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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2007 09-04 PreMeridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 The Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting was called to order at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 4, 2007 by President Councilman Joe Borton. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, David Zaremba, Charlie Rountree and Joe Borton. Staff Present: Bill Nary, Anna Canning, Will Thornton, Pete Friedman, Tracy Basterrechea and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X David Zaremba X__Joe Borton X__Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird _X_ Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Zaremba: Mr. President. Borton: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I move that we adopt the agenda as posted. Rountree: Second. Borton: It has been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda as published. All those in favor say aye. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Status and Proposed Approach for Implementing Design Review by the Planning Department: Canning: Thank you President Borton. You are all making fun of this before Will even gets a chance to do this. De Weerd: We are serious. We have been waiting most of our careers. Canning: Well then that is a good thing. First of all, thanks for letting us come talk to you at the Pre-Council tonight. The purpose tonight is to just run this by you and then at the end we will come and ask you where you want us to go from Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 2 of 13 here or if you have any further direction for us. But, I wanted to take just a second. Will is really going to do the presentation for you, but some of you may not have met Will yet, so I wanted to introduce Will. He has been doing a great job for us. We originally thought we would hire somebody that had design review experience so that they could just kind of jump in and get the ball rolling. Well, Will didn’t have that experience, but we just dumped everything in the office that we had regarding design review on his desk and he has assimilated it all and he has come up with a really unique and interesting approach. So, I think we really benefited, actually from having somebody that is really – some fresh eyes looking at the concept of design review and he has come up with the framework and that is what he is going to discuss with you all tonight. It is a little different than I think what we had originally anticipated, so I wanted to make sure Council is on board so that he can start running with the actual site design and architectural design standards from here, but we wanted to get this framework established and before you all. So with that, I will hand it over to the highly capable Will Thornton and Pete Friedman and I don’t know if he is going to chime in or if he is just sitting there. So, we will see. Then we will answer any questions afterwards. So, if you have got questions, you can either stop and ask Will midway or save them for the end; whatever you all would like to do. Borton: Thanks Anna. Thornton: Council President, Madame Mayor, Members of the Council thank you for this time tonight. I would like to start off with a brief outline of what we will discuss tonight. I am going to shortly summarize the work and research that I have assimilated and then I will talk a little bit about character, what it is and how do we create it. Then I will go into design review as an integrated approach; how I established the framework and then we will evaluate some recently approved projects and then I will tell you what the next step is for implementing design guidelines. Then if you have any discussion or questions afterwards, we can tackle that. Let me go back. As Anna has mentioned, they pretty much put everything they had on my desk and I spent many days reading. That was all I did. There were several approaches from previous errors, where there were talks about themes and creating towns that all look the same in architecture and style-wise. But, a gentleman by the name of Mark Henshaw and he is currently in Seattle and he is utmost, foremost a guru on design review and he has cautioned against using design review and design guidelines for purely aesthetic reasons. That started me thinking, well what was design review and how can we apply it to Meridian, so we don’t just get pretty buildings that don’t fit on their sites. So, I will begin with character and character is an experience. When people describe places, they tend to use emotions and feelings and character is based on relationships; relationships on the people that use them; relationships on between buildings and the street; how it is used in a public sense and a private sense. There are some key fundamental elements that create character. One of those and foremost, probably is the presence of usable public space. What I mean by this is it doesn’t have to solely be owned by the city. It can be Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 3 of 13 that transition area between the street curb and the front of the building. It can be a courtyard that sits back from that building. It can also be public space within a building; an atrium, a lobby – these are all public spaces and semi-public spaces and they are key and important components of creating this character. Another key element is connections to other activities. There has to be a variety of things to do, things to experience, things to see, things to smell and taste. Without these, character tends to be one sided and when things become one sided or they tend to be nonexistent or non-noticeable and, therefore, it is important that characters are continuous, that we establish it, we maintain it, we enhance it and we recreate it or redevelop it if necessary. I assembled these images so that we can see some of these components as they apply. If you notice the park in the lower right, we see that there are people there. People are an important component because they are what creates the activity. On the upper left we have an entryway into what appears to be a main street scene and we have decorated it with flowers and there is an obelisk with a clock on it and over on the upper right and the lower left we see that greenery, trees, plants – they all have their own aesthetic appeal. We move more into the architectural side and planning side. On the lower right we have a transit stop and we see it is a different kind of activity that involves automobiles, a bus and trains, but it is still activity and it is diversified. Up there along the upper right, we have a street wall or what we call a street wall in architecture, it is actually the store fronts and we see people using that sidewalk space, they are separated, they are not worrying about if a car is going to hit them. We got some nightlife action in the upper left and we got some people playing in a fountain. Now compare these two pictures here. We have a street life on a main street scene in the upper left with plants and activity and on the lower right we have a recently constructed building (inaudible--) curb separated by trees and although there is no activity now, there is a sense that there could be. This is just to demonstrate, on the lower left a single tree and a parking, pretty much the standard landscape for parking lots and the other two we noticed that the trees are spaced closer together. They overhang the cars and the stalls and it not only creates a sense of character and beauty, but it also helps provide for needs of those automobiles and those users of the parking lots. So here we have some examples of some time spent on architecture alone. We notice that the fast food chain in the upper left has done a great deal in brickwork and architectural details, but has little concern for the site and what is adjacent to it. If you notice in the right hand side of that photo there is another drive-thru window. That same building the drive-thru windows are on the lower right and on the other two they are closer to the street. One has parking in front of; one is abutted to the street, but does not provide for pedestrian or activity – there is no sidewalk on that lower left. Here again, we have some same details in the upper right or upper left we have blank walls, a single entry and although it has been somewhat articulated architecturally, there is no sense of welcome. If you compare the upper right and the lower left, we see that they both are near the street. They both have sidewalks. They both have some landscaping, but if you notice in the upper right, although there is no activity currently, there is a place for it to happen and that is that key element, Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 4 of 13 that provision of public space. So, I didn’t want to leave off with a bad image, so I went back to this one. So now I am going to talk about our current planning tools. We have zoning and don’t get me wrong, we need zoning and we need comprehensive planning, but by themselves they are not effective tools for design review and establishing character. Zoning separates land uses. It has rigid and quantitative standards. It often establishes and maintains a minimum level of compliance and therefore it is an inappropriate tool for ensuring the quality that we desire, creating necessary physical form in those relationships between those forms and it cannot support a diverse and livable community, nor can it sustain economic development solely on its own. Comprehensive planning on the other side shapes land use in a broad context. It summarizes community values. It gives a general description of what is desired, the qualities that the community desires in their built form and how it is used. The short fall with comprehensive planning is that the general policies lack specific guidance for development and developers to use to create that quality. It gives them a sense of what it could be and what they want it to be, but it doesn’t quite get them the specifics that they need to develop it. So if we take current planning, zoning and planning, we notice that there is a gap between there. Somewhere we have to get the specifics that we need and still be flexible enough to provide for the variations and the diversity that character requires. One way to fill that gap is to use aesthetics controls and as I mentioned before, Mark Henshaw has advised against using purely aesthetic controls. They are prescriptive and narrowly focused. They tend to be superficial and focus on architecture alone. They are product driven and the emphasis is on conformity. The problem with emphasizing conformity is that if you have these guidelines that delineate the architectural features then after a while certain areas tend to look alike and that is what I mean by conformity is that even though they are diverse and subtle architectural features, over time and development they take on the same character and for a community like Meridian, I think it is a vital aspect that we create a character that is diverse and varied throughout the city. Therefore, aesthetic controls alone don’t ensure quality or quality in the sense of a quality environment. They can ensure quality built materials. That is for certain. But they lack the creativity and necessary to create that physical form and identify those relationships between buildings, streets, public space and site planning. So, therefore, they cannot support a diverse and livable community. We can see in our model here that if we fill the gap with just aesthetic design guidelines, although we have created a bridge that gap still exists. Another approach is to take a design review approach and what I mean by design review is that we review those relationships and we look for those key elements that we spoke about earlier. Those key elements mainly being public space, the use of the site, orientation of the building, buildings themselves and the appropriateness in the context of their surroundings. Design review tends to be descriptive, broadly oriented. This would appeal to most developers because it allows for that flexibility and diversity. It conveys the preferred quality that not only the city is looking for, but many users and residents are. It embraces different solutions. That goes back to the ability to be flexible. It encourages collaboration between Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 5 of 13 Planning Department, the city, its residents and the developers. By ensuring quality design it creates those necessary integration of the physical form and establishes those relationships that make those key elements successful. So here is our model again with all three of them working together to establish the character we are desiring. It links the guidelines to our objectives established in the comprehensive plan. To help bridge that gap between being too specific and too quantitative and being too general. It encourages development to conform to a coherent plan. What I mean by this is when a site plan comes in and we review it, we review the building and the site plan together, but not only as a single site, but as a member of the whole community. So its relation to its context to other sites and other parts that we are trying to establish in the city. This is the important part for at least design review concerning. It establishes an overall character hierarchy for the community meaning we will know exactly where we want certain areas to develop in certain ways. So this is how I developed the framework. I started with primary land uses and I made general assumptions about their intensity related to the density and about their character related to our favorite three words, urban, suburban and rural. If we take a general approach and we start getting specific then when we get to a point we will be able to assimilate several different things. Here we have primary land uses and I have linked them to the future land use map. I have also incorporated the designations that were assigned for the Ten Mile Area Plan. Now numbers 1- 5 on the left are a general classification for those designations in the land use maps. Here I have taken each land use designation and assigned it to one of those categories. Now the second part was to incorporate the zoning, our current zoning. Again taking a general approach, making categories and assigning our current zoning districts into those categories would be most appropriate to establish that land use for a similar category or intensity. Now this is the tricky part; trying to categorize character. I started with general assumptions and from research about different types of areas. Urban tends to be more pedestrian oriented, less traffic emphases; suburban tends to be more traffic emphases and less pedestrian friendly. So, I developed this chart with color codes to establish those relationships. I have titled these categories according to what the most appropriate development type would be. Now transit would be our most intense highest density, vertical mixed uses. They tend to be oriented towards transit routes and bus and train, etc. Our urban environment tend to be our main streets, our downtowns, our central business districts. Our transitional spaces are those areas that bridge between urban and our suburban neighborhoods, which lead us to neighborhood. Now an urban neighborhood could be a solely residential neighborhood in an urban environment. But here at a lower density it tends to mean our suburbs. In a rural setting, by this I put rural setting instead of rural because when I think of rural I think of agriculture. Although it would be nice to still have some on our edges of the city. I am not sure if we need to focus on that. So our rural setting would still allow for some of that in low density subdivisions, but it doesn’t specifically tie us down to creating and maintaining it. So if we put those three things together, we come up with a matrix. Now the neat thing about this matrix is that it will tell us if you see where Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 6 of 13 there is no color and no letters and no numbers, there is an “x”. Those “x”s mean that a use in that category in that position on the matrix is inappropriate to establishing that character. So if we use that matrix you will notice that each colored square has a letter and a number. Those correspond to a general character. Now this goes back to the character hierarchy that I was speaking about earlier. The four squares that make up an urban environment consists of that transit, oriented development and our urban oriented developments. The urban suburban is that transitional phase where if it is close to an urban he could be more urban and have suburban elements or vice-a-versa be more suburban and have urban elements. Our suburban is pretty much limited development, light service – I didn’t want – my intent here is to push those commercial and those business districts closer to the urban fabric and allow for more subdued residential developments on the outskirts of them. So this is a general character profile. This helps us understand relationships between those character hierarchies and the development that they could create. So now let us go into an example. First this is a spreadsheet basically. A worksheet that I set up that has all of those elements we just talked about combined onto one sheet. The numbers on the right there are the steps that you would take to follow through to evaluate a potential project. I am going to skip them at this time because I am going to walk you through the first project. This is a recently approved project – Bellabrook Vista. It is located at Locust Grove near Franklin. Its designated land use is mixed use community. Now that enables a residential development to be anywhere from three to fifteen units an acre for density. It is proposed as a solely residential neighborhood. Here we have the zoning map and its current zoning is R-8. Here is the proposed plat. They are proposing an R-15 zone. They are attached single family homes. There are 34 just over a four acre lot and the density is just under eight units an acre. Here are some beautiful renderings. Here is an aerial that shows us how the positions are laid out on the site. Now here is our worksheet. If we start with – we always will start with the land use, the comprehensive plan. So on the first section and I will point to it with the arrow – this is our preliminary land use section. This is where we get our land use designations – now mixed use community falls within the number two and number three. If we move to the right of that, we see the letters and that is the zoning groups. R-15 will fit into anywhere between an A through a D or an A through a C. So if you look up on the matrix, we find those letters and those numbers and we find the corresponding squares that we correspond to that. We can move over to the development category and we can see what type of development we can expect. This one happens to fall using the matrix within the transitional and the neighborhood setting. We move down to the general character from those three squares. We are listed at 2C, 3C and 3D. Two tends to be in the urban area, if we look at the matrix. It is on the lower end of the urban area. So I am going to rule out the urban and move down to the 3C and the 3D. It is at the top of the suburban so we can expect some density. This one happens to fit within the urban suburban or that transitional phased area. An alternative would be to take the land use designation and instead of classifying it as mixed use community, since the project is solely residential and there is no Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 7 of 13 mixed use within it, classify it at a lower density, a lower intensity as a neighborhood and we still get 34 units on just over four acres, the density stays the same, but the character changes. You go from the transitional to a neighborhood and a suburban setting. The next project is a Paramount Commercial at Linder and McMillan. The land use designation is commercial. The zoning is C-G, our highest and most intense commercial district. They propose – it’s an 18 ½ acre site, they are proposing 18 commercial lots within that subdivision. Here is the plat for the lower half of the – the southern half of that area. We can see that they divided up the lots into small lots, probably around an acre or maybe an acre and one half. We wouldn’t expect to see big box stores in this area by their preliminary map. But, if we use the worksheet, we find commercial which falls again within number two and number three land uses. C-G is only allowed in the C, the middle, that transitional area. Again we are trying to push those business areas up towards the urban fabric. So this happens to fall into a development category of transition and that corresponds to the general character down at the bottom. Now if you look closely you can see at the bottom in the character profile there is a big box colored red and a small box colored red. These are our transitional areas. This is where we would expect to see our big box stores and change stores, but provided with a character that is transitional and we can expect to see a variety there and indeed they are proposing something different than a box. These photos submitted with their application demonstrate the intent of the character, architecturally speaking, the intent to produce. That is all the examples that I have. Briefly before we take questions go onto what do we take this from next? Soon, we will be selecting committee members to serve on the Steering Committee. We will be contacting them and arranging meeting times. The guideline priorities are what we need to focus on primarily next; taking that established framework and applying it to writing those guidelines to create those areas and those characters. The first priority would be the non-residential and commercial developments. That includes refining the Ten Mile Area Plan guidelines. Next we would re-work and integrate the downtown and TN-C guidelines followed by the multi-family and residential guidelines. After we have established the committee members and made arrangements we will be writing the guidelines to match those characters that we have established. I thank the President and the Council and Madame Mayor for your time. Borton: Thank you, Will we appreciate that presentation. Pete, do you have something to add? Friedman: Well that is a tough act to follow Council President, Madame Mayor and Council Members. I think the thing that – Will has done an excellent job. I mean when I first saw this for the first time my head was just spinning. It was so much farther taken above sort of the scope of work that we envision that we had run by you when we had our joint workshop with the Planning Commission and taking it to another level. I think the key to this and we haven’t seen it yet is that this matrix and this framework that is established is really our ladder or our Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 8 of 13 roadmap into the guidelines and I think that is sort of what I wanted to emphasize because out of that will flow the guidelines that can then be applied back and applied to development applications as they come to the city. Borton: Anna? Canning: President Borton, Members of the Council, Madame Mayor also it makes it seem like he hasn’t done anything on his next step, but he has been working all along on that stuff already. We wanted to take this time and talk to you about this framework because again as Pete said this is – we never anticipated this at all. I mean I think all we knew about was aesthetic controls and that is all that we were really anticipating, but when Will brought this up I really saw this as an opportunity to link it back to the comprehensive plan and address those difficulties that we have particularly with our mixed use categories in helping people understand what does the neighborhood center mean? What does mixed use community mean verses mixed use regional? What is mixed use neighborhood? Those are really where we have struggled, I think over time and for one mixed use regional, a box or a use may be appropriate where it is not in another one and I think that this framework really helps to address that in what is the character we are looking for and how does this relate, not just to our zoning districts or not just to the site, but to the city as a whole to the comprehensive plan and the zoning ordinance. What we are hoping tonight is that if you feel comfortable enough in the presentation and how it has been presented which is a lot easier, I think, to understand than when we first got it. Quite frankly we thought Will would present it to you tonight and you wouldn’t have a clue of what was going on and we would meet with you in two’s to discuss it further. That was the original intent because we never understood it the first time through. It took a few times for us to understand it as well. That may still be the case. I am getting to the point now where it makes sense to me, but we would be happy to meet in two’s if you would like to do that or if you feel comfortable with the presentation and the framework we can move forward. So either way is fine with us. We did anticipate that this is not an easy subject to grasp the first time through and if you would like more information on it in an individual basis we would be happy to. De Weerd: Mr. President. Borton: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I guess what I would like to see is one of those mixed use designations that don’t work. So you showed us some good examples of where it did, but how can this really be used to capture the intent of the comp plan and where it is blatantly in contrast with the vision of what we had, using the mixed use designations? You know what I am saying? Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 9 of 13 Canning: Yes, I understand. Will did you find one that didn’t work? I seem to remember you saying something. De Weerd: I can think of an example that comes to mind. Canning: I know we can’t use that one, though. We were pushing it with Paramount, but we figured since we weren’t talking about it it was okay. Thornton: Members of the Council, Madame Mayor I will find an example that doesn’t work to demonstrate. De Weerd: Even if it has to be fictitious, you know if you take one of our heavy mixed use regional and you plop it into a mixed use neighborhood or community and just show us. If you tried to stuff this one here this is what it would look like and that is how it would show us that it is incompatible. Canning: We can certainly come up with that. Would you like us to – we can come up with that for the two’s meetings or for another Pre-Council or just see you individually – give us direction and we will gladly take it. Bird: Mr. President. Borton: Mr. Bird. Bird: I will put my two cents’ worth in and I hope you don’t fall down on it. But, I would like to see these – as everybody knows I am not a real fan of design review, but I think Will has done a great job and I would like to see it go forward and get going on it before we hopefully get busy. Again we have got it in place, we have got all of the – everything out of it so we don’t have a UDC Code problem again. Let’s get it all done. So I would like to see this go on forward and he can bring back something. Like the Mayor said and I agree with her on that, but they got something that can be as we go forward, it can even be brought back to us. Rountree: Mr. President. Borton: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Yeah, this is my second time through this and I think I am kind of getting it, but I will spend more time with Anna, Pete and Will on my own or if somebody wants to accompany me that would be great too. As I sleep on this stuff and try and put it into my own words and I haven’t yet, but I will and when I can I will understand it entirely. So I agree with the Mayor I would like to see where it doesn’t work and I would also like to see the next step, the actual guidelines and like the first example you suggested maybe change it to a Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 10 of 13 residential category of activity and what difference that would have made to a potential applicant. Borton: I don’t get it all and I have got a laundry list of questions in confusion and so I would love to be with you and probably Councilman Rountree, if not others, to go forward with it. Will this is awesome. I like the way you presented this and are thinking and I am far away from being a planner, so it would be difficult for me to understand where you are coming from because I see as we go through it there is a reference to design guidelines and how there are inadequate tools and so we try and create a character that is not really pinned down word for word of exactly what we want. It is kind of more touchy feely big picture, but then we are going to create some guidelines – what I worry about is from the other side is their zoning and comp plan, UDC, plus some additional guidelines which – I guess I am just confused; I see the design guidelines are inadequate as a gap filler, but we are going to create some? You know I didn’t see something in the presentation that would prevent some of the negative things of you know, a blank wall against the street fence? This is more big picture. Canning: It is definitely more big picture and some of the complaints like somebody who used to sit right there, I think – some design guidelines or some design standards force you to just add stuff to the building. It is not integral to the building. It is not tied to much of anything. It is just stick this on the building and you will get approved, you know? Put in another window, put in another course of brick or whatever it is. It is just purely aesthetic. They don’t have any basis for it necessarily. There might be something related to an Old Town District like down here where you are trying to mimic an existing style and that is never what Meridian wanted to do, but those aesthetic controls that is basically all they are doing is saying make the building look this way. The reason we wanted your buy off on the framework is because these guidelines, if we take this approach there will probably be a lot more emphasis on the site and the relationships of the buildings to one another and the relationships of the buildings to the street rather than the architectural detail of the buildings. That will come also. But, the emphasis will be more on the context, more on creating character. Not creating cute buildings, but creating a real long lasting character and that is why it was important to get this framework in front of you because that is not exactly how we had talked about it in the past. I think we all thought we were going into this and just getting more attractive buildings out of it. But, the research that Will has done really has taken it back a couple of steps and said yeah that is nice, but that won’t solve all of your problems. What you really need to do is look at these larger contexts and make sure it implements your comprehensive plan and works with your zoning. Friedman: Thank you Council President, Madame Mayor and Council Members and I think I understand Council President’s concern. We certainly don’t want to create a set of guidelines or additional regulations that are broad and wide open to interpretation or abusive interpretation. At the same time we don’t want to get Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 11 of 13 those so specific or descriptive that we are telling you exactly how large each window will be and what the slope of each roof shall be. So obviously the twain shall meet in there somewhere and I think that has been the approach we have taken all along as we want to ensure that we encourage innovation and excellence by promoting flexibility, but at the same time having some book ends on it and designing these guidelines so that – in fact Will and I were talking about this earlier this afternoon, we will have some descriptive text, but we also want to make generous use of either pictures or graphics and so forth so that when we meet with our developers and so forth, they say well what is it that you are looking for? We will not only be able to tell it, but we will be able to show it and then turn them loose with their creative process. We still need to make that step, that bridge to the development of those guidelines. But certainly your concern is a legitimate one because I have heard that in other communities – well we don’t want to be in a situation where we know it when we see it. We do want to provide the guidance, but at the same time we want to have some certainty, but we also want to have that flexibility. I certainly understand your concerns. Borton: My first thought is the ration might be – you know one application might fit all the “p’s” and “q’s”, but it could get denied at staff level because it just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t seem like it feels right and people will come to us and say what the heck does it mean that it doesn’t feel right? I mean, I understand the intent, but it is just so wishy-washy. Canning: As we develop those we will certainly run them by you. But, before Will jumped into – he is going to have some urban components and look at transitional components and suburban components and that is what we kind of wanted to get the buy off on tonight is so that he could structure his guidelines that way and move forward. So if you would like to meet first that is certainly fine. If you don’t think we are ready to move forward that is fine or if you just want us to meet with you to explain it more? De Weerd: Mr. President, I have to appreciate your comments, but – I guess, you are right this wasn’t really the initial view on what the tool that we would first roll out. But what is unique and what I like about this being the first approach is that in some areas you have a real chopped up fill to our community and you have to see how they interconnect and how they feel. We are starting to see the interpretation of what those mixed use regional or mixed use community and mixed use neighborhoods and they aren’t what was envisioned and they are forgetting that you have to have a transition between uses and those mixed use areas were actually created so you had a transition from one intense use to another less intense use and that is what this tool does. It really shows the transition and how you start connecting different types of uses together without dictating to them exactly what they are supposed to do. Zaremba: Mr. President. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 12 of 13 Borton: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Just a comment that this goes above and beyond anything that I was expecting and I am excited by the concept. Apparently it is a novel concept, but it seems to me to be right on. Good thinking. Well I spent a lot of years on the Planning and Zoning Commission so I have already thought about some of these things as well. So I am excited by the presentation. I agree that it would be helpful to have an example or two that don’t work or actually show that the system works to say no at a certain time, but maybe I am rephrasing what the Mayor meant. But a few examples where they fall into the white area that had an “x” in it where the answer would be no you are not doing what we envision on a grand scale. Some of the other details and the devil is always in the details of course will come out by the Steering Committee and the guideline priorities that are eventually made and in my opinion this is a great start to keep it going and go this direction. I would be happy to have the other Council Members express their concerns and have those worked into the fabric of this as well. I think all input makes it better. The one thought that I always have when you are talking about something that eventually the developers are going to have to buy into; I like to make sure that they feel that there is a level playing field and it goes a little bit to President Borton’s comment that if we just say well we want this feel – the developers when they come to us they need to feel that to some extent we are predictable and definitely need to feel that maybe a different developer, their competitor isn’t somehow going to get a better deal than they did. So the guidelines need to be defined to some extent well enough that everybody can understand that it – (Tape turned over) Zaremba: -- of who they are talking to this day that just has a certain opinion. So I agree that it does need to be defined, but I am perfectly comfortable with Councilman Rountree and Borton working with that. I am happy to see it go ahead without me. Rountree: Mr. President by no means do I want to stop it. Move forward and continue with the process. I just want to be comfortable with it, so I want to be able to work with you and since I am your liaison you will probably see me more, but just to be a sounding wall on some of the things that come up and just be there to answer questions as they come up. Canning: Mr. Borton. Borton: Go ahead Anna. Canning: I would propose this. Let’s have Will come up with some examples and type them up and do a nice little cut sheet with some graphics. He can email that out to everyone, so you can see those examples where it does not Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting September 4, 2007 Page 13 of 13 work. I will schedule a lunch or some other meeting with President Borton and Mayor if you would like to or Charlie and Mayor, if you would like to all three of you. So we will do that and in the meantime, Will will continue to work on the standards as well and move forward with those. Borton: I think that is a perfect way to go. I am not trying to slow down or stop it for the slow kid in class. But, I do have questions going through and will have more so I appreciate that. Canning: We are still figuring it out too. It is a very complicated little – it is very complicated. Borton: Thanks Anna. Thank you Will and thank you Pete. Council that brings us to the end of the Pre-Council agenda. Zaremba: Mr. President. Borton: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I move we adjourn the Pre-Council meeting. Rountree: Second. Borton: It has been moved and seconded to adjourn. All those in favor say aye. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:50 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: / / TAMMY DE WEERD, MAYOR DATE APPROVED ATTESTED: ___ WILLIAM G. BERG, JR., CITY CLERK