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HomeMy WebLinkAboutminutes.apz.19880112 RECORD OF PROCBEDINGS PLANNING AND ZONING JARUARY 12. 1988 Chairman Welton Anderson called the meeting to order at 5:00 pm. ROLL CALL Answering roll call were Welton Anderson, Jasmine Tygre, David White, Roger Hunt, Mari Peyton and Michael Herron. Ramona Markalunas and Jim Colombo arrived shortly after roll call. COMMISSIORBR'S COMMENTS Mari: I would like to know if the application for the amendments on the hotel came in. Alan: No. It keeps getting further behind. In terms of schedule the most optimistic date for your first review would be February 16, 1988. The later they are in terms of submitting the tougher that's becoming in terms of getting the thing turned around. If we do have a meeting on the 16th on the hotel it will be to rescore the GMP with detail review 2 weeks later. That won't happen till the first week in March. I met yesterday with the architects. I sent a letter to Hadid after reviewing the drawings in detail myself and I made some extremely critical remarks about the design. And they have basically redone the plan. It doesn't look at all like what they presented. They have really changed it. We gave them some more comments yesterday. And they are resubmitting the architecture probably January 26th. Jasmine: One of the things brought up at a meeting on the hotel which a friend of mine attended was the number of construction workers that would be needed and what the construction schedule was going to be. A couple of the contractors pointed out that based on the size of the hole, they would need to be carrying out 100 dump trucks a day for a 120 days to get all the dirt out. And they agreedl I think that is a very frightening statistic. Excerpt TYGRE RICHMAN P & Z minutes Januarv 12. 1988 This lead me to another thing that had to do with employee housing. Part of it was triggered by the article in the Daily rag today about the guys who met with some unnamed city and county officials about tax loss investors wanting to become involved in employee housing, and there seem to be very little interest on the part of the city in pursuing this, which I find kind of appalling, because of the situation that we are finding ourselves in. The second thing was that in reviewing the 3 residential GMP submissions one of the first things I looked for was the employee housing section. I think that we can consider employee housing provided by developers a thing of the past, totally. And I have comments about this in terms of what's actually been happening and the impacts that I think it's having on the city. I kind of wanted to relate that to some of the things in the sections here because it's obviously too late to do anything about the projects that are already in but it does seem to me that there comes a time when if the city inventory is just totally inadequate to deal with what we already have, there has to be a time when you have to say to a developer cash-in-lieu is not one of your options this year. The Code definitely gives you that right, right now. It was intended quite purposefully for that. The cash- in-lieu is not an automatic. The cash-in-lieu is expressionary approval, and you do have the ability, right now, to say no. TYGRE Well, see I was looking through, in here, too see if there was something like that. It seems to me that one of the problems that they mentioned in the article was the lack of location, the lack of land in the city, on which to put employee housing. So the city is then going to have to go to the county to try and get land for money that is generated by cash-in-lieu, the county may not give us the money (sic). Or on the other hand, you may have to use city land that was acquired and earmarked for other public purposes, which requires voter approval, which you then may not get, and/or you may wind up with employee housing in locations that if a developer came up with this location, you wouldn't approve. But you're stuck with it because we've told them cash-in-lieu is okay and the city has the author- ity and said this is where we're going to put it. You know, we're tying ourselves up in very bad ways here. (kJAf'tA.il./ If cash-in-lieu is a option, what are the conditions ~r'-~~ for denying it? RICHMAN We've always brought when cash-in-lieu comes in, we've always brought it to Council for their approval, for action. BURSTEIN Right, we always take it to Council in our conditions. RICHMAN But I'm looking for language in here, it really isn't in here BURSTEIN As far as like criteria for whether its acceptable RICHMAN I remember discussing that to a great degree with the city Council when we adopted this, when we adopted the cash-in-lieu we had a great deal of difficulty convinc- ing people it was a good option. I happen to still think it's a great option. TYGRE I think it is a good option RICHMAN There are times where it is not the preferred option. There may be times where you prefer to have the applicant build it, and it's really not in the language in either place, and I guess when we get to the employee housing section of Article 8 we should bring that up again, and if the P & Z wants to give me direction to make it clear that cash-in-lieu can be turned down, that cash-in-lieu is subject to review, we can do that. TYGRE Because I think what happens now, you're doing a disservice to the applicants for this year's residen- tial GMP because I don't think it's anywhere clear in the Code, and if we did, if anybody else agrees with me that it would be really a good thing for them to put some stuff on-site as opposed to waiting another 4 years to get employee housing to cover this, the generated employees, whatever number they may be, then they're all going to turn around and say, Dhow can you do this to us nowD, and I think they would have every right to say that. RICHMAN I'm going to look back at the ordinance that created cash-in-lieu option and report back to you, and I'll try and do it before next week's meeting, you know at the beginning section of next week's meeting. I'll try and report back to you if there was something that didn't get codified because I'm remembering it was kind of a special TYGRE I think we went through that quite a bit, but see the other thing is it's not even so much the cash-in-lieu and not becau.e I think necessarily cash-in-lieu is necessarily a bad thing but it's the problem of finding the location. The locations don't exist for the city. .,--' RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN WHITE ?? The locations can exist for the developer as part of pieces of land they're actually developing. Where else are we going to get the land. Otherwise, every- thing is going to be west of 82. I'm not sure I buy the argument there are no parcels that exist for housing, and I think we've going scheduled for February 9th the presentation of the housing element of the master plan. The housing authority has been working long and hard, and you folks have participated You see there were a lot of locations they showed us that we just didn't like at all I understand that but there are locations that they are pursing and they do have the money now that the cash- in-lieu program has in fact taken off. It really only took off in the last building season that we actually, in the city, came up with money. Up to then it was basically a county program, first of all, and none of the projects in the county got past the approval stage, none of them went to building permit. In the ci ty, everything went right through, approved, building permit, constructed, and we got quite a bit of money. And we know that we have the capability to build a dorm project if we wanted to. That's the project that I personally am a strong proponent of and that I think is going to make a difference around here to a much greater degree than putting 3 or 4 two-bedroom units in scattered locations. I still think that adopting that ordinance made sense. Jasmine, you have support from me on areas you want to go. Since Christmastime, I have had 3 business owners come to me and tell me that they are buying units for their employees because they're scared stiff of being able to have places for good employees to live. These are all people who have been here for a long time, who have had businesses here for a long time. And it's a major, major problem. You know, these businesses have all been here for a long period of time, they can figure these things out. They have good employees, but they said they can't keep on getting good employees unless they buy the housing to guarantee it, and that's the future problem. We're about a year or two away from that being a major, major problem. We've got to get them built. Do we have Paul here right now, in line for cash-in- lieu, if someone has put employee housing on property and then at a later date can they change that employee housing over to commercial use and pay cash-in-lieu instead. RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN It depends on the nature of the housing. If someone gets an FAR bonus in the downtown, you go from 1.5 to 2 in the CC, the only way you can do that now is by doing on-site housing. So in a case like that, the answer would be no. On the other hand, if someone had a unit that they wished to convert from deed restricted to some kind of free market, commercial free market residential, they would have the right to apply for that. They can' [t just go and do it by making a payment. They would have to go to this board and the city Council, housing authority, all 3 and get approval, but yes, they certainly could do. But there's no requirement that you take a deed restriction off a piece of property. The place we're having the most problem is obviously the disbursed units in the downtown. We're obviously _ doing very well in the complexes, and we're doing well in other uni ts. The GMP produced deed re st r i cted units. I think the points you are making are definitely things you want to bring up in the next meeting with the housing authority, which is about a month away. But to the extent to which we can incor- porate policy changes now in this document, I am more than happy to do it. I am not crazy about trying to anticipate policies that are going to come out in a master plan element that you are going to adopt in the next couple of months. I would rather see you adopt that plan element than revise this Code again. My main thrust in all of this work has not been to implement a new housing policy. We have always assumed that was going to happen with the housing office and not as part of the "code simplificationft, it's obviously way beyond the bounds of this code simplification. The only thing I wanted to make sure is that, it still seems to me for a number of reasons . . . that we could build in incentives in the GMP process to have the applicants actually construct the housing, and that cash-in-lieu should just be one option. It disturbed me to see that it seems to have become the option of choice for the convenience of the developer, and it does not necessarily, I don't think, address a lot of the problem that the city has in terms of providing housing in reasonable locations for employees without additionally clogging the highways, too, which is already a critical mass. I would really rather come back to you with that as a head-on issue than try and face that one now. I think you should make that decision in the plan element. If you come to the decision that you do prefer to encourage it on-site than to get it through cash, then TYGRE RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN TYGRE RICHMAN we should implement that policy through the GMP. I hate to see you just make that decision now without having the plan element in your hands, and saying hold it I really do like what we get out of cash-in-lieu, or I don't 1 ike what we get out of cash-in-lieu. It's going to happen so quickly. I had Adamski in my office today, he said the draft is going to be out next week. They're scheduled to meet with you next month. I [' m not putting you off until next summer. I know it's something that we can get done before the next growth management round hits. We're having growth management Well, there's no way we're going to effect this one. We all agreed that this code would not effect this one. But according to what you say, there is something in the code that says that No, according to my recollection when we adopted cash- in-lieu that was the case. I do not find it in the language in the code, now, because Steve has showed me what we have now, or in here. We didn't change what we have in the code to what's in here. So I have to go back and look at the ordinance that adopted the cash- in-lieu option and see what either didn't happen or what got lost. Because either we didn't follow through on something we told you we were going to follow through on, or there's something that didn't get codified probably. Okay, but if it's in the ordinance but not in the code, could we then apply it to these applicants? Yes, you could make the decision, for example with these 3 applications, yes, I understand you are providing 40 percent employee housing; however, as part of the subdivision review or PUD review of this application, we do not accept that you are providing it through cash-in-lieu and at the detailed submission or preliminary submission stage, you shall come back with an on-site solution. You have that right, right now. If that's in the ordinance You have that right, regardless We do? Sure. Their concept is, we're providing cash-in-lieu. Their GMP commitment, I don't care if they're providing cash-in-lieu, on-site, off-site, their GMP commitment is for a number of points, and its a percentage housed period. It's the only thing they commit to is a percentage housed. If you say, okay, we'll give you points for housing a percentage but the bottom line is when you come in and get this project approved finally at final submission, you'd better put it on site, and if you don't, you don't have a project. You have the right to make that a condition. '" I mean, they'll scream bloody murder, but, you've got that right. There's nothing in here prohibiting you from that right now. ANDERSON Any other commissioners comments? -",.. PZMl.12.88 '~i"" ARTICLB 8 PUBLIC BEARING Welton opened the continued public hearing. Commission members and Alan and Steve of the Planning Department then went through Article 8 making corrections, additions and deletions. Comments were also taken from members of the public. At 7:15 pm Welton continued the public hearing to date of February 2, 1988 at 5:00 pm. Meeting was adjourned. Time was 7:15 pm. Janice M. Carney, Deputy City Clerk 2