I'd like to call to order the December 17th Planning Commission meeting.

First item on the agenda is roll call.

Ms.

Hoxhaw, can you help us with that?

Thank you.

Commissioner Callahan?

Yes.

Commissioner Felista?

Present.

Commissioner Lynn?

Present.

By Sam Allen?

Sure.

Sam What?

Present?

Mr.

Wana Funday?

Present.

The next item of business then is the approval of the agenda.

Are there any changes to the agenda anybody would like to make?

Hearing none.

The next item is the approval of minutes.

Are there any changes anybody would like to make?

Then we move into general public comments.

Is there any general public comment before we get into the public hearing that anybody would like to make?

I'm sorry.

I have no general public comment for tonight.

Thank you.

So then we're opening up the public hearing.

Tonight's public hearing is regarding the community renewal area or CRA sign code update.

The purpose for the hearing is to obtain public testimony and for the commission to develop a recommendation to forward to the city council on this topic.

The process for this public hearing is as follows.

The city will present its staff report.

The commission will be given an opportunity to ask clarified questions.

Individuals will be given an opportunity to testify to testify.

After all testimony has been received, the commission will begin deliberation and may ask questions of the staff.

And lastly, the commission will vote and then close the public hearing.

Are there any staff, excuse me, the city staff person who's going to present?

Laura Garloff, Planning Manager.

Thank you.

And I'd like to share my screen and we can begin our discussion.

Okay, so Shoreline, please, sign code update.

We've uh discussed this a couple times, and I think the Planning Commission has done some good work at looking at all these issues that are really important to our retail community and trying to make some fair uh decisions about how to balance competing interests and how to come up with a set of code amendments that will work better and encourage redevelopment on the former Aurora Square site.

So this is the area south of 160th, pretty much west of Aurora that was previously developed with a Sears Center as an anchor and a number of smaller businesses.

The Washington State Department of Transportation has some offices off on the west hand side, and then there's some Northwest School down at the southern end.

But the the bulk of it in the area that you see in blue under screen is just older commercial area, which has been redeveloped or rebranded as shoreline place, and so the intent of this sign code is to support that redevelopment with some regulations that are more tailored to what we'd like to see happen on this site in the future.

So the last uh discussion that the planning commission had was in November, and they had uh whittled the issues down to a number of um just a number of things that needed some additional discussion.

Staff had presented some different options and then the council or the plan, I'm sorry, the planning commission discussed those, and I think generally uh achieved consensus on the direction they'd like to go on those.

So I'll kind of briefly talk over those items that were still kind of up for discussion.

Um all of those changes have been incorporated into the draft that was attached to your staff report, so that if you're you know remaining agreement that this is the direction that you'd like to go with your recommendation to council, then you'd be able to make a motion based on the information that was attached to the staff report.

So that if you're you know remaining agreement that this is the direction that you'd like to go with your recommendation to council, then you'd be able to make a motion based on the information that was attached to the staff report.

So one of the the first question that we had talked about were how many monument signs should be allowed.

And previously they had been allocated by driveway.

And there were some issues with that.

Placing the signs next to driveways can cause some site distance issues, and that the driveways weren't really equally distributed across the frontage.

So we came up with a different idea, which was to base the number of monument signs on the length of the street frontage.

And so they would be either one, two, or three, depending on the amount of frontage that a given parcel had on a public street.

And then there was also a concern well, what if someone were to subdivide their property in order to try to get additional signs?

And we know that Merlot Geyer who owns the central portion of the site where the Sears building used to be, instead of doing a short plaque, they've done a binding site plan, which allows the parcel to be considered as a whole for zoning reasons while being divided into additional leaseholds.

So smaller areas can be developed by different developers at least separately, but the site as a whole would have zoning standards like the skip or signage or setbacks applied around the perimeter.