Planning Commission

SUMMARY MINUTES Regular Meeting Eugene Planning Commission Sloat Room—The Atrium—99 West 10th Avenue April 2, 2007 11:30 a.m. PRESENT: Rick Duncan, President; Randy Hledik, Vice President; Jon Belcher, Phillip Carroll, Ann Kneeland, John Lawless, Anthony McCown, members; Lisa Gardner, Steve Nystrom, Kurt Yeiter, Planning and Development Department; Gary McNeel, Public Works Department; Michael Morin, Zachary Vishanoff, guests. ABSENT: Mike Sullivan, ex officio. PUBLIC COMMENT ON NON-AGENDA ITEMS I. APPROVAL OF MINUTES II. PLANNING COMMISSION RETREAT FOLLOW-UP III. ITEMS FROM COMMISSION AND STAFF A. Other Items from Staff B. Other Items from Commission MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 1  MINUTES Regular Meeting Eugene Planning Commission Sloat Room—The Atrium—99 West 10th Avenue April 2, 2007 11:30 a.m. PRESENT: Rick Duncan, President; Randy Hledik, Vice President; Jon Belcher, Phillip Carroll, Ann Kneeland, John Lawless, Anthony McCown, members; Lisa Gardner, Steve Nystrom, Kurt Yeiter, Planning and Development Department; Gary McNeel, Public Works Department; Michael Morin, Zachary Vishanoff, guests. ABSENT: Mike Sullivan, ex officio. PUBLIC COMMENT ON NON-AGENDA ITEMS Zachary Vishanoff, Patterson Street, offered an update about the University of Oregon (UO). He distributed copies of the March 14, 2007 edition of the Oregon Daily Emerald, and highlighted articles related to university athletics. He invited Commissioners to attend the April 6, 2007 City Club meeting at which Mayor Kitty Piercy would speak on EWEB plans. He urged Commissioners to include an additional public hearing to the Walnut Node process. In response to a question from Mr. Lawless, Mr. Vishanoff said EWEB would not be in attendance at the April 6 City Club meeting. Mr. Belcher asked staff for a one page timeline for the Walnut Node public involvement process which Ms. Gardner said she would have e-mailed to Commissioners. I. APPROVAL OF MINUTES Mr. Lawless, seconded by Mr. Hledik, moved to approve the minutes of November 27, 2006, January 22, and February 12, 2007, as submitted. The motion passed unanimously 7:0. II. PLANNING COMMISSION RETREAT FOLLOW-UP Ms. Gardner distributed a report entitled Planning Commission Retreat—January 26, 2007— Lamb Cottage. The purpose of today’s meeting was to provide an opportunity for the Planning Commission to continue discussion of issues raised at the January retreat. Ms. Gardner offered a PowerPoint presentation to facilitate the discussion entitled, Building Neighborhood Support through Context Sensitive Solutions that focused on the following topics: MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 1  • What is CSS? • Examples of CSS Around the Country. • Eugene Examples. • Crest Drive Street Design Process. Ms. Gardner reported that the City Council had allocated $240,000 in General Fund money in June 2005 for the Crest Drive CSS process. The CSS recommended design was scheduled to go to the Council by August 2007. Ms. Gardner facilitated a question and answer session with Commissioners: QUESTION: What was initial CSS timeline? ANSWER: The group had met every three weeks since March 2006, and would continue to do so through about June 2007. There had been three public forums and one Saturday workshop. Q: What was the plan to use this process in other areas? A: The key was through the neighbors not the City. The process was a trust building one for the neighbors and the City. The neighbors and the City built a common script with the Crest Drive project, and it was necessary to trust people to deliver the script and not micro-manage the process. Q: There was support for the intent and nature of the process. If it continued and became evident that the a more transparent process which engaged more people was a more expensive process, and translated into a much larger budget to address more projects in this manner, would the citizens of Crest Drive be happy to financially support their citizens’ share of Rasor Park, Walnut Node, and other plans that created a much higher level of planning expenditure to achieve the goal in this manner. A. The costs needed to be analyzed. There were previous attempts in the Crest Drive neighborhood and River Avenue to have a process that was not well received by the neighbors and had incurred costs. There may not be a significant difference in the long run. As trust continued to be built, subsequent processes may be shorter. The process needed to be adapted for the scale of projects, and types of projects ranging from land use to street design processes. Q. There was a problem with timing related to TGM grants. Starting the work before applying for time sensitive grants should be considered. A. TGM grants were challenging and constraining, and had not been a good match for the Rasor Park project. Doing more work up front before applying for TGM grants, or looking for different funding sources were potential solutions. The next project the Planning Commission would likely have significant involvement in was West Eleventh Avenue, including a Lane Transit District (LTD) Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, and the next steps following the West Eugene Parkway going away. Federal funding was being sought for this project rather than TGM funding. Q. How did the CSS designed segment differ from a standard City design? A. The outcome was influenced by having citizen input and knowledge that the design team did not have. MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 2 Q. Why was a facilitator hired for the Crest Drive CSS process rather than using staff facilitators? A. Staff were not perceived as being neutral facilitators. This was part of the investment for the future. There was some trust building occurring with Rasor Park in seeking staff facilitation. Q. Was there an application for this process to be used in alternate path discussions in PUD approvals? Could a facilitated meeting with neighbors and developers occur at the beginning of the process to avoid problems at the end of the process? A. The concept came out of the neighborhood summit. There may be some opportunity to require a developer to meet with a neighborhood group before application submittal or even earlier. A PUD was not as tangible as street design projects, and offered other challenges. It may be more about the approach than the final product. The collaborative, transparent processes were key regardless of whether the process was land use code, transportation, or other projects. Q. What were the components of the process and how would they be used? How do we know where to bring in elements such as the loose timeline and collaborative voting process? A. There was information and links on the City’s website. A process did not need to be protracted. A timeline could be established for a CSS approach. There was not a magical template, but elements could include defining the public involvement process, identifying design issues, timeline and money considerations, that could be used to assemble an approach. Q. The formation of the stakeholder group was very important. There was a struggle with neighborhood association leaders versus neighbors who cared but did not participate in the neighborhood association. Rasor Park was an example where neighborhood leaders were up to speed, had trust in the City, and yet, that was not the issue. Forming stakeholder groups may be helpful. A. In the Crest Drive process, there were stakeholders outside of the immediate residents, including bike commuters, LTD, Eugene School District 4J, and others, and they needed to be engaged in the process. In the Rasor Park process, there was neighborhood leader buy-in, but business owners, a broader neighborhood engagement and others needed to be included. Q. What did this mean for the City of Eugene? Where would it be used? A. It could move forward in different ways. Transportation Engineering staff were supportive of CSS and would advocate for that approach for many of the projects coming out of that group. There could be policy considerations and direction from the Planning Commission and City Council that CSS be used in planning work. In Utah CSS was supported at the highest level in the governor’s office for use on a statewide basis. Q. How was the Crest Drive neighborhood team selected? Did it result in the community accepting the team? The Chambers Revisited process was driven by the neighbors, not the City, and totally went around the neighborhood association, basically excluding the neighborhood association’s involvement. A. The Crest Drive Neighborhood Association had a transportation subcommittee that developed the list of people based on street segment representation, at-large representation, bike members, MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 3 and ad hoc members. Determining the makeup of the committee was critical. Anyone who wanted to be at the table should be able to be there. There needed to be rules for participation which everyone followed. BIG PICTURE DISCUSSION Mr. Duncan said Commissioners expressed an interest in talking more about the “Big Picture” at the conclusion of the January retreat. This was an opportunity for Commissioners to brainstorm ideas on where they were heading, areas of concern, and questions on how the Planning Commission could be more effective. The following ideas were offered by Commissioners: • How do each of the growth management policies affect land use actions? • Did we benefit from the Growth Management Study. • There was a need for an understanding for buy-in from the top down for State land use goals, how they were adopted locally, what support and guidance did they provide the Commission in making decisions and recommendations. • How did the State land use goals intersect with having transparent and fully functional citizen involvement? Those who were involved also had to buy into the top down staging of decisions as they related at the neighborhood and individual property level. • If pieces of the process broke down, policy makers should be made aware of that so they could address the problems. • Policy documents relied upon in making decisions were quite dated. Perhaps old documents should be reviewed prior to commencement of projects to determine if they were still appropriate policies on which to base decisions. • Some people viewed growth management as growth limitation in which there was a fundamental dysfunction. • We should talk about how do we do it rather than what are we going to do? Should the Planning Commission regularly set aside time with staff to talk about a big picture item. • A fundamental question was should the Planning Commission spend time developing a broad philosophy or attend strictly to functional needs. • Were there sufficient staff and Commission resources to develop a broad philosophy? • What was the Planning Commission’s capacity and how was that capacity assessed? • It was important to engage policy makers in ambiguous and high level issues without making recommendations or having to craft a proactive position. It was important to have a venue in which to air those concerns with policy makers present. • Being proactive with Council Buddies helped to make policy makers aware of the challenges faced by the Planning Commission in making decisions. It was not clear what policy makers wanted the Planning Commission to do. • The planning part of the Commission’s work to a certain degree ended with the adoption of the Metro Plan. The Commission had become more of a zoning and implementation board, through its work dealing with PUD appeals and plan amendments. • The City Council was land use adept. Much of the policy and the Planning Commission’s work program came from the Council. • The Planning Commission should be evaluating the Growth Management Policies against land use actions, to see how they worked, and how to balance limited growth versus managed growth. • A simple evaluation matrix could be developed to track Commission processes. • Doing a lessons learned or after action debriefs against a Growth Management Policy MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 4  check list could be the basis for a process review that could reveal systemic problems. • How does the upcoming Metro Plan amendment apply to the fifteen statewide goals? We should take a more context sensitive approach in evaluating the amendments against the outdated refinement plan and the Growth Management Study. • As with Ballot Measure 37, the public was not engaged with the Metro Plan amendment process. The large processes could not be undertaken every year, but they did need to be reviewed periodically to make sure they still made sense. We were not in an implementation stage, but rather a reassessment and reevaluation stage. • We have growth management policies that said we wanted to grow up not out, but we have not figured out how to do that. Everyone may not agree with these policies anymore. • The Planning Commission should play a role in initiating new phases of the planning process if needed. • The community would continue to grow either with people or economically which was a concern that people would have to be wealthier to live here. It was time to push for the next phase of determining what we have to look forward to over the next 10-30 years in terms of expanding the urban growth boundary (UGB). • We need to look to the needs of the future and not hope that the old tools would work. • Consider providing minority opinion to City Council when recommendations were forward to the Council. • Invite Ed Weeks and Shaun Boles to a Planning Commission meeting to discuss how the growth management policy worked. It would be educational to understand how comprehensive the process was and how the information from the process led to the current policies. • What do we do with all of the comments people bring to the Planning Commission at the beginning of each meeting? • Need to schedule regular time or regular meeting to discuss big picture issues. • How realistic it would it be to run the growth management policies checklist against issues that the Planning Commission did not see that were subject to Planning Director approval or Hearings Official decisions not appealable to the Commission. • Would it be feasible to have voluntary check list for completion by applicants asking them to help the City determine the value, validity and applicability of the growth management policies to their project. III. ITEMS FROM COMMISSION AND STAFF A. Other Items from Staff B. Other Items from Commission In response to Mr. Hledik, Ms. Gardner said she would bring a timeline to the Commission for development of next year’s workplan. Mr. Duncan said the April 2, 2007 meeting would be a study session for the McKenzie Willamette Medical Center public hearing. Commissioners and staff discussed logistics for the public hearing. Mr. Carroll said he was on the River Road Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The process had broken down and the State had put a hold on grant funding based upon a lack of community support. There was a new focus with City staff working with neighborhood leaders and MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 5 community members to get the project restarted. There was a sense of discouragement and frustration on all sides, as well as a renewed commitment. The trust between neighborhood leaders and City staff was still there. He was impressed with the willingness of staff to get into the details to determine how to make the process work. There were new community faces, offering their skills and time to piece the process back together. A public forum was scheduled for April 3, 2007. Mr. Duncan adjourned the Planning Commission meeting at 1:35 p.m. (Recorded by Linda Henry) m:\2007\planning and development department\planning division\pc70402.doc MINUTES—Eugene Planning Commission April 2, 2007 Page 6