Springfield City Council — January 24, 2022

0:05 all right i'm going to call the springfield city council work session to order with roll call mayor van gorden here councillor pitts here councillor mo here council rodley here councillor stare here counselor woodrow here encounter pictionary i'm here thank you oh look at this um before we get started neil could you uh let everybody know how much how many folks are on the line since we can't see it in the building yes the 19 participants total uh 13 attendees and six panelists all right thank you um we've got two uh items tonight so it's the first items fiscal year 2023 community development block grant draft action plan with aaron fifield

0:53 thank you mayor council i'm here tonight with the draft one year action plan for fiscal year 2023 community development block grant or cdbg funds um i'm here just for discussion and sort of to get your input on what you would like to see as you know the city receives an annual allocation of federal cdbg funds to address community needs primarily those of low and moderate income residents in springfield so this is a draft plan that will be published for public comment uh council's community development advisory committee is the designated body to hold a public hearing on this draft plan and then they will make a funding

1:38 recommendation to council that will come back for your review in april with a final decision in may what's included in your packet is a draft that follows a process that we've used the last few years which is to estimate the entitlement award we're going to receive anticipate funds that will come forward from past projects that have not moved forward and fully fund existing programs that you have supported such like the home repair program for low-income homeowners um helping human services um through the lane county human services commission contribution and then as well as funding uh staff grant administration costs um the

2:25 remaining funds um are proposed to be put forward in a request for proposals which kind of goes out to the broader community for local agencies um to put forward a proposal um that then gets reviewed by the cdac and again decision made by council um so that's what's in your packet i'd like to make two highlights that kind of differ from previous years one is the 641 000 that is sort of putting forward proposed be put forward this year again for affordable housing this was two years ago an award that you had made to help cornerstone community housing purchase the former school district administrative building to ultimately

3:12 build new affordable housing at that site the school district eventually sold that property to a a different organization and so cornerstone isn't moving forward with that project but there is a letter in your packet explaining their committed interest to building affordable housing in springfield and so given your direction in the past through the housing strategy um and certainly what i've heard not just from cornerstone but other developers is how important land is and how any help we can provide with them to acquire land ultimately helps them would help them build affordable housing in springfield so the proposal being keeping the 641 in that bucket but trying to figure out

3:57 a better way to make sure agencies can move forward with the project i'll say the other highlight i want to point out is that the down payment assistance program the shop program that the city has operated for many years has undergone a few changes in the last year last year certainly with the housing crisis and we have been unable to sort of give out down payment assistance through that program to really help homeowners sort of bridge the gap between what they're able to afford and what we've seen houses going for sale on the private market last year you may remember square one villages came in with a request for down payment assistance with their c street co-op and that's an innovative model to still help homeowners that are low income

4:42 purchase a place in springfield but we're not seeing it through our pro our program so you do not see funding allocated toward that strategy through the draft but certainly available to come in through the rfp just like it has in the past so um i think i'll leave it there um i'm open to all sorts of questions yeah thank thanks aaron um so the this um this property on mill street where we outbid by the uh by the other uh property or i mean by the other buyer that was my understanding is that the school district went with a higher bid

5:27 than what cornerstone put forward okay the city did not so i i know that we've been uh the city's been pretty aggressive in land banking over the last few years is the land that we've got just improperly zoned for affordable housing um do we i would say i don't know if i'm asking the right person no it's a great question the city has wanted to be aggressive in land banking in the last few years but we have not um we've not been able to put forward our own sort of project or our own program for that development it's sort of trying to figure out how to help developers um but we do not have lands really for developers as they're stating

6:13 that it's needed in like the right zoning in the right size thank you yeah corey so my question is there's two questions um one is i know that the way the market has gone we haven't been able to support down payment assistance for home ownership but and we a lot of this is a lean towards affordable housing which we need for sure i'm wondering if we can't do the down payment assistance can we do some sort of innovative support to support home ownership first-time homebuyers are there other programs or things that we can support to try to encourage that happening and that leads into the second piece of

6:58 my question is just wondering because i'm relatively new to this process if this is pretty much just carrying over the priorities from the past or if there's anything new on here or any room for us to sort of look at new things to like you said like the c street co-op anything else that could be innovative to help to like increase housing yeah great questions um i would say that is where we rely really on the rfp process because ultimately i don't know that we have the capacity to create a new program ourselves here at the city um or even are the ones to best know it but are open to helping someone else fund that program through the rfp process and which is where the c street co-op

7:43 project came through i certainly have plans to talk to dev northwest knowing that they have funded down payment assistance in the past and certainly are helping prospective home buyers figure out their finances and they might have an innovative model that could potentially work more than than we are familiar with um you know if if you look at the um sort of that last line in the budget or the the is it an appendix or attachment two maybe that kind of has just the one pager budget proposal um you'll see that call that first column is called the consolidated plan strategy and so those those seven strategies are

8:30 kind of like the big big umbrella that any project needs to fit into but it can be pretty flexible about what that project looks like so you'll see you know economic development in there but you know i've talked to city manager's office and they have a loan program there but if there's something new like a micro enterprise program or something that dev northwest wants to sort of bring back it can certainly come in through the request for proposals um so maybe to your point it's more about outreach in educating the community or our partners about the kind of innovation that we would be able to fund so long as we're helping you know low-income residents in our community and and if the federal funds are a good match then maybe we can encourage them to submit a proposal

9:17 so aaron right now right what we're approach what we're sort of head nodding tonight is just sort of the menu items right these are just the big buckets they're not about individual projects it's sort of the scoping of where we want to spend that spend this money so we can put it out for public comment is that right more or less i would say the home repair program is a specific project um but yes the the this is what we want the public to comment on um and with that in mind given this we're going to put forward an rfp that says we have about 260 000 available for next year given your support for the other items like this can certainly change depending on what comes in through the rfp and any other thing we learned through public comment or the public

10:02 hearing and that'll come back to you um first the cdac and then you all to sort of make that decision based on what we've learned you're certainly able to change this then but is this what you want to put forward for the public to comment on right and then it's the rfp where we where we have sort of the specific uh projects that were that we're looking at and evaluating right the ones we don't know about yet exactly corey i guess my follow-up on that is that in the column for um whatever that's called whatever we call it the down payment assistance we have it at zero so that's where i'm wondering do we need to move some things around and make sure that we're holding some space for that or is that money then that we might have last year or a year before put in that column is that

10:48 going into the um the rfp process um i would say yes last year we put forward zero in that column for the draft through the rfp we got a request for about sixty thousand dollars and then the final allocation had 60 63 000 um in that in that bucket i would say two years ago this body put eleven thousand dollars up forward like to say in the cities program we're going to put 11 000 in there and we have not spent that in the last year and a half um there hasn't been a project that's been successful in order to help someone buy a house in that sense so that's i'm kind of reluctant to offer that again when we still have those funds to say but if someone comes in with a project um perhaps we could fund dumping down

11:34 payment assistance that way joe thank you um i the list looks fine to me but generally speaking but i've got a uh my interest is peaked when it comes to we have nothing you what you just kind of allude to that's under number seven the city may receive a request for a project towards this strategy through rfp which is the make strategic improvements to improve low-income neighborhoods i apologize the one right above it it's the promote economic development and employment opportunities through the creation of jobs and business development and i don't see um really any other spending in that category or in that strategy and i just want to really like to emphasize that i want to

12:19 see that so it's spread out so it's not focused so much in one area i would like to see that money spread out and invested and that will give us an opportunity to see really what kind of bang for buck we're getting and what kind of returns we're getting on those investments is you know returns meaning are we getting are we getting good economic development are we getting good jobs or you know we're creating good business opportunities because that's we can't invest everything in housing and nothing anywhere else without improving the the general climate and so again like i said i i basically agree with the list and how it's allocated but i i definitely want to make sure we have something there should the city receive a request through ceta to for a project

13:06 i don't want to be i don't want to turn around say i'm sorry too late we don't have anything yeah i'll talk to um city manager's office about um more about that program and my understanding in the past was like oh that program works in the successful if there's a different kind of need um for economic development but i'll see if that um if there's room to combine what this program requires with what the need is or what we anticipate the need will be right well i mean it's either about a valid strategy or not if it's not then let's take it out of there but if it's if it's valid strategy we can make it work then let's let's go forward with it because i don't think we've used that before

13:53 it's been a while it's been a few years yeah yeah i just i think i just wanted to to remember and remind um that this is a this this isn't this particular list isn't casting concrete um we're looking ahead to the rfps that come in and the evaluation of them and until we finalize it um as a council we we can change it however we want even though we've allotted a certain amount of money in a certain area if something good comes in that do we want to award that rather than something that's that else we can do that we can we can negotiate

14:38 move stuff around we have that capability all the way up until the time will be absolutely finalize it as the one-year action plan so i think um uh this is just a menu to begin with um that gives a highlight of what um what can be and where the money can go but we don't know what rfps will come in so we don't know how to evaluate the final menu until we hear from those rfps so aaron if on the very top we have funds may have made available through rfp 259 000 ish when we get rfps the the people responding can take that 259 000 and sort of allocate it to any one of these

15:23 strategies that they want right is that the idea yeah the rfu would require a proposal that meets one of these strategies exactly so depending on what council directs funding for we kind of shuffle them all to their respective um and before we go on aj if i know you're keeping notes about stuff that we've got to go and uh and look at this screen right here is off centered for so we may just have to tweak it a little bit all right i couldn't see anybody's hand come up

16:08 counselor all right well uh i i uh i agree with counselor pictionary about smoothing out the amounts that are being allocated to each one of these items see the only one um well let me ask is there are there criteria for people qualifying for the down payment assistance yes what um would it be a certain income level or uh what yeah it's no more than 80 percent area median income um and then we actually rely on the lender they're working with to determine um what they qualify for with escrow and so then they kind of it's the lender that comes to us to say this person would qualify for this much house this is what they applied for they

16:53 have this gap we would need five thousand dollars um in order to sort of meet that gap and it's a loan that gets on the home um i would say in the last few years though with housing prices seven thousand dollars hasn't been enough to cover the gap yeah these these all seem like worthy goals um it's probably going to sound kind of strange coming from me but i would say that number six promoter employment opportunities is probably the least urgent of them i mean uh the the job market is booming right now i mean i think just about anybody who wants to get a job in springfield can have one so i would i would definitely prioritize all of them except for number six steve we uh we we've given uh 631 thousand dollars to cornerstone

17:40 which apparently they got outbid and they're asking in their letter here that we uh reserve a portion of this money available through 2022 for the specific purpose of land acquisition how do we do that can we do that so we need to figure out so yeah that's what so in the draft put forward that um that's that 641 that cornerstone is asking about or 631 plus staff costs is in strategy one and so it's not included in the rfp i think that was a problem in the past is that when the rfu is open for six weeks we were essentially saying please fit finding lands that you need for development into the six week period so we can evaluate it through the rfp but really

18:25 that's not how the market works and so is there a way to hold the 641 for what council has indicated is important in terms of acquiring land for future development but let's figure out a process outside of the rfp process um to make sure okay a developer that qualifies has a project that qualifies it meets the criteria um they have site control now we can move forward still meet council goal but kind of do it out of this this six week period um so that is that is what that's referring to is to keep it for that purpose oh we can do it yes merely

19:11 um just just a thorough thought out there uh in in hsc today and corey was there too one of the conversations that came up that pointed out was that non-profits in the job market and to retain being able to retain employees because of the difficulty they have it within providing insurance and and paid off days and all that kind of stuff so it was a conversation that came up with anybody that has any great ideas they're going to pursue possibilities but the job market may be great but in some of those instances especially with the non-profits the difficulty in being able to retain employees especially ones who are skilled or have experience it's kind of it's it's really tough it always has been in that field it's even

19:57 more so now um so um i don't know if anything in this kind of money can be set aside or somebody comes up with a brilliant idea between the county commissioners and the state or whatever um but it's it's just it's a thought to throw out there to keep in mind thinking about that because it's it's um the social service nonprofits are vital to the community in my in my opinion and um if there's a way to keep um the expertise the experience uh the passionate uh people that are working for him and you know maybe there's an idea out there that can help out um not that may not be an answer but there may be an ideas ideas out there

20:42 that can help out so just just a thought in regards to it's a great job market but in some areas it's kind of it's kind of iffy joe thank you sean so in regards to the job market and creation of jobs etc i'm thinking i don't know well i guess marylee was here and maybe sean would we put together that package for uh u.s bakery and in in glenwood and part of the parameters of our of us city helping that uh bakery go into glenwood is that there was it was conditional and it was conditional that those jobs paid over

21:28 the the mean income and that they had they had to have so many people employed full-time over the over that mean income which then allowed all those families that were working there to be able to go into homes that were not low-income homes which took the stress off of those low-income homes and inventory so we can't i just don't want to be bottled into getting so focused on the low income housing when it when we we have to make sure that our all our price price points have got some availability otherwise it it's just a choke point and we're not going to get any we're not going to get any footing so that's i just wanted to make sure

22:13 it's balanced in that sense i don't want to take away from people but you have to give those opportunities for the higher price points so we can create a vacuum where other people can move into lower income homes otherwise we're just going to continue down this road of subsidized housing and and we create our own biggest problem okay so i'm looking around and i'm did you have something out oh never mind joe hands down um i think you're good aaron to sort of put this out there's a lot of good commentary when we get the public feedback about what we might change how we might change it and what to consider um and i do hear some emphasis like a lot of emphasis on trying to make sure

22:58 that we've got that 250 000 or 200 is some of that shows up in an economic development project which we haven't seen in a while okay yeah and i'll certainly reach out to be at the chamber or like i said to the mayor's office or just whoever the partners are to say um these are the parameters would that be of assistance for like you said this kind of loan guaranteeing sort of this kind of income for this population so um yeah i'll i'll bring that in for me great thank you all right thank you all right looks like the next item is our quarterly uh development code update with mark rust and we have mark right on

23:45 time good evening mayor and counselors thanks for allowing me time tonight i'm going to share my screen if that's all right i do have some powerpoint slides i want to walk through and my apologies for having these get to you late they were emailed out earlier this afternoon and i did just notice a typo in one of them i'll point out when i get to it tonight but i'm here to provide you the quarterly update on the development code update project and uh just let you know where we're at we're moving right along with the project on phase one and phase two which is phase one is housing and phase two is the employment lands i like to just go through these purpose and objective

24:30 statements every time so we all are reminded and for anybody watching or listening now or later that these purpose and objective statements i'm not going to read through them but these were approved as part of the community engagement plan that were developed with the city council and then ultimately approved uh by our planning commission acting in their capacity as the command committee for citizen involvement so this these parts of the community engagement plan have been in place all throughout the project we have incorporated the purpose and objectives into the findings and the working documents to help justify the code of dates that we're proposing another reminder on the timeline where we're at you've all seen this timeline

25:16 before it's also in the community engagement plan it has been updated a couple times throughout the over three years duration so far of the project you can see here in the first quarter of 2022 where the the yellow bars represent the phase one the housing code updates and the orange bars represent phase two for employment lands we are moved into now the tasks of the adoption process and we're about halfway through that process and where we're at with those is in the formal public hearings process with our planning commission so i'm going to touch on that a little bit a lot of this information is contained in your packet tonight in your packet memorandum

26:01 and in that packet also is an attachment number three that is one of the memos that we provided to our planning commission as well for their last work session and deliberations so we did hold the formal public hearing on january 4th this is the typo here the number four in the slides that were shared with you this afternoon it said january 1st just a slip of the finger there so january 4th right at the beginning of the year we came out of holidays and held a public hearing we had i go into this in a little bit more detail but provided notice for those publicarians and we did receive some comments at the end of the public hearing that night on the fourth the joint planning

26:46 commissions closed the public hearing and left the record open for two weeks until the january 18th and the joint planning commissions met on the 18th in the evening again for joint deliberations and i'm saying saying joint planning commissions because it's both now the springfield planning commission and the lane county planning commission because some of our proposed code changes impact the lands outside the city limits inside the urban growth boundary lane county co-adopts those portions that affect those lands outside the city limits so they did set some continuing deliberations to meet separately after the january 18th joint deliberations so our planning commission will be meeting on february 1st followed by

27:32 delane county planning commission meeting on february 15th depending on how the first the february first deliberations go with our planning commission that february 15 deliberations could be another joint deliberations if our planning commission is ready to move forward and make a formal recommendation to the city council and the lane county planning commission make a recommendation to the board of county commissioners so at the public hearing on january 4th there were about it was a virtual meeting and so we there were about 19 people or members of the public attending the meeting participating in the meeting as participants including planning commissioners and staff there were about 43 participants

28:19 we had mailed out about 1400 notices directly to property owners in addition to publishing the notice of the public hearing and the registered guard and email notice to our interested parties list which contains about 400 people and also updated and provided information on the project web page so just a quick summary of how that initial public hearing went based on all those notices and the people that i attended eight people testified from the public it was some good testimony two written pieces of testimony were submitted prior to the public hearing and leading up to the public hearing based on all the notices we sent out about 25 people reached out mostly i

29:04 fielded phone calls some of those were emails that i we talked directly with people about what the proposal entailed i will just mention here a lot of that mail notice was as a result of what's referred to as a measure 56 notice that's an old piece of legislation not too old but it's been around for probably a decade or longer where the state requires us to mail notice anytime we propose a change that might impact the value of somebody's property negatively or limiting the use of people's property and i can get into a little bit more detail about what all there was one change that triggered that major 56 notice to a limited number of properties those 1400 properties that we mailed notice to we did not mail a city-wide

29:52 notice to every single property in the city we relied on the published notice and notice on the web page and those sorts of things to notify the broad community so some of the topics that were talked about at the hearing and that were discussed in deliberations subsequently revolved mainly about around the housing issues and one was the topic of lot sizes specifically related to middle housing for the most part as you're aware i've talked to you before about us implementing the state requirements to allow middle housing as a reminder middle housing is duplexes triplexes fourplexes townhomes and cottage clusters another concern is

30:37 how we're implementing lot coverage or we had proposed to change the lot coverage to what we were calling an impervious surface area standard and i can i can hit on any of this in more detail if needed parking and and these topics are also discussed in more detail in the packet materials including the agenda memo to the planning commission in the back of your packet parking is one of those topics that seems to always come up and that people are pretty interested in for sure and then some key definitions that were brought up to make sure we get the definitions part correct because definitions do are relied on for a lot of the interpretation and how things are applied

31:22 other topics that came up through either public testimony or deliberations with the planning commissions included displacement or demolition of existing dwellings concerns about that and so protecting existing housing so that it's not all demolished and replaced necessarily ensuring adequate access to green space was a topic promoting home ownership over rather just pure rental housing being built and then also the topic of annexation came up so just to touch on a few of these topics in a little bit more detail on the annexation issue and related to kind of what i talked about in terms of what triggered the measure 56 notice because this was a joint meeting with lane county planning commission and springfield planning commission the

32:08 difference between what applies inside the city limits versus outside the city limits inside the urban growth boundary was a topic we explained that in more detail and provide some information in the memorandums this is a map showing all of the properties inside the city limits i'm not sure how well you'll be able to see this but there's this comprises the majority of the 1400 properties that we mailed notice to and what these properties are are the existing medium density and high density residential zone properties in the city limits there's another map here in a second that contains 50 more properties that are outside the city limits inside the

32:53 urban growth boundary but the change that we're making that triggered this measure 56 notice is because we're proposing to no longer allow detached single family homes to be built by themselves on these medium density and high density residential zone properties our existing development code allows just one home to be built on these properties and there's some logic behind that that i can get into it relates to how the state laws are requiring us to implement the new middle housing provisions and also protecting our land supply because there's a pretty finite amount of this medium density and high density that protecting it for more intense really housing development

33:40 rather than just single family homes and middle housing but really this is where we would see development more like apartment complexes and things like that the this is the map these are pretty hard to see i've identified seven different areas with numbers here that just are small little pockets of just a handful of lots scattered around the perimeter of the city like i said just outside the city limits inside the urban growth boundary so those are some pockets of land outside the city limits there's about 50 of them only two of those 50 are undeveloped the majority of them are already developed and so we talked at the county planning commission level specifically about these because that's

34:25 one of their areas of concern is outside the city limits another topic that we've heard quite a bit about and i know at least councilor mo has also heard quite a bit about is impacts to the historic district so the state laws around how we implement middle housing are very specific about what we can and can't do in relation to allowing or not allowing middle housing in the historic district or in any historic district around the state so this is the map of the boundary of our existing historic district this kind of dark line highlighting the perimeter so our existing historic district is uh has two different zoning districts within it actually has more than that

35:10 there's some properties that are zoned commercial down here along the southern edge as well but primarily you can see this area on the west side or the left side of the map that is a darker shade that's medium density residential where this larger the east side of the historic district is low density residential so again because of that proposal to no longer allow detached single family homes in medium and high density residential these property owners about a third or maybe a little more than a third of the property owners in the historic district received those mailed notices where the rest of the property owners in the low density did not receive those

35:55 mail notices and in retrospect we think that created some confusion um it did the the state mandated language that's required to go in that notice talks about rezoning of your property and within the context of this required notice the state considers rezoning as anything where we're changing the proposed uses allowed so because we're proposing to no longer allow detached single family um that there was some confusion that that that we're proposing to rezone and up zone or make it high density residential so i did go through a list of things um talking about what the change how what impacts the

36:40 changes will have on the historic district and what changes it won't we did as a result of some of the feedback we got and interest we had around the historic district created a new fact sheet specific to the historic district that went up on the project web page i provided that to the interested parties email list as well as our historic commission i think i sent it directly maybe to counselor mo hopefully as well so he could provide it to his constituents but just even just not so much specific to the historic district but related to this topic and what the code is doing or is not doing with the proposed changes

37:25 is as required by state law we're allowing all these new middle housing types in all residential areas including the historic district so we there was some understanding by folks or questions about that middle housing shouldn't be allowed in the historic district and that is not true the state law very clearly requires us that we must allow the middle housing in the historic district one of the big differences between the middle housing that we have to allow in the historic district versus middle housing outside of the historic district everywhere else throughout the city is that we can still require any of that new middle housing

38:11 to meet all the historic district development standards and along the lines of the aesthetics and maintaining the historic character of the historic district so we cannot do that we cannot require any kind of subjective design review for middle housing outside the historic district but we can continue to do that for the housing types in the historic district and then as i mentioned we're no longer proposing to no longer allow the single unit dwellings in the medium and high density residential zones um that's i'm not going to read this i'm happy to go into more detail i just have a couple more slides here and then so this is what also will not

38:56 um be proposed any new or any existing single unit dwellings will not be required to make any change um there's some confusion about also just again the way the state laws are written to implement middle housing is and the way we've defined them is that you could add a second detached single family home to a property similar to an adu but it could be bigger than an adu so it's technically a completely separate new dwelling even though that would be two single-family dwellings on one lot it would be considered a duplex under the middle housing rules

39:41 and so people wanted to clarify that that would still be allowed even though it sounds like oh well we want to add a second single family dwelling you're saying we can't do that well you can again it kind of relates back to the definitions so some of the nuance is still there unfortunately with the code update more broadly we're trying to make the code more simple to use and easier to understand and implement we didn't envision all this middle housing new regulations at the outset of the project so some of that intent or the objectives of the bigger project have been a little more complicated to reach due to now having to implement all this new middle housing so but there were some fears out there i i was aware of some social media posts

40:27 by folks in the historic district that were worried that we were abolishing the historic district or that we were going to upzone it or get rid of our historic commission none of those things are true or accurate so we just wanted to make sure we were conveying accurate and complete information so with that i'm happy to go into detail any more detail about any of this stuff and answer questions or provide more information um crete thank you very much for that and for sharing what the concerns were i just wanted to drill down a little bit into the parking i'm curious as to because i've had people talk to me about different parking concerns so i'm curious whether it is um and it might be a mix whether it's

41:12 primarily like off street parking or on street parking or if it's depending on the neighborhood if people are having different sorts of parking concerns yeah great question thank you councillor rodley the i will refer you to the community survey results in the packet tonight there's a public engagement report and at the last work session when i was in front of you on november 8th joint with our planning commission i provided some summary results or high level results of the public survey that we conducted as part of the outreach so the public outreach report includes all of the public outreach that we've conducted but on let's starting on page

41:58 11 of 22 of the packet which is page six of that public outreach report those are the public survey outreach results and so i would just encourage you to look at those one of the questions is specific to parking and i would categorize the results as for the most part supporting middle housing and allowing more middle housing to happen and those sorts of things however the one area if you look at the results you'll see parking is where the community survey results supported requiring the most parking possible under state law which really isn't that much it's one space per dwelling unit for all the

42:44 middle housing types so currently we require two spaces for a single family home these are on-site parking spaces to kind of address part of your question and so under today's code for a duplex we would require four parking spaces two for each side of the dwelling or for each of the two dwellings under the state law we will only be able to require one parking space per unit for a duplex or triplex or fourplex so i would say based on the community survey results it's really not broken down by neighborhood but for the most part i would say that the survey results supported again requiring the most parking we did get one of the eight people

43:29 testifying at the public hearing requesting a reduction of the parking so that's a conversation that the planning commission was having they were asking for a reduction of up to uh down to a half a space per unit so it's it's again it's one of those topics that gets a little interesting but there is more information also in the the memo to the planning commission for their january 18th deliberations that talk about the parking we're actually staff recommendation going forward with the planning commission at this point is to keep the one space per dwelling unit is the maximum we can require by state law and there's some reasoning behind

44:15 that but i hope that answers your question for the most part i'm happy to elaborate thank you uh mark i got a couple questions if you could help me out i'd appreciate it and i'll just go ahead and go and drill right down on the scenes how you got parking right there in front of you so you said one space maximum so it's not sand one space minimum so again so what i'm what i'm thinking is that if we have a duplex and you say okay one car space for this side one car space for this side so what happened to the families that they're both workers and and i don't know of any family

45:01 that at least out out here in thurston that has got one car and they're renters and they're trying to work and yet we're gonna force them out onto the street which the streets are already uh burdened with with vehicles how how's that going to work i i mean i can't see it working it's a great person and a person that wants half a space we're not all bikers bicyclists okay yeah and it's a great comment and question counselor prisoner i appreciate that and i know it it's it's it's one of these topics that's definitely people have thoughts about and um i'm not necessarily saying i agree with it for sure and i want to clarify that the maximum is the maximum we can

45:46 require to be built so it's really not a maximum that they're allowed to build so a developer has the opportunity to build more whatever the market dictates it's just that in terms of the city's requirements the most we can require a developer to build is the one space per unit if a developer says you know they want to be able to rent their units and understand the dynamics of the market so they're going to build two per unit or more they can continue to do that there's no limitation on the amount they can build it's just that it's the limitation on the amount we can require them to build so it almost seems backwards to me in a sense that it's like okay

46:31 um you're going to build a duplex and we're not going to tell you how many you can as far as you can make more than one space per car but because it's a maximum we're not saying you can you if you want to build you only put in half a space per residence and that's okay too i'm not sure where the i'm not sure where the where the requirement is are we telling them you can you know obviously you say we can build more than one space per unit but then are we telling them that they can also do half a space per unit where's the regulation so no we we can we can require them to have at least one space per unit so if they wanted to only build a half a space per unit our regulations would not

47:18 allow that now i will there's a caveat to that and that is so as approved you'll recall a couple years ago i think three or four years ago now we approved a bunch of updates to implement the tsp the transportation system plan one of the big pieces of that was related to parking so we did adopt or the council did ultimately adopt some on-street parking credit and this gets back to a little bit of counselor rodley's question about on-site versus off-site and on-street parking so there are some allowed reductions to the on-site parking requirements the way it boils down is that they don't really come into play unless you're over four units because it's a maximum of 20

48:05 percent of credit so if for instance if if somebody were to build five units on a property like under the cottage cluster standards and they only wanted to build four on-site parking spaces for those five cottages because they had frontage on their street for one on street parking they would be allowed to do that but other than those those on-street parking credits which really don't apply to duplexes triplexers or four plexes they have to at least build the way our regulations work it is a minimum they have to at least build the one space per unit per our regulations okay i agree with that i just wanted to make sure

48:50 i didn't get angry about something i needed to so uh the uh it is it does draw another concern too is because i think what happens some renters that are crunched for space believe they owned they own the parking on the street literally and they they place objects on the street to prevent others from parking on the street and i'm not even sure i'd like to have like to know if someone could research and find out if there's any codification that doesn't allow placing objects in the street so that's that we're going to be pushing more people in the street and that's going to be causing more and more of that so enough said on that i appreciate that now that the last the only other question i had at this point

49:35 was that when you go to change you're talking about throwing a single family dwelling and a single family dwelling on the same lot you're going to call you're going to redesignate those as a duplex correct correct so has that creates an impact a significant impact with financial institutions on property designations when it comes to financing there's completely different finance structures uh in place for a duplex property versus a single family property who is going to what what owners who's going to have or bear the owners of notification of those finance or the owner of those mortgages because that is that is a huge a huge

50:20 difference when it comes to valuation but also with the the ability or actually the future inability for someone to finance that lot or refinance that lot because it's now a duplex yeah it's a great point and this will be happening statewide so this whole idea that basically for the for the most part every single family home neighborhood now is for all intents and purposes re-zoned to allow duplexes triplexes and four plexes is a phenomenon that's going to be happening in all the large cities statewide and you know i can't speak directly to the financing part i will say you know we get what we call zoning verification letter requests often from

51:06 financial institutions where somebody's either refinancing or trying to get a loan for something and so we'll verify what the zoning is so they have it writing from us on our letterhead um to use it for their you know financing package and so you're right though i think that there is a potential there to create some confusion about well you know what is this property zoned and what's allowed on it or and honestly that's one of the reasons why we're proposing to change the name of the zones to begin with so our existing zoning names for the residential districts are low density residential medium density residential and high density because of middle housing really regulating by density has kind of gone

51:53 out the window because of metal housing effectively all the previous low density residential land has a now allows densities that are more on par with the medium density zones for sure if not pushing the high density residential so just changing to r1 r2 r3 designations takes out that nomenclature about talking about about density and and it's potentially just blurring the lines between having different zones altogether but anyway so in essence any of this change could negatively impact all properties depending on your perspective yeah i mean it's you know again but there's

52:38 opportunity you know there's two sides to every coin kind of thing it's like it's providing opportunity to build a lot more housing or providing a lot more flexibility to create a lot more use units people could build wealth by adding a second unit to their property where they couldn't have before and and those types of things so i'm not saying i'm against it i'm just talking about your requirements for notification if you go to make these changes it potentially could create negative impact for almost all properties and you were talking about mailing out those mailers to three or four hundred so yeah again we we followed the state law requirements around who we were by law required to notice it's an enormous cost to mail a notice to 40 or 50 000 different properties

53:24 that we didn't want to have to do if we didn't have to so you know the under 10 000 worth of postage and mailing fees we paid just to notify the 1400 i don't know what the cost was just some reduced number of cost to mail just 1400 notices was a lot less than mailing 40 or 50 000 notices i'll just have a state pit okay sounds good thanks appreciate it damian yeah i mean so this is kind of a rhetorical question but i'm just curious what the makeup of the people who are making these state laws about parking is because it seems that they're probably married or partnered probably a little older and own property

54:09 as somebody who lives in the town uh house that was built five years ago uh i mean i'm lucky enough to have an assigned parking spot but if i want to have people over they have to either uber over which you know that's ridiculous or they have to park across the street and potentially get towed and so i do understand that parking can be expensive but when you think about diversity inclusion or retaining and recruiting the best and the brightest who will potentially stay here and spend their dollars and tell other people to come here uh something as simple as having an extra parking spot so somebody can visit you could be the thing that keeps people sane i mean i'm speaking from experience you know and nobody should have to risk

54:54 getting towed to get some cuddles i mean it's kind of it's kind of ridiculous uh and i i mean i don't understand land use that much i mean i'm a sociologist so but i do understand comfort and i mean half these apartments don't have ac as it is and and but they swear it's not hot here but then to add that like i can't handle body over or they're going to get towed like it it doesn't make this place all that livable especially for single people and so i just really am curious what the makeup of this board is because they seem to be extremely out of touch and kind of selfish i'm happy to comment um counselor pitts i think it's it's important comments and you know questions being raised and so i

55:40 was on a panel of i forget how many people probably at least 30 people on the statewide rules advisory committee for writing the rules the mint oregon administrative rules on how to implement this new legislation it was a bit of uh i don't know frustrating process i guess is a word i'll use the you know just the fact that city of springfield is designated by the state as a large city under these rules is a little bit questionable to me so depending on your perspective portland is is barely a large city um it's obviously the largest city in the state but

56:25 um you know because then they have different set of rules for medium-sized city in my mind springfield's a large town growing in to be a small city but anyway it is what it is the law you know was passed by the legislature our representatives at the state level so but in writing these rules i'll just share that a lot of the perspective was from kind of a large city perspective and honestly you know i would i think i can report fairly that the idea of kind of a very urban setting and say portland is the vision for these rules to put onto other cities so people

57:10 are using like public transportation or ubers or not owning cars and and i mean the rule i think the idea is to kind of mandate that those kind of standards um a lot of it you'll hear too that you know what's more important this provides space to house people or space to house cars and so you know it can be a little difficult to argue with that kind of a sentiment or argument but um i think what i hear some in your comments is there's a balance and there's a breaking point hopefully again similar to what i commented on um in response to commissioner or counselor pictionary's remarks is the market will dictate in some respects i mean there

57:57 will be developers that recognize that people do want multiple parking spaces and so hopefully we'll continue to develop and provide that but i don't know how that'll ultimately play out thank you uh steve what i see is what i call a greenhouse effect what they're trying to do is encourage less auto use by finding other modes of transportation in the long range so it'll be able to become a lifestyle as we go on and um so i that's the intent of the laws i think that makes sense but you know i think since i've been here a lot of the research for anything that we're trying to figure out is on big cities

58:43 one thing that big cities have is more than three black people so i'm just kidding no i'm not kidding uh but i mean you have uh various industries you have different types of diversity uh you have different institutions of higher education that are going to attract people here but i love springfield there's these things just don't exist and so it'd be nice if you know these various boards of commissions stop looking at these large cities because we'll never compare and if you look at the demographics that's a reason why uh so yeah i mean i get it but and for example i just looked at portland portland's now the 25th largest city united states and so that's a big city uh you know 653 000 it's not not a drop

59:30 in the bucket and so it'll be nice if we just are cognizant of not always comparing ourselves because they're small things that people don't think about like certain types of restaurants certain types of churches or social organizations that do not exist out here that play a large role in retaining people okay i'm done sorry if if i could just offer a quick comment to counselor mo's and i know some of you are aware of this but i'll just take it as an opportunity to plug the climate friendly and equitable communities act or the rules making process that's happening right now at the state level i know the mayor's involved with this i think with emma newman our staff

1:00:19 one of the reasons we're recommending keeping the maximum parking at one and not lowering it now is because we we envision we're going to be revisiting this within the next couple of years probably at the most when we're required by the state to implement the climate friendly and equitable communities rule that are being written right now um i think the rules coming out of that process that's the result of a governor's executive order not even legislation that was passed is likely going to have even bigger impacts than this middle housing rules um so anyway just so it's on your radar if it's not already it's it's um something worth looking into see i've seen that list that's going to be quite an impact quite startling

1:01:05 leonard uh well meaning uh no disrespect to either council or missionary or a councillor pits um i i think i'm on the wrong side based on what i'm hearing on the parking issue but i i i'm an old guy now but i remember that young people are very resourceful when it comes to getting their cuddles and so um i i think they're always going to be able to find a way but the um i i would also like to ask about the uh middle density and high density um housing the um there there's obviously um

1:01:50 no no more um restrictions on middle housing and mdr and hdr zoning is that right well it's a little bit complicated but i'll try and explain it briefly if i can so the new middle housing rules are required by the state to be applied anywhere we allow detached single family homes to be built so this is the reason why we're actually proposing to no longer allow detached single family homes in the mdr and hdr is that so we don't have to apply or allow middle housing on our mdr and hdr zoned property and

1:02:38 but when i say that it's we are pro it's confusing but so we are proposing to allow all the middle housing types on the mdr and hdr it's just that by not allowing the detached single family homes we don't have to allow those in compliance with the state rules around it and the one rule that's a catch and why we're doing it is because if we continued to allow the single family homes in mdr and hdr and we had to allow the middle housing we could not allow we could not require it to meet the minimum density standards of those two zones

1:03:24 and again so because we have a finite supply of mdr and hdr and that's where we're hoping to get more housing units if if we're allowing that limited supply to be used up and not meet the minimum density then we're not fully realizing the potential of those limited lands in terms of the number of housing units we could get so there has to be a certain density in each in in each zone in other words in the mdr house and the mdr zoning and hdr zoning how about in the low density um residential is there a is there a minimum density in the low density residential as well there is

1:04:10 it's it's um six units per net acre which equates to the 3 000 square foot lot size that we're proposing thank you merrily we got to talking about parking or talking about about uh not using cars i'll go back to my my age-old question and that is in what in what or how uh does someone who's disabled get uh maybe exclusionary do they get compensation to accommodate and don't need compensation accommodation um in these rules um

1:04:57 i've had conversations in the past with representative lively when he was talking about trying to get more people to use the bus and how are you going to get somebody whose day say who can't walk far from their house to the bus stop so i mean to me that's a realistic question and i look at this in the same way you're talking about one parking space per uh dwelling unit and yet you may have somebody in there who has to have an accommodating vehicle uh set up for them to be able to drive it in and maybe the rest of the family doesn't need that so you're automatically required to have two vehicles how does that get accommodated if it gets accommodated

1:05:43 yeah it's a it's an important question i think i'm unfortunately not going to have a great answer because i think it's an area that's been overlooked and these rules for sure and i know we've worked with aarp they've actually provided some funding to do some of the work we've leading up to this project they advocate for that and probably one of the areas that i know they're working on that that concern could be addressed more specifically is actually in the building code requirements because currently my understanding of the building code isn't as great as our building official but really the the building code doesn't require say ada accommodations in terms

1:06:30 of parking or ingress egress even into dwellings until you get into like basically apartment buildings so again it's really a kind of the market demand standpoint but i think part of your point is too even um considering proximity to frequent transit and things like that i mean are there ada accessible sidewalk routes and ramps and things between housing and frequent transit or but yeah parking definitely is again it's i've said this multiple times in front of the council here and throughout the public hearings process parking is definitely one of those issues that's a tough one and unfortunately we're being mandated by state to deal with it in a way that

1:07:15 doesn't sit well for a lot of people but then again on the same hand you have people advocating for even less so yeah i hear you like i've had this conversation for the last 10 years same conversation nobody's paying a day attention but i have the same conversation i mean it could do what goes to what council fits commented on too you know it doesn't make it for the size of the town that we live in it you know we don't we don't walk out and walk a quarter of a block to a transit stop you know the closest one might be a mile or a mile and a half or two miles away and what do we do for people in that kind of a situation so and and as often as i've asked the question nobody has

1:08:00 been able to answer it so don't feel bad so um the i guess the question that i had so in mdr and hdr single-family detached homes would would be wouldn't be allowed if you had a scenario i thought under state law you could subdivide if i put an adu on a on a piece of land i could subdivide it and make two single family homes so would we see that scenario on on mdr the short answer is yes you could have that scenario a lot of it's going to depend on the size of the property one of the members of the public of the eight people that testified is a similar

1:08:45 scenario to what you're asking about he's concerned with his mdr property that has a single home on it and how he would become non-conforming or how he could redevelop but again as soon as you were to even add a second dwelling on that property you wouldn't even have to necessarily divide it and you would be conforming again because it would be a duplex then even though they're two detached single-family homes but and as you're aware of and part of what i think you're talking about is the other new state law that is also being implemented with this code update that we're required to by the state is now allowing land division of middle housing this was not contemplated at the outset

1:09:30 of house bill 2001 the middle housing rules it came two years later with a new piece of legislation but so now any middle housing is going to the city has to allow to be divided each onto their own lots so say you build even a four plex can be four little detached houses on a property but then we have to allow that four plex to be divided each one onto their own lot regardless of lot size regardless of frontage on a road um regardless of density so financial institutions will require that

1:10:17 okay so that's i think a good point um i guess in the comment i think i have uh for the council is as we like the state legislature is continuing to pass housing rules at a very very high clip and i think we we have to continue to be mindful of you know asking um salem to make sure that they sort of stay at the right sort of level instead of trying to legislate at a very detailed level and acknowledge that it takes time to implement these um because we're just barely keeping taught up and then the next role comes down and i want to make sure that you know we have enough space and time to sort of put these into place mark i just interrupted you i apologize so and i interrupted you too you're fine we knew he'd be cool i'm good

1:11:03 it will be clunky the first meeting um mark um the only thing that that i would ask when we see this again is just to bring us more details about parking when i listen to the conversation around here there's still a lot of questions about getting our head around the parking parking rules and it just is acknowledging that land is a limited supply in the city and how do we fit both infrastructure and homes and parks and everything and and cars and bikes and everything around it so um do you have anything else mark or did you have enough direction yeah i think that's great it's provided all the information i need and just as a quick segue in terms of when you will see this again we are planning to bring another quarterly update to you in uh probably the early to mid april

1:11:49 and very shortly after that we also hope to be coming to you with a public hearing with the formal planning commission recommendations so then the next work session in early april will probably be a brief introduction moving towards your public hearing it's envisioned that that will be a joint public hearing with the board of county commissioners similar to how we've conducted a joint public hearing with the county on at the planning commission level so that's where we're headed and hope to get there and we are under a deadline to move this stuff forward again by the state i will definitely plan to bring some more detailed information about parking as we go forward for you okay perfect and before we adjourn for the evening mary bridget did we have to declare that we had that we were

1:12:34 property owners that's right we have the um potential conflict of interest that you guys go around and declare and you can do that now i'm glad we were we all remembered yes thank you sorry about that all right so we'll go by uh we'll we'll go by i'll start and then we'll go by ward number so i have a potential conflict of interest because i'm a property owner in the city of springfield i have no conflicts of interest i have a potential conflict of interest because i own property in the city of springfield i have a potential conflict of interest as a property owner in springfield a potential conflict of interest as i am a mortgage holder in the city of springfield

1:13:20 i have a potential conflict of interest because i'm a property owner in springfield i have a potential conflict of interest because i have properties in springfield all right great that looks like the last item for the evening so i am going to go ahead and join us and thank you everybody have a good night good night