You can’t blame Michael Rubsam for feeling like Rocky after climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The one great obstacle to his success as chair of the Planning & Zoning Commission had been removed. No longer is he Coleridge’s ancient mariner. It’s as if Camus had permitted Sisyphus to retire. Goodbye Landscape Ordinance and good luck at your next stop.
The commission finally passed Tuesday evening and sent to the city council its revised Landscape Ordinance. And when that unanimous vote (commissioners Lori Huey and Brad Growt did not attend) was recorded, a broad smile could be seen on Rubsam’s face as he raised both arms in the air.
"The landscape ordinance has been an issue for several years now," Rubsam told me after the commission’s two-hour, 24-minute meeting adjourned. "It’s been through many commissioners and we’ve had a lot of input, not only from the commissioners but also from the public. And I’m very pleased we’re going to move forward with this because I think it will streamline what we’ve been faced with granting variances in planning and zoning. It will clarify the rules for the builders in the future."
C’mon, Mike. Quit sounding like a government official. Tell us how you really feel right now.
"This is one of the best days I’ve had at the end of a P&Z meeting for a long time," he said, another broad smile lighting up his face.
The commissioners spent an hour going through the 21-page document making sure all five of them were pleased with every single word on every single page.
The most substantial discussion involved a section labeled "Exceptions" that read "In order to address atypical, site specific development/redevelopment challenges, the community development director and/or his/her designee is authorized to approve alternative compliance landscape plans when s/he determines that one or more of the following conditions are present" and then it listed four such conditions. Commissioner Timothy Kay wanted the commission to have that authority, not the "community development director and/or his/her designee."
Kay was also concerned about the next paragraph which said anyone "with standing" who didn’t like the staff’s decision to approve an alternative plan could appeal that decision to P&Z within 30 days. Kay wondered how anyone, outside the party who asked staff for the change, would even be aware a change had been made.
Although commissioner Dex Ellision said he agreed with Kay in theory he finally sided with the other three commissioners who said the driving motivation behind the revised ordinance was to keep P&Z from having to rule on all these requests. The commissioner also agreed that giving this responsibility to city staff would speed up the permitting process, something all developers everywhere clamor for (see the complaints of one such developer below). As for informing those "with standing" of a possible change, language was added so that once a change was requested, a sign reflecting that change request had to be posted on the property and the change could not be approved until at least 10 days after the posting of that sign.
That, and the word "Exceptions" was changed to "Variances."
The commissioners also recommended the council approve language amending the ordinances regarding impervious surfaces and postponed until their Oct. 11 meeting deciding the fate of two conditional use permits.
In the first conditional use permit case, the commissioners were concerned the north side of a proposed 9,000-square-foot retail center planned for the northbound frontage road of I-35, just north of the AMM Collision Center, did not contain the required masonry the city dictates must be on all buildings. The building’s owner, Dennis Artale, who said he hoped to lease a portion of the center for a restaurant and eventually construct a hotel just to the south of the center, said since all traffic would be driving north on the frontage road anyway, that side of the building wouldn’t be that visible. In addition, he said, a line of trees on the property line just beyond the building also obscured that side.
City planner William Atkinson said, however, everything Artale said was irrelevant. "The I-35 overlay standards have been in place for quite some time, prior to 2015," Atkinson told the commissioners. "To be honest it really shouldn’t be an issue that the four-side masonry on the north side needs to be in place. We go by our code and it’s a simple as that."
Needless to say, Artale was not happy with the entire process.
"This will end up raising the cost on the property in addition to the added wait time," he said. "I have never built anything in Kyle. This is my first experience and it hasn’t been a good one. I’ve built two retails in Buda off of 967 but I hadn’t built one here in Kyle yet. But it seems like the process takes a lot longer here. I don’t know if there is any way we can speed the process up because the small business person we have to get a loan to buy the land, the loan for the interim and all of that. It just adds more and more layers to the cost. Then we have to hope we can lease it out enough to make ends meet."
In the second case, involving a proposed 16,000-square foot blood bank across Kyle Parkway from Seton Medical Center, the commissioners were hesitant to act until the Board of Adjustments rules on the property owner’s request for additional parking places. That ruling is expected at the Board of Adjustments’ Oct. 3 meeting. The maximum allowable parking spaces for such a facility is 101. The blood bank, BioLife Plasma Services, is seeking 170, which their architect claimed, is the number needed to accommodate customer demand at all the other identical facilities the company has constructed around the country.
The big question on the impervious surface issue was whether a swimming pool filled with water could be considered an impervious surface. In the end, the commissioners decided it was.
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