discussion we're having here today and that's the housing crisis. and if we want to be more specific, sb827, which will come back. the issue is whether we'll keep longstanding land use rules or modernize them to improve housing production. a lot of folks, as you've heard, want to keep the rules as they are because changing them reduces their opportunities and the tools they have at their disposal to impede, obstruct and delay high-end density urban infill and that especially includes affordable housing. my neighbors in forest hill successfully killed 150 units of low-in come senior housing because they understand the choke points and the process that we have. our good friends at csfn are making the argument that sb827 will come back and why it's so badly needed. >> president hillis: thank you,

mr. colon. next speaker, please. >> hi. i'm jeff hodges. i'm a tenant at 14th and guerrero. grateful for your time today. these are modest, worthwhile changes. as a tenant, these changes give me more notifications than before. these changes are worth your vote today and not later. these processes corrected here are ones that have allowed xenophobic neighbors to grind out full-scale, multi-family homes because they disproportionately house those that need the housing the most. every delay is another possibility for xenophobes to enact their fear. every shout of fear is the red lining that san francisco reels from. we haven't built enough housing to match the children being born and raised here. i live around mixed-income, affordable housing, one of the few places where i see actual

families. housing delayed is housing denied to families like them. these mild changes are a good step facing the mistakes of our past. please pass these today. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> thank you, commissioners. i'm greg scott, president of pacific heights residenidents association. we oppose this. we oppose anything that opposes input and having things reviewed. i have a personal experience with a house next to me illegally divided to four units with no parking and they wanted to expand the top unit that would impede my light and air. and i had to point out to the planner, who had not thought about it, that it was an expansion of nonconforming use,

which is not allowed under the planning code and that stops the project. maybe that makes me xenophobic, but i think that things should be kept to a code for a reason. we have a planning code, so we have a rational understanding of hat wll happen in our neighborhood. we need to respect zoning and the neighbors' time for input. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon, commissioners. jeremy schaub, schaub lee architects. i was not planning to speak about this. i have an upcoming project, but i wanted to give you a couple of thoughts i had. it seems like we have two camps here. one wants to be efficient with how we notify neighbors. we have 43 some-odd notices going on. and others want a chance to be notified and make an appeal. i think the two ideas could be separated, where if we're going to have a hearing, like my upcoming project, 20 days on a

postcard seems fine. if you have a project that's ready to be approved without an appeal, maybe 30 days is what we need to do because people may not be familiar with the project. if they dante peel, there is no hearing. so maybe those need to be separated. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you, mr. schaub. next speaker, please. >> hello. kristie wong from spur and also san francisco resident. thank you for the opportunity to weigh in on the process improvements ordinance. spur strongly supports this effort for streamline the approvals process. i don't believe that the rules we have in san francisco were set up to slow down housing, but that over time the layers of different things that have come up have served to end up creep eig -- creating this process. i appreciate this opportunity to try to make some strategic

changes. 100% affordable housing complex to be approved administratively feels like a no-brainer. they're broadly supported and they face enough challenges with financing and other issues that we don't need the city's process to get in the way. it makes sense to eliminate duplicative hearing processes, where possible, and allow minor scopes of work to be approved administratively by staff. we support that. we support the standardization of neighborhood notification requirements. i understand any change to that will raise concerns. i don't think that the goal of the planning department is to reduce the information that's available. i think they looked at it carefully to try to come up with something that will be more standardized and applicable across the spectrum. and we appreciate some of the improvements that have been proposed. i find it astonishing that there are different sets of requirements for notification and it's not surprising then

that mistakes would get made. if it's able to free up staff to work on more in-depth work, that's also a huge benefit. we would encourage the city, the planning commission, to move this piece along and continue to look for other opportunities to make our approvals process more efficient without giving up project quality and without giving up opportunities for the community to speak up. the planning department's -- the plan from last december outlines a lot of great recommendations that we think should come fehr ward. and spur recently put out a blueprint for change where we have more recommend doations th i recommend you check out. >> president hillis: thank you, ms. wong. next speaker, please. >> reporter: my >> my name is kevin burke. i'm a small business owner. every unit we're not adding in san francisco means we're

building another track home in antioch. another low-income family is being displaced in oakland. housing in those areas doesn't have as good public transit as san francisco does. when people move to places like arizona and texas, they will run the air-conditioning 24/7. that's not good for the environment. when people move here and we don't build, housing stock is expensive. 96% of the rental stock in san francisco is reset to the market rate when the tenant moves out and it's extremely expensive. we should be differential to people trying to add housing. we should consider streamlining to 50%. 50 affordable and 50 market-rate should get the same treatment with 100% affordable. we need to balance the community need for more notification against the need to prevent displacement by adding more

housing. notification does no good if you were forced to leave due to high rents. follow amount of notification will suffice for some. you could build a customized youtube video and people would complain it's not enough. what i've heard a lot is that neighbors have gotten used to blackmailing applicants over zoning complaint projects. i don't think that neighbors should be able to blackmail projects that comply with the zoning codes. applicants should be able to predict if they're application will succeed. that's one of the primary objectives of the planning department. we should make it easier to add 100% affordable housing to other parts of the city. there are too many parts of the city where you cannot build dense housing. i don't think we should move discretionary review on-line. i think we should make it harder to file. a lot of discretionary reviews are pernicious and designed to

get rid of it. i think we should move it to alcatraz and charge $2,000. [laughter] >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> i'm jimmy, resident of the sunset. born and raised here, lived here all my life. because i'm one of pport this those nosy neighbors that gets all of your notifications and i'm kind of, quite frankly, horrified at the amount of mail i got. it's overwhelming. and it takes me hours to read through everything. i'm also horrified at how easy it is to butt into my neighbors' business and kill their housing projects. i get mail for like building a deck. i don't care about a deck. and then i get enormous amounts of mail for plans and stuff. we're in a housing crisis and i'm here asking you to please streamline this process. my friends and family, we've all -- a lot of them have had to leave san francisco, because they can no longer live here and

one of reasons why is because we're in a housing shortage and it's so easy to delay and kill projects and obstruct them. as a matter of fact, my sister told me that her neighbors were d.r.'d. one neighbor didn't like the project, so they d.r.'d it. and then that neighbor decided to d.r. that neighbor. so it's a d.r. fight. this is a waste of all of your time and resource. you have a lot of important housi housing projects to focus on. for the minor stuff, streamline it and make it easier for everyone. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. teresa fladrick, senior action. the case of carl jensen, i really treasure and value that

we do have a process in order to bring exactly those things to the light. we must admit there are some bad actors. they're not all bad actors. but because they do exist and we know they've gone way beyond the scope of a permit or gone ahead and just built and later asked for legalization of things, we need to accept that that exists and to try to do whatever we can to prevent those bad actors from continuing that. so if you can please find a way to flag what you do know and you do know of a number of people who consistently do the same things over and over again. it's the other reason we do have discretionary reviews. and i only know of cases where we use the discretionary review to truly go after those bad actors. i don't know about blackmailing. i don't know about any of those things. however, i do know that it's a very important tool.

again, for notifications for neighbors, i know many owners of multi unit victims in north beach who want and need to know about things going up around them. they can also watch for those that we know are bad actors. it's about -- it's about our quality of life, also for the tenants, so they know what's going on. so a 30-day notice is really important, that there is that time. again, many of the seniors who are owners of multiunit buildings do not use the internet. so it would be really important to take that into consideration in adopting some of the amendments here. so i wanted to point those things out. thank you very much. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon,

commissioners. lisa firmer, liberty hill. it's hard to underd why the planning department continues to create policies that directly affect residents but leaves them out of the process. the proposed process improvements change existing protocol but raise some of the following concerns. reducing the public notice period to 20 days is not an improvement. it makes public engagement more difficult. neighbors need time to process and understand projects that will affect them. they need time to meet, discuss, and negotiate. neighborhood associations also play a role, but communications and meeting times map not synchronize with limited notice times. to be fair, public notice time has to work for the public, not just for planning staff. lack of adequate time to resolve concerns weakens the entire

public notification process, so please keep the 30-day period. reducing the packet of information to a mere postcard also places additional burdens on the public. not everyone has a computer, as the person before me pointed out. and not everyone is capable of navigating planning's website to access plans. understanding the plans is another challenge and may require additional consults. the point of the packet is to provide adequate information to the public and postcard substitutions will hinder this process. recent modifications noticing rear yard additions have responded to problems of serial permitting, but problems remain. cases exist where plans shown to neighbors differ from 311 plans

submitted for permit. 3751 comes to mind. requiring both to be the same is common sense other concerns have been mentioned, but the question remains -- what's being accomplished and who is being served by these changes? disregarding a public process continues to stifle relations and strain trust between the planning department and neighborhood residents. i don't think it's blackmail. policies or improvements, call them what you will, must work for all residents and tenants as well as planners. good planning is collaborative, not top-down decision making. thanks. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon, commissioners. ozzie brown, noe neighborhood council. first of all, a few words to the folks that showed up before me,

the core of architects here, a.i.a. members, they had one advantage over us, they were included. they were in the meetings, we weren't. also, it was said that the plans for pop-outs are code-complaint. any plan approved by the city planning in san francisco is code-complaint, at least we hope so. by the time we get notices, these are code-complaint plans anyway. the reason we get notices for bors is because the neigh want the opportunity to speak up about the impact. that's another thing i want to point out. and i have something to also say to the gentleman from palo alto, who is probably not familiar with our building and planning codes as much as we are. he said we need to have streamlining for affordable housing up to 50%. we do have that.

it's called st35 curt ourtesy o senator weiner. he should have known that. o w sayething to the scores of architects here supporting the program and this is a famous quote from upton sinclair. "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." lastly, i want to move up to my specific objection to the process improvements. what i brought up to you last time on may 17 still stands. i don't think this modification does anything to improve the process improvement changes. just wanted to bring up to you that as of june 5, we had a game-changer. and that was the election that delivered prop f to us. a lot of these changes do affect tenants. and i wish the department consulted with tenants union and

usustipeople. they would have told you that these changes, these constructions, these renovations result in evictions. prop f requires the city of san francisco to defend those tenants that will be subject to eviction. this will cost the city money. if we're gg to be enabling developers to use the renovation tactics to get rid of tenants, it will be costly. please, we should be mindful of these changes. these will be changes for the worst. we should not be able to have 10 days in the span of a project -- ask any of the architects that are here. do they think that a project lasts a couple of months? never. ask them who -- which one of their clients left the city of san francisco because they could not build a pop-out? this is not true. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you.

next speaker, please, ms. courtney. >> president hillis, members of the planning commission, kathleen courtney, russian hill community association. first of all, i can't even begin to tell you how i take umbrage at the accusation that i or other neighborhood people here impede, obstruct or delay projects. honest to god, everything approved by this commission will last a century in this city. so residents have a right to really ask people who want to construct anything in their area, what is the impact going to be on my street and on my city? that's -- we live here. six weeks ago, many people came before you and said, hey, and i

will quote our letter, "the total lack of community outreach, the unwillingness to illicit or listen to neighborhood concerns and questions and the inability to recognize and appreciatehe contributions that those of us who reside in this city are able to make." that's a pattern that really needs to be upset because what it does is it establishes an adversarial relationship and that's not the name of the game. the name of the game is to improve the quality of living in this city. specific issues are three. number one, we can't adjust the notification process. you have community people, members of the public, you get a notificat it's mailed on day one, neighborhood leader receives it on day four. 10 days it pull together some

sort of a team to really talk about, look at plans. you need 30 days. whatever will be built will last aturen you need to give the opportunity the opportunity to look and discuss what will happen in their area. i feel that very strongly about pop-ups. you will disrupt a neighborhood and a community. at least give the neighbors an opportunity to review. i strongly urge you to continue this ordinance. this is not ready for a hands up or hands down. suggesting that the planning department that they call together neighbor types just as they did with the architect and the contracting community so that we can all participate in this discussion. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you,

ms. courtney. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon, commissioners. my name is joy mop. i'm an architect in san francisco for 15 years. we currently have 35 projects in san francisco. i'm in support of your proposal to streamline any aspect of the permitting review process. as trained professionals, we're entrusted by the citizens of san francisco from a wide economic spectrum to modify their homes. people that save up for years to improve their victorians, their stucco boxes, modern eclectics, whatever. all the clients are 100% willing to follow the code and procedures to the t. they host the meetings themselves and almost always these are friendly, cordial

encounters with their neighbors. building owners of san francisco rely on us to navigate these milestones in their lives. when the professionals cannot give them an idea of timeline and costs, they're getting surprised, and our credibility is gone. a few other professionals, as mentioned, sold out and left the city and this unfortunate out come is getting more and more prevalent. those that made it through the process, often have to pay $10,000, $20,000 permit fee to go through thenning review. so i have to say the frustration is shared by the planning staff who are almost always overworked, severely backlogged. it's sad to hear some of the planners reviewing our projects saying, let me know when your a.d.u. is built because i want to move to the city.

the proposed 10-day difference is insignificance in the average of a year of permitting process anyway. most of us that own a building in the city will have to do something to our house eventually. i don't believe it's a me-against-the-neighbor issue. i support the advancements to making san francisco a sustainable, resilient city. >> president hillis: thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. i'm shavon. i'm here today to support this process improvement as it's been proposed. i have heard a lot of the public comment. i will try to share something that you haven't heard already. as a child, i spent a lot of time getting together with my cousins and friends, talking the bus to different parts of the city, playing in different

playgroun playgrounds, even during the summer, taking muni out to ocean beach, which then was okay. today it's not okay. it's not okay to drop your child off at the play ground pick up groceries. it's not okay to do anything that our parents used to do. when we talk about a bump-out in somebody's backyard, it could make a big difference. i live in a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom with a 1-year-old and small, in-home business. to have a pop-out and have a play room or an office, my toddler playing in a different space than where i'm cooking, is instrumental to our quality of life. and to be able it do something like this that's code-complaint and doesn't have a big effect on neighborhood character in a house that was built 100 years ago for family life 100 years ago is important to see past some of the neighbor concerns.

nobody wants to take any transparency away from the neighborhood. everyone wants to live in a family community. and to do that, i think it's important that families be able to stay and to do something like this in a less burdensome and hopefully faster process. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. ms. clark. >> laura clark. as usual when we talk about housing, it's hard not to talk about everything. and so i'm going to try to -- which is unusual for me -- limit myself to the scope of the legislation, which is small are than we'd like it to be. the first thing is, affordable housing component. luckily no one seems to be speaking opposed to it. it's easy. it's what we've been talking about doing for a long time. the second part is an obscure downtown redundancy thing. that also seems good. a nice, easy improvement.

the postcards are controversial. things i really like about this. we have nine affiliated neighborhood clubs that complain to me about the level of mail that they're signing themselves up for when they want to be following projects. it's a nightmare how much mail. so they're like, laura, can we get it directed to your office. i'm like, eh, sure, okay, cool. so now i'm in charge of managing the mail and getting the things. a shareable link is obviously an improvement and makes neighborhood interests easier for people to manage and keep track of these things. a phone number on the postcards, so people can say, i want it on paper, is easy. the thing i'm most excited about going digital with is, that we can make sure that we let tenants know their rights. we can put on that website, a link that said, know your rights. do not be afraid.

these are all of the things that we endorse. we can put it on the postcard and get people the information that we should be sending them once a year anyway. tenants should know their rights. we can add other kinds of important information. when we're talking about making it so there's a digital link to a website, you can see changes that the project might have had over time. you can understand the whole thing at once rather than trying to figure out 14 different pieces of paper you received about 10 different projects in the area that you are keeping track of. it's a nightmare right now. and activists need to have something in one place. tenants need to know what to do. and if they can fight something if an eviction is coming. they need to know with the they're rights are, especially when it comes to unpermitted a.d.u.s. a friend of mine is dealing with the fact that their landlord didn't want to deal with this process. got an illegal a.d.u.

they live in it and they're worried they will be evicted. if they were able to access what their rights are when the landlord now wants to do improvements to the building, they with not be calling me every three days asking me, what can i do? what can i do? and i would not be scrambling to try to figure out the answer to that question. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> hello again. steven bosh. i want to say how amazing it is that everyone agrees that streaming aordable housing is the right thing to do. i think there's been two people that say they don't support it because it streamlines market rate. i know you read your packet. it does not streamline market rate. so everybody is in agreement. it's fantastic. it's what we've been talking about for a long time and time

to do it. i'm -- i'm ambivalent about the notification changes. it's good. we should standardize on one system and should not have different rules or projects that are so similar. 20 days is eno time. someone said before, if 20 days isn't enough time for you, you haven't been part of the process and you are piling on at the last .te you see that all the time. people file a d.r. on the last dave and it's not to get a better project. it's to delay it. it's to see if they can kill it. so 20 days, it's enough time for anybody. also, i love that there will be multilingual and on-line and i'm going to write a little bot that checks notices and analyzing them in realtime. so i strongly support that. that gives me a nice, little project. also, i think most of you know, but i'm a tenant and i would like to get these notices mailed to me as well.

i got a notice mailed to my landlord and i opened it because -- whatever. it was huge. it was like a 20-page document and there's architectural diagrams and i found it fascinating, but most people that get that will look at that and say, what is this? and they will throw it away. a postcard-sized notice is excellent. you can glance at it decide, do i care about this? do i not? there's a website. i will check it out if i'm interested. if not, recycling bin. it's one piece of paper, no the dozens. it's a green policy and we should definitely adopt that. and, finally, we should definitely trust the experts on staff that say, we don't think this contributes much value especially related to staff time and resources and they say, we should eliminate these because it's not

eliminating anything. we should trust the experts. in favor of moving this forward today everything we can do to streamline development and make things happen faster leads to more people getting housed faster. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. mr. keegran. if anyone else would like to speak on this item, please line up on the screen side of the room. >> good afternoon, commissioners. i'm here to speak specifically to section 136 about the pop-outs. our membership has no financial gain one way or another with these pop-outs. we couldn't find a single member who has only done a pop-out. we've done vertical additions and horizontal additions. i am concerned, however, about the workload being put on the planning department. there's not a month that goes by that something comes out of the second floor of this building that puts additional loads on

your staff. my favorite memory was during the live-work era, when people wanted planning department staffers to go into the units at nighttime and confirm people were sleeping in them. recently, i think it became law that staff has been asked to go out and monitor how we're using our garages. monitor the parking. where does it all end? my point here is, we have a very limited amount of resources and are we using them as wisely and to the best of our ability? i heard some very real and genuine concerns today. and i say very respectfully, i don't believe the pop-outs are as scary as they feel. and i say that very respectfully. most projects, most of the scary

stories that i heard, would be vertical and horizontal additions or new constructions, not just the pop-outs. i heard comments about plans. yes plans are important to a complex vertical and horizontal addition. but if it's just a pop-out, go in 5, out 12, that's it. it's very simple and that's what we're talking about. just pop-outs. i'd also like to remind the commission and the public that nothing, nothing in this changes the appeal process. if someone doesn't like it, there's another whole other means to address that after the permit is issued. i for one have always been very, very cautious about taking away any part of transparency. it's so important to the process and my members pay the price if

there's an ounce of suspicion or any misunderstanding. so i'm here extremely cautiously, but also here to say, on a regular basis, we're asked for family housing. we're asked to produce it and at some point, not everyone wants the new condominium. what they do want is a simple, reliable, predictable timeline for a modest addition to their home. i would encourage to you give it a shot. if it doesn't work, we can come back and address it. i don't want anyone to come back in a year or two and say it's not working. at minimum, throw it out for a certain amount of time. or maybe there's a hybrid model. maybe it's issued over the counter with a notification that gets out so it tees it up for the one or two that is a problem

and then they end up at the board of permit appeals. i think we have to do something, but we have to also with respectful of the neighborhood groups. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. ms. hester. >> sue hester. i asked the staff in writing, have they done outreach to the people that file d.r.s? you should have a list of people who have filed d.r.s? i've filed d.r.s. and contact them and get input from them, apart from d.r. requesters. basically, the whole process

broke down because your staff decided the public was irrelevant. the only people they had to talk to were the architects, developers and their attorneys. that's screwed up. the planning commission represents the public. the public comes to the hearings. we waste our lives coming to these hearings. we have something valuable to say and i think you should hear it. the planning department has proposed to basically eliminate public input. maybe it so hard that no one can do it. if you had people f te neighborhoods and people like me in the same room with architects complaining about various processes, i think we would have a good dialogue.

some of the objections are real. i hear them. but we deal with people that lie. people that evict tenants. people that don't tell the truth to the planner and the planner is taken in by the tap dance they're hearing. a, this is not something that should be sent out now. the mayor did very manipulative timing the plans came over to the planning department on may 2. it's now two days after a mayoral election. take the time that you have on a 90-day process and, seconda airily, use that time to have meetings involving people that

are saying that the process didn't involve us. that's real. i could give the staff, if they would ask me, a list of people that would have some wisdom for the input. the planning department is not a all-wise. and i think we're here because the planning department is a part of the problem, not just the public. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. commissioner miguel, welcome. >> yes, president hillis, and commissioners. i'm actually here for another item, but i couldn't resist. i started out over 40 years ago as a neighborhood activist. i'm still active with two neighborhood organizations in the city. i have a little different perspective because not only that act and those activities, but i was one of the founders

some 22, 23 years ago of the san francisco housing action coalition. and i've had the privilege of sitting on the dias here. the san francisco planning code has a one-word description -- convoluted. commissioner moore remembers when she got on the commission, as i did, we were given three binders, each this thick, of the planning code and it's probably expanded to a fifth by now. ridiculous, honestly. there were attempts during the time i was on the commission and certainly before that as well, to do some of the streamlining that this will do. is it perfect? probably not. nothing is. look at the majority of laws and

codes passed in our country, let alone just in our city. perfect? no. progressive? yes. needed? absolutely. the public and even the professionals get confused. is this 20? is it 30? is it 150? is it 300 feet? wait a minute. i have to look it up. that's what the planning code is at the moment. so this attempt at simplification is a logical attempt. it's the best attempt i've seen in certainly 20 years. and i urge you to move it forward. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> hello. thank you for your time. my name is norma guzman. i will try to be brief. i'm also here to support the

changes to make it easy tore streamline much-needed housing. as some who grew up in affordable housing, my parents spent eight years waiting for an affordable unit in the '80s on a waitlist until we got one when i was 7 years old. so they applied before i was born. i'm happy that this process is going to eliminate some of the time that it will take to build mucheded housing. i'm also excited for the fact that these documents will now be available on-line, so they will be easy to share and available in spanish, which was my first language, so that excites me. as someone that used to be a city planner, i'm excited for the time that this is going to save all of our city staff and i know that resilience and sort of emergency response is really important to everyone in the city, all the agencies, and so the more nimble and the more

time that our city staff have to respond to any events that happen here in san francisco the better. this is the greatest thing to approve. if we find out in a year or two years some of the changes don't work the best for us, we have another chance to come back here and make more changes. thank you so much. >> president hillis: thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> commissioners, i've been hearing a lament of getting notices. i mean, my goodness, the hardshi of getting written notices in the mail. what can be a bigger hardship than that? i can tell you -- getting extricated or evicted from your home because of somebody that got or utilized a loophole to do

so. i feel like this really needs to go back to planning and be re-examined. i feel that it should be looked at again. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. >> hello. i'm before you for two reasons today. the first is to get my sungla sunglass sunglasses. and the second is that i think it's a great package of reforms. i think that freeing up money from affordable housing developers that instead of spending it on all their time and their money on sending out the outreach, that they would be able to spend that on building affordable housing. i also like freeing up planning staff time so that for good projects, they can hurry them along. for bad projects, give them the scrutiny they deserve without

being distracted with projects that are clearly going to sail through. and, finally, i think that the postcard reform is fantastic, speaking as somebody whose volunteer job it is to go to my post office box and clear it out for all of the mailings that come in from the project sponsors. every time i go there, and i try to get there often as i can, it's a huge brick. all i do is take everything out, open the envelopes. take a picture with my phone and drop it in the recycling bin and then go home and have pictures to go through from my camera roll. it would be much easier if i could use my web browser and look them up on-line and share them with people much more easily that way. i hope you will support this package. >> president hillis: thank you. any additional public comment on this item? seeing none, we'll close public comment. director? >> i would like to thank

everyone for coming out. a couple of points of clarificati clarification. there was a reference to a meeting that only developers came to. that didn't have to do with this legislation. that meeting had to do with accepting applications. so we had a meeting with the folks that submit applications and change that. this commission and many members of the community have supported it to have one application instead of two. the document referenced about housing strategy. that's not from planning. it's economic and work force development, having to do with post-entitlement approvals of development projects. the third clarification with respect to pop-outs. the proposal in front of you would only eliminate notice for

pop-outs that are at maximum what you see on the diagrams. if there was a vertical addition, if it was more than 360 feet, if it didn't meet 5-foot setbacks for the two-story version, that would all still require notification. one of the advantages we see of creating this situation is it's an incentive for property owners to live within the limits, rather than produce something much bigger, which would be a much longer process. so i wanted to clarify. there was some confusion that we were taking away notice for any addition for any building. that's not in front of you. what is in front of you is notice for limited set of additions and rear yard additions that are permitted in the code. beyond that, it would require notice. >> president hillis: thanks. can i ask a couple of questions on this to start things off? first of all, i appreciate the time and effort that's gone into putting this together as well as the public comment.

i think most of it has been generally productive and specific and we always get intos s a giveaway to developers or something else, which is -- most of them are smart improvements, but there's a couple of things that i had a question for. first, if i'm going to do a vertical or horizontal addition on my own home, can you quickly run through the process of notification and how long that would take? presumably, i get a designer. and have a pre-arc meeting. >> right. meet with your architects. a lot of times folks come in and don't know the process. i have a regular shift, along with most of the planners, at the counter and people think they're ready to go and we inform them that that's an expansion. and so it will need neighborhood notification. so we give them a packet that explains how to do the preapplication meeting, which

said who you have to mail, you provide the plan sets and shows you all the things that you need to bring back to us no sooner than two weeks after that time, to give people time to attend the meeting. and show us and prove that all of the information is true, so show that the preapplication meeting happened. at that point in time, we'll do the intake of the permit application. we'll create the record within a week electronically. and it will wait to get on a planner's desk. >> president hillis: will the notice go out at that point? >> no. >> president hillis: why not? >> we need to look at what has been proposed. [please stand by]

>> -- rather than the building permit in that case, so you would come in, apply for the c.u., see if we need to have them apply for what the right type of environmental use permit is. we do the plan check, make sure the environmental planning is all in order. >> president hillis: but the same general process would happen. you have a general app meeting, followed by whatever c.u. notice you would need. >> no. if there was a c.u., for example, that supersedes the

notification. in the case there's something such as a more intensive level of review, the notice for the hearing, which is a 20-day noti foris hearing today, for example, that would be the notice the neighbors would receive that the project has been proposed. >> president hillis: that would be the postcard notification. >> right, and we're proposing that the postcard knostfication be for both purposes. >> president hillis: that makes sense. yeah. i generally think -- i think most of what's in here is not controversial and is smart, good planning making our noticing procedures efficient and modern day. as i was sitting here, i got a preapplication notice, but it wasn't from the planning department, it was from my neighborhood group about a project on fulton street converting an old service -- auto service station. and what's terrible, they explained kind of what's happening, and then, they

pasted the planning department's preapplication notification. what we tell people, you need to be a legal scholar to understand what exactly the project is doing. so in my case, the neighborhood group in this case interpreted what that is and put a picture of the project and let me know. so i don't think we're doing anybody any favors with the current way we notify neighbors. i often go to the postings on the side of the building and try to understand exactly what's happening, and i've sat on this commission for six years. sometimes, i don't know what's going on just by reading the posted note if i indication. -- notification. sometimes, the postcard, most people, even architects probably can't read the plans that are being sent in the 11 by 17 package. i think that's incredible smart, and we should do that. in making the notifications

periods consistent, the approvals to affordable housing, the routine appropriations to historic buildings are all good. i think the only thing i have issue with is the pop out. just the rational here is kind of -- we want to forgo it. i don't think the notification is what's triggering the time being spent on this. and again, i use the example i would not want to come home one day and my neighbor's pouring a foundation of a two-story bumpout in the back yard, and i've never been noticed. now i know miss courtney brought this you've talked

about, urban design, and they coul be vertical additions. mr. keegan said that they do the minimum bump outs that are -- meet the minimum code compliance. i think one of the first processes you talked about when you talked about process improvements, we're not going to degrade notice. that's one thing you did. it'll be 30 days for that standard basic expansion to be approved. i get it, there's way(a) to do it where we send it up to the planner, wait for design review, or(b), we approve it at

the counter. >> right. since the 311 notification prevents us from approving it until the notice has been sent out, that's why the proposal in your packet, the preapp is where you get that early heads up at the very beginning of the process from the applicant if you're one of the neighbors, and then, of course, you can talk with your neighbor if you have a concern however long it takes -- >> president hillis: the problem is you don't know ultimately what is applied for. you and i can have a preapp meeting. yeah, i'll take your issues into concern, and then i'll just go approve whatever i was proposing before. it complies with the no noticing, and you're good. >> right, but if you were a neighbor with a lot of concerns about it, presumably, you would be talking to the applicant, and the applicant knows at the end of that process, the neighbor is going to be notified and have the opportunity to do discretionary review. so in other words, the preapplication meeting is really helpful because it puts

the neighbors on notice early on. >> but you wouldn't know -- >> you know from the point of the preapplication review it will be coming, when it's issued. we have the ability rite now to sign up and get knowfications for any permit. in an entire neighborhood group, they can sign up to get notifications every two days, every permit that's going on in the neighborhood. >> i think i would take what you're trying to do with bumpouts, and expand it to even routine construction of a two story building. if it's code compliant and meets urban design standards can be approved over the counter and held in abeyance until this 30-day period. that's what happens at dbi.

there's kind of the same thing. it gets you the process improvements but still maintains that simple noticing that -- that -- to nrs. i think if you're bumping out your building, whether it's code

i got this thing called an annual report, and i don't -- for some reason, i didn't get it -- how do we measure whether we're doing a good job, and