Can get started.

Thank you again for everybody who's coming out tonight to see this presentation and provide your input about the environmental review process for the R3 zoning district update.

As a reminder, this is the scoping meeting for that process.

This is a required part of the California Environmental Quality Act.

And so as we'll talk more in this meeting, the purpose of this meeting is to hear from the community about issues that should be addressed in the environmental review process.

So we're going to start with the presentation and then we'll get into your questions and comments.

The meeting tonight is going to have an introduction, description of the R3 zoning district update and what it will include.

Then we're going to talk a little bit about what is CEQA and what is scoping, and then we'll talk about schedule and next steps, how to submit comments, and then we'll have your opportunities for questions and comments.

I am Eric Anderson.

I'm the planning manager for long-range planning for the city of Mountain View, and I'm managing this project.

I'm also joined by the project manager for Opticos, who is our code consultant on this project.

They're helping us to draft the code and provide best practices and other consultant expertise on this project.

And then we have our environmental consultant, Gianna Meskey.

She's the project manager for Rincon consultants, and they are taking the lead on all aspects of CEQA compliance.

So thank you to Gianna and Cecilia for joining.

So basic introduction, CEQA California Environmental Quality Act requires the city to hold this meeting regarding this project.

And the purpose of scoping, as I said earlier, is to identify environmental issues related to a project before we actually start getting into the full drafting of the EIR.

Scoping can also identify possible alternatives or mitigation measures that could avoid potentially significant environmental effects.

So this project has been developed over the past several years.

The council provided direction on the kind of land use direction for this project at a meeting in March, March 25th, as well as a more recent meeting on June 24th.

Fundamentally, the project is an update to the R3 zoning district, which is the primary multifamily housing zoning district in the city.

You can see it in orange on this map, but it also affects a few of the gray areas on the maps.

Those are precise plans that may reference the R3 zone.

It's going to increase allowable density in specific areas that I'll talk about in a minute.

We're going to update development standards to address kind of modern building types and to generally make projects buildable at allowed densities.

And then the council has directed us to allow neighborhood commercial.

And so we'll be having more conversations with council about the extent of neighborhood serving commercial, but that is also going to be a part of this project.

There will also be associated general plan amendments because we are changing densities in the R3 zone.

And we're also integrating various housing element implementation programs.

It includes several projects, several programs that have overlap with this project.

One of which is to take areas that are zoned R2.

And on this map, those are kind of the darker yellow areas, and either allow the types of development that would be permitted in R1 under SB9, so up to four units plus additional ADUs, or to upzone into the R3 zone.

And we'll talk about where council has directed us to do that.

And then, of course, another housing element implementation item is to update standards for nonconforming densities, especially in the R1 and R2 zone to allow longer life for multifamily buildings in those zones, or also potentially to allow reconstruction of those of those buildings.

Fundamentally, this project could result in up to 10,000 to 16,000 new units across the city.

It is a there is a large potential for change with this project, uh, given the densities that are being contemplated in this EIR.

So focusing in on the R3 zone and uh the different densities that the R3 zone will contemplate.

Uh, council has already directed us to look at five different density levels.

Uh you can see those in the far right column here, ranging from about 15 to 20 units to about 75 to 110 units uh per acre.

Um then on the map on the left, you can see where those uh different zones are going to apply.

The darkest reddest areas are the highest densities, 75 to 110 units per acre.

I apologize for the typo in the map.

That should be uh 75 to 110.

The um the table is correct.

Um, and then uh the um kind of medium red is 75, 50 to 75 units per acre.

Uh, and again, that's that's an upper range.

That's not a range of minimum to maximum density.

Uh, we still have a more analysis that we need to do to identify what the actual maximum density is going to be, but it will be somewhere in that range.

Um, R3B and R3C are uh areas of stability in the R3 zone.

They are not uh increasing densities.

The existing general plan density of 25 units per acre will continue to apply in the R3B areas, and the existing general plan density of 35 units per acre will continue to apply in the R3C areas.

And then of course, in the table here, you can see the relative acreage of these areas.

Um I can provide any uh you know more detail about uh the densification program if you have any questions at the end of the presentation.

Uh we are also considering during this project to uh take existing city parks, and because of limits under state law, we cannot rezone them from residential to parkland.

So uh because we have this opportunity where we're increasing density pretty significantly across the city, we can do some targeted rezonings to existing city parks to re zone them to public facilities for um our typical parkland zoning district.

Again, these are existing city parks, no new um uh public property or anything else is being identified through this process.

It's more of an administrative uh code cleanup that we can do now because we're upzoning.

I'm gonna hand it over to Gianna to uh carry out the rest of the presentation.

Thank you, Gianna.

Thank you, Eric.