11/25/2002 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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PRD Meeting 11-25-02 Page 15 Council President Buckholtz asked, do we dictate square footage? We dictate roughly the size of the garage? Mr. Marquardt said no, there wasn't a thing on the garage. Council President Buckholtz said but a 2-car. Mr. Marrie said 400 square feet it said. Mr. Samac said yes. Council President Buckholtz said but I mean there's all those requirements and then so much between-only 3 units per building, setback from the street, setback from the side, back setbacks, you could never put 16 units on one acre. Mr. Samac said from a practical sense you might as well say no. But never say never. Dr. Parker asked, what do you mean by never say never? Mr. Samac said anytime you think you have all the bases covered, somebody comes up with a very creative idea. And that's why sometimes locking things in just tightly with the number may not necessarily be the best way to go. But, you know, it's difficult to explain and just as difficult forme to try to even draw a picture. But, while we were discussing this 4 units per acre and if an acre is not building, it's-you know-who and how do you make-who makes that determination that it's not buildable and how do you make the determination so it's equitable? You could have anarea-say if you have a 2-acre site, you could have one perfectly flat acre, the other acre could be on a 45 degree slope. Now, a creative developer is going to say, yes, I could put, the density is 4 units per acre, I could put 8 acres on that one flat acre. And here's how I determined that. I draw a line right across-right through the center of that slope- perpendicular to it and-or actually it would be parallel to the slope-and if you have a half acre of flat land and you have a half acre of a 45 degree slope, you still have one acre there and you could put 4 units on there. Half of it's flat but it makes no difference, it complies with the requirement for 4 units per acre as far as the density is concerned. Depending on how the unbuildable areas maybe broken up, a creative guy could sit there and zig zag out aone-acre lot and say here's my one acre, and here's my 4 units. Here's my other acre and here's my 4 units. Now, again, you run into the problem with setback requirements, that sort of drive it to an extent, but sometimes there's creative ways of making things work. So, it's something to think about. It's something that Planning Commission beat around for hours, I guess, if you really come down to the whole picture. And, it's a difficult thing to just put down in a set of numbers. And I'll get to an alternative to that at the end. Council President Buckholtz asked what's the drama? Let's keep moving. Mr. Samac said the building setbacks, we really didn't have muchwe didn't have anything on there. The minimum separations for buildings, we discussed several times and everybody was