the city's eligibility for transportation grants, but are not required. The fourth category is formatting and cleanup items, removing redundancy, fixing numbers, reorganizing things, things of that nature. Pursuant to your direction last time, we don't discuss that anymore in this report or presentation, but as always are happy to take questions. All right. We have a very dense couple of next slides, so there's the heads up, but I'll try to break this down. First category, items implementing requirements, state law, and housing law specifically on this slide. First item is establishing the by-right approval process for eligible processes on eligible sites. We've made this as an administrative review process consistent with what was discussed last time. This would include notice to adjacent parcels like other administrative permits and would add a new notice to Planning Commission and City Council. This by right approval process is limited applicability and only the things where it's required by state to apply. Right now that's eligible projects on four housing element sites. So those would need to be, it would need to be at least 20% lower income housing and only those four sites that were reuse or rezoned that have capacity for lower income. It would also apply to approvals for low barrier navigation centers in support of housing projects as required by state law. They also have changing findings for approving housing projects, like residential site plan and architectural reviews. This is a housing element program. And the last item on this slide is removing barriers to creating additional bedrooms in existing homes, as that contradicts current fair housing law. Continuing with housing commitments here, we have updated regulations to comply with state law for a number of topics, including low barrier navigation centers, emergency shelters, density bonus law, accessory dwelling units, manufactured housing, standards in the downtown district amenity zone, and then the last one on there should be its own bullet point, also removing the open space agricultural resource management district, which is responsive to a housing element program. Additionally, there's code amendments to add and modify definitions for housing pursuant to state law and aligned with state law. Our last blue slide on here is less focused on housing but is still implementing state law. The first one is allowing family home daycare up to 14 children without a CUP. The second item is allowing religious assembly uses at the same permitting level as other non-religious assembly uses. You'll see we've done this by combining them into one larger public assembly category that includes them both. From here, we're going to move on into our yellow items, which is the recommended improvements. This is a larger range of items, and these do not speak directly to a certain state law or housing element commitment. First item here is removing small or large homeless shelters as a permitted use in residential districts. As we have sufficient capacity for homeless shelters or emergency shelters in other districts, and as we have less discretion over how they can be run or implemented, staff believes it is appropriate to remove these as a permittable use in those districts. Second item is removing the single room occupancy hotel and retaining only single room occupancy living facility, because we had two processes for two uses that were essentially the same. Third item here is retitling homeless shelter to emergency shelter. This does better align with state law and make it more clear that we are complying, but was not a specific commitment or requirement. Final item on this slide is adding or modifying definitions that are currently missing or unclear within the code. Small check-in. Am I going at an appropriate speed?

Yeah, I don't know, Elliot, if you want to take questions by color code or if you want to wait till the end, whatever is easier for you. I don't know what my fellow commissioners would like to do, but... I asked that question. We'll just get through it then and then we'll ask questions.

Thank you. Continuing with items that are recommended. Next one would be combining temporary uses into one land use category. This makes the code simpler to implement. It would also make the change for certain temporary uses that currently required an administrative use permit. that would now require only a temporary use permit. Combining schools such as elementary, high school, and vocational school into one private school category, we'll note that public schools are not subject to our processes, that's why it's private school here. And then the last item on this slide, allowing small amusement centers and photography studios with an administrative use permit in commercial office district to align them with the other commercial zones. This recommended improvement slide focuses on parking. One change here is to clarify, separate, and amend residential parking standards. These changes make it more clear as to what standards apply to what types of housing, but would also include the following changes. Carports could be visible from the street. Multifamily front yard paving standards are separated from single family and would allow more paving in multifamily front yards. restrictions on how much of that could be used for parking would remain the same. Amending the code to clarify that parking is allowed in driveways, not drive aisles, but driveways, and allow tandem parking arrangements for single family development subject to certain findings. The other change here would be adding an allowance of parking reductions when supported by a peer reviewed parking study. On our final yellow slide, First item here is to modify the administrative use process to add a notification to City Council and Planning Commission. This would be for the administrative use permit and would match the new administrative by right administrative by right permit. We also are recommending changing the defaults for approvals from one to two years with an ability for a one-year director level extension. This could be modified with conditions on a project by project basis, but this would be the default in the code. And finally, we recommend removing the allowances for permitting a use listed in a less restricted district in a more restrictive district with a CUP to match zoning code best practices. Moving on from here to our green category, the transit oriented communities policy. There's only two changes proposed here. First change would require one bike parking space per residential unit for new development, and the second would allow those bike parking spaces to be located or get credit for garages or storage rooms. Again, these are not required by state law, but this would increase cities' eligibility for transportation funds provided regionally. That gets us to the end of going over the substantial list of recommended changes. Wrapping up here, we have environmental determination for the zoning code amendments. There's a number of exemptions and consistencies this falls under, specifically exemptions for rezoning that implements actions of the approved housing element, consistency with the negative declaration adopted for the housing element, a specific exemption for the accessory dwelling unit regulations and a common-sense exemption for items that apply to amendments including technical corrections and minor changes where there's no possibility of a significant effect on the environment. This hearing was noticed for the November 13th meeting including the 20-day Notice, newspapers, city buildings, notified developer stakeholders, and at that meeting, the hearing was continued to a date certain. I will highlight that we did receive one comment letter earlier in the day today, which you should have at your dais. We'd like to thank this public commenter for identifying one section of the government code that has changed, and we will be recommending implementing that one change to fix the reference. The commenter also believed that we did not include certain streamlining provisions within subsection D of the amended ordinance. Those items are included below within subsection E of the ADU regulations as proposed. but we are recommending that we add some language into subsection D that clarifies and points to AD is eligible for streamlining, can see section E below, or similar wording, making it a bit more clear where those live. With that presentation, we are recommending the adoption of a resolution recommending these changes to the City Council and are available for questions.

All right. Thank you, Elliot. I know I really did appreciate all the color codes. Thank you very much. I think that worked a lot better. With that, Commissioner Epstein, questions?

Yes, just one. Can you talk about with the temporary, the change with the land use, from what I understood of it, it's allowing more opportunity to use them in a temporary state than...

Yes. So two types of permits that we have here, sorry, two types of permits we have here. One is an administrative use permit and one is a temporary use permit. Both we take in on the staff level, can review out to relevant staff. A lot of times for things like events, it's a lot of coordination with public safety. A lot of times for things where it involves site development, it's more coordination with engineering and building. Temporary use permits usually have the certain timeline and it's approval for this given event or these given events, while an administrative use permit usually has a longer timeline. otherwise both very similar reviews. This would not change the uses required but rather our code currently says certain events and do you have the example of that?

That's what I was looking for. So I understood the process. It was which events are we allowing to be moved from the administrative review to the temporary?

If we look on your color coded outline on page, The one I can't find. Page 16, thank you. Oh, okay, so on page 16, you'll see it in yellow, and then I'll read those items out loud for the benefit of the folks in the audience. Currently, our code lists many temporary uses and events under the temporary use permit, but has the following items listed under administrative use permit. Flea market or swap meet, live entertainment, recreation event, and religious assembly. I'll note also within our temporary use permit provisions, we do have an item that says if this will be recurring for more than a given number of times in a calendar year or over a certain amount of time, it would come for a conditional use permit. But if this is a one-off event, this change would make that just be a temporary use permit.

Great, thank you. That clears that up.

Thank you.

Commissioner Lam.

No question. Thank you.

I think you made a lot of the substantive changes that we requested last time. So at this point, I don't have any questions. I'm going to go ahead and open it up for public. At this point, I'm going to ask Molly to step to the podium.

Hi, all. Hi, all. I'm Molly Ruber. I live in M section. I'm excited to see these updates. That's what I wanted to come and talk about. But I also want to talk about the process of notification and how we make sure that individuals are notified when they should be notified. I live very close to where the proposed synergy facility was. There wasn't notification there for an admin use permit as the notices went to the developer and to the realtors. So making sure that there is a process for public to be informed even if they don't receive a mail notice I think will be really critical so that people aren't surprised as there are developments, particularly when they're required by law, that come in around them.

That's the big thing.

The second thing I want to say, though, is that we make sure that people are clear on what is the process for these things being approved generally. I think there's a lot of room for interpretation. I believe this is an agenda item coming up. But there's a lot of room for interpretation even when we think things are objective. And so how do we make sure that that doesn't happen. For example, when we think about common sense CEQA exemptions, I'm not sure how that Resynergy project didn't get a CEQA or didn't have to go through CEQA. And so as we think about what we might think is common sense, how do we document that? How do we make sure that the EIR actually applies and make sure the public is informed?

Thank you.

Thank you. Jake McKenzie. Oh, I'm sorry. There we go. You're right. Next item. With that, I'll close the public hearing. Any other questions for staff at this time? No? I'll entertain a motion.

Uh-oh. There we go. That's what I need.

Thank you. I make a motion that we adopt the Planning Commission Resolution 2025-6 recommending the changes to the municipal code and the listed chapters of the code. There we go.

Could you repeat that for the record?

Seeing you're late and everybody picks on you. All right. We're going to go ahead and... All right.

Oh, thank you.

I'm going to make a motion to adopt Planning Commission Resolution 2025-6, recommending to the City Council changes to Titles 1, General Provisions, 16 Subdivisions, and 17 Zoning of the Roanoke Park Municipal Code. Can I have a second? Second.

Second.

Just one comment before we vote. Elliot, the changes that you had indicated, that would be part of this recommendation, correct? We don't need to alter the...

Yes, that would be part of that recommendation as noted in the staff report.

Okay, thank you very much. With that, roll call please.

Roll call is as follows. Chair Orlov?

Yes.

Commissioner Epstein?

Yes.

Commissioner Lamb? Yes. The motion passes with three ayes, zero noes, and two excused absent.

All right.

Thank you. All right, item 6.2. We'll have a public hearing on the draft environmental impact report for Roanoke Park General Plan 2040. I'll introduce Barry Miller, our planning consultant. Welcome, Barry.

It's on.

Thank you. There we go. OK. Good evening, commissioners, members of the public. I'm Barry Miller, the consultant assisting the city with the general plan adoption process. And we're here this evening to have a public hearing to take comments on the environmental impact report, which is now in circulation as a draft document. So just for some context, the general plan is the long range vision for Rohnert Park's future. It focuses on growth and development issues. The plan is required by state law and it's organized into chapters or elements that address different topics. Most of these are state mandated topics. such as land use, transportation, housing, safety, and so on. And then there are also optional elements that deal with topics that the city feels are especially important. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a general plan update, which is what we've just done, is defined as a project. And that means that it's subject to CEQA rules. In this case, an environmental impact report has been prepared. And what that Environmental Impact Report, or EIR, does is it evaluates the effect of adding roughly 6,000 homes and 6,000 jobs in the Roanoke Park planning area over the next 20 years. So it's a plan. The general plan itself looks out to the year 2045. What the EIR does is evaluate at a kind of a high level What will be the effects of that additional population and employment on all of the topics that you typically see covered in an EIR like biological resources, geology, water and water quality and so forth? One of the unique things about the general plan EIRs is that they tend to be self-mitigating. They're designed to mitigate the impacts they might create through the policies and the programs within the document. So in an ideal world, there would be no significant and unavoidable impacts at the end of the day because the general plan would have had policies that mitigate all of those. Often that's not the case because there are some impacts you just can't mitigate, they're global, like greenhouse gas emissions and so forth. So we look at those as well and come up with mitigation measures where feasible. So just to recap the timeline for the project, you can see here that this has been going on for a long time. This actually started in 2018 and there was a lot of movement on the project in the first five years. A lot of community input, community workshops, data collection and analysis, development of policies and actions. There was a slowdown because the city had to get the housing element finished in 2023, so resources were devoted to that. That again was a state mandate with consequences for missing certain deadlines. Work on the project resumed after that was completed, and there's now a draft EIR and general plan there out for review. I'll point out that the general plan and EIR were both released on the same day, which is November 21st, 2025, both through public notices and an email that was sent directly to the general plan mailing list, which includes 970 distinct email addresses. So we feel that there has been broad notification that this process is underway. I want to introduce my colleague Hannah Bareschi from Rincon Consultants. Rincon prepared the EIR for this project, and Hannah will walk you through a couple of slides explaining what is in the EIR and what the process looks like, and then I'll hop back up just to do a next steps slide, and then we'll turn it back to the Commission. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. So I'll go ahead and go into the environmental review process thus far and where we are at in that process. So you'll see that we have the notice of preparation, which was published most recently in March of 2022. The draft EIR was prepared, as Barry mentioned, and it was ultimately published on November 21st of this year. We are currently in the public review period, which is 45 days. So we are accepting public comment now, and the public comment period will ultimately close on January 9th, 2026. That will then put us into preparing the final EIR, which will include the responses to comments. It will also include the city ultimately making a decision on the project once the final EIR is published. To give a brief overview of what's in the draft EIR, we have chapter two, which is the project description. And that summarizes the 2040 general plan, its objectives, and the necessary approvals required. There is also a discussion of impacts and mitigation measures, which is really the bulk of the EIR. That's going to be in chapters 4.1 through 4.18. And you'll note that all CEQA Guidelines Appendix G issue areas are covered in this EIR. There is a Chapter 5, which covers other CEQA-required discussions, which include growth inducement, irreversible effects, and cumulative impacts. And then we do also have Chapter 6, which covers the alternatives. Those are listed here, and I'll briefly describe each one. The first alternative is the no project alternative, which would be a continuation of the 2020 general plan. We also have the environmental conservation alternative, which would change the designation for several parts parcels specifically in the northwest areas of the city and that overall reduced the estimated build out. We do also have the workforce housing program alternative, which implements workforce housing on non-residential parcels. And then there was also a fourth alternative labeled the missing middle housing alternative and that ALLOWS FOR HIGH-DENSITY RESIDENTIAL ZONING IN THE NORTHWEST AND WILFRED DOW SPECIFIC PLAN AREAS. YOU'LL NOTE THAT THE EIR IN CHAPTER 6 DOES COMPARE ALL OF THESE ALTERNATIVES TO THE PROJECT, WHICH IS THE 2040 GENERAL PLAN. And then going into the main body of the EIR, as I mentioned, it mainly covers the analysis which includes mitigation measures. This slide summarizes the impacts that required mitigation as well as the significant unavoidable impacts. I will note that this also, as Barry mentioned, the analysis section definitely incorporated a lot of collaboration and consultation with the Great and Rancheria tribes. So that is incorporated in the tribal cultural resources and cultural resources sections of the EIR. Getting more into the ones that are highlighted bold here, you'll see that we do have significant unavoidable impacts for greenhouse gas emissions, construction noise, and vehicle miles traveled. For construction noise, there is feasible mitigation. However, for greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled, you'll note that there is not. And as Barry mentioned, There are, for each of these, there are general plan policies that do help to reduce those impacts. For construction noise, ultimately we conservatively assume significant unavoidable just because we're not quite sure where and how much noise and all of that for each individual project that might be implemented under the general plan. So we conservatively assume significant unavoidable. For vehicle miles traveled, there is a similar approach there, conservatively assuming at a programmatic level that there would be significant unavoidable impacts due to uncertainty around the VMT reduction strategies and how those would be applied specifically to specific projects implemented under the general plan. And then lastly, I'll just briefly mention for greenhouse gas emissions, there are several implementation policies and programs in the general plan to reduce this impact, some of which require the adoption of a climate action plan. Since that can take quite some time and development projects may go into effect before then, we did also conservatively assume significant unavoidable for that specific impact. So just to explain a little bit about the self-mitigation and why those still are significant and unavoidable for this EIR. And I will go ahead and pass this back to Barry.

So this is our final slide. We're just wanting to go over next steps in this process. And I'll emphasize that this hearing this evening is really intended to give the public an opportunity to comment on the draft environmental impact report and to give the Commission an opportunity to ask any questions make any comments as well. Any comments that are made orally or verbally this evening will be recorded and will be responded to in the final EIR, which includes responses to comments. We do have comment cards that are available on the table over there for any member of the audience who wishes to comment. As Hannah mentioned, the comment period closes on January 9th, 2026. What that means is we can accept written comments on the EIR between now and the end of that week in January. That's a Friday, January 9th. Comments on the General Plan we can continue to receive until the General Plan is adopted, so there is not a hard date or deadline for General Plan comments at this point. And we'll be taking those comments on an ongoing basis. We are planning on holding a joint study session with the Planning Commission and City Council. The tentative date for that is February 5th, so that'll be a really important date to please be there. And that'll be an opportunity to roll up your sleeves and kind of do a deep dive into the general plan itself and go through the elements and the policies and the actions and the maps and ask questions and share any thoughts about that before we bring it back to you for a public hearing. So while the... We're having that meeting. There's also a response to comments document that's going to be prepared. The final EIR will be coming out about the same time as that study session, and then we'll begin the public hearing process. At this point, our tentative schedule is to bring this back to you in March. for a hearing on both the adoption of the EIR and the general plan. What you would be doing is passing a resolution or considering a resolution to the city council that they adopt the plan and certify the EIR. That, we anticipate, would happen in April. That assumes that the commission holds one hearing to do this. You may hold additional hearings at your discretion. And with that, we are available for questions, comments, and comments from the public on the EIR. Thank you.

Thank you, Barry. Questions for staff or our consultants? All right, I'll open up for public hearing. Now, Jake McKenzie.

Mr. Chair, commissioners, staff, consultants, Jake McKenzie, 1536 Gladstone Way. I'm here to remind you historically of our general plan under which we currently exist was finalized and approved by the city council in the year 2000. We're now almost in 2026. A lot of time has passed. And at that same time in the year 2000, a 20-year urban growth boundary was passed. That was renewed in 2019, I believe until 2040. So the basic shape of the city of Roanoke Park has been determined and will continue to be determined by the urban growth boundary. I believe under the general plan diagram, the one thing that, the one thing that has really changed on the western side of Roanoke Park is the existence of the Great Resort and Casino and particularly some recent actions that have taken place which has had a major impact on the northwest sector of this city. The main thing that I would say, I'll submit written comments on the draft EIR, obviously a weighty document, various alternatives. The one alternative number four that particularly interested me was going back to that Northwest area, the original concept can no longer be realized because of the change in ownership and sovereignty of that particular portion. And alternative number four talks to the possibility of missing middle housing. And those of us who have been living in Roanoke Park, in my case, for 40 years, who still live in a two-story standalone family dwelling of 1800 square feet find that there are not a lot of alternatives for the increasingly aging population of this city. And that is one very specific comment I would make that to consider once the general plan is up for discussion and in the work session in February to take another look. It doesn't seem to me that what is currently in the general plan diagram for that area is designated as a business park. I think what we've learned over the last couple of decades is that business parks and the old model that guided the market may not be applicable over the next 20 years. And certainly we have an example in Runner Park Expressway in the University District of Land that we very carefully laid out to be a model a business area and an area with restaurants and other facilities, everybody knows as you drive by that area, that sign is still up there. There does not seem to be an overwhelming interest, frankly, in going ahead with these designations of business areas when It is probably more valuable to the city to be considering some alternative housing options. I was accused by the late columnist, Judge Snyder, of sleeping with the general plan under my pillow. I never did that, but I certainly was involved with council member Vidak Martinez and planning your former or your predecessors, Sean Kielat and Greg Norden in the process that resulted in the existing general plan. And the general outline and proposal for the next 15, 20 years has really not changed, but we do have the state requirements for climate adaptation Some of these additions, very valuable. We tried to do that back in 2009, 2010, and the political climate was not favorable to that at that time. So finally, we're coming to this point. That's the real reason I'm down here, just to observe the fact that now in 2025, the new general plan is coming to fruition. Thank you.

Thank you, Jake. Are there any other individuals who'd like to speak up during the public hearing? Close the public hearing. All right, are there any other comments or questions for staff or our consultants? My fellow commissioners? This topic. this topic. Any questions for staff? No. I would just reiterate former Mayor McKenzie's comments in regard to single story housing. I think we discussed back in 2019 that parcel of land on the corner of Petaluma Hill and and the expressway being converted to housing. I think that didn't go over well at that time. I think there was also some discussions about the parcel and W section going over to housing. I know that we converted to housing the parcel that was adjacent to Costco, and that's been built out. But those are some Good points made, I think. I think definitely with our aging population, that single story family homes are important. With that, I have no other comments. I guess we'll see you next two months or so, February. Thank you. All right. Moving on, item 6.3, study session on objective design standards, CEQA status, not a project. And this is being, I assume you're Tom Ford.

I am. Good evening, Chair Orloff and the Planning Commission. So I'm here tonight just to talk about objective design standards. What we originally set up as a scope of work with the staff was two study sessions to work through some of the issues, hear from you, throw out some ideas, and hear back. That's the first study session. At the next study session, approximately February or March, we'll come back with study session number two, We might have like a draft document and I'll say that loosely, just sort of a draft, something for you to chew on. You would get in advance and then we'll discuss it at that workshop number two. So there's a very granular agenda. It's not going to take that long to go through it. So don't feel like this is a two hour agenda. But I just want to say the objective as to why we're here. I kind of started to go into it. Give you a background of how we got here and how the state helped us get here with some of the recent legislation. Give you a project timeline. Then talk for a little bit about the difference between subjective design guidelines and objective design standards, which is the document that we aim to produce here. We'll talk about some of the existing design policy documents that you already have and that we can use as a resource. Then I'll talk about a few different design issues, particularly along the lines of the way our firm generally sets up an objective design standards document. And then we have some case study examples and then love to hear your discussion. So the reason we're here, is to discuss and receive direction from you about the priorities you might have for design, design priorities and development priorities for multifamily and mixed-use development that we can incorporate into an objective standards document. The background is that the state has recently adopted a number of different laws that sort of remove a lot of the approval process from a discretionary process to a ministerial process. And it started generally in 2017 with SB 35 and started saying that a body could not judge a project by subjective guidelines. It had to be an objective standard. So that's when objective standards started really coming into the fore. They have to be written in a way that it's subjective. So the staff can look at a checklist and say, does this meet the standard? Yes? No? So you go through it that way. So what we like to do is set up a standards document that codifies your values and what you think about the different character areas of the city or the different typologies of residential development and how our process can provide the staff with the document that allows them to do the ministerial review because you won't have a chance to do a discretionary review for many of the projects that will come forward. The timeline for what we're doing, there we are tonight in the bright yellow. And what we'll do is we'll have this discussion with you. It's unfortunate there's three-fifths of you, but I'm sure there'll be new ideas that we'll hear the next time we're back here, and we can listen to your colleagues as well. We'll go away and prepare basically an administrative draft based on what we hear and based on our background, my firm's background in developing documents like this. We'll come back to study session number two, which I said is probably going to be February or March. We'll let you chew on that. Talk about certain issues. Maybe there's a metric we use about window size or something that you want to talk about. Then we'll go away and we'll develop, we'll respond to those, the directives and comments, and we'll come back with a public review draft. And so that'll be a hearing in front of you where we'll ask you to consider and recommend for adoption that document. You might have changes you want us to make before we actually take it to the council for a hearing and an adoption consideration. So what are objective design standards? This is language directly from SB 35 in 2017, and it's been used in much legislation since. It's really the definition. There can be no personal or subjective judgment when you're looking at something. It has to be the applicant on one side of the counter and the planner on the other side of the counter, and there's no wiggle room. So it's like it's either three feet or it's not three feet, and so you can answer the question. So objective standards tend to need to be written with that kind of knowability. So just to point out some of the differences, if you've seen any of your design guideline documents that you have in this community, The design guidelines are generally, they're not enforceable. They're suggestions. They're recommendations. Eyes on the street. Make sure windows face the public entry. there's a lot of room to quibble there. So they involve negotiation and compromise, and they're generally defined by the verb should. Your project should do this. So again, that's not enforceable, whereas if you look at the column on the right, the objective standards will have enforceable requirements. There's a metric involved, so you can measure it, and the two people on either side of the planning counter can say yes or no, it meets it or it doesn't. And they're generally defined with the verb shall, that you shall provide 20% fenestration on the ground floor or something like that. It's easily reviewed. So again, I just kind of said this, but I already in the previous slide, but here's two versions, you know, so pedestrians should do this. But then on the other hand, if you look at the objective standard on the right, There's a way to define it, that there should be an internally connected pathway that connects all building entries. So that's very easily seen on the applicant's plan. There's a number of ways to do this. You can just have pure metrics, counts, and measurements. A commercial ground floor in a mixed-use development shall have a ceiling height of no less than 12 feet, something like that. You can do ratios. The ground floor should step back, you know, two times the amount of the height or something like that. Checklists, um, uh, in order to achieve this standard, follow four of the five following the four of the five following things. And so they, we would have a range and this, this is a way of, um, uh, providing some flexibility for the designer. You say here, do four of these things and you provide six options so they can like pick and choose and maybe, um, find a way to still manifest their design, but with some options. Scorecards, do seven of the following things. The first two are worth three points. The second set is worth five points and you must achieve a combined 12 points, something like that. And then performance measures, you know, make sure that 10% of the ground floor is, or the ground space is open space usable to the residents. So as I said, you have a number of documents that we can take reference from. These are policy documents that exist for your city. Generally, many of them are very area focused. They might have been written for a specific plan that's at a certain area of town. There's a couple of them. Bullet point number two. This is more of a townwide general mixed use and multifamily design guidelines. But again, those are very subjective. They're written for, hey, you should do this. So there's, you know, the applicant doesn't necessarily have to do that. So what we do generally when we make a document like this and we've done this in. Well, we did the objective standards in Petaluma, Alameda County, Los Gatos, Lafayette, a number of different Bay Area community, Calistoga, a number of different communities. As we generally divided into two sections, concentrate on site design issues and go through a series of issues there. And I'm going to do that in just a little bit with you. And then talk about building design issues so you can see on the right there's a top there's a middle and there's a base and then sometimes you can also divide up the bays so that there's a way of breaking down the mass and addressing different building issues. Once you get into those two designations or chapters, there's a whole series of issues that you can start to talk about and provide objective guidance for, or not guidance, objective standards for. So I'm going to just show I think about three here, just three or four examples, and then For this whole list, we actually have images at the back end of the slideshow after I finish. If you say, oh, let's talk about fenestration, we can jump over there. But here I'm just going to just kind of go through some of these issues. All of the photos that you'll see in this presentation tonight are from Roanoke Park. They're somewhat recent, but not always real recent, but they're recent multifamily development that we've seen in different parts of the community. So here's the issue of vehicle access and parking generally to facilitate better pedestrian and bicycle safety and circulation. Buildings generally are trying to avoid this kind of a pattern where the parking lot is in front and sort of doesn't give the pedestrian much safety or form. And so we generally try to write a standard that achieves what the SUBJECTIVE GUIDELINE THERE IN THE UNION UNIVERSITY DISTRICT SPECIFIC PLAN TALKS ABOUT SO WE CAN COME UP WITH THE STANDARD THAT PUTS THE BUILDING AT THE FRONT STILL PROVIDES ADEQUATE PARKING, BUT YOU REALLY SHAPE THE STREET AS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PLACE, NOT JUST FOR VEHICLES, BUT ALSO FOR PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLISTS. Equipment, utilities and service areas, we threw this in here even though it's kind of one I don't really like because almost everything we always write generally gets, the service provider just comes in and does whatever they want. So when they're going to collect the trash, they're going to collect the trash they want. And if you want to put a door there, that doesn't mean they're going to close the door. So it's a really difficult standard, but there are things we can do. putting a roof, putting landscaping, putting gates, but there's only so much you can do. You're really at the whim of the service provider. Moving on to building issues, ground floor design. Where is the front door? Does it face the sidewalk? Does it face the street? Does it provide some activity that makes the sidewalk experience more lively? rather than turning your back on the sidewalk and not creating as safe or desirable of a place. So there's a lot of things you can do in terms of, you know, maybe you make a standard where you don't allow that front yard to be tucked underneath that balcony. Maybe there's a way to have a railing on the porch so that it has some personal scale. A number of different things. But this is a pretty nice front yard in a way because it's got the landscape buffer between the sidewalk and the porch. It has an identifiable front door and it has some detail in the facade materials. Another issue is materials. You can do something, we generally don't allow this where you have one material just sort of slapped onto the front, if you will. You generally would want to write a standard and it's a pretty easy standard to write where you demand that a material Turn the corner, and if you're going to change materials, you do it at an interior corner so that it doesn't look like such a veneer, a slapped-on veneer, but it looks like it's a formidable piece of material. So you can also have standards that say the front facade shall have a minimum of two materials. Either one can be no less than 30% of the total. There's a lot of things we can do there to provide variety. And while I'm on it, you can also talk about windows. A lot of times we get into... not allowing a window like this. This is kind of the design. I can see that they've sort of had this flat window that's sort of co-planar with the facade, but sometimes you might want to have a window detail that provides some shadow and some depth and some articulation for the facade. So again, here's just the same list of design issues. What I wanted to do now is just leave this with you. We can go on to questions or comments or public comment and we can return to this, but as I said, We also have a whole series of design issues here at the back that we can go to. Let me just finish here though. So what we wanted you to do is to have a discussion. We put these three questions in the staff report too. Is there something you saw here or didn't see that you think should be prioritized as we go away and start to make that draft document and come back here within February or March? Are there specific design issues based on a recent approval process that you might have been part of that you want us to concentrate on? And then are there design issues or specific locations that should be emphasized? So, you know, on the west side, don't do this or on the, you know, near the university, do this or make sure that the open space is handled and opens onto the street better or something like this. So these are just broad questions to help you if you want to provide any questions or comments. Where we're going from here, as I said earlier, is that we're gonna go away and we're gonna write a draft document. It'll have some diagrams in it as well. And we'll bring that, we'll work with staff to get that, to make sure it's something that they're happy with us bringing forward for you to discuss. And then we'll come back in February or March and have that meeting, that planning commission study session number two. We'll take comment and direction from you and then go away, and spruce up that document and bring back something that you can consider for recommending the council adopt. And then after that, we would then of course go to the council hearing. That's my presentation.

Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it. I'll open it up to the commissioners. Commissioner Epstein, questions?

Yes, so there's a unique issue that I wonder if falls under this because of its uniqueness. It didn't seem to find a home for where it could get addressed. So both in W section and in K section, there was this unique problem of Because the homes are so close together and the height of the homes with the windows, there were several instances where the reflection of the sun off of the window into then the neighbor's yard was actually starting fires. It was melting furniture. And it was actually burning the side of the neighbor's home where the reflection was coming down. And there was some damage to vehicles. I know case section and actual fire started in some bark. And it all goes back to this window design. how close they are to the other homes and I know when I spoke with the fire marshal when it originally happened there was also this kind of conundrum because it was specifically because of the type of windows that were being used but those were the windows required by the building code and so the design the developer did everything right but this is a unique problem that came up and I'm just wondering is that something that we could solve through design because Like I said, the developer did everything per the building code. There was no violation of any fire code. So it was this weird middle ground of everybody did everything right and we still had this issue.

I was about to say yes until you said that they followed the building code. So I would be happy to look into that. I was going to suggest it was some sort of glare quality in the glass. But then when you said that they followed the building code, I don't know if that's the right. I had never heard about it. I heard about it in London where a skyscraper that was all glass had started a fire. But I hadn't heard about it in a residential context. So it seems like it's probably, as you said, the glass. It's not the distance between the residents or anything like that. It was just the quality of the glass and the glare.

I think it's a combination of how close everybody is with the reflection. I mean, you can track where the sun's going to be every day. So it was just some homes, because it wasn't happening... all over, but it was enough. I think there were six or seven occasions in W section, and I don't know how many there were in K, but it seemed specific to certain, because you know how it is. There's... like four or five designs for the homes and they just kind of repeat down the block and it was consistent with one type of design of the house because of the height where the windows were that were reflecting into the yard that it was just a combination of materials and building so um and while i'm and while the developer followed the building code you know as well as i do there's different There's all kinds of things in the building code that you can use So I just thought that would be it's a unique problem that we faced and it was really concerning to some people and I thought You know as we continue to build these types of homes that might be a problem that we get I can look into it with Elliot as we continue

I'm assuming it was probably a south-facing facade or maybe a west-facing facade. So I can look into what happened there and maybe even research how they responded. Did the fire marshal make a decision or draw a conclusion?

Yeah, it was the former fire marshal, and his solution was that, his recommendation was that the houses that were with the glass that was reflecting put in a tent that would then absorb, and then there was a lot of back and forth over whose responsibility was that, and it kind of got to be a whole other thing. Right.

I mean, that was my first inclination, but I still go to what you said, that they were following the building code, but we can look into it. Thank you. Commissioner Lam.

Thank you for the presentation. When you are asking the commissioners what are our priorities, excuse me, in terms of looking into the standards. So are we going to rewrite or look at all the standards or are we picking some of them only for this process?

Tonight it would be great if you could share with us, share with me things that you really want to see happen in terms of design or not happen. You know, I wish they hadn't, that building they did on X Street, I wish they'd broken up the mass or something. When we come back to workshop number two and we'll have more of an actual document that you can go through, that's when you can start to say, Well, Tom, you said five feet, but it seems like this should be eight feet. Or you can say, this isn't really that important of an issue. You can drop it. Or why don't you push this issue a little bit further? Maybe we can talk a little bit more about massing. So that's the second one. The second workshop is where you can start to criticize or be critical with the document that we bring. Tonight, we're just wanting to hear any kinds of ideas or hopefully something I already showed maybe triggered an idea that you have.

Got it. I understand. Thank you.

Hi, Tom. My preference is that the items that we look at sort of like concentrate on safety elements. And so there are a lot of issues that come up such as ingress-egress where that might happen from the street and whatnot. We have some housing properties that will fall into buy-right on Snyder that will become an issue, I believe. and you know that that would include not only placement of where the driveway might be but also traffic studies because of the proximity to school populations as well as how sidewalks might meander adjacent to the property because not only will you have cars close to making turns that might interfere with a driveway but we have a lot of sidewalks and bike lanes that are not protected especially on the bike lane part of it it's there there are some great paths and some great areas to get from one place to another and runner park but some of the streets and it may and this might be a general plan issue you know as well you know that we'll be discussing but if Quite frankly, bicycles on main thoroughfares is, you know, you're taking your life in your hands. You know, whether you're on Bodway, whether you're on Golf Course, whether you're on Snyder or Country Club, it's just a dangerous proposition. And some of these where housing is going to go on Snyder, I think it complicates it, especially when you have bicycles that are moving from bike lanes onto the sidewalk to try to remain safe. Now they're not safe to pedestrians, right? I think also, you know, some of the streets, you know, when you talk about K&W, you know, the width of the streets is just not safe for public safety. And so I think we have to look at what's an appropriate width to make sure that our public safety officials, whether by fire truck or otherwise, ambulance, et cetera, have appropriate ingress to those neighborhoods so that they can deal with emergency situations. That's my, on the one side of the, I think the left side of your slide, The other side of it, I'm sort of like, from a building design perspective, I think we have to look at height requirements and how they're affecting neighboring properties. There's this big hill on the east side of town that everybody seems to want a view of. And sometimes with new, we'll call high rises, even if there are just three stories, people get upset over the loss of views. And I think there's probably mitigation that can be looked at from that perspective. I don't see anything about native plants in there. I think that we have to maintain appropriate vegetation i think color palettes are important i don't i i know that in m section there's a lime greenhouse it's the ugliest thing i've seen i think we need to go with earth tones or we have to agree on what the palette should look like um that's off the top of my head i know that commissioner epstein has another issue so i'll just pass the baton over to matt

Yeah, I should have mentioned it earlier. I want to make sure that we're taking all the wildland urban interface recommendations into consideration. Something as simple as closed gutters. You know, the last two major fires we had in this county and the way fire is changing is they're all ember driven, you know, or wind driven ember fires. And so we should take every precaution to make sure that people are, you know, that we're building safe structures both with material There's been a lot of work done on fire-resistant materials for building homes, for building roofs, and then other recommendations that the NFPA and other organizations have made for how to deal with the WUI. I mean, if you look at, again, both K and W, where they're built on one of the most vulnerable sides of Roanoke Park when it comes to wildland urban interface, and we're continuing to build, and it's just a reality in this county. So I think we should look at what those recommendations are and really make them requirements for new construction, especially as we do continue to build and have more dense areas because we're also increasing the fire load of the town by doing that and so by building them with fire resistance and fire safe materials we're protecting the other older homes around them that are not built that way thank you anymore nope okay um if there are no other questions i um just respond to you sure chair

because I don't want to come back in two months and disappoint you. Color is really, really difficult, particularly in a community where basically you're looking at infill development. It's much easier to control in greenfield development where you've got the whole 40 acres and you're going to say there's these three styles and that's it, and there's these five colors and that's it. When you're here in a community that's already built and you're bringing in development, it's a lot harder, especially in an objective way, to control. So you use the color green. I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find somebody here in your community that likes the color green that you don't like. So it's a really hard thing to control. So we'll do our best. It's related to materials. And so what we generally do with materials, it's much harder to do for color. but with materials rather than saying, hey, you can use these materials because there's gonna be some composite material that comes in and you didn't think of it. We generally define which materials are not allowed. And so we have, it can be an exhaustive list or it can be a somewhat thorough list, but we generally approach materials from that standpoint. And we've always just had a hard time trying to control color from an objective sense.

I understand that. And out of the list of things I mentioned, that was probably the least that I was concerned with. But I understand where you're coming from from that perspective. And I guess color is subjective, right?

In response to what you just said, I would encourage the effort. I understand what you're saying about materials because it can be an exhaustive list. But specific to the topic I brought up, it doesn't have to be name brand, but there are lists of types of materials that are used for the WUI environment. And I think just take the opportunity to look at what those are. There's been a lot of work done. I know they have some of similar ordinances have popped up in Marin. It's not foreign to our surrounding community. And I think it'd be good.

We'll look into it more. But also last year, about a year ago this time, we did the objective design standards in Woodside. which is up in the hills and it's a very fire dangerous area. And their subjective design guidelines already were trying to approach it. So that was our starting point. And we developed a lot of great objective standards for materials that simply just wouldn't be allowed. So we can start there and start to address the issue you're raising.

Okay. Any more questions? All right. Thank you, everybody. Look forward to seeing you again. OK. Oh, I'm sorry. Right. Any public comments on this item? Thank you for sticking with us. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. OK, thank you. All right. Item seven. items from the Planning Commission. Commissioner Epstein, anything?

I really want to thank the staff for putting together and reworking the first motion from tonight. I mean, I think it's a good example of how good conversation can get the stuff done, but I can only imagine how much work it was to completely redo that, so I thank you very much. Acknowledging that the majority of the changes that were made were based on state law, and we had no ability to say no to that. I really want to make sure I say that before I say the next thing, but one of the unfortunate consequences of that by no fault of anybody but the state passing these laws is that a lot of this there's a larger shift of the decision-making not being brought to this commission, but being made by the staff and being made in a less transparent environment. Again, no fault of your own, but the way that the state has written the laws in an effort to try to boost the housing. But given some recent events in the city and the general tenor and tone that I get from the people that I speak to in the community, there is a lot of concern about transparency and process. And so I thank you for adding the notification pieces in because that was not a requirement. That was a request of the commission, so thank you. And I would just really put out there that any time that we can take the extra steps to notify, to be transparent, to put the information out, although not required, and even if the public doesn't have an opportunity to have a comment or we don't have an opportunity to comment, I think it would build trust with the community just by saying, hey, there's not a lot we can do here, but this is happening. And I think that that will at least give people the opportunity to not be caught off guard and can kind of build back some trust. So thank you again for all the work on that. Thanks, Matt. Fannie?

Nothing. All right. Yeah, I echo Matt's comments. The binder was a lot easier to get through, and I do appreciate those changes that were made. With that, I'm going to toss it to item eight, items from the development services staff. Christina?

Okay. Just one that was mentioned earlier, that there's a joint meeting with the Planning Commission and the Council, coming up February 5th, and thank you all. I have all three yeses that are sitting here, and one more yes, so we definitely have four out of five at least, and possibly all five of you, so looking forward to that. That should be really a lot of fun. And, sorry, I'm a planner. I think it's fun, but also very productive. And also that there is a upcoming change for council hours. I'm sorry, for council meetings starting at 5.30 rather than 5. And I'm sorry, that starts January?

Yes, that's starting the first meeting January 13th.

Okay, just as an FYI and if anyone's listening.

Oh, okay. Our meeting time is the same, right?

Your meeting time is the same, yes.

Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, so if there's nothing else, it's 7.42 and we'll adjourn this meeting. Thank you.

Whoops. I'm too fine for covering. Sorry. No, no, no.