Springfield City Council — November 8, 2021

0:04 all right i'm going to call the city council work session for springfield to order uh with roll call mayor van gorden here councillors pitts here mo here broadly here here woodrow here and pictionary and counselor pictionary is excused for the evening and then i'll turn it over to to the planning commission thank you mayor van gorden i'll call the springfield planning commission work session to order could i have a roll call please brenda richard mcginley president commissioner landon commissioner coivula here commissioner gill is absent commissioner

0:51 bergen here commissioner buck president and commissioner selzer okay i will note i see commissioner salazar in the attendees he should become momentarily he has been given permission to promote thank you okay great welcome commissioner salazar we just did roll call thank you present it's all about the timing when you get here all right well welcome everybody um this is our annual uh city council and

1:37 planning commission joint uh hearing um joint uh meeting and this is really an opportunity for us to kind of get connected and um and just sort of discuss things that were that both the city council and the planning commission are working together um and you know more importantly especially as we've been working more remotely sometimes we all feel a little bit more disconnected and having a chance to talk about like what's coming up in the city what's on our minds and how do we all work uh collectively better together is is critical the last point i would make and then i'll offer it to sophie to see if she's got any opening remarks before we get started um i i want the planning commission to know that like how much we on the

2:23 i appreciate what you guys are doing and the city council appreciates what you guys are doing uh you guys probably work the hardest of any of our citizen committees um and i know we ask a lot of you guys week in and week out and it's noticed and appreciated sophie did you have any comments you wanted to make before we got started just say welcome everyone it's nice to finally have a joint work session again it's been a couple years since we last met and there's some new faces on both the council and the commission so just excited for us to see each other tonight and connect and i'm grateful to mayor van gorden for suggesting that we come together again looking forward to our discussion all right before we turn it um over to

3:08 the staff we're going to do a quick round of introduction since i don't think everybody knows each other so we'll go through the city council first and we'll go by award um so i'm sean van jorden mayor damian pitts ward one steve mo word two free rod lee my pronouns are she her and hers ward three leonard stare ward four merrily woodrow ward five and counselor pictionary is the one that's missing so then um i'll turn it over to the planning commission and if you guys can do a quick round of introductions and then we'll get started thank you we don't have ward orders so i'll just call on everyone and maybe just say um which word you live in so

3:56 i'm sophie mcginley i'm the chair of the planning commission and i live in ward 2 and my pronouns are she hers commissioner bergen um i'm sorry um commissioner grace working here um and i live in ward one i've been on the planning commission for a handful of years um andrew buck i'm in ward six yeah pretty sure it's six um and i'm brand new to the planning commission uh for a few months ago

4:42 thank you and commissioner cueva mike cueva um i'm in my second term i'll be off the commission in 2023 and i did want to say that i believe that the recent appointments to the planning commission have just been excellent high commendations to the city council for your picks hello everyone matt salazar i am resident of ward 2 i use he him pronouns and have been on the planning commission for 11 months now

5:27 it looks like before thank you very much um the first item looks at like a set of discussion questions um that sandy's prepared for us so i'm going to turn it over to sandy good evening mayor and council and planning commissioners um i actually took these questions from the chair of the planning commission in terms of what they thought would be helpful to talk about with you um in preparing for this meeting with the mayor and chair mcginley we had identified two main topics for discussion for this joint meeting one being public outreach and public meetings particularly in the pandemic environment and how that has

6:13 gone and then the second one is the big project for the planning commission and the city is the development code update so these questions really um are best answered sort of interspersed throughout your meeting tonight because they do touch on both the introductions as well as the public outreach and development code update and so i'll just um say that if you wanted to take the cue from the first question here if you wanted to continue talking in terms of an introductory mode to mention something you're proud of from the past year in your service um to the city and if you want to skip that and just go on to public outreach i can launch into that

6:58 but as you wish i think we're ready to keep going on to public outreach alrighty so um the overview of citizen involvement that i provided um touches on the meetings that set themselves in terms of the planning commission we tried out a virtual assist in terms of springfield oregon speaks which allows for asynchronous meetings and then i also provided an overview of the three big projects um we've done more than those but three of the comprehensive planning projects uh with a table of the outreach efforts that have

7:44 happened over this past year and then working with the planners who had managed those projects identified a number of lessons learned that we can take forward as we look into doing public outreach both next year but also you know potentially switching over to the hybrid environment uh so with that i'm gonna just stop and then refer to you know questions could be about excuse me you know how did the outreach seem from both the planning commission and council perspective uh in terms of

8:32 functioning in this virtual environment did we were we successful in doing the outreach necessary um and what improvements could we make going forward and then commissioners could speak to your experience with springfield oregon speaks if you wanted to talk about that at all so turn it back over to you all right so who wants to get us kicked off with a conversation sort of about public outreach merely yeah um uh i i was aware of springfield speaks several months ago when it went online um and i went back into it today as if i were a community member uh to figure out how to work it and what

9:18 to do or how to how to make comments and and i i don't want to make people feel bad but it was very confusing um i went on the website the home page for the city and unless i went to the planning commission um and and worked my way through to all the way up to a contact there was just so many steps it wasn't easy if we want to um i think it's a great idea i like the idea of springfield speaks i like that i like to uh they're reaching out to gain their participation i think we have an evolving community we start we still have a certain percentage of people who are not in with the

10:04 technology but as we grow as a community and and with as we age we're going to have the majority of the community who is technologically uh connected so this is a good beginning this is a good start to get people used to being able to connect with um the the city in whatever way they want to and i think springfield springs is a good way to do it um but the problems that i had i had just a few things and i'll throw them out for whatever discussion or response people might have and i could have missed something so i'm not you know gonna be i'm not talking as an authority um i like i said it was difficult it wasn't to me it wasn't user friendly to be able to get to a point or a place where i

10:49 could make a comment unless i knew ahead of time a certain project or something that i wanted to make a comment on if i just wanted to make a comment from my part of the community it was it was very hard to figure out if i what if it wasn't attached to a certain project um and like i said maybe i missed something but i couldn't find it um let's see um what i was interested one of the things i was interested in is one of the comments that was made was um a having connections um having having uh a relationship establishing a relationship and then knowing um having connected with a project and that and i

11:34 saw the um the charts of participation and i've been involved with this main street project so i knew i knew what that one looked like um and participation-wise that one looks awesome but i also know that their outreach was tremendous i mean it went out very far in lots of different ways because they needed to have that in order to proceed and make decisions and so i expected the participation to be high and higher in that because of the different things that they use but it wasn't all springfield speaks that was related to that chart um i feel like i'm talking in circles but

12:20 um how would we know to direct someone to a project or to uh outreach how do we know to do that um how does someone get noticed that that's that that is an option to use like i said to me it was very user unfriendly momentarily um and it seems like we've got we've council has talked about different ways of uh nancy has mentioned uh having a agenda software which is going to pull topics and projects and and things together in a in a more uh linear way and um

13:07 is there a way to incorporate springfield speaks into that so that we can get so we can connect um people and comments with certain topics um i was i was that that's one of the things that came up um in my mind as i was as i was reading through this um that for this to be successful and really get again garner participation um interconnectivity is really key and so that we connect the people that speak the people that make comments uh the people who have been tagged by outreach but it needs to be it needs to be available and i know

13:52 we're just in the beginning stages of it and that's part of where my comments are coming from i would like to see it be successful i would like to see it be it be used and used well but i'd like the community to know that it's there um and that it's user-friendly that they can end and that it connects um with whatever part of the city or whatever project it needs to connect to or if it's isolated it needs to connect somehow or other in data assembly um so that so that we know it's there and we know to it knows to to be addressed so those are my comments um right now and like i said i'm tossing i'm just tossing them out because of what i did today to go through the experience of using it so

14:37 perfect thank you corey thank you um and i appreciate counselor wardrobe sharing that perspective because mine was different um i i didn't have the same sort of experience on the website i just went and kind of checked it out and granted i didn't spend a lot of time but i appreciate i i actually i actually thought it was pretty easy to kind of navigate through and to see what was happening um so there's there's probably something there in just sort of different experiences of it and wondering you know how do we get to something that is going to be useful for everyone um and i think also i was just thinking of it as one tool in terms of public outreach um it definitely is sharing

15:22 information and it's it was it's more accessible to me than um how i used to find just trying to figure out what was going on at like a council meeting i mean this way you can kind of look down and see what it is that you're interested in look at that so that's just my sort of alternative perspective in that i did not find it a challenge to navigate through and actually you know found it to be sort of fine and interesting and also didn't spend a ton of time on there but just like oh what if i wanted to ask myself a couple questions what if i wanted to blah blah and i was able to see it and i appreciated also having the sort of resource materials along with it so there's information there about like what is a quasi-judicial meeting and and here is our land acknowledgement and so i kind

16:08 of i appreciated that that stuff was in a place that was very public all right anybody else want to jump in here steve i'm talking about city's web page that's our image to anybody that looks at the city of springfield and they go to that webpage whether it's hopefully easy and informative to them uh and i've heard a lot of people have having problems with it and i'm okay with it now but i did it at the beginning too uh and i think i've heard acknowledged somewhere else that we need to look into that so i want to stress that right now i'd like to make that more user friendly for the public out there because that's how they view springfield the first time

16:58 hi uh so personally i mean i think the page is fairly accessible when i think about you know the larger picture how do we as citizens of springfield make people want to actually engage on that page and want to you know give comment to actually read the stuff because i mean i think there are a lot of people who just i'm not gonna say they don't care but they're busy dealing with their other things and and they also feel that government isn't necessarily accessible or for them i mean when you look across all boards of commissions i mean it's fairly homogeneous and so how do you get people who would not normally contribute to contribute and to me i think that's one of the hardest things to do i mean we can provide resources and make it accessible but

17:43 just because it's accessible doesn't mean people want to access it and so how do we fix that and to me that i think that's one of the biggest things that we need to do i have a vis a vision in my mind of a funnel um there's there's all different ways to be in in touch with the city springfield speaks testifying at council sending an email all those different ways um if you're a member of the community you're not involved you look at all the different ways and you just go ah you don't know if how valuable a comment

18:30 is going to be in whatever source you might choose to to proceed with your with what you want to say or who you want to get connected with what i'd like to see and i agree with corey that it is once functional speaks is a tool we need to take our toolbox and we need to create like a funnel so that we create a data collection or a data um whatever you would call it putting it all together so it interconnects it connects because having isolated tools is not going to create the resource that we want for the community to be able to feel comfortable that when they do connect on the on with the way that they're comfortable with they can connect if they're comfortable with email with a phone call but springfield speaks whatever way they're comfortable in reaching out they need to feel that

19:15 that's going to get somewhere and so we need to have some way of putting that all all together from the different resources down to it in a funnel way so that it gets to a point of where it reaches um uh sort of being sorted out and being uh in context so that it's valuable and and makes a makes an impact um thanks mayor um i was just looking at the city council web or the city website myself and it looks as though there are links for the agendas and the minutes um and

20:00 for public documents relevant to the planning commission and the city council and i was wondering if it would be feasible to have a search function by keyword um like for instance if you wanted to find out what had been going on in glenwood for the last few years you could just type in glenwood and look at the documents that were relevant um within the recent future anyway i mean recent past sorry recent future would be more difficult i think they've got that down as maybe an idea uh grace

20:45 thank you um it's very valuable to hear um the city council's view on this because you haven't been in it like we have um so in utilizing it there's a couple things that i have found really beneficial first of all any suggestions that we've had for sandy she's been able to take back to the company and work through and find solutions which i applaud them for um one of the things that i really like is i don't always have my ipad with me therefore i don't always have my email with me so i am able to log in from any device to sprinkle springfield oregon speaks and find um if i have down a down moment say i'm waiting for an appointment or something um i have a down moment to where i can go in and review documents um i have the accessibility is a lot greater um i think with anything that's new there's

21:30 going to be a learning curve um so teaching if you will be our community but that's an opportunity for them to go in and have everything more together so then they have that opportunity to do their research before they submit their testimony i think is helpful for me it's helpful having all of the testimony categorized based upon each specific topic that we're talking about so if i wanted to look at a specific topic i'm not having to file through or scroll through excuse me um an entire packet it's really helpful to be able to go clicking and finding things um i don't always log in to actually most of the time i don't log into springfield work and speaks and so the way that i'm looking at everything is almost as if i

22:17 am looking at it like a community member that's not coming to the meetings so i'm able to see what a lot of them are seeing um however i've been so one track focused to where i'm not going out and exploring like it sounds like counselor woodrow has and so um that's really good to hear um but when i'm using it on the back end it has been helpful one of the things that we um shared with sandy that we wanted to see is um as you know we have a rotating schedule for the planning commissioners to visit in on the council meetings um and sandy was able to work with the organization or the company to where we can have a tab at the bottom to have our schedule which has been really helpful because again we're not always next to

23:02 that email um that's on the ipad so i've had some overall pretty good um experience with it and and i'm excited to see what other things they could offer for us and what are other things they can do for our city all right thank you um and i would be interested as we kind of get into the planning commissioners to hear if if the public comment that you have comes to you feel like it's sort of an actionable form to sort of successfully consider for any any land use hearings that you have quite andrew um yeah so i'm i'm fairly new to this and um one of the things that

23:47 uh stands out to me is that when i when i'm reading through the public comments i'm noticing definite definitely clear positions and and definitely people have some strong opinions i don't know that they're always actionable per se but i i think it's clear where people stand and what their issues are one of the things that i wonder and i don't know about is when people do make comments in in other venues when i've made comments um on something knowing that that got read knowing that it got seen by somebody is always a really nice validation kind

24:33 of matters i don't know if springfield oregon speaks has a feature attached to it like that where when commissioners or other um maybe council members would look at that if it if it gives that feedback like hey this this is your comment has been read it's been received and i think that having something like that is gonna help with what counselor pitts was talking about how do we how do we get people to want to spend some time engaging and i think that one of the one of the answers to that is people need to feel like it matters people need to feel like there was a point to

25:18 spending you know 15 minutes 20 minutes an hour even looking through the issues looking through the resources and then giving their opinion because if they don't have that validation if that just feels like it goes into nowhere then i think i think it's going to be hard to feel like it matters it's it's like growing up people talked about your vote matters well this is this is our version of that here is your opinion matters so i just think that being able to create that so people got that response and feedback i think is important

26:03 um thanks andrew i would just offer the suggestion for us all that it sometimes it won't be a check-off list that gets people to understand that we're listening and hearing it it's it's comments that we make right it's relationships that we build and being able to really explain how you're considering and diving into public input really helps to live by that that doesn't mean tools like that don't help but we really need to kind of have this to describe our values as a public entity which is hey we're weighing your input we're applying it no matter what sophie thank you mayor and for the record i'll note that vice chair landon is here now uh let me look down at my notes um i've really enjoyed having springfield oregon speaks and i commend staff for launching it during the pandemic i think that was

26:49 an apt time to try something new virtually i have felt that it's intuitive and i think some of that comes from my generation so grew up with the internet in my hand basically and so i recognized that we are we there is this element of um you know helping helping it become more intuitive for people so one of my suggestions is perhaps having a youtube video for how to navigate the site at the you know very front page the landing page and then as always making materials accessible by mail or for folks going into springfield city hall so i think it's great that city hall is open now i also wish that the meetings were live streamed i think it's great to have them

27:34 on zoom and if they automatically went to youtube and people could watch them on youtube that would also reduce the administrative burden on the staff for having to upload them later and that can all be set up with a few clicks which is nice i do wish that there was a button you could click to activate google translate so if we had that just integrated into the platform it's not perfect and it's a start um you know actual comprehensive translation takes a lot of time and sometimes money so if we had a quick fix in the interim while we're having a budget crisis i think it would be helpful to have that option if available as far as usability as a commissioner we

28:19 used to get emailed a whole pdf of our packet and as you all know sometimes land use packets can be 700 pages long and how do you how do you approach that so as commissioner bergen said it's been really helpful to have each topic have its own spot and then it makes it easier for me as a commissioner to read the book by the chapter instead of just the whole thing so being able to digest the content that way and navigate during a meeting to specific things instead of aimlessly scrolling through my pdf and then my last comment that i'll make is that i think once all of the city boards and commissions and the council are using springfield oregon speaks then it will make a little bit more sense because right now even

29:04 when i go to find council materials i start on springfield oregon speaks so used to it and then it's like oh wait no i have to go back to the web page and then i get that whole pdf that's 800 pages long and so i think once we all make the jump together it'll get a little bit easier but i've really enjoyed it and just echoing another one of commissioner bergen's sentiments that staff has been so responsive and asked us how it works for us and how it can be improved and really appreciate that um thank you excuse me um yeah i and i and i think i hope we get to the live streaming of meetings as well right it's going to help a ton and i would i don't know that springfield oregon speaks is going to be the place where the council ends up but

29:49 i want to acknowledge that it's probably in the conversation about you know well how do we manage sort of the workflow and the contents that as we see see see the council so even though you guys are huge fans i like they just need there needs to be space to have that conversation for the council matt um yeah i guess i'm speaking as a um i guess quote unquote native to springfield oregon speaks um in as a planning commissioner my first meeting um was on springfield oregon speak so i don't know a time before using this platform but i do know that um i have enjoyed what commissioner mckinley was mentioning about

30:35 and commissioner bergen mentioning about the um how the packets are broken up and you can click on a certain item and see all of the attachments related to that that topic i have found that the ability to log in as a commissioner to springfield oregon speaks and see a public comment and mark it as read has been a very helpful tool and then to see not only how many of my fellow commissioners have read that um that comment but also for that person the author of that comment to see um if how many folk how many members of the um the commission have read that comment is

31:20 really helpful um in terms of actionableness of comments i've found it helpful i i've noticed a few times when um we've gotten pointed comment about a particular item before the meeting and then we bring it up in our questions with staff the the items that are being raised in those comments and i've noticed a few times where someone who's lost who's logged into the meeting with the same name as the person who gave the comment is presumably there to share the same concern in public testimony we raise those questions that have come up in their comments and then they don't give public testimony seemingly i would guess

32:06 because they feel that their their concerns have been heard by the council so i noticed that a couple times i would say in terms of um i've noticed a few times where staff has received comment by email or some other means and put it in springfield oregon speaks so um i think in in that terms i think springfield oregon speaks could be a helpful tool in that um kind of funnel that you're talking about uh councilor woodrow the the tool to bring um items together from disparate whether it's coming in by email or by phone call or by a letter into the city council or in springfield oregon speaks itself i

32:52 think that could act as that funnel potentially um and i think just to use a there i think there is a learning curve i would never recommend using one single tool and only going digital in terms of collecting public comment or because you want to have a multiplicity of ways for people to engage um but yeah to use a planning metaphor i think learning springfield oregon speaks is not dissimilar from learning how a roundabout works like a traffic circle um using a using a roundabout as a driver the first few times it's kind of tricky you're learning the ropes but after a few times using that roundabout you know

33:37 which exit to take you know kind of the rules of the road per se so i think with some training um the public could get used to to this tool and i found it helpful as a commissioner thank you thank you mary lee yeah i i agree i think that uh um i like your metaphor your comparison with the roundabout that's true and i think that um the thing is getting people out there wanting to wanting to learn wanting to know um and like i said that the further along the community grows the more people are going to be like sophie who just automatically are you know oriented technologically you know if we don't we're gonna have fewer and fewer

34:22 that aren't oriented that way as we go along it's just going to evolve um the only other comment i had was um when when the information comes in um to anything that you're discussing project or otherwise um and you find that comments or um information that has been presented uh is has weight it has value in your decision process or your recommendation process is there a way to flag it to have that be part of your recommendation we received this testimony from this person through springfield speaks and it had value in our discussion and in our recommendation and so here is here is

35:08 what we you know what we found value you know of value um i think that might help um when it comes to making recommendations to well i'm thinking council but even staff um in order to be utilized um what comes in because i i think um and that's another way to have people realize that what they're doing is valuable community all right great um mike uh thank you mr mayor um uh yeah i'm hearing some great suggestions here and i know uh sandy has been very good at incorporating our suggestions into springfield oregon speaks i myself did have a little bit of problems with it initially

35:53 and uh now that i've gotten used to it after a few months um it's pretty intuitive to me i'm a big fan of those 900 page pdfs i use adobe acrobat and they've also provided us an excellent review um program called um let's see what is that called uh it's it's use usable on the mac only on the ipad only and um both of those things are very useful in dealing with the larger files of bookmarks etc so thank you all right so in regards to springfield oregon speaks i'm hearing that we want to kind of keep using it from the planning commission like there's a couple of suggestions

36:39 sort of floating around and sort of a lot of acknowledgement that you know going into some sort of hybrid meeting in the in the future we still need a lot of places to engage the public um and take you know online content you know for sometimes hard and complex complex things now um does when i look down this list does did anybody have other comments that's specific to some of the other forms of public engagement and outreach that are in the packet the one that i really that jumped out to me was really the virtual town halls um and you know reading the comments from the virtual town halls a few that we've seen the last two years they've been helpful i think from a usability perspective

37:26 they've been good like i'm still waiting for that i'm not sure i have it all the way meaning that you know when you think about how you gather information in and then you turn that into policy sometimes i feel like the comments coming back it takes me a little bit more time thinking about where that person's coming from uh to get to really be able to formulate policy based off of it i don't know that that's a that's an issue with the actual town hall mechanic that may just be this is a new thing or all you learning how to use it including myself but that's one of the i guess one of the reactions i had to it yeah sophie you um some of the comments i had for things that went well is um i appreciated that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach

38:12 to planning projects um each project that was featured had its own engagement approach and its own results and i think it was also tailored to the um the skill set of the staff person who's the project manager um so really appreciated that and i've just been so proud of what springfield staff have been able to accomplish and have really felt as if you know our role as the cci has been you know carried out for what we'd like to see happen for things that i think could improve or i'd like to see improve in the coming year is i think we had a little bit of a quiet year with virtual meetings planning commission is usually kind of a quieter space unless there's a super high profile project but i would like to see more people at

38:57 meetings or at least more people involved with public comments and another comment that i have is that planning commission sometimes sounds like someone is on trial and sometimes it is very serious and uncomfortable the things that we're talking about in local government but i think especially with land use going to planning commission because your neighbors building a fence could often be your first time interacting with your local government and it can be really daunting coming into these meetings so i've been asking myself you know how do we meet these legal requirements while making meetings more accessible and welcoming so do we do we continue to hold our public hearings the way that we always have just because that's the way we always have or is there a way to do

39:43 things in the order that we're supposed to do while kind of modernizing and making local government more accessible and i'll just say again big big kudos to staff i have no idea how springfield gets everything done with the staff that they have i hope one day that more staff is added you can only do more with more staff and i do fear burnout sometimes for them back when i was an intern i was just amazed by how much stuff got done and i've stayed on i you know moved to springfield and applied to the planning commission because i was so impressed with all of the work that staff does and continues to do so just really want to take this opportunity you have a very special staff and you have a planning commission

40:29 that i think has established a great relationship with staff and has built that trust and confidence with them and hope that we're making you proud i think we're pretty proud of the work that's happening as far as engagement goes thank you matt thank you mayor yeah i'd like to just once again commend staff i think in terms of outreach that was really particularly great that i noticed was with the main street safety project staff put together a fact sheet that was particular to dispelling myths and rumors and misconceptions and addressing those and i just really would love to see

41:15 something like that for any project that the city does i think for any public project there's bound to be a a rumor mill that that comes up and some of those rumors come seemingly out of nowhere um and i just think that um that particular fact sheet was a really great way to say this is what we've heard in the community we're hearing what's coming up in the community the and this is our attempt to address and um be transparent around um maybe some some things that are being misunderstood for whatever reason all right perfect all right does anybody else have other comments or issues that they want to bring up

42:04 all right i'm going to check the questions that that sandy wrote down for us and see if we've covered if we've covered everything um i think sandy we are we may be ready for we may be ready for the development code update sure so mark rust um should be joining us here shortly um to be able to present on that item all right we'll see if we've got him yet we're running just a little bit ahead of schedule it looks like i know he was in the meeting but um needs to be made he is in the meeting and i have already tried to promote him i'm just waiting for it to pull him thank you

43:01 this is my first experience with zoom where i have just been thrown in error code so please hold we will be with you momentarily all right good evening i am here just clicking buttons feverishly to uh get access so um so thanks for all the talk about um public outreach and citizen involvement tonight the framing on the development code update project tonight is a little bit two-fold um in the discussion questions part there there's already been some discussion about the development code in

43:47 terms of implementing an overhaul and takeaways and that sort of thing so i'm i'm not going to really touch on that necessarily more unless there's questions specific to it but in the third agenda item packet tonight the packet includes a list of new legislative items that have been adopted by the state that we're working to incorporate into the development code update project you've between the two bodies planning commission and city council you've both heard a fair amount about some of these and the the natural one that rises at the top of the list is house bill 2001 but

44:32 there's a couple others and many others that are also being dealt with in the background that i wanted to just touch on i don't intend to necessarily go down the list in the entirety so um i just want to touch on a couple and then if there's specific questions i'm happy to go into more detail the other one i've probably talked mostly about other than house bill 2001 and its companion legislation house bill 2003 that is going to provide some more work for us to do in the near future but senate bill 458 you've heard some about it was just adopted i think of this list all of these are from the most recent legislative session so just the legislation late of session from 2021

45:18 that just concluded earlier this year house bills 2001 and 2003 are from the 2019 legislative session however the timelines for implementation of many of these new pieces of legislation just from a handful of months ago are just as quick as the implementation deadlines for the two-year-old legislative work that we're we've been working on so it's been a little bit of a scramble to try and get up to speed and figure out how to do implementation all this stuff but again senate bill 458 is the middle housing land division legislation it's directly related to house bill 2001 and in addition to

46:03 requiring new middle housing this new legislation requires us to allow division of that new middle housing and so it actually supersedes some of the provisions of the administrative rules that were adopted by the state for implementing house bill 2001 in regard to middle housing um so it's it's kind of been a moving target i guess is a short way of saying that um some more recent legislation i'm i'm gonna just go to the second one on the list house bill 2583 deals with not being able to regulate buy and um for housing um not regulate occupancy limits violent by family status

46:49 no yeah how fat like since house bill 2001 right like across oregon housing is a huge issue how fast are these new requirements coming out out of the legislature can we even keep up can we sorry i missed the very last piece can we even keep up like flying this list gets longer and longer yeah yeah i mean i think it's a valid question and um i would say in terms of implementing it all and so let me play this this way if if we weren't already updating our development code or we if we weren't mid process in the in the project already starting up a project from scratch to

47:35 try and um get a lot of this new legislative um work implemented would be a stretch at best i think um so in terms of keeping up i think my wording for that would be is i think we're scrambling to keep up again i think commissioner mckinley rightly pointed out the staff in springfield like i refer to it as a lean and mean team we tend to all work on a lot of different things all the same time and we're trying to get a lot of work done i think sandy can attest to that from the comprehensive planning side of things um just planning sometimes it feels like we're planning a day a day at a time kind of thing or a week at a time and not really you know the council themselves you have

48:21 priorities that i'm sure you would love to be able to have worked on and get reports on the comprehensive or long-range work program and the capacity we have and some of that capacity is definitely being used up by these new legislative mandates i would say well i i think that may be a good takeaway for us all to remember as we interface with you know legislators and you know um colleagues in the policy world just to encoura like some of these are really good ideas right but just encourage them to be the legislature to be a governor on the speed that they're flying at people to allow us to sort of keep up and integrate them in in a in a way that makes some sort of uh sense right because we want them to generate new housing

49:06 i think that's ultimately where my question was is like okay there's a lot flying down at us how do we continue to say some of these are good ideas but can we sort of space them out in a way that allows us to implement them and impact the housing in the city yeah i think it's a great comment and i think how they interact together i mean a lot of these were thought of a little bit in isolation but trying to understand how they work all together is a whole another dynamic there may be some unintended consequences that are as a result the other piece is some of these legislative changes mandate or require administrative role changes at the state level that haven't even taken place yet

49:53 we got into a little bit of that concern around trying to get ahead of house bill 2001 originally with mental housing and trying to start to write some code that we thought would be consistent with the legislation but then once the implementing rules were decided quickly realized that again it felt a little bit like a moving target that the rules implementing the legislation was slightly different than the legislation itself i'm happy to listen to other comments or ask other questions um again you you've all have the list of these legislative matters i know this the agenda item was scheduled to be pretty short

50:38 i will say it is been a lot to try and figure out how to incorporate a lot of this into the code i feel the council's original direction for the development code update in in the big picture was to try and really just update and modernize our code but for the most part stay policy neutral and when i say that i mean consistent with our existing comprehensive plan some of these changes have i think required us to look at our comprehensive plan policies and how that means some of that policy may need to change as well in order to implement some of the legislation steve do you have a comment i do for some time i've been saying the development code was outdated finally we decided to to make us a new one and we

51:26 would put mark on that project and he's the best we've ever had and luckily he's he he lays on in salem so he brings that stuff back he knows it very well but we're being there's legislators are just giving us all new stuff all the time trying to pull it into our development code really is make it complex and coming down the road is this lcdc document i have talking about designation of climate friendly areas and parking all kinds of stuff depend on this stuff here but i know it's going to end up being legislation eventually this stuff is getting complicated expensive and very hard for people to follow i i don't have an answer but it's it's

52:12 pretty complex out there and mark's doing a good job as soon as we get in the books then the staff has to interpret it but i'll tell you it it's going to get hard and i'll just comment quickly if i may and that is one it's not just me there's a whole staff of people working on all this stuff this city attorney's office is a huge help other staff members it does take a team of people but counselor mo you're right the the um climate friendly and equitable communities rulemaking process that's underway right now it's not as a result of legislation it's as a result of a governor's executive order and it's being framed by some as

53:00 likely to have a greater or as great of impact as the original creation of the land use program in the state so in terms of the potential impacts from what that how those rules will come out it's it's likely to generate a great amount of work for us to try and implement or react to luckily we have emma newman another great staff member tracking that rule making process as well at the same salem level but we do it and that's okay except it just becomes more complex all the time we keep sending things down to us to make changes it's the new world i guess that's going to happen but how do we handle how do we staff money we've got you know we have budget constraints here too

53:46 and uh so it's complex i think that's the message to our legislature steve that we as a council have to take forward through the legislative committee right like is to just talk like some of this is atomic level detail it may be too big uh and too complicated for them for state rule making i mean it's there's just a lot and that you know one of the things that that i feel like is missing in this entire conversation and mark alluded to it before was these bills are sort of and rules are sort of made in a silo and they may actually impact other bills and other rules that are sort of made by other groups right and one of the messages i think is really important for us to have

54:31 is for everybody to kind of back up and look at the whole picture so that we don't have one group making one rule and then another group turning around and either making it harder or undoing that same rule right because that just creates there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen here conflict yep sophie i think i'm uh in the minority of my opinion on this um i'm a professional planner for another jurisdiction um so do a lot of planning all the time sometimes paid sometimes volunteer and i i chose to pursue a planning career in the state of oregon because it's the premier place in the country to do land use planning because of senate bill 100 in 1972 introduced by governor tom

55:17 mccall so that must have been so scary when it came down and required a lot of work to establish urban growth boundaries and comprehensive plans and statewide planning goals and we are such a wonderful place to live and such a phenomenal place to do land use planning because of it and so i totally sympathize with staff it is too much work right now especially in a time where there's a budget crisis due to the pandemic and it's so daunting to add daunting or sometimes impossible to add additional staff capacity and i'm hopeful that when we get to the other side of this we'll be an even better place for land use planning and we'll have even stronger rules to lean

56:02 on for our local decisions and i'm actually really excited to see what comes of it and yeah i'll leave it a thought what i was what i what crossed my mind as mark and steve were talking was when we got started on revamping the development code the whole idea was to make it simpler make it easier for the for the developers for the people who came to the counter and said i want to do this and the more simple we try the more complex it it seems to get not under our control but you know in control that tells us you know you will do it this and we will do it this way so i you talk about sending a message to

56:48 salem and to our representatives i think that's one message that needs to needs to go is that the more complex it gets the less interest um the developers are going to be in in creating the end result that they would like to see there are certain things that they're they're passing this legislation with end results in mind but if we don't have anybody that wants to get in the middle of it and make it work it's it's not gonna it's not gonna create the result that they want so it really is i mean that was our whole idea was to make it simpler and easier to use and it's just gotten you know they just keep throwing things at us and making it harder it's getting costlier and and we keep

57:35 passing it on to the homeowner the home buyer buy it so price of housing goes up because the result of this uh it's just it's just one of the things that happens and then you end up having the big groups the big mega groups coming in and buying a whole property and creating 300 apartments rather than somebody being able to afford to buy that property and put a house on it or a duplex or something like that so it it creates issues in in in some ways all right other comments or we can turn it back over to mark to keep talking about some of the other issues coming up all right mark keep on going

58:20 yeah and and definitely i would say housing and affordability is an underwriting theme with a lot of the legislation it's no secret we're obviously in a crisis with housing not locally or statewide but nationally a lot of the legislation has to do with kind of signing of emergency shelters or just some and again i think mayor van gorden or one of the counselors mentioned a lot of the ideas are good and you know they they're trying to accomplish things to make things easier in a lot of cases so to the extent that some of these bills you know try and identify maybe barriers in the system

59:09 the i guess part of it that can get tricky for looking at it at a local level for springfield is these are one size fits all type of solutions that apply pretty much statewide in a lot of cases to different size jurisdictions and so some jurisdictions do tend to use put barriers in place or use their codes in ways to try and prevent development so it's kind of um it's setting a bar in a certain place for everybody when some people maybe want to um work at a higher level than that bar singles like that i'm thinking of springfield my impression is like counselor woodrow said is you know making things easier so where some of this legislation might actually work towards undoing that

59:54 versus a different jurisdiction that might actually want to make things more complicated and so this is actually forcing them to have it be simpler than where they're at so it's it's a matter of where we're at on the spectrum again i don't necessarily feel like i need to go through all these bills another one we're working on right now i will mention house bill 3109 child care facilities but seemingly a pretty straightforward piece of legislation um it's again i think mayor van gorden mentioned it's like when you you get into the details or figure out all the implications from it and how it's implemented that it can get tricky so certain members of the community might hear about this legislation or think

1:00:40 that it does a certain thing and then when you really evaluate it it may or may not be realizing the exact outcome that it was sold as or that people thought it might be doing so the child care facility legislation is another one we're kind of grappling with right now to try and figure out how to implement it again the implementation date is the first of the year so just less than two months away and there's no way we're going to change our code in time to have that in our code to react to state law so then it creates this dynamic where for a period of time until we can change our code to be consistent with the new law that we're out of compliance that then

1:01:25 we're not implementing our local code we have to defer to the state laws and it's a similar case with some adu language around parking that was implemented as part of house bill 2001 i mean it's not um unheard of but it just it creates a dynamic where even our own code is in a state of flux where it's not accurate and so if if people don't know that and they're trying to read our code to understand it's they have it makes it more difficult to use what i see is a lot of these issues are the development code is too difficult to overcome to get them there so they're doing patches like look at these these are band-aids that

1:02:10 they're they're passing to allow some of these these issues to go beyond that and well it helps but it sure complicates things for you so i would say that's really all i pretty much have tonight again i'm happy to elaborate further on any of the topics or answer questions but just kind of really a big picture of you at the idea that there's a lot happening in the background with trying to keep up with all these changes in laws and legislation and building it into the development code so with the hopes that when you ultimately do see the development code

1:02:57 the planning commission is getting ready to have their first public hearing on the development code on january 4th we're um busily getting ready for that we have a work session in another week from tomorrow night with the planning commission and the notices will be going out so you'll be hearing probably from community members about some of this that it will hopefully or likely generate a little bit more of a buzz about that the formal public hearing process is happening more formal final versions of the public hearing sections of the code that will be in front of the planning commission will be going out those types of things will be happening so anyway it's it's a lot of work to put

1:03:43 it all on paper and get it to a point where hopefully it all works together um also recognizing that i've been the face of this development code update project now for over three years or about three years and i'll probably likely be the scapegoat when things are found to be wrong and not doing that well and i'll be happy to take that but um just acknowledging up front that we won't get it 100 right the first time so there will likely be fixes brought back to the planning commission in the city council to you know correct things or adjust things as necessary but anyway just want to put that out there

1:04:28 all right thanks mark um other comments about the development code i just i just want to say thank you that list that he put in in that was really helpful i mean it kind of separated things out and have had gave us an opportunity to read through it in just a very simple way to see what some of those had to do because i trying to research and find out is even even in media it's like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle so this was really helpful and i definitely want to give credit where credit's due i didn't do the work our city attorney's office did put that list together so christina kras is a big kudos to her for keeping track of all that thank you christina

1:05:17 so it's it's a team effort um and mark is a great person to work with on this project so it's my pleasure mark what additional support you need from either the council or the planning commission for this because this is probably the most important thing we've got going on for the long term uh sake of the the city and i know that this is always something that's talked about among this group so is there any additional support or additional feedback that you need from us well um i mean there are i think most of these two bodies are where i was recently promoted to current planning supervisor to backfill the vacancy left by jim donovan who retired so i'm kind of juggling two positions both the current planning supervisor and the

1:06:02 co-development project right now we are actively working sandy is working on backfilling the code development code update project position so there will be a lot of coordination there i guess just some grace a little bit of grace in that we're all working in a different environment now and just recognizing the shifting dynamics of things but um we're we're doing the best we can with what we got i think the council has been in the planning commission both very supportive and um complementary of the work and so we appreciate that and um keep asking the questions i mean we're we're here to wrestle with the issues and um answer the hard questions

1:06:49 so i i always appreciate multiple sets of eyes on the work because the the more we can identify up front the better it'll be and the outcome will be steve we have to remember our ultimate goal in springfield is to produce more affordable housing and with that jobs that go with that's that's what we're trying to do that's the big picture yeah and i think it's critical for us to keep that kind of our eyes on the prize here right we want people to have an easy experience from the planning code and understand what they need to do with their piece of property to develop it so people can choose to live here

1:07:34 okay um perfect thank you mark um that's our last topic for the joint meeting um i'm gonna open it up one more time to see if there's any other sort of questions or comments the planning commission or city council has before i let the planning commission go because i have one quick announcement for the city council okay uh so i mean i would love to hear from uh the commission what role they see the uh city council liaison playing i mean i think with legalities and biases and stuff uh a city councilor can't really comment

1:08:20 can't contribute nearly as much other than give an update you all send people to these meetings and so you know just thinking you know holistically i would love to hear from you all what role you think the council would play at the meeting specifically or what you even think a city or council liaison even means sophie thank you mayor and thank you counselor pitts and i do have an email somewhere that i'm trying to reference but i can just try to go off of memory and then perhaps call a friend by bringing sandy in and so um we

1:09:05 the the planning commission uh has a city council liaison and commissioner gill who is not here tonight however she does not watch every single one of the meetings we take turns as a commission watching the meetings and that's been something that's been helpful for us so that we have some evenings free occasionally however i think the city council liaison has in the past been expected to attend planning commission meetings but since they aren't on the planning commission aren't able to speak or deliberate um and i think that that can be frustrating that time commitment and you know just having to watch the meeting so i think next steps there could be counselor pitts meeting with commissioner gill to discuss the roles

1:09:50 and the best way to move forward and sandy am i missing anything there for things that could potentially change can you hear me yeah okay i think it's really up to you know what the commission and the council um want in terms of that back and forth and i think it's a good question to ask both um you know for this particular circumstance but then as the council considers its bylaws and committee appointments and such and i think each committee is different it has a different dynamic in some cases the counselor isn't a voting member of the committee

1:10:35 and in other cases like the planning commission the counselor that's attending as the liaison is not a voting member and so then what is the expectation there but um to to respond to commissioner gill's question i think it can be collaborating or coordinating you know outside of the meetings to make sure that any issues that are um from the planning commission that the council should be aware of that get coordinated or vice versa a council direction on certain policy issues that might affect the planning commission outcome to have that come back the other way so from a staff perspective you know we're looking at

1:11:20 making sure that the coordination that it's not all up to a staff to make to be communicating everything to planning commissioner of the council that there can be some cross communication between the two bodies directly thanks sandy for that for that feedback uh andrew thank you um you know i'm fairly new so um i'm just gonna kind of throw out my thought to uh that the question i think on a on a much kind of like like your 30 000 foot review of it there it'd be helpful to know

1:12:06 um how closely aligned you know the the commission and the council end up being on issues and so part of our our role is to provide recommendations to the council give you guys them the information that you guys need and the resources you guys need to make ultimate decisions in a lot of cases especially when it goes beyond the commission level and so to have a better sense of gosh are we on the same page here are we looking at this the same way or are we kind of going one direction with with our recommendations and the council is kind of in a different different direction so just kind of

1:12:52 making sure that there's some communication so that we're we're at least kind of looking at things from a similar lens so that so that it's not hey we're over here and then the recommendation goes up and then the council's in a different place so that's the only thought that i have towards that and and again i'm pretty new so there's a lot that i'm still learning the first few months here have been um been definitely educational for me a lot to learn but that's just one one thought that i have and i don't know how close close we are in some of those but thanks for the question councilman and i i think my suggestion would be like i like the idea of

1:13:38 uh curry and damian meeting regularly right like i think that probably is going to bring a lot more value uh then it is necessarily having somebody physically go to the actual hearing every single every single time but that you know on the flip side every once in a while there's there's really high profile items where the flavor and the value could be there but i think it's you know i i think it's up to damien for you to find that fine find the the the place or the you know use a judgment based on on the situation that that you guys are you guys find yourself in and then i think andrew brings up a really good point about like both bodies work best when they're relatively connected and just understanding like where that

1:14:23 we're where we're all working towards is sort of a critical piece and how um and just like i said feeling a bit more connected is probably the best one of the better outcomes of a meetings like this very good sophie i'm gonna have you adjourn the planning commission and let these folks go i have one quick item for the city council that is gonna take less than like two and a half minutes but we have gone already over and i really appreciate you guys coming and meeting with us and just sharing some additional information i think it helps a ton thank you for having us tonight as your

1:15:08 guests and with that i adjourn the planning commission work session have a good night guys thank you all right um i had one quick um i guess uh item that i wanted to share going into next week we are going to start with boards and commissions aj keep me honest if i'm if i have the date wrong one of the things that one of the things that uh that we talked about throughout the rest of the year is to instead of having six or seven questions really shrink down that interview as small as possible and my recommendation um you know when we were in agenda review was to simply just have two questions and i want to make sure that you guys

1:15:55 have an opportunity to go never mind i want seven questions or like two still sounds fine to me um the two questions that i was going to have aj um sort of load into the the agenda were like why do you want to serve and right um in a question about explaining just their thoughts on their role between advisory boards and their relationship to the council um there's a lot of good information in these agenda in these applications so we didn't necessarily need to re-ask all those questions with that i'm gonna pause let you guys give any comments if you're like hey that sounds great or no i have a different opinion here leonard

1:16:44 thanks mayor uh yeah i i like both of those questions i i i do see a place for another question that would be along the lines of what do you see as the issues or challenges confronting the city um as relates to you know the commission i mean it it seems as though the these are both like very pragmatic questions that you're proposing and i think there's a room there's room for a big picture question too okay merrily my thought was similar to add a question similar to leonard's that encompasses how do they feel because i look at each i look at each committee and commission as being the people that are on it are representative of different parts of the community

1:17:29 and so i i it along in line with what leonard was thinking how this person um views themselves as a representative um of either their area or their area of expertise um and how and how they would fit into that committee or commission with that being able to represent um their part of the community okay so we're right on to that adding kind of a third question okay damian go ahead hi uh i'm not sure the second question really hits on anything i mean you know what role do they see i mean i i don't i don't see how that question shows that they are wanting to and can serve in this commission i mean i i

1:18:15 would love to see questions actually come from the commission because they're going to be the ones or bored or whatever it is because they're going to be the ones who are working with us on occasion in our liaison roles or we have a meeting with them but i mean i i think we really need the input of the actual boards and commissions because they are going to be the ones on the front lines of these people not us and i mean i you know i understand that there needs to be a some standardization but you know just like was mentioned last few minutes ago the complaint the planning commission is completely different from cpac or the historic commission and so we need to tailor those questions specifically to those boards i mean i don't know if there are any legal issues with diversifying the questions a little bit

1:19:01 but yeah but going back to my point i'm not sure what question two really does because technically they can say i have no idea and they shouldn't be gigged for it uh but they will be let's be real that that's true it is a common question that gets asked when um to kind of see where people what their sense of like okay what role does the staff play what role does the advisory board play and what role does that what role does that council play in this and you know some people we put people that has not been a deal killer of a question for anybody corey yeah i know i know we're making this more than two minutes you're over you're over allowed already corey

1:19:48 but i i actually really agree with counselor pitts and i know i've talked to you about this before and i know i'm late to the party because we've made a decision that everyone's going to be interviewed by the council for these positions but i do think that the people who are doing the work and the combination of staff and the boards and commissions and committees should be doing some of that that sort of helping to and i don't want to save bet because i i also don't want to like lean into total self-selection but we don't know like i don't know what makes a good whatever i mean the only i've served on the budget committee and even that it's like so i think that that it comes across like we're trying to sort of you know find a cultural fit as opposed to like

1:20:34 finding a person who's like genuinely passionate for the work so i agree with counselor pitts we probably can't do that this time around but i would love to see us maybe get out of it a bit yeah and and that's i think when we get to when we get to goal setting and when that gets scheduled let that that's one of the questions that's going to get sort of vetted out and sort of flushed out right like so about about the overall process so just be patient i hear you corey i know you want to have a longer conversation about it i got you covered merely we did that i don't know how we got away from it but we did have an initial screening process so if we had six or seven uh applicants for the arts commission

1:21:20 they talked to all of them and they recommended two or three to come to council for for questions there so we were i don't know how it got changed but we were doing that as as soon back as maybe four years so um i agree i think that should be i think that should be done i think we should bring that back yeah and again we'll i think we'll we'll have time to talk about it from uh on that when we get into when we get into goal setting right because we we've saved all of our sort of appointments for the year we kind of have to get through some of this stuff but it is on the agenda for goal setting steve yep uh i look at when we advertise for a committee uh

1:22:06 then the applicant responds to that and when you talk to an application i sort of like it as a resume so they talk about what qualities and they have for that committee and so i like to when we i want to interview them just even if it's a couple of quests to get a feel for them because that's a whole different thing so we know what the resume is and in that and that that question process we'll get a whole nother another view of them and helps us make our make our choice okay so for i'm hearing two things now that we're over two minutes and i'm blaming counselor broadly no i'm just kidding let's go three questions for new three questions for next week right and we'll write them up and we

1:22:52 will get a chance to change them if for some reason you know if we want to change some of the phrasing right right before we we ask questions we just have to ask them consistently the second thing is um that we really want to talk about how we make appointments when it comes to goal setting for the next year and nancy and i have a meeting later about when we're going to schedule that it does not have a date yet right because i'm hearing a lot of like well why don't we do this why don't we do that and we can we can adjust what we're doing going forward okay anything else all right thanks guys for staying on late have a good night we are adjourned you too good night