Okay, we would like to welcome you today to the Anacortis Planning Commission meeting of August 27th, and Ms. Glyklin, would you please take roll? Commissioner Mills.
Present.
Commissioner McCombs. Commissioner Ryan.
Present.
Commissioner Martin.
Here, Commissioner Stoneman.
Here.
Commissioner Jaretsky.
Here.
Commissioner Currier.
Here.
Okay.
Now for the pledge of allegiance, would you please join me?
I
pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Okay. Item number three is minutes, and Ms. Lyckman just informed me that we will have a number of minutes soon, but not for tonight.
Number four is public comment and it is awesome to see so many of you here tonight.
So let me explain about the public comment.
This is your opportunity to speak about something that's not on the agenda.
And I have a list of people that would like to speak.
We will also have a public hearing right after this.
and it looks like most of you have signed up that I can see for the public hearing.
But first, let's talk about just public comments.
Something that's not on the agenda, we will be happy to give you three minutes.
You can come up to the podium, state your name and the city that you live in
and give us whatever comments you would like to give.
I'm just going to pause for a minute.
I'm assuming most of you are here for the public hearing.
So anybody online for public comment?
There are no hands raised.
Okay.
Item number five is public hearing for the 2025 Comprehensive Plan Periodic Update.
Public hearing on the draft proposal 2025 to 2045 Comprehensive Plan.
Thank you. Okay. We will still give you three minutes in order to save some time. If you
have the same thing to say as somebody that's already spoken, you wouldn't mind just saying,
you know, I agree with so-and-so or whatever, that would just save us some time. But we will give you
your full three minutes. This is not a time for question and answer back and forth. So the commission
is here to hear, and most of us will take notes on what you have to say, and we do appreciate
that you care enough to come. So I'm just going to go down the list. The first person
on the list is Vicki.
Is Miss Libby Grage. Good evening. I'm Libby Grage. I'm the planning
manager and the planning and community and economic development department. The City
We have Anna Cortis. Welcome, everyone. It's good to see you all.
And I think first we do have a brief presentation just as background because I think there's probably
some folks online and an audience that maybe haven't been following along the entire process,
which has been going on for a while, so I'm just going to do a brief overview to bring us all
up to speed. And then first, I think John Coleman, the director, would like to say a couple
words too. Okay, thank you.
Good evening everybody. Planning commission. My name is John
Coleman. I'm the director of the Planning Community and Economic Development Department.
Nice to see so many people here today. Thank you all for coming. It's very good to see so many
people actively engaged in this important visioning process. So since a lot of people may not have
been following this closely over the past year and a half, two years that we've been working
on this process, I'm going to just give a brief overview of some of the highlights.
I'm going to try to keep it very brief.
And then Libby's going to give a brief presentation before we open it up to public hearing.
So as I was already mentioned, this is the 2025 to 2045 periodic update of our comprehensive plan.
This update is a required update per the Growth Management Act.
we have to update our comprehensive plan every 10 years and in that update process we look
at our next 20 years of projected growth. So this time we're looking at how much growth
we're anticipating between 2025 and 2045. So what does that all mean?
We're required to project how much population we're expecting over the next 20 years.
Along with that projection, we also have to look at how much housing we're going to have
to accommodate over the next 20 years to provide homes for those people that are moving to the
city.
We also have to anticipate 20 years' worth of jobs growth, so we're the process with the county that happened back in 2024.
We looked at how much the county was going to grow by and then we extrapolated based on past performance of other cities or past growth of all the cities and extrapolated how much of that growth is going to go to each city.
So, Annacortis, we used our past population growth to project how much we're expecting
over the next 20 years, same with jobs.
And then the Department of Commerce helped out with providing information about how many
housing units are going to be necessary, and I'll get into that a little bit.
So just as a baseline, what we're talking about is we're expecting just under 5,000 new residents
between 20, really 20, 23, and 20, 45, and that sounds like a lot. Right now, we're
at about 18,000 people. What that really is is if we look at our past population growth,
it's actually a little slower rate of growth than we've seen in previous decades, but still
We're still pretty close to what we've seen in the past decades.
To accommodate those residents, we're anticipating about 2,942 new homes are necessary.
And we're also expecting to accommodate 3,145 jobs.
So what that means is now we need to make sure that we've got enough land within our city limits in urban growth area to accommodate that number of houses and
So we did a whole land use analysis, land capacity analysis last year, and determined that we don't need to expand our urban growth area boundaries in order to accommodate that growth.
We have enough space within our existing planning area.
One note about these population projections is they're exactly that, they're projections.
questions. They're not targets. We're not saying we'd like to see this many people come.
Some people might like to see that many people. I'm sure a lot of people that live here would
not like to see that many people come here.
What we're doing is we're making sure that
we're addressing the future anticipated growth. So just because, you know, in such a case
where we felt like maybe we don't want to accommodate that much growth, we still want
to be prepared to because the people are going to move here. We don't have a way of saying
you can't move to Annacortis. We can't shut the door and say you can't come in. People
will likely move here. And so we just want to be prepared for that growth. That way we don't
suffer the ills of unplanned growth, which means what we want to do is we want to make sure
that we've got enough sewer capacity. We have enough water capacity. Our roads are in such
shape that can handle the anticipated growth in traffic and then we can also look at the
financial aspects of this and make sure that we're planning ahead for all of these
capital facilities and housing and whatnot.
So this process where we're at now is the
comprehensive plan review. After the comprehensive plan there's also development regulation updates
But the comprehensive plan is the vision statement that says, how do we want our city to look in 20 years?
And so we go through this public process where we ask people to participate.
We use information, staff researchers, information from the state,
past information, what do we have in the city limits and what will we need?
And so we're trying to bridge that gap between what we have and what we'll need over the next 20 years.
And we put that into our vision statement that is our comprehensive plan.
So this is the public's opportunity to say how they'd like their community to look over the next 20 years.
And so we are tasked with not only putting down what the community wants.
we also have to balance that with regulations that the state has in the Growth Management Act.
Over the past couple of years, there's been some major changes to the Growth Management Act that
requires us to now allow ADUs and planning commissions to talk a little bit about that.
Well, I think we still have more discussion around that.
We're required to have a climate element, so that's a new part of our comprehensive plan
and I know the planning commission has seen a lot of that.
We're also required to not only make sure we have enough land to accommodate all of our future housing.
We have to make sure that we've got the zoning in place to accommodate different types of housing.
So the state's now saying you have to plan not just to accommodate all of your housing as one type say single family houses are all apartments.
you have to provide a mix.
And what that means is we really need to accommodate
is housing in all sections of the area median income.
So that means people who earn 0% to 30% of the area median income,
you know, they make a very small amount of money.
And that's, we need to make sure that zoning
and systems are in place to accommodate that type of housing.
We don't necessarily have to build it, but we have to make sure that our rules allow for it.
And that's going to be anything in the 0 to 30 is going to be some sort of subsidized housing.
30 to 50% AMI area median income is another is the next segment.
That's also likely to be some sort of supported housing.
And the income brackets go up from there.
It's 50 to 80% AMI, 80 to 100% AMI.
and then 100 to 120% AMI and then 120 and above.
What the state says is that single-family homes,
based on what it costs to build a new single-family home,
you, a wage or a wage earning family needs to be
in the 120% AMI or higher in order to purchase
or build a new single-family residence.
So the Department of Commerce from the state
gave some guidelines about housing types, multi-family housing would be in that 0-80 and 0-50,
those are the types of housing that could accommodate those AMIs.
And then-
Mr. Coleman, just for the sake of everybody, can you explain what AMI means?
We've got area median income.
And that changes annually right now last year was about $108,000 for a family.
And there's, yeah, I don't want to get into the details on that.
But that's if you make $108,000 in 2024,
that was roughly the area median income.
And that way, you can see it would be tough to buy a new single family house
when it's going for over $700,000.
So we're trying to achieve, as we're required to achieve,
is making sure that we have zoning and housing policies in place to accommodate other types
of housing besides single families.
So that means duplexes, foreplexes, condominiums, multifamily, smaller apartments, single-family
houses, accessory dwelling units.
So that's been a large part of what we've worked on.
So I'm going to stop right there of just one brief reminder that there's a lot of information
available here and hopefully the communities had a chance to look at all.
If you go to our city 2025 to 2045 comprehensive update website on the planning page,
you'll find all of that information broken down by the different elements of the comp plan.
And if that's too hard to look up, I always like to say we've also created a website,
Or a shortcut called planacortis.com, or planacortis.org, that'll get you to that page.
I always like to plug that.
There's a lot of information there.
We're holding a public comment tonight.
We technically closed the public comment period after this, I think tomorrow is the last
day.
But we're going to keep it open because our development regulations, we're still working
on.
and we're going to bring those to the city council
or bring those to the Planning Commission, excuse me,
in the near future.
And so there's no reason to necessarily close
the comprehensive plan.
Public comment period, well, we haven't made any decisions. We're not expecting planning commission to make any decisions tonight, and we do and we recommend that we leave the public comment period open after this meeting. So, I'll turn it over to Libby Grage now. Thanks.
All right. Thank you, John, for that introduction. I will try not to repeat too much of that.
I don't think I will, but so the purpose of tonight's hearing is that it is an opportunity
for the public to provide their formal input on the proposed updates to the city's comprehensive
plan.
I was going to provide a brief overview of the overall update process, highlight key changes
and then recommend that we open the Florida public comment.
So, the comprehensive plan is, as John mentioned, it's the long range plan that guides growth
development and investment in Anacortis over the next 20 years.
It has nine elements within it, including land use, housing, economic development, capital
facilities, utilities, transportation, parks, recreation and open space, environment and
conservation and the new climate element and the comprehensive plan is required by the
Growth Management Act, which is a state law that has been around since the 90s.
The Growth Management Act is a law that requires fast growing counties and cities to plan
to manage population growth and we do that through our comprehensive plans and our implementing
development regulations. The Growth Management Act has 15 planning goals that are sort of the
framework for comprehensive plans. Comprehensive plans need to be for all cities and counties that are
planning under GMA, need to be consistent with the planning goals.
This is just a summary, these aren't the full goals, but you're welcome to go take a look at the statute to see the full text there.
The goals aren't in any order of priority in the state laws, really up to the local jurisdictions to develop their comprehensive plan.
plans and development regulations to be not in conflict with these goals to give some
effect to the goals and not and to prioritize and balance between the goals in accordance
with the community's vision for its future. So what we're doing through this process.
So again, we're required to do an update to the comprehensive plan under the Growth Management
This is a mandatory update that GMA requires every 10 years.
The last periodic update that the city completed was done, the conference plan was done in 2016.
And the development regulations were a few years later in 2019.
So it's been a little while.
The reason that we, another reason to do the update is to ensure that all of our local policies and regulations are consistent with state law.
And also making sure that as John mentioned, planning for growth, we want to avoid the ills of unplanned growth.
So, going through this process helps us plan appropriately and make sure we have the infrastructure in place to accommodate the projected future growth.
So, with the periodic update, there are some mandatory requirements, so the State Law Growth Management Act requires the city to look at or to address certain topics through the update process.
And that includes the new growth projections that John mentioned and also looking at the urban
growth area capacity to accommodate those growth projections.
We also look at changes in state law, new legislation passed by the Washington State Legislature.
And there's been quite a bit recently, especially since 2016.
a lot of new legislation about around housing, and there's also been new law requiring jurisdictions
to plan for climate change.
This is just a slide sort of recapping the growth information, the growth projections.
So, you'll see, so these are 20-year growth projections.
This table is showing the 2022 estimated information for population and jobs.
And then what is projected for 2045 and then the difference.
So the anticipated or projected growth over that 20 years.
This table comes out of one of the documents that's available on the website.
The LAN capacity analysis that John mentioned, it is sort of showing the number of projected
housing, it's projecting housing needs in number of units based on income band.
So, you can see down at the bottom, you've got the 0-30, 31-50, 51-80, and so on, and then
these bars are showing the projected need for new homes affordable to these income levels.
And so you can see the biggest need here is the zero to 30% with little over 900 units projected to be needed over the next 20 years.
And then so on, 604 new units in the 31 to 50, so on and so on.
And so the land capacity analysis corresponds the different income levels with the types of housing that are likely to be affordable to those income levels.
And then the city has to make sure that we have the zoning in place to accommodate those types of housing throughout the city.
So,
in addition to the mandatory updates that are just required under GMA in the state law,
we also have some updates that are not mandatory, but are proposed in order to address local
needs.
The City Council last year, docketed a list of development regulation and comp plan policy
amendments that you can find on Resolution 3161 is available on our project website but that
contains a list of, you know, in addition to all of the state-mandated things, these are the other
items that we want to consider as part of the update process. So those include some different
There are revisions to policies around housing, walkability, and historic preservation.
There were some petitions from landowners to change the future land use designation of their properties.
The city submitted a request to the county to change the urban growth area boundary to include certain city-owned parcels that are adjacent
to the Antiquitous Community Forest Lands in order to eventually bring those into city limits so
that the city's regulations would apply and those properties are all or most of them are protected by
restrictive covenants that mean that their use will continue to be recreation ACFL city operations purposes.
So, they will not be used to accommodate any housing or jobs growth.
And actually that amendment was adopted by the county, not too long ago.
And then also on the docket is some property owner proposed or some citizen initiated development
regulation amendments.
So this isn't called plan amendments, but development regulations, so they wanted to see certain changes to regulations and so those are being considered through this process as well.
So I just, I know there's a lot of different things that are being updated and so I wanted to give you a summary of those things and kind of what to expect coming up because tonight is our public hearing about the comprehensive plan.
And that is sort of the policy level guidance document that we will soon be releasing our
draft amendments to development regulations which the development regulations are actually
the rules that govern what can be built on the grounds and how.
So, that includes things like the zoning regulations, the official zoning map, permitted
uses, subdivision standards, parking, lot size, setbacks, so all of those details and
standards are in development regulations.
And we have not released a draft for public review yet, so that will be coming in September,
soon.
So and then finally critical areas regulations are also required to be updated as part
of this process.
Currently the city has hired a consulting firm to look at the best available
science which we're required to use in designating and protecting critical areas looking at what has
changed in the best available science since the last time we conducted an update and so
they're working on writing those reports right now and we should have some drafts on
that soon. The next steps for that part of the process will be doing some public engagement
and then ultimately drafting amendments and those will also go through public review process.
So the conference of plan and development regulations have a deadline of December 31st, 2025.
So we expect to have those adopted by a city council by that date.
The critical areas regulations are also, they have a due date of December 31st, 2025, however,
as long as the city continues making substantial progress towards completing those updates.
It's the actual deadline is when you get a one-year extension.
So we anticipate meeting that deadline.
So just a quick overview of the process that we've been through so far for
this periodic update, the process is broken down into two phases.
Phase one was occurring all through 2024.
There was a lot of information gathering and analysis, we did a lot of public outreach going to different community events over the summer and trying to get the word out that this update process was happening and asking people to get involved to sign up for email list distribution list so that they could be notified of upcoming dates and releases of draft documents, etc.
The City Council established a climate team by resolution, which was formed to help in the development of the new climate element, and so they met four times over the course of last year to help guide that document.
City staff also released draft preliminary goal and policy revision proposals in sort of a table format for each element.
And so and that's available on the website as well, so you'll see for each element the existing comprehensive plan language, bulls and policies.
the proposed change to the policy if there was one and strike through underline format and then a rationale for the reason for the proposed change.
So you can kind of track what this was required because state law changed or trying to consolidate policies to make things more concise and clear, things like that.
So that's all available for the public.
All of those, we've been calling them revision trackers, but those documents all went through.
Through a public comment period and public hearings, so that all happened last year, so we got public feedback on those and then took all of that input and created a complete compiled draft comprehensive plan, draft comprehensive plan that we released in July of this year.
And so that is sort of the kickoff, the beginning of phase two, which is where we're at now.
So the next steps are going to be releasing the draft development regulations, as I mentioned.
Public comment, public hearings on those.
And then ultimately, City Council will review an adoption of all of these amendments.
This is just a calendar and visual format calendar or timeline showing the overall process
from the beginning of 2024.
We are here where the yellow circle is in phase two.
Just real quickly next steps after tonight and we can talk about this later too if there
are questions, commissioners.
As John mentioned, we would just recommend keeping the public hearing open, keeping the public
comment period open after tonight.
There will be another planning commission meeting on September 10th where we could continue
to take comments if needed and plan to discuss the new draft development regulation amendments.
So that will be sort of the beginning of that discussion.
And then this is trying to estimate what's going to be happening at each planning commission
meeting over the next couple of months to get through this process.
This will all be putting this presentation online so folks can get to this schedule.
So again, how to comment, we're glad you're all here tonight to provide your feedback.
So that is one way that you can provide public comments.
You can also submit written comments to your comp plan at anacortiswaw.gov.
You can also mail them, mail written comments to this address.
And then just another plug for planacortis.org or comp, it doesn't matter, either one will
get you there.
And there's just so much information on the website that has been developed to support this
update process.
So, this is just a list of all of those reports and analysis.
Okay, I'm done.
Sorry for taking so long.
All right, that's all I have.
And thank you.
That was very helpful.
Okay.
So, now we're going to officially open the public hearing for the Comprehensive Plan.
and I'm just going to use the list of in the order that you signed up and if you came in and didn't have a chance to sign up or you want to speak after that, you're welcome to do that.
Again, I'm going to ask that you come to the podium, make sure the microphone is on and we will give you three minutes and I believe can you see.
So that one has the countdown and then there's also the red yellow green lights on the podium.
Okay, so I'm going to because there are so many of you, I'm going to try and be pretty much of a stickler to make sure that it stays to the three minutes so that we can make sure we hear from all of you because that's what we want to do.
Okay. With that, the first person is Vicki Starch. I hope I'm not saying names wrong, and this is regarding housing.
So, yeah, push the button so it's...
Is it on now? Yes. Good evening commissioners.
Just say your name and your city. Yeah.
I'm Vicki Stache. I live at 20033 Nice Street and a quarter. So, I'm here tonight to talk about the housing.
element of the plan and to tell you that I am definitely a supporter of the
need for all types of housing. I've worked in the community in various aspects
with seniors, with low income people, with wealthy people, the whole nine yards
over the years and I see a big need for particularly that housing for what we
all the middle area. Families, seniors that maybe are wanting to downsize. We have some
really good examples already of townhouses, triplexes, even ADUs that to me look just great.
One example is the housing across the street from the library. Those are condos, but you
to know it looking at them and least stereotypically.
So I would really encourage us to move forward
in that direction.
We can't just be a community of can't afford us,
which we are known as in many ways.
We have lots of families here who are below the median income.
They are the people that are working in the restaurants
and nursing homes, the hospitals.
That's all taken account in your plan.
So I commend you for the work that you've done.
So again, I support and I hope that anybody that's here tonight that's a NIMBY will also come around to that point of view after they've read the plan.
So thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Okay, next person, Stan and D.
I'm sorry.
I just hate butchering people's names.
Jim Kus.
And Jim Kus, 1307, Irri Avenue.
And I guess Mary Stoll, she's probably having this whole thing up.
The fire we got in the mail, I just thought it was junk mail.
And on the back side, there was a lot to read, but I didn't go all the way through it.
After I threw it away, she contacted us and said, hey, did you read everything that's
on there. So I hadn't, but I'm concerned because there's two lots between us, between Erie
and Dakota, and I understand that it's possible that the zoning would be changed from residential
to multifamily. And, you know, I don't know if multifamily is a duplex or triplex or exactly
what it is, but I'm concerned about that. Also, the property that is there, it hasn't
ever been mowed. West Second is, I guess it's the designated wetlands. Well, the city
is pretty good. Man, every time it gets up a little bit, they're out there with their
little robot cut it down but in between the two houses here between Dakota and
our house the grass is up four feet and it is a fire hazard thank goodness we
haven't had a fire but I would think that the city must have some ruling that a
property owner would take care of their their lot so anyway that's my
concerns. I'm sure Mary has a lot more to put in. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Okay, next, Carol France, about responding to speak about housing.
That's fine, no problem. All right, next person, Sandra Shimkas.
Yes.
Thank you.
Next person, Ron Johnson, regarding the plan.
I'll do the previous ones.
I thought that was a sign in.
I'm new to the community.
Ron Johnson from Anacortis.
However, as long as I have three minutes, my one concern or multiple concerns with the plan,
And I've already submitted written comments, but with the recent legislative session,
it seems like our state government is trying to discourage business and investment in the state.
So, I'm not sure that growth in a positive vein is necessarily predictable anymore.
We could also have negative growth.
So I just wanted to make that point.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next person, Mark.
I'm not sure Leon.
It's
Mark Leone, 4902, Paisley Place, and Accordus.
I just want to reiterate Biggie Stosh's comments.
I owned a small business here in town for 20 years, and it was a hospitality business.
Service workers were very difficult to find places in Anacordus to work, to live, and support their families.
So, I think it's a critical issue to find and make adjustments to building codes to allow for development of affordable housing.
That's it, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next person, Heather McPhale, housing and transport.
Is this all?
Okay, just stay here and just support of a couple policies.
Just state your name and I'm sorry. My name is Heather McPhale. I live on Macbeth Drive 5105.
I'm here to support a couple policies that are in the plan as presented to us so far.
One is the policy H-46, which is that the policy is to look into more emergency shelters, especially for our youth.
The last I checked with Director Johnson at the family center, there were over 200 kids,
children who are couch surfing in an accordus. This shouldn't happen.
So that's, I was pleased to see that you've taken that into consideration and that you're encouraging it.
The next two policy numbers are policy T2.32 and T2.33.
They have to do with transportation for the elderly who I'm old and I live in skyline
and if I get to the point where I can no longer drive, which I hope won't happen too soon,
but I will have to walk a mile to get to the bus and I think that needs to be
reconsidered to. The idea on those two policy items that I mentioned to you
would be a reasonable answer to that problem for a lot of people who live out
there. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.
Next person, Mary, I think it's
stall, housing and zoning?
By the way, you can just state that you live in Annacordas.
You don't have to state your whole address unless you want to.
Mary's stall and I live in Annacordas.
Thanks.
Well, I really came here to ask questions, and apparently we're not doing that.
So I live on Dakota, and we had questions about this particular piece of property
that when it was sold, the new person that bought it immediately wanted to go and went downtown
to see about building a triplex.
Now, we don't have, the neighborhood is kind of small, where second is a grass path,
and there's an alley behind me, and then the neighbors live on either side, and a triplex would be
completely out of character for the neighborhood and I know that Ryan has talked about organic
integration which I kind of don't get the connection with the word to building but anyway
this is our concern that our lovely little neighborhood is going to somehow be ruined
by either triplexes or many homes A to U's in this particular lot which is a third of an
So, that's just, I mean, not against all of the, you know, having more housing.
An accordus is definitely unaffordable for many low-income people.
But we can do that at the sacrificing our neighborhoods to be there.
So, that's my thing for now.
Otherwise, they have a million questions, which...
Just for the sake, for your sake and the rest of the audience, yes, we're not answering questions right now, but there are many answers actually online already. You can check what the zoning is. And you can also check with our great staff.
You have to speak in. It says what the zoning is now. There's no comparison. There's no, this is the
what the zoning is now. This is what we're proposing. Okay, we don't see any of that. Also,
the notice that I got in the mail from you a couple of weeks ago was the first that I've really
heard about this planning commission, which apparently has been going on for a year and a half.
So that's my rant. Thank you.
Next person, Pat Barrett,
but regarding Olson and medium housing.
Thank you for your time, I don't think you'll have a problem here in me.
My name is Pat Barrett, I live in Anacourt, is Washington in Old Town.
I think that's in Washington state.
Anyway, the bottom line is I have a few comments to make and
acknowledge that thank you all for doing what you're doing.
It's a tough job, I sit on a government housing, I sit on the Anacourt,
is housing authority and it's the first time I've sat on a government panel or a government
commission.
It's hell because you can't really, you can't really air your laundry in public very easily
because everybody hears it and nobody wants to see your dirty laundry.
Anyway, bottom line is from a housing standpoint and I'll echo Mark's comments with regard
to housing.
My family has been in town for a long time, and we are very active in the community
and our active in various businesses, and my son owns Pelican Books.
And Eli says very eloquently that the biggest risk to a true small business in this town is housing.
I mean, we can all talk about, you know, the ability to build a big house and the zoning
problems and the headaches with the city to build a big house out in the skyline or
out in, you know, rock ridge or places like that, but that's not where our challenge lies.
We can't hire people for restaurants in this town because they can't afford to pay those
people to live here. And it's not that they want to buy a big house. His employees just can't
find a rental. It's tough. And the fact that we've loosened the 80 U rules up is great. That's
going to help a lot.
But we need small, we housing, not two bedroom housing, frankly. The housing
The housing authority has quite a few, it's the least demanding housing that they have
coming to them.
What they need is single family or single people, two people living in a home and you
don't need a big house for that.
I say that and I live in a big house because I bought a big house in old town and it worked
out for us but as a family we believe in housing and getting our kids here and keeping them
in town so that they can continue to work.
On the housing note, I appreciate the fact that in the plan you've changed light manufacturing on the Olsen building property to CBD.
It helps us keep in line with our goals as a housing authority to build that property out.
The plans aren't final yet, the permitting process has started the goal at this stage of the game is to have 27 units.
Thank you.
All right.
Anyway, good job.
Thanks for doing it.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Okay.
Next person, Dustin, might be Johnson?
Yeah.
Hi.
Good evening.
My name is Dustin.
in Johnson from I live in work in Annacortis.
My day job is as the Annacortis Family Center's executive director.
And I am not an expert in a lot of things.
I'm an expert in a few things.
One of them being affordable housing and the need for more access,
for housing, for low income people.
I set as the president of the senior center as the president
of the senior center foundation board.
One of the things that we heard continuously
seriously is that our seniors don't have the ability to downsize because they can't afford places to downsize to age in place.
So we're kicking our seniors out of their housing, or they're not moving out of housing to make room for
new families or families that are people wanting to return to our community.
I think it's important when Libby talks about those income ranges, who are those people?
And if you look at the zero to 50% median income range,
you're looking at someone who's making $40,000 to $50,000 a year if they're a family of four.
So two adults, two kids, or a single mom with three kids, and that's not uncommon in our community.
That person is making between $20 and $25 an hour.
What we heard consistently, and what I hear consistently in our community,
is we want those folks to live in this community for a couple of reasons.
And it's number one, if you look at the crisis point that we're at with our school district,
the biggest reason that our school district is constricting in so many ways,
is because we don't have the ability for new families to move here.
And so our enrollment rates are dropping and dropping and dropping.
The second biggest issue that we see and I just had a conversation with the family that owns
many of the assisted living facilities around AFC and in neighboring areas.
And what they continuously say is that they cannot plan for an emergency if one or both
bridges were to go out, the support staff that would need to come to support the patients
living and assisted living to open our hospitals, to open our clinics simply wouldn't be able
to get on island because they can't afford to live here.
Therefore, those folks are going to go suffering, people are going to die, and those consequences
are going to be huge.
So what I stand here asking you today as the leaders in our community around planning
is to make planning easier, especially at the affordable levels, remove the barriers.
It is not a silver bullet.
There are still so many issues to building and to building affordable housing in our community,
But reducing barriers is absolutely attainable and is something that is well within your reach.
Thank you.
Next person, I believe it says, Tarn, O'Hana,
and this is regarding climate change,
element, land capacity, analysis, et cetera.
I apologize for my handwriting.
That's okay.
Okay.
Good evening, everyone.
I want to thank the Planning Commission and the Planning Department.
I want to thank the Planning Commission and the Planning Department for their outreach communication, the planning quarters dot org website and it's really well done.
I wanted to thank everyone for that.
A lot of people have come here to talk about the need for housing and different types of housing.
So I'm going to kind of gloss over that, but we need more homes of different types everywhere in this city.
I've noticed that the current plan continues to cluster high-density homes, which are going to be more affordable to younger families.
People with children on high, high-volume materials, high-speed high-volume materials, which tend to be much more dangerous, more polluted.
And I think that is an error when we talk about planning document as a vision for a community, our values.
I think we need to consider pushing the limits on what we consider medium housing throughout the city.
There's no place in Anacortis should be inaccessible to transit.
But it's not a particularly big city.
We should be capable of handling getting people to and from their homes to work to their
leisure without needing to operate a motor vehicle at any age, really.
I'd like to address some of the policies and goals.
I think goal H2, which is the allowing for organic change, but limiting that change.
not extreme. It's a very wishy-washy. That doesn't really address what organic change looks like,
and how extreme change looks. It gives us a lot of wiggle room. There are some specific
transportation policies that I'd like to address in the remaining minute. A policy T-1.10,
I would like to point out that damage to the road surface which turns out to be a very expensive
of city expenditure to fix and also as a heart's community livability increases at the
fourth power to the weight of the axle of the vehicles on there.
So what we really need to do is we need to introduce a goal to reduce the vehicle miles
traveled per person.
I also think we need to re-address the concept of the level of service.
We need to set a minimum threshold for doing this analysis under policy T3.4.
and policy T3.22 publicly invest in public parking, that is a mistake.
That is waste of public resources and we need to eliminate that as a policy goal, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Three minutes.
Good job.
Darleen Follett, Able Housing, I think ADA.
Thank you, my name is Dereen Follett, I live in Skyline.
And I just wanted to again thank you and everyone for this comprehensive plan.
One of the things that is very close to my heart is our intellectually disabled in our
community and finding housing that will support them in the future and in perpetuity.
And we have discussed with the HACS committee and we'll be sending our document and our notes
to hopefully have some of the H4 changes in there that specifically states what our population
is in need of. Currently, one of the things that's discussed in there is group housing,
which they can't actually do with the, we need more integration into just single family
homes, so the ADU's cottages and smaller homes are the focus because the support services
that they're provided that is not their parent, it has to be done in a non-group setting.
And so we will be requesting some changes to the information there.
I also wanted to just say that I support exactly what Pat and Dustin have said that we need
more affordable housing. One of the things that is happening right now is our habitat
for humanity houses, and this is an exciting time for an accordist to get housing that's
affordable, except that our parent educators that work in our schools that help our children
can't afford a habitat for humanity house because they can't afford 70 to 80% AMI in an
So we really do need that lower AMI and more housing to help support those people.
And these are the same people that will be helping to support our developmentally disabled.
Because it's not a high paying job.
There are zero services for our children.
And it is going to be a problem because a lot of our kids have very aging parents.
We've identified a number, I believe it's 46 currently and a lot of those parents are in their 70s and 80s and what will happen to our children is they will be picked up and removed from their community, from their house, from their jobs.
These are people that work in our community, they're not homeless, they're not drug addicted, they're not any of these things that they're grouped into in a usual manner in something like this.
So we just want to make sure to give them their own voice in this comprehensive plan for their future in perpetuity.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next person is Marlene Finley, all.
Good evening, my name is Marlene Finley.
I live in Annacortis, and I'm here this evening representing Evergreen Islands.
Evergreen Islands is a local nonprofit which has been working since 1977 to ensure
the built and natural environment remains healthy for future generations here locally.
So I just had, we submitted seven pages of comments so I just wanted to touch on a few
this evening.
We've been actively participating in the city's road bus public involvement process.
There's been 20 or so meetings between the Planning Commission and City Council, the three
We open houses, the climate team, the surveys, and much more.
And a lot of comments have been received by the city, but we don't see the response loop.
We haven't seen how the city is analyzing and tracking the public feedback.
back.
And
We couldn't find that on the website, so it would, we feel like it's important to show how the public's being listened to. Then under the climate element, we'd like to see the city taking a stronger leadership role on guiding the future of March point with the two refineries. By far the March point refineries are the greatest greenhouse gas emitters in our area, although they're not within the city
boundaries, they are within the growth area management, the urban growth area.
So they are subject, the refineries, zoning is subject to an accordous municipal code
and is shaped by the an accordous comprehensive plan, but the county manages the permitting
and environmental review process.
So, between the two things can kind of fall away and not, and attention not paid.
So, what we are recommending is that the city take the lead in a sub area plan for
March point to help guide the future of March point.
And if you want an example, Tacoma has a title flat sub area plan where they work for
several years with tribes, the county, the city, industry leaders, and interest group
representatives.
So March point.
Another area I wanted to bring up is as the strategy in the comprehensive plan is for
infill, is for higher density in those undeveloped parcels we've heard about this evening, we'd
I'd like to see focus on the storm water management and sewer capacity, as the areas are, as if there's going to be more density in those areas, that the city plan for the storm water management and sewer capacity with higher density.
Also, I want to bring to your attention that the plan recommends.
Yes, your time is up.
Okay, well we have written comments and we wanted to thank all the staff and we noticed the department heads that have also been attending the meetings. Thank you. Thank you.
Okay, next person, Michelle Shaw, emailed concerns.
By the way, we have received many written and emailed comments and believe me, we're reading them carefully.
I'm Michelle Shodd, I wasn't really planning to talk tonight, but one of the things I would like to address is pedestrian safety and with all this growth we live out by Washington Park, but getting into town is very unsafe, I've asked the city public works to put in a crosswalk out that way because we have a tourist destination out there that many people don't are not aware of what's happening with all these
speeding cars and their kids or bus stops, that's my biggest concern and then walking into town is not feasible for many of us because of all the traffic and people on their phones and just all this added road things, which probably is something to do with climate and emissions, but that's pretty much what I wanted to say and address, and I did send in comments about this to the commission.
Thank you. Thank you.
Next person is Robert. I'm not sure how to say your last name, SH.
Oh, okay. Let's see here.
Next person, Sarah Roberts.
Good evening. My name is Sarah Roberts and I'm from Anacortis.
And I was not planning on talking. I was just signing in.
So this might sound a little incoherent.
I really support a lot of the comments that went before about the housing.
When I was talking to a city employee back early on in an open house, one of the things
that he said was that you can have a parcel zoned for a certain type of house, but you can't
actually make someone build that kind of house there.
So I'm concerned that we won't actually get these lower income and
mid-income houses in there unless we have a way of controlling or
incentivizing the developers to put in those houses.
I see from perhaps layman's terms that one of the mistakes that
Anacotus made was all of the developments out to wealth,
the really kind of in general fancy houses.
They attracted a lot of out of town people.
It made the developers very happy,
but didn't really solve our local housing problems.
What I'd like to see is mixed type housing
instead of trying to stratify the types of housing
within an area mixed type housing seems the healthiest, lower crime, more sort of
social justice oriented rather than trying to have the high end, high income. So even
in precious downtown I think we can look at ways of opening it up to some
higher density housing here and there and that with that focus in housing consideration
should be made for access to parks, pedestrian friendly access to shops for people that
can't afford the gas or the cars or so on access to schools. The other thing I want
to promote is plant some trees. I'd like more trees around the city, more trees in the
development trees are good for temperature, water, run-off, mood,
para, important for a lot of things, and they make the peel of the
town much, much better. So, thank you for your time, and thank you so much for
the work you've done.
Thank you.
Next person.
And Jerry, I think it's Jerry, or Terry,
show S-H-O-E-N, show-and-thall, here we go.
Thank you.
I'm sorry, I'm butchering names, and I hate to do that.
Good evening.
My name's Terry, show-and-thall.
I'm an Anacorder's resident.
And we've lived in Anacorder's now for the past six years, and I've been pretty ruthless.
in talking to our neighbors and the people who work here in town about whether they actually live here or not.
And I think one of the key things is that we have hundreds and hundreds of people who work here every day
who would love to live here in Anacortis and who simply cannot. It's just out of their reach.
And we see it every day with the traffic flowing in in the morning and the traffic flowing out at night.
And we've seen some nice diagrams talking about the stratification of what we really need.
We need the low income housing.
What we need is housing and lots of it.
It doesn't, you can't control a lot of the aspects that it's very hard to control that.
It's going to be low income or whatever.
But housing does become more affordable, the more of it that you construct.
So in the last go-around, when the development standards were set, five story units were
allowed.
One jumped, oh, quickly jumped at it, and it turned into this huge bruhaha in the community.
That it was changing things, there was a more Tory input up about it, and we really haven't
seen much a lot in the way since then, but we also know that five stories is one of those
economic hurdles that developers look to overcome.
So my personal thing is avoid the conditional use wherever you can.
Remove the hurdles to construction.
Don't fret whether you're getting upper level construction happening or for affordability.
I mean, focus on that to some degree.
But remove the hurdles to construction and construction will happen.
I think we've already seen some of that, so I guess one of my things is that the way
to avoid some of the nimbyism that happens in our community is to simply permit outright
the housing that we want.
Don't spend a lot of time and a lot of agony turning them into conditional use where hundreds
of people come in and fret about whether or not this is going to change the community.
It will.
It will change the community over time.
But I would argue that the community is a lot different now than it was before in terms of gated communities and multi-million dollar homes as well.
So, housing, we needed here so thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next person is Chris.
And I don't know what the last name is.
Chris is coming, okay?
Ironically I'm one of those people that had no intention of speaking, but I'm going to go ahead and speak anyway because I'm spilling over but I'm going to try to focus my attention on affordability.
I'm a developer builder, so stay state your name.
I'm Christiana and I'm a resident of Anacourt as well.
I've also been a developer and builder in town for many, many years and I can understand everybody's points that were here.
people that want things to stay the same I've been here since 1974, my parents were both teachers here.
I've watched the town change in many different ways, so I understand the people that want the town
to stay the same, but like all small towns in this country, there's going to be change.
The one thing I wanted to talk about is affordable housing.
Everybody talks about affordable housing and my question is affordable to who.
In the last five to six years, the average cost for me to build a home has gone up $36,000.
because of energy code, which I understand needs to happen, because of storm water.
All the different changes, the code requirements, each of these houses I build has gone up on the average of $36,000 a year.
So to build, I build multi-million dollar homes, I build duplexes, I build every level of home there is.
But for me to build a duplex, I pay basically permit fees for two homes.
So what I've always said that we should, as a municipality, maybe make it more affordable for
developers and builders to build affordable housing, come back with reduced permit fees for multi-housing.
To the point where I would love to be a philanthropist and build free homes for everybody.
But it's a really bad business model for me to build homes that I'm going to lose money on.
When I could help the community and build more homes at a more affordable price,
but it's going to take all of us from different angles to make housing affordable.
And right now I find it a challenge as a builder and developer.
It's not anybody's fault, but the time it takes to get a permit, the cost of permits,
the impact fees, all those things.
It just keeps growing the price for me to build a home to the point where at the end it's not affordable to just about anybody in that load.
And that's, I mean, according to the GMA, that's the housing market that we need to be focused on.
That's where we need the most homes, but I can't, as a builder, build homes that are going to meet that requirement.
So, that's my concern, that's my comment.
Thank you very much.
Okay, next person is Trina Wary.
Good evening, my name is Trina Wary.
I live in Annacorta, so I'm a relatively new resident.
What I hear tonight, and I'm very interested in this comprehensive plan because it is showing us, as was stated earlier, a vision, and we need visions, we need to have a goal to figure out where we want to go.
And when I hear about housing, and I hear from Dustin Johnson, and I hear from Mark Leone, and I hear from Vicki Stouch, we need affordable housing.
and we want people to come and we want people to go out and enjoy the area and we need service folks, we need people that want to work there.
So that kind of housing is just critical.
And then when I see on the charts that you showed here, that 900 units for people in the 0 to 30% AMI and then another 600 units for a 30 to 50% AMI, that's the vast majority.
majority, 1,500 units.
So I think it's really clear that information is giving you the road map for the city.
That's all I have.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next person is Laurie Gehr.
Thank you.
Next person is Courtney Orrick.
She left and
it says here no comment.
Sorry. One more who signed up, but again, if you want to speak and you haven't signed
up, I'm going to give you the opportunity. The last person on my list here is Louise
Brissy.
No? Okay. Is there anybody else who would like to speak? Come on up.
Good evening. My name is Betsy Braun, and I am a resident of the city of Anacortis. First, I have in my past life put these kinds of plans together in another life. And I just want to say a huge shout out to everybody at the city and all the people in the community who've participated in putting this plan together because it is awesome.
And I'm really excited after reading through it about where the city is going and how thoughtful and how forward-thinking this plan is.
So huge shout out.
Second, I would like to talk a little bit about barriers to development.
But I live on a property here in Anacortis that has a covenant that extends from Diavenu all the way to Anacopper Road.
And interestingly enough, that covenant was put on the original plat for the property.
And it completely restricts everything that density would otherwise want to produce in that neighborhood.
I know it's not being followed.
I've gone to open houses and I have seen accessory dwelling units and I've seen people converting garages and there's a new three-story house right across the street for me that's under construction that is in violation of that covenant.
So clearly nobody wants it, but it's hundreds of properties and we need help from the city to provide leadership to remove it.
But I know that there are similar covenants and similar homeowners association restrictions in many other parts of the city that are going to prevent the development that this plan is intending to encourage.
So I would ask the city to help us move forward and move past these 1970s, single family, single story with a walk out basement, no accessory dwelling unit to garages, thinking that we need to move past.
And that's, you know, 50, 60 years ago, it's time.
I also would like to say that I read the whole thing, all the attachments, everything.
And it was difficult to follow, to have things struck out and have the new language inserted,
especially when there'd be pages and pages of strikeouts and then pages of inserts.
On the next iteration, could you issue both the one with changes in a conformed document so that we can go through the conformed document if we have a question, see back to what's changed?
I think that would just make the whole flow of the plan and the review process much easier for those of us who don't do this for a living anymore.
And lastly, I want to give a shout out to the city's planning department.
I got a permit in two hours for a little renovation.
How can we scale that up for developers who need to be able to walk in in a day and walk out with their permit?
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Jordan Hay, I live right here in Anacortis and I'm here to speak for the Downtown Anacortis Alliance Board.
I want to thank you all for the work you've done on the 2025 comprehensive plan.
It's great as Anacortis' main street organization, we use the Comprehensive Plan as the foundation
of our work which keeps us aligned with the city and with our community and so we're
really excited that you can put energy into having it there.
In this plan we strongly support the emphasis on gathering spaces, workforce housing, pedestrian
friendly streets, connections to the waterfront and the arts and the creative district.
This plan gives us clear direction and we really look forward to partnering with the city to bring it to life.
Thanks.
Thank you very much.
Anybody else?
Okay, as recommended we're going to leave this public hearing open.
So with that, we're going to move on to the next item of business.
Madam Chair.
Yes. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to make sure that we gave folks that are online the opportunity to speak if they would raise their hand if they would like to make a comment.
There's no hands raised at the moment.
Thanks. That's all.
Thanks.
Other business looks like I have nothing other business, but I do have a packet with things.
Miss,
Miss Grage,
I'm
sorry, you do have a packet?
I have a packet, yes, you do have a packet, so there isn't, I don't have any updates for the planning department.
The packet document contains an updated staff report, supplemental staff report regarding the future land use amendment changes.
And so it's mostly stuff, mostly you've already seen, we added some information about the additional amendment requests for the Wilson property and the museum property, right?
Okay.
Madam Chairman.
Mr. Mills.
I just wanted to acknowledge that in reading that updated packet that I set back information that I requested has not been embedded in that I appreciate.
Okay, so I'm moving on to item 7, which is Planning Department Update.
All right, thank you to everybody that showed up tonight.
That was an incredibly well-run and informative public hearing.
So I've done this a long time, that was really impressive.
So, getting to our Planning Department update, we were just here last week and nothing of major consequence that I can remember has happened in the past week, so I don't have a lot to offer any new information for the Planning Commission tonight.
I apologize.
I don't apologize, nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, I do have a question, and I wish I would have looked ahead of time, but there is a meeting, I think it's September 9th.
I think it's at the Mount Vernon Library, and it's regarding housing.
So that's another North Star presentation, we can have Greg Colburn present again.
Thank you.
I believe Greg presented at the North Star Seminar Symposium, which was, I believe, June 6th or June 9th, I can't remember.
But he's going to be giving another presentation at the request of North Star to talk about the importance of housing and
And you probably recall he's the author of housing homelessness is a housing problem.
So a lot of data indicating the correlation between the lack of affordable housing in
housing in general and homelessness.
And then discussing how these issues can be addressed and things that can be done.
Thank you.
And planning commissioners was recommended if you are able to go.
You do need to sign up and I just wanted to make sure or see.
I have signed up.
Has anybody else on the commission signed up,
okay?
If you're interested, you would go to the North Star website.
I don't know what that website is, but I'm sure you can find it.
And I think it's about two hours, something like that?
Yeah, that would seem like right.
Six to eight or something like that.
But if you're interested, I guess it'd be important to let Mr.
Coleman know, because if there are more than three of us,
that would, we would need to publish that as a meeting.
I would appreciate that, thank you.
Thanks.
Okay, anything else for the good of the order commissioners?
Do we need to revisit, I'm sorry, I don't remember.
Mr. Mills.
Do we need to revisit the schedule of special meetings that we have laying it out for the next couple of months?
Or is there still as no change?
I don't know the answer to that.
Do you have information about the schedule?
So you have that in your PowerPoint,
yes.
And I can also send this out as well.
So the September 24th, as I remember, was the question about whether we would have a quorum.
September 24th.
If you actually look at all of these dates, and if you know, I know that I won't be here on
October 1st or 8th?
Okay, September 17th, Mr. Dretzky can't make it, but can everybody else make it?
17th, yes, 24th. No.
Okay, the 24th. Mr. Mills will not be there.
I'm also out the 24th.
And Mr. Stoneman, everybody else as far as you know?
Okay, so I think we're fine. I think we will have a quorum each meeting.
Okay,
Mr. Ryan says October 1st he will not be there, that still gives us a quorum, so I think we're fine.
Okay, so we were slow to start taking notes.
What we're seeing is on September 24th, Commissioner Stoneman and Mills are unavailable, any others?
The Mr. McCombs say he can, okay.
Mr. McCombs, we were wondering.
Is it no, also?
No, he said he would be here.
So we'll have a quorum it looks like for each of these meetings.
And then October 1st is just Commissioner Ryan, that's unavailable.
And me.
Okay, okay.
And I will not be available on the 8th either,
okay?
Anything else for the good of the order?
Did you want to excuse Mr. Mills' absence today?
We did not do that earlier.
Mr. McCombs absence.
Sorry, Mr. McCombs, I would like
to move that we excuse Mr. McCombs.
I'll second that.
Okay, it's been moved and seconded to excuse Mr. McCombs for today.
All those in favor, signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed.
Okay, Mr. McCombs is excused.
thank you. Okay it is 728 and we are adjourned.
Thank you very much.