August 25, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[3:05] city council i'm council member mark wallach thank you for joining us i will be your mc for this evening we have on tonight's agenda two items our first item will cover site review criteria update project after that we will hear information on the use table and standards project update regarding industrial areas and neighborhoods and yes that is its title we're going to start this meeting with tonight's announcements may i have the slides on that okay covert 19 testing and vaccinations on testing for information and provider locations for the free covet 19 testing go to www.boco.org coveted testing

[4:00] the boulder site at 2445 stasio drive and it's open seven days a week from eight a.m to six pm for vaccine information and provider locations go to wwe covet vaccine our next announcement okay during the entire month of august rtd will offer zero fares across its system as part of the zero fare for better air initiative this collaborative statewide initiative made possible by colorado senate bill 22-180 in partnership with the colorado energy office is designed to reduce ground level ozone by increasing use of public transit current rtd customers will also benefit as they will not have to use or purchase fare products from august 1st to the 31st during colorado's high ozone season by taking advantage of free transit in

[5:00] august you can save money on gas and parking avoid the frustration of driving in traffic help improve air quality by reducing single occupant vehicle traffic and use your commute to catch up on work listen to music or read a book for more information please visit the rtd site at www.rtd.denver.com fare okay before we go into our work items i'd like to outline how the meeting will be conducted we're going to review staff's presentations for each of the items and then we'll have time for questions at the end of the presentation we'll conduct our council discussion with staff uh if you do have questions i would encourage you to wait for staff to complete their presentation if at all possible i'm now going to turn this over to our city manager nuria rivera vandermeide to introduce our first item maria thank you so much councilmember and i

[6:01] just all of a sudden had a thought that this entire council actually says my entire name much better than my former city so it's that's a always a pleasant thing um today is pnds night pretty much and so i'm gonna turn it over to our new director who has really hit the ground running since he's arrived as we start off with site criteria so brad tossing it to you thank you daria uh i am new to the city as you all know but i am not new to code overhauls and one of the things that i've gained an appreciation for when trying to comprehensively provide simplification of a code is that ironically simplification of a code is actually one of the most complex undertakings that a planning and development department can take um very impressed and appreciative of the hard work that's taking place leading up to this time both by councils and planning boards and

[7:00] dab and certainly the staff very much uh there's a lot of detail in what we've presented to you this evening and what we will present ultimately this is about simplification in response to uh values and feedback that we've heard from the public from the development community and from you and previous councils it's an admirable goal uh it's not unusual that codes become frankenstein with lots of bits and pieces and this is a really valiant effort to try to simplify that it is an art not a science to find the balance between uh allowing for creativity in design but also uh ensuring that there's predictability and what we've heard from the community leading up to this time is that while appreciative of the flexibility and allowance for creativity over time over the years maybe that's become too much and it's time to swing the pendulum the other way to more predictability and that's what

[8:01] we'll present to you this evening uh i'm turning it over to our expert carl geiler on that and we've got a presentation and thank you again thank you brad good evening council members i'm going to pull up my presentation sorry i gotta get it from the beginning [Music] just that doesn't seem to be working for some reason so we'll just edge it back here good evening um we're going to talk about the site review criteria update project which some council members will remember that this is actually a component of the broader community benefit project it's actually the final component of the community benefit project so i'll talk a little bit about

[9:00] the history of the project what's been done so far and then get into the details of this particular project the community benefit project started in 2018 we really focused on the updates to the criteria in the past which related to adding additional permanently affordable housing requirements for any buildings that go over zoning district height limits such as adding a fourth or a fifth story so many of you will remember that there are additional requirements that kick in on such projects that add the additional floor area this is really just a holistic update to the site review criteria um to meet some new goals and objectives so this there's already an ordinance that's associated with this it's ordinance 85 15. um we've been working on it for some time now we did bring it to planning board as part of a work session

[10:00] in october of last year and got feedback and then returned to planning board in may for feedback or actually for a recommendation to city council the board at that time and i'll talk about the i'll summarize the feedback as we go through the presentation did not act on the ordinance at that time they did not make a recommendation to counsel they did respond to some concerns that they were hearing in the development community um some of the new members had um concerns of their own uh so i'll talk about that as we get through the presentation but we thought it'd be a good idea to come back to city council particularly since the composition of council has changed since this project has been underway we wanted to get feedback from this council before making any changes to the ordinance we also brought the ordinance to the design advisory board in june of this year so we'll talk about that so as far as this presentation is concerned i'm going to start talking about the background of

[11:01] the project the goals and objectives what work has been done leading up to the ordinance and then we're going to set up some uh questions for city council which are basically the key issues that we want council to focus on tonight and again we thank you for your input on this complex project part three is really where we jump into the the components of the ordinance um all the different parts of the criteria how it's changing and then we'll conclude with we'll go into the key issues each with our analysis and talk about the planning board and dab feedback as part of the key issues discussion so i did want to point out that john gerstell and sarah silver of the planning board are here tonight to answer any questions or present some thoughts on the ordinance we also have matthew scheck snyder who's the chair of the dab who can also share thoughts on that review i'll talk about the public comments

[12:00] on the ordinance and then conclude with the next steps leading into questions so going back in time in some of you might remember in 2015 there were quite a few um larger taller buildings that were getting built in the city of boulder and it raised a lot of concerns in the community about the quality of the buildings and was leading to some findings that perhaps a lot of these buildings even though they're getting additional uh floor area are larger more noticeable that they're not really reflective of city policies and goals and weren't necessarily high quality and it raised some concerns we did some uh tours with city council members and planning board members and we started noticing that there's these uh themes with some of the projects that uh we're not delivering uh good design outcomes so some of the things that have come up are too many materials on buildings material changes in a particular plane like you

[13:00] can see in the picture uh flush mounted windows make some of the buildings look kind of cheap attack on balconies as well and also a concern about the low quality and the materials so these were some of the things that initiated what we called the design excellence initiative so as part of that the city hired a expert a national expert planner and architect victor dover who made some recommendations uh and i think this is around 2017 at this point that the city you know some of the recommendations are to tighten up the city code make some of the requirements more prescriptive to make it more reflective of the city values what the city wants to see this led to the form based code pilot that was initiated for boulder junction and also led to uh recommendations that the city update the site review criteria uh to reflect that as well so the goals and objectives that you see on the slide are derived from the community benefit

[14:00] project as it relates to the site review criteria so identify incentives to address the community economic social and environmental objectives of the boulder valley commerce of plan determine additional design standards for projects requesting a height modification and identify other aspects of the site review criteria to further city goals and create more predictability and projects so having worked on site review cases for many years we we've been looking at our code and and noticing a lot of things that were always either redundant uh overly complicated uh out of order a lot of improvements we've always been looking at the site review criteria to make um so these are this has been kind of an ongoing project for some time as the site review criteria haven't really been updated for many years so some of these recommendations were then presented to the site review focus group which is composed of some design professionals in

[15:01] the community uh we also presented some of these ideas to neighborhood representatives as well and we've been getting feedback from these groups to figure out what kind of changes we should be making to the site review criteria before we get into too much of the detail i did want to talk about just a refresher on the site review process we get about generally 12 to 15 site review applications a year um these are only one application type that goes to planning board a planning board also looks at annexations re-zonings use reviews other applications so with a site review it's really meant to kind of capture generally larger scale projects where they're asking for additional intensity in a lot of cases so we do have a table in the land use code that goes by zoning districts so basically if a building is over a certain size or is has a certain number of units or if they're asking for

[16:02] modifications to the code which is like if they're not meeting setbacks and want to ask for something different that would be something that requires the site review and again it's different by zoning district and not all projects are eligible for site review most site reviews are actually staff level staff can make decisions on site reviews and they we send those decisions to the planning board and all uh decisions from staff are subject to planning board um call up or citizen appeal uh if they are called up we then uh schedule a public hearing before the board any site review project um that comes before the city can only be approved if it meets the the comprehensive criteria of site review so that's in section 9214h of the code and as as you've seen is very lengthy and and deals with a lot of different urban design elements there are some projects if they ask for

[17:01] any additional density or height modification like going over the zoning district height limit that's automatic planning board at a public hearing so i did want to just really quickly just touch on the community benefit part of the project so you can see a buy right building would be shown there in blue on the left there that would be something that wouldn't necessarily require a site review but if they go over the height anything any floor area that's in a fourth or a fifth story or any floor area that goes above that the floor area ratio maximum of the site if the zone allows it would would have to go would have to provide community benefits so there'd be additional permanently affordable housing requirements that would apply for that additional floor area just as a refresher some of the challenges that we've seen in the site review over the years is that the criteria are generally written in a subjective manner

[18:01] maybe by design back in the past to provide that flexibility but it is kind of challenging as some of these these phrases that are from our current site review criteria everyone has a different definition of whether or not they're met you know is this building pedestrian friendly is this high quality materials is it consistent with the character of the area does it provide appropriate visual interest is it compatible is it human scale these are things that we struggle with as as staff and we tend to get these projects where everyone has a different interpretation and often times staff and architects go back and forth until there's agreement that the criterion is met and then we take it to planning board or council and there is because everyone has different opinions on whether the project is met it does lead to unpredictable results which is really one of the big reasons why uh we've tackled this project so one thing that like i said victor dover had recommended was making the

[19:02] criteria more prescriptive and just to show what that means i like to show this graphic because it on the left you can see kind of what site reviews like you almost have to think of each criterion like it's one of those knobs like from zero to ten and everything is on balance right so there might be one that's an eight there might be one that's a seven there might be one that's a four but because this one's a ten that's okay like that's kind of how we look at site review projects today and that kind of contributes to the unpredictability that we've been seeing so everyone puts the knob in a different place and then we bring it to boards and council and uh it's difficult or challenging to kind of see what the outcome is going to be in looking at a form based code which is influencing this particular project and i'll get into that it's more of does it meet the requirement or not um it's more black and white so we call it prescriptive standards so it's more like is the light switch on or is the

[20:01] light switch off for the particular requirement so i just wanted to show that contrast between the two processes so these are the approaches to the update to the site review criteria that we've brought to council several times to kind of get the nod on on the direction that we're working on so in going through the goals and objectives and then consulting with the community these are the approaches so emphasize criteria that result in projects that address important city policies reorganize the criteria into a more top-down approach so really starting at the top with the more holistic big picture policy level issues and then trickle down to to the site design what what's happening what's the circulation the open space the landscaping the layout of parking and then buildings getting into the actual skins of buildings like what kind of materials what do they look like where are they located on the site and really kind of getting down into the real

[21:00] definitive details so that's how we've reorganized the criteria simplify the criteria by reducing some of the length through eliminating redundant criteria and combining some sections so we've done that there's there was a lot of redundancy in the site review criteria and there were some sections that touched on the same things multiple times we've condensed those we've we've taken the parking and circulation section and we've condensed that into a broader just transportation access and mobility section for instance uh remove unnecessary complicated criteria that don't accomplish design excellence have overlap or are rarely implemented there's some parts of it like the br1 far bonus which is rarely ever used we've changed that and i'll talk about that later and also a big part of the update to the criteria is adding more descriptive language into the criteria that describes what the intent of the criteria is and what is expected to get

[22:00] that better design um so it's really not a necessarily a change in the intent of the criteria it's just better describing what the city means by what is a good landscape design things like that in some certain areas we've we've made the criteria more prescriptive like the form based code and we've brought in some form-based code type requirements that we've found to be successful in the boulder junction area and we felt would be appropriate especially for the larger taller buildings again getting at that goal and objective to address buildings with hype modifications all this is being done to make the site review process more predictable so the questions we have for council tonight and i'll i'll try to make this as uh in in chewable bytes as possible it's just the first question is overall does the city council find that the updated criteria within the ordinance meet the goals and objectives outlined for the project and then we jump into kind of the more

[23:01] specifics um the first one deals with the specific policy on boulder valley conference of plan compliance um right now the the plan or the site review process requires compliance with all boulder valley conference of plan policies we're asking whether that should continue um should it still be written that way or should it be more specific to the built environment section or should it just be um refined down to key uh topics in the the plan so that's something we will talk about the next one relates to the greenhouse gas emission reduction criteria uh which we've proposed would apply to any new buildings that are over 30 000 square feet in size uh we originally were proposing three different options that projects could could meet that requirement and planning board asked that um all three apply so we wanted to get some feedback from council on that whether it should be one of three or all three

[24:01] um and then the last one is does planning does uh city council believe that the criteria should be modified to be less prescriptive or are there any other changes uh that council think need to be made to the criteria so just to boil it down uh try to make it a little bit more digestible these are the key issues that we wanted uh council to focus on tonight so boulder valley conference of plan criterion so should it require the uh compliance with all policies just the building environment section or as proposed in the ordinance uh greenhouse gas emission criterion require one of three or all three uh and the last one is really the area related to public realm and the building design criteria should we keep them as it is in the ordinance today or make them less prescriptive and i'll go into detail on this these are the key issues because these are the points that have been criticized in the past as being the most vague parts of the site review criteria that make it

[25:02] uh somewhat unpredictable and these are also the areas where the development community has concerns that the criteria are too prescriptive so we felt like this is really what should be focused on as part of this study session uh really quick um this is some housekeeping stuff that's included in the the ordinance some of you recall the appendix j map restricted where height modifications could be in the city this has since expired um so we wanted to remove all the references to appendix j in the code since it's expired but we were requested by previous council members and planning board to still list some zoning districts where height modifications for community benefit basically any buildings that are four stories and up would be inappropriate so we've come up with this list that's shown in the map it's generally the low

[26:00] density areas where typically single family type construction we've listed those zones as areas that where you shouldn't have a community benefit project we've also made some tweaks to the hype modification exemption for permanently affordable housing projects just to make that more clear we also wanted to add an exception for the community benefits stairs to allow any two or three story building to get a height modification if they have to raise their building because of a flood elevation so we've given some flexibility there for of five feet some council members might remember that in the previous iterations of this uh project we had some density modifications in the land-use intensity modifications in the criteria there were some concerns that were raised from those being in the site review process also some concerns about changes in state law that relate to affordable

[27:01] housing and rentals so we've pulled some of those density modifications out of these site review criteria this is something that's really been folded into a new 2022 work program item where we're looking at tweaks to particular zones like br1 and the bc zones for trying to encourage more affordable or less expensive housing so that's something that we will be working on or have started working on um instead of including it as part of these criteria so again i understand a lot of this is very complex and i'll be happy to answer questions on this so i was just going to jump through the the components of the ordinance the specific sections in the criteria so we've tried to simplify the the comp plan criteria um with respect to the density language it's more clear clearly applied to the land use map um one of the criticisms we've heard

[28:00] from members of the community and previous councils is just the on balance requirement that projects meet all comprehensive planning policies which some are very are very much competing so we felt that maybe this particular criterion should be made more specific to key comp plan policies rather than requiring all policies be applied so we did add some new sections to this reducing greenhouse gas emissions requirements for landmarking historic buildings different criteria for getting housing diversity and environmental preservation criteria this is something that uh planning board was particularly concerned about so i'll talk about that in our one of the key issues there's also an economic feasibility criterion that we found to be unnecessary uh since a project wouldn't move forward if applicant found that it was not economically feasible we didn't

[29:00] think that that was helpful so we're proposing its removal as i stated before the parking circulation and parking design section and the circulation section were all consolidated into a new access transportation mobility section um this has really just largely been condensed but we've also tried to write more descriptive language here what connectivity between projects should be a lot of it's the same intent that's in the code now um same as open space it's it's generally the same intense but we've tried to be more prescriptive about what a well-designed open space should be there's a couple additional prescript more prescriptive standards that have been added relative to courtyards uh for projects that are over an acre or projects that are over 50 dwelling units there's a requirement for some active recreation the current criteria talk about all these things but it doesn't make it clear when they apply a lot of

[30:01] times someone will just say it's not a big enough project to require a ball field things like that we've tried to be a little bit more specific again at trying to add to the predictability in the code on landscaping it requires that landscaping be in excess of the by right standards that's how it's stated today in the code we've that's always been a little bit uh vague what is in in excess so what we've proposed is that the minimum plantings be at least 15 percent more than a buy right project uh to clarify that in excess the most complicated part of the site review criteria and where we've heard the most concerns in terms of building quality and everything is the building design section so this is where we've tried to borrow from the form based code some elements that we believe uh would result in uh better design projects um the first is requiring that at least 75 of building materials be high quality

[31:02] so that's like brick stone wood there's a list of of a number of building materials there one thing we've talked about is is windows would need to be recessed at least two inches from the the facade this gives the building more of a permanent look to it you'll see in some of the pictures i'll show there's also a minimum transparency requirement so a minimum amount of how many window penetration should be on each floor in order to get that glazing and avoid blank walls one of the goals and objectives of the project was to have additional requirements design requirements for taller larger buildings so again we've looked at some of the things that have worked with the form-based code project uh so again trying to get some detailing on these buildings it's it's really as simple as adding an expression line in certain areas of the facade which is just basically an offset of a material at least two inches

[32:01] to uh give some detail give some shadowing you know things that that avoid those blank walls and you'll see in the pictures that i'm about to show there's a maximum building length of 150 feet there's a required facade variation requirement for buildings that are over 120 feet again all of these are things that have applied in the form based code to those taller buildings that you see in those areas also roof cap types there's a section on that that's been added so this is just a to illustrate designs on the left are ones that we've found to be unsuccessful the use of stucco things like lower quality materials versus where you're trying to get higher quality materials and buildings so this is just to show you like on the left some designs that haven't worked so well and on the right are some projects we feel have looked much better with the higher quality building des materials

[33:04] the other thing i want to point out is just the the requirement about not allowing a change in material in the same plane this is something that's been criticized in the community extensively so there are restrictions on which facades you can actually have a material change like that again you can see on the left like blank walls um windows that are not indented uh when you see the windows indented or and then the minimum amount of glazing adds to better design outcomes we've added some requirements on balconies trying to get them more integrated into the building trying to avoid the tack on balconies or the juliet balconies you can see here in the blue building again the detailing i think there's some concern about expression lines but this just this picture on the right shows that an expression line is just it's largely

[34:01] just the same material just with a offset that just gives a little bit more visual interest on the facade so this is where we're trying to make things more predictable like where the current criteria say it adds visual interest the new criteria just say like add an expression line it's just it's more specific and more easily determined uh whether the criterion is met so this is like as we've talked about the the the project has gone on since 2018 so we've done a variety of ways of getting the word out on community benefit and the update to the site review criteria we've done in person and virtual meetings we've done uh open houses as part of what we used to call the coda paloozas uh we've done b herd boulder questionnaires a segment on channel 8 i talked about the neighborhood review group and the site review focus group that have provided input we've also presented to better boulder plan boulder uli we've been sending updates out on the planning newsletter and we've also

[35:01] been letting our boulder architects be aware of the progression of the project so it's hard to encapsulate all that we've heard on one slide we have heard you know some folks that support the project in adding these requirements uh given uh the buildings that are going up in certain parts of the city that meet these requirements uh we've heard comments that the new criteria would help would help clarify whether the project is compliant with the comp plan and they've found that it's aligned with the goals and objectives of the project another thing we've heard from folks is that there's not a one-size-fits-all nature of the criteria particularly with respect to smaller projects and larger projects so we we have tried to work through the criteria to exempt out some of the smaller projects to not have to meet all these requirements and really apply it to the the taller larger buildings as the goals and objectives laid out

[36:00] one thing we've particularly heard from the development community and also some boards which i'll talk about is that the proposed changes are too prescriptive too many shell statements i think we've heard some support in general that form-based code type requirements do often result in better designs but they're we've heard caution about applying it through the site review process some folks have been concerned about the density bonus provisions being taken out of the site review criteria and we've also heard from some groups that there should be a requirement about a minimum amount of home ownership in projects we have not included that in the ordinance we'd have to do more work to to analyze that from a legal perspective and we also have some equity concerns about adding that into the criteria since we do want to try to get as many affordable housing units out into the community so starting with the with the first uh

[37:01] question for council uh does council find that the updated criteria meet the goals and objectives for the project so this is again uh the goals and objectives slide i won't read it again we can go back to this slide when we're having the the discussion um to help answer this again we we feel that we that it the goals and objectives are met in this particular project we've included an attachment to the memo that details every single criteria and how we believe um it improves the design outcomes in the community i'm not talking about the the policy part on this particular key issue i wanted to focus more on the design piece but again this graphic shows a less successful design on the left with the blank walls the flush mounted windows the lower quality materials versus some of the the form-based code type requirements uh that would apply through the site review criteria

[38:01] key issue number two is how should the criterion related to the comp plan compliance be evaluated for development projects so again should all policies be applied to projects on balance like it is today or should it only apply to the built environment section or should it be as we have it in the ordinance so the current criterion requires that projects be consistent with all policies in the plan on balance so this is a criterion that's been cited the most uh for its vagueness and unpredictability since there's many different competing policies in the plan and can be used in any manner against a project or for a project so it really doesn't lay out a predictable outcome so this is something that we felt should be made more specific um so we've refined that policy to focus on key parts of the the boulder valley commemorative plan related to

[39:00] land-use map compliance consistency with sub-community or area plans we've added the greenhouse gas emissions reduction again we'll talk about that in key issue number three community design and edges that's already a criterion that's in the building design section we felt that that was more policy related and moved it up to this section um a criterion requiring landmarking of buildings housing diversity and bedroom unit types and environmental preservations again hitting on a lot of those things we want to get from a high level integrated into projects this was an interesting discussion topic at planning board dab didn't really talk about it so i'm going to summarize planning board and dap feedback with each of these slides with this particular case the board planning board was concerned that if we removed the criteria that all policies would apply that it would remove a lot of discretion or a lot of um there we might not get you know some

[40:01] better projects in the community so we pretty much heard from most of the board members that there was a preference to um go back to a policy that requires all bvcp policies on balance be applied so this is something that we would really like to hear from city council uh since it is one that again adds to the unpredictability in projects and has been cited as one of the most vague of the criteria and moving on to the greenhouse gas emission reduction criteria again this would apply to buildings that are over 30 000 square feet in size um city staff proposed option number one here this particular slide you can see what the existing criteria is if you just read that it relates to energy use it's it's quite vague it's it's been looked at in in the for years as one of the more vague uh criteria um it's it doesn't have any

[41:00] measurable metrics in it so it's often unevenly applied it's difficult and challenging to determine whether a project meets it or not so this is one we felt should have more specific requirements that go above and beyond the city's already rigorous uh energy code so what we had presented to planning board was um three options and that an applicant would have the ability to meet one of those three options so reducing the embodied carbon within concrete materials design an electric project and then a whole building life cycle assessment which would require a 10 offset um from a normally compliant building so this is something that we've worked with our energy code staff on i believe um carolyn elam is here tonight if there are questions on this it is very complex um planning board looked at this and felt that um this is maybe something where all three of the requirements uh should apply so

[42:02] option two is really to apply the first two as required so that's reducing the embodied carbon and the whole building life cycle assessment and then the third could be the option of doing a electrical project or being 10 more efficient than code or designed to code and participate in an outcome verified code path which is a pilot program that the energy code staff have already used um so we wanted to hear back from council on this particular issue last question i know i'm throwing a lot of information out tonight uh does the city council believe that the criteria should be modified to be less prescriptive so again this is one of the um biggest points of the discussion that we had at planning board the city council suggests any additional modifications um so based on concerns that we heard particularly from the site review focus group we did go through the criteria again and responding to that concern

[43:01] about requiring um certain things against small projects versus large projects so we did update the criteria to really apply some of those form-based code type requirements to the larger buildings and exempt out smaller projects like single-family duplex townhouse or mobile homes we also loosened up some of the prescriptive standards to not be as strict we have table five in the memo does go through a more detailed list of what changes were made we also have an alternative compliance section which is similar to the form based code want to make it clear that this is not a separate process it's just more discretionary criteria that at least would highlight if if a particular project isn't meeting a more strict standard they would have some flexibility to ask for some relief through alternative compliance and we've proposed some criteria related to compatibility um how the building relates to the public realm how it meets the intent of of site review

[44:02] um and also if it if it's a project that was previously approved according to the prior criteria we would give them some more um flexibility where strict adherence doesn't make sense so this was obviously um the biggest focus of the planning board discussion and again the board members are here tonight they can recount their um their thoughts on it the planning board was very mixed on this they did a straw ultimately that was four to three more in favor of of predictive standards but there were some board members that were very much concerned that the criteria were too prescriptive and should be loosened up we also brought it to the design advisory board the feedback that we got from them and again we've attached the minutes from those meetings so attachment e is the planning board minutes and attachment f is the dab minutes uh dab was complementary of the approaches to uh what we were trying to get for better

[45:02] design but overall the dab felt very strongly that the criteria were too prescriptive uh they felt that the site review criteria should be rewritten uh to be more like guidelines so again this there's a there's a you know a balance that we're trying to strike here in making the criteria more predictable making trying to make them more simpler trying to remove some of the um unpredictability from the process but also understanding that there is a rigidity that comes in those prescriptive standards and we understand the concerns from some of those planning board members and dab members so i'm coming back to the the overall key issues of the discussion tonight the boulder valley commerce of plan criterion the greenhouse gas emissions criterion and the public realm and building design criterion so i can come back to these slides uh if there's any uh questions we also left you with some different options in the memo

[46:01] um that we that are possible options for the project so i'll go over these really quickly and we've laid out some pros and cons in the memo um option a is just to keep the criteria in the ordinance as it is right now um option b would be to make some of the suggested uh changes in in a memo that the majority of the planning board uh requested so that would be making all three of those options of the greenhouse gas reduction apply uh and then making all the bvcb policies apply um this would meet the majority of the planning board members requests but one thing we pointed out in the memo is that this is obviously could cause some concern in the development community because it would layer on even more additional requirements on top of prescriptive standards that could be concerning option c is revise the ordinance to be less prescriptive so we've heard from some

[47:00] in the development community um who've made you know comments that perhaps the criteria particularly the the public realm and building design criteria could be rewritten to be you know the intent of this section is to accomplish this and in in determining whether this is meant the following factors uh could be considered uh so rather than requiring them as strict requirements it could be just something that can be considered and they might have an alternative adding some flexibility to the review again that would reduce the level of of um predictability in the in the code but could address some of those concerns related to the the overly prescriptive nature option d is revise the goals and objectives of the project and direct staff uh to other changes in the criteria um our caution about this particular one is that this has been an ongoing project for for quite a while now and this would uh be more time intensive it could impact some other

[48:01] code change priorities um if we were to uh do an overhaul of that scope and then lastly option d is make no changes to the site review criteria and table the project um so i think that brings us to next steps um so again tonight the the purpose is to hear city council input on the project update the ordinance following this discussion per council feedback solicit more public feedback on the changes and bring the ordinance back to planning board and council for adoption um so that concludes this presentation with many uh uh bits of information that i know you're digesting but i'm happy to answer any questions you might have carl thank you very much for that that was quite a bit of information i think at some point i want to open the proceedings to comments from our

[49:00] planning board members if they have a comment to make but let's start with council questions and um well nicole you are up first all right um thank you and thank you staff for uh for the presentation and just for the volume of work that has gone into this it is quite apparent even as somebody relatively new that this has been a very extensive process um and one that has taken quite a bit of time free from you all so thank you i just wanted to start with a really basic question as somebody who is not kind of all that familiar with planning and development which is i was trying to understand reading through what the kind of overall goal is of the site review process like what are we trying to achieve um because when when i was looking at the the sort of purpose statement it was encouraging innovation and then kind of after that there were a lot of other sort of things that that

[50:02] were in there as things that we're trying to do through this process and so just like for somebody who's kind of a newbie to all of this what is the overarching you know goal what what is the purpose we're trying to achieve with site reveal that's a great question uh you know the purpose statement of site review has not really been revised in this project we were you know trying to accomplish criteria that still are consistent with that purpose statement so the purpose is really number one if you have a larger scale project in terms of floor area and floor number of units or is going to be a more notable change in the environment it does have the potential for greater impact on the community so it's a higher standard to determine compatibility you know particularly taller buildings so determining compatibility with the neighborhood and then you know overall it just means it it's trying to get an improved design

[51:00] over what you would typically get in a buy right project so a smaller scale building two stories three stories it's kind of more like a background building when you start getting into a bigger project it's more noticeable so it is held to a higher standard in terms of quality that's the way site review is today um but it does require that improved design above buy right but also allows flexibility so through site review um they can ask for modifications to like setbacks you know there's specific things listed in the site review section of what they can ask to vary and then basically through that process you know we make a determination about whether it is an improved design or not um so that isn't really changing it's just being tightened up through this particular ordinance thank you i believe juni you're up next then aaron then matt oh oh thank you thank you so much i just had a question

[52:01] and i appreciate nicole's comments it's still hard to fully understand a lot of the processes of the site review so um but my question has to do with page eight when you talk for the section about the proposed criteria structures by the way that's really well laid out thank you so much but i still feel like i needed some more explanation as to the additional criteria for parking reduction what is it that we are intending to do i know you mentioned that earlier and i was trying to focus on that but it's still not very clear to me as well um the additional criteria for for parking reduction is not changing so those are existing criteria in the code the only reason we have it bolded is because we changed the numbering so we tried to lay it out in a more intuitive way the way it is right now it's like

[53:00] you know it now it'll be h1 h2 h3 h4 like it's just easier to see what the main sections are rather than it being buried so we just changed the title we didn't change that section thank you so much that's all thank you erin yeah carl thanks for the comprehensive presentation and all the very hard and quality work that you and your department have put into this over a number of years it's great to see this community benefit project coming to a final stage so a couple of just detailed questions that i had one thing that i don't think you touched on your presentation was about preservation of view corridors uh which was added in um that wasn't previously in the start review criteria and let me i just have that in front of me and it says that where a building is proposed to exceed the buy right zoning district height limit and is located adjacent to a public park plaza or open space

[54:02] buildings are cited or designed in a manner that avoids or minimizes blocking the public views of the mountains so the the public when this would apply i was just trying to figure that out so public park is clear a plaza seems you know pretty straightforward but open space you know is it could uh include like a parking lot or a dirt lot that that is owned by somebody else next door so what would be the definition of open space that would trigger this i mean i think we were looking at you know any kind of place that's a gathering place um that's what looks like a park or a plaza whether it's on a particular project site or or an actual public park or or open space we just one thing we heard throughout this project particularly because the concerns that tyrion in the site review that talks about minimizing impact of views but that's one of the ones that's considered quite vague like is that you know us a person could but put a second

[55:02] story edition on their single family home and block a flatiron's view from a from a neighbor or you know someone and still be meeting code so we felt like we had to be a little bit more specific in the criteria about what type of views should be protected for instance so that's one thing we heard in the outreach was that there should be you know and this kind of comes from like the the the old daily camera site you know there were concerns about that building going up and blocking the view of the flood iron so some of the feedback we heard was we should be a little bit more specific about what's an important view and then if there is an important view where should that view be protected from uh we started going down the road of you know looking at other communities like denver that have actual easement air easement kind of view corridor protections and talked to denver about that we did come back to council i think it was in 2020 and asked whether we should be hiring a consultant to be

[56:01] doing these view corridors and council felt that we didn't need to go to that length but there was interest in having a criterion that might try to um accomplish protecting some some views of that nature does that help well it definitely helps on the intent but i guess i still don't i'm still not hearing a definition of open space that would allow somebody necessarily to apply that criterion so i guess maybe i'll come back to that in comments later on but that things that's helpful to understand the intent and um my one other question was it is about zoning districts where requesting height modifications aren't allowed and so that this was the replacement of the nxj map and it's primarily single family zones and that that would include a ones that had the 40 or more affordable housing right i mean it's just a flat out you can't ask for a height modification

[57:02] no the the zoning district piece only applies to projects that are asking for community benefit per the community benefit requirements that were added um that other section for like the 40 could still ask for a height modification in any of those zones if it meets those requirements got it okay so they would still be they would still be allowed to ask that yes and then also to be clear like it doesn't say that a single family home like if it has a slope issue or topography issue those are those would still be eligible in lower density zones if if the you know it doesn't allow them to build a third story it's it's really meant to just avoid the fourth and fifth story requests in areas where it would be inappropriate but there would still be that affordable housing exemption yeah on on-site affordable great thanks for clearing that for you that's all i got thank you and you have the floor then lauren and

[58:00] rachel thanks mark uh carl uh thanks for the the details uh it certainly helps lay the some of the context from which we're discussing i have a couple questions um one kind of centers around this work and the timing of us revising the comp plan i think we're gonna what start net work on this next year and so i'm just wondering are are we going to be is the the tail wagon the dog here a little where we're going to be doing this revision revise the comp plan and then need to redo this again are the are we going to be going down enough revisions of the comp plan that's going to necessitate another modification to site review so i'm just sort of just wondering about the compressed timing and i understand we started this and covet slowed it down so that that we got pinched for reasons that are not of our control but here we are a little closer to a comp plan so i'm just wondering how that might play out from timing yeah i mean it was it was never really discussed that the update to the comp plan would have would bear into this particular project um we there's nothing that says that we

[59:00] can't update it in the future but obviously we do you know updates to our comp plan every you know is it three to five years it doesn't always necessitate a change of the site review criteria it's very rare that that happens actually but um we we're not anticipating any changes from this now but we could certainly do them in the future if needed okay i appreciate that um the other question has to do with sort of thinking about the other side of site review is have we thought about the things that won't trigger psych review i.e you what we're doing what maybe allowing more things to be done by right if they reach certain community benefits so that we don't trigger as many site reviews because i sort of think is one of the goals of all of this is to reduce the um the manner in which just our our general processes can be quite onerous for developers and so the simplification is a goal but have we thought about coming at it on the other end of how do we allow more right for things that are maybe 100 affordable

[60:00] or you know you know surpassing environmental goals things that you can just say look if you're doing these things you don't even you just bypass site review it's by right it's so in line with community benefit we can kind of just get out of their site review process as a whole so has that been thought of on on working at it from both sides i think we've thought about that but we we didn't include any exemptions for those things we did i think the concern is that you know in projects where for instance there there might be affordable housing it doesn't always result in good design outcomes in some projects and we've gotten we've heard a lot of criticism on those types of projects so that that kind of made us hesitate to go down that path as of yet we certainly could um but again like all it takes is one project that really doesn't do well and then there's concerns you know that why didn't that go through site review so we didn't really go down that path i appreciate it that's all for me thank you

[61:01] lauren rachel tara and then i'll call him myself thanks mark um so i have a sort of broad questions first um could you outline like the most common reasons projects go like apply for site review like what sort of are the typical trigger like the most common triggers that we see in our community um i mean i think a lot of them tend to be just the number of dwelling units or the floor area often triggers site reviews so these are smaller scale projects a lot of them are staff level most of them are probably staff level because of just the the sheer number of dwelling units or the floor area okay i appreciate that thank you and um so you're saying that most of those are

[62:01] end up just being staff level review overall what percentage of applications are just staff level reviews i mean i think it changes from from time to time i'd just be putting a guess here but um you know obviously a lot of projects go to planning board and it seems like they're all hype modifications but there are staff level ones but i'd say uh 60 to 70 percent are probably staff level is my guess okay no i mean i think that's helpful because i you know we obviously see the ones that come in front of planning board and in front of us but there's a lot that are going on kind of in the background that aren't coming in front of council as often um and then there's also kind of different scales right there's a sort of full-blown site review and i forget what it's called but there's like there's a more limited version right that like for pud modifications and for modifications to

[63:00] existing site reviews can you kind of explain like how much of this these new changes because you mentioned simplifying some of that and i um just didn't that that much so maybe you could explain a little bit how the more limited process has been simplified as well well we we didn't really um change the process with this particular project it was really focused on the criteria all those requirements that we have in now for like minor amendments or amendments minor modifications that's all staying the same okay um we have you know heard from some folks that that needs to be simplified we've tried to simplify here and there but not largely not changing the process as part of this okay um and then i kind of have a question that's really similar to matt's but

[64:00] you know you mentioned that there wasn't any that for things like having a hundred percent affordable housing that didn't feel like that while that's providing a community benefit might still present some risks that made it seem appropriate to continue to go through site review i was wondering if there was any discussion of allowing form-based code for those kinds of projects or having having that be an option particularly the project is providing a clear community benefit well we haven't looked at applying form-based code to project sites that might be outside the form based code areas i mean the form-based code started as a limited area so boulder junction and

[65:00] that's been expanded to alpine balsam for instance and we're starting to look at potential areas of east boulder sub-community that might be form-based code but it wouldn't be just applied in random areas of the city you know the other thing that we we deal with obviously through these processes is um you know we try to simplify like form based code we we did remove the requirement that anything over the height limit automatically goes to planning board to incentivize it but there has been concern on boards and in in councils in the past about losing discretion on certain projects like we even proposed doing if you met the form based code requirements you wouldn't have to go to any kind of call-up process but there's been concerns about letting go i i think it's a longer process yeah i think the community people want to really make sure that this reflects

[66:00] good design and is appropriate before that discretion gets let go so we're not quite to that point yet but it could happen in the future okay and then another trigger that i've always been curious about so we have a couple of zoning districts like rmx2 and rh2 where the number of dwelling units you know you can have the same size building and do a buy right project or if you you can get up to addition i think double density essentially by going through site review and it just feels to me that's always felt out of line with our community goals in terms of um providing more affordable housing to our community even if it's not you know permanently affordable or deed restricted it's sort of going to intrinsically be a more affordable product that's being created um any thought put into sort of changing some of those

[67:00] criteria well i think that's something that we could certainly look at in the um upcoming work program item related to trying to get more affordable housing or less expensive housing um you know like we're looking at the bc zones in the um the br1 zone we could look at rh2 i know what you're talking about where you can get a certain density and then if you want more you have to go to planning board we could look at that it's just again it gets to that underlying assumption of site review that if there's the potential for increased impacts on neighbors that typically puts you into a site review process thank you carl that's all for my questions rachel thank you mark wallach okay um i am starting on page 30. i i just wanted to give bonus points before i asked my questions for working in

[68:00] the words prairie dogs like where i at least expected to see them here on council so eight for effort there um but my question on that page is number 20 about the acoustic study and consultant um and it's you know if you're located near a freeway expressway or principal arterial and we really want to incentivize developments along transit quarters so that seems potentially in conflict so i just wanted to know you know how you worked through that yeah um just to give you the evolution of this particular requirement so there's a current criterion that says that noise will be mitigated between units or from noise sources but again it doesn't give you a metric so we're like we thought that that was an area of the criteria that was too vague so we felt that um that should be updated to be um where would this record be required

[69:00] you know this is something honestly this is the the version of the ordinance that went to planning board one thing that came up at planning board is maybe instead of having to require an acoustic consultant you just create a metric that they have to meet in their building design and we thought that that was an interesting comment and so we went into the code and there actually is a requirement like that that just requires a certain construction without having to hire a consultant and it's already in the residential and industrial standards so i think moving forward we may actually take this requirement out and update that noise criterion to be just like the one that's in the residential and industrial zone standards so it wouldn't require that extra extra expense but it would require a certain construction that would lower the noise impacts okay thanks for that and would that be you know unduly burdensome expense wise i guess i'm just worried that we might put something in

[70:00] here that would disincentivize people from building right where we want them to build that's a good point i will look into that okay thanks um let's see next um on page 31 no 33. um f no e historic or cultural resources um if president project protects significant historic and cultural resources i just didn't understand what that means like that seems kind of subjective to me yeah so the boulder valley commerce of plan has policies that encourage the city looking at any buildings that typically are over 50 years to see if they're worthy of preservation or potentially landmarking our site review criteria do not specifically say that as a requirement it really comes through the the criterion that relates to the

[71:02] whether it's compliant with the comp plan or not we felt that the historic preservation element which we've been doing for many many years we're not really changing the requirement but basically it just says that any building that is potentially a historic cultural resource will be looked at by the city landmark staff and they evaluate whether or not it's something that should be landmarked and during the site review process the city does have discretion to um refer this to landmark sport to landmark a building so we wanted to more specifically state in the criteria that's something that we'd be looking at it's current practice we just wanted to make it um more clear that makes sense um although i mean a little bit veering into feedback here but that also injects uh i think some additional layers into the process potentially if it's codified like this so

[72:01] i would have a question mark for me on that one um okay and then also page 33g environmental preservation new language project let's see provides for the preservation of our mitigation of adverse impacts to natural features including ground and surface water wetlands riparian areas drainage and such um it seems that state and federal laws already cover this pretty well so i'm wondering what are we adding here and um you know how how are we um who's enforcing that like what is the project what would that process look like uh we we have a staff member in our competitive planning team that looks at um impacts to potentially like wildlife things like that this is actually an existing criterion we just moved it up into the policy section but it is the criterion that we typically use to like if there are identified areas that should be

[73:00] preserved from an environmental standpoint this is the criterion that's typically used by the city to get like an easement over an area or um get the issue related to like prairie dogs looked at i know that there's other federal laws but this is something that we've been implementing for some time okay um i'd probably have a little question mark there just for future consideration um just would not want that to turn into something that could be uh sort of a a cudgel i guess to slow things down okay and then um the last ones on the next page well i think i think that actually somebody else already asked that question so those i believe are all my questions thanks sarah and then i will ask a couple of questions myself so i'm a newbie on council and also a complete newbie in the field of planning and development so these questions might or might not have nothing or something to do with our

[74:00] discussion tonight so forgive me if they don't but the first question i have has to do with community benefit which is a topic we've been talking about tonight a lot i understand community benefit when it is comes to affordable housing but can you explain to me a community benefit when it comes to commercial properties well the permanently affordable aspect we called phase one of the community benefit project so that was adopted by council i believe in 2019 um so that just sets a requirement that you know if you build over three stories the additional requirements um a higher amount of affordable units would be required either on site or a higher in luffy it also means a higher commercial linkage fee if they're doing just a non-residential project we did move into phase two after that which was affordable commercial or

[75:01] what we called affordable below market rate uh commercial uh we worked with a economist during that process we were trying to basically do an um an analysis of an equivalency between the whatever below market rate requirement would be to affordable housing um which was it ended up being quite complicated uh we ended up having kind of write a pro a process for how much space would have to be in a building that would be below market rate um so this this actually went to the prior council i believe in uh the summer of 2020 we did have an ordinance uh we did have our economist uh making the recommendations of what we were proposing it did cause some concerns uh in the development community um as to its complexity um so ultimately it was something that the city council did not adopt um finding that it you know was too complicated and maybe not necessarily um equivalent in their eyes to um the

[76:02] permanently affordable so we've just been moving forward with the permanently affordable requirement okay so when it came to you talked about the daily camera building and then we built that very large building on the daily camera property do you ever find that community benefit clashes with design outcomes did you what was the not that i'm putting that building down but what was the community benefit of that building that it got so large and why i'm asking is because i wonder you know in business you always look back at mistakes and i'm not saying this is a mistake it might or might not be but you always look back at them and you say what can we do so that we don't that doesn't happen again whether it be an ugly building like let's say i know ugly's neat um in the eye of the beholder but let's say the entire community agrees that x building how did this happen so do we have do we have a way of looking back and saying

[77:01] let's not ever let's not that was a problem the way we did that was a mistake or and how can we not have that happen again so that we don't have repeat offenders of this type of thing or is it i think we're always looking at projects for like what didn't go well and what could be done better um that particular project um the the old daily camera site that predated the community benefit requirements so there was no community benefit requirements pertaining to that building that building was what i remember is that they were promising some sort of theater complex in it which ultimately wasn't built but again there wasn't any requirements in the code at that time so i think that was one of the buildings where it did trigger concerns in the community that maybe there should be community benefit requirements so that's where we updated our boulder valley commerce of plan added a new policy related to community benefit

[78:01] that in turn informed our the project to update the site review criteria that was really helpful thank you so much we have some new hands um but teresa you had your hand up for a moment did you want to say something no thank you it was a it was a hand and error okay so we're going back to lauren and then rachel sorry mine's a tangent but since we brought up the new daily camera building part of the community benefit was the park on top which could use some signage on the sidewalk just just a thought so that it's clear that that's part of the agreement there rachel are you coming back for seconds i'm sorry i would like to if that's okay fearless leader of the evening um my

[79:00] computer is moving really slowly so i couldn't scroll down to see if i had more questions so i'm going to turn my camera off if that's okay in hopes that my scrolling will comply with my requests here and i have a couple more questions so one um is on page 36 pedestrian linkage um from and through uh [Music] to open space maybe provided if consistent i just didn't understand what uh what's new about that little six oh yeah there there's an existing criterion um that just says if possible open space is linked to an area or city-wide system it's very vague i've always had trouble figuring out you know how to respond to that so we wanted to be clear about any project that is adjacent to open space oftentimes there's then an exploration of should the project connect

[80:01] into that open space so this criterion just basically makes it clear that in general we'd like to see connections where possible but we want to make sure that open space evaluates that project and make sure that a connection from that project is appropriate um so you don't get like you know social trails where you shouldn't or if they develop it they that they're aware of the new trail connection okay thanks um page 37 right above the old d number little three i'm talking about landscaping design and water conservation i just didn't know did we is it appropriate in here and did we talk about like avoiding fire accelerant plantings i don't know that we consider that i mean we certainly could add that i think we're looking at that elsewhere but if we're getting into like water conservation it also seems you know that we're then opening some doors and and i think that it's part of the you know resiliency and uh preventing

[81:02] wildfires from tearing through cities as we now know that they can um work so it might be helpful to put something in here and carl if i might add i know that there is a joint project right now um with our forestry forestry chain fire department and climate initiatives to create some better definition around what would be preferred landscaping um so i do think that's a good opportunity awesome thanks carolyn um okay next question uh let's see it talks on page 40 about building materials um and it's it mentions wood and fiber cement board um and i think let's see fiber cement board was considered not high quality materials and wood was considered high quality i think and again just with the fire mitigation discussions are we also looking at that like in addition to

[82:00] what's high quality like my understanding was that maybe fiber cement more board was was better for not not spreading fires not as much of a fire accelerant i don't know if i'm right on that but just wanted to know if we looked at that at those sorts of considerations uh we didn't look at that specifically um for the building materials requirement there is already wildfire areas designated in the city where the building code already requires um certain types of construction but we can coordinate with our our friends and fire department on on how this is written make sure it's consistent okay and i mean at least it would be my opinion that uh sort of the urban wild wildfire interface is is the whole city at this point and so i would not want us to be um you know designating building materials that are fire accelerants that makes sense okay um let's see i just had a question on a on

[83:01] the same page a little too excluding detached dwelling units duplexes townhouses i wasn't sure why we were excluding duplexes there i mean this is one of the examples of where we were getting concerns that the form-based code type requirements might not be appropriate when applied to smaller scale projects so we tried to look at the form-based code requirements that we thought might be too restrictive for smaller scale projects so that's why we included that exemption i see okay um and then i'm on page 42 it's vi at least three elements of the proposed building design shall draw from or improve upon the character of the surrounding area i just put a aha next to that like i don't i don't understand how how we would define improving upon the character of our surrounding area this is one of the ones where um

[84:00] the current criteria is vague um there has to be a finding that the project is compatible with the surrounding area so we thought how could we write that to be a little bit more specific and asking the applicant to really draw out why why this project how how is it going to be compatible so that we tried to write it in a way where they had to list three things um that would determine whether or not we agreed whether it was compatible with the area or not okay um and let's see this i i this is just my uh lack of i guess knowledge about architecture so maybe lauren poker it says it would be good to answer this question i don't know but on page 43 where we talk about recessed windows and it says you know and i understand we're trying to to make sure that the the buildings that we are approving are not going to have sort of

[85:01] a cheap and unfinished look sort of and it says they must be recessed at least two inches from the facade does that leave room for sort of a really modern looking building like there is some uh i don't know like i'm visualizing mid-century modern architecture and i don't know that the windows would be recessed so it'll be left in a wiggle room there for different styles that that may also be objectively aesthetically pleasing i mean i i certainly i i certainly think that you can get modern buildings uh with this requirement i think there's some examples being built you know in in east boulder but you know if we got a you know a particularly interesting modern design that did not meet that this is something that where an applicant might request an alternative compliance okay and then make the case for why this building is unique and why it's better that it not recess it and give those reasons of how it meets those criteria so that's why we included

[86:01] an alternative compliance all right that sounds good um i i think truly those are all my questions now thanks for bearing with me and for letting me have my camera off are you sure i i'll never say never okay all right i have a few questions myself um one of the questions you've asked us uh is whether we should have uh compliance with all bvc policies or the ones you have specified um now i of course um read the comp plan assiduously every night before i go to sleep but not everyone does so i would ask you can you specify some of the comp plan values that we are eliminating not the ones that you've added in or listed but what are the ones that we would be forgoing if we did what you request

[87:02] i mean one i'm trying to think of of which particular policies have been applied to projects that have been problematic from a predictability standpoint so for instance there's the policy about jobs housing and balance so jobs housing and balance is definitely an issue but it's something that we should be you know trying to factor into our actual zoning code with particular limits things of that nature rather than making a decision on whether a project exacerbates the jobs housing balance or not um you know so i think a decision could be made that one particular project would exacerbate the jobs housing balance yet another decision might not pick up on that yet and they wouldn't be looked at fairly so i mean that's where some of the inherent risk comes in with applying all the policies

[88:00] um really what those policies are meant to do are to inform all the you know programs that the city has the zoning codes the area plans all that stuff inform what the specifics should be through those rather than just the high-level policy okay i i hear you i'm just asking is there anything that would be left out as a result of the list that you're providing for us that we ought to know about and be considering and it might be appropriate for us to think about in terms of a site review process i mean nothing specific comes to mind i've gone through the comp plan quite a few times i feel like you know what's most appropriate is you can have a policy a criterion that touches on the boulder valley commerce of plan but really all of the criteria are meant to implement the boulder valley conference of plan so there's already you know if you look at the built environment standards there's there's

[89:00] um if you read the the boulder valley comp plan policies on design it touches on all of the elements that you already see in the site review criteria so there's nothing to me that's that's seems like it's missing you know affordable housing is dealt with through the inclusionary housing program um design is in the built environment we already have a criterion about environmental preservation we're adding we're proposing to add you know greenhouse gas reduction i mean nothing's really coming to my mind as being left out okay i will ask later if our planning board representatives have a different view on that um i want to go back to a comment made by my colleague lauren who used the term metrics and i am interested in with respect to the site review process do we have any sense of the incremental cost of going through the site review process or the additional timing that's required to do so because you hear that

[90:00] complaint a lot from the development community and i'm wondering if is there any there there were you pointing that question to lauren or no no i was referencing the fact that lauren wasn't was requesting the concept of metrics i am now picking up on that and asking do we have any metrics on these kinds of issues we don't have any specific metrics we we have kind of anecdotal um observations about form-based code for instance so we have heard from some architects that because there are additional requirements it can add to the initial cost of preparing a detailed package of plans for the city to review um but at the same time we've also heard that those plans when they're submitted can often take less time to review

[91:00] because it's more clear of whether a standard is met or not and that there could be some cost savings just in the fact that you don't have to keep going back and forth revising the plans to meet the criteria we don't have any specific data on that okay and perhaps you can deal with a certain perplexity that i'm experiencing for the last two and a half years every time i have spoken to a consultant or a developer the complaint has been uh about the arbitrary arbitrariness the subjectivity of the process and now on page 11 you're telling us that the development community now resists a more prescriptive system i mean which is to me the the exact opposite of what i've been hearing for the last two and a half years on the theory that you know you can't

[92:01] have it both ways what is the development community actually saying do how do they want it do they want prescriptive or do they want subjective i don't know that i have a good answer to that um i i think i understand what you're saying because i i i feel like i i've heard similar complaints in the past and i feel that through this process we've tried to address those um so i think there was a little there was a bit of an element of surprise on my part that there was resistance to this i mean obviously there's a higher volume of requirements in here and and requirements that probably add to expense in the project you know with respect to building materials and you know it might take a little bit more time to design a project to meet these requirements so i understand that resistance but i i i i understand that observation

[93:00] and just two more questions one is with respect to the environmental uh regulations you're trying to incorporate into this process has anybody costed them out what is it you know in a city that's very unaffordable um are we making it more unaffordable to what extent are we doing that what what is the cost going to be for entering into those requirements are you referring specifically to the greenhouse gas carolyn you want to take that one sure perhaps absolutely thank you again i'm carol nealum i'm a sustainability senior manager in the climate initiatives department managing our energy systems work and partnering with our um planning development services on our energy code work just as background um so we did do research um some specific things we've heard around the low concrete requirement um specifically for the first criteria

[94:00] is that that could be anywhere from cost parity to ten percent recogni um that's from concrete providers in the industry so it's it's a range we are acknowledging that there's state requirements and other things coming down around low concrete materials that are making it the preferred material so generally we're not expecting that to have a material impact on the life cycle assessment we did some sampling and see that for the added cost of the project of less than ten thousand dollars so that's less than uh is a fraction of a percent of the cost and then on the three optional criteria an all-electric building depending on the building type can be cost parity due to the savings um from not having to install gas infrastructure and handling devices so we've seen for example multi-family affordable housing coming in and choosing all electric because it's the more cost-effective option for them so there's a range within that

[95:00] we would expect 10 percent higher than building code to add a cost we have not specifically estimated what that is because we leave discretion um to builders on how they want to achieve that and there's different cost parameters that go into that and then for the the third criteria the outcome verified code path uh assuming that they um are properly modelling their billing we would expect no incremental costs associated with that that's just verifying it performs the way it was designed to perform okay my last question and it makes me a little uncomfortable to even raise this but but i think i have to um there are a remarkable number of points of disagreement between staff and the planning board on this and i'm i am asking uh why this is coming to council without having worked through some of those disagreements and trying to reach a more consensual basis for

[96:00] recommendation and the discomfort for me is a i like to empower our boards and b i you know putting us in the position of being the referee is not the analytical position i think we ought to be in in considering something of this gravity and this weight so my question is wow can you explain the timing of this that leaves us having to choose their thoughts versus your thoughts um uh without trying to narrow those differences i think some of the difficulties we've been dealing with this project is obviously um we did a very detailed presentation to the planning board in october of last year of of of the criteria and all the approaches we were taking and the composition of the planning board changed significantly um by the time we were moving into developing the ordinance and bringing it

[97:01] before them so opinions changed um a lot of the work that we've done there was some disagreement on so um that that's a that's an issue and and we also felt in the same vein the composition of the city council changed during the course of this project so we felt that as council is you know the ones leading the project and had originally set out the goals and objectives that it would be prudent to come back to this this this particular council and make sure we're on the right track before we start making changes and working with planning board again i hear you but i remain pretty uncomfortable lauren you had some more questions yeah i just was reminded of one around the energy requirements i noticed that it outlined there was an outline of sort of what our anticipated um 2023

[98:00] energy code update was going to bring forward um and i was wondering why not use those as the basis for the energy requirements in this site plan review update um carl you can back me up on this but i think generally as carl's indicated there's characteristics of these projects that demonstrate an increased impact on the community whether it's increased density increased impacts on transportation there there's some characteristics to the project that um that go above and beyond in terms of impact on the community and therefore we've historically tried to go above and beyond minimum code requirements as well to compensate for those characteristics so you know when you think about multi-building properties you're increasing for example the amount of um concrete connectivity between those buildings and some other

[99:01] things within the project so the goal was to further mitigate that combined impact where a code only addresses the single building structure itself and not the totality of the project and maybe i was just reading them incorrectly but it seemed like the 2023 code or at least what was written in there was more stringent than what was being suggested in terms of the um update for this site plan review like the site plan review i believe was 10 better than code and then the 2020 iecc and then it looked like the energy code was going to be 15 percent better than 2020 iecc and the technology yeah that's 10 better than our code so it would be 10 more stringent than the city's energy conservation code which in turn is 15 to 20 percent more stringent than the base national code

[100:00] so it would be additive on top of our our city code okay and that was probably just an oversight on my part we can make that that clear though yeah it's intended to reference our um city of boulder conservation code i ask to follow up on that do you mind one month please so carol i hear what you're saying about kind of larger projects you know having a larger impact it looks like as i read the ordinance that the threshold for that is if any building is over 30 000 square feet that those additional requirements would kick in do i have that right and was subject to site review right and would it be the whole project or just any particular building over the 30 000 square foot threshold it's any building over the 30 000 square foot threshold uh so it's only if you have a mix of smaller and larger buildings it would only apply to those larger ones correct

[101:01] thanks for helping me understand and then with the um reduction in co2 emissions for concrete you know that was type site review and then it looked like there was sort of looking at co2 reductions for the entire building envelope as part of the energy code and to me again the the entire envelope seems more restrictive than just looking at concrete um can you clarify your question for me i think i'm understanding i um the as currently proposed so originally it was one of the three and and i think his um plan in response to planning board there was desire to both to require both the low embodied carbon concrete and the life cycle assessment and then the choices are are the ones that are intended to address

[102:01] more of the envelope and total building performance impact so we're trying to do both through those criteria and then maybe this isn't the right time but mark you did ask some questions about from the development side what you know how difficult these are to implement and you know i have gone through this process on the development side if you want my opinion on um how tricky or how time-consuming it is um i don't do them a lot but i've been you know done my fair share of site reviews no okay that's fine juni you're up thank you mark i think i'm just thinking back to one comment that you made mark

[103:02] and i think it's very hard to answer some of the questions put forward by staff and i'm thinking about for example question number three on page 16 asking to what extent should greenhouse gas emission reduction criterion be applied to larger buildings should there be three options for compliance or should projects be required to always comply with all three and i'm thinking well i'm a council member there's still a lot of things that are kind of not connecting for me and part of the questions and i know you mentioned earlier that you have done there has been community outreach and community engagement but i think part of that question is how receptive was the business community to each of the plans that you proposed and what was the feedback that you got

[104:01] i i think the feedback we got from at least the site review focus group and some others in the community there was concern about adding new requirements yeah yeah no i completely understand that because i think part of for me to be able to answer that question is to think about what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks right and i think it goes back to something that council member you know wallet brought forward was that okay is this going to cost more i mean i'm all for energy efficiency but also we want to ensure that's a process that you know businesses can go through as well in how we incentivizing i know this is not this is probably not the council meeting to talk about incentives but how well we incentivize a lot of these plans to ensure that they are they can be achieved so cost efficiency i think that's something that you know in my mind that i'm thinking about how to answer that question and i feel like

[105:01] i'm still missing so much on how to best answer that question thank you brad did you have your hand up a couple minutes ago did but it was an error turns out that button is very close to other key buttons okay any other questions from council okay at this point uh we should probably move into discussion of the questions being presented to us can you put those questions up aaron mark i was just wondering when you thought we might hear from the planning board and dad members you know that's a very good point why don't we hear from the planning board before we do that um uh do the planning board members wish to uh make a statement of any kind sarah john go ahead sarah well i don't think we have a statement i

[106:01] think we're here to answer questions um uh i will say that um of the issues that you are first of all thank you all for the work you're doing um carl thank you for walking everyone through um really complex uh proposed legislation and to the city council members who haven't already served on planning board welcome to our world um i think that there were two or three issues that planning board was particularly [Music] concerned about the first one was the staff's proposal to limit our use of um boulder valley comp plan policies for evaluating site review proposals i think it's helpful to think about

[107:03] how planning board utilizes site review processes not just to evaluate specific projects but also to surface key planning issues so i can't remember in the three and a half years i've been on planning board that there's ever been a site review that's been rejected because of a boulder valley comp plan policy john maybe you can remember one i i don't but we do use it extensively to let staff and the applicant community know that we have some concerns that are not being addressed in the individual projects that are coming our way because our job is to help the city be planful as much as our job is to evaluate individual projects so when carl for example brought up the jobs housing balance

[108:00] that comes up in almost every single commercial project that comes our way no project has ever to my knowledge been rejected because we bring it up but we want to make sure that applicants and staff and the rest of the city knows that we recognize that the jobs housing balance is an issue and that we want it we want we keep um putting it out there and putting it out there and putting out there same as true with missing middle housing so um i believe that our um sort of nose count during the planning board discussion of this issue was certainly a majority and i think it was actually a 7-0 sort of nose count wants those wants the opportunity to refer to all of the boulder valley comp plan policies um during site review i think the the second issue which had to do with prescriptive versus

[109:00] descriptive um i think the nose count vote on that was four uh planning board members indicating that they thought that the proposed uh design um changes or reviews were um not were fine they were not too prescriptive and three members um i think it was all three of the new members thought they were um and that is actually why we sent it to design advisory board for their input um and um you know i would love to hear from i think it would be helpful for you all to hear from matthew what the dab's take on that was um and then there were um there was a long discussion around height issues um but it was specifically around um context versus feet like that the context in which a building might be going in versus

[110:01] how close the next tall building was and i think where we landed was context and you know having just gone through a concept review on tuesday about a very a proposed very tall building that was going to be quite a bit taller than the two buildings right next to it that context really does matter and it's a really valuable tool for us during certainly concept review and then site review um personally there was one issue that we had put on i put on the table which had to do with um to to um uh aaron's point we talk about height around high frequency corridors but we in the city don't have a definition for high frequency corridors and i think that it would be very valuable for staff to figure out a definition so that another one of those subjective um opportunities is reduced and a developer an applicant would actually know whether or not the building he or she is

[111:00] proposing is on a high frequency corridor or not so those are my um my the things i thought were useful to highlight in terms of our meeting john what did you want to add well i i think you've done a beautiful job i would just add that with respect to the to the use of the boulder valley comp plan there was also some concern about uh devaluing the comp plan itself by not allowing it to be fully considered in circumstances where it can play a significant role if if the planning board is limited as to which portions of the comp plan it can consider in for certain applications then then the value of the comp plan itself is diminished and uh that uh that is a concern that uh that is quite significant considering that's the

[112:02] fundamental document on which we have based everything else that we're doing i would add one comment which is a quote from our former planning board member lupita montoya who was always reminding us that we're the planning committee not the welcoming committee and that um our job really is um but to both review specific projects but also to try to bear in mind the planning for the entire city like what do we what do we all collectively want the city to grow into and without the bvcp on balance option it's very it would be almost impossible to fulfill that responsibility and of course if you have any questions we're happy to answer them

[113:01] are there any questions okay all right i think at this point we should move in has a question mark i'm sorry i'm sorry harry has her hand up i'm sorry i have a quick question about uh the one when we were talking about the green buildings and sarah you guys chose all three words the city did not do you remember what i'm referring to all three can you say can you tell us why you disagreed with them exactly i don't think it was so much a disagreement um it was more of a we'd like to have and and this was a a conversation that was led mostly by ml if i'm not mistaken john is that right we recognize that climate change is a a primary concern um in general and

[114:02] certainly for um the people of boulder who have um we've talked about everything from reducing single occupancy vehicle and improving alternative transportation and moving from gas to electric in all of our buildings and i think the point ml was trying to make is that there are more opportunities for reducing um climate impacts through the how buildings are built and i you know i think that that is what was driving her um her lead on that conversation i personally i thought that staff's suggestion of requiring two and making the third an option was actually a good sort of solomonic solution to this do you think you all brought up an important issue which is the issue of cost and that that is in your your guys hands right just to just to add the the the sense of the board was we don't

[115:00] know the costs of these but none of these overlap and they all make sense so that's that's how we came to that conclusion thank you john matthew for my hand here yeah thanks for your time and and also um to staff you know this is not an easy thing which is why i think it has always is a ongoing conversation and so you know with that in mind i have a couple of things to bring up and i apologize if it's not laser focused but i think the overall concept we're talking about here is site review within um the context of public benefit or design initiative or incentives and i think you know um looking at ways that these things help

[116:01] developers and designers understand that there's a road map towards favorable outcomes is really what site review functions as you know i'm a designer myself site review in some ways is when you when it comes down to delivering a project is a necessary checklist to understand how you're going to get from a proposal to adult project so i think you know conceptually and not just speaking for myself but from the design board perspective anything we can do to make that roadmap more clear and to make the incentives and some of the constraints along the way more clear in my mind that is the favorable uh you know revision to the site review process if the site review process has you know requirements added i think that's fine as long as they're clearly stipulated

[117:03] you know also to concur with some of the general comments from the planning board i think those are all in line with the general consensus of the design board as well there are a couple um [Music] questions i have um i guess and they're really probably for carl just clarifications um for myself that may be beneficial um is it is it my understanding is my understanding correctly that if if if the form base code the intent of the form based code where it where in the city it's employed would be to give designers and developers an option not to do site review is that correct no i mean we looked at it being an optional path when we were developing the form based code in 2016 we opted to just apply the form based code so

[118:01] rather than being an option so basically the whole area of the you know boulder junction it's it's form-based code so they're not even eligible for site reviews same as alpine balsam uh right and is that will that remain going forward that projects in the you know could elect to do form-based code rather than a full site review process yeah i mean it doesn't have to be that way it could be an optional thing there could be some inconsistency potentially by allowing it to be the option of of an applicant but um yeah so i think this is my thank you for clarifying i think my comment i don't want to muddy the waters because it's this coming is a bit out of the scope of what you're presenting to council but i think just conceptually the value of having a form-based code and this goes for other jurisdictions you know that i've worked with i'm sure you're familiar with a really good outcome for site review is

[119:02] to provide a way for for people to um i would say not go through it right but if there was a way that it was prescriptive enough that it simplified the process in the you know there were less site reviews to have to review basically widening the net of the staff level review you know it seems like if you're introducing form-based elements into the site review criteria you're taking just kind of a step halfway between a form based code and what we have now which is basically a review-based process so i'm sorry that's not super focused i know it's a little bit out of the the uh scope um one last question is you know most most of the times where i've seen projects come into a site reviewed or a very easy trigger

[120:00] for site review is the fact that we have so many site kind of legacy puds throughout the city so that effectively there's very little by right zoning in a lot of the commercial you know a lot of the commercial zones especially but even in many of the residential areas is there any um sort of revision or or restructuring the pud system that would dovetail with what we're talking about the types of measures we're talking about today that would make site reviews more clear and perhaps you know less reduce the amount of unknowns as you go into the site review process matthew i think we're getting a little far afield at this point and i'd like to turn the conversation back to what we need to do tonight which is to answer several questions that have been posed

[121:00] by um staff yeah that's fine thanks mark i appreciate it um staying on target and we are we are now done with questions um i suggest that we you got to be kidding what do you got i just wanted to ask matthew a question is that okay i mean you did say you depend on our boards right mark the thing briefly please yes what then how what was your feeling what was the design advisory board's feeling about the question about uh prescriptive versus um that particular question did you feel it was too prescriptive then all of you or how did that come yeah i i think um our recommendation is it has to be a balance very prescriptive if we have for very prescriptive measures such as a visual band or something it should be one of several prescriptive

[122:00] measures that are options or else we're really we're prescribing every new project to have a set of the remarkably similar details and i think overall that would not be a desirable outcome either you know so hopefully that answers a question and now i declare all questions closed let's move to the questions that staff require some direction on um we can comment on those and then we can take a straw poll as to how we feel about it carl can you bring those up bring them up okay question one city council find that the updated site review criteria within draft ordinance 8515 meets the goals and objectives outlined

[123:00] for the project anybody want to jump in on that or under review matt i i was waiting for some colleagues to jump in but um for the sake of moving that along i'll i'll pipe in so my answer would be yes but um to be honest uh yes as the way it was defined when the project started but i think that there's things that we haven't pushed the envelope far enough on that that i think if we were to start this project now independent of the work that's been done or the sacrifices that might be made to future work that were that we have in the pipeline that i might i would suggest we define some of this differently and look to be a bit bolder in how we think about site review and encompass some more facets to this

[124:01] but not wanting to slow or hold the project up too much that that's not really the case so so yes but but i think we probably could have started with a bit more aggressive goals and and really tried to push the envelope on on how we think about maybe reinventing site review in our community um to meet our goals so that's my short long response thanks lauren i think you were next thanks mark so of the approaches um i completely like you broke it down to five different things this emphasize reorganize simplify remove and add so the first four i completely support but the ad category was a little problematic um i i think that site review is intended to be a subjective process meant to deal with situations that we don't think code can adequately address and i think that sort of some of the pieces in here

[125:02] um kind of like what matthew said sort of hit this in-between form-based code and a site review process that i think removes um variety that i think is important to our community i think the answer is yes i agree with um what matt was saying um that maybe this council would not have defined the goals and objectives quite the same um as the previous councils did but i don't believe that that we should be moving goal posts at the tail end of a project so i think the answer to question one is yes aaron and yeah i mean i think generally so you know i was on on those councils and and i was sometimes in the minority in the opinions at the time but i i think that this this does respond to the the goals that were set um i think y'all did some fantastic work i i would tweak some of

[126:01] the outcomes which i'll get to and the answers to the other questions but i think um you all have been responsive um to the to feedback uh which has changed somewhat over the years which is always challenging so thanks for your flexibility and tara it is so challenging especially when you have a new council i really can understand the stress of that so i'm just going to agree with lauren on this i'm not sure this is the question to say this but i'm super concerned that things don't all look alike and that there's creativity in our projects and i don't want this to take away from that so i agree with what matthew said tonight as well as lauren and i'm going to second their statements okay we've seen no other comments perhaps we can take a straw poll on this um all who uh are supportive of uh

[127:01] or vote i in terms of question one um that the site review criteria meet the goals and objectives outlined for the project raise your hand and actually see anything but this screen is it just me i can't see everybody else okay i think then we've already let's try that one more time there's a clear majority on that thank you shall we try question two sorry let me pull that back up again [Music] this is not very responsive

[128:03] [Music] there you go all right question two how's the criterion related to bvcp policy compliance be evaluated for development projects should all policies be applied to projects on balance or should only the built environment policies apply comments hands let's start with lauren then nicole then the mayor i think aaron got his hand up first well i couldn't see that so aaron if you have your hand up first go first well i might have thanks lauren not that it matters terribly but um i just could you know i i did spend almost five years on playing board and i found that the ability to talk about the policies in the bdcp was really important but something that i found challenging

[129:00] sometimes was there was occasionally an inclination on one or more on the part of one or more board members to deny a project because it didn't comply with just one or two out of the many many policies in the boulder valley comprehensive plan and so the word on balance was never fully defined and i saw us get tangled up in knots on that over and over and over again so i i would recommend not going back to the exact not sticking with the exact language that we have right now i think you know i think generally i'm supportive of the direction that staff was going in but i think in a way that makes it clear that you know the how the bbcp is being complied with should be up for discussion per sarah and john's points right it's not that you shouldn't talk about how this project deals with one or the other of the bbcp policies but what i think we want to make sure is that the that i would um i would say is to update the language

[130:00] such that a denial is only possible based on you know maybe just the built uh environment policies or some subset like you were in the direction that you were going in so if you can kind of thread that a little bit to make it clear can still be part of the discussion but that that projects should not be denied because they uh potentially don't comply with just one or two policies so that would be my direction i know you've gotten varied feedback but that that's the direction i'm going i think lauren was next but forgive me if i'm wrong thanks mark um so i'm sort of generally in the same line of thinking as aaron i would like to i would actually like to see the on balance language included but then with um sort of a caveat sentence added about you know where feasible or appropriate based on the size and scale of the project

[131:01] and you know not where not already handled by other zoning and building codes because i think that there are things where you know the boulder valley comprehensive plan is talking about you know guiding a lot of different things in our community and not all of them are going to apply especially to smaller projects and you know depending on what the zoning already is some of the thing many things in the polar valley comprehensive plan will or won't be allowed nicole i'm kind of along the same lines as um aaron and lauren here and that um on balance doesn't it doesn't quite uh i i would lean away from on balance and have some more um more specific policies and and part of that i mean i guess if the you know if we are keeping on balance and really tying to the boulder valley comprehensive plan part of my beef is really with the comprehensive plan and being um not quite specific enough to

[132:02] offer this sort of guidance it seems like it's a little bit open to interpretation and people can kind of pull out different sections to back up you know whatever position they want to have so um i think i would lean toward not moving away from on balance and having some more specific policies and if we don't go that route i'd just like us to be more um just to be a little more specific as we approach the uh comprehensive plan in the future um i'm gonna agree with my colleagues who just spoke um i think the unbalanced language is dangerous um or it has been used let me all say it this way it has been misused the uh the boulevard comp plan is kind of like the bible uh you can probably find anything in there to support any position you want to take and like aaron i've seen many instances where it has been used more frequently used to deny projects than to support them oftentimes they

[133:01] meet many many criteria so that's not a problem but but um often times if a planning board uh wants to to turn on a project they'll they'll they'll find enough books in the in the comp plan to turn it down and and then we have the unbalanced language and and then who knows what how that that those weights uh balance out and so i i i'm not gonna wordsmith that tonight but i agree with lauren that that that some sort of caveat language or qualifying language needs to be put in there or the unbalanced language needs to be completely taken out and rewritten in a more equitable fashion anyone else i will ask one quick question from for carl um how many site plans have failed to complete the process and how many have failed to complete the process based on this language you know nothing jumps to my mind as far

[134:00] as a project being denied specifically based on the bvcp i think obviously like with an annexation that's legislative um there's more authority to apply the um boulder valley concert comprehensive plan policies there have been some denials of annexations for instance but i can't think of any site reviews um and there certainly are site reviews that have been denied but maybe not based on this language okay all right then my comment will be i i think we're attempting to dance on the head of a pin this is not a factual language for denial of a project uh i don't know why we would not encourage conversation about any uh policy in the comp plan that might be relevant to the project if it's not going to end up um being the cause of it being denied so i will take a different view on that um but let's take a straw poll and see

[135:00] where we are um for those who think that the uh can you pull this down can you pull that slide down i'm sorry uh one moment okay um for those who think we should just be referencing the built environment as part of the site plan raise your hands seemed a little broader than that but like that's the side i think i'm on maybe even not you know not limiting using the entire comp plan but but limiting the limiting the aspects of the comp plan that should be referenced in the site review aaron you had a comment first well you just kind of heard the discussion i think i wouldn't just say just the built environment but kind of go in the direction of moving away from the on balance for the comments that have been made so far did we go from that point i'm not quite sure what you're

[136:01] suggesting so let's be so what i say you were saying uh do we want to move to just the built environment and i would say instead have a question of do we want to move away from the on balance approach subject to the comments that have been made so far tonight okay uh brad lauren yeah i i i would characterize the discussion i've heard tonight as being uh not binary anymore so it's not the two choices that we've kind of teed up but rather of the mingling of the two and if that's the sense of verbum i think that gives us the direction we need to move forward okay does anybody agree to letting staff run with this and meld the concepts okay question three aaron did another one for you that was a mistake sorry

[137:00] oh go ahead i was going for mute and i hit ray's hand instead [Laughter] okay what extension the greenhouse gas emission reduction criterion apply to larger buildings should there be three options for compliance or should projects always be required to meet all three all right who wishes to comment uh starting the call yeah i think i'm just a little stuck here and this this may kind of be going back to just um my my lack of knowledge around planning so i'll be here to hear other people's comments too um but with something like this i mean for greenhouse gas emissions that's so linked to something our community cares so much about um i guess i just i just don't understand why it's kind of showing up here versus just in in our code um like what and so maybe this is just a clarifying question for staff on this question

[138:00] um why why wouldn't we want all buildings to have um greenhouse gas emission reduction criteria applied i think there's like certain level of requirements that already do apply in the energy code it's just the concept of if an applicant comes in for a site review and wants to build more than what the zoning typically allows that there'll be an additional requirement okay thank you that's helpful sorry can i call a queen aircraft because i i believe that it wasn't if they're asking for more than what's allowed by right but if specifically a building is 30 000 square feet or greater when these kick in that's correct so you know we were trying to look at thresholds for what what typically becomes what people perceive as a large building that might have a greater carbon footprint so that's where we resolve the the thirty

[139:01] thousand size great things just wanna clear okay i think lauren you were next and then matt thanks mark yeah i would i i think that it would be good to get a little bit more sort of outreach to the community to get some feedback on this i um i like the second option that staff presented where it was sort of you had to do all three but then there was a choice for the third um but again i i would like to see some a little bit more feedback on that before we implement it and i i guess in general i you know these projects take a long time to come to fruition so they end up being sort of one or two code step but often they aren't meeting our current energy standards when they're built because they

[140:01] typically get to use the energy standards that they are that were in place when they were started um and so i can also see kind of trying to have these be almost like one step ahead of what the energy code is going to be so that um there is future alignment but i would still i would still support option two thank you matt um i so i completely agree with where lauren is going and i i to sort of maybe push on that little tendril a little more is is we got to be thinking beyond zero beyond our current standards and and to sort of wrap a point juni brought up earlier was what are our incentives to do so and i think having giving options and and say and i think we do need to have that because site review is a is a can be an onerous process for for for buildings

[141:00] that just have to automatically go through that and so if there's ways that they can meet and far exceed the guidelines that are presented to them and they get to bypass some site review and maybe have some other code that keeps things in intact like i think it it's more it's not about building our needs for today it's about building for tomorrow so i'd love to really think about how we can really create an environment for developers anybody building stuff certainly of sufficient size to go way beyond our requirements um and so i i like where lauren was going with her comments and i'd really like to push the envelope on on some of those options certainly with regards to our climate goals tara aaron rachel i like the staff's idea best um that it was two and then pick the third whichever you like aaron yeah well and i'll just say kind of to nicole's question at the first part i

[142:00] mean i i do like to see this kind of energy requirements go into our base building code and i think that's where most of it belongs so like like the low the lower carbon concrete like if that's a feasible technology right now let's get that into our building codes you know it's um you know rather than have it be a something that only applies to certain buildings under certain circumstances when you go into in the site review uh so i i i'd like to maybe if we could think about we're updating our building codes i think we're gonna start talking about in a handful months and to implement uh next year so if we can be thinking about hey these are some great ideas let's carry two or three of these forward into our energy code update next year and and make them happen for everybody i think that that would be great and then so maybe in the site review maybe it's more things like the the total building evaluation um stuff where that's like a more of a performance thing that you might not have in an energy code necessarily although we might be moving in that direction but

[143:00] that's um less about how you build the building and more about making sure it's performing correctly that sounds like maybe the the kind of thing that's maybe more appropriate for the site review criteria so i'll just put that there as a thought i mean i think your general approach of let's do these two all the time and then pick from these other three is a good one but i just and maybe the way i go with it is let's take those first two and if they're feasible let's just put them in the energy code and then pick one out of three something like that thanks if i can colloquy for a minute aaron um i'm not sure where you're coming down on this particular question and i'm eager to know if i can reflect back i i think what i i heard you say mayor is you would like us for all buildings to build to a low carbon emissions concrete standard and consider that as base coat as well as the life cycle assessment but allow the third option which is kind of the outcome based

[144:02] um to be within site review is that an accurate summary or no it is it's but i'm i'm also i'm giving that feedback to to look into that right like because if you were to come back and say like actually you know what the the low carbon concrete things really only applies appropriately to larger buildings for this reason i'll listen to you but see if they if these feel like things that are on are feasible things now i'm just saying rather than having the site review criteria it's pushing in the energy code that'd be my recommendation great thank you is that clear enough this time mark i think so thank you rachel i think my feedback's pretty similar to aaron's which is is as much of this that can go into the energy code makes most sense to me so that um you know even in aaron's last example if it if you know something only applies in a large building that still to me makes sense to go in the energy code as as you know energy related um constant so

[145:02] i guess just for simplicity and and being able to find what you're looking for uh it would seem that that ideally anything that's going to be um energy related would be there rather than here so that's my general feedback on that okay bob i'm going to agree with rachel and aaron i the energy code is a much more nimble instrument to use we we update that from time to time there's national international standards that are constantly evolving as technology changes and i think the correct place for these types of things is the code as ra lawrence we're about to launch into revisions to that code in a few months anyway uh and so i would be content to wait get into the code have it applied to to everything um we don't touch cr uh sorry i think aaron this is why you like only the first or second time we've adjusted several criteria in seven years we've been on council and i'm afraid that that we could hardwire something in here and and then it doesn't get touched for many many years whereas the code i think we look at every couple years so i i think

[146:02] aaron's absolutely right that it's it's really the energy code where this belongs right nicole yes just kind of coming back around um i just wanted to spotlight one thing that i think lauren was referring to and i think mark you mentioned this earlier as well so this idea of incentivizing because as i understand the site review process part of it is to really spur innovation um and kind of allow for a creative space that may not exist within kind of the box of our our typical code and so if we can kind of have this general code that applies to everybody and then also have some sort of incentive that is driving this innovation that the site review process is kind of meant to do that feels like the ideal outcome for me uh i'll make a brief comment that i am in agreement with bob rachel and aaron in terms of the best place for these restrictions to be it's in the in the code itself as opposed to the site

[147:00] review process all right what do we have to um can we get the question back up so we can at least decide on what we're doing here okay oh there we go does the city council believe that the criteria should be modified to be less prescriptive can we get a show of hands on that like this is this is question four i'm not sure we've uh passed question three yet have we thank you there we go um to what extent do the greenhouse gas emission reduction criterion apply to larger buildings sorry

[148:00] can i get a show of hands on uh the question can we remove this slide can we what remove the slide so i can see everybody okay what extent should the criterion apply to larger buildings do we think it should hands mark can i just ask clarifying yes certainly um it feels like this is another place where our discussion has sort of changed the nature of the question and so i'm wondering if um maybe a question we could ask is whether staff feels like they have enough from our discussion to answer this question because i feel like i can't answer it at this point based on our discussion carl do you have enough guidance yeah i think we've that's definitely good feedback i'd like to go back and talk to carolyn and other staff about what's been said tonight and and move forward

[149:00] yeah and i would agree on both questions that are the a and b parts of question b question i i think we've covered both the a and b questions that are in question three there and you have what you need yes okay now we can do question four [Music] question four drum roll okay sorry it's just a bit sluggish it's all right so am i we had it there for a second there we go the city council believe that the criteria should be modified to be less prescriptive and do we have any other modifications to the criteria and the draft ordinance anybody want to take that on mayor thanks mark um well just i'll just jump in here uh that i i would i would go in

[150:01] the less prescriptive direction on this i mean i think you've outlined a lot of great design ideas and guidelines and such here but i don't know that they need to apply to every building i think somebody was mentioning danger of every building starting to look the same if we get a little bit too prescriptive in our design ideas i was looking around my my neighborhood earlier today i don't know that any of my current the buildings in my current neighborhood comply with with every single criteria um so so i think there's a lot of great stuff in there but what my recommendation would be to do something like this and this is just an idea so you have the alternative compliance method which is it was a good it's a good escape hatch for having a prescriptive approach but it has a lot of really good language in and of itself kind of in in a broad statement of how we should approach designing great buildings and so i just wonder if that could become like the heading for the design section to say that like broadly speaking we should do these great things around design and open space and and such and then say list and we recommend

[151:02] or highly recommend or some language around like these you know 14 um specific design moves uh that we found to make successful buildings and so we would look to see most of them implemented in your design something like that but then so that gives you some way to give feedback to developer if they can come back with nothing but blank walls and unarticulated facades and you know 17 materials you can say look you got to do at least most of this stuff that you're not you're not going with our design criteria but but if somebody doesn't put a vertical expression line in one place because it's not their vision for the design or if they have a longer building because like my neighbors are senior senior housing they have a longer building so that they only have one elevator for the whole building right so it saves costs and things like that so that there would be room for something like that so so that that would be my my recommendation there and that's kind of on the bigger topic maybe i'll let my other colleagues win and i have one or two little specific things as well

[152:01] lauren yeah so as an architect i think design is really important and i don't think that making a checklist encourages design thinking um on design advisory board we saw out of town developers come in and think that like the easiest path forward was just to kind of like do a you know go through the list and try and like check all the boxes and i think that this just encourages that kind of um design even more and so i would really i again i think that site review is sort of intended to be a discretionary process and i think that it's important for these guidelines to feel like guidelines and to try and encourage um innovative design um i can go through a checklist of things that i think are problematic it's

[153:00] fairly extensive but um i think that that sort of generally covers it that you know thank you matt and rachel thanks mark um well i mean i think this is tough um but i think just sort of looking back i mean we're sort of caught in the quasi-judicial nature of sight review right right i mean it's a criterion-based decision and yet if the criteria is then totally subjective it's it's it's entropy not order um and and so i get the predictability side and so i i i want to see i like you know what what's the middle ground of that more or less is is really i think the question and i and i can't point to specific pieces for that but i think that you know by and large i i like where aaron's going but i but i want to make sure that we still have a clear understanding of that quasi-judicial nature of criteria based

[154:01] decision making and we've that's the predictability part that i think is really important but i don't want homogeny as a byproduct of that so so it doesn't really answer the question but it sort of settles somewhere in the middle of the nature of site review lends itself and and maybe it's the fact that it's quasi-judicial and that's the point that that's the sticking point of this whole thing is it has to be criterion-based so i really to answer the question i'd say i'd be less prescript less prescriptive provide some options but if we can also create really clear definitions for things and terms that allow us to come back to less subjectivity and just find that middle ground in that balance i think we might get where we need to go and lauren i just sort of uh i don't know a question or comment on on maybe some threads i think i was picking up tonight which were if i was following matthew from dab i thought he was you know and a couple other colleagues comments

[155:00] that that maybe there's a desire you know what we were trying to get to with the form-based code type of um decision making is is you know it's predictable and and maybe in some cases you know you can have fewer steps maybe i think maybe one of the options would be you don't have to do site review i don't know if that's like just too scary to even consider um but is are we will this process look at that at all going forward or is that just sort of dead because it wasn't asked up front is there any room for something that that would be prescriptive still that allows some some time and money savings for people and yet have the the creativity that lauren is suggested that we need to have beautiful spaces i don't know that that um was included in the original scope of the project so we haven't really spent much time on it it doesn't mean we don't think about it um it might be something that we

[156:01] try to fold into again the 2022 work program items to incentivize you know affordable housing maybe there's other things in the site review process that we could also think about okay yeah i'm certainly not trying to again move goal posts but it seemed like a sort of common thread and maybe worthwhile for us to look at long term thanks lauren to you and then to matt i just wanted to add in a comment about sort of this back and forth between predictability and subjectivity so i think you know on a lot of developers when they're coming up with their pro forma and things like that that the kinds of things that they are really looking for predictability around are you know the number of units that they can have and the floor area and how many parking spaces they're going to have um i think that you know as long as we get to a point where we can agree on the window details at some point that that's largely

[157:03] you know that's not what makes or breaks a project in terms of whether or not it's financially feasible for them which is a large portion of what they they care about so i think that having the detail on the public realm side be a little bit more subjective um again i think can lead to better design out options or the possibility for better design options and is something that i would encourage keeping open that i didn't answer the second part of the question so my apologies to sort of suggestions or modifications i'll circle back to something i mentioned earlier and maybe it's pie in the sky and maybe it doesn't belong here but it's certainly related to site review which is just where do we think about really clear community benefit projects and how they can be allowed knowingly you know assuming we have a strong general building code

[158:02] and and use tables that by right they can meet those really huge community goals and sidestep and not go through site review and then sort of just stay within the realm of good code and they're doing something exceptionally needed in our community that we would define i just i i don't know if that's here brad and carl but but somewhere that conversation is is very close or adjacent to this conversation a site review so i just wanted to put that out there since that was sort of a criteria sort of what suggestions but that's what i leave with okay and i'll make a just a quick comment um you know to the extent that we are being responsive to development community uh desires for less prescription um since that is the um really contrary to what i've i've heard from every developer consultant i've spoken to over the last two and a half years who all bemoan the subjective nature of the process i'm

[159:01] really agnostic as to which way we go but if if we are going to be less prescriptive i never want to hear another complaint from another developer in this city that the process is too subjective and they don't know what what their obligations are going to be um this is something we're accommodating um i'm i'm cognizant of uh lauren's concern for better design and that's kind of why i'm agnostic either way but i never want to hear another complaint thanks and aaron i think you've got something and then nicole yeah i just had one a couple detailed follow-ups i also would not like to hear complaints again about anything really so that's all i agree with here um so just a couple detailed comments one is coming back to the the view corridor thing i do really think that we need to pin down the definition of open space uh in in terms of where you're blocking your view corridor from like i think about um the parking lot of home depot has a great view to flat irons it is technically an open space but that's not

[160:00] a view that i think we need to prioritize preservation if somebody wanted to build on the southern corner of it with some great you know affordable housing or something um so that that i think we need some good qualification on and then the other thing was just about the the height um when when a taller building um might be permitted i thought the thousand foot contiguity kind of idea was maybe not the right way to go i just think about like there are industrial parts of town that currently are all two to three story buildings and there's not a four-story building within a good a pretty long way but are a perfect perfectly reasonable place to have a four-story building as they redevelop into mixed use for the east boulder sub-community plan so i would just want our our criteria for considering a height modification to take into account redeveloping areas you know that that don't have much of an established character yet but that may be perfectly reasonable for a height exemption um and and so just make sure we get that into the criteria there and i would focus less on the exact um buildings within 1000 feet so

[161:02] that's just my other point and i'm done thanks so much okay nicole you're last all right um and i just i just want to name something that's kind of a sticking point for me in coming up with an answer to this question it seems like one of the areas of tension here is that um it's not necessarily a lack of objective criteria but rather a lack of subjective or or too much subjective decision making right and that that and and i know that the criteria we're using to make decisions they're um obviously those two are very related but it seems like the issue is coming in terms of people being very um subjective in terms of saying you know well this project isn't going to meet this need for this reason um that could kind of be turned around and and you could say um make the opposite decision for the same reason right so i i don't really know how to um address this i

[162:01] trust you know that you all staff you all do uh better than i do but i i really you know i hear lauren's concerns and the other concerns um from uh some of the architects that are around allowing creativity and innovation right i think that's what makes that's what makes buildings interesting is when we allow that space for people um to be a little more general so how can we afford that creativity and um make it so that developers aren't saying that they're uh being uh the the decision our decision-making process is subjective brad before you speak do you have enough here to go on or do we need to take a vote on anything or do you have enough guidance was actually mark what i was going to speak to i think here again the nature of the question has morphed into feedback that's very helpful i would summarize that um you've given us feedback that on some specific things like vertical lines and such there needs

[163:00] to be enough space for creativity in some of those specifics coupled with some maybe intent language that is another form of that safety valve to make sure that there is still that creativity and finding that balance between the predictable elements and the creative elements so uh if i'm if i've if i've stated that generally correct i think the the the other details that have been talked about in this subject uh we've captured as well and and we can move forward with that okay very good and i will refer to carl though just to make sure i'm not missing anything from his perspective no i think this is all really great feedback we really appreciate it okay i think that wraps up this subject i'm going to propose a five-minute recess um so that we can all get energized and excited about a conversation about use tables uh in industrial areas and i know we've all been waiting for that and uh

[164:00] you know we all want to have good energy to to have that conversation so why don't we readjourn at 8 46. all right [Music] [Music]

[169:22] others in industrial areas i will turn it back to uh our esteemed city manager maria uh thank you and in the interest of time i think i'll just uh give it to brad who has been holding down the show today he and his team are doing a great job well follow that um i'm gonna hand it right over to lisa howe who's gonna let her go thanks thanks brad good evening council i have the enviable task of talking about more landy's code after you've already been through almost three hours of it

[170:00] tonight we're going to talk about the use table and standards project and the purpose of this discussion is to update the council on the second phase of the project and also discuss the next steps related to both industrial areas and then the neighborhood serving uses part so if you remember we are in phase two of the use table and standards project you all adopted an ordinance related to the first module of the project back in june so that was the one related to user friendliness and technical updates and we have divided the remainder of the project into two other modules so we have module two focused on industrial areas that we are hoping to wrap up by the end of this year and then we'll go into module three which is related to neighborhoods and neighborhood centers neighborhood serving uses just some background on this project um it actually started back in 2018 and we completed phase one of the

[171:00] project in 2019 and in 2020 is when we started phase two however we had to pause the project in the fall of 2020 due to the staffing levels related to the pandemic so we restarted the project at the beginning of this year and like i said went through that first module of technical updates and now we've gotten to the more substantive parts so the initial goals of the project as you may remember are to simplify and streamline the use table which is a very important part of the land use code so you've been talking a lot about the design review of projects but this is the review of which uses businesses or housing types would be allowed so trying to make that more understandable and legible we got a lot of that from the module two ordinance that was adopted and creating more predictability and certainty by doing that the bottom two goals are really what we're trying to get to with these next substantive modules so we're trying to align the use table and the permitted

[172:01] uses better with the boulder valley comp plan goals policies and land use designations and also try to identify where there might be some uses that are desired by the compute by the community but um the use table is actually acting as a barrier so trying to fix some of those issues as well we um put together a planning board subcommittee back before this project was um paused in 2020 and they did a lot of really great work they met over 20 times over a couple of years really digging into the use table doing a district by district analysis of all of the uses that are allowed in each zoning district they came up with areas of consideration things to focus on and even though the project was paused that input continues to guide the project and we've kind of rethought the formation of the subcommittee and i'll explain that a little bit more on on a slide coming up but i just wanted to highlight how much work was done by those planning board members and

[173:00] how it will continue to inform the rest of the project also the project has been to city council several times for both action and guidance so uh council saw it back in may 2019 had a study session on that phase one then adopted the ordinance for phase one that was really related to the opportunity zone that was in october of 2019. there was a study session on phase two back in august 2020 and so i'll kind of be sprinkling in some of the guidance that we heard at that point because it is a little bit of a unique uh nature of this project that it was paused and now we're bringing it back so i'll sprinkle that into the presentation as well and then like i mentioned module one was adopted back in june so tonight i really want to talk about the next steps for this project and if you all are okay with it it's organized a little bit differently than carl's presentation so the questions are a bit more disparate from each other so if you're okay with stopping at each question and then

[174:00] discussing and then we'll go into the next topic that's kind of how i planned it but if you'd like to do it all the way through just let me know but um just a little bit more background before we get to the specific questions um so the plan for public engagement for the remainder of the project through the rest of this year and early next year is i mentioned we are kind of rethinking that planning board subcommittee so we now have two planning board liaisons that we will be working with we've started working with already to get their guidance and feedback throughout this project and so we'd be meeting with them every other month or so but then we've also pulled together a use table in standards public working group and so that's a group of about 15 to 20 interested stakeholders residents community members business interests members of the arts community we're really trying to get a diverse group of perspectives who can give some initial input at the outset of each of these modules and then also provide feedback as we develop drafts and so the reason why we

[175:01] kind of changed the um the setup of the subcommittee was just to be able to have the public more um more meaningfully engaged in um both the uh proposals and also the from the outset of uh each of those modules so the planning board subcommittee had been a fairly formal process so this is just a way to get kind of people more involved um throughout we're also hoping to do broader engagement so um we're actually planning a be heard boulder questionnaire that would be a virtual engagement opportunity that would go out specifically for this module two um next week and go through september and then we're also hoping to include more in-person opportunities for engagement as the covid situation improves so the first uh two questions that were laid out in your memo are related to module two the industrial areas so you all are familiar but there are basically

[176:00] three different areas of the city that have industrial zoning so you have the gun barrel area northeast corner of the city there's a big swath of industrial zoning there's a small area just at the very north end of north boulder where there's industrial zoning and then also you all have talked a lot about this recently the industrial zoning in east folder so those are really the three areas that we're focusing on in module two and thinking through what businesses are allowed in those zoning districts what housing should be allowed and things like that um for those who are not familiar or don't read the zoning code every day you know there's four different zoning districts so just a brief overview of what kind of the intent and purpose of each of those is we have the is zoning district which is the industrial service district and that is meant to have kind of repair and service uses small-scale manufacturing and then we have the ig

[177:01] district which is industrial general that's kind of more like a light industrial district with research manufacturing some service industrial uses and then the code actually also says that residential uses and complementary uses are allowed there in appropriate locations similarly im is industrial manufacturing it has a lot of similar intents research development manufacturing service industrial kind of the main differences that's envisioned to be kind of on larger lots so larger scale and more manufacturing but also allowed in the code or mentioned in the code that residential and complementary uses in appropriate locations are allowed finally we have the ims district that's the industrial mixed service district and that's really a different kind of district so it's really more pedestrian oriented it's supposed to be kind of industrial areas that are on the edge of a main street commercial area and so it envisions more of first floor industrial with industrial residential

[178:00] or offices above so i mentioned that the um the kind of the main goals of the project are really to align the use table better with the boulder valley comprehensive plan so specific to this module two and industrial areas this is really pulling a lot from this specific policy 2.21 which relates to light industrial areas so if you focus on the kind of green box this is directly from the comp plan there's five main principles related to light industrial areas and four and five don't really apply here because they're related to transportation but one two and three is what we're really focusing on in trying to make sure that the use table aligns with these so the first one is preserving established businesses and the opportunity for industrial businesses however the comp plan also says that we should be encouraging housing infill in appropriate places and also offering a mix of uses so those are really the three guiding principles

[179:00] from the comp plan that are also informing this work i mentioned that i would bring in some feedback that we've heard in previous iterations of this project so back in august of 2020 we did a similar study session with city council and the council at the time gave their support for additional uses such as residential retail and restaurants in light industrial areas in order to foster more mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods however the council also expressed the need to balance the protection of existing industrial uses and introducing new residential uses so this gives us to the point of the kind of two main topics related to industrial that we're hoping to get your feedback and policy direction on so the first one is related to residential and the second is related to office so i'll give some background this is the first one related to residential development in industrial zoning districts so right now

[180:00] we have residential development in industrial district standards and kind of the background in the history of this is back in 1997 there was a comprehensive rezoning study that was done to address the jobs and housing balance issue in boulder and at that time no residential uses were allowed in industrial districts they were really meant to be preserved for industrial use the only exception was that live work units were allowed at that point however um just seven years later uh that policy kind of shifted and residential development in order to increase those housing numbers residential development was made possible in industrial districts however through used review so you've been talking a lot about site review there's also a discretionary process called use review which reviews the compatibility and appropriateness of certain uses in districts so that is still how residential development is reviewed in industrial districts um the standards have not been updated in the last 18

[181:00] years so they're the same ones and um basically a short summary of what they are is it limits the sites in the industrial district specifically the ig and im it limits the sites to only a few that are eligible so if you look at the map that's on this on the screen um the parcels that are pink are not eligible for residential development um the ones that are in light blue are eligible for residential development and then those that are in dark blue are parcels that have either been approved for a residential use are already built with residential use so in order to be eligible a parcel has to be contiguous so it's based on contiguity to residential and existing residential use or zoning district or to parks and open space it also has to have a minimum lot size of two acres um so that actually reduces the number of sites that are actually eligible for

[182:00] residential development so even though they're allowed in industrial districts by user view only a certain portion can actually build there um and also in those standards it requires site review which we've been talking about a lot tonight so you get into that higher threshold of review if it's a mixed-use project so if it's only residential they don't have to do site review and if it's of a certain size um but if you if they were to put in non-residential uses then they would have to do skype review there's also some other standards in there related to environmental suitability noise and then also a declaration of use is required that people the owners and tenants have to say that they know that they are a residential use in an industrial area interestingly over the last 18 years since these standards were put in place only four projects have been either approved or built so there's one project that's been built in gun barrel one project that's been approved in gun barrel one project that's been built in east boulder and one that's been

[183:00] approved so that's just some background on the kind of the the state right now of residential development in industrial districts and how that would be approved going back to kind of those guiding principles that green box that we were looking at on the other side it says that housing should occur in a logical pattern in proximity to existing and planned amenities it also specifies that that housing infill should really only be in areas that are zoned industrial general the ig or the more light industrial not the manufacturing industrial or service and that housing should be encouraged in appropriate places near other residential uses or retail services so in identifying this as a main issue of focus for module two i think that the issue is that the current residential development in industrial standards and basing it on contiguity is not necessarily coming up with a logical pattern as you

[184:01] can tell from that map it's a bit of a scatter shot of which parcels are actually eligible for residential and i know you all haven't been in a lot of discussions about the east boulder sub-community plan and understand the much more fine-grained thought that goes into those sub-community plans to identify which areas are appropriate for residential and which aren't and so that just isn't really in line with how the sites are determined to be eligible for residential development based on those existing standards so that's why it's been identified as one of the the main issues that we want to get your guidance on tonight so that brings us to the first question um in thinking through this residential issue does council support changes to the standards for residential development in industrial districts that would make potentially make more sites eligible for residential use and we thought through what some of those changes could be like i mentioned removing the current contiguity

[185:01] requirement maybe removing that minimum lot size and i think that the crux with industrial and residential uses um is really trying to and trying to determine um where the appropriate place is for residential um that's that's the issue is trying what's the best way to determine which sites are appropriate is it guidance from sub-community plans or from the comp plan um is it somewhere where we would limit residential development only to either the ig zoning district or a certain zoning district and then exclude it from others or maybe are there other potential approaches could it be proximity from other uses or things like that there might be other uses so if you're okay with pausing here to go through this question uh before going into the office in module three we can do it that way or i can continue going that's kind of up to you i think this is a good point to to get some comments and questions from council great lauren europe first i think

[186:04] thanks um so i would support updates to the standards for residential development in industrial districts i think we should eliminate the contiguity requirement the exclusivity of use for industrial and residential minimum lot size the more restrictive setbacks and far requirements that are typically required of of housing in those zones instead i would like to see suitability determined based on looking at a combination of intentions set out in the applicable area plans and boulder comprehensive plan so you know those talk about housing areas along transit lines and surrounding retail and amenity hubs um housing that's integrated into mixed-use buildings and neighborhoods with diverse housing commercial and retail options involving the um

[187:00] but i think that this housing needs to be in addition to industrial uses and not instead of it in some you know in some zones so in some areas it might be that the first floor has to mainta stay industrial and housing could be put above or that it's like a percentage on the site um or maybe there's the creation of new conditional uses to kind of help shape that so that it these this fits closer to kind of what we've described in especially the east boulder sub-community plan uh well thanks lauren for just mike dropping that answer um so i got nothing to add there that was awesome um the only point i'd make is regarding engagement which uh lauren took the answer perfectly um i just saw an engagement well but i didn't see and maybe it's implied in there or was done earlier but

[188:00] at least on the slide and new sweats on the memo i didn't see much with reference to sort of community connectors and reaching out to some of our marginalized communities i think as we all know zoning and land use has almost traditionally always disproportionately impacted those communities and so as we think about how we're using our zoning in our land use and what our allowable uses that i really want to make sure we've checked in with those communities so that as we're going forward how we use and do our land use in zoning is um in is appropriate for everybody in in our community and not leaving anyone out so if that's been done awesome then maybe just break a note of it if it hasn't i'd love to make sure that we're tapping those communities and getting their input mayor uh yes i thought i thought lauren said that extremely well so i'll rest on her comments with the the one exception let's say that it was a little unclear to me lauren if you were thinking that that each site had to be a mix of residential and industrial which which i wouldn't

[189:01] say would be necessary personally so that like you we don't want 100 of all industrial zoned areas to become 100 residential but i think in on any given parcel it could be appropriate for for an all residential project potentially so i think with the guardrails on a whole sector basis can be tough but i just wouldn't put a per parcel restriction on the percentage of residential percent but other than that i thought lauren was right on and matt's comments on engagement were great too and thanks for bringing this to us i think there's a good direction uh if no one else i have a couple of questions um kind of comment um am i correct that in the is zone industrial service um residential is not permitted attached goings are actually permitted there are some um stipulations like they can't be on the

[190:00] first floor so um an example of that is the bus stop apartments were built in is on north broadway and so they have like an art gallery on the first floor and some live work units so is actually does permit attached dwelling units well okay um why do you think that there were so few projects completed over a period of years uh so few developers have taken advantage of the ability to have a residential use in an industrial zone yeah i think that's a great question and i wondered that myself that's why i included the number because it seemed low to me i i mean i think that the the contiguity really restricts the parcels that are able and eligible to be developed for residential um also i think the fact that it's a user view maybe adds more unpredictability um or uncertainty about whether it would apply um but other than that it could just be economic factors or you know any

[191:01] number of things unrelated to zoning but it certainly is a low number of projects and three of those projects were in the last uh two years i think so uh it was almost nothing for a while all right and i guess my comments are as follows i think one of the things we we need to do here is to determine what we want what what kinds of industrial uses we want to preserve because to the extent that you permit residential development in an industrial zone it is likely to crowd out most of the industrial users um you know residential development is going to be more profitable than industrial facilities uh it doesn't mean we can't do it but it should be an intentional choice um and understand what we're doing and i think often in terms of the service industrial facilities that are located off pearl parkway um and if residential is permitted there they're

[192:01] gone i mean there's just no economic rationale for keeping those businesses if you can actually convert that area into residential and that should be an intentional decision policy decision on the part of the city um because it's going to happen if you do that um [Music] and i i'm very concerned about that i think small industrial service businesses whether it's a whether it's plumbing or or whatever have a real place in the community and to the extent that you don't have any protection for those um you're going to face the law of unintended consequences we will get a little more residential construction but we will lose we will be getting our plumbing supplies or getting our shoes fixed in longmont and that's something we need to be cognizant of

[193:00] there are other industrial areas where it might be a little more compatible but i'm particularly concerned with the service uh in the service industrial because those those are serving our community in a very direct way and if we give owners of land the choice to do residential or keep those facilities open and active they're gone and i'm concerned with that uh rachel i think you were next and then aaron i was just gonna agree with you on that last point mark i know that we talked about that a lot during the east older subcommittee community planning process that if we weren't fairly intentional about um preserving or looking at uh the industrial and light industrial that was there it would it would evaporate and that it is a community value to have that here so um and my son did work i

[194:00] think i've mentioned before at the marshmallow factory on that pearl parkway and uh you know it's also as you're saying like hard to um you know find plumbers and and car repairs and and you know the the things that we need as a community um they're they're also small business owners and um we would not want to inadvertently knock people out of the community that that we benefit by having them here and uh they deserve a place to be here as well thanks erin did you have your hand up again okay anybody else all right um does anybody want to comment on the question one and give some guidance to staff on this well let's put it this way those who would support

[195:00] changes uh to make more sites available for residential um indicate show of hands can we remove the slide that's better with guardrails as discussed yes with and i'm with you on that with guardrails to protect the the industries that we need for this community okay solid majority there does that give you the guidance you need it does thank you next all right all right the next topic is related to offices so this is one that we also would love some policy direction on because it's a a main issue um that can be addressed during this module too um and i'll explain why if with this policy background so this one's gonna get a little uh zoning wonky

[196:01] so i'm going to try to make it as interesting as possible but essentially right now we have two separate use types in the use table for two different kinds of offices so we have professional office and technical office and professional office is like a lawyer's office accounting office real estate office things like that a business service that um you would see an office for a technical office is something more like an engineering firm or software engineer or like software development those type of technical offices we attempted to clarify the direction or the the definitions back in module one and so when we did that we kind of explained that technical offices that technical office is what is involved in kind of the making of something so whether that's a physical or digital good and professional office is more of a client service that's provided

[197:01] so the this is actually really rare around the country to have this kind of bifurcation of types of office it's something that is almost completely unique to boulder there's a couple cities that do something kind of similar but it actually comes from that same comprehensive rezoning study back in 1997 and so the intent of where this came from was to limit speculative office buildings at the time support startups preserve industrial areas for industrial uses but also recognizing that there is a need for offices that are really associated with industrial uses or are more industrial in character so those are those technical offices so what happened in 1997 was they decided there were two different types of offices and professional office was going to be prohibited from the industrial districts so lawyers office accountants office those are not allowed in the industrial districts but those technical offices like graphic design firm engineering firm those are allowed in the industrial

[198:00] districts what we found over the last 25 years is that this is a challenging tool to use to implement this policy it's a pretty fuzzy line between the two types of offices so a good example of that is um we had a patent lawyer who came in and so that's a lawyer's office but they're dealing with patents related to industrial product products so the kind of visual impact of these types of offices the parking impacts things those might be almost identical and so what we've been hinging on kind of to differentiate between these two is client contact so there's a part of the definition that says that professional office might have frequent client contact clients coming and going where technical office is like unlikely to have that frequent client contact however as you know over the last 25 years and especially the last few years the nature of offices have really evolved and changed and there is not a lot of client contact happening for

[199:01] either type of office i mean they're probably that there are for some but in the vast majority and then also just certain offices over the last 25 years have evolved in their practice of um that kind of client contact so it's just a really challenging tool it's unpredictable for business owners to understand whether their type of office is going to be allowed in the business in the building that they're trying to lease it's not something that's conceptually people really think of there being two different types of offices we have in our sub-community plans including the east boulder sub-community plan there's really no specific guidance for having these two different types of offices there's not a lot other than from what that had happened in 1997 with the comprehensive free zoning study there's not a lot of policy direction about where these certain kinds of offices um are appropriate or not appropriate and so we think that at this point with this use table project with module 2 focusing on industrial

[200:01] districts this was something that was done very intentionally for the industrial districts to protect them from the professional office type but now it's been about 25 years and you know the situation has changed and it has been challenging both from the business owner property owner perspective and also from just city implementation um so that's that this raises the question now of whether this is the policy direction that we want to continue going in or whether there's some other tool or some other way that we could do this so thinking through that the um second question that i have for you tonight is um do we want to be more like the rest uh or other cities around the country and consolidate these two types of offices into a generalized office one office use type however if we were to do that there is an important policy reason for why we do it um is that something that we want to

[201:02] like i mentioned professional offices prohibited an industrial district technical office is allowed if they were consolidated would offices be allowed or would they be prohibited in the industrial districts or is there kind of a middle ground where they're allowed with some sorts of limitations so that's the question related to offices the answer to that question will come first from lauren and then rachel so i do strongly support combining professional office and technical office i mean as an architect under the definition i officially fit under a technical office but i would say that my work more closely resembles professional office um so it just when we have those definitions it's just as confusing for everyone i do think that we need to consider restrictions to ensure that the office use is not displacing industrial use in

[202:01] industrial zones like requiring the first floor to remain industrial or as a mac or having some sort of maximum percentage of floor area or a maximum square footage per lot or i'm open to other things too just i do think we want to protect that industrial usage rachel and then um i agree with what lauren just said and have we done engagement on this yet we haven't but there i mean we have done that we've discussed it with the use table um working group and also the planning board liaisons but the general public engagement that push is going to go out next week yeah okay so that's my only feedback is obviously i i do not have an office and nor an industrial space so would be hoping that we do robust engagement to make sure that we don't have unintended ripple effects thanks

[203:00] right once again lauren just uh knocks it out of the park so uh ditto lauren nicole yeah i just had a question more related to the second one site i also agree with lauren's perspective here um i mean i guess i guess what i'm what i'm trying to understand is what are the um what are some examples of other limitations that might be necessary for office uses in industrial districts because um to me it seems like kind of a self-selection process on the part of the person who is um using the office space so for example if you know i were a therapist or something um i wouldn't necessarily want you know an office and a space that's really loud or something like that so i might just choose to not have my office there so i i guess i would just like some examples of what options will be sure yeah lauren gave a lot of great examples so percentage of square foot uh per building or per lot um maybe the

[204:02] location we do that for a lot of other uses like it can't be on the ground floor but it could be on the second floor um the actually the only other city that does something similar is portland and they have kind of an far related so it's related to the lot size and then you can have so much percentage of um office so those are some other possibilities we also have some other similar things that we do throughout the code where like the building can be 50 residential or non-residential we could do something like that with office so there's a variety of different approaches we could take and we could analyze um some of those options yep that's helpful so just just to make sure i completely understand um it's not really dependent on kind of how it's going to be used at all it's just if it's office space and then where the um some of the limitations would come from is more in the um some of these other things like square footage and things like that yeah i think that would be kind of the approach is moving away from trying to you know kind of micromanage exactly how that

[205:00] office looks or you know is functioning and more of just what the space looks like what the building looks like um as that as being used as office space a more general type great thank you for clarifying there yeah i'll just agree with the folks that have said let's move on this but but add some limitations so that our industrial zone areas don't just become off the sparks so uh well said everyone already i'll just add my voice to this okay there's no one else i will comment um again the law of unintended consequences is in my mind um industrial land tends to be cheaper and if we simply put the two office categories together without guardrails of any kind i i think this could actually accelerate the creation of um speculative office building because it's going to be cost advantageous to do

[206:02] so because the cost of land is going to be cheaper so um and you can get better rents from uh speculative offices than you can from industrial properties so i'm i'm just i'm happy to consolidate but i'd like there to be some fairly robust guard rails in place so that it doesn't become more attractive to buy industrial properties and use them for speculative office purposes because i don't think that's where the community interest lies anyone else lisa do you have enough guidance on this i do i see that tara has her hand up though that's okay i was going to absolutely agree with mark on this one and aaron in the sense that we definitely don't want office parks where industrial should be so we have to absolutely protect that so i group them all right

[207:00] if no one else then we can go to the next question okay so we're gonna transition from that industrial focus to now module three so this is related oh sorry i actually forgot i have one more slide on industrial too soon so these two are not related are these um are not related to the two questions but i just wanted to highlight a couple other potential changes that came up through the planning board subcommittee and then the initial public engagement that's been done so far and this is really trying to get at the offer of mix of uses um policy guidance so we've heard a lot about live work units and trying to support those in more places in the city so probably a change that you could see it would be allowing that in more districts and then also expanding the allowance of what that work use would be right now it's only allowed to be an industrial use but maybe expanding that to commercial use or things like that so that's one thing we're looking at as part of module two also our manufacturing definitions are

[208:01] very vague and unclear and kind of out of step with the best practice around the country it's more common to have kind of levels of manufacturing like light manufacturing medium heavy um so we'd be taking a look at those definitions to better support kind of small scale manufacturing allowing that in more places and also better defining kind of where that heavier manufacturing use is defined also something we've heard through public input so far is related to schools something kind of unique about the industrial districts is that private colleges are permitted in some industrial districts but private schools so elementary middle and high schools are not um permitted in any of the industrial districts so that's been raised through the planning board subcommittee and some of the public comments so far um and then pub but public schools are allowed in all districts um so just some inconsistency there to look at also related to the offering of mix of uses we do allow restaurants in

[209:00] industrial districts but the standards say that they can't be on major streets so that's something that we are looking at eliminating as a way to allow restaurants in more locations and then finally retail and personal services so retail uses any type of store personal services is kind of like hair salons bakeries those kinds of types of things um those are currently all prohibited in industrial districts and so to get at that idea of a 15-minute neighborhood where uh your services and retail might be within a walkable distance from you that's something we'd be looking at looking at allowing in industrial districts but probably having a limitation on the size so these would be limited scale but be permitted in the industrial district so i did just want to raise those as potential changes that you might see in an upcoming draft ordinance and see if there's any initial red flags on those kind of brief summaries okay all right we will move on to module three so this

[210:01] is related to neighborhoods neighborhood areas neighborhood centers really focused on neighborhood serving uses and getting back again to that idea of the 15 minute neighborhood the focus for module three obviously we're in module two right now so that's a little bit more in the nitty-gritty right now and this is more for the future so the question for this point is really just general direction for that one um first of all this is going to be our most robust public engagement for this one obviously impacts to neighborhoods are going to be most important to talk with the neighborhoods make sure that we're understanding what the desired land uses are what the potential impacts would be you know trying to avoid like you said any unintended consequences um but we will be focusing on the goals that have been previously identified by the planning board subcommittee that's encouraging 15-minute neighborhoods where a variety of services and amenities are reachable um within a walking distance supporting mixed-use nodes

[211:00] along corridors through the city and supporting walkable neighborhood centers in various scales throughout the city and to do that we'll assess the use table and how it aligns or is in conflict with those boulder valley comp plan goals um there's been a ton of work already done by the planning board subcommittee this was actually the focus of most of the public engagement that was already done before the project was paused so we have a lot that we can build on but we really need to supplement as we start to draft options in this section we're also looking at investigating certain areas of the cities that might of the city that might be appropriate for small scale mixed use kind of sprinkling through some of those services throughout uh areas that are mainly mostly homogeneous now and then also just reviewing the use mixes in our neighborhood centers some of the uses that we've identified through that public engagement as main areas of focus are restaurants we've really complicated rules about restaurants and where those are allowed

[212:01] offices again retail sales personal services uh housing types back to live work units as well and then also home occupations so those will be those have been identified already as something we need to kind of narrow in on for module three i mentioned we've already done some public engagement on this so back when in the first iteration of phase two in 2020 uh when we had to do virtual engagement we did have a questionnaire on be heard boulder got about 80 responses and just at a very high level because this was the the subject of the last time city council had a study session on it was to receive all of this public feedback but very high level overview the majority of respondents were open to a greater mix of uses and neighborhood centers also open to additional uses within a 15-minute walk that's where they live really focus on trying to allow restaurants coffee shops retail personal services and then allow more of a mix of

[213:00] housing in the neighborhood centers and what we heard at that point was that walking and biking access and human scale design was most important to people in allowing those types of uses related to the more of the 15-minute walk so outside of those neighborhood centers very similar uses were supported um as the one above but maybe seeing housing types at a lower intensity there and then same thing we have gotten a ton of detailed input through those planning board subcommittees that we'll also be using to to build the initial drafts for this um a reminder that if we did talk about this in august 2020 and the feedback that we got from the council at that time was support for allowing a greater diversity of uses in the neighborhood centers we heard to focus on those neighborhood serving uses and the uses that encourage walkability and to allow limited circumstances of walkable and compatible uses to foster 15 minute neighborhoods in those

[214:00] homogenous neighborhoods but the council said at the time that the review process should allow opportunities for neighborhood input in those areas and potentially planning board review also providing more flexibility for creative uses so kind of arts uses theaters small theaters things like that um more support there and then just really the council of the time emphasized the need to outreach the neighborhoods for feedback on potential changes so that's kind of a summary of what we've heard so far on module 3 what we're kind of thinking of as the main direction but we did want to get in front of you now to just understand if there's anything specific any specific direction that you'd like to add understanding it's a different council and this module hasn't really begun yet if there's any other kind of main priorities or things that you could see related to neighborhoods or neighborhood serving uses that we should know of now

[215:02] nicole i think this is just a general question um that that i have that um i i at least would be interested in hearing feedback on um this kind of comes back to this incentives idea that we've been talking about a little bit in some of our previous discussions um what are the incentives that would encourage neighborhoods to try out some of these new land uses that would move us toward 50 minute neighborhoods because i think you know sometimes it sounds good in theory but when you're thinking about you know something next door or you know a few houses down from you um it sort of feels a little different right so with those places where it may feel a little scary to neighborhoods to think about making some of these changes what are some of the things that would encourage them to move through that fear and and really think about moving toward these 15-minute neighborhoods yeah i think that's a that's a really good question and a valid question i think something we should focus on

[216:00] before we start thinking about those changes to make um i think obviously um the comprehensive plan has a lot of policy guidance that says we're working towards those 15-minute neighborhoods so the ability to provide those services without people needing to get in a car so i think that that incentive would be something that we would highlight but i think that's a question we'll need to think more on i think aaron was first then matt yeah so thanks this is a great presentation of uh where we've been in the past and where we're going and i i remember that that meeting from back in 2020 and i thought it was a really good one i thought the feedback at that meeting was was uh really good and generally agreed with that so i'm still on the same page as from a couple years ago and just but we'll just say that i think you know let's let's see how we can be innovative in terms of you know getting more of those 15-minute uses you know into those homogeneous neighborhoods whether they be

[217:00] you know residential or industrial or commercial like when we have a rich mix of uses you know that's that allows us to you know stay close to home and live more sustainably and i think in our new world of work where so many people we think about a residential neighborhood so many people are working from home if you get a cup of coffee or grab a you know loaf of bread uh near your house both which i'm fortunate to be able to do you know then you don't hop in your car and are it makes for a more sustainable society as we all know so i just encourage you to to you know be innovative and bold and come up with you know a great list of changes for us to consider because i think this is a really important direction that we're moving in thanks matt then lauren thanks uh thanks mark and yeah lisa i thought this was this was really good because it just sort of laid out a little bit of a nice historical context and led us right where we need to go um i have a clarifying sort of question um this conversation about sort of housing

[218:01] um stuff you really sort of lends into the conversation adus yeah we're going to be talking about adus in a little bit so i just want to make sure that we're not cross you know working that that adus will still be folded into this narrative even though we're gonna have a deeper dive in that coming up so i just want to make sure that that's not that it's appropriate that they're in both places in this conversation at least being thought of here even though we are going to talk about it later so i was just sort of curious if they're disjointed or not here yeah that's a great point i think i mean all of these planning issues are interrelated um so i think the focus more on for this project is more on the different housing types like duplexes triplex's attached rolling units and liver units um but certainly adus play into the conversation because those are um you know allowed in our lowest density residential districts so i think they'll all play on each other um and obviously we'll be talking about the adus and kind of the direction of that ordinance as well so we'll hopefully be able to integrate them as well as we can and

[219:01] talk about them i mean we kind of have to talk about all of them all the same time anyway so they'll definitely be closely tied i appreciate that and you know as you sort of think of what are these anchor points i think of schools certainly along the broadway corridor and the challenges those schools are facing with enrollment and the pressure that housing is putting on those schools and so as we think about what types of housing and different types of uses are allowed thinking of the schools as the anchor for for those whether it's 15 minute neighborhoods or larger spots i i think if thinking of it through that filter might be really helpful in how we shape uh what we want to do in those areas so that we are not a position as a community where we see our schools being shut down because we haven't been intentional with the types of housing and the types of folks in the community that we want to be populating in and around our schools certainly along the broadway corridor that's a great point thanks lauren

[220:04] thank you for bringing forward such thoughtful presentations for all of these modules um so with the residential zone i think that we have sort of we have a really it represents a lot of area with our community and so it has a lot of potential in terms of addressing some of the concerns that we have some of our biggest concerns around costs of housing and climate change and so i think that i'm so excited about this piece moving forward um and i hope that you will provide a broad range of options for us because i think that there are a number of different ways we could go about this and i think that you know it is really important to have robust feedback on sort of a variety of

[221:01] options but we also have to look at doing a number of things together because i think you know if we just add commercial hubs without increasing density at all around those hubs um you know it's it's unlikely that you're either going to create a lot of car traffic or um not have enough people within a walkable area to support those businesses so i think you know just making sure that we're paying attention to all of those tricky balances as we move those forward but not being scared to make big recommendations or to or at least put on the table some pretty exciting ideas erin got an old hand all of my hands are old [Laughter] tell me about it um

[222:02] any other comments from members of council okay uh lisa you have everything you need i do yes i want to thank you for the presentation which was uh excellent thank you very much thank you okay i believe or at least i'm hoping that that's our last piece of business for the evening and if so unless anybody has anything to say at this point or forever hold your peace i'm going to gather this meeting to a close at 9 40. have a good night all right good job mark yeah congratulations mark thank you thank you quick goodbye [Music]

[223:06] you