Planning Commission - Special Meeting

Francis, are you ready? Oops. Oops. We need to all shut our our disconnect our audio audio. Yes.

I'm ready when you are, chair Kauser.

Thank you. At the bottom, there's a Are we recording up there?

As you all are looking into that, I wanted to let you know I found some new information out that if you have your phone even on the dais, it could cause the static interruption. So let's try to keep our phones off the dais as well.

Okay.

Thank you, Francis. We are ready. Welcome. I would like to call the Planning Commission meeting for September 24 to order and ask that we rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I would like to ask Zindeed to please explain the meeting process, and then we'll proceed with roll call.

Pursuant to Saratoga City Council's remote public participation policy, members of the public may participate in this meeting in person at the location listed on the agenda or via remote attendance using the Zoom information listed on the agenda. Public attendees participating by Zoom are automatically muted and are not viewable on camera. I will now call the roll. Commissioner Sreedharan? Present. Hassan? Present. Brownlee?

Here.

Zhang?

Present.

Jim Arad?

Present.

Vice Chair Lee?

Present. Chair Kauser? Present. Moving on to oral communications on non agendized items. Any member of the public will be allowed to address the Planning Commission for up to three minutes on matters not on this agenda. The law generally prohibits the Planning Commission from discussing or taking action on such items. However, the Planning Commission may instruct staff accordingly regarding oral communications. At this point, I would like to open public comment on non agendized items. Staff, can you please explain the public comment process and announce our first speaker?

In person attendees can request to speak by submitting a speaker slip to staff and approaching the podium. For those viewing in Zoom who would like to speak on this item, please use the tool in Zoom to raise your hand. I don't see any hands raised online. Chair Kauser?

Thank you. Do we have anyone in person? Are you for non agendized? Okay. Go ahead.

Good evening, members the commission.

It's not on.

Good evening, members of the planning commission. My name is Jojo Choi. I've formally served on the planning commission. I'm here to talk about something that's not agendized but related to later on what we'll be talking about in terms of the noticing. Previously when we had talked about ministerial review approval processes, there was a long discussion about how do we notice the public.

When I was on the planning commission, we ultimately decided to go ahead and do the public noticing by providing a mailing of around 500 feet. Went to the city council. The city council rescinded that requirement and then instead did the public noticing through a website. And now the public noticing lives in the Planning Commission or the Planning Division's web pages, but it's a GIS map. So it's really hard to find out when new projects are actually being developed or submitted or what applications are being put forth.

And so what I'm asking you to do as a planning commission is to review the GIS website as is and, take a look to see if it's sufficient, for providing public notice. I think that the GIS is not enough. We should also be providing a table that's searchable or a query where you can actually see, you can sort of sort by date to see when new applications are being being submitted, as well as understanding where in the process that application is. Because otherwise, when it's just on the GIS map, if you're not actually checking it frequently or you're not having like a web crawler who's always checking what data's on there and doing a compare and contrast, you never know when a new project is gonna be posted or what new projects are there. It's very what the intent of the public notice is obfuscated.

And it's not feeling what the desire was for letting the citizens of Saratoga know what's going on in their neighborhoods. So I urge you to put this on a future meeting to actually look at, make recommendations to staff, and to see, evaluate for yourself whether or not it's sufficient to provide public notice to the residents. I don't think so, but I think there should be a process for where we can give you feedback and actually have a public hearing, and then you can give formal recommendations. And if it's a okay, then at least we guys did sort of your due diligence and your homework. If you feel like there's improvements that need to be made, at least there's a forum for us to talk about it, and then you can give your recommendations to the city staff.

Future item, but also important. Thank you.

Thank you, Jojo. Seeing no other cards, we will now close public hearing for non agendized items. And moving on to our first item on the public hearing 1.1, the cities periodically adopt several cleanup addendums to the city code to clarify and compile with state laws and to conform to new best practices that have changed since the code was adopted. So can we have the staff report please?

Yes. Thank you. Excuse me. On August 20, the city council viewed a list of current amendments and directed staff to prepare an ordinance of implementing the amendments for consideration by the city council. The staff report includes tables which summarizes the topics being addressed with proposed update.

The full text of the amendments are included in the resolution. The table on the pages is a summary of topics being addressed with the annual update. The actual amendments, the text and the zenith code are included in the resolution, like I mentioned. These amendments include rezoning the 12 acre site at the corner of Chester And Allendale Avenues Agricultural with APOS overlay to r one twenty thousand. This rezoning will implement a policy from the housing element where the city committed to rezoning specific sites to accommodate the city's RHNA requirement of 1,712 housing units.

In 2016, the city council adopted updated procedures for processing Williams Knock applications. Because of that new procedure, the APOS overlay was no longer necessary. The text of the zoning ordinance was updated in 2018 to omit the APOS. As there's no longer a reference to this in the zoning code, proposed amendment would revise the zoning map to remove this designation for 11 parcels on Mount Eden Road. Last year, the governor approved senate bill eleven twenty three.

This legislation requires cities to administer the approve a tentative and final map in housing developments of tenant few fewer residential units, multifamily zone parcels of five acres or less, or a vacant single family residential parcel not exceeding 1.5 acres. Minimum lot sizes are 600 square feet if it's still multifamily or 1,200 square feet if it's zoned single family. This development must comply with objective zoning and design standards, including height limit for the existing zoning designation and setbacks of no less than four feet from original lot lines. Opposed amendments to the tree removal criteria would allow an applicant to request that the tree replacement fee imposed for tree removal in the WUI be placed in a separate safety fund for use in WUI public safety improvement projects. And lastly, currently only net housing units are required to pay park and loop fees.

The proposed amendments would require the applicants for new ADUs with seven fifty square feet in size, often required to pay park and loop fees. The fee will be based on the size of the ADU relative to the size of the primary dwelling unit. ADUs that are subject to affordable housing restrictions, thereby creating affordable unit, required to pay one half of the amount. DEV recommends the Planning Commission adopt resolution number 25Dash016, recommending that the city council adopt an ordinance which includes amendments chapter 15 of Zurich City Code. Thank you.

Questions for the staff? Go ahead.

So my understanding on reading this, Chris, is that all of the things that are changed are either required by state statute or have already been run by the city council and

That's correct. The city council, the city attorney brought a preview of all the changes to city council. And the city council then directed staff to come back with an ordinance adopting those recommendations.

Yeah. So our job tonight is to basically, formally go through a process that basically is already been decided by the city council and the state legislative Well,

directed by the city council, yes.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you.

Other questions for staff? Seeing none at this time, we will open up for public hearing, as there is no applicant as such. So, everyone who would like speak on this agenda item, please come forward and complete a card. You'll have three minutes to speak. And Francis, if you could please keep track of everybody online. You can go first and recognize anyone who is online.

Thank you, Chair Causer. Glenda, please accept the prompt to speak.

Can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes.

Okay. If I'm understanding this correctly, you are planning to change the zoning for some parcels along a Mount Eden Road. This is going to open the door for more housing, including builders remedy projects. While I'm not opposed to housing, I am greatly concerned about adding more traffic on Pierce Road. Pierce Road is already saturated.

We can expect a hundred and two hundred to 200 more cars from the current Builders Remedy projects along that road, including Mountain Winery housing and their hotel. So my question is, if you're gonna change this, what is the city going to do to make this major route for the hillsides safe every day and in an evacuation? Don't change this zoning if you can't address safety for the Hillside residents who are dependent on Pierce Road. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there another speaker, Frances?

Francesca There are no other hands raised.

Thank you. Now I would like to call Jojo.

Good evening, questions again. Well, I definitely understand the position you guys are in. The state is sort of mandating certain things, like they want more housing. You do have the authority and the which we've discussed before to change the public noticing requirements. So I think it's really important that, especially for the sub lot, the small lot subdivisions where you can subdivide a lot into 10 subunits.

Don't want think of yourself as a resident and your neighbor decides to go along and go ahead and do the subdivision of 10 units. You're not gonna and you don't find out about it until they break ground. That's just jarring. And you want to, as a neighbor, to encourage sort of dialogue and discussion and just noticing, you want them, you want Saratoga's to not feel like stuff is happening in a big black box that's not transparent. All of our commissioner, all of our council members have run on having a friendly community in Saratoga, having transparency.

I want them to deliver on it. I want them to actually say yes. And one way to do that is by having public noticing requirements. I understand that the formal notice requirements of mailing is a sort of the taste of the flavor for what they want today, but at minimum you can do what we've done with the housing single family residents and the multi family residents ministerial review noticing sort of database that we put online. So that's why on my non agenda item, we'll say, look, if this is where we're gonna put public noticing for these type of projects, take a look at it, do it.

And for all of your changes that are coming in, the code changes that are gonna be under ministerial review, put them under the same bucket that all the other miniscule review processes are gonna be in and have it be put on the website as well. Don't let it be silent. Don't let it be something that's just in a black box that residents have to put a FOIA request in order to find out what's happening in their neighborhood. It's just don't make it that inconvenient. We should have some semblance of transparency.

The state has left that door open. It's open it's left open to you as a planning commission and a large city council to actually go forth, walk through that door, and allow for transparency and allow for the opportunity for our neighbors to have a conversation and to know about what's going on in their neighborhood and for them to actually talk. And maybe make changes that they otherwise might not have had they not known earlier in the process, right? So if you have public noticing, I know it's not required for them to do anything different, but you can raise the issue and maybe there's an opportunity or room for change. So please, please, please put some minimum public noticing standard on the changes that are going through.

Thank you. Do we have any other speakers in the audience? Seeing none, I'm going to close public comment and bring it back to the Commission for discussion or further questions of the staff. Go ahead, Herbert.

I have a question for staff. So I just read from code change. It says 11 parts are going to be removed from the designation for the Mountain Eaton Road, So, I understand that those 11 parcels are either agricultural land or they are the open space, right? So open space reserve, right? So in that area, I think there's mountains, right? There's a lot of hills. So are they really beautiful? So we are not we're going to change those rezoning those 11 parcels to be the beautiful parcel right away. What are we actually doing here?

So the parcels all have HR zoning.

Okay.

The APOS overlay zone was put in place for properties that had Williamson Act contracts. Well, Williamson Acts already include limitations on what you can build on Williamson Act lands. And so there's really no need to have APUS overlay anymore. That's why it was taken out of the zoning code because the Williamson Act contracts themselves limit what can be built on those properties. It has no effect on the zoning. The zoning is going to stay HR.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Other questions? Go ahead, Badri.

So there's a concern about traffic. There was a concern about traffic on PS Road. I'm also an avid biker on PS Road, and I feel that more and more those traffic concerns are becoming legitimate. From past Planning Commission meetings, I remember that we're not we can't take any single development. We can't consider that for traffic mitigation, but the sum of building coming up, think, will cause a problem. I'd like for the planning commission to somehow make a message that we need more we either need another road there or we need some sort of effort to improve traffic flow in that region.

Thank you. Paul?

Can I build on that

by way of a

question? Are you, do you know what is on the plans for Pierce Road? Is there a group that's looking at widening it for instance and putting it?

No. None of the plans for Pierce Road include road widening.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

Other questions? Singer, I have a question regarding the ADU. You said in the past we didn't have a parking rec fee and now we are adding that. And how much would that add to the COP?

Good question. It would be add a one quarter the cost of the, what the house is. So I believe the house is based on, correct me if I'm wrong, square footage. And so it's one quarter whatever the primary residence impact fee will be.

So let's say if the house is 2,500 square feet, what would be the impact fee?

I don't know offhand.

Oh, okay. So it would be one fourth

of it.

It's one quarter of what the primary house would pay.

Okay. And is this something that's required by the state? No. Because what it is doing, it's going to do is even make it more difficult, more expensive for homeowners to build ADUs. And if we want to encourage that, as per the housing element that we passed, we had X number of ADUs on it, This may be another thing that would discourage it because of adding additional fees because they have other things like PG and E has a huge fee. Sanitary District has a huge fee. So why is there a need for the city to add this fee?

Well, because it still has an impact on parks just like the city currently has park impact fees on all net new development. So if you replace a house one for one, there's no park fee. When you build a new house, for example, for if you do a SB nine lot split, you pay a parking back fee for that new lot. Well, ADUs are in essence having the same effect. It's creating more demand for the parks.

Okay. I can see that effect, but I think we are kind of going against what we are trying to do. Like one, you know, on one road we are saying we should build more homes and encourage people to build so that we can meet our arena numbers. And on the flip side, we are adding fees and making, increasing the cost of building these homes.

We do offer an incentive for, you can reduce those fees by 50% if you de restrict that unit for an affordable unit. So it still has an opportunity for, to still pay 50% less than you normally would pay.

Thank you. Anyone has any other questions? Go ahead. Yeah.

So there are two items for tree permits, which probably not related to the housing part. But we as a commission, I think we agree that we add our work plan for this year to actually visit to revisit some of the the parts of the regulations. I'm just curious about the changes that we made here is kind of a minor changes and what would be the process for us to make to really evaluate, for example, the list of the trees that we, the citizens, can remove, can be granted without I mean, the permit can always be granted.

So we will we do plan on coming back to the commission with recommendations for tree species in the WUI, and there will be an opportunity to discuss the tree ordinance more. The tonight's tonight, we're really doing kind of minor cleanups, so we're not gonna be looking at new kind of new regulations. So it will be coming back to the Planning Commission.

Okay. Thank you.

You had another question? You good? No, I'm good. Go ahead.

No questions, but just following up on Paul's earlier comments about it sounds like the rezoning ordinances have to do with cleaning up given the passage of the housing element and complying with state law. And then the ASOP overlay is becoming in line with previous city council decisions. And same with the rest of these. So this is cleanup of amendments to be consistent with state law and prior city council decisions. And then they directed staff to bring all of these changes back to us. So I was just following up with Paul's lead comments on why these are before us tonight.

Thank you. If no more questions or discussion, we can

I'll make a motion to approve the resolution as presented.

I have a second.

Second.

Thank you, Zaheer. Motion made by Paul and seconded by Zaheer. Can you please do a roll call vote?

Commissioner Shu Heberron? Aye. Hassan? Brownlee?

Aye.

Zane? Aye. Germerod? Aye. Vice Chair Lee?

Aye. Chair Kauser?

Aye. Thank you.

Motion passes.

Thank you. Moving on to item number two, Director's Items.

Thank you, staff, for a great job tonight. Planning Commission, thanks for coming. I know we've got another will we have a meeting in October? We will. Okay. So we have a lot of meetings on your docket, so thank you for your time. We have a WUI presentation this upcoming week at the City Council. So if you'd like to watch or participate, I encourage you to do so. And then later this, in October, the new building code cycle will be presented to the City Council. So all exciting things. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Going to item number three, commission items. Anyone has anyone anything to share? Go ahead, Paul.

I was very appreciative of Jojo's comments and just wondering what would be an appropriate path forward on that. I was unaware, my own ignorance, that the city council had not taken the advice to

have

under feet. So is what's the mechanism by which we could have a discussion and then make a recommendation to the city council?

I think we'll have to put it on the agenda. So let's talk to staff and see how we can get it on the agenda. We can't really discuss it right now.

I realize we better okay. So that your process is to put it on the agenda as an agenda item?

It has to be an agenda item.

Okay. Then I'd recommend that we do so. Thank you.

Yeah. Can I have a follow-up comments?

Sure.

Yeah. I also, you know, appreciate the comments from Juju. I remember, I think last year, we actually put the public noticing around the 50 yard that as the conditional agreement. Actually, we proposed the City Council, but they are rejected for but I don't get any reason why they are rejected. We actually passed. We passed the notice.

I'm sorry, but we can discuss this at the time when we have it on the agenda.

Yes. Fine. So I just would like to know, also read

Yes, the that would be part of the agenda Okay,

thank you so much.

Anyone Thank else? Seeing none, thank you everybody for coming out. And thank you staff for putting the packet together. And with that, we adjourn the meeting. Thank you.