Carlis Crawford.

Present.

Here.

Present.

Kurt Ramsey?

Here.

Sean Simpson.

Yes.

First item on the agenda is the approval of minutes.

Does anyone have any additions or corrections to the minutes?

Nope.

Is that a motion?

So moved.

Second.

All opposed.

Okay.

Moving on to today's business.

We have the zoning code review process.

Take it away.

I'll turn it over to uh the director Logan thing in a moment.

Just wanted to clarify for the committee and for the public.

This is one of several planning initiatives that are ongoing within the city.

It's a long time coming.

We've had a lot of discussions of plans over the last 30 years.

This is the furthest advancement we've come to making a substantive change to the code.

And this process is before you prior to going to council.

But the aim is to modernize the process to streamline things for consideration.

The staff will get into the particulars or relate to advance from the development committee and start the process of the council.

With that, I'll turn it over to the planning director, and then we'll take any questions and questions or just curious issues you might have after that.

So thank you, Andy.

He uh actually stole my first two slides on this, but I wanted to talk through a little bit of the review process just because, as you know, we've we've been working on the zoning code uh updates since January of last year.

So it's kind of hard to believe that we're nearing the end of the process.

We have a full draft of the code that staff is currently working through, and then you know, here in the next month or so, we'll really be kicking off the adoption process, which will have a number of other uh public hearings as part of that to share all the different aspects and really dive into all of the details of the code itself.

Um of the items in particular that we wanted to highlight was the review process, because this is a really big item as to how it relates to the public review aspect of it, how it relates to some of the challenges that we faced with uh previous developments, and really when we're talking about that review process, we're talking about the required steps that a project has to get before they would be able to file for building permits, which is the actual construction of whatever that project might be.

Um so you have a lot of different components that are included in the the review process itself.

Um, but really at the end of the day, our current process has a lot of steps that just are not very clear, they overlap with one another.

Um, and that's that's posed a lot of challenges for some of the development projects that have come through before.

It's either made it a very long process that the developer is in, there's a lot of confusion as to what point can the public you know share certain comments and feedback on things.

So we want to, in this rewrite process, we want to be able to refine and really be intentional about the types of applications that are required and you know what reviewing bodies that they go to so that from everyone's perspective perspective, they kind of know where is you know development in the process, what steps are remaining, you know, what other options or approval might be outstanding that they can weigh in on when they're seeing something get published or when they're hearing something uh in the community itself.

Um a lot of the recommendations that I talked about, you know, were further uh reinforced by our zoning code consultant that did an assessment of our code.

So a lot of the recommendations that they had for store is is really focused on streamlining the process, making sure that boards, commissions, approval authorities, all of those are very clear as to where their authority starts and stops, and then what are all those steps that are going to be required for a project depending on the scope and scale of the of the project itself?

So one of the things that I want to highlight is just a comparison, you know, at a high level of what our traditional process looks like today versus the direction that we're going within the rewrite.

So what you see on the on the screen here is that there's really three key approval steps that we have that are in the middle there: the sketch plan, the preliminary development plan, and the final.

Those have a number of different public hearings that are part of it.

And as I mentioned, there's a lot of overlap into some of those that you have, and really what are you reviewing under a preliminary versus a final?

There are opportunities to combine those to you know shorten the process if a development's a little bit more straightforward, if there's additional time constraints, consolidating down so that there aren't as many public hearings, but on average you're looking at about four to five public hearings, which you know, each of each one of those is gonna take about two months to get through from when you're filing the application, going through public notices, actually getting to the meeting, getting a determination, and that doesn't include any additional time in between those approval steps that an applicant may have to address outstanding items, may have to address feedback that they heard from the commission, city council, the public.

So there's even more time that gets added in as to you know when I start this process versus when I stop this, you know, when can I actually get under construction?

The direction that we're going with that, like I said, is to really reorient and reorganize what some of those steps are and really what is the purpose behind that approval versus the ones that we have today.

So a lot of those steps are gonna we'll still have them, we'll still have the sketch plan, we'll still have a preliminary, we'll still have a final, but we may not treat them the same way as we go forward.

So, for instance, one of the changes that we're looking at for the sketch plan is that that's really an optional.

Right now, it's only required under specific conditions in the code.

At the end of the day, that's that's just for feedback.

That's a developer, an applicant is looking to get feedback on a proposal before they really start putting the investment behind all of the construction drawings and the details that we need to ensure that they're meeting code.

So they may have concerns about something, staff may have concerns about something relative to the project.

We would want them to be able to file that sketch plan to get the feedback.

They know what some of the challenges are, some of the things that they need to address, they know that up front, they can take that feedback and incorporate it into their proposal.

One of the bigger changes that we have is between the preliminary and the the final really development plan that you have.

And the biggest aspect of that is council's review in the process.

So right now, council is kind of the last reviewing body at the end of the entire process.

So that final development plan goes to council for two hearings, they're signing off, and from there an applicant can file for building permits.