Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutcoa.pz.gmc.19960618Growth Management Commission Tuesday, June 18, 1996 4:30 P.M. Sister Cities Meeting Room, City Hall Commissioners: city Jasmine Tygre Sara Garton Roger Hunt Steve Buettow Marta Chaiaovska Dave Johnston Timothy Mooney County: David Guthrie Sheltie Harper Steve Whipple Jake Vickery Staff: Cindy Houben Tim Malloy Ellen Sassano I PROPOSED CODE AMENDMENTS AH Overlay Tim Malloy - Staff' (discussion regarding late members from the Pitkin County Commissioners and beginning the meeting) Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 2 Malloy: (Reading from the ordinances) No meeting shall be called without a quorum. (continued to wait for a 4th member from the County Planning and Zoning Commission). Garton: I will call the joint meeting to order. Tonight we will hear on the issues and concerns associated with the adoption of an amendment to the Pitkin County Land Use Code creating a AH Overlay district. Malloy: We have two things on the agenda tonight. The approach we would like to take tonight would be to discuss the AH overlay until 6 p.m. Then we can save some time for the Zone District. I do not think we will get through everything tonight. I have done presentations for you individually with each of the Commissions and on the County side it has been almost six weeks since this was last before the Commission. I can go over some of the items if you need to; or we can go straight into discussion. Some of our focus will be on the exemptions for projects which incorporate affordable housing and local serving commercial uses. Tim (Mooney) left a message and stated he was concerned with providing an exemption for commercial square footage. He felt the AACP basically desired a pull back from the square footage allocated for commercial uses. It was a way of exempting commercial square footage from the growth management system, because of the number of lodge units retired. This exemption was ultimately rejected. This grew out of that discussion. We analyzed the numbers and how it would function at the Highlands and the North Forty project and determined the community would receive more affordable housing through the AH Overlay/PUD approach. The City's Land Use Code has exemptions which are somewhat similar. There are approximately six exemptions already competing which range from minimal impacts to impacts which can be handled by mitigation etc. It is not too diss-similar. That is one of the things to discuss here tonight, whether the County should modify its quota system to the 60 percent of the employees generated by the commercial use. The proposal amends the County's Land Use Code in several ways, some of it is housekeeping while other aspects require policy changes. The amendment requires the land is already zoned commercial and if it does not already have that zoning, it would have to go through a re -zoning step. It has to be in the metro area and the PUD criteria would apply to all applications. They must meet the requirements in the PUD process and be adequate and reviewed. Garton: Does anyone want to start with the appropriateness of this kind of overlay. (No one speaks) I will start. There is no way to keep accessory neighborhoods or neighborhood serving from becoming an expensive commercial zone. The example is Messaluna. It will start out that way, being a neighborhood commercial, but in five years it will change. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 3 Malloy: That was discussed in the Highlands review, the local serving would mean that people based in the area would utilize these commercial businesses and we discussed how that would be restricted to the local serving use. That was a concern of the BOCC and the County P&Z. Perhaps a lease space limitation would be required. One of the problems at this Time, in the land use code we do not have a definition for local serving. It is not going to be easy and it has to be very carefully looked at. Garton: This zone could have lease restrictions? Malloy: I cannot comment on the legality of lease restrictions. If it were voluntary we could work with it. I am not sure we could force them to do local serving if it were tested in Court. Glenn Horn: The way this was envisioned, the discussion is mixing two types of commercial uses, there are certain commercial uses which will be neighborhood directed and certain tourist oriented uses. On page 5, the intent of the overlay, it does allow for the commercial uses mixed with the underlying zone district. The district is intended to have an array of using including -affordable housing, tourist oriented, recreational facilities, and an array of mixes which are consistent with the AACP goals and character.. Gideon Kaufman: You talked about Messaluna, in the off season it is one of the few places that stays open. The business that seem to survive in this community, they are here when the locals need them. The operation cycle is a way to look at it. Some local owned businesses which close in the off-season, do not compliment the local resident who lives here year around. The goal of the business is it has to accommodate local people. Malloy: The underlying zone districts we are discussing are AR1, there is some R30 and also AFR10 which is the current zoning. They are proposing to switch to R15. Horn: AR is similar to the district in the City which allows tourist and commercial in the same area. The way it is envisioned is it allows hotels, lodges, restaurants and uses which are commercial in nature but not directly linked to the hotel. It is a mixed bag type district. We are making changes to the affordable housing complement with that type of zone district. Malloy: That is one example, the North Forty would have R6, they want to do some re -zoning and have B2 and over that underlying zone district is the exemption for affordable housing. It is another way to do a similar thing as we proposed at the Highlands. Vickery: This is along a different line then we have been discussing. We say there is an imbalance in the community, there is an excess of commercial already existing. What we are trying to do is solve that problem and re-establish a balance, it is counter -productive to institute new commercial uses into the scenario if this in -balance persists. It is not logical. There is also an enforceablitlity issue. I am also very concerned that local serving businesses do not have viability. It takes a threshold level to sustain the Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 4 business and if they rely solely on only local patronage and that does not pan out, then what happens. I see a lot of turn over. Malloy: Let us back up, this language allows the standard for mitigation from 100% to 60% of employees mitigated for. There is some economic incentive to support this. I am not sure I understood your first comment, I read the AACP a little differently and interpret it somewhat differently than you. At build -out, if you consider all of the areas currently zoned for commercial, that includes commercial re -development, the ultimate goal of the AACP would be less than or approximately half of the commercial area developed. We are rolling back the ultimate build out. The AACP does not say there is too much commercial. I am interpreting that section of the document differently. Tygre: I interpreted Jake's remarks differently, there is an imbalance of workers and housing at the present time, I share the concerns Jake has expressed. There is a shortage for existing commercial space, and now why are we adding more commercial. In City code requirements, there are employees associated with commercial, so many workers per square foot and employee numbers has been understated on the square foot basis. Hunt: I am having a problem with the use of commercial or business to denote all businesses and the use of this overall generic term. For example, we may not have a shortage of retail but we have a shortage of SCI space. (Service Commercial Industrial). Mooney: I have some fundamental problems with this. I do not understand why it is an affordable housing overlay. They need to play by the rules of affordable housing, the commercial will facilitate the affordable housing. The Highlands is the applicant here and not the County Commissioners and if the Commissioners are the applicants, then they should be here. I see it as exemptions for commercial square footage's, the Highlands will own it and operate it, the Highlands will have control. The affordable housing zone means qualified employees and space where they can live which is controlled by the Housing Authority. I see this as a bonus for someone who wants to build commercial square footage. In the Highlands there is commercial square footage already. And if commercial is not the first choice, why are we creating the additional neighborhood commercial with the bonus. I think it is a target for growth, I do not see saving auto trips, it will be a shopping center. I do not know what we are talking about here and why is it a bonus and why should we give them any more exemptions. Malloy: I did not follow it all. The overlay goes over the entire project. All of the land. I will start with North Forty because it is simpler. You have two pieces, one is commercial and the other is residential. It is like the City's AH3 and available in the same way. In the Highlands, you have land segregated by two uses. In the overlay the mixed uses may be in different buildings and on different floors. You would provide the same exemption to everyone in that underlying zone district, you have a piece of land which has 70% free market and 3 0% affordable Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 5 housing. There are no current tools available to a normal project to allow for this mix of uses. The housing is well in excess to what is required for the zone district. Mooney: If the two uses are in the same building why have that? Malloy: We are trying to have vertical zoning. If there was a commercial engine for a tax basis you could provide affordable housing more economically. The project will be re -zoned and that zoning is a mix of what I said earlier. There is a second layer of zoning, it applies over all underlying zoning. It would apply and under certain conditions you would be allowed to have the exemptions if you meet the conditions discussed in the code requirements. You asked if this is a Pandora's box? Is it properly accounted for. It is limited to a fairly defined area and it is an overlay and you would have to have the correct zoning to be able to apply this type of overlay in any future projects. Any other projects, beyond the two discussed, would have to go through all the tests which would be in compliance with the AACP. That is a important point. There is limited potential for that ever happening. Garton: What about Cozy Point? Malloy: It is not in the metro area. Horn: The commercial space occurring in this zone district remains the same does not enlarge. The proposed overlay generates a secondary use for the commercial zone. It allows for the two zone districts to blend together. Tygre: What is the rational for exemption for the commercial space in affordable housing. Malloy: You are taking it to the City standard, it is being modified to emulate the City's numbers. Vickery: Why do that? Horn: You have to ask, "what are the fiscal impacts in providing a 6040 ratio". There are annually recurring deficits associated with residential zoning but if commercial was developed in the commercial space, it would help off -set the deficits. It generates revenues. Vickery: You are starting from an imbalance. If there is already an excess of commercial there should already be excess revenues. Kaufman: There has never been a fiscal analysis done in the past to determine the impacts associated with the 60/40 ratio. That information is only now becoming available and an deficit does exist in the revenues. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 6 Malloy: I looked at this by discovering how much mitigation would be required on the Highland Project if we used the straight zone district. The current standard is one person for every three people in free market. If we associated a 50/50 ratio with this application, we would not be where we want to be. The largeness of that disparity helps to make this work. The only time this overlay would not work is when there would be a residential component larger than a commercial component. Horn: Highland is six stores the size of Aspen Sports. It is not a huge shopping center. There is a total of 36,000 commercial space and the P&Z office looked at it and determined it was actually under- sized. Mooney: The overlay causes some concerns for me. Which zone has the integrity. Kaufman: You are getting less commercial. You are getting the affordable housing. Guthrie: We discussed the fact that the footprint will not grow larger? The concept was with the vertical zoning, allowed for less sprawl. Malloy: I don't believe the applicants agreed to lessen the footprint, but the vertical zoning does have its attributes. Kaufman: We are providing all category housing in this project. You have to look at what you get. You are getting category 1, 2, 3 and 4's and built single family housing. Mooney: That is for your development. That will mitigate only for your employees. These people will work only for the Highlands. Kaufman: No. The people housed at the Highlands will work all over Pitkin County. Malloy: You made a comment about the dominate zoning. The answer is the underlying zoning. It creates all of the rules, what uses, floor area ratios, the only thing which the overlay does is it makes an exemption for the affordable housing. We are proposing some portion of commercial sq. footage would be exempt under that program. Everything else is managed and controlled by the underlying zoning. Garton: For example, what if Williams Ranch came in for AH overlay and they wanted to put up a gas station and store. Malloy: They could not do that. There is no commercial zone there. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 7 Garton: That is the net for this whole thing. There was some social engineering concerns, he was concerned whether the community could sustain the 60/40 impact. Houben: The fiscal impact analysis for the Highlands project, the tax revenues would off -set the cost of services on the high end sales, but that is not so. The mill levy is low and cost of services may be high. Garton: Regarding the neighborhood serving commercial business, you may need some lease restrictions, how would you manage that. Tygre: The standard so many employees per square foot is not an accurate measure. We have implemented a monitoring system and that way we could look at the need for additional mitigation in the future. What mechanism would adjust that in this process? Malloy: That is a complicated debate. Perhaps sq. footage is not a good unit to use as a employee generator, the flip side of that is, and I look at things from a legal challenge point of view, you need some sort of unit measure which has a rational relationship. If I build this square footage, I pay the mitigation and now I lease it to someone with more employees but later there are less employees. It would difficult to administer that kind of program. We have charts and here is the use and that use generates x number of employees per 1,000 sq. feet and our numbers may be off but we can show that relationship if we are challenged. Garton: Someone requested space for jeep guided tours. That requires two employees in a booth, but how many are coming from down valley to manage the business although there are only two employees in the booth. That question is the mitigation may not keep up with the demands of the business based on the square footage in the booth. Horn: Along that point, in the County generated employee per space application, the mitigation does not always coincide with the demand. It is not a straight calculation, there has been a discussion about the standards. For example, this is a warehouse and there are few employees for a great deal of space. It is a little different in each scenario. Mooney: In the case of a ski area, the base village is the predominate factor, the number of miles of ski area does not dictate the space, although there are quite a few employees not mitigated for the in base village who will be servicing the ski area. The Aspen Skiing Company has 2,700 employees, ski people, maintenance crews, ski schools and many other aspects. Malloy: We have two entities sharing the use of this ski area. The Master Plan for the ski area includes this shared application and we have actual figures for the employee base for both. There is a separate tracking. There are lots of ways to look at this. For example, if this project were separated and granted Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 8 the affordable housing growth management and you would do 100% of employees, that would net more employees than you would want to house on the site according to the Master Plan. I would not recommend that many affordable housing on site, cash in lieu would be 10 million dollars and there were be a lapse in reason associated with this monetary figure. It did not meet the feasibility test. If you change the mitigation to 60/40 instead of 75/25 and we get a compromise approach. Chaiaovska: I like this use of the overlay. Development in this day and age is going toward a Highlands type use. You have to have a way to tie it together. We need to look at the big picture. Garton: We were asked to deal with one more issue. We have to stop. Vickery: I would like to follow up very quickly, if you did your project and with your commercial area space accounted for, you would end up with some number of employee housing on site. Earlier you said that if you did the mitigation you would get more. Then you said there would be a shortage. I am confused. Malloy: I think you miss -understood, I discussed changing the ratio and then the impact would be greater. Malloy: We will get back to you with another day when we can continue this discussion. Rural & Remote Clarke: I am Lance Clarke. I am the new person in the housing office and I have not meet a lot of you before. We are asking from you here tonight to take another look at the Rural and Remote District, which has been before you before. We wanted you to look at it and give us some feed back. The first set of amendments to the Rural and Remote District are in the paperwork before you. Number one, there is some cleanup or administrative things which has taken place in the code amendments. The County P&Z is familiar with this, points number 2, 4, 5 and 7 which discusses additional uses for TDRs is something we wanted to bring to your attention tonight. We are trying to make them more viable and marketable. Some people have maxed out their square footage requirements and we felt above 15,000 for non-residential sq. feet was a good solution for some of the TDRs. The County reviewed and discussed it and felt it would be an allowable use. A typical use was associated with this 8,000 sq. feet, it correlated with the use of an in -door tennis court. The County then made that recommendation for non-residential sq. footage's, TDR's could be purchased to exceed the square footage ceilings. Item 4 discussed affordable housing mitigation, the ordinance was silent regarding the housing mitigation being provided to the receiving sites. The rational was to sell these sites and there would be no housing mitigation. Number 5 is for residential sq. footage for increasing residential sq. footage. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 9 An additional item was using TDR's for guest houses. When would this be allowed and this will be put on the table tonight. These are the policy issues which deal with different kinds of uses for TDR's. We are interested in your comments. Chaiaovska: I have not been that involved. I do not understand, this would be for additional sq. footage above 15,000 sq. feet? Guthrie: That is a typo, we felt where there was allowable sq. footage for the site. Whipple: You have brought up a good point. The TDR could be used for the initial structure when there is a ratio for the lot size. Sassano: Typically, where there are larger parcels in the County and the current FAR allows for up to 15,000 and you could exceed the 15,000 with the purchase of a TDR. Cindy does not suggest you could exceed the ratio in the smaller lot sizes. Chaiaovska: There should be some mechanism to allow the excess in a ratio discussion. Guthrie: I thought this was our intention. Sassano: I don't believe we had discussed that option, but it may certainly be a discussion which we could incorporate. Guthrie: There is some clarification, there would be some TDRs which did not have a housing mitigation associated with the site. The difficulty in monitoring the sites as to whether housing mitigation was associated with the site or not was too difficult a task. It seemed equality was more desirable and helped. marketability. Whipple: We decided to make this straight across the board. Harper: This has just struck me as a point which we have not previously discussed or analyzed. Are we primarily telling the poor people not to build in rural and remote and allowing rich people to build. Chaiaovska: This is a range which if allowed to build in rural and remote must meet certain qualifications. The house size permitted, the type of electricity etc. The TDR accommodates many uses and does not significantly impact the people who have these parcels with the code requirements which would allow them to build in rural and remote areas. Garton: There are other receiving areas for these TDRs. Is there a map associated with that? There are some receiving areas in rural and remote I have also noticed. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 10 Sassano: There are some rural remote areas which may be more suitable for receiving these TDRs, that is true. There are mining claims which go way up on the mountain, that may be in a location or an area along the road and you could cluster two buildings within the rural and remote areas. It would have to be adjacent to a road. Guthrie: It could not be above 9,000 feet in elevation. Sassano: The second site must have a set of criteria which it must meet and there is a limit to floor area. Garton: Shellie there is your answer. Chaiaovska: I want to address Shellie,. You asked, "how do we compensate people who we have taken away there right?" You have just answered that. Now here is all the ways to make money for these TDRs. You have to allow them to build a home if they want to. I object to Rural and Remote. Let us give them a market. Sassano: You are certainly right, it was an issue discussed at great length. Specifically in the Little Annie area and we looked at what is there in regard to building sizes and amenities, that is actually what was there. We were trying to come up with something that actually worked. The point is well taken a and it was discussed. Garton: We need to speak to 2, 4, 5, and 7. Perhaps it would be a comment to the commissioners that we would like to see the discussions continue. How are the receivership areas going to be mapped. Sassano: Sites will be approved on a site by site basis and potential receiving areas are still being discussed. Whipple: There are not approved receiving areas. This is a conceptual basis. The concept for TDR uses such as increasing square footage, guest houses is new and a new range of applications. Perhaps a low impact subdivision would be a receiving site. Someone may want like to take 100 acre and divide them into a TDR receiving area. It would still go through the land use process and would have to be reviewed and approved. But this is self creating. Garton: It is special review and a public hearing? Sassano: The only restriction was the TDR from down valley could not come up -valley. The receiving area had to be in the non -metro down valley area. The upper valley TDR's stated the receiving area would be in the metro area. That way we would not see a lot of development coming up valley and not being concentrated into just one area. Growth Management Commission June 18, 1995 Page 11 Garton: There has been a lot of work done on this. Hunt: I move to recommend the County P&Z and the planning staff and the questions and comments they have asked of us here tonight, receives our concurrence. Chaiaovska: Second. Garton: All in favor. Unanimous The Growth Management is adjourned. Respectfully submitted, Dee Benson Recording Secretary