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HomeMy WebLinkAboutApproved Minutes - 2010-03-16 SpecialCITY COUNCIL SPECIAL MEETING MINUTES March 16, 2010 Council President Kristin Johnson called the special City Council meeting to order at 5:35 p.m. on March 16, 2010, in the Municipal Courtroom, 380 A Avenue. Present: Mayor Hoffman (6:00), Councilors Johnson, Hennagin (5:40), Olson, Moncrieff, and Jordan. Councilor Tierney was excused. Staff Present: Alex McIntyre, City Manager; David Powell, City Attorney; Robyn Christie, City Recorder; Jessica Numanoglu, Associate Planner; Denny Egner, Asst Planning Director 3. WORK SESSION 3.1 Overview of Code Audit Ms. Numanoglu introduced Donald Elliott and Paul Anthony of Clarion Associates, the consultants for the code audit. She noted that the scope of the work was to outline an approach for creating a more user-friendly code, focusing on elements such as organization and formatting more than substantive changes. She mentioned the stakeholder meetings already held with staff, the development community, and the City Boards and Commissions (Planning Commission, Development Review Commission, and Sustainability Advisory Board). She indicated that the public meeting tomorrow night was open to all. She encouraged the Council members to fill out the online survey. She mentioned that staff would present the final report to the Council in early summer, following a presentation of the draft report to the public and the Planning Commission and Development Review Commission this spring. Mr. Elliott indicated that their small firm focused solely on this type of work across the country. He mentioned that the number one complaint of the jurisdictions with which they worked was no one could understand the code, and the second was that the code worked but it was not leading the City towards its planning goals. He stated that their firm did not do entitlement work or represent developers in getting their applications approved. He mentioned several cities for which they were currently rewriting the code, including Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Duluth, and North Las Vegas. He explained that they told the cities that hired them to rewrite their codes that their first step was to listen to everybody about what was wrong with the code, and their second step was to organize in an outline form where it was going to go. The outline could be 50 to 70 pages long and should cover every single point in the code. He commented that they would like to hear the Council's perceptions of the code. Councilor Jordan asked how the Council would know that the direction identified by the consultants from all the stakeholder comments was truly the Council's desired direction. She mentioned that the Council knew that there were stakeholder groups speaking out loudly about certain issues that did not necessarily represent the entire community. Mr. Elliott said that they would work closely with staff to weed out that sort of thing. He mentioned their awareness of some of the loudly speaking groups. He indicated that he always copied any e- mails he received to the project manager, who knew whether an issue was not a priority for the City. He mentioned that, so far, 40% of the survey respondents were interested citizens, 40% were staff, and only 10% were builders, which told him that he needed to hear more from the builders. City Council Special Meeting Minutes Page 1 of 5 March 16, 2010 He explained that the survey allowed them to spot issues, which they checked with staff on to see if it was a real problem or people stuffing the ballot box. He indicated that the next step was drafting an annotated outline, which staff would check for factual errors. Following that, they would take the draft outline to the public for comment, revise the outline based on that comment, and then present a document it to the Council that it could use to move forward. He observed that this document continued to evolve over time as the City made adjustments for lessons learned along the way. Councilor Moncrieff mentioned questions raised last night at the Sustainability Advisory Board meeting about why the City hired consultants from outside the Portland metro area, and whether someone more familiar with Lake Oswego would be better qualified to do this work. Ms. Numanoglu indicated that most of the five consultants that staff interviewed were from the Portland metro area, but Clarion had the type of experience and knowledge that staff thought was great for this level of review. She pointed out that this was not a code rewrite but rather an identification of the issues and a framing approach. She stated that staff felt that Clarion was the best qualified to pursue this work. Mr. Egner concurred. Ms. Numanoglu commented that it helped to have someone with an outside perspective, unclouded by the local issues do this level of review. She acknowledged that someone local and familiar with the issues might be better for an actual code rewrite. Mr. Egner noted that their main objective right now was a code structure that made the code easier to use. Councilor Jordan mentioned the tension in the community between those who were not happy with the exceptions process and those who wanted options. She spoke of finding the places where they could clarify the code and still allow flexibility. Councilor Hennagin asked how they could simplify a complicated and often obtuse code without a complete rewrite. Mr. Elliott described the process they used in rewriting a code, which resulted in a new code with extensive footnotes documenting the process. He discussed the process they used to reorganize a code and minimize the number of policy changes. He indicated that many jurisdictions used a two-phase approach of first simplifying the code and second tackling the substantive issues. He emphasized that a code reorganization was the minority approach, and more difficult because they were rewriting the bad rather than taking the opportunity to fix it. Councilor Hennagin asked if simplifying the code to enable staffers to apply it consistently before the City did its Comprehensive Plan update was putting the cart before the horse. He indicated that he was not convinced of the Mayor's argument that the Comprehensive Plan did not control the Community Development Code. Mr. Elliott confirmed Councilor Olson's description of Clarion's work as making suggestions on how to improve the code and identifying policy issues but not actually doing anything to the code. Councilor Olson agreed that the Comprehensive Plan review needed to influence the process of working through the policy issues to fix the substance of the code. Mr. Egner concurred with the need for a thoughtful and strategic process to address the issues. Councilor Moncrieff concurred with Councilor Jordan that people wanted certainty in the code and not to leave the decision up to staff interpretation until staff told them something that they did not want to hear, and then they wanted flexibility and reasonableness built into the code. She cited the City's current struggles with LOC 50.16, which people had complained was too open to staff interpretation. However, after staff revised that section to make everything black and white, the community found it too restrictive; it needed more flexibility and reasonableness. She commented that finding the perfect balance would be miraculous. Mr. Elliott observed that everyone wanted predictability and flexibility, which were like a square circle. Councilor Jordan spoke of the consultant identifying areas where the City could provide options to give some flexibility but without opening up Pandora's Box. She commented that it was best to keep it simple and clean. Mr. Elliott concurred. City Council Special Meeting Minutes Page 2 of 5 March 16, 2010 Mr. Elliott commented that Lake Oswego had an unusual code in a number of ways, including that each section seemed to have been a debate in itself. Consequently, exceptions were woven throughout the entire code. He reported receiving comments on the survey that there were no rules in Lake Oswego because there were exceptions for every rule; one could build whatever one wanted to, if one looked hard enough. He mentioned his sympathy for staff with that kind of code. He discussed the concept of `predictable flexibility,' which acknowledged that not every site was the same and therefore some flexibility was needed. However, a code needed to limit that flexibility so that the results were fairly predictable in the long run. He indicated that the general trend was people moving towards taking out `fuzz language' and putting in objective standards. He suggested putting all the exceptions in one place and condensing the other rules. If staff reached the conclusion that something could not be done based on the rules, then they could look in one place for any exceptions to the rules. He commented that the Council could discuss the exceptions section in terms of how much flexibility to allow. Mr. Elliott indicated to Council President Johnson that most municipalities did not address the code a section at a time, which would take forever, but rather they divided it up into modules of a size that the public could comfortably absorb what the City was doing. He said that the norm was to divide the code into three sections: zoning districts and uses (including overlay zones), development standards, and procedures. He mentioned that the frustration he was seeing right now in Lake Oswego focused on the ambiguity of how the City made these decisions. He described the remainder of the process of taking a draft for each module out for public discussion and weaving the modules together at the end. He pointed out that momentum was important, as these types of processes were so complicated that if the City did not keep it moving, it would bog down. Therefore, the City had to have a schedule for doing the modules. Mayor Hoffman asked how the consultants would consider alternate zoning schemes other than Euclidean. Mr. Elliott indicated that they would most likely do it as part of their research. He asked if the Mayor was inclined to a form -based code. Mayor Hoffman indicated that he was disinclined to put uses in separate bubbles. He suggested taking another look at how they organized their urban environment in the Portland region, given the prediction of a million people coming to the region. He posed the question of how to make a much denser urban environment a good urban environment that satisfied Goal 14 of the statewide land use planning goals. Mr. Elliott discussed the two main issues he saw in the Mayor's comments. He agreed that almost all cities did not like the Euclidean separation of traditional zoning, although there would always be a market in the U.S. for traditional residential development. However, there was a movement towards incorporating mixed uses creatively and finding out which industrial, commercial, and retail uses could exist comfortably intermixed with residential, thus increasing walkability. He indicated that the second issue was whether it was better to think of cities in terms of form if density increased. Mayor Hoffman mentioned that the Portland region was eliminating the distinction between industrial and employment and moving towards employment -based zones. He noted that some office buildings held research and development, manufacturing, and retail for high tech products. Mr. Elliott concurred that the middle of the spectrum was not about industrial but rather about employment. He described the transition of the industrial zone to a special purpose zone for an increasingly small number of the heavy activities (e.g. heavy truck traffic, use of hazardous materials) that made reasonable people question whether people should live near that use. He indicated that good design could render light industrial and heavy commercial medium uses compatible with residential uses in close proximity. Mayor Hoffman said that he was also interested in the implications and significance of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) January report on housing trends, and whether a zoning code should react to its predictions. Mr. Elliott commented that he has heard similar data for the last several years from the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute that America's housing stock was "way out of whack City Council Special Meeting Minutes Page 3 of 5 March 16, 2010 with its demography." He said that what the City should do was to make sure that it was allowing a wide variety of different housing types in its single-family and attached -family zones. Mr. Elliott commented that, while the market could respond to the changes, Jonathan Lavine, in his book Zoned Out, made the point that planners have been contributing to this problem by preventing the types of housing that people wanted to buy and live in. He indicated that communities needed zoning because the private market could not solve all the problems by itself, but in the opinion of the ULI and others, zoning has become unreasonable exclusive in not allowing the types of housing that people wanted to live in. Councilor Hennagin asked Mr. Elliott to make recommendations on how the City could facilitate a variety of styles and types of housing, especially given the change in Lake Oswego's median age from 35 to 47. Mr. Elliott observed that the very people who used to object to multi -family housing were now the ones wanting that kind of housing. Ms. Numanoglu confirmed to Councilor Olson that the scope of work did not include working on policy issues, and that this was going a little bit beyond that scope. She explained that staff did want the consultants to discuss and define the different types of zoning (e.g., Euclidean, form - based) because they did not think that most people knew what those terms meant. However, this code audit would not answer the question of whether the City wanted to move towards a different type of zoning. Mr. Elliott suggested that the outline they developed include how to organize uses in districts and flag the policy issues in the footnotes. He mentioned that Lake Oswego's current menu of housing options was significantly narrower than other cities used. He encouraged the Council to explore in this section what additional types of housing it wanted. Council President Johnson commented that it was important to identify and flag those areas in the outline in order to facilitate the City's decision on what kind of modules to use in moving forward. Mr. Elliott mentioned that even the order in which the City brought the modules forward was important. He cited their work in Philadelphia, which found that almost all the public anger was about the City's procedures, and therefore, they brought that module forward first to demonstrate to the public that they were tackling the meaningful issues. Mr. Elliott indicated to Councilor Olson that they have discussed the topic of different kinds of zoning and housing primarily with the builders group and somewhat with the sustainability group. He reported that those groups both answered yes to the question of whether the code was getting in the way of sustainability. He mentioned that they needed to discuss more with staff the big question of whether the City wanted to develop a radically different code before they talked to the stakeholder groups about it. He explained that they needed citizens to identify what was not working. They would then work with staff and the Council to identify what was the City's preferred policy solution to address those issues. Councilor Jordan commented that she was interested in the idea of bringing mixed use more into the City's established neighborhoods. She wondered whether the City's existing Neighborhood Commercial zone might be limiting people's thinking of what could be done. She suggested identifying places where the City has isolated particular types of things, but then not used it often because it created an image that people did not want. Mr. Egner clarified that staff wrote the scope of work to allow Clarion to highlight substantive issues but kept the primary focus on the process and making the code easier to use. He observed that the comments Mr. Elliott has heard regarding exceptions and understanding the code might point the City to a process -driven solution as the first component. That would allow staff to complete a lot of the other Comprehensive Plan work that might drive some of the other structural or code standard questions. Mr. Elliott mentioned that the tour Ms. Numanoglu took them on gave them a sense of the City neighborhoods and housing stock. He commented that, in a desirable community like this, he City Council Special Meeting Minutes Page 4 of 5 March 16, 2010 expected the majority of people to want no change at all. Therefore, the City needed to be careful about getting too far ahead of the community. Councilor Jordan mentioned the neighborhood overlays. She recalled that some of those who worked on neighborhood overlays suggested that the City consolidate the common overlay elements into a standard rather than having multiplying overlays. Mr. Elliott commented that that was a good way to simplify things, as neighborhood overlays often said exactly the same thing. 4. ADJOURNMENT Council President Johnson adjourned the meeting at 6:15 p.m. APPROVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL: ON June 1. 2010 . _ J Respectfully submitted, Robyn ristie City Recorder City Council Special Meeting Minutes Page 5 of 5 March 16, 2010