Seattle City Council Land Use Committee 5/10/23

Good afternoon, the May 10th 2023 meeting of the land use committee will come to order it is 2 PM.

I'm Dan Strauss, chair of the committee, council members Mosqueda and Morales are excused.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Morales has come back.

Thank you, thank you.

Start if you could again, clerk.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Morales.

Here.

Chair Strauss.

Present.

Board present.

Thank you.

We have five items on the agenda today.

We are transitioning out of the tree ordinance conversations and we are transitioning straight into the maritime industrial zoning changes.

This is going to run a similar schedule where we're going to have meetings dedicated to this topic and an amendment deadline next week.

So we have these five items on today's agenda and they will occur on many other agendas, which are Council Bill 120567 a briefing and discussion on creating a chapter 23.50 a in the SMC Council Bill 120568 a briefing discussion on annual comprehensive plan amendments.

council bill 120569 a briefing and discussion on creating a new zoning map with three new industrial zones and council bill 120570 a briefing and discussion on amending chapter 23.50 and lastly council bill 120571 a briefing and discussion on modifying exterior sound limits within bin mix Now, clerk, as we proceed through, you don't have to read those long titles.

We just went over them.

I'll save my remarks about this package for just a moment.

But before we begin, if there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing that that was not an objection, the agenda is adopted.

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

Clerk, if you could play the video.

Hello, Seattle.

We are the Emerald City, the city of flowers and the city of goodwill, built on indigenous land, the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

The Seattle City Council welcomes remote public comment and is eager to hear from residents of our city.

If you would like to be a speaker and provide a verbal public comment, you may register two hours prior to the meeting via the Seattle City Council website.

Here's some information about the public comment proceedings.

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That is your cue that it's your turn to speak.

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Be sure your phone is unmuted on your end so that you will be heard.

As a speaker, you should begin by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

A chime will sound when 10 seconds are left in your allotted time as a gentle reminder to wrap up your public comments.

At the end of the allotted time, your microphone will be muted and the next speaker registered will be called.

Once speakers have completed providing public comment, Please disconnect from the public comment line and join us by following the meeting via Seattle Channel broadcast or through the listening line option listed on the agenda.

The council reserves the right to eliminate public comment if the system is being abused or if the process impedes the council's ability to conduct its business on behalf of residents of the city.

Any offensive language that is disruptive to these proceedings or that is not focused on an appropriate topic as specified in Council rules may lead to the speaker being muted by the presiding officer.

Our hope is to provide an opportunity for productive discussions that will assist our orderly consideration of issues before the Council.

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

Please remember to press star six after you hear the prompt of you have been unmuted.

Thank you Seattle.

Thank you, Clerk.

We have four people signed up, so we will have two minutes for public comment.

William McNeil, I see that you have not identified an item on today's agenda for public comment.

We must have you speak to an item on today's agenda.

If you are not here to speak to that agenda item, I'm happy to talk to you after committee.

Great.

And maybe clerk, if you could pass your contact info over that way, if you don't want to wait through the whole committee, we can be in touch with you shortly.

What committee is scheduled for two hours.

Okay, great.

Um, so the list is, and we're actually going to do a remote, uh, public comment first.

This is not typical.

It is because we have Port Commissioner Fred Fellman on the line.

So it will be Fred, Alex Zimmerman, and then Steve Rubstello.

Clerk, we are ready.

Fred, Port Commissioner Fellman, I see you're off mute.

At your convenience.

Well, thank you so much for this opportunity.

Council Chair Strauss and members of the committee, thanks for the opportunity to provide public comment in support of the industrial lands proposal.

that the Office of Planning and Community Development will be briefing the committee on today.

I apologize for the background noise.

I'm actually in a Seaport Alliance meeting, and I have to go outside to find quiet.

I'm Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman, and I've been serving in the capacity since 2016. I'm also a Ballard resident, and I'm deeply committed to finding ways for the maritime and manufacturing industry to coexist in our communities in order to sustain the living wage jobs and quality of life.

The Port of Seattle enthusiastically urges your support for the industrial lands proposal as transmitted by Mayor Harrell.

The Port is greatly appreciative of the Mayor's recognition of the importance maritime and industrial lands play in the ecosystem needed for our gateway to remain a major international trading hub.

We also very much appreciate your leadership, Chair Strauss, and the time the Office of the Planning and Community Development put in to soliciting public input in the development of the zoning package that protects historic industrial lands vital to the region's economy.

In 2016, the Port of Seattle adopted guiding principles to protect and enhance maritime and manufacturing lands.

Among these principles are no net loss of industrial land to support diversified job growth.

Seattle's industrial zoned land make up approximately 12% of the city's total land area, but generate 30% of the city's tax base.

The city's Duwamish and Ballard Interbay Manufacturing Industrial Centers support over 70,000 jobs within vital industries like maritime logistics, shipbuilding and repair, metal fabricating, aerospace, and commercial fishing.

These jobs depend on...

That's it, huh?

Oh, you have 10 seconds.

Okay, so as you consider the zoning package, the city's industrial areas, manufacturing, industrial centers remain under intense pressure to up-zone.

I urge your support and welcome an opportunity to discuss and just plan further with every council member on the committee.

Thanks so much for your consideration.

Thank you, Commissioner Feldman.

I will also note for the record that Councilmember Mosqueda has been present with us since we did roll call.

Thank you.

Up next is Alex Zimmerman, followed by Steve Rubstello.

Mr. Zimmerman, you were not in compliance yesterday with council rules.

I'm going to give you awareness right now that if you you must comment on items on today's agenda if you do not remain in compliance with council rules that prohibit abusive and harassing behavior we will give you a warning and then if you continue I will ask you to leave.

I have disagree with you because I doing everything legally and you give me 14 trespasses 14 trespasses I right now it's like celebrity.

Okay See Kyle, my dirty crooks.

Mr. Zimmerman, this is your first warning that that is abusive and harassing language.

It is not welcome in this chamber.

Who told this abusive, harassing lesson?

Go to U.S.

Supreme Court, local court, constitution.

Who told this you?

See how my dirty fuhrer is harassing me?

Mr. Zimmerman, you've been warned and you are not in compliance with the council rules that prohibit abusive and harassing behavior.

Pursuant to council rules, I'm excluding you from today's agenda.

Who told this harassing behavior?

Security staff, if you could please escort Mr. Zimmerman out of the room.

Thank you.

Up next, Steve Roobstel.

Great to see you, friend.

Hang on real quick.

I want to make sure that this microphone's on for you.

This one?

Yeah.

OK.

The development community has not yet digested fully their ability to remove trees, unlike the rest of us.

But now we're moving towards industrial and maritime.

These are areas with our highest and best use.

We must protect because when they're gone, they are gone.

The city has not always done a great job of that because what you have is multiply use.

And when you put a use that pays over a thousand dollars a square foot, besides something that pays in maybe $500 a square foot, generally speaking, $1,000 or more tends to prevail.

And what happens is that we see the erosion of the industrial and maritime areas as you allow other uses, primarily residential nearby.

And that's been a big problem in the city because one guy can make a few extra bucks.

And of course, that's a good thing for them, but it may not be a good thing for the city of Seattle.

With highest and best use, you're also raising the taxes on the industrial when you put other uses on the table that can be done in that same area.

And for us, that is a means a loss.

Now we have a lot of union and even some family wage jobs at risk, but the development community who doesn't want you to count and the city does not seem to want to count the units that they destroy that are cheaper.

and the new stuff is built for the people who make it 100,000 or more a year.

There are a few less in the city who don't.

Thank you, Mr. Rubstell.

Are there any other...

Would you like to speak today or...

No, not today.

You're always welcome to.

Seeing as we have no further public commenters, remotely or physically present, we will move on to the next agenda item.

Clerk, will you please read the next with the short titles of all bills into the record and then we'll break them up one by one.

Item one, council bill 120567. Item two, council bill 120568, 120569, 120570, and 120571, the industrial and maritime package for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

And security, if you could open the back doors, that would be great.

Thank you.

I'm gonna give us a brief overview of this legislation and the legislative history here, and then we will dive into presentations.

I will also share with you the schedule for this work.

We did just wrap up the tree legislation in our committee, which is again, set to go to full council at May 23rd.

Today we have in committee, we have Tim Burgess from the mayor's office, former council president and former interim mayor, Tim Burgess.

We have Jeff Wetland and Jim Holmes from Office of Planning and Community Development.

And we have Lish Whitson, our central staff leader on this work.

As a reminder, there is still time to provide written public comment before this, as this process continues.

And if you'd like to meet with me, you can reach out to Naomi Lewis, my clerk, to have a meeting.

I want to give a brief history of this legislation.

The last time industrial lands were modified, I believe it was 2007. We've got about 16 years of no changes having been made.

The proposal that you see before you today has been in the works since at least 2019. At this point, we have had three mayors, four if you count one of the interim mayors, And we've had two land use, three land use chairs in this time as well.

This has traditionally been a very contentious topic because you have stakeholders that are ultimately opposed in substantial ways.

For these reasons, as the conversation was continuing, Brian David Scott, BDS Planning, was hired to facilitate a conversation that lasted between 2019 and last year.

I participated in those conversations beginning in 2020, as soon as I became elected.

While there were votes taken in those facilitated meetings, I did not vote.

My purpose of being there was to understand the legislative history for The moment that we got to today, which is it coming to my committee.

When BDS planning was doing their facilitation we did reach, I believe it was 87% agreement between stakeholders that are usually in disagreement.

I think a surprise to everyone, really, quite frankly, and is the only way that we are able to get to where we are today.

I also want to thank Chase Kitchen, who was in the last mayor's office, who facilitated this work on the city side.

From the point of finishing the facilitated workshops, the Office of Planning and Community Development, that's created and put forward an EIS that allowed us to bring forward the bills that we have today.

That EIS was completed this last year.

and it has generated these bills.

Now, there is another component to this, which is ensuring that the changes that we are making are within the guise of the compromise that was reached.

I will tell you that this is, at this time, a tenuous compromise.

This is a good compromise.

We have good and important changes that are within this bill, and there And if we are not taking this bill under serious consideration, it does have the chance to unravel.

So I just want to be really open with all of my colleagues.

And I know usually we bring a bill before committee, and that's where the stakeholdering work occurs.

And I share this history because that stakeholdering work has occurred over the last five years.

And while you have weren't in those meetings, I was there representing us.

And so I just want to share that with you.

Within this, I'm very aware that the conversation of housing has come up many times.

I'll just give you a little bit of the take that I have coming into this conversation, which is that this is a delicate compromise, and housing is essential in that compromise.

The fact that the EIS had housing analyzed and the stadium district is true and with the amount of changes that are occurring at terminal 46 at the Waska site and the potential Coast Guard siting of their facility in and around the stadium district there is a lot of unknowns and at this time, housing in the stadium district, I believe, would unravel this entire package.

I'm just starting there.

The other element that I have come to understand is that the agreements within SOTO are more tenuous than in the other parts of our industrial zones.

I'm going to be very careful with any changes that we're making in SOTO.

looking through the lens of ensuring that we do not unravel the overall compromise that we have, because there are so many amazing aspects to this package.

And we cannot delay while the final changes are made in and around the stadium district.

We cannot delay this work while Waska, T46, and Coast Guard, those plans are finalized.

We cannot delay on the really amazing parts of this bill.

And so as we look at Ballard, as we look at Georgetown, and we look at South Park, I think that there's more of an openness to consider tweaks around the edges that I just share with colleagues from the get-go.

Changes in SOTO are going to need to be vetted by all stakeholders, and housing within the stadium district could unravel this entire package.

With that, I'm going to go into just some scheduling procedures, this is the first of four land use committee hearings, we will discuss the maritime and industrial package.

You might notice that in all written forms industrial comes before maritime but because I'm from Ballard we call it maritime.

I put the schedule on the Land Use Committee website and attached it to future meetings.

There was one change.

We have needed to change the June 7th meeting to June 8th because of a conflicting committee here in Chambers.

This package was transmitted to Council on April 12th, 2023. And I have briefed all colleagues on this numerous times at council briefing.

I've invited all colleagues to land use committee meetings, even if they don't sit on the land use committee.

And I've invited all colleagues to submit amendments, should they desire to, because amendments at full council will be unwelcome.

Here we are today, May 10th, we are gonna have an initial briefing from Office of Planning and Community Development.

On Monday, May 15th, we will have a briefing from council central staff and our planning commission on their recommendations.

On May 17th, Sintamay is the amendments deadline due to central staff.

So that is in one week from today that amendments will be due.

You do not need to have your amendment fully flushed out.

You just need to have an idea so that Lish Whitson has the time to do his analysis, to do his writing, to have it reviewed by law, and we need to have that understanding of what the full realm of amendments will look like.

On May 24th, we will have a public hearing in this committee.

We will be hearing other bills that day, most likely.

We will not have a presentation on this bill.

On June 8th, we will have a committee meeting in the morning.

And we will vote on amendments and vote the bill out of committee as amended.

Noting this had been previously published as June 7. On June 13th will be final passage from full council.

We have reserved June 14th in committee in case we need additional time to hear the bill.

As colleagues, you all know our land use committee is quite full.

And if this does occur, it's gonna create additional cascading impacts on our land use schedule.

So I'm hoping that, and this is why we have amendments due next week.

I have emailed all colleagues this last Friday and again on this last Monday regarding this and requesting that you receive a briefing from Lischwitz and Jim Holmes, Jeffrey Wetland.

I believe.

And I know that Director Rico Quirendonga will join us if able.

And he has been very helpful in this process.

And so with that, I guess, just colleagues, any questions on my opening remarks and overall schedule?

I think it's a very similar schedule that we used for the tree ordinance, and this one's even more refined.

So with that, we have today Jeffrey Wetland, Jim Holmes from Office of Planning and Community Development, Lish Whitson from Council Central Staff, and Tim Burgess, who has been leading this package since Mayor Harrell came into office.

And again, I'm just gonna leave us with, this has been years in the making.

This has some really important and amazing changes before us, and we can't punt.

We need to do this now.

So with that, Jeff, Jim, you want to take it away?

And again, I know we have five bills.

I don't know if the presentation has it very clearly outlined, but let's just do one bill at a time, and then I'll ask colleagues for questions.

So colleagues, we're going to get through all of the information in each bill, and then I'll open it up for questions, and we can go back to previous slides.

gentlemen.

Okay.

Great.

Uh, thank you, chair Strauss.

Um, my name is Jeff Wendland.

I'm the land use policy manager in the office of planning and community development, Jim Holmes.

Jim and I are going to give you a, um, an overview of the full suite of the proposed legislation.

I want to emphasize that our director Rico here in Dongo, um, had a unavoidable scheduling conflict.

Um, he would love to be here and he might even try to drop in, but just wanted to pass that along.

And I'm going to go ahead and share some slides.

There's a lot here.

So this will probably take 20 plus minutes.

I'm going to try to move through it as quickly as we can and have plenty of time to answer questions at the end.

First, just a word on the title.

This is called the Industrial Maritime Strategy because it includes many components beyond just land use.

There's transportation supports, workforce development that the city is actively advancing as well, but today we'll be focused on land use, the comprehensive plan, and zoning.

The key features of this proposal that we'll talk about are here on the slide.

And the first is to strengthen land use protections for core industrial areas.

That's 85% plus of all the city's industrial lands that would be put into a more protective maritime manufacturing and logistics zone.

This proposal would also limit future removals of land from industrial zoned areas.

and it would close some zoning loopholes that have allowed non-industrial developments such as box stores and mini storage warehouses on our industrial lands.

The second key feature is we are also proposing to up-zone several areas for transit-oriented development near light rail.

There will be five newer expanded light rail stations on industrial land.

So this concept we're excited about, allowing dense employment development near light rail stations where people can walk to their job.

The next key feature is adding capacity for about 3,000 new units of housing focused on workforce and middle income.

Many of the housing units would be located outside of industrial land or places that would no longer be industrial.

And the last key feature is addressing livability and environmental justice in edge neighborhoods.

So those are neighborhoods like Georgetown and South Park with better requirements for landscaping, trees, streetscape improvements, et cetera.

So the purpose or the policy intent, the big picture here is to protect and grow the 95,000 plus workforce jobs that are on industrial land.

These are good jobs.

Two-thirds are accessible without a traditional four-year degree.

Many remain unionized with high-quality benefits and even starting salaries are good in key fields.

These jobs also maintain stable economic sectors in the economy that withstand the ups and downs during the COVID pandemic.

People still were essential workers on industrial lands and were coming to work every day.

The proposal also has a regional and statewide significance in that we're preserving infrastructure of a regional and statewide importance, exporters and importers that support the state's overall economy.

This legislation also tries to address emerging opportunities.

So we're looking to the future.

This is a long-term plan.

and it sets a renewed vision for industrial areas.

And importantly, this builds on that 2021 consensus that Chair Strauss described.

That was a 60 plus member stakeholder council that arrived at that consensus.

And what you have before you today adheres very closely to that consensus as Chair Strauss mentioned.

I'm not gonna go through the details here, but this just shows that seven of that advisory council's 11 consensus recommendations would be directly implemented by this legislation.

Um, we wanted to emphasize a word on workforce equity partnerships because, um, I discussed the policy rationale of protecting, you know, good quality jobs on industrial land, but we also need to ask, uh, jobs for who, who's benefiting.

Um, and the, the office did do a, uh, a racial equity toolkit analysis on the proposal.

Um, and these are some of the outcomes.

The office of economic development is investing directly in support for BIPOC youth to access jobs in maritime sectors.

We looked at the pipelines to jobs through our area colleges and you can see that Seattle area colleges that house the vocational and technical education programs have a good inclusive demographic composition.

And I also just want to note that Seattle has more participating employers in the state's advanced manufacturing apprenticeship program than any other city in Washington state still.

You know, a lot of, sometimes people don't always think of Seattle as continuing to have robust manufacturing, but yeah.

Could you pull the microphone a little closer?

Oh, yep.

Okay.

Could you pause for a moment?

Yes.

Is that slide in the, In the presentation that's linked on the agenda, am I just missing a slide, or was it updated recently?

It was updated recently, so the version you have may have not had that slide.

Okay, thank you.

We'll send around, and it'll be updated on the website.

But yeah, actually, yeah, exactly.

Also for the public.

Yeah, great.

Okay, so this is the geography of Seattle's industrial lands.

There are two regionally designated manufacturing industrial centers, the Ballard Inner Bay North End, MIC, and the Greater Duwamish MIC.

And there are several neighborhood areas that are in or at the edges of Seattle's industrial land that are listed here.

Okay, so

This packaging Jeff, just before we jump in at the end of each section, I'm just going to check with colleagues, see if there's any questions.

Do we have any questions on the overview?

Seeing none, keep going.

Okay.

This is a list of the five ordinances that are before you today.

We'll walk through each of these.

The first is the comprehensive plan amendments.

That's council bill ending in 568 in your packet.

This includes text amendments to land use policies in the comprehensive plan and map amendments to the future land use map.

The second piece are land use code text amendments.

That is Council Bill ending in 567. This would create a new Chapter 2350A in the Land Use Code that establishes new industrial zones essentially.

The third on this list is Procedural only, it relocates the existing industrial commercial zone text.

So that's a zone that would be retained under this proposed legislation, but moved into the new zoning chapter.

So that number three ordinance, which in your packet is Council Bill ending in 570, all that does is move the existing zone into the new zoning chapter.

number four on the list are zoning map changes.

So, this is council bill ending in 569 in your packet and it's just a series of maps that apply the new zone industrial zones to specific locations on the map.

and the last ordinance in the package is addresses the noise ordinance and it amends support shoreline industrial uses in the Ballard and Bay North end area.

And that is ordinance council bill ending in 571 in your packet.

So before I'll go into the different pieces, but I just want to emphasize that this is a package that works together as a whole.

Okay.

So the first one we'll address are the comprehensive plan text amendments.

Again, this is council bill 568. Um, so this, uh, includes two new land use goal statements for industrial lands, um, that guide the overall approach to industrial land.

And one of those new goal statements is for transit oriented areas.

And one concerns, um, better transitions at the edge of our industrial areas.

There are also six new land use policy statements and these policy statements basically establish and layout parameters for those new industrial zones.

They guide where the zones should be located and what the zones intention should be.

there is a new standalone policy statement calling for stronger protection of industrial land.

And what this would do is remove the ability for property owners to propose reclassification of industrial land to a non-industrial category in the comprehensive plan, except as part of a city initiated study or part of a major comprehensive plan update.

So the key change here is that today anyone can petition for removal of land from an industrial area and we receive those regularly.

That would change so that could only be done once on an eight to 10 year cycle effectively.

And lastly, there's a new policy statement calling for site-specific master planning at two key sites, the Waska site, which is near the stadium area in Soto, and the Inner Bay Armory site.

Both of these are under control or owned by the state of Washington.

And this policy signals the city's intention to do a detailed site-specific master planning process before those key large properties are reused in a significant way.

Those were the text changes.

I'm now going to describe for you the map changes.

So these are changes to the Comprehensive Plan's future land use map, the FLUM, and they are proposed for three areas.

Georgetown, a part of Georgetown, a part of South Park, and a part of Judkins Park.

And I'll just look at the maps for each of those, starting with South Park.

So on this map, the area shaded light blue is the South Park Urban Village, and the two areas that have the red hatch are proposed for being removed from the Manufacturing Industrial Center and added to the South Park Urban Village.

These two changes would better connect the South Park neighborhood to the Duwamish River, as you can see, and they're both near open spaces directly adjacent to a park.

So this was a request or a concept that the South Park community liked to better connect the urban village to the waterfront.

The next map is for the Georgetown area.

And on this map, the triangular area in hatched red lines would be removed from the manufactured industrial center and put into a mixed use zoning category.

This is the area that a lot of people think of as the something of the center of Georgetown.

It has a lot of restaurants, some bars, et cetera.

And it kind of is between the two residential areas of Georgetown.

The Georgetown community generally supported this concept to build a more complete neighborhood and connect the existing residential pockets in Georgetown.

And so this change would allow for mixed use development, including housing in the center of Georgetown.

And the third future land use map change would be for the Judkins Park area.

You're seeing the curve of I-90 there.

This is very close to the to the Judkins Park light rail station.

This is not within a manufacturing industrial center, but it would change it from an industrial zone to a mixed use zone.

I'm going to pause because we're at the end of the comp plan section and our director Rico Quirendongo has been able to drop in.

I just wonder if Rico might like to say a few framing comments.

Yeah, welcome, Director.

We're excited to see you.

Thank you for being able to join us.

We finished the first bill.

We'll go through the rest, but if you have anything you'd like to share, please, the floor is yours.

Nothing substantive to add.

I apologize.

I was at a briefing at the mayor's office on the seventh floor, and I got down here as quickly as I could.

As you know, we've been working on this legislation and the preparation for this legislation for almost three years now and so it's a huge milestone to be at this point and just excited for the conversation today and any questions that you have.

Thank you, Director, and thank you for your leadership on this.

Jeff, if you want to continue sharing screen, I'm going to pause now.

Colleagues, are there questions at this time about the text or map adjustments that will be in the annual comprehensive plan?

Council Member Peterson, please.

Thank you, Chair Strauss, and just some opening remarks.

I really appreciate this presentation today on the five council bills on zoning changes proposed by the Harrell administration.

Taking a step back a moment for the benefit of my constituents, I believe there's unity about the benefit of having a diversified local economy and Jobs that pay a living wage, even for those who don't have a college degree and jobs within the maritime industrial zones, provide those, those opportunities that benefit our entire economy and I appreciate hearing that this proposal is supported by the Port Commission.

That's an important and promising indicator for me.

I've been involved in this only for the last few weeks, even though some of you have been working on this for years, but I'm glad that we're, we're listening to the port, which is such an important economic engine for our city and the entire state.

And at first glance, I agree that it seems you found a reasonable balance with your proposed changes.

The first, so I've got about three questions about what we've just gone through already, including these maps.

The first slide says 85% of industrial maritime lands would be protected.

Does that mean, or could you provide some context around that?

I mean, does that mean that 15% of existing industrial maritime zoning land would be removed from that designation?

No, the 85% figure is the percentage that would be zoned in the most protective maritime manufacturing logistics zone.

There are two other industrial zones.

They are industrial, they do allow for a little more mixing and flexibility, and we'll go through that.

But the answer to your question is that the 85% is the percentage that goes into the most protective and more protective zone designation than we currently have.

And for those zones that are loosening up and becoming some other zone, is it generally true that those aren't actively being used?

Council Member Peterson, could I hold that question until the next bill, just because it will get into exactly your question right there.

Sure, I'll go ahead and ask my map questions then.

So we've been talking about Stadium District in Soto and Duwamish River.

There is also a proposed change in Wallingford, which is in Council District 4. So I'm hoping we'll get to describe that proposed change for my constituents.

I don't think it's, I don't know if it's part of this presentation, but that's obviously important too.

to the Wallingford area and some of the businesses and landowners there.

Yeah.

Yes, that's in a later bill.

So right now, this bill before us that we're discussing is just the comprehensive plan amendments.

We will get into the zoning map changes a little bit later in this presentation.

Got it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So just, I mean, your questions are spot on because What we're looking at in these three maps are simply the changes that need to be made in the comprehensive plan because they are associated with the manufacturing industrial corridors.

Is that correct, Jim and Jeff?

That's correct.

So these map changes have to occur in the annual comprehensive plan change.

The other map changes that we will be discussing in just a minute are just what we can do by ordinance.

Understood.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good questions.

Other colleagues?

I think we'll get into answering Council Member Peterson's second question.

What are the changed zones we are looking at?

Because to your point, Council Member Peterson, we are not removing very much zoning from industrial zones.

We are, number one, adding protections to the majority of the industrial and maritime zones.

And then we are adding flexibility in two different ways to some of the area within currently existed industrial or industrial buffer zones.

With that, Jeff.

Yes, exactly.

So what you see on this slide are the three new proposed zone designations.

So these make up the new Chapter 2350A.

Again, that's the council bill ending in 567 in your packet.

So we'll do an overview of these three.

So the first is the maritime manufacturing was just logistics zone, that's the 85% of the land that Councilmember Peterson asked about, and it would strengthen established economic clusters, strengthen our protections for industrial land.

The second is the industry and innovation zone.

focused on transit oriented development for industrial areas, and we'll talk about that.

And the third is the urban industrial zone.

And this is intended to foster vibrant districts that support local manufacturing and, and entrepreneurship.

So this is for the edges of industrial land near neighborhoods.

And these, I want to emphasize essentially replace they would replace the existing industrial zones.

So to the extent that there are changes in Wallingford, as the council member mentioned, it's not so much of a change as an update to these new categories.

Okay, so there are a few kind of structural changes in these zones that cut across all of them.

The first is a new industrial, non-industrial use identification.

This clarifies exactly which uses are industrial and which are not.

That's not something that the code does today, so we're adding clarity on that.

The second is to prohibit mini storage warehouses in all of the industrial zones.

Many storage warehouses have been common recently and they've taken up a lot of of our industrial land base without providing many jobs, if any, and they're not really an industrial use.

So this action would prohibit those across the industrial zones.

And lastly, there would be really robust non-conforming use provisions.

So as the city, if you choose to make this update, changes the zones, existing operators, businesses, they wouldn't have to worry about the change affecting their operation.

They could keep doing what they're doing for as long as they want and even expand that so they wouldn't be affected.

But at the time of a new development, the new rules would kick in.

Okay, so I'm going to give an overview of the three new zone designations.

The first is the Maritime Manufacturing and Logistics or MML zone.

This would be located in areas only within the manufacturing industrial centers.

areas that have proximity to heavy rail or freight infrastructure, areas that are close to the shorelines and deep water ports, and areas around the clusters of industrial or maritime suppliers and services, and areas that are generally flat.

So these would cover 76% of the Ballard-Interbay North End MCC and 93% of the Greater Duwamish MCC.

These are just a few images.

I think through this section, I'm going to call on questions as we're going.

Great.

Council Member Nelson.

All right.

Is there any new adjacent land that was added?

I mean, it's 73 and 93 or something like that of existing industrial lands, but was anything else added?

Added?

I mean, is there anything that was rendered more industrially is what I'm trying to say, more protected?

I think I got it.

Are you, let me ask the question back.

Are you asking in these zones, are we adding protections to industrial maritime?

Is that?

Yes.

Yeah.

Jeff?

Yes.

The answer is yes.

These are strong.

It would be stronger protections and limitations so that it would only be industrial in these areas.

Yeah.

So some of the issues that this zone addresses are the speculative pressure on industrial land, closing some of those zoning loopholes that have allowed a non-industrial development.

And they generally replace the existing Industrial General 1 and Industrial General 2 zones.

I want to just summarize a couple of key development standards for council members in the audience.

I'm going to focus on the middle of the page here.

There would be new floor area ratio limitation of 0.4 on non-industrial uses and a maximum size of use limit.

that's smaller on non-industrial uses like office and retail sales.

So the effect of this is that recently the city's seen some box retail stores or grocery stores on industrial land.

This would close the loophole by having a smaller maximum size of use limit on those uses.

So we wouldn't continue to see that type of development occur here.

And I'm just going to keep moving through, hitting some highlights.

Yeah.

I have a question.

And I apologize.

I'm actually looking at the director's report.

But under the discussion around non-conforming use provisions, it says the new zoning framework adjusts development standards, including stricter maximum size of use limits.

Boy, my microphone sounds really loud.

Um, some existing businesses may not fully conform to the new standards, um, and there will be an incentive system for non-industrial development.

Um, can you, can you talk a little bit about the effect of this?

Like, what is the goal that you're trying to achieve with that?

And can you give an example of what, uh, you know, what a non-industrial development use would be in these zones?

I think you're asking about like an existing non-industrial use that's there today in one of these zoned areas.

Sure, if that's...

Well, an office building.

So, you know, an office use is not and would not be considered an industrial use.

So, if there was a development, size of the office use would be capped at a certain number of square feet.

And so for if there are existing businesses there, how are they affected by the change?

I guess that's what I'm asking.

That's where the non-conforming use provisions would help them.

So the existing sort of grandfathered.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And, and we've added an ability for a grandfathered in use even to expand to some degree.

So, yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

While you're on that topic, I haven't read that part of the director's report, but does that grandfathered use stay with the property or with the owner?

I mean, what if that property is sold?

Can it be redeveloped to the new to the existing use by a different owner?

It would be yeah, it would be fine as long as the use continues.

So a new.

Owner could buy that or the company owner could change so long as the use itself continues.

Days in office.

So you're telling me that the Sephora in the industrial district gets to stay?

Sure.

Yeah, OK.

Thank you.

Colleagues, any other questions right now?

Fantastic.

Keep going.

Okay.

Let's talk about the next new zone category.

This is the industry and innovation zone.

We're really excited about this concept.

This would be a new transit-oriented development concept for industrial areas.

Its intent would be to have a mix of light industrial space, excuse me, with other dense employment uses, such as technology, it could be office.

And this would be limited and focused to areas within a half mile walking distance of a light rail station.

So it's intended for areas, again, within the manufacturing industrial centers, but only within a half mile distance of light rail.

and areas with a high potential to attract new investment in buildings and infrastructure.

So one of the problems that we see with Seattle's industrial land is that the infrastructure is very outdated.

It can cost a lot to invest in a new structure.

One of the things this zone does is it tries to encourage that investment in brand new, high quality, state of the art space.

by allowing for quite a bit more development capacity than exists today.

So the developer, in order to build those upper stories in this graphic, would have to include the gray on this graphic as bonafide light industrial space.

They could do that in a number of ways, but it's an incentive to build high quality new industrial space.

These are just some images to give you a sense of the intended character.

Some of the issues and opportunities that are addressed here are that current zoning in these areas would not really create enough density near light rail to support transit-oriented development.

We're trying to change that to envision density of jobs in these areas.

Again, redevelopment costs can be very expensive here.

So we want to incentivize investment.

And I also want to note the third point that The closest zone on the books today, the industrial commercial zone, really hasn't had any true industrial space in it.

It's mostly been developed as only office.

So this shift would allow for those higher value office technology uses, but only if the developer includes bona fide industrial space mixed in with the development.

Jeff, could you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Because I think this is actually the crux of this zone.

Because we are at the same time preserving light manufacturing and industrial space while incentivizing more people being in this area because of the proximity to transit.

Can you talk about the requirements that are in place to be able to accept those incentives of office space?

Yeah.

Thank you.

So it would be an incentive-based system where in order to access the bonus development, the developer would have to include a certain quantity of bona fide industrial space, and I'll talk about that.

So yeah, by floor area ratio, the way it would work is for Any development participating in that bonus structure for every square foot of true industrial space that they build, they would be able to access five additional square feet of unlimited use space.

So that's how the incentive would work.

This zone would also have an information computer technology use definition that would be new to the code.

That's a use category that would be encouraged here and you know, industry today is not the same as it was, you know, 50 or 100 years ago.

And a lot of the technology uses that we're seeing, they use, you know, computers, software a lot, but are essentially industrial type businesses, a company making products or innovating.

So that would be allowed to occupy the industrial space.

Jeff, I think that's a really important point.

And then I see Vice Chair Morales has a question, which is to say industrial zones of the past have been the places where we pollute and make a lot of noise.

Steel fabrication, which is still occurring in Delridge, the former steel plant in Ballard is now a Fred Meyer, right?

These are the changes that we're seeing.

And, you know, there are even space companies that are occupying warehouse space that were formerly manufacturing space here in our city.

We've seen a lot of our more traditional industrial uses move to the Renton Valley, and we still have a lot of industrial space in our city.

And so these changes allow for us to be a little bit more flexible and dynamic With both information technology, but these other to have the space industry in Seattle is an amazing thing to have telescopes and lenses produced here.

And I just want to circle in and focus in on the the office bonuses and I just want to maybe if you could confirm my understanding is correct that.

for a developer to get the office bonus, they have to create a space where light manufacturing or information technology can occur on the first floor.

And what I mean by this is we are A, upgrading our current facilities from something that is a remnant of the past and maybe falling down or in need of great improvement.

So we're updating facilities and then in addition, that only when there is light manufacturing or space for that type of work on the first floor that developers are able to get the office bonus.

Did I get that right?

Yeah, you certainly did.

Thank you for elaborating.

These are the actual criteria for what that bona fide industrial space would have to be.

Um, so I'm just going to touch on these, that space would have, and then once you're done with this, I see vice chair had a question.

Okay.

I'll run through this real quick and then take the question.

So that space would have to have load bearing floors, 250 pounds per square foot for ground level and 125 per square foot for other floors, high Florida ceiling clearances of at least 16 feet.

It'd have to be built to a building code occupancy group for an industrial use.

and be serviced directly by a loading dock or bay or a freight elevator.

So the city would have assurances that that space is built to a really high standard that is truly an industrial space.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales?

Can you go back a slide to the computer technology and talk a little bit more about, I'm going to be asking for a lot of examples.

Because I don't know what this means.

And I'm, you know, when you just say information computer technology, I wonder, is this like manufacturing of hardware?

Are we talking making computers?

making keyboards?

Are you talking call center?

Is this like industrial design?

I'm just trying to get an understanding of what it means.

I appreciate that the goal here is is to encourage dense employment.

And, you know, I fear something like, warehouse distribution that is not creating really high road labor practices with warehouse workers, for example, but it is all very much computer-based.

And so I'm just trying to get a little bit better understanding of what that means.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think it might be worth me just reading the definition.

It's not a long definition.

I'll just go ahead and read that.

It's information computer technology means a use primarily focused on computing, computer coding, or digital information technology leading to the development of new products, knowledge creation, and innovation.

This use may include computer hardware or software development and includes research and prototyping and engineering activities that result in technology and computer products or applications.

This use shall be considered a distinct use category in industrial zones of this chapter and shall be considered part of the office use category in other zones.

Okay.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And so I think another key point here is that this is focused in that industry and innovation zone area and would not be an industrial use that would be allowed in the other industrial zones.

So you would not see this in large measure in the protective maritime manufacturing logistics zone.

We're only talking about focusing this near light rail in the industry and innovation zone.

Okay, thank you.

Okay.

Some images, picture always helps.

This image is one that some property owners in the Soto Lander Station area had prepared.

And it's just a character image, but it's meant to depict that the ground floors of that structure would be bona fide industrial space with multiple stories of employment use above that.

In this image, you're seeing the Soto Trail improved And that would be a feature of this zone is that it would come with very high standards for streetscape improvements, pedestrian safety, landscaping and trees, and improvements to the Soto Trail.

And the images on the right are showing you just a couple of sketches where the purple color is meant to depict the light industrial space and the pink would be other uses that are bonus.

So you see that it could be stacked with uses on upper floors, or maybe a builder would do two separate buildings with a light industrial building and a separate building on site.

The building on the right has 12 floors, but I have information that it could have accommodated 16 in this area.

Is that true?

It just depends on how they're configured.

What is the height limit?

There are two height limits that this zone would have.

would be a 125-foot height limit, and one would be a 160-foot height limit.

So it depends on the area, but yes.

I'm just talking about Industrial Innovation 2.

Could you speak into the mic?

Oh, I'm just talking about Industrial Innovation 2. When you say depends on the area, I am talking about this area here.

I'm sorry, I'm not, I'm having trouble hearing you.

But when you said depends on the area, I'm referring to the industry and innovation two zone area.

Is that?

So there are different height limits applied in the industrial innovation zone in different parts of the city.

So in Ballard, there'll be different height limits than there are around the Lander station.

Oh, I see.

So we're seeing different heights of these buildings because of that.

Got it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lish.

Okay.

I'm going to move on to the next proposed new zone, if that sounds good.

Sounds great.

Okay.

The third new zone would be titled the Urban Industrial Zone.

And this is intended for areas at the transition between core industrial areas.

and non-industrial zone areas or urban villages, so places at the edges of neighborhoods.

This would generally be in locations within the Manufacturing Industrial Center, but some community members have suggested that they'd also like to see this zone potentially in the future in other locations.

And it would be for areas that have smaller parcel sizes and a variety of existing smaller businesses.

Again, just some images to give you a sense of the character and the issues or opportunities addressed are the need to improve livability and environmental health in areas near residential neighborhoods and an opportunity to recognize the changing nature of industry where more so in the past, visitors from a nearby neighborhood enjoy businesses and uses in the industrial area near where they live or work.

More walkable, healthier, and so forth.

This zone would generally replace the industrial buffer zone.

Great.

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you so this gets back to my question on the change proposed in Wallingford, because that's the change going from industrial buffer to this new.

This new zone urban industrial, so I've got some questions about that, but.

Is the power this PowerPoint presentation will it be attached to the agenda later?

It's it's helpful to have it to follow along.

Okay, thank you.

So.

Just to dig into this new zoning designation a little bit.

Does, does it allow live work.

There's a limited housing allowance, and I wanted to get into that and describe that in the next several slides.

Okay, yeah.

If you want to just move on to the next slide to answer customer Peterson's question I think that's.

I think you're going to answer his questions right now.

Councilmember Peterson, you're always so on point.

I love it.

Just a couple of key development standards.

This would have an allowance for The size of use limit would be low for things like office and retail, but if you have an industrial or making use like a brewery, or a company that's making a product, you can have a larger showroom or tasting room etc so it really incentivizes.

companies that have a connection to an industrial use over standalone large retail or just a standalone restaurant, say, that doesn't have a connection to an industrial use.

And I want to note that this zone has much higher landscaping requirements than the existing zone, the existing industrial buffer zone.

It would apply the green factor landscaping requirement for the first time to an industrial zone, and it would require street trees and pedestrian scale lighting with new development.

This dense slide addresses the housing question.

This urban industrial zone would have a limited housing allowance.

It's focused on workforce housing.

So the intent here in the legislation before you is to allow for workforce housing as a conditional use.

The intent is not to generate significant amounts of new housing, but to provide some housing that might be affordable to local workers in these industrial areas.

The conditions to add housing would be the list that's there.

It would have a maximum density of 50 dwelling units per acre.

It could not be located within 200 feet of a shoreline.

It could not be located within 200 feet of a major truck street.

The housing would have to have sound insulating windows would have to be carefully located not to conflict with Jason businesses.

The owners would have to sign an acknowledgement of it being an industrial neighborhood.

It could not exceed 50% of the floor area of a mixed use project and.

the residential use would have to be one of two things.

Either A, it could be a live work unit or a caretaker's quarters for someone who works on site, or B, it would have to be workforce affordable housing, affordable to households at 60% AMI, 80% AMI, or 90% AMI, depending on the size of the unit.

in a nutshell, limited housing focused on workforce.

Council Member Peterson, do you wanna follow up with any of your questions or?

Thank you.

Yes.

So you had mentioned that it would be permitted via conditional use if these other items are met, but that conditional use is an administrative type one.

So STCI could just, make it happen if they reviewed the proposal and it met these criteria?

Is that right?

It's a type two decision, but yes, that's right.

And it's appealable to the hearing examiner, but yes, it's administratively approved by SDCI.

Okay.

All right.

So what if you wanted to do something different than it would be a type three or type four approval?

if you wanted to.

Yeah, it wouldn't conform to the zoning, so you'd have to have a rezone to do more housing than this, yeah.

Okay.

And eventually I'll want to, and we can do this separately from today's meeting, which I know there's a lot going on here and there's a lot of geography covered, but I do want to do a deeper dive in that strip along Wallingford because it's also a little confusing because there is the shoreline right there.

And so just trying to understand, you know, because it says here within 200 feet of shoreline, and a lot of that is within 200 feet of the shoreline.

Do you happen to know why you are proposing to change that section of Wallingford from industrial buffer to urban industrial?

Is there- Yeah.

Council Member Peterson-Strauss over here.

I think we're going to hold the Wallingford question until we get to that map and the question you're posing right now is going to provide us the example needed to really dive in to understand this UI zone.

Is it okay to hold the Wallingford question until to the map?

Yeah, of course.

And I didn't have this presentation in advance, so I don't know what's coming next.

That's why these questions are coming out as they are.

I don't want to miss my opportunity.

So good to know we can get to it, though.

Yeah, it's coming up.

OK.

It's important to note that land within the stadium areas would be zoned urban industrial.

However, this proposal would not include the allowance for limited workforce housing in the stadium overlay.

So this map shows you the existing boundary of the stadium area overlay district.

That's something that exists in the code today, it would be retained.

And those overlay zone provisions would continue and expand flexibility for some stadium supportive uses such as hotels and flexibility for larger scale retail and restaurants than would be in in other areas that are zoned urban industrial.

So some stadium area supportive features, however, it would not allow the housing in this location.

And Jeff I just want to bring up what I said at the start of this meeting again this is a great slide to illustrate what I was talking about the EIS studied housing, and so if a future council decided to take action on housing that work has already been completed.

And what is really the central focus to me is this picture.

describes three very large initiatives that are underway right now that have not had their final decisions made.

T-46 is right there kind of in just above CenturyLink.

Below T-46 is the Waska site.

And then just to the left, it's a little hard to read, but it says U.S.

Coast Guard Base Seattle.

We are going to have an expansion of our Coast Guard facilities here in the city.

And without understanding the finalized plan for these three sites, I believe the housing conversation in this area is going to become very controversial, but it has a potential to unravel this entire package.

And there are so many great things in this package that we can't punt this to once these final decisions have been made to pass the package.

Those are comments, not a question for you, Jeff.

Um, I'm sorry but could we go back to slide 27 I did have some questions I guess I got a little distracted by Councilmember Peterson's great questions here.

Um, can you describe the purpose between behind choosing 50 dwelling units per acre for the maximum density.

Yeah, the, the purpose really is to.

have a limited quantity so that it's not a full-on market housing development.

It would have to be combined with other allowable uses in a mixed-use development.

The sense is that if the city were to allow full market rate housing development in an industrial area, that would it would take off and displace a lot of the industrial uses in the industrial land.

So it's metered in a way to test this concept of allowing some workforce housing while having it still be predominantly an industrial development.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

And can you explain how the workforce housing requirement will ensure these units are affordable for industrial workers?

It would be monitored and enforced in the same way that the Office of Housing does for other programs.

So there'd be an annual monitoring process where the resident would have to meet the maximum income threshold and the rent would have to be capped at a certain level.

Okay, and is that why MHA is not required with this housing or maybe speak to why MHA is not required to this housing?

Correct, we, the proposal does not call for MHA here because this is, it does have a workforce income restriction pathway also because it's not full market rate housing as I noted.

Applying an additional MHA requirement would not be, we would probably not support development of any housing.

Thank you.

Those are my questions on the slide.

Okay.

We're getting close to the end here.

Thank you for your patience.

I know this is a lot of material.

Just some overall effects.

I want to quantify our estimations of the overall impact of this package.

So this is the estimated total quantity of housing.

So overall, we believe this proposal would create about 2,935 or around 3,000 total units of housing.

and generate about $20 million of MHA funds.

Those would be for the areas outside of industrial.

So the breakdown here is that the top portion of this table are the additional housing units in new mixed use areas.

Those are broken out for Ballard, Judkins Park, Georgetown and South Park, totaling about 2000 units.

And the bottom of the table is the amount for the new urban industrial zones, that limited workforce allowance, we estimate would produce about 880 units.

Together, that totals up to roughly 3,000 units overall.

And the overall impact on jobs.

We estimate that over a 20 plus year time horizon, there would be an additional 35,000 jobs overall here.

That's about 12,000 more than we believe would otherwise occur.

Some of that is because in that industry innovation zone, you're getting industrial development that you would otherwise get plus new employment on top of that.

And important to note that both of the mix would remain over 50% industrial employment and that's the threshold in the Puget Sound Regional Council's requirement for designated manufacturing industrial centers is to have more than half employment as industrial.

Okay, so now we're...

And Jeff, just for the purpose of understanding the bills that are before us today, we have now gone through Council Bill 120567, the municipal code changes, is that correct?

Yes.

So we've gone through the comp plan changes.

What we were just discussing was changing chapter 23.50A and then the discussion.

How about you lead me through which bills have we talked about and which ones are we about to talk about?

You got it.

We talked about the comp plan, which is the council bill ending in 568. I just completed the overview of the land use the zoning code changes, which is Council Bill 567. And we're just shifting now to the rezone maps, which would be Council Bill ending in 569.

Wonderful, thank you.

So should we go ahead and just do a quick walkthrough of the maps?

Yeah, and I've seen Council Member Nelson.

I just had one last question about urban industrial.

I'm looking here, it's basically it generally replaces existing industrial buffer zones, and you have pictures of breweries here I think of Ballard when I look at this, but you can already put breweries in Ballard so are there significant changes in use that are allowed in the new UI zone that aren't allowed in in IB.

The zone very much encourages and supports breweries for one thing, but the cluster, we know there's a cluster of breweries in Ballard, and so there aren't any changes that restrict that any further.

But it sounds like there is no change from industrial buffer to UI in what, from what you can do now to what you could do

When this is implemented, there's there's more of a limit on non industrial uses.

So there's a lower maximum size of use limit for standalone retail and office compared to today.

You can also have a much larger proportion using the brewery example, larger tap room than you ordinarily would be if you didn't have a brewery.

There are tap rooms that have been established independent of the breweries.

They would have to live with the size of use limit, but an actual brewery would actually be able to have a larger tap room, and it could even be within 1,500 feet of their brewery.

is a way to encourage that kind of activity.

And it's not just breweries, but industrial uses with more public facing uses that have active retail showrooms and that sort of activity.

So I'll use the example, and we had a meeting where Jim and Jeff were able to come to the brewery district and present to industrial stakeholders and brewery stakeholders.

And one example that I'll use, because I know Vice Chair likes examples and real images, is in Ballard, in the brewery district on 52nd Street, used to be the Ness Crane Yard.

So Ness Cranes merged with Campbell.

So you now see Ness Campbell Cranes throughout the city.

My cousins are Nesses.

I grew up hanging out at the Ness Crane Yard.

It was an industrial space.

It has been transformed into stoop brewing and into the rad-powered bike office building.

And so what the changes before us would allow is for those office buildings to be built if there is a space on the ground floor that is, we are talking about the, you know, the light rail?

Or did we switch?

Sorry, now I'm getting

We switched, we're talking about the urban industrial zone, but I think your example still makes sense.

It applies to where the brewery district is.

Sorry.

So, in the brewery district, I'll just finish this example, which is you create that big space on the first floor for the brewery or for the rad powered bike manufacturing, and that's what allows above.

I'm sorry, Council Member Nelson, you were talking about urban industrial, and I got a little confused because then we started talking about the brewery district, but there's an example.

The stoop people on this page.

So I just wanna know what is different, what is allowed there differently in the new plan from currently, because if we're trying to preserve industrial land, then sounds like what you're saying is that there's a little bit of difference because You can already have retail though.

You can already have a tasting room.

So do you see where I'm getting at?

What is the significant difference that would please someone who's wanting to make sure that those industries can continue to operate?

All industrial uses would continue to be allowed and encouraged in the urban industrial zone.

change that matters the most is that there would be a lower maximum size of use limit on non-industrial uses.

So, you know, a standalone retail store or a standalone office, there'd be a slightly lower limit on those.

Thank you.

Council Member Peterson.

Yeah, just to follow up on that about the difference between industrial buffer and urban industrial.

Under existing industrial buffer, can you build workforce housing?

No.

That's a key difference, isn't it?

That is.

I'm doing my best to summarize.

Yes, that's a key difference.

Yeah, I think that's important.

One of the main themes here is are we preserving industrial maritime or are we going to residential?

I think, you know, I would like to highlight that urban industrial would be introduced this new concept of workforce housing in those zones.

And that gets back to what's happening, what's being proposed in Wallingford there.

So hopefully we'll get to talk more about that too.

And I think we are in that section of doing the maps.

So Council Member Peterson, I know we're waiting with bated breath.

We are getting into the maps, Jeff.

Okay, great.

I'm going to just do a quick overview of this.

citywide view, and then we'll zoom in and look at several maps, including the Wallingford map.

So the dark blue is the maritime manufacturing logistics.

That's the one that covers the 86% stronger protections.

The places that you see the purple, the industry and innovation zone, are near existing or future light rail stations.

So Soto Lander, south of CID, Smith Cove and Inner Bay, and the future Ballard station.

The gold, the urban industrial, you see that at the edges of neighborhoods as a transition.

So there's some of that in northeast Ballard.

We'll talk about the portion along Lake Union.

near the stadiums and at the edges of Georgetown and South Park.

And the rust color, the red color is the new mixed use zones.

These are those limited places that would be removed from industrial and put into a new mixed use zone.

So again, that's near the center of Georgetown, two places adjacent to South Park, an area near Judkins Park, and a small sliver, I don't think I've talked about, in West Ballard, north of Market.

And let's now like walk through a few of the maps from north to south.

Just give me a minute.

Okay, and I'm going to try to do this using the interactive map that's online so anyone watching can find this on OPCD's website and zoom in if you like.

So we'll start here in Ballard.

So just quickly summarizing, the dark blue, the maritime manufacturing logistics, you see that all along the Salmon Bay waterfront.

Includes all the shipyards, fishermen's terminal, et cetera.

Applies stronger protections.

The change to a mixed use zone is here on the north edge of Market Street.

This lighter blue color is the existing industrial commercial zone.

It would not be proposed to change.

This is the existing industrial zone that would be retained and moved over into the new code chapter.

The purple, the industry innovation zone for transit oriented development near light rail, it's positioned along 14th Avenue Northwest.

The light rail station would be kind of close to the intersection with 15th here.

And the urban industrial would be applied in blocks north of Leary Way.

There are some breweries proposed in the urban industrial area and there are also some that would be in the industry innovation.

And, Jeff, this is where I got confused when you were talking Councilmember Nelson because, as you can see the urban and industrial is off to the right hand side, but where that cluster breweries that I think is has the affinity of the brewery district I know there are other birds outside of that area is mostly in the purple.

The purple is sized to be roughly that half mile walk from future light rail.

Okay, we're going to zoom over towards Fremont and Wallingford.

I do want to just note one thing.

I just toggled there.

A lot of the zoning in this area is not changing.

So what you see on the map right now is industrial commercial zoning that would have no change.

This is all area that's outside of the designated manufacturing industrial center.

I just want to note that.

So when we look at the proposed zoning where there would be a change, I do want to point out that in Fremont, the industrial commercial zone would be extended to more area.

And for council member Peterson, You can see on this map, the 200 foot shoreline buffer.

You see the double line there where one line is the shoreline and one line is the 200 foot buffer.

So you could not have the housing allowance within that 200 foot buffer.

And this effectively rules out all of the urban industrial zoned area for housing that's on the North shore of Lake Union.

I also want to note that the Shoreline Master Program rules apply and largely control here.

So there's no change proposed to the Shoreline Master Program rules.

So just to summarize here, there would not be housing allowed anywhere within this urban industrial that you see on the map here on the North Shore of Lake Union.

Go for it Councilmember Peterson, this is your time my friend.

Thank you.

If you could just zoom back on that that was really helpful to explain I think for.

I mean, the workforce housing element you have I think is great because it's.

it's because of the affordability element that you've built into it.

And I really commend the Harrell administration for doing that.

And it'd be interesting to see more of that workforce housing elsewhere in the city.

For me, it's really just taking all this dense material on the five councils and trying to boil it down to what exactly is going on here because there's a new zone that you're creating called urban industrial.

What does that mean?

looking at the definitions and trying to parse through what could actually happen here.

And then layering on top of that, the shoreline restrictions.

So your just going through that was really helpful to show what's possible here and what's not.

Just wanted to, two things on the map here.

Gasworks Park is in the map and is now, says it's urban industrial, but I'm assuming the park use would supersede That.

And, yes, no, there would be no change.

Okay, for the park it's owned by Seattle parks and there would be no change.

And that little orange rectangle and up for the left a little bit on 35th Street is that just the Seattle Public Utilities transfer station.

Yes, I believe that's correct.

Okay.

And what is the sort of general philosophy for why?

Because so much of the focus here is Soto and the stadium district and areas near the port and Duwamish River and Ballard.

But what is the philosophy for sort of moving over into this area?

What is the goal you're trying to accomplish by changing this from industrial buffer to urban industrial?

I think a good way to think of it as an update, it's similar to the existing industrial buffer zone, but it's an updated zone that has some improvements such as better landscaping and streetscaping requirements and more encouragement of smaller business spaces as opposed to large standalone retailer office spaces.

It's got a new name, but it really, in this case, is in the spirit of making some improvements and incremental modifications and updates to the zone.

Thank you very much.

Really appreciate drilling down into that.

Thanks.

OK.

We'll keep moving through the maps here.

So an inner bay.

There is some urban industrial proposed near the Dravis area where there would be a light rail station.

So we move south to Smith Cove.

You're going to see that where the cursor is, if you can see it, the interbay armory site is placed in the protective maritime manufacturing and logistics zone.

until that detailed master plan could be completed.

So if there's a detailed master plan created, there could be a different future, but for now it's placed in the most protective industrial zone.

The Elliott Avenue corridor is placed into the industry and innovation zone.

And that wraps up the BINMIC.

Let's move south to the Duwamish, Mick.

So again, you're going to see all the areas.

Before you move, could I ask one question?

How much housing could be accommodated around that future light rail zone in the Inner Bay area?

I know that it's 50 per acre, but how big is that parcel?

The question is about.

I'm sorry, it was about the armory site or about

whatever was around the future light rail station.

At Dravis.

Let me go back.

I just need to go back to the quantities on the slide here.

And I will give us all awareness.

We have about 20 minutes left in committee.

And so if you don't have this on hand, I might ask you to follow up with council member Nelson.

Yeah.

Just tell me how big it is.

Yeah, I don't have the exact quantity on hand, so I'm gonna have to get back to you with that one, yeah.

Good question.

And I'm gonna need to reshare.

Okay, so in, The Duwamish Mic, again, all the lands along Harbor Island, along the waterways, is in the Maritime Manufacturing Logistics Zone.

You are going to see the Urban Industrial Zone around the stadium area, and we talked about that.

You see the proposed Industry and Innovation Zone in two places that will have light rail.

One is around the Soto Lander Street Station.

So you can see the existing station that will be expanded when the new line is built.

So this is generally purple within a half mile walk of that station.

I also want to note that industry innovation would apply near the South CID station area.

I want to just zoom over here and remind you that the area near Judkins Park This would be removed from the industrial commercial zone and put into a mixed use zone, specifically a neighborhood commercial zone that would allow housing there.

And let's just take a quick look at Georgetown.

So what you're seeing not shaded on this map, so that it's in that light gray color, these are the existing residential or commercial areas of Georgetown.

So the red on the map is that place that's proposed to be removed from an industrial zone and placed in a mixed use zone, specifically neighborhood commercial.

And again, you see that kind of connecting the different residential parts of Georgetown.

A change in Georgetown would also be an extension of the urban industrial zone over towards 4th Avenue South.

So you'd have the possibility for some of that workforce housing there, as well as along the edges of the residential neighborhood.

And lastly, just in South Park, you see that the edge of South Park between the urban village and the core industrial area would be in the urban industrial zone.

And you see the two locations I mentioned earlier that would be removed from the manufacturing industrial center and placed into a new mixed use zone specifically a neighborhood commercial zone.

So that was a very quick overview.

The map changes are contained in the ordinance.

ending in Council Bill 569. And I think I'm just gonna pause there and see if there are questions or comments.

And I'm sorry, I will admit I started multitasking because the map that you're using right now is on your website.

And so this is publicly available to everyone.

And so I had pulled up the map and started poking around myself.

Did you focus in on the Soto Light Rail Station?

I went through it pretty quickly.

Okay.

I will, I'll take other people's questions.

I know I've gone in depth.

I see we have Council Member Nelson, Council Member Mosqueda, and then that's the cue right now.

Two quick questions.

Is there any affordability condition in the new mixed use areas since you're putting them?

Those areas would have the city's mandatory housing affordability program.

So that would be applied there as it is in other.

But no workforce affordability.

Yeah, it would be the MHA program which requires units at 60% AMI and below or in lieu contribution.

Okay.

And then the other one is there's a dearth of music venues in the south, and there will hopefully be some more, some growth in our creative cluster.

And so I am wondering if there, if there's anywhere in these zones where something like a recording studio slash performance spaces would be considered accommodatable?

Would that fit into maybe computer?

Entertainment uses are permitted in all of the zones.

They have different size of use limits.

In the maritime manufacturing logistics zone, the most restrictive zone, they're limited to 10,000 square feet in size, but then in the urban industrial, 25,000.

So there's a range of sizes that they're permitted as well.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thanks so much.

I'm just going to put this out there and I hope it doesn't lead to a debate, and I'm sure we'll talk about it another time.

But I just feel a little compelled to say in response to a little bit of the back and forth on the last question, below 30% AMI is also workforce housing.

If we want to talk about that in another place, maybe in the housing committee, happy to do so.

But there's a lot of folks who work and still are below 30% AMI.

Just want to make sure that we're making a distinction between workforce housing being at a certain AMI level or not.

Separately, I have a question.

If you could scroll back over to the areas around North Delridge and over by Jack Block Park.

I thought I saw some yellow areas there.

Do you mind just reiterating what some of those changes are, especially in the corridor on the west side of, I think that's Pigeon Point right there.

If you want to go a little bit further west and then out there by the waterfront as well.

Up by the current cranyard.

Yeah, those those those areas.

Yep.

So, yeah, the furthest one up by jackpot park.

The owner of that side of the purchase about removing that land from the Mac.

He doesn't feel that, given the limited use of the shoreline that that's appropriate for the current industrial general zone.

We're not removing it from the MIC, but we suggested maybe the urban industrial zone would help them get better use of that property.

So that's the reason for that change.

Those other changes you see are currently zoned industrial buffer.

And I think as Jeff said earlier, as a general rule of thumb, we've replaced industrial buffer with the urban industrial zone.

Because once all of this has been, if it's approved and implemented, we would expect that the urban industrial buffer zone will cease to exist.

We will come back to repeal chapter 2350.

So kind of oversimplified, and it is not actually this simple.

One way to think about this is that we are removing the industrial buffer and replacing it with urban industrial.

And at the bottom of that dip right there, is that Nucor or is it across the street from Nucor?

Over there by the stream.

Along Yellow Creek right there.

Yeah, in the maritime manufacturing logistics.

And there is a small area of urban industrial to the south of Nucor.

OK.

Thanks.

One of the questions prompted something that I forgot to mention, and I'd like to just mention it for the council's awareness.

In Georgetown, the new mixed use zone would include incentives for retention of an art space or inclusion of an art space in a structure, and it would include an incentive for preservation of a historic structure.

So I just failed to mention that earlier, that there are some unique provisions in the Georgetown area.

Great.

And can you circle back up to Ballard?

I know that we quickly skimmed over the mixed-use change, but I do want to just highlight it for the public.

This is one area that is being changed out, and you can see in the light purple is essentially where FENPRO steel manufacturing used to occur.

It is now an active kind of light industrial space, the Nordic Museum and others.

Across the street in the red zone has traditionally been urban, the industrial buffer zone, and so these are parcels including Veterans of Foreign Wars, Eagles and Ballard Post, We have a taco time, we have a dog boarding facility, we have a City Light property, and the iconic Sloop Tavern.

I want to just note for the community's awareness that this area is going to be changed in the zoning, and I think this map is hard to to understand the connectivity to the current zoning because what is in red is adjacent to the right.

So if you could move the cursor just in that area, it is the same zoning as that red change.

And so while it might seem abrupt here, it's only because it is out of context with the current zoning that is surrounding it.

It is also on the downhill side of a hill.

And so even though it might be taller than the low rise zone that is directly north of it, it will be offset with a hill.

Colleagues, any other questions on the map section before we move to the last council bill?

Luckily the, probably the, the easiest to understand of all five bills in this package with 10 minutes left.

We are just preparing to change and Are you ready to, do you need to share screen?

I don't have a slide for the last ordinance.

Okay.

I'll just quickly summarize it.

It would be helpful to send us a slide deck so that we can post it to the agenda and for the viewing public, this slide deck will be posted to the legistar as soon as this committee is over.

Apologies for not having that ahead of time.

It will be future practice that all presentations will be attached to Legistar before the meeting.

So since you don't have a presentation, it's all you for just talking.

Sure, I'll just quickly summarize what the last bill in this package does.

It's the one that ends in council bill number 571 and it amends the city's noise ordinance.

This change would only apply in the Ballard Interbay North End Manufacturing Industrial Center.

And what it does is it allows industrial uses that are within 200 feet of the shoreline.

So shoreline industrial uses to operate and under the noise ordinance, have the industrial level of noise have that threshold apply to any adjacent use area, regardless of whether that's commercial or residential, the shoreline industrial user would be able to operate under the industrial level noise standard.

So the way that it works with the noise ordinance is that you have a zone where the noise originates and a zone where the noise is received.

This just says that for shoreline industrial uses, even if there's a commercial use within proximity to that industrial use, that industrial user can operate up to the industrial level noise standard.

And the reason for this is because we've heard loud and clear from shoreline industrial users in the Ballard area that there's been encroachment over the years, other uses have gotten very, very close.

They haven't changed what they're doing, but, you know, the proximity has impacted them.

So this allows them some assurances that they can continue their operations.

Just to kind of summarize, we have traditionally used industrial areas as places that we can make louder noise.

I'm going to just use a real example from Ballard where tugboats are built, literally built on the shore.

Building a tugboat is not a quiet activity.

There's welding, there's hammering, there's upholstery, there's refrigeration.

There's electronics, there's a lot of noise that goes into this.

And so as we are allowing housing to be closer to industrial uses, which I think is a good thing, we also must protect at the end of the day, the existing uses.

And for the fact that this is an employment bill, if we do not have a place in Ballard that allows for tugboat to be built.

That means that the direct tug and barge that Western Tow Boat pulls the barges up to Alaska and services communities that do not have road access.

Literally, there are communities in Alaska whose only access out of their community is Western Tow Boat through Ballard.

And so we need to be able to protect Western towboats ability to make noise, as an example, not them specifically but as an example, their ability to make noise.

pay working wage, family wage jobs, while at the same time allowing housing to be a little bit closer.

And this noise ordinance update would help that.

Can you just confirm for me, Jeff, I did notice this in one of your slides, but just to bring it back up, for buildings that are, or residential units built in urban industrial zones, they are required to have noise thickening, noise buffering windows and insulation, is that correct?

That's correct.

Great.

Colleagues, any questions on the noise ordinance?

I would love, Jeff, just to have this slide deck summarized.

For most people, reading ordinances is pretty confusing, and just to put it in layperson's terms, for myself included.

Really helpful, thank you.

Colleagues, any other questions on this ordinance or at this point on any of the five ordinances that we have reviewed today?

Seeing none, my computer has glitched out on me, so I'm going to bring back up my script to close us out.

All this to say, you know, the changes that we're making right now are to improve the ability to have employment centers for family wage jobs in our city.

This allows greater flexibility, it cleans up a lot of text, and it ensures that our industrial zones aren't having loopholes used.

And so we're going to create more jobs in our city.

I mean, industrial zones, as our overall economy fluctuates, as it goes up and as it goes down, industrial zones typically stay even keeled.

And this is critical because you might not notice industrial zones in the good times.

You will absolutely always notice them in the bad times because they're staying strong and steady.

Um, This is why, I mean, when we look at Fisherman's Terminal, each of the fishing vessels is a small business directly employing, you know, five to 10 people individually.

The Fisherman's Terminal, all of those small businesses together are employing hundreds in our community, and the ancillary businesses on land are employing thousands of family wage jobs in our community.

And this is the impact.

This is why Ballard has always had a strong economy, even before people who lived outside of Ballard wanted to come to Ballard.

This bill updates our industrial zones to be more flexible, increase employment opportunities, and where appropriate, allow housing.

Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you, June.

Thank you, Director Quindongo.

Thank you, former interim mayor and Council President Tim Burgess.

And if you'd like to say anything now, please feel free.

You can always join for the next meeting as well.

Thank you.

team did a great job and you you guys are all tracking so that's great wonderful thank you um so just next steps here we will have uh lish witson our lead walk us through a briefing on monday we will then have amendments due next wednesday sitting in my may 17th If there are no further questions.

But we are supposed to get you why you've said before that the 12th is important.

Sorry, I was wrong when I said the 12th.

You've got till the 17th.

So I know it's Norwegian Constitution Day and we shouldn't schedule things on Norwegian Constitution Day.

But here we are.

Amendments are due and sent to my May 17th.

With no further questions, this concludes the Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 Land Use Committee.

The next Land Use Committee meeting is a special meeting on Monday, May 15th, 2023 at 2 p.m.

Thank you for attending.

We are adjourned.