Want to go ahead and uh call the order our finance committee meeting um for Monday, November 17th.

Um tonight we're uh talking about our budget and its parks and recreation and department of planning, and we have a few other uh overview questions.

Um parts.

Oh Miranda, did you want to go first?

Yes, please.

Good evening, everyone.

So this evening we'll um it's okay with you all, we'll start with the Department of Planning, and then there was one question submitted for the Department of Planning.

So Director Blackford will give his priorities and answer his question, and then Director Farrell is here on behalf of Parks and Recreation and some of her leadership team as well to go over their priorities and then the parks and recreation questions, and then Director Burry has made it back here to her favorite place to answer the outstanding questions uh for the department of finance.

Thank you.

Yep.

Thank you, Director Bulmer.

Uh, we would like to make one clarification.

Uh it's not just Joanne's favorite place, but this is also my favorite place as well.

That's unrelated to the uh department's priorities, uh budget request.

Uh so this is uh our department of planning's uh three of our top priorities for 2026.

First one on your screen here, this is our zoning code updates that we do periodically.

It's imperative that our uh long-range vision documents, such as the land use plan and our newly adopted strategic plan, they're consistent with our rules and regulations, our laws, which is our code.

So that's why you know when issues arise, we always uh are analyzing our consistency of our zoning code uh with those documents.

So that again is a um priority for 2026.

And again, it's really to make sure not that these documents match.

It's not like if one says 16 feet and the other says 17 feet, that's an issue because they're very different documents with very different uh objectives and priorities.

So again, a land use plan and a strategic plan, those are not laws like our codes, those are aspirational documents in that.

And so, if an aspirational document is talking about a vision, a desired state for an area, let's say uh the city has land use plan or the strategic plan talk about, let's say the creekside area, and the vision for the creekside area, obviously, as we talked about today, is a mixed use, high-intensity area, pedestrian friendly.

But if our zoning code is still from 1958, which talks about agrarian types of uses, large lot, residential agricultural uses, that's a conflict.

That's when cities have have issues.

And uh it's something that actually is fairly prevalent in cities where these documents are in conflict with their rules, and that's a very uh can cause a lot of issues because again, these documents are where our community is looking for to anticipate what our vision and where to grow.

So, again, you know, making sure our zoning code is consistent with the vision documents.

Next up on your screen, let's create online mapping tools.

Very simply here, this is about creating awareness within our community about future public hearing applications.

That's something the Department of Planning gets a lot of calls.

A lot of times people will see maybe activity on the site, they'll see a survey crew and they they'll call, or they'll talk to their neighbors, their neighbors say I heard something, or the queen mother of them all, they hear read something on the interwebs about something coming.

So a lot of this is to get out in front of some of that missed information.

It's a lot easier to get information out there uh rather than trying to correct a record when things get out there.

So when applications get submitted, those are our public records.

So a lot of communities they have a mapping tool where it links where these projects are gonna be located.

You can track along, look at hearing dates, things of that nature.

Final one up here.

Uh this is about our land entitlement process.

So uh great meeting to kind of bring this up.

Uh several folks talked about Creekside and sort of that long-term vision and how young we all were when that vision was being contemplated, and that and here we are many years later, decades later, and there's still parcels that haven't been developed.

So when we talk a lot in this facility in this room here, we talk a lot about plans and what those visions are.

We talk a lot about codes.

We talk a little bit less about process, and process is how we get from our vision into that reality.

And that so I know there's a lot of conversations about Creekside, a lot of acknowledgement about that project having to go through a staff review and such.

And so that staff review gets a lot more complicated than what we've done so far.

And there's more moving parts.

So again, we focus a lot on some of the outward facing initiatives, but an inward facing initiative is really that permitting process.

How do we get better at it?

And so we don't talk a lot about process, but did talk about this.

I remember some of those faces back in June when it was up before you talking about what our priorities for our department was.

There was a particular slide up there that talked about, it had three images on there.

I talked about inputs, outputs, and in the middle there is is process.

And we talked about continuously improving that process.

So what we were going to do, what we'd like to do here is look at our process, do a deep dive, very similar, it's not related to say Kaizan or Lean or Six Sigma project, but it's sort of in that spirit where we want to look at our process, see what's working well, what isn't working well, where we can improve efficiencies, and such.

So again, it's about improving efficiency, always continuously improving.

We don't know exactly what the scope of work is going to be, but there are certain things that we know that are paramount for initiative like this to be successful.

This is going to be very heavily intensive for staff.

This is a lot of conversations with staff with our consultant, getting a knowledge of what our experiences have been, what works, what doesn't work, looking at where some of these touch points are occurring.

This is well beyond just a department of planning.

This isn't going to encompass other departments as well because the land entitlement process, like the mayor was just talking about.