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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2024-12-17 Planning & Transportation Commission Verbatim Minutes_______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Planning & Transportation Commission 1 Verbatim Minutes: December 17, 2024 2 Council Chambers & Virtual 3 6:00 PM 4 5 Call to Order / Roll Call 6 6:00 PM 7 8 ROLL CALL 9 Chair Chang: Good evening, everyone. Calling to order this special meeting of the Planning and 10 Transportation Commission for this Tuesday, December 17, 2024. Could we call the roll, please? 11 12 Administrative Associate Vickie Tran: Chair Chang? 13 14 Chair Chang: Here. 15 16 Vickie Tran: Vice-Chair Reckdahl? 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Here. 19 20 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Hechtman? 21 22 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Hechtman: Here. 1 2 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Templeton? 3 4 Commissioner Templeton: Here. 5 6 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Summa? Oh, sorry. Commissioner Akin? 7 8 Commissioner Akin: Here. 9 10 Vickie Tran: And Commissioner Lu? 11 12 Commissioner Lu: Here. 13 14 Vickie Tran: We have a quorum. 15 16 Chair Chang: Thank you. 17 18 Oral Communications 19 The public may speak to any item not on the agenda. Three (3) minutes per speaker.1,2 20 21 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Our first order of business is public comment for items that are not on the agenda 1 tonight. Do we have any speakers? 2 3 Vickie Tran: No, there are no speakers for non-agenda items. 4 5 Chair Chang: Okay. 6 7 Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions 8 The Chair or Commission majority may modify the agenda order to improve meeting management. 9 10 Chair Chang: Then our next item. Do we have any agenda changes, additions, and deletions? 11 12 Assistant Director Jennifer Armer: Not this evening, no. 13 14 Chair Chang: Thank you. And then on to City Official Reports. 15 16 City Official Reports 17 1. Directors Report, Meeting Schedule and Assignments 18 19 20 Jennifer Armer: Good evening, Commissioners. Jennifer Armer, Assistant Director. And we can 21 go ahead and move to the second page here for the Director's Report. Just an update on 22 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. upcoming meetings. We are planning to hold a special meeting on January 15 of the new year 1 given that the normally scheduled first meeting would not have been feasible with staff report 2 distribution right after the turn of the new year. We have sent out a survey to request 3 confirmation from the Planning Commissioners so that we can ensure that there will be a 4 quorum for that meeting. So if you have not yet responded, please do so or you can comment 5 during this meeting to let us know you'll be available. The second meeting in January will be 6 held as normal on the 29th, and for that meeting, we have a couple of parking and 7 transportation-related items. 8 9 On to the next page. Then a couple of other upcoming items. We've got the Council meeting on 10 the 21st. It does include some of the Housing Element Implementation Ordinance changes that 11 you recommended on November 13. I also wanted to add here for an update on Community 12 Meeting and Outreach that staff has organized for the Stream Corridor Protection Ordinance in 13 response to your direction, that will be held here at City Hall on February 6. And so we have 14 some additional information and we're doing outreach right now to ensure that as many people 15 as possible have the opportunity to come and share their input for that. And that concludes my 16 report. Thank you. 17 18 Chair Chang: Thank you. And then do we have anything from Transportation tonight? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: Given that it's a special meeting, I do not believe we do. 1 2 Chair Chang: Any questions from… 3 4 Commissioner Templeton: Did we want to answer her question about availability? 5 6 Chair Chang: Sure, go ahead. 7 8 Commissioner Templeton: On the 15th, I am unsure if I will be available for not, but it looks like 9 you gave us a preview of the agenda item. So when do you need to know by? I – you need – as 10 long as you have a quorum, you should be fine, right? So… 11 12 Jennifer Armer: Right. As long we have a quorum so that we know we can proceed with that 13 item, we want to provide an update to the applicant and ensure that we've got the staff report 14 pulled together in time. 15 16 Commissioner Templeton: Okay. So if I'm not here and the 2 commissioners who are moving on 17 to Council are not here, then everybody else has to be here. So you guys want to confirm? 18 19 Chair Chang: I've already confirmed that I will be here. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Akin: As have I. 2 3 Commissioner Hechtman: I'll be here. 4 5 Commissioner Templeton: And is Commissioner Summa going to be here? 6 7 Female: [Inaudible 4:18]. 8 9 Chair Chang: I don't know. Staff? 10 11 Jennifer Armer: Thank you. We will check in with her. 12 13 Chair Chang: Thank you. 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: All right. If she's not, can you please reach out to me directly instead 16 of canceling the item… 17 18 Jennifer Armer: Yes, we will. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Templeton: …like last time? 1 2 Jennifer Armer: Thank you. 3 4 Commissioner Templeton: Thank you. 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Is the quorum reduced if we reduce the number of commissioners? 7 8 Jennifer Armer: I will look into that. Generally it's – to vote to… 9 10 Chair Chang: Mr. Yang? 11 12 Jennifer Armer: Oh yes. 13 14 Assistant City Attorney Albert Yang: [Yes 4:42]. 15 16 Jennifer Armer: [Inaudible 4:43] the city attorney may. 17 18 Albert Yang: But the quorum's always going to be 4 members even if there's only 5 sitting. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: And then do things change with the [brownout 4:55] in terms of the number of 1 people that we can speak to? 2 3 Albert Yang: Hm. I don't believe so. I think that also is based on a quorum. 4 5 Chair Chang: I would – I'd appreciate if you could just verify that for us and then either let us 6 know today or email us all. Actually, I think emailing us all would be helpful just because 7 Commissioner Summa isn't here tonight. 8 9 Albert Yang: Will do. Thank you. 10 11 Chair Chang: Thank you so much. 12 13 Action Items 14 Public Comment is Permitted. Five (5) minutes per speaker. 15 16 2. Recommendation on an Ordinance Implementing Programs 3.3A, B, and D and 17 3.4A-D of the Housing Element, Including Modifications to: 1) Chapter 18.14: 18 Housing Incentives to Update Regulations for the Affordable Housing Incentive 19 Program (AHIP) and Housing Incentive Program (HIP); 2) Section 18.40.180: Retail 20 Preservation; and 3) Modifications to Base Zoning Districts Throughout Title 18. The 21 Addendum to the Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report (EIR), 22 considered by the City Council on April 15, 2024, analyzed potential environmental 23 impacts of the 6th Cycle Draft Housing Element including Programs 3.3 and 3.4. 24 (Continued from December 11, 2024) 25 26 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Okay. So then I think we're on to our first action item tonight. This was continued 1 from last week. It's a recommendation on an ordinance implementing several programs of the 2 Housing Element, including Modifications to Chapter 18.14, Section 18.40.180, which is Retail 3 Preservation, and Modifications to Base Zoning Districts Throughout Title 18. Could we have the 4 staff report, please? 5 6 Jennifer Armer: Yes, Ms. Eisberg will be providing the staff report this evening. 7 8 Consultant Jean Eisberg: Hi. Good evening, Chair, members of the Commission. I am Jean 9 Eisberg. This is a public hearing on presentation and potential recommendation on 10 amendments to Title 18, the Zoning Ordinance to implement 2 key programs of the Housing 11 Element, the Housing Incentive Program, which we call the HIP, and the Affordable Housing 12 Incentive Program, the AHIP. 13 14 So just to summarize what these programs are, the HIP provides an opportunity for relaxed 15 development standards for market rate projects in exchange for processing through 16 Architectural Review, which is up to 3 meetings with the Architectural Review Board, the ARB. 17 The Affordable Housing Incentive Program, the AHIP, provides relaxed development standards 18 for affordable projects up to middle-income levels in commercial districts specifically near 19 transit in exchange, again, for processing through Architectural Review. The Housing Element 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Program for the AHIP 3.4 calls for streamlining of the approval process, modifying Retail 1 Preservation Ordinance requirements, expanding the applicability to several new zoning 2 districts, and then modifying zoning standards to enable greater housing production. The 3 Program 3.3 for modifications to the AHIP is very specific. This is the only slide I'm going to 4 show on the AHIP because it calls for very specific changes to the floor area ratio, building 5 heights, calls for reduced parking requirements, and then expands applicability to all Housing 6 Element opportunity sites. The key question for the Commission to consider is a staff potential 7 suggestion that the AHIP be expanded to include all locations eligible for the HIP. And so that 8 would mean additional commercial corridors, not just the Housing Element opportunity sites. 9 10 As you may recall, we held a study session with the Commission in September and provided 11 [inaudible 8:05] feedback about the potential development standards, recommendations for 12 looking at potential incentives for alternative travel if we're going to reduce parking 13 requirements, feedback about the idea of unlimited residential density, specifically standards 14 related to adjacent uses, residential lower density uses, and then more information about the 15 retail requirements. So I'm going to focus the presentation on responding to the Commission 16 comments here. 17 18 Also wanted to explain what we heard from the ARB during the study session in October. They 19 provided a little bit of a different set of feedback, and so if the Commission is interested in 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. taking on any of this feedback in the ordinance, we would need further direction from the 1 Commission tonight. So their recommendations included eliminating maximum FAR, providing 2 an additional 5-foot increase in height across the board for all zoning districts. They 3 recommended further reductions in the parking unlike what we heard back from the 4 Commission, and then the recommendations around open space and retail are already baked 5 into the draft ordinance. 6 7 So the key changes to the HIP. You may recall when we met in September we had an economist 8 and an urban designer presenting the physical feasibility analysis and the financial feasibility 9 analysis, and those analyses helped inform the development standards that are included in the 10 ordinance. So the increases in the maximum FAR limit and the building height limit are the 11 same in this ordinance as what you saw in September. Likewise, potential changes to the 12 daylight plane and setbacks were included in those analyses of those physical and financial 13 feasibility. Again, you're seeing the minimum parking ratios reduced only up to the State 14 Density Bonus Law limits, so they would be equivalent. And then, in response to the 15 Commission's feedback, we've added this objective series of TDM measures – that's 16 Transportation Demand Management measures – for projects that are reducing parking ratios 17 by more than half. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. And then lastly, in response to the Commission's concerns about potential unintended 1 consequences of having an unlimited residential density limit, there was some concern that 2 that could lead to more microunits or studios, we've added an incentive for projects that 3 provide at least 10 percent of their units as 3 or more bedroom units, that those projects would 4 be allowed to have unlimited residential density but not other projects. And that would affect 5 just the RM-zoned projects. And this also [helps 10:53] implement another Housing Element 6 Program which is specific about family-friendly standards; that is Program 6.2A. 7 8 So how will this actually work? You may recall, the Housing Element sets up these 2 separate 9 thresholds. So a site in the same zoning district may have different standards depending on 10 whether or not it's a Housing Opportunity Site. So that does lead to some complexity in the 11 zoning ordinance, and this HIP adds another layer of complexity because we're staying sort of 12 aligned with that idea that the Housing Element Opportunity Site has these different standards 13 because those are the sites where we expect development to happen. So in the commercial 14 mixed-use districts, you can think of this HIP as adding an increment over and above what the 15 base zoning currently allows. So that means, again, the – if you layer on the HIP on a Housing 16 Opportunity Site, you're going to get potentially more yield than a site that does not have the 17 opportunity site designation. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. This map just shows the expansion areas. So the HIP would expand to the RM zones, the R-1 1 Faith-Based zones that are opportunity sites, as well as the potential development standard 2 changes to some of the existing locations where the HIP is allowed such as on El Camino. 3 4 So Program 3.4 also includes changes to the Retail Preservation Ordinance, and we've made 5 some tweaks there based on the Planning Commission's feedback. And I wanted to share this 6 idea about creating these nodes on El Camino where the Retail Preservation Ordinance would 7 continue to apply. So looking at this sort of more graphically, the way it is now and would 8 continue is that the Downtown and California Avenue that have these overlay designations of 9 G, F, and R would continue to be subject to the Retail Preservation Ordinance. Those are really 10 critical retail areas in the City. We've included this idea of the El Camino Real nodes. I'm going 11 to show the map in just a minute. Those would also be subject to the Retail Preservation 12 Ordinance. The code currently has this other [trunch 13:16] where reduced retail preservation 13 is allowed, so just replacing retail up to 1500 square feet for high-density residential and mixed-14 use projects. So that's retained except in these locations where you have these overlays and the 15 El Camino node. And then exempt from the Retail Preservation Ordinance, just as the code says 16 today, 100 percent affordable projects as well as we've added Housing Opportunity Sites. And 17 this is a requirement under State law that Housing Opportunity Sites can build out as 100 18 percent retail. Critically, there are no Housing Opportunity Sites that have this G, F, or R 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. overlay, and that was really on purpose so that the City could continue to enforce ground-floor 1 retail requirement in those key locations. 2 3 So this is showing those required retail nodes at the base of California Avenue, the North 4 Ventura CAP. The Coordinated Area Plan requires retail on the El Camino Frontage. We've 5 suggested a node within the existing El Camino Focus Area and then at El Camino Way. 6 7 So as I mentioned, we had study sessions this fall. Tonight here we are at a public hearing and 8 then our expectation is we would go to the City Council after the new year. 9 10 So I mentioned 2 questions that we have for the Commission to consider. Again, one should the 11 AHIP be expanded to include all of the locations eligible for the HIP and should the ordinance 12 incorporate any of the ARB's alternate recommendations. That concludes my presentation. I'm 13 happy to answer questions. Thank you. 14 15 Chair Chang: Thank you. Commissioners, do you have some clarifying questions? Vice-Chair 16 Reckdahl? 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. Can you go to Slide 13? And I'm looking at the Triangle Node. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Do you want the light? 1 2 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: No, let's wait till 13 comes up here. Okay. So in these areas, the focus 3 nodes and the Triangle Node, if you have a Housing Element Opportunity site there, that still 4 can be no retail. Is that correct? 5 6 Jean Eisberg: That's correct. 7 8 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So some of these, for example, the Triangle Node, there's really not 9 going to be a lot of forced retail there. It could almost be entirely residential. This only looks like 10 3 parcels that are not opportunity sites [inaudible 15:57]. 11 12 Jean Eisberg: So what we tried to do in the code is we created some language that said, okay, if 13 you're a Housing Opportunity Site and you're taking advantage of the HIP and you're exceeding 14 the realistic capacity that's identified in the Housing Element, which are fairly conservative 15 estimates, then you would be required to do retail. So in that way, it's sort of a carrot more 16 than a stick, but it's a way to generate that ground-floor retail since, you're right, we cannot 17 require it. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Oh, so if you exceed it – if you exceed the Housing Element allocation, you 1 have to have retail? 2 3 Jean Eisberg: And you're using the HIP program in order to gain those more relaxed 4 development standards, increased density, then the requirement would be to have – excuse 5 me – well, to meet the Retail Preservation Ordinance requirements. So that means if there's 6 currently retail or retail-like uses on the site. If there's not otherwise a retail requirement in the 7 base zoning, then the Retail Preservation Ordinance wouldn't apply. 8 9 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Thank you. 10 11 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin? 12 13 Commissioner Akin: Thank you, Chair. On last week's Packet Page 125, there's the definition of 14 100 percent affordable housing, and I was just wondering if you could review the rationale for 15 using the average of household incomes rather than a single maximum. 16 17 Jean Eisberg: Can you point me to the location in the ordinance that you're looking at? There's a 18 couple different places where we talk about… 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Akin: In last week's packet, it's on Packet Page 125. 1 2 Commissioner Hechtman: It started on 124. 3 4 Commissioner Akin: Yeah, although the relevant part is on 125, but yes, the paragraph begins 5 on 124. 6 7 Jean Eisberg: So this is part of the AHIP program. And right now, the way the AHIP is written, 8 the income levels can go up to 120 percent of AMI, so moderate income. The idea is that we 9 don't necessarily see a project that's completely at moderate income levels. In an effort to 10 provide a more distributed range of income levels, say a mix of up to 80 percent and 120 11 percent, the average gets us a little bit lower so that all the units couldn't be at 120 percent. 12 13 Commissioner Akin: Sure, that makes sense. What defines the 120 percent upper limit? Where 14 does that come from? 15 16 Jean Eisberg: That comes from HUD and HCD. They publish every year the income limits for the 17 county. 18 19 Commissioner Akin: No, I meant the application of 120 percent to the AHIP, not for… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Jean Eisberg: That is an existing – that's an existing standard. So in this case, the page you're 2 looking at, the text that's underlined is new and the standard test is existing code. Maybe 3 somebody else in the – somebody else might have an idea about why it was originally 120 4 percent, but that just – that's the existing code language. 5 6 Commissioner Akin: Okay. Just to explain why it's of interest, I was curious as to why the 120 7 percent wasn't simply changed to 100 percent given that the average will be the same, but with 8 the way it's written now, the distribution will be different and it's a little hard to predict what 9 the effect of that would be. All right. That's it for now. Thank you though. 10 11 Chair Chang: Mr. Yang? 12 13 Albert Yang: I can just add a little bit more on that last question. The purpose – or the benefit of 14 using an average is that it just allows more flexibility for different types of projects to come in. 15 And one thing that we see with tax credit projects with nonprofit developers is that they 16 appreciate having the flexibility of having an average of 60 percent AMI because that makes it 17 easier for them to plan their projects and build their projects. So that's – it's a concept that we 18 borrowed, I think, from our experience with nonprofit developers. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Are you finished, Commissioner Akin? 1 2 Commissioner Akin: Yes, I'm done with that. Thank you. 3 4 Chair Chang: Okay. Do we have other clarifying questions? All right. I've got a quick one. So how 5 did you guys arrive – how did staff arrive at the 10 percent threshold for the 10 percent of 3 6 bedroom – 10 percent of units being 3 bedrooms for that incentive that you were talking 7 about? 8 9 Jean Eisberg: So we did a little of both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. So we looked at, 10 I believe it was 8 projects in the City that have been approved or proposed in recent years and 11 looked at the distribution of unit sizes. Of those multifamily projects, 2 of them did exceed 3 12 bedroom – that's 10 percent of 3 bedrooms – and the remaining did not. The only other 13 project, a townhome project. Generally, townhomes, a lot of them are 3 bedrooms, and so 14 townhome projects generally would well exceed that 10 percent threshold but wouldn't need 15 the density limit. We also spoke to some developers and architects about how they design and 16 typically distribute units. Something that I learned that's maybe of interest to others is that the 17 3-bedroom units tend to be at the corners of buildings. Really, you can only get so many. You 18 need windows on both sides to provide light into bedrooms. And so it's harder to get those 19 units into the middle of the building, and so we don't see as many projects that would have a 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. host of 3-plus bedroom units. And so 10 percent was seen as a goal – an achievable goal – but 1 something that could be achievable with a little bit of a push but not too high as to disqualify 2 projects. 3 4 Chair Chang: Okay. All right. And then similarly, how did we arrive at the 1500 square feet for 5 the retail? 6 7 Jean Eisberg: So the 1500 square feet, that section is also an exi-, looks like that's an existing 8 standard as well. It also happens to be the existing standard where the City allows certain 9 exemptions from parking; 1500 square feet can accommodate more than just a small retail 10 space, like a small cafe. It can get you something a little bit bigger but is something that can fit 11 in in a building footprint in a lobby area, again without potentially generating a parking 12 requirement and still allowing enough space on a sort of minimum 10,000 square foot site to 13 have a lobby and potentially parking to serve that on the residential side parking. 14 15 Chair Chang: Okay. Thank you. Any other clarifying questions? All right then, time for Public 16 Comment. What do you have, Ms. Tran? 17 18 PUBLIC COMMENTS 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vickie Tran: We have one public comment for Item 2 and we have another one for Item 3 and 1 that's it. 2 3 Chair Chang: Okay. Great. Let's go ahead. 4 5 Vickie Tran: For Item #2 and 3, it's Amie Ashton. 6 7 Amie Ashton: Amie Ashton, Executive Director of Palo Alto Forward. This is really tough stuff. I 8 worked for the Planning Department for years, and I had to reread the staff report several 9 times to really digest all of this. But you know what I'm here for. We need to make changes to 10 our zoning ordinance to facilitate feasible housing projects. We know that. We are a thousand 11 units behind at this point. We've got a lot of work to do. So HIP and AHIP: The incentive in the 12 description is key. These programs need to be far superior to the State Density Bonus for any 13 home builder to even consider using them, and we want them to be used to ensure projects 14 undergo a full architectural review consistent with our standards. I urge you not to waste this 15 opportunity. Let's extend HIP and AHIP to other areas and zones. Why wouldn't we want to 16 facilitate affordable housing wherever we can get it? Remove density standards. Consider 17 removing floor area ratios. We have other standards that better regulate the size and look of a 18 building. Reduce parking requirements. The ARB discussed removing them altogether as the 19 City of Mountain View just did last month. Allow 5 feet of additional height to facilitate projects 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. with ground-floor commercial uses. Ensure that we have actually created real incentives to 1 make development out of our housing – excuse me – development of our Housing Element 2 Sites attractive to home builders. We here at Palo Alto Forward are working hard to generate 3 community support for all of this. In 4 days, I was able to – and I submitted this online – we 4 were able to get 120 signatures in support of these changes. They're important. They're 5 essential, and our community wants them. So thank you so much for your consideration 6 tonight. 7 8 Chair Chang: Thank you. Okay, Commissioners. Let's just start with general comments. I know 9 there's a couple specific areas that staff wants us to give them feedback on, but let's just start 10 with some general comments, see where the discussion goes. I think this is Commissioner Akin? 11 Oh, Lu. Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Lu. 12 13 Commissioner Lu: Yes, I had some nonclarifying or slightly more substantive questions. I just 14 wanted to start with that before going to comments. First of all, just as a baseline question, can 15 you help clarify how the over-, how we should think about the overlap between the HIP and 16 AHIP and El Camino Focus Area because, of course, there are discussions of the El Camino Focus 17 Area in this packet, but I'm a little bit confused to what extent that the El Camino Focus Area is 18 a separate overlay that likely wouldn't be affected by any changes we make to the HIP here. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: So one thing that the Draft Ordinance does is try to better distinguish the HIP and 1 the AHIP. The way it is today, HIP is written into 2 sections of the Zoning Ordinance related to 2 Downtown and the Commercial Corridors, and it says okay, here's a set of standards that apply 3 if you're a market rate project and here's a different set of standards that apply if you're an 4 affordable project. We've tried to segment that so that the HIP applies to market rate projects, 5 the AHIP applies to affordable projects, and that's the distinction. The El Camino Focus Area, 6 you could sort of think of it as a super HIP. It is – some of those sites within the El Camino Focus 7 Area may be eligible for the HIP. However, they'd be unlikely – they could choose to do the HIP. 8 They wouldn't get as generous a set of development standards, but they could also – the El 9 Camino Focus Area requires onsite affordable housing. The HIP does not. The HIP requires that 10 you meet the City's inclusionary requirement, which in the case of the rental projects you can 11 pay an in-lieu fee. And so that would be a distinction between the HIP and the focus area, but 12 there are some sites within the focus area that could be eligible for both the HIP and the focus 13 area. 14 15 Commissioner Lu: Got it. That makes sense, and that helps clarify how I would think about the 16 retail requirements for the El Camino Focus Area as it relates to the HIP, for example. Slight 17 segueing to comment, but I guess I'm unsure if there was any clear Council direction either way 18 with if they wanted the HIP to potentially apply to the El Camino Focus Area or if they wanted 19 the El Camino Focus Area to kind of stand alone and be its own program in that area. That's 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. kind of an open question and a comment but may be something we could come back to in the 1 discussion when we talk about the areas that are most applicable. 2 3 I did have another question about one of the ARB recommendations for – or their first 4 recommendation for eliminating the maximum FAR and using other standards to implicitly 5 restrict FAR. I think the staff reference is well noted that this probably takes more analysis, but 6 do we have any gut sense for what the practical difference in FAR or how much more 7 permissive the ARB's recommendation actually would be? 8 9 Jean Eisberg: I think what happens when you eliminate – the City generally does not regulate 10 residential density dwelling units an acre, particularly in the commercial zones. It's only 11 regulated in the RM zones. So if you don't have residential density and if you don't have FAR, 12 then it’s the – all the other standards that set the development envelope, the box that you can 13 build in. And so it basically would be height, lot coverage, setbacks that create that box. FAR is a 14 numeric value, but it does feel a little bit squishy. Like, what does a 3.0 FAR look like? It can look 15 like many things. It can be long and skinny or it can be tall and narrow depending on the lot 16 coverage, the setbacks, the building height. So I think it is more difficult to visualize, but again, 17 those other set of standards set the box. I can't say precisely if it's going to mean a whole lot 18 more FAR or less. One thing that the zoning changes in January did was try to align FAR and 19 building height and lot coverage. The FARs were fairly low, and so the rezoning that happened 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. in January bumped up those FARs to build out the box, to build out the height. It really didn't 1 change height very much with those changes that were made in January. So maybe that's – I 2 don't know if that's a helpful sort of color, but I can't really say too much more about what may 3 or may not happen if we reduce or eliminate FAR. 4 5 Commissioner Lu: Got it. That's helpful. I just wanted to understand kind of what the – roughly 6 what kind of risk reward would be and whether that would merit more study, and it sounds like 7 we don't quite know how much more FAR we could potentially get. So we would really need to 8 study kind of from scratch to get a better picture of this. Okay. Thank you. Those were my initial 9 questions. 10 11 Chair Chang: Thanks, Commissioner Lu. Commissioner Akin? 12 13 Commissioner Akin: Thank you, Chair. I'd like to follow up on the affordability definition just a 14 little bit more. I appreciate the virtue of using the average number because that makes the 15 financials more predictable. Unfortunately, it makes other things less predictable. For example, 16 you can no longer have first come, first serve as a waitlist policy because you have to make sure 17 that whoever is coming in fits within the average. So there is some complexity there. Secondly, 18 the 100 percent of AMI target I was a little worried about because using the HUD 30 percent 19 rule, that results in rents that are already very close to the market rate. We talked about this a 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. little bit in the study session. So the effect of that is that allowing any number of households at 1 120 percent of AMI just reduces the number of households that can move in at below market 2 rate even though the average is still about 100 percent. So I guess if I had to make a 3 recommendation, then I would say the right thing to do is just to set a maximum rather than to 4 use the average. But I appreciate that there are some virtues in using the average and so I defer 5 to staff's opinion on what the appropriate mechanism should be and I would be interested to 6 know if any of our – any of my fellow commissioners have any thoughts on that. 7 8 Chair Chang: We have Commissioner Hechtman next, but I want to just interject right here 9 because I have a question along the same lines. So for that average affordability, how would 10 that actually be implemented? So my question is along 2 lines. One, is it an average across the 11 numbers of units there? So in other words, if you have one unit that is at 120 percent and 12 another unit that is at 80 percent, then the average would be considered 100 percent? So let 13 me pause there for an answer to that question. Or is it going to be based on square feet? 14 15 Albert Yang: So it would be based on units and unit type, so number of bedrooms per unit most 16 likely. 17 18 Chair Chang: And is the reason for that because we can't make it square feet? Because one of 19 the things that we, one of the things that we – that I have seen and that I object to often is that 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. there's these really, really small units that effectively become market rate because the market 1 pricing for any given unit is based on location, age of unit, size of unit. And so you can have a 1 2 bedroom that's $1000 per month and then another 1 bedroom that is $1000 a month and one 3 of those would be below market and the other one would be at market if you understand my 4 meaning. So it is possible for us to make an average based on square feet? 5 6 Albert Yang: Sure, that's certainly possible. You could basically weight the average by square 7 feet. 8 9 Chair Chang: Right. Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. And then my second question in terms of 10 implementation is how would this be done practically? Is it that each unit would be earmarked 11 and specified as deed restricted at a particular affordability level so that the averaging happens 12 kind of at the time the development is designed rather than with the rental to each successive 13 tenant? 14 15 Albert Yang: That's right. The averaging would be done upfront at the permitting stage and then 16 each unit would be – have a certain affordability level that would be set. 17 18 Chair Chang: Okay. And then finally, I'm foreseeing implementation challenges here. How are 19 things like grounding happening, right? Because if you have – or if we were to do square feet, 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. are developers allowed to say this unit is capped at 87 percent affordability as opposed to 100 1 in order to get the math to work out? 2 3 Albert Yang: Right. So our experience has only been with nonprofit developers who are going to 4 be meeting those HUD categories. So they will be at up – at 60 percent and 30 percent and 80 5 percent, and I imagine we would create sort of guidelines to have a similar system as 6 appropriate. 7 8 Jennifer Armer: And through the Chair… 9 10 Chair Chang: Okay. Thanks. 11 12 Jennifer Armer: …I'll jump in and add as well that as you do see these affordable housing 13 projects come forward, they do generally specify the affordability level of the units that are 14 proposed, and we ask them to identify which units are affordable at the different levels to 15 ensure that it's distributed through the project. And so through that, then that leads into the 16 deed restrictions that are implemented prior to building permit – or building final for those 17 units and final inspection. And so there is likely some flexibility on what exact percentages they 18 use for those deed restrictions, but we would make sure that in the end that that average does 19 work out depending on what the direction is that you provide. We also will likely look at if you, 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. for example, make a recommendation that is based on square footage, we will take a look at 1 that and make sure that we formulate something that is – that can be implemented before we 2 take that on to Council. 3 4 Chair Chang: Okay, thank you. That's my questions. Commissioner Hechtman? 5 6 Commissioner Hechtman: Thank you. So the fact that we here on the Commission are asking 7 questions about sort of the nuts and bolts of how this works really reflects the fact that we just 8 haven't seen many of these projects to become familiar with the mechanics of them, and that is 9 the problem that we need to remedy, and that's what we can attempt to do in part through the 10 item that's before us. So my attitude as an overview here, and I've said it before, is I think we 11 have to go bold. I think we have to be what we might perceive as overly generous to see how 12 the market reacts, knowing that if, God forbid, we get a rush of housing applications beyond 13 what our staff can handle, we can pull back in our ordinance. A group of applicants would be in 14 the door and that's fine, but in the long run, we can find the right balance. And I think that 15 that's preferable to starting with something that is too strict and lacks sufficient incentives and 16 we don't get the applications and then we're 2 years down the road. Then the question is well, 17 okay, how long are we going to wait before we acknowledge the incentives we've created are 18 not sufficient, we're not getting enough applications. So there are a variety of items that staff 19 has pointed to, should we do this way or that way. Generally, I'm supportive of doing it in the 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. way that creates the best opportunity that we might get projects in the door that are subject to 1 some level of architectural review. I'm supportive of the ARB recommendations except the 2 parking still gives me a little heartburn, but our public speaker tonight mentioning, I think it was 3 the public speaker mentioning that Mountain View has just done away with parking 4 requirements in whatever areas that is applicable to reminds me and should remind all of us 5 that we're not operating in a vacuum here in Palo Alto. So not only do we have to create a 6 program that the development community sees the potential to have a successful project, we 7 are competing against the site in Mountain View and the site in Menlo Park and Redwood City 8 and so forth to see if those sites are more attractive. And so it's another reason – it's not a 9 reason to match those cities characteristic for characteristic, but it is a reason to go bold where 10 we think it's appropriate for Palo Alto so that we can maybe have some offsetting incentives 11 that maybe Mountain View doesn't have. And so while we may require more parking than they 12 do, we offer some other aspect that they don't and that will bring the development community 13 here to submit applications. So those are my overall thoughts on the item before us. Thanks. 14 15 Chair Chang: Vice Chair Reckdahl. 16 17 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: [To 42:31] follow up on that, I have a question for Mr. Yang. The State 18 does not allow us to downzone. If we change the HIP to be less generous, I assume that that 19 would not be considered downzoning since it's an optional program? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Albert Yang: Right. So we're not allowed to downzone compared to 2019. And so there's a lot of 2 things that we've done since then that have increased, and so we would be able to pull back 3 from those programs. In addition… 4 5 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: But the State is just for the underlying zoning, correct? This is an optional 6 program? 7 8 Albert Yang: The prohibition on downzoning is not that specific. It just says that we won't 9 change our zoning to reduce the intensity of development. So that could be broad enough to 10 encompass this type of program. 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Oh, okay. But you're saying even if we relax it, as long as we didn't relax it 13 further than it was in 2019, then it would be fine? 14 15 Albert Yang: Ri-, yeah. Even if we sort of restrict this program, make it less generous, as long as 16 we didn't go beyond what it was in 2019, we'd be okay. 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. I generally support what Commissioner Hechtman was saying is that 19 too much housing would be a really good problem to have, so I think I would lean towards 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. being generous also. Question about the AHIP, the questions on that last slide, should the AHIP 1 be expanded to include all locations… 2 3 Chair Chang: Ms. Eisberg… 4 5 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …of the HIP? 6 7 Chair Chang: …could you pull up the slide, please? 8 9 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So this is the last slide in the package. And what is the downside of the first 10 one? Why – if we expand AHIP to all locations, are we worried that we're going to get a whole 11 bunch of [allocations 44:54] for affordable housing or… 12 13 Jean Eisberg: I don't think so. So again, this program is only for projects that are 100 percent 14 affordable up to 120 percent of AMI, but I don't think we expect – there's – it's mostly nonprofit 15 developers. It's possible it could be a developer who's doing all workforce type of housing, but 16 there's only so many of those as well. 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So what downsides would you see of us doing this? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: I don't see any downsides. I think it's a little bit of a change in the program. The 1 program was originally intended for sites near transit. So it's sort of a change in the purpose of 2 the program, but it seems like it's consistent with the Housing Element to encourage housing 3 production and affordability, which is why we suggested thinking about it a little more broadly 4 than the program in the Housing Element. 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Thank you. The – I have a question about – Commissioner Chang or 7 Chair Chang had the question about 1500. That seems rather small to me. I understand we 8 want to scale it back because when you have housing above retail, there is going to be some 9 overhead of stairways and parking and other things like that, but if you have a 10,000 square 10 foot lot, I would think you'd want to have much more than 1500 retail. 11 12 Jean Eisberg: So again, that 1500 square feet is an existing standard. So we just didn't change 13 that standard. I would… 14 15 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: But that was a standard for [inaudible 46:34]… 16 17 Jean Eisberg: …[inaudible 46:34] 10,000 square foot site… 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: [Inaudible 46:37]. But 1500 is the standard for no additional parking 1 needed, correct? 2 3 Jean Eisberg: It's also the standard for reduced retail preservation replacement requirement. 4 So… 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: And what condition is that? When could I satisfy that if I'm a developer? 7 8 Jean Eisberg: So the way the Retail Preservation Ordinance works, if you have existing retail, 9 retail-like uses on a site, you're supposed to replace that in kind. Let's say you had a 5000 10 square foot retail space, which is fairly large, you would be required to replace all 5000 square 11 feet. As it stands today, the ordinance allows residential mixed-used projects with at least 30 12 dwelling units an acre to replace not the full 5000 square feet but instead this lower limit of 13 1500 square feet. And so we've retained that requirement, and I think even for a 10,000 square 14 foot site that is parked at the ground level, it's actually tricky to fit in even that retail space. The 15 competition at the ground floor is really intense for the lobby, for the mailroom, for 16 mechanicals, for the parking. So even getting in that 1500 square feet can be tricky, which is 17 why we have – the code, I think, already has this exemption for that amount of parking. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. What about if it's a large parcel? I would – some of these parcels are 1 really tiny and some of them are huge, and it seems strange to have a fixed amount. 2 3 Jean Eisberg: Another way you could think about it is sort of a percentage requirement. We 4 kept it consistent with the way the current code is written, but yes, there are other ways you 5 could think about having a reduced requirement. 6 7 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Do you have a question? [No 48:31]. Do you have some guidance on how 8 we could do that? Do we have – have we looked into this at all, what would be reasonable? 9 Because we don't want to be unreasonable and make it impossible for someone to convert this 10 into housing, yet we don't want to throw away retail because retail is one of the things that 11 people who live in housing really want. They want nearby retail, and if they have to go down 6 12 blocks to the node to get retail, it's not going to be nearly as attractive if there's significant 13 retail nearby. 14 15 Jean Eisberg: Well I guess 2 things. One, I want to clarify that this isn't just a – it's not a retail 16 requirement. This is in the Retail Preservation Ordinance. So the code may still require retail in 17 certain zoning districts, and that is not being affected by any of these proposed changes. So if 18 the code today says there's a minimum ground-floor retail requirement, that remains. What 19 this program does – I know it's a little confusing because it's in the same program where we 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. have the HIP, but you can think about it as a little bit of a different piece. The Retail 1 Preservation Ordinance is being changed as part of this program, but it's sort of unrelated to 2 the HIP. So this is really about what happens when you have existing retail on a site. 3 4 We did – one other thing we did look at is the idea of, I mentioned the percentage. So let's say 5 instead of just a limited 1500 square foot requirement, it could [instead 49:54] be only half of 6 the retail needs to get replaced rather than the full amount that's currently there. Some of this 7 thinking is that when we think about what happens in terms of redevelopment of the City's 8 commercial corridors, it is a lot of replacing existing commercial uses with residential mixed 9 use. So if you look at the Housing Opportunity Sites in the Housing Element, a lot of them are 10 existing one-story commercial uses. If you're to replace that entire footprint, which is generally 11 a building surrounded by surface parking, it could be a 5000 square foot retail space, which, 12 again, is really tricky to fit in to a mixed-use building given all that competition on the ground 13 floor. So even replacing half of it, 2500 square feet, might be a challenge for a retail – excuse 14 me – a residential mixed-use project. 15 16 Jennifer Armer: And I'll jump in as well and just point out that the section here which is talking 17 about the 1500 square feet, since that actually is an existing component, the changes that you 18 see to that section are actually adding that that would not apply to sites in the – on the El 19 Camino Real retail node area. So we're actually kind of protecting those areas further along the 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. lines of the protections that were already there for the ground-floor retail combining districts. 1 It's just that it has – and then we have added in this shall be exempt from minimum vehicle 2 parking requirements pursuant to Chapter 18.52, Table 1, for retail or retail-like floor area. Just 3 since it is then proposed to be part of a mixed-use project, there seemed to be less need for 4 parking when you have that mixed-use activity in that location. 5 6 Chair Chang: Okay. I don't see other lights right now, so I have – I'll do my overall comment, 7 which is in general I'm very supportive of everything that's here. My concerns are really in 3 8 areas, which you probably guessed already given my questions. One was about that 10 percent 9 threshold for a 3-bedroom. I don't – I guess I'm like could it be 15. I'm trying to think about the 10 implications for that because that means that if we had 10 units we could have 10 studios and 11 one 3 – I'm sorry, 9 studios and one 3-bedroom and is that really – what's the right way to think 12 about that? So that's one area that I was thinking about. The other – the second one is around 13 the average affordability. I think I – I'm comfortable with the average affordability as listed on 14 page 125, but that phrase is also referred to in a number of other areas including as it relates to 15 exemption from the Retail Protection Ordinance. And so that leads me to my third area of 16 concern, which is really about the retail. If I look at where – having been on the PTC's retail ad 17 hoc and looking at where our retail is thriving, our retail is thriving all along El Camino 18 presumably because of lower rents there. And there is also some really well frequented bus-, 19 some businesses are not very well frequented. Some are, and my concern is that, for example, 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. there is a number of decently popular restaurants along that, and those will go away with this 1 incentive. And I worry that we'll have sort of this ghost town along El Camino. And I know that 2 we have the nodes, but as I was driving along El Camino trying to figure out, okay, where do we 3 have retail that's neighborhood serving and we talked about the 15-minute city and all of that, 4 and I look at the nodes that are currently in the plan, there are not enough of them I think. It's 5 not truly walkable if we limit it to those areas, and there's actually a lot of businesses in 6 between. Ideally, there would be housing on top of those businesses but – and I know that 7 there's all sorts of difficulties with respect to how shallow the lot is and how difficult it is to 8 replace the retail and the expense of retail, but I'm wondering what we could do to – it's like if 9 we needed to go higher in order to give the – to encourage the retail, maybe there's something 10 that we do there because what I would hate to see is to basically say all of Palo Alto has to then 11 flee to other parts – to other surrounding cities in order to access sort of the everyday retail 12 that's not the super-glitzy stuff that you see at Town & Country or on University or on Cal Ave. 13 Cal Ave's a little bit more mellow. But that would be a real shame. And so I'm concerned that as 14 written, and I don't think I fully understand the implications of this. As our public commenter 15 mentioned, it's a lot to digest, but that would be my third sort of area of concern. And so one 16 question before I end is how difficult or not would it be to modify the retail nodes? I saw a note 17 on Packet Page 135 that talks about the map being adopted by resolution. And so if you could 18 answer that question, that would be helpful. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: Yes. So I think that was the idea to adopt... 1 2 Chair Chang: [Inaudible 56:07]. 3 4 Jean Eisberg: …the map... 5 6 Chair Chang: Okay, good. 7 8 Jean Eisberg: …to – I think it says allow the Director to modify the map based on input from the 9 Commission from time to time. So it's not adopted by ordinance in that it is, again, a little easier 10 to make changes to. Again, I want to clarify. So parts – not all of El Camino is required to have 11 ground-floor retail today. So… 12 13 Chair Chang: No, it's not required but it's required to be replaced. That… 14 15 Jean Eisberg: It's required to be replaced if there's retail there now. 16 17 Chair Chang: Right. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: So that is a little bit of a distinction. I think it is sort of something to consider. It's 1 going to be very difficult to get mixed-use residential over retail along the entire length of El 2 Camino. As the Commissioner indicated, it is difficult to do mixed-use buildings in general. I 3 don't think we're expecting all of El Camino to redevelop, and the sites that have been 4 identified in the Housing Element and through the focus area are the sites that are more likely 5 to develop. The smaller sites probably will take longer to redevelop. The bigger sites probably 6 will redevelop first and may be able to accommodate more retail, but as it is, yes, you won't 7 necessarily see every building redeveloping as mixed use. Some of them would redevelop with 8 100 percent residential uses either because State law says that they are allowed to or because 9 the development cannot or does not want to accommodate ground-floor retail. 10 11 Chair Chang: Right. And certainly with the developments that we've seen come in on San 12 Antonio, for the most part, they haven't had retail at the ground floor. And so I think what I 13 would like to see is maybe – I wish we could spend an entire meeting looking at El Camino and 14 trying to figure out where we need to add a few more nodes in, but if we just added a few more 15 nodes in, that would make me feel a lot more comfortable about it because right now it's not 16 walkable and we're going to create a problem. Yeah, we're – and it'll be to the detriment of our 17 citizens. But I do want to see – I'm not saying what we should preserve all the retail there, it's 18 just that as done we might be shooting ourselves in the foot. Okay, that's it for my comments 19 right now. Commissioner Templeton? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. So I'm just thinking about what you're saying and I thought 2 maybe we could get some clarification from staff about what they're asking us to look at. Are 3 you asking us to look at for areas deemed to be part of the program what should the rules be or 4 are you asking us to determine what the areas should be that are participating in the program 5 or both? 6 7 Jean Eisberg: So what the program says is that we should waive the Retail Preservation 8 Requirement for opportunity sites, so that's one thing that's clear direction from the program. 9 And then it says reduced retail replacement requirements elsewhere except in some specific 10 locations: Downtown, GF overlay, Cal Ave, R overlay, and nodes along El Camino. So we've tried 11 to define those nodes along El Camino where retail replacement requirements should be 12 preserved. If the Commission is interested in adding additional nodes to El Camino, that's 13 something you could weigh in on now, but as we've expressed, the map itself we're not looking 14 to adopt by ordinance so that it can be more easily changed over time. So if you – but that's 15 really the area I think that's most open is the nodes along El Camino. Otherwise, the direction's 16 pretty clear from the program. 17 18 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Follow-up on that about Director approval for the nodes is – so it says by 1 resolution. So is by resolution mean by City Council's resolution as opposed to an ordinance or 2 what – or it is just the Director's call? 3 4 Jean Eisberg: Maybe I'll ask – all right, there we go. 5 6 Albert Yang: Yeah. So resolution would be City Council resolution and – but that is a much 7 quicker process than an ordinance. It wouldn't have to come through the PTC and it doesn't 8 require 2 hearings in 30 days. It goes into effect immediately. So the City Council is still 9 involved, but it's a faster process. 10 11 Chair Chang: Okay. Thank you. Thanks for letting me interrupt you, Commissioner Templeton. 12 13 Commissioner Templeton: It's fine. I'm just trying to figure out – that was a really long-winded 14 answer and explanation about whether we need to resolve this tonight or not, and I'm not sure 15 I heard the answer. So what all do we need to resolve tonight? Is it defining what the program 16 does or defining where it does it or both in terms of getting a motion passed? 17 18 Chair Chang: Well… 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Templeton: I'm hearing you say we could spend hours on this and I… 1 2 Chair Chang: We could spend hours… 3 4 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. 5 6 Chair Chang: …on it. I think that in order for me to be comfortable with it, I would have to have 7 that section come – in order for me to support it – because I just think that there's some pretty 8 big unintended consequences with how that whole retail section is written, we would have to 9 put a pin in that and ensure that the nodes came back to us. I think the rest of the things we 10 could probably tweak here tonight, but I'm not sure. I don’t know how other Commissioners 11 feel about it. 12 13 Commissioner Templeton: So… 14 15 Chair Chang: I don't want to hold up the process, but I – these are – we asked the same 16 question about the nodes when it first came to us in the study session and… 17 18 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: …unfortunately the – what's come back to us is not something that I'm 1 comfortable with. 2 3 Commissioner Templeton: And did we have this meeting tonight because there's a timeline on 4 this? 5 6 Jennifer Armer: So I'll let Ms. Eisberg answer the specific deadlines. I know this is one of our 7 Housing Element Implementation programs. I believe it was intended to be completed by the 8 end of this year and we felt that if we were at least getting a recommendation from Planning 9 Commission and had a scheduled date for Town Council adoption that that would satisfy it in 10 terms of our reporting out to the State. What I might suggest, since we do have an ordinance in 11 front of you for consideration tonight, taking a look at that, identifying things as has been 12 suggested that maybe should be tweaked or changed, but you are also just making a 13 recommendation. And that recommendation could include a recommendation that Council 14 direct staff to come back with a revision to the map that includes additional nodes on El Camino 15 Real. That then would likely be behind the ordinance but could be something if that's part of 16 your recommendation that there should be additional nodes. 17 18 Commissioner Templeton: So that's exactly what I was trying to get at. I was trying to help 19 identify a way through for tonight because it is problematic if we don't get something through, 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. but I like your suggestions about getting the where more refined and – but tonight I think we 1 have to get the how. So that's just my input there. Thanks. 2 3 Chair Chang: Do we have other Commissioners with comments? Commissioner Lu. 4 5 Commissioner Lu: I think I agree with the suggestion that we move forward tonight and with 6 direction to come back on retail. I think these nodes are difficult to define just in my head. As I 7 was hearing this conversation, I was trying to think, okay there's a Walgreens in South Palo Alto, 8 there's another cluster of retail here. A lot of these clusters are Housing Element Opportunity 9 sites where the Retail Preservation Ordinance doesn't apply anyway, so to what extent can we 10 really construct a node? I don't think we can come to that tonight, but I think we should still 11 move forward. 12 13 In terms of other comments, I certainly believe that the AHIP should be expanded to other 14 sites. I think this is low stakes. It's more affordable housing in more places. And just touching on 15 some other things that staff wanted comment on, I am definitely interested in following the 16 ARB's recommendation to eliminate FAR. I – please jump in if this is not correct, but my 17 understanding is that State Density Bonus would allow waivers of FAR anyways. So to the 18 extent that we do not have additional FAR requirements and go with the ARB's 19 recommendation, it's still in some ways not as aggressive as the State Density Bonus. So I think I 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. could move that forward. My only concern is still that I'm not sure what actually happens. I 1 don't know how much more FAR you actually get, whether it's just kind of a formalism or 2 whether it's actually I'm getting full amount of more housing. And so if we do move that 3 forward, I would also definitely recommend that staff try to do some preliminary analysis. Yes, 4 Mr. Yang. You're probably about to correct me. 5 6 Albert Yang: Yeah. I just want – I was just going to respond to the one statement about being 7 able to waive FAR under density bonus. That's true for areas where we have a dwelling unit per 8 acre standard, but for areas where we don't have a dwelling unit per acre standard, the City 9 effectively regulates density through FAR. So you can get a bonus percentage of FAR equal to 10 the density bonus, but you can't just waive it. 11 12 Commissioner Lu: Okay. Got it. I will think more about that and look again at the packet. In 13 terms of other ARB recommendations, I'm supportive of an extra 5 feet. I think that is relatively 14 marginal but does [allow 66:21] more welcoming spaces, better streetscapes, better retail as 15 well. And on parking ratios, I am definitely open to reduced parking ratios. I think at the ARB 16 recommendation, the – of half a space per studio unit and one space per 1-bedroom plus unit, I 17 think that is close if not already half of the required parking that we would otherwise require in 18 a multifamily development context. So actually, I'm rereading this and maybe getting this 19 wrong, in which case the TDM requirements might kick in and at least partially mitigate that 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. reduced parking. So yeah, those are my comments on the ARB recommendations and staff's 1 points for feedback. 2 3 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin? 4 5 Commissioner Akin: Thank you. Since we've moved on to the specific responses, mine are going 6 to echo a lot of what Commissioner Lu just said. Yes, expanding AHIP to all the HIP sites I think 7 is clearly the right thing to do. Given this year's election results, I expect the limitation for 8 affordable housing is going to be funding rather than site availability, but there's no reason to 9 put another barrier into place. With regard to the ARB's recommendations, staff's responses 10 look right to me. There's certainly several of these that I support. I have no problem with the 11 extra 5 feet and I'm certainly open to eliminating the maximum FAR, but in both cases, it does 12 require a little bit of attention from staff before I can feel confident that we haven't missed 13 anything or that we might want to apply it in a more general way. As Commissioner Hechtman 14 said, yeah parking, there is some heartburn there. So that is the only one of the ARB's 15 recommendations that I think I would like to stand pat on, but I'm certainly open to all the 16 others provided staff is comfortable with the implications. All right. I think that's it. Thank you. 17 18 Chair Chang: Commissioner Hechtman? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Hechtman: So yeah, to go point by point now, so per the slide that we're not 1 currently looking at, I'm supportive of expanding the AHIP as referenced in that first bullet 2 point. I'm supportive of the ARB's 5 feet of additional height for mixed-use projects and 3 citywide. On the parking mandates, what I was thinking is maybe we could – rather than bake 4 this in as an incentive across the board, we could provide an opportunity to get to these 5 numbers that ARB has recommended if you're going to do certain things rather than just every 6 project can have this because it's in this location. And this – I'm – Commissioner Summa is not 7 with us tonight, but I'm hearing her voice in my head talking about her concerns about TDMs. 8 And so I'm not sure that that's the right mechanism and I don't know that we need to decide it 9 now, but going forward, I would be open to the opportunity to reduce parking requirements for 10 sites that can demonstrate to some objective standard that they're not going to need that level 11 of parking. And so, again, I think that's a refinement maybe we could make down the road but 12 to hold the parking standards the way they are now. 13 14 In terms of the density standards, I do – I like the kind of compromise concept that we've come 15 up with, although I understand it's not to everybody's satisfaction, at least not yet, where we 16 protect against the microunit, the 100 percent microunit development by activating the no FAR 17 only where you provide 10 percent 3-bedroom plus units. And while Chair Chang's math is 18 unquestionable that on a 10-unit project that means one 3-bedroom unit, we really have to 19 look at this at scale. And to me what it means is out of 1000 new units, that's a 100 three-20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. bedroom places, and that's only ⅙ of what we're targeted to achieve, and so that's a lot of 3-1 bedroom places. And I think that's a good starting point. And again, I'd like to get this ordinance 2 in place and see how the market reacts. Maybe 10 percent is too much, or maybe we see a 3 bunch of people coming in with these 10 percent 3-bedrooms and that tells us maybe we can 4 push a little harder and ratchet up the percentage. But I do like that as, again, a way to address 5 the pure microdevelopment concern. And I think those are all the items on the – that were on 6 the bullet points that we were looking at. 7 8 Chair Chang: Commissioner Reckdahl? 9 10 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, I have a question about the 10 percent 3-bedroom. Unlimited 11 residential density, is that unlimited FAR or is that unlimited units per acre? 12 13 Jean Eisberg: That's unlimited units per acre. So that only affects the RM zones. This incentive 14 would only apply in the RM zones because the other zones do not regulate residential density. 15 16 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Could we give an FAR bonus in other zones? 17 18 Jean Eisberg: Yes. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. I think that would be a good thing, but – I think we should move 1 forward, but I think that that would be something that we should consider adding to this is – 2 because RM zone is – a lot of these units are – or a lot of these opportunity sites are not RM 3 zoned. All around all El Camino is not RM zoned, so I would want to see this as wide as we can 4 because there's a lot of demand for the units. 5 6 Now let me go to the last slide then. AHIP I think should be expanded to all the sites. The FAR 7 standard, probably I'm inclined to do that. I would want staff to scrub that a little more and give 8 a confident answer that there's not side effects, but I would think that that would be a good 9 thing. Five feet of height, that seems reasonable, but again, I would want them to scrub that, 10 but I'd be inclined to support that. Parking ratios, not at this time, I would not support that just 11 because I would love to reduce required parking. It's just so expensive, but I've never seen data 12 that we've had a successful reduction. It's all wishful thinking. If we reduce the parking, it'll 13 happen. What'll happen is that we'll be flooding our streets with cars and there'll be no place 14 for visitors to park. So if we can find an effective way to limiting parking, then, yeah, then that's 15 a good thing. Reduced parking makes housing much more affordable, much more feasible. So I 16 really would want to support that, but I would want some real data showing that we have a 17 program that can reduce that. That's all. Thank you. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: I don't see another light, so I will go about point by point. I'd to align my 1 comments with Commissioners Akin and Vice-Chair Reckdahl. I come out exactly the same. I 2 think that where staff arrived with respect to the ARB comments is the right place, but yes, I'm 3 open to FAR and the 5 feet, but I would hold [inaudible 75:10] [minimum] parking as well for 4 now. [And I 75:16] also agree with everybody else who has spoken that AHIP should apply to 5 everywhere that HIP applies. I would like to see some changes with respect to the retail section 6 of the ordinance or the retail changes. So we talk about waivers on page – exemptions on page 7 135. And so what's confusing to me is that sometimes it's 100 percent average, sometimes it's 8 80 percent average affordability, and I think that – and then in other places it's just 120. So I 9 think I need a chart to help me understand it, but maybe if Ms. Eisberg can just kind of recap for 10 us. I want to make sure I understand what's being done. And so if you – so actually, before you 11 do that, Ms. Eisberg, I have a question for Mr. Yang. Is the Retail Protection Ordinance – can 12 that be waived via density bonus? 13 14 Albert Yang: That is a difficult question to answer. So certainly applicants have asserted that it 15 can be waived and staff have at times pushed back on that, asserting that it's not a physical 16 development standard that's subject to waiver but rather a regulation of use. So sorry, I don't 17 have a straightforward answer to you. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: So we don't know is the answer? Because the HIP's "competition" is the density 1 bonus and so we need to understand with respect to density bonus what can and can't be done 2 with respect to retail. And by and large, that's my only area of heartburn here. So – because 3 without knowing, what I would say is that we should extend that 100 percent average to 4A on 4 page 135 so that – just so we're consistent throughout. But maybe then we can move on to my 5 question to Ms. Eisberg about if you can just kind of summarize for us what's in place right now 6 and then what each of these exemptions are. I think you had a slide maybe on this. 7 8 Jean Eisberg: Okay. I'm going to start with the ordinances on the screen, and then I can show 9 the graphic if that's helpful, but – so here again the [underlined and 78:20] strikeout is the new 10 text. The basic black text is the existing standard. So Subsection A. So this is exemption. 11 Subsection A says okay you have 100 percent affordable project up to 120 percent of AMI, so 12 that's your up to moderate income. Those projects are exempt unless it's within the GFR, so 13 that's Downtown or Cal Ave or newly the El Camino nodes. Otherwise those projects are 14 exempt. 15 16 The second layer under B is if – okay, so outside of those exemption areas, if you're 100 percent 17 affordable project at a deeper level of affordability, so up to 80 percent of AMI, but you are just 18 outside the El Camino nodes but otherwise on El Camino, the exemption only applies to the 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. affordable projects outside of the El Camino nodes. So you have to have a deeper affordability 1 in order to get that exemption. 2 3 Item C is new, and so this is an exemption for Housing Element Opportunity sites that are listed 4 in the Housing Element and that is a State law requirement. And so what we've tried to do to 5 get around the idea that some of these sites are within those nodes and in locations where the 6 City might want to see retail, we've said okay, if you're exceeding the realistic capacity that's 7 listed in the Housing Element, so you've already met that threshold to meet the RHNA and 8 you're using the HIP program, then you need to provide – you need to replace that retail 9 because you've gone over and above the retail – the realistic capacity. 10 11 And then fourth, Subsection D, is this existing provision for higher-density residential projects 12 that exceed 30 units an acre, that those sites have a reduced replacement requirement. So they 13 only need to replace 1500 square feet and they can exempt that replacement from the parking 14 requirement. 15 16 Chair Chang: Okay. I think I'm being dense here, but for D, so that was already in existence that 17 if you have more than 30 – 30 or more dwelling units per acre, then your retail replacement 18 requirement is reduced. Is that correct? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: That's right. And so we've – as Ms. Armer said earlier, we've actually made this a 1 little stricter because we've said except in the El Camino nodes. So currently today, this reduced 2 threshold was only available in Downtown or Cal Ave and now we've added the retail – excuse 3 me, the nodes on El Camino as well. 4 5 Chair Chang: Got it. Okay. 6 7 Jennifer Armer: So the first one is changed from abutting all of El Camino Real. It's kind of 8 narrowed it just down to those nodes. For those nodes then, you're looking at B can apply 9 where it's a lower affordability level. And then we're creating that new C. And then we take D 10 and we've expanded again. Where it previously only applied to the ground floor and retail 11 combining, it now also is applying to those nodes on El Camino. 12 13 Chair Chang: Okay. So then, to be consistent, this is where – to be consistent with our definition 14 of 100 percent affordable for the AHIP, it would seem to me to make sense that a 4A, you can 15 keep the maximum at 120 percent, but then it should be consistent and say that the average 16 affordability is at 100 percent. It's just really confusing otherwise because we have all these 17 different affordability thresholds. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: Well, and part of that, the reason that there are the different thresholds is that 1 they are applying to different areas, that if you're going to be doing this affordability project 2 and you want to be exempt from the retail replacement requirement, it needs to be more 3 affordable, right? 4 5 Chair Chang: No, I understand that… 6 7 Jennifer Armer: Okay. 8 9 Chair Chang: …but what I'm saying is that now we have 3 levels. We have one for the AHIP 10 where affordability is defined as maximum 120, average 100, and then here we just have 120, 11 and then here in 4A we have 120, and in 4B we have 120 where the average needs to be 80. So 12 I just think that if we just – for 4A we change it to 120 where the – because, as we know 13 already, even with 100 percent AMI, we're fairly close to market in many situations depending 14 on the square footage of the unit, if we just change it to match the AHIP for 4A. Anyway, that 15 would be my proposal very specific to that. And then separately from that, I had suggested that 16 we do a square foot definition for averaging. So that's it for me. 17 18 Commissioner Hechtman: Chair? I'm sorry to interrupt. While we have this slide up… 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Yes. 1 2 Commissioner Hechtman: …I'm wondering if there's a mistake here in B or maybe it's just that I 3 don't understand it, but A is talking about an area that is not GF, R, or a node, right? If it's not 4 one of those 3 things with this change, right, then here's the definition of affordable – in those 5 areas that are outside these 3 areas, here's the definition of 100 percent affordable housing 6 projects. So A is talking about – is excluding part of the sites abutting El Camino Real, but when 7 we get down to B, it says this is the definition that applies to sites abutting El Camino Real, 8 which would include the node sites, right? And so doesn't that mean that – isn't A – the 9 definition in A applies on El Camino Real outside the node sites, but now – and that has the – 10 but B is overlapping that. 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: I think I see what the issue is. 13 14 Commissioner Hechtman: Yeah. 15 16 Commissioner Templeton: See how they added on line 2 of A, they added this or El Camino. 17 They forgot to add the corollary exception on B. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Hechtman: Yeah. Well in A we're replacing the whole – we're – instead of 1 excluding all of El Camino, we're only excluding the El Camino nodes. And there's a – so there's 2 a definition for all of El Camino except the nodes that's contained in A, but I think there's the 3 same geographic area is covered in B because it includes the area along El Camino both inside 4 and outside the nodes. In any event, if staff could look at that however this plays out tonight 5 and if some cleanup is necessary there, if they could take care of that, I'd appreciate it. 6 7 Chair Chang: I see more lights, so – yes? 8 9 Commissioner Templeton: Let me just add. So staff, are – can you please respond? Is B 10 supposed to not be overlapping with A? Because we do need to know what we're voting on. 11 12 Jean Eisberg: So B is inclusive of everything on El Camino that's just outside of the R combining 13 district. There are some R combining districts in El Camino, so that would include the El Camino 14 nodes. So there's 2 options if you're an El Camino node, either that lower level of affordability 15 or this higher level of affordability. That's the way it's written right now. 16 17 Jennifer Armer: Through the Chair, I think there is a point there that with A it does state 100 18 percent affordable housing project not within the ground floor and/or retail combining districts 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. or El Camino Real node area, whereas B is saying 100 percent affordable housing project on 1 sites abutting El Camino Real. So that's both those that are… 2 3 Chair Chang: Inside and outside the nodes. 4 5 Jennifer Armer: …in the nodes and outside the nodes. 6 7 Chair Chang: Yes. 8 9 Jennifer Armer: And so it's for those that are on El Camino Real but not in the nodes that you 10 have kind of the 2 options, whereas in the nodes, because they're excluded from A, it's you 11 would be using B. 12 13 Chair Chang: Right. That makes sense. I unders-, yes. Okay. But we still have, with respect to 14 AHIP and HIP, 3 different definitions of affordable. And I'm just saying that I don't – I just think 15 that for the exemption that's an A we should change that one to say below 120 but with the 16 average of 100 so that's it consistent with the other definition of affordable as it relates to the 17 HIP and AHIP. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: And just if I can maybe help provide a little additional color. So the code, frankly, 1 does have different definitions of 100 percent affordable project in different locations. This 2 Retail Preservation Ordinance is a – in a different section of the ordinance than the HIP and 3 AHIP programs. Again, they were put in the same program, the HIP and the Retail Preservation 4 Ordinance, but they really are distinct issues and topics, so different code sections. So they're 5 not near each other in the code. So we can certainly make that change, but if the intention is 6 just to align it with the HIP because that's what we're talking about here, again, it's separate 7 code sections. 8 9 Chair Chang: Well, that's certainly partially my intention, but I think the City Council had also 10 raised at one point that we really need to look at the 120 percent affordability level overall as a 11 question and so here we would be one place to address that, especially since we've come up 12 with something already in the other part of – in AHIP. Yeah. So – Commissioner Templeton. 13 14 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. Since we're splitting hairs here, just to prevent future 15 frustration in 4A, line 2, we should clarify that language about [inaudible 90:22] the not is 16 applying to the second clause as well. Should it be a nor? I'm not trying to be silly here but this 17 is going to cause problems already, so I would like you to think about cleaning up that language. 18 I think we're clear here, but for posterity's sake, you need to make sure that makes sense. I 19 would also say to the Chair that your request for having a chart for this is a good idea and that's 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. something you can propose at premeeting to save us all the headache. Sorry, I shouldn't say 1 that part out loud. So yeah, I would say potentially if staff wouldn't mind producing that for 2 Council because it is proving challenging because there's a lot of clauses and subclauses and 3 sections that are applied to and not applied to. You can see how a visual would be helpful. 4 Thank you. 5 6 Chair Chang: Do we have other comments? Commissioner Lu. 7 8 Commissioner Lu: Yes. On this section, I definitely agree that a table or a chart could be useful 9 here and maybe even this part of the code while we're rewriting it could be simplified in a 10 table. I just actually noticed one small thing while we're here. On 4D, shall be required to 11 replace only up to 1500 square feet of an existing retail-like space. When we say up to, that 12 means you could by choice do 500 feet of retail and I think that contradicts the intent of what 13 we discussed and what was previously in the packet. So just want to confirm what the meaning 14 and interpretation of up to is in 4D. And maybe I'm reading that wrong, and if I'm reading that 15 wrong, apologies. 16 17 Commissioner Templeton: Possibly the word replace is significant here. If you only have 500 18 now and you only have to do 500 to – of replacement or – I don't know. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Lu: Ah. 1 2 Jean Eisberg: That's the intention… 3 4 Chair Chang: But it's still unclear. 5 6 Jean Eisberg: [Inaudible 92:31]. 7 8 Chair Chang: Yeah. I think it's a good catch. 9 10 Commissioner Lu: Yeah. 11 12 Jennifer Armer: I think that is the intention and so clarification may be helpful. 13 14 Commissioner Lu: Okay. Got it. I think that's something, yeah, we can just modify and maybe 15 get replaced with a table anyways. 16 17 Chair Chang: All right, I'm going to just continue to flay the dying horse here, but with respect to 18 4D, Commissioner – Vice-Chair Reckdahl had also mentioned his concern about 1500. And so 19 this – I guess the question would be about things like Walgreens and pretty big – bigger places 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. that we might want to preserve. So I just wanted to see if other Commissioners had thoughts 1 on this or is it just not really relevant because this is actually existing code and – yeah, I think 2 I'm just confused as to what's the new part and what's the old part. 3 4 Jennifer Armer: So I can confirm that the number, the 1500, is existing. So it's just the things 5 that are underlined that are new text and those that are struck out are proposed to be deleted. 6 So that number, as you can see, does not have the underline under it, so it is existing. The 7 change there was to expand that section to include the node areas. 8 9 Chair Chang: Okay. Then I guess it's fine. It's a little off topic then and out of scope if – okay. 10 Other comments? 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: I got one. Vice-Chair Reckdahl said we don't want to weigh in on 13 parking unless we have data. Is there data behind that recommendation about some 14 effectiveness of parking or nonparking? 15 16 Jennifer Armer: I'll defer to Ms. Eisberg if she's got any thoughts on the data behind the 17 parking. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: [Inaudible 95:06] proposed the p-, the change proposed is consistent with the 1 Housing Element Program, which said to reduce parking requirements consistent with State 2 Density Bonus Law. So that's what we've kept it at. We have not proposed further reductions. 3 4 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: No, I'm okay with what's in there. The question was do you want to go 5 further. And again, we're competing against the Density Bonus Law. And so if we're the same as 6 Density Bonus Law, that's not going to be a distinguishing factor when people are choosing 7 which one to have. One of the options that ARB was saying, well, we could further reduce that, 8 and I think we're pushing the envelope right now. So I would not feel comfortable pushing it 9 further, but I feel comfortable what's in the ordinance right now. 10 11 Commissioner Templeton: So my question, Ms. Eisberg, is was there any reason or rationale 12 behind the recommendation from the ARB or it's in front of us what is… 13 14 Jean Eisberg: So their discussion and recommendation was to further reduce parking as a way 15 to increase housing production. So right now, every unit requires parking. If you don't require 16 that parking requirement, you could fit more units whether on the ground floor or in the 17 envelope of the building. So it's really about a way to increase project feasibility because you 18 don't have the cost of parking as well as increasing the unit yield on the site. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: And [inaudible 96:37]… 1 2 Jean Eisberg: And just letting the market decide. It's not that there would be no parking on the 3 site, but that would just allow the market to decide what's appropriate for the… 4 5 Jennifer Armer: And… 6 7 Jean Eisberg: …particular project. 8 9 Jennifer Armer: Yeah. And their discussion really was try to get at what's been mentioned here 10 this evening of trying to make sure that this program is appealing enough that it will get used as 11 opposed to other state tools and I think a recognition that parking is a major burden on a lot of 12 projects and so they were recommending reducing it. But as you've seen in the ordinance, 13 what's drafted for you tonight really is what was discussed by the PTC at the last meeting and it 14 aligns to State law with other items being the incentives. 15 16 Commissioner Templeton: So there is no data supporting the suggestions from the ARB that 17 these changes would make it more likely to get things built. 18 19 Jennifer Armer: We did not have any additional data supporting that, no. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: Thank you for confirming. 2 3 Chair Chang: I don't see other lights here. I wanted to ask Commissioner – Vice-Chair Reckdahl 4 about his suggestion about an FAR bonus for… 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Ten percent more than 3 bedrooms. 7 8 Chair Chang: Nonhousing – was it nonhousing element? 9 10 Jennifer Armer: It was the non-RM zones. 11 12 Chair Chang: Oh, for non-RM zones, yes. For non-RM zones. I think that's a good idea because 13 we want to make this as appealing as possible, but I don't have enough information to know 14 what that should be. Ms. Eisberg, do you have a suggestion for what might be a good FAR 15 bonus? 16 17 Jean Eisberg: I think if it's something the Commission's interested in and you want to provide 18 that recommendation, we can come up with something for the Council. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Okay? 1 2 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 3 4 Chair Chang: All right. I don't see lights here, so does somebody want to make the motion? I 5 have a whole bunch of notes here. 6 7 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. Well, the only changes that I see are the FA… 8 9 Chair Chang: Do you want to go ahead? Go [ahead 99:04]. 10 11 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …the FAR bonus for non-RM and also then additional nodes on El Camino. 12 Both of these we don't have specific numbers, but we want additional work on that. 13 14 Chair Chang: And are we comfortable with the 10 percent for 3 bedrooms? Because I'd like to 15 see it go up a little bit. Similarly with the affordability for 4A on that page, I would like to specify 16 it to match. 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Maybe we request staff to look at that and give a recommendation. We 19 want it to be used, and if we have too high a bar, it won't be used and won't get any 3 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. bedrooms, but if we have too low a bar, we won't get as many 3 bedrooms as we could've. And 1 so what's that optimal point? 2 3 Jennifer Armer: And through the… 4 5 Chair Chang: Well, staff made a recommendation… 6 7 Jennifer Armer: Yeah. 8 9 Chair Chang: …at 10 percent. 10 11 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. 12 13 Jennifer Armer: Through the Chair, what I was going to say is this is actually a topic that we 14 discussed internally that we considered whether 10 percent was an appropriate level. And that 15 is what we're recommending based on an understanding generally of development and the 16 difficulty as previously stated in finding a location where you can have the egress windows that 17 you need for the 3 bedrooms, etc. So 10 percent is the staff recommendation. 18 19 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. I'm happy with that unless you… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: All right. Commissioner Lu had a comment. 2 3 Commissioner Lu: Oh, I was just about to comment on the motion and try to recap the list of 4 things we've discussed, staying in the same vein as Vice-Chair Reckdahl. So Vice-Chair Reckdahl 5 can totally continue with no interruption taken. 6 7 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: I just want to make sure – did I miss anything? Was there other points that 8 we wanted staff to look at or any changes? 9 10 Commissioner Lu: We were also generally supportive, I believe, of expanding the AHIP and the 11 additional 5 feet. And I think we also were generally supportive, though I'm not sure, about 12 recommending the FAR refactoring along the ARB suggestion with further staff input or just 13 kind of preliminary sizing of how impactful that change would be. So yeah, those would be the 14 only other things that I would have. 15 16 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: What was staff looking for for that last slide [inaudible 101:43] the 17 questions? Did you want the batch to be part of the motion, or did you just want to hear our 18 struggle here? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: So what we're looking for is a motion to recommend the ordinance as 1 presented with a list of additional modifications or additional information that you believe we 2 should provide to Council as part of their consideration. So if there's anything, for example, 3 some of those ARB recommendations that were not included in the ordinance but that you are 4 supportive of, then we would want to call that out as a specific list. 5 6 Chair Chang: And what I heard from colleagues up here regarding the ARB recommendations 7 was that what is currently included in the staff report is what we would be comfortable 8 advancing to Council as is, but we can certainly, as kind of a second part of the motion, say that 9 we support looking some more at these others. But staff had said in the packet that it's 10 probably larger than this ordinance to implement things citywide. So I think that in order to get 11 this done and meet the target for our – meet the deadline for the Housing Element, it's best to 12 keep it as is and then also say that we would support additional staff investigation to 13 implement those 2, or those however many it is, ARB… 14 15 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah, okay. 16 17 Chair Chang: …[inaudible 103:26]. Okay. 18 19 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So let's give this a shot here. I move that we accept – or let's see… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: You move the staff recommendation. 2 3 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. I move the staff recommendation, and in addition, we support 4 having AHIP expanded to all HIP sites or all HIP-eligible sites I should say. And in addition, we 5 want staff to investigate an FAR bonus for non-RM developments with 10 percent or more 3-6 bedroom apartments. We want staff to investigate adding additional nodes to El Camino, and 7 we also want staff to investigate eliminating the FAR standard and/or adding 5 feet of height to 8 the HIP program. 9 10 Chair Chang: To the HIP program or to the citywide – so I think it's not part of the HIP. It's just – 11 in other words, it's already somewhat there in the HIP ordinance. 12 13 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Oh, this – this is… 14 15 Jean Eisberg: [Inaudible 104:52] no FAR limit… 16 17 Chair Chang: Ms. Eisberg, could… 18 19 Jean Eisberg: …for the HIP program. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: [Inaudible 104:56]. 2 3 Chair Chang: Could you say that again, Ms. Eisberg? 4 5 Jean Eisberg: The ARB comment about not having an FAR limit was specific to the HIP. 6 7 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. I thought this was all for the HIP, this last slide. Another step would 8 be expanding those citywide. The first step would be to expand that… 9 10 Chair Chang: Sorry. My understanding with respect to height was that the Draft Ordinance 11 already includes something… 12 13 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: That was for retail. 14 15 Chair Chang: …for – yes. 16 17 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: And ARB is saying just add 5 feet across the board regardless of whether 18 you have retail or not. So if you add retail, you get 5 plus 5. If you don't add retail, you just get 19 5. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: Right, but staff was suggesting that we look at that change on a citywide level for 2 that rather than for the HIP only. 3 4 Jean Eisberg: To clarify, it was if we're going to think about the idea of removing FAR as a 5 standard, is it something to look at citywide, yes, beyond the HIP. But for the purposes of this 6 ordinance, the ARB comment and any reduct-, any removal of the FAR limit would be specific to 7 the HIP. 8 9 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So do you want… 10 11 Chair Chang: Yeah. I understand that for the – with respect to FAR. The second point is on 12 height. So yes, I'm – can you just restate the motion again because I'm not quite sure what… 13 14 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So on that last slide where we say eliminate FAR standard and add 5 15 feet of height, was that when people said they were supportive of that, were they supportive 16 citywide or were they supportive for the HIP? My understanding was this last slide is just 17 pointing to the HIP. Now the next step would – if we're happy with this and they do their work 18 and say it's a good thing, let's add it to the HIP, then the next question is, well, should we add in 19 that citywide. But I would… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: Can somebody bring up the slide he's talking about? I can't see his 2 screen. Thanks. 3 4 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So I think the question before us is do you add it to the HIP? 5 6 Chair Chang: And what I would say is that I'm supportive for the FAR to add it to the HIP, but 7 with respect to the height I would go – I would defer to the staff recommendation which is to 8 analyze such a change at a citywide level. That's what I'm suggesting, but if staff says it's okay to 9 add to the HIP, then I would go with the staff recommendation there. 10 11 Commissioner Templeton: So you're saying point number 2 should say should the HIP 12 ordinance incorporate? 13 14 Chair Chang: Yes because I think staff's recommendation was that it – if you look at Packet Page 15 107 – so I just need to know what staff recommends here because I would go with whatever 16 staff recommends, but my reading of the packet says that staff recommends analyzing such a 17 change and revising height exemptions at a citywide level rather than for the HIP only. So if 18 staff says it's fine for us to do it for the HIP only, okay. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: So it would be okay to do it for the HIP only. I think the recommendation there 1 was a recognition that the reason for that additional 5 feet was to enable mixed use, and 2 therefore, maybe that type of thing is more reasonable as something to be considered citywide. 3 However, it is – it seems there is general support here for this as something to make it easier to 4 construct and so a first step could be to include it in this ordinance. That is fine. That second 5 point on the slide was – we really are at this point just talking about what should this ordinance 6 include for the HIP and AHIP sites. And then while I have the microphone on in front of me, I 7 want to point out that there were 2 parts of your motion that talk about FAR. One talks about 8 investigating an FAR bonus for non-RM developments with 100 – or with 10 percent or more 3 9 bedrooms, and another was to investigate eliminating FAR completely. Those are contradictory. 10 And so, because if you eliminated FAR completely then you wouldn't need… 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yep. 13 14 Jennifer Armer: …the other, it could be that the elimination of FAR could be the bonus that you 15 are talking about in the earlier point for those that are 10 percent. Sorry for… 16 17 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay… 18 19 Jennifer Armer: …complicating it, but… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …[inaudible 109:56]. 2 3 Jennifer Armer: We can investigate and provide additional information on all of those points. I 4 just wanted to make sure there was clarity… 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. 7 8 Jennifer Armer: …on that. 9 10 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Your guidance on what you think would be a good thing would be, I think, 11 appreciated. We're not committing to anything. We're just saying more information. And so 12 your thoughts of how we should handle this – because one of my concerns is if you eliminate 13 FAR, then anything with an FAR bonus is no longer… 14 15 Chair Chang: So my… 16 17 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …a bonus. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: …recommendation would be this. Staff clearly has made a recommendation, and 1 that is the ordinance that is here before us because they could weigh things based on our 2 feedback as well as ARB's feedback. So what I would say is that the clearest-cut thing to do 3 would be to make a motion to recommend the staff's ordinance with very targeted changes if 4 we need them. So… 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: I'm further confused though because – let's look at the slide, [inaudible 7 110:44] the slide that [we have 110:47] up here. This add 5 feet of height – and the ARB said 8 that – were they talking about for retail in HIP or were they just talking in general citywide? 9 10 Jean Eisberg: They were talking about the HIP in general, so not the idea of mixed use 11 specifically but just the HIP. 12 13 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Just HIP regardless of whether you have retail or not? 14 15 Jean Eisberg: Right. 16 17 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. And do we think that that's a good thing? I think 5 feet – what's in 18 the ordinance right now, the 5 feet for retail is a really good thing. The question is do we want 19 to give them an extra 5 feet. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: Opinions, colleagues? 2 3 Jennifer Armer: And… 4 5 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin? 6 7 Jennifer Armer: …to provide. Sorry. To provide a little more context from the ARB discussion, I 8 think it just was generally they felt that the height was more useable if there was an additional 9 5 feet. And then the additional for retail was because the ground floor generally needs more 10 height if it's going to be retail. 11 12 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin. 13 14 Commissioner Akin: Right. So I see these as there are several recommendations here from the 15 ARB and it sounds like we have the extra 5 feet in the retail case already. So that I view as the 16 most important factor. So we're okay there. As future investigation, certainly height increases 17 are going to be considered for changes that we make in the future, so I don't see any reason to 18 call that out specifically in this motion. And I think the exemption for elevator and stair 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. overruns is also a good thing, but given – but again, I think that requires examination beyond 1 the scope of this particular motion. 2 3 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: But elevator overruns, they're already not counted, right? If – when I – if I 4 have an elevator going above the roof line, that doesn't count towards the maximum height. 5 6 Jennifer Armer: I don't know that off the top… 7 8 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 9 10 Jennifer Armer: …of my head yet. I don't know if… 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 13 14 Jennifer Armer: …Ms. Eisberg has… 15 16 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Well… 17 18 Jennifer Armer: …[that or not 113:10]. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …let's then move on here. Okay. So… 1 2 Chair Chang: [Inaudible 113:14]. 3 4 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: …let's give this a shot here. I move the staff recommended ordinance. 5 Additionally, I request – or we request staff investigate providing the FAR bonus for non-RM 6 developments with 3 or more bedrooms. We request staff to investigate additional nodes on El 7 Camino. And we request that AHIP is expanded to all HIP-eligible sites. 8 9 Chair Chang: Second. But I would make one comment, which is make it stronger regarding the 10 nodes. I would like that to come back to us within a certain amount of time, particularly 11 because it's not something that needs to be done as an ordinance. So I would like to say that 12 we see it within the first 3 months of next year or something like that because I – these 13 developments are coming and I want to… 14 15 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. 16 17 Chair Chang: …make sure that we preserve the retail. Okay. So that would be my suggest-… 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So we're going to change that to direct staff to propose additional nodes 1 on El Camino within 3 months. 2 3 Chair Chang: Amendment accepted. Okay. Commissioner Hechtman. 4 5 Commissioner Hechtman: So as I started with tonight, I think we have to go bold here. And 6 what I'm feeling with this motion is we're not doing that. Instead we're doing sort of a wait and 7 see, let's go incremental. So let's not tamper with the FAR now, let's do some studying of it and 8 have, at some point, staff come back to us with how good an idea is it to get rid of FAR in the 9 HIP if in exchange we get this commitment to 10 percent of 3 bedrooms. Again, my belief is – 10 well, I don't know that this will come back to us in the next couple of years because this city – 11 every – we're having a special meeting now because we have that much work and staff has this 12 much work and it – you need to just take a position on this ordinance and move it on to Council 13 and let them do something and then live with it and see how it works. So it – just this concept 14 of we're going to go part way now and then study and maybe we'll mess with it in the next year 15 or 2, that's not realistic. So I would hope that the maker of the motion might sort of rethink 16 some of those parts of it and let's take our best shot now. And if we want the Council to 17 consider as a part of this motion we're approving whether they should direct staff to investigate 18 and put in their work plan whether there should be additional nodes on El Camino, I'd be okay 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. with that because then the Council and staff can work it into their work plan consistent with 1 whatever the Council's priorities are. 2 3 And similarly with the FAR, I thought our issue here is really limited to what the ARB 4 recommended was and that was within the HIP. They want to get rid of the FAR, and I thought 5 our counterbalance to that was if you're willing to do the 10 percent of 3 bedroom, then in the 6 HIP you get rid of the FAR. And again, if you want it studied, it's going to be a couple of years 7 before it happens and we will have lost all this opportunity to actually see in the ground if it 8 works. So that's why I was leaning on a couple of these issues toward just taking the dive. And 9 so just add those comments for what the maker and seconder of the motion, whatever they 10 want to do, if anything, with them. 11 12 Chair Chang: Commissioner Lu? 13 14 Commissioner Lu: I generally agree with that. I just want to explicitly confirm what staff's 15 understanding and timeline was to bring things like the ARB's recommendation for FAR or FAR 16 bonus for 3-plus bedrooms. Would that be a dedicated study that would then come back 17 through the full process or would that just be some direction and intuition and math that you 18 work out and then include in the Council discussion in the coming months? Ideally, it could just 19 be a decision that Council makes in a couple of months, and therefore, by recommending this 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. motion, we actually give the Council the chance to be as aggressive as Commissioner Hechtman 1 notes. 2 3 Chair Chang: Yeah. That's a good question. And my understanding of the motion was that it 4 would be done on the way to Council. 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Correct. [Inaudible 118:35]. 7 8 Chair Chang: So it wouldn't have to come back here first, but then Council would know that we 9 wanted staff to look into this some more and the ordinance that's presented to Council would 10 actually have those – that recommendation embedded based on the additional work that staff 11 feels like needs to be done on that item – that topic, I mean. 12 13 And then my comment with respect to Commissioner's Hechtman's comment about the nodes 14 wasn't that that would prevent or slow this down at all because the nodes are a separate 15 document. So this would go on, this would get approved, and then in – while parallel process 16 we're also revising the node document because I imagine that City Council is going to want us 17 to look at that anyway. So we can assign ourselves some work there. That, at least, was my 18 intent and thought. Can you confirm? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Vice-Chair Reckdahl: I confirm. 1 2 Chair Chang: Okay. 3 4 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: To me, I thought the FAR bonus would be decided before it went to 5 Council, AHIP would be added before it went to Council, and the nodes would be something 6 that would be working with the Director within the next few months. 7 8 Chair Chang: Commissioner Templeton? 9 10 Commissioner Templeton: Thanks. I had a follow-up about your comment on the timing on the 11 nodes. Can you clarify? I… 12 13 Chair Chang: So… 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: I'm sure I misheard but… 16 17 Chair Chang: …my understanding is that as – when it goes to Council, whatever the node 18 document is as of that date is what would be approved. Right? So if we happen to manage to 19 revise it before then and… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: But it sounded like you said there was projects in the docket that are 2 – we need to decide before they… 3 4 Chair Chang: Well… 5 6 Commissioner Templeton: …get to us. 7 8 Chair Chang: …what I don't want to do… 9 10 Commissioner Templeton: And that seems a little uncomfortable to me. 11 12 Chair Chang: Well, no, not projects on the docket but just that the more we delay – my interest 13 in having this come back to us shortly and putting a timeline on it is because I think that this is 14 work that Council would ultimately send back to us anyway, and I don't want it to come back to 15 us in 2 years. Right? So I would like to get another look at that, particularly since retail is fresh in 16 our minds as a commission, and then we can have a discussion on what… 17 18 Commissioner Templeton: So more generally, there are potential projects coming, not just 19 specific projects? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: Correct. 2 3 Commissioner Templeton: Thanks for clarifying. 4 5 Chair Chang: Correct, yes. Potential projects coming. Just like with San Antonio, we're just 6 seeing all these things and it's lost opportunity. Yeah. Thanks. 7 8 Commissioner Hechtman: Is it – I'm just wondering on the schedule we saw, is this supposed to 9 go to Council in January? 10 11 Chair Chang: In June? Is that the… 12 13 Jennifer Armer: No, we are trying to get it to Council in the first quarter of the year, I believe. I 14 can look up what we've got as a tentative schedule, but the goal was in the next few months. 15 16 Commissioner Hechtman: Okay. So then if I could ask staff, since it sounds like the intention of 17 the motion is to have staff provide some information to the Council that we don't have and it 18 won't come back here. And a lot of that information relates to a couple of the ARB 19 recommendations, which I think were made 2 months ago on October 3. So given with that kind 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. of head start, are you going to – does staff feel that they can look at those issues further in time 1 to meet your current goal of when to get it to Council? Is that doable? 2 3 Jean Eisberg: I can take this question. So yes, as you may recall we have a lot of information 4 from the modeling that we did on FAR. So it may be the idea that was thrown out about an FAR 5 – unlimited FAR for just the 10 percent 3-plus bedroom units or an unlimited FAR situation, but 6 we have a lot of information from that modeling. 7 8 Commissioner Hechtman: Yeah. So you're comfortable that you can provide additional analyses 9 in the timeline you're trying to get this to Council? 10 11 Jean Eisberg: Yes. 12 13 Commissioner Hechtman: Okay. Great. 14 15 Chair Chang: Commissioner Lu, then Templeton. 16 17 Female: [Inaudible 123:00]. 18 19 Chair Chang: Oh, ghost light. Commissioner Lu. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Lu: I – that was also a ghost light. I'm comfortable with the recommendation as it 2 is. I feel like if we want to be a little bit more bold, I could go for the 5 feet, but I'm not splitting 3 or worrying about that difference now. And it's something the Council can also take up later. 4 5 Chair Chang: Okay. Seeing no lights. Ms. Tran, could you please call the vote? 6 7 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Akin? 8 9 Commissioner Akin: Yes. 10 11 Vickie Tran: Chair Chang? 12 13 Chair Chang: Yes. 14 15 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Hechtman? 16 17 Commissioner Hechtman: Yes. 18 19 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Lu? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Lu: Yes. 2 3 Vickie Tran: Vice-Chair Reckdahl? 4 5 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yes. 6 7 Vickie Tran: Commissioner Templeton? 8 9 Commissioner Templeton: Yes. 10 11 Vickie Tran: Motion carries. 12 13 Chair Chang: Okay. thank you. What time is it? 8:05. Let's take a quick 5-minute break and then 14 we'll come back for the second item. 15 16 Study Session 17 Public Comment is Permitted. Three (3) minutes per speaker. 18 19 3. Study Session to Review Potential Amendments to the Regulations for the El Camino 20 Real Focus Area in Title 18 (Zoning) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code to Implement 21 Program 3.4E of the Adopted 2023-2031 Housing Element. Environmental 22 Assessment: On April 15, 2024, Council adopted Resolution No. 10155, approving an 23 Addendum to the Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report (EIR). 24 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Chair Chang: Okay. Welcome back everybody. So on to our second action item of the evening. 2 This is the study session to review potential amendments to the regulations for the El Camino 3 Real Focus Area in Title 18. So we first need to ask for disclosures and recusals. So if we want to 4 start down with Commissioner Lu. 5 6 Commissioner Lu: Unfortunately, I need to recuse from this item. I live sufficiently close to the 7 El Camino Focus Area that I won't be able to discuss it right now. 8 9 Chair Chang: Anybody else? Nope. I think we're… 10 11 Commissioner Templeton: Staff? Would staff have reached out to us if we lived that close? 12 Because I haven't heard from staff. 13 14 Albert Yang: [Inaudible 134:07]. 15 16 Chair Chang: That's a good question. 17 18 Albert Yang: Yes. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Okay. So the rest of us are all good then, right? Okay. Great. So let's start with the 1 staff report. Thank you so much, Commissioner Lu. I'm not sure that we will see him back 2 tonight. And this is his last cou-, his last PTC meeting before we will see him again on City 3 Council. 4 5 Commissioner Lu: Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you. 6 7 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Thank you, George. 8 9 Chair Chang: All right. Staff report, please. 10 11 Jean Eisberg: Jean Eisberg with Lexington Planning. So this is a study session on the El Camino 12 Real Focus Area. So by way of background, this is a code section that went into effect of January 13 this year and it came out of the Housing Element and the Housing Element Working Group, the 14 Council Ad Hoc Committee on Housing, and it allows generous development standards in 15 exchange for providing on-site, below-market rate housing for lower-income households. The 16 area, and I'll show it on the next slide, was seen as having appropriate context for taller building 17 heights, excellent access to transit, to services, several motivated property owners, which we 18 know based on preapplications and Builder's Remedy applications submitted. And so this 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. program is an alternative to State Density Bonus Law and to – essentially to the Builder's 1 Remedy. 2 3 So the purpose tonight is to discuss some ideas about expanding the geographic boundaries 4 and potentially revising development standards. And so the Housing Element included 2 5 separate programs about the focus area, one to come up with these st-, specific standards for 6 the current focus area as part of what we call Program 1.1, and that was the rezoning to meet 7 the RHNA. And that program included this focus area idea as part of Program 1.1. That's why it 8 was adopted in January. And then Program 3.4 talked about – already talked about the idea of 9 expanding the geographic boundaries. There were property owners that did come to the tail 10 end of those meetings and were interested in being part of the focus area. There wasn't enough 11 time at that point in time, so there's a program to look at expansion and to look at the 12 development standards again. Since that time, State law always continues to change. And so 13 there's a new bill that went – was assigned by the Governor and will go into effect on January 1, 14 2025, that amends the Housing Accountability Act Government Code Section, and it requires 15 zoning compliance under the Builder's Remedy but reduces the affordable requirements. So the 16 first row of this table, the way it is right now under the Builder's Remedy and under the El 17 Camino Focus Area, is a project has to provide 20 percent of its units to lower-income 18 households on site. This new Bill 1893 will allow alternative compliance options for the 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. affordable housing requirement. So you could choose, as it says here, to do 7 percent extremely 1 low or just 13 percent lower income or even 100 percent moderate income. 2 3 So in terms of the expansion geographically, we looked at a number of criteria in the South El 4 Camino area for where potentially the focus area could expand to. The size of the lot is really 5 critical here because in order to really utilize the 80-foot height – 85-foot height limit, the 4.0 6 FAR, you need a larger site if you're going to park on site. We looked at Housing Opportunity 7 Site locations since those have already been vetted as potential housing sites, looked at sites of 8 developer interest, proximity to transit, and sites that avoided abutting R1 districts. And so we 9 divided these into tiers, Tier 1 being the highest potential for inclusion in the focus area and 10 Tier 4 being the lowest potential. And the staff report goes on to really look more closely at – 11 recommended looking more closely at Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites and not recommending moving 12 forward with Tier 3 and Tier 4 sites for inclusion. Those sites could take advantage of either 13 base zoning standards or the HIP, for example. 14 15 So this map starts to look at those potential tiers. So in the darkest red, the Tier 1, the highest 16 potential we see around California Avenue, larger sites that have consolidated and abutting the 17 existing focus area. Tier 2 sites such as the North Ventura CAP area and north of California 18 Avenue. The Tier 3 and 4 sites you see more in the middle of the corridor. A lot of these sites 19 are much smaller sites. They're independently owned. Lot consolidation might be a little bit 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. more tricky. A lot of shallower sites; they don't have the depth that you see in the existing focus 1 area. And a lot of these sites abut the R1 zoning districts where taller heights might not be 2 appropriate. It's not to say that these sites might not redevelop; it's just, again, that they may 3 take advantage of the HIP where they're eligible but wouldn't necessarily be able to take 4 advantage of these more generous focus area standards. 5 6 So when we think about revising development standards, 2 things to think about. One is 7 potential revisions to existing standards within the existing focus area. And this is suggestions 8 based on feedback that we've received from developers and applicants, property owners within 9 the focus area about certain standards that don't quite work. Second is the idea of if we are 10 going to expand the focus area into the – some of these other locations that maybe are a little 11 further from transit, smaller sites maybe can't utilize that 85-foot height limit or 4.0 FAR in the 12 same way, do we want to look at reduced standards in those locations. 13 14 So a couple – in terms of the existing standards, a couple of things I wanted to highlight and 15 that are in the staff report that have been flagged as problematic by some of the property 16 owners within the focus area. So this graphic is showing the overlay of the required daylight 17 plane and the required height transition when a project site is next to a R1 zone, for example. 18 So the – there's a daylight plane that starts at 16 feet, 60 degrees up to the maximum height of 19 85 feet and abutting R1 zones. You also have a height transition requirement that is 2 step from 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 35 feet to 45 feet, and the issue here is that there's this volume of space that is allowed by the 1 daylight plane but not allowed by the height transition. 2 3 The second issue is related to the front stepback. So there's a front stepback requirement on 4 the El Camino frontage to not allow that 85 feet to go all the way up along the facade but 5 instead requiring this upper story stepback so you get essentially a daylight plane on the front 6 too. And the question here is really if we're concerned about the rear yard, especially where 7 abutting an R1, is there openness to having more of the development envelope instead fill in on 8 the El Camino side and to allow that buildable area to extend either out to the property line or 9 the setback line or at least closer to. So for example, when we think about potential modified 10 standards for the expanded [inaudible 142:07]… 11 12 Chair Chang: Ms. Eisberg? So whenever you switch slides, your first 5 or 6 words we can't hear 13 you. I don't know if it's a setting or something that's going on. 14 15 Jennifer Armer: You might just pause for a moment after you switch a slide before speaking. 16 17 Jean Eisberg: Okay. And we're almost done here. So the idea behind modified standards, again, 18 for the expanded focus area is there interest in having reduced height limits for the expanded 19 focus area. Lot coverage could remain the same. Parking limits could remain the same. Again, 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. the idea of – that if developers want to provide more parking to meet the market, then they 1 will do so. And setbacks, just keeping those consistent with the general El Camino standards. 2 3 In terms of the timeline for this program, the Housing Element indicates that this program 4 should be adopted by the middle of next year. So right now we're holding study sessions this 5 week with the Planning Commission and the ARB, and then we would prepare a Draft 6 Ordinance based on that feedback. The Housing Element conducted CEQA Review on this idea 7 of an expanded focus area, and so depending on the level of expansion, potentially additional 8 CEQA Review might be required. And so that would happen in the spring and then we would 9 come back with an ordinance to the Planning Commission before going on to the Council. 10 11 So our questions for you are here on the screen. Based on the mapping that we've shown, 12 which geographic area should the focus area expand to? Should the standards be adjusted for 13 those different tiers or different areas of the expansion? And then are the daylight plane and 14 height transitions acceptable to accommodate higher-density development when adjacent to 15 those lower-density neighbors? And then should that front stepback standard on El Camino be 16 modified to allow more massing on the El Camino frontage? [Inaudible 144:23] any questions. 17 Thank you. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Thank you, Ms. Eisberg. Clarifying questions from the Commission? Commissioner 1 Templeton. 2 3 Commissioner Templeton: Yes. Could you please go back to the slide with the chart about the 4 differences? Thank you. I was just wanting to hear your – I think you spoke to it and I just 5 wanted you to say it again explicitly separately why did you want to reduce the max building 6 height for the expanded focus area? 7 8 Jean Eisberg: So a couple things. So one, this 85-foot building height came about in the existing 9 focus area because of the existing height context. The Palo Alto Square already has taller 10 heights. They were larger sites. They didn't have, with the exception of the Creekside Inn site, 11 didn't have the R1 adjacencies. Closest to transit. Closest to jobs, California Avenue, services, 12 etc. So really seen as the – some of the better sites. These are the biggest sites. These expanded 13 areas have smaller sites. They're further from California Avenue, transit at least. And so I'm 14 posing it as a question as well but may not – it may be less – it may have – be less appropriate 15 for these tallest height limits and FAR could be reduced in the same vein [inaudible 146:11]. 16 17 Commissioner Templeton: So adjacencies in lot size – R1 adjacencies in lot size? 18 19 Jean Eisberg: Pardon? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: Your answer to why it shouldn't be 85 feet in these other areas is R1 2 adjacencies in lot size? I just want to make sure… 3 4 Jean Eisberg: So… 5 6 Commissioner Templeton: So it's what it sounded like you said. I'm – sorry, it's really hard to 7 hear you so I'm trying to summarize. 8 9 Jean Eisberg: It's also about the context. So the existing focus area closest to California Avenue, 10 services there, closest to transit. 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: Well, we're – okay. So the context is not just whether it's R1 13 adjacent and we don't consider El Camino adjacent enough for the transit, right? So that's – is 14 that what you mean by context? 15 16 Jean Eisberg: Yes. So existing context of the taller height limits, transit, services. Yes. 17 18 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Templeton: Oh, thank you. And I think I figured out what's going on with your 1 mic. I think it's when you stop it has a, I don't know, a 5-second warm-up phase before the mic 2 turns back on. 3 4 Jean Eisberg: Okay. I'm going to try… 5 6 Commissioner Templeton: I don't know if there's anything you can do about it, but just letting 7 you [know 147:26]. 8 9 Jean Eisberg: I'm going to try a headset instead, see if that helps. Pardon me. 10 11 Chair Chang: Other questions? Okay. Then let's take public comment. 12 13 PUBLIC COMMENTS 14 15 Chair Chang: How many public comments do we have, Ms. Tran? 16 17 Vickie Tran: We have 3 public comments, 1 online and 2 in person. 18 19 Chair Chang: Okay. Great. Let's go ahead. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vickie Tran: We ha-, first we have Amie Ashton. 2 3 Amie Ashton: Hello again. I'll just skip over my intro, unimportant, because really what's 4 important here are – the devil's really in the details I guess is where I'm going with these. 5 There's so much potential in these El Camino Focus Area sites. I'm so excited to see El Camino 6 redevelop, especially near Cal Ave to support businesses. This is just such, again, a huge 7 opportunity to really get large numbers of units with a big punch. We have big lots, there's a lot 8 of them, and they're ready to be redeveloped. Probably the 3 biggest devils in our details: First 9 of all, it's the height transitions along the El Camino frontage. I know we talk about the canyon 10 effect. El Camino Real is a 200-foot wide right of way. When we don't frontload the units on El 11 Camino, that means they get frontload or backloaded, I suppose, to other uses, single family. To 12 me, it makes perfect sense to frontload on El Camino, get the units along that frontage where 13 they can really pack a punch and potentially impact neighbors less. So I think probably also as 14 part of that, the height transitions that have been – the stepbacks that are required when 15 you're facing El Camino. These are an issue. They're really difficult to waterproof. They're 16 vulnerabilities for fire ratings. It's difficult and expensive. We have other objective standards 17 that can really create that variability in a site frontage. So getting rid of these requirements is 18 key to unlocking more housing that is financially feasible. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. There's also the parking issue. I'm just going to mention it again. One space per unit is a lot of 1 parking potentially. And again, looking towards other cities, they are eliminating parking 2 requirements, not because developers won't provide parking, but it's because developers know 3 what they need for a workable financially fundable project. They're not going to provide zero 4 parking. They're going to provide parking for the units that they're building. 5 6 And then the last one is really the big one here. It's that setback to residential. And I know it's a 7 difficult subject. I remember when this originally came before Planning Commission. Staff had 8 proposed – and correct me if I'm wrong staff – a 50-foot setback. So the transition to residential 9 was a 35-foot height limit within 50 feet of residential. We also have a daylight plane in there, 10 and that was what staff had recommended. And it was amended to be 150 feet, that transition 11 150 feet. These are narrow lots. That completely obliterates any development potential for 12 residential on a lot of these sites and it's an issue. Again, we have a daylight plane. We have 13 agreed-upon transitions. A hundred and fifty feet at 35 feet tall is a lot of space. It's excessive 14 and it eliminates the development potential on most of these sites. So again, the height 15 transition and setback to residential, please study that, think about it, help us unlock units here. 16 It's also the parking mandates. Think about looking at what cities like Mountain View are doing. 17 Maybe even reflect the HIP parking ratios, which I believe is 0.5 for a studio and 1 per every 18 other unit; at least that's matching with HIP. And then also the stepback requirements on El 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Camino. Let's frontload. Why not put those units away from residential if that's who we're 1 trying to protect? So thank you very much, and I really look forward to hearing this discussion. 2 3 Chair Chang: Who's our next speaker? 4 5 Vickie Tran: Next we have Peter Giovannotto. 6 7 Peter Giovannotto: Pretty close. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'm here to 8 voice my strong support for the City's initiative to designate this section of El Camino Real as a 9 focus area for redevelopment. This kind of effort has the potential to create a more vibrant 10 urban corridor and it will meet the evolving needs of the community. I'm a local townie. I was 11 born and raised here. I'm back here living here, and it's inspiring to see the City actually taking a 12 step forward in what I think is the right direction to address future housing needs and urban 13 design needs. I believe that proactively shaping the vision for this area, the City's creating 14 meaningful opportunities for thoughtful redevelopment and more relevant land uses along this 15 corridor. In particular, I'm enthusiastic about the possibility of expanding the focus area to 16 include both my family's projects, which are at 3606 and 3781 El Camino Real. While we are 17 currently pursuing a redevelopment path through Builder's Remedy, we share the City's vision 18 for turning this section of Palo Alto into a lively urban corridor, and we're excited to collaborate 19 and align our project proposals with this vision as much as possible. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Lastly, I want to highlight the importance of creating the right conditions for redevelopment, 2 not only to ensure that projects are financially feasible but also to ensure great design and a 3 dynamic environment. Expanding and refining the focus area to support these goals is an 4 admirable step in the right direction, and I fully support the City's initiative. Thank you again for 5 giving me the chance to speak. 6 7 Chair Chang: Thank you. And who's our next speaker? 8 9 Vickie Tran: Next we have Winter Gery from Zoom. 10 11 Winter Dellenbach: Winter Dellenbach. You know, unlike the first 2 speakers, this is my 12 neighborhood. I live in Barron Park. And listening to this discussion is very, very difficult. I want 13 to point out a few things and then I have a recommendation. As of September 2024, there were 14 7 projects from Page Mill Road south down to as far as Curtner, and so this is along Ventura 15 Barron Park neighborhoods along El Camino. The total number of units, dwelling units that that 16 represents is 1363 total dwellings plus 192 hotel rooms at Creekside. So it's a huge amount of 17 development. No one knows what, of course, the transportation impacts are going to be from 18 this. It seems almost insurmountable. Certainly between the Creekside projects and the project 19 immediately across the street on Matadero on the same side and then the – and then another 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 177 apartments straight across El Camino would basically wipe out the safe route to school 1 that's on Matadero Avenue that feeds into a middle school, a high school, a elementary school 2 and goes straight up to the pedestrian bike pathway that goes to Stanford Research Park, to 3 Stanford, to Gunn High School, Terman, and so on. So we have a huge in a very, very few 4 blocks, just a very few blocks, we have an enormous number of either builder remedies or 5 preapplications. Here's my recommendation. So we just saw – there was a map up and we saw 6 a lot of dark area along El Camino. There are 4 blocks from Matadero to Los Robles. Those are 7 the only really 2 significant ways into Barron Park. We're a cul-de-sac neighborhood. I suggest 8 that 4 blocks from Matadero to Los Robles simply not be included in any expansion of the focus 9 area from Matadero to Los Robles to preserve at least one safe route to school, which is Los 10 Robles. Almost all of the g-, all of our retail is in those 4 blocks from Matadero to Los Robles on 11 both sides of El Camino. So you could save a whole lot of retail. Anyway, I hope you take this 12 seriously and I care about my neighborhood, as do my neighbors, and we're not just a cash cow. 13 Thank you. 14 15 Chair Chang: Thank you. Okay. So I think that's it for our public comment and so now we bring it 16 back to the Commission for Commission comments. 17 18 Commissioner Questions, Comments or Announcements 19 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Akin: Procedural question first. We have 4 questions before us. Would you like 2 to organize the discussion around those or simply take turns and rotate through what each 3 Commissioner would like to say? 4 5 Chair Chang: Ms. Eisberg, could you please pull up the slide with the 4 questions? So I think just 6 to speed things along it'd be great if each Commissioner could do an overview for us so we can 7 kind of see where the energy is because some of these things might not be as a big of a deal or 8 we might have agreement. Go ahead. 9 10 Commissioner Akin: Okay. To proceed with a high-level overview, most of my concerns have to 11 do with development standards, particularly the height transitions and the daylight plane, and I 12 have a good bit of flexibility on the other areas. 13 14 Chair Chang: Commissioner Hechtman? 15 16 Commissioner Hechtman: So I want to maybe expand our discussion, or at least as I looked at 17 this, a couple of ideas came to mind. And the first one is really related to what geographic areas 18 should the focus area expand to. We saw in the staff report that they're recommending Tier 1 19 and Tier 2 and reasons why and not Tier 3 and 4 at this time. These focus areas – essentially 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. we're trying to incentivize the result we want, right? And we're targeting areas to try to get the 1 result we want. And I think that there's an opportunity here to enlarge the focus area by 2 incentivizing assemblage or what the staff report calls a couple times consolidation. And I think, 3 for example, there was one of the Tier 3 areas on Packet Page 19, the Mid Corridor El Camino 4 Way. Part of the issue with that is that they are small lots and so it really won't work without 5 consolidation. So one concept I have is to incentivize assemblage, and the way that looks is 6 here are the standards if you're beyond a certain size, right? So I may own a single parcel, I 7 don't qualify, but if I partner with the parcel next to me or maybe the parcels on both sides of 8 me, I could. And that could make it worthwhile and will get bigger developments, and if I want 9 to go on my own, I just don't get those benefits. So that's one thought I had that could allow us 10 to expand the focus area but in a controlled way. 11 12 The second idea I have is something in planning they sometimes call feathering, which we are 13 accomplishing here. We basically have a single row of parcels on each side of El Camino and we 14 are feathering by our height transitions, stepping down as we get toward the back of the 15 property, particularly where there's residential. But the other way to do feathering, which I 16 think you might see a bit more of in other parts of El Camino outside of Palo Alto, is to look at 17 allowing the parcels directly on El Camino to have bulk and mass properly articulated but then 18 to upzone the properties immediately behind them where appropriate, and it won't be 19 appropriate always. But some of the R1, for example, behind some of this could be a higher-20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. density product. And when I was thinking about this, I was remembering during our NVCAP we 1 had one of the – I think it was a property owner on Pepper, which is a single-family street there, 2 and his question was real interesting. And he's like, well what about me? You're providing more 3 density west of me on El Camino. You've got the Sobrato thing happening on the other side of 4 me. Why can't I get upzoned and get some more density? And so I think that we could consider 5 expanding our – the scope of this investigation to see whether there might be some pockets 6 behind that first row of parcels that we're looking at generally. There are a few places I think 7 where they were co-owned going back that we bunched them, but maybe there are some 8 places where it might be appropriate to upzone a parcel behind and then you can have more 9 bulk on the front and use that rear parcel with some, again, more moderate zoning to be the 10 stepdown feather to R1 behind it. So those were the kind of overview concepts that I had that 11 might be useful in really getting the most out of these focus areas. 12 13 Chair Chang: Commiss-, Vice-Chair Reckdahl? 14 15 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah I had a question about the front setback on – let me pull up the – for 16 example, on Slide 10. Okay. The 20-foot setback up front, how is that determined? What drove 17 that value? Do we know? 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: So some of this was – we originally talked about a narrower setback actually as I 1 recall and ended up doing it deeper so that there would be more of a visual – the idea was 2 more of a visual change. It's really if you're driving down the corridor. If you're standing on El 3 Camino looking up, you're not going to see that high anyway. 4 5 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Mm-hm. 6 7 Jean Eisberg: And the other thinking was that it could create more of an open space like a 8 courtyard patio at the upper level. 9 10 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. Because part of it is like a daylight plane on the front but also part of 11 it is just to break up that facade so it's not nearly as imposing. And something smaller than that, 12 5, 10 feet might be sufficient to break up the facade so it doesn't look imposing. So to me that 13 would make sense is to shrink that down. So that would be one inclination I have. 14 15 Let's see. Looking at the questions now, my biggest concerns are the daylight plane, particularly 16 on the back side. When we looked at, let's see, Slide 9 – is this the height transition, the dotted 17 line for the current focus area? I thought the focus area had allowed more height. 18 19 Jean Eisberg: So this is the existing standards that apply on the focus area, yes. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. And… 2 3 Jean Eisberg: When you're – when it – there's an adjacency to the R1 zone. Different daylight 4 planes apply when you do not have that adjacency. 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 7 8 Commissioner Akin: If I may interject here. This is one of the subjects I intended to cover later, 9 but are you sure that that 20-foot setback that you're using here is correct for current 10 conditions? 11 12 Jean Eisberg: This is not intended to show – this is just showing the daylight plane and height 13 transition. 14 15 Commissioner Akin: Right. It's just that the daylight plane requires 2 parameters, not only the 16 angle but also how close it is to the structure. And what appears to be drawn here is a 20-foot 17 setback. I'm not sure that that is correct. 18 19 Jean Eisberg: This is – this daylight plane… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Akin: Not height. 2 3 Jean Eisberg: …is showing the initial height of 16 feet at the property line, not at the… 4 5 Commissioner Akin: Right. 6 7 Jean Eisberg: …setback line. 8 9 Commissioner Akin: No, not height. It's the set-, the question I'm asking is about the setback 10 from the property line to the building on the focus area site. 11 12 Jean Eisberg: Okay. So that depends on the zoning district. 13 14 Commissioner Akin: That's right. 15 16 Jean Eisberg: So… 17 18 Commissioner Akin: And for… 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: …it depends on the zoning district. 1 2 Commissioner Akin: Right. And… 3 4 Jean Eisberg: And it depends on the use. 5 6 Commissioner Akin: And what should that be for an R1? 7 8 Jean Eisberg: Let me double check. 9 10 Commissioner Akin: Okay. I'm sorry to interrupt. It was just – you need to be careful about 11 interpreting the diagram without the context. 12 13 Jean Eisberg: So it depends on the zoning district. If it is a CNCS, which is typical on El Camino – 14 frankly, the focus area has many different base districts. There's RP, there's CNCS, but it's a 10-15 foot rear yard setback when there's a residential use and it's abutting a residential zone district. 16 17 Commissioner Akin: Right. That's what I was going to get to later is what's drawn appears to be 18 20, but in the actual situation, you get a different outcome if it's 10. So I'll talk about that more 19 later. Apologies again. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. So the purpose of this slide, was this just to say what it is and you 2 want to get our feelings, or did staff have a recommendation? 3 4 Chair Chang: Which slide are you referring to? 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Slide 9. 7 8 Chair Chang: Okay. 9 10 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Sorry. The one that was up here. 11 12 Jean Eisberg: So this slide is just pointing out this… 13 14 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. 15 16 Jean Eisberg: …gap. Basically the daylight plane is not even – doesn't even come into play when 17 you have the height transition requirement because you can't fill out the daylight plane. So 18 what the staff report suggests is either reducing or eliminating the height transition and just 19 allowing the daylight plane to regulate. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Okay. Gotcha. 2 3 Chair Chang: I just have a related question to this because this is really only relevant if it's next 4 to an R1 zone. Is that correct? 5 6 Jean Eisberg: That's correct. 7 8 Chair Chang: [Inaudible 169:07] R1, R2, [inaudible 169:10], correct? Low-density residential? 9 10 Jean Eisberg: That's right. 11 12 Chair Chang: Okay. And so how many – most of the current El Camino Real Focus Area doesn't 13 even abut onto R1, so this picture is not really relevant for most of the current sites. Is that 14 correct? 15 16 Jean Eisberg: Right. So it's… 17 18 Chair Chang: That's – so you don't have that information in our map? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jean Eisberg: So this – right now, this only applies to the Creekside Inn site. 1 2 Chair Chang: Okay. And then for… 3 4 Jean Eisberg: [If the 169:49] 5 6 Chair Chang: …for the additional Tier 1 and Tier 2, which ones does it apply to there? Could you 7 pull up that map? 8 9 Jean Eisberg: So the R1 zone is shown in this sort of taupy yellow. 10 11 Chair Chang: Uh-huh. Okay. 12 13 Jean Eisberg: And so… 14 15 Chair Chang: That helps. Yeah. 16 17 Jean Eisberg: So it would apply to any site where the taupy yellow abuts the El Camino frontage 18 site. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Okay. Commissioner Templeton? 1 2 Commissioner Templeton: Thank you. This is a very interesting discussion. Thinking about one 3 of the public comments about how the – could you please don't change the slide; I want to 4 refer to that. But if you're going to bring the slides back up, let's go to the one with the other 5 diagram of the buildings, not the daylight plane but the setback on the El Camino side. I think 6 that it's interesting because a lot of times we talk about what is the experience from driving 7 down El Camino and I've heard that mentioned a few times tonight and in previous 8 conversations, right, the canyon effect and whatnot. But as someone who has lived on either 9 side of El Camino in this city, I have a different perspective about what would benefit the 10 community. And there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of noise from El Camino, and being able to 11 have some of these structures, as long as it doesn't intrude on the daylight plane, be between 12 the noise of that particular thoroughfare and my backyard or my neighbor's backyard or – I 13 think there's something to be said for that. And something we can think about is not only what 14 are the downsides of building it out on the El Camino side but what are the benefits. We don't 15 really talk a lot about that. So think about that and I think that would benefit the communities 16 on both sides. 17 18 So if we go back to the Tiers 1 through 4 with the R1 zone map that we had up a moment ago. 19 There you go. Having at least slightly higher than the residential properties, so having higher 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. buildings between El Camino and the residential properties could have some benefits in terms 1 of acoustics. Also, we mentioned some benefits of being able to have newer development and 2 better retail facilities there would also benefit the neighbors who, at least in the areas where 3 I've lived, have really enjoyed frequenting the retailers in these areas. So just throwing that out 4 there that we should make sure we understand it from the multiple perspectives. It's not just 5 the drivers that matter here. Thank you. 6 7 Chair Chang: Okay. Seeing no lights, I will go ahead. So I just wanted to level set here. I think 8 one public commenter mentioned that El Camino is 200 feet wide, and that is true for some 9 sections of El Camino, but right at Page Mill and in certain sections of Palo Alto, it is much 10 narrower than that. It's actually only 100 feet wide. We were just measuring on Google Maps. 11 And so that gives me pause in terms of the canyon effect because 200 feet is much substantial 12 in terms of how it would feel to both pedestrians and cars. I'm not only concerned about the 13 cars that are going through. So right at Page Mill and El Camino, it is – and for a couple blocks – 14 essentially for the length of the current El Camino Real Focus Area – it's actually pretty narrow 15 there. It's only 100 feet. That said, I agree with Commissioner Reckdahl, and as I think about my 16 experience driving down El Camino and also on portions of San Antonio and how the stepback 17 does change how it – how things feel, we probably don't need the full 20-foot setback in order 18 to achieve the same effect and could get some units there. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. With respect to the rear setback, we're really only looking at Tier 1 and Tier 2 expansion of the 1 El Camino Real Focus Area. I'm okay – I'd like to pull up Slide 9 again if you could. But really this 2 picture looks quite severe but it doesn't really impact – it impacts one site. And I think that the 3 – we went pretty big as it was with the El Camino Real Focus Area precisely because of the 4 limited impact on R1, and we just heard a project last week about the effect of really big 5 massing right behind somebody's – in the backyard. So I'm not sure how I feel about this 6 because it's largely irrelevant for the focus area. It looks like a pretty scary picture, but it's not 7 really relevant to the bulk of the sites, even with an expansion. Could we see the list of 8 questions? Okay. 9 10 And so perhaps standards should be adjusted for different sections of the focus area, meaning 11 if we do change things, we should pay attention to where it's R1 abutting. And then with 12 respect to the geographic areas of expansion, I had a question for staff because we received a 13 public comment here tonight as well as a letter from – a public comment from Sand Hill, I 14 believe, regarding specific sites that [we're 177:01] requesting to be included, and I wondered if 15 staff had looked at the – those sites at all and if we could point out where they are on the map. 16 I did map on my own where the Hansen Way parcels are, but then for the other public 17 commenter, I didn't catch the areas that they are looking at. And I'm also very sensitive to Ms. 18 Dellenbach's comment about those 4 blocks right along Barron Park because that is such a 19 retail-rich area. I just want to make sure that what we do there doesn't stifle what's actually a 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. pretty vibrant area in our city. It's one of the nice sections of El Camino. Those are my thoughts. 1 And I don't know if staff wanted to speak at all to those additional parcels. 2 3 Jennifer Armer: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. For the longer letter that was received 4 this afternoon from Sand Hill, or was sent in this morning, we haven't had a – an opportunity to 5 look at that in detail and I think we would want to have some internal discussions about those 6 points before we provided any particular recommendation, though developer interest in 7 general was one of the items that was considered as we were trying to provide you 8 recommendations for the different tiers. So this is a study session this evening. We're looking 9 for suggestions and direction, but we will be coming back based on this discussion and the 10 discussion with the ARB. 11 12 Chair Chang: Commissioner Akin, then Templeton. 13 14 Commissioner Akin: Thank you, Chair. So a passing comment apropos Commissioner 15 Hechtman's comments. One thing that occurred to me when looking at the site tiering, which is 16 really comprehensive. Good work by the way. I liked that a lot. One of the issues there is 17 parking, developments that contain parking. Are there any impediments to shared parking 18 facilities particularly in the Tier 2 and maybe some Tier 3 areas? If there are, then those might 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. be worth eliminating so that parking could be provided without having to do it exclusively on 1 the development sites themselves. 2 3 So the remainder of the comments I want to make at the moment have to do with questions 2 4 and 3. Should standards be adjusted for different sections, and my conclusion was absolutely 5 yes, they have to be. There's just too much variation in the expanded area, so it's going to be 6 essential. And to dive down into a little more detail, let's look at, I believe that was Slide 9. 7 That's the stepback discussion. So as I read the code, my first reaction looking at this diagram 8 was well that doesn't look right to me. And as I read the code, I believe it isn't. As Ms. Eisberg 9 said, the setback to the building is 10 feet in this case, [to have 180:29] like a CN-based district. 10 And if you work the numbers for that, you discover that it violates the 60-degree daylight plane. 11 So the vast volume that you see here is violated almost immediately by the rules that we have 12 in place today. 13 14 So that prompted me to go look at what the daylight planes give us compared to the stepbacks, 15 and what I learned from that is that really the height transitions to 35 feet and 85 feet are the 16 ones that matter. Those are the ones that have the greatest impact on both the daylight plane 17 and the buildable volume. And there's a lot of room in the middle here for some interesting 18 compromises that we haven't explored. For example, while I would say that a 60-degree 19 daylight plane with a small setback really isn't acceptable next to an R1, and as Chair Chang 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. said, we just saw some examples of that in a previous project, a 30-degree daylight plane from 1 an R1 is really pretty nice. And if you work it out, the 30-degree daylight plane actually offers 2 you more buildable volume than the stepbacks that we have today. 3 4 So there are interesting compromises available here in the middle that we could use. A 45-5 degree daylight plane might be acceptable, although from what we saw in our project last 6 week, I'm dubious, but there might be room for some agreement there in the R1 case but – 7 maybe in the R1 case but certainly when there are other adjacencies involved. So yes, bottom 8 line, I think we really do need different standards. It looks possible to get acceptable height 9 transitions even if we just stick to daylight plane as the physical standard, one that gives us 10 both good neighborliness for adjacent properties and more buildable volume than we have 11 today. So those were my observations on those. 12 13 Chair Chang: Thank you, Commissioner Akin. And Commissioner Templeton. 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: Thank you. Staff, can you please respond to whether this diagram is 16 inaccurate, not to scale, and/or misleading? 17 18 Jean Eisberg: So this diagram is intended just to show the daylight plane and height transitions. 19 It is true that the setback is variable depending on use, zoning district, etc. So the – if it's a 10-20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. foot setback or 20-foot setback, that would affect where this height transition takes place and 1 whether it could be – a building could start [plan 183:49] left or start where this line is shown, 2 but the daylight plane is measured from the property line and not from the setback. 3 4 Jennifer Armer: And so to more… 5 6 Jean Eisberg: And I – go ahead. 7 8 Jennifer Armer: I'll jump in and just to more directly, I think, answer your question. The one 9 component of this diagram that might be clarified or that we're really talking about here is that 10 potential building wall that is closest to the property line, that in some cases it could be half the 11 distance as what is shown here. However, as was discussed, that area above the building height 12 limit and up to the daylight plane, that is still accurate. So it's really just the part that we were 13 pointing out as potentially inaccurate in some cases has more to do with where that initial 14 building wall might be. And yes, in some cases if it was at the 10-foot setback, it actually would 15 be overlapping with the daylight plane, but this indication of volume is still accurate. 16 17 Commissioner Templeton: But if it were overlapping with the daylight plane, it wouldn't be built 18 that way. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Jennifer Armer: Correct. 1 2 Commissioner Templeton: All right. 3 4 Jennifer Armer: Correct. You would need to… 5 6 Commissioner Templeton: So it's a moot point. 7 8 Jennifer Armer: Yeah, yeah. [And that 185:08]… 9 10 Commissioner Templeton: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. So there's this empty space 11 above the stepback that staff has asked us to consider whether that's a space we want to fill or 12 not. So can we look at the questions again? All right. Yes, standards should be adjusted. Yes, I 13 think the daylight plane and the height transition would accommodate in most cases. There are 14 exceptions and we would have to figure out how to deal with that, but as far as the study 15 session goes and if you want that feedback, I think the daylight's much more important. Should 16 the front stepback standard on El Camino – we already talked about that. Yes, it should be 17 modified. And which geographic areas should the focus area expand to? This is an interesting 18 question and I'm going to ask you to go back to the slide with the beige. Yeah, there you go. So 19 it sounds like we're pretty much agreed for 1 and 2. For 3 and 4, 4 appears to have fewer 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. adjacencies to R1, though it still has a few. And maybe 3 – oh, I see. Let me take a different look 1 at whether 3 and 4 should be included. Someone mentioned that they were concerned it would 2 destroy retail in those areas. Do we have a sense of whether that has been looked at yet or 3 whether – if it hasn't, whether we can get some kind of projections that would help us 4 understand that? Because it is a very rich retail area for this ci-, for this part of the City. 5 6 Jennifer Armer: So it may be that gathering more information about existing uses might be 7 additional information. It looks like that area that was discussed is mostly these small shallow 8 sites with R1 adjacencies that are in the Tier 4. So that area is, I believe, not currently part of 9 the recommendation from staff to move forward with even if we were to include some of the 10 Tier 3. 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. It's tough because a lot of 13 those areas were developed a while back and have not been redeveloped and maintained to 14 the standards that some other areas of town have been, but they are really important to the 15 neighborhood. So I think if the question is should they ever be developed, that's a different 16 question than should they be included for development sooner rather than later. So – and then 17 to the Chair's point about some of the office buildings off of Hansen, I think that's a really 18 interesting question because there – there's a ton of parking and not a ton of retail or housing 19 in those areas. So it does seem like a interesting opportunity. The question is given how our 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. particular city handles office space sometimes, if you change that, you don't necessarily get it 1 back. So that would be an interesting opportunity for us to look at. I don't know if it'd be part of 2 this project or not because it does have that unique characteristic, but I'm interested in learning 3 more because that is my – me and my family have worked in that area of town as well and 4 wouldn't it be nice to have a little bit more housing and retail there too. So it's an interesting 5 opportunity. 6 7 Okay. So back to the questions. I think 1 and 2 are good for now, 3 and 4 not yet because we 8 have a whole ton of other issues and a lot of opportunity that we want to develop first, and 9 then everything else I've already spoken to. Thank you. 10 11 Chair Chang: Commissioner Hechtman and then Commissioner Reckdahl. 12 13 Commissioner Hechtman: Let's see. So just – I'm glad that staff is going to take some time to 14 digest the Sand Hill letter that just came in today, but I do appreciate the development 15 community taking the effort to engage. It would be helpful if they could do it a little sooner so 16 that we could benefit from staff's analysis, but I'm grateful that they made the effort in any 17 event and when this comes back, it will have been digested and to whatever extent it's going to 18 be folded in. I did review it and I did see some points that had logic to them and so I'll be 19 interested in how staff perceives it. And I also just appreciate – this is not an academic exercise. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. We are trying to design an envelope that builders are willing to build within, and this is a well-1 known builder who is commenting on our initial effort and giving us their feedback. Now, of 2 course, their feedback, as I read it, it's tempered, but of course, it's kind of their wish list, not 3 everything maybe they might want but a lot of what they might want. And so we can take it 4 with a grain of salt but we also need to take it as feedback from somebody who clearly would 5 like to be building here. And they've got some properties that they are wanting to move 6 forward on, and so I think it's useful information. 7 8 In terms of the 4 questions, which have different meaning in my religion, the first one of what 9 geographic areas should the focus area expand to, Tier 1 and Tier 2, agree with staff on that. 10 Again, I had mentioned earlier that if there are parts of Tier 3 that would be appropriate with 11 required assemblages, then I think that's something we should take a look at. And when I'm 12 looking at this map that's on our screen right now, one of the areas I'm noticing, which is Tier 3 13 is what I call the island between El Camino Way and El Camino. And so that has a physical buffer 14 from adjacencies and quite a distance from any R1 product. And so it seems to me that the 15 drawback, if you will, there is its proximity to big transit and so maybe that's why it's being 16 looked at as a Tier 3, but I think that area bears a little further examination to see if maybe that 17 should be something that is moved into a Tier 2 category. 18 19 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Different development standards, yeah. I think Commissioner Akin said it well. I think it's going 1 to be necessary. I think the challenge for staff is going to be how to do this without just making 2 different rules for every parcel and how can we sort of do building blocks of allowances and the 3 more of these characteristics that you – your site has, the more of these building blocks you can 4 use– so I think that's going to be a challenge for staff to figure out a way to do this that is not 5 basically a piece by piece. And so I'm looking forward to when we get something back to see 6 how staff has tackled that. 7 8 Question 3, the modified daylight plane and height transitions, are they acceptable? If this 9 diagram that we saw, which I think you maybe said was page 9 – yeah, that one – if that's what 10 we're talking about, no, that's not acceptable. And I think the comment was well right now it 11 only applies to Creekside, and to me that's not even acceptable at Creekside because we're 12 losing – again, the point of this exercise is we're trying to balance the experience of the low-13 density residential with the need for housing and development along El Camino. And to me this 14 doesn't strike the right balance because we've got this huge envelope which would actually be 15 slightly larger if we did slide this line over to 10 feet. And what you're doing is you're basically 16 going to clip the back – you're going to have a little notch at the back corner of the building. 17 And really the R1 – the low-density residence is not – there's not a countervailing benefit to 18 having all of that unused space above the property footprint. And it doesn't look like this issue 19 is showing up with any of the Tier 1 or Tier 2 except there was one corner of I think a Tier 2 that 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. did seem to be adjacent to low-density residential, so maybe it would apply there. So – but to 1 the extent something like this applies, it's not right and I think we need to fix it. 2 3 Should the stepback standard on El Camino, #4, be modified? Sure, absolutely. I don't know 4 what the right number is, but in the relatively short setback, there are ways to articulate. And 5 the point's been made, if you're on the street, you're not going to see this articulation anyway 6 because it's going to be too high above you and so – but I did think that Vice-Chair Reckdahl 7 brought up a good issue about the open space, right? The one thing that 20 feet could possibly 8 do is provide this upstairs open space. 9 10 Chair Chang: Mm-hm. 11 12 Commissioner Hechtman: And I think as we go forward, that's – I'm wondering about rooftop 13 gardens on the top of the 85 feet. 14 15 Chair Chang: Mm-hm. 16 17 Commissioner Hechtman: And maybe that's something when this comes back we can talk 18 about. It's more height, right? It's – when people are up there, it would be visible and maybe 19 there would be gazebos or something, but we have to think about that and maybe it's not the 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. best place for it to have it in a 20-foot strip along El Camino 6, 7 stories up. And so I do think we 1 can collapse that down. Thanks. 2 3 Chair Chang: Commissioner Templeton? 4 5 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. I just wanted to say that the – having the park space along the 6 most polluted area in our city is probably not my favorite idea. So I would not put it on the El 7 Camino side, but I like having it, perhaps on a different side that wasn't as close to the pollution 8 of the vehicles. Then again, once we've achieved no pollution, that might not be an issue. Thank 9 you. 10 11 Chair Chang: Any other co-, Vice-Chair Reckdahl. 12 13 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So I've been looking at the Google Maps. Get back to the slide. So this slide 14 really bothers me. 15 16 Chair Chang: Which one? 17 18 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: The one that's up on the screen right now. Slide 9. It – so this really – 19 there's 2 ways of thinking it. Are you the builder or are you the person sitting in that R1 zone? 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. And so if I'm in the R1 zone, I can see this being attractive and this is protecting me from being 1 totally overwhelmed, but is Mr. Yang on board? When I look at the map of the different sites, 2 are all these eligible for density bonus? 3 4 Albert Yang: Yes, everything is eligible for density bonus [inaudible 199:26]. 5 6 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So we look at those Tier 1 and Tier 2 and so forth, all those would be 7 eligible for density bonus and so that means that they could waive the daylight plane 8 altogether, correct? 9 10 Albert Yang: Correct. 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: So if we institute this and say okay the dotted line, the height transition is 13 what you get if you do the focus area or they can waive the daylight plane altogether, they're 14 going to waive the daylight plane altogether and they're not going to play ball with us. So I feel 15 sympathetic to the person in the R1 zone, but if we make this too protective of them, they're 16 going to get the density bonus and no daylight plane. And so now then, well, what kind of 17 daylight plane would protect that person in the R1 zone but yet still make it attractive enough 18 that the developers want to do ball with us, and I don't know what that is. I look at even 60. 19 Sixty coverts – what is that – and 60 – yeah, 69 feet is what it takes to get up to 85 feet. So 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. you're talking – I'm sorry, 39 feet. So yeah. So if I'm sitting at my fence line, 39 feet away there's 1 a 85-foot building. And that's really impressive. That would be – I would not want that on my 2 property. If you did something like 45 degrees and then it would be 69 feet away. And so that's 3 getting – that's a lot and a half away. That's still pretty close to me. I think 30 degrees would be 4 a better protection from – but I'm afraid at 30 degrees now that that's going to be a lot of 5 wasted space – or lost space I should say – lost space that the developer can't build. So this is 6 really tricky because it's just not protecting R1 but it's making this attractive so the developers 7 want to use our pr-, our plan instead of density bonus. And so this is something that I think staff 8 is going to have to work with is, well, how do we balance that? 9 10 Chair Chang: Well I think we could also – I see no other comments, so I'm just going to jump in 11 here. We could do a changing daylight plane, right? So that it's like the 30 degrees and then at a 12 certain number of feet it changes to a different one, and that would achieve the effect, I think, 13 that we want while not leaving any wasted space. So… 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: But it might undermine the meaning of the daylight plane? 16 17 Chair Chang: Well, it would and it wouldn't, right? Because if – for example, right here it's 60 18 percent but 39 feet away. It could – if we just adhered to daylight plane, 39 feet away you'd 19 have a 85-foot high building, which is, I don't think, achieving at least what I would want to 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. achieve with it. Others may differ here. But if then we said okay, at a certain number of feet 1 out, then we shift the angle, then at least it's more gradual. So yes, it would change daylight 2 plane, but it also – as we experienced last week, there's this – it's not just daylight, there's also 3 this massing issue. 4 5 Commissioner Templeton: Right, but we'd have to probably… 6 7 Chair Chang: And privacy. 8 9 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah, we'd have to call it all those things because daylight is daylight, 10 there's one sun. So what I'm trying to say is that the… 11 12 Chair Chang: Well, you just have a different daylight plane or – and stepup plane is kind of what 13 I'm suggesting, so I don't think… 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah. That would make more sense. I'm just – the reason I'm 16 nitpicking the wording here is because I don’t know how the law has been vetted and I don't 17 want to undermine the daylight plane if we then go that it's not really related to daylight, it's a 18 different law. 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Chair Chang: Well, I'm suggesting I think a stepup daylight plane so as to not waste volume. 1 2 Commissioner Templeton: Daylight parabola? 3 4 Commissioner Akin: I'll jump in since I see no one is waiting. Yeah, I did look at some of those 5 options as you might expect. And yeah, you could probably make something like that work. It's 6 just a variation of what we already have, which is stepbacks. It's just they're angular rather than 7 rectilinear. But yeah, you need to look at a diagram with a 30-degree daylight plane. There is 8 surprisingly large amount of building volume there that you wouldn't guess from just saying oh, 9 well, we're looking at 60 now; 30 is going to be half of that. Well, it's not. It's really a – it's an 10 interesting exercise and I think it tells us how much room we have to maneuver here. They're 11 really a lot of options. 12 13 Commissioner Templeton: It's that whole calculus infinite block exercise that makes the curve 14 by a bunch of different-size blocks. You know what I'm talking about? 15 16 Commissioner Akin: I do, but… 17 18 Commissioner Templeton: Is that what you're mentioning in terms of buildings here? 19 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. Commissioner Akin: I did not indulge in that, no. 1 2 Chair Chang: So I did want to raise one issue that I had not thought about that was brought up 3 by the commenter via Zoom, which is sort of the impact on one particular neighborhood, which 4 is Barron Park, where there's only – it's like a cul-de-sac neighborhood. That's a pretty 5 substantial impact for an entire neighborhood, and so I don't what the right solution is for that, 6 but that's something that I would want staff to think about. 7 8 Commissioner Templeton: It is most certainly not a cul-de-sac. What do you mean? 9 10 Chair Chang: Well, there's only 2 streets that go in to the neighborhood. 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: There's not only 2 streets that go into the neighborhood. 13 14 Chair Chang: From El Camino? 15 16 Commissioner Templeton: No. I live in that neighborhood. Those are the 2 primary streets that 17 she's referring to, but there's probably… 18 19 Chair Chang: Right, but a whole bunch of them just… 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: [Inaudible 205:47]. 2 3 Chair Chang: …dead end in to things, don't they? 4 5 Commissioner Templeton: No. 6 7 Chair Chang: Okay. All right. 8 9 Commissioner Templeton: I drive them all when there's traffic. I have to detour any of those, so 10 I've seen them all. 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: But I think her point was that there's not a lot of through traffic. Most 13 people who go through Barron Park go into Barron Park because they go in to a destination. 14 15 Commissioner Templeton: Yeah, I think you're right about that, but I don't know what that has 16 to do with this scenario. 17 18 Chair Chang: Well, I just think that the numbers that were cited were pretty stunning in terms 19 of the impact on one particular area of our city. 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. 1 Commissioner Templeton: What numbers? What – staff… 2 3 Chair Chang: The number – I don't know if they're correct, but the number of units that are 4 currently proposed with Builder's Remedy and etc., there. So we need to think about the larger 5 impacts, right, to our city. 6 7 Commissioner Templeton: Are… 8 9 Chair Chang: I don't know whether it's… 10 11 Commissioner Templeton: Are you saying we should consider this project as ways to throttle 12 development, because I think that was a very different approach than what staff has asked us… 13 14 Chair Chang: No, I'm not… 15 16 Commissioner Templeton: …to look at. 17 18 Chair Chang: …suggesting to throttle. I'm just suggesting as we think about which areas should 19 be added – and it doesn't look like staff is suggesting right now that we would add much in that 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. area – but to think about, especially as Commissioner Hechtman had suggested, that there 1 might be consolidation opportunities. Like thinking forward, what would the implications be 2 relative to what that speaker was talking about. And I don't know what the answer is, but I just 3 thought that that was an interesting comment. 4 5 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: I want to chime in. I didn't respond to Commissioner Hechtman about the 6 assemblage. I think that's a very good idea. The bigger the lot, the more efficient it is. You can 7 have parking better, it takes less space for everything, so that means that you have more room 8 left over if you want to do retail. So I think that's a really good idea and we can encourage that 9 as much as we can. 10 11 Chair Chang: Okay. Are there any additional comments? Does staff feel like we have given – 12 have we given enough feedback on the 4 areas of investigation or do you need more of 13 anything? 14 15 Jennifer Armer: I think that is helpful, though I will defer to Ms. Eisberg if you had any particular 16 areas you wanted additional direction on. 17 18 Jean Eisberg: I wanted to make one clarification which is that the existing focus area standard 19 does have a 20-foot setback when you are adjacent to an R1 zone. So you're correct that this is 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. measured at 20 feet for the purposes of showing existing standards. It's variable when you're 1 not next to an R1 zone. 2 3 Chair Chang: That's actually really, really helpful particularly because we're all so familiar with 4 what 10 feet looks like in the project that was here last week. So that's very helpful for us. 5 6 Jean Eisberg: And I appreciate everyone's feedback. We are going to the ARB on Thursday, so at 7 least verbally we can relay this more nuanced conversation to the ARB and get their input in 8 particular on daylight plane, height transitions, getting at numbers. 9 10 Chair Chang: Okay. Thank you. 11 12 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Can I say one more thing? 13 14 Chair Chang: One more thing from Miss-, from Vice-Chair Reckdahl. 15 16 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. The other thing with setbacks. If there are biking paths, we really 17 should make sure that we have enough setbacks that we're not impeding on the bike traffic, 18 say for out to school. Commissioner Chang, or Chair Chang was also looking at down in 19 Mountain View there was one with a 25-foot sidewalk and it feels very comfortable, and we're 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. going to be half that amount. So 12 along El Camino is not going to feel nearly as enjoyable, but 1 you also have given up 12 feet of – or 13 feet of apartments. So there's a tradeoff there. So 2 consider setbacks both for the ability to walk along the El Camino and also the ability to bike – 3 ride bikes through. 4 5 Commissioner Templeton: I love that idea. I would love to see better, newer, smoother, safer, 6 wider sidewalks in the Barron Park area and all along El Camino. 7 8 Chair Chang: Okay. So with that, then I think that concludes this item. And we're on to our next 9 agenda item which is probably approval of minutes. Oh, no. Okay. So then are there any 10 Commissioner questions, comments, or announcements. 11 12 Commissioner Templeton: Happy holidays. 13 14 Commissioner Templeton: Okay. Great. This meeting – oh, so many lights. Commissioner 15 Hechtman and then Vice-Chair Reckdahl. 16 17 Commissioner Hechtman: And maybe we have related items here, but Commissioner Lu left 18 early, unfortunately, because I would have appreciated giving him the opportunity to have 19 some concluding remarks. He was a tremendous contributor to the Commission during his 20 _______________________ 1. Spokespersons that are representing a group of five or more people who are identified as present at the meeting at the time of the spokesperson’s presentation will be allowed up to ten (10) minutes at the discretion of the Chair, provided that the non-speaking members agree not to speak individually. 2. The Chair may limit Oral Communications to 30 minutes for all combined speakers. 3. The Chair may reduce the allowed time to speak to three minutes to accommodate a larger number of speakers. relatively short time here. And we're, of course, losing our Vice-Chair under similar 1 circumstances to go on to better things, and so I'm hoping that he was hitting his button to give 2 us a few parting remarks because we will miss his contributions as well. 3 4 Vice-Chair Reckdahl: Yeah. Going on to bigger things, not necessarily better. I do want to thank 5 all of you. It's been a very good 3 years. I've enjoyed my time. I've loved the thoughtful process 6 and people thinking and contributing, and I think that's just so valuable. So I look forward to 7 hearing good things coming out of PTC and being very proud that at one time I was part of that 8 crew. So thank you. 9 10 Chair Chang: Thank you, Vice-Chair Reckdahl and Commissioner Lu for your service and for your 11 continuing service to the City. All right, meeting adjourned. Happy holidays. 12 13 Adjournment 14 9:34 PM 15 16 /km 17