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HomeMy WebLinkAboutEconomic Advisory Board - MINUTES - 08/21/2024Page 1 06/26/24 Minutes Economic Advisory Board REGULAR MEETING Wednesday, August 21, 2024 – 4:00 PM 300 Laporte Ave, CIC Room 1. CALL TO ORDER: 4:00 PM 2. ROLL CALL a. Board Members Present – • Tim Cochran • Denny Coleman • Chris Denton • Thierry Dossou • Erin Gray • Val Kailburn • Braulio Rojas • Richard Waal • Renee Walkup b. Board Members Absent – c. Staff Members Present – • Ashley Kailburn, Sr Specialist, Economic Health Office • Erin Sporer, Business Support, Economic Health Office • Clay Frickey, Sr Manager, City Planning d. Guest(s) – 3. AGENDA REVIEW 4. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION 5. APPROVAL OF MINUTES a. Val motioned and Renee seconds to approve the June and July Minutes. Motion carried Unanimous. 8-0 6. NEW BUSINESS a. Land Use Code (LUC) Phase II • Council adopted Phase I that focused on residential parts of the community in May. • Phase II focuses on commercial corridors. • Team and internal partnerships include Clay Frickey, Sylvia Tatman- Burruss, Megan Keith, Noah Beals, Planning and Zoning, FCMoves and Transfort, Economic Health Office, Forestry, and Utilities. • Phase I included an audit of the LUC that highlighted gaps and barriers to Page 2 06/26/24 Minutes achieving our goals in the LUC. In phase one as part of that diagnostic the consultant looked at commercial corridors and highlighted the key issues. • Commercial zone districts that do the same thing • Standards around primary and secondary uses • Models of employment have changed • Will try to align with City codes, plans and Council priorities • We want to make sure we don’t over process things. • Improvements overtime to businesses as there is change. • Does it make sense or work? • What type of improvements? • More clarity is needed in code and more resources are needed. • Questions to explore through Phase II • Are there opportunities to add clarity to the development review process? • How can the LUC be more aligned with our policy plans? • How can we advance our 15-minute city goals through LUC? • How do we balance multiple desired outcomes through our development standards? • Potential work streams (see slide) • Commercial and Mixed-Use Corridors • Creating commercial and industrial building types • Recalibrating employment & industrial zoning • Standards for specific uses • Small business considerations • 15-Minute Cities • Neighborhood centers • Transit-supportive development • Development Standards • Landscaping & trees • Site planning & design • Natural resource standards • Bike, pedestrian & trail connectivity • Processes and Procedures • Amendment process (micro/minor/major) • Basic development review process • Other development review processes (type 1 and type 2 reviews) • Customer tools & resources • State legislation • 3 pieces to get compliant with • Housing in transit-oriented communities (HB-1313) • Accessory dwelling units (HB-1152) • Minimum parking requirements (HB-1304) • Community engagement • Doing community kick off events in October • Want to go to a commercial center in each Council district. • Ask questions: what do like, what do you want to see, did you have problems getting here, would you bike or use transit, etc. • Opportunity to see how community responds and what they want to see in corridors. Page 3 06/26/24 Minutes • After that they will go back to City Council for work session after • Talk about timing and priorities • Originally wanted it before election next year but gives them less than 6 months to get the work done. • Want to do a good job on priorities vs rush the whole thing. • Types of engagement • Newsletters, events, videos, work sessions, review and comment on draft code, focus groups, etc. • Work session is November 12th. Questions • One of the Council priorities includes improving efficiency and streamlining at City level for approval of projects. I don’t see it as a priority listed in your slide. • One of our work streams is going to be focused on the development review process and making it more efficient. We will get to it in a couple slides but that’s going to be its own dedicated work streams. A lot of the things we will want to talk about is change of use, if you want to go from a salon to a restaurant. A lot of people don’t realize you go through a process to do that. An example we got recently is a school was operating in a commercial center and never got approval to do that and it caused the City to deny a liquor license for another business in that commercial center. Situations like that are going to happen when you don’t catch stuff like that. It is a big priority for us. We want to make sure those processes are as painless as possible. We realize it is a big barrier to business. • If the state says we can have accessory dwelling units (ADUs) does that mean Fort Collins has to fall in line or is there some agency with Fort Collins on where and when? • There is some agency on how they look. There are some things that are pretty clear in the state statute like they mandate the level of parking. They mandate the size. They also say if you allow single family homes in that district, you have to allow native use. A lot of that stuff is taken care of. We also have some areas, Old Town being a good example where we have specific design standards for buildings in that area that we’d apply to ADUs. We might want to do some more massaging of that for ADUs in certain parts of town. What some communities have done is work with different neighborhoods or preapproved designs for ADUs to try and point people in the right direction. A lot of people are building ADUs because they have kids that are moving back home or have aging parents. Some are just trying to afford to live here and having that additional rental income can help. Having plans that you can pull off the shelf that are preapproved can cut down significantly on design costs. We have talked about that. I don’t know if that’s going to gain any momentum, but we want to explore concepts like that. We want to listen to the community with what they want as well as try and address it to the extent that we can, knowing it was such a hot button topic the 1st go around. • Did you say parking was mandated by the state? • At one point they said, you cannot require parking, and I thought at the last minute we changed that. I have to Page 4 06/26/24 Minutes double check though. Parking is addressed clearly. The minimum parking requirement bill is for areas close to high frequent transit. By May of 2025 we can’t have parking minimums anymore in those areas. I think we can still do streety parking for 2 hours in certain spots but for new development we can’t say you need one space per 1,000 square feet. The theory there is that parking adds to cost development, especially for housing. They trying to say let the market dictate the right amount of parking for those things. Finance agencies dictate marking too, a lot of vendors won’t lend to you unless you have a certain amount of parking for your project. It is really letting that drive parking rather than municipalities. Fort Collins has pretty low parking standards and oftentimes our requirements are much lower than what lending agencies want. It’s not really targeted at us. The last one is a housing and transit-oriented communities. I am not going to spend a lot of time on it though because it is still a little wonky. But essentially you have to accommodate a certain amount of housing. So zoned capacity within our LUC in proximity to transit. That one has a longer fuse and it’s not going to directly relate to the production of housing but more making sure that we’re not preventing housing from getting close to transit. • Thinking about community feedback, there seems to be a format that is done with sticky notes. I am wondering if that format is effective or it’s a habit and there also doesn’t seem to be a feedback loop. • I suspect the sticky note thing is mainly a habit and what people know and can do themselves with out having to go to a consultant. When we go out to these commercial centers its not going to be an exercise. I think it is going to be more of a dialogue. Hopefully we can just walk around the commercial center and talk about specific issues. In term of the feedback loop, we try to collect the feedback and summarize it. We normally post it someplace publicly like a website and send it out to emails. What we did for phase I and other city plans is document, here is this change, on page 15 we changed this word etc. We try to make it as transparent as possible so people can see their words in the end product. No everyone needs that, but we try to highlight the feedback as much as possible. As we do subsequent engagement, we will also tell the story of how we got there and share what feedback we have had. • So those have been sent out via email? • Yeah email, we post them on the City website. • I have never gotten an email. So that is interesting. I know the information is is effective but just the format of gathering information. That is my concern for something that is important that affects everyone. • I can assure you we are not using sticky notes. We want to do events that will be more engaging. • Will you share with us when the community kick off event will happen and then I think we should plan to see you after the November 12th work session. Page 5 06/26/24 Minutes • Is it part of the plan to put together where you are actually doing it? Do you have all the commercial centers outlined yet? • It is part of the plan. We were brainstorming that earlier today. We are trying to have at least one in every Council district but also trying to get centers that have different zoning and were built at different times so we can look at the full spectrum of commercial centers. Some of the ones we were tossing around were Drake and Shields. • What constitutes a center? • It is a little nebulous in fairness. We have had that conversation too. The City Plan highlights a lot of major intersections and the centers at those major intersections as being activity centers. I think for a lot of people if there’s a corner store and a couple commercial budlings close to their neighborhood, they could probably call that a center as well. I don’t think the definition is clear. So that is why we are trying to capture range so we can see what the trends there might be. We might need more specific guidance on these different centers because they all operate a little differently. It is not a one size fits all. • You said in phase I they addressed something about it. What did they use for their definition? • Phase I didn’t touch commercial centers much. It was more about the building types. We essentially moved to a way of assessing designed based on the way the building looks. We need to develop those prototypes for commercial. • You probably already have this but some type of KPI for some indexes that allow you to say this is what you want to accomplish and help us in the future see with all this LUC change, we will reach out goal. • I don’t think we have clear metrics on corridor success. One thing we are working on is called place-based assessment as part of the 15-minute city priority. We are going to do an analysis of which commercial centers are performing well and assess the potential. From that we can develop some metrics to help us with success. • Just something generally because many of those things are subjective. Try to bring some objectivity to the process. • That is a good point and try and tie it to the policy goals you are trying to reach like something around affordability for the 15-minute cities. • For some of those like 15-minute city, we have some metrics there and same thing for affordability. We have a lot less in terms of how well it is performing. • Have you ever taken a poll of some of the other larger businesses so they can see this process on what they like or don’t like about it? When you start looking at some of the bigger businesses, they probably have branches that are not here, some may have chosen to be here and then expand into other places the reason for that could have nothing to do with the city but there are other cases where people are making decisions because maybe we don’t have the right labor force. • On the land use side, we did a development review survey that went to all applicants in the past five years and asked some of those questions. We have a lot of feedback and things they would like to see improved upon as part of the process and LUC. Most of it was Page 6 06/26/24 Minutes related to the process. We do have a work stream dedicated to that as part of this process. WE also have an advisory board that is consultants helping those big businesses go through the development review process. We are trying to tackle that from a couple different angles. • There are a lot of barriers people are not aware of unless they are in it. That is what we hear most is you don’t know what you don’t know. We want to connect people at the right time in that space; not so much larger employers because they have consultants that do this but midsize to small businesses that don’t know about change of use. They are one that get hit the most because they don’t have as many resources to go through the process, but it could be a good idea. • The board is interested in having Clay return after the work session as well as getting information about the community kick off events. 7. UNFINISHED BUSINESS a. Building Performance Standards (BPS) Memo Discussion • Last meeting they agreed on BPS is important and positive for the environment, it may be expensive for business to fulfill at this point, and it should be recommended versus mandatory for businesses. • The board discussed various changes to the draft memo: • Take out direct wording about recommending to not adopt it and change it to recommend Council consider tradeoffs that have not been sufficiently explored. • Add a consideration for return of investment (ROI) as the current ROI does not consider other benefits and factors that can directly improve the ROI for building owners and businesses such as access to state and federal financial resources. • Add consideration for co-benefits of BPS that cannot be easily monetized such as improved indoor air quality. • Add a consideration for transaction costs of building owners and businesses as they will struggle to find time to navigate the technical and financial resources. The technical complexity of BPS should be matched with technical support and resources. • Add a suggestion that the City encourages incentives to business owners for retention rather than imposing fines for noncompliance. • Add a paragraph regarding the ongoing lawsuits in Denver. They also added an addendum with an article about the lawsuits. • Add a suggestion to do a cost feasibly on City buildings first and then CSU. • Minor wordsmithing • The board discussed how a navigator would be a huge asset to help businesses though the process and possibly having the City do a cost feasibility on City buildings first. • Chris motioned and Erin seconded to approve the memo as amended. Motion approved unanimously 9-0. b. Water Supply Requirements (WSR), Excess Water Use (EWU) Surcharge, and Allotments for All Commercial Customers Memo Discussion • Erin is working on a draft. The draft will hopefully be ready for the next meeting. 8. BOARD MEMBER REPORTS Page 7 06/26/24 Minutes a.Denny met with Kat from the Economic Health Office for an update on the AEDO process. They should find out soon regarding if they got the certification. It sounds like it went very well but they would be awarded with it a the IEDC annual conference in Denver this September. It is a rigorous process. Congratulations to the staff. •Braulio participated in the process. There were a lot of positives on his side. He shared about EAB and how supportive and diverse they are. The mayor also participated. 9.STAFF REPORTS a.Interested in having Davina come to the board to discuss process of memos and make sure we are not violating Colorado Open Records Act. •Board had a lot of concern about memo writing and efficiency if they cannot discuss over email or in Google Docs. b.Tyler Menzales was hired in the Economic Health Office (EHO). He will eventually take over as the EAB staff liaison c.Staff also gave a brief update on Budgeting for Outcomes and the two enhancement offers EHO has helped with including the offer for the Multicultural Business and Entrepreneur Center and a Navigator position to help business navigate planning and development processes. There will be a work session with Council on September 10th. The City Manager’s recommended budget will be posted by the end of August. SeonAh the director of EHO can come and speak more to it if the board is interested. 10.OTHER BUSINESS a.The board asked for an IEDC accreditation update •Application has gone in, and one reviewer has finished. We should hear 11.ADJOURNMENT a.(6:06PM) Minutes approved by a vote of the Board/Commission on 09/18/2024