Ann Arbor City Planning CommissionMeeting 4-5-22

001call us to order good evening and welcome to the tuesday april 5th 2022 regular meeting of the ann arbor planning commission for detailed information on meeting procedures please review the full printed meeting agenda which is available online mr leonard will you please help us with the roll call item number two absolutely commissioner mills here commissioner gib brandel commissioner sovay here commissioner abrams here commissioner hammerschmidt here commissioner dish here commissioner lee here commissioner clark here commissioner wage here full commission excellent um item three is approval of the agenda can i have a commission or move the agenda moved by commissioner white seconded by commissioner dish any discussion of the agenda all in favor please raise a hand or say yes that is unanimous the motion carries item for our approval of the minutes of the previous

002meeting we have in our packet the minutes from the march 15 2020 to city planning commission meeting moved by commissioner dish seconded by commissioner sovay any discussion or corrections on the minutes all in favor please raise a hand or say yes that's all of the hands so that motion carries um next item five are all of the reports um from city administration and city council commissioner dish could you start us off i have an incredible amount of good news so tc1 is passed yes 350 south fifth is passed with a change to the um i i can't remember what they're called but they're the supplemental use regulations or something like that that require that all of the affordable units be on site and there is a uh i don't i don't know there's not really

003a plan but there's an understanding that in order to take at least one little piece of this complex puzzle out of the equation uh it would be seen as fine and dandy if the city sold the site to the ann arbor housing commission and allowed us to retire the debt so that that way there's nothing driving us to want to get a high enough price for this site in order that we can retire the debt with it and then there was money for affordable housing site purchases passed in the arpa funds and i can't remember anything else of specific interest to the planning commission in the arpa funds and was there anything else on the agenda yes but okay so sartorius we approved the brownfield use plan which really wasn't ours we didn't see that

004and we have allowed given them a one month postponement to continue negotiating with the office of sustainability and innovation which is helping them be even more innovative around our carbon neutrality goals and when they are done with that then they will come to city council and ask for their tax abatement very good thank you for that update mr leonard nothing additional all right are there any planning commission officers or committee liaisons that have anything to report out the orc did meet we discussed premiums thank you and yes the next effectively kind of scoping out both the process and kind of the geographic extent of tc1 the next batch of proactive rezoning which staff had recommended b west stadium so because that was something that we talked about as a group before thank you all for

005contributing to that anything else i'd just say that we did receive communications both over the weekend and then an additional set that was sent uh before the meeting today so we have that all right um item six is uh the first opportunity for public comment persons can speak for up to three minutes about an issue that is not listed on um the agenda as a public hearing so we will have separate public hearings tonight for the maple cove 2 proposal and for the amendments to off-street parking requirements um for any other matters uh now is an appropriate time to speak we'll first call on individuals who are here in council chambers and then to remote participants if you are joining us remotely and have already dialed in you can press star 9 on your phone

006to indicate your interest in participating in the public comment opportunity if you are watching us through the web link you can use the raised hand feature and if you are watching us on tv you can dial in now that number is 877-853-5247 and our meeting id is 12 977-6634-1226 mr leonard will select those who have uh again raise their hand digitally by pressing star 9 or the raised hand button they'll call on you by the last three digits of your telephone number please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and whether you are speaking in person or uh through remote means please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments is there anyone here in council chambers that would like to provide

007a public comment now all right mr leonard anybody online no online attendees have indicated a desire to address the commission all right well there's another opportunity at the end of the meeting um so we'll close the public comment opportunity this first one and move to item seven uh the public hearing scheduled for the next business meeting for the april 19th uh planning commission meeting we've got two new uh scheduled public hearings one is for 212 miller avenue a site plan for planning commission approval this is the proposed construction of an eight-unit multi-family residential building uh totaling 13 934 square feet on a 0.2 acre parcel zone d2 downtown interface and then second 2600 pontiac trail annexation and zoning for city council approval this is a proposed annexation from ann arbor township into the city of

008ann arbor the petitioner of the village of the ann arbor project is seeking to add this 5.7 acre parcel of land to their existing project site area and zone it r4a just uh an additional note you'll recall that the planning commission is considered the annexation for the corresponding properties um but they have not yet been approved by the state the site plan will be uh following after that annexation is complete all right very good uh we are on to item eight a this is regular business uh the discussion or well uh this the first item of business is for the maple cove two which is for city planning commission approval tonight we'll have the project presentation presumably by the petitioners and then our staff report before the public hearing and then our discussion there's mr

009kowalski joining us we can see him and a petitioner in the flesh very good yeah actually live um so i uh i got brett's email so i guess i'll guide you through is uh going through the slides like this and you can't see that you can't see them um can you see it on the monitor right there at the podium yes i can there you go yep so i am heath hart i'm with midwestern consulting um part of the project team also with me is brad moore who is with the architectural side of the project and joining remotely via zoom is mokasham who is the owner and also the developer so brett if you want to slide to the next next slide [Applause] and the next slide so as you see on the screen this

010is a project for a piece of land that is located on the northwest corner of miller and maple intersection this is currently zoned office with a very small triangle portion at the very south that's zoned r1c that particular triangle shape was annexed into the city here in the last two years i think so that's why it was has a different zoning than the rest of the site this was identified in the master plan as a preferred use for housing even though its own office across the street on the other quadrants of that intersection is all commercial you have subways and gas stations and a little strip mall and then an office park on the southeast corner next slide brett the existing condition right now it is occupied by what's shown on the side slides is

011two vacant houses the house on the south has actually been demolished now so that is no longer standing there is a wetland that is in the center of the site so we have an associated wetland buffer around that wetland and then there is a stand of some trees on the southwest and also in that triangle shaped portion located at the very south i will say that south triangle shaped there is no planned um development proposed for that that area so next slide so what we're proposing is three multi-family residential apartment units the the ownership of of these apartments is the same ownership and control as the existing maple cob apartments which is directly to the north so the the thought is to use the same maintenance staff management staff for both apartments and really have

012this act as a i guess in unison with that that top one we're planning a public or a i'm sorry a shared access easement through both developments so they can share parking share the pedestrian paths share the access as well as site amendment entities that are present so we are proposing two curb cuts one on maple road and one on miller road those will serve for not only circulation within the site but also for emergency vehicle accesses we're also proposing the connection to the existing maple cove apartments to the north therefore it will provide the internal circulation on the site next slide brett uh back one there you go so um there is a total of 70 units that we're proposing we have a proposed 86 parking spaces throughout the complex when we originally submitted

013this it was under the old um planning ordinance where we were going to city council for approval and since since it's a buy right project now we no longer have to serve that we did however opt to leave the electric vehicle parking that would have been required under the old standards into the plan so we are still going to propose to add that electrical vehicle parking right now we've got a total of 71 spaces proposed to either be the installed capable or ready spaces bikes bicycle parking would be provided with bike hoops outside the buildings as well as a centrally located bike shelter for the class a parking natural features just quickly touch on that we do have seven landmark trees that were proposing to be removed mitigation for those would be on site there

014is some impacts not to the wetlands but to the wetland buffer and that is primarily associated with the existing garage that sits in that buffer so our impacts to the buffer would be to the removal of that garage there would be a small retaining wall established along the edge of that buffer and then the associated restoration of that buffer with the plantings i also will state that the wetland we are proposing to have a water management budget so that wetland would continue to receive some storm water the amount of that storm water was is we tried to match it to be equal for the existing conditions of what is proposed the rest of that storm water would be in an underground system located on site next slide brett so talking quickly about the utilities you

015can see here that the uh storm water detention system proposed is an underground system that is located under the paved parking area on drive access trying to take advantage of dual space for that parking structure the outlet is out to a county drain located on the east side of maple road so we do have approvals through the water resources commission for that connection and we'll continue to work with them for the final permit with the construction details each building would have its own water and sanitary connections out to the respective either miller or maple roads for all three buildings and then we do have one fire hydrant that we're adding actually two fire hydrants i'm sorry that we're adding adjacent to the entrances and that's to provide the fire coverages necessary for the buildings so

016with the next slide i'll turn it over to brad and he can speak about the architecture since this is a continuation of the original maple cove project all the buildings in the nipple cove too have been designed to match those buildings there are a mixture of a variety of masonry exterior materials and also some cementitious siding the buildings are three stories there's some limited basement storage space for the tenants in the buildings and each building has a community patio deck on the roof so that it's a an amenity for every building that they have a rooftop place to go out and get a suntan and enjoy some conviviality the parking spaces for the original maple cove did not include any of the electric vehicle charging stations and they will because of this cross access easements

017have access to the charging stations in this phase so that everybody uh in the project will have access to charger electric vehicles if you have any other questions he and i are here to answer them thank you thank you very much mr kowalski okay good evening everybody um i i don't really have a lot to add from their presentation a couple of things i did want to point out however um as the petitioner did mention um the 70 units uh and they're a mix of one and two bedroom units really there's about 23 147 two bedroom units and these are ranging in size from about 630 square feet to a little over a thousand square feet um so they're they're smaller there are smaller units which may make them a little bit more affordable by

018nature of their size and the limited number of bedrooms there um again with a couple of other notable items is the cross access that we wanted to point out with the maple cove one project adjacent to it um that has a couple of benefits obviously for um the pedestrian pedestrian traffic as well to kind of cut through there are some amenities on this site there's kind of a small picnic area they're planning um in in the middle area of the site and again some of the enclosed bicycle lockers those would be available to the residents as i understand it of both sites to be able to use those um again in a couple the other the wetland use permit as you will see on that is that does require the separate motion for approval now

019as again the petitioner did indicate um there while they're not going into the wetlands uh per se that there is uh some encroachment as it stands right now due to the existing garage which will obviously be removed and there will be some restoration in that area and a little bit of grading um obviously to make the grades work in there as well as to ring uh maintain a lot uh water budget for that wetland so one of the things within the storm water plan obviously the majority of the stormwater needs to be routed to the treatment there is an ability though as as they worked with our natural features coordinator to have some of the water uh maintain the existing uh water budget for that wetland so but because of that encroachment and because of

020a little bit of use within that wetland buffer area that that is why the wetland uh use permit is required um and again one of the uh items it was mentioned but i think it bears repeating is that although obviously now this is a site plan for planning commission approval so if approved by you all tonight this obviously would be the final stop um so the ev parking is not required however they have maintained the uh the same ratio that would be required as if the plan was going to um city council for final approval and um that really kind of sums up my presentation now i believe the petitioner had covered everything else as i go back through my notes and look here um so yep i think that and staff is recommending approval

021of both the site plan as well as the wetland use permit and i am certainly available for any questions thank you very much mr kowalski all right i will open up uh the public hearing for this item this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about the maple cove 2 site plan um we will as before first call on folks that are here in council chambers and then those that are online um if you have joined through the web link use the raised hand button to raise your hand if you're watching and need to call in now the number is eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and then enter our meeting id which is nine seven seven sixty six thirty four twelve twenty six once you're

022in or if you already are on the phone you can press star 9 to raise your hand indicating you're interested in participating in the public hearing this evening mr leonard will call on you by the last three digits of your telephone number or by your name if you join through zoom and when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds if you could for either method of participation please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and again please keep them to three minutes is there anyone here in council chambers that would like to participate in the public hearing my name is ken garber i live at 28 haverhill court the staff report for this project indicated that the petitioner was prepared to discuss sustainability elements at the

023meeting so i was very hopeful that in the presentation we just heard we would have heard plans for building electrification and hopefully also photovoltaic panel solar panels on the roof to generate some of the electricity on site what we heard was some information about ev charging stations and bicycle parking both of which either are already required or at this stage pretty much expected of new developments um so i'm disappointed maybe some more will come out during q a but in the meantime i would remind both planning commission and the petitioner that there has been a very strong trend in the last year and a half for new residential developments to come in all electric lockwood senior living last year 211 packard new north town homes mostly and the biggest one was valhalla glenn apartment units

024and um i know the development team is very familiar with this project because i believe mr moore is the architect on that um so um i'm a little puzzled that this has not been proposed for this project as well so if that's a question i would have for the petitioner if i were sitting in your seats and otherwise you know about all i can say good about this project is it's housing we need housing i suppose the units are smaller and so perhaps more affordable although i hesitate to use use the word affordable for um units that well end up in the first phase are over fourteen hundred dollars a month for a single for a one bedroom apartment um but i guess everything's relative so you can chalk that up in the fair in

025this project's favor other than that um very disappointing thank you any other participants mr leonard are there any online no speakers who indicated a desire to speak all right i will close the public hearing then and read the two motions i'll read them together the ann arbor city planning commission approves the maple cove 2 site plan at 1605 north maple road dated february 2nd 2022 as the site plan complies with all applicable requirements of the unified development code and other applicable laws ordinances standards and regulations and based upon the following condition that all parcels must be combined before issuance of any building permits the second motion is that the planning commission approves the wetland use permit for the maple cove 2 project site plan can i have a commissioner move that moved by commissioner gbrandle

026seconded by commissioner lee who would like to kick off discussion or questions go ahead commissioner silvay i think i have a few simple ones um i mean i i appreciate the kind of continuation of the apartments kind of along this block i know we've seen a other parcel just north of here so it's great to see this density of housing for the petitioner every um the vehicle charging stations are all labeled consistently but it is intended to be a phased project as it's noted can you outline which ones might be vc and or installed versus capable within the plan will we see installed in phase one um to be honest i can't give an accurate answer on that um i know the the installation is thought to be associated with each building so um they

027were in close proximity of the building so as far as the determination of which exact ones would be installed in phase one i probably can't speak on that at the moment um i can't say that they're all would be you know be capable so you know actually choosing the final resting place for those units would have to be determined at that time it'd be nice especially because the other unit hasn't had any and if these are going to be to start with the installed and kind of work your way down the tier through the phases would be you know an ideal preference i know it's the desire of the owner to to have some installed units in phase one in phase one bring them on early that way they would be available for the existing

028apartment complex also great not just the new buildings stay up here the next question curb cuts the current development uh has one curb cut with two dead end parkings this now has two more curb cuts um and the join so three crops for the whole development and i'm wondering if you did any analysis to see if you could have a dead end corridor you know within this development and still get the vehicular movement necessary without the extra curb cut would you be are you referring to removing a curb cut off the public street yep okay um it could be possible i know we were looking at the the vehicle circulation it was desired to have that access to miller road especially for vehicles leaving so they wouldn't have to go out to maple road and

029then attempt to you know right turn lane during traffic times so the desire was there to have that that circulation problem i know or that that the process that the one curve cut off of maple road was designed one actually off of both roads because of the height of the buildings those curb cuts the drive vials as you come in are 26 feet wide and that does provide the aerial access required from the fire department so with that aspect yes they will both be required um to be present okay that's just helpful another engineering um for the architect it says on the roof plan optional roof deck patio so can you speak to if what is the plan for that uh since there is limited green space and it's labeled as optional is it guaranteed

030are we going to see this or if it's optional is the other option solar panels instead so um it has been my discussion with the owner that he intends to put them on the buildings i have no belief that they wouldn't be included in the project we do have him with us on zoom but as far as i know they intend to build them you can go ahead if you want to address it yeah yeah the first phase does have uh both buildings with rooftops completed and we want to keep that consistent in in the second phase with these three additional buildings so the plan is to have a rooftop patio on each building okay and then electric for i think you know the easiest ones that we see pretty consistently is electric stoves instead

031of gas stoves is that something that you're willing to comply with for this project um so if we're open to it we're not ready to commit at this time i just want to leave the options open [Music] we're not at that point just yet are you seeing any limits to your electric capacity on the site or what are your reasons to not wanting to commit uh to be honest i just i just haven't done a whole lot of research on the two um and i just want to kind of weigh out the two options at the time when we're ready to uh to make that decision i would heavily encourage it um just in terms of you know your renewables and the safety of all of your residents in terms of air quality and it's

032a very minimal of anything cost to the difference so i would really uh encourage that as the simple lowest hanging fruit direction in moving this building towards electrification so um that if not everything else yeah i definitely will uh look into it very deeply and and make the best choice great those are just my first project questions for now thank you other questions or comments commissioners commissioner weich i just want to pick up from commissioner sovay's comment around the fire truck in the curb cuts on miller was it a requirement of the fire department that you installed the curb cut on miller or are you saying because you've installed the curb cut it meets the specification of the fire department the the fire code which is adopted by the city of ann arbor requires certain

033accessibility requirements to each building including aerial access for the ladder trucks and this was the this was the only configuration which gave us the required aerial apparatus access to all three buildings okay how did you meet the specification for the first two because you have the same configuration of the building so as i'm looking at the aerial shot you have a building with a parking lot that is identical to what you're proposing in this edition so how did you meet that one but in this one you have to put in a curb cut in order to meet it well it is it is in essence the same configuration there's a curb cut between two adjacent buildings so the aerial apparatus truck can pull off of maple road via the curb cut and the aero apparatus

034can service either building that's the same case in the first but you don't have you don't have two um can you put up their site plan please mr leonard would you please put up their site plan so that i could refer to it so that we're looking at the same thing and i can get a i might add a little clarity when according to the the fire code that aerial apparatus has to be within 15 or 30 feet of the building so it's the proximity of that 26 foot wide drive lane in order to meet that that code and maybe maybe this is a question for staff then like how did they meet it in the first when because the configuration of the building is the same yeah i'll leave that to uh mr kowalski

035matt do you have any uh reports on the fire from the fire marshal can that can speak to that i well unfortunately i mean i can't speak directly to the the first approval although i was the planner on that project i'm not aware of exactly the requirements in that area but what i can say is to this effect is that one of my first comments was to uh close or like minimize the curve cuts was to eliminate that the additional curb cut on maple and um it is correct the fire marshal came back and did uh didn't want that required that that access point there so in addition it also helped with the solid waste layout as well the solid waste would have been shifted considerably over in order to get that clearance so unfortunately

036i can't speak to the first approval but i can speak to this and that is the staff comment that was regarding the curb cut and the fire marshal did um push back a little bit and said that that fire access there would be required or they would have to provide say like a large turnaround that wouldn't kind of fit within that area anyway so okay and i would i would just add if you would like if the commission is interested in more information we of course going to follow up with the fire marshal to provide that inquiry um i i i don't want to reference numbers because and i i can't speak for to the fire code um architects in this in the room probably know this better than i do but there's that 26

037foot requirement is accessible to the building or within a distance it may be that that first curb cut provided the distance for the two buildings to be accessible however once you started stacking multiple buildings beyond that you might have gone beyond that dimension but if there's more clarification desired we could always follow that yeah my first question was following up from commissioner sylves question which is was it required or not and it sounds like at least for mr klossy that it was required uh in order to accomplish that to the owner as well as the petitioners who are in the room i'd like to again echo commissioner sovay's comment around electrification um just for the well-being and health of the residents just you know natural gas just creates more carbon that gets put into the

038home and without adequate ventilation that can cause health problems that are well documented now and so as we are in our climate crisis as we are trying to achieve our climate goals electrification is something that not only helps us with that but it also helps the health and well-being of the residents the other question that i had was around um the crosswalk like is that uh are there issues one putting in these additional units having um residents needing to cross maple i see that there is a crosswalk that's at sort of the south part of the first development was there any conversation either from staff or with the petitioner about addressing um sort of pedestrian safety around the building and being able to cross or pedestrian traffic i think that's still inside our purview from

039the building to other sites and amenities on uh maple i mean i can i can let the petitioner add to this but um i did that again that was one of the comments that i relate over to the transportation reviewer on this is whether or not she felt there would be a need for a mid-block crossing um and a couple of reasons no she didn't feel that there was a need given the proximity of the one to the south also with other driveways and access points within there um it there was there was not a good point there's not a good access point there so um to that i'm not sure if the petitioner explored that but again i asked a question and it was not recommended so i did not pursue it past that

040point okay is there um access to that like was that a question or um like a verbal or a written response i'm just interested in why because if people are turning into this new curb cut from a left turn lane that is going to impede the bike lane as well as the pedestrian movement on the west side of maple and so i'm just a little surprised that there wasn't any consideration for how that would impact uh safety there i i yeah i can't i mean i don't have a written risk actually i probably do have a written response just whether or not it's warranted i don't know exactly how many factors that she did look into regarding like cross uh turning lane interference and things like that or across the bike lane i'm not sure

041how far that analysis analysis went down there but again i know i did have that conversation with her and um that could be again something that's that's worth following up on to see maybe if those other uh items were explored there but again to the initial response was uh that it wasn't um warranted at that area okay we can certainly follow up on that one as well absolutely and then my last question maybe more of a comment is there aren't uh since this was zoned office and just in a survey a quick survey nearby the property there aren't any parks um or sort of like open green spaces for the residents and so since that south corner wedge isn't being developed and if i'm looking at the site plan correctly there's a lot of shrubs

042but i can see there might be some space in there without having to take out any trees to maybe place a pocket park and so i wondered if the petitioner had considered an amenity for the residents outside of the rooftop patios to create some kind of green space or maybe even a play area if there will be families residing in these units we did have some discussions about doing that very thing we had not advanced the layout of that to a finalized state yet but yes we had already identified that as a possibility those are my initial comments and questions thank you very much mr white commissioner weich don't know why i called you mr weich it's i don't know i'm glad i remembered your last name this time because previous weeks that's not that's

043not been my cup of tea other questions comments commissioner brandel um i guess this is just part of our own issues within the city um that is is difficult and frustrating to me which is that um if we didn't have that curb cut we still you would have still had to mitigate for it but we could have preserved a 24-inch white oak tree in that place where it's coming out under miller and i realize that we don't you know as petitioners and as staff members within the city that there's often conflicts between different departments about what they want and what their standards are and things like that i know it always defaults to fire health safety welfare all that kind of business but um i guess i'm just pointing out just to us as a

044body and to the city in general that it's really frustrating to me when there are options that we could maybe have given that it looks like that building is just barely beyond the 26 feet from miller that would allow aerial access that it's just and and obviously i'm sure you have it right sit back and all that kind of thing um i just find it frustrating that we have to take down a huge gorgeous white oak which you can see from the google street view is back in there um i just find it frustrating that we have to make those kinds of choices when something is so close to being potentially workable and again you would have had to mitigate for it anyway because you would have affected fifty percent of critical root zone but

045maybe it would have made it through the construction process if the rest of it had really been protected i know this isn't your problem i'm just pointing this out i think as a body that it's something i get frustrated with both as somebody who sits here and somebody who puts things through the city as well that uh that we have to make these choices and that i i just would really like it if we could try to figure out how to have a little bit more flexibility with something so that we could make choices that just make sense with some of this stuff so i'm just kind of saying that out loud i'm not expecting anything because i understand that you know you all were responding to staff comments and you know you're going to

046do what the fire marshal is going to tell you to do but it's it's i just find it hard when there's just these things out there that we have that that are in conflict with one another when i feel like just a little bit of flexibility sometimes could allow us to make better choices around some of those things so um uh in my perfect world you would have designed to run out in the first place so that maybe you had five less parking spaces and you know the way that you configure that whole drive but you know that what's done is done you guys are doing what's within your code so i'm not going to fault you for that um it's the way i wish people started their site plans is thinking about those really

047amazing resources that we do have and trying to start from that point rather than laying it out and then realizing that we're you're taking out like two big oaks in that area one of which is right in the middle of the building and you probably couldn't have done much about um [Music] uh so i'm just putting that out there for the record i guess um i would also encourage whatever electric you can manage and stoves seem pretty pretty straightforward um there's also induction too we just did this my own house which i know that there's kind of the whole kind of which market you're getting at and you have people tend to think of electric as being oh maybe it's not nice enough for the rents i want to charge and then there's gas but

048induction is actually getting to be more trendy and so there are ways to do electric that are that are higher end too if that's part of the market that you're going for so that's something also i think that um is an option for people as they're putting developments out there that electric can be something that is high performance as well um for for some of the kitchen appliances um so yeah i i am um less in favor of a park at that busy corner i think it'd be i don't think i'd want to hang out there i think it's too busy um there are some around it's not great i agree um i mean maybe you could plop a bench there but it feels really it's a busy intersection i don't know that i'd want

049to hang out there if it was in a different part of the site i think i want to hang out there more so that's where i am i guess in terms of the in terms of that maybe you can do some really cool things with the the rooftop areas for people in terms of making them pleasant and nice for people to be in um so uh the other just random thing i would say is that the building to the north i know somebody was doing commissioning with it and there were some issues with moisture and the way the masonry was handled and so i would hope that that would get corrected the second time around there's kind of that white inflorescence that happens on the outside of a brick that says something was wrong in

050terms of the way that i don't know if it's design or construction or you know what it was but there was some sort of issue with it in terms of uh in terms of how it was handling moisture so given that this is kind of phase two of that overall thing i would hope that that would you'd look into that for this next round and be able to make sure that that gets corrected so that when we do build things they're they're built to last so that's it for now go ahead commissioner hammerschmidt thank you um so we had a neighbor send us some communication and and i wanted to bring up one of the things that she brought up um which is parking i don't specifically have a problem with the number of parking

051spots that you have proposed but i'm curious i guess how you got there um and it might be that that's what it's required for office but then beyond that um the development the maple cove one i'm wondering about you know what are the demographics of the people that live there like have you seen parking challenges on that site is it the same parking ratio i'm just kind of trying to suss out any sort of concerns about the limited number but perceived limited number of parking spaces for the number of units particularly you know 47 two bedroom units are the people that are going to be living they're going to have two cars are we going to see spillover so uh in in my discussions with the owner the answer is some of the two-bedroom units

052have a single car and some of them have two cars now the current um or the existing um phase one if you will medvalk cove one had up a ratio of about 1.7 i think uh parking spaces per drawing unit in in this version we've scaled that down to about 1.27 so it is a reduction from the first one but they're they're connected and so they can be shared correct so uh and the other uh consideration is that um the uh in the um installed ev spaces won't be a permanent parking space uh tenants will rotate while charging in and out of those so it's uh so that's why we need to have a more than the one per apartment requirement uh for the office zoning district is so that we have enough spaces not

053only so that the residents have faced this current project phase two in our my owner's mind have the ability to park but also jockey the people from phase one in and out of the uh that you need sparking spaces okay got it i'll just underscore um the electrification i think you know we can't require it but anything you can do to look into that i would i don't own an induction stove but i really want an induction stove i think people are really would really gravitate towards that as an amenity in the building plus just not putting gas in to the building is actually or is obviously great for um our sustainability goals in the city and i would agree with commissioner gabriel i don't think that corner is right for i see why people

054would want you know there's a lack of green space it's used to cross roads in order to get to any of the parks but i would really encourage those rooftop at minimum the rooftop open spaces for people to be able to get outside and enjoy that is it thank you others go ahead commissioner abrams no yes that's me that's you it is um i'll just add my voice to the chorus of people urging you to consider full building electrification for this project uh beyond just the stoves um and as uh the public commenter mentioned at the beginning your this architect your architect has worked on projects um and so you have expertise already on the team for full building electrification and i think um you know i would urge you to do it not because

055it's required of you but because it's the responsible thing to do and the ethical thing to do thanks i'm going to chime in along those same lines but also just to say um the staff report suggested that the petitioner will be prepared to discuss sustainability items at the meeting and i'm curious i um what considerations have been given other than we haven't thought about it entirely we need to look more into electrification uh what discussion are there other elements of sustainability that you have thought about that we that you can share with us um i would i would just default to what moe said earlier and he's is that he is considering all options um and we you know this project is such that he's not anticipating beginning construction documents until next year so it

056so perhaps it's a long way off in his thinking to make a commitment um but he is not um objecting to doing electrification um it is one option he will be considering i can't say anything more than he's already said okay i sorry i was just thinking that there would have been more more discussion to share with us um along along with electrification again in particularly in parts of the roof where there may not be um if you are not offering that amenity area i think this is a great opportunity for rooftop solar there's also an amenity that could be offered in solar car ports that pair very nicely actually with electric vehicle charging so that's another option and staff can suggest the process if solar car ports were added later i don't act that

057doesn't require coming back to us so that is uh to let you know about that flexibility that our code offers um those are the the the things that i would rattle off again electrification would be my priority um here um but solar is also something to consider the economics of that are changing so particularly if it's going to be a year from now that's um the the prices have been dropping precipitously um as have exp the experience curve along with building electrification and so kind of what uh electric heating systems might look like today price wise i you know i would expect those prices to come down in the year so um i would not just consider it today but if you aren't going to be fully you know ready to do to break ground

058for another year give it a look then too um initially as i was reviewing this i was thinking to myself why are these buildings only three stories and not four um and and i think it was because uh this was in the slides tonight that there is an far you're pretty close to maxing out the far um even so i'm curious uh if if you considered consolidating it into two buildings that were four stories um if that was a consideration at all when we did the analysis of putting all of the far into the two buildings we we breached a height limit that would trigger high-rise codes in the building and also push us over the very limited height in the office zoning district okay just for tc1 a whole bit different ball game okay

059um i was just curious if you know i know that it's limited at four stories but i didn't know if four-story slightly larger building would have allowed for more creativity um in terms of site design um [Music] i would also echo that i am really excited that this is a second phase that these parking lots are connected that there's this opportunity for sharing parking um in an area where you know uh it so that you don't have to make do on your own lot considering like contingencies and building in excess but the idea that we're sharing across lots i think i'm that was one of the um one of the things that when i saw this i was particularly excited about and especially thank you for sharing kind of what the parking ratios are here

060compared to the neighboring lot um those were my comments other comments questions commissioner lee go ahead thank you um i have some just the clerical thing sheet six um site plan utility plan the outlet control structure just missing a t i was just kind of very very small nuance thing i think there was just a misspelling just wanted to point out to you guys um overall from a neighborhood building continuity standpoint i think it fits the neighborhood pretty well three um three-story low rise i would like to have seen some of the buildings be kind of closer to the street if possible i know there's a wetlands that obviously makes it difficult but as it's a busy intersection and as people have been talking about activation and utility of that corner we all know that

061the built environment influences you know human behavior so would like to see a little more i guess you know towards the street slow it down a bit create a sense of arrival as you're going down miller towards downtown um but overall you know i think i'm okay with the you know what i'm seeing here uh for clarification there's no elevator in this building i didn't see it on the floor plan on a a horizontal um or i'm sorry a vertical penetration standpoint so okay gotcha um aside from that yeah just the utilization of that corner is something i'd like to you know understand better is to say whether it's a garden or something that you know creates a little bit more beautification because i know this is a big entry point of anybody getting off

062you know 14 and plenty of reasons that people want to live here good bike connectivity overall in support but yeah go like feel free to respond to that i just wanted to say that one of the companies that my client owns is a landscaping company so yeah i'm sure it will be end up very nice gotcha no that that's great um uh yep and then obviously uh sustainability uh the thing that i will say on behalf of the petitioners that um bringing 70 you know units in town will help you know regional trip alleviation suncog says you know average commute times about 25 minutes so if we can bring more people to ann arbor there's a higher likelihood that they'll engage in using bikes as opposed to you know cars so i think there's a

063little bit of that element of regional trip alleviation obviously the building form we do hope to see you know greater utilization of electrification i know it's a balancing of affordability so um overall uh 10 million dollars for 78 000 square feet uh 126 dollars a square foot good luck hitting those construction numbers um that's uh you know it seems like a very um optimistic number given the current market but i'm overall in support of what i see i do echo every one sentiment that obviously environmental sustainability and eight to zero plans are pretty important so um other than that those are the you know kind of clerical comments i had with respect to this thank you any others all right this one oh go ahead commissioner get randall um could i ask a question of

064mr hart so i'm trying to track down one thing i just noticed is that um the soils are seem pretty hydrated from what i don't i was trying to search for the the wwab the huawei or whatever that one is series which is from what i'm remembering it's like pretty hydric which makes sense given that it's right next to a wetland i'm just wondering if you have to do anything sort of special to protect pavements and again just thinking about longevity and thinking about footing drains doing their thing all the time and just are there things that you need to do um to be able to make sure that um you know pavements aren't breaking up and that you know when you are building this thing that it's actually again built to last and that

065you're not having issues with how i can answer that and very briefly um the one area where we've got the underground detention at of course that's going to be filled with gravel so that's going to be a very well drained well-drained area the drive on the west which does not have the underground detention in it has approximately um i think it's about a four percent slope that comes across that so water is going to be draining off very quickly from that area i'm talking about from underneath from underneath yeah just because if the if it's super hydratic and it's got seasonally high well that area has got about from the the from the property the west to the wetlands there's about 15 feet of fall so it's got a very high slope to it i'm

066not sure if you'll see the water in those upper upper section of that with that slope but the pavement itself has got a very good slope so the thought is get that water off the pavement very quickly but yes there is no um we don't have any any uh uh storm sewer on that side um it's all surface flow so uh there is no um there is no storm structures to tie in an underdrain to so everything would go into your stormwater system um basically any kind of with anything at the surface going in i guess what i'm just thinking about it and again this is really isn't a planning commission issue i guess it's more just like an awareness of as you move into more specifics and things like that there may be things

067you need to do to kind of protect that pavement from from just groundwater seasonally high ground water you know that may end up breaking it up faster than it would normally in terms of just method and and how you're handling base material and drainage and all that kind of business so there may be an opportunity to get another drain in that area yeah to help protect that um we'll get into that as far as the detailed construction drawings go so i guess we can take a look at that thank you commissioner weich this is a question for staff mr quasi would it be possible or could you give me a sense of the effort it would take uh staff to produce a sustainability score or an environmental impact score for a development like this so

068that we would have a sense of if this isn't electrified and it's doing you know natural gas how much you know carbon are we uh approving with this development like it is that something that would be easy for staff to get through osi or is that something that would add a material impact on the staff report commissioner which i'm happy if i could take that um sorry mr quasi you don't get to answer well i might i'll let him answer as well so as part of our standard review of petitions now we do we have the office of sustainability and innovations provide a review of these site plans as well they evaluate the plans according to the city's a2 climate neutrality plan the differential as we've talked about here is we don't have udc standards

069to hold that to but you will find i think what you're talking about is an evaluation of that in the supporting materials when you review a site plan we are have again we are having them to measure it against that those those plans it is in uh is online available typically we don't we don't attach every staff review if that's something you're interested in though we can definitely start getting that with every development we're talking about the same five things right and if we could just get a sense right away and in the staff report it said that we were going to have a conversation around sustainability and the conversation that we had around state sustainability was no conversation around sustainability so there is no conversation around heat pumps there is no conversation around um

070geothermal whether in the parking lot there is no conversation around solar mounted car ports and so i just feel like they're it's hard to figure out how to suss this out and then we wind up having these same questions with every practitioner so if osi is already doing that if we could see that if i could if no one else wants to wait there are heads okay if we could see that i think it would just prepare these questions a little bit better especially when the petitioners are saying things around like oh you know we're not sure how in our climate we can add a heat pump we've had that conversation and i know because i reached out to dr stoltz directly and she said you know there are heat pumps that work in our

071climate that are cost competitive with other heating sources and while we are working on a petition or lobbying efforts with the state to allow us to include these kinds of things in our code while we are on that path we i would like us to signal to developers in our community that this is important and that um they should come to this body with an answer and the answer could be we just don't care but they should have an answer and and i just feel like we did not get an answer tonight and uh that is that is absolutely disappointing yeah and i i need to correct myself i'm as as i'm discussing that i'm looking in uh mr quality can correct me if i'm wrong i don't see osi's review of it um if

072that's something you'd like to see before you take action that's something that we can definitely to the arrange is that an oversight or do they normally does osi normally review these so it's a relatively new process um we designated a couple of categories of projects that we are sending to osi for that review um i i would probably report back to my instinct as this one should have gone to them for that review so that's something i'm happy to follow up with if you'd like that level of detail about how this specifically relates to the city's carbon neutrality plan and isn't this something that's coming like we're going to be reviewing the buildings right isn't that what osi is planning wasn't that a conversation at council around and the fee structure being around that wasn't

073that in that so many aspects to the carbon neutrality plan everything from you know advocacy at the state level to update building plans so that communities have the ability to just require these as more standard building permit requirements but in the meantime again because i think it is of interest to commissions that's where we've started that process i i i would speculate that it was an oversight in this case but i want to go back to the decisions that we made about the types of projects that we had flagged for that review not at all don't worry um i mean my sense too is that because this is advisory or it would be informational uh this is my son says chair um but you can certainly disagree with me um and there are not standards

074associated with at this point it's good information and i agree that this would be fantastic information among those class of uh developments where we are asking for it to share that in this in the plans um including that in this case i wouldn't i do not feel comfortable holding this up because that doesn't change the standards upon which we tonight are being asked to evaluate this proposal but i think it would help our conversation guide our conversation and um provide the additional information um in this again advisory role educational role to some extent elevating that conversation for the future um go ahead commissioner dish yeah in that vein i wanted to be sure that i was following both what osi is providing in these reports currently and what commissioner weich was interested in having because

075i heard the idea of a score which is interesting i suppose um but i also heard the idea of alternatives if you did this and these alternatives can be done without greater cost or with 10 extra cost or something like that that to me would be a little bit more useful because when we have these conversations that sometimes feels to be the thing that's missing like well we haven't done our research and we're not sure and it might add cost and whatever and so to me the alternatives would be great i guess we could have a score it's a little hard to score when you're not when you don't have standards but over time we would be able to say oh yeah you know the valhalla scores at x for these reasons and your project

076compares favorably or unfavorably to that project that might be useful but to me for the informational part of our conversation these are the things that you're doing these are some things any one of the menu of which as you began to elucidate chairmills would make your project more green and they exist and their cost they raise the cost of projects on average x or lower it over time because of the energy savings is am i at all making sense you are making sense to me and during commission proposed business or just more education i can tell you a student that i will have working that i will be advising working with mr leonard this summer that i think will help move towards something like that so commissioner give randall i think i think this is

077a really intriguing idea i'm glad that we're discussing this i think in some ways it could be sort of a similar role to the design review board which also doesn't have any kind of you know we just look at their report they don't they don't pass anything they don't vote on anything but they give us a really good idea of how things fit into the downtown and they have a robust discussion about this and so i think that they do have some standards but it would be an interesting maybe comparison for um how to kind of structure something that they're that again they don't necessarily hang their hat on something specific and they have they're not voting on anything but they are like a recommending or whatever i don't know that just may be some

078potential way to think about that as a as a role with the office of sustainability if there's some sort of report and again just to be able to advance the discussion because i think that's part of what we're missing here is is to be able to kind of have have something on which we can base the discussion on and the other thing that i'm hearing too though is is just having resources for a developer because this is something that is newer this is not something that mr moore does he's not a mechanical engineer he probably has some sense of how things fit together but that's not his expertise we're not we don't mechanical engineers and people that do these systems are not part of the building process up to this point usually they usually come

079way later in the process in terms of like when things come through site plan submission the buildings are not very designed at this point even though it feels like they are they're really not i mean there's a lot of changes all the guts have to be created and there's a lot of floor plans and all kinds of things that shift and change so um it's it's just those people haven't even been engaged yet often times in this process and so how can we set up something so that there you know i don't know if it's like recommendations or handouts or guidance or resources or something that can kind of help people think about these general principles early on just to be able to because like you know mr war saying we may not be doing

080construction documents for another eight months you know and that and that's when you're really getting into the guts of all this design so what can we do as a city to elevate people that don't they're not thinking along these lines but we want them to so how can we help them too how can we i mean without it being crazy how can we help them to be able to because anything new for any of us people anything that we do that's new we're always like just a second i'm not sure about this it's just we're human right i mean it just takes some time to kind of like i'm not sure if i'm ready for that so how can we make this something that isn't so scary and new so that people can get their

081heads around it and just have some sense of like oh okay just a second there are these other examples of where people are doing this and this kind of climate and they handle it this way and i think what can be tricky about these systems is that it's not a one-size-fits-all thing and that's what gets hard about it um so i guess again during commission um business that proposed business that maybe we just start to think about ways that we can both have the discussion but also just have resources for people so they can have the discussion i mean we want to set people up for success for this not just be like well why aren't you when they're like whoa whoa whoa i don't even know what this is about you know so um

082so anyway i just want to that's i probably should have saved this for when we had the commission business at the end but i kind of want you all present here too to hear this because i feel and and the developer you know that it is new but it's it's not so new that it's like completely being tested and and nobody's done it before you know so um i get the hesitancy but i also think that nudging from the design team too to kind of say this is these are the things that these people are expecting to be able to have conversations around and you kind of need to get up to speed on some of these things in order to have this conversation so i also want to send that message too go ahead

083mr leonard um i just want to clarify the sustainable review on this project was not um it was not an oversight the i'm looking at the distribution the the project the typology that we have determined that would be reviewed by sustainability are those that have a discretionary aspect to them um so that's this is a this is a site plan being proposed under the udc uh and so those types of projects have not been flagged for that review so i want to clarify that i would suggest as we talked about let's have this conversation about how to improve our sustainability process outside of this petition thank you all right any other comments on this petition there are two motions again i think that we can take them together all right uh and i think mr

084leonard we are ready for a vote commissioner gibrandal yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes motion carries thank you very much all right um we are on to item 8b uh these are the amendments to the off-street parking requirements which will be for city council approval this is business that we have taken upon ourselves and so um but why we've taking upon ourselves i mean we do not have an external petitioner but uh that instead uh staff will help walk us through the kind of choices that we have been making along the way and all of the fantastic work they've been doing to pull this information together so whenever you're ready great my name is jeff khan

085i've been assisting brett leonard in creating a staff report and proposing amendments to our parking requirements you should have in your packet two items one would be a staff report and two would be the actual proposed amendment language which includes a reference in the a20 plan for carbon neutrality that calls for eliminating parking minimums and setting low parking maximums um i also want to point out that we did provide a summary of what four comparison cities are requiring for parking which is sort of a helpful comparison we also included some local examples of off street parking including parking at three spaces per thousand we did learn a few things from this exercise one is that we we learned that the requiring of or limiting parking maximum to three spaces per thousand would allow quite a

086lot of parking spaces for residential for retail it would probably come in somewhat lower than we currently have been seeing in place at shopping centers like arbor hills shopping center and here on village shopping center also this list does not include restaurants full-service restaurants of say 5 000 square feet um typically would um generate a need for quite a lot of parking spaces but three per thousand might be 15 parking spaces so we did learn a bit from that exercise i do want to briefly summarize what the proposed amendments are they include eliminating minimum parking requirements for any land use in any zoning district establish a maximum of three parking spaces per 1 000 square feet of floor area in the tc1 zoning district regardless of use those are like those are the big proposed

087amendments we also are proposing to consolidate parking uses in the udc parking table we're proposing to eliminate uses from the parking table when standards are unlikely to apply such as public schools and government buildings we're proposing to eliminate the provision of required uh bicycle parking from being provided off-site we're proposing to amend the weight limit of vehicles prohibited in driveways we're proposing to add a table to communicate special parking districts such as d1 d2 and tc1 and lastly we're amending requirements proposing to amend requirements uh for electric vehicle um infrastructure uh in in a number of in a number of ways the staff report summarizes all that um and lastly i want to read the recommendation staff recommends that the amendments to the unified development code be approved because the proposed amendments will reduce the

088amount of underutilized impervious surface surfaces and encourage land uses to be used more efficiently incentivize the construction of new residential dwelling units by reducing construction and land acquisition costs which may result in more affordable housing units being constructed and by using land more efficiently will support transit service these proposed amendments are also consistent with the recommendations in the city's master plan land use element and the a2 zero climate action plan so that that's the conclusion of my staff report summary uh mr leonard and i are here to answer any questions you might have thank you very much mr khan um now i'll open the public hearing for this so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about the proposed changes to the uh unified development code off-street parking requirements

089we'll first again call on folks that are here in council chambers and then move to remote participants to speak um during this public hearing opportunity if you've joined remotely you can use the raised hand feature if you join through zoom if you're watching us now our dial-in number is 877-853-5247 and our meeting id is 977-6634-1226 you have dialed in you can press star 9 on your phone to indicate your interest in speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and whether you are here in person or joining us remotely please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments is there anyone that's here in council chambers that would like to provide public comment come on up hello everyone my name is

090nani wolf i live at 125 for don road i've lived in ann arbor my entire life but part of the reason i'm here is i am the planning and zoning administrator for the city of ecorse and we do not have any parking minimums and it's fabulous so i'm really here just to support that we have it for i think one single land use and that's automotive repair shops have to have two it's our max and min and that's it but absolutely nothing else has any parking requirements and it speeds up the development process it's excellent for sustainability the market is naturally sorting itself out where people who have too much parking are able to sell their property whereas other places that need parking can petition for whatever amount they need we do have maximums as

091well so if you want a really high number you have to go before the zoning board of appeals but yeah so i'm just here to support that i know it's not really usual in michigan yet and just the fact that i'm a planner for one community that is i wanted to come out and say it's great and you know i can't say everything's perfect of course things go wrong sometimes and occasionally there's issues as you figure everything out but the jump is worth it so i'm encouraging you to just make that jump thank you any others go ahead hi my name is josh lurkey i live at 521 snyder uh over by the stadium uh i'm for eliminating parking minimums and i'm excited that it's something we're discussing cars are a wasteful and dangerous transit

092option that pollute our cities and our lungs and require costly and desolate land uses uh just to cope with the amount of traffic and of course parking but eliminating parking is not just about that it's about making development more affordable high cost of parking spaces per any sort of use it's about reducing sprawl and making it easier for people who aren't in cars whether they can whether they can't use a car can't afford a car don't want a car makes it easier for those people to just live their lives so i'm super in favor of this and i'm just excited thank you thank you any others mr garber yes thank you chair mills ken garber again i'm very pleased to second what miss wolf and mr lurkey said or maybe third um about the desirability

093of eliminating parking minimums and setting parking maximums i did not have time to review the staff reports so just based on mr khan's summary it sounds like setting a maximum of three spaces per thousand square feet of building space would work for a commercial maybe but not for residential and you would have to set a lower maximum so maybe consider if i'm reading it right or list hearing it right maybe consider separate maximums for residential versus commercial that's my only other comment and i really encourage planning commission to go forward with this and maybe miss wolf if she's still around can talk to what the maximums are at e-course thank you thank you all right any other takers in the audience here mr leonard are there any online we do alex lowe you have three

094minutes to address the planning commission alex lowe you can go ahead and adjust the planning commission we'll try again let's try it again alex lowe you have three minutes to address the planning commission can you hear me now we can oh wonderful uh hi i'm i'm alex lowe i'm calling tonight from fernwood avenue in support of the citywide removable parking minimum i think this is a wonderful idea that will make infill development far more financially viable and work towards many of the city's goals however i would like to request that you reduce the parking maximum for the tc once three spaces per thousand square feet still results in as much space dedicated to parking as there is total floor space which is contrary to the intended purpose of tc1 from the city of ann arbor's

095current unified development code this district has been created to facilitate encourage and support redevelopment and infill development to realize mixed-use developments and achieve mixed-use corridors that support and sustain transit sets providing as much space as park for parking as there is space for people will still maintain very much a car oriented development pattern while this is fine in some areas tc1 is not that space need i think a maximum of one maybe two spaces per thousand square feet would likely be amply sufficient maybe up to two and a half if uh if that extra space were dedicated to car sharing facilities reduced parking and car sharing go hand in hand to reduce private automobile ownership and usage which is by far the best way to support and sustain transit usage which is the purpose of

096tc1 as such i strongly believe the maximums listed are so far too high thank you so much thank you no other speakers all right then i will close the public hearing and read the motion let's see all right the motion reads the ann arbor city planning commission hereby recommends that the mayor and city council approve the amendments to chapter 55 unified development code section 5.19 regarding proposed modifications to the city's off-street parking requirements moved by commissioner hammerschmidt seconded by commissioner lee who wants to start mr leonard can i start discussion please so um i just want to maybe set this set a couple points that maybe would help the commission contemplate this um one i want to i want to be forthright there are a couple of other changes in the ordinance that we will

097would need to visit if these changes are enacted for example we have some special parking requirements and special regulations for daycare centers and some other places in the in the order so i just want to be forthright that we thought that the discussion of sort of the big ass parking policy aspects was first there might be some subsequent changes that would be incorporated and rolled into that for um just references and the like so um so that's one piece and then i want to talk to a little just a couple of examples about tc1 the proposed changes here in tc1 would result in adding 31 parking maximums to uses permitted in the tc1 district that don't exist now it would also decrease parking maximums for 18 uses in that tc-1 district yep uses in the

098tc1 district do not currently have parking maximums 18 that do have parking maximums would be reduced as an example city planner khan referenced this we recently had a site plan submitted that has it hasn't been accepted for review yet but in the um south state corridor for a restaurant that proposed restaurant was about a 5 000 square foot restaurant the example is mr khan was indicating so under the tc1 current maximum that would be a maximum of 15 spaces as indicated that site plan was proposing 137 spaces on that site plan so i think one of the tensions and i think you've you're hearing this from from the speakers and i think that you will probably get to this is that by um and i just want to be clear staff has been very forthright

099trying to build a single standard for that district a d1 and d2 in order to provide flexibility for uses there one of the one of the challenges for adaptive reuse at times is when you are shifting for from a say retail use to a restaurant use and when we have different parking standards in a commercial district for example that can make reuse of that building different i don't i don't necessarily think that we talked about it here at the table the conversion from residential is pretty unlikely the conversion to residential from some types of uses can happen i'm not saying it happens often but i think that that's one of the things that the commission should consider in the context of some of these this specifically the special parking district for tc1 this number is

100a number that was presented as a means of trying to find a unifying standard so that we could apply that standard not care about what's happening in that floor area and not care to future choices about how that floor area might evolve we don't have to do that we could elect to look at differing standards for residential and non-residential uses or others so i just want to set that stage about um i i guess part of me recognizes that i think that that single standard is imperfect i think to to adequately address one of those uses you're probably not addressing the core the other use correctly so i just wanted to be clear it doesn't have to go in that regard but that was the intention that was presented and discussed at the orc at

101the working session to now is to provide a single standard to provide ultimate flexibility and utility for the evolution of those buildings in that district i and i would just add into that that the other cap that we have reminding myself the other cap that we have in tc1 is not just about what the multiplier is but the actual area associated with it which means that it cannot exceed even though we are expecting we require multi-family or multi-story buildings the footprint of the parking cannot exceed the footprint of the first floor effectively of the building so um that's another cap that they'll be held to yes that's correct okay so sorry i wanted to make sure that like we're starting our conversation about that particular element with that in mind commissioner abrams um i guess

102i have a lot of thoughts about this so i don't know where to start but maybe um i mean in terms of a unified standard to avoid constricting adaptive reuse in the future office to residential seems likely but restaurant to residential seems unlikely like i i guess i'm wondering like would it be possible to so that's just one thought like would it be possible to actually pull out a couple of uses which we understand to be exceptions when it comes both to reuse and to parking um pressures um so that would be one thing to consider but i guess my other thought when i hear about this proposed development is that what we are hoping for in these corridors is denser development so the the three per thousand might be very constricting to a restaurant

103use but if they had residential units above the three per thousand is very generous and the point is that the average should be adequate and responsible and so i guess because we don't know what the ratios and what the i guess i'm wondering like maybe i could use some help from staff or even or other commissioners like without actually like modeling scenario scenarios how or how do we feel reassured that um that it's the right that we're hitting the right target so i think the comparisons in the staff report were very helpful but i observed the same thing that you pointed out in the presentation which is obviously for residential three per a thousand is too high nobody should be building that many that buffer is in there for other uses um but maybe what

104we want to do is encourage mixed use and dense development and not one five thousand square foot restaurant with a hundred and you know 130 spaces i guess the other thing i'm thinking is the three four thousand fifteen i mean ten would be really really constricted but fifteen is still a fraction of what they are asked what they really would want right you said a hundred and something so in some ways it's like it doesn't if two per thousand made sense in every other use but restaurant i'm not sure we should keep it at three just for restaurant it's like it doesn't solve the restaurant's problem so uh i'm rambling a bit but maybe just to to sum up so that we can get i can get some feedback like density and mixed use versus

105single single use uh future proofing for adaptive reuse maybe we don't maybe we pull restaurant out of that are there other uses besides restaurants that have that exceptional kind of pre parking need and uh maybe even though it's difficult for the restaurant um i'm not sure moving from three to two actually produces more hardship for them which is maybe a funny way to think about it but because i think two might make more sense for other uses than three per thousand were you bef uh you were putting that out there i think that was there i heard a question for staff which is am i thinking about this right or was that not intended to be a question sorry so i guess there there was a lot in there maybe one question for staff is

106are there uses other than restaurants that you see being burdened by this maximum that's maybe we start there i can try to answer that um we do know that there are some uses that do generate more parking than one would think they would generate and one would be medical dental office which tends to have a fairly high staff ratio as well as a high number of of patients visiting we also know that grocery stores tend to have a large capture area and people tend to spend quite a lot of time there instead of just going for one item people might spend a half an hour or or or longer so we do know there there are some uses like that that that will generate that kind of demand one of the things i did consider

107when when you brought up this sort of divergence of demand between residential and non-residential is the a concept of post and i'm going to throw something new in there but it's something to think about the possibility of coming up with a a lower maximum for residential uses and then three per thousand for non-residential uses so you know we can sort of create whatever it is we think is is reasonable and that's just an idea that i had after listening to what what you had said about that deviation mr leonard might have something to add to that yeah i mean i think this is it relates to the question of conversion like i do think like that that type of approach if you were going to come up with two scenarios for example where residential was

108a different rate and commercial uses were a higher rate um another example of that i think could be office uses i think from uh probably from i i suspect that parking provision is part of office marketability that there are that is one of the factors that people are thinking about when they're choosing to locate an office it is what's going to be available to them and that is it's not something that i profess to know what those numbers are but i would speculate that it's a pretty fluid thing right now between kovid like i think there's been a trend where offices have started to be utilized in a much more dense fashion than they have historically but now over the last couple years i wouldn't i couldn't guess what the reality is going to be

109so um but uh going so apart from that other example of sort of maybe a more parking intensive use from a market value perspective i think if we were going to establish two different standards that would be pretty really easy to realize obviously in the tc1 we would just establish those we'd count up your residential floor area we'd count up your non-residential floor area maybe apply two different ratios at the end of the day if we're setting them as maximums it's still going to have a limiting factor in that conversion for example if you are providing force four floors of office and four floors of residential and you come back and you want to convert another floor of office to residential if they're truly maximums we can't approve that conversion unless you eliminate that parking

110so um so that's that's the argument for finding a standard that works but again i want to be clear i we there's very i don't think that i don't know to what extent that we will have that evolution of uses in these corridors like we do in maybe single-story smaller spaces along our commercial corridors in our downtown that's where i think i'm i'm sort of fueled by that experience of trying to reuse old commercial spaces and i want to avoid i just want to avoid making it harder 20 30 50 years down the road from having the same flexibility of what gets realized here commissioner dish then commissioner lee i'm in the lynn song seat and she didn't turn on her mic last night so that's what's happening um so i'm understanding better that indeed

111you are doing what i'm what i was understanding you to be doing but when i look at these numbers they're they're a little bit hard it's a little bit hard to use them as a guidepost but what i notice is that the disparities between parking at three per thousand and actual parking say in the huron village shopping center it's not that high it's 384 is what it would be at three per thousand and 411 is what they have so that's a difference of about 30. so that's not bad and um it's a little bit higher but not that much for arbor hills it's parking provided 328 parking at three per thousand 285. that doesn't seem to me to be devastating the um the differences are sometimes six to one in the residential ones that you're

112citing but the residential examples that you're citing with the exception of the one which is in my neighborhood she says with joy um the uh the the disparities are really high i mean they're really like um the standard at six to one but they're those are downtown and they're primarily students and there are many many disincentives for students having cars we don't give them any place to park them downtown or on campus so why would you drive from the standard to your class when you are not going to be able to park even as close as the standard so i'm not sure how to treat the residential examples that you've given us i don't know if the disparities are really um are as wide but if so if i just took all your numbers at

113face value i would say we're doing too much to adjust for the shopping center because the disparities are not that great and we are way overshooting the residential need because the disparities are enormous gulf-like cavernous so i don't know if maybe some different examples of parking at places that are a little bit farther out would be helpful or i'm sure you all know just in your heads about how many parking spaces you know what places tend to do you uh mr moore was saying you know 1.3 1.7 those are interesting numbers so you know that pushes me towards couldn't we try 2.5 as the one number fits all or do we think about two numbers as commissioner abrams was was suggesting so it's that is really more of an observation and if but i'm i

114suppose i'm saying would you want to offer us some different examples of residential because the ones that you have here possibly exaggerate the discrepancy we could certainly do that one of the base standards for minimum parking in multi-family is 1.5 per thousand or 2 per excuse me per dwelling unit or two spaces per dwelling unit and um if you're an apartment community and you're constructing a um a 1 000 square foot unit these standards would require three or you know the these the these standards would um would require three three spaces per um thousand so wow yes because allow hello because no we do not require anything anymore if we pass suggest the approval of this tonight so that seems high for a transit so um commissioner lee then i saw commissioner gbrandle thank you

115um yeah i could provide a little bit of insight here as far as commercial leases because my my day job is i go through you know 110 of these a year so um first off there are yeah offices definitely a large part of what people are looking for is do i have availability of parking so there are oftentimes max or minimum leasehold interest that they try to dictate saying i want at least 3.6 spaces per thousand i want i told you about the therapist group that we're working with currently we have an loi4 that wanted four per thousand square feet over on the northeast side so um when you look at for example so let me actually rewind just a little bit i think eliminating minimums makes perfect sense i think maximums here's kind of

116the way i think about it the parking spaces let's let's talk about from a revenue generation standpoint right um the downtown we're looking at 220 a month so let's let's go ahead and you know just i think that's about right right 2 20 or so that's dda rates yep so 220 times 12 you're looking at 2 600 on an annual basis let's call it nine by 20. it's 180 square feet so downtown a parking spot is generating about 14 a square foot on a rental rate basis you know essentially office is going for about 25 30 on a class a building maybe 35. so to a developer or somebody who's looking to build they don't really see parking lots it's something like oh i really want to build this right i don't like heck yeah

117i'm trying to build more spots they try to cater to what the market is requiring so um i saw the commission or we got some communication about the george and the conversion of those retail units to residential currently right so obviously there's a lot of public that's saying they don't want to see that be converted to residential because they they don't want a food desert they want amenities so one of the things that i look at look at the hyatt that was built on state street there's a lake michigan credit union they tried to lease that forever it was very difficult because there's only like 10 spots so originally the hotel thought i'm getting a restaurant in there just did not happen because of the parking issue no restaurant wanted to touch it so you're

118right i think segmentation of usus does merit some additional consideration calling it a blanket you know 2.5 i think you'd really have to look at how it really shakes out but my concern would be that retail users office users who do see a certain level i mean like it's what they ask for on lois basically as they're negotiating obviously i don't think any again i mean i think surface parking spots are what 35 thousand dollars a spot underground is going to run 80 000 a spot so from like a cap rate or capitalized perspective of what a parking lot is worth relative to is cost so what kind of revenue generation it has you're just not going to get the kind of level of like return so it's like it's not nobody goes into a

119project saying yes i'm going to build a ton of parking spots and this is this is going to be i think they look like they don't want to build they only want to build as much as it requires to attract so retail restaurants they look at their sales so retails are completely driven by sales whether you know it's they look at a gross health ratio right what is by total sales relative to by total occupancy cost now when you take a look at total sales it's how many people can they get through that space as quickly as possible so for restaurants i mean you look at garden they literally have those on the table you know checkout machines where they're like i want you to move quicker during you know lunch and so they're trying

120to get people to move quicker and so grocery stores as you said or certain uses that people tend to take their times as long as they're buying more materials right so that's how retail is going to look at it from a gross sales perspective and to do that they need to have people have access now we obviously want them to be using buses bicycles we want non-motorized or you know larger transit the points that i just wanted to say is that the segmentation of uses does merit additional thought that a blanket may make it more difficult for retail and you know amenitization of spaces and that that's kind of where you know you see how the georgia's really yeah they should be looking at it from let me get somebody in let me take a

121crack at just percentage rent and they should be taking a much more aggressive stance of how can i get retailers to take a chance here now if we don't have you know if they'll have their parking requirements um i mean if you're trader joe's i imagine they're saying i don't want it at all actually i want to be in the heart but i mean that that's in jest but i do want us to seriously think about you know is there i haven't heard a single builder say i want to build more parking spots for the heck of it it's only to really make sure that they have the marketability they need to create revenue generating space so i wanted to at least you know throw that out there so that there's about clarity so i

122think segmentation to use is definitely merits discussion uh non-residential versus retail versus restaurant versus office office leases literally have that leasehold restriction where they say i need a minimum of so and so spots and it's generally between 3.4 and 4. so i i had a software tonight who used to bench all of their engineers their requirement was 7 spots per thousand i could not do it for them so they left they left the community they went to kind of on the outskirts uh you know where where they could actually get that so i just it's something that i want to be able to communicate because it's it's relevant information because you know i just i live in this area pretty much so um i'm all in support of the elimination of the minimums i think

123that is uh it's a no-brainer move um the imposition of you know maximums it's something i think we should think about it merits further discussions i i certainly hear people saying hey like for residential we shouldn't have that much at all uh and again i think it comes down to segmentation of use and i do want to echo what kirk westfall had said was you know something when it's urban or suburban right and so we want to move towards that urban form i also don't want first floor retail being empty for three four years because the retailer is too old school to give this a try so um i just just wanted to throw that out there that uh you know change and and patterns have to be incremental so we have to recognize the

124current conditions of what we deal with from a sales perspective so hopefully that helps from an insight perspective commissioner that was super helpful thank you so much for that um just because i think that we're guessing at a lot of stuff at this table and to have that kind of data coming at us is really helpful so thank you for that um i have a really hard time with the one size fits all i started looking at different places around ann arbor and and i was just like wow i don't know how i don't know how we do that very easily because they're so wildly different and um if maybe chairmills is the only one that was here but for the um uh for holmes brewery remember that little slip of the that was retail

125right that was retail at the time because of his escape shop and then they they like basically slipped it under the wire and it became a restaurant and i have heard so many neighbors complaining about all those people parking in their neighborhood and being really loud and so that's you know that's an that's a use next to use issue but it's also just says something about the amount of traffic that comes to restaurants which is real and so and i know part of what we're trying to do is get people to get out of their cars too and i'm a big biker and a big walker but i still drive i do i don't like i occasionally bike to get my big grocery shopping but i don't do that i mean i think that we

126we need we need to keep our eyes on the prize about where we want to go but we also need to be real about where we are too and think about how we can get there and so right-sizing this so that we're like encouraging making it a little bit uncomfortable but not totally impossible because i think things sitting empty for three or four years i think that's pointless i really do i wish that woman you were talking to was still here because i would love to ask how they solved the parking maximums thing and what issues that they run up against i'd be really curious to see how they right size that so i i kind of meant feeling like we need to get more specific about it because it just feels like it's difficult

127to find the the goldilocks and have it address the things on the outside of that it seems ridiculously overbuilt if it's residential and then it seems really underbuilt for some of the other uses that we might want to be able to get in there so i'm having a hard time figuring out how we can kind of make this make this work and i totally get the flexibility thing but i'm just not sure how that's actually going to work um i also think we need to be careful like we have this standard of per unit for parking for residential and then we have the standard of per square footage for these other things and it really does make sense on a per unit basis like a multi-family place is going to be totally different in terms

128of like a single person who's out of school and is you know willing to take the bus and isn't schlepping kids run to soccer practice and stuff like that it's like so there's that whole piece of it too that isn't one size fits all in terms of the square footage way of applying things too so i'm kind of struggling with that as well i'm just curious are there any places that have no maximums and no minimums what does that look like i'm just like just based on what commissioner lee is saying and and i'm i'm not saying this is what i believe i'm just asking the question what does it look like to have is it always going to be the 5 000 square foot restaurant that says i at 137 parking spaces which seems

129crazy to me um but i don't know that that's really going to happen that often given the cost and the storm water and all the other things that you're going to be required to do that um or is there a way to let there be maximums but have there be incentives that sort of steer you towards doing less i don't know it's just something it's it's something that i i think that's worth it for us to talk about that i don't know i guess i just i think it's worth discussing to see what that what would that really look like are there other places besides hartford what are the issues really we can kind of imagine things but what is it like but what does it really look like i saw hands over here i'll

130come back to you commissioner hammersmith commissioner weich so uh just so that i'm understanding uh correctly and i think i've been following along we're only considering the establishment of a maximum in the tc1 and the tc1 already has restrictions for parking so that 5 000 square foot restaurant on a single floor would only be able to create a parking lot of 5 000 square feet which at 180 square feet would be 27 spots as opposed to 15 you know based on the the other calculation of three per thousand so that is that really all we're discussing as it exists in this amendment and then so because i'm going to answer that like can i get a yes a no maybe so i think yes just when you're calculating that you gotta you know it's not

131it's not stacking spaces into that space you're probably not getting there with maneuvering and the like because that's a measure of vehicular use area all right so there there may be a few more um okay great thank you so then would it be beneficial to us to remove this amendment from the cohort so that we could approve what we what i think we are all in agreement with which are the rest of the amendments and then give us time to work through this because it it feels like it's only in the tc1 so if it's only in the tc1 then the issue is about the residential because we don't want to maximize or create more parking because of residential being measured by unit and not by square foot and so there's a give in that

132so i'm just trying to like really dive into where we are now and and i'd be happy to move that we pull this establishment of a parking maximum out of this proposal so that we can approve what staff has presented to us which i think we're all in agreement with and then we could continue to debate it tonight or postpone it so that we could move ahead so is that friendly to the body or is that not friendly to the body no it is not friendly to the body okay great so so the body wants to have the establishment of the three per square foot or a thousand in this group here if i may yeah my understanding of what you're proposing commissioner weich would actually be moving at least temporarily to a situation that

133commissioner abrams pointed out is what happens in hartford where they're in that transit district because right now the tc district is based on you know taking the minimums and making them maximums in doing this we would have a time period where in tc1 there would be no maximum at all and so except for the square footage area which is where i started because i similarly i would say that i am not terribly worried about it because i think that from a form perspective we got ourselves covered this is like boot and suspenders and i and i or no no belt and suspenders belt and suspenders not boots and suspenders but boots and i don't know whatever yeah yeah waiters yeah i that's my personal opinion so i actually i'm not i'm i i i'm not

134so um concerned i i think that there's a lot of merit in that particularly like i don't know if three is too high or too low personally um but i'm not so worried because i do think we have ourselves covered in other ways um but i just want to make that's is that did my interpretation is that right uh let me defer to brett but um that's that's that's what i thought i i thought you were correct yeah commissioner mills you started this i mean another way to do it would be not to have any parking requirements for tc1 have the parking managed by form it's we're limiting we're limiting the footprint of parking based relative to the footprint of construction on the site the layering of the like you you don't have to layer

135ratios with that we could simply leave that as a requirement that we don't care how many spaces you provide as long as it is in a footprint equal or smaller to the building knock yourself out but but yeah it's it's still a vehicular use area so it's you don't get to double dip by structuring you can put it in a structure to mimic parking demand for the building um so so actually can you clarify that so if uh let's say your lot is i don't know and five acres uh if you uh if your building is two acres you can't have parking that's more than two acres is it what if you stack it up um let me get i'm gonna pull up the language yeah give me a minute right i i believe it's

136very limiting okay i remember that we talked about this before and the the into the tc1 it says vehicular use area may not exceed 100 or 125 of the area of the building's footprint so it was like the vehicular use area is separate from the footprint so yeah help me understand that because i think that that that each floor is two acres no exactly it doesn't yeah right it limits the area so it is it is uber restrictive the vehicular use area which is the aggregate of your parking area so if it's a surface lot it's the surface lot if it's a two-story parking structure it's going to be the area of both of those levels that cannot exceed depending on the lot width either 100 or 125 percent of the building foot print not

137foot floor area so the building footprint is limiting you can't designate more square footage to parking than you are per the footprint of the building and further because we require a minimum of two-story buildings that means that your parking area is already is already going to be half of the floor at the most it will be half of the area half of the square footage of your building potentially so the fast math is if you do 250 square feet per spot and it's one spot like four per a thousand but you stack you have two stories of building you're now two per 500 right and so like the four per thousand is more than the three per thousand so it's a separate limiter if you think about that stack right like there's two when you

138stack there's four when you're flat we're at three right in the middle so quick question so just in mind again if you do if you stack you have to count each floor separately so you can't just say well my foot my my whatever half acre building i'm taking up a half acre of space but i'm just going to go up with my parking structure you can't do it that way the intention was more people and use less cars i mean in some ways it's like it'd be so expensive it's kind of like why even limit it because you're gonna automatically you know so vehicular use area though too the tricky part about that is that that includes your drive so really you know by having the parking area at the back you're making it so

139that you're really limiting what um what you can get out of that and then then there's the things like the fire marshal is making us do two curb cuts and all of that kind of stuff which are the realities of are we making it is that what does that do i i guess in that scenario what does that really look like in terms of how that lays out because like we're saying it's not it's not per parking space it's all of the other stuff you have to have in a parking lot to be able to make it a parking lot and how are you counting all the parking lot islands is that even though they're internal are they part of your square footage that you can have or no how does that work because you

140know the sizes are based on you know minimum sizes to be able to get trees in there and all that kind of business so is that part of your vehicular use area too or no the area devoted to a use by or for motor vehicles including parking or storage any paved area used for access um i don't know how have we to we probably typically include interior islands in the overall area but not the perimeter they are they are a requirement of our landscape section of code for all parking lots it's it's a standard requirement i i would include the landscaping but um if if code were silent i i would i would include landscaping because it includes landscaping within the like you here's my half acre building here's my half acre parking you're gonna

141have to take out you know a fifth of it to be able to put the the parking lot islands into i i would not exclude the parking uh the the landscape islands i i i would include them if i were if i were calculating the size of the of the um of the parking lot this is where i i don't i guess my hesitation is not pull out this piece so that we can move on i feel like we still have to think about this because i would be really curious to see like let's really lay out what that looks like and what does it really mean in terms of an example of of parking just all the stuff we're talking about about how you design these things should you be punished basically for having

142a large landscape island because you have an odd shaped lot you know i mean it's like that to me i would say the landscape islands yes they're part of the holistic idea of a parking lot but that you shouldn't have those count against you if if we're i mean i would rather pull those out in terms of just like the area because then i think people just make them as tiny as possible and then then the trees aren't happy and you know i don't know too many developers who provide more landscaping than would be required for for a parking lot yeah but there's ways though that i mean we do not everybody does i get that but it's like i just think that um i i would want to like the way that i just

143feel like we're being pretty course about this in terms of the way that it's laying out and i just feel like we need a little bit more of a here's a real example of how it would actually work and how it would function in terms of what do we end up with you know what's it what's a typical office restaurant below office above you know something like that to see what does this really look like and is this tenable you know in terms of the footprint idea being devoted to something so to be clear i just want to make sure what you are proposing or what you're suggesting you need more information on commissioner gib randle is not actually the edits that are up for that are before us tonight but actually the requirements within

144tc1 because what you're talking about like and the concern over that is actually within tc1 okay i want to make sure that everybody like the the people know that that's yeah that's not necessarily this but this raises because we're talking about maximums entirely because of tz1 which is raising this in your mind okay um go ahead commissioner silvay i'll just say i'm not concerned about any of this um tell me why so i understand because you're designing too so yes tell me why so i think a lot of it uh when we talk about the single user aspect of this we're trying to incentivize housing if housing is the thing that gives you the most flexibility of the parking account not about the footprint stuff that's the thing that gives developers the most flexibility to

145build the most in terms of this maximum and then they could share some of that overflow with the commercial sector that feels like a great benefit to incentivize housing i don't think we're doing tc1 to incentivize restaurants i don't think we're doing tc1 to incentivize more retail in these corridors we're trying to incentivize housing and corridors that currently have restaurants in retail so that's where i see this blanket giving the most flexibility for developers to figure out what to do with their building over time without substantial adjustments to site planning being able to do interior remodels without throwing up a bunch of red flags um i think similar like the letters of the george this is all outside of tc1 but what you see is maybe that is a better use as residential but with

146this talking just about removing parking uh minimum requirements there's a lot along that corridor that could provide more and the 5 000 square foot restaurant is just crazy because our current standards say we just need 50 parking spaces as a minimum so 130 or whatever is just if we turned our minimums into maximums it would be 50 not 130. so i'm throwing that data point out the window and it references frazier and york who both do not meet current parking minimums and so our current parking minimums as maximums in the restaurant example is still too much to what makes a successful neighborhood joint and i think that's what we're talking about here in certain corridors is adding that layer of character and access to housing so that we're not just operating on the downtown so

147once again that's why i feel like restaurants as an outlier is not actually an outlier we're talking about a different scale of infusion here we're not talking about the big kind of commercial restaurants that need large swaths of space um because my five thousand square foot restaurants don't care about them but we're going to talk about uh tc1 if we want to retalk about the footprint stuff incentivize housing the ratio makes sense to give that flexibility and overall i support the redaction of minimums everywhere to give that flexible reuse and additional corridors so like i have no concerns at this point um that we're going to give a lot more parking to housing and that'll shift to where we have in tc1 we require along uh a hundred feet linear feet of commercial so in

148those we need to give that buffer and so to keep a higher maximum allows that buffer to offset for those commercial that is required in tc1 as well so i feel good about this like layering restaurants on top of one another we're not layering restaurants you know we might have office on a second floor sort of thing but i actually don't see that uh happening significantly in some of these other corridors i think south state is more substantial but we have a ton of parking there now and it is one of these typologies that could really do the shared parking between office during the day housing at night you know we have that shared timeline and we talk about these more concentrated corridors we actually have closer adjacency to housing and so like the amount

149of people like that are coming there are coming more locally and again incentivizing those additional loads of transit sort of thing so that's my take i like it how it is and it's a living document the same way we're having a conversation right now that we might go back to tc1 that we just passed if three you know in this interchange we can change three but at least we have a maximum instead of an opening at the end of the evening commissioner hammerschmidt sorry i told you i would come back to you and then i promptly forgot that that is like a perfect segue to just what i wanted what i wanted to sort of bring up is that i believe it's either maybe it's on our work plan to actually like the next step

150in this parking discussion is to talk about parking maximum city-wide and so if i think through that more deep analysis by type we we learned something that made us think like okay this three per thousand in tc1 doesn't make sense we need to segment it we'll have the opportunity to do that um i also just want to express i'm so excited i told my husband earlier i'm like we're abolishing parking minimums today and i just think i'm super excited about that or we're recommending the abolishment parking um tonight maybe hopefully um i think it's a really huge step forward just you know kind of mimicking so many other cities across the country that have done this and while mr moore is still here this this reminded me while we were going through the previous petition

151um you guys had proposed evie installed ready and capable but this would change that a little bit so you know more ev ready it's simplifying um that part of the ev requirements that would just be installed and capable and i think that's that'll help um i think clarify a lot of things for petitioners as well in the future so i'm i love this i'm excited let's do it any other comments or questions just one other thing go ahead commissioner gibrandal and then commissioner abrams it's a lot easier to see your hands on zoom honestly than like this back and forth so exactly i um i wish i were part of it had been part of the discussion at rc so i could have my head more in it you know in terms of how you

152all were talking about it but i'm curious with this footprint thing that we're we've been discussing and with essentially using the fact that we're incentivizing residential to your point commissioner sovay as as basically your your maximum you know what i mean because it is sort of out of whack right um that um it's giving them flexibility what is like what are we going to get height-wise with this i'm just curious if if you all kind of looked at that at all in terms of does this mean that it's sort of a three-story building something in the bottom two above can you do a ten story building you know what i'm saying like i just wonder what effectively this ends up incentivizing in terms of height and then what we're hoping for in terms of height

153and in terms of density where we're we're limiting it right by having that and so what does that mean in terms of what we may get um i don't i don't think we did that sort of scenario planning with it as you're asking the question i think i suspect that if there is an unintended consequence of this there's going to be one of two things that happen you'll get two-story buildings in the tc1 corridor because that limiter is putting a harder cap on how much parking you can provide so just just think about that regulation if as you add stories you're not adding vehicular use area so if you are if you've got a ten thousand square foot footprint you're gonna have either a ten 000 square foot parking area or 1250 depending on your

154lot size and so i think the market is going to probably challenge building four stick levels over a podium because of this tension and so i think that to keep to keep the maximums and that footprint is is very much and i think that was the intention of this is change how these corridors are used and so i i think that i think the tensions for these regulations are these are these are saying we want a very high quality sustainable development and we don't want other types of development and so i think that i think that the most likely scenario is probably there's going to be some time where we get potentially slower development while the market is sorting out these parking to square footage or we're probably going to start with two-story buildings it's

155my speculation but again that's valuable these are big parking areas that we can put to better productive use and over time i think you're talking about incremental over time those stories will start being more they'll probably start penciling out more because they're probably not going to pencil out for the first one but it might pencil out for the sixth or eighth one so um that's sort of my take i i'll leave it to other orc members i'll go we also have like no setbacks so if you do 50 50 it's 100 impervious just to be the bleakest of moments right like i mean you have green roofs and impervious pavement you know if we really want to go sustainable but if you think of 50 50 trade and zero setbacks that really is kind of

156worst case scenario so i am just kind of if we want to start scenario planning that's what it looks like the other uh potential interim outcome that i think could happen now is that uh by reducing parking minimums and again staff correct me if i'm wrong citywide reducing parking minimums it means that if there is an existing parking lot maybe not the one that's being redeveloped but that is underutilized there is nothing stopping their that kind of parking sharing like we don't have to see those agreements any there's no there's no review of that anymore and so my hope is that the excessive overflow parking that already exists in some of those places by now not holding those individual buildings to those minimums that would allow for some of that transition until people can feel

157comfortable that yes it is possible to live in this city right along these transit corridors without a car until the market catches up right until things kind of normalize um i think that that's a possibility commissioner dish i wondered if we could just roll back to the two-story buildings scenario i don't think this was the intent right at all actually i think the aspiration on council at least in some people's minds is uh and actually mr moore said earlier if this were tc1 we would get more hype right i think the idea was more units and if we're getting a bunch of two-story buildings part of which has to be retail on the first floor yeah we're getting more than none but we're not getting scale this was supposed to give us housing at scale

158i'm a little bit worried about this footprint part which i don't think i understood until just tonight so i'm sorry if i was confused previously sounds like there should be more in commissioner proposed business unless we want to take up tc because i don't think that we want to take up tc1 as part of this or maybe we do i guess i would put that back to both commissioner gibb randall and commissioner dish about that particular element within tc1 zoning i would like us to move on parking minimums which we can do i think we have agreement about that and that won't that doesn't affect tc1 i think this maximum discussion is really really complicated and it really does have the potential to not fit with what people's thought was about i mean the people

159who hate tc1 say you're going to build a bunch of skyscrapers and the people who love tc1 are saying we're going to build at scale and scale now is up it's not subdivisions anymore like it was in the 60s so i am concerned but i don't view this as preventing us from passing the parking minimum part and sending that to council i am concerned that nobody is going to build a five to eight story multi-family unit with i don't know how many parking spaces you would get out of the footprint but it will be you know point two per it but potentially i don't know my ma i'm just crazy so you're shaking so someone who's better at math do it but it's going to be way off but the amendment on the table is

160not that the amendment on the table is about a like how many you could put in the footprint you can provide adjusting the footprint to do multiple levels is commission proposed business to change the tc1 amendment not the parking standards amendment i think that's what we need like clarity on is we're talking about two separate amendments here parking maximums like if you had enough square footage to do a parking lot up to three spaces per thousand we could probably go five six stories the concern is you can't actually spread out all that parking further than your building footprint so the the parking footprint is probably limiting more so than the three per thousand but the building the parking footprint is not part of this amendment oh i didn't realize that the parking footprint is part

161of the tc1 ordinance that we already passed and so we need to make a commission proposed business to revisit the tc1 ordinance right tonight we are just passing three parking spaces maximum right and that was a part of what i was suggesting way back exactly where it doesn't make a difference right that we already reject it so so like um yeah i think it's helpful now to see it and in future discussions it might be helpful now that we're all together to see it on a chart so that we can um sort of separate the two things that we're talking about so that we are not conflating them um no no no i'm i'm not i'm not suggesting that i'm just saying um this is the parking maximums is somewhat complicated um in some ways

162in other ways it's very simple and straightforward especially in the tc one because of the area which you know commissioner solvay is pointed out to us so i'm good um now i think i understand it and the amendments and i i support what we're doing tonight so and then we can pick up the other piece as needed i see go ahead commissioner abrams so i think obviously we need to put the the tc1 or that part of the tc1 ordinance and the on our agenda to talk about in the meantime um i i would i would be in favor of passing what's before us this evening with the tc1 maximum in it um and i just wanted to go on the record to say that i would be interested in reducing that maximum in the

163future if further study warranted it and i think um i just wanted to maybe like underscore what commissioner survey was saying about acknowledging the kind of development that that will make tc1 unfriendly to certain kinds of development but that that is i think our intention as opposed to an unfortunate byproduct there are certain kinds of development that should not be appropriate and incentivized in tc1 and i think a single-story 5 000 square foot restaurant would be one of those uses i think we want denser use if we want um residential use so uh i would be in favor of voting on what's in front of us without any motion to amend this amendment and then revisiting the tc1 parking in a more holistic way and thinking about maximums and minimum city-wide also in a more

164holistic way and i personally would be interested in exploring what it would mean to reduce the maximum in the future and just maybe to remind everybody i think the existing maximums for retail and office range from three three point three and a half or three point seven to four so three is a reduction of the existing maximum um but it it's not it's not r it's not rad well i don't know actually i don't know if that's radical or revolutionary in the in the scale of a commercial so i won't say but it is a it is a reduction that's all thanks mr leonard uh just to that last point roughly the those that have maximums the non-residential uses are in the range of four spaces per thousand square feet yep for for retail the

165maximum is 3.75 4 and 4.25 depending on the size of the center i continue to be confused and that may be because last night was late late but when we started out with these interesting idea that 31 uses in tc1 currently don't have maxes so these would be newly imposed and in 18 uses that have parking maxes these will be reduced those are interesting except that it seems like what's really constraining the parking in the tc1 district is the footprint thing and so these maxes are kind of moot for tc1 because you probably aren't going to be able to get to them in the first place mostly depending okay commissioner lee oh i just wanted to say that i do think the elimination of minimums is such a critical objective for us to chase that

166um and then really my comments were trying to illustrate kind of the challenges of retailers and how they think about you know commercial leases same thing with office folks but i in this particular instance i believe that the all of the progress that we make in this particular amendment outweighs any kind of considerations that you know and we could always come back and say this is why this wasn't working so um you know i i i have certain levels of concern just looking at it from like a pure um you know restaurateur or a salonist hair salonist you know kind of perspective but um but again i guess the point i'm trying to make is i would be i would be voting in favor of this if it went uh to a vote right now

167simply because i think the amount of good that comes from this outweighs certainly some of the concerns and misgivings i may have so thanks the only additional note that i had is that i appreciate the staff report mr khan this is great talking about how all of this aligns with our existing plans and there's one additional one which is the moving together towards vision zero the transportation plan this is eliminating parking minimums was something that was specifically called out on that that we were supposed to accomplish this year we did it yay but it also lists that we also need to look at we need to consider parking maximum city-wide so i would further say like we know that's on our work plan um but just to check that off in because that is um

168while the that is uh one of the documents that is part of our compilation of comprehensive plan documents so um i also have on my list like we joined e-course in eliminating parking minimums amazing uh pulling up what they have on their parking maximums table like there's lots of different things i don't know if you were able to talk to her but there's lots of uh they don't have one single standard so i think it we we know that that one may be the one that takes a little bit more time and understanding that from their perspective i think would actually be really helpful any other things before we vote i have i am effectively hearing moving forward as is with the uh the full set of changes um including the tc1 three per a

169thousand multiplier or max yes commissioner silvay this is really for you mr khan and if you leave before commission promotes business the thing that would help in all of these metrics that you did provide is if you could do an aerial view footprint analysis and tell us of these projects that you've done the calculations for what would be allowed versus what there is what is the building footprint and what is the parking lot footprint um you know i just like i'll just say i not to distract any more from this footprint thing but the whole foods if we gave a metric of 250 square feet per parking spot it's 106 000 square feet for the parking area the building is 127 000 square feet of retail space but that's the shopping center and i believe

170there's two stories on one of those buildings sort of thing so though those are you know those are really helpful things that instead of doing quick math if we get to this becoming before us from commissioner proposed business that would be the next metric so we don't kind of see it again decide what the work to do is i'm just going to make that note right now great thank you and yes commissioner gabriel take you back in case you do run away mr khan i would really like to consider that i'm not letting him go anywhere like he's done with his section he wants to go home i understand that um that i would really like to not to disincentivize having robust parking lot islands and aisles between things that have green so that we

171can shade our parking lots and try to reduce urban heat island effect and things like that so i would like to as part of that discussion or as part of the researcher however that what that looks like to take those islands out of it so that we're not disincentivizing that so great anything else before we vote on the many exciting amendments to udc parking standards mr leonard i think we are ready commissioner g randall yes commissioner sovay heck yes commissioner abrams yes is that a heck yes or just a yes can i say hell yeah commissioner hammersmith i have nothing guys yes two thumbs up commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes passes on to city council very good um before we move on to other business

172can we take a break uh we'll come back in seven minutes at roughly 8 50. 849 depending on your watch i will call us back to order to talk about uh 9a which is the planning commission review of the city council policy agenda yes uh as a reminder the city council um adopts a policy agenda it uses this to instruct staff um representatives like lobbyists to advocate on behalf of the things that matter to the city the city council distributes this to its boards and advisory boards and commissions we had an initial conversation about this i think that there was a lot of agreement uh and some there was some slight modification uh i think commissioner sovay provided some clarification on um uh gender-neutral uh restrooms for building code advocacy and i think the the

173sort of late in the meeting we got a bit stuck on inclusionary zoning commissioner clark had provided some resources as she had referenced in the meeting and i shared those in a in a memo with my acknowledgedly hopefully somewhat accurate high-level summaries of of what those resources were and would planning commission has two options you don't have to provide any comments to the city council you could adopt the comments as presented or you could make any modifications and adopt proposed comments from a staff perspective i see both sides i think generally i will say that the more state legislative tools we have the better so my inclination would be to leave that in there but i can also see the argument in the context of limited resources maybe this is not something worthwhile that the

174city council sets as a priority so with that just any uh communication that the planning commission chooses if desired to share with the council we don't have a public hearing for this um is there even like a motion that's at the end of the end of the memo i think there's two options okay um so we kind of have to choose one of those options before we move forward so why don't i why don't i read the first one um and we can ch like normal if we don't like it then we can choose to vote it down so that we can start discussion we got to move it and have it seconded and then we have discussion then we vote on the motion to discuss let me just read it and then we can

175decide i'm gonna read the first one the planning uh i'm uh this is a motion to recommend amendments to the draft policy agenda as presented um and forward to the mayor and city council that's what we're gonna that's what we're going to be discussing and voting upon and then if people want to make amendments to it then that's what we can do in the process does anybody want to move that motion does this makes go ahead uh commissioner abram seconded by commissioner gibb randall let's open discussion comments go ahead commissioner hammerschmidt so sort of tooth step well i don't know that i like either of these so i think like the the text line changes like the edits that you did are good and i think you know the gender-neutral bathrooms and i think those

176are good so then i mean to me it's the whole like are we including the inclusionary zoning component of it that's really the meat of this discussion so like i i don't like either of these actions because i think we need to talk about maybe that component of it like i i don't know i'm airing on the side of just like either you know sending these texts like line edits and also i think last time we talked about maybe just coming up with some sort of like language about we don't fully like we don't necessarily support like lobbying to like have inclusionary zoning and like here are some of the reasons why but we're you know we we definitely think like we need more housing i forget didn't we discuss this last time i think

177he so i my you might be conflating we had a conversation about a proposed resolution for um workforce housing and sort of discussing just some um sort of higher level comments about some of the city's plan policies i think you're right though the the the substantive discussion i think was whether or not to include the inclusionary zoning requirement and so um maybe just to keep it simple is if if the commission is of a mind that that is not a good tool that should be available to communities and not something that the city should spend any resources or advocacy on we just uh remove that and then we could send the recommendations for those changes with with that reflection would we i mean i would be in favor of that and i don't know if

178we would need to because it's not just sort of like a language edit i don't know if there needs to be some sort of like paragraph explanation of why we're just deleting that or we just yeah i would kind of like what you just said yeah i'd be happy to just i think the my takeaway was that inclusionaries on zoning research has has shown doesn't often doesn't result in the outcomes as desired therefore this planning commission doesn't advise city resources going towards advocating for it okay oh i'm remembering now the thing that i was talking about that i was completely yes sorry but yeah i think some sort of statement about why we would be if we agree that we should just sort of recommend that they take this out some sort of statement as

179to why i think would be helpful um are you moving to strike that statement i think so i'm i wouldn't yes so this is striking number two well the first number two on page three the numbering of this is not ideal can we not strike the whole line but just the phrase inclusionary zoning practices keep affordability incentives i would just strike the whole thing but we don't want to keep advocacy for affordability incentives that already exists in state legislation from my lungs okay done did we share this with uh teresa gilotti yes i asked if she had any feedback she did not have any specific feedback on inclusionary zoning i don't know if the housing and human services advisory board brought that up my recollection is historically the the that board has been an advocate

180of keeping inclusionary zoning as a way to uh realize units um but i don't know if they looked at it this time so actually let me go back commissioner hammerschmidt moved that um amendment yes amending the the effect of adopting and passing this on as drafted any one second the amendment to strike that entire line about inclusionary zoning seconded by commissioner lee now we can discuss it we should discuss it and honestly that's what we've been talking about this whole time okay go ahead vote for this um i would have to read that research myself and i have not had time to do that um so just on the bay not because i doubt it but i would really need to read it first and understand what it's saying um so uh but that doesn't

181matter other discussion about the proposed amendment to strike the advocacy for an ability to incorporate inclusionary zoning and in addition to that with a memo with a short statement about why and i'm trying to i'm just trying to remember the discussion about it in terms of what was that commissioner clark that was explaining that to us before could you just give us a 30 second primer on it again so you can drag my memory yeah i know right so maybe that's unrealistic long story short is it's complicated and there's just a new article with new research that came out a couple months ago in governing magazine not exactly the most like failing read but it's actually really interesting um so yeah there's just basically like it can create if there's not carefully constructed parameters on

182it you risk creating kind of um depending on the strength of the housing market as well you kind of risk creating a floor that prevents a lot of people you create two markets a really expensive market and then a subsidized market and it's kind of like picking winners and then it can kind of throw off the housing market further um can also raise the uh level so it's like i guess the policy itself is the reason i'm not spoken of earlier i think there's also a point to be made like what's feasible at the state level right now within the current legislature and um if it's worth spending a lot of time debating the merits of the policy if it can be crafted in a certain way and i guess my only concern would be

183like um the competitive advantage of if it were passed at a state level and allowed and then if um what that might impact on our ability to provide housing compared to neighboring areas if we were to enact such legislation and let's say pittsfield doesn't um if that might have a result in where the development goes um and so there's just a lot to consider there i'm a bit uh sorry it's been a long meeting so i'm probably not being super well spoken but i guess the the bottom line being the state legislature being in the current stages probably doesn't make it such a thing worth spending time on with the lobbying okay thank you at a local level so it's messy go ahead commissioner abrams um i feel like because there is definitely uh sorry

184i wasn't saying like even if there's not consensus 100 in the affordable housing community about whether it's good practice there certainly is enough research showing that we need to think more carefully about it as a practice i'm comfortable i would support striking it from this so that we aren't proactively affirming support for something that we're worried isn't effective it doesn't mean that it can't happen we're not forbidding it we're just removing vocal support for it and therefore i would be in favor of striking it other thoughts all right let's vote on the amendment then general call vote sure and again the amendment would strike the language commissioner gabe randall yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish no commissioner lee yes commissioner clerk yes commissioner white yes commissioner mills yes motion

185carries all right any other uh um changes that we would suggest on the otherwise drafted marked up red markup agenda policy agenda not our actual agenda okay then i think we can vote on this too mr leonard commissioner good brand yes commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner hammerschmidt yes commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark yes commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes the motion carries um moving on to item 9b this is the calendar year 2022 uh planning commission meeting schedule before turning it over i just want to note that uh next week's working session will still be remote if that notice hasn't got gone out i got a calendar invite that said meeting place had changed but no we will still continue to be only on zoom and so you can expect

186to have zoom information do we know if that is changing nope it will be remote uh until we hear otherwise the working sessions will continue to be remote and orc will continue to be remote until we hear our otherwise okay anything else to note in the meeting schedule no my apologies i think you got a generous email from mia gayle from our office we keep messing up your first may meeting for a bunch of holidays and we're trying to fix it again so the primary change is that it was rather than being scheduled may 3rd it will be may 4th which is wednesday because there's voting on may 3rd that's the change mr leonard and the fiscal year adding on the rest and adding the rest all right any we have to vote this up

187is are any is anybody noticing any other conflicts uh while we are quickly looking at this it looks like i will know while you're looking at this one of the things in the past is we have set the meeting calendar on a fiscal year um which only matters to bureaucrats so um part of this is i am hoping to transition that where we will be setting our schedule on a calendar year like most of the rest of the world and for the second half of the next fiscal or the first half of the next fiscal year that's highlighted in yellow that first meeting is like on a wednesday not a tuesday the entire time um and you're asking why that is no it's it's j it's july 6th the it's the little one next to

188it july august september october and november are all wednesday meetings yes commissioner abrams can i just request that um somebody send us the calendar invites as soon as possible so that they show up in my summer calendar thank you i was gonna say fourth of july i don't know what august is election primary thank you labor day labor day yeah and then another election november first unless you all want to get rid of democracy no all right uh any other discussion this looks right though good like don't plan on wednesday things and yes we will get appointments out thank you all in fake can we just do a voice vote all in favor of this calendar please raise a hand or say yes yes no shoot okay so so commissioner randall moved commissioner seconded and

189then we all voted yes thank you i did not hear that thank you all right uh let's see next up is public comment this is the final opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes about any issue that um is on their minds tonight uh if you are joining us go ahead and use the raised hand button you can call in at 877-853-5247 our meeting id is 977-6634-1226 once you've joined the meeting you can press star 9 on your phone to digitally raise your hand please mute any television or background sound so that we can hear you clearly would you like to provide public comment [Music] wood chair mills since you invited people to speak on any issue that is on their minds it's a bit general um but uh so i'll do

190that um ken garber again um two major reasons i see why we as a society have completely failed to address the climate crisis is that we don't take the social cost of carbon into consideration in our decisions and that cost ends up being paid usually by those least able at least responsible for the problem to begin with especially those in what we call the third world and and poor people and minority communities in this country the second major reason i think we've failed is that no one knows a relative impact of the different things we do in terms of emissions um and um so this is what i've tried to do in some of my letters to you and some of my comments is to quantify a bit what the consequences are for example you

191know maple cove too they're going with gas i think that's very fair to assume at this point you know i calculate 910 metric tons co2 equivalent emissions a year if you include upstream methane emissions from that [Music] so i i guess what i'm getting to is is commissioner weiss's very sensible idea of putting of osi providing routinely a report to you and maybe even earlier in the process to staff putting some of these numbers together not that we can require anything along these lines but just so the developers can be can see them and they may not care and i think the one tonight certainly wouldn't but many of them will and they just don't know what the consequences are of what they're doing um you know to me in my personal life maybe you

192do this too i'm sure some of you do i can guess which ones i calculate my personal carbon footprint um i know that uh every gallon of gas is creates 13.2 kilograms co2 equivalent emissions so i fill up my tank that's 150 kilograms that really gives me pause you know uh 0.8 kilograms per passing passenger mile traveled by air in coach yeah i three that's three thousand that's three metric tons if i fly to san francisco in bag that's gonna really screw up my personal car carbon footprint so i just don't fly anymore um you know and if i didn't know that i wouldn't care and i didn't for the longest time um so osi should obviously provide these reports not even to udc conforming projects not just to others but they should also be

193more quantitative they tend to be very qualitative and they'd certainly have the staff very capable of doing that you know uh thea jaeger well i'm done i guess you have the you have the uh discretion to let me go longer by the way thank you i was just going to say that theo jagerlander in osi is a very capable analyst he puts together brilliant um greenhouse gas inventories annually that i use as a resource uh many of your calculations so osi can do this and this is obviously something i need to bring up with them not with you and i will but uh some developers are very sophisticated i have my issues with sartorius as you know but they know exactly how much energy they're using and how much emissions they're putting out even though

194they don't they don't disclose that they they did disclose the energy use intensity of their building which is um energy consumption per square foot per year much higher than i thought it was um so that's another figure that either we should that we should try to pin developers down on um there's a lot we can do in this area and that we should do we just need we need more information um it may not in the end make a difference but it's it's this isn't rocket science this is quantitative information that that we can get from osi um to help us in our decision making so anyway that's all i really wanted to say i really hope that commissioner weiss's idea is pursued thank you thank you mr leonard are there any callers who have

195indicated an interest in speaking no all right uh then we can move on to item 11 commission proposed business i charted things down but does anybody else want to speak up so what i have what i have is that we ought to have a discussion and probably outside of orc that given this conversation um for tc1 particular looking at the parking footprint um the form based limit uh that is one thing i also think in that conversation as i alluded to before there is a student who didn't find enough people to join her masters project that would be working with the city to help quantify trade-offs between um between uh green space housing and kind of solar and so i think actually bit i wrote down the time print from tonight's discussion where this i

196think came up in that conversation but um i as a point of information for folks there will be a very capable c's masters student working on this summer on that um to the point though of specifically quantitative assessments from osi i mean this is exactly when you you know the the the energy efficiency labels when you go to buy an appliance like that's not requiring you to do anything it just helps you make informed choices um uh and so i think that you know i think that there's certainly merit there as well and those are the things that i had on my list what else did i miss yeah can we just specify what we're asking for or do we not want to do that right now from osi um because i think it was

197we we threw around a lot of things which are all valuable and so you can't see mr leonard raising his hand and i'm sure he has a brilliant idea not brilliant i i would observe that the commission spent as much time if not more this evening talking about building operational aspects as planning and land use aspects that well that makes me feel great that you have a lot of confidence in our regulations as it relates to use and area height placement and parking and landscaping and storm water and the like it obviously we've had this discussion quite a bit that we don't and this relates to whether osi provides a report we don't have anything to measure that against i would suggest maybe maybe even at this next working session we start having a conversation

198as a commission as to what are the things that you would like to require in code in the zoning code from a sustainability i think i hear the city council has been clear in adoption of the a20 policy it's not a master plan but it's a clear direction of the city council i hear it at this table a desire for impacting projects as it relates to their heating source their utility sources these are not things that are in our udc i'm not sitting here saying that to do that we will that i that i think it's appropriate to put all things in the udc but i sort of i am speculating that it's time for us as a commission to start looking at the a20 goals and think about the things that we do want

199to require if we could require every new building has to be net zero constructed in the city do we want our udc to say that if we want to require no natural gas connection in the city do we want to say that so i sort of think that we should start having a conversation about measurable things that we can put in there so that when osi eventually is doing those reports it is a standard of approval it is not a standard of hey wouldn't it be great if you could do this i think we need to have that conversation yep if we could what do we wanted to say i think we just had this conversation about tc1 is tc1 is uh it is it is trying to get to a very specific typology and

200a lot of typologies that are happening in the world construction-wise won't won't fit into that and so what do we want to do the same as regards to sustainability aspects so that's not a brilliant idea but maybe it's the time we have that conversation and maybe we started having that sooner it just i just i i feel like it's pent up in the commission in the conversations about these developments and i i think we need to even even if we can't include everything what are the what are what is the i don't know that there's low-hanging fruit but what is the easiest hanging fruit to incorporate and i would tying many of these things together i would offer that we're still we can still scope out a bit of kind of what the student is

201working on this summer and i think that that's really helpful because i similar to the conversation that we had about inclusionary zoning i worry a bit about unintended consequences of us requiring things that drive maybe some uses we do want to drive to the suburbs because there are suburban uses but other things that may the the the you know don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good to some extent um and so i think that that's something that could kind of be within the remit exploring what some of those unintended consequences might be go ahead commissioner abrams or sovay wrong this might just be a clarification and not be work but uh with the ev parking if it's a phased project can a petitioner elect when and where to place it or is

202it all required to be placed in phase one or proportional because this evening was a loophole that they just conceded to instead of a requirement so the code's not specific right now the code says when you're the proposed code that you just advanced to city council says when you are adding parking spaces they have to meet these percentages for ev parking so um i would say typically we have required phases to stand on their own like if you want a certificate of occupancy for phase one you have to have all the amenities for faith that is incorporated in phase one for that [Music] i don't i guess i so in short the code's silent on it there might be times that that's really important there might be times that there might be a benefit because

203of the overall arrangement and distribution that we don't want that you have to do ten percent in phase one and ten percent in phase two of a ten phase project so um i don't know can we look at that when we look at the rest of the parking standards that we're going to go back to if we can just add that to the list of round two parking now commissioner abrams thank you um i just was gonna speak in support of um mr leonard's proposal because i think we do spend a lot of time talking about things that are actually not within our jurisdiction um that are wishlists based on our our principles and values but actually not related to planning and land use and zoning but there are things related to those things that

204we have not yet discussed and could and should and maybe even would be more impactful um because sometimes it does feel like we we there's a kind of performance we we we kind of like asked the petitioner to to bear with us while we tell them all these things that we wish but actually at the end of the day we vote yes because even if they don't comply with those things because it's not our jurisdiction so it's a kind of awkward position to be in and i think that frustration is what mr leonard is pointing to um so as far as i understand it we could not write into the udc that buildings have to be electric electrified because we're prevented by law from doing it so maybe we should focus on the things that

205we can um i'm not saying we shouldn't make our principles known we still could communicate those and vocalize our preferences and make it clear that that's what we want but i think there are other levers we should be pulling that we're not so i like that idea commissioner dish we've had this we've gone we've this is another iteration and i am entirely on board with the idea that we should be doing the things we can do but i think what came up in our discussion tonight with this petitioner was i think the desire to inform and just say do you he may know nothing about indoor air quality like most people don't even think about that so i don't know if this is something worth our time except i do know that a lot of

206projects aren't going to be going to council and so does that mean that we really need to be specific about what's under our purview or does that mean that there's a possibility for us to say but i don't know if osi has time to give us a report for everything where there's no discretion this is a lot of staff time so but i think that what i heard is the impulse which i which i thought was a valuable impulse was just the desire to be able to say you are tending to want to do it this way because this is what you know but there are these things that other buildings are doing that add x percent maybe financial cost to a project but that in a city like ann arbor may get you a

207market share or maybe the responsible and ethical thing to do and leave it at that you know just we want to inform you and fee we feel like we should do that or we feel we're going to arrogate to ourselves the privilege of doing that i think we should think this through because i don't want us to keep having these wishlist conversations i feel tired when the moment comes for us to all say have you thought about this and they go no okay um and yet you know and and and these are building code things they're not things we can do they can't be in our code they can't even be in our building code but we are the place that is signing off on these site plans and then i am getting email in

208my mailbox saying you are a hypocrite and i'm not going to vote for your sustainability millage because you don't actually care because you voted for this and that you know and so i don't know what the answer is there and i'm happy to say narrow rather than broaden but i wanted to just say what i thought i heard in the suggestion and you know so similarly based on research of land use and renewables in terms of how people feel about the planning process when we're talking about citing a large-scale renewable project there are some things that we know are outside of the purview of a planning commission but when members of the public are concerned about that rather than them thinking that you're not listening articulating again why it is that like this is our

209this is something that we care about but these are the bounds of what we have actually is is helpful in that kind of situation when we're talking about large-scale utility projects because they recognize that you're hearing them and we well know that while there are some people that regularly write us letters often times somebody just may write be writing the letter about the thing that's proposed behind them and so they may not this may be the first time that they realize that this is not in our purview and so i do think like i i think we ought to have a conversation but the education i think is not just to the petitioner it's also to the to other interested community members who may be tuning in for the very first time or maybe joining

210us for the very first time to say we hear you it's not like we're just ignoring you but this is this is what is within our discretion so um commissioner hammerschmidt i think that's a good point it's also going to underscore just i think what i heard from both commissioner weich and from mr garber was like and commissioner abrams and i were talking about this when we were on our break like just this need for that this education of you know land use practitioners that come before us that you know maybe i i could also sort of tell from the petitioner tonight like he probably i don't know what he's gonna end up doing i don't think he's thought about this at all because it is not the way that he's developed other projects that

211he's worked on and the architect maybe hasn't talked about building electrification or like he doesn't have the right engineers or like i mean we need a fundamental shift and like all land use practitioners but i'm i'm wondering if there's something that osi has already or could create that would come early in a process with a petitioner that planning staff could use to say like here's a guidebook or something here's context of like developers in ann arbor or close by that are like considering these things that you could talk to about like pricing this out i just think that there's so much like status quo that people and then they come you know they've done so much work by the time they come here and then we're like oh solar panels oh building electrification and it's

212like nobody said this to me before or like nobody's really given me like like my architect hasn't said anything to me about that so i i think there really is this deep need for the education piece really early in the process with a lot of these petitioners so if there's anything that we could help facilitate the creation of that you know once you start working with planning staff or that it gets distributed more broadly in our community so that before you even come to the city you've somehow gotten this or like all the engineers and all the architects in the community like have this it's just sort of a resource otherwise i don't know i mean i don't know how else we're going to really like change the way that people are building things here

213that they will just if we make it too hard they'll go to the townships but i think like people are i'm hoping that people's values are similar enough to ours that they want to do the right thing they just maybe don't know how or don't know what the options are because nobody has told them so i don't know if that sort of that was a rant i'm sorry but some sort of like educational resource that we could try to help create could be sort of a starting point for some of this this is what we might be getting ourselves into mr leonard for our work session no i i think it just emphasizes why this would be a valuable conversation so you know city council actually directed for example resources about uh embodied carbon and

214existing buildings so we have been directed to put something on our website as the most important and important thing that you can do is use an existing building don't replace it with something else that has impacts about what you can accomplish on that particular site sometimes that might be a really viable option sometimes it might not be a viable option that resource doesn't say that you must or you can't but that's an example of moving in that direction to the to the notion of sort of a scorecard you know this is a i don't profess to have the knowledge this is a rapidly evolving field but i i just want to share that i have had those conversations with osi staff how can i provide like the way i presented it was i would like

215to provide with all due respect a dumbed down version of a sustainability score so that it gives us commissioners and the public uh a quick snapshot score grade as to how this might impact and the answer was it's complicated by what natural resources are there the method of construction the extent of construction so there really isn't thus far there really isn't that sort of easily comparative scorecard so so that's why i think find like a conversation we might not we might not get to anything but finding a conversation of something that is measurable that can be eventually incorporated into our code those are the great incremental steps that is it's not that it's not this dance of education it is another standard that we can clearly communicate to the development community that if you meet

216this you shall be approved period well i think the conversation is how aspirational and how how incremental and how aspirational should those standards be what are those standards i i feel like there is a there's a latent desire of this board to move in that direction with some measurable standards so it moves past that and so i think it's it's time that we start exploring those mr leonard is this for do you think that this will be next week's discussion or are we gonna do it in a month i don't know okay maybe we'll start it next week okay i i retain the right to change my mind all right uh commissioner gibrandal i'm just wondering if we should invite some people to this discussion that no more than we do definitely and and i'm

217i mean i'm not just thinking about the office of sustainability but like developers that are embarking on this i feel like would be really important to have at that discussion too and so maybe that means it's a month from now or maybe it's like we start it start sorting out chunks of information or whatever so that we know what we how we want to be effective with other people's time but um i i feel like you know we have our own limits for sure um and uh i have a few names of some people that i think would be helpful okay anything else under commission proposed business item 12 is adjournment would anyone like to move that moved by commissioner white seconded by commissioner dish all in favor that is all of the oh that

218is all of the hands