08/08/2011 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of the Special Meeting of Council Monday, August 8, 2011 Page 6 - RANDY SMITH Mr. Smith passed around handouts and referred to a posterboard rendering. Basically the lots we are looking at rezoning are the rear lots on the east side at this point going back. It's about 1.3 acres of the entire parcel which is 3.7 total. We currently occupy up to this line of the parking lot. We are proposing to expand the cars back into this area which is currently zoned residential. We have worked extensively with the city, with various Boards, Planning Commissions, Architectural Review Board, Planning and Zoning, and we have finally come to this conclusion which we think serves both the Deacons property and the residential properties. Along Wilson Mills Road right now there's a heavy line of pine trees along this line and there's a heavy line of plantings along the east line and along the south line here so what we have done is we have dedicated an area of this property to a greenspace in an easement to the city. We have 30 feet in the front. We have 50 feet along the east property line and 25 feet along the south property line that we are dedicating as greerispace for the city for future use or just as a buffer for the residents here. The other thing we are doing is we are pulling this property away a little bit further. We are going to eliminate a couple of spaces here so that we can maintain the 25 foot access into that property. So that property will be deeded and that really comprises 40% of these two lots that we are asking you to rezone. We are giving up 40% of that additional property for greenspace for the residents' benefit and to assure that we give them proper buffering along this space. We have moved all our lighting into the lot as much as possible so that we don't have any spillage out on to the adjacent properties. We've got all that covered. At one point in time, this driveway was much further east. In discussions with the Planning, they thought that it would be best if it were directly opposite from the commercial development that's further north so we have relocated that driveway. That really freed up this green area up in this area. Right now, there are cars displayed across here. That car display would remain the same. Really the view from Wilson Mills is not going to be radically altered. There's one large tree here that we think we're going to have to lose to get this driveway in. The rest of these trees will be existing to remain and we are going to fill in all of the holes and cracks with additional evergreens and plantings to make that a solid buffer. The idea being that you can't see any of this as you are going down Wilson Mills Road and you won't realize that this is really being utilized for commercial use as much as possible. The building itself, our prototype building when we first got this from Chrysler was a square building facing SOM Center Road. It basically came up within a couple feet of the 12 foot landscape line. We had two concerns with that from a design standpoint. One was there's no contact to the rear lot so the salesmen couldn't monitor the rear lot and the other concern was you really wanted to try and get some greenspace up here in front of the building to try to soften this up a little bit. We configured the building, pulled the entrance to the corner of the building facing out to the intersection of SOM Center and Wilson Mills and we were able to shorten this building up a little bit so it was not quite as deep. Now we have 22 feet of greenspace up in front of the building, soften that up, give it a little bit nicer look. Actually as you come down to the South on SOM Center, these adjacent buildings are back about 40 feet so you're starting to pick