The Kirkland Planning Commission met on August 28, 2026, for a study session and two public hearings. The study session focused on the Neighborhood Stores and Services Code Amendment project, exploring updates to regulations for home occupations and introducing small-scale neighborhood commercial uses. The public hearings addressed code cleanup for state-mandated parking reforms and zoning amendments to facilitate affordable housing on faith-owned land. The Commission voted unanimously on the parking reform recommendations after amending bike parking standards, and unanimously recommended the faith-owned land amendments with additions to support homeownership and property transfer provisions.
All right, uh let's call this meeting to order. Uh before the roll call, I've been told by city staff that uh we are using multiple microphones in this room. So please keep your side conversations to a minimum. The microphones will pick them up and then confuse everyone online. So now can we have the roll call? Margaret Bunyan here. And you should recharge. Oh, here. Erin Jacobson. Here. Gina Medea. Here. Julia Nolan. Here. Scott Ricer. Here. Ronnie Rutherford. Here. All right. And now we move to items from the audience. Uh this is a time in our meeting when anyone can talk can speak on any topic not subject to a public hearing. So if you would like to speak on anything that is not the public hearing for code cleanup amendments for state mandated parking reform or affordable housing on faith owned lands, now's the time to speak. I see we have one person signed up, B Naon. Uh, if you could sit at the end of the table. That's going to be my next question. Tell me where to go, which I don't often offer to people. All right, you have three minutes whenever you're ready. Thank you very much. Good evening, Planning Commission, and thank you for this opportunity to speak. For those of you I have not met, my name is B Naon. I'm about a 30-year resident of downtown Kirkland. And one of the things I love about living in downtown Kirkland is that I can walk to many goods and services. And I'm excited that you're going to start exploring having more neighborhood goods and services available in residential neighborhoods. And you're going to hear about various things that are great about that, and you're going to be hearing about concerns that people have. I want to bring to you a concern you may not be hearing much about, and that has to do with land use policy 4.6 and complying with it because it says develop standards that allow small scale neighborhood oriented commercial uses within residential areas, including corner stores and commercial uses, et cetera, to meet local needs and reduce reliance on vehicle trips to meet daily needs. That's great. But here's the thing just because a business is walking distance from my home doesn't mean that I can walk there. Doesn't mean that a lot of people can walk there. We have people with all sorts of accessibility issues. They could be visual, they could be auditory, they could be sensory, they could just be mobility. And especially in residential neighborhoods, we have sloping driveways up and sloping driveways down, and we have pathways that are uneven and incomplete sidewalks and unleveled sidewalks and doorways that aren't necessarily wide enough. And even when you get to the doorway, they may be stairs without a railing. You're going to hear from staff, most likely, that this is all addressed in our building code. But our building code is woefully shy of doing what needs to be done. If you're going to have that neighborhood business where I can go and get a cup of coffee and an egg salad sandwich, if I can do that, if I can't walk there, I can't go there. Our standards are really lacking because unless you need a building permit, nothing needs to be done. So if there's no electrical work, if there's no plumbing work, they don't even need a building permit. And I assume they don't need to deal with it, they don't need a building permit, and they don't have to deal with accessibility. And even if they do have a building permit, our standards say that they can we can require no more than 20% of their expenditures to be used for accessibility. Let's look at what other cities are doing.