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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2000 08-17Meridian City Council Workshop August 17, 2000 The City Council Workshop of the Meridian City Council in conjunction with Ada County Highway District was called to order at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 10, 2000, by Mayor Robert D. Corrie. Members Present: Robert Corrie, Keith Bird, Tammy deWeerd, Cherie McCandless. Members Absent: Ron Anderson. Others Present: Will Berg, Susan Eastlake, Marlyss Meyer, Dave Bivens, Judy Peavey-Derr, Sherry Huber, J. Scheitzer, Joe Rosenlund, Christy Richardson, and Will Berg. Corrie: The agenda we have is the Land Use Planning by ACHD, Shari Stiles. I think Shari handed out a little flyer type thing that explains this. Stiles: I just kind of prepared this so you had some kind of idea at what you are looking at. We are asking for some help with people coming in, they've been coming into ACHD all the time getting roadways approved in the middle, creating an illegal split or utility easement problems. I know that you are not concerned with what our ordinance says, but we do require that any roadway dedications be done in the platting process. When people come in to get a roadway dedication through ACHD, we are not going to recognize it unless they follow what our law says and it is approved by our Council. After all of the process has been gone through, all the public hearings, it seems they are going back to ACHD and renegotiating items that were approved which changes our conditions of approval. We are asking that if people want to do that, they do it through the City to ask for a revision of their conditions and then we would forward that to ACHD. I know it is frustrating to us and probably your staff because people don't like the conditions after ACHD Commissioners have approved it and they want to renegotiate some of the terms and in some of the cases, it has actually changed the site plans. We are just asking for your help on some of these cases. Try to get of some of these people coming in. One of the items we were talking about. Peavey-Derr: I'm unclear and maybe you folks can help me, we don't seem to have this kind of situation with other cities. What is it that is different about you folks? Is your process slightly different? Why are we having the trouble? Stiles: This has only happened in the last 6 months. I have been here 6 ½ years and have never had this problem and in the last 6 months, we've probably had half a dozen or more roadway dedications. Peavey-Derr: Nothing's changed, has it? Eastlake: On the first one, Creekside Arbour, I don't understand how you can say ACHD approved a private road. We didn't approve a private road. We don't ever approve private roads. We write a staff report that says that the applicant is requesting a private road in this location. I don't understand how we would have it if it hadn't been referred by you. Stiles: No, it wasn't. Peavey-Derr: How is that happening, I wonder? deWeerd: Maybe if something's being changed six months later or maybe even later, maybe we need to see if there's a glitch somehow. Peavey-Derr: What I'm trying to figure out is how it got back to ACHD step if it wasn't referred, if the applicant didn't come back to the City, file a new plat. How would it ever get to our staff? Stiles: It was a conditional use permit. It wasn't a plat. I guess we would rather that you held it up or said we can't comment on this or we are not done reviewing it. I guess we would rather do that before the City Council of findings of fact and conclusions of law with conditions that are not enforceable anymore. Peavey-Derr: Shari, let us go back and see what has broken down. It seems to me if you have been here for six years and it's just starting, something's wrong. Let us go back and look at what's happened. Stiles: Maybe the roadway dedication request didn't happen before, I don't know. Eastlake: The same with this Ron Van Auker property near R.C. Willey. It says ACHD gave approval for private road. Well I mean we absolutely don't do that. Our report might say that the applicant requested a private road and we just say, there's going to be a private road there. We didn’t give approval for it because what we did we said, we found no need for a public road. Peavey-Derr: Jay, maybe you can look into this while we are having this trouble. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Eastlake: We have modified our reports to say or stronger language in bold and then maybe how the reports are coming back, it might be something ACHD does not approve private roadways. Just a little disclaimer on our part. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: Based upon our traffic engineers, here's what we think is the best scenario, then you look at it and say okay. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Stiles: For example, where St. Luke's is going to connect to Magic View, that's really an important to our comp plan and that's what we have been wanting to happen. We wouldn't especially need a subdivision for that. But in other cases, sometimes they've already made an illegal split and they think they are going to have a roadway dedicated so they can say that they have a public road and we've already got frontage on it. Eastlake: Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We will, in each of these examples, take a look and see what has gone wrong. Peavey-Derr: It helps when you go through examples for us to go back through. Stiles: This memo is all I have and for asking for your help. I think a lot of it is that developers are taking advantage of all of this, knowing how busy we are. Eastlake: Mr. Mayor, I think we should talk about the ACHD Park-and-Ride Lot because this has been something that we've been trying to get done for a considerable period of time. Our staff just recently gave us a report on this because the cost has more than doubled. The problem being the amount that we can get from federal funds is fixed. So the part that ACHD is being asked to fund has gone from $100,000 to $350,000 or so. We are faced with the likelihood that we're not going to have to do this project or try and get a different location because the cost has gone up so high. Peavey-Derr: The reason we had the discussion that started question the cost was because you wanted to put a sidewalk on that and the adjacent property owner, who wasn't going to be paying for any of it, would benefit tremendously from that requirement that you had. That was only one component of it besides the cost. We had a pretty lengthy discussion on that too. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: The people next door, I think it's Meridian Ford. Our concern was that we would be paying in with taxpayer money against federal laws. A private individual would be benefiting from it. That was just part of the discussion. Eastlake: There's a lot of discussion, like when Viatrans comes in and shared costs now going in. This was one that actually had a lot of discussion about it. Eastlake: Actually we told them to do that but when they negotiated the first time, they didn't want the sidewalk down that whole side. The negotiation went before we knew that was an issue. Peavey-Derr: When we require improvements, we can't require offsite improvements. We can only require improvements abutting the property and this is an offsite requirement that Meridian was putting on the Highway District as a condition of doing the development that we didn't know was going to be there. deWeerd: I guess we don't considerate it offsite because it's one piece of property. Eastlake: It was excessive. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: We were just sitting here discussing if perhaps we could have one of Meridian's staff at our Tech Review meeting to address some of these questions and that way we could solve some of these problems before they got to a public meeting. None the less, I think the communication needs to take place. Stiles: The issues is in these odd ones. Corrie: Maybe we could send the Planning & Zoning staff to see what is going on. Eastlake: I'm just trying to figure out a situation in which we would approve a roadway dedication that wouldn't be part of a plat. I just doesn't make any sense to me. I can't figure it out. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: Also, if we recommend or say we put our blessings on a private road, any city has the option to say sorry, we are not in agreement and we don't want this section to have private roads. In fact, Boise does do that. Eastlake: I would think any town would probably propose this. If they oppose this, the City staff would tell us they don't want private roads. That would be the end of that. Corrie: We are definitely seeing more of that request coming in and whether we are going to get it together. Eastlake: What I don't understand is not really saving the developer any money isn't it? It's still being built exactly as a public road. Peavey-Derr: That's why when you have one acre lots, the sidewalks and curbs, you are getting out in the road, especially county, you are going to get a lot of private roads because they are building them out there. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Corrie: So we've got that pretty well, what they need. The next one is request for income output from ACHD to the City of Boise sponsored by Council Member Bird. Bird: I requested at your last meeting, three or four months ago, that we get a five year report on Boise's income and output within the City of Boise and I have yet to see it. Eastlake: Jay are you aware of that request? Schweitzer: I don't remember that request. I'll get on it. Eastlake: You mean impact fees. What do you mean? Bird: I want what they've taken in and how much you spend in their City. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Corrie: ACHD items that you might have here that you can bring up. Bird: The Fire Station should be on line in May, I think. Eastlake: Joe? Rosenlund: We've gone out in the field and have an idea what we need to do. What we are trying to do is, probably going to put in the emergency signal without putting in a signal and transferring it right away. But trying to work it out for when we do the signal light. We have it pretty well figured out but we may have a few utility interference we will have to work with. It'll probably be sometime this winter before we will be able to do it. Corrie: One of the things we are up amongst is we are going to lose a fire truck out there. People don't stop and won't stop. If one of our trucks hit somebody or they got hit, we know the problems there. Whatever can be done as quickly as possible. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Rosenlund: The problem with emergency signals is they are always flashing yellow or sitting green or whatever. Everyone just gets you used to it and never get used to the fact that they actually changed colors. Eastlake: There's not a battery operated thing that the Fire Department could just move out on the road. Something that's portable. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: Joe, can you talk about that photo enforcement thing? Rosenlund: Okay. What we are working on right now, we will be meeting with ITD and some others to discuss how we could formulate a law to take to the legislature. So ITD will be taking the lead on trying to get a new law passed at the legislature to allow the use of photo enforcement. The focus is on the red light running issue. The biggest fight is the privacy issue. A lot of the states work around that by not taking the picture of the driver, just the license plate. Technology is improving all the time, the cameras and all that, so there is less error relating to those. The main issue right now is to deal with the red light running. Eastlake: Garden City talked about this too. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Bird: Mr. Mayor, how many more employees is Jabil supposed to put on? Corrie: Six hundred to seven hundred I heard. Eastlake: What are you planning in Parks? That always throws us a curve. Peavey-Derr: What is the goal for the old downtown area? Corrie: That is what the Downtown Redevelopment Committee is working on right now. They want to see the buildings first and keep the old historical. We will have to do some ordinance parking downtown because we can't keep that ordinance we have now. We are in the process of changing all that. As far as the downtown is concerned, the Committee will tell us their ideas are and where they want to go with it. Eastlake: Jay, are we all going to fit into two vans? (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Peavey-Derr: I don't understand when you can be a mile or a half a mile from the river and you are getting that stuff from the river, then you clean it out and enhance it, and then get in trouble. Eastlake: It was wetlands. Corrie: I can't imagine ACHD wanting to take that from the County, that retention pond, just because it wasn't paid up in taxes. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Corrie: I know we have been after them every year, the fence was falling down and that being the end of that. (inaudible discussion amongst Attendees) Corrie: We are adjourning the meeting and going on the tour of sites in Meridian. Adjourned at 8:32 p.m. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 8:32 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVE: ____________________________ ROBERT D. CORRIE, MAYOR ATTEST: _______________________________ WILLIAM G. BERG, JR., CITY CLERK