Building_development

43:31 to apply commercial land use designation. We understand this requires agricultural designation, but this is not functioning agricultural land, and it has not been for 30 years. It's surrounded by urban development and infrastructure and is already divided into 116 five-acre parcels, which is what that will become if this is not changed to support our request. Thank you very much. Thank you. OK, list center. Hello. I'm Angie Merrill. I'm sorry. M-E-R-R-I-L-L. Good afternoon. I'm with the city of La Center. I'm the city planner. Good evening, council. The city of La Center thanks you for the opportunity

44:29 to provide testimony for the 2045 comprehensive plan. Throughout the development of the comprehensive plan, city leaders and staff have repeatedly engaged public and stakeholders to hear their vision for the city of La Center. Through this outreach, we've heard several consistent messages. Maintain our small town charm and feel of downtown La Center. Focus growth near the I-5 junction, where there's adequate transportation and infrastructure to support growth. Provide family wage jobs in the city to prevent becoming a bedroom community. With these goals, the city council unanimously adopted a preferred alternative that closely mirrors the county's alternative, too. This alternative includes targeted free zones to provide housing for all income levels,

45:23 as well as targeted [AUDIO OUT] on land around I-5 corridor and providing jobs. Without these minor expansions, the city will fall short by nearly 600 jobs. The areas proposed for expansions are already characterized by urban development and are directly adjacent to I-5 and the Cowlitz reservation. The city has established a close partnership with the Cowlitz tribe and shares their vision for the junction to be a center point of entertainment, recreation, and commerce. If these areas are not brought into the city, they will be developed by the tribe and will have no way to meet the UGA state and county requirements. The city encourages the council to include all 14 de-designation criteria included in the WAC and the egg study.

46:20 The criteria supports the de-designation of these lands for urban growth. The city understands and supports the need to preserve productive agricultural land with the county and continues to work with the county and other cities to develop a TDR program to allow productive agriculture to be preserved and to still allow for needed growth of urban areas within the county. We have worked hard over the past four years to develop a preferred land use alternative that meets the state and county requirements and maintains our small town charm that defines the center. The city respectively requests that the county council selects alternative two as recommended by the county planning commission and proceed towards the final EIS. Thank you. OK.

47:17 Are you going to call out Pleasant Valley? Because I'm from Pleasant Valley. Pleasant Valley is a city? Because I'm not in the city. It's a neighborhood. Yeah, it's Pleasant Valley area. You'll have an opportunity to speak, but the cities are going first. OK, Ridgefield. Good afternoon. For the record, I am Mayor Matt Cole with the city of Ridgefield, C-O-L-E. I want to start by first thanking you for your partnership over this process. A good policy is built through earnest deliberation, and I believe we should approach that all in the same spirit. But I'm here today because Ridgefield has a vision. Our community built it. Our council adopted it, and we need your help to honor it. And this comp plan isn't just about numbers, lines, and datas. It's about setting the vision for our cities and the county

48:17 for the next 20 years. And I trust you know that in Ridgefield, we care deeply about our community, its unique needs, and the expressed desires of its residents. And I trust that you understand that our planning efforts are intended to honor the work and preserve Ridgefield's character through balancing the needs of local growth. Our vision embraces local growth in a way that makes sense locally and focuses on active, well-serviced, mixed-use hubs rather than blanket densification of existing neighborhoods that our residents cherish. To do this, we need capacity for 1,261 jobs and 840 affordable housing units in the targeted UGA expansion areas that were brought into this conversation by property owners and are already characterized by urban development. These target expansion areas don't meet the needs of the requirements for designation as ag. So to confirm, we're asking that the county council direct staff

49:14 to review these sites against all 14 legally required criteria that were included in the county-wide ag study but were mostly dismissed. Even though our targeted expansion areas don't meet the definition of ag, we see a unique opportunity to save land that does through a TDR program that we proposed. And now we're asking the county council to direct staff to include county-wide planning policies and comp plan policies necessary to form the foundation for that program. Our community has a vision and needs for how we grow, and our city council is tasked with meeting those needs, but we need your help. So with that, we ask that you please support DEIS alternative number two and proceed with the additional work that we are requesting. And as we've consistently shown, we stand ready to assist in getting the work done in a timely fashion, but more importantly, a way that's done right. This is how Ridgefield meets its targets--

50:14 realistically, responsibly, and together. And we ask that you, again, direct all staff to apply all 14 criteria and support alternative two to help us do this right. Thank you again for your partnership. We look forward to the good outcome here. Thank you. OK, city of Vancouver. Good evening. Brian Snodres, speaking in place of my council and mayor who have hearings and workshops on Monday afternoon and are unable to attend. First, I want to thank you for the work in getting to the preferred alternative stage. It's an important juncture. Did want to say, though, this is the first we saw of some of the specific numbers of the capacities. We did work with the county on making some updates to ours, which reduced it somewhat.

51:12 It's the first we knew of a deficit in the Vancouver UGA, which obviously is a great deal of interest to the city. We saw what some of the numbers were for the city of Vancouver, but this is the first inkling of a deficit in the VUGA. That's easily addressed by the council. You can change the allocation. The county-wide surpluses, as Chair Marshall picked up on, is still there. But that step would need to be taken. And we would want to be able to respond to any VUGA expansions that are made in light of this newly revealed deficit in the VUGA. In terms of-- as regards the city and the VUGA, we support the Planning Commission's recommendation with a couple of small exceptions noted in our letter. We would note that that does provide not only ample surplus of land, even

52:11 with these adjustments discussed, but also still some opportunities for homeownership, which are letter outlines and other further benefits. The one area of disagreement with the plan-- or rather, one area we want to particularly affirm for the plan from the Planning Commission is their decision to remove the VUGA employment expansions, including the northern one on 219th Street. That came about by a math problem earlier that had been resolved. And it looks like some of the math problem may have reared its head again. But it was never added for the particular qualities of what was going on in the ground. Our letter goes into some detail on that. We did not recommend against it, as there was some discussion on the Planning Commission because of it being far away from the city or revenue issues, but rather because of its parcelized and critical lands

53:10 nature, which probably would mean that if it is brought in now, it would develop in a-- only partially develop, and some of it would likely be before you on a request at some point in the near future to convert to residential. One area of disagreement with the Planning Commission recommendation is on including the failure to include additional commercial opportunities in the existing VUGA in areas where there are no such opportunities for miles around. This issue has been before you. We've discussed it previously. We recognize it's a hard one to deal with in this kind of a setting. Like TDRs, we are proposing a change in policy language so the issue can be addressed going forward in the future. On TDRs, our letter elaborates a little bit further. We've received your letter. Thank you.

54:05 OK. Anyone from Washougal? We have Mitch-- He said Vancouver. He was Vancouver. Mitch Knipe on the phone online. Thank you. Mitch, you've been sent a request to unmute. Please go ahead and spell your last name for the record and go ahead with your comment. Thank you. My name is Mitch Knipe. Last name is spelled K-N-E-I-P-P. Thank you, Chair Marshall and fellow councilors. I will be brief in my comments. As noted at the joint county council and planning commission hearing, the city of Washougal is in support of alternative 2. And we agree with the planning commission's recommendation to you as it pertains to Washougal. That is listed as alternative number 2E in the preferred alternative selection table listed in exhibit B. However, I did want to note that preferred alternative selection

55:03 table was also used by the planning commission when they made their current recommendation to you. But in their table, alternative number 2E also noted that the excess employment capacity in the city of Vancouver was going to be used to accommodate the jobs that Washougal was over allocated, as Jose spoke about earlier. The overall allocation of jobs to Washougal and the willingness of Vancouver to accept those jobs to remedy that situation has been an issue that I've noted several times in my previous testimony. So I just, once again, wanted to bring that solution to the council's attention. Thank you again for working with this process. Thank you to staff. And true to my word, I was briefed. But I'll be available to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you very much. OK, Woodland. We have a little bit of Woodland in our comprehensive plan. No one here.

56:03 OK, that brings us to Yakult. Nobody here from Yakult. OK, then we'll move on to the boards and commissions. And the Agricultural Commission has a statement they'd like to make.

56:27 Hello, council. Nice to see you all. Mo McKenna, last name, M-C-K-E-N-N-A. I am the co-chair of the Agricultural Advisory Commission. And tonight I am speaking on behalf of the commission. Last Wednesday night at our meeting, the commission voted unanimously to have me share a few points from our recommendations as you can consider what alternative you want to study. We're so glad that so many people have been listening to our recommendations, especially around our support of TDR, PDR, and mitigation programs. But we have a couple key points we wanted to reiterate tonight. First, we assert that these farmland protection programs should be implemented countywide and with all cities

57:26 participating. Second, we ask that no farmland is de-designated prior to a program being in place. We'd like to have no de-designation during this comprehensive plan update to make sure that the work of developing a program that aligns with the GMA that we know is going to take research, lots of input from various stakeholders, that that program is done well, and that it actually protects farmland in the end. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Is there anyone representing DEEP? Good evening, council. I'm Eric Alimo, G-O-L-E-M-O, with the Development Engineering Advisory Board. I want to thank you for the opportunity to comment. Also, I want to reference two memos that were submitted.

58:24 And I'm going to try not to repeat those and just add a little additional information that might provide some input to the group as well. First, I want to talk about what the alternatives really are and what they mean to the community. So alternative one is basically no change. It has no new land added. There's no new housing, no increase in density. It does nothing to address the housing shortage and affordability. It's basically the status quo.