The Kirkland City Council met on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, for a study session starting at 5:30 p.m. and a regular meeting beginning at 7:30 p.m., adjourning at 11:27 p.m. The meeting included a study session on the 2044 Comprehensive Plan, a public hearing on the 2025-2026 budget, and action on several resolutions and ordinances. The council also heard from numerous public speakers on various topics, including housing, transportation, and climate action.
I'd like to call the order to city council meeting of November 19th 2004. Council Member Timchison. Councilmember Black. Here. Councilmember Sweet. Here. Council Member Falcon. Here. Councilmember Poskell. Here. Council Deputy Mayor Arnold. Here. Mayor Curtis. Here. All right. Our study session tonight is on the 2044 comprehensive plan. We expect to reconvene our regular meeting at 7:30. City Manager. All right. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Deputy Mayor, members of Council, and the community. So we have the whole 90 minutes focused on the comprehensive plan discussion. Uh in the likely event. It might take us even longer than that. Want to let everyone know we have a business item set for later this evening. We also have the study session of the December 10th council meeting. We could also make available if we need to have further discussion, and then obviously final action on December 10th. So there's more time. And so here to lead you through that as Alison Zyke, our deputy director of planning and building. And she's joined by many other people from planning who'll be helping her throughout this process. So Alison. Thank you, City Manager, and good evening, Madam Mayor, Deputy Mayor, and Council members. We're very excited to talk with you tonight. We have many slides, but a lot of these are your slides. So we're gonna involve you in the presentation here a little bit and ask you to cover some of them with us. So we're gonna just recap a little bit what we heard the last time we talked to you on October 15th with that in that joint session with Planning Commission. We're gonna talk through several potential amendments, and these would be amendments to the planning commission recommended versions of each comp plan element. Some of these are staff initiated. This is based on what we we thought we heard from council, so we might be right on. We might need to talk further about what you did or didn't intend for us to do with your feedback from October 15th. So these staff initiated amendments are our attempt to try to get closer to council's intent on the comp plan policies. There's also several council member initiated amendments, and we have those noted on slides for you so that you can introduce uh your own amendments. Um you've received several comments in the last few days. Just wanted to acknowledge that. Um we've gotten um comments, some of them might be um holdovers that were previously or previously sent to planning commission, some of them are newer comments and have some um either support for comp plan elements, some of them express concern about certain uh proposed policies still or nomenclature of how we're talking about land use districts. Um, but want to acknowledge that some of these comments might tight might take some additional time for council to think through. Um so really quick back to October 15th. Um Planning Commission recommended elements gave you and what we thought we heard council want to emphasize was that we're focusing growth over the next 20 years and existing urban growth centers, existing neighborhood centers, and then continuing to focus on optimizing middle housing options outside of those centers and throughout uh residential neighborhoods in Kirkland. Um, as I already mentioned, um, we identified when we were hearing your feedback on October 15th, we identified several areas that seem to be areas of shared confusion or in need of clarification from council, and so a lot of the staff initiated amendments you'll be hearing tonight are our attempt to clarify what we heard was maybe universally or um uh there was consensus kind of confusion around those. And then we have your amendments as well.