The Spokane Valley City Council held a special meeting on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. at City Hall to discuss the Comprehensive Plan Update and review HCDAC grant applications. The meeting featured presentations from staff and a consultant, extensive council deliberation on land-use scenarios, and input on proposed allocations for affordable housing and community development grants.
Mayor Patton, it's five o'clock when you're ready. All right. Okay, I think we're ready to bring this special meeting to order on Tuesday, March 10th, 2026. So if you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. So the clerk will call the roll. Thank you. Mayor Padden. Here. Deputy Mayor Hattenberg? Here. Councilmember Kelly. Present. Councilmember Yeager? Here. Councilmember Haley. Councilmember Wick? Here. And Councilmember Merkel. Here. Thank you. We have the approval of the agenda. Move to approve the agenda. All those in favor? All right. Opposed. The agenda is approved. We have non-action items. The first is a review or report on the comprehensive plan. With Steve Roberts and Mike Basinger. And I will like to say, just to begin, first of all, I appreciate the approach that has been used. The state is mandating that we make these changes, and we want to make them in the best way possible. We're not dotting the I's and crossing the Ts on this yet. We have a lot more discussion to have. So if we can kind of keep it, you know, at that higher level and not delve into the super detailed level. So if you would like to proceed. Actually, I just follow up on the mayor's comment there. Um so as we get into this, Mike's gonna talk about how did we get here, what did we do in 2016? Um the one thing uh about tonight, we want to be able to have a good discussion following up on uh what Mayor Patton said, keep it at high level, but please if you see something in the document that you want to make note of or change, please feel free to mark that up and get comments over to Mike and Steve. That's one of the things if you remember Mike, I'm sure you do, um, that we received lots of input from the council in 2016, uh, written all kinds of stuff. So then we were able to compile those and make a really good document out of those. And uh some of the council members actually had meetings with constituents at McDonald's and did all kinds of zoning stuff, if you remember that. Um so yeah, please please feel free if you have a question or a concern or you don't like the way the language says, mark it up and provide that uh for staff so we can we can work that out for you. Yeah, so um as John mentioned, uh I was gonna provide a little context on how we got to the map that's uh right behind us here, which is our existing comprehensive plan. I went back, I was telling some of the council members at the advanced agenda meeting. I went back and looked at the video in 2016 and listened to it, and I'll say uh John and I we we looked a lot younger. Um my goatee was brown, it wasn't a beard, uh my hair was thicker, so yeah, exactly. But it it really was um telling for me to go back and and watch those videos just uh um see what we talked about. Um I think the biggest thing is is when we started out last time through this effort in 2016, we had a lot more comprehensive plan designations, and a lot of that was based on Euclidean zoning and Euclidean zoning. What you would do is you'd say have a higher intensity uh zoning classification, you would then buffer that with a lower intensity zoning classification. So for instance, in all of the north-south corridors, Argonne, Pines, Evergreen, Sullivan.