01.18.22 MEETING MINUTES SPEC. - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of the Special Meeting of Council Public Hearing on Ordinance 2021-14 Tuesday, January 18, 2022 Page 9 The other question I believe was the impetus for doing this and it's essentially, we have lost two employers here on Beta in the last year because they had nowhere to go. They both ran out of space and we couldn't accommodate them. It wasn't insignificant as far as the tax base goes. We are at risk perhaps of the same thing happening within the next 4 or 5 years. Again, what we want to do is provide the opportunity for folks to grow closer to the sidewalk if they need to and higher if they need to. With respect to building height, we chose four stories again because two of those buildings do exist and we thought that would make for a reasonable benchmark. But I will say is given the state of the office market here in Northeast Ohio, I really don't predict any four-story office buildings to be built here any time soon, not certainly in my time. But what this would provide the opportunity is it would provide for a warehouse user or an industrial user to get higher clearance which most of our buildings here cannot achieve right now. That was sort of the driver for building height. Council President Schutt stated, thank you, Mr. Marquardt. Chris Kincel 6617 SOM Court I recently moved two months ago from out of state so I am not all that familiar with the area. One of the things that does concern me is the point about retail. As the other gentleman stated, there are commercial industrial buildings behind that development but retail would bring in a different type of traffic pattern or a different type of individual, perhaps individuals coming in versus your 9:00-5:00. So, when we talk about retail, will there be sort of a limit on what are we saying by retail? I do understand the restaurants and food service and it's not drive-through so you wouldn't have a McDonald's or something along those lines but I am concerned about retail. I don't think there's any room for the box stores versus a strip mall if you would. Thank you. Council President Schutt asked, Mr. Marquart? Mr. Marquart replied, thank you. As it is currently written, the overlay does not restrict one type of retail from another. It does not differentiate one type from another. But what I can say and this came up actually during the First Reading of Council, is that Beta Drive is situated in such a way that it's frankly not very attractive to large retailers. It's sort of off the beaten path and it also has such small traffic counts. There's so little traffic counts that retailers simply aren't interested. What we foresee happening here if anything again is smaller supportive retail that would support the industrial users or warehouse users. It would be a place to get coffee or a place to get lunch or to ship a package. Something along those lines. We don't differentiate those types of uses in the overlay but in practice, that is what we foresee happening.