Attachment 16 - April 27, 2022 Planning Commission Verbatim MinutesLOS GATOS PLANNING COMMISSION 4/27/2022
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A P P E A R A N C E S:
Los Gatos Planning
Commissioners:
Melanie Hanssen, Chair
Jeffrey Barnett, Vice Chair
Kylie Clark
Kathryn Janoff
Steve Raspe
Emily Thomas
Town Manager: Laurel Prevetti
Community Development
Director:
Joel Paulson
Town Attorney: Robert Schultz
Transcribed by: Vicki L. Blandin
(619) 541-3405
ATTACHMENT 16
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P R O C E E D I N G S:
CHAIR HANSSEN: The last item on the agenda is the
continuation of the discussion of the Draft 2040 General
Plan as well as the Final EIR that goes along with it.
Staff did an amended agenda.
The Planning Commission met on Monday of this
week to continue its discussion that started in our April
13th meeting, and during the meeting on Monday, as noted in
the Staff Report, we did finish several of the elements and
got through most of the comments on the Land Use Element,
but did not finish our recommendation on the Land Use
Element. In addition we will be discussing the Community
Design Element, and then we’ll be discussing the Final EIR,
and the goal is for the Planning Commission to make a
recommendation regarding the overall Draft General Plan as
well as the Final EIR and whether it should be certified or
not.
That being the case, I will ask Staff if you
wanted to make a quick Staff Report covering anything
before we start the discussion?
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JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you, Chair. Good evening,
Commissioners. You actually did cover most of the points
that I was going to go over to start us off this evening.
Just making sure that everybody who is watching
is aware that there are materials on the Draft 2040 General
Plan and Final Environmental Impact Report available in the
Planning Commission packets for the April 13th meeting, the
April 25th special meeting, and then for tonight’s meeting.
The discussion so far has been focused on going
step-by-step through the summary of potential comments and
potential changes proposed by the public and other agencies
and Staff, all included in Exhibit 7, and that’s from the
Staff Report from April 13th.
As previously stated, we have made it through
most of the chapters, most of the elements of the General
Plan, and at the end of the last meeting on Monday we got
through a discussion of the Land Use Element. The
discussion of the Land Use Element did go through all of
the ideas summarized in Exhibit 7 as well as some other
ideas by the Commissioners, though no specific motion was
made, because we didn’t get to the end of that discussion.
Staff’s notes include general support from the
Commission for items 21, 33, and 34, but we expect a motion
giving specific direction would occur after the conclusion
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of the discussion of the housing numbers, which is what we
will be focusing on next. Once that discussion of the Land
Use Element is complete, then as the Chair mentioned, we
would move on to the Community Design Element and then on
to the Final EIR.
I’m available to provide additional information
on the Final EIR when we do get to that section, since that
discussion is slightly different than discussing the Draft
2040 General Plan.
There was a Desk Item today with some additional
Commissioner comments, but this concludes Staff’s
presentation and I’d be happy to answer any questions.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you very much, Ms. Armer.
Do any Commissioners have questions for Ms. Armer? I don’t
see any.
As a reminder to members of the public, we did
take all of the verbal comments relative to the Planning
Commission’s consideration of the 2040 General Plan and
Final EIR during our April 13th meeting, so we will not be
doing public comments during this portion of the meeting,
however, we have received hundreds of comments over the
last year since the General Plan Update Advisory Committee
ceased meeting and completed the Draft General Plan, and we
continue to receive a number of written comments and
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received quite a few verbal comments as well during our
April 13th meeting, so all of those comments that you have
made have been reviewed and considered by the Commission as
we discussed the General Plan, and we do incredibly
appreciate all of the public input that we’ve received on
the Draft General Plan.
With that in mind, we will turn our discussion
to, as Ms. Armer and I alluded to, where we were in the
Land Use Element. The very last thing that we did in our
meeting on Monday, which was a special meeting, is we
talked about Exhibit 7 is something that Staff did for us
and that was part of the April 13th Staff Report, and it is
a summary of all of the comments that have been received
since the Draft General Plan was received, and they did
categorize them by element, and while we did go through all
of the comments we did not complete the discussion of what
the build number would be in the recommendation that was
going to go to Town Council.
What we did do is we took a poll of the
Commissioners in terms of what their feelings were on the
possibility of reductions to the build number that were
listed in item 20.
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In the comments were no increase in housing units
and housing levels whatsoever, which is not recommended,
because that would be in violation of state law.
The second one is reducing the number of new
housing units to a lower, less ambitious target than the
3,738 number that was put into the build table of the Draft
General Plan.
Item C is reducing the number of new housing
units to 1,993, which is not recommended by Staff, because
that is the actual number for the RHNA for the plan and it
doesn’t incorporate anything that is naturally going to
happen that the Town has no control over, such as growth of
ADUs and projects that are already in the pipeline, and
also that we are required to do a buffer by HCD.
Then item D is reducing the number of new housing
units to 1,993 plus a 15-20% buffer, and of course while we
can look at doing that, we also have to remember that there
will be housing units built outside of the timeline of 2031
when the completion of the next Housing Element is done.
I added an additional item, which was item E,
which was to leave the number and the densities in the Land
Use section as they were and as are listed currently in the
Draft General Plan, and the reason that’s not in item 20 is
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because the whole Exhibit 7 was recommended changes, and
leaving it the way it is would not be a change.
I thought it might not be a bad idea before we go
any further, rather than just having a poll of the
Commissioners that we should vote whether or not to reduce
the number in the General Plan versus leaving it the same.
I was hoping to get a motion one way or the other and then
we could vote on that, and then depending where the
Commission comes out will help guide our discussion in
terms of if the will of the Commission was to recommend to
reduce the number, then we would be able to proceed with
that, and if the will of the Commission was to leave it the
same, then we would proceed with that. Are there any
questions or comments on that?
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you. I think that I
will repeat what I said when we started this conversation
at our last meeting on Monday.
We’re the Planning Commission and our job is to
plan and make sure the plans for the Town are recommended
in a prudent and thoughtful manner listening to the public,
listening to what we have to do legally, so we’ve got a big
decision.
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I understand why the number in the current Draft
General Plan is what is, the total as well as the
breakdown, and I’m also mindful of the amount of feedback
we’ve gotten from the public. Let me say that it’s more
than feedback, it’s more like uproar, recommending that we
reduce those numbers, in some cases to the lowest that we
would recommend, which would be the current RHNA housing
cycle numbers plus the buffer, or someplace in between that
RHNA number and buffer and what is in the current General
Plan.
I’m in favor of doing what the Commission through
its deliberation is interested in doing, but I would say,
as I did last time, that in our planning capacity we have
to remember that the General Plan is covering three housing
cycles, two complete housing cycles and the initiation of a
third, so I’d like to hear the Commission’s discussion
around whether it’s prudent or not to simply ignore the
next two or severely reduce the next targets for the next
two housing cycles, which is the general direction that a
lot of the public is asking us to take. What impact does
that have—maybe is a question for Staff—if we don’t include
those numbers greater than the current RHNA cycle in
anticipation of additional numbers coming in the future
RHNA cycles?
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I’m just interested in what the conversation
around that would be. I personally feel like we have a
responsibility to include those future cycles. Whether we
need to do it with specific numbers or not, I’m not sure,
but certainly our zoning designations and the changes that
we’re making to the zoning designations would facilitate
growth in those future housing cycles. I’m just really
struggling with that question and would appreciate
conversation from the Commission and Staff.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Would you like Staff to respond
to what you were saying, if we were to, say, focus only on
1,993 plus the buffer, how would that translate into
possibilities for considering that the General Plan is a
2040 General Plan?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes, I would.
CHAIR HANSSEN: So if Staff could comment on
that, that would be helpful.
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you for that question. You
are correct, this is a 20-year plan and the housing numbers
associated with the RHNA allocation, that is just for the
eight-year RHNA cycle, the next Housing Element update, and
so that is one component of what has been discussed through
this process, that there will be another cycle-and-a-half
that’s included in these 20 years, and so recognizing that
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the growth projected in this Draft General Plan is based on
a 20-year rather than just an eight-year cycle.
In addition to that, one of things though to keep
in mind in this discussion is that you have recommended
that there be a five-year kind of check in on the Land Use
Element in particular, and there is an implementation
measure for a ten-year check in on the whole General Plan,
so there are options through that timeline to check in, or
if we get to the next cycle and find that there isn’t
enough capacity within the General Plan, then it may be
that as part of that Housing Element there needs to also be
some updates to the land use regulations.
All of that being said, Staff is in support of
the Draft 2040 General Plan as recommended by the GPAC, and
if some reductions were proposed as part of the
recommendation from the Planning Commission, we would
recommend that it not be any more than the difference that
was noted on page six of the Staff Report for the April 13th
meeting where we laid out certain portions of the built-out
table, certain portions of those numbers that wouldn’t
count towards the next eight year, for example, 300 ADU
units, and we modified some of those numbers to try to make
this more of a apples-to-apples comparison and then showed
what the different between that and the RHNA plus buffer
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is, and so a reduction that’s greater than that would not
be recommended by Staff.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Very good. Commissioner Thomas,
you have your hand up.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Thank you, Chair Hanssen. I
do appreciate the reminder that we will be checking in on
the Land Use Element at a more frequent cycle than the 20-
year General Plan cycle, I just don’t see how we reasonably
are not going to get similar RHNA numbers moving forward in
the future, and so if that’s the case I feel like this
3,700 number seems very reasonable. I completely understand
that that makes a lot of people in Town very scared for
very justifiable reasons, but I also am very confident that
the rest of the General Plan and the implementation
programs that are being prioritized over the next five and
ten years are ones that will improve infrastructure and
ensure that the Town can support this housing.
I think that when people voiced concerns to me
prior to when I came I didn’t talk to anyone about it, but
when I saw all of our feedback and public comments that
were received, I feel like people see this number and have
an initial reaction without reading and looking at the
entire General Plan, and I think that a lot of residents
would be comforted by understanding more fully the entire
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General Plan as an entire package instead of just this
small piece of the Land Use Element.
I want to be in agreement with the other
Commissioners tonight and I’ve really been trying to think
a lot about this over the past two days since our meeting
on Monday, but I am afraid that we’re setting future
Commissions, Housing Element Advisory Boards, and the Town
up for many more challenges instead of opportunities to
meet our future RHNA numbers if we reduce this number
significantly. So that’s my main concern, and I think that
having a goal, and then if we in like five or ten years
need to adjust this land use number down, that’s going to
be easier to do than getting our RHNA and then having to go
back and change our land use, and check in with our Land
Use Element as we’re writing a new Housing Element, so I
don’t think we should plan on having to change the Land Use
Element. I think we should try to hope for it to be
designed to last 20 years and as the backup have it be
available to be updated. So those are my feelings on these
things.
I think also something that is really important
is that no matter what the number is in the General Plan,
the Town and the plan itself does not have control over how
many units are going to be developed. The Town itself is
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not developing those units. Developers have to come in and
want to build, and what is much more important to the
number of units that are going to be built is how zoning is
going to be changed and densities are going to be changed.
I think that just because this is written into the General
Plan as a goal that’s a Guiding Principle it does not
automatically set us up for the addition of 3,700 new units
in the next just couple of years at a growth that’s
unsustainable for the Town, because we still have local
control. But if we don’t meet our RHNA numbers, then I’m
afraid that we’re going to lose control over a lot of
things that are really important to people in Town.
That’s just how I’m feeling about this, but I
really am curious to hear what other Commissioners have to
say.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you, Commissioner Thomas,
for all your comments, and that was very thoughtful and
gave us a lot of things to think about as a Commission in
terms of making our recommendation.
Director Paulson has his hand up, so I’m going to
ask him to comment before I go to Commissioner Clark.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you, Chair. Thank you for
the comments, Commissioner Thomas. Just for the entirety of
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the Commission’s understanding, a couple of points of
clarification.
The challenge that has been brought up in public
comments as well, we modify the densities for the General
Plan to what is currently proposed. Under current state law
there is not an option to draw those back, so we’re not
allowed to reduce those densities. I just want the
Commission to understand that component.
It gets a little bit to the point, which I think
we talked about before, if the number is changed, which is
definitely under the purview of the Commission and then
ultimately the Council, if that number is changed, should
we run into an issue, whether it’s five years or as we
start to look at the next seventh cycle Housing Element out
in probably 2028 or 2029, if we don’t have capacity for
whatever the anticipated number there for that cycle is,
then ultimately we would be revisiting the General Plan
Land Use Element either while we’re going through the
Housing Element or we would have implementation programs in
that Housing Element that would require modification so
that we could accommodate our RHNA if we didn’t have the
capacity left.
I just wanted to make those two points of
clarification for both.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, thank you for that,
Director Paulson.
Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. I first want to
say that I really, really value the opinions of my fellow
commissioners and so I’ll share my thoughts, but I’m really
excited to hear what others have to say and I’m very open
to everyone’s ideas, comments, and knowledge.
A few of my thoughts are first, I do think just
one problem we’ve had so far is misinformation and the
knee-jerk reaction that people had to that number. I heard
people saying that we’re going to build 30,000 units, and
so it did get really inflated, and also I think that people
did imagine the Town going and building 3,700 units or
something like that, and people not really understanding
that this is for three cycles, like we’ve been talking
about.
My thoughts are that I think that one thing that
the entire community can agree on is that we want to get
our Housing Element through, and I think that we agree on
this whether you’re the biggest CMB ever or whether you
really want to avoid state control and to maintain local
control that we all want our Housing Element to go through
for whatever reason.
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For me, I think that these numbers make it
exponentially more likely that we get our Housing Element
through and that we would need to accommodate for this
number of units within the three General Plan cycles
regardless, so my inclination for what’s really best is
that I think that we should leave it as is, or very close
as is, but I also understand that we need to alleviate
community concerns, and so I think regardless something
we’ll have to do after this is some additional education
and really making sure that people understand the reasons
behind whatever decision we make tonight.
But I also think in terms of keeping a high
number, we need as many opportunities as possible to offer
developers, so as many locations and as much density in the
appropriate zoning, because there are only so many
developments to go around and I think we don’t want all of
them to get built in other communities that were a little
more ambitious or did do more to accommodate for
construction, and so I want to make sure that we’re also an
appealing location and one where there is opportunity.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Commissioner
Clark.
Vice Chair Barnett.
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VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Thank you. I also am
desirous of hearing from all the Commissioners on this
important issue.
I come from the other direction, more of what Mr.
Paulson was saying, that we review the housing capacity on
a five-year basis and see where we are, so we’re not
speculating about what the future RHNA requirements would
be.
I also am very concerned that if we up-zone 40%
of the land in the Town that we will not be able to down-
zone despite problems with traffic and greenhouse gases,
which are noted already in the EIR as being over the
acceptable margins, and also problems concerning public
service demands, school crowding, and water, which have
been major sources of concern to the members of the public.
So again, while I’m open minded, I think that a
more appropriate approach would be to start with the RHNA
and the buffer and add additional housing opportunities in
certain zoning areas as I’ve suggested in my submission.
Thank you.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Vice Chair
Barnett. Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Thank you, Chair. First off,
like all my fellow commissioners I think we’ve collected a
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diverse group of Commissioners with varying ideas and I
think that adds to this discussion. I’m looking forward to
the discussion that we’re about to have.
As part of that, as I was thinking about it over
the last several days I called into question a little bit
what is the roll of a Planning Commissioner? Are we here to
just give our own voices, or is it to give voice to all
those in the community? We certainly heard a lot of voices
on these particular issues, and I think as Commissioner
Janoff indicated, maybe upheaval is a better word. Those
kind of set the tone for my thinking and my discussion.
I think at the end of our last meeting I
indicated that I was in the camp of the RHNA numbers plus
the buffer, 15-20%, and since that time I’ve done a little
bit more thinking and I want to actually commend Vice Chair
Barnett. I spent time studying your initial proposal and
then our revised proposal that I looked at today, and in my
view those are good starting points for the discussion. I
think they encapsulate well, perhaps not the exact number
that I’m at, but certainly my thinking on the subject.
And like Vice Chair Barnett, and as Director
Paulson indicated, the five-year review gives me comfort
that if we don’t get it exactly right this first time, it’s
not irretrievable, it’s not irreversible. This is going to
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be an ongoing process. I think even if we adopt the GPAC
numbers, it probably won’t carry us through all the cycles
that will occur in the 20-year General Plan, and so at some
point it’s going to have to be revisited.
Those are my thoughts, but again, I look forward
to having this discussion with all my Commissioners.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. Before I go
back to Commissioner Janoff and Commissioner Thomas, and
Commissioner Thomas was first, I will reiterate some of
what I said the other night.
When we started the process of the General Plan
update back in 2018 we didn’t know what our RHNA was, and
so we had to imagine what might happen over the next 20
years, and the number we put in during the (inaudible) was
2,000 units, and low and behold, that became our RHNA for
eight years.
Getting back to all the concerns that we had in
the public, putting 2,000 units in Town, although we have
no responsibility for building them, it will be developers
doing that, we do have to plan for them, and it’s a scary
thing for everybody.
We’ve had issues, beach traffic and whatnot, so
I’m of the mind that Staff made some recommendations in the
Staff Report that we should consider a compromise position
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in between satisfying the needs of the eight years and
looking somewhat ahead, and being mindful of the fact there
are some things over the 20-years that we have no control
over, for example, Staff is forecasting that we’ll have 500
ADUs, and that’s based on the rate that we’re getting ADUs
right now, and state law makes it a ministerial permit to
be able to do ADUs and there’s nothing at all that the
Commission or the Town Council or anyone can do about that.
My feeling is that we ought to consider an
approach that’s balanced, that does not isolate housing
into one particular zoning category, but that is something
in between what we saw and had put out a year ago and where
we need to be in the RHNA numbers, so something in between
those two is where I thought we should be, but I also
respect and want to hear from the rest of the Commission.
I’ll go back to Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Thank you. I think that it
is a great idea to be able to come back and review the Land
Use Element every five years, but I don’t think my intent
of being able to do that and recommend that to Town Council
was not so that we can come back and adjust our numbers
every five years. That was an emergency because things
might be changing over the next 20 years, and I still do
think that it is our responsibility as a Planning
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Commission to try to get this as good as we can for a 20-
year vision and the backup to be that we can review this
every five years and make updates if needed.
I also understand, Commissioner Raspe, what
you’re saying with regard to public comments and public
outcry and what Commissioner Janoff mentioned, but I feel
very strongly that it is also our job as Planning
Commissioners to make sure that we represent underserved
populations and their voices and those that can’t
necessarily speak up for themselves.
We’re going to need to build a lot of these units
and that’s going to need to be for like young children who
live in Town right now and who are going to grow up and
can’t afford to live here, and so I do think that we
shouldn’t just always listen to the loudest voice in the
room as Planning Commissioners and it is our role to take a
step back and make decisions that are best for the entire
community, and that includes people that work here that
can’t afford to live here right now.
I do really want to come into agreement, but I
really do feel strongly that we should be trying to plan
for the next 20 years, even though I know that we have a
backup plan of being able to change things on a five-year
time period with the Land Use Element.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you. Let me just
start by saying I noted in the 2020 General Plan currently
in place there is a discussion of land use, but there’s no
discussion of numbers whatsoever, so I appreciate the fact
that we’ve got a table of numbers in here. It’s really full
transparency to the public what is happening and is
anticipated to be happening in terms of the drive by the
State of California to increase housing, and the reason
that we’re at this 2,000 number now, which is extraordinary
in itself, is because Los Gatos as well as—perhaps the
exception is Morgan Hill—has not planned adequately to get
to the population that’s most in need.
I especially appreciate Commissioner Thomas’
comment about the underserved in our community. That’s
precisely the sector that we don’t hear from, but that’s
precisely the sector that the state is hoping to be better
served through these laws and measures. So I just wanted to
comment that I truly appreciate that the General Plan is
laying it all out there, the draft plan, so that people can
understand.
There are two bullets in the list of potential
reductions that are reducing the density from 40 dwellings
per acre to 30 in Mixed-Use and High-Density. My question
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to Staff is if we did reduce that density in the General
Plan, can we do incentives in a Land Use Element to provide
increased density beyond the 30, if we were to reduce it to
30? Can the Housing Element incentivize over what’s in the
General Plan? My suspicion is the answer is no. But
alternatively can we condition what’s in the General Plan
in terms of zoning densities that it’s 40 units per acre
only if you are providing this type of housing, otherwise
it goes down to 30?
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you for that question.
I’ll start with one point in terms of the densities and
reduction of them and some concerns about reducing those
down to, say, a level of 30, and then I would guess that
our Community Development Director or Town Manager may have
more to add.
The one thing to keep in mind in terms of
reduction of some of those zones that are higher density
under the current Draft 2040 General Plan is that if we are
going to count those parcels are potential affordable
housing it’s not just that the maximum allowed density
needs to be at least 30, it’s actually that it needs to be
a range with the minimum being 30, so it does actually need
to be a bit above that, and we can talk more about that to
provide additional clarification, but that’s one component.
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Providing incentives for more affordable housing
is more likely to be something that would be part of the
Housing Element, a program there, but with that I think I
will pass it off Community Development Director Paulson.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. I think Jennifer
touched on a couple of important points. For our default
density, which in the last cycle was 20 dwelling units per
acre, some of you might remember, because the San Jose
metro area is now above two million we are now in a
different category, which our default density is now 30
dwelling units per acre.
Just to go back, the reductions that are outlined
in the Staff Report, those are just examples based on input
from Council of what kind of information we should bring
for consideration. They’re not necessarily recommendations
of Staff.
But ultimately, I think that range, again,
getting back to the point of we’re not going to be able to
reduce the density, maybe rather than 30 to 40, it’s an
option of 30 to 35. Obviously, those could be reduced in
any and all of the zones, so whatever the Commission and
ultimately the Council want, but in those conversations I
think it’s important to understand that default density
opportunity, and the biggest opportunity with that is that
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once we hit that default density we’re going to have better
justification even though we’re going to have to provide
evidence and additional information to say that those types
of sites, because we are increasing the density, are going
to be able to accommodate that very low category, which is
the most difficult for many jurisdictions, especially
jurisdictions like the Town, to accomplish.
So as you get into those higher densities, that
default density is going to be looked at differently this
cycle, frankly, than the last cycle, and I think I might
have mentioned that in one of the last two meetings we
heard comments about the North Forty, that they had
promised to do these affordable levels in the Housing
Element and didn’t do that. That wasn’t a promise from the
developer. That is part of the Housing Element, and because
it was 20 dwelling units per acre the state said yes, you
can say all of those are going to be affordable, and so
that’s what was done.
Even though we can’t compel developers to build
to those levels, there is not any state law that allows us
to compel that, we do have inclusionary housing, which
covers moderate and low, but we don’t have anything that
can get down to that very low. It’s really, as you’ve seen
with the North Forty, an affordable housing developer
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teaming up with a market rate developer and them basically
providing land and other options so it makes sense for the
affordable housing developer to develop that house.
Ultimately, we need to have the density, from my
perspective, and I’m not sure, we’ll see if Ms. Prevetti
has additional comments, but I don’t think you can put in
our General Plan the density is, let’s say, 30, but if you
do X, Y, and Z you can go to 40. That becomes challenging.
There are a lot of opportunities through other state laws,
state density bonus law changed recently and is much more
generous. Previously the maximum density bonus was 35%
through that law, now it’s all the way up to 80% density
bonus.
So those are some of the other factors to
consider as you’re going through this process, but the
answer to your incentivizing, I would say no. We can, again
as Ms. Armer mentioned, look for opportunities to
incentivize through the Housing Element, which may lead to
implementation programs that look to modify the General
Plan; that’s a possibility. Hopefully we can do it kind of
as a standalone option, but those are definitely going to
be opportunities through the Housing Element that we’re
going to have to explore just to try to come up with
realistic opportunities for that very low housing level.
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COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I did have a second
question, unless the Town Manager wanted to jump in. My
second question is would there be any problem with changing
the way that the projected number of housing units is in
the plan, instead of giving one lump number that separates
it out by zoning designation, we have a table that
separates the numbers by Housing Element, so it’s clear
that we’ve got Housing Element 1 with 2,292 units as the
target, and then an estimate for the next cycle and an
estimate for the third cycle, because that seems to be a
way that we can make the numbers more understandable to the
public rather than lumping it all together.
At this point I haven’t really heard a compelling
reason to reduce these numbers down to the number that Vice
Chair Barnett is suggesting. That may be appropriate for
the first eight to ten years, but we’re still looking at a
longer duration plan, and if the expectation is that we
estimate a number or put a number forward that we think is
reasonable for the entire period of the plan, then I think
it needs to be a higher number. If what we’re doing is
recognizing what we know as our current RHNA target and
then we don’t know for the next two cycles, that’s
different.
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I don’t think that’s as transparent as we should
be with the Town, so at the moment I’m still not convinced
that we shouldn’t communicate the numbers much higher than
the, I guess, 2,400 or 2,600 that Vice Chair Barnett has
offered. But I’m open to understanding why that would make
sense.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, and I just
want to check in, because the Town Manager has her camera
one. Did you want to comment or not?
LAUREL PREVETTI: I just wanted to say I think
what Commissioner Janoff is suggesting is some kind of
phased housing development in the General Plan, maybe 1,993
plus a buffer for the first, I don't know, eight or ten
years, and then some other increment of housing for another
time period. I just want you to know that from my
experience of having tried to implement a phased housing
General Plan, usually the sites that you identify for that
first phase just never seem to line up with where the
developers want to build, so you’re still going to be
looking at General Plan amendments and having those policy
debates, and quite frankly, we’re so small that I’m not
sure a phased approach for Los Gatos would really work. In
theory it can work, but the implementation of that is very,
very, challenging, so I would recommend that the Commission
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focus on a total number for the Council’s consideration and
then we can work through the implementation once we have an
adopted General Plan. Thank you.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: If I could just add a
comment. I wasn’t suggesting a phased plan per se, just
that these are how the numbers might play out over a period
of time, but not phasing. I don’t think I would change the
zoning designations that we have to enable the 3,700 or
however many numbers, so I wouldn’t recommend a phasing of
any of those policies or zoning limits. It was just a
matter of communicating this is the number we know for this
cycle, and then there are going to be more without phasing.
JENNIFER ARMER: Commissioner Janoff, what I’m
hearing from you is just ideas of how to share the
information about what this development would be. Since
these numbers were estimated based on a 20-year timeline,
what is that estimate? If you broke that out into chunks of
time over the 20 years, how many numbers would go into each
bucket is what I’m hearing.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: That’s exactly what I’m
suggesting, just for clarification for the public so
they’re not saying, oh my goodness, 3,700 units in the next
five years; we’ll be overwhelmed. Yes, we would be
overwhelmed, and that’s not what we’re planning for.
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JENNIFER ARMER: Yes, and I’m not sure if that’s
something that with a General Plan, it’s general, it’s long
range, and so getting into that kind of detailed prediction
is likely a difficult thing and might not be feasible. It
looks like Director Paulson may have something to add.
JOEL PAULSON: We have tried through many methods
to communicate the current cycle versus the 20-year plan
and that we’re going to have two-plus cycles in there. I
would say absolute best-case scenario from an assumption
perspective, we know that we have this cycle.
Let’s say by some miraculous stroke of luck the
state in the next cycle says that was too ambitious, we’re
going to go back to your fifth cycle number, which was 619,
so you can just use that number, again, not knowing what
that number is going to be. But if it did go back that far,
we still wouldn’t have the capacity in what we’re currently
proposing, and I think the reality is—we talked about this
a lot in the GPAC also—this is a big leap for the Town in a
lot of these areas from a density perspective, so we
understand that.
My thought is going into this we understand that
whether it’s five years from now, ten years from now, 15
years from now, we’re probably going to be reevaluating
some other options so that we can accommodate whatever that
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next cycle number is, because we probably aren’t going to
have the capacity, and then state laws change relating to
Housing Elements.
You’re all aware, there’s much more stringent
guidelines about using sites that were in previous
elements, sites that are not vacant, and with a town like
ours, we don’t have a whole lot of vacant land sitting
around, so those are going to be conversations over the
next decades, whatever chunk you want to put that in, that
we’re going to have to accomplish, and we understand that,
but we also appreciate that from the community’s
perspective this is a big leap from a density perspective
in a lot of these areas.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for all that. I know
Commissioners Clark and Thomas have had their hands up, but
I do have a couple of questions that I think are really
important to ask right now.
Supposing that it was the will of the Commission
to be more conservative and know that we will have to
reevaluate this thing at the next Housing Element cycle and
that we weren’t going to be tying our hands behind our back
to get there, I wanted to ask a couple of specific
questions about the suggestions that were on page six of
the April 13th Staff Report.
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One was about the potential reductions. If it was
the will of the Commission to do potential reductions,
Commissioner Janoff brought up about the density for Mixed-
Use or High-Density, even knowing about how affordable
housing happens I would be really reluctant to change any
of the densities for Mixed-Use or High-Density, because
what we really want to encourage is smaller units, and
while there is no guarantee that the smaller units will be
smaller prices, they will be but it might not be as small
as we’d like, and that’s where the affordable housing
developers come in. The affordable housing developers are
not going to get involved in Low-Density Residential,
because it’s simply not going to be enough units for them
to make a difference, so I definitely wouldn’t want to
change any of that.
One of the things that occurred to me since I was
on the GPAC, at the very last minute toward the very end of
the process to give ourselves more tools we did add in the
possibility of housing in Office and Service Commercial,
and if you look on page six of the Staff Report, that
translated in terms of modeling into 313 units, but when we
were discussing it at the GPAC I don’t think any of us
thought that we would get that many units out of that,
because a lot of the service that we’re talking about are
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like the auto repair shops. It’s going to be one unit or
something like that, so my question for Staff would be if
we were take away that particular housing designation to
allow housing in Office and Service Commercial, would that
prevent us from having Mixed-Use in another area where
there would be Office and Housing.
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you. Office is an allowed
use in some of our other Commercial zones, for example,
Mixed-Use, and so having a Mixed-Use Office and Residential
would still be possible in those land use designations.
JOEL PAULSON: In Office it currently is proposed
at 40, and in Service Commercial it’s currently proposed as
a maximum of 30, so should those be more aligned with, for
instance, the Neighborhood Commercial which has a maximum
of 20, or as you suggested, should one or both of those be
pulled off the table, I think the challenge you run into is
if you still want to have the opportunity for Mixed-Use on
those sites, then we need to have a density for those
sites, so that gets to be the conversation. So if you were
trying to maybe lessen the impact from a number of units
perspective, but also allow the opportunity for a Mixed-Use
project, for instance, then we would want to set a density
range for that designation. Maybe it’s just a lower density
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range that incrementally reduces that number but not the
entirety of the 313 units.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think I understand. Similar
question for Low-Density Residential. The current proposal
in the General Plan is to go up to 12 units per acre.
Twelve units per acre isn’t anywhere close to the minimum
density that’s required to consider affordable housing, so
I’m not sure what we get by doing that except for that we
would be not concentrating as much in other zones, because
it would be spreading the housing around more, and also the
fact that with Low-Density Residential, and we’re not
planning as such to make ADUs happen, we’re certainly
educating people about it, but ADUs are where I would think
would be mostly in Low-Density Residential, and then to the
extent that SB 9 actually does take off, we don’t know yet,
that will be a Low-Density Residential as well, so would we
be hurting ourselves in terms of production of affordable
housing by lowering our density somewhat in Low-Density
Residential? That’s my question.
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you for your question. I
think the major impact of reducing the density in the Low-
Density Residential zone is the loss of that missing middle
housing. That density, you would need to keep it pretty
close to where it is really to allow the potential for
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triplexes and potentially fourplexes on some of the larger
lots in the Low-Density. That still would need to be
designed for compatibility with those neighborhoods, but
allowing that missing middle, that variety of housing, not
just the small affordable housing, but that in between, and
so if we do move forward with a recommendation to reduce
that density back to the existing level for Low-Density
Residential, because the General Plan is no longer
providing a place for the missing middle housing, then that
discussion and those policies would be removed along with
it.
CHAIR HANSSEN: That seemed like such an
appealing thing to everyone in on the General Plan Advisory
Committee.
Director Paulson.
JOEL PAULSON: Yes, thank you. Ms. Armer is
correct, and as we pointed out in the Staff Report, that
would be the impact to the current Draft General Plan.
I think what we’ve seen in public comment and we
hear in public meetings, and you reference as well, is we
don’t know what’s going to become of SB 9. SB 9, frankly,
provides similar opportunities from a unit count
perspective, and even with the missing middle, unless it
was a very large site where you have five or more units
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that are going to be proposed, which obviously SB 9 doesn’t
cover, because currently we’ve been limited to four, but
five is our current trigger for our inclusionary housing,
so unless it was a large site that would even accommodate
five units so you’re getting up to close to a half-acre
even at the 12 range, that’s where you lose that
opportunity. The reality is even with missing middle,
that’s not going to get into the moderate or low, and for
sure not the very-low, from an income category.
ADUs are a little bit different, because as I’ve
mentioned before, we’re currently able to count those as
all moderate units, even though they’re not deed
restricted. We’re going to have that same conversation with
HCD. This time there’s actually been some early guidance
that in some jurisdictions HCD may be willing to allow
jurisdictions to split their ADUs into three different
categories: moderate, low, and very-low, and one of the
ratios that we’ve heard is 30% moderate, 30% low, and 10%
very-low. We’re going to have to provide evidence if we’re
able to convince HCD to get down to that very-low level,
and that could be based on factors such as Junior ADUs,
which can’t be more than 500 square feet, so those are
going to be renting for a lower level. Whether it’s the
very-low or we’re able to split in some ratio even between
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moderate and low, those are the opportunities that we see
with that.
Ultimately, I think that’s the counter-argument
you’ll hear, that SB 9 creates that capacity already and
we’re not allowed to use density to limit that, so you’re
going to have a lot of those same opportunities potentially
for SB 9, it’s just a matter of how many folks are going to
be interested in utilizing that state law.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, thank you for that.
I’ll go to Commissioner Clark, and then Commissioner
Thomas.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. I appreciated
hearing your questions before, actually, so thank you.
Real quick, on that conversation we were just
having about missing middle housing, I do think that it’s
pretty important that we don’t reduce the density in Low-
Density Residential just because those missing middle
opportunities I think are one of the few ways that we have
of building housing that’s at least more affordable that
doesn’t require a non-profit developer to come in, so I
think that’s something that we should keep there. I know
that there are some really affordable fourplexes in Los
Gatos that aren’t technically affordable housing; they’re
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just naturally affordable because of the way that they’re
built.
Then I have a few thoughts. I agree with what
Commissioner Thomas said earlier. I don’t think that we
should use the every five years thing as a fallback. I
think that the conversation we’re having, we shouldn’t keep
saying but we can do this in five years or things like
that. I think it’s good to know that it’s there, but we
should try to plan for longer term than that, because it
really is there more as a safety net.
In terms of the public outcry that we’ve been
receiving, and obviously we’ve heard a lot from the public,
I do absolutely think that our role as Planning
Commissioners is to represent the public, not just our own
voices and obviously not our own interests and opinions,
but I do think we’ve heard more from members of the public
who are traditionally engaging in these spaces and who have
more access to that and are more affluent and are better
off, and so they’re coming more from a place of fear, and
we haven’t been hearing as much from the people who really
need this housing, because they may are like working two
jobs and so they don’t have enough time to write public
comment, or they’re completely unaware that this is
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happening, or they’re currently working in Los Gatos but
not able to afford to live here.
I, personally, work with those people. The non-
profit I work at serves Los Gatos, and so I think that I
personally feel like we need to remember to represent those
voices, even if we haven’t received an equal number of
public comments from them.
Also I do think we need to balance the public
comments in opposition with misinformation, so like for
schools really we need more students in the schools. Like
they’re closing in this area, and statistically the way
that the population is going, more children in the schools
isn’t going to affect the overall number just because of
the way that our population is structured.
Then for water, like only 3% of water is used for
residential, and that’s just for landscaping and
agriculture and things like that.
The last thing I want to say is just that I think
in hindsight community members will be less upset about the
higher number and things like that, because I remember when
the Town was one of very few in the area not to appeal our
RHNA numbers. People were up in arms and were so upset that
the Town didn’t do that, and then every single application
got denied, and so in the end the Town saved us a lot of
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money and time and resources by not doing that, and I think
that the same could happen when the Housing Element review
comes around. If ours is one of few that goes through, or
we have a lot easier of a time, and other communities who
tried to be as strict as they could don’t have that same
scenario happen for them.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, well said. Thank you
for that, Commissioner Clark.
Commissioner Thomas, and then Commissioner
Janoff.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I want to thank
Commissioner Clark for bringing up the reminder about
school enrollment and some of the populations that are less
likely to engage in public discourse, because I think that
that is really important and as a group we need to make
sure that we are serving and representing.
I also think that the questions about the changes
about the densities was really helpful, because I had a lot
of questions about that, which ones are really open
realistically to change, which ones we can change but
should not, because it won’t allow us for the growth that
we need.
I think adding on to some of the comments that
Commissioner Clark just said, I know that traffic is a
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major, major concern in Town, and I know that that is
honestly for a lot of residents one of the top, top reasons
that they are opposed to this Residential build-out chart.
And I understand. I grew up in Los Gatos and I still live
here and I fully understand that traffic has gotten worse,
but I do think when I look at our Pedestrian and Bike
Master Plan, and I look at our Capital Improvement
projects, and I look at the rest of the General Plan, and
when we went to the Planning Commissioner Academy last year
and we saw some of the really amazing changes for getting
people out of cars and onto transit and into bike lanes and
walking, all of us were really excited that we were there
and got to see some of the amazing changes.
I think that the potential for those changes are
really built into other parts of the General Plan outside
of this very small section of the land use, and so I think
that the GPAC did so much work before I got to it, and I
was just so incredibly impressed with how forward thinking
with regard to connectivity the General Plan really is, and
I think that that will relieve a lot of the issues with
traffic.
And one of the reasons traffic is bad is because
people have to travel so far because people that work in
Town can’t affordable to live here, and that is one of the
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reasons why traffic is bad, because people are living so
far away from their place of work, and in lower density
communities and lower density towns there is a higher cost
to getting transit, so the most important part about
getting connected to the rest of Silicon Valley, like
getting our connection with VTA and light rail, is that we
need to build higher density so that VTA will actually
bring more service here. We know that Los Gatos has said we
want light rail to extend all the way to Vasona, and light
rail is like there’s no point, because there’s not enough
ridership, because you don’t have housing available there.
I know that some people complain and say that because
there’s too much traffic we can’t build more housing, but
really this is like an if you built it, it will come
scenario, and there is a ton of funding available for
connectivity and transit, which makes me super excited for
our Town.
It just makes me very excited for the
opportunities, like very genuinely I really do love
transit, but very genuinely it makes me really excited for
our towns and for our youth.
I’m not a teacher here in Town, but I was just
talking this week to my students. They’re studying air
pollution and they all are like the number one thing that
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the State of California needs to do is get people out of
cars and onto transit and other multimodal transportation,
and they’re like you need to make it easier to use, you
need to build it out, you need to make it free, and they
know this, and I’m like comment to this meeting. I feel
like these are the people that we’re planning for for the
future, and we have to build higher density in some parts
of our Town in order for transit to make sense and be
economically feasible, and that will significantly reduce
traffic in the entire region.
I just get really excited about transit, so thank
you for letting me talk about it, but it is really
fascinating because a lot of fears about traffic are very
counterintuitive to reality, and there are a lot of studies
that show that high-density housing reduces traffic because
of linkages to transit.
The last thing, I know a lot people are nervous
about this number in combination with SB 9. I agree with
Commissioner Clark and I appreciate that Director Paulson
has reiterated that we’re going to have opportunities for
duplexes and triplexes, etc., through SB 9. I think that
it’s nice to have two pathways and two opportunities,
especially because one will be more locally controlled and
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we’ll have a little bit more say on it as a town and as
residents.
A lot of people are worried and concerned and
afraid of SB 9, and the reason that SB 9 is here is because
towns like Los Gatos, not like us historically, but because
towns and cities didn’t make the all out effort to meet
their RHNA numbers, and so the state is going further and
further with trying to take state control, and I think that
we have done a really amazing job with the General Plan and
the GPAC did such a great job regarding trying to be a
leader with the Racial, Social, and Environmental Justice
element, and I really think that this is our responsibility
to like be leaders right now.
Like Commissioner Clark just said, like not
appealing, make it as easy as possible to get our Housing
Element passed as a way to save time, energy, and money for
our Staff and the Town, and try to make the effort to meet
the growth that the state is going to demand of us, because
I don’t want us to look back and think that we have regrets
because we resisted growth and there’s more state-wide
housing laws that come down the pipeline that strip us of
local control.
I think that we really have an opportunity to be
a leader in this, and I know that one major fear of Town
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residents is losing local control, and so I think that
that, even though we’ve heard a lot about the specific
number, I think we need to take that fact and that idea of
the potential loss of local control the more we resist
growth and development as something that we need to take
into consideration. I mean, there’s even talk that all new
housing projects will be exempt of CEQA no matter what, and
so I think that I just really want us to be a part of the
solution, so I just am very excited about the
possibilities.
Now, I do want to say, and I will be done with my
comments in a moment, I do think what Commissioner Janoff
was mentioning earlier about the changing of the numbers, I
appreciate that we are too small of a Town to phase things
out over the next 20 years, but I do think that just adding
a little bit of information to Table 3.3-1 with the build-
out, with the explaining before like this is a 20-year
thing; this is the expected growth of the entire county;
the state is going to make us responsible for absorbing
some of this growth over the next 20 years; this is our
current RHNA number; we are going to go through two more
cycles; etc., as a preface. Having that in there I think
would maybe ease some of the public tension, and then also
just having that like this number is also linked to all of
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the planning in the entire General Plan. So that’s my
suggestion for a recommended change.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, and thank you
for all your comments. I think we could make it really
simple in terms of whatever the final number (inaudible)
have to be to put it into the current RHNA cycle, and then
anything after that. It doesn’t have to be broken down in
any more granular detail, but I think that would help at
least in terms of communicating what we’re doing.
If you look at what Staff did in the Staff
Report, they essentially did that for our consideration. If
you look at page five it has the 3,738 number, and then
when they normalized it for the current RHNA cycle it was
3,038, 700 less units. I think something like that is
really essential for everyone. It will help with some level
of panic, but it is a big number and it’s a scary thing for
everyone.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you. I just wanted to
add too that not all of the comments we received were
negative. In fact, there were a number that came in that
were in favor of growth, or in favor of the General Plan as
it’s drafted. We understand that there is likely to be
infrastructure problems, but don’t make the infrastructure
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that we don’t have now the barrier to adding housing that
we need, because you’ll never get the infrastructure in
place before housing. There are great comments and
levelheaded comments that came from a different
perspective, and some of those comments included no, we
shouldn’t concentrate development or new housing in one
space. This is a Town issue; we should spread housing
throughout the Town and ensure that the burden is shared.
Or you could say ensure that the benefits are shared,
right?
We heard a lot of great testimony during our
meetings with… I’m going to get the topic wrong, but it was
engage in the communities so that we could hear the story
relative to the low-income housing, and what we heard was
such beautiful stories of communities and connectedness
among people, increased diversity, and she made me really
excited for the dimensions that Los Gatos could grow into,
and so those are all really exciting things, and I think if
we think about this as a benefit to the Town and try to see
it that way and pursue it that way, it makes much more
sense, and everyone can engage in a positive way rather a
not in my backyard way.
I also appreciate the comments of Commissioners
Clark and Thomas and I would just underscore the concept of
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leadership. That’s what we are here for. We are in a
position to make a difficult designation or make an easy
designation, however you see it, but that’s what we need to
do, and we need to make sure that we aren’t just playing a
numbers games, because for me the numbers, aside from the
current RHNA cycle numbers, don’t really matter.
The point is that we need to plan for growth and
we need to plan for it reasonably, and that’s what we’re
doing. I really am not sure that I care about the numbers
beyond the current cycle, but it’s still prudent to
estimate for the benefit of the public, for transparency.
I’m still of a mind that the General Plan as
written, maybe pull some of the numbers down a little bit
if we are… One of the things that I had a little bit of an
issue with was letting ADUs be a standalone number when in
fact they may actually be—and Chair Hanssen and I have had
this conversation over many months—that those ADUs are more
likely to be in a Low-Density and Medium-Density
Residential, and so you’re going to have added housing in
all density areas of Town. Acknowledge that and let it be
part of the plan.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. Some very,
very good comments.
Vice Chair Barnett, go ahead.
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VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I appreciate all the
comments that have been submitted. I have a couple of
thoughts.
First, increased housing is not going to
necessarily bring low-cost housing. What with the land
values in Los Gatos, that’s going to be a struggle. We did
hear in the past about some consolidation of interest by
nonprofits as well as for-profit developers as being a
possible avenue to increase low-cost housing, but from the
speakers that I heard at the presentation of Commissioner
Clark’s organization, West Valley Community Services,
that’s going to be a tough road to hoe. We hope it happens.
I’m in favor of low-cost housing and there is a housing
crisis throughout the State of California.
Saying that, I do think that we can achieve
significant housing growth in Los Gatos without going up to
the 3,738 number. We know there’s going to be SB 9 and ADU
developments that are going to go into the R-1 area and
will make a reasonable contribution to the growth of
housing in that area, and I think that it would be
important to recognize that there is some value to keeping
the traditional character of the neighborhoods in place
where possible while still accommodating reasonable growth
within the community.
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So those are some of the concerns that I have,
some perspectives on how Los Gatos can continue to be Los
Gatos and yet meet the state legal requirements. I think
they’re compatible.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Vice Chair
Barnett. Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: A question related to what
Vice Chair Barnett mentioned. It’s not clear to me, and
Staff, hopefully you can clarify how SB 9 units and/or ADUs
over the 500 planned might be counted. Well, let’s not talk
about 500, let’s talk I guess it’s 200 that are in the
first cycle. If those are not named as items to be counted
in our Housing Element, but they come, do we count those as
units toward the RHNA goals or do they not count at all?
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you for the question. I
think there are two different ways to respond to your
question.
One part of it is what can we count in terms of
the showing that the Housing Element will meet our RHNA
requirement and getting it accepted by the state? That has
to be based on our past history, and that’s what this
estimate of 200 units over the eight years is based on.
It’s based on our past history, which has been increasing,
and so we will do a final study in terms of what that final
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number is, but what we have right now is an estimate of 200
over that eight years.
The second part of your questions I think is then
do those units, if we actually have more than that number
built over those eight years, how are those counted? And
they would be counted. Every new housing unit that comes
into the Town during that RHNA cycle, that eight-year
reporting period, would be counted. It would be part of the
ongoing reporting that we do every year, and so they will
be part of reporting out on how we’re doing, our status,
but we can’t go beyond what our past studies show as
reasonable; that’s the justification we’d be providing to
the state.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: So you’re saying that in
the plan in advance of anything being certified or
approved, but that the plan that we put forward needs to
have history behind it, but once the plan is certified and
we’re moving forward in that period that whatever is built
is counted.
But I think it’s also fair to say that we
acknowledge that ADUs and the SB 9 lot splits might not
wind up being low-income housing, so if our density and our
targets need to be focused on how to develop the low-income
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housing, that’s kind of a different conversation, but thank
you for clarifying how the units are actually counted.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I would add to this, I had
brought this up with Staff earlier. If you look at what the
Housing Element Advisory Board is working on right now, we
just met last week and talked about the site inventory, and
since the beginning of the month the Balancing Act tool is
something that was introduced as part of this Housing
Element and the Balancing Act tool actually has the draft
site inventory loaded into it, along with a possible
housing production, and the way that the tool works is that
you can’t submit anything until you get up to 1,993,
meaning that if you’re any member of the public or anyone
using the tool, if you only wanted to grow 200 units, you
can’t submit it, because you have to actually get the bar
up to 1,993.
However, in that Balancing Act tool, it’s set up
where the 200 expected units of ADUs are actually deducted
from the 1,993, so that is where I think Commissioner
Janoff’s question was going and I kind of had the some one.
But with the General Plan, because it’s a 20-year
timeline, Staff has pulled that out because we do expect
500 ADUs over the course of the timeline between now and
2020, but it does beg the question of do we really need to
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plan for 1,993 units plus a buffer, or is it the 2,292 that
would include the buffer minus 200 ADUs, meaning we only
need to plan for 2,092 units.
So it’s not clear how all that is going to work,
but that is a question that I had as well, and so I don't
know if we have the latitude to think about that as a
potential reduction of the overall growth. That’s a
question.
JENNIFER ARMER: What I would say is the way that
we presented it in the April 13th Staff Report was intended
to try to narrow down the difference in numbers we’re
looking at, trying to avoid this confusion about how many
ADUs are or aren’t counted, so when we adjusted those
numbers to the 3,038 that was trying to adjust how much of
the potential development that’s shown in that table in the
Land Use Element of the Draft 2040 General Plan, how much
of that capacity might potentially we counted toward the
Housing Element since 300 of the ADUs could not be counted
towards our RHNA requirement.
So then rather than needing to really fully
understand where all those numbers come from and where they
go, trying to adjust those numbers then to say if you start
from an assumption that for the Housing Element we want
enough capacity for the RHNA allocation, the 1,993, plus
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the recommended buffer of at least 15%, then you look at
the development capacity as estimated in the Draft General
Plan.
What we came to was saying that there is some
additional room within those calculations, because it is a
20-year plan, because the GPAC was trying to provide some
additional capacity so that there would be some choices
when we got to the point of working out the details, which
is what the Housing Element Advisory Board is working on
now. That extra capacity, as we laid it out in that Staff
Report, is the 746 units.
So we can talk through more and try to understand
how many ADUs you keep in or keep out, but as we laid out
in the Staff Report, if the Planning Commission as a whole,
the recommendation as a whole, is to reduce below what was
recommended by the GPAC, if your desire is to find some way
to reduce those numbers somewhat, the reduction factor, the
limit of that reduction that Staff would recommend is that
it not go for more than a 746 unit reduction.
Because we knew there was that interest for you
to have some numbers to work with, both based on the public
comments that were received, but also direction from Town
Council to provide you with some nice, clear options, these
aren’t the only options, and you could do some kind of
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partial options, but this was intended to allow if the
Planning Commission wishes to reduce, to modify what was
recommended by the GPAC, here are some different ways that
you could do it.
Just like the Exhibit 7 was put together not as
verbatim of all of the public comments, but a summary in a
way that was intended to help in your discussion. For many
of those Staff was neutral. It’s really up to the Planning
Commission to as to what changes, but we would recommend
focusing on if you want to reduce as part of your
recommendation what components, where would those
reductions be, and focusing on a number in the range of
that 746 kind of as a limit if you are going to reduce.
CHAIR HANSSEN: We thank you for that, and that’s
where I was going with some of my questions earlier. I
believe that we’re well and truly divided right now in
terms of whether or not to reduce the number, and also it
is 9:25, so I’m going to suggest that we take a ten minute
break, and when we come back see if we can get to a
consensus about whether or not the number needs to be
reduced. It might be a split vote, but I think we need to
see if we can get some resolution on that, and if we do
decide to reduce it, then we do have to make a specific
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recommendation on how we would do it. So let’s do that.
It’s 9:25 and then we’ll come back at 9:35.
(INTERMISSION)
CHAIR HANSSEN: …but we do at some point need to
get to whether or not we want to recommend reducing the
number that’s proposed, and Staff has given us some
possible ways to go about that. I’m not sure what the best
way to proceed is, but I’m going to make a suggestion that
because I think we’re divided on this we could try having
someone make a motion, because I’m quite sure that the six
of us that are here are not going to vote for one or the
other unanimously.
The options on the table would be to leave the
number as is, which I know at least two Commissioners
aren’t there, and then as far as the option of reducing the
number, I think there are varying opinions about how much
to do. So would anyone want to try to make a motion and see
where that goes, or do you want to ask more questions?
Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I’m happy to make a motion.
I think we all know what it would be, and if it passes,
then we’re done, and if not, then we’ll need to discuss
changes to the numbers.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay.
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COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I guess I shouldn’t include
everything in the Land Use Element in this?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Not yet.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Oh, not yet. So we’re just
voting for number 20?
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think that would be best. We do
have to go there on the other ones, but let’s take it in
two parts, kind of like we did with the Environment and
Sustainability Element where we looked at sections of it.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Okay. We were in agreement
from the other night on the other three items that the
Staff mentioned earlier, correct? Or do we need to go back
to discuss that more?
CHAIR HANSSEN: I don't know that we need to
discuss it. That was close to my recollection on it, but I
didn’t know if Commissioners wanted to relook at it to make
sure that that. Now I’m seeing no. Well then, go ahead and
make the motion on the entire Land Use Element, including
the other changes that…
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Director Paulson says
don’t. I’m not, because then people will have to vote on
some and not others, and then they’re split.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I get it. I get it. But I
could make a motion first for those other three, if you
want me to try to do them together, two separate motions.
I’m trying to be efficient and now I’m not.
CHAIR HANSSEN: You can make two separate
motions, and that’s fine, but in terms of timing I would
just make them serial.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: My first motion is to
recommend the changes in the Land Use Element outlined in
21, 33, and 34. And 40? No.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Well, yes. Actually, that’s a
very good one to bring up. We had a conversation on Monday
about making a recommendation to modify the North Forty
Specific Plan.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Yes, so do we want to make
that an implementation program? We do want to make that an
implementation program. Okay, so yes, include 40 in that
too.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: So 40, 34, 33, and 21 as
written in the document.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, so then is there a
second? Looks like Commissioner Clark has her hand up.
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COMMISSIONER CLARK: I have a couple of
modifications, a couple of other additions. I think I
didn’t realize at the end of the last meeting that we were
done with it, so can I just make two short suggestions?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: First is to add a definition
of “rafters” to key terms, because they’re referenced in
the definition of eave, but there’s no definition of
rafters, and I felt like that could be helpful.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Then the other one was
supposed to be in the Community Design Element, I’m sorry.
I will second Commissioner Thomas’ motion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Will the maker of the motion be
willing to add the rafters definition to your motion?
COMMISSIONER CLARK: The rafters was actually in
Community Design Element. My bad
CHAIR HANSSEN: I’m sorry, that was for the
Community Design Element, so we don’t have to modify the
motion at all.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: (Shakes head no.)
CHAIR HANSSEN: So the motion on the table that
has been seconded is 21, 33, 34, and 40. So motion and a
second. Any other comments? And this is on everything other
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than the discussion we’ve been having about 20. So then
we’ll do a roll call vote, yes, no, or abstain.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And I vote yes as well.
So that one was easy. Then we have the harder
one, which is whether or not to recommend any reductions.
Normally we are only making motions if we were going to
recommend a change, but in this particular case I think if
the will of the Commissioner would be to keep it, we should
vote that way as well.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I just had a question before
we attempt to form a motion. I think it’s clear where
Commissioner Clark and Commissioner Thomas are on a
possible motion. It’s not clear to me where Commissioner
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Raspe and Vice Chair Barnett are. We’ve heard in early
comments that you are recommending something that was about
1,000 units lower than what’s already recommended in the
General Plan, and I’m just curious to know whether that’s
your current position so you’re really focusing on the
current RHNA with a slight increase, or has the discussion
at all modulated your thinking, and are we still so far
apart, or had any middle ground been reached on your
behalf? Sorry to put you on the spot, but I just am not
sure where we are here.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I actually think that is a fair
question, only because it’s awkward to put motions out
there that are going to fail. It’s better if you know where
you stand.
Go ahead, Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Thank you, Chair. I’ll
answer Commissioner Janoff’s question to the extent I
might.
First of all, I think I indicated a general
support for Commissioner Barnett’s proposal as he
circulated on April 27th, and if I read it correctly I think
it actually calls for a total reduction of 569 units, and
as I read those I supported him and I still support them
now.
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I will tell the Commission I feel most strongly
about the Low-Density Residential and slightly less, but
also fairly strongly, about the Medium-Density Residential.
Changes to those densities I find the most troubling of the
recommendations, and so those are the ones I feel most
strongly about, which I guess results in about 350 units or
so, or maybe a little bit more than that.
That’s kind of where my thinking is, and so I
wouldn’t support, if we were to take a vote, which I
suspect we will immediately, not an across the board
acceptance of the GPAC numbers. I would like to see some
movement, most specifically in the Low-Density and Medium-
Density Residential numbers. So that’s my current thinking.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Through the Chair, may I
ask a question?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Commissioner Raspe, I
wasn’t clear if you were saying you wanted to see Low-
Density and Medium-Density revert back to the 2020 numbers?
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Correct, yes.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: And did the conversation
about the missing middle give you any pause with respect to
how going to the 2020 numbers might eliminate that category
and the benefits that that offers?
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COMMISSIONER RASPE: It absolutely did, and just
in my own mind in response, and I think maybe Vice Chair
Barnett or someone else made the comment, to the extent
those developments come into play I’m not sure, again, the
way those would be priced and built. I suspect those would
be high-income developments, if they happened at all, but
I’m not sure that it’s just by virtue of the fact that we
are bringing the densities up that those developments will
come in. I understand your argument; I just don’t know that
it’s going to be the natural flow of events that follow
from our decisions.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Let’s see, I’m going to go to
Vice Chair Barnett, because he had his hand up next, but I
suspect that Commissioner Thomas had a response to that,
but let’s hear from Vice Chair Barnett and then
Commissioner Thomas.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I think the reductions that
I proposed in my spreadsheet are reasonable and consider
all the factors that have been talked about in realistic
terms. How much are we going to be able to reduce traffic
by multimodal? That’s certainly the goal, but I think the
public raised questions as to how practical that is in real
life.
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The other concerns about character of the
neighborhood, of course I’m working off the 3,038 number
with my reduction of 569, getting to 2,469, not the 3,738
number.
CHAIR HANSSEN: The 3,738 number as per the Staff
Report on page five versus page six, they parse that out
between what’s beyond the current Housing Element and
what’s in the current Housing Element timeline.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I think that’s realistic.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Can you reiterate for everybody
that might not have that page open what the components were
of the reductions that you were recommending?
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Yes. The Low-Density, I was
proposing all 279; Medium-Density reduction was 165; the
Community Commercial to Neighborhood Commercial was 58; and
the Central Business District was 67; so that’s a 50%
reduction in the Medium-Density and the Central Business
District and 100% in the Low-Density.
CHAIR HANSSEN: What was the last one? You said
58 in Community Commercial to Neighborhood Commercial, and
then what was the last one?
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Central Business District.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And how much was that?
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Half of the total, 67.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, good. That helps to
not have every page open at the same time.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Through the Chair, can I
ask a clarifying question? Vice Chair Barnett, you’re
recommending a reduction of 165 Medium-Density Residential
units over what I’m looking at Table 3-1 in the General
Plan, and there’s a total of approximately 570 units in the
Medium-Density. You’re proposing to keep the balance of
that number but just reduce it a little bit?
And I actually had the same question, again
looking at Table 3-1 in the Draft General Plan. The Low-
Density Residential total number is 283 plus 84, which
would bring us to about 367. I’m not sure what table you
might be looking at, but that’s my reference in terms of
the numbers proposed in the current Draft General Plan that
we would be reducing from.
JENNIFER ARMER: Through the Chair, if I may?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Go ahead.
JENNIFER ARMER: Commissioner Janoff, I recommend
you also take a look at page six of the Staff Report from
April 13th. I believe that some of the numbers that are
proposed for reduction are from that list of potential
reductions laid out by Staff in response to previous input.
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One of those, the 279, is the reduction in
housing if the Low-Density housing designation were to
revert back to the density allowed in the current 2020
General Plan, and then it appears that the 165 unit
reduction for the Medium-Density Residential designation
that’s proposed by Vice Chair Barnett is half of the
reduction, basically going halfway down to what is
currently allowed in the 2020 General Plan, because bullet
number two on page six of that Staff Report talks about
reverting the Medium-Density housing designation to the
existing 2020 General Plan level, and that that would be a
reduction in 327 units. The Director has something to add
too.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: That’s correct what you’re
referring to.
JOEL PAULSON: Through the Chair, I think it’s
important for the Commission to understand that the numbers
that are in the Staff Report and that Vice Chair Barnett is
using, that’s the delta between the existing General Plan
and the proposed General Plan, so that’s why it’s not
coming up with the numbers. Commissioner Janoff, you’re
looking at the new, and that’s why they’re not jiving.
JENNIFER ARMER: So there would be some
development.
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COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Right, the numbers wouldn’t
be zero for Low-Density, or 165. Well, it might be 165, but
it wouldn't be zero for Low-Density is what I’m hearing.
JENNIFER ARMER: Correct, because there is still,
even with the current density, some capacity for growth and
redevelopment.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Can I ask a question on what was
said though? I’m looking at Table 3-1. Let’s take Low-
Density Residential. It talks about the proposed new
density range, and then with the assumed redevelopment rate
it’s 84 units for Low-Density Residential, but if we
reverted to the existing 2020 levels in the Staff Report as
described on page six, it would be 279 units. Why would it
be 279 units versus 84?
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you for that question. The
new housing from the Low-Density Residential is actually
283 on vacant land plus 84 for redevelopment. So those two
columns actually get combined to give you how much
additional housing would be estimated within the Low-
Density Residential designations.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes, of course. I should have had
my glasses on when I was looking at that.
JENNIFER ARMER: It’s a lot of numbers.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: But it’s still not the same,
because 283 plus 84 is well over 300, and then 279 is less
than that.
JENNIFER ARMER: Right, and so 279, if we had
Table 3-1 and we put in put in appropriate assumptions
based on the current density for the current 2020 General
Plan, those numbers in the columns would not be zero. There
would be some redevelopment and there would be some new
units on vacant land. It would be less than what is here,
because the densities would be lower, the redevelopment
assumptions would be lower because of those lower
densities, so what we put in the Staff Report for some of
the designations is what’s that delta? We worked with the
consultant to figure out what would those numbers be if we
kept it at the 2020 General Plan, and we said what’s the
change? So if you revert back to the 2020 General Plan you
don’t remove all of the 283 plus 84 units; it’s a portion
of that.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I see. That makes perfect sense.
Thank you for explaining that.
Director Paulson.
JOEL PAULSON: Just another way to think about
it, I think Vice Chair Barnett is looking at roughly half
of what is allowed in the proposed General Plan. Currently
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the maximum density in the Medium-Density is 12, the
proposed is 24, so if you split that in half you end up—and
we’d have to run the numbers—but the maximum would come
down from 24 to 18, because the difference between 12 and
24 is 12, and you cut it in half, so it would probably be
around 18, if not 18.7. So that’s how you could think about
some of these numbers where it’s half, whether it’s this
proposal or some other proposal that might have a different
ratio, but this one happens to be half.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. That helps,
because you have to kind of think through the whole
problem.
Vice Chair Barnett and then Commissioner Thomas.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I just wanted to say that I
was looking at the reduction numbers on page 184 and I did
play with the Medium-Density Residential figure and figured
it 8 to 18 instead of 14 to 24, just as an example.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. Commissioner
Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Thank you for the
clarification about the reduction and everything. I think
that I understand the argument that higher density does not
automatically equal lower income, but it does allow for
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that possibility, and not including higher density is going
to make lower income housing less likely to happen.
I know that there's been a lot of talk with the
GPAC. I know the GPAC, before I joined, talked a lot about
how all the Town has to absorb this new growth, like we all
have to be responsible for it, and we all have to be
responsible for trying to increase low-income housing
throughout Town and affordable housing throughout Town, and
I completely understand that we could do everything in the
world and housing is still going to be expensive in Los
Gatos, but we’re definitely guaranteeing that we’re not
going to improve access to affordable housing if we don’t
increase our densities in certain areas, so I personally
don’t feel that the argument that higher density doesn’t
automatically equal more affordable housing or low-income
housing is a reason that we shouldn’t increase densities.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that.
Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I’m just going to quickly
tack onto what Commissioner Thomas just said. I completely
agree. I think even though a fourplex existing doesn’t mean
that the units will be completely affordable. Naturally,
smaller units cost less, and so it will be more affordable
than other housing and I think we really can count on that,
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and I really agree with what she said that it’s everyone’s
responsibility, it’s every designation’s responsibility.
Just because you live in a single-family
neighborhood shouldn’t mean that you’re completely immune
to these changes, and I really feel like the purpose of the
kind of housing that this would allow, like fourplexes and
triplexes and things like that, is that it blends in with
the neighborhood, and I think that once there are a few
around people will see that they’re not so scary and that
they can make a valuable contribution to a neighborhood,
and so I really think that we should reframe how we’re
thinking about them. I think that they kind of guarantee
more affordability compared to a large single-family home.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Commissioner
Clark.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you. I see the appeal
of reducing the Low-Density designation. It seems to be
popular among those who are most concerned, and I can
understand that, and there has also been discussion that
that designation isn’t likely to generate as much housing,
period, let alone affordable housing.
But the reason I’m having trouble with reverting
back to the 2020 numbers is precisely what Staff said, and
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that is that we lose the missing middle. I can’t express to
you how long and deeply the GPAC discussed missing middle
and how important those concepts are in ensuring that the
visual character of the Town is maintained, the transitions
between single-story and two-story. The transitions in
different areas between Low-Density and Medium-Density are
really accomplished most beautifully by the missing middle
concept, and it’s a very, very important concept that I
personally would have a lot of trouble just throwing
completely out, and if that’s the effect of reverting back
to the 2020 General Plan density for Low-Density, I would
not be in favor.
The change in the Medium-Density, maybe, but
again, there are unintended consequences of messing around
with the numbers and I think we run the risk of throwing
something that’s really important completely out.
I guess relative to Vice Chair Barnett, I would
agree that the Community Commercial or Neighborhood
Commercial could be reduced. The Office and Service
Commercial, which is 313 units, maybe that could be
reduced, but I’m really concerned about losing the
opportunity in High-Density and many units of affordable
housing aside, we heard a lot of feedback from the
community about how we didn’t want to ruin the visual look
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of Los Gatos, and the missing middle really gives us more
control over how that is going to be affected than
anything, and if we think about missing middle as being a
better for the Town alternative in terms of retaining Town
charm and Town character then SB 9 simple lot splits, which
could just be ugly boxes and we have no discretion
whatsoever over how those look as long as they meet
building codes, so I think we lose something extremely
valuable in the ability to hold onto or control the
character of our Town when we throw out the missing middle,
so I would not be in favor of changing the density in the
Low-Density back to 2020 numbers.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Commissioner
Janoff. Back to Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I just really wanted to
echo what Commissioner Janoff just said, because I do think
that missing middle is the key to maintaining our Town
character, which in addition to the traffic and other
infrastructure concerns I know is a huge concern of
residents in Town and it is something that is really
important to a lot of people that live here, and I do think
that if we can build visually appealing structures in Low-
and Medium-Residential areas right now to accommodate for
our growth, we’re going to avoid having to go back and
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change like the heights so that we’re building a ton of
concentrated housing on Los Gatos Boulevard.
And I know other communities have had this
struggle in the past. I know up in San Mateo that they have
made decisions to keep their Low-Density Residential
densities lower, and then a lot of their growth has been
concentrated in areas and gone really upward, because
that’s the only way that they can build more housing, and
then people have been really unhappy with that in the area
too.
So I do really think that missing middle, I know
it was discussed a lot before I was on the GPAC, but I do
know that it was definitely a priority and there was a lot
of thought put into that with the whole entire General
Plan, and I do think that it’s something that is
particularly helpful here in Town that we’re truly missing
for our specific residents and future residents.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. Before I take
additional comments I wanted to ask Staff a question.
We haven’t completed the process of the objective
standards, but Vice Chair Barnett and I and former-
Commissioner Burch had worked on where we could go with the
objective standards and the consultants have taken it to
the community, but supposing that we stay with the existing
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proposed densities in the Draft 2040 General Plan, what
tools do we have in Town to make sure that the vision we
have describing the General Plan doesn’t change the
character of neighborhoods? Because I know people are
really panicked, everyone’s neighborhood, but for instance
historic neighborhoods and whatnot. What tools do we have
to enforce the idea of the missing middle?
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you. I would say that yes,
we are working on objective standards. We’re going to the
community for a community meeting with a list of draft
standards based on the work that you discussed. That’s
going to be on May 12th to get input on that, and once we do
get further input, that will be proceeding to Planning
Commission and Town Council. That is really targeted at the
Medium-Density Residential and High-Density Residential and
Mixed-Use projects rather than these duplex type projects
that go through the SB 9 process.
When we do work towards a permanent ordinance for
the SB 9 type projects, that will include, as it did with
the interim ordinance, some objective standards there as
well, but for a lot of those smaller projects we don’t have
a whole lot of objective standards that apply to them.
It does look like Director Paulson has something
else to add as well.
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JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. Just briefly to try to
differentiate from a control perspective SB 9 versus
missing middle.
Missing middle, we would be using the controls of
the underlying zone, so setbacks, height, coverage, that’s
where you get to what a lot of you have been talking about
where you get the potential form of a single-family house
but maybe it has three or four units in it, so you still
have those controls from a zoning perspective.
Now, there could be some consideration after the
General Plan gets adopted to modify some of those, maybe
allow an additional 5’ or a little bit more FAR like we do
for ADUs, because we know we’re having more units, whereas
SB 9, a lot of those controls are gone, so the side and
rear setbacks are 4’. Our lowest side setback for a
residential building, and I’ll use the R-1:D, which is
happens to be Medium-Density Residential, is 5’, so it’s
those types of things where a lot of the provisions of SB 9
give way more flexibility to whoever is developing those,
and so that’s where that control comes in.
The other is obviously SB 9 is going to be tied
to objective standards, so when we’re doing the ordinance
we may want to look at that as a separate document. As Ms.
Armer mentioned, the current objective standards really are
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Mixed-Use and Multi-Family, so that’s something to use as
you’re thinking about this from a control perspective;
that’s the simplest distinction I can make at this point.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think that’s fine. And we do
have Residential Design Guidelines, and if you’re really
trying to make a duplex in the same form factor as a
single-family home, then the Residential Design Guidelines
will apply as well.
Commissioner Clark and then Vice Chair Barnett.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I just want to say that I
think we’re seeing that it’s risky when you start to play
with the numbers, and I think what this is really all about
is opportunities and the number of opportunities that we
are providing, and I would hate to see us have to choose
what density we’re reducing in order to lower the numbers
just because we want to lower the numbers, and then miss
out on some opportunities that we could have had otherwise.
I just want to emphasize that we need a bigger
number, because these units can’t all get built. It’s not
going to be like we allow for all of this development and
developers all come in, but I think that we need to make
sure that we’re providing options and that we’re not
limiting ourselves, which I just think that we do start to
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do that when we start moving around the numbers like that
and kind of having to choose where that happens.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Commissioner
Clark. Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I just wanted to point out
that in my proposal there would be missing middle in the
Medium-Density Residential zone for area in that
designation, and again, I’m harping back on what I’ve said
before, but the ADUs and the SB 9 units will add density to
the Low-Density Residential designation as well.
One concern I had with the 3,738 number, the
lower number, is how are we achieving that? Is it possible
to realistically and reasonably project what the housing is
going to be in the seventh and eighth RHNA allocations? I
think that the number is somewhat arbitrary and it makes
more sense to focus on what we have and then to adjust as
we go forward, although I recognize there will be some
small inconvenience in amending the General Plan at
possibly two different cycles downstream, but it seems to
me that’s the more responsible approach rather than going
into this with some speculative numbers. Thank you.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that, Vice Chair
Barnett. Director Paulson has something to say, and then
I’ll go to Commissioner Thomas.
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JOEL PAULSON: Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to
pull back a little on how we started this conversation,
which was maybe you should have a conversation or ask the
question of does the majority of the Commission think we
should reduce the number or not, because if the majority
thinks we should reduce the number, then we can get into
all the which designations and how much it should be
reduced, so I would say going back to where I think
Commissioner Thomas started, that’s where we’re going to
start.
Then we got to the elements outside of 20, but we
were still going to come back to that conversation of
should the numbers be reduced from what’s currently
proposed if there’s a motion to that effect, and see where
that does, and then that will help inform this continued
conversation and think about what, if any, modifications
should be done.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Well, that’s how I started at the
very beginning, and then I think a lot of the Commissioners
had a lot to say and there has been a lot of very good
discussion.
Here’s a suggestion. I think that if I had to
read where everyone was at I’m going to say that we have
two Commissioners that are in the same place with Vice
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Chair Barnett’s suggestion that was submitted in writing,
we have two Commissioners that are firmly convinced that we
should stay with the numbers already proposed in the 2040
General Plan, and then Commissioner Janoff and I are
somewhere in the middle I think is where I would
characterize us.
Then the question should be whether or not we
reduce it at all, and then we can see if there’s consensus
about that if we can get agreement on what the number is,
although I suspect that the people who wanted to keep the
number the same would not be comfortable with any changes
that got made, but nonetheless we have to come to a
decision.
I have comments from Vice Chair Barnett, and then
from Commissioner Thomas.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I just want to say that I
agree with the approach from the Chair.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right. Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I think that it’s really
important for us to try to maintain local say and control
over what housing gets developed in Low-Density
Residential, and if we don’t increase the density and the
only option is the SB 9 route, and we don’t have any
control over that, I think residents are going to be not
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happy with our decision, and so that makes me really
nervous about reverting back to the current General Plan’s
density, especially for Low-Density Residential, because I
think that we want to keep the option open that people have
the opportunity to increase density with input from
neighbors and the Town and everything, so I feel that way.
I kind of feel like from Director Paulson, I
don't know if I need to make a motion. I’m fine with my
motion failing if it does. I can make a motion, but do we
need to continue to discuss options? I’m not entirely sure
what to do moving forward.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think that the Staff did make
the recommendation that we should see if we can’t get some
resolution on reduce yes or reduce no, and then we could
talk about how.
I can tell you for me, personally, I would be
very uncomfortable about reverting to the 2020 General Plan
densities in any category, honestly, because I think that
we’re going to have unintended consequences.
When I looked at the proposed site inventory for
the Housing Element, something like 70-80% of the sites are
on Los Gatos Boulevard, and while that makes a lot of sense
from so many dimensions, because we can put more High-
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Density and Mixed-Use housing there, it’s close to
Commercial, all those things.
But it has the unintended consequence of if it
all gets built there, if you think the traffic is really
bad now, and Los Gatos Boulevard is one of the places where
the traffic is the worst, how much worse is it going to
get? What if there are several hundred units spread
throughout the Town, through all of our single-family
neighborhoods, that’s going to be incrementally way, way
less traffic for everyone and it won’t be felt at all.
So while I’m not in one side or the other in
terms of where I come out, I wouldn’t be comfortable with
going to zero change in any zone.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: As the other person who is
sort of in the middle here, I’m going to make a
recommendation that we start with the 2,262, which is the
current RHNA cycle, and we add to that two cycles of 600
units which are commensurate with the previous RHNA cycles,
so we have some history around why that might be. That gets
me to a total of 3,462 units. If I subtract that number
from the 3,782, that is the total proposed in the current
Draft General Plan, the difference is 320.
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My proposal then would be to remove housing from
Office and Service Commercial designations, which is 313
units. That would be my recommendation. So we’re coming
down off the 3,782, we’re recognizing that we’re going to
get something in the next two RHNA cycles, possibly not as
much as what we’ve had this cycle, and then my question to
Staff was are there any unintended consequences of removing
housing from Office and Service Commercial that would make
that less than a desirable option? But that would be my
proposal.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Thomas really wanted
to say something.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: You’re saying 3,782, but I
think it’s 3,738, right?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes, thank you.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Okay. I just wanted to make
sure before you wrote down any firm math.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And the RHNA plus the 15% buffer
I believe is 2,292.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: 2,292. I’ve got a lot of
little errors in my math, but if you guys get the idea
where I’m (inaudible).
CHAIR HANSSEN: We totally get it.
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COMMISSIONER JANOFF: So we need to find a few
more units if this seems like an acceptable approach, but
I’d be interested in hearing from Staff. I’m so concerned
about the missing middle loss that I don’t want to go
there. These are new housing opportunities for us and in
general these were planned, these came up during GPAC. I
said what if we added these here? It might be beneficial to
the people who work in these sorts of environments, but we
also had some concern about then becoming only housing.
CHAIR HANSSEN: It was the last thing that we
added out of everything that we discussed.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And so that’s where I had
started, but go ahead, Staff.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. The only unintended
consequence I see we don’t see it very often. I can’t
recall any in the Office, but technically someone could
propose a Mixed-Use Office project, and so that would be
the only one, but that obviously also is the largest number
between Office… The Service Commercial is kind of light
industrial, which was a new one for sure, but that was only
54 units, I think. So that’s the only unintended
consequence I could see. The other is the Office is spread
around Town, so you have the option for that disbursement
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as well, given what everyone has been talking about
tonight.
So off the top of my head those are the couple of
things from a consideration perspective I’d like the
Commission to think about.
CHAIR HANSSEN: But let me go back to what I
asked earlier though. If there are Office properties that
are currently in a Mixed-Use General Plan designation, they
can add housing, right?
JENNIFER ARMER: That’s correct. For example, the
new office building that’s being constructed that was
approved a few years ago on Alberto Way, that actually is
the Highway Commercial designation, and so anything in that
zone can be office. It also can be Mixed-Use, Office and
Residential, or other Mixed-Use.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Where I was going with that is
that by removing that designation where it’s just Office or
just Service Commercial, we’re not eliminating the
possibility of Mixed-Use using Office.
JENNIFER ARMER: Correct.
CHAIR HANSSEN: But it would have to already be
in a designation where Mixed-Use with Residential were
permitted along with Office?
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JENNIFER ARMER: Correct. It’s just eliminating
Mixed-Use from those that are actually designated with the
Office land use designation.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes. Okay, got it. So was that a
proposal, Commissioner Janoff? It was sort of heading
towards a motion.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I’d be happy to call that a
motion if somebody has the correct numbers.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Can you read the numbers
one more time so that we know them?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: All right. Let me use the
correct numbers. We’re at 2,292 for the current RHNA cycle,
plus 600 for the next RHNA cycle, and 600 for the third
RHNA cycle. It adds 1,200 units to that. However, if you
want to be really precise, we only have a fraction of the
third RHNA cycle. We could change that third 600 down to, I
think, 200 if you wanted to do that, so adding, let’s say,
800 units, 600 and 200, then we’re at 3,092. And then we
subtract that from the 3,738. So if somebody wants to do
that math, that comes out to about 720 units or so.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I’m just going to have you hold
for a second, because the Town Manager just turned her
camera on, but then I’m going to give you back the floor,
Commissioner Janoff.
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LAUREL PREVETTI: I just want to make sure that
the motion includes the totality of what you’re
recommendation a few minutes ago was, that in order to get
to that reduced number you were proposing that we remove
housing from Office and Service Commercial on the order of
the 313 units, and that might be a simpler way of
explaining the net effect. Just a suggestion.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Through the Chair for the
Town Manager. Is it reasonable to reduce that third RHNA
cycle number from 600 if we only have a partial RHNA cycle
to accommodate under this Draft General Plan?
LAUREL PREVETTI: I think the real exercise is
what total capacity would you like to see in the 2040
General Plan, and I think it is useful, as we were talking
earlier this evening to explain that we’re trying to not
only accommodate the current RHNA but also future RHNA. I
think it might be simpler to just really focus on that the
idea is that we need capacity for missing middle based on
the conversation that the Commission is interested in more
Mixed-Use opportunities. However, in the interest of trying
to protect Service Commercial and some of these other needs
that we have in the Town, that really what we’re talking
about is a net decrease of the 313.
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And again, we can provide the context as
discussed earlier, but I think simplifying the motion might
be easier as we continue to move forward in the process.
Again, that’s just a suggestion based on the very nice
recommendation you made just a few minutes ago.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I understood all that, so
question for Commissioner Janoff. If I’m going by where the
Town Manager is going with this, which is we should really
be thinking of what is the overall capacity that we have,
and based on the Draft 2040 General Plan we have 3,738 as
the reasonable growth during that timeframe given the
densities that are proposed, and if we take 313 off the
table, then that only gets us down to 3,400-and-something,
right?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Which is where I’m prepared
to stop.
CHAIR HANSSEN: That is actually where you first
stated talking, and if you look at what makes up that
number, 300 units of that is ADUs that are not going to be
built until after 2031, so in terms of more current
housing, that number is going to be likely under 3,000.
Let’s see, we have comments or questions from
Commissioner Clark and then Commissioner Thomas.
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COMMISSIONER CLARK: I do just want to clarify,
so now we’re talking about subtracting 313 units from the
3,738 original number, which would give us 3,425 is the
number.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay. And then Commissioner
Thomas, did you have a question or a comment?
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: My question is that I think
we need to follow up with where those numbers would come
from, if that’s what I’m hearing from the Town Manager,
that we need to make sure that we’re reducing that 300 from
a specific place, and I’m only seeing 259 in Office
Professional, so that’s a little bit confusing to me, or
I’m not following something.
CHAIR HANSSEN: If you look on page six of the
Staff Report, at the bottom it says, “These are some
options to reduce,” and it says if we remove housing from
Office and Service Commercial it equates to 313 units.
What’s behind that is they would be changing the densities,
and I think it’s also a permitted use then for that
category.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Oh, because it’s Office and
Service Commercial combined?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Fifty-nine plus 54, got it.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: I don't know if you remember when
we discussed it at GPAC, but we all knew that Service
Commercial is going to be a lot smaller, because we’re
talking about like a unit above an auto repair shop.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I get it. I just was like I
thought you were only referring to Office Professional, and
I was like wait, but it’s Office and Service Commercial.
Okay, now I understand that.
My concern with this is that I think that most of
the feedback and input from the community that we have
gotten is that people don’t want growth and development in
Low-Density and Medium-Density Residential areas, and so
now we’re just taking off the table development in other
areas just to appease and make the number seem lower, and I
feel like we’re just taking away options for developers. I
mean, I truly commend Commissioner Janoff for trying to get
us to a consensus, but I just fear that the fear is coming
from those other neighborhoods.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Let me elaborate a little
bit. As we look back over the course of the meetings and
information that we’ve received from developers in
particular, we’ve heard a lot of input that this particular
format is an unlikely format to build, that office builders
build office, and home builders build homes, and putting
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the two together may be a laudatory vision, but it’s an
unlikely thing to happen.
So realistically, looking at what developers
would be interested in building, I think this is a very
unlikely format. I could be wrong, but if that’s the case
and removing it doesn’t affect any of the really special
things that GPAC wanted to do to incorporate real beautiful
change into the community, this doesn’t really impact that
vision, so that’s my thinking behind it, and thank you for
asking.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Director Paulson.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. I think Town Manager
Prevetti may have some input.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes, go ahead, Ms. Prevetti.
LAUREL PREVETTI: Thank you. I just wanted to
clarify, I think we have a motion on the floor and
typically we need a second before discussing it.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Actually, you are correct about
that and I was remiss because so many hands came up. So can
we get a second for Commissioner Janoff’s motion?
Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I second.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay, so we do have a second, so
we can continue the discussion before voting, and thank you
for remind us of that.
Commissioner Clark, did you want to comment?
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes, thank you. I just want
to jump off of what Commissioner Janoff was saying about
the reasoning behind this, and I think something else we’ve
discussed a lot tonight is everybody needs to do their
part, and so to me it’s if we do want to be a little less
ambitious and build a little less housing, I want to do
that in a way that doesn’t alleviate anyone of playing some
sort of role in this, because we need to do this as an
entire community, so I think that, along with it not being
as realistic of an option for developers, to me makes it
the best way that we can reduce our numbers.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that.
I would comment that I like where this is going,
and that my first thought when we were thinking about these
exercises is that especially since the GPAC added that at
the very end and it didn’t seem essential, and then since
we’ve gotten the additional feedback from developers it
doesn’t seem like it’s that feasible.
We kind of have a good idea about ADUs, but
because of the uncertainty of where SB 9 will go, it would
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be my preference. I could get comfortable with where we
are. It would be my preference to take something off the
table in Low-Density Residential, but not all of it. But
that might not be enough for me to not vote…to go with the
motion that Commissioner Janoff presented. I don't know if
other people have thoughts about that.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Question for Staff. Is it
possible to reduce the density in Low-Density and still get
missing middle, and if so, what would that look like?
JENNIFER ARMER: There is probably some room to
reduce it somewhat, but my understanding is if it went
below ten dwelling units per acre, then that really would
eliminate the possibility of missing middle housing. I
believe that’s what we’ve discussed previously.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I know we talked about this
earlier, that if we were going to go in this direction that
you wouldn’t automatically be able to spew out what would
the number be with that change in density, but I’m sure if
we took it to ten it would be less than 279.
JENNIFER ARMER: Correct.
CHAIR HANSSEN: But we don’t know how much less,
so that’s the uncertainty of this process, but we could go
down that path and in theory, I guess, but if we don’t know
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what numbers it gives us, it kind of makes it hard, but I
would be agreeing with Commissioner Janoff that I wouldn't
want to do anything that would take away the possibility of
missing middle housing, because I think that really is
essential to creating balance in the community, but if it
was possible to bring it down a little bit, I think that
makes a lot sense, and that would take away some of the
uncertainty with where we don’t know where SB 9 is going to
go.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you. Even though I
started the motion by talking about numbers, I think at
this point we should depart from that conversation and give
Staff the guidance. I’d be willing to modify the motion or
add to the motion that we consider reducing the density in
Low-Density and Medium-Density to a number that still
supports missing middle but lowers the numbers. It may be a
small number, but if that makes sense to do so, I don’t
need to know what that number is. Staff can take that into
consideration and then run the numbers and include that as
part of the illustration of how the numbers come down, but
I would be willing to do that. The numbers themselves are
kind of general, but if we can get more specific reductions
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in density without losing the benefits that the GPAC has
put forward, I would say that is a reasonable inclusion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. Let’s see, I
think it was Commissioner Clark and then Commissioner
Thomas.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I think it was Commissioner
Thomas first.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Oh, thank you for that. Actually,
Director Paulson has his hand up, so I just want to make
sure we capture Staff’s comments before we continue to
deliberate on this.
JOEL PAULSON: Since Commissioner Clark was the
seconder; she would need to accept that amendment.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes, I accept that
amendment. Actually, can I ask you a question about it, or
do I need to second it before I can ask a question?
JENNIFER ARMER: You can ask a clarifying
question.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yeah, I think you can ask a
question.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I just want to clarify, like
I want to make sure that we’re on the same page about what
it would mean to still allow missing middle. I think we
need to be really clear about that. For me, it would be all
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the way up to fourplexes, because I think that those are
able to very well fit the structure of a single-family home
and that they don’t look very different from triplexes and
stuff, but they’re still affordable, and so would that be
what we consider?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I think missing middle to
me means whatever number of units is proposed. It doesn’t
have to be up to a limit, I don’t think, but I would
certainly be in support of fourplexes, or five or sixes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I was going to say, Commissioner
Clark, and Staff would probably explain it better than me,
but if you’re looking at, let’s just say, the hearing we
had earlier to day, the 6,800 square foot lot, you’d have
to do the math and figure out if you’re doing ten dwelling
units maximum per acre, then what percentage of an acre
that is, and so if it’s ten, it depends on the size of the
lot whether you could get four units, if that makes sense.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Okay, I do see what you
mean.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And so it wouldn’t unilaterally
be true that… Even with 12 dwelling units per acre, I’m not
sure if you could do a fourplex on every single lot, but
maybe Staff would a better way to talk through that.
Director Paulson has his hand up.
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JOEL PAULSON: Thank you, Chair. I was just going
to comment to Commissioner Clark’s thought on if we’re
trying to get four to allow four units at ten dwelling
units per acre, for instance, you need more than a 15,000
square foot lot, and if you’re talking about, let’s say,
eight units as a max, then you’re looking somewhere around
approximately 20,000 square feet in lot size to accomplish
that.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. I just want to
make sure we’re providing the right amount of direction, if
that makes sense, so understanding what it means to
slightly reduce the number. I don't know if we are being
clear enough about that. I also do trust Staff and they
have all the context of this conversation.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Director Paulson.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. Commissioner Janoff and
Commissioner Clark can correct me if I’m wrong, but I would
envision how Staff would carry this forward to Council is
that there was a desire to have some reduction of the
maximum density for Low-Density Residential, and so
ultimately we would provide a couple of options or
scenarios like I just mentioned, but we check those numbers
to see what the exact number is from a lot size to get to
the four units to make sure that what’s the minimum lot
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size that’s required to allow four units. So that would be
one way we would carry it forward to the Council for their
consideration.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Okay, thank you.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Then the other question that we
wish we knew the answer to is out of all our Low-Density
Residential, how many lots are there at that size? Because
we do have a fair number of lots that are like 8,000 square
feet. I don’t expect Staff to have the answer to that, and
they won’t in tonight’s meeting, but that would be
important information to know to increase the comfort level
with making that decision, the recommendation.
I’ll go back to Commissioner Clark, and then I
don't know between Commissioner Janoff and Commissioner
Thomas who was first, but they both have their hands up.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you, and yes, I see
Commissioner Janoff has her hand up. I’m curious to hear
what you’ll think about this, but I feel like reducing the
number in Low-Density Residential is not doing what we want
it to do, because where the number is only really allows up
to missing middle, and so reducing the number will just
reduce the number of missing middle housing, so if we do
feel like we need to reduce it, I would rather go up one
level or something, and especially just because we don’t
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know how many lots it would affect, and you do need a
relatively lot to do this.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I hear you. Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Commissioner Clark, when
you say you would like to go up one level, do you mean to
do Medium-Density?
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yeah, like if we felt like
we needed to do that, I’d be more comfortable in Medium-
Density, although my preference would be to leave the
motion as it originally was.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: My hand is up because I
wanted to just clarify with Director Paulson that the
interest is in reducing the density in Low-Density and
Medium-Density as long as that reduction can still
accommodate missing middle, and if it can’t, then I
wouldn’t be in favor of making a reduction.
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you for the clarification.
Yes, it’s Low-Density and Medium-Density. I only gave the
example for Low-Density. Medium-Density, right now the
maximum is 24. Like we talked about before, if we cut it in
half we’d still be at 18, so that would accommodate missing
middle even on smaller lots than our Draft General Plan
currently allows in Low-Density.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Thank you.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: I think it would be fine to
proceed forward with that motion, since there is still some
investigation to be done as long as the proviso is that
we’re not eliminating missing middle, then the research can
be done, and if it turns out that it doesn’t work for Low-
Density Residential, then we should stay with the 2040
proposal as is, is kind of where I was thinking that would
go.
Ms. Armer.
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you. I wanted to ask
whether the seconder had received enough clarification that
they could accept the modification or not?
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I’d like to ask one more
clarifying question, and I think I’m just having a hard
time grasping this, but to me it seems like reducing the
density in Low-Density Residential only has the possibility
of like reducing or eliminating missing middle, because I
want to know pretty much at that density level what other
types of properties there is the possibility of reducing,
if that makes sense.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I’m not if that’s a
question to me, but the motion would be to reduce density
only if it did not eliminate missing middle.
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COMMISSIONER CLARK: And Staff, are you able to
clarify if there are other types of properties that might
be like not possible if you go from 12 to ten units per
acre, for example?
JENNIFER ARMER: In just taking a lot at some of
the numbers, we have a lot of Low-Density Residential, for
example, it’s 8,000 square foot lots, and even at the 12
units per acre, that’s only going to allow a duplex, the
two units plus whatever ADUs, for example, so this
modification wouldn’t necessarily change for that size of
lot a whole lot of what would be allowed.
It is really going to be on the slightly larger
lots where there might be possibilities for triplexes or
fourplexes, and we can provide some of that additional
information, and that Planning Commission’s recommendation
was only to do the modification to this Low-Density
Residential designation if it doesn’t reduce or eliminate
the possibility to missing middle housing.
I think just based on looking at some of those
numbers preliminarily that the reduction is more likely to
be possible in the Medium-Density Residential designation
rather than Low-Density Residential, but we can provide the
qualitative motion from the Planning Commission and provide
them some quantitative numbers that they can then consider
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in determining whether to accept the recommendation from
the Planning Commission or to do something different.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. Yeah, I think
that that’s where my stipulation was. It feels like in the
Low-Density Residential that wouldn’t really happen, but I
also think because that’s in the motion then that would be
okay, so I’m still comfortable seconding the motion. Thank
you, everyone, for clarifying.
CHAIR HANSSEN: No problem. Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I think that I am much more
comfortable just reducing the overall number by 313 from
the Office Professional and Service Commercial areas,
because we know that those were added at the end for GPAC,
those were like just bonus extra things that were added on
at the end, and we know that that type of a development is
going to be the most difficult for the Town to essentially
incentivize, because it’s just not appealing to developers,
so I would be much more comfortable reducing the number by
313 with those.
I think that the only thing that we achieve with
reducing the density in Low-Density Residential or Medium-
Density Residential is making the SB 9 pathway more
appealing, which again, doesn’t allow for as much local
input and I think could actually upset people in those
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neighborhoods. I wouldn’t want to reduce any potential
housing opportunities that could go through Town. I want to
make our options in Town more appealing than going the SB 9
route, if that makes sense, because I do think that that’s
in the best interest of the community and neighbors that
will be affected by any new development or redevelopment,
so I’m not in favor of changing the densities, but I do
understand and think that it’s a good compromise to knock
those 313 units off from those two places.
I think that that also gives a very clear
recommendation to Town Council, and I’m afraid that if we
say we can change the densities a little bit for Low-
Density Residential and Medium-Density Residential and we
forward that along to Town Council, it’s not quite as
clear, and then that is a concern to me that we’re not
going to really see the final number before we forward
that, so that’s where I’m at with this motion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Based on us having a motion and a
second, you would be a no vote. I would go ahead and count
it before I go back to Commissioner Clark.
Commissioner Clark and I both went to the recent
Planning Commissioner Academy and they did a pretty
extensive thing on SB 9, and what I remember them talking
about was that it actually is really hard only with SB 9 to
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get fourplex, because you would have to do it with a lot
split, start with a lot split was my understanding of it,
and so it would have to be supplemented by ordinances from
towns that would help facilitate that, so it isn’t
necessarily the panacea that everyone thought it was, and
that’s why they’re not expecting the take up rate to be
super high, because not everyone is going to want to do a
lot split.
But with that being said, we don’t know for sure,
right? And so I understand your concern, but given that we
have this motion on the table we should probably see that
through and see if we can get enough votes and go from
there, but Commissioner Clark, you wanted to comment and
it’s fine to go ahead.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Can I ask a clarifying
question about that? I mean, that makes me feel better if
you think that it is going to not be as appealing to do a
fourplex at that level through the SB 9 route. I hope that
we’re all on the same page, that we want people to take the
local Town route versus the SB 9 route as much as possible.
I’m trying to ask you, Chair Hanssen, you’re not
concerned that reducing the density slightly in these two
areas would discourage people from going through Town or
only give people options to go through SB 9?
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CHAIR HANSSEN: Based on what I understand, which
I’m no expert, but based on what I’ve heard about SB 9 so
far, and Staff probably knows more than me, I don't know
that you could make the statement that slightly reducing
the densities in Low-Density Residential for the General
Plan would open the door for SB 9, because I think there
are enough things about SB 9 that are limiting, that’s all.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Okay, thank you.
CHAIR HANSSEN: If Staff has anything more to add
on SB 9, because you guys are closer then I am, but that
was my impression. But I don’t see them.
Commissioner Clark, and then Vice Chair Barnett.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. I’ll add
something on SB 9. It doesn’t allow fourplexes, which I
think is another reason why these density changes are
really important, because they’ll open up that possibility,
because that’s something I’m bummed about with SB 9 is that
that wasn’t an option.
Then I want to clarify something. So the
amendment to Commissioner Janoff’s original motion had been
made because of Chair Hanssen’s concerns with Low-Density
Residential, and so I wasn’t sure how Medium-Density
Residential became part of the motion and if it officially
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is part of it, because it would be my preference to keep it
for just Low-Density Residential.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I would have said both Low-
Density Residential and Medium-Density Residential with a
slight reduction with the idea that I’m not taking too much
off the table for any one particular thing. That was my
logic.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: That’s good with me. Thank
you.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Thank you, Chair. I’m having
trouble understanding how we could give meaningful
direction to the Council if we’re talking about not
impairing the missing middle in the Low-Density Residential
and Medium-Density Residential designations. I don’t see
how we can, given the variety of types of those kind of
housings with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, I don't know
how that can materially be evaluated. Maybe I’m missing
something.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Staff, first of all, we aren’t
going to get any more clarity on this for our meeting
tonight, so then if we were able to get resolution on this
and get a majority vote, what could you tell the Council on
this particular point?
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JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you. What I heard from the
Planning Commission this evening on this item and this
motion is that if this were supported, the recommendation
to Town Council is to remove the housing densities from the
Office and Service Commercial and to consider lowering the
allowed densities in the Low-Density Residential and
Medium-Density Residential zones, but only to a point that
would still allow the missing middle.
As I said, it’s more of a qualitative kind of
quality direction rather than a number direction. It’s
indicating that you recognize that there is interest from
the community to not increase the densities in those
designations as far as in the Draft General Plan, but
recognizing the importance of missing middle housing, and
so that they could then when they have additional numbers
consider that recommendation and how to implement it, if
they support it. Is that helpful?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett took his hand
down, so I guess he got his answer as much as we have an
answer.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: It seems to me that it’s
still pretty ambiguous and doesn’t give a lot of direction.
I would favor going for a number such as proposed, or a
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bigger number than that, but I think we’re moving into a
nebulous area.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Ms. Armer has her hand up.
JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you, Chair. I just wanted
to call attention to the fact that it is 10:57, and so we
will need a motion if we want to go past 11:00 o’clock.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I’m going to ask someone to make
a motion to continue to 11:30, because I would like to at
least finish this part of the discussion. I don’t think
we’ll finish the rest of the plan, but would someone make a
motion to continue to 11:30? Let’s see, I’ve got
Commissioner Janoff, is that a motion? And then
Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Sorry, I had my hand up for
a clarification, but I defer to Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I move to extend the
meeting until 11:30.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay, thank you for that, and do
we have a second? Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Second.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And then a quick roll call vote.
Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Raspe.
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COMMISSIONER RASPE: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And I vote yes as well. We may
not need to go to 11:30.
So Commissioner Janoff, you had a question, and
then I think Commissioner Thomas does as well.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Actually a clarification.
The purpose of adding the Low-Density and Medium-Density
reduction possibilities is to call attention to the Council
that if it goes too far they’ll lose missing middle, and so
it’s really a notion that the GPAC felt very strongly about
missing middle, and we had over the course of time a number
of Council members on the GPAC also very much in favor of
missing middle, so it’s really not a number per se. I mean,
Staff will get it down to a number by the time this goes to
Council, so they’ll know what that is, but the notion is
the Planning Commission is in favor of retaining missing
middle.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: To add onto that, if you look at
it from the number perspective, such as you did, Vice Chair
Barnett, it has to translate into a change in density, so
if you say all, then it goes back to 2020, but if it’s half
and you say I want to reduce the number in half, then the
Staff has to do the calculations to determine at what
density level would it actually translate into half of
that, so you wouldn’t know the answer to that if you put
the number out there either in terms of the only thing that
will change in the actual General Plan is the density,
because we don’t have control over the exact number, we
have only a model that translates from the density, if that
makes sense.
Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I understand what you’re
saying, but I do still have the same concerns as Vice Chair
Barnett, and so therefore I’d just feel comfortable like
knocking off the Office Professional and Service
Commercial, because I feel like that’s just a very specific
thing that we can eliminate from this equation and sends a
message that we think the missing middle is still
important, which is also what we want to do as a group.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Through the Chair, that
number is already part of the motion.
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COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I know, but I think that
that’s the only part of the motion that I support. I don’t
want to change the densities also, because I think that
then it does get into a gray area and we’re forwarding
something that we haven’t seen the final numbers of.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay, that’s a fair comment. Are
there others that would like to comment on this?
Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I agree overall with
Commissioner Thomas. I think that would definitely be my
preferred motion, but I don’t think that’s the direction
we’re overall going. I also think that Commissioner
Janoff’s motion does kind of acknowledge that Council still
very well might reduce these numbers further, and so if we
do it this way there’s a very strong message to keep
missing middle housing, and we’ve also created a path in
which missing middle housing is retained in the General
Plan, and so yeah, I think for those reasons I prefer this
motion overall.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I don’t like having an uncertain
situation go along to Council, but I feel like there’s
enough parameters on it with Commissioner Janoff’s motion,
and then as I said, we kind of knew when we had a meeting
before this meeting to discuss it that we would end up with
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incomplete information, because you can’t off the top of
your head translate densities into numbers necessarily, so
we would have ended up in the this situation unless we went
with one of the numbers that’s on this page here in the
Staff Report, because they’ve already done those
calculations for us for those.
If there are no other comments, I think it would
be worth going ahead and taking a vote and see where we
stand, and if we can’t have a majority, that’s fine, we’ll
have to come up with another motion and go from there.
So the motion on the table, do we need to go back
over it, or is everyone clear? I think Commissioner Janoff
did outline it several times, so I think we’re fine. I will
start out with Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: No.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: No.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: No.
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CHAIR HANSSEN: And I vote yes, so we’re split 3-
3, so the motion fails, and we have to go back and come up
with another suggestion.
Commissioner Thomas and then Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Commissioner Janoff can go.
I’m fine.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: So we understand the
concern that Commissioner Thomas voiced, and I’d like, if
it’s not inconvenient, to ask Commissioner Raspe and Vice
Chair Barnett if you’re still with Vice Chair Barnett’s
numbers, or is there something else that you have in mind?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Raspe, you have our
hand up.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Sure. I raised that for a
different reason, but I’ll answer Commissioner Janoff’s
question.
As I indicated earlier, my strongest concern is
changing the numbers of the Low-Density housing
designation, and the motion as presented leaves great
ambiguity in that respect. Largely it’s unknown if we vote
for that motion what will happen to those designations,
whether those numbers will change. It could be the case
that none may change, it could be the case that a great
many will change.
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And I appreciate the guidance we want to give the
Council, but I think in that formulation it leads to too
many questions and too much unknowns, so that hopefully
answers your question, Commissioner.
Mine was a question more to Staff. I’m curious;
we are two or three different positions amongst us. Is it
necessary that we agree on a point to provide to Council?
Would it be adequate that we provide them an advisement
that two Commissioners feel this way, three Commissioners
feel this way, etc.? Because again, these are
recommendations we’re making to Council, as I understand
it, so would that be a way through this? I’m just thinking
out loud. I’m sorry. And part of it is it’s 11:00 o’clock.
Thanks so much.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Would Staff want to comment on
Commissioner Raspe’s question?
JOEL PAULSON: Thank you. I think we’re typically
looking for a majority motion. There are a lot of different
views and ideas across the Commissioners that we have here
tonight, and I think that’s pretty obvious through the
discussion. It may be that, as I mentioned before, we’ll
send them verbatim minutes.
I’ll defer to Ms. Prevetti after I say what I
probably shouldn’t say, but it is after 11:00, so I’m going
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to say it anyway. You could get to a point where you can’t
reach majority on any reconfiguration of the numbers, and
so at that point we’re going to come to an impasse and
we’re just going to have to move it forward without an
actual, explicit motion on any reduction in the number is
my thought.
LAUREL PREVETTI: And I would support Director
Paulson with that. You’ve had a very robust conversation
over these last two meetings over the numbers, and so there
is a lot of really good commentary for the Council to
consider. We do have a little bit of time yet tonight if
somebody would like to try another motion, but it’s
perfectly fine for us to express the three-way split that
has emerged through the course of these conversations.
Thank you.
JENNIFER ARMER: Just to clarify that, I would
say that if that is where the Commission ends up finding
themselves on the numbers, then in the end the motion that
the Commission would be considering is a recommendation to
forward the Draft 2040 General Plan to Town Council for
consideration with the modifications that we have discussed
over these three meetings and no specific recommendation on
modifications to the housing densities, but Staff would
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provide a summary, and as Town Manager Prevetti mentioned,
they will have access to verbatim minutes as well.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Thank you, Staff. And just
to be clear, I don’t believe we’re at an impasse yet, I
think there are still discussions and ideas to be had. I
just wanted to discuss the what-if situation just so we all
have that in our heads, so thank you for answering the
question.
CHAIR HANSSEN: We’re going to have to go to
another meeting anyway, because we haven’t gotten to the
Community Design Element or the EIR yet, so that isn’t
going to happen tonight.
The other thing that is in play here is
Commissioner Tavana is not here, so we have six votes
instead of seven, and even the last motion couldn’t have
been split.
So that being said, I think that where we’re
stuck is kind of where I’m not seeing that anybody has a
problem with the motion to remove Office and Service
Commercial housing and therefore the density associated
with it from the 2040 General Plan.
The issue is around Low-Density Residential and
Medium-Density Residential and where the split is is
between taking that off the table except for what’s already
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ministerial by law or something in between, and then we
have the let’s not change anything so that we can make the
most possible.
Commissioner Janoff and then Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: What I’m thinking is in
order to further assist if we don’t have a majority
decision is to go through the bullets on page 219. We’re
talking about potential reductions, and I think for
clarification to Council we should probably indicate which
the Planning Commission would be in favor of, kind of a yes
or no, and then if we had any conversation… I think it’s
clear where we are with the Low-Density and Medium-Density.
We’ve already suggested removing the Office and Service
Commercial. “Revert properties in New Community designation
back to Neighborhood 58 units,” that could be. But I think
we also agree that we don’t want to reduce the density in
the Mixed-Use designation or the final bullet.
CHAIR HANSSEN: You’re suggesting we have that
discussion?
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: That’s my summary. We’ve
kind of been talking around these bullets, but I was just
thinking since these bullets were potential reductions that
came I believe from Council, then responding to those
potential reduction areas probably further gives guidance
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as to the recommendation of the Planning Commission, even
if we can’t reach a consensus.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes, I think that makes sense.
Commissioner Clark, you have your hand up.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. I do feel like we
can reach an at least majority consensus, and I think that
to me feels like an important thing to do to really be able
to pass a single General Plan on with at least something
that we’ve all come together to recommend.
Earlier we were able to have a majority who
agreed to eliminating the 313 from the Office and Service
Commercial designations, then beyond that the concern was
that they get the strong message about missing middle
housing that they understand that the dissenting
Commissioners’ concerns are related to Low-Density
Residential and Medium-Density Residential.
So I would like to make a motion that is along
the lines of the original one, which is to remove the 313
housing units from Office and Service Commercial
designations.
CHAIR HANSSEN: You mean to just get approval for
that and recognize that the Commission is not comfortable
with the balance of it? I’m trying to understand.
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COMMISSIONER CLARK: I think we were all in a
place where we were ready to agree with that or that we had
the majority in agreement with that, and then beyond that
our concerns were that the Council receive certain
messages, and so I think that it’s recommending that number
and then us having the comfort of knowing that the Council
will be aware of this entire conversation and of the
nuances of our conversation.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think I understand where you’re
going. I’m not really comfortable with that personally as
the Chair, but it is a Commission decision, but feel like
we should, and it is our role to try to come to some
resolution on the other issues that are on the table
besides that.
Director Paulson
JOEL PAULSON: I just wanted to say, we have a
motion on the floor, we need to at least see if we have a
second, and then we can have a discussion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes, fair enough. Thank you for
that. Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: I second the motion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: So there is a motion and a
second, and the motion is simply about the Office and
Service Commercial. My question is we’re not making a
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recommendation on the overall land use number, we’re only
making a recommendation on that one aspect of the land use
number, is that correct?
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I think that my vision of it
is that it’s pretty much Commissioner Janoff’s original
motion, so that it is on the overall number with the
reduction of the 313 units. Does that make sense?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes. So there’s a motion and
second, and is there other discussion?
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes, I think that I would
like to hear from Commissioner Barnett regarding also
adding to this the Community Commercial to Neighborhood
Commercial and Central Business District reductions. Vice
Chair Barnett is recommending a 50% reduction in those
numbers and I’m just curious what of those numbers is
actually on the list of bullets from the Council, and I’m
just wondering whether there is agreement in adding the
reverting the properties in the new Community Commercial
back to Neighborhood Commercial for an additional 58 units,
and reducing the Central Business District down to 67
units?
CHAIR HANSSEN: So Vice Chair Barnett.
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VICE CHAIR BARNETT: The motion that’s on the
floor, I thought we already voted on it and it was a motion
that failed. Yes, in the abstract with looking at specific
line items I would agree with the two changes that
Commissioner Janoff just mentioned, but that leaves all the
other ones to be discussed.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I’d like to amend my motion
to include those two additional changes suggested by
Commissioner Janoff.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And is there a second?
Commissioner Thomas, do you agree to the amendment of the
motion?
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Yes. Can they be repeated
one more time before I agree? I need clarification.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes, and let’s look at the
Town’s bullet number four, “Revert properties in the New
Community Commercial designation back to Neighborhood
Commercial, which would have a reduction of 58 units,” and
then not on this list, but Vice Chair Barnett has
recommended the Central Business District be reduced, I
don't know what from, but to 67. Let me just look.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: It’s from 135 total.
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COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Right, 135 total down to
67.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Down to 67. Yes, I accept
the second.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Ms. Armer, did you have a
comment?
JENNIFER ARMER: In looking at the numbers it
looks like the reduction in the Central Business District,
I believe you just reduced the total number half. That
keeps it still slightly above the densities that are
currently allowed in downtown, but gets it pretty close to
what the existing is. We have to do some numbers to figure
out what the density would actually be.
JOEL PAULSON: I’ll just jump in real quick.
Since the max now is 20 and proposed is 30, he’s cutting it
in half, the 135, so it’s probably somewhere in the order
of a maximum of 25 (inaudible) that’s greater.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, so we do have a motion
from Commissioner Clark and then a second by Commissioner
Thomas. Is there more discussion? I’ll weigh in. I’m not
super comfortable for a couple of reasons.
One is given the discussion that we had at the
Housing Element Advisory Board about the site inventory,
and we did already go through downtown. We had some very
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passionate comments from the Vice Mayor, who lives
downtown, and a few others about there are some really
wonderful opportunities for Mixed-Use development that
could fit in nicely with downtown, and one of the specific
properties that was mentioned was the post office, and
while there is no application on the table at the moment
that I know of, I’m not sure that given the things that
we’ve been hearing from people about Mixed-Use that that
wouldn’t come off the table if we were to take more density
off the table. In fact, what I’ve been hearing is we might
even need to do more, so I’d be uncomfortable with that
part of it alone.
The Community Commercial to Neighborhood
Commercial was fine, but I would further add that I’m not
sure that not reducing anything in Low-Density or Medium-
Density is going to be acceptable to Commissioner Raspe and
Vice Chair Barnett. We can go ahead and try to vote on it,
but those are the problems I see.
Let’s see, Commissioner Thomas and then
Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Chair Hanssen, which part
of the motion are you uncomfortable with?
CHAIR HANSSEN: The Central Business District,
downtown.
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COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Just the reducing the
density of that specific space?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: But you’re okay with
changing Community Commercial, reverting that back to
Neighborhood Commercial?
CHAIR HANSSEN: Yes. But I don’t know if it’s
going to work out to not make some reduction in Low-Density
or Medium-Density, but I could be okay with that.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Okay.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Let’s see, Commissioner Clark and
then Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. Here’s my
thought. Since we’re clearly going to meet again, would it
be possible to have Staff explore that loose guidance that
had been given about reducing the densities in Low-Density
Residential and Medium-Density Residential to a point where
they still allow missing middle housing, and then we would
be able to use that to guide our discussions since some of
the problems were with the ambiguities?
JOEL PAULSON: I’ll jump in. That’s a definite
maybe. We’ll see what we can pull together. It’s almost
11:30. We still have to get through this motion if we ever
actually call the question, and then we also are going to
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have to continue this to a date certain, so we need to keep
that in mind. We may need another motion to extend past
11:30, but we will work with Staff to see what we can pull
up from a numbers perspective to try to get what the
minimum lot size for four units or missing middle is and
then see if we can go through our GIS to figure out how
many lots of the lots in those designations would still
remain viable.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Thank you. That’s a lot of
work, so thank you very much, and yeah, I think that’s my
preference. I don't know if this is possible, but I don’t
think we need to worry about that motion I made previously,
and the motion that I would prefer that we make is what I
just suggested, to wait and have the Staff explore that
possibility.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Can she just withdraw her motion?
JOEL PAULSON: She would need to withdraw her
motion, yes.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: I withdraw my motion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: All right, and then since we are
running close to our deadline, I don't know that we need to
continue past 11:30 as long as we can come up with a date
certain and vote on that before, but I’m going to look to
Staff for guidance on that.
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JENNIFER ARMER: Thank you, Chair. We have looked
at the Town’s calendars in terms of upcoming meetings and
what dates might be possibilities for continuance. Next
Monday, May 2nd would be one option. If it were a 7:00
o’clock meeting it would not conflict with other scheduled
Town meetings.
Unfortunately we’ve got a lot of evening meetings
coming up, so another option then would be Tuesday the 10th,
which is the day before your next regular meeting on the
11th, which would also be an option.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Can I just see a show of hands
from the Commissioners who can make it on Monday, May 2nd?
It looks like everybody. And Tuesday, May 10th. Not as much.
Okay.
I’ll go ahead and make the motion to continue
this to a date certain of Monday, May 2nd at 7:00 o’clock.
Can I get a second? Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: I second the motion.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Okay, great.
Commissioner Raspe, did you have a question.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Quick question. I just want
to confirm with Staff that May 2nd is enough time for them
to complete the work that we’ve asked them to do?
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CHAIR HANSSEN: Thank you for that. That’s a good
question.
JENNIFER ARMER: Well, as Director Paulson said,
it’s a definite maybe. We will put together what
information we can for a Staff Report this Friday, but that
is the day after tomorrow, so we can pull some information,
but it would likely be limited.
JOEL PAULSON: I’d just offer that if we can’t
get it for the Friday memo, then we can see what we can
pull together on Monday for a Desk Item.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think that was a good issue to
raise though. It looked like we had five out six of us for
the 10th.
Commissioner Janoff.
COMMISSIONER JANOFF: I would just like to say
that personally I’m not looking for a precise number, it’s
more an order of magnitude. Are we going to get 10%, 20%,
just so we know that there’s a meaningful reduction if we
go down that route? I know that some Commissioners are keen
on having a precise number, but if time does not allow for
that analysis, then I think knowing that there’s a
substantial enough number or not would be sufficient for
me.
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JENNIFER ARMER: And I would say that I think we
can come up with some numbers as to what minimum lot size
would be required for a fourplex based on a couple of
different densities, and then I am hopeful that we would be
able, if not Friday then by Monday, to figure out the
number of parcels in our Low-Density designation to meet
that. It may be that we would need to do that for Medium-
Density as well, so I think we could get you some
information. It’s just it is going to be a quick
turnaround, so we don’t want to promise too much.
CHAIR HANSSEN: I think that would be enough. I
hope you guys feel the same way. There’s always going to be
more, but I think that would give us, based on the
questions I was hearing, so can I get a second for my
motion for Monday, May 2nd?
Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: I’ll second.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And then I will do a quick roll
call vote.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Thomas.
COMMISSIONER THOMAS: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Raspe.
COMMISSIONER RASPE: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Janoff.
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COMMISSIONER JANOFF: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Commissioner Clark.
COMMISSIONER CLARK: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: Vice Chair Barnett.
VICE CHAIR BARNETT: Yes.
CHAIR HANSSEN: And I vote yes as well.
Since we’re continuing the meeting we don’t need
to do the concluding things, right Staff? Okay.
I want to thank you all for a really very good
and in depth discussion, and I think that so much good
things have gone on and that’s why there are some people in
different directions on this thing, but I think the end
result is going to be much, much better because of all the
issues that we’re bringing up and vetting through this
process, so we will see you all on Monday, May 2nd, and good
night.
This meeting is adjourned.
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