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which have included a ground floor residential component, which have carefully protected land designated for commercial use. The draft DSP proposes three land use designations that would permit both residential and commercial uses (see Attachments 3 and 4 for the existing and proposed land use maps): • Downtown Commercial district (Downtown Commercial land use designation in the existing Specific Plan) which applies to Main Street and the surrounding areas; • Mixed Use- Downtown (MU-D) district (Public land use designation in the existing Specific Plan) which applies to the existing Civic Center site and former SFPUC property; and • Mixed Use- Transitional (MU-T) district (Office land use designation in the Specific Plan), which applies to the properties on the north side of Old Bernal Avenue and the east side of Peters Avenue. Throughout the Specific Plan update process, the Task Force supported a restrictive approach to residential development in these three land use districts that would prohibit all ground-floor residential uses, with residential only permitted on upper-floors. As such, the draft DSP included language in the land use descriptions for each of these districts; and in Policy LD-P.17, more explicitly prohibiting ground-floor residential. Furthermore, Policy LD-P.18 prohibits street-fronting residential building entries on streets in the Downtown Commercial district. Comments received during the November/December outreach, particularly from members of the development community, and in later written comments from the Pleasanton Downtown Association (PDA) and Chamber of Commerce (Chamber), expressed concern that proposed development standards and restrictions placed on ground-floor residential uses were too stringent, and requested that they be relaxed. As such, staff provided the following options to refine or re-evaluate these policies. • Modifying policy language to discourage, rather than prohibit ground-floor residential, provided that it is located in the rear of the site and not visually prominent from the street; and • If ground-floor residential were to be permitted, staff suggested including an additional requirement for a street fronting commercial spaces to have a minimum depth of 50-feet so as to maintain the commercial character of the street frontage and to avoid "token" retail with a predominantly residential site in the downtown core. The rationale for this recommended change is threefold: 1) it solves for a lack of clarity about how parking for residential uses would be treated (i.e., the location of the garage if only upper-floor residential is permitted); 2) the change reduces the overall concern that prohibiting ground-floor residential may discourage redevelopment/ reinvestment in Page 6 of 15