This work session of the Astoria City Council focused on two main agenda items: an update on the Development Review Audit progress and a discussion on next steps for developing the Darigold and Customs House sites. No formal action was taken, but council provided direction on guiding principles and next steps.
Well, good evening and welcome to the Monday, January 26th, 2026 work session of the Australia City Council. Mr. Spence, if we could have a roll call, please. Counselor Adams. Here. Councilor Davis here. Counselor Cocklin? Here. Council Mozzarella? Here. Mayor Fitzpatrick here. So first off, we have a development review development review audit progress update. Mr. Spence. By no other mic. That's right. Council will recall that this is a primary goal of the city council approved work plan. We've identified areas where we would like to provide a better customer service experience. And we also like to have our process more timely and predictable when it comes to any application that resolves in a permit or land use action, but also for our internal coordination with staff. And so as you know, that we hired 3GA consultants to start that process. And with that, I'm going to hand this off to our community development director, John Roberts to explain kind of the high level of what is occurring and then the timeline and when you expect to see that before council. Yeah. Good evening, everybody. John Roberts, community development director. Good overview, Scott. Thank you. Another way to maybe introduce this topic in a in a sort of comical way or higher level conversation would be I'm sure when you're out in the community at an event at the store, patronizing someplace, you hear I'm waiting for the city to issue my permits. And I would just like to say that we now have a culture downstairs that welcomes to hear that question because we really enjoy engaging with people and drilling into that question when people ask us about it because we are more than well equipped now after this process to understand what's going on better on our end and their end. So if anything, what this process has really done is this created a lot of great awareness regarding things we we need to work on. So development isn't really that complicated. You have three disciplines planning, building, and engineering. And what we did here is say, hey, how can we make these three disciplines work better to achieve to um find better solutions and deliver um better customer service to our customers? So uh the this audit is winding down in the four deliverables that we're gonna see in February and um hopefully get to you in a more formal presentation by March would be what we call the current state assessment. Site plan review framework would be the second one. Uh an audit of our development uh code, not the entire code, but uh important pieces of our development code and comparative best practices of other jurisdictions. Um so those are uh four of the key deliverables, and you can imagine each one has a lot of uh interesting information. I think what is going to be challenging now for us as staff is to take that and say, hey, uh what do we need to work on in the immediate foreseeable future? What is realistic to think about working on in the next six months and what do you want to achieve in a year? And I could tell you already, we're already working on stuff. Um example I could uh tell you is that um it's a two-way street, and there's been a culture, a long-standing culture in the community in really not submitting good applications. Um how do you change that behavior, right? It starts with the application itself. And so we're already overhauling many of our building applications. Um that's just one example of things that that we'll do. Um, again, to try to uh create a more predictable and timely and objective development review process. Um a lot of exciting pieces of this is gonna tee up a series of code amendments. Um I would think that's that's a big goal too is being smart with our capacity this year to be able to bring to you a bunch of different code amendments that would implement different pieces of this from uh site site plan, um, modernizing different aspects of definitions to public hearing requirements. So um just a lot to look forward to. And again, um I think uh big next step is for us to try to wrap our hands around the finished projects and and give you something a little more concrete in March with um what to expect. But happy to answer any questions, right?