[Matt Leming]: Testing. Good. Okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm looking for a new boyfriend.
[Matt Leming]: Well, my committee is, you know, thanks for being here, Liz. I really appreciate you. I just, yeah, thanks. I just want to say that I, well, she does, but you know, that I'm boring. Yeah, okay. Just want to appreciate all of the Councilors who are here. Okay, Anna says she's on her way, so that's good. Yes, yes, I know. I'm very aware that my voice is going out to the Zoom because the people should know that, okay, okay, here's Emily.
[Unidentified]: OK, yep, there. OK.
[Matt Leming]: All right, we will have a meeting of the Medford City Council Planning and Permitting Committee. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan. Councilor Callahan is not here. Councilor Malauulu. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: President Bears. here at the moment, and Chair Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Present. Three present, two absent. Should note that I've heard from both Councilors Callahan and Council President Bears that they will be here in person. They're just running a little bit late, but we do have quorum and we can just get started here. So the two items on the agenda are the, and Councilor Callahan just arrived, So would like to note that, hold on, I'm hearing some echo here. Okay. Yep. We have two items on the agenda. The first is proposed amendments to technical and procedural issues in the Medford Zoning Ordinance. This is essentially the list of quote unquote cleanup items from our zoning ordinance. So this is small things like language, typos, things that have been frustrating both our PDS and the building department for a while now. And we also have the proposed vacant building ordinance, which we're going to hear about again and just go over some brief updates there. The first thing we can start on is the cleanup parts, So in the agenda packet, we received a number of papers related to cleanup items. I asked Building and PDS to basically just kind of take all of their wish lists, all of the things that they wanted, any work they had done just to resolve things like typos, et cetera, et cetera. put them into a document. Senior planner Evans also put, also emailed me, or passed around this document right here, which I'm now presenting on Zoom, and I passed around to the rest of the meeting, which is a slightly more high-level document. bullet point list of things that the building or sorry that PBS and building would sort of like to do. And again we're not going to be we're not going to be referring anything out today. But I do want to kind of just get this process started just to understand first what the biggest priorities are, kind of get an idea from the folks who are here about what things do need to be changed and just get it on the record, help council understand the different issues with our zoning ordinance and how we could help. And also try to get some idea of the capacity of our current staff to address these items. What are the priority items that you think should be done? Is there anything that could easily be referred out at a meeting? at a nearby future meeting or some of these sort of longer term projects that will take a little bit more time to sort of knock out. So essentially what I'm trying to do here is to get an understanding of what needs to be changed and to hammer out some sort of timeline and get sort of an idea of that. I'd just like to thank Senior Planner Evans again for offering this list of sort of pretty clear items that do need to be changed. It's things that range from just adding missing definitions, wordsmithing any items that we've seen for clarity, issues with conflicting language, modernizing or zoning to get it up to date with current practices. And yeah, so I would like to sort of, I would like to turn it over to staff just to let them kind of talk about this, give us, and again, just give us an impression of what what you think needs to be changed, what can be referred out of, what can be referred out of committee in the near future, and how long you think this will take, given capacity and sort of other priorities that you, that you have at the moment. See, PDS Director Evans, or. Hunt. You know, I'm very glad that.
[Danielle Evans]: Promoting. Did I just get promoted?
[Matt Leming]: Yes, what? I don't know.
[Scott Vandewalle]: Are you sure you want to be?
[Matt Leming]: Alicia, please. Please, you have the floor.
[Alicia Hunt]: So there are a couple of different documents and there are different types of edits that need to be done. And so I've been trying to help us all categorize them in a really big picture. The first one that I want to just call your attention to is this very gigantic doc, well it's not that dynamic, gigantic, it's 15 pages. But we can also provide it as a clean document that is called the list of proposed changes for Medford zoning cleanup that is typos. It's titles for tables. So none of the tables have actual titles and like numbers for them so that you can't reference them in the text. And there are a number of formatting things that when we raised before to lawyers and said, are these just copy edits that can be done? They said it would be better if the formatting went actually through this process. So it's not that document, but the next one, the list of proposed changes, because this one is truly should not have anything that is changing anything in meaning, but the lawyers have advised us. And it's things like all numbers should be presented in the same way with a word followed by a number in parentheses. And it's the addition of the tables throughout this entire document. There are things like wrong references. Anytime you see a reference that's 94 dot and then a three digit number, that's the old zoning code and it was never updated. And so whenever you see that, that is us just putting in the correct reference. And then there were a few places where wrong things were sort of copy and pasted. Like one thing that jumps out at me for example is that in the linkage area road and traffic was written in the water and sewer section. And so under the heading water and sewer we delete right. That's the kind of level. So this is the kind of thing that I needs to go in front of you needs to go to a public hearing. I invite you all to look at it in depth if you want to. But this is really just true cleanup then the other documents are documents where we're correcting things. And so that first one the proposed zoning cleanup is something that Scott our building commissioner and Danielle the senior planner spent several hours together coming through with those. And it is some that are straight up. There were some typos that occurred that were meaningful in the text that we really would like to get corrected. We all talk about the one that says how many. Primary buildings are allowed on a lot the word not was inserted when it shouldn't have been and it completely flipped the meaning of the entire section. But there are other things in there most of which are making things more clear or in alignment with the building code. This is the place where some people may think that meanings are changing. If that is the case, then we can discuss that, figure that out. But the important thing in the end is how does the building commissioner interpret the zoning? And so I'll let Scott speak for himself, but that is part of bringing the words together in alignment so that when reasonable people read them, they're all reading it and understanding it the same way. And there are a few definitions in here that have been misinterpreted by people or have caused confusion. And some of this goes back to language that was used in the 50s and 60s has evolved. And so the terminology that was used then sometimes means something different now. So that's most of what's in here. One of the things we do want to flag for you is this is not everything. This is when they sat together for hours, what they've come up with so far. And we should move some of these forward. The other that I think is important to recognize is the table of uses and definitions. This is where our intern Christian, who's on the call, he's a legal expert on this. He's really dug into it. But he went through and every use, if there's a definition in our zoning, he put it in the table. And if there's no definition in the table, then it's blank. And that can be problematic, because then reasonable people will again argue over what it means. And so this is something that we feel needs to be filled out. And whether we can fill it out in this process, we would really like to, because it's really problematic for us having words with no definitions. And if some of them, however, it is my personal opinion that if we get bogged down in debating over any definitions, we should set those aside. We should move forward past as much of this as we can and then come back to and. workshop the ones that we argue over. I don't think there are very many of those. I think it's pretty straightforward, but it is important. So let me actually turn it over to Scott and see if he wants to add or go into any details on any of this so far.
[Scott Vandewalle]: Hi. Yeah, my reflections and comments are based on what we've experienced over the last couple of years I've been here and dealing with this at the desk on a daily basis. It also comes from my past experience as a commissioner and a zoning person and as a member of a zoning board. prior to that. So I put it all together and these are the daily functional types of issues that we run into where definitions and things are hard to follow and open to a lot of interpretation. And believe me, everybody has a different interpretation depending on what their goal is for for process are. So we've tried to put it in there. I do agree there are some that will be more challenging to resolve than others. Others may be fairly straightforward, simple, but certainly the more challenging ones should be set aside and discussed. But happy to discuss any one of them in particular and tell you where I'm coming from and we can kind of go from there. And that's what I have for now.
[Matt Leming]: Senior Planner Evans, do you have anything to add? Or you don't have to have anything to add. I'm just wondering if you wanted to.
[Danielle Evans]: No, I won't. Thank you, Chair Leming. Yeah, I won't belabor the conversation too much. You saw my high level recommended things that we need to look at. definitely need more time to dig into it because I'm trying to put all my efforts into getting the Medford Square zoning over the finish line because that's so important to get it right. I'm trying to put all my energy towards that in addition to development review, which is also a huge part of my daily tasks. I'm very appreciative that the council is open to making some of these changes and whether that's doing these and you know, a couple passes where it's the typos, formatting, simple fixes first that will make our lives a lot easier. And then, you know, that second tier and third tier changes that might need a little bit more time. So, yeah, thank you for that.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. And all of your efforts to get Medford Square over the finish line are very much appreciated.
[Alicia Hunt]: May I add one thing? So one of the things I did discuss with our legal counsel was the process for some of this because it can be really complicated and a lot of pages. And she said to me that we shouldn't pass something that is like, fix all the formatting to be in alignment, that we should actually have a document that has all the formatting and typos exactly clean as we want them, and we should do that. And so Christian's actually prepared that document, so at some point, it's like 165 pages of zoning. We have a redlined version and a clean version. that would need to be actually circulated and that would be what you would actually vote on. And so as we go through this, one of my thoughts was to start with his version, that is the formatting, and then as these other edits, we sort of, we, this group says yes, that should be part of it, then he adds them into the red line and clean version so that what gets submitted to the city council for public hearing is both, One hundred and sixty five pages of red line and one hundred and sixty five pages of clean document.
[Matt Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you, so appreciate all of your work putting this together. In our packets, the second section is the simplest one, and that all looks quite reasonable from what I see. The one that appears first in our packets is the one that you mentioned, I believe, second, and it's not the dimensional table, right? And I just wanted to ask a little bit about, there appear to be a lot of deletions. So, you know, in the landscaping buffers and screening, there's like whole paragraphs deleted, then under definitions, deleting, building accessory, building attached, building detached, building principle, building coverage, greenhouse. So, it doesn't appear to just be sort of clean up. It looks like a lot of things are being deleted, but not updated. So, I just was curious about those. Yep.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, my mic wasn't on. Yes, so that's the first document. This is what Scott was talking to. Sorry, I didn't quite catch it. Did you want us to go through that or comment on this?
[Anna Callahan]: As you were discussing it, I thought that it might be a little bit less of an obvious change of complete sections deleted. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the goal is here, but I thought that it was minor changes that didn't change the meaning. Or confusions that people had.
[Alicia Hunt]: So right, are you thinking about the definitions that we're seeing?
[Anna Callahan]: I could, but maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it looks like in a few places there are large sections simply deleted.
[Scott Vandewalle]: Yeah, over the last two years of this process, I have on several occasions sent emails off to NSA, and these are things we should be looking at that don't make sense. We should look at a different way of defining them. Yeah, they're at the next level above and beyond Scribner's errors, which is a huge portion of that. So I look at it more from that perspective of things we think could be made clearer, the things we've struggled with down at the desk at times to understand what was meant or had people come in with entirely opposite opinions and then having to argue about what it is and make a call. So these are sort of, yes, second level above Scribner's errors where some sections are obsolete or make no sense. Other things need to be sort of put in to clarify stuff like the two principle structures in a lot one. moved around and I know the board's talked about definitions for high frequency trans and some others that may be difficult to do, but we've put suggestions in there for those as well.
[Anna Callahan]: Great. And I think that is what I kind of thought you were saying. I then still have this question of like it seems like you're removing like six definitions in a row without any replacement. So which is if that makes sense then it does make sense unless I'm reading it wrong. Right.
[Scott Vandewalle]: No, that's correct, and we can surely walk through why we've looked at it in that way.
[Anna Callahan]: I would be interested in any of these more apparently major changes, like why they make sense. That would be lovely. Thanks.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I think my question is, when? Do we want to do that now tonight, or do we want to actually put a pin in, these are the ones that are, and some of these I actually did start to comment, like this seems substantial versus this is not. You can see some of the back and forth. comments between myself and Scott to sort of talk through some of this in there. So yeah, do you want us to... I think Scott could talk in detail about any of these.
[Matt Leming]: I think just talk about maybe one just to give an example of your thinking in one case, but you don't have to go through every single one of them. Just if you wanna pick one or if Anna wants to... I'll let you guys pick one that... Yep.
[Anna Callahan]: I don't mind. I will. I'll just go to these definitions. It looks like we're removing building accessory building attached building detached building principal building coverage. But like all of those are going away. Is that accurate. Is anything replacing them.
[Scott Vandewalle]: No we are. The intention was to replace them but to simplify them in our end. Part of the challenge here is that the zoning talks about structures and the zoning talks about buildings and really the structure is what we're talking about. Building is one structure, but if you look at our definition of structure, there's a whole bunch of other things that we zone in some effect. So part of the answer was to clarify structures and dwellings versus buildings, buildings is not a complete enough definition. So part of the intent was to focus it away from buildings and onto the concept of dwellings, structures with dwellings and structures without dwellings, structures attached, structures detached, so that we fully encompassed all the definitions of structures. We use them both somewhat interchangeably. They're not truly interchangeably. Buildings is sort of a roof and a wall and this, but there are a number of other items that need to be covered somewhere.
[Alicia Hunt]: Would you, for example, as more in a layman, I look at building accessory and building detached, building attached and building principle. So here we're saying that there should be a definition of a building, and that's what matters. And there's a definition of whether there's a habitable space or an occupiable space, and that whether the building that it's in other places that these words are used, right?
[Scott Vandewalle]: And so how do we then- Yes, going out to dwelling where we have multiple dwellings, single family dwellings. I felt that was a more apt way to describe versus buildings. It felt like we were duplicative in there to some extent. You'll see under dwellings we still have multiple dwellings, attached dwellings. We do have accessory structures. A garage is an accessory structure in our language, not really an accessory building. So it was an attempt to bring those together. So dwellings is how I start to refer to buildings with people living in them.
[Alicia Hunt]: And so I think one of the questions that is we haven't quite, that I think you're gonna make this leap, and that I then have to Scott and Danielle and Christian is, has somebody gone through the zoning and found where these words are used to make sure that we're not then using words that are no longer defined, but we have replaced them with the right word? Maybe that's a Christian question.
[Scott Vandewalle]: It's a little bit of both. These right now were strong suggestions of things we thought should be clarified. Have we gone back and identified all the missing pieces yet, not necessarily are going to rely a little bit on Christian to find out where those words are. But if you read through it, you find the word structure appears far more often than building. And it was tempted to match that up a little bit closer. The other upside to it is it does match up a little bit closer with building code, which talks about dwellings and structures. So we're not trying to sync them exactly, but have them sort of coordinate with each other as often as possible. So that's kind of the goal there.
[Matt Leming]: senior planner Evans.
[Danielle Evans]: Yes. Uh, thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, yeah. So the structure, like I, I agree with commissioner van wall, um, that we would talk about accessory structures and principal structures, um, you know, as uses and also needing their own dimensional requirements, you know, an accessory structure could be a dwelling unit or it's not. Um, also when it comes to, um, you know, controlling for impervious surface and coverage of a lot, we'd want to go by lot coverage, which would include structures, not building coverage. So cleaning up some of that. And ideally, when we have a nice, clean zoning ordinance with a bow on it, I would like every defined term to appear in the ordinance with a different font. So when you come across it, you're like, this is a defined term. And then looked and make sure that you understand the meaning of it. That's a best practice in zoning so that we all know that we're talking about the same things. So that kind of inconsistency is all throughout the ordinance. And it's hard to see it because you're not seeing all the definitions in one spot. So it looked like we're not defining buildings anymore. That would probably, you know, also set off kind of an alarm bell, but knowing that we're using different words elsewhere, hopefully will help when seeing it all in a cohesive manner.
[Matt Leming]: Councilor Mullane.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Councilor Mullane's mic is not on.
[Liz Mullane]: Oh, sorry.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you.
[Liz Mullane]: I didn't touch it this time, I promise.
[Unidentified]: I better say something great now, right? After all this.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay, when I was reading through this, I was just getting a little bit, trying to follow where you both landed when you were commenting back and forth on the different pages of like, where we landed on some of the decisions. So for example, when you look at the dimensional requirements for accessory structures and there's a comment from Alicia and then I think Scott responded and I just wasn't sure kind of where we landed or if it was still up in the air or if that's something we need to work through. OK. All right. So those are some of the pieces we need to kind of. OK. Got it.
[Alicia Hunt]: This is some of the timeline is that we haven't had the chance to get to that final.
[Zac Bears]: Sure.
[Alicia Hunt]: And but it doesn't mean that city councilors others couldn't participate in that discussion. Got it.
[Zac Bears]: I just want to clarify for everybody that something went on with the microphone system so you can turn on and off your own microphone. So just be aware of that. Just be aware of that.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. Councilor Callahan. Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. It was very, very clarifying to talk through those building to structure to dwelling changes. And also, I think it does make sense to agree upon the definitions before, you know, getting all of the changes. I mean, you could prepare and know where they all are. But I think knowing that we are in fact going to make that change before doing that does make sense. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, Council President Bears. Thank you. I think in general, I appreciated your thoughts about process. I think it makes sense. I didn't include, we got the Christian version. I was like, I'm not putting that in this packet, because Rich already had to print 80 pages. And I was like, I'm not going to make it 240 pages for this meeting. So I think that makes sense. I think something that might be useful, it's not clear to me. at least I didn't take a close enough look at all four documents that we saw. It seems to me like most of the three things in here aren't in that fourth one yet, in the one that Christian has done, or at least some of them are and aren't. And I'm guessing that's because just procedurally you haven't maybe had a chance to discuss them between you guys. But I think it might make sense to Councilor Callahan's point that when we do come back and we're talking about kind of the red line versus the clean cleanup version, it might be good to just say here are kind bigger changes or group them into some sort of memo. And that's probably, again, more work for Christian. Sorry, Christian. But I think that might just be useful, because sometimes walking through the whole 160 pages, it's hard to parse, especially if we're removing a definition, switching some stuff over. And it doesn't need to be as detailed as you know, every time the word building has changed to structure, I think that's like a waste of Christian's time and all of our time to put that into a memo. But just to say, these definitions removed and we went through and we replaced, you know, the word building with structure. And then I think, you know, it might also be useful, I like the tier kind of concept that everybody's talking about, Scribner's errors, and then kind of a semi-substantive change. And then I think there will probably be a few things that are policy changes that are just, Truly just shifts and how we've been doing things also because of what you guys are hearing in terms of implementing the ordinance on the ground. So those those that would be kind of how I would structure the memo.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I believe, Christian, correct me if this is wrong, but that was the intention, is that the 15 pages is actually the summary version to let you know what's deeper into the document. And we probably could bring that up just a little bit more, like at a higher level, just saying we've corrected incorrect references or references to the old zoning. Old zoning numbers have been updated with correct zoning numbers as a bullet line and as opposed to this document actually just lists every one of them.
[Unidentified]: Right.
[Alicia Hunt]: As long as on the final version that finally gets submitted, I don't know that it needs to be printed, but that goes online is a full red line with all of those in them. And then you will need the clean one eventually. to post, so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, exactly.
[Alicia Hunt]: And Christian has his hand up, so.
[Matt Leming]: Yep, Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I just want to note that the 15-page document includes all of the page numbers on which these changes were made, minus the ones that are like, I didn't want to put the page numbers for every number I changed because that's 160 pages worth of the ordinance. So everything besides the headings and numbers have page numbers where they directly link to that full red line version on what pages they were changed and what was changed.
[Zac Bears]: Great, yeah, and that's super helpful. And I guess more, you know, I hate to suggest like... essentially three documents, right? There's like the redlined ordinance text, then what you put together, Christian, and then kind of a third even simpler thing. So maybe that last piece is just something we do towards the end. Unless, of course, it's easier to put it together while you're doing it. Like I think that's really up to the person who's doing the work. So just my two cents. I think that's a helpful process and I think, you know, after we've gone through questions, it might be useful to talk through timeline.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. This may just be a repetition of what Council President Bears was saying. Maybe I'm adding something. For me it would be incredibly helpful. Like I think in this first document that I'm looking at there are a number of conceptual changes. So one of them is the one that you described. It was incredibly helpful for me to be like oh great that makes perfect sense now. I see the changes here and the changes there. They all have to do with the way that we talk about building structures and dwellings. So I don't know if there could be purpose. There are issues that people not understanding or disagreeing with state code around building structures dwellings. We would like to change these for that for this purpose. Different purpose. Here's the reason why we want to do this change. I think there are some conceptual things that would make it a lot easier for city council to be like fantastic. Love it. Move on. Great. It would just make the process faster. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: One question I had is, so we're probably gonna see a final product of this after we've already passed some other amendments to the zoning ordinance down the line. Will the 165 page changes in any way conflict or make it more complicated when we, for instance, have a Tufts or Boston Avenue changes also coming down the pipeline and like how to, Well, I just want to get a feeling for how those would end up being implemented on top of each other.
[Alicia Hunt]: Actually, Danielle and I were just messaging each other about that as we walked downstairs. Because there are certain, for example, what has come up in the Medford Square zoning is how one interprets building height. And it turns out that it's not readily obvious that intelligent people don't all interpret it the same way or understand how Medford has been using it. And so we need a clear updated definition of building height. We need it for the Medford Square zoning so everybody's understanding it. We need the same definition throughout the whole zoning packet. And so my thought that would work is for some of the things like that to literally put it in both places, just make sure that it's word for word exactly the same definition. That we update the definition in the Medford Square zoning And then we also carry it through in this, because the Medford Square zoning is supposed to be just that section of the zoning. We didn't advertise that we were updating these other definitions. So when you pass it for Medford Square, you would be passing it literally just for Medford Square. Then we include the definition here in the bigger packet and at that time we update it for the rest of the city with the goal that these are happening close in time to each other within months not years. Right. So that the gap where you're choosing it. So the reality is that's an example where. The definition the working definition doesn't change correct Scott the way you're interpreting it is not going to change. It's the words in the documents so that everybody else who reads it reads it the same way.
[Scott Vandewalle]: It's an odd definition if we're going to talk about building height that's based on an interior rafter placement which is not something you can see or observe it's not a typical thing and it's based off the curb. elevation which the question has come up well I have a private way I have no curb what are we measuring to more typical stuff is the height of the building at the place it sits from the ground around it to halfway up the roof or to the peak. So we're trying to make it more understandable in that sense and not based on things that don't really have a role per se. In zoning because raft I can move my rafters around anywhere I want the roof and it doesn't change the height. I don't think that's the goal. The curbs don't always make sense that penalizes some people so it's partially conceptual. It's also partially making it more logically fit what we observe. as a zoning perspective so that everybody is, oh, that makes sense. Right now, it doesn't make great sense, the definition as it is, and it's hard to understand. And virtually every drawing that comes in has never read the definition. They're all taking what other communities do and say, oh, this is nice. No, you got to go measure the curb up here, and you got to measure to the right. And it gets very confusing very quickly. So cases like that, we're trying to make it consistent with people who want to see, want to do, what they expect to walk into and see when they're on the street.
[Alicia Hunt]: And some of the confusion, particularly in this case in Medford Square, is that there is, for many of these parcels, there is a curb at High Street and there is a curb at Mystic Valley Parkway, and they are between one and two stories height difference apart. And people were looking at the building saying, look, that's an eight story building. But it turns out that under Medford's definition, it's a six-story building, and there are two stories below grade, except they're not really below grade. They're like open to the air on three, if not four sides, which was leading to really a lot of confusion. So these are kind of the things that how do we make sure that we use them and we carry them through everywhere. So that's my suggestion, to come back to your question, is that we put the things that need to be changed in Medford Square and in the Boston Ave and institutional zoning in those documents, and then any of them that we want to carry through for the whole city, we could then also place in this. It's easy to say that with definitions. The places where it becomes a little bit like, let's talk about it, maybe I'm not, maybe that answer isn't right, is when it's, What do we allow for parking? One of the things, actually a non-controversial but better one, is this idea of historic preservation, allowing people to waive setbacks and other things if they preserve the exterior facade of the building. That is being proposed in the Medford Square zoning. Some people are going, oh, well, for buildings over a certain age or on the historic registers and stuff like that, maybe that should be allowed anywhere in the city. That's a bigger question, right? So I'm not clear that we can just do that in what we're calling the cleanup, whereas a definition I hope we could do in a cleanup.
[Matt Leming]: So in terms of what we have on the proposed schedule, obviously there is a bit of a, you know, we did have to do some rescheduling. So originally this was the only planning and permitting committee dedicated to building and to these cleanup changes. And we'll have to do more. But the next one, which could be changed to a planning and permitting committee meeting, was on April 28th. Over a little over a month from now Do you? I guess my question is what changes do you think, given other workloads, could feasibly be prepared by then? Do you think that a finished draft of the definitions could be prepared by then? Is there anything that would be in a state to be referred out of committee by about 40 days from now?
[Scott Vandewalle]: Yeah, I mean, I think the Scrivener's errors is kind of an easy step to do. We sort of have that. It's a little bit more challenging with some of the other language we need to hash out amongst ourselves a little more. I think tonight my goal was to throw the stuff out we're looking at and get some feedback. Some things just may not be right for this time. Some things maybe need explored a little bit more. Maybe it's everything I'm hoping for, but it may not. So we sort of need, again, tier these from Scrivener's, tier one, tier two stuff we think makes clean-up sense in terms of revised definitions, and then certainly other things are a whole other conversation. I think high-frequency traffic's my favorite. There's a whole lot of different ways to look at that, and each one has its different impact, and we're not looking have these had that kind of dramatic impact. That's really more of a conceptual error, like you said, but Scriveners and logic cleanups, I think we could certainly get to by the 28th and certainly give you a list of what's left of more conceptual challenges. I think that's doable from my end.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. I think I just want to clarify what I was saying about conceptual. It's not a category of changes. It's like, to me, it'll be so much easier for me to be able to say yes, yes, yes, or yes, yes, no, if for each set of changes, like the ones that you described about building structured dwelling was maybe 30 lines, right? I don't know exactly how many lines, but it's a bunch of deletions, a bunch of additions. and for every grouping of changes to understand what the purpose is would be incredibly helpful to me. So that's what I meant by conceptual, not that some changes are conceptual and other changes are, you know, logistical or whatever. And then I don't know if we can vote on the Scrivener ones today or not, how people feel about that.
[Zac Bears]: If you don't mind, Matt. Council President Bears. I mean, I think just like talking through the process, probably one zoning amendment is easier than two or three zoning amendments. So if you guys can make it through, and just given the timeline on Medford Square and then we still have to figure out Boston Avenue, Tufts, zoning, certainly if we can get those first two tiers by April 28th, which is quite a ways away, we could at least refer that out. And then looking at the... Just like look at that high level priorities document you know I think the high frequency transit and maybe the site plan review levels with administrative reviews. And potentially like the implications from 22 23 zoning changes like those feel like they might be more significant policy changes that might fall into that tier 3. Because I like I appreciated that structural outline of the different tiers of things. And maybe you know if you guys in in the next six weeks feel like you can come up with a strong proposal that we can talk about on April 28 or it's actually probably the 29th.
[Matt Leming]: That's the Wednesday. Yeah, the 28th it said it was like this is supposed to be like a regular meeting, which obviously isn't going to happen unless we refer something else out tonight. But I do feel like it would be best to kind of, like you said, have this in one kind of solid packet just to have, if anything, to give the CDB kind of like fewer papers.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, so I think it's April. I just saw there was an open Wednesday, April 29th. I don't know if that conflicts with community development board either, so. Cuz I can't remember if you guys are first and third or second and fourth. I never remember it, but is it CDB first?
[Alicia Hunt]: CDB meets first and third.
[Zac Bears]: First and third, so I think that the Wednesday the 29th might work for a planning department.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, we do not have CD board scheduled that night.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Alicia Hunt]: Wait, I thought they were all in my calendar. Yes, April, we have the 15th is the only one. The 29th is like an extra, it's a bonus Wednesday.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, so we could take the bonus Wednesday for this. And I'm just looking at the calendar, I think that would work. But yeah, I mean, if we have the first two tiers and then there's three or four things that are in that, this is a substantive policy shift. If you guys feel like you've had enough time to talk about it and ready for prime time, we could maybe move that with the rest of it. And if there's stuff that comes here and we need to talk about it more, then we need to talk about it more. Just my thoughts.
[Alicia Hunt]: So yeah, so I'm back channeling with Christian. And he says that everything regarding the errors, the cleanup, that stuff, it's done. It's ready to go, to your point of voting it out. And I think that what we're saying, and I want to make sure I understand this, because I want to restate it, because I'm going to be directing Christian's work. is that there's a bunch of other things that we're suggesting, these other documents, and we're gonna put those in a document. Some of you may remember from two years ago, there was a bunch of zoning changes where we had like a purpose, we had existing language, and then we had new proposed language. That went through a bunch of rounds, and that's the one where the not got in the wrong way, and that was after it went back and forth between us and the lawyers, the office and the city council. Somehow in all of that it got But that document I think we're going to use as an example document. It just loads purpose and then each of those. But then we're going to ask him to track those in a master document and so that at the end of the planning and permitting committee meeting. You all can say, yes, these 25 items that you laid out purpose for, we've accepted 23 of them, and two of them we think we should hold and do later. And then he will produce a redlined full copy of the zoning with those 23 items in it, but we'll still have that side document with the purpose and the explanation and stuff, and then put that onto the agenda to move forward through the public hearing process. And I think what I would add, because I'm seeing nods, is that if you all can take the time to just look at what was sent to you and was submitted through this, and if there's anything that jumped out at you as like, oh, this is a problem, I don't think this is a good idea, raise it to us now, because it may be that we actually just need to have an offline conversation to clarify things, and then that would help. Or there's something else going on that we're not realizing what a big deal it is. And then we just want to pull it from now and put it onto something that's more substantial later.
[Anna Callahan]: So I think just for myself it's a whole lot easier for me to like pass the things I understand now now pass other things later like I would prefer. And if I were on the city board, I think I would feel the same. Like, I would rather have them in smaller pieces than have a gigantic document. And I'm curious if, like, what your opinion is of whether it would be better to, like, pass these scrivener changes today and pass other things later, or if there is a way for us to I'm trying to think of a way that we don't receive like 160 pages and we have to pass the whole thing. And the other thing I'll say is, and I apologize for repeating myself, but it would be very difficult for me to read through these changes and be able to say whether it works or doesn't work without the explanation of the reason why we're removing six building definitions and adding two dwelling definitions is because X, Y, Z. Like, I just couldn't even, I wouldn't understand what those changes were. So having the purpose and the laid out in the way that you were saying that did happen, you know, a year and a half or more ago, that would be crucial for me personally to be able to make that determination and give you the feedback that you're looking for.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I think that what I'm taking away is the document with the Scrivener's type errors, we should just be planning to run with it. I can't imagine why anybody would object to that document. I mean, some of you may want to read through it just because you care about that level of detail. But I can't imagine that there are any concerns in there. We're putting them out to the public now. I don't want, in a month from now, people to say, oh, that document is too big. It's available now. It's not going to get changed. It is what it is We can also make it available the full version on the zoning web page if anybody There are other armchair planners out there who want to look at it And I'm wondering if there's any sense to us sending materials in chunks to city Councilors like as they're available So the only thing is that I don't want I The staff have a lot on their plates, so I don't want to be saying, oh, we can get you stuff earlier. But some of this may be as simple as Christian reformatting this existing document with some purposes in front of it and recirculating it in a week or two so that you see that. But it's not fully flushed out. It's not done. It was the draft that we had when they wanted to go to print with the agenda.
[Matt Leming]: So is the 165 page scripters or a document just the edits that are listed out in this list of proposed zoning changes in the agenda except actually like in a corrected changes kind of a format? Well, basically when it comes to the referring something out of committee tonight, I just want to be sure that something that reflects that is fully within the agenda packet that we have now.
[Alicia Hunt]: I see. So it's one of the documents that I sent you all that we didn't attach is literally a red line of our existing zoning. Is that correct, Christian? Am I misstating that? Actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is correct. It's highlighted with different colors, blue being reformatting, red and orange or red and yellow being additions and removing, and then green being grammar, grammatical changes.
[Alicia Hunt]: So whatever that is, it's more than 150 pages. So we could make that available for people to look at at any time.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, and again, I would just like, referring out Scribner's errors tonight seems fine. My concern is just making sure that when we do that in this committee that we would actually have the document in front of us in a publicly available way before we actually do that. That's my only concern. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. Yeah, I think, I don't want to get bogged down in version control. I understand what you're saying, Anna, but I really think one zoning amendment Is just easier for people to handle process wise like it's probably a lot more to read it once so totally get that but. Yeah, I mean, so it sounds like tier one Scrivener's errors, that's done and could be formatted, adjusted, and ready to go. That second grouping of like, we want to align the code with practices and addressing issues that we're seeing in implementation, where are we at with that group of things?
[Alicia Hunt]: That's the document in front of you right now. So to be clear, in my gut, it'll never be fully done. So how far we go is how far we get with the amount of time we have. But that's the document. Like there's not more than that sitting somewhere.
[Zac Bears]: Right now, yeah. And then that third tier is kind of what was in that higher level overview. There's a few things that are certainly substantive policy changes that, and there's maybe like four to eight of those.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And some of them, as we have discussed, are a little sort of straightforward. The idea that we're supposed to do site plan review on a store that's under 2,500 square feet seems incredibly ridiculously burdensome. I didn't even realize myself that it had gotten in there. So like striking that out like feels like an easy thing. That's not a wholesale review of site plan review which we do think we should do. But there might be some easier wins that we could get ease get. And that may also be that this document that we provide you is like here's the reason. here are things that are, here are easy, and then we, in a meeting, sit, go, yes to these, and let's set these others aside.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And then I think, like, I just want to align this with the rest of the process. So we have Medford Square. We're coming into it. We're hopefully, you know, at least going to make a ton of good progress next week, if not move forward to getting something out for passage. And then the other parts of this phase, which we have basically the end of May and some of June to work on, are Tufts-Boston Ave and this, the cleanup and adjustment. You know, the things that Innis is working on, the Tufts-Boston Ave and the Medford Square, they're not working really on this, is my understanding, right?
[Alicia Hunt]: We have not asked them to work on this specifically. I think they do have a little bit of bandwidth to do some of this. But as long as we have Christian's assistance through the end of the school year, don't get a job too fast, Christian. By the way, if anybody's listening, he is looking for a job after graduation. That moving this forward now makes sense to us. it is overwhelming to the staff to then start thinking about the Boston, the Tufts, Boston Ave, because it's the same people, it's Danielle and Scott who need to really be thinking about those. The formatting parts, the table labels, that's easy, that's crush trend.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I guess I'm just saying like... We should prioritize the Tufts Boston Ave because the Innis contract is time limited and we have a certain number of meetings available. And I don't want us to get bogged down in three different versions of this cleanup in three different zoning amendments that then community development board is like, what is this, what is, you know, or, you know, I'm just saying I think if we wait until the end of April, give you guys internally time to take everything that we've talked about tonight, put it into a document, do that formatting like you mentioned with like the purpose, old, new. To me, unless you think that in the next six weeks, like not changing these things is gonna make your, it's like worse than changing. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, like if there are things that like, if we don't change them in the next six weeks, it's gonna be a problem, like then maybe we split things up and move it ahead, but I really think Let's just keep these as three items and we've talked a lot about zoning being confusing and I don't want to like split this up and make it have people be like what's going on. They said they were doing three things now they're doing six things and it feels more confusing is really just my main thing. So that's that's what I'm suggesting and I think we also have some date changes that we need to do in April around Tufts Boston and planning and permitting committees and things like that anyway. So if we can just say. come back to us on April 29th with the documents that we've talked about. I hope that gives enough time for those three tiers of changes. I personally would prefer that we do that.
[Matt Leming]: Senior Planner Evans.
[Danielle Evans]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to chime in and say that I don't think we need Innis for a lot of this cleanup. As staff, we Like intimately know the ordinance and what needs to be fixed, and we only know that because we use it constantly. The only we really need probably legal review to make sure that everything is constructed clearly. I don't know if that's something that we can do with our existing retainer with KP or not. But we want to make sure that. We're timing like some of these definitions and aligned. uses while they're finishing up their specific sections. So I don't think we need to use too much of their time or resources.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, and I think what I was hearing from Councilor Bears was, could we wait till we're done doing the INIS? Would it be better? And my biggest concern is that Christian might go get a job, and we won't have that resource.
[Zac Bears]: I think I'm offering a middle ground, which is, let's not rush this in the next two to four weeks. Let's give six weeks. April 29th, you know, still the semester, right? We're still in the spring semester at that point. But that will let us either have Innes and our team being able to focus on finishing up Menford Square if we need more time, or getting started on Tufts-Boston Ave without a bunch of pressure and time pressure on you guys to do this whole third thing, since it's not. If the only urgency is Christian's pending departure, which we're very sad about.
[Scott Vandewalle]: And I can hold up the permits to Tufts for tents for the graduation ceremonies by a couple weeks, and that'll help us.
[Zac Bears]: Rocko, that was not me. We have all sorts of tools. No. And I think that's a middle ground in my mind. So I was agreeing with what Danielle said. We don't need Innis for this, but maybe we don't need to... I don't think we need to split this up to rush parts. Some parts of it are done, and I'm glad that some parts of it are done and non-controversial.
[Alicia Hunt]: We actually have scheduled a public meeting on Tufts Boston Ave on April 30th.
[Unidentified]: Right.
[Alicia Hunt]: And it would be my preference that we hold that meeting before we refer stuff to public hearing.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we're hearing from the public before we have a version that's going through the public hearing process. Right.
[Zac Bears]: And I think we also have an issue where the planning and permitting committees are scheduled on the community development board nights in April. So I think I'm, I just, there's an email that I need to get back to you, you guys on from Thursday about that.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we have just CD board meeting on April 15th. Right. April 1st we skipped because of Passover.
[Zac Bears]: And we probably should too. So, and then we have an April 15th planning and permitting which is for Boston Ave. So maybe we need to look at that intervening week for that. So we'll have to look at the schedule. My point being that initial conversation, so there's something to talk about at the info session on the 30th. It's looking like maybe that's April 8th, given what we have here. And I don't know if that's enough time for us to really start talking about Tufts-Boston Ave. So some of this depends on what happens next week with Medford Square, right? But if we can have time in April to draft and at least have one meeting in this body about an initial proposal for Tufts Boston Ave, and then get that out. I just think we should focus on that. The Innis contract, is that June 30th finishing or May 31st?
[Alicia Hunt]: So I don't remember, but we can extend it to June 30th without a problem.
[Zac Bears]: But after that we're in a pickle.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's money that's been appropriated outside of the general fund, so the money doesn't have as much of a timeline. We may have a little bit of flexibility with the end dates there.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. But not from a procurement?
[Alicia Hunt]: We couldn't, like, extend it for real, but if something runs over a month or something, those are things that are doable. Yeah, I thought the hard deadline was... Right, it's this, you can't do a contract more than three years, but often what'll happen is the contract expires, but we still have an open purchase order, because we're finishing up the end of the work. Yeah. There may be a little flexibility with that. Right.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, my feeling was, you know, meeting in late April, April 29th possibly. We could pretty easily get the Scribner's errors out then, but I do agree with Council President Bears that the priority really has to be everything happening under NIS. But even so, do you think that some, you know, substantial chunk like the definitions would be doable by then and just to have some progress on this item before? Okay, so yeah, working on the definitions seems like it's kind of like very foundational to the rest of the work and it would be a pretty good step forward if that could be done by then and having a package that has the definitions as well as the Scrivener's errors would be a pretty good step forward without taking too much time on this.
[Zac Bears]: So April 29th we'll come back we'll talk about all three.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I'm just going to say Wednesday April 29th right. Just because. OK.
[Matt Leming]: Do we have any other. Comments from councilors or staff? I don't really know members of the public here, I don't believe. Do we have a motion on the floor?
[Zac Bears]: A motion to keep the paper in committee.
[Matt Leming]: Do we have a second? Second. Mr. Clerk, on the motion to keep the paper in committee, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Malauulu?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro?
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: President Bears? Yes. Chair Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Yes. Five in the affirmative, none in the negative. The motion passes. And we will now move on to the vacant building ordinance. I would like to thank Councilor Tseng, who not a member of this committee, but did significant work on this ordinance. I'd like to thank him for tuning in at the moment. I'd also like to apologize for not quite getting the correct version in the agenda pack and later on only... One moment, I'm gonna share. And only recently getting the version out to Councilors which had the edits on it. Anyway, so we did pretty, I'm not gonna go over the whole presentation again like we did last time, but we did a pretty, went over the actual ordinance itself quite a bit. Tried to take in as much feedback as we could from the community. from the economic, the city's economic development office. Also responded to a couple of, to a couple of points of feedback that we got at the last committee meeting. Just gonna go over some of the, some of the, some of the changes one by one. The first was that there was a requirement within the ordinance for these properties to be managed by either a local individual or a local property management company. We added in definitions of those local individuals, a person whose primary residence is no more than 15 miles outside the city. And a local property management company is a third party contractor legal entity property owners to handle the daily operations, et cetera, et cetera, with the primary office located within 30 miles of the city. Moving on, there were, yes, there were some comments about, Most of the definitions here really had to do with giving discretion to city staff and actually enforcing these. So there was one comment that, sorry, going. Sorry, I'm trying to find exactly where it is. Sorry, Councilor, let me.
[Zac Bears]: Yep. Just to be clear on the edits, so there's like some comments in here from Scott, it looks like. Right.
[Matt Leming]: So the comments from Scott were from a much, were from an earlier draft. That was, so we got those before the initial planning and, before the initial planning and permitting committee meeting. And some, in many cases, those were already acted upon
[Zac Bears]: If we could just go through the legislative history of it here and this may just be, I think I missed that meeting so I apologize. This is on me. So there were comments. It was reviewed in January. There's been more discussion with Kayla and Scott about the draft ordinance and these changes, everyone's looked at this.
[Matt Leming]: Sure, so wait, you weren't in attendance? No, I wasn't in attendance. So basically, the legislative history of this was this most recent version was drafted by Councilor Tseng and his classmates at Harvard Law. We went through, we ended up gathering comments from it from both Building Commissioner Van De Wall, as well as the Deputy Economic Development Director, Kayla Myros. And there were some back and forths there, Councilor Tseng had a lot more of those conversations directly, especially with Kayla. We had a, we had a, we gave a presentation on it. We had, you know, some very pretty slides and everything.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I read those. I guess between that meeting and this meeting, what's changed and who's been part of the discussions?
[Matt Leming]: So, yeah, sorry. So, just to be clear, the comments on here that, sorry, I apologize for the confusion there. The comments in here that are attributed to Scott were from the earlier, were from the much earlier draft. Every edit in this document is from between, is from between the previous planning and permitting committee and today. So some of these, so a couple of these edits, like for instance, this whole paragraph right here was added in to make it clear that a lot of these, to make it clear that a lot of the, sorry, a lot of the enforcement is really up to the discretion of the building department, because that was kind of a, piece of feedback that we kept on hearing from both planning and the building department that a lot of this should be up to their discretion. In terms of the other substantive changes, there was one here, which was a suggestion by Councilor Callahan that there should be some difference between the smaller vacant buildings and like the very large vacant buildings. And so we put in, and we could discuss this tonight, but we put in one, One change here, which specified that vacant space under 2,500 square feet doesn't have any additional fee. Anything from 2,500 to 10,000 gets an additional 500 a year. And anything over 10,000 square feet gets an additional 10,000 per year for the vacant storefront. So that's like, if it's some small mom and pop shot, that should be differentiated from if a company decides to keep the entirety of Target empty for some reason. So that's. that was placed in there.
[Zac Bears]: So the red line changes are what we should be looking at. And who made those red lines? I'm just wondering, was that something that Justin, Councilor Tseng did?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, so Councilor Tseng made most of the red line changes after conversations with the deputy. With Kayla and Scott. Yeah, with Kayla. And I added in the points about local individual and local property management. I believe that this red line change right here with the differentiations and vacant space depending on square footage was a suggestion by.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we can go through it. I just wanted to understand. where we were at.
[Matt Leming]: Sure, and it's confusing, and I apologize for that.
[Zac Bears]: No, it's fine. It's totally normal legislative process. So we can go through each of these red line blocks, and I guess the last thing is, is this the first time you guys are seeing the red line changes?
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay, so we should probably go through and make sure that we're all... And are those... Is that red line document available somewhere we can scroll through it locally?
[Matt Leming]: I don't know. Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and email.
[Alicia Hunt]: Can you email it to us?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, sorry, yeah. Apologies, we didn't get the final draft of this in by the time the agenda was supposed to go out. So I'm just going to send that very quickly.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I can update that on Civiclerk as well.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, well, I actually, I did send one version over, yeah, that should be it, actually, if you just, yeah, just forward it to Danielle, Scott, and Alicia. Yeah, because I did send a PDF earlier, but it turns out that when you export from a Google Doc to a PDF, it doesn't actually preserve the redline changes itself, and that was a version that I sent out, we sent out, I believe, yesterday.
[Matt Leming]: All right, so yeah, because of that, we're just gonna go ahead and go through these one at a time, so without much more jumping around. All right, so this was a comment here. Kayla mentioned that, hold on now, sorry. Right, this red line change right there. Okay, the other one was a... Demonstration by clear and convincing evidence that the vacant commercial property or vacant industrial property cannot reasonably be sold, leased, preoccupied, or otherwise activated due to a bona fide legal dispute concerning title or possessionary rights, including but not limited to administration of an estate where legal authority to convey or lease the property is unresolved, pending probate, land court, or superior Proceedings to quiet, title, or resolve defects in the chain of title. Active litigation concerning ownership, control, or the right to lease or convey the property. Or a court order, injunction, or legal constraint that materially limits the court's ability to act with respect to the property. Any waiver granted under this subsection shall be temporary, shall be subject to periodic review, and shall expire upon resolution. of the underlying legal impediment. So this was essentially just a clarification of the, of one of the exemption, of one of the exemption conditions by, under which a vacant property would be exempted from the annual fees.
[Zac Bears]: Council Member Lemme, I think it might be useful if we're just going through this for the first time, If we could just go back, so the first major changes that two definitions have been added, local individual and local property management company, correct? Yes.
[Matt Leming]: All right, yeah. Yeah, so the purpose of this is that there is a requirement that any vacant properties had to have the names of whoever the property management company or the local individual would have out in front of it. So it had some contact information posted on the vacant building itself. And the issue with that was that we didn't really define what a local individual or a local property management company. Sorry, the lights here keep going out. And so just added some definitions here to designate that a local individual is a person who lived within at least 15 miles of the city, just to make sure that you're not designating somebody who lives in California. if they're going to be here, and if it's a property management company, again, it's a company that you can at least get somebody on the phone within the range of, within a reasonable geographic range if you had an issue with the property in question. Great, okay.
[Zac Bears]: I think it might just be useful, let's go through each block change and then see if anybody has any questions and then go to the next one. So I don't have any questions on this one. But I don't know, does that address the concern? Again, I apologize for not being here for that meeting, but does that address that concern? That's the concern that was raised at the meeting and the reason this was added in. I'm not really asking you. I'm saying you should ask everyone else.
[Matt Leming]: Do any Councilors have concerns with this particular definition?
[Liz Mullane]: I think that does kind of clarify some of the questions that came up the last time we had this conversation.
[SPEAKER_09]: Great. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: This year change, I believe there was a concern that it needed, this was from one of Scott's earlier comments that we need to determine what is an adequate certification that the property was, that originally was a certification as determined by the building commissioner that the property was inspected by the owner-agent. Just to make it a little bit more flexible, we just added in the word adequate so that if the building commissioner thought that there was an adequate certification, it's just, again, this kind of goes into that idea of giving. giving additional discretion to staff when dealing with these issues one-on-one. Any comments, questions, concerns?
[Zac Bears]: I guess, does that address that question for you, Scott?
[Matt Leming]: Sure. Okay. And once again, already went over this, but in order to reflect the greater inspection monitoring and administrative oversight associated with larger vacant commercial and industrial spaces, the following additional registration permit fee shall apply based on the square. footage of the vacant commercial or industrial space, vacant space under 2,500 square feet, no additional fee, vacant space 2,500 to 10,000 square feet, additional 500 a year, vacant space over 10,000, additional 1,000 a year. For purposes of the subsection, square footage shall be determined based on the gross floor area of the vacant commercial or industrial spaces recorded in municipal property records or building permit documentation Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. I just wanted to give a bit more context to this edit. Councilor Callaghan had asked at the last meeting whether we could look at kind of a higher fees, I guess, or larger properties. And at that meeting, I told, and at that meeting, there was interest in that from this committee. And I had basically said that I wasn't sure if that would be feasible legally, that we'd have to find out, you know, do the calculations or have an idea of the work that would go in. And in talking to Kayla and in thinking it through, Thinking through how the wording could be, I think there would be a reasonable justification in terms of saying that larger vacant properties will require more work in terms of inspection, monitoring, the administrative work in terms of going in. the administering this program and getting businesses to come in to fill that space would be more difficult for larger properties as well and so these calculations would be I think reasonable given the breakdown in the memo that was sent out with the first along with the first meeting. That being said I drafted this so that committee could consider whether it wanted to include this change to the fee structure and for city staff to give any feedback. I know I talked to Caleb kind of before I wrote this and conceptually about this, and I think we were on board with exploring it, but I wanted to put this out there for feedback.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I believe, and Councilor Sen, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe this is the only edit that would actually constitute a policy change between, and not just like a clarification. Is that accurate?
[Justin Tseng]: I think that's right. The second big chunk that I had sent was, let me just scroll down. Yep, it's the only policy change, yes.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. Right. And the rest is just clarification. Great. Do we have any questions, comments, concerns from Councilors or staff on this particular policy change or do we think it's fine?
[Zac Bears]: Okay. My one question would be just like aligning, you know, do we think that the cost is just an additional 500 per year or can we use the justification in general? Which is, you know, could it, does that align with what the actual greater inspection monitoring and oversight costs like are? I guess that would just be my only flag. I don't know what that is.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, through the chair, Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to answer your question, Councilor Bereson through the chair. I think that's a great question. To be honest, a lot of the structure in this ordinance very likely doesn't fully capture the the work that would go into it. And so I think legally you could justify even the baseline being a lot more than what it is now. The reason why we had proposed the 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 numbers and then the additional 500 and 1,000 per year is that it's much more in line with other municipalities in Massachusetts. And I think every municipality is likely undershooting the costs associated with vacant properties to the city. Those costs include everything we talked about here and also effects on other businesses in the city, the kind of effects on police, fire safety, et cetera. That's all to say the numbers that we put in here are basically in line with other Massachusetts municipalities and moving it up is definitely, I think, legally justifiable, but a little bit more out of the ordinary. Got it. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_09]: Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Scott's got a comment.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. Going back. Well, first, I see Councilor Lazzaro and then Scott. Councilor Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you, I just wanted to agree with Councilor Tseng and. What he said that there are unseen costs and. the crux of this ordinance is the teeth that it has. And it's really imperative that we be affirmative about keeping this section in. It's where the policy has an impact on the community and on what happens with this ordinance being something with actual actual impact on the behavior of our landlords. So I appreciate him saying that, and that there is research that can reflect how these impacts affect our communities. So I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Scott?
[Scott Vandewalle]: Yeah, I mean, when I look at these, I sort of equivocate this to what we call our periodic inspections. We do have a lot of different types of entities throughout the community. The periodic inspections themselves are kind of a standard fee. They get more complicated when we have bigger spaces. For example, we may do a hotel and we see an awful lot of different things versus we may see a daycare center and you almost see it all from the front door. So certainly the bigger, more complex ones will involve more effort, they involve more safety systems that we want to check, et cetera, et cetera, for both us and the fire. So I guess I do agree with the concept of it takes more time, it takes more space. Is it enough? It depends how much chasing we have to do, which is our biggest challenge with all of these is getting people to do this stuff and consistently, and that's hard to tell. Some landlords are cooperative, others are so far away from here. We're going to have to put in more effort to get them to comply. So it's hard to say exactly how much accurate how accurate this is at this time but everything helps.
[Matt Leming]: Yes. Would there be a lot of landlords absentee landlords who own vacant spaces over 10000 feet. We've got.
[Alicia Hunt]: I think what I might add to this is that when you have a space that's not vacant, you can walk in and talk to somebody. The problem we've been having with vacant storefronts from the econ dev side is sometimes just identifying who the person is and how do you get a hold of them, because the legal information you can find is usually a mailing address, and what you need is a phone number or at least an email address to be able to talk to somebody. So I'm just floating there can be a lot more legwork in finding a body to talk to.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. And that's that's why one of the one of the items under this ordinance is requiring that there be contact information for somebody local posted right in front of the building so that because that is a pretty pretty difficult problem. Yes I could.
[Scott Vandewalle]: Go ahead. I sit currently under the vacant properties we do for residential. We do require a local agent and that usually comes to the 24 hour emergency phone number that we have been able to call as well as the owner who may be a very far away distant entity. So we do typically require that and increasingly we ask for copies of home of property owners phone numbers and email contacts just on a regular old building permit so we have the ability to reach out to somebody. And we always say, hey, it's also in your best interest, too, to have a contact so that if something happens, we can find somebody to explain to you you have all kinds of different problems to resolve. So it's just, right, the challenge is finding someone the more distance they get, but we're trying to work on improving that every step of the way.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. I just wanted to note that what Director Hunt said was really vital to the problem. I mean, that's what I what I've been hearing from this office and also from offices around the state, that that was the main challenge and essentially the contact information sections of this ordinance. are pretty much exactly the same as the previous requirements for residential. I just lifted it from what we currently have. So it's not really, it's the same language actually. And just applying it to commercial industrial as well. And the fee structure part, the fee part of the ordinance is basically, oh, it gets the people who aren't coming to the table, you know, the people who we're having a hard time getting contact with to come to the table and to give us their contact information. And in talking to staff and mayors from, policy makers from other municipalities, it's been helpful.
[Zac Bears]: Great, and I was just gonna add that I appreciate that this is an undershoot, right? Like it seems like we're trying to balance not necessarily onerous fees with actual costs to do the business, which I think we often find, certainly with our civil fine structures and other things, right? Like on the civil side, we're only allowed to do so much. And in this case, it seems like we're trying to do this, but we want to, want to be in line with what other communities are doing because those are good examples. And also, you know, you don't start right at the beginning by just going as far as you can. I think it seems to be a principle. And again, I apologize if there were extensive discussions of this at the last meeting.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, the next block, as read through it earlier, essentially this adds to the waiver section, and this was added in by, this was one of the edits that was added in by Councilor Tseng, but it essentially, actually Councilor Tseng, since I've already read it out earlier, would you go ahead and explain some of the justification for this?
[Justin Tseng]: Sure. For this section, we have a resident reach out to note that if we didn't include this, it might be really confusing for both property owners and for city staff to enforce the ordinance when we don't really know who has legal title to the property. And so this is just like kind of a backstop to basically create an exemption for those properties where that title is in dispute and where that legal situation is unresolved.
[Matt Leming]: Yep. Right. So basically, if you're about to sell a building then, and it's vacant for that reason, you shouldn't get charged because it's transferring. It's transferring ownership. Any comments, concerns, questions, thoughts about this section? Going once. Going twice. Sold. All right. No comments or concerns about this section. Speak now or forever hold your peace. You know, I don't think there are actually folks, I don't think anybody from the public is actually in this meeting right now, interestingly. Okay. It's, this is the most fun that we can possibly be having at a city council planning and permitting. If we just promise people to go line by line through a 165-page document of typos, then I think we will fill the room. Okay. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to waive or suspend the maintenance, safety, inspection, or registration requirements of this ordinance except as expressly provided herein. Councilor Tseng, why don't we add that one?
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, this is just a clarification just to, just filling up every hole that we can find. The ordinance would be fine without this amendment to be honest, but this is about closing loopholes.
[Matt Leming]: Any comments, questions, concerns?
[Scott Vandewalle]: The only question I want to ask is in line 8 above that, we're making reference to a section we took out. There's several of those, 94, 758s. Is that the section we took out at the very beginning?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, okay, that is true. That is, I believe that's probably something that would need to be corrected. Councilor is saying, since we're deleting that section, we would just be able to clear this one out entirely, or is there a, or I'm not 100% sure if we would just delete all of eight, or if we would just refer this to another section.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, we would just refer this to the numbering below, which I can find quickly right now.
[Matt Leming]: Okay.
[Justin Tseng]: It would be 10-125.
[Matt Leming]: Right. Well, we could have added to the Scrivener's documents if, you know, Building Commissioner Vandewalle hadn't pointed that out. But, you know, now we don't have, that's one less item for the Scrivener's documents. You know?
[Alicia Hunt]: I just want to flag, because we had some confusion in the office. The part at the very, very beginning where you say repeal 94, I think it's Ninety four seven point five. There's a typo. Ninety four dash that zoning. So that has to go through the zoning. Yeah. Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: We see. Yeah. This was we did go through this.
[Alicia Hunt]: So but you see if you had left that typo in that's not part of the zoning because the new section is not zoning so it would not go through that Scrivener's process. You can do whatever you Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: So we but yeah we would basically we would pretty much have to refer this out. The process for us moving forward is we would have to get it to a regular meeting of city council. We already agreed at the previous meeting to refer to legal for review which we haven't done yet because we still like Councilor Tseng wanted to have the more a more finalized version of the edits before we sent it to KP law. But we'll have to basically go to the CDB. and say, will you agree to delete the entirety of the vacant building zoning so that we could put it elsewhere? And yeah.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, Councilor Leming, if I, oh, you go, you finish first. I just wanted to chime in after.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, yeah, so that'll be a little bit odd, because technically the only zoning amendment would be deleting that entire section of the zoning, because we would then be moving it.
[Zac Bears]: What if we put it in the building PDS thing?
[Matt Leming]: Well, I feel like it's just easier to refer it out as its own thing. I just think it's basically a tech, it's a... Can I chime in? Yes, Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: I mentioned this at the last meeting, but in pretty much every municipality with a vacant property registration fee, the vacant property ordinances are not in zoning. So we're in Medford's unique. If we adopt as like a registration fee, we would be the only municipality where it would be in the zoning section of the code of ordinances.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, so this will have to be sort of its own package that goes before the CDB to delete the entirety of our vacant zoning so that we can move it to building codes essentially.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the one piece though, this is all about, sorry that I haven't been as close, commercial. What about residential? We delete 7-5 and then we don't have any.
[Justin Tseng]: I noticed that when Scott was talking. I think originally we had We have intended to shift the focus away from, shift the focus towards commercial industrial, but I do think that's a scrivener's error. So I have another doc, that's this doc that I'm updating as I'm going on, where I've just copied in what we have right now for vacant residential properties, and just copied in word for word what we have right now for vacant residential properties. And I think we should make that amendment as well.
[Alicia Hunt]: So they'll also be a section in section 10 that covers residential properties.
[Alicia Hunt]: We care about them.
[Zac Bears]: I guess just two questions. I mean I don't think. we should talk more about the zoning amendment and adding a fourth zoning amendment where we're just repealing this because we're putting it in a different ordinance. I don't think that that needs to be, that would seem to fit pretty well with the larger thing that we're talking about with the changes that we're making on the cleanup, you know, personally, in my opinion. I guess my question is on that residential piece. If we just take this, as it exists now, are there, and I don't wanna belabor this, I think we could still refer this out and maybe get there, or if we wanna come back to this at another time, that's fine too, but given that we're amending this ordinance, are there items around residential vacancy, vacant properties? Have you had difficulties or any issues or things you'd like to see changed with that procedure, if that were to be outside of zoning versus now currently being in zoning that we might wanna take a look at?
[Scott Vandewalle]: We do have homes On the registry at this point, there are a couple of agencies that seem to be involved with every mortgage company, and they do come and go frequently. We don't do a tremendous amount with it and sort of kind of track it. Occasionally, we do get requests from people, what are your vacant properties in town or code violations? So I assume they want to pursue them for the purposes of turning them around. It also ties a little bit into the abandoned housing initiative with the Attorney General, and that gives us a place to sort of start putting that information in there. We haven't had trouble with it, per se. We don't do a huge amount with it, other than sort of track it. But I wouldn't want to see the ordinance... Wipe it out. Wipe it out, which is kind of what it, at first reading, it does.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: Sure.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, um, that makes sense. And, uh, let's make sure it doesn't wipe it out. Um, I, I guess I had one question for you, uh, Commissioner van der Waal. Would you So the reason why the fee structure, the fee part of it, anything to do with the fees, is only for commercial industrialists because that's what folks in city government and outside have said is the problem area. Do you think it would be wise to extend that to residential as well? Because that would just change how I structure putting the residential stuff back in.
[Scott Vandewalle]: Well, we do charge a fee right now. I believe it's $100 for an annual registration for residential property. So that is built into our system. And at the very least, it covers us for the entry process and cashing the check or whatever else we have to do. So yeah, there should still be something in there for that.
[Justin Tseng]: OK. That is in the part that I've copied and pasted into this proposal on my doc. just taking that directly from what we have right now. So I just wanted to clarify that question. And so that sounds good to me. And then the, I just wanted to note for Councilors and the public and for staff that the maintenance requirements, like the, that kind of stuff is applies to all properties as well. So that would, that part of the ordinance would extend to all vacant properties.
[Alicia Hunt]: And if I just might add, as you do that language, just make sure that it's clear what happens when it's mixed use. For example, if the whole building is vacant but it's commercial with residential, or what if it's a vacant storefront with occupied residential above. I just want it to be clear so that we are, and we have problems with vacant storefronts with occupied above. So those should be included.
[Justin Tseng]: Yep. That's something that Kayla had noted to us, I think in January, a few months ago. And so we fixed that. We addressed that in the definitions part of the ordinance. All right.
[Matt Leming]: We did decide to keep vectors in here. The owner of a vacant property must maintain the property free from rats, mice, and other vectors, you know, bugs, termites, et cetera. We honestly couldn't find a better word.
[Zac Bears]: One other thing on this residential piece, there might be definitions that need to be added, Justin.
[Justin Tseng]: Yes, we would need to add a definition for vacant residential, I believe, which actually I do have, was in the very first draft of this ordinance that went out to city staff, but we took that out. We can just add that back in.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. And then, you know, I think the section 10-122, which is where we're going to, I guess I have a, I'd like to maybe talk through a little bit more whether this makes sense to apply to residential properties and foreclosures because it seems pretty, you know, monthly documentation about, you know, I just, I want to think through that a little bit more. Like, I just don't know that the maintenance requirements were considered, like, it makes sense to me as I read through it for a commercial or industrial property, but does it make sense for a residential only property? I don't know. So I'd like to know.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. Just through the chair, this in pretty much every ordinance outside of Medford, the vacant building ordinance, it does apply these specific requirements.
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[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I don't think the intent of this ordinance was ever to levy it for residential.
[Scott Vandewalle]: And Lord shut it off and they can't get back on time. So we're having fire watches. So I don't really You know, unless there's an immediate emergency, I'm not going over shutting off of anybody's utility services. They're virtually impossible to get put back on. Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: Excuse me, Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. And if I could just chime in. We discussed this at the last committee meeting that this is, we don't expect that section to be, that sentence to be used. but that it's for the kind of immediate emergency situations, just like giving the building commissioner the authority to make that discretionary choice, which is something that we don't have right now. So if we didn't have that sentence in, then the building commissioner would not of the discretion, at least under this ordinance to do that. But I do think that it's fine with, it's fine without. It kind of has the same effect with that sentence.
[Matt Leming]: Danielle, you did have your hand up for a little bit. Did you have anything to add?
[Danielle Evans]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm a little reluctant to chime in because I have not read this, but it's very interesting. I was also very curious about how it works with the residential above. I'm genuinely concerned for those apartments above the vacant storefronts in West Medford. I wonder if they're really even habitable. Should people even be living in there? Should the health department be shutting them down perhaps? Has the health department been kind of looped in with this and how this kind of interacts with what kind of enforcement they have with stuff like that.
[Matt Leming]: Don't mean to cut you off, but we did give a presentation at the last planning and permitting committee. Marianne O'Connor, Scott, and Kayla were all at that. It was a much more put together kind of a presentation slide show, just walking through all of the parts of this, as well as some of the FAQs that we'd had on the ordinance. Mary Ann supported and said it would be very useful for her work. My intention here for this committee meeting was really just to, you know, address some of the more minor edits we got through here and then hopefully refer it out to committee and then essentially repeat that presentation at a regular council meeting for the general public. Hearing some of the questions tonight, I think it might have been useful to repeat that presentation for. For me? Yeah, for. I read the presentation. For some of the, well, it's better in person. There's reading the slides and they're seeing Councilor Tseng and I's grandiose, but also for the planners and whatnot, Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I will say we added a lot orally to the slides. And I also wanted to note that Sal was there at that meeting as well. With regards to the more specific question about mixed use, basically how we resolved Kayla's concern with it back then, because she brought up exactly the same points that are coming up tonight about mixed use. What we worked through and sent to her was that redefining commercial property to basically be based on either commercial uses as like a building or a portion thereof that contains commercial uses as indicated in the table of use of parking regulations of the zoning code or retail and service uses as indicated in that table of the zoning code as well. And if city staff feels like that's under-inclusive, we're open to suggestions. But we found that, I think, as a group, to be the clearest and simplest way to include mixed use.
[Zac Bears]: My only question really looking through this, I mean, yeah, hearing the intent of the Building Commissioner for Enforcement, I understand that. It's more the, I think my question is really the Section 10-122, Subsection 1, Subsection see really, like does it make sense to be treating for the residential foreclosures and what not to be coming back monthly. Monthly, where is it, one month after the seasonal expansion and every one month thereafter. The owner must provide the health director with documentation about reinspection. That's the only one where I have a question as to that applying to residential versus commercial.
[Matt Leming]: Correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it was originally six months and this was directly requested by Mary Ann because she said that monthly is great for the commercial.
[Zac Bears]: I'm just wondering about the residential. You know if this is going to apply to residential is that too onerous of a schedule for a residential property and maybe that's something we should just ask Mary and none of these questions for me I would. are precluding moving this forward to a regular meeting on my end. It's just this is this question where the residential is coming in.
[Scott Vandewalle]: I just want to make sure it all we don't give the residentials that level of inspection process that once they're abandoned they're secured and that's kind of the end of it until somebody. can clear them, buy them, do whatever they have to. We would respond in terms of overgrowth or rats in a complaint and try to deal with it, but we don't do consistent re-inspections of them. They're certainly very difficult to find the right person even to get that, to let us into some of those. Commercial might be a little bit easier.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. That's pretty much my concern. That one just seems like particularly regular and specific. I mean that's just a lot for a foreclosed or vacant residential property in my view. So that's that's the only thing in this maintenance requirements section that I think feels like it might need to have a differentiation for a residential versus a commercial or industrial property. So that's just my two cents there.
[Matt Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I guess I really think that this is a conversation we should be having that's more along the lines of we need a different ordinance about having a housing stability office or maybe some, a separate discussion with the office of prevention and outreach about how to protect residents that are living in condemned buildings and not a discussion of vacant properties in storefronts, which is what we are talking about. So if we want to protect our residents from landlords who are not taking care of them, we can do that. But that's not what we're doing here. This is a vacant property discussion, and we can talk about that other stuff at a different time. I think that we should just carry this forward. And I mean, it's been a long time in the making. I think this is a super, super strong ordinance. We've talked about it ad nauseum. And I really don't think it's in the spirit of the ordinance to be holding it back for the purpose of under the guise of protecting our residents. I think we should absolutely, more than anything in this world, I think we should be protecting our residents from landlords that are trying to not take care of their properties. But this is one angle of protecting Medford from people who are not taking care of their properties, and we can tackle the people in residential spaces separately. That's obviously not what we're talking about here, but I appreciate the, And I would be happy to introduce a separate ordinance about that at a later date.
[Zac Bears]: If I just could, yeah, and I agree that we could do more on that. I just want to make sure that if we are bringing the residential, if we're repealing the vacant and foreclosing properties in the zoning ordinance because we're replacing it with a non-zoning ordinance that if we're bringing in the residential piece of that now into this structure that we don't apply the commercial stuff to the solely residential thing. So that's just more the technical question. And I know Justin is, it sounds like Justin you were trying to take what's in for residential in 94-7.5 and kind of map it over this. So I just wanted to flag that one conflict. I think that's, oh, sorry, Chair Leming.
[Justin Tseng]: I think that's super helpful actually. Mary Ann did request the one month, but back then we were talking about this being, I mean, the focus of that conversation was commercial industrial. And even though I think we did say at that meeting that this would cover residential as well, I think it would be good to just check in with her between meetings.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, it's perfect sense as is for the commercial. Sorry.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. All right. The other. major one had to do with enforcement. This was, I believe this was added in at the request of, to address one of Kayla's concerns just about, again, one thing that the staff liked about this is, again, that so much of it was left up to the discretion, so much of the enforcement was left up to the discretion of staff. And this was sort of meant to clarify the building commissioner's authority in these areas, violations and penalties enforcement. The building commissioner and other officials responsible for enforcing this section may prioritize inspections and enforcement actions based on available municipal resources and the degree to which a property presents risks to public health, safety, neighborhood conditions, or municipal services. In administering the section, the city may also seek voluntary compliance and corrective action by property owners prior to initiating formal enforcement proceedings. including providing notice, guidance, or reasonable opportunity to remedy conditions or bring property into compliance. B factors may be considered in prioritizing enforcement include, but are not limited to, the duration of vacancy, evidence of deterioration, unsafe conditions, or nuisance activity complaints from members of the public, prior violations of this section or other applicable laws. and the degree of cooperation by the owner in addressing vacancy or maintenance concerns. See nothing in this subsection shall be construed to exempt any property to requirements of this section or to limit the enforcement of the city to the authority of the city to enforce this section with respect to any property when the city determines enforcement is necessary to protect the public health, safety or welfare. Any comments, questions, concerns, thoughts? Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Just to give a little bit of background, as Chair Leming I think has noted a few times tonight, When I talked to Kayla most recently, I think the point that she made to me was that she was really happy that we had emphasized this idea of enforcement discretion and still leaving open channels of communications with with property owners that might comply with the city or might want to work with the city and to avoid fees that way. And so she had told me that in her conversations with staff, people would feel better about the ordinance if there was a section in here that just made it more clear that discretion was possible. And so this draft language is speaking to that.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. Just sort of waiting to see if anybody else kind of thinks up some questions to this. As long as Council President Bears hand first, then Scott.
[Zac Bears]: Just really, yours might be more relevant. Mine's kind of addendum, so if you want to- Scott.
[Scott Vandewalle]: My, as I just noticed in the next chapter three, we have the wrong zoning references replete and every paragraph again need to be corrected.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Never mind, it was exactly what I asked. And I had one kind of a question there too. I just noticed the comment about the $300 civil versus criminal, and I was wondering if we came down somewhere on that. Is it still a civil violation or?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I believe this was something that Councilor Tseng looked into, if you wanted to comment.
[Justin Tseng]: I think the committee had decided to ask this, the KP law. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: So that would happen with the legal review. Great, and then we're just going to update the section references here.
[Justin Tseng]: Yep, I'll make sure we go through that and make sure, I'll make sure we go through the whole ordinance and update the references.
[Matt Leming]: Look, Christian needs things to do. I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to try to see if he's if he's this is a test for him. All right. And you're ruining the test. It's all very deliberate.
[Zac Bears]: It's going to get a job correcting reference.
[Justin Tseng]: Look, the paper before this one took over an hour or so. I don't think Christian is short on things to do.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, just where these originally came from was this was originally going to be put into the zoning ordinance. And then we kind of realized that no other community actually did that. So went through and just tried to change every reference to make it part of the building codes, but obviously missed a couple in doing so. Actually, yeah, everything in this section. So we'll get that done with.
[Zac Bears]: Just don't worry about it. One question. We'll be good. Yep. Thank you, Chair Leming. Councilor Tsenger, is everything here going to be self-referential, essentially? Like all of the updates to the sections 94, 95, 94-7.5, is that all going to change to something that's in here? Yep. OK. Great. Yeah. Yeah, and just noting in the appeal section.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, there's one more. That one is a bit more. Yeah, that one we can just take out and cross reference.
[Zac Bears]: That probably goes back to just the 10. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yep. All right.
[Matt Leming]: Those are the only the only edits, the only actual edits that we had.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, sure. Let me if I could. Because I'm realizing through this meeting that not everyone was at the last meeting and that some, I think the comments on the side are getting a little bit confusing for people. So during this meeting, I've also just kind of gone through all those comments to make sure that we've covered all the bases with the updates that we were talking about tonight. And I think for the most part we have, there are, Two things in here. The comments are both in the waiver and exemption section. And we had this conversation at the last meeting where I think the building commissioner had noted that substantial financial hardship isn't defined in here and that the compliance with future use can be hard to deal with. The substantial financial hardship is essentially in every other municipality has been kind of left as is in the ordinance itself and the building commissioner in those cities have promulgated kind of rules about what that means. I have drafted something to consider, but it would be unusual to put it in this ordinance. And I think it is something better left to the building commissioner. Um, but I'd be happy to send that to the building commissioner for his consideration. Um, and then with the, um, very similarly with this, the improvement for future use thing too, I've, I have drafted something, but again, I'm not the building commissioner. And so, and, and it's not something that city councils or city, uh, legislators usually put in the ordinance. So. That's something that is usually promulgated by city staff after the ordinance is passed.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, most of the, well, a lot of the comments here we decided, we were kind of going with the theme of allowing pretty significant discrimination to the building commissioner enforcing this.
[Justin Tseng]: Discretion, not discrimination.
[Matt Leming]: Discretion. I'm really tired, guys. I'm sorry. It's been a, yeah. Allowing, I just want this meeting to be over. Allowing pretty significant discretion to the building commissioner in determining different things like whether financial hardship is discriminated. is demonstrated. So when we're having a conversation about these edits and we decided to not change the language, that was the logic for a good number of them. Anyway. All right but all that being all that being said so we do have some we do have some Scrivener's errors to to correct which could be done and could be could be could be done in a couple of minutes. and would need to continue the discussion about the inclusion of residential and how to treat those sections within the current zoning. You know, whether or not we keep residential zoning in Section 94 or we find ways to join it in with this one and just delete the vacant property zoning ordinance entirely, My feeling is we leave the vacant residential alone and have this one only apply to vacant storefronts. But I would want to have a conversation with Mariano Conner especially about that one as well. Other than that, I think that this one is in a state where we could refer it to a regular meeting and fix some of the items that we've discussed tonight. I do feel like they are minor enough to not to be able to be accomplished between a committee meeting and a regular meeting. And I also think that a regular meeting would probably be the most appropriate arena to kind of give the presentation that we presented last time again from scratch and sort of, you know, show the general public what this is all about and have a conversation about that. Those are my thoughts. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: I think personally I'd be fine if we referred this out of committee, referred to legal counsel and authorized Councilor Tseng to incorporate the edits as well as the edits we discussed tonight as well as just figuring out the residential piece in the draft and then that could go to KP and could come back. You know, Councilor Tseng can work with Scott or Kayla or Mary Ann, whoever needs to be you know, whoever he needs to talk to about those changes. So that would be my suggestion. I'm happy to make a motion to that effect to refer this out of committee to a regular meeting pending Councilor Tseng making necessary edits and referring to KP law for legal review. And then maybe we'd be looking at a meeting in April, regular meeting in April for a further presentation. You know either the 7th or the 28th. And I also can say if you could just do some version control on the header here update the dates maybe update it have a greater version that has today's date and then create a version. or whatever you wanna do, just a version that's like, this is what we talked about tonight and is getting referred to council and then, and remove any of the outstanding comments that shouldn't be in there. And then maybe do some draft numbers as well. Maybe that's draft two. And then whatever we get back from KP could be draft three, just so we can keep track if that works.
[Matt Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I think that all makes sense. And I would prefer that approach myself.
[Zac Bears]: then I will make that motion.
[Matt Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Liz Mullane]: I will second that.
[Matt Leming]: On the motion by Council President Bears, seconded by Councilor Mullane, Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Mullane?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: President Bears? Yes. Chair Leming? Yes.
[Matt Leming]: Five yeses, no nays, the motion passes. Let's see, public comment. Anybody in the chambers want to comment publicly? No, yes, okay. On the motion to adjourn by Council President Bears, seconded by Councilor Callahan. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Maloney?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: President Bears? And Chair Levin? Yes. Meeting is adjourned.
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