Building_development + Cross_cutting

1:44 Just want to acknowledge before we jump in that this has been an extremely long process. Many folks in the community have stuck with it and been active participants throughout. And some have just gotten involved in, you know, the last year or two. But want to just acknowledge and thank people for their participation and also thank the commission for what has been an extraordinary amount of work. With that I'll kick it off.

2:40 So my name is Rebecca Kennedy, I'm the deputy community development director for the city and part of the team that has been working on the comprehensive plan for the last several years. I'm joined by mark person, senior planner and our land use team. Mark has been a core part of the entire team and also led the code update task. So the agenda is pretty straightforward tonight. We'll walk through as we always do the legal and policy framework for the comprehensive plan work including the growth management act. We'll outline the big buckets of key tasks and processes that are required and have occurred as part of this process. We will walk through the plan and the changes that have happened since the last draft that you all saw for both the plan and the code. Finally just go over the final environmental impact statement which was issued earlier

3:38 this month and represents our compliance with the state environmental policy act for a non-project action of this size and scope. And then we should have lots of time for questions and discussion. And then we'll ask for a planning commission recommendation to council on the planning code. So the legal and policy framework for this is the growth management act which was established in 1991 in Washington state. It requires the fastest growing cities and counties and at this point it's really most of the cities and counties in the state except for with some very few exceptions, really small jurisdictions. To plan for growth we have to look at how we -- we have to look at and establish population

4:33 projections and the housing and jobs associated with those and we have to have a set of elements within the comprehensive plan, outline goals for those and have policies and demonstrate how we will implement those particularly with our development code. I think important to note is under the growth management act your development code must implement your comprehensive plan. We know and I think everybody knows that our aspirations go beyond just regulation and they are about who we want to be and what we want the community to be in the future and that takes more than just regulation, it takes programmatic and capital investment and so there are pieces of the plan that speak to that as well, including the capital facilities plan which is a requirement under the growth management act. Every ten years we all go through a process called the periodic review process.

5:29 Typically that's sort of staggered around the state so not everyone in the entire state is on the exact same schedule because that would drive the staff at the Department of Commerce absolutely bananas but there's a set sort of staging or period where some jurisdictions are due this year and a group of us are due the next and so on. So the ten-year periodic review process is where we update our projections. You have to do it every ten years. You can do an updated comp plan more frequently than ten years. We typically haven't and then of course nothing is sort of set in stone. We can amend our comprehensive plan once annually and we have to do that cumulatively with all the proposed changes and we can update our code whenever we want and we frequently bring processes through the planning commission and council process to amend the code in response

6:24 to unexpected circumstances or changing technology or emerging issues. And then just want to note that a new requirement under the growth management act with this periodic review cycle is a five-year report out to commerce on how we're doing which could potentially trigger a forced update potentially no one knows because it hasn't happened yet but we are going to be able much more we're going to be held much more accountable to the Department of Commerce and seeing where we're at and meeting our goals particularly I think on the housing and greenhouse gas reduction goals. We show this slide every time. I won't spend a ton of time here but I just want to acknowledge that beyond regulations and council policies there's also just the sort of inescapable fact of change which is

7:19 a condition of kind of existing in our world so things have shifted since our last plan they change regularly we've seen rising housing costs increase houselessness greater impacts from climate change greater demand and need for new strategies on how we move people around on the transportation system new challenges related to the economy and the types of jobs we have and the wages they pay and how that relates to what you need to pay to you know raise a family so it's not just that our council has policy goals and that there are state laws it's also just that the world has changed as we know and we have to adjust and keep up in order to you know address challenges and take advantage of opportunities and continue to evolve as a community. There are of course new state laws which you all are very familiar with but that includes

8:16 HB 1220 which requires every jurisdiction to not only have a target of jobs capacity they have to demonstrate but also capacity by income band including very significant numbers below 60% of the average median income and including a set of units that are permanent include permanently supportive housing HB 1110 requires us to allow four to six residential units per predominantly single-family lot in the city four is a minimum two if they are within a quarter mile walking distance of transit or are affordable and importantly both from a regulatory side but also a process side we cannot treat mental housing differently than we treat detached single-family homes HB 1220 also requires us to account for racially disparate impacts so to audit past policies and regulations that created those disparate

9:14 impacts and develop new policies and regulations that don't continue that harm and those disparate impacts but seek to provide kind of equitable access for everyone we have to allow 280 use per residential lot we cannot require parking minimums that exceed 0.5 stalls per unit we are going beyond that we're recommending on our proposed code has no parking minimums we wouldn't rely on development to build the parking they need we all are also required and have actually earlier than most jurisdictions implemented a single stairwell for buildings up to six stories if you have adequate what fire protection and that's actually been in place that's a builder and alternate in our code now and then we are required newly in this cycle to have a climate chapter which requires a greenhouse gas analysis like an inventory it also really requires us to look at climate vulnerability geographically and

10:11 to think about how we will address that vulnerability to things like wildfire smoke intense heat and flooding so obviously this has been a pretty complex and involved process but if you have to distill it all down these are the five key tasks that we would distill it down into so the first one is community partnership and engagement a public involvement plan and a process for the public to understand receive information and participate is a requirement of the growth management act for periodic reviews you can see in our documents that we've done very extensive engagement with many opportunities and different ways for people to participate and have had significant participation and we've summarized that as part of an overall engagement summary by phase which goes into quite a bit of detail the

11:10 second task is the comprehensive plan document itself and so that is not just the the elements although those are you know the meat of it there's elements of the plan and those have goals and policies and implementation steps but it's also the analysis that goes into it that you are required to do in terms of the existing conditions that that your you know do sort of your baseline starting point and projecting out what you need to accommodate future growth title 20 is our land use and development code you this is a key piece of the growth management act you have to show that your development code is implementing your plan it is sort of the primary though not seeing not not only by any means regulatory implementer of the plan you have to demonstrate some implementation steps particularly within the public facilities and services so there's a there's an element or a chapter on that

12:07 there's also a capital facilities plan that shows planned capital investments needed to serve growth with a finance plan from the one to six year period and the seven to 20 year period we also have a lot of again information in here on programmatic and non-capital investments because we know that those will be needed in order to reach our vision for the for the future and then the final sort of key task is the environmental impact statement process which is really meeting the requirements of the state environmental policy act or seepa it requires you to have a seepa scoping notice and a comment period you have to do in our case there are levels of work required for seepa compliance the most rigorous one is the environmental impact statement process we do that for a project of this size or a

13:05 planning process of this size because of its citywide implications important to note this is a non-project action so many of you may be familiar like with the interstate bridge there's been an eis done on that that is a project action something's getting built and we're analyzing very quantifiable specific impacts of a project this is a policy and planning document and so we are analyzing broad impacts and potential mitigations for nothing that's been built but something that shapes the future of what will be built and so we have released and published that in final environmental impact statement which is our compliance with the state environmental policy act importantly you are not making recommendations on the feis and the council doesn't vote on the feis it is just there as the thing that is required to meet the seepa requirements. So here is a graphic that outlines the process the first part of this was really socializing

14:04 and educating the community on the fact that the comprehensive plan update was beginning and forthcoming and represented you know a big vision and potentially significant change in the community and it also included a lot of analysis of existing conditions and historical conditions that got us to where we are and that form the sort of foundation from which we you know build and plan for the next 20 years that included things for really foundational documents like the housing needs assessment and economic conditions and opportunity assessment and equity atlas and community atlas. Then we worked to develop potential land use alternatives so that really looked at analyzing data, understanding again what it was going to take excuse me to hit our targets that are required under the growth management act but also and the creation sorry of new zoning

15:00 districts that allow different mixes of development types at different scales and then we worked with the community you all the planning commission and the council other boards and commissions many many different working groups and community groups to map different zoning districts around the city and get a sense of where people thought different types of uses should be and why and what they wanted to be in proximity to and also you know maybe things they wanted you know elsewhere and so that all went into the next phase which was analyzing a set of alternatives through an environment draft environmental impact statement process I think it's important to note that there was a 60-day public comment period for that July to September of last year we received 400 plus comments and then based on those comments and based on councils policies and state laws and a framework that council developed we refined

15:59 those alternatives into what we call preferred alternative or a single map that included elements of both the action alternatives though very few elements of the no action alternative and the exception of that is much of our heavy industrial lands didn't change then when we got to the preferred alternative we started analyzing it that's what's in the final EIS we also continued to refine drafts of the plan and the code and we have now are at the last phase where we're taking them through the planning commission and council review and ultimately the adoption process I do want to note that while the most sort of while like the complete drafts of the planning code were just were published in February for the first time the code framework like the concepts of the districts the scale of development

16:55 have been things that have been publicly workshopped and presented on since 2024 both with council but in in public meetings at neighborhood association meetings and other locations as have the major components of the plan in fact the goals for the various plan elements were endorsed by council via resolution in early 2024 so they really have been out there for quite a while this is a high level busy summary of some of the engagement and outreach that occurred as part of the process we have directly talked to 200 or sorry 2,000 plus people so that's direct one-on-one communication through various presentations workshops tabling events meetings we have community and this slide actually might need to be updated after last night but I believe we have actually had 26 city council workshops and 24 now or 23 planning

17:55 workshops plus you all had two joint workshops together one where you talked about the collective goals and needs around equity and the other one where you did the mapping exercise together we have had a lot of input from people including I mean I think again last summer 409 specific comments on the EIS we've had lots of folks who participated via the online story maps and pin maps in the beginning and we've done a lot of outreach that's you know I guess less more passive in the sense that we're not interacting directly back and forth with people but just distributed information through different newsletters organizations canvassing etc social media. So the first draft of the full draft of the comprehensive plan and the development code

18:52 was published on February 19th the second draft was published on April 7th and the third draft which you are reviewing tonight making a recommendation on was published on April 17th so we have included in your last workshop and tonight the change logs for what have changed between different drafts and I'm just going to go over those with you all briefly. As we always do we're starting with you know the comprehensive plan is a 20-year plan it guides the way that we manage the built and natural environment and we have a series of targets that were developed with the county and the other jurisdictions looking at a county-wide population projection and then allocating out different numbers to the jurisdictions and the urban growth areas we did also our own housing needs assessment and came up with

19:50 a slightly different number than the county so we are planning for the minimum we think that we need to meet our existing deficit and provide for future growth so we're projecting 81,000 new residents the need that translates into 38,000 new housing units and our council has expressed a desire to maintain their existing policy that there will be slightly more than one job per working age person to provide lots of employment opportunities and so they have set the job target at 43,200. So quickly just to walk through the elements the introduction element is not required but it would be kind of strange not to have one to kind of say what we're doing what's the history and context you know what is kind of this document doing for us there have been no changes to the introduction chapter since you saw it community experience as you know

20:49 is not required by the growth management act but is a central piece of framing what our aspirational future communities experience as being part of Vancouver there's also been no changes there since the last draft equity and inclusion embeds equity into city decisions and investments it's also not required but something the city opted to include I will say though that HB 1220 requires us to do an analysis of racially disparate impacts and this is where that analysis is located in addition to an appendix with a detailed analysis that we've done and there were just there's a small change between the last draft in this draft and it was making sure that we were defining disparities and inequities clearly and consistently and using those terms clearly and consistently so there's some changes

21:42 in the narrative to ensure that that was in fact happening so the land use and development factor or element is a requirement we have to you know basically do zoning we have to designate the general distribution and the location and intensity of land uses within the city establish densities sufficient to demonstrate capacity for planned growth over the 20-year planning period it includes a growth concept as well as a map of comprehensive plan designations and then the zoning designations applied that essentially gets it goes from conceptual to specific and we did change a couple things we added I think a bullet or two to the community feedback summary just to be comprehensive basically and then we

22:34 also added a footnote just to clarify that the zoning code or the zoning map in here is really for understanding and but it's not does not adopted into the comprehensive plan in a way that means we couldn't change it more than once a year right zoning code could be changed more than once a year if it doesn't require a comp plan designation change so there's just a footnote to clarify that that's the case in terms of the housing element this is a requirement as we've talked through a lot of times we have to identify existing and projected needs and again newly the cycle on income levels and demonstrate sufficient capacity and zoning to meet those needs we have to include and accommodate step housing is so it was the state called step housing which is supportive transitional emergency

23:34 and permanently affordable housing which we have done we made a couple changes from the last draft we've added a footnote to talk about how our allocations have worked and how essentially we the city was always ahead of the county on this process and so we used the commerce tool to estimate our needs in various categories and then they assigned