May 27, 2008 C/C MinutesMeridian Ciry Council
May 27, 2008
Page 42 of 52
Bird: I have none.
De Weerd: Okay. Does the applicant have any comments? No comments. Must
agree with staff, since they agree wifh you.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: I would move that we close the Public Hearing on Item 13, VAC 08-004.
Bird: Second.
De Weerd: Okay. I have a mofion and a second to close the Public Hearing on Item
13. All those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
Borton: Madam Mayor'?
De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Borton.
Borton: I would move that we approve Item 13, request for vacation VAC 08-004.
Bird: Second.
De Weerd: Okay. I have a motion and a second to approve Item 13. If there is no
discussion, Madam Clerk, will you, please, call roll.
Roil-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
Item 14: Public Hearing: ZOA 08-001 Request for a Zoning Ordinance / Unified
Development Code (UDC) Text Amendment to modify, clean up and add
specific sections to the UDC (see application for details of all secfions
proposed for amendments) for Unified Development Code Text
Amendment #4 by the City of Meridian Planning Department:
De Weerd: Thank you. Item 14 is a Public Hearing on ZOA 08-001. I will open this
with staff comments.
Canning: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, this is our fourth Unified
Development Code text amendment since its adoption in 2005. We are still finding
fhings that could be fine tuned or nits and picks here and there or other issues that you
have asked us to address. So, the Commission did recommend approval of this at their
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May 1 st, 2008, Public Hearing. Planning staff spoke in favor. No one spoke in
opposition. No one commented, nor provided written testimony. Key issues of
discussion by the Commission were request for clarification on the intent of the
modificafion to UDC 11-2A-2C regarding the necessity of adding: Or listed as a
prelimina .ry use and I'm -- there are a lot of fhese amendments that are written for the
sake of enforcement and just being able to -- for fhe prosecutors or whatever individual
that takes these forward to be able to stand in front of a judge and say that it's clearly
covered by the UDC. So, a lot of the amendments that are before you -- about half of
them or at least a third are related to that and what I'd like -- with regard to key
Commission changes to staff recommendafion, there were none. All they asked for was
that clarification. And to our knowledge there are no outstanding issues for City
Council. I did receive a letter from Mr. Jewett and he talked to me quite some time ago
about the concepts proposed in his letter and you have a copy of that. I am generally
okay with those. I didn't get them in enough time to really go over the exact wording, so
I would like to go through kind of just the general concepts in fhe UDC text amendments
and, then, probably review Mr. Jewett's suggestions and bring back appropriate wording
for you next week. Having said that, I'm going to jump into the general concepts. As I
had mentioned before, a lot of these are enforcement related. In particular, that very
first one, 11-1-12, this is actually something that we think will come in very handy. It's
already come in handy. We have a similar provision in fhe temporary use ordinance.
And it, basically, says in the enforcement secfiion that the city may withhold any
approval and a permit for any and all proposed activity or uses on any real property with
outstanding violafiions of this title, except that such approval and/or permit shall not be
withheld where doing so would adversely affect health, safety, or fhe general public
welfare. So, that gives us the ability -- if there is an outstanding violation, it just gives us
a tool to get them to come into compliance, because somefimes they -- they basically
just say sue me and we're not always sure we will win in court, so we don't proceed with
the lawsuit. There are a number of those. If you look down to number 11-2, the
applicability statement, again, those were put in by Mrs. Kane for the purpose of -- of
aiding in prosecution. And the same with 11-2A-2A, permitted uses. This language is
just largely for enforcement purposes, as is 2B and as is 2C. And you will see those
repeated throughout every zoning district. We also have changes related to changes in
the IBC and that one is number 3D-3 here. So, where the UDC prior -- previously
allowed buildings less fihan 120 square feet in area to not require a building permit, so
we exempted them fhe requirements of ineeting setbacks. That number has moved up
to -- or -- I'm sorry. It was previously 200, now it's down to 120. So, we made a similar
change to the UDC to be consistent with that building code. There are a number of
changes related to wireless communication facilities and I certainly don't want to go
through them all. You may remember when -- just prior to the UDC being complete Mr.
Dave McKinnon brought through a text amendment to the old code for wireless facilities
and about midway through that --
De Weerd: I remember his presentation.
Canning: Yeah. About midway through that he just -- his client decided not to pursue
the text amendment anymore. So, it kind of got half the way through and, then, was just
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left. When we were doing the UDC we tried to incorporate those things, but I have to
admit I was confused and couldn't figure it out. Well, I finally -- we haven't had a lot of
wireless communication facilities. I knew there was a flaw in there. I was having a hard
time figuring out where the flaw was. I sat down one afternoon -- I think I figured it out
and so there is a lot of little changes necessary to make it do what we wanted it to do
and that was, basically, to allow stealth facilities and to allow very small facilities within
the residential neighborhoods that met certain standards. So, I'm not going to go
through those in detail. You did that years ago. But if's just -- the mechanics of it
weren't working correcfly, but f believe they are now.
De Weerd: I still wouldn't want to see it on a street light outside my window.
Canning: Yeah. There are -- there is one I wanted to bring to your attention regarding
access to streets and thafs on 11-3A. This is to address some of the issues we have
with some of the older commercial developed areas. Fairview Avenue comes to mind
between Eagle and Meridian. Basically, what this says is that if you're developing
property that has access to an arterial or collector roadway and you have got another
option, you need to keep that option or if you don't have another option you need to
provide cross-access. The idea was that we can, hopefully, close down some of those
access points to those arterial roadways over time. This is probably the most
controversial provision we had added to the whole -- the whole document, so I just
wanted to make sure you were clear on that and aware of that. We did a few
modifications to the required parking spaces for residential use. These are down in 3C.
Basically, the way Mr. Hood restructured this was to make the parking space
requirement related to number of bedrooms, rather than the type of unit necessarily. It
provided a little more equity when it came to -- well, it provided a relief to one bedroom
units, which we are seeing a lot of smaller units these days where you don't really -- if
you have got one bedroom you probably don't need four car parks, as would be
required right now if it were a detached family dwelling. So, that's the general intent of
those -- of those changes. Oh. And, then, in 11-3C-5B we kind of clarified this idea of
when is it okay not to actually pave a parking area. We have discussed this with you
about temporary uses. There are some other times where asphalt isn't really necessary
to achieve the goals we want as far as development of the community, but making sure
that we have a dustless surface and making sure that just -- that there is a reason for
not doing the asphalt. Okay. Moving on. We made a few changes to signs. Those are
in 36. One -- Mr. Anderson's gone, but fhis was kind of for him. We found out -- oh,
there he is. We found out that because of the zoning on some of fire stations in
particular or some of our other public and quasi-public buildings we have out there,
sometimes they have a residential zoning with no sign permissions. So, we did add a
statement that says any sign erected by or under the authority of the City of Meridian on
property owned by the City of Meridian shall be exempt ~from the provisions of this
article. And that allows us to identify station number four as such -- or station number
five as such. So, fhat was the idea behind that change. And, then, we did at look some
of the temporary sign provisions. I know the Mayor has recenfly asked us to look at
election signs again. We did have a section in here coming forward prior to that request
from the Mayor. Okay. So, we also clarified the permanent and temporary window
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signs and particular temporary window signs. We clarified that they need to be painted
directly upon the window glass or composed of a transparent material affixed directly
upon the window glass surface. The idea was not to have opaque objects placed on
the windows such that fihey don't function as windows any longer. And I think that that
becomes important for clutter and also some of our design guidelines as we are looking
for visibility into those spaces. It also -- we were having issues with a sign company
putting -- basically affixing large rafiher very solid copy -- changeable copy letter signs
put on the windows -- affixed to fhe windows and calling them window signs. So, this
would clarify that issue as well. Let's see. We also have -- we added a change for
school signs. We have allowed school signs, but we didn't have any standards for
those. So, we did put a standard in that maximum height for school signs shall not
exceed 15 feet and maximum background area shall not exceed 80 square feet. We
did send this off #o the school district. They haven't provided any comment. We also
sent it to the Building Contractors Association and fhe Developers Council and we have
received no comments. Finally -- oh. Wait a minute. No. We have made some
modifications to the L-O district and new district setbacks and those are -- I need to go
backwards for you here. One of the items we added -- fhis was specifically one the
Council had requested was business hours of operation within the L-O and C-N districts
shall be limited from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. This restriction applies to all business
operations occurring outside an enclosed structure, including, but not limited to
customer or client visits, trash compacting, and deliveries. This restriction does not
apply to business operations occurring wifhin an enclosed structure, including, but not
limited to cleaning, bookkeeping, and after-hours work by a limited number of
employees. We also changed the front and the rear sefback on the L-O. It was the only
district fhat previously had any front and rear setbacks. The idea had been fhat the L-O
lots would -- would be homes that were being converted. We did have people going in
and doing L-O subdivisions and fhose setbacks were making for inefficient layout and
development of the subdivision. What we left for the L-O was to make sure that we had
the buffers to fhe residential uses and, then, the interior side setback buffers as well.
So, we feel we left the protections necessary, but gave them the -- a little more flexibility
with regard to subdivision design. Okay. And, then, finally, we added two new districts
and those are the ME and the HE. The MEHE. And they are mixed employment and
high density employment. So, you will see fhe mixed employment -- and these are
direcfly related to the Ten Mile specific area plan. The mixed employment corresponds
with fhe land use designation of that name and would allow a mix of light office, light
industrial, any employment center are basically -- they typically were envisioned as not
-- not the tallest buildings in the Ten Mile specifiic area plan, so we picked the height
limits similar to the C-G zoning currently. And, then, for the high density employment,
these were a minimum or four to six stories, so we have a maximum height limit of 95
for that one.
De Weerd: So, what do the initials stand for?
Canning: Mixed employment and high density employment. And, then, I have pulled
out the use table and showed you which uses were allowed and how they are allowed.
So, like animal care facility would be conditional in the mixed employment. I don't know
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why I left these ones in. Church, as always, is conditionally allowed. Conference center
would be conditional in mixed employment, but principally permitted in high density
employment. A employment center would be allowed as an accessory use in either
district to a large office complex, for example, or conditionally allowed as a stand alone
use. A group day care, again, conditionally allowed. Drinking establishment,
conditionally allowed within the high density employment. Education institution, a
private school would be principally permitted. Public school as well. Financial
insfitution would be principally permitted in the mixed employment, but only an
accessory use to the high density empJoyment. The idea being there it would be bank
offices that would be more appropriate within high density employment, not just the
bank itself. Not the customer service end of that. Flex space, which is kind of a light
indusfirial use, would be principally permitted in the mixed employment. Fuel sale facility
would be conditionally allowed within fhe high density employment and a lot of these
issues had been considered within the plan itself. They had a number of appropriate
uses, so it was fairly easy to go through and to pick out the specific uses that were
appropriate with fhose districts. Truck stop would not be appropriate in either. Health
care or social services would be principally permitted in either. Hospital would be
principally permitted in the high density employment. I'd actually like to -- if the Council
approves the zoning designation, to go talk to St. Luke's about perhaps rezoning their
property from L-0 to high density employment, more consistent with their use. Hotel
and motel, principally permitted in high density employment, conditional in mixed
employment. Industry information principally permitted in either. Light industry
principally permitted in mixed employment, conditional in high density employment.
Laundry and dry cleaning could be accessory in the high density. Parking facilities, as
well as parks, public and -- public infrastructure, public or quasi-public use, public
utilities, those are all kind of general public uses. Personal service would be accessory
in fihe -- both zones, whereas a professional service, like bookkeeping, would be
principally permitted. So, this would be like a hair dresser would be accessory to the
larger use, but offices, again, would be principally permitted. Research and
development facility, principally permitted. Restaurant and retail stores, both accessory
in either zone, as well as temporary uses. Car wash could be accessory to the fuel sale
facility in the high density employment. Warehouse would be an accessory or
conditional use in the mixed employment. And, then, we get into the wireless stuff.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: Back on fhe restaurants. Wouldn't -- in a high employment area wouldn't we
want to encourage there to be restaurants, so that they wouldn't have to go very far for
a lunch break or before and after'? It would seem to me that would be a good place for
principally permitted restaurants. Or am I thinking wrong?
Canning: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. No, thaYs -- and that's why we listed
them as accessory. The idea is you don't want to have a restaurant pad, though. The
high density area envisions minimum structures of four to six stories, so --
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Zaremba: It would have to be in the big building, not a separate building, is that the --
Canning: I haven't seen a six story restaurant yet. So, I mean I suppose we could have
one want to come in, but the idea was that they would be accessory to -- you know, be
on one floor of an office building or something like that.
Zaremba: But it could be operated separately from the rest of the businesses.
Canning: Yes.
Zaremba: In other words, it's not the cafeteria of a big business that's in there.
Canning: Correct. And perhaps we need to -- that's a good point.
Zaremba: It's open to the public.
Canning: Yeah. We could make that principally permitted. That's -- accessory does
imply that it's accessory, so maybe it would be better to do principally permitted and,
then, just rely on the fact that it needs to be --
Zaremba: Six stories.
Canning: -- four to six stories.
Zaremba: Just a fihought.
Canning: You talked me into it. I think I have overwhelmed the Council. I wasn't
looking for acfion tonight, so I can take this up again with you next week or -- fhat would
seem the most appropriate -- oh, I'd like to talk about Mr. Jewett's letter, too. I forgot
about that.
Rountree: Madam Mayor, if I might ask Anna. There is a couple things we have talked
about that may or may not be applicable to this amendment, but one question that came
up a number of months ago was gated communities. Is that something that could be
discussed in this amendment? _
Canning: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, we hadn't discussed it. The direction
you gave the applicants was that they needed to bring it forward, that staff wasn't going
to. So, I didn't. But I could.
Borton: We sort of left it hanging.
Rountree: I personally would like to wrap up some of these, if -- we can at least talk
about fhem and either leave them the same or make -- modify them to make them work.
And that's one we have talked about I know. And, then, another --
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Canning: You may recall staff didn't support that one. I think that may have been why
you asked fhem to bring it back, but we can work on it.
Rountree: Well, I know you didn't support it, but I got the sense that we might have.
De Weerd: You may not have, but --
Rountree: You may not have, but I thought Council --
De Weerd: There was an interest --
Rountree: I think there was an interest on the part of the Council.
Canning: Yes.
Rountree: So -- and, again, I don't know if this is the opportune time to talk about
landscape requirements on industrial zoning, but that might be a future amendment that
we need to talk about.
Canning: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Mr. Rountree, I think that we can do
that through the aiternative compiiance. I'm more comfortable with that -- doing that that
way for now.
Rountree: Okay. .As long as we can make it work.
Canning: We will -- I think we can.
Rountree: Okay.
Canning: And at least give it awhile to see what bugs we flush out and, fhen, we can
make an amendment once we get that worked out.
Rountree: I'm fiine with that.
Canning: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, the issue Mr. Rountree is --
Councilmember Rountree is speaking about is the necessity for the five foot landscape
strip on truck maneuvering areas within an I-L district, as opposed to car parking areas.
These were just only the areas where the trucks are maneuvering. It's generally against
another I-L property. And i fhink that the code allows me enough flexibility to work with
the applicants on just providing some alternative compliance for those areas until we
find out a better code solution.
Rountree: Okay.
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De Weerd: Okay. Council, anything further? 1 guess I would ask Mr. Jewett, do you
have any comments that -- I know that we just got your letter -- I haven't looked at it.
Staff hasn't reviewed it. Do you want to comment on fhat?
Canning: Or I can, Jim. Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, if you wouldn't mind,
I'd just -- I can comment on the general nature of Mr. Jewett's comments.
De Weerd: Or why don't you -- would you rather read it and have a chance to really
evaluate it or do you feel you need to comment on it tonight?
Canning: Well, I just wanted to give a brief overview.
De Weerd: Okay.
Canning: What -- the TN-C and the Old Town District didn't have the same kind of
allowances for height and variations from height and foot -- square footage footprints
that the other commercial districts did. And in reviewing his South Ridge project Mr.
Jewett felt the need to have that flexibility for the TN-C district and it may be appropriate
to have it for the Old Town District as well. What I'd like to do is work wifh Will Thornton
who is working on kind of the site design stuff for those districts, be able to go over
those with him. But, basically, it says if you want to do something else it's a CU, rather
than a variance. If you want to do a larger footprint, it would be as a conditional use. If
you want to go higher, it would be a conditional use, rather than a variance. And I'm
okay wifh that concept. There was one -- there is a two story minimum requirement for
the TN-C. Mr. Jewett is proposing that -- that it could be -- as long as 50 percent of it is
two stories, you could have wings, perhaps, that were one story. That's the one in
particular I want to talk to Mr. Thornton about and see how that folds into our design
guidelines we are considering. But, in general, I'm okay wifh the proposals suggested.
De Weerd: Okay. Good. I love the fact he doesn't want to comment. Okay. However,
this is a Public Hearing. Is there anyone who would like to provide comment at this
time? Certainly it looks like we will be continuing it until -- until when? Next week?
Bird: June 3rd.
Rountree: June 3rd.
Canning: Next week would be fine for me, Madam Mayor.
Rountree: Madam Mayor`?
De Weerd: Yes.
Rountree: I move that we confinue Item 14 until June 3rd.
Bird: Second.
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De Weerd: Okay. I have a motion and a second to continue Item 14 to June 3rd. All
those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carries.
MOTION CARRfED: ALL AYES.
Item 15: Ordinance No. : RZ 07-014 Request for a
Rezone of 30.08 acres from R-8 to C-N (13.59 acres) and TN-C (16.49
acres) zones for Cavanauqh by Kasterra Development, LLC - Southeast
Corner of South Meridian Road and East Victory Road:
De Weerd: Okay. Item 15 is Ord'inance No. 08-1367 and I would ask Madam Clerk to,
please, read this by title only.
Holman: Thank you, Madam Mayor. City of Meridian Ordinance No. 08-1367, an
ordinance finding that Projects West, Inc., the owner of certain real property, has made
a written request for rezone of the zoning classification RZ 07-014, Cavanaugh, for real
property being a parcel of land in fhe northwest one quarter of Section 30, Township 3
North, Range 1 East of the Boise Meridian, Ada County, Idaho, as described in
Attachment A of this ordinance and rezoning certain lands and territory situated in Ada
County, Idaho, and wifhin the corporate limits of the City of Meridian and rezoning the
land use zoning classificafiion of said land from R-8, Medium Density Residential
District, to C-N, Neighborhood Business District and TN-C, Traditional Neighborhood
Center, in the Meridian City Code, providing that copies of this ordinance shall be filed
with the Ada County Assessor, the Ada County recorder, and the Idaho State Tax
Commission, as required by law, and providing for a summary of the ordinance and
providing for a waiver of the reading rules and providing an effective date.
De Weerd: You have heard this ordinance read by title only. Is there anyone who
would like to hear it read in its entirety? Seeing none, Council, do I have a motion?
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
B'ird: I move we approve Ordinance 08-1367, with suspension of rules.
Rountree: Second.
De Weerd: Okay. I have a mofion and a second to approve Item 15. If there is no
discussion I will call for roll call vote.
Roll-CaIL• Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea.
MOTION CARRI:ED: ALL AYES.