Discussion Item: Zoning Code Amendment Process

Vice Mayor Evans and Councilmember Barotz requested the discussion of the Zoning Code amendment process be placed back on the agenda.  This original discussion occurred on November 27, 2012; however, these members felt there was a majority of Council calling for one process and a minority group calling for a second process with the minority group prevailing.  To clarify the will of Council, the City Manager has placed this back on the agenda in order to receive more formal direction from Council regarding the process for determining how policy items should be considered during the Zoning Code amendment process.

There are two possible processes that were present in the original discussion.  Before discussing them, let's set the stage.  The revisit of the Zoning Code is  actually a staff initiated item.  At the time of adoption, staff noted it would be back six months to a year after adoption to clean-up the ordinance because there are always items that emerge which weren’t intended or were missed.  These are staff initiated technical amendments. 
 
A few months ago, Councilmember Oravits put on the discussion agenda a request to revisit the sign code.  At that time, the majority of Council said we will discuss that when we get to the scheduled review of the entire Zoning Code.  Therefore, staff added this policy question to the scheduled review.  Along the way, there were other requests for policy reviews from Councilmembers.  Consequently, staff added those to the list.
 
The first process option could be called: "All In."  Typically, if something is staff initiated in CD, it starts with a work group, moves to a Council Commission and then is brought to Council.  This time, the City Manager suggested the process start with Council and get a comprehensive list so that we didn’t get to the end of the process and have several new items thrown out that had not collected staff, commission or public input.  So part of the exercise was to get a comprehensive list of topics without necessarily discussing the policy of each item. Given these are not final votes, but direction to staff, the City Manager placed the item on a work session.  A flaw in this process is that whatever Council decides are the topics, does not mean that those would be the only topics discussed because staff was open to collecting other topics through our public process and our conversation with P&Z.  In other words, both groups may see something in the code that they wanted to add to the discussion list and have Council debate.  Again, this is pretty typical of our process when we start with staff and public. 
 
The second process option might be called: "Prior Consent."  The City Council has a consistent practice of requiring four votes to move things forward that will require staff work.  Our agenda process allows any Councilmember to place something on the Discussion portion of the agenda, but requires four votes to move it to an action item, or presentation, or something that requires staff research.  We used this process when determining Council goals and the actions associated with those goals.  The Policy items listed for Zoning Code amendments were added at the request of one or two Councilmembers.  The only grey area was that the overall review of the zoning code was staff initiated, but staff did not place any policy issues on the list.  Policy items came from Council.
 
At the November 27th Council meeting, there was a very specific discussion about the accessible parking spaces.  Clearly a majority expressed disinterest in re-examining this policy.  The Mayor expressed that we were just putting the list together and not debating each policy amendment.  This represented the competing process options mentioned above.  The Mayor continued to state what his intentions were and no Councilmember called the question (which would have been tough as Council was in Work Session and there was not a motion on the table).  So the process was a bit grey. 
 
Given two Councilmembers want to flesh this out, the purpose of this agenda item is to determine which process option the majority would like to follow (not to debate each policy).  If the majority decides they want to winnow the policy list up front (prior consent), then the City Manager will schedule this as an action item on a future agenda so the Council can vote item by item which policy items they want staff to take through the vetting process and which ones they want to leave off.  It will also let the public know to come and weigh-in on each policy item.  If the majority of Council favors the "All IN" option, then staff will proceed to take all policy items on the list forward for vetting and then return to Council for resolution on the merits of each item.

Lastly, staff seeks direction on how Council would like staff to handle topics that come up from members of the public or P&Z members that were not discussed by Council during this process.