2007-01-05 tgpamendment - Laserfiche WebLink

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GRAHAM: Okay. So Number 4 is the proposed amendment to the General Plan amendment procedures as initiated by the Planning Director. Go ahead. YUEN: All right. And Number 3 is the result of a County Council resolution to amend the procedure for amending the General Plan. And Number 4 is a Planning Director proposed amendment covering exactly the same subject. The background of this, just to refresh everybody’s memory on this, towards the end of last year the County Council introduced a resolution to change the procedure for amending the General Plan. The procedure is part of the General Plan. So the amendment itself is an amendment to the General Plan. The Council expressed the desire to have a quicker procedure, basically. And the Council attached a draft bill to that and the bill, that is Number 3 on your agenda item. And the bill itself, you know, we can get into the details of it but essentially the bill shortened the timeframe for amending the General Plan. It still talks about, as required by the charter, that the interim amendments have to go through the Planning Commission and come up to the Council, but it basically shortens some of the timeframes involved. And then the request is, and then again this is because of this current procedure, the request was that the Planning Director takes a look at this and make a recommendation, and of course it has to be passed on through the Planning Commission. When I took a look at it I thought that we could improve the current procedure, but I wasn’t satisfied with the bill that the Council had as far as an improvement. So with the input from Corporation Counsel we came up with a different bill or different procedure for this. And we brought both that bill and the Council’s bill to the Planning Commission in November I believe it was. The Council resolution had asked for expedited consideration, I believe it was October. The Council resolution had asked for expedited consideration by the Planning Commission. At that time the Planning Commission did not pass out either bill. There were some questions by the Commission and so the Planning Commission did not take action within the timeframe asked for by the Council. And I think that the reason for the expected timeframe was that the Council wanted to take action on this before the change-over in Council terms. Now given that, I did talk with the Chair of the Council who was the initiator of the Council’s bill; and following up on a suggestion made at the Planning Commission suggested that my revisions rather than be considered as an amendment to the Council’s bill be done from scratch as an interim amendment to the General Plan under the current procedures. So that requires workshops, public workshops. So I did hold public workshops on that proposed change to the General Plan. There were no public testimony at either, or attendance in fact at either of the workshops; and that proposed interim amendment to the General Plan is the bill that’s tabbed as Number 4 on your agenda item. So the Department’s recommendation is that the Planning Commission forward a negative recommendation on the Council’s initiated interim amendment to the General Plan that’s tabbed as Number 3 on your agenda item, and that the Commission forward a favorable recommendation to the Council on the item tabbed as Number 4 which is the Planning Director’s initiated amendment to the General Plan. EXHIBIT C 2