City Council Meeting

Claire SchweigerstaffThe comprehensive plan envisions all new streets as well-designed complete streets that are aligned at regular intersections for a continuous street grid, and the new streets are not aligned at regular intersections. The zoning ordinance requires that street trees be planted no more than 15 feet from edge of pavement. The applicant is providing street trees along University Drive, Democracy Lane, proposed streets 1 and 2, and along Blinnem Boulevard. The street trees along University Drive are proposed to be planted more than 15 feet from edge of pavement. Street sections of the small area plans show street trees planted on the street side of the sidewalk, while the applicant is proposing to plant trees on the interior side of the sidewalk.

Colleen Gillisapplicantbut those are in very limited locations, and they are to accommodate some of this alignment and this architecture. So this is, let's talk first about this. This is Street 1, and we are building the northern half of Street 1. We're building the section of the road, but only the northern portion of the sidewalk width. exception because we want to we want the future development of the parcel to ourselves to actually add that sidewalk they will want a sidewalk on their property so that it leads to their uses if we put it on our property it starts to create some challenges but the TOD also calls for 10 foot sidewalks but the small area plans calls for a more fluid streetscape so what you can see here is

Speaker 43that so we are supporting the small area plan that has been adopted by the City Council we will always encourage development to include as much retail programming as possible and we have had several conversations with this applicant already and they have as they've mentioned increased their retail inclusion I think that's a positive thing that that number has gone up it I mean just numbers are numbers though and it is a smaller number than what exists on the site right now so we will continue supporting the the council objectives of you know creating spaces that encourage retail development especially in the center of the small area plans and and so that's kind of where we are right now

Claire SchweigerstaffYeah, sure. Yeah, you're okay. I'll try to answer all of them So there are inconsistencies between the small area plan and the zoning ordinance. And we know that, and we're currently working on updating our zoning ordinance to better match the small area plans. The applicant has submitted nine special exceptions, which are a lot of special exceptions. But for a development of this size, it's not uncommon to have those nine special exceptions. there are two special exceptions that they've requested that are like you you mentioned like within that zone of like the inconsistencies between the zoning ordinance and the small area plan and those two are the height requirement and the height special exception request and also maybe the

Fosterstaffand i and thank you for bringing that up what i would say is i some of the things in that have come up in previous presentations like pre-application meetings and certain things um a lot of it not all of them but been you know but you know we have the small area plans and so and they and those are adopted by you know currently in effect and those have parameters and so some of the things i hear you discussing are um you maybe don't agree with those parameters so like for example if it encourages as a certain height but well no that's too tall we don't like that height that's really more of a discussion i think than that you want to have about whether it's the small area plan the comprehensive plan etc

Thomas PetersonOkay. Council Member Peterson? Just to go back to Council Member Hardy Chandler's point, if I understand it correctly, in your response, one thing that I do think is a chronic issue is the disconnect between small area plans and public reception. Because what we're hearing repeatedly is people reacting negatively to projects that come forward that are driven by and consistent but not consistent with their preferences. And so just to recognize there's a disconnect here. We've already heard about it. We're going to hear this repetitively going forward, and we're going to be needing to address that, and these things are in conflict. And so we're going to have to be dealing with that conflict as we go forward.