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HomeMy WebLinkAbout01/21/2003 MINUTESMinutes of Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 I. Call to Order The meeting was called to order by Chairman Kennedy at 5:33 p.m. II. Roll Call Those present were: Chairman Kennedy, Commissioner Cockburn, Commissioner Dingfield, Commissioner Kosusko, Commissioner Nelson and Commissioner Wood. Quorum certified. III. Approval of Agenda Commissioner Kennedy introduced the agenda and noted several changes per Ms. Honore'. A motion was made by Commissioner Kosusko and seconded by Commissioner Wood to approve the agenda as corrected. Called for a vote: Cockburn: yes; Dingfield: yes; Kosusko: yes; Nelson: yes; Wood: yes, and Kennedy: yes. Agenda approved as corrected. IV. Approval of Minutes The Regular Meeting of December 17, 2002, minutes were presented for approval by Commissioner Kennedy. Commissioner Kennedy stated on page 13, it should say Suquamish Tribe. A motion was made by Commissioner Nelson and seconded by Commissioner Dingfield to approve the minutes as corrected. Called for a vote: Cockburn: yes; Dingfield: yes; Kosusko: yes; Nelson: yes; Wood: yes; and Kennedy: yes. Minutes approved as corrected. V. Public Meeting Chairman Kennedy moved directly to the call to the public portion. A. Call to the Public (public comments on any item not on tonight's agenda). Seeing no comments from the public, Commissioner Kennedy closed this portion of the meeting and moved onto the public meeting portion. B. Public Meeting Public Hearing: Commissioner Kennedy then opened the meeting up for public hearing. a. None 2. Workshops: a. Commissioner Kennedy then explained that there would be a short workshop regarding the Comprehensive Plan and turned the floor over to Mr. Rogerson of the Department of Community Development. Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 1 of 6 Mr. Rogerson stated that a few things have happened since the last update. He explained that he would be sharing some of the products with the Commission. The Coordinating Council will not meet again until March so that we could focus on getting some of the products done. He referred to a map on the easel. Alternative one is no land use designations. There is now a distinction on the map between neighborhood centers and district centers (color coded). There is also a change in the location of the Westpark Center — it is moved to the east side of the site. After some discussions with the Bremerton Housing Authority, we are now moving toward one of these scenarios which does not show the Westpark property. The design scheme that Bremerton Housing Authority is working on right now may be better depicted by using some standard zoning designations rather than a "centers" designation. He predicts that at least one of these scenarios may show a center no longer designated in the vicinity of Westpark. Instead, some more typical land use designations on that property and that would help the housing authority reach their goals. Commissioner Dingfield asked which designation is being discussed. She stated that when we first started discussing the "centers" concept, we also discussed the four corners where Kitsap Way meets Highway 3. There are commercial areas there already. Will we be including that whole area as a center because there are other things on the other side of the Highway? Mr. Rogersons said that one scenario that does employ the centers concept. There is another scenario that uses the traditional location, the first location we all talked about, will be closer to the corner of Kitsap Way and SR -3. The last scenario would put the location on the east side of the site and allowing more intense use on the west corner. He said that he hesitates to get too deep in this session about Westpark because we have to understand where the Housing Authority's plan is headed and we are not there yet. We don't fully understand what they are proposing. The other change on the map is a new center that you've never seen before. The Hadden Center, which is centered on the corner of Callow and 13 There is a small neighborhood commercial node there already. This would be a center that is very close to the Charleston District Center. This is an attempt to addresses the issue of there not being a neighborhood type center within any reach of neighborhoods on Madronna Point or North Lafayette. The rest of the maps are revised versions of scenario two and three with the changes we discussed. The whole issue of Westpark is still in more flux than any of the other portions of the map. Commissioner Kosusko asked about the downtown center as illustrated on the map. He stated that it still depicted as being that small planned (Calthorp center type), which is smaller than we discussed. Mr. Rogerson replied by saying that at this point, after discussing this with Chris Hugo, and understanding some of the other factors involving the larger downtown portion of the city — we are moving toward recommending that the centers Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 2 of 6 designation (the new mixed used concept of centers) is probably only applicable in the Calthorp core. Beyond that, some slightly different mixes of uses, either traditional, single purpose zoning or some more limited mixes of uses. He says that in at least one or two of these scenarios, the downtown Calthorp core be the only thing that we recommend receive a true "centers" designation. Then around that you will see either a more standard, traditional designation /zoning scheme or a hybrid that creates new zones that might be somewhat different mixes of land uses than a real center would have. We are having a hard time getting the true centers concept extending into most of the areas of the downtown region. Commissioner Dingfield asked about the residential designations. We want to keep a residential core downtown to support the center. Should there be some kind of neighborhood center to help keep the density that we want? Mr. Rogerson said that is one of the scenarios. We are still wrestling with a number of issues. The one scenario suggests companion centers, maybe even a full fledged neighborhood center at Evergreen Park, for example. The full fledged mixed use centers designation is restricted to the Calthorp boundaries but there may be other mixed used type designations around there. Mr. Rogerson then referred to a map and explained that they were looking at a map of the city with the centers shown and the transportation analysis zone lines (TAZ Lines). The City has been divided since the 1995 planning effort into transportation analysis zones. We already have a database of population and pointer numbers assigned to each of those transportation analysis zones. We are planning on using the TAZ zones that already exist and the database that is associated with it as the baseline or starting point to update for this plan. The task that we've been working on in the last two weeks is to develop population /employment numbers for each zone and then aggregate that number into the appropriate TAZ and add it to the population for that TAZ. This is important because this product, plus the land use scenario maps is what we need to hand off to the consultant who is working on transportation numbers. Parametrix has been under contract for the City for a year now — waiting in the wings to do the transportation number crunching. According to the contract, they will be writing the entire transportation element. He said that a meeting was set in about 9 days. At that meeting, we will give them the updated TAZ numbers, the land use scenario maps and the table of data that goes with it and send them to crunch transportation numbers. They should also have everything to start drafting the transportation element. In order to come up with the table of data that goes with the land use scenario maps, we have developed some intermediate products. GIS developed analysis for each of the centers — the GIS system has calculated for us the acreage, the range of parcel sizes, the average parcel size, and the number of undeveloped ( or largely undeveloped) parcels for each center. The other product is a spreadsheet that we are using to calculate the population (taking the acreage numbers from GIS, add the assumptions about residential density and employment density for area ratios, etc.) which gives us a number we can attach and add to the TAZ numbers. Finally, we are working on some text: draft centers descriptions of each center — slightly different for Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 3 of 6 each center. He gave some examples from Perry Avenue and Marinette neighborhoods centers. There was a short discussion of these examples The City has adopted capital improvement programs and began a series of meetings with the new Finance Director. The department now knows what issues are of concern to him. Mr. Rogerson concluded by sharing that the department is crunching lots of data and staff is busy writing text. Also Ms. Ralph is currently writing introduction sections for each element. She is our style and format guru. Her primary focus is the transportation introduction section so that it can go with the information to Parametrix next week. They will get the goals and policies; executive summary type introduction section; and hard data to work with. Commissioner Kennedy asked if Parametrix will be getting all the information that the Transportation Committee has worked on to this point so they will have some concept of where the public is on these issues. Mr. Rogerson said that yes, they will. He said that we want them to know the concept of the whole Comprehensive Plan, not just the transportation goals and policies. Even though there's consistency between them — it is still too narrow a focus. You want the team that is writing the transportation element to be aware of the big picture. Mr. Rogerson then talked about scheduling. He said that we are still on schedule. There are two trump cards — one is community participation, especially as we move closer to adoption. The natural concern that we all have is that there be adequate public workshops and a good, solid public hearing process. The schedule is still dependent on all of that. The other big trump card is the SEPA process. We still intend to do a full environmental impact statement (EIS). Because we are a city, like any other city in the state of Washington in the year 2003 — the funding for hiring a consultant to do that is something we are digging deep in our pockets for. So, the jury is still out on where we're going under SEPA. However, the intent and the goal is still to go for a full EIS. That process takes a while to get through — so if we don't start it very soon, it will begin to impact our schedule. Assuming that we start SEPA soon, we are still looking at draft products by the time we come back together. We should have our first draft product for you during our March meeting. Then a month or so after that a more refined draft product that can begin to go out to public workshops for public feedback. This should get us to April and depending on how that all goes, it is possible then to be looking at the adoption processes at the end of April or first of May. This is still consistent with the schedule we discussed before. Commissioner Kennedy asked if we have any kind of plan about how we are going to expose the public to the draft. Will there be another charette. That seemed to be a good format, people enjoyed the interaction. Is this something we are considering or does it have to be something more formalized? Mr. Rogerson recommended that there be a more informal public workshop. At least one but preferably a series of two or three. There was a short discussion about the format and Planning Commission participation level. He further stated that the exact format of the public workshops will be discussed at a later date. Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 4 of 6 Mr. Rogerson then skipped forward to the director's report. VI. Business Meeting A. Chair Report — Commissioner Kennedy. 1. None. B. Director's Report — Mr. Rogerson . 1. Introduction of new staff member - Mr. Rogerson introduced Robert Grumbach. He has been with us since January 2, 2003. He is working mainly in current planning and has lots of experience with some of the issues we'll be dealing with — specific issues like cell tower, writing of subdivision ordinances. He said that the Planning Commission will likely see Robert as we get into the final details of the Comprehensive Plan. He then turned the floor over to Mr. Grumbach. Mr. Grumbach stated that he was previously with Spokane County. He said that he also worked for City of Medical Lake and Spokane County Parks Department for about two years. He said that he attended Seattle University and Eastern Washington University. He has lived on both sides of the mountains, but comes from all over the place. Commissioner Kennedy welcomed him and said that we are glad to have him here. C. Old Business: None. D. New Business: Commissioner Kennedy asked if there were any more questions for Mr. Rogerson. Status of Moratoria Commissioner Cockburn asked about the status of the moratoria (billboards and cell towers). Mr. Rogerson replied by saying that the public hearing for the moratoria on the cell towers and billboards is tomorrow night (January 22, 2003), at the City Council meeting. The Council was briefed a week prior and had very few questions. He then said that we are moving forward on the program as we discussed at our December meeting. It will be decided tomorrow evening and if so, we will be looking for our commissioner volunteers for the committees on Thursday. 2. Update on the new Windemere Building Commissioner Dingfield asked Commissioner Kennedy to report on the progress of the new Windemere Building. Commissioner Kennedy stated that January 31, 2003 is occupation date. The final trim work is being done now. She said that when she sees the landscaping she will know it is really close. Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 5 of 6 Information Regarding 60- Minutes Program Video Ms. Honore' reported to the Commission that she had researched the video discussed during the December Planning Commission meeting. She found that the program was a 60 Minutes 2 Program which aired on December 11, 2002. The name of the program was "Tearing Down Cabrini Green ". The cost, including shipping and handling is $34.90 — and asked the pleasure of the Commission. During the last meeting the Commission had said that it would be a good program for the City Council to help get them on -board with the big picture of the Comprehensive Plan. After a short discussion the Planning Commission unanimously recommended that Mr. Hugo spend the $35.00 for this program for the City Council. VII. Adjournment Meeting was adjourned at 6:53 p.m. The next regular meeting is scheduled for March 18, 2003. Respectfully submitted by: Executive Secretary Approved by: Jessica Kennedy, Chairman Planning Commission Meeting January 21, 2003 Page 6 of 6