The Bend City Council approved a $482,000 contract amendment Wednesday to start determining how to build homes and businesses on a 479-acre area in the city’s southeast “elbow.”

Councilors voted to hire Portland-based Angelo Planning Group, which also is handling updates to transportation plans for the city and the Bend Metropolitan Planning Organization, to develop an area plan.

Planning is expected to last through January 2020.

Land in the area is split among 27 property owners. It’s expected to add 820 homes and 2,274 jobs, according to city projections.

“One of the primary purposes of the elbow is to add land for employment,” Bend Senior Planner Damien Syrnyk said.

Work done by Angelo Planning Group is one step toward developing in Bend’s recently expanded urban growth boundary, the state-approved invisible line around the city that determines where it can grow. City councilors previously approved road funding to extend Empire Avenue and Murphy Road to help develop the northeast and southeast expansion areas.

The city’s also working on a proposal to use tax increment financing — a method in which cities invest upfront in infrastructure improvements and pay for those improvements with expected increases in property tax revenue — to build up a more dense urban core. State laws require cities to build up as well as expand outward. Bend’s planning commission and City Council would check in on the elbow area plan periodically, but the city also plans to create a new advisory committee to oversee it. Additionally, the committee and staff would host several open houses, using a total budget of about $154,000 for community engagement.

Christen Brown, one of the property owners who also lives in the elbow area, said he didn’t want the city to create a new committee. Instead, he said oversight should stay with the planning commission and City Council.

“We’re talking about community outreach and spending $153,000, but the public doesn’t get to testify,” he said.

The advisory committee would include representatives from landowners in the elbow area, adjacent neighborhood associations and property owners, Syrnyk said.

“We’re talking about working with 27 landowners,” Syrnyk said. “We also need to coordinate with neighborhood associations and other agencies.”

City staff have already spent about a year working with a group of four property owners in an expansion area on the northwest side of Bend, he said, and the elbow is more complicated because it has many more landowners.

The city also wants to involve people affected by development early on, to avoid lengthy and expensive appeals.

“We’re looking at spending this money and coming out with a plan at the other end that everyone understands and that we can ideally come forward with,” Mayor Pro Tem Sally Russell said.

In other business, councilors approved a two-year agreement for around $1.35 million per year to continue city bus service. The agreement includes requiring Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, which oversees Cascades East Transit, to provide monthly bus ridership numbers.

The City Council also voted to mandate all city councilors and committee members to take sexual harassment training now required for city employees. Russell proposed the training in July, following reports that city councilor and Democratic state House candidate Nathan Boddie had groped a young woman at a bar several years before.

Boddie, who has remained on the City Council and in his campaign despite calls for him to step down, seconded the resolution and voted for it.

— Reporter: 541-633-2160; jshumway@bendbulletin.com