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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2020-10-14 - Minutes - PC-HPC Historic Preservation Commission and Planning Commission Agenda October 14, 2020 MINUTES Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91729 7:00 p.m. A. Call to Order The meeting of the Historic Presentation Commission and Planning Commission was held on October 14, 2020. The meeting was called to order by Chairman Guglielmo at 7:00pm. Planning Commission present: Chairman Guglielmo, Vice Chair Oaxaca, Commissioner Dopp, Commissioner Morales, and Commissioner Williams. Staff Present: Nick Ghirelli, Assistant City Attorney; Anne McIntosh, Planning Director; Elizabeth Thornhill, Executive Assistant; Jason Welday, Engineering Director; Dat Tran, Assistant Planner; David Eoff, Sr. Planner; Baldwin Ngai, Associate Engineer. B. Public Communications Chairman Guglielmo opened the public communications and hearing no comment, closed public communications. C. Consent Calendar C1. Consideration to adopt Regular Meeting Minutes of September 9, 2020. Motion by Commissioner Williams, second by Vice Chair Oaxaca. Motion carried 5-0 to adopt the minutes as presented. D. Public Hearings - None E. General Business Ell. PRESENTATION — SB743 Implementation - Engineering will present an informational item regarding SB743, which changes the methodology and thresholds for traffic impacts from LEVEL OF SERVICE (LOS) to VEHICLE MILES TRAVELED (VMT). Jason Welday, Director of Engineering and Baldwin Ngai, Associate Engineer, presented Commissioners with a presentation and video explaining the City's newly adopted guidelines setting Vehicle Miles Traveled thresholds for California Environmental Quality Act compliance. (Copy on file). Commissioner Morales stated it was a great presentation. Added, glad they were able to work with the regional agencies to come up with data. Commissioner Dopp asked what the consequences are of significant increase of impact for VMT. Jason Welday, Director of Engineering, explained it is possible for projects to much more easily fall into a significant impact under a VMT metric. The difficulty comes in mitigation. Under a level of service model, mitigation appears more apparent than under VMT. There are a number of recommended mitigations in the guidelines, but the developer would have to show their use actually results in mitigation. Commissioner Dopp stated he was looking at the map and a lot of the industrial areas do not fall under the less than 15% threshold. What are the consequences in terms of the General Plan moving forward, how we might look at that area. Anne McIntosh, Planning Director, talked about the Planning side and the motivation behind this policy was to try and encourage cities to develop policies to encourage in-fill development. Looking at how it applies to the General Plan, is one of the things the General Plan Team is talking about. How to make it easier for people to get from one place to the other, without people needing to drive so far. As we look at the General Plan, it is something we are considering as it applies to land use decisions. Commissioner Dopp asked are there consequences or other guidelines the City has to meet in terms of the VMT numbers. Jason Welday replied he is not aware of any other directly related to VMT numbers. Explaining VMT has been used for a long time for generation of the greenhouse gas emissions calculations in the CEQA process. For a number of years, it has already been incorporated into the CEQA document as part of the GHG section. It is geared towards encouraging different land uses and different land use patterns. Nick Ghirelli, Assistant City Attorney, added that SB7843 and the implementing CEQA guidelines do give the City some discretion to decide what the most appropriate threshold of the significance will be for VMT. He knows of some cities that have said, if your projects are not actually reducing VMT by more than 10% than you have a significant impact on traffic. Jason and staff justified the threshold used here and it was based on substantial evidence. Anne McIntosh stated for Commission purposes, what you will see with projects you are reviewing is that standards have been applied. It will either be below or above the threshold. Any kind of mitigation that is required will come along with the project. You should be able to make sound legal decisions because they are quantifiable standards. Commissioner Williams asked regarding new projects, do we use new VMT standards or will it be in conjunction with new and old. Jason Welday explained CEQA no longer allow use of Level of Service metrics anymore. VMT is the only metric that will be used now for transportation impact under CEQA. However, we still use Level of Service for design purposes. As the team looks at the General Plan, they will probably get a little bit more granular with Row the General Plan looks at the Level of Service design metric. Nick Ghirelli mentioned the level of service is still appropriate for purposes of meeting General Plan Policies and Goals and can be used to make sure that a project will ultimately be consistent with the General Plan before you approve it. Vice Chair Oaxaca stated he noticed the same thing on the map as Commissioner Dopp, the area considered to be more industrial part of town. He asked, does this create a heavier burden on those projects and does that lead us to start rethinking whether those types of projects really fit within those scenarios looking at VMT or do they fit differently in some way. HPC/PC Minutes— October 14, 2020 Page 2 of 4 Jason Welday replied the final guidelines that were adopted by Natural Resources Agency and proposed by OPR kind of bifurcated the trips related to freight. Explaining, in their assessment of VMT, the guidelines do not look at truck trips but look at the employee/customer trips. The truck trips are set aside, and they look at the employee trips. If the use is going to attract employees from a local area, then it could generate less than average VMT. It's an important area the team will look at for the next 20 years or so in the General Plan. Vice Chair Oaxaca asked a question for Planning staff. Raising the level of density and looking at more mixed-use type projects, you are concentrating users in a better area. As we go through this General Plan Update process again, any thoughts on how we might approach that issue since the direction from Council and this Commission agrees that we do want to encourage innovative projects that really try to combine housing and those amenities to meet some of these goals, stating it's been a challenge. Anne McIntosh replied one of the elements of the General Plan is the mobility element. Jason has been working with the General Plan CORE Team in terms of establishing mobility policies. They will get some items on the mobility, housing and land use element that helps address some of these questions before projects come in. Jason Welday stated they are still working through those details. It ties in with the land use element as to where you place density and land use types. Where and how the roads are placed along with grid patterns, which play into those decisions very closely. Ann McIntosh mentioned to Vice Chair Oaxaca to bring his question back again in December when they will bring the land use alternatives to the Commission. Looking at different alternatives that either congregate density or disperse it with different goals in mind. Vice Chair Oaxaca asked are there also provisions to relook at our threshold over time in case conditions change or things that we do not predict or expect come up. Jason Welday responded yes and explained one of the aspects staff asked Council to approve as part of the guidelines was ability for the process to be updated from time to time. It was included in the recommendation Council approved. They will look at the threshold at a future date. Chairman Guglielmo asked regarding the video viewed earlier, it seems subjective to him and asked who is responsible for calculating that number and what goes into it. Baldwin Ngai explained there are two primary trains of thoughts when you try to calculate VMT. One is the origin-destination method. The other method is looking at production-attraction, which is looking at how a project type is going to generate trips and how a project type is going to track trips from other locations. Data comes from either survey data or big data that tracks the trips' distances. All those play into the regional transportation analysis model, which keeps track of the average trip distance and trip frequency to help do the calculation. Chairman Guglielmo asked does the applicant bring the data points to you. Baldwin Ngai answered that the City does not have the capability to run those models. Explaining, the City depends on SBCTA maintaining models for our use and reference. Adding, the applicants are doing all the heavy lifting and calculating on the back end. Jason Welday explained that SBCTA manages and maintains their Regional Transportation Model for the County. When a project is required to do a VMT analysis, their traffic engineer will get the raw data from HPC/PC Minutes—October 14, 2020 Page 3 of 4 SBCTA's model and run it through their own modeling software adding in the project. If additional data is needed, then anonymized big data is utilized in the process. Chairman Guglielmo opened for public communications and hearing no comment, closed communications. F. Director Announcements Anne McIntosh, Planning Director, thanked each Commissioner for meeting with her to talk about ideas as we go forward with the General Plan. It was very helpful. Confirmed the one and only November HPC/PC meeting is scheduled for November 1211 @ 6:OOpm. G. Commission Announcements - None H. Workshop — None I. Adjournment Motion by Vice Chair Oaxaca, second by Commissioner Morales to adjourn the meeting; motion carried unanimously, 5-0 vote. Meeting was adjourned at 7:53pm. Respectfully submitted, Iath Thornhill �i Ex utive Assistant, Planning Department Approved: October 28, 2020 — HPC/PC Regular Meeting HPC/PC Minutes—October 14, 2020 Page 4 of 4