Land Use and Sustainability Committee 8/5/2026

All right, good morning, everyone.

August 5th, 2026, Land Use and Sustainability Committee meeting will come to order.

It's 9.33 a.m.

I'm Eddie Lin, Chair of the Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Vice Chair Strauss?

Present.

Council Member Rank?

Here.

Chair Lin?

Here.

Chair, there are three members present.

And Council Member Foster and Council President Hollingsworth are excused from today's meeting.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda's adopted.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for coming to this Thursday morning, Wednesday morning meeting to discuss land use.

As always, thank you to the city clerks, council central staff, mayor's office, and OPCD for helping us prepare for this meeting.

So we will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comment should relate to items on the agenda, items within the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Currently, we have two speakers in person and one online.

OK.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

We'll start with in-person speakers first.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 60 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

In-person speakers will be called first, after which we will move to remote speakers until the public comment period has ended.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow for the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open.

We will begin with the first speaker on the list who is Hannah Ziff.

Hannah give me one moment for the timer.

I'm from Pioneer Square, and I'm here to discuss the growth of downtown from a humanist perspective as well as a business perspective.

I have a couple of unpopular opinions to share and ask that you be open-minded and try to see my meaning.

The first is that I come from a business family, and I really respect the eye on our budget that Rivera kept.

Yesterday I said the native tribe does the best job of developing the economy downtown from what I see.

And the meeting after that reflected my point.

The tribe's people were well organized and professional with tons of good news about their accomplishments and were efficient in every way.

The budget committee contrasted very sharply with that and there were a lot of raised eyebrows about where money is coming from, Even though there were three administrators, the budget and presentation of it was disorganized.

This is a really unpopular opinion, but who has lots of MBAs and does a really good job?

black women of color.

And I didn't see any on the budget committee.

And I think they would do a really good job of seeing where our money is coming from, where it's going, and making sure that we're really efficient.

Also yesterday, we voted to give away about over 100 square feet of land to a private developer for an alleyway.

So I live on Jackson and First, and there's an empty office building next to me.

And I don't know, but I'd be willing to put money that the city also gave away a private alley, gave away an alleyway to be privatized by them too.

What do you think would happen if the private sector owned all the alleyways in Seattle?

Do you think that would be a security threat?

What do you think that police people think that we're vacating all the alleyways, and then we're talking about making the city safer?

Who's doing the drug deals?

Who's doing the human trafficking?

It's the private sector and the alleyways.

Thank you.

Next is Steve Rubitella.

Surprisingly, citizens have feelings too.

I understand that the chairman was not too happy about some of the things said as they were grabbing more rights away from the citizens again.

I come to these meetings, and I am regularly called NIMBY, which is code for old.

I guess I got that one.

Old, you own a house.

I don't own that one.

And racist, which I find really offensive.

And this just rolls off the speech of the opponents when I point out how much money people are making and how little housing we're getting.

and I don't like being called a racist specifically.

Give me the house and you can call me a homeowner.

And I can't do much about the age.

I'm not, after one of our meetings here, not the meeting before the full council, it was explained to me that me and my kind are the problem in Seattle.

See, old people just don't wanna die.

We have extended life.

and no, I'm not willing to die.

You see, if a whole bunch of people died, then we would lower the price of housing because there'd be fewer people here.

But I'm not willing to do that and I'm not willing to move out of the city of Seattle.

I think that our biggest problem is all the carrots go to the industry and all the sticks go to the public.

When you look at major trees, easy as heck for the developers to get rid of them.

All they have to do is ask SDOT or city planning and the preferred is usually remove the trees.

Thank you, Steve.

Next, two remote speakers, starting with Tina Boucher.

Please press star six.

Good morning, everybody.

Tina Boucher, District 7. Today I'd like to talk about some opportunities in the Comprehensive Plan, specifically as it relates to the Downtown Regional Center Plan, but the whole city as well.

I appreciate the plan recognizes the importance of the ADA accessibility and Seattle has made some meaningful progress, but this is an opportunity to move beyond compliance and embrace the full intent of the ADA as a civil rights law.

Accessibility is fundamental to downtown livability.

A truly livable downtown is one where every resident, visitor, regardless of age or ability, can move safely, independently, and with dignity.

That requires accessibility to be more than a project-by-project requirement.

It should be a guiding principle that shapes every decision involving development, transportation, construction, construction, implementation, curb management, micromobility, and the public realm.

I encourage the council to adopt a cross-cutting accessibility policy, establish a continuous accessible network, strengthen standards for construction and micro-mobility, assign clear accountability, and measure progress through regular public reporting.

This goes way beyond one department.

The measure of success should not simply be whether individual projects comply with ADA or with the consent degree.

but whether downtown is genuinely livable and accessible for everyone every day.

The plan speaks often about growth, housing, and economic vitality, but it says much less about what makes downtown truly livable for the people who call it home.

Livability isn't an amenity.

It is the foundation of a successful neighborhood.

It means safe and welcoming streets, accessible public spaces, clean sidewalks, opportunities to gather access to nature, reasonable noise levels.

Thank you.

Next is David Haynes.

Hi, thank you, David Haynes.

Is the council going to take away the restrictions that the city council landlords put into the comprehensive plan that sabotaged the integrity of the whole thing for the next 20 years.

There's nothing worse than like, let's say you're on the link light rail and you're looking over and you see all these buildings that are lower than the train and all you can, and people can hear the echo from that.

It's like, you can't put low level housing right near the transit oriented infrastructure when you don't have noise abatement walls when you don't go high enough that people can go to the amenities at the top of the floor, at the top of the building to get a reprieve from the noise pollution from the trash pickup or whatever it is.

But if you take a look at like Interbay, a perfect example of how screwed up Seattle is.

You got a toxic industrial train that's honking its horn, driving people nuts.

And yet y'all are thinking about putting housing right on the side of that train in Interbay.

And if you take a look at the, Take a good old whiff of the Seattle Storms practice location.

That's right next to the train yard.

Those people are never going to win another championship because when they're working out, they're breathing toxic air.

It is so overwhelming.

Anyway, we need to take the restrictions off the comprehensive plan and purge the one Seattle plan that Bruce Harrell racially tainted.

It's like the landlords and the city council sabotage the integrity and put these restrictions on real developers, weaponized the MHAP fund to line the pockets of their politically connected, unqualified non-profits, and yet everything is tainted in a racist lens.

You gotta be black to develop in the Central District, you gotta be black if you're gonna move into it, and you gotta be black if you're gonna be living in the Central District.

It's just a racist change of storm of experience that needs to be purged from government.

Thank you, David.

That is concluded, public speakers.

Okay.

Thank you all for your public comment.

We'll now move on to our one item of business.

Will the clerk please read agenda item one.

Agenda item one, CB 121268, an ordinance relating to land use and zoning, amending the Seattle comprehensive plan to incorporate changes proposed as part of the 2026 comprehensive plan annual amendment process for briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

And representative from central staff joining us.

And once you're ready, please go ahead and introduce yourself.

Thank you, Chair Lynn.

My name is Rebecca Maskin, Legislative Analyst with Central Staff.

And just give me a minute to pull up my presentation here.

Absolutely.

Take your time.

Colleagues, given we've had a pretty light agenda, feel free to provide comments or questions as we go along.

So thank you.

Again, my name is Rebecca Maskin.

I'm central staff, legislative analyst, and today we'll be discussing Council Bill 121268, which is the 2026th Annual Amendment to the Comprehensive Plan.

So under the Growth Management Act, jurisdictions are allowed to amend their comprehensive plans once a year, more than once a year under extreme circumstances.

And Seattle has done this in most years, and this would be the first annual amendment to the newly adopted One Seattle comprehensive plan, adopted in 2025. This package includes four sub-area plans representing the two regional centers and two manufacturing industrial centers, or we also call them MICs or MICs.

And you can see the regional centers on this map here in the darkest blue color, and the MICs are represented in this gray color as well.

So why are we talking about this now?

Well, these sub-area plans, in addition to being good planning practices, planning for neighborhoods and substantial areas, they're also required by the Puget Sound Regional Council to maintain certification of these regional centers, which makes transportation projects that serve centers more competitive in federal funding competitions.

so we are interested in maintaining that certification and we will be producing sub-area plans for each of the regional centers.

This is just the first batch.

More center plans are anticipated next year as well for another annual amendment.

So the plans are adopted into the comprehensive plan in an appendix.

These plans do not offer any zoning changes or development regulation changes so there's not those kinds of policy pieces attached to this.

I want to spend a little time talking about SEPA analyses because these plans were studied, the environmental impacts of these plans were studied under different SEPA analyses related to different plans.

So the regional centers plans were analyzed on addenda to the comprehensive plan EIS from 2025. That was a phase one comprehensive plan.

and the SEPA analysis are separate for each of the plans.

So each plan has its own analysis.

And I'll go into some detail about them later on.

The MIC plans were analyzed in addenda to the Industrial and Maritime Strategy Environmental Impact Statement, which was adopted in 2023. and I should note as well, this is important, that the Duwamish plan was appealed to the hearing examiner in May of 2026. That appeal is still ongoing and until it is resolved in either way, that the council should not act in adopting this plan.

So we'll talk about that a little bit.

If you could just move the mic a little bit closer, I think that'd be helpful.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so now I'll give a little background on each center.

I won't go into as much detail as OPCD SAF did last week on each center, but I'll raise the highlights and potential comments about them.

First of all, note that the regional center plans are striking visual documents.

They contain a lot of illustrations and policies in a very visually striking kind of way.

Another interesting thing that the plans do is that they cut across standard comprehensive or sub-area plan chapters like land use or transportation.

and they're organized around five themes.

So in downtown, you can see the themes are listed there on the slide.

But just to illustrate how each of these themes are kind of cross-cutting, as an example, the Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming theme area has policies about not only public safety, but transportation and parks and open space.

So it's kind of a unique approach to completing a sub-area plan.

The other thing I'd like to note about the plans themselves for regional center plans is they add more detail than a comprehensive plan generally does.

Comprehensive plan usually has goals and policies that implement those goals and a vision as well.

These sub-area plans have implementing actions as well as part of the plans, which is a level of detail that's a little bit more specific than the comprehensive plan.

In the review of the, first I'll say that downtown not only meets regional center criteria set by the county and PSRC, in terms of quantitative criteria, the center is probably the most dense and most active within the region.

but PSRC also left some comments about land use and capacity detail which is covered in the plan.

There's a map about offering some detail of future land use in different portions of the downtown that could be used a little bit of clarity as well.

So anticipated that downtown will grow by about 13,500 homes in the future, add 60,000 jobs as well.

And that is consistent with the growth anticipated in the comprehensive plan.

So it doesn't go beyond what the comprehensive plan says.

Relating to SEPA, some of the findings were that there were no additional adverse impacts that this plan offers relative to the comprehensive plan and that the actually potential impacts are already anticipated within that comprehensive plan environmental impact statement.

In fact, some of the policies within the plan mitigate for some of the transportation impacts considered elsewhere in the plan.

So based on the connectivity and transit serving policies within this plan, some of those transportation impacts are mitigated.

Moving on to the Northgate plan, again, these have these cross-cutting themes for Northgate.

Some of the key focus areas in Northgate are improving connections between people and nature, between people and the places they want to be, improving pedestrian connections and connections between different modes, given the light rail station there.

This was also something that PSRC picked up on in their commentary in that the shape as you can see in the center map on the right there is a bit unusual and there are some limited connections between different parts of the center, both for people and for other modes of traffic as well.

So PSR's comment was to consider potential boundary improvements to improve that connectivity within the center, and that is not considered in this plan.

Sticking with the center boundary as proposed is the same.

So it's not a detrimental characteristic, I just want to call that out.

So Northgate's planning for about 2,000 new homes and 2,500 new jobs, which again is consistent with the comprehensive plan.

This plan was not determined to have significant impacts to the environment or to people.

even beyond the comprehensive plan.

There's some moderate impacts identified within the SEPA analysis and transportation and redevelopment, but those are consistent with what was studied under the comprehensive plan.

And so there was a determination of non-significance for the sub-area plan.

So moving on to the MICs.

So these plans are more traditional in terms of their format, set up with traditional land use transportation economy chapters, for example.

The plans both really strongly build upon the industrial maritime strategy that was adopted in 2023 and the land use changes that went along with that.

So some of the key, Oh, I should note also that the content of the plan, the format, is very similar between both the BINMIC and the Greater Duwamish MICs.

The goals in the plan are the same across those two plans, and the policies are specific for each center, but the format and the kind of goals are the same.

So some of the key themes in the plan.

So the plan themes are very similar across the MICs.

These are places where land use encroachment from non-industrial uses has happened over time.

They're both places where light rail stations are either currently in or are planned to exist.

So dealing with those kinds of land use conflicts or potential conflicts and preserving industrial land are key themes of both of these plans.

BINMIC meets most of the MIC criteria set out by the county and PSRC, but one issue that is persistent in BINMIC is that the current share of industrial jobs out of the total jobs within the center is below 50%, and that is a criteria for maintaining certification status, kind of balanced among the other ones.

The plan does have policies and the land use assumptions that were adopted in 2023 look to prevent further loss of industrial employment.

And with those protections in place, the plan anticipates that we would get to that 50% industrial jobs by 2044. So that's how to kind of resolve that criteria deficiency.

The areas are planning to add about 6,000 jobs by 2024, and one of the most significant SEPA findings that was included in this analysis was about transportation, given the different potential conflicts between transportation modes that are affected by the different land uses here and increasing development and growth.

So these are mitigated within the plan, but the SEPA analysis acknowledges that there are some significant impacts as well.

And finally, for the Greater Duwamish Manufacturing Industrial Center, again, the kind of similar themes about integrating land uses, developing industrially-oriented, transit-oriented design.

There's a different kind of land use mix within the stadium district that's focused towards entertainment and how that interacts with the industrial mix there.

Preserving that industrial land amidst those conflicts and preserving those other uses is a key theme of here, as well as a large redevelopment site that was created after the SR-99 tunnel was put in.

The Greater Duwamish Mic definitely, it meets the MIC criteria set out by the county and PSRC.

They're planning for 12,500 jobs, which is again consistent with the comprehensive plan.

And some of the SEPA findings that I'll call out again relate to transportation.

There's specifically impacts noted that are perhaps not completely mitigated to vulnerable users of the transportation system, folks who are walking, biking, rolling.

in the neighborhood can come into conflict with some of the other more industrial modes of transportation.

And so that is one particular environmental area of focus in this center.

And again, the Greater Duwamish Plan was appealed to the hearings examiner this year.

And so council members should consider whether action on this plan is ripe at this time, and maybe it should be deferred until to the future annual amendment when the appeal is resolved.

Building on that, I just want to lay out process steps for you all.

So we have a briefing today.

I'm happy to answer any questions after I end my presentation.

We're asking for any amendment proposals to the plan by council members be returned by August 10th.

We will discuss those potential amendments on August 19, hold a public hearing on this amendment on September 11, with a potential vote on the 16th following that, and then moving to council on the 22nd potentially.

So that is my presentation.

I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about the plans or the process, and thank you very much.

Okay, colleagues, any questions or comments in particular about the timeline?

I just wanna reiterate, can you go back to that last slide?

to make sure that folks are aware of the proposed timeline.

And my understanding is we can't really take action on the Greater Duwamish pending, given the pending appeal.

I'm not sure the exact timeline.

Do you have any idea on the timeline for when that might be done?

I believe that the appeal would be considered in September.

There's potential that it would be heard by November, in mid-November, which is obviously after this potential schedule.

Vice Chair Strauss.

Hey, thanks, Chair Lynn.

This timeline looks good to me, makes sense to me.

I do have a number of amendments for at least the BIN MEC.

I don't know of any for the Duwamish MEC at this time.

And just noting that I will not be able to join you on August 19th, so I'll just ask you to read my comments if I've got some.

That's all.

Okay.

That sounds good, very sure.

Thank you.

I appreciate the structure and the process that you set up.

This is great.

Thank you.

and I certainly see one amendment just in terms of obviously if we're ever not passing the greater Duwamish we'll just need to take that out presumably of the proposed ordinance, draft ordinance.

Any other questions or comments?

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Look forward to any proposed amendments.

And if that's it, I think we've reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

Is there any further business to come before the committee before we adjourn?

Hearing no further business, we are adjourned at 10 a.m.

Next scheduled meeting is August 19th.

Thank you.