001here i'd like to thank the board for putting in your your time to assist with our applicant and um uh the appeal that's going before you now um i'd like to bring up two things before we start the first thing uh is catherine le vesser uh who was a board member had to resign or she is leaving because she's unable to attend the meetings any longer she has taken a new position is moving in a different direction but um we do appreciate her being part of the group so just so everybody knows she is no longer on the board for a request from her uh the second thing is and when we do a roll call is one of the requirements now is that you if when you uh answer that you're attending if you
002can also uh indicate your location what city you're in uh that helps meet the rule requirements as uh recently brought forth i guess so um and with that i'm going to turn it over to you paul and thank you again thank you glenn so i called to order the may 2021 meeting of the building board of appeals can we have a roll call please paul darling here robert hart here david arnsdorff here deborah hey please um please indicate your location all right can we start over here sorry paul darling here and i'm in ann arbor thank you robert hart here i'm in ann arbor michigan third planet from the sun david arnsdorff i'm here in my house in ann arbor you flat i'm here and also in my house in ann arbor jeffrey perkins i
003thought we had jeffrey you're muted jeff sorry i was muted uh here ann arbor bruce carson my show is absent not in the waiting room we have a quorum if i could call a roll call for staff i have glenn dempsey here here and i'm in the lansing area michael redman here city of ann arbor brandi lewis here adrian michigan mike lemieux here ann arbor michigan john reiser here ann arbor michigan myself deborah williams in ann arbor we're ready to go okay thank you um we have an agenda posted we're looking to have someone make a motion to prove the agenda is there any additions or changes the agenda that anybody wants to make before we approve the agenda need a motion to approve the agenda move to approve second step in favor hi hi
004all right the agenda is passed the next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the january 21st 2021 meeting was there any comments on those [Music] i think i have one change to make um mike lemieux you were part of that meeting correct because i don't have you on the roll call um i need to know the date it was january 21st yes all right i will make that change you have a motion to approve the amended minutes of the january 21st meeting motion to approve support second those in favor aye right minutes as amended are approved uh the next item on the agenda is appeals and actions and show cost hearings and um i'd like to kind of walk through the procedure this for the new applicants for the applicants
005here to understand the process here uh the first thing we'll do is we'll once we call your appeal up we'll have a staff report and they'll do their report from the billing official fire department um and continue inspectors are gonna weigh in next we'll ask the applicant to present their appeal and um brief comment with what they're requesting and we'd appreciate if you would list if you're um asking for appeal based on if it's equally or better than the code the code doesn't apply or if the code is being misinterpreted uh so after the applicant presents their appeal well the board will have discussions among themselves what we may have asked questions for the applicant and at which point uh we're ready to make a motion we'll close the discussion and we'll make a motion
006and vote on the appeal so with that said the first item on the agenda is application 210968 bba 21002 at 660 gerhart road ann arbor michigan can we have a staff report please yes good afternoon to all board members to all staff and to all the appeals applicants i prepared a brief synopsis of the staff report for bba 21-002 please reference my staff report or the bba packet for the applicable fire code verbiage it was included the property at 660 earhart road is a 56 single family dwelling unit development site it was cited during a pre-submittal meeting that a second fire access road would be required due to the number of dwelling units in the proposed development under section d 107.1 of the 2015 international fire code later during my first fire review of the
007submitted site plans it was found that the second fire access road did not meet the minimum requirements of section d 107.2 of the 2015 international fire code for remoteness or distance apart this is due to the fact that the site does not have enough public road frontage to be fire code compliant for a second access road the petitioner was granted the only listed exception in fire code to remove the need for a second fire access road under 2015 international fire code section d 107.1 exception number one to this day the petitioner has not accepted the listed exception in fire code and i want to make a note that modifications or deviation from fire code is solely up to the discretion of the fire marshal or fire h.j fire code is written as a minimum life
008safety requirement and any exception from it i believe should be written in it as a listed exception for the specific code that is being cited this ensures the safety is still being met with the intent of the code as written by the code writer the proposed site plan does not meet the current fire codes that have been adopted as life safety standards by the city of ann arbor michigan the code has not been misinterpreted the provisions of the code do fully apply and the reduced distance between the two access roads is not equal to nor will provide the proper protection or safety proposed in fire code thank you thank you i'm glad you have any comment uh no comment for me is there any other staff report that wants to weigh in that would have
009been a clickable stat person or is that that's the complete report so um the next piece will be to have the applicant present their uh experience request all right hello this is jason rickert with toll brothers i'm in brighton michigan right now um i want to thank the board for hearing us out today i appreciate everything mr redmond just said and i i don't disagree with any you know most of what he said he's it was very clear and and very helpful through the process so i do appreciate that um what we do and like i think he's asked before is is the code being misinterpreted and that's that's their basis for this appeal and we feel that it's being misinterpreted because based on you know mr redmond's comments that he does have the authority
010based on the code under practical difficulties and i do believe our practical difficulty is is we do not have enough road frontage to meet this requirement the life and safety of this neighborhood is being met with the second entrance and the distance between those two roads um in our mind is arbitrary with our constraint for our you know practical difficulty of not being able to supply the entire distance so we're asking for is not to remove the second entrance um which we have provided it is to allow us to reduce that remoteness distance from 710 feet to 205 feet as we've provided in our plans and we do believe that the the safety and you know life and safety of this project is still being met providing those two entrances even though they don't meet
011the remoteness distance apart okay thank you so does the board have any uh questions for the applicant uh yeah so um there are very there's a there's an alternative there's an alternate site plan that's that's that's offer first of all i do have one quick procedural question so the code references a board of appeals within the the fire code is is that a different board of appeals than than us or was that intended to be us because the way the qualifications read it sounds like it's supposed to be staffed by more by fire personnel than building department or building um qualified people just a question if i might jump in um glenn dempsey building official uh our city code actually directs us to the building board of appeals and not to a fire board of
012appeals okay um and i don't i don't believe i've been to one of these before because generally uh in past i haven't we haven't had somebody uh want to appeal it so but the city uh in the city code takes us to the bba okay so so um i guess here here are my questions um there's a second fire access road that's proposed under exhibit a which would skirt the backs of properties like one through eight um is that does that conform to the 20 foot minimum width exclusive of shoulders that's required yes that's the cross section that we have provided based on those requirements yes okay so that that and that would be a paved road that is correct okay and then [Music] the other i understand that that's not the preferred solution that
013you guys are are advocating for that you'd actually looking to have like a divided boulevard instead that is correct so one of the things that we did before we finalized our submittal to the city was to have a neighborhood meeting and at that neighborhood meeting um earhart village to the north did you know bring up some concerns with that fire access road being put there um we listened to their concerns we actually went back and modified our landscaping plans pretty pretty in depth went back and had a separate meeting with their their association board um they were actually pretty pleased with what we came up with but one of their requests was that when we come to this appeal that they asked for a variance from the 205 feet down to a boulevard entrance so
014we would have two basically two 20-foot access roads parallel i'll be they'd only be 15 feet apart um i think we went to the fire marshal in the very beginning and you know he was not in support of that the first time that's why we went with this plan but we did promise that board that we would present that to you today as an alternative um i know that that procedure has been approved in the past i don't think it was under the new fire code but it was um you know in previous approvals so we do realize that that would be you know a long shot with this appeal i mean it seems like somewhat contorted way to get in there yep okay so i'd like to just ask this question because um in
015in exhibit b you have you have two places where the parcels are the parcel bundles are separated there's one in the upper part um of the plan where the first the first turn is i guess that's close to the green green hill school property correct and then there's another wedge-shaped split that's down near the very end that this sort of faces down toward the concordia property correct okay so i live in the northeast part of town and we have a number of relatively recent that's within the last to 20 years subdivisions that have easily as many or more um plots and it and they have one entrance off a main road but they have a fire access easement that adjoins that joins another property and i'm i'm sort of putting the question out there to
016both you and the fire marshal as to whether that's a possibility that would you know satisfy the intent of the code to have two remote um entrances and i'll jump in real quick there so obviously you know i've been doing this quite a while and and there are certain circumstances where if we were coming in here raw that we would be able to provide a stub road to the northerly property line for an example that would provide that secondary access and that subdivision may be a future subdivision and then the fire marshal would have the authority to grant us that approval based on the likelihood of that subdivision being approved and developed in the future um as you can see the subdivision to the north did not provide a stub to our property through the
017site plan process the property to the southwest did not provide a stub to our property during its site plan process and obviously of us 23 bordering us and in two private schools so we've kind of been landlocked in there so i i kind of understand what you're trying to say i would have to defer to the fire marshal on that because i i don't see what our options are for that well since since the property that you're that you're developing belong to concordia and it joins concord the concordia campus why wouldn't that be a an option um basically for site constraints that southerly boundary line is basically a 20-foot ravine with a a creek that runs through the bottom of it so it becomes very impractical to build a fire access road through there and
018anything having to do with the green hill school was not a possibility either we have approached them and they basically don't want to restrict their rights because they don't know what their plans would be in the future to to lock in an easement that would eliminate any future expansion for them for uh just just for the sake of those that you mentioned about this being through the kind of the building board of appeals and not fire personnel the code that's being cited here is very similar if i can paint a picture in your mind is with egress from a building with the doors it's the exact same concept that when you take the the diagonal of a building and cut it in half for the location of your second egress door to be considered egress
019as a second doorway for capacity so fire code follows a lot of the building code requirements the the code that's cited here obviously is to the extent for big fire apparatus to respond there to have access and if you read the commentary under 2015 ifc for the sort of the commentary books it lists numerous items that could block the access of the fire department in the event of coming in it can be anything from down power lines accidents even routine maintenance on the roadways and that's why they picked the distance they picked so the distance obviously to cut down from the 700 down to 200 is not compliant with fire code you know would it affect it i mean there's that's just the active nature of what would happen within that space um the listed
020exception that was granted that was in fire code that removes the need for it was to sprinkle the houses um and when i look at fire code i do look at it as a minimum life safety standard minimum requirement kind of the same as the building code for egress coming out a hallway a stairway you know the the railings in there it's all usually based off a minimum requirement and i i do not see how a 200 foot distance apart remoteness comes even close to what should be 700 feet and when we have a listed exception that can be granted that was offered so and i'd just like to write about that just a little and i don't disagree with what you're saying but the we do i guess we do have the right and
021thank you for pointing that out to fire suppress our units and the reason why we're here today is that's an atypical process in this market it's not commonly used to to sprinkle individual single-family homes it becomes a burden to the homeowner so we were just trying to come up with a different solution for that and and i do understand that there's a code for that distance and i do understand that a building and and they're applying that system to this and that's obviously they have to come up with some kind of system but 200 feet or 700 feet down a road i i don't feel impacts the likelihood of any change of your access to our site there are no intermediate intersections in that section of road you know if there if if to me
022if the code should be written is there has to be another means of access through that 700 feet of road which there is not even if we went up 700 feet there are no other subdivision roads you could get through to get there so it's all about the likelihood that something happened if something happens in that first 200 feet that you can't get to us it wouldn't matter if our entry you know if it's 700 feet up that's the only difference of the the likelihood of an accident happening in that 200 foot gap versus 700 foot gap which is in my mind a little arbitrary um but it is part of the code and that's why we're asking for that practical difficulty because we can't physically get it with our property dimensions and and all
023due respect for what you just explained would be the exact reason why i would i would want you guys to go with an exception to sprinkle the houses because most secondary access roads come off another road that's how a lot of the sites are there's a lot of corner development sites the two the north sky development they have two access roads off the same road the third access road is in the barton green development um and that was set up during the site planning of it so they have three access roads and one is through another area that if the materials are too close they wouldn't have a problem with that sometimes the south never happened it's happening it's in it's almost done right now i understand it but if it never happened which is
024a possibility that those two entrances would still be the same situation we have there is actually a code for that particular thing for the second development and that second development was cited as far as i know in that i wasn't the fire marshal at the time but it was cited within their secondary access because when that second site where when the site plan came up for barton greene's it was clearly marked within that site plan for that to be the third to confirm that they were keeping that third entrance into the sky uh the north sky development and the only other one just for reference purposes when you guys mentioned the the packard development that was a dare i say a play on numbers that they had 29 buildings in there and 25 were one
025and two family dwellings and four of them were multi-family and they came underneath the numbers on both codes that apply to it so right um so i i'd like to interject real quick too i think it's important if we're talking about norse sky all three of those entrances whether they're in the north sky development or the development to the south of north sky are all still off a pontiac trail and they're all still very close together uh i i would disagree with you i'd have to look at the barton green one i believe there's a um entrance off of that somewhere else i'd have to look at the site plan again but the greater the distance the better like i say i we we can we can talk about this about the spacing of it
026but when you're on the same road it makes more sense that we are farther apart when we're on the same road it's always better one of the site plans i just did i'm working on today has two access points and they are purposely on two separate roads um you know so for me to be on the same road would be more reason why i would want to stick to fire code to keep what the fire code writer wrote as a minimum requirement and and i agree i don't disagree with what you're saying and i think we've given the largest gap we can between our entrances based on our site conditions that's that's why we're asking for the appeal officer redmond when we mentioned sprinkling the houses would it require sprinkling all houses or is there
027any variance to where you only sprinkle the furthest away no the code is written for all of them to be uh sprinkled and there's there's the three different systems that can be installed whether it's an nfpa 13 uh 13r or 13d obviously the the most reasonable one is a 13d um it has the lesses or the less stringent uh requirements for a 13d system but it lists all three systems that can be installed but it does include that the verbage for that code says all dwellings would be sprinkled [Music] that was a good question we asked him the same question and got the same answer so thank you what's the cost of sprinkling a dollar a square foot would it cost less of a sprinkle than put an access road in i mean roads aren't
028cheap um the sprinkler system is extremely expensive and that and that's why it's a burden to our homeowners you know the the state of michigan waived or took these residential sprinkler a portion of the code out of our residential code when they approved it other states are using the international residential code and one of the concerns that i have first of all you're being given an alternative and yes it may add cost to the houses um but if if we have a code requirement that specifies the access to the site and you're being given an alternative to meet the code then i think the sprinklers should be done and one of my concerns is that the michigan association of home builders went to the state and had good reason for removing residential sprinklers uh from
029the code but in cases where i think there's a demonstrable safety issue i think that the sprinklers are are the option um we're not usually we we've done residential projects where we've put sprinklers in them yes they do add cost to the project um but they also add a safety aspect and um not that cost isn't an issue but we usually don't look at cost as a life safety uh reason for uh for reducing the uh the code requirements for a project so just out of curiosity what is residential sprinklering adding to house or two houses in other states where you're working um every market is a little bit different and so this market where it's not prevalent is it the cost is much higher because they we it was hard for us to even
030get companies to bid us out on this so i believe our cost would be much higher here in michigan because they just don't do this system where in in chicago where we do it and you know i think half the houses we build in that market there's there's multiple trades that do it on a daily basis the price comes down so it's it's just a burden in this market because of the lack of trades want me to get you some names i would love that is there any other questions about the board now can we have a motion i can say before i make a motion is that if depending on the appeal the variance comes out you can appeal our board's decision to the state and you have 30 days to do that so
031you'd have to do that within by the 20th of june to appeal to the state that correct uh glenn commuted glenn uh i'll have to check on that but i'll have an answer for you tomorrow if if a fire appeal goes to the construction code commission will respect the the decision made here today okay thank you thank you so much on the board have a motion i moved it in the case of bba 21-0 sp 21-006 the appeal of the fire marshal's decision that the development at 660 erhard road is denied and the building board of appeals affirms the fire martian's decision for the reasons below the true intent of the 2015 international fire code in section b 107.2 governing the development of 660 erhard road has been correctly interpreted by the fire marshal two
032that the provisions of 2015 international fire code d107.2 does apply to development at 60 air hard road and three the applicant has not proposed an equal or better method of protection or safety thank you uh do we have a second any other further discussion on the uh wording of the appeal if not uh those in favor say aye aye all right that three i'm going to raise your hand so definitely count those at three one two those opposed the i so that is three to one we have that's my count two okay we have five members or four today we have five can we do a voice vote i think there was four yeses or four nodes i'm sorry okay thank you so for no's means that uh fuel doesn't pass is that covering that
033correctly or three four five voices in favor and it does pass it was the the i read from the appeal denied okay so it's written and it's not written the positive okay all right if you're in the negative then i i'm voting in favor of not approving the beer so i guess that would be five to nothing then the is is the outcome of that then well thank you very much we'll revise our plans to fire sprinkler homes you could receive a lot of maybe maybe 30 lots i guess too a big bigger lots or yeah what else the other ways to get around it there there but i can't approval but yeah that will be the best solution so thank you very much all right you're welcome thank you thanks everybody next item on
034the agenda is uh [Music] old business old business yeah so uh cba 821 0 001 withdrawal of appeal number 830 at henry street let's provide an update on that glenn did you want to share about the withdrawal of that application i don't have it up in front of me do you have it i don't have it in front of me but i can speak to the reason that they're no longer requesting the appeal um at 8 30 henry unit 11 um they've decided to alter the stairway to meet the minimum code requirements and are no longer seeking a variance from the code all right good news find a way to make it work that's good news yeah they did next item on the agenda is uh new business there's nothing listed there for new business
035and you want to have any new business items reports of communication nothing listed public commentary general do you have any comment any public deborah no one in the waiting room all right we have a motion to adjourn move to adjourn second was in favor hi hi all right thank you everyone thank you good afternoon bye-bye thank you