Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Tonight's meeting, we will open up with taking roll.

Sorry for the delay. Jeffrey Barrett. Here.

Amy Barry. Here. Amy Burrows.

Here.

Brian Scott.

Here.

Anna Sullivan. Here. Michael Vella.

Here.

All right. We'll move to the report of the chair and vice chair, and I have nothing to report.

I have nothing to report.

We'll move to report of the director.

Alright. Update on city council business. Last night was one of their busiest meetings as far as land use, planning, zoning issues. We're gonna start with one that council did enact temporary zoning regulations pertaining to daily water use. So this is a provision we already have on our in our code that we adopted in twenty two thou twenty twenty one that limits the daily water use to 200,000 gallons per day, which is still a lot of water.

However, what the council enacted, expands. There's some exemptions in our codes, for different types of uses, and what the council enacted was a narrowing of those exceptions. So more land uses would be, subject to those. Those exemptions that are in our code right now are things like agricultural residential uses, which we don't have a residential use that comes close to using that much water, and institutional land uses. What this does is that it primarily breaks down what specific institutional uses that might be subject to that, including certain government operated facilities.

As a temporary land use regulation, it's in effect for one hundred and eighty days unless the city adopts an ordinance that makes those permanent, which is our intention. So that will come to the planning commission in fairly short order. It does require the mayor to initiate that petition. So that's already been put in motion for the mayor to do that. And once we get that, we will start our process.

So it'll probably be to the planning commission at one of the May meetings. Hundred and eighty days is basically six months from now. So by the September, the city will have to have something in place. The council also adopted a number of sorry. I have to scroll through their agenda because there is a lot, and I can't remember it all.

But so they adopted the proposal dealing with the text amendment dealing with alley and street closures and vacations. So once that's published, will go into effect. So any applications after that point will start following those new standards, are new factors and process that the Planning Commission saw back in 2025. They also adopted two proposals that modified fence height. So this dealt with residential fence heights increasing it up to seven feet, which the Planning Commission actually recommended against.

The council chose to do that, to make it seven feet, and removed hedge height from the regulations of fences. So it's regulated just like vegetation. And also lowered the or allowed for six foot tall fences in light manufacturing zones. So that was adopted. They also adopted what's titled the Rio Grande Master Plan and Zoning Map Amendments.

This is for the land just east of Salt Lake Central Station. So they basically rezoned that from GMU to D4. The Planning Commission recommended that back in 2025 as well. They also adopted a both of general plan and zoning map amendment on 400 East and just south of 500 South. This was a continuation of a project that's already been built that went through a rezone several years ago.

This is a small little piece for an addition to that. And then of note, this is something that wasn't required to come to the Planning Commission, but they also approved temporary street closures surrounding Temple Square for the duration of the LDS Church's open house for the temple. So that will occur in 2027. Let's see. They had multiple public hearings last night.

The big one was the proposal to rezone the property next to Shur House Park from ME 3 to ME 8 for that proposed hotel. They did not take action on that. They closed the public hearing. As is typical for their process, they'll make a decision at a later date. Right now, that tentative date is April 7 for a decision.

They also had a public hearing for a zoning amendment up off of Foothill And 1300 South. It's for three homes, if you may recall this, that they want to rezone to match. I think it's ME 3 that's across maybe it's ME 5 across the street. It's ME 3. Not across the street, adjacent to it for a fairly large residential development that would occur on that parking lot.

And then they also had a public hearing for the proposal for the expiration of land use approvals. So that's they did not adopt that either. It's also scheduled for April 7 right now as a tentative action date. And then they approved one alley closure. This was one where there's been a building there that we could document from the nineteen fifties blocking it, and it really hasn't been used by the property in question. It kinda terminates that property. Let's see. I think that was about it on council actions yesterday. So there's, like, something like 10 different items on that agenda related to what you do as a planning commission. That's all I have.

Alright. Thank you. Next, we will move into open forum. So if there's something we want to discuss that's not directly tied to a specific item on the agenda, we can do that. We'll have ten minutes.

I am curious if you have any updates. I know that the Trib sort of associated some of the water use rules with the potential detention center on the West Side. I'm curious if you have any updates on the the the request for additional information that we gave to the staff.

Yeah. So the state law is pretty clear that lands owned by the federal government are not subject to local land use regulations. And so there's not much from a zoning perspective that under that provision in state code that really the city can apply here. So we've looked at other options and things like that. I will say that one thing for the commission to consider is that we do have a land use called community correction facility in our land use tables that is generally could apply to things like privately operated types of facilities, which we do have in the state contracts with providers, particularly for what's commonly called a halfway house that fits into that category.

And we do have several of those in Salt Lake City. So really, from the commission perspective, that would be the type of use where if you want to continue with if you want us to add something to modify those provisions where those are allowed, if they're still allowed altogether, then that's something that we certainly can add at the next or one of the next two Planning Commission meetings. So we can bring back some more specific information, put it on the agenda for you. You've already made that ask by motion, so we can do that part.

Okay.

I mean, guess I would ask other folks if they have any interest in looking in the direction of community correction facilities. I just, this happened, this facility was purchased under cover of night, and I know a lot of folks in my community are really, really scared, and I just, you know, I'm trying to get creative or imagine any way that we can use the small grant of power that we have in order to try and protect or slow down, right, dig our heels in in any way we can imagine, just given the context and what we know is going to happen in that facility.

Yeah. And I think we don't know any real details at this point still as a city. So as soon as we find out more information, I think we'll analyze that collectively. It won't just be planning division that looks at that, and we'll you know, I'm I'm sure the city will consider what our options are at that point.

I I I'm interested in continuing to to hear what the options are or what the rules are, like, have the have the response for that. I'm interested in it.

I mean, certainly, I would I would love to to get an understanding of the real nitty gritty of what we can't do, because you said it's state law, so it's not like a federal preemption issue. It's a state preemption issue.

No, it's a federal preemption too. We can't apply local land use regulations to federally owned properties.

And this was actually federally purchased, it's not being leased or under contract, correct?

From what we know, yes. Got you.

So the notion that you were talking about a moment ago was to the extent that we have this sort of halfway house designation in certain zones, presumably under allowed uses, that falls. And so you're suggesting that we could change where that would be an acceptable use?

Yes, yes. I mean, that's within your authority. And I think the lens that we would be looking at that from is, the city already carrying more than its fair share of that service for the region or the state. And I think that's what we would look at in that. So we already have several of these facilities. We clearly already have we now have the state prison. So we can give you information about what those facilities are, where they are located, and then what other future what that might mean for the future.

Yeah. Let's do it. Okay.

Sure. And then the effect of that would be though then that, I mean if I'm understanding, just to be very explicit about it, if we had already changed the rule for whatever zone that was in, and we'd said that this type of use is not acceptable in that area, then they couldn't have bought it with an eye to that type of use. Is that

they I'm couldn't trying to like Our land use regulations do not apply to state owned or federally owned land.

But it wouldn't be owned. I'm saying that if they didn't yet own it, if they were to come in to try to buy a second dice facility after we'd made such a change, would they in any way be subject to this? Because it's not an

If they It's no longer an

acceptable place.

If they don't own it, we'd have to look at what the legalities of our regulations are at that point. But when they own it, it's very, very clear.

And we can't prevent the federal government from purchasing property. So even if this regulation had been in place, sense and I wish there were other ways we could approach this, but my sense is that we would not have been able to prevent it because they were purchasing potentially with an eye towards a community correction facility because the land use regulations are implemented at the point of the change in use rather than the point of sale. Yes. Yeah. I am curious if that community correction facility designation would also apply to, for example, private incarceration facilities that are contracted by ICE.

It absolutely would to privately owned or operated facilities on privately owned land.

Yeah. Understood. Thank

you. Yeah. Let's do that.

At minimum. Alright, then we will move on into our consent agenda, which is just approval of last meeting's minutes. If someone would like to make a motion.

I'm happy to move that we approve the minutes from two weeks ago. I second.

Alright, we have a motion and a second. We'll go ahead and vote.

Commissioner Barrett?

Yes.

Commissioner Berry? Yes. Commissioner Burrows?

I'll abstain because I wasn't here.

Commissioner Leverett?

Yes.

Commissioner Rosenfield?

Yes.

Commissioner Scott?

Yes.

Commissioner Sullivan? Yes. Commissioner Bella?

Yes. Pass.

Alright and then we'll move on to our our working sessions for this evening, which is the Planning Division Annual Report.

All right. As you may or may not know, we're required to provide an annual report on just the development activity the application activity that comes through the Planning Division and our work to the Planning Commission in March of every year. So that's what we're doing here. This year, we published this as a website. And I think an email went out to everybody.

If not, we'll send it to you. So I just wanted to touch on some of the highlights of this. So for those that don't know, because we realize you may not interact with our entire team all the time, but we have several functions that are within the Planning division. One is this part that you're all familiar with, that we process land use applications that are privately submitted. We work on our community plans and the city's general plan as a whole.

But we also do things like review building permits for zoning compliance, And we have a variety of teams that do that. The first team I'm going to talk about is what we call the planning counter. This is the first point of contact for almost everybody who wants to interact with the planning division. So these are the people who answer questions about zoning and do our application intake to make sure they're all complete. They review business licenses, and they also process some land use applications as well.

This is actually a very busy group, as you can imagine. One of the interesting trends that's happened here is really since 2020 and COVID, The number of walk ins we get never recovered from COVID. Before COVID, we would probably get, I think, about close to 3,000 walk ins every year. That's down down one third of what that number was. Part of that is because we had to revamp how we work, right?

And it turns out a lot of people like that. They don't want to come in if they don't have to. And so things like our walk ins, like I said, are down. We average between three and four per working day is all. Our phone calls are way, way up. And then we get over 5,000 phone calls specific to the planning counter. This does not include the phone calls that all the other 39 staff members in the planning division receive. This is just to that planning counter number. And then we get about 2,000 email inquiries. This team last year reviewed 2,000 business licenses.

Those are new business licenses or expansions. So if someone's renewing a business license, it's just a click of a button. We don't really we just make sure it's the same business, and then we just go on. But if it's new, we obviously have to make sure that it's an allowed use and there's no sort of other triggers that come in. They also prescreen all of our applications.

Last year, had nine eighty three land use applications that came in. And then they do a lot of our quick turnaround types of applications. So, we'll get to these numbers, down below. Our development review team are the people who do most of the zoning reviews in the city. You can see that they reviewed 4,600 more than 4,600 building permits last year.

This is everything from small little things like changes to a historic building, maybe someone's replacing a railing, all the way up to large massive developments. They also manage what we call the development review team. These are people who are preparing to submit a building permit. They come in, they meet with representatives from different city departments. We manage that process in the planning division, and this is the team that does it.

Last year this is also a number that's way down. We basically have these about two hours a day, thirty minute appointments for people. 2022 and before, these were full. In fact, you sometimes are waiting four or five weeks to schedule one of these. Now they're almost next day. So that's as much a reflection of some of the code changes we've made where people don't it's a lot easier for people to actually get to that point where they're submitting a permit, but it's also a reflection of a slowed down development economy.

Do you think that to any extent this is people giving up because in 2022 there was a five week out wait? Like there was a lack of capacity and people

No, because people were waiting. They were willing to do it. And they just, at that point in time, they understood, look, it's a boom time. Things are going to be slower.

A

lot of times under this, people don't necessarily have the same types of questions that they used to. So I think it's a reflection of all the other city departments also being more responsive to inquiries, and a lot of these things we can handle without having to set up the meeting.

It's not an indicator of a lack of city capacity in any way?

No. Okay. Thank you. So we also hold what we call pre submittal meetings. So before anyone submits a major application that eventually comes here, we offer these pre submittal meetings. This is where they come and they talk to us. They tell us what they want to do. We tell them what processes are required. This is the meeting where people say, oh, they come here. This is what the planning division recommended we do.

And it's not that we're recommending you do it. We're telling you, you have to go through these processes. You can choose to do that or not and just propose something that complies with code. But if you don't, you have to do these things. So just like the development review team, these have slowed down quite a bit.

But we still did 110 of these last year. Not all of these lead to applications. A lot of times people have proposals that we think are just so far out there from what they would need to do that it's just not worth their time. And I'm talking things like somebody wanting to propose like D1 a zone on Foothill Drive. Not that we've ever had that, but that's kind of the nature of some of these asks that we get.

We generally will not tell people. A lot of people at those meetings want to know if we're going to support their application. We do not tell them at those meetings that we do, but we will tell them we think this is a long shot. We've got a good understanding what the Planning Commission historically has viewed these things, what the City Council does too. So let's get into the meat of it. So these are our land use applications that are broken into five I'm sorry, did someone have sec?

I'm curious if you have any way of tallying some of those more out there inquiries or identifying if there are patterns in those requests?

There's not really any patterns. I mean, we keep records of everything that we say to those people, so we track that. So we'll know if somebody comes in with the same property every two or three years, which we have those people. But there's not really a pattern on that level of I don't know the right term, but those ideas that are just so far out there that they're just not going to be a reality.

So it's not like, oh, this might be indicating something that's in the direction of, there is a high demand for D1 to expand in this particular direction or Yeah. Thank you.

All right. So we have five categories of applications. We obviously have the commissions, the Planning, Christian, Landmarks Commission. And then we have our things that are more administrative in nature, subdivisions, what we call zoning administration, which is a lot of smaller things. And then we have the appeals process.

So this is a breakdown of the applications that we receive. And these are pretty typical percentages. They're usually around these ballparks every year. The applications we get for changes to historic buildings are far and away the largest group of applications we Nearly all of those are done at a staff level. So we'll get to breakdowns of what the Landmarks Commission has seen in the last year, but probably more than 90% of those are done by staff.

Appeals, we'll get into as well. They make a very small percent but take up a lot of time when we get those. We get them not only of the commission decisions but our administrative decisions too. We're also responsible for processing appeals of zoning violations. So those go to the same hearing officer as well. We fortunately get very few appeals, partly because and and know, we're pretty prudent about making sure that we have evidence on our decisions. And you see that in our staff reports, in our discussions, etcetera, and that's reflected in how few items are appealed.

Are any of the appeals from Planning Commission this year?

There was one, and we're going to get

to And

then obviously, subdivisions. We do a lot of subdivisions. Most of them are small kind of lot line adjustments and consolidations, but we do a fair number of new subdivisions too. They're just typically not residential in nature. They're almost always commercial or industrial. So we'll break these down. So we had 12 appeals in 2025, which is about average. There was only one appeal of commission decisions. The other 11 were administrative decisions. That appeal was you granted a time extension for a prior approval.

There's no real basis for an appeal there, and obviously your decision was upheld by the hearing officer. Yeah. In fact, we haven't had a decision of the I think in the last four years, we've had one Planning Commission decision that was overturned. And that was a development on 200 East where the code authorized the application, and it was denied because someone on the commission didn't feel like it should be authorized. That's not a reason to make a decision.

Code authorizes it. You have to consider it. And then this is just a breakdown of all those. I'm not going to go through each one of these. Variances are listed here, but they're generally not an appeal. They're categorized in our zoning administration. Variances are very rarely applied for. It's even more rare where they're granted. Variances are dictated by state code, and there's five standards that have to be met. You have to meet all five of those, or has to be denied.

And one of the big things is that there has to be a hardship that is created not by the property owner, which most of these variants are someone trying to legalize something they've already done. And it has to be related to the land, really. So it's a really high bar. We also have an administrative hearing process, which you may not know about. But these are public hearing in front of our the administrative hearing officer, which is typically the zoning administrator.

These our code allows conditional uses to be approved at that process if they're not either in a residential zone, adjacent to residential use, things like that. We only had two of these last year, which I think is the lowest we've ever seen, both cell towers. So Landmarks Commission, here's a breakdown of what they've seen. So they, unlike the Planning Commission, they only had 23 agenda items last year. They generally have very low numbers as far as that because there's just not the things that are required to go to the Landmarks Commission are any new construction of a principal building, the relocations and reconstructions, and then some major alterations, and any demolition of what's called a contributing building.

Non contributing buildings are not required to go to Landmarks Commission because they're not considered historic. Here you can see how frequently people view the Landmarks Commission information. So that's quite a high number considering 23 agenda items. They meet once a month. And sometimes they get canceled.

So I think last year they actually only had 10 meetings. So their agenda is being viewed about 200 times per meeting, which is quite a high number. And then you can see how often their recordings are viewed, not as frequently. But so the Planning Commission, these are all the applications. I wanna make a quick note here.

The transit station development, which is no longer in our code, and the zoning incentives, those are things that do not come to the planning commission, but they're categorized in this category simply because that's where those applications land in our program that manages our applications. So that's roughly I don't know what that math is right there, but roughly onethree of the applications that come in. So you had 83 agenda items. You can see how frequently your agenda was accessed on our website and how frequently the recordings were viewed. So you had, I think, 22 meetings twice a month except for November and December.

So that gives you an idea of how many per meeting. You're roughly three to four applications per meeting. This is way down for those of you who are on the Planning Commission four or five years ago when we routinely went to between nine and 10PM. And there was a very concerted effort after one of those years where I think the average meeting length was five hours, where the commission's like, we need to change some things. That's when we started updating a lot of code as far as what was required to come to the planning commission. So we streamlined a lot of those applications. And a lot of those things now don't need to come to the commission. Do you do

any sort of comps between us and similarly sized and situated communities in North America?

Yeah, we did it several years ago around that time. What we really were it's really hard to find that data. Some cities have similar annual reports, so it's easy to find. Other times, you're actually having to go through agendas to try to calculate it. And what we found is that we had a very high number of applications per planner compared to most other cities.

We were five times the number per staff member of a city like LA. But we were lower than a city like Boise. And then we looked, well, what are they looking at? They looked at a they have a lot of really minor, minor things that go to their planning commission. They don't anymore because they changed it. But yeah, we've done some of that comp. We're probably and then there's some cities like Portland who up until two years ago, totally different approval structure. So yeah. So we do analyze those things and look at Oregon. So here's our subdivision numbers.

You can see 131 applications, but they're broken down and they're relatively manageable, smaller numbers there. The zoning administration is another big category. This is where variances land. But most of these are things where people want to get something in writing about what the current status of their property is. We call those zoning verification letters.

These are almost always for people who are purchasing nonresidential properties. And those, as part of the due diligence and closing process, they a lot of financial institutions require them to get something like this. One thing, this number in years past has been in the three and 400s. So this is actually one of our indicators about what's happening in the development economy, because as this goes down, we know that there's less transactions happening with our commercial and nonresidential properties. And so there seems to be a very direct correlation between how many of these do and what the development pressures in the city are.

So this is low compared to

the last probably ten years. Is that mostly commercial development pressure,

or are residential and commercial development

pressures So so tightly linked that

when we say commercial from this aspect, it's everything from multi family to industrial. Gotcha. So we rarely get asked about these for someone buying a new single family home or a duplex. It's usually more investment level Nick, you track those by map, or are those shown on the map? Yeah, we don't map them. Because a lot of times they come in with incorrect addresses. And so then we have to go through and try to figure out exactly what they're doing, and then link it to their tax ID numbers and stuff. It's just yeah.

Do you have

to pay for this zoning verification letter?

You do. All of our applications except for some of our historic ones in the zoning application fee.

And are the fees all different? Like there's a

They are. So they're all cost justified. At some point in time in the past, the city's done a cost justification for how much it typically takes to process one of those applications. Things like a zoning verification letter are usually maybe an hour of staff time, and so they're, I think, dollars 70, something like that, whereas some of the other ones are close to $1,000 Most of our land use applications that you see, those application fees are only covering about 30 to 40% of the cost. So the city's subsidizing all those applications to some degree.

Is the menu available easy to see, like the price menu?

Yeah. The city is required to publish consult, what we call a consolidated fee schedule. It has every fee the city charges for every reason on there. It's broken in by categories, including zoning fees.

Director, I had a question. Several times, did I understand you correctly in that several of these numbers are less than the previous year? On the Historic Landmark Commission side and on the planning side, usually those are like twelve to eighteen months ahead of construction that's going vertical?

It's hard to say right now. I think with Planning Commission things, it's longer than that, just because it's taking longer to get all of everyone financing in place. The landmark stuff is a little different. Like right now, the minor applications are way up. And that's because there's, if you don't know this, there's a massive, like we're in probably our largest nationwide, our largest investment in home renovations that we've ever had.

I guess my question is, are you seeing a pattern things are slowing down because there's less and less application?

Things are definitely slowing down.

I mean, significantly?

I think that's hard to say. So we go through phases where we won't have any new construction starts, at least like residential, for several months. And then we'll get four. And then we'll get something else. So one measure we use for that overall is our building permit valuations. So building permit valuations have had a steady incline every single year. I don't know what they're going to look like for their fiscal year, they're so a little different than calendar year. I don't know what they're going to look like because we haven't seen those numbers yet so far this year. Then we haven't projected That'll them all come out as the city starts the budget process.

How can building permit evaluations go up when other things are going up?

Because of the home renovation market. Gotcha. Thanks.

Were

all of those local historic districts approved? Like there are a lot of new historic

Yeah, most renovations are approved.

I mean, like all the new remember we got the applications for all the new historic I

don't know if all of them have approved. I think we have one or two that we have, I think, one that's outstanding. But I'd have to double check

that.

But it doesn't really look different because there's 100 more houses on the land.

Yeah. The historic districts we're getting now, as you know, are fairly small in terms of number of properties. It's not like the avenues that has like whatever Oh, yeah. 2,000 properties in it.

Yeah, that's right. There any sort of fee waiver program for, like, a single family homeowner who is land rich, cash poor wants to do some sort of modification?

So small things don't have an I think the application fee might be $25 Okay. So they're low. Those are the things that the city doesn't assess the full cost because we want to encourage people to get the proper approvals on our historic buildings. So we try to make it as easy as possible.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

So one thing that changed also after COVID was how we do public engagement. We used to hold in person open houses twice a month randomly over the city. We hardly would get anyone to show up. But one thing that we were forced to do is put everything online. And so in 2025, we did 108 applications that are required to go through what we call our early engagement process.

That's that forty five day public input period. Some of those have to go to community councils. Some of them don't, depending on what it is and how close it is to the borders of multiple community councils. But one of the things that you can see is the total number of visits to our online open house items. So last year we had 15,100.

That's not just people clicking on the web page. This is actually accessing the information. So 108 applications, 15,000, whatever that math is, 150 times per application is a lot more than what we would see when we were doing in person. We get four or five people to show up. And we track that every year.

So getting into some of the accomplishments, you know all of this because these things have all been to the Planning Commission. But obviously, the City Council did adopt the mixed use zoning consolidation in July. That went into effect three after adoption. And so one of the things that this did is that it likely reduces the number of applications that are going to be coming to the Planning Commission. One of the things that we see a lot of planned developments are townhomes where they have lots that technically don't front on a street. We've exempted those from having to come back to the Planning Commission.

So they end up, though, upping your administrative numbers, Right?

Yeah. So because Yeah.

It does. That to you.

But reviewing these things at the staff level without having to prepare staff reports and everything else actually saves us time. So so that was one of the big pushes there. City Council also adopted the RMF 35 and RMF 45 zoning amendments. And so those are in effect now. We started the expanding housing options, which you were recently briefed on.

That's in the public engagement phase. In fact, there's a meeting tonight in Council District 5 at their town hall where we're going to answer questions about that. We did start the Northwest Community Plan, which just, I think, last meeting or two meetings ago, you forwarded a recommendation for adoption to. We also are working on updates to both Avenues and Capitol Hill community plans. So we have 10 community plans that collectively make up our general plan.

These three are some of the oldest. In fact, Northwest Avenues is the oldest, last adopted in the late '80s. Northwest was 'ninety two. Capitol Hill is early 2000s. So at your next meeting, we're actually going to go over our schedule for updating all of these plans.

But we have a goal to have all of our community plans, including the most recent ones, updated to include current policies in the next three years. So we're going to bring that forward. That's partly one of the reasons why we have been focused on reducing the number of applications is so that we have the time and the commission has the time to actually talk and focus more about policy and make those recommendations to city council versus just reviewing development applications. We also adopted into PlantSalt Lake policies relating to how we grow our land use and water and how those work together, which is one of the reasons why the council initiated that petition. If you didn't watch or haven't seen some of the articles about the Salt Lake City specific water supply that we've seen.

We all know our snowpack is, at least as of yesterday, is less than 50% of average. Our runoff in many of our rivers and streams has already peaked and is actually declining. And so we are preparing for pretty significant drought conditions, at least this year and likely in the future. And so this plan actually guides us on how to deal with that. It's also the basis for our public utilities water plan, which they are required by state code to do every five years.

So we'll keep you obviously updated on all that stuff. There are a bunch of other zoning amendments that were adopted last year. These are just some of the big ones that you may have remembered going from there. One thing I wanted to talk about are some things that are upcoming, particularly this one. This is actually a big thing.

So two or three years ago, the city adopted what we called our community benefit amendments for all requests to amend our general plan or our zoning. And you've seen that in action now for some time. We're adding that a similar community benefit requirement to our planned developments. The intent behind this is that if somebody is going to come in and ask to modify zoning regulations essentially for their project, that there should be a better community benefit defined other than meeting the six or seven objectives that are in there. And so we've been working on this for quite some time because this is an administrative decision and not part of what the council has full discretion over, this has to be a little bit different and more focused.

And so that's what we've been coming on. So we expect that this will be released to the public in the next few months, so sometime before summer. And then we'll start that process. We'll give you an early update on what's included in it and go from there. But it

will be similar to the community benefits for zoning

reasons It's the same concept, but it will be done differently. And I think more because this is an administrative function, we need to more specifically tie it to the scope of what's being asked. So if somebody is coming in like, hey, we got this property. We can fit these five homes on it, but we need to reduce a rear yard setback from 25 feet to 22, that's a pretty small adjustment. That community benefit might be smaller.

Now if they're doing something else where it's like, woah, you're getting because of this, you're getting a significant additional development right, then that's where we would have some other things. And similar to the zoning amendment, they would be proposing something as part of their application. They have to propose something. It has to meet certain criteria. And then the Planning Commission gets to decide if that's appropriate or not. So unlike our zoning ones where you're making a recommendation, you actually get to decide that.

A couple questions about this. Or you're going be talking about it later, aren't you?

We're going to talk about this in much more detail. Yeah. So a couple of things that you may or may not know that we do, but this year we actually and Salt Lake City hosted we are the host city for the American Planning Association's Utah Conference. So we actually planned a lot of the content for these meetings in this, mainly to teach people and have people learn how we're doing planning in Salt Lake City. There was, I think, roughly between four hundred and five hundred people who attended this.

I can't remember the exact numbers. But these are all the different mobile tours or sessions that we participated in. We had a wide variety of our staff participating. A lot of them volunteered to help manage the conference. These are everything from walking tours to presentations to even a downtown biking tour that we did.

We try to do this in conjunction with other departments and divisions in the city, too, because a lot of communities in Utah don't have that division like we do. Their planning office may do all of this planning where we split it up with transportation or parks, etcetera. We also made several of our staff members made presentations at national conferences. So the National APA Conference was in Denver this year, and we not only discussed and participated in implementing general plans, but also how to engage the youth, which we have one of our staff members that's one of their specialties. And then the city also held the National League of Cities conference this year, and we participated quite heavily in that as well.

In fact, we had one city come this was in November we had a city bring most of their city team back here to learn more about what we were doing, and particularly around housing and some of the innovative things we've done with housing in the city. So not just planning stuff, but funding and everything else. So that is the annual report. Any other questions?

I have a question next. So this isn't going to necessarily reflect on the workload of the commission, but it does somewhat tie into the development, redevelopment of projects in the city. Do you track how many building permits get processed then versus how many then peter out and after that first year, don't move on, don't ask for an extension, etcetera?

We do. So we track things that come through our office and whether or not they get building absolutely. Right now, that number is actually high because most people that are submitting applications have a pretty good assurance that their project's going to get built. In boom years, we get so many applications that a lot of them are speculative. Only maybe half of those will end up getting built.

Yeah. I mean, my memory is only as good as the moment. But considering those boom times of how many projects were coming through the commission, it never felt like we never got those numbers but I would just they weren't coming to fruition. Eventually I would be like, hey whatever happened to that? What happened to that? So yeah, was just wondering if that was something you track and if that's also an indicator of how, don't know, not so much the economy, but how much redevelopment the city actually sees.

Yeah. Can probably pretty easily pull those numbers and give you an idea. That can just be an easy update or even just an email to everybody about what's happening in there. I will say so 2021, I believe the Planning Commission approved, through the various applications, over 8,000 dwellings in the city. We do know that only about 5,000 of those were built. The rest of them took a while to get going, then the cost of borrowing money went up so much they just died.

What are typical turnaround times for the different applications, like subdivisions versus zoning verification letters?

Yeah. Zoning verification letters are typically done within three days. Occasionally, there's some issue with a property that we have to go back and forth with. We do know the numbers of the other. Subdivisions are a little bit hard to track.

So we have for residential subdivisions, have state mandates to complete city reviews in a certain time frame. And we're I'm not going to say we're 100% on that because every division who's involved has to do it. Planning is probably 99%. Other divisions and departments may not be that high because we don't actually track what they're doing. But what we do know is that most of the processing time for subdivisions, applications are waiting on applicants to update plans, submit whatever information they need.

One of the big things that takes a long time is finalizing their what's called a public infrastructure agreement, so all the things that we have to agree to for them to build and warranty the infrastructure streets, sidewalks, curbs, etcetera. And that sometimes can take a long time. The other things, things that come to the Planning Commission are also kind of application dependent. We have a goal. When you factor in the forty five days, the amount so the ten days that we tell our staff an application has to be deemed complete, we're we were doing that in roughly two days right now.

We have the forty five day thing. We have the noticing for public hearing. Most once somebody has made all their corrections to the plans and everything else that's needed, we average between, depending on the application type, ninety to one hundred and thirty days. So we're actually trying to get that down. But it's been really hard when more than half the applications submitted have such significant errors that we can't actually process them.

We can't even route them to other departments, even though under state code they're considered complete because under state code it's, do you have all the submittal requirements? That's a complete application. It doesn't matter if the information complies or not. It's just did give us everything to do our job? And it's, yeah, you did, but you've left 90% of the details out. So yeah. Anything else?

You know, I think a thing that I have sort of seen show up in planning literature, especially over the past couple years, sort of a convergence between a couple of different areas of recent debates in planning theory, has been a discussion of regulatory capacity and staff capacity. This idea that in many ways, regardless of what our regulations are, do we have the capacity where professional staff are really able to dig in with applicants to better understand what the goals are and also to have the professional experience and judgment to be able to work towards the goals that the city has set and also that emerge from the technical expertise of staff. And I am curious, and maybe that's a little bit abstract, and my apologies if it is, but I'm curious sort of how you think that relates to, in particular, the work that you're doing in the Salt Lake Planning Division. Do you think that our city staff have been able to increase and develop that capacity and that expertise? Do you think that the scale that the planning staff is working at is sufficient, or do you not have enough?

Yeah. So we do track how so I think there's multiple parts to that. I'm going to start with just time capacity. So we do track every several years. We have several of our staff members keep track of how long each step of every application takes.

That gives us an idea of how many staff hours we're spending on things. And then we can use that based on number of applications to figure out how much of our time is being spent on the various functions we do. The last time we did that, it showed that we were actually we had so many applications coming in that it was greater than our total annual working hours. And so we had no choice. And that's that's with at the time so the development review planners were still in the permits office.

I'm trying to remember the numbers, but we had something like 22 planners or something like that. So that would have been working full time and that we don't anticipate people expect people to work more than forty hours a week, although almost every one of our staff members does. But when we calculated that out, we were probably spending about 14% more than what our total capacity was in the year. And we did present that to the city council, and they gave us more people. But they also said, how do we create capacity?

Because we knew that we didn't have the time to do things like update our plans, which I know has been a frustration for many planning commissioners over the years. And so we looked at that holistically and were like, if we want to do this, this is what has to happen. And so right now, we have a goal from a time perspective of trying to maintain as close to a fiftyfifty split with what we're working on, city private stuff. We also do highly value training our staff on current needs. So we do a lot of internal training.

So every staff meeting, we also have various things for project review, we're reviewing applications, has an entire team so that people who have seen something before can weigh in. They can help build that experience for those planners. So between 2019 and 2022, more than twothree of our staff was either new or in a different role. So we reorganized our division to help do that. So we also make it a point to ensure that we allocate as much of our budget as possible to training.

So not just our in house training, but we view we have to get outside training too. And that's not just from the typical American Planning Association. We send people to a variety of conferences, whether they're economic in nature, urban design, transportation even. Even though we don't do a lot of transportation planning, we want to make sure that connection is there. So yeah, I think I would and I think I've said this publicly before I think that we have as good of a planning department as any city in this country.

And I would put that up and challenge that for anybody. And as part of my career, I've actually visited other planning divisions through various professional organizations and helped them analyze what they're doing and things. And so I'm pretty familiar with a lot of planning departments, and I'm very comfortable saying that.

Thank you. That is really wonderful to hear. I mean, my regards and congratulations to all your staff.

I will. They're the ones who do the work and put in the time.

Alright. Alright. Thank you. Well, we can move on to your next president.

Alright. Next up, everybody's funnest time of the year. Let's recap what the legislature did and what it means to us. I will start this by saying from strictly a planning and land use perspective that our commission is involved with, this was a fairly light year. We had some pretty meaty things, but not as impactful as far as changes we have to make as past years.

So first off, I wanted to give you an insight into how we actually review bills. Don't know if this these are pretty small font. But basically, whenever there's a new bill that's posted, this actually starts happening well before the session. Bills start getting populated. They get assigned to various departments and divisions for review.

We review those. We put our comment in a citywide tracker that our legislative affairs department has access to, and they kind of wrangle all the cats. Then the city establishes the legislative subcommittee of the city, which are department some department directors, mayor's office, city council representatives. They determine what priorities are. We make suggestions.

They ultimately get to decide. And then we do our work of trying to get changes to bills. We indicate, you know what, this doesn't impact us or it's such a small impact, it's not worth putting our time towards. And then on the complete other extreme, our resources towards that kind of a thing. So this year, the city you know, the city reads every single bill to decide what the impact is to the city. This year, there are over a thousand bills. So that's right here. We had 105 assigned to our department this year. Planning had 41 bills that we tracked. Only eight of those were adopted.

So a lot of them were not very well thought out bills. And they didn't end up going anywhere. So here's just a recap of that so you can kind of see how it scales down to that. We're going to get into some of these. So this first bill deals with political signs.

This doesn't really impact the Planning Commission, but it impacts our zoning code because this bill basically allows people to put political signs in front of their property on the park strip as long as they're not creating a safety hazard. So right now, we prohibit those in park strips. We know it happens. People complain. Our enforcement team goes out and takes care of it. This will require us to update our code.

We're talking now about adopting the adopted

So this is adopted. These are all past bills. We're only talking about the past bills. And so this bill goes into effect May 6. So even though we won't have our code updated by then, we have to start following up.

Do you know how this affects renters and apartments?

It deals with the property owner. So the property owner can choose to allow or not allow people to put a a political sign in front of their property. It doesn't give anyone the right to put a political sign in front of somebody else's property or in city parks and things like that.

I noticed this here. Are you familiar with Project Rainbow where they put out

Yeah.

Pride flags or whatever in your front yard and then they take them away? For the first time ever, this week, they stuck one in our yard, but not in our yard, in our park strip. They've never done that before. And I'm wondering if it was if it's a reflection of

this, but

you say this isn't an effect.

I doubt it has any

Yeah. Just random.

It's randomness. It's just a coincidence.

Just that volunteer did it that way.

Yeah. Ours Yeah. They put on our property every year. Anyway, this other this HB76 dealt with a data center and their water use. So basically this requires the city to send a notice to the state Division of Water Rights, Water Quality, and to the water provider, which is the city in Salt Lake City, for any data center that's proposed that would use 75 acre feet of water per year.

I broke that down into gallons, so maybe it's relatable because no one really knows what an acre foot looks like. So anyway, this doesn't really require us to do much other than send that notice.

Do you know if there are any major data centers within the boundaries of the city? I know most of them are down south.

We do have some. Okay. Yeah. We also have some that are for very large institutions. For example, the University of Utah has their own data center that's actually in Central 9th.

HP one hundred twenty six deals with microeducation facilities. This may require us adding this use to our zoning code. We don't really have it now, although it's been in state law for a while. We have to follow it. But basically, it allows what's called a micro education facility in most zones in the city. This actually expanded how cities can regulate them if they want.

I see that there's some stuff about alcohol related land uses there. Because bars are not allowed to be close to Schools. Schools. Or does that mean that we can sort of

So this bill says that we can prohibit them in these zones. We cannot typically things like religious institutions, can't actually prohibit in certain zones. So that creates some issues sometimes. But in this case, we can't actually prohibit them in some zones. This is mainly meant for people to operate small schools out of their home. That's the primary Or homeschooling.

If we are allowing alcohol based facilities in most MU whatever, it might

Yeah, what pretty we don't want is for somebody to come in with one of and then have it negatively impact someone else's property. Of course.

Yeah. So

the HB two fifteen dealt with landscaping restrictions. This is limited to the wildland urban interface. Basically, says we can't prohibit somebody from removing trees and vegetation if the purpose of removing it is to comply with our defensible space requirements in the WUI code. So in Salt Lake City, we do have a couple of regulations in our foothill zones that require preservation of existing natural trees. And we have what we call a specimen tree ordinance, which requires the privately owned trees to be kept in certain development.

So this, again, is very limited. It doesn't prevent us from doing those things outside of the small number of properties that are subject to the WUI code, which are really those that have a direct interface with the natural land.

And WUI is mostly only in the Foothill Protection area, Yes.

And it's not even all of the Foothill properties. It's literally if you share a property line with a natural area, so you're the eastern edge or in the avenues, the northern edge. That's typically where and then along some of our canal or our creek corridors. This is HB five ninety seven alcohol amendments. This is actually something the city's been working on for a number of years, primarily because restaurants in twenty seventeen or 'eighteen Prior to that, there used to be a local variance for the spacing requirements.

So we could grant people permission to be within to either reduce or waive that separation requirement from a community location. That went away. And since we've had a number of restaurants, and particularly that, for example, can't be across the street from the downtown library or across the street from Pioneer Park. And so we've really been trying to get some of that back. This year it happened, although it's limited.

I mean, we got the restaurants, which is good. And then it also would apply to restaurants or bars that are in hotels. You can use your imagination at what that's aimed at. It's also limited to only parks, playgrounds, and libraries. So schools and churches still have that separation requirements.

It does require a public hearing prior to granting that local consent. So what the law says is that I can't remember the term, but it basically says the it's not land use authority, but whatever the authority is can grant has to hold that public hearing. And then if you look at the other definitions, that authority in Salt Lake City, we think is the city council. So this will be fun. But we will have to amend our code somewhere.

Does that also mean it comes to us too or not necessarily? No. Yeah.

So we'll have to we're still trying to figure that stuff out. This was also a fun one where cities now, SB23, cities have to consider the following when adopting regulations that impact on families. And it specifically says the family health, stability, and formation. So it's only the legislative body that needs to consider this luckily, so you don't need to worry about considering how families are formed.

I love that family isn't defined.

Mean

It's not defined. Yeah. They don't define what a family means. So it's

We need to be promoting gay molecules in Salt Lake City.

There's always next year.

I did wanna spend some time on this big one because, one, the commission brought this up. But SB two forty two, this is the transportation amendments. This does a lot of things, but there's very Salt Lake City specific things in here. And what this requires us to do is to develop what's called the critical capacity routes map that gets basically that UDOT agrees to and that we adopt. So this will be something that, UDOT has to agree on that map by January 1, basically.

And what that map will do is identify all the streets in the city that are Tier one, two, three, or four. Tier one and two, we're fairly limited on what we can do, but Tier one is a regionally significant highway. So this is a key point. The city cannot implement highway reduction strategies. So on UDOT streets, we already can't do that without UDOT approval, right? And that's been that way. But there likely will be city owned streets that are tier one. And so that's a limitation. We'll get into some of what we can and can't do there.

Nick, you

give you any guidance of how the legislature thinks or what your criteria is for what will be tier one, what would be tier two? Or is that already in some UDOT policies?

So no. This is something that we're gonna have to work with UDOT on establishing. Obviously, I'm assuming all UDOT roads will be that. Right? But which city streets are is another question that we'll have to figure out over the next nine months at this point.

Tier two, we can do what's called a highway reduction strategy. So this is basically making our streets safer for L users. But we can do some of these after we've done some sort of data collection and impact analysis, which we're already due for these types of things anyway. In fact, UDOT, after last year's bill, did a full study of all of the changes we've made to our city streets over the last several years and found basically there's been no impact to traffic. So it's going be pretty hard for us to then for them to then say, well, we actually do think there's an impact.

No. This is Salt Lake City only. In fact, my favorite every year I try to find one little nugget from every bill that I read that stands out. Like a few years ago, was bills establishing or creating micro enterprise businesses, which basically produce food in your home to sell. And it had a definition of food. And it's what you think it would be, anything that's consumable. And then as we know code structure, if it's a list, it'll say and or or. And then it said and gum. So this year's my favorite line was in this bill, actually. And it was a definition of city.

And so it says, city means Salt Lake City. I think we should put that on t shirts because you know, and and mark that because I think it's a great line.

I mean, it's better than last year, the similar build from last year, which wasn't the definition of city that had a study, was like a city in a class one county with an international airport.

Yeah. And a city and a county a first class city and a first class county that has an international airport. Yeah. It's like, just say Salt Lake City.

I was reading a bill today for work that defined shade as a condition where the sun is blocked such that in that area, a shadow cannot be cast. That was how shade was defined. Perfect.

Yeah, it was really, really interesting.

I was like So

on tier two streets, even after we've done this engagement and our analysis, UDOT still has to approve it.

And this only applies to like there's a specific study area, right? Redwood to Yeah.

I didn't put that in here. But the study area basically is oh, I'm probably going to butcher this. But I think it's like 600 North on the North, Foothill on the East, the southern city boundary, and Redwood Road on the West. So it's a big area. If any streets outside of that, we don't need to do any of this for. But outside of the industrial area, there's really not a lot of major streets out there, right?

Can you remind us what the de facto tier one streets are, the UDOT streets? They haven't been established yet. No, but the ones that are where the tier one already effectively apply, like 3rd West, 7th East

Oh, So UDOT streets, UDOT roads are 400 South, Foothill 700 East, portions of 2100 South but West Of State, State Street, portions of 300 West, North Of 500 South, think, or 600 South, Redwood Road. Boy, I said, yeah, Foothill is definitely one of them. I might be missing a few, but those are generally the big major ones.

I mean, there's like two blocks of the Grand Boulevard, 5th And 6th South, because they are basically freeway interchanges So and

then it comes to UDOT also controls all of the streets of the University of Utah, so South Campus Drive, North Campus Drive, everything in between. And then what's that? No, Research Park are actually city streets. And then freeway off ramps, there's a certain distance from freeway off ramps. So that's where like 1,300 portions of it would be.

So tier three, we can implement, basically do what we want as long as it's in the agreement. And then tier four, not regulated. Yeah. It also we're hoping most streets fall in tier four, but we'll have to see how VDOT feels about that. The agreement also requires to include our plan and timeline to mitigate impacts of traffic calming on streets we've already done things on, And those streets are listed here.

I think one of the questions we are going to have with UDOT is if your study showed there's no impacts, what is there to mitigate? So we'll see what that means. There's some who think this means initially thought this was removing, but they made it very clear it doesn't include that. So last thing we wanna do is take out millions and millions of dollars of improvements we've made as a city.

Well, it's about making sure that everybody under understands how to turn right off of 200 South.

What's

that? It's about making sure that everybody understands how to turn right off of 200 South. Right turns are scary.

There's a bunch of other details in here. So we can do some safety improvements on tier Obviously, require UDAT approval, and then they can't, what the code says, materially reduce travel capacity. We're also this is something the city negotiated down. But on tier one, we have to maintain the width where possible of at least 11 feet. That initially was we can't dictate lane width at all.

Tier three, we got it down to 10 feet. There's also a weird provision in here that says we cannot reduce on street parking by more than three stalls per block unless we've done some public engagement and informed UDOT. Now there were some provisions added to this bill that talked about that if there's off street parking available, we can do this kind of stuff. So we'll see how this what ends up in the agreement here. But one of our immediate things here is sometimes we have to remove on street parking for fire access.

That's almost always more than three stalls. So that will end up impacting private development because they're going to suddenly they may not be able to use the street for fire access anymore. So that's something we hope to get clarification on in the agreement. And then we have to report back to the legislature's Transportation Interim Committee, by 11/30/2027. So we're going to move on to what every year there's a bill that deals with local land use.

This year, it's called local land and water modifications. The good news is most of these things we already do as a city or we're not impacted by. So here's this actually does impact the Planning Commission because they put in some very specific things related to commissions. So we'll go over that on the next few slides. In fact, we're just going to jump to this. So some of this, if there's a check mark in this box, we already do it. So we already have all of our regulations and fees on our website. We have application checklists and fees posted. We already allow detached ADUs. So we don't need to worry about this provision because we fully comply with it already.

The commission specific requirements we're going to get to on the next slide. We may need to make a small little change about filling vacancies because we have to adopt that instead of having it in our policies and procedures. This third one down, processes for unlisted land use. So this is a process that was in state code last year. But this year there was a modification for it.

So if we don't list a land use and it's clearly prohibited or allowed or prohibited, somebody can ask the council basically to add it. And that's something that does not come to the Planning Commission, straight to city council. So it's essentially a zoning text amendment that doesn't come here. It's limited to those types of uses. So we'll see how that shakes out. We probably need to make some tweaks to our code for that.

Doesn't it currently isn't it like if there isn't a specific land use, you are the one who decides what the closest land

use The irony behind this is that it actually makes it harder in Salt Lake City, because typically we'll do this with an administrative interpretation, where we'll look at, one, if a use isn't defined in our code and it's not listed, then we'll look at it, figure out what is the closest use, and then use that to decide if it's allowed in that zone. So that's a staff level decision in our code now. This actually somewhat takes that away. So someone has to go through the city council. We try to bring that up that

And there's no language about a more permissive structure? No. That sucks for a lot

of business It does. So there also is changes to appeals. Basically, the burden of proof is now different based on who appeals. If the applicant appeals, it's one standard. If it's an aggrieved party, it's another standard. Also, fairly bad approach to these things. And then development agreements, can be challenged in district court thirty days after enactment. So that is a city council decision. So it matches when they adopt zoning and things like that.

The burden of proof difference, that's like our hearing officer?

Yes. Does

it raise the burden of proof for aggrieved, or does it lower the burden of proof?

Yeah, so an applicant the applicant only needs to demonstrate that the decision maker didn't have evidence to back up their decision, basically. Whereas an aggrieved party has to prove that it was an illegal act So the it's a little bit different.

And what is currently closer to what we do?

Currently, basically, either party has to prove that the Planning Commission acted illegally or that there wasn't evidence supported. Now it's split that, basically.

So it lowers the burden of proof for applicants. So

these are the Planning Commission specific requirements. So we have to have in our code the number of commissioners. We do that. The process for appointing, we do that. This is the one processing for filling vacancies. It's not explicit in our code. But we also because we don't have a minimum we have a range. We don't really unless we drop below the minimum number, we don't really run into an issue with the timing of filling vacancies. And then processes for removal, which we already have. They added reasons for removal here.

And we're going go into some of this in more detail in a minute. So basically, these are things that you can't do as a commissioner or you risk being removed. You already know most of this. So this first one probably doesn't apply to you, but you can't use public funds for political purposes. City staff knows this, but you I mean, yeah, we give commissioners sometimes access to like the iPads or whatever in the past.

I don't know if we still do that, but you could only use that for Planning Commission business, right? And then there was this piece added about violating state code ten-three, part 13. We're going to give you some what that is on the next few slides. And then obviously, intent to influence decisions outside of a public hearing. And I like to bring up that we, at one point in time in the past, had a planning commissioner who didn't like that the commission approved a project and actually helped some and it wasn't a popular project in that specific neighborhood.

We had a commissioner actually help that neighborhood group put together their appeal. That commissioner was removed from the commission. So that's kind of what getting at. Added Nick, can

I ask a question?

Yeah.

What if we, for example, were to recommend the council not do a thing? And then we not be allowed or are we not allowed to then speak to the city council members in a personal capacity about the issue? We've already ruled on it here.

In a public setting, it's okay for a commissioner to go and give testimony to a public hearing. I would advise against trying to set up one on one meetings with city council people. Yeah.

Yeah. Would

until a decision is final, I would refrain from doing any of that, even after you've made a recommendation. Because you never know if the commission is going to send or the council is going to send it back, which sometimes in the past they've considered doing that. They rarely do, but it's always their option. Everything should be exhausted before. Yeah.

Yeah. So additional training, really, they wanted you already have the minimum of four hours every year of training. We try to do that and give you access to do that so it's easy. But role of the Planning Commission and administrative, legislative, and quasi judicial proceedings, you do not really have much of a quasi judicial role in Salt Lake City. Some commissions do, but you don't really have that much of it here.

Ex parte communications, which you're all very familiar with, and then conflict of interest. So those were specifically added. This last thing is also kind of a big thing. So this allows the City Council to act without a Planning Commission recommendation in two instances. One, an applicant can request that a recommendation be made within forty five days of the and if the commission doesn't, it can go straight to the city council for a decision.

Or the city council can determine if a commission has had adequate time to consider making a recommendation and just hasn't. So this gets to if you table something for various reasons. The council can just act if they make a finding that you've they think you've had enough time.

Nick, would that apply also to like an internal like text texting amendment?

This is this is for legislative items.

Right. But so but not an applicant, but it's a legislator or a text amendment brought forward by the planning division or the mayor. Does this also

Yes. Affect They can be sent. Because the council can initiate text amendments too. And they may be like, hey, what's taken, you know, the planning commission

So it's really not the applicant. It's anything. That's legislative.

So the yeah. So an applicant can request a decision of the by the commission in forty five days.

But anything that's coming Anything else? Or that's legislative, the city council could be like you've had enough

A good example is, you know, we talked about the temporary land use related to water use. If they are looking at, hey, we need to get this enacted in one hundred and eighty days and we're at day 120 and the commission hasn't acted, they can then basically decide we're going to act.

Even if we've tabled it and it hasn't come Yes,

that's exactly what this is getting at is just tabling just to delay.

Has that been an issue in Salt Lake City ever? Or I is it maybe an

issue don't in another think city so. I or think we've been I can't recall a situation where I've been made aware that the council is really pushing for a recommendation.

That forty five day timeline, if an applicant requests that, then we're on the clock at

that point. You're on the clock.

And I assume that staff will be able to inform us and make sure that it gets on our schedule

when We will do do everything we can to give you the opportunity to make a recommendation in situations So like right now, same forty five day thing applies to administrative items. Once an application is deemed complete, an applicant can request that decision. So we have not had that happen in Salt Lake City yet.

Would that waive or change the public notice

It could eliminate the forty five day public engagement period if someone made that request. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. So

then somebody who does something unpopular would just say

Well, and so this yeah, that's what I was going ask is, like, when does that forty five day start? Because it's not that, like, we tabled it, then it's forty five days. Like, they could turn in their application and be like, I want my forty five days now.

Yes. They have to give us what the coach is, they have to give us a reasonable amount of time to process it. And then they can make a request in writing. So most people are Okay with how our process works. But it's possible that somebody could. If somebody came in, submitted an application a week later, said I request a thing, we'd say, we haven't even done our department review. No, that's not reasonable. Wait for that and then resubmit. So I wanted to kind of cover what's in this section of state code that now applies to the commission. Technically, it probably already applied to you anyway, only now it's more explicit.

So basically, you cannot use your position for personal your position has a commissioner. I'm going to give you a really good example of where this might happen. We have had applicants approach architects who have been on the commission and ask them if they can hire them because they think it might help them get through the process quicker. That is a clear conflict, right? And I hope and I don't think we've ever had this that somebody in their business practice who may be involved in the development world and who also sits on the commission isn't using their position to try to get business.

If they were, that would be a violation here. And that would be very it would be grounds for removal. And I would expect if we could prove it probably very quickly, someone would be removed, right? So that's basically what this is all about.

And did you say that this continues to apply after we leave the commission?

No. Once you are no longer an appointed official of the city, none of this applies to you. So here are some other examples. So basically, if you seek a contract with the city in your professional world, you have to disclose it. You already have to do that anyway.

And quite frankly, if someone submits something to try to get a contract with the city and their commissioner, we're probably going to get notified internally about that because we do have a list of everybody has basically appointed officials that are reviewed here. So this is all about disclosing any potential conflict and financial conflict. We already have these in our policies and procedures. I'm not that concerned about it, but I felt like we should give you some training on this because we can check the box and say we've had it and you are now aware. If you violate it, here's the penalties.

So if someone asks you to violate this code, they are actually potentially committing a misdemeanor, class A right there. And then penalties for violating, obviously, removal from the commission is an option. And then depending on the dollar amount, it determines what other potential crime might have been committed. So obviously failure to disclose may result in your removal. If you have a contract with the city, it also may rescind that contract.

Any questions about that? I tried to cover that really quickly because of one, I think you already know all of this. But it's a new section of code that you may not have been familiar with. So I wanted to cover one of the new requirements is to talk about the Planning Commission powers and duties. Most of you already know this too, but this is fulfilling some required training. So where your powers come from, two places, right? State code ten twenty, that's commonly known as LUDA. It used to be ten-9A, for those that were familiar with state code. It changed in a special session last year to ten twenty. And then in city code.

So these are the various places where your powers come from. Utah code, basically this is what it says, and you're going to find out that city code essentially matches this. But you recommend a city council. You already know all this stuff, any sort of general plan or amendments to it, land use regulations. The state code uses this language, delegation of power to a land use authority. So we have multiple land use authorities in Salt Lake City. You're one of The Landmarks Commission is one of them. And then the planning director and zoning administrator are one of them. And we all delegate that. These are for the administrative matters so that the Planning Commission doesn't have to deal with the day to day stuff.

Also, you make recommendations on who the appeal authority is. Salt Lake City, ten or twelve years ago, we used to be a Board of Adjustment. We chose to get rid of the Board of Adjustment and just have essentially contracts with land use attorneys to be our appeal authority. You get to decide what application processes are. And one of the requirements in carrying out your duty is to protect the rights of everyone to be heard who's before you.

So we do that pretty well, I think. City code, very similar. Ultimately, your power and duty is to technically prepare general plans and amendments. Obviously, we're not going to send you all home and ask you to write a plan. That's why we have city staff.

But our charge is to make sure that we're working very closely with you on what's in there, what we're addressing, etcetera. And then you can decide to recommend it or not. The second piece is also something that we're one of the reasons why we're trying to redirect our staff capacities is so that we can actually study our existing conditions in the city and bring up issues. And we can get in front of things instead of just being reactionary. We can be proactive.

Housing supply is a big piece of this, right? And so you are actually going to start seeing some of these studies. We did this with the R1 study that led to the expanding housing options and things like that. And then obviously you get to decide those administrative land use applications that our codes established. So there's a couple of things about land use applications that applies to all of us as land use authorities is that, one, we must apply the plain language.

So basically, that means wording means what it says. And we can't apply some unusual interpretation of what that means. Is it commonly understood to mean this by most people? And then if a land use application is not plainly restricted, we have to interpret our regulations to favor the application. This is why we focus a lot when we write our codes that they're very specific, they're not vague, they're not subjective, that it's very clearly understood understand it in the same way.

This is a piece I wanted to highlight in this code. So an applicant is entitled to approval if they conform. So this really gets to those administrative things. A land it's important to note, a land use application are things like conditional uses, planned developments, as I agree. A land use application is not a zoning amendment by state code.

So this is only to these things. And they're entitled to whatever rules are in place at the time their application is complete. That's why deeming that application is a critical step in this whole process. So if we have something underway and we haven't acted on it timely, someone doesn't need to we can't hold an application, except in very limited situations, waiting for new codes to be adopted. They get what's in place at the time.

And that's where this unless at the end of here comes from because there are some instances. So unless we find a compelling, countervailing public interest that would be jeopardized, and we put that in writing to the applicant. So this would be something like I mean, it's really hard to actually come up with an issue here, but it might be something where, hey, we have been trying to get something in our code forever, but we think your land use application maybe a good example is the proposed gas station next to Sugarhouse Park, right, where the commission found there was very compelling evidence that the public interest was likely to be jeopardized, and he made a decision based on that. And that decision was upheld on appeal. So that would be an example of that.

The second is something that the council just did. Right? So they essentially adopted temporary land use regulations. That means those regulations are in place. Hundred and eighty days. We have a hundred and eighty days to act. We can also, if we haven't already started proceedings, meaning we haven't started the process of adopting a code, we can invoke a pending ordinance doctrine. What that means is we can hold applications for up to one hundred and eighty days. We can't deny them if they are likely to not comply with a proposed regulation. We can only do that for one hundred and eighty days.

If new regulations are not adopted, we have to process it. Or if they were likely to comply with what's going to be adopted, we typically would have processed those two. We have invoked this. We don't do it very often. The last time we did it is we were making changes to what was the TSA zoning district. And so we invoked that pending ordinance doctrine. When we do this under our internal policies, we have to notify the city council that we are doing that. And then we post it on our website so that any applicant knows that that's coming.

Nick, I just want to make a, I guess a statement. So to further clarify. So countervailing public interest presumably then is written into the standards. Right? Because Yes.

I mean I think that's the Determining that into a broad sense that can be like, you can't. So we've distilled that into the standards of what that prevailing public interest is. So as we make our decisions and we tie it to that because we hear a lot of what could be defined as public interest that falls without or falls outside of A, the standards or B, even our purview. And so I guess I think it's important for the commission but then also for any of public who goes back to look at this. That it's not a broad brush.

It's not.

And that it's for us and as decision makers, it's very specific.

Right. And when we have standards adopted, it means we do it aimed at making sure these types of things are addressed and given the ability for decision makers to rely on the standards to find that. This is pretty rare. So when the city council adopts temporary land use regulations, they make a finding of a compelling countervailing public interest. And so if you go back and look at that statement, their ordinance that they adopted last night, they will have those in the preamble of that, in the recitals.

And there is a chance between when the city becomes aware of an application that's going to occur and the county can do that one hundred and eighty day, or do you really have to be aware

of it before You the application is generally have to invoke that doctrine or adopt that temporary regulation before an application is submitted. If someone submitted something and you haven't done anything, you probably have to process it.

Great. Thank you.

So one of the big things, and this gets to that, is ensuring our record includes evidence for this. These are things that we kind of ask ourselves as we're writing staff reports. But basically, does the application comply? And if we find a standard that maybe there's some question, that's where we dig into. And I think it's relevant to the commission as you're deliberating too, is that's a really good starting point.

When you're ready to deliberate, does this comply with standards? If not, which standards aren't and what can you do about it? If none of you can find any reason that something may not comply, you're pretty much already at the decision making point, right? So just some helpful hints on what happens if it's not. Identify what the standard is. Discuss why it doesn't. The meeting record is part of the decision. It doesn't always have to rely on only the written documentation. And then decide if modifications can be made to address it. Can you apply conditions?

And if not, that's where you discuss if you can deny something because it doesn't meet the standard and there's nothing you can really do about it, we'll make it.

So Nick, is this tied to the state code that directs us on say conditional uses that I can't remember the exact wording of all of it, it states that something about it being reasonable, right? So can we, is, can we reasonably condition this to lessen a detrimental impact? That's nebulous, what's reasonable and what's not. But that's kind of then becomes the direction for conditional uses in terms of perhaps voting against one, is if we cannot reasonably condition it to lessen the detrimental impact.

Yeah. So there's two cases two situations where the term reasonable really comes in. One is, is it reasonable to expect that detrimental impact to occur? If it's not, if it's so kind of rare or outlandish maybe, you know what I mean, that's not really a reasonably anticipated detrimental impact. The second is can you apply reasonable conditions to mitigate it?

And so reasonable in that case isn't so much it's more about how do you ensure that the property right is still maintained, that you're not putting a condition on that essentially prohibits the use.

Is that still a standard you would then kind of parlay into this, reasonable modifications? Because I think an applicant could think that's not reasonable or this is. To achieve, is it compliance to the standards? Or just like

That's why, that is why you have the discussion and you put things on record, right? To establish that. I think it's likely that applicants may not like conditions, especially that the commission discusses supply. If they know about them, that's usually one thing. But if it's something that comes up in a meeting, I think their tendency is probably to be like, well, wait a minute. You can always ask them too. Like, hey, we want to apply this condition. Do you have a response to it?

Yeah, if you want approval, you're going to have this condition.

But the key is making sure any condition is tied to a standard. So they can't just be made up. I think this commission actually does a really good job of discussing conditions and figuring it out. Again, just when in doubt, questions of each other. You have attorneys here, city staff here.

We're all here to ensure that the record is complete enough to justify your decision. These are some ways to maybe start the conversation or have it amongst yourselves, ask us, etcetera. And that's the end. Any other questions?

All right, well thank you for those. That is all we have for this evening. See you guys next meeting is the eighth, believe.

Thank you.