PC 041316 - Laserfiche WebLink

way, there's always a way, to really be creative and build a home that in this element does conform with literally every other home in the neighborhood, and that it maintains that character. And, as Commissioner Balch said, certainly we don't want to suggest what it ought to look like, but we are asking questions hoping to move the suggestion, but I would support you guys being creative and building a home with some sort of a front porch. Chair Ritter: Could you just put the other pictures of the porches up on that and then we'll hear Commissioner O'Connor's thoughts. Commissioner O'Connor: I'm a bit conflicted here. I do think that if we extended the same roofline, didn't change any of your roofline but just extended it out and use the three columns to have a porch in front, I actually think, in my own opinion, that it would be more attractive and fit the neighborhood better. But, where I'm a bit conflicted here is it's been nine months that you've been working with the City and to have this condition placed on this family with only six days' notice after I think they must have felt this was going to be approved, and again, I'm only hearing what the applicant says so I'm hoping the City can clarify a bit, but it seems like a six day notice is hard to take even though we, as a Planning Commission, have given people no notice and had to change design. But maybe staff could clarify the 6 day notice. Has the applicant known about this a little longer than six days out? Weinstein: The design guidelines that are one of the drivers of our request for inclusion of a porch on this house is something that's been around for a long time actually. Those design guidelines were proposed by these applicants. The language that required the porch or suggested the inclusion of a porch in these new houses on this site was a little bit loose and it didn't absolutely require an inclusion of a porch. So it was initially not a requirement that needed to be included as part of this design and we worked with the applicant team, including Terry Townsend, very long on this project and they made lots of adjustment in response to our comments and worked really collaboratively with us, so I want to emphasize that as well, and made lots of really positive changes to get to the project we see before us tonight. In going through our final review of projects before or even days after the Planning Commission staff report is published we sometimes look at projects again with a slightly new perspective, taking into account all the conditions of approval that are identified for a project, and it's sort of our last chance to take one big holistic look at the project. 95 percent of the time we don't find anything else we think should be changed, but there are certain times that we take that big picture look and there are things that we see which we think are missing from a project and that's what happened this time. Our suggestion to add the porch did happen at a later point in the process than we desired and to address that, we didn't of course require the applicant team to re- design their project immediately and bring revised plans to the Planning Commission. We crafted a condition such that the plans could be supplemented with a porch and then brought to us at the building permit stage so that the applicant team would not have to invest time and money in refining these plans in advance of the Planning Commission meeting. PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, April 13, 2016 Page 11 of 33