Cities throughout the Country are faced with a challenging future related to economic development, commercial vitality and responsible growth along important corridors. The City of Brea has been focused on planning to ensure a healthy future for our City. Brick and mortar businesses, specifically our retail centers including the Downtown and Brea Mall, are continuing to look at how they will evolve and respond to the competition of on-line shopping and changing trends in the market. Employers are competing for a workforce in a new age of commerce focused on lifestyle work campuses and other creative environments. Our community through Brea Envisions has identified the following as key themes for the City to focus on for Brea’s future success:
- Attracting Business including small and local diverse variety of businesses and retaining regional commercial vitality;
- Ensure responsible development, manage impacts, address traffic and maintain open space; and
- Provide new opportunities to realize workforce housing and a diversity of housing options.
Without redevelopment as an investment and development tool the City needs to find ways to be able to bring in new investment and business to our City. Removing impediments and creating predictable outcomes is our most effective and reliable resource available. Having a current General Plan is critical for a City to guide the development process. While there is no legal requirement to update the General Plan more often than 25-30 years, it is important for the City to stay in communication with the public and the development community on a more regular basis to share vision, values and direction for land use. Periodic, thoughtful, community driven conversations and updates to the General Plan and any necessary zoning tools will avoid the community feeling things are “happening to them” and instead will feel a part of the process and the outcomes.
This project will initiate a multi-disciplinary planning approach to facilitate the next steps of Brea Envisions and to prepare baseline information, economic context and planning tools to address key opportunities and needs within our Central City Core and proactively anticipate development requests. More specifically this effort will:
- Set the direction from a land use, urban design, and policy/regulatory perspective for the Central Core;
- Evaluate options for infill development, considering development proposals, and addressing various housing needs and goals; and
- Build on Brea Envisions community engagement effort through focused outreach to the residents, land owners, developers, business owners, employers, and employees related to the Central Core.
This effort will be the first phase in a two-phase approach to provide a focused update to the General Plan, develop land use regulations and urban design policies and to facilitate development implementation over a 10 to 15 year horizon.
The geographic area currently under consideration is bound by the 57 Freeway on the east, Imperial Highway on the south, Berry Street on the west and Lambert Road on the north.
The scope remains open to modifying the geographic area as we gain insights through the work effort. General interests for this area include: expanding affordable housing opportunities; strategic economic development; streetscape design guidance, alternative transportation planning and linkage (e.g. Tracks at Brea linkage to neighborhoods), and addressing issues and opportunities resulting from the Brea Envisions project. This area has been specifically identified given:
- The Birch Street corridor, between Brea Downtown and State College Boulevard, has been identified in our General Plan as an opportunity for improved linkage. Discussions have included a goal to provide a gateway presence to our downtown and Civic & Cultural district of the City Core, via this corridor.
- The Lambert Rd/Brea Blvd area has some lands provided with mixed use zoning, others with commercial zoning and all are anticipated to have imminent development proposed. The Central City Core efforts will provide additional guidelines to help influence these projects and assure cohesive urban design.
- The Tracks at Brea is a linear park and trail system which will span the entire breadth of Brea once completed. Major segments are located along former railroad right-of-way which has been purchased by the City. A major segment, located between Brea Boulevard and State College Avenue, is now open and has been very well received by the community. So much so, that discussion has already begun about shaping future neighborhood connections and design to the Tracks. Some initial discussion and guidance toward these goals is desired.
- Several housing opportunity sites have been identified within the boundaries of the proposed area. Understanding the opportunities and challenges with additional housing in our Core will be important to better plan and prepare for this needed resource.
- The Brea Mall is continuing to look at options for reinventing and responding to the market demands to be successful and competitive. Determining economic conditions, market share, draw and other considerations will help this important land use in our Core better plan and adapt in the future.
- The Downtown is looking at the next generation of land uses and how to continue to improve serving the Brea community and be a regional destination. The City’s investment to realize a new parking garage will be a catalyst for further evolving the Downtown. Setting the stage to facilitate Downtown 2.0 will be an important consideration for Brea’s future.
- Finally, regarding the general area of the northwest corner of Imperial Highway and Berry Street, the City is beginning to hear of development interests in this area which can benefit by proactively engaging now, rather than reactively later. Currently, these lands are industrially zoned and speculation suggests mixed use scenarios are being explored and may come forward. Given these facts we’d like to discuss possible approaches to address.
DISCUSSION
Consultant Services and the Proposed Project Approach-- The City initiated a competitive process toward professional services assistance in Fall 2016. Based on initial qualification consideration, a creative approach to this effort evolved from those discussions. Rather than selecting one firm with high skills but perhaps not selecting another firm with expertise in an area of importance, the approach brings together three competing firms to work cooperatively and bring their areas of expertise to this effort. The proposal commits the Principals of these highly regarded consulting firms with a breadth of experience in community development, planning, design and implementation. Karen Gulley will lead the PlaceWorks team and will head up the systems, organization, technical analysis, economic and land use expertise. Nate Cherry is the Principal in Charge of the RTKL team offering expertise with community-driven processes, design, streetscape, complete streets and a long history with Brea and our Downtown. Lastly, David Barquist provides leadership for the Kimley-Horn group and will knit together baseline analysis, development proformas, GIS-based land use planning, sensitivity analysis, due diligence, design, landscape architecture, civil engineering, and transportation planning. The combination of these experts provide the City the depth of resources with proven track records to accomplish this effort on time and within budget, exceeding the expectations of the project.
One option to complete this work was to consider having our professional in-house staff conduct the effort. The proposed bandwidth of the consulting team, offers a high level of service and work on multiple components simultaneously which would not be possible with city staff. The consultant team does this type of work daily realizing a high level of efficiency in the work effort. They also have access to technical experts, such as GIS, economic, and design that would otherwise not be available in a staff led effort. Finally, based on the review of hours needed for this effort, utilizing a consultant team would actually save money considering the staffing resources required to complete this effort internally. We estimated the consultant time to complete this task is between 1100 to 2000 hours. Generally, that could equate to one year of full time equivalent staff or, 2 staff at 50% dedicated time. Given the multitude of duties required by staff, it would pull a significant amount of resources to complete existing internal work responsibilities and impact the ability to maintain service to the community.
The proposal provides for this first phase of work to be completed in 6 months. A phased approach to this work effort is necessary in order to provide for proactive planning tools to address more immediate development needs, with a future phase or phases to incorporate additional planning detail and CEQA analysis to provide a platform to implement development proposals long-term.
Project Tasks and Work Products --- The attached proposed scope of services outline the project approach steps, tasks, and resulting work products. As previously discussed, this first phase of the Central City Core effort will set the stage for more detail to come in a second phase. Critically, until the first phase is well underway, or even complete, it would be premature to scope the second phase and its specific needs and tasks. This first phase is meant to further inform and then set-up a general framework for development guidelines, standards and opportunity locations, with the future second phase fleshing out the detail of those criteria via appropriate zoning tools (such as a Specific Plan), as well as then providing the CEQA analysis to move those tools and future development forward. |