PC 021308 - Laserfiche WebLink

resembled daycare with some of the components of daycare, such as transportation, with children at the facility from 11:40 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Staff crafted language requiring that the children be signed in and out in order to follow the City's practice. Similarly, as an example, Ms. Decker stated that the City had many applications with second residential units that looked like and had all of the facilities for second residential units; residents may state that they were not second residential units, but the City would proceed in requiring that they conform to the second residential unit ordinance. Generally, if a site resembled a particular use, the City proceeded on that basis and required the proposal to meet the ordinance. With respect to Commissioner Fox's question regarding children in industrial areas being free to come and go, Ms. Decker replied that the issue of having use permits in industrial zones involving children has been a particularly difficult for both staff and the Planning Commission. Staff has had various internal discussions regarding the appropriateness of having these uses in industrial areas and that the Code allowed these uses with conditional use permits. Staff looked specifically at the adj acent uses and the parking impacts and what could happen in the future when the uses may change. She noted that the letter written by DSS stated that children at any age would be free to come and go as they wished. She recalled Commissioner Pearce's observation that smaller children were held back by the operator and were told that they could not leave. She noted that the issue of supervision was a fine line and that if the operator were to prevent the child from leaving the premises with anyone other than the supervising adult, the applicant would be acting in a supervisory capacity, which contradicts the DSS policy. In that case, the applicant is indeed acting as a daycare facility in a supervisory capacity. Commissioner Fox noted that she called DSS and received examples of several martial arts studios licensed as daycare facilities by the State. One is Cerezo's Martial Arts on Florin Mall in Sacramento, which provided a webpage for an after-school program for children ages 5 to 13 years and operates from 2:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Another is Manna's Martial Arts After School program, which is also a licensed daycare facility. She noted that for the applicant's proposal to have children at the facility from 11:30 a.m. until 6:15 p.m., there was the potential for a particular child to spend 33 hours per week in the facility compared to the 17 hours that children are spending in martial arts facilities cited previously that were licensed by the State. She inquired whether exceeding 15 or 16 or 17 hours per week would require the applicant's facility to be licensed as a daycare facility and whether it was staff s opinion that the proposed application would need to be licensed by the State as a childcare facility. Ms. Decker replied that numerous martial arts studios operated in the City as martial arts studios, where children were dropped off and picked up after a 60- or 90-minute session and where no other activities were involved. Generally, the hours of operation ran after school until the early evening, but they are regular classes according to a schedule in hour or hour-and-a-half increments. She noted that the proposal before the Commission did not appear to have those same constraints in that children could potentially attend as early as 11:40 a.m. and be picked up at 6:15 p.m. Staff was concerned that this project should adhere to the same sign- PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, February 13, 2008 Page 20 of 42