City manager announces ‘fresh, modern’ new website for city.
ATASCADERO — The Atascadero City Council met for their regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 14, at 6 p.m. The hybrid meeting was held in the City Council Chambers and was followed by a closed session.
The agenda passed unanimously at the beginning of the meeting.
City Manager Jim Lewis had a clarification for the second item on the Consent Calendar, Lift Station No. 13, and Force Main Replacement Project Construction Award. On the agenda, the fiscal impact for the item was listed as TBD, which was a clerical error.
“The staff report does correctly break down the expenses and funding for the item. After further review, we did determine that the overall fiscal impact of the item will be a little lower than what is reflected in the staff report for this item as well,” Lewis said. “So, to be clear, the fiscal impact of the item is as follows. I wanted to share it with you before you vote. Approving staff recommendations will result in estimated expenditures of $6,620,008 in wastewater funds and $1.3 million in road repair and accountability act funds,” stated Lewis.
Mayor Heather Moreno then pointed out that the city has been planning on this, and the item is in their budget. The Consent Calendar was then passed unanimously.
In his Updates from the City Manager, Lewis announced that the city’s website has been officially updated with a new look. You can go to atascadero.org to see for yourself.
“It’s a very fresh, modern website. It’s much easier to find things. We’ll continue to work on little bugs here or there or links,” Lewis said. “We wanted to get it out and get people working on it. Just a really really impressive website and I hope our public enjoy it and can get more important information better and easier.”
Planning Manager Kelly Gleason addressed the council on the evening’s only Public Hearing: Ordinance Amending the Definitions of “Hotels” and “Motels” in Title 9 of the Atascadero Municipal Code. The amendment would make it so hotels and motels can provide more full kitchens in their rooms to compete with the Airbnb market.
“So, a little bit of background: our current code does limit full-sized kitchens, so we still allow wet bars, but full-sized kitchens in hotel rooms to 25 percent of the total number of rooms,” Gleason said. “It does that through the definition of hotel and motel, so it no longer is a hotel or a motel is 25 percent of the rooms have kitchens in them. So this definition becomes a little bit problematic when we look at hotels that are trying to be a more extended stay hotel, which still means less than 30 days, but might be a little longer and might have some different needs.”
The city has at least three hotels/motels in for application who would like to take advantage of a zone-text-change as proposed.
“To deal with that, we’ve done a couple of code text amendments that we’ve proposed this evening,” said Gleason. “The first one is just changing the definition of hotel and motel to be silent on the number of kitchens that can be accommodated in individual hotel rooms and remove that section from the definition. The second portion of the code update would be to address any concerns with potential conversion to long-term residential units.
“There’s a new proposed to our Title 9 that would regulate what hotels and motels that provide kitchens get to do and a couple of standards on what they need to implement to ensure some of our concerns are taken care of.”
That included hotels and motels without any kind of kitchens in rooms can exist without approval processes beyond what the code regulates. And an allowance for hotels/motels to have kitchens in up to 50 percent of their rooms as long as they have 20 rooms on their property. And a deed notification against the property for future owners so they know it is a short-term stay hotel and could not be used as a long-term residential property in the future. The amendment passed unanimously.
The next Atascadero City Council meeting will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m.
