Planning Commission Regular Meeting

Frederickstaffspecial exceptions and a major certificate of appropriateness for architecture and landscaping the subject property is located in the Old Town small area plan the site is currently developed with a single-family home that was constructed around 1916 the subject property is located on the eastern side of Chambers Road at the intersection of judicial Drive and spans a block from with frontage on the west side of University Drive across from Breckenridge Lane south of Sager Avenue and north of Armstrong Street the surrounding adjacent uses consists of a former bank site to the north office condos to the south Breckenridge townhomes to the east and to the west is a former site of Red have in blue restaurant several offices and the Fairfax County Judicial Complex

so in terms of the special exceptions there are a number of there are seven special exceptions for this application and I'll try to go through each one the first special exception is for 75% ground floor non-residential use in a mixed-use building density of requesting a special exception for density of more than 24 acres and in the TOD and also a height it's a special exception for TOD the applicants also looking to look into it eliminate the requirement of landscape the landscape strip and street trees along the access drive as well as eliminate the requirement to provide very good access to a buddy non residential properties to eliminate the requirement of sidewalk on the north side of the proposed access drive while providing the sidewalk on the south side

James Featherabout that. Again, I think you're meeting a lot of the other important aspects of the As far as the special exceptions are concerned, we don't make recommendations related to those, but I will just remind folks, several of those stem from the fact that our zoning ordinance has not kept up with the small area plan. We are working that, but as Mr. Frederick pointed out, when it comes to things like density and height and so forth, those aren't prescribed. well density is not prescribed in the small area plan but sizes like heights are and you're in conformance with that by nature it's going to bring greater density but that was the whole idea of having activity centers is to develop vibrant mixed-use communities and you're not going to get

that with some very small or minimal construction that maybe meets some very low density I'm not terribly concerned. I don't think 24 dwelling units per acre is probably even reasonable in a commercial urban zoning district if we really think about what urban means. But that's what our zoning ordinance is. But we're not limited by that in the small area plan. So I'm not too concerned about those special exceptions as they pertain to zoning ordinances. Others are just the practical in nature of what's the sense of having a sidewalk on the north side of the driveway when there's nothing over there. and we don't know how that property is going to be developed. Those kind of things I'm not at all concerned about.