General Plan Advisory Committee
General Plan Advisory Committee
Thu, May 18, 2023
Agenda items
Vote records
Discussion summary
Transcript
Meeting summaryAI-generated
General Plan Advisory Committee — May 18, 2023
This was a working session of the General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC), focused primarily on a presentation of recommendations from the American Institute of Architects Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT). The meeting was held via Zoom and included substantial public participation. No binding votes were taken; this is an advisory body.
General Public Comment
Two members of the public spoke during the general comment period.
The first speaker, identified as Taryn (or Taran) Abaid, expressed growing anxiety about the pace of the General Plan Update process. She noted that draft design standards and policy documents have not yet been shared with GPAC members, and warned that without adequate time to review detailed language, the final plan could end up vague and developer-friendly — citing the Sid Commons project as a cautionary example where ambiguous General Plan language was used by a developer to justify actions the community opposed. She urged immediate release of draft materials from the various ad hoc working groups.
The second speaker said she had been a participant in the previous General Plan process, had applied to serve on GPAC, and believed her environmental expertise was not accurately represented in the staff review of applications. She asked committee members to consider recommending her appointment if a seat became available, and expressed concern that the environmental elements of the General Plan remain incomplete.
Project and Staff Updates
City planner Christina (last name not clearly identified in transcript) provided updates on several parallel workstreams:
Housing Element: The city received notification the same day that its Housing Element has been certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) — a significant milestone, as many Bay Area and Southern California cities remain uncertified.
Climate Action and Adaptation Plan: A complete draft exists and is being refined with a consultant; it will go to the public and then to GPAC, though GPAC's engagement with it will likely be brief given the broader General Plan workload.
Floodplain and Sea Level Rise Modeling: The city is in its third or fourth round of refinements with a San Diego-based consultant, working with GPAC member Roger Leventhal to ensure scientifically defensible methodology. A public meeting, potentially in person, is being targeted for July.
Schedule: The overall General Plan timeline is being actively revised. Staff acknowledged the original two-year projection has stretched, and a more detailed updated schedule will be provided to GPAC within one to two months. Unlike the Housing Element, there is no statutory deadline for the General Plan's adoption.
GPAC member Kevin (last name unclear) echoed Taryn Abaid's concerns, stressing urgency about getting draft materials in front of the committee before it is too late to meaningfully react.
SDAT Presentation: *Reimagining Petaluma*
The main agenda item was a presentation by Pete (last name not stated) on behalf of a local volunteer group of approximately 15 Petaluma residents who, starting in late 2019, applied for and received an AIA Sustainable Design Assessment Team grant worth $180,000 in design services. The SDAT team — a multidisciplinary group of outside urban design professionals — visited Petaluma in August 2022, engaged over 350 community members, and published a final report in November 2022 titled *Reimagining Petaluma*. The purpose of the GPAC presentation was to ensure those recommendations are integrated into the General Plan and other guiding documents.
15-Minute Neighborhoods
The SDAT report centers on the concept of the "15-minute city" — a neighborhood where residents can meet most daily needs within a 15-minute walk (roughly a three-quarter-mile radius) of their home. The AIA team identified nine potential mixed-use neighborhood nodes across Petaluma, each centered on existing or potential activity centers. The team was explicit that these maps were conceptual and illustrative, not prescriptive.
Pete emphasized that current zoning codes discourage the organic evolution of neighborhoods toward mixed use, and the SDAT recommends revising zoning to permit limited commercial uses in currently residential-only areas, allowing neighborhoods to develop more organically over time.
Transportation and Streets
The report calls for transforming Washington Street and other four-lane arterials — described in planning terminology as "stroads" (roads that inefficiently try to function as both high-speed connectors and local commercial streets) — into "green arders": narrower, tree-lined, multi-use corridors with wide planting areas and paths on both sides. A typical 100-foot right-of-way would be reorganized to allocate 33 feet to vehicles and the remainder to landscaping, bioswales, and multi-use paths.
The report also recommends: improving transit reliability and frequency; updating street design standards (last updated in 1996); and creating a robust neighborhood traffic calming program including roundabouts, chicanes, raised crosswalks, and one-lane pinch points.
GPAC Discussion Highlights
The discussion was extensive. Key themes included:
Washington Street: Multiple GPAC members expressed strong support for transforming Washington Street, calling it unsafe and a socioeconomic barrier between east and west Petaluma. Pete noted that narrowing to one lane each direction could enable roundabouts, which data shows move traffic more smoothly than signalized intersections. Some members (Roberto, Kevin) urged caution about moving too fast given current traffic volumes, with Roberto suggesting 3D solutions (elevated pathways) as an alternative. GPAC member Ally endorsed piloting near-term physical demonstration projects — paint, signage, temporary treatments — to make the vision tangible to the public before full implementation.
Integration: GPAC member Dave Alden (also identified as chairing the transit committee) pushed back on characterizing Petaluma's transit as "unreliable," arguing frequency and coverage are the real problems. He also stressed that the 15-minute neighborhood concept only works if affordable housing exists near nodes so that workers who staff local retail can also live nearby.
Zoning flexibility: Dave Alden and GPAC member Josh both raised the idea of moving away from prescriptive zoning toward more form-based, flexible approaches, citing the "Strong Towns" philosophy that no neighborhood should be immune from incremental change, but none should face cataclysmic change either. GPAC member Bill Wolpert advocated for the city's existing Smart Code as a model for form-based, transect-based planning.
Equity: GPAC member Grant asked how to ensure less affluent neighborhoods are not left behind as nodes evolve organically. Christina noted the city has developed a detailed disadvantaged communities analysis that could be cross-referenced with potential node locations.
Street trees and sidewalks: Public commenter Darren discussed the complexity of street tree maintenance (public works responsibility ends at the curb; easements are needed to use private water lines), and noted the city recently received a $250,000 urban forestry grant being implemented with an outside urban forestry consultant. Dave Alden pointed out that some California cities (e.g., Concord) have made sidewalk maintenance a city responsibility, but Prop 13 constraints complicate that in Petaluma.
Scope of GPAC's role: GPAC member Bill Wolpert reminded the committee that the General Plan is a vision document — implementation details belong in zoning codes and specific plans. The committee's job is to articulate the vision clearly enough to drive that downstream work.
Staff confirmed that the SDAT recommendations are reflected in the draft policy frameworks being developed with consultant Remy (full name not stated), though not always verbatim. Washington Street does feature prominently in the draft Transportation Policy Framework.
Closing Committee Comments
Roberto reiterated a longstanding request for visual map overlays showing current conditions alongside proposed changes (housing, transportation, 15-minute nodes) to help committee members reason spatially about tradeoffs. Christina agreed this would be valuable as land use conversations advance. Veronica thanked the planning team and SDAT volunteers, and GPAC members expressed enthusiasm for a possible walking or bus tour of potential neighborhood nodes — similar to one organized for the visiting AIA team last year.
Key Takeaways
Housing Element certified: Petaluma's Housing Element received HCD certification the day of the meeting — a significant achievement that many Bay Area cities have not yet accomplished.
SDAT vision presented: A volunteer group's AIA-funded study recommends organizing Petaluma around nine 15-minute walkable mixed-use neighborhood nodes, transforming Washington Street and other four-lane arterials into greened, narrowed corridors, and updating street standards last revised in 1996. GPAC broadly supported the vision.
Process anxiety is growing: Multiple GPAC members and public commenters expressed concern that draft General Plan policies, design standards, and land use alternatives have not yet been released for review, and that the committee may not have enough time to rigorously evaluate detailed language before the process concludes.
General Plan timeline is shifting: Staff confirmed the schedule is being actively revised and will be shared with GPAC within one to two months; there is no statutory deadline forcing a rushed completion, but the committee wants adequate review time built in.
Near-term pilot projects encouraged: Several GPAC members and the SDAT group recommended that the city pursue demonstration projects (temporary traffic calming, node identification markers) in the near term, without waiting for the General Plan to be finalized, to test ideas and build public understanding.
AI-generated summary from voice-to-text transcript. Not the official record. Verify important details with the source documents linked above.
What happened at this meeting
GENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT During General Public Comment, the public is invited to make comments on items of public interest that are within the Committee’s subject matter jurisdiction and that are not listed on the current agenda. Public comments are limited to three minutes per person, unless public comment is anticipated to total more than twenty minutes, at which point the time will be allocated in equal shares.
# General Public Comment Summary
During public comment, community members raised several concerns about the General Plan Update process. A resident emphasized the importance of detailed design standards at the neighborhood level to prevent generic development and preserve distinct characteristics, while Taryn stressed the urgency of releasing draft design standards and the full General Plan immediately, noting that with less than a year remaining and accounting for absences, the committee would have only 1-2 months for review and refinement—insufficient time given recent Sacramento legislation that limits community input. Susan advocated for reopening the natural resources and open space work group, noting that seven GPAC members are absent and requesting consideration for her appointment based on her environmental expertise. On a positive note, Darren highlighted progress on urban forestry initiatives, including a $250,000 grant, tree surveys on public lands, and planned collaboration with the new Community Development director (Brian) and Public Works to establish an urban forestry plan and expand greening initiatives around streets and rivers.
During public comment, community members raised several concerns about the General Plan Update process. A resident emphasized the importance of detailed design standards at the neighborhood level to prevent generic development and preserve distinct characteristics, while Taryn stressed the urgency of releasing draft design standards and the full General Plan immediately, noting that with less than a year remaining and accounting for absences, the committee would have only 1-2 months for review and refinement—insufficient time given recent Sacramento legislation that limits community input. Susan advocated for reopening the natural resources and open space work group, noting that seven GPAC members are absent and requesting consideration for her appointment based on her environmental expertise. On a positive note, Darren highlighted progress on urban forestry initiatives, including a $250,000 grant, tree surveys on public lands, and planned collaboration with the new Community Development director (Brian) and Public Works to establish an urban forestry plan and expand greening initiatives around streets and rivers.
PROJECT AND STAFF UPDATES a. Updates on initiatives related to the General Plan Update (GPU) b. Clarifying questions from GPAC members
# PROJECT AND STAFF UPDATES: General Plan Update
Christina presented updates on the General Plan Update, noting the process has extended beyond its original two-year timeline to prioritize the Housing Element, which is now HCD-certified. Staff is developing a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and conducting floodplain and sea level rise modeling with consultants, with a public draft planned for GPAC in coming months, possibly July. Committee member Kevin raised concerns about having adequate time to review detailed materials and avoiding rushed, developer-oriented solutions, while Dave Alden and Taryn expressed worry about the volume of material being developed faster than the committee can review. Christina responded that staff is finalizing comments on policy frameworks and will provide a detailed schedule within one to two months, and staff committed to developing a revised schedule that allows for full discussion while accounting for extended modeling timelines and aiming for reasonable completion.
Christina presented updates on the General Plan Update, noting the process has extended beyond its original two-year timeline to prioritize the Housing Element, which is now HCD-certified. Staff is developing a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and conducting floodplain and sea level rise modeling with consultants, with a public draft planned for GPAC in coming months, possibly July. Committee member Kevin raised concerns about having adequate time to review detailed materials and avoiding rushed, developer-oriented solutions, while Dave Alden and Taryn expressed worry about the volume of material being developed faster than the committee can review. Christina responded that staff is finalizing comments on policy frameworks and will provide a detailed schedule within one to two months, and staff committed to developing a revised schedule that allows for full discussion while accounting for extended modeling timelines and aiming for reasonable completion.
SUSTAINABLE DESIGN ASSISTANCE TEAM RECOMMENDATIONS a. Presentation by members of the Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT) committee of recommendations in the SDAT final report b. Clarifying questions from GPAC members c. Public comment d. Discussion
# Summary: Sustainable Design Assistance Team Recommendations
Pete presented recommendations from the Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT), a $180,000 AIA grant program that brought a design team to Petaluma for four days in August to develop the "Reimagining Petaluma" report. The SDAT's core recommendations centered on creating 15-minute neighborhoods—mixed-use communities where residents can access daily needs within a 15-minute walk—and transforming streets into "living streets" through nine overlapping walkable development nodes identified across the city. Key recommendations included revising zoning codes to permit limited commercial uses in residential areas, establishing Washington Street as a green ribbon with complete streets design, updating street standards (last revised in 1996), improving transit frequency and reliability, and implementing traffic calming measures. Committee members raised implementation concerns about zoning flexibility, tree maintenance responsibilities, traffic capacity on East Washington, equitable amenities distribution across neighborhoods, and the need to integrate affordable housing and employment to make 15-minute neighborhoods viable. Staff confirmed that SDAT concepts are being integrated into the General Plan's policy frameworks, with members emphasizing the importance of positive messaging around convenience and incremental neighborhood evolution, while noting the urgent need to address Washington Street improvements for safety and equity reasons.
Pete presented recommendations from the Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT), a $180,000 AIA grant program that brought a design team to Petaluma for four days in August to develop the "Reimagining Petaluma" report. The SDAT's core recommendations centered on creating 15-minute neighborhoods—mixed-use communities where residents can access daily needs within a 15-minute walk—and transforming streets into "living streets" through nine overlapping walkable development nodes identified across the city. Key recommendations included revising zoning codes to permit limited commercial uses in residential areas, establishing Washington Street as a green ribbon with complete streets design, updating street standards (last revised in 1996), improving transit frequency and reliability, and implementing traffic calming measures. Committee members raised implementation concerns about zoning flexibility, tree maintenance responsibilities, traffic capacity on East Washington, equitable amenities distribution across neighborhoods, and the need to integrate affordable housing and employment to make 15-minute neighborhoods viable. Staff confirmed that SDAT concepts are being integrated into the General Plan's policy frameworks, with members emphasizing the importance of positive messaging around convenience and incremental neighborhood evolution, while noting the urgent need to address Washington Street improvements for safety and equity reasons.
COMMITTEE MEMBER GENERAL COMMENT Open time for thoughts, reflection, and closing comments from GPAC members
# GPAC General Comment Summary
During the final general comment period, committee members reflected on the General Plan Update process and shared implementation concerns. Taryn thanked volunteers and community members who have contributed unpaid work since 2019, while Mary expressed concerns about development pace and requested evaluation of existing amenities in neighborhood nodes through ground-truthing and participatory community processes. Jesse highlighted connections between built environment and mental health, and Roberto emphasized realistic implementation challenges given Petaluma's current role as a commuter town, requesting interactive map layers to visualize the 15-minute neighborhood concept. Chris proposed GPAC field trips to specific nodes like the Corona Road station area as case studies, and staff confirmed the city had established priority development areas around planned stations with grant recommendations expected soon. Veronica concluded by thanking the planning team for their tireless support of the General Plan Update vision.
During the final general comment period, committee members reflected on the General Plan Update process and shared implementation concerns. Taryn thanked volunteers and community members who have contributed unpaid work since 2019, while Mary expressed concerns about development pace and requested evaluation of existing amenities in neighborhood nodes through ground-truthing and participatory community processes. Jesse highlighted connections between built environment and mental health, and Roberto emphasized realistic implementation challenges given Petaluma's current role as a commuter town, requesting interactive map layers to visualize the 15-minute neighborhood concept. Chris proposed GPAC field trips to specific nodes like the Corona Road station area as case studies, and staff confirmed the city had established priority development areas around planned stations with grant recommendations expected soon. Veronica concluded by thanking the planning team for their tireless support of the General Plan Update vision.
Agenda items (8)
Procedural (8)
1ProceduralCALL TO ORDER
2ProceduralROLL CALL, LOGISTICS AND MEETING OVERVIEW
3ProceduralGENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT During General Public Comment, the public is invited to make comments on items of public interest that are within the Committee’s subject matter jurisdiction and that are not listed on the current agenda. Public comments are limited to three minutes per person, unless public comment is anticipated to total more than twenty minutes, at which point the time will be allocated in equal shares.
What happened
# General Public Comment SummaryDuring public comment, community members raised several concerns about the General Plan Update process. A resident emphasized the importance of detailed design standards at the neighborhood level to prevent generic development and preserve distinct characteristics, while Taryn stressed the urgency of releasing draft design standards and the full General Plan immediately, noting that with less than a year remaining and accounting for absences, the committee would have only 1-2 months for review and refinement—insufficient time given recent Sacramento legislation that limits community input. Susan advocated for reopening the natural resources and open space work group, noting that seven GPAC members are absent and requesting consideration for her appointment based on her environmental expertise. On a positive note, Darren highlighted progress on urban forestry initiatives, including a $250,000 grant, tree surveys on public lands, and planned collaboration with the new Community Development director (Brian) and Public Works to establish an urban forestry plan and expand greening initiatives around streets and rivers.
4ProceduralPROJECT AND STAFF UPDATES a. Updates on initiatives related to the General Plan Update (GPU) b. Clarifying questions from GPAC members
What happened
# PROJECT AND STAFF UPDATES: General Plan UpdateChristina presented updates on the General Plan Update, noting the process has extended beyond its original two-year timeline to prioritize the Housing Element, which is now HCD-certified. Staff is developing a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and conducting floodplain and sea level rise modeling with consultants, with a public draft planned for GPAC in coming months, possibly July. Committee member Kevin raised concerns about having adequate time to review detailed materials and avoiding rushed, developer-oriented solutions, while Dave Alden and Taryn expressed worry about the volume of material being developed faster than the committee can review. Christina responded that staff is finalizing comments on policy frameworks and will provide a detailed schedule within one to two months, and staff committed to developing a revised schedule that allows for full discussion while accounting for extended modeling timelines and aiming for reasonable completion.
5ProceduralSUSTAINABLE DESIGN ASSISTANCE TEAM RECOMMENDATIONS a. Presentation by members of the Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT) committee of recommendations in the SDAT final report b. Clarifying questions from GPAC members c. Public comment d. Discussion
What happened
# Summary: Sustainable Design Assistance Team RecommendationsPete presented recommendations from the Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT), a $180,000 AIA grant program that brought a design team to Petaluma for four days in August to develop the "Reimagining Petaluma" report. The SDAT's core recommendations centered on creating 15-minute neighborhoods—mixed-use communities where residents can access daily needs within a 15-minute walk—and transforming streets into "living streets" through nine overlapping walkable development nodes identified across the city. Key recommendations included revising zoning codes to permit limited commercial uses in residential areas, establishing Washington Street as a green ribbon with complete streets design, updating street standards (last revised in 1996), improving transit frequency and reliability, and implementing traffic calming measures. Committee members raised implementation concerns about zoning flexibility, tree maintenance responsibilities, traffic capacity on East Washington, equitable amenities distribution across neighborhoods, and the need to integrate affordable housing and employment to make 15-minute neighborhoods viable. Staff confirmed that SDAT concepts are being integrated into the General Plan's policy frameworks, with members emphasizing the importance of positive messaging around convenience and incremental neighborhood evolution, while noting the urgent need to address Washington Street improvements for safety and equity reasons.
6ProceduralCOMMITTEE MEMBER GENERAL COMMENT Open time for thoughts, reflection, and closing comments from GPAC members
What happened
# GPAC General Comment SummaryDuring the final general comment period, committee members reflected on the General Plan Update process and shared implementation concerns. Taryn thanked volunteers and community members who have contributed unpaid work since 2019, while Mary expressed concerns about development pace and requested evaluation of existing amenities in neighborhood nodes through ground-truthing and participatory community processes. Jesse highlighted connections between built environment and mental health, and Roberto emphasized realistic implementation challenges given Petaluma's current role as a commuter town, requesting interactive map layers to visualize the 15-minute neighborhood concept. Chris proposed GPAC field trips to specific nodes like the Corona Road station area as case studies, and staff confirmed the city had established priority development areas around planned stations with grant recommendations expected soon. Veronica concluded by thanking the planning team for their tireless support of the General Plan Update vision.
7ProceduralWRAP-UP
8ProceduralADJOURN Any member of the public who needs accommodations should email the City Clerk at cityclerk@cityofpetaluma.org or by calling 707-778-4360. The City Clerk will use their best efforts to provide reasonable accommodations to provide as much accessibility as possible while also maintaining public safety in accordance with the City procedure for resolving reasonable accommodation requests.
Verbatim transcript available
67 transcript segments indexed
will I need to unmute yeah yes and if you could please unmute yourself it sounds like you all right yeah thank you hi good evening everyone uh I wanted to make two comments tonight um I'm a person that um in my career has worked with really large studies really large bodies of analyzes really large reports and my concern has been growing over the months since I first brought this up I'm feeling pretty anxious about it and that is that we still haven't done our design standards that I've seen and there's been so much work on the general plan that has been done by um you great gpac members but we're not seeing it and the longer we wait this is my concern the longer we wait the less time that we will have to review it to dig into it design standards in other cities they go down to the neighborhood level so that we're not seeing generic buildings going up something that you know on the east side that looks just like something on the North side look something on the South Side Etc distinct characteristics of neighborhoods reflected in distinct design standards per neighborhoods that's the standard these days that I see and I really want that for Petaluma and I'm afraid that we're not going to get it the general plan I'm I've spent hundreds of hours with our general plan it is all quite a document it is very detailed very long very complex and it's not just the general plan the general plan refers to Hazard mitigation plan uh river access and enhancement plan to our municipal code
to our ordinances and all of those things need to be precisely cross-referenced correctly to get your vision locked in and insured because you get one word wrong and it's got big consequences here's a good example with Sid Commons the developer kept saying oh the general plan calls for gutting the river calls for destroying habitat calls for using outdated flood mitigation practices that are obsolete now that mean gut the entire River and citizens had to fight so much for that um and it went back and forth forever because the developer kept pointing to the vague language we need to cover off on all of that so I asked tonight for you to please push for immediate release of some draft for all the ad hoc work that we've done I participated on natural resources but we need to get a draft so we can start looking at it going through it with a fine-tooth comb otherwise it's going to be too late thank you great thank you for your comment and next up uh Susan um whenever you are ready we'll restart the timer uh please unmute yourself and I'll start just as soon as I thank you Daniel and thank you committee members for being present this evening thank you to Tara bade for her presence and her always very thoughtful comments I noticed in the roll call this evening that I believe you have seven members absent and one member is now reported to have stepped aside and is moving on to something else um you know there are some of us in the community who were involved with the current General
plan that's going to expire I was one of those people attending every single meeting that was ever held way back when and I'd like to say that I was an applicant for your TPAC um I was very hopeful to be appointed especially with my ability to contribute to our environmental information unfortunately when the staff did a graph and analyzed applications my information along with some others was misrepresented and not reported accurately um but anyway I didn't receive any votes for the gpac I I did um hear council member schribs question why I wasn't higher up on the list of preferences and noting that I probably had the deepest environmental experience to bring to the committee so I'm I'm still available I see you've had one Committee Member apparently step aside if any of you feel inclined to speak to any of our elected officials to suggest that I had been attending all of your meetings I participated in the work group for natural resources and open space and think that work group needs to be reopened and Revisited I'm very concerned about the fact that your committee has prioritized environment and Equity as the two cornerstones through which all other chapters and elements should be assessed and I feel that the environmental part of the general plan to date is not complete and really needs a lot more work so I'm just reaching out to you as committee members please speak to our electives if you feel that I would be helpful to you on the committee I would be happy to serve
and I appreciate all of you who have made the time tonight to uphold your responsibility and to be present noting that your committee has not met for some time thank you thank you very much for your comment um so with that I don't see any more answers so I'll turn it back over to Christina or Ron uh Christina if you want to run through the quick project related updates yes happy too can you go to the next slide please thank you all right here we are um looking at the overall sequence of the general plan um I do want to note that when we originally began this process we anticipated that it might be a two-year process um we ended up wanting to or the city and Community ended up deciding to take some more time with the general plan and to prioritize the completion of the housing element that is now complete and also certified from hcd so we have a fully certified housing element which is a great thing many of the cities in the Bay Area do not have a certified housing element and in fact many of the cities in Southern California that were a few years ahead of us also don't have certified housing elements so we will really proud of that work we are also in the midst of developing our climate action and adaptation plan and our policies and alternatives one of the pieces that we are working on that relates to this is blood flame modeling which I will talk about in a couple of slides um but because of all of this ongoing work we're actively working on updating this schedule and so we
plan to have a new and more detailed schedule for you all in the next month or two next slide please the housing element final steps as I just mentioned we got notification today that our housing element is certified so we are really pleased with that thank you to all of the many hours that you spent helping us to to shape that document on the climate action planning front we have a complete draft that staff is working with the rainy team on refining for our greenhouse gas reduction strategy we're actually going to be handling adaptation in concert with the general plan because it relates more closely to land use but we expect that in the coming months we will be coming forward to the climate action plan with a draft of that document they have been working with us on that document in pieces that will come with a full public draft and then we will come through gpac with that as well although because there is so much to cover on the general plan it's likely to be um a shorter conversation with this body we will let you know when the polar public conversation is happening on the floodplain and sea level rise we are on our second or third or fourth round uh refinements with the consultant less Consultants out of San Diego to develop a floodplain and sea level rise methodology we've been working with Roger Leventhal of the gpac who can't be here but who is involved in this process to ensure that we're using uh Cutting Edge approaches to make sure that we have the best most
scientifically defensible model possible and we are working to bring that to the public as quickly as possible it may be that we have a general plan advisory committee and public meeting in person right now I think that we're aiming for July but working on refining that that date any other updates there are many things happening in the cities so it's always a good idea to read the community updates and and sign up for updates on both the land Petaluma page as well as the city's website thank you two any gpac members have any questions to I'm sorry Kevin is breaking up for me all right let's let's move on and hope that Kevin rejoins if he rejoins we'll pause and um and and there's there's no time Kevin Kevin I'm Kevin I'm so sorry um you froze for that whole time until the very last couple of words can you can you let us know again what your question was so I'll speak more slowly maybe the that'll help um uh Taran abaid I think her name was uh who spoke first on the um uh Community I I share her concerns completely I am very afraid that we might get backed into not having enough time to really react fully to things that are very that are maybe detail-oriented but very important um so the sooner we can get what she was asking for the the better because otherwise um exactly what she fears um you know that that that will there will be it'll just be a developer kind of um uh Bland solution to everything that that could come to pass if we don't have time to review these things so I
think that's a that's a very very big concern and I'd ask when we might expect that so there are two different pieces there there are the objective design standards and addition Al policy and land use work for the general plan right now staff is working on finalizing comments to Remy on the policy Frameworks that we've walked through with the gpac over the course of I think it was around six meetings um so that will be coming fairly shortly we do want to get into our land use and adaptation conversations so that we can also be working on Alternatives so we'll be giving more detail on all of that and we're working on the schedule now to make sure that there's enough process to make sure that it's complete and also an efficient enough process to make sure that we complete the general plan in a reasonable amount of time um so we'll share more detail on that some of the some of the gpac members might be thinking you know I said two years y'all um so we appreciate your continued uh hanging out with us um so we'll give more detail on that on the objective design standards that is a document that we are working on or bringing a draft to Planning Commission on um so that's coming too yeah the sooner the better okay I think next on the agenda unless there are any other gpac questions was to turn things over to our guest this evening uh Pete gang and with support from Dave Alden um so if you haven't already Daniel please make Pete a co-host and Pete and go ahead and share screen and
start your presentation as a reminder everybody he don't make his presentation then we'll have a brief few minutes for any clarifying questions from gpac then we'll go to public comment and then come back for more robust gpac discussion okay uh I am sharing screen um maybe you are we can see your notes and everything um so you might just want to go into slideshow mode unless you have another screen for your um uh one might have expected that there would be a little pickup in this whole process uh let me try that again slideshow uh presenter View foreign how about I show the slides and you can have your notes on your screen and you do have to say next slide please but that's cool I might not always say please and sometimes it might just say next and sometimes I might nothing at all when I should have said next okay if there if there is an awkward pause I will forward the slacks um can you stop sharing Pete um stop share yes great okay can everybody see the slideshow great all right Pete whenever you're ready uh I'm almost ready now I have to okay I'm ready um I will try to remember to speak slowly and pause in between sentences um just as a bit of a preface I just wanted to make clearer to everybody who might not be familiar with American Institute of Architects sustainable design assessment team process uh the American Institute of Architects is a National Organization it's the Professional Organization for Architects and for several years they've been offering the services
of Architects and other design professionals to communities around the country who request their services in in helping solve um Urban Design related issues and uh this slide presentation is the result of what our local team asked of the American Institute of Architects and what resulted from it so I will begin if asked most of us would say that we are in favor of progress in favor of a better tomorrow but what does progress mean if we don't have a clear sense of where we're headed the city of Petaluma has made a commitment to rapidly transition toward an equitable Urban neutral future within seven years a future that we are now beginning to Imagine Next slide as a city we need a shared vision of where we're going a vision of what a prosperous Equitable resilient zero carbon regenerative City might look like and to get there we need to get Beyond business as usual we need some big bold ideas I'm speaking tonight on behalf of an ad hoc group of 15 Petaluma residents some of whom are members of gpac who came together more than three years ago out of our shared interest in helping our city align its sights toward that prosperous Urban neutral future next in December of 2019 we applied to the American Institute of Architects for a sustainable design assessment team or sdat Grant to bring to Petaluma a multi-disciplinary team of Urban Design experts to assist us with some big bold ideas in January of 2020 the American Institute of Architects the AIA selected Petaluma one of only
eight communities Nationwide to receive a grant worth 180 thousand dollars in Design Services although the project was put on hold for two years due to covid it was revived in next in early August of last year the AIA team spent four days in Petaluma to focus on our selected topic namely complete 15-minute neighborhoods and living streets the AIA team reviewed relevant documents visited sites around town next slide conducted meetings with over 350 community members room maps and made sketches and made recommendations that were then presented to City Council on August 8th next slide please their final report titled reimagining Petaluma was delivered three months later in November of last year this presentation is a short summary of their final report with commentary by members of our local group the group that brought the estat team to our city the purpose of this presentation and others that we will be making over the next few weeks is to ensure that the big bold ideas of the aia's experts are fully integrated into our City's guiding documents into our general plan climate action and adaptation plan active Transportation plan and other key documents the time has come to turn words into action next slide the sdat team of design professionals collaborated to develop a suite of Integrated Solutions ones that would solve multiple problems simultaneously their recommendations address issues of land use Transportation ecosystem Health climate Equity Financial stability and more
we'll start with their recommendations for 15-minute neighborhoods next slide please what is a 15-minute neighborhood their final report offers this next slide and this is a quote from their report the 15-minute city is a concept that describes a residential Community with a decentralized mixed-use development node that provides most of the residents daily needs within a 15-minute walk from all the residents homes next slide within a short walk or bike ride people of all ages and abilities living in a 15-minute neighborhood have safe and convenient access to a wide variety of grocery and other retail stores coffee shops restaurants schools daycare facilities Parks Playing Fields public open spaces Community Gardens Civic amenities and more next slide this is after all how people live for all of human history up until a little over a hundred years ago when the automobile arrived on the scene and came to dominate the public Realm until that time all previous generations had lived in villages in towns and cities that allowed older people to move about safely on their own that allowed children to play in the street and that fostered chance conversations between Neighbors the street was a public living room next slide as the urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs said lowly unpurposeful and random as they appear sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life must grow although Jacobs wrote this in 1961 the concept remains as relevant today as ever next
slide the AAA team started their analysis using a what they call a 15-minute Walk Circle the radius of the 15-minute Walk Circle represents the distance that an average person can walk in about 15 minutes about three quarters of a mile here we have a 15-minute Walk Circle centered over our downtown next slide then after looking at a range of Social and environmental data the AIA team overlaid 15-minute walk circles over a map of the whole city this map shows nine overlapping walk circles each centered on a mixed use development node as the AIA team said in their final report quote the maps and drawings present within this section were created during our four day visit an hour and are intended to be conceptual and illustrative rather than prescriptive the intention was not to create detailed schematics but rather to spark inspiration and a new way of thinking about these areas next slide so we the local team enthusiastically support the development of 15-minute walkable mixed-use neighborhoods and believe that the location of the mixed-use neighborhood nodes merits more careful study and Community input next slide cities throughout history have always grown and changed organically because our present zoning codes tend to discourage mixed-use development they inhibit organic growth and change next slide we believe it's important to encourage the spontaneous development of mixed-use neighborhoods through revisions to our zoning code that would permit limited commercial uses on
Parcels currently zoned exclusively residential with uses and hours as appropriate next slide doing so would reintroduce the much needed element of liveliness of neighborliness and community into our residential neighborhoods next transportation next slide please the estat team titled this section reimagining Mobility at the August 5th community meeting the AIA team heard participants identify five key challenges that our roadway system presents here in Petaluma next they heard the community voice these concerns fragmented Bikeway network limited Crosstown connectivity motorists speeding through neighborhoods narrow sidewalks and unreliable Transit service now these are not revelatory Concepts we we local folks uh already know these realities these are our complaints though it gives us some reassurance to um to hear our concerns voiced by an outside expert next slide the first set of recommended actions in the final report is grouped Under The Heading remove barriers and first among them is fix Washington Street the report reads quote the city and its Partners must fix Washington Street to meet its goals related to climate resiliency Urban neutrality vehicle miles traveled connectivity and safety the report illustrates the big bold fix as a what they call a green ribbon of connected corridors a complete and Integrated Network that starts by transforming Washington Street and then our other four-lane arterials our strodes Eli Boulevard McDowell Boulevard and others
transforming them into green arders in this illustration a typical 100 foot wide roadway right-of-way is transformed into 33 feet for vehicles with wide planting areas and multi-use pathways on both sides next slide imagine Washington Street between say Petaluma Boulevard and McDowell Boulevard transformed next slide the report also calls for quote transforming gray corridors into healthy walkable bikeable resource-rich diverse corridors the transformed arterials would then be connected to our existing network of Creekside multi-use trails to create a complete and integrated Mobility Network linking all of our schools Parks playgrounds ball fields and Commercial districts next slide such a system is designed with consideration of the needs not just of bicycle Riders and pedestrians but also of drivers of all types of vehicles and users of all types of Mobility devices both self-powered and powered by electricity among the other recommendations in the final report three others stand out next slide first the AIA team identified our street design standards as being out of step with our intentions and with current best practices our street design standards were last updated in 1996.
the report reads quote best practices for Street design in the United States have evolved in profound ways since then especially in the Arenas of pride in the Arenas of prioritizing safe safety for active transportation and incorporating landscaping and green infrastructure next slide second the report recommends improving Transit reliability and frequency in order to encourage all residents and visitors to use Transit rather than drive and third next slide that we create a neighborhood traffic common program from the report quote in addition to more traditional traffic conning treatments such as curb extensions and speed humps the city should explore or continue to explore many traffic circles raised crosswalks decanes and one lane pinch points this illustration shows a clever and very simple solution it's just paint on pavement and I'll just digress for a minute the city is in the process of developing a neighborhood traffic common program but the range of traffic calming solutions that they are currently envisioning um is is far limited it's it's limited Beyond it doesn't include the ones that they are suggesting next slide so in summary our vision for a prosperous resilient regenerative City requires policy implementation that will facilitate necessary physical changes reconfigure streets re-wild and green streets neighborhoods and Parks reduce average car speeds allow varied uses in existing residential areas create mixed-use development course in convenient locations
de-emphasize our parking and reimagine the transit system to align With The Changes above next slide in summary the high-level recommendations we wish to reinforce and Advance are these one integrate the big bold ideas contained in the estat final report into all our guiding documents and the general plan among all of our guiding documents is certainly one of the most the most powerful so this is [Music] good to be presenting this to this group of people who actively work toward and remove barriers to creating mixed-use 15-minute neighborhood nodes in convenient locations and three fully commit to the goal of our 2008 bike and pedestrian master plan which is to build a safe comprehensive and integrated bicycle and pedestrian system throughout Petaluma that encourages bicycling and walking and is accessible to all next slide our future for all that it might or might not be is a shared future we're all in this together and we need to work together as a community to realize our shared vision and next slide so thank you for the opportunity to bring these this this family of ideas out into the public discourse um and thanks to the city of Petaluma for um for helping fund and support this whole effort thanks to our strategic partners and thanks to all the hard work and community members who have um Advanced this project to this stage and will continue to advance the the project route to incorporation in our guiding documents uh next slide that's all I have um so I hope that's um
that's fodder for to to Spur some discussion thank you Pete um this group doesn't usually need fodder but you're given an attorney and so I expect a robust conversation um but just as a reminder for folks we're going to have a few minutes for clarifying questions if you please limit your comments to questions at this point just to make sure you understood what Pete presented because we first want to have the give the public an opportunity to comment so that it informs the subsequent more detailed discussion that you will have shortly after public comment so any clarifying questions at this point when while folks think about that I just also want to recognize that Veronica oh is here with us um this evening I think maybe from very far away thank you Veronica for joining us um and so she may she's instrumental in putting this together and and may also be answering questions so thanks for being here and I noticed several of the gpac members names on that list of of our team members so thank you all also for your contributions um Mary question uh Pete could you clarify the um the radius is it a three-quarter mile radius or is it a three-quarter mile diameter Mary I I will not clarify for you uh it's a three the way they interpreted it it's a three-quarter mile radius and I'll just say that that as I familiarize myself with the concept of 15 minutes 50 15 minute neighborhood um it's it's not tightly defined there there are different definitions um different radii uh in some
interpretations it's the radius some it's the diameter some talk about walking or biking some definitions talk about Transit so it's it's really very fungible but in their interpretation it was a three-quarter mile radius thank you uh bill that was a great presentation but I was just uh curious um if we create 10 to 11 foot wide um halves for bicycles and pedestrians I wasn't clear some of the slides look like everybody's kind of mingled together and I'm just thinking that cyclists often if they're using it for transportation they're just not Meandering they're trying to get someplace they're going faster than pedestrians are is a 10 or 11 foot wide pathway sufficient to separate cyclists go in one speed and pedestrians going another uh bill I'm not I'm not a transportation expert but one of the things that I just wanted I'd want to point out is that is that you heard in the goal of our 2008 bike pedestrian master plan that it seemed to be anticipating the needs of cyclists and pedestrians and if we are looking ahead to to the Future uh in in a realistic way we need to think about all different kinds of Mobility devices both human powered and and electric and uh my my sense is that maybe 10 feet is not is not the best dimension but we need to accommodate you know skateboards and hoverboards and and young children on bicycles um you and I perhaps being more confident cyclists we might want to just ride in the road with with the big trucks and and buses um but but I don't think
we can we can neatly segregate all different types of Mobility devices each with their own separate separate Lanes I think we have to we have to recognize that at some point um all all of these different people on all these different devices will be just mashed together um and that will work as long as average speeds are kept Limited okay thanks I I think it's something that'll sort itself out as it progresses but uh just thinking out loud thanks Pete thanks any additional gpac clarifying questions before we go to public comment seeing none Daniel if you wouldn't mind facilitating public comment on this agenda item and then we'll come back for gpac discussion sure uh thanks Ron so we'll go ahead and reopen public comments uh please keep your comments specific to the agenda item um it was just presented on and um so with that if you'd like to make a public comment please utilize the raise hand feature in zoom and just let us know if you have any questions about how to do that um so with that uh hi Darren um looks like we have one hand raised therein so I'll go ahead and share my screen when the timer starts uh go ahead and the floor will be yours thank you hey thank you Daniel can you guys hear me okay foreign go ahead perfect uh well first I just want to thank Pete Veronica the whole team that put together the estat program the opportunity to have that impedimist beautiful I think the vision is beautiful we just saw this at tree committee last evening and I think one of the
biggest things for implementation is we're gonna have to figure out how to navigate the private property situation with Tree Care a lot of Street trees you know Public Works responsibility ends at the curb and that means that it's private property owners that have to care for Street trees so some of these beautiful corridors which is a design concept that you know seems so obvious is how great an idea it is but it's challenged by the fact that you know we would need to work with private property owners to have them plant the proper trees care for the trees even if the city wants to take over watering of the trees I've heard that the city would need to get an easement to use water coming off of that residence water line because there's not a separate water line that is just for the city so there's kind of some complications to navigate there and I think if we can get a handle on that you know by asking public works so I've had a lot of success with you know just as members of the public reaching out and saying hey we want more Street trees how can we work with Public Works to navigate the access issues the maintenance issues and then also you know having that personnel and Public Works staff who knows about Tree Care you know because if we're going to ask to expand the scope to take care of Street trees we have to make sure that there are Personnel on staff who can look at that and that would probably also mean changing budgets and it sounds like the kind of thing perfect for
General plan discussion uh I also want to make a quick comment on General plan process I just want to just get a gauge on you know I think there's a lot of discussion that still has to happen on land use and some of these big kind of meaty topics that the general plan really lays out that end up so setting the table for future development projects you know this giant questions of zoning and what different areas of the city we want to see land use designations and future Visions for so if any staff or gpac members have updates on when we might see some of those decisions or discussion items coming out of this process you know just so we don't get to the end and suddenly have to rush through some of the biggest kind of topics that have a huge impact like land use but anyway thank you so much for the presentation I love to see more trees and as I said I think as members of the public just reaching out on this issue in particular about navigating the street tree issue and seeing how Public Works could add this to their purview what that would look like right because they already take on so much and just learn about that process and kind of move the needle I think that would go a long way to implementing this incredible Vision so thanks for all your hard work great thank you for your comment um next up we have Dwayne so Dwayne whenever you're ready go ahead and unmute yourself and uh um I'll go ahead and start the timer whenever you're ready foreign are you there um you should
have the ability to unmute yourself great it just appeared on my screen can you hear me yes loud and clear thank you okay thank you um I was impressed with the description of downtown I'm a great fan of the downtown area of Petaluma but the descriptions of the various um nodes one of them describes the northeast corner of town and mentioned the fact that they have a grocery store and a number of restaurants the playground at playing fields um all in the um within 15-minute walking area and what hasn't been mentioned is how did that come to be the case that one place would be exceptional and uh on the east side and the South End would be obviously in need of exactly that type of a a Marketplace being created and so as to follow up as to how to create that which is admired on the northeast corner is how to create it on the Southeast Corner also I worry that um the financial situation is that some markets would be under pressure to close and I would like to see us design it so that the land that is Zone Market stays Market within 15 minutes of everybody's home that they're able to get a good fresh food not not sugar in booze that seems to be the specialty of some very small um drive-through markets I would point out also that's kind of out of the area here is that we have a a country where we give two thousand dollars a year according most sources uh to subsidize cars and the state gives us 600 a year to subsidize cars and this enormous subsidy to cars serves to undo all the
great work this committee is doing and how to how to get this stopped uh the subsidies to automobiles is is going to be a major project if we're going to uh deal with climate change and one third Point um oh it it appears that our smart people want everyone to drive across Washington in order to get over to the east side Smart Station to park and to ride and that's exactly the opposite of what this group attempted to do for Washington is to make it into a a single in each way and with lots of trees so it's it's a question is how we convince other government agencies to respect what we're trying to do here thank you great thank you very much for your comment Glenn and um next up we have Taryn uh so Taryn whenever you're ready go ahead and unmute yourself and I'll start the timer when you're ready thank you hi I'd like to um thank the community members who worked so hard for so many years starting back in 2020 I believe it was or was it late 1999 oh late 2019 thank you for volunteering and doing this without pay to provide this vision for our city that otherwise we would not have um I just really want to thank you it's excellent work um yesterday when you presented to us on the at the treat committee uh meeting um I asked this question so I'm asking it tonight um just to bring it up with a new audience um and not and not to um uh not specifically to the presenters and the citizens that did such excellent work and that question is what are we gonna do to close the gap in terms
of vision to translation to specifically what we want where to codes to ordinances to zoning to specifically where is that going to be in the general plan and specifically which language in the general plan earlier tonight I spoke about my concern that we're not given enough time we it this thing is due in less than a year take out vacation take out people not showing up to meetings um I do not want to see us with just one month two months to review this this is the kind of thing that we need to see the general plan draft now we need to see the design standards now because you want to look at it you want to reflect on this Vision you want to discuss it across different committees as individual gpac members you want to discuss it with people that aren't in our town you want to think about it you want to sleep on it you want to come back and read it again you want to go to another document the river acts as an enhancement plan study that well exactly how should we tweak that and make that more concrete so that this Vision has a better chance of happening you guys the devil is in the detail and unless we have I swear a good nine ten months to be looking at this document these documents that are past due and looking at the language and refining the language discussing the language and re-refining the language we're not going to have the Excellence that we deserve we don't want to miss these opportunities and the devil's in the details and when it comes to developments and all the
legislation that's being passed in Sacramento that bypasses Community input bypasses public hearings just moves us all to ministerial approvals we are not going to have a prayer unless it's specifically in the general plan so please talk about that demand it thank you great thank you Taryn for your comments um so with that I see no more hands raised so I'll go ahead and stop sharing turn it back over to Ron and Christina thanks thank you Daniel and thank you members of the public um I was going to start by asking Pete Dave anyone else who was on the estat committee it was was did you guys come with any particular questions or discussion prompts for the gpac if not um Christina and other City staff and I came up with a few that we thought would be interesting to explore what I wanted to First give see if you guys had any particular questions or anything in particular you wanted to to ask the Jeep go ahead that was me yes please thank you okay and answer your question Ron I was probably considering myself more a gpac member this evening than uh than an estab member uh but I did make a list of things I wanted to respond to P regarding um is now the right time to say those or should I just get back in line with the other gpac members it will give you a distance trying to do the right thing here um I'll start with one where I'm going to quibble a little bit and I I apologize to Pete for not having to raise this earlier I really should have I don't understand why we talk at several
points in that slide presentation about unreliable Transit um I chair the transit committee the reality is we missed about it eight or ten trips last fall because we were just playing out of drivers in the aftermath of coven but we are probably more reliable than we've been in the history of Petaluma now if you want to argue that we aren't frequent enough and we don't have enough coverage absolutely I agree with you um so I I would like to see the word unreliable disappear from that slide deck going forward um Now to turn to the positive the one word Pete said there that I just absolutely agree with is integrated two quick stories uh an early presentation of this I had a good friend a neighbor of mine who's very active in a local community come to me and say it can't possibly work and it well there's a story that's come out recently about you know 50-minute neighborhoods fail when you can walk five minutes to get a cappuccino but your Barista has to drive 30 minutes to get to his job and that's absolutely the point she was going to make unless we have more people in town who can staff these retail nodes the whole concept doesn't make sense so we get back to the integrated integrated can't just be creating retail nodes it's creating housing options affordable housing options for the people who are going to staff the notes to make it all work have a place to live where they can walk to their jobs also not just the customers but everybody um I guess similarly in the transit
committee last week I heard the comment of what if my preferred dentist or my insurance agent is not in my node do I need to get in my car anyway and the answer is no we need a robust enough transit system where you walk a couple of blocks the bus comes along within less than 10 minutes and you get to the node where your services are and your car still stays in the garage so again we just can't do retail it has to be the whole picture in fact really I would say this fundamentally reworks the way Petaluma exists it's not just upon applying a Band-Aid here and there this is completely changing how we live our lives we're gonna have to get our hands around that I'm not even sure I'm there yet but I know it has to happen um next point is I heard zoning raised I think maybe misobates comment touched on that if we get to far into where the no go how do we zone for it what does it look like I think we missed the point what the future is going to look like we don't know there are going to be things that change in our world over the next 20 30 years as we adjust to climate change that we are going to be shocked by if we try to assume we know too much about the future and get too precise in our zoning we're gonna get it wrong there is a movement afoot now and I'm going to hear one of the speakers just the next week and a half on this topic saying that zoning has been a fundamental failure for the last century in this country and we should be greatly reducing it or completely rolling it
back I'm not sure I'm there yet personally but it makes a lot of sense in this case we should be rather than trying to say how the future should be we should be getting ourselves out of the way and letting the future organically evolve in the way it needs to to meet to meet what we need it to be um and then lastly I want to touch on the on the question that bill walpert raised earlier about how do we mix the different modes of traffic Pete said speed management absolutely correct I'd even go further to say that the whole 20 is plenty movement is exactly what we need no more than 20 miles an hour on no streets except to very few and and even at 20 miles an hour applies to bikes nobody goes more than 20 miles an hour if you're a bike who's a serious biker and you can meld in with cars of 20 miles an hour great if you're a kid with training wheels you get in the sidewalk we just we we sort ourselves out we make it all work but we have to stop we have to get away from the people driving 40 miles an hour through a residential neighborhood thank you for the thumbs up Pete okay that's what I've got thank you foreign thank you Dave and um Mary I see your hand up but I also saw that Veronica went off mute for a second um Veronica were there any other things that you wanted to add um hi everyone good evening I I just wanted to you know also frame this discussion about um the 15-minute neighborhoods and living streets as just a new way of us thinking about um having access to resources
for our daily lives and as people become more remote working more remotely and that as our work becomes more local that we will require more amenities so we're actually providing a service through this process to our community and yeah just looking forward to the discussion tonight thanks Veronica Mary hi um yeah definitely I want to appreciate Veronica and all the hard work that she has put into this over the years and Pete for pulling this presentation together and other members who are going around and presenting to different committees um a couple of things I wanted to share um I'd like to put in the chat a link to a 15-minute city that was really spearheaded by Professor Carlos Moreno who is um French well he's Franco Columbian scientist and um won the world habitat award for promoting 15-minute cities and the mayor of Paris adopted it and it's been adopted in nine countries numerous cities and um this isn't a brand new idea in fact it's probably a quite an ancient idea um it turns out that uh in the just 70 years we've become all our cities have become oriented to the point where this is what we considered normal and thinking any other way is like taking something away though this is a fairly recent development in um in in City history um I love the fixed Washington first as the critical connectivity between um our different parts of town and how what a great test case this would be to Pro even if we could possibly prioritize it but it should go front and center um and
I I do really I agree with everything Dave Alden said and I also agree with what Taryn is asking for in the sense that there's so much there's so much meat that is getting developed that we're not able to to look at and um and and respond to or get ahead of that is concerning to me as well but just on the topic of the the 15-minute neighborhoods um it's really good if you listen to this this uh you well I don't think it's a YouTube but it's a video um news video I think you'll see there are some challenges there's pushback in the community there's there's confusion and and worry and fear because as Pete said it is major major change uh to how we look at developing our Our Town um so anyway that's that's what I'd like to say and let me know if it is possible to to share the link or how to do that thanks Mary if you want to email it to me I can share my screen or and also email it out to gpac folks thank you while I'm talking um I want to talk about the schedule point a little bit uh unlike the housing element there is no statutory deadline for the adoption of the general plan and so we are working to Define like I mentioned earlier a schedule that allows for for full discussion of all of the topics in the general plan uh and also aims for a completion that's not too far out um so I don't have that final estimated time uh you know we are needing to respond to Extended modeling timelines and all kinds of things um and so that's going to be baked into that schedule that we're
gonna that we're gonna bring out next um I also want to note that you know it has been helpful and the city has been working with a staff folks from since the beginning of the Grant application and and works to try to help facilitate the meeting Etc and so these are topics that we have been mentioning in these meetings and also have been thinking about in a lot of detail as we put together those those General plan policies that we'll all be talking about in more details soon Jesse please go ahead oh good thanks just a few um comments um and thoughts and reactions um definitely love that Jane Jacobs quote Pete on um community and social capital and I made me immediately think about how much our built environment and what we're doing with the general plan affects Mental Health and Social Services um and it also made me immediately think about this new report from the surgeon general's office about the epidemic of loneliness um and how we can try to address that in Petaluma with our Urban Design and how we're yeah so I think that's all really tied together and really key um especially coming out of the pandemic um the other thing I was thinking just a little bit about remote work the comment I think Veronica made but tying that to David and your comment about being flexible because so much of the remote jobs are no longer so the remote job um Trend remote work may be past its prime there's a lot of new data on that and people getting called back to the office I think less than
10 of jobs on LinkedIn are now remote um so I think to Dave Dave Walden's comment trying to remain adaptable with with what we plan it's very hard to predict the future no one predicted the pandemic no one predicted remote work being so um on the present and then just then going kind of going down in popularity so just I think thinking about our land uses and making sure we're planning for a flexible future also really hard to predict how AI is going to impact jobs um I'm I work in data science so I'm like really thinking about a lot about that um and um I'm also thinking a lot about like autonomous vehicles and other types of like micro Mobility that we can't even imagine that might pop up on the street so yeah just finding ways to maintain adaptability I think is key here and um but I I love the 15-minute concept and the three-quarter Mile and um as an access framework and um agree that it's with some other comments it's really beautiful and definitely can help us think about how our communities can be more cohesive so kudos to you guys for putting all that work in thank you Jesse Roberto I see your hand raised yeah so uh once again thank you Pete for a great presentation I want to start off with the chart that referenced the visual of all the linkages between the 15-minute you know walking radiuses uh for the communities I think when looking at that just at a quick glance when you flash through it it theoretically it makes a lot of sense around kind of the more perimeter
areas right really you know I'm looking I'm kind of thinking realistically of how East Washington is currently impact impacted by being probably the most flow rate of traffic we get and so when you flash to East Washington and you know and you and then there's that theory that visual of like if we shorn it you know let's narrow down to one lane on each side I I think it's a great vision you know we all want that but in reality it's like our highest you know dense is kind of you know traffic area and I'm wondering if you know showing that and what you know and kind of implanting that as like yes this is what we're gonna do might be kind of counter-intuitive of what other risk factors May Lie by you know shortening it right away um on that note though right we haven't really talked about you know this one's kind of a very extreme idea but you know second tier making it 3D right like if he's Washington is a very done Syria with high traffic and uh to Jesse's point about work from home right that's I I've also started noticing that's going away so if we are right now A commuter town we kind of have to make a hybrid model of this right and um and also to let it be adaptable for the future so I've never really thought about maybe you know making East watching a second tier but what if you had you know lower tier all that roadway and stuff like that and then upper tier where you get all the Sun and make it more public accessible you really negate everything else from that traffic
standpoint right so um and then if you couple that with all these new units and housing developments right making that shorter doesn't really make sense right so um I don't think it's a good assumption to say that our main you know East Washington Road should be limited I think it just needs to be reformatted take a little bit advantage of 3D space that we have um and especially with everything else that we have going on so just wanted to throw that in there because for me it really does not make sense to make it shorter or sorry uh yeah short in the in the width sense of reducing the lane traffic um I think it's gonna would cause more problems in the near term with the hopes of being successful long term so that's my comment thank you Roberto um Josh and then Bill Reiner yeah thank you um I'm I'm a little uh I'm struck by that presentation uh and really deeply appreciative of all the work of the folks who made it happen and contributed along the way um really the the way that it communicated a vision I know that over the last however long it's been that we've been working together on this uh we we engage Vision a lot uh but I thought felt like that presentation brought together a lot of threads in a way that that I found pretty impactful um specific recommendations um appreciate them and I I was definitely taken by the boldness of like all right East Washington um and I think that can be uh on on their tactician but uh I love that as like an evocative as a thought exercise
at the very least because if we can do it there we can do it anywhere um I wanted to appreciate uh I never considered what planning would look like without zoning I just wanted to I think Dave Alden mentioned that that's a thing that's uh I hadn't conceived of that um and just a broader point about planning for in such a way that allows for possible futures um you know being fairly flexible in our approaches not said uh the specific stuff about work from home I just wanted to observe that yeah who we really don't know what's going to end up there uh what that's going to end up like I think it probably will ebb and flow but one of the things that I tried to remind myself in this process is that we're sort of Designing for a possible future and like there's certain ones that we're trying to select over others um and remote work is is one of those things that it's climate friendly makes a lot of sense for as many jobs where it can be done so that said again planning who knows uh we got to be fairly flexible and I choose detailed in our thinking again thank you everybody for the work on that thanks Josh uh Bill and then Ally and Kevin thank you for your patience great thanks um yeah also big thanks I've you know been a strong proponent for 15 minute neighborhoods for a long time and even when I consider five five minute neighborhoods where I bought my own house was because I literally can go get nearly everything within five minutes and I think that's even a model that's
achievable here in Petaluma um a couple of things have been brought up about you know how do we accomplish this and how do we codify it and I think um a couple of things first of all Pete is right on I mean the street network is the public realm and that is you know and you pointed to our existing Street standards that is exactly the first step in um in how to get this implemented um I think the thing that this General plan committee and the Consulting should be doing really one of the main things is looking at our circulation plan and redefine the hierarchy of all of our our corridors and we need new Street standards you know we're looking at Washington Street and the section that you showed Pete um that had the 13-foot bio swales and you know I think that would be great on Washington Street say east of Mcdowell but I would like to see McDowell or um Washington between say the highway and the boulevard is much more urban you know and um and it's more walkable it's it's slower sure and it's narrower but it's it's it's not a Parkway it's not a Boulevard but you know in some places that'll work so again I think really this committee what we should be thinking about in terms of is a new Street hierarchy new standards and um you know answer Bill Wilbert's question about how do we integrate these well maybe we have different corridors that are specialized for different Mobility types but at the same time our main streets are you know comfortable for everybody um so then you know
in towards that I think we have in our town we have the smart code which is a great place to look for a lot of these answers and about to what David said about allowing for flexibility and the way we do that is kind of more more form-based you know transect based planning so it's it's a form of zoning it's been adopted we have it here in town but it absolutely allows for um you know Mobility variety and also for flexibility in building types and we just you know we do that using the the transect that I'm not sure if how many people are familiar with it but we have it already adopted in our smart code which sort of defines where our densities are where our larger buildings are where our you know smaller buildings and neighborhoods are it's a great standard and I know I think I've had some conversations with the consultant team that okay we're not really doing form-based codes but I think if we looked at that smart code and thought what problems do we have with it why isn't it you know why hasn't everybody's gotten sold on it and try and solve those I think it's really going in the direction that that this presentation and that the 15-minute neighborhoods concept needs to go so I would like to look there it's a couple things I think is is looking at form-based Zoning for the city at least in our major corridors and thinking in a transect basis I think reimagining our our corridors which we've been talking about all along but actually developing the street standards in the
general plan and have a hierarchy of streets that really focuses on these changes um so my next thing I would just say um I kind of wanted to ask the consultant team if they're understanding and their Direction that we're taking these policy Frameworks as they get developed if it's consistent with what this presentation showed so I think that's a question for you Christina's I mean are you in agreement with that or is it partially the way you're going or what what would you say sorry put me on the spot right I can take Christina off the spot I can answer that if you want I mean the simple answer is yes I was in preparation for the meeting I was reviewing the report and the presentation and I think on just about every Point there's related elements in the policy Frameworks so um and that's should be surprising because each of the consultant team members were provided the estat report as soon as it was published and and asked to integrate relevant Concepts as appropriate and so um I think you'll be pleased when you see those uh drafts and how things are reflected so um one thing that I'm going to lift up is going to be an ongoing challenge which we're still going to be talking with the city about yet is the integration point that they've made earlier for the time being the policy Frameworks are organized by subject and that doesn't necessarily do them Justice in a way that particularly like when you think about the integrated nature of 15-minute nodes so but simply answered
your question bill is yes um I wanna I noticed Veronica you raised your hand I think we'd like to make this a conversation discussion between stat team members and gpac members so if you had a if you raised your hand because you had a comment or response in response to what another gpac member had had mentioned I'd welcome you to yes thanks so much I just wanted um and then I want to temper what Ron said go ahead okay um I just wanted to um I don't know if people heard me but when I was talking I um earlier um I know Jesse mentioned that I talked about remote work and I said and localizing our work so our whole goal as climate leaders is to create a work um you know the you know localized work so that people don't have to travel because right now our figures are off the charts for people leaving Petaluma and and entering Petaluma um I think it's in the in the number of between sixteen thousand out and twenty thousand in or something like that every day so I just wanted to clarify that it was both and thanks yeah thanks Veronica and that's something that a lot of planners are looking at too is jobs housing balance you know do it may not be all the same housing and all the same same jobs we are trying to have some some balance there um I also wanted to say to what Ron was saying is yes all of this is reflected in the general plan it's not all reflected verbatim coming out of the estat recommendations we don't for example at this point have a section of Washington Street talking
about its transformation and we're not necessarily thinking about precisely the nodes that the s-dot group identified but in in spirit and concept it's all carried through one more question do um Street standards to what level will the gpac or the general plan be addressing that I I know we'll have a circulation element we'll have a new uh probably a street Network map quarters map will we be talking about the actual Street sections and standards okay and that would come in future development code revision okay but it's something we can be thinking about and providing policy that will drive that yeah I'm not sure that's a black and white there's that I I think that's an open question still because there's a way to address the form and function of a street without necessarily defining the standards in the general plan um and I I think we're going to make every effort with the GP to be very clear about what the standards should reflect without as folks mentioned earlier being overly rigid and establishing you know engineering drawings and a general plan that really has a much longer time frame and and and the standards probably should be a little more adaptable over time so um it's definitely top of mind the question is kind of how best to do that within the GP so um and just quickly to to Washington it is it does feature somewhat prominently in the draft Transportation policy framework so it's not that we're not tapping a hit on but it certainly is a a central concern knowing
that something needs to be it's best to be clear about what the future of Washington should be so um Ali thank you for again for your patience and then Kevin hi thanks um and please let me know if I cut out I was unstable earlier today um so yeah thank you for this uh presentation and I think the 15-minute neighborhoods is the great idea um I always like to think about you know the downtown node that we have as a 15-minute neighborhood and how popular that is and how many people from out of town are aware of it and people love it um and I think that messaging about the 15 minute neighborhood is really important so that people can understand and identify with something and feel like it's they're gaining something with a 15-minute neighborhood rather than having something taken away um and really understanding that having a 15-minute neighborhood is actually more convenient rather than oh you're slowing the traffic down you're taking away my parking space it's actually you don't have to deal with traffic like you don't have to deal with finding parking right so I like to make sure that we're um talking about it in those kinds of ways um and I'm just gonna also jump on the bandwagon of fixing Washington is a must I mean I keep saying like if that's one thing I can do before I die um that is going to be where I'd like to to die on that Hill because it's it's unsafe right now it is you know a socioeconomically unsafe it connects different racial groups different uh income groups
and it is just it's a barrier right now and it's dangerous and it's not okay to have that be one of the major corridors in a town like Petaluma um but I think also it's hard when we're talking about these big long-term implementation plans for people to understand what that means um without actually seeing some of these like chicanes what you know who knows what that is without seeing that in real life um and I think there's a really great opportunity especially with the general plan maybe being extended out another year for some of those treatments to be able to be done so that people can see them feedback can be provided community members can see what's going on the DPW actually had a really great Zoom meeting regarding the um Garfield Street repaving project where um neighbors logged onto the zoom and were talking about the speeding problems that they have with cut through traffic from folks going to leaving and going to Casa Grande um for for school times and they were talking about maybe putting chicanes or to you know small roundabouts in to test that as a demonstration project and see um how you know how that works and how the neighbors might feel about that so I just think there's some really good opportunities that um that we should all be thinking about now of what can be done while we're we're still working on the general plan um and the implementation pieces and I think that just gets to my last and final comment that I wanted to make is about the implementation I
know in the 15-minute neighborhoods presentation was given by the estac to the council last year um that there were some focus on sir you know this is a great idea but how are we going to pay for all this right how are we going to implement all of this and I think that it is important to talk about that and to give people an idea of how can we implement this and maybe even start talking about all right you know we're gonna pick one node and we're going to start implementing it there because it's gonna take a lot of money it might take some um you know government subsidy it might take the city subsidizing some affordable housing there it might take subsidizing some some small businesses there that that you know for economic development but it it's not I don't think it's going to be convincing for people to just anticipate that the the laissez-faire I could you know Market is going to create all of these 15-minute nodes or you know maybe in 25 or 30 years the general plan will create these nodes and that will be great I think people want to see what is it going to do now thanks yeah Evan if I could just make a quick comment before you hear yours I just I appreciate your second to last comment noting that much of some of this could be implemented while waiting for it to be integrated into the city's policy code and Regulatory framework and I appreciated that about the report um page I think was back at the end page 51 or so there were a lot of ideas in the report specifically
for how to begin implementation right away with demonstration and other types of projects and I was that was one of the questions I came to this conversation with is and maybe that's later for the folks who've been involved is like what do you have in mind in the near term for how to begin getting some of these ideas out there and testing them while we are continuing with uh with the planning process but uh first Kevin yeah hi um first of all what great ideas um couldn't agree um more with uh what Ali said in terms of piloting things making them real making them physical even if they're not totally built out and you know it's interesting I'm a big student of architectural history and if you look at Rome um uh Pope 6 disc back in the 16th 15th century went around and he said there should be a node here a node here a note here and those are all the great squares of Rome and they all relate to each other but it wasn't until like 250 years later that they were actually built out but during that time there was an obelisk in almost all of them and that Obelisk said this is a node it's not done yet but it's going to be in the future and it took 250 years the last one I think was The Piazza del popolo and uh it told everybody what the plan was and they stuck to it so I think it's it you know even if it's if it's doing some sort of striping on the intersection or something that make people realize physically that this is the plan and that the reason for that thing being there is that
in the future we're going to do x y and z um I really liked um Roberto I think it was Roberto's comment about going 3D um you know it reminds me I know Petaluma is a good deal smaller than New York but The High Line in New York where people circulate on a street above the traffic um it wouldn't have to cover the whole of of uh uh Washington Street it could be elevated areas my problem with I think what is shown in the report is wonderful but there are still so many people going down Washington Street because it's the only connection to the freeway and um even though I do believe that in the long run people will not work five days a week because I think that experiment of going back to the office frankly is going to fail the people will see no reason to go someplace to do what they could do at home in many instances but we still have tons and tons of people going onto the freeway and how do we deal with that and I'm not sure that I mean I think there'll be there's already wailing the nation of teeth when when um this is discussed uh with you know people who think of streets only for cars um it's going to be a hard sell and maybe maybe thinking about it three-dimensionally is is the way to go um you know if we don't want to if we can't restrict that roadway so much also I think it gets a lot of enemies and you're pie in the sky and you're crazy um when they are confronted with the idea you know they'll say oh it's already so crowded on on uh Washington Street there's going to
be a lot of people it's going to take a while to convince let's put it that way I think that that could happen in the future but I think it's better to start with the nodes than to go too crazy on Washington Street right away because I think you're going to get a lot of opposition thank you Kevin ah I was going to be surprised if there were no more hands raised thank you Brent for saving me Brent go ahead yeah I wanna express some appreciation to Pete for that really great presentation and the team that put all that together over the years extremely impressive I'm very intrigued by the multiple Greenway concept where you know to take us off the topic of what to do with Washington Street but to have multiple corridors that are um friendly to alternative forms of transportation whatever they may be um that's that's very interesting and and in treating from especially my perspective as someone who lives on on the east side of town um and how to access um other areas including beyond my 15-minute neighborhood um but I think at this point I I really sort of want to reserve judgment or endorsement on on this concept or or how high I I wanna um support it relative to other priorities at least until um you know we've been able to consider additional policies as part of the overall General plan um and I I guess my lens is a little bit you know I'm a newbie to the committee so I'm trying to still digest some of the priorities that that we're grappling with um and someone mentioned uh
you know what is the cost to transition you know these streets into Greenways and the cost of Washington Street or maybe creating an elevated uh Road over Washington Street I'd like to understand that in the context of you know what is our overall cost for for drastically improving our transit system and and electrifying buses um as as we must under the the Innovative clean Transit regulation that that's been adopted by the California air sources board um uh you know how how do we support um low-income households in Petaluma Electrify their homes um and adapt to to this this changing energy construct that we're going to have over the next few years so I'm I'm very intrigued by this concept but I really like to understand some of the other elements the general plan and other priorities that that are that are going to necessarily necessitate funding and and what priorities all those line up and thank you Brett um I see Pete your hand raised um and yeah I was going to reinvite folks who were involved with the estat initiative to respond or comment on anything they've heard from gpac Members I also see Christine's hand or Chris's hand raised go ahead Pete uh thank you uh I have a lot that I could say in response but I just wanted to bring into this into this the discussion this one idea that one that Washington Street is on our is part of our eye injury Network it is known that it there are many fatalities and serious automobile related collisions on Washington Street so that
that's one strong reason to fix it but keep in mind this idea that if we were to narrow Washington Street to one lane in each Direction instead of two then our signalized intersections would be candidates for roundabouts and in in communication with Ken eichstat our chief traffic engineer there is a wealth of data supporting the the idea of roundabouts in as Oppo instead of signalized intersections that that roundabouts move traffic much much more quickly or much more steadily and smoothly than signalized intersections and if there's one thing that everybody in Petaluma agrees on is that traffic is terrible especially on Washington Street so so it's a little bit counterintuitive but there is the potential that by reducing the number of lanes we could actually increase the overall speed of getting across town that's all I wanted to say thanks thanks Pete uh Chris can you hear me okay here so great evening I'm learning a lot I think it's really exciting um the one thing I want to bring up and I there was a news release there's a study that was out this week I just sent a link and a copy to Veronica it talked about 15-minute cities around the world and that one of the things that really needs to be paid attention to is the quality of the sidewalks that if the sidewalks are not great for accessibility they're not safe that it's sort of um blows the whole thing out of the water that you know it's like right down to the to the basics like when you walk out your front door and you
want to take advantage of that 15-minute neighborhood how easy is it to walk to get to where you want to go um based on all kinds of accessibility issues so I mean I'm a newbie to this whole thing I don't really have anything much more to add I'm excited I I think the concept is great it seems overwhelming and I you know I love the idea of what is planned or vision for Washington Street and I can just imagine the the uh the vitriol that is going to be raised with that and I think it's just something that if this you know this is a concept that we really want to get behind that that people need to think about that and think about messaging I mean it's it'll it's going to be a it'll be a hullabaloo but I think it's probably a hullabaloo that's worth getting into if planning's anything it's a hullabaloo um I'm gonna turn it to Veronica and then the two bills thanks so much um I just wanted to make a comment about just our framing of this concept and you know trying to Grapple with all the limitations that it it seemingly provides for our brains to you know get around because we have such a different land use right now but um it's really not a bubble it's a platform and um and thinking of it as not a bunch of restrictions but as a platform to an entry to solutions for our equity and climate goals for our transportation goals um it's really a it's it's a nice um umbrella that has to be defined by this group and people who are involved at the city who are doing the planning I think
um there's a lot of neighborhoods around the world that don't provide amenities for the people who live in them and um if we're if we're Equity focused in in our general planning then we have to look at what does exist for people you know what is life what you know looking at the user looking at the experience every day for people when they you know get out of their house what is it you know how do they how are they living so I think um it's it's kind of scary and exciting at the same time just having something so new so I just wanted to encourage everyone that we're all in this together as Pete said thank you Pete and yeah I think we can just also realize that we're all ambassadors for this type of vision and that the community came together over 350 people participated in this in one of the largest community events ever held in Petaluma and that it was it was uh the results time and time again people said the same things and that this report reflects those Community inputs thanks thank you uh Bill Wilbur yeah I I guess I want to tag on to what Veronica just said um and before she spoke I I was thinking that I don't want to see us get sidetracked on figuring out how do we Implement all these things because that's not our job the this General plan that we're creating is a it's a vision document so what Pete has presented today is is exactly what what we're trying to accomplish as Veronica said there's been tremendous community outreach and involvement to develop the different
aspects of this vision but it's up to our our zoning code our smart code our specific plans to implement these things and then get into the into the Weeds on how do we actually do this but that's not our job our job is to create the vision for where we want to go into the future and and I think we're on track so I'm just I just want to encourage everybody don't get discouraged by what feels overwhelming right now because we don't we don't really have to deal with it right now what we want is a vision for where we want to go and how we want to live our lives and what kind of quality do we want to create for everybody so that's my comment thank you Bill Bill Reiner I agreed thank you Bill for the perspective there I uh you know good setup for this I want to just throw out a concept which I think is going to require a lot of suspension of reality and and feedback and on what Bill said about creating the vision and looking you know to the Future not figuring it out but we've been talking about a lot about Washington Street but we're kind of talking about it in the sense of it's a corner that connects east and west and connects people to the freeway and really what I see is um Petaluma you know we all agree it's divided East and West somewhat but I think Washington is more than just a connector it really needs to be a node itself and a new Main Street you know with the library and the fairgrounds there are a lot of services along Washington right now but it doesn't feel like Main
Street and I think that's a lot of it has to do with the form of the buildings but it sure could over time you know if every new proposal kind of that's accepted it has something that brings to a node or to the center of a town over time Washington Street should be on Main Street it should move traffic sure but it should also feel like the center of town because it is geographically you know the center of town rather than you know we have our Historic downtown we have shopping centers on the east side but it would be great if more than just a connector that it was Main Street you know so that's you know taking a big leap but it's a vision go ahead Mary okay um thank you yeah I agree with what the uh Bill and Bill said um hey this is just a question um Darren had brought this up in public comment and Chris had mentioned it um one of the about the sidewalks about Street trees about responsibility is there a mechanism to change um and make the city responsible and I mean this in the sense of you know getting some consistency instead of this Patchwork that you find in downtown streets um on the sidewalks and who you know the trees and getting a real robust uh Urban treescape I are there cities that do um take that responsibility um you know from the into the public realm is that a possibility for us name not a tree not a tree expert is anyone else who's been involved in the tree efforts locally you know the answer to that question it you know responded I just wanted to say you
know there's something I've been tracking for a long time and um there are certainly a lot of communities and I can name a few examples that have taken on the urban forestry as a public infrastructure thing and they've um been very successful and um it's certainly something we could do and so I think that should be another goal Mary as you and I have been talking about through this open space and natural resources and everybody trees should be be elevated and should be accepted as City infrastructure and um like just like you said and I think we can so it's been done there are examples we should talk more about that yeah thank you a little bit differently Dave please go ahead well it's not directly responsive to the street question or a free question but it's related to that um one of the points of controversy in Petaluma is that we still rely on the property owner to maintain sidewalk as we heard said earlier today if the sidewalks are broken the whole 50-minute neighborhood falls apart there are cities in California I just recently learned Concord is one of them that does make sidewalk maintenance a city responsibility I'm not proposing it for Petaluma because of the way Prop 13 treats our city but those are the kind of obstacles we need to overcome and start moving things like sidewalks and trees back into the city purview thanks thanks Dave uh Darren we had public comment we wouldn't normally we take it again I suppose if a city would like but we'd like to First Complete
the gpac discussion do I see any other hands raised from gpac Members or our guests from the estat team or do we want to do we want to share the questions that we put together they've actually been thoroughly addressed one was General reactions anything surprising uh we may be missing another was about what they thought of the two most the two of the most transformative ideas 15 minute note and converting Washington Street and the last was you know what what ideas do you have for how to implement this in the near term while it works its way through the planning process before we move on I do kind of want to dig into the 15-minute node a little bit more um because the the estat group when they came they intentionally chose to locate nodes on on public property or on you know non-residential property because they didn't want to get into the question of rezoning or somebody moving or or something like that you know everybody everybody owns their parcel but you know Pete used a little bit different language for example and was saying you know maybe we could integrate some commercial into residential neighborhoods or allow some commercial in residential neighborhoods and really what this concept is about is is allowing a little bit of evolution in some of our residential neighborhoods that are you know where where there may be houses right now um and and there's no top of taking away anybody's control of their property but it does mean some change you know we have many of us grown
up or lived in these monocultural Suburban neighborhoods for quite a long time you know they've been in place for quite a long time and so it's a it's a fairly radical you could say or it could be a big change to allow those neighborhoods to begin to evolve um you know they haven't been in place forever and so it is really interesting to think about that future just like Chris said it could cause a big hullabaloo to say you know maybe it's time for these neighborhoods to begin to allow to uh you know to allow to evolve allow a little bit of change um because where we're talking you know as we're talking about infill development Etc et cetera we're talking about new things happening in the existing Urban form um rather than like a new 15-minute node somewhere we're not creating a completely new neighborhood this is the change of an existing neighborhood does anybody have any thoughts about that I see Veronica's hand is up in Dave please Veronica go ahead help Veronica do you put your hand down or your can you sorry it was moving around so I couldn't find my cursor sorry um no I just had a quick comment about um just the idea of of creating um there was an earlier comment about you know implementation and some idea about um somehow identifying some some places or districts or um nodes that already exist and then trying to thicken those with amenities or you know things that would be identified as you know the definition of what what amenities are for Petaluma like what is kind
of our list um I think could be a really good exercise to figure out how how those different neighborhoods could um provide more amenities for its residents in conjunction with you know private property owners um starting the conversation about creating places and place making thank you Dave what did you want to add in the last I guess during the course of this meeting I've heard a couple of strong towns ideas brought up not that there was a they were tied to strong challenge but I thought they were worth sort of reminding people of the strong counts philosophy with regard to what you said a few minutes ago about changes to neighborhoods he is 10 of strong counts is no neighborhood should be immune from incremental change on the other hand no neighborhood should be subject to cataclysmic change that's the only way you build wealth and then earlier this evening Ron used the phrase Strode and I don't know how many of you have heard that word before or maybe you don't know what what came from what it really means if you go back to what strong Town says they Define we have two kinds of streets we should have two kinds of streets streets that are the places you build wealth commercial office even residential you know fat wealth of family life community life so Kentucky Street might be the best Street in town but a lot of us live on things that function the streets and then roads are places that connect places where wealth is built the connect collections of streets a road is the
ultimate road is a freeway uh a Strode then is something that tries to do both you have businesses along it but you're also conveying people to town and as as the founder of strong cancer would say it's like a futon it's a bad couch that turns into a bad bed it just can't possibly work so just a way to think about the concept thanks Dave Roberto please go ahead no I'm glad you brought that comment up Christina because those were some thoughts that were running through my head about what would be some of the impacts on kind of the existing architecture of just the design right because over these last two years and a half we've been kind of uh I want to say bounded by not this type of philosophy right so you're almost looking at if you know this is a big assumption right like but if this would be the model what are some of the architectural change that we would need to implement uh I guess to adjust over the last two years and one that comes to mind right like we spent a lot of time about talking about housing development and where they were going to go Etc and so I don't have it's not really an answer it's more of like a comment but when you're when you describe that I was thinking of those facts or like okay this is a great idea but we have not been tailoring or like a discussion at all towards like hey let's try to aim for this type of model and everything that we designed for the changes housing you know streets Pathways you know and then based on a different Baseline of an
architectural design as a city and so yeah those are just my thoughts because it's it's a it's a huge change especially when you look at it's like okay what currently exists are we gonna have to like demo some houses to make room for this and this or stuff like that to have accessibility you know um in different areas and so yeah so just want to express some thoughts based on what you said so thank you thank you it could be it's a bit of a different paradigm uh all right Ellie please go ahead sorry trying to find my mute button um yeah I like the question and I I liked um Veronica's extra comment about thinking about what the actual list of amenities would need to be because I think that um you know box those amenities could fit in could look a lot different depending on where the different nodes are and you know maybe right now there's a an underutilized piece of land that could accommodate many kinds of different structures or talking about Place making and thickening I mean we've got a really good opportunity coming up here with the new skate park on the east side right I think that'll be um really a vital um node for the community and there will be a lot of opportunity potentially for you know intergenerational activities to build on what's already going on there and it'll bring a lot of people I mean I don't know I talked to some skate folks that are like in their 40s which is you know like oh people in their 40s are going there with their children who are you know five
or ten years old wow this is you know great everybody can do the same thing it's like pickleball I guess you know so it's just the opportunities to have different things that different age groups that are participating in maybe there are some commercial uses there maybe there's a coffee shop next to the skate park because then you know people can go utilize that too it's just it doesn't have to be the same thing in every node it's not doesn't need to be this like Cookie Cutter this is what a 15-minute neighborhood is and I think that was you know another comment about not being too prescriptive about what um what we're trying to talk about here so it can kind of organically form and maybe you know the exact amenities in one node are a little bit different than what is in a different node things Ally all right Mary please go ahead I'll just make this quick um the just looking at the different use for example the graphic that Pete showed with the circles it's a great way to start thinking about it and go into a circle and see what's there there's a park but there's no uh place to there's no small office building or there's no chiropractor there's no doctor's office or there's no small grocery store or there's no Cafe but maybe some of them have one or two of those things um and but where is the school in this in this node um or the daycare and um that's how you really do just you can go real time and look and um find an empty lot or an underutilized uh building that could be
transformed I mean this is the the real work so we're on this kind of theoretical Vision part that bill wolfbrook talked about and I think that's like step one like get get behind it if you believe in it go for it but I don't think it's so daunting to start to look at it in real time and real land ground proofing of how to really evaluate the needs of different places and let it be a community uh participative participatory event um so anyway it's pretty exciting to me um quite I can imagine things happening just money uh money and time um you know um anyway that's all thanks thanks Mary Chris please go ahead so just following up Mary set me up for my comment I mean it's just a possibility there be gpac field trips to a particular possible node where a group of us could take a survey and walk around and we could we could do our own visioning which I think would be like really uh fun and be outside and be safe so we wouldn't have to you know worry necessarily too much about viruses and that we could you know we could we could bounce ideas around or at least share our sense of things with each other because there's a ton of stuff that I'm not aware of and if somebody points it out anyway I I would be in favor of that so I'm just going to put that out there as a possibility and also I just keep thinking about we're gonna get this new train station that you know the second the second train station so so that's that's a piece of you know that's going to go there but the
surrounding area there seems like there's possibilities there and is that like a case study for the general plan or where where there could be a vision for that part of the east side of town because it's there's there's a lot of blank canvas there or semi-blank canvas and that seems like that would that's another opportunity we have areas in town that are seem like they're pretty much not set in stone but they are what they are but but maybe there's something to do with that part of town just just a thought yeah thank you Chris um we the city actually submitted there's a so the city in early 2020 established or late 2019 established a priority Development Area that surrounds the planned Corona Road station and then actually goes all the way out McDowell to Washington and then there's another plan Development Area that's around downtown the downtown station that goes up to the freeway anyway we submitted an application for grant funding from abag or Regional agency to do a specific plan for that specific for that priority Development Area surrounding that station so uh you're not alone in thinking that it would be a good thing to study in a lot more detail um and we should hear about that in a couple of months hopefully to to find out what the recommendations are um and on the on the tour idea uh Veronica and team put together a pretty amazing tour for for the estat folks so we should we should think about a little walking tour or that was a bus tour which was also fun um to
to think about how all of this stuff could hit the ground thanks for that idea Grant please go ahead yeah Christine I I heard you present the question how to you know how could nodes evolve organically over time um and I I'd be certainly interested in in learning and understanding how we can ensure that that certain communities aren't left behind in in that Evolution um while you know let's say more affluent nodes within Petaluma evolve more quickly or or more nicely than than less affluent nodes um so that we have some social Equity built in or uh to ensure social Equity during the evolution of of that process that's a great question um we have a pretty exhaustive analysis that we developed as part of the general plan existing conditions work that helps to identify draft and you know very close to final disadvantaged communities we could call them communities of focus but the the legal term is a disadvantaged community and so I think it's a great idea to I can't think of the I hate this phrase but I'm going to use it anyway because that's the only one I can think of to crosswalk um the idea of 15-minute neighborhoods and those and those disadvantaged communities and think about where those nodes might be or how to support um so thank you for that Phil please go ahead oh I just to follow up on um Chris's idea of doing a ground truth walking tour um and regarding the Smart Station site you know about 10 years ago we did a station area plan and we did a focused development plan
for that area I'm glad great to hear that there's a grant opportunity to revisit that but I think it would be really fun to pull that out again and sort of ground truth and see how much of it still holds up what new opportunities there are you know and just as sort of a case study because I think we still have that on the Shelf I can't remember how deep it wasn't as specific as the downtown station area but but we did a stationary plan so it would be a good start you know just for a fun tour anyway thank you thank you all right uh if nobody else has any comments for now you can we'll all keep talking about this this is not the first or last time that we're going to be talking about these topics in fact it's a really um it's a really great opportunity to kind of kick us off into a new phase of the general plan that's not not all about housing um or the in first ideas of policy development so so thank you and really appreciate the team the asset team and all the gpac folks who participated and Etc everybody who attended that incredibly incredible meeting that they put together thanks for this work uh and let's go ahead Darren you've been waiting why don't we give you three minutes um Daniel if you can absolutely um just go ahead and get the timer set up okay uh Darren whenever you're ready we'll start the timer thank you thank you Daniel thank you Christina for that leeway I just got so excited I wanted to add on this whole urban forestry discussion uh the reason I brought that
up uh the tree committee we've been or not the tree committee the tree committee has been listening to Cindy Chong talk about her progress on implementing a 250 000 urban forestry grant our city got with help from folks like council member schribs and relief and that plan is really starting to move forward it starts with a survey of trees on public lands but also most importantly I think includes consultation with an urban Forester in this case uh Daniel and his last name is escaping me right now but um oh that kills me but anyway we're going to have an urban Forester come in and lay out some tenants and principles around a successful urban forestry plan you know there's been a lot of talk about a tree ordinance that's not really the same thing that's one piece of a larger plan and included in that is discussions of how do we get staff on board in at the tree committee we have the communications and Outreach ad hoc that includes Taryn and Roger mccarland on tree and planning and we had a conversation with Brian oh our new director of Community Development who is totally on board with visions like this um and not calling it the exact that's that Vision that we did talk about that just that idea of Greening this kind of skeleton framework of these Greenways around streets and rivers is an incredible idea that Community Development is on board with and he sees in the future bringing on board that urban forestry expertise or maybe Urban Design with a lot of experience in urban
forestry on some kind of long-term basis whether that's Personnel or more likely someone contracted to come in and help push that policy forward we'll also be planning to meet with Public Works hopefully Chris bolt and talk about what does it look like to expand the purview of Public Public Works in Petaluma again this is a core issue I think there's a lot of exciting movement around this with like urban forestry coming to the fore the work of folks like Bill Reinhardt Bill walpert kind of set the stage for this over the years and something like the estat actually is super useful as a platform to give a vision uh last night the tree committee we told Pete you know this just having pictures of what the roads could look like these are powerful tools when you have a meeting with someone say look here's what we want to do and here's what that looks like how do we get here uh so I think there's a lot of exciting potential and I appreciate you guys giving us that kind of visual this kind of platform to start moving these ideas forward in really productive ways thanks great uh thank you commissioner uh with that I don't see any more hands raised so I'll uh we'll go ahead and close general public comment and I'll send it back to Ron and Christina thanks thank you Daniel and Darren um and usually our last agenda item same as the case tonight is a final opportunity for any additional gpac comments um unrelated or related to agenda items anything else on people's minds tonight you'd
like to share same now here oh there's Roberto go ahead yeah I know I asked this every time but now we've been given like a whole different um kind of you know design Philosophy for Petaluma and I'm a like a very visual person and so having these overlays that I always ask for would be so great and like we just added on a whole different concept of what we could do with if we had these 15-minute walking radiuses and so I'm gonna ask again if you know if we will ever have those and given with all the different design implementations and things we've kind of discussed I think having like just something layered on top of each other to seeing the current layout of Petaluma with even this and just like really visualizing it with where our Housing Development planning has looked or our transportation has looked I think it just from a visual perspective to be able to just click and turn on and off some layers would be extremely helpful at this point um so yeah I just want to re-request that so thanks Roberto that's a good thing as we get into our land use uh conversation also which will be very Geographic Veronica please go ahead thanks so much I I didn't don't know if there was an ending Beyond this but I just wanted to extend my thanks to You Christina and the planning team and Ron for the support and to provide the platform for tonight it's wonderful um that we're we're all going to be ambassadors for you know different aspects of this because this is our community vision and I
just wanted to say thank you so much to the um our core team that really has worked tirelessly Mary and Pete and Ileana and Bill Wolpert who also were part of the application team and have helped on the event and it's just been an amazing experience and I look forward to us and Dave sorry did I mention Dave if I forgot somebody's name you'll forgive me because it's quite late for me and I'm a little um so yeah I I think I that everyone did I Dave yes okay anyway yeah just thank thank you to everyone and um yeah I look forward to us um the tour idea is awesome and let's do it all right thank you everybody for coming for the team to help put this together and the presentation together and everything um and we look forward to our next meeting good night foreign