05/09/2005 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Special Council Minutes 5/9/OS Page 7 SLIDE: Objectives Used in P1anning Process Mayor Rinker said these objectives were again the process of working with a number of Village residents in conjunction with C.S.U. and I will take them all briefly: expanding Recreation; controlling traffic; dealing with the zoning; we wanted high quality development. We knew that there were some Wetlands but we didn't know quite the extent at that point that is why we had "Shaker Lakes" as opposed to the Wetland Preserve today. We had stormwater issues with the drainages through the area. Progressive is actually on a watershed between the Chagrin and the Euclid Creek drainages. We wanted-and it was very important to keep our population which has really remained at 3,500 really since the `70s. We wanted to improve the income and property tax base; maintain lower income tax and property tax rates; maintain a rural residential character; maintain a positive revenue stream for our school district and levels of service for our residents--trying to achieve a balance between ultimately often competing interests. SLIDE: What is Layercake Zoning? Mayor Rinker said this is the infamous Layercake Zoning that the courts told us we had to stick to. Some of you may recall, in 1994, we went to a referendum vote to rezone this area to conventional single-family residential development which was the only zoning we had until recently. The property owners, having gone to court previously-succeeded in securing first a preliminary and then a permanent injunction keeping the Village from going ahead with its referendum vote. We never got the results of the vote but we are pretty certain that it probably passes. But we handed with the proverbial, "Fait Accompli " of what to do with it. Layercake Zoning (it is kind of hard to see here) is this green band (think of green icing) is all residential zoning. Highland Road; S.O.M. Center Road and White Road. The first band in, the yellow, is the office/laboratory (which in our code is our SLIDE: Northwest Quadrant Zoning Must Remain Layercake Mayor Rinker said this is just repeating what I had said a moment ago about the legal decisions impacting the Layercake Zoning. Again, this was all part of the presentation we made back in 1997. SLIDE: Land Redistribution Improves Use Mayor Rinker said I thought this was a good visual. The golf course we purchased with an option which we exercised in 1997-right at the time we announced this project and Progressive bought highest and best commercial usage.) The logic of the Layercake is that adjacent to a residential, it is a more favorable type of use because you have some aesthetic controls; it is a cleaner business and generally speaking it is a softer commercial use adjacent to a residential. And then a more intensive, less friendly adjacent to a residential is the Warehouse-Distribution. Along I-271 where it takes advantage of that kind of commercial arterial, you see that in Euclid; you see that in Willoughby; they have more retail components but generally it's the same idea. We have a lot of it in Beta Park (which we've learned has really been kind of a dinosaur from our standpoint in terms of an economic engine.) What the proposal gave us the first chance to do was "x" this out entirely; remove Warehouse-Distribution as a component of this development and concentrate strictly on the Office- Laboratory. So if you look at this and think about if you shove that blue off the map and expand the green and the yellow; that is pretty much what we have achieved today. Out of about 306 acres, viriually half are either residential or public lands and by operation of law, Village lands are treated as residential classification. And then the other half, it is close to within a couple of acres-the other half would be as projected an Office-Laboratory development.