Government Performance and Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Thank you for coming.

Let's go.

Life Call to Order, the Government Performance and Finance Committee meeting of July 7, 2026. Clerk, please call the roll.

Vice Chair Bushnell.

Present.

Council Member Rumba. Here. Council Member Sedalge.

Here.

And Chair Hines.

Here. All right. For those of you that were waiting in the waiting room, I'm sorry. It took us a minute to get started. Summertime is a challenge with kids and dogs. But I made it here. Roughly my time. So with that, we'll move on to public comment. Clerk B, please read.

To request a speaker in public comment for items on the agenda, please sign up in the front of the room if you have not done so already. If you are speaking virtually, please press the raise hand button near the bottom of your screen or star 9 on your phone. Your name or the last four digits of your phone number will be called out when it is your turn to speak.

All right. Clerk, does anyone sign up to speak virtually or in person?

We have one in person, and that's Dick Burns.

All right. We'll set the timer for three minutes, and you don't have to solve that. Well, you know, it's nice to give people the flexibility, so.

Appreciate it. Yeah, my name's Kit Burns, so I live in Tacoma. I'm interested in hearing the report. I didn't find it online, so I expect I'll get a copy in some way. In reviewing the memo, it just mentioned primarily the builders, but not so much the community. So I was concerned on that, but I was also concerned that it doesn't mention the director of planning. Now, I've been coming to city council meetings for 10 years, and I've only seen one presentation, a very short one, by the director of planning. I'm wondering why the director of planning is responsible for all the permits that are here. Now, perhaps there's a reason, but I don't know what that is. Maybe I'm missing something. But in a number of the meetings I've gone to, like before, but I did quite often go I've never seen the planning director talk about that process of permit what slows it down and as an architect who's worked through King County Seattle Tacoma multiple agencies jurisdictions Olympia to name another one I'm just finding that it's odd to me that I don't hear from that component now the City Council has passed a A number of resolutions that actually affect the processing and makes the city responsible city doesn't respond, the city will have to give back some fees, which is a concern I raised at the time. And so anyway, I think that it would be just a suggestion or idea to actually get or have the planning director planning services. of the planning department is, how it relates to land use. So that's just what comes up. But I look forward to hearing about the process.

Yeah. Thank you. And we'll make sure we get a copy of the report here when we're all done. We'll pass off the clerk to get attached to the meeting materials later. OK. Thank you. Anyone else signed up?

That is it. OK. All right.

Well, with that, we are going to move on to briefing item number one. which is community engagement report, barriers to policy considerations for accelerating housing production. Since I'm leading this presentation that I have. I sent this to you all ahead of time. I sent it to the community members ahead of time. That's teacher for a long time, I gotta go. Okay, who is driving the power plant? Okay, so with the summer upon us and we're a little early on the rates making cycle for the utilities at this point, I'm trying to find the highest best use of our time as a committee and so one of the projects that I've been working on that I'm going to share with you today is this idea of looking into what are some of the barriers and policy considerations for accelerating household production. So how do we get here? Can we click to the next slide? All right. So what we're going to do is I've handed out a community engagement report to you all, and I'll talk a little bit about what that says, and I'd love to discuss with you all your feedback and next steps. Because in my mind, this is just the beginning of a conversation. I've taken some time to talk to a few folks. Obviously, not as many people as I'd like to be at this initial conversation, but I really would like to have you all help our policy so you know so as background before we kind of get into this right here one of the questions so a couple things i've said multiple times so um i've been on the council since 2020 we've talked a lot about zoning in this city and changing zoning allowing different land use types different housing types and expanding the zoning capacity so that we get more housing so we've been talking about since 2020 and all of you have been part of those conversations as we went One of the things I said initially early on, way back in 2020, in talking to legislators and then through my role, at least initially at the beginning with the Housing Solutions Group for the Association of Washington Cities, was the city of Tacoma has places that are zoned for growth. So we have mixed-use centers where you can build five-story buildings. You can build as much as you want. And there was nothing there. So we had places in our city like Proctor or the downtown of the stadium district where you saw bigger buildings come out of the ground. And then we had other mixed use centers across our state where we saw nothing. And so my question at that time to legislators was, if zoning is the answer, then why in areas where we see high capacity zoning do we not see the housing? So zoning alone is not going to fix the problem. So then the next question is, well, what are the other issues beyond zoning? And as the state has moved forward, the state has done a lot of zoning changes and continues to make zoning changes all the time. We are doing that through Home with Tacoma, but the next question is, what else can we be doing to help support housing development? So this conversation really started with that and going out and talking to some of the folks that are building housing in our community to understand what are the barriers that they're potentially running into. And you can see this report that I'm gonna talk through today is the result of over 25 email communications that we sent out to a list of 50 or so folks who had And this is a result, what the data, what you're seeing here is built up over 25 email communications, seven different sit-down longer conversations with developers to talk through this, plus other conversations that I've had throughout the last few years with developers, community members, finance folks, all different types of people who are thinking about web areas to kind of understand what we got here. Okay, we'll go to the next slide. So a little bit of the overview, and you all know this, we've done a lot around housing in Tacoma in the last few years. So started out in 2018 with creating the affordable housing action strategy. We started the Home in Tacoma project, which began as the kind of infill pilot project way back in 2019. And then in 2020, we moved it from the infill pilot project. We went from 1.0 to 2.0, moving into Home in Tacoma. And then finally, we see the Home in Tacoma being adopted in 2025. So one of the things that we have believed in this city is that we need more housing, trying to build more housing. But the question that I think many of us have in our minds and the community has on its mind is if housing is a crisis and we need more of it, how are we making it happen faster? How are we getting from the, we've identified the problem, there's not enough housing. We've identified some of the tools we have control over, we've changed the zoning. The next question is how do we get the answer move forward so we can actually see more housing. And so the question that I pose here at the bottom is the new and urgent challenge for Tacoma is how to accelerate the movement of projects from concept to permit, from permit to construction, and from construction to occupancy. So it's not just how many permits do we issue, it's how many of those permits move into construction, and how many of those construction projects move to occupancy. And so one of the things I have noticed, and you probably all have noticed this too, and I'm probably saying this for the community more than anything, is when I started on the council in 2020, 2021, we saw a lot of projects come out of the ground. We saw a lot of buildings being built in the city of Tacoma. If you just walk down Market Street or you walk down Broadway or you walk down any of these neighborhoods in downtown Tacoma, you see many large buildings built in that 2021, 2022, 2023 period. So we see lots of buildings being built in the city of Tacoma. And then what we see is, and at the same period of time, we saw lots of projects that were being permitted around that same time. But now, in 2026, we're seeing many fewer projects being built. So something has dramatically shifted between the heyday of 2021, 2022, 2023, to where we are in 2024, 2025, or 2026. So one of the things that I have been really trying to focus on is what happened. Go ahead and click to the next slide. So some of the things in talking to developers are, So we're going to walk through, and these are in the report, but I just want to talk to you about them. So number one, a lot of developers are feeling being squeezed from multiple directions at the same time. And so one area of squeeze that we have no control over, and then there's an area of squeeze where we have more control over. So let's talk about the area where we have no control over, because I think that's probably the best place to start. In 2021, 2022, and then in 2023, one thing that we've seen is interest rates have gone up. As inflation happens, we see interest rates go up, which means that the cost to build and finance these projects has expanded and grown up, has gone up. And this has, at least in some of these earlier projects, and some of you may remember this, right? There were some projects down in Pacific Avenue. There were some projects that were, there's a specific one that I'm thinking of out in the Narrows Business District that were these larger 542 seven-story buildings that were were permitted, they started going through the process, and now they're not happening anymore. And the big reason is interest rates went up. It became too expensive to build the project. We don't really have control over interest rates. I want to talk a little bit about maybe how we can support some of that later. But as interest rates go up, it means that the cost to build a building is more expensive. It means that the time it takes to build a building is more expensive. It means that every decision a developer has to make about what they paid for and don't pay for has a real cost as interest rates are high. And you think about this. To give us a clear example, and I'll tell the committee members, how many people refinanced their houses in 2020 or 2021? Anybody refinance their house? I did in 2020, and I went down to a 2.5 interest rate on my mortgage. So me, like many other people who refinanced in 2020, are not moving because our interest rates are so low that if I move to a new place where interest rates are now six, seven, six, seven, right? That's not even money anymore. And now it's six, seven, six or seven percent. The cost to not only move, even though I have equity in my home, even though I have ability, the cost to move my mortgage payment is much higher because the cost of borrowing the money to buy the home is much higher. So during the low interest rate period, you could buy more house because the cost to borrow the money was lower. Like I could buy a bigger house because it's lower. as interest rates get higher, I can't afford as much, I can't buy as much, it's happening at the micro level with us as homeowners, it's happening at the macro level with development. So that is not under our control. But when we start thinking about off-site improvement costs, infrastructure costs, which is something developers have brought up, this does have an impact on the cost to build. Because that is additional costs they either have to finance or pay for in order to get the project to come out of the ground. And so, what developers identified was there's kind of increasing cost for us in improvements, and city related infrastructure, and they also highlighted that there might be a disproportionate impact on small, infill, missing middle, affordable, or non-profit housing. So there's a lot there. So what are we saying? And this is something that I've said at the Association of Watch Cities, and many of you have heard this, that when a new building gets built in a city like Tacoma, where infrastructure's 100 years old in some cases, Someone has to pay to rebuild the infrastructure. It's not free, and we can't ignore it. If we ignore it, it'll become a problem down the road. So the two tools that cities have right now to pay for new infrastructure is one, we make the new builder or the new developer pay for their impacts on the infrastructure, so we make them pay for it and fix it, which in the end means that it costs more to build, which in the end means we see fewer projects get permitted, because as they get more expensive, it means that they're on the margin, gonna see fewer buildings happen, because it just costs more and more. Or, we don't make them fix the infrastructure, then we pass those costs off onto everyone else, which we all recognize is a challenge, because we have a lot of people who are really cost burdened right now. We can't get away from the fact that we need the infrastructure rebuilt, and we can't get away from the fact that we only have two choices to pay for it. this is really kind of one of these challenges we're having, that we're seeing with the development community. Because they're feeling like, you say you want more housing, but you're making me pay these outside improvement costs for sewer, storm water, water, power, ADA, sidewalks. But we all know we as a city have the need to build this infrastructure, and we have a community that wants the infrastructure built. No one's, I don't, I speak for myself, but maybe I can find some agreement with the committee, but I don't think any of us is ever gonna say, you can build that house and not do the ADA. So the question is, how do we make that work? A second part of this is brought up is, and I know Councilor Saga, I've heard this from folks before, which is at what level do we ask developers to fix or mitigate the impact that they're having? And at what level are we asking them to fix a pre-existing problem or something broader than that? So we say, you're going to build a new house in the middle of a block. We can't, you know, how much of the sidewalk, they have to do, they have to do the sidewalk to the corner, once they get to the corner, they have to do all three corners, and once they do all three corners, they have to do the whole intersection, because they built this one house, and developers are asking, well, is that my fault that I have to, this infrastructure needs to be rebuilt? Is that the city's job, because the city is responsible for the infrastructure? That fine kind of dance that we see is one that developers have talked about, and it's one of the questions we kind of come up with on this one. There's a whole, so there's one is the cost of infrastructure and off-site improvements. There's a second one around regulations hindering projects. So this is, you know, things about regulations that can complicate site design, that can, you know, when we think about how the site's built, how things are put together, the amount of reviews that are required to get the site right. That tends to slow down some of these info projects, and I think this is really acute for us in a city like Tacoma, because if you go out to Bonnie Lake, like some of our friends are out in the rural areas, they are building green fields. So they just take a bulldozer out, they level it out, and they build the community to today's standards. You know, they make people pay for this and pack these, but they build the community to today's standards. The sidewalks are already ADA compliant. The property's already graded for whatever they need. The stormwater's built before the houses show up. Everything's just built for that housing. When you start thinking about a city like Tacoma, where we don't have many greenfield developments left, it's almost all infill or almost all brownfield development, the question comes back to how do we help developers or development navigate that? Because it is different. Right, we've joked, Councilor Robon, I've joked about trees in the backyard, which is no one planted trees in their backyard with the development of capacity or development potential in mind. It's like okay, I'm gonna plant the trees along the side of my yard because one day I might build a fourplex in my backyard. Or I'm gonna put my sewer line off the side here and down the side of the property because I'm gonna one day put a ADU in my backyard. Right, people, they live in their homes and then as development changes, there's a requirement to kind of rebuild some of these things. And so the question we come back to is where can we look at regulations, impediments, and reduce unfunded mandates to make it easier for housing projects to pencil? So when you think about some of the requirements, whether for stormwater, wastewater, whether for our APA, all these other things, we have all these things that we are required to do as a city that are unfunded mandates. So the federal government says you have to do these things, or the state government says you have to do these things. and don't give us money to do it. So we're in a pinch. So when we see new development, we don't have the capacity right now to pay for those, so we often pass that off. And so that's kind of our fundamental, it's triple down. So, go on to the next slide. And I think our public commenter made this comment too, which is uncertainty is a cost multiplier, especially when interest rates are high. So every review cycle I have to go through increases the time I have to borrow money, increases the time it takes me to project out of the ground, it is a multiplier. If developers are already using contingent dollars, or closed on finance, or closed on their financing, meaning they've already said, hey, I think the project's gonna be a $50 million project, I have my financing, I'm ready to go. Start getting into the site develop process, oh, actually, hey, you have to do all these off-site improvements, or these other improvements starting the project happening, their financing is already set, they then have to go back out and find new financing, in order to pay for it. That new finance is also more expensive sometimes or oftentimes. And so a question we have is how can we reduce the time between concept and project with clear certainty? So one of the things I heard from developers is some of our larger developers who develop all the time know how the process works. So they submit their plans, they get their comments, they review it, they fix it, they send it back to the state, they get the dance. They also get the dance around how much off-site improvement costs they have to pay for, right? So the city says, you gotta pay all of this. And they're like, well, we're not gonna pay all of that. You could pay this. And they go back and forth, and they get to a place where they've had a grant. That provides, and that works for most of the people who know how the process works. It does add time to the cost, time to the process. It does add uncertainty. It does add cost. I think about this more of a conversation around, well, how are we helping the smaller scale developers in this situation? If I want to put an ADU in my backyard, and I don't know how the process works, where I need to negotiate with the city and go back and forth a bunch of times to get closer to something I understand, am I going to be locked out from building this? Or if there's a single family homeowner somewhere in the neighborhood, like on Hilltop, Eastside, Southend, or Northend, or anywhere in the city, They don't know how the process works. So that uncertainty, the timelines can create risk and they may just be like, I can't do this. And so what can we do to help support some of that? All right, next slide. All right, the other one is kind of a payment timing issue. So currently almost all of our fees are associated with when you pull your billing permit, you pay ahead of time. which requires a lot of capital upfront, which I understand we do to mitigate risk on our end that we don't get the money we're supposed to get, but when you think about a period of high interest rates or high cost to borrow, and then over time, there is a question around how many of these projects are being asked to float a lot of money in the beginning, carry that cost for a longer period of time, increase the interest costs, and then finally get down to the financing. So the question is, in some states you're looking at, how can we, especially for smaller projects, look at timing the fees? Again, we have to collect the money. The infrastructure impacts are real. We have infrastructure we have to maintain. Can we time the fee payment to later in the process or a better place in the process by which I don't have to have all the money up front, but I can have it over time? Can we build the processing? Can we help ease those payments over time? to make it more likely that we get from the permit to the completion. Next slide. The last one, I think my last slide for this part is, in talking to a lot of developers, we did hear a lot about limitability and investor concerns. And when you think about it like this, you say, well, Developers are making money. I will not dispute that point. They also are investing people's money. And when you think about investments, they want to think about investments that are safe and that are going to repay a certain amount of money. If we think about this in our personal financing area, would you be happy if I told you, well, here's a bank account you can invest in. 50% of the time, you may lose all your money. But then sometimes you make good money. I mean, most people would say, I don't know if I'm in for that. Some people are up for that. Most people want lower risk investment, right? They want as low a risk as possible to make sure their money stays. I don't think we can think that's not what's happening with a lot of investors when we think about the state's coma. So some of the things are brought up. Public safety, street conditions, amenities, commercial vacancies, landlord-tenant laws, and all factoring investor confidence in housing project feasibility. So as I said, if I'm going to build a project, like a big project. I'm going to get some money from the bank, probably about 60%. Another 40% I have to go out onto the equity market to get the money to fill in the gap. I've got to find somebody who wants to give me money to help me get the project out of the ground. That person who has money is not going to just give it to me out of the goodness of their heart. They're going to want to see some kind of return and some sense that I will get some money back for this. I'm loaning you the money and I'll get something in return. And so things like I don't know what the building's going to have if due to kind of public safety concerns or the lack of amenities. If the project is filled, if it's going to generate the rents, they're going to pay back my money. If I don't feel like that's there, I won't get the money in the first place and won't fund the project. And so this, what the developers brought up, this idea of we need to think more seriously about kind of how do we create an ecosystem, how do we create neighborhoods that people want to invest in and want to live in, and then that can help flow some of these project dollars in. All right? I can speak to more certain things if we go further. All right. And so the closing line I brought back was, developers are not simply saying to companies, remove requirements for development. They're saying the system needs to be more predictable, proportionable, proportional, and financeable if the city wants to see more housing produced. So no one I talked to said, we're not going to pay for this. No one I talked to said, this is not. I mean, no one. No one who responded to my email said I'm not going to pay for this. No one I talked to said this is not what I want. Or I don't think we need to pay for impacts or do these things. It all comes back to a system that's predictable, meaning I know when I have to pay. I know how much I'm going to pay as early as possible in the process. I know when I'm going to pay. It's proportional, meaning I understand that I'm paying for my impacts. And then it's financeable, meaning I can borrow money in order to do it. So, that's kind of the question we're getting towards. Let's get to the next slide. Okay, so we'll go back to the previous slide here for a second. So, as I want to talk, I want to have a conversation. So, I framed a lot of pieces here that I want to chat about. I would love to get open up for questions, and if anybody has questions or comments on this. One of the things I did say, and I think is a I want to say this part. As I said it when I was at Spokane for AFC, I think it's important here, is one of the goals I think we have as a city that's been unstated, but I'd like to state it clearly, is I think we'd like to better democratize development. So what does that mean? It means that we want to create a process not where five companies can build really large buildings in the city. Better. and faster, right? We do want, we do need a mix of housing types, right? And so downtown, we can need larger buildings, because that's a mix of types. But we also want rules that make it easier for, say, grandma, who is cost, who is land rich and cash poor, and is afraid of being displaced, can easily build an ADU in her backyard or a duplex in her backyard, and create not only housing for us, but also income just to keep her on her property. Or one day, if she lives in a really big house, to move into that house in her backyard. We want parents to be able to build housing for their parents. We want parents to be able to build housing for their children. We want a diverse mix of housing types that are all shapes and sizes to meet people's needs. And what that means is not focusing on just making it so a few people can build more housing, but how do we think about the process from beginning to end in a way that democratizes development and lets more people build housing. the goal with a lot of these conversations and talking to a lot of these middle housing developers was what are some of the issues that are there? And in some of those questions, there are things that we all value, and there's things that we, but the question is how much of these values are things that we're willing to maybe not trade away, but to deprioritize or reprioritize in order to get more of the housing types you want to see and more people to do it for. All right, with that, Yeah, there you go, Jo, you got it. Any questions, or any questions or comments?

Oh, I was going to go first. So I just want to say, I really appreciate this. I just spent a long time on it. And I really feel like you sort of hit the nail on the head. Because when I, there's a whole bunch of things I want to say. First off, the parking thing, that's an easy fix. I mean, we already have many areas of our city where there is no parking. Like, there's no parking standards downtown. No parking standards out on 6th Avenue. No parking standards where we don't, we aren't requiring parking. So I don't, I think that that's like a no-brainer that we could get to that. And I really, I want to support you on that idea. One thing I want to say is that when we look at small business, most of our city is small business. It's not big box. When you look at what a city is, it's 98% or something like that is small businesses. It should be that way when we look at development. And it's not. And part of it is that there are a lot of people in our city trying to develop that didn't have the skill set, never had had the chance, maybe never had a house until they got older. And I've met with these people. I've met with these developers. And I know that there are other people trying to help them get that foot up as far as having a chance to develop. And I think that our system is sort of rigged against them. I can tell you from my own experience, when I had a house that I was trying to build before I got on council and how I got treated, Because I was like one person building one house. And compared to Rush, who comes in and builds 235 units, they come in, there's a system, they know all the people, they know everything, and they are just like moving through. And my project took three years. And it's ridiculous it took three years. But it was like, because it's a small developer, everything is a lot more work. with that. There's also not as much money in it, so I understand that. I really appreciate the conversation about why we make people pay all the money up front. I think that that's really, when I go to buy something like something that costs a lot of money, like say a washing machine and dryer, you can pay it out in a credit card, like a credit card, and then you can pay it over time. You can pay it all in cash. We have other options. So there should be other options. I mean, obviously, if someone's not paying for the whole thing up front, there should be a thing where if they don't finish the project, we get to take the project, which might be a way for the city to own more housing to support some of the people who are in low-income housing that are more constrained in income to be able to afford places to live here. So that might be another solution. Also, who wants to lose their project, right? I just want to say that the other thing I think is really interesting about this that I really loved was the conversation about, let's see here, let's see, sometimes when we have to wait to do improvements, I mean, I was out doing a stormwater, like looking at stormwater design with people from the city of Reston and Pierce County last week, we were in your district, and over by Point Defiance, and one of the things that one of our staff said that's so true, I was talking about the east side and how We didn't provide stormwater catch bases and things like that because it was so expensive to build development and we were trying to make it easier to build. What they said was, yeah, but we get to go back and build these more green stormwater projects now instead of all the concrete that we do with most stormwater projects. And so I think the idea that we wait, sometimes there's a better solution than what we've been doing. Possibly we could look at different road designs that don't make the project cost as much curbing and everything like that. there are some things that we could do to be more nimble when it comes to the cost of development. And I think this is an opportunity to kind of lean into that. I think we constantly, and anyone who's a public works person might scream at me, but as someone who is a city planner, that's where the costs are. They're like so expensive to do some of those things. I think I really appreciate that. And the last thing I want to say, because I'm taking up a lot of time, is that I think having a yes mindset is really important, and that's something that at the city I have seen as kind of changing to that, and I really appreciate it. But the other thing is when we only think black and white, we are missing that gray area in between, and those administrative choices and things that work for a project really do make that project pencil out. As much as I'm a tree lover, you know I am, As long as we can get trees in the neighborhood, like I have one policy where they go in the storm water, like in the area of the larger watershed, I just, that is more the goal, is to make sure we're increasing tree canopy. It doesn't mean every tree stays every place, but we just need to be increasing tree canopy. So however we get there, great. I don't want to stop development. That's not my plan. But I also, I appreciate this conversation. You spent a lot of time on it, and I'd like to see us get to some of your

I think there's two things that I want to make sure I bring up about parking. is people talk about the cost of parking and yes there is a cost of the physical building of parking right so like you have to either if it's a big construction you have to build the concrete construction for parking um which you know is thousands of dollars that is kind of hidden in your rent because you know as you think about if you think about building is built has costs back whatever the rents that are generated by the building have to be enough to not only pay for the maintenance of the building, but also to return money to the investors in the bank, because they want to make their money back. If you require built parking, it adds to that cost, which means the rents have to be higher. One of the things I was in a course, a housing finance course this last year, they talked about though your rent doesn't say parking cost written into it, it's there.

I want to say when they put the Lux in, people are paying like $250 for a parking space. Everybody has a parking space, but it's like you're paying $250 a month or something like that. It's extra on top of your rent.

And then you're also paying extra because they had to build the parking in the first place.

So you're like... Well, he chose... No, no, no. Actually, he didn't have to do. He chose to do the parking he did. Because that's in the downtown area, and it doesn't require parking.

I guess what I'm saying is, if the building didn't build any parking, let's say it was $80 million, right? So then there's a cost to pay that back over time. Choosing to build parking may put the price at $100 million. It's $45,000. So that has to be amortized over some time.

Correct. And also people who do the projects like Eric's teachers are going to do is because they're looking in the future to think about what might happen with that property.

So there's a cost to actually build the parking. But the other one that I did a presentation on, and I didn't bring it for this map, but I wanted to show you. They did it in Kansas City, Missouri, which showed that half of the property inside the urban park in Kansas City, Missouri is reserved for parking. because when you look at how much parking is required per spot, how many spots per whatever it is, and you look at a map, half of the city parking is required for it. You couldn't add more housing because there's no place to put the parking to go with it. So it's not only the cost of the actual physically building it, it's the cost of the opportunity cost and the land cost. And some of us have done tours of people building. One of the reasons why I've seen ADUs kind of take off is because of the parking environment. You don't have to build a parking lot. People choose to do it, but they don't have to. But if you have to reserve part of your lawn, or part of a lawn, next year you leave for parking, and then that can't be like next year there's property, and it can't be all the other parts. So, I think that would be the one. The other one, the timing, you know, I have, there's now, there's kind of a couple of timing pieces, right, with a payment of fees, right? We have kind of two check-in points where there's like a do not pass, you can't rent this thing. One is the issuance of the building permits, the second is the issuance of the certificate of occupancy. So, outside of those two, we don't have too many places to say like, you can't do this, but we could, some cities have chosen to have everything do by the certificate of occupancy versus the building permits. There is risk associated with that, but then what happens is before someone else can buy the building, all that stuff is due before they can actually issue it.

Can I ask a question of you? So I'm not sure how much you've talked to staff, but I guess understanding what the funding mechanisms are for people, like understanding what bridge loans are and what it's costing someone, I think that when you actually have some empathy for the person who's at the counter who's coming with a project, it really changes how you look at things. So I just wonder if there's an education component to understanding what the actual cost is and then sitting down and saying, we're taking out a $3.5 million bridge loan to get this done, and every month it's costing us $60,000 in interest, which means that this project is going to be $300,000 more if it takes five months more. I think when you really understand it, it makes you uncomfortable that we're taking so long. And that is obviously a function of how many staff we have, what our process is, how we work together. That's our side, right? But I'm just wondering if there is any educational component to understanding the cost.

I don't know. That's a good question. I'm going to write this down.

Because once I figured that out at my job when I was a city planner doing this stuff, which like when you start talking about this, I understand that it's pretty, you have a different lens to what's happening as people come in to do projects and get them done.

Yeah. The other part I was going to talk to you mentioned about is, I know there's some conversation around these ideas of late-comer agreements, right? So the idea, like, I build the infrastructure first, like, I'm the missing middle guy who builds it from the middle, walk out, and then as people hook on, I get paid back some of them because they're going to share the cost of the infrastructure I already built, which is not a, which is just something we have to look at to see what that could look like, right? So if I'm going to build, if I'm doing infill and I'm building from the middle of the street, and I have to do a sewer line, a mallet, And the sidewalks, maybe it's all out. And then if somebody else comes in later, closer to the block, and the infrastructure's already built for them, they don't have to pay for it. So they're looking at ways to look at late-comer agreements to say, how might I, as a developer, recoup that cost as I build the infrastructure for them?

And what about the people who are already there beforehand who didn't have to do any of that? That's the question. It's like, how do you recoup any of that? Because they're going to benefit from it.

Yeah, I think there's a benefit. All right.

Sorry. I could go on forever.

I'll stop. No, it's good. This is why I wanted to have a conversation.

OK.

I have a lot. I literally have a report here. We have plenty of time. But first of all, thank you, Council Member Hines, for putting this together. We've had countless conversations around housing and what we can do to accelerate housing. I love the fact that you used the word accelerate. housing is what we really need to do. And, you know, so I want to start my comments in couching in why this is important. And I say this over and over again, I think to the level where it's ad nauseum, you and I, and I think the rest of the council here, members here know that the sheer lack of housing makes every single thing we try to do to solve things in the city harder and harder. It's like sand in gears that just slow everything down and it is because this is an area that people are moving to that we've continued to have really strong growth year over year and we need policies that allow us to be able to meet that demand because if we don't meet that demand of people who begin it leads to the issues we see all displacement of existing individuals in a port of option. And so that is why after I came on council, I think I was a little more nippy with an N. And then after I came on council, I became way more yimpy with a Y, having visited and gone around and seen how hard it is for us to solve things. I'm very much in agreement with many of these policies. My comments are about additional color. Thank you for mentioning parking and thank you for also mentioning Planning Commission is taking up parking. I'm actually about to send out emails for my people. My consideration around parking is communicating to people that Removing parking minimums is not mandating zero parking. And one way we should be communicating that is to also in this conversation of talking about parking, we really talk about adding flexibility to parking because with the minimums is a rigidity that stops building from a current, right? If we're going to remove the minimums, let's add flexibility that still encourages people to build offsite parking. And for me personally, I think it is really important that we have secure offsite parking options. Something I've mentioned as a very detailed thing is front facing garages as an opportunity when they are applicable to have secure parking for an individual's vehicle. Because for example, parts of my district need to take a vehicle to get to work. They earn less money. If their vehicles are broken into, that is a larger impact on their lives. So still appreciating that if we add flexibility that allows offsite parking to be built, it is also gonna be a benefit. Other things I kinda wanted to mention. Let me just not go through this entire list. I am very, I've come around to being a lot more bullish on the idea of pre-approved plans. The Starter Home Initiative, which is a non-profit, just released seven plans that have now been approved. The state is going to take up legislation that is potentially going to kind of approve them through LNI and everything. statewide, and these are townhomes, sorry, not just DADs, so building from DADs to go to townhomes, that has the potential. The promise of that is if you have the building approved, then the question becomes site development, and site development should, with quotes or asterisks or something, should be a lot faster. than the whole thing because you take half of the review out because the structure has already been pre-approved, so now you gotta just make sure you fit it onto your site properly and deal with the site development part of it. I am very, I would love to be able to anticipate this coming through the state and if it does, to work on ensuring that our policies, land use and otherwise, um will allow us to take advantage of those pre-approved plans sooner than other jurisdictions that would be a wonderful i think that would be a really good um thing for us to to go around and in that vein you know i don't know how much policy or maybe this partnership with with industry um and this is something that has been kind of you know a sore point for me which is The idea that as we are becoming in our, we think we're becoming more innovative, right? And progressive and creative with our policy. But I do think, and I like this idea of democratizing development because I believe that there are certain developers out there that are anchored in how they approach developments and it's kind of the same development they've already done. And really what we're trying to do is encourage people to think more creative and innovative and come up with new design ideas that can hit these criteria. I understand how when you're trying to be innovative, creative, and creating new types of housing, coming to all these other barriers kind of limits you and there's a balance to be had. Maybe this is a world in which we can talk about how can we partnership over time to consider innovative building methodologies potentially and encouraging that if that's the solution. I appreciate you mentioning investor confidence and the importance of financing in all of this. And you mentioned how interest rates have a huge impact on cost. Absolutely does. It also has an impact on the end user and consumer. Something that's really important to me is to encourage as much home ownership, sorry, occupancy home ownership housing as much as possible. On a value basis, for me, what I would be looking for is, you know, there is a world that is turning into a subscription model, and homeownership has the ability to have individuals not only own their land or their home, but it does mitigate rising monthly costs. A standard 30-year mortgage is the same interest and principal for 30 years. Your property taxes today are limited to a 1% increase. The only thing that can really change in your monthly amount is your insurance. And quite frankly, if your insurance goes up so much that it's 25% of your monthly amount, you probably shouldn't be living there anymore. I'm thinking about places like California, the base of wildfires, right? That's where they went up a lot, or Florida, where there was a lot of flooding, but the actual cost of your home stays the same, it is a mitigating factor that leads to, you know, people talk about it as generational wealth. What it does is add security in knowing that, hey, as long as I make this much, I got a home, I can take, you know, I'm more secure. In that vein, what I wanted to point out in interest rates is, you know, Just a 1% or 2% drop in interest rates have huge buying power changes that do affect the market. It's what we're also dealing with. So not only is that harder to build, it's also harder to sell at a higher price. The example I'll give you, because I had to actually do this for, I was pointing this out to a constituent, The area median income in Pierce County this year is $127,000, which seems like a lot, but that's two people making about $60,000. Reasonable assumptions on everything at a 6.5% interest rate. Home affordability calculators will say that's a purchase price of about $440,000. If that drops 2%, that's a purchase price of $525,000. That's a massive difference. That is a compounding effect and that is why we are talking about what can we do to ease barriers to development in a world where cost is just super high. Another reason, I think a criticism people can make can give to this report out of context is, you know, we're just looking to give things away to developers, right? But the fact is built housing, which in the way we've defined it through Home in Tacoma is housing that still has the same presence in a neighborhood that isn't out of character, out of size, but still adds units is literally the hardest type of housing to build today. There's a reason why, actually it's just economies of scale, there's a reason why for a really long time, absent artificial limitations on single-family exclusive zoning, even in areas that add the ability to build more housing, you weren't seeing two, three, four, five family homes. Actually, you were seeing two and sometimes three, but you wouldn't see four plus. And that is there's a step function increase in complexity and financing when you go four plus. You end up going from residential to commercial code in many jurisdictions. There's insurance considerations. There's different financing vehicles. All of those things get to a point where a lot of people say, well, this isn't worth it unless I do 20, 30, 40, or 50 units to spread that cost. And in a world in which we are encouraging middle housing, we have to understand that that middle housing in many ways per unit is some of the most expensive outside of just single family. So I do want to point that out to anyone who is looking at this and thinking that it is too heavily geared towards developers. And the fact of the matter is today we ask a lot more of developers than we ever have. Right? Between off-site improvements, we have instituted impact fees that are supposed to take, you know, those are fees on developments to do good things elsewhere. But housing and all housing being built will have a mitigating factor across the board, but we also need to build it a certain amount, right? So one of the policy considerations or maybe kind of thoughts that I had in a resolution I myself, and I think I've kind of mentioned it, but I have put together in kind of conceptualizing is, you know, being very intentional about understanding have we met our GMA goals, our Growth Management Act goals per year. We still haven't. We've gotten closer to it than we ever had, having about 1500 units a year for three years in a row. But as far as we know, we're not going to meet that for several more years because our pipeline of projects in consideration is almost nil right now. It's effectively almost nothing. I would love to have something where we are told, hey, we've missed our GMA go by this much this year, you know, this many thousands of units. And for those that might be listening, I believe we have to hit something in the order of 2,500 housing units a year, and the best we've done is 1,500. And so every year that we're not hitting that number is a year we fall further behind. And quite frankly, today, We have just short of 100,000 housing units in the city of Tacoma. That is probably about 10,000. We're probably 10,000 units shorter, almost 10% of the housing that we have currently is what we're short for a healthy housing market. There are lots of fees that come into play. Recently, we were working on I was helping to navigate through a project for a non-profit humanities where some of the new tree fees that we put in was $60,000 to $80,000 in total that would have been spread over each unit and get passed on to the, actually it wouldn't have been passed on, it would have been peaked. We need to just really fully understand the impact of the fee stacking and understand that people have a choice of whether they develop in Tacoma or they develop in nearby areas. Sumner's doing an amazing job in developing affordable housing actually using the number, this is a quote from their, I forget their city manager or their planning commissioner or planning person, but in a SHAPE meeting they mentioned that it was the number one program to build affordable housing, which is the multi-family tax exemption. They built hundreds and hundreds of affordable, mostly ownership units in Sumner. And you can get to tour that, actually. It was amazing. Let's just go through this. I'm going to skip all the ones that get too much. It seems to be talked a lot about. Oh, my idea around potential resolution is about this idea, and I do like how you kind of segregated the world of permitting. I do want to use a different word. I don't know what the word is for permitting. It goes beyond permitting. I think there was a world in which you went to a permit counter, got a permit, and you could build whatever you could. That was a very long time ago, generations ago. Today, permitting is really central function that takes into account a lot of different departments that kind of have their hand in this. A good question would be how many different individuals or departments are involved in different types of permits of different sizes. How many individuals or departments or entities need to review something? And we don't need to know this on a policy level. One thing I'm considering is an idea of asking the question, can we take two important milestones, let's say permit applied and certificate of occupancy given, and put a direction that says we want to reduce that time for the bottom 90% of all permits, basically most permits, by 10%. Put that as a goal. and understand what can we do. The reason I'm thinking in those terms is this, a broad kind of policy directive like that affects not just the permitting department, but every department and even organizations like Tacoma Power Utilities in being involved in understanding what does it take for their part to be as efficient. The reason you say something like bottom 90% is that's generally supposed to be what your regular work is, and what you're really asking is can we make the regular stuff faster, which gives us more time to do the more difficult and involved ones. Does that kind of make sense? That, you know, so that is something I'm conceptualizing and will start sharing with additional council members as we kind of flesh that out as a housing accelerator kind of actual direction to see if we can because I think there are ideas operationally that can kind of come to fruition from there right I would love for there to be active you know communication that helps Someone that walks in, get a sheet that says, hey, did you know we have all these different incentives? These are other ways that you can accelerate your development. You want to build a DAE, these are things that we've learned. You want to build a four-plex, these are incentives that are in place to remove your barriers. And then the last thing I do want to talk about is, you know, conceptually, I like the idea of setting up either through the city or other maybe through state funding mechanisms, you know, whether, and I think they should be, especially for market rate, the lower interest rate, but the interest rate basically pays for the management of it, funds that allow developers to dip in as a, you know, last resort funding mechanism that allows them to complete a project, whether that is to do, we talk about off-site improvements because we can talk about, and I'd like to point out that an off-site improvement has a benefit to the entire neighborhood, and that is a reason why we should consider something like that. I think that a funding mechanism like that can also work with the ebbs and flows of interest rate policy that we have no control over. Because if interest rates are really low and they're lower than what would cost us to manage that program, people won't use that program. They will find other funding sources, right? But we will continue to collect the monies from the previous ones, as I said, given out and in the world where they increase again they would consider that as a more viable option I like this idea of setting it up in a way that it kind of self kind of regulates when it needs to be used and when it doesn't it doesn't it isn't quote unquote a giveaway people have to pay a low interest rate on it I think there's a path forward I do think we do need to work with our policy team on a state level to ensure that we don't have any barriers or that we can work with state funds. You have mentioned to me several times that we're going to increase CHIP, right, and expanding CHIP on a state level that allows people to, especially nonprofits, to be able to dip into a fund that helps pay for infrastructure. To me, that feels like one of the most If we had something like that, that could help mitigate and would have not had the dearth of backing projects right now. Because I do feel like in 27, 28, I think we're going to struggle to hit our average of 700 units a year. And I think if you look at a 20-year average of how many units have been built, 600 or 700 units a year in Tacoma, which is probably about as low as we're going to be for a couple years before we see income back up. Okay, I said a lot, so I don't know if you have back at me or if that helped or not.

No, thank you. It was really good. I took a lot of notes. This is not the last conversation. I just want to underline a couple things that I want to hear from Debra and Michelle. Seattle Times had a recent article that we're the second fastest growing city in the state of Washington behind Seattle by pure population numbers, not by percentage. That's what we know. But we added the most residents last year in any city in the state of Washington. So people are moving here.

Can I add color? Yeah. Why numbers is more important than percentage? Sure. Numbers is more important than percentage because on average there's 2.2 to 2.3 people per household. And numbers tells you how many households you meet.

There you go. So that is another reason why this conference is very important, is in spite of all the things we've done to ruin this city that I get told through my email every day, people are still living here. Sorry, that was a joke for some of my fans out there. We're still growing, so I think that's really important. A couple things that I didn't talk about beforehand, I'd love to talk more about the permitting and how we can look at that. I like the idea of looking at the bottom 90%, so we should talk more about that. I mean, one of the questions we have to do work through is risk mitigation when it comes to permitting, because the number one thing I hear from permitting is they permit something and then one of us complains about it, it's ugly, or it ruined the neighborhood, or some neighborhood community member says it's ugly and it ruined the neighborhood, and then we yell at staff, like, why did this get permitted? How did this happen? I think no one wants to take any innovation steps that are permanent. So I think the question we come back to with that is, I'd love to see how we speak permitting, but there needs to be kind of a common agreement around, as we allow things to move faster, it may mean some things we don't like are going to move too, which I think we're all on the same page around that. But that's a broader conversation for us, kind of with the community. I thought one point you made that I want to highlight, removing parking minimums does not remove parking. We get rid of parking, but it doesn't mean anybody doesn't come out and rip up a parking spot. So the parking we have now is still here, and there are many places that people complain there are empty parking lots. So that is something to keep in mind. I think I looked down here. I think that was a good part too, a good one too. Your point around the interest rate calculation, if people are struggling to understand how that impacts development, just think about it yourself when you're trying to buy a house, right? And your purchasing power that you're able to. So when interest rates were 2%, go look at what you could have bought back in 2020, and look at what you can buy now that's short 6%, and you'll have a clear idea of how it does that. Another piece of this, we were at Spokane, I was at the Chihuahua State Conference, and the economists that talked to us made a clear point that stuck with me, which is in 2020, when interest rates were basically zero, you were stupid not to start putting your money and doing stuff with it. Like, you would actually lose money by sitting on it. And so we saw a huge flush of money into the economy around housing development. Now, as interest rates get higher, you're actually better off because the S&P returns about 10 or 12%. Keeping your money in investing or keeping it in savings account actually pays you pretty well, and there's no risk of limiting it. So I think that's just a thing that's impacting what we're talking about here. Oh, last thing, and then I'll let the customer jump in. The point about SHIP and a bridge loan program in Pennsylvania, I think it's really good, because one thing we don't have is we don't have a counter-cyclical mechanism, meaning when the economy's down, we're investing, and then when the economy goes up, we're, how can we use that as a way to say, okay, Interest rates are high, use our money. Interest rates are low because the economy's in the toilet. We don't need our money, right? And then it just kind of floats back and forth. Almost like a dynamic pricing model, which I know people don't like, but we can't do dynamic pricing with our permitting or our infrastructure costs. How much, you know, look at the data and say, how much is Christopher Bushnell willing to pay for outside purposes. We're gonna make it pay $1 less than that, right? We can't do dynamic pricing, but we do probably have to think about tools that allow us to kind of fluctuate the marketplace. And I think having that fun and if people need it and they can access it, but if the math, they don't need it, they don't have to, I think we have to think about what are the requirements, what are the things you want to see Pelicunet put out of that, right? Because it's gonna have value. But I think it's great.

Thank you. A lot of similar comments, so I'll kind of keep it down to a few specific themes. Again, thank you for all the work on this. This is a really good report. I think you really do a good job of laying out a lot of the challenges that folks are facing when it comes to building more housing in Tacoma, which we desperately need, like significantly desperately need. And part of the reason why costs have been escalating is because of our lack of housing for everybody, as has been mentioned by Bill's personality. So one of the things I was thinking about is the fee payment. We had talked about when and where you pay fees, is that mostly administrative in nature? Is that something that we can all fix internally, and we can like, hey, we're going to, after you hit certain milestones, these are the fees that you need to pay, as opposed to front-loading a bunch of specific fees?

Well, so if we use system development charges as an example, that's written straight into the ordinance. It says, system development charges will be paid for initial business building permits are issued. It's in code, so if that council wanted to change that, they could just draw a line. I mean, it's more complicated than that, but it's our code, but which we determine. We can't not take the money, right? We have to do that. And I see Susan's probably going, it's the treasurer, it's the finance person, so there's lots of considerations with that. But it would be a conversation for us to have, which I think there'd be a good conversation about risk and things like that.

Well, I mean, in order to mitigate those risks, as Councillor Grumbach's point, that is there an opportunity? Okay. Like maybe there's a lien on the property or something like that. And then, you know, if a project falls through, which I, which has happened, it actually happens pretty often, that there's a mechanism for us to recoup costs, either through sale of the property or something like that. I mean, it obviously would take time. Yeah.

Things like that could happen. But one thing we do is you have people take out bonds as part of the process. So we have them. We don't make them pay up front. You take out a bond. It secures the project. And then it's there to make sure. And if it didn't happen or didn't get paid, we collect it.

Well, there's clearly some complications there, but I think it's certainly an area that we need to explore. Maybe there is some streamlining making sure that we can spread out those costs a little bit more. We can always change the code if we need to, right? So if there's specific hindrances with the code and it doesn't make sense to have it there, we can talk about moving it. So, but I think that's certainly a worthwhile conversation. And something else, kind of going along with the cost, and I really appreciate you bringing up the idea of like trying to help pay for, help the, some sort of mechanism to help pay for infrastructure. And I think that there's an opportunity either local level on a smaller scale, but even at the state level on a larger scale, is doing some sort of revolving loan fund for infrastructure specifically. Low interest loans that go towards system development charges, that go towards offsite improvements that are available for small, someone trying to build an ADU, or a larger developer. And the interest would be going back into supporting that fund, which would revolve back into other infrastructure projects across. in a smaller scale city or in a large scale state. That kind of leads into potential, like, I think an infrastructure bank of some sort at the state level would be really beneficial to our community. And to your point of, you know, when interest rates are high, maybe the infrastructure bank for the state is set at, like, a 3% level, right, as opposed to a 6%. But as, you know, maybe the pendulum swings the other way, private equity and private banking or public banking, you know, maybe their interest rates tend to be lower than the public infrastructure. So they might pick and choose how they go around filling out those loans. But I think because there's a public benefit to infrastructure improvements to a lot of these developments, I think having some sort of evolving workflow for infrastructure specifically and we can ride out the criteria, I think it would be really beneficial for all our communities. And so, Yeah, so I think that's something worth considering. And I really like our revolving loan funds that we have with the CDBG, and are there other economic development tools that we utilize? So I think those are very similar models that could potentially be used for infrastructure specifically. And I don't know how much it would cost to fund something like that, maybe use a cap. So maybe at a local level we say, okay, any development under a million dollars could utilize some local revolving loan funds for infrastructure costs, especially for the missing middle that we're looking for, right? or maybe it's five million dollars, something like that. So that way, you know, the larger developers that are going to tens of hundreds of millions of dollars for their buildings, you know, they would need to obviously self-finance that with, you know, regular institutions, but try to democratize the ability to build housing for everyone. And I think being able to float those kind of loads is pretty much impossible for any, you know, most homeowners in the city. So I think that there's different ways to scale it in a way that would work for our community. Pre-approved plans, I think they're really important. Site development in particular. So every single site has unique conditions. I think that's part of the challenge that a lot of our permitting staff as well as our developers and why the comment periods kind of go back and forth. Utilities are not always set up the exact same way every single time. You know, you have topography changes, you have critical areas, you have a whole bunch of significant things that could really impact how sites are developed. And so I think that's really going to be really tough not to crack to try and like find a uniform way to do that. And that's part of what increases the amount of comments back and forth which increases timelines but speaking of timelines and i think the city manager's already been kind of going down this path kind of a consolidation of like one stop shop for permitting where can we consolidate do review all in one as much as we can when it comes to the different things i think that helps one get all the comments done you know in one time, but then also you have everybody kind of around the table looking at the project in a holistic way. Because a lot of, everyone kind of gets stuck in their, this is my little piece, this is my little piece, my little piece, and not really, you know, left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. But I'm also, similar to how the fee payments are structured, you know, where are we pulling permits at what time? Does that make sense also based on the different projects? And so I guess I don't know enough about where, at what point do you need to pull permits for certain things, but is that the right way to do it too? So that's another thing I would think about is the timing right for the different permitting milestones that are needed. Obviously, the last thing is pretty much a certificate of occupancy permit, so there's that, but what about anything else before that? So parking, I think I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Planning Commission recommends. I know a lot of it's been really taken out of our hands by the state. And so if there's ways for us to simplify parking, I think it would be beneficial for everybody. And I know that in Spokane, they were, oh, had they already eliminated parking? Yep. So guess what? They're still parking in Spokane.

so i will uh stop there uh thank you again so much for all the work on this and uh i'm not sure you have anything to add i do have a couple of i'll make these brief yeah first i mean i i'm i want to just thank all of you great conversation lots of good work to initiate the conversation lots of great follow-up questions so um i think you should all be proud of that uh one broad The the all the costs that have been the focus of this because that's where we live is a critical thing but what the market what the market can bear is the other piece and that Tacoma so many of the Multifamily where the affordable housing rent is the market rent or maybe I mean so that we are a bedroom community and 60% of the people living here commute out of the city and out of the county to go to work. That isn't a part of this, but I think it's an important piece of it that economic development would be another part to help them fix it. The third thing is the developer's perspective is critical, and I can completely validate having been in the utility world for almost 40 years now. We are conservative people, right? And so we drive into the future remembering the building that was built over the sewer line and the big problem that that created so that all those development reviews come from an honest place of where this is really costing everybody a bunch of money. And if we'd have prevented it in the first place, you know, we'd be better off. But that does not mean that we can't and must get better. I 100% agree. But I also think behind the developer's perspective, there is the people that are doing the permitting trying to protect the interests of people who aren't even at the table yet because they have no more. And then finally, I would just offline like to know more about the We've got one of your policy considerations, the electrical infrastructure costs. I'm not quite familiar with the references in there, so I could get some more detail on that.

Okay. Yeah, no, I'm happy to do it. All right. Well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for all of your – well, let me – Can I just say one more thing?

Okay, go ahead. I just wanted to comment on something that Councilmember Sedalge was talking, I think it was, about the One Stop, or maybe it was Councilmember, Deputy Mayor Bushnell. You know, we have gone away from the One Stop shopping permit center idea. That was something that I thought was a brainchild when I was a planner. Moving more to an online presence, which has been, in some way, I appreciate the online. Once you figure it out, it's great. But that one-stop shop, having that person there that can answer your question immediately or within the next hour is really helpful. And I just want to say, I think, I hope that as we have this conversation, we understand how important it is to have everyone at the room talking. Stop not thinking silently, but thinking how we all work together. I think that that's it. I'm surprised that our city of this size is still kind of a little bit like that. And I'm hoping that we can have a conversation at some point about, I don't realize it's like that until I talk to developers. I think we're all talking to each other and then I find out it's not really like that. So I would love to see how we can do a better job with that. So thank you so much.

All right. Thank you. Well, first of all, this has been a great conversation. I'm glad we had it. I got three pages of notes here. I just want to provide just two pieces of comments from this question on where to draw a law fund, and then I'll go to the next slide. We'll talk about next steps. I think the conversation, infrastructure bank, revolving loan funds, that's something I'm definitely thinking a lot about. There's a lot of states and cities that have decided to move into this space with this idea of Revolving loan funds is the idea of bridging the gaps for financing and the idea that one of the ways we operate with financing some of our more affordable housing right now is you give money away and then it's gone, which is fine. We get the housing in return, but it's gone. A lot of cities and states are looking at revolving loan funds as a way to cycle money, meaning you give them the money and then something comes back. And the interest rates are low enough because at the end of the day, probably would have just given them the money and not wanted anything back, but if you can get a low interest rate, then you can siphon the money and help build projects. So Montgomery County, Maryland is one county that's looking at those revolving loan funds. The state of Massachusetts, the state of Illinois, the state of, there's a few other states that are doing this, the city of Atlanta that have lots of things around this that are doing this. Talked to Councilor Slaughey about the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. which puts money aside, and what they have been doing, and it was written about in the New York Times, is they've been going to buildings that are for market rate rent, rental projects, and buying affordability out of them. So in exchange for money, low interest rate loans, to buy down the cost, the developer signs a agreement and in exchange they provide affordable housing for a certain period of time, like 50 years or something like that. And I think there's a way to look at some of those ideas, so where we can, we're not requiring councils in the future to allocate lots of money over and over again to leave when we have a revolving building fund that can recycle itself. So I think that's been great. I would love to talk more about the state. We're going to have a conversation with the health exclusion groups today to talk about that. The other part, I think, Councilor Schell, you hit right on the nail on the head. Site development looks different, right? Sites don't make this piece of paper flat in a box and you just put everything on it, right? They look different. And one thing I have noticed, one of the big concerns that came out of home in Tacoma when we talked about it, was a lot of neighbors, and maybe your constituents are similar to mine, were afraid that what's going to happen is we pass home in Tacoma, and the bulldozers show up and wipe the single family house off the lot, and then build something new. And what we're seeing more and more is that doesn't happen, because the houses have value. And so we're seeing a lot of keep the house on the property, basically renovate it, and then build an ADU or a duplex or a triplex or a fourplex in the backyard. So we're keeping the house, and then we're building more units onto it, which means that it's even more difficult when you think about how you fit it on the box if you're not taking the house off of it. And there's a couple, if you haven't done those, if anybody's interested, I can connect you to lots of folks that are doing that kind of work. You can go see some of their projects. I think it's pretty cool how creative people are being. I think you're right. The term we came into is the measure twice, cut once idea with the utilities. We'd rather take the time, make sure we don't screw this up. Because if we do screw it up, it's going to cost us down the road. I think it's really important. And we can talk about electrical infrastructure too. Can we put the last slide back up on the screen so I can talk through? Okay. So I, so this is step one. And what the goal of this report was, what is the problem statement, right? Because there's one thing I could say is like, here's what I think the problem is. But I'm just, you know, a council member and a teacher, right? And I don't do this for a living. So this report was meant to say, well, what is the problem? So reaching out to people in the building who are doing something in the city and recognize the problem that has been identified or that I had identified that I worked backwards from was, we have projects that are permitted, we have zoning that allows housing to be built, but we're not seeing the number of housing units actually get built that we think should correspond with that. There's a gap between what we allow, what's permitted, and what actually gets built. So that's the kind of problems, what are we doing here? This report was reaching out to developers to say, okay, what do you see as the barriers? And to Council Member Zalmey's point, right, you know, why reach out to developers, and public comment around community members, I think it was just more around the idea of the people doing the work every day and using their kind of lived experience to understand what the issues are and starting there. I've never built anything in my life, and so if you asked me how much an AU would cost, I imagine I would wildly underestimate the cost of it. And so I wanted to make sure we're operating for people who are actually doing the work. As we move further, I want to bring community members into this conversation, too, to understand kind of where they fit But my goal is, you can see right there, I've started talking about this idea of a Tacoma affordable housing accelerator program. And the idea is two things that you've all identified. Number one, there's a need to get some housing built faster, to democratize it, that's a piece of it. But two is, the city's already doing a lot. But we do a poor job of packaging things. We do a poor job of saying, you want to build housing here? Here's everything we do to help you. Here's all the incentives. Here's all the things you need to do. Here are all the programs that can help you. It's all in one place. Here you go. And my goal is, with your feedback and thinking about this, is to come back with, what's a package of things we could do to help people build? So if grandma wants to build ADU, or my neighbor wants to build a duplex, what is the package of things we could do to help them go quicker from idea to the buildings on the ground? Some of this may just be streamlining some of the permitting we were already talking about. Some of it may be additional programming around funding sources that can help us with infrastructure costs. Some of it will be adding components to our legislative priorities to talk to the state and the federal government around them. But that's kind of the goal, is to come back to GQFC Taking in your feedback, we're kind of like, here's a list of potential policy options we could take to kind of accelerate housing. And package them under a Tacoma affordable housing accelerator program. So this is just kind of phase one. Yes. And I would love to talk to you all more about this as I kind of start working through.

I just want to recognize that We're updating AHAS, the affordable housing strategy. I'm wondering, based on your affordable housing accelerator program, where that fits in AHAS and if that, and I don't want to assume, but does that take place instead of AHAS? Because I see, I want to say with the accelerator program, What I see already is there's opportunity to make sure we're running into different types of developers, which is a strategy that I think we should maybe be talking about when we talk about your accelerator program. I'm just curious where you think AHAS lives in this, and now that housing is in NCS, how does this fit with what's happening in CVS now that we have NCS as housing?

Yeah, I mean I think my thought is that Yeah, AHAS, the Affordable Housing Action Strategy, was drafted in 2018 or adopted in 2018. I see that as the framing document for what we're trying to do, and I see the accelerator program as how do we get it to happen faster. Because I think, one, I'm a big believer that speed is a progressive value, right? Like this idea of doing things quicker. Because, I mean, if we believe things like housing, homelessness is a housing problem. then if we're sitting around slowing down housing production, then we're basically saying we're okay with homelessness, right? I mean, there's a progressive value. We want it to be faster. So I see AHAS as kind of setting the strategy, and the housing seller program is like, how do we take that and make it happen faster? And how do we make it transparent to the public about what are strategies we're gonna need to make it faster? Because one thing I would say, and I think underlying the tension with this conversation and the tension, I believe, with the community around housing is this idea that 100% of zero is still zero. So the community has this vision of new housing that is surrounded by trees, environmentally friendly, electrified, with new ADA ramps, new driveway, beautifully designed, LEED certified, I'm okay with housing as long as it checks 1,000 boxes. And then the question comes back to like, well, if you make the housing check 1,000 boxes, you might get nothing in return. And so part of the conversation around this is, what are the things we are willing to trade or to accept if we want more housing? Some of those things we're not gonna trade off, right? Some of those things we're gonna be like, you know what, we want this, not that. But there's a conversation around it, And so my goal is just how do we move AHAS faster?

I just want to make sure that when we talk about AHAS, we're talking about your accelerated program because they're linked. They're linked. So if we're going to be talking about AHAS at CBS, it would be necessary to maybe be present at a meeting to give a presentation. I'd love to. Okay, thank you. I'll make sure I get that to staff.

For sure. Those are kind of the next steps. And some of the, so my goal is based on this conversation, other ones I have with colleagues, is to come back with a list of proposed potential ordinances, funding items, this kind of package of things we could and couldn't do, and then decide where we go from there. That will come back through GPSN.

I like everything you said. The thought I had when I was kind of reading this is it really peaked and and 100 i've actually said this i think too much in other contexts i think we've done a lot and i love the fact that you pointed out that we've done a lot that we don't do a lot about showing people hey this is all the stuff you can take advantage of like being more proactive um in that vein You know, as much as we have something like 300 more units that were permitted after Home and Tacoma that could not have been permitted prior to Home and Tacoma, the fact of the matter is we have very few that have taken advantage of our bonuses for affordability and homeownership and so forth. Now, that just might be a timing thing to get that out there. But, you know, a simple thing that can be done to kind of set up successful down in the future is to maybe direct our departments to ask every individual that's going and asking for a permit, did you know you could do more if you did this bonus? What is stopping you from doing it? And collect that in real time as well. And that comes to me in the squeaky wheel version of it today. But maybe if we had an active thing that said, hey, when you apply for a permit of, I don't know, a certain size, you know, proactively have people ask, hey, by the way, you know you could add one or two units if you added this bonus. Do you want to learn more about it? Do you mind telling, do you have time to tell us why you wouldn't do it, right? And collect that information for those that are willing to tell us. Oh, I don't have enough room. Oh, I can't get financing. Oh, I would love to do it, but the FAR is in the way, which is actually something that happened in the development in my district. limited the size of it and I don't want to do you know in order for me to still achieve it I would have had to do 300 square foot units instead of what I actually want to do which are two bedrooms right those are real considerations that we kind of want to collect and review at some point in real world examples yeah and I think it's great because I think we haven't done a bunch of not only do we have zoning that allows housing that's not there we have incentives that aren't being taken up

And again, this is a good conversation for us to have as a thought, as a council. But if you were to ask me, I come back to this idea of we already went through the challenging process of putting home a Tacoma 3, where we fought with the neighbors, we did all the stuff, and I went through the time, and we'll wrap up in a second. But I don't want to, and I'll just be really clear, I don't want to spill a lot of political blood treasure to get nothing. be riling people up saying, we're going to build more housing, we're going to build more housing. And then six years from now, the next council's like, well, what happened? Those guys back in 2026 didn't do anything. It's like, fair enough. And so I think for me, if you ask me, my bias is towards speed, getting things done, because I think we are in a housing crisis, we are growing, and we need more housing now. We don't need it 25 years from now. We need it now. And I think this is, you know, and if people are willing to build duplexes and 80 units in their backyards, along with some of the bigger stuff, that like keeps your neighborhoods and also adds density, the gentle density that occurs to your neighborhoods. I'm all for it. So, all right. With that, yeah.

Susan, we'll go to topics for upcoming meetings. Okay, so. So July 21st, we tend to typically have the clerk's office letter review. And then we have water coming in to do a presentation on the water IRP. And then August 4th, we have the dam recertification. And then August 18th, we have environmental services doing some rate projection presentations, as well as to come up with utilities doing their preliminary budget and rate updates.

All right. Thank you for that. Any questions? Oh, here. Any other items of interest? I've been here for a while. So the committee has received Baker Utilities' 2025 Audit Exit Conference Memorandum presentation on the audit results for Tacoma Public Utilities Power, Water, and Rail, and Environmental Services Solid Waste, Wastewater, and Stormwater. There will not be a presentation at this time, and the materials will be available on Legistar after the meeting. Susan Calderon from Finance is available if any of my colleagues would like to ask any questions at this time. I imagine if we're just doing a presentation, there were no letters or findings that came with a clean audit.

Very clean audit for all five utilities.

Good job. Perfect. I will say that we will make sure that the document, the report that I put together is available online through the clerk's office. So if you are listening at home or here in the meeting, we'll make sure you get a copy of it available online so you can review. And just as a reminder, this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end. All right. I move to adjourn.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye.