Okay, thank you.

And so tonight we have uh several items.

We've gonna we're gonna have a presentation with regarding the entertainment zone in Old Town and downtown Auburn.

And then we also have uh four different public hearings.

Uh one is for a fence height setback at two six five Swenson Court.

A second is uh, well, there are three actual uh permits for short-term rentals at 180 Glenfield, 133 Olive Street, and 10670 sunrise.

But our first item on the agenda tonight is for public comment.

If anyone has comments to make that are not related to those items that will be covered under the agenda, now would be the time to do so.

And if you do, please rise, come to the podium, uh, state your name and address and the comment that you might have.

Do we have any public comments this evening on items other than what is to be covered under the agenda?

Okay, well, hearing none, then let's move right into the presentation.

Jonathan, you've got a presentation on the entertainment zone and old town and downtown.

Right.

Good evening, Chair, good evening, Planning Commission members.

Jonathan Wright, economic development director.

Um, kind of an overview, not so much presentation, because I would have done more of a PowerPoint, but I did put in front of you a copy of the draft ordinance as well as some of the maps.

And if anybody else in the audience, I have extras if anybody's interested in in seeing what I'm talking about.

It may become more interesting as I start talking about it.

So we'll see.

Feel free to stop me any time.

Um, so we remember this thing called COVID happened a while back, shut down a lot of stores, a lot of businesses.

Uh, one of the state's reactions to that was okay, well, let's create these areas where people can be outdoors.

And so a lot of the breweries, a lot of the restaurants, a lot of those, you know, things that were dependent on people sitting down and spending time were able to move their accommodations outside.

Um, the state then, after the end of the COVID emergency, rescinded that.

The state's legislature looked back and went, you know, that wasn't such a bad idea.

There's some things there that you know really could benefit, especially some of these smaller towns.

And so they pushed that legislation forward.

So SB 969 came out, went into effect in January of this year.

And I went over to the old town and downtown business associations and went, there's this kind of fun piece of legislation that just came out.

And so what do you think?

And they were all in.

So since then, I've been talking to them about many of the requirements that are within this this ordinance.

Um, it's pretty basic.

So ABC kind of steps back and looks at it and goes, okay, cities, if you want to do this, then you create an ordinance, you create the time, place, and manner regulations, and then we basically help you enforce with your law enforcement folks.

So this is this was draft working with the police chief and working with the districts to come up with kind of a win-win, you know, at least experiment with it.

It's an ordinance, we can resend it, uh, we can modify it, we can do whatever we need to.

So this is just our first like open the door and see what happens.

There was a little bit of a sense of urgency here because the districts wanted to try it out before the holidays.

And given that I had to have a first reading, second reading, and allow 30 days before implementation, it'll be the day before Thanksgiving that it technically goes into effect, should it be granted at the next city council meeting will be the second reading, so next Monday uh from there 30 days.

Um, the only way we could regulate the business side of it, so putting together business regulations so that when ABC said, Oh, yes, you can do this.

Well, how does the city control that?

I mean, if we have, I'm not saying we have bad actor uh businesses out there, but if we did have one that was frequently causing issues with over serving or or other issues, um, how do we how do we then enforce that?

And so I put a licensing provision in here.

So they have to every business that wants to do it has to have a license.

Therefore, they are granted the ability to do this function.

And then if something were to happen, I had the ability to take it away.

I also have the ability to say, okay, here's the parameters that you have to operate by.

You have to educate your staff on on telling people about you know where the the ends of the zones are, um, how the thing works and so forth.

So if you get into it, they had they first require us to put together a legal description of the area in which um this would be applicable.

So basically it applies to all the public right-of-way and sidewalks for these entire areas.

Uh, I put in a legal description, but I also was required to put a map together for graphical representation.

So if you look at the first one, which is our actually, I have a bigger one here.

We can do this really fun.

Uh, well, you're still not gonna be able to see it out there.

Well, you're still not gonna be able to see it out there.

The first one is the camera.

Um the downtown area.

So basically it starts out by the station public house uh on upper Lincoln or Lincoln Way, uh, heads all the way down the hill through our commercial district there, drops down onto High Street.

Now you notice there's a little bit of a dog leg to it that goes up high street, and that's because the working with the person at the PGE building that's doing the renovation there, ultimately their goal is to also have a restaurant and bar.

And so I wanted to think ahead and just put that in there so that when they had a chance um that it was already set out and I didn't have to go back and amend any boundaries.