Recap: Planning Commission

9/12/2019 Planning Commission Quick Recap:

•The order of the public comments have been rearranged to match that of the city council and will be held first of the meeting instead of the last. We had about a dozen comments including topics like the general plan and the survey, concerns about sensitive lands and farms, lower densities/open space, favoring the C/O to be removed and rights of property owners and concerns about the cobblestone short term rental. Julie Losee did a great job of presenting some more information about the lofts and how the north side was zoned residential, and therefore can not contain any of the lofts HDH. Mike Skousen suggested members signing an ethics agreement similar to other cities to prevent improper influence of conflicts of interests among the commission.

•There was a discussion on another short term rental and ordinances put into place for that specific place.

•Commercial overall removal was discussed and talked about the administrative process. They also talked about defining mixed use. A discussion before city council will take place on 09/26. Tim Grubb mentioned having a meeting to talk about and define mixed use. Staff is currently working on their first draft of defining it. The discussion on 9/26 will probably make changes and have further conversations about it. The next time the commission is slated to meet and discuss it would be October 10th, which they would also be discussing all the public comments of the general plan. However it was also realized that public comment won't have ended yet. There was a discussion of moving that meeting until after public comment was finished. Rob Osborne said he felt that the adoption of the GP should be postponed until mixed use is defined.

•Many (all?) of the commissioners thanked the community for getting involved and really encouraged feedback on the general plan. It was stated several times that the GP should reflect the view of citizens - without public comment they just have to do their best. Taylor Walton talked about how we really need to find another way to do an East West corridor and encouraged everyone to come up with some ideas of how to accomplish that. Taylor also wanted to work on getting very specific ordinance zoning which would allow for the PC to have more to hold developers too. (Hopefully Im getting my words and understanding correctly!). Wes Johnson had the idea of creating an ordinance that if a zone change is done the developer does not present plans within a time frame, the property returns to its previous zone it was. Both are great ideas! Debbi Pitts spent some time working with the concerns of the Cobblestone short term rental of parking up and down the street and how to write and create ordinances to allow to enforce violations. I appreciated her taking the time to discuss it.

•This is just a recap! Please listen to the audio or read the minutes to get more info. :-)

•In other news, Mayor Jo was at the meeting and I talked with her about how the public potentially may not have the opportunity to comment on the GP since public comment will end before mixed use is probably defined. I asked her if she would be willing to postpone the adoption of the plan or extend public comment, both of which she was open too. I also talked with her about some of the concerns and issues people are having with the online survey. She said she will talk to David Larsen about them, but if you have any problems, you can call him too!