In between major updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, the city is allowed to make minor updates once a year. The city’s normal process is to gather proposed updates the summer before from members of the public and from government agencies and departments, and then the City Council reviews and approves some number for “docketing” and study for a year. Docketing doesn’t ensure that the proposed amendment will ultimately be adopted — many aren’t — but anything that isn’t docketed definitely won’t be.
Next summer’s minor amendments will be the last before the major update in 2024. The docketing memo, which will be discussed by the City Council this week, lists several proposed amendments but recommends that none of them be docketed. Several are recommended to be rolled into the 2024 major update planning; a couple of the are retreads of prior ones, and some are simply not appropriate for updates to the Comprehensive Plan (every year there are one or two small property rezones that are too small to be Comp Plan amendments to the Future Land Use Map (FLUM), but get proposed anyway).
Nevertheless, the memo gives us a hint of what might be up for consideration as part of the 2024 Comprehensive Plan major update. For example, Councilmember Morales has proposed changing neighborhood zoning to allow more non-residential uses for property when such services are not available within a quarter-mile of the area.
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