Seattle City Council Land Use & Neighborhoods Committee 9/9/2020

and Neighborhoods Committee will come to order.

It is 9.32 a.m.

I'm Dan Strauss, the chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Peterson?

Here.

Councilmember Lewis?

Present.

Councilmember Juarez?

Here.

Councilmember Mosqueda?

Here.

Chair Strauss?

Present.

Five present.

Thank you.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are on the traditional lands of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and Tulalip people, past and present, and honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and Tulalip peoples and tribes.

We have five items on the agenda today, a briefing and public hearing on CB119838, annual comprehensive plan amendments, a briefing and public hearing on the 2020 and 2021 comprehensive plan docket setting resolution, a discussion and vote on CB119827, which rezones land in the Rainier Beach neighborhood for affordable housing, a briefing and discussion on CB119877, which extends provisions allowing for virtual design review and landmarks meetings during the COVID-19 emergency, and the required post-adoption public hearing for CB 119832, which the council adopted in July to implement interim floodplain regulations.

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee is on Wednesday, September 23rd, starting at 930 AM.

Before we begin, if there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

At this time, we will open remote public comment period for items on today's agenda.

Before we begin, I ask that everyone please be patient as we learn to operate this new system in real time.

I'll also note that we have several public hearings.

And so if you have signed up for public comment and were and had identified that you are speaking to a specific item that has a public hearing, we have already automatically reassigned you to that public hearing.

While it remains our strong intent to have public comment regularly included in meeting agendas, the city council reserves the right to end or eliminate these public comment periods at any point if we deem the system as being abused or is unsuitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently and in a manner which we are able to conduct our necessary business.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

The public comment for this meeting is set up for 10 minutes and each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on each speaker by name and the order in which they registered on the council's website.

If you have not registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of the public comment by going to the council's website.

The public comment link is also on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate mic and the automatic prompt if you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it is their turn to speak.

Please begin by stating your name and the item in which you are addressing.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left on the allotted time.

Once the speaker hears the chime, we ask you begin to wrap up your public comments.

It is not the end of your public comments.

You have 10 seconds left when you hear that chime.

If speakers do not end their public comments or their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's mic will be muted for 10 seconds to allow us to call, after 10 seconds to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel, which was recently awarded for their excellent work, or the listening options listed on the agenda.

Please remember that there are separate public hearings for the agenda items one, two, and five, which are comprehensive plan amendments and docketing, as well as the interim floodplain regulations.

If your comments are about one of those items, we will reassign you automatically, or I also ask that you please hold them for those public hearings.

The public comment period is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

I'm going to read through the list.

As we have 12 people signed up, one is a duplicate and one is not present.

So we have Mark Brunson, Megan Cruz, Laura Lowe, Ryan Paul, Chris Lehman, and Richard Ellison.

Richard, we see that you are not present.

So if you would like to participate, please join us.

Our first speaker is Mark Brunson.

Mark, take it away.

and you must press star six yourself for the public commenters.

Hi, my name is Mark Brunson.

I'm a renter in district three.

I am calling today in support of council bill 119877 to extend the virtual design review meetings and allow for administrative design review.

Ultimately, Seattle needs to rethink the goals of design review.

As far as I can tell, the only people happy with design review are people who want to delay more housing from being built.

It is long past time to look to other cities with other models that achieve good design of multifamily buildings while streamlining their approval process.

I applaud the exemption of affordable housing from design review and hope that this is made permanent.

We are in the middle of a severe housing crisis and our city declared a homelessness emergency years ago Our city has been sweeping our unhoused neighbors across the city, throwing away their belongings and brutalizing people offering aid to them.

We have not invested in short term solutions to housing people in a manner appropriate during COVID and during a season of regular heat waves and unhealthy air quality.

I urge you to invest in providing shelter right now in the short term while expediting long-term solutions like affordable housing and permanent supportive housing.

Our crisis will only worsen once our eviction ban ends and puts more families in a precarious situation.

The faster we build permanent affordable housing, the less we will need to spend on short-term solutions to housing our neighbors in need, and exempting them from design review is one small way that we can do this.

Thank you for your time today.

Thank you, Mark.

Up next, we have Megan Cruz, then Laura Lowe, and then Ryan Paul.

Megan?

Good morning.

I'm Megan Cruz here to address CB 119877. This bill's predecessor was framed as an urgent measure, suspending the public design review in favor of internal administrative review, but only until online meetings could begin.

The public was told it was necessary so affordable housing could move forward in the pandemic.

But this bill goes beyond extending virtual design review meetings.

Even though they are up and running, it expands the timeline and criteria for big market rate projects to qualify for ADR through the end of the year.

It will extend discretionary power to SBCI and make all the bill's measures extend until six months after the emergency proclamation.

It's the definition of overreach.

We know business is still booming for SBCI.

In June alone, it took in a record $600 million in permits, much of it from big market rate developments.

Since mid-August, I've asked council member Strauss' office for help learning how many projects filed for permits during the original legislation period, especially downtown, and how many overall were for affordable housing.

We still don't know, and the council should know this information.

If investors filed for permits during this time to build in Seattle, it should not be because they expected a pass from the public design review process.

Without public review, we lose neighbors' voices and those of local design review board members who are looking at all projects in the area.

Their involvement makes for more sustainable and equitable development, and citizens who feel they aren't being shut out of a process that directly impacts their lives.

You may recall, people feared the original bill would lead to an abuse of due process, transparency, and public participation.

Please prove them wrong.

This new bill should be no more than a technical bill that extends virtual meetings until it is safe to meet in person.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Megan.

I appreciate hearing those remarks, and I think we'll be incorporating some of those changes.

Laura Lowe, then Ryan Paul, then Chris Lehman.

Richard Ellison, we still see that you are not present.

So if you would like to join us, please do.

Laura Lowe.

When you are ready, press star six and take it away.

Hello, I'm calling today.

My name is Laura.

I live in Queen Anne.

I'm a renter.

I'm calling about CB 119877. And I'd like you to extend the ordinance 126072 We need to make sure that affordable housing is expedited at this time.

If we end ADR and make folks go back to regular design review right now, we are needlessly slowing down affordable housing.

We have a housing and homelessness emergency.

We have a climate emergency.

We have a COVID emergency.

And imagining being outdoors today with asthma and breathing in the particulate air, the fear of being swept, afraid to go to a congregate shelter and get COVID, afraid of getting the hopes up for a waiting list for shelter, but maybe not getting it.

It's emotionally and physically abusive to not provide housing for all of Seattle's houseless neighbors.

It's a human rights violation.

And skipping regular design review and using ADRs at this time is really important.

We can't just allow the Marty Kaplan's to feel like they can control the design aesthetics of our city.

as an excuse for not providing housing for folks that need affordable housing.

So I really encourage you to keep the ADR in place during the COVID crisis and beyond, especially for affordable housing.

We need all types of housing and we need you to really focus on prioritizing people getting inside tiny house villages and other temporary shelters, allowing trailers to be parked in people's driveways and have that not be illegal, allowing folks that have vehicles to find safe loss, and really expanding all of our emergency housing solutions.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Laura.

Up next is Ryan Paul, Chris Lehman, and then Richard Ellison.

We're still not seeing you present.

Ryan, take it away when you're ready.

Hi, this is Ryan Paul.

I'm a homeowner in district six.

I'm just calling in support of CB 119877. And also for the, and just to echo the previous speaker's points, just we need to prioritize affordable housing Due to all or many crises, our affordable housing crisis has not slowed down.

We have not kept up with any of the units that we need.

People are frankly just not able to find a house in the city and are leaving Seattle due to this.

And if we're going to make Seattle an affordable place for everyone to live, we need to basically really look at our processes and see what we can do to make it better.

And unfortunately, I don't think Design Review has ever made affordable housing more affordable.

It's only stopped it or made it more expensive.

And I would strongly urge, you know, any amendments, any bills that are pushed through to really prioritize affordable housing.

And that's all I have.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ryan.

Chris Lehman, and then Richard Elson, and I see Nicole Sweeney has just signed up, but is not present.

So, Nicole, if you'd like to remind us, please do so.

Chris, welcome.

Yes, can you hear me?

I can, how are you?

Good, thank you.

I'm commenting on two things.

First of all, it's so surprising to hear people say that regular design review is not valuable.

It is absolutely important for any housing and buildings, especially affordable housing, to be improved by that public and expert process.

And also, it's a very good thing for buildings to be accepted and supported in their communities.

That was the original purpose of design review, and it's very alarming and should be opposed.

not to use regular design review, as was always promised.

Second, I'm concerned about the process for the hearing on the scoping decisions on the annual comprehensive plan amendments.

It doesn't say that you're going to take a vote on those amendments.

I trust that because your agenda doesn't say so, you won't be doing so.

at the very earliest that you couldn't do that until September 23rd.

I urge that you take longer because the process has been so difficult for people to know how even to find out what the comments are.

I have proposed seven comprehensive plan amendments and every single one of them is recommended not to be even studied.

And if I am limited to two minutes in the hearing then I will have to spend no more than 17 seconds on each of those.

And in the past, for many, for decades, people were, and I sent you an email about this, sir, and the other members of the committee, there was a provision that the applicants would be allowed a certain amount of extra time in order to present their amendments.

And I, if you can't do that, then allow everyone a little more time so that they can meaningfully comment on more than one amendment.

Otherwise, just seconds would not be meaningful.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chris.

And we have reviewed your proposed amendments in depth, and I believe that they have been addressed in other ways.

And we will probably, I'll likely give you a couple extra minutes, if we could give you five minutes in total for all your amendments.

Once we get to that public hearing, noting that you have also used two minutes just now, I think that would be a great way of going forward.

Richard Ellison or Nicole Sweeney, I see that you are not present at the moment.

If you are going to join us, I'm going to give it just one more minute.

Not seeing them present.

Wanting to check with the clerk and IT that we have no other folks signed up for public comment.

That is correct.

Great.

Seeing as we have no additional speakers remotely present, we will move on to the next agenda item.

Our first item of business today is a briefing and public hearing for CB 119838, which is the annual round of comprehensive plan amendments.

Mr. Ahn, will you please read the abbreviated title into the record?

Agenda item one, council bill 119838, In ordinance relating to land use and zoning, amending the Seattle comprehensive plan to incorporate changes proposed as part of the 2019 to 2020 comprehensive plan annual amendment process.

Thank you.

We are joined by Vanessa Murdoch, the Executive Director of the Planning Commission, Jim Holmes, and Michael Hubner from Office of OPCD, and Eric McConaghy and Lish Whitson of our Council Central staff.

Will you give us a brief refresher on the comprehensive plan process and provide us your briefing?

Hello, just checking that I'm audible and visible.

Good morning.

Good morning, Eric.

Yes, you are.

Thank you.

I'm Eric McConnachie.

I'm the council central staff, and I'd love to give you a briefing.

So the council bill that you just read into the record that Noah read in would make two changes to Seattle's comprehensive plan.

The comprehensive plan is Seattle's core sort of foundational policy document to guide the city's growth.

It is, It has a horizon of 20 years, and the state law requires that it be revisited for a major update every eight years.

Now, it can be amended each year, and council has set up a resolution, through a resolution, an annual process to do that.

This bill is the culmination of the process that began last year.

So you can think of that as the 2019-2020 cycle.

The initial sort of kickoff or sort of first decision that council makes in that process is to resolve to say what items should be studied.

That was done last year through a resolution, excuse me, I'll strike up a number, through a resolution number 31896, And you'll notice that on the agenda today, the second item is a resolution for the next annual cycle.

That's the 2020-2021 cycle.

I think the only thing I want to say about that is that there were a number of items that were adopted for study.

OPCD will, I understand in the presentation, address them.

Two of those are in the bill.

And others are recommended for taking it up in a different manner.

If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer them now.

But otherwise, I think I'll step aside and let the folks from OPCD take it over.

My name is Michael Hubner.

I'm the long-range planning manager in the Office of Planning and Community Development, and I'm joined by Jim Holmes.

I am here.

Oh, great.

Thank you, Jim.

Jim is a strategic advisor in OPCB, and he leads up our annual amendment process.

Next slide, please.

So what we're going to do briefly this morning is review of LPCB's response to, and I have a correction to the first bullet here, apologies.

There were a total of eight proposals that were docketed for the 2020 annual amendments, not 11. And that's also a correction to your memo this morning.

So we responded to eight proposals that were docketed last year.

Three of the proposed amendments were further analyzed by OPCB and we'll report out on our analysis and recommendations.

Two of those analyzed amendments are amended for adoption and one of the proposed amendments is our recommendation is not to adopt.

Next slide please.

So I very briefly want to review and this is consistent with OPCB's recommendations on the docket last year, what our response was, and these were items that were subsequently docketed.

But at the time, and our approach to these has been consistent since our recommendations last summer, each of five of the docketed amendments or areas to study related to the current plan, our approach to that recommendations on timing and the manner in which they should be taken out The first is impact fees.

This is a set of amendments that would provide for the ability of the city to adopt impact fees.

This was an area that was being worked on in 2017 and 2018. At the time of the DACA, and it's still a case, this is an issue that is being led by council, and council had developed proposed amendments and had started the CBER process in 2018. That was subsequently appealed, and our understanding is that work is on pause right now, and it's the thing that OPC has been leading, so not something that we worked on in preparation for the recommendation today.

The second docketed item that we did not, and I'm sorry, we're not ready for the next slide.

The second item, alternative name for single family zoning.

This is an item that we would prefer to address in the major update to the comprehensive plan, which is a process that we'll be initiating next year, culminating in an adoption of a fully updated plan in 2024. We feel that taking on naming conventions for major land use categories in the plan is best addressed as we take on in a more substantive way and more comprehensively land use and housing policies.

And in this case, they relate to areas that are currently called single family and the comprehensive plan future land use map.

Considerable community engagement.

Yes.

It seems that we have a question from our vice chair.

Oh, yes.

I'm sorry.

I hear a little bit of an echo.

So I'll wait for you.

If you were still talking about bullet number two, I just want to make a comment before we move on.

I am I am not talking apologies for the echo.

Please let me know if that continues.

Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just wanted to flag on this item.

I am very interested in continuing to advance the conversations around the name change for single family zones to update it to a more inclusive and accurate name, such as neighborhood residential.

And I'd like to work with the chair and the members of this committee.

I know that this is something that other members have expressed interest in as well.

This is something that we docketed last year in the MHA companion resolution in 2018. And again, during the comprehensive plan annual docketing process in 2019, This change has been recommended as well, as many of you already know, by the planning commission, and I just think it's very important that we not get into conflating.

Again, what I think is a.

really already well-researched and well-studied recommendation.

And it is a minor change that fits squarely within this update.

It's a minor update and should not wait until the next major comprehensive plan, in my opinion.

So I just wanted to make sure that at the forefront, I flagged that interest.

And I know that many other council members are probably interested in that along with the leadership of the good chair.

So thank you, Mr. Chair, for your leadership on that too.

Just didn't want to go past this bullet without noting that.

So noted.

Thank you, Vice Chair Mosqueda, and let's follow up after the meeting to discuss next steps.

Thank you.

Michael, please continue.

Yes.

The third item that we did not analyze was policies related to fossil fuel facilities and public health.

At the time this was docketed, it actually was not a recommendation of OPCDs because this was added to the docket after a recommendation was drafted.

However, our approach to this has been at that time last fall, and it continues to be the case that this item, while an important issue of policy to explore, it's not something that OPCB aligned with our work plan nor our staff capacity to take on at the time last fall, and is, again, something that we would propose taking up in the major update.

The fourth item here, 130th Street, considering designation of a new urban village around the planned light rail station at North 130th and I-5.

We do have a process that is ongoing to develop a station area plan that will consider an urban village designation at this location.

for this year's docket.

For today, it's not a process that has completed far enough along to bring that particular issue and a recommendation on urban village designation to you.

So that work is ongoing.

And as we talk about next year's docket, I'll have more information to share about how we envision this process proceeding for the 2021 amendment.

And finally, South Park urban village designation, as was documented last year, there was a request to evaluate how South Park aligns with criteria for urban village designation and consider whether any recommendations flow from that.

Again, as with several of these others, we understand this to be a question that is much better brought up in the context of a more comprehensive review.

of urban villages across the city, how they align with current criteria, and to make recommendations in a more comprehensive way, rather than looking at one urban village in isolation.

And such a change would also involve considerable public engagement.

We would want to ensure we had capacity to take on in looking at South Park and its future.

I believe there's a question from the council member.

There is.

Vice Chair, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

On this last bullet, just for historical purposes, could you remind us how long the folks in South Park have been asking for an urban village designation?

I visited South Park and met with a number of elders and families in the area who specifically had concerns about the lack of affordable housing and the desire to make sure that there was housing, two, three, four bedrooms so that elders and families could live together and that more people could live and work in that area without having to commute in long distances.

And especially given the concerns that I'm hearing as well about traffic speeding through the area, wanting to make it a more walkable neighborhood.

Can you remind us just how long the folks in South Park have been asking about this and how they've already been engaged?

Michael, if that's a question for you.

I think one clarifying point to make here is the South Park currently is an urban village.

So it's not a question of.

designating it as an urban village, but whether it should continue to be designated as an urban village.

Okay, I just understood the comment, because I thought that what folks were asking for in South Park, at least the large coalition that I met with, was the ability to have greater housing mixed use options along the corridor and potentially expanding it.

Is that not the question?

Is somebody asking to downsize it?

This not being an issue, we haven't done any targeted public engagement around.

I can't really answer the question as to what the stakeholders you've heard from are asking with regard to the urban village designation, but the issues you raise are certainly issues that an urban village we would be interested in addressing as an urban village.

So as we take on a review of of the urban villages, including South Park, we would certainly follow up on the kinds of questions that you've raised.

But currently, this is an urban village.

And our understanding of the docketed items is to study how this urban village compares to the criteria in the comprehensive plan and whether that designation is still appropriate.

That's how we understood the docketed item.

Liz, did you have something to add to that?

Yeah, just to provide a little history on this.

This came out of the mandatory housing affordability process.

And yes, some of the residents of South Park who saw the up zones in the neighborhood as part of that process were concerned and asked that they be reassessed to determine whether or not they met the criteria for an urban village.

So the proposal from some members of the community was to de-designate their urban village.

Okay, well, I will be very interested in following up with that given the conversations that I had with folks who live and work in the area.

I know that there's a lot of interest in creating greater affordable housing and more mixed use and mixed income opportunities.

So if that's to be docketed, Mr. Chair, thank you for flagging for me when the appropriate time to engage in that is.

Great.

Let's follow up after the meeting with central staff and OPCB.

Thank you.

Thank you for allowing me the time to walk through the issues we didn't analyze.

I think it's important to understand that context.

But I'm going to turn this over to Jim Holmes.

We'll get to the meat of the matter in terms of our recommendations for action to amend the comprehensive plan in 2020. Jim?

Yeah, thanks, Michael.

The first recommendation for adoption is an amendment to the future land use map that would expand the boundaries of the West Seattle Harbor Urban Village to include the campus of Providence Mount St. Vincent's.

Providence Mount St. Vincent's is a social service organization.

They provide senior assisted living with skilled nursing care, health services and social services for the elderly in the community, as well as an intergenerational daycare.

It is currently zoned LR3.

The effect of including its campus within the West Seattle Hub Urban Village would be to allow heights of up to 50 feet, the current height limit is 40 feet, and an increase permitted FAR from 1.8 to 2.3.

Providence Mount St. Vincent's anticipates redeveloping the site with the same uses, but an updated and modernized facilities and possible expansion.

And that is why they were seeking this amendment.

It meets the goals for a hub urban village of promoting dense mixed use walkable communities.

And so that is the basis of our recommendation.

We're also recommending a set of goals and policies to the Delridge Neighborhood Plan.

These policies were developed as part of the North Delridge Action Plan process, which involved rigorous community engagement and offers specific recommendations for improvements in the neighborhood.

These goals and policies will support diverse engaged communities, They want to support dynamic neighborhood destinations.

You could have access to healthy, affordable, healthy food, active transportation choices, policies that promote a healthy Lungfellow Creek Basin, and advocating for parks and cultural facilities and support a healthy community.

The amendment that we studied that we are not recommending for adoption is an amendment, future land use map amendment to the Northgate Urban Center.

The reasons for not recommending this amendment is it's a relatively small amount of land that would be added to the urban center.

It's fairly distant from high capacity transit or frequent transit.

And really because of its size, We think if an expansion north in this area is to be considered, we really should look at the whole block to ensure there's adequate infrastructure, which has been a concern in the past, to handle increased density.

And that is the end of our recommendations.

Thank you, Eric, Jim, Michael, Vice Chair Mosqueda.

I see you have a question.

I'll defer.

I've been asked a few questions, so I'll wait until after a few other council members.

Fair.

Council Member Lewis, take it away.

Thank you so much, Council Member Strauss.

And I appreciate this presentation on the slew of proposed comprehensive plan changes.

I wanted to circle back and talk a little bit more about the the sort of stalled out impact fee component of this.

Just because I do feel, and I think a number of my colleagues on the council do as well, that as so many other jurisdictions in King County have impact fees, this is certainly something that we could continue to keep looking into.

I mean, what I'm particularly interested in is looking at how impact fees could potentially dovetail with some of the really long ignored infrastructure improvements that can come along with growth, particularly Vision Zero-related infrastructure, protected bike lanes, traffic calming measures, things that continue to fight for scarce and limited resources, and that would all be, in a lot of cases, added capacity since we're so far And of course, in North Seattle, you know, not my district, but in North Seattle, sidewalks could potentially be something too.

And I guess that I just wanted to throw out there, if we could get a summary of where we are on this, because my understanding is that it's still stalled in squaring some circles in the SEPA process.

so that we can go forward on this, that it was sent back by the hearing examiner.

And I would be interested in figuring out if we can't move them forward in this cycle of comprehensive plan amendments, what kind of work we could do to keep moving forward on this and make sure that we're making all of our downs in that process and keeping it alive as a potential additive source of transportation infrastructure funding.

Keitel Freeman here.

I can speak a little bit to that.

As Michael noted, the Council got an adverse SEPA decision from the hearing examiner about a year ago in November, which returns the Council to square one, at least for the purposes of SEPA, for analyzing comprehensive plan amendments that would be a preliminary step, necessary but not sufficient step, to establishing a GMA authorized impact fee program As the committee members know, during discussion of the TBD renewal, council members talked about an alternative impact fee pathway, one based on authority that the TBD has.

That's a slightly different, more than slightly, that is a different analytical approach.

And also, but it has the benefit of being able to fund things that GMA authorized impact fees can't fund, such as transit service.

So with respect to GMA authorized impact fees, the council is somewhat further along and can begin CEPA work, assuming that the council agrees on a project list, because that's what a GMA, that's what a comprehensive plan amendment would do, would be to establish a project list of projects that would be eligible for future impact expenditures.

If the council's interested in looking at an alternative that could include a TBD authorized impact fee program, there's probably more analytical work that needs to happen.

There's more analytical work that needs to happen in either case, but for the TBD authorized impact fee stuff, there are some threshold questions that we need to answer with the law department before proceeding.

Mr. Chair, if I can chime in quickly.

Yes, please, Council Member Juarez.

I am watching, so I do see what's going on in the charts, and I want to thank you and also Council Member Muscatab for following it with me.

I should say that I have been in the loop on the development regarding the 130th for the light rail station and the well over 2,000 units that are going to come in for affordable housing and the NHL training center.

And we got all of our upstones in, I think, two years ago.

And we were happy with that.

I think we asked for 22 and we got like 19 of them.

And then we purchased or worked with the mayor's office and office of housing.

to purchase a ton of land across the street from Northgate for low-income housing, and I think it's like 20 acres, and it's already low-income, so we'll accommodate those folks, and then when we build up, those same folks will move back in.

So I've been kind of silent because I kind of know all this, but I just wanted to chime in so the listening public knows that we've been very active with especially since I sit on Sound Transit, so I'm aware of the zoning that we've been doing and also the community planning for the two light rail stations, the one at Northgate and the one up on 130th.

And thank you, Council Member, regarding sidewalks.

That's always going to be an issue in the North End.

And at one time, we were looking at the different lawsuits in different cities, ADA lawsuits, about lawsuits about not having adequate sidewalks, particularly for our elders, our children, high density areas.

And we figured out back in, I think, 2015 or 16, that it would be like over, I'm trying to remember the exact number, but it was like up in the billions of what it would cost to provide sidewalks for the North End.

Not just District 5, just the North End, if we were even to try to get close to meeting federal law and ADA responsibilities.

So that's still an issue.

That is still an area we target, working with SDOT and even on Seattle Public Schools when we had the two elementary, brand new elementary schools come online to make sure we had right curbs and cutaways and sidewalks.

I appreciate Andrew Lewis's comment about the sidewalks up north.

And again, it isn't just limited to District 5. It's the whole north end.

And the reason why you hear more about D5, of course, is that Lake City didn't come incorporated into the city, I think, until the 60s.

That's still an issue, but we have been focusing these last four or five years on transit-oriented housing, transit-oriented development, transit-oriented childcare, anything that we could slap transit-oriented in front of And I do want to just come back to one other issue that Councilor Mosqueda raised.

There's actually two, but we really do need to look at language about what single family zoning means.

It really is full of, it's really a byproduct from long ago that was a dog whistle and a code for what a particular family is supposed to look like and be like.

And I do agree that at some point, I mean, if you Googled the term, what that means, and we read that when we were looking at the HALA report about what single family zoning meant.

And I've said this before, if you want to change behavior, you have to change the language.

And so I'm a big proponent, not just because it's cosmetic, but because it really goes to that families aren't just single family.

We know that families include extended family, particularly now when we take care of our elders that live with us.

you know, we take care of our own children and our extended family children.

So I want to thank Council Member Mosqueda for that point.

Everything else, I want to thank you guys for the work that you've done on certainly paying attention and watching and looking at the information that you provided to the Land Use and Neighborhood Committee.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Juarez, very well put.

Council Member Lewis, is that in response, I did see Council Member Peterson just ahead of you.

Yeah, sorry, Mr. Chair.

I had a few follow-up questions for Ketel from the previous conversation around impact fees, if I could just get some clarification first.

Sure.

I want to talk a little bit, because you mentioned, and I'm glad you brought it up, the two different authorities, the Seattle Transit Benefit District and the GMA Authority for Impact Fees.

I just want to make sure that, you know, for the committee and the viewing public, that we clarify, because my understanding is those are not mutually exclusive authorities, and that we could develop both of them.

And there could be advantages to that, since they can be assessed on different types of development, and they can be used for different kinds of projects.

and that for both of them there's certain different analytical prerequisites as you laid them out.

So I guess the only reason I want to bring that up to get clarification is, I wouldn't want us to not continue to pursue the GMA fees through the comprehensive plan process because we are also expecting to develop and pursue the transportation benefit district options.

I'd wanna make sure that we are doing the work that we need to do to develop out both options and to be able to mix and match and assess based on different projects and different needs.

So I just wanted to throw that out there to give you a chance to clarify that a little and to sort of guide what we might do in this comprehensive plan process here to be able to knock out some of the prerequisites on the GMA options.

Sure.

So thank you for the chance to contextualize a little bit.

For TBD authorized impact fees, we don't really have much to go on here by way of precedent in the state of Washington.

There is authority in the RCWs for TBD authorized impact fees, but to my knowledge, no jurisdiction in Washington has actually used that authority.

So we need to look to guidance maybe to other states to see what they have done.

I understand that California has a similar authority that it grants to transportation benefit districts.

All that is to say that it's a little bit unclear what the procedural requirements would be for setting up a TBD authorized impact fee program.

Unambiguously, a GMA authorized impact fee program will require amendments to the comprehensive plan.

So that's something that's a step that has to happen for authorizing any sort of GMA based impact fee program.

The TBD authority references transportation plans, but the city has a variety of transportation plans.

There's the transportation element of the comprehensive plan, and then we have a bunch of functional modal plans.

So we need to do some internal work to figure out whether comprehensive plan amendments would be required for the TBD authorized impact fee program.

On the face of it, Maybe not, but we don't know for certain.

But for certain, a GMA authorized impact fee program would need a project list established and the comprehensive plan and the project list for GMA authorized impact fees makes those projects eligible for expenditures of impact fee revenue if an impact fee program is established.

So there's more work to be done in looking at what goes into the docket setting resolution this year.

The council may want to carve out space for considering comprehensive plan amendments related to a TBD authorized impact fee program, just to preserve that option and make sure that procedurally our I's are dotted and T's are crossed.

Thank you, Ketel.

Council Member Lewis, any followup?

No, I think I can follow up offline if I have additional questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Great.

Thank you for your line of questioning.

Councilmember Peterson, thank you for waiting.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

So I just, I want to echo the sentiments of Council Member Lewis on impact fees as a potential source of funding and to make sure we don't cut off any options so that we just keep the door open on that.

So Ketel, sort of looking to your guidance on what we need to do to keep both of those doors open, one being the GMA path and the other being the TPD path.

For example, we're getting an audit on our bridges that that's going to be coming next week.

And it's what I suspect it will show is that there's a lot of deferred maintenance.

And I know that those to fix bridges is not necessarily additive.

So that would be more of a transportation benefit district use of funds, whereas GMA, I believe, requires things to be more of an additive nature to to deal with the impacts.

So just wanna keep echoing Council Member Lewis's comments, wanna keep both doors open.

So need guidance on this process today on what you need from us to keep both doors open.

Yeah, I understood.

And Lish and I can, and Eric can discuss what needs to go into the docket setting resolution.

I'm gonna run it past law so that those options are preserved.

As you correctly point out Council Member Peterson, GMA authorized impact visa for capacity-related improvements, and so they can't be used for things like transit service or purchasing rolling stock.

So there is those, both authorities can purchase different things.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

And Vice-Chair Mosqueda, do you have questions that you would like to ask?

Thank you very much.

First, I just want to say how much I appreciated the historical context that Councilmember Juarez added to the concern around waiting on the single family zone name change, especially given the historical context, the studies that have already been done, and the current context that we're in, where right now, we are at the highest rate of people who are under 40 living with their parents.

We really need to be thinking about how we create more inclusive options for families across the city and looking at.

the various age spectrums of folks that are needing to live in the city with very limited housing options.

And we need to appropriately name it so.

I did have a question about the planning commission.

And if this is for Michael or anybody else who's still on the line with us, can you talk about the planning commission's recommendations with respect to the additional changes that could be made this year?

Do they have any comments or?

Anybody.

Thank you, council member mosquito.

This is Vanessa Murdoch.

I am the executive director of the planning commission and in terms of the recommendations for.

Last year's docketed items we did in our letter of recommendation call attention to the.

Proposed amendments that were not docketed last year, which actually do include the renaming single family.

as well as impact fees and some others.

So we definitely support the further study of those.

And I appreciate your comments and that of other council members regarding the renaming of single family.

That is something that the planning commission recommended in our neighborhoods for all report and continue to support.

And we do have concerns about waiting until the 2024 major update to address this issue as well as a number of others.

Thank you, Vanessa.

I'm sorry I didn't see you on there earlier.

That's great, I appreciate you being there.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair, and thank you, Council Member Peterson, Council Member Lewis, Council Member Juarez, Vanessa.

The questions that I had listed out have already been asked by my colleagues, so it seems that we are working well in collaboration to address the issues before us.

If there are no further questions from my colleagues, we will open the public hearing.

Seeing none, before we open the public hearing, I would again ask that everyone please be patient as we continue to learn and operate this new system in real time to navigate through the inevitable growing pains.

We are continuously looking for ways to fine tune this process and adding new features that allow for additional means of public participation in our council meetings.

I'll moderate the public hearing in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on one speaker at a time in the order in which registered on the council's website.

If you have not registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up for the end of the public hearing by going to the council's website at Seattle.gov forward slash council.

The link is also listed in today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and the automatic prompt of you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that is their turn to speak.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item you're addressing.

As a reminder, the public comment should be related to Council Bill 119838. If you have comments about something that is not on today's agenda, you can always provide written comments by email in my office.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Once you hear the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment.

If speakers do not end their comments by the end of the allotted time, speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to move on to the next speaker.

Once you have completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following this meeting, please do so via the Seattle Channel or listening options provided on the agenda.

The public hearing on CB 119838 is now open.

And we will begin with the, we have Laura Lowe, Deb Barker, Suzanne Schwab, Richard Ellison listed.

Laura Lowe and Richard Ellison are listed as not present.

So we will begin with Deb.

Deb Barker, welcome.

Hello.

Hi.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

I thought we were doing a deja vu all over again.

Just want to clarify, council member, that this is my opportunity to speak on 119838, because I also want to speak on docketing.

Will this time count towards docketing comment time?

Just 838.

Perfect.

Here, let's start that timer.

Hi, my name is Deb Barker.

Restart the timer.

Please.

My name is Deb Barker.

on 119838, and I had called in to give my firm endorsement to a project that is well-known in West Seattle, The Mount.

No one in West Seattle calls it Provident Mount St. Vincent's Hospital.

Everyone knows it as The Mount, and I'm totally in support of the recommendation for the future land use map amendment to include this in the West Seattle hub urban village.

Very, very appropriate action and I hope you pass that forward.

However, I also just going to throw in my two cents about impact fees because I worked for over 20 years in a municipality in the state of Washington that had Impact fees.

They had them since incorporation, starting in 1990. And I got to tell you that here's what happens in every single city other than the city of Seattle.

Developers come in to the counter.

They ask about all kinds of things, zoning, blah, blah, blah.

And they ask, everyone asks the question, what are my impact fee obligations?

No one is surprised that there's an impact fee.

They all expect it.

It is a matter of business, and it's embarrassing to be a member of the city of Seattle that doesn't have impact fees.

So I urge the council to get impact fees, the basic impact fee under GMA that every other, well, all right, not every other, the majority of cities in the state of Washington have in place.

Get those adopted as soon as possible, please.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Deb.

Thank you.

And next we have Suzanne Schwab.

Hi, everyone.

Good morning.

Good morning.

OK, great.

You can hear me.

I'm Suzanne Schwab, Land Use and Planning Director for Providence St. Joseph Health.

And I am calling in on behalf of Agenda Item 119838, And a big thank you to Deb there for her support of the mount.

We own and operate the facility that's located in West Seattle.

We have about nine acres there and are really excited to be here today talking about inclusion in the hub urban village designation.

We fit really nicely into the junction area there.

We're within that 10 minute walking guideline and as Jim discussed earlier, we provide a lot of social services to the neighborhood and greater Seattle as well.

You might also know that we have a residential facility for our sisters there.

We operate and have an open public chapel and our religious archives and library are there as well as the child care center, the nursing care assisted living that's provided.

And we're really excited to be looking toward the future of that property, being able to expand as well as continue to provide any type of affordable housing options and your care options as well, kind of trying towards that model of continuum of care and helping people to age in place.

So I just want to say thank you all today for and I'm also here to answer any questions if any arise.

Thank you, Suzanne.

Richard Ellison, I see that you're not present.

Checking with IT, do we have any further speakers?

No more speakers.

Any additional speakers?

Thank you, son.

That was our last speaker remotely present to speak at this public hearing.

The public hearing on CB 119838 is now closed.

Thank you to Deb and Suzanne who provided comment today.

This legislation will be back before committee on September 23rd for a vote.

Item 2. Our next item of business on today's agenda is a briefing and public hearing on the 2020-2021 Comprehensive Plan Docket Setting Resolution.

Mr. Ahn, will you please read the abbreviated title into the record?

Agenda item 2, 2020-2021 Comprehensive Plan Annual Docket Setting Resolution.

Thank you.

And we are again joined by Vanessa Murdoch, the Executive Director of the Planning Commission, Jim Holmes, and Michael Hubner of OPCD, and Eric McConaghy-Lischwitz, and Keto Freeman, of course, of Council Central staff.

Will you please give us a briefing on this agenda item?

Good morning, Council Members.

So as you heard, the Comforts of Plan can be amended once a year.

And in order to coordinate review of potential amendments to the Comprehensive Plan, the Council has set out a resolution that includes a annual process for reviewing Comprehensive Plan amendments and criteria for considering which amendments merit deeper study and potential analysis.

So you are here today as part of the for this item as part of the 2020-2021 comprehensive plan amendment process.

Based on discussion today, we will draft a resolution capturing the committee's direction for consideration at your next meeting.

The council puts out an open call for potential amendments every year.

This year, we received 11 proposals for members of the public.

And we, as you've already heard, we have a number of other amendments that have been adopted in previous years and are still pending evaluation and resolution.

At this stage, the council's role is to determine which of the proposed amendments merits study based on criteria that the council has previously adopted.

This is not a determination of whether or not you agree with the policy direction embedded in each of the proposals, but rather whether the proposals meet the criteria included in the resolution.

And I will share my screen to walk through those amendments.

These can be found At the end of the staff memo that we prepared on this item, there's a very last page of the planning commission's letter to the council.

Very briefly, the criteria ask whether the amendment would be legal under state and local law, whether it's appropriate for the conferences plan, whether it's practical to consider the amendment, including whether there is time to do the necessary review and analysis.

including environmental review.

If an amendment has previously been proposed and not docketed or considered and rejected, we ask that the proponent identify that circumstances have changed significantly.

If an amendment changes the neighborhood plan, we ask that there be outreach to that neighborhood.

if we want to make sure that the amendment is likely to make a difference in city regulations or funding.

And if an amendment would change the boundary of an urban center or urban village, it definitely requires review.

But if it would instead just amend colors on the future land use map, then there's a size threshold that we use.

Any questions on those criteria before we dive into what amendments have been proposed?

Thank you, Lish.

I am not seeing questions from my colleagues.

Great.

At this time.

So we have 11 amendments proposed by members of the public.

The first is a amendment to the future land use map and the boundaries of the university community urban center along 15th Avenue between Northeast 56th Street and Northeast Ravenna Boulevard.

Half a block is proposed to be added to the urban center.

The Planning Commission, OPCD, and central staff all recommend docketing this item.

The next, yeah.

Just as we're, again, I believe that you just mentioned this, but now that we have this chart before us, can you explain the difference between the three sets of recommendations, OPCD, the Planning Commission, and Central Staff?

I believe you just mentioned it, but with this before us, it would be helpful to hear it once more.

Yeah, so each group has reviewed most of the amendment proposals.

There are a couple at the end that were submitted by departments or council members that we haven't, that were not distributed to all three parties.

But attached to our staff memo, you have letters from the planning commission and OPCD that include their recommendation.

We lost your audio there.

as Lish is making the switch.

There we are, loud and clear.

Thank you.

Can you hear me now?

Even better.

Great.

So you have letters from the Planning Commission, OPCD, and our staff memo.

And the Planning Commission and OPCD are available for comments if you have questions about their recommendations.

And after I run through this table, OPCD is going to have a short discussion of their recommendations.

Excellent.

Thank you.

The next set of amendment is one of the few where there is difference of opinion.

Deb Barker has proposed that the comp plan be reviewed to look at whether there are changes that should be made based on the closure of the West Seattle Bridge.

OPCD, most of her recommendations were focused on land use element changes to potentially slow growth based on the impact of the bridge closure.

We, central staff recommends that you look at this amendment, but really focus on whether there are changes to the transportation element that are necessitated by the closure of the bridge, particularly maps on freight routes and transit routes that should be updated to reflect the bridge closure.

The next amendment is from James Chesko.

It asks that the comp plan be amended to cease use of potential landslide area covenants.

These covenants are creatures of the drainage code.

They indemnify the city against potential impacts from landslides.

landslides based on development in a landslide potential, a potential landslide area.

And we do not recommend docketing this item.

It's not a comprehensive plan issue.

The next eight amendments all are recommended not to move forward for the same reason.

The council has previously received these amendments and has previously decided not to docket them or has reviewed them and proposed not to move forward with the proposed amendment.

The proposers for each of these items have not shown that there's been a change in circumstances since they were last reviewed.

And so they do not meet the criteria in the council's resolution.

If the proponents do show that there's a change in circumstances or change the proposal in some way to better address and better meet the criteria of the comprehensive plan, the council could consider these in future years.

As was discussed during the previous item, there are a number of issues that were included in previous years' docketing resolutions that have not yet been resolved.

And since these received a fairly hearty discussion, I'll just run through them to remind you what they are.

Impact fee amendments, alternative name for single-family areas, designation of the South Park Urban Village, Status, new urban village at North 130th Street and I-5 and amendments related to fossil fuels and public health for each of these.

The Planning Commission and central staff recommend continuing to keep them on the docket and OPCD recommends that they not be docketed at this time because they will take more time than is available for an amendment to be considered next year.

Finally, we have three new amendments proposed by council members and city departments.

Council Member Strauss has asked that the docket include an item related to trees, that we review the work that's currently underway related to trees in partnership with the Urban Forestry Commission and SDCI.

and identify whether there are any changes that are appropriate for the comprehensive plan coming out of that work.

While OPCD is recommending not docketing an urban village designation for 130th and I-5 because that work will not be completed next year, they are suggesting that there may be some targeted changes around 130th and I-5 that may be ready for council review next year.

And finally, it looks like it dropped off.

There's one more related to manufacturing and industrial centers.

And that one comes out of work that has been docketed in the past.

The mayor has convened a maritime and industrial task force to review policies related to maritime and industrial.

areas that task force is meeting and may have some preliminary recommendations coming out of their work.

So we did not, so OPCD is suggesting to add that to the docket.

Any questions before I hand it over to OPCD?

Let's check with our colleagues.

We have Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Lewis, please take it away.

So, Lish, going back to that last one, the industrial lands being added to the docket, what is the implication of having that added to the docket in advance of any of the specific recommendations or even preliminary ones coming out of the industrial lands stakeholder group?

What would the implications be to include them in this?

So the reason why we have the docket is because the Growth Management Act requires early and ongoing public involvement.

The docketing process provides a heads up to members of the public that there could be changes being made in sort of broad areas related to the comprehensive plan or where it relates to map amendments, pretty specific changes.

If it is added to docket, it will be incumbent on OPCD to do public outreach and environmental review of any changes.

And if it's not docketed, then there will be a higher threshold for council to consider changes that would come out of that work.

It's not a hard and fast, no, if a department recommends changes that were not docketed, but it sort of requires more or we would ask for more indication that members of the public were aware of the changes and had opportunity to be involved.

Right.

So it's, we're essentially providing notice because we anticipate that there are going to be recommendations and information that come out of that stakeholder process.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Council member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Lish, thank you for this presentation.

Could you go back to item one, or I think it was the first item.

Yeah, let's see.

There we go.

Yeah, so item one is in city council district four that I represent, and I'm very familiar with that block.

Do you know why?

And thank you for speaking to the process to answer Council Member Lewis's question because that alleviates concern that I have in that this is just the beginning of a process in which there will be additional input because I guess, You know, from looking at the map, it looks like a logical place to have additional density.

There are some single family homes there on that arterial.

There are also some older apartment buildings, though.

Naturally occurring affordable housing is there as well on half of that block.

So I'd be curious, you know, as to what the input will be.

Do you happen to know why it was not included?

and tell us more about the proposal, the proposer.

Do we know more about the proposer?

Is that a?

I don't know, Mr. Budigan himself.

Katie Kendall is a land use attorney who submits complaint amendment proposals most years.

The area was included in scoping documents for additional potential changes to the University District zoning that came out of the mandatory housing affordability process.

This area is currently zoned LR 323 without a mandatory housing affordability requirement.

That work is moving very slowly.

And so the proponents of this amendment would like to see changes happen more quickly on this half block.

And additional analysis would be performed on the impacts of this change prior to coming back to council if it's documented.

But in your view, it meets all the criteria to be docketed?

Correct.

And so the discussion about whether to approve it, the substance of that would happen later?

Correct.

All right.

Once environmental review is performed and additional outreach is performed.

OK.

Thank you.

Any further questions from my colleagues?

Seeing none, OPCD, are you ready to present?

Yes, we are.

Thank you, Chair.

Again, Michael Hubner, Long-Range Planning Manager in OPCD, joined by Jim Holmes, who leads up our annual amendment process.

Next slide, please.

So very briefly, I thank you to essential staff for covering actually a lot of the substance that we were going to cover and then summarizing our recommendations.

In particular, we'll provide a bit more information on the executive's proposals on the 130th and the industrial maritime amendments that we'd be looking at.

But we will provide an overview of the one comprehensive plan amendment that was proposed by the community.

that we are recommending for docketing.

The 10 amendment applications submitted by community that we're not recommending.

Two, we consider them to be modified proposals that were based on prior docketed items, both 130th and Industrial Maritime.

And then three proposals identified in earlier Council resolutions that we are not recommending.

for docketing.

So we'll run through each of those categories and I'll turn it over to Jim to lead off on several of these items.

As we've just been discussing, one of the proposals is to amend the future land use map to include the half block funding on 15th Avenue Northeast.

We are recommending that be docketed.

I'm not going to belabor the point.

I think we just discussed that quite a bit.

Um, that's the only, uh, proposed community proposed amendment we're recommending for docketing.

Um, we are recommending, we are not recommending docketing a number of applications because they were previously docketed or considered for docketing by the city council.

Um, those relate to heavy vehicles, open participatory government, yards and trees, pedestrian grade separation, rezones and conditional uses, development monitoring, demolition displacement tree canopy.

Two, we are not recommending that we're submitted this year for the first time.

One is potential landslide area covenants, because that is more appropriately addressed through the Seattle Municipal Code.

And then the West Seattle Bridge proposal, which involved a number of actions having to do with land use and transportation.

And we are deferring to the SDOT process, which is running a fairly rigorous public process to identify both short-term and long-term strategies to mitigate the impacts of the West Seattle Bridge closure.

as well as identifying neighborhood proposed transportation improvements.

And we feel that that's the more appropriate course of action to take.

We've been talking about amendments identified in previous council resolutions.

First, I'm going to start with what we're not recommending for docketing, impact fees, fossil fuels and health, single family zoning name, South Park Urban Village.

And for all the reasons that we discussed in the earlier agenda item, We are recommending two modified.

We have two modified recommendations for docketing from previous resolutions, one regarding 130th Street Station, Urban Village, and one that has to do with industrial land use policy.

And Michael's going to talk about 130th Street.

Thank you, Jim.

Yeah, so let me provide some context and explain what our proposed approach is to 130th Street station.

So as I described briefly in the in the previous agenda item, we have had a station area planning process ongoing for over a year around the not only the planned 130th Street station, but also 145th Street station just a short bit to the north of that location along I-5.

This process is ongoing.

Obviously, with the COVID-19 closures, there has been some slowdown in that process and our ability to do community engagement, but we're getting back to it and adopting new and creative approaches as an evolving, We're not alone, obviously, in the city and working with community around issues that have begun when we were able to meet in person, but we're doing some online information sessions and engaging with community to move this process along.

We're very cognizant of the decision-making process at Sound Transit about the station itself and their capital program and the potential timing of bringing the station online.

but very committed to planning for transit-oriented development at 130th as well as 145th, but mainly focusing here on 130th and having a really robust community-involved, community-engaged stationary planning process to ground that in.

The planning area for the station area and potentially for an urban village designation is roughly a walk shed of a half mile around the 130th Street station.

And there are a number of land use concepts which have been discussed with community as well as policy issues and community needs ranging from housing and parks and open space, certainly mobility and transportation in that neighborhood.

Concerns around critical areas and A number of issues have come up through this process.

And as that process moves forward, the question of should this area location be an urban village will be one of the questions that OPCD will evaluate and bring when that is right for the council to take up would bring a recommendation about urban village designations specifically.

However, that process, while we expect by the end of the year, we will be well along toward having a draft plan or vision for the station area and a draft of that plan moving through this process.

We don't anticipate that we will have time for the more rigorous zoning analysis and environmental review and additional community engagement to bring back recommendations on land use across that full walk shed in time for the 2021 amendments to the comprehensive plan, which we anticipate we would be bringing recommendations to you in spring.

So it's just really not enough time to take on the full station area in that timeframe.

However, this, OPCV and the city is very committed to transit oriented development at 130th and we do think it is reasonable based on the work that's been done to date to bring a more targeted recommendation for land use changes for the one block that is just immediately to the east of the planned 130th Street Station.

This would be an interim action which would involve amending the future land use map and It may also entail some language changes to existing policies to facilitate and to accommodate transit-oriented development in this location.

That one block currently contains 32 parcels with about eight acres.

It's predominantly single-family at this time.

There's also a major potential opportunity site for TOD that church property with parking in a single-family home.

there's there are opportunities to discuss potential transit supported development immediately adjacent to the station.

We think that that's a good thing to pursue and can be done within the time frame for the 2021 amendments.

Community engagement community engagement will continue through the fall and into early 2021. So very much grounded in in that community engagement and the For the larger area, while we don't have a certain timeframe for bringing the any land use changes for the full walk shed, it likely could be accommodated either in a subsequent year's annual amendment, either 2022 or 2023, or quite possibly in the major update to the comprehensive plan along with an urban village designation should we be recommending that that's appropriate.

I'll pause there if there are any questions about 130, since I just shared a bit of information with you.

Happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Michael.

And Council Member Juarez's comments earlier were very instructive as well.

Colleagues, any questions?

Not seeing any questions at this time, Michael.

Thank you.

Great.

I'm going to turn to Jim to talk about the industrial maritime strategy and what we might bring for the 2021 action on the complex.

Yes, last year the mayor appointed a citywide stakeholder group, as well as for neighborhood sub area groups to work on developing an industry, industry and maritime strategy.

And while we're talking about land use today, it's worth noting that this land use strategy is not just land use.

It addresses land use, but also addresses workforce training, environmental issues, transportation, and public safety to develop a kind of a cohesive approach to supporting industry and maritime in the city.

This process, we anticipated having some policies ready for you to look at this year.

COVID paused that process.

We are restarting that process in the fall.

And we anticipate having some preliminary land use policy recommendations.

In 2021, these would help provide a policy framework to make a lot of the decisions that are facing the city, such as what happens around sound transit stations.

What about the stadium district?

What about the armory site?

So we want to kind of create a cohesive platform for those decisions.

The land use policy framework policies we hope to have before you in 2021. The additional implementation steps, including land use map amendments and development regulations, would be undertaken in 2022 or possibly during the major update to the comprehensive plan in 2024. And Michael, I think you were going to address this slide.

I am, I'm just messing with my microphone, apologies.

Yes, so finally we do want to highlight for you a couple of issues that are also contained in our in our memo to the committee for docketing for this year.

These are really more in the in the vein of for your information to let you know the OPCD is working on several issues that while we don't think that they're right for putting on the docket in terms of specific proposals to acknowledge that there's a context of a priority within OPCD and of course the city as a whole around recovery in in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the two areas of work that we think may as that work proceeds with some urgency through the fall and into early 2021 that there may be additional executive proposals as appropriate to amend the comp plan at least as first steps toward two large concepts which stem from the response to COVID-19 One is a racially equitable recovery strategy for the city.

There are a number of areas that OPCV is working on in this vein.

And we are in light of priorities around promoting community ownership and wealth building, affordable housing, And even some of the work that we are continuing around our racial equity assessment of the growth strategy and especially in light of the disproportional impacts of the pandemic and the issues around systemic racism that that has heightened our awareness around that there may indeed be amendment proposals that could come to you in early 2021 in time for in time for inclusion in the packet amendments that you would be considering.

And as Lish was explaining there would certainly be a heightened emphasis on community engagement that the executive would pursue those issues in light of.

But really not there isn't a specific proposal to put on the docket at this time but just wanted to highlight for you that we're continuing to work in that area.

And the comp plan could help us to set a course for addressing systemic racism and recovery.

And 2021 could be a time that something could be brought to you.

Similarly and in a related vein the response to the pandemic and the ongoing emphasis on what we're all many of us are experiencing around the importance of neighborhoods and accessibility of a range of goods and services and amenities within relatively easy accessibility of where people are able to live throughout the city is of heightened importance to OPCD.

We're doing work in that area, both in terms of the accessibility question, as well as some of the housing and land use implications.

There's a concept of the 15-minute city that some of you may be aware of that some other cities, Paris, Portland, a number of other cities are looking at the C40 Cities Green and Just Recovery Plan, which was developed in the wake of the pandemic, identifies this as a recommended strategy that really looks at our neighborhoods and localities within cities with respect to having homes of a variety of types and affordability levels located within an easy walk or bicycle distance to a full range of the needs that a person may have each and every day.

Jobs, businesses, services, public amenities, health care, parks, education, the full range of daily needs.

And we're exploring this as a potential framework for addressing land use and community development in the comprehensive plan update.

It's very early thinking, but there may be something that springs from this work that would also lend itself to a preliminary amendment or amendments in 2021. So I just wanted to describe to you a couple of our themes that we're working on in OPCV and give you a heads up should the executive bring any recommendations.

Thank you very much.

Could you put that slide back up?

On the first bullet there, racially equitable COVID recovery.

Can you tell me more about what that means and who's invited to the table for developing these recommendations?

This isn't one initiative.

And for the brevity of the slide, this was a phrase that we felt would capture the suite of things that the city is looking at in terms of how we are addressing our recovery strategy and in light of the racial inequities in terms of COVID impacts and impacts of the the economic impacts the housing impacts from the shutdown.

So there isn't a specific process that this is referring to but rather work the OPCD that the executive is doing generally in responding to COVID-19 and addressing racial disparities may result in amendment proposals that the executive would bring forward next year.

Mr. Chair, I would like to flag that the importance of this work and the importance of doing this urgently in 2020 requires us to have a better understanding of what the actual policy objectives are here and to I mean, to put this on the slide is important and I appreciate you doing that because we shouldn't miss the opportunity to say that this should be front and center of all of the conversations we're having in every committee.

but since it was included in the PowerPoint presentation and I still am vague on what that process looks like and who is at the table for coming up with those recommendations, and again, happy to see it listed, but I think some examples would be good, some policy objectives or at least categories and having a better understanding of who's involved in that process would be important.

I'll also note that I think part of our jumpstart I think it is important for us to get more information on what exactly is being considered.

Noted, well said, and I would also like to follow up with OPCD more on these issues.

So at the next committee or the next presentation of this bill, I think it will be important to hear more details about objectives, who is participating, and what are the action steps being taken.

And Michael and Jim, any further presentation from you?

Colleagues, any further questions on OPCD's presentation?

Seeing and hearing none, Vanessa, did you have a presentation?

I am realizing it's not in my script, but wanted to just check in with you.

Thank you, Chair.

No, I do not have a presentation.

I'm happy to answer any questions you or the other council members may have regarding the Planning Commission's recommendations.

Wonderful.

Colleagues, any questions for the Planning Commission?

Seeing and hearing none, we will open this public hearing.

And Mr. Lehman, I was reminded of my very strict public comment precedent that I have set at the beginning of this year, even the tree song, which I loved so much, I had to give a verbal warning to because of the extended participation throughout council chambers.

And so what I would request from you, Chris, Mr. Lehman, I see that you are present and you will be presenting.

If you could submit any additional comments in writing for the record to reflect your comments.

And then additionally, I would be happy to meet with you virtually with staff to discuss any input that you would like to have me think about and consider.

And so before we begin, Before we open the remote public hearing, I would again ask that everyone please be patient as we continue to learn to operate this new system in real time and navigate through the inevitable growing pains.

We are continuously looking for ways to fine tune this process and adding features that allow for additional means of public participation in our council meetings.

I'll moderate the public hearing in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on one speaker at a time and in the order in which they are registered on the council's website.

If you have not registered to speak and would like to, you can sign up before the end of this public hearing by going to the council's website at Seattle.gov forward slash council.

The link is also listed in today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and the automatic prompt if you have been unmuted will be the speaker's cue that it is their turn to speak.

Please begin by speaking by stating your name and the item you are addressing.

As a reminder, your comments should relate to the comprehensive plan docketing.

If you have comments about something not on this item or today's agenda, you can always provide written comments by emailing my office.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Once you hear the chime, we ask you to begin to wrap up your public comments as you have 10 seconds left.

If you do not end your comments by the end of the allotted time, speaker's microphone will be muted.

to allow the next speaker.

Also remember that you must press star six to unmute yourself.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following this meeting, please do so via the award winning Seattle channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The public hearing for the comprehensive docketing is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

I have listed here today Maria Batiola.

However, Maria, you are listed as not present.

We have Dave Moehring, Deb Barker, Chris Lehman, and Richard Ellison.

The rest are present.

So Maria, if you would like to join us, please do so, and we will come back to you at the end.

David Moehring, please take it away.

Thank you, council members Strauss, Morris, Lewis, Peterson, and Mosqueda.

The reason I'm calling in here today is for the 2020 to 2021 comp plan amendments that were proposed but are recommended not to be pursued or not to be docketed.

One of them that I submitted was item number 11 for the tree canopy and item number five, four yards and trees is very similar.

I think the one that I was at least submitted was also rejected two years in a row.

I think we all agree that both added density and added healthy tree canopy are required to fight the climate change issues that we know of.

This is well documented in the 2017 tree canopy study that the city conducted.

I encourage you all to take a look at So what's going on then with the comp plan?

How does the comp plan attend to both of those issues?

We know that Seattle's parks and about 250,000 street trees cannot achieve the 30% canopy goal by 2037. We also know that over two thirds of Seattle's tree canopies are on private property.

So as we densify our private property, that means our tree canopy will be greatly impacted.

Therefore, if growth in Seattle excludes private property as the current comp plan does, there is not going to be a way to achieve the 30% canopy goal, and our impact to the climate will be significant.

Look at Seattle's tree canopy in Belltown, say, for example, where it's about 10 to 13% compared to South request that we include this in the docket and not to defer the tree canopy with growth any longer.

Thank you.

Thank you, David.

Some of the thoughts that you just expressed is why I put forward an additional item to be docketed.

Up next is Deb Barker, then Chris Lehman, and then Richard Ellison.

Deb, welcome back.

Thank you so much, Chair Strauss.

For members reading along, I direct your attention to the land use and neighborhood memorandum by central staff, page four of six, second to the last paragraph, considering whether changes to the comprehensive plan are merited due to the significant impact to the city's infrastructure is prudent, says central staff.

I am Deb Barker.

On March 23rd, 2020, at 7 p.m., right after the rush hour ended, the West Seattle High Bridge was closed because of potentially cataclysmic cracks.

The unplanned closure of this critical transportation component immediately created uncharted neighborhood and transportation-related impacts for a wide area in the southern portion of the city.

Please, please realize that thousands of people have been and will continue to be adversely impacted by the West Seattle Bridge closure for a very long time.

Because of these unknowns looming for West Seattle and the Duwamish Valley, I authored this comprehensive plan amendment.

My goal was to help the City of Seattle mitigate West Seattle Bridge closure impacts.

My hope was that the Comprehensive Plan Amendment would enable methods of mitigation beyond the scope and outside of what SDOT typically controls.

I consider this Comprehensive Plan Amendment a placeholder for future mitigation actions.

You may recall that the mayor didn't authorize emergency proclamations until mid-July.

Today, SDOT is still fine-tuning formal mitigation plans for the affected communities.

I would like to start with a case in point.

Yesterday, SDCI issued a land use decision for a West Seattle junction mixed use project, had 55 units, 44 parking stalls.

That project has been in the pipeline for almost three years.

The decision does not even mention the West Seattle bridge closure, and the two-year-old traffic analysis is based on the bridge being opened.

There's no discussion and no mitigation for the additional

Thank you, Deb.

Thank you for your comments.

And if you'd like to follow up in writing with any additional thoughts, we'd be happy to receive those and have them reflected in the record.

Chris Lehman, you are next, and I hope that you heard my comments earlier of having precedent set.

And if you would like to meet with me individually and submit written recommendations, written comments for public comment today, we would be happy to accept both.

Currently, we have your public comment set at two minutes.

Well, obviously, the five-minute offer that you made earlier was what I was relying on.

I'm going to have to drop mentioning five of the seven amendments, and I do take you up on your offer to meet.

I hope that you'll help with a fresh look at these things.

The two that I'm going to talk about, one is establish a section or appendix of the comp plan in which the city would plan for open and participatory government.

While my amendment proposal offers some best practices as illustrations it emphasizes that this is something that the mayor and council should accept ownership of and engage with the public.

The your staff unfortunately did not correctly inform you.

I did in in this amendment and the next one specifically say what it changed.

What it changed is that the coronavirus crisis has shown that the city council does not have a plan and it did not and does not have a plan to open presidiory government.

It needs one and it also needs to honor its 2008 resolution to establish such a plan.

So I wish I had more time to talk about that.

The other one is about this the completely unacceptable and escalating damage to our roads and bridges by extra heavy vehicles, which are owned or chartered by the city and the county.

I mean, it's shocking.

Taxpayers need to realize, and certainly elected officials need to realize, that tens of millions of dollars a year are being caused unnecessarily by these vehicles to our roads and bridges.

And since I first began proposing this amendment, hundreds of millions of dollars of damage And again, I specifically said that the West Seattle Bridge is a perfect example.

FSDOT has now acknowledged that extra heavy transit vehicles in many ways have contributed to this serious problem.

Thank you, Chris.

And I look forward to meeting with you one on one to discuss how Circumstances have changed and what those impacts are to the proposals that you have made.

I appreciate your time and please do feel free to submit anything in writing that you'd like reflected in the record.

Next, Richard Ellison.

Richard, please take it away.

As a reminder, you must press star six on your own phone pad to be unmuted.

I see you there, Richard.

I hear you.

Good morning.

I heard you there for a second, Richard.

You might need to press star six one additional time.

I see you are now on mute.

Maybe try one more time.

I truly look forward to in-person meetings again when we can have them.

Richard, I see you are now unmuted.

Let me give it a shot.

IT, any thoughts on what's going on?

I see Richard Ellison.

I see he is unmuted.

We have no thoughts.

Can you hear me?

We can now.

Good morning.

All right.

Good morning.

It's just a rather difficult process, but we're working on it.

In dealing with Comprehensive Plan amendments, one of the four core values of the Comprehensive Amendment is environmental stewardship.

And that is reflected in having an environmental element.

And there are two elements that are proposals related to trees that were turned down.

And now there's the new one.

Thank you, Council Member Strauss, for trying to have a new amendment on trees.

I would suggest that all parties involved that have suggested amendments on trees be working with you to try to come up with a one final one that hopefully would be accepted by the docket.

The importance of that is, for example, we have a smoke problem today.

days in a row and this is not the first year where climate change causing fires impacts air quality.

Trees are a tremendous asset in regards to climate change and yet it would seem as though the housing community doesn't want to find a way to work with trees.

They're thinking that trees are going to stop housing and they would stop housing if we don't change the way we protect trees and we don't change the way that we allow buildings to be put in and that is We need to build taller around existing trees, not just cut a lot down and plant little twigs.

The green factor is a failure in regards to saving trees and needs to have radical changes to it.

COVID-19 is also making us want to be outside more.

And right now, the new proposals for development all seem to be building lot line to lot line.

There's no open space on ground for trees.

And so trees have to be somehow to work into the building process in a much more robust way.

There needs to be much more active planning.

It's as though the tobacco industry was in charge of building housing here, where we're in denial of the fact that, gee, cutting down trees is gonna have any effect on our health, and it does.

We need to have a strategy for saving trees, and we need to work that in as part of a new docket for a new comprehensive plan amendment.

Part of the design review should allow fuller public input as well.

Thank you, Richard.

And not seeing any additional speakers, that was our last speaker remotely present to speak at this public hearing.

The public hearing on the comprehensive plan docketing is now closed.

Thank you to, unless Maria, have you rejoined us?

My apologies for not circling back.

IT, I have not seen that Maria is present.

Can you confirm?

Not present.

Thank you.

Maria, please feel free to give my office a call or submit written comments at any time.

That was our last speaker remotely present to speak at the public hearing.

The public hearing on the comprehensive plan docketing is now closed.

Thank you to David, Deb, Chris, and Richard for providing comment today.

This legislation will be back before committee on September 23rd for a vote.

Item number three, I have invited Council Member Morales to join our committee for this item.

Our third item of business today is a discussion on CB 119827, which rezones land in Rainier Beach to facilitate the development of affordable housing.

Mr. Ahn, will you please read the abbreviated title into the record?

Agenda Item 3, Council Bill 119827, an ordinance relating to land use and zoning, amending the Seattle Municipal Code to rezone land in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.

Thank you.

We heard this item in committee and held a public hearing before recess began.

Jeff Wetland of OPCD and Yolanda Ho of our Council Central staff have joined us today to answer any questions before we vote.

And Jeff and Yolanda, could you give us a short briefing and discussion on this bill once again?

Jeff, do you want to go or?

Oh, I was deferring to you.

Okay, I can do a quick summary.

And then if there are more questions, I might pitch them to you.

So quick summary of this legislation is Council Bill 119827 would rezone 2.72 acres in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.

Rainier Beach neighborhood to support affordable housing projects.

It is comprised of two areas, both located along Rainier Avenue South.

There's one rezone area just north of South Row Street.

I might just see if I can pull up a map here to see that what I'm talking about.

Does that work?

Excellent.

Thank you, Yolanda.

OK.

Hold on.

Now my speaking points are hidden.

OK.

So can you see it?

Sorry, technology.

Yes, we can still see it.

OK, great.

So there is one area on the north side, kind of on the northern end here in the map.

It consists of one single large parcel zoned as three different zones on it.

Zoned L. R.

three with a mandatory housing affordability suffix single family five thousand and then a very small Southwest portion here that zone and see two fifty five and.

the proposal would rezone this LR3M area to NC255M.

And then on the Eastern portion, this would be a rezone from single family 5,000 to LR3M2.

The other area is located within the Rainier Beach urban village or the residential urban village.

And that is three parcels that are currently zoned NC255M And they are proposed to be rezoned to NC265M1.

And that is your quick summary.

Does anyone have any questions?

Great.

I do have a question for Jeff, but I do know that Councilmember Morales has joined us and this being her district, I would defer to her before I ask my questions.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you, Chair Strauss, for inviting me to come.

I don't have any questions.

I'm really just here to express my support for the proposed changes.

you know as the there's some pretty thorough information provided to the council members but I do want to say that this you know as a legislative zone change really does support the city's goals in terms of you know in terms of racial equity goals we were just talking I've been listening here for a little while talking about the comp plan and the the really important need to make sure that as we are moving forward with with any sort of land use policy that we are centering racial equity.

But it's also meeting the strategic purpose of increasing affordable housing.

As you know, the Rainier Beach neighborhood is an area designated as low economic opportunity and high risk of displacement.

And so it's really important that we are supporting projects that increase housing, that increase the kinds of goods and services that are available in the community so that we can try to shift the dial there.

And these aren't EDI projects, but I think it also sort of illustrates why that program is so important, because there are need for goods and services.

And when these kinds of projects are trying to get put into place, very often the organizations doing them have limited resources, and it puts the project at risk if they can't get the finances in place.

I'm really happy to see that these projects are moving forward.

The project specifically also will provide some really important services.

The Rainier Valley Food Bank is critical right now.

Food security in South Seattle and South King County has grown tremendously, food insecurity, especially in light of COVID.

And then the housing projects at the northern end of the area will provide some much needed housing, particularly family size housing.

We have a very diverse community here and many of the households have multi-generational households and so this is really important because they just aren't served by studios and one bedrooms that we've been building in the city.

And then that project additionally has the opportunity for child care and as we have been talking about for a long time we know how important it is to increase the amount of child care that's going to be available in the city.

So I just wanted to touch base.

Thanks for letting me tap in and express my support for these.

And I want to thank the Land Use Committee for really digging into the details of how to make sure that we are centering racial equity as we are thinking about how to move forward with our land use policies here.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

I do have a question.

Jeff, when we first spoke about this bill, I asked if you could explain how this qualifies for a legislative rezone rather than a contract rezone.

You provided a very helpful memo, and thank you for this memo that explains the distinction.

For our viewing public, would you be able to summarize the reasoning for anyone who may not have read your memo?

Great, thank you, Council Member Strauss.

Yeah, so this is what we call a legislative rezone, which is a council or city initiated rezone that's a change to policy.

In this case, a change to our land use regulations.

It's different from what we call a contract rezone, which is when an individual property owner applies for a change to the zoning according to some criteria that are in the code.

So this is the city making amendments to policy.

And the reason why it qualifies for such is because this is an area, as the name implies.

So it's a collection of sites.

It composes a relatively large area when you look at the number of parcels and the size of the parcels.

All those lands are physically close to each other in one neighborhood in Rainier Beach.

They're within walking distance, within a quarter mile of one another.

And this is proposed with a strategic purpose.

So all of these are infill sites that will directly support affordable housing and community supportive services.

So it hangs together under that thematic purpose, in addition to being a collection of sites close to one another physically.

And the executive and the council members felt it was a high priority bring this proposal forward as a policy change at this time, because as council member noted, it really does support direct community supports that are important in light of COVID impacts in a neighborhood at high risk of displacement and does not create any additional risk of displacement because the sites are vacant or do not have housing.

a high priority to bring it forward at this time as a policy change.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jeff.

That is very helpful information.

And your memo was very instructive for me understanding how this change fits into our process in the different ways that we are able to rezone land in our city.

Have you heard at this time any concerns arising from the community?

I have not.

I have not received any comments since we last talked opposing this proposal.

I've heard from the agencies and the housing providers who are involved that really want to see it move forward, but I haven't heard any comments in opposition.

Thank you.

Very helpful.

Colleagues, any questions?

I know that we had a robust hearing even though it was about a month ago on this bill.

Any additional comments or thoughts?

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

I just wanted to thank you for inviting Council Member Morales because that would have been my first question is how does the district council member feel about it?

So it's great to have her here to validate this as well as staff.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson and Vice Chair Mosqueda.

I just want to also echo the words of appreciation for this moving forward.

I'm really excited to see these projects that pair affordable housing, co-located services and equitable development features like child care and job training.

small business incubation along with community space.

And I know that this has been a work in progress for many years.

So congratulations to the Rainier Beach community in particular for their years of advocacy, especially around the Food Innovation Center and making sure that we're investing in affordable housing and also investing in equitable development and good jobs for every community member.

I am very excited this is moving forward and also just want to emphasize the importance of this being directly connected to transit opportunities and our commitment to transit-oriented development in a more equitable way.

So thank you for the work on this and excited to support these projects.

Thank you, Vice Chair Mosqueda.

Council Member Lewis, Council Member Juarez, any questions, comments, concerns?

None for me, Mr. Chairman.

Great, thank you both.

Oh boy, I miss you, Council Member Juarez.

Before we vote on the bill itself, I understand that there is a substitute we should consider.

Yolanda, can you talk to us and brief us about this substitute bill?

Sure, Chair.

Thank you.

Substitute version D5 was attached to the central staff memo for the August 12th meeting.

So that just makes some technical corrections to the bill that was transmitted from OPCD.

So, specifically, it strikes attachments one and two, which illustrated each of the two reason areas, which I described earlier.

and replaces them with a single new attachment that shows the entire rezone area, actually the map I just showed to you all as I described the proposal, and amends the language in Council Bill 119827 accordingly, and also corrects the South Rose Street rezone area to accurately reflect the existing zoning boundaries, which don't quite follow the parcel lines in the Southwest portion.

And for the western portion of the area, it changes the mandatory housing affordability suffix for NC 255 from M1 to M, which is consistent with the scale of the development capacity increase.

Thank you, Yolanda, and I appreciate that technical cleanup.

If there's no further discussion, colleagues, seeing none, I move to amend Council Bill 119827 by substituting version D5 or D4 as shown in the central staff memo.

Is there a second?

Second.

Second.

Thank you.

It has been moved and seconded to amend Council Bill 119827 as shown in the substitute amendment.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Peterson?

Yes.

Juarez?

Aye.

Lewis?

Yes.

Morales?

I am not a member of this committee.

Right, sorry.

But I vote yes.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

And Chair Strass?

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you, Mr. Allen.

Just a point of order, Chairman.

Council Member Morales can still vote.

She's still on city council, so you don't need to be a member of the committee to vote.

Excuse me, this is Deputy Clerk Schwinn.

With our newly adopted council rules January of this year, council members that are not part of a committee may be invited to the committee but may not vote.

Okay, well I'm staying corrected then from the old days.

Yeah, that's no problem.

That's something we newly implemented and has not come up very often.

So thank you.

Thanks for trying.

I'm so glad she said she said yay.

Oh, thank you all.

It is You know, here we are in September and typically in a typical year, we would have had nine months of committee meetings.

Yet we are here and probably the second or third month worth of committee meetings.

And so while those new rules were adopted in January, there have been few opportunities to exercise those rules.

Thank you, Deputy Clerk Schwinn, for keeping us on track as always.

Is there further discussion on this bill before we vote on the underlying legislation?

Hearing and seeing none, I move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 119827. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

It has been moved and seconded to recommend passage of the bill.

If there are no additional comments, will the clerk please call the roll?

Peterson?

Yes.

Lewis?

Yes.

Juarez?

Aye.

Mosqueda?

Aye.

Chair Strauss?

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

The motion carries.

Thank you all for the discussion today.

This bill will be back before the full council on Monday, next Monday, September 14th.

Our fourth item of business today is a briefing and discussion on Council Bill 119-877, which would extend the allowance for virtual design review and landmarks preservation meetings.

Noah, Mr. Ahn, would you please read the abbreviated title into the record?

Agenda item four, Council Bill 119-877.

An ordinance relating to land use review decision and meeting procedures temporarily modifying and suspending procedures entitled 23 and 25 of the Seattle Municipal Code and amending chapters of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Thank you.

We are joined by Mike Podolski, Lisa Rutzik of SDCI, Sarah Bell, Sarah Sote, and Maureen Sheehan of Department of Neighborhoods, Ketel Freeman of our Council Central staff to be able to provide us a briefing on this legislation.

I'm not sure who would be interested to go first.

I see both Ketel and Mike

Yeah, maybe I'll just say a few introductory words and highlight a distinction in the mechanics of this piece of legislation from the ordinance that the council passed back in April and then talk about next steps very briefly and then turn it over to SDCI and D.O.N. to go through the substance of the bill.

Sound okay?

Sounds great.

All right.

So as Council Member Strauss mentioned, this is an initial briefing on Council Bill 119877, which would Extend temporary modifications to land use and historic preservation procedures that were approved through ordinance 126072 back in April.

The procedures that are primarily affected by this ordinance are design review landmarks procedures.

departures for public schools and also the major institutional master plan process.

I'm probably missing a few, but those are the types of permitting processes that are affected by ordinance 126072 and also by this proposed council bill.

Just to refresh your memory, the council did request a report from SDCI and DON on progress towards standing up virtual meetings.

That report is attached to the agenda provided by SDCI in July, and it details some of the challenges in selecting the technology, some staffing changes at SDCI to facilitate virtual meetings, and also indicates that virtual meetings began to roll out in August.

I'm just one key distinction in the mechanics of this piece of legislation, as opposed to the previous bill that the Council considered ordinance 12607 to so the one that many of the changes would be extended by the current bill.

Was enacted on a charter emergency basis to allow the bill to become effective immediately.

And it was also enacted pursuant to RCW 3678 390 which is a provision on the growth management act that allows jurisdictions to bypass some procedural requirements.

To establish regulations on an interim in this case six month basis.

The current bill is not supposed to be enacted as an emergency or as an interim control.

It's a little bit different in character.

The provisions in the bill are temporary, but they expire on a date that is identifiable, but it's essentially indefinite.

So many of the changes in the bill would continue until six months after the mayor terminates the COVID civil emergency.

And obviously that's a date that is unknown.

So that's something to keep in mind and considering the provisions of this bill.

With respect to process, this is an initial briefing.

There's a public hearing that's currently scheduled for the 23rd.

Just given how this bill would become effective, there is a gap between when this bill could become effective and when the provisions of Ordinance 126072, the April Ordinance, expire.

So if the council wants to minimize that gap, the committee may want to consider action on the same day as the public hearing.

So that's all for me, unless you have further questions, and I'll turn it over to STCI and DON.

Thank you, Kito.

I just have one.

I have many questions here.

The one that I believe that you touched on is, do we have an exact date that ordinance 126072 expires?

I believe that's October 25th.

Yes, that's right.

Copy.

Thank you very much.

And Mr. Budowski, would you like to take it away?

Yes, thank you for your time and attention this morning.

We have a brief

presentation.

I think it's on its way.

There we go.

There we are.

I'll do the bulk of the speaking to the slides and then Lisa Ruczik from SDCI and Sarah Bells from the Department of Neighborhoods will join in primarily to provide a status report in progress towards the report back that Ketel mentioned on how Our efforts are going with administrative review and virtual meetings to date.

So Ketel's introduction, I think, serves the purpose well.

We have a little bit more maybe to add to that, a couple of things maybe to highlight on the ordinance.

As I mentioned, we'll have a status report.

And then we'll unpack some of the details about the provisions that are proposed to be extended and a few minor tweaks that we're hoping the committee will agree are good things to do.

As Kito mentioned, following the COVID emergency, a proclamation by the governor related to public gatherings and limiting them.

even in the case of local government decision-making in the interest of public health and safety, as well as the emergency declaration that the mayor made.

As we talked about, the provisions of the emergency bill do expire soon, given where we are now.

As Kito mentioned, we were proposing rather than have to come back to council, because we don't know when it'll be safe again for us to have meetings in person, tying the end date to the extended provisions to a finding that the emergency is no longer in our midst.

Just kind of like at a high level unpacking of what we'll talk about in more detail, the ordinance allowed for virtual meetings, I think as you heard in the public comments in the beginning, and certainly it's the department's interest and support of public outreach to have public meetings, whether they're virtual or in person.

But given some of the technical difficulties and some of the capacity challenges that virtual meetings pose for us, we do want to talk with you some more about a limited extension of some of the ability to do some more administrative review related to the design review processes that are part of the proposal.

We're also gonna talk some more about some of the DON overseeing projects related to historic preservation, public school departures, and some of the other important permit reviews that they're in charge of, as well as some of their administrative decision-making ability.

And an administrative review is really important in the short term while these bills are in place, in part to allow processes to continue so that it's a predictable environment for permit applicants as well as neighbors and others that are following along, financial backers in some cases, but also so that we could manage the capacity of the virtual meetings to focus on the really important, potentially impactful meetings that people really want to be able to weigh in on.

So at this point, I'll turn it over to Lisa and Sarah to talk some more about the experience that we've had since the emergency bill was put in place with these three major categories.

Thank you, Mr. Podolsky.

Hi, my name is Lisa Redzig.

I manage the Design Review Program at the Department of Construction and Inspections.

We launched the virtual early design guidance meetings on August 1st.

We had four meetings in August and we have four scheduled for September as well.

And we are planning to fold in the projects at the recommendation phase starting on October 1st.

And we currently have nine projects scheduled for October, including both early design guidance and recommendation phased projects.

We hired a staff person to help run, I refer to him as the technology pilot for these meetings.

So he's working in conjunction with staff and the board chair to run the meetings so far.

They've gone fairly smoothly.

We're continuously improving on the process.

trying to better understand the WebEx events platform, which is also evolving.

And so we're feeling like it's going well, and we're just going to continue to roll out.

And starting October 1st, we'd have the ability to do full capacity for all the projects to go to virtual.

Wonderful.

I see a question from Vice Chair Mosqueda, and I have a question as well.

So, Vice Chair, please take it away.

Thank you very much.

Can you speak to the permitting turnaround times as compared to before these changes were adopted?

Specifically, any comments or feedback on permitting turnaround times related to affordable housing efforts?

So I cannot speak to the affordable housing component specifically, because as you know, they are now exempt from design review.

So I am no longer working with those projects.

The turnaround time for projects that are staying within design review, I don't have the exact numbers.

It's been a little bit of a shift, because there's time saved by keeping the projects in-house and not having to wait to go to scheduled in the board's calendar.

However, staff has also been inundated with taking this body of work on over the past six months, so I don't know where that's where the timelines have fallen over the past six months, but those have been those are the things that we've been juggling with.

I would just add that the Office of Housing is looking into helping us describe the benefits that have accrued to the affordable housing projects.

We understand there have been about a dozen of them.

And we can report back before the next committee meeting with that information.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you both.

And Lisa, can you share how this has improved or undercut the design review process?

And if either direction, what improvements do we need to be making or thinking about at this time?

That's a good question.

I, you know, it still feels fairly new.

We've only had 4 projects under our belt.

We have our 5th meeting tonight.

I think that it.

For some people, having the digital access to a meeting is much easier than showing up to a meeting in person.

For other people, that's less convenient.

I've been hearing a lot of positive feedback about it, although I've heard some complaints as well.

So that's just anecdotal.

I don't have any specific data.

I think the time of day, we've made the meeting slightly early in the day.

They were typically held in the evenings.

Now they're late afternoon to early evening.

I think there have been some people that are very pleased with that change, while for others it's not convenient.

And that kind of speaks to that there's really no perfect time to be convenient for everybody.

The ability for public comment to happen during the meeting is still the same agenda we've always had.

We have an online speaker form.

And people have the option of either speaking during the public comment part of the meeting or writing in a comment, which is read into the record by staff.

We, I think, have been able to, so far, get a lot of consistency across the different boards with a script that we're all using and really sticking to as we're kind of moving into this new world.

I'm sure you've also experienced a similar thing.

So I think that's a nice point of consistency for, you know, across the boards.

But there's a learning curve.

There's a learning curve for everybody.

The downside is it's quite resource intensive.

There's probably three to four hours of prep work prior to every meeting that never occurred before.

We're doing dry runs with every applicant team and dry runs with the board to get the boards up to speed and comfortable with the platform as well as staff.

So we have eight boards, 42 board members, about 15 or 20 staff people involved with design review, and then every applicant team.

So it's quite a bit of advanced work, which we want to do.

We want to provide that resource.

We want people to feel comfortable with it, but it is time consuming.

I'm imagining, I'm hoping that that actually will, it's going to be most intense now and will decrease as we all get more comfortable with it.

But for these first few months, it's pretty resource intensive.

Yes, we had that same experience here on Council as we transferred to virtual meetings.

And as you saw earlier today, we still had some virtual issues.

And so I...

Yes.

I have heard your points about, for some people, it is easier to attend because they don't have to travel anywhere.

They can simply access the meeting over the internet.

That is an ease and convenience for some.

And for others, that ability to access technology is a barrier.

So understanding that there is no perfect method, I've heard good feedback so far about the virtual meetings.

If this legislation were not adopted, would virtual meetings still continue to occur?

I believe my understanding is that we actually need the legislation in order for us to do the virtual meetings.

important things to realize is the code specifies that meetings are held in the district where the projects occur.

So in one of the eight districts.

So that alone necessitates that we have this ability to run a digital meeting which obviously is not occurring in any given address.

Great.

Very helpful.

Colleagues does anyone have questions for Lisa in particular or maybe we'll continue through the presentation.

We could have Sarah speak to the to the DLN run programs.

Thank you.

Very helpful.

Yeah.

So, I'm Sarah bells.

I am and I direct the community assets division at the department of neighborhoods, which includes historic preservation, major institutions and schools and patches.

And also on the call today are Sarah Soutt, who's the city's historic preservation officer, and Maureen Sheehan, who manages the city's major institutions and schools program.

So if you have any specific questions about their programs and how they have transitioned to administrative review and virtual meetings, they're available as well.

I guess just to give you a quick overview of where we are at in terms of our processes in D.O.N., So for historic preservation boards and commissions, we began hosting virtual meetings in early July, I believe the first meeting was on July 1 and that was for the landmarks preservation board.

Since then, the Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, and International Special Review District Boards have also held virtual meetings.

We're also in the process of developing and implementing some language access protocols for ISRD virtual meetings in partnership with DON's community liaison team and also OIRA staff.

So we are hoping to get those operationalized within the next few weeks.

In terms of the breakdown between administrative review and virtual meetings, under the emergency legislation for historic preservation, staff have the authority to complete administrative review of many of the, I guess I would classify them as maybe more minor or smaller scale applications that come in to Dawn's historic preservation program.

Things like signage reviews, applications for awnings, exterior painting, exterior seating, those sorts of things, staff are processing administratively now instead of sending them to the full board.

And then larger scale applications, things like designation applications, applications related to new construction, things like that are still being processed through our historic preservation boards.

In terms of public school departures, staff have the authority to complete administrative review of public school departure applications, and that's a process that we work through with SDCI staff.

I believe three schools are, we have at least begun the process of administratively reviewing departure applications for three public school projects.

And then the other element of the process our major institution advisory committees.

And Maureen has begun conducting those meetings virtually.

That process also, I believe, began in July.

And what we're doing there is we're trying to only host virtual meetings of the major institution committees when there's a need either due to a new construction project or a proposed amendment to a major institution master plan or if there's an annual meeting requirement that needs to be met.

Prior to COVID, some of our more active major institution advisory committees, such as such as CUCAC, which is the committee for UW, they were meeting monthly.

And what we're trying to do now is just convene meetings when there is business that needs action by the committee.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Sarah.

And similar question that I asked Lisa, how has this been going?

What are the benefits and the drawbacks to virtual meetings?

And are there improvements that can be made?

Yeah, so I may defer some of the response to that to Sarah and to Maureen, just because they are more in the thick of it in terms of administering and facilitating the public meetings.

I will say we're using Webex, that's the platform that we have chosen for all of our virtual meetings.

And I think overall have felt like that's been a successful avenue for us, but I'm gonna I'm going to defer to them to respond to that directly.

Thanks.

This is Sarah, and I'm the city's historic preservation officer.

And I can really just echo a lot of the same comments that Lisa Retsick made.

I think that the staff lift is what has surprised us the most.

And just that work ahead of time that it takes to get these virtual meetings up and running.

We've received actually quite a bit of positive feedback.

I think that one of the big moves that we did was that we have placed our public comment period at the beginning of the meeting.

Some of the feedback that we've received is that makes it easier for folks to know when they should attend.

It's made sign up pretty easy and smooth.

So that's been one of the changes that we've made that has worked pretty well for us.

Otherwise, it has been very smooth and we're just going to keep doing them.

Wonderful.

Has there been an ease in workload by allowing things like signage and awnings to be done administratively?

I know that through our work previously that sometimes those types of decisions could take up a lot of time.

Yes, indeed.

And so that has really helped us reduce our agenda items for the virtual meetings down to kind of the big Um, more substantial agenda items and so our, um.

Staff has, I think, done about 115 administrative reviews since the legislation was put into place.

And those are 115 applications that haven't had to go to a virtual meeting.

Our, our virtual landmarks board meetings have, um.

They started about three at 330 and they've been consistently going until 630 or seven typically and we are trying to keep it down to three to four.

larger agenda items and that's working pretty well for us.

So we try to be done by 630 or seven, although we don't have a whole lot of control over that, but this seems to be manageable.

So the administrative review really helps us and I think is also beneficial to all those property owners and business owners that are putting applications in.

Very helpful.

Thank you, Sarah.

Colleagues, I have a fair number of questions to continue and just wanted to check with you to see if you wanted to jump in.

Not seeing any questions from my colleagues, I will continue.

Feel free to jump in anytime.

And this may have been a question along the lines that Council Member Mosqueda had asked, but do we know how many applications were approved for the administrative design review before virtual meetings began?

I don't have the numbers of how many projects had gone through administrative design review prior to the emergency legislation.

I know that we did convert 70 projects to administrative design review that would have otherwise gone to the boards between, within the effective date of the legislation, the emergency legislation.

So between March and this month, checked the numbers and I think it came to 70. But I don't know.

Again, those were all projects that would have otherwise gone to the full board review.

I don't know if that answers your question, but I can try to get more details if you're wondering about previous.

I mean, it's not really apples to apples because they weren't subject to administrative design review prior.

These were ones that were subject to the full process.

Yep.

Thank you, Lisa.

And yes, feel free to connect after the committee meeting.

And if any of these questions, the answers are not right at the tips of your fingers.

Happy to follow up after committee.

And this might be more for Mike, but can someone explain the reasoning behind allowing some projects to stay in administrative design review until the end of the year, and why making projects go back to full design review midstream may pose problems?

We do have a slide that speaks to that.

Why don't I advance to that, and then we can talk about it.

Oh, and if there is additional presentation that I was not aware of, please, I'm happy to sit back and listen until the end of the presentation.

This is kind of a natural conversation, and we could go to this slide here, which lays that out for you.

This is one of the adjustments that we're proposing, rather than just extending what was in the emergency bill.

First line here to let you know that As some of the people who testified at the beginning of the meeting, the original bill allowed people to elect to be reviewed through design review.

We're proposing a limited extension of that as a transition, if you will.

The numbered one and two items here speak to that.

This ability to do this would expire at the end of the year, this year, and it would be only for projects that have already elected to be part of the process and have made certain milestones in that process.

That's the second bullet there.

Or if, as you have mentioned, the council has experienced in their use of virtual meeting technologies or we are sort of planning as a contingency measure, if either because of staff capacity owing to the needs for preparing for these meetings, or technical glitches, you know, if we're not able to make a meeting available to allow this limited use of administrative review.

So we are proposing to extend a certain flavor of administrative review, but in a very limited fashion.

Thank you.

And then the final note here just lets you know that if we hadn't already given public notice at one of these elections, we're proposing a line in the bill that would make it clear that we would do that.

Very helpful.

And I will hold the rest of my questions until the end of your presentation.

OK.

Anything else for Lisa and Sarah?

I'll back up below here, and we'll just get into some of the details that we skipped over.

All right, Mr. Chair.

Yes.

Oh, so sorry.

On slide seven there, in the second bullet, just before we move on.

That's okay.

Okay.

Could you describe the potential impact to project timelines for the projects that are nearing completion of early design guidance?

which then are switched to a fall design review process midstream, and what would that actually cause the design review process to do?

Would it be longer than usual under full design review?

That's probably better for Lisa to answer.

The answer to that is it depends.

Some boards are quite busy.

There's a lot of projects.

a lot of construction and development being proposed in a certain district.

And so their calendar tends to get booked up quicker than a district that hasn't been as busy.

So it really depends on where the project is.

For a project that has been converted to administrative design review, and then we'll go back to the full board review, really the only question is, when's the next available date that the board Um, so that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's are going to play out in the future, since it really is in the applicant's court as to when projects come back to us.

It depends on staff capacity and staff workload.

And then, as I said, the volume that individual boards are experiencing.

OK.

Just a quick follow-up, Mr. Chair.

Ketel, I didn't know if you had something else I saw you.

Okay, and there was some comments made earlier about, or in public comment, there was a discussion about whether or not the West Seattle Bridge closure has had an impact on development changes or slowing down development.

I'm just wondering, maybe as a follow-up at some point, since you have specific district information, living in District 1, it does not seem like there's been a slowdown, but I would be, and maybe that's more on the residential side, But perhaps you could give us a quick summary to see if you've seen a noticeable impact from that.

And if you don't have that now, that's okay.

You can follow up.

What I can say is there had actually been no activity with the Southwest Board for several months.

But I was very happy that our first two meetings were with the Southwest Board.

So I was really excited that we could at least give West Seattle folks the first meeting, the first virtual meeting.

So there were two fairly large sites that went through the EDG process last month with the Southwest Board.

And they have a third project scheduled for early October.

So it actually seems like it's picked up more than it had in the past few months.

But of course, it's anecdotal.

It's hard to know what to attribute that to.

Yeah, that seems consistent with what I've seen too.

But thank you for that summary.

And I will keep an eye on it.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

And Mike, if you'd like to continue with where you were in the presentation.

All right, so this next two slides, and this will be the conclusion of our presentation, just kind of lays out all of the aspects of design review and the DON-run programs that would be extended as they are in the current emergency ordinance.

And, you know, it runs from things we've been talking about already, about virtual meetings, the limited ability to continue to do administrative design review, Some people spoke to this issue as part of the testimony at the beginning of the meeting.

There's provisions in the original ordinance that we would extend that exempt certain affordable housing projects from the design review process, but do allow the SDCI director to allow some flexibility with how certain development standards are met.

Early community outreach is a relatively new part of the design review program.

It's run by the Department of Neighborhoods prior to beginning the process, or as an earlier part of the process, and recognizing virtual meetings that are part of that.

There's some special zoning provisions, including design review thresholds that apply to Seattle Housing Authority's, yes, their terrace development.

And there are some administrative review and virtual meeting provisions that are specific to them.

As Sarah and her staff were talking, some of the approvals for landmarks can be done administratively.

The first line here lists the various landmark areas that are involved in those processes.

School departures for public schools is something that we're running on a virtual basis at this point.

as well as a planning tool that's used in the downtown zone called planned community developments.

These are development proposals that would span more than one block and area and involves public processes to help select public benefits that would be an important part of such a development.

So there's provisions in the bill that allow for some virtual meetings to accomplish those public input responsibilities.

We already talked about this slide.

So those were the things we wanted to bring to your attention in this presentation, and we had a good conversation.

And if there are any final questions, we'd be happy to take them.

Yes, thank you, Mike.

Lisa, Sarah, and Sarah, what a wonderful presentation.

I really appreciate all of your fast work with the original bill and being able to quickly change how we do business to adapt to this COVID reality.

I'm not going to call it a new normal, yet we are still transitioning.

One question that I do have for Mike, what is the basis for setting the expiration of this extension to six months post the civil emergency ending?

I do have some pretty strong concerns with this, and so I want to make sure that I understand what the rationale is.

Well, we're not certain in the beginning when the conditions would be safe for in-purpose public meetings.

We certainly value public participation and are looking forward to post-COVID times and being able to get back together.

We think that the administrative proposal here is very limited and does not interfere with the value that we place on the virtual public meetings at this point.

But we did think that things are uncertain enough.

Even private sector businesses aren't planning on recalling their people to their offices until at the earliest January.

And similar things are happening with the government, including the governor's proclamations related to public health and safety allowances under the state laws for open public meetings.

It does seem like in our minds, a approach that was key towards sort of conditions, you know, facing us at the time, in terms of whether or not an emergency proclamation was still applicable, seemed like a very sort of logical and responsive way to frame how long this bill would last.

And the 180 days was meant to sort of give people some time to sort of close up their work and not be surprised by the termination of the proclamation.

We'd be happy to talk with you further about perhaps other ways to accomplish these goals.

But we think that perhaps this would be, if you agree, a common way to approach any of the interim provisions that the city has going on across the boards.

conditions are still going to continue to warrant special treatment.

Thank you, Mike.

Yes, I would love to follow up with you about that.

I do have some initial concerns about extending the life of this bill past the civil emergency.

And with that said, you know, in the conversation with Lisa and with Sarah and Sarah, it does demonstrate that there are benefits to how we are adapting to this changed scenario of having to work virtually.

And so maybe there is a way that we can merge our shared desires and ensure that there's a predictable stream of permit review and approval or denial for builders to have predictability.

I do have a few other questions, and this might be for Ketel.

Has public notice been provided for projects that moved into administrative design review?

Or I guess that one's still for Mike.

Yes, every single project that converted over to administrative design review was given public notice.

So the thinking is for going forward, if the last notice that occurred did not identify it as administrative review, then we will provide that notice.

Excellent.

Thank you so much, Lisa.

And lastly, could you remind us of when this legislation was posted to the committee website and confirm that public hearing notice was given 30 days before the hearing?

Yeah, so it was.

We posted the legislation, had not yet been introduced, but we posted the legislation and the supporting materials that are actually attached to the agenda to your, to the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee webpage back in August.

The hearing has been noticed.

30 days was provided, probably a little bit more, probably 33 or so.

And that hearing is scheduled for the next Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee meeting on September 23rd.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Ketel.

Colleagues, any further questions?

Lisa, Sarah, Sarah, Mike, any further comments?

Council Member Stratoff?

Ah, Council Member Lewis, yes.

Yeah, thank you.

So I just want to jump in a little bit, because I think there's been some confusion among some in the community about the scope of this legislation.

And I just wanted to try to put a fine point on The categories of projects that are covered and how this would influence things.

So, first, my understanding is that.

As far as being able to elect to enter into administrative review as an alternative to full virtual design review, based on the earlier comments from presenters, that would be limited to essentially grandfathering people in from the summer who have already elected into it under the emergency ordinance, want to continue to pursue it, and they would be allowed to until the end of this year, until December.

So that's my first question, just to confirm that that's the case.

And my second question would just be if someone could provide a quick summary, you know, like 5,000 feet above summary of the scope of projects under this new bill that would be subject to the new virtual meetings and the scope of projects that would be subject to APR or have design review waived entirely.

Because I do think it's important to just make sure that some of the concerns in the public that I think are based on assuming this bill completely gets rid of design review, either people that are in favor of that or against that, I think it's important for people to know what this actually does and to know the scope and scale of the projects impacted.

And I just want to make sure that at the end of this presentation here, I think this is a good time to just really quickly run down those bullet points so that the public knows exactly what this does and what the scope of the impacted projects is.

Lisa, do you want to take that?

I would love to.

So to answer the first part of your question, which was, that going forward, all projects will be subject to virtual design review unless you are, I think you said, grandfathered in, is correct.

But there is a caveat that the only ones that are allowed to stay in the administrative track are ones that completed the early design guidance phase under the emergency provisions of the existing emergency ordinance.

and in the new ordinance extended to December 31st.

In other words, if you converted over to administrative design review and completed your EDG under the administrative design review during the life of this emergency ordinance, you are allowed to stay in the administrative track for the rest of the process.

And Lisa, sorry to interrupt, but can I ask just a quick follow up on that point?

And I really appreciate your response to that.

How many projects would you even predict would fall into that category at this point?

I don't have that number.

I'd have to manually check that.

I don't have that number.

Right, I can follow up with you on that track that down and send it to me.

I'd appreciate that because I mean, it sounds to me like a pretty narrow.

Category of projects, so I just like to to have that that fact at my fingertips and I really appreciate you clarifying that.

So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to ask.

Yeah.

It's all very wonky when you look at code things.

So I just want to, I'm trying to explain it as clearly as possible.

You know, generally you might say that half the projects that we converted were recommendation level and half were EDG level of the ones that were in the EDG phase.

I would assume, I would think that at least half of those completed EDG and would be able to therefore stay in the administrative track.

Other ones may have been brought back for a second or third EDG review, meaning they have not completed their EDG review under this phase.

So I think that I'm hoping that answers the first part of your question.

The second part of your question, which is sort of the big overview of what this all means.

So I think what I'll do is I'll just talk about what the design review threshold table is.

So any project that's 8,000 square feet or less is not subject to any form of design review.

If a project is between 8,000 and 15,000 square feet, it's subject to streamlined design review.

Nothing about that has changed.

If you're between 15,000 square feet and 30,000 square feet, you're subject to administrative design review.

None of that has changed.

If you're over 30,000 square feet, you are subject to full design review.

That's the piece that has changed with this emergency legislation.

Um, that.

Full full designer means that you go before a designer view board and those projects were allowed to convert to administrative designer view.

But now that we have launched virtual designer view board meetings.

The process will be exactly the same, except for the board meeting is held virtually and not in person.

Um, there are some.

Caveats because we are talking about the land use code.

So there are for projects that have.

Certain site specific characteristics that would have been subject to streamlined design review may actually be bumped up to administrative design review.

Again, that's not the body of projects that we're talking about.

We're talking about the ones that were over the 30,000 square feet and then the.

affordable housing projects, those were already only subject to administrative design review and now they are no longer subject to design review at all.

So I'm hoping that, does that give you the overview that you were looking for?

That does.

I appreciate that.

And that accords with my understanding.

I think it was really important to get that into the to put a fine point on that at the end here, just because of a lot of the the expectations and concerns from community that that, frankly, I do not see borne out by this legislation.

And so I appreciate that.

You were able to clarify that because I think that a lot of those concerns are unfounded based on what this actually does.

So thank you.

You know, it's the land use code is quite complicated, and it's difficult to summarize in generalities because, as you know, there's exceptions to everything.

But that hopefully explains it in the most straightforward way that I can.

Thank you so much.

And I don't have any further questions, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Any other questions from the committee?

Vice Chair Mosqueda, please take it away.

Thank you very much.

And I want to thank Council Member Lewis for asking that sort of simplified question, because I think, you know, to put it in terms where we're all In terms of what we're all experiencing right now, I mean, all of us are at home.

If our offices were to open next week, I would be very concerned about coming.

If our offices were to open in January, I would be very concerned about going in.

And given that we're talking about volunteer boards, I just don't want to put anybody in a position where they're having to make a decision about whether or not they continue to serve on a volunteer board, given the ongoing concerns about COVID.

So no matter when a vaccine is ever present or it becomes more regular to go back into offices, let's say that happens sometime in the spring next year, I don't want us to ever be in a position where we're unintentionally screening out those who have health complications or have underlying health conditions that would prevent them from being able to serve on a board because of being more at risk for the lingering effects of COVID.

just makes a lot of sense to me that we are making accommodations to continue this type of operation so that we can have projects in the pipeline continue, make sure that they're not hitting roadblocks and that we're not unintentionally screening out some of our community members who want to serve on these volunteer boards and protecting their health as well.

Thank you.

Councilmember Peterson, Councilmember Juarez, any further questions, comments, concerns?

I'm good.

Great.

Go for it, Councilmember Peterson.

I do have some concerns about it, but I can address those later.

Thank you.

OK, thank you.

Thank you all, Sarah, Sarah, Lisa, Mike, Ketel, you all are doing really fantastic and amazing work for the city and really appreciate your work.

And thank you for coming to the committee today.

This legislation will be back before the committee on Wednesday, September 23rd for a public hearing and possible vote.

Our final item of business today is a public hearing on CB 119832. Mr. Ahn, will you please read the abbreviated title into the record?

Agenda item five, interim floodplain regulations.

Wonderful.

As you recall, the Council adopted CB 119832, which adopted interim floodplain regulations as required by FEMA in July.

Due to state law, the Council is required to hold a post-adoption public hearing.

Before we begin the public hearing, Maggie Lewicki from SDCI and Ketil Freeman from Central Staff are joining us to provide a brief refresher.

Ketil and Maggie, please take it away.

So you said some of the things I was gonna say, so thank you for that.

Council Member Strauss, just to refresh the council members' memories here, back in July, the council passed Ordinance 126113, and that established interim floodplain regulations and updated flood insurance rate maps.

Passage of that legislation was necessary to ensure continued participation in the National Flood Insurance Rate Program, National Flood Insurance Program.

And it's a requirement that it's an obligation that comes from regulations that are administered by FEMA.

Because the regulations were in action on an interim basis, the council can elect to hold a public hearing after passage of the ordinance, which is what the committee is doing today.

STCI will transmit permanent regulations for council consideration later this year.

Maggie, is there anything that you'd like to add to that?

Yeah, I'll just add a few things.

Thank you, Chair Strauss and council members for having me here today.

So most importantly, the ordinance includes the adoption of FEMA's maps that were adopted by FEMA in February 2020. So these are the floodplain insurance rate maps and the flood insurance study for the city of Seattle.

And as Kito said, the interim regulations will be in effect for six months.

That's starting August 23rd, which is the effective date of the ordinance.

And currently, SDCIA is working on the permanent regulations.

We've got a website up and running.

And we hope to have the permanent regulations for city council for review later this year, beginning of next year, with the February expiration date of the interim regulations, unless they're renewed.

And then if I can answer any questions specifically.

And also just to point everybody to the SDCI memo that provides additional details about about the ordinance.

Great.

Thank you, Maggie.

That was very helpful.

And thank you for your work to ensure that we stay compliant within state and federal law.

Colleagues, any further questions?

I know that we had a conversation and briefing about this when the legislation came before us previously.

hearing and seeing none before we, and Deputy Clerk Schwinn, seeing as we have no one signed up for public comment or public comment for this public hearing, do I still need to walk through the entire script and then close out the public hearing?

Jody, are you not receiving a response?

I'm just going to walk through the whole process here and just want to apologize.

I apologize.

I was on a call with another committee right now.

How can what was your question?

Copy.

We have no one signed up for the public hearing.

Should I just run through the whole script?

Yes, you should still open it up, run through your script, make sure nobody wants to speak, close it up, and then we are good.

Apologize for that.

No apologies needed, you are amazing.

So I will moderate, before we open the remote public hearing, I would again ask that everyone please be patient as we continue to learn and operate the new system in real time and navigate through the inevitable growing pains.

We are continuously looking for ways to fine tune this process and adding new features that allow for additional means of public participation in our council meetings.

I will moderate the public hearing in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on one speaker at a time in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

If you've not registered but would like to speak, you can sign up before the end of this public hearing by going to the council's website at seattle.gov forward slash council.

The link is also in today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone in an automatic prompt.

If you've been unmuted, it will be the speaker's cue that is their time to speak.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item you are addressing.

As a reminder, your public comment should relate to Council Bill 119832. If you have comments about something that is not on today's agenda, you can always provide written comments by emailing my office.

Speakers will hear a chime at the 10 seconds that are left in their allotted time.

Once you hear the chime, we will ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, The speaker's microphone will be unmuted to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you continue following the meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The public hearing on Council Bill 119832 is now open.

We will begin with the first speaker on the list.

IT and clerks just confirming there is no one on the list.

Is that correct?

Nobody.

Thank you, son.

At this time, I do not have anyone remotely present to speak.

Will staff please, did that?

Staff has confirmed there is no, not a member of the public in the queue, and we will be closing this public comment.

Being that there's not a member of the public remotely present for this public hearing on CB119832, the public hearing is now closed.

Colleagues, that concludes our Wednesday, September 9th, 2020 meeting of the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee now at 1237, three hours.

Plus, I have one item for the good of the order, which is Christina Postlewaite, which is our council liaison from SDCI, who my staff works with closely, recently had a baby boy.

So wanted to welcome Will into the world.

Congratulations, Christina.

Looking forward to meeting Will when we can.

Any other members of the committee with an item for the good of the agenda, good of the order?

Nope.

Hearing none, this concludes the September 9th meeting of the Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee.

As a reminder, our next committee meeting will be on September 23rd, starting at 9.30 a.m.

Thank you for attending.

We are adjourned.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jodi.

Thank you.

Even though you put me on blast, girl.

Come on, take it easy.