Mr.

Blundell, would you like to call your meeting to order as well?

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

I will call the Planning Commission into order as well for October 27, 2025.

Thank you.

Item number two, presentation and discussion of the Unified Development Code project, including an overview of potential future changes to Title 21, subdivisions, Title 22 zoning, Title 23 stormwater range, and other sections of the Edmund Municipal Code.

Thank you.

And we're going to turn the microphone over to you.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Becca Patrick.

I am the project manager for this project and also a senior current planner in the planning department.

I thought your last name was Smith.

Didn't you get married?

Yes.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

So we have been working on this project since June of 2022, so it's been a couple of years.

We're about 60% of the way through it.

Like Mr.

Mayor said, it is titles 21 subdivisions, 22 zoning, and 23 stormwater, and it's being combined into a unified development code, also known as the UDC.

I am going to hand this presentation over to Dawn in just a second.

She is with Friesen Nichols, our consultant who's been working alongside us on this project.

Throughout the last couple of years, we have had multiple advisory committees and multiple multiple advisory committee meetings, including a dedicated downtown advisory committee, a whole citywide advisory committee comprised of engineers, planners, developers, previous council members, and actually a couple of current planning commissioners on that advisory committee as well, and an internal staff committee comprised of site plan review team.

So I'm going to give it over to Don.

Right.

She got all my stuff here.

Good afternoon.

As Becca mentioned, my name is Don Thomas.

I'm with Friesen Nichols and serve as the project manager for this unified development code project.

On the screen, you see Jake Lange.

He's not going to be presenting with us today, but I left him up there to give him credit.

He helped put together, largely put together the presentation and has been doing quite a bit of the drafting relative to this particular project.

And I will mention from the top, staff has been incredibly involved.

We meet with them biweekly.

We communicate a lot.

They've been doing a lot of reviews and providing consistent flow of feedback relative to this project.

It's a fairly large under undertaking, and I think they are making sure that we are doing what we need to be doing, but they're also reviewing every every word that we're putting together so that they make sure that it's the best document to serve the City of Edmund as it can possibly be.

Today I'm going to talk about just an overview of the project.

It's been quite a while since we did an update and provided sort of a briefing to the City Council, and I know that several of you are new to the council.

So I wanted to start at the beginning and get everybody kind of up to speed with regard to the basics of the project, but also some of the key changes that we're proposing so that you have a good understanding of what's going on.

So we'll start with an introduction, go through the contents, basically a summary of the contents, and sort of dig in a little bit to some of those sections so that you've got an understanding of how we're restructuring things, and then we'll talk a little bit more about next steps and how this is going to roll out over the next several months.

So starting at the beginning, um the project purpose.

We discussed this, I mean, even through the RFP that the staff initiated the project with, there was always an understanding that some of the goals, some of the high-level goals of this project included streamlining the development process, clarifying regulations, but also clarifying the steps, the responsibilities and the various um elements of the development review process, ensuring that all of the projects that come through the city for approval represent the high-quality development outcomes that the city expects and that it is consistently applied across the board for projects.

And also to implement and ultimately realize the goals and objectives and the overarching vision of the Edmund plan.

So your comprehensive plan sets the stage for this series of updates to ensure that the policy statements that are expressed in that plan document can be achieved through your regulatory structure related to growth and development.

So the overall schedule looks like this.

We did start in late 22 actually getting things started, began the diagnostic report.

The first phase of this project we spent quite a bit of time on because it is important that that became the roadmap for making actual code amendments.

The diagnostic phase included meeting with stakeholders and with staff, identifying all of the key issues, and also conducting a thorough review of your existing codes as well as your existing policy documents and studies.

So you'll see as we go through the presentation some of the information that is kind of coming to fore with regard to the updated development regulations as well as the updated zoning map.

Come spring, we will be moving into the adoption phase.

That's going to be taking this thing out to the public and through the various boards planning commission recommendation and city council action to hopefully adopt the code as well as the revised zoning map.

So things to look forward to.

The diagnostic report I mentioned became the roadmap for making code amendments.

We utilized existing regulations just to understand what the foundation is, identified where we felt like there were deficiencies in current regulations in an effort to identify the things within subdivision zoning and stormwater regulations that needed to be adjusted in order to accomplish those higher higher arching goals that were identified early on and to ensure that the unified development code, once complete, is a document that flows, that is instructive, and that is as usable as possible and as understandable as possible to the various parties that typically utilize that.

And we know that there are a variety of different audiences that utilize the development regulations.

Everyone from a property owner who just wants to know what's happening with regard to their property or their neighbors to developers and design engineers who are more sophisticated and use the code more regularly, staff who are kind of your local experts on what the code is, and those decision makers like yourselves that need a general knowledge of the regulations in order to do your work.