And then we will move on to our meeting tonight's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website city of Santa Cruz dot com. If you wish to comment on tonight's item, call in using the instructions on your screen, mute your television or streaming device and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming. So, if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak when it is time for public comment, press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak during public comment. You will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Watkins. Here. Calentary Johnson. Here. Brown. Here. Cummings. Here. Golder. Here. Vice Mayor Brunner. President and Mayor Meyers. The agenda item today is affordable housing, streamlined ministerial approval, SB 35 and density bonus study, putting procedural direction for such requests for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If this is an item you want to come on on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I just want to make clear for folks who are attending this. Again, this is noticed as a as a meeting and our agenda item tonight is the affordable housing, streamlined ministerial approval, otherwise known as SB 35. And we also will be hearing about the density bonus as well. And we will not be taking comments on the 831 water street project this evening. So I just want to make sure that people are clear. If you are going to comment about 831 water street, I will have to unfortunately stop your comments because we are not taking any public comment on that because it's not the noticed item on our agenda. So I just want to make sure folks are clear on that. So next I want to sort of outline the process. We're going to go ahead and get a presentation by our staff and then council will ask questions. I'll ask council to please just keep it to questions during that period of time. Then I'm going to go out to public comment and then we'll come back for further council and deliberation and action. So I'll go ahead and turn this over. And on my sheet, it says that Eric Marlett, our assistant director of planning community development is here to introduce the item. Is that correct? I want to make sure that hasn't changed. Good evening, Mayor Lee Butler here, director deputy city manager and director of planning and community development. I will be kicking off the presentation. Great. Thanks, Mayor and council members, I'm going to share my screen here.  Yes, we can see it. Excellent. All right, I'm going to kick off with some framing of this issue. And then I'm going to turn it over to Barbara Caltz. She is an attorney with gold barb Littman and recognized throughout the state for her expertise in a variety of land use issues. And she'll be covering the SB 35 and density bonus items. We also have Sarah noisy with us, our senior planner, who will be telling us about the objective standards process a little bit on that and where we're at and where we're heading. And we also have a number of folks on the line with us, Samantha hasher, our principal planner, as well as Tony, can Dottie, our city attorney and Darcy Pruitt, also in the attorney's office, as well as a number of other staff. Should you have specific questions as we go through the presentation? All right, so I'm going to start this off by giving you a little bit of context of how we got here. And some of the housing production stats from throughout the state that have led to some implications like housing price increases and really frame the legislature's analysis and give sort of a snapshot of the legislature was looking at when they started approving a whole series of new housing bills back in 2017. And many of those are a number of those, I should say, have important changes with respect to cities, abilities to affect land use within their jurisdiction and the helping accountability act and SB 35 changes to those have substantially altered the landscape in which city councils and planning commissions and zoning administrators can review and consider projects. So I'll jump right in with some of the stats that we have related to housing production over the last 20 years. You can see here that the projected housing need as identified by the legislative analyst office, as well as the State Department of Housing and Community Development, the need is about 100,000, 180,000 homes annually. And you can see here, we dropped way down back in 2009 and for the past seven or so years, we've been hovering at or below about 50% of what's needed. And the big drop in 2009 was the great recession that was fueled by poor home lending practices and just a quick aside, the jurisdiction that I was working for at the time went from approving thousands of dwelling units to approving 120 units in 2009 in terms of building permits that were approved. So huge drop off and you can see that was the case across the state here and many people left the construction industry and many haven't returned. They said, hey, this is too volatile. I've got to go find something. And so labor has been an issue since that time. And then a few years later, we lost the. And they were a key tool in the production of affordable housing. So I'll share some stats on our affordable housing deficit in a moment as well. You can see here that the trend has continued in the last few years. I started with the 2016 numbers because that's when the legislature really started looking, that's the snapshot in time that they were looking at. And you can see here when they're, when you take that past table back out to 1980, there's still only a few years in the early 80s when we were even close to the overall housing production between single family and multifamily that we've seen over the last 12 or so years. And you can see here going all the way back to 1954, 60 years plus that we are at really historic low levels. They're only a few years where this where the housing production has been as low as it has been since the great recession. And that has some significant implications on our housing supply as well as implications in the market. And so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a few of those that the legislature was looking at. We have the second lowest home ownership rate among the 50 states. We have a huge percentage households that are rent burdened, especially when you're looking at lower income households. So those making 80% of the area median income or less 80% of those households are rent burdened. And even when you look at the moderate income, which goes up to 120% of area median income, even when you look at that. For 41% of those individuals who are renters are rent burdened. Here we've got a 1.5 million unit shortfall in rentals just in affordable and just in very extremely low income units. That's just in those very low and extremely low income categories. Huge lack of supply in affordable housing that the legislature was looking at. And again, you can see the source was 2016. This is this is the snapshot in time that they're looking at. And then the legislature also looked at the transportation associated with housing and they tied that they recognize that the transportation costs are also a factor in reducing the affordability of renters and of living in California. And so that that factored into some of the policy decisions that they made as well. And I'll touch on that in a few minutes as well. The legislature looked at. Strengths at every stage of the development process. And they found that they compound to create a large gap between the projected housing need. And the amount of housing that's actually built. And you can see a wide range of those on the slide here. Everything from restrictive local regulations to community resistance to development costs, all contributing to that gap between the housing and the housing that was being created. And so given this this framework, it's no wonder that the legislator legislature responded by creating a wide range of policy changes. And the first one that I'll talk about really briefly is updates to the housing accountability act. So a lot of people are aware of SB 330, but even before that there were substantial changes in 2017 that took effect as part of AB 31 94. And the housing accountability act has been reframed to reduce cities ability to deny a project or reduce its density. If the project meets objective standards. So the objective standards issue is not just one from SB 35. It's part of every housing project now that is applicable under the housing accountability act. So it's a really wide ranging approach that the state legislature took. They also made changes to the density bonus. Just a few years ago, the maximum density bonus increase was 35%. And now with AB 1763 and AB 2345, you can go up to a 50% density bonus, or if you're 100% affordable project, you can get an 80% bonus. Or if you're close to transit, again, where the legislature was looking at those transit costs associated with overall living costs. If you're close to transit and you've got 100% affordable housing project, the density limit is removed entirely and three extra stories can be added to what's otherwise allowed by the regulations. So again, the legislature is doing a lot of changes to help housing development forward. Equal changes were done. Grant funding was provided. The first grant funding that came through was SB 2. And I'll note that that grant funding, the city said that we want to do our objective standards. This is the direction that the legislature is moving. And so there are three cycles of grant funding. The first one that we did was for the objective standards process. And that's the one that is furthest along because we started that as the first grant opportunity that we got from the state related to this overall package of housing bills that has been coming through each year since 2017. And of course, you know, we're here to talk about some of the streamlining efforts that they have talked that they have put in place related to SB 35. And SB 35 applicability is tied to the regional housing needs assessment. So I am going to speak to that for just a few minutes before I hand it over to Barbara Couch to talk about the SB 35 specifics and density bonus. So the regional housing needs assessment is a state requirement that's handed down through the council of government, which here is and bag the association of moderate Bay Area governments. So essentially the state requires that each jurisdiction adequately plan to meet the housing needs and each city has to adopt a housing element that will show how the city will meet those needs. The housing element is a part of the general plan and the state doles out what's called the regional housing needs determination. And that is the total number of units that needs to be planned for throughout the region in our case that Santa Cruz and moderate counties. And the council of governments and bag association and moderate Bay Area governments for us then divides that up in what's called the arena, the regional housing needs allocation. So each city, each county gets here's how much housing you need to plan for based on the different income levels. We're currently in the cycle of the arena numbers and that stretches from 2014 to 2023. We report each year to the state we have to provide a report by April 1 and they've expanded the data that we have to provide substantially but the key indicator is still building permits issued. So let's take a look, a quick look at what we have as far as our regional housing needs allocation status updates. So the the table this table has actually been updated from the one that you saw earlier this year and it's been updated because we had a developer that provided some additional units in their project. That we were able to count towards the very low income level, even with that, we have only achieved 32% of the building permits that we need to issue in order to meet our 180 unit total in the very low income. We're doing two thirds of the way through the reporting cycle and we're not even one third of the way to achieving the very low income totals. You can see that we're doing pretty well in the low moderate and above moderate categories. And that is, you know, that's laudable and I'll get to get to in a second why that has implications for what category we applied, what category of applicability we have from SB5. But just want to point out that even though we've done fairly well, the next round of regional housing needs determination is going to at least triple. So we just got just on Friday, we received the statistics from the state went down to and bag and and bag distributed to the cities. You can see here that from 2014 to 2023 during that nine year period, we had to plan for 10,430 units. We're having to plan over the next eight years for 33,274 units. So we can expect that the numbers in this table are going to be up significantly. We don't know what those are yet they they haven't as part of the green allocation but we'll know in the coming months. And the last two slides that I have before I turn it over to Barbara are just that we are not alone in having SB35 applied to us. This is the region. If cities have not achieved adequate market rate housing production, then they're in this 10% category. You can see the blue is the 10% category. Actually, there's a carve out in the Senate in the San Francisco Bay area that triggers 20%. But nevertheless, cities in our in Santa Cruz County, the county, for example, they're eligible any project that has at least 10% affordable housing is eligible for SB35 streamlining. We're in the category where a project has had 50% affordable housing in order for it to be eligible for SB35 streamlining. And you can see across the state here, going back to those numbers that we were talking about that across the state up and down the state we have not been producing enough housing. And this shows that there are only a few counties in gray here. They're very few and far between where they do not have the SB35 streamlining applicable to them, either the 10% or the 50%. And you can see the majority of the state actually has the 10% applicable. So with that, I will turn it over to Barbara Caltz, and she will give you an overview of SB35, as well as a primer on the density bonus. And then Sarah Noisy will talk to you about objective standards and then I will round out the presentation before opening up to any questions. Members of the council, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for asking me. So I am going to initially give an overview of SB35 and then talk about density bonus law, which I know the city has more experience with. SB35 is government code section 65913.4. It was adopted in 2017 along with a whole slew of other housing bills in 2017 was really when the legislature began to make major changes in housing law. It's amended every year since then some minor changes, some major changes. In addition, the Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD has published a whole series of interpretive guidelines, which we also use in trying to parse out SB35. I will say that although the bill has been in effect for about three and a half years, it didn't seem to be used very much. So here we've seen many, many of our clients having their first SB35 project. So I'm going to talk about SB35 in two parts. I want to first of all, explain the basic requirements that a project must meet in order to be approved under SB35. Secondly, I want to describe what the process is as written into the legislation and some of the options that Santa Cruz has in terms of processing these projects. Next slide. I just pointed out the legislature has been very concerned about the housing crisis and for better or for worse, they view local government as one of the primary reason that more housing hasn't been built in the state. I think the answer is a little more complicated than that, but that is the belief of the legislature. And although this language was not attached to SB35, it was attached to the Housing Act when it was amended in 2017. And you see here that the legislature intends to curb the capability of local governments to deny, reduce the density of a render infeasible housing development projects. And if you look at that, that's really the bills each year have been stricter and stricter in trying to require that cities actually approve housing developments. SB35 goes farther than the Housing Accountability Act was mentioned because it severely limits the scope of review and to some extent the extent of public participation, which I'll discuss later. So next slide. First thing I want to talk about is what kinds of projects can qualify for SB35 approval. So it has to be a multifamily unit in an urban area with 75% of the perimeter develop. Either the general plan or the zoning has to allow for residential use of mixed use. So if the general plan has a mixed use designation, but the zoning doesn't potential a project can still qualify for SB35. And two thirds of the floor area must be residential. So it allows fairly extensive mixed use projects as part, which can all mixed use projects, which also are eligible for SB35. One of the big limitations is that the site can't have contained any housing occupied by tenants in the last 10 years. If the if the housing was demolished in the house last 10 years, the site isn't eligible. If the housing is subject to price control, it's not eligible. So effectively SB35 is confined to vacant sites or redeveloped commercial sites. Another big limitation in Santa Cruz is that the site can't be in the coastal zone. And in addition, can't be in egg land, can't be a former mobile home park, can't require the destruction of a historic resource.  Next slide. For I bet in Santa Cruz, the housing has to be 50% affordable. And if I could congratulate the city, I think your housing production, including your affordable housing production is really commendable and much more than I've seen in most cities. So what does it mean for the housing to be affordable? Under SB35, half of the units Santa Cruz for a site to be eligible have to serve people whose income can't exceed 80% of the median income. The rent test is based on 30% of 60% of median income. And it also has to meet any city inclusionary requirements. For instance, the city allows somewhat higher rent than SB35, but all the housing has to meet the SB rent standards. And conversely, the city requires that 20% of the units be affordable in perpetuity, but SB35 only requires that they be affordable for 55 years. So in this particular case, 20% of the units in a 50% affordable project, 20% would be affordable in perpetuity and 30% for 55 years. Next slide, please. Just as an example of who the affordable units will serve, the maximum household income here are around $70,000 for a two-person household, around $90,000 for a four-person household, and the maximum rent for one bedroom is about $1,300. Three bedrooms, $1,700 a month is lower income households. Next slide. Another major requirement is that projects that have more than 10 units must pay prevailing wages. So what are prevailing wages? They're wages that are set by the Department of Industrial Relations that are typically varies to union wages. There are also apprentice requirements, fairly extensive administrative requirements, and they're to be enforced by the Labor Commissioner. It appears there's fairly heavy penalties if the developer does not pay the required rate wages. In addition, if the project involves a subdivision, i.e., if it's a for sale project, the project has to use a skilled and trained labor, which translates mostly to union labor or has to have a project labor agreement. Developers feel that prevailing wage requirements increase costs by, I've heard, 15 to 20%. I've heard, I believe that unions think that's too high, but in any case, there are extensive administrative requirements to go along with this. Anyway, any project that qualifies for that uses SD35 has to pay prevailing wages. Next slide. And then, finally, a qualifying project has to be consistent with objective zoning subdivision and design review standards. A project is considered consistent with the zoning if it's consistent with the maximum density in the general plan. So if a general plan allows, let's say, 10 to 30 units an acre in a zone, but the zoning only allows 20 units an acre, the project is entitled to use the maximum density in the general plan, which is 30 units an acre. In general, the zoning, the general plan trumps inconsistent standards that are in the zoning, a specific plan, or another document. The city is directed to find a project consistent if there's substantial evidence that would allow a reasonable person to conclude that the project's consistent. So the burden of proof, if you like, is directed to try to find projects consistent with the objective standards if there's substantial evidence that the project's consistent. And lastly, if a project receives a density bonus, a parking reduction, a waiver or concession, and I'll explain all of that when I talk about density bonuses, it's considered to be consistent with the objective zoning standards. Next slide. So what is an objective standard? Well, the legislation defines it in this somewhat mind-numbing definition that involves no personal judgment and is uniformly verifiable by reference to an external benchmark can be known by both the development applicant and the public official prior to submittal. So the most obvious types of objective standards are for height, setbacks, different distance from property line, how much open space must be required, the density, floor area ratio, all those kind of set standards. I will say that someone said to me, well, if you can argue about a standard, doesn't that mean it's not objective? Well, one of our lines is that a smart attorney can try to make anything seem unobjective. So the mere fact you're arguing about what a standard means does not mean it's not objective. I was dealing with a city with a city that had parking standards shown to be the parking space had to be eight and a half feet wide, 19 feet long, and someone was trying to argue that a parking space that was narrower and shorter still met the standard. So the mere argument does not mean that it's not objective. But I think this is a very strict standard. And one needs to look at whether if you look at the standard, you could figure out what's required. So I have a number of examples here. Next slide has put out a book on objective standards, trying to distinguish between design guidelines, which they consider not objective and design standards, which they considered to be objective. One of the differences are they need to be requirements. They can't be just recommendations. They have to be measurable. And they should use terms like shall and must, or is required to rather than should or may. So while this provides more reliability for a developer or more, more ability to know what's required. Design standards are inherently going to going to allow much less flexibility. Next, they provided some examples of what they thought was a guideline and what what was considered a standard. So a guide for writing articulation to reduce the mass of the building. And as opposed to a design standard, which is that at every interval of it, at least 100 feet has to be a break that's offset by at least five feet by 25 feet in length. So that means that if the offset is four feet and 20 feet in length that no longer qualifies and no longer meets the objective standard. There'll be much less flexibility, be more predictability. Next one Lee. Okay, so this there have been a few court decisions where the courts have talked about what is an objective standard and what is not. This particular project was a 320 unit project in one of the wealthy Silicon Valley cities suburbs. So the city had spent a great deal of time developing a specific plan for the site had approved the specific plan. And then, but when the project came in, they put up story polls and there was community kind of community outrage and the development plan. Denied on a three to two vote. The developers presented rather voluminous evidence of conformance with objective standards. And there were no the staff presented no objective standards that the project didn't conform with. So the superior court decided that the housing accountability act had not been because the denial was not based in objective standards. In order the city to make appropriate findings under the housing accountability act. Next slide. So this was one of the objective standards in the specific plan, which I'm certainly not going to bore you reading, but you can see it. Detailed standard about, for instance, in this case, how high does to be measured. Next standard. Sorry, next slide. So the court said that the reason that the city had denied the project, the standards on which the denial was based objective. It talked about addressing the unmet need for senior housing. The project actually had a 50 unit senior housing development. And the court said, you know, there's no standard here about how many more senior units it would have had the city would the developer would have had to provide. There was a standard about reflecting the look and feel of the community. And at the hearings various slides are presented about what the community was. But again, because the court said this is not objective. And then in the one published case that looked at objective standards. The Court of Appeals said that the subdivision map back standard finding that the site is not physically suitable for the project is similarly not an objective standard. Slide. So that project is it was eventually approved by the city and it's now under construction. Next slide. What other types of objective standards can the city use a city can request studies. If they're required by an objective standards, for an example, a noise study is if a noise study is required when exterior noise levels exceed 60 decibels to demonstrate that interior noise does not exceed 45 decibels. That kind of a study can be done. But here's a case where where there's not an objective standard. So if the city has no standard for the adequacy of fire of action route evacuation routes, or no standard requiring as part of every application that the adequacy of fire of action routes be looked at, the city does not have the ability to ask an SB 35 application to look at this, even though it's a health could be considered a health and safety action from how a project qualifies to be eligible for SB 35 review. I want to talk about SB 35 processing. One of the advantages to the applicant are there's no review under the California Environmental Quality Act. The city is allowed to do what's called ministerial review only based only on objective standards and that's like building permits. And they're very strict timelines that the city has to meet when reviewing the project. Next slide. So the first step with SB 35 processing is that the applicant has to submit a notice of intent in the form of a preliminary application. So preliminary application was a type of application was instituted by SB 330, which went into effect on January 1, 2020. And there's a list of information that can be required that that someone needs to provide to have it be considered a preliminary application, which is specified in state law. The city can't require any more information as part of the preliminary application that is listed in state law. And I would call a preliminary application kind of a mini schematic planning application. But before to be considered a notice of intent, it has to include all the information that's listed in state law. And the significance here is that the city standards are those that apply when the notice of intent is submitted. Assuming that the preliminary application includes all the required information. So at that point, the city standards are frozen. Next slide, which was instituted last year in September of last year of 2020. This is a consultation. So the city has to notify Native American tribes that are associated with the area where the project is located within 30 days after they get this notice of intent. The tribes have 30 days to respond. If no tribe responds, then the applicant can submit the SB 35 application with any tribe responds and says they would like to have a consultation. The consultation has to start within 30 days. And a developer cannot submit, cannot use SB 35. They can obviously apply under another process, but they can't use SB 35 if there's no agreement after the consultation with the tribe. Next slide. So assuming that the tribal consultation is over and the project's ready to be submitted. Then at that point, the actual SB 35 application is submitted. And so the city is required to post its application requirements and relevant objective standards for review. But if the city hasn't done that, the city still must accept an application that meets the requirements for a standard multifamily entitlement. Essentially the application cannot require something nearly because it's an SB 35 application, aside from showing, for instance, that the project conforms with the prevailing wage and other requirements. But in general, the actual planning application can't be more detailed than what the city would typically require for a design for its last entitlement. In Santa Cruz's case, what would be required for design review application, but that's a fairly pretty detailed set of plans. And as I mentioned, the city can require studies if they're required by an objective standard. The next next slide. So then within 60 to 90 days of the submittal, 60 days for a project with 150 units or less, 90 days for a larger project. Project, I mean, the city must provide a list of any inconsistencies with objective zoning and design review standards, or the project is quote, deemed consistent with the objective standards. And as I mentioned before, modifications under density bonus law don't make a project inconsistent with objective standards. The city can't simply reject an application is incomplete. Rather, it has to explain if some information is missing that it needs to explain that it can't determine if the application conforms to the standards because information is. So if the project is either inconsistent with a standard, or if there's insufficient information to determine consistency, the city can deny the project under SB 35 is not eligible because the project is only eligible if it meets objective standards. The applicant is free to resubmit under SB 35. 60 to 90 90 day clock would start all over. The applicant could also decide that they can't meet the standards and just an apply under the city's ordinary procedures. If there's only minor problems, the city could allow the applicant to correct them within the first 60 to 90 day period. But essentially, if the project doesn't conform with all objective standards, then the city. And also if it doesn't comply with the other 35 requirements, the city can't deny the app the application. The applicant is free to free to reapply and the clock starts ticking over. And then the last step is design review, which must be completed and a decision on the project must be completed within 90 to 180 days of submittal. 90 days again for a project with 150 units or less. 180 days if the project has more than 150 units. The city can complete any design review. There also can be any, there also can be public oversight of the housing of a public hearing can be held. Public oversight is prohibited from this is language directly from the statute inhibiting chilling or precluding the ministerial review of the project. And the design review in the public oversight has to be strictly focused on assessing the compliance with the objective area. There's a very limited form of public design review or public oversight, and it has to be has to be confined to the city's objective standards. When the project is approved, the city can apply standard conditions of approval or other conditions that are based on objective standards. The applicant still must apply for a building permit. A design review application is not the equivalent of construction there are needs needed for a building permit. And any other ministerial permits before they start construction, they're allowed to change the project by up to 15% of units or 15% of square feet, either an increase or a decrease. The advantage of the original standards that were in place when they made their original application. The city can, however, apply current building code standards as they change and can require the usual building permit studies, such as a soils report and stormwater. The project is 50% affordable and receives public funds beyond tax credits. The SB 35 approval never expires. Otherwise, it expires generally three years after approval, or if there's litigation three years after the conclusion of the litigation. The approval remains valid so long as rating or some kind of construction on the slide has begun. Next slide. Understanding is that the chief item on the agenda tonight is how Santa Cruz wants to wants to do its SB 35 process. The staff will do an initial review under this during the 60 to 90 days for conformance with the statute with the objective standards. The city has the option of holding a public oversight hearing within the 60 to 90 day period. And at the conclusion of that period, a letter will be sent to the applicant regarding conformance with all objective standards. Next slide. And so with that, that's the conclusion of the presentation on SB 35.  So essentially density bonuses give a developer who provides affordable housing, senior housing, even if it's not even if it's even if none of the housing is affordable land for affordable housing or student housing gets is entitled to four different. What I call incentives, one, they can get more more units bonus units. The parking standards are reduced or limited. And then they can get what are called incentives and incentives are the same thing. I don't know why they use two words for it. And they can get waivers. The bill density bonuses were originally adopted in 1979. And the bill's been amended 27 times. Like SB 35, it seems to be amended every single year. This year alone, 19 bills were introduced that would amend the density bonus statute, although only a few of them are passing, I believe. And it's generally been supported by the legislation to encourage affordable housing and provide a means for developers to modify local zoning standards. Also, unlike SB 35, it applies in the coastal zone. Although all the applicable requirements of your local coastal plan has to be met such as those around habitat views and public public access and open space. Next slide. Table shows the density bonus that's available to mixed income projects. As pointed out already, the maximum bonus has been increased to 50%. And a very low income project with as little as, I'm sorry, a mixed income project with as little as 15%, very low income housing is entitled to a 50% density bonus. A low income project with 24%, low income is entitled to the 50% bonus and one with 45% moderate income. Generally, in our experience, developers find the 15% very low income option to be the most beneficial. There's not, if the project meets our affordable housing and it meets all the income and other limits in the, in the statute, there's really no grounds to deny the developers request for the additional density. Next slide. For 100% affordable project, we already went over this, all 100% affordable projects are entitled to 80% bonus. And within half a mile of a major transit stop, there's unlimited density, plus either three stories or 33 feet. Next slide. So here's an example of an S5 project in Santa Cruz. So let's say the project without the density bonus could get 100 units. It's required to have 50 affordable units. It can get a 50% density bonus. And so with the density bonus, essentially a third of the units end up being affordable. There'll be 100 market rate units and 50 affordable units. Next slide. One other, I didn't provide a slide about this, but developments are also entitled to parking reductions. There's large parking reductions available for projects within half a mile of a major transit stop. But in any case, the city can't require more than one parking space for studio or one bedroom units, one and a half spaces for two to three bedroom units and two and a half or four or more. The developer is entitled to incentives or concessions. And I'll explain in just a minute what an incentive or concession is. But basically, a project that's 100% affordable is entitled to four concessions. And the other project is entitled to anywhere from one to three concessions depending on the percentage of affordability with a 15% very low income project entitled to three concessions. Next slide. So what are incentives? The definition in the statute is that their modifications of development standards result in identifiable and actual cost reductions that provide for affordable housing. And the city can obtain reasonable documentation, that's what the state, but not a study to demonstrate that the incentive meets the definition. So cities formally required proformas to demonstrate that the incentive was necessary to provide for the affordable housing. But if you look at the history of the statute, that the intent of not allowing a study seemed to be to not allow proformas. Now the city is limited to reasonable documentation. So typically the type of evidence that's provided is evidence, first of all, of the cost savings, often from a contractor showing how the modification of developments to reduce costs. And some evidence that those cost savings help to provide for the affordable housing. There is no requirement specifically that the city waive any fees, provide any money, or waive any of its dedication requirements as an incentive or an incentive. Santa Cruz allows some incentives with no further study to encourage developers to use those incentives. For instance, a developer can get a 20% increase in lot coverage without providing any more evidence. Next slide. An incentive, though, can only be denied if the city can make one of three findings. One is that there's a specific health or safety impact or impact on the physical environment or on historic structure that can't be mitigated. That what the person is asking for violates state or federal law, or that it can make a finding that it doesn't result in cost reductions to provide for affordable housing. Typically in order for the city to make that a last finding it would need to hire its own consultant to review the developer's report because the city is required to have substantial evidence to make these findings. And the burden of proof is on the city if it denies the application. Now what's a specific adverse impact? A specific adverse impact has to be significant, has to be a significant, quantifiable, direct, and unavoidable impact based on objective, identified, written standards, policies, and conditions. So an example might be a requirement to underground power lines in a very high fire hazard area. That would be an objective identified standard which probably cannot be mitigated, which maybe cannot be adequately mitigated if the power lines weren't undergrounded. So that might question that concession. The city might be able to make that finding or possibly a landslide that's too large to be adequately mitigated. But a city, even if there's a, but even if there might be a standard, for instance, inadequate fire evacuation routes, if the city has no standard that was in a, and the project was submitted, it can't deny based on that, based on that finding. Next slide. Additional modifications of development standards that developers can request are waivers. The city can't apply a development standard that would physically preclude the construction of the project with the density bonus or the incentives that the project's entitled to. And as you noticed here, the developer can request an unlimited number of waivers. It's removed from any kind of economic justification. Santa Cruz has what I think is a very good process where it looks at the base density of the project without the bonus. And basically looks at what kind of waiver is necessary to accommodate the additional density or other changes that the project might be requesting. Like the findings to deny a waiver are very similar to those that must be made to deny an incentive. If the development standards don't physically preclude the project with the density bonus or the waivers violates state or federal law, or they have a specific adverse effect on health safety or the physical environment, or an adverse impact on a project on the California Register. And the grounds for making a finding of denial are very limited. And just to talk a little bit about the differences between incentives and waivers, I kind of look at them this way to try to distinguish them. So the developers can save the developer money to help make up for the cost of providing affordable housing. And so some examples I've seen recently was where a city waived required utility underground and not in a high-fire hazard area outside of fire hazard area, or waived a requirement on masonry wall.  And you can think of examples, increased height, increased floor area, reduced setbacks, something that's necessary so that you can still fit the project onto the site. And so if you have a bonus being requested as part of SB 35, the density bonus essentially has to be processed within the SB 35 timelines as part of the application. And if there's a public oversight hearing, because this is one application, the density bonus requests would be heard at the same time. They need to be processed with timelines and as part of the rest of the application. There is only one published SB 35 case, which just published a couple of months ago. There's several density bonus cases. The legislature wants both of these statutes to be interpreted very liberally by the group courts. And so the language for SB 35 is that it should be interpreted and implemented to afford the fullest possible way to the interest of an approval and provision of increased housing. And density bonus similarly has to be interpreted in favor of producing the maximum number of housing units. And next slide. We've litigated both, we haven't litigated any SB 35 but we've litigated a number of Housing Accountability Act and density bonus cases. And we've observed that there's a great deal of pressure on the courts to favor housing. In the most recent cases, the courts had the housing approvals and overturned denials. The Ruegg B. Ellsworth and Ellsworth B. Berkeley case, that's the one published SB 35 case is an example. In that case, the court, in a ministerial approval, the court is supposed to give great deference to the city. And in that case, the court really overturned years of established precedent and said it needed to give no deference to the city. Particularly with density bonus cases, there's significant attorney's fee exposure as the city denies the project. And it's later, its denial is overturned by the courts. And there's, and we've discovered these cases is very cost, even if the city is ultimately successful. And so with that, I will conclude my presentation and be happy to answer any questions. Good evening, Council members and members of the public that are joining us here tonight. My name is Sarah Noisy. I am a senior planner with the advanced planning division in the housing and the planning and community development department. And I just have three slides here really quick to talk about one of the projects that I'm working on, which is the project to develop objective standards for multi-family housing. And I understand a lot of members of the community have been a little confused. They're hearing about objective standards that apply that we have to use under doing an SB 35 review. And they say, well, we're just writing objective standards now, so that must be funny at all. And so I just want to talk a little bit about what my project is, what this is going to do for the city and what it's not going to do. And then just tell people how they can participate if they're interested in participating. So this project to develop objective standards for multi-family housing began based on some council direction we received in August of 2019 to reconcile a discrepancy between our adopted general plan and our building ordinance to fully implement the general plan and bring those two documents into alignment with one another. So that assignment dovetailed really nicely with the grant opportunity that we mentioned at the beginning of our presentation for SB 2 to actually also go ahead and use grant funding to develop objective standards because we needed zoning standards for these places where we had general plan land use designations that weren't fully implemented by the city's zoning code. And so this project is doing a couple of things. We're developing zoning standards for those places where we don't have zoning standards that fully implement the general plan. And then also we are writing a set of design standards objectives, design and development standards that will apply to all multi-family housing built everywhere throughout the city. And that essentially takes the process that we have relied on heavily that our code is built around for project review, which is making findings for design permits. So these laws that Barbara has been discussing SB 35, SB 330, they really take the effectiveness out of that process of review and that process of making findings. Those findings are with one exception. There are 10 findings, eight of them applied to residential development. One of them is an objective standard. The rest of them are very subjective. I paraphrase a couple of here and sort of shorten them, but, you know, building design is compatible with the design of existing buildings in the neighborhood. So, you know, what does that mean? How do we incorporate that into our code and really interpret that, you know, reasonably protect against factors which make the environment less desirable? I mean, we're trying to write things into our code so that we can actually measure and define these things and working with the community to figure out what are those things that really are, you know, need to be defined and determined and have us write standards that govern the site and building design for new multi-family development throughout the city. Next slide. So what our, what the project won't do is we cannot, through a nine standards, reduce building size, density or number of units that's allowed on a site. You know, a process to do that would have to simultaneously relocate any of that density or unit or building size to another site. So that would kind of be in the process of a general plan amendment that would be sort of a citywide effort. And as Barbara has discussed, the density bonus proposals can still get waivers and incentives on the density bonus law. The idea with these writing these objective design standards is that site design and building design will have to meet some objective standards, some basic minimal set of objective standards so that we don't just have, you know, her box buildings that meet the building envelope that's described in our current objective zoning standards. And our thinking and some of our hope here is that as we have more standards to apply, more of those standards will also apply to density bonus projects. So for example, you know, we had the example earlier about providing some relief in the facade of a building and putting a break in there that's a minimum of five feet deep and a minimum of 25 feet long for every 100 feet of building facade. So that's obviously disrupting a very large building and that wouldn't be the appropriate standard to have in every location in our city but you know that might be something along those lines might make sense on some of our larger sites. And I think it would be really hard for a density bonus proposal to say that that physically precluded development so I think that would be the kind of standard it would be hard to get a waiver for. So, you know, could there be some incentives and concessions perhaps but then there's a limited number of those so as we have design standards that apply, more of those will end up applying to these density bonus projects. Next slide please. Where we are right now we've completed our community survey and our focus groups to really hone in on what are those important features that define the character of Santa Cruz that are things we want to preserve and make sure we see moving forward in family development as it happens over the coming decades. Our next step is going to be a community review of the standards so we're we have our administrative draft we're working that through with the consultants and sort of trying to iron out a bunch of the details. And then we're going to have as many of the details as we can before we send that out for community review of these standards and we're shooting for that to happen sometime in mid October. And those that standard the standards and the the for collecting feedback that's going to be open for a minimum of four weeks we want to make sure that people really have time to spend some time with this content it's that there's a lot of information here and a lot of detail in these projects that we have plenty of time to really sit and think about them and give us thoughtful careful feedback because I know our community is really able to do that and really willing and committed to doing that. So we're shooting then for public hearings with these proposed objective standards for multi family housing in the winter of 2021 maybe a little bit after the first of the year. Thank you Sarah and Barbara. So I'm going to wrap it up here and I first want to do a quick review of the the density bonus here and I'm going to I'm going to try to stay out of the weeds related to this but I also want to explain the thought process and hopefully that will come through here so so the density bonus hearing. Our municipal code actually requires a public hearing this is not state law but our municipal code does and it says that if there's no public hearing then the zoning administrator will hear it. The zoning administrator can refer to the planning commission and the planning commission's decision is appealable to the city council. The important factor here is that state law trumps local law and we would not be able to go through that public hearing and the appeal process within the timeline set the SB 35 mandates. So in the agenda report of say of having the council say yes we're going to consider the density bonus as part of the consideration of consistency with objective standards was just to try to meet the intent of both both our zoning code which should be a public hearing and the state law which says you need to do it quickly but frankly the the the SB 35 language it trumps the the local requirements for a public hearing the the local requirements for a tentative map or for a design permit they would other to a public hearing are not required as part of an SB 35 application. So really the the thought was that or the point is that whatever body whatever entity is reviewing for consistency with objective standards will at the same time be reviewing for the density bonus criteria and as Barbara talked about in depth you know our discretion in both SB 35 project and density bonus is really limited but I apologize for the confusion there were a lot of questions from the public and others related to that recommendation with respect to density bonus projects by the council and really it's just there needs to be a determination on it and whoever is making the determination for consistency with SB 35 should also be making the consistent the determination of consistency with the density bonus hopefully that clarifies that the next thing that I wanted to clarify is that the review for consistency with objective standards can be done by a in a variety of ways and you all have that option tonight that's really the consideration that is before you this evening that can do that administratively the second bullet here is shows a quote from the SB 35 language which says that there's also an opportunity for a public oversight meeting that can be done by the planning commission or the city council or an equivalent board or commission so so the zoning administrator could do it at a public hearing the planning commission could do it or the city council could do it and the staff could do it administratively you saw in the agenda report the recommendation that we had which was to bring the that the council serve in that capacity for the public oversight meeting and I wanted to just briefly elaborate on what went into that we're all aware there is a application in for an SB 35 project that's generated substantial amount of community interest in the interest of transparency we thought maybe the council will want to do this as a way to maximize transparency that said I have to point out that we are putting everything that we get related to SB 35 the SB 35 application that we have in we're putting that on our website so we're aiming to be as transparent as possible and we're putting that up immediately it's up on the website typically within a day we've heard some some concerns about the the council's role in this oversight meeting as well and those related to there being a limited role for the public and there absolutely is and Barbara talked about that that you know the role is or whoever is determining the consistency with objective standards it's really focused on that consistency with objective standards and not on any subjective information and then there's also some concerns about the politicization politicization of the decision and just wanted to put all of that out there for the council's consideration say that you know if the council wants to go in an alternative direction we're happy to do that and we're happy to feel any questions that you may have about whether it's you want to give it to staff administratively staff at a zoning administrator hearing or planning commission at a planning commission hearing one of their meetings or the council can take it up and as you saw in our agenda report we were recommending that the the council considered but we're happy to take whatever approach is the desire of the council and with that I am sure that you all have many questions and staffers to address those as best as we can. Okay. Thank you. We and Barbara and Sarah for the presentation. So we'll go into council questions at this time. So again just focused on questions at this point and go ahead and look to see if we have any hands up from city council members council member Brown and then council member Contar Johnson. Thank you. I will say thank you for all of the information. It's a lot and even for somebody who has spent some time with this material heard presentations from you. Thank you Barbara for being here. And our staff it still is like just astounding how complex it is. So my I have some kind of clarifying questions I guess and some of these were referenced but I still don't know that I would be able to answer them. So I'm just going to put them out there and I'm taking this opportunity I think also because Barbara because you are here. So and I know this is your this is really your wheelhouse. So if I could just ask a few if that's the mayor if that's all right if I just ask those questions and we're okay. So is it sounds like from what I heard in the presentations that this may not be an issue because of what properties can be developed using SP 35 but it would federal relocation law be applicable if there was any like federal project if relocation was needed or is that just not an issue because of the vacant property and property zone property zone in particular ways kind of qualification. Yeah, I think all the replacement housing and the relocation requirements probably don't apply to an SP 35 project because there can't be any rental housing on the site in the last 10 years I guess if somebody were buying a you know if you were buying it from an owner then anyway and the relocation wouldn't apply anyway. Thank you I just wanted to confirm that okay. And then in terms of the question about how they're just ways I hate you know the I mean it sounds like it is disturbing when we should think about it that way but are there in the case where site may contain how they're just ways or have been designated in that way. What's needed to document that as there are some kind of list somewhere I don't need to know what all the details are but is that clear and you know to the applicants or general public and people who are interested how one would go about. There's something called the court list that that lists has a very comprehensive list of hazardous waste sites in the state. I've seen in some new legislation they seem to be changing how they're doing it, but basically if it's on that list they would have to have evidence that either the State Department of Public Health Water Resources Board or the Department of Toxic Substances Control DTSC had cleared the site for residential use. Thank you got it. So following up on that. Just wondering if our SB 35 projects subject to all of the requirements like you mentioned water quality, the regional water quality. You know the it's not embarked anymore the Monterey Bay Air Pollution and Control District. Caltrans and those kinds of standards all would be applicable. Right the stormwater requirements are you know this I'm sure the city has leverage stormwater requirements for instance it has to the project. And thank you and it sounds like just the reference I think on how the prevailing wage requirements kick in made me feel pretty assured that that's monitored. But if the city doesn't have to play a role in that or how does that I've seen let's say for the projects that have been approved the cities have typically applied conditions, but as the statute is written the city is not required to be the monitor of the prevailing wage requirements. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. I have council member counter Johnson is next. Thank you. Thank you for all of that information. And there's a lot a lot to digest. So one of my questions is, can our city or have any other cities developed like a community development guide or best practices in the process of reviewing SB 35 like how I understand. Public hearings aren't required. But have there been community development guides that have that have led the process for these SB 35 applications. I mean, I think the city of San Francisco at some of the earliest applications so they have a fairly well developed guide on their website. But I haven't. My clients, to be honest, are kind of, you know, rushing to get application forms together. I'm not aware of any, you know, of any kind of standard SB 35 application that someone has put together. Okay. And can can a jurisdiction expresses intent for for neighbor aesthetics and character within SB 35 projects or is that go against what SB 35 is trying to accomplish. Well, the city had objective design standards that, you know, related to neighborhood character the city could have could could enforce those. But other than that, you know, of course, the city can talk to an applicant and ask an applicant, could you just, you know, make some changes. There's always discussion. But there's no legal part of the developer to make changes unless they're reflected in an objective standard. Okay, I understand. There were there were a couple of examples provided. The building design is compatible with design of existing buildings and neighborhoods, reasonably protect against factors which may make the environment less desirable. Those are some specific that objective stand objective standards would replace those type of permit finding a way that would measure and define those particular components. And how, how does that look like how does building designs compatible with design of existing buildings and neighborhoods. How can that be. Could you provide like, I don't know if I've done that here might be better able to do that. You know, I was asked if anyone has actually adopted objective standards. Most of my clients are really in the position that the city is in. They're working on objective standards. Someone put out a something on the list of I believe Morgan Hill has actually adopted some standards and mother some standards. But mostly what I've seen is have been drafts. And so I don't have an example that I can steer you to. We've been we've been looking around at lots of jurisdictions through our process and and you know lots of jurisdictions have pieces that are objective. And so, you know, a lot of what we're doing is sort of like trying to take the best pieces that we've found and then compare that with what we've heard from our community in terms of like what's the most important thing. But so for example, you know, compatible with the neighborhood that might turn into like 10 requirements. Right. That's going to be a height standard. That's going to be an FAR standard to some degree. That's going to be a requirement for, you know, what happens on the ground floor and how the entries look. That's going to be requirements for high quality materials. It may be requirements for specific roof pitches or architectural features, you know, if neighborhoods have like a really strong character. And largely what we found in Santa Cruz is that the character and what people prefer about Santa Cruz is this eclectic mix that we have. So I'm trying to translate that into standards that like, you know, hold something to to some kind of bar has been a bit of a challenge, because, you know, people want to see a mix of roof forms. But, you know, do we require, you know, a minimum, you know, like changes in the roof form every, you know, X number of feet for the building and then that has to be coincided with like setting the facade making a change in the depth of the facade to some degree. So it's really defining that what is this character that we see and then let's write standards that can make that work given the amount of housing we have to supply a big one for Santa Cruz is about trees and landscaping. And so we're thinking a lot about like, how can we make sure there's space for that? How can we incentivize keeping those existing trees on properties so that they, you know, stay as part of the skyline. So, you know, things like that, so that, you know, fits in with community character is going to become kind of a laundry list of things. I see. Okay. And then just maybe, well, maybe this is a comment. So I'll just, I'll just hold on to that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Golder. Thank you guys for the presentation. My question is one that a lot of constituents have been asking me and what would happen if the city did not or does not meet green allocation? Really nothing. I mean, right now the, right now the penalty is being subject to SB 35. But there was some talk, there was a bill proposed, SB 215, that was going to, I think, a mid-cycle discussion with HTD if the city hadn't met its arena allocations, but that was substantially amended to take that out. Right now there aren't, there aren't penalties for not meeting arena allocation. There's stiff penalties for not having an adequate housing element, not, you know, violating the Housing Accountability Act and so forth. But hopefully the legislature recognizes that cities don't build housing and there's not sufficient funds to build all the affordable housing that cities have been assigned to build. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next I have Council Member Cummings. Mayor, my question kind of follows up on that. So, I know our planning director, we about to mention that 1.5 million is 1.5 million unit shortfall in the very low and extremely low households in California. And I know that, for example, you know, probably close to 2010, 2013, we saw an uptick in the number of units that got transferred over to vacation rentals, whether it's BRBO or Airbnb. And, you know, that has created, you know, incentives for more investment and different jurisdictions have done things to kind of regulate the number of BRBOs and Airbnb's that can be in communities. But I'm wondering what's being done to take into account the units that have shifted from very low and extremely low into some of these in a higher moderate or very high. Or even taking off the market and gone into like Airbnb and BRBO. I know in Santa Cruz we see that happening a lot where, you know, older landlords who have owned property for very long periods of time, you know, provide those units at what is now considered, you know, low and very low are retiring and now those homes are being sold for market rate and transitioning to becoming market rate homes. Is there anything being done at the state level to track this? There's been initiatives at the city to kind of track this, but, you know, that has a very big impact on, you know, like we can meet our renails one year, but then if we look and see how many units are still within those categories in another year, they can dramatically shift and we can be losing, you know, more affordable housing that we're creating. So I'm just wondering at the state level, has there been any initiatives or efforts done to kind of track where housing is kind of shifting over time to meet these goals? You know, I'm not aware of any, you know, someone, you know, maybe aware of bills that I'm not aware of, but I'm not aware of any efforts at the state level to deal with that. There was an effort some years ago to remove the state property tax exemption for second homes, but that didn't go anywhere, you know, which is a similar issue. We're, you know, properties used for second homes and it's not available, but I'm not aware of any initiatives at the state level regarding Airbnb's. Lee, did you have something to add on that? Thanks. I'll just add, and I'll actually lean on Sarah for a moment here, but I believe that while the state, I'm not aware of things that the state is tracking related to that either. But the recent updates to ADU law to specify that cities have the ability to prohibit short term rentals. Is that accurate? That's true. Unproperties that have ADUs, cities retain the right to require, but it's just a right to require. It's not a, you know, the state doesn't mandate that ADU properties be used for long term rentals. Thank you. Yeah, that was that was my recollection. And then just to add on briefly to the prior comments related to the implications of not meeting Rena. There are some conversations about certain grant opportunities not being available based on with the rent targets. And then there were also some conversations related to carryover. So if you didn't meet your Rena goals in one cycle, they would carry over to the next. I don't know the exact status of those, but I think it's safe to say between the bill that Barbara was referencing as well as some of these. The state is looking at ways in which they can add more teeth to the Rena targets and reaching those. And I think it is a balancing act because the cities in general don't build the housing. You know, a developer has to come in and build the housing, but to the extent that that isn't happening, they're looking at ways to incentivize it to happen like SB 35. I had a follow up question regarding the Rena numbers and kind of the Rena goals. I know that it was mentioned earlier in the presentation that these are numbers that are at the county level. And so I'm just kind of curious, for example, when the city of Santa. County are meeting their Rena goals versus other cities that are not attempting to meet those Rena goals, especially for those very low and low designations. I guess like what control do cities have over ensuring that they're not overburdened with kind of having to meet these goals that other cities aren't, you know, meeting or attempting to meet. So the way that that is, the way that cities can influence that is through conversations with Ambag. And so what Ambag is doing right now is going through a process whereby they establish here are the priorities that we want to look at. So we want to focus housing growth near existing jobs or future job projections. Do we want to focus it near existing public transit or future planned public transit or both in either of those cases. And then they're looking at a variety of other things like farmland preservation, avoiding wildfire prone areas or the wildland urban interface. So they're trying to get a policy level and agreement of how this distribution will occur. Once that and then that's in process right now. Once that agreement is made, that's what they'll use to divvy up those numbers. And then what they do is they go out and they'll have those conversations. And they will, they'll talk to the cities and say, hey, you know, what did you think about this? And the cities will look at all the other cities and point out the, they see with respect to penalization. I have not, I have not been through a cycle with Ambag where the reallocations were provided, but I have with ABAC, the Association of Monterey Bay Area Government over the hill. And when those came out, there, there were potentially considerations of, well, you have housing in the past. And so, you know, we're going to reward you for that with more capacity. I think that, that in general, the approach that I'm seeing here in with Ambag is one where they're trying to establish those policies first. So, you know, I do expect that, that, you know, we, we meet a lot of those triggers. We're not in the, the wildfire areas. We've got relatively larger amount of public transportation. And so, you know, when, when that comes down, when that arena allocation comes down, they're going to be looking at all. And we may also want to still advocate that, hey, you know, it doesn't look like this person or sorry, this city is getting their share of housing and while there isn't transit there now, there could be, for example. So, you know, that'll be, that'll be a back and forth conversation that we have with Ambag in the coming months. And then I guess one final question. There's discussion around significant attorney fees exposure. I think those around the upholder upholding and rejecting denials for housing. And I defend costs. Even if some of these court cases were successful. I'm just wondering if there's an opportunity for cities to countersue in situations where, you know, they feel that they're on the right and you're trying to fight some of these cases around. You know, whether they can connect with whether they can reject the approvals certain types of housing and they're found to be the founder when those cases. These can really only collect attorney fees if they're if the if they can show that the lawsuit was frivolous and that's a very high standard to meet. Anyway, anyway, it's it's really a asymmetrical situation, I would say where it's relatively if a city loses, it's relatively easy, except in some cases. For the other side to get attorney fees and it's a very difficult almost impossible for cities to get attorney fees. There is a provision that if a project is if someone sues to challenge the approval of affordable housing project under very limited circumstances, the city could require that the plaintiff post a bond. But then you have to have evidence that the intent was because the person didn't like affordable housing. As you know, most of that litigation is is in terms of the California Environmental Quality Act or something else.  Thank you. Those are my questions. Thank you, Council Member on my bond to Vice Mayor Brunner. Myers. Thank you, Barbara. And Sarah, I recognize one of those slides from Berkeley. Forth Avenue, Perth Street there. So my question is Barbara, I was on slide 43. I don't know if there's an easy way to go back to that slide. Maybe my numbering is different. I only have my own slide. There were numbers on the bottom of the slide. Which one is that? I'm sharing it. Is this the one you're referring to? That says 44. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. I wrote slide 43. Okay, I just wanted to confirm those numbers that were shown as it moved through pretty quick. Okay, thanks for confirming that. And then my next question was how many cities have city council have their city council make the determination of consistency to objective standards versus the other options of zoning administrator, planning staff, planning commission. So far with our clients and I certainly can't say, you know, we represent every city in the city. So far we've had SB 35 project, but all the, all of our clients so far that have had SB 35 projects have had them just reviewed at the staff level without a public hearing. Do you know of any cities that have city council make the determination of consistency to objective standards? Somebody mentioned teamie valley to me, but I don't know if that's correct. I can speak to, I know that the city of Watsonville recently had their council act on an SB 35, 100% affordable SB 35 application. Thank you, Lee. And then for city attorney Tony condati, what is the legal risk if any for city council to see the determination of consistency with objective standards. It's awkward for me to discuss legal text of a public meeting because normally I would advise the council and close session and invoke attorney but you have received communications from a couple of different groups asserting that the city council does not have the legal authority to to review projects under SB 35 and I happen to disagree with those assertions but should the council review the project or a project that comes before it and and decide that the project does not conform with the city's objective standards and I would expect that to be raised as an issue in the litigation and I and I also suspect that it wouldn't be the controlling factor in a court's analysis of whether or not the city acted appropriately but it would be a a factor that would have to be litigated. Okay, thank you. And maybe my question is around the process of determining consistency with objective standards. What does that process look like? How long does it take? Are you going and doing a checklist and determining I understand that objective standards are going through and finding the language that is must and shall versus maybe but what is that can you describe and walk us through what that process looks like? So essentially what happens is a matrix is put together and on one side it's got the objective standards from all of the relevant documents so the general plan has objective standards and we look at the general plan land use designation if those standards are being met. We look at the zoning ordinance to see what standards are being met there. There are provisions in the subdivision ordinance that we look at and in area plans that are applicable so we would go through all of those and identify here are the objective items and then we would evaluate the remainder of the matrix we would evaluate does it conform or does it not conform and if it does not conform then we have to actually specify the reasons why it does not conform. And so that's essentially the process of mining all of those standards evaluating the project for consistency with those standards and then if it is not consistent identifying the reason for the inconsistency. How many people does that take and how long is that process? Samantha would you like to comment on how many people you are working with on that? Sure. Introduce yourself for the council. Samantha with the current planning department. So yeah we have been working with all of the relevant department so fire department, water department, the public works department, the city attorney's office. And we actually went through the code and all the policies and plans like Lee was describing and we pulled out. We went through every single standard and said whether or not it was objective or not objective and then whether or not it could apply to a project. And I believe that with our new objective standards process we're looking at potentially having checklists put together that could assist us in that and make it a little bit more user friendly with this new objective standards process. But it's been a very time consuming process. Like six months, six weeks, every day, eight hours a day. That's a good question. Can you define what a very, what that process? Many staff, so not just as Samantha was mentioning, not just staff in our department, but across the department. There's, there've been a lot of people dedicating a lot of establishment or the pulling the objective standards out to understand which ones would apply in SB 35 instances, which ones don't as well as a lot of time with the attorneys working back and forth on. That applicability. So, first of all, Lee, as Samantha stated in the future going forward future SB 35. So, the process could be a little easier. Once those checklists are in place and once Sarah's project is through that process of established and objective standards. Is that accurate to. To assume. Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think that's what we're hoping for. And then, um, sorry, I just have so many questions. I thank you. Thanks everyone for your patience. I'm trying to wrap my brain around all of this. A lot of information. So thank you. If city council were the public oversight. To determine the body to determine consistency with objective standards. Would we be the ones going through and doing all that or staff brings it to city council having already done that and we have to. Double check staffs work to make sure they didn't miss anything. What does that look like? We would be doing the work and presenting it to the council. So that matrix. That I was talking about. What would be presented to the council. For the council's. Consideration. I'll just add that. For SB 35, we're only required to. Provide the applicant with the areas where they're inconsistent with objective standards. We would provide the council with, you know, the full gamut of. Where the. And not consistent for your review. But we could also whittle it down to the areas where they're inconsistent if there are any. And then we would have to go through and determine if that's. Accurate by going through all the policies and codes and. Determining that. We would be providing that analysis for the council based on our professional recommendations and the consistency or inconsistency with objective standards. Would be laid out in terms of what we believe is accurate. And the council could confirm or ask us questions really. I have a couple of questions that constituents also wrote in. I'd like to ask them. I don't know. That they were answered in the presentation. So. This is regarding prevailing wages. And for construction workers. However, it is. What is construction? It happens offsite and onsite. Is it. Only for onsite construction or. Any, any work done with. A project, a development project. You know, I can't answer that. There was just a new supreme court case. That changed what the prevailing wages apply to and said that certain work. That we had assumed was subject to prevailing wages not. So I'm not sure I can give a clear answer on that. I don't know. If Tony or somebody can, but we could. We could provide that information later. Okay. And then someone asked about the oversight of prevailing wage. And there's an oversight person. My understanding is that there's an oversight. Person. That would. Enforce that. Wage. With the state. She says that the labor commissioner. Will enforce the is authorized to enforce the prevailing wage requirement. Okay. And. So this Rosemary, I just wanted to note that. The city of course deals with prevailing wages on its construction contracts on routine basis. And I just wanted to say that there's a recording mechanism that happens. I think monthly. And then there's typically a sort of a check. So it's done very root nice from. I think it's the department of industrial relations is the reporting agency that. That happens. And I would presume that it's not just.  Entity. Right. Thank you. Question was. One moment. Can we come back to me really? Is that possible? Sure. Can we, can I switch? Can I go to Martina? Yes. Thank you. Council member Watkins. Thank you, mayor. A number of my questions have already been asked and answered. But was one question that was brought up by a constituent around sort of the staff clarification of. Cities that are. The areas of the city that are within one half mile of a major transit. Stop and leave. This question was forwarded to you. If you have any further clarification on what was. I'm asking regards to kind of where that falls into. Our city. In terms of awareness, but also in terms of what that means for classification for a density bonus. Sure. So. We do have that information posted on our GIS. It's actually under a. A layer. And I can. I can actually. Pull it up right now. So everyone can see. So under the, this is our standard GIS. And under. The layers. You go down to planning. And then down towards the bottom, the revised density bonus. It gives the. One half mile of transit. And. With respect to. The. The. Density bonus and SB. 35. The leave. And I'll. Lean on some of my colleagues here if I'm, I'm misspeaking, but I believe that. That. There is. Minimal. Influence. Especially when it comes to parking, you know, so parking SB. 35 applications. They actually have a different definition. It is proximity to public transit. And it's not. The. The density bonus and SB. 35. Believe. And I'll lean on some of my colleagues here. The. The. The. Parking is in transit and it's not defined as, as high quality transit. Versus. In the dense. Is defined as high quality transit as a half mile. And. The. The parking allowance is in SB. 35, if you're. In proximity to just any transit, then there's no parking. Requirement at all. Is my recollection. And then. parking requirements if you're in proximity to high-quality public transit. I think when there's two applications that the SB35 provisions are going to, in many instances, allow for greater flexibility in terms of no parking standard. I'd ask if any of my other colleagues would like to join in by either misspoke or. No, I've been nodding, as you said. Thank you. Yeah, the SB35 standard is if you're within basically a half mile of a bus stop, there's no parking required regardless of how frequently or infrequently the bus comes. Sorry, just to make sure I'm clear. Then the overlay of the density bonus has been the high-quality transit location. Is that correct? Or how do those two interact with SB35 and then the density bonus? I mean, yeah, go ahead, please. Well, SB35 is going to be lower parking ratios. SB35 is lower parking and it's less restrictive. As Barbara was saying, it's any bus stop, any public transit, whereas I think that the, and I'd have to go back and look and maybe folks know, but I think it's 15-minute headways for two lines. Two inter-sixing lines, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so that's the definition of the high-quality public transit. But under SB35, it's much more broadly applicable and the lower parking ratio. And then, sorry, so in terms of the 15-minute headway during the monitor on a regular basis, I mean, obviously, just for our bus stops, right? So is that monitor on a regular basis? Because it seems that we've also heard this inconsistency with how often the bus stop kind of is frequented. So how is that sort of monitored, I guess, to be a clarifying question? So I believe it's set forth by the regional transportation group and back. Yeah, usually in terms of determining whether there's intersecting lines at 15-minute intervals, people look at the bus schedules rather than actual monitoring the, rather than actual setting, sending someone to sit at the bus stop. It's usually what the scheduled bus service is. And I believe there's something about existing plans. I think that the layer on our website is related to both existing and planned. Right. Okay. If it's in the regional transportation plan, then it's a planned major stop, yeah. I see. So it doesn't need to necessarily be true as much as come frequently, but it could be a planned expectation or hope, and that's how it will qualify under that. Well, it has to be in the regional transportation plan, which a little bit more reality. It means it's a project that's scheduled to be funded, but anyway. Okay. I see also that our transportation engineer is on the line here. So, Nathan, if you'd like to jump in and provide any, if we're misspeaking on anything, then just go for you to jump in. You're muted, Nathan. Nathan Wendt, city of Santa Cruz, transmission manager. I think you guys are correct. The metro does have planned, you know, the increase of headways on Water Street. I don't know about the intersecting line on on France at 40, but I believe it does have a high quality transit board because it is planned and I believe it is an RTP. Okay. Thank you. And then my other question, which I think has already been answered is essentially there's no real role for a planning commission in this process to weigh in as our advisor's body. SB35 is really working around allowing those steps to take place. Is that accurately sort of summarized what I've taken away from this? I would say that they could. Okay. So, but, but really in the way that it says the law is issued in, you know, Barbara, I'm stepping in for you here, but it says that the city may have a oversight meeting and that oversight meeting can be done at any of the regular approval bodies. So for us, that could be the zoning administrator. That could be the planning commission. That could be the city council. What isn't really expressly clear and correct me if I'm wrong, Barbara or Tony, but is there isn't anything about multiple hearings? There isn't anything about like an advisory body recommending and frankly like the timelines particularly for projects that are less than that are 150 units or less are such that it would be really challenging to have to, to have an advisory body and a another body weigh in on that decision. Yeah, I agree. It's challenging, but not necessarily impossible is what I'm hearing. Yeah, if there were, you know, for example with the greater than 150 units when we've got 90 days to do that initial determination, you know, that would be more feasible, you know, to actually do two hearings within a 60-day period. You know, that's, that's really tough. It's tough to do one with getting all of that analysis done and pulling all those materials together. And this will be my last one. Have there ever been any circumstances which you have like a joint planning commission council hearing? I've had joint planning commission questions. I'm not a hearing, I don't know, Barbara, if you've seen any of that. I guess it would depend on what the role is, you know, they don't know if Tony wants to weigh in. I mean, it seems to me that both bodies could meet, both of them could, but if the decision, the decision has to be with one body or the other or with the staff, if they're meeting together just to give comments to the staff, I wouldn't see a problem with that. But I think if, you know, at some point, one or the other has to be assigned, if it's not, the staff isn't given the authority to make the determination and has to be one body. Yeah, I guess I would just agree with that. And that I think of having a joint meeting like that sort of with sort of muddles the goals of the different decision-making bodies. OK, yeah, thank you. Vice Mayor Bruner, did you have some additional questions? Yes, I found the other question. It was regarding questioning whether staff could be objective in their assessment of determining consistency with objective standards. And is it true that planning department staff received significant income through a pre-application phase of these developments, therefore making it a conflict of interest for them to be considered in the role? I can address the conflict of interest question. It seems to me that planning department staff are all salary. And so, you know, fees that are paid by a developer defray the cost of processing an application, which is a function of the general fund. It really has no bearing on planning department staff income. And with regard to whether my staff can be objective, I think that's an interesting comment given all of the correspondence that the city's received in the past week, suggesting that council members cannot be objective because they're more influenced by political pressure. So, you know, I think you can make that either way. I think the correspondence from the pro, you know, the applicants, legal counsel and the advocacy groups in favor of approval of the development have suggested that staff are uniquely qualified to evaluate the project objectively. That's their argument. So that really cuts both ways. And I would add that our fees and my recollection and Sam, this is your area, but I think our fees for preliminary reviews are really inexpensive. So they're not adding really much at all to our revenue, which does go to the general funds, but which does also, you know, we aim for cost recovery. But I think they're on the order of like a few thousand dollars. Samantha, very insubstantial in that overall scheme of the revenues that we bring in. We actually encourage preliminary reviews so that issues can be worked out early in the process and that we can communicate with the community early in the process before substantial investments have been made into full sets of plans. And so one of the ways that we do that is with a low cost for that preliminary review application process. OK, thank you. Is that it? Yes, thank you. OK, I think most of I think all of my questions have been answered or asked and answered. I had a question about the one question I I do have a question about is the. Maybe a little bit about. Our existing conditions of approval. And how those sort of relate to objectives, how those relate to. I guess kind of the approvals. The analysis of consistency and or basically being something consistent, because there's really no approval, right? I mean, I guess it's the it's the thing that's. A little bit out of whack in that we're so used to this idea that we get to approve something and what SB 35 does is it just takes all our approval, right? It just it removes that it's not we haven't it's a ministerial action. So if you and Barbara I was looking at some of the some of the language in a in a document. I think you're one of the authors of that was done for the League of Cities. And there's a there's just a there's a sort of a recommendation that. Conditions of approval may play a role to some extent. To address inconsistency inconsistencies with objective standards. So I'm just trying to understand what that relationship would be like and what that what that I'm just trying to understand that concept. Barbara, I don't know if you can speak to. Yeah, I think I was talking about the Housing Accountability Act in that paper. But but yeah, there is actually an approval and the approval problem may have conditions. So it may look, you know, at some point, let's say that the project conforms of all objective standards, the city will issue an approval and say your your project is approved. The guidelines that HDD has published actually say that the city can apply standard conditions of approval that would apply generally to projects. So I don't I don't know if if you have standard conditions, most cities do. So you can generally apply those if they're applicable, you know, and there may be there may be other conditions that are necessary to make the project comply, you know, with objective standards that the city may elect to to to apply. But generally, the project is supposed to be modified in the case of an SB 35 project. The project, you know, be modified or at least the developer has to agree to the condition, I think, for it to be eligible for an SB 35 approval. If the project doesn't comply with an objective standard, then it's not eligible for SB 35 approval. But there is actually an approval at the end of the line, you know, OK, yeah, I think you're saying all of the city will issue an approval. OK, so if a if a condition of approval was was so conditions of approval are applicable then as you go through the process and those conditions can existing conditions of approval be. The challenge, for example, by a developer. Sure.  That's the only place where conditions of approval are are are discussed. But I but they seem to recognize that these these guidelines seem to recognize that cities typically have their conditions of approval that they apply to projects. And how and and maybe this is for Lee. conditions of approval are those those are not in the zoning code. I mean, those are sort of standard standard. Where do those exist in our world and do those get changed very often? They do get changed from time to time and we have that standard list of conditions. Sam's team works from that. Both of those into projects. They are updated on a regular basis when, you know, do say new region water water quality control board requirements come into play. Or if we consult with the city attorney's office and we say, you know, all right, this this wording would be better off this way or that one. Or new new policies take effect. So is that where any kind of public health and safety types of things would be considered in those conditions of approval? Is that the kind of thing that shows up in conditions of approval? So a new law, whatever that may be. With respect to public health and safety, you know, there are some things in our standard conditions of approval that relate to public health and safety. But with respect to this, you know, the public health and safety, the conditions of approval oftentimes are related to non public items. Yeah, I can jump in on that as well. We put a lot of our conditions of approval are tied to code requirements. And but we have gone away from listing out building permit requirements and fire department requirements really specifically in our conditions of approval, because we want for the plans that are more developed at that state to be reviewed by the fire and building departments and water departments and for them to be able to apply whatever standards they have. So we usually include a really general condition of approval. That's, you know, the project shall comply with all requirements of the building, fire, water departments. In this project, we're trying to be a little bit more specific. What would these SB 35 projects? And list out some of the things that are local standards and not state requirements like building code or state fire code or state stormwater requirements. Those will apply no matter what. So if someone's concerned about a project, you know, as not reviewing a soils report, for example, at the at this review stage, which might not be required as an objective standard, that would most likely be required as part of the building permit review. OK, thank you. OK, I think that's it for council questions. So I'm going to go ahead and take this out for public comment. I do just want to real quickly. Before we go to public comment, I wanted to be sure to acknowledge that we are meeting tonight on the second day of the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah. And as a city, we observe the holiday when it began yesterday. And so today, on behalf of this council, I would like to wish all of those who are celebrating a very happy new year today. And we typically try to avoid holidays in our council deliberations. In some cases, and tonight was one of those there was a request and actually a motion to set this meeting before the public hearing, which many people for the A-31 project. And so this was really the night that that, unfortunately, we had to be able to pull people together. But I do want to, again, just recognize the holiday tonight and again celebrate and wish everyone a happy new year. I'll go ahead and bring this out to the public now for comments. So tonight, public comment really is a time for just that, which is commenting on the affordable housing streamlined ministerial approval, which also we all know is SB-35 and the density bonus as presented tonight. If you do want to speak, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that we've been unmuted and then we'll set the timer to two minutes. And again, I just just for those of who may have joined late, this will on the materials presented tonight. It will not be. We will not be discussing the A-31 water project or I can, unfortunately, not take any comment on that either tonight, because that is not a noticed item on our agenda. So I'll go ahead and ask the first person with their hand up, which is Sue Terrence, to go ahead and press star six on you. And you can begin speaking. Thank you. I believe Sarah said that planning is hoping to have a list of applicants applicable objective standards for SB-35 by mid-October. Is that right? And Barbara shared a slide that stated that the objective standards must be knowable prior to the submittal of the application. And my question, the first part is knowable by whom? Knowable by the developer, the developer, knowable by the developer, the planning department, the public city council, who must know about the objective standards that are applicable prior to submittal? Right. Thank you. And for those who may ask questions, I will defer to council to see if the body would like to have some of these questions answered. So I'll go ahead and take all the public comment. We'll track on some of these and then we'll see if council wants to follow up questions answered. Tony, is that OK to do tonight? Yes, that's perfectly fine, Mayor. Thank you. Next I have. Thank you, Sue. Is that it? Or did you have additional questions or comments? I just was hoping to get some understanding from Barbara about the timing for anything that was not submitted by the developer. What is the timing for getting those things submitted? OK, I'll make a note of your questions, so thank you. Thank you. Are there any others? I'll stop there. OK, thank you very much. Next, I have Lyra Filipini, a star six. Unmute yourself, please. Hi, thank you. My questions are also so the first one, and we did submit these a little over a week ago, actually, some of them. So the first one has to do with timing specifically. So there are two different time timing deadlines for both categories of sizes of SB 35 projects. And one of them is the response time where the city must to the applicant with how the application either does conform or does not conform both to SB 35 and the knowable objective standards. The second time is the approval or denial time. So, for instance, for a one hundred and fifty unit development, the sixty day notice is for the response to this is what the planning department has identified in either issues or being fulfilling of the various requirements. And then there's another thirty day window. And so my question is, what are other cities doing with those those thirty days? And is if there is a design review or public oversight meeting, does it usually happen after that response, but before the approval or denial time, or does it usually happen? Looks like from what Lee was saying, he's currently expecting for Santa Cruz that the public oversight meeting will happen before the public actually sees what the city is saying as far as whether objective standards are adhered to or not. And so I just want some more clarity around that because it's a little confusing, I think, to the public and I think also to counsel if I'm correct. Another thing is the complete application. Is it complete to point at what San Francisco is doing? If the department provides written comments to the project sponsors of the applicant saying, hey, it's not eligible as proposed, maybe the units, there aren't enough units that are affordable or we've noticed objective standards, non-compliance, that that timeline start fresh as soon as the applicant fixes those issues and resubmits the application. That is what we're doing. So just wondering if that's something that Santa Cruz will also be doing. Thank you, Leera. OK, next I have phone number ending in 8466, please. This is Rafa Salman Felt. SB 35 is a law that was created by the state legislature to help ensure that when cities are unable to meet their obligations under the housing needs allocation for whatever reason. And most often those reasons are because of local politics, that there's a predictable objective review process for especially good projects to be evaluated under. The renown numbers for the next cycle are going to be three times larger. I encourage the city to designate the zoning administrator to serve as a review body for this process, precisely because they will not be biased by local pressures while reviewing these applications. We elect the city council to ensure that we have good objective standards for development and to set land use policy by adopting general plan and zoning standards, but not the past judgment as to whether projects meet these objective standards, which is a better job, a job better left to a professional administrator, cities like Los Altos, who unwisely allowed council politics to intervene in their process, learn the hard way that they can't bluff their way around state law by making up reasons for denying housing with no basis in their own laws. Los Altos was actually ordered by a judge to issue a seven million dollar surety bond after they appealed a lawsuit they lost for denying an SB35 project and realized that the smart move was to settle the case and approve the project with higher production goals. You know, the three times the renown numbers of the current cycle on the horizon, the city is likely to see more and more SB35 projects as we fall further behind our goals. I think the council's time is better spent addressing that problem instead of injecting politics into a ministerial approval, which undoubtedly makes it even harder to meet those goals. Thank you. Next we have Elizabeth Conlon. Hello, everyone. Thank you for your time this evening. I'm a renter here in the city, and I would like to voice my support for city staff handling the approval process as they do for other ministerial approvals. Staff, like Sarah, have spent months doing extensive outreach to different demographics and Santa Cruz regarding objective standards, including outreach in Spanish to renters and across neighborhoods. I really applaud their efforts, grounding the process and equity, including review of the history of the government's role in segregating our communities. In order to following objective standards, if the choice is between staff doing the review or staff presenting a recommendation to council, it seems to me that if the staff is already doing the review and making a recommendation, we should keep this process with our city's staff. I ask that you let these staff with the expertise and standards conduct all ministerial reviews and to do so quickly. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have phone number ending in four, nine, six, five. Am I on the line? Yes, you are. Sorry, my name is Candice Brown, long term resident here. You know, SB 35, basically, main intent is to deregulate housing development entirely, which is why in the groups throughout the state are pushing for you know, any alleged body to aggregate the responsibility on land use policies. But I would invite the council to be involved in this process. You realize it's very complex, but there is a learning process. If you divorce yourself from this process, you'll never regain expertise to be a part of a growing complex of a lot of impacts in our community. This project impacts a particular project we can't speak of tonight, but I will also say that if the quarter plan had had the compromises that were revealed that should have been made on the far value, for instance, which a lot of people don't understand what that is, which it has to do with massing, if that had been resolved in the compromise, then some of these have been resolved and some of the issues with this project or particular projects would not be before you as they will be in the near future. There's a need for an understanding. It's very complex. You need to be in the game. And as an elected body, I invite you and beg you to be a part of this process. It is very important. This is the life of our city to be a part of it. Thank you. Thank you. If anyone else in the attending the meeting tonight wants to speak on this item, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. Right. I see another hand. Amara Morrison, please press R6 and you can speak. Mayor Meyers and council members, my name is Amara Morrison and I'm an attorney with Wendell Rosen and we represent Novin Development Corporation. I trust you received our letter from yesterday regarding the council's proposed action and I'd like to focus on the proposed motion in the staff report, which we addressed in this verbal staff report and underscores a couple of critical issues for your consideration. Council's motion proposes to confirm a course of action, which is not currently a part of the city's density bonus ordinance when it in fact is creating a new procedure for SB 35 projects, which include a density bonus request. The council's proposed action amounts to an amendment of the city's density bonus ordinance, which under these circumstances requires city staff, and in this case, the zoning administrator, to make determinations related to requested concessions and waivers. In order to amend the city's ordinance, the amendment has to be introduced at the council meeting, formally a subsequent meeting and take effect 30 days thereafter, which both state law and the charter and your charter require. Finally, SB 35 specifically prohibits this kind of mid application shift in procedure and specifically states that a local government shall not adopt or impose any requirement that applies to a project solely or partially on the basis that the project is eligible to receive ministerial or streamlined approval. And as Ms. Council pointed out during her presentation, SB 330 also locks in the standards, which were in effect at the time the preliminary application was submitted. So we would respectfully request that the council refrain from taking the proposed action, which is mentioned most definitely for tonight in order to adhere to the mandates, which are clearly set forth in the street. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you. Next, we have Sabina. Hey there. I just like to call out two points. One is that per the presentation tonight, the city will leave behind on very low income housing units that are available. It's only at 32 percent, way under what it needs to be. And everything else is far exceeding what it needs to be. And so that really just tells me that the city is just not doing a very good job at this at this moment. I'd like to point out is that the moderate majority on the city council is all funded by developers and real estate agents and lay and landlords, there's landlords that are on the city council. And it's really hard for me to see how you're going to be objected when that funding is directly coming from those exact sources. And those are all backed up in records. And I'd really love to comment on that, especially if they are being backed by all of these real estate moguls, basically. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the attendees tonight that wants to speak to this? OK, if you are in the audience, it'd be great if you could raise your hand, press star nine and then we'll get folks. Next, I have phone number ending in 0836. Just press start. There you go. You should be able to speak. Evening, council members, I want to appreciate all of you spending your evening time on this very complex subject and graduate you for working hard on it. I just want to point out and I sent correspondence to each of you that you were elected to consider these subjects and to make decisions for our city. And I hope you will vote to do that and not defer it to a staff member who was not hired for that purpose. You all were hired for that purpose and that we honor you for being our city's board of directors. You have to make our decisions. Thanks very much. Thank you. Next, I have the Madison. I'm just a regular person living in a neighborhood. I love this city. I love this area. I want more housing. We need more housing. So I think some of the things that you hear that might be touched as people being against big housing. I'm not most of my neighborhood is not. I think we're looking for you and we're trusting and believe and have full faith that our government can help us create new housing that is respectful, you know, respective of neighbors and not just such a huge, crazy building. So speaking for myself and I hope some of my neighbors, I am, of course, in favor of more housing, but fully trust that you guys have the ability to work within the constraints of these new state laws to protect our neighborhoods and deliver great new housing opportunities that are respectful of our neighbors. Thanks. Next, I have Kyle Kelly. Hey, thank you so much. I just want to bring up that right now, single family homes are treated with ministerial approval, while multifamily homes are not and have not had ministerial approval for a very, very long time. And I think it's something worth reflecting on that we can a new two million dollar house go up that is reviewed by staff that would have a mortgage near to 8000, 9000, maybe 10,000 a month, while an apartment and immediately for these ones going for a thousand a month and with how's a lot more has to go through much more process. And so I encourage each of you to think about for the future what impact that has on renters versus what impacts that has on people that are that are going to be buying effectively luxury monoplexes. And it's just something to think about. Does it mean that maybe all ministerial approvals should go through council, including single family homes, every renovation? Or maybe there should be a fair and predictable process for housing for renters, housing for people with less mean than there should be for all projects? Thank you. Thank you. Is there any more folks in the audience or the attendees this evening that would like to speak to this item? I'm not seeing any. OK. If folks are going to speak to this item, I'd like you to raise your hands so that we can get a sense of how many folks are out there. So after phone number ending in six, three, nine, six, I'm going to cut off public comment because I'm not seeing any other hands pass then. OK, we'll go to phone number five, six, nine, zero, please. Star six to unmute yourself, please. Yes, I'm here to speak tonight in favor of the City Council actually being involved because the amount of detail that is in this huge SB 35 is very complex. And what we're doing right now is we're trying to get a grasp on the future of our city and this will come up again. And without building the knowledge bit by bit by bit, it doesn't help our city and you have been elected to represent our city and be very involved in these important issues. And I really appreciate you doing the best you can to be the ones to do the review. Thank you. Next, I have phone number ending in seven, nine, eight. My name is Jeanine. And first of all, I want to say thank you to all the staff and Barbara for their presentations, and I'm particularly glad that they went beyond SB 35. I also talk about the Housing Accountability Act and the housing element. And I also want to thank everyone on the council, because I think you had some very excellent questions. You know, I saw the chart how critical the housing crisis is and how far behind we are, and I really appreciate that the state legislature is working on multiple approaches to get there. I can also understand that you guys, all the council has a real strong interest in housing development, but I also learned a few other things tonight. I learned that having multiple layers of oversight or approval of the objective standards is a challenge with the timeline. The risks from litigation that's asymmetric. I heard from Barbara that there are no other cities that she's aware of, or maybe it was CME Valley, is the exception that had the city council on this role. And then the mayor said something that was really telling, which is that there really is no approval, the public oversight meeting is really just to determine and review a checklist relating to zoning statements. So I respectfully ask you to take yourself out of this equation. Let's let the zoning administrator or the professional staff do their job, because there really is no way to have a public oversight meeting without bringing politically charged nature of projects into the discussion. I really want to support doing the objective standards. I've been a part of that project and I'm really looking forward to it being completed. I think it will help a lot and I think it should include all the traffic, other site and environmental concerns, and they should all be objectives. And let's keep moving with affordable housing and let's stay in compliance with the law. Thank you. Thank you. Next, I have Simon. Go ahead, please. Simon, you'll have to press star six to unmute yourself. Sorry, I was a little bit away from the computer. I was just in response to what seemed to come up with the idea of who should be responsible and involved in seeing the applications for a city site. And I think because it's coming rather quickly on the end of covid. So those applications that are already in the argument that the city staff would be unswayed by political pressure and only adhere to objective standards is rather moot because there are no objective standards yet. They're still in development and yet the applications are in. So I'm asking the question, making the opinion, but I think perhaps the council should be involved at least in the early stages because with the lack of objective standards to kind of assess the applications are already in and next best alternative are representatives of the people. And members of the council. In this situation, as a kind of next best alternative, they shouldn't be swayed by political forces when doing their job. It's just a human trait that they may be. But if we're talking about any absence of actual objective standards, I think it's maybe the best we've got as an alternative since we're faced with applications now. Thank you. Next, I have phone number ending in eight seven one nine. Hello. Thank you very much for taking the time just that you're spending on this tonight. My comment is in strong opposition to the one made earlier, discouraging you, the city council, our elected officials from serving in an over set all with respect to SB 35 projects. Beginning with the one proposed for eight three one Water Street. I'm sorry, these can be very, very large projects as we're seeing. That can create numerous health and safety issues for the city residents. You represent unlike the eight three one Water Street developer and the attorneys he is hired to tonight. I actually believe that you, the city council, serving in an oversight role will be able to do the right thing. I can give incomplete applications the response they deserve. Thank you very much. Thank you. And our last column will be phone number ending in six three nine six. Please press star and mute. Good evening, council. This is Robert of Rizzi checking in. Thank you for taking our questions ahead of time and answering some of them. However, I feel like staff has not addressed some of them. One of my main concerns here is what standards has the city currently reviewed and accepted as objectives? And what standards has the city rejected is non-objective and why? I think this is going to be a very critical point for examine and decide upon, obviously, because this is where we can make the determination if a project really does meet the requirements for an SB 35 application. Also, what happens when there is an incomplete SB 35 application? I think we need to talk about this more. Will the public have input on setting the final adopted guidelines that the application need to include the development specific elements, parameters and design shows how the development complies with objective standards and SB 35 requirements. There are many things to take into account here. Also, I haven't heard anything about any type of archaeological digs outside of the tribal oversight at the beginning. I think there has been more discussion on that to protect native lands. And I want to thank council for taking this on. Thank you very much, Mayor Meyers, for allowing this special meeting tonight. I admire all your hard work, all of you, and please, please understand that the public really depends on council to take this and to decide for the city how we are going to proceed with all SB 35 applications. This is really, really an important decision for you to take on for all of us. Thank you so much. Thank you. OK, I'm going to take a five minute break and let the council just use the restroom real quick, and then we will reconvene. We'll come back at 10 20. And then we'll have deliberation by the council. And thank you, everyone, for attending tonight. We'll be right back into, I think, a few topic areas, Barbara. And I hope you were I did not I did not let you know that we were going to have you respond, but I'm hoping you sort of were able to kind of tease them out. The things that I picked up on were some around the timing specifically in terms of response time and things like that. So maybe tackle that first. And then there's quite a few questions around sort of, you know, the objective standards. We had questions about how many we have, in a sense, already identified that we might be using in terms of the number and then sort of, you know, this concept of knowable and who is, you know, who is knowable about objective standards. And I think this fits in with really around the process. You know, so, you know, I think what's happened is that the application came in, you know, and so how do these pieces fit together? And where is where is the public in, you know, where does the public get to look into some of this before what feels like, you know, I think a decision is made or, you know, there's all of a sudden you're at you're sort of you're sort of at you're at the end of the at the at the end of the process and so many people are used to, you know, a very predictable way to talk about changes and development in their communities. And so this is a very foreign way to think about how to enter the community member, whether you're pro to pro the project or answer the project, we've all been trained over the years to really have an interactive, you know, kind of process that we can trust and we can see into. And so I think some of these questions is I'm sensing that that's where some of the struggles coming is that people really don't understand where, where to as a public member, where do I get transparency into this? And how does that work, you know, and what does that look like? So I don't know, Barbara, if you could maybe. And then I'll go to counsel at some point, but, you know, right now, I'm going to have Barbara and folks answer. Thank you. Maybe I'll just explain first about the whole timing and then kind of try to get into the transparency. SB 35 sets everything up from the time of submittal, whether or not the application is complete or not. You know, I think I think we've all gotten used to thinking about somebody submits an application. The city staff determines if it's complete to get sent back, you know, until it's complete and ready to be approved. But that's not how SB 35 was set up. So with SB 35, everything has to happen from the date somebody actually submits the application. We're assuming the whole tribal process is over, but it's someone could theoretically submit, you know, almost a page saying, you know, this is my SB 35 application and the city would still need to respond. And so the response that the city must do in 60 to 90 days is tell about is tell the applicant whether or not the application conforms with objectives, with these objective standards. So, you know, I gather from what Lee said that the city has compiled a rather long list of all the objective standards that it has, you know, in the general plan, in the plans, in the subdivision ordinance and other ordinances that has a list of objective standards. So what the city must do within 60 days is say, either to the applicant, what you submitted complies with the objective standards. I can see what you submitted does not comply with the standards or you haven't given me enough information so I can tell if it complies with the standards. And that's the and that's the way the legislature has set up SB 35. So it's a very tight timeline, but doesn't put the same obligations, if you like, on the applicant to submit a complete application, regardless of whether the application is missing items, the city still must respond within 60 to 90 days, explain, you know, where where where the project complies, where it doesn't comply and where and saying I can't figure it out because, you know, you haven't given me enough. So I think that's a big change. It was mentioned that San Francisco, you know, if they send a letter back saying, you know, either you haven't given me enough information or the application doesn't come that this timeline starts over again. And that's exactly the way it is set up. Actually, it's the way that HCD and the guidelines say it happens. So if after the first 60 to 90 days, the application is either missing stuff or doesn't comply, the city sends the applicant the letter. It's basically a denial of the project of the saying your project does not comply to the SB 35 with SB 35. You're not eligible because you don't comply with objective standards and you or you haven't given me enough information to make that determination. The applicant can then come back and start again. But the 60 to 90 days starts all over again. I'll just stop there and see if that's reasonably clear to people. Are there questions? And so that that determination is different, Barbara, than a public oversight meeting or is that that is that what we will be looking at? If we if we assume that role, we will be looking at that part of the process. Is that correct? Yes, the the statute allows you to have a public oversight meeting either for design review or to look at the objective standards. So if you have a public oversight meeting in this first 60 to 90 day period, you would be looking all you would be looking at would be the compliance of the objective standards. That would be that. I mean, you would also look at, you know, does it? I mean, the staff will also analyze is it eligible for SB 35? But usually the and then also you will be looking at time review application to see if they provided the information necessary to make it. Did I say design review and then density bonus? We'll also be looking at the information submitted to justify the density bonus. So those are the that's that's what the council would do or whatever. Your body or the staff would do in the first 60 to 90 days. OK, I think the then it was asked, you know, then the time to actually make it to conduct design review is listed as either 90 days after submittal or 180 days after submittal. I think that second phase comes after the project has been determined to comply with all objective standards. And that's you could think of that developing the conditions of approval for the project. I've only seen most of the projects that SB 35 projects we've worked in are still in the phase of lack of compliance with objective standards. But I've seen a couple that have been approved. And essentially the applicant has resubmitted. Finally, the application appears to come with standards in the city. And let's see, in both cases, I look at the city was ready to grant the concessions and waivers and bonuses that the project had applied for. Then the city did a final approval that showed that showed the compliance of all the standards. And plus that conditions of approval. OK, thanks. Barbara, can you or Lee, can you? I think the other questions. Really revolve around the objective standards are basically such an important part of this, right? I mean, they're kind of the link to kind of the values of what we kind of want our community to look like, you know, in a sense. I mean, short of having design standards, which we have, those are the things that sort of really determine what this what the project, any project may look like. So that seems to be. And so, yeah, questions around sort of kind of uncovering a little bit about what those are, how many there are. I mean, I know you're still working on it, but, you know, I I've heard some examples tonight, but maybe there's maybe there's a little more specificity. And I don't know if that's Barbara or Sam or Lee or you, I'm not sure. Thanks, Mary Myers. I know Samantha had a number of conversations with members of the community about this. So I'll invite her to respond to the question about the objective standards that we have and where they can be found and what you've been communicating to the community center. There are objective standards in our code now. Many of our codes are objective. And because this is the first time we've gone through this process and because our code wasn't written with this intent, there have been some questions that have come up on, you know, how is this word? It is it's objective and we're working closely with the city attorney's office on on those. But, like I said, many of our objective, I think some of the big ones, the big questions that we've been asked are about archaeological reports. We do have an objective standard that requires an archaeological report to be submitted wi