Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Reminders. There we go. Can you hear me now? Welcome to the 10/16/2025 Stanislaus County Planning Commission meeting. I'd like to start with a few reminders. Please silence your cell phones. During the public hearings, we're happy to accept any comments on the projects, but we do ask that you avoid repetition. During a long hearing, it's okay just to say that you agree with the previous speakers rather than to repeat what's already been said. Can we have roll call,

Commissioner Borcheto. Here. Commissioner Kalas.

Here.

Commissioner Campo. Here. Commissioner Huff. Here. Commissioner Morad? Here. Commissioner Willerop?

Here. Commissioner Zipser?

Here.

Thank you. Please join me in the pledge of allegiance.

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

The Citizens Forum is a time for the public to speak on issues that are not on tonight's agenda. However, the commission cannot take action on these items. Is there anyone that would like to speak on any issues that are not on the agenda tonight?

Madam chair, can we let

the record reflect that commissioners Marring and Zabala

are absent this evening, please?

Yes, noted. Thank you. All right. And for the minutes for 10/02/2025, is there a motion to accept and a second to accept the minutes?

Move to approve.

We got a second.

I'm sorry. Didn't catch who was the first? Zipser? And second by Campo? Yes.

All in favor?

Aye. Aye.

Any opposition? So moved. Okay. Do we have any correspondence? We have none this evening. Alright. Thank you. Are there any commissioners that would like to declare a conflict of interest?

I have one.

And which item is that, commissioner Howe?

It's for items b and c, the housing element update and implementation.

So noted. When the time comes, we will direct the appropriate steps for that. Thank you. Consent items are items on tonight's agenda designated by an asterisk next to the item requiring a Planning Commission public hearing, but which following an initial evaluation by staff have been found to be consistent with existing county policy and the county general plan and are therefore recommended for routine approval. If you want a particular item removed from consent, please speak up and advise the chair.

That item will be then withdrawn from consent and reviewed in detail as scheduled. The remaining consent items for which there are no voice objections will be handled by a single action of the commission. Does anyone wish to discuss any of the consent items?

I make a motion to approve the consent item parcel map application PLN2021Dash0021.

I'll second.

Do we need a roll call for that? No. Alright. So moved. Can we soon we send you the vote though. Yep.

Is that all? Alright. All in favor?

Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Alright. So moved. Alright. So moving on to non consent items. General plan amendment application number PLN2022Dash0045. Six cycle housing element update. Do I call each one, or will it be presented by staff each one? Which way would you like to do that?

So I unless we're gonna move to c and d for or d and e first, I'll I'll be exiting here.

Let's see. Is there anyone that we have that will be speaking that is in the crowd here from last We

do have members of the audience here this evening for the two housing element items, and some of them were here at the last meeting.

Okay. So would you like to recuse yourself, commissioner Huff, when we come to that particular item? We might still need an input from you, Ed, for the housing element?

The housing element, I will recuse myself first.

Okay. Then you are recused.

Okay.

Thank you. So we can let

the record reflect at

06/2005

when commissioner Haap has left the dais. Okay.

So Christy Dowd, deputy director for planning, San Luis County. And this evening, I have two housing element items for you for the sixth sixth cycle, and I just wanted to say, you know, they are both connected. So I'm gonna cover most the material in the first presentation and then briefly, touch on that in the second presentation. But because they are separate items, we do need two, public hearings for each item to open and close the hearings. We've been working on this six cycle housing element for the last three years.

You can see there that the project number's from 2022. It's been a long process, so we're actually really happy to be here tonight to be presenting it to you guys. So the first project is a request to update and amend the housing element of the Stanislaus County general plan, which is for the sixth cycle and will cover an eight year period between January 2023 through December 2031 and consideration of a common CEQA common sense exemption. So the housing element is just one of seven elements in the county's general plan, but it does have more restrictions, more state mandates surrounding it. And it's required to be updated every eight years, and it needs to be reviewed and certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development or HCD.

What does a housing element do? State law requires that each jurisdiction identify current and future housing needs, identify barriers and opportunities for housing development, and to establish an action plan, which includes specific goals, objectives, policies, and programs to meet the identified housing needs. The county's six cycle housing element only covers unincorporated Stanislaus County, and it only plans for the development of the development of housing. So it includes actions that may make housing easier to build, but it does not require that that development occur. And here, you can just see how it's organized.

There's a housing needs assessment, a housing constraints analysis. There's a chapter on affirmatively furthering fair housing, an inventory of our housing resources and sites inventory, a plan that has programs and actions, and just the summary of our public participation we went through and our sites inventory. Again, this just kinda shows you what the housing element has in it. It has a community profile that looks at demographics and housing stock. It and that analyzes housing constraints, looks at what our resources are, what our needs are, and then builds a plan for how to solve our housing issues in the county.

Again, the sixth cycle covers an eight year span between 2023 and 2031. And between the fifth and sixth cycle, there have been significant shifts in terms of the state laws that we need to make need to meet in the housing element, specifically around how we can identify sites in the regional housing needs allocation or RENA. So you're gonna hear that word, RENA. It has stricter methodology, a higher standard for site selection, stronger requirements for analyzing environmental social health and income conditions. It has an emphasis on integrating affordable housing in high resource areas and has more rigorous standards for demonstrating development potential.

It also has increased accountability and penalties for not meeting standards, including, you know, a risk of losing grant funding if we don't get our housing element certified. So this is gonna be a long slide. I'm just gonna try to brief as brief as I can go over for you the community engagement process that we went over. Over the last three years, we we have we are still doing community outreach, and we will continue to do community outreach once the housing element is adopted because a lot of the plan asks for us to implement things that require community outreach. Development of the county's six cycle housing element began back in 2022 with opportunities.

We kinda created a list of anyone that would be interested, community organizations, developers, engineers, any anyone that we thought would be interested and then anyone who asked us to put them on a list. We continue to notify them with every single opportunity for community output or community input and every time we sent out a a draft of the housing element or had online surveys. So in 2022, we had a survey online that you could do. We also had a GIS exercise you can do where you could tell us what kind of where you think housing should go, what kind of what types of housing should go there. We, like I said, created that list.

We had an in person community event. And then I think we drafted our first we sent out our first draft. And from there, we sent letters to all the property owners that were included in our site's inventory if they were proposed to be, sites that were gonna be rezoned. After we had our, I think, our second draft housing element, then we went and we did, additional one on one interviews with, specific kind of populations that HDD had recommended we connect with, like farm workers, the unhoused, and extremely low income families. And then we went in April and May.

We did a series of pop up events. We had a community meeting in we attended one in Rouse, Colorado in Parklawn. We went to South Modesto MAC. We went to the West Modesto Community Collaborative. We went to a farmer's market in the airport neighborhood and a a day of the children event in Grayson.

So we did we continue to do significant outreach. We had a virtual workshop as well and also just a project website that had all of the information included on it. We did one on one stakeholder interviews with local housing developers, agencies, and housing community health app advocates. We also met with our general plan update committee on multiple occasions. We had a training here with the planning commission way back in 2022.

And then on multiple occasions, went to our municipal advisory councils where the rezone sites were, being proposed in. So that includes South Modesto, Empire, Denair, Salida, and Keyes Max. And then we went through public review with releasing the drafts on six different occasions. And in addition to noticing the property owners of the rezone sites, we also noticed property owners 300 feet surrounding those sites and two parcels out in all directions. So that actually ended up being, like, several thousand, landowner notices that went out.

So some of the input we got, what we do with this input is we, you know, translated it into adding actions in our housing element that address the input received. Some of the input input was just a request to conduct additional outreach, which we did then went out and did. We had input regarding where housing should be located, which was that it should be located near transit, shopping, and jobs, and where sewer and water is available. And then that input then translated into our site selection for the rezones and for our vacant and underlie underutilized sites. We had input saying that the county needs more variety of housing, more flexible housing standards, so that then translated into us having actions to amend our ordinances to allow for more flexible development, some of which you'll hear in the next project.

We had requests to expand and analysis of fair housing, that kinda led to us adding a bunch of local knowledge about all of the fringe unincorporated communities and everything we knew about them, we we added a lot of information into our housing element about that. Additional detail about infrastructure availability. We added targeting to special populations based on input such as, like, they we needed more housing for farm workers or for extremely low income families. And then we we did attempt to equitably distribute the housing units between low and high resource areas, which I'll get into more detail later. So one of the first parts of the housing element was for us to do a housing needs assessment.

This assessment quantifies our existing projected housing needs. In Stanislaus County, I would say the most significant finding we had is that we have a a much higher percentage of older housing stock. Housing that is 50 years or older was ranking at about 40% of our housing. And of our housing units, we have about 1.6 that the assessor considers to be substandard. We identified special populations in Stanislaus County that have unique needs, and that includes seniors, persons with disabilities, large households, farm workers, and the homeless population.

Housing constraints is another section of the housing element, which evaluates governmental, nongovernmental constraints, environmental environmental barriers to housing development, such as perhaps land being located in a flood zone or not having access to water and sewer. A lack of land with water and sewer availability was one of the highest ranking constraints that we saw in unincorporated Stanislaus County. Some other limitations to our zoning ordinance being not consistent with state law were also identified. For example, we didn't meet the state's minimum standard for emergency shelter regulations and parking standards, things like that. So those ended up becoming actions that we need to go back and and implement later, some of which are coming tonight.

And then there was a finding that there was insufficient land that was zoned for high density development. And affirmatively furthering fair housing or what I'm gonna call from now on AFFH is one of the biggest areas of change between the fifth and sixth cycles. So these requirements, they they go into how we have to analyze our housing needs, our sites inventory, and also how we have to do our community outreach. So it it hits multiple parts of the process of the housing element update. And the shift has very, very strict requirements.

It's a lot of research. It's a lot of outreach and stricter requirements around how we can do our sites inventory. So the AFFH analysis must identify patterns of segregation, disparities in access to opportunity, and disproportionate housing needs, including the integration and segregation patterns and trends, identification of racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, which are called recaps, and of racially concentrated areas of affluence, which are called RCAAs, areas at risk of displacement, as well as identifying other relevant factors, which include historical disinvestment, language barriers, lack of infrastructure improvements, the presence of older affordable housing units that may be at risk of conversion. The AFFH must also look at census data such as race and ethnicity, household income, and at the pollution burden percentiles for each census tract. The county's AFFH analysis also includes local knowledge about residential development patterns and current conditions in each unincorporated island or French neighborhood and community throughout the unincorporated

county. So

just to go over, there's a big focus on what we call recaps and RCAAs, racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty and racially concentrated areas of affluence. And there's a push with the AFFH requirements to place your lower income housing in these RCAA areas, so that they have access to, high resource areas. In unincorporated county, we had identified three recaps, and those are in the area of the Airport neighborhood, Bret Hart neighborhood, and Rouse, Colorado neighborhood. And the RCAAs that were identified were in the communities of Diner, East Oakdale, Knights Ferry, and Valley Home. And each of the recaps were also predominantly Hispanic Latino, and elevated rates of poverty were found.

And in contrast, the RCAAs have generally higher median incomes and resources available to them. Here's just another map from the AFFH chapter, which rates areas by their opportunity. And the dark purple there is showing you the highest resource areas, and then the light yellow is showing areas of high segregation and poverty. So AFF regulations, the analysis then were incorporated into the actions in our housing plan, and those actions generally had to do with housing and employment mobility, place based strategies, anti displacement strategies, again, ongoing and meaningful community outreach, fair housing services, and then also geographic targeting of each of our actions to places that are at high risk of displacement, to recaps our RCAAs, or to high and low resource areas. Okay.

So the next section of our housing element has to do with the site's inventory or the arena, which I briefly touched on. This process begins with the state giving SANCOG a number for the entire county. That number for the sixth cycle was 34,344 housing units. STANCOG then works with each of the cities in the county to distribute those numbers between each jurisdiction based on a variety of factors. And, you know, after that process was done, which I believe was adopted in the 2022, yeah, 08/17/2022, this is the breakdown between each city.

So the county ended up with about 2,475 units that it had to accommodate. Whereas in comparison, you could see the larger city of Modesto has 11,248 units that it had to accommodate. And the overall number is then broken up between income category. So there's a number that you have to accommodate very low units, low income units, moderate income units, and above moderate income units. And here you can see for unincorporated Snasslaus County, very low and low income.

We had 574 units for very low, which is between 24,000 and $40,000 income average per year. And then the low income, 398 units, which would be for a family that is making between 40,000 and 64,000 per year. We had 458 moderate income units and then a 45 above moderate. And it's kinda difficult to claim a low income site. You can't just base it on what you think, like, size wise or, you know, where it's located.

So there's quite stringent, criteria to to be able to claim these lower income sites. And, again, later when you're reporting your sites than to report it as lower income. So this is where we started with our RENA process. You're allowed to get credit for the things that you're currently doing. And the county was already approved for about 252, units that were gonna occur because of low density subdivision maps that they have been recorded.

And then based on the number of building permits issued for accessory dwelling units, we're allowed to get a credit of a 184 anticipated accessory dwelling units. And here you can kinda see where those approved subdivision maps were that we were allowed to take credit for. We then inventoried our land based on its existing zoning and whether or not it's vacant or if it has, you know, something built on it, if it has vacant land that could be redeveloped. And through that analysis, we were allowed to count a few more sites in the moderate and above moderate income. So 580 vacant sites and 360 underutilized sites.

And you can see that we kind of reached our above moderate goal. So we had more than we had a 109 more units than we needed, but we were still deficient in the lower income and moderate income areas, leaving us with a deficiency of 1,099 sites. So that inventory showed us that we didn't have enough land inventory that could accommodate the lower income arena that we had to meet, and so that's why we had to create a rezone program to, make up for the deficit. In order to claim those lower incomes lower income sites, the site has to be between a half acre and 10 no more than 10 acres in size, has to accommodate a minimum density of 20 units per acre. It has to have a realistic likelihood of redevelopment, meaning, you know, that it is mostly vacant or vacant, and it has to have sewer and water availability.

And so the challenges for us as an unincorporated county, again, are that we didn't have a lot of infrastructure availability. Most of our infrastructure is within spheres of influence of the city of Modesto or Ceres or within the communities of Keyes or Denair. And so that left us with a deficiency of available and adequate land. And then we also have measure e here, which does not allow us to rezone agriculturally zone property for residential purposes unless there's a vote of the majority of the public first. So that kind of did keep us from looking at ag properties.

So once we did that analysis, we ended up with a rezone program that was broken up. It included 48 sites and 88 acres approximately in these following communities, the Brethart community, Diner, Empire, Quays, North Siri, Salida, South Siri, and West Modesto. And the rezone program, has extra sites than what our lower income arena is, just a little bit of buffer because that's recommended by HCD. So with implementation of the rezone program, then the county would was able to meet the arena in all income categories. So here you can kind of see visually where those rezone sites are, and I'll show you just a little more detail.

Here's the Bret Harte area. The purple on the left there are sites surrounding the Fairview Park area. Five parcels proposed proposed for rezoning, which could accommodate 590 units over a total of 29 acres. Sorry. There's another rezone area there, along Crow's Landing Road that you see in orange, And those are proposed to be rezoned to mixed use, which is a new zoning district that we're proposing to create.

In the community of Diner, you can see the four parcels highlighted in green. Those are also proposed to be rezoned to high density residential to accommodate a total of a 140 units over 12 acres. In the community of Empire, you can see on the bottom half of this map, we have about five parcels proposed for rezoning highlighted in green there. About 4.77 acres, one parcel of which is where the old it's owned by the county, and it's where the Empire Library used to be located. It relocated across the highway there.

In Keyes, we have owned three parcels proposed for rezone, and that includes 4.45 acres. We'll accommodate 78 units. And here and we're calling it North Series, but it's kind of showing you the Weistrum area, which is also known as South Modesto. There's three parcels proposed for rezoning there, and then one in the Hatch Sonum area, which is just an island community, a pocket in the city of Seres. In Salida, we have three parcels proposed for rezoning, and, again, this is a proposal to rezone to mixed use.

And then in South Ceres, one parcel West Modesto, we have the Spencer Marshall area, about 18 parcels made up of 23 acres, and it's showing as being able to accommodate 370 units. Okay. So the last part of the housing element is the housing plan, and this is the part that provides an action plan. It takes all of that research that we did, and it puts it into a plan that has goals, programs, and actions. They need to address the public comments that we've received and the data we got in terms of housing needs, what the governmental constraints are, fair housing issues that were brought up, and also to update policies to reflect current state law because a lot of laws changed from the last cycle.

There's a lot of programs from the previous housing element that have been retained and updated, but they've just kind of been expanded. Here's just our general categories of programs. Our first goal is to conserve and improve existing housing stock, and that includes programs around home rehab, residential compliance, building and design standards for energy efficiency, and the preservation of at risk affordable housing. Another goal is surrounding the assisting assisting the development of affordable housing. So here we have affordable housing development assistance, a density bonus provision, housing choice voucher action, supporting homeownership opportunities, the creation of a housing trust fund, and regional collaboration.

Our next goal is providing adequate sites. And here we have programs around making sure that we have adequate sites, so including the rezone program, a no net loss zoning action, replacing replacement housing action, adaptive reuse, zoning for a variety of housing types, streamlining, expedited project review action, accessory dwelling unit action, and an infrastructure action. Our next goal is about housings housing for persons with special needs, including special population housing, farm worker housing, housing for the homeless, and community outreach and education. And then the next goal is equal housing opportunity for all persons. Here's where you see our AFFH and environmental justice policies, fair housing services, and actions that have to do with displacement prevention, place based strategies, and housing mobility.

So, generally, giving you a summary of the actions that are included in the housing plan, Many of them have geographic targeting. This is something that HDD required through multiple drafts that we sent them. They asked us to add this geographic targeting into our actions, targeting to the recaps to re to RCAAs to areas at risk of displacement or to disadvantaged unincorporated communities. They also asked us to add in actions that were targeted to special populations that were identified as having a special housing need in San Jose County, including farm workers, persons with disabilities, the homeless, and extremely low income families. We also have actions that allow for more flexible, adaptive, and alternative housing types, For expanded fair housing, infrastructure projects, and farm worker housing actions, those were things we had in the previous housing element.

We just kind of expanded on them. Many actions are included, because they're required for us to meet current state law. And then we have a housing status loss project that we did several years ago, and so trying to build off of that. Many of the recommendations on our housing status loss project have been, incorporated into our action plan. And, again, the big focus on AFFH, there's also a new requirement that will be triggered once we adopt our housing element that requires us to develop environmental justice actions.

So some of those actions are built into our housing element, and then we will build, additional policies into other parts of our general plan. But these policies and actions have to do with anti displacement strategies, place based strategies, community outreach, diversity, equity, inclusion, and economic and housing mobility. Okay. So our review process, it we basically had four reviews with HCV, and each of those reviews have, state mandated time frames with them. So the first draft needs to be circulated for a thirty day public review period, which we released from August 2023 to October 2023.

And during that process, we received six comments, and then we made edits to the document to address those comments. And once we revised the document, we then sent it to HDD, and the first review period is required to be ninety days. So that ninety day review period went from November 2023 to February 2023. HDD did provide a a lot of comments to us during that first draft, and those comments had to do with wanting a focus on extremely low income households and farm workers, both with additional outreach and additional actions. They asked for a lot of additional AFFH data, including demographics.

They wanted us to incorporate more local knowledge into our housing element, which we we did a significant deep dive in each neighborhood and community and added that information. And then they wanted us connect our findings to our actions and, to have more of an analysis in our site's inventory about providing them evidence of, showing that it's possible that there's a a potential for building. And they really, through every single draft, focused on giving us comments that that they we they wanted our goals and our actions to be specific and quantifiable. So we then took all those comments. We updated our to a second draft of our housing element.

It was now the second review for the public is only seven days, which is a lot less than thirty days. That ran from 08/29/2024 to 09/04/2024. Through that process, we got five comments. We made edits to address those comments, and we did during that time extend the public review period for ten days, because we had a request to extend it, so we did that. We sent that revised draft to HDD.

The second review in every future review is only sixty days in length. And so that circulated to them from September 2024 to November 2024. We did receive additional comments, kind of similar, requests for more information on infrastructure, and then, again, more specific commitments and geographic targeting, be added to our actions and programs. However, we did not receive any comments on our sites inventory, and so after that second draft, we left it as is. The third draft was circulated for seven days again in January 2025 to February 2025.

We did receive one comment. We sent the draft to HDD from February 25 to April 25. And we got some preliminary comments from HDD at this time, and and we made those edits. And then we circulated it to the public again for seven days when that 60 review period for h t d was still going. We got two comments that time.

And then when h t d's review period ended, we did get some additional comments about, again, specific commitments, discrete timing metrics, and geographic targeting, about AFFH and environmental justice, housing mobility, displacement prevention actions, commitments to conduct ongoing outreach and engagement, the need for additional local knowledge, specifically with the recap areas. And so we did go out and conduct a lot of additional that's when we did a lot of those additional community pop ups and meetings that we did in the spring of this year. So our fourth draft after making edits, was circulated in July for seven days. We received two comments. And then to HDD from July until September, we again got preliminary comments from HDD, made some edits, circulated it again for the public, got two additional comments.

HDD kind of just said they thought they were good with it, but they wanted additional anti displacement actions, and so we did add a new action about anti creating an anti displacement program. And after that edit, we received a letter of tentative approval from HDD on September 29, which we are very excited about. So generally, some input that we received a significance during that last draft, the fourth draft. California rural legal assistance, CRLA, we have received over the entire time period of this housing element. They've sent us five different responses.

We've met with them on multiple occasions. Generally, their comments have focused on wanting to see additional anti displacement actions, actions targeted to recaps. They've asked for additional local knowledge for meaningful community outreach and, additional lower income sites in the RCAA areas, the the high resource areas. We also received several, comments from public service providers, from MID and OID just providing some general input about their requirements. And then two responses from fire districts from the Burbank Paradise and Salida Fire Districts, which did, state some concerns with adequate fire service provision.

And we do have a requirement for fire fees to be paid prior to issuance of any building permit. And the county planning department is in constant contact with, fire departments and school districts when they're doing their fee updates to let them know what development potential is in their district. So that's a constant process that we're going through. Additionally, there was a requirement added into the mixed use zoning district where Salida, is gonna be rezoning to mixed use that requires parcels that develop there to annex into their community facility district. And the the majority of the input we got through the phone, in person, over the counter, sometimes emails, were a lot of requests to have people's properties added to the rezone program.

And so each time we got these, we did try to do an analysis to see if it would be appropriate. And, typically, the parcels were too small or didn't have water and sewer or rezoned ag and were not able to be included. So as we do with every project, we need to evaluate general plan and zoning consistency. And in this case, the general plan, state law requires it to be internally consistent. The land use element is probably the most closely tied to the housing element and some policies that we did find the housing element update to be consistent with our requirements to provide an effective level of public service.

There's a requirement that if a project's located in the sphere of influence of a city that you get that city's approval before moving forward with the project. So we met with city of Modesto and city of Ceres, and and they did not object to the rezones and the sites inventory that we had. You know, we worked with them a little bit before we got to our our draft sites inventory. Also, that policy requires that you work with any kind of service provider. So we did, reach out to Salida sanitary, to the Denair Community Services District, to the Keys Community Services District, and then, also to the municipal advisory councils.

Approval oh, sorry. Also, we needed to evaluate the proposed site's inventory in terms of its consistency with community plans that we have. And so there are some amendments that are gonna have to happen to the Denair community plan to make sure that consistency is continued. Approval of this housing element, when the board adopts it, will trigger an update several other general plan updates that we'll have to we're in the process of kinda doing them, but after the housing element, we'll come back. We'll follow-up in with those amendments.

So one is an update to our disadvantaged unincorporated communities report, which is in the land use element as an appendix. And then, we need to update our safety element to address climate, adaptation and policies that have been approved by the state. And updated fire hazard maps have also been released that we need to incorporate. And then, as I mentioned previously, we need to incorporate environmental justice policies throughout, multiple elements of the general plan, and that's gonna require community outreach before we finish developing those. So we have to go through that process next after the housing element.

In terms of environmental review, the housing element update has been found, to be exempt through the section one five zero six one b three, the common sense exemption. Due to it being a long range planning planning document, it just provides guidance for policies and programs. It will not directly lead to development. Implementation of the actions in the housing element will undergo their a separate environmental review. So with that, thanks for sticking with me with that very long presentation.

Staff does recommend for this first item that the planning commission make a recommendation to the board of supervisors for approval of the Stanislaus County six HEICO housing element, find the project to be CEQA exempt, and order the filing of a notice of exemption and to make the general plan consistency findings. And that's all I have on the general plan update. I'm available for any questions.

Thank you for that report. Are there any questions from the commissions to clarify for staff?

A point of information. You mentioned on the geographic targeting that that was guidance you got back from HCD. Is there a statutory requirement for the geographic targeting, or is is that within HCD's discretionary purview and their approval of the housing plan element update?

So they don't mandate a certain percentage has to be in a high resource or, you know but, it's part of the AFFH state laws that were passed to encourage that, low income housing be placed in high resource areas.

Got it. Thank you. I had one more. Please. So the 1.1 x percent of housing stock that was found to be substandard Mhmm. Or below standard, is that higher or lower than surrounding counties?

It's, I think, slightly higher, but pretty on par. And that was based on assessor data.

Got it. Thank you. Mhmm.

Does HCD have a deadline for you on completing this?

Yes. I might have blown past that slide. It was due 12/31/2023. Quite some time ago. And then, it was extended to 04/30/2024. So we're about over a year and a half late. And at this point, they are kind of threatening to withhold grant funding from us that

How much is that? What's the

One I know is the HAP funding at several million dollars for homeless funding. That's, of the most concern right now. Yeah. Just a follow-up.

Is that state funding or federal funding? State funding. You. Any other questions from the commission? Seeing none, we will open it up for public hearing. Is there anyone that would like to speak in opposition? Please come up and identify yourself.

Hi. Not necessarily opposition. Just wanna provide some additional information for the planning commission to consider. But my name is Nick Jensen. Oh, sorry.

It's okay.

Go ahead. Yeah. My name is Nick Jensen. I'm an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance. As you heard, we've spoken with Kristen and Angela quite a bit through this process.

And so I just wanted to share just to kind of explain our some of our concerns, share some policy recommendations, and make a request. And before I launch into that, the first thing I just wanna say is to thank Angela and Kristen for all of the work that they've done to continue improving this over the very long process. It's it's, yeah, it's been a long process, but we've seen so many improvements that they've made to so many sections of this, adding additional local knowledge, It's been even recently adding an anti displacement strategy that we're, you know, excited to see some of these additional programs and policies that they've been working to implement. So I I just wanna recognize that first and foremost. But so launching into our concerns.

So, basically, our concern stems mainly from the overall distribution of where low and very low income housing alloc units have been allocated throughout the county. As Kristen was showing so there's, you know, there's there you know, they there are certain constraints on where they're able to identify sites to be rezoned for low and very low income housing. Unfortunately, the way that it plays out across the county due to a lot of the, you know, lack of water and wastewater infrastructure and certain community plan related cons constraints, 80% of the low and very low income housing is being allocated to areas that are considered very low resource or racially or ethically concentrated areas of poverty. And in fact, 45.7 of the overall so almost half of the overall low and very low income housing units have been allocated to Bret Hart, specifically, which is one of the most disadvantaged racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty in the whole county. So that that's a tremendous amount of low and very low income housing units that are being allocated to areas that are already very low in resources.

So this has been a big concern for us. And so we've been trying to work with the county, and they've been helping us out a lot. And we've been having conversations to try to identify if there are sites in, you know, higher you know, areas of higher affluence that can be rezoned for addition you know, to accommodate additional low income housing to to help combat segregation as affirmatively furthering fair housing requires the county to do. And, unfortunately, so far, you know, we've been kind of coming up short on that, and so we, you know, we consider these conversations to be ongoing with the county. We would like to be able to continue talking with them about the possibility of additional rezone sites.

But in addition to looking just at the sites themselves, we also believe as we've been looking into these constraints, we believe there are additional programs and policies that the county county could consider to add to the housing plan that would additionally help to combat segregation and make affordable housing development in these higher resource areas more possible. We've identified a couple that we actually I have here. I don't actually have enough for everybody, but we prepared some comments that I'm happy to share with y'all. And then I did, you know, email over to Chris and Angela before this meeting. But just a few of these recommendations that we have would be, for example, an action.

And I know they're already considering updating some of the community plans, but an action to review and, you know, systematically review and update community plans that might be outdated. For example, Danair, I think the community plan was last or it was last created in, like, 1998. And so a lot of these community plans are outdated, and so they might be able to update them to accommodate additional affordable housing in higher resource areas. Sort of the other side of that coin is an action that could spur the development of community plans for lower resource areas as well. A lot of lower resource areas in the county don't already have community plans.

And if they were able to have that process, then they'd be able to possibly bring me more resources to combat segregation areas that are being, you know, like Red Heart that are being having all this additional housing allocated to them. Additionally to that, since water and wastewater infrastructure is a huge limiting factor on being able to develop affordable housing in in a lot of the air you know, a lot of areas of the county like East Oakdale, Del Rio, or other high resource areas, And action the county could consider an action that would evaluate infrastructure developments throughout the planning period by, for example, private developers even to to find and basically to identify and then potentially rezone in the future if it becomes more possible to develop more affordable housing in some of those higher resource areas. And then in addition to that, one that we've been looking into that we're getting more information about is the possibility of developing overlay districts. And if the overlay districts can't be used to satisfy RINA, but they can potentially incentivize additional affordable housing development in higher resource areas. And so that's something that we're investigating as well.

And so so that was the concern. Those are the policy recommendations. And so, basically, our our request tonight, we don't wanna delay this process any further. All that we're asking is for the planning commission to direct the county to continue working with us and continue developing alternatives that can then be considered as part of the final housing element package that they bring to the board of supervisors because we would love to be able to continue collaborating with the county to to improve the housing element and make it as best as it can be to support the needs of low income residents in the county. Yeah. So that's that's that's what we have, and thank you for your time.

Thank you for your comments.

Madam chair, if I may, mister Jensen? Yes. Just need some clarification here. Sure. You said something about some written remarks that

you had?

Yeah. I have them right here.

What was your intention with the written remarks tonight?

My intention with the written remarks was really just to sort of provide documentation of what I what I shared. It's mostly a summary of that.

Is that okay. Is it new or different information that you want the commissioners to consider tonight, or was that for use later part of this ongoing conversation?

It be both?

I'm asking you so.

Yeah. So I'm I'm happy to provide that.

Then all I'm gonna say is that we need to distribute it to the members. Sure. We need to have an opportunity to look at it.

Absolutely. Yeah. I can do

that right now. You did you mention that you emailed that to staff, what you have with you?

I did just email to staff, and I I apologize. I I was out sick a couple days this week, so it took me a minute to to get this information together.

They they may have emailed it to us, but we have not received it yet. Being that it was probably recent, like, when we were heading down here.

Yeah. I see.

How many

problems do you have, sir?

I had five.

Maybe we can take a break, and I think we can make some copies so that all the commissioners have them.

Would that work pretty much, can I take three pieces?

Yes. We can take a ten minute break. We'll be back at 07:00. Is that is that good?

That's enough time to read your marks? Sure. That sounds great.

Okay. We'll do that for now. How big is this document?

It's about four pages.

I think we can do four pages in ten minutes.

I think we just need some time to actually print them so that we have copies for each of the commissioners. So maybe fifteen minutes.

We'll be back five after seven. Alright. It is 07:05, and we are back on the record. Do any of the commissioners need more time to read what was submitted? We're all good on that. Are there any questions that we have regarding what was presented to us around 06:45 to ask staff?

I just don't know what staff saw through on this. There's a lot to be thrown at us last minute, and and we've been working on this project for, I'd say, years. And we have three LA phone books right here. So I know you've been putting in the due diligence, but I would ask that this is something which is in the realm of what we're already working on and can be implemented or not because it's got a lot to take on in the fifteen minutes we've been given to how to review this. So

Yeah. The the the there is a lot there to process, and these have been ongoing conversations that we've had just, you know, looking at the document, you know, briefly, you know, here this evening. You know, we think that there's a lot of it's already been covered through the work that we've been that we've done. And it's like we've been there. We've explored it.

We've you know, and we've we've prepared for you what we think is doable and what is feasible. Some of the things in there, you know, with regards to, like, the community plans and infrastructure, we think we have actions there that already have us seeking funds to do conceptual land use plans and redevelopment plans, which we think, you know, these asks can be folded into those existing actions. So we're not necessarily, you know, at least here this evening based on what we have seen thinking that there's a need for new policies and actions. We certainly you know, this item, you know, if we get a recommendation of whatever recommendation we get this evening, we're looking at going to the board December 9. So we've got time to continue working and having conversations with CRLA to see where these items fold into the existing actions and policies, because there's a lot of existing actions and policies that we can fold these things into.

Thank you, Angela. Any other comments?

Yeah, think. Miss sorry, ma'am. I'm sure I asked Mr. Jensen to come back. So based on the director's comments, Mr. Jensen, with understanding that we're to go to the board as a recommendation, How does that sound to you

in these

remarks? In an ongoing conversation.

Yeah. An ongoing conversation would be great, and I I could totally see how there could be opportunities to maybe bring some of these elements into existing policies rather than creating whole new actions. We're very open to those conversations, and we would definitely appreciate being able to continue talking with county staff about that.

Great. We appreciate your flexibility. Thank

you. Thank you.

Thank you, counsel. Bringing it back to the commission for any discussion or emotion.

I think there's some need to agree.

Oh, okay. Alright. Thank you. I didn't see anyone, but is there anyone else that would like to speak on this proposal and all that was just discussed? Seeing none. Okay. We'll bring it back to the commission for any comments, discussions, or a motion.

Oh, madam chair, I just wanted to say, number one, this is a really impressive undertaking by staff. And it reminds me of the hardest math problem I ever had to solve, which was that algebra equation for three unknown variables. So a lot of work's gone into this. Also wanted to say, with regard to the CRLA advocate here, you know, the county's got a good advocate in what you're trying to do here, and I appreciate what you've done here.

I'm ready to make a motion to approve the general plan amendment PLN two zero two two dash zero zero four five, the six cycle housing element update with the exhibit in a section a as approval. You mean recommend approval? Recommendation approval. Sorry. And I'll second. Can

we have a roll call on that, please? Commissioner Borcheto?

Aye.

Commissioner Callis? Aye. Commissioner Campos? Aye. Commissioner Morat? Aye. Commissioner Willara?

Aye.

Commissioner Zipser?

Aye.

Motion passes. Alright.

So moved. Moving on to item c, general plan amendment rezone and ordinance amendment application number PLN twenty twenty five dash zero zero five three six cycle housing element implementation. May we have a staff report, please?

Can you just wait for so this is very similar to the last presentation I just gave, but it's more focused on implementing some of those actions that I, went over in my presentation. The project is a general plan amendment, rezone, and ordinance amendment PLN twenty twenty five dash zero zero fifty three. It's a six cycle housing element implementation. The project involves the rezoning of a 139 properties, various zoning text amendments, amendments to the land use element, adoption of objective design standards for multifamily and mixed use development, and a CEQA general plan addendum, to our general plan EIR. So like I mentioned in my previous presentation, we are not considered to be certified by the state and therefore eligible for various grant funding unless we both have an adopted housing element, which is the first step, the first project we listened to, and also an adopted rezone program.

So this is that second step. Both need to be approved in order to be certified. So a lot of the community engagement that we did with this project went hand in hand with the housing element. All of the count community outreach we did early on informed the choosing of the rezone sites. But then additionally, once we finally had drafts of all the ordinance amendments and of the objective objective design standards, we did end up adding additional sites to those 48 sites just so we could, make a solid block of zoning.

So it wasn't just spot zoning of, you know, multifamily, which I'll show you some maps of that later. So then we packaged it all together and sent it out for a thirty day review period, which was not required, but we wanted to do that for the public to all those interested parties and, other lists that we had, to any responsible agencies, to the property owners for the rezone sites, for the additional rezone sites as well, and then for those surrounding land the landowners. We then had all the presentations for the municipal advisory councils in June from June to August, and presented the items to the general plan update committee in September. And here we are at a public hearing for planning commission on October 16, and we are scheduled to go to the board of supervisors on December 9. Here again, you see those rezone sites that are included in this project that we're asking you to approve in order to meet the county's RINA.

But then we added 91 additional sites so that we could provide more of a comprehensive rezoning. And so I'll go through those maps with you where you can kind of see in green is the rezoning sites that are required for the arena, and then the little dash line are the sites we added to make it more of a a solid comprehensive area that would be rezoned. And that's Denair. And here in Empire, we added about nine additional sites to to make it a solid block along Abbey Street. In Keyes, we did not add any additional sites because they kinda were so separated that we just left it as is.

So a few areas, we just left it as is. In Bijstrom, we did add several parcels to do a solid block there. And then in the Hatchstone, which you can see at the bottom, because it's just a a county island that has five parcels in it, just included all five parcels. In Salida, we did add quite a few sites that we just wanted to do that whole kind of little chunk of land right there. And a lot of these sites were not included in the rezone program because they weren't quite big enough or maybe they had too many buildings on them, but we just wanted you know, there's still a a potential for redevelopment if the property owner wants.

South Series, we did not add any sites because it was kind of just a stand alone parcel that was pretty large in size. And in the Bret Harte area, we did not add any parcels because, again, those five parcels are a continue contiguous, and they're also vacant, and they're surrounding a park. So there didn't seem to be any need to add any land there. Along Crow's Landing Road, we did add several parcels that were not included because they're already built on, but we wanted that solid area, so we added several parcels here. And then in Spencer Marshall, the West Modesto, Spencer Marshall area, we also added some of those smaller parcels that weren't included because of their size.

And then just one parcel in West Modesto in the Beverly Waverly neighborhood was added. So, again, 91 parcels were added. 48 are for the rezone program to meet our site's inventory. We have proposed zoning text amendments that are actions included in the housing element that we'll be implementing. And those amendments include various programs throughout, many of which are to meet current state law.

We're proposing a new mixed use zone. It will allow residential use and commercial use, but the residential use up to 25 dwelling units per acre. And we're proposing to amend the r three ordinance to allow single room occupancy developments, and we'll be removing the allowance for single family dwellings in the R 3, which is a state requirement. Other changes to comply with state law and the zoning ordinances that are before you include raising the emergency shelter bed cap from 10 to 20 as required by state law. We're including a provision for SB nine lot splits, which are, it's a state law that allows for your parcel to be split in two in a low density residential zone, and then you can build up to two units per parcel if you have water and sewer and you're in an urban area.

We are allowing farm worker housing by right up to 36 beds or 12 single family units in the ag zone, which is required by state law. And we're allowing low barrier navigation centers in the C 1 neighborhood commercial zone, and we have to allow mobile homes in the Historic Sites District. We've also included some changes in the ordinance amendments to allow residential develop to be residential development to be more flexible in our existing residential zoning districts. So that includes a lot coverage limit increase from 40 to 50% in single family residential zoning district. The medium density residential district r two, we're gonna be allowing for the development of two family dwellings, so duplexes, up to 14 units per acre, and we're increasing the lot coverage from 50 to 60%.

And then the r three multiple family residential zip district, we're we're cleaning up terminology. We've added, like I said before, the single room occupancy housing as a permitted use, decreasing minimum lot size from 6,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet. And here and in the mixed use, we've added the objective design standard requirement. And for specific to the rezone sites, there's a prohibition on new single family dwellings and a requirement that when the parcel develops, you have to allow for at least 20 dwelling units per acre to be developed. Not at one time, though.

We also have land use updates to our land use element proposed tonight. So one is to our commercial land use designation that will incorporate mixed use into the description for the zoning districts that are compatible, that will allow mixed use to develop with residential. We also have amendments to the community plan designation in Denair, from low density residential to medium high dense density residential. And, around a 100 of the parcels being rezoned also require an amendment to their general plan land use designation, which are low density or commercial or planned development. They'll be amended to medium high density residential.

So we've also developed our consultant has developed objective design standards. This is coming from state law that requires that if you have design standards for development that you can't have design review committees that look at things on a subjective basis, that your standards have to be clear, defined, measurable, consistently applied, not subject to interpretation. And these are things that typically cover architectural styles, massing, landscaping, signage, and building materials. So the goal with the objective design standards is to reduce subjectivity, enable ministerial approval to limit development delays, increase predictability for developers, support compliance with state housing laws, and to encourage housing production. And here you can see it involves things that like certain percentage of transparent glass is required on the ground floor of a mixed use building, awnings are required.

It has requirements about building mass, having varying roof forms within certain distances. Requirements for window trims, shutters, recessed windows, again, awnings, for recessing of garage doors or trellises above garage doors and specific landscaping requirements. In terms of our project outreach and review, I won't go over this too much because I did a lot of that in my last presentation. But, again, we went out to the municipal advisory councils, Diner, Empire Quays, Salida, and South Modesto MAC, as well as to the South Modesto Businesses United, which is a group that, represents the Baystrom area and the Roseland Road area. All of the MACs did vote to support the rezoning with the exception of Keyes.

The Keyes MAC did not vote to support it because they their cited reason was because the property owners of the three parcels were not, in attendance, and they weren't there to speak up in support of the rezoning. So that's why they voted against it. We also met with the general plan update committee who did support the rezoning and the objective design standards and ordinance amendments. And, again, we did get that green light from, HCD, on our action plans and our site's inventory as of September 29. And the outreach that through our outreach, the input that we received, we kind of already went over a lot of the input from CRLA.

But specific to this project, it did focus on the redistribution of those sites from the Bret Harte Fairview Park neighborhood to Diner to have a more even distribution between the recaps and the RCAAs. They also wanted us to have meaningful community outreach, which we did attempt to continually have outreach throughout this process. And, again, we did also get input from service providers. And Burbank, Paradise, and Salida fire districts did raise concerns with adequate fire service provision. Again, fire fees are required to be paid prior to issuance of a building permit.

And for the mixed use zoning ordinance, we did include a specific, section in there that requires any mixed use development in Salida to annex into the fire community facility for Salida. And, again, we just had a lot of input from the community asking to have their property added to the rezone program, which we were not able to accommodate. So here's a map that Sierra Lake provided us providing alternate sites in yellow that they believed could be rezoned to high density residential in Denair. So we did have our consultant go through these sites for viability. Most of them were were taken out just because Diner does have a community plan action that wants the high density residential to be towards the center near services in the community and for lower density residential to be on the outskirts of the community to allow for, like, a a smoother interface between the community and the surrounding agricultural land.

Some of the sites didn't work because they already had they were too small in size. They didn't have enough vacant lands or, you know, poor access. Some of them actually are already, current projects that are in the pipeline, so we, disallowed them. Another one was just not included because we've already gotten input from property owners that they are not supportive of affordable housing development or high density development, so we did not include that one. So vetting all these parcels, we we are proposing to stick with our current plan, which are in red for the rezoning.

Just comparing, with the additional sites in Denner, we do kind of have a more even, number of acres overall. So in Brethart, we have a total of 24 acres, and then in Danair with the additional site, it's more around 21 acres. So, when you look at the Rina sites, it does seem very uneven, but when you look at the additional sites, it does even it out a little bit more. When we were doing this evaluation, our consultant did notice that there was 25 above moderate income sites that were erroneously assigned to Diner. So we removed those, and we updated the numbers everywhere in our sites inventory throughout the housing element.

So this reflects the correct numbers. So with every project, we need to evaluate general plan and zoning consistency. Again, the general plan needs to maintain internal consistency, and the zoning ordinance needs to, be consistent with the general plan. In terms of land use element consistency, the amendments do include amendments to the general plan designation of the denier community plan to medium high density residential, to the commercial land use designation, and then to a 101 parcels, which will be changed their land use general plan designation will be changed to medium high density residential. We found it to be consistent with maintaining effective levels of public service with our sphere of influence policies, including the referrals to the max, and with our existing community plans.

And, again, the update of the housing element is gonna trigger several other updates to the general plan, which include the update to the disadvantaged unincorporated unincorporated communities report and the land use element, to our safety element, and then we need to create environmental justice policies, which will be coming to the commission post housing element adoption. For the environmental review prepared for this project, did prepare an addendum to the county's general plan environmental impact report based on the premise that the project would increase density on the identified rezone parcels, but it would not facilitate development beyond the total remaining build out of the general plan EIR. Therefore, it would not result in new environmental effects or a substantial increase in previously identified environmental effects. And future development facilitated by the proposed rezones and ordinance amendments and objective design standards would be subject to all applicable regulations, permitting, county ordinances, and would be required to pay all applicable fire, school, and public facility fees. So with that, staff's recommendation is that the Planning Commission provide a recommendation of approval to the Board of Supervisors for the amendment to the general plan and zoning designations of the 139 rezone parcels for the zoning ordinance amendments that are proposed, the amendment to the land use element, and adoption of the objective design standards, and approval of the EIR, the addendum to the general plan EIR.

And that concludes my presentation. Staff's available for any questions. Thank you

for that report. Are there any questions from the commission?

On your housing cycle since it's the sixth cycle, have the other rezones previously been utilized at all, or is this just kind of rezoning and, you know, there's been no one that's used up the last ones?

That's a really good question, and that's something I haven't gotten into. Because one of the changes from the fifth to the sixth cycle is that we have to prove that we have water and sewer. And in the past cycle, we were able to use the Salida Community Plan Amendment Area to fulfill our arena pretty easily because that's a pretty significant area that has the zoning in place, but it does not have water and sewer worked out yet. So we weren't able to to include that amendment area, and that's why the rezone program was created. Created.

Is there any companies interested in doing any of the properties that we're going to look at rezoning here? Is there anyone that's came forward as far as active projects?

We've we've received a lot of inquiries and interest, but Angela, I think, recently went through an RFP where she's been gauging development interest. Yeah.

I can't necessarily speak to to the most current RFP, but, I mean, just Community of Empire. We know that in that area around the county's old library site that there is some interest there. And as Christie said, we have gotten inquiries from other developers.

Some of the actions in the housing element have to do with development property owner outreach. So we're gonna have a website that maintains these sites. We're gonna, you know, directly outreach, continue to do RFPs. So we're gonna try to connect property owners to interested developers. So that's another part of the the implementation of the housing element.

K. That's it.

Kristen, the, you mentioned that measure e doesn't come into play in any of these parcels.

And that's another good question I should have included in my presentation. So measure e does just for everyone, is a requirement that if you're gonna convert if you're gonna change the land use designation of an agricultural property to for residential purposes, so you have to have a vote, majority vote of the public in order to approve it. But there is a caveat that, an exemption for measure e for RENA if the state finds that we are unable to meet our RENA. Also for farm worker housing. So we do have an action in the housing plan that allows us to create a backup list of sites that if for some reason we're unable to meet our RENA, we would be able to try to activate that exemption with the state.

So I'm assuming then that that also exempt would be exempted would be farmland mitigation.

That's a good question.

I thought it was a dumb question.

But No.

I'm not sure. I don't know that it would be exempt.

Actually, that's a very good question. I don't believe that it would be exempt.

So that kind of muddies the water a little bit Makes it

a little more difficult.

And more expensive.

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's yes.

If that were to happen, it would not be ag land outside of a sphere of influence or outside of a community an existing community plan boundary.

Because you'd have to walk have the water, sewer, and utilities?

Because that would be considered a loss of prime farmland probably. And there's no water. Yeah. Same thing.

A question. Are property owners contacted regarding their their property and the proposed rezoning to whether high density or anything else just so that we meet Yes. Our requirements?

Yeah. They were contacted for the Rina sites probably way too many times, about, like, eight times. And then, for the additional sites and for the surround even the people surrounding those properties 300 feet out and two properties out, they were notified twice. And they'll be notified again before the board.

Were there any any property owners that Yes. Weren't really in favor of Oh, no. Rezoning?

There were a lot of property owners who contacted me, and and most of them were confused and just wanted me to confirm that their parcel was indeed on the list. And most of those I could confirm, yes, your parcel is on the list. Then they asked me to check other parcels they owned and, you know, so but no, did not receive any requests to not be included.

Thank you. Any other follow-up questions to staff? Seeing none, we'll open up to the public for anyone to speak in opposition or in favor of what was discussed? Right, seeing none, we'll bring it back to the commission. Any final discussions, comments? Did staff have a comment? No? Okay. Any discussions or follow-up that leads up to a motion?

I'm ready to make a

motion. Okay.

I'll move that the Planning Commission recommend approval of the general plan amendment rezone ordinance amendment application for PLN twenty twenty five dash zero zero five three six cycle housing element implementation and the findings included in exhibit A. I will second that.

Can we have

a roll call, please? So I have a motion by commissioner Callis, a second by commissioner Burketto. Commissioner Burketto? Aye. Commissioner Callis? Aye. Commissioner Campos? Aye. Commissioner Morad? Aye. Commissioner Willard?

Aye.

Commissioner Zipser?

Aye.

Motion passes six zero. Alright. So moved. We move to

the next item, can we ask commissioner Puff to come back in, please? Alright. Welcome back. Let's get on the record at 07:32. Commissioner Hoff has joined us again. Alright. Ready to move on? Ordinance amendment application number PLN2025Dash0069, Track Parking.

Good evening, Morant, commissioners, members of the public. My name is Kristen Anaya, senior planner, here to present the ordinance amendment request for truck parking. So this is a request to amend title 21 of the Stanislaus County zoning ordinance to update existing allowances to conduct truck parking in the a two district of the unincorporated Stanislaus County by updating existing criteria to provide clearer and more objective standards and adding new restrictions to address community and agency concerns. The proposed ordinance amendments include edits to chapter twenty one twenty, general Agriculture district, and chapter twenty one ninety four, home occupations, and proposes to update and consolidate truck parking requirements in a new proposed chapter twenty one eighty nine truck parking facilities. So begin before getting into the proposed amendments, I'll speak to the background of truck parking being permitted in the general Agriculture or a two district, specifically for stand alone parking facilities serving tractor trailer combinations with at least five axles and capable of calling a combined gross vehicle weight of 80,000 pounds, which I'll hereafter refer to as trucks.

The county's agricultural areas are generally zoned a two, which are the areas you can see in various shades of green on the county map there. So for some background, prior to 2012, the county did not allow truck parking to occur in the A 2 zone unless directly associated in serving farm operations or agricultural related businesses like processes, haulers, and shellers. The county was approached by a group of formed by individuals in the trucking industry to establish a permitting pathway to allow truck parking in the A 2 zoning district to address the need for safe and secure parking facilities. Following an ordinance development process guided by an ad hoc committee formed to provide recommendations, the board of supervisors eventually approved an ordinance amendment to create the existing allowance to permit truck parking facilities in the A 2 zoning district, which is currently allowed via two path permitting pathways. So number one, if you lived on an a two zone parcel over one acre in size, then you could obtain a home occupation business license to park three trucks and three trailers, provided all three are registered to the business operator and the business operator lived on-site.

Number two, was otherwise a property owner may apply for a use permit to park up to 12 trucks and 24 trailers on a parcel, and this would entail discretionary environmental review subject to a determination from the planning commission and a finding that the use will not create a concentration of commercial uses in the vicinity. Under both of these permit types, the zoning code has specific criteria more than what's listed on screen that must be met in order to qualify for the license or permit as a means to control the scale and intensity of the associated development. I'll discuss the criteria for each later in this presentation. And in instances where a proposed facility exceeds the allowed number of trucks or does not meet all applicable criteria, a request can be considered under a general plan amendment or rezone application to change the designation from a two to plan development. However, this is a more difficult process and is subject to board of supervisors approval.

The proposed amendments that I'm currently discussing do not address these larger scale facilities of 13 or more trucks, and that'll be my next presentation. So the process which led to this request to update the home occupation and use permit allowances first really began in 2022 when the county saw a steady increase in trend and community complaints tied to unpermitted truck parking facilities in the agricultural areas of the county and corresponding spike in related code enforcement cases. In 2024, the board of supervisors requested that this issue be looked into, which resulted in the general plan update committee requesting that an ad hoc committee be formed to evaluate truck parking allowances and then prepare recommendations. An ad hoc committee can comprised of supervisor Vidio Chiesa and planning commission chair Carmen Moran was formed in January and has guided staff in evaluating the issues tied to truck parking. The process, which took place between January and August this year, involved staff working with the ad hoc committee to research and conduct public outreach to stakeholders and agency groups to understand issues tied to truck parking in the existing zoning ordinance.

This subsequently led to recommendations that the existing ordinances be updated to provide better clarity to existing regulations and minimize issues between truck parking facilities and surrounding agriculture and residents. So the first draft of the zoning ordinance was presented to the general plan update committee for consideration back in June. Following feedback from the ad hoc committee and general plan update committee, tweaks were made to the language of the drafts, then subsequent drafts have been shared with the public at an informational meeting and, again, with the general plan update committee and agricultural advisory board most recently in September. And so we'll highlight some of the outreach that took place during this process to evaluate issues and concerns raised with truck parking. So planning to staff met with a variety of county departments to identify issues with the county's current zoning ordinance and permitting process.

We also met with neighboring planning jurisdictions to see if they had experienced similar increases in unpermitted truck parking activities and how they are working to address it. And finally, we met with other non agency stakeholder groups, which consisted of individual stakeholder meetings with groups like county residents who have vocalized concerns about truck parking in their vicinity, local trucking business operators who have had applications on file with the county in the past and present, and realtors who engage in agricultural and commercial real estate market transactions. And I'll provide a summary of some of the highlighted information we heard on the following slide. But first, I'll also share some of the initial feedback we heard once we developed draft ordinance amendments at an informational meeting we held for members of the public. So we had 46 attendees attend this meeting in July.

Staff presented the contents of the drafts, ordinance amendments followed by a q and a to allow feedback. The input we received covered a variety of areas. We heard concerns about truck idling, road impacts, concerns about home occupation allowances for trucks to be potentially reduced. Attendees asked questions about staff's approach to defining what a concentration is, whether cities would be subject to any of the changes to the county ordinances, which we confirmed they are not, and whether ag related trucking businesses would be affected by the proposed changes. To that, we responded that, no.

There would be allowances for a tier one and tier two use permit or as an agricultural service establishment, so which would could allow truck agriculturally related trucking operations to to exist in the Ag zone irrespective of these changes. We also received comments about the statewide deficit of adequate truck parking facilities as well as comments about the need to preserve prime farmland by not allowing paving and developing over ag land with commercial uses. So in a general summary, we highlighted the following major issues which we aim to address with the proposed zoning ordinance amendments. Amendments. These include issues of the static aesthetics and site maintenance, achieving regulatory compliance from operators with respect to site storing and handling hazardous materials such as engine oils, concerns regarding agricultural land conversion, access and road requirements, defining and limiting what constitutes a concentration, clarifying how parking areas should be developed, concerns with sites meeting the William Sinai principles of compatibility, and maintaining compliance and enforcement following project approval.

And so to reiterate, the proposed amendments were developed through the ad hoc committee review process and involve updating the criteria and adding new restrictions and clarification for truck parking facilities permitted under a use permit and home occupation business license, then consolidates all those requirements into a new chapter. And I wanna clarify that these sites that are legally permitted and operating under an approved use permit or otherwise legal non conforming and grandfathered in would not be subject to the new regulations that I'll be discussing in a in a moment. And so now I'll get into specifics. So for home occupations, the county's current allowances allow people to obtain a business license, and to permit a resident of any a two zone parcel, at least an acre in size, to obtain a business license to allow them to park three trucks and three trailers, provided they're all registered to the on-site resident and the person lives on-site. The proposed changes, are in red, proposed to reduce this allowance to one truck and two trailers, remove the allowance for a one and a half acre developed parking area, and remove the allowance for any on-site maintenance.

We're further clarifying that no truck washing is permitted on-site and that no stockpiling of parts or tires is permitted. And so for use permits, the proposed amendments will continue to allow the parking of 12 trucks and 24 trailers, but adds a new requirement that all trucks be registered in California, that the property owner has to have lived on the parcel for six months before applying for a use permit. It is proposed that the parcel must be no now no larger than 10 gross acres to qualify for a use permit and will still have to be at least one acre in size, and the parcel cannot be enrolled in a Williams in that contract. Current allowances for light on-site maintenance are proposed to now be prohibited, and new specification that no stockpiling of vehicle parts, tires, or truck washing may occur on-site. There is also new clarification that the one and a half acre area that may be used for truck parking must now take into account to the area used for a driveway as well as any area used for an on-site office or restroom or areas used to access those.

Additionally, the existing allowance for a 1,200 square foot on-site office is gonna be maintained as well. And so clear parameters for how the parking areas may develop are also proposed. These include a setbacks of 50 feet from adjacent residences and 20 feet from road frontages, additionally screen landscaping along front front road frontages to screen the parking areas required as well as a six foot tall solid fence installed around the one and a half acre parking area and requirements for all parking to occur specifically within delineated stalls. The allowance for the parking area to be graveled is maintained, but the amendments clarify that pavement may only be used in areas that have not been in recent agricultural production. Additionally, new requirements for on-site restrooms, prohibition of on of off-site advertisements of the parking of the sorry.

Off-site advertisements identifying the parking facility's address and requirements that the applicant pay fair share contributions to any city or county roadways based on the proposed truck route is also proposed. State and local access requirements includes including surface transportation assistant act access requirements for non California legal trucks will also be required to be met. That's a regulatory requirement, but we're now including it in the code. Additionally, the proposed amendments will now prohibit either submittal of a new application or project consideration by the planning commission if a site for which an application has been filed has unpaid code enforcement fines. Use permits for truck parking are proposed to have a five year life, which may be expended extended by five year increments if a property owner obtains a staff approval permit and has not violated the conditions of the use permit.

The annual inspections for use permits approved under the proposed regulations will also be subject to annual inspections by code enforcement. Additionally, if a property ownership of a parcel with a use permit changes hands, new use permit would be required to continue truck parking on-site. And so the final kind of major change to the proposed use permit allowances is to establish a clear definition of what constitutes a concentration, or in other words, how many truck parking facilities can develop in a given area. So the existing findings required for the Planning Commission to approve the project of a use permit project is that the use, if approved, will not create a concentration of commercial or industrial uses in a vicinity. However, there's no definition or threshold of what a concentration is, which in the past has posed issues with staff and and the planning commission.

However, a recent project application planning commission did provide input that they believed two truck parking in a one mile area would potentially constitute a concentration. That idea has been further clarified and defined within consultation with the ad hoc committee. And so these amendments proposed to set a threshold that will aim to increase the number of truck parking facilities near major transportation corridors and then decrease them as they slowly move away from into more intensely rural ag areas and away from major state highways. This concentration evaluation will take into account permitted truck parking facilities on a two zone land, either LNC or with the use permit, but exempts out ag related truck trucking businesses that operate under a tier one or tier use permit. It also doesn't take into account any unpermitted facilities operating in violation of the county's ordinance.

And so the threshold on how many truck parking facilities that can develop in an area is proposed to be dependent on how close you are to a major transportation corridor. If you are within a one mile distance of a state highway, we're proposing that a concentration would be created if there is more than two truck parking facilities in a one mile radius of any property in the county. So I'll I'll run through a couple scenarios. But basically, if I live on a property somewhere in the a two zone and I have two truck parking facilities within a mile of my house and parcel, and the planning commission is now considering a new use permit request on a property across the street from me that would create three truck parking facilities in a one mile radius of my parcel, and that would be considered a concentration if that new site is approved. So for areas in the county that are further than one mile distance from a state highway, this threshold is proposed to be even stricter with only one truck parking facility permitted within a one mile radius of any property in the county.

However, a second truck parking facility may be allowed if it's within that one mile buffer of the state highway. I'll show you visual examples in the following slides to clarify these thresholds, But we're also proposing to build in an allowance that the planning commission can make an exception to determine a concentration is not set are met if there's a physical barrier preventing trucks from accessing different sites and from traveling the same roadways. And so there's kind of two measurements at play here. There is whether or not an area is within a one mile buffer of a state highway, and then you're looking at, you know, from any property in the county, a one mile distance of that that site. And so using this proposed criteria, we can look at a scenario where there's an existing truck parking facility in blue and a new use permit proposed in red.

And because they're both within a one mile distance of Highway 99 and there there is no concentration because the ordinance allows two truck parking facilities in a one mile radius of other property, and that's shown in that kind of tan color circle. So, no, it's not a concentration. In this scenario, you have two existing truck parking facilities within that one mile buffer, and a third is proposed. In this case, you would have a concentration because you have three truck parking facilities in a one mile radius from the property at the center of the circle. But even if one of the existing sites is farther than one mile and a of from the State Route, two truck parking facilities are exceeded.

And so the maximum that has been exceeded, you have three truck parking facilities in a one mile radius of other properties. So you're you're at a concentration. Okay. In this scenario, you have an existing truck parking facility within a mile of State Route 89 and a use permit being requested on a parcel beyond the one mile distance. There would not be a concentration because there's only one truck parking facility beyond the one mile buffer, and then that second facility is within that one mile buffer.

So there's no more and there's no more than two truck parking facilities total. But if the existing site was further than one mile, you're only allowed to have one within a one mile distance of any property, so you have exceeded the standard. Oops. Excuse me. And so in this last scenario, there is also a concentration because you have three total truck parking facilities in a one mile radius of the property at the center of the the circle.

They have one on the outside, you have two on the inside. You're still not allowed to exceed two within any one mile radius of any property. Okay. So I'm done with those kind of scenarios. An exception is included, as I mentioned, in the concentration determination when there's a physical or geographical feature that separates facilities and results in facilities traveling different roadways.

Here, can see 99 separates two truck parking facilities from another two. The planning commission could theoretically determine, probably with more information from the project applicant, that 99 sufficiently buffers these sites from one another if none of the traffic on either side of 99 for each of the two facilities uses the same roadways. And so the general plan update committee was presented these recommendations on August 7, and they made the motion to support the draft amendments. However, in light of the discussion and public comment that was presented during that meeting, it was identified that while a concentration threshold for use permits was addressed for sites, they requested that a concentration threshold be identified for larger scale truck parking facilities that would be subject to a rezone or general plan amendment. I haven't really gotten into that in this presentation.

I'll discuss it in my next one. But accordingly, the general plan update committee recommended staff present the amendments to the planning commission subject to the staff working with the ad hoc committee to develop a concentration threshold for larger scale truck parking facilities and incorporate those changes in the versions that are now presented to you tonight. And that's, like I said, gonna be presented in the next presentation. And on September 8, the Ag Advisory Board was presented the recommendations, and ultimately, they voted to support the drafts, provided that code enforcement action continue moving forward on unpermitted trip parking, facilities. And so from September 10 to September 30, we refer circulated an early consultation referral to outside agencies, organizations, and interested parties.

Letters letters were provided in response to this early consultation. So no comment was provided from Department of Environmental Resources Groundwater Division, Stanislaus Fire Protection District, Hills Ferry Cemetery District. The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, Turlock Irrigation District, Caltrans, and Hetch Hetchy Water Empower provided comment letters providing kind of their standard district regulations and regulatory requirements. And so those will be implemented on prod at a project level basis when individual projects come through and are are referred to those various agencies. And then those requirements would be would be placed on the project as conditions of approval.

And so Department of Environmental Resources Hazardous Materials Division requested that language be amended in the zoning ordinances to specify that no lead acid battery replacements occur, and so that is included in the, text of the draft amendments. Likewise, the city Modesto responded, with a letter stating that truck parking is an incompatible land use with all city general plan land use designations with the exception of industrial and expressed concerns about the type of land use developing in their sphere of influence. So this concern will be addressed through existing county general plan sphere of influence policies, which require written support of the affected city and application of all applicable development standards before projects considered by the planning commissioner board of supervisors. Additionally, Rajeet Pattar, a project applicant of a use permit application currently in process, responded to the referral stating that impacts from truck parking would be insignificant due to minimal traffic volumes, restricted hours of operation, and recommended that issues with truck parking facilities be addressed via dust control measures, implementation of clear signage and driveways. He also requested flexibility for fencing and setback requirements to prevent existing unpermitted facilities from facing costly costly upgrades.

And so kind of to speak to existing applications we have in the process that are unlikely to be processed before and considered by the planning commission before these draft amendments go before our board of supervisors in November. There are currently four truck parking applications in process where if the proposed ordinance amendments are adopted would be subject to the new requirements. All four would not be eligible for a use permit under the proposed amendments to the concentration thresholds and parcel size limits. Three of the four are concentrated in South Turlock area where there is already two approved use permit applications. Additionally well, having said that, JASON trucking, the first use permit application mentioned in that slide, may not create a concentration if the planning commission does determine that State Route 90 sufficiently buffers the facility from the other permitted truck parking facilities in the area, concentration but that would be further assessed in the processing of that application.

Staff has reviewed this project for consistency with the general plan, including the land use elements, sphere of influence policies, goals, and policies addressing compatibility between uses and accommodation of citing of industries with unique requirements, and the agricultural elements, agricultural buffer policies, and policies regarding the Williamson Act. Staff found the proposed ordinance amendments to be consistent with the general plan. Excuse me. Project has been determined to be generally exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to section 15 o six one common sense exemption. Accordingly, a notice of exempt exemption has been prepared for project for the project, and the project will not have a significant effect on the environment.

Staff is recommending that the planning commission provide a recommendation of approval of ordinance amendment application PLN twenty twenty five zero zero six nine truck parking to the board of supervisors. Exhibit a provides an overview of all the findings required for project approval, which includes findings regard regarding finding the project CEQA exempt, finding the project to be consistent with the general plan, and recommending project approval. And that concludes my presentation, and staff is available for questions.

Thank you for that lengthy report. And before we start the discussion, I would like to thank you for all your hard work, also staff for all their hard work, and Supervisor Kiesa. So I just wanted to make sure that this lengthy process that met, that included meeting with the community members and all involved. It was very educational for all of us involved. Thank you. Any commissioners have any questions for staff?

One quick question on the annual inspection requirement. Mhmm. How many how many code enforcement inspectors are are on the payroll for the county? You

know, I I can speak to the total number. I'll look to my director.

You know, I don't know the exact number, but I do believe that they try to have one for each district. So there's at least five plus their manager. Now, whether or not they're all filled, we don't know. But we did work. You know, that was a concern that we had as to whether or not they had the capacity capacity to do this because we were looking at, could we contract this out, hire somebody to do it? But they were pretty they said they could do it.

Got it. And so that the intent is that the annual inspection occurs it's an annual inspection that's required.

Yes.

Got it. Thank you.

And I will just add that we do have one dedicated code enforcement officer to truck parking at the moment.

Got it. Thank you. I

I do know that we're gonna discuss next week in the nuisance abatement board regarding fines and outstanding fines for those applying for for for approvals. But I do have a question. Are we looking at increasing the fine dollar amount to make this less of an issue for us going forward? Doubling or tripling it? Because generally, that's money's gonna keep people from doing the wrong things here.

So I I our code enforcement, folks have been working with our county council to look for ways that we can use existing tools that we have to increase those fine amounts, whether it be just the frequency in which they're fining them. But I think there's just there's some constraints within state law that limit our ability to increase those fines to the levels that I think we would all like to see. So we're trying to work within the framework that we have to use the tools that we have. And I'm going to look county council to see if he's got anything else to add.

That's fine. I I

get it. Something to add.

On a on another question, same thing. Have we you discussed with public you you did a real good job. I'm really impressed what you guys did here. But did we discuss this with our neighboring counties and what they're doing and how they're addressing this issue? How Merced's doing this? San Joaquin County is doing this?

So, yes, we met with both jurisdictions. San Joaquin County went through kind of a similar process in 2021. Basically, they had an issue with unpermitted truck parking facilities, and open code enforcement cases, and they went through a process of specifically identifying sites to rezone for a that would be rezoned to a new zoning district that specifically is, like, kind of a it's a it's an industrial esque zoning district that kind of is oriented towards trucking uses, and they're located at intersections. So they created that new zoning district. Other sites that they meet certain locational criteria, like parcel size, not normally in snack, other kind of thresholds, they can be rezoned into that zoning district.

But I believe they they went through a process to kind of rezone approximately 23 parcels. So

what we what I'm asking is, I don't I don't like seeing ag land going away, period. I also don't wanna lose lose off to the competitors as a county. So we're being consistent so that we're all having some sort of a monopoly that all the counties are in sync and doing the same sort of thing. So there's not one favored area to park their vehicles to take advantage of that, which may disadvantage our county or give advantage to

our county.

So all both Merced and San Joaquin County have discretionary kind of simply use permit, essentially, application processes for to conduct truck parking. So in in that respect, we're in line with kind of what they're doing.

In line with the concentration thresholds as well, or did they not really do that?

Do we know?

Merced San Joaquin County went more with the con like a a targeted rezone than kind of allowing them to be scattered about the county And Merced just has not they have indicated to us that they don't have a big issue.

Yet.

If I may add, there's also a geographical difference, quite a difference, with State Highway and the other two counties than we are. That was also taken into consideration. Any other comments or questions?

I was curious about the what why is it the less than 10 acre parcel requirement?

The intent is to minimize the amount of larger parcels that could potentially sustain, you know, production agriculture. Our Williamson Act uniform rules kind of identify as 10 gross acres as kind of the the minimum viable parcel minimum parcel size for parcels to be enrolled in a Williams Snake contract. So we went kind of in alignment with that, where if you're under 10 acres, you're potentially within areas that are less intensely agriculture and and you're not running as big of a risk of of converting those larger agricultural land.

So are we gonna see a rash of subdividing partials into something that will work for this?

But we already have minimum parcel sizes of 40 acres for from most of the counties. So, this isn't gonna trigger additional additional parcels.

Okay.

So, we're looking at the impact also to county roads in regards to having these tractor trailers in these more rural areas?

Yes. So we've added a requirement. One of the criteria for use permit applications is that we'll assess their truck routes that they're in application review process. And if they're traveling on kind of city owned roads, county owned roads, they'll have to pay a fair share fee identified and agreed upon by the county and city's respective public works departments.

So we found by going one step further and saying as these get approved, that public works is doing a report to see what the status of the roads are at that approval time and then reevaluating that either on an annual basis when they're going through to do the review to make sure they're not they are in compliance. So if we are seeing a congregation, we're catching at that time bill time as well.

We haven't built in any kind of additional, like, annual inspection where Public Works could add additional requirements based on wear and tear

of the road.

I'd say it's an idea.

Yeah. But they are subject to renewal after five years. So at that time, public works, if there's if the mitigation wasn't significant wasn't sufficient and the roads are being torn up, we could do it at that time.

Okay.

I don't

Thank you.

Additionally, sorry, just to add, with that staff approval process to add an additional five years, there is kind of a caveat that there's the ability to add additional conditions of approval at that time to kind of address nuisance conditions that that have been identified.

The the other comment I only other comment I have is I've looked at all four of those permits that are pending, and I know we discussed it for the past, but looked at them today in Google Maps, and they're all in agricultural areas, and they're all surrounded by farms, all surrounded by trees or something going on. And I hate to see it happen, and I get this. I get that we're we're in a position here where we gotta deal with this problem. We want capitalist capitalism to prevail. We also wanna protect our our ag. Otherwise, we've got to these trucks can't haul anything down the road. That's it. I'm off my horse.

Thank you. Mhmm.

So pertaining to this, this does not affect I just wanna clarify, like, haulers, shellers, dairies, places of that that are hauling agricultural commodities from the site to a facility that is commercial that doesn't pertain to them. Right?

So the types those facilities that they have their own, like, tractor trailer combinations Yep. Those may be continue to be parked accessory to that with the hauler sheller processor, etcetera, as the predominant kind of land use, assuming that they have their respective permits that they need. We also have a pathway where if a truck, a tractor trailer combination parking facility is used exclusively to serve farmers in a localized area. We have an ag service establishment provision where those facilities can get a use permit as well in the AT zoning district completely irrespective of the ordinance amendments that we're proposing today. So they would not be subject to these requirements and could still get applications.

How does the enforcement go if you have multiple people saying they are ag, but they aren't? How how does that determine? Is that

There's there's a state registration system that identifies what kind of freight they haul, and that's what we use to verify what they're they're

hauling. Cool.

Was there a specific reason why you said no transfers of licenses? Like, if the if it's already developed and the guy wants to sell to somebody else, why wouldn't the use permit go with it for the same period? Like, it wouldn't renew for five years, but it would be the remainder of the the use.

It was another concern with, you know, continued enforcement and maintaining compliance with the conditions of approval of that use permit.

The use wouldn't it it wouldn't just remain the same?

I mean, the condition well, under the proposed amendments.

I mean, there could be differences with whether or not they're going to be leasing spaces, whether or not they have their own trucking operations. There's also requirements that the owner live on-site. So there needs to be an ability to be able to kind of go in and kind of review who's gonna be living on-site and whether or not all the criteria is being met met under the new owner.

So, basically, you're gonna put them through two years of planning in order to re reuse the parcel for the same use that it was being used for. Yes? We're

gonna go through

the criteria and make sure that they're meeting the criteria.

The

use has already been approved, and it's essentially the same thing. The process should be far more streamlined than the original. Yeah.

Thank you. Any other comments, follow ups?

The last thing is, was there any consideration to requiring, permanent bathrooms in place of

So that is something we looked at for the larger scale facilities, kind of in an effort to maintain some more flexibility with the smaller scale facilities, we opted to basically allow whatever is required by Plumbing Code and the Department of Environmental Resources to be provided on-site. So in cases where there is an office proposed, either a building permit or a tenant improvement permit may need to be obtained. And at that point, that would trigger plumbing code, which may require fixed permanent on-site restrooms for employees. So in those kinds of circumstances, permanent restrooms would be required. In the case where there's absolutely no structure proposed on-site with the exception of the on-site residence that houses the property owner and the business operator, we opted to allow that flexibility for portables.

I

believe that answers a lot of the questions. Is there any follow ups for staff? Seeing none, we will open up to the public. Is there any comments in opposition or in favor of the proposal? Seeing none, we'll bring it back for discussion and motion.

I just like to say, think you guys did a really nice job. When this topic popped up almost a year ago, I thought, wow, this is going to be

a tough one. I think

you guys did a really nice job striking the balance.

Yeah. I'd like to commend commissioner Morad and Ad Health Committee, also county staff. I did attend the outreach meeting, and also I attended the Ag Advisory Board just to kind of hear comments. I thought the county did an awful a great job of of incorporating the concerns of all the everyone involved. It was good discussion.

And I I just I I think this is where government works best is at the local level. We may we see how dysfunctional it is in the state and the federal, but I just wanna commend commissioner Moore and the ad hoc committee to putting together something, you know, not everyone loved it, but it it it did address everyone's concerns. So I'm going to vote in favor of this. And if it's okay with anybody, I can make a motion. Okay.

I move to recommend to the board of supervisors approval of ordinance amendment application number PLN2025Dash0069Truck parking.

Is that included making all the findings and actions in exhibit a?

Yes. Thank you.

And I will second.

We have a call. Commissioner Berquetto.

Aye.

Commissioner Callis.

Aye.

Commissioner Campo. Aye. Commissioner Huff. Aye. Commissioner Morad. Aye. Commissioner Wilder. Aye. Commissioner Sipser.

Aye.

Motion passes. Thank you.

Before we move on to the next item, I'd like to thank the commission for the comments. But I also like to thank four members of the community who aren't here tonight that did participate and provide a lot of information. This was, as Commissioner Zipser said, it is a community effort, but also kudos to staff, especially you for really the due diligence that it took. And I hope this will take care of some of the issues that we've had in our community and our county. Thank you. Moving on to item E, general plan amendment application number PLN, twenty twenty five dash zero zero seven o Highway Commercial

Plan Development. Okay. Good evening again. So now I'm going to present the proposed general plan amendment for the Highway Commercial Plan Development land use designation. And so this one is a request to amend the text of the highway commercial plan development land use designation of the general plan land use element to provide new requirements for large scale truck parking facilities, which require a rezone or a general, excuse me, general plan amendment to permit and do not qualify under the allowances for a use permit or home occupation in the Etude zoning district.

So I I won't re reiterate all of the background, of the county initiating efforts to form an hoc committee to evaluate truck parking allowances in the county. I'll just simply state that as part of the 2025 process during which the board of supervisors directed staff to study issues surrounding truck parking as guided by the truck parking ad hoc committee, Recommendations were developed not just for the truck parking, which could be allowed in A2 zone under a use permit or home occupation business license, but also for large scale truck parking facilities, either exceed the use permit allowances by proposed parking of more than 12 trucks, that propose maintenance or activities accessory to the truck parking, or otherwise need a rezone or general plan amendment to entitle the use. So this could include even land that is not being redesignated a rezone from agriculture, but from another designation. And so again, these were the major issues we sought to address through both the ordinance amendments and the proposed general plan text amendment related to various community compatibility concerns, aesthetic concerns, regulatory concerns, and nuisance concerns. These were the issues that were identified through that outreach process and of research process.

And so the current Highway Commercial Plan Development designation, or HCPD designation for short, is utilized for parcels immediately adjacent to freeway interchanges or for uses which serve the traveling public. Truck parking is considered a compatible use when operated with a truck stop currently. The proposed changes to the general plan text include calling out truck parking as its own use under the HCPD designation. And then specific to truck parking when it's the principal use, we're proposing to add expand applicable parcels, not just to locations at freeway interchanges, but to any parcel within a half mile of an interstate or state highway. And then for those parcels, that proposed state be redesignated to HCPD, establish new criteria to limit the intensity and address land use compatibility concerns of truck parking facilities.

So the amendments propose to update the HCPD designation to set a policy direction of establishing the HCPD designation as the appropriate land use designation for requests for truck parking facilities which require a rezone or general plan amendment. And so under the HCPD designation, the proposed new criteria is that a parcel cannot require a Williams NAC cancellation to be redesignated to HCPD. Parcels shall be less than 10 gross acres in size. Parcels project requests should be limited to no more than the parking of 80 trucks and 160 trailers. They shall provide permanent restrooms.

They must meet applicable access requirements and incorporate high quality landscaping and screening treatments. And any proposed project request that is going to be under the HCPD designation must not create a concentration. So I spoke about concentration in my previous presentation, Specifically, any site for the principal use of truck parking under the HCPD designation may not result in more than two truck parking facilities, inclusive of sites operating under a use permit on A2 or PD zone lands in a one mile radius of any property in the county. So again, we're kind of limiting any kind of truck parking facility where that is the primary use to no more than two within any one mile radius of any property. And so the responses shared in response to the early consultation for the truck parking ordinance amendments were also provided and considered for the proposed general plan text amendment.

Just to reiterate briefly, we received several no comment letters from DER Groundwater Division, James House Fire Protection District, Hills Ferry Cemetery District, and then Regional Water Quality Control Board, DID, Caltrans, and Hetch Hetchy Water and Power provided their standard district regulations, which, again, will be addressed through individual project referrals. City of Manisto, to address their concerns over truck parking facilities being incompatible with the majority of their general plan land use designations, will be addressed through project being evaluated through the county's sphere of influence policy and then being referred to the city for basically their support or opposition before a project can be considered by the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors. So staff has reviewed this project for consistency with the general plan, including the land use elements fear of influence policy, goals and policies addressing compatibility between uses and accommodation of siting of industries with unique requirements, and the agricultural elements, agricultural buffer policies, and policies regarding the Williamson Act. Staff found the proposed ordinance amendment to be consistent with the general plan. This project has been determined to be generally exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act pursuant to section 15,061, the Common Sense Exemption.

Accordingly, a notice of exemption has been prepared for approval of the project, and the project will have a significant effect on the environment. So staff is recommending that the Planning Commission provide a recommendation of approval on general plan amendment application of our PLN twenty twenty five-seventy, highly commercial plan development to the board of supervisors. Exhibit a provides an overview of all the findings required for project approval, which includes findings regarding the project being CEQA exempt, finding the project to be consistent with the general plan, and recommending project approval. And that concludes my presentation on that, and staff is available for questions.

Thank you for that report. Any questions from the commission?

I've got one. Mhmm. I realize I'm running out of questions. On the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power response

Mhmm.

It wasn't clear if they are requesting a complete review of the plan amendment or if every individual project truck parking project that would come through would be needed to be reviewed by

So in further clarification with their staff, it was a specific comment, basically, that would be satisfied that, you know, any project that is adjacent or abuts Hetch Hetchy Water Empower right of way would be referred to them, which is a process we would already comply with. And through that process, we would consult with them and and meet any regulatory requirements they have.

Got it. Thanks.

Seeing no more questions, we'll go ahead and open it to public hearing. Any comments or any opposition or in favor? Seeing none, we'll bring it back to the commission for final discussions and a motion.

I'll make a motion to approve the recommendation approval for the general plan amendment application PLN 2025 Dash 0070 Highway Commercial Plan Development Board Of Supervisors as a follow-up findings in exhibit A. For approval.

I'll second.

That's a motion by Commissioner Wilder up. A second by Commissioner Callis. Commissioner Perketo.

Aye.

Commissioner Callis? Aye. Commissioner Campo? Aye. Commissioner Huck?

Aye.

Commissioner Morat? Aye. Commissioner Willero?

Aye.

Commissioner Zipser?

Aye.

Motion passes seven zero. So moved. Moving on to a report from

the Planning Director.

Yes, on

October 14, the Board of Supervisors set the public hearing for December 9 at 9AM to consider the Planning Commission's recommendation of the general plan amendment that you conducted this evening with regards to the rezone and the update to the six cycle housing element. They also set the public hearing for November 18 for consideration of the Planning Commission's recommendation for the ordinance amendment portion of the truck parking. The highway commercial plan development portion will go December 16, still pending that set public hearing. On November 6, for this Planning Commission, we have one parcel map with a variance in Williamsburg cancellation out in the Croods Landing area. For November 20, we have a rezoned parcel map in the Modesto area.

And December 5, right now, we don't have any items. That concludes my report.

Thank you so much. Seeing no other comments, thank you all for your patience and thank you for all the reports. We are adjourned.