Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. Welcome to the City of Taft Planning Commission special meeting for Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. Meetings being held at City Hall, Council Chamber, 209 East Kern Street, Taft, California 93268. The City of Tap Planning Commission meetings are being held in person with full capacity seating and are livereamed at httpsw.youtube.com user cityofft. Public comment can be made in person and can be received per the following. Written comments may be dropped off in the dropbox in front of city hall. Comments may be emailed to the city clerk at city of clerk at cityof.org. They may be made by phone to the city clerk's office at 661-7631222. Public comments not made in person will be accepted up until one hour before the meeting and any comments received will be read into the record. Okay. We will have uh the pledge of allegiance followed by the invocation which will be done by pastor Bella Black. So um you do salute. Pledge. I pledge algiance 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. Pastor, thank you. Father God, I thank you for the opportunity to pray for this planning commission. Father, I thank you that you've brought these people together for

the opportunity to work for Taft. Father, I know that during these times, there is a lot going on in this nation that could hinder the work that you have for them to do. So, Father, as they go forward, I pray right now that you would give them wisdom, that you would guide them, that you would give them grace, that you would give them mercy. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray a blessing over them and I pray that your grace would be with them and I thank you for them in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Okay. We'll need the roll call, which this time I remembered. I was trying to slow down a little bit. Okay. Chairman Livingston present. Vice Chairman Sherz is out of town. Commissioner Dowen here. Commissioner Johnson here and Commissioner Orin is absent. Okay. And seeing that we have no uh people signed up for public comment. Item one will be skipped and we'll go to item two, the minutes. I need a motion and a second. I'll make that motion. I'll second. Um, can we please have a vote? Roll call. Commissioner Dowen, yes. Commissioner Johnson, yes. Chairman Livingston, yes. Thank you. Okay, that brings us to item number three on the agenda, which is the public hearing for site plan review number 2025-01, General Production Services Incorporated's new warehouse building. Um, planning director Staples. Uh, thank you, Chairman Livingston. As you mentioned, uh, the item before you is conditional use or sorry, uh, site plan

review number 2025-01 for a new warehouse building at the general production services facility site. Um the applicant um which is both uh angle and company which is the engineer and general production services proposing a 6,500 square foot warehouse located on a 1.47 acre parcel within the industrial zone district at 1333 Kern Street. The the pro the proposed project is located on the 4.48 48 um acre headquarters site for the GPS that includes 21,526 of existing office, shop, and warehouse operations supporting the local oil and gas industry. The property is surrounded by existing commercial and industrial land uses including Country Tire and Wheel and DNA McCrae U to the west at 1355 and 57 Kern Street. Uh, Chevron operations with a yard and storage tanks to the south at 1441 Wade Avenue. Um, current electric distributors to the north at 1310 Kern and J&D recycling to the west at 1277 Kern. The entirety of the proposed 6,500 ft and 25 ft tall warehouse building will be utilized for storage of equipment and materials. The building is cited in the southeast corner of the um eastern half of the GPS facility behind the existing vehicle service shop and warehouse buildings. Um there are no proposed tenant improvements of the uh building for office shop or other uses. The project site has direct access to Kern Street Highway 33 with access from the main driveway that services the entirety of the GPS facility. Uh the project does have a secondary access point to the south via Wade Avenue that also connects to Kern Street uh or Highway 33. Uh TAB zoning ordinance chapter 14 table 14A identifies the industrial uses is required to provide

one parking space for every 1,000 square ft of warehouse building area. The 6,500 foot warehouse building is required to provide a minimum of seven parking spaces uh with the number of handicap spaces determined by the total number of parking provided on site. Uh the existing GPS office, shop, and warehouse warehouses with the proposed new warehouse requires a total of 45 parking spaces with two accessible spaces. Um the facility currently has a total of 46 parking spaces. um and see the table below on page two of your staff report for um all the required development standards. Um the applicant submitted their application um on January 30th, 2025 as a project was found to be in compliance with the development standards of the industrial zone district. The proposed project was publicly noticed for uh planning commission review and approval. Um below is a table that details how the proposed project complies with the industrial zone district and the required parking standards as I prior stated and the SEA determination on this project is uh that it's exempt from SQUA set forth in section 15301 of the SQA guidelines related to existing facilities which means existing development sites. Um, attached to your staff report is the approval resolution along with the aerial map and the um, general schematic plans of the new 6,500 ft² warehouse building. Um, that concludes my presentation. I'm available for any questions you may have before um, public hearing. Okay. Does anybody have any questions for Mark? I'm pretty familiar with the yard and where it's going and yeah, it looks like it's going to feel all right. Is there going to be any sort of bathrooms in there or anything? It's just warehouse space. I believe all the um restroom facilities are on the uh

probably both halves of the current facility. You know, the office is on the one and the shop and warehouse is on the other half. More specifically, we have representatives from uh um general production and angle who could get into the details of what's existing on the facility for breast room, but a warehouse like this doesn't require it. Okay. I didn't see anything for like lighting or anything inside. Yeah, they didn't propose any additional lighting to what's existing on site. Uh but they could add on to it. um being an industrial area, no nearby um residential, it's far enough away from the new um Sandy Creek Estates. Um the that Chevron property is probably quarter to half mile gap between them and those houses and Sandy Creek itself. Yep, I'm good. Do you have any? I don't have any questions. Okay. On the other way, actually. Um, so why don't we go ahead and let's open up the public hearing. Um, is anybody have anything to say uh to discuss the project? You'll need to come to the microphone. Good evening. Uh, my name is Joseph Engel. Engle is spelled E N G- L. Uh, Mr. Chairman, fellow commissioners. Um, I'm representing the owner and I want to point out two things about this project and they're already in your packet, but I want to emphasize them. First of all, it's shown to be a 6,500 square foot building, and that's true in the enclosed walls, but there's also an overhang on one side of the building. It's indicated on the

drawings. You saw it. And it's simply to provide shade at those at those uh those doors. So, the other thing is we sent a colored uh elevation that showed the intended colors for the building. And you may have seen that. However, when you take the colors off the website for the metal building and you put them and you print them, they don't look quite right. So, I brought colored samples with me, but the intent is to match the buildings that are already on site. Okay, those are my two points. Do you have any questions for me? Questions? No, I don't. I don't think so. That's Thank you very much. Thank you. Unless we've got anybody else needs to ask a question or speak, we'll close the public hearing and um open it up for a motion and a second. I can make motion. I make a motion to adopt a resolution entitled a resolution of the planning commission of the city of Taft approving site plan review number 2025-01 to construct a 6,500 square foot warehouse building on an existing industrial site with a 21,526 square ft of office shop and warehouse uses. Located on a 1.47 47 acre parcel located in the industrial one zone district at 1333 Kern Street and find that the project is exempt from the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act, SQUA, as set forth in section 15301 of the CQA guidelines existing facilities. Okay, I'll second.

Okay, we'll need a roll call. M Commissioner Dowen, yes. Commissioner Johnson, yes. Chairman Livingston, yes. Thank you. Passes on a 300 vote with excuse absences. Um we will move on to item. Let me get back to my agenda. Believe we're just moving on to the planning director's report. Uh thank you, Chairman Livingston. I have one quick one. It's to remind everybody we will not have our regular meeting is scheduled on April 2nd. Um we will have another special meeting on the third week of the month on April 16th. Uh we do have a project to review and uh take action on. Okay. Um so we'll be doing that and I'll add one more is we've sent out our second draft to state housing community development for the housing element. We're hoping um either they'll have very few comments or questions or we could just have a back and forth um or they should find this uh um uh draft compliant because we had some pretty good conversations uh u via email and over Zoom about how we wanted to address their comments and add more to um the housing element. It's more dealing with uh future public outreach and uh and just more technical terms I would say or jargon or descriptions how they see our different efforts in the different programs we had. Um I think it only added like three more programs which the main one that I'm entertaining um is to have like a twice a year public forum type meeting like we have for the workshop cuz we have committees and other things that are in here or conference room but that can unintentionally limit input and people being able to speak and things like

that. So, more of like a interim updates of how housing development's going and um let people voice whatever their current concerns are and then hopefully it could be also more of an open forum to get some of the stakeholders we tried to reach out to that we weren't able to have conversations with. um you know the all the housing services if you will for like affordable rent control whatever um the housing authority all that will try to invite them out as a speaker and then give an update on how housing is going in Taft and right now I'm thinking it's twice a year until it picks up that actually sounds like a good idea one of the things that tends to happen as you know is that for the public the report goes on a shelf and they never never see it again file folder eight years and Um while we look at it, it still would be better to have a broader input on it wherever possible and making it more open because a committee will be limited to the five to seven people selected for that, right? It has a public comment period, but it's not really an interactive type thing. So, keeping it more open and having at the transit center instead of here, things like that to bring more people out to uh have that conversation, whatever may be the topic of the day when we have those meetings. But I'm hoping to center it around having at least one person, a home builder, the housing authority, CAPK, whoever it may be, uh, when um, Habitat finishes their house, maybe we could have a meeting about that, you know, things like that where it it we'll bring people in and not just have still have somewhat of a I know planning work could be kind of stale and boring sometimes, but um, I want to be able to make it worth people's time to talk to someone who's in the housing world in some way. Mhm. I agree that's the that's the main thing that's being added though it still looks kind of general on the paper. Okay. Any questions from either of you? No. And then we'll move on to city attorney statements. Thank you, Mr.

Chairman. No statement. Thank you, city attorney. Uh any comments from our commissioners? None at this time. I just appreciate the city and as we look at what's happening uh nationwide, it's really nice to have confidence that our city government is operating with uh great oversight and great um attention to our budgets and how we operate. It's really nice to see. Yeah, I appreciate that as well. Um, in that case, we're going to move on to, as is usually the case, a vindication of a representative to the city council. Why don't you do it this time? Okay, I think I can do I'll second that. Um, it was funny because I was sitting in the back of the room yesterday and Dave Nor looked at me and then looked at the agenda and then asked if there was a report to be done. I thought, "Oh, yeah, I could see that." it' be normally that would be the day I would have been doing a presentation on. So, um it's nice to at least be noticed that they're looking for you. Um in that case, then the last thing to do is a motion to adjourn. I'll motion it. Second it. Okay. Everybody in favor say I. I. I. This could be the shortest meeting.