Providence Committee on Ordinances-Wednesday, September 11, 2024-5:30 PM

We have three present, two absent. We have a party.

Thank you so much. First item of the agenda, please.

Item number one, an ordinance adopting the city of Providence official comprehensive plan. The following have been invited for a presentation. Robert Azar, deputy director, department of planning and development. Timothy Shih, community planning manager, department of planning and development.

Thank you so much. I would like to acknowledge we have a couple of.

So

--.

You so much for being here to. Also have, which is. Good evening to you all. But, you know, we are in the middle of the final stage for finalizing the comprehensive plan, which is... It's going to set a footprint for the next ten years, whether it's gonna guide our housing, our investment, etcetera.

So it... It's It is critical that we're here. And I know we... The final planning that... For the last couple of years, I've been conducting a meeting.

I think all the community meetings that put together a community input. We went back and build it up and made some amendment based on recommendations that were made in the. So you're here tonight to present to the council. This enters now our responsibility to see through this and see what what we think about it, and then when we have an appeal or not, whether any amendments would be made, or will they just move ahead and start the plan as it is? Also, like, do acknowledge not to want the interwatch.

Oh, that's okay. Here. So tonight, we have invited couples that you get. It's the agent. It's the same chat.

We'll add a PowerPoint presentation. So what you want us to do is to see exactly where we are today. To the members of the province, we will not take this public. There is a public meeting, public meeting scheduled for next Monday, the sixteenth, at 05:30. At that time, we'll be able to speak on this plan.

So with that said, with the aza, please take a word. Walk us through the telephone presentation.

Thank you, mister chair, members of the committee, other council members. It's really a privilege and a pleasure to be here after a very long role that we've been on the past couple of years working on this conference plan, engaging the public in all corners of the city. And I think we are at a point where we have adopted that this draft. We're very proud of it. We think it it represents our best efforts at charting the cities of growth over the next twenty years.

As you know, this is a document that that we have not really touched at all for the past ten years, and it's time both because of state law that requires us to update the plan every ten years, but also because conditions have changed so much since 2014. So what we're gonna do tonight is is walk you through the the plan at a relatively high level, and we'll get into the specific... Specifics of the land use chapter, which is really the the one that is seeing the most change and the one that is, I think, one of the most impactful We're

in a meeting.

Most impactful to the built environment of our city. So I'm going to turn it over to Tim Shea, our community planning manager who has been really a tough place for this project as it pertains to the community engagement process, it's been out there in farmers markets and more meetings and and events large and small throughout the city, really, know, trying to to meet people where they are and to talk about what they think the city needs and what what what can be improved. So it's been great having him on our team. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Tim to lead as well. Thank you.

Great. Thank you all very much.

I just wanted to test our clicker. Is there a way to

put it into the whole presentation meeting? Actually,

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Beautiful. Thank you. Perfect.. We're also joined at

once in person in the North, and think this afternoon rolls. Thanks for being here. Go ahead.

Okay. Thank you again so much for having us. So I'm gonna talk us through kind of the process that got here. I'll give I'll give a brief summary of the kind of key policy elements aside from the land use chapter,

and then I'll hand it over to to Bob to walk us through

the land use chapter. Okay?

So first of all, I... Just to make sure that we're all kind of on the same page, you know, Bob Bob mentioned it briefly, but comprehensive plan is our, you know, our once a decade opportunity to bring together community members, business owners, a range of stakeholders to think about how the city has grown over the last ten years and think about our vision for its future ten, twenty years from now. And so, of course, that vision touches on a lot of different topic areas. It touches on transportation, economic development, parks and recreation. And so a comprehensive plan has has many elements, but one thing that is unique that Bob referenced is that it has this land use chapter.

So we think about our vision for the city ten, twenty years from now, and then we tie that directly to how land is used, about what can be built where, and how we want the city to grow. As this reference, for more than a year now, actually, two years, we've been engaging community members in a process that was really intentionally designed to be iterative to kinda walk people through this planning process. So we started in 2022 with a phase of of engagement that was focused on really listening and hearing how people see the city changing, what they think are the most important issues. And then last year, we, through a variety of methods, whether that was online surveying, whether it's workshops, co hosted with community organizations or many of you here. We hosted one workshop in every ward in the city.

We also went to, as Bob referenced, community events, block parties, farmers markets. We did good thing collaboratively with community members about how we solve the challenges that the city faces can pull. So that's really the foundation of a draft plan that we have with us here today. And this year, we started a more formal process. In the spring, we presented the draft plan to our city planning commission, and we received comment feedback there.

We also took it out to the neighborhoods. We did a a series of library drop in feedback events, and we made changes during that city plan commission review phase before they passed it on to the airport. But this is really the biggest part of that formal review process before it gets passed on to the state. And I... We have some beautiful images.

We've got a lot of images from this process. These kind of feature different forms of engagement where there's smaller focus groups or tabling at events. But we were delivered to host these events in neighborhoods where we, you know, historically haven't done the best job of connecting with people and furthering their participation in these processes. So that was really deliberate. But we wanted to make sure we were doing events in every neighborhood in the city, in every ward in the city, And I think our plan is better for that.

So I won't go too deep into our engagement summary. There's more online, but, you know,

just one one kind of

graphic to point to is, you know, our initial community survey, we ask people about their priority issues, what they're most concerned about, thinking about that needs to be addressed over the next twenty years. And, you know, no matter what neighborhood you were in, often no matter what demographic you're talking to, the housing crisis was issue number one around the city. So tenants, homeowners, people with kids looking to buy, people who were raised in the city and wanna have a state in its future are really concerned about housing. And so that permeates a lot of the changes in this plan. But, you know, there are also a lot of pressing concerns around things like transportation, issues around climate, how we compare the climate changing, improving city services, and, you know, thinking about the design of our city, new development.

So I'm gonna move into kind of the summary of key policies here. There's a lot more depth in the draft plan, but if I could kind of give a one sentence summary of each each of these chapters, that's that's what the goal is here. But but first of all, a vision, you know, all these these various topic areas have to be behind kind of one united vision. So we we outline that as a more prosperous, sustainable, resilient province for all, a city that's vibrant, affordable, sustainable, beautiful, rich with economic opportunity. And then another key thing that we heard from community members was that we want Providence to thrive because of what makes it unique, being supported.

So our quality of life, welcoming our quality of life, people, places that make Providence unique. But a key part of why Providence is unique is because we embrace change and welcome new people, new ideas, and new ways of living that benefit all of us. So here's a quick list of all the the topic areas that I'm gonna dive into now. So sustainability. This is, of course, a really important issue.

A lot of the... So each chapter has guiding goal. It has a set of objectives and that implementing strategies. And the sustainability chapter is really focused on predicting reducing our climate emissions, preparing for resilience to extreme weather, to storm water, to heat island effects, conserving our areas of environmental quality or parks and green spaces. But one key change here is there's...

It really aligns more with our climate justice plan and centering equity, environmental justice in these strategies. So that's kind of one key for us to policy change. So moving on to the built environment. This is our chapter that's on kind of province's design architecture, and the goals and strategies here focused on improving design standards and our review processes of new development, encouraging adaptive reuse of existing buildings, and really focusing on green building practices, and also expanding our efforts at preserving their historic districts and unique places in the city. Bob's gonna speak a little bit more to urban design and review as it relates to land use.

Economic development. So this is a topic area where the goals and strategies here really looks on adapting and growing the city's economy through investments in key sectors, things like blue economy, life sciences, but also arts and culture, workforce, and small business developments, and improving cities in infrastructure and services that are kind of the the foundation of our economy. There's a chapter on housing in the comprehensive plan. And while our land use and zoning really impacts housing, it's also a chapter that thinks about how the city invests in housing, what type of housing we're encouraging. And the focus here is on encouraging more supply of housing and a real focus on long term affordability.

So how we invest in and encourage long term affordable housing that supports communities with special needs in the city, that places housing near public transit, that's energy efficient and includes accessibility in its design, models, speech, model, and moments. So mow... There's a chapter on mobility. It's kind of our our transportation chapter, has objectives on really every every way of getting around the city. So the goal here is really to accelerate our transition to a more multimodal transportation system where people have safe and convenient options for how to get around, whether that's walking, taking public transit, driving, riding a bike.

And there's a lot of codifying of, you know, the city's recent great streets plan and also, RIPTA's long range, change of master plan in this chapter. Art and cultural resources. So the city recently had a planning process that was led by artists and culture bearers, our cultural plan. And so this really popifies roles and strategies there that kinda shift to focus on centering the well-being of artists in the city and fostering a a culture across our city's public life that's fostering vibrant, equitable, artistic and creative culture, thinking about its benefits to our neighborhoods, to the public realm, civic life. The people in public spaces chapter, this is our kind of parks chapter.

And so there's a lot of momentum here since it's really focused on continuing the investment that we've seen in the last decade in our parks and public spaces, a focus on making sure that programming is responsive to the communities that live near those those parks and public spaces, how we're incorporating climate resilience and stormwater management, and how we think about our green spaces, how they're connected to each other, and how people, neighbors participate in the design use of those spaces. And then lastly, there's a pretty large chapter called community services and facilities. This touches on city utilities, city services, also public facilities. So really kind of a broad range of of topics in this one, but all about how we improve the quality of services and buildings and the coordination of them. So we could think of our electricity or schools or recreation centers, All touched upon in this chapter, but I encourage folks to to look at the draft plans for more depth on that.

So thank you so much. I'm gonna pass this over to deputy director Azar to talk about land use.

Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Tim. Alright. So I'm gonna do a deep dive into land use because it's probably the most important chapter of this comprehensive plan.

Under state law, the land use chapter, has has certain legal standards. Unlike the other chapters of the plan, which are incredibly important and and, you know, they are policy statements that will guide the activities of the city. The land use section is unique because it is the one section that is legally binding on our land use regulations, specifically our zoning ordinance and also the subdivision and development review regulations. So anything having to do with land use, any regulations, any zoning ordinance, it all has to tie back to the. So we need to make sure that what we say in the comprehensive plan and then implement it in the zone.

So just to provide a little bit of context, ten years ago, we developed the map on the left here, which is called the areas of stability and change, and it's kind of a a large scale map that that sets forth these blue... Dark blue areas where we expected to see most of the new development in the city. It also called out certain commercial corridors where we want to focus growth in higher density development. And in doing that, the hope was that it would take some of the the pressure off of the residential neighborhoods so that they could be largely stable, and we we wouldn't expect to see a lot of change in developed environment in those neighborhoods. That then translates into much more detailed future land use map you see on the right hand side, which then translates into our current zoning map, you know, you know, zoning regulations.