Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

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I want to hear more about on compre sometime. Yeah, absolutely. Somebody used it that long. You did that in one day also. I did that for like Oh yeah. Wow. So worth it. I think the full unit is meeting. Good evening everyone and welcome to the September 23rd, 2025 meeting of the City of Westminster Planning Commission. Anyone who would like to speak, please sign up at the back of the room. Can we have a roll call, please? Commissioner Peg, here. Commissioner Conir, here. Commissioner Young,

present. Commissioner Mayo, Excused. Commission uh Vice Chair Carpenter here. Chair Boscher here. Commissioner Calling excused. Commissioner Dunn here. Commissioner Tomachek here. Thank you.

Okay, we have a quorum and both alternates will be voting tonight. All right, we have one item on this evening's agenda, and that is item 3A, public hearing and recommendation, childc care amendments to the 2040 comprehensive plan. I hereby open the public hearing on item 3A. And it looks like we have Mr. Spurgeon to give a presentation this evening.

Good evening. How about I turn it on? Good evening, commissioners. I'm Adri Spurgeon, principal planner with the community services department, and I will There we go. Hoping that would come up. Uh I'm here tonight to present proposed uh text amendments to our 2040 comprehensive plan uh that would allow child care as an allowed support commercial use within the plan's office and employment land use types. Uh with this presentation tonight, the commission is asked to hold a public hearing and then make a recommendation to the city council um on these proposed amendments that I'll be presenting. With this presentation, staff is hereby entering the agenda memo and attachments into the public record. Notice of this public hearing was published in the Westminster window on September 11th of this year. The purpose of these amendments uh is really to again uh update and u make sure our comprehensive plan remains relevant. Um managed growth is one of the four uh plan cornerstones of the comprehensive plan and part of that is ensuring fir further employment development within Westminster. Employment development has a symbiotic relationship with child care because businesses need child care in order to attract and retain employees. Uh and likewise, uh people are not looking for childare services if they don't have jobs to go to. Um and more specifically, the 2025 strategic plan, uh for the city of Westminster includes a specific operational initiative uh challenging uh staff to find ways to expand access and improve quality and reduce the cost of child care in Westminster for residents and employers. Um so the text amendments have um several components to them. um that are requiring these text changes. Uh

currently we uh do allow child care in residential settings, typically a homebased environment, as well as in our commercial and mixeduse areas. Um that that's typically what you see when you find a child care facility in Westminster. Um, these amendments, if approved, would allow child care as what we call a support commercial use within our neighborhood office, employment flex and employment office institutional land uses. Um, if this is to be approved, it would basically um allow child care to be um available at any land use in our comprehensive plan other than our um parks and open space uh facilities. But then even there uh the PRL department does run some child care programs out of our uh recreation and uh library facilities. Uh support commercial uses in the comprehensive plan are optional complimentary uses that support the viability of the primary use in the building in this case as a place of employment. Um currently the support commercial is fairly limited uh restaurants, office supplies, things that that maybe are secondary in nature to what's going on in the building. And this would add child care um to that list of allowed uses. A second um main component of that is allowing a slightly greater size uh for the support commercial uses. These are currently fairly limited in our comprehensive plan and this would increase the um size allowance uh in the two employment land use types. the uh percentage size allowance. Um but the overall 15,000 square foot cap that's already in the comprehensive plan that would remain in place. Uh the childcare facilities that we evaluated are are typically smaller than that. Uh the size limitations would also ensure that in these uh three land use categories, these are still primarily places of employment um with the child care being a supportive use as the name would

imply. Um, something that we we did struggle with a little bit is um a state regulatory requirement in order to get a license is having access to um an outdoor play area. And the state law uh when I started looking into it was uh surprisingly specific about how big it is and how close it is and how you get to it and how it's secured and and so forth. Um so we we think that could be challenging in some of the employment um land use sites that may require uh ripping out parking or drive aisles um which we're happy to work with applicants on you know subject to meeting other uh typical code requirements. uh we would propose in the places where industrial uses have been added through the PDP or ODP process to a specific site uh we would not support child care with there if there were actually industrial uses on a property and that's just to minimize potential conflicts um safety issues uh from noises uh exposure to hazardous materials conflicts with freight traffic and and the kind of things you'd see in an industrial area. Uh this would open up potentially 7% of the city's land area for child care uses. Again, every land use type uh would allow child care. Uh with this change, uh this slide just shows a few examples where a child care facility has has located within um a larger office building. Um so it's it's a good service for employees in that those environments. Um so that that's it. It's fairly fairly simple um text amendments in this case. Uh staff recommendation would be that you hold a public public hearing and then um we would request that you recommend to city council to approve an ordinance adopting these proposed amendments to the comprehensive plan. Um with your action tonight, uh we would

docket this for the October 13th city council agenda. Um just as a reminder, these are just text changes to the plan. We're not actually changing the land use map on any particular property. That would that's something that would still be done through an individual um land use case uh such as you had at your last meeting or yeah that's right Zer the last meeting. Um that was a long meeting. Um in terms of our strategic plan um alliance uh this is relates to the priority of economic vitality. Um this is supported by providing access to child care and office and employment land uses which would meet the needs of the local workforce. Uh this concludes our um presentation. We're happy to take any questions after you um hold the public hearing.

Thank you. And um I actually have a question now. Would this ordinance affect residential daycare in any way? No. No. Okay. Any other questions from commissioners? Commissioner Tomichek. Um so uh some businesses have child care within their office. It's provided by that company. Um this at least the examples you provided were appeared to be like third parties that were also located in that building. Is does this uh change differentiate between those two? How does that affect the the calculations and mixes or anything like that?

That's a great question. We we had that same question even amongst our own staff on that. So it's a great question. If if a major employer today uh you know one of the big firms out in Westmore for example you know a lot of those are full service campus settings with um cafeterias and workout facilities. If they were running their own child care as a service for their employees, this amendment wouldn't be necessary. That would be an accessory use as part of the primary employment use. This would provide the opportunity for a third-party, you know, potentially commercial childcare facility to come into one of these buildings uh that's not maybe directly affiliated with the tenant or tenants of of an office building. To sort of build on that, if a third party moves into a building that already has a corporatrun child care in it, does that affect the 15% or 10% uh allowable area that they're allowed to occupy?

I think it would. Yeah, we would look at them as a group. Okay. Um, Vice Chair Carpenter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Uh just a couple questions. Uh number one, it looks it seems like the 30% of gross floor area textual change is kind of independent of the child care use. Is that is that correct? That's correct. Um it's it's because when we we've had a few people actually propose this to us um and looking at the situations they showed us that greater allowance would would accommodate the situations we've seen.

Okay. And and I guess the other question on that so since it's a support commercial use so say I'm thinking Westmore building 3 that I used to work in there was a cafe in there for example. uh if they added a child care would that 30% include the child care plus the restaurant the uh right so so that 30 so it's basically allowing for more of those types of uses in or just more area of of non nonoffice related or uses in there

potentially yes it's the the child care along with the the restaurant the pharmacy the office supplies those those would all be able to avail themselves of that greater percentage. Okay. Yeah. And and since it's gross gross area, it probably doesn't matter if I guess if if a major tenant left, it would still as long as it was under that gross area, it wouldn't be make a big deal. Wouldn't be a problem either way. Uh right. Yeah. It's the building area, not it's occupancy. Yeah. It's not occupancy based. Okay. All right. Those are my questions. Thank you.

Okay, no more questions at this time. So, oh, you do, Commissioner Caner. Thanks. I'm sorry. Are were there any other um state lensure or other issues that were discussed that might be implicated by this? Um that that's that's question one that would be of concern to the applicants seeking the approval. Uh, so I'm not going to pretend to be a childcare expert. Um, but in in the meetings we've had with people trying to do this, that seems to be the the biggest issue, at least in terms of the land and and how they could use it. This is out the outdoor space issue.

The the other uh there there would be other potential city uh impediments or or regulations they would need to, you know, be mindful of. Uh sometimes older, you know, older buildings were built under different codes uh for group occupancies, things like fire sprinklers. Um we've we've had talks with one group that, you know, has a full um uh dining uh program and um you know, so the site would need to have, you know, grease traps and and those kind of things. So there's there's various other reasons why probably not every office building would actually be able to do this.

Okay. And then on the issue that you kind of identified um where they need to develop some outdoor space and that might implicate parking or other things, is there a presumption or a preference given to approve these with these modifications to parking and other issues or is it an ad hoc we'll review it when we get it type of thing?

Yeah, we would we would review it case by case. Uh we would we would still look for minimum parking to be met and you know ensure uh you know there's the correct you know fire um access routes uh to buildings and so forth. But um you know understanding if if if they have if they need to create one of these outdoor spaces such as the one in this uh photo it could this was sort of hypothetical like could hypothetically mean you know losing parking or you know reconfiguring you know how the site's been laid out. Um,

yeah, I was really just trying to understand since this is satisfying one of the strategic plan goals if this is going to be something that is given kind of a preference or or presumption of validity if they're seeking this this type of modification. Sounds like maybe not. It'd just be reviewed on a case- by case basis. Yeah, I mean I mean we would really it would be whenever we see particularly in a multi-tenant building um different uses have different parking requirements and we you know we we try to make sure we we we crunch the numbers the right way so they come out whole. Okay, great. Thanks.

Okay, any more questions? Looks like no. So, at this time, I would like to open the public testimony on this item and first ask, did we receive any email or voicemail input on this? Uh, no emails and no voicemails were received.

Thank you. In that case, um, it is open to anyone who would like to speak. And it looks like there's no one here. So, I'm going to go ahead and close the public testimony portion of the hearing. and uh ask if there's any questions from commissioners. Okay. In that case, any discussion? Nope. Oh, looks like uh Commissioner Peg or

uh I guess my one comment is concerning the uh the parking the interaction of this with parking requirements. And the fact of the matter is I think this is dead on arrival. I I'm gonna vote to approve this, but nobody's gonna reconfigure a whole site to make a playground. Be surprised. Just not believable to me. And you're going to have to I think you're going to have to relax on parking requirements in order to make this ever happen. Um otherwise, I think it's great. Vice Chair Carpenter. Um are we ready for a motion? Yes, we are.

All right. I move the planning commission recommend city council approve an ordinance amending the 2040 comprehensive plan. Do we have a second? Commissioner. Oh, okay. Commissioner Jeang seconded. Um, quick comment. I think and I believe as the workforce grows, uh, child care is going to become one of the major problems. So, this is getting out in front of that. I appreciate that. I think it's a good idea. Any other comments? Okay, seeing none, I will call the question. Can we get a roll call, please? Commissioner Peg, yes. Commissioner Conir,

yes. Commissioner Young, yes. Vice Chair Carpenter, yes. Chair Bosch, yes. Commissioner Dunn, yes. Commissioner Tomichek. Yes. Okay. The motion passes unanimously. And uh do we have any other old business, new business, miscellaneous business? Any comments? Okay. Seeing none, this meeting has is hereby adjourned. Thank you everyone. Thank you.