PC 120915 - Laserfiche WebLink

legitimate point when they say they now have a hard time figuring out where their employees should park or where they will park at night. He stated that in the end, that is the biggest challenge of this project; and the long and short of it is that there is a project to be had here, it is a mixed use project, and the findings that staff is recommending are all right; but this project is not properly defined. Commissioner O'Connor agreed that he does not think this project plays out and that it needs to be looked at again. He added that he failed to mention that he does not have a problem with a three -story structure that is 30 feet tall because most two -story structures are 30 feet tall. Chair Allen agreed as well. She stated that she is open to a mixed -use project and to residential in the back and on the first floor, but she thinks the project is not fully cooked yet and needs more work. She indicated that the Commission needs to make sure it supports the parking. She added that she could potentially be open for a little smaller commercial up front, based on the assumption some of the Commissioners were arguing for that residential would go down to provide parking. Commissioner O'Connor noted that at the Work Session, three of the Commissioners on board gave the direction to staff and the applicant to reduce residential to three units, even if they were ground floor all the way in the back in the corner where the building is being demolished, separate from the retail but with parking in between to keep commercial people from driving to the residential areas. Chair Allen agreed. Commissioner Ritter indicated that he remembers that discussion and asked staff if they reviewed that with the applicant and that the reason they came back with this plan is because that direction did not pencil out. Mr. Weinstein said yes. He stated that a standard experience in terms of what happens after a Work Session is that the discussion with the applicant always starts with all of the recommendations the Planning Commission made, and similar to other projects, a lot of requests were made and the applicant felt like it was hard to accommodate those on this particular site. He noted that after a lot of meetings and conversations and design iterations, the project ended up with what is here today, and everybody who was involved in that process was cognizant that some of the checklist items that were requested by the Planning Commission, most notably, parking, were not met. Chair Allen commented that she wondered what the project would look like if the requirement to fully park the property were set as a constraint, have a mixed -use and some retail and office on the front and office, and then back it in. Commissioner O'Connor noted that this building, regardless of what use is in it, came back bigger than what it was at the Work Session. Commissioner Ritter recalled the discussion that if the project were to be fully parked on the property, it needed to be all residential, but because the Commission started pushing to get it more commercial as that was what the PDA wanted and to add PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, December 9, 2015 Page 31 of 40