COM 0200.002 2006-2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Honorable Pete Hoffmann Chair and Presiding Officer and Members of the County Council COUNTY COUNCIL Page 2 March 8, 2007 typically do a subdivision to create the individual lots for sale, bearing the cost of roads, water, and other infrastructure, then sell the individual lots. Then the lot owners will apply for plan approval for their buildings. Because plan approval is tied to a particular use, it is easier to estimate job generation at that time, but the various owners will come in one by one, and obviously, it wouldn't be fair or practical for the County to waive affordable housing in a particular industrial subdivision for the first 99 employees, then start to assess affordable housing on every business that came in afterwards. The option is to have the original developer of the industrial subdivision take care of the affordable housing at the time of subdivision. Apart from the difficulty of estimating the number of employees, the developer cannot do this by creating affordable housing onsite, because residential uses are not allowed in ML, MG, or MCX zones. It can also be a very high requirement for a developer who is just building infrastructure and not the final buildings on the site, as discussed below. So if the council wants to do something like this, the ordinance must have: (1) an initial assessment at the time of rezoning whether the project, as a whole, will generate more than 100 jobs, to determine if there will be a future affordable housing requirement; and (2) a fair way of assessing the affordable housing requirement when the businesses actually start to occupy the project. The attached proposed amendments to Chap. 11 would do the following: First, at the time of any new zoning to ML, MG, or MCX, the future potential job generation would be estimated at ten employees per acre. This is basically consistent with an economic study done for TSA in their recent LUC application and rezoning for Increment 4 of the Kaloko industrial park. This means that a rezoning of ten or more acres of ML, MG, or MCX would trigger a future affordable housing requirement when the project is developed. Second, the actual affordable housing requirement, within any such project, would be determined at the time of plan approval. To avoid having to deal with businesses on a case-by-case basis, the number of employees would be assessed based on ten employees per acre, or one employee per 1000 square feet of gross floor area, whichever is greater. (A one-acre light industrial lot developed with awarehouse-type building will typically have 10,000-20,000 square feet in gross floor area, after allowance for setbacks and parking.) The Zoning Code requires one parking space for 400 square feet of gross floor