The May 5, 2026 Hillsboro City Council meeting included an HEDC (Hillsboro Economic Development Council) meeting followed by the regular City Council meeting. Key topics included a presentation on recent state land use legislation (SB 974 and HB 4037) affecting housing applications, public hearing and noticing requirements, extensive public testimony on data center tax abatements, a street naming policy request, and several ordinance adoptions. The meeting featured the Youth Advisory Council (YAC) shadowing and a proclamation for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Nearly 20 community members provided testimony, predominantly opposing data center tax abatements and raising concerns about transparency.
Tonight we'll be discussing land use legislation and upcoming housing amendments. And our presenters today are Dan Dias, our economic and community development director and Rachel Marble, our economic and community development code and policy project manager. Welcome to you both. Thanks for being here. And Robbie, did you want to say anything? Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Good evening, Council. First, a big thanks to Rachel and Dan and all their staff. The information we're going to be sharing tonight is quite complicated. This is stuff that's come up in the legislature over the past couple of years as the legislature continues to push ways for helping there to be more housing, which is great, but it does on the local level create some challenges. And so Rachel's going to walk us through tonight about what those things are so that the council could be prepared because some of these things are going to need to be adopted as is from the state. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rachel. Good evening, counselors. My name's Rachel Marble. I'm a code policy project manager in the economic and community development department. As mentioned, I'm going to talk to you all about some legislative updates specific to housing this evening. So this list is not conclusive. It's not all of the legislation that's passed that's relative to land use, but as you can see, there's there's been a big focus on housing. There's been a couple of other things that have been focused on by the legislature that are represented in that other category, which include child care facilities, residential treatment facilities, middle, middle housing and land divisions. But I'm gonna focus on housing tonight because there's some big upcoming changes specific to housing applications. So just first of all to go over the legislative intent of some of these bills. They are aimed at reducing barriers to the land use process for housing production, and mostly focused on procedures for housing for land use applications, some of which we'll see tonight. There's also been a focus on or a shift of focus on public involvement occurring earlier in the process, so at the community planning, comprehensive planning stage rather than on a case-by-case basis during the land use process for development. So just a quick overview reminder of land use procedures, um, because like Robbie mentioned, it is very complicated. Um there's four types of land use procedures ranging from a type one, which is like a fence permit, um, it's a ministerial permit, you get over the over the counter, um, all the way to a type uh four land use procedure, which is a legislative procedure, which is what a code amendment would be brought brought to you all as. For this evening, the procedures that we're gonna be focusing on are uh both type two and type three procedures, which are administrative. Uh type two is administrative, so those decisions are made at the staff level. There's no public hearing. Um you don't see those land use decisions unless there is an appeal which comes before you all. Um those currently in our code have a 200-foot public notice radius. Um, there's also been changes to type three of land use decisions, which are quasi-judicial decisions. Um, those decisions do require a public hearing by statute, and they um in our our code require a 500-foot public notice radius. Um, I will note that these there are land use procedures set in statute for both types of these applications. And um they actually uh differ a little bit from our code in that the type two procedure in the statute requires a 100-foot public notice radius. So we we extended that and we over notice those applications. And then type three applications, similarly, they at minimum require a 100-foot notice radius for properties inside the urban growth boundary. Um, that gets extended a little bit if you're noticing land use applications that involve properties outside of the urban growth boundary. So, for example, an annexation. Um, but we um have have typically overnoticed those land use applications to allow more properties surrounding the development application property to be aware of what's happening and an opportunity to comment. And the last thing I'll say about these two procedure types in the statute is that um there are certain land use procedures in the statute that establish a floor for public notices, and there are certain ones that establish a ceiling. So there are certain ones we can extend and certain ones we cannot extend. So there are two of them. Thank you. Um so the types are also determined. It's uh it's part of this statute. The yes. So in the statute, right more previously, um, the the land use procedures were tied to what type of decision you were making, not necessarily the type of application. Um, this has been a bit of a shift because the statute is now very specific to certain types of applications, not certain um procedure types. So the statute talks about limited land use decisions, which are made at staff level. It talks about quasi-judicial decisions, but it doesn't talk about what specific land use applications they are talking about when they talk about those procedures.