to good morning everyone today's meeting of the affordable housing advisory committee is called to order on this day november 18th 2025 welcome everyone agendas of today's meeting are at the entrance to the meeting room please remember to turn off your cell phones to ensure a complete record of the committee's actions we ask that each individual wishing to speak clearly state your name and spell your name your last name for the clerk we ask that you limit your comments to three minutes at this time i would like to ask the board members to introduce themselves and state the fields you represent i'm going to start from my right christine bond advocate for low income individuals rick vale affordable housing michelle chanel community development board frank cornier construction mike menino clearwater city council charissa doughty affordable housing linda buyer city resident and i'm robin feel your board chair and i represent i'm a residential lending as a affordable housing this is the fourth and final meeting of this committee for 2025 i thought we had a great discussion at our last meeting i know we have a lot to discuss today so let's get right to the agenda so the first order of business is to approve the minutes of the committee's meeting on october 18th 2025 may i have a motion to approve motion to approve second all in favor any opposed minutes are approved the main item on today's agenda is to continue our discussion led by amanda warner of wade trim ms warner the floor is yours thank you good morning everyone good morning great so welcome so today is our fourth and final meeting of the affordable housing advisory committee for 2025 so just to review we have worked our way through the affordable housing advisory committee process uh beginning with selection of the ahack in august uh and then through our meetings in september october to workshop the recommendations of the local housing incentive strategy report today we're holding a public hearing to approve hopefully approve the updated lhis report and then from this point forward it will be taken to city council on december 4th uh if city council approves the lhis report on december 4th then it will be transmitted to the state of florida as a requirement of the uh ship program for the city after that uh if it's uh then accepted by the state then it will be incorporated into the local housing assistance plan and will be uh again submitted in the spring of 2026 as part of the local housing assistance plan so again this is our fourth meeting uh we're holding this as a public hearing today uh and during our meetings that we had proceeding in september and october we reviewed the values principles and visions of the local housing uh incentive strategies report uh during those meetings uh the committee revised one of the affordable housing values so there were four affordable housing values uh you can see them there on the screen a b and c affordable housing value c was revised uh to read aspires to have housing that fits the city's residents and this was done to incorporate not only the workforce but retired residents and other uh citizens of the city of clearwater as well to make that more um open uh with that uh the affordable housing principles stayed the same there are six of them uh so those were kept as uh were uh originally approved uh in the lhis report and then the affordable housing vision uh was kept as well so the affordable housing vision for 2025 was that the city of clearwater will incentivize the development of a diverse supply of housing that is safe accessible affordable sustainable and energy and cost efficient that blends into the aesthetic character of all the city's neighborhoods proximate to public amenities employment opportunities and which supports an inclusive community and the diverse needs of residents so that was the final vision statement that was incorporated all right so the local housing incentive strategies just as a reminder and for those listening today uh that uh this is their first time listening to the meeting the local housing incentive strategies are required by florida statute as uh something that the committee is required to review in support of the city ship program which is the state and initiatives partnership program so uh for the incentive areas there are 11 required by florida statute those are listed on the left hand of the screen and the affordable housing advisory committee is established to review those 11 incentive areas look at the city's processes and procedures related to those incentive areas and decide whether any recommend recommendations can be made for the city to utilize any of those incentives on the right hand side of the screen are five additional incentive areas uh and those are ones that have been added over the years by the affordable housing advisory committee those are not required by florida statute but are incentive areas that the city has chosen to pursue uh so those are the five on the right hand uh so this year uh in our proceeding workshops uh the committee identified several barriers and incentives for affordable housing uh that the city of clearwater should uh review and those are uh for the barrett list of barriers it would be lack of affordable housing supply generally a lack of housing options for senior citizens specifically uh the renter cost burden high cost of rent and utilities real estate taxes and insurance costs for home ownership these are what we refer to as third party barriers uh land use and zoning regulations another barrier and then two incentives were discussed previously this year and those were accessory dwelling units as a incentive area and infill density as an incentive area so those are the broad overarching barriers and incentives that were identified during the first few workshops that we had so uh after uh that discussion uh so over the last probably two a hack meetings the committee reviewed the recommendations of previous committees that were included in what would have been the 2024 local housing incentive strategy report and then made decisions about whether those recommendations should be modified or continued so to summarize so the committee reviewed the 11 incentive areas required by a florida statute as well as the five incentive areas added by the affordable housing advisory committee over the years and those totaled 34 recommendations from the previous committees that are actually documented in the local housing incentive strategy report of those 34 recommendations there are two incentive areas i should say of the 11 incentive areas there are two incentive areas uh that had no recommendation and those were infrastructure capacity and modification of street requirements and those were continued this year with no recommendation as well so those are two incentive areas where the committee decided not to provide recommendations regarding those however the other nine incentive areas there were recommendations related to those as well as the five optional incentive areas so and during that review it was identified that many of the recommendations over the years have been implemented or they are currently in progress um so the 2025 committee continued 28 recommendations out of that 34 and modified six recommendations so the six recommendations that were modified were recommendations 1.2 1.3 1.5 9.2 13.1 and 16.1 and i'll go over those uh today just to review uh the changes that were made so looking at the 2025 lhis report and everyone should have received um that uh as part of the agenda packet it looks like this document here um so this is the latest version and the latest version has a watermark that says public hearing on the back of it so it'll help you identify which one is the current one um so in that report recommendation 1.2 uh over our discussions over the last few months 1.2 was to revise this to include single family as well as multi-family affordable housing projects so single family was added to this recommendation and then city staff also made some changes to this one to adjust the the roles the titles of the persons responsible for implementing this so the recommendation as modified reads recommendation 1.2 the housing manager and development services division manager will continue to be the primary and secondary points of contact when submitting single family and multi-family affordable housing projects through close coordination these two staff positions will and then it goes through a list of the actions that those staff positions will take to help encourage affordable housing so that was the change to recommendation 1.2 is everyone still comfortable with that modification today as we're continuing with the final report so the next modified recommendation was recommendation 1.3 uh this was a very minor modification to this one so um precedingly uh there was a bullet point in here that required a list of potential mentors experienced in affordable housing development to be prepared uh that list had not yet been prepared so the timeline for that was adjusted from 2025 to 2026 so that was the minor minor modification to this one recommendation 1.3 so um 1.5 is the next modified recommendation this recommendation was modified uh to add accessory dwelling units as a type of plan that could be submitted in advance as a plan on file so the new recommendation 1.5 would read encourage affordable housing developers of single-family homes and accessory dwelling units to submit frequently used building example plans for pre-screening by the building official to further expedite the staff permit review process is everybody okay okay all right uh the next modified recommendation was 9.2 uh this was revised because the senior executive team no longer carry outs that carries out this process uh so this is done interdepartmentally between the economic uh development and housing department and planning so uh basically this was revised to say continue the city's interdepartmental review process through which any new regulatory instrument created in the city ordinances regulations etc or by related state legislation can be evaluated for its effect on and then the next modified recommendation was 13.1 uh the discussion at our last meeting on october 28th uh there was discussion about accessibility features being incorporated into affordable housing projects uh in discussion with city staff this is currently not in the code and is not something that's being discussed currently however it could be considered in future iterations so just to make it clear that section 3-920 um point a point three point c point one through three that section of the code currently does not include this these are aspirational the bullet points that are under that so uh so the revision is to say to continue to incentivize developers to address recommended design standards for affordable housing developments consistent with section 3-920 of the city of clearwater community development code other future criteria to be considered could include but are not limited to and then we've added provide accessibility features there the other bullet points are are similarly aspirational provide direct and visual access to open space play areas night door outdoor illumination etc and things to be considered on in future revisions all right seeing no comments i'll move on um so 16.1 partnerships uh so this was to develop public and private partnerships for the provision of affordable housing in one of our preceding meetings uh the committee had discussed uh how persons basically obtain information about affordable housing in the city in terms of development and there was a suggestion to add uh a bullet point under here directing uh persons to the city of clearwater's website and specifically the affordable housing web page so now it reads direct persons seeking information about affordable housing development in the city of clearwater to the city's affordable housing web page and then provide staff of address so that was the change on that one i have one small question if you could go back to 13 yes in your experience in your experience does that um i know we talked about it last meeting but does that language further restrict developers and builders from looking at design features for affordable housing and the reason i'm saying that is because i remember last meeting discussing that there's only like nine or ten all year if that and but i don't recall that we um added the language that added um play areas nighttime outdoor elimination i think some of that's already in the code actually i think that part is uh landscape standards and buffers those are those are kind of already in the in the code so do we want to for lack of a better word scare builders and developers in reading that again they already know it's well this is my question is is is this restricting affordable housing development or is this opening it up from where we were before yes so i will say it's common with density bonuses to have some kind of criteria tied to them so you know in order to obtain that density bonus for that specific whatever that ends up being um that there is some kind of criteria that they would have to meet because there's something that um they're basically complying with in order to get that additional density however for the the pure incentive of affordable housing obviously that is an incentive of an in and of itself right correct um that you would be giving that density in order to get affordable housing in return okay um there is criteria in there um specifically i don't have it called out in here which ones are already in that density bonus criteria listing um in the code um but this is again something that's more aspirational in terms of it could be considered in for future iterations of revisions to that density bonus but it's not something that's being done right now and um i don't know do you have any other comments no okay okay yeah i mean i was going to say that if you read the sentence it says future criteria to be considered could include yeah but are not limited to so okay yeah so that's good so we're not we're not restricting we're not trying to no right correct so the way this is written it's more of potential and i think that the concept behind enter adding this as something that could be considered in the future is that when it would be considered it would be weighed is this a barrier or not when that's revisited against all the other criteria that's already in that density bonus um thank you very much yeah okay appreciate you indulging me yep happy to answer so um did anybody else have any other comments regarding this one before we move on okay so then uh we went over 16 so 16 was about um adding a reference to the affordable housing website so i'm going to pause there on 16 because that's our our last recommendation of this set of recommendations um does anybody have any other comments to discuss before we go into um asking for approval to move forward to city council yes sir thank you um just in an effort to share i don't want to go back and redo anything so please don't let me scare anybody uh i am the elected member that sits on the a hack workshop so i just i sat on two regional meetings since our last one so i wanted to make sure i shared what's being discussed across the region uh this we're doing an amazing job you know there's very very very limited gaps on what we're discussing um i just wanted to highlight three things that are being pretty heavily discussed in other regions that we may not be number one was yigby yes in god's backyard as a tool i don't know and i don't recall us having any deeper discussions regarding that the state identified as a tool that could open up upwards of 30 plus thousand parcels of land across the state for affordable housing so maybe future discussions that can take place we discussed 1.5 adus adus was talked heavily across every region understandably so and the last one um was we discussed it in here is a barrier of senior housing senior housing being a future gap that they're noticing that continues to grow uh in all of our communities across the region so those are just the three things i wanted to share before we move too far thank you thank you um regarding the the availability for using properties that are currently um utilized for religious purposes that was something if i'm remembering correctly was opened up through the live local act changes this year and so that is something that we were um evaluating in terms of the parcels and everything to bring forward to city council at a later date gotcha as part of our updates for the the changes for live local very limited on property i wasn't sure if that affected us at all or if we identified some parcels i'm sure we'll find out some right i mean it it's kind of strange the way it's written because it's used by or adjacent to right if i remember correctly and so it's also written as a may enable so that we felt was a policy decision for city council well yes in god's backyard is an interesting title there are a lot of new acronyms related to housing these days didn't that used to be called nimby or not in my backyard yes yeah so that's the thing yeah that's funny yeah there's some pretty interesting acronyms these days a question please uh under the land use for the city of clearwater that you've got residential commercial industrial and auto related where does the the religious fall within land use regulations if for example you've got 59.3 residential 2.1 industrial 8.8 commercial and 1.1 auto related so where would that fall within the code um the community development code has a use called places of places of worship and those are permitted in institutionally zoned district the institutional district however some may be predated the 1999 code many did and it's possible that there are some places of worship that aren't necessarily zoned institutional don't tell thank you appreciate that so um all right anything else before we move on all right so um so the next uh stop on our agenda today is uh to um basically for the committee to consider approval of the 2025 lhis report again that would be the full document uh that looks the summary of recommendations are in the back uh you'll see um that the recommendations are discussed throughout the report but appendix e is the comprehensive summary of the final recommendations um so the next stop would be for the ahac to consider approval and uh make uh if the committee so desires make a motion and vote on the approval to send this to city council the city council meeting is on december 4th i think you said that we had a copy of that but i don't have a copy do you all have copies i don't have a copy so if if it can just be emailed yeah if it can just be emailed to us it should have yeah i'll get it okay thank you so um just to summarize the recommendations that changed from the previous version that you received were all the ones that we went over today on the slides yes madam charl make a motion if the board's comfortable moving forward to approve the 2025 lhis report second all in favor any opposed thank you very much thank you everyone so uh i just want to say um so next steps uh we are going to um the city council meeting on december 4th that's at 6 p.m that's a thursday this will be on the agenda that evening uh and then once uh if city council approves it at that meeting then it will go to the state and get submitted to the state of florida and this is all in support of the city's state housing initiatives partnership program uh grant funding so um with that i want to thank everyone for their time this year uh it's been a delight uh working with you and um i look forward to next year's committee as well so all right take care happy holidays thank you thank you thank you item four is there anyone here to speak on items not on today's agenda if so please step to the podium state your name spell your last name for the record you will have three minutes to speak on a subject that is not on today's agenda seeing no one come forward there are no e-comments i will now close the public comment period and ask if there are any final comments from committee members yes sir madam chair just wanted to thank you for your leadership you've done a wonderful job uh walking us through this and holding our hand but thank you all and thank you everyone for uh your service it's very important to the community and i appreciate it thank you i also would like to thank everyone on the committee um i guess i've been here the longest which scares me but anyway lastly i'd like to ask dylan may you if he has anything additional to report to the committee just that i appreciate everyone be able to to make it today and uh for your time i know this is some of these meetings are a few hours and everyone's very busy so i really do appreciate it and uh other than that thank you thank you thank you again thank you to all my fellow board members staff and the public public for your input in this process i'm excited to see clearwater progress its affordable housing inventory over the next year the meeting is adjourned thank you