Springfield City Council — February 10, 2025

0:04 I'm going to call the Springfield City Council work session to order with the roll call here Council weard here councelor Mo here councel rodley here councelor Blackwell here councelor Doyle here and councelor stout here thank you right we have one work item work work session item tonight which is a climate friendly areas update yeah I know it's been a little while so I'm Chelsea Hartman senior planner um and tonight I also have with me uh Monica sather she's our community engagement lead for the project and then Victor Tran with Cascadia Partners on Zoom tonight um so the last time we were at at council with you all was with Cascadia to present the market study findings on climate friendly areas back in June of last year uh so tonight if

0:50 Allison you could please bring up the presentation uh we're really going to start with a brief overview of climate friendly area since it's been a little while talk about the latest Community engagement that we've done and then go into staff recommendations for CFA locations tonight we are seeking your selection of preferred CFA locations so that we can proceed with drafting the plan and code amendments and bring that back for the adoption process later this year let's see if the clicker will

1:40 okay thank you okay yeah if you can click to the next slide while I do thank you um so Oregon's climate friendly and Equitable communities rules which I'll try to avoid saying a lot cuz it's a mouthful um require some cities including Springfield to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by identifying and adopting one or more cfas which will allow for dense Urban mixed use centers where people have options to meet most of their needs without only relying on a car um some of the specific requirements include we must have at least one primary CFA that's at least 25 acres um we must accommodate at least

2:25 30% of our 20-year current and future housing need these areas will allow for a mix of uses and be accessible by bike walking and Transit and include strategies to help residents uh keep or find housing if costs increase as cfas redevelop let's see if it'll work this time no okay next slide please um so a little bit about primary versus secondary cfas the state rules require that we have one primary and we have flexibility and designated additional primary or secondary cfas to meet our housing capacity requirement the primary cfas have taller building Heights of about seven stories and a higher

3:10 required minimum density of 25 units per net acre and the secondary cfas are similar but have lower allow Heights of about four stories and a lower density of 15 units per acre next slide please so in Spring 2024 engagement really focused on building awareness of the project and getting early thoughts on the key features of cfas and the potential locations following that we summarized Community input and the information on infrastructure availability major land owner willingness and market economics to discuss the potential benefits and trade-offs with Planning Commission and you all in June of last year at that time there was some interest on allowing

3:55 more housing near jobs and supporting home ownership opportunities Council guidance was to continue exploring all four of the locations and one scenario of Interest was to consider the potential for Glenwood Riverfront as a primary CFA and to consider shrinking downtown or not including Mohawk or the Gateway Riverbend area we used that as the basis for the next round of Outreach in the fall which focused on design outcomes housing tools that could help residents keep or find housing if costs increase as these areas redevelop over time and more specific questions about the locations being primary secondary or exploring smaller boundaries in some of the areas next slide please so in the fall we used a variety

4:41 of strategies to re reach the people who live work or own property in these areas um and the areas around the cfas along with anyone else who had an interest in the project the combination of the strategies intended to make it more convenient and easier for people with varying levels capacity ability and means to participate in order to reach more community members some of the key strategies in the fall were similar things from the first round so surveys again postcards and this time around we had online and inperson events and did some partner agency coordination most of our feedback was collected in the survey and we did receive some at inperson events on some posters next slide please

5:28 so beyond regulating things like height density and uses having design standards for cfas is not required uh cfas will allow higher densities and taller Heights in some cases so we wanted to hear perspectives on what design outcomes are important to the community the survey participants expressed a desire to balance flexible development with the ability to ensure quality outcomes some of the more desired design standards included things like weather protection Open Spaces with amenities and prominent entrances and some other common ones were active ground floor uses maximum building links and building articulation next slide please thank you so this is a summary of the tool

6:15 categories that were provided in the community survey we identified a list of possible tools to increase housing production and alleviate pressures from possible displacement in general these tools were found to be they could be applied to any of the CFA locations and some of them could even be applied Citywide as part of the city's upcoming housing planning efforts so we're going to be I'll be back in front of you all in a month from today uh to provide more information on the housing tools more specifically as part of a overall City housing strategy update and at that work session on March 10th we'll seek feedback on specific housing strategies that Council may have interest in exploring further next slide please so from the survey some key results uh

7:02 41% of participants uh rank tenant support so things like rner protections as the highest priority category there overall there was a strong desire for new affordable housing and helping residents find ways to stay uh living in the community that they're in now 32% of survey participants ranked Financial tools as another high C priority so things like Direct direct subsidy and tax incentives and there was a general acknowledgement that reducing the cost of development could help result in more housing units at different price points there was General support for other tools such as public private Partnerships and streamlining

7:50 development so part of the Fall survey again similar to the spring one we asked about the locations more specifically in the fall we asked about whether downtown or the Glenwood Riverfront should become primary cfas and if either of those should have smaller boundaries we also asked about whether Mohawk or Gateway Riverbend should become secondary cfas so 57% of the participants uh liked Glenwood Riverfront for a primary CFA with the current boundaries and few people thought that we should shrink it to only focus on the master plan area uh for downtown 50% of participants thought it was suitable for a primary CFA with its current boundaries and then for Mohawk 61% of

8:36 participants thought it could become a secondary CFA and 54% for Gateway Riverbend as a secondary CFA this slide also shows some of the poster votes that we gathered at the in-person events so this slide might be a little bit familiar from June we have revised it since um this shows how the different areas align with certain evaluation criteria based on the CFA study findings from 2023 and further analysis with Cascadia Partners in 2024 this just gives a quick visual way to see how suitable some of these areas are for becoming cfas and if you remember from our last conversation um there's challenges with each of the areas so we Tred to take that into

9:21 consideration with the recommendations um So based on the community feedback and the benefits and trade-offs of each area staff is recommending Glenwood Riverfront and Mohawk to become primary cfas and a smaller portion of the downtown to become a secondary CFA uh staff is not recommending Gateway Riverbend as a CFA given its lower suit suitability based on the criteria and I'll go into more detail on each of the areas in the recommendations for each in the next few slides um the CAC rules require that one or more cfas be large enough to accommodate 30% of our housing capacity which equates to a little less

10:06 than 10,000 housing units based on our current adopted housing needs analysis by December 2027 we must complete a new housing analysis using projections provided by the state which will require us to plan for more housing than when our last housing analysis was done to proactively plan for that staff is recommending a combination of cfas that can accommodate a little more than 30% of our housing capacity when accounting for this new housing projection from the state so that's kind of shown in the green text on the slide here excuse me I'm gonna ask clarifying question here so in the situation where our housing analysis has to be redone

10:51 you know coming up and I forget what year you said do would the rules support us to revisit the cfas if we don't have enough capacity in our cfas that is one way that we could accommodate housing capacity and that's kind of Our Hope of wanting to preempt that of planning for more cfas now so that we don't have to consider that again in a couple years is our current understanding or reading of the rules require that when we we get the updated housing analysis that we would have to account make sure that we account for the updated projection in our cfas I don't think so um I don't think we'd have to revisit CFA adoption because of that I think as long as we're accommodating our housing

11:36 capacity in a variety of different ways so it could be other code changes um Urban growth boundary expansions those things I think they're definitely placing a lot of emphasis on accommodating it in a variety of ways okay so cfas okay so while we while while the recommendation from staff is to leave a little bit like a more head romor growth in the cfas that is not something that we're required to do under our okay yeah based on the C rules we only have to go off of our current adopted housing analysis okay thank you yeah good question because I know it gets confusing with all the numbers and all the moving rules um so downtown um staff recommend downtown for a secondary CFA with a

12:22 revised boundary Community input Express General support for the larger downtown boundary that currently goes to 23rd Street to coincide with the urban R renewal District however staff considered Council comments about shrinking downtown as well as how the CFA standards could impact the adjacent residential areas the proposed downtown CFA has an eastern boundary at 14th Street as shown on the slide since that's a connector to the Mohawk CFA this revision balances having less impact to the residential areas adjacent to the community commercial District so the large red bright red area on the slide here uh with having a CFA that's large enough to accommodate more housing capacity the community commercial

13:08 District currently has a transition standard where the building height must be no greater than that permitted in AB budding residential districts for a distance of 50 ft that height transition would not be allowed in cfas and resulted in staff recommending removing a large portion of the community commercial area from the CFA there is an alternative option for downtown uh where council could consider further shrinking the CFA to 8 street which would align with the Eastern edge of the mixed use commercial district and the noal Development Area this smaller option works if both Glenwood Riverfront and Mohawk become primary cfas while the community feedback was supportive of downtown for a primary

13:55 staff is recommending this for secondary since the lower minimum density uh the minimum density required for primary could limit new Housing Development downtown since it's quite High um this also addresses concerns that the higher allowed he Heights for primary cfas would not be consistent with historic properties in downtown or the adjacent Washburn historic district and other residential areas the code approach for downtown would include resoning the R2 and R3 areas to mixed use residential and applying a CFA overlay to bring the existing districts into compliance while removing the nodal development overlay since it's functioning functioning essentially the same as a CFA

14:40 would so Glennwood is our next one Glennwood River Front for recommending for a primary CFA again with a revised boundary Community feedback was supportive of the larger Glenwood River Front rather than only focusing on just the master plan area the Glen wood Riverfront refinement plan that's in place implemented a three-story height limit within the green wamic Greenway area so we recommended amending the boundary to exclude that in order to retain the height limit next to the river the Glenwood Riverfront ranked highly for a primary CFA in community feedback and is currently most compliant with primary CFA standards and for the code approach for Glenwood this would include resoning the

15:26 area to Glenwood residential mix use and aligning that with primary CFA standards so the main change would really to be allowing commercial uses as primary uses which is consistent with what the master plan approach is doing for the code in that area um this approach would eliminate the Glenwood office mixed use district and designation and the CFA would then allow a more flexible mix of uses that can respond to different Market demands and similarly we would remove the nodal development overlay here we have been coordinating closely with the Glenwood master plan efforts and will'll continue to do so as we start drafting the plan and code amendments for the adoption process uh for Mohawk we are also

16:13 recommending this one for a primary CFA but there are no boundary changes for this area the community feedback expressed support for Mohawk to be a secondary CFA however staff is recommending mohawk for primary as it already mostly complies with the primary CFA requirements uh it currently H allows a mix of uses and has higher allowed Heights in the mixed use commercial District the main change here would be to increase the required minimum density for the few mixed use Residential Properties and establishing a minimum density for the Mixed e commercial District as an alternative option for Mohawk council could choose to make Mohawk a secondary CFA to have the lower density of 15 units per net acre while

16:59 keeping the higher allowed Heights that currently exist in this area this change with the alternative option would impact the overall housing capacity of cfas and mean that the downtown CFA boundary should remain at 14th and not shrink to eth uh the code approach here is a little simpler of with just replacing the nodal development overlay with a CFA overlay to bring the existing districts into compliance and then the last area Gateway Riverbend so due to infrastructure market and development constraints in this area um there's limited potential for new housing and it will primarily be used for the hospital's needs given that in the lower existing development regulation

17:45 compliance staff is not recommending this area become a CFA this map does show a revised boundary to exclude the floodway since that area is considered uh undevelopable based on the CFA requirements and should not have been included an alternative option for this area the community feedback did express some support for this area to become a secondary CFA and if Council prefers to designate Gateway Riverbend as a CFA that would require an amendment to W larlin's comprehensive plan that was recently updated since that does not currently have plans for more Parks access in this area and then to summarize

18:30 um So based on your direction tonight we'll begin working on the plan and code amendments if the staff recommendation moves forward we would have to make changes to the Glenwood and downtown refinement plans if Council chooses to also designate the Gateway Riverbend area we would also have to amend the Gateway refinement plan and there will be more opportunities for the community we to weigh in when we start drafting the Amendments uh this summer and as part of the adoption process that will be again later this year and ultimately Council will formally designate cfas and adopt the corresponding amendments if the Glenwood Riverfront CFA moves forward the Lane County Planning Commission and Board of Commissioners will also be a part of the adoption

19:15 process and then my last slide here really just summarizes the last several slides of the recommendations for each area we did share this with Planning Commission last week at their February 4th work session to get their feedback and they did Express General support for the staff recommendations planning Commissioners agreed that Glennwood and downtown make sense and discussed reasoning for recommending Glennwood as primary and downtown as secondary there were some comments of support for the downtown boundary at 14th Street to have a connection to Mohawk and not going smaller than that to consider um our future housing planning efforts that will beginning soon um there were also some comments appreciating the approach with

20:01 considering how to implement these prescriptive State rules in a way that makes sense for Springfield and that the recommendations considered alignment with what the city has already been working on for these areas such as wanting active mixed use in Glenwood Riverfront and downtown and improving how it feels to get around in Mohawk by providing more Transportation options and lastly there were supportive comments about not including Gateway River Bend as a CFA since it's not near or well connected with the other areas we're looking at and comments that it was that it's important to consider creating connections between these areas and better accessibility within them so that is all I have and I'll turn it back to you all thank

20:47 you question you mentioned something about County Planning Commission being involv in Glen is that because it's not in the city limits yet gr can be not yeah so the area we're looking at some of it will still be outside the city limits so they would have to be involved CC Blackwell thank you that's a lot of information um so uh will the designation of a primary CFA reduce the land available for other types of needed development um needed housing specifically with the um with the density requirement that's on there the 25 per acre that's a good question and that was a main reason we ended up going with a

21:33 secondary recommendation for downtown because it could limit some housing types um thankfully the Glenwood Riverfront already has a really high density and so there's not really much changing there and then Mohawk um it just didn't seem as limiting but yeah so it definitely is more about multif family housing would be be any single family housing duplexes Cottage cluster style in those areas so would that be when I was reading through it I was just thinking are we are we limiting um possibilities of home ownership in those areas it's a good question um and I don't know if Victor has any thoughts based on the market study analysis but I mean it's possible I think we keep hearing it's possible to develop home

22:19 ownership options but it's not the easiest um it probably will be more renter options in these areas yeah and then hi there hey Council this is uh Victor Tran with Cascade Partners thank you for your time tonight um that's a very good question and it's a really hard one to answer because uh a lot of development depends on the entitlements given and for climate friendly areas the intent of the program is to create more uh walkable mixed use districts and from a market perspective it lends itself to certain product types so for um downtown and Glenwood uh when we did our market analysis these areas uh tended to skew towards um more of the

23:05 like mid-range densities three story apartment buildings that type of thing so most likely these products would be more on the rental side however um it is really up to the market to build uh what they see fit with entitlements they're given so a long-winded way of saying um it's hard to know the answer to that question um other than we can look at the entitlements C given in cfas and make a kind of a a best guess based on what those provide but uh it could potentially lead to more ownership housing or more rental housing depending on what the market decides to produce rley thank you um and I really

23:50 appreciate councelor second did the attorney need to jump in there I have information if it's helpful in response to that based on when we were working during the r Mak process with dlcd staff on the primary cfa's minimum density they were unable to provide us any examples even using the middle housing resources that they provided where you could develop home ownership housing that was not relyant on a condo or land trust type model so there were no options that they could show us where there was sort of the one house per lot um not stacked housing that would meet those minimum density requirements so I would say from the information that we had in our comments

24:35 during the rulemaking process it's not um clear at all that that it would be possible to do home ownership housing outside of a condominium model in the primary cfas right C rley did you want to jump in again I was just gonna say which Oregon's um condo rules and laws and regulations are so cumbersome that they dis in advise Builders or developers to want to do condos so it's really unlikely to see at least the way it is right now now it's my turn thank you well I really appreciate that question because um um and we've talked about this before that there are those of us who would really like to see condo reform and maybe this would help put some pressure around that um and also like the balance I think one I really appreciate all of

25:21 the Outreach around this um because one of the the things that I don't know that I was thinking about really hard before that Rose to the top um of people's concerns is wanting to make sure that people don't get priced out of living in Springfield and so when I was reading through this and thinking about this I was like oh that really I you know we don't know exactly yet what we're going to do in Glennwood um and we we want it to be as mixed as possible Right to to your point like we want people to be able to purchase there we want people to be able to have businesses and restaurants and people could afford to live there and walk and move around so um I don't know that I'm I'm making any suggestions other than I

26:06 just wanted to out loud say that us thinking about that affordability and how do we support people living in Springfield um is just going to be an important piece of this I'm fine with moving forward with it the way it is I have I know that there are some folks in the Mohawk area that are a little concerned about the height and what that might look like because that would be a big change in that area and it'll probably take us a while to get there you knew didn't you I almost started with you um I'm just curious on the the the community engagement and the feedback that you you received did you actually get anybody that was a landlord or a

26:51 property management company or developers the people that were talking about potentially putting these restrictions on how they do their business and how they rent and it's hard to know since the survey was Anonymous um at in-person events I think Ian we didn't ask that either but we did mail to all Property Owners um and residents in the area I think the last round of Outreach in the spring we did more deliberate Outreach to some major land owners like we talked with the Glenwood master plan team about how this would work with that and then peace health since they are a significant land owner in that one area um and they didn't have concerns that it would get in the way of what they were wanting to do so that was at least helpful to hear and I don't think we saw a lot of specific comments come through with that

27:37 in the survey either okay yeah I just would have some concerns when they when I hear that the feedback was yeah we want to make sure that landlords you know that there's rules around how we can be you know evicted or whatever it is it sounds like that probably came more from um are less likely to have come from the people that are actually out there renting the properties um the other thing is I I too share the concern with mohawk um and being a primary rather than a secondary I'd almost rather see that um downtown area going to 14th and to make that a primary just because of the height Building height and some of that stuff that surrounds that area um isn't it also with these overlays with the CFA overlay doesn't that create more requirements like more green spaces and um um parks and things

28:25 like that that are put on the the responsibility of the property owners to to make them um it gets specific in prioritizing Parks access in that area a lot of that's on us um thankfully these areas were to found were found to have decent enough Parks access already um so like Mohawk I think the main issue is improving Transportation access to get to the parks in that area definitely okay well I appreciate that thank you very much just one thing uh if we're looking at adding the CFA to the downtown piece some of that's zoned uh industrial is that stay industrial or ises that get what happens to the industrial land in terms of development we did remove all

29:12 of the Industrial Area except for there's some Booth Kelly mixed use which is the closest um but we did earlier on try to remove It's probably hard to see in this map but in the packet it's a little easier with the tax slot boundaries so the booth Kelly mixed use is that like brown hatched a area um which was more CFA compliant but we deliberately excluded the industrial just because it's so different than what a CFA should be right and I would just kind of even though the city owns currently the booth Kelly land I'd be very concerned about losing that key piece of industrial real estate for the industrial purposes I understand that it's not currently used by an active rail user but that is a key piece of I think Springfield's industrial backbone that we would be um remiss to to lose

29:57 that section on to make it more difficult for an industrial user to take up space there again I understand the building his problems but that's all thank you all right so what is the advantage to having Mohawk being a primary CFA really just accommodating more housing capacity to account for that upcoming housing planning effort um I think we went back and forth of it mostly functions as a primary so the Heights in the mixed e commercial District I think are 90 ft CFA a primary CFA would require 85 it's very different than the reality of what's on the ground there right now um the main change would be the density so I think that's the

30:43 tradeoff of if we require a higher minimum density we get to count that towards our housing capacity requirement if we have the lower density it speaks to your comments earlier about just permitting more housing types so it's been a long time since we saw the market in analysis and but if my memory serves did did Mohawk because I thought it was like in two tiers one of them was sort of a lower density you know sort of U housing products and one of then then the second one was some of those higher Tower type housing products and if my memory serves they were saying that the market analysis was saying those higher end high density High Towers were not going to develop in Mohawk yes that's correct and I'll let Victor speak if there's more thoughts but I think the land costs in Mohawk are

31:29 pretty high so that would be pretty infeasible for the actual tall development to happen do you have anything you want to add Victor uh that's essentially it um we found across all four proposed uh CFA locations that the for example like the seven story mixed use types are incredibly hard to make work um for Mohawk's specifically we targeted uh the three to four story apartment range as being more feasible um but like Chelsea said the one advantage of being assigned as a primary CFA is you allow that greater envelope of entitlements and there's uh nothing in the code that says you have to build up to a certain height but it's more of a

32:15 uh you're allowed up to a certain height for um a primary versus secondary CFA I guess I guess the thing that I'm trying to wrap my head around and maybe I'm not thinking about this right is the market analysis says those Heights won't develop but if we Market it if we designate it a primary CFA then we're sort of counting those you know counting those in a potential housing need which in theory would you know sort of show our lower our gap for other policy options so in my mind and please correct me if I'm thinking about this wrong is that maybe we actually want to leave it as a secondary where the market analysis supports that level a little bit more because then it will force us further down the road road to choose um to

33:00 choose some other policy options to sort of soak up the additional housing need in the community yes I think that makes a lot of sense and with mohawk a secondary if we continue to have Glenwood Riverfront and the downtown boundary at 14th um we have plenty of housing capacity either way and so if everybody would like I'm looking to and see if people are kind of head nodding about maybe keeping Mohawk as a secondary CFA okay um the other I guess question that I had about cfas in general well when I read we probably need to back up a whole other step when when we do the public hearing here we're going to get a lot of questions about different housing types

33:46 and as housing is continues to get more complicated one of the things that would help us is to just get a clear um set of definitions around what do we mean when we're talking about what goes in cfas what's low income what's affordable housing what's subsidized housing because I think that's going to help lead the community Through the conversation because there's if we get confused about affordability levels right and we see you guys every Monday then you know 60,000 people are going to get a little bit more more confused I think that with that one change to Mohawk I think I'm fine with the recommendations you know for you guys to uh for you guys to write them up the only other question I have is really around Glenwood if we cover that sort of

34:31 you know the master well not the master plan area the refinement plan area one of the con the constant pieces of feedback we get from developers is that you know that the refinement plan makes it really difficult to develop smaller Parcels in Glenwood so if you take that sort of feedback and you overlay primary cfas on top of that are we getting are we getting so so many regulations that we will never see anything happen in that sort of Western end of Glenwood that's a good question I think a big part of the code approach we ended up recommending um we could have kept the Glenwood office mixed use as it is and just make it CFA compliant but really cfas will make it easier or it's

35:18 more permissive of a mix of uses right now the office mix district is a little bit restrictive because it has that high requirement for office and there's not the market to support that we would be getting rid of that barrier um and to allow just it would all become residential mixed use and similar to like what the master plan is doing um not have it be so different of like this is primarily residential this is primarily commercial it's kind of like we allow all these things it's up to the market to decide what's allowed so okay so when we get done towards implementation the the thinking is on that Western half of Glenwood we're going to it may it may just become yep okay yeah that's our hope perfect yeah U this looks good so I appreciate you guys bringing it Forward did anybody else

36:03 have other comments so I think we're ready to go I think we're fine with the recommendation just switch Mohawk to a secondary thank you so much that's helpful thank you I guess we're going to Ceda next so we are adjourned