Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

Paul Nabtistaffokay then moving to the location elements as I discussed earlier the Planning Commission previously discussed the Fairfax Square office complex as an ideal location for having language to support a mixed-use place type again this is not recommending changes to the future land use map only having language consideration that support it as a alternative if that is ever sought this request or this site was identified based on several criteria that reviewed by the Planning Commission including site sizes and building to land value ratios staff once we prepared this we with that analysis we really only looked at commercial corridor sites but once we received this direction from the Planning at the existing parcel specific considerations to see if any of those

James Featherpause there for a second? Yep. You have question mark others. One of the observations I made as I was staring at this again, The Fairfax Square site, one of the things that sets it apart from other commercial corridor sites is its adjacency existing to residential. It faces a commercial main, or is that a boulevard? I forget. But it's surrounded by residential. almost none of the other commercial sites that I can identify along the boulevard have residential on the boulevard or commercial main adjacent to it, which seems to me to set this site apart in another way that hadn't really crossed my mind before. Arguably the parcel adjacent to the Fairfax Square site parcels, if they were to be consolidated,

you know might lend itself to the mixed-use place type extending the characteristic that Fairfax Square may be pursuing but there aren't that many places like that and that's one of the things that I was trying to describe in my own mind what kind of parcel if it's big enough makes it suitable to the mixed-use a combo of residential and commercial and that is the adjacency on residential you know abutting it there aren't many places like that when I look at Main Street to the west there aren't many places like that either new Northfax development the new Northfax development all that commercial property well the other thing is adjacent to activity centers but they're already adjacent the activity center is also is already the place we want to do

Paul Nabtistaffother side is that each of these has kind of unique characteristics as to why we would want to support them. And so rather than just relying on a general place type language, we can make statements about things like the fact that Fairfax Square is surrounded by multifamily complex. How do we address that? How do we relate to that complex? And Innova already has that language, but there's a lot of information in there about how to treat Innova's relationship to the surrounding residential community. And so it's really difficult to do that with a general place type language to accommodate the variety of conditions that we could be dealing with. Does that answer your question?

Okay. First, looking at proximity to activity centers, we'll look more closely at each of these areas circled, which is our five activity centers. And then we also have the area around the intersections of Main Street and Burke Station and Main Street and Roberts Road. This is where our Fairfax Square site is, but it's also an area, You'll notice on this map where we have at least one major road one intersection of two major roads That is outside of an activity center We are looking at these in comparison to the building to land value Ratio from that map So first starting with the Camp Washington Activity Center There's not a whole lot here because this activity center boundary was expanded to include surrounding commercial corridor areas

then lastly looking at picket in Maine the only commercial corridor areas again these are industrial sites extending up picket Road smaller sites relatively moderate building to land value ratio so we don't see any strong opportunities for adding these place types there and then the last area to look at here was the as I mentioned the area along Main Street near Roberts Road and Burke Station due to transportation access not that it's an activity center so the two larger orange sites in the yellow one in between them on the right side is Fairfax Square combined that's over five acres and so that is the one site we're looking at you can see there might be some other opportunities here and not necessarily directly connected to that site but worth

then lastly going to Fairfax Square you can see that this is near floodplain and resource protection area this is partially because the stream is in a culvert below this site but that does prevent it from being in the floodplain and resource protection not a impairment