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market demands for small offices because obviously you're not going to put a high rise office building on the civic center site so you're, by definition, talking about insurance offices, accountant and lawyer offices and things like that and there isn't demand in the community for that kind of use of that property. I'm not saying that should dictate clearly our conversation tonight, but it's another data point about a piece of property directly across the street. Commissioner O'Connor: Sure, as we keep talking about vitality downtown, office doesn't usually generate the vitality you're talking about in a downtown location. Commissioner Allen: If I could just follow -up with that, so if it's not office then what are the choices — retail, mixed use or residential? Commissioner Nagler: Retail, mixed use, residential, potentially a small movie theater, restaurants, entertainment. Commissioner Allen: So we don't know. I mean if it's retail then do we want to turn property across the street which is office into residential or is it better to consider it for retail? I mean, we don't know which way it's going to go. Commissioner Nagler: No, we don't have any idea. Commissioner Allen: Do you know in terms of where it's going? Commissioner Balch: We'll keep it to this item. Chair Ritter: Okay, so let's hear from the applicant. We have Mike Carey and after that we have a speaker card from Tim Ward. THE PUBLIC HEARING WAS OPENED. Mike Carey – Applicant: Tim is the architect so he can kind of jump in with me. Thanks everybody. Staff has been awesome to work with. Tim designed the Starbuck's downtown so we're really excited to work with him because he has some great ideas and concepts on mixed use and he's done a lot of projects in Lafayette and kind of all of the surrounding towns. We're super excited from where we started and how we evolved. We started with Gerry and we started out with live /work on site. We brought in three live /work units and I believe two or three houses? Tim Ward: Two. Carey: The live /work was a great idea but we kind of explored and we talked to Gerry and we figured they'd probably move into the units and never work there. We were ahead of ourselves and we are not quite Berkeley and all that, but we started with that a little bit. And then we started changing the plans. Tim came up with studios on top which I thought was a great idea because everybody's looking to downsize, looking for smaller units, cheaper units, the affordability in towns and we're trying to play with what staff PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, May 25, 2016 Page 8 of 28