The Milwaukie City Council met on September 15, 2026, to discuss a potential ban on new mini storage facilities, consider a revolving loan fund for homeownership, and review the solid waste franchise system. Council also set direction for staff on several items, including allocating $300,000 for a pilot homeownership assistance program and forming a subcommittee to negotiate a new franchise agreement with haulers.
Pass uh code for the M zone and the VI zone uh the code fix package code update. There was something I meant to bring up that night. I totally spaced it. Um but I wanted to see how it lands with you guys. Uh and if it's if it if people are generally supportive, we can ask staff to work it into the next sort of code fix package, which is banning mini storage. I feel like um mini storage, we have quite a bit in Milwaukee. We have a whole lot just on the very edge of Milwaukee. It's a very low job producer, it is not um you know creating jobs for people in our uh in our employment areas. So I would like to see us not allow more mini storage, and I wanted to see what you guys think on that. I gotta tell you, I this was not on my radar at all until I read those articles. Yeah, and uh, but it you know, a lot of it makes sense. Um I guess my question is it's kind of like you know, the old ad if you never say never, you know. And uh so and I don't know about the you know uh potential uh legal pushback we might get from the mini storage association or whatever they might be. And so um I mean there might be uh a way to achieve a thing without going at all and a moratorium. Well, yeah, I mean it wouldn't affect existing ones. It wouldn't affect the code. I just like moratorium for data center and then a moratorium for storage uh facilities. What's the point about that? I like it. It's uh it's a lot of moratoriums, it's funny. Well, I think that you you might be able to avoid some uh potential legal issues. I don't know. Well, I mean I think it could be handled a couple of different ways. It could be uh we could get an N for no not allowed in the zone. It could also be a conditional use, and we could you know not say outright no, but that you have to jump through some more hoops and maybe put some you know put a heavy thing heavy hand on the scale for the positional use. Um yeah, I mean are yours by moratorium you mean like a freeze or certainly freeze for a fixed number of years. Welcome. Hi so the issue is the I had sent an email around after the last meeting because I'd forgotten to bring it up when we were doing the business code, but I think we should um prohibit mini storages because I think they're very low employment generators, and we have plenty of them. Thank you. I just weren't sticking. Can you prohibit them before the next month of rent is too? So I know when I was looking at data center policy and what other cities had to go through, you have to reach out to DLCD and give 45-day notice and have some like findings about why you're restricting uses. Is that something we'd have to do here? Like for data centers at least, you had to like have a showing of fact about why you're prohibiting data centers. I don't think we have to do that. We I mean we've made some pretty significant changes in what was allowed and not we have disallowed schools, right? Yeah. Um As I understand it, yeah, it's to you disallowed screeners. Yes. You voted on it. Where was this? In the business industrial zone. Oh, oh, okay. Oh, yeah, and that okay. We didn't ban schools. See. Yeah. We definitely remembered that one. So what do people think? And we don't have to decide this now, but it was just uh uh I was filling time till Adam got eight.