[MissoulaGov] PAZ yesterday

[Marilyn Marler]

Hi Bob,
Your take on the PAZ meeting and ADU discussion is more cynical than mine. I thought it was a pretty good display of working together as a council to get through that very divisive issue.  I didn't get the perfect outcome that I wanted, but that is the nature of this kind of work.

I hope it set a more positive tone for the rest of the discussion on the re-write. Thanks for your weekly summaries, you provide a great service.  Marilyn
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob Jaffe 
  To: missoulagov at cmslists.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:41 PM
  Subject: [MissoulaGov] Committee Update 6-24-09


  Greetings,

  This morning we set the public hearing for the new panhandling ordinances in Public Safety. 

  The panhandling working group has been organizing a number of efforts like the "Real Change" program and the work on this ordinance. This link takes you to the referral and ordinances:

  http://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentView.aspx?DID=1654

   

  The whole thing pushes both my liberal and libertarian buttons.  I don't really like making laws to make things harder for the destitute. And I'm not sure we really need a law that tells folks they can't "force themselves upon the company of others." But there is no doubt aggressive panhandling is a major bummer for those trying to attract visitors and shoppers to downtown.  The police say they need a more specific ordinance to respond to the requests of merchants and citizens.  Ellie Hill from the Poverello assured us that the serial inebriates have no interest in interaction with the police and will quickly learn and follow the new rules. A similar set of rules was passed in Billings. Even though they have had very few citations they had a high level of compliance and complaints dropped significantly after passing the ordinance. We set a public hearing for July 27th.

   

  In PAZ we continued our discussion on the zoning ordinance. We had the long public hearing Monday night. Most folks probably read the Missoulian coverage. There were about 100 people there. Maybe 50 spoke. The ADU was still the focal point of much of the comment. I counted off about 30 comments in favor or the project and ADU's. About fifteen against, and five or so who spoke only to specific technical issues.  On Stacy's request, a table was set up at the entrance with forms for people to submit written comment. This worked pretty well. There were an additional 18 comment forms submitted. Most with well articulated points of view. They were pretty evenly split on support and opposition on the ADU issue.

   

  The following morning we returned to committee and returned to the motion on the floor from last week to send the whole thing back to the planning board.  After a pretty lengthy discussion the motion failed and I attempted to move the discussion on to the topic of the ADU overlay.  There was much wrangling about process. Dick made a motion to do something like just endlessly talk about issues but not make any amendments until some later date.  We "frittered" away about two hours on that nonsense. It wasn't until the fourth call for the question that I finally got a majority to be done talking about it and we were able to dispose of the idea.  So we were back to the main motion to adopt title 20 with some bizarre caveat that if the question is called on the main motion we have to wait seven days to actually vote on it.  I may yet call that divergence from procedure out of order.  There appeared to be some concern that we would force the thing back to the floor before everyone had an opportunity to have their issues heard. Possibly as we get further into this and all the suspicion and fear subsides we will be able to just dispense with the weird seven day waiting amendment.  The frustration level was extremely high at that point in the meeting so we took a recess. After a few minutes we reconvened and spent the remaining 45 minutes just asking questions of our consultant. That part was pretty productive so I chose to provide another hour or so at today's meeting for more Q&A

   

  So we started off this morning's PAZ with more random Q&A for the consultant. Then we got into the ADU discussion. Stacy moved to allow them by right in the multi-family zones. Then Jon made a substitute motion to exclude the option for the ADU overlay from the single family zones. After much discussion and minor amendments both motions passed. Jon's with Marilyn, Dave, Renee, Dick, Lynn, Jon, and John.  Stacy's with Marilyn, Ed, Jon, Myself, Stacy, Pam, Jason, and Dave. Hendrickson Abstained. It had all the appearance of a glorious moment of compromise amongst the council but in reality it was the usual liberal giveaway. Best I can tell the ADU doesn't really offer much to the multi-family zones and now they can't even be had in the single family zones with an overlay rezoning process. But the goal here is to pass title 20. Hopefully this gets us closer to that goal. My intention is to refrain from revisiting this issue in committee. There may be some further amendments on the floor once the details really get worked out.

   

  After the lunch break we had A&F. The CDBG-R grant that we were going to use for replacing park equipment was denied. HUD decided that parks were not considered infrastructure for low income families. We disagree. The mayor argued the case all the way to Washington but it didn't get anywhere. HUD announced the final decision that recovery money could not be used for parks on the same day the white house announced that they were getting a playground. So now we are going to use the money for repairs to the pedestrian railroad overpass. There are some structural issues to address and we want to get rid of the pigeon roosts and the homeless hiding places. 

   

  In Public Works we approved various sewer related contracts and the CMAQ grant contract for the bike/ped program.  A few of us have concerns about how some of this money is being applied but this wasn't really the time to take it up.  We will need to try to remember to have this conversation much earlier in the process next year.  The main concern is whether the best use of this money is on various promotional and educational efforts as opposed to hard infrastructure.  Could the $11,000 we spend on the bike ambassadors do more for cyclists if it was spent on creating more bike lanes? Are the little signs telling us that we are on a safe route to school more important than actually doing something to make the route safer? It's a discussion worth having at another time.

   

  In BCOW we pretty much finished up the budget. There are still a few loose ends so we held off on approving the preliminary budget. It always gets amended later when final numbers are in but there are still some negotiations happening that could change things.  If the unions are unwilling to work with us on the health care contribution reductions we may need to come back for more cuts.

   

  Thanks for your interest, 

   

           

   

  Bob Jaffe

  Missoula City Council, Ward 3

  1225 South 2nd West

  Missoula, MT 59801

  (406) 728-1052

   



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