The design review commission meeting for Wednesday, July first is in session.

If there are any members of the public present who would like to speak, please fill out a speaker's card and give it to the commission secretary.

Um, please state your name and address and who you represent when you come up to the microphone, and please use the microphone.

Thank you.

Are there any items of consideration that the um commissioners want to add or bring out?

Prior to that.

Okay.

Thank you.

Uh Commissioner Newsom appears to be running late, I believe.

Uh Commissioner Pros?

Commissioner Case.

Vice Chair Riley.

Here.

Chair Basting.

Yes.

Thank you.

We have a quorum.

Okay.

Nothing on the consent calendar today.

All right, thank you.

Do we have any public communications that are not on the agenda this evening?

Seeing none.

Do we have any ex parte communications that we need to disclose?

Okay.

Curtis Sawyer, uh associate planner.

Tonight we're gonna get into something a little bit different, something exciting.

Um, it's not just your typical residential or commercial designer view subject up for discussion and deliberation tonight.

Tonight we get the expand our horizons and talk signage.

Exciting stuff.

Um staff have been working diligently to craft and revise our sign ordinance that protects community charm and character, uh brings balance, encourages creativity, and even introduces introduces technology.

Uh, you and the public may be wondering um why now, why are we here this evening uh to answer that?

It's really been quite some time since we've had the opportunity to provide a comprehensive um overhaul and update to our sign ordinance.

Um, jumping in, uh the product before you this evening is our most recent version of the draft sign ordinance.

Our goal tonight is to present it before you, um, obtain your comments and feedback, and ultimately take your feedback and feedback from our working group, um, stakeholders and members of the community, um, and ultimately go before the planning commission for further consideration, and then ultimately adoption before the council.

Um with that, I would like to introduce our consultants, Michael Gibbons and Nikki Zenschetta with Mentir Harnish.

Um, they're here to review the draft with you, go over our presentation.

Um, with that, we also have it uh about eight questions lined up specifically.

Um so with that, I'd like to introduce the consultant team and come on up, guys.

Good evening, commissioners.

Uh, my name is Nikki Zanchetta.

I'm a associate planner with Mentir Harnish, and with me is Michael Gibbons, he's the project manager uh through this project.

Um so as Curtis said, we're tonight, we want to go through the sign ordinance that we've been working on over the past uh several months, and just an overview of what we're gonna be talking about tonight.

We wanna just go over a background of where the project's been, where we are now, how we got to this evening, and that includes what we've done for community outreach, um, and then also going over the actual changes that we've made to the sign ordinance and um, and then going through any additional uh questions and clarification that we wanna get from commission before moving forward with another draft.

And uh at the end of the presentation, we'll just go over the next steps and what we can expect for the rest of the process.

So just a quick overview of the project.

So the overall purpose of this project, as Curtis was also mentioning, um, so we are really looking to just modernize the sign ordinance, bring it into current best practices in the industry, and just really meeting Walnut Creek's uh business needs and uh creating more flexibility and creativity in the sign ordinance.

And the last time that the code was the sign ordinance was fully overhauled and unupdated was back in 1992.

Since then there's been a few minor updates, but this is again our chance to really get into it and make any significant changes that uh the city would like to see um and bringing it into kind of a modern contemporary uh version of the sign ordinance.

So the goals are to one clarify uh the intent of the ordinance and really what the city's role is in ensuring that signs are meeting the city's expectations, are reducing clutter and making sure to ensure the public health and safety.

And we also want to incorporate as part of the goals just ways to make the sign ordinance more flexible while meeting business needs and still maintaining the character of Walnut Creek.

And so again, our kind of main intent of this is to really create flexibility and recognize that signs are an important part of the business community, and also recognizing that the city is the primary um has the primary responsibility of really ensuring that the signs aren't impeding on any of the neighborhood character, any of the safety, and um reducing just the overall aesthetic and visual visual clutter that signs can have the uh can have an impact on for the community.

And so our project approach has been to we've established a working group as a primary advising body for this initial draft that's before you this evening.

The working group consisted of a member of the DRC, which was Phil, who is not um in attendance yet.

So it sounds like he's on his way.

Um, and then we also had a member from Planning Commission as well.

And the role of the working group was really just to, we would go back and forth with them with different drafts.

They would provide feedback.

We would go through discussion questions similar to what we're doing tonight, and we've gone through that a couple times.

And then we also wanted to solicit feedback from the public.

We did more of a focused public outreach mainly to the business community and property owners, just because they're the ones that are interacting with the sign ordinance more directly and wanting to understand where the shortfalls were.