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placement of the buildings to be able to accommodate what staff wants. Actually, I think staff's done a great job because it's made the project a little bit better. Lots 3 and 4 are the problem and if you look, there's a large oak tree in the middle of the property and that riparian vegetation extended. We had what you're seeing with your staff report, you had House 4 flip so that the tail end of that extends into that tree line. We're able to flip that so we're within the compliance with the regulation. A couple of other things you really can't see is we've adjusted Lot 5 by five feet to the right, Lot 2 by one foot so we've made those adjustments and we think that's made for a better project. Another actually important issue is the issue of emergency protection of the creek and when we first started the project, we submitted to staff a letter from the Church of Christ that said historically we have accessed the creek from the north side. There's a flat spot. We can actually drive a vehicle down there so we're able to access the creek that way and staff came back and said no, that's not adequate and we want to have access from both sides of the creek from the church. When we start noodling on that more and more we thought really if there is a blockage in that creek and there's a real problem, then the people who are really going to be more interested in this are those homeowners. The church is 50 feet higher in the air and they're not going to be affected as much. So we thought it was important for the church to be able to access from our side, but conversely it's important for the homeowners to be able to access their creek in the time of an emergency, for any type of maintenance or issues that come up with the creek. So what we devised is a reciprocal easement for both parties so that we can access their creek in these events and then we have a spot where going up Lot 2, the church can have access to that easement and then there's a 20 -foot easement throughout the project. So, again, we think that was an improvement that staff brought up and we're able to have a rational solution to this that gets everybody involved in the event of an emergency. This is an outstanding issue that I think is real important. It was mentioned in the staff report that we're going to be taking out trees for this development. In fact, two trees are going to be taken out because of the buildings. The majority of the trees are going to be taken out because of the sidewalk requirement that we have. This is a copy that you should have in front of you from the arborist's report. On page 2 it says 10 trees are planned for removal solely due to conflict with the proposed sidewalk parallel to Dublin Canyon Road." If you see here on the lower left hand side, most of the trees are on the periphery of the property and so you have eight down there and then two on Dublin Canyon Road as you go east. All of those are going to be taken out because of the requirement for the sidewalk. Our position is that we would rather not have that sidewalk there because it begins and ends with our property. It's kind of a highway to nowhere. The utility is not high, plus all of the neighbors are saying this kind of takes away from the type of country atmosphere that we all want; having a 6 -foot wide sidewalk. And then the third thing is that these are all oak trees and we think that that is something we would rather not do. A secondary comment on Lot 1 from staff was that the placement of the garage faces Dublin Canyon Road and we all know that that's in planning now and we would rather not have garages face on any roads. Well, when we devised this plan, we thought we PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, January 13, 2016 Page 8 of 26