City Council - Special Meeting

for [Applause] f okay e e there we go it's not red anymore it's off I pushed a button can our online participants hear us okay sorry if you were sorry you Inu um we went around the room with the participants in the room uh we'll begin with OR we're going to run through the online participants D you can just give your name and if you're with a jurisdiction just name the jurisdiction at the top of the screen shice can you begin yes I'm shice Graham with scj Alliance consultant to the county on the comp plan update thank you uh Bill Grimes all right I am Bill Grimes also with scj Alliance Consultants the county and then Andrew hello I'm Andrew Oliver with lead Consulting Group we're working with scj um on uh on population and housing thank you and then uh ran uh good afternoon everyone ran Harper see home planning for Everson noack and Sumas thank you and then uh let's see Ted yeah I'm Ted Camp I actually uh work with Oliver so um with leeling Consulting Group um working for scj on the uh population and employment and housing forecast thank you Bruce yeah uh Bruce Bosch mayor sus and uh her yes uh her Porter Ferndale city council thank you uh [Music] Jonathan hi John scanland wam County Council and then uh Dave yeah hi Dave Timmer City London planner and [Music] Carrie I'm sorry Carrie you're muted sorry about that car Carrie bernside Bellingham tenant Union and Washington Lo housing Alliance you and then I'm moving to the ones I can just see icons for um John John Perry city of

everon thank you and Matt Matt be with the Birch Bay incorporation Association aspiring City just want to listen in thank you and hi you hi there Heidi goody with the city of lynon and then uh let's see we have uh cie hi this is Callie with the city of Bellingham I'm the permitting systems permitting systems business analyst thank you and then Kurt uh good afternoon uh city of Bellingham planning and Community Development Department thank you okay I think I think we've heard from everybody and we have uh Hannah do you want to introduce your oh sorry Hannah Stone Bellingham city council perfect did anyone else coming while I have my back turned great I think we got everybody and we're expecting uh mayor lond mayor lond will be arriving shortly and then just to uh just full disclosure we are recording this meeting um just I'm supposed to announce that when we do that we started actually at the beginning I think we might have we might have been muted for the first few minutes but we've got that um and also for the different jurisdictions the uh teams recording and also the the text transcription can will be available afterwards if you need that for your purposes for documenting after the meeting so okay great thanks Chris uh so this afternoon um leand Consulting Group uh will be making two presentations to start us off first will be on the population and employment uh growth projections technical report uh that report uh represents a starting point for public import discussions

uh by the planning Commissioners and uh elected officials throughout the county uh in the policy phase of the review the county and the cities will issue recommendations uh to adjust if necessary the technical allocations based upon County goals um City goals public input uh infrastructure capacity mind availability Etc as we go through that that process um Leland's second presentation uh will be on House Bill 1220 and the housing for all planning Tool uh that bill requires the cities in the county to plan for uh affordable housing to Ser serve all the income groups household income groups um in in in in the county uh including low very low and moderate income housing um L's presentation will dig into the methods for accomplishing this task um uh in a a coordinated manner amongst the cities and and the county then scj Alliance will give a presentation on the environmental impact statement uh being prepared for the 2025 update um that will existing conditions impacts asso Alternatives and potential mitigating then we'll open it up for discussion uh amongst the elects and staff and understand you guys recog have other issues this is the venue to have ation so part of the reason that we're here having these meetings so okay that's it for me um Leland you guys want to take it away sure uh and I apologize I I seem to be suffering from unusually slow frame rate not sure what's going on there so I don't freeze frame very well if on the slides from this end I can do that we have it

loaded locally okay well I uh I don't know which would be easier I I've clicked present in teams is it showing up as a shared you see the presentation I no we can't right now um no we're we're just seeing your teams this meeting in your teams oh wellow that's unfortunate uh maybe go local Go Local that's a good idea yeah let's just I'll just tell you when to change slides is that all right that's fine uh okay so we are uh our task was uh basically to look at population and employment forecasts or starting with population forecasts uh prepared by ofm at the county level uh and with the end goal of getting those reasonably allocated to the different jurisdictions in the county uh and to look at the uh range of the high and low projections and and look at potentially adjusting those and [Music] also uh we were allowed also and you know it's legal within the U state law to actually make adjustments to to the ofm middle projection uh we set a a pretty high bar for that though partly because it's it creates uh a pain to do that uh and in my opinion we we really needed to have a very uh defensible position for adjusting that middle projection because their uh demographers have reasonably sophisticated models uh for doing that projection but let me just talk about if you can go are you on slide or can you go to slide three uh that I believe that's what we're on now yeah thank you okay perfect um so uh this is just looking at at some of the fundamentals of growth um and you can see uh

from the graph the basic Trend that uh is going on and then is projected to sort of smooth out going forward is just a declining uh rate of of growth for the county overall it's it's never a clean a super clean shape uh of of decline when looking at actual real past data the darker blue bars uh but uh that gets smoothed out when looking forward and if you go to the next slide I'll just talk about some the the two main fundamentals essentially driving um the reasoning behind the the Assumption of the slower slower growth um and the most important one really is is the uh natural increase portion of population growth where it you take the births minus the deaths essentially uh and if you look at the the graph there uh left of the dotted line is actual data and to the right is projected data from ofm uh in the last decade well in the last three decades uh the birth rate has been declining uh not just in wam but it's it's more of a national Trend uh and just in the past decade from 2010 on the death rate uh has been increasing largely as a function of the big baby boomer bulge in the population uh you know inching closer to life median life expectancy basically um and the combination of those two Trends is just a a lowering of of growth rate uh and so that those uh the death rate is projected to increase more the birth rate is projected to sort of plateau for a little bit and then uh go down after that so it can go to the next Slide the other main factor uh when looking at

population projections other than natural increase is net migration so people moving in minus people moving out and that as you can tell from the graph is a lot more volatile typically it's very tied to economic factors it it can be tied to Lifestyle uh factors and things like that but just in recent years it's been as high as 133% of the population or nearly 14% of the population uh uh that nit migration being equal to around 14% of the standing population to as low as 2.5% and that um the projection going forward sort of hovers around 5% there is an average of not that whole time period but uh recent years I believe going back to 2010 again we we set a a high bar for deciding whether there was reason to doubt these enough to change the the middle projection uh and the short story is that that we did not if you go to the next slide um uh and because this is an update we're we also uh took a close look at uh what the economist did uh last time around and tried to for the most part stick with those accepted methodologies uh if there were different availability of data sources or or strong reasons to deviate from that uh we did uh but our our basic process was just to review that middle projection for population uh and then look at the low and high ranges and and make changes uh where needed and essentially what we did with the low and high uh you could defend the low the ofm low and the ofm high based on past Trends but uh what we decided was that the the range was uh too

extreme to be practical from a a a planning standpoint it it was just while those low and high may be possible it it's just uh enough of a different planning environment with uh that extreme range that we essentially tighten that a bit and that's what uh the Economist did uh last time around as well uh we the low range uh did seem like it was it was too low too conservative relative to Historic growth Al although it's hard to ignore those uh birth and death Trends uh and we adjusted the high range uh not quite as much uh keeping the meaning of the word conservative sort of uh reverses when you're talking about uh future projections because leaving a potential High worst kind of worst case scenario from an infrastructure standpoint there seems to be some wisdom and keeping that uh a little on the high side so we tighten that a bit uh but but not as much as we did with the low end and you can see that graphically on the next slide uh so slide seven um that middle Gray Line is the ofm middle projection that's got uh so we're looking at uh 20203 I believe is the start year going out to 2045 our Horizon year uh and the the dashed lines were the original ofm high and low projections and the dotted lines are are adjusted um you know there there's Al although we did do it by looking at uh mainly sort of tinkering with the range of the migration rate the birth and death rate is sort of hard to harder to argue with uh because it just is what it is driven by um underlying demographic

factors but by tweaking the net Migra a assumptions we've tightened in that lower range and brought down uh the higher range a bit but still leaving a you know a decent Gap there in the ending population The Next Step uh on slide eight is um after settling on that countywide growth trajectory range we the task was then to allocate that uh the growth the roughly 20 years of growth out to the different jurisdictions and that we did at the ug level um and essentially that was based on uh whatever uh the each ug's share of recent growth past decade growth essentially uh we assumed to be uh approximately the share going forward um and you can just see the last two columns there the the share the share of County growth is not exactly the same as the share of just the whole St standing County population because some areas are growing faster uh than others as of late uh if you go to slide nine uh this is what that allocation looks like uh when distributed out to the uh and this would be the tech you know so-called technical allocation out to the ugas uh the technically we could have added some growth to Cherry Point because they did have a bit of growth uh in the past decade but in talking to Matt um uh it was decided that that's that's really not the policy plann for for Cherry Point is to put any more household growth in there so we took that small amount actually pretty small amount and and rather than Distributing it across all of them we added that into Bellingham it it didn't

make a again it was sort of a uh didn't make a tremendous difference and uh that seemed like a a logical way to do that um on slide 10 uh so that was the population technical uh allocation to ugas and then moving to employment growth uh here we we followed reasonably closely the the methodology used by The Economist last time around a and because ofm and and the state in general does not produce uh employment forecasts at the county level um of the kind that would be uh useful for this analysis we looked at the ratio we essentially assigned employment growth proportionally to population growth at the county level and then in moving down we had to also distribute it across these four pretty broad land use categor uh natural resources industrial retail and commercial that correspond to uh you know zoning categories essentially um we we looked at each City's shares across those four things as well as their shares of uh recent job growth in general so this was more of a two-way um thing and if you go go to the next well no this is I sort of spared you some of the sausage making on that but it it's a similar intermediate table there of uh showing the percentages of of that recent growth and the percentages across the different Industries and these are the growth allocations uh the technical growth allocations for employment that resulted from that analysis so the the grand total the county as a whole is expected to add 20 24 little over 24,000 jobs uh most of that in commercial uh

the actually last time around resource the resource jobs were not even allocated they were sort of uh ignored in the analysis and we decided it would be uh worthwhile to put those to leave those in the model even though it's the smallest group overall and most of that growth goes to non ug uh sort of unincorporated areas that aren't in the in any ug um so that's it for the technical allocations of population and employment I'm happy to discuss any technical details uh you know either separately or someone has questions now but but those were partly the basis then of what Andrew uh was doing on the housing Alle side question so the 19% of the population or 11,000 people and 1,000 industrial jobs in the unincorporated areas are those like I'm sing the non ug areas are is that just like randomly distributed through a zoning World zoning in the county or is that planning where future ugas might be what's the sense of we did because the next step is to go from these ug allocations once those have sort of been settled and agreed upon is to take that down to the Taz level that you know small geography traffic analysis zones we sort of for the non- ug areas we essentially hted that those decisions a bit for that phase of figuring out exactly those would logically go uh the reason there is any growth assigned there at all is just because there was there has been uh historic industrial growth I have a question as [Music] well first go ahead okay I had the same question but Tod said

just because it's been traditional that let's take what the past population is and percent increase and everything why are we forcing people to live in unincorporated area where they should be living in city we rather take more jobs you have so many jobs in Bellingham there is no space to create jobs in Bellingham industrial commercial right if you look at traditional the college the university the government all these jobs but the new future jobs are not going to be in that sector they are going to be more in manufacturing industrial and other type of I think the county should unincorporated area should take those jobs create the places with more industrial land and people should come and live in a city rather than make them live in unincorporated area there are no sewer there are no other services everything I know cities are worried about that we don't have money to provide services who's going to provide the sewer who's going to provide the roads and all this but we have to change this trend this we keep promoting the same thing that's what we did 10 years ago and now we're going to do this and then we'll wait 10 years to do it again so I really want to expand on what to is asking put more jobs in industrial area into the unincorporated areas so that we can collectively find a solution maybe we have to find more zoning of light industrial heavy industrial zones out there rather than putting them inside the cities where we can accommodate population where the

infrastructure already exist for people to live even increase the density but we are creating a relief valve for cities to do that this is what happened last 10 years and you know if you look at the population u i just sorry I came late but if you add the Ferndale and Lyon's uh growth that is same as on unincorporated so we are trying to create that unincorporated is like a city I just wanted to expand but he's on the right there's nowhere to put all that in the unincorporated nonu where we going to put another burndale yeah that's what I'm saying let's do industry there we can actually that will force us to find land for hii Cherry Point is is not a very viable option left for us we when we count the number of Acres we say we got like thousand acres in Cherry Point we have waited 35 years nothing has happened except Big Industry and there is no like under private ownership we have no say to dwell Cherry Point we should get that fact and accept that fact and we should create more it doesn't have to be one place like Cherry Point it could be 10 different areas in our County where we create new zoning so anyway sorry I just that's that's all valid yeah and my understanding is that that is why there is this the technical analysis phase where it's sort of more predictive based on past Trends uh as uh compared to a a policy allocation that is more of a negotiated thought about uh allocation that that is rooted in this technical allocation or you know doesn't deviate wildly from it

but allows you to do things like just what you were talking about if if if I honestly I don't know exactly the mechanics of how you are to negotiate that but I know that this is assumed to be sort of a negotiation phase amongst the jurisdictions to go from technical to policy allocation uh council member yeah at a later point in this meeting is kind of an open topic I would like to offer some thoughts and make a request on countywide planning with regard to Industrial lands I think there's a very important conversation be had there for the moment however I want to ask a question uh about the numbers were those numbers particularly for employment growth at all constrained by consideration of the actual availability of appropriately zoned land in other words the retail growth that anyone look at the availability of retail land for the industrial growth was that modified or was the availability of the appropriate industrially zoned land considered were those numbers uh derived kind of independent of looking at the ground or were they just based on Trends rather than on I mean the short answer is no not not at this point that that uh that was um assumed to happen during the the Taz allocation the small area allocation phase I mean I I can I see what you're saying and that that that is important um I backwards I mean uh you kind of want to say look at the amount of land Zone industrial and then say what kind of likely potential is there for growth if you know unless we have enough

land for every use and every replac then there's going to be a constraint and we should either seek to remove it or seek to maybe strengthen it if we want to restraint I'm just saying availability is almost more important to me yeah although my uh partial push back to that would be that I'm sure that if you had done that in the last round in the 2013 uh round of the same exercise that you may have been wrong just to the extent that new land can be zoned uh you know there can be zoning changes and there can be annexations uh that so you're ingoing land capacity by land use is not necessarily the same as it's what it's going to end up being uh by The Horizon here or or in between Ted um I'll just also say that we are uh working on the land Capacity Analysis part of the exercise next uh to see where that lines up with these um with these sort of trend based targets so I'll talk a little bit about that later too move yeah just real quick a poll who was involved in the last comp plan update I show hands here okay um what I seem to remember was kind of uh to go along with the theme of council member Donovan the executive and council member liist um and I I remember having this conversation I believe Jack Petri bought it brought it up at the time if we're going to base future projections on past experience then we're if we're planning for stagnation we're just going to continue to forecast it so I'll give you an example uh Maple Falls how many thousands of people live up there

anybody eight n, so you know it's what a 45 minute drive to the grocery store a 45 minute job to your drive to your job point of the growth management Act is to cut down on some of these commutes right and so you know when we talk we talked about this 10 years ago hey how about we provide some zoning up there for some lightning industrial or a grocery store or a retail section and what was the answer historically speaking there's been no need for that well of course because we didn't provide it and so I tend to agree that we should be looking at this not like hey what did we see over the last 10 years okay that's what we're going to allocate for the next 10 years like we should look for opportunities and plan for them and when I say that I I think most everybody that lives in kle would be very happy if there was land use for a grocery store or a place to have a job so they don't have to drive for 45 minutes especially you know $4 gallon fuel but um I don't want to put words in these guys's mouth but that's kind of what I'm heing like why do we keep planning base our future off of the past when we have things that you know not a lot of folks are happy with there's a whole group of people in Birch Bay that aren't really happy about the growth that's happened out there and they're seeking to fix that too so maybe in this comp plan update we can fix some of the things that we've maybe historically not done well I think we had a question here yeah from um my perspective in lynon I

looking to the past and then modeling it for the future I I see from the one chart we're 7% of the population and we're expected to take 12 almost 133% the growth in fer similar um I think I mean I guess I'm going to look to Bellingham you're the big urban center but I would love to see Bellingham expand its Urban growth areas and put housing more housing that people want I would vote for that um I think I think Lyndon Ferndale Blaine everon no like we're building a different housing group than what Bingham just say based on inventory of product both at rental and ownership levels we don't have a lot of availability I think whatever we have people want so yeah I agree with that the final point of your comment is a little fuzzy my personal reply is I don't want to add just residential land that's a lousy City I want to add a balanced mix of uses so I have a balanced City from I don't want to keep from the small City perspective you haven't gotten enough Urban growth area to take care of the population growth that's coming I'm not disagreeing with you SC I'm just saying that I look at growth I want it to be balanced growth you may focus on housing for good reason but I want to focus on the other uses as well and we have in linen and we have lots of industrial land that's can be developed um yeah I know you will but maybe try to expand your Riv growth there and get here and to maybe uh clarify a little bit that 12.8% is that's what you did do in the past 10 years is you 12.8% of

the countywide growth did go to Ferndale um I agree with that that doesn't mean we like it or where it and and that I think is really the whole point of the having a difference between the technical allocation and the policy allocation yeah the the question about land use capacity or land capacity I think it should be the other way around we should first plan where we want something and then find the capacity you are going to base Your Capacity based on what the zoning is and what everything exist and then give us a picture what this is the land capacity we have why don't we create the land capacity ourselves and then drive the zoning because that is all because we have no mechanism our county is totally dependent on Count's decisions with GMA everything they give us some restrictions but whatever we decide that's what we got to live with so why don't we drive the land capacity if we say we need I'm just going to throw some numbers here we need 3,000 Acres of industrial land in our County other than Cherry Point we should say we need density to increase in every city by this proportional right we should drive that we should drive that that where we want uh uh other zonings current zonings have been written 50 years ago why don't we say that let's look at the whole zoning code what is hii because you were waiting for two more refineries to come here 40 years nobody is comeing here Bridge didn't come here right so we have to start thinking in a different ways and and uh and and

and spread it around so that the owners of the land are motivated to to put services or do this now we have large land owners now it's even smaller in Char point and and they have no incentive really to create 10 acre lots or 20 acre lots and and where we want to invest money I think we should change our course I I I'm talking to all the collectors here uh this is my suggestion that we should rethink this whole thing for next 20 years what we want our County to look like 20 years not but incrementally we can do incrementally squeeze here incrementally grow here it will not solve the problem it will exasperate for the Next Generation just an observation I mean this is supposed to be the technical projections but as policy makers we're jumping the gun for obvious reasons we want to go to the policy allocation discussion immediately as soon as we see a technical allocation our wheels are turning and we're not thinking about what you know is just projected but what we would like to see happen so this is natural but I do think we're kind of jumping the gun in this meeting but it didn't happen last time we just took the projections and that's where we went are we ready to transition to Andrew with the p tool which I think will I think it's a good segue based on your comment it gets us a little bit more into the 1220 policy allocation piece so are we okay and we we'll have opportunity after that for more questions Andrew are you ready to yeah do you want me to open that SL yeah okay

uh yeah and I think that you know this this is more housing focused um the land Capac analysis that we're working on we'll talk about at the end of the this deck also does start to get into commercial land capacity as well so I think that uh this might spur further discussion on these topics um but first I'll I'll give a little overview of what's going on with the housing side um so here we see in uh uh 20121 the GMA was amended to require uh not only PL planning for a sufficient um housing capacity but also housing affordable to all economic segments uh and uh now commerce was directed by the legislature to project housing needs including as we heard earlier units for moderate low very low and extreme low hous households as well as emergency housing uh shelters and permanent Supportive Housing uh so there's this tool that Commerce developed called the hap the housing for all planning tool and um based on the population input it generates um uh the total countywide housing unit need and that comes down from Commerce and has to be used as it is that grand total however you do have the option you know uh as we've been talking about to to put any grand total County future population within the range the ofm range that Ted presented earlier and then the county allocates these units to jurisdictions uh based on what income band housing units can serve and then finally the jurisdictions have to show the land capacity to accommodate the units uh through zoning and then document

potential barriers to production and racially disparate impacts in housing policy so uh you know that the the housing um hp220 framework is set up in that order first to allocate the units based on income bands and we'll talk about how that works in the next couple of slides and then to see how that matches up with current land capacity as currently Zone um and then to potentially make future changes to that zoning as the executive was saying um uh to accommodate the targets and I put these links in here so that if uh anyone wants to do some light reading they're each about 100 pages long um the first one is the County Guidance and the second is the city guidance for um for this whole process okay next slide oh it's animated I didn't even know that all right so this is how the the half tool Works um uh housing units are categorized by the income bands that they could potentially serve income is expressed in terms of the area mediating income uh so it's a measurement of family income that's not actually household size it's it's should say housing uh you know bedroom number of bedrooms so it's it's more than one bedroom it's like an average number of bedrooms unit um and the Ami in wam County this year is $12,600 so all of these income bands are expressed as a percentage of that number $12,600 um and so this is this is the math behind what goes on in the Tool uh essentially you take the population projection which whichever you eventually decide on we started with the the

moderate the middle you know of the range but that can be adjusted um it takes out group quarters uh so you get your your household population divided by the average household size and then um it assumes a bunch of other things uh including vacancy rates um to to look at how many total units will be needed and uh that's that's the the basic math of how it works that there's other factors involved um the tool also uh uh incorporates estimates of how many units will be needed in order to account for historic under production of housing in the past as well as how many units will be needed to account for um people currently experiencing homelessness uh so it's not exactly just you know dividing the the units by the or multiplying the units by the household size it's a little more complic okay next slide oh sorry that's on this slide all right so this is um this is the uh categorization by income band so I know there's a lot of text on here um the the Hat tool starts with a 2020 Baseline and uh based on as you see here the the comprehensive housing affordability strategy that's a data set called the Chaz and the public unit micro dat sample which is called the pums uh these are census data sets that uh include detailed data on how much households are paying for housing uh and so Commerce used those data sets to um um calculate what income bands are being served by existing housing and then for the future as I just said uh here in the colored boxes these are the additional units

needed for the future so uh housing needed to eliminate uh based on R cost burden people who are paying too much for housing housing to eliminate uh the people currently experiencing homelessness obviously the big one additional housing to accommodate future population growth and and that gives you your projected that new units and I want to mention this briefly and hopefully um uh if you want to research it more there's a lot of information in the book um there is a a projection for emergency housing and permanent Supportive Housing um for the county and it is based on a very complicated statistical model called the Monte Carlo model this just bullet point here has a list of a bunch of things that go into this model you know evictions incarceration rate rent burden Etc um in the book uh that I linked to in the earlier slide um is a bunch more write up on this but uh suffice to say there's a a lot of statistical analysis that went into trying to quantify how much emergency housing that's expressed in shelter beds rather than units and permanent Supportive Housing um units are going to be needed in future uh and we'll return to that a little bit later okay so this is what the tool looks like um uh I we inputed the ofm medium uh projection to start with here as you can see on the bottom left and it spits out this gray bar with the net new housing needed that's broken down by income band so the net new total for 2020 to 2045 is 35,6 24 units and then you have your 0 to 30% so

extremely low income housing that's broken down into two categories which is non-permanent Supportive Housing which just means regular units subsidized units of course and then permanent Supportive Housing then you go up the income bands 30 to 50% 50 80% Ami Etc all the way up and on the far right is the separate allocation of emergency housing um and with the complex statistical analysis behind it 520 new units so um I think I'll briefly pause because next um we're going to talk about allocating this down to jurisdictions uh but before that um are there any sort of pressing questions on on the county calculations the Commerce tool or anything good question about the 2020 thing so is the goal that every city accommodates a certain amount of the lower can housing bandre yeah how is it enforcable on if a city doesn't Zone that or build that um it's not about build well first of all it's Zone zone for it uh so it's it's Zone capacity not necessarily um uh building at the city doesn't have to put money to building in um there is a check-in process that um a five-year check-in that Commerce uh will conduct in five years time to see if the city has made those changes I'm not sure how much of a stick that checkin is going to contain in other words if they would forcibly somehow reone or or sue the city or whatever um but there is there is a sort of process at least in in the way that it's written now as I understand and Bill maybe you know more I'm not sure um there is uh you know

going to be um a comparison of uh of need to to what's been built but also you know making sure sure that resoning that had to take place has taken place uh and there will maybe be some technical assistance offered by Commerce or funding to make zoning changes if they haven't been made so there's sort of another round of of lighter enforcement of that type Commerce working with the jurisdiction to make those changes is kind of How It's phrased in the guidance right now um there's probably more information on that out there that um that we can get can I make a comment to that point oh sorry you and then go go ahead go I think the city's done some back of the envelope calculations around the costs on the permanent supporting housing if we assume our responsibility for those uh 3,400 units that's an unfunded annual cost of between like $1 130 to $150 million a year for that number for our portion let alone other cities so uh we certainly don't know how we would accomplish that from where we are today so that would be a massive body of work to solve that piece of the puzzle to answer the earlier question most of those are Target mbers at this point it access to funding if you're if you're looking for Grant opportuni and other things like that can be contingent on your ability to to zone for some of this stuff if you look towards other states that are a little further along in this process there are some more sticks U particularly California has done what they call a builder

remedy where if you don't meet your housing allocations and allow for it developers can come in and you're obligated to approve it so I mean they're they're not we're not there at that point yet but if that's forecasting out what some other other states are doing a [Music] possibility my question Sor go ahead yeah okay uh my my question is that this is great that you use the Excel formula you found for 2045 the overall number for the county now do we have the freedom within this jurisdiction all the people responsible how do we allocate or does that also need to use the same formula for each City because if we know the overall number if ofm is happy then the decision comes to all of us how are we going to allocate that and that's something we can kind of fight it out here right yeah yeah absolutely and in fact that that's what the second half of these slides are on is is the the initial process we've we've worked through so far to do that allocation but you are correct the the the responsibility for allocating this um after this point is is up to the county and not to ofm or to to Commerce you oh I'll just stop I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone would know whether or not we did the right thing to create housing at those price points if I have 300 acres zone for multif family my zoning doesn't control pice price point it developed at 100% Ami or 80% Ami or 150% Ami my zoning doesn't control price point and if my tool to deliver income ban housing is zoning I don't

know how my tool gets the job done there's got to be other tools because zoning ain't it zoning is the first step the the the way that this works on the jurisdictional level is and I will agree I mean obviously uh it's much more complicated than that I think that the the intention was to uh show that that housing at these income levels could be built in other words that there wasn't a barrier to it being built through zoning and um there's also uh a subsequent sort of checklist that Commerce is asking jurisdictions to complete um which looks at other barriers to the production of uh of units at lower income levels uh you know whether that be something like um parking requirements or you know uh design standards or or other things you know I I me these are just examples that that you know from the Commerce book but um uh but there are you know they they're asking this cities to look at um and end counties to look at what those barriers to production might be even if the zoning is in place and and then what what is within the sort of capacity of cities and counties to to do to remove barriers for the production of that housing and you know and then what isn't I mean there there are things obviously the the market um you know is is is going to determine the price point as you're saying and so that you know there's sort of an understanding there that that um funding and you know sources of funding sources of housing subsidy um overall Market demands um uh are are not all

controllable but I think that the the purpose of this of this exercise and of this um uh of this tool and allocation is to uh try to remove the maximum amount of barriers you know that might be in place starting from zoning and and then some of other things as well oh Jonathan yeah thanks um so the number there the 35,000 units and I forget if you said this earlier um that is based on the medium Target is that correct yes um and given that um the previous data that we were looking at I think was only looking out 10 years I'm just wondering if you can pull the two together in show if we were to go based on the um High projection medium projection low projection the previous presentation is there a way to see how many units we would end up with I'm trying to connect the previous presentation to this one yeah yeah this tool you can input you know any anywhere within that range so we could generate this for the low medium and high uh scenarios um as well we we just started with the medium to start but um that's definitely possible to look at um it just goes in that cell on the bottom left of the um of the sheet there so yeah yeah I recall seeing these numbers in the past from Commerce and when I think about this when it comes to the policy setting is we know what happens if if we don't even get close to this we live in a desirable place people are going to continue to come here and if we don't build out for it then the cost of housing is just going to get higher and higher and

higher so I'm of the sense that we got to build out for it and yes council member list I agree with you this is not the only tool and I think you've seen in California even when they have made policy change on a number of fronts from you know density to adus dadus you know they haven't necessarily seen to change um in affordability but it's it's just one tool among many to do this and we all know we need the state and federal government to do a lot more on affordability but we got to do our job too yeah my question is also about affordability suppose we have a zoning for multif family and Zoning for for single family just taking a simple example is it legal for the cities to say that this area these lots are for low income that put another layer on top of it like how do you convince a developer owner of the land how does the cities uh exert that pressure to meet those numbers is it legal for for the cities to say these are lots of it should be pre-announced so that the developers and land owners everybody knows that if you want to build it here it has to be low income and they can be sprinkled around I'm not saying the one thing so there is no Clarity we are given the targets the Ami targets and everything there are no tools how do you convince the private developer we can make any policy we want got incentiv incentiv like with what we don't have no money you don't doy you give them tax breaks break bre that should not be negotiated with the developer when they want to

develop a project there should be a overlay that defines predefines that thing so that it's everybody clear to the developer to the landowner everything this is the conditions they need to meet now what we are doing we negotiating with individual developer would you please do 20% this and then we'll give you this I don't know I'm not a town planner or anything I'm just thinking illogically that it's been very hard for us to meet those targets we everybody wants affordable housing but what tool do we use to to convince others that you should build this Ferndale did that with their downtown area they they put your little Catalyst project I don't know if it ever standed out but it wasn't enough yeah it wasn't enough they did they over an area be consistent all cities so that I mean there should be some flexibility but if we want a countywide we want to achieve that then we should have some kind of commonality on our policy so that it's not like I'm going to leave you I'm going to go there and do this because I going to go there and do this I just my suggestions 10% didn't didn't wasn't enough to move yeah oh sorry okay should we carry on yeah let's just let's finish these and I mean this is all a great discussion and I think it is important to consider I mean the implementation is sort of the the Step Beyond the allocation but it is it is obviously very challenging to implement this um so if we look at the next slide um this shows the Baseline units so we we updated the so okay

so as I mentioned the the HS Tool has this 2020 Baseline uh the county asked us to update that to 2023 so we looked at what's been built between 2020 and 2023 and what income levels those units are serving and um uh and we we put this in here so this is this is just the updated Baseline I we will send this out to everyone of course to review um and then on the next slide um I just want think the city of Bellingham ahead of time for taking all emergency housing yes thank you permanent support of hous um okay so how do we allocate this jurisdiction so the the the um the ha tool had a sort of basic methodology that only allocated to cities and everything outside of a city was in one blob so we modified this Tool uh working with the county to allocate units to more specific geographies so cities plus ugas and then the unincorporated ugas uh and then also we split the rest of the you know non ug areas into lams and non lamed areas um in an attempt to see about the capacity to increase density in lams to some degree uh and and so now you know there there are um several methods for the allocation of these units to cities and ugas that were provided by Commerce and uh the the Baseline method is called method a uh this allocates an equal share of new units at each income band to each jurisdiction and I want to point out here that it's is sort of an interesting time to be doing this because um Commerce is also updating this ha tool to account for specific considerations of Lo income

units in rural areas uh because when these housing units uh targets are connected to zoning uh obviously as you might suspect the more subsidized and lower income units sort of take the form of multi family zoning where you could build you know say a tax credit housing project um and commerce you know recommends that that and as the whole purpose of the GMA of course is you know to concentrate denser housing in inside ugas so the original tool was a little bit um General in the way that it allocated lower income units in terms of rural areas so as I said we've modified this to uh to change that allocation and commerce is also working on the same thing um and in a minute um I'll show you in the last couple of slides um what that looks like on the allocation level but first I just want to show one quick slide on the connection between income bands and housing types which we've already got into a little bit um you next slide uh so on the left is the Commerce graphic explaining this process um basically you look at the land capacity in each Zone and then the zones are categorized into you know broader categories based on what housing types are allowed and in number three what zone categories um those you know what income categories those housing types can serve uh and then you know you look at the capacity in each Zone and you compare the productive needs uh and then you know you see whether or not there's a mismatch or if there needs to be some changes to the to the zoning so

this chart here this table in exhibit 12 here shows the the Baseline sort of relationship between these Zone categories housing types and affordability levels and again as we've already started talking about it is a pretty basic way of looking at this you know detached single family homes serve higher incomes as you see at the right and that's the low density category you know uh when you get into zones that allow a lot of different types of housing this can get a little bit messy but the the basic assumption is uh you know that things like duplexes triplexes middle housing you know serving a middle inome groups U multif Family Apartments have the potential uh you know with subsidies or incentives as you see there on on the chart to serve lower income houses households um and then there's a sort of separate calculation for use yeah oh sorry did somebody say something okay so uh finally this shows uh okay I'm going to show two matrixes uh this is the first one this is just the Baseline allocation so at the top is the 31 units needed by 2045 and then in the second line is what share of those units are needed at each income un so you know the ha tool generates these numbers as we saw 26% at 0 to 30 non psh 21% at 30 to 50 Etc all the way up so this is what what the need the you know the the estimated need that the county U has according to Commerce and and um so in the bottom basically you just take the total percentage for each ug um and multiply it by the same percentages at

the top for each income band so this just distributes you know this is the Baseline just Distributing equally the uh the share of units across income bands to all jurisdictions based on their share of projected growth and um you know we we got some emails and communication from Commerce recently about uh what to do about lower income units in rural areas as you can see rural areas here do have you know sort of large allocations of low-income units which doesn't make sense based on the form that this analysis expects those unit to take so we worked with the county um if you go to the next slide Chris to uh to redistribute the lower income units away from rural areas um and um and correspondingly some higher income units move into those areas so that the totals um are the same as far as the total project yeah these um I guess what's going through my mind is um Farm worker housing like on farm so if does that qualify as as lowincome hous for your analysis and planning and if so why would we want to move those out of the rural areas yeah it does and that's something we've we've talked a lot about um in in with with the our little subcommittee um and we have been doing some analysis of you know how much those uh are renting for they are very low income um units and they're in rural areas so what we're trying to do is to come up with uh some reasonable you know expectation of farm worker growth uh and and and um and add some of those units in so this is just taking all of the rural

area Target out of um under 50% but we do expect to to have some in there to account for Farmer housing in the final question so it as you say the original model just disted everything evenly as if the universe doesn't care where they go right care I'm also thinking about two other bends of housing uh the above 120% and say that maybe 80 to 100 or 50 to 80 um no one is going to build entry level housing and most of the zoning in Bellingham those houses whether I like it or not are going to be very expensive similarly if I find a Halfacre and put a manufactored home on it that is a really affordable form of housing now but it's not occur inside the city is a really great form of 50 to 80% housing find that little lot put a manufactured home on it nice they they're nice homes these days it's never going to occur in the city but it really will occur in other areas so reality suggests that many these categories have to be adjusted whether we like it or not yeah and I mean it's a great point about manufactured homes and I I mean I think that um you know this similar to the overall projections is also sort of um The Next Step you know uh the the this is like okay you got to start with with an equal distribution and then uh you know moving moving forward into um taking these considerations into account um and and and adjusting these numbers accordingly but yeah I mean it's it is good a great point about M homes I think I think there's a fundamental flaw with this all these slides if

you look at the very first column it's always the same you know that the percentage of total between different things I think that's where we need to rethink in different situations that first allocation of that should be decided by us what we want to see because otherwise it's like a proportional formula the Excel spills it out and then the rest follows that yeah absolutely and and that is where these two things do connect you know the the the allocation to each City in ug uh is not set you know this was just our first draft based on the past 10 years of growth as Ted uh as Ted described uh you know that that the future 20 years would follow the same Trend as the past 10 years as far as what percentage of total countywide growth would occur in each jurisdiction that is up for for uh for discussion and um and negotiation as well and it's something that we have been talking about in the city County Planning Group a little bit and we'll probably talk about this week as well um um is is you know what what are what are the the considerations around adjusting the the left column and and I think we had some discussion last week about uh you know where the county indicated that um that if cities wanted to take more or less percentage or or or felt like they wanted to adjust that the the the grand total could also be adjusted to accommodate that because there is that large range even within our adjusted low to high range so uh that yeah absolutely that that's that's something that

that needs to be discussed and and um can be adjusted and that grand total part is one that I I'm not entirely clear on like surely there are boundaries uh to how much like if in this sort of policy discussion there are more people there are more jurisdictions that want to limit growth and there are that want to take growth and and therefore we kind of need to adjust Baseline overall number are there limits to that what are the repercussions uh it seems like that sort of throws the the Statewide housing model into uh potential a little bit of chaos well the yeah I think that the county can choose anywhere in the range for the whole County I think the cities and ug also can choose within that the low medium and high range um for them for the cities understand what I'm looking at here because this one has 49.7% of the total of allocated to Bellingham at 15570 and then the last presentation had that at 42.5% for the middle projection of 24158 so what this is a this is a subset of what from compared to the previous this is housing units this is housing units yeah exactly so it all it was done in the same way we looked at the past 10 years of growth in housing units by jurisdiction uh and um and these percentages are based on the past 10 years of growth in housing units whereas the last one was based on the past 10 years of growth in population um sh the housing units but'll come out the 42% yeah the reason it's 49 instead of 42 and we we talked about this ly and Ferndale their

percentage are slightly different too is because household sizes are uh are different across jurisdictions average household size is smaller and so therefore yeah a higher number of units a higher percentage of units than than the percentage of people make sure hands um sorry Andrew I'm just checking to make sure we're not missing any hands that are raised online here I don't think we I don't see any so okay so yeah I mean I I'll kind of defer to you Chris or or whoever um on on how to proceed I mean there is a slide that says next steps it's not much on it essentially refine these allocations um we are uh modifying the land Capacity Analysis spreadsheets uh that were used during the buildable lands process um updating those with uh you know recent development and um parcel status so that we can do a test run of you know the the zoned capacity uh and see where that is and that can also help inform uh this the eventual allocations you know to see what as you were discussing earlier to see what's what's uh currently zoned on the ground under the current zoning uh how that relates to these targets both the the jobs projections that population and housing projections and income band projections or targets um so I think that there's a sort of a you know a cycle of uh of of data and uh discussions to be had here to refine these um both sort of from the top down Target perspective and also the bottom up yes we lost you for just a second there can you repeat your last what you just

said oh I'm sorry um yeah I think that that there's a sort of um a cycle of of data and and discussion to be had here where we we're going to do this land Capacity Analysis test run working with Matt to do that and the cities and ugas uh looking at what's zoned what capacity is for housing and jobs right now under current zoning and that can also help inform the eventual you know next uh final you know iterations of these allocations so that will hopefully allow you know both to look at the the overall targets from a top down like you were saying earlier um you know looking at the past and trending that out or potentially the other Trends but also to look at what's zoned now uh and and and see where that lines up with it you know to just discuss what might want to be changed in in zoning um going forward was that your last slide there uh Matt asked me to to share the definition of Perman support of housing so there's a slide on that um this is the definition um it's it's quite long I assume this slide will or has been sent out to you uh but essentially um it's uh you know support services for for people housing with with Support Services um primarily serving people who have been homeless or or uh you know having other issues so um I I put that there for reference but yeah that's that's the end of the slides I see Jonathan has his hand up yeah Andrew would you go to do that next step um in looking at the land capacity when it comes to housing do you also look at what happens

if you change other policy mechanisms I think about things like parking minimums and what that can do um I don't know if folks have seen this but sometime in 2023 there's this great blog post by the urbanist looking at um surface level parking in downtown Bellingham and I'm not picking on Bellingham I live in Bellingham but that's what they did it for and they showed there's more than two million what is the number uh million square feet of surface parking in downtown Bellingham if you were to build that out at a similar level of samish Commons that adds in 4,400 units of housing that it's stuff like that that I think would be interesting to look at that then helps us when it comes to um policy tools so I'm curious what else you look at in that next uh process yeah I mean I think that that it's um it it's a lot of it's tied to density assumption so when you look at the zoning and see how many acres there are I mean first you know making sure that things that are classified as vacant you know are reasonable places for development but when you have a bunch of acreage of vacant or redevelop land that's been classified um and you want to see what you could put on it um there's definitely the opportunity to explore uh you know what sort of densities could fit within your zoning and if you were to for example change parking you know what sort of density uh increases you would be able to accommodate um so that's the the way in which things like parking or um you know setbacks or

other uh dimensional standards and height as well obviously come into play um in in that process and that and that is is you know can be based on projects that have been built um or you know prototypes uh of of of buildings with a certain amount of parking you know to see what density they are even if there aren't projects of that type in the in the city um currently so that yeah those considerations do come in on the sort of jurisdictional level looking at the land Capacity Analysis assumptions the density assumptions behind the that analysis [Music] thanks mayn I just want to assure uh council member scanland that the city team is actively looking uh especially after once you read that urbanist blog you just don't see parking lots the same way ever again you can't you can't you can't look at them the same way we also look at up the high number of corn banks that have really low utilization in our downtown um we we look at those and and see lots of opportunities so uh it's it's an active conversation at the city and I recognize the county is a problem because we own some of those lots I also want to give a props to Andrew for the very aesthetic book dra uh bookcase organization in the background then color W I have to give credit to my wife for doing that actually but yes it's a hit all right are we Bill are you up next here uh I could be but I think Sharice is probably better qualified to talk about the and would you like me to launch your slides yes please I think that'll

be certainly be easiest and actually that discussion was a great segue into um the sea analysis various documents have been send these to you if you want I'm sure you prob I just didn't know like well this one this is the one on pops it's a dro [Laughter] basket I know now you got inspiration I'm trying to see well this isal don't you have like on the name for meeting at our place one up the link embed in there I think weon officials they're very patient with us thanks everyone online start here so you go ahead and just tell me when when you'd like me to Advance your slid great thank you you go ahead go to the the next one um part of the part of the planning process and um the process for coming up with those scenarios and how to allocate the growth how and where to allocate the growth um is dictated by the growth management act uh requiring you to look at the potential environmental impacts of of those different scenarios and so I'm going to quickly go through kind of the the sea process so the State Environmental Policy Act process that we're um starting now and go ahead and go to the next slide this is just a high level overview of the steps in the sea process um starts with a notice of intent and scoping um and that's scoping determines what we look at or what we analyze in the sepa document and in this case we'll be doing an environmental impact statement um there's a 30-day public comment period in January uh ran from January 10th to January 31st we had a public hearing

on January 24th um and in total we received 18 uh written comments and had three people give oral testimony at the hearing um and all of that is being taken into consideration in how um how we look at the areas of the environment and and what's included in the in the document itself um the next step is actually preparation of the draft Eis and that's where we're at now we're we're defining the Alternatives we're looking at existing conditions and then and that's the the black text there and then everything else is is what we're what we're moving forward with um we'll be doing the impact evaluation mitigation strategies we'll be publishing the draft for public review and then eventually we'll be issuing a final Eis with a preferred alternative next slide go go to the next slide my there we go so SE requires us to look at a range of Alternatives and again this kind of plays into um the idea of of looking at different scenarios for how growth can happen in the county um one required piece is to look at a no action alternative and that's the assumption that growth would happen in the county um as it as the with the current growth projections carried forward from the last comprehensive plan um it's a it's a lower obviously a lower growth option um than what we're what Leland folks are are um modeling now um then there's three uh action Alternatives we call them or or growth uh scenarios that we're looking at alternative one would use the um ofm medium population projection um and

again using kind of the recent uh historic population shares of the allocation to the different jurisdictions alternative two would use uh the population projection and allocations to each um ug in the area outside the ug is requested by the cities and counties and that's the process we're going through right now to um to get that information from from you all and that plays into what you want to see um alternative three uh would use a higher population projections so that's kind of the higher range of of the of the growth scenario um and it would be higher than both the ofm and the medium medium projection and the population projection requested population projections requested by each of the jurisdictions um as kind of a again a high a high end of that range of Alternatives we're looking at um all of these Alternatives um are going to include again where appropriate changes to land use and Zoning designations residential densities Urban growth area boundaries um and all of it to kind of accommodate growth throughout the planning Horizon which is out to 2045 and I but Bill do you want to add anything about the the land use Alternatives that we're looking at no not at this point except you just reinforce the segue and the relationship between what we just heard from Andrew and Ted exactly um so where we are now in putting the document together is gathering all of the existing conditions um again this is a SE required element this is our Baseline evaluation we look at um

everything that is an existing condition today um and we look at potential issues that could be exacerbated or created by Future growth um and then obviously we'll compare that with between the Alternatives um the areas of the environment that we're going to be evaluating in the Eis are the same as they were in the previous comp plan Eis document um and that's this list here um that goes into like your comments earlier about parking and different um different policies that could be put in place to um adjust what what the communities look like in over over the next planning Horizon as we put all of these existing conditions um as we start documenting all of these existing conditions we're going to be um disseminating that information to the different departments within the county and and potentially to the cities as well to make sure that we have um documented all that accurately um get your input on what those issues those those existing issues might be um and then um from there we can move forward and do our impact analysis and next slide so that brings us to the next steps um again we will be completing that impact analysis and a comparison of the Alternatives uh we're going to be developing mitigation strategies for um identified impacts we're going to publish the draft of the Eis um hopefully this early this fall um there's a 30-day at least a 30-day comment period while we will'll be receiving public comments from the um from the public and other agencies we'll be

holding a hearing and or you know public open house to make sure that people get that information and have various opportunities for for input and then using that feedback and the rest of the work that the the counties and cities are doing um we will be um putting together a final Eis that will um outline the preferred alternative that will go into the comprehensive Plan update and hopefully we'll be doing that around the first quarter of 2025 and next slide and this kind of gives an overview of the timeline um basically what I just went through a little more detail about uh when the meetings different meetings will happen and rather than read through all of that I'll just ask if anybody has has questions about the the process the timeline or any of the information that'll be going into the analysis I think we're going to adopt it on top right there I have a question about the Eis itself is can I ask you sure please explain me the purpose of this Eis in a Project based Eis you might choose a different project or permit something differently or you might require mitigation so something is either not done or or reduced or mitigated we're not going to not do the comp plan update we're not going to minimize it or avoid it to reduce the impact so what utility is in E for these mandated processes great question for the it's yeah and it is definitely a different process for what what we call a programmatic review than for a project level review what we're looking at is the potential

impacts of implementing this policy um implementing the zoning changes implementing these um incentives for for growth in a specific way so what we are doing is garnering input on potential environmental impacts of your policy decisions and how that how that might be mitigated through either additional policy or um different choices in where or how growth happens some some of the issues we're looking at are are things like [Music] um uh potential development in areas where there's naturally occurring ASB bestus or other critical areas uh looking at the impacts uh to the traffic and infrastructure um from types you know from clustering you know types of housing developments or or um concentrating employment growth in certain areas um it's it it's you know it's a very wide range and wide net and granted it is all at a fairly high level because we we don't have specific projects we're looking at but we're trying to give it give a kind of a whole istic view of how um these growth scenarios could affect all of those areas of the might an e tell me that sprawl is bad and that we should all try to build denser can it actually guide our planning preferences that that is one thing it can tell um and and it will definitely be more obvious when it comes to things like transportation and uh public services and utilities um I think all of us understand fairly well the um the efficiencies that can be had from denser development over urban sprawl but um those are the things those are the

types of of things that become evident in this analysis Sherice if I can just add a little bit to to what what you just said I think that's I think it's all all right on um you know sea gives us an opportunity to do two things we either have a negative declaration I'm sorry a determination of non- significant I'm talking not not a negative declar determination of nonsignificance or or determination of significance and the the DNS tells us that the program that we're considering uh either doesn't have a negative impact or can be mitigated to a point where it will not have a negative impact on the environment uh the DS tells us that the program May have an impact on the environment uh and so if we if we say that our policy Choice might have an impact on the environment it really does point us into the world of having to prepare an Eis and and the Eis is intended to be a Disclosure document so that it can not necessarily tell you if sprawl is bad but it can let you know what some of the relative consequences and costs might be for that kind of a growth policy Choice versus something that's a little bit more Compact and it goes ahead and and uh discloses that and makes that available to the policy makers so anyway I just wanted to add that to the to the Eis conversation right now yeah that was great Bill any other questions anyone online have any questions all right shice did you have any other Jimmy to jump back to your slide deck that yeah the only other slide was just the

question questions about the process um if anything if anything comes up you know in the future we're we're certainly happy to to fi those questions did did we have any other agenda was that the end of the agenda this is uh that was the end of the presentation so it's a general discussion or comments from anyone and otherwise we can we can we can start to wrap up sounds like uh it's a very good spirited discussion it's awesome to hear that uh we've all worked out all these issues and we're all in agreement that's awesome that how you interpret we do look forward to as you can see there's a lot coming um this process as we're working our way through the system and through the analysis and the processes first at the technical level and then we will get to get to you guys in those juicy policy discussions so they are they are coming want to th send that to the room since we have city the city and the cities and County never really got in a room together much the last time around so this is this is really helpful I think when we got to the phase where we're we get this back from the Planning Commission and we did kind of when say autopilot but really sort of did stick with the the allocations that were that were that we started that we're seeing right here I guess what's hard for me to figure out as a policy maker is how do we how do we have that conversation is it before the Planning Commission gets this thing about what the priorities are of the cities and the counties it was

kind of backwards last time where we would get here's the ug expansion requests maybe and here's the population projections and then some of those ugas haven't been touched since I we we can do that but that doesn't mean there's actually like infrastructure in those ugas so does that count when we do the land Capacity Analysis like the timing of when we got out information didn't really work well last time and I don't know what the better process is but does the county need to know ahead of time if there's ug's expansion existing ug that that counts towards these allocations and it's going to work or is it they doesn't work because there's no infrastructure there no one wants to pay for it and which is kind of what happened the last couple times so I don't so does for staff or for how do we make those things mesh together this time I I can take a step uh like we need we need the projections and the allocations then we'll look at our individual ugas and we'll determine if we have enough capacity in the ug uh to accommodate that by either changing the zoning up zoning making development regulation changes uh and then if we can't do that within the existing ug that's when we're likely to look at expanding the ug uh probably from the reserve areas that already exist the flaw and everything we're looking at today is that we're assigning growth to the county without understanding if the county has the capacity to undertake that growth or if the ug have the infrastructure no matter

what acon you put there no we we we have the ability to provide infrastructure that's what Engineers are for time and money we don't necess have the ability to provide the money yeah nobody wanted to provide the money last time but but not understanding if you're applying a certain amount of growth outside of the Cities then what are you going to do if you don't have the capacity are you going to up zone out there no right so like understanding that to there's I just want to make a statement or a request or whatever you call it or appeal I would say that all the town planners city planners everything make your councils uncomfortable push them really I'm serious I'm really serious because you guys are our subject matter experts yeah we as politicians we want the shortest route where we don't have to face public I I'm telling you the truth okay you have to stop all the pull all the stops see what is best for your jurisdiction for next 25 years not just 5 years I'm going to be retiring in 5 years I do this I'm good with that make us uncomfortable make us to take hard decisions we will come up with decisions we are forced to that that's what our job is to make those hard decisions but if we don't face those decision don't don't assume if I say thing my mayor is not going to like it or Council will never pass it don't assume that you have worked with this system for last 10 years or different maybe different jurisdiction you have a lot of experience and you know but you can never

tell when you are at your work spot but this is your opportunity after years tell us what do you think can solve our housing problem which way we should approach it we will worry about the cost of it we will worry about how we can afford it not afford it until we really know what can be done what is possible how could we find Solutions I think that please go all the way tell us what do you feel what do you think that is the best solution for our community and and it tough decisions well I want to hear that from the planners obviously but I also like at what point do we wait till the end and lyndon's like no we don't want that much and we're seeing we want billing them to take more that's the political stuff we wait till too late sometimes to do that yeah CU that's what the timeline has laid out that's what stuck out to me I'm like I'm looking at June July and August September for public engagement and Planning Commission and in front of council and I'm like hm that seems like that's by Design so that you guys can come up with your plan and then say well it's too late to change anything we got to meet this timeline what frustrates me to no end is 10 years ago when I was on the Planning Commission and we were doing the comp plan I'm looking at you mark for what frustrates me to no end is is you know some of the same issues same projects same land owners same developments we're still talking about 10 years later we didn't solve anything and these are things these are projects

that the community wants and the people are still here hanging on by the skin or their teeth maybe there's different land owners but the projects are still there like we can fix them now so let's do it I I'm I'm with Todd and Z Paul and Michael and I'm hoping Greg and Scott and the rest of us you know elected no not things in the room let's be bold and and let's make some Chang just let's let's do it let's stop talking about it because I can I know I mean I'll be so bold enough to say I know what the public um input's going to be I know what the Realtor Association is going to say I know what Scott's going to say what Greg's going to say I know what their people are telling them like and I'm sorry Kim but if those single family residence that people are buying in Lyon were built in Bellingham I think that people would preferably buy them in so listen when they tell you what the market we need it all we do need it all but but like if you wonder why a massive amount of growth happen on the flood plane in suass it's because that's the single family residence that people could afford right and so if we don't want to do that we got to give them somewhere else to live and we have to do that with land use policy so I think it's I think it's time we do it so that in 10 years cuz I'm probably one of the youngest guys in the room I'll be here in 10 years I won by 61% I just bought another Farm in Ferndale I'm not leaving I'll be here in 10 years I don't want to keep having this

conversation with personius Just J rection I think Ben I might be around a little longer yeah you you might be but to that point Lyon our Urban growth area is an area prone to flooding in certain weather conditions doesn't flood all the time and we have to take care of that problem and one thing we want is affordable housing and our Urban growth area is saying this is where we got to go and we've got we're putting on a 10 or sorry $119,000 Transportation impact fee for the for the units in that area to take care of the infrastructure to take care of the water and you know I would love to grow some other area around linen we can't we're not allowed to cross the badger we're not allowed to do those my farm land yeah I know it I so we go where we're told to go and it's expensive so people tell us you know we need affordable housing what we're doing is working sorry not for linon anyway and and I would Echo that in Ferndale where um you know the the urban growth boundaries that were were drawn up in the in the 90s um were were somewhat aspirational somewhat kind of just based on geography but when you start to to look at the the cost of infrastructure to service those boundaries um we actually would be better off growing in a different direction um it's going to cost less to to um to to put in the infrastructure to grow in a different direction but that's outside of not just our Urban growth boundy but our Urban growth reserve and and you know kind of to Echo what's been said in

a couple different ways around the room maybe this is the time to maybe blow up some of that and and actually have some difficult conversations um you know between jurisdictions between you know jurisdictions in the county around where where we actually are going to grow um and and um you know where can we actually redraw some of our Earth Urban growth boundaries and and reserves in a more logical way that actually you know speaks to trying to reach some of the of the the housing affordability numbers um and and um actually gives us a fighting chance to to deal with some of our housing challenges and I understand there's a lot of kind of legal hurdles in in totally flip-flopping your over Urban growth bage and your reserves but again right um make people uncomfortable well Greg this is very valuable for me to hear because I had actually put a lot of Hope more in Fr of than linen because I knew of your constraints I I don't know what your constraints are but if your only constraint is that is that 15 years ago the city was aimed in the wrong direction but all we going do is in a different direction then let's fix that well that's that's one of them the other one is is is is money I mean you know it's it's extending those Services you know we need to we don't we actually aren't even servicing our entire city limits with with sewer at this time uh probably shouldn't have Incorporated it into our city limits back in the early 2000s late n late 90s early 2000s but we did it's

there um and we're you know we're looking down the face of a $25 million sewer extension we can't do that we can't so misery loves company because whenever we talk about expens Bellingham internally I just go to infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure not just infrastructure Urban Services fire libraries yeah the services and infrastructure that go with Urban being inside City Limits and that's where I want to and so I kind of want to talk about housing and housing affordability and employment employment lands but internally it's infrastructure that's getting in my way and that's what stuff we def find something as ug no one gos there okay but we also have to acknowledge that Bellingham is the only jurisdiction in the room that has to deal with house buillt 1110 in Middle hous there's a whole another line of conversation that has to be going on there that's not being equably distributed around the county so there's a there's a level of complexity that we've got to deal with that we're the only one in the room that has you brought us along for the party because we get to deal with it like years because we have like 10 ft of ug that touch us yeah yeah so we'll learn from I just had two other thoughts not sure who's chairing at this point but um one I think we talk a lot about building out I think we should talk about building up and everybody can build up it doesn't just have to be one city I think about you know the new project coming in Blaine with um the library plus

housing you know that's a great example of how to build up in a in a smaller City I think we can do more of that in more of our cities um and then the other places you know if we are building out and going into ugas this is where I think EDI money can come into play I think EDI money can help with some of the infrastructure needs obviously not all of it but it can help with some and that can be a way where um the county can work with the cities on that infrastructure Mayor Scott secret I already heard the cat's out of the bag can I start I start a new topic right yeah exact my new topic is my appeal if you were in the city council meeting on Monday you heard me probing our our Port director on this this has to do with a countywide look at industrial ends I believe it was the county back November presented the walking County Business Commerce Committee a study of the need for heavy industrial lands countywide I would like to see a countywide assessment of light industrial lands cuz frankly I don't want heavy Industrial in my city limits but I do want light industrial and it' be nice were all coordinated on that I'm trying to get an idea together that uh that that ought to be a sub project for this countywide planning process I would I would like a special look just at industrial lands where are we going to butcher the cows that's what I want to know we need that is my appeal I'd like to know who would lead on that I'm looking at the county looking at you because it's the count

of in process but I would love to get the city I I almost got rob you know fixed to promise I actually thought the port was leading on this I think commissioner Bell has indicated that in conversation with me um but is that g to happen or are we going to talk about it we have some influence with the new the new economic development director no I I think I just want to make one more statement is that we should not underestimate the cooperation that this county has been able to do that like look at we meant through Co because because we were all on the same page we went through this jail 15 years later right because we can build upon that you can build upon that have this give and take and we have been able to do in many different ways and let's keep extending that this is a existential thing we talking we are in trouble now just look 20 years from now if we don't change direction where will be 20 years from now do we want to leave it like that that's that's where I am Mel you anex you get heav talk about free so I'm confused a bit um Port director Rob fix indicated they're willing to follow other jurisdiction's leads but it also sounds like Port commissioner Bell who I also talked to sounds like he wants the port to lead I kind of don't care who does it but I would like the work to get done so I'm in support I'm just saying I'm in support um I'd like that I'd like that to be established early because I think that information should be known early in our comp planning process

so all of our jurisdictions can look at that piece because like I said I'm very much interested in in in a balanc approach to growth which includes looking commercial industrial land not just where the housing goes by I'd also like to put out kind of a ploy or in the room as as the state starts to look at the building codes and the IRC and the IVC if we truly are going to look at additional housing forms we really need to look at the the inefficiencies in the building code because right now you get a one and two family is in the IRC and there's a lot of additional regulatory hurdles to actually getting housing built unless we streamline some of that building go St so as that starts to come up in the next two years years in the technical advisory groups your various building officials can be active participants in that that will help align some of the uh land use policies to some of our actual building code regulations and that will that certainly um pay some dividends if we we invest some time I would just add on to the industrial lands conversation that you know we'll we'll have some of those answers that will come out of this land Capacity Analysis and of the employment uh the the technical allocations so we'll be able to Crunch the numbers the staffs and the consultants and know hey are we short uh or do we need to expand industrial landbase somewhere and that will sort of lead to that conversation as well right so we have some work from the port already about where the

infrastructure is we have some good some good background uh analysis that's been done and that can help us then start finding about okay where should we go we do need industrial additional Industrial is the corridor Point what if we're going to Z Zone say a heavy industrial area in the bingan ug that's a loss that needs to be considered it's a gain to the Bellingham if it becomes light industrial because I think we need that base but it's a loss to the county and the and that's a docketed item for us uh already that we'll be bringing to uh to the Planning Commission and the County Council hopefully the County Council I'm we we need to talk about it is that the one we were scheduling a check in about next counc yes okay one thing uh executive to has been saying though for many years is I think we should consider a wetland M mitigation Bank as infrastructure too because we have so many people sitting on Parcels yes um that would love to build right now that are unable to do that building so uh do you guys a guy named Victor Woodward he's one of the like he did um he did a whole bunch of mitigation banking in like the Duvall area through there and did a whole bunch of activism at the state level to make it legal and uh I ran into him because we he raises cows now um but I would love for him to come up here and give maybe the council or planning andite planning committee like a overview of what he had go through to get it done in a in a legal manner down there I I I just want to

share that we want to do a wetland Bank like 5,000 Acres I'm not thinking like let's do another 400 acres and we'll worry about if we want to start that process let's think big every good land in whatam county is already built anything we have has ha on it it's a CEO it's Shoreline it's Wetland it's something the problem is is that that stuff it's Farmland that gets banked so so so what I'm saying is that we should take a bold step so that which is good for next 20 30 40 years not in a small way and that is our solution lot of land which we cannot build or very expensive to build will become reasonable it it may take us 5 10 years but that 10 years start now if we had started 10 years ago we would have it today so I have been working with mayor on this very idea uh to to put a three people together Court us and this and I would like to do share that all the cities are welcome to join and it should not be only for the government projects or government things it should be for our developers land owners everybody so that they can make use of that Wetland bank I got to go with him so all right guys thank you very much thanks the last just one quick thing our next quarterly meeting is scheduled for like mid-september and so uh look with your staff your staff will be in communication with you and how we're going between now and then so where that at where is it should we have it at the L Indian Business Council building they keep telling me they want to participate but here they're