[1:08] Unidentified Speaker: Testing. One, two, three. And here’s Daniel.
[1:20] Unidentified Speaker: Okay. Nice timing. Yeah.
[1:42] Chair Barton DeLacy: All right. If I could ask everyone to please take a seat unless you’re signing up to make public comment. At this time I would like to call the October 6, 2026 Des Moines Planning Commission meeting to order. I don’t have a gavel. Pound my phone. Anyway, let’s do a roll call. Commissioner Andrew—
[2:18] Unidentified Speakers (roll call): Do you want— Yeah, right. Just committee. Danielle Anderson, Planning Commission. Good. Nicole [surname TBC], present.
[2:30] Chair DeLacy: Yeah. Chuck Coleman, Barton DeLacy, Colleen [surname TBC], Michelle Curry. All right. All members are here.
Our commissioner Traci Buxton has had to resign for health reasons, and we want to acknowledge that in the short time she had served on the commission, she brought with her a great deal of knowledge. Of course, she was a longtime councilmember and had been mayor as well. So she’ll be a friend of the commission. We’ll keep in touch with her, and we wish her good health and a speedy recovery.
We obviously have comments from the public tonight. So the way this works: we’ll ask that you keep your comments respectful. When I call your name, please come to the podium up here and speak into the microphone. You’ll have three minutes to speak. Please state your name and city of residence. And for those that haven’t been here, we won’t have an opportunity to respond directly to you, but this is an opportunity to provide a statement for the record, and of course we’ll consider it in due course.
Is anyone— Okay. It’s okay. Okay. All right. Dave Kaplan, former mayor of Des Moines.
[4:39] Dave Kaplan (Port of Seattle): Good evening. Dave Kaplan. I’m local government relations manager for the Port of Seattle. Members of the commission, thank you first for serving. I know anytime anybody volunteers on a commission, it’s a great deal of commitment on your part and the effort that you make. So thank you for doing that.
I’m here tonight on behalf of the Port of Seattle to comment on the city’s draft tree ordinance that you’re going to be taking up or looking at tonight. While the Port understands and supports the city’s general objectives in terms of enhancing tree coverage in the city, changes are necessary to the draft ordinance for consistency with federal and state statutes that protect airport operations from tree hazards. Our goal is to work collaboratively to resolve the Port’s concerns while achieving the city’s goals.
Under Revised Code of Washington 14.12.020, the Port has a legal obligation to remove trees over a certain height that are considered, quote, “airport hazards,” unquote, and public nuisances. The Port’s FAA-issued airport operating certificate similarly requires the Port to ensure that no obstacles or obstructions affect aviation safety. More generally, RCW 7.48.230 authorizes any person to remove especially injurious public nuisances.
The Port must be able to remove these hazardous trees efficiently and without threat of penalty. The current draft does not include an exception that clearly encapsulates our concerns regarding tree hazard removal. Other jurisdictions we work closely with, Burien and also SeaTac, took those into consideration. So I’d be happy to work with staff to try and address those.
Specifically, the city should identify hazardous tree removal by the Port as an exception under part two of the application and exemption section. The new tree regulation could incorporate the statutory definition of airport hazards to ensure that any exceptions are appropriately limited to Port activity and others aren’t taking advantage of it. The replacement standard should incorporate a maximum height to ensure that new trees don’t risk becoming hazards and having to be cut down in the future. And then we recommend the inclusion of a fee-in-lieu option for tree replacement for the same reason. Most jurisdictions provide that option.
With that, again, we’d be happy to collaborate with city staff, and happy to organize a meeting with city and Port staff to further refine the draft. I want to thank you for taking that into consideration.
[7:22] Chair DeLacy [probable]: David, I’ll just— do you have a map that presumably would be an overlay, where we would have the hazard and where not?
[7:35] Dave Kaplan: It doesn’t quite work that way. What happens is that there are what are called surfaces that the FAA has. So, for example, a plane that was going around on one engine and needed to make a go-around: the airspace, based upon the altitude and the geographic height of the area plus whatever obstruction on top of it, a tree, it would have to be able to clear. In the time that we’ve had our Flight Corridor Safety Program, there’s only been one tree in Des Moines that had been identified. The North Hill area is the most likely area where this would be an issue. Most of the city it wouldn’t, but since it applies, it needs to apply obviously on a citywide basis.
[8:16] Chair DeLacy [probable]: So is this ad hoc? If the airport decides a tree is an issue, it could be a tree any place, then? Is that it?
[8:24] Dave Kaplan: It could be, but what happens is within a certain distance of the airport, and the certain planes— meaning not planes as in the flight planes themselves, but the altitude, or specifically what would need to be clear. And so what happens is every five years we have LiDAR go out and screen everything. So we identify everything. We actually go field-verify everything before we ever get to a point where we need to remove it.
[9:09] Chair DeLacy [probable]: You simply have to have the enabling language in our ordinance.
[9:13] Dave Kaplan: Correct.
[9:14] Chair DeLacy: Okay. Thank you. Daniel K. Olsen.
[9:31] Chair DeLacy: Okay. Thank you. Your name and your city of residence.
[9:40] Daniel Kenneth Olsen: Daniel Kenneth Olsen, and I live in Des Moines. I am here tonight because I heard about the workshop for the planning committee, and I’ve lived here in Des Moines for 10 years now. I lived in Burien when I was younger, and I always liked Des Moines, and I ended up coming here in 2016. So now, being here 10 years, we have a house on the end of Tenth going down to Kent-Des Moines Road. And I saw when there was a building behind Wallally’s [unclear] that went up. I think it’s an apartment building. As that gradually went up, our little sliver of view we have there suddenly disappeared. And so when I heard that there could be more buildings that tall in there, I started imagining that these slivers we have, and they’re not big, could gradually disappear to the point where we just have jets flying over our house at night. So anyway, I’m here to learn more, and that’s all I think I need to say at this point. Thank you.
[10:59] Chair DeLacy: Anna Jacobson. Microphone.
[11:09] Anna Jacobson: I can talk right close to it. Thank you. First of all, I want to thank Dan. My name is Anna Jacobson, and I live in Des Moines, near Dan and most of these people. I want to thank him for saying Des Moines correctly, because it’s “Des Moines,” not “Des Moines.” [pronunciation contrast lost in transcription]
I also am here out of concern for what the plans are for the city. I don’t know what they are and how they all work out, what decides what happens. But out of concern for that, I’m here because I, unlike what I’ve read, don’t think Des Moines is this dying little town. I think it’s a really wonderful town, and I think to attract people here, we don’t need them to necessarily live here. I think there are a lot of apartments in Des Moines. If you go from Pac Highway down to downtown, there’s a lot of multifamily places for people to live. So I don’t think we need more of that. I think what we need is to attract people. And unlike a lot of my friends that I love very much, I actually really like the stair project, because I think that, like Alki: if you don’t live on Alki, you go to Alki because you like it. And I feel like Des Moines could have that attraction for families and people. So anyway, I’m here to learn more about what the plan is and how it’s decided what happens. Thank you.
[12:36] Chair DeLacy: Thank you. Victoria Nichols, and then Will Sharp, and then Brandon Bowers.
[12:46] Victoria Nichols: My name is Victoria Nichols. I live in Des Moines, and I’ve been a resident for over 60-some years. I bought my parents’ house, and I’m here too on the idea of heights. My parents fought heights for a long time. I can remember when the original buildings went in for the marina, and we saw all the condos go across there and build a wall. And my parents were down here at this meeting. I was down here.
One of the things I want to talk about is infrastructure. I want to make sure that we put in infrastructure that’s correct, that there are adequate roads for people to exit and enter on. In the Seattle Times today it came out that 96% of the people commute. If 96% of the people are trying to commute, we have to have roads that are in good shape and that they can use.
The other thing I want to talk about is there is a piece of land that’s up for sale in my neighborhood that’s 1.9 acres. They’re talking about the possibility of 46 townhouses on that. And the road they want to use is 8th Avenue. It would be an exit road. If anyone has been down 8th Avenue, you know that it is a one-lane road. I remember when it was a two-lane road, and we tried to put two lanes of cars down that. Let me tell you, it was not successful, and that’s why it went to one lane. We have to have people be able to get in and out. You do that on 10th. I live on 226th Place. That would be the first road you could get up to 10th from. It is not a wide road. So I want you to look at that. I want you to also look at the water, the sewer, the retention plans, that type of thing.
The other thing: I don’t want to see Des Moines become like West Seattle. You drive down California Avenue in West Seattle and it’s like a cavern. I think we want people to be able to drive through the city and actually see the water, not just see buildings. And I think that a lot of people feel that way. And like I say, I don’t want to lose the value I have in my home, because if I lose my view, I will lose— you lose property tax, and when you lose that property tax, then you don’t have the money. Thank you.
[15:34] Chair DeLacy: Will Sharp? Yep. Sharp.
[15:49] Will Sharp: My name is Will Sharp. I live in Des Moines. I’ve been here for 26 years. I seem to come to these meetings every couple years. We talk about heights, zoning. So I’m fortunate you guys reach out and give us the opportunity to speak to the council, and other public members can hear our opinions as well.
One of the things we talked about years ago was a canyon effect when you guys want to build up, change the zoning rules. We’ve had presentations on that in the past. If you look at the aesthetics, if you’re going to do a 48-unit condo development on a two-acre thing, it’s aesthetically not going to fit into the architecture of the area. If you’re looking to drive revenue: mixed-use, there’s a lot of vacancies. I think it’s going to be hard to find developers to invest in developing when there’s a lot of vacancies; they’re not getting revenue, they’re not motivated to develop.
To Vicki’s point, revenue doesn’t necessarily have to come from property tax. It can come from tourism. I know you’ve invested in the pier, the whole breakwater reinforcement there. Kudos. I’m all for that, too.
We do have to keep in mind the infrastructure. 8th Avenue is a one-way street. If somebody develops that property, it probably will have to be rezoned to a two-way street. That probably means removing the sidewalks that were put in, the easements, whatnot. I’m not a civil engineer, but I’m sure there’s ramifications around that, and costs and licenses and those types of things. All in the name of, let’s get more tax-based revenue. Well, as Vicki pointed out, we’re going to see our house values go down because the views are going down. So you’re actually going to lose revenue. You need to take that into consideration.
You’re also going to have people exiting that have been here for a long time. So there’s going to be an exodus. If you think about the infrastructure, we have three main arterials to get down here: we have KDM, we have 216th, and we have First Avenue. So you need to think about how are we going to get people down here if we’re going to have them live down here or be tourists down here. I think we’re putting the cart in front of the horse by changing the zoning laws. Let’s think about some of the more basic steps that need to be taken before we do this.
So thank you again for giving the opportunity to speak. I’m sure we’ll be back here in a couple more years having the same conversations. I really want to thank the neighbors that came out to listen and to also voice their opinions. I think this is a great opportunity for us to do that, and I hope you take this into consideration when you make your decisions. I would love to see what the plan is, because right now it’s just rumor mill, and I’d love to see something on paper with explanations. There’s a lot of questions the city has about these unknowns. Let’s get answers to those before we push things forward. Thank you very much.
[18:37] Chair DeLacy: Brandon Bowers.
[18:43] Brandon Bowers: Hello. My name is Brandon Bowers. I’ve lived in Des Moines since 2014, and I’m living right adjacent to the property that we’ve all been speaking about. That’s why I’m here. My understanding when I walked in is that this proposal has not been proposed to the council or the city, but something like this is going to come. All of us are here— Jan Parker particularly, she and I chatted— we knew this was coming. It’s a large amount of property. So we’re concerned about it now that it’s sort of in limbo.
When my wife and I heard about this, we definitely wanted to understand the process of how this is going to happen. So that’s number one: I would like to make sure that you guys let us know what’s happening, and who is applying for new land use, and also just to learn. I’m recognizing I’m ignorant. So I’m here to work with the community and learn about that.
Some of the parts of that property that I’ve experienced firsthand: there is a lot of drainage down this hill, which makes for really nice growing along my fence. But that is going to be an issue with this property that needs to be looked at. And please, if we end up not being able to stop a development, do thorough research into that property, because I remember about five years ago we had a pretty good flood there at Taco Time because of drainage issues.
Secondly, that property is difficult for entry and exit, as other people have brought up. And I want to just echo the same with the infrastructure being a concern.
Finally, I would like to say I’m a fan of the Steps. I love Des Moines. I want to brag that I think I use the waterfront access of Des Moines more than anybody, because I’m sort of a newbie to some of these 60-year veterans. I love Des Moines. I like what the city has been doing, and just want to keep it that way and keep going in a way we’re all enjoying it. Thank you.
[21:13] Chair DeLacy: Thank you. Are there any other comments from the public that didn’t get a chance to sign in? Otherwise our process is to roll into the meeting. And I’ll just preface: we are a new body that only started meeting this summer, and as you’ll witness tonight, we’re still going through really an orientation process. We’re here to consider the highest and best use of our city and try to balance the concerns within the legal ramifications of use, etc. You’ve heard there are airport conditions, there are traffic concerns. So nothing has happened yet, and so this is good timing, and it’s a process, and I invite you all to stay tuned. As projects come forward, your written comments are very important. So please feel free to continue to provide that input.
With that, we need to approve the minutes from our July 7th meeting, I guess. Is there a motion to approve the minutes?
[23:05] Unidentified Commissioner: So move.
[23:07] Chair DeLacy: All right. Commissioner [Colleen, surname TBC] moves. Is there a second? A second from Commissioner Curry. Have a show of hands. All right. The motion passes, and the minutes are approved. Rebecca, thank you.
So now we go to unfinished business. Again, for those citizens that are here: a month ago the Planning Commission met with the City Council, and we had representatives from ECONorthwest, the consultants hired by the city. I would ask both Morgan and Ian if they would introduce themselves for the benefit of our citizens that are here, and welcome, and we look forward to the presentation.
[24:26] Morgan (ECONorthwest): Good evening, commission members. Again, Morgan— no worries, no worries— a partner and director of ECONorthwest. We are a public policy firm. We work with cities, counties, state governments, foundations, nonprofits, private interest groups, to look at public policy matters. And we’ve been retained here by the city to do an exploration with the commission and council around the desire to see more investment in downtown, and to reflect on the code that basically operationalizes those ideas. Our first meeting was really just to set some foundational understanding on the current marketplace, growth trends, what’s actually in the downtown code. And today we’re here to do a little more follow-up, to try to peel back the onion a little bit and engage in some conversation with you all on trying to understand how do we want to think about potential new investment in downtown, and what does it really mean, whether that’s enabled in the code or not enabled in the code, and are these choices that your community wants to make. So with that, Ian, maybe just a quick intro.
[25:44] Ian (ECONorthwest): Yes. Great to see you all again. My name is Ian [surname TBC]. Grew up across the water on Vashon Island, and really happy to be working with you all here in the beautiful city of Des Moines.
[25:58] Morgan: That’s great. So I think we’ve got here till about 7:30, so we’ll want to be tidy. We don’t have too many slides here, and we want to really engage with you on this conversation. We’re going to flip things around a little bit and actually start with your homework. Lucky me, I have to go to another city council meeting after this one. So we were going to make sure I could join for the front, but I think I could push back on the other one.
So the first thing we asked folks to do was to share an example of a building that you would think would be appropriate for new development in downtown. We had a conversation around where you want the downtown to go last session. And so one way to make that more real is to actually say, “Hey, I really like this project,” or “I really like this thing.” So we can start with that. We can go around, or people can offer their own thoughts. We’d just like to hear the location of it, a basic description of the building, how tall it is, and what kind of uses are inside of it. Those are some of the pieces that we’d particularly like to hear about.
[27:10] Chair DeLacy: Oh, okay. And a couple folks have submitted. All right. Well, as some of you may know, I’m a Portland, Oregon, native, and the area has some interesting developments that I think might be models.
This first one is what’s called the French Quarter. It’s hard to capture. It’s a converted gas station in the Multnomah Village area of Southwest Portland. Quite an affluent area, but Multnomah Village is kind of a Birkenstock kind of a— it’s a very eclectic neighborhood. And some thoughts that have been bandied about over my time here relative to the marina, for example, a little bit down from downtown, was: gee, we have the Quarterdeck, which is basically a container, which is very popular, and people are there. Well, what if we had a cluster of containers and food trucks and such right down in the marina area, where people could access it when they’re walking, if they get off their boat? We really don’t have that now. If you look at some of the communities that we’ll be talking about in the area, in Edmonds and Mukilteo, the restaurants and such are right there on the water, and here they’re a quarter to half a mile to the east. So this was one idea. Obviously a lot of this is eating outside, but it’s a broad list. I think they have eight or nine different offerings, from Mexican to Italian to some beer to ice cream, coffee. The purveyors are in small— I think they call them pod carts or something— where they’re sort of anchored to the site but they’re still mobile. So it’d be a good interim use to get things started before we had more brick and mortar.
The second idea that I have: I was on the planning commission in Lake Oswego for a couple terms in the ’90s, and this is one of the areas that got redeveloped. Lake Oswego at the time— it’s an affluent suburb south of Portland— had a population of 35,000, much like Des Moines does today. It’s got a man-made lake that much of the town is made of, and it sits on the Willamette River, part of it, crossed by highways. This site was just an old 1950s-era commercial district. In order to create more of a destination, they tore down— there was actually kind of a nice shopping center on the west side of this, but it was dated and time to transition.
The clever thing here, I thought, was they created three or four levels of parking in the center and surrounded it with one- and two-story retail and plazas. It’s very pedestrian friendly, but you park in the rear, you go in. So you’re not dealing with street parking. It’s an idea that we possibly could use, for some of the larger sites, if they were to be developed commercially rather than strictly residential. Interestingly, here again you have commercial all around the parking structure on your right, and then on the left, the improvements along the street are for the most part retail with maybe an office above, and then behind that are townhouses, and it blends into what is still predominantly a residential single-family neighborhood. It’s a nice buffer. And it’s got stone and brick, and it’s classy and looks nice.
[32:14] Ian [probable]: Thank you. Okay, great.
[32:19] Rebecca (staff) [probable]: So this is the one that Traci sent in before she resigned and couldn’t make it today. She said that she’s including this as she felt it was a significant investment in design standards. It is from Covington, which had engaged in redevelopment over the last decade. She particularly appreciated the attention to stone exterior and finished products, as well as modern and upscale signage. She felt that the lack of this same emphasis in our development is one of the many reasons, along with the lack of historical charm, for the inability to qualify for national resources and redevelopment. If we did something like this and had more of this kind of thing, we’d be looking at more of the kind of Main Street programs that those cities have. So that’s what she sent.
[33:19] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Thank you, Rebecca.
[33:25] Commissioner Colleen [surname TBC]: Oh, I’ll be quick. I promise. I’ll just whip through these slides. This has just been something I’ve been working on for a while. So when I got the request, and Barton sent his— oh my gosh, we had homework. So I already had this going. I’m Colleen, by the way, everyone.
This is the quintessential waterfront town. I don’t exactly know where it is, but it was the one that kind of wrapped it all together for me. What you see here is connection, thriving businesses, activation, and investment in attractive design. We’ll go on to the next slide.
So I visited Carlsbad. Some of these cities have their city name across— and if you go to the next slide, very cool connection: a fish painted across the street to guide people in between the two sides of the street downtown. Again, the sign that you see: Point Loma, California. They took advantage of the buildings that they already had, the old buildings, and just ramped them up a little bit with design standards. The next one: people investing in the downtown have tiles, as you’ve seen in Pike Place Market and other places. And even their Target: they just took an old building and made a little mini Target right in their downtown. Very convenient.
So then closer to home, Washington and Oregon. A couple of examples. We have Edmonds. Everyone loves Edmonds. Why do they love Edmonds? There’s different heights. You see some are short, some are tall. There’s a variance of heights, businesses along the bottom and some residential up top. And it’s a marina town. Gig Harbor, same thing: taking advantage of the old charming buildings and putting some more life into them. I love this Langley one. Again, you see the varying heights. So it’s not creating the canyon effect that you were talking about. It’s giving some three-dimensional, some different heights, colors, things like that. I love Port Angeles. I’ve been spending a lot of time there lately. Hidden gem, and if you ever get a chance to go there, I think there’s some great similarities to be had between Des Moines and Port Angeles. Cannon Beach, Oregon: we’ve had the flower baskets hanging; again, the three-dimensional feeling. They have that as well: varying heights, businesses, and mixed-use residential.
Here we have Des Moines. This is a very large structure, beautiful, and I don’t know that we want a whole entire downtown of those, but some variation. So what could our beach town be? I kind of call this my can-of-paint campaign. If we had some design cohesion of bringing in the colors that we see downtown— there’s a lot of browns throughout town. If you look on the next slide, we’ve got blues, sprinkles. These are like your base colors: your browns, your blues. I think tan comes next on the next slide. Just, what are the themes that you see as you go throughout town? So colors and styles: I would really go with kind of a beach style, with this base color, white trim, things like that, that look very beachy.
When I first moved here, I thought that Des Moines Square [unclear] was the coolest thing. There must be so much going on in there. No. Not much of anything. So we just need some activation, and we’ve got some spaces that we can use.
Next, we have splashes of fun color throughout: yellows; we have reds on the next slide. So you can see I’m emphasizing the design using what we have: mixed use, some higher buildings, some lower, a mix. And then moving right along, we do have a document that was produced that I didn’t know about, like a Des Moines marina standards plan. It kind of followed along the same thing, but I don’t think we’ve activated it. I’m not fully educated on that, but it does exist and is worthwhile taking a look at.
So here’s just a summary of those base colors that can really liven the town up, make it a destination. I think one of you said tourism: this is a great place for people to come and spend a day, weekend, or week staying here. Finally, the first easy step: same buildings, a few cans of paint with a plan, a whole new downtown. I know it’s a lot harder than just a can of paint. And then for later I have discussion items and a final slide, and we’re done with my example. Thank you. That’s it.
[38:38] Unidentified Speaker: I love hers. I hope Michelle’s is next.
[38:42] Unidentified Speaker: Okay. Not necessary to— oh yeah, we do have another visual, too.
[38:49] Commissioner Michelle Curry: Hi, I’m Michelle. I didn’t submit it to Rebecca. I just printed it out. That’s just fine, because I’ve got a print shop. My example is from Edmonds, coincidentally. It’s super cute. I included the rendering of when the plan first came out; someone who loves it drew what the space looks like. They’ve got Molly Moon’s. Then it’s connected to a larger building, which happens to be a pizza place. It’s built just two stories up, and because it’s over things, it has a view of the water in the distance there. Water is down here in the corner. And then the sloped building on the other side of the little courtyard has a bunch of other small— I think there’s a winery thing in there. There’s a crumpet shop. There’s a bunch of cute stuff in there.
But the main part that I love is the space in the center. They use it for community activities. They have a Halloween costume contest in there. And I just love the idea of having the downtown have space where the community can come together and hang out, a place where people can gather, where young people can be, that doesn’t cost money, but it’s surrounded by commerce, so people are going and shopping and spending money. And I just like the aesthetics of it. It’s modern. It’s varied. The white building looks different, but it’s still cohesive. We don’t have to have a super matchy-matchy, cookie-cutter everything. It can be just a little bit more intentional than the way we’ve ended up now, which is super hodgepodge. My whole life, something will pop up and you’ll be like, “Well, that’s out of place.” So if we could just have some direction moving forward— it doesn’t have to match, it doesn’t have to be cookie-cutter, but as long as we can come up with some kind of aesthetic standards, that’s what I’m all for. So, thank you.
[40:35] Commissioner Danielle Anderson [probable]: Thank you. Hi there. I didn’t get a chance to print anything out, and I don’t know if you can Google really quickly or not. The two areas that came to mind when I was thinking of this particular downtown area were, first, downtown Boise. There’s a great few blocks, I don’t know who’s been there, where you can eat outside, and it’s very pedestrian friendly. And I like it because it’s a fairly small scale. Especially in the summertime, walking through there— I’ve been on road trips and ended up stopping in Boise a couple times— it’s such a pleasant place to be. There’s people of all ages, and it’s just a lot of people eating outside. The thing I like about it is that you have activity that spills out onto the sidewalk, and it just creates this really warm, friendly environment for people to be.
The second place that came to mind was a particular area of Yaletown in Vancouver, BC. I thought about this one because of the hill. Des Moines’s downtown area is obviously sloping down towards the waterfront. And in Yaletown they had a situation at the bottom of the hill where they had a bunch of old warehouses that had loading docks elevated to truck height. The area became gentrified and was no longer used for warehouses. And so what the city did was they took the loading platforms and turned them into outdoor seating areas, and then added some restaurants into those old warehouse areas. It’s a really amazing way of walking down the hill, taking your businesses down the hill. It’s extremely pedestrian friendly.
And Seventh Avenue comes to mind on this one, because right now there’s not much going on back there, but there’s a lot more that could go on back there. Something like this that slopes down the hill allows for terrace seating in the back, something like that. You’re getting closer to the waterfront, closer to the marina, closer to those Steps. So I guess I was thinking less about the height of the building and more about the experience of being on the street with fellow members of the community.
[43:16] Unidentified Speaker: All right. A couple other folks?
[43:19] Unidentified Commissioner: I guess just me, because I also didn’t send anything in. Part of my inspiration ties in what everyone else has been saying. I was in Ballard this weekend, and you walk around there and you think, why is this such a lovely experience? Part of it is the trees covering the street. Part of it is the tiny stores. I think that’s appealing because you can pop into many different places and look at many different things. And then of course the restaurants are the other thing. It’s always bustling. I know it’s a different part of the city, but to have that many choices of restaurants. The main street is a one-way street, so a lot of the restaurants have pushed out into the street to have additional seating. And just that intermix between the two, so people can actually spend a whole evening going up and down the block. I would love to see that in Des Moines.
[44:17] Unidentified Speaker: Okay. Thank you. Mr. Pman [unclear].
[44:23] Unidentified Commissioner: I didn’t have a chance to really do a whole lot of research, but my hometown, Greenville, South Carolina— if you look at that, downtown was horrible. It was very crowded, very fast. The city was able to shrink the road down to slow down traffic. They gave that space over to the sidewalks. So they created these very deep sidewalks, planted trees that were fast growing, and really brought the scale of downtown to human size. Put in new lighting, new signage, created really a walking district, and it turned that city around quite a bit. I haven’t lived there forever, but take a look at that. I think you’ll get some images on that.
[45:23] Morgan: Well, great. I think that’s useful, because just listening and hearing folks talk about experience: a lot of that is measured to the nature of Des Moines today, but with higher levels of activation, more options for retail, dining, other things. And some folks talked about the land side to it. As Commissioner Barton said, they built housing, and as part of that housing they did retail. Particularly when we talk about this next part of the conversation, a lot of that is bundled together. You’re trying to deliver the experience in a new thing.
It’s worth noting there are existing buildings. If you’re a property owner of those things and you see an opportunity to rise, you’re like, “Great, I’m going to fix up the building.” Nothing tears down, but you reinvigorate the space. The sad card shop becomes a hip consignment store or something like that. People find a new production frontier where they can sell things and have higher rates of return. And that’s just part of those buildings. But sometimes some buildings just don’t fit anymore, and you take opportunities because there’s demand for new housing, demand for new retail, new office, or whatever it may be. And that’s the nature of the conversation that we’re ready to jump into.
So we titled today’s conversation “Building Blocks.” Let’s go to the next slide here. I’m going to have Ian walk us through this. A lot of what you see is really framed by two forces. The first force is basically: what is the price or rent that a tenant, owner, or business is willing to pay? Because on the other side of that, we know that if you were to stand up a cardboard carton, it would be pretty cheap to build. But if you wanted to build nice habitable spaces and have those quality things— and I think anybody who’s ever done a home remodel project knows that’s increasingly expensive. Those two forces come together and frame the way you see things get built. And that’s a function of the code interacting with the marketplace.
Everything has different variations, different facades, design treatments, and things of that nature. But fundamentally you’re like: are we building with wood? Are we building with concrete? Are we building with steel? And if so, we have to adhere to life-safety standards and the building code. And that really frames what the thing looks like. That’s a useful way to think about this conversation, because in a lot of ways we’re really talking about these unitized things. And then you’re saying: should these be deployed or allowed and enabled in downtown Des Moines? And if so, what are the characteristics we want to attach to that? What color facades, design treatments, to knit together this idea around what Des Moines is as a little beach town.
So, Ian, maybe you walk us through, taking some of these ideas you had for experiences and projects. We’ll call them building blocks, design prototypes. Then we’re going to talk a little bit about the economics of those things. I don’t want to get too sidetracked with that, but just give you a sense: we’re not talking about 70-story high-rises. The economics aren’t there. But there are economics that are working for some of these things, or within reach, and they’re worth us having a conversation around how they may or may not be within the code. And then we want to do that little crosswalk: think about these building blocks, how they sit in your code, and start having a conversation around questions you have, appetite for change. Is this appropriate? Where do you feel like you need more information? This is a first pass at trying to put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes, just to see if things fit for y’all. So, Ian, why don’t you walk us through a little bit.
[49:44] Ian: Yes. And first I’d like to step back to our meeting last month, which really had some great discussions, and there were many things said. Some of the big themes that we’ve pulled out here are very relevant to the responses you all shared to the homework. There’s a lot of interest in lively third places, many different kinds of businesses. And one of the things that we came back to at that meeting was that you need customers to support that retail; it doesn’t just exist in and of itself. We also heard about some great examples, some of which we’ve heard about again tonight: Edmonds, Poulsbo [unclear], Kirkland, Burien, places that have lively waterfronts or lively downtowns. And one of the things partly coming out of our slides at the last meeting was how new construction is pretty essential at this point to city finances, just in the way Washington state tax structures are set up. Cities have a hard time if they’re not having new construction occurring. We had the summary that went out with the agenda packet, with some other good nuggets in there as well, but I just wanted to touch on those before we get into development types.
Okay, now going. So our objective tonight is to coalesce around some preferred development types and look at the feasibility issues as we’re moving forward in this process. “Development types” is a little bit of planner and real estate jargon. When we talk about a building this way, it loses some of its individuality, which is unfortunate, but it allows you to model it and think about: okay, this is a certain kind of building, and plop it down in many different places and see what works. And that’s what we’re doing tonight. As Morgan will touch on, we’ll look at the feasibility of these, we’ll talk about how they fit in with the code, and then try to overlay those and see where it takes us.
Townhouses: obviously a very typical development type. We’ve all seen them, and we talked about this a little bit at the last meeting too. Worth noting: ownership oriented. That has an important bearing on it economically, as well as in other ways. A moderate density, relatively cheap construction. So there’s this overlap where they’re not too complicated to build and they can sell for a decent price point. That makes them often easier to build than some other types of buildings.
Three-story apartments. I found a nicer picture, but it was a little too late to get it in this presentation. Three-story walk-up apartments are super common and a way of providing rental housing at a relatively low cost of construction. They often have a surface parking lot, usually rental oriented in Washington state, and actually often a similar density to townhouses, which makes sense when you think about it. It’s three stories of building, and they’re stacked vertically rather than side by side.
You’ve got your mid-rise podium kinds of buildings. We looked at several of these in the feasibility, the pro forma modeling. This is a photo from up on 99, which has got retail on the ground floor. It’s got four stories of residential above, or maybe five in certain spots. You could also have a building that’s all residential. We modeled two heights: five stories and eight stories. This is a little more expensive to build, naturally, but you do have the option for garage parking in the concrete podium there, and naturally a higher density.
Another building type that we modeled is strip commercial retail. It is not as wonderful as food cart pods, as a resident or an appreciator of Portland, Oregon. The cart pods are quite special. But this is the more conventional. This is not to say that smaller, more diverse retail can’t happen, but strip retail is a predictable product when we’re talking about development types. This example here is also on Highway 99, right next to that mid-rise we just looked at. And I’ll pass it over to Morgan.
[54:51] Morgan: Great. So the point of this here is not to be predictive of any kind of project. It’s really to give you some sense of direction, trying to relate the fundamentals of construction to what market prices are today: what are the rent premiums, what are the price premiums for these things, and is this something useful for you to talk about? The only purpose here is to do a little math.
One of the things we didn’t look at, but I think we have some good feedback from Chuck, is to think about office. Nobody’s building spec office these days, but people are still building purpose-built office, particularly medical, dental, and maybe some financial services if it’s an owner-operator. That tends to look like a retail function. They want to be close to population centers, or other reasons. I would put that in there. At the prototypes we’re talking about, if you’re not talking a medical campus, you’re usually talking a two- to three-story purpose-built office building. Some of it could be wood-frame construction, but a lot of it is steel construction, just to meet a lot of the higher life-safety and fire concerns. And so I would say that is probably something that could be within the range in the future of Des Moines. It’s a residential center. The old axiom is: people want to live close to the businesses, businesses want to be close to their markets. Things like medical office are that same thing. Their marketplace is really the rooftops around them.
So let’s think about some of these simple massings. The idea here is to give you some sense of the scale of the envelopes when we’re talking about these types of buildings. What we have here is simple color codes to give you some sense between residential, nonresidential, and then the parking as they get deployed on these kinds of projects. For example, townhomes: you all see the different ways those get built, but it’s all residential. Versus the biggest thing we have here, a mixed-use podium project. Typically you’ll have two stories of concrete podium. They’ll try to take advantage of the slope as much as possible to provide parking on the non-retail portions that may be fronting on the street. Some code requires 100%; some code requires 50%. I differentiate that from a multifamily podium. A lot of times in these cases they’re still building the podium as required, and then in some cases can build up to six stories of wood-frame construction on top. What happens typically in that podium is parking, but also sometimes people do live-work units to help activate the street front. And then what you see in the five-story versions is just smaller scales of these things.
The reason we put this in here is that the difference between the scales is really sensitive to the economics, because the marginal cost to build that bigger thing isn’t too much more, but it’s really the inflection point of the rents. Once you hit a tipping point in the rents, it becomes really feasible to do the eight-story versus the five-story, because you get these increasing economies of scale. That’s why we’re helping push the outer bounds here for you, so we can find where the frontier is.
So the way we did this here is to give you three ways to think about this. The first one is: could it be competitive today, at today’s prices? And as I heard in some of the comments, no surprise, townhomes and stacked flats are pretty price competitive, given where for-sale and renter prices are and where construction costs are. Doesn’t mean everything’s going to get built, but it’s in an interesting space if you were thinking about being a real estate investor.
The denser projects— you can think of this as within reach, a little outside of reach, descending. I say “within reach” because the economics of these things are pretty challenging. We have an untested dense multifamily market here, but you would think it’d be pretty competitive for all the reasons people love Des Moines. It’s really cute, great views. But if you had things like MFTE— did you want to participate in a public-private partnership? Did the city want to use TIF? Does a property have a land basis of zero, perhaps because it’s been owned free and clear for decades? You can see how those things start being additive, and you’d be like, oh yeah, it’s not so unreasonable, if those stars align, that somebody could come in and say, “I would love to build a five-story mixed-use building in your downtown.” And that’s the way I want you to think about this. This is a real thing you should be contemplating if you’re thinking about a 10-year horizon. These are things that realistically you could be talking about.
The strip retail, I would say, from a spec perspective, most people aren’t building those things. The rents in downtown aren’t in a place where people do that. That said, you see a lot of purpose-built stuff. If you were doing a bank, if you were doing a fast food place, those types of things have their own set of economics that don’t necessarily sit within how the retail market works. And again, I would add: like an office building, a service-oriented office building probably also is within reach. Maybe not competitive today, because a lot of these things probably want to be a little closer to denser environments and more accessible to major transportation. But that said, if I was an oral surgeon and said, “Oh, I would like to build my own surgery center, two stories, 15,000 square feet,” that to me doesn’t sound crazy for somebody wanting to do that in Des Moines.
Okay. I don’t want to get into all the caveats and the issues here, but a few things to keep in mind. Right now, think of the way the market works as basically a slope around density, and moving from ownership to rental. The things that are probably more like the scale that you’ve all been talking about, around ownership housing, two to three stories, those are probably more approximate, more real. You have much more optionality to do things. As you get into the denser, more mixed-use kinds of things, it gets much more challenging. And the point around mid-rise, back to that inflection point: it doesn’t take much in the market realizing its potential to actually flip it. Just looking at some of the price premiums on the condo sales in downtown, things are going for $1 million, $1.2 million. Those reflect the value that is in ownership projects down here. And you would think that value premium also extends a little bit to the rental market too, given the right orientation of the building.
It’s important to also talk about retail. We had this conversation last time. Part of the retail environment is really about demand. And when cities are trying to build demand, they do it in a lot of ways. People here have mentioned tourism. We want visitors to have a reason to come here. Projects at the marina, the Steps, are all ways to increase the accessibility and unlock some of the value that people already know is there. And that’s good, and you’re going to drive some of that.
Another channel people use to drive demand, I think, is Ballard. Ballard is one of the denser neighborhoods in the region. Ballard Avenue and those shops are fairly low scale and not very intense, but everything around that neighborhood is really building demand. Think of it as trying to build a 14-hour day. When people live in a community, it’s not just that they’re spending more locally, but they’re spending at times that visitors typically don’t. They’re like, “Oh, I’ll get takeout. I’ll go get the coffee in the morning. I’ll do my dry cleaning,” or whatever. And then visitors fill in some of those gaps on the weekends. That’s why that complementary approach to building the demand profile drives both the visitation piece and what you’re doing in your own community.
[1:03:54] Morgan: Okay. All right. Now let’s get to the fun stuff.
[1:03:59] Ian: Okay. Yes. Good. Pretty much all fits. Great. Apologies, we did change these terms across the chart, but we’ve got “competitive today” in green. We’ve got “within reach with tools” in yellow. And then we’ve got the reddish: rents lag construction cost. So here we’ve taken those colors, with slightly shorter words, across the top here, to show which ones are feasible, which ones would be within reach with tools or with some help, and then finally which ones are out of reach under the current market for speculative construction, as Morgan said.
And then we lined these prototypes up with the zoning code as it is today. You can see that there aren’t a lot of green squares in the lower rows of the chart here. So we’ll work our way across.
We’ve got the townhouse prototype. Not allowed in the DC zone, generally, because of the ground floor commercial requirement. It is allowed in the RM900 zone. We have a zoning map on a later slide we can refer back to. And also not allowed in the RM900A. That’s when it says “use” there in that lower left corner. That just means the land use of townhouses is not allowed in that zone.
Then we get to the stacked flats model, the three-story apartment building. Similarly not allowed in the DC zone. There’s a density limit in the RM900 zone. You certainly can build three-story apartment buildings, but the existing density limits would be lower than what we modeled in the pro forma. And that’s the same for the 900A as well.
That five-story podium multifamily building would not be allowed in any zone, partly because of the ground floor commercial requirements, partly because of the height limit in most of downtown, and also because of the density, and also because of the floor area ratio in the RM900 and 900A.
Similarly with the mixed-use five-story building: you could build that on one block in the DC zone, where the Dollar Tree is. That one allows five stories. But it wouldn’t be allowed in other places because it’s too tall. And then similarly the density, the floor area ratio, and the use prohibitions would make that illegal in the 900 and 900A. Eight-story buildings: not allowed in any of the zones, for various reasons.
As you can see, the strip retail is allowed in the DC zone. It is not allowed in the 900 or 900A zones. Put you on the spot: office?
[1:07:04] Unidentified Speaker: A lot similar to strip retail. Yeah. With maybe a few things in the 900.
[1:07:11] Ian: Okay. Similar. Right. Yes, we thought there might be questions on this slide.
[1:07:19] Commissioner Nicole [surname TBC] [probable]: I don’t know if it’s this presentation or what you presented last time, or maybe I’m making this up, but isn’t the ground floor commercial requirement getting reduced in the future?
[1:07:36] Ian: We will talk about that. Yes, we have more details about how that law works later on in the presentation.
[1:07:43] Commissioner Nicole [probable]: Will that affect this chart, then? Once that goes into effect, will we have green boxes?
[1:07:49] Ian: The city actually has flexibility. So not necessarily. There are decisions to be made.
[1:07:58] Commissioner Nicole [probable]: Okay.
[1:08:02] Ian: Any other questions or quick reactions to this chart? Okay. Great.
So now we’re going to take a little bit of a turn and look at things from a different direction. Looking at our favorite pier city, the reverse Des Moines, 220 blocks north of Seattle: Edmonds. That was something we’ve heard come up a lot, and I think it may have been Barton or another one of the commissioners at the last meeting who said it would be helpful to look at these two cities side by side, at scale. So here they are. This is 1-to-12,000 scale. We’ve got Des Moines on the left, Edmonds on the right. North is to the left. And for context, Edmonds’s population is about a quarter larger than Des Moines. They’re about 42,000. Des Moines is 33,000.
So here’s the downtown zoning for the two cities at the same scale. In both cases this requires a ground floor commercial use, which could be office or retail or a restaurant or things like that. In the city of Des Moines we have 85 acres. Granted, some of that’s marina, but all the same. And in Edmonds there’s 77 acres of that downtown zoning.
In Des Moines there’s just about 44 acres of nearby multifamily zoning. There’s a little bit more off to the left and up; I can’t remember the number of the street there. But still, it’s not a ton of multifamily zoning near Des Moines’s downtown. There’s 125 acres in downtown Edmonds, by comparison. A lot of single family as well.
And then this is the actual— so the zoning is the rules around what can be built today. This map shows the actual buildings on the ground, what they’re used for. The orange is multifamily, the light yellow is single family, the red and the purple and whatnot are commercial uses. These are not vastly different images. But you can see, to my eye, that there is notably more of that multifamily use surrounding Edmonds. And again, those are customers for businesses and people who walk along the streets.
And then the last of these side-by-side comparisons I wanted to show real quick: this is the population density of the census tracts. And again you can see there are some higher population densities around downtown Edmonds.
[1:11:29] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Ian, did you do anything to model or demonstrate— we have a lot of vacant lots and land around our downtown. Is that also present in Edmonds?
[1:11:47] Ian: If you were able to zoom in on this, you can kind of see the gap-tooth effect along Marine View Drive, and Seventh, actually, more so. Those are a dull, light gray color. Those are the vacant lots that you can see in Des Moines, and I see maybe one there in downtown Edmonds. Sorry, it’s hard to see at this scale, but I think at some point that would be a good image to highlight.
[1:12:26] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Great. Thank you.
[1:12:28] Ian: We’ll do. So again, we just wanted to step aside, because it was a helpful suggestion to get some real context for what we are talking about here in Des Moines. But now, away from the concrete and back to the land of codes and regulations, to start to work through some of the core components of the rules around what can be built here in Des Moines. And the first one being building heights. We want to talk about a popular topic of discussion. And we’re glad everyone is here tonight.
So here’s the existing zoning map, as we mentioned. We’ve got the DC zone. It covers a lot of area. A fair amount of it is water, but still a lot of land. And then we have the RM900 and some little blotches of 900A. I would challenge someone to draw this map from memory, even someone who’s lived here their entire life, from their knowledge of downtown.
And we’ve got the height differences. We’ve got that 55-foot area there where the Dollar Tree is. Along Marine View Drive is 35 feet, and along 7th is 45 feet. And then similarly there’s 35 feet in the 900 and 900A zones.
Okay, sorry, a little bit more. There’s our map of the heights. We obviously know the geography: there is a hill. It’s not a super steep giant hill. It’s a gently sloping hill. And I just want to give that visual perspective there. This is a very vertically exaggerated transect, because that was what Google Earth gave me. But you can see 8th Avenue there, which is the edge of the study area, is about 87 feet in elevation. Just for context, when we’re talking about an 80-foot building, that’s about that same height from sea level. So, helpful context there.
So now our discussion question. We’d just like to hear some of your reflections, based on this last set of slides and some of the other ones as well: what appropriate heights for new buildings downtown might be, and what some of the considerations would be that you would have for those, which may include different parts of downtown. So we open it up.
[1:15:32] Unidentified Speaker: We should go back to our little cheat sheet. The map—
[1:15:37] Ian: Oh, the pro forma one?
[1:15:39] Unidentified Speaker: No, this one.
[1:15:42] Ian: Oh, okay. That might be useful context.
[1:15:47] Chair DeLacy: Commissioner [Colleen], for a minute.
[1:15:51] Commissioner Colleen: You talked about this at the last meeting, Commissioner Anderson. There’s something to be said for the entry points of Des Moines. We have the Dollar Tree on the north end, and then we have Taco Time on the south end. And we have some opportunities in both areas to have something a little bit more distinctive, not necessarily tall. Although I think we talked about last time the Dollar Tree having less impact going up tall than perhaps over by Taco Time. So I guess I would leave it at that: distinctive entry points, and the north end with more opportunity to go up. I think less impact on views.
[1:16:52] Ian: That was something we were talking about at the last meeting: just because of where it’s located, there would be less of a potential visual impact.
[1:17:02] Chair DeLacy [probable]: I’m not sure how you will model this, but I think the key in Edmonds and in some of the other communities— what they lack— I’m not sure we have to go higher if we simply absorb the vacant lots, the holes in the ground. That was my question with Edmonds. You can get a lot of activity if you’re simply occupying all the space. I did an inventory some time ago, and it’s a measurable fraction of our downtown that is vacant. What happens if that’s even developed with townhouses, something within the height limit? I think that would go far in making the downtown more walkable. I’m not sure that necessarily jacking up the height across the downtown is the answer, though we might have areas where it would be appropriate. And maybe, given that you have some tools, you might show where a five-over-one or eight-over-one could be built with the least impact to neighbors. We don’t really see that in these massings.
[1:18:42] Unidentified Speaker: Yes.
[1:18:49] Unidentified Commissioner: Apologies if I missed this last time. Do we have documentation of why these were set, what the conclusion was when these were set in the first place? Was it strictly on views? Was it input from the airport? How did we get the heights in the first place?
[1:19:08] Rebecca (staff): It’s not the airport. The 35 towards the water is going to be shoreline. So we don’t need to worry about the marina, since we’re going to have that dealt with through the shoreline stuff. But once we get into downtown, that’s going to be pretty much our council decision and recommendation.
[1:19:36] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. So there was no limiting factor before for why these heights were put down, I guess, is the question.
[1:19:45] Rebecca: Yeah. Again, we just have the 35 feet within the shoreline requirement. Everything else is just going to be zoning choice. There were some density bonus options that we had for a while that weren’t taken advantage of, except we did have the one property take advantage of it, and that was the theater.
[1:20:08] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Thank you.
[1:20:10] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: I’ll speak really loud.
[1:20:23] Unidentified Speaker: Yes, please.
[1:20:24] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: Okay. Since our last meeting, I have been giving the specific question of height a ton of thought as I’ve been driving down Marine View Drive almost every day. I think that we do have to deal with view corridors. I think that’s just something we have to deal with. I don’t think we can pretend like there’s no water there that’s really pretty to look at, because that’s one of the things that makes our city really special.
So in driving down Marine View Drive, I think it’s around 223rd where you start to have a really good water view. When you’re north of that, there’s not much water to be seen. It’s a lot of apartment buildings, strip malls, that kind of thing. I think that is where the opportunity is for height, if it’s necessary. And that could be a longer-term goal, because what you guys are saying is it’s not super economically feasible at the time. I want the community to hear that too. This is not the kind of thing where in the next year we’re going to start building podium buildings that are eight stories tall. There’s no real need for that right now. But over time, if we’re experiencing growth, that would be a place where growth would make sense.
South of 223rd, heading down towards the entry to the marina, I think we need to be a lot more careful on our maximum height, because we don’t want to create the corridor that a lot of people are talking about, and we also want to maintain that Puget Sound view. So as far as appropriate heights and where things go, about 223rd is about the boundary there for maybe higher versus lower. When you get down towards Taco Time, I think it still needs to maybe stay a little bit lower.
And I think that’s why, when I was looking at buildings, I talked about Boise and Yaletown. Those are really nice pedestrian-friendly environments. The actual pedestrian experience is a little bit detached from the height of the building. It could be a one-story building or it could be a 10-story building; the experience is actually the same. And I think that’s the sort of thing we can create potentially in that area, and that would make sense with trying to connect it to the Steps, the marina, all that kind of stuff. So that’s my input.
[1:23:09] Rebecca: And if I can update: I just pulled up the density, the height bonus that we had allowed. This is generic, since I don’t have the map up. Generically, Area 2 was allowed to go up to 55 feet. It was allowed a maximum of three buildings at 55 feet. So Area 2 would have allowed generally three buildings at 55 feet. And then a portion of Area 1, just the strip from Area 2 to Marine View Drive— not all of Area 1— that part could get an extra 10 feet.
[1:24:12] Unidentified Commissioner: So just that strip, one side of the road?
[1:24:15] Rebecca: Correct.
[1:24:21] Unidentified Speaker: Apart from 45 feet.
[1:24:24] Ian: Apart from changes to some of the big ones— height, use, density, etc.— it would probably be helpful to generally simplify some of these provisions, because it was hard for us to even figure out some of those bonuses.
[1:24:40] Rebecca: And those expired, so those aren’t good now, but that’s what was there for a while. It was not fully taken advantage of. Like I said, only one property did take advantage of it.
[1:24:54] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Okay. Something else we haven’t really talked about: if we were to cluster retail and a pedestrian walk— the walking score in Des Moines is a minus number, and we won’t go into that, with lack of sidewalks and the topography— but assuming people will have to drive to come down to our downtown core. Many of the areas that have really— I’m thinking of Freeport, Maine, where they have all these little stores, and there’s an area for parking that’s away, and then everything is clustered on a very pedestrian-friendly Main Street. We haven’t really heard anything, but maybe Main Street is not Marine View Drive. Maybe it’s an east-west street like 223rd— but that’s too far north— one of the streets further. Again, the numbers change. Where we would have clusters of restaurants and that kind of thing, but then we would need to put their parking someplace, and we haven’t really addressed that. And they’re not going to go down to the marina to park and walk up. That’s the problem.
[1:26:17] Ian: So this is great. We’re going to get into uses, and we’ll even touch on parking going forward. Morgan is going to need to leave us, unfortunately.
[1:26:33] Morgan: Yeah. I get to talk about minimum wage and taxes in Kirkland tonight. So I’ll have to take my leave, but you’re in great hands with Ian for the rest of the conversation.
[1:26:42] Ian: Thanks, Morgan. Sorry— yeah, go ahead.
[1:26:47] Unidentified Commissioner: This relates to this. Understanding that some of these buildings are in, say, family trusts, it’s difficult to get them to move on any kind of improvements or development. Are there things that can be done to force improvements? Even just a paint job. Are there things that can be done that make economic sense, that we could convince owners, “Hey, this is in your best interest to do this, because it increases rent,” or something like that? Because these are buildings that we have now that we may not be able to get rid of. So I’m wondering what we can do to deal with what we’ve got, to some degree.
[1:27:38] Rebecca: There’s not much we can do to force. Obviously we’ve got a new chamber that can definitely go door-to-door and try and convince people. There’s always that. There’s different incentives. That was one of the nice things about what we did have with the density bonus. One of the requirements was to sign a no-protest for a business improvement district, so that if we got enough people to all come together, we could have created an improvement area. So there’s different ways to do those kinds of incentives. If someone takes advantage of some sort of bonus, we could say, “Hey, you’ve taken advantage of something, so when we do this later, you’ve signed that you won’t protest it.” But it’s hard to force an existing owner who doesn’t want to do anything now to comply with a code in the future.
[1:28:47] Ian: One of the other things I’ll say in response to that: I’m trying to think of a nicer phrase than “beggars can’t be choosers,” which is not what I’m saying. But when you have an opportunity that is attractive, then you can ask for things. And right now, basically, you can see from this chart with all the red colors on it, the city isn’t offering a lot of opportunities and is asking for a lot also. That’s not a winning combination. That makes it difficult to get some of the beautification that we might also want. And then also, as we talked about last time, older buildings tend to have more maintenance issues, and some reflect a different urban design standpoint.
While Morgan’s presence is still fresh here, one of the things that’s relevant to this conversation: we should remember, when we’re thinking about heights, that if we saw four large new buildings in a 20-year span, that would be quite a remarkable outcome. So we should not assume under any circumstances that all of downtown will be redeveloped. Just take that under consideration. These changes take a long time to play out. Great. Any more comments on heights before we move on to the next exciting issue? Yes.
[1:30:38] Unidentified Commissioner: I’m curious: if we had more opportunity for a five-story, and only one went in, or somebody wanted to do one, could we say, “Oh no, not in that area,” or could we turn them down? Or once you have the regulation, do you have to say yes to someone who would want to put it in anywhere?
[1:30:53] Rebecca: Correct. If we allowed it, then yes.
[1:30:56] Unidentified Commissioner: Sorry, that seems obvious, but I just wanted—
[1:30:58] Ian: That’s a great question.
[1:31:12] Rebecca: Now, if you wanted to, like you said, allow something in certain corners, we could narrow the zoning down to allow something. I think that’s how we came up with a 900A, so that you allowed something in A and not elsewhere. So if you wanted to get that specific, we could say this is now DC-A, because we want entry points, so we allow something taller in that area than we allow in other areas. Or, we had the map for heights; we could change that so that you still had something different. But once you allow it there, then anywhere in that new map it would be allowed.
[1:32:03] Unidentified Commissioner: Thank you.
[1:32:06] Ian: So we do want to touch on parking, basically to share information, because it’s important and we had the follow-up question on that. It’s not a main focus of this project, but it is an important part of the overall equation of development. So, sharing that information here: these are the current parking requirements for the different uses. We’ve got the commercial uses: it’s one parking space per 350 to 400 square feet. There’s some variation in that depending on the retail type. You’ve got restaurants at one parking space per 125 square feet of floor area.
This can be very hard to visualize. The math gets a little funny. So these are very simple diagrams over here on the right. If you’re looking from the top down, the orange block is a building, the light gray block is a parking lot. It’s basically a one-to-one ratio, half and half, if you’re requiring one parking space for every 350 feet of building. If you’re requiring one for 125 square feet, you can see that there’s quite a bit more parking lot than there is building. This is assuming a one-story building and not factoring in all the landscaping or things like that. Current code requires two parking spaces per multifamily unit—
[1:33:41] Rebecca: Is that not for multifamily? That would be for single family.
[1:33:45] Ian: Okay. All right. I see. Single-family units. My apologies there. And you have a parking requirement for moorage as well. We’ve got another helpful diagram visualizing how some of these ratios work out into built footprints. A lot of the examples that we were looking at had very low parking ratios, or perhaps, like Commissioner DeLacy shared with Lake Oswego, there’s a municipally funded parking garage there, and then there’s less in other areas of that downtown.
This is all in flux, and we’re not touching on it too closely in this project, because of Senate Bill 5184, which was passed last year. The city will not be able to require more than one parking space per 10,000 square feet of commercial. So that’ll be about a third of what you’re requiring for a convenience store, or almost an eighth of what you’re requiring for a restaurant currently. The city also won’t be able to require more than half of a space per multifamily unit. So these are quite large changes. The city needs to update its code by July of ’28. So there’s still a little bit of time until then. There’s some other provisions there about change of use and things like that.
One takeaway here is that this will make development easier in downtown, parking being an expensive thing to provide. But it also may make the other conversations around parking management— time limits or pricing, permits, things like that— a little bit more important than they have been in the past. So that’s just important to bear in mind as we’re thinking about new development in downtown.
[1:35:45] Unidentified Speaker: Mr. G— [unclear]
[1:35:53] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. I was with another resident this week, and she said we have a real parking problem in Des Moines. I didn’t realize, because I walk a lot to get down there; I’m fairly close. So I started looking at it more seriously. So it’s going to get worse, basically?
[1:36:11] Rebecca: It is going to get worse. We’ve done some parking counts. I’ve never worked in a city where someone hasn’t said there’s a parking problem in downtown. It’s a parking problem for anyone who wants to park in front of the store they want to park in. There’s usually not a parking problem in the sense that you can usually find parking and walk a majority of the time. There’s going to be some times, obviously, when there’s events and things where you’re going to have a problem, because you want a popular downtown.
But it is, no matter what, with something like this going to get worse, when we’re not going to be able to require any parking for new buildings, or less parking for new conversions. Someone goes from an existing building that had just a few spaces to a new use that would have a much bigger need for parking. Even in our code, we would have said, “No, you can’t use that building because you don’t have sufficient parking.” Under the new code, for conversion, we won’t be able to say that at all. They’ll be able to do it, because you can’t require parking for conversion of existing buildings.
And mixed use: even if we do preserve— we were talking about the preservation of mixed use— with the new code, in mixed-use buildings we won’t even be able to park the ground floor commercial. So even if we say in our downtown we want to preserve ground floor commercial, with the new parking code we’ll be able to park the new multifamily at half a space per unit, but we won’t be able to consider the commercial space in mixed-use buildings in the parking counts. So that’s what the legislature has passed down to us in terms of parking. So there’s a lot of consideration. There are things we’ll have to start thinking about: does the city want to look at parking structures, or timed parking or paid parking or whatever, to keep cars moving so that there’s more opportunities for other people to come in.
[1:38:55] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Commissioner Anderson.
[1:38:57] Commissioner Danielle Anderson: Yeah. Okay. A couple things I just want to mention here, because I see panic rising. One, like we said before, if we get four large buildings built over the next 20 years, that would be sort of miraculous, unless we have some big economic boom. These developments take years and years to build. So this is not an immediate problem that we have with parking. And the second thing I wanted to bring up: to some degree the parking situation is a bit generational. Younger generations don’t own as many cars. They are more comfortable with public transit, biking, things like that. So I just don’t want this to become a bigger thing than it actually is, because I think there will be change generationally anyway. Climate change, electric vehicles, all that kind of stuff. We may not need as much parking in the future as we currently have. So I just don’t want to see parking become the thing that drives development. I would prefer it to be the other way around.
[1:40:16] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Could I offer— Ian, would you be able to show us best practices with cluster parking around—
[1:40:23] Rebecca: I think the whole reason we want to say parking is a future discussion is because we’ll come back when it’s time to talk about this bill, when we have to update the parking code. Since parking is a future discussion on future legislation, we didn’t want to discuss parking as part of this discussion, because we’re going to have to bring it back per the state legislature. We wanted to leave it out of the discussion. We figured there’s more important topics than parking, since we’re being forced to update it anyway.
[1:40:59] Ian: Okay, there we go. Thanks, Rebecca. Speaking of allowed uses: there’s a few other pieces of code that we aren’t digging into tonight— the floor area ratios, densities, and design standards, which are not in our scope to analyze. But we do want to talk about allowed uses. As we’re talking about residential, commercial, office, etc., it’s a really important piece. Some of the conversation around heights— we heard at the first meeting some grander visions around increasing heights downtown. But the other big lever in terms of development feasibility in downtown would be loosening up some of the use provisions.
Currently, the DC zone requires a ground floor commercial use on the street fronts for all buildings. There’s a higher requirement, I believe, on Marine View Drive and a lower requirement on 7th Avenue, and that might have even expired. But in any event, it’s still something that has to be present for each development. At the same time— remember that zoning map that we looked at, it’s a funny boundary— it’s prohibited to have that ground floor commercial use in the RM900 and 900A. So you’ve got one place where you’re requiring it and the other place where it’s not allowed. We should also note that all the vacant lots are in that DC zone, the downtown zone. As we discussed, speculative retail development does not pencil, because of the rents and the lack of local population to support the businesses.
We had a great question at the last meeting about how many customers it takes to support a bakery. That’s a whole other contract in itself to do a detailed analysis. But I poked around a little bit, and one of the things that you have to really think about when you’re doing that kind of analysis is: where are the other clusters of businesses that you’re competing with? Here you’ve got Burien, you’ve got Normandy Park, and you’ve got Highway 99, all pretty close by. So your market area is not that large. So that’s one thing that is going to influence the success of different desired business types here in downtown. That’s a little bit of consultant bullets on that.
Also, another law the legislature has passed that we want to fill you in on is SB 6026. Commissioner Nicole [surname TBC], thank you, mentioned it earlier. This was passed just this year. I thought more time had gone by already. The city will not be able to require ground floor commercial anywhere within a half mile of light rail stations or a quarter mile of a RapidRide stop. So that knocks out all of Highway 99, actually. And then not in 60% of the remaining areas that are zoned for commercial or mixed use. You can see this map here, prepared by the Department of Commerce: the red and the purple zones, that’s that remainder. The city will need to decide by the first of the year of 2028, I think— so it’s actually on a faster time frame than the parking— where ground floor commercial will be required. But regardless of that law, you would want to think about this for downtown anyhow, based on all the things we’ve been saying about the use restrictions preventing development from happening in these vacant lots.
And so I guess this is the time when we want to ask you all: where is it most essential to require ground floor retail? If you would like to say everywhere, that’s a totally valid response. But yes, now open up to responses.
[1:45:47] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Well, I think it should be recognized that ground floor commercial in apartments just doesn’t work very well. And I think you could concentrate that in a compact downtown, where you would perhaps require retail. But I’m not sure that it needs to be required. If you drive along Pacific Highway and you look at all the new TOD-oriented apartment buildings that have been built, I can’t think of any that have viable retail in them. They’re defaulting to maybe offices. But that probably should be left to the market and the developer, and not be mandated by us.
[1:46:43] Rebecca [probable]: But what are you considering a compact downtown? Are you saying you don’t want to require any mandatory commercial?
[1:46:50] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Well, let’s identify a compact downtown.
[1:46:52] Rebecca [probable]: So that’s what I’m asking. What are you thinking is that compact downtown?
[1:46:55] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Well, I think it’s probably south of 223rd, for example. We don’t have all the numbers on here. This is 223rd? Okay. Excellent. Is that right? Okay. One more. Okay. You don’t have a 222nd or 221st, huh? Okay. Excellent. I mean, if it occurs, that’s great, but it doesn’t have to be mandated. And then that would leave that section from 223rd south, and particularly on 7th. Those would be areas that we’d look to to have a more vibrant retail core.
[1:47:41] Unidentified Speaker: Huh?
[1:47:45] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Well, I’m saying north of it you wouldn’t require it, and south of it you could leave it as it is.
[1:47:53] Unidentified Speaker: How many blocks?
[1:47:55] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Oh, down to our gateway, I guess. Taco Time.
[1:47:59] Unidentified Speaker: Taco Time. Yeah. I think that’s the logical—
[1:48:07] Chair DeLacy [probable]: I mean, that area is already, and would likely continue to be, commercial.
[1:48:17] Ian: Right. So we’ve got the theater right there anchoring that block between 223rd and 225th, and then some of the continuous storefront there, for context. Other thoughts? Oh, I’m sorry, Nicole.
[1:48:34] Commissioner Nicole: No, you’re good. We compared to Edmonds earlier this evening. How are they zoning this? Did they lift all ground floor retail rules and then just what came, came?
[1:48:49] Ian: No, they have quite a large area. We’ve got 77 acres here in Edmonds.
[1:48:56] Rebecca: So we don’t know if they’ve implemented 6026 yet, because it’s not due until the end of next year. So we don’t know how they’ve protected their 40% yet, because we don’t know how they’ve implemented it. I can call and see what they’re thinking, but I don’t know what they’re doing yet.
[1:49:27] Commissioner Nicole: No, that’s fair. They probably don’t know either. It’s okay.
[1:49:30] Unidentified Commissioner: Also, just a point of clarification: 223rd is where the lighthouse is, which is distinctive. And also it’s the street that goes to the stairs.
[1:49:39] Unidentified Speaker: Yes. Mm-hmm.
[1:49:46] Ian: So, one thought, putting my urban designer hat on from previous firms where I worked: you can have a T kind of layout. It’s a pretty common thing, being very strategic about where you’re requiring it. So you’re concentrating the activity along maybe Marine View Drive and 223rd, bringing people down to the Steps and the waterfront. It’s just a thought.
[1:50:19] Unidentified Speaker: Very good.
[1:50:24] Chair DeLacy: There’s a pause here. I would like to recognize some of our Counselors of Real Estate who are here in town. Tony [surname TBC] is the chair. We’re kind of informal here. Tony, is there anything you’d like to say to the group, many of whom you’ve already interviewed? Our guests here tonight, who are our citizens, probably don’t know what you’re doing in town. Maybe you could just quickly explain who the Counselors are and your charge. Go ahead and introduce yourself and state your home residence.
[1:51:13] Tony [surname TBC] (Counselors of Real Estate): Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Tony [surname TBC]. I’m an attorney, and I’m based in New Jersey. I’m one of our Consulting Corps team members that is here today as part of a volunteer assignment that we’ve undertaken for an organization called the Counselors of Real Estate. The Counselors is an invitation-only organization made up of real estate advisers. We have a little under a thousand members. We are represented in 22 countries around the world, and our membership occupies more than 60 professional disciplines in the real estate industry. Our Consulting Corps initiative has been around a long time, and it continues to flourish and evolve. We do it in partnership not only with our own members but with the National Association of Realtors, who actually helped us find this assignment. Whenever we have one, we will seek to put together a team that’s suited to the issues and the areas of expertise that are appropriate for the assignment.
So this assignment for us is to try to help your city understand different ways that it may not only achieve more successful revitalization, but in ways that may be a little outside the box, because we’re not from here. And we can offer our views from what may have worked or not worked in our own communities. The team that we have assembled here— fortunately it’s not all lawyers, because there’s too many of us in the world, and most of us recognize that— we have members from the capital area, the DC area. There are three members from California: two from Northern California, one from Southern California. And then we have our fearless leader, who is our staff person, Samantha [surname TBC], who keeps us honest and keeps us on time.
What we’ve been doing this week: we arrived here on Sunday. We’ve walked the area. We’ve driven it. We’ve had meetings all day yesterday and today and tomorrow. Thursday we will be convening internally to talk about what we think can help you. And then we’re going to be delivering a presentation on Friday morning to city and Planning Commission officials. That will be followed by a written report, which we’ll be delivering sometime after the assignment. We are all volunteers. We are not being paid to do this. We are devoting our time to worthy causes like this, and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to help you.
I met Barton almost 20 years ago, at one of my first meetings as a Counselor of Real Estate. He’s one of our esteemed members, and we hit it off right away. I consider him a good friend, and I’m thrilled to be able to partner with his city. Thank you for inviting us, and thank you for the opportunity to introduce ourselves to your group.
[1:54:22] Chair DeLacy: And of the Counselors, we have Garner Chandler and Samantha [surname TBC] here as well. Get back to it.
[1:54:33] Ian: Yeah, back to work.
[1:54:35] Chair DeLacy: Sorry, but I thought that was important. Thank you.
[1:54:39] Ian: And we had the pleasure of speaking with the Counselors of Real Estate earlier this evening, which was a great conversation.
How about, what do we think about Seventh Avenue? What is the future of Seventh Avenue? Like we said, the ground floor commercial requirements are a little bit less stringent there currently, but still in place. You can see most of 7th is in the DC zone, but then only half of it is once you get up to 220th and north of there. There’s several of the vacant lots along there. There are businesses; mostly they’re set back from the sidewalk, in my observation at least.
[1:55:25] Chair DeLacy: Could I ask Commissioner Curry, who owns and operates a business there, to maybe begin this conversation?
[1:55:30] Ian: Yes.
[1:55:36] Commissioner Michelle Curry: Seventh is pretty sleepy. The lots there are sometimes problematic. They need to be dealt with. I think there’s a lot of potential for Seventh. I don’t understand why, if we’re connecting the marina and the goal is to connect it to Marine View Drive, we’re not connecting the whole area. Let’s just make the whole thing desirable. I would love to see it totally activated. More retail. As a business owner, I actually don’t believe that our real estate is best used as a print shop. A print shop can be anywhere. Not that I don’t want to be there, but I think making the area desirable for investors, whatever that looks like— I think there’s a huge amount of potential in Seventh. It’s sleepy, and there’s no reason that it needs to stay that way. I still want to see it charming. I was going with the cute Edmonds picture. I’m big on aesthetics.
[1:56:30] Ian: To be blunt: do you think ground floor residential, like townhouses or apartments, along Seventh would be appropriate?
[1:56:42] Commissioner Curry: I think in areas it could be appropriate. Yeah. I like that townhouses aren’t super tall. Aesthetically, I like the stoops on the sidewalks, and I’m imagining Christmas decorations and pumpkins on stoops, and I think it could fit in lovely with mixed use, with residential and with commercial.
[1:57:01] Ian: Yeah. Great. Thank you. Oh, I’m sorry.
[1:57:08] Commissioner Nicole [probable]: No, you’re good. To add to that, though, I think it would make a cozier feel on 7th, because a lot of the businesses that are on 7th, the parking lot is between the road and the business. So it’s road, empty parking lot or maybe full parking lot, and then the business. So sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can’t. Whereas if we had townhomes, ideally they would come up to a sidewalk, and then you would feel like, “Oh, the community is right there,” versus, “Oh, I have to cross this parking lot to get into, I don’t know, ABC,” or something. Bad example, because that doesn’t stop people.
[1:57:47] Ian: It’s a good point. A lot of times in planning we talk about activating a streetscape, and that means you’ve got to have active, nonresidential uses. But in some cases townhouses actually can serve to activate a streetscape. That makes sense, and this is where design standards are very important. I think it’s almost an advantage of it being sleepier. It’s not a perfect tool, but you can imagine in some cases you have ground floor residential uses in really busy areas, and people just always have the shades down, and they tend to be kind of closed off. That’s not a great outcome. It’s not the worst outcome in the world, but it’s not ideal. But in an environment like this, you could have more people feeling comfortable just engaging with the street. Speculation. Apologies. Do we have any other thoughts about 7th Avenue?
[1:58:52] Commissioner Chuck Coleman [probable]: Yeah. I try to be quiet so I can let everybody else talk. So, Ian, in your urban planning background, what are your thoughts about this? You’ve got the experience that all of us don’t have. I hear everything. I agree with everything. I think view corridors are great. I think it’s very difficult to define those and put that on paper so that developers know what their limitations are. It’s getting pretty granular with codes in a small town. Larger cities maybe not so much. But for example, think about retail. Where would you put a grocery store here?
[1:59:45] Ian: I think— okay. Yeah, of course.
[1:59:49] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: Okay. My dream scenario— and I understand the rules about radii with grocery stores and all that— I think it worked really well where the Dollar Tree is; there used to be a QFC there. But I think it needs to be a different building. Going back to what Nicole was saying, we need to encourage development that doesn’t put parking lots between sidewalks and businesses. So in my mind, north of 223rd is the place for the grocery store, because that’s where you have the potential for more density and just a little bit larger-scale things. I could see a grocery store with apartments above it. I think that would be great somewhere in that region of 220th, 219th, over there. A grocery store feels too big to me to be further south. So I think that’s the place to put it, personally, but I would love to hear what you have to say too.
[2:00:57] Ian: I think you’re right on that. One of the things that we talked about with the Counselors earlier was there’s not a lot of large parcels in downtown, and I think that’s partly what gives it its charm. But it does make it harder for redevelopment. Going out on a limb is a dangerous thing, but if I’m just thinking about it, the easiest thing to imagine is a five-story above a podium, with a grocery store on the ground floor there at the Dollar Tree lot, after other residential development has gone in to increase the customer base. That’s an outcome you can kind of squint and see.
[2:01:47] Unidentified Commissioner: I was down in the Santa Clara area of— I guess that’s Northern California. That was an area that did suburban development before it was cool. But it was all being redeveloped. They were fairly large-sized blocks, but they were pushing the retail out in front, and then in back they were putting apartments and condos, probably with structured parking underneath. So you got the best of everything. You had the density. And I know exactly what you mean: they brought the store out to the street, and it created, at least there, a somewhat more walkable, appealing streetscape than what it replaced.
[2:02:52] Ian: Like we’ve said, Des Moines has so much potential. And getting the market to a place where you’re seeing development come in that aligns with your design standards, where maybe you have some creative developers who are not just building the cookie-cutter product— those would all be a great place to get to. But I feel like there’s some harder work that’s going to have to go in, maybe, before we get there.
We’re at 8:00. We don’t have to respond directly to these questions, but we want to create space for the last little bit of discussion. Some of the questions that we did want to serve up to you all: again, thinking about these building types, some of the ones that we’ve talked about during the meeting— if there’s anything that you haven’t said yet about how much you like one of them, this is a great opportunity to do so. Some other things that we haven’t touched on too much: how about the city facilitating development? I think the conversations are starting up about the multifamily tax exemption again, which is a tool that many cities use to encourage development, and sometimes all the developers just want to go to those cities. There’s a version that requires affordable housing, and there’s a version that doesn’t require affordable housing, and those have somewhat different terms. So there’s some options there. And the other question is just about other development types that are going to contribute to our goals, basically. So I just want to open it up one more time.
[2:04:52] Unidentified Commissioner: What I heard you say, Ian, is that we need more housing to support all these cute little businesses we keep talking about. Grocery stores— we don’t have enough. Sorry to say, our [unclear: “turos”]: you go in there, and I’m always the only family there. How are you even keeping your business open? So you’re saying we need more people.
[2:05:13] Ian: That’s our assessment. Yeah.
[2:05:15] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Thank you.
[2:05:18] Unidentified Commissioner: I have a question.
[2:05:21] Ian: Yeah, go ahead.
[2:05:23] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Talking about the multifamily tax break situation: wouldn’t that be sort of counterproductive to the fact that Des Moines desperately needs tax revenue? Can you speak to that?
[2:05:39] Ian: Something Morgan has pointed out to me: certainly there’s less money, but it’s temporary. And there’s other— I honestly didn’t even know this, but Morgan pointed out there’s the sales tax component of construction, which is quite significant. So it’s a portion. When you do the MFTE— as I understand it; I’m not an expert on MFTE, so I’m not the best person—
[2:06:13] Rebecca: I’m still actually relistening, since I missed the council presentation. It’s not the land, it’s the building on it, so you don’t lose all of it. So it’s just a portion. And again, there’s 8 years and there’s 12 years. So it’s only for a set period. It encourages them to come. So it’s vacant, what you have now, versus an eight-year exemption, and you’re setting yourself up for a longer period.
[2:06:45] Unidentified Commissioner: So these are not the same kind of situations as a fully tax-exempt—
[2:06:56] Rebecca: Correct.
[2:06:57] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. It’s not like Wesley Garden [unclear].
[2:07:03] Rebecca: Correct. Well, there are some that are, but that’s a fully affordable project. No one’s really used that MFTE where you’re doing a 99-year affordable housing project. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about an 8-year exemption that’s non-affordable, or even if it is affordable, it’s 20%, but that’s only putting a 12-year exemption on it. Not the kind that has permanent affordability.
[2:07:31] Unidentified Commissioner: Oh, great.
[2:07:33] Unidentified Commissioner: I just want to say the council voted that they wanted to hear more about that, and then they’re going to pass it to us. So there’s way more coming.
[2:07:40] Rebecca: Yeah, there’s more discussion.
[2:07:42] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. So they’re going to do another round of learning about it for them, and then it’s going to come to us, and it’s going to go back up. So we’re going to learn a lot more.
[2:07:51] Commissioner Coleman [probable]: So, Ian, in your analysis you stated that retail follows rooftops, which is true. So I will also take that to mean that higher-end retail follows higher-end rooftops. Is that generally true? I would say that in Des Moines we have plenty of low-end retail. Let’s just be honest. So I think where we’re trying to get to, going the reverse, is some higher-end residential. And higher-end residential requires certain amenities that are planned in the zoning. Hopeful that the CRE analysis will help us with this. But again, from your urban planning background, what do you think?
[2:08:44] Ian: Well, a little bit of background on that: every city in Washington now has to plan housing based on income categories, buckets, they’re often called, ranging from low to high, at different percentages of AMI. I believe that Des Moines already has a great deal of housing that is affordable to moderate- and lower-income populations, and so as such is under less pressure than many cities to add additional affordable housing. So you’ve got, like we’ve said, the wonderful views. There’s not really anything getting in the way of higher-end housing. Yes. Or any other kind.
[2:09:37] Chair DeLacy: Okay, thank you, Ian. We have just a few other Planning Commission business items to handle, and I’m mindful of time, so maybe it’s time to wrap things up.
[2:09:57] Ian: Okay. Yes. Thank you all so much for your time. It’s been a great discussion.
[2:10:03] Chair DeLacy: Okay. Thank you. New business. We have a staff presentation by Payton on tree regulations and where we are on that.
[2:10:22] Payton Murphy (staff planner): Yeah. “Presentation” is a stretch. I’m calling it a guided discussion. I’m Payton Murphy, one of the planners here on staff. Just a background refresher on where we’re at and how we got to our current discussion. We currently have no tree regulations for tree removal outside of critical areas. In June of this year there was a staff presentation to you, looking for some general guidance on where we begin for developing a new tree ordinance. We’re looking at both development scenarios and non-development scenarios. You provided us some direction. That was great. And so we circulated for your review a very initial draft, looking more at policies. So we’ll get your feedback tonight. I have a couple key policy questions for you, and then we’ll come back with a well-rounded final draft for you to take a look at, and hopefully a public hearing as well.
So did everybody get a chance to review that? Okay, excellent. The first policy question I wanted to touch on is for exemptions. In non-development scenarios, should the city allow for two trees to be removed on private single-family properties per year? And are we looking at a reduced fee or a waived fee? That had been an initial discussion we had last time. So I wanted to get some feedback on that proposal.
[2:11:44] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Commissioner G—
[2:11:53] Unidentified Commissioner: Just for clarification: if we do a reduced or a waived fee, we still require single-family properties to alert the city, so we know how many trees they’re taking down within, say, a calendar year?
[2:12:11] Payton Murphy: Yes, that was the idea. That way, even if we exempted it, we had a way of tracking it. So still a permit application, so we have everything on file, but the fee is really what we’re discussing.
[2:12:22] Rebecca: So even if we said you get two per year, how would we know they got their two, if they didn’t submit the form to tell us they’re pulling their two at no cost, as an example?
[2:12:40] Unidentified Commissioner: Can you say that again?
[2:12:41] Rebecca: So originally we were saying we were going to allow two tree removals per year without replacement, and whether we wanted to do it even without a permit. We wouldn’t know if someone did it if they didn’t get a permit. So we needed the permit so that we could track it, and so we could do it at either reduced cost or no cost. And so we wanted to get that clarification. Permit application, but the fee for the two freebies, basically, is the question: a reduced fee or a waived fee. Or if you don’t like that idea, we can discuss that as well.
[2:13:11] Unidentified Commissioner: Are we also putting in language with these, for ones that would qualify for fees but are free if they’re the ones that the arborist has certified as dangerous? How does that go towards the two?
[2:13:33] Rebecca: So there is a process if it has to be— a permit pulled after the fact. If your tree fell, you can get the permit after it. It’s still the process of whether you’re replacing it or not. If you’re allowing two removals, either free or not free, the whole idea is you don’t have to replace it at the same placement, possibly. So I think part of the discussion is dealing around—
[2:14:04] Payton Murphy: Yeah. So the intent of this, in our original discussion, was to be able to remove trees where you’re like, “I don’t want that tree on my property.” It’s not a hazard, because we have a procedure for that. For landscaping purposes, whatever it is that you want to do on your private property, and to the benefit of a homeowner: if you want to take down just one tree, you’re not necessarily paying for that. There’s an avenue to make that more accessible for people, and without having to require replacement. And I think there was a note in the actual text saying that’s as long as you’ve met the minimum requirements for the property in terms of the amount of trees that you have.
[2:14:51] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay.
[2:14:59] Unidentified Commissioner: So, Payton, could you run this by me one more time? If I’ve got 10 trees on my lot, three of them are diseased, and I’ve got an arborist report saying you need to take these down or they’re going to fall on your house or somebody else’s. So what about the third tree?
[2:15:21] Payton Murphy: Yeah. So that’s the difference here. The intent behind this is not the diseased or damaged ones. Those we would cover under a different permitting avenue. And then this would be for anything additional, that’s more of just “I as a homeowner am choosing to remove this tree.”
[2:15:40] Unidentified Commissioner: Got it. And we do have an approved tree list for the city?
[2:15:45] Rebecca: Is it currently in the code? We have some language in other parts of our code, like the critical areas ordinance, for trees, but I don’t think we have a proposed tree list. We’re not mandating what kinds of trees. If that’s something you would like to mandate, what kind of trees people can plant, we could add that. But that’s not something that was discussed at the last round of discussion.
[2:16:08] Unidentified Commissioner: Maybe we can talk about it. But if I have a miniature crepe myrtle, I want to use that as my replacement tree.
[2:16:15] Payton Murphy: Yeah. Other language, like our SMP, has a list of native trees. So we could use a similar reference point and add that to this as well.
[2:16:24] Rebecca: In terms of required replacement, that’s different. Yes, for required landscaping and required replacement. But not in terms of just generalized. I get what you’re saying for that.
[2:16:34] Unidentified Commissioner: Got it. Thank you.
[2:16:41] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. I’m going to go out on a limb and make a statement here. I think we should waive the fee for these two trees.
[2:16:49] Payton Murphy: Perfect. Okay. Thank you. That’s what we were looking for.
[2:16:53] Chair DeLacy [probable]: Thank you. And that doesn’t require a motion at this stage?
[2:16:57] Rebecca: No, we’re just looking for direction. We don’t have an ordinance yet.
[2:17:00] Unidentified Commissioner: Can I also, while I’m at it: this permit that you have to submit to take down these two accessory trees— I’m thinking about this because I have a tree I want to take down— can we somehow procedurally make this a one-pager that anybody can handle filling out?
[2:17:20] Rebecca: Automated. It’s more like we just need your address and location. I think the idea was we really wanted it to be a no-permit form, but we needed to track what locations are getting those. So almost automated, in our new online application system: just, here, give us your information. You got one. How many trees are existing? Super simple. If you have your two minimum trees for a single-family lot, okay, you got it. If you didn’t, then you need to replace it, to make sure you keep your two minimum. That’s all we’re looking for.
[2:17:56] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah, and I can understand totally why you want to track these things. I just— because I deal in permits so often— we just need to make sure that your average citizen can handle this on their own, and they don’t need to hire a professional to get a tree removed.
[2:18:11] Payton Murphy: Yes. Okay. Excellent. Any other comments on this policy question? All right.
[2:18:20] Rebecca: And it’ll be more fleshed out as we get further in.
[2:18:22] Payton Murphy: Yeah. So this is just gathering more information, and we’ll come back with a more fleshed-out ordinance. The next one is for tree retention. Should the standards for tree retention only apply to developable areas— so areas that are outside of your right-of-way, easements, buffers, critical areas, that kind of thing— or the entire parcel? Our neighboring cities differ in how they do this. So that’s why we wanted to bring it to you and see what your thoughts are. Again, this would be standards to retain trees, and the number. Are we looking at square footage of the lot itself, or are we looking at developable areas, or something in between? Whatever your thoughts are.
[2:19:04] Rebecca: So as an example: you might have a parcel where we’ve already got standards for your critical area. Is our new standard going to look at that as a whole separate requirement, and this new one is only outside the critical area? Is our new standard going to take into account standards that we already have that require buffers or street trees? Are those going to go into your minimum tree counts? Because in that same vein, you could have very, very steep slopes on your property, and all your trees are down there. Do they count towards your retention requirement, and then you can have none on your developable area? Or do you want it to be more spread out across the parcel? That’s an example we see a lot in our city. There’s so many variables. Do you want it to be the whole parcel that these counts apply to? Or do you want this new code to exempt the critical area and be spread out— and maybe it does count right-of-way, buffers, and everything but the critical area?
[2:20:16] Unidentified Commissioner: No, go ahead.
[2:20:21] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Buffers: are we talking like riparian zones? What are the buffers?
[2:20:26] Rebecca: Buffers are usually like when you have to have a buffer between industrial and residential, those kinds of buffers. Not critical area buffers. Other buffers we’d loop in with critical areas.
[2:20:42] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: Okay. My personal opinion, here we go, is that we exempt critical areas and buffers and rights-of-way, because otherwise you could end up having to plant like 20 trees in a very small area that’s actually buildable. That’s my take on this.
[2:20:59] Unidentified Commissioner: I agree with Commissioner Anderson, provided we have reliable maps that define those areas.
[2:21:11] Rebecca: So you’re saying it should just apply to the whole parcel, or exempt those buffer areas?
[2:21:16] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: Exempt. Yeah. But I think you bring up a good point here, and this is maybe a little outside of the tree question, but for developments of a certain size, I think surveys with vegetation on them should be required, so that we know exactly what’s there, and people aren’t trying to create loopholes here.
[2:21:44] Unidentified Commissioner: Agreed. Yeah.
[2:21:52] Unidentified Commissioner: Actually, I agree with that. I think we should have that in our development standards: landscaping and tree drawing submittals should be part of the package.
[2:22:13] Unidentified Speaker: Yeah.
[2:22:15] Commissioner Anderson [probable]: Yeah. And likewise, I personally think that surveys should also be required for this kind of development, but larger development too.
[2:22:22] Unidentified Commissioner: Well, consider where we live and where the development will go. It’s likely to be on hillsides that are wooded.
[2:22:32] Rebecca: Right. There again, the critical area is going to have stuff. But for larger development we can definitely put something in. We could figure out a size and make a recommendation.
[2:22:40] Unidentified Commissioner: Sure. Good.
[2:22:44] Payton Murphy: Excellent. All right. Next one is about minimum tree credits. In the draft there was a chart that had a couple highlights in it. The real question there is: what should the division of zones be for the tree credit requirements? Specifically looking at our commercial zones. I also looked at Burien’s code, and they separate— and I couldn’t really tell why they drew the line where they did between their industrial and commercial zones. I threw our residential zones all in one, but I wanted to know where you think the division of requirement should be, looking at commercial development, that kind of thing.
[2:23:33] Rebecca: Or did you think all commercial should be— or not divide it at all and just give it 0.25, because that’s what we had in the code? Where did you think it should be at?
[2:23:46] Unidentified Commissioner: I would just prefer to err on the conservative side and let the owner, the developer, come back and say, “Would you consider removing these trees?”
[2:23:57] Rebecca: Well, I think the direction was to give minimum tree credits. So we need to have a minimum tree credit per zone. I think the question was: what do we want the commercial and industrial minimum tree credit at, if we’re not going to split it up? We had one in for the residential, and then we were trying to figure out where 0.5 or 0.25 goes, in what zones.
[2:24:22] Payton Murphy: Because with Burien, they had their lighter industrial/commercial area at 0.5, and then their really more heavy industrial was 0.25. But we don’t have that same zoning, and our specific city needs line up a little differently. So that’s really the question: where do we draw that line? Do we draw that line, or do we just have commercial and residential, and then allow for some flexibility elsewhere?
[2:24:51] Unidentified Commissioner: Did you happen to check Federal Way, what they do?
[2:24:53] Payton Murphy: I had Federal Way’s up, but I can’t recall off the top of my head what they did for this.
[2:24:59] Rebecca: In our last discussion we talked about basically exempting any residential lot that was under 10,000 square feet. I think we’ll come back to that. I think it’s similar.
[2:25:13] Payton Murphy: Yeah. In the chart, the language we had was required minimum tree credits per 5,000 square feet of developable area, not exceeding two per 10,000 square feet.
[2:25:28] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Yeah, this is tricky. So here’s where my mind is right now. Our new autonomous drone warehouse— big, giant, ugly warehouse. I can see it from my house. Stuff like that: I feel like we should be mandating some amount of trees around the outside of the building, because otherwise they’re just going to become heat islands, for one thing, but they’re also just unsightly. I don’t know what the language is. I don’t know how we say that.
[2:26:07] Unidentified Commissioner: Well, and that’s a really good idea, because one of the mitigations down the road for being in the flight path is going to be development that isn’t sensitive to that, which includes warehouses, not apartments. And that’s fine, but I agree with you. That Panattoni [probable], that was Port property, but that was a forest, and it took people by surprise. There should be some requirement for tree screening at the very least. Screening is the word I’m looking for.
[2:26:50] Unidentified Speaker: Yes, please.
[2:26:53] Payton Murphy: Good. So we do have screening landscaping requirements for developments that are separate from this conversation. And I don’t know if we want to bring those into it, or if we can maybe—
[2:27:09] Rebecca: Yeah. And that one would be subject to the same— again, if we went with a 0.5 for that zone, for the BP zone, they would be subject to that. But again, I think we brought in the idea that there would still be a fee in lieu, so they would have been able to pay, and maybe pay for street trees on 7th Avenue or something.
[2:27:31] Unidentified Commissioner: Correct. Well, and here the fee in lieu is an interesting idea also, because can you pay a fee to exempt you from planting any trees, or is it just partial?
[2:27:44] Rebecca: They would still be subject to our trees per parking space. They would still be subject to our screening. It would only be the replacement requirement, the tier and replacement requirement, in lieu fees. They would still have to meet all the minimum— like we just talked about, screening, the minimum parking landscape. They’d still have to meet all of our minimum landscape requirements unless they get a variance.
[2:28:16] Unidentified Commissioner: So it’s just like if they took out a forest and they put in a warehouse—
[2:28:20] Rebecca: Correct.
[2:28:21] Unidentified Commissioner: —the area of the warehouse is the fee-in-lieu part, basically.
[2:28:24] Rebecca: Yes.
[2:28:26] Unidentified Commissioner: I have a question. Off the top of your head, can you give a parcel example in Des Moines of what would fill in these two? I know it’s the zoning.
[2:28:33] Rebecca: So like we were just talking about, the BP zone, which would be the warehouse. It would be DC; we just talked about the DC zone. Which one would be the 0.5 and which one would be the 0.25, that’s what we’re asking you. We’re asking between the commercial and industrial zones, so all the different zoning that we went over when we went through the different zone characters.
[2:28:56] Payton Murphy: And I apologize, I didn’t put the laptops out for you for this discussion. I can list the different— I have our zoning up. So everything residential’s covered here. And then what’s left would be Neighborhood Commercial, Institutional Campus, Business Commercial, Business Park, Community Commercial, Downtown Commercial, General Commercial, Highway Commercial, and then Woodmont Commercial.
[2:29:29] Unidentified Commissioner: I think slicing and dicing takes—
[2:29:33] Rebecca: Well, that’s what we’re asking.
[2:29:35] Unidentified Commissioner: Let’s just have one. Let’s just have residential and nonresidential.
[2:29:41] Rebecca: Okay. And so which one do you want at the nonresidential? Do you want that at 0.5?
[2:29:45] Unidentified Commissioner: 0.5. Yeah.
[2:29:59] Payton Murphy: Is that a consensus, on just commercial and residential? Perfect. Okay. So, kind of a secondary question here. Should lots be required to meet the minimum amount of tree credits when it’s new construction? So we’re talking attached or detached, exceeding 500 square feet of gross square footage or larger. We had touched on that again last time. So if you’re doing a garage, this kind of smaller-scale project, maybe—
[2:30:30] Unidentified Commissioner: I’m wondering, can we do a payment in lieu, so it’s not—
[2:30:35] Rebecca: Well, that’s what we’re asking. Where’s that threshold? When do we want to make sure that minimum trees are required? Do we want to allow payment in lieu when you don’t meet your minimum trees? So if you don’t have two trees on a single family, do we want to require two trees, or do we want to allow payment in lieu even if you just don’t have two trees? All we’re asking on some residentials is two trees. Are we really saying you have to pay, when all we’re asking is two trees?
[2:31:07] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. I’m thinking if we’re doing townhouses and zero-lot-line builds, maybe we have a fund for street trees elsewhere, so you don’t inhibit in front of—
[2:31:18] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah, that’s what I think would be lovely. You know, like the brownstone neighborhoods. What we don’t want is cement gardens.
[2:31:31] Rebecca: No, no. But that’s what we’re saying. If it’s in front of, then you don’t need a fee in lieu; you can plant it in front of. So that’s what we’re saying.
[2:31:42] Unidentified Commissioner: So the requirement is two trees? Or are you just using that as an example?
[2:31:46] Rebecca: Well, that’s the minimum on the single family.
[2:31:51] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. Oh, because that’s the tree credit. So it’s one tree per credit. Is that how you’re thinking about doing it?
[2:31:57] Rebecca: Yes. It’s one per— not exceeding two per 10,000 square feet. So that’s going to meet most of your single-family lots.
[2:32:06] Unidentified Commissioner: I’m just asking because other cities have things where one tree is worth 0.5 and one tree is worth 0.25, and it just depends on the size of them. So are we delineating between sizes of trees? I kind of hope we’re not, because that gets really tedious.
[2:32:21] Payton Murphy: It sets it in the following priority: first an existing healthy tree, then replacement, then last, fee in lieu. There’s a note on here that non-significant existing healthy trees can count for half a credit. If they’re too small, then you don’t get a tree credit. That’s for existing trees, not replacement trees. Replacement trees would be at a 1:1 ratio.
[2:32:47] Unidentified Commissioner: 500 square feet. What is 500 square feet? That’s like a two-car garage.
[2:32:52] Unidentified Commissioner: That’s like a two-car garage. Yeah.
[2:32:57] Unidentified Commissioner: Or adding a little— well, that’s like a studio ADU with parking underneath and something on top.
[2:33:04] Unidentified Commissioner: Well, no, that’s more like a thousand. But it’s a small ADU if you’re looking at 500. Yeah, 500 is very small. I think it should be a thousand.
[2:33:13] Unidentified Commissioner: A double tiny house.
[2:33:14] Unidentified Commissioner: A double tiny house. Yeah. I think a thousand is better than 500 for this one.
[2:33:21] Rebecca: Okay. So anything above a thousand, the lot then has to meet the minimum standards, is what you’re saying.
[2:33:27] Unidentified Commissioner: Yes. 500 just seems so small. I don’t know who would build just 500.
[2:33:36] Rebecca: Well, people add onto their garages all the time. That’s almost exclusively additions; an addition to an existing building would be.
[2:33:44] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. Okay.
[2:33:46] Payton Murphy: Any other comments, feedback on this one? No. Thank you.
[2:33:51] Rebecca: Excellent. And the code is allowing a fee in lieu. So we’re not saying you can’t pay it. I’m just saying it’s a small thing. We’re asking for a small thing, honestly, in the code, but we are allowing the fee in lieu.
[2:34:08] Payton Murphy: All right. Replacement ratio. The existing provisions have a 3:1 penalty replacement ratio. That’s for trees that are identified to be retained during development activity and are removed without permission. So it’s currently at a 3:1 penalty. Do we want to increase this, and should there also be a fine associated? So they’ve submitted a plan, they’ve said “we’re keeping this tree,” and we show up to do an inspection and the tree is gone.
[2:34:33] Unidentified Commissioner: Is there such a thing as a sliding scale? Like, the plan was to keep the tree and they deliberately took it out, FU-style, that’s like a 5:1. And then if they accidentally did something and the tree came down, then you’re at a—
[2:34:50] Unidentified Speaker: It’s hard to verify that.
[2:34:51] Rebecca: It’s hard to verify. It’d be hard to put something into the code that really can police that, because of intent.
[2:34:56] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. You can’t prove intent.
[2:34:58] Rebecca: Driver accidentally hit it versus it was— unless they videotape themselves doing it, it would be hard to police.
[2:35:07] Unidentified Commissioner: Okay. I think for sure a fine. Whatever we pick as the ratio, for sure a fine.
[2:35:14] Payton Murphy: So a replacement ratio plus a fine. Yes. Okay. And do you think increasing the ratio from what it is currently, or maintaining? Thoughts on that?
[2:35:22] Unidentified Commissioner: I think 3:1’s fine, given that we’re doing a fine too. It just wants to be a threshold that really deters people, which I think a fine does.
[2:35:39] Rebecca: Well, I have a feeling that with our fee in lieu, we’ll probably end up with a big fine, because I feel that people probably take advantage of the fee in lieu as well. So they may be paying for the three plus the fine. So we might end up with a nice—
[2:35:47] Unidentified Commissioner: So if it’s a small project—
[2:35:55] Unidentified Commissioner: Yeah. They might end up paying a big— what is our fee in lieu?
[2:36:01] Rebecca: We haven’t set it yet, because it’s new. Tonight— no, we don’t have anything. There’s no adoption tonight.
[2:36:13] Unidentified Speaker: I know. I bring up trees and people leave. That’s weird.
[2:36:18] Unidentified Speaker: Right. Is that it? What are we doing?
[2:36:22] Payton Murphy: I think so. If we want to stick with that 3:1 and a fine—
[2:36:28] Unidentified Commissioner: What do other surrounding cities do?
[2:36:31] Payton Murphy: Most have a fine associated.
[2:36:33] Rebecca: I think the reason we asked is, originally council had directed to increase it generally to 3:1, but there was no discussion of a fine. But I think that original discussion was before this whole new code, and it was just like they didn’t feel— I think the whole idea was, “Hey, we need a code that requires replacement of trees at four to one,” but that was before we were talking tree credits. That was before a whole new code was discussed. So I don’t think the idea was just a penalty discussion.
[2:37:06] Unidentified Commissioner: We don’t have big pieces of property. I’m thinking at some point you get to a point where you can’t replace.
[2:37:17] Rebecca: Well, that’s what I’m saying: with the creation of minimum requirements and everything, I don’t know that that same argument applies necessarily, because we’ve now created a whole code. Now this is just a penalty discussion. I think it’s a different discussion.
[2:37:32] Payton Murphy: Yeah. So just curious what you guys think about what kind of fine you would propose.
[2:37:39] Rebecca: Normally there’s limits. I’d probably have to turn it over to legal, because you get to some limits on fines where you can’t go over, where it can’t be excessive. There’s some stuff where we get in trouble if we go over $1,000 a day for certain types of issues. So I’d probably meet with legal and get recommendations for tree fines and bring it back. In the ordinance it’ll probably be “per adopted fee schedule,” because we’ll want to leave it so we can update it based on what’s recommended. The amount probably won’t be in the actual ordinance.
[2:38:20] Payton Murphy: Just curious. I have just one more slide, which is a question on timing for you guys.
[2:38:26] Rebecca: Well, before we go to the timing question: since we didn’t actually go through the details of the draft, was there anything that stood out to you?
[2:38:44] Commissioner Michelle Curry [probable]: The money for the fee in lieu and the fines: is that going to be earmarked to go towards trees, to canopies?
[2:38:53] Rebecca: Yes. It’ll get put into a special account to go towards that type of thing. The idea is that it goes into an account that could be used for tree and tree canopy purchases. The hope is that it’ll go for street trees or other stuff. I do want to put it into an account that could also possibly go towards purchase of property that can hold more tree canopy, and not just only purchase of trees and planting, or even maybe Arbor Day events. So all tree-related canopy improvements.
[2:39:46] Payton Murphy: Okay. Were there any other concerns with the tree regulations, questions or comments to direct us?
[2:39:58] Unidentified Commissioner: I would just ask that the credit system be as simple as you can possibly make it. Just keep it so simple.
[2:40:04] Rebecca: Did you have concerns with how we wrote it?
[2:40:06] Unidentified Commissioner: No, no. I’m just thinking of Renton. You guys can look up Renton. Just don’t make it like Renton. Please, please, please.
[2:40:14] Payton Murphy: I thought we got it pretty simple.
[2:40:18] Unidentified Commissioner: It seems— I think you’re okay.
[2:40:22] Rebecca: Okay. So our last question is: we have this code. If you weren’t aware, the development agreement ordinance was directed back to you. We have the STEP housing ordinance hopefully coming by the end of the year. We have a bunch of other stuff on your to-do list. Let me pull it up. So that’s probably a long list for the December meeting. So my question is: do you want to bring back the November meeting? Which means you would have two meetings in one week in November, because you’d have your normal Planning Commission—
[2:41:08] Chair DeLacy: Rebecca, my preference is for frequency rather than duration.
[2:41:14] Rebecca: There’s no hurry on some of these items. So the other option is to postpone some of the items to, for instance, January.
[2:41:23] Chair DeLacy: I think we should meet. I’d like to bring back the November 3rd meeting, try to keep it to an hour, hour and a half, wrap these things up, and then we’ll have the opportunity to meet with the council again in a great work session. But I think for continuity’s sake we need to keep these, and we won’t have to have these marathon meetings. So is everyone available for November 3rd?
[2:41:54] Rebecca: Okay. So my plan will probably be to bring the two specific ordinances, the trees and the development agreement, for November, if that sounds good.
[2:42:07] Unidentified Commissioner: Are we saying public hearing?
[2:42:09] Rebecca: If we’re ready, we will do that. We can plan for a public hearing for the trees on November 3rd.
[2:42:12] Unidentified Speaker: Election day.
[2:42:22] Unidentified Speaker: It is a Tuesday. So it is. Yeah, it would be. Well, all of you will have voted.
[2:42:31] Chair DeLacy: Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to say we’re at the end of our meeting. Our next meeting will be November 3rd. Is there a motion to adjourn?
[2:42:41] Unidentified Commissioner: I’ll make a motion.
[2:42:48] Chair DeLacy: Thank you. Is that seconded? All in favor? Okay. Tap my phone. Maybe next time I’ll get a gavel.