Flagstaff Advances Regional Land Use Plan 2045 with Priority Concerns Flagged

Let's go ahead and get started. I would like to call to order the planning and Sonic Commission meeting for Wednesday, September 10th, 2025. The notice of option to recess into executive um session pursuant to ARS 38-43102.

Notice is hereby given to members of the commission and to the general public that at this meeting the um the commission may vote to go into executive session which will be not which will not be open to the public for and it would be for legal advice and discussion with the commission's attorneys on any item listed on this agenda that again is pursuant to ARS 38-4 431.0383. If we can have roll call. Carol Mandino present. Joshua Mayor present. Christine C. Lkey Mary Norton present.

Megan Weller present. Thank you. Hello everyone. Um, thanks for being here tonight. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping things to say about the audio system here. So, you may have noticed we're not in the normal uh council chambers where the planning and zoning commission usually meets. Um, in this room, we have uh two microphones and a speaker to make sure that everyone can hear in the room.

However, this room is miked in the ceiling uh for the online participants and the recording. So, that means that if you're having a side conversation in the back, the mics may pick it up and include it um for anyone listening online. So, if you would like to have any side conversations, please um head out to the lobby and come back in just so we make sure we have a good recording for this meeting and um that the people online can participate fully and hear.

Um uh for the planning and zoning commissioners, you've already been doing this uh well, but just um please pass the mic along and um don't start your comment until you have the mic. Um, and then for online attendees, if you're having trouble hearing a comment, uh, please type an S in the chat for sound and then we'll pause and staff will ask that the comment be repeated. That way, we'll try to keep on top of any audio issues.

Um, and then also make sure if you are, so during public comment, we'll have the mic up at this podium. And um, if you're coming up to speak, make sure you hold it uh, close enough to your mouth, not out of here like this, so that everyone can hear your voice. Okay, that's it for audio. Also, during the comment period, um, you'll have three minutes. You need to first state your name and your address for the record. when you are about to present, I will probably remind you of that.

Um, and then if we need you to repeat something, I will ask you to repeat it. Thank you. Right. First, we go into public comment. Um, at this time, any member of the public may address the commission on any subject within our jurisdiction that is not scheduled before the commission today. So, due to public meeting laws, the commission cannot discuss or act on items presented during this public comment time of the agenda. to address the commission on an item that is on the agenda.

Please wait for me to call for public comment at the time the item is heard. Is there any public comment currently? That's not on the agenda tonight. I don't think so. I don't have the syllabus, so I'm sorry. Sorry. No, it's not on here. All right. If you come forward to the podium. All right. And again, give your name and address and then you have microphone. Three minutes. Oh, I'm James. The timer behind me. Okay. and James Lmerch 10429 East Palamino Road 86004.

My concern is the amount of trash that is in this city. I think we need to do something before we make this town bigger or whatever we're going to do. We really need to get some kind of trash pickup because, you know, I always thought this place was the gateway to the to the canyon. It really, you drive down the roads here, it's like gateway to the dump. So, that's all I got to say. I hope we can get something together that we can we can't blame the wind.

We can't blame anything else, but we just need to start. And before anybody says, "Well, what are you doing about it?" I do three miles on I40 every three months and pick up trash. And I pick up 25 to 30 bags of trash every three months. That's only three miles. So, I don't know where this is going to go, but I just had to voice my opinion. Over and out. Thank you. Does anybody else have any public comment for items that are not on the agenda tonight?

And seeing none, um we'll move into the approval of the minutes of our regular meeting on August 27th, 2025. Does anybody want to make a motion to approve the minutes? Any to approve the minutes from August 27th, 2025? So, there's been a motion to approve the minutes from August 27th to 2025. And I believe I'll have a second. Second. Is there any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? The minutes are approved. Thank you. Thank you, CJ.

And now we'll go into the public hearing on Flagstaff Regional Land Use Plan 2045 adoption presentation. Thank you, Chairman Dino. I am Sarah Dector. I'm the comprehensive and neighborhood planning manager for the city of Flagstaff and the project lead for the joint city and county Flagstaff regional plan. Um with me today on staff we have several resources. The regional plan is a very broad document. It covers a lot of topics. Um the public commenter was correct.

It does not cover trash pickup directly. Um but there are a lot of things that are covered by the document. So I want to thank all the staff who have participated. Only over 70 city and county staff and state and partner staff from federal employees have been reviewing Slacknet for the last two years.

In addition to the 20 person citizen advisory committee, the technical advisory group um and many others who hundreds of others who came to public meetings and events throughout this process to provide input. Um we will be going over today um quite a few things that are really pertinent to the hearing. So we won't be going over chapter by chapter what is in the plan.

We're going to go over the findings required for the hearing and the process that we will use to take a 200page document and basically do a very careful markup before sending it to council. Um staff is here to help answer questions. So, commissioners, if you have a question presentation or during discussion time or after you hear some public comment, please let us know. All right, let's see if my clicker advances properly. Voila. Okay. Um, so today, this is the plan for today.

I have a 30 minute presentation that covers mostly the legal findings and then a few reminders having seen the 18 or so public comments that have come in. Um what we might want to be mindful of as we're working through the material after that is commission discussion. So if you have you've received about 18 written public comments that some of them were fairly lengthy, you know, four to 10 pages of people really put time into and bought into the document.

you'd like to identify any of those to kind of move forward and I'll talk about how and why um we can have that during the initial discussion and if you have any clarifying questions or areas you want to go over then we would ask the chair to call public comment which as demonstrated will include a threeminut timer um unless you have a group of 15 or more people you are or 10 or more people you are representing um and then after the public comment which may conclude today or may not if we do not have time.

This is a two-part hearing. Um, so we have to be leaving this room at 7:30 p.m. That is the end today because this building closes at 8. This is one of those tricky things, but the state law says we have to have these hearings in two separate locations at city hall on the 24th. We can stay open and keep working until you guys are ready to conclude the evening. But tonight, we have a hard stop at 7:30 p.m. to allow the Aquaplex staff to close the building and go home on time.

So, I would ask the chair to please um conclude a pause public comment and continue it at 7:20 p.m. And we'll remind you that it's 7:20. Um that will give us 10 minutes to close out any other discussion or callup that we need as we prepare to continue the hearing. If you provide a public comment card and are not called tonight, you will be called at the hearing on the 24th at city hall. Unlike tonight, there will not be a presentation on the 24th.

So, we will get right into discussion and public comment. So, we're treating these three and a half hours tonight and the four to six hours you may spend on the 24th as one event even though it's happening in two locations. Are there any questions from the commission about that? over here. That was important to cover up front. All right.

So, the comprehensive update to the general plan has unusual findings that you do not review on a regular basis and they come from the Arizona statute 9-461.05, 05 city code title 11-01 city code title 11-02 and and the broader ARS tied to general plans and zoning and annexations and other related land use and municipal planning decisions. The plan has also been reviewed for title 10 ARS um material which ties to the county but that is not pertinent to this hearing.

the county will have their own hearings on the legal findings of the of the regional plan at a later time. So, let's go over the first part of these legal findings. The first is procedural requirements. Um, the ARS of the Arizona statutes requires effective early and continuous public participation and title 11 gives further detail on how it is expected to take place. The hearings and all previous meetings have met all required notifications.

These hearings were advertised on August 23rd in the Arizona Daily Sun and September 9th. Um, and then we also have gone and done more than is what required. There have been regionwide postcards, some of which are available over here on the table if someone did not receive one at their address.

What are the loot's social media paid and free radio advertising press releases and inperson outreach tables for the last three years on this process which has helped us create an effective and continuous outreach. We are in phase four congratulations of this fourphase process to update our plan completely. Um and this is the most formal phase of the process. So what? Hello. I'm sorry. You're unmuted. Whoever is speaking, someone might have to mute them. Okay. Thank you.

Um, so all public input is going to be taken through the public hearings at this point. This is the start of it. Um there are not other meetings or other outreach that staff will be doing. We are encouraging everyone to come to the public hearings and be part of the three that are happening between now and August 9th.

Um the process after this is that the city will call a ballot to put the plan in front of city voters and the county then will also hold separate adoption hearings before the county planning zoning commission and the board of supervisors. the order of which are being determined now. So I said we've met all required notices. In addition, there are required notices directly to certain agencies and people in the community. And so I'm going to put those up quickly for you to see.

That includes NCOG, the county, which of course is a partner in this, not just noticing the Arizona Commerce Authority, um the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Water Services Department, helped us reach the right person to review the document in that organization as well. And then our usual list of interested parties, which is maintained by U. Nancy, our administrator, and Tiffany Antl, our zoning code administrator, also all received copies of the proposal.

And the neither was to review the citizen review session that we had on August 27th is another required step in this process. So on the 27th we met the pre the timing requirement of citizen review session but because this is an inter uh intergovernmental document we did have a previous review session that included the board of supervisors planning and zoning commission city council and the county planning and zoning.

I'm just going to remind the audience for a moment that the um the entire room is miked and so the side conversations may be being picked up and heard online. So if you need to have a discussion, it's you should feel free to pass notes like it's high school, but you can also step into the lobby to consider the conversations. But maybe I'm just old enough to have remembered passing notes in high school. I'm sure now they like send things on their iPads to each other.

Um so the citizen review session requirements have been met. The hearing and ratification um requirements are underway. That means these two public hearings, one here and one September 24th at city hall. Um also the city council has elected to hold special meeting Thursday, October 9th at 3 p.m. to conduct their public hearing. This will be the only item on that agenda. Like much like tonight, they will not have regular business. They will not have consent.

They will have their full time just discuss document. And then the ratification will happen as special election scheduled within 120 more at least 120 days after October 9th if that's the date it is adopted. Currently that is believed to be May 2026. There are additional coordination requirements in the state statute both with Cookanino County which as a partner in this had plenty of coordination but also with the Arizona State Land Department.

It requires that we coordinate on any conceptual land use plans. There are no conceptual land use plans for state land within this region. There was one that was drafted in the late 90s that some people might remember but it was actually never adopted by state land. Um, so as an alternative and to keep with the spirit of the statute, we have met quarterly and updated state land and involve them in every part of the process. So now let's talk about what's called required elements.

Required elements are basically the checklist of plan content that is in the state statute. And for cities the size of Flagstaff, it is um a pretty lengthy list.

it it grows the barrier city is but we are in the maximum list so I have about there about 20 of these and I'm going to try and go through them quickly all of these are addressed in your staff report in detail with the cross references so if I need to pause let me know but I'm going to try and do these slides fairly quickly um the statement of community goals and development policies is anchored in the priorities that we are setting for this plan which have been identified as housing attainability and equity, climate action, walkable mixeduse neighborhoods, a walkable mixeduse community, natural cultural resources, a healthy economy, and resilient public services and facilities.

The center of all of these things is their integration into the land use, circulation, and growth elements. The land use elements core is defining the general distribution and location and extent of land use categories and that each category provide a wide variety of uses and housing types. In addition, there's a requirement for addressing in appropriate locations for infill and compact form which are addressed in goals CD, PK, DP and I.

This is the future growth illustration which is um found in maps for DA policy maps 4-1 4-2. Um we are um not making huge changes to the number of categories or what those categories are called. There are changes to what is defined in each category and also what is um what material findings there are for each one. So the categories are hard to read when you see the map but um here they are in a list.

So there's four kinds of building blocks to build the map which were all based on the scenario planning efforts that are described in chapter 4. And then center and neighborhood are further defined as urban, suburban, and rural. The neighborhood building block also has a neighborhood commercial element which is different than our current plan.

It also describes districts, urban, suburban corridors, which are basically urban and suburban primarily commercial along frontages of major roads, employment, university and research. And then there are now two landscape categories. There's parks and open space and then a second category that is new called federal lands and working landscapes. Federal lands and working landscapes are different than parks and open space.

Parks they have some of the elements though of recreation and outdoor open space in them but they they may have private land uses that are permitted with existing entitlements. So that is important. It is not a category that allows no development. is just a broad category that covers in holdings in the national forest national forest system lands that have very different approach to how they are managed. So the circulation element is another key central part of the plan.

It has maps 4-3 and 4-4 policy maps 4-3 and 4-4 cover material and collector functional class roads and our transit permit transit network. The policies in the plan address parking, air and freight, multimodal transportation. And then there is a requirement to addressing like how we assign addresses within the city. We already have as a city a very formal process for doing this and we did not add anything in the plan.

We simply described it because we are meeting the national standards for the E911 process. So when that requirement was written, there was not necessarily a national standard. There is now. That's just a change. The growth element um includes both integration of the land use and transportation framework. So the circulation and land use elements as well as promoting public and private construction of timely and financially sound infrastructure expansion.

This covers all the policies that talk about how infrastructure and growth should be tied together. It also discusses significant natural resources. The term significant is one of the required words in the statute. Some people gave us comments and said we should get rid of the word significant but that's actually from the statute. Um and so we have integrated that in several ways both into chapter 7 and chapter 3. Open spaces is also addressed in chapter 3 and in the map 3-1.

So I'll skip to the open space element and show you this map. It is important to know that the open space map in the regional plan, not a map that might occur in an open space master plan or parks and recreation plan, um may not identify any land as open space without written property owner permission. So most of the land you see identified as open space is city and county land owned property.

What we have on this map though are bubbles that are hash hashed out and they are basically areas where we have identified a need for large property acquisition not small property acquisition um but we are not identifying any particular parts because of the limitation of the state statute which is written in detail in the plan. Environmental planning is covered both water, air and natural resources as well as the approach of resilience, mitigation and preparedness.

All of these elements also incorporate ecosystem health and significant natural resources. The cost of development element is written a little differently for Flagstaff because we are in a housing affordability emergency. And so we rewritten it so that it is focused on diversifying our financial strategies so that we can provide infrastructure and housing production in a manner that supports our housing attainability priority.

Water elements and conservation elements um provide for the required information What is required for water is not the same as the water master plan. It is the use and location of known legally and physically available water supplies. That is that is really the only requirement. But we have gone long uh more in depth than that because the water services department and Lee Williams, our water services director is here and can answer questions when we get to those details.

um has an Arizona Department of Water Resources 100-year water supply designation that we established with the last regional plan and are carrying forward. Conservation element has a lot of overlap with that growth element and that was covered. In addition to the minimum, we also discussed dark skies.

The recreation element of the plan also relies on map 3-1 to meet the requirements and the transportation framework in chapter 4 covers urban and regional trails which are part of the recreation element and the bicycling element. Public services and facilities are mainly focused on public safety, emergency response, risk reduction and hazard assessment. There are only over 20 existing operational and strategic plans for these topics in the region.

Um, and those are all integrated and pulled together in this document into the broader ideas that link them. The housing element is particularly important for Flagstaff. It includes existing and forecasted affordable housing needs through the community. We have four sources we use for those findings. We use the estimations based on the office of economic opportunity data provided by the state and we did run our forecasts by the demographers and verify them.

The 10-year housing plan and the land availability suitability study code analysis project which was run concurrent to the regional plan and then the regional plan scenario planning process. We're down to maybe the last four or five weeks. Okay. conservation and rehabilitation and redevelopment is that urban landscape. This is a very interesting and potentially outdated for our community, but it requires that the city identify slums and areas of light and we have not identified any in this plan.

There are occasionally areas of the city or individual properties that have issues. Those are dealt with not in delay and scale but by our code compliance process. The there are also several policies that discuss compact development and the diversity of housing which is a requirement under this element. Public buildings that are required to be identified by the statute are identified on map 11-1 for public buildings. The safety element has a lot of pieces to it.

Um, and it's important to remember that this is safety but from the perspective of land use patterns and land use planning, not safety from the point of view of how many fire trucks do we have. It's more are we have are we building fire stations in the correct locations? Are we staging our resources and organizing them within our land use patterns correctly? So, safety from natural and artificial hazards are addressed in several goals and policies.

RS2, RS3, goal R, go PS, which is for public safety. Evacuation routes are identified at the Cookanino County level and not at the city level. They're even bigger than the regional level. And so, Cookanino County maintains a map of those, but there are policies that address how we want them to be constructed and where we want them, what purpose we want them to serve.

There's also a requirement that I think is more detailed than people expect which is that the we must analyze if the water system can meet the peak water load supply within the city limits that is needed for fire flows and that is the correct word fire flows from the international fire code. Many people have said that should be water flows. It is not. Fireflow has a very specific definition.

Um so page 111-1 addresses that as does policy WR1 and the calculations of water adequacy described at chapter 8. There's some redundancy with circulation element in this element. Um it requires that there's minimum road width considerations. These are not directly identified in the plan. at 4-3 identifies the functional classifications of roads collectors and above and the engineering design standards and specifications have road widths for each of those categories.

So we did not repeat them because they could change over time and they have changed in the last 10 years because fire codes and best practices and nacto guides they change over time as science and research comes out about improving roadways. We have left that alone to map Bord Street. Geological hazards. This is another area of overlap with the growth element are identified on the significant natural resources map. We identify mapped and known geological faults which do have a role in safety.

We have found faults in our buildings. We have found areas where we've had to do seismic stabilization for buildings. That that is an ongoing issue that we identify in the plan. Um, policy map 4-5,4-7 and 4-8 meet all the requirements of the bicycling element. The energy element requires that we discuss energy efficiency of buildings and promote the production of renewable energy and that is covered in policies CA2, CA3 and E1.

And the neighborhood preservation and revitalization element requires that we encourage home ownership and improvement of housing conditions which is covered under the housing attainability and equity priority and also that we discuss how we are creating a functional and attractive built environment which is covered under both the guidelines in chapter 4 CR and the best practices for creating a sense of place. Those are the required findings.

Any questions on those two procedural and then required elements? I want to talk about a few additional considerations before I conclude um for consideration in how we are implementing the plan. So this is a graphic that if you've been to any previous meeting you've seen before but if you haven't this may be new to you. Um the regional plan has is the basis for a lot of other planning that the city and the county do but it does not replace or supersede those plans.

So for instance, one of the comments we received this week was a comment that someone was concerned about the construction of an intersection near their home. That is covered in the capital improvement program and how the design work goes on of that. That is not a regional plan level issue. If I were to put that item and comment in the blue box, that's where I would see it. I would put it blue left essentially.

So, I think this graphic will be helpful as you comm the commission are looking through comments. You read the comment. You may want to think what part of this tri of this pyramid really is does it belong in? Does it belong in the blue left, blue right, or is it something that really does belong in the brown level, maroon level of the regional plan? Um, another example that we might see is people might bring up an area specific comment that is about their neighborhood or their community.

The state requires that policies written in the regional plan be able to cover or in the general plan for the city really be able to cover the entire city. So policies that maybe were just for green law. We need green law needs its own policy. Someone might say, I don't think anyone was saying that tonight, but I'm using it as an example. um and they need to say these things.

They belong in a neighborhood plan and they don't meet the requirement of being applicable citywide that is required for all regional plan policies. There's some additional things to consider. The regional plan must define our major and minor MMA categories and provide a general sense of how different components of the plan may be used. So there's a lot of vagueness in state statute about what what goes in your plan. It says you have to have major and minor plan amendments.

You have to use your plan in specific kinds of findings. But then it doesn't tell you once you write your plan how to organize that. So a big part of our discussion tonight through this hearing process should be making sure we are satisfied with how this plan proposed us to do that. Because this is a unique joint plan.

There's often also some consideration that there may be some unique aspect as aspects of process for the city and county on which the plan may be a little vague or silent because there is code that covers it. And Melissa Shaw from Cookanino County is here if we have questions about any of the county only policies. So you'll find some policies say county only or city only and then some that are kind of written so that it can apply to both.

So let's be mindful of that when we are editing or looking at policies. And lastly, the city and county code need to be updated separately to implement the new plan. We won't be doing joint code updates. So looking at the action items or anything in that area.

Also be aware that on the 24th of September, the planning and zoning commission for Cookanino County is taking up their comprehensive plan which has additional action items in their implementation strategy that do not appear in this document. And again, Melissa can answer questions about that if they come up. So I want to go over quickly the major plan amendment categories are different than the current plan. So again, we'd like to draw your attention to them as a commission.

Um the current plan is has a kind of uses a boundary of the activity centers to determine whether a proposal should that proposes an increase or decrease in intensity and density is appropriate or not and whether it's a big deal, which is what I think of major plan amendments or not a big deal. that has changed in this draft um in that the urban growth boundary is the difference.

Now, if you're in the urban growth boundary, the plan makes decreasing your intensity or density a major plan amendment because we want to ensure efficiency of infrastructure, which is part of what we talked about in the required elements. And that if you are outside the urban growth boundary, increasing your intensity and density, which is not all in the county, some areas, city and areas of the county would be what triggers a major plan amendment.

expanding the urban growth boundary, which is that same boundary we talked about for major minor plan amendments, then also becomes a major amendment if it allows for you to increase, right? Because that's what ties category two and three are kind of they're not quite duplications because there may be times where you trigger three but not two, but they have a relationship to each other.

Also, um changing any area within the planning boundary to a corridor in a location that does not have access to an arterial or collector because that's the definition of a corridor is that you're on an arterial or collector would likewise trigger a major plan amendment. Decreasing areas of parks, open space, and federal lands, and working landscapes, and changing them to some other category would trigger a major plan amendment, and so would deleting any goal or policy.

I wanted to talk quickly about the urban growth boundary because I believe we have some comments about it today. Um the urban growth boundary and Lee can answer questions about this as well was established by the city in the early 1990s as part of our water policies and it was the area where we could serve water and sewer effectively. it was brought into the 2001 regal plan has been carried forward without any changes in this round to the actual line.

So that blue line on the map that you're looking at is the urban growth boundary. That map has not changed since 2014. The red line is the city limit. So you will see that there are some areas within the urban growth boundary that are outside the city limits and some areas in the city limit that are outside the urban growth boundary.

The other way we use the urban growth boundary is we think of it as the area within which the city would be willing to consider an annexation without a major plan amendment. So, properties such as um the Pine Dell area, Don Park, um the Cheshire neighborhood that's north of the city boundary are not in the urban growth boundary. And if anyone wanted to propose in it would have to be an individual property owner.

The city would not propose this wanted to propose they are annexed to the city, they would have to do a major plan amendment or an annexation would be considered. So, that is how this relates. So there's sometimes people think of areas that or that because we did a regional plan anywhere in the region might be subject to annexation. That is not what our plan says. Our plan says that if you are in the urban growth boundary, you may request annexation.

And that includes all the county islands and the area kind of around Quintana that is like a peninsula into the city. Any questions about that from the commission? Okay. The the other thing to consider is that the state requires that for plan conformance and zoning amendments that it shall conform with the land use element of the general plan and within low intensities and densities that it won't be construed in a manner.

It has to be done in a manner that furthers implementation of and is not contrary to goals and policies and applicable elements of the plan. This is important because our current plan has this flipped a little bit. It uses the land use to screen things and then it just looks at goals and policies when when we've brought forward zoning cases. But I wanted to bring up the state language because this is how the state intends us to use our plan.

And so we're trying to get the requirements in the plan of how it applies to be closer to the state statute with the revisions we're making in the proposed plan. The way we are doing that is we are saying that chapter four remember four not three um has four things in it that every zoning map amendment will consider the zoning categories and compatible zoning categories for each land use category.

There are guidelines in that chapter that are written in a development mindset like what that they would be written in a way that applies to development and not more generally to other policym category guidelines and then the transportation framework for roads and trails and bikeways and crosses. These are the things that you would get a a confined of conformance for any zoning map amendment.

If a regional plan amendment is required, which means you're not meeting those top four things for some reason, then we would in addition require that plan amendment cases, of which you see a couple every year, would have at least two plan priorities that are analyzed in substantially further. Remember, substantially further is that language from the state statute. and also that none of the other ones that they didn't analyze could be considered contrary.

So, we're trying to get this language queued up a little tighter with state requirements. Um, the text amendments to the zoning code um could still use all the desired densities and goals and policies and other kinds of policy decisions could still use the the plan content in a more flexible way, but this would be specific for zoning map amendments. So, here's my flowchart of how that works because some people like to see the words, some people like to see the picture.

Um, so the way if someone proposes a zoning map amendment, the first screening would be designate all these things in chapter 4. So, in that first blue big blue diamond, put chapter 4 in your brain. Um, if the answer is no, that's when staff would start talking about is a major or minor plan amendment required.

And then then we would do a further analysis of goals and policies because part of the assumption is if you are not conforming with our land use element which has been calibrated to our goals and policies then you need to show a reason why that is a acceptable proposal or this or why the commission and council should accept that proposal. So if you cannot make that finding that's when staff would recommend denial.

So we try and get people through a plan amendment first and if we can't then that's when you end up with denial. But if the answer to both of those boxes is yes, then you end up with a finding that's approval or approved of conditions. And that's how changing up this part of chapter 2 and how chapter 3 and four would be used going forward is important for your future decision- making as a commission.

Some other things to keep in mind going back to planning pyramid is thinking about chapter three and four. Chapter four is really about that bright side of the triangle. It's about development review. Chapter three is about both sides of the triangle.

The visioning side where we might talk about things in budgeting or other policym or when we're revising a master plan, service plan for the city, but also could be considered in text amendments, specific plans, annexations, and other kinds of decisions. Chapters 5 through 11 are fully about the left side of the triangle.

They do provide some analysis and justification for why chapter 4 and three are written the way they are, but they would not directly none of that language would be considered in a zoning map amendment or an annexation case. They'reformational primarily in chapters 5 through 11. So useful for staff, useful for people who pick up the plan in the future and think, what did they mean or why did they set this policy? But nothing in chapter 5 or 11 set policy.

We need to provide information so people can understand policies. All right, that's it on content. We'd like to talk a little about how we are going to help you as a commission successfully made through the 130 individual action items that have been suggested in the 18 comments you received so far and any other things that come up. verbal public comment and any other things that you want to bring up here as part of the meetings.

The first thing we have is staff's already started preparing a an ARA. Ara is only for grammar, spelling and non-s substantive corrections. So we will not put anything on the aata that is substantive. A good example is the word appropriate. the I and the A were flipped in a place or you know a comma is missing from this list in this sentence. They're very very simple changes.

You have been provided one as part of your packet but Elsa and Lauren over here at the table for my staff, our um senior planner and our associate planner have a live umbrella that they can edit as we are discussing things and we can pull it up and look at it at the end to make sure it's complete. Another thing we are building in the background and we'll pull up on the screen as we need to is a document called a holding space.

So your holding space is where you've read these comments and you can say I'd like to have further discussion and consider for a future condition of approval comments by from such and such letter and this kind of thing and Elsa and Lauren will build that in the background and then we can pull it up and go through it systematically either by page number or topic or however you would like it sorted. And lastly, we we are going to ask you to finalize this list at the next hearing, so not tonight.

And then adopt it through your motion as a condition. Staff will then if we can do that by the 24th, if we don't have to go an extra meeting, then staff will try and prepare a version that is an original version that you saw at the beginning of this process and an updated version with your changes for council. That is due to council by October 1st. So I would have less than a week to prepare that.

So if there's too many changes or if um we have to continue to October 2nd then I won't be we won't be able to prepare that additional material. So your staff recommended motion in your packet is a little different the one on this slide and I will update the packet before the next meeting but it is that staff recommends planning zoning forward the request the city council for adoption of plan and submit the proposed update to voters for ratification.

We recommend the following conditions that you updated update the plan for the attached arata which will be the final arata that you look at on the 24th and give us the thumbs up on and then make changes to the plan as listed in the conditions of approval document prepared and reviewed during the hearing. So that holding space will start to become your conditions of approval. Staff will be over there typing and editing and then you will be able to say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no down the list.

That's helpful. If anyone who is here tonight, um I know everyone gets on here and we have 210 pages of content that you might be interested in talking about and you only have three minutes. That is not the only way you can participate. We are continuing to accept online written comments.

So if you have a great book report in your heart and spirit, I don't know which ones of you do, but yeah, someone has a great book report in their heart and spirit, wants to read it, wants to provide more detailed comments, they can podium, you can scan this QR code or you can email regional plan 45 comments at flagstaff.gov. It is also on the postcard that Lauren has over there on the table if you're here in person.

Um, and that will give us the we will continue to get those comments through the 24th. We actually will continue to get them all the way till October 9th and I will keep packaging them and attaching them and making sure everyone's getting them as we move forward. Any questions for me before the discussion? If you get those comments after the 24th and we're not having another meeting before council meeting, then those comments would go to council as considerations. Correct.

That you would still as members of the planning and zoning commission be copied on them. So you could see if there are new comments coming in after your recommendation, but your recommendation of approval uh your approval and and associated conditions would stand and then any new requests or comments would get considered after council. So we would build like a similar table for council to work through at that time. Thank you. We got a letter today from the open space commission.

Is that considered public comment as well? Yes, if you got a letter today. I was not able to upload it to a packet or anything like that because we the everything has to be finalized 24 hours in advance of the meeting. But I will bring that forward for the 24th. So there will be a cut off date there too where I have to send you guys a packet the week before and so we'll we'll keep bringing them forward as quickly as we can and you should all be copied on them.

If someone sent one though maybe during this meeting you might not look at it till tomorrow or maybe you would. First question is um this presentation would you be able to post it so that we have it to refer to as we're continuing to study between now and the next month? Yes, it will be part of your minutes. It will also be it can also or it can be attached to your minutes but I can also attach it to the packet for the next meeting. That would be helpful.

And then I just wanted to tag on to what Commissioner Sharp asked about um you know we we got two letters. This one was from things like feature and open space that didn't make it into you know the summary of comments. So when comments like that come in or are we do we need to wait till they become part of public record or can they be discussed at if we get to the point of discussion today can they be discussed or because the greater public hasn't seen them yet. Is that a problem?

they can be discussed because they will be published again and made available as part of the minutes packet and even I know some of us uh replied as public citizens you know and we we were instructed to put our AA comments and you know our general comments so like little things like Aata things that we caught those weren't on your ATA list did they just not make it or maybe that ara list was finalized almost a month ago okay So, I can't I couldn't add things to it yet.

You you need to discuss them tonight. So, anything even if a commissioner sent it in and really commissioner should not be using the distribution email as stated at the last meeting, you should be sending them to Alex, we will make sure they are they are ready to go when you bring them up. Um, but we want to make sure all that stays here and that there's not an accidental like reply to those.

Um, so the the question of, you know, are if you commented like right now, then we would probably not pull it up right this second, but if you commented earlier today, um, Elsa has already kind of got those at the ready up on the screen if someone wants to discuss them and she's kind of drafted how maybe we would want to move them over um, in the spreadsheet for the holding space. So we we are prepared with anything that was received before about 2:30 today. So then I just wanted to clarify.

So the large challenge had 383 comments that those were comments based on the previous version of the regional plan before the rewrite. Correct. There were 2,000 public comments received during the 60-day public review. And a very long spreadsheet we gave you was every single one of those comments and how we addressed it. Okay. says those are not things that we are necessarily discussing.

We're discussing what the recent comments are on the latest version which were those basically two files of comments. If you have a question about how something transitioned from the 60-day public draft to this draft, then that's that is part of something you can discuss tonight. No, that was I just wanted to make sure that we were only looking what we needed to look at.

Yeah, there was one commission this the commission for inclusion and adaptive living which provided a comment letter in December that asked you to please consider their comment letter and anything that's not yet been incorporated as part of your discussion. I I think I forwarded that request from their chair to you. So would we be the ones responsible to have to cross reference what did get addressed in the rewrite versus what's remaining? Yes.

There was another I think comment maybe by a private citizen that also summarized some of that. I guess that's something that we would have to sort of sip through. Yes, staff can help. We have an Excel version of that long PDF table. I'm sorry I can't upload Excel into your agenda quick platform. Um but we can sort and we can look for things for you. Um that's why we have two ready enabled planners to like be fast lookups to help your conversation stay on track. Thank you.

Any other questions or comments? I got a question. All right. You'll Is that CJ? Thank you. It is. Okay. CJ, um I just had a question about um the traffic coming in from Fort Valley since you were talking about the urban growth boundary and how to increase that hadn't been increased since 2016 was my understanding and that if people wanted to have the services they would have to request to be annexed. But what about the traffic coming through from those areas outside?

Is that considered anywhere? Thank you, council. I'm sorry. Thank you, Commissioner Luki. Um, the 180 corridor study was completed in 2020 by the Arizona Department of Transportation. US 180 is an Arizona Department of Transportation route. Um, there's not additional consideration in the regional plan because there is a definitive buildout.

That plan also considered alternative routes and for the third time in in addition to the I think we said we spent $500,000 studying alternative routes to 180 in the last 20 years and all of them have said there is no financially feasible alternative route to 180 which was a finding that was made and included in the US 180 corridor study. That is an Arizona Department of Transportation document.

So it is really outside the scope of the plan other than how the built environment around that road may interact with it. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Thank you. You is the present are you done with your audience? Yes, the presentation is concluded. So, um I think step two was um discussion for all of you and and one of the things you can discuss is if some of these written comments that you saw, you want to put them in the holding space.

Um Elsa, how many were Elsa went through all of the comments over the last few days, our associate planner, and she pulled out all of the actual action items like things people said you should change this, the plan should talk about this. How many are there? for consideration. You can just tell me. I'll repeat it. 30 or so. Yeah, there about 130 from those 18 comments.

So, rather than copy all of them over, I think it is up to all of you if you want to flag some of them to be pulled forward in advance of the rest of your conversation. All right. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for your great presentation again. Um so we are open to discussion from commissioners and I don't know how we want to start to go about that but if anybody has initial discussion yeah don't think I was quite ready prepare prepared for this. I thought we were going to do public comment first.

um and then move things to holding space. But if you want us to start with the written comments, um yeah, I still don't feel 100% prepared to discuss the nitty-gritty details of each, but there's certainly ones that came through that I would like to see elevated to holding space. I I agree with that, Council Member Norton. I would encourage you just to identify these are the ones I want in the holding space and not have a long discussion of them until after you hear public comment.

but it would help um us prepare the spreadsheet and make sure we know we can organize it so it's ready for you when public comments concluded. Okay. Um want me to just list off the top of my head what I recall. Um I would like to see Friends of Flagstaff futures letter put into the holding space. I would like to see the letter from Open Space Commission put in the holding space. I would like to see the comment from Ian Sharp as a citizen put in the holding space.

Um I do want to talk about adaptive living inclusivity. I just don't know how to tackle that yet, but I do think that's worth a discussion at a higher level. Um so can I ask for my own? As a private citizen, I would like to I would like to have my comments uh put in. Um, those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head right now. I may have others that after I do a little further review or based on public comment. Anybody else? I think that's good for now. Okay.

So, we're not going to go into a full discussion of that, but we're going to put those in the holding space at this time. So, that was F3, Ann and Mary Norton, open spaces letter, and adaptive living letter. Is that the five that I wrote down? Can I ask for clarification? Sure. Commissioner Norton, do you just want accessibility and inclusion as a broad topic in the holding space for now, or do you want any I think there were two or three, right? It adds up to a big portion of the list.

So, so I don't really I'd have to look I'd have to read them again to know, but let's let's just start then by putting something broad in the holding space so that we can add detail when you're ready. That would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any other discussion?

I have a whole lot of questions of my to ask and I don't know if it's best to let people in the audience go ahead and have their say because they're here or hold them or should I ask the questions now or should I ask them next what I put on the slide previously was any clarifying questions. So if you if you want to ask some questions now because you think it'd be beneficial for everyone to hear before the public comment starts um that would be fine.

But I'll have opportunity later to ask questions as well. I'll hold my breath for now. Anyone else have any comments or question? Okay. Yes, because I teams. Um, all right. Then I think we're open to public comments. And I want to remind everybody a couple of things that we started off with was that if you're having side discussions, for those of you who came late, the audio was picking up everything.

So, you probably want to go out in the lobby area for side discussions because you may be picked up on something may pick you up on a side discussion. So, I'm just reminding you of that. I'm also reminding you when you do come to the podium and you should have if you want to make a comment you should fill out a card to make out a comment but when you come to the podium if you could please give your name and address for the record and then you have three minutes to speak.

Um, if we have questions, um, because people are taking copious notes and our note takers may need you to slow down, we'll give you that extra little bit of time for the noteakers to catch up with you. All right. So, um, first we have sought best. If you'll please come to the podium again, give your name and address. Madam Chair, Commissioner Best 3935 Paradise here. Housing and density are the big issues in this document. As you know, why do people come here and want a house?

Because of the environment most statement. The environment is the land forms, the animals, the plants on the land forms. If we have a question about animals, we make a single phone call. The Arizona Game and Fish, they've got generations of data research. They keep their data, many professionals bringing it all together. And you've all seen wildlife and you've been around a while, so you know how good they are. In the world of plants, we don't have anything close to that.

Um, the concept of invasive weeds is well represented here. We've got a problem. So far, it is not overwhelming. It is kind of a nuisance level. If we let it go to landscape scale, it is overwhelming and we have no answer for it. And it can change everything.

Um on the other side we have the plants that we want and as we increase density um we're going to look more like a city and uh I just heard a strong town um presentation through uh from the future and one of the things it was a great presentation about yeah density uh more for economics than anything else in this part of the culture. Every slide was ugly. I mean, people want to get out of town and live in the suburbs because it's green and beautiful.

And how do we make things green and beautiful through plants? We need somebody strongly representing the positive side of plants and coordinating with the negative side of plants. Uh the negative side of of plants, the best way to defeat invasive species is a healthy system of native plants. That's how it works. When we blade something and remove the native plants, we get the bad guys.

What I propose to both attorney and city and I'm a commissioner um county is a single position that would represent plants, a joint position. Uh who's five times? We only got a minute. I got 21 seconds. Okay. So to support that, I would like to broaden these a couple of things here to kind of stick good plants in with the bad plants. And this is not a big change. RS7 uh prevent inventory, treat and remove invasive plant species and preserve native plant communities dot dot dot.

So I'm sticking good guys and bad guys together even though the emphasis on the bad guys. The good guys are part of the selection. And on uh page So that's on page you got it 314 on page 712. So you've gone over time. Thank you. One more thing. On page 712 ask you to write this in. Oh I will definitely saw that but I'm working on at the same time. So I I understand but we have three minutes so I need to let the next All right. I will send these into you then. Thank you. Thank you.

The next person um to speak is Sean Goliger. I hope I pronounced that right. Close enough. And again, you have um he's speaking on a as on behalf of a group of 10 or more. Does that give him five minutes? Don't worry about it. I can still do it at three. Okay. If you'll I'll keep it short and sweet. State your name and address. Call her. Sean D. 813 West Koi Drive, 86005.

And basically what I'm concerned with mostly is with the housing and the regulations for infrastructure would be still following the carbon neutrality plan which has now been funded and I I've already sent in multiple articles as well as a four-page thing with alternatives on the energy and water policy plans.

They actually have different policies for like say for example you can start instead of having recycled water you can start looking at primary water also for energy instead of use renewables we got a better renewable right here called volcanic energy there's a volcano right here in a lava field we can also start going back to actually natural gas instead of total electricity since our power grid will not work with that extra load unless we decide to build more nuclear power plants around here or bring back say maybe the old coal fire generator plants and convert them to natural gas which is a lot cleaner.

Furthermore, uh some of the other renewables that we do have, we also for we need to look at doing reclamation because most of the materials that are made out of this stuff are highly toxic and you cannot just bury it and hope that it's not going to leak into our water supply or into our food supply. And okay, what what was the other part?

Oh yes, the accessibility part I found kind of odd when she mentioned it slow needs to have inclusivity that has some negative connotations and political environment and I think that might actually uh have some issues legally later on down the road. Further uh I basically just say that we need to go and a lot of this carbon neutrality part we need to scrap it and just go back to the drawing board. I'd be willing to actually u bring in more suggestions and everything like I already have.

If you have any other questions, I'm easily reached. Thank you. Thank you. And it's also it's not it's Flagstaff. It was Flagstaff County. I'm sorry. Okay. Next, we'll ask um Michael William Mart come forward and again state your name and address for the record, please. William Martin, as the Coast Guard said below this line, you don't. It's optional. I live in the area. My zip code is 861 86003. Did you give your address? Give your post office box. Will that do for you?

Usually we need a physical address so that we know you're in the city. It says it's optional on the form. I'm taking you. We're asking you it's optional on the form. We're asking then change your form. are asking you to give it when you speak. So that's fine. Go ahead. Okay, I can go ahead. Yes, please go ahead. It's it's optional. You're fine. Thank you. I a related issue.

The the city seems to be wanting to make itself bigger and I notice you have a host of uh county islands in the middle of it. What's the logic of those county islands and and what is the criterion of the county islands? So, that's a question I'm putting to you. Seems to me kind of silly that you have, but that's not a big So, I'd like you to fill me in on that as you can. Thank you. Would you like staff to answer Yes. the question of why there are county islands? Yes. Yeah.

So there are the city does not initiate um annexation cases against property owner wishes. So property owners who have who live within county islands have just not requested to be annexed. As long as a county island is within the urban growth boundary, it is eligible for consideration with annexation. of that is sometimes more detailed than that general description. Like is the infrastructure something the city is going to take over or is a homeowners association going to manage it?

Those sort of things are um maybe even a district that might be created to support an annexation. Those are questions that are worked out on a case-byase basis. But those county islands exist for a number of reasons. Some of them simply being property owner preference to be in the county versus the city. Thank you, Sarah. Do any commissioners have any questions about that? All right, we will move on to Diane M. Martin and please state your name and address for the record.

Diane Martin, 5530 trail. I wasn't here at the last meeting, but I got some information secondhand which I'm concerned about. Um, does your plan consider annexation of Timberline Fernwood and Don Clark for future annex annexation? And what if if that's correct, what impact will have on our property taxes? And now we have limited sizes like one acre and two and a half acres on the properties. Will that affect the change of the size of properties being built out there?

Again, Sarah, I'll reflect to you. Um, Lauren, could you pull up the presentation in the urban growth boundary slide again? Just give us a moment. I think the visual aid will help. Can't see it from here. There we go. So it is incorrect and this the information discussed it was not generated by the city. It was someone else who mis who had not read this part of the plan.

But anywhere that is outside the blue line um is not eligible for the city to consider for annexation without a major plan amendment. So that means that there is almost an additional 6 months to a year of process that it would take to do that. It can be requested. It is not in the city's plans. The plan does not support that.

That's what the amendment process does is basically if someone says my application requires a plan amendment, it means that it was not a foreseen land use or infrastructure change at the time the plan was adopted. So no, there is no plans and the plan does not support annexing Timberline, Fernwood or Don Park. Those are all outside the urban growth factory.

And just to state for the record, other county areas that you would that are outside that urban growth or the urban grow growth boundary would be um Pineell is outside the urban growth boundary to the south as is Mountaineer and Pacina which are not contiguous to the city. Um the neighbor part of the Cheshure neighborhood and in um Valley are both outside as well as Belmont and some of the areas on East 66 and some of the western 66 and some other areas on the I 180 border.

Yes, 180 plus the city limits is not considered for annexation. Okay. Well, at least not not supported by the plan. So those areas are not supported by the plan to be annexed into the city. There is no plan for that. Um and so those people living in those neighborhoods that you just mentioned, Fernwood, Don Park, um Wildcat, Log Ranch, all of those all those areas are not being considered to be annexed as part of this plan. Okay.

the citizens there wanted to be annexed, it would be something that they would have to bring forward and it would be a major plan amendment. That is correct. Thank you. All right. Uh Russell Randall, again, if you'll state your name and address. Thank you, Sarah. Hi, I'm Russell Randall. I live at 1199 West Koi here in Flagstaff. Um chair, commissioners, um today I represent barrier free flag staff. Barrier free flag staff is a disability advocacy group.

We have about 20 members that cut across the ability and disability field. Um I also represent the community practice transition team. It's about 35 members uh largely um all members who are professionals in the field of disabilities. Um people can't sorry as I present today I would first like to congratulate Sarah and her team for um really including a lot more things with regards to accessibility inclusion and universal design in this plan and we're thrilled to see those things included.

Um we're also very excited to see things like um sense of place and considering how sense of place can be made available for folks with disabilities. Very important issue of the disability community. Um and and really a lot of discussion about universal design as well. Um I've sent in a lot of comments. Uh I submitted a lot of comments. Um but we do have some suggestion for improvement.

We would like to see more uh mentions of accessibility inclusion and and um universal design in the action part of the plan. Um it's easy to kind of talk about doing a sense of place, but we would like to see more actions taken to ensure that that sense of place actually could occur. Um, as I discussed last time, we have about 25 masks which are not accessible to folks with color blindness. Perhaps that could be rectified.

Um, we have a concern there is no discussion really no discussion at all of accessibility or inclusivity and chapter 5 social and economic systems. Um, specifically with housing, we would like to see some more discussion about the availability of 88 light housing. um housings that housing that includes accommodation mobility challenges. Um we're thrilled the glossery is much improved. A lot of discussion about disability related terms in in the glossery. We would like to see a few more perhaps.

Um and um we have a concern there's no discussion of increasing accessibility, increasing ADA compliance and portions of the Flagstaff urban trial system. um to remember that folks with mobility challenges also like to get out in nature. They also like to use Flagstaff urban trail and uh that's kind of a complicated thing. Martin in I have talked about that a lot. We've actually walked those trails together about where the trails could be made more accessible.

So we would like to see more mention of that especially in the action part of the plan. And then there's no discussion whatsoever with regards to therapeutic recreation um and actually providing recreation that is therapeutic and accommodating for folks with disabilities. Uh but again in summary uh we congratulate Sarah and her team for really including a lot of these things. Love to see a bit more. I'd like to call up James Keane again.

If you'll state your name and address for the record, Madam Chairman, Commissioners, so you need to speak louder and right to the mic. Is this better? Thank you. Uh James Ke 1234 North Copeland Lane, Flagstaff 804604. My understanding coming to the meeting tonight was that there would be consideration of annex annexing Don Park, Timberline, and those areas. That clearly isn't the case. However, I would like to make one suggestion uh for the future in looking at the plan.

I've looked over some of the plan, read through part of it. Um, but I also over the last two or three years have been uh reading various names on the internet. We had had property in Fort Valley since about 1976 and they didn't quite grow up the way we liked it. The corridor is the earlier mission that is very very busy. So we sold that property in 22 and bought this timberline property. in looking at this um in and having been engaged in building and so forth.

The one thing I see that is sort of missing is maybe more practical implementation of policies. Um or just give you an example the uh county does not have an engineer in the building department. So you have to go outside of that get engineering and stamp drawings.

I'm wondering how this might this sort of uh annexation may affect the the additional needs of the for example the building department in the city of Flagstaff whether they would they have an engineer or not or how it would delay permits and so forth because of the additional needs of the population of the various property holders.

That's just one example uh that that in the sense of an implementation of the policies once things are actually annexed and I'm not sure if that's in included in your skull here but that comment. Did you have a question?

I don't know if Sarah wants to address that about how that would Yeah, that's all I was I would have had more if in fact timberline or that area would be included in this annexation, but I think it's just a suggestion that we improve the or at least comment on how implementation of the policies affect the property orders or particular in that there are particular needs supply of water, supply of electricity. um working with the building departments for permits and and so on and so forth.

Thank you very much. Um Madam Chair, I could ask um Melissa Shaw from the county if maybe she could address those comments before calling up the next person. My phone a friend option. Thank you. Good evening, commissioners, and good evening. Um, I would like to I'm Melissa Shaw and just to um I guess clarify again the um the area of building parks Timberline Burnwood is not proposed to be annexed or supported to be annexed by the uh regional plan.

Um, so in terms of providing engineering review for any building permits or applications like that, the county does have an engineer on staff in our community development department who regularly reviews plans that need engineer review. So I hope that answers your question about um implementation of the regional plan policies. Um the the regional plan policies are also supported and supplemented by the county's comprehensive plan and also the donating park timberline area plan.

So there are more specific planning documents that are related directly to that community and the county itself. Maybe if you have a further question we can follow up later after the meeting. I was hoping that answered your question for you. Not fully. Okay. So, if you will meet, you can meet after the meeting's over. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Um Michelle James representing F3. Close. We're here. My name is Michelle James. I'm the executive director of Friends of Flair's Future.

Um I live at 713 West Grand Canyon. FQ has been actively involved in the regional planning process, serving on the technical advisory committee and later appointed to the community regional plan committee. In addition, we've engaged often with multiple city staff to discuss our concerns and recommendations regarding the 60-day draft and the public hearing draft of the regional plan.

We support the plan's core and complimentary priorities and would like to see these six priorities treated in a truly balanced manner despite the two tiered nature of their presentation in the plan. Addressing Flagstaff's declared emergencies of housing affordability and climate action are important. However, we must also acknowledge that our city cannot function without the complimentary uh complimentary I just lost my spot. Excuse me. Um priorities as well.

The planning plan that we dominated by housing density concerns that result in our dep prioritization of climate action and the four complimentary actions priorities, excuse me. FCubed has sent written comments to PNZ with recommendations of ways to strengthen and clarify the plan. I sent those very late last night. So I don't have time here today to review all of them, but I would like to focus on two of our recommendations.

strengthening the language that limits water provision to inside the urban growth boundary and best practices for creating a sense of place. We recommend that the plan language be modified to make it clear that any proposal to provide water for any reason outside the urban growth boundary will require a major plan amendment. The current language indicates such an amendment would only be required if increase in density.

relatedly strengthen the guidelines for all land use categories to clarify that the statement development requiring drinking water and sewer will be located within the urban growth boundary that was a quoted applies to any proposal that requires a development application whether it's for a new development or for an existing development or home requesting water and sewer services.

We have struggled with the limiting nature of the elements outlined in the best practices for creating a sense of place. The elements needed to retain or create what is essentially community character or community identity need to be expanded to include additional important characteristics that are found in the Flagstaff historic downtown and adjacent older neighborhoods. These additional important considerations are provided in detail in our written comments.

Thank you for your efforts reviewing this plan. Thank you. Next up to to speak is Jacqueline Thomas. Again, if you will state your name and address for the record. Thank you. Good afternoon, chair, vice chair, and commissioners. I'm Jacqueline Thomas, 25 West Silver Spruce, and I'm here today on behalf of the Open Space Commission to share our recommended revisions to the draft regional land use plan 2045.

The Open Spaces Commission has been keenly interested and involved in development of the regional plan throughout the process. We gratefully received presentations from comprehensive and neighborhood planning staff, provided input from an open space perspective, received citizen comments, and formally reviewed and submitted a recommendation revision letter during the last public comment period in December.

In short, we've worked hard to stay informed and engaged in the process and recently have undertaken review of the current revised plan. Before submitting these comments, the commission again had discussions with city planning staff to gather their insights and gain a deeper understanding of their perspective. We have now developed a set of recommendations that we believe are crucial for ensuring the document is both usable and representative of the community's needs.

We created a recommendation letter with 18 points for your consideration that has been emailed.

I assure you that the commission spent ample time del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del deliberating these points and narrowing down their comments to those that would be the most impactful to be respective over time I'll share the commission's main points and I'm happy to address any questions you may have our first significant point is about integration currently open space isn't integrated into the plan in a way that aligns with the core priorities of housing and climate for example the plan calls housing and climate non-negotiable objectives this indicates that the plan completely Complimentary priorities will only be considered if the first core priorities are met.

Then only then will the complimentary priorities be considered. Second, the policy themselves need balance. Policy OS22 is a good example. As this policy is written, it sounds like open space will only be considered where development can't happen. We're recommending revision to update that policy that so that open space is a part of the design. Third, the regional plan needs to guide development so it helps deliver the things that the community values.

We need to ensure that projects include parks, trails, and access points and open spaces. We made some recommendations that are specific to this point, particularly mapping updates that pertain to open space needs for the community. For instance, we suggested adding clarifications to better communicate open space needs. And finally, I want to highlight policy map fix recommendation number eight in the letter.

We're requesting a correction to the future growth illustration maps to prevent the loss of top priority trail corridor between the Leotaa Flag Water Reclamation Plant and Forest Service land. This is an important wildlife corridor, a community connection, and a way to make sure neighborhoods can reach public lands. Along this corridor, a suburban center which includes medium to high intensity of people, residencies, jobs, and activities is currently identified.

developmental developmental goals for this zoning type may not support this long-standing trail corridor are a priority. We appreciate your time and thank you for recognizing the commission's hard work. Yes. Thank you very much. You must have rehearsed that to get it. Yeah, we've been working on this a long time. So, thank you. That was that was great. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Next on the agenda is Mike Pobjoy. Again, please state your name and address for the record.

Hello, my name is Mike Bojoy. Thanks for your consideration this evening. My address is 3030 Westport Hills Drive 86 001. I really wanted to focus on one thing contained in the regional plan which is the regional trails plan in particular. So there's a map I forget which uh number the map is but my understanding is that that trails plan came from excuse me a regional trail strategy that was developed a few years ago.

And one thing I'd like to highlight is um a concern about the inclusion of unauthorized trails in that current map in the plan. The vast majority of the trails in the trails plan are on Forest Service land but have not been approved by the Forest Service. In addition, these unauthorized trails were not on in the trail strategy that the current plan is pulling from. So, I'd just like to highlight a few concerns. Um, this includes trails in sensitive wildlife habitat.

It also includes some unauthorized trails that have been closed by an NEPA decision by the Forest Service, especially in the Mount Elden tri hills area. And it also includes unauthorized trails on land owned by the Navajo Nations in the Mount Elden dry lake hills area. So my request would be that the map be updated to remove unauthorized trails from the regional trails plan um that are currently shown uh on the map in the plan. Thanks for your inspiration. Thank you very much.

Next is Raquel Simua. Please state your name and address for the record. Would you like to I'm sorry if I is it Rachel. Sorry. That's okay. It's Rachel Simonda. I want to say good evening chair, madam chairperson, vice chair, and commissioners. Um, I am here um as a private citizen and I just have two things I'd like to bring to your attention. Uh, in the spirit of inclusivity for differently aabled citizens, the maps are incredibly hard to see. Uh, we've got some visually disabled people.

Uh, and I've heard from them that they're very hard to understand. I don't know what the fix to that would be, but I think in a spirit of inclusivity, it needs to be considered. Um the other thing is and this is also in the spirit of inclusivity having your closed captions on because when I attend next time I will be on Zoom and closed captioning helps because I am heart of hearing. Uh so the closed captioning would help.

And then finally I just want to give a shout out to you guys because this is not an easy job. I know, but I think that you guys have been doing a really good job on parts of the foot systems and as somebody who is a mobility user, I just have to say Buffalo Park, I don't know if you guys were important with that, but um Martin really hit it out of the park with that. Uh the other thing is right here along Fourth Street, um amazing.

Three bicycles can pass me and we don't all have to crowd over to one side or the other. So, really good job on portions of it. Now, I did get stuck on a portion of Sandy Canyon. I'm sure you all know where that is, but um I got stuck on that and had to call I'd call Power Rangers. So, I just wanted to give a big shout out to this commission because I do believe you guys are doing some really important work and sometimes don't get acknowledged enough. So, thank you. Thank you.

Well, I don't know that that's part of our important work, but part of other city commissions important work. Um, so hopefully the city will let those commissioners know that you thank them for that. Also, I have to can I say I agree on the maps. I am not yet visually challenged, but it's still I'm challenged by the brain and the colors on the maps and things. So it's it's very hard for me to distinguish. So I I also agree with that. So any else wants to add anything?

I'll hear I'm a person who produces maps and I've had clients ask me to make them more accessible for visually impaired. It's extremely difficult. It's it is very difficult. So I I want to applaud those who have made the maps. I see both sides of it, but it it could be very challenging to convey that information in grayscale or shades of olive or yellow, it could be very difficult. Thank you for sharing that. Yes.

Um I I do want to say and I said it at the last meeting that because of that difficulty with a print map, um we can certainly run it back through the the tools that we have. Um, but yes, there's when that once you get past six colors on a map, it it's really impossible to make it fully accessible at the scale that we are using these maps at.

However, when we we have a a draft interactive map platform posted to the website, which we hope once the maps are finalized and adopted by council, it'll be put to the ballot. The GIS staff has said they would create some accessible version and layers that can be turned in and on and off that are more highlighted to texture and other things.

It's just a limitation of once when you're producing a document versus what we are able to do um with the ArcGIS line environment and and we will use the tools available so that there is a fully accessible version or and and for color blindness accessible looks different depending on the kind of color blindness you have but we can set it up that way which was not something we could do 10 years ago very easily. Thank you very much.

So hopefully those updates will come about when the when it this gets approved and then GIS makes those um maps more accessible before others. Thank you Sarah. Next I have a comment by Taylor and pronounce that wrong. I apologize but if you'll give your name and address for the record please. All right. Uh, my name is Taylor Sery. I live at 2252 Easter Drive.

Um, I really only have one kind of specific question of since this is a pretty long-term regional plan, I'm hoping that there's nothing that would necessarily block uh the possibility of light rail or passenger rail expansion in the future. I know that's really iffy because it usually requires federal funding, which right now, but you know, who knows what will happen in the next 20 years.

So that's really um the only question I have for the outlook of you know has that been considered and you know do you know the answer to that of the regional plan not necessarily supporting it but not getting in the way either Sarah I will defer to you. Sure I can I can answer that question. So for passenger rail, the plan does have a goal of supporting passenger rail and mode shift at our passenger rail hub in the downtown. There's only one in town. Um the I did go back to Mountain Line.

That comment was provided as part of the 60-day public review and so I showed it to Mountain Line, our local transit agency. We are as a city just big enough and just dense enough to support bus rapid transit which is a a level of transit speed that is about providing um efficiencies for buses on the roadways. But you have to have a certain density and intensity to support light rail um far beyond what our plan supports. And so the plan is not there. And also you have to have some proximity.

So the spacing out of our region means that we would need a bigger area than just Flag Staff to make that work. Um and also we would have trouble going north to south. There were many failed historic railroads that tried to get up the rim over the course of the last two centuries. Um, and so it's uh there are some geographic barriers to like a light rail to Phoenix or and the Verie Valley for instance.

Um, and then there are some density and intensity barriers um that the plan does support increasing density intensity but maybe not to the scale that might be needed. So that is a beyond the probably beyond the 20 years that the plan has in it. If passenger rail, highspeed passenger rail, passenger rail improvements were proposed through the region, the plan would support those. Thank you. Hopefully that answers your question on that. I know at a former meeting I talked about uh vehicles.

I would support light rail as well. But anyhow, we transfusion technology is changing rapidly. It is changing rapidly and that may mean amendments to the regional plan if that occurs. So, and I think there could be amendments to those items if that were to occur. Thank you, Charity. Lee, if you'll state your name and address for the record. Thank you. ers Terry Lee with Cast Homes, 1385 University Avenue. I sent you an email late this afternoon.

I did I printed it, but I was reading through it and I realized I had a typo. So, I'm going to fix that and resend it, but I just want to not go through the whole thing, but just kind of call out a couple um key points. One of the things that I saw when I was reading through the plan was there wasn't an implementation plan. And one of the other speakers had mentioned this too, but I think what I'm coming at it is you have your goals and you have your policies, but how are you going to do this?

So, if you had a an implementation plan that was supported with um actual specific things that staff could achieve within the next year, 10 years. I think that would be really um great to see. Another thing, again, I'm going to just mention the maps. Um, I couldn't tell on some of the properties what color they were, and maybe that's my own personal issue, but specifically the shark bite to me looked like it was between rural neighborhood or suburban corridor. So, I wasn't 100% sure on that.

I was thinking it was suburban corridor, but I couldn't tell. And then um dwelling units. I did find it after I looked again, but I I would like to say that suburban neighborhood um we would promote um there's a rank from 2 to 29, not a minimum at five. So for suburban neighborhood, um I have some suggestions for some word smithing, which I'll again send it to you and fix my my error. Um, I did have a question on public facilities and infrastructure bullet number two.

I didn't understand what they were really saying there. So maybe staff can explain that. Natural resources number three suggesting to remove it all together. This is bullet point number three. I don't understand why we're suggesting to follow um Arizona State Mining Inspection Aggregate Protection Guidance. So I'd like an explanation there. policy maps four through three and four through four.

They show um roads on Juniper Point and um Canyon Del Juniper Point specifically and Canyon Del Rio that should be um removed or they should be um downgraded to minor collectors. Our plan hasn't yet determined if they're major collectors. So, I'd like staff to look at that. And also um uh I think I'm almost out of time. Submitts of trails across the Rio should match current development plans that we've recently submitted.

And then I would also add that on policy maps 4 through six that you include um disclaimer language also for private properties, not just only specific to the um state. Thank you. Thank you. Sarah, do you want to address any of that or just take that as comment? Is there a part of it you'd like clarification on? I can't remember. So, I think I'll let me uh I do have uh Miss Lee's uh written comment. Hang on just a second. I wish you went over it briefly, but so I can pull up the details.

I think that addressing to her about the imp implementation plan that it's um Oh yes. So chapters chapters 5 through 11 basically are our implementation plan. They have action items in each chapter. Um you know you have to organize things a certain way in the document because you're trying to get information across. It's not uncommon that we create guides and shorthand documents.

So I think um pulling all the action items or reorganizing them instead of by chapter in a different way in some kind of future document after adoption so that there's another way to look at them or understand them um is certainly a reasonable thing for staff to do as an additional product in the future. Um but there is an action plan. Chapters 5 through 11 have that.

One other thing I would I would address because it's very technical and weird is the um inspector's aggregate protection guidance. The state statute requires So you're going to go right into the legal findings. The state statute requires that the city include a map of existing aggregate mineral sources known in the city. And then it says we should have some guidance for it. We that requirement existed in 2012, but we didn't put anything in the current plan.

So, we really had to do that from scratch. So, one of my interns went and did research on what every other plan that he could find did about materials. And it was not very consistent or easy to understand. And so we called the state mining inspector who is who is referenced and the basically the experts on aggregate protection and said what do you recommend? And they said well at the time that that legislation existed was put in place we didn't have any guidance put out for aggate protection.

So everyone was making up their own way. Their recommendation to staff was that we just include a reference to their guidance. their guidance is written to be implemented a certain way, but it certainly has they felt it was flexible enough to be um understood for like what it was recommending in period.

They kind of have a method they recommend you implement it with the zoning code amendment, but they said even if we chose not to do that, they felt we could use the guidance in it if we had a discretionary case. So if we delete that, we might be out we might have to have an e session to determine if we would be out of conformance with the findings required under the state statute.

So I don't I don't know the answer to that, but if you would like more detail on it, we could prepare something for the 24th. Your explanation is good. So I don't but I don't know about other commissioners. sort of a my question isn't related to that specifically, but you know, several of the comments were uh centered around uh what the current policy maps showed in terms of what's a collector road, what's a minor collector road, what have you.

Um, could you explain what the process is when there is a conflict between what is currently or what ultimately gets adopted versus what the plans truly require. Happy to. Um so the lines on the map and the levels listed are um good first guesses in the areas where we don't have a developed road system yet. We almost always in those areas need additional minor collectors or we might have to route them differently. We don't require a plan amendment generally.

Um, if you are taking a line in the map and connecting having similar connectivity and connecting similar places, they are not hard lines when there's no road system out there. That's just a completely undeveloped piece of land.

But if the proposal reduces the connectivity on the site or is you know being done in a way that's very very different than what the plan has then yes minor amendments the plan could be could be required depending on the details of that and staff would have to work with engineering to make those recommendations but the state requires that we identify a future road network with collectors and arterials um and that we we do that across areas within the region.

There are two areas, one kind of near the um the uh water treatment plant that's under I40 and then the other out in East Flagstaff in the Picture Canyon area where we have a blue bubble on those maps that we say defined for future connectivity study. That does not mean it's freefor-all or that there's no connections that are going to happen in that area. It's simply that the natural resources or cultural resources.

The topography and the unknown of what kind of development we might see in that area because it's a difficult to develop area um means we have chosen not to put roads but to recognize that before new road networks proceed they need a connectivity study to understand how connections are being made across properties and where the connections are being created. So that's what's in the future road network map right now.

So if someone came through and their property is vacant, we drew a road network on it that wasn't feasible, we would look at that and it would be part of the consideration of how much change could be acceptable. It it does have not necessarily direct subjectivity to it, but it is a call that would be made on a case by case basis. All right. Thank you. and Barry, I just I wanted to go on to add a part about, you know, what the way things are drawn now. And obviously, this is a long process.

This has been going on for a while and things have changed even during that process such as um the trails that Lee mentioned on Del Rio. They're now probably adopted with the phase 2 consequ parcels. How do we ensure that the final draft if it's adopted is up to date at time of adoption, not when it was originally first sketched out like as far as like land ownership and and trails and and such. So, Commissioner Martin, I I know the comment you sent in on land ownership for the ARA.

Um, the property you were referring to that actually is not owned yet by that property owner. So, state land when it is put to auction, just because someone won the auction doesn't mean they yet own the property. They own the property when it is conveyed, which is not done sometimes for months or years because they have to meet criteria that state land sets. So we do not change property ownership information unless it is already in the assessor's data.

So we're there are times of course where state land is going to be auctioned. That's really the only property ownership that's shown on the policy maps is state lands. Um and that that won't change anything because state land is treated just like private land in many cases in our in our maps and in our network.

So um it it will be update sometimes on policy maps umformational maps in the plan because we have created a list of administrative changes can be updated for the most up-to-date information but policy maps um will be a different piece. We are recommending and we recommended in the staff report adding an administrative change category. Um that basically says any changes that are adopted by council between October 9th and the ratification can be updated administratively.

So if we get an application and council approves it in March for a plan amendment and council approves it in you know or a plaque or something like that they include they approve it in like March 2026 we would administratively change that because there's an approval associated with that already.

If you choose to add that administrative change and you may want to word smith that administrative change category I think it's category number seven for that but that's that is how we would propose but yes sometimes these maps don't match what ultimately gets constructed especially when a property owner uses their existing entitlements. But that would apply to trails on the property that she was talking about as well as potential ownership changes.

Those could be administrative changes along the way act plan is adopted. Not always not and not to the policy map. So some of them will be out of date. That is just part of the nature of it being a living document. And we will keep proposing amendments and make sure those are updated as best we can. Thank you. Thank you. So, I have one last I have one card left if anybody else would like to make a statement. Um, I encourage you to run over and fill out a card.

Other than that, the person I have left to speak is Jean Christie. Again, if you can please state your name and address for the record. All right. Hi, I'm Jean Christie. My address is 6825 East Eagle Crest Drive, 8604. Um, first of all, I'd like to say thank you for your service. Um, I appreciate the hard work that you do, Sarah. I sat through your presentation, the city hall. Impressive hours worth And um I don't um claim to know very much about what you're doing.

I'm college educated, not as smart as my brothers. They keep reminding me considered somewhat intelligent and I cannot get through that 35page presentation for the life of me. And so, um, I'd like the council to consider, uh, making their publications that will be voted on accessible to the not so smart as their brother people, um, by having, uh, and this will have the effect of or something like that.

though that people who don't have the time or experience or degrees to process all of this stuff, I think one of the council members even mentioned it at the last or the commissioner members um mentioned what about the average person, you know, because uh and if these decisions that you make affect us as well. Um, my family's been here for generations and some of the trails that have been nonauthorized or whatever are are trails that my family has walked for a long time.

So, think about the average person, please, and try and make your material as accessible as possible and as you consider uh options for sustainability. And I have sent in uh an email as well. Um, let's think about Flagstaff. Miss Flagstaff, we're not a cookie cutter. New York, Minnesota. Uh, one thing I read even said, "Oh, well, the way that they park on the streets is Rome." And I'm like, "I've been to Rome. We don't compare to Rome. We don't drive little mini cars like they do in Rome.

So, let's keep it um what what looks like Flagstaff, the people that live in Flagstaff and make sustainable and Flagstaff. So, that's what I'm going to say. Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much. Can Can I just say very quickly? I don't have your written comment in my email. No, because it's just been sent. But I was looking and I was like, "Oh, no.

I don't think I have it." So, if I don't if I don't get it by the end of the hearing, if you wouldn't mind visiting with me and making sure I get it in the right email. Thank you. I don't want to miss anyone's comments. There was a lot to do any comments that were from online. Nobody has a question or a comment online. I see a hand up from Sarah Hall. Sarah, again, if you'll state Oh, state your name and address for the record. And you'll have three minutes as everybody else has had. Yes.

Hi, thank you. My name is Sarah Hall at 9595 Stardust Trail um out here in Donnie Park, 86004. Let me close my door a little bit. My question is uh I'm not quite sure if I maybe missed it or um what are the implications of this project on current homeowners and our current land that we own? Uh is there any chance that that the city will be minimizing the land that we own? I'm sorry. I was trying to take notes.

Um, I'll leave that to Sarah who would answer, but I'll Miss Hall, if that's the end of your comments, we can answer, but if not, because you're timed, I'd suggest you just proceed and we'll try and answer your questions at the end. That was all I needed to know is whether or not I have to worry about my own property lines being um encroached on by this new plan. And that's the end. Try and answer that question. Um the regional plan does not affect existing entitlements.

So whatever a person's property is currently zoned, they have the right to come in for building permits and site plans and concept plans under those existing entitlements. The regional plan is triggered, a review with the regional plan is triggered when a property owner requests different entitlements. So different ability to you have land uses or different zoning categories on their property and um when they request to be annexed into the city.

So now if it we're talking about adjacent properties, adjacent property owners have the same the same right to make applications under the under the current zoning and the regional plan. And so if a property owner does not like what the regional plan says they can request as a future land use under the plan, they can also request an amendment to the plan and to provide due process to everyone. Staff processes those using a consistent set of criteria, applications and procedures.

Um, so that is so not there's no effect to your property from the regional plan directly without you coming in and requesting it. Now the regional plan also has a list of action items in chapters 5 through 11 and some of those are recommending changes to the zoning code. When the zoning code is updated, it can change what is permitted or not permitted on your property.

And that is that is a process that where the new proposal is compared to the regional plan, but it goes through a public hearing process. It's second process that has to occur at some time in the future. Adoption for the regional plan itself changes no entitlements on any property in the region. long answer and the short answer. Thank you very much. And that's the same in the county area as well. Want to speak to that? Melissa nodded yes and so but do you want to come answer further? you again.

And just to clarify, so the area Don Park is in the county. So that's county um under county jurisdiction and the regional plan, like Sarah mentioned, does not change any existing property lines. It doesn't propose to do that. And um just to remind everybody that the um county comprehensive plan and the area plan for county park food um also apply to that area, not just the regional plan. So, um, just to kind of clarify again that that area is still under county jurisdiction.

Thank you very much. Pardon me if and one more one more question. Um, there is a specific process that is um called a land division or a subdivision that could change property lines, but that is a specific request by a property owner to do something like that. So, that's a much more technical process than what we're talking about tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other online comments? See any hands up, but I'm going to scroll. So, I don't see any other online comments.

So, Sarah, our next step would be to Is there any discussion that we want to have or do we want to? I do want to say that if anybody here or online or anybody else that you know wants to make comments, you can do so online is the preferred to email your comments. So again, if you'll give that address because I don't have it memorized, right? It's regional plan45 comments flagstaff.gov. Um, and that is we have that on this the project website as well, so people can find it.

Um, and it's on the postcard. If you got the postcard, it's in the newspaper ad if you've seen the newspaper ad. Um, the the process going forward is yes, it is time for you to start your discussion tonight. When we continue the hearing at the end of the meeting, you can also take public participation cards and new public participation at the next meeting as well.

So people who've not spoken, maybe just listen tonight or maybe couldn't join tonight can join on the 24th and we will have another round of public comment for consideration. Um but for tonight from this point, you actually have a nice robust 90 minutes. Um Lauren can pull up the conditions of approval holding space and we can start talking through that if that's how you'd like to proceed unless you have other questions. I know commissioner Sharp earlier said he had a lot of questions.

So if you'd like to start with questions and then move to the holding space or starting space. I we can start with questions. Meanwhile, I'm running to the restroom. There are some public comments that were made to tonight that I think would warrant further discussion in the in the holding space. Do you want to call out what those were? So, so Elsa and Lauren can put them in the right column. Yes. So, I just wanted to clarify.

So I know that the dece we talked a little bit already about just wanted letter that was from December but there as some of the speakers were here and as I kind of went back through comments that I had saved I just wanted to make sure that we had elevated Russell Randall's letter and comments and Rachel's Rachel Simukandu um comments and they were all kind of in the same realm. H how would you like to do that, Commissioner Norton? Do you want to just have us copy all of those over?

That might the We've not or do you are there spec I think what I would encourage is for lengthy comment letters like that. And if you're not prepared to do it tonight, that's fine. But you actually call out specifically what parts you would like carry forward. If we took the whole thing forward, I think we would spend more than me meeting time just discussing all those but I either I or other commissioners would probably need to specifically go through their letters.

I on a topical level I think these are the things that we should potentially talk about. So would you have some notes of what topics you'd want? Um because we could pull the portions of their letters that cover specific topics. I would have to be prepared to give you that, which I'm not tonight. You know, I just thought I really thought that tonight would be all public comment and we wouldn't be having these discussions until the next public hearing. That's fine.

We will have time at the next public hearing and you could um like we said email myself and Alex Puchelli if you wanted to like load us with that in advance and then we could okay we could have it ready so that you could describe it on the 24th and it would be ready to pull up on the screen right away. Right. I mean I just want to make sure that's not getting discussed outside of the hearing, but you can tell us like please have this prepared so I can speak to it at the hearing.

Um, I'll be interested in seeing SB Best's email with the comments that he made. I mentioned Russell Randall. I'd be interested in seeing Mike Popejoy's comments um about unauthorized trails. Can I address that one really quick? Commissioner Norton Martin did not join us yet tonight, but I think he Oh, no. He made it. There you go. Martin, would you like to talk about the regional trails map and the Flagstaff trails initiative really quick? Would would it be okay to pause?

Yeah, that would be fine. I just kind of wanted to hear more about um the unauthorized trails that they feel that are represented. So, yeah, I would like Martin to answer that. Before Martin, you take this, can I just add that there's probably portions of Charity and Lee's letter that I would want to ask questions about. So, but I just wanted to bring that up as Sure. Yeah, that and that is it should be in your inbox, but I'll we'll organize that as well. Thank you, commission members.

Uh Martin, I'm a transportation planner for the city. Um so that that trails map has two different types of trails, existing forest service trails or single track trails and uh plan trails. uh the existing trails. Um it looks like that that data was taken from a couple different riders and I think um I talked to to Mike Pope after his comments and some of the trails that are depicted on the existing trails may be considered uh unauthorized or non-system trails by the forest service.

Uh we have a good set of data that has all the uh forest service county city trails that are considered official in system. So, I would leave it to Sarah to figure out the best process for considering them as part of that map. Um, but we can certainly provide the information um to meet his concerns to make sure we don't have any social trails depicted. I just wanted to make sure we, you know, acknowledge that if there were unauthorized trails, you know, that it's been checked, you know.

Yes, thank you for that. Um, we have worked with the Forest Service and the county to make sure that all the trails that we have in our data layer, they consider to be official trails. So, we have a fairly high degree of confidence that we don't have social trails depicted or unauthorized trails depicted in our current layer. Um, real quickly, the second second piece was the planned trails and those are all taken from the Flav trail strategy from a couple of years ago.

um the the forest service and and that the the uh trail strategy was developed by a multi-jurisdictional uh flag staff trails initiative. Uh most of them are on forest service land and they have a different kind of outlook on planned trails and I and I think they may have asked for in their comments for a disclaimer to reflect their position on plan trails on forest service land. Thank you.

Yeah, unless are you fine with withdrawing that as a further discussion point unless any other commissioner had other questions. Yeah, commission there's terminology around trails. We have a lot of comments about trails. First of all, the plan trails, some of those currently are unauthorized. The Forest Service would have to do NEPA. They would have to go through a process like they did for the dry lake hills in the Simona trails plan.

In the dry lake hills plan, the Cookanino National Forest has a history of taking some unauthorized trails and improving them or adopting them as they are. So just because a road a trail is currently considered unauthorized does not necessarily mean it won't someday be part of the system. So this is like a nuance, right? They don't want to, much like other conversations we've had, we don't want to encourage people on unauthorized trails.

But there is also no prohibition from hiking cross country anywhere on a national forest. So unlike National Park Service land, you can just walk in a forest. You don't there's no limitations.

So, it's a little bit different than the conversations where people are like, "I don't want people trespassing on my property." Unless there's an actual forest closure, you you may walk as you will in the forest, consider it being responsible for your own safety and well-being, but you know, we do a lot of search and rescue around here. You know how that works.

Um, so but yeah, so I mean I think if we need to clean up the existing trails later, that would be a good thing to take forward in your conditions of approval and I can keep working on that this month and try and get it updated back to council. I I'm okay knowing that you're on it. Um, and I know through open space obviously we've all looked at the trail systems and made other comments which is this was not one of them that was our concern.

Um, and I've having been through the Observatory Mesa Trail Plan process with the Open Space Commission, I completely understand what you're talking about with regard to unauthorized and some of them get adopted. So, I'm fine with that. Questions. So, I I'll start with um my biggest complaint about this and it's a really good plan. There's a lot to it. It took me a lot of reading and I spent a ton of time.

I think my biggest complaint has to do with the the six priorities, the the two core, the four complimentary. Um I would like to see that framework totally revised. So it's six six priority all of equal waiting and that way as things come up the powers that be can decide based upon what comes up. Um I'm afraid that with the two core you're going to find yourself ignoring problems as they come up.

You know capital improvements may come up and will get neglected because there might be a housing reason or whatnot. And in the end, if you don't have a good robust economy and if you don't have a place that people want to live in, well, housing affordability doesn't matter. And addressing climate change isn't going to happen. You know, if the economy is there, not the economy is not there to sustain your climate change goals, nothing's going to happen.

So my position would be rearrange this so they're all six equal priorities and then maybe change the language so if something comes in three of them have to be addressed and only say two to the exclusion. That would be where I'll start this. Does anybody have any discussion around that?

I think maybe to add that to the holding space if people want time to think about it or you can have discussion now anybody DJ I don't know I guess I'll add on to that we had that discussion in open space um because we felt that you know open space was represented within two of the complimentary But it either maybe deserved its own or maybe everything got elevated to the six.

So I you know there's been other discussions on that you know are we at a point in the regional plan where that can be you know revised um and and I understand why we got to the two core because of the declared emergencies. I get that.

Um I too on a personal level, you know, feel that um you know, when you're looking at a plan that's going to last 10 to 15 years, um if we don't have some equal waiting to some of those um other priorities that are important to the residents that they do start to slip away, you know, are do we what do we give away um by just centering on those two core? So, I do worry about that balance.

Whether it's a discussion we have as far as a recommendation, I I'm not sure we're at that point to to be able to to do that at this point in the game. And I just wanted to say what a long process this has been. And Sarah and the team, it's like having 2,000 clients review your work. And I sympathize with that deeply. um having been in like a career that serves clients that are evaluating things like that or creative work.

Um so I just want to acknowledge all the hard work and how difficult this is to kind of be reviewed over and over and over again. Um but I also feel how important it is that we just get these last little pieces in here that um the people and the stakeholders and the interested parties really feel that they have that represent representation so that this regional plan can be overwhelmingly accepted and approved.

And I appreciate the the wisdom to look at how much work is the change that you're asking for at this point. I think that that that's a good like weight to add to the scale here and understanding is it's probably if you're doing some things that are not like rearranging all of chapter 3, but maybe changing the introductory wording or that language that we talked about in chapter 2 that is that I showed on the slide. That's like a streamlined idea.

If you're like, I want to reorganize all the priorities and all the policies around that's a really big idea and that's the kind that would take a big lift. Like it took us 3 months to do that last time between the 60-day public review and now we had it, you know, we did not organize the pro policies by priorities in the 60-day public review, but we chose to do that because the feedback was so overwhelming in terms of the climate priority and the housing priority and the public comments.

So really the priorities were based on the feedback from the public, not status necessary apartments. It's just that those aligned with the public feedback volume and tone aligned with the emergencies that the city has. So, um, if you think there's a better way to organize it, I think you can make that a recommendation to council and council might need to weigh that with all the public comment.

That's why all the 60-day public review comments are in your packet and the council's packet is cuz yeah, it's like the 2,00 clients. You you as a commission are one of the clients, right? Because you'll be doing a lot of the implementation work as a body in the future. So, I think if you have an idea that's not in any of the public comments, it's great. Keep it propose it like and then it will be up to council on whether they want to change the proposal on how.

But it is good to be mindful of like how much we're throwing pizza in the air at this even cause a project delay or not. Thank you. I think I think maybe the offset and this is how I've rectified it in my mind is you know if we're going to have these two core priorities and whether we're able to serve those core priorities through this regional plan over the next 10 years if it really works out.

Um, but by having some of these verbiage changes that have been suggested, little pieces, little seeds that are planted within the regional plan in other places that leave it open to exploring, you know, these things that have been um, you know, become only complimentary and maybe even less than. Um, I think that gives plan the flexibility to pivot as necessary.

Um, so you know, I think knowing what a structural change it would be to change the way that priorities are listed, um, I support leaving them as is, but really strongly um, considering some of these thoughtout research, deep um, revisions that have been asked that may seem minor, may seem like a just a word here are there, but to the people that know how it could be implemented and and grabbed on to later to go in a different direction if necessary, I think it gives that opportunity.

So, and my this is on my thought, can you hear me? shows it's on. My thought is that um you know as this is a a long-term plan. This is 2045, right? So we may have priorities that change but then hopefully the plan is fluid for amendments for those. So that let's say we meet the core two and something else becomes core or that we see that a change is needed that is that something that could be amended in the in the subsequent years?

Yes, chairman Dino changing the priorities would be a minor regional plan amendment and up to the discretion of council to probably propose Okay, thank you. Any other discussion about this point, these points? Any other discussion? Anybody else? CJ, not seeing any other Oh, wait. CJ, no. None for me. Okay, thank you. You have other questions? No. I had a handful of questions on infill.

Infill seems to be a big part of this and rightly so and I think you might have seen one of my comments had to deal with so much of where infill might be is potentially hundred-year flood plates. I think there's a conflict the city's going to have to deal with as this progresses and and that something everybody can deal with down the road. Um but one of the things is infill um it assumes infill is going to reduce infrastructure cost.

So you're infilling in areas that already have utilities and all that. Has the city put in effort to figure out if these utilities have capacity to take care of infill? So increasing density and things like that or is that something that's planned to be done down the road? Commissioner Sharp, when we did the 2018 high occupancy housing plan, we did a broad plan level look at that. Um, there's two maps in our high occupancy housing plan called the readiness and the preparedness maps.

And those were where we looked at where is our infrastructure prepared for larger, denser, more intense uses and where is it in need of additional um improvements in order to support that. And so we do have some broadscale maps to do that. The water and the water services master plan is due to be updated soon. So for water and sewer, we'll be taking a look at that after the plan's adopted. Like once the plan's adopted, that will be the baseline for any new analysis of what you're talking about.

For streets, we are in the metro plan is working with the city and we are in the process of doing a similar analysis called our safe streets master plan, which is really it's a transportation master plan period. It's not just about safety. Um, and we're hiring a consultant to lead a two to threeyear process to update that as well. So the plan, like thinking of the triangle, what you're asking is blue questions, not the brown level questions, not the not that maroon base.

So the blue level work is on deck right now. to answer some of those things. I did talk with Ed Shank, our storm water manager today about your question about infill areas that are in the flood plane. And he said, "Yes, it's in the flood plane.

It's not always, especially the 500 flood plane, it's not always impossible to develop, but those are the cost of developing it." and he said those might need a more refined look at some point in the future, but that's probably again a blue level future study that we would need to do as we start heading into that next area. And you have a valid point. Those are blue level issues, but then I think about those blue level issues feed back into can this plan actually work.

So if you have, you know, 50 properties are in a flood plane that if you're going to redevelop them all require three feet of fill, it may never work. And so what's the point of the plan? So it kind of goes hand in hand. And I'm not discrediting the plan. I think I think infill is the right answer, but it's going to take a lot of work to do it right.

I think I think the preferred scenario estimated that the densest scenario put about 500 new units in flood planes where like the least dense scenario put more close to like 300 units in like Olivial fans. So the question of like how predictable is the hazard aluvial fans when we're getting into details here I know have a less predictable hazard right because they usually require disturbance to cause flooding where like mapped flood planes are a little more of a predictable hazard.

So we did look at that in the scenario planning and we tried to optimize it. Um but that's not as precise as some of those other follow-up studies that I think are going to be needed. Um, the other big question I have with Enfield, um, I have two really. It it it seems like it's just leading to gentrification, and I don't know how you deal with that. Um, but the other question I have is, you know, infill in my mind is prime property for short-term rentals and second homes.

And I don't know how the city deals with that, but I would love to see language added to this document that at least says we as a city are going to try to do these things. We're going to work with the other cities in the state to try to make the state see these are problems that we need to address and and maybe come up some creative solutions to help prevent that because otherwise what's the point? Uh we do have language under development pattern policies.

Um policy DP3 says keep standards up to date on emerging land use issues that support housing attainability and carbon neutrality such as legislative changes, short-term rental regulations, and carbon dioxide removal technology. That's actually written though to be a lot that's really is a such as list. That could be a lot of other things. right now on short-term rentals pretty heavily preemptive by our state legislature.

I think you have probably heard that cities and counties throughout the state started to lobby for those changes. Um that is also listed in chapter 5 as an action item that we need to keep following up on the impacts of short-term rentals to the community.

Um otherwise the plan talks about displacement in the housing obtainability um and neighborhood and equity goals um and says that we'd like to mitigate and minimize displacement of residents and prevent the loss of existable existing affordable housing units. And so that is that's the policy that we we have written. Um, I think also Friends of Flagstaff's futures comments included ways they thought that topic could be expanded in their opinion and how in the plan.

So that's a that I think that's right for discussion and some of that's in the holding space now. Um, and when we send it out, you might look at it and see if there's an element to that that is not discussed that you don't want to see. short-term rentals. What we can put in the plan and what's relevant to land use decision-m is here. Is it satisfactory to everyone who's concerned how it's impacting affordability in our city and region? No. But it's not that way for staff either.

Um but we have to have a feasible implementable legal plan. And so um another area that if the world opens up a little I hope we have policies that mean we don't have to amend the plan. It will just be something that the city can start doing code updates once those opportunities become available. Yeah, I feel like the short-term rentals is the thing that we keep hitting our head against the wall every time we have PNC medium. I'd love to see it. Um, anybody else has questions?

Just take the microphone. Um, so I have a lot of questions scenario. It sounds very aspirational. This idea that we're going to reduce housing costs by 20% sounds great. If we woke up tomorrow and all a sudden housing costs were 20% cheaper than they are today, I don't know that it's going to change anything. When you think about housing is a regional problem. There's two million houses short in California alone and all the other cities in Arizona are short. I don't know how it changes anything.

It's still is a it's a market driven economy. And so if housing developer can sell their home for 20% less, but there's still drive to sell those homes, I don't know how we're going to change much. Um, that's not to say we shouldn't try to make things less expensive and easier to develop, but I really don't buy what the preferred scenario is trying to sell, that it's going to bring cost down. Um, has that criticism been brought up? Have you guys thought through that?

What are the answers to that? I think I can answer from the preferred scenario standpoint, but I wonder if Michelle if you want to offer some planned availability suitability study findings. They're kind of they're kind of handinhand things we looked at. We didn't look at one all by itself. Do you want to Oh, I don't really Okay, I'll I'll try it.

Um so so the word first scenario the way it is developed is that it is there's the four scenarios I just want to go over this I know you've read it but other people who might not know we're talking about who listen who are listening I want to make sure they understand it is that we created four scenarios of how the f how the pattern of development the density and intensity of development could be done differently over a 20-year period and we tried to understand if the pattern matter.

That's really what the scenario planning is about. It cannot take into account macro like I what you described as like well the housing market in California. I call those macroeconomic conditions that are outside the control of the plan.

So you have to do some controlling for those to be stable or trending and and we basically just hold them constant in the preferred scenario because there is not anything that the regional plan can do about the housing market in California or how Fanny May and Freddy Mack are issuing mortgages or what the Fed set the mortgage rate at. That's all just something that happens in the atmosphere.

But what the preferred scenario does and this is where I think people are misunderstanding it is it tests these scenarios to figure out which performs the best not in one condition but in many future conditions. So it's trying to pick not the best scenario but the most resilient scenario. So it's saying if the market is really good and it's still growing this still helps us. If the market is starting to decline and we're in a recession, it also still helps us.

If the um if the way that housing is constructed and technology in housing is changed, these policies can still help us. So it is looking for that like sweet spot where funding availability and climate change in our region and those macroeconomic trends are out there but we have picked our best performance point. So that's very different than like it being the best scenario or guaranteeing it will perform this way. It's a it is what um the consultant called a crash test dummy.

We are testing it and testing it and testing it. We do it iteratively. And so the preferred scenario is the best crash test dummy. It's the it is the vehicle that did the best to protect us when the vehicle crashed. Like the dummies were survived. They had the least injuries. So when you think of it that way, that's what the preferred scenario is about. It is not a tell all, but what it says is it could it could best protect us. But if you are crushed by a semi-truck, you might still be injured.

There's no control over that. And then I'll have Michelle talk a little bit about other findings from the last cap. Thanks, Michelle. Multi planning and development services director. And I wanted Sarah to speak to the scenario planning first because she definitely has her head wrapped around that more. And so at the same time we were doing a lot of that, we were doing up availability and understanding how much land do we even have left.

And you guys have heard that presentation, but you know, just for anybody listening and trying to understand how much land do we have left and do we even have enough to meet, you know, our kind of housing goal of the 8,000? And and the answer is yes, we do if we're efficient with the land use. And so, you know, to your point about if we build it doesn't mean it necessarily doesn't get absorbed by a different market.

And when I say different market being people who maybe don't live here full-time, people who are using it as a commercial type property. Um but what we did find is that you know removing the barriers everything matters. There's so many costs.

You know when you look at the soft cost of the land and different things and then you know everything Sarah talked about with the um interest rates and there is the market aspect but there is the supply and demand and when we don't have enough supply that demand gets higher. So we do have some level of comfort that if we can at least get more supply, we do start to reduce that demand. But it is a matter of everybody in the industry working together, right?

Like we can make code changes and we can start to remove the barriers. Time is money. So if we can bring more production online of a variety of housing types, then we allow people to move out of housing. You know, we have a we have a lot of different challenges, not just with supply, but also people having a housing type to move into. We have people who have outgrown their homes and they need a bigger home. We have people who are empty neester and want a smaller home.

The reality is with the interest rates and the supply as they are, nobody's leaving where they're at. Um, and so we need that supply to keep everybody moving. Um, but we we need everybody in the industry and in the market to be doing something to be moving that needle. And I would just say, and I think you touched on it, we can't just not do anything because we're afraid it's not enough. We have to keep I I want to say chipping away.

I think we need to be taking big bites out of this, but for a lack of better words, I'll just say we need to all be chipping away at this and improving it however we can. Thanks. Excellent answers. I really appreciate that. One other relevant thing, Commissioner Sharp, to bring up is Sorry, I'm trying to keep my my cough from coming back. I have pretty bad allergies.

Um, in chapter five and four, you know, people brought up with a lot of our projections and the cost pieces of like how much housing costs and how much rent is that we have added a lot of rental units more than we did in the previous 15 years and the last 15 years. So since 2010, let's say and that's good news in some ways. And there is some very fresh, not replicatable yet market evidence that we are starting to see rents stabilize.

They're still very high, but we look quarterly, we look annually, we're trying to understand those changes over time, but it's just inconclusive right now whether the units we've added have stabilized rents permanently or if there's something in the bigger market going on. But if we look at that data in three years and we see rents stabilized, stabilized and started to go down, then we'll know we have done something. But the responsiveness of the data to our actions in land use planning is long.

It might take us, you know, we started the trend of adding a lot of rental units in 2010 and you've heard all the public hearing comments about that for the last however many years you have been on the commission. It is it is a question mark and housing and I have the housing staff and I have looked at it pretty carefully.

We can't draw that conclusion yet but it's good to see that the data didn't keep going up that we hit we we at least you know we hope it's a flat area that maybe declines but we at least started leveling off. That's the kind of thing that we will not like be able to monitor year to year and say this year we built 800 units and look the rent went down.

it won't have that kind of responsiveness in this data which is why looking at it long term and maybe even in a speculative you know testing kind of mindset helps us understand those factors. Yeah, I think my favorite thing I heard from you guys was um we have to do our part. I believe the plan really is doing our part. While I don't agree that it's going to bring prices down, I agree that it's doing its part and it is the right answer to all this. I have a a rather sensitive question here.

One of the things that the um plan brings up is it recognizes that there's racial disparity in housing and all that house ownership and all that. Is that an outcome of the current plan? I think much like housing cost, it's an outcome of some very macro social forces, but also some very long historical forces as well. Like it's definitely not something that's emerged since 2014. It's something that's been occurring over time in our community and every community for a long time.

And the neighborhood plans we did in the last 10 years for Plaza, Vieja, Southside were really places where people and families that have been here for generations talked to staff about the impact intergenerationally of housing discrimination on them, on their cousins, on their family members who moved away. Um, and we wanted to honor that by making sure it it was described in a way that was data driven in the planned. Um, but there are there are stories that go with those numbers.

Um, and they're not all about city policy or the city did something to cause it. But as Michelle said, the plan and policies we set can be a part of resolving some of those disparities and helping acknowledge them to move forward. For instance, the 10ear housing plan, we acknowledge that there are mortgage plans that are underutilized in our region.

We have almost 18 to 25% depending on what numbers or geographic regions you looked at of Native Americans and yet they're the lowest home ownership numbers. But there are specialized mortgage programs that could be provide that could provide housing opportunities maybe we weren't utilizing before. So just continuing on a path where we're examining our policies for our is are they really bringing helping everyone?

Are they, you know, helping people who, um, Sydney really talks about this a lot, like are you helping people who are already ready to help themselves or people who need the help? I just want to add something. I think you asked if it's the the plan that is causing it, and I would say no, I think it's our zoning code.

I think there's a lot of things there's a lot of historical decision- making but I think there are a lot of things in our code that favor things that um reduce density that favor things like larger lots larger houses um and so what I think the code the plan gets to we also have challenges that in our most vulnerable neighborhoods southside to sunny side um you have zoning code that is the most permissive and the the easiest to redevelop um by right.

And so a big part of what we're doing with the land availability suitability and code analysis project is looking that and what we're kind of calling as equalizing the other zoning districts so it's as easy to develop density in those districts so that that concentration just isn't in those neighborhoods. Um and then also by the plan really talking about affordability in our neighborhoods and connectivity and smaller lots and you know kind of getting to right sizing our code.

I would say our planning plan is moving in the right direction of trying to make up for some of those things that have been historically an issue with um intentionally and I would say also unintentionally. A lot of this is just the practice that you've seen across every city um across the United States and I think it was just this is just good planning and then we've had different challenges different forces that have that have changed things and and they're no longer good practices.

So I think this plan actually gets to setting the the policies for making those code changes that start to relieve some of those housing pressures. So I I think those are all good answers and a good background about how we got here and why we're here.

I think my caution and and I'm not sure of any specific language in here that I would criticize, but my caution would be don't use race-based solutions to solve race problems and be very careful with using language like you just used to say we're going to try to make things equitable based upon economics and not based upon race or things like that. So, I guess that would be my caution. Just be careful that that doesn't enter in there so we don't have problems down the road.

you want to take the mic or um on the employment districts. Um I I'm really curious how those are going to work out. I think they're kind of clever. Um but I did find myself thinking that it smelled a lot like the hospital expansion and that we were having, if I read it right, it was proposing employment districts based upon a specific employer or an industry bringing in houses around it.

And that's a lot like what we saw with the hospital expansion that ended up being just this big train wreck for the city. And I'm just curious if if anybody else recognizes that and if maybe that might be something that if something like that came through that it would be opposed again by the residents. Sorry. Um, so, Commissioner Sharp, the current regional plan has some mostly similar employment areas in it, which does not allow any housing in those blue areas.

Because of the housing emergency, staff was encouraged not just because of a particular case to look at what the those areas maybe shouldn't be off limits for housing, but they might have really limited housing or housing of a particular character. And the reason for that is we don't want we have very limited we talk about land limitations. We have limited industrial land. The last cap was really about housing. We probably need some future study on our industrial land availability.

But if we spit the region out of industrial land, then you start losing things like concrete plants and lumber yards and freight locations, which can increase the transportation costs of all construction and all goods and services in the community. So part of the healthy economy is having enough of these industrial lands. Part of the challenge is some of those employers are having a hard time opening or maintaining businesses because they can't house their workforce here.

So that is where the idea of having workforce housing in that's tied to an employer in the industrial zone because we did not want to open it up for everyone to go buy an industrial property and expect to build an apartment on it because we would the demand for housing is so great it would quickly overwhelm those blue areas on the map. Um, but we did not want to have as hard an exclusion as the current plan has because of the housing emergency.

So, it's just an attempt to kind of find a balance there. So, is there a differentiation between workforce housing in that area and just general housing? Because going back to the hospital, it was not workforce housing that they were proposing. it was general housing for the public. So is there a differentiation between those two? Yes, Chairman Dino.

Um it's defined in the glossery we think three definitions for housing and workforce housing is defined as and it says in this regional plan there are a lot of definitions for workforce housing. So if it's defined differently for some other context, great. But in this regional plan, workforce housing refers to housing that is made available in connection with an employer for its employees.

A good example is that um the unified school district and the Forest Service have both been looking at employee housing for their employees. Not uncommon for the Forest Service to have employee housing. They have it down in HappyJack. They have it down in Blige. They don't have any Flagstaff even though they have more employees here and they have no and they have more housing difficulties here in the Flagstaff Ranger District area.

So that's a great example of like if they wanted to take their property um or property near their main office and help it develop for housing that would be tied to your employment with the forest service. That is workforce housing. It gets managed in a lot of different ways. It's not always purely workforce housing. It might be this apartment developer is building this apartment on my property and they are reserving 30% of the units for my workforce.

Those will be calls that we will have to probably make when the case is before us. It's like is it enough? The plan won't always answer the is it enough questions. That's really what the commission and council will be doing in future case consideration. So what you described originally was let's say the school district has an empty school. They have an empty building. They decide to retrofit that building into an an apartment building that would house workforce.

They could, you know, that's something or they could have somebody come in and build something on that property where say 30% would be workforce housing and the rest could be general housing. Correct. Right. I think the latter example would be one where staff might bring it to you and say, "Do you agree this is works housing?" Like, and why do we think it's workforce housing? It needs this definition. The plan doesn't like set a hard percentage because it's not code. Um, they want flexibility.

And we want the flexibility to have be open in those negotiations. Those kinds of negotiations always will go to council, you know, will always end up in front of the commission because the underlying zoning in these employment areas doesn't allow any of that by right.

So, it will have to come forward either as a tax amendment that allows something that is a certain percentage or a particular case that reszones a property in that blue area to allow for some housing with restrictions that would have to be set by a development agreement. That's kind of how I would imagine it works and probably in five years we'll have a different way we could imagine it works. I mean, that's part of the flexibility of the plan.

But but yes, we've kind of mentally gained that out a little bit further and tried to think about like what could it look like and there are property owners who have industrial properties who started those some of those conversations with us and wanted to understand this part of the plan in particular. So it's a good one to bring up and ask questions about. Thank you. So I think I have just two more questions for tonight and they're mostly related to water resources.

So hopefully you can answer them. If not, we could kick them down the road. Um, the first Yeah, that's fine. Um, the first one is, so the sea aquifer is a shared resource. Um, how do our how does Flagstaff our growth avoid conflicts with neighboring communities if they're sharing the aquifer? So, that's something for us to consider.

Um, the big one that I really am frustrated with and I don't know how to handle this one is, so if I I understand an Arizona state law requires 100-year assured water for houses, but not for apartment complexes. Single lots don't have to have that rule. So, an apartment complex, if I understand it correctly, doesn't have that same requirement. That That's not correct. Yeah, that's that's not a correct understanding. Okay, good.

So, so first of all, the city of Flagstaff is not in a attainment area. We are not required to have the Arizona Department of Water Resources under your water supply. So, let's do question two and then I'll question one we might ask Le and Aaron to answer at the next meeting. Um, but question two is is you know that this this water supply designation includes all projected growth over a hundred years. So it is it is single family homes, it is apartments. Okay.

It what what Aaron Young in water services does is she has a database based on our current use um profile for different kinds of housing. So she knows how much the average one apartment uses. I don't know how detailed I'd have you have to let her answer that. Versus a single family home on a large lot. And when she makes her projection of water consumption, she's not assuming like an average use per household. She is differentiating the kinds of households.

So when we look at the preferred scenario, for instance, it really performs well when we have more apartments for water conservation because they don't have yards and they don't have gardens, they don't irrigation, they tend to have fewer bathrooms. So for those reasons, they tend to have a less of a per capita water use. Um, and the data holds that up for the people who don't believe that.

I do live in a single family home and maybe you don't want to believe I'm not doing my best for water conservation, but it's still just facts. Um, and so that is used along with the population and housing projections for the ADWR. So there's no there there's a differentiation from the standpoint of making good educated guesses on how population translates to consumption but it does not mean that one has a requirement and one does not. Thank you.

And so the other question because um Williams who's our water services director had to leave I would I will show him this little clip and then get him and Aaron to be prepared at the next meeting. Any other questions or concerns? We have about 30 minutes if you want to pull up the holding space or talk through anything in the holding space. If you think there's little ones you like think we could just check off and move.

encourage I'd encourage you to use your time because the time you use now could make your meeting next meeting shorter. I'm I'm not sure like if everybody's like read through all the letters, you know, like the open space letter or the or the FQ letter, things like that. Um if we're ready to talk about Well, they're they're all I'd encourage Can you guys share the screen?

Let's get the screen up and then maybe I think the visual will help you decide how you Yeah, I think it would just be good to navigate it too for 30 minutes. Just like the visual of the holding space. Yes. Okay, that would be helpful. Somebody's getting it up. We got to wait. Kill a little time. It's going up now. Okay. So currently here's what the holding space looks like.

Um so for instance um the first thing in the holding space is the new administrative changes category that staff recommended. This didn't come from a public comment. It was part of your staff report. Um you want to talk about that one at all? We might be able to check that one off. Do you like the wording of this? Do you I know this maybe Commissioner Norton this was one of your concerns. It's like well what are we going to do if stuff changes between now and a May election.

So the way let me read it the way it's written is changes the we would add an administrative changes category to page 2-8 that states changes to the future growth illustration that match the plan amendments and specific plans to the Flagstaff regional plan 2030. So, our current plan with effective dates after the adoption of the Flagstaff Regional Plan 2045 currently scheduled for October 20 to October 9th.

So, if between October 9th and the ratification, council adopts plan amendments to the 2030 plan that staff could just administratively update the 2045 plan after it's ratified because we'd have a council decision that backs that up.

would be willy-nilly and it would be one of those ones that obviously it has a very short shelf life but I thought it was a good it came from a conversation we had with friends of Flagstaff's future which was concerned people would that we would get out of sync essentially as you stated earlier and that this would be one way we could make sure that what do you think of this wording happy to reward it you know I'm all about like whatever we can do to make the document the most upto-date version possible at that starting point.

So if this is what helps implement that, I I'm in favor of this. So functionally, do we vote on each one of these or how do we do this? Yeah. Well, I think that you to to have Elsa, who's the eee up there, put the word yes under add to conditions, I think you would I don't know if you have to make a motion, but I think you would at least say like is a majority of the commission in favor of this at least for this first round? We could do we could do a thumbs it.

It's not nothing's a formal vote until you make your final motion, right? So brush up on the manual between now and the next meeting too because you might do that motions now. A thumbs up or thumb? We could do the thumbs up tonight. Thumbs up tonight. I see. One, two, three, four, five. CJ, are you still on? Yes. Thumbs up. Okay. So, that one's a yes. We'll move that one. We'll count that as one of your conditions of approval. So the next one, and we don't have to take these in order.

You can say skip if you want, but the next one is to revise category 3 on the major plan amendments t list on page 2-7. And we can pull up that page if you need us to to take off the end that says expand the services. This one I would recommend we wait until Lee is here because I think you'll have Lee questions. So maybe we just hold this one. All right. So, let's hold this one maybe for the 21, but what's the next one? Keep going.

Like, this is how I imagine us doing is we're just going to keep completed the list. Let's keep working down the list. So, number the second one is hold. Is that right? Yeah, we'll just put Can you put a note Elsa in the um Yeah, in the last column just say hold for the 24th. The next one is under public facilities infrastructure revise the first guideline and this is on page 414 which is all guidelines for all land use categories.

Um so that it applies to any proposal that requires a development application whether it's a new development for or for an existing development requiring drinking water and then they must be located within the urban growth boundary. You may also want to hold this one because it's really about the urban growth boundary again, right? And water. So, we'll hold that for knowing 24.

And then the next is to revise the first bullet to areas already served by existing infrastructure and public facilities while minimizing and mitigating displacement. And that Sarah, do you have anything that can help us with? Yeah, I can read you what it says right now. Um, it says so this is the first bullet under the public facilities and infrastructure. Um, it's adding law minimizing and mitigating displacement. Yeah, that doesn't seem like it's the right Oh, no.

I think this is the first one under all neighborhoods. Is that correct? Okay. Are those page numbers? 414. 414 is a page number. So yes, in all categories. Okay, the first bullet under all C. So that one currently reads encourage infill development and redevelopment in areas already served by existing infrastructure and public facilities. Period. So they are proposing to add while minimizing and mitigating displacement through this this guideline. So let me read it again.

encourage infill development and redevelopment in areas already served by existing infrastructure and public facilities. And the question is, is the last five words, should they be added or not? Is this one worth trying to talk about? I think so, but Okay. So, okay. I'm sorry. I'll hand it off now. I'm where you're at. So elsewhere in the document where where would it where would it have teeth to m to minimize and mitigate displacement? Is that handled elsewhere?

It is currently written in policy HA.1 which means it only would be considered where there's a plan amendment under the current which of course is up to your and council's discretion to revise right now or recommendations. Did you have something? No. Well, no. Um, so basically it's just adding in and mitigating displacement. I would be in favor of that addition of those words. I'm just wondering if it has to be more defined. Is that defined enough? Minimizing and mitigating displacement.

I don't know if um Alex or Michelle wants to take crack at that thinking about it. Can we come back to that? I think we need time to think about that because that's what's the implementation, right? So that that would be you know it sounds good. How do you achieve it? So maybe on the note on this one is we'll develop a staff recommendation. We'll look into it over the next two weeks and staff will come back with a recommendation on this one.

And maybe the next one because I think the next one is also related. We'll just say like staff recommendation needed or something. And I think on that one I understand the spirit of what they're doing, but the term minimizing that's a measurable item. And so how do you actually define that? I minimized it. I made it as minimal as possible. And then how then is mitigation defined? Are we paying writing checks? Are is the rest of the city doing this?

So I think there could be unintended consequences. There's good attention here. Yeah, it's certainly I we did not find it problematic necessarily say that as a policy, but as a guideline that could be it could be challenging. And I don't know if Michelle wants to jump in here too. I do.

And I'm I'm looking at Jen Michael said because this is a conversation we have at Nauseium as we're doing our code and this project and actually a key part of what we're trying to incorporate into that of actually getting some expertise of how do we write code that does does these things.

Um and I mean and then there's the question just another thing to add to the complexity of why this is a hard guideline is because is it displacement if you have subpar housing that you are replacing with a different type of housing um and maybe um it's a dilapitated you know a falling apart apartment building and it's being replaced with a new apartment building.

Are we displacing someone because now they can't afford that and is that the right thing because is that really the conditions we want our community to live in? So, it is something that we really really struggle with and that's why I just wanted to explain why we need more time to think through that because it is something we've been struggling with as well. Thank you. I think that we can put that on hold. And also, will you copy that to the 518 one too? Those are two related. Okay.

I I did have one comment about that. The CJ um I I just think what what um the staff member said is absolutely correct. I I'm thinking about Sunnyside in particular that we have very high density in the area that has a lot of um dilapitated buildings and if those are all redeveloped, what are going to happen? What's going to happen to all the people there if they can't afford to live there? Okay. So, we'll look at staff recommendations for that. Yes.

And then we're looking at item number I think it's item number six. Yeah, item number six is another one I think we should hold until Lee is available because it's primarily about reclaimed water and irrigation. And I think there's been a whole reclaimed water study. They know he and Aaron would know all the different circumstances. And I think public would be a good one to hold for water service availability. Okay, thank you.

And then number seven, add new guideline under design and other considerations. Activation of street fronts is desired. Blank or inactive walls are discouraged. I'm not current there. This is under urban center and the current guidelines for urban center under design and other considerations are provide direct accessibility to groundf flooror businesses and community services for pedestrians from a public space. So it's very specific.

It says um then it says allow for residential mixeduse building facing arterials to be set back for larger pedestrian zones and reduce noise for residents. So, don't be inflexible about building forward. Encourage new multi-story mixeduse buildings to have windows and doors facing sidewalks and give preference to adaptive reuse of buildings and development of vacant and underutilized parcels over demolishing historic buildings and landmarks.

So, those are the four design and other consideration guidelines. They are suggesting that activation of the street front is desired and blank and inactive walls are discouraged. Um it it's I think that is I don't know how I'd look to maybe Alex who's our architect on staff um on whether that is something that's complementaryary to what we already have or is adding something additional. Would you come speak to that? Alexander for planning the other at the city.

Um, I would say that this statement is in line with some of the requirements we have of the zoning code now and certainly in line with the philosophies behind transex zoning and building type and street activation. Um, so I could see this working in two different ways that either it become it becomes something that you can apply to a discretionary case specifically or you're looking at possible future code amendments and that this guideline would support certain architectural design standards.

Any questions, discussion? A thumbs up or thumbs down? I'm a neutral. Thumbs up. I see. I see. Mostly thumbs up. I'm a neutral. Yeah, I see. Or I think Megan, are you neutral? I can't tell what Megan's doing. Okay. Yeah. So, I saw three neutrals and three thumbs up. So, maybe we say I don't I don't want to put yes or no here, but maybe we just record that and say three neutral at this time and three um positive feelings about it. And then, of course, um well, Christine will be here on the 24th.

And that'll give her a good note to know she might be a tiebreaker on whether to move it forward or not.

staff didn't have any I can't think of any reason this doesn't fit either Alex so I'd go with Alex's it's pretty in line with our current philosophy and zoning code okay and then on so we'll mark that as that on policy map 4-9 add a gateway designation for four street and route 66 so the gateway map which is um um yeah let me give you a page number for policy map 4-9 for a second for those who are navigating 4-9 is on page 4 dash hold on I'm almost there 4-41 that's where it is the current map and current plan does not identify any gateways interior to the city, but the map in the proposed plan identifies gateways interior to the city at the corner of Butler Avenue in Milton and at Route 66 and the new Lone Three overpass.

If you wanted to add one to fourth street, what that would mean is thinking about enhanced design and entryway features at that intersection, which it has some of that now. um thought that you know there were supposed to be some emphasis on that that corridor right there because it's the geographical center of the city and yes there is improvement you know like with the overpass and and how that was handled and built.

I think it would be especially since there's so much development going on in the fourth street corridor right there in town. I think it would be advantageous to identify it as a gateway to encourage that kind of architectural design and furthering that. Luke has her hand up just so you know. CJ, I just absolutely second what Commissioner Norton said. Does anybody else have question?

So, what are the My question is always when we're talking about things like this, what are the um broader implications, right? And like it's it's great if some of these things happen organically and and what have you, but if we're designating these things, does it compel some of the private land owners to do things that perhaps they would rather not do with her current plan?

Some examples of what private property owners have done on great streets, which 66 is already listed as a great street is like not put up chain link fencing or improving the appearance of the fencing and the entryways along the road. Timber Sky is a good example of that. Part of their design that they proposed in their zoning map amendment was really looking at that great street frontage and making sure it had enhanced design features.

Um, it's also been used in working with the Arizona Department of Transportation for enhanced design in the public right away. So, and that's really one of the big reasons we kept it. It was discussed like how useful were great streets and did we really accomplish gateways? Are they in the right places? We had those conversations.

But the Mill Road Plan and the US 180 plan both considered great the great street designation and the gateway designations in our current regional plan in why they um recommended improved crossings and pedestrian designs. We felt it was important to identify those key places and it's a big intersection right over here at 4th and 66. It takes almost three minutes to time through it. So, two minutes. No, no. One thing to contribute here.

I'll can bring you the I was gonna I can We can pass this one. I'll meet you halfway. I just want to add that my understanding of of designating something as a gateway would really once again that would be lead to a discretionary case where you were looking to reszone and then we would look for those sort of enhanced design considerations. So, if you're concerned about existing entitlements that current property owners have, I don't believe that this would necessarily change any of that.

It just might affect future de development if not under existing entitlements. So, follow up on that. Why is it not already designated as a gateway? No one proposed it for now. Okay. So, how do commissioners feel about that? Thumbs up. Thumbs up. I think we heard CJ. Yeah, CJ was a thumbs up. I see six thumbs up. So, we'll put that as a yes and decide it today. Yes. Thumbs up. Look, we have 15 more minutes and we're making good progress. Keep going. We're on to number nine, which is in 414.

revised first guideline to areas already served by existing and future infrastructure and public facilities. So you can read that whole heading. So it's the first bullet under which heading? Oh, so this is a different let's say this is a different tale to the same thing. So the first guideline again says encourage infill development and redevelopment in areas already served by existing infrastructure and public facilities and it just says revise it. What is the Can you help and future?

Oh and future. So this is adding and future. I believe you I these were both proposed in the letter from FC ccubed and I believe you could combine both revisions but I listed them separately here because they're proposed separately for different reasons.

So originally it said areas already served by existing infrastructures and public facilities and this is saying to please add future infrastructures and I mean it's by existing and future uh oh now where did you and and the commenter here is still here and I would have a question as staff for them I guess the definition of infill and redevelopment it's that it's occurring in an existing developed area so um I think does future infrastructure mean like upgrading existing infra infrastructure or like new sewer lines in existing neighbor like I guess I'd like to hear more about like the future they were thinking of when they wrote the comment is because it's it seems in Congress without and maybe we can think of a better word because future and infill is not always doesn't really go together planners but do you mean we can't think of a better way we're only seeing part of it still now back up it's This is the same sentence to revise.

Think about it all in context. Yeah. Adding that to the end and then in future to the middle. Yes. So Lauren who didn't have the mic was saying that um we didn't pass it fast enough is that remember this is there's two edits proposed to the same line. But I don't know could could we ask Michelle James to come up and answer that question? Sure. you feel ready to do that? Sorry if my explanation in my uh written comments was not clear, but I was using an example of uh public transit.

So, if you have some infill in an area, guess what I was thinking about with things like um Mer Springs before uh Mountain Line decided to go west further west on Route 66. and you knew they were planning on it because it was in the five-year plan, right? And they just needed the money to do it. And so infill in that area might be appropriate because you knew there was coming infrastructure that you wanted. Does that make sense? Also, there's sometimes there's things going on.

The city is building extensions for water lines, etc. You know, it's coming. You know, it's two years down the road. Um maybe and fill in that area close to that. I mean, I have to have water anyway, but uh someplace close to that would be appropriate. So, it just opens things up a little bit. I what I tried to say in my comments was using the word near future. I think when I talked to talked to you Sarah, we were just talking about future, but in the near future.

So, something that's coming soon and you know it's on the books already, maybe that could be included, but then that only occurs in the next couple of years. And the plan is for 15 years down the road. So, sure. I think Steph has a Yeah. Okay. I have a comment to that. Yeah.

So, Alex and and Michelle, we're we're flagging the word that we've used to describe something similar to what Friends of Flagstaff Future said in their comment elsewhere in the plan is is the word planned trails or planned services. What that means to staff is it's in a capital improvement plan or it's a funded thing that will be in a capital improvement plan. And then I'll let Michelle expand on that. So maybe it's existing and planned infrastructure and public facilities might be need. Yeah.

And just to get to your point um chairman you know is that if you say plan yes this is a 10-year plan but we update the capital improvement plan every 3 to five years. So it's as it's getting planned, we're kind of moving out with the future. So it kind of covers all that. So maybe and and Michelle James behind me nodded and said yes, that would meet her needs.

So we could we could alter that proposed revision to existing and planned infrastructure and public facilities and would the would the commission support that? I I think that would be something I would support rather than just future. How how do other commissioners feel? Thumbs up. Thank you. I see all thumbs up. Great. Yep. Put a yes next. All right. Um the next one is tied to the future growth illustration. I'll just do a time check. We have 10 minutes.

So if you feel like it's too big to talk about, we can put a pin in it. Um the this is expanding the urban center along both sides of Milton south to Forest Meadows. It currently that designation if you go to the page that the the future growth illustration is on and we might need to pull it up on the screen. Um do you have it open or do I need to switch and share my screen? Yeah. 4-10 is the page number. Um, but if you look at Milton Road, do you want the web? Yeah, the web should be good.

The there there was all of the Woodlands Village area was suburban center in the 60-day public review. Um, Friends of Flagstaff's future recommended that some more of the area be designated as an urban center, which we are agreeable to. We staff looked at it and recommended that that go down to University Avenue but did not extend it further south. And so this proposal would be to take that purple area that Lauren's getting on the screen for us now.

And I'm killing all the time I can to get her there. Um would go all the way south to Forest Meadows, which is the next east west line down. So M. So when you see that area, there's a couple east west roads.

There's university and we stopped at old university, but bring it all the way down to Forest Meadows would include like the coals and the porch and the apartments there at uh Woodlands Village and the um Hilton like taking that whole area and saying as that redevelops, it should be becoming more urban and less suburban. One of the reasons we didn't take it down that far is those are pretty big blocks.

They're way bigger than what we would consider an urban block and they were identified in the high occupancy housing plan as suburban centers where the block north of there it needs some road connections but could be closer to an urban grid. That was just staff's like rationale. Um but open to your thoughts on that. I don't think that's a place we you would stand very firm if you felt strongly that it should be urban.

I'll tell you in the occupancy housing plan readiness area, this area was ranked very high still. So it does have it lacks the road network of an urban area, but it does have underlying infrastructure. It's just the road network is not as dense. So it it would be a medium in our minds, I guess. Any thoughts from commissioners? So Sarah, there were two things that you said. You recommended taking it down to university instead of all the way down to Forest Meadows. Forest metals. Thank you.

I couldn't remember the name. Um no idea that street. Um and I would be supportive in that to do to university. I don't know about others. You mean sorry, can you restate what you'd be supportive of? Uh making that urban all the way down to university. Is that already urban? Yeah, that's the area that's already Do you mean forests? Yes. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. Keep zooming all the way down to Forest Meadows and then where would that that would just be the stopping line?

Would Forest Meadows be all the way up back to University and then stop or would it be all the way up to Route 66 on the west side of it? I mean the area between um currently old university and and state purple it would be extending that purple. So now Forest Meadows, which is north of Walmart to um and north of the um the what's that one called? That big station. Fremont Station. North of Fremont Station. That would all be considered urban as areas are redeveloping, right?

I mean, it's all built out right now. But the the question I guess I'm asking is to the west side because forest um oh it goes west of woodlands village or two woodlands the two woodlands village I don't know that's a good question I I was thinking yeah cuz forest meadows goes around so I guess we would have to define that as woodlands village and then if you can go up a little bit does that go all the way to Route 66?

The purple on the east side of women's village does go all the way to Route 66. Okay. Okay. Thank you. So, it would be this this Oh, now go back to being big. I'm sorry. So, Forest Meadows and the dividing line would be um Interstate 17 there.

That's so Milton is on I think yeah it would be NA campus to Woodlands Village I think unless and and that Michelle James the commenter nodded that what they intended was all the purple that's on the um east side of the road all that area that's like brownish would turn purple and then Okay. And then Forest Meadows and Woodlands Village that whole big block would be purple. Yeah. Okay. And I I can visualize that. Thank you.

So being that this area is all developed out, what would this encourage for the future by bumping it up to urban center? It would do a couple things.

It would encourage that we start if properties start to come in and say I'm going to develop I'm going to demo Kohl's and I'm going to build something else here that we would say well we would start looking at this block for like how can we get more road connections through it because it's not got a gritted urban scale network we start looking to a firing rightway probably couldn't just blast road through this it took us 20 years to do it the first time so it would probably start a slow process of trying to increase the grid in this area and it also incurred a lot of density and intensity in the redevelopment of any of these parcels.

I couldn't guess which ones. Yeah, I have about four minutes left. And would that think about it? What would that do with the viewshed? The viewshed from where? from that area that we're talking about. You know, you're coming into town, you have a view shed. I think a lot of Flagstaff citizens back when Walmart was built and when all garden and those places were built, the hotel that's up there, they were worried about the viewhed.

I think the viewshed's already maximally impacted by Fremont Station and the courtyard. So, I'm not sure that anything you did north of there would impact the viewshed very much. I think it's already the foreground is already covered. So, this would be background to like views from the interstate or views from the entrance to Okay, that's yeah, that's what I was asking because that was a citizen concern for years and years and I don't know if this would impact it more.

We did discuss the view shed along Milton when we were considering a Miltown development. And it's part of why they built smaller buildings in the front bigger building on the back side is because they didn't want to block the kind of big peaks view that people get on Milton. And that's something that developers could work with the city on. Sure. Yeah. So, do we want to do a thumbs up, thumbs down, one more, CJ? Sorry. I was just going to say thumbs up. I I think it's a good idea. Okay.

everybody else. Okay. Well, I think that's the last one we'll have time for tonight. But I think this was a good calm practice um to get us started. And now when we're we meet on the 24th after we take public comment, I think everybody will be ready to go. Okay. So, next on the agenda is miscellaneous miscellaneous items to and from commissioners. Any miscellaneous items hearing? Where do we close it out?

Sarah to, you know, the earlier discussion we had when I when I put some of these things in the the holding space, particularly, you know, the adaptive and living inclusivity and all of all of those comments and letters.

Are you you still want to say these are the things I want in the holdings to be specifically when you look at this and may I make a suggestion when you look Commissioner Nord at this the letter from the actual commission all of those things are covered in the response to comments. So you can go look up they have this comment. Okay, here's why. And if you'd like access to the Excel version so that you can sort or hunt easier. Um we'd be happy to provide that. And I correct me if I'm wrong.

Um all Russell Randall's more recent letter seems to filter out what has already been addressed. It does. Would you agree with that? I would agree. He's filtered out. I think it's already addressed, but he um but the his comments are for a different group. Yes. Even though Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, okay. Um but yes, which of those do you think has merit to or do you want to see a staff recommendation on?

Like staff can look at those and see if there's some we I don't think it should just be me doing that. So, yes, that would be great. All right. Sorry, I just wanted to make one note on Russ's comments. There is there is one section that is I think a duplicate comment from the um the previous letter from the commission on inclusion when building which has to do with the illustrations in chapter 4 and some things that were uh he suggested for the key.

Um so that um we did include some of those edits to the key that were previously suggested during the 68 review. Okay. Is there any other are there any items to and from commissioners? See CJ doesn't have anything. So we are adjourned. It is 7:31 late.