We are ready to get going here with our work session for the Ven City Council.

We are all here.

I just want to get started because we're a little bit behind.

So I see everyone is here.

I'm not going to do a formal roll call.

Okay.

So first up is commercial strategies.

Yep.

So good afternoon, Mayor Council, Respiration, Chief Operations Officer with Sarah Hudson.

Good news, we're not here to talk about transportation funding, because that's usually we've seen us before, right?

We're here to, I'm just gonna give a quick context of what we're gonna do here.

We're gonna try to give a 10 to 15 minute presentation just to provide context of all the different kind of questions and areas around commercial um developments around town and different strategies.

And then if you notice behind me, we've got a host of staff, then some extra chairs here.

So we have a lot of experts in the room, depending on questions and direction you want to go.

Probably pull some people forward, but Sarah and I will find the context of where we're at, what we're trying to do, and the different kind of levers we're talking about.

And then we'll be more than happy to we really want to get into conversation on this to make sure that we're addressing council's questions, concerns, and ideas about what how to move forward.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Sarah.

Hello.

So um as we kind of go through today's discussion, I know Russ just kind of gave that overview, but in terms of framing what we're talking about, there's lots of different threads of conversation happening.

We've heard from our Petros and Eastern neighbors, and kind of in terms of the focus of protection where there is commercial lands in the city, how do we preserve that and balance that with needed housing?

So that's kind of the protection side of the conversation.

There's also kind of a piece around how do we activate commercial.

So with recent um presentations and feedback from um Central Oregon Land Watch and Yimby and conversations at BDAB about where do we want commercial in the city, how do we get more of it, what types of commercial we want to see.

So kind of that protection side and that activation side.

So kind of be thinking um about that through um tonight's conversation.

Um as Russ said, we're gonna talk about a little bit more why we're here, kind of give some background.

Um, and that will really serve as a good foundation for talking about, okay, what are the tools, what are the levers at the city level that we could be really looking at um in the short term, medium term, and long term.

So we'll get into that um a little later in the presentation, and then we want to leave a lot of time for that discussion and question and answer.

So just to uh kind of align with council goals, obviously there's several council goals in around this area.

I'm not gonna go into great detail there on the screen, but this we know that this is an area of interest around complete neighborhoods, um, how does this relate to housing?

Because some of those conversations on housing and and kind of commercial, and how do those two relate?

And then urban renewal is in theory an investment strategy or incentive strategy if you want to use so um to kind of get these complete communities.

So I'm gonna spend a little bit of time, this is the context portion of the presentation just for council and for for the audience listening of what are we talking about.

So when we say commercial, especially in the context of this conversation, we're talking about a wide breadth of commercial.

You'll see different examples on the screen of what we have around town.

So when we start talking about how do we get commercial into existing neighborhoods, you have things like Jackson's Quarter, um, Jackson's Corner, Active Culture, Bruno's Market, they're they're embedded into the residential neighborhoods, and I know there's um desire by council to how how do we broaden that and get that more in more different areas around the city and incentivize those.

And I know there's desire by council to how do we broaden that and get that more in more different areas around the city and incentivize those.

Then you start moving into more of kind of neighborhood center commercial when you think of the area, recent development up at 27th and remarket over by NEF and 27th of the hospital, down on Brookswood.

Now you're starting to get more services and kind of collective smaller scale commercial activities, and then we start going to corridors, so up in the upper right, that's the Newport Corridor, where you start to see a big mix of uses along streets, and then we start talking about the actual shopping centers that range from like the West Side Safeway with the ancillary buildings around that, and that can then that can also stretch up to the power, what we call the power box centers, which is you know the Costco's and things like that.

Really kind of focused in this range, because I know that's what the interest of council we're not talking about the power super centers and things like that.

It's more how do we get these kind of activated different levels of commercials into and to support the existing residential neighborhoods.

So, real quick, how do we do that in terms of all of our documents and how we plan the city?

So this is just the kind of running at different elevations gonna start up.

I know council's aware of this, but I just want to give some context.

Starting with the 30,000 foot levels where we start, that's really where we envision what the city's gonna look and feel like around town.

And that's really our comprehensive plan, which is our policies around growth, it determines where our zoning is going to be and what how we where and how we want the city to develop that rolls into the implementing documents, which is our development code, which is really the kind of the instruction manual for developments when they come in, what do they need to do?

What permissive uses do you have in each one of these zones based off of the policies and and and kind of the leading principles of the comprehensive plan?

Then those are further refined through special area plans like the Southeast Area Plan that the city did, and master plans that are done by developers to take those kind of comprehensive plan goals and objectives and zonings and acreages, and then actually translate that into a more um developable piece of property where they know exactly where the roads are gonna be and the different zones are gonna be, but there's definitely rules of engagement around that.

And then we get down to what we call the street level.

That's when we actually get how do we actually activate these spaces, right?

So that's when land use applications come in.

We look at market conditions.

Um are we just letting the market figure out where this is going to go, or do we want to look at city incentives?

And this is also where we have the discussions of you know, we start to figure out what projects need to build and the kind of supporting things and costs that will go in relationship to the project.

So a lot of times when you see things come in at the street level, there's a lot of things that are already happening on those upper bands to create and set the table for that stuff to happen.

The other thing I will say in here is this is where we have a lot of state guidance that occurs.

This is Oregon and the Oregon land use system.

We use that to create the upper documents.

There's a lot of rules as council knows in terms of how we create those documents, but then also at every session, I'm gonna talk about this on the next slide.

We could get new legislation that kind of either overwrites what we have or changes what we have that we need to adapt to, not only in the comprehensive plan when we update that, but also specific to what uses go on what property.