I'd like to call the order special meeting.

Oh, I need to do it over.

Start again.

I'd like to call to order the city council special meeting of May the 11th, 2022.

Clerk, will you please call the role?

Council Member Nixon.

Here.

Council Member Black.

Here.

Council Member Curtis.

Here.

Councilmember Falcone.

Here.

Council Member Pascal.

Here.

Deputy Mayor Arnold.

Here.

Mayor Sweet.

Here.

This is a public hearing to receive public comment on a proposed Google Development Agreement related to the 85th Street Station Area Plan.

I will now open the public hearing with the July 6th Google Development Agreement study session incorporated into tonight's record.

City manager.

Okay.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Deputy Mayor, members of the council.

So as you mentioned, tonight is a public hearing, but we have a uh presentation that's an overview of the development agreement.

Um that presentation is going to be made by our planning and building director, Adam Weinstein.

This is not as detailed as the presentation received on July 6th.

And as you mentioned, any member of the public who'd like to go, the full presentation is already online in our link, and uh people can watch the entire thing.

So we don't have a lot of the background, but we're really focused on what's actually in the development agreement and our conversation tonight.

Um we also have many staff on the line, um, technical staff to help.

So if the council has any specific questions following the presentation, we do have staff ready to assist with that.

And with that, I will turn it over to Adam.

All right.

Good evening, Mayor Sweet and Deputy Mayor Arnold and Council members.

Um, as the city manager mentioned, um, this is a very short presentation.

It's a public hearing tonight, so we really want to hear from the public and make sure we have enough time for that.

Um, and I will be joined by Tracy Dunlap, our deputy city manager, and Joel Funn, our transportation manager.

And as the city manager mentioned, the larger cast of characters that was here for the study session will be here to answer questions.

Um this is not a very complicated agenda tonight.

We discussed the development agreement in a lot of detail last Wednesday, and we won't be going into the similar level of detail tonight, but obviously please chime in if you have any questions.

So the presentation tonight really focuses uh less on the legal aspects of the development agreement and more on the community facing or practical provisions and benefits of the development agreement, the ones that community members are likely to see and feel if they were to walk around the Google project and its surroundings in several years when we actually see stationary plan implementation happen.

And we'll also weave into this presentation some recommended changes to the development agreement made after the the discussion at the study session last week, along with some clarifications.

So in the study session presentation, we had a slide tracing a very long series of events leading up to the station area plan and the development agreement, starting with the initiation of the planning process surrounding that major major regional transportation investment embodied in the Bus Rapid Transit station at I 405 and 85th Street.

And I won't elaborate on that, but we'll note that when a plan of this scale gets adopted, development of the plan doesn't happen spontaneously because the private sector does most of the actual building in a plan area, although public investments are crucial.

Um and then private development happens on its own schedule.

So that means that the initiation of development called for in the plan can sometimes take many years to realize and is dependent on the whims of the real estate market and the local and regional economy.

And we saw that up in Totem Lake, which took many years to achieve its vision because of an economic recession, developer interest, and other factors.

And so that really speaks to the importance of catalyst projects, like the one that's the subject of the development agreement tonight, which can immediately generate the physical changes that the plan was intended to produce uh in the first place.

The form-based code adopted by City Council last month, explicitly recognizes the importance of catalyst projects in this in the station area plan as major projects that provide the right kind of development for sites that can really leverage their proximity to the the bus rapid transit station while locking in public benefits and traffic mitigation and other infrastructure uh commitments for the community.

So, in doing so, the form-based code encourages that development agreements be negotiated for larger development sites of four acres or more in areas within close proximity to the BRT station.

So this development agreement that we're talking about tonight is an implementation of something that was anticipated in the form-based code, both in terms of the actual agreement, the development agreement, which is a mechanism explicitly authorized in the adopted form-based code, and then also what that what that development will yield, which is a green sustainable, employment focused development adjacent to the bus rapid transit station that will help us achieve goals in our sustainability master plan, our comprehensive plan, our transportation master plan, and many other governing planning documents.

So this is a voluntary agreement that's a basic principle of development agreements.

What it does is it gives Google certainty about the future trajectory of their development, and then confirming that the rules won't change during a multi-year multi-phase development project.

And then also, of course, confirming to the community that the project will yield more public benefits, things like open space and a community benefit payment to be used for affordable housing, then what our code would otherwise require.

And also that Google will build the infrastructure that's needed to support that development.

All right, so the top couple bullets of the slide indicating 36 sections and eight detailed exhibits covering five phases of a development project, believing, I think, some of the overarching simplicity of this development agreement, which is built on a couple of key core principles.

One is that the totality of the public benefits provided by Google.

So I'm talking about parks and open space and bike and ped features, and also their contribution to affordable housing, will exceed the benefits that are required in the zoning code for a project of this size and height.

A second principle is that on top of these public benefits, the project will exceed the sustainability requirements that the code would require for a project of this size.