Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[4:34] whatever date it is August 22nd 2017 which is charmingly delightfully only focused on one big topic so with that we'll hand it over to you Thank You mayor and members of council I'm Jim Robertson director of the planning Housing and sustainability Department I'm joined by a number of members of our team and I'll just

[5:01] briefly give you an introduction to them as I as I sort of give you a preview for the evening the agenda for this evening is that I will give you a brief introduction to the evening without getting any into any specifics on particular be vcp implementation items will then move and this is per the request we got at CAC yesterday morning we'll move straight into a deeper dive on three particular BDCP implementation items that we are currently and work on and we'll have an opportunity for a short period of your questions and discussion on each one of those I'll be doing the first one on building height and then the accessory dwelling units J

[6:01] Signet from the housing who is right behind me here and Curt fern Harbor from our housing division will be leading the presentation on that and of course that will be followed by a time period for discussion and questions and then we'll have a final deep dive on sub community and area planning with a particular focus on Alpine balsam Leslie will do a brief introduction to that and then Katelyn zacharias will take you into a little deeper dive on that that's gonna take us through the bout the first hour and a half to two hours of the meeting we anticipate we would however like to reserve time a substantial chunk of time where we will then zoom back out if you will to look at the action plan as a whole because we want to get your feedback in addition to getting your feedback on these individual items are we you know for those individual items we'll be asking you is this the scope of work that you

[7:01] anticipate are these the issues you anticipate we ought to be dealing with is our approach for doing them seems sound but then we want to zoom out to the larger scale and we want to get your feedback on the action plan as a whole which contains about 16 broad items and then we'll wrap up for the evening so with that a little bit of the purpose as part of the comprehensive plan the comprehensive plan specifically calls for the development and ultimately council acceptance of an implementation action plan this is a plan that's been developed over the course of the two-plus years that the update has been underway and the action plan will be in front of you for for your acceptance on September 5th and then the action plan the the the comp plan also specifies that it should be revisited each year in

[8:02] conjunction with the City Council's work planning so the next one in the next episode of that of course will be in January 2018 so tonight we want to get your feedback on that both the deep-dive way on three things and then on the balance of it overall as I said there are three particular items that are already underway those are three of actually five items that are underway the other two that we won't be getting into tonight because they sort of have an existence on their own and you're well aware of them and have actually seen some of those are see you south property there will be implementation associated with that and the inclusion amendments to the inclusionary housing regulations and that's well along and you'll be seeing that in front of you within the next few weeks a little bit of context

[9:00] of course as important as implementation of the comprehensive plan is it is not the sort of totality of work that we're engaged in right now and we wanted you to look at and help us prioritize the action plan in light of other work that's underway we're experiencing still I would I think it's fair to say sort of record levels of cases coming in to the development services Center some of those are high very high profiles I mean you've seen or will see like ogen pan cost and others we're active on a number of housing fronts including of course the recent purchase of the Ponderosa site and and work associated with that but also implementation of the middle income and housing strategy those inclusionary housing amendments that I just mentioned we're also involved in several significant redevelopment projects that of course you're aware of one would be the redevelopment of the the Pollard

[10:02] site the 30th and Perl site you'll be seeing in front of you and item on that in terms of the next step in that process other redevelopment projects of course include the Civic area with a specific focus in the near term on planning for the East bookend and then of course we also participate in the planning processes that other departments engage in including those conducted by community vitality such as the economic sustainability strategy OS OS MP master planning transfer update to the transportation master plan and the library master plan so that's just a little bit of quick summary of the portfolio of work that we have on our plate in addition to the implementation work that we're gonna be discussing tonight that's my introduction and unless you have any questions right there I'll dive straight into the first of the three sort of deeper dive topics where we're we're talking about building

[11:00] height and Community Benefit I'll pause and if I don't see questions and I will keep moving okay so what I'm gonna do is give you a little bit of background sort of what were the rules pre 2015 and then what of the rules that have been in place since 2015 on this issue of hiding community benefit and then I want to preview the work that we are intending to undertake in the coming 10 months and of course we'll be bringing that back to you pre 2015 of course going all about 1971 you've got the 55 foot height limit which is in the city charter and I want to emphasize and I think I have this reminder to myself later but none of which were none of what we're talking about doing in the next year has anything to do with modifying that it is all out all the all the things we would be doing would be within that 55 foot height limit of course in much of the

[12:01] city our zoning districts establish a sort of by ride height of no more than 35 feet in most parts of the city and pre 2015 applicants could propose to do either a by right development in other words up to 35 feet or they could seek additional height through the city site review process now what was happening and I'm of course since I've been here a year recounting the information that happened prior to my arrival but it's my understanding and that applicants were seeking additional height in other words more than 35 more than the base height of 35 feet in a number of parts of the city including parts of the city where no targeted sort of area or sub community planning had been done and that raised a concern is is is this consistent with our comprehensive plan our comprehensive plan and I've quoted a section of it right here envisions a compact development pattern with density and appropriate location so there were

[13:01] concerns being raised about whether these sort of across-the-board availability of this Avenue for achieving additional height was appropriate and consistent with the comprehensive plan so in 2015 the council adopted ordinance eight zero to eight which modified the land use code it did a few things that it created appendix J which is a map this is not a literal translation of appendix J but it's a it's just we it's been cleaned up a little bit just to make it make the information even more apparent it identified specific areas where additional height could be sought via the site review process and of course these are areas oftentimes that corresponded with areas where planning had been done or were there other reasons where where the community felt like we at least ought to entertain applications for that it also set in place it being 280 28 some other

[14:03] conditions under which additional height could be requested topography special conditions of the building or the use like an industrial use and things like that and so that's that this is the regulatory regime we've been operating in for the last two-plus years that ordinance 80 28 had an expiration date on it which was April of this year and in March of this year in anticipation of that expiration the City Council adopted ordinance 81 72 which extended the effect of of 80 28 until July 19th 2018 and of course then we we city staff are then tasked with bringing back to Planning Board and to you and to the community in advance of that a proposal for what ought to be the the set of rules that goes into a place honor by

[15:03] July 19th 2018 couple considerations before I get into sort of what our proposed approach on this is as I said there's no proposal to change the Charter height limit what you're going to hear me say in a few minutes is that we are proposing to focus on affordable housing as the community benefit that is is would be provided in conjunction with requests for additional height in the code amendments that we would present to you for a and on or before July 2018 of course that's not the only community benefit there's been community benefits discussions going on in the community for quite some time but from a from a sort of efficacy point of view in terms of getting a set of code amendments in front of the Planning Board in you between now and 20 July 2018 we thought it might be appropriate to

[16:01] afford to focus that on affordable housing as the community benefit that's not a random selection obviously that is one of the if not the highest priority that's been expressed by by you as well as many members of our community so it seems like the one that that would be the highest interest of course what we could do then and that last bullet speaks to this point is even if we focus on on affordable housing as the sole community benefit higher then once you have the code basically the code provisions in place you can in de gauge in additional efforts after it would be after July 2018 to consider adding other community benefits to that - to that program if you will in other words maybe the community would say that under certain circumstances or in certain locations things other than affordable housing ought to be considered in the context of requests for additional

[17:00] height so we created for ourselves in order to undertake this body of work a problem statement and this is this is an articulation of that problem statement and I'm gonna almost read it verbatim because I want to go through it so we're in other words what's the geography of this and under what circumstances should properties be allowed to seek additional height above and beyond the 35 foot by right but less than the 55 but up to the 55 charter limit and what community benefits should be in return it provided in return for that additional height that we summarized as the basic problem statement in a nutshell that the coming 10 months of work would address we're not we're not going into this without a toolkit of of policy feed policy information the BBC P has a couple areas

[18:03] that I wanted to bring to your attention and I'm pretty sure you're already aware of them policy 1.1 one specifically addresses this for land users owning district changes for added height that increases intensity you know develop regulations so that new development provides benefits to the community that's in a sense that's almost a restatement of the problem statement I had I posited for you two point three five also from the BBC update speak specifically about guidance on height and intensity of land uses and specifically their relationship to building height and aesthetics and view protection and as an incentive in exchange for community benefits once again sort of a statement if you will or an alternative version of sort of the fundamental problem statement that that's in front of us this is the question for Council I'm previewing it

[19:00] right now before I get into a little more detail on our work plan I just wanted to give you a sense of what we're going to be posing for you here in a few minutes do you agree with the approach that we are proposing for you so that's just a preview for your benefit so our work plan and this returns somewhat to that problem statement one helpful one potentially helpful way of thinking about this is a set of questions where what and how the we're being where should additional height be allowed i don't arrive to you tonight with a particular outcomes here but that's one of the basic questions we will be asking in other words what are the criteria we should use should it just should it takes the appendix j approach you can just identify areas on a map and say that's where it should be allowed should we consider other tools that might set criteria like a corresponding to particular zoning districts or there may

[20:02] be other things or combinations of those things the second question than what the what question what types of projects and this can be it could be by use it could be well I guess by use would be one of the main things you could look at commercial and industrial uses should they be should they be eligible and under what circumstances and then the how and how has two components if a project is going to seek additional height through the site review standards are there additional design standards that should kick in in order to ensure that the community interest is met notwithstanding the increased height this goes to that aesthetics and view protection item that was in the the BBC P policy that I had on the screen a moment ago and then the second piece of the how is sort of what

[21:00] type of community benefit and how much of that community benefit is appropriate if you will if you want to think of it this way in exchange for additional height so those are the that's kind of another Restatement of them of the the mission in front of us we have a work plan I won't go into this in detail the project basically were in sort of what we call project initiation right now where we set the scope the timeline we'll be developing a community engagement plan and of course we're in front of you tonight we'll be in front of the Planning Board on Thursday night phase one is where we really get into the meat of the issue will be developing options and alternatives will be doing analysis including potentially even economic analysis of sort of how does this play out from an economics point of view in terms of what's a reasonable exchange if you will between height and community benefits we'll be doing a lot of community engagement and of course our community engagement will be

[22:00] determined by our community engagement plan which will be vetting with Planning Board and this is what I call the plain English at the end of this we would have a plain English version of what we would propose to then convert into code language Phase two would then be the code out you know where we draft the the engagement during this point because hopefully the engagement will be sufficiently robust during the sort of plain English phase one if you will that we will have arrived at a tentative proposal for you so this will be focused on code drafting with some targeted in gauge mminton tissa paid in order to meet that July 2018 deadline we're going to need to begin to sort of review an adoption process in about April of next year what would be the outcomes well one would be sort of transparency consistency and predictability both for the community and for applicants so the rules are clear to all parties involved we would want to provide criteria for

[23:00] the decision-makers so that they have guidance in terms of evaluating requests for additional height and then of course the the hard the hard copy deliver belief for the outcome if you will is a set of code a set of code amendments that would be offered up for consideration and potential adoption prior to that expiration deadline next steps obviously will adjust this work plan based on what we hear from you and the Planning Board will be developing a community engagement plan which we will then take back to the Planning Board to get their additional feedback on that and we will undertake the meet of the work so with that here is the question for your consideration and discussion excellent let's just start with any clarifying questions I had Sam Janne Mary than me thank you for that one

[24:03] question is we often talk about not just height as far as community benefit but also floor area ratio and other exemptions to the standard by right codes have you thought about tying those into this at all yes and I'm gonna well let me just jump in I realized in some especially in some circumstances there may be occasions where for a particular project the 35 height the 35 foot height limit is not the the constraining force if you will but it could be Florida area ratio in other words a project may be perfectly happy to stay within the 35 feet but it wants to get more intense if you will denser via some modification to the floor area ratio so with specifically

[25:01] with regard to FA are I think that's something we could fairly easily accommodate in our work over the coming year because I realize in one some cases the currency is hide in other cases the currency as FA are having said that if we were to and I don't know what other things you have in mind there are other variations that sometimes get asked for setback variations and so forth like that the broader we get a little harder it gets to move along rapidly but I'm certainly open to and we're certainly open of course to suggestions you or the council as a whole has on the key the key variables in terms of the development rules that come via the base zoning and and if somebody seeks modification of them that it produces a more intense project if you will then I think that can be part of the equation good and then the other question I have is about the other community benefits so

[26:00] it seems to me there's one argument which is just do this because we have this looming deadline and there's another argument that says if we're going to bite this off let's let's you know do it all at once so that community benefits are all and considered together and if there's more waiting on some than others then we go ahead and bring that forward I understand the Planning Board produce the community benefits matrix as you take notes mentioned and I have a copy of it right here ok great do you think it would be that much more work to incorporate the community benefit matrix however it turns out and however we choose to look at that is it that much more work to actually do it all rather than just doing part of it I'm really wanted I'm gonna give you a short answer which is yes it would be quite a bit more work and if you will allow me the the ability to expand on that answer I'll say I'll say why the

[27:03] matrix I'm actually going to pull out my copy of it because it may be a useful visual so sorry for the low tech here but this is the planning boards this is the one I'm familiar with which may look familiar to some of you and I actually had a discussion with some of the team this afternoon on this to make sure I understood this it essentially has an x-axis which is all these all the columns and these are broad array I don't know what that is ten twelve fourteen different community benefits really starting with affordable housing a couple different categories of affordable housing but then moving into parks and open space cultural facilities environmental protection school community space urban design enhanced mixed-use extort preservation so forth an array of community benefits across the top and then the Rose if you will the y-axis here contains a number of if

[28:02] you will vehicles for laboratory regulatory vehicles that offer opportunities to achieve some of these community benefits so those are increases in units increases in FA are of course annexation is one height other increases in intensity parking reduction setbacks and so forth as I understand sort of tackling the whole thing would be to look across the array of community benefits and across the array of vehicles if you use my word I'll give you an example of why I think that would dramatically expand the body of work every time you add a community benefit at least to my mind to do it to do this sort of thing prudently every time you add a community benefit you have to do in a value first of all

[29:00] you got to define the community benefit and then you have to which can be a challenge in itself like what's a cultural space does a private art gallery count as a cultural space or does it have to be a public facility so you get into crude definitions like that all of which requires some engagement so forth you also then have to do what I call calibrate which is to say how much of that community benefit should how much credit should we give a project for providing enhanced mixed-use is that worth a full-height you know should that be is that so valuable to our community that that by itself should be something that a project should provide in order to get additional height or is it some of that combined with some of some other things so you get into what I call the calibration which is really getting an appropriate exchange of value if you will in other words we the community don't want to leave to use of metaphor or to use a phrase leave money on the

[30:01] table we don't want to give a halfway height for things that are valuable but by the same token we have to be careful to make you know if we if we put too many community benefits into the program we never met it may get any of them because we've asked too much if you will so all of the analysis that goes into every time you add a vehicle or add a community benefit I think does add substantially to the work sorry that's the answer but that that's that's kind of my sense having one other things so if you were to do that I would say we need to think about a different deadline and we would probably need to know that now as opposed to April okay so we have a lot of questions I guess you have to keep shorter answers there's a bunch more that want to jump in on this question I just have one more that's related to that was related to that yeah so I wasn't imagining the entire matrix you make a very good point the have you

[31:03] thought about the possibility of expanding community benefit beyond affordable housing maybe not everything on that matrix but only having one vehicle because we're really only talking about height and floor area ratio exemptions so rather than all of the things on that y-axis we're just looking at far and height exemption as the two you know the mmm it's gonna be traded and then it doesn't even have to be a full subset but could you add a few different if you can add far and height and the first five community benefit it seems like we might be making big steps forward yes you could do that unless I think adding the additional the word I used was vehicles in other words FA our height and so forth that to my mind does not so dramatically expand the scope of work as adding additional community benefits depending on which ones you added I would want to get back to you I

[32:02] think as to how much with and with a more recent evaluation of how much that expands the work and therefore do we need to talk about changing the deadlines so Aaron had wonder if on this one and then okay and then Jan and then Marion look just Jim tier excuse me to your last answer there I understand that the calibration that you're talking about which you girls think about as a quantification of the community benefits I understand how that would be an option but would it be a requirement I mean the site review criteria we don't quantify most of the other things there are ears that you just simply must do some things are discretionary it seems like we could take a menu of approaches to that question so you raise some excellent points but seems like there are some options there would you do you think that's fair you could do a menu but if you did a menu and don't calibrate or quantify as you said I'll tell I mean my sense is the market is going to go to the cheapest means of getting that

[33:00] additional height and so if you just have a menu and say okay one of the options available is additional open space if the market if you will this you know market that operates in a smart way out there decides that that's the cheapest way then that's what they'll be coming to the city with and we may run the risk that we may not get any affordable housing because we've provided a cheaper mean for projects to get additional height that's I think the essence of why you need to do this quantification or calibration okay excellent point it there's a concern there and maybe we can find different ways around it Jen thanks Jim two questions one is how do you define affordable housing in this case I think well I think that that is certainly something that could be considered within the body of this work I think absolutely we be talking about deed restriction deed restricted permanently affordable housing the

[34:01] levels of affordability I think could be worked out in other words are we talking about sixty percent or below or some even more aggressive goal of below sixty percent would we want there would we want sort of the some of the sort of mortal workforce in this sort of 60 to 120 percent account I think that's something we could look at during the course of this you'd want to once again returning to that calibration or quantification thing obviously the deeper affordability you asked for via this program the more expensive it becomes to a project in other words the gap between market and affordable gets bigger the deeper you go and so you would probably want to make sure that if you were doing workforce housing which is less expensive for a project to produce that you got more of it okay second I think first of all kudos for putting together a plan and that timeline because I had not been done before and that's what we had to kind of pun it so I really appreciate the work

[35:00] that you put in but being somewhat impatient I'm just really wondering why does it take so long to get to the point where you can make a proposal can you talk a little bit about that the the timeline between now and I think it was April when you would come with the first with the first council we would let me go back to my this slide recommendation yeah we would our plan and and on that phase one you'll see down into where the marks our we would intend to come back to you in probably January or February of 2018 not with code language but with what I'm calling the plain English recommendation for your consideration the reason it takes whatever it is between now and that is four or five months which is not a long time in the grand scheme of things is we want to develop several options that we take out

[36:02] to the community different ways you could go about doing this to the extent we're talking about we would want to talk about some of the issues we've just talked about here are we talking about one type of affordability or are we talking about others are we talking about only height or we're talking about faer and so every time you know you add these permutations I think both we need to do the analysis to make sure that ultimately we would be bringing you a program that we can recommend and second of all we would want to vet those options with the community to make sure that we're in alignment with with the community and I think even even doing that between now and let's call it February is moving along pretty quickly Mary I think most of my questions have been asked but I'm gonna ask when in kind of a different way so some of the

[37:00] the requirement the site review requirements are FA are requirements that we have in place right now end up giving us larger units then we would like to see it they provide incentives for larger units rather than smaller units so that is something that you're going to look at in this process yes okay great and you mentioned that when you were saying what areas and if there's some areas that wouldn't be considered for for height exceptions and if they aren't what areas would they be so does that mean that if some areas were not considered for height exceptions would that mean that basically the only option is a buy right option yes I mean I think the short answer is yes one thing that you could choose to leave in place would be well I mean the

[38:02] current ordinance the current ordinance has a you know a sort of if a project comes forward and they want to provide 50 percent affordable housing regardless of their location they can be considered for that I you know sitting right now that would not be my recommendation I think you want to set a clear transparent path you know if I think for the community and for the decision-makers in terms of a really predictable path in other words if this then that and I think you know whether the criteria was Devon designed by a map based approach or a zoning district based approach or some combination thereof I think you have that clarity of course those can be amended over time you could change that map let's say we conducted an area plan and we'll talk about area planning a little bit later but let's say a couple years two years three years down the road we did an area plan out of 55th and Arapaho via that

[39:01] area planning you might decide okay now that we've done that this might be an area where we ought to yeah and then you would just amend the map and it would now become an LG area that was eligible thank you that's all I had so Aaron and then let's turn to input and I'm gonna but something that Q good so Jim in terms of providing affordable housing is a community benefit how would you envision that would work on projects that were not mixed use or not residential so a purely commercial a purely industrial or retail project well I think that's something we would be looking at in the coming months and we will be bringing you a proposal on that in early 2018 a few thoughts about that in terms of what the options might be one option might be just say to say regardless of what type of project you are whether you're a purely commercial project or a mixed-use building or a purely

[40:00] residential building you have to provide on-site unit that would be one option another option would be to and I'm not saying any of these should win out I'm just listing options right now another option would be to say if you're a project that you know no part of your pro forma it contemplates providing housing units we'd say okay well we can live with that but we want you to contribute money to a fund for the creation of housing units that's a policy decision I get that and I think that's one thing we would want we would want to bring to you for your consideration and so I think what we will be doing in the coming months is examining what are the implications of those different choices like that including sort of how might those work from an economics point of view and and then vetting that with the community and bringing you back with either a proposal or a couple options for your consideration specifically on questions like that one thank you okay I have one

[41:04] question and then I want to wait forth I guess one of the other things that is on the menu of things we could look at that we're going to talk about at the end is hey community benefit insight reveal right so this pulls out what you're talking about just pulls out height modifications to look at community benefit what if we said hey we want our other project to look at community benefit writ large and we want him to do concurrently you know I'm saying kind of was Sam was headed or at least a huge portion of that how would how do you think that that could look timing wise I'll give a short answer and then I'll let my colleague lastly jump in or all that Leslie or with the longer the answer and discussion might occur when we talk about the larger portfolio answer would be we've got this deadline and unless that that deadline changes our recommendation is to take this piece

[42:03] of the community benefit discussion beening affordable housing and this piece of you know height and potentially fa or and other things like that and look at that right now and it we can focus on bringing you code amendments for that if it was the will of the council that at the same time we devote other resources or additional resources to the broader discussion of community benefits we could look at that but I think we need to look at that in combination with the portfolio of things you asked us to do to implement the comprehensive plan so if you if if it's okay with you maybe we ought to return to that issue when we're looking at across the entire portfolio of the 16 potential areas and then revisit that is like is that one that can be done in conjunction or simultaneous with the heightened community benefit one does that kind of at least give you an as Earl is I'm kind of I do want to add to

[43:02] that yeah because I think you're gonna get a little input here yeah I would generally agree with that and I think I mean it's gonna be natural that the conversation as it unfolds around the height ordinance input will lead to probably discussion around other community benefits so we could certainly be doing some of that work concurrently and then potentially provide those code amendments after the July timeframe and maybe at the end of next year or something like that so it could be that there's work that's done concurrently and that just doesn't bring isn't brought forward on the same timeline okay so in terms of my opinion I think at a minimum we should add if they are to this I also think it would be useful to as you say look a little bit further along the x axis x axis just because it's weird to bite off a piece of it and then everybody's gonna want to go and

[44:01] talk about the more of it and I it seems to me that there's some efficiency there we created that deadline and doesn't mean we shouldn't make it I mean I think a lot of people are counting on us making it and I also think affordable housing is the top thing so yeah but I think it in my mind this is a top priority the community benefit conversation so that we could have a robust conversation over the next year and get er done so I guess that's my even we could put some sideboards on it to me that's a top priority for me so okay we'll start with Bob Andrew Jim I'm gonna largely agree with an I I would like us to meet her deadline but but as Sam and maybe Aaron indicated I think we should look at some of the other community benefits we're gonna be looking at them anyway and and I get the fact that it creates a lot more time and we'll talk a little bit later in the evening about your portfolio and maybe if we give you relief there you'll be more comfortable at this Jim but you know as Aaron

[45:01] pointed out I'm you know if a building is doesn't have any residential units then we're gonna have to creditors create some artificial devices to to allow them to provide affordable housing if that's the only community benefit and I'm also thinking you know we have a bias towards trying to get on people in affordable housing into owned units so I'm in trying to envision a five-story building where there's owned units well the I guess that means condos and we've got other issues with condos and so I think we're looking at attached and detached houses not five-story apartment buildings for some of our affordable housing so I think we run into a little bit of a conflict on our preference there and so I'd like us to look at other community benefits maybe it's not all 12 or 15 things on the x-axis on what the Planning Board provided you but - Sam's plane surely there are three or four or five things on the list that we could be looking at in parallel for community benefits it gets to Aaron's point about you know how do we deal with commercial ability exclusively commercial buildings it gets to the issue of do we really want five-story

[46:01] affordable housing units and does that achieve our goal of ownership in certain circumstances and so I think you will have to talk a little bit about which we litter the four or five or three or seven community benefits we should tackle but I wouldn't limit it to housing affordability even though it's number one on our list it's not the only thing on our list I'm gonna do most of what's been said I I'm not too concerned in fact I'm a little bit worried about this you know overemphasis on calibration this isn't an exact science and we're not going to know until we do it what options people are gonna choose and I feel like we're this is the perfect being the enemy of the good kind of situation you can always adjust and and we have in the past you know whether it's vacation rentals or whatever else if we see we see something happening that we don't like we can go back and dial it back and take I mean these kinds

[47:01] of projects by the way take a long time to get done anyway so it's it's not like everything's gonna happen tomorrow if we start to see applications coming in and site reviews and whatnot we can we can fix them the other issue I want to well affordable housing is very important that I just want to bring us back to the fact that you know we spent a long time you're talking about attacks and all kinds of community benefits that that we want the citizens of Boulder to pay for interestingly that they're willing to pay for and we haven't put an affordable housing tax on the ballot because maybe we're not sure people will pay for that but there's all these other kinds of things we think people will pay for obviously those are community benefits and so much so that people will be willing to pay for them and so you know whether it's art whether it's you know whether it's developing a new revenue stream because of the public-private partnership for a for an area of the town that hasn't been getting funding or

[48:02] the needs funding and and I would not limit the community benefit projects on the x-axis to what the Planning Board provided because they're looking at it through one lens and and but the Planning Board doesn't deal with a number of issues in the city that provide community benefits and so I would talk to city staff about all the kinds of issues we have Molly winters a great example and other people about well what is it that are keeping projects that we want from getting done getting done and how could we encourage that and and and you know talk to the art community and what you know what one of the kinds of I could see community benefit being the kind of art that we're talking about taxing the citizens of older for so I'll leave it at that in Aaron Matt Sam well you're gonna love this gym I'm gonna disagree with what everyone said and I'm gonna do that partially because

[49:00] you're a new guy and I believe that you I want to support you and being successful and I feel like we have had over leeway overly complex stuff zoning land use matrices and so I actually like the idea that you've got here which is putting the wood behind the arrow and you've picked out what the community has told us time and time again is the highest priority which is housing so I actually like the idea that you have said we're gonna pick the highest priority and we're gonna develop this and and it doesn't have to be forever maybe this is where we start but also it enables you in your new role to maybe change some of the processes of gathering input from the community and being more successful in generating more consensus around one item rather than a

[50:00] 15 by 6 matrix so I really support your idea of a giving community value around the highest priority that's simple it's a message that's that's simple to the community and be simplifying things which will enable you to do everything easier so I support your approach completely well so I'm gonna agree with most of what's been said and it kind of a combined way I mean I think it's important sometime soon to include multiple community benefits I mean we spent a long time on this and the comp plan process and for example I worked with the folks who worked hard on getting heart as a community benefit into the Comprehensive Plan and so I think we need to have a menu of options we might consider a staged approach you know Leslie you mentioned that intrigued me something about maybe we kick off the whole process now but we have a couple of steps in in the way that might allow us

[51:01] to do what Jan was just talking about and hit our deadline for passing this thing but maybe it starts with affordable housing but we're beginning the conversation about the broader community benefits at the same time and they can follow up and in a little bit later maybe not just applied to height but applied to some other things and I personally mm-hmm sorry I'm getting over a cold I personally would start with height I would not add on F AR or other things I think we have potential there I think for example we've talked about I'm only granting more intense owning unless we got community benefit and so I think we could FA are and things like that can play into that conversation but I wouldn't put FA our in this conversation but anyway so put that idea out of stages because I think I think we do want to hit that deadline and we do want to include multiple community benefits but maybe we take a list in French well I think I mostly Aviva Jan for what it's

[52:00] worth but maybe for slightly different reasons I when I looked at the matrix from the planning for the first thing that jumped out at me and maybe this is a kind of a Jim was saying about quantifying things is that so many of the items I had no idea he'd quantify them and a lot of them didn't seem very permanent to me and that really troubles me we already have a kind of an example of that where we force certain developments to provide you know transit passes for three years well that's just totally worthless and frankly I've never understood that I mean either say something's permanent or it's irrelevant a lot of the other things struck me is not being very permanent and being awfully hard to figure out how an earth you would quantify them I think from the community's perspective it is always hard to talk for the community that polling or not surveys or not I got very

[53:01] many people in the community would trade off extra height for a piece of art sorry ain't there or even some arts facility and Jim of course raises a good question about how on earth would you define that what his permanence mean we just kind of went through that didn't we and and we know exactly how hard that is so I think I'd stick to keeping it simple and have something that is exceptionally easy to quantify we know exactly how to do it and we also know that if you get money in lieu of something which could be the case for any of these benefits because a lot of them wouldn't work on-site anyway in the housing world we already have ways to deal with that and they're really good ways whereas in the other worlds yeah it's not very clear we have lots of kind of unsettled ways of spending money that is certainly not clear to me not that we waste it but

[54:01] it's it's nowhere near as clear I mean the other benefit that I think would be at the top of people's list and the community would be transportation but to be honest with you I have no idea how you quantify that and how you make that happen I mean other than cash what is somebody gonna do you know put in a rail line so it's kind of really hard for one project to do much in the realm of transportation and the last thing I'd say is some of these community benefits and the one that pops into my mind that I think is important to the community which is better design we should just require that I mean this is not some of these shouldn't be kind of trade offs we should just say you're gonna do that and I know we're working towards that and I'm fine with it but but but that's a kind of separate category just require it and I'm not suggesting beating up on

[55:00] people but just be as clear as we can and require it and and I think that would help us an awful lot with with some of this and the last thing I'd say FA are is you know said you almost got me talked into that if I think of the things that are the most obvious to people probably the two are height and in certain circumstances FA are that one's a little tougher and I think the first thing you'd have to do is remind everybody and counsel what the current rules are and I remember them for FA are increases kisses already certain benefits that are built-in thou shalt not get an extra point five unless thou does Visser VAT so they're kind of already a bunch of requirements now they may not be enough that's fine but it's not as if you get the extra if they are right now without doing something you've got it and it's only in certain zoning districts and you

[56:00] know on and on and on it's all very complicated as as we always make things so I yeah I mean for me I guess the first step would be I probably FA are insofar as we can define it almost certainly focusing on affordable housing for now and not worrying so much about it whether it's on-site or not we have even though we keep fighting this battle every couple of weeks we have learned repeatedly that getting cash in lieu gives us more units and disperses them more even though everybody seems to hate that it's better for the community last thing is just one more comment because I think we get confused on this I do too there's kind of a difference between what something costs the developer and what the value of the benefit is to the community and they're different and we shouldn't confuse them gyms absolutely right the development community is

[57:00] really smart and if there's a cheaper way to do it they'll do it fair enough but just because something might be cheaper doesn't mean it isn't more valuable to the community and we seem to get just all caught up in the oh my god there's all these greedy developers and they're getting away with something well yeah that may be true but on the other hand if what the community is getting is incredibly valuable to the community what's so wrong about that again that's a place for a housing is kind of the easiest I think the other ones get a little more tricky or something that might be frankly fairly inexpensive to a developer might be of great you did the community I won't weigh in on whether it's good or bad but I you know I don't don't tie yourself in knots over that Sam so I'm mostly in the place that I'd like to see if they are added just those two right now because that

[58:02] will keep it simple I Matt points out some of the complexity with bringing if they are in but that's definitely what you know it creates more impact when you have more floor area ratio just by its very nature with transportation and traffic and so on so I think it it's similar to height in that way because I will do the same thing generally so I would like to see that type in and I'm okay if we do either a very small subset of community benefit or if we phase it I mean I think that that's okay because the principles you'll have to come up with when you do it if you do it for one or two or three are the principles you'll use to bring other things in right so I could see there being a weighting where we wait you know different types of community benefit based on what we think the value is to the community and then the the quantity qualification Matt brings up a good point about value and cost but they can

[59:01] be related and so you could at the very least say you know the total amount spent on community benefit for relating it to height and floor area ratio will ultimately be determined by the planning board right but here's some guidelines anything you could do to kind of give people direction I mean I I find three easy types of community benefit to think about one is affordable housing one is surpassing the required energy codes I think in this community there's a lot of emphasis on on renewable energy and energy efficiency so I think that's one that you could look at it might actually be relatively easy to quantify and then the third one is publicly accessible spaces you know because in order to create those spaces the developer will have forgo a certain amount of building that they would otherwise probably do and so anyway those would be the three at the

[60:01] top of my list to be thinking about and I don't know if that's too much and it will put you past the deadline but for me those would be ones to think about first I generally would like to meet this deadline and I think you know by keeping it narrowly focused there's a shot at doing that I want to put out the good word though that community engagement is going to be a big deal for this and I think you've accurately pointed out that there will be a lot of public interest in this so doing anything to shortcut that process will just lead to community anger in the end and I think you know now you feel like the department's been doing good outreach I thought the comp plan process went very well and I feel like the community felt pretty engaged and so if you can do the same kinds of approach you don't need a steering committee or anything but the same kinds of outreach that you did for this for the comp plan and I think it'll be successful so I

[61:03] would just like to add that I do feel that the calibration piece is important I think it's very very important because otherwise we're gonna end up with as you said developers just paying the lowest amount that they can pay I would also say that to be careful as we move forward with in lieu piece because that's something that we're now trying to undo with the inclusionary housing so we want to do it so that we get it as close to right in terms of amounts so that we get what we want and it goes back to that value versus cost it may not cost very much but the value is higher vice versa and so we need to calibrate on those two pieces I would also like to add the FA are I think

[62:00] that's a pretty important vehicle or maybe I should put it this way add whatever vehicle you need to add in order to get us to one of the things that I've heard in the community is that we get bigger units in in the taller buildings and that's not really what we would like to see if we're looking for workforce housing housing so you know whatever vehicle it's likely FA are but whatever vehicle it takes to accomplish that I would pick that one and then finally also to Matt's point about ones that are permanent and easy to calibrate in order to make it to keep it simple and I like the idea of meeting the deadline and then just having some things in the wings that we can then approve later on so that's all I have to add ok ok good

[63:00] ok thanks Mary for that point I just want to agree with that that idea if we could get something that some vehicle that can be incentivize the larger units and incentivize the smaller ones I think that would be great I don't know if it fits into this I don't know if FA R is the vehicle that does that but I also love the idea ok if I may be so bold to try to sum up I think I think everybody still agrees portable housing that is the top some people and I think it might be a plurality is ok to add an addition to height FA are or other vehicles that get at the issue just named but understanding they need to keep it simple and it sounds like I think we are talking ourselves into coming up with principles such that you can we meet our deadlines on the height issue but we can also have a fuller conversation about

[64:00] community benefit and stage some others coming along and I'll just underscore what Matt and Mary said about permanent they need to be real and they need to be well calibrated so does anybody disagree with that summary ok is that helpful yes very ok alright ok with that hand over the microphone Jake with Kurt and Jay signature talking about 80 use good evening so the we've been wanting for I think at least a year to talk up to be in front of you to talk about ad use so we're really excited to be here tonight and I I believe it it was discussed prior to

[65:01] that as well on several occasions and we've also heard from the community that they want us to talk about 80 use both in the comp plan as well as emails and phone calls that we receive at the beginning of the year at the council retreat what we heard maybe not consistently but overall was that you wanted us to look at incremental changes to ad use which would allow for an increase in ad use generally within the city ad use are not a silver bullet to affordable housing but they're one of many tools when combined with other affordable housing approaches or regulations that are gonna together in combination have an impact on the percentage of affordable housing and diversity of housing that we want in

[66:01] the city so ad use do represent a type of diverse housing that many in the community have said that they would like to see more of so I'm gonna hand it over to JJ has done a lot of work on this and is really the sort of staff expert in the city on on ad use he's the senior planning within the division of housing good evening hope Kurt didn't oversell me on that one so I'm just gonna provide a little bit of background on sort of what ad yous are so the definition in the code is a separate and complete housekeeping unit it's it can be attached or detached from the primary residential unit but the key is that it's on a single-family lot the code defines three different types of accessory units I'm not going to talk about limited accessory units because there's only one in the city but this is

[67:00] gets really confusing for most people I've had a hard time with this so I found this very graphic so an accessory dwelling unit is typically within that home is it can either be in the Attic I'm in Boulder most typically it's in the basement an owner accessory unit can be either attached or detached it's detached is often associated with a garage if it's attached it just means it shares a wall with the primary structure so a little bit of history the first ordinance was adopted back in 1983 it was amended in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s it's been identified in the toolkit of housing options for the comprehensive housing strategy both 1999 and 2014 there was a great study that was done in 2012 there was a link in the memo has lots of great information about the number of accessory units in the city when they were built it has a survey results and

[68:00] our list of potential amendments are partially come from owners experiences has national best practices what are other cities doing and identifies this areas of a number of barriers to creating more of them in 2016 or with the community survey found that there was strong support for allowing accessory unit in some single film single-family neighborhoods and just to put all this in context as of January this year there are only 205 legal accessory units which is one-half of one percent of the housing stock do you know how many illegal yeah a few more so we I'm going to start and just go through the options are very quickly so the idea is what are some minor incremental changes that we can make and the first one has to do with the five-year requirement so a home must

[69:01] be 5 years old before it's eligible to have an accessory unit and the original intent was to make sure that it was for existing homeowners to remain in their homes but I think the the city had attitude has changed a bit and there's more openness to encouraging this as an additional housing type even in new construction how does that allow an existing owner to stay in their house is it actually Achieva the 5-year requirement yeah basically if the house has to be 5 years old so you basically you can't build it as part of new construction so you can't build an accessory dwelling unit with a brand new house you have to wait 5 years ok I still don't get why a chizel I know but

[70:00] so the idea is that you finish your basement you put a bedroom in a kitchen down there someone can live there and they're bringing additional income to you on a regular basis which allows you to pay for like increase property taxes if you are a senior right so unlike coops or wayward we're gonna displace a single family having somebody in your basement doesn't displace the single family so that's why I don't understand why we put that in to achieve that goal at all it's hard to understand maybe we should just remove it ok so the second one has to do with neighborhood notification which is a requirement for any accessory unit application and of course the intent was to provide transparency in the regulatory process however it creates a sometimes tense dynamic between neighbors and the owner and staff when staff has to explain that accessory dwelling units can be built by right and the neighbor has real no implement no real influence over the process so staff

[71:01] would propose potentially removing that requirement as well concentration probably a larger barrier the saturation rule no more than ten percent of the homes within 300 feet may have an accessory unit it's a little different for the different types of accessory units the intent was to prevent overabundance of these types of housing what staff would propose is increasing that potentially to 20 percent again in the goal of promoting additional accessory units in the city non-conforming structures are also considered as part of that saturation rule as well as mostly duplexes but also some apartments so again the idea was to prevent overabundance of non single-family homes so we would want to recognize that duplexes and these other types are very different and contributed to that diversity of housing in our city

[72:01] size size is probably a bigger barrier than I need the previous ones it limits the home size limits building coverage how much you can build on a lot and it limits the expansion of certain types of accessory units and additionally we have very detailed design requirements in the ordinance and all that was to ensure the new units are subordinate to the single-family home so what staff wants to look at is raising or removing or loosening some of these rules and it recognizing that the compatible development standards that were adopted after the accessory unit ordinance addresses a lot of these issues does that make sense okay parking so probably the biggest obstacle that we've heard from owners and and people trying to build these

[73:00] it's also probably the most controversial so who requires one additional off-street parking space the original intent of course reduce the impact of additional cars parked in the street the option we would propose removing that requirement three primary reasons we're not proposing to increase the occupancy limits as part of this effort so theoretically a single-family home and a home with an ad you would have could have the same number of automobiles Boulder is one of the few remaining cities with the requirement a lot of cities across the country started out with the parking requirement but that's one of the barriers that they have removed over time and based on recent council action it was not required for cooperative housing and then this came from the council agenda committee was to explore location specific rather than citywide implementation an example is the parking may be there may be parts of the city where we wouldn't want to waive the

[74:01] parking requirement and this could also be addressed as part of the area planning effort that will get discussed a little bit later tonight so those are the options are the clear CA C was just saying that we should note that this is an option we're not recommending it just because that's one of our on our menu is we can apply any of these things in different parts of the town as a pilot so that's just to clarify that sorry are you done almost okay just reiterating this is a very short effort so we said we would do this very quickly october/november a draft report in open house I think Susan Richard owned promised an open house at the retreat as early as January December January drafting an ordinance and going to Planning Board and then being back at Council in February March and then here are your specific questions in one way that a previous council agenda committee

[75:01] also suggested we frame this is are there any on this list that would not be considered incremental by council and therefore should not be part of our work plan okay clarifying questions if Mary we have Bob gin and do that thanks for that mr. Adu expert J in your presentation you were talking about changing the size of the mission for the ad use and currently it's a percentage of the main house correct correct did you or would you consider as part of the process just putting a flat square footage limit instead of variation by percentage we could but I think the idea is still that you want it subordinate to the primary

[76:00] structure and you may have homes that are only 1,200 square feet so for you but the flip side of that is that you have homes that are 5000 square feet right so and that's why I'm asking the question so you know if you would consider the flip side of that coin I think that would be that would address consideration of the flip side would address them well I guess we're not commenting yet so that was one question and then was there any consideration given to as we move forward in the process is you know corner Lots and how that extra area could maybe contribute to maybe another ad you right now I know some cities have the corner lot so I pay allowed to accessory unit I was I would argue that's probably not incremental okay okay and then permanent

[77:01] affordability did do you consider that piece of it we did we did some research Santa Cruz right now is really the only city that has any provision for permanent affordability and I haven't done the research and find out how it's been used but for example in 2016 they could get 14,000 dollars off their fees if they rent 2-0 to 50% am i I'm not sure how attractive that would be to a homeowner for just a little so I think there was like there was a 2008 report where there were maybe another city that had done that permanent affordability so you know I there that would be interesting to know and it's also challenging because these are rental units the accessory unit is always a rental and so this in the states

[78:01] prohibition against we're in control makes that challenging as well that's the way it would be deed restricted because then you don't have that right if well never mind and then I had another question and it just kind of flew out the other ear so I guess I'm done talk a little bit or understand a little bit more about your item a I see the general Rogers in the room I know that he J thanks for meeting with him and talking but from a customer perspective about how challenging our process is and I'm really happy to see that number on your list is simplifying our process you talk a little bit more about some of the things you're thinking of I know we're not just anything tonight but I like to know a little bit more about what you see our shortcomings or flaws in our process and how you would envision streamlining them well as a general and we spoke several months ago this effort was never really envisioned to look at the process per se

[79:02] I mean City Council could make that decision it was really focused on what in the code can we do to streamline approval and these are primarily deleting code we're not talking about adding code or having more complexity in Mike I haven't had that many conversations about how the process works and I'm not involved in it day to day so I'm probably not the best person to talk about it but I definitely have heard that's a concern that the general public has a very difficult time navigating our regulations and being willing to go to the make the time in the effort to actually go through the permitting process so I just suggest that that in addition to the substantive changes which I think we're heading down a good path we also look at process changes because this is not these are not developers right this is I mean our development process can be as complicated you want to make it because we have very sophisticated people with lawyers and architects involved but these are just asking

[80:00] questions all homeowners like us who are trying to get something done so I would suggest week we consider as improvement yeah yeah and then Andrew I've got several questions one is why do we have a separate definition of oau a to you that even you are confused with because I'm definitely confused with and I think we're the only city in the country that have that so why is that and would you consider simplifying that by just having one I identified that in my original list and we discussed it internally and it was deemed that was fairly complicated would that be you involve a complete rewrite of the code okay I cannot tell you the history of where that came from why I mean a lot of it and keep in mind this is sort of common with all jurisdictions throughout the country you know ad use back in the 1970s it was kind of a new thing was a little scary so they wanted it to write code for

[81:00] events of the worst case scenario so they made it overly complex and tried to define it and part of what we're trying to do is is simplify that but I think that would be sort of a next go around as you're writing it and so that brings up the question what is the next go-around and I appreciate the fact that you're trying to do something really quickly so I support that but what would be the next phase then to really clean this up and simplify it and make it two pages rather than 98 or whatever what do you want me answer well Charles may answer this as well but I know there's a general discussion around simplifying certain areas of the code generally and it may fall into that category as well okay can you address if you've looked at the roadblocks that were addressed in that survey which was quite good in 22 of and you know that report card from sideline org that kind of said these are

[82:01] the biggest roadblocks that we found across the country or in the Pacific Northwest and tried to address those things do you feel like you're addressing most of the the key issues to being successful I do I think this is a good package but I want to emphasize what Kurt said in the beginning this is not a silver bullet I mean cities have removed barriers and actually gone to the point of incentivizing them by waiving fees and they're now seeing a huge groundswell of ad use I mean you have to be motivated to actually build one of these that's true even in Portland yeah we just saw a Portland as one a day now a new license a day so it seems to be turning the corner there in Portland just a couple more have you looked at simplifying the rules for existing ad use because we've heard from existing owners who need to upgrade them and it's classified as new construction can you do something to enable them to get to the process quicker I think that is part of the

[83:02] process improvements it will be potentially yes okay excellent Carl's going to turn and then my final question is you're looking at changing the maximum square footage but if I remember correctly there was actually a minimum square footage and I was wondering if you were getting rid of that no I don't believe so because that's route why would we ever say you have to at least build this would it be a fire code building code requirement is the minimum okay I'd have to understand that a little bit more yep welcome back it's the same as standard residential construction okay but I really want to understand why would we ever tell someone you have to build at least this big it's basic life safety so a bedroom has to be 70 square feet they're actually not very onerous requirements but every bedroom in the city has to be

[84:01] 70 square feet at least okay I understand the egress windows but I'm not sure I understand minimum square footage but although I'll look into that later with you guys thank you very much Harry Potter's bedroom was in 70 square feet so I did this stairs let's say so I guess I I was I was understanding the ATU oh do you know all these acronym distinctions so you said there were no occupancy changes okay explain that I if there is a let's just take a home where the occupancy limit is 4 all right and you add an A to you is the occupancy limit of that home still 4th I'm looking at David that's correct so what is the benefit of I mean if

[85:03] you've got house of for unrelated people whether you have a sink in and a you know in a stove in the attic or in the basement what's what can you do with an Adu that you can't do with a home it is a home I think that the idea of an Adu is that you just add an kitchen essentially and you occupy it in the same way and frankly it allows you to more easily get to the maximum occupancy allowed by the zone and you know it is so this is just that for a to use the typical way that they're occupied is part of it is you know our occupancy regulations are a family plus two people well you either have the family in the unit or you're renting it to a family

[86:02] and then you use the one or two extra people in the ad you which is a small unit but I guess you know what the so right now in my home could I put a could I put a stove in my basement we have zoning regulations so if you wanted to do like multiple kitchens in a single-family home we have a process for approving that well you can't have an Adu because the concentration level in our neighborhood is too high I guess what I'm asking is if I always thought an a the human you get to add people and so if you can't add people what is it that's stopping somebody right now from adding an extra stove in their house and adding to borders rumors nothing that's a lot buyers owning so I mean it's just those

[87:02] almost the difference between an Adu and a single-family home a home with an Adu and a home with that and a to you is it really just I mean what's what's the difference is is that you're essentially creating two dwelling units within a house and you're still living with the same limitations that everybody else within the zoning district have to live with in terms of occupancy and then I think that it's Jay pointed out in his presentation there are a number of additional regulations that that he's proposing that we remove that were originally adopted to address a lot of those impacts so I guess in essence a lot of the proposed changes that are being discussed this evening are making it closer even closer to a single-family home just a just a clarifying question

[88:03] on that on that response so really what this does the then the difference between not having an aide to you and having a couple of orders and having an aide to you and a couple of orders is that you don't have to share the stove that's the only difference that's pretty much it and you have separate you know it reads like a duplex right it's to send two units with and structure I get I get the the you know you can have two different mailboxes I guess now right but other than that I mean there's nothing that prevents you in the city from from separating two parts of your house right there are but I mean I can say you know I can have a door that locks between two sides of the house right that's correct okay and so and I can you just told me I could put a stove in my basement or in my attic if I follow the rules and I

[89:02] could put a sink in this tub in the basement the attic of a follow the rules you can't build the kitchen you can actually we do have a regulation not if you're gonna rent it out yeah I was gonna say David you can you can if I mean if you have a single-family house and you want to build a fancy bar and something downstairs you can is but you have to say state that you're not going to rent it out if you're going to rent it out you have to get an Adu license oh that's the that's the answer is looking for if that's the case okay right so I think if I'm correct this is basically a mechanism if you don't want to have borders live with you but you want to have borders it's you know so you can have to create a separate and that's about what it does okay we have Matt and we're just doing questions and then we're getting on to input so Matt and then Aaron questions they're kind of dancing around the same issues because they're a little confusing but so Jan is right the naming it so it's taken me ten years to

[90:00] remember what the difference between a tu and au au is and I'm sure I'll forget here shortly can we like maybe call them internal accessory units and extra accessory units so you might have some chance of understanding what they are does everybody concur with that [Laughter] okay I mean I get this isn't so much but it is actually a question it was kind of asked I mean I'm looking at the code I guess I get what you can't just call them all the same because the external ones even if we simplify I'm assuming you would still say well have to be differences in sizes and placement and blah blah blah and internal and the code be real confusing if she then had a separated out anyway yeah ice we were making progress you just funded it no I so occupancy one other piece of

[91:02] occupancy that nobody's raised that the code seems to have I didn't know this until I just looked at it is is you can only have the way it's written here it can only be two unrelated or it could only be two people in the ADA you it's written in the memo it says they're gonna be a max of two people in the ad you is that correct I think that's correct well I asked that because that's a little different than two and related of course I mean it kind of solves the problem of you couldn't rented to a family of 12 which I assume is what we're trying to avoid so that kind of further limits it whether it's a internal or external aid to you but then the owner could live in the the accessory if the owner lives in the accessory and rents out the main is the still a limit of where the limits then I am completely lost as to what happens in those circumstances they typically

[92:01] typically what happens in that circumstance is that they're renting to a family so if you were a single or a couple and you want to live you want to downsize and move into the ad you they would typically market that to a faith they would typically market that to somebody who would need that amount of space and that would be a fan of it so the rule would still be the accessory unit is still the accessory unit there's only be two of you even if you're the owner yep that's correct and then the the bigger the main house whatever you want to call it yeah it's just a rental well I kind of asked that because of the question that Mary asked which I also have which is sizes I mean on large lots with big houses I was kind of thinking well you know who's gonna build a 2000 to 2500 square foot accessory unit if you gotta rent to two people but you can move into it and now you can rent your five thousand foot house out how is that useful to the

[93:01] community I mean this is where I also get lost how is that what problem is what problem are we solving there that we want to allow people to build such large things on their Lots clearly none of these are going to be even remotely affordable to anybody so what problem are we solving and then that's kind of the follow-up to Mary's question so I just leave that as a question if you don't have a size love it I don't know what problem we're solving the other question I've got I got a few others one is also on sizes there's a minimum lot size for kind of both of them but I guess my question is the a is that not solved by kind of which zoning districts these things are allowed and and B is it not additionally solved by all the compatible development rules we now have I mean if you really have a small a lot let's say a non-conforming lot you can

[94:00] have a real tough time I mean you could have one in your house you could have the inter and a lady you but you're gonna have a really tough time having an external one because you know you've used up your your coverage you used up something so I think that's I mean it's a question of if you thought about that or is that not is that not incremental enough is it just too much of a of a change to really bother with at this point so building coverage was included in the slide and I'm oh well but we still have the minimum lot sizes yeah that part I'm not Tyla Clara and have to look into more that's all but in terms of the size of the accessory unit I want to be clear we weren't proposing to eliminate the 1,000 square foot limit we were proposing to increase it from one third so it's 1,000 feet or one third increasing that to one half so whichever is smaller so you can't have a 5,000 square foot house and build take a look

[95:01] at what you did again it seemed to me that had opened that up but all right that's fine that's not our intent now okay do we have any sense have we done any research into who actually occupies the current legal 80s and overuse it's a little harder to get the illegal ones even though there's almost certainly more other than the legal ones so that's a question it doesn't have to be answered right this minute but I'm just curious what do we know about who's really in them I mean demographically or cost or something the 2012 survey the 2012 survey has a lot of great information talks about the current use is it rented you know who's in your household I'm trying to think I'd have to go back and okay no that's fine I there's a lot of them that might need an

[96:01] update I mean both it's just because prices have gone up 50 percent in Boulder since 2012 so the world is unfortunately more different than we'd like it to be from back then anyway that that would be helpful in terms of and so another thing I wonder about in terms of what I'm calling the external accessory units I one of the downsides I've always seen to them is they increase the property value and I'm wondering if we have any data on that we've actually had complaints from people and emails who said you know my neighbor built one of these things legal or illegal and it increased is there a property value and then of course the Assessor comes along it increases everybody's property value because that's the crazy way the Assessor works and that's that's a negative that's not a positive for Boulder so another question is do we have any information on how that might affect things I mean if you build a

[97:02] thousand square foot unit our property probably increases your property value pretty substantially which then has to tends to have spin-off effects in the surrounding properties so some information on that if you can get any relatively easily would be helpful again that question was triggered by some emails we've gone people who are unhappy about that so okay so what can i yeah just uh my experience in Portland with the accessory dwelling units it's not necessarily the neighbors problem property taxes but once you build that then the Assessor does come along and you end up paying significantly more I mean property taxes are higher in Portland but it almost wipes away the value of adding that accessory unit but the additional taxes you have to pay for it well that's part of the answer Chris our preppy taxes are a lot lower than well last question I've got is used to something about parking and how we don't

[98:00] need any parking requirements because doesn't change anything and I didn't get that I mean it theoretically doesn't in the sense that this kind of goes back to Andrews question of well yes right now somebody could have to as we put them so wonderfully borders in their house legally but the difference for the accessory unit is the chances of it being rented of course go up stupendously not very many people have two boarders in their house I would assume that if you go to the trouble of setting up at eighty you or Lau the odds go up a lot like close for a hundred percent that you're going to have it rented out so how does that not change parking so I believe I said the word theoretical as well okay okay basic principle is what I was trying to convey and then we're going to much more expeditiously give input on this okay

[99:02] just following up on the tax issue that we are the you know increased assessment and whatnot which sounds like it's undesirable from from the incentivization standpoint that's not a it's not a great thing and is it goes back to the issue of what what why do we have a distinction between and how a home with an Adu and a home with extra why don't we just allow or as consideration be given to the idea of allowing renting out too orders and adding a kitchen or closing off part of your house and adding a separate entrance but why does it have to go to do that why does it have to go through all the rigmarole of calling it an ad that's why I'm asking why do we have separate regimes basically which allow this taxation difference and various other things and creates all this confusion and so forth why don't just make it part of being a rental license for a home allowing you to subdivide your home in some way but not

[100:01] increasing your occupancy it's the d-word it increases density you can't do that it's the same density that's what they just told us it's no it's no different occupancy yeah yeah the difference is that very few people do the former and more people would do the latter okay you didn't get an answer I mean what's what's from the Planning Department or legal folks what what's the why the need for the difference hi Charles Ferro Community Planning and sustainability so I think the allotment to have an additional kitchen in your basement or your attic I think is to Matt's point and that if you do have a game room or you have a pool house you know we see a number of these applications all the

[101:00] time some people want a kosher kitchen to be separate from the regular day-to-day kitchen so I think though that's why that's provision is in place it was never set up to encourage those sorts of things being rented out although it happens part of the process involves the requirement to record a declaration of use so that it's transferred through the title so that it lives throughout the with the life of the property so that anybody who assumes that property and the future would know that you're not allowed to rent that out that that's not what that approval was for okay but why why not allow someone who rents their home to just put walls I mean you know if they follow the edu regulations you just incorporate those into the rental regulations for apple why do we have to go through this whole idea of a separate concept of an Adu I'll just take a crack at it I think it's just a policy consideration that

[102:00] you guys need to make in terms of you know when we went into ad use the first thing that you have to be thinking about is they are single-family zoning districts and when you put another dwelling unit some people might think of that home as a duplex and a duplex is not a use that's a lot in the zoning district so in terms of how you go about regulating it there's probably a lot of different ways of doing that and I don't know that any given way is right it's really just a matter of policy in terms of how you how you want to regulate in this community so I've just a thought on that that injured it's an interesting idea if you took that approach I think you'd get far more people renting out their homes like renting out to people in their homes so we could take that I don't think it'd be incremental approach it's a perfectly legitimate approach you just be incentive allowing people to create a lot more rentals so a rent a lot more people in their houses so as a City

[103:00] Council you could make that policy decision it would be kind of a big change okay fascinating unfortunately not what we're well I don't throw it out there but yeah you had a couple of questions did Thanks so question on zoning districts the ad use what certain districts are they allowed and I couldn't quite parse that out from the memo and didn't look at it myself do you mind if I take this one Jay yes even if you haven't memorized I actually probably do but I just want to talk a little bit about just in response to that just the difference between ad use and Oh a use and basically their zoning districts specific so ad use predominantly are permitted in the low-density residential zoning districts and they're also allowed in all of the estate residential districts as well when you get to Oh a use those were created in the late 1990s it came out of the down zoning basically of Whittier

[104:02] whittier was a neighborhood that throughout the 70s we spent a lot of time densifying and I think at some point the neighborhood said you guys have succeeded now it's time to knock it off so we we essentially at the request of the neighborhood down zone the neighborhood since then areas of most recently gas Grove asked for this zoning as well so one of the things that that you know Whittier was a lot of the medium density residential and high residential zoning we tried to preserve the density that we had there but also I think that they wanted to have an additional outlet for development one of the things that you notice about the Whittier neighborhood and some of the other neighborhoods that are close to downtown that also have this zoning is that there was a lot of house behind a house development so it was when a full sized house was built in the backyard

[105:02] one of the things that I think that the OAU standards that we developed in the late 90s were intended to do was to provide people in those zoning districts with another development option that wasn't a full house thank you for that background so my question was in the which zoning districts are a to use Aladdin spacer allowed in the low-density residential and residential estate and then the rural residential zoning districts are they allowed an RM x1 as well it was that was actually kind of where I was going so in our mx1 the memo attachment B which is I have a hard copy so I don't know where it appears in terms of PDF page number but it's attachment B it's about otherís pages in front at the bottom of the page there's a listing you know thanks you can do there called

[106:02] internal Oh a use so you can do an and basically an ad you within the confines of your existing home in our mhm so but not in okay so I guess the and then my next question is here is I didn't as far as I can tell harem x2 doesn't allow either types I'm just wondering I live at our mx2 seems like a reasonable place for an Adu why was that decision made or dude do we know is that something we might be open to changing is I we had discussed internally about do we want to expand it to additional zones and I think you know again back to what can we accomplish in a short period of time you know staffs recommendation was let's not mess with the zones okay thank you and then here item a here does that include the five year removing the five year change and the notice requirements yes and what about the not including non-conforming

[107:01] units in the maximum in the saturation count yes great thank you so I have a question about the question you understand your premise that we could do all of these within a short time frame that is your premise and that it wouldn't be too controversial okay so I think we were asking if okay maybe two so to me there's a big difference between do we think this is gonna be controversial yeah do we think we should do it well let me ask you another question do we think we should go to a public process with these on the menu and see what comes out the end I guess there's also different than what we all vote for these right so I think I'm just guessing we all know that this will be controversial and the question really should be is there anything we want assuming everybody wants to proceed with

[108:01] this is that a good assumption is there anybody that doesn't wait what's an oddly well I mean it to me it's it's I mean you you can't I mean maybe this is where you're going but you can't do well my question does everybody want to proceed with some fashion of this list is that a fair assumption yes No not you everybody but Andrew wants to proceed well because the this this is like a shallow in my view a very shallow approach that is is going to encounter a tremendous amount of pushback from the public and if you're going to get that why not go and really explore all the issues we've been we've been talking about I mean this is the cost-benefit analysis here doesn't doesn't work for me in terms of the capital of the political capital associated with this okay responses to that notion yeah I

[109:02] mean it really is driven by this this is where the public process would help and this is where some community planning might come in because I really think the topologies are important and the way people think about their neighborhoods are important and so on and so forth so my you know in thinking about location specific designations right that's when you would do something like that naturally because I think one of the things that happens and it gets right to andrew's point is we're trying to do something that changes stuff citywide and it's super complicated and it's based on zone district where zone districts similar zone districts in different parts of the city look different from each other and you know they function differently and so I guess I would put in I mean some of these might not be super controversial but some of them will be very controversial right so one thing we could do is focus on the the few that aren't going to be that controversial hear from the public and move forward with it but changing the concentration amount is going to be

[110:01] something that people are going to want to talk about and that's what might be controversial and you know I've got a bunch of questions about like the rest of you do but I'm not gonna bore us with them because I don't think the answers really determine anything we're going to do I mean one thing I would get rid of as part of all this is the idea that for an ad you the the license or the permit goes with the person the owner and not the property I mean that could lead to crazy outcomes right where you know the person on the waiting list applies because the person moving in doesn't renew and then you know the person who just moved in who maybe didn't understand what they were getting themselves into is supposed to tear out their a to you because the person on the waiting list took it so something like that I could see getting rid of because that's only gonna help people out but these other things they're different and they're not being done in a way that I can gives locations sensitive okay so thoughts thoughts on this notion

[111:04] of how best to proceed whether we want to do a deep dive because we're gonna it's gonna be controversial whether we want to split these into really simple versus okay I tend to agree with Andrew if we're gonna expend political capital I mean we found this out with the co-op's we expended a lot of political capital or you know a very small amount of people that would benefit so I think that what we want to do is make sure that if we're going to expend that that we do it the best that we can and I think that one of the things that would really add to the appeal of allowing more ad use would be to add an incentive for permanent affordability because that's really what's going to make have an impact over time because over time ad use are just gonna get just as expensive

[112:01] rentals as rentals as anything else so I would explore consider exploring an incentive for creating permanent affordability however you get around the the laws and then the the other thing that you mentioned was that in the in the survey that was done for the comp plan there was acceptability in some neighborhoods more than others and perhaps you know to Sam's point explore those neighborhoods first and you know start there okay I have Aaron Matt Jan Sam so I'm looking forward to our meeting with about the with the public process working group and exploring all those concepts in depth but preliminary lis if that's word one of the ideas I came away with from that reading that report was that people were looking for authentic engagement

[113:01] from City Council and really listening to residents and taking their concerns and making them a meaningful part of the process and so I think the fundamental point that we're getting at here which is that hey maybe we can bite off the easy things now and then maybe we do a deep dive later we don't have to make the decision ourselves about which ones are the easy ones and which ones require the deep dive we can reach out to the public and look to them for the information about that because for example I'm looking I'm thinking gosh removing the parking requirements gonna really make people upset the 10% concentration doesn't seem like that big a deal I think the same disagreed with that but I don't think we really know so that that would be my proposal has let's put together a relative you know put these things together as some itemized things and go out to the public and say we're really interested we want to do something relatively quick relatively easy but only on the things that have broad agreement and see what people say Matt good luck Karen but okay so my two

[114:03] comments all right I don't totally disagree with Andrew I mean I think actually it's the 10% concentration with another 300-foot radius that's the key to what you're saying danger to a large extent I mean if you got rid of the concentration and the radius requirement just said you know what if you want to do it you can do it that's kind of where you're at so the question is what is the scope of B I mean it's the scope of be a small change oh we'll make it 12% we'll make it within a 500-foot radius or is the scope of B anything goes you get rid of it and you know what if you meet all the other criteria of which there are many you can do it and it's not about concentration and it's not whoever gets there first gets to two on the block and everybody else has to wait 30 years before they get a chance which is awfully arbitrary

[115:00] so what do you think the scope of be is have you thought about that so we propose it's changing from 10 percent to 20 percent and that's about as far as you think that would that is what we would consider incremental so you're basically doubling the number potentially yeah potentially well I mean I think that's a that to me is a kind of fundamental question of what if you go out to the public and you say all of these are up for grabs you might get one response if you go out and you say these can all be tweaked with in some pretty narrow ranges you might get some very different public process and and outcomes and I don't have a great suggestion on Adam just saying those are very different feeling to me as to how you structure how you what you what you say you're going to do and then of course if you say you're gonna keep it within some limits don't come back later and you know renege on that you're gonna have to live up to the limitations the only other thing in Sandoz I'll say this

[116:01] is no this is not a sub community issue that is like the wrong scale by a factor of maybe a thousand I have a problem even with location specific but you guys can work on that you know if this is really beneficial to the community you shouldn't let certain neighborhoods opt out it would be like allowing a neighborhood to opt out of affordable housing gee we don't like affordable housing our neighborhood just took a vote we don't really want any affordable housing in our neighborhood we don't really want any affordable housing in our sub community hey you should listen to us you know I don't think you would I don't think you should and if this is beneficial the same applies if you really believe it's beneficial people shouldn't be able opt out because they don't wanna add a density in the neighborhood or they don't want those people living in their neighborhood anyway so he also I think try to define

[117:03] that a bit before you go out there because that also will have a big impact on the type of response you're going to get from people jab Jim Sam Andrew Mary and keep in mind what we're interested is not your opinions on whether you like this stuff but whether we're gonna bite off a chunk of this all of it none of it or something else okay Jim okay market across the country for three years now particularly those who are now being more successful like Portland [Music] applications for 80 years so I mean we've got the most obtuse regulations right now so to me these are

[118:01] a great way to bite off and make some progress towards something that can work and can provide housing which again is our number one objective so I think they've picked five things that they can execute I I personally don't think we should look at Yun with Matt on that one because I have not seen another city that has said you can have it in one region not another so that would be a working-class kind of performance area for Boulder so I think that we should go with what they've recommended knowing that in another year or a year and a half we'll say oh well we've only created that so let's take the next tranche trying to make it more successful and one more comment and that is that the survey that we did the 2012 survey which I thought was quite good I remember one of the questions asked what do your neighbors think and I think the most prevalent answer was they don't

[119:01] even know I have one and that is also consistent across the country so what cities always worry about are things that were worried about and they never come out as being legitimate concerns it just doesn't happen so I think it might not be as politically risky as we think and we had 62% who supported it in in the motor belly compliance survey so I think generally people do support this one server it comes as no surprise that I would disagree with Matt on this one I was not talking about a neighborhood level skirmish on what we would do in each sub community it would be something where you're looking more broadly to hear how people in that sub community would feel about is it ten percent is it fifteen percent is a twenty percent do they like you know the way it's being done would they like more then another

[120:00] part of the city would it's not and this I am gonna go back to Mary and say we're gonna do this right we're gonna talk about affordability at the same time you know we're gonna use and that gets back to Matt's point about too much value you know you add the second dwelling unit you get more value well if that second dwelling unit is permanently affordable it will have both different taxing implications and it will have you know permanent affordability for the residents so I think that is really a key part to make these work well and I I'm just gonna keep saying sub Community Planning would help with this location specific I thought they said something about paying attention in the the survey report in 2012 I thought they also said something about neighborhood character you know and having different regulations for different types of areas so anyway what would I be interested in here so simplifying current regulations sure modifying the 10% concentration I'd like to hear from the public modifying the

[121:01] size limit I think that could be okay but I'd love to hear from the public removing the parking requirement loved hear from the public and then exploring location specific implementation I'm in favor that I'm largely aligned with Sam on this it shouldn't be surprising because we've he and I have talked about this numerous times I really think that and that's why I you know again I think this sort of this to me is a shallow one-size-fits-all approach that's gonna as I said before we're gonna get a lot of pushback from the community for not much benefit and then and the reason we're gonna get a lot of pushback is because it's one size fits all and and there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about what a to use are and I don't think you're going to be able we saw this with coops you know it's just people people misunderstand and they will continue to misunderstand and and there are real concerns and parts of the community I

[122:00] take you know let's just use the obvious example it's what I use often but is that is are we out to create more student housing and there's a lot of people in the community think less the university's job and every time we create student housing even if we created an apportion of a home do we actually take that away from a single-family home use you know just we've got an email today or at least some of us did about how a tenth Street where I used to live between college and nuclear has now lost three more single family homes to investment properties in the past a couple of months here and to address Jan's point I mean Portland the sort of shining star in terms of a to use it has no university to speak of and we learned that on our trip I mean Portland does not have the university student investment property problem or issue I guess just to address what they have a great University they do but they don't have this yeah yeah understood because

[123:02] I'm sure they watched generally so the idea to that I've heard you say this before that you know we're allowing neighborhoods to opt out and you for it makes it sound like we're forcing something on people that we that they don't want and therefore if we let one neighborhood opt out then all of a sudden they get some benefit that we forced something on the other I don't see this I may be wrong but the way this has been sold to me is that that people want this and if we're going to do it for them because they want it not because we're cramming it down the citizens throats and if we're cramming it down the citizens throats I think we need to go through a heck of a lot more public process than some sort of incremental idea here and that's why again I think it's neighborhood specific I can guarantee you that that the neighbors on the hill who are families at least the

[124:02] way they understand ad use right now probably don't want this and so are you going to force something on them they're gonna see it that way other neighborhoods lisa has used her example of her neighborhood for example would like to see this and so why do we do a one-size-fits-all approach when and we prevent the folks that want it from getting it because there's other parts of the community that don't think it's right for their neighborhood and there's good reason because there are different types of people that live in various neighborhoods I'm getting there and so anyway again I think the sub community approaches the way to do this go deep dive with each sub community and address it that way and finally I think Sam was right that the 62% figure was and you I think you put it up on the screen with support in some areas it's not 62% support one size fits all 80 years so

[125:00] just so I understand you're saying don't do this do it do this when you do a sub area plan correct so it's really it's it's it's a in the context of sub community planning now so don't even do a just I just we have Mary so I wanted to go back to Erin's comment about the public participation working group and the top recommendation or at least the first recommendation in that report was define the problem and I think that that would be real important to do in this case and what's the problem we're trying to solve start there and and I think that that would tell us a lot when we do our outreach and trying to just defining the problem so okay I want to push you so your answer to this question is do it let's start with a survey or what are you saying oh don't do it at all

[126:02] I'm okay I'm not finding any list how could humblest I think simplifying the regulations is is fine the concentration the size limit and the parking requirement are I'm with Sam asked you know I'd like to hear from the public and then exploring the location specific implementation I think is important and sub Community Planning is the way to do it Aaron and then we are we are slowly getting way behind so we'll see what we can consensus applies here just to add to my previous comments I am in favor of moving for that wasn't totally clear but just on on II I think the location specific implementation I mean maybe some of that but if we wait to do a full sub community plan to allow a to use in different parts of the city will be

[127:00] waiting for years or even decades so I'm not in favor of waiting to implement Adu changes until we do full sub community plans but if there is some geographical aspect to the project we could consider that you know to that point I think there might be neighborhoods that would come forward and say yeah within this boundary we agreed that we couldn't the only thing that I found out is though what does it mean for a neighborhood to come forward um yeah well yeah and but I would rather than say well we'll allow it in you know one twentieth of the city or fiftieth of the city I'd say well if there are certain areas of the city that maybe are under pressure that maybe we don't do it or we do a little differently fine but I would go for bigger and so that there's that I just wanted to raise one very specific issue we got an email a number of months ago from a woman who's a part of a deed restriction program that was a temporary program but it didn't allow the creation of a to use and in her single-family home I just want to put out there that I'd be

[128:00] interested in hearing if maybe as part of this process we could help people in that narrow situation out so just put that out there may be something to look into okay I don't know sir like waiting you oh yes and I think Darrin's point I think on he what I would do is we rather than trying to build it from the ground up and trying to survey each neighborhood or 60 or 80 neighborhoods and saying do you want it you want it because even with the neighborhoods we're gonna get differences of opinion I think to Andrews point if there's a specific reason for us to exclude a neighborhood maybe the hills one of it maybe there's a small handful others I would take it from the top down in other words I would start off on the assumption that it would be citywide and if there are specific policy reasons to exclude certain neighborhoods perhaps we exclude them but the assumption is this would cover 80 90 maybe upwards of 100 percent of the community but otherwise I'm happy with where you get hidden I just want to clarify my comment about sub Community

[129:00] Planning is not to delay common-sense regulation changes so we have some community plans in place that's not at all what I'm saying I'm just saying this conversation and the differences that we'll hear from different parts of the community reflect why having those in place would ultimately be a good thing so like like I said I listed specific examples of stuff I think we should change like the Adu permitting process is one when the house sells a absolutely for another and then all I said subsequent to that was I'd like to hear from the public if we're gonna do these other ones BCD deserve public input even if we do some that citywide okay I'm not sure that I have a sense of this a seems to represent a very small number of things other than a couple people who don't think it's worthwhile it it it sounds like we could proceed with those I think but that's pretty minor stuff

[130:03] right I think I think actually it the way it's summarized makes it sound bigger than it actually is it's just week a few things and then what I get from people and I agree a B C and D are gonna be big more controversy or more robust discussion so if we're gonna do it I think we need to just know that sure people said they want to hear from the public and I don't know what that means because no matter what we're gonna hear from the public so I'm not sure from a process standpoint what that means other than is the only one you can do without a heck of a lot of controversy this I think we're pretty clear on and the rest will be more robust and some people think it should happen citywide in people and neighborhoods will tell us but not here for these policy reasons or the inverse which is do it here to start out that's not very good direction so I guess I'm

[131:00] get a sense from us in the scheme of things do we think it's this body of work is important to pursue it's just going to be a harder work then and if it's okay if I can ELISA I called her before the meeting and she said she wants to have the discussion and that she wants to hear from the public I didn't go through each one of these but I think she would probably agree with your summary which is she wants to talk about it but I'm sure she'll want to involve the public and anything that's really truly simple we should just go ahead and do like a or changing the ATU licensing or something like that so anyway she I spoke with her right before and she sends her regards yeah and I've got yeah I've been emailing on the subject too and I know she strongly feels with respect to e okay had one thing in Mary actually goes back to your question which is what problem we're trying to solve I mean I am assuming that people

[132:02] are assuming that the problem we're trying to solve is a more affordable housing and that kind of goes back to to me you know sizes of units and are they permanent affordable oh no no no no no which actually aren't some of that isn't quite on this list frankly but I think the question Suzanne you're asking which really does need to be asked and I don't know how the heck even I would answer it is there's lots of ways to think about providing more affordable housing in the community some were painful than others say any time you deal with land use regular Asians the painful needle spikes given that we can only take on not very many of them at a time like maybe one or two is this one of the most important ones for the next year plus because I think that's really the question of all the possible tools all of which are

[133:01] controversial is this the one where you want our staff to spend a lot of time on in the theory that the problem we're solving is some more affordable housing and I don't know the answer it kind of depends on well how much affordable housing do you think you're gonna get out of this anyway and how affordable is it gonna be you know if you knew you would get a lot and you knew it would really be affordable that may be worth it if you think you're gonna get a hundred units and half of them aren't going to be particularly affordable that's a lot of work that's been getting 50 nominally affordable units in the city surely we could spend a year's worth of staff time doing something a little more productive I think that's really the key question and I think it's a really tough one to answer right now frankly okay so wait was that your hand up are you gonna answer that question because I was gonna try to summarize where I think we are go ahead I think

[134:03] Kurt and his team have done have come up with some ideas that they think they can do relatively simple based on the knowledge that they have in the study that they've done and you know we do have generally good support for this this is development that's done by people as opposed to developers and I think Boulder people are going to be more supportive of that supply and demand does exist in the housing world and if you put rental units out in the market it's going to help with prices I mean I don't want to go into the discussion of permanently affordable because these are rentals and the homeowner owns it so I don't really know you do that but I really do believe this is something that the team feels like they can do to take a bite out of this and that it will provide which we need [Music] so so whatever a student or two blends

[135:00] in it it's they need help to students on this so trying to show some progress towards reasonable so Jay and I just detest pushing so you would keep I don't I put words in your mouth you'd keep this scope fairly constrained so you could get done reasonably quickly and you get something out of it presumably and then you see what's next that's what I've seen other communities do that the city has to invest individuals invest

[136:04] [Music] some sort of return so yes that's my recommendation this is something that can help us with some of these key decision points and show some progress towards housing okay to continue what we were afraid was going to happen now this is a good summary Matt and and I support that I just want to say in terms of the complexity side I think what staff has said is that these are low complexity changes from a land use code perspective so that well we may get a lot of input from the public I don't think that this is a complex scope in terms of staff time which is why I'll go back to my reaching out to the community and find and respond to them see what they think and then respond accordingly and we want to scale way back we scale way back into it feels like this is pretty doable at this scope then then great I

[137:00] really liked what Mary said about stating the problem and thanks for bringing that up and just as we is we do that part of the issue here is about providing housing types so it's not just affordable housing but housing options like for multi-generational living so I want to get that into the problem statement if we formulate one what you think we should okay so if it sounds like we would like to proceed in some fashion on ad use we think I believe that only a is going to be simple I think there is some appetite if I'm picking up to do a more robust citizen process starting with defining the problem I also heard if we're gonna go that we're gonna spend some political capital that we all acknowledge this I'm not sure the question whether this would be the next biggest thing we would do is the question we're supposed to get at at the end of the night so but tentatively

[138:01] that there's some appetite to do this a lot of public engagement to find out this I also think adding this idea about permanent affordability as something as to exploit because as long as we're going to spend some capital we might as well see about that I also think how you clear how you these as issues or solutions and whether it's 10 percent to 20 percent or whether it's do you want to change this you'll get very different answers so I think tentatively the only thing I'm not clear about is do we just want to say yeah I'll go ahead and do a long process for the rest of it or do it altogether while you're thinking about everything else can I put in a pitch for what I was saying before you go see how this gets received and then as you do that you're into a full public process a

[139:00] view once you start great how do we we don't have an easy way to find out what everybody thinks the first we have to explain ad and where they're at and blah blah blah and then we're into the process right so oh yes okay so you say do it all together then okay is that just go ahead and say we're gonna bite this off and it's gonna be bigger than you think okay sounds it simply I think that's where we're at okay I don't know if that's all thank you I think that's also in line with what the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan told us as well all right does everybody know we are now full on 45 minutes behind which is okay this is important but just pace yourself okay are you ready to move on yeah okay

[140:06] so I think we can hopefully make up some time here and our goal is to reserve a little time at the end to just check back with you on the big picture as you mentioned I'm going to do a quick introduction to the area plans sub community peace and then hand it over to Caitlin who will explain the Alpine balsam process that we're proposing so of course as you know during the comprehensive plan update we heard a fair amount of interest from the community from you all from the board about doing more granular level planning and we have we also have the policy policies and direction in the plan to do area plans area plans that are done with residents with neighbors with businesses with landowners and so forth working together to identify visions goals actions for the plan and so the the comprehensive plan as it's been updated does carry forward that current focus on

[141:01] area planning and includes criteria for how we do that it identifies and it actually expands the criteria this time around to include some of the ideas around identifying community benefits and so on we did of course a fair amount of planning at the sub community level to hear people about surveys and so on so the action plan also includes several items around sub community and area planning including some ideas around neighborhood planning and residential infill pilot which we can touch on when we get to that part of the segment but the big area focused and the work that we're really doing this year and and next will be focused around the Alpine balsam community site the site that we currently own now and potentially some of the sites nearby including the county owns site and you'll hear a bit about that you approved the vision plan for the Alpine balsam site just a couple

[142:00] months ago in June and that's a foundation we see that as a foundation and ultimately a component of the area plan that's going to be developed so there's a lot of good direction in there and so certainly if you have broader direction around area planning and priorities we might hear from you about that in the latter part of the the session I'm gonna at this point hand it over to Katelyn who will give you this description of the Alpine balsam Area Plan process that we're proposing for the year and a half or so coming up Thank You Leslie all right so this is the question that we'll come back to and before I talk about where we're going I'll talk a little bit about where we've been which Leslie just touched on but you guys you can skip a lot of this we just went over this so with the vision plan under our belt we're now in the area planning process which will then lead to the next step of architectural design constructions with things

[143:00] happening on this site and the scope for this process three cornerstones of what we're going to be doing or the area plan coordination with related projects and efforts and innovative and transparent community engagement and the basic components a very plan process which familiar with things like land use urban design guidelines connections plans this area plan will also include financing strategies for the site and there are numerous projects going on in the city that all are related and this includes what will become the site design for this parcel the planning efforts in the Civic area East bookend and we have facilities planning happening on both the city and county levels and the cornerstone of innovative and transparent community engagement so the vision plan spoke to community engagement as some of our key performance guidelines for the plan we

[144:01] have the public participation working group final report and we'll get into next steps about a questionnaire this fall to the community about how they would like to be engaged in the process and we'll be coming back to you with a draft community engagement plan for feedback so when we come back to you for that that'll be at our generous study session with these other things that we'll be coming back with defining the boundaries our detailed scope convening agent plan and confirming reuse options for the medical pavilion building which is following up from our conversations with you earlier this year else we put the question wow that was quick so when we did we just went over this so probably not a lot of questions are there people in agreement anybody want to add some at one point I just went to mayor's innovation project conference

[145:02] was really good and there's a lot of really interesting community financing options out there where citizens can buy bonds whether withing social impact financing like all really cool stuff and I glad that you've included that and would love for us to all sort of increase our community what's it literacy on these options because I think this would be a wonderful place to try some of that out so yeah no this is all right I just have one quick comment that will be ignored but that's alright I'll provide out there anyway which is I mean I absolutely agree that this there needs to be some area planning here because there's gonna be some significant change but I also think it's incredibly important for the entire community to be involved in this when we do big projects like this this really is owned by the entire community I mean if you look at what we're trying to

[146:00] accomplish here we're trying to accomplish things like you know a place for city employees to work that's a lot more effective and a lot more efficient we're trying to accomplish I assume a bunch of affordable housing we're trying to accomplish some sort of public public-private partnership that makes this affordable those are community level City level goals and yes the impacts such as they are will be somewhat more heavily felt on the immediately surrounding area and folks in the immediate area will certainly come out and no doubt will populate will be ninety percent of the people who come to the forums and that's fine I have no trouble with that but I really hope we reach out to everybody and not see this as well it's not Alpine emboss some Broadway and so those people who live there and who work there own property there well they just get to decide you know hey in three months I am thank goodness gonna be just a regular old

[147:00] random citizen and I live in southeast Boulder and all those goals I just stated it really important to me and I care about them a lot and I think my voice should be just as important to somebody who lives two blocks away when it comes to accomplishing those goals so to me that's true for any of these kind of mega projects that have what I would consider to be citywide goals as opposed to you know a single building somewhere that isn't really a citywide type of project but if this isn't a citywide type of project that's are really hard for me to know what might be given what types of problems and concerns it is supposed to help solve or mitigate or deal with in the community so that's that's my one thing but otherwise though you're absolute on the right track I mean I think you've got the right types of concerns enumerated and and it'll be a really interesting process

[148:01] others say I'm in the main yeah we did just see this so I don't have a lot to add I I think once this is done and once the Broadway corridor study is done including the Irish and balsam you know because I know that there could be some movement here with Irish and balsam depending on what we do with the county at the Alpine and awesome site so I've been Irish and Broadway I really think it forms the basis of a sub community plan I mean I really do think you've done some of the hardest work and what's left is like the shopping centers and what could happen in the neighborhoods so at the end of this process I want to think about how this could relate to doing a sub community plan for alcohol in north central Boulder it's the central Boulder got divided during the comp plan process and I think all this good work that's going to go in and stuff that is foundational and it can then work to form the basis of something

[149:01] bigger very I didn't have my hand race I don't have anything to handle I agree with what's been said anybody else have anything to add okay what you can't sense is the enthusiasm we have for what you're doing feels like we just went through all this and those people are stoked so this is great so thank you for that and you're enthusiastic for that too right okay well what that will carry you on to the last item which is just a summary of the action plan itself and the posters that you see on the wall and you also have a bit of a handout that we thought would maybe be easier than flipping through the the memo we did reach out to you in advance of this meeting and we got a 44 percent response rate well 50% of those of you in the room so so we think that was a pretty good

[150:01] sample of where you might lie in terms of moving some of these things around in priorities and maybe a good starting point for discussion but I thought I'd just use the posters on the wall to kind of explain what the action plan says and then where we might be able to move some things around to reflect your priorities and as Jim said the action plan is a part of the major update that we do you adopt it we'll bring it back to you September 5th but you will have chances to revisit it if you'd like but we want to make sure that we basically have this pretty close to being right and the good news is none of you said add a whole bunch of other things to it and we didn't really hear you know the folks that you heard from from from you all so far council members who have given us some advance feedback there may be others in the room who have different thoughts and we wouldn't preclude those of course but there seems to be some general general input around the idea

[151:00] that this is basically the right things that we should look at and then some different ideas about how to prioritize these things so really what we like from you tonight if we can is this question about do you agree with with the identified near and midterm priorities especially the near term priorities we have five things on the list three of which you spent a fair amount of time talking about tonight and and and whether or not there are any additional items that should move from the mid term list to the near term list we heard from at least one of you that nope that's those are the right things we heard from a couple of you that you'd like to see neighborhood planning and infill pilot project on the near term list we heard from one of you that you'd like to see 55th and Arapaho planning on that list we also heard from a couple of you about the sub community benefit item and of

[152:00] course you talked about that a fair amount earlier and we got some really good and put her out around that and then one of you also would like to see the Teva item move a little bit on the list other than that there were a few things that actually showed up as being potentially moveable to the longer term action item list and maybe with that I'll just be quiet and see what additional feedback you have and those of you who gave us some advance feedback were those of you who didn't that would be great yeah let's do just a few questions good I have one the third item down neighborhood plan residential infill pilot project is that a specific neighborhood or is that it no so the comprehensive plan identifies basically some new criteria for self selecting neighborhood that would like to come in and work with the city to do some work and there's their criteria

[153:00] that are set in the plan about what the outcomes of that might include and so the question that we would have to you is is that something that you'd like us to start advancing and working with the community at large to then open it up for some applications for neighborhoods Thanks one question yeah enhanced community benefit that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people does that include and I don't remember we're on earth we left this does that include things like requiring additional benefit for up zoning as an example because we talked about that quite a bit right now our code is anything kind of woefully lacking and I've also mentioned things like minimum density zoning but but there's lots of ways to yeah get some is that in your mind in that bucket it is in that bucket and it's also the broader list of the items that were

[154:02] originally generated in the planning board matrix that then landed in the policy in the plan that spell out the types of things that could be included in that can I follow up on that sure hmm and then I have a question would that also include some broader revisions to the site review criteria that aren't tied directly to community benefit we've been talking about that idea for years and I know it's it made it on the action list somewhere and I think that probably has yet to be defined but yes it could include that you know if it moves into the near term list we have to talk some more probably about what that might entail and how complicated it is if it's in the mid term list we probably have a little time to still define exactly what the scope might look like are you thinking of things like yeah discussions we've had about kind of incident we currently we seem to somewhat accidentally incentivize larger units over smaller units I think it's a

[155:00] little bit more in the land use code I'm thinking about like wherever the word minimize appears rises up in knots from the evaluated project or things like that I think we just talked about and we we just kind of talked about it as a first item it's part of the first item tonight but I guess I would put an asterisk I would like a street if except we can have a no regrets like let's change that soon because we're not getting what we want so depending on whether we covered that under community benefit or not cuz we talked about that I'm just gonna offer that but I guess I have another question and that is and maybe this is a I didn't go to the planning board so maybe this I should know this is it site review where people

[156:02] say hey we're gonna build say for lack of a better example a theater so our building needs to be a certain density or height and then they don't have C or maybe whatever any how is that under type review so I was so site plan review criteria that's the most unsexy things that are about to come out of my mouth and review criteria and you staple review so both of those you know come up periodically at the retreat and then they always get prioritized really low and those too and then the the land use for eggs how things are dwelling units per acre right or those three different things are super unsexy they don't get headlines and they're things that really impact how things go in the community so I would like those captured as a bullet point up here so

[157:01] that we can think about prioritizing them because we need to have them top of mind because yes the theater example is site plan review criteria use table review would be you know do we want to allow some mixed use in areas that are currently all industrial and then a third one is I'm gonna lose track of this one oh the dwelling units per acre right so anyway I think those are all worthy of our attention and the comp plan action plan is a place where that might actually occur well in Sam I do hope you put up zoning in there but I without trying to make enhance community benefits such a huge thing that it never gets done I mean I think it would be helpful if staff made a list of all those things the stuff Sam mentioned and some other ideas and and then maybe council tried to figure out which ones of those and you figured out which ones of those could be accomplished and whatever piece of time you've set aside for this I to me they're all part of

[158:01] community benefit I mean this is the problem with all of the examples you gave is we have a code right now that doesn't provide the outcomes that we would like I mean not paying anybody's fault the world's changed and we haven't quite kept up with some of the changes and so if you want some additional benefits out of your land use code what do you have to change to get those community benefit we did just talk about and some of that we talked about principles so we can stage but these other things what yeah some of these other things would actually be in the list of ongoing and other land use code amend I mean things like use table that Sam mentioned have come up again and again especially in conversations with planning board and there is a pretty long list of those things that exists already so one of the things that we could do with you over the next few months is revisit that list and give you

[159:01] a chance to go through the list again and reprioritize and see if there are other things on it that then you know then we could figure out where they might fit within this overall the plan but yeah a lot of those things have been identified time and time again they've been they've been put on that list we have Mary and then Jim I think the point you were trying to make Susan was that to the extent that the community benefit analysis that we talked about as the first part of the evening to the extent that it affects other pieces of what Sam just talked about we should apply what we learned from that community benefit and make sure that if it can be addressed sooner because we learned something from that process then yeah I mean we heard also that we probably will

[160:01] be having some of those conversations during that process but we may just not be able to commit to completing the effort by July but if we can capture as much feedback and input during you know the months that we're working on the height code issue and then feed that into something that maybe takes a little bit longer to complete that may help us get there okay we have Jan Erin I I wanted to ask just one question sorry which is under we list all these centers under prioritize future area plans yeah which I don't think of centers as area plans but anyhow House come places I don't pause thank you isn't on that list as the one that most needs it yes very good question so two two reasons one is it didn't show up really

[161:02] highly in the last survey that we did I think it actually did in the earlier survey we also did some planning work around it about what eight six eight years ago and we weren't able to progress forward with it because of the land land ownership constraints in that area Jane's nodding she was here I was not so or David may remember that but so that's part of the reason we've we've done some work around that some others of you in the room may recall that but certainly if it's something that you're interested in taking a look at again and we may be able to build from what we know from before you know well it's been a little while if we ever get to those I would I'll just note that I think all those other ones are fairly well functioning could be better but that one could be at the top of my list I'll just sort it out there okay we have Jan and then Erin I don't know the details what makes things

[162:02] difficult and what not I had on my list the use table things I've talked about this before it strikes me that we talked about $650,000 bathrooms and library part of that cost is our process and how much it costs someone through the process of building something whether that be us or someone else and I always wonder if we could simplify our code or use tables or whatever else with Six Sigma processes or whatever if that wouldn't help take the cost out of building for everyone including us and is that a process that if we took that on first would that help everything else get streamlined and I don't know the answer to that but I'd really like you to look at that Jim giving the we've doubled the staff in planning and

[163:00] development in ten years and I think sometimes when we add people were covering up for problems coming up for process problems and maybe you know [Music] maybe it's time to take a step back and say what can we do to simplify all this and make life easier for everyone and then there's a part B to this which is I have heard complaints about what's happening at the front desk with particularly just homeowners who want to add a garage or staircase or something like that [Music] Architects or I have to have someone help me with this process so I'd really like you to look at to support regular residents through the city so again to take the cost out for them and then I had a third but I don't remember so I

[164:11] guess all I'm saying is I know it's not on the list but maybe it's something that if you we did put it on the list it would it would help with everything else I don't know the answer to that but I think it's worth you looking at Jim in your new role Erin so just as a comment following up from my earlier question that I like the idea of getting to the enhanced community benefit as a future stage to the height discussion they were having tonight you know we're talking about attacking heightened affordable housing and then community benefit around height and then that can roll into the discussion around the site review criteria and I would love as part of that to to take a crack at some some modifications to the site review criteria we don't have to revise them from scratch which would be a huge project but staff could bring forward at the same time some little problem areas with suggestions for changes because I'd

[165:02] love to see that get done something small and bite off a ball sooner rather than later so we've been talking about it for years and the other one that I'll just say on this is I really like the idea of enabling the neighborhood pilot project sooner rather than later because in and of itself it won't actually do anything it will only create a framework for then people to come in and come in with their interesting ideas and apply and so it's something that's can take a long time from when we start things off before anything actually happens so it'd be great to get that going and it would help us respond to some specific areas of the city where people are seeing problems and they have ideas for solutions and you know we don't want to create some huge land-use change that affect the whole city but we could come up with something targeted where people are interested so I think it would help us be responsive as a government and as that council and you know in a targeted way so I'd love to see that move forward sooner rather than later can I ask you a question about that

[166:00] whoever how do we envision that happening like neighborhoods please apply I mean do we well that process was started as I recall when we were working in the the process subcommittee in housing I think we had a presentation from a consultant that had come on that was going to start looking at that and and then it kind of went away but I agree with Aaron I'd like for all the reasons that he stated and I think it would might also be a good place to evaluate the Adu changes can I ask a question about that and I think it's an interesting concept but it sure seems to me that somebody has to come up with some at least fundamental criteria of what you're trying to accomplish I mean neighborhood comes in and I guess I'm

[167:03] just making this crazy assumption that whatever they're offering has to further some again citywide goals so my neighborhood could come in and say well let's close off all the streets because we don't like the traffic on it well that's great for the neighborhood but doesn't exactly further neighborhood goals or let's down zone the whole neighborhood cuz guide we don't want any higher density on a neighborhood all that doesn't exactly further any name any broader community goals although the neighborhood might be a hundred percent in favor of it so what are the criteria here I mean they have to further some fundamental citywide goals that we're struggling with and with saying hey let's see if somebody can do something in a way that will actually get us from here to there and at a minimum I think you need to save that not just okay you can come in with any idea you like cuz I have a feeling I know exactly what we're

[168:01] gonna hear from from certain neighborhoods that might not be very helpful and we actually do have those language with community-wide goals in the plan and I think that would I mean to answer the question that how would we start we would look to the Comprehensive Plan and the criteria that got approved through that process that does define things like yes it would be neighborhoods that have an interest in self defining and addressing some of the issues that they have identified but also or if they're changes in the neighborhood that are worrisome to them or imminent change but also you know the agreeableness to identify solutions for community-wide goals and challenges and as well as addressing local needs and planning board in particular gave a lot of input around this and had a lot of discussion about that very thing and the other thing I'd suggest that I suggested this with the neighborhood traffic project too is I think we need to be I still hate this word proactive about

[169:01] going out to some neighborhoods is another example where neighborhoods that are organized and know how to do these things will go may be organized and do it that's fine but the neighborhoods that aren't so organized or have lots of renter's or who you know don't have a history of kind of getting their act together especially if we know some places that might benefit from something like this but I would hope we'd go out and maybe with our neighborhood liaison or whomever kind of work with them a bit because it could be really hard for them to come forward for something like this you really do need a history of some years of working with each other you can't just one day pop up and say well gee the neighborhood would like to try this project that isn't going to happen so this is we have Android that we have gin and I think the question we're answering is that one to two additional items so

[170:02] that's what we're answering so you don't have to respond to others you can fill in that blank right yep that's the main question if we can walk away tonight with clarity around what goes on that list you'll be able to revisit the midterm and long-term lists again at your future re3 so okay we just want to make sure we're doing the right work for the next six - we're suddenly back on track and in danger of getting out on time so I'm gonna try to hold us to that go for it I will point out to at least one of you said that we don't need to add any more items on the list that's okay - correct okay so are you are you asking then for example on the 1 to 2 additional action items on ongoing a near-term are we supposed to move something from one of the later lists okay so for me the neighborhood plan residential infill pilot project is something that I would I would like to see sooner rather than

[171:01] later and we've we've we've heard from various neighborhoods about issues and it's look I mean we're all struggling with with sort of the the various neighborhood issues and how about something where the neighborhood is asking us to do something as opposed to us telling the neighborhood's what's going to happen and to me that that's where we're gonna see the most the quickest change and have the best pilot project and I can and I can think of several different I won't go into them but I could think of several different you know there are not all the same kinds of things just opportunities where the neighborhood says we've got a problem we'd like to see it Lanning process fix it it's almost like sub-community planning light that a community is asked for are like a neighborhoods asked for and let's do it so I'm strongly in favor of that and I think probably more than half of you may

[172:00] be is that true would that be worth just a strawpoll well hang on cuz yeah so far we've heard enhance community benefit in this stuff around site review criteria and this one so we've got three in the running and I don't know if you're going to make us choose two because one kind of was flowing out of the height thing okay can I ask a clarifying question on that real quick is the enhanced community benefit here is that really the bucket of things that I was describing fundamentally well because it is and then it might be a little bit broader than that because I think what you brought into that what's already on the list which I addresses the policy that's in the plan and the work that Planning Board did but I think some of the items that are in this list as well my use tables and that kind of thing would probably be an expansion of that particular item so they they play out in

[173:03] a couple different places but we could probably look at this and see if it could be slightly expanded to address some of those other items as well okay so who hasn't weighed in yet no more speeches well you said so review criteria is a separate thing I was really talking about can you just get a little bit of it into that larger conversation that's what I was checking on exactly I think I think that what you're describing is what's in the middle one and then the bigger more holistic thing is in this longer term so it's just telling that gets a separate one we just okay so maybe we're just down to two and we can stop soon okay I'm not sure what the order is people that haven't talked in a while about going next so how about Bob I was next why don't we I was after Andrew I know you [Laughter] that's all so and then Jim I was the person that suggested no additional

[174:00] action items and I think the earlier discussion tonight makes me feel even more strongly about that we I think expanded the scope of the building height and land use changes and the accessor and we acknowledged I think reality that the ad you work is gonna take a lot more of our time and staff time so I'd like to suggest well my first suggestion would be that we we had nothing new to the to the immediate plan and talked about these things at a retreat as Leslie suggested if we are going to add anything I'd suggest that we can pull Lester on one thing I think we're putting off a lot of work here when I said we we're biting off a lot of work for staff here and I'd like to suggest that we really try to prioritize and move only one thing in and I could weigh in a my one thing I guess for the reasons previously stated I would probably vote for infill I would vote for nothing but I would accept in Phillips we had to pick one thing I think should be impact

[175:04] on but I'm assuming activities that's an assumption famous Mary so I had voted for the neighborhood infill project as well and I'm pretty satisfied where we landed in our earlier conversation regarding the height and enhance community benefit to say that we've kind of sort of addressed

[176:01] that in that piece of it so I'd be ok with just keeping it to the neighborhood and then you know if we can add those Siberia criteria as part of that earlier conversation that'd be great to just take a look at that I you know maybe I'm gonna agree with Sam I would actually take some combination of whatever is meant by enhanced community benefit and that ongoing list of potential land use code amendments and do them I have no problem with the neighborhood plan residential infill and these may be different people anyway because kind of different staff works on those things but you know year after year after year after year I look at development projects and I look at rezoning and I look at all sorts of things and you just shake your head and you think we can get what we wanted out of this and it's

[177:02] because we just haven't fixed up some of the things we need to fix up and you know we get told we don't have the authority to do it I think I think there's much more of that going on than there is of the other things going on and I think it adds up a lot over the years where it's you know five acres here and a hundred units here and two acres here and 50 and it's here and before you know it it's a lot of acres and a lot of units so I to me it's not sexy but it makes the biggest of the differences okay so I'm very sympathetic to what Paul Benjamin have said as far as trying to make it only one thing I'm with Matt that I think the most important of the things up there are the way they put it and you since I really criteria related to affordable housing right and I think that that is important because that's probably why it's there's

[178:01] got that narrow focus as opposed to what's over here which is a much longer list I would propose that we do both the pilot and the more focused I plan regard to you because I don't get the sense that that pilot is going to move super fast or take time and that the community has to get really involved with that right we have to develop criteria but the community has to develop or the neighborhood or the pilot has to develop the plans so I don't know I'd look to staff you know if if the two that were added were enhance community benefit and the pilot over here to the near term would that be something that would be onerous I mean I'm just asking the question just here we're here oh can i I'll take a shot at that yeah what I heard earlier this

[179:02] evening in the context of every time my height is I think we I think you arrived at a point where you felt fairly comfortable with us moving forward with this scope of work we identified focusing on height and you know in FA our but and that sort of thing as it relates to affordable housing while at the same time you know we're conducting engagement on that listening and perhaps developing some some other community benefit options that could be handled post July 2018 so in some ways what I'm hearing is that some of the land use code changes for Community Benefit and affordable housing that item which is currently over on the you know the after 2018 items will be doing some of that and will be queuing up the conversation that can occur that can occur post July 2018 on those I'm comfortable with that sort of phased approach and so but

[180:02] Leslie you weigh in here too which I think then would allow you know I'm hearing a lot of consensus around the neighborhood planning infill pilot project as being one of the additional items I'm also hearing a lot of consensus around us coming to you and saying are there some code amendments that that deal with the site review criteria that would be impactful and that we believe are achievable and we don't know exactly I I certainly don't know exactly which ones those are so we could come back to you perhaps January even for at the work planning and identify those and so we would have functionally we would be doing neighborhood infill and yet to be determined set of site review criteria that will be impactful and achievable while at the same time dealing with the broader community benefits piece in a phased approach in conjunction with the

[181:00] height we have we want we need to fix and I would like to like to figure out a schedule to start checking those off and we're gonna be engaging neighborhoods a lot on that list of stuff you know if an infill project thing can emerge from all that great but meanwhile let's get our code working away where we want it that that be my vote so since I wasn't on that list and if we can do both great

[182:01] otherwise I would prioritize the community benefit site review criteria stuff fixing that stuff first so that's that's my vote yes so Jim thank you for that answer I think that's that's absolutely sounds like a good track to be on I just want to say that I don't know that some of these things come out of the site review criteria specifically so I want to make sure that our direction isn't just revised the site review criteria about affordable housing it's that there are these outcomes that are undesired that we get out of our land use code and I think specifically of incentivizing larger units so I think the the mission from us is to go look for those things and it may be the site review criteria maybe other places would be my thought on that and I agree that that is a very high priority just another thought on the the neighborhood envelope islet idea is that that can that could create a discretionary review process like through the Planning Board so just

[183:01] to think about we don't necessarily have to pin down every little detail of what we're looking for and how it would have to work we could lay out a framework that's fairly broad and with some criteria but then allow it through a proposal through a discretionary review process us with Planning Board approval and City Council call up just offering options but just in terms of scoping that it might that might control the scope a little bit if every item had to have a separate approval because then we have future touches on it okay good did you I think so I mean we've got some time between now and January you'll have some more conversations around this and we recognize of course there will be some new council members and you know that there may be some new conversations around some of these items too but that gives us I think enough to go on at least to put this in shape for you for September 5th and then for us to continue at the staff level or work and

[184:01] with the community and then to come back to Council again and revisit it in a few months if I'm if I'm not mistaken on the the protocols pardon my sort of newness on all the protocols I think we come back to you with a study session summary anyway if I'm not mistaken we were returning with that and so in some ways both the September 5th occasion and the study session summary will give us an opportunity to try to articulate what we think we heard and you'll be able to look at that and say yes bought on or not quite right and I think the folks that are most familiar with these code things that we're talking about may running right articulate them so that we're clear what we meant here to you guys okay do you feel like it would be helpful to have a specific conversation around that I or how what's the best way for you to get the feedback to us about what's broken that needs to be fixed the board

[185:02] that's what I'm adding board well I was gonna say an IP might be appropriate maybe it's something you take to Planning Board for validation because I know my understanding is Charles Farrow and others have kept a running list of broken things and you know we may want to add to the list planning board may want to add to the list but if you just wanted to Tod up the list of broken things in an IP especially those geared towards things like you're creating incentives for the things we don't want like smaller we're trying to Vincent in center buys smaller units but we're not getting there yeah so that's just an idea an IP that we can review those of us that have been steeped in this and then we can give you feedback that work okay I think this we ended up a very good place so thank you thank you adjourned

[186:09] [Music]