Like, and I don't see you as often as I would like.

My my schedule doesn't allow it, and unfortunately, as it turns out, I won't be able to state to the very end tonight either.

But there was no way that I was going to miss tonight's meeting.

Um and I just want to tell you at the outset how very thrilled I am about tonight's item.

Uh the staff will be taking you through uh uh a series of proposed zoning reforms.

Uh at times it's going to be perhaps on the technical side, perhaps even on the dry side.

But at a high level, what this represents is something very special that the planning staff has done.

Uh many of these changes we've wanted to do for months or even years.

And with the volume of work that the planning staff uh have handled every month, they're just it's been hard to find the time to do it.

Uh but they found a way, and uh through a lot of teamwork and very uh innovative um problem solving, they're able to squeeze uh a time for what they called a hackathon.

They came together in a very innovative and collaborative way, and the result of that collaboration, what you see is a package of reforms that will propel the city forward with uh changes to our uh zoning that will improve efficiency and work towards a better uh city.

This is not the kind of uh sexy, flashy work that makes the papers, uh, but it is very important as far as making our planning apparatus run smoothly.

So I just want to publicly commend um uh Salaish, Tony, and their team for the work that you're about to uh hear.

And uh I'm gonna go and be in the audience and listen with great interest, and uh I can't wait uh for to hear what they present to you.

Thank you.

No, well, good evening, Commission.

Uh my name is Tony Rossi, principal planner with the planning division.

And tonight we're bringing you a big giant package of zoning ordinance text amendments.

Uh a little background.

What are we doing?

Uh the zoning ordinance as we use and implement uh day-to-day was adopted in 2010, and that was updated along with uh a number of items that needed to be updated, really because we hadn't touched it since 1986.

Um like our director just mentioned, we've been oh hello.

Um like our director Alex Greenwood mentioned, the uh changes have been under contemplation for the last couple of years, and in fact, in 2016, some of this body, uh some of the members of this body reviewed proposed amendments to the zoning uh zoning ordinance.

Uh they just never uh found their way onto an agenda uh over the last couple of years, and other priorities emerged.

We've had a ton of building, and we finally had an opportunity now to focus on this and bring it forward.

So a few kind of ground rules for tonight.

I'm I'm hoping you want to interrupt it any time.

You have on your uh dais a uh a new copy.

It's labeled errata for planning commission meeting.

It's in red, underlined, so that'll show you all the changes.

Um this was comprehensive, and in fact, we found three other changes that didn't make it into the published uh ordinance that went out in the packet last week.

So we've uh included those in the document you have before you.

I'll also go through all three of them.

They're fairly minor in the PowerPoint.

Um the handout has page numbers, so I think for the purposes of discussion tonight, if something popped out at you during the your initial reviews or tonight, if you can reference the page number um with this document, hopefully we'll all be on the same page.

Um then finally, if you see that little red exclamation mark symbol, uh that indicates one of those new mistakes.

There's three of them.

I'll go over it.

Um with that, I'm gonna jump into our 54 uh slide presentation.

But it's gonna be fun.

There's pictures and uh we'll have a good time.

So there's really five categories of amendments we're we're pursuing and recommending to you and to the council.

Correcting just basic errors and emissions, and I'll I'll give you some examples.

Clarifying language and intent over the last couple years using the zoning ordinance.

We've found uh that's not exactly what we meant.

What do we mean?

And we realize some of us have different interpretations of the code, so we've tried to clarify that.

Um we're also making sure that the zoning ordinance is always consistent with our general plan.

That's that's law, and we want to make sure that we're always implementing the vision of the council and and the community.

Um we want to simplify the zoning ordinance, and so we've got proposals that do that or make it a little bit clearer.

And then we're also recommending an expansion of the zoning administrator role, which is generally served by our chief planner planning manager, Silesh Mara, um, as a way to sort of foster uh a shorter timeline for review and make sure that applicants that are interested pursue uh projects, don't get scared away from some of the current uh fees and processes that we have in place.

I gave you the background overview, interrupt any time you have the handout in front of you.

We can kind of work up those page numbers.

Everything's marked in red, including three new um changes we'd like to make, and I'll walk through those in the PowerPoint.

Um and spoiler alert, uh, if you see one of these little exclamation marks, it means it's a new change, and we'll we'll talk about it.

Uh the categories, as I mentioned, are errors and emissions, clarifying the language, uh and intent, uh, ensuring we're consistent with other policies and documents throughout the um that the city has, simplifying the ordinance so it's a little bit easier to use and and implement for our planners on a day-to-day basis.

And we're also looking at expanding the role of the zoning administrator.

So, correcting errors and emissions.

This gives you an example of the types of changes, and a lot of these were from 2016.

We were really focused just on minor errors and and not a lot of substantive changes, and that's what uh the commission looked at in 2016 over two meeting sessions.