PC 032316 - Laserfiche WebLink

since 1971, and I brag about this City, and I consider myself very fortunate living here. Your Planning Commission is outstanding, the City Council, everything, but I wanted to just pose these concerns to you for your consideration. Thank you very much for hearing me. Chair Ritter: Thank you. We value your input. I know the Planning Commission and staff wrestles with these issues all the time and that's why it's sometimes painful for us to go through this process. It wasn't brought up yet, but I believe we read in here that drought tolerance is very important to the Ponderosa in their development. Do we have any other comments on that staff? Weinstein: Yes, like all projects, this development project was reviewed by our Landscape Architect who scrutinizes landscape plans for water use. If you look at the plant list on the landscape sheets, you'll see that the vast majority of plant species that are proposed are low and very low water use plants. There is a sprinkling of moderate water use plants, but overall, there is a huge reduction in water use from standard landscape. The only other element I want to point out about the landscape plans is that there is very, very little turf proposed as part of this project. Turf as you know is a huge source of water demand in residential environments like ours and the fact that these residents will have a very small amount of turf speaks to the fact that they are going to be pretty effective at conserving water. The project will also be required to adhere to the latest building code requirements for water efficient fixtures which will limit water use as well in terms of project operations or the internal water use of this project. Chair Ritter: Okay, any other questions for staff? Commissioner Allen: I have a question for the applicant if I may. It has to do with the FAR and I wanted to share my point of view and then I'll ask the question. So my point of view is related to, and I just pulled from our website, the definition of what is considered in a PUD. There are seven items on what's considered in a PUD. Number 2 is, is it consistent essentially with our General Plan and zoning. And the next one is, is it compatible with properties in the vicinity. Now, we all know in PUDs that under unique circumstances we can make variances; changes to a PUD for specific reasons. As I look at this project, there are 2 items though, and I'm looking at Table 1 on page 6 of 14, where the project is out of sync you might say with what the standard is. I'm specifically talking about height where, in fact, the project is really 30 feet and the applicant said they'd be willing to change some of the tables to be 30 feet, so that solves my table issue on height. But on FAR the maximum should be 40% and I'm looking again at what the standard is for this kind of area, 40 %, whereas this project is 45 %. And all the neighboring projects have met 40 %. And, this may sound nitpicky because I can understand the rationale about it's the end of the lane and we can see the reason for going a little larger. But what I worry about, in principle when we have projects where we allow fudging on zoning that isn't otherwise required or necessary is a project like this, like any project, is used often times as the precedent. As a matter of fact, the next project we'll see in a workshop has precedent, but is used as a precedent or example for the next project that comes forward. So I in principle get concerned where we have a blank slate like this which is a fairly large, open piece of property and we don't try to PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, March 23, 2016 Page 14 of 46