Building_development + Forests_green_space

0:00 >> Today is April, Monday, April 27, 2026. I'm Ann McEnerny-Ogle. We are starting our workshops. Our first workshop will be on the comprehensive plan update. So staff and Councillors, please remember to identify yourselves before speaking and make sure your microphones are on. Anything else, Sarah? We're good. Okay, Rebecca, you're on. Thank you. >> Great. Hi. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I'm Rebecca Kennedy, deputy director of the community development department for the city and part of the team that has been working for several years now to update our comprehensive plan and development code. Next slide, please.

0:55 And I'm joined by Mark Person, senior planner also in community development, and he'll be taking part of the conversations he's been leading the task, the code update task. So the agenda for tonight is to really do well, how we open every presentation on the comp plan, which is sort of the legal and policy framework and the key things we have to do as part of it. We'll go through the changes that have happened since the last draft you reviewed at your last workshop on April 13th, so essentially between the second draft of the plan and the third draft that was published on April 17th. We'll do that for both the plan and the code. We'll walk you through a few additional changes we think are going to happen between essentially now and the third draft and the final draft, review briefly the final environmental impact statement findings and remind folks what it is and remind all

1:55 of us that's what helps us meet our state environmental policy act obligations in terms of supporting the adoption of a comprehensive plan and then talk about final steps and have lots of time for your questions. So briefly, we do comprehensive planning under the legal framework of the growth management act that was established in Washington in 1990. It requires cities to plan and it has several goals associated with it in terms of protecting agricultural, rural, natural areas, forest and resource lands by focusing development into cities, preventing sprawl into those areas outside cities and outside urban growth areas. It requires us to project for growth in coordination with other jurisdictions in the county and Clark County itself and then demonstrate the ability to accommodate and

2:52 have capacity to meet that growth. And it requires several elements which you are all familiar with that where we need to address very specific items either from a policy standpoint or a regulatory standpoint or both and demonstrate compliance. We've reviewed those chapters in depth with all of you over the last several months but that includes our land use and development chapter, housing, economic opportunity, public facilities, transportation, parks and open space. We have an equity chapter, a climate chapter, a community experience chapter. So there's requirements associated with all the required chapters. And then just a reminder too we're not doing this in a vacuum. We as part of the growth management act all jurisdictions are required to look at their plans and their codes and their other implementing regulations

3:46 every ten years through what's called the periodic review process. This is when we update population projections and then the housing and jobs that come with that. You can do it more frequently. Vancouver is typically stuck to the every ten year or close to that. Other jurisdictions have done it more often including our colleagues at Clark County. And then just a reminder too that this isn't like this isn't lock us in stone. We look at our plan every year through the annual review process. We look at if there's plan, text or map changes that are needed. If there's zoning code, text or map changes that are needed. Comp plan changes have to happen once a year and have to be assessed together. Basically you have to look at impacts cumulatively. We can update the code any time under the growth management act. And then just want to note too that there's a full review and progress report due to the

4:42 state after five years from this periodic review update process. And that is a new requirement that the legislature added a couple years ago. So there's a more robust reporting and review process than there previously was half way through the periodic update time frame. Rebecca, before you go any further, Anne McEnerny-Ogle, you stated update the population projections. The county gave us that number that we for housing didn't they? Correct, yeah. So the county in the growth management act structure, counties are responsible for selecting population targets and then translating that into numbers of housing and jobs and then allocating those out to the city. We planned for a little more like I think a little more than a thousand

5:38 more units than the county allocated us and that's because we don't always agree with their model. And we did our own analysis to figure out what we would need to do to meet our housing goals in terms of meeting our existing deficit and meeting that future growth, but it's all within pretty close. But the original allocation, the large number of housing units, yes, came from the county and they allocated units to other cities and the urban growth areas as well. Thank you. There's many reasons to do a periodic update and a full update of our comprehensive plan and our code now, both from a regulatory standpoint as well as just what's happening in the community. We see quite a lot of changes, more people

6:32 moving here, has impacts on housing affordability, which has impacts on housing stability and houselessness. We see different economic trends emerging, certainly since COVID we see more work from home but we also see a hollowing out of sort of those middle wage family jobs, family wage jobs. We're all familiar with the growth and the growing diversity of the city. Our analyses show that it is pretty much undisputable that where you live determines your access to different opportunities and we want to strive and have aspirational goals to make it so it doesn't matter that everybody has access to opportunity regardless of whether zip code is in the city, health care, education, parks and recreation, fresh food, transportation, all of that, jobs. And then we have council policy direction to take robust climate action

7:30 and address the impacts of climate change. We also have state requirements to do that, including new legislation around conducting greenhouse gas inventories and demonstrating that your land use plans and transportation plans reduce the local sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Good entry into new state laws. As you are familiar, there are many new state laws relating to what cities and counties and others planning under the growth management act need to do to demonstrate compliance and particularly focused on housing. So we have to allow a minimum of four to six units on every residential lot and we have to importantly make sure that standards for middle housing are not more restrictive than what we impose on single family development, detached single family development. We have to make room again for this set number of housing units. But what's new in this cycle is that we also have

8:29 to demonstrate capacity for units by income band. And we have to also demonstrate that we allow permanently supportive housing everywhere we allow housing. We have to account for racially disparate impacts and we have to demonstrate and apply that lens to ensuring new policies