12/07/2006 - Minutes PROCEEDINGS OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
WORK SESSION
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7 , 2006
The City Council of Salt Lake City, Utah, met in a Work Session on
Thursday, December 7, 2006, at 5 : 30 p.m. in Room 326, City Council
Office, City County Building, 451 South State Street.
In Attendance : Council Members Carlton Christensen, Van Turner, Eric
Jergensen, Nancy Saxton, Jill Remington Love, Dave Buhler and Soren
Simonsen.
Also in Attendance : Cindy Gust-Jenson, Executive Council Director;
Edwin Rutan, City Attorney; Cindy Lou Rockwood, Council Staff
Assistant; Russell Weeks, Council Policy Analyst; Janice Jardine,
Council Land Use Policy Analyst; Jennifer Bruno, Council Policy
Analyst; Louis Zunguze, Community Development Director; Cheri Coffey,
Planning Deputy Director; Andrea Curtis, Community Development
Management Support Coordinator; Peggy McDonough, Planning Commission
Chair; Allison McFarlane, Mayor' s Senior Advisor for Economic
Development; D. J. Baxter, Mayor' s Senior Advisor; Sam Guevara, Mayor' s
Chief of Staff; Bill Knowles, Downtown Construction Mitigation
Ombudsman; Chris Shoop, Community Development Analyst; Bishop H. David
Burton, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; Alan Sullivan,
Property Reserve Incorporated (PRI) ; Grant Thomas, Construction
Coordinator/Manager of the City Creek Project; Bill Williams, PRI' s
Director of Architecture and Engineering; Natalie Gochnour, Salt Lake
Chamber of Commerce; and Beverly Jones, Deputy City Recorder.
Councilmember Buhler presided at and conducted the meeting.
The meeting was called to order at 5 : 35 p.m.
AGENDA ITEMS
#1 . 5 : 35 : 34 PM HOLD A BRIEFING REGARDING THE STATUS OF STUDIES OF
THE DOWNTOWN AND PROJECTS IN THE DOWNTOWN AREA INCLUDING, View
Attachments
A. 5 : 36 : 11 PM PLANNING COMMISSION PROCESS
Peggy McDonough and Louis Zunguze briefed the Council .
B. 6 : 19 : 50 PM CITY CREEK PROJECT
Bishop H. David Burton, Alan Sullivan, Grant Thomas and Bill
Williams briefed the Council with a power point presentation.
C. 7 : 47 : 04 PM DOWNTOWN RISING View Attachments
Natalie Gochnour briefed the Council from the attached handouts .
06 - 1
PROCEEDINGS OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
WORK SESSION
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7 , 2006
D. 8 : 22 : 05 PM CITY DOWNTOWN MASTER PLAN AND CITY ADMINISTRATIVE
PROCESSES
Louis Zunguze briefed the Council .
#2 . REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR INCLUDING A REVIEW OF COUNCIL
INFORMATION ITEMS AND 8 : 36 : 17 PM ANNOUNCEMENTS .
No report was given. See File M 06-5 for announcements .
The meeting adjourned at 9 : 00 p.m.
Council Chair
Chief Deputy City Recorder
This document along with the digital recording constitute the
official minutes for the City Council Work Session held December 7,
2006 .
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06 - 2
DOWNTOWN RISING
I N S P I R E D B Y THE S E C O N D CENT 4 R Y P L A N
Update
Salt Lake City Council Work Session
December 7, 2006
Partners
• Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County and State
of Utah
• University of Utah, College of Architecture
and Planning
• American Institute of Architects
• Envision Utah
• Business sponsors
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Accomplishments
• Enthusiasm • Symbol
• Movement • Ethic
Downtown Rising Vision Process
Aug. 06 - Feb. 07
3 Tracks
Draft
Vision Public Final Products
Commen# Final Vision aostef
Preparation
ON THE RISE 32-page booklet
e :: :::
1 '�'' Research onvenr/ ��
Teams \\.
_. \', 5-10 minute video
Focus Areas
sf+ -International Other(e.g.Utah'.
...... -',, -"`" -Education Business Magazine)
Technical -Transportation Recommendations
Support -Arts&culture
-Business friendly and compact
(UofU/AIA) -Green
-Urban living
-Main Street
-Beautiful streets
Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb.
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Public Involvement Methods
• Comment cards
- -100
• Newspaper insert
- 220,000; -50 survey forms sent in
• Web site
- 2.4 million hits;880,000 page downloads; 55,000 visits; 36,000 unique
visits.
- "600 comments received
• Visual preference survey
- Farmers Market, Gallivan Center, Gateway and Clayton Middle School
- -300 surveys completed
• Community visioning workshops
- Two hands on, roll-up your sleeves,detailed workshops
Public Involvement Findings
1. Great support for draft vision (86% approval)
• "Everything sounds wonderful!I can't wait!"
2. Maintain historic quality
• "No need to blend in with other contemporary cities."
3. Develop convenient transportation and parking
• "We need better access into and around the core downtown area."
4. Create natural spaces
• "More green and less concrete is great.Bravo!"
5. Develop unique retail
• "Bring a unique attraction to retail life."
6. Build intimate/human-scale places
• "Create urban neighborhoods."
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Next Steps
• Additional Convener/Cabinet meetings (Dec.-Jan.)
• Final correlation (Jan.)
• Public release (Late Feb.)
• Share all information with SLC Planning
• Implementation (on-going)
DOWNTOWN RISING
i�sPREo a. T..E sE�o�o cc.,ru... Pa�
"The need for planning and visionary
leadership never ends. We will refine and
express a vision within nine months and
continue to update it thereafter. "
- Downtown Rising Charter
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MEMORANDUM
51
DATE: December 5, 2006
TO: City Council Members
FROM: Russell Weeks
RE: Additional Background Material for December 7 Downtown Update
CC: Cindy Gust-Jenson, Steve Fawcett, Louis Zunguze, Tim Harpst, DJ Baxter, Gary
Mumford, Jennifer Bruno, Janice Jardine
This memorandum is a summary of two public meetings held last week that may have a
bearing on the City Council's scheduled update of issues involving downtown Salt Lake City.
One meeting was a Community Leaders Forum held November 29 as part of preparation for
writing the downtown transportation master plan commissioned by the City, the Utah Transit
Authority and the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. The other meeting was the annual Emerging
Trends in Real Estate Forum on November 28 sponsored by the Urban Land Institute.
COMMUNITY LEADERS FORUM
Forum organizers invited three speakers: Mark Johnson of Civitas Inc. in Denver(You
may remember him from the discussions of the design of the east side of Library Square); Charles
Hales of HDR Engineering and a former Transportation Commissioner in Portland, Oregon; and
Gordon Price, a planner and former councilor for Vancouver,British Columbia.
Each spoke about their cities' experiences in developing downtowns that serve residents
and attract people to them.
DENVER
Mr.Johnson's experience in Denver has been extensive. He served on the Denver
Planning Commission, and his company has been involved in many projects in and around
downtown Denver.
Mr. Johnson said downtown Denver is the result of three things:
• "Tremendous"political involvement through the last three mayoral administrations over
the last 20 years.
• A "deeply committed" business community.
• The"layering and layering and layering"of land use and transportation.
The City's—and the region's—commitment to major public investments downtown also
has been a key to downtown Denver's development. The city has two stadiums, a professional
basketball arena, a fairly new library, and two buildings that house a fairly extensive art
collection.
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PORTLAND
Charles Hales said cities should"focus on place"and not on the movement of people
through the place. He emphasized that in Portland "the pedestrian is the first-class passenger,"
and that walking and public transit make better use of public rights of way than automobiles.
He said four ways to improve downtowns are to:
• Develop good land-use plans and stick to them.
• Commit to the public realm.
• Fight bad plans.
• Invest in public transit—to serve planning.
He said Portland has done several things to improve and expand its downtown since the
1980s, starting with land use plans. Mr. Hales said Portland's land-use plans for downtown
ensure that buildings have a relationship to the streets around them. In Portland, developers can
"build what they want as high as they want," but they have to adhere to strict design
requirements. He said Portland has high floor-to-area ratios and generous heights,but the
buildings have to relate to the streets around them.
Mr. Hales also said to have dense downtowns cities"have to be aggressive"about
building affordable housing. That kind of housing attracts younger people who want to live in
urban settings, he said.
He said Portland has learned that cities can use transit to organize new development.
However, he cautioned that"you can't talk about transit oriented development unless transit is
there"or will be in place soon. He said Portland paid for half its capital costs to build its newest
street-car line by raising parking meter revenues and bonding against the revenue generated by
the increase. The return on investment from building the transit lines has been far beyond what
expected.
VANCOUVER
Like Salt Lake City, Vancouver makes up roughly 25 percent of the greater Vancouver
area,according to Mr. Price. Vancouver is urban and limited by its landscape's natural
boundaries. Greater Vancouver is suburban, and like the greater Seattle area, extends in three
directions from downtown Vancouver.
Mr. Price said part of what Vancouver does is offer residents of Greater Vancouver a
choice of where they want to live. He said that people who do not want to live in an urban setting
can live comfortably in Greater Vancouver. However,Vancouver has made it a point to attract a
percentage of the roughly 23,000 people who move each year to the Greater Vancouver area. He
speculated that the level of growth is not much larger than the growth level in northern Utah.
Vancouver itself has sought to enhance its urban center by organizing itself in a
traditional "loop that extends to the grid." Doing that has allowed Vancouver to provide other
methods of transportation, such as walking, bicycling, and mass transit, that people can use
instead of automobiles. One result has been that automobile use has declined in downtown
Vancouver even as its population has grown significantly.
Mr. Price said Vancouver's transportation plan is based on the city's historic
transportation corridors that allowed neighborhood and residential development to grow because
transportation linkages weren't forced.
Vancouver has achieved that by emphasizing population density'living close to a mix of
services that people need and like and by providing transportation choices for people to use, he
said. Foremost among services Vancouver has encouraged to develop are residential services,
particularly grocery stores, that allow residents to walk from their homes to areas that provide
daily shopping.
Like people who live in suburbs,people who want to live downtown expect to live in
apartments or condominiums with more floor space than buildings in the past provided, Mr. Price
said. That requires larger buildings to accommodate the same number of people living in older
buildings "because they want bigger space,"he said.
Mr. Price noted that universities and cultural institutions "are investment magnets,"and
provided a series of maxims to consider:
• Decide on land-use first, then layer transportation to serve the land use.
• Growth pays for growth.
• Private investment can pay a public benefit—such as a park or other amenity—and public
benefits add value to private investments.
• Budgets are ideology without rhetoric.
ULI: EMERGING TRENDS IN REAL ESTATE
Michael Brodsky, chairman of the Hamlet group; Mark Millburn, president of Equimark
Properties, and Peter Korpacz, director of the Global Strategic Real Estate Work Group of
PricewaterhouseCoopers, made forecasts of the real estate market in northern Utah and nationally
at a forum held last Wednesday.
Mr. Brodsky and Mr. Millburn focused on the northern Utah real estate market. Both saw
a fairly stable, growing real-estate market in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area compared to
other cities in the Intermountain West.Both cited the strength of the area's economy—Mr.
Brodsky said the Salt Lake economy ranked 16th nationally—as reasons for cautious optimism for
2007.
Mr.Brodsky said the ideal housing supply is a six-to-nine month inventory of houses for
sale,but that Salt Lake City is starting to creep beyond that figure. However, the most evident
inventory increases are on high-end homes. The increased cost of housing has increased the
opportunity to build multi-unit condominiums or apai tnients.
Noting that there is "still" a shortage of truly affordable housing available in the Salt
Lake area,Mr. Millburn said that urban condominiums are a"very fertile area"for investment
and that well-developed products, would perform"exceptionally"well. If one developed a mixed-
use development coupled with mass transit, one would "have a real home run,"he said. Mr.
Millburn also noted that the apartment rental market currently has about a 5.6 percent vacancy
rate, and two-bedroom, 2-bath apartments are the greatest rent growth sector. Average rents—at
$653 a month—are well below the national average of$952 per month,he said.
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Their assessments were close to Mr. Korpacz's view nationally. He said the Salt Lake
area housing market appeared to be doing well even in a slowing national economy. Mr. Korpacz
said the best real-estate investments in 2007 appeared to be multi-family rental units and full
service hotels. Other potentially strong performers were senior and elderly housing, urban mixed-
use properties, student housing, and mixed-use town centers.
At the national level, port markets—cities on either coast plus Chicago—are growing
exponentially, Mr. Korpacz said. People are drawn to the cities because of the opportunity for
work and because they are where goods and ideas arrive and depart. The cities are"investment
Meccas that are located along global pathways and operate 24 hours a day.
Nevertheless,people are investing in other places. He said there currently are six
"development havens"—Denver,Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston—because of their
industry and their emphasis of"brain power over manpower."
He said the Salt Lake area is somewhere in the middle of the pack for real-estate
investment—which, given its size probably is where the area wants to be in 2007.
One other item that all three speakers noted is that there appears to be a significant
amount of private equity available to invest in development projects. "Capital remains
oversupplied Mr. Korpacz said. In some cases the oversupply has inflated the cost of properties,
but if people use caution, he said, "core holdings" have nowhere to go but up.
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