 I'm going to text her now, so I don't even... All right, everybody ready to go? Wow, the audio sounds really good tonight, up here. Welcome, everyone. I'd like to call this meeting at the City of Santa Cruz Planning Commission to order. Vivian, can we get a roll call, please? Commissioner Dawson. Here. Commissioner Conway. Here. Commissioner Kennedy. Here. Commissioner Maxwell. Here. Commissioner McKelvie. Commissioner Palmos. So both Commissioner Gordon and Paul Hamas just texted me. They're out sick and are not going to make it tonight. Mike said another thing and can't get here. So that's all right. We have a quorum. So next on the agenda is approving the minutes, I believe. There is a little discrepancy test emailed the minutes at the last minute. They look fine to me. Everybody get a chance to look at those. We clarified you can still vote on them, but you wouldn't know if the content was correct or not. Okay, so hearing that, let's move to approve the minutes. Move to approve the minutes for what are the dates? Somebody help me here. November 30th and December 21st. Thank you. Yes, November 30th and December 21st. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. I'm good. And then do you have the agenda? All right. Minutes are done. I will now open the public hearing on our first. I'm sorry. Thank you. I know I was forgetting about something. Thanks. Thanks. Chair Kennedy. We've got statements of disqualifications and oral communications before the. Thank you. Thank you. Flustered for a moment. Are there any statements of disqualification from the commissioners? Seeing none. Any oral communications from the public? Oral communication is time. I see you to hear from you about items that are not on the agenda tonight. So anything that's not on the agenda, come on up. If you wouldn't mind just stating your name clearly that helps the clerks get it down. I'm number one on the list. I'm Jill Wynn. And thank you for your service to our community at your November meeting. I promised to return in January with an update in November. I said I was dismayed architects. Matt's in Britain used only the term beige to describe as best as composite citing on an existing home in my neighborhood while identifying the existing roofing material as asphalt composite in a project submission to planning department, which included some demolition. Today I provide you with copies of letters and email. I wrote to prior to plan approval to planning public works and the building department where I outlined very specific concerns about asbestos asbestos removal and public safety. And while there were 29 conditions of approval listed on the project by the planning department, none were specific to public safety regarding the exterior asbestos composite citing removal. I vacated my own home during asbestos removal and returned to find asbestos composite citing debris in my yard. This is unacceptable. Something is out of whack. If tonight you are reviewing a report on the number of volunteer trees breaking through asphalt on a commercial lot, on the site of a former gas station and valid public safety concerns are not addressed in the planning department. I'll be back in April with my next update. Are you in contact with staff and working with somebody? Or should we connect with someone to talk to? My understanding this is oral communications. We really can't discuss this, but I'm not used. Last time someone said they would be back and no one has been back. So. Okay. Staff, could you just get her some contact information? All right. I don't have much context on that, but it sounds like someone should look into it. Thanks. All right. Any other oral communications, ma'am? Hold on. All right. She's gone. Great. With that, we'll close oral communications. We did the minutes out of order. So let's dive into the public hearing. Can we get a staff report, please? Oh, yes. Good evening, Ryan Bain. Maybe for a minute to get back. I don't know. Senior planner. I think we're all right. Before us tonight is a project at 11, a proposed project at 1130 mission street. In terms of site location, it's a approximately 0.287 acre project site consists of two parcels that are located on the northwest corner of mission and Laurel streets. Commercial uses surround the site along mission and Laurel with the exception of some of residential uses directly to the west and then across the creek to the north. The flat site is mostly paved with commercial buildings that are proposed for demolition as part of the application. And there are seven trees that are located on the site, two of which qualify as heritage heritage due to their size. So being proposed tonight is a five store and mixed use project with that grade parking and commercial space and 59 single room occupancy units. A pre app was submitted and approved in January of 2023. It was deemed complete. And as a result of proposed project became subject to the ordinances and policies in effect at the time of the pre application completeness. So the formal application, which is before the planning commission tonight is not subject to either the rezoning or city objective standards that were adopted after that pre app was deemed complete as part of SB 330. So the general plan designation for the site is a mixed use medium density. It calls for businesses that serve the general needs of the community, including retail service and office establishments, typical uses in these areas include restaurants, grocery stores, furniture stores, et cetera, as well as a mixed use projects that include these commercial uses on the ground floor. The community commercial designation also allows the floor ratio range from .75 to 1.75. The proposed project FAR is 3.86 and a waiver to FAR is included as part of the density bonus waiver, which we'll get into a little bit later. There are numerous general plan policies the project is consistent with and listed in the staff report. I just pulled a couple of the obvious ones that are most applicable on discouraging strip commercial development in favor of a clustered commercial and mixed use development along transit corridor, which this project is doing, encouraging higher intensity residential uses and maximum densities in accordance with the general plan or possible site buildings at the street frontage and place parking areas away from street corners into the rear buildings, which this project does. Also on major corridors encourage mixed use development, especially projects with priority for commercial uses that can provide services to the adjacent community. These are just a few of the general plan policies. The project location is also within the Mission Street Urban Design Plan area. Specifically, it's located in the west side zone. And so the vision of the plan is to, of the Mission Street plan is to reestablish Mission Street as a vibrant commercial corridor that recognizes and carefully balances its functions as both a state highway and local serving commercial street. As noted in the plan, the corridor should maintain a predominantly commercial mixed use character. Residential uses should be restricted to multifamily and to residential above ground floor retail. And the project meets all of these goals. A mix of higher density residential and office uses along Mission will complement and support the retail base and contribute to the creation of a neighborhood with around the clock vitality, which is all goals of the Mission Street plan. It also calls for encouraging redevelopment and infill development along the Mission Street that will improve the corridor's economic vitality, enhance the character of the corridor and create better pedestrian scale and orientation. So in terms of permits that are being considered tonight as part of this project application, a non-residential demolition authorization permit, a boundary adjustment, sign permit, special use permit, water course development permit, and density bonus. So for the non-residential demolition permit, basically this is for approval of the demolition of the existing commercial structures that are currently on the site. The original structures were constructed in 1966 with some later additions in the 70s, and the structure has been evaluated, and it was determined that the property is not listed on any historical registries, and it's not eligible for listing on the City Historic Building Survey. Also a boundary adjustment is proposed to merge the two existing parcels. The resulting parcel will be approximately 0.287 acres, 12,500 square feet, which meets the minimum 8,000 square feet required for a mixed use project. So being located in the CC community commercial, the purpose listed in our zoning ordinance for that district is to provide locations throughout the community for a variety of commercial and services uses for residents of the city and the region which promote the policies of the general plan to encourage a harmonious mixture of a wide variety of commercial and residential. SRO developments of 16 or more units and mixed residential and commercial developments with 10 or more above commercial are permitted with approval of a special use permit and design permit in the CC zone district, so both of these are included as part of the application. So this is a table that goes over some of the CC development standards. The maximum allowed height of building in the CC is three stories and 40 feet. However, as we'll get into the California state density bonus law and cities corresponding density bonus ordinance provide tools to incentivize affordable housing and deeper levels of affordability. And one incentive is that the applicants can utilize a waiver or modification to develop the standards if those standards would physically preclude construction of the density bonus project. So for the subject project, applicants are proposing a waiver to the district height standard to allow for two additional stories with the highest point of the building at approximately 61 feet and waivers are also being requested for the rear setback and creek setback. The proposed mixed use project consists of four stories of residential units above ground level retail and parking with a footprint that covers the majority of the site area. Vacuum access to the garage is provided via a driveway access off of Laurel and the first floor consists of approximately 2,627 square feet of retail at the corner of Mission and Laurel. Additionally, there's a residential lobby with a mailroom which is accessed from Mission Street. There's closure access and utility rooms front off of Laurel and the trash room layout and interface with the street has been reviewed and approved by our public works department. Here are a few renderings of the proposed project. This is generally from the intersection of Laurel and Mission. This is looking directly across the street Mission and this is kind of down the street Mission looking south. In terms of... because there's maybe people in the audience that haven't seen it, I've looked at them a lot. This is kind of looking from the intersection this would be the east. From Mission Street. Across the street Mission this is looking kind of south like from the downtown area south. Alright thank you. In terms of building materials it's a contemporary design incorporating a variety of exterior finishes including a textured concrete metal panels fiber cement panel and stucco pattern metal fences gates, screens, sunshades and aluminum windows. Residential uses as I mentioned will be located on floors two through five. The second floor that's shown here includes a podium terrace open space with seating and landscaping as well as an interior amenity room with laundry facilities and storage lockers which are located throughout the project. The proposed 59 single room occupancy units are broken down into 30 288 square foot studios and 29 287 square foot studio units. So in our zoning ordinance we have a section that regulates single room occupancy units and so this table kind of demonstrates how the development meets these standards so meeting requirements in regards to unit size kitchen facilities closet facility requirements usable interior and outdoor open space laundry facilities storage and management unit and management plan. So all of those requirements for single room occupancy is being met. As some of you are probably aware, AB 2097 that was adopted and came into effect on January of last year prohibits local jurisdictions from imposing minimum automobile parking requirements most developments located within a half mile radius of a major transit stop which is applicable to this subject site. So though the applicant is not required to provide any parking, they are providing 12 parking spaces ground level and they're also meeting the bike parking requirements which is 82 class 1 and 32 class 2 bike spaces. In regards to offsite improvements there will be a sidewalk expansion along Mission Street so a bald out excuse me I'll be at the intersection all utilities will be undergrounded, there will be three new street lights as well as nine new street trees incorporated into the streetscape. The property of butts a section of Laurel Creek reach 4 which is a perennial water course it's a category B water course these are generally creeks that are located in urban areas and that function primarily as a drainage system. This category includes water versus limited riparian habitat that is generally confined by adjacent land uses with limited area to expand so pursuant to the citywide creeks and wetlands management plan in Laurel Creek reach 4 is the category B as a 10 foot riparian corridor a 15 foot setback development setback in a 40 foot management area so a portion of the proposed mix use development cantilevers above the first floor and will be located within these setback areas and therefore requires a water course development permit as part of that a biotic review was prepared to identify water course setbacks and sensitive biotic resources within the project area and evaluate the proposed project relative to these resources the report identifies this stretch of Laurel Creek adjacent to the site as an open channel with a mixture of natural and concrete lined side slopes and as comprised of non-native landscaping and non-native forbs and vines the value of the riparian corridor to native wildlife is moderated due to its small size and the lack of native riparian vegetation and as I mentioned 68 square feet of the building would overhang the riparian corridor which is about 16 feet above grade however this feature will not impact any of the existing riparian woodland vegetation for the biotic review there are also indicated there was no special status plant species been recorded for the property and they were none observed also part of the biotic review were recommendations measures to protect the creek we've included these as conditions of approval and some of these conditions and recommendations include implementing riparian restoration and enhancements so removing invasive non-native plant species I'm sorry to interrupt I should just tell everyone what just happened Mike's a high school teacher he was at back to school night and came running down but since he wasn't here for the whole hearing so I was just letting him know is that right? it is generally right you need to rehabilitate yourself although I think where we're at in the hearing right now is Ryan's basically given a report of what's in the staff report we haven't started the public deliberation yet that's okay for future reference oh no can you hear us the techs are flying before the media everybody alright anyway so as conditions of approval there's several creek restoration conditions of approval that have been included including planting local native plant species prohibiting lighting prohibiting mowing and remove our parent vegetation and then incorporating BMPs to protect the creek during any construction so in regards to density bonus the applicant has provided plans for a base project that meets all of the CC development standards including height setbacks open space etc and determined the base density to be 40 units so the developer is entitled to a 50% density bonus or 60 units they're proposing 59 so they're within the 60 units that would be allowed on the base density pursuant to the zoning code for SRO developments 20% of the single room occupancy occupancy units shall be made available for rent to very low income households at an affordable rent so with the base density of 40 8 or 20% of the residential units will be required to be provided as affordable housing units at the very low income level which is 50% AMI in addition to allowing more market rate units to offset the cost of providing affordable units the point of density bonus the law also provides a variety of tools that applicants can utilize to make projects physically or more economically feasible including waivers from development standards as needed if the development standard would preclude the density bonus project from being built at the allowed density the city must grant these waivers that violate state or federal law create a specific adverse impact on health and safety or the physical environment that cannot be mitigated or adversely impact a historic resource so SAP has found new evidence that the waivers requested should not be granted as required by state law the applicant has requested three waivers listed here as I mentioned the exceeding height FAR and then the setbacks along the rear setback and then the creek setback so the applicant has requested these three waivers of development standards all of which are required to be waived if they preclude the project development meeting the established development standards would reduce the volume of the building and eliminate a substantial number of residential units physically precluding the construction of the projects that would include a number of residential units allowed under the state density bonus law consistent with our reach policy for planning projects the applicants held an online webinar for the community to learn about the project ask questions and give input it was held on April 18 there were approximately 100 members of the public that attended with questions and discussions discussion items involving everything from height, parking traffic, shading, trash pickup pedestrian family improvements there were also comments regarding supporting the project in terms of identity housing along Mission Street which is desired and the provision of affordable income units so in addition to the webinar Project Waved was created and posted to the City of Santa Cruz website that provides a link to the recorded webinar and allowed for members of the public to submit comments SICO provides several categorical exemptions which are applicable to categories of projects and activities that the City has determined generally do not pose a risk of significant impact on the environment so this project has been determined to be exempt from SICO under section 15332 for infill development projects so development will implement the City's vision for the west side zone area as expressed by the general plan and the Mission Street urban design plan additionally with a request for a density bonus the project will maximize density while providing 20% of the base density units at the very low income level which will be a significant addition to the City's affordable housing stock and with that the staff is recommending that the Planning Commission acknowledge environmental determination and recommend approval of the project based on the permits that are listed here based on the findings and conditions that were included as far as the stack report is available for any questions you might have excuse me chair I just want to add a couple things I want to like to note that since the time that this project was locked in under SB 330 the elimination of onsite parking was actually already adopted and codified into our local ordinance so the intent of that was to encourage the type of housing options and create a more inclusive and equitable community so although this one was locked in and is utilizing the state law which supersedes since that time we have that in our local ordinance we're already moving towards that goal also wanted to remind you that under the Housing Accountability Act the City can't deny a housing project or reduce its density FAR or unit count if the project is consistent with the objective standards that were in effect that the project was deemed complete unless the City makes written findings that the project would have a specific adverse impact on public health and safety and at this point we don't have any evidence to support that there are those impacts so I see a lot of faces I haven't seen out here so like as a hypothetical if we wanted to make this a two-story project what could we do that I'm sorry what was that if we all agreed to reduce this to a two-story project are we allowed to do that because my impression is no I just wanted to add that conversation yes that's correct under the Housing Accountability Act the City cannot reduce the density of a project if it complies with all of the objective standards Mr. Dawson yeah I just wanted to ask a couple questions that'll help inform both us and the audience side so we talked about that this project we asked for a density bonus and we talked about waivers so is there any limit to the amount of waivers they can ask for in this case they've asked for three can they ask for as many as they want yeah there's no limit to waivers our limits to concessions but not to waivers okay and when a developer asks for a waiver is there any sort of limit on how much they can exceed the standard that they're asking to be waived is it kind of pinned to like a height standard or whatever or when they ask it's just waived to whatever they need to make the project feasible well as an example we're like in this particular project with height so they prepared a base that basically has the size of the units and the number of units within the setbacks and height that are allowed in that CC in terms of the development standards so with the 50% density bonus basically the waiver has to be allowed if it physically precludes you from adding those in this case 20 extra units so height-wise you're not going to be able to get those 20 extra units because this parcel is so small the only way they can put those units on this parcel is to go up right exactly okay so yeah those are all taken into consideration so basically the height would have to be allowed to go up setbacks expanded basically to accommodate those additional 20 units and I just want to also clarify for the public that when the density bonus is calculated on the base number of units so on the base number of units they calculated it for 40 is that correct and 20% of 40 is 8 and then they get to add the additional units but they don't have to add additional affordable housing that calculation is only for the base units that's based on the law my understanding is that that's 20% only on the base so functionally this project has 13.3% affordable housing and that's compliant with the law I would agree with that but yeah if you wanted to look at that way you could look at it that way I suppose great thank you thanks so with regards to calculating the base density units how is that calculated in like a project like this how do we get to 40 as the base number basically they take what the setback and height requirements are for the underlying zoning district so that gives you a volume great yeah and then they basically would take the number of units and this is something I think that depending on the project I mean we've had other projects where they're not single room occupancy they're larger but basically you take you have to basically take whatever they're proposing in terms of the unit sizes and then accommodate the same unit size for those additional 50% essentially yeah and when you're calculating that the volume we're including the commercial space in that yes that's it I don't know if it's possible to put it up this is on page GP 0.05 and at least for me like seeing it visually it kind of helps me understand it yeah on the plan set so if you have it on here I'm just wondering as far as the commercial space being utilized to figure out the base number of residential units which to me is kind of the same on the ground floor alright other questions condition number eight specifies that building plans need to be internally consistent is there any explicit requirement that these design documents have the same internal consistency sorry I was bringing this up so I didn't quite hear all of it I'll just go back to the chase what I'm thinking about there's a ground floor plan on GP 0.05 that shows one layout for the commercial space the utility spaces etc and that does not match the layout that's shown on AP 1.01 some of the calculations I think are based on this layout that we're seeing now but I'm not sure that it doesn't match the sort of more detailed plans that come later in the set I just want to make sure there's no ramification I don't believe I mean really what we're mainly looking at I mean the first floor essentially is all non-residential correct so what we're really looking terms of density bonus is the units and the residential units and the volume of those and there's no impact on any of the other site planning or access to the building or anything based on that the scar footages yeah I see what you're saying I think you're referring to that first floor floor plans a little different it shows significantly more commercial space and a little less parking the other plan that is in the detailed plan set shows less commercial space I don't think from a density bonus standpoint I don't think that's going to come into play I mean I think in terms of density bonus the 50% is really related mostly to the residential component of the project I'll mention that the applicant is here and has a presentation as well they may answer some of that that presentation may answer some of your questions too yeah Jordan yeah I may have some more questions after the applicant's presentation but could you point out to me there is disabled parking I know if you provide parking under these state rules where you don't have to but if you do a certain percentage of it has to be disabled parking and isn't there also a requirement that's for some EV or did I mix that with something else yes there is in fact they're indicating EV for all of these here these are all EV in Arizona there is a minimum percentage of EVs sadly they do meet that and then I ask this question about every project that we get like this but in particular because it's my neighborhood too I'd like to ask about deliveries and so this is also a commercial space of course it's very active but every time we see smaller denser projects with less parking than we're used to I always wonder about the Amazon driver and or whoever it is has that been considered of how that would work the applicant might be able to answer that better than I can but I think they can speak to it but I believe that there are kind of two ways one is for a truck or van to be able to pull in to the parking area unload and then also along Laurel temporarily just to unload some product a good question I was thinking about EVs too so just for is the parking count is determined solely it's just they're just volunteering parking so there's no required parking AB 2097 there's no parking the city cannot based on state law require them to provide parking so ADA and EV strangely in this case is voluntary for the parking spots that's interesting I guess I would also just piggyback on that prior to AB 2097 taking effect our climate action plan actually had policies that seeks to reduce and eliminate parking and then I'll also add that in our housing element there's a policy that seeks to eliminate parking minimums by I believe it's 2028 so it's not just the state it's also direction to the cities headed even before the state came down with the legislation on that I think it's great and I should be determined by the needs of the use that's my personal opinion Mike, questions? Thank you I wanted to tell the public sorry I'm late I did read the staff report a couple times just so you know and I'm prepared to look at this project tonight I just had a quick question I think I know the answer to this but I just wanted to clarify it before we move forward so the city-wide and this has to just do with variances versus waivers with the city-wide creeks and wetlands management plan of course variance but since there's a density bonus in this project which I assume is under state law the development is entitled to essentially unlimited waivers to incorporate those units as proposed correct? Yeah, essentially the thought process was that essentially the water course variance and a waiver are an equivalent essentially and that was one of the reasons why we also said well let's do a biotic let's do an intense biotic view which we would do as part of a water course variance request as well so basically it kind of followed the same exact process as we would of a water course variance Okay great, yeah I was just curious about that process and whether in my mind they were fairly equivalent but I wanted to see if there was some difference there The findings are slightly different for the waiver you need to show that the underlying development standards physically preclude the project from being built with the density bonus units with the variance there's other findings that are also enumerated in state law such as the fact that there needs to be a physical special circumstance associated with the lot that necessitates the variance and that you're not getting any special privileges so little different findings but either way we can get to the same end result Okay thank you So I've got two more questions I remember when the mission street plan was made it's kind of cool it's pretty Santa Cruz it's funky in my opinion I know there's been some conflicts with Caltrans like over the last 30 years building it out so could you just describe like in terms of street trees or driveways how that moving forward like you guys through a design submit to Caltrans they say you can or can't do this is that out works or have you been through that well just in terms of this particular project I know that you know standard processes when an application is submitted it gets distributed to various city departments so public works being obviously one of them buyer building etc so public works usually they coordinated with Caltrans in this particular case and had conversations with them about the proposed improvements along Highway 1 we did receive correspondence from Caltrans saying that they were good with what's being proposed That's good that that communication has happened thanks for saying that explicitly my second question is just regarding lighting this is always sensitive like along corridors and neighborhoods I live in just a block off mission so I feel it but I see two great conditions in there 15 and 16 and maybe we could be ready to put those up later on but could you just like give me your feeling about how this is going with projects or projects I mean I know ones downtown have had these conditions and I love these words and I see some buildings with really good you know what's your professional opinion on how these conditions are working I mean just my personal experience I haven't received many complaints from people about newer projects and lighting being a nuisance or anything like that it hasn't been a common occurrence so I'm not expecting anything to happen but yeah there's conditions standard conditions of approval usually have to do with lighting being and not shining out being a nuisance to neighboring properties and basically the whole point of lighting is for safety, for pathways parking and all those kinds of things okay thanks for answering that that's a bit of a hard ball okay I'll talk more about that later so that's all my questions are there questions for staff or alright so next we hear a presentation from the applicants welcome come on up and just so everyone knows the process we'll hear from the applicants have a few more questions from us then we'll open the public hearing and hear from all of you so stick with us Ryan we have 15 minutes 20 minutes but we don't need 20 I don't think we need 20 Ryan's covered a lot of it and we'll talk quickly but okay good evening and thank you all for being here tonight I'm one of the founders and co-owners of workbench we're really excited to present this project to the community and to the commission for those of you who don't know us workbench is a local design development and building firm we're based in Santa Cruz and we are passionate about working to provide housing and meaningful community spaces for our neighbors Ryan I think you can go forward a couple slides yeah one more almost two years ago Doug and Peggy the owners of the food bin and our room came to us with the request to thoughtfully develop their parcel with residences and to breathe new life into the boob stores the project you're seeing tonight is a result of the work that we have all done together over these last two years and with that I'd like to hand it over to Doug Wallace the owner of the food bin and the project developer hello good evening everyone my name is Doug Wallace just that comment about the parking most vendors come in a small van pulling the parking lot they dump off product and they drive away we get about one semi truck a day maybe and they park on Laurel Street and then once in a while you get the guys from San Francisco in the park on Mission Street unload a pallet or two and then they're gone that usually happens before 8 a.m. so that's pretty doesn't obstruct anything typically they're pretty good at getting in and out so anyway thank you all for being here and yeah this is interesting thank you thank you everybody for being here too these are a lot of customers from the store and I know a lot of people have a lot of energy about the product about the project and so it's glad everybody can be in the room together and talk about it and hear about it and yeah so I'll just kick it off so I've been in Santa Cruz for 55 years went to France for elementary and I'm vested in Santa Cruz I love Santa Cruz and I want to do the right thing for the town and be a part of it for a long time so we purchased the food been in the air room pretty much a dying business really about five years ago and a beloved business though for the community and we took it on from the old owner who basically was just handing it to us including the property we paid for it but he really wanted to get rid of it and was having problems with it and so we invested a lot of time energy labor fixtures equipment trying to fix it up and put some breathing life into it invest in labor so that people could come in and have a good experience and that we could actually be a competitor in town with an option for new leaf, an option for TJ an option for Whole Foods when back in the day the food then had that all themselves and there were no other stores in town so just think about all the competition we've had over the years with the majority of people really hitting new leaf TJs Costco and Whole Foods and shoppers maybe right so those are the big shops we compete against so our idea was like okay we worked in there for five years and then then COVID hit and we realized hey this long term it's not really a sustainable model for a grocery store it's not a sustainable facility the plant and equipment it's just 60 plus years old it's an old gas station and so we need to do something so we cut our head together and we started to work with workbench and we looked at a bunch of different options and how to maintain the integrity of the store and you know we landed on this this project so we landed on the mixed use where the food bend will be the anchor for the building and they'll be able to exist hopefully for another 50, 40, 50 years and be buffered a little bit by the residential as well so that's a little bit of protection for them with customers to make the whole project work if you will and build it so it's a little safer than going straight out with commercial so really yeah we have three to four goals for the project the first is really just to redevelop the site in a tasteful way and and I know for some people it is tall it's a big project but it's also something that incorporates the current laws and I think to me it's like an extension of downtown we're bringing downtown to the edge of town but we're also doing it in a way that people can still walk to it and get there and really develop a long term home for the stores that was the second part of that and then the last thing was in terms of goals create a meeting space and a community gathering space so the herb rooms a separate gathering space in the food bin but really create that in this new project so that the residents mingle with the customers and it becomes still a meeting and gathering place to get information and to find new products to learn about health and wellness so that's kind of the foundation if you will but the initial seed is really how do we create the long term home for the stores so that was the main thing and really it doubles the size of the stores almost square foot to square foot what we have now versus where we're going and so we can enhance our product mix in both stores be a little more competitive with some of the other stores potentially put a coffee bar in so that we can maybe have coffee bar and burritos grab and go trying to catch that shopper in their pattern but also create a little supermarket to appeal to sort of the neighborhood shoppers if you will which is the bread and butter of the business is really the neighborhood shoppers and they're the ones who are very fond of the store and so it would be a very much an enhancement but hard for people to realize it changing so it's been I talk with a lot of people about it on a daily basis and it's tough so I hear them and I try and understand and also say hey I think it's really going to be nice at the end of the day so and then housing, housing came in because that helps the whole project work it helps meet the needs of the city and the community and you know there's a house across the street from us next to the old Emily's and I think there are 16 kids in there so you've got houses around our neighborhood with loads of kids and hopefully this can take some impact away from the neighborhoods and provide another option for students, young couples not just students and young couples but maybe small households and people who will like a smaller space and somewhat affordable so I kind of think of it as almost like an ADU like an ADU for a couple so yeah and then the parking we have this roughly the same number maybe one or two less of parking for the store that we have now and then workbench they're going to talk about parking in a little bit in terms of some other ideas we have there and also look at encouraging people to ride their bikes and take scooters and we get a lot of that now we probably get 10 or 12% of people who do that now without any incentives so maybe we can incent that possibly down the road too and then the last part is just yeah continue to create like a community meeting place part of the natural products industry is really learning community and teaching and turning people on to products and helping people with health and wellness and so really trying to be a resource for that so making a cool new space where we could do that in a much more professional efficient just a much nicer shop for people if you will yeah and I think the last part is just you know we're small business owners and we'll work hard to create a neighborhood market that really you know synergistic with the town and the neighborhood so thank you very much thank you good evening thank you all for being here my name is Elizabeth Bishop I'm a creative director at workbench so very tall I'm a licensed architect as well and I've been leading the design of the 1130 mission project Ryan could you go ahead a couple slides please maybe one more I'm going to talk about the project overview Ryan's talked about a lot of this already he did a great job especially talking about the density diagrams without looking at them that was impressive this slide it shows some of the things that we're thinking about as we're designing Santa Cruz needs smaller units like single room occupancy units for retirees and students so families can occupy single family homes where these groups presently reside based on data from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition for fiscal year 2021 Santa Cruz County has the highest cost burden for a two bedroom rental in California and the third highest in the whole country so these are having impacts on community and Santa Cruz and something we're thinking about as we're designing this project some of these statistics 63% of Santa Cruz runners are paying well over 30% of their income towards housing more supply of rental housing and more affordable units will help with this the city of Santa Cruz is required by the state to try to create at least 3,736 housing units in the years between 2024 and 2031 1130 mission is contributing 59 of these required units currently locals are unable to find small-sized affordably priced well located housing in the city they work in or grew up in 1130 mission street offers right-sized housing at a lower price point allowing locals to say local and students here are unable to find stable housing according to a 2020 UCSC study 9% of students are unhoused and this is the project site Ryan's going to run through this a little bit in the corner of Laurel and mission street on highway 1 which is mission street commercial surrounds the four corners there and there's single family neighborhoods of budding across from the creek one of the documents that we referenced when we started design was the mission street overlay which is from April 2002 so it's over 20 years old the vision for the mission street corridor in that document Ryan spoke about this a little bit and he said the mission street is a vibrant commercial corridor that recognizes and carefully balances its functions as both state highway and local serving commercial street community envisions mission street as a main street for the west side an attractive pedestrian friendly shopping district where local residents can fulfill many of their daily shopping needs without having to drive this is over 20 years old next slide please and this is a drawing of quaint hand drawing of the food bin in the herb room at the corner of Laurel mission in this document it states facade and landscape enhancement concepts are proposed with pedestrian gathering spaces proposed off of mission street but visible for mission street to enhance the feeling of the pedestrian environment and in that drawing you can see the corner of mission at Laurel is dedicated to the pedestrian realm and parking is less visible to enhance pedestrian access to the businesses this is the existing site condition currently it's worth saying it's not the original location of the food bin in herb room they've moved in the past they also were in a castation originally the stores as Doug was referring or mentioning earlier are now 50 plus years old and need of a refresh and the site is earmarked for development by the city and the existing issues with the aging buildings included several earthquakes on ground with a very high water table the site was originally a gas station and the intent was never to be a grocery store or a health food store remediation work has been completed recently and they've removed the remediation monitoring and the stores have energy and efficient roofs which we're going to address in the new building and there have been in the past loading issues with trucks stopping at mission street and Doug was mentioning most of the deliveries now are going to be off of Laurel Street so the food bin in the herb room are staying they're not going to leave you can see we photoshopped the signage on the image on the bottom the herb room and food bin the newly proposed space is going to be larger than existing stores as Doug mentioned and the current product mix is going to be maintained along with a grab and go coffee bar and modern equipment will enable efficient customer service go to the next slide so this is overall project information I think we probably skip it Ryan you did a pretty good job this is a good one so who will live here Doug kind of mentioned this earlier primary market profile is young professional singles under 30 years of age college students secondary market would be couples or roommates or older singles looking to downsize and there's data that shows that people choose to live in units of the size and scale for largely economic reasons potential residents interested in spending 20-30% less than a conventional unit there's also people want to live in the neighborhood and have reduced utility costs and also people don't want cars and won't have to keep a vehicle and so there's been a lot of concerns from the community about the creek so we have been mindful of the creek from the outside of the design we're designing the building in sort of a U-shape to face the creek and we've got a lot of diverse habitats or green roofs on native plantings and we're respecting that creek setback and treating the creek as a natural amenity this is a new slide actually we added this recently so the red on the left diagram shows areas that we could have put building we've waved out of setbacks as we were mentioning earlier but we've actually pulled the building away from the property line on the left to give the neighbors some room there and to lessen the impact of the building's bulk there's some comments from the community about shading the building and shading the PV so we've moved the building over a bit to give them a bit more light also like the image is on the right you could see as we're having this mentioning we're going in with 59 units we're allowed to have 60 but we've removed that corner unit to reduce the bulk of the building so from the corner of Mission and Laurel Street you can see on the right it does look significantly less massive and we've removed that unit and we've been asking how can we be a good neighbor provide housing that's more affordable for people within the community encouraging biodiversity on the site building a connection between the commercial space and passersby through site, sound and material really featuring that herb room and food bin at the corner improving that pedestrian experience that we were talking about earlier visible from Mission Street bringing natural light and greenery building with built-in planters and nine street trees and we're bringing the food bin back reinstating the small local business on the site and we're actively encouraging residents to adopt a car free lifestyle so I'm going to hand over to Jamily to talk about traffic and parking thank you Elizabeth, next slide Ryan so some proposed parking information I think we've covered some of this but I know parking is a big concern for everybody here tonight we have a little bit of time on this slide we are aiming for a car free community in this building we are prioritizing Doug and Peggy are prioritizing renting to residents without cars and utilizing that state bill allows us to prioritize housing people over parking cars the proposed parking is for the food bin only during operating hours with potentially managing the parking in a way that guests to the building could park when the food bin is closed there's currently a permit parking permit strategy in place this is what the owners do right now for their employees so there's parking permits that allow the employees to park in the neighborhood but those would not be available to residents of 1130 mission they could be deemed ineligible for parking permits in the adjacent neighborhood Doug mentioned this they're considering doing additional promoting 10% off if you bike on Tuesdays and then we heard a lot of feedback about parking in the community meeting so we did a bunch of rework on the ground floor and we were able to up the parking from 6 regular parking stalls to 10 and with 2 accessible parking stalls so there's a total of 12 and previously we had 8 all of the parking spots are EV it's a mislabel on the drawings but I do think that everybody was clear on that in the packet next slide Ryan we talked about this so access to the building is off of Laurel parking trash recycling loading all of that will be in the building where possible or in the yellow or the white loading zone off of Laurel with that kind of activity off of mission street next slide mitigating traffic and parking impact again just promoting alternative modes of transportation like road racing in the streets and green rooms and parks and parking parking for residents and there's a really heart free living we're also looking at promoting sustainable travel so we can do that transit subsidies bike repair services on site and the residential parking permit exclusions that we talked about before there are outside of the building. There's 36 class 2 bike storage spaces. Santa Cruz in this this location in particular is considered a biker's paradise. We get a bike score of 100 out of 100. All daily errands can be accomplished on a bike. Next slide please. You know I think most people in the room are familiar with the location. Really easy biking to sense to state parks, UCSC, downtown and beaches. We can move on. Next slide. You it's a very walkable location and gets a walk score of 89. So you can walk to all of these services within a quarter of a mile. Retail pharmacies, restaurants, medical dental offices, 3 schools and city parks and trails. Next slide. A little bit more about the strategies for reducing parking and traffic impacts. So the transit subsidies and the bus routes. The Metro Metro has a program that'll that partners with housing developments to make subsidized transit passes for all residents. Really easy. There's 3 bus stops within a quarter mile of the site. The Bay and Mission UCSC bus stop is within a half a mile and there's 5 bus routes that serve those bus stops. Next slide. So we really feel at workbench that more parking equals more traffic equals more impact. Less parking means less cars which is less traffic and less impact. And in the interest of time, I don't know if we want to do the next slides or not. Yeah Ryan, I think you've already talked through most of the site plans but if you want to skip all the site plans, yeah site plans and floor plans we can pass and then there's a little bit about the exterior design that we can really quickly go through. So the exterior design, we took inspiration from the natural landscape of Santa Cruz. And if you go to the next slide, you can see the color palette. It's going to reference those warm browns and the kind of natural tones. It might be the like, I get involved with that. Okay. It feels a little uncomfortable. Okay. Yeah so we were looking at the natural landscape of Santa Cruz for inspiration and Peggy also had this lovely idea about like a butterfly garden or a wildlife garden on the roof of the project. So we worked with our biologist and our landscape architect to develop an all-native planting palette. There has been a lot of concern about the creek and what gets planted there in the biotic report. Currently, I think there's only three to four inches of water in the creek. It's a concrete channel. In terms of native species, Ryan mentioned this, there's nothing of significance. There is one tree in the creek area that we're removing. It's an ash, so not a native species. And the biologist has recommended that we go back in with native species and replant some of the area. We're going to be removing, I think it's bamboo, ivy, invasive species and replanting with native species. And we've got container gardens, so that's level two on the podium with built-in seeding and those are all native plantings as well. And then this is the butterfly garden on the roof. So our biologist has reviewed our landscape drawings as recommended some removal of certain plants. There is concern from the community about monarchs and so we've removed all the milkweed. There's no milkweed. We're not intending to attract monarchs to the project. But there are other butterflies, other pollinators. And the idea is to bring that creek. You can see from this image, actually, leaving a lot of the greenery from the creek and bring that into the building. So supporting the species that are there and encouraging more native species with native plantings. And yeah, this image is from Mission Street. You can see the residential entrance on the far right and the entrance to the food bin on the left. And we get some self-shading from the sawtooth facade. So the idea is to reduce the solar heat gain with the self-shading. It's an all-electric building. And we've got PV on the roof as well. And you can see we've added a lot of greenery. Ryan was mentioning the the street trees. We've got planters built in and even a little area at the bottom for bins of produce, which the project retail takes its name from the food bin. All right. Thank you for that. Any further questions from publishers for the applicant? Commissioner Dawson? Yeah, I just could you clarify about the bus passes? So is so our bus passes going to be available to all residents? And if so, for how long or you talk a little bit more about that? I don't know a lot about the Metro program, but I know that there is a program through Santa Cruz Metro that allows us to work closely with them and provide bus passes for residents. Doug, do you know more about it? Anyone else? Sorry, Commissioner Dawson. I don't have a lot of information about it. But the idea would be that it's available to residents. It's something that's either subsidized or part of the rent package. It wouldn't be something that you get for six months and then gets taken away. So it's something to be open to a condition that says that you're would work with Metro to, you know, move that program forward. Yes. Okay. Great. Thanks. I've got a few other questions. Yeah, I just had a quick question. I thought I heard you say something about like a lunch situation like a hot bar. Did I hear that right? Grab and go. And I'll just tell you why I'm bringing this up. I'm thinking not only about, you know, residents supporting the urban room, but also its proximity to Santa Cruz High School as a lunch spot for Santa Cruz High kids. That's going to be a thing once that gets out. So I'm just curious about what you what your thoughts were there. Yeah, no, I agree. It's funny because we have that now. We have some students who wander into the food bin for lunch, but none of them really buy anything. They buy like a drink. That's it. That's their lunch usually, but they do go to a lot. They go to La hot down the street. They used to go to Emily's. And so the idea there is we could have a healthy burrito or healthy sandwich or something that would attract the students as well, especially now that Emily's is closed and is moving into another type of business. Yeah, absolutely. And then on this same ticket, I'm not sure this is a quite this is probably more of a question for staff. So given that Mission Street is technically a state highway, right? Do we have any sort of leverage about the crosswalk situation going on there? Is that more of like a Caltrans issue? Again, Curtis Buzinhart in the Public Works Department, I know that he he had conversations and met with representatives of Caltrans. So certainly anything that we'd want to propose, we probably, you know, want to run by them if it's going to be different than what is currently being proposed. But yeah, I mean, I know Caltrans can have some pretty strict requirements along their highways. So what are you thinking of a revision or change or addition or something? Well, in my mind, you know, Mission Street is not the safest road in the city. And you know, I don't know how out of bounds crosswalk improvements would be, you know, or what the process would be there. It's not the most dangerous intersection that there is, but it's not great either. I'm sure we could probably craft. If you had an idea of a condition, we could craft it with some type of caveat that, you know, reviewed and approved by Caltrans or something to that effect. If you had certain details, ideas about the sidewalk or Well, it's muddy waters for me because I don't want to put a condition on the project that makes it take longer and that we have to run by Caltrans and do all these things. But at the same time, if there's a simple evaluation that can be done to make sure that, you know, that kids can get to their room, if it's going to be a more popular place, then that is something that I would like to explore at the very least. So yeah, I just wanted to get a sense of what that might look like, like, you know, little flashing lights in the crosswalk, right? Or, you know, I don't even know what you call them, but you push the buttons and it says walk, don't walk, right? Or, you know, things like that. I don't want to. What's that? Oh, it does. Okay. Well done. We're good. And it's been going, okay, they have that red light one down by, I still call long CVS. That's like Caltrans being like positive and supporting the city, I think. Just a couple of questions. I don't think we can comment on aesthetics. I'm probably just as well, but I wanted to talk about some logistical things. You mentioned the the applicant mentioned the articulated vehicles, semis come to the site currently. Do they currently loop through the lot? When they you're seeing the unload on Laurel and and then what do they, where do they go from there? Do they go up through the neighborhood or do they? So most of them are like the Ford Econovan, the smaller ones with the, you know, they pull in. Yeah. Usually they back up in the lot and pull out on Laurel just because it's easier getting off the Laurel than going into mission. Yep. The semis, the only thing the semis do is they'll back into the lot. Excuse me, can you guys please be quiet right now? Thank you. Back into the lot. The ones that know how to do it back in and drop it off because it's right there. But then a lot of them park on Laurel Street. Yeah, dump the pallet there and then, you know, hand truck it all the way over to the receiving area. Right. And then the really like San Francisco type drivers to stop on Mission Street and block the slow lane. Okay. Drop the pallet, bring it in, but it's only about 10 minutes, you know, so it's early in the morning. But how do the people that simply park on Laurel, you're saying some of them back out and then come back down Laurel? If do they come up through the neighborhood when that doesn't happen? Is there any other option for them? I think some do come. Yeah, I think some come from King, maybe down Laurel. I don't think they're supposed to go. Most of them know they're not supposed to go that way, but some that don't know come that way just because it's an easier exit. Yeah. So I was just, I like that you have provided a space. Commissioner Conway's comment about the UPS driver. There is a place where they can pull in and come out, head out and just go back to Mission. Even I think with the height of the lower floor, there's probably space for a small box truck. Yeah, be tight. But it's I think it's possible. But I am a little bit concerned about articulated trailers and larger trucks. How much you said that's maybe once? Yeah, so we probably get on average of every day, we get one pallet from one semi on two days of the week, we get two semis. Okay. And this when we have two semis on those two days, we get, you know, that's our big day. So we might get a pallet from the one and maybe two or three pallets max from the other one. So they're pretty quick on loads and loads. Sometimes a guy will pull in a parking lot, shuffle his load around, and he's in a smaller truck and he goes UCSC so you can get, you know, smaller truck in there. Right. And, you know, I'm not I support the concept of the project. They're just these logistical things that I think are real impacts on the neighborhood. And I'd like to see if there's some way that we could shape that, instead of it, you know, being, I realized that the San Francisco guys or whatever, they are going to do what they do. But I do think those are real impacts. And we don't really manage them around that right now. They kind of let them do what they do. We can talk to the driver say this, you know, and that's kind of what I'm getting at, though. It's just if it is, if there are some prescriptions that we could talk about that would be very useful. Similarly, the waste collection and and loading on garbage days. I'm presuming these things you've gone through with public works. Is it still the case that you're thinking of staging them in the entrance to the parking? What we do now is we just move recycling green waste show everything to the street. Yep. But the recycling of hard cardboard and garbage, he backs right in gets it. He goes right out. Right. I think, but I don't probably drawings, it seems to indicate that they're they're pulled out of the room and staged in front of the gate that exits the parking. And is that the intention or you mean now on the drawings proposed? Oh, yeah, that's I think it's the it's the more detail there. No. Yeah, that's it. So in the entrance to the driveway behind the gate, it looks like they're being staged for pick up. Curtis, listen hard about it. And this is so you can see what the trash room is. Yes, it's being shared between the commercial space and also the trash shoots coming down from above. Yes, to the ideas. Those are pulled out and staged there at the at that sort of dashed area. So that the garbage shoots are why the bins are not on the exterior. Yes, yes. So we're trying to share. We're trying to maximize our footprint, maximize the commercial space. So by sharing that trash and recycle room between the commercial space and the residences above, we can get an extra parking space in there. No, I get that. I mean, to me, and this is I'm not trying to redesign the project, but seems with the way that the ordinance is written for trash collection, the ideal thing is they want a an enclosure of a certain size has drainage, etc, etc. But then they want the opportunity to be able to either stab the big the big containers and lift them into the truck, which might be possible. This is what we're doing. Yeah, so we've Curtis said this same thing. And so we've got clearance at the ground level to do that. That's that's great. I'm just saying that it seems like staging those bins at the entrance to the driveway when you're proposing to let people park there overnight is problematic. That's, you know, yeah, I go on. May they be on the street? No, they're not my office. We have a similar situation, but they actually come in and wheel out the bins from an area that's sidewalk. Curtis didn't. But Curtis, I know public works does not want building management will will do it rather than well, like I say, it's it's I think those are real impacts that could be and look at it as so as we go into the next stages of design, you can certainly look at it. We want the electrical room on the exterior for PG&E. So that's important. But yeah, we can certainly take a look at that shuffle those things around. And obviously, working with Curtis and public works is going to be an important part of that. And I know that Curtis said that in John, I believe there's a condition that requires like a operations plan. Is that a plan? Like to be submitted later? I've seen those conditions before I didn't see it in this, but I didn't check for that one. Yeah, I was just going to mention that I know that they have worked with Curtis on this quite a bit and discussed different options. And while, as you mentioned, it's not completely ideal. Curtis through their discussions determined that this would this would be acceptable. I was actually thinking about safety. Just, you know, hemming people in with those, you know, those bins being that's all. Similarly, there was one other issue that I wanted to ask about. And there is some space that is provided across the sidewalk and that little bit of common area that's between the property line and the front and the gate that enters the building. These are all going to be automatic, automatic gates or how how maybe that's part of the operations plan to but the person that's coming to the gate. Is that just always open during business hours? Or is it is it controlled at night? Is it because vehicles need places to pull out while they're waiting for it to open that kind of thing? So one of the things Sam and Ryan asked for was the draft SRO management narrative. And so I think what you're asking about was covered under security, which is TBD, we're still working through it. And as the project progresses, we'll understand more and develop it more. But it is expected the project will design and install a security camera and monitoring system covering the ground floor and parking areas. Card fob key or other secure means of access will be provided to the tenant entrance as well as to the secure bike bicycle parking area on the sites. So there's just a lot of work to be done on that. But we're that's fine. I'm just that I think, you know, a lot of public works departments, they want a complete pull out area for a vehicle that's waiting for a gate to open. And so I just like to make sure that those things are addressed. As the project goes forward and more detailed development. Yes, thank you. Alright, well, I've got three more questions for the applicant, maybe mainly the workbench team, but whoever. You said it's an all electric building technically you could come back and do a gas building right now. Don't tell anyone. But are you committed to all electric? Didn't no matter what the laws say at this point? Yes, we are. You don't want to waste the extra money on the fossil infrastructure. Awesome. And it's a key value of workbench sustainability is quite important. I thought so I just want to say in public one more time, just in case. So I have two more detailed questions. The first is kind of I touched on it earlier involving light trespass. And I see this personally, I like modern buildings. And I think it's cool. And the whole front of it to me is like light this baby up, light that orange V up, make it a sign. Then I think of the neighbors on the backside and the right pairing corridor side and say, Oh, the opposite, I don't want a single drop of light in this entire facade ever touching that neighbor's house. You know, I want to stand up on the hill and look down on this baby and not see anything just blackness. So could you speak to what's already happening there and how we can help make sure that the building is lit for retail in a cool way but not trespassing and describe the baseline because it's really high in California. Yeah. So I think one of our concerns has to do with wildlife and light. And so ensuring there's no light trespasses really important because we're right next to the riparian corridor to the creek. So I think Ryan mentioned a little bit before like all the up lights will be or they won't be any up lighting and all be shielded. Light trespass like no light will go from our building off of the property line. And we have some work to do, you know, specifying different Lumiere's achieve that, which is doable. And we're looking at like the lead requirements for light, which is again, there's a whole checklist of things that we'll be taking a look at the if you scroll up a little bit so you can see the amenity area on the plan. Yeah, that corner. These are planning drawings. So we'll be developing these significantly as we move forward, but making sure that there's not heavily glazed areas that are allowing light trespass from the inside of the building outside is going to be something that we're looking at in the design. So I don't want to cause extra cost. I get this design is coming later. I see photometric plans all the time. Would you be doing one already or would that be something you be open to? Yeah, that's a great idea. Actually, we need to make sure we're getting enough lighting like in the parking areas to meet the requirements of the building code. So photometric studies are great. Okay, and to pause for the public, a photometric is a special study by the lighting designer of the site, where they put each light in and then plot out, you know, like, if you have a tall parking lot light, it's going to put more light out like that. If you have a little low light, it just puts it on the ground. So it's a pretty good tool to have the design team able to look at that in a very detailed way. Okay, I think I'll probably require that sounds like you're pretty amenable to it. I do want to get more specific about that one neighbor who clearly is bearing the brunt of this project impact wise. Can we look at that north elevation? What she what sheet is it? I wrote it down here somewhere. EP 4.01. This is planning stage. I think this will come later. But looking at kind of the bottom floor, we're on the right one. You get one more. There it is. Yeah, that's from the if you're standing, that's facing the creek, right? You're it's if that is what faces the creek. Yes, this one. Yeah, that's that's Laurel Street. You can see the little outline of the ADU of the neighbor. So that's the view that I was looking at earlier. At the ground levels. Oh, no, it looks like a six foot fence on your side of the property line, not whatever is going on their side. And that's designed to be kind of like a perforated metal screen. Yeah, it's a it's a screen. It doesn't matter what I think, but I was like, cool. Then you see beyond that you'll kind of see into the parking area. And then if you're standing in that neighbor's yard, you're looking up kind of at the ceiling of a podium, which in my experience has tons of emergency lighting everywhere and, you know, all those things that come. So I wonder again, this is like compromises, right? We're not going to make it perfect for this neighbor. I'm sorry, neighbor, but could you describe what you'd be willing to do in the future to kind of talk to them about options? And you know, it seems like if I'm that neighbor and I could ask them input into is that a solid fence or a brick wall, it might not have a huge cost impact, but it might really mean a lot to that person. So I didn't even condition it, but I just wanted to have that conversation. Great idea. So we had had conversations about the fence in the screen and had changed it a couple of times, just the appearance of it to make it so right now before I think it was more opaque. And right now it has a kind of a reference to like tree branches. But yeah, we're developing that and you know, working with the neighbor to, you know, refine something that is suitable. Yeah, would totally be possible. We could also look at and really actually frankly thought about the soffit or the underside of sort of level one. And so in doing some studies, maybe views of that, just understanding what you would see from if you're standing there looking up. I miss something. That's why we get the paid the big bucks up here is to bring these things. It's gonna be I want to point out to that you mentioned earlier, you brought that building back. I forget 12 feet 15 or 15, like voluntarily, but that that really helps there. Okay, again, I don't expect to be perfect, but the more that communication that can happen, the less static we'll have the next big building that comes. Okay, last question. And then we are getting a public comment. Thanks, everybody for your patience. This one's fairly detailed to look at the roof plan real quick. I love modern rules. There's like so many things going on up there. I see the green roof is that part of the stormwater treatment? One more down. There you go. Is it just an amenity space? A lot of times it's used for stormwater. Yeah, no, you can see. Actually, it's Yeah, there's a better one that shows it in color. There's some downspouts. So there is drainage going off of the roof. I guess this one has green on it. So it's maybe just see but the I worked on the architecture one. So I know what's going on there. mechanical equipment screened already green roof. And then a hangout area on the top roof. Yeah, do you mind going back to the architectural drawing? Yeah, so yeah, the landscape architect. But so those two, you can kind of see trees at the bottom. And those are green roof open spaces for the residents. So my question is mechanical equipment. We live in this new world of lots of big things going on the roof, less so in Santa Cruz, less so with unconditioned corridors makes a big difference. We have this condition about visually screening mechanical equipment from the roof, which is fine. Okay, great. But I wonder if you'd be amenable to us kind of increasing that to maybe study like a more sound blocking solution. And I don't think one heat pump is going to change our town from a town where I can hear the sea lions, you know, from my porch. But I think the one I put in last year and the one you're putting on top of this building and his and you know, everyone adding these in, we're going to get this hum in Santa Cruz. And I'm real nervous about conditioning this because it's costly. But I just want to say, could you talk to him, you know, talk to an acoustic person about possibly cost effective ways of at least on like the neighborhood side screening that like one project we had, they use solid plywood. And that was all it took, you know, something like that. So all right, I'm rambling now. But I'm concerned about overall noise. It's way up in the air. These are quiet machines that are well maintained. But often you can pay a few bucks extra for the quieter one. So just want to bring that up. Yeah, that's a great point. And we have been really sensitive to noise just in general, as far as the reason the view of the building is facing the creek. So that rather than turning towards Mission Street, because Mission Street is quite loud. So that would be very loud for the residents. So we've got the mechanical equipment where it is towards the north, because we wanted to increase the light for all the plants and the solar panels. But it might be possible to move the mechanical equipment closer to Mission Street, which is louder. In terms of acoustic attenuation, I think adding mass is usually the way you handle noise. So if plywood would work, that's something we could look at. You can see as Director Engineer just like cringing about putting that on the roof. But you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Those are my questions. I have one more follow-up. Yeah, most of my questions have been answered. But I did have a couple. And I love that you brought that up. I'm not crazy about adding conditions that, you know, kind of slathering them on. But I'd love that as a point. I think that's really great. My question was, because I walk on Mission Street to get there all the time, you're adding width to the sidewalk, I believe, that's there, which I think is great. Mission is not that fun to walk on, even though I do it all the time. How much are you adding? However much you guys ask. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but a long mission, it's going to be because the building kind of... I could see it kind of, it looks like it's 10 to 12 feet is going to be the width along Mission for the sidewalk. It's probably something more like... And then it's 9 to 11 along Laurel. Okay. And that's not really counting kind of the larger area at the corner, which is more open with the bulb out and all that kind of stuff. That's just kind of... Yeah, okay. It kind of looks like it'd be more than twice as wide. Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking too. Yeah, I was going to guess maybe now, is it six or seven? That's what... That sounds right. Yeah. It's kind of a squeeze. It's going to be quite... Okay. Quite a bit wider. And no curb cuts on that whole side. That's pretty sweet. That's good. That's what you get when you're done parking it. I love it. Yep. Okay. Okay. So any other questions? I just wanted to clarify something really quick based on what Commissioner McKelvie was saying that he could not comment on aesthetics. You certainly can comment on aesthetics. What you can't do is deny the project based on aesthetics or make the project infeasible based on aesthetics or reduce density. So feel free to do it. The only thing I wanted to comment on was on the facades themselves, it looks like there are a series of platforms made and is this... I've asked this question of other projects. Is part of the consideration of the way these units are designed that they may be modular? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That is what we're considering modular construction. It has less of an impact on the community because it goes up faster. And the modular fabricator we're talking to has union labor, which has been a concern. Well, let me just mention one thing that Commissioner Kennedy brought up. And that is treatment of the screens with that high parking area behind. And that is that I'm you know just from an aesthetic point of view, the screens I think could be terrific, but you're going to be looking up at basically what looks probably like the bottom of a highway overpass and they're going to be a bunch of big pipes. And they're just going to be... That's what people are going to experience. And that's... it's very urban and it could be really cool if it's designed really nicely. But if it's just kind of like, you know, we need an eight inch pipe, you know, put it where it is, whatever it needs to be, you know, it could be sublime or profane. So... That's a good point. It was something that we hadn't studied before, but it is sort of an elevation of the project, if you will, the underside of that. And because it is visible, especially from the neighbor's view, so... With that height and the clearance between the top of the fence as it's indicated, and then, you know, the entire underside of that building going all the way back, it's going to be, you know, a lot of concrete and it's going to be pretty dark. So... All right, one last question. Any conditions you really don't like and we should consider dropping? Think about it, you can answer later. I'll ask again. All right, so if all questions are done, we will now open the public hearing. I want to set the table real quick. We're all here to participate in an open public process. This is democracy in action. It's great. We're all here working to make this a better building. And I want to really encourage everyone, everyone's been great so far, but just please continue to be respectful and hold your comments, clapping, snickering, yelling stuff out, at least for me, does not help your point. So let me do two quick straw pulls. This is just for me to get a feeling of how many people want to speak. How many people here want to speak? Okay, great. How many people here love the food bin and herb room and want it to persist? All right, cool. That's a separate poll. How many, last question, how many people here in this audience and the commission have lived in an apartment in their life? Okay, so we're going to open public comment. I'm going to put a two-minute limit on public comment. The reason we do that is not to cut you off. It's just to move the meeting along. If someone has said what you've said, there's no need to say it again. Two minutes is really a long time. Feel free to use it. You don't need to use the full two minutes. It's really important to sign your name in on the paper over here so staff can write it down correctly. And you're not required, but if you can say your name, that is great and really helps. So let's get started. I'm opening the public comment period. Hi, my name is Joel Domhoff. I want to first thank Commissioner Paul Hamas. I, too, am a full-time high school teacher. So appreciate what you do in the classroom. I also want to thank Commissioner Dawson for raising that question. She did. I hope everyone watching and all of you are paying attention because as the old saying goes, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. They twisted the numbers. They told you it was 40 and it was going to have X percentage based on that and then they added it. That to me is disingenuous and not cool. Third thing I want to say is we heard Commissioner Conway ask about deliveries early on. The owner said there were no problems with deliveries. Workbench then got up here and said the problem with the current setup is there are problems with delivery. So what is it? One or the other? Okay, I've got a couple things written down here. Why are we giving all these waivers? We've already been forced to bend the rules for the state. Why are we giving additional waivers for this type of thing in this neighborhood? Secondly, the riparian quarter argument, they've asked for a waiver on that. What's the point of having the riparian quarter parameters in place if they're going to waive them? That goes right into Neri Lagoon. It's Laurel Creek is identified as a legal creek in the city. That shouldn't be allowed. Lastly, the relationship between the non-profit that's involved in this and workbench. Why is Sibley Simon a partner in both entities? If he's in a non-profit world, why is he also involved in the for-profit side of this? I'm just asking, is that a conflict of interest? To me it is, but that's for you all to decide. I'm not anti-growth, but I do think these should be built downtown. I say, Commissioner Kennedy, you said, why can't we do two stories? And Ms. Hatcher said, you can't say no based on this, that, and the other. I say you can. Guess what? There's plenty of lawyers who would love to say, hey, why don't we build one story on every business on the Mission Street corridor instead of five on top of one? And then lastly, I grew up in this town, I grew up right there. I used to go to Melis Market, not there anymore. So my response to that is for Mr. Wallace, the owner, hey, you can do your thing. You can have drive-through lunch. Why do you have to have five stories on top? Keep it as it is. Build up your business, survive or die. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ellen, resident of 1227 Morrill Street for more than 30 years and a neighbor and loyal customer of the food bin. I am in principle supportive of the development of the property, but strongly believe that the height is incompatible with the character of the neighborhood. Certainly, as attested here, when Doug and Peggy started to research this project, they did not anticipate building a five-story building. It was not in anybody's plan years ago that this would happen. And so I would ask Mr. Kennedy, if you would ask the question again, could this be built at four stories? You asked too, could this be built at four stories? And my thought is that that would be somewhat mitigating the circumstances of that. And my other question is, is this a density bonus or a density mandate? So like, do they have any say in this? Do we have any say in this? Do you have any say in this? Could it be a four-story building? Could that help somewhat? Regardless of the developers, I believe it's the city that needs to be accountable for going beyond bureaucratic compliance checklists and having the foresight to understand and address the impact their decisions will have. The parking situation will be untenable for the neighborhood and for the food bin in servicing its future customers. We're already a pretty high-density neighborhood with multi- generations living in single family homes and many aid to use, which is great. But we are already at capacity on the 1,200 block of Laurel with 23 parking spaces for 12 lots, the food bin having at this point five additional neighborhood parking permits for staff and ever-increasing commercial customer parking demands with the food bin, copal, real taco truck, and soon a cannabis dispensary. Adding 59, thank you. Adding 59 residences with potentially many more residents and their visitors and the increased commercial traffic, I believe it's incumbent upon the city to come up with real solutions before finalizing permits. Hi, my name is Mark Thomas. I'm a retired teacher. My first teaching experience was Santa Cruz High in 1976. I also serve as a real estate agent for Lighthouse Realty. Locally, I'm also on the board of Habitat for Humanity. I've done development myself. I've done real estate myself for the last 30 years. I strongly support this project. I look at the SROs as a sustainable alternative for the future for folks that can't afford to live in bigger houses. In my case, in particular, I like the idea that SROs will bring more children to the neighborhood. Our community is growing and becoming more like me, more aches and pains, more boring. I want to see kids. I'd like the schools to be able to survive. In the last five years of my teaching career, for example, we lost 25 percent of our kids because they couldn't afford to live here. This gives us a sustainable, long-term alternative. This and the other SRO projects. So I do appreciate that. I also appreciate the affordable housing. I also appreciate the lean towards electricity and electric vehicles. We're going through a transformation in terms of transportation and the use of electric vehicles. And I think we'll be using less cars in the future and hopefully more public transit, more walkable neighborhoods, more walkable buildings. And this fits in that long-term future. I'd like to thank Doug and Peggy personally for sticking their necks out and doing all the work to take on a project like this. I know it's not easy. Given the pandemic, the cost of construction has gone up astronomically. The cost of materials, supply chain issues, it's not easy to build. For folks that would like to see things one story, the problem is it doesn't pencil out, meaning you can't afford to build it. I don't look at Doug and Peggy as gouging in the community. I look at them as contributing to the community. And I love the idea that FoodBenz is going to be with us for a long time. Thank you. Good evening, commissioners. Thank you for the time to speak. My name is Ryan Mechel. I am so excited that this project is here and I can't wait to see it move forward. I remember when the permits were filed and the pictures went up on the city site, like the project, I kind of had butterflies around me all day. It was such a great project. I'm really thankful that the FoodBenz and Herb Room have decided to address our city's housing crisis while also providing them a modern space that is sustainable into the future so that it's loved local business, does not have to leave like many of our residents have due to housing costs here. I'd like to speak personally to this project. I would have loved to live here when I was a student up at UCSC. I didn't have a car then, I still don't now, and I essentially paid for housing once I moved off campus. I was paying for parking that I wasn't using. Adding parking to these projects adds tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per space depending on how it's built and those are costs passed off to the residents. That means higher rent costs, higher building costs, and higher costs of living in Santa Cruz. I'm glad we're giving people like myself more options like this to be able to live in the city close to their friends, close to work, close to family. I know how much more to add. I hope you move this forward. Thank you very much for your time. Hi, my name is Eric Schmidt. I'm also a resident of 1200 Block of Laurel and I'm generally favorable to the project but I do think there's a horrible blind spot around parking. To put a scale to this, this room right now has about 60 people in it. So 60 units. The Block of 1200 currently has about 35 residents. We have about 23 spots out front. I don't know how we're going to make it through trash day. You were talking about trash day and how the logistics of that are going to work. If we have our cars and our driveway on trash day and no place to park on the street, we can't even get the cars out of the driveway and park them where to get our cans out to the street. So that's one point I'd make and the other thing I'd say is when parking was brought up in the presentation, it was brought up as if it was responding to comments that were made. But from my perspective, it worked for expanding the parking for the for the air room and the food bin, but it only exacerbates the problem for what's going to happen on the block. So I think our block is going to experience whatever this experiment winds up yielding. Thank you. Good evening. My name is James Miller. I'm a resident of the Cleveland Laurel neighborhood and generally support this project, which I'm excited that almost everyone here that's in my neighborhood is in caveat, but supportive of the project because we all know it needs to happen. I think there's, as was mentioned, a couple of huge blind spots here. One, things I'd just like to bring to that council's attention is under findings. There's references, the findings on the agenda packet here, the staff report talks about all the references like the commercial requirements for setbacks and all those sort of stuff, but it doesn't reference at all any of the residential requirements, even though some of the findings specifically say that they can interfere with like the reference, like the requirements for not having an impact on the residential properties, a reference staff funding 12, 15 and 18 specifically if you want to reference those that say like site plans should respect the need for privacy of adjacent residents, not impact residential quality of the neighborhood and areas. And having a five story building right behind single family homes just gives all those windows an opportunity to look down into, you know, otherwise private places where we raise our families. And I think it's not a hard ask to say that there needs to be some design elements in there. They've got separators to provide privacy between the windows laterally, but to have some sort of vertical thing to limit the view down because there's an entire wall of windows facing directly into our neighborhood where people can see down. The parking, I think, as I've mentioned, aspirational. There's as Doug, I'm known Doug, known Doug for five years. He's said, you know, there's going to be two people per unit, you know, for couples that's 120 people moving into this block we're naive if we think that not everyone's going to have a car. Any even a small percentage of people with cars is going to be a really tough case to solve there. We need to have before this is and I wanted to prove but I think we need to have masking for to pause the approval of this so we can get some real parking solutions involved with either permitting. There's a really lovely letter that my neighborhood all got together and wrote that was submitted that I just like you guys to take a minute to read. It's proactive. It has solutions in it that we've come up with to try and help like what we think would be a solution to some of these problems that being the traffic, the privacy and the parking. That's for you. Thank you. My name is Doug Martin and I'm the neighbor in question. Hi. And thank you for your comments and I thank you for the opportunity to speak a little bit. I did submit a letter to both to Ryan and to the hope that you had a chance to look at and I just want to hit some of the high points. Local born and raised in Santa Cruz my whole life on the west side. In 1985 I bought my house on next door behind the building in 1985. To be near my wife's families, cottages, that we have cottages behind the the present structure there along along the Laurel Creek. And we've been renting providing housing for students and teachers and people for 40 years and many have stayed for 10 and 20 and 30 years. They like living there. It's a lovely place. I've always loved the Laurel Creek. I used to catch crottage and take them home and put them in my aquariums. Lots of wildlife there. It's it's declining over the years, but there is a nice varied wildlife there. I had it in my house. I added gardens and chickens and solar panels and trying to make my house as green as possible. I I I appreciate your your efforts to to to make keep Santa Cruz green and make it greener. And I try and try and live this as green as possible life as I can. And then later, my kids walked from to Bayview School, walked to Mission Hill and walked to Santa Cruz High. That's that's it's a family neighborhood that we live in on Laurel Street. And my grandkids live next door to my and they are now walking to my granddaughter's riding her bike to Mission Hill. It's a it's a neighborhood of children to carry on. Let me give you a little I'm going to go first. That's a 66 or whatever height that building is just not working for a lot of different reasons. It's out of scale. It invades our privacy. It invades our security. By blocking much of the sun, it would devastate my gardens, devastate my solar panels, which I'm still paying for and totally shades three to four of our cottages that are on the back side of the photo that we don't really see angles of that, but there's three or four cottages there that are completely shaded by that by this building. And more importantly, the shading blocks the sunlight to the Laurel Creek and that riparian corridor right there. The Laurel Creek purifies water. It it it as it flows down from UCSC down to the down to the Lyrile Goon. It removes pollutants. It nitrifies ammonia turns it into nitrates, which is plant food. It pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, sinks the carbon. You talked about and it gives us oxygen and all of all that that that wonderful place, that wonderful riparian corridor, it doesn't work without the sun. It needs sunlight. It's and when you deprive of systems like that of the of the sun, you get dark, dank, moldy, dead wasteland down there. And I'm I just don't want to see that happen. Just please rethink the height of this building. I don't think we have any argument. But please, if you could, if you could look at it. Come up to come up to Laurel Creek, come up and walk around, walk around the building and look down and imagine the impact that that building that size would have on on on on our on our neighborhood. Thank you. Good evening, commissioners, Rachel Marconi. I'm actually a longtime planner in Santa Cruz. I lived on Mission Street next to Falafel and the Chocolate Factory for 11 years. And now for the last 10 years, I've been associated with the 1200 block of Laurel where my partner lives. And I now am a renter there. So long time commitment to the food bin. I've probably spent a thousand dollars every couple months at this place. It's an important business. I'm really glad that it exists. As a planner, it is I'm torn on this project. Of course, I support densification. I support adding more affordable housing into our community. I'm incredibly disappointed that this is not an affordable housing project and that the cost per square foot for these units is ludicrous. It's going to be in the $3,000 range, probably for a 280 something square foot thing. And to raise your child in that like tight space, I'd like to see the health statistics on that of having people crammed into these small units. We've seen it in other developments around the country where the projects get shut down because having that many people in one space doesn't always help public health. I found I don't notice respect to Ryan, but I did find several errors in the staff report. Our Laurel Cleveland neighborhood letter attachment to identify several of the findings, which are erroneous that Ellen and others have already mentioned. This is not compatible with our neighbor. It's not to scale. It's very disappointing that none of the renderings show this building from the north side looking down towards it from our neighborhood, from Cleveland Avenue, from King Street, even up the hill. This thing is going to be a monstrosity. I support, OK, one last thing is as a planner, I strongly support planning and how we as a community came together. We pulled the Mission Street plan has some problems, but many parts of that were a compromise. We came together for that. The zoning decisions, the general plan, these are well vetted decisions came forward. And I think all of us could live at the 40 foot building, but the 60 foot thing that is right next to other Doug's house is just too much. So thank you. So you'll notice I'm letting people go a little bit over, but like don't count on it. I still might cut you off in two minutes. Go ahead. Craig Schundler lived in Santa Cruz for 40 years, was a professor at UCSC and Environmental Ethics. Our home in Bonny Do and Burned Down in the CZU fire, we lost everything. You learn a lot from that experience. You learn how precious it is to have a home. We didn't have one for a time. We were very blessed to have purchased a home on Laurel Street in this neighborhood four doors down from this building. You also learn how precious it is for people to have affordable housing. I go to the food bin regularly. I buy my lunch there every day. I love these guys. We're not against the development. We're not. But please come to our neighborhood and look up at the building from our point of view at five stories. Try to understand what it means to our backyards. The repair and stream, there's a hawk nesting in the backyard next to us. There are ducks that come. We're a little grandbabies come and play. This is happening currently. OK. There's going to be maybe 120 people in this building. There's no way to mandate that they don't get cars. We can't enforce that. There will be some cars. And yes, it's good. We're not building parking. But then something is going to happen to our neighborhood where people are out looking for parking. There are delivery trucks coming through on Laurel Street all the time already. There are going to be more delivery trucks because the food bin is now improved and wider. OK, what are we going to do about that? What are the things we can do? You could turn Laurel Street into a one-way street like at CVS or like PAMP, where you stop. You could get out coming this way, but you can't go in. So therefore, we don't have all that truck, that traffic thing. You can mitigate the size of the building. That would help a lot. You can turn the windows, the big windows that are staring down on all our backyards on Mission Street and the packages. Read the letter, please. It was precious to move into this neighborhood. This is an amazing group of people, the idea that the whole neighborhood would come together and write this letter to all of you. Please take it seriously. OK, we try. We want to work together. We want to make the project work. But we want to make it work in a way that isn't a mess and that is truly sustainable. Thank you. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. My name is Dan Versman. I live down the street on Van Ness just a block away. But I'd like to speak about local contractors. I'm one of them. It's really been a shame to see the buildings go up downtown using labor from out of town. So I just want to speak about my personal family business. But I know there's quite a few businesses that would also probably be eligible to work on this project, where I'll strike for an outlet. My dad started in 1980 since he's passed on to me. Many of our employees have worked longer than I've been alive at the company for over 35 years. And we weren't given a shot to work on any of the big local developments that have been going up. We've been really saddened to see that people from Southern California or San Francisco or Oakland are working on these projects. And we're competitive. And we can do it. And I'm sure a lot of other contractors that are local can too. So that's really what I came to say. One other thing about it is there was, at one point, my dad told me the city council did say that local subcontractors had to be used for developments. But the builders chose not to abide by those regulations. So maybe there needs to be some sort of more strict rules regarding that. Because even if you say that local subcontractors have to be used, they might not even abide by that. So that's what I have to say. Thank you for having me. I'm Brian Pearson. I've owned a home on 327 Cleveland for about 20 years, which is on the corner of Cleveland and Laurel. And I'll get to another Iona triplex at 1303 Laurel Street. The project is going to happen. A lot of this is performative despite the slides that are pretty disingenuous. The slides are fairly toothless. We intend. We want our vision. Over and over and over, we all know how this goes down. Very little of what their intent actually gets followed through. What I want to talk about is parking on Laurel Street, in between Mission and Cleveland right now, it's the de facto food bin parking lot. It already is. And food bin owners and employees have somehow, without the community input, has parking permits in our area. And the parking office will say, oh, the theory was that people are at work during the day so food bin employees can park in that neighborhood. There's work from home. There was a pandemic. Nothing changed. So what I want the council to do is to say, if you say this is a no parking, no parking development, let's take that at face value. Right now, the two hour parking up until the hours, the triplex that I own at 1303 through 1307, I rent under market to students and they all have cars. So don't kid yourself. Like 60 units, more than 60 people, they're going to have cars. If you say it's a no parking development, then protect the community with beefed up parking regulations. The parking office says they take a neighborhood by neighborhood approach to parking impacts. Make that happen. Thanks. Hello, my name is Nancy Connelly. Dreaded this moment. Hate public speaking. But I'm doing it. And so this is going to be all over the place. And Eric, I want to say hi to you. My old neighbor. Haven't seen your dog's age. OK, so I live on 1200 block of Laurel Street. This is very close to my heart. I'm not an eloquent speaker, so I'm just going to be all over the map. Just be prepared. Generally, I am in support of the project. Again, not at the current proposal at a much smaller degree. Ellen said four stories. I love three stories. I look at all the other buildings in town. This is going to be the highest building in town. And it's in a small community. I grant it. I understand it's on the mission corridor, but we're not downtown. Someone said, oh, we're part of downtown. We're not part of downtown. I'm sorry. We didn't move to the upper Laurel to be downtown. A few things. Here I go. Be prepared. Doug said, or someone said, it would be half the amount of parking, but the double the size of the store. How does that work? Just, just, that's just common sense. Two, it's supposed to be a grab and go supermarket. But I don't know any other grab and go place that doesn't have parking. Taco, taco spot, we've got taqueria via a huge parking lot. Everybody's got parking lots. We don't have parking. So, OK, going back, traffic, my three issues are traffic, safety, lack of compatibility with the neighborhood, and a sense of community. The other things were parking. That's what's mentioned. There is no issue with trucks down the street. There are. I live on big trucks come down all the time. Five o'clock in the morning. So I know that to be true. That's not accurate. Sorry, I just could. Five, it's going to be for students. We know that. I know we're helping out UCSC. I have friends who live nearby that have 200 square foot apartments. They get requests all the time for five people to live in that. So if we're looking at 60 units, what does that look? That's a minimum of 100 people, 120 people. It's just unrealistic. It's not going to. I don't know how this is going to help the issue of affordable housing. There's only eight units. So I think that should be come off. It's not an affordability issue. Please read our letter. And then the last thing I want to say is we keep going on about bike. It's a biker's paradise. Santa Cruz County is in the worst 20% of bike, of lack of safety in the United States. There are accidents left and right. So it's not a biker's paradise. And this does not lend itself to safety. And there's no other project that I know of in the county that is geared toward this being a bike safety community. And so thank you for listening. And I appreciate your time. Thanks. Hello. My name is Andrea Hudson. I live on the 1,100 block of King Street. So I'm not as directly affected by this project as a lot of the other people who live closer. But I will say that parking is a huge issue on King Street as well. And when I see a project like this with possibly 120 or even more residents and then only 12 parking spots, it just seems super not realistic to expect that some of those people are not going to be parking in the neighborhood. I recently redid my driveway on King Street. That was a fun adventure. And I frequently, many times like during the day around 4 o'clock, I would have nowhere to park within a block of my house. I would be carrying, not joking, 60 pounds of groceries to and from my car with small children until there's nowhere to park. It's just not enforced in that neighborhood at all for the two hour street parking. I actually really want to talk about very little has been said about the safety of the crosswalk on Mission Street. We've got Mission Hill Junior High and Santa Cruz High. And we've got kids going to and from school crossing Mission Street every day. The idea that there's no mitigation, no one has anything to say about like how we can make this safe when we've got a five story building and people just driving so fast on Mission Street, like no enhancements to like a bike lane or anything like that. Like it just makes it so scary. I'm a teacher at Santa Cruz High and I ride my bike. I would ride my bike every single day and it was terrifying every single day. I actually changed what school my kids went to because I hated crossing Mission Street so much. I mean for real, like this has like been a huge factor in my life here. I hope we can pay some more attention to that. And the walk score and the bike score, what who came up with those numbers? I'm sorry, but I'm kind of infuriated and 89 for the walk score. What? No, no, walking in that area is hell on earth. It is not. I'm baffled by those numbers. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Hello, my name is Elizabeth Lowry Burton and I'm a longtime Santa Cruz resident. Since 1976, I feel like I kind of have an unusual circumstance. And then I used to live on Vaness Avenue and a long time. Food bin lover love, Peggy and Doug, big proponents of their business. And in keeping with it, being a beloved business, I continue to shop there even though I now live on Baldwin Street. So I'm one of those people who I no longer do walk to the food bin. I go to the food bin because I love to shop there in my car because I'm coming home from work or going to work and pick things up. If I feel like there's cross purposes here, great if you have SROs for people not to have vehicles. But if you want to have a sustainable business, you need to have a place where people can park if they're getting groceries. I really appreciate the spirit of the design of this building, but the practical implications of the reality of it are not sustainable. There is a big difference between this drawing, Mission Street does not look like that. Look, look how you call it that looks. The trees, the piece, that is not the Mission Street I know. Also, just in the verbiage of this project, what you say that you're after that you want to have multi-families, multi-families are not SROs. I realize that there are variances and you've traded things to get the height. We had a very similar project since I now live on Baldwin Street that's at the end that was proposed to be five stories. We had a similar neighborhood rallying like this. It's three stories. It's harmonious, which is also one of the words that you used in describing your desired building footprint and spirit. This is not a harmonious building. The other thing I would like to say about the parking spaces is realistically if you have a building that is getting supplies you need to have a place to unload them. Also, I want the food bin to survive, but they're not going to be able to survive if people can't shop there. I do want to just inject a little humor at the end of my thing which is Peggy and Doug if you want to mix some extra money with the new business that's going into Emily's just sell munchies and brownies and perhaps you could make up the difference. Thank you very much. Hi there. How are you guys doing today? My name is Zenin Elliott Crowe. I'm the founder of the UCSC Student Housing Coalition and I wanted to speak today kind of like from the perspective of we're talking about the next generation and the demographic that this development is obviously skating towards especially as it comes to parking. I can tell you guys that talking to my roommates, talk to my classmates, and talking to folks that I know right now are commuting in the same distances to get to campus that this is the exact type of housing that they wish they could live in. This is the kind of thing that we know when folks are accessed to a high-quality bus corridor that's going directly and it's going to be improved significantly with the Santa Cruz Metro plans for increasing frequency on all the routes and additionally with the new plans from Caltrans to go ahead and improve a lot of the crosswalks and crossings along the entire Mission Street corridor that's going to be happening in the next couple of years. We know that projects like this pay towards those transportation improvement funds, towards those streetscapes improvement funds and so I think when we're looking at the broader themes of the lack of parking in this project and lack of safety for biking and walkability. This is the kind of thing that we can do and we can approve that can actually help fix those things by providing the funding to actually create those changes. When we're providing fewer parking spots, data has shown that in the end, it means that fewer people own cars because as soon as you're paying for parking that you're not actually using, then you have an impetus to actually own a car and fill that parking spot. Similarly, I completely agree with all the folks that are talking about the fact that we shouldn't be allowing people to park on the street that don't have the space to park it off the street. I think that's something we should all be applying across the board to make sure that folks, we aren't burdening beyond street parking availability by saying if Tokyo the way they do it is you can't own a car unless you have an off-street parking space where you know you can park it. I think that's a perfectly reasonable and something we should be supporting especially when it comes to our climate goals. Because when we look at our missions in the city of Santa Cruz, 69 percent of our missions are just from cars. That's it. It's the entire discussion is how we get around and this is the exact kind of project that will go and help that. So in the end, like to speak to my personal experience, right now I'm living with six people in a house that used to have as a family. I don't want to be living in a house that is not designed for six people. We don't have the space that we need. We don't have the kitchen facilities. It's insane. And we much all would rather live in a place like this where we could all have our own individual space and not be displacing folks that otherwise would need a family sized home. And so in building this type of housing, we're able to actually have these. And so I really do understand the concerns of every person that came here today with all the different things related to, okay, if we took it down by one or two floors or if we changed and maybe added one more floor of parking below ground or did XYZ, but I do want to point to the overall housing crisis and say that when we are talking about this housing and we are talking about our impact on the community, every single time that we go and we say we need to do this and we do this and we do this, it means the housing itself gets more expensive and it means that we end up with 9% of students at UCSC being homeless and the highest per capita homeless population in the nation. And because it keeps on rising the cost of what actually it takes to live here. And so I think that there are always going to be a lot of reasons to deny a project, but I really want to look at the alternatives of where we are today and look at the reasons for why this project is really ideal for the location it's being presented at. Thank you. Hi, my name is Aaron Olson and three or four years ago, I bought property on Rigg Street, which is just right around the corner, 314 Rigg Street and it was a rundown on by landlord and developed into something I think is much nicer. The city did allow me to put multiple units on it. It was tough to stay within the height limit. We did that. And I rent to 15, 16 college kids and easily 70% of them have cars. None of them ride bikes, not a safe place to ride bikes on Mission Street on there's no bike lanes. I think they, you know, they should stick to three stories. There's, if there's a hundred people in that building, they're easily be 60 cars. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Isabella Story. Thank you for having us and allowing us to speak. I am also a part of the student housing coalition and I wanted to echo how amazing having this additional housing would be for a lot of UC Santa Cruz students. There's an incredible lack of housing for students and that causes some of our peers to have to commute from other areas such as the lower Bay Area and areas like San Jose. And I know students who commute from San Jose to Santa Cruz for school because they're unable to find housing in Santa Cruz and that commute is a nightmare. Having to drive on 17 on a regular basis is not fun. And yeah, and so having a project like this go up that would provide a lot of places for students to live would be really beneficial. Thank you. Hey, my name is Wadi Shargal. I'm here speaking on behalf of myself but also as a member of the student housing coalition. I'm a UCSC student myself as well. I really appreciate when we have turnout like this for public meetings, even though it does make for a longer night for you all. And that's because we're all here with a shared goal of building a city that works for its people, right? A city where we can all live the kinds of lives that we wanna live. And I really appreciate that and we're in that kind of effort together. And I wanna point out that for UCSC students right now, the prospect of living car free would be the least of our problems for a lot of folks. I mean, as we've heard mentioned, people are commuting from South County, from Salinas, from over the hill because there's nowhere for students to live in Santa Cruz. And a project like this is a step towards a solution to that. We hear all of these issues that we have with bicycle safety, pedestrian safety, lacking public transit infrastructure. And a project like this is a step towards improving that. It's not gonna solve everything. These are incremental improvements. And so I want this to be one part in a larger commitment to working to improve the problems that people have with the way that our city works for people. And that means working to improve affordability, working to build more housing suited for students and working to make our city a place that's safe to get around by bike, by walking, by public transit and a place where that's convenient. So I understand y'all don't have much choice in denying this project. I support this project. I think it's one step in the right direction, but it's just one step and we have to remain committed to improving our city on all of those other fronts as well. Thank you. Hello, I'm Ethan Singleton. I'm a student at UCSC, also with the Student Housing Coalition. I've been fairly fortunate when it comes to housing comparatively, but that said, in the past year, there've been two separate times where I had to find temporary housing and both times it was incredibly stressful. Well, it was not at all a foregone conclusion that I'd find a place and I had to, and I had to tell my professors, I'm not sure if I'd be able to attend classes or not. And this is at the same time as that Wall Street Journal article came out. I'm about that very same thing about the problems that UCSC students are having and it was pretty surreal, like, oh, it's not even, it's not really a me problem, like this is a much bigger thing. But I have found a place for my last school year here, but like I said, I've been fairly fortunate. I know people who have to commute like multiple hours a day, who had to be put on like academic probation or whatever the policy is, just because they couldn't find a place. And that's just people I know, you go like second hand, third hand and there's really no end to it. And it's really reflected in the data. 9% of UCSC students are currently experiencing homelessness, 2.3,000 homeless residents overall and the median income home price here has topped a million and is for this reason that I'm very supportive of this project. A few things I'm especially grateful for. One is that it's on the west side, which is very exclusionary. Santa Cruz doesn't just have an affordability problem, it also has a segregation problem and one look at the zoning map will make that pretty clear. And the other thing is that 15% of the units are designated very low income and that's exactly the kind of proactive action that I think is necessary to address this problem. So I support this project. Hi, my name is Natalia Gray. I'm actually a student at UC Santa Cruz and I support the building of this project because I, not currently, but I actually used to live off of Laurel and so having housing like this would have been awesome when I was looking for housing because the only reason I actually ended up living off of Laurel was because I spent five months looking for housing that I could afford and housing that didn't make me feel unsafe. So kind of coming at this, I think we should build this project because just having housing available for students is so important. There's no reason that my friends at school should be homeless and living in their cars. I think having this project built is so important so that even if it isn't the most affordable housing, the students that can't afford it will be able to live there and they won't be in other places and that could just free up spaces for more students to live close to school and be able to avoid those long commutes like others said. Yeah, so I do support the building of this project. Thank you. Hello, commissioners. My name is Nicholas Robles. I'm part of the UCSC Student Housing Coalition and first I wanna mention that I really agree with all my peers and all the other UC students who couldn't be here tonight. So I have a couple points. So from what I've heard that this building project is not gonna be including any parking and I have to say that I heard as well and I wanna stress this point that the agreement to signing onto a lease at these buildings are going to be that you don't own a car. I don't know if that's true or not but I think for anybody to say that parking is going to be a hassle, I don't believe so because nobody's gonna be owning a car in that building anyways. And then I have to say as well, UCSC has been increasing their costs for parking at campus and it's now $530 when it was 300 something last year. And so that was a $200 increase and I can say as a commuting student I really wish that I didn't have to own a car and this building project would be really helpful especially with the metro system increasing their services and along with expanding their services which is an improvement to Santa Cruz and it would be really great to show the commitments and the support to use to the Santa Cruz services over here. And then I also have to say that UCSC students right now on campus already live car free. That's a lot of students that can live comfortably and they live within their housing and they have food and markets and there's a lot of services that are being provided for students without using any cars or vehicles. And I have to say as well that having a store here in the housing project is going to be able to increase the unplanned trips that occur at the stores. So the food payment will be having a lot of unplanned trips from students who are gonna be coming home after a long day of class at like 8 p.m. and they're gonna look at the food bin and they're gonna go, man, I really want some food right now. I haven't been able to eat all day. I've been studying, I'm tired. Like students at UCSC are already paying premiums for M&Ms. It's like $3 at the vending machines and they're paying that and it's selling, it's selling. So I was gonna say it's a pretty good deal for the food bin as well. Thank you. Hi, my name's Don Radcliffe and I live at 323 Cleveland, which is around the corner off Laurel. And I know that if this goes through, I will not be able to park in front of my house. In addition, I don't think that Brian has been totally honest with you about whether you can not demand parking spaces for this place. I've read Senate Bill 92 and I see that you can. Okay, so if you keep with this, you'll be hearing from my lawyer, okay? Because that's just not true. And this business of it's gotta be a five-story unit or it doesn't work. Well, that's not our problem and we're not responsible for providing on-campus or mirroring on-campus housing for UCSC students. They need to build that on-campus. Okay, and as far as the creek, it took me 10 years to get a permit to rebuild my garage because I was 50 feet from the creek. And I don't appreciate you tearing up the rules for somebody trying to put in a new unit like this. And as far as I know, he said this, the food bin can exist there unless it's subsidized by the 60 or 59 units, they're gonna be paying higher rents on top of that. The students think they're gonna get low rents, they're not, you know. It's gonna be a million dollars a year in rent that's gonna make this thing work. That's all I have to say, thank you. My name's Alex Cardenas. I live here in the West Side and I own a business here in Santa Cruz. Definitely not opposed to Mission Street becoming more beautiful, becoming harmonious, becoming something where there's places to buy things and more housing. However, I don't feel that this building that I'm looking at right now does any of those things. I don't think it's harmonious. I think the height of the building is lacking consideration. For the unique character of Santa Cruz, it's just too big. I definitely want to just shadow what everyone else is saying with just making it smaller. I don't see why that's a problem. I don't think it's necessarily solving much housing crisis. What students are gonna be actually able to live here? Ones that only have wealthy families or have a trust fund. I would love the students to have a place to live. Like we all want a place to live, right? All of us are suffering right now from high rent and from just the economy turning into what it is. I understand the need. I wanna see that as well. I don't think this will do it. I really don't think they'll feel as happy about it when they see what the rent is gonna be. It is a single resident occupancy. What about the students who are like, oh, shit, I'm sorry, like my friends just got a place? And then they start having people crashing there. They have friends over. Where's the parking with that? Not just with the residents, but what about visitors and friends? There's just not a really clear, clean, concise way to make this harmonious with the people who live there and who are planning to live here long-term, hopefully have their families continue to live here and not get kicked out. We're widening the sidewalk, but we're not talking about any bike safety. It's a 100% biker paradise or whatever. I bike it every single day. It's not, it's pretty scary. So I would just like these things to be considered. Yeah, I would just love to find a solution that respects our past, respects our present needs and comes to a harmonious solution for everyone that lives here, because this is really an eyesore. That's all, thank you. Hi, my name's Cameron Lewis. I live at 1229 Laurel Street, so about four houses down. My family moved here three years after my middle son graduated from UC Santa Cruz. So I completely understand the plight of the students and what they've been facing. I've lived with it, I've had a son go through it. So in principle, supportive of the aspirations behind this project. But I, this is the only comment I have, well, two comments, sorry. One is I urge you to read the letter that my neighbors and I put together. I think you'll find it a valuable experience to get our perspective from that. The second thing that I wanna, is really a question. Why is UC Santa Cruz administration not involved in this conversation and in this planning? If this building that I'm looking at is gonna end up housing so many students, what does that say? Why aren't we expanding facilities at the top of the hill? I don't know if you guys have the answer to that, I certainly don't but I think somebody needs to pick up the phone and call one of the administrators at the university and see if they can come down and join the conversation. Thanks. Hello, my name is Greg Jacobson. I live on 226 Van Ness. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I get really nervous when I do things like this but I'm gonna do the best I can. So, think 20 years from now. This building seems to me like a precedent. There are any number of properties along the corridor that are gonna be developed like this and from what I've heard, and forgive my naivety, but the general plan for the corridor was three stories and what we're looking at here because of the density bonus, they've upped it to five stories. Hypothetically speaking, what if the property was 25% smaller? Does that mean that the density bonus will take it up to eight stories? I mean, I don't know, is this the kind of thing that is going to be happening every time another parcel gets developed like this? You'll be facing the same questions. So, I don't know, it seems to me like sticking with the original plan would be better because now you're thinking the long-term future of the whole corridor and limiting the size so that people up on the hill can actually still see the ocean. I don't know, thank you very much. Yeah, hi, I'm John Wallace and I live at 1220 Laurel Street, which is three houses down from the project. And so I had a whole pile of things to say, but I think I'm gonna talk on something different with, I have a couple degrees from 50 years ago from UCSC and so I have compassion for what's going on there, you know, the costs of education these days because when I went, it was almost free. So, and there's always been a debate, I guess, between who's responsible for what and I do think the university needs to take some responsibility here for the high costs. The fact is people who get a better education get more money, pay more taxes. We should see it as an investment, not as a going to school, I mean, and yet they've made it a burden with the high costs. People get out of school in trouble. Anyway, but I really agree, I feel real sorry for Doug and I'm only a couple of houses down from him. But it is a burden already parking across the street, they're building a house. Okay, single family residents as they're being allowed to put new houses in back. So there's two houses with, and I'm not sure where the zoning stuff has gone and where our vision for a city is. We're being the universities dictating things and the states dictating things and promoting things that I think we should stand against so that we have the quality. I've lived here 50 years, lived in the 1220 house for 25 years and it is a great place to live. For a while I rented to six students. I had a house on Western and was renting the house on Laurel but then I moved to Laurel 25 years ago. Anyway, hopefully you take that into concern that the quality that we're seeing when we jam up big density, we have problems in the traffic, we have problems with the dams, the water and just the services and the whole bit. So take it into consideration. Well thank you. Hello, I'm Dave Wallace and first off I commiserate with all the Laurel Street neighbors but the fact behind it is is that 50 years ago UCSE had 4,000 students. UCSE now has 20,000 students. In 20 years they're gonna add another 10,000 students. Where are you gonna put them? If it's not here, is there some other magic places sprouting up on Mission Street? The west side has really not carried much of the burden as far as any density housing so far as what I've seen. I live on the east side and we have bigger lots and we've seen a lot of it and a lot of these projects that we are upset about never get built anyway cause they don't pencil out. They don't stand the pencil test cause it's expensive to build and they die on the vine. I mean I don't know where they're all going. Is this project perfect? Absolutely not but at some point we need to build some housing and it's not, I mean there's a few downtown but not nearly enough to absorb what we have coming in the next 20 years and I think that's, maybe it's the shape of the things that come and I don't know. Good evening. Jeff LaPierre, I live on King Street so I'm a little less impacted, been there 20 years. Most I'm here to talk about parking. A lot's been said. I just, one idea I wanna contribute. Any housing development I think would reasonably have a system where you have some guest passes, right? We could ask Doug, I vaguely support the project. Doug, least 20 parking spaces nearby. There's a clothing store, used clothing, big parking lot right across the street. Maintain these 20 spots, have guest passes. You know, that way when friends and neighbors come in out of town, they can rent a guest pass, put them somewhere responsible. If we don't put any kind of requirement like that, and that doesn't seem like that far fetched, then we're obviously just dumping those people into the neighborhood. There's just no two ways about it. Thank you. Hi, my name is Sarah Smith and I live on Van S Avenue and I've lived there 40 years and I love the food bin and walk there with my grandson and I drive there on my way to and from home. And I like the idea of affordable housing and I support that idea and I really feel like this is too much. It's, there's too many problems with what it does to that, in that location. And I feel like if it were just over where the old mellis market was, it would have been a better location. And it's just, it's way too much and it's dangerous. And I guess I'm a nurse, I'm a public health nurse and I was at community hospital when we had the big earthquake. And from the standpoint of safety and the challenges of dealing with getting in and out and that many people in a building where it's very little access, I think it's dangerous. And I just, I feel like with the bicycle, so much of it being bicycle friendly, all of us on the West side know that the bicycles have challenges and there's safety issues with bicycles. And I probably won't drive to the food bin anymore if that gets built. I'd rather go to the West side. And it just, it's not like you're gonna have my business there because I don't wanna have to deal with a lot of bicycles, a lot more people. And even with my grandson walking across over to Emily's, it felt like a safety. I mean, we really practice major safety things. So I think consider the challenges with safety, consider the public health challenges of having that many people. It's way too big a project for that space. And I don't know what tools you have to deny or to change the system, the way it's set up. And I know your hands are tied, but I'd sure look to try and find a way to make it more suitable so that it would work for all of us. Thank you. Hi, I'm Natasha Guy. I live on Otis Street. Clearly not from here, but I've lived here a long time. I hope to stay here forever if they let me. I am a color and material designer by trade. I specialize in aesthetics, the way things look and how that makes people feel. If we're looking at health as one of the reasons why we would or wouldn't build something, mental health is part of that. This is a dangerous precedent. If we build this kind of thing all a long mission, the mission traffic is already insane. And I worry for that in terms of our mental health and I worry about what that means for King Street and people using that as a way to cut through. I have two kids, one and three, who I hope will go to the local schools. I will not want them to walk around the local neighborhood if this sort of thing continues to be built up in the area. And I'm really disappointed and emotional about the fact that this could happen because I love it here and I wanna stay here and I didn't choose London or San Jose. The style of this, I come back to aesthetics, is neither in keeping with the landscape, the area, the beautiful wood eclectic houses that we all know and love. Neither is it modern in a timeless way. And I stress that I do this every day for a living. So this is something I feel really strongly about that a 12-foot butterfly is not gonna curb how we all feel about how it looks. I would urge that we, again, I've probably funded partially this project because I love the food bin. I've not shopped there for the last year out of my own morals because I can only vote with my buck here. But I also would love them to continue with this in some form in a more considered beautiful manner and bearing in mind us residents who are either affected dramatically like Doug or the rest of us who live in the neighborhood. I hope you'll take another look at it. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Susan and I live on Brig Street. First, I just wanna say I really applaud the students that have come down tonight and used their voice on behalf of the plight of affordable housing. It's vital, but it's also transient and temporary. Students graduate and move on. I'm here as Natasha, I believe, on behalf of families in the neighborhood, having recently moved to the area with a young child and the intention of being a long-term permanent residence. It's equal parts insulting and laughable that this project is proposed as a solution for families whether directly as housing solutions or as a positive impact on neighborhood safety or quality of living. I reiterate the critical problems on the height and the parking. This can maybe come up in future things. I've certainly not seen debate or discussion on why all the SROs. I don't know why when we're talking about two-bedroom stats and young family stats and all kinds of things why we're looking at studios of such size. I would just say if you want to nurture families to thrive here this proposal needs swift reconsideration and to involve and respect the community on a deeper cross-functional level, please. To echo previous thought leaders tonight, let's harmonize. Thank you. My name is Donna Haraway and have a little different perspective. I live at 312 Cleveland and I've lived in Santa Cruz for about 40 years and I've taught at UCSC most of that time but I speak as a neighborhood person and a person who uses Mission Street a lot, shops at the food bin and the air room all the time. If housing of this kind, three, four and five story, SROs and also other kinds of housing with commercial space on the bottoms more of that kind of building along Mission Street in my view would make for a much more vibrant community if coupled with serious enforcement of no car, no parking permit, sorry. If you're gonna park your car you gotta find a building to park it in. Serious enforcement, serious development of safer bike areas, serious development of better crosswalk. My problem is my dogs are terrified of Mission Street and won't go across, children and dogs are not safe on Mission Street. Little things are not safe on Mission Street, it's a big problem, this building doesn't solve it but this kind of building including five stories of I think a lovely design belongs on Mission Street. I think the people on Laurel Street bear the burden and suffer for it and I think that should be mitigated as much as possible but this kind of development is what I want as a neighbor in this immediate area on Cleveland Avenue. Hello, my name is Kare Frazier and I live down by Neary Lagoon. I work at the food bin and I've worked there for more than a year. I've shopped there for decades and the thing that I would like the council to be noting is this concept of the place that uses bicycles and having a place that where the premise is that you don't get a parking permit when you live here and you travel because we live right on the transportation corridor. I'd like the city council to be encouraging that model. I didn't have a car when I was going to the university and my kids have gone to the university on the bus too. And I think that that is something I'd like to see more of. Thank you. All right, thanks everybody. Anyone else like to speak? Yeah, be sure to get your name over there when you're done. Yeah, Rustin Hognas. I just live around the corner on Cleveland. I go to the food bin all the time. I love it. I like this project and I want to leave you just with an image that of someone who might move into there that isn't a student. My sister, 74 years old, rides her bike, walks, takes public transportation everywhere, had to move to Seattle to take care of my father. Would love to be here if she went to school in Santa Cruz. This is an ideal sort of place for her. So think not only of students, think of retirees, other people who want to get away from cars, it's a good place. Thanks. All right, last call for public comment. Thanks again, everybody. We'll go ahead and close the public comment period. So if I remember right, we need a motion to go past 10 o'clock. Is that 11? Okay, thanks. How are people doing? Do anybody want to take a break or just keep going? I'm all right. So next, I want to give the applicant a chance to rebut anything that was raised during public comment if they'd like to. We'd like to address the car issue. Obviously, that's a really big concern for everybody in the neighborhood. The owner, any owner of a building is allowed to legally not rent to somebody who owns a car. You can check it with a DMV. You can, so to speak, be prejudice against the car owning class. They are not a protected class of people. So we can choose that. We can say that you cannot rent to anybody who owns a car. You can fact check it with a DMV. And I don't know what the measure would be for this, but I'm assuming there could be some kind of long-term protocol that checks that as you renew your lease or every six months or something like that to make sure that people aren't moving in and then buying a car and being an impact to the neighborhood. So that's one big thing that we can do around vehicles. A couple of comments about the commercial drop-offs in the traffic. I think we could manage that much more effectively with our vendors. So ensure they're not in the neighborhoods. Doug and Peggy are really committed to making this as manageable for the neighborhood as possible. I thought the recommendation about shared parking with another commercial space is a really great idea. There's obviously a longevity issue to that. If that property gets developed, then that parking goes away, but we're absolutely open to exploring those options in the meantime so that that impact is mitigated for as long as possible. Another comment about parking on Laurel Street. Yeah, we do buy five permits for our employees and now heard from the neighbors. And so what we do now is we buy them on Cleveland I look for like the neighbors where there's wider streets and there's less cars, which there's quite a bit like north of Laurel and Cleveland. So down Cleveland, there's some just wide open sites. So I try and buy the permits farther down the employee has to walk a little bit, but it's still relatively close. So I think there is parking in and around some of those neighborhoods, not all of them. Laurel takes the brunt of it, but spread out into the neighborhood, there are some spots. So I think some of it could be, you know, mitigated, but yeah, there's, and the residents have first option on those spots. They can buy those spots in front of their house. I don't know if you guys knew that, but you can buy the spots or they become available for the businesses on Mission Street, apparently. So that's how I understand that. Doug, I live in the neighborhood, sweatily walk around in the early morning, you may see me. My memory is that most of the streets have neighbor permit parking already, not saying it's effective or enforced or any of that, but the signs are up in most of those blocks already. Exactly, yeah, two hour parking, Monday through Friday, and I think it's mainly for those students don't park there and then just leave their car there all day. Again, I'm not saying that that solves the problem or anything, but I just wanted to recognize that the tool that exists, which is a very weak and sad tool. Correct, yeah, and we get, our employees get tickets and then I go down and try and get them waived. Okay, thank you. All right, so let's bring it back up to the commission for more discussion and I'd like to hear a motion to see. I've got a few things. I have a few things. John? There were comments made about the base density not actually being 20%, et cetera. Our inclusionary ordinance specifies percentage of units in a project that have to be made affordable can be done at different levels and that affects other aspects of the design, but the incentives that are offered and the density bonuses that are offered, they do not reduce that amount. They reduce, you could read it that it reduces the percentage required, but the truth is we don't lose any affordable housing based on these inclusionary, the density bonus or any of the other incentives. All the units that would otherwise be required under the base density, they're still there. That's one thing. I think a lot of the people here already know that with a lot of the incentives, the prohibitions on parking under maybe under 2097, those are state requirements that we don't really have a lot of control over and so to a degree, we're not able to really affect that. There are also comments made about UC housing being the problem and the difficulty is that housing at UCSC can only be paid for out of the proceeds of the people that are paying rent that live there. They can't, there's not money that the state gives university campuses for building housing. They can't use tuition money, they can't use other sources of money, has to be strictly paid for by the people that live there and with all the sustainability requirements that the university has, it's very difficult for them to keep the price of housing down. We all wanna be sustainable, but that really costs a huge amount of money for the university and anyone that's trying to do it. The corridor plan, I am very sympathetic to arguments about that being better, but that was rejected by many members of the community and a previous council and it's, we could maybe be avoiding a lot of these discussions if it hadn't been. Similarly, all housing, I think it's fairly well known, it improves affordability, accessibility and equity and I'm a strong advocate of density for all those reasons. I feel like, if small units are not considered family units, I think it's pretty easy to see that if you have three couples living in a three-bedroom home and each of them can move to a small unit and have their own place to live, that makes a family home affordable or available and it's difficult to look at all the nuance of everyone's housing situation, but I think just as a general rule, small units relieve pressure on family homes and make them more available. I'll just leave it there, but I'm very sympathetic to the impacts on the neighborhood, but the ones that are mentioned most routinely in the comments, they're largely things that we as a body don't have that much control over. Thanks for all your time coming in though. Thank you Commissioner Conway. Thank you and first of all, I want to thank everybody for coming and for being a great neighborhood and I've read every single letter, most of them more than once. And Doug, I really want to thank you for bringing this project forward. I was there one of the days when the freezer broke and you were handing out what was being in the freezer just so it wouldn't go to waste because please take this, we can't fix it. I was genuinely worried that we were gonna lose the food bin altogether and it just made me so sad and I'm really pleased that you have come up with a way to sustain the food bin and way into the future and I do feel like you've done it in a way that is really thoughtful and I appreciate that. I feel like this project is the respectful outgrowth of our times which must continue to change and I think that this really is bringing it forward. So in the midst of much change, we're continuing with our fundamental value of protecting open space by focusing growth within the urban boundary that is one of the, that is I would say the key value within this community. This project makes that possible and sustains it. And it also, another one of the choices that we made with our general plan, we decided that we don't want to spread the growth that we must accept into neighborhoods. We decided that we don't wanna have four plexus and six plexus and small apartments which would have been a perfectly acceptable choice and we decided not to do that and instead we're gonna put it along our transportation corridors. Now, inevitably someone lives next to it and there is a transition space. I know as I've watched this project be conceptualized and looked at the solar on the house next door, and really thought about how do we manage the impacts of change? So again, I'm gonna stand up very loudly in support of staying within our urban growth boundary and developing density along corridors. I wish that as a city, and I think that we do have opportunities to look closely at what those impacts mean. There's not that many properties that are gonna be like the Martins. We looked at a multifamily project, also of SROs, further up mission, but across the street and that shadow, it shadows Mission Street. I thought I was very touched by your description of your garden and of course I go by there all the time and I'm really aware of it and that is important. The impact there, it is important. But so is this project. And small units mean that the single family homes, I have one across the street from me. It's five bedrooms in that one. The owners are doing better than they were, but two kids, two students, sorry, in every single room, that was a lot. So another thing that I'm committed to is housing policies that allow housing to be built. So in other words, we have to accept that it has rebuilt at the densities that make it pencil. And I know a lot of people think it would pencil just as well at three stories. And I can tell you, I haven't looked at this performer, but I've looked at a lot of them and I just don't think so. And also not burdening projects with, we've really killed so many projects by burdening them with more and more layers that we think are making it a better project, but what it does is it makes it impossible to build it. And let's see, I think there were quite a few misunderstandings about the approval in the development process, but I don't need to take that up right now. I would like to address what is really a red herring of saying that if you rent to students and they all have cars, therefore all of these students are gonna have cars. I just have to call BS on that one. Tell them they can't have cars. Tell them you're gonna rent to students who don't have cars. And those are the people you'll rent to and there are enough students. And it's true, a lot of students have cars. They live across street from me. I know that they do, but I just don't think, I think it's disingenuous to say that there's not a way to manage that. Let's see. I guess I could go on about a lot of other things, but instead what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move the staff recommendation. I need a second first. I'll second the motion and then we can, I think some conditions of approval coming when there's some things going to work. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Cool. Thanks everybody for coming out and speaking. I know I lived on King Street for six years and raised my kids there. Now I live on the lower side a little bit further away, but I know that area very well and I used to go to the food ban quite often. Obviously there's a lot of emotions around seeing this kind of development on Mission Street. The size of it is quite large. The largest that I believe is on Mission Street right now. The thing that I think one of the, I forget his name, but he brought up a really good point is we are gonna start to see a lot more of this development. It's a necessary, we are growing, but what kind of development, where it is, how big, these are all, this is why we're all here right now. That's why I'm here, sitting here. When we have these density bonus laws, it gets really tricky and our hands get tied, but we're not totally tied. And the way we decide our base density, I brought it up earlier around, including commercial space using, I don't believe that that is a necessary requirement. Am I, I'm checking in with staff right now? When we, when we are, because we're gonna see a lot of these mixed use developments, you know, storefront on the bottom, residences up top, when we're looking at calculating the base density and we're using that commercial space to kind of bump up the numbers of the base density, is that like a, do we have to use the commercial space to do that? Is that in some sort of a code? Just it would seem to me that using the commercial space would actually lower the base density, right? Because it eliminates area that would be dedicated to residential uses. Yeah, that's my point. So when we're looking at size of buildings, and especially when we're getting into density bonus, we're adding 50% on top of that base density. That's when we're losing affordability. That's where I'm gonna disagree with John. We don't, I agree that we don't lose affordable units, but we also don't gain affordable units. And this is a big, big issue that we're gonna have to look at as we move forward with density bonus law. And in this case, if we took away that 2,675 square foot commercial space out of the base density calculation, I wonder if that would, I mean, that would affect obviously this project quite drastically. It would also probably make it a four-story building. That would be interesting. I just think it's interesting, I'll give me one more second. We have a general plan for a reason, right? It's been, these are kind of our guidelines of how we'd like to see things move forward. Now we have a base density law coming in and really drastically changing. I mean, like the gentleman said earlier, I mean, we have a FAR of 0.75 to 1.75. FAR is kind of a way of determining density. This is 3.86 over twice what is in the general plan allowed. That's crazy. I mean, we're, you know, we are gonna start growing. We're gonna start moving forward and we want density, but three point like over twice is what is in the general plan right now. That is a lot. And so my thing is, you know, this is one project is before us now and we do need density. We all love the food bin, let's be honest. It's beautiful. I love it's very Santa Cruz. It is Santa Cruz and I'm glad that it gets to stay. I do feel that five stories is a lot and as much as our hands are tied up here, it's not totally tied. And I do believe that if we look at the way we calculate base density and projects moving not just this project, but projects moving forward that we could somehow mitigate where we do have some control as a community, you know? So and on that note, you know, I'll let staff talk to the space density idea around using commercial space versus not, but also I wanna say to the public as we are just a public body, we're just a commission. This is gonna come before the city council as well. Probably in February, I imagine if everything goes passing with things get passed tonight. We are only one bump along the way of this project. So for all the people that came out tonight, use your voice and, you know, vote the way you wanna vote and the way you wanna see the future of Santa Cruz. I was just gonna offer some clarification that with the objective standards that were approved, there is a more specific requirement for the area of commercial on the ground floor. So there will be some more, I guess, assurance of how much of the ground floor is gonna be commercial. At least there's a minimum that's set. So, and then beyond that, you could put residential units and I don't have it all memorized, but it might be live work units, but there are some ways that you can get residential on the ground floor as well. But this one is before. So it's not subject to the objective standards. So then my question is, when we are determining the base, the density, I think Ms. Dawson talked about earlier is like, where is the limit? Like, I said, if it's 25% smaller a lot, are we talking eight stories? Well, the base density is gonna be calculated on what you can say within the site standards. Yeah, so any hard setbacks, yeah. And we don't have any sort of code around or law in a law around using commercial space as base density calculations, correct? We just decide if we wanna do it or not. Do you mean like counting the commercial space as a residential unit? No, just using the square footage to calculate the base density. Like we were talking like you just said, you could use some of that commercial space, but with the objective standard, no, we're getting into weeds here, but do you understand where I'm coming in? The idea that I'm saying is do we get to decide, do you get to decide as staff how much of the commercial space or not to use it or not to use it when calculating the base density on a mixed use project development? So you're asking, once they reach the project that's subject to the objective standards, once they reach the minimum amount of commercial space that's required, if they go beyond that, do we say, well, that could be residential space and that could be a unit? That's one part, it could go that way or it also could be like, whatever the minimum, that is just not gonna be calculated at all. And whether they choose to add to it or not, that's their choice, right? I think that that's been considered. I know there's state laws around that protect these types of developments and that tell us to look at the project as proposed, that specific language is included in a lot of the state laws. So it would be something we'd have to look at. Okay. And I recall there being some litigation around that. I could imagine. As well with certain jurisdictions on density bonus saying, hey, your project could be this. Right. And then getting that ruling overturned at the courts. All right. I'm thinking back to when we read the downtown plan, it's a different context than this project, which we're kind of straying away from, but we had all these discussions about ground floor. And like you, in my opinion, you kind of want to read to, you know, I hear what you're saying, like just some exercise of it. The whole, the whole point. It was harder than you think. The whole point, the reason I'm bringing this up, the whole reason I'm bringing this up is that we do have control. Like don't act like we, we do have some say here. So like for us to say, for, for me to say that, I just have to say yes to this, that's not true. We do have some, we do have, we do have some say. I'm not saying we can, I can totally say no to this, but we can at least ask for, you know, we can figure out a way to make this a little bit more agreeable for everybody. I think I'd like to. Yeah. I think for, so to respond to the density bonus and what you need to make in the way of findings, I mean, there's, there's a few first, it needs to meet the minimum affordability requirements, which are ADU or I'm sorry, our SRO ordinance automatically qualifies a project for a 50% density bonus to get the, the waivers. There needs to be a finding that the standards in our zoning code physically preclude a development from achieving that density that's allowed. Which one of them is whether it's a negative impact on the neighborhood, correct? Right. Well, no, it's so in order to deny a density bonus, you need to find that there's a specific adverse impact upon the public health or safety unless the project is disapproved. And then it says, as used in this paragraph, a specific adverse impact means a significant, quantifiable, direct and unavoidable impact based on an objective, identified written public health or safety standard policy or conditions as existed on the date the application was deemed complete. That's a pretty tall order. It's almost, it's virtually impossible to make that finding on a project like this on an infill urbanized site. We've got a biotic study that says there's no habitat whatsoever. I mean, there, you know, there's really nothing to hang your hat on to either reduce density or deny the density bonus. The only, the only question is whether, what do we use to calculate base density? That's what I'm bringing up, which is arguable. Yeah, and also responding to some of the comments made from the public, you know, the state's getting serious about housing laws. They have a new housing accountability division within HCD. I know, I've talked to them. We've had inquiries about it. If the city violates the Housing Accountability Act, we're on the hook for $10,000 per unit. So if you were to reduce density by 20 units, it would cost the city $200,000. We'd have to reverse our decision within 60 days and pay employer fees. That's if we go against that. If we, if we lose in court, right. Which we would. Cindy, I just want to, the motion is like to pass the project, so I want to hear what you have to say, but if we're moving toward a different motion, that should be a separate discussion. I have a couple of comments and then I'd like to propose a friendly amendment a condition to add. So just to build on what Commissioner Maxwell said, I do want to remind the public of the process again that we are an advisory body and the decision-making body is a city council and the folks that you elected there. So hold them accountable accordingly. And I would also just say that, the people passing these state housing laws are your elected Senate and assembly members. So just as engaged public, we need to keep an eye on the ball here and a lot of, and you're hearing about these state laws that continue to pass in Sacramento. And so I think that's something just to remember that it does trickle down and you're feeling these impacts in your neighborhood. I do want to just make a couple of general comments and disagree with, respectfully disagree with Commissioner McKelvie, math is math and the way that the density bonus law is implemented is that the overall percentage, we have a 20% inclusionary in the city of Santa Cruz when a density bonus project gets put forward and the numbers get, and you get the density bonus, the overall percentage of units you get is not 20%. That's just math on this project. It's about 13%. So that's also just something to keep in mind as we move through thinking about these projects. A couple of other things I would just like to recognize one of the local contractors who come up and just again say, city council is in charge of project labor agreements and using local labor. That's something to continue to mention. That's not something under our purview. And then when we're talking about these projects, I also want us just to be very honest about what we're building. We're not building family housing. SROs, that's not what this is. We do need smaller units and we do need more affordable units. This is 13% affordable. That's not enough, but that meets the current standards. And as the commission, we are tasked with looking at the laws as they're written, seeing if a project meets that and moves forward. I do want to just second this idea of continuing to bring up with council and staff how we calculate base unit because that's gonna, when we apply the density unit, if it was 30 units and we were applying a density unit, it'd be different than it was 40 units and the height of buildings would be differently. And this idea of using commercial space and that calculation, whether we do it or not, I think is something to continue to pursue as this moves through the process. Lastly, just a general comment before I make my condition. As someone who bikes as their primary mode of transportation, we really need to get serious about conditioning on projects on these corridors, bike and pedestrian safety as a condition and not just as a, it's something we'll think about as density increase, traffic increases, people's patients decrease. It's very dangerous. I actually walk more now than I bike because it's so dangerous to bike and I certainly never bike on mission. And when campus opens every year and I see students biking on mission, I roll down my window and say, go to King, do not bike on mission. So we need to get really serious about it. So along those lines, we did, the developer did seem to be open to a condition. So I'd like to make a friendly amendment for a condition. And I think the wording would be something like for the developer to work with Metro to take advantage of existing programs to develop bus passes. Is that something you guys would be okay with? I'm not seeing any. Are you talking about free bus passes? What did I just say? That the developer would work with the Metro to take advantage of existing programs to implement bike passes for residents. Bus passes. Bus passes, yeah, not bike passes, bus passes. Thank you. In pass, we've added the words like for residents that request them because a lot of times they have them and like nobody wants them, they're needed for Doug to pay for them. I'm happy. As for residents that request them. I also need to jump in and I add here in all caps, do not ride your bike on Mission Street. So thanks for mentioning that. Do not ride your bike on Mission Street, people. You'll die. The sign that says it's okay. Okay, I have, as the maker of the motion, I'll have to accept it as a friendly amendment. And my problem with this, and I don't know that I'm dead set against it, but these residents are already gonna have bus passes. I'm doing the same thing. If they want them, they're gonna get bus passes. I don't think that there's a financial reason why they couldn't. I certainly think that working with Metro and linking property management company to make it as easy as possible and seamless as possible makes sense. I see no reason why we would burden the project financially to have them take on a financial cost for it. I don't think that, I don't feel like the resident necessarily need it and it doesn't seem fair to the project to me. However, I mean, if you don't care about that responsibility, I think what you're asking Doug to do, maybe I misunderstand, I might. Yeah, I think you misunderstood. So you're not asking the project to provide bus passes. I'm asking them to work with Metro to take advantage of existing programs. Oh, if there's programs, that's great. I'm totally fine with that. I mean, I still don't like layering extra conditions, but I mean, this one seems okay. I just didn't wanna add an extra cost. I think adding some coordination and ease of use makes sense. So yeah, I would accept that. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to, I think we're coming too close here, so I just wanted to make a few comments before, before we wrap this up. First off, just in, I received some emails actually during the meeting from a engaged citizen that was just talking about all the improvements that are gonna be coming from Caltrans to this particular intersection and they include, as I see it, high visibility crosswalk improvements, bike boxes and renewed ramps and other things like this. So the need for a condition on the development, I don't think is necessary as these improvements are coming. So I just wanted to address that as there were some concerns about people crossing mission. I have some of those same concerns with some of my kids at Santa Cruz High. And so that seems to be in the works, which I'm really happy to see. Secondly, I just wanted to touch base about affordable housing and just talk about that for a second. So on these individual projects, many of the projects that seek density bonuses do have overall affordability percentages that get watered down beyond what, on the surface, we ask for as a local community, right? That is part of the density bonus issue that ruffles a lot of feathers. And ultimately the courts have decided that these density bonus units cannot have affordability requirements applied to them. And that is the incentive for the developer. They say we're going to include X amount of affordable units in return to make this project pencil out. You're going to get X amount of density bonus units and it does water down that percentage. But this is, it's a forest in the trees issue because these types of projects allow us to meet our rena goals, which make us eligible for a pro housing designation, which makes us eligible for more funding for affordable housing. And if I'm remembering correctly, I think our last housing element we secured close to, if not over 50% affordable units out of all the units we built out of that eight year period. And the reason we are able to do that beyond other fees that we charge and other grants that we can secure is because we build housing, right? That's one of the best things that we can do in this particular situation. And I just want to highlight that, that our overall housing output is geared very much towards low income earners or at least it has been over the past eight years. And now with the pro housing designation and projects like this that will add eight very low income units, those are very, very difficult units to build. And in fact, every single one of those units requires close to $20,000 in subsidy from the developer. So that is a big ask and that is the reason that they get these density bonus units. So I just want people to be reminded of that and that there are benefits to these types of projects. And while yes, there are costs, there are costs to this approach. This is done at the state level, as Commissioner Dawson did mention, talk to your state representatives about how this is impacting you and that at this very moment, that is the way things are. But I also think that one of the big upsides to this particular site is that, yeah, you have some very accessible amenities here. You have good restaurants, you have within walking distance, you have a medical clinic, within walking distance you have athletic fields, within walking distance or biking distance. You have a lot of these other things going on and the economic potential of clustering businesses and dense housing in this particular place could add some good benefits to your neighborhood as well. And so I understand the parking issue. I think that the parking issue is probably one of the biggest downsides to what the state is doing right now. And I do think that some of the conclusions that the state is reaching around just eliminating parking requirements, I think, are somewhat unrealistic. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna support this project as amended by conditions of approval or I'm sorry, a friendly amendment. And I think that these types of projects are beneficial to the community. And with any kind of luck, that Emily's across the street is not gonna be a medical marijuana facility. It's gonna be a coffee shop, all right, if I have anything to say about it. So marijuana delivery is a thing. So you don't need to, it doesn't need to be that close. So that's my comments. Thank you for everybody that came out to speak. All right, anyone else have a few things to talk about? I have a question. Sure. I know we did talk speaking of the parking issue. I know you guys, the developers, and talked about the somewhat idea of not agreeing not to rent to car owners, but that's just, you could not do that. You know what I mean? Like that's just a saying of, is there anything in like, I mean, this is the thing, if you have an empty unit and you're the only people that, at some point you gotta fill the units, correct? Can I say something? Sure. Yeah, come on up just so the mic can hear you. In case anyone's still awake at home. Okay, so if somebody has a car, they're not gonna really be able to park because you have to have a permit for Laurel. You can't get a permit for Laurel because your address is gonna be on mission. We, the food bin, only get permits because of some magnanimous, something rather than God, because we don't know where we'd have our employees park. So we're, on the one hand, we intend to not have cars there because that's one thing we can do to not piss off the neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, there you go. And then another thing is we are feeling like people might be logical who wanna live in these places that they're gonna self-select not to have cars because what are they gonna do with their cars? They're gonna get tickets. Enforcement will probably increase because everybody's gonna be pissed off and start hassling the city to increase enforcement. I've gotten a ticket in there. I don't know what people are talking about that you don't get tickets. I've gotten a ticket there. So anyway, there is a self-selection aspect. There's, and yeah, we don't want cars. This is like our idea. I wanted the roof to have plants. We want no cars. This is like progressive. That's my say. All right, Commissioner McKelvie. Did you have someone else? All right, I have two quick friendly amendments to propose. One, would you put that text I sent you earlier up? I don't wanna add crazy conditions, but I think these will be pretty mild. Let me know if you feel differently about them. So what you'll see here, everybody, I copied the conditions that are in there. A Vivian, I don't know if you can zoom in on the top one. Yeah, whoever's got it. Sweet, thank you guys for putting that up. So the numbers changed, but there's two, those are the two light trespass conditions that are in there. They're pretty solid. Like we started this process many years ago. They were hardened up. They're already in there. Guys, folks, those are in there already. Plans submitted for building permit issuance shall show all exterior site lighting locations and fixture details. All exterior building lighting shall be shielded and contained in a downward direction. No exterior lighting shall produce offsite glare. That's a big one, really, glare is huge. Exterior site lighting shall be provided along pedestrian pathways and in the vehicle parking area, which right there is conflicting with that neighbor, which we get that. Security lighting shall be motion sensor only because always on security lighting is not effective according to science. And so then I'd just like to add that photometric site plan and she'll be provided to verify this. And then I get kind of cheeky writing conditions and I put three more in there just for y'all to think about. I'm not suggesting we put them on this project, but like we could clarify, maybe the first one I'll suggest it. Let's see how you feel about this one. Building department staff shall observe the final lighting at night before the CFO is granted. Maybe that happens already. We have to do that for green building inspections to see how it looks, you know? Yeah, if the majority of the commission wants to go there, I'd recommend that it be planning staff to check on that. I'm not the one to go there, but. Yeah. And if you wanted to go the direction of an ad hoc committee, I know we've done it. Let's leave that one there. That's pretty aggressive. Okay. Yeah. We should go look at these buildings and see if we did it or not, but we wouldn't want you to coordinate us for that inspection. I think the words no lighting shall spill off the site in the direction of the residential neighborhood nor the creek is too strong. And then we talked about that lighting facade issue, so I trust that will be handled naturally during design now that I've raised it. So I'd like to propose the friendly amendment to add that photometric site plan. She'll be provided to verify, and I think it was better with the top condition, Ryan, which I believe was 15, but put it wherever you want. Do you have a condition or just have it stand alone? Well, let me look at it. So plan submitted for building permit, issuance, blah, blah, blah. Let's add it to the end of that condition. Because the plan just puts in writing what condition, what says one up there is actually saying. So is this all one condition? No, just that first line. Just this first line? Yep. Thank you for doing the editing for me. Cool, do you guys get it? That's just my ask there. I do, but I have a question in the first sense. Suggesting or modifying the language so that, sorry. Modifying the language so that we also kind of favor the placement of any luminaires lower to the ground. I love this. I thought a lot about it. Ballards and things that are going to illuminate the ground that needs to be illuminated rather than having large light fixtures. It's more economical because there are fewer of them, but it would be much more, do you want to respond? Please. Sure, yes. Oh, of course, of course, yes, right. No, because there's gonna be that conflict. I don't know what that language should be, but that's I think that would be an effective thing to keep the dark sky objectives in mind. Two questions. So that's good, right? I like putting that in there. If everyone's all right with that. I have a couple of questions. Yeah. Well, I wanted to just get input from all the commissioners. Okay, I have a couple of questions. I love that this is your area. It's not my area. I'd like to know how much does it, additional cost is there to the project to create a photometric site plan? Is that negligible? Is that easy? Don't know, but are there... Is it a lot? I see it on every 40-init apartment building on my desk. Okay, all right. Because I hate how some, one of the things we've done to prevent getting any housing built is just to make it too expensive. I agree. Hanging, treating COAs is like a Christmas tree. I hear you, Julie. All right, thank you. I'm not sure that I am so keen on the planning department staff going out to the final lighting at night before it's granted. Aren't we just, they're doing all of this. Why are we doing this extra thing? It's staff time. They're going out at night. I don't think we're accomplishing anything. Okay. So I hear you. My experience with this is the, it's now the Hampton Inn down at the end of Mission Street. Yeah. You know, is the sunset in? Is that right? I can't remember what it's called. So it's a large building. We put these conditions on it. Contractor blew it on the wall packs and they're just like blasting light. It's just one of those like dumb things. You're right. Nobody noticed. You're right. And I'm planning commissioner, volunteer walking by at night and I'm like, what's going on with these lights? Don't we have these conditions? I know it's that building. Don't spray light into your neighbors. So contractor came out with these little metal thingies on. The stupid thing about lighting is it's stupid easy to shield them right if you just like put five seconds into it in my experience. So I'm not coming out of left-wing. Okay. I just want to. I think if Eric would have been out there at night, we would have immediately been like, yeah, those aren't going to work and it would have saved everybody a lot of pain. You work well past dark. Cool. Well, and I was just going to say they are after dark pretty. I would just like to add to that that on Hanover Street, there's also a same thing. Like all those conditions were there and I can guarantee that they do not meet the conditions right now, which is a block. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, so. So Julie, I hear you and I really thought about cost because I'm here to build some housing. Okay. And I do not think this is a project killer or pain in the butt type thing. It's really? More input? A little. Yeah. I thought about approve, but what if it's a different panning commission and they're all just like we hate that light. It's not even us, it's staff making that. To confirm. To confirm that the final lighting is consistent with photometric study. It's consistent. Well, no, that's a good point. The staff shouldn't be, is not technically qualified to evaluate if it meets the photometric study. So, yeah, no, no, that's perfect. But she'll, I'm just trying to think of a word. Why don't you just say, verify this by observing the final lighting at night before CFO is granted to the satisfaction of the planning director. Too hard, too hard. Is that too much? Okay, I've opened the stand doors box. Yeah, I just want to interject. So we will go out to the site. The planning staff go out to the site anyway and we'll observe and confirm that everything is done to the condition. So this seems clear to me if we see any offsite glare or if there's any bright lights or if something looks different than we're showing on the plans, then we would have a conversation. Does that work? All right. Okay, good, good, good. This is not to catch y'all. It's to just highlight it a bit more and put it in the document. And I will accept that. Cool, okay, I got one more. Can we scroll down to MAC equipment? Did we, I'm not sure that mic is the same mic. Oh, I'm sorry, are you good with that one? Okay. Thank you. This again is one I've worked on for many years. Mechanical equipment screening is in the code and we talked about earlier to like visually screen. So this is my brainstorming. Ryan, can we add the word heat pump or remove air conditioners, one or the other? Mechanical equipment covers heat pump and air conditioners, but when you say air conditioner, it sounds like we're still living in the combustion fuel age. Is it, I'm sorry, you want? Just add heat pumps there. Add heat pumps. If that is all right with everybody, it's just a clarification. So the idea of this is that you don't have to see it, right? And acoustical control is super tough and expensive. So I'd like to simply add the words sound control shall be considered when designing the screening and stop there. And I don't know anyone to talk about this next couple there. Excuse me, chair. Just before more people leave, I wanted to clarify that this project is not going to, this does not require city council approval. This is the final approval. So if it gets appealed, then it would be. So I want to, yes, I want to touch on that too. This can be the last meeting unless the neighbor's appeal. And we could actually just go start building this project whenever these guys are ready to go. So I understand that everyone always appeals. And that's all right, but just please try to be as constructive as possible. And like us with choice on this density bonus, you neighbors have the choice of appealing and extending the bane here in hopes of some other concessions or not. But I just want to say it does not by nature go to city council. Yeah, let's take a stop. No, this is too much. We're out of public comment. Nope, I'm sorry, you're violating the rules of this meeting. We can talk more afterward. No, this is enough discussion. Stop, please. This is, we're not in public discussion. We're here talking amongst the commission. So now is not the time to give us further input. I'm sorry, it feels that way. Nope, public comment is over. So mechanical equipment, I'd like to add those words. Sound control should be considered when designing the screening, not asked to be decibel 40, whatever. Okay, that's it. I'm all right with that one too. And then Eric, I'm not gonna do the zoning administrator. She'll suggest best practices. That was bad, bad idea. I know. Okay, thank you. How do you guys feel about that from the amendment? Good, excellent. So I have a few comments and then I'm looking forward to a vote. So you know, I live in this neighborhood. I have kids, I have a mom. I grew up by Mission Hill on King Street. I think God got a house way down on Miramar. So I walk through here all the time. I've seen so many of the people here. So I feel the impact I really do and there's serious impact here. I was thinking about what's like the something this big that's ever happened in our neighborhood. The closest I could come to was that monster redwood tree at Laurel and King. Like that might've been taller than this building. So let me just say it. This is a huge ass building. It's big. It's gonna stick out. It's gigantic. It's gonna shade people. It's higher than most people in this town want, I think. And like, I don't wanna, Sean kind of alluded to it earlier and we do this thing where, and I've said it before, oh, the state's making us do this. Oh God, we have no control over this. This is just like political padding, you know? I want these units. I want more housing. And you know why? Cause I have two kids and the odds of me getting them each, a single family house to give them, so they can live in this damp town, like my parents did for me, the odds of that happening are zero at this point in my life. That's 47. So I hope by the time they're ready for it, they could get an apartment and these eat affordable and however many other is not gonna do it but we're heading in that right direction. Also, my mom lives right there and she's at 75 and getting older and lives in a 3,000 square foot house with five bedrooms and it's crazy. So I'd sure love to have her move into an apartment right there than somewhere else much further away from me and my family and my kids. Can't say again, like the terror of crossing Mission Street, I really felt that me, my kids, someone said it's like extreme safety. It's totally like that. It's like, you stop your bike 20 feet ahead. This project's not gonna change that. Traffic's already terrible. This is gonna add a drop in the bucket. I forget the numbers. I think peak traffic on Mission is 6,000 cars an hour, right? So if all 60 people hop in their alleged car, it's not, it's a drop in the bucket. So I get it, like it's a small thing but things are bad. This is not gonna make it that much worse, I think. Okay, I don't wanna ramble on it's late. For street cred, I totally remember earthquake in 1989 after the power went out and I could be, I was 13, but people were trading food in the parking lot of the food and that's like, that doesn't get much more Santa Cruz than that. Like, hey, I got these beans and you know, so I just love that hippie part of our community. This small business will go on. I can't say that enough. Inarguably, the project increases pedestrian safety on Mission. A lot of people said that. We're getting a huge sidewalk. It's, what, 12 feet wide or something with a row of street trees? We got nine street trees, including around the corner. That's gonna make this stretch of mission in that corner a whole new experience. You know, new sidewalks. So I am fine with just updating it. It's gonna make things safer for most everybody. So I get a little bit grouchy and I'll try not to express that on everybody but this idea that it's an okay to be a landlord in the single family neighborhood two blocks away, renting the 17 UCSC kids who park on the street, but not okay for Doug to build a building that's designed for people to not have cars. I mean, that really just rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I love cars, you know, I drove cars. I have a minivan, I ride bikes. Anyway, that just rubbed me the wrong way and I had to get it out. The parking is a shared resource. Like, I used to pretend like the parking program worked, you know, but it doesn't. Public Works hates it. It's a pain for reinforcement. They don't have the resources to do it, right? Nobody has the resources to do it, right? Like a real city would do, which is charge for parking everywhere, right? Anyway. So I don't think the parking permit thing, whatever way it goes, is gonna have any impact. My mom's house is the perfect example. She's the first street without permits over on Kirby and King Street there. If I think right through down all those streets and walnut and so if someone living here might go park in her house, in front of her house, but her neighbors have the option to go and do the petition and get those permits and call the police and you know, that's all there already. So I just don't think it had, we have plenty of parking. There's eight parking spots in the US for every car in the US, you know? So anyway, let me stop on that soap box. Oh, I have a quick joke. This will be the only bodega of all time where you can't buy weed once it's approved, right? That'll be across the street and not part of your operation. I used to live in Berkeley. Okay. And then a bit more of a rant. Suburbia sure as hell is not high density. Single family zoning is by nature an intent racist in my opinion. And so I'm sorry, but everyone can't have single family homes because it keeps everyone else out of your community. So in my opinion, every apartment bill affordable or not is a tiny step toward racial justice, equity, all these things that I really value. And I know that racist word is strong, but go research it. It's literally true. Zoning was invented in Berkeley to keep black people out. So, you know, again, I'm not saying we're forced to do this. I want to do this clear eyed about the impacts. And that just is how this goes. So we just can't do this anymore. You know, the NIMBY word I try not to use, but so many people said, I love this project, but not by me. And that speaks for itself in my opinion. Okay, so I'm in favor of the project. My last joke was, is it possible to keep the sign going during construction? Because boy, do I love that sign. And I think putting it in the rendering, like you captured my heart. So, nice job, nice job. Yeah, cool, cool. It's an important news medium in our town. Okay, that's all that I have to a vote. All right, Vivian, could we do a roll call vote, please? Missioner Dawson. Hi. Missioner Conway. Hi. Missioner Kennedy. Hi. Missioner Maxwell. I don't agree with the way that the base density is being calculated in this project. I do not say no to housing. I like the housing. I think it's too big. So I'm gonna say no. Mission or Paul, Miss? Yes. Mission or Calvi? Yes. So with that, the motion passes unanimously. No. Nope. I'm sorry. Excuse me. With that, the motion passes five to one with Commissioner Maxwell against. Excuse me. So that ends the item. We have some more business. So if you wanna keep chatting, if you can scoot out of the room, we'd appreciate that. Thank you everyone for coming. Do you have a long one? I have a speech, but it's not 11 minutes long. It's tired, I understand. So, this is the end of my year at chair. So some brief words. Can I do that under informational items? Sure. Sweet. So I don't have a long speech. It's been a great year you all. I wanted to appreciate you all. I remember like whipping out that housing thing a year ago. And damn do we approve some housing. So thank you all. I really appreciate you all showing up and contributing. This commission is so much stronger for each of your unique inputs. Mike, I love your teacher knowledge and reason. You know, you wanna study things and get to the bottom of it, which is super refreshing to have some facts applied to this process. John, I love your architectural expertise. Thank you. And you always caution me against COAs, which I appreciate. Sean, it was fun working to save that senior housing deck on the top of the Eucalyptus project. I was thinking about that one. I think that's when we first connected. It's like, oh, we can do things together. And that was a fun moment. And that's Soquel Street bike death ride. That was a fun one too. So anyway, I love you, man. Cindy, you have good thoughtful comments on gentrification. You're always reminding me of the broader social justice perspective, which I really appreciate sincerely. And we don't agree on math, but that's okay. Timory's not here, but she has such great comments on materials and how important those details are to the building coming out nice. And Julie's like my rock. Thanks for slowing me down when I tried to go too fast. And you always get all those details about affordable housing and like proformas, right? So that just impresses me. That's the end of my comments. Any other informational items? Sure, I got a couple. So at the January 9th city council meeting, they approved the Warf Master Plan. They did it subject to removal of the Western Walkway and references to the landmark building. I'll say at the hearing, the petitioners who don't morph the Warf folks who have filed lawsuit against the city, it indicated that if the Western Walkway was removed, that they would not pursue further litigation. So that may have played into the decision. Measure M, the analysis of that measure, which the drafters call the housing for people measure, is on the council's agenda for this coming Tuesday, the 23rd, the city did hire a third party consultant to prepare the analysis. And just briefly, the consultant's report finds that the measure is broadly applicable throughout the city. It would constrain housing supply resulting in less affordable housing and less market rate housing. It would constrain the city's ability to comply with state law requirements and would have a significant negative fiscal impact. That full analysis is on the city's website for that council meeting. It's item number 40. I'd encourage you all to take a look at it. And then, yeah. No, it's a presentation. Yeah. Right. So upcoming schedule for February, we have the oversized vehicle ordinance coastal permit that'll be before you on February 1st. And then you'll recall the downtown hotel on Front Street was continued to the February 15th agenda. So we've got those two projects locked in over your next two meetings. That's all I have. Great. We don't have any, oh, one more. Yeah. I have an item to refer to future agendas. Oh, yeah. I believe this is my last agenda. And I just wanna thank staff. I know four years has gone by quite fast. The pandemic ensuing and not meeting in person. Yeah. I've learned a lot in four years. And yeah, I just wanna appreciate you guys taking your, I mean, you guys have to do this. I wanna appreciate you guys, my other fellow commissioners. We all bear a brand now that we walk forward forever being a planning commissioner and knowing what that means as we reach close to 11 o'clock tonight. But yeah, I just wanna say thank you. It's been a pleasure. And maybe I'll see you guys around the corner somewhere. Thanks. I just also wanted to thank staff. You guys have been so responsive and just very, very professional. And it's really, really appreciated. I know it's your job, but you all do it very well. And it's much appreciated. So thank you. Yeah, thank you both too. I've worked in a number of jurisdictions and I can really say that both of you, everybody on the commission for that matter, I can tell really takes the time to read the reports and puts a lot of thought into your decision-making and that doesn't always happen in other jurisdictions. So really appreciate the input and thank you for your service. All right, with that, this meeting is adjourned. Thanks, everybody. Made it. Five minutes. Five minutes. It's not a record either. No resolutions.