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Town Center Visioning Public Hearing #1 Wednesday January 20, 2016 Transcript
[NOTE TO READER: This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a verbatim record of the proceedings.]
Lisa K. Hutchinson CART Provider
SCOTT: So, good evening, everybody. I'm Scott Greenberg, the city's development services group director.
And before I turn it over to Jon Friedman, chair of the Planning Commission, I would like to recognize city staff and councilmembers in the audience.
So, I see Councilmember Grausz over there and
Councilmember Wisenteiner is here somewhere.
Any other councilmembers that slipped past me? I think we're expecting more. City staff, we have our interim city manager Steve
Lancaster and assistant city manager Kirsten Taylor.
For other city staff, Alison VanGorp, administrative services manager and ombudsman in my department.
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Shana Restall, our principal planner. And is Travis here? Travis Saunders, our senior planner, is behind me. And then our strategic communications consultant, I guess that's what we're calling her, Karen Reed in the back, as some of you know.
And that's it for introduction. I'll be back up in a few minutes to do a brief presentation for you, but I'll turn it over to Chair Friedman.
JON: Thank you, Scott. Good evening and welcome. My name is Jon Friedman. I'm the chair of the Mercer Island Planning
Commission. I would like to thank you all for coming tonight. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I'll start with a note about who we are and why we're having this meeting.
This Joint Commission started meetings this past
October, at the request of the city council, to tackle the vision and code updates for Town Center.
We are members of either the Planning Commission or
Design Commission, all of us appointed by the city council.
We're here tonight hoping to get your feedback on
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four issues: A set of Town Center development principles, heights of building in the Town Center, setbacks and size of building, and affordable housing initiatives.
Tonight is the first of three public hearings we'll have over the course of this work.
In addition, we're encouraging everyone to give us as much public comment as possible online.
The Town Center code update has been under discussion in various city charter groups for nearly two years.
The city council felt that after all the work so far, the combined input of both of our commissions would be beneficial to helping drive home this project.
The Planning Commission is required by law to provide its recommendations on the subject before council makes any changes to the land use code.
And it's the Design Commission that reviews most major Town Center projects.
The whole point of this effort is to increase the likelihood of future development in the Town Center better
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reflects what we want as a community.
I would like to make three points before turning it over to each of the commissioners to introduce themselves.
First, we're an advisory body. The council may or may not accept any recommendation that we give them.
Second, we are trying to encourage input from the community.
And we would like as much input as possible and you can email your input as well and that can be sent to:
The email address is on the agenda handout. And thirdly, we haven't made any recommendations yet.
This is a long process and we're really just getting going.
Again, thank you for coming tonight. We really do look forward to hearing from you. So, next I would like each commissioner to introduce themselves.
State your name, the commission you're on, and anything else that you feel is important.
SUSANNE F.: I'm Susanne Foster. I have been on the Design Commission for about
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eight years now.
And really love every minute of it. It is very diverse and it always deals with my hometown here of 30 years.
I am on the Commission for the landscaping. My background is horticulture. Thank you. HUI: My name is Hui Tian. This is the second term of me on the board. I'm an architect by training. I've been living on Mercer Island for 16 years. COLIN: Colin Brandt. I'm also on the Design
Commission, an architect, and sort of that's the primary capacity in which I serve on that commission.
LARA: Lara Sanderson, Design Commission approximately two and a half years.
I like the work mostly because I think there are some opportunities on Mercer Island that haven't been addressed yet, so it's been rewarding to get to know people who are interested in solving those problems.
Thank you. TAMI: Tami Szerlip. I'm five years on the Design
Commission.
I enjoy speaking for you. I am the general member
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for the community, and I'm here until the end of March, I believe.
RICHARD W.: I'm not going to stand up. Richard Weinman, vice chair of the Planning
Commission.
I'm a planner attorney by training. I'm on my second term on the commission. Lived on
Mercer Island for 40 years.
JENNI: Hi. I'm Jenni Mechem. I'm on the Planning
Commission.
This is my first term, so I've just been on it for about five months or so.
And my background is in accessibility and civil rights, so I'm finding this fascinating learning more about this from a planning perspective and also really enjoying the opportunity to make Mercer Island a better place and to meet so many of you and hear people's opinions.
SUZANNE S.: Hi. I'm Suzanne Skone and I'm a planning commissioner.
This is about the second year of my second term as a planning commissioner.
I was on the commission 25 years ago. I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I'm a business owner in Mercer Island Town Center,
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and I've been on Mercer Island for about 35 years.
TIFFIN: Hi. My name is Tiffin Goodman. This is my first year on the commission, and my background is in planning, primarily in transportation. And thank you for coming tonight.
DANIEL: I thought my chair tipped over. Good evening. My name is Dan Hubbell. I'm a marketing and PR by profession, but my minor in college was urban studies and urban planning, which is why I'm on the Design Commission.
And prior to being here on Mercer Island -- I've been here five years. I will claim the fact that my wife grew up here and graduated from (inaudible) high school.
I'll latch on to that. Prior to coming here, I was chair of the Planning
Commission in Newcastle for eight years and served as the deputy mayor for four.
BRYAN: I'm Bryan Cairns. I have been on -- lived on Mercer Island for 47 years.
I'm a physicist, which has nothing to do with being on the Planning Commission. But the relevance of being there is that I was ten years on the city council: four years deputy mayor and two years mayor, so I've been through
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these sort of exercises a number of times.
CRAIG: I'm Craig Olson. I'm on the Planning
Commission.
And this is my second tour on Mercer Island. I graduated from high school here many years ago and we've been back for eight years.
I'm a civil engineer and currently work as a public works director of the city in engineering.
JON: Thanks, everyone. We were hoping to hear comments from you tonight focusing on four areas.
First of all, the Town Center vision: We have developed a working draft of a vision statement that is shorter than one earlier endorsed by the Town Center stakeholder group.
It's a road map for us and we would like your thoughts on that.
Second is building heights. We are looking at a few different alternatives right now.
Having said that, we are not looking at anything taller than 65 feet or five stories, and much of what we're looking at is smaller.
Third, setbacks and size of buildings: We are
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looking at some different ideas here as well.
The goal is to be sure the code gives us human-scale inviting buildings.
What can we require in our code to break up building mass, prevent a canyon feel on streets, and get light, air, and pedestrian access.
Fourth is affordable housing. There's been a lot of input on this issue and this process, and looking into affordable housing started before this commission got going.
But we want to see what we can do in an intelligent way, whether it's creating incentives or mandates or some mix of both.
But so having said that, we'll start off with a relatively short presentation. Scott Greenberg, the development director, will give you a presentation of these four subject areas and then we'll move directly to public comment after that presentation.
I currently have a sign-in sheet for folks that want to speak.
And if you haven't signed up yet, you still want to speak, there's another one of these in back.
And so please sign up, because we want to make sure we know how many people we're going to have to speak and
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sort of work the timing so that we make sure and get everybody through and get everybody through fairly and get out of here when we need to.
So, the Joint Commission, we will not be discussing anything tonight.
Our job really here tonight is to listen and get as much input as possible from all of you.
We also receive written comment and we encourage you to do that if you don't want to, for whatever reason, speak in public or just don't have time. Just please feel free to do that. We do look at it.
I would like to thank Scott and all the team for the work that they do. This is a pretty big project for all of us and staff has really been helpful in getting this going for us.
So, without anything further, Scott Greenberg. SCOTT: Thank you. On the sign-up sheets in the back, if you haven't signed in to speak, there's actually two different sign-up sheets.
One says Sign in to Speak at the top and the other just says Sign in, so if you would like to speak, write your name on the one that says to speak.
The other one is if you don't want to speak but you
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want to get on our email list and get updates and that sort of thing.
Councilmember Wong also walked in. He's back over there.
So, we had some technical difficulties with the presentation I was going to do, so the presentation basically had a lot of these boards on the presentation that many of you had a chance to walk around and see.
So I'll just sort of talk about the boards and, when I need to, I'll walk over to them.
And after the meeting you're welcome to come look at the boards further.
So, the process started nearly two years ago . . .
(Captioning paused, then resumed.) SCOTT: . . . short list of vision points here. And then the Joint Commission sort of whittled that down to more principles.
Be the heart, be accessible, be convenient, be well-designed, be diverse, be local, be home.
There are other words that go with those descriptors, but that's the vision. That's kind of the foundation for everything.
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Next topic is subareas and building heights. Building heights is a big topic. The subareas are on the drawing over there with the format.
I hope you had a chance to look at that, because you're not going to be able to see it well from here.
The four maps on there, the one on the -- the one on the upper left is Alternative A and that's the proposed building height areas that came from the stakeholder group.
So that would tell you at a glance whether the area would be allowed to go to five stories, four stories, or three stories as maximum height.
The next one over, Alternative B, is an option that the Joint Commission asked to have prepared. We've just mapped it to get some feedback on it.
And then also to be able to do some additional studies on it.
So, let me go back a second. The Alternative A would have five-story buildings basically north of 29th Street, north of the Shell station.
It would have lower height for Farmers Insurance and the multifamily area along 76th and on 80th.
Taller buildings would be allowed four-story buildings. The shopping center where Island Books is
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located could go to four stories. Today it can only go to three.
The KeyBank and Windermere properties south of
Tabit Square today can be built to four stories. And this proposal would allow them to be built to five.
Alternative B, the one that the Joint Commission asked us to look at, takes that western multifamily area on 76th, up on the hill there, and brings that back to four stories.
So that height would not change from today's rules. And then on what I'll call the super block between
77th and 78th, on the east and west and 28th and 29th on the north and south, so basically from Walgreen's down to the King property would go from five stories down to four stories.
Is that correct? No. I wrote it wrong. It would go -- yeah, five stories down to four stories. Looking at my sheet here.
So that would be a reduction in height. And then where height would increase to five stories is along 80th Avenue Southeast, so on the east side of the Town Center adjacent to Island Crest there's a hill there and the Joint Commission wanted to look at that.
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And then there's one with a big question mark. What we would like to hear from you is: What's your idea of the height limits for Town Center?
Next topic is affordable housing, which is this board over here. I won't use the board.
Basically, the stakeholder group recommended having affordable housing be required or incentives for affordable housing in exchange for increased building height.
The Joint Commission's considering that, but also considering whether at some point affordable housing should simply be required, a certain number of affordable housing units, a certain affordability level to go from two stories up to three, four, or five stories.
For context, the current code does have some requirement for affordable housing for taller buildings.
So this is not new. That is something that's currently in place.
The Legacy building Hadley Apartments currently under construction, that's one of the things they had to provide to get the taller building height.
They would have 13 affordable housing units. AUDIENCE: How many units total? SCOTT: So, building height, find the right board. This one behind Chair Friedman here, so, one of the
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things that's been talked about with building height is currently for a five-story, the five-story area, building height can go five stories and 65 feet.
What we looked at was the idea that in most buildings being built today, the first floor is 15 feet high. In some cases it's actually 20 feet high. And then the residential floors are 10 feet high.
When you add all that up, it comes up to 55 feet if you have five floors.
Today we're allowing 65 feet. Joint Commission is talking about reducing that by
5 feet.
I know it's not a lot, but if the 5 feet plus maybe an additional -- so 55 plus an additional 5 feet up to 60, the additional height might be allowed for pitched roofs or parapets or other things to help with the architecture of the building.
It would not necessarily be used for additional cubic footage in units, for example. Or it might be. It's something they're still talking about.
This is the Legacy Hadley building. What I wanted to show here is the problem that we're trying to solve by routing heights and a couple other things that are being talked about.
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This is the base of the facade here where the concrete area is here.
If you measure the face of that facade up to the very top and that's topped out now. This is actually what it would be at 75 feet.
The reason it's 75 feet, it's how we currently measure height in the Town Center.
This is on a sloping site and there's nothing in our code that would require that to be a certain height and go as high as it wants as long as the overall average height of the building doesn't exceed that 65 feet.
So, with Joint Commission's discussion, this line right here is at 60 feet and that's how tall the building could potentially be -- could have been if the rules under consideration were in place when this building was built.
Trying to show you the difference. It would be 15 foot less in height. They would lose the little mezzanine on top and plus they would lose the top floor.
The other thing we're talking about, just to be clear on that, is not only measuring the average building height which we currently do, but also a rule that would say that any part of any building facade, any face of the building, cannot exceed the height limit.
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SCOTT: So in that example, in that five-story area, you could not have more than 60 feet on any facade. And then there would be some different things that would happen on sloping lots to make sure that that also doesn't exceed that 60 feet.
AUDIENCE: Scott -- SCOTT: Another thing that -- AUDIENCE: Scott. SCOTT: I'm not taking questions. AUDIENCE: Okay. SCOTT: Another thing that the group is talking about is step-backs. So, some of the Town Center buildings go straight up from the sidewalk to the very top.
It's a flat facade. Maybe there's a deck or two or some minor modulation of the facade.
So the problem is the code allows those facades to go straight up.
So the Joint Commission is talking about a couple different options for vertical step-backs. So, one of them is just the very straight -- you get your first two floors going straight up with some modulation so it looks good. The third floor would have to be stepped back 15 feet from the front of the second floor. Then each additional floor
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would have to be stepped back 10 feet. It's what's been referred to as the wedding cake approach. It kind of looks like a wedding cake. That will achieve the objective, but it doesn't allow a lot of flexibility for design. And the fear is that the buildings that are built in the future might all tend to look the same. They might have all the exact same profile.
So one option that's being discussed is doing what's called an average daylight plane. The diagonal line could basically be drawn from the sidewalk. It could be drawn from the edge of the first floor. That's something we'll be discussing. But the idea is that the building would have to stay within that line, but there would also be some flexibility where it could go outside of that line for very minor projections if there was more open space provided in the front of the building. We haven't fully developed that concept, but it's something that has been discussed to provide a little bit of flexibility.
I am skipping a few slides. I think my last one is what's called block frontage massing. So if you look at some of the Town Center buildings today from the air, and we had a -- the context board over there that shows the buildings, they are basically doughnuts. And the doughnut hole in the middle is private open space.
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The one shown on here, that's actually where
Safeway is in downtown Bellevue. It's basically a big doughnut without any openings in it. That's what we're trying to avoid. So the concept here is that when a facade gets to be a certain length, there has to be some major way to break that up into smaller pieces. And some of the things we're talking about is providing some open space. It could be public. It could be private. But this is more about the building design than the use of that space.
The other thing we're talking about is providing some through-block connections through these projects. So, one example, it's probably not a great example, but it gives you an idea of what we're talking about. Island Square where the bagel shop is and Coldwell Banker. That's actually five separate buildings that share a common parking garage.
And the buildings are built to look a little bit different from each other, but they still fit together.
If the open area in between those buildings was open to the public, that's what we're talking about. That's the type of thing that we're talking about. Not sure we could get that required to be open to the public, but that's the idea. That in order to break up the facade, that might be something that could be an incentive or required.
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Okay. And that's my presentation. I'm going to turn it back over to Chair Friedman and then we want to hear from all of you.
JON: Scott, before you go, do we have this slide available here?
SCOTT: No. JON: We have it on the Web site? SCOTT: Yep. So, on our Web site, on the Town
Center page, and I think it's also probably on the Planning Commission's page, is the agenda and the packet for tonight. The packet was the slide presentation we had some difficulties with.
It's actually some bigger things of this. And did we put the boards online?
ALISON: Not yet, but we can do that. SCOTT: We'll also put all the boards online. They are a pdf file. We'll get that up in the next couple of days.
JON: Thank you, Scott. I just want to -- I do want to say the staff has been really great in responding to everything we've asked and has been working really hard in getting this stuff taken care of and getting the stuff on the Web site, making sure we have as much outreach and public information on this as
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possible as we are working through the process.
Do we have any more in terms of the sign-up sheet?
Any more folks that -- okay. So, anybody else that wants to sign up to speak, there is still going to be a sign-up sheet in back.
What we'll go ahead and do now is we'll go ahead and open up our public hearing at this point. We as a commission are here to listen, so we won't be responding to any questions in this format, and there won't be any discussion up here.
In terms of the public comment, any comments that you have to say, obviously we're most interested to hear what you have to say for the four subjects that we're talking about tonight, but obviously anything else related to our work that we're doing is important and we look forward to any information, any feedback that you can give us.
So, the way this is going to go, I have to say that there's a -- just reference a code of conduct. Everybody knows just to be respectful. I don't need to go too much over that, but everybody pretty much knows. I have to mention that.
In addition, based on the sign-ups we have, we'll go ahead and stick with our three-minute limit on public
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comment. What I have done, anybody that's gone to our meetings in the past has known I've been pretty liberal in terms of the people speaking and going over the time. In this setting we're going to have to be a little bit -- we're going to have to stick to the three minutes. We need to make sure we're fair to everyone and everybody gets the same amount of time and nobody -- doesn't look like anybody's getting any more time, and so three minutes is where we need to stick.
So, what you'll see is you'll see the yellow light flashing. I think it flashes. Maybe it just is steady. In any event -- it flashes. Then you have 30 seconds, and the red light will go off, and we'll need you to wrap it up.
I think that is about it. I think we'll call up two people at a time. And forgive me if I trash your name here, but I'll do my best to pronounce everything correctly.
But we'll call up two. There are two microphones up here. And we'll just kind of rotate that way so that we make sure we get everybody through.
Anybody else? So, what we do need from you is state your name and address for the record.
