John Barstow served on the Design Review Committee and then on the Arcata Planning Commission for a total of 30 years.  He left the Planning Commission in October, 2022. His expertise, calm voice, and clear outlook are very much missed.

John Barstow’s words here were transcribed from the August 23, 2022, joint study session for the City Council and the Planning Commission. This is about 1 hour 11 minutes into the audio recording. The audio recording and screen images of this joint study session are available here on Arcata1.com.

Below is John Barstow speaking at the August 23, 2022, meeting.

I voted for four stories in all the areas. But I believe that it should be possible to build a taller building if the building meets very specific known criteria.

I’m not in love with the Community Benefit idea. But you know, when we actually developed the the Form-Based Code, that’s when we’re going to really call out all of the requirements and all the different criteria by which a building could be made taller.

Also, I think there’s ways to consider the possibility of requiring discretionary review for buildings taller than four stories. That would kind of eliminate or at least partially eliminate the need for having really specific criteria.

The development of the Form-Based Code is really the hard part of this process. All we’re doing here is laying out the general pattern of the policies. When we get to working on the Code itself, we’re just going to have to be extremely careful to try to visualize how it’s going to be interpreted by the people that are actually building in the buildings.

So anyhow, basically, I favor of a basic four story limit for the whole area with the possibility of [words not clear] taller building. If you use the State density bonus rule, then you can pop your your building up, if you qualify for that by having enough affordable housing. You can make the building taller, regardless of what we have to say.