[OMS_MANAGERS] Bills of interest

[Liz Hannum]

As mentioned last week at Mornings on Main, there are a few bills that would effect our downtowns. Here’s a few with a short explanation from Sightline Institute who seems to primarily be an economic development think tank with a heavy environmental bend:
HB 2984 (support?) - This bill you testified on last week would allow residential reuse of existing commercial buildings and waive some or all SDCs and parking minimums for such projects. As introduced, it'd include a 120% AMI price cap but that might go away to simplify things.
SB 847 (support?) - Among various other things, this would allow residential reuse of commercial zones. It might also make small-scale condo projects less expensive/risky to develop if an amendment includes reductions to the current 10-year liability window. (This amendment may or may not happen.)
HB 2980 (support?) - creates a revolving state loan fund that covers infrastructure needs for infill or rehabbed housing, then is paid back with the first 10 years of additional property taxes on the new structure. (Could potentially be used to buy down SDCs for example.) Like a URA, but (a) no local bonds or administration, since it all goes through the state, (b) only applies to the new buildings, not to all property tax growth in a certain area, (c) specifically earmarked for infrastructure that enables housing up to 120% AMI, and (d) probably there'd be a carveout for fire districts. I'm excited about this one, hoping to write about it soon.
HB 3414 (support?) - as introduced, requires cities to automatically approve any variance request from a developer unless found to endanger health, safety, or habitability, except for variances related to unit count, height or FAR. This may well be scaled back (for example, it might just shift the burden of proof onto the city to show that the variance is a bad idea, rather than requiring the developer to show that it's a good idea). Still, this would function as granting flexibility on parking and other sticky adaptive reuse stuff for places like Baker City, Astoria, and The Dalles that weren't included in the CFEC parking reforms. Speaking of which...
HB 2659 / SB 580 (oppose?) - As introduced, these would repeal the recent state parking reforms that give full parking flexibility near relatively frequent transit and therefore for most downtowns within MPOs (the eight largest metro areas, everything down to Grants Pass). These bills are coming up for a hearing in the next few weeks (last week of March is the best intel at the moment) and I will be mobilizing anyone I can find to testify against them.

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