All right.

I would like to call to order the city council study session of October 21st, 2025.

Clerk, will you please call the role?

Councilmember Bushnell.

Present.

Deputy Mayor Daniels.

Here.

Councilmember Diaz.

Here.

Councilmember Heinz.

Councilmember Rumba.

Here.

Councilmember Sidalgay.

Here.

Councilmember Scott.

Here.

Councilmember Walker.

Mayor Woodards.

Absent the material sent to you at 1101.

Okay.

We are going to start study session today with our middle middle housing permit program.

And for that, I would like to call on Planning and Development Services Director, Peter Huffman to begin that presentation along with Corey Newton, our division manager.

Planning and development services.

Yeah, thank you, Deputy Mayor.

Peter Huffman, I'm the director of plan development services, and to my right is Corey Newton.

He's the division manager in planning development services of the development services division.

And we're here to I guess introduce you to a proposal that we've been working on with the city manager's office on how we can streamline the permitting process for what we call middle housing.

Next slide, please.

Perfect.

So we're gonna start with a little background on how we got to where we're at right now, a little overview of what the pilot program will be, and then what we really want at the end is some feedback from the council on your thoughts on this proposal, and then we'll adjust accordingly.

Next slide, please.

So at the request of interim city manager Kim, um he he he approached me and said, Hey, is there a way that we can look at how we can um expedite or streamline or make more efficient the permitting process for what is commonly referred to as um middle housing?

And he and he asked us to think big and and challenged us to really try to do something that's a little bit innovative and different, um, something that might um be you know um a stretch, but um try it out and learn from it and go from there.

And so we started thinking about what a scope of that type of process could be, and so we really looked at that middle housing, those aspects of housing that were really a focus of the home and Tacoma um process, those those you know, traditional, not large multi-family, but basically between six, you know, six units up to like 10, 20 units, and we thought, okay, is that something that we could really kind of focus on and look at the approaches that we've been doing for um fourplexes and sixplexes, and can we expand that forward?

And so we thought, all right, well, let's let's try to attempt to do this as a pilot for one year, um, starting in uh 2026, January 2026 through um January 2027, and try to explore different ways that we can work more collaboratively with everybody and do some different things uh as far as how we actually process and review permits, and Corey's gonna talk about that.

Um I really want to give a shout out before we get into this presentation to the leadership and the staff of um public works, environmental services, uh Tacoma Public Utilities and IT, all of those um partner departments are integral to making this work, and um especially right now with IT because IT is scrambling to um do some reconfiguration of the Excel a software program so that we can um track the metrics that we want to track um through the pilot program so that we can come back to the council with some data on how it's working and discuss with the council next steps.

Next slide, please.

So what exactly is it?

So uh what this would be is like I mentioned it would be a one-year pilot and we would be focusing on um 20 units or less.

And of course, the first question is is well, why 20?

Um so first what we've done is under home and to comas we looked at this approach for uh six units or less, and it's it's working.

Um, and we thought, okay, well, let's expand that.

And of course, our first thought was well, why don't we go to 10?

But you know, getting back to the city manager's request, think big and challenge ourselves.

We thought, well, let's go to 20, because really when you think about middle housing and all the discussions that we had with the community and the council through the home and to comba process, it's really like 20 units or less is that middle housing, that flexible housing type.

Um that would include townhouses and and other types of projects that you think is middle housing.

I think the other aspect of it is when we did go through home and tacoma, if you recall, we did a series of tests, and so we sat down with the service providers, uh TPU, environmental services, um, public works, and we ran these case studies.

And so we sat down with the service providers, TPU, environmental services, public works, and we ran these case studies.

And those case studies are okay, can this work?

How much stuff can we get on a lot?

Will it work?

And we did that up to 20 units.

So we thought, okay, well, we've done sort of the civil engineering, if you will, in the land use analysis for 20.

So we've got some good data there, and we're comfortable that we can go up to 20 and make that work.

So that's kind of where the 20 came.

And then we thought, okay, knowing that the high priority, there's a high priority of council for home ownership, and there's this new tool called unit lot subdivision.

We thought, all right, well, let's let's try to get it for unit lots subdivisions too, which are basically between 10 and 20 units.

And so we thought if we do up the 20 and focus on unit lots subdivisions, we can you know meet a lot of policy objectives of the council of seeing that middle housing get built as well of home ownership.

The other scope that we put in place is 12,000 square feet, and so it's got to be 12,000 square feet or less.

And the reason that we did that is that's just the threshold for us to sort of I don't want to say avoid, but stay clear of some of some other regulatory complexities associated with such things as stormwater, um traffic, and other regulations.