06/17/2002 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting 6-17-02 Page 16 Mayor Rinker said if I can-and I think there are a couple of misunderstandings here that, again, I think the record needs to reflect. The first thing is to understand that in reviewing this particular issue-and you've all seen both the memorandum and you've seen minutes of the meeting which, unfortunately, was not entirely attended by Council. But you've certainly had a chance to review what is the law. And the law is that when you have dimensional area variance requests such as this, the issue before you is one of practical difficulties. What is practical? I think it is making the issue to dismiss this request as something that is only their economics. I think we've had very substantial discussion about the fact that it is more just economics and it's not as simple as just chopping off a story-and sure you can do it-on the contrary you change the quality and caliber of this particular property not only in the marketplace, but for us a community. Why do we have a 35' height restriction? Why do we have that? Is this the Bible? Is this some command from on high. Why do we think we have 35'? Where did that come from? Was this something that some wise sage imparted to us from the mount that 35' henceforth will never be violated. That's bologna. That's there because next to a residential area you have a commercial development. No matter how many ways you cut it mathematically along-this structure is less obtrusive, it's farther away, it's visually lower on the horizon than what our code requires. So to say that this is placing a burden on adjacent residents, I think is entirely misleading. I think it is incorrect, iYs not supported by plain mathematics. And certainly when you look at the overall benefit that we derive from this thing, I think it is misleading to say that somehow when we go to 3 stories, that's okay. I think it's a false premise and I think it's based on supposition and I think, frankly, it shortchanges all of us. Jim Heller - KA - said I just want to offer a couple of thoughts for you. We have probably designed in the Cleveland area a magnitude of about 41/z to 5 million square feet of office space. I met you back when we did Progressive One on Wilson Mills Road. The fact of the matter is, as the Mayor said and I think as you said I think very truthfully and honestly, the caliber of a tenant coming to this Village is enhanced greatly by a 4story building. I can also tell you that when we first looked at this property, we designed the site plan, we worked with the land, to be as sensitive as we could to the neighbors. We could have set a building to the south. We could have come in off of an entry road and come to the front of the building. We chose not to do that. We chose to create a building that has as small a footprint as possible (and let me tell you, with the number of tenants that we worked with-many in a speculative nature when the building has multi-tenants, or whether it is Progressive or Allen-Bradley that we designed, or most recently as you see going up now a 4?` building for MBNA-those buildings are single-tenant buildings. Not one of those buildings has a footprint as large as what a 3-story building would be. There's a reason. There's a reason that in the grouping of tenants, a building that is approaching a 40,000 square foot footprint works really only in one format. I hate to say it because some of them exist in this Village. That is a multi-tenant one-story building. Those buildings you find have large, large footprints. As you go higher and higher, you end up with better, high quality tenant. It means that we can offer the Village, that we can promote a building, that we can market a building and only along the freeway which is where it is most appropriate to be somewhat taller to accomplish that. I can tell you that if you look at any code-- and I will take all the way to San Francisco-because we're doing a building there that's 400' in height. But I can tell you that we had to move the building farther off of the street and away from other buildings to get it to be taller. So, it happens there. It's in the new Highland Hills code in Beachwood where the Highland Development is built that for every additional foot in height beyond 35', you move one foot further in setback. Well, we are way beyond that here. You don't happen to have that in your code but the guideline has a good rationale beyond it. And, here where we are 262, 16