Planning Commission

[Music] something ready okay welcome everyone uh to the I'd like to call to order the March 7th 2024 meeting of the Bellingham City Planning Commission Heather can you call the role please Jad blo here Mike Estes here hose LEP here Mike mcau Barbara plasket here R Whidby here and Scott Jones is excused okay uh I don't recall seeing any minutes no okay um tonight's meeting is a informational presentation from staff on um to date engagement on the Bellingham plan with the public and review of some survey data um so we don't have any public hearing we're not voting on anything but um before we turn it over to staff for a presentation uh the public is welcome to give any general public comment to the commission tonight um so if you are here tonight in the audience or at home on zoom and would like to address the commission for three minutes uh please raise your hand on Zoom or come on down and um I'll start a little timer so um yeah okay just just say your name and I'll time you for 3 minutes evening my name is Daniel blemker I live in the Birchwood neighborhood and I'm here tonight to give support to the Future planning changes from House Bill 1110 House Bill 1110 is the state's missing midle bill that prevents cities from only having single family detached zoning these measures include requiring cities to allow quad plexes higher floor area ratios and lower minimum parking values things that used to be common before they were made illegal I'm asking the plan commission to be

supportive of and encourage the planning and Community Development Department to consider the prescriptive zoning in HB 1110 as the bare minimum and that we can create a code that allows people to build places people want to live lowering or eliminating lot line setbacks and parking minimums raising floor area ratios and height limits and overall less tedious overly prescriptive design requirements that currently make every new build look kind of the same I want us to let people build what they want to build in their own neighborhoods Seattle this week just released their one Seattle growth planning plan that drastically under builds and is likely to increase housing costs in Seattle and as a knock on Bellingham being bold in removing restrictions can help reduce or reverse these pressures and I hope we all have the courage to do so thank you thank you any other comments from the public any Zoom hands no all right last chance going once Zoom hands um not seeing any other hands we'll go ahead and close the public comment in uh the rest of meeting we'll turn over to Chris and staff great good evening Commissioners good to see you all again it's been a while since we've been here so um we are back in front of you with an update on the Bellingham plan as you said uh I think we were in front of you last year uh summertime for our initial launch kind of gave you a project overview and then we touched base again before the end of the year on um kind of the ress to date and this is a

really a showing you the phase one wrapup um which we provided you some documents to preview if you so chose and uh we'll Elizabeth will be stepping through um some survey information and we'll talk a little bit about what's coming with respect to um the various house bills uh that we need to address in this update um and that our code will need to be adjusted to accommodate and uh we'll also review some of the upcoming just uh very recently um very recently uh happening or things that have just happened I guess having an awkward time saying that apologies uh public events and then the four upcoming ones part of our six event series that's what I was trying to say um and then we'd love to have a conversation with you about any questions you have about those and and then specifically about the the um data that we'll kind of nerd out a little bit with you on and and give you a little bit of a taste of so that's kind of what we're doing so um if you have questions maybe let us get through what will probably be a 20ish minute presentation and then we'd love to just open it up for questions on any of the material all right thanks Chris and as you many of you know I think I'm Elizabeth ericon and Chris gave a kind of an overview of what we'll go through tonight um here's just the quick agenda doing a lot of kind of looking back but then a little bit of looking forward as well and then also um quite a bit of detail on some of the state requirements and what they really mean for this

project in particular so we did want to start off by just kind of a reminder about a big piece of the Bellingham plan is thinking about growth and where we're going to be in 20 years a lot of that is looking at our population growth and what that means for housing and jobs as well and this is just a quick look at some of that projection so you can see on this map across the county all the yellow areas are the cities and their Urban growth areas and the urban growth areas out in the county as well um all of these except for Cherry Point um would be uh prescribed to get some of this growth so this is looking at over the next 20 years to 2045 57,000 additional people about 36,000 new housing units so that's the medium projection we're still working with the other cities in the county on exactly how that'll be distributed and kind of where in that projection range will will end up but this gives you a kind of a quick view and this is what it looks like in comparison to the growth we've seen over the last uh you know 40 45 years or so and you you can see that you know it's not that dramatically different than from the last 10 20 years or so um it's pretty similarly um you know about 1300 people each year um so you can see that kind of projected out so that'll be fairly similar and we'll have a little bit more detail next time before you on really what we're honing in on and how that might be distributed across the cities as well and how that fits into some of the state legislation

so just as a reminder I know we've given you a lot of updates and several of you have been very active at our um engagement efforts so you're probably pretty familiar with this but just as a reminder um there's kind of a few different things we're doing with this update one of them is really oh thank you heather um one of them is really looking forward um kind of at the future but some of it is also looking back at the past so kind of thinking about what we've done in the past that's really working well and continuing those principles moving forward building off of the growth that um and kind of growth of strategy and approach that has worked really well but also figuring out what's not working as well and how to address that so starting a good base and layering things on top to get where we want to be in 20 years um we also want to make sure that we're really being aspirational and thinking ahead and not just being reactionary to things that we've seen but being aspirational to things that we want to see in the future um we also are really intentionally planning in a way where we're trying to get as many people of different backgrounds and different perspectives to engage in this process as possible and setting the stage for that to be kind of something we can do in the future as well and in other efforts so really setting that as as a standard um and then we'll talk more about the state legislation but we've told you a little bit about them before a lot of different

elements of the last few years have been adopted at the state level that focus on housing um kind of housing types housing affordability um housing Equity as well as kind of climate change and and how we respond to that so those are some of the big topics here's a reminder of all the chapters that are in the comprehensive plan today um you can see in blue our current chapters and we've highlighted the land use and housing with those circles or whatever ovals to represent um the chapters that we know are going to be the biggest focus in this update but of course all of the chapters will be looked at um with the exception of the Pro Plan chapter which has its own update process that will come through in 2026 but of course we're still talking about parks and open space because it's all integrated with all of these other chapters so we're working closely with Park staff Park staff were actually at our event last night for example so that we can make sure that all of this forward together but we also wanted to highlight on the left you can see the climate and Community well-being additions um based on both state legislation and the importance that we have here in the community around climate and responding to climate change and being resilient as a community um that's going going to be a theme in this update we're not sure whether that means it'll be its own new chapter maybe it'll be incorporated into the environment chapter or kind of s out everything it certainly will be that

as it relates to many of these topics but it will be a theme throughout and similar with Community well-being this might have to do with topics like safety which come up a lot topics like gathering together as a community arts and culture a lot of these things that really build community um have really come through as an important theme so these are topics that we know will be incorporated as part of this update again we're not sure if it'll be a whole new chapter or maybe it's a section that's highlighted in every chapter but it will be important so this is the project schedule last time we came to you we showed you this but we were kind of you know early on in Phase One we're now through phase one and we're coming to tell you about what we heard and what we did in Phase One and looking forward to what we're going to be doing in phase two a lot of phase one was really focused on Broad Outreach really hearing from the community about what they care about and what we need to accomplish in this update um as well as just kind of building awareness of the project we were able to build up a list of over 2 200 people who want to get information about this project in particular so that's been really great so that we can build off of that foundation in this next phase um and really work with the community in this phase we're really focusing on how we want to grow over time and so we have a series of events that Chris will go through to kind of address those issues and start big and

then hone in on particular issues so that by the end of this phase we really have a good handle on how we want to grow what approach we would like to take and then once we get to that point we'll be able to go through um kind of a draft review and so we'll we'll take everything we heard pull it together create a draft get some feedback both from from uh groups like you and also the community itself um and get get some feedback before bringing it through the formal adoption process that will go through the Planning Commission and ultimately to council by your recommendation um we do want to note you can see kind of at the bottom here there is a bill that passed this session in the legislature that gave us a six-month extension um that is really helpful because you can see there's a bar here about the development code related to a lot of the state legislation that is due 6 months after our adoption date so previously that was due at the end of 2025 now we have until mid 2026 to get that code updated which will help give us just a little bit more time on that the basic schedule for this part of the project with the policy updates will probably remain similar but it means we can stagger them a little bit more and not have quite as much overlap where we're trying to do too many things at once so um I did uh send out some information ahead of this and that was these three documents for you all to review but we're going to give you some highlights from all of them um these are

documents that give information about the kind of what we heard in Phase One and the work we did so the first one is a pretty high level summary all of these are available on our website so that's what this QR code is as well so anyone from the community who wants to dive in deep they are welcome to um the first one is is a quite quick read and high level the other two are much more detailed reports about particular surveys that we did and we'll be going through some of those slides uh in this presentation so the vision survey is the survey we did at the beginning of phase one kind kind of in the middle middle of phase one um but that we got quite significant feedback on from across the community and then we also did a housing preference survey with a consultant who helped us get statistically valid responses across a variety of demographics so that's really helpful for us to understand not just from folks who have a lot of time to engage with us on a regular basis but also from those that are often harder to reach hearing their voices as well and understanding what their kind of preferences are related to housing and their neighborhoods so this is a high level recap of phase one um from July through December of last year we were at all sorts of different places I'm not going to read every single one of these but we were just trying to get out in the community be tbling um get the word out um reach out to different organizations see what they're organizing a piggyback off of

that all sorts of different things and then in the lower left you can see we also were able to make the rounds with the boards and commissions and hear from them about what they felt was important if they had ideas about how to get out in the community all of those things to really set the stage for success uccessful rest of this project um we also were able to hold several um public meetings for this or public events for this project as well so we were able to do those both virtually and in person so this is kind of by the Numbers what we heard who we reached in the first phase um we got over 4,000 Vision surveys um through both um a mailer that was sent out but also through online engagement through our tabling efforts things like that we got almost 1,500 housing preference surveys um and that was through both a mailer and um efforts through um kind of reaching out through social media through local community- based organizations we got a little over 30 student surveys which were very similar to The Vision surveys but really just um pushed at a particular event that we did out at Western and then we also got to a lot of folks through different public events over around 200 participants at those um kind of Live Events and a lot of folks participating online so lot of the other things listed on this are sort of um options we had online to participate if you weren't able to make it in person you could still do the same activities on our website and then a lot of tabling and

presentations out in the community from those who invited us we also worked quite a bit with youth kind of collaborating with teachers in the city as well um we did notice though throughout phase one we had a lot of trouble reaching these three demographics so this is something we're really trying to focus on in this phase is really working most intentionally with these groups to try to get more interactions with them so working with the latinx Or Hispanic communities um and the the younger adults 18 to 24 year olds and college students and then renters are always a challenge to reach and we really want to find ways to reach them as well um this is kind of a high level summary of some of the themes across all of those different efforts that we heard from the community um we heard a lot of course about housing types housing affordability rental protections all of those things came came through is a very strong theme but we also heard a lot about how people want to gather how people want to be able to walk to spaces to get together with friends to access um grocery stores and things like that that they need to get to on a regular basis a lot of just kind of pedestrian Centric interest um but then also Bellingham everybody loves how local we are so a lot of interest in local businesses some of those kind of smaller scale places um really you know having an active downtown and opportunities for those types of places was important to folks um definitely a theme of safety you'll

see in our vision survey wordcloud later um what that looks like but interest in safety in general um accessible Health and Social Services for everyone as well um and then also interest in arts and culture in general and finding ways to incorporate that into ways that that we gather and support one another and then again a lot of interest in Equitable representation so that's of course something that we as staff found was really important for this update but the community is really picking up on that as well and saying we need to reach more folks we need to you know get out in the community in ways that the city does not traditionally reach folks so that's great to hear from them as well so this is that word cloud uh one of the questions in the vision survey the only open-ended one since it was such a large survey we had to be careful to not overcommit ourselves to processing information but this was a question asking folks to respond with three words to describe the Bellingham that they want to see in 20 years and so um across the 4,000 and some odd surveys is we got over 11,000 words and created this word cloud things like safety and safe are combined into a single word so it kind of simplifies things here you can see that safe is the biggest word on this word cloud and affordable is the second biggest but there are a lot of other words here so encourage you to dig in there's a lot of kind of things to find in here that are it's kind of fun to to see everything that came

together but you can see some of the really important themes we also are giving you a few teasers here of some of the breakouts by demographics that we did for the vision survey since the vision survey was not a statistically valid survey it means anyone who wanted to take it could take it and so we did get some skewed results we definitely heard more from um owners than renters we heard more from White and Caucasian folks than from the bip Community um from a little bit more from older folks than younger though better than I think we've often done in the past in all of these categories so we wanted to make sure that given that we understood where variations in opin lie and so here are a couple examples um one of the questions was to prioritize things that the city does um and tell us what um are the the highest priorities to work on in this update and so there were all of these different options um and people were told to identify three and so when you look at across the spectrum of folks you know which were most common no matter what demographic they identified as they always said that housing for all incomes was number one so I don't think that comes as a shock but I think it comes as a very strong message for us um so that's just important to note that that's always in the top of these but you can see that other things change when you look um across different races and ethnicities you see that Community diversity jumps from the bipot community again not necessarily

shocking but important to note that if we had a more representative uh sample we may have had seen some things like that pop up higher in the priority list overall so it's fun to dive into these I'm not going to go through them in deta but just give you a couple highlights um this is one um across income the top seven was consistent across in all income so to simplify this chart we showed just the top seven but you can see how things like the downtown experience are is still important still top half for those earning the least but it jumps up to second most important for those earning the most so some of these things become more and less important depending on what you earn things like living wage job stability becomes less important the more you own own the more you earn which also makes sense when you think about it but is important to note similarly across owners and renters top seven were the same housing for all incomes though is like the the one that's a straight line and so many other ones switched around so you see Home Ownership opportunity is more important for renters again makes sense but it's important to kind of think about these things and make sure that who we're hearing from we understand where their priorities lie we also ask questions about what's important to have close to home so we can think about our land use classifications across the city and where different things are permitted and between owners owners and renters there's a lot of similarities which

is nice to see but you can also see that some things are more or less important to each of them as well so jumping from the vision survey to the housing preference survey um we had a few highlights for you um we'll walk through a couple of these but it really is a fascinating survey and so I encourage en you to look through all of the those slides that that we sent over um and that are posted on our website but a few of the important things relate to what kinds of neighborhoods folks are interested in and I think we have a separate slide on that but really the I think a big takeaway is that folks are really interested in uh the types of neighborhoods that have a variety of small to mediumsized housing types and that are pretty walkable and have good access to Transit so it's a lot of interest in those types of neighborhoods and having more of those um not surprisingly lot of interest in owning as opposed to renting but definitely some folks that prefer to rent um people are generally pretty happy with um their housing which is nice to see um but there's less satisfaction among some of those more marginalized communities so important to note that um they're not as as satisfied and would like different options uh we also had an exercise in this survey around housing trade-offs and so I'll highlight a couple of those things that were most important on that but it's really interesting digging into that and seeing people first said what would they prefer to have but then when they

could only select a certain number of those their priority sort of shifted and you were able to see what's most important not just what you'd like to have but what you really think is most important um and then of course as always happens with Bellingham everybody really loves their parks and trails and I love how in all of these surveys that came through is so important for everybody and it was great to see that that came across in the housing preference survey as well both in why people love their neighborhoods but also what they want to see more of and something that's a little bit um you know you might not think would be in housing preference survey but is very relevant we asked about working from home and so I'll show you a slide on that in a bit here too but a lot of folks are working remotely now who were not five years ago and so that's something we need to consider when we think about housing so here's an example of when we asked folks what they would prefer to have they could select as many of these as they wanted um and you you can see that one thing that's really important in this list this was for the the home itself not the the neighborhood uh they really want two bedroom units that's the by far the most common preference for number of bedrooms in their unit you can see three bedroom one bedroom and four bedroom follow but they're quite a bit behind two-bedroom almost half of folks would prefer a two-bedroom unit and that's not necessarily what we're building a

lot of right now so that's something we need to think about in this update um this was kind of a series of questions where we gave a couple of different scenarios and had folks say you know if you have to lean more one way than the other or a lot one way um what would you prefer I'm not going to highlight all of these but some of them are really interesting to look at and some like there's not a clear preference you can see um kind of the one that's third from the bottom is just about 50/50 split and that's whether people would prefer to kind of have more privacy and have their their homes kind of facing away from one another or would they prefer to um you know have porches and have the ability to face one another and feel more of a community that's not a clear preference people want both of those options so things like that are important to note and the one under that kind of has to do with um trees as well so I'm sure you'll see that come back in some information that um we're we're looking at when we think about the balance between trees and some of our other priorities as well this is the one about neighborhood preferences and so you can see that that small scale residential and that Urban residential um there are descriptions on the right they're very wordy but they're kind of what I described earlier um are the most preferred but you can also see there's a lot of variety folks don't all want the same thing so we want to provide choices for people and then this is that

slide about remote work so we asked folks a number of questions about this but this is just a highlevel answer about folks who are working fully on site sometimes on site and sometimes remote and fully remote and you can see that there's a lot of folks in each of those categories and people who are basically working fully from home is about a quarter of the population who of folks who are working full-time in the city so that's really interesting to note and so that was sort of our recap of phase one um I'm going to hand it over to Chris here in a moment to start looking forward but I encourage you all to be familiar with our engagement page engage Bellingham is where we have a whole lot of information and we've given it a revamp over the last couple weeks um and as information comes out and As We Gather uh kind of educational materials and draft materials they'll all be on these different kind of topic based subpages that we have here so there's a lot to see there with that I'll hand it off to Chris thanks Elizabeth so these are those six uh public events that um we're we started uh in February and then we're going through uh through July with those and you can see the first two the Community Vision event and then um just uh this week we did the uh the vibrant Equitable and welcoming Community event over at Bellingham High School um about 150 at the first one over at se home and about like I said 75 or 80 um at the the second one and at both of them uh great conversations we

had uh variety of uh boards and things at those meetings and people could spend uh you know uh half an hour or 45 minutes at the beginning learning some things about the process um and about the plan and about the various topics and then we did tbling conversations with um some uh prompts to guide them and then just kind of let them uh they had a scribe at each table and took notes and so we've are in the process of starting to digest some of that feedback and that will go into the eventually into the phase two wrap-up report and will help us as we move move forward um and you can see that there's kind of a progression of themes we start out with the kind of high level Community Vision conversations we progress through um some more specific topics um you can see housing is mentioned a couple of times there and we end up with the how we grow conversation which is really getting a little bit more down in the weeds and looking at like the land use map and trying to figure out okay well what are some different ways different approaches that we could examine as a community and um maybe adjust that map a bit in some in some ways to accommodate again some of the things Elizabeth talked about um different variety of housing um and still accommodates uh that growth curve that we see um coming in the next 20 years so it'll be kind of a progression of conversations and um we're excited to get more information from people on those specific topics so I'll I'm going to step through some of

the uh details on a few of the recent State housing uh pieces of State housing legislation uh three in particular um House Bill 1220 which um we've talked about u in front of you before was passed in 2021 and that's um the Department of Commerce has a lot of guidance on that now and that's the one that requires us to plan not just for enough housing for the growth that we see coming in our plan but also housing in each income bracket so that um people in at all the income levels that are present in Bellingham have opportunities uh for housing and then um house spill 1110 related to that it's really an implementation step for House Bill 1220 is to open our zoning code up and allow those middle housing forms up to four units outright in every residential lot in Bellingham and up to six if two of those units are affordable to 80% of median income and then um House Bill uh 1998 is uh in the current legislative session it's passed both houses and is on the governor's desk for Signature and that's uh encouraging and allowing uh more co-living housing and co- living housing an example would be um it's it's similar to what a lot of uh student dorms offer at University campuses but it's a a kind of like a large apartment where you have uh each bedroom rented as a separate unit they typically have their own bathroom they would also typically have keyed locks and then there'd be a shared living room or living space and a shared kitchen that all the units would share um and so it's kind

of a again it's a a communal living Arrangement um it's something we've seen recently in Bellingham with uh we have a handful of uh fairly large student housing student oriented housing projects but allowing that for for anybody so that would be another uh approach for uh units that would be more affordable um so that would be that's another thing that we'll be looking at um once that uh assuming that that gets signed by the governor again uh the QR code that's on here goes to a web page that we've recently added um to cob.org that um has a running list of um of a dozen or more housing bills that have passed in the last few years these are just a few of them and it gives a a basic description of what the bill entails and then uh gives a a IND a of how the city either has responded because some of them we've adopted code for already you'll recall the house bill 1337 accessory dwelling unit amendments that that you recommended to council and then Council ended up adopting um and then some of them we have yet to take action on but have plans to act on um so it give some kind of indication about what the what the planned action is to come into compliance with those new rules and um and that's something that we'll update um as we make progress on on each of those items so starting with health Bill 1220 again it was passed in 2021 um Department of Commerce has three guide books that they've published um dealing with how we um uh determine housing uh allocation targets for each

jurisdiction for counties and then for cities within those counties um there's also guidance on how we review our development regulations and make sure that we don't have barriers to uh housing production and then there's a third book that deals with uh racially disparate impacts and kind of the history of like exclusionary zoning in the UN United States and a variety of other related kinds of things um so kind of gives us detailed guidance on a kind of a comprehensive approach to evaluating our housing chapter um and also our land use chapter and uh bringing that um into compliance with recent state law and also just current planning best practices what this looks at this shows you the the income ranges that we need to plan for starting at the very low end up to 30% and then progressing up to the the um upper moderate and upper income at 120% and then the uh the red text that you see on there um the 10 12,600 is the current median family income for watom County and for Bellingham and then those uh ones on the top of the bar there are kind of where um a allocation for housing so if you think about your your 102,000 as your whole income and then take 30% of that as what is kind of the yard stick that we usually assume for housing um that would be um 102,000 would be uh this $2,500 a month is what you would have in your housing budget if you were you were spending exactly 30% of your income on your either your rent or your mortgage that's yes that is thank you for yeah Rose

that's the kind of the it's the uh Federal HUD standard is the when you hear that um Ami uh talked about usually it's the um family income for a family of four and then when lenders are qualifying people or or um like cities are qualifying people for program prrs involving uh affordable housing um that gets adjusted depending on the family size up or down and there's a kind of a matrix that people look at for that so this gives you an idea you know 2500 for for median income in our community um and then you know down to uh 800 a month for someone making uh 30% um and and that's just that's the threshold between you know and then if you're making 20% obviously less than that but you know it kind of kind of pritel a little bit of realism to the the challenge that we face when you think about you know if you're aware of what what units are renting for in Bellingham um the uh 2023 rent study that our Community Development Division did a studio apartment um was just over $1,300 a month um so if you're um you know and this is the income for a family of four um so if you're at 30% or 50% of that median um you know it's challenging to figure out you know where can you even find units in that price range and and also just what would if we were looking at code amendments and saying well for for new units um what might those look like it's you know there's some real real challenges there and and uh things that we have to figure out so House Bill 1220 also uh requires us to plan for

emergency housing and permanent Supportive Housing and so these are all examples from our community you can see uh shelters like base camp we've got our kind of tiny home Villages which we have several of in Bellingham now um this is one operated by uh the low-income housing Institute and then also permanent Supportive Housing which Francis place over on Cornwall is an example of that where you've got uh permanent units residents are don't have a defined length that they're allowed to stay there they're just once they uh qualify and are given a spot there they are they are there as long as they need to be and there are uh supportive uh services that are on site for a variety of things so um just kind of the whole range of emergency and then permanent Supportive Housing spill 1220 um also again requires us to um examine our regulations and to allow um a wider variety of Housing and so you can see at the the left side here kind of traditional single family detached and then on the right side what we would just a representation here graphically of kind of traditional uh larger format multif family development and so what we're talking about is everything in between so you might have smaller accessory dwelling units duplexes town homes triplexes and small apartment and condominium blocks would be all the kinds of things that we'd be looking at um and then there's all kinds of subtle differences within that too it can be Cottage housing a whole variety of different kinds of

smaller forms that are um compatible with with uh the scale that you'd find in a lot of our neighborhoods and so just um finding more ways that we can open up capacity for those housing forms the um the build does not require cities and counties to actually get into the construction business and build these units and it does doesn't require us to um mandate that the builders build them either but it does require us to do a comprehensive look at all of our regulatory structures our codes and to say what what do we see as barriers to um to housing production so are there areas where we're um you know neighborhoods or zones where we're seeing low numbers over a long period of time and to look at those and say are there certain kinds of uh are we only allowing a certain kind of housing in that area do we need to open it up and get allow more uh variety um are there critical pieces of infrastructure that are prerequisite requirements for development that we don't have funding for we haven't identified um a way of making that happen we've just said they need to have a road or some other critical piece in this area and have made no progress in for you know a period of time on that so we need to dig in and look at those the whole variety of things that affect um um that create challenges for development and figure out if it's something that uh the city has control over to change our code and and um kind of get out of the way so that's that is a critical requirement for 1220 and then

also those as I said before kind of um undoing uh a lot of the exclusionary policies that we have for decades had um and again that's not something that's unique to Bellingham it's something that's happened across our country for a long time um and that would include any policies that favor for instance single family detached housing over other types um and there there you know there are other kinds of uh lending practices and a whole variety of things that have affected uh people of color and other um other U you know whether it's uh race or ethnicity or um a whole variety of things that's uh we just need to look at those policies and say are there things that are treating some people different than others um and limiting opportunity for people and then amend those policies these are some examples just pulled from a few of our neighborhood plans of the kinds of things that we need to to flag and then um and and that would not be uh compliant with House Bill 1220 so you can see just highlighted language for instance minimizing impact on current single family development um uh prioritizing large Lots in single family zoning um maintaining current densities with single family residents consistent with zoning um or just uh language expressing you know the wish of a neighborhood to basically minimize change those are all kinds of things that would be we be flagged by House Bill 1220 because they all kind of limit those opportunities um and and the variety of housing forms that

could be built in neighborhoods so then coming to House Bill 1110 like I said that's really one of the the legislature passed that a couple years after uh House Bill 1220 and it was really seen it's it's an implementation piece that responds to uh the needs expressed by House Bill 1220 and that is to allow up to four homes uh on every lot in the city in all all residential zones and then up to six if two of those units are affordable to the 80% of the median area income and so as you might imagine those those uh changes uh those will change the nature of residential zoning in Bellingham in particular all of the areas that are yellow on this map which are residential single zones um some of these areas do allow the infill toolkit if they have a zones with a cluster provision which we've talked before about what a cluster provision is um the uh some of these areas do allow that but others don't and in those areas that don't the infill toolkit is not allowed um and so that's uh and the infill toolkit is just our is bellingham's current kind of middle housing regulatory piece um but this would uh go a few steps beyond that and say that's uh that those kinds of regulations should be allowed everywhere and that you should be able to do four units outright regardless of the current the current zoning um so that's something that we'll need to uh we'll need to figure out what our approach to that is and we've got I'll show you on the next slide here we do have um some ideas about how

we might approach that um at least in the in the interim and then in the longer term and so you can see on the bottom here what what this really means as is that the uh all of these residential single zones the nature of that zoning will change we really we don't know what we'll be calling it um it won't technically be residential single zoning anymore because it will allow a whole variety of additional middle housing forms um and so over those 25 neighborhoods um which we have you know roughly 450 sub areas in those 25 neighborhoods um we we won't be able to in the course of this update go in and rewrite what the zoning is for all of those neighborhoods and so when we come to plan adoption we'll have to figure out what what mechanism or what um approach we apply um to those neighborhood plans they they won't be able to be folded into the current comprehensive plan so we'll have to figure out what what the what the future of those is um and what pieces that are in those neighborhood plans um are still uh important to carry forward in some way but we don't know what that what that approach will be yet so again talking about what our um kind of short-term approach is and this is something we've been talking about at the staff level um is that a potential solution could be to expand the infill toolkit to all zones and then um you can just see here this is a a infel toolkit has been in our code since 2009 uh it took a while for it to get going we we kind of started in the midst

of the Great Recession but um you know by 2014 2015 you were starting to see projects land in Bellingham and um you can see over the last uh five to six years in particular we've had um a lot of projects land on the ground and you can see there are quite a few in the pipeline as well um and we've had some uh you know a lot of them have been in our uh existing established neighborhoods we've had some Greenfield development at the north end of town that's utilizing the infill tool kit for new uh newer larger projects um we've uh seen a lot of town homes developed through the infill toolkit but also some of the other smaller housing forms um to the tune of about 590 or almost 600 units now um and uh about half of those have been uh completed in the other half for and have either been approved and are under construction or in the process of being reviewed at this point this is just some uh some illustrations that uh go along with the the code on our website just kind of showing again the variety of kind of smaller scale what we call middle scale housing that's compatible with um existing neighborhoods and uh you know again the the townhouse is the one we've seen the most utilization of but also um kind of shared Court uh duplex Triplex Carriage Houses which is a unit above a garage um and then the just kind of small and smaller lot um uh uh single unit development and then Cottages which are again small units around some kind of a common green and in its simplest form this is

kind of what the infill toolkit is trying to achieve you can see just the the graphic there with within a particular floor area um being able to find creative ways um within a very similar building envelope to just generate more units so you can see there uh the same lot on all three of those panels from left to right same height and envelope characteristics but you can see um you know going from two units to three units to four units um and really just varying the size of those units within that envelope and finding creative ways to do that this example they're all attached but they're also all again looking at that previous diagram there's a variety of detached forms as well this shows the areas where the infill toolkit is currently all low the uh the pink areas were the original 2009 ordinance which was uh a lot of our our areas that were zoned for multif family um and then the Urban Village areas and then in 2018 when our title 23 land division or subdivision ordinance was Rewritten we expanded that to the residential single areas that have that cluster provision um and so the remaining yellow areas you see on the map are the residential single zones that don't have that cluster provision and so um we would think as an interim measure about applying the infill toolkit to all of these areas probably with the exception of the Silver Beach area which is uh protected the lake watom Watershed or Silver Beach ordinance set of rules protects that from um uh additional additional

density or additional development so that would be one area we'd consider accepting but um for the most part the other areas would be ones that we would think as an interim step we could apply the infill toolkit so that's something we're really considering doing rather um doing sooner rather than later and then um working through the next few years to come up with whatever uh changes we need to in the way of a permanent set of regulations that that would um that would accomplish that that allowing four units outright are up to six if they were uh couple of affordable ones on every lot um I was just uh indicating that if we were to sorry the question we had a question from the audience I'll just we don't generally do this but it's it's a very simple question um just to clarify that the uh the city has the Silver Beach ordinance which uh has particular rules that regulate how development in the lake watom Watershed happens uh limits the time of year that uh things like uh clearing and Grading can happen and limits uh in some cases how many units can be built there so this would be uh an area where we we um would consider applying the rules differently in that area this gives you just a few uh visuals a lot of these will be projects you're you're familiar with um around town but just some of the examples of infil toolkit projects that have landed in Bellingham in the last uh 5 to 10 years um some of them fairly recently um a lot of these are in the areas around the um uh

Fountain district and also over in the Roosevelt neighborhood um and a few of them are up um in areas uh areas in like York and uh down in the South like Happy Valley areas but you can see examples of uh town homes and uh duplexes smaller homes um a variety of locations before you leave that slide why um can you go back go back to it yeah the upper left I think that's I don't know I always get it wrong it's on Boulevard is why is that an infill toolkit project is I think that's a duplex actually D and that had to be a toolkit project right there it was it was uh built under the toolkit regulations as a duplex the duplex is one of the allowed forms yeah I guess my my question is why why that particular lot because that entire street is nothing but multif family housing you know I'd have to look at the particulars on that permit to see why why they chose to use the toolkit regulations yeah thanks there's just a few more examples there so that really that concludes our presentation um we covered a lot of information there um we have access to the can pull up the variety of again the two survey reports or the project Phase One summary report that Elizabeth referenced if you have questions uh about particulars that you've already seen in those reports or questions about what we presented tonight um but we're we're at your disposal for a while here to to just respond to questions um you're curious about what's coming next um so questions start at the end Barbara So when going back

to the slide where you know the color bars and everything's kind of trailed between the different sections um I'm curious as to ex ly how that translates into policy so you're looking at something that's so vastly different different between different income levels and different different um you know housing types um homeowners versus renters how do you translate that into policy that's a great question there's I mean there's a a a number of ways that we could use this kind of information that we plan to um one is to look at areas where uh we have you know um looking at again just this example here talking about amenities that would be close to home and looking at uh housing tenure so owners versus renters and you know it's it's it's a generalization that you know multif family zones or zones with with residential multihousing forms are um populated primarily by renters that's in many cases that's true but there are also Condominiums and other ownership oriented products in those neighborhoods and just on the on the flip side of that a lot of uh residential single homes are rented in our community not the majority but there certainly are quite a few in our inventory that are rental homes um but that being said you know this could this could influence um the kinds of things that we would allow in different zones around the city and we could just say oh well we've heard clearly that um access you know food access is a priority for people so maybe that's something where if we're

allowing um more um smaller Commercial Services in neighborhoods we would you know certainly want to include grocery stores or markets as one of the allowed uses in those you know in the zoning code for that kind of thing um you know in the same way uh our our friends in the parks department would look at you know obviously they've already done a great job of prioritizing access to parks with their current plan but they would continue to do that this just reinforces that as a priority and then just looking at the other kinds of things that are prioritized um that's one thing we would do is try and connect uh demographics um and uh or or uh location of of um things with those details that we include like in the allowed uses in our zoning code um so when we're looking at different kinds of uh residential zoning um or other like in urban villages we would looking at those what uses are allowed as an important piece um also just looking at the uh physical like locational you know criteria uh people would you know if we're talking about people want to be within walking distance of certain things um or um that the it's important that maybe they want to be less car dependent so we would maybe encourage um higher densities near Transit facilities um in a particular maybe high frequency Transit facilities um so there's there's a variety of ways we could do that there's there's a lot of a lot of data here that we haven't really connected up with policies yet we were more just you know

really again curious about um a lot of people's uh how they think about housing forms and especially when Elizabeth was talking about some of those tradeoffs that people are considering like okay well if you ask me what I want I'll tell you everything I want but if you ask me to kind of weigh that in balance it with kind of the reality of what's possible then I might make some different choices and that's kind of what we were trying to get at in a general sense with that survey is is trying to get people to balance priorities um knowing that not everything's possible I think also as I mentioned when I was presenting these um understanding who we're not hearing from as much and what's important to them is critical you know we're hearing more from folks who are wealthier but we hear that folks who are earning less think that living wage job stability is really really important but our overall statistics aren't telling us that that's probably because we're not hearing from as many of those um lower income households so things like that are ways we can kind of amplify the voices of those that we are not hearing as much from but that we know there are more of out in the community than we heard from um also I think it's just helpful to know that there's a variety of opinions I think think in a lot of these if you just look at kind of a bar chart or something like that you might not see the nuance and I think breaking it down can show that there's variety and people want choices we

just go on the line Mike one at a time you want my you want my entire list I'm King I Have a h one question each through everyone first I got to tell you this every single sentence you've said so far I've had a question about but I'm going to ask you this one it's a bit of a followup I'm telling I got a billion questions um this one is about Transit right so right now it's not even a chicken and an egg it's literally non-existent there's a a housing density um allowance would near a high high frequency line a go line right but no else nowhere else okay so doesn't the new regulation sort of just open the entire city up so we don't even have to tie more density to a go line now it's anywhere right so the the House Bill 1110 applies to every lot in Bellingham regardless of every lot in a residential Zone regardless of location so all across the city limits it doesn't include our unincorporated growth area but once those areas get annexed then they would be subject to it um the the proximity to Transit piece is with some of the um the parking requirements and some of the much like with the Adu regulations too that you could you could uh relax parking requirements near Transit MH um although the house bill 1110 if I if I remember right the way that it's written we don't actually have any of the uh the the 15-minute go lines that we have that wam Transit operates don't actually qualify as the major Transit stop I think was the term that they used um in in that legislation so uh

that might that would be a choice our community could make but the to just at the kind of the basic compliance level it doesn't doesn't meet that so the it's really four units outright allowed on every buildable lot and then those two additional units would be um really just the affordability component is what would trigger that again just based on the laws it's written yeah because without without the density the the WT will never have the the capacity for people so we'll never get we'll never get to that greenlighting point of oh we have enough density now we can get the bus lines it's not even a chicken and egg they just won't do it not to blame them it's just there's no there's no writers ship there's no budget right yeah I think a big part of this project is figuring out not just what's allowed where but how do we encourage growth in the places that make the most sense and so as we start looking at different growth approaches or growth Alternatives we might be investigating ways we can encourage different things to happen rather than just allowing it to happen we want to allow these housing typologies to happen where people like where there's demand but we also want to make sure that we're not um encouraging growth in w that we didn't anticipate and that we don't have the capacity or the um the the infrastructure for so there's definitely more that can be done than just allowing something across the city I would also say that there's more density than just what 1110

allows that's up to a certain point but there's also kind of more truly middle scale or you know Middle High you know it kind of depends on what what your ranges but there's there's bigger densities than what 1110 allows and those could potentially be along the the go lines as as one approach the concern is that there's that because we just don't have any capacity for the buses so they're if we're tying any of our conversation to Transit capacity we'll never have it ever because they just don't they don't have the service right yeah it doesn't have to be tied to the service itself it could be tied to the areas that we know we are investing in transit and would like to continue investing in transit rather than having the legislature say you know based on 15minute um stop times or or anything like that the floor area ratio and if that's um if there's considerations of changing that relative to increasing density in the existing neighborhoods um seems like there would potentially be some lots that may not even be developable um at with higher density based on smaller lot sizes and things like that yeah I think we would I mean certainly the our our code development folks would be looking at how the Flor ratios uh how the current infill toolkit is is written and for the the zones that it applies in and then as that applies to um these you know to additional areas that would be added to that if there are changes that would need to be made um to allow you know a greater variety of

those mle housing forms um the uh um you know and there that infill toolkit is really designed um it it's designed for um flexibility for you know lots that have challenging shapes or that maybe there's there are you know slopes or that you need to be working around environmental constraints um there there's a kind of a wide variety of ways that the well I mean you know you've seen a lot of the projects that have that have been implemented in the last five or 10 years um so that's that's what that's really designed for is to you know not every lot needs to have Frontage on the street you can have lots tuck in behind um and then as long as you provide The Pedestrian access um that there are you know creative ways that you can you can get like a third unit or a fourth unit onto a lot that um before we had that toolkit there really wasn't a way to accomplish that so that's really kind of what we see is it's a it's a piece of code that we're very familiar with now that the development Community locally is is relatively familiar with and has had some success with and so that's kind of the first piece of our code we're looking to to maybe say hey can this be the beginning of our approach to expand where it's offered and then over the next two years really look at what additional modifications could we make to it to make it work even better um I had a question about the uh Emergen requirements to plan for emergency and support of housing um we did a package of related things three

or four years ago ahead of some shelters changes coming in and and I can't remember all the details but the state what is the state requiring in terms of like you know there was kind of the uh religious entities can't be prohibited from allowing Supportive Housing on their properties by zoning and we went beyond that in our rules is the state looking for X perent you have to have x per of land that the zoning allows for an emergency shelter type of permit like what's what's the framework for like saying you can't exclude those types in certain zones we need we need to do a uh much like we do under our our current planning scheme when we say we you know we need to uh accommodate whatever the growth forecast is for new people that would be moving to our community and we need to provide a certain number of housing units and so what Commerce does is they provide a uh not just a forecast for units and then units by affordability but also that that emergency and support of housing component they say uh you know the the housing for all planning tool that they have created that um generates the initial uh numbers for each County and then those get distributed to cities uh it has a component that is that emergency and Supportive Housing and it's based on the size of our community the number of uh of uh residents and housing units and then there's a couple of different methods that they lay out that we can can use or we can choose our own uh kind of modifier approach in in uh

coordination with the county and it it provides basically a forecast of you also in addition to these income bands and the housing units you need to provide this many units of permanent affordable housing and part of that involves a Capacity Analysis to say okay well which zones do we currently allow shelters in and emergency Supportive Housing um and permanent or uh Supportive Housing and permanent support of Housing and uh to say well based on the forecast need do we think we have enough space for that Pro in our community and if we don't then we need to make we need to show that we've made changes to our zoning to open that up to a wider variety of of um neighborhoods or zones around the city um and make it un allowed use maybe potentially in all zones um but that's up to each Community to to decide how you know they have discretion to figure that out but they do need to show their work and say that yeah we we think over the next 20 years we've got capacity for what the state is saying we would probably need in the way of of units okay first I just want to say you guys have a ton of work that you're doing and it's Monumental given you know staff capacity and everything so just commending all of the work and that you're able to juggle and navigate all of this and you have a plan um but um and I have several questions but I'll start with House Bill 1110 and I had a couple of light bulbs today during the presentation and one is around the infield toolkit and all the areas

that it's allowed now and then where it will be allowed in the future and the one thing that has always kind of like caught me is that um you can't have standards that are more uh restriced than single family and I had always sort of compartmentalize that to single family zones and design is is the one that I keep sort of getting caught on and will this then require us to change the infill toolkit to all areas to re to change the design requirements of infill toolkit everywhere so so that's exactly the conversation we're having internally it's one of the pieces of that puzzle is the um and and I'll hold up Spokane as an example because they have had a had an interim ordinance and now of a permanent middle housing ordinance that they've had um so they've effectively had a middle housing uh Zoning for a couple of years now and just adopted their their permanent one um late last year and um so what they did because they like Bellingham they did not have um design standards for single family detached housing and but they did adopt a very basic set of objective design standards for those housing forms and they looked at things like you know porch orientation to the street pedestrian access to the property um the garage orientation and prominence relative to the home and those kinds of things so just a a very basic kind of set of Standards uh that'll be objectively you know be administrative administratively approved and evaluated um and um so that's something that we're trying to

figure out okay well we have our multif family design guidelines that are for the larger multif family style projects those would likely remain as they are and those have been amended in recent years and and appear to be working um for the infill toolkit we would have to look at that and figure out okay what are the um objective standards that we would you know move forward within the toolkit that would apply everywhere um so yeah but that's that's a critical piece of 1110 I don't know why it just took me until today to think about it as a Citywide sort of thing well first of all uh I appreciate it coming to the event last night as I saw both both of you working hard and being a part of the Bellingham High School um it is a it must be a daunting overwhelming task so once again con congratulations um the second thing that comes to mind is the fact that I guess my question is a couple of things I'm going to kind of get two in quickly uh thinking about the bipac community um and you've done a great job of I I see to you last night if you remember like you guys are on tour right um and I understand that um but I'm wondering how you make that extra appeal are you thinking about that making that extra appeal a little bit later on as the next six events occur are you thinking about maybe going to uh making I don't know conversations with organizations like community community uh or um the Spanish-speaking uh Catholic churches or uh some of the Ukrainian or Russian communities or or

some of our families and the temples they're at so is there any kind of effort to maybe make that I know you're doing a great job and you're really exerting yourself but I'm asking for just a little bit more for those communities that couldn't make a 5 to seven at Bellingham High School we probably working two three jobs to make ends meet at the lower end of the Ami so is there any kind of thought process or appeal to those communities that may even lead translators as we have to do at school sessions right so I'm just wondering about that part of the community that you may not be hearing from as much that you're going to have to go to different types of uh you might say organizations or Community uh uh possibilities sure yeah that's a great question I'm gon to let Elizabeth she's got probably more of it in her head than I do but we've we've been trying all through phase one and we have things in phase two that we're doing to try and um and it's a huge challenge there's always we're never going to be able to do as good a job as we would like but there are some things that we're doing um some special efforts in that regard yeah I can highlight a few of those but I do want to say we are always open to suggestions and folks from various communities who want to um reach out we would love that but a few things we are doing um one thing I didn't mention during the presentation is that we have a community work group put together so we had someone in the community um an organization

the community help us um recruit a group of um very diverse folks from across the community who have all sorts of different backgrounds and who um who come from a variety of marginalized communities in particular and their meeting once a month throughout 2024 so we've had two of those meetings so far we have another one next week and um they're doing kind of a similar type of discussion to what we're doing at some of these public meetings at this point but kind of a month ahead of those sessions um but we also are getting more in depth since these folks are you know coming back each month and are fairly Ed educated on this project we're able to have pretty um indeep in-depth conversations with them and so that's one way that we are really trying to hear from folks um from communities that we often don't hear from we also as far as our Outreach to the broader communities we are working with a local community- based organization who works with the Hispanic community and um we're working on a contract with them right now to do Outreach specifically to that community and so they'll be helping us build some uh relationships there and ultimately build up to hopefully a large event much like the one last night but covering a variety of topics specifically for that Community um so that's another way that that we're hoping to do um Outreach to um kind of one of our largest communities within the larger bipod Community um and then additionally we're trying to work with other community-

based organizations across the city who work with a variety of communities not just bipac ones but a variety of marginalized communities and um work with them to get the word out try to um you know just build those relationships and um use the networks that they've already built to try to get more folks to um communicate with us to come to these events or engage online or take surveys things like that one other thing related to like the well this is a image from the vision survey but for the housing preference survey it was important that we we tried and the consultant prioritized hearing again from a more uh representative cross-section of our community and so there was a couple of different things uh in the approach to that survey that we we utilized one was the um for the mail out component um there were about 10,000 households that that survey was mailed to um randomly selected in Bellingham um across kind of just you know think about geographically distributed but for census tracks that have a higher than the city-wide average um either bipac population lwi income population rent population and a variety of other kind of metrics we were demographic kind of categories we were really trying to Target we oversaturated the number of random addresses in those tracks not that we can Target specific households but with the likelihood that we would reach more households that met those demographic criteria and then um another way that we did was uh in addition to the mail out we

actually worked with and had the consultant contact a variety of communitybased organizations with with established networks and contacts in Bellingham to specifically Outreach out to their their um again the people that are in that community and encourage them to get online and fill out the online version of the survey um it worked to some degree um they did end up having to wait the the samples a bit to get to the balance they were looking for but not as much um as they would have had we not gone and and done that so it was like you said um best of intentions but you know there's always there's always more work to do one thing that I forgot to mention in the presentation is that for the housing preference survey we do have the ability online right now for you to actually look at an interactive um stream of the data it's using Tableau um but it's a great way to kind of dig into you can kind of Select certain demographics and see what their answers to questions were and so it's much more um advanced than a diagram like this so this is very visually um easy to understand So for anybody who's a data nerd dive in there thank you the just a build on that the um the statistical valid survey and then also the vision plan um like the results were aggregated and there's the breakdowns you just mentioned but when you're doing these smaller targeted group sessions like I think you mentioned campus or some of these other marginalized groups um how will that show up in the data in the

future you know if you don't have 1500 people and it's all sorted out if you're doing these more ad hoc smaller more personal groups how how will we see that data so uh well we we will we'll have a report like we just like we have a phase one report we'll have a a report that rolls up our um conversations and what we the themes we heard and what we learned um with with some breakout Again by by specific categories where we feel it's helpful um for all of the the the six larger public conversations that we're in the midst of and then also um uh focus groups um the whether it's the marginalized communities or we'll be talking with um people in the Housing Industry um we have uh conversations with with like team watcom which is kind of the the Coalition of Economic Development experts in the community um we're going to have a variety of those kind of um more focused smaller format conversations over the coming months on specific topics and also just on the plan in general um to hear kind of um policy priorities and hear kind of what's working and what isn't working um and just hear again those kind of aspirational uh comments from people in the community as well we're also not really relying as much on the quantitative aspect in phase too I think in phase one we were really trying to get the word out and understand priority so it was easier to do kind of like a quantitative survey but we wanted to understand where the flaws in that kind of method worked as well but for this

phase it's a lot more like Chris described a lot more conversations a lot of these um kind of more qualitative feedback loops and so it's not like we're going to say oh you're voting on this policy or this policy it'll be much more nuanced than that so we'll we'll be wrapping up that up in a way that's more um understandable and kind of simplified but it should get those nuances better than just kind of a simple bar chart or something like that which show thanks back to the beginning so sitting here I've got a list of five places that you guys can go to reach renters and the bipot community um low-income people and the handicap um and it's uh DSHS I don't know why if you guys have gone to DSHS and and sat in their Lobby and and talk to people there um the Housing Authority has a list of Section 8 people that are renting all over town not just in Housing Authority buildings but from private owners as well um semar large Hispanic population medical office but you could be sitting in the lobby and talking to people um caregiving agencies uh not only are the caregivers low income but their clients are too so two for one um and then another one which I think is a little bit of outof the boox thinking is lunchrooms uh CCO Fred Meyer um any of the major Employers in in the town have lunchrooms and all of those employees are probably not in the upper echelon of the income brackets and you have reached a massive amount of people that will also talk to their friends so I think it's I

mean and I'm volunteering I will help those are great suggestions thanks Barbara I've had I've had this um Point I've tried to make with any former mayor or city council person that will have a beer with me which is we talk a lot about downtown but this town's much much larger and on the list I see downtown experience my first thought was are we interested in the Fair Haven experience or the Barkley experience or the Meridian around the mall experience all of which are economic hubs like the downtown right um is that thinking percolating at all um or just the downtown yeah I think for um the options that were listed in the kind of I think it was like 15 or 16 options that that were on here those were really developed based on what we heard in our initial Outreach what people were bringing up most and so people were bringing up the downtown experience a lot and so we wanted to reflect that and not ignore that but we also want to recognize that Bellingham is a city of neighborhoods and they're all unique and so we we do want to make sure that not only are we hearing from folks from across the city but that we're also hearing about areas across the city and so having conversations about placemaking and Gathering and making sure that those things are not just happening downtown is definitely part of this um but we also want to make sure that we're not ignoring what we're hearing from the community and that that's a topic of interest to them that I think for me if if you are

hearing downtown a lot that you're not reaching out enough in this city and the experience for me is I rarely do this and I encourage everybody in this room to do this go to the mall and see how many people you know go downtown to see how many people you know right so I think we're in a bubble and we got you got to be careful thank you so I think my takeaways from kind of all the charts and questionnaires and things was that like I mean we obviously we have an issue with affordable housing um and then the other thing is we have people who want to be owners of homes and there's just not enough on the market right now basically the only way to get a home is to have cash and to you know have quite a bit of wealth so you know uh try trying to accomplish both of those things um you know in terms of like the the design and construction industry right now I mean you you can't build a multif family building for a low enough price to to Market it or price it at such that it is relatively affordable I mean the projects I'm working on right now is like you have to rent a studio for like almost two grand just to be able to pay you know basically keep up with the escalations and construction costs the changes to energy code um all the things you know it's just going up up and up and so like I'm trying to comprehend I guess with like you know in my mind I'm thinking like well smaller is is one thing you know people having less might be part of the solution or smaller um and then using our

existing building stock that you could parcel out and not have to basically build something from scratch are kind of like the two things where I'm thinking like maybe that's a way to start to accomplish those things but then also like condominium iing and and how does that work within this and so I'm just curious like in order to accomplish those two goals without just building new expensive things which everything new tends to be pretty expensive right now um how do we try to meet those goals that seem to be most important to the public well I think you just mentioned several of the ones that we're that we're talking about um and I think as we look at the the housing chapter and the the work that we need to address with House Bill 1220 and being able to show our work to the Department of Commerce that we've we've Quantified the need we've looked at our code and um addressed all of the barriers that we were able to identify and then coming up with some kind of an estimate about how many of those um different housing forms and those income ranges might actually get built in the next 20 years that will be you know that's a an exercise we're going through regardless um but I think especially some of those more creative um Solutions are ones that we're going to be looking to as as you know what we're hoping we'll see more of and I think you're absolutely right that new construction is probably not the solution in most cases for affordable housing but are there creative ways we

can look at you know like you said building conversions um and if new construction is something we look at for that then then really size is a critical factor that is one way to to definitely cut costs um but again there's there are limits even to that there's just kind of economies of scale and certain certain kind of fixed costs with development that are always there so yeah I no no magic Solutions there for sure but just trying to make forward progress um kind of on on a whole variety of fronts so I'm not I'm not going to ask question but I'm going to dog pile on I I support 100% what he's at um the costs of construction are so high I don't see how you're getting there it's a tough puzzle um some of the planning for housing at all income types analysis can get into are we planning for income types that are working in the market but are forced to buy an older house you know PE sometimes a new construction can serve a need and let and have people move up and it opens up an older unit and some of that those filtering chains can can be part of the answer um it's hard to analyze that but there's you know general research out there that does it not specific to Bellingham um um my question was you made a comment about the timing of neighborhood you use the word neighborhood plan and the zoning table and how that relates to the comprehensive plan I wonder if you could say it again because I was a little confused and in terms of how we Implement 1110 within the comp plan itself

versus the zoning changes that will be needed to comply with 1110 and is is that a separate process from what we're doing with it's all related um so there there will be the comprehensive plan where we'll have the housing chapter that will establish the different income ranges our estimate about what our current inventory of housing in each of those income ranges is and then what we estimate the the land use map that we adopt would would allow for new housing over the next 20 years so that kind of gets us to the you know again our our best guess given a range of assumptions about what might get built in our community and then importantly making sure that um as the part of the implementation of that plan that gets adopted at the end of 2025 is that we have regulatory updates that go with that to say okay if there are um uh current policies or things in the Bellingham Municipal Code we've identified that present barriers to production of housing we we evaluate those and say hey is there something we could do differently here um and do that is you know that's our high priority after the plan is adopted is to address those um and then like I said with House Bill 1110 in particular maybe not waiting until we adopt the comp plan but implementing a an interim ordinance that does something sooner and then have kind of a permanent solution that's a follow on um and that gives us a little bit of time to evaluate okay well what kinds of projects are we seeing come in under this interim

uh set of regulations and do they kind of match up with what we hope for are there tweaks we can make along the way um so that whatever the final code is that we adopt is is um is most effective and performs well and then of course you know we're not going to we don't pretend to think we're going to get it right the first time we'll we will be back you know before you and before Council making amendments probably for a number of years until we get that right um it'll be a learning experience and every you know the the the nice thing is every community in the state is going through the same exercise that's one thing Elizabeth has done is has um after last year's APA conference uh kept in contact with a lot of the city planners from around the state and we've been doing uh I think we've had two so far and we have a third one coming up this week um where we just do a zoom call with with planning staff from all over the state and talk about what's your approach for House Bill 1110 what are you currently working on we've had Spokan be a guest speaker there um their planning director provided some insight about what their process was and kind of what their code looks like and how they've gone through that um so a lot of that will be happening but to to get back to your question um so the comp plan will be the policy piece uh for House Bill 1110 we will amend the the municipal code and in particular the um those zoning tables for each of the 25 neighborhoods that are embedded in the

the municipal code for all of those those zoning sub areas you know when when you do a uh uh when you uh consider a reone and make a recommendation to council one of the docket items like when you uh uh made the recommendation to rezone part of the South neighborhood area 8A we do that sub area uh create a new sub area that gets embedded then in that zoning table in The BMC so that's that's the update we need to look at is changing all of those sub areas in the municipal code to now reflect that hey the infal toolkit is allowed in all of these and any other necessary changes that we think need to take place um on it simple in in it simplest form all of the ones that say residential single and that that's the only allowed use in those zones that would change we'd have a of middle housing forms that would now be allowed in those zones as well um and then the neighborhood plans which are a separate document that um relate to that Citywide land use map those would then be out of step with those zoning tables in the Bellingham municipal code and so we would have to go back and then over you know we'd have to look at those piece by piece and say okay there's a description of each of these sub areas there's also a lot of other information in in the narrative piece of those neighborhood plans that talks about neighborhood character and the nature of single family zoning or whatever the different types of land use are so it's it's a fairly involved set of steps that would you know to

go through and and update each of those 25 plans it's not something we're currently um you know that's that's not something that's on our work plan that we're staffed up to uh pull off at this point so we don't really know what that what that approach would be and what the future of those plans would be but there would be um significant pieces of them once the 2025 plan is adopted and then once the follow on exercise of updating the municipal code is done there'd be significant pieces of those 25 neighborhood plans that would not be in Step anymore with those those changed pieces of the code and our our kind of city-wide policy document which is the comp plan how how does that interface with the 1220 and the some of the language you highlighted from the narratives of the neighborhood plans that had the state bill called out as you know older out outdated language um the the neighborhood plans decades ago were modified through a very different process than this or when they were created and it's sort of ad hoc how often those are updated small groups of neighbors get together and have conversations it's it's much different than this large process Citywide does that will that happen again like how do you remove line items from the narrative that are you know no longer allowed without going back to a different smaller separate process those kind of intention yeah so I mean the short answer is we don't know yet we don't have that process in mind um we don't know how many you know

what kinds of Staff resources would be required to do that um and there's also you know the the conversations we're having is Al you know are also um significant portions of the neighborhood plans deal with critical infrastructure in each neighborhood and describe um you know from some of them from as far back in the early 80s when those neighborhoods neighborhood plans were first written you know they described um Park and trail facilities that would be that are either already there and they they um had uh um indicated a preference for changing them or improving them or they indicated a need for a new park or Trail facility and the same thing with uh Road connections with um with uh bike and pedestrian facilities there's a whole whole range of things also um you know other infrastructure in general talking about Community facilities in each neighborhood over you know since the 1980s the city has changed the way that we plan infrastructure largely in response to growth management but also just because our community has has grown so much um you're all familiar with we have a a bicycle master plan a pedestrian plan we have a water and a sewer plan storm water plan um and all of those are are um conceived of and updated on a city-wide basis um there's network connectivity that we look at there are um you know we look at the efficiency of a system and what's the best way to of the whole community and those plans are updated on a fairly regular basis um we don't think of those

infrastructure plans in 450 sub area components we think about them as city-wide efficient networks that do their best job to serve the community so so there are some ways of thinking that that we just you know Bellingham has changed um and and is uh trying to keep up with uh the pace of development with with you know responsible forward-looking infrastructure planning and so maintaining a lot of those pieces in 25 separate documents is is not the way that we we haven't been doing it that way for quite some time and so there are again pieces in those plans that if they were to be Revisited we would we would have to put a lot of thought into um did they even talk about infrastructure at all and that's that's you know that's not a question anyone has an answer for at this point um but then specific just to those land use components like we had highlighted just a handful of them that would be again red flags based on what house bill 1220 would have us do because they have exclusionary language so we will in the course of this update be removing any language that's exclusionary from the comprehensive plan um and those will be changes that'll be you know Redline changes that'll be brought before you folks and you'll you'll look at them and make decisions and make recommendations for the Council on those but we won't be bringing the the 25 plans neighborhood plans before you just because that's a that's an undertaking that we just don't have the resources to to to handle right now

so that's where like I said the the neighborhood plans are not going away but we will not incorporate them by reference as as we have in past plans because we just the status of them is just unknown um after we make those changes there will be inconsistencies between them so we just won't be able to to um have them function that same way thank you yeah my my line of questioning was similar um just given that it feels just a few years ago middle housing and adus and boarding houses were like dirty words for neighborhood plans and um the basis of neighborhood plans were largely exclusionary um you know it was the few homeowners that had the time to help put those neighborhood plans together and um it does feel like this is an opportunity as we're thinking about like the the you know all of the efforts that you mentioned how inclusive you're trying to make this comprehensive plan and the visioning plans they're substantially more inclusive than any of those neighborhood plans probably were when they were put together so just thinking about how um how we might rethink um getting um sort of that um localized you know people want to have control and and input into their like direct neighborhood but how do we do that in a way that's more inclusive that doesn't create um 25 different plans on top of the 20 other different plans and um yeah uh but it I was curious about House Bill 1998 um and the co-housing and and you had mentioned that that's um like the example you used was the

like sort of dormatory type housing um but what that applied also like boarding houses in in like is there a a scale at which the the co- Co co-housing co- living uh ordinance or build that just passed sorry my language is not coming to me very well but I think you understand what I'm saying yeah I I I think there's a variety of of of configurations that that housing can take I think like the The Boarding House kind of concept could be one of those kind of communal living sorts of of of uses that would probably fit within that category as well I'm sure there are others that that I can't think of right now but but that is definitely something I don't know Elizabeth you have any comments on that yeah I mean we haven't done our full technical analysis on the bill since it just passed but um it only applies to certain areas based on uh number of units um but that doesn't mean that that's not something we should be thinking about or talking about so that is a topic that we are discussing in these sessions with the community and that we expect you will hear more of um so I think there's there's what the Bill's minimum requirements are but there's also what our community wants and needs so that's definitely a topic for discussion okay yeah I was I was thinking back to our conversations around the rule of three the no more than three unrelated people living in the same house and I don't know that that ever got officially changed like we had conversations at Planning Commission but I

don't know that we actually like it actually went to council and changed I I don't think we have actually amended that but state law has superseded that so it's um but that's a that's something that we could at some point go back and clean that up just a little clean up yeah yeah okay I would just to finish off the conversations about the neighborhood plans too um you know indicated that you know we haven't planned infrastructure that way for a while and we will be again there will be inconsistencies but what I would say is um kind of get at your point about how do we plan now as a community and try and be as inclusive as possible and make sure we're hearing from everybody that's part of Bellingham and who we are um I would say that you know the neighborhood plans as they were written in 1980 were were reflective of community priorities at that point um there was a broad Community process and they have been through updates over the years uh but I would say that you know our comprehensive plan is largely reflective and and has benefited from those plans over the years um and all of our infrastructure plans that are now Citywide in nature had um you know their origin in some form in that work so I would say that you know they leave a good Legacy um it's not something that um you know we like I said there the we don't know what the approach would be to move them forward but I would say that um the the large majority of the content of those neighborhood plans is either in the

Bellingham Municipal Code now in those zoning tables and we'll be updated as c as we update our code for like 1110 and other other kinds of um you know uh housing related bills and other other zoning issues um but also in the comprehensive plan you know the the land use map and the the pattern that we're currently working with is is present in those neighborhood plans as well so we're not you know we're not um abandoning our approach to growth we're we're we're adjusting it and moving forward and continuing to kind of make progress as a community so um just you know it's it's it's a it's a subtle thing but just wanted to express that that it's you know those are kind of um the Fingerprints of the neighborhood plans are all over our our code and our our current comprehensive plan um and they have been you know in lock step and integrated um to come to the point where we find ourselves today so just again kind of wanted to express that as well well one of the things I wanted to just share is the fact that uh I know you both are thinking about that but um just as you were saying the 25 neighborhood associations I still think it's a great idea to continue to have conversations with all of them and uh just let them know that things are going to be a changing um right I know that's not maybe a a good lead in but certainly it might be uh good on your part to start having those conversations and let them know that uh Things Are um just changing and they're going to be changing and

just get ahead of the curve and those conversations with the 25 neighborhood associations we have we're we're doing our best we were we've been in front of mnac a couple of times uh just recently with a a presentation very similar to this just a couple of weeks ago and yeah we will definitely um that you know they are part of that conversation moving forward that's a way to continue your tour right you're on tour so uh the second thing I would want to kind of share is the fact as you you're saying with yourself and Elizabeth that um I don't want to say it this way but I will misery loves company right you know it's not just Bellingham there other communities as you mentioned right Spokan being one of them so we're not the only ones going through this process right right so other communities that are all all 39 counties uh certainly all of the growth management planning counties in the state are all subject to the same set of rules that Bellingham is um and we all know that you know all across Washington everybody is in the midst of a housing crisis just like we are um to one degree or another and just like every state in the United States is it's it's it's a you know it's a broad problem so um yeah we're you know it it is it is reassuring to be able to call planners and other jurisdictions and here um you know one that they're struggling with the same thing but then they have that many you know extra heads kind of wrapped around the same problem we're hoping to learn from

each other and and keep in communication as we move forward so we don't all kind of invent the same wheel you know dozens of different times I prefer it since where coastal city we're all in the same boat right yeah so we need to learn and encourage one another and try to use that creative Synergy to give hope to all 39 counties and your colleagues yeah and there there are a couple of things that we've you know Spokan being a again about a year ahead of most of the other cities is learning things about you know how do appraisers look at at properties and kind of the threshold between residential and commercial appraisals and what you know in what cases does the Residential Building Code versus the international building code apply so there's a lot of those things that are really more in our our kind of uh short- range planners world that the our development services planners uh world that they're you know really um working with those codes every day as they review and approve building projects um that you know we're all learning from each other and trying to figure out oh well if this is the path we go down what are the things that we really have to think about that could become roadblocks or make things more difficult or challenging or or what are ways that we could just make things easier and I'll get one more in and I'll shut up ination what have you Chris and Elizabeth learned through this process so far what's the one impactful thing or one or two impactful things you've

learned thus far in this process each of you personally in your professional capacity um well I think I think I'm one just the conversations we've had with the public in the last six months and then in particular particular in the last you know couple of open house sessions just a lot of really um you know we have a community that's very in very uh thoughtful very engaged very up to speed on a lot of things even even kind of being able to nerd out with us on land use kind of conversations they're you know they're concerned about Urban Forest cover they're concerned about parking they're concerned about affordability um all of these things that you see prioritized here they're not they're not all just worried about their own home and their own you know household situation they're concerned about the community so those are those are you know I always am reassured after I come home from a meeting like that because it's like yeah these people really care about Bellingham and about their neighbors and so that's that's I should I'm not surprised by that I've been to you know just know Bellingham well enough to know that that is the general sentiment but it's it's really reassuring to hear that too well Chris kind of stole mine but that's okay um given that I am more new to Bellingham um but have lived in lots of other areas in Washington that is something that's really struck me about um Belling hamsters that they really are thoughtful and put the different pieces together and

really care um but since Chris already said that I'll give a different answer um I think it's been really interesting to see that you can't simplify what people want and what they need into just a few statements I think it's more complicated than that and we need to come at things from a lot of different fronts I mean I think that's what we do as planners so I don't know that that's necessarily something I learned but it's something that's been emphasized that you can't just say we need this one thing or or this one type of housing um or we need to fill this one Gap there's a lot of different things we need to do and not everybody has the same needs and we need to recognize that that people need choices um across a whole swath of topics but of course we talked a lot about housing today that's definitely one where people need choices thank you yeah I love the looking at data like that I really appreciate the way you put it together um I encourage everyone to read the PDFs um they're pretty accessible um and um to have a lot of rich rich information in there it's it's always a good opportunity I find to take your your personal preference or your personal policy preference and and and gauge against what the community thinks and see where you your assumptions line up and see where your assump assumptions do not line up um the one interesting thing I saw in there I mean I think I really agree that there's like not one size fits all there are so many different preferences and there

are a lot of a stated preferences that are probably in conflict and un unsolvable fully you know to the tensions you you outlined Jed but um uh you know the breakdown of of what uh what do you value if you can value everything has a list of things and then what what do you value if you can only pick five things and so you know we we talk about parking one it said uh you know dedicated parking spot was like 66% but if you had to pick top five things it falls down to something like 33% there's a wide range in there of you know if you if you if you prefer living near a grocery store or near job or near medical or near having a dedicated parking spot you might not get all 15 things on the list and so um it's super super interesting so I appreciate how the the day was put together um I didn't have anything else I think we can go around one more time um I think some people might have a long list of questions and I would encourage you if you have a lot of questions that you're curious about feel free to to ask staff but if you have any other topics you think are good for the group when we're around when we're pass yeah I don't know if we're at that that point in this process yet but um I I kept thinking as I was listening about the derc properties in our town and I'm wondering at what point I mean is there a point when that's going to be addressed in the in the plan um cuz I mean I think any one of us can name I can name at least four really large derel properties right in our

downtown area or at the edges of it and um and it just seems like there's a lot of opportunity to help with some of our issues in those things but they just sit there and I know that a lot of it is private and there's some some you know legal conflicts and stuff like that but it just seems like there should be some City remedies to some of that we haven't you know in a comp plan you're it's a high level forward-looking uh aspirational document so we don't really address like specific properties per se but we would be um as part of that implementation especially for House Bill 1220 we'd be looking at um you know types of properties that we see that just decade after decade have not seen interest from um just aren't developing for whatever reason so we would be looking at those and saying well why what are what are are there reasons we can identify that that we as local government have levers we can pull um maybe we have some regulations or requirements that are um a barrier in those cases some of it could just be locational dependent and there are just some properties that are in unfortunate locations but if it's something related to a regulatory change that we could make then those are the things that we would be targeting and saying hey um you know we really are trying to leave no stone unturned as our council's directed and and if there's a way of of um you know undoing some of those barriers those would be things we would prior ized as you know a follow-up action to the

update to the plan there's a ton of work to do right I get it nobody's got enough staff I get that too um but I look at this as a as that's not the hard part right just I go to work every day I just do my job right sometimes it's harder and sometimes it's less hard um but that's just that's just the work I think the two biggest problems for this entire process one it's the emotional challenge for the citizens of this city to realize now that their neighbors putting three units on that property right that's going to be hard for people to swallow second hardest thing is what I think Jed you brought up earlier I know what it cost to build in this town so even if we rehabit old house I know what that's costing and you're not there's just no way I don't know how I wish I had an answer um because I think about this literally every single day in my job how do I get you this thing at a price that you can afford right and um I recently had a conversation with a builder in Ferndale and in Ferndale they can deliver this product cheaper than they can at Bellingham right and the first time an appraiser or a real estate agent runs a comp on a property under the new rules that $400,000 unit or uh bare lot on Peabody that's now a $700,000 and every one after that going to be more expensive so add that on to the cost of the construction the cost of the rehabilitation of a building right that's the hardest thing for all of this it doesn't matter what the regulations say right the hardest thing

is going to be the cost plumbers are $150 to $200 an hour Carpenters are billing out at 100 or 85 to over 100 an hour right so so do the math the hardest part of this is really the cost of the construction whether it's a rehabilitation remodel converting a to a large house into two or three units or even the new construction right that's going to be the hardest part of this and I think that's if there's any way in this conversation that the new rules can tackle that that's the one important thing in my mind I guess we've been talking a lot on most like the effects of some State bills that will um that we have to react to basically because they're the law of the land now I'm just curious because I mean it's also the law of the land that we have to redo our comp plan every so often and so just in that you know um I see Bellingham is becoming you know it's it's always been kind of a unique place but the the outskirts are starting to to fill in and you know all of the surrounding cities ferndell and Blain and you know just everything around us is is is growing and so as that continues to happen are there things that you see in terms of kind of like this comp plan that maybe it's our downtown or other parts of the city that would be a lot different than what the previous plan was whether that be height allowances for buildings or what's kind of your future view of the Bellingham in like 20 years well I mean that's that's The $64,000 Question when we get to the the point of having

growth Alternatives and what our pref you know what the preferred the community's preferred alternative will end up being but the things you just mentioned um you know uh increased height in different areas around town to accommodate growth is is one approach we're talking about um Transit oriented development corridors you know cordinating with watom Transit Authority um and you know and they're in the midst of a a study to look at at increased highfrequency Transit over a number of years so looking at you know what are the routes they're looking at what would what would a reasonable land use an overlay for zoning look like for those kind of corridors is it you know we'll be examining our Urban growth area boundary um do we have enough land given the current land use rules that we have and what the the state will have us adopting um so all of those things are on the table um and and that's just like I said right now they're just pieces of the puzzle we don't know what order they're going to land in um we do know that you know things like Elizabeth had said the the current land use scheme that we've been operating under with Reliance on Urban Villages for a piece of infill um some infill in neighborhoods and our existing residential multis zones and Commercial plan zones that allow housing as well are all um you know still something that we're likely to continue to encourage going forward um it'll just be what adjustments will be making for you know the additional people that

will be moving here and for um new requirements like allowing those middle housing forms in in all areas um as I'm thinking about um how we went through the RM uh resoning or update process and simplifying from I can't even remember like 60 some different RM zones to essentially coming up with three and um thinking about the very many single family different zoning types we have and how this is such an opportunity for us to reduce the complexity of our zoning codes and Zoning tables um and hope that that is part of the thinking as we go through this um to find ways to simplify and reduce complexity it's definitely something we've talked about in internally and it's not we haven't quite figured out if that would be in an interim ordinance or if that would be in the final what our final um ordinance would be that we would we would work on towards 202 26 but that's definitely been part of the conversation is something similar to what we did with the RM project don't don't the don't these new bills though really just remove so much because that's all exclusivity right that's what the zoning is about does don't these new bills really remove all those almost all of those anyway and sort of just create less exclusivity and which automatically will result in fewer you know smaller zones everywhere it's it's really a conversation we can dig into maybe next time we're in front of you but um but it's um there are a variety of ways that you can you know four units on any lot but then

density still plays a role when you're looking at like Green Field development how does that work versus infill on an existing lot in the city um so yeah there's that's let's not jump into that right now but it's definitely there's there's there's a lot of rabbit holes we could go down there yeah well I mean the big picture is the state bills don't change lot size so that's what a lot of the different different zones or for I I guess I don't I'm hearing what my colleagues are saying the cost and and I I guess I just prefer to have this emotional optimism that somehow someway we're going to figure it out we got 39 counties going through the same thing we are not alone I sound like I'm on Star Trek or something I know but um I I just figure out what this concerted effort it's GNA somehow we're going to figure this thing out we're looking into the future 20 years ahead um and I just feel that with the Creative Energy and the Synergy we have I just figure we're going to some way figure this thing out you're mentioning the thoughtful concerned people here in Bellingham um we have a lot of passion we have a lot of heart we had a lot of uh intelligence I just feel that um with the state doing what they done it's kind of pushed us there whether we want it or not so we're just going to have to figure it out so I'm just going to remain optimistically positive that we're going to be able to get this done and I know my colleague Mr moli might disagree with me but I think all oh really

wow oh W well so I think we're going to figure it out so that's what I just wanted I I agree and I think you guys are going to be a big part of that helping us figure it out is that a good high note to end on can I can I just follow up on a thing in I think it was in December and I I just want to make sure that I'm clear on this we have room right now for 30,000 more people in this city right okay so we're changing nothing we've already accomplished the goals that the state has set which is make room for more people right well we've we've got room for housing units we just need to figure out the the income category component of that's the hard part here the hardest part isn't making is isn't making the room we have the room it's providing that housing at the affordable rate everybody who can afford it is fine the hardest part is that affordable at affordable rate we have the room now how do we get the people in to something that they can afford that's that's the real gist of the thing right yeah y well that that 30,000 number you also have to look at is is housing materializing at the rate we think it will based on that zone capacity or would additional Zone capacity lead to housing materializing at a quicker rate okay um staff do you want to close out this section any uh future looking thoughts upcoming meetings for us to look out for or anything else um you some things on your calendar already I believe um Silver Beach um I don't have the date in my head right now later in

March 21st you'll be looking at some um of the Silver Beach areas and doing some uh uh amendments to that plan um proposed and then um the 28th is the Fair Haven um location and talking about some amendments at stuff was proposing for that area and an application that came in okay so thank you this was great conversation thanks for the chance to let you know where we're at I got to say I envy you and I don't right I mean showing up to work every day and it's just kind of the same thing that's no fun and every night right but yeah uh Heather do we want to do our new business elections okay it's a new year we are supposed to appoint a chair and a vice chair when we have enough people to do so we have enough people okay um well as chair I am interested and willing in continuing another year if you like that and Jed's currently Vice chair so but I don't know how we do nominations can I make a motion yes I make a motion that my guest is uh remain as president and Jed Balo remain as vice president I'll second that okay I guess other nomination ideas are Al can be put on the table no I'm I'm trying to be fair and not just bully people inight um any other nominations ORS you is Jed willing okay um uh cool so the motion is or we don't is it a motion you're not the motion is for Mike as chair and Jed for vice chair all in favor raise your hand I post okay I saw six 6 Z yay continuity um Heather anything else okay we are [Music] adjourned [Music]