i'd like to welcome everybody who has come out this evening and before i start i just want to take a moment to send our best wishes to the auto be family if you might have remembered bob auto be who's kind of one of our resident historians that writes a lot of these fun books passed away over the weekend suddenly so definitely want to keep the auto bees and our thoughts and prayers i think counselor abel used to work with them at the rocky mountain news yeah he was a newsroom clerk and the rest of his family so and then i'm going to turn it over real quick because i cut off our city manager abruptly at the end of last meeting and she actually had a report and we skipped her sorry okay thank you mayor paul a couple of weeks ago i was just going to announce that i had the good fortune of signing the closing papers for the taylor property so we are we're looking for funding to reimburse our our investment but it is now sixty acres almost sixty acres as a part of the city of lakewood parkland so i'm really happy about that and i wanted to let you know thank you very much that is fantastic and and so just for everybody's information so we have three presentations well public comment after all those this public comm is different than a regular city council meeting where there's open comment this pertains strictly to the information presented and allows you to participate in the conversation like we would so it would be limited to questions about what the vertical can we just jump into that this council mind if we do that first because i think it's gonna be quick so go ahead the council policies and procedures yeah thanks mayor paul appreciate you putting this towards the front i do think it'll be quick i did want to just kind of talk through to the public about the council of policies and procedures and wanted to first recognize the net nealon for all the hard work from the staff perspective that she put forth to get this to the point it's at a little bit of the background information is that the policies and procedures has been in place for a very long time and when i joined council that was probably december of two thousand and fifteen raised the point that i thought it needed to go through a revision process again along with a couple other councillors and so wanted to just kind of give folks some background information on that we went through a very extensive kind of council review and redlining process where we reviewed it and we look to wherever we could build consensus and that was through our facilitator jody erickson with jsc and associates and we always looked for consensus but weren't able to always get that so then we went to majority rule and then we set up a drafting committee and that was myself as chair mayor paul and councillor abel who were on the drafting committee and so our job was to take all of that discussion and all of those decision points and turned that into revised language that then went back before the council so this has been a very extensive process that we've gone through  we also kind of started the engagement really in earnest that would be around february of two thousand and seventeen and we really had some goals to do a few different things and nannette nealon has put together some great information i want to just go through a few things one of the purpose of the council manual is to extend on but not conflict with the charter to add additional detail and steps for the charter and the ordinance policy and to be a guidance kind of better understand the larger picture we look to clarify language we wanted to always be in compliance with the charter another one was to really remove some of that training language that maybe got in there over the years and to remove out any editorialized comment it was also important for us to make sure that we protected the citizens right to speak at meetings and i'm sure as most of you know we've actually expanded those opportunities to study sessions and so those are some good things that have come out of that it's important to note that tonight we're just kind of introducing this the packet contains the full policies and procedures manual for your review it can be found at lakewood org slash council policy manual and what's great about that is you'll you'll find that there are all the videos first seven of the meetings where you can watch that dialogue happening we felt that was really important for transparency you'll also see on that same page you will hol list of the former ordinances all the way back i believe to the s all the way through the two thousand and nine ten so that lets you see kind of that historical perspective on the manual and i think we have put in a ton of great work on this i think we've made it easier to read easier to but we certainly welcome the public's feedback on this as we move into the next meeting where it'll be up for  there was a lengthy process i believe the funding for it was four years ago and put into the city attorney's budget or at sat for a couple of years  point for those folks that watch this there was a debate of whether we should go word for word at the diocese and i think that the way that we were able to do this actually helped us get through the tough things that we needed now there is an addendum to this and it has to do with a i'm gonna say it wrong mister skilling workplace harassment policy and we had a quite an antiquated policy and so that was actually removed we have received some new language that will then be subjected to a amended version whether council adopts that with the full pulses and procedures or not but just so the community knows that'll be part of that and it's a meaningful part for for the group as we looked at dealing with those types of issues unfortunately so with that is there any other comments or questions from council yes thank you mayor and i want i would like to thank the maiko councillors and the mayor for other hard work on this i know it's taken a lot of time and effort and and i know how much work it is to try and wordsmith the document like this  having had to do things like this myself at times so i want to just express my appreciation i also want to make a point i think is really important that this is just what it is a procedural manual it doesn't address substan substantive issues that we might have to deal with as we move forward it's it's just a way of approaching those substantive issues in one as an example you know we're talking about the the harassment that's a substantive issue and we're gonna bring that back in at some point and that's the way it should be we don't want to hold this up for something that complicated that difficult likewise we have other issues substantive issues that are still outstanding and one of them we've talked about a couple of times as a matter of how the city attorney is reviewed and hired and so forth and so on and i want to make it clear that that by adopting what we have or without what we will adopt in no way forecloses further discussions in that regard going forward and i'm hoping that we can do that in the next couple of months and get that that issue addressed and resolved certainly and that has been not scheduled but we have a couple months i think with the goals to have it by by may so that is in in motion as we speak also just want to take a moment to thank everyone for their hard work and especially the drafting committee i know several people have already said this but it really was above and beyond the call of duty did a lot of extra time and hours so really appreciate everyone and and nanette as well for for the many many hours thank you for your efforts we appreciate it and also thank you and i'm hopeful that we can get this passed as an addendum the harassment policy so one thing everyone for that as well thank you miss franks and i just wanted to close and by thanking the citizens who reached out who either attended our meetings or who watched the videos and sent me emails or texts or phone calls about additions and suggestions without you i don't think we would have achieved the level of quality so really appreciate that and want to continue to encourage folks to reach out to all of us or some of us but you know however you want to reach out but make sure that if you've got great ideas that they get documented inside these types of documents it's important that we include the community and so for those who did come and sit with us on so sometimes long nights while we were doing that we really do appreciate your time mister skilling mayor just are we discussing the new addendum tonight or are we not discussing this tonight so you certainly not sure if all the council had a chance cuz we got that today but it's certainly open if you'd like to discuss that i don't want to discuss it until everyone's had a time had time to review it because it would be like talking to myself which is fun but  i don't think that would be productive so i will wait all right anybody else okay so going forward the community just to be aware we will have this as a resolution adoption next week will give council a week to look at the memo that we received and we can have a conversation about that at that time or going forward so is there any public input for policies and procedures and nobody has signed up right so we will now move on to the union corridor transportation plan and i'll bring down mister hutchison good evening thank america evening city council and welcome to all the others participating this evening particularly planning commission who is not here always for city council study session but i'm thrilled that they are for this part of the discussion and a later item of course i'm here to introduce a discussion that m basket will present and it has to do with the union quarter primarily the union quarter between alameda avenue and th avenue although the study area was much larger than that because the transportation system is such that impacts come from many places when you look at  transportation system the community has been working toward what is now the union area transportation study for months and we have a fair amount of information to present tonight of note will be a number of proposed projects that will be discussed by mister basket as he makes his presentation so again thank you for the time and i'll introduce mister basket thank you good evening mister basket welcome good evening thank you thank you so the gifts the first question is why were we doing this study and in the last ten years as we recovered from the two thousand and eight two thousand and nine recession we've had a lot of activity in the corridor saint anthony's hospital opened the w line light rail open three medical office buildings have been built apartment complexes with over six hundred apartment units the area became much more diverse adding many fast casual dining options we built a hotel there's another hotel under construction right now and all of this has led to more congestion first i'd like to promise you i'm not going to sit here and redo slides so you have to do some reading on your own all right the focus area extends roughly from sixth avenue to alameda and then gordon to the federal center and then the impact area is about a half mile beyond the focus area in each direction one of the things that i thought was really critical to do is get outreach and engagement methods in place that would be able to reach so many people because there are just so many different users in the group in the corridor that you need to approach things now in many different ways to be able to give people the options to look and here i'm clicking them up with some of the things that we've used with the digital and print contacting hoas fliers and surveys an open ended  online comments but then we also wanted to go and meet with people in person the open house was we had on the deck of the old chicago you could actually look out and see up and down the corridor  rush hours so you could see its worst we also had pop ups at the light rail in jason's deli we had individual meetings with business owners and property managers we had the bigger normal type of public meetings we met with special interest groups and by the time we were done we had outreach that to date when this was prepared last fall of eighty six thousand seven hundred and thirty nine people that we had contacted through social media ma this is what we gathered some of the information about who it was we were talking to and asking for their input on what they thought the plusses and minuses were of the corridor some surprising things twelve percent of employees travel over fifty miles to get to work i do thirty i thought that was a long way on the right hand side you see that we have sixteen zero three hundred people that come into the corridor and six thousand plus leave there's only three hundred and eighty employees lived within the focus area when we began since then the beacon apartments have opened and another apartment building is in the planning stage there's also two zero people that just use the corridor to get through to their employment either to the north or south and many are currently perceived as unsafe for all users vibrant businesses and activity in the area is highly valued and people appreciate the many commercial establishments along corridor vehicle congestion concerns are corridor wide but are most concentrated at the gateways to the study area th and union and alameda and union to determine the amount of development that should be assumed we looked at prior development that has occurred the final amount of development assumed was based on past development and how much could physically occur based on the most land intensive scenario for development the auto mode scenario which i'll discuss in a minute this also corresponds to doctor cox projections we're predicting a little bit less than the amount of increase that we've seen in the last twenty years to occur in the next twenty years and a shift in the character now that there will be more residential units that will lead to more retail and services coming the whole comment that retail follows rooftops still have more hotels coming in and  there will be a shift probably to more and more office and medical office use hospitals never seem to stop growing during the recession told vehicle miles traveled that's vmt flatten is vmt per capita declined and this occurred region wide however we're now in a point where  the sheer volume of people moving into the metro area has overwhelmed the decline in the vmt per capita so that now we see total vmt increasing the union corridor with the addition of the w line and more housing and traffic volumes the traffic volumes were moderated more than the rest of the region you can actually see in the northern part of the corridor we've seen a decline of about ten percent and the amount of traffic whereas in the the middle of the corridor was a two percent increase that's over a seven year period and a sixteen percent increase that occurred at the southern end of the the corridor where there's been a lot of development occurring this is a some more those were traffic counts that we took here is some information we got from doctor cog and you can see took a while to pull out of the recession there is not much change in  the early years it took until about two thousand and twelve or thirteen for the traffic volumes start to start to pick up there's a sharp spike in pedestrian activity around lunchtime particularly in the south end of the corridor you can see i'm not here it comes up at second place cedar the wendy's area and if you've ever tried to eat at wendy's there at lunch it takes a while this creates traffic congestion as the lights on union stay red longer to get the pedestrians across the street is there going back and forth the signals have to be timed for elderly handicapped people to be able to make it all the way across so that means in many cases when there is not someone like there like that that pushed the button the lights are still going to be red for that extra of five or ten seconds and everybody is stopped because there's no way to change the lights based on we we don't have facial recognition or anything about who is pressing the button so availability of alternative modes leads to increased activity in an area many times the presence of car share and bike share opportunities is based on the form and density of development we took a look here at three different scenarios for the future development to occur the auto mode is pretty much the way that historically the corridor had developed the mixed mode is in between scenario that still relies a lot on the automobile but doesn't take the deep dive of really focusing on creating a destination and focuses on alternative modes and they take precedence over the automobile so we wanted to look at all three of these to see what what the differences would be so here's some forecast and as you would expect if you're going to develop around the automobile you're going to have more auto traffic and that means you're probably going to have less pedestrian traffic because things are going to continue to be more spread out and so there'll be less walking trips that take place then as you move up the ladder to mixed use you get more less auto traffic you would expect if you're going to have more cars on the road that it's not going to work as well it's going to take longer to get through and sure enough that's what what we show here that travel times do continue to go down as you go from auto to mixed use to alternatives here's a different way of looking at here's five different intersections that we're talking about level of service at the intersection and again that's with more autos as you would expect  get a lower level of service except for this one right here the alternative mode union cedar and that is because we threw in this one to say okay if we're really going to  be working for alternative modes first we threw in a mid block pedestrian signal and one of the problems we have on union the with the signal spacing and the number of signals if you add another one to make it easier for the it really does have a tendency to make it very very difficult for the cars to achieve any type of progression and so you get more delay okay there are a number of different ways considerations you can take into account when you're when you're trying to develop projects and prioritize them and what we did is we started out that we had well what's the impact on the network and the users and we found out that people wanted us to give points for bikes pedestrians and autos that's reflected from the citizen input and they wanted things that improve things for everyone to score higher than something that was just focused on one mode or another and they want to primarily concentrate on reducing congestion on alameda and union you look at cost low medium and high low we said is five hundred thousand dollars or less medium cost is five hundred thousand to three million and a high cost project would be over three million we wanted to look at stakeholder support that's what we had all the surveys for the people filling things out so that we knew what the people thought regardless of what the costs were or the impacts of the system what do they think about it and then another thing that you can use to prioritize projects is the readiness of the project do we have right of way is there funding available is it partially designed things of that nature so that you could move more quickly and then what is the relationship with the comprehensive plan so now i'd like to go in and discuss some of the the projects that we evaluated that rose to the top the first is to do two lanes on the eastbound sixth avenue that would modify the the right turns at the signal to allow two lanes to enter and part of what that does is right now sorry i take it the laser pointer doesn't show up what's your screens is sorry about that well there's a double left turn here and in order to get through the signal both turn lanes fill up but if people are in the inside turn lane and they want to go left and as soon as they turn they immediately have to try and merge with other traffic and it generates a lot of conflict and we get some sideswipe accidents and that that becomes a problem well if you can have it so that two lanes can make the turn by altering the signals and making some minor modifications to that island then we think that we can get some real benefit in terms of safety and then it shouldn't cost too much money and we should be able to work with c dot we've talked to them about this and they say yeah we should take a look we think that something could be done there and this had the highest level of community support the next is the route street extension which is to extend route street over sixth avenue with sidewalks and bike lanes to connect to quail on the north side this would provide an alternate route over us six and it'd be safer route for everybody involved and reduced congestion on unit union it's a high cost project and so what we would suggest is that it's also a bigger project and if you've ever worked with the federal aid highway you have to do environmental this stuff takes a long time so you could get started on the project by talking to the c dot personnel and environmental and seeing what level they would make us go through this also had the highest level community support this is one that that people did not really understand i don't think as as well so i went and took another example here the parallel gr separations of freeways near interchanges are becoming a common reliever technique this is i twenty five and university and you can see just a few blocks away is steel street a collector street that goes over  the highway and it removes a few thousand cars a day from the interchange and by doing that you can really make a major impact on the interchange the one on the right is us thirty six at federal interchange and a few blocks away you have lowell that goes underneath it and the idea is not to make this some major street you really just need to take a few thousand vehicles a day out of that interchange mix to really improve the flow we also have the union alameda this was designed for high speed auto movements using sweeping right turns and merge lane designing for  connectivity work better and it's low cost and we think that we can fund this out of the existing transportation budget we've already gone in improved the signage improved the striping of the crosswalks cleared out some of the the visibility and we're keeping track to see how people like that there are steps that you can go beyond that i'm sure love you have gone across the raised crosswalk at these free right turns that would be something that we could try going all the way to even having signalized for the pedestrians because it would be a very short signal that you're only need to cross maybe stop a car for fifteen seconds to make that happen but we like to start with the least invasive as we can and then see how it works before we jump into something bigger and it has a high level of community support these get to be a little bit more difficult to explain but first of all a lot of people don't know what seri lane is it's a private road that goes from union  back to the back of where these buildings are at right now there's a hotel that's under construction right here the idea is to make a connection that would go from  site around here and as redevelopment occurred around this way some of you can see has already been done the street and basically this work would be done as the area redevelops and by doing that you get a connection from schneider up to surrey lane that provides a different way for people to be able to get in and out and this is an old picture but  the three medical office buildings ones up here here and here and it's being designed so that you can see this curb cut that would eventually connect to cedar so that you can have most of this work gets done as part of development and we again and improves mobility for all modes and reduces congestion by providing more ways to get around so we're not forcing everybody to use just a couple of major intersections off of union and union itself so it it has a high level of community support this one is to extend siri lane from union to healing way with sidewalks and bike lanes  this is mostly being done right now by the hotel where they'll be extending it up to the drainage ditch and what will need to be done in the future that could be something that the city gets involved in is a bridge over the ditch that could be just for pedestrians and bikes or it could be to connect autos to the street as well to get better ways to get through this is a medium cost we're saying because of the the fact of having to do a bridge and some connections to it and this has a pretty high level of community support the community support by the way is on a based on one to ten  so then the next thing that came up a lot was the idea of connections between the buildings along union to the street and between the buildings and that would be to add new sidewalk and repair existing sidewalks like you can see here one of the things that we're looking at is a transportation management association that's it's a private nonprofit made up of local governments and private sector to implement transportation demand management programs and projects they apply for grants from various sources a particular focus usually on improving first and last mile accessibility to transit uses and areas of high demand for pedestrians and bikes that reduce auto trips and right now the city is involved with denver and the housing authorities and has a grant application into doctor cog we were hoping that we would know by now that the answer is yes but we feel pretty good that the answer is going to be yes and that this could be one of the types of projects that would be good for them to start out with here's another one of these improve connections through the parking lots this is all private property here and while it's possible to make it through the existing parking lots now as redevelopment occurs this could be strengthened for all users by making it more like a street rather than a parking drive aisle and if we could get sidewalks and we could get room for  this area here is where the beacon apartments are at and we have in right now in this area development proposals to put in another apartment building so we're looking at the idea that you could create something a lot like siri lane on the other side of the street and again it would be low cost because it would be done with redevelopment and it has a fair l community support this this was also confusing to people there we got comments like well how many people want to go from the va to wendy's it's like before the second place intersection it's one of our highest use pedestrian intersections in the corridor and our highest use bus intersection there are numerous challenges and trade offs here between know there's things for example that you can use what's called a leading walk light so that the light is red for everybody but the walk light comes on for like five seconds to let the groups of people get out in the street before the light turns green and the cars try to run them over you know and that's because one of the things that happens is is and we can start doing this too is taking away the  right on red because people are we have instance where they look they're looking to the left because that's where the traffic is going to be coming from they see a brake and they start to pull out and  crosswalk that they haven't seen and it's quite frightening if you're the pedestrian and people have been bumped so you can correct some of that by your combination of factors with the signal  and it's just a perpetual balancing act that we think that we can do things to improve it and it would be low cost and within our existing budget  and every time you you get into something where it's a challenge between different user groups you don't get a high level of support you get right kind of in the middle that it's like is this going to be good for me or bad for me it's sort of hard to tell access management is something that we do already his property develops it's largely a safety a capacity thing where instead of having the design feature on the right where you've got five driveways the pedestrians and bicyclists have to cross and people have to worry about somebody's all of a sudden going to slow down to turn right and they rear in them that if you reduce the number of those access points you can really control that type of accident from occurring and just make it safer for everybody like i said we're already doing this and it looks like we need to do more education to explain why this is good since it didn't even get up to halfway on community support so this one is the hawk signal to install a call button in the middle i can tell you right now if the signal is used properly getting stuck in the middle wouldn't occur but we can approve the safety for scofflaws who are not using this and go properly by giving them a button in the middle so that if they have started crossed against the red light and then suddenly the traffic is flowing all around them and it's like oh my god well there's nobody there to push the button so we can we can do that within our existing budget and this year has some mixed support okay so what we're asking for is a consensus to bring a resolution forward adopting the union area transportation plan if that's done then we would take  the things i've mentioned before that we could do within our existing budget we'd start on that i get input from you about how we should proceed with other projects i've mentioned and that would be worked into  the budget process for next year and we could make a start to try to solve some of the problems here so with that are there any questions yes sir i think there will be so i'm gonna start with a couple for as long as i've been on council alameda and nena has been a challenge and it's an expensive challenge did anything come up about i know in the past there had been talk of even doing a fly kind of a little flyover that kept people going west or some some things to change the actual whole course over there would that come up at all of a group to consider and that would be really really expensive so we actually eliminated things like that that were that expensive do we have some sort of design work that shows what we would if we had a we did sunny in the world what we would put there because and what i'm getting at is if we do have that that should probably be incorporated potentially into this okay we've done some sketches but take a look at that but we haven't really taken it beyond that and then it's interesting you can see the increase as soon as the alameda interchange opened you saw the increase of usage tied back to the date on alameda and union so you could see more folks utilizing the interchange and then coming down that way what is an e intersection  okay level of service this is part of a is like you're on a road you can drive in any lane you want any speed you want b you can pick your your speed you might have to switch lanes c you're mostly able to be to travel at the the speed limit or close to it d you're starting to run into congestion you might not get through a signal for example on the first cycle that you're there by the time you get to level of service e that that's a pretty common thing you know that you're not going to make it through on the first time that you get there so it's just increasing delay and then f things are broken down to where you're actually carrying less traffic than you did with the lower levels of service even though you have more vehicles they're trying to use it and then two other questions the seeder connection did you examine actually taking cedar down to alameda rather than going to route and one of those so one of the suggestions is that we would go to route but it examined that we would take alameda because that could take a lot of cars who are going to union could take them off the road a lot sooner than alameda and union if that makes sense yes we we have looked at that i'm not sure if i can find the right slide to show you now but the problem really is that there's a big drainage culture and so it becomes very expensive to build the bridge across and at that location that would be close enough to the union alameda intersection that it could only right in right out i wouldn't be able to make it a full movement so you pretty expensive for the benefit it makes sense and then t examined how about a bid and i know that's been something that's been kicked around and not so much i you're not going to get your heavy transportation issues solved but with a bitter business improvement district you may get some of the pedestrian type features that would benefit the businesses along the corridor yeah we didn't look in a in a bid we would leave that to economic development to get involved but with the interest in the to to get a grant to try and get it up and running and that could very well lead to the next step that you're talking about that as you get the businesses together and you know working for a common good then that could become a next step well and then i'll just make one comment that this is scheduled to be adopted on mentioned that this is so maybe i'm confused and thank you for the presentation but so this is being called a plan i thought it was a study that has all of the underlying data it has a lot of different projects different lots of different ways to go i'm unclear how this is a plan i thought we were talking about a whole list of priorities and from this when we're making future decisions on projects we could go back to this yes and look at things everything you just described so i'm i wasn't planning on asking this but now this is up on the slide i'm curious what the plan is that you were correct in your description and that's that's what this is and the first slide actually calls a union area transportation study which is really what it is and so that's the way we'll bring back the resolution because it's not a pla it was gathering input it was getting all this different data because what we were trying to figure out from the public and from the council what's traction you really want to go here i mean are we gonna pick one way and say no we're you know we're gonna make this a place we're gonna treat this more like a belmar as a destination or what westminster's doing up at westminster city center or are we going to to treat it as this is someplace that we want to get traffic through i mean if people want to get to sixth avenue and back you know and so let's let's focus on that because it's two entirely different things and you know we can do pretty well on any one of the priorities but once you say oh no we want it to work for everybody well that's a little more difficult and i promise i read it so i just want to clear that yes there isn't a plan buried in here that i wasn't aware of that we're adopting on because i looked at exactly how you explained it is how i looked at it is that if you want the auto oriented you got some of that in here if you want the mix there's some of that too depending on which way you want to go you've got the underlying underlying data in here moving forward am i correct in that you are and there's not been any specific recommendations that we go towards auto or that you go towards the alternative it's just that this gives you a framework to operate if you chose to go one of those two ways correct right okay well thank you for that and in my reading i noted that on page twenty three and then in your slides here it had your slide said the future development was one thousand one hundred residential dwelling units and then in twenty three it had talked about future forecast for development  was there any thought about the development out in rooney valley and what the impacts of that would be on the union corridor because all those folks out there mayor paul's point the timing of when the alameda interchange opens so you can imagine if they build out the valley those folks got one way to go pretty much they're gonna all come down alameda and then guess where they're gonna go they're gonna go up union so has there been any thought to that when we're doing these forecasts yes it's all incorporated in the traffic modeling that's done we we pick up the doctor cog regional transportation plan and the population employment by traffic zones and that's all incorporated in the into the modeling that becomes the background for the traffic and then we make adjustments to that based upon if we're going to be pushing towards an auto or an alternative mode that would have a tendency to modify the projections that they're making so you're saying that the projections did include the ravello yes yes okay and do you recall whether are they projecting that to come down ala meat or what does that projection look like because i think that would go towards the auto versus the mix i mean the mix is fine and the alternate would be a nice utopia but if we've got all that many cars i mean that would somewhat impact which way we go on prioritizing projects yeah that that is included already in the in the forecast and a lot of what's happening is that people are making changes and it's getting harder and harder for us when you get these things like you know ways and google maps and all the stuff and you hit the button that says oh today you're better off going to see four hundred and seventy and heading south and looping around and the next day it says going west to get onto c seventy and then north and looping around the th avenue to stay out of the union corridor right ok a couple other questions the what about the flashing yellows did you guys look at using flashing yellows at all on any of these turns because i'll give you example you come down alameda and you turn on union and we travel this probably every day so if you're coming down out meeting you turn up on union you've got to  up north there and if you're back far enough you're missing that light every time and forget about it in the wintertime so has there been thought to extending that putting in the flashing yellows there did you guys look at any of that we look at whether the flashing yellows are appropriate at every signal that we do that and it's more and more difficult when you have multiple turn lanes we don't use them nearly as often where we have more than one left turn lane because it's too difficult for people to be able to see through the the traffic that skewed across the street so in in places like that we actually tend to use more of a protected only turn lane and then the other thing with the higher speed streets like that there where it's really congested we have a problem with people running red lights and you can get into high speed collisions when  and that's some of the ones that generate the most injuries and hopefully not fatalities but that occurs too sometimes so that when i adopted a flashing yellow would help but yes we did we go through and we check them all the time to see what's changed and would it be appropriate or not i noted one of the project list was styled as the innovative intersection alternatives and that was one of the bright one of the intersection so i didn't know what the alternative would be there other than you'd mentioned putting in the signage on the high speed turn lanes well some of the things that we actually walks three and a half feet per second we're only having them cross for maybe five seconds and then have a clearance interval for like eight seconds something like that so you would be delaying the right turning vehicle for a very short period of time to allow the pedestrian to cross safely before they get to the the traffic signal then there's the raised intersection so that they slowed down because they got the bump and  that sometimes works and sometimes people just take the bump if you're in a great big pickup you know you don't even feel it so yeah though they'll be looking at a lot of those things my  last comment for you was that and talking about the pedestrians i note that i don't see a lot of pedestrians crossing there i mean i know that they're there and i think the whole to mayor paul's point to the flyovers it seems to me that i just don't pedestrians crossing as much it seemed to me that if you did flyovers at certain points and eliminated as many stops you get traffic just moving through union and they could pull over to whatever business they want to go to but if you could just eliminate those dang lights go in red and the only purpose seems to be sometimes just for the the flyover idea i mean i think that would get a lot of support from a lot of people if you just made that whole thing look we know there's gonna be cars people are turning in their cars and getting on ebikes except maybe barb but nobody else is turning in their cars so you're gonna have all these cars are always i mean for the foreseeable future union needs to be a place where people can drive through and not be congested seems to me that flyover idea that we were just talking about would be one that i know it might be expensive but let's talk about it okay i mean look i mean what is where we talk i mean how many millions of dollars is it i don't know maybe we'll get funding for the record the ebike has been away for the winter so i actually travel union every day and wanted to talk about some of the actual experience all things and see how much they factored in so basically i go from kind of the dunstan and divini area along you know and go up to to union what i'm seeing along the union is everything from people trying to get to a set business and having to do all kinds of funky  u turns because there's no way to get in and out of the businesses i'm seeing truck deliveries that are being delivered during rush hour and doing their backing up and so traffic so basically you know supplies being delivered during during rush hours  people turning in to get their caffeine in the morning and the lines going out so i'm seeing that the fact that we don't have good setbacks we don't have driveways wide enough for people to make a reasonable turn so we get a lot of  in the morning for folks in those situations plus folks coming that would be eastbound on alameda coming by the gas station and the rite aid i think in the gas station and then immediately needing to get over onto cedar than having to cut through three lanes of traffic so we're all of those behavioral things looked at because i don't see anything that addresses any of those issues well yes we did we actually from  the consultant that we used has offices in the ten story building that you can look right down on the cedar intersection and we did observe that  many times of the u turns taking place to dive into the gas station and  so yeah there's a problem and then the starbucks we tried to get them as part of the development to make a connection with i forgot the burger place next to it and it's private property we couldn't force that to happen and so now it's a very difficult situation where there's no flow through traffic and people get stuck backing up in a parking lot that's  that's rather small for the volume that they have and the like you're talking about it in the morning when everybody wants their caffeine so we did look at a lot of that but i'm not really sure how you correct people's bad behavior well i think what i'm speaking to is i just don't think that we are planning holistically enough you know when we do a site plan we look very narrowly and again these parking lots were designed in ways in which they don't support those so i think that we're exasperated it by not looking at larger you know we kind of look at one thing individually we're not looking at things holistically and so we end up with this entire corridor which is difficult to navigate both morning and night you've got folks then coming southbound on union who are trying to jockey to get past the people turning on cedar and trying to do this horrible leap frogging and i've been in near accidents usually about two three times a month so i guess what i'm trying to impress on that i understand that you have some limited but we don't do deep enough setbacks when we put things too close and we can't expand when we don't make driveways large enough when we don't have parking those things all overtime is each individual new development comes in justkeep exasperating the problems larger so i'm not saying it's necessarily you i'm kind of speaking to the broader thing here where if we don't step back and start looking holistically and we just keep approving one project at a time we are going to be like that poor frog in the pot to where the we just gets one degree warmer until we're all absolutely miserable and it's it's become a very difficult commute the last five years i would just say and i'm sensing that people in the community are getting to the point of frustration where we have folks who are considering leaving our lovely community because it's no longer something that they can they can tolerate so i want us all to hear that even though it may be it's not pleasant to hear well that's part of what this study was supposed to do is to to take a more holistic yeah to take a more holistic view of their and i can tell you and one of the things that we looked at it's in the study is the parking and there's actually the parking is pretty good too excessive and a lot of places in the corridor but there's a few places where there's specific problems but like for example both of the apartment buildings always have lots of empty parking spaces in their structures and that makes it that's what that's by the way another even better and my last question is did you guys factor in how many cars you think that that route street bridge would take off of union i mean is there an estimate of how many cars that we would expect would be able to utilize that considering that there's a lot of traffic getting onto sixth avenue so unless you're planning a second on ramp if it's just an overpass but but how many cars do you think the route street extension would take off the streets probably in the five to seven thousand range you know what a great presentation i appreciate all the hard work that everybody did a couple of questions that i had as i was going through the the study i noticed a couple of talking about people who had mobility or disability that challenges getting across the street was that because i know you had said earlier in the presentation that a lot of times lights had to be longer to allow people i'm assuming that that was was kind of looked at all through the the study area correct yes it was okay and then one question that or a suggestion i'll just consider it a suggestion some cities are painting what they call the square a totally different color and that seems to be able to bring more attention to the box in the middle of the red didn't last as long as they had had hoped we're using green on garrison for the bike lanes and some of those the difficulty with it is it's very expensive to put down and it doesn't last very long so you have to continue to replace it and there's some question about how effective it really is sell advertising yeah we tried to do that once in parking lots saying it would work mister abel thank you and tell you how many proposals of extending streets and connecting various parking lots and such might provide that was kind of escape routes from from heavy traffic if you were to get if we were to do all of that everything that's mentioned here any idea of what the total price would be up i'm guessing that would be somewhere probably in the forty to fifty million dollars over a period of you know twenty years something like that that would include the route street bridge and yeah we're thinking that the route street bridge has probably come in somewhere in the twelve to fifteen million dollars and that's the most expensive project that that we had considered if we go back to alameda and union with a flyover there that would be probably at least as much as it's a very difficult place that the the union and alameda assume that would require some takings of property well we weren't really looking at that we were talking about maybe getting easements trying to do it as part the redevelopment we weren't talking about making him really public streets we had some pushback from the property owners about that they like to keep everything they've got that's part of the inheritance i guess if you will from the development that took place because union was developed in the era of the super blocks were the huge chunks of land and that you'd have flexibility to make changes in the in the future but as a result the connectivity i mean it's just one parking lot budding up but against another and there's no clear way to get through but again part of the hope there is that it  really does take something like a tm a rbi d where you have people that can just work with that small group of businesses and get them to work together and now we have instances without naming the properties or anything where we have been able to do cross access agreements and then they got to fight and somebody puts a cable across you know because they're squabbling about things so the idea that we're looking at is if you could get like an access easement of some kind so that it's really legal but we're not taking the land so stay if you want to  use and that brings up the question of how many parking spaces but that remove from an area that except for the larger apartment buildings you were talking about van garden and beacon  parking parkings at a premium over there so many would lose not many because we you can already find a drive while going through but it would take some because there's no there's no walk that people  walking across the parking lot and the main thing that we're talking about that's different is trying to make the dive a little bit more direct but then being able to put sidewalks on the side so by doing that probably in the spot yeah i would have to be designed in such a way that you you really wouldn't back out into that drive aisle it would be just dedicated to getting through which some of them are already and then you'd have other drive aisles that would tee into them and that's where people would be doing the backing out and so it would just be for through traffic just between us i already in all honesty it's taken hours for me to try and digest so much data and an information and on page twenty three seems to be the most insightful relevant and honest statement in the entire document and it speaks to the update to the rezoning code that was completed and twelve and that it indicates that at that time the city plan to change the character of this area into high density mixed use form it goes on to say and twelve update a significant amount of development has occurred and an increase in bike and pedestrian traffic has also been realized as a result some in the city have expressed cern's that the current direction main may be unsustainable in the future and i would like to suggest and i know that you mentioned at one point that in there was a noticeable increase in traffic in two thousand and twelve for the last four years during different election cycles and even b before that the most the biggest the largest comment that i hear from people is concern about the way that we are growing and developing and in fact there was even an initiative that was brought forth by the people regarding growth and development and i would just like to suggest that we the city have created this with the rezoning rewrite in tw and it seems very clear to me that one of the things that we could do to remediate this is to downsize that whole corridor regarding the intensity and a density that is being pushed on to it nowhere in the document does it talk about parks or open space we are increasing density and pushing more and more in and doing a lot of in ll but not taking into consideration the way the people are going to live after they're there and also i do have a question or a comment i went to several of your open houses and they were nice thank you the the first one i believe was at old chicago right and one of the comments that i heard there was that after beacon went up the vacancy rate in the office building adjacent or just to the south of it increased because the folks in the building no longer had a very nice line of sight now they're looking at this huge apartment house i believe you're productive in some ways for some of the office buildings as well also there's been a lot of interest and i and i totally get it to  upgrade the route street from alameda north to sixth avenue i haven't heard any mention about what that's going to do to the street north of sixth avenue if it can accommodate to what you were saying what five thousand cars a day yeah well a collector street is expected to be able to carry up to twelve thousand vehicles per day right now everything to the north quail up to colfax is a industrial collector street it serves our city shops and that type the buses for the school district for example designed to be able to accommodate those development around there has changed a lot you know it's gone from it used to be that the furniture row type thing was much larger than it is now and it's kind of down scale but it was designed that area to accommodate semi trucks to be able to come in and make deliveries there's the recreational vehicle facility there so it it's the right type of street to take that type of use no residential for example so it can accommodate yes okay also in the document and councillor skilling pointed it out i think it's on page twenty three about one thousand one hundred new residential units that would be north of the transit station and south of the hospital and west union mountain to me it's very clear that we as a council have got to address the density that we are pushing in this corridor and even though on the maps it shows that it's purple it's targeted for increased density we have created a monster and pleased that my next comment in question is not designed to to to speak to anybody's integrity of this document but there were three hundred and seventy four participants do we know if the people that participated all lived in lakewood number one and our population is what about one hundred and fifty five thousand we're going to be growing in density what we do on this corridor is going to have very long term impact fifty years from now and i don't want my legacy to be that i created more problems for the city and the people that already live here please talk to me about the survey itself there's three hundred and seventy four participants how statistically significant is that and did was there any talk to do a random survey sometimes these people self select and the reason i'm saying that is when i went to the meetings the biking lobby is very strong and active in these types of things they don't all live in the area where the people who already live there are being impacted by and just as a side comment this document is awesome it's it kept me entertained for many hours over the weekend but it targets it speaks frequently maybe twenty to twenty five times regarding pedestrians and it actually also talks about in some ways the difficulty that we are creating for autos i'm having a hard time with that beacon hill and on page nine of this it's talking about one of the apartment houses that during the day the the vacancy rate in the parking lot is w the document feels is high that's assuming everybody has one car maybe some of the people in these apartment houses have two cars and it's talking about repurposing some of the different land for other things when the parking isn't being used i'm digressing please talk to me about the relevancy and i'm not trying to to demean anybody's integrity on this but i think it's a fair question to ask if it was randomized and if it's really statistically significant with three hundred and seventy six participants ok well let me let me say  nervous i can you can get back in address we didn't just take the survey that's why we had all the other outreach having people show them the video we did not to to limit it to people who live in lake would because this is one of our major employment area at the place for a major economic growth and we know like it said twelve percent of employees drive in from over fifty miles away but they are they've got a stake in in this you know as well so we talked to all the the users and people did self selected and what we tried to do is contact as many people as many different ways as we could from the social media to direct mail to we even had the for a week before the meetings the big meetings we had variable message signs on the corridor to attract people who are just you know driving by to let them know that they could come in in doing these studies like statistically significant i don't know i'm i i couldn't really tell you if it is or not what i can tell you it is the most extensive outreach effort that has been done in this area and there have been a number of prior studies including the comprehensive plan for the federal center and the connectivity plan that has done a number of years ago for union corridor and some of the zoning things well this this was  about as broad about reaches we could could get and you know we had that's why we have all the breakdown in there about you know who did respond and what was  relationship to the corridor for example there's a table and there that talks about that you know are you an employer your resident how long have you been here things of that nature so you can you can look at that and get an idea  didn't to help people that we could do this we can't trace a person but we can go in and identify if people were trying to cheat by finding the ip address that was used on the computer to fill out the survey and we had one computer that was used to fill out seven surveys i think it was so if they and that could have been from a library or something we're not tracing where it came from just if if one computer was being used over and over again like the the bots that we hear about and we know that that wasn't the case so i don't know there are a lot of  people who are interested in boy they had a lot of different opinions about what should be done i can tell you that the conversation that you were talking about related to the density and how much development that's certainly not unique to lakewood that's going on right now and boulder was just in the denver paper yesterday about out by the five points area  everybody is doing because we've gotten so much within the past decade the metro areas received about a million new people coming in and that it's pretty stressing all over one of the things that i did does just on my own i was out of curiosity i went back for like three decades to look at the percent of population in jefferson county that lived in lakewood and it's pretty consistent it's right around seventeen percent of the population in jefferson county lives in lakewood and that's been a pretty that you did take into consideration all stakeholders yeah however that needs to be balanced with for me i personally feel strongly that a community is defined by the people that live here and that are actually paying the property taxes and so many of the homes west of union we have  created a problem for them and it it actually only makes sense when beacon went up it's totally apartments it's not mixed use and people are gonna want to go to starbucks so of course they're gonna want to cross the street but we as a city frankly with our zoning and look and wanting to go high density we have created a monster and we can help to remediate that by redressing and taking another look at the high intensity the high density that's being pushed on that corridor for not only the folks that live right close to the corridor but for the folks north and as councillor skilling was talking about south with any potential growth over there by rooney valley green mountain and of course the denver federal center again i'd like for us to take a look at having a document that speaks to what our culture is and one of our biggest values in our city is open space and if we infill on everything there's there's no room for parks and open space even pocket parks that's not what this study yep so this is a transportation study so i think the density issues are what we're dealing with in the development i understand this plan anyone who is interested in reading it it's amazing just how much information is in and one thing that really struck me is looking at the traffic counts over the years and that some of them decreased some stayed about the same and then some intersections we saw an increase i thought i thought that was so interesting because i hear a lot of complaints about traffic and and i think we all you know feel that i i'm wondering if i think it's because traffic is just such a miserable experience that that maybe that's what we're kind of focused on but it was really interesting to me just to be able to put that in perspective and see okay you know not all of it has gotten worse some of it's about the same and some of it has become worse and i think that it's really important that we prioritize this because it has become a pain point for a community and like you mentioned not just liquid the whole denver metro area has experienced a lot of growth um so my question a couple of them one is with the tma do we need is  don't know that much about what the arrangements are i just know that it's the to housing districts and the two cities yes thank you it is a collaborative with denver and denver housing authorities so city and county divert the housing authority of denver city of lakewood as well as metro west housing solutions and we are as dave indicated we are looking for a grant from doctor to support at ema in order to have to focus on last mile connections and funding thereof awesome okay great thank you um and then let's see my other question is just about the two lanes on to eastbound six that had low cost and high impact is that something that feel good about making improvements here and investing in that and i realize you said thirty percent of our community would like to spend no money but that seventy percent that was would like to see us make investments here so i hope we can prioritize that and then the last thing i wanted to ask you about is you know we've talked a little bit about these different scenarios we have the auto scenario the mixed scenario and the alternative and there's a page on page thirty four that kind of breaks down what these different scenarios look like and part of being a mixed use scenario is having the higher storey buildings is that a fair assessment to say that if we want to be a mixed use community then we have that comes with higher densities and higher buildings yes so i just the reason i'm asking that is i think this is something that i think our community gets a lot of confusion around is  that you know if we so and the other thing when we looked at the the data the the traffic actually gets worse in the auto only scenario so that's right because you need your car to get everywhere right so so if we do only cars with lower densities we will have more traffic but if we have higher buildings where people can live where they work and they can you know take alternative modes of transportation will actually have lower traffic so i that's just something that gets a lot of confusion and misconceptions about and and i think just not anticipated to stop and whether or not whatever we do with our zoning code you know growth is anticipated to come to the denver metro area and we should be planning for it and while there you know there's  frustration and angst around higher buildings ultimately it does lead to lower traffic so thank well thank you sir sure and on a different note thank you for your service to our community i know you're riding off into the sunset to do some great things but if the community doesn't know what kind of a set mister basket has been we were able to secure a lot of money in dollars for a lot of projects especially surrounding the light rail and you have great expertise and understanding those crazy formulas and finding a way for the city of lakewood to get dollars so thank you so much for all your hard work your dedication for commuting every day back and forth and is your wife going to continue to work or cheat on yes going you know she's looking for at least five more years and she's in westminster kind of doing the same oh this was a joint study session so i thought we'd have an opportunity to ask some questions both you'd like to certainly haven't spent most of my career dealing with such issues i wish i had time to review the whole thing then we'd be here all night with the answer question but but one thing that i noticed and i'm surprised i used to work for michael baker surprised didn't come up or maybe it did and it was discounted because of the cost but we have talked about high cost items and maybe this falls in the same category with the improvement that the intersection if we truly if we do proceed with the concept of of mixed use in having this a mixed use area and at least go the middle route to have some consideration of of making this a mixed use area one of the biggest impediments is getting from one side to the other of  union was there any consideration of some way to do that through i mean there's a lot of a lot of ways to do it the the most common way is a bridge or a tunnel but but there are are other alternatives some of them are pretty far out there but was that ever was that ever considered i mean you could i mean in some cities they do walkways between buildings that you know maybe and some of this might seem pie in the sky but if we get a benefactor or the throw some money we ought to at least have a plan that addresses one of the most important things i one location in particular the siri way to put in another hawk signal there it's it's really interesting that it's one of those the hawk signal comes out it has supporters it thinks it's the greatest thing in the world and then there's a another group of people somewhat smaller but they think it's the stupidest thing they've ever seen in their lives yeah but so you know but it's a but there's also it doesn't have to be a hawk there are get people to the other side i don't know a tram system think outside the box that that should have at least been in in the study i would think some somewhere well there was some discussion about things like that it really comes down to a lot autonomous vehicles and ride hailing services and the things that they're trying to do th know like i know there's a big setback today that occurred in doing this but you know uber and lyft are both see as part of their future that they would be able to put most of the bus companies out of business as soon as they can get to autonomous vehicles that they could set it up but they could deliver much quicker and that they would be able to do things like this and  we're not there now to make it feasible thought what i understood you to say is we were almost talking like in think minneapolis where they have the bridges that connect one side of the street to the other side of the street is that yeah ype of things that we're looking for some direction from council like we had done for example with belmar it was planned initially that there was going to be a hotel at the the corner of that was going to be the the big anchor and that if we could get another building on the other side that we could have a second or third level connection like they do in downtown denver from i forgot the name of the hotel now sheraton yeah where they have something across and and that didn't work out and you know if some of the scenarios that we were looking at if you were to have the big buildings brought up close to the street and you got it a couple of them right across the street from each other you could look at something like that but we were basically looking at things  that that we could get some money for to build and a lot of this stuff is like with the town the problem with the overpasses is that with the ad a requirements if you put in ramps then you're making people walk three times as far to get up and then over and then down again and you can only have so many of them and they just jaywalk i mean it's that much simpler about the undergrounding though like they've done in boulder with the culverts and yeah that's a we hit we've looked and started to do some of that we did it on waze worth  and we did it well two places on mods worth just down the hill here and north of th avenue we don't have any projects like that underway here to do that right now and they have it's it's somewhat lesser of a problem in terms of the grades but what you run into with trying to do the tunnels on the big corridors like union that have there's so many utilities and their big utilities because you have all that density that's in there that it's it's hard to miss them all without going really really deep and so the cost starts to get out of hand pretty quickly mister hollander or anybody else on the plan the only other comment i have is in defense of the traffic department and consultant the purpose of a transportation study is not to deal with you know make development type decisions it's to but they have to account for that the existing planning that we have and that's and that's what was done here commissioners oh that's right to be county commissioners ask somebody with that cost so that's what you're talking about right the switchbacks cuz that's a ta yes okay and then one other comment that i just i forgot to mention was you know solving the problem of  union the traffic we've mentioned it a couple times anecdotally cedar and then the right turn onto alameda the game of frogger there everybody's playing that is the number one so when people complain about traffic on union i bet you that's what they're talking about so if you had a dedicated turn lane making a right and i understand king soopers wouldn't like it because that's the issue you can't have a dedicated because that nobody can get over to go into king soopers but if you had a dedicated all the time everyone can make a right that would solve that problem i don't know how to do that it's above my pay grade but that's that would solve a major problem on union we talk about traffic that's the big big one and i only know that because i drive it every day it is i i understand i've been caught up in it myself and watched it and studied it in yeah it's miss johnson just one last comment you have a design here that shows how many people come into the area it's sixteen thousand three hundred basically six thousand are leaving it and only three hundred and eighty are actually staying that live and work in the area so even though we've created a lot of high density folks aren't staying there to work well no that was the one apartment building that was on van gordon that's all that was included there and it wasn't totally occupied  so and we do know is that at least forty of the people who live there work at the va and walk over there every day so and now is there's another one the beacon is open and would their council give some direction as to just maybe some more background on alameda and union would that be helpful to see what plans in the past we have had so council can kind of have an idea of what that looks like that's something that we c produced is that okay with council you like to see that okay okay all right great thank you you know and i think what it comes down to is we need to look at you know this corridor as an asset and does anybody remember ninety six to ninety eight trying to turn right on alameda on union before they w and gave it a dedicated it was a mess so what i'm saying is we've had these messes before and we're gonna work through them and this is an opportunity for us to see a way forward and of course everything has a fiscal note attached to it but also keep in mind when you look at you know pre zoning update prior whatever look at a hospital that was put in with two thousand five hundred new jobs and that adds to it as well and so when you look at areas of density you know what is that balance and that's the the future conversations we're gonna have but that's really if you look around communities throughout the metro area union boulevard is unique to the city of lakewood i can't think of any of our other sister cities in the county that have something like union boulevard you know and where you have kind of a secondary downtown because belmar gets mad if you don't call them the downtown but you know i mean and that's going to continue to change so with that i will open the public feedback on this presentation and i have ray you'd like to speak good evening appreciate the opportunity to address this transportation study and it seems to me that the current slide that's on the screen there that says they want a consensus to bring forward a resolution to the union area transportation plan there were plans in this study which is supposed to have been a study and if the plans are adopted it's going to accessor bate what i already see is a and the existing an ongoing problem in the city of lakeland and that's its growth lakewood at this point in time has exceeded its capacity to accept additional growth i see this study is nothing more than a plan to continually grow the city to the point that we began to look and act like many of the cities in the east if this plan is enabled you can bet that twenty years down the road there will be another need to conduct another study to do the very same thing and i'd like to use a few analogies one is with is if you were obese and you want to improve your prospects for a good long healthy life do you make plans to buy bigger and bigger clothes to accommodate the future increase in your obesity or do you establish a diet to lose weight or maintain your self at a present weight why is it that we are always looking to increase business and population in an area that at one time based its charm on being quiet and laid back instead of planning for additional growth why not plan for a reduction in population density that solve a lot of problems when you place more than more and more people in the city without allowing for personal space you are create and a recipe for disaster just look at all the problems the major population centers back east and for that matter any large city in the world are experiencing as a result of their growth growth is kind of like a bag of rocks you can stuff only so many in the bag if you try to exceed that bags capacity you will destroy the bag it is my opinion that we should be looking forward we should be looking to control growth if not eliminated and concentrate on improving the existing infrastructure and community services and i have just one last question to leave with all of you just who is it that says that we as a community are obligated to provide low cost housing to people who don't even live here at this point did you keep this to the transportation please that's the part of the presentation thing that's that's the growth shoo thank you very much thank you mayor council thank you for the opportunity to comment on the study i'm an engineer and so i i know how important it is to get the input correctly for any type of study so that you can make the proper conclusions and have the proper output and i do have concerns about this study and i think that there are some factors that were not considered in the input that could potentially dramatically affect the output so the first of which i know it was mentioned earlier that the the cch proposal was not included because that came in too late however there have been previous plans for development residential development mixed use in that area i think it's important that that is looked at maybe even as a sensitivity but even more important than that there was a question asked about the development in rooney valley and that i don't believe could have been taken fully into consideration in this plan because the data that was input into it was from the i believe the two thousand and forty metro vision regional transportation plan from doctor cog that plan was adopted on april nineteen two thousand and seventeen and it used land use demographic info from the urban sim model and in looking at the information and i think others who are more familiar with this would be able to comment on it but it looks like that data it used actual data up to tw and then estimated data from two thousand and fifteen to two thousand and forty and back in two thousand and fifteen the rooney valley plan was to have commercial you guys might remember i think a lot of us were here as the rooney valley master plan was updated from heavily being commercial to heavy on the residential side and so i don't think that was incorporated but if it was even if it was which i really  it was but if it was i think it would have such a significant effect on that estimated sixteen zero trips coming into the area that it should be spelled out specifically how many trips are coming in from that development i think what we're gonna end up having is looking at the middle ground the mixed juice where we do a lot of heavy development thinking people are going to walk and use that area but then we also have a lot of car trips so we really have the worst of both worlds we have all these car trips coming in and that mixed use so i think that's something important to look at and i just wanted to also let folks know how imminent the potential rooney valley development cedar union to healing way i know that there is a mention of some improvements on that by the hotel by that development i think it'd be valuable to see what they what part would be done by those improvements and what part would be done by the city similar with the van gordon to union near beacon and the other proposed apartments talking about that could be low cost with redevelopment maybe a little bit more detail on that and and then the last thing i just want to really support mister hollanders comment on looking at ways to get folks from the other side appreciate that discussion one thing maybe folks could think about is there's trolleys or underground as mentioned but i think that's a really important need today and in the future and i will pass this schedule out so folks can understand that this is a factor it's coming up and should be considered thank you sustainability it is commendable to see that a traffic study is being done for the union corridor however it is a bit concerning that the scope does not seem to sufficiently address the impeding impacts from the rooney valley proposed developments as that whole side of the valley has no public transit to speak of the larger problem is that lakewood is a city that was built around the car and while one could say that we could potentially turn union into a mixed mode street as  was kind of suggested in some of the scenarios in a study what about the lacking infrastructure in the rest of the city if not the whole valley will people drive from say the southern edge of the rooney valley then park it an underground garage somewhere hop on the bike and then proceed to ride in the rest of the city what happens when it snows and etc etc it is very expensive but it is still not too late to really push for comprehensive public transit network in the whole valley so i urge you to direct a comprehensive citywide study while proceeding with some of the very good suggestions that were pointed out in the current study however there are a lot of points even in the present study highlighting how many opportunities to do better have already been missed for example some of the suggestions seem to imply that sections of the road need to have the outer lanes narrowed in order to make room for the bike lanes this demonstrates the myopia has resulted in poorly laid out roadways we have to deal with now so we ask you to initiate a more comprehensive study to drive more visionary planning and zoning practices for the whole city so that there are fewer design errors to correct in the future developments basically treat some of the findings in this current study as lessons learned for what not to allow in a common developments thank you very much thank you  anybody else all right we will move on to our next subject good evening dave whitman lord for as a former and now recovering politician i can understand the the need to spend some money and if you're gonna do it i suppose this as good as any but what i want to talk to you about tonight is as what alex and and miss peters and even councillor skilling mentioned who is when we started this if you go back to the nexus a couple of years ago we were looking at developments in in the rooney valley and the question that we asked on council was what would be the impact on the rest of the city specifically we're asking union boulevard how much more traffic could it take you want the number if we if we get a thousand new houses in rooney valley can a thousand new go on union that was the question so that was a point of the so called study but of course that's entirely lost right now those questions are still not answered now when when the question was asked as to what is going to be the long term assumptions it was you know rudy vallee was that was not included you notice when they looked at the the map obviously was not included and when it came to the matter of what is the overall impact the answer we got was it was a doctor cog numbers well the doctor cog numbers assumed a half a percent growth a year now we know for a fact that is absurd number you know it's more like you know two percent but remember when they did the growth initiative they asked for a one percent limit and we were told that one percent is not going to be adequate it's gonna be far more than one percent and so for this study to sit there and assume that half a percent is go a incorporate it is going to consider all the issues obviously it's not so my point is go ahead if you want to spend some money that's fine but when the time comes and we talk about development down and rohde valley and stuff like that and we asked for once again what is going to be the impact don't use this study as a justification for saying you've addressed that issue this study does not address the issue of the impact of running valley or any other development thank you  so and i think we actually track at less than one percent for growth i think it's zero seven to zero seven and the idea about the rooney valley is it could happen it might not happen what happens if we change zoning through the updates there's a lot of unknowns in the rooney valley there's also an ability for neighborhoods serving amenities to happen and if those things ever would come to fruition people wouldn't drive to the king soopers on alameda and union it just makes sense right so you're trying to anticipate something that may never happen right depending upon the conditions or where development agreements go or the market so to say that this was somehow flawed because different numbers were used to address the valley i i don't find that to be accurate and i think that you do have to look at look at it holistically and see what that impact would be but there's also a commercial component to parts of the valley that could commercial development that are going to save trips going one way for instance i would go the other way if there were more amenities down that way and i think a lot of folks on my side of town would agree so next up mister hollander you purpose of us being here is to update city council on what's been going on with the development dialogue and as we reported before we had three hearings so now we're actually getting to the point where we're gonna start presenting some gordon's recommendations for ordinance changes this wednesday is the public hearing on parking then we decided to combine housing and mixed use because there was a lot of things that came up that were related when when dealing with these issues this point is there any other information from the planning commission or anything that the  so tell us about the process for beef would people been showing up you have an electronic format well idaho not a whole lot of people have been showing up to our study sessions there has been outreach online we've gotten a lot of comments online and we you know we've we've taken a very diverse number of  comments in into into account and we've spent a lot of time discussing those at meetings there were very few i think that we were unanimous on on our approach it took quite a while to get it get a consensus and some of these things we are a diverse group that comes at these problems from different angles and  so we we look forward to the public hearings and hearing more from the public as to what we present and then based upon your public hearings then it's going to recommend yeah we'll make recommendations to city council and then it's up to you to you know make decisions as to actual ordinance changes i encourage all of you to look at the minutes of our meetings and and if you have time look at some of our study well this shouldn't be a long meeting you know there's not a whole lot of controversy in this area and and you know ten o'clock were still there it's complex and and if we if we if that that you take our recommendation seriously when we proceed with the process but ultimately you're gonna have to schedule your public hearings after hours and decide what to move forward with yeah certainly and so for the for the community there'll be two opportunities and or at least three more because if we have study sessions on your recommendations but there'll be public hearings and then there'll be the opportunity to have the public hearings here and i would agree you know we got here after a three year process and we're gonna try to wrap this up in less than a year so you know for some people it's not fast enough for some folks it's too fast we take it up and and handle it as that item and we can get get the ball rolling as soon as they're taking some actions making their recommendation that's a great question i would anticipate that i'm gonna go look to our planning director yes well we'll certainly once we have recommendations from each of those from each of those public hearings we can bring it directly we can bring them as a bunch but the plan would be we'll schedule them as soon as as soon as we have recommendations out of the public hearings some of these things we've been talking about for nearly two years i think we need to address them as soon as possible and put some solutions in place imagine that will happen it is good  wine okay i just wanted to encourage everyone in the community to come to the planning commission hearings and the public hearings because i know it kind of can seem boring and maybe people wonder you know why why should i participate in this but this really is going to have a big impact on a lot of the issues that that do impact our everyday lives and so you know my hope would be that everyone who cares about the outcome would would go and would participate so that by the time we get the recommendation your feedback has already at least been heard and and hopefully  accounted for so please please go to the planning commission public hearings issues are a couple years old for you all or several years old for us there it's a few months is what we've been in so we've been working fast and hard to to get through these things and and we i agree there is not as much public comment as you'd like to hear it i mean what we all kind of know that if if people disagree that's when they then they tend to do want to come out and and talk but i i appreciate councilwoman gue twines comment and plea to people to come and and comment the worst thing that we can hear probably for you all to is is after the process is over somebody says well how come we didn't know about this why didn't we have a chance to command that sort of thing so so we are anxious to have people  to have people comment mister mayor i believe travis has somebody to introduce that that to add a head to the conversation we're having here so we we did invite a guest today and it one of the discussions that we assumed would come up tonight and and that the planning commission had talked about at length was the the makes  district and the emmys zone so to the extent that you'd like to hear from him we do have an outside expert that's prepared to talk todd messinger as a planner and lawyer that is prepared to talk about that if you'd like to hear from him tonight so i guess certainly there's an education component to this and  okay certainly this is d i'd like to add one more thing so here what we're doing at the end of the day after these hearings the recommendations will be pushed forward to city council then you decide if you want to implement or not or make amendments and when the legislation when the code has changed you know keep your expectations in with a reality check that all the problems we were complaining about in lakewood not enough open space too many people moving in here those problems won't just go away by us changing code what's that i mean it's it's going to take time but the outcome is hopefully to have a much much improved process to i think henry said it well we have a we have a good plan but there's some holes in it and hopefully we can fill those holes moving forward mister messenger good evening i guess would you like to hear to yourself and give us some background certainly mister mayor members of the city council members of the planning commission my name is todd messinger i'm an attorney and recovering urban  either writing codes or helping development get done or negotiating transactions or whatever comes with that i was asked simply to shed a little bit light on the mixed use employment district because we understand that that had created some confusion consternation among members of this body and the planning commission and the staff and maybe some confusion in the community so we took a very careful look at it and came to the conclusion that there are some intent statements that are in the in  zone for all mixed use districts and then from mix juice employment more generally speaking and then there are some actual regulations and our legal view of that is that the intent statements are sort of non binding this is what we suggest this district be used for and then underneath of that all of the you know the quantitative figures and the design standards and the use tables and so forth actually regulate what happens in that zoning district the upshot of that is that in the transit context some mixed employment transit as opposed to mix employment suburban there are actual standards in here that require first floor retail and then anything else on any other part of the building so true mixed use requirement if you will in the suburban context there is no standard like that so what happens in that circumstance is that the use table then would control what uses are allowed and if somebody comes in with a single use development that's permitted in the zone and that development ought to be permitted under the zone because the intent statements aren't sufficient to control the development moving forward to the extent your planning commission is coming up with recommendations to provide clarity on the point  you know that that's how your code to to me is sort of somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight and somebody who drafts codes for a living not sees it so we just wanted to provide that objective analysis for you so then let me ask you this there there's certainly confusion then that comes with that and if it's a zone district that we're certainly looking to envision certain things what is a recommendation that you would make to try to clean that language up to make it so it's more more direct more understandable for the community for the neighbors things like that certainly so for iii i don't know from the planning perspective whether it serves or not serves the communities objectives i think that there's a certain amount of disagreement among members of the community about what it should actually do i do know that it could be used in furtherance of the objectives that are stated but it also could be used in any number of ways that the market may direct and so oftentimes we see mixed use districts come  in as we're now in an era of significant change in retail formats significant need to reuse aging retail centers that are you know sort of dying out and meeting a new breath of life we could do that in a number of different ways and in some cases the simply aren't enough rooftops or are not enough economic energy to support the retail component anymore and in that case you build rooftops in one area and then you take another center and revitalize it based on that new economic energy in the community or at a transit stop where you  have the opportunity for all the throughput of passengers you know when you require retail there there's a pretty good chance that somebody will take you up on that because there's a better economic opportunity but throughout the region and the codes that i'm writing and you know in particular i'm working with one of your neighboring municipalities now we're considering actually scrapping commercial districts as a straight district altogether which is something like what actually pretty much has done your only commercial district in your code now is a regional commercial district all of your other commerce then would occur under some of these mixed use zone formats so you're actually kind of a leader in this regard the difficulty is that when the when the regulations require a mix of uses a lot of times you get actually nothing because the developer doesn't really  do that or can't make that work for whatever reason and so what you want to do with a mixed use district particularly in a suburban context is create the opportunity to do a variety of different things that can be then absorbed into the same framework of the community in a way that works and that's actually your principal purpose of your district is land use compatibility at the edges economic opportunity in the middle so then how do we come overcome that the developer doesn't want to and move it along to say well this is really you know more of what we want and you need to do that then you said in certain parameters for that like we have in the transit where you just require it outright if you require it outright you can i guess require it outright the wisdom of that is is another use communities to actually get mixed use a lot of the businesses come and go and a lot of times that that property stays vacant and that's not really a good outcome for the person who wants to build that or the residential comes first there's an attempt at commercials it may may or may not be well positioned sometimes it doesn't get built when it does get built that's construction on the backside of a residential development and people don't like construction so you know if retail is already there it's an amenity if it comes second it's a casualty r i wanted to get some insight into how you see that we could do a better job in the future of separating out that aspirational aspect from the kind of what the underlying code is before i joined council and this whole ordinance coming up specifically asked about the contiguous zone districts and was given information that led me to have one expectation then when i get on council it's oh that's all aspirational and so what i think we've done is we've set expectations in our community where they think they can expect something then later they're told it's aspirational but they may have made a decision to buy or sell or other things so how do you recommend going forward that we separate those things from one another so there isn't that confusion where people get confused about aspirational versus what's enforceable certainly and to be fair a lot of people actually won't read the code and most people that buy a home won't know what zoning districts it's located in but to the extent that you made that mandatory so as a lawyer i'm gonna look for wills and showels and not you know maze and goods and shoulds and so when you look at the intent statements there isn't a word in there that's mandatory and you do have actually a provision of your code that says the following words are mandatory and the following words are non mandatory and none of the non mandatory words that are in your in your aspirational statements are actually listed as non mandatory either but it does say for all other words the dictionary definition controls a so what you end up with in purpose statements is that that aspirational language if you will that does not control then the application that said if you wanted to fix that you could just have some introductory language at the beginning of your code that says the purpose statements in here are suggestions about how this should be used but not binding regulations or basis for making a decision you could certainly do that i think if you take the purpose statements and make them into a basis for making a decision you'll probably create a whole bunch unintended consequences at this point as you've done a full scale legislative remapping you may find that some of those mapped areas actually don't fit these circumstances and yet the list of permitted uses that you have in your code and the standards you have for performance along the edges would be sufficient to integrate into the neighborhood and provide some useful market driven development and so i would be careful about making things mandatory but it wouldn't be a bad idea to clarify what's not i i really didn't think  getting into the details was on some of these issues was a that was the purpose of the meeting but since we're discussing it i do have a question you you're saying th having mixed use in every building in a mixed use zone is not it's not something that would be desirable i guess what i'm saying is from a legal perspective it's not what your code currently requires yeah put that in the transit contact yeah but but there one of the considerations could be to change it to require it for each building what's your opinion on that i think from a market perspective it's a bad idea i mean there isn't enough market support out there for vertically mixed use and a number of areas that you've mapped it in lakewood that would be my guess without having to look at the data you know you've got very few actual mixed use vertically mixed use centers that are all vertically mixed use throughout regionally and when you look at that you know those concentrate the energy and suck up that available market and when you look at the proliferation and make sure you surround it that makes juice is going to grow from that central core and then you're going to get other areas like belmar which is mixed use vertically and mix juice horizontally  i think if you wanted to require every building to be mixed use vertically you know that's a certain type of development a certain type of developer a certain type of building code that's more expensive to deal with and it's a lifestyle that you may not have you know the depth of market for  that in that area so you want to be able to allow in a region with mixed use fine grain of horizontally mixed use vertically makes use if it's appropriate but you know in areas of a suburban planning context where you're typically dealing with a lot of cars and so forth you know your prior presentation was about transportation and pedestrian places and whatnot transit is a great place for that urban areas are a great place for that but when we're catering to the car with front filled parking at retail and whatever you know having vertically mixed use buildings in an auto oriented shopping center is not a marketable idea in the region and so we would not recommend that in the suburban context at the very minimum at that's that's been my experience too but if you have a mixed use you know i understand that each individual building should not have should not be mixed use it just doesn't work doesn't accomplish what you're trying to accomplish but  are you aware of any successful ordinances you know if you if you have an entire misused zone that does not makes use it really defeats the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish do you know of any successful ordinances that that require a mixed use air you know the the entire zone to be mixed use i think those things work better in an urban context and i've certainly seen in areas in small areas where you want to activate a street frontage with pedestrians and interests where retails and restaurants and things like that are gonna be on the first floor and then whatever else on the second floor i have seen that successfully deploy about well one one one way you could do is through plan development and you know maybe maybe that's the answer but you know there's a lot of problems with planned developments as you know yes what i'm talking about is is having a requirement for an entire zone to be mixed use maybe the individual like like a belmar where not every building is mixed use but the area's makes use one of the things we struggle with when we were discussing it is is is how do we find a way to actually require it with requiring it for each individual building i think where i've seen better success in something like that is to incentivize it rather than require it because ultimately you're going to have people that want to build a certain thing in a certain location because they think that there's a market for that and people want that product in that place that's what really drives development developers have their different specialties that they want to work in and they find a piece of property that they think is going to be very successful for what they want to do as the government we take certain amount of risk that they're going to be successful or not and that's you know our code sort of directs it with the dna but ideally you want your code to use the market to deliver the products that the community wants and needs in a design that's compatible with the fabric and the culture of the community most of my developer clients want to be compatible with the fabric and the culture of the community because that's going to make their product more marketable so that works well but when the when the ordinance is too prescriptive about the mix of uses you're going to have some people that are out because they don't want to do that that's not what they're used to that's not what they know that can succeed at and then you're gonna have others that say well you know the market it's not going to be there for that product your code is rather static compared to the dynamics of the market and so you may on any given year maybe get ahead or maybe not but that will let the land lie you know  underutilized at least for a period of time until something comes to fill that need but it's it's usually better not to try to plan that out in advance particularly when you're looking at i mean your your commercial regional district is your only commercial district everything else has been remapped into one of these mixed use districts and so therefore you're saying we anticipate a large a huge area of land is going to be you know mixed use projects your market may not absorb that granularity or it might but you might want to leave that up on a site by site basis to figure that out the good news is i mean we used to want to say we need to have a certain level of retail land inventory because we have to get sales tax and now we can get sales tax from amazon that's helpful obviously we need to create interesting retail places like belmar so people will come from somewhere else and bring sales tax into the town that don't live here but with that online sales tax coming to municipalities now that's a very helpful way to say some of that inventory can  places for people to live which i understand you know the politics around growth and whatever but supply and demand on housing is a pretty big deal for pricing housing for our children okay mister abel and the mister skilling and then we can go back to the planning commission thank you for your opinion you spoke to intent our community and our community wants and needs our community spent three years putting this thing together and they spoke their intent and from a long time observing court cases appellate courts generally rely on the intent of the legislative body so it would seem to me that to say intent is not a determinant factor that seemed to be to ignore what a judge would look for in our community decided a few years back that they would like to according to the definition and this is a paraphrase see a mix of uses on the same parcel or adjacent parcels as part of the larger project that's what our community said they wanted we when we went into looking at this development dialogue went in with the idea that we weren't going to overturn what that three year effort produced we were going to enable it i believe you said that your career is helping get development done one of the reasons that folks that builders are not putting in multi or multi mixed uses is that if they can get into a mixed use district with a single use residential  project they can crown more units into the same space than they can if they follow our regulations for purely residential multifamily used that would seem to me to be more than incentive the incentive that we offer developers is to use our real estate to make a profit from and that the rules under which that we asked them to operate are designed for the health and welfare of our citizens and to avoid the open space requirements in mixed use is to not give folks the amount of fresh air they need not give their pets the place to walk and do their business and it goes against the grain of what the community said they want and need that if i may as to the first issue with what an appellate court would do it's my understanding that the state of the law is that the appellate court won't look to the legislative intent if the law on its face is entirely clear and in this case the law on its face with respect to the use table and the lack of any requirement for mixed use in your suburban context is entirely clear and therefore the intent statements would be left behind by an appellate court if it were ambiguous they would look to the legislative intent and that's where we would have the issue but your code is actually unambiguously allows a single use it it is ambiguous on its face so you and i will continue to disagree on that until somebody takes us to court and you won't be suffering the the problems that a court ruling might leave us with so and you referred to belmar as mixed use it is pd has been from the get go and predates your end right and i don't think this forum was meant for our for us to debate these issues i think when when an opinion is spoken and there are other opinions out there they need to be addressed so and i realized that this is a very passionate issue but passionately held views in the community i come in as somebody who yes i do represent developers right now about sixty percent of my work is represented municipalities and code writing projects so i'm on both sides of that desk and i understand both sides so just to give you a better background on who i am i was asked to just come in here and tell you what i think this code actually sa never a fan of mixed use to start with but it is what our community wanted to see and that's what i think we should give our community is a way to accomplish their own vision of their future it's not for me to debate that thank you mister skilling thank you meirin's as much as i agree that i didn't think that we were going to be debating this issue tonight you have raised some things that i think we need to discuss have mentioned that it's not ambiguous and i appreciate your opinion from there and and as part of the study session i think i'd like to get some clarity on your input on this when i look at the zoning code i happen to have the binder here and i look at the use section and i look at the permitted uses now i don't read anything that says that the table that under permitted uses that you can go ahead and just do those things as use by right i don't read that in the code here what i read is under permitted use it says that those are permitted as used nom this is seventeen five or point one point two that the permitted use in a specific zone district is subject to compliance with all other applicable standards of this zoning ordinance mmm you with me on that yes now i turn to the definitions and you would agree with me that the clarity on this point because this is something that as you've identified we have struggled with this there are different opinions so we've got the permitted and then i turn back into the definitions section and i look at what the mixed you says and it's a single building containing more than one type of land use or a single development of more than one building and use where the different types of land uses are in close proximity and planned as a unified complementary whole so if i read the definition of mixed use and i put that into a mixed use district and i flip back and say well gee what are the permitted uses well i would incorporate that definition into the words all applicable standards of the zoning ordinance that's what i would do am i way off base with doing that i would hate to call a councilmember way off base but you can call me whatever you want is that also ever scaling i think what i would say to you is this there is nothing in your code that uses the word mixed use in the context of an mes zone that requires mixed use in that definition what it says is it promotes the mix of uses which is non mandatory language and there's nothing within there excuse me there's nothing within the code that i've read that says mixed uses a required outcome but wait if it's the name of the district but that's not legally op okay if it's a mixed use zone that means within that zone we look to what what what do we look to for the definitions we look and see what we can do there right we look at the permitted uses the limited uses we look to those things we look on the table right yes we do and each of those things are defined in the back of the code right yes they are among those definitions would be mixed use so if we want to know what we do in a certain district we look towards the definitions including what mixed use means right again you would have to find mixed used within the body of the code in a way that's legally operative and while you may find that in other areas of the code in the mes zone in particular you won't so i would challenge you to read the m zone specific things and look for a place where it says mixed use is required because it doesn't it does say mixed uses a mix of uses is promoted but that's a very different it's a far cry from saying it's required but what gives when you say that these certain things are aspirational the definitions or even the title of the district apparently has no legal effect why does the table have legal effect but the definitions don't the definitions absolutely have legal effect so when you come across a defined phrase and a zoning code you go back to the definition what i'm saying is that the absence of the word mixed use within the operative requirements the substantive requirements of the mes zoning district is what makes it a headache what is phrase mixed use is actually notably absent from the legal requirements of development in the mes zone it's in the title it's in the title but you could call it fred or barbara george that's just the title it is not legally operative the title of the zoning district but if we look to the uses that you can have yes yeah we look to the table right well is that where we look where do we look in this binder because there's what sounds to me what you're saying is that we don't need all of this other language we could just have the use table and if it's on there you can build it you could have a section that says at least two of the uses that are allowable in the use table are required on any given parcel but that's what we have in the definition of the  what do you mean a single building containing more than one type of land use or a single development of more than one building and use i agree now councilman i understand your headache about this i do i get it it's a mixed use district why the heck doesn't it require mixed use right mixed uses to define phrase but i lifted it at length and couldn't find the word the phrase mixed use in the mes zoning requirements only in the title what's the zoning requirement you keep referring to is that so there's there's a there's a design standards there's a the use table doesn't have a mixed use because what you could do is you could have a line for mixed juice in the use table and make that the only permitted us say what's the operative thing i can do because i know it's not the little sheets that we give out the little one pagers sure so each zoning district after the use table after the use specific standards let me try to find this here i'm sorry i have to flip through twelve so let's see so you've got mixed use dimensional standards five fifteen is the page number i have a table seventeen five to you right after that you've got minimum building story requirements minimum building height by station area and if you look at the the transit related their requirements for specific mixed use zone district context seventeen five three six and there you've got a mixed use requirement in mct for example where you've got this picture i don't know if you this picture of a building and it has a retail requirement right for retail arkmc and then design for any other allowed  e that building is by definition mixed use the only place where that building is required is in a mixed use district in a transit context there's nothing else in your code that requires this in any other mixed use district yeah but you were saying what this thing i could look in this section and i could find what standards i use for mixed use zones it would be the legally operative language these are legally operative standards these are the types of standards that i'm referring to so then when we go back up to the zoning district let's see that would be way back so when we establish the mixed use zone and talk about its purposes prior to the east table  article three i believe it is right so you've got your mixed use zones are defined in seventeen three dot four and it says mixed use districts are established to provide a range of district types from the small neighborhood center to regional level centers while fostering high quality building and site design pedestrian bicycle transit automobile circulation the mixed use zone districts are specifically intended to and get this because we don't use the word or the phrase mixed use we say accommodate and promote a mix of uses a mix of commercial retail service office and residential uses so we're accommodating which take it or leave it and promoting meaning where it may be incentivizing it or allowing it but not requiring it because we're promoting it that's a difference of all of the aspirational language you're talking right nothing about mixed use there there's no use the phrase mixed use and then when we get down to m e it's the same the emme district is intended to provide for office and campus development with ancillary retail and residential uses along our taylor and collect arterial and collector streets part one part t the district may also act as a buffer between higher intensity mixed use districts and adjacent residential neighborhood and then part sort of two and a half maybe one and a half i'm not really sure but it's another aspirational statement unrelated the district provides for medium to high density employment opportunities as well as educational institutional campuses now obviously when we look at the use table it also provides for a bunch of other stuff like multifamily let me just stop you there i get everything you're saying right but i take it that that's the part that you were saying isn't the legal legally operative words right none of that is mandatory all i want to know is the part where where is the legally operative language in here where is that that's all i'm asking where is that exactly the use table the design standards the setbacks the bulk requirements none of which say mix juice and mes so right now if you wanted mix you sent mes you could require that as a municipality i've told you what i think that's my opinion i'm not a sitting member of this council i can't even vote for it it's up to you but with respect to what this code says now it doesn't same excuse in mes in fact to the contrary it says this district provides for medium to high density employment opportunities as well as educational institutional campuses so theoretically you could just have an institutional campus like a hospital and that would be it single use and that would be a p in your in your use table right just like multifamily or just like whatever else is a p in your use table it doesn't require mix use and in fact anticipate single use that's not residential okay so it's your use table that operates on the use and that's it okay so there we go so that's so the use table is all that operates that's the only operative thing from the you mention all standards the height standards access the design the landscaping are all also substantive requirements none of which either require mix use in this zone okay and there are permitted uses within that use table right yes and that's what allows you to do the single use yes okay why is it then if you can do the single use why do we disregard the other definitions and the word and the actual definition of permitted use how do you get from permitted to use to single use by right how do you make that jump because that's the one we're all struggling with how do you make that jump why wouldn't you go with the definitions why wouldn't you use that it's a fair point and the reason th i use that is because i'm only going to look for a definition if the definition is an illegally operative piece of code so when i look at the use table and i see multifamily i'm obligated to go look up what multifamily means because that's what i'm looking at but if there's a mixed use zone it says it's subject a permitted use it says it's subject to other applicable standards within the zoning ordinance the title what are the other output applicable standards that that could possibly be referring to but all of the other standards in the zoning ordinance are landscaping lighting parking setbacks building high building massing all of that stuff that comes in here and your zoning code is quite extensive on design right it's all its extensive on design and it extensive on what the deaf it has extensive definition sections correct it does councilmember skilling i understand your frustration that the phrase makes use is being abused here i understand but the phrase mixed use in the title of the zoning district is in my opinion not legally operative the zoning district could be called fred or barney what matters is what are the standards and what are the uses that are allowable in that zoning district when i look at your use table there's not even a subscript that says this use in conjunction with one other use there's nothing in your design standard that says the front forty feet of the building in the suburban context needs to be retail although that is in your transit context so it was thought about when the code was developed but as the co now as a land use lawyer i would come in and look at it and say is there requirement i would have a red flag that says it's a mixed juice zone is there a requirement for mixed use or is there an opportunity for a broad mix of uses whatever i want to do and when i look at the way this code is structured in the mes zone specifically not an m eighty or any other tee but in the mes zone my conclusion is i can do any single use or any multiple of any set of uses that i want that are permitted limited or conditional or special i'm sorry in your in your code and my last point this has been fun but my likewise i think you can understand i'm well past titles okay i understand i'm not i'm not worried about the titles of things i just brought that up is kind of a point when we're talking about that there's nowhere in there that there's mixed use i think it's very important at that point and i hate to interrupt the councilmembers but it's very important at that point to say mixed use in the zoning title is the only place where the phrase makes juice is used in mes so that's why  went back to it here's my last point here's what i don't understand if you were coming in as the land use attorney looking at this and you saw the definition as i've read now several times would you just regard that definition of i would do a keyword search for your code for all the definition all the places where the phrase mixed use came up and i would see if any of them applied to my project and the mes zone and having done that i would conclude no they don't so the definition of mixed use that's in this code you would disregard if it did not apply to my project i wouldn't worry about it and if my project were in an mes zone there is no wording under any of the standards that apply in the mes where the phrase mixed use as defined in your code is actually used as hard as that is to believe it's true and so we have a point of order from mister abel we do and you can help us point out those things we need to change but the nice discussion was about to beat was supposed to be about the process and the next steps well this came in i don't know but we're wandering off the that we told the community we would stick to understand some of the tricky things that were up against here so this hard time did you have i was going to mention that that really illustrates the the concern that we've heard in the community and the importance of some kind of change in the in the code so that there isn't this frustration in our code so that conversation just really illustrated that m while we're waiting thank you for that i appreciate it that was entertaining welcome  i'm my name is sandeep yoli i am a resident of ward five i am also a land planner and development consultant with that does a lot of private development i've done residential master plan communities all the way down to small commercial i have attended some but not all of the commission study sessions but i have read all the memos and i'm up to up to date on all those i just wanted to walk through a couple points i was seeing during those study sessions because we weren't able to make comments during the study sessions for that so i was kind of keeping track i would like to encourage commission and council and staff to take into consideration specifically how any new standards and even some of the existing standards affect projects of different sizes a lot of the standards specifically associated with mixed use and in transit areas are assuming  that in some cases it would be a large redevelopment a whole block or a whole two blocks of mixed use development with apartments on the top and retail on the bottom and office and all of this stuff but there are some parcels within the mixed use transit zone that are very small they're not very deep they're not very wide a lot of them are on busy streets with no alleys in the back specifically i'm thinking of areas near on colfax and specifically on some parcels along sheridan there are very small parcels along shared and that are mixed use transit so i just wanted to make sure that everybody kind of keeps that in mind i do support clarifying the mixed use language that each project does not mu but the zone is and i'll just from my experience i work with developers that do one type of project they very rarely do a mixed use vertical mixed use and a lot of the projects that we've looked at a lot of the sites we've looked at in lakewood don't necessarily work for the type of use that they're looking at whether it's commercial or whether it's residential we're also not going to have a lot of infill development in lakewood in the near future that is the size of belmar is the size of solteira we're not there there there isn't that much kind of stuff left so we're looking at the smaller stuff and so we kind of need to keep that in mind during the building use building design conversation there was a lot of conversations about what kind of architecture we wanted to see in the city and i just wanted to make a note that we don't want to create enhancement requirements for the sake of having something to review and something it actually creates a messy facade with no style and i would specifically refer to some stuff that's happening in centennial they require specific a lot of specific types of things be added to an architectural building that don't necessarily make sense for an architect to put on there specifically if the building is not that big you can't cram a lot of stuff into one into one facade we there was some talk about design review committees there's a fin balance on that and i'd like if that is going to be a topic of conversation we kind of need to flush that out if that's going to continue because most design review committees are set up by developers in order in order in order to control the product that is going into their communities or into their project so they have a financial reason for that sometimes jurisdictions do do that but it's very rare there was also some discussion on appointments versus paid unpaid things like that so there's some things that we kind of need to keep an eye on on that on site design there was some conversations associated specifically with community public amenities and they talked a lot there again in a lot of cases kind of assuming that we would have a large scale belmar that would allow like a public atrium or a public small plaza those kinds of things but we have to remember that again some  developments don't have necessarily that room on that site i am one a couple other things i just wanted to mention i am okay with the parking coming up as quickly as it is one thing is that often the end user is determined to have a certain amount of parking and often restaurants if they can't meet a certain threshold aren't going to go into that space and so having a low parking requirement has actually been a hindrance for some people and then one last thing i just wanted to say in the tiny home discussion make sure that you define what tiny homes are i had a community i had somebody that we were looking at that and in our own group we were confused as to what tiny homes were some people thought they were literally permanent homes that are small size but apparently there was also a movement of mobile homes small size thank you thanks for coming out and for lending that mister kentner you thank you i'm kathy kentner award one resident as some of you had mentioned i was not originally planning to speak tonight i thought this was about the process however in light of the converse a comments from the attorney who was here and as a planning academy graduate i would like to ask where's the other side yes it was some education however it was very contrary to the education we received in the planning academy as a recent graduate i can assure you that an attorney very clearly taught us that our comprehensive plan is our aspirational document and all of title seventeen is our code is the law  because of this confusion i do have a request that it's your upcoming meeting to have a first reading ordinance or possibly as an emergency that we have all of these single use projects in mixed use zone districts come either stop until it's clarified or come before council we already have many of these in the works and it sounds like from what i heard tonight about the process it's going to be at least another six months before a second reading ordinance on some of these zoning issues comes before you as a body and before we have more of these projects and and there are if you read other standards in the code the setbacks and open space standards they are different for these single use projects i think counselor abel mentioned that they're different for these single use because it's not in the health safety of our what and welfare of our residents to put the single use of residential with this setback and lack of open space standards that exist in some of our mixed use context so for that reason for the health safety and welfare of our residents i ask that you pl consider immediately at your next meeting having any single use projects and mixed use districts come before council or simply have a moratorium on them and you further clarified it it would also be helpful i think for all of us to hear from perhaps the attorney who did present at the planning academy who very clearly stated that our code is to be followed and the other aspiration l and i think those are all that know oh and the last thing was on the process oh please remember that this dialogue on both planning commission and council this dialogue has been happening for nearly five years now we have a lot have come before council just once or twice beginning with thirty five and gordon street letting you know that these are issues and these are issues that we can deal with we're not scared we just have some unintended consequences in our new zoning ordinance and we're happy to deal with them thank you had code that really itemized it all out and was very clear it would be interesting to know if he does know of another city that has something that you could take a look at and we could maybe try and follow that so it would be more clear for our citizens i think we all appreciate all the work that the planning commission has done i know i really do i of course attend the study sessions you're not surprised i'm sure but there's no comment at their study sessions like there is it yours so we haven't really had a chance to say anything now one of the commissioners and i thank you katie did sit down with two of the neighborhood's to understand our issues and our concerns and i know she's brought that back to the planning commission as they've been going through and doing all this work for you so hopefully it's a little cleared out by the time you get it but there are only three hearings that the planning commission will be where there is comment and actually all the neighborhoods all along colfax from sheridan all the way out to the mills we all got together and divided this up and tried to take a look at it so that we could we could give some comments but there are only the three and i am going to take a vacation and i'm not going to be there for one so you just need to be aware that not all the comments will have been ferret it out so don't think that this is all going to come to you and it's all going to be done deal because it's not all the comments will not have been brought forward so you're going to still get a lot of them and that should not be a surprise please also keep in mind that there will be issues that have not been resolved at the planning commission level and there may be things that the citizens will bring to you that the planning commission didn't address so thank you keep in mind you can participate online and send all your comments and honestly so you need to do that you need to tell folks who aren't going to be there to do that so you could participate and you don't have to be there that night so there's an actual website that you can comment on everything that they're hearing  we'll have we'll publicize that tonight come on down ma'am go ahead yeah yeah please come on  from golden seeking a ranch house without stairs that's why we're here we are very glad that city council and planning commission are working to make it possible for brewskis to develop a proper parking lot at two thousand one hundred young field we welcome a brewskis into our neighborhood they're a fine restaurant and they add class to the commercial development on yonge field we are glad they are planning a proper parking lot with paving lighting landscaping and drainage we wish to share three areas of concern about implementation of this plan first concern is traffic control including pedestrian safety adding the parking lot will certainly help reduce street parking in front of our pedestrians are crossing myrtlewood just a few feet from young field my husband and i who are both seasoned and safe drivers have come close to colliding with pedestrians making this crossing as we could safely cross an alternate proposal is to install a traffic signal light with a left turn arrow and a special time to signal for pedestrian crossing  would not be allowed to turn into either myrtlewood or into the parking lot in addition at a heavily marked crosswalk across myrtlewood with flashing lights warning of pedestrians crossing you've seen this in other places they have these lights now second concern is lighting we often enjoy sitting on our back patio looking out west at the beautiful sunsets are watching the stars and meteor showers we hope the parking lot that's just west of us will have the modern low height downward facing lights that will not shine over our fence third concern is drainage we have serious concerns after yesterday's light snowfall and today's gentle melting we observed water draining from the existing at brewskis locked or the extra restaurant is on to myrtle wood and pooling in front of ireneaus house that's the people right next door our residential property at to one hundred and thirty five myrtlewood lane is downhill from the temporary lot at two thousand one hundred young field the lot itself is downhill from that section young field young field and the connecting streets including myrtle would lack storm drains in rain events these streets become waterways in addition there's a one hundred and twenty three inch that is ten feet three inches differential between the high point of our property and the low point we are confident in these figures because we recently had our lot professionally surveyed by laser and drone therefore we are also concerned about wastewater and debris from paving and construction draining down into our property we hope to hear from the appropriate city personnel that our concerns will be adequately addressed thank you thank you and welcome to lakewood and right anybody else all right awesome did you have something to say were you raising that thought okay so mister chairman i promised you  and i barely after ten well we got into some discussions i didn't think we were gonna get into forgive me that's my i think i mean and we've recognized this i think it's obvious i mean lawyers are disagreeing that's when you've changed the code and that's what we're doing i think the bigger question is what are we going to change it to and you know if if your intent is to stop development and then to find the code as every building has to be mixed use and you know if that's the case then you know i hope you'd be upfront saying  that having said that i still think there's a problem with with the mixed use zone as a whole if we don't make it makes use it's not gonna solve the problems that we're trying to solve and reducing traffic  and all these other issues so the time to talk about that is in the public hearing when when these are brought up what is the website where public comments can be taken w speaks org i'm looking at diane are you writing that down okay and great there is a link on the front page of the of the city's website and this has this has been up and running for several months now the planning commission's used it it  tracks their views so the public can ensure that their comments are being read by the planning commission and it also offers the public the chance to ask questions of either the staff or the applicants well okay well and i would point out if any any one of us don't go to that site and read it it shows up and will be will be reported well and i want to just thank you thank you all i mean you've really carried a heavy load and you've tried to do a lot of things and i certainly i think i can speak on behalf of this body you know you are you're our planning experts use your expertise use your independence and  bring us the best thing that you can and we'll make it better or or not but we do appreciate that and so i know that communities anxious and we can start our our schedule of public hearings i think it's it's up to you to schedule your public hearings based on this schedule and and i don't i don't know how soon afterwards we need to have a discussion with you at some point on whether you want a series of study sessions to hear the results of these hearings or if you want to go straight into hearings yeah all the process after this is up to you we'll be done with them in a few weeks okay thank you miss goodwin i just wanted to say that when i was encouraging everyone to come to the planning commission i was not in any way trying to to say not to come to council i think it's a good rule of thumb to do early and often so as many times as we thank you mary just a quick reminder we're gonna be having our ward three meeting on saturday nine a m at phillips united methodist church and mayor i'll let you talk about the dc mister ab harrison um i just wanted to thank all those who came to the beautiful junk sale jefferson county fairgrounds this weekend friday was phenomenal it was our best friday ever saturday because it was saint patty's day and we had a lot of things we were kind of working with wasn't quite as shiny but just wait there'll be another one in october thank you mister skilling thank you to everyone that came out to our ward for meeting we had our usual outstanding attendance and if you keep coming all still i'll keep answering the tough questions and stay as long as it takes like we did this last time and then a reminder we're doing prizes for the people that can sign up the most folks to our newsletter so you didn't know about that prizes to be announced that's it thank you it's a good idea i that just really do the planning dialog i know we talked about in some of our well we recently at some of our meetings we're discussing potentially looking at  starting our meetings early or doing special meetings or a little bit longer or something like that this might be a good time to sort of rehab that conversation because we got a lot of stuff to get through so something to think about but  mention yeah we just recently got back from washington dc i think it was a very productive trip we were there for the national league of cities we met with our congressional delegation we talked about many pressing issues facing lakewood  we learned about affordable housing state of the housing issues and affordability as it relates to well around the country we also talked a little bit about homelessness which obviously is a challenging topic that lakewood  is talking a lot about right now and i think it's fair to say all the cities there were talking a lot about pushing congress to act on infrastructure not later but now i think that's a very important conversation i was glad to be a part of goodwin just quickly wanted to tell everyone about a really cool experience we had on friday night the sustainable neighborhoods program had a leadership retreat and it was really exciting a bunch of you know all the different neighborhoods came and it was a partnership with denver it was at the alliance center a really really cool building and it was fun to talk about  and reflect back on all the great memories that we had and then also to build those skills in the community to advance their project so very exciting evening great a couple  things so next next month or next week the th we originally had an executive session on active shooter training and that has been changed the executive session will pertain to the denver federal center and  but also will be recognizing us hockey olympic hockey goalie nicole hensley at city council next monday night so it could be a crowded house i'm excited for that we'll hear an update from the ac ic will be appointing members the planning commission board of adjustment historic preservation board of appeals approving a grant application for goko adopting policies and procedures miss frank's and then first reading on community development block raksha plan parkland dedication fee and second reading on energy efficiency so it's a pretty packed night and i hope folks that can get out can get out or watch on tv but it'll actually start out in a really really cool actually came down to congress in perlmutter's office which i guess is a big deal when the senator comes down to the house offices especially when you're in a different party but what that says is there's great interest in what's going on in our community and so we were able to sit down and have candid conversations and share your concerns about the proposed colorado coalition project about the mckinney vento act and kind of you know where we are all on that and they are willing to engage as much as they can and be there to support us and anything else that we move forward or have an opportunity to and again beyond that we are continuing to do many different things and i'm afraid not all of it is stuff that we can talk about because of things that are in you know encompassed in that that's why we'll be having an executive session but it's really important for the community to know that where we are very aware we're very concerned and we're working everything in every angle that we can so with that that's all i have miss hudson just a quick exciting announcement today one of our own a liquid high school senior camilla m's bro she won the colorado girls basketball gatorade player of the year and that was announced today she happens to be six foot five and her gpa is four point eight three and she's going to yale and her identical twin is she was sidelined this year with a knee injury but she's going to princeton what oh slackers yeah they are slackers no so he just said that so i'm in congratulations to camilla that's amazing she's the girls basketball player of the year so congratulations mister hollander anything on behalf of the commission nothing further okay with that we will a