AgdaPkt 2009-11-09 - Laserfiche WebLink

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7C Page 1 REPORT To The Honorable Mayor and City Council From the Ci Mana er November 9,2009 SUBJECT Draft New General Plan - Final City Council Check-in RECOMMENDATION Consider update on progress made since September on the draft New General Plan and prepare for the November 23 joint meeting with the Planning Commission. BACKGROUND The final draft General Plan is nearing completion and will be presented to the City Council in a joint meeting with the Planning Commission on November 23. The first draft of the New General Plan has been reviewed over many months in multiple public forums, including three sessions with the City Council in July, August and September. At the September 21,2009 meeting, the City Council considered several specific changes to the draft plan including the Introduction as well as sections of land use policy in the Built Environment Element. At that meeting, Council also directed staff to continue with additional revisions and prepare a final draft for further review including environmental evaluation. Per this direction, the General Plan team has been revising the draft General Plan based on input from the City Council, Planning Commission, Boards, Commissions, and Committees (BCC), as well as the general public. Over the course of the past six months, almost 600 comments on the draft plan have been compiled from these various sources. In addition to release of the final draft General Plan, responses to all of the comments received will be presented in a "comment matrix" on November 23 to provide Council full oversight of the complete record of public input and how each comment was addressed in the final plan. The purpose of this report is to provide Council with a final"check in" on the New General Plan ahead of the joint meeting with the Planning Commission on November 23. Several topic areas of the draft plan have been the subject of significant comment or have been reexamined by the team based on other relevant factors and thus reflect areas where the draft plan has been changed the most. These areas are summarized below and members of the General Plan consultant-staff team will be present on November 9 to provide further explanation per Council's direction. . Housing Element. Significant effort has been focused on the Housing Element in the past month. On October 5, the City received the Department of Housing and Community Development's (HCD's) review of the second draft Housing Element. HCD is requesting additional revisions to the Housing Element, mostly pertaining to the provision of additional detailed information about site inventory for the past 1999-2006 and current 2007 -2014 period. HCD's most recent comments were primarily related to Redwood City's status of not having adopted its Housing Element for the previous period. Because the previous element was not adopted, State law requires that the City's Housing Element for the current period present an analysis to document that although the City did not adopt its Housing Element last period I the City did retain zoning on a significant