Legislative Meeting - Regular Meeting

There you go. We're ready.

Hey, good afternoon. If you're watching online, we're going to take maybe a 10 or so minute delay a little bit to see if some folks show up here in the room, and then we'll get started. And so hang in there, and we'll be back in just a little bit. And in the meantime, since you are here and On time. If you've got some any specific questions or something. I'm happy to take them. Of sequence.

So it's bigger and You got a lot of people online. The game started at 5.30. I could stay home, but I thought, well, she'd maybe, you know, be in front of the boat.

What we hopefully will talk about this evening is where we are with what's called the environmental impact statement, how that analysis comes together, how that affects growth areas on the edge, and then some ideas for new zoning techniques that help Meet our gma records management act requirements for increased density within our current areas and how we can work in these new areas around the edges of the urban growth area. So. We had one event last night, a handful of people. Though they are recorded, so anybody, you must be able to watch any different event if. If this one is as. late attended as it appears to be uh we'll probably call it short and like i said just answer questions that you may have about what's going on and we'll go from there so yeah are we recording right now yes

I'm taking advantage of looking at the screen.

There you go.

So the environmental impact statement is an analysis that looks at or could look at all sorts of negative impacts of growth and development on the environment. We narrow it down by using three alternatives of three scenarios. And that helps give us a range of things. And then the analysis looks at how does that affect the environment? How do you need to change things? And by the environment, it's not just natural or the ecology, it's the infrastructure and built environment as well. So how does growth affect transportation? How does it affect capital facilities? There are three alternatives. One is called a no action alternative, which is pretty straightforward. It means what happens if the county takes no action to change its development codes or to change its growth area? How does it handle 104,000 new residents in 20 years? Second or alternative one is if you use only your regulations, how do you accommodate that growth? So in the simplest sense, that means how do you increase density in existing areas to accommodate all of that growth in population housing. And the third is something of a hybrid or a combination. Some amount of increased density or more efficient, more intense land use for what's existing in the urban growth area and already served by urban services. And reflecting what we call the historic development pattern of the county, which is about four and a half units an acre of single family housing and how much additional land Would that require over 20 years? This is the calendar that we're working on for this. We're here at the second of four open houses here at Center Place in Spokane Valley. We'll be looking through these, taking comments from attendees, taking comments from anybody that sends them in through email or through our website. We will compile it in part of this and taking those comments. I'm sorry, I couldn't say. This draft EIS will be published on Friday. We as staff are going through the technical analysis right now. We will be publishing that on Friday for public comment. There will be a 30-day comment period. Comments will be due back, well, on really just before or after Independence Day. And we will be talking with our Board of County Commissioners on July 6th about the results of that. This is the metro core study area map, and because it's a big core, it's hard to see on the map. In the room, we have some display maps up that show the various study areas. Simply look at the green parcel with the sort of lilac color around them that are the urban growth area, study boundary or study limits. The more colored areas, the purple, the hatched are the inside the UGA density increase or alternative one areas for the most part. So a handful of these urban growth areas we want to highlight here. They're all in the EIS and they're all listed in this kind of detail. But for example, Airway Heights has a high priority for development because it has availability to do that in terms of urban services. The Alcott UGA, which is on the east side of the city of Spokane, roughly kind of off between 29th and 37th Avenue on the east boundary. That has more of a medium. And there's another one connected to this, the Moran Prairie, Fenrose area. I'll get to that one part in a second. Deer Park, relatively low. They're growing, but fairly slow growing, and they have quite a little bit of land available within their current boundaries. Five Mile Prairie, north side of the city of Spokane, central to northwest. It has developed a lot in pieces over the years, and therefore it has the elements of growing in. It needs some urban services, but those urban services can be leveraged by more than a little development, so it has a high priority for development. Medical Lake, smaller community. wants to grow back into a small resort town. We're working with their mayor, Mayor Cooper, to make that happen for them or to give them assistance to do that. And part of that is reorienting their urban growth area from their northern boundary, which is just adjacent to or south of the Fairchild Air Force Base runway, to their east side along their highway going out toward the interstate. That gives them a chance of a front door and also recognizes that development in and around the lake can provide a chance to bring sewer and water out to the residents that can maybe have some environmental protection and some better access around at least part of the lakes. Moran Glen Rose is the one we mentioned before. It's east and southeast of the city of Spokane. Alcott is just north of it. It's been a growing area over the last 15 years or so. It still has room to grow, and it is a good area for that. But it's considered medium because it's sort of split in terms of interest. It has capability. It's split in terms of, for example, providing sewer services. In the northern part of these UGAs, a lot of that falls into the counties. wastewater collection system and the southern part falls into the cities. So there are some technical differences that would have to be worked out for growth in this area. And there are a lot of property owners in that rural area between the city of Spokane and Lake Dishman Hills area that want to retain large lot, low density rural living. And so there's emphasis on growth and then there's emphasis on preservation of rural living. The last two are both high north metro in the area. Division Street at Wentworth University moving east over toward Newport Highway where the new Costco is. This is an area with a lot of change in the last five years and expects to have a lot of growth in the next five to ten years. And the West Plains has been a growing area for Well, certainly the last 10 years, and even in the last five, there have been a lot of transitions of land there from the previously planned light industrial areas south of I-90 to residential uses. So that we see continuing. So in that alternative one, it talks about how you can use land more intensely, increasing densities, increasing the allowable times of architecture that are there from single family to townhouses, flats, stacked flats, limited multifamily. It gives that a chance to exist in an area that now is really single family or only that. And so there's a couple of maps that we'll put up just to kind of show some of the differences. And this is the first round of what we would consider for redevelopment. It simply changes the zoning using the existing plan category. So it goes from some commercial zoning to some mixed use zoning in areas to provide from regional commercial to mixes of uses that provide for that one more density. Similarly, here in that Moran Glen Rose area, this is over on the west side. That is 57th, just as it turns south to Patch Road. on the West Plains. You can see here some of those areas in the lilac, which is light industrial zoning, were actually platted because the county rules allowed that from 2005 to 2007. County rules changed, so now we're going to put the right cover on the map to start with, but talk about can there be some more intense neighborhood-style zoning in these areas because there's room to do that. And then some smaller ones here on the east side. Just changing some uses and something we'll talk about or at least we'll share a little later in terms of building changes. The map is suggesting or we're suggesting this is a residential zone with a vacant parcel and moving that into a mixed use of some kind might allow for small shops or a sea store or something that could benefit the neighbors in that area. Right now, it wouldn't be allowed by an residential zoning.

Your example there was one in the valley, but I noticed that you didn't have any valley, or maybe I just missed it. Earlier in the slide, you didn't have any, and nothing in the valley was showing as a priority, medium, low, high, was it?

No, they weren't, because the UGA We call them polygons. So the little areas in the valley are all very small. Most of them have just a little bit of land to add to that. So anything that adds to it kind of has to fit into that neighborhood. These others have bigger areas that can actually hold more capacity. So this is then where that kind of bridge between what's there now and what we're calling a neighborhood residential or a neighborhood business zoning. And this is on the north side. This is in the north metro division is here. This is, for example, the Rockwood Retirement. Whitworth University is right here. You can see there's lots of different colors on the map and the colors represent the existing zoning. So there's a lot going on there over time that has changed. We're talking about creating something that you can do by right. A series of ideas of of being able to. Add some intensity in there, but do it with development standards that make. Make it more compatible, so you don't have these disparate uses, big uses to each other. Another version of this. Can't quite see all West Plains happening. The same kind of idea is taking a mix of uses and trying to unify them for future development that makes some sense. And then alternative two is the recognizing that our historic development pattern doesn't work with alternative one. Single family detached housing needs a little more land. It uses it up in faster chunks. The parcels on I think it's still the left most map back on the easels, show all of the UGA study areas. And those study areas combined represent about 3,000 total acres of land that is poised for development. Far more than we need by our growth projections, far more than would be even allowed by the growth management. So we narrow that down by looking at kind of that alternative zero. What happens if we do nothing, but we keep growing at the rate we do? That would suggest we might need the rest of the land in the existing UGA in another 1,200 to 1,300 acres. If we then add some amount of infill density to fill up some of that and look at what's left after that, we get kind of a year, about 20 parcels and needing maybe about 600 acres to grow. So that's how we look at ultimately what do we want to put a boundary around and say, this is where a UGA should go next. So those alternative to, and this is the same map that's back there. It's impossible to bring up the screen. And the map that we have has the first round of staff comments specifically on transportation. And that's one of the key parameters on judging how potential areas go forward because improving transportation is very expensive. You know, kind of next in line is provision of sewer water. All of that infrastructure has to be either available or there in an affordable way to have these urban growth areas rank strongly. So just a few kind of notes here. Now, this is at North Spokane area. We've talked about a little bit. That same idea. This is a Whitworth area or Rockwood, Whitworth. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Hastings and firewall or up here, this is a mixed use project in a the costco is sitting right about there, this has changed a lot in the last few years, and so we. We look at that as a way of saying, why don't we get ahead of those changes and try to plan it as a whole so that they link together. We can assess parking impacts. We can assess transportation impacts. Maybe have a trail system put in there. And then those green dots are the potential study areas for UGA expansion. West Plains. similar scale or similar labels to the map, the same idea of better use of land in these hatched areas, and then filling in some gaps that make sense economically and well as the population factors that we attach to do that. Southern part, you know, this was a project proposed at Hatch Road coming down the hill to 195. This is the Alcott-Moran Prairie UGA. So I'd say there's some parcels that score fairly well, and then there's others that just don't want to see growth in that area. And lastly, back to your other comment, the East Valley has really these small UGAs that are attached here, some of which have some pretty good potential for growth to fill in gaps. They're generally supported by transportation. And so those would be things. And this is Argonne Road going north. Month in this 30-day comment period. So that's the first part of this in terms of UGA and EIS. Anything that jumps out at you? Anything online, Ronna?

No.

The second part is coding and zoning. Spokane County, like a lot of places, derives its zoning from the original zoning in maybe LA, but New York, 1916, and Ohio in 1926. Ultimately, the Supreme Court found that that action by government was a legitimate use of the city's police powers, and that's how zoning became zoning. We use that same system now. It's all about separation. Separation of residential from business, business from industrial. And in the county, it's even separation of residential densities from low, medium, and high densities. Those tools have been blended by other places over the years, and we're looking to do that here, which is to create what we call neighborhood zoning, which would allow a range of Multi-family, single-family, detached, townhomes, stacked flats, live-work units, all in a single area under a single zone. So a builder-developer or group, partnership, joint venture, whatever, could look at that and plan and build something that reacts to a market that is different than one thing at one time. And the other advantages in the current system, if you wanted to do that, you have to go through literally a series of comprehensive plan amendments to move from low to medium to high. Each of which can take pretty easily two years of time. And so this allows a system that lets the regulatory group react to the market rather than the market having to do something that is a regulatory burden. We think this is going to provide a lot of flexibility for development. And it comes with some conditions. You've got to talk about how these work together, urban design, how they fit into something that looks like it makes some sense. And so this is a similar thing about this neighborhood zoning. So these are the three categories that we're studying to use for most of our zoning in the future. Neighborhood residential one is essentially what is today LDR and MDR, low density residential, medium density residential. This is designed to a large degree to protect investment that's already been made in neighborhoods, in subdivisions. If there are a small handful of outlaws that remain in certain areas, this zoning would give them some direction how to do that, but it would do it in a way to protect the investment of what's already there. Neighborhood residential two is more of the master plan approach, trying to do what this illustration did on the previous slide, build something from scratch that can evolve over time and markets. And then neighborhood business is finding a way to allow higher density residential in traditional business, mostly commercial settings, like that north metro area around universities, major institutions, even shopping areas. The south side of the city of Spokane on Regal and Palouse Highway put in a target about 10 years ago. And there was a great deal of opposition from the neighborhood because they wanted an urban form in that area, not the suburban target. We helped Target and the developer design that in a way so that the parking lot of the Target store is sized to fit multifamily footprints. And so you could put residential in there and in the future, the market never came along. And we'll show you an example of that actually. So NR1, again, it's more of a transition of the LDR system And importantly is this attribute. So these new areas, the zoning will help guide design of those to blend in with their neighbors rather than be totally contrasting. So in the past, if there was a neighborhood that had one acre, two acre lots, and when the county board increased the density limits in 2020 up to eight, 10 units an acre, you could have much smaller lots in those areas, but they were outfunding these bigger lot areas and they didn't really react well. They didn't look very good together. They didn't work very well together. This is a way of trying to blend that, recognizing that there are still market forces in play. So NR2, again, that master plan approach we talked about in this area along the West Plains, and then this neighborhood business back in some of the interior areas. This is particularly, in a way, this is something that normally happens in cities, but because of the strange annexation rules in Washington over these last 20 years, there are places like this in the north metro area that are essentially urban, but they're still in unincorporated counties. So we have to learn how to deal with these and let them evolve in a way to make that happen. And so here's an example of how neighborhood business can work. This is the same area, about 10 years apart. The slides are dated longer. There's a major arterial on the top, another arterial north-south going on this side. Very traditional 1960s shopping center. Department store in the middle, grocery store in one end, usual sort of shops. And then the usual sea of parking, this entire parking field, which you can see clearly in that photo is about I don't know, a quarter used or a third used. And the rule of thumb, we used to joke about it in planning, but the retailers would, their version of how much parking do I need is, I want to build my parking lot for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And that's fine, but then the other 51 weeks a year, you're using 20% of it or more or less. So that's what's happening. So what happened here is over time, And you can see residential neighborhood on the other side of this is Midvale Boulevard in Madison, Wisconsin. Built a row of townhomes on the street face itself. Structured parking behind that and then put a set of liner buildings against the parking and created a little bit of a boulevard in front of the existing wall and then repurposed the mall. And so you've got new retail energy in here. You've got residential. You've transformed it into a neighborhood. And on top of it, this smaller use here from before became a big deal.

You don't see a separate target parking lot. It's all shared parking with the neighbors. So this is a way of reclaiming land. and the neighborhoods. So this is the concept of that neighborhood business. And then to wrap up, tables look like in the county zoning code.

The zone itself across one side, the various attributes, density, building height, lot sizes down the side, how they all fit together. So it's kind of a builder's recipe on how to do something. These are where we're starting to put the parameters of what these neighborhood zones look like, some of which are going to be higher density. And we are working on comments where we may not have any density standards at all, but simply use lot coverage as part of that. Minimum lot sizes are shrinking. There's an opportunity in the NR2 to have an area with no minimum lot size that would allow for developers and builders to figure out Can I use this to make more affordable housing? Can I use it to be more flexible? One example of that is already in use. It's a little way from here. It's a project called the Beadworks up on Highway 2 on the Port Highway behind Costco, reclaimed from Kaiser Aluminum Land. And Greenstone is doing that project, and that's an area using the county's mixed-use zone now, which has no minimum lots on it, so we're We're thinking about bringing that across the line and putting that directly into a residential cell.

Verona, I got locked out. It just told me there was a internet instability.

Nice view from this one. Yes, Verona. We've got some just kind of quick.

I'll just go back to this.

Can you move it from your side?

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, there we go. So as we talk about these standards, these are kind of the things that we'd be looking for to add direction to development. And you can see there's this project and both of these are blocking them. So again, we're talking about things that have been done in other areas.

Exactly.

description of where we're going.

I'm happy to take some time to answer any questions or anything else we've got. And in the broader sense, especially those viewing remotely, you can send comments to us. SpokaneCounty.gov slash BP. Click on the comprehensive plan and it will give you a place to submit things. And you can do it even in the old town. be taking comments on the EIS through the end of June. And then we'll be bringing that back for discussion. And there's going to be many more chances to comment on the complete draft of this as we go forward. So that's what we have. Happy to take some questions.

Eric? Is the neighborhood graphic that you have there with the one, two, business, et cetera. Has that evolved since your last presentation in May? Yes. Significantly. Okay. Significantly.

There is a draft. There's a draft of that chapter that we posted on our web a while ago. We discussed it with the Planning Commission briefly at their last meeting. Happy to go over that with the idea of We had a slide. I didn't think anybody, I didn't think somebody from the West Plains would be interested as we dropped it out of tonight's presentation. But the West Plains slide and the area in the middle of that is perfectly set up for this neighborhood business approach and from a scratch perspective instead of a basic perspective, which provides that mixed use approach in a way that lets you do very much similar things to the existing business. So happy to talk about that offline too. I got your call. Sorry to get back to you very quickly.

I've had to end the webinar.