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HomeMy WebLinkAboutStaff Report 301-07TO: FROM: City of Palo Alto C ty Ma ager’ Report HONORABLE CITY COUNCIL CITY MANAGER DEPARTMENT: PLANNING AND COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENT DATE: SUB3ECT: .JULY 30, 2007 CMR: 301:07 ZONING ORDINANCE UPDATE - ADOPTION OF AN ORDINANCE: A) CONSOLIDATING AND REVISING CHAPTERS 18.22, 18.24, AND 18.26 INTO A NEW CHAPTER 18.13 (MULTIPLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS: RM-15, RM-30, AND R3M-40); B) REORGANIZING AND REVISING CHAPTER 18.83 INTO NEW CHAPTERS 18.52 (OFF- STREET PARKING AND LOADING REGULATIONS) AND 18.54 (PARKING FACILITY DESIGN STANDARDS); C) CONSOLIDATING AND REVISING CHAPTERS 18.32, 18.71, AND 18.72 INTO A NEW CHAPTER 18.28 (SPECIAL PURPOSE DISTRICTS: PF, OS, AND AC); D) REVISING CERTAIN DEFINITIONS IN CHAPTER 18.04 DEFINITIONS); AND E) REVISING MISCELLANEOUS ZONING PROVISIONS TO PROVIDE FOR CLARIFICATION AND REFORMATTING OF THE ORDINANCE RECOMMENDATION Staff and the Planning and Trmasportation Commission (P&TC) recommend that the City Council adopt the attached ordinance to update, consolidate and reformat zoning provisions related to a) multi-family residential districts, b) parking and loading regulations and design, c) special purpose districts (including public facilities, open space, and agricultural conservation), d) definitions, and e) miscellaneous provisions of Title 18. BACKGROUND The City of Palo Alto has been updating its Zoning Ordinance (Title 18 of the Municipal Code) since early 2001. Substantial revisions have been completed and incorporated into the Code, including chapters related to R-! Single Family Residential Districts; Low Density Residential Districts; Office, Research. and Manufacturing Districts; Neighborhood, Cormnunity, and Se~wice Commercial Districts; Dov~aatown Commercial Districts; a Pedestrian Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) District; Performance Criteria for Multiple-Fanaily Residential, Commercial, Industrial, and Plamaed Community Districts; General Standards and Exceptions (including new criteria for landscaping, streana corridor protection, mad storm water quality protection); Standards for Special Uses (including new criteria for wireless communications facilities); and Permits and Approvals. CMR: 301:07 Page t of 10 The revisions to the Zoning Ordinance represent major steps forward in the implementation of numerous Comprehensive Plan policies, as well as providing for updated definitions and land uses and a more readable format. The format includes a single-column text (rather than the current two-columns) and include context-based desi~ criteria (form code provisions) for several chapters. Many of the changes also support the City’s priorities for retaining retail and other revenue-producing uses and for preparing and implementing sustainability and green building criteria. Si~iificant modifications include: Revisions to the R-1 single-family residential regulations to clarify terms, allow for small attached second dwelling units, mad incorporate provisions for Individual Review, Single Story Combining Districts, and Home hnprovement Exceptions (note: a companion award- wimling tectmical manual was compiled to further describe and illustrate terms and concepts outlined in the ordinance). Adoption of commercial/mixed use criteria in Commercial districts to better facilitate a mix of uses that reduce trips and encourage neighborhood walkability. Requirements for a minimum amount (0.15 FAR) of Retail Commercial for mixed use projects and prohibition of stand-alone residential uses in Commercial districts. Increased FAR allowances for hotel uses in the Commercial Neighborhood (CN) and Conmaercial Service (CS) zones to encourage those revenue-producing uses. Allowance for small markets or other retail in large multi-family residential projects, to minimize external retail and service trips. Adoption of a Pedestrian Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) district near the California Ave. Caltrain station, facilitating transit use and walkability in the neighborhood. Updated performance standards to address impacts of multi-family, commercial and industrial development on adjacent residences, particularly regarding noise and lighting, and requiring a conditional use permit for late night uses adjacent to residential areas. Requirements for notice to neighbors of new or increased hazardous materials on nearby sites. E~anced landscape requirements, including a requirement for 50% tree canopy cover over parking lots within 15 years. Stream corridor protection, including increased setbacks; and stoma water protection requirements, including the integration of storm water and landscape plmming. Standards for wireless communications facilities, addressing visual impacts, locational criteria, and the review process for such equipment. Addition of Comprehensive Plan Open Space criteria to the OS district zoning regulations. Context-based desi~ (form code) sections of the commercia!!mixed use, PTOD, and multi- family chapters of the code, including criteria related to landscape, permeable materials, stoma water, pedestrian and bike com~ections, sustainability, etc. Transportation demand management (TDM) criteria related to parking reductions, outlining possible TDM measures, performance standards, and monitoring. Upon Council adoption of the proposed revisions, staff will make modifications to fom~at the remainder of the ordinance consistent with the other chapters already approved, and con’ect section references and numbering to create a final version of the updated Zoning Ordinance. CMR: 30!:07 Page 2 of 10 Plalmina and Transportation Commission Review On January 31, March 14, mad April 1 !, 2007, the P&TC reviewed the proposed revisions to the Multi-Family Residential and Parking chapters. On April 11, the Commission recommended to the Council approval of draft chapters 18.13, 18.52, and 18.54 (Attaclm~ent A). The Commission staffreports and minutes are included as attactnnents to this CMR. On May 31 a~d June 13, 2007, the Commission discussed new chapters 18.28 and miscellaneous revisions to other sections of the Zoning Ordinance. On May 31, the Commission recommended approval of the miscellaneous revisions and on June 13 recommended approval of the Chapter 18.28, with focused discussion on the Open Space (OS) district. Those amendments are also encompassed in Attactm~ent A. The Commission staff reports and minutes are included as attactm~ents to the CMR. DISCUSSION Attactvnent A comprises a draft ordinance encompassing all of the proposed Zoning Ordinance revisions recommended by the Commission, including: 1.Adding a new Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts: RM-15, RM-30, and RM-40), and deleting existing Chapters 18.22, 18.24, and 18.26; 2.Adding new Chapters 18.52 (Parking a~d Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards) to replace current Chapter 18.83; 3. Adding a new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts: PF, OS, and AC) and deleting the cm-rent chapters related to those districts; 4. Revising several definitions for clarification; and 5. Providing for miscellaneous revisions to clarify the code, reformat and renumber code chapters and sections, and reconcile references to specific sections to match the revised code numbering sequence. The discussions below outline the key changes for each of the proposed chapters or sections. Multi-Family Districts (Chapter 18.13) Current regulations for multi-family residential zoning districts are contained within Chapters 18.22 (RM-15), 18.24 (P,M-30), and 18.26 (RM-40) of the Zoning Ordinance. Chapter 18.28 (Multi-Family Residence District Guidelines) has recently been deleted and supplanted by the new Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria), adopted by Council on February 5, 2007. Staff and the P&TC propose to consolidate the ttv’ee multi-family zone districts into a new Chapter 18.13, similar to the approach for the low-density residential, commercial and industrial districts. Attachment A includes the new chapter and Attactm~ent B provides a redlined version of the proposed new Chapter 18.13 related to Multiple Family Residential Districts. The redlined version outlines the substm~tive changes to existing provisions, but does not detail verbatim modifications due to the extensive reformatting of the current chapters. The most significant revisions to current multi-family residence regulations include: Deletion of the daylight plane requirement next to sites zoned and used for non-residential development. Daylight plane requirements would still apply where a building is adjacent to an existing residential (R-1, R-2, P,~M) zone or residential use. CMR: 301:07 Page 3 of 10 Allowance for substandard lots of less than 70 feet in width to reduce the side setback to 6 feet, but not closer than the required setback on an adjacent lot, in order to provide flexibility in development of these lots. Allowance of tandem spaces for parking in multi-family zones, subject to the tandem space being located behind a space desi~ated for the same dwelling unit, and subject to not more than 25% of the spaces on a site being tandem. Continued exclusion of parking fi’om floor area calculations, but only up to a maximum of 230 square feet per covered parking space. A modest allowance for neighborhood retail and service uses within large residential complexes (40 units or greater) subject to approval of a conditional use permit. The size of the support uses would be limited to a maximum of 3% of the total floor area or 5,000 squae feet of commercial space, whichever is less, and a maximmn of 2,500 square feet per business establistvnent. In addition, a minimum of 1,500 square feet of neighborhood retail or services may be required where the Director detem~ines that neighborhood commercial services are not available within 500 feet of the site. The commercial square footage is proposed to be exempt from FAR limits to encourage such support uses. A list of allowable uses is included in the ordinance to limit the potential for more regional uses or uses likely to impact residents. Addition of a Context-Based Desi~ Criteria section (similar to that developed for other chapters) to illustrate desired desi~ and compatibility concepts, including for Village Residential use. Revision to the BMR section to reflect cunent BMR and Comprehensive Plan policy requiring 15% BMR units (20% for sites in excess of 5 acres in size). Requirement that, where 3 or more units exist, at least 2 of which are rentals, those units may not be demolished or replaced unless replaced by an equal number of rentals or the maximum number of rental units allowed by zoning density. This provision is intended to preclude the loss of rental housing pursuant to Comprehensive Plan prod’am H-29, or at least only to the extent that the site density is reduced to confom~ with density requirements. Individual Review for single-family or two-family residences in multi-fancily zone districts, where the interior side lot line of the site abuts the interior side or rear lot line of a single- family or two-family zone or use. The purview of the Individual Review process would be to evaluate the relationship between the adjacent low density residential uses and, to a lesser extent, streetscape compatibility. Provision for Village Residential fee ownership housing tbges in the RM-15 district, substandard size lots in RM-30 and RM-40 districts, or at the perimeter of large sites as a transition to low density residential areas. The housing could be attached or detached (small lots), and would generally have to meet RM-15 standards (F,a~R, coverage, open space, height, etc.) for the entire development site, including setbacks and daylight planes at the site perimeter. A maximum density of 12 units per acre is prescribed and maxin~mn house size is limited to 2,500 square feet (including attached parking). Provisions are also included to assure that the site is plam~ed as a ~vhole and that a process for subsequent modifications is outlined in the initial approval. Parking Regulations (Chapters 18.52 and I8.54] Parking requirements are cunently contained in Chapter 18.83 of the Zoning Ordinance. Attactvnent A includes the revised new chapters, and Attactm~ent C comprises a redlined version of the new Chapters 18.52 and 18.54 related to parking regulations and desi~. The redlined CMR: 301:07 Page 4 of 10 versions reflect substantive revisions to the regulations, not verbatim changes, since the chapters have been consolidated, rearranged, and reformatted. Staff m~d the P&TC propose a number of relatively minor changes to parking regulations and desi~ criteria. Parking rates (numbers of spaces per unit or square foot, etc.) are only modified where necessary to clari~ a complex or inconsistent rate. The most si~lificant revisions to current parking regulations include: Splitting the current Chapter 18.83 into two chapters: Parking and Loading Regulations (Chapter 18.52) and Parking Facility Desi~ Standards (Chapter 18.54). This allows for easier reading of the regulations and a more logical organization of the requirements. Deletion of allowances for "compact" parking spaces, instead requiring all spaces to be of a "uni-class" size (8.5’ x 17.5’). Limiting multiple parking reductions, establishing a maximum cumulative percent reduction, and requiring a parking analysis in most cases to justin, parldng reductions. Automatic parking reductions for providing additional bike parking would be eliminated, but added bicycle facilities may support a TDM pro~am reduction. A potential parking reduction for affordable housing and SROs is added. Addition of TDM requirements in most cases when parking adjustments are requested, as well as for CEQA mitigation. The TDM section also includes extensive details of development, monitoring and enforcement of TDM pro~’ams, including a list of potential TDM measures, two and five year rnonitoring reports, and requirements for future modifications if performance targets are not achieved. Traffic-reducing housing, ~een parking priorities, and parking cashout are listed as prospective TDM approaches. Revision of the tl’n’eshold to request a mixed use parking reduction to 10 spaces (rather than 30 spaces). Allowance for tandem parking in multi-family zones, subject to the limitations noted above in the multi-family discussion. Changing the bicycle parking ratios to be independent of the vehicle parking rates, and to base the requirements instead on square footage, nmnber of units, or number of employees. Also, outdated references to T?ge I and Type II bike racks are updated to Bike Racks (short term) and Lockers (long term), respectively. Outdated references to Type IIt requirements are deleted. These changes were prepared by the City’s bicycle consultant and were reviewed by the Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee. Incorporation of the 50% tree canopy in 15 years standard in the landscape section, as well as reference to the newly adopted landscape requirements of Section 18.40.130. Provisions in Section 18.54.050(d) to specify that paving materials may be pen-neable and encouraging integration of parking and stormwater management. Modification of the tables and figures at the end of Chapter 18.54 to eliminate those that dealt with metric measurements, standard size spaces, and compact spaces. Remaining tables and figures are only those pertinent to uni-class spaces, handicapped accessible spaces, and driveway desi~. Special Purpose (PF, OS, and AC) Districts (Chapter 18.28) A new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) has been prepared (Attaclm~ent A), consolidating the Public Facilities (PF), Open Space (OS), and Agricultural Conservation (AC) districts from the current code. The format for the chapter is similar to that provided for other CMR: 301:07 Page 5 of 10 chapters, including tables outlining allowable uses a~d required development standards. A redlined version of the chapter is provided as Attactm~ent D. No substantive changes are suggested for the Public Facilities or Agricultural Conservation districts. TMee key revisions are made to the Open Space (OS) zone, however: A new section 18.28.070(1) is added to clari~l that, with respect to impervious cover limitations in the OS zone, all paved surfaces (including semi-pervious paving) count as impera4ous surface limitations, except !) ~avel driveways and 2) portions of driveways across scenic setbacks (e.g., along Page Mill Road). The P&TC included this requirement so that excess impe~wious cover gained by using semi-pervious surfaces could not be added to the residence to increase house size. The P&TC directed that staff assemble a working ~oup of OS district residents, open space advocates, and staff to evaluate potential approaches to credit semi-permeable materials against impeiwious cover in conjunction with maximum house size, FAR, or other new regulations to assure that house size retains an appropriate scale. The P&TC members stated that the impervious cover language would in effect maintain the restriction where it was up until recent advances in pervious materials, and that larger house sizes have been the unintended consequence of credits against impervious cover. ,Q~ OS working Doup will report back to the P&TC within 90 days of Council’s adoption of the ZOU amendments. A new section 18.28.070(m) is added to require that projects in the OS zone comply with the open space criteria outlined in the Comprehensive Plan. These 12 criteria emphasize inte~ation of the development with the natural enviromnent with respect to vegetation and landscaping, ~’ading and topo~’aphy, views, materials, lighting and access. Inclusion of the Open Space criteria in the Zoning Ordinance will assure that they are more readily apparent to applicants, staff and the public. Subsections of Section 18.28.070 were added related to landscaping (subsection d) of natural areas and maintenance of plantings to provide reference to landscape criteria elsewhere in the code and to incorporate a standard condition of landscape maintenance into the OS code. A similar standard condition for lighting and glare was added as well (subsection n). Definitions and Miscellaneous Revisions Staff and the P&TC propose a number of revisions as specified in Attactm~ent A (and further delineated in Attacbanents E and F) to current definitions in Chapter 18.04 and miscellaneous other provisions of the Zoning Ordinance. Most are relatively minor changes to definitions or a variety of regulations ttzroughout the code, primarily oriented to clarify or conect existing language, but with a few more substantive changes. The more substantive revisions include: Clarifying that the measurement of basement walls above ~ade should be fronl the existing or finished ~ade, whichever is lower. This change would prevent someone from backfilling against a basement wall to discount the basement, having the effect of increasing the apparent height and floor area of the structure. Requiring Individual Review for second story development in the R-2 and P,5/ID distl-icts, except where ARB review is already required for second dwellings on RMD lots. Allowing zoning text amendments to be initiated by a property owner, in addition to the P&TC or Council. A property owner can already initiate a map change and this would al!ow for a text change as well. CMR: 301:07 Page 6 of 10 Providing a new Section 18.42.120 to specify criteria for "resource-conserving energy facilities" that would be exempt from floor area and coverage requirements of the code. These facilities, such as cogeneration or fuel cell generation, would be limited in size to 3,000 square feet of floor area and 6,000 square feet of coverage, would require architectural review, and would be subject to all provisions of the recently adopted Performance Criteria (Chapter 18.23), particularly those related to noise and visual impacts. The definition of "gross floor area" is revised to reflect exemptions for resource-conser~4ng energy facilities, such as small cogeneration facilities, subject to the limitations outlined in the new section 18.42.120. These provisions would help accommodate alternative energy approaches consistent with the City’s sustainability goals. Deleting the Floodplain (F) District Regulations (cunent Chapter 18.74) of the ordinance. This zoning desi~ation has never been applied to any site and would only be applicable in the Baylands area, where other protective zoning for public or open space lands already exists. Staff does not believe that it is purposeful to retain this district. Revising the Hotel (H) Combining District to allow it to be applied to the CN and the research/manufacturing zones (ROLM, R_P, and GM), and deleting its applicability in the CS and CC zones. The current district only has the effect of appl~ng the overlay in the CS and CC zone and the only change it provides is to allow an FAR of 0.6:1 in those zones. Hotels are now permitted uses in the CS and CC zones and have specific FARs that are applicable in each, so the FAR provision is now irrelevant. The CN, ROLM, RP, and GM zones, however, do not currently allow hotels or application of the (H) overlay, but there may be limited circumstances where the City deems hotels to be appropriate in those zones. The revised standards would allow for a maxinmm F.&R of 1.0:1 in the CN zone and 2.0:1 in the other zones, but would also require rezoning to apply the (H) overlay mad Site and Desi~ Review for each site that is rezoned. Revising the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) regulations pertaining to City-owned historic properties to allow "ba~ing" of bonus square footage from an eligible City-owned historic structure for later sale as TDR for use on other eligible City-owned properties. Adding a new subsection (g) to the Architectural Review provisions to preclude demolition of structures subject to Architectural Review prior to approval of the entitlement application, except where health and safety necessitate demolition. This has been a long-standing practice, but is not currently codified. Adding a maximun~ number of garage spaces (4) allowed as an accessory use for a single family residence in the R- 1 district, under section 18.12.080 (a). Reformatting all of the remaining chapters of the Zoning Ordinance to a format similar to that used for the ZOU to date, and renumbering the chapters and sections to follow the Table of Contents proposed as Attaclm~ent G. The chapters that have already been updated by the Commission and Council are shown in bold in the proposed Table of Contents. Revising all section references to reflect the renumbering of the code chapters and sections. Zoning_ Issues for Future Evaluation Staff reco~aizes that there are a number of zoning-related issues that have not been addressed in the Zoning Ordinance Update, but are intended for future review or at least deserve discussion. Some of these items may need to be defened until after the Comprehensive Plan is updated, but staff expects to bring high priority revisions forward as time and resources pen-nit. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, and the Council may wish to add to the list to assure it is CMR: 301:07 Page 7 of 10 more inclusive. The items are listed approximately in what staff believes is priority order based on Council and Connnission direction: Evaluating potential additional criteria in the Open Space (OS) district, in concert with area residents, open space advocates, and the P&TC. Establishing Neen building criteria (compliance with green building checklists) to implement the Council’s recent policy direction (note: a requirement for submittal of LEED checklists and an ARB finding related to sustainable desi~ are scheduled for Council review on August 6). Revising the Plamaed Community (PC) zone to clarify the review procedure and to outline the role and scope of "public benefits" in PC requests. Better defining mad limiting Desi~a Erd~ancement Exceptions (DEEs), similar to the approach used to refine criteria for Home Improvement Exceptions (HIEs). Providing additional criteria for landscape treatrnents in or near natural areas and transitions fiom open space to developed sites, such as in the Research Park. Revisiting "cottage cluster" housing options and criteria in the R-1 and multi-family districts, including incentives to retain existing cottage cluster development. Developing additional incentives or requirements for retaining existing rental housing. Evaluating potential for a University Avenue Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) Zoning District. Providing for im~ovative parking strategies or pro~ams to reduce the need for parking. Evaluating the feasibility of conservation districts to outline specific standards for neighborhoods or areas of the city. Identifying potential zoning map changes where existing zone districts may no longer be appropriate, such as using ROLM instead of GM for some sites. Next Steps Upon Council adoption of the proposed revisions, staff will make modifications to format the remainder of the ordinance consistent with the other chapters already approved, and correct section references and nulnbering to create a final version of the updated Zoning Ordinance. Staff will also modify the graphics in the ordinance (particularly the context-based desi~ sections) to assure they are more readable. Staff expects to complete the revisions within 30-45 days to produce a final updated Zoning Ordinance for public distribution. Staff has initiated background work on the update of the Comprehensive Plan and will devote Advance Plamaing staff., supplemented with consultant assistance as necessary, to this effort. The Zoning Ordinance is and should be a d)~amic docmnent, however, reflecting the City’s changing priorities and circumstances and implementing revisions to the Comprehensive Plan. Staff wilt process subsequent zoning amendments, such as those listed in the preceding section, according to Council priorities and available staff resources. Staff further anticipates producing am~ual reports of the effectiveness of the updated zoning provisions, with recommendations for needed amendments. RESOURCE IMPACT The proposed zoning revisions will have little, if any, resource impact on the City of Palo Alto. The new measures generally provide for minor modification to existing uses and standads, ordinance clarifications, reformatting, and cleanup to reconcile inconsistencies. Allm~ able land CMR: 301:07 Page 8 of 10 uses and intensity/density of use would not be substantially changed. Multiple family residential revisions would allow for Neater flexibility for development on small lots, resulting in minimal increase in density. Small an~ounts of retail or setwice uses would be permitted within large multi-family developments, but are not expected to generate measurable sales tax revenue increases. Village residential provisions would provide flexibility for ownership housing in zones, but would not result in increased density. Parking revisions would allow greater potential to allow parking reductions, but would be restricted in other ways so that overall parking changes would be minor. Other revisions to the Open Space district and various miscellaneous sections of the code acconvnodate flexibility in desi~a, clari~~ code provisions, or provide for reformatting, but would not have a resource impact or result in changes in land uses, density or intensity. Minor incremental staff costs will be incurred in the review and enforcement of development proposals to implement these additional requirelnents. These costs will generally be recovered in application permit fees, however. POLICY IMPLICATIONS The Zoning Ordinance Update is intended to bring the Zoning Ordinance into compliance with the 1998-2010 Comprehensive Plata. Staff and the Conm~ission believe that the proposed amendments reflect the intent and policies of the Comprehensive Plan to provide for increased housing choices, protect existing rental units, assure compatibility with residential neighborhoods, implement reduced parking and transportation demand management strategies, protect and assure compatible landscaping in open space lands, and to facilitate mixed use and other sustainability concepts. ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW The proposed modifications to the Zoning Ordinance would not affect the intensity of development pemaitted, and would provide ~’eater enviromnental protection regarding the potential impacts of development. The anaendments are consistent with the policies and programs outlined in the Comprehensive Plan and with the Comprehensive Plan EIR. PREPARED BY: CURTIS WILLIAMS Assistant Director of P,l~tming a~d~nmaunity E, nvirotm~ent DEP.~TMENT HE~ !S?EV~/EMSLIE " Direct& of PMming and Community Enviromnent CITY MANAGER APPROVAL: EMILY Assistant City Manager CMR: 301:07 Page 9 of 10 ATTACHMENTS Attaclmaent A: Attaclmaent B: Attactmaent C: Attaclm~ent D: Attactmaent E: Attaclvnent F: Attactvnent G: Attaclmaent H: Draft Ordinance Redlined Version of Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential) Redlined Version of Chapters 18.52 and 18.54 (Parldng) Redlined Version of Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) Proposed Revisions to Chapter 18.04 (Definitions) Miscellaneous Revisions to Title 18 Revised Title 18 Table of Contents Electronic Letter fiom Leonard Lelmaa~m dated July 9, 2007 Under Separate Cover: January 31, 2007 P&TC StaffReport and Minutes March 14, 2007 P&TC Staff Report and Minutes April 11, 2007 P&TC Staff Report and Minutes May 30, 2007 P&TC StaffReport and Minutes June 13, 2007 P&TC Staff Report and Minutes COURTESY COPIES Plamaing and Transportation Commission :-~chitectural Review Board Doug Moran, Barron Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen \\qaite, Duveneck/St. Francis Neighborhood Association Ramsey Shuayto, Stanford University Land, Buildings, and Real Estate CMR: 301:07 Page 10 of 10 ATTACHMENT A NOT YET APPROVED ORDINANCE NO. ORDINANCE OF TI~ COU~,rCIL OF THE CITY OF PALO ALTO AMENDING TITLE 18 [ZONING] OF THE PALO ALTO MUNICIPAL CODE DELETING CHAPTERS 18.22, 18.24 AND 18.26 AND ADDING CHAPTER 18.13 [MULTIPLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS: RM-15, RM-30 AND RM-40]; DELETING CHAPTER 18.83 AND ADDING CHAPTERS 18.52 [OFF-STREET PARKING AN~D LOADING REGULATIONS] AND 18.54 [PARKING FACILITY DESIGN STANDARDS]; DELETING CHAPTERS 18.32, 18.7i, AND 18.72 AI’¢D ADDING CHAPTER 18.28 [SPECIAL PURPOSE DISTRICTS]; AMEN~DING DEFINITIONS IN CHAPTER 18.04 (DEFINITIONS); AND AMENDING MISCELLANEOUS ZONING PROVISIONS TO PROVIDE CLARWICATION AN~D TO REFORMAT Tt~ ORDINANCE The Council of the City of Palo Alto does ORDAIN as follows: SECTION 1. Findings and Declarations. The City Council finds and declares as follows: (a) That in December 2000, the City Council approved a work plan for the Zoning Ordinance Update involving the preparation of a new Title 18 (Zoning Code) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code (PAMC), including the update of existing land use chapters and processes as well as the preparation of chapters for new and revised land uses; (b) The 1998-2010 Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan includes several pro~ams and policies related to multi-family residential development, parking standards and open space protection. The Zoning Ordinance Update was initiated in part to accomplish these programs and policies. (c) The last comprehensive update of the Palo Alto Zoning Code took place in 1978. Provisions for multi-family residential development, parking standards and open space protection in that update do not respond to current Comprehensive Plan goals and Council priorities. (d) The 1978 Zoning Code update and subsequent amendments also do not address changes in land uses and City Council priorities that exist today, and the ordinance is not presented in a format that is orderly and readily understood by its various users. SECTION 2. Chapters 18.22 (RM-15 Low Density Multiple-Family Residence District Regulations), 8.24 (RM-30 Medium Density Multiple-Family Residence District Regulations), and 1826 (RM-40 High Density Multiple-Family Residence District Regulations) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code is hereby deleted and Chapter t8.13 (Multiple Family Residential District: RM15, RM-30, and RM-40) is hereby added to read as follows: 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED Chapter 18.13 MULTIPLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS (RM-15, RM-30, AND RM-40) Sections: !8.13.010 18.13.020 18.13.030 18.13.040 18.13.050 18.13.060 18.13.070 Purposes Applicable Regulations Land Uses Development Standards Village Residential Development Multiple Family Context-Based Design Criteria Grandfathered Uses 18.13.010 Purposes This section specifies regulations for three multiple family residential districts. (a) RM-15 Low Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-15] The RM-15 low-density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance areas for a mixture of single-family and multiple-family housing which is compatible with lower density and residential districts nearby, including single-family residence districts. The RM-15 residence district also serves as a transition to moderate density multiple-family districts or districts with nonresidential uses. Permitted densities in the RM-15 residence district range from eight to fifteen dwetling units per acre. (b)RM-30 Medium Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-30] The RM-30 medium density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance neighborhoods for multiple-family housing with site development standards and visual characteristics intended to mitigate impacts on nearby lower density residential districts. Projects at this density are intended for larger parcels that will enable developments to provide their own parking spaces and to meet their open space needs in the form of garden apartments or cluster developments. Permitted densities in the RM-30 residence district range from sixteen to thirty dwelling units per acre. (c)RM-40 High Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-40] The RM-40 high density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance locations for apartment living at the highest density deemed appropriate for Palo Alto. The most suitable locations for this district are in the downtown area, in select sites in the California Avenue area and along major transportation corridors which are close to mass transportation facilities and major employment and service centers. Permitted densities in the RM-40 residence district range from thirty-one to forty dwelling units per acre. 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED 18.13.020 Applicable Regulations The specific regulations of this chapter and the additional regulations and procedures established by other pertinent chapters in Title 18 shall apply to all multiple-family residence districts. 18.13.030 Land Uses Table 1 specifies the permitted and conditionally permitted land uses in the multiple-family residence districts. Table h Multiple Family Residential Uses ACCESSORY AN~ SUPPORT USES Accessory Facilities and uses customarily incidental to permitted uses Home Occupations, when accessory to permitted residential uses Horticulture, Gardening, and Growing of food products for consumption by occupants of a site Surface Parking Facilities located on abandoned railroad rights-of-way EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS, ANI) ASSEMBLY USES Churches and Religious Institutions Private Clubs, Lodges, or Fraternal Organizations, excluding any such facility operated as a business for profit Private Educational Facilities P P CUP CUP P P P CUP cup CUP P P P CUP cUP cUP cUP PUBLIC/QUASI-PUBLIC USES Community Centers CUP CUP CUP Utility Facilities essential to provision of utility services but excluding construction CUP CUP CUPor storage yards, maintenance facilities, or .corporation yard.~.. ...................................... RECREATION USES Neighborhood Recreational Centers CUP CUP CUP RESIDENTIAL USES Single-Family Two-Family P~> Multiple-Family P Village Residential P Mobile Homes P Residential Care Homes P P (37 P P SERVICE AND RETAIL USES P Chapter 18.40 Chapter 18.42 18.13.050 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED [ Subject to Regulations in: Convalescent Facilities CUP Day Care Centers CUP CUP P ...... Small Family Day Care Homes P P P Large Family Day Care Homes P P P Small Adult Day Care Homes P P P Large Adult Day Care Homes CUP CUP CUP Eating and Drinking Services, except CUP CUP 18.13.040(f)drive-in and take-out services Personal Services and Retail Services of a CUP CUP 18.13.040(f)neighborhood-servin~ nature TEMPORARY USES Temporary Uses, subject to regulations in CUP CUP CUP 18.42.050Current Code Chapter 18.42.050 P = Permitted Use CUP = C0ndi.~ional Us~ Permit RequireO ................ <1~ Permitted use only on lots less than 8,500 square feet in size. (:) Permitted use only on lots less than 6,000 square feet in size. <3/Permitted use only if lot is substandard in size, e.g., less than 8,500 square feet or less than 70 feet in width, or at the perimeter of a site in excess of one acre where used as a transition to low-density residential area. 18.13.(140 Development Standards (a)Site specifications, building size and bulk, and residential density The site development regulations in Table 2 shall apply in the multiple-family residence districts, provided that more restrictive regulations may be recommended by the Architectural Review Board and approved by the Director of Planning and Community Environment, pursuant to the regulations set forth in Chapter 18.76, performance criteria set forth in Chapter 18.23, and the context-based design criteria set forth in Section 18.13.060. 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED Table 2: Multiple Family Residential Development Table Minimum Si~ S~dfications Site Area (ft2) Site Width (ft) Site Depth (ft) Substandard Lot Specifications Site Area (ft2) Site Width (ft) Minimum Setbacks Front Yard (ft) On arterial roadways Interior Side Yards (ft) For lots with width of 70 feet or greater For lots with width of less than 70 feet Interior Rear Yards (ft) Street Side and Street Rear Yards (ft) Maximum Height (ft) Maximum height for those portions of a site within 50 feet of a more restrictive residential district or a site containing a residential use in a nonresidential district Daylight Planes(7) Daylight Plane for side and rear lot lines for sites abutting any R-l, R-2, RMD, or RM-15 district or abutting a site containing a single- family or two-family residential use in a nonresidential district: Initial Height (ft) Angle (degrees) Daylight Plane for side and rear lot lines for sites abutting a RM-30, RM-40, Planned Community, or nonresidential district that does not contain a single-family or two-family residential use: For lots with width of 70 feet or greater For lots with width of less than 70 feet, limited to the first 10 feet from the property line (no daylight plane beyond 10 feet): Initial Height (ft) Angle (de~ees) Maximum Site Coverage: Base RM-15 RAI-30 RM-40 8,500 70 100 Less than 8,500 square feet and/or Hess than 70 feet in width Setback lines imposed by a special setback map pursuant to Chapter 20.08 of this code may apply 20 0_20(1) 10 10 16 20 0-25(1) 0_20(1)0_25(!) 10 10 6 feet 10 10 16 0-16(2) 35 403O 10 45 Subject to regulations in: None 35 10 35%40%45% 18.13.040(b) 070717 syn 0120245 5 NOT YET APPROVED Subject to R31-15 regulations in: Additional area permitted to be covered by covered patios or overhangs otherwise in 5% ,, comPliance with all applicable laws ........ Maximum Floor Area Ratio (F,AR)~4)0.5:1 Maximum Residential Density (units) 1~I-30 5% 0.6:1 3O 30 150 75 RM-40 5% !.0:1 40 20 18.13.040(e) 100 50 t 8. ! 3.040(e) 5O Maximum number of units per acre~3) ,,,15 , Minimum Site Open Space~s) (percent)35 Minimum Usable Open Space (sf per unit)<5)200 Minimum common open space (sf per unit)100 Minimum private o en space (sf per unit)50 , 50 Performance Criteria [ See provisions of Chap!er !8.~"Ch. 18.23 Landscape Requii?ements ......... ........ ......18.40.130 P.ar -k_ing~6).’ ....See provisions, of Chapter 18.52 Ch. 18.~2 {a) Minimum front s~"ibacks shall be determined by the Architectural Review Board upon review pursuant to criteria set forth in Chapter 18.76 and the context-based criteria outlined in Section 18.13.060.c-~ Minimum street side setbacks in the ILM-40 zone may be from 0 to 16 feet and shall be determined by the Architectural Review Board upon review pursuant to criteria set forth in Chapter 18.76 and the context-based criteria outlined in Section 18.13.060.~3~ Provided that, for any lot of 5,000 square feet or greater, two units are allowed, subject to compliance with all other development regulations.<z> Covered parking is not included as floor area in multi-family development, up to a maximum of 230 square feet per required parking space that is covered. Covered parking spaces in excess of required parking spaces count as floor area.<5) Subject to the limitations of Section 18.13.040(e). Usable open space is included as part of the minimum site open space; required usable open space in excess of the minimum required for common and private open space may be used as either common or private usable open space; landscaping may count towards total site open space after usable open space requirements are met.<6) Tandem parking is allowed for any, unit requiring two parking spaces, provided that both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit. For projects with more than four (4) units, not more than 25% of the required parking spaces shall be in a tandem configuration.<7) Each daylight plane applies specifically and separately to each property line according to the adiacent use. (b)Setbacks, Daylight Planes and Height - Additional Requirements and Exceptions (1)Setbacks (A)Setbacks for lot lines adjacent to an arterial street, expressway or freeway, as designated in the Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan, shall be a minimum of twenty- five feet (25’), except that lesser setbacks may be allowed or required by the Planning Director, upon recommendation by the Architectural Review Board, where prescribed by the context-based criteria outlined in Section 18.13.060. Special setbacks of greater than 25 feet may not be reduced except upon approval of a design enhancement exception or variance. (B) 070717 syn 0120245 Required parking spaces shall not be located in a required front yard, nor in the first ten feet (10’) adjoining the street property line of a required street side yard. 6 NOT YET APPROVED (C)Projections into yards are permitted only to the extent allowed by Section 18.40.070 of this code. (2)Height and Daylight Planes (a) (B) Exceptions to maximum height limitations are permitted only to the extent allowed by Section 18.40.090 of this code. The following features may extend beyond the daylight plane established by the applicable district, provided that such features do not exceed the height limit for the district unless permitted to by Section 18.40.090 of this code: i.Television and radio antennas; ii. iii. Chimneys and flues that do not exceed 5 feet in width, provided that chimneys do not extend past the required daylight plane a distance exceeding the minimum allowed pursuant to Chapter 16.04 of this code. Cornices and eaves, excluding flat or continuous walls or enclosures of usable interior space, provided such features do not extend past the daylight plane more than 4 feet, and so long as they do not encroach into the side setback greater than 2 feet. (c)Single-Family and Two-Family Uses (1)The regulations in Chapter 18.12 that apply to the R-1 district shall apply to sites in single-family use in the multiple-family residence districts. The regulations in Chapter 18.10 that apply to the R-2 district may be applied, at the applicant’s discretion, to sites in two-family use in the multiple-family residence districts, in lieu of the multi-family standards. (2)The Individual Review provisions of Section 18.12.110 of the Zoning Ordinance shall be applied to any single-family or two-family residence in the multi-family districts, to those sides of a site that share an interior side lot line with the interior side or rear lot line of a property zoned for or used for single-family or two-family dwellings. The Individual Review shall not be applied to adjacent uses other than single-family and two-family uses. (d)Substandard Lots (e) Substandard lots in the multiple family zoning districts are those that are: 1) less than the minimum 8,500 square feet in size, or 2) less than 70 feet in width. These lots may be developed pursuant to the regulations outlined in Table 2 or may be developed according to the regulations provided for Village Residential development, as outlined in Section 18.13.050. Single-family and two-family development on these lots shall be developed as outlined in subsection (c) above. Usable Open Space The following usable open space regulations shall apply: (1)Required Minimum Site Open Space. Each site shall, at a minimum, have a portion of the site, as prescribed in Table 2, developed into permanently maintained open 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (f) (2) space Site open space includes all usable open space plus landscape or other uncovered areas not used for driveways, parking, or walkways. Usable Open Space (Private and Common). Each project shall, at a minimum, have a portion of the site, as prescribed in Table 2, developed into permanently maintained usable open space, including private and common usable open space areas. Usable open space shall be located protected from the activities of commercial areas and adjacent public streets and shall provide noise buffering from surrounding uses where feasible. Parking, driveways and required parking lot landscaping shall not be counted as usable open space. (A)Private Usable Open Space. Each dwelling unit shall have at least one private usable open space area contiguous to the unit that allows the occupants of the unit the personal use of the outdoor space. The minimum size of such areas shall be as follows: (i)Balconies (above ground level): 50 square feet, the least dimension of which shall is 6 feet. (ii)Patios or yards in the RM-15 and RM-30 districts: 100 square feet, the least dimension of which is 8 feet for at least 75% of the area. (iii)Patios or yards in the RM-40 district: 80 square feet, the least dimension of which is 6 feet for at least 75% of the area. (B)Common Usable Open Space. The minimum designated common open space area on the site shall be !0 feet wide and each such designated area shall comprise a minimum of 200 square feet. In the RM-30 and RM-40 districts, part or all of the required private usable open space areas may be added to the required common usable open space in a development, for purposes of improved design, privacy, protection and increased play area for children, upon a recommendation of the Architectural Review Board and approval of the Director. Personal Services, Retail Services, and Eating and Drinking Services in the RM-30 and RM-40 districts Within a single residential development containing not less than 40 dwelling units, personal services, retail services, and eating and drinking services solely of a neighborhood-serving nature to residents in the development or in the general vicinity of the project may be allowed upon approval of a conditional use permit, subject to the following limitations and to such additional conditions as may be established by the conditional use permit: (1)Total gross floor area of all such uses shall not exceed 5,000 square feet or three percent of the gross residential floor area within the development, whichever is smaller, and may not occupy any level other than the ground level or below grade levels. (2)A maximum of 2,500 square feet of retail and/or service and/or eating and drinking uses shall be allowed per establishment. 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (4) (6) (7) (8) Personal services, retail services, and eating and drinking services provided in accordance with this section shall not be included in the gross floor area for the site. The Conditional Use Permit for the project may preclude certain uses and shall include conditions that are appropriate to limit impacts of noise, lighting, odors, parking and trash disposal from the operation of the commercial establishment. The hours of operation shall be limited to assure compatibility with the residential use and surrounding residential uses. Allowable Neighborhood-Serving Uses. A neighborhood-serving use primarily serves individual consumers and households, not businesses, is generally pedestrian oriented in design, and does not generate noise, fumes or truck traffic greater than that typically expected for uses with a local customer base. A neighborhood-serving use is also one to which a significant number of local customers and clients can walk, bicycle or travel short distances, rather than relying primarily on automobile access or the provider of the goods or services traveling off-site. Allowable neighborhood-serving personal services, retail services and eating and drinking services may include, but are not limited to, "agent" dry cleaners, flower shops, convenience grocery stores (excluding liquor stores), delicatessens, cafes, fitness facilities, day care facilities, and similar uses found by the Planning Director to be compatible with the intent of this provision. Sign programs, including size, number, color, placement, etc. shall be permitted only as specified in the conditional use pe~rnit and by the Planning Director upon recommendation of the Architectural Review Board Off-street parking and bicycle facilities, in addition to facilities required for residential uses, shall be provided as may be specified by the conditional use permit. However, there shall not be less than one parking space for each employee working or expected to be working at the same time. For any project containing forty (40) or greater units and located more than 500 feet from neighborhood commercial services, as determined by the Director, a minimum of 1,500 square feet of neighborhood serving retail, personal service, and/or eating or drinking uses shall be provided, subject to the above limitations. No conditional use permit is required, but the commercial use shall be reviewed by the Architectural Review Board as part of the architectural review approval. A minimum of one parking space for each employee working or expected to be working at the same time shall be provided. (g)Below Market Rate Units and Rental Housing Protection (1)In developments of five or more units on sites of less than five acres, not less than fifteen percent (15%) of the units shall be provided at below-market rates (BMR) to very-low, low and moderate income households in accordance with Program H-36 of the Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan Housing Element. In developments of five or more units on sites of five acres or more, not less than twenty percent (20%) of the units shall be provided at below-market rates (BMR). Specified percentages are applied to all proposed units in a project, including those designated as BMR units. 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (2)Further details of the BMR program requirements, including their applicability ~o subdivisions and for density bonus purposes, are found in the discussion of Programs H-36 and H-38 of the Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan Housing Element. (3)For any multi-family zoned site on which three (3) or more units exist, where at least two (2) of the units are rentals, the units may not be demolished or replaced unless: (A) Replaced by an identical or greater number of rental units; or (B)Replaced by the maximum number of rental units allowed on the site under the maximum zoning density permitted. (h)Performance Criteria In addition to all other provisions of this Chapter, all multi-family development shall comply with applicable provisions of Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria for Multiple Family, Commercial, Industria! and Planned Community Districts). 18.13.050 Village Residential Development (a)Purpose Village Residential multiple-family development is intended to create, preserve and enhance areas for a mixture of single-family and multiple-family housing that is compatible with lower density and residential districts nearby, including single-family residence districts. Housing types may include but are not limited to single family houses on small lots, attached rowhouse!townhouse, and cottage clusters. Village Residential development also serves as a transition to moderate density multiple-family districts or districts with nonresidential uses. Permitted densities range from eight to twelve dwelling units per acre. Village Residential housing also provides a means to accommodate home ownership options in multiple-family zones. (b)Applicability of Regulations Village Residential development standards may be applied to RM-15 multiple-family residence district sites, as well as to substandard RM-30 and RM-40 multiple-family residence sites. It may also be applied to the perimeter of RM-30 and RM-40 sites larger than one acre in size where a transition to a lower-density adjacent use is desired. The Director may require the submittal of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs), maintenance agreements, easements, and!or other legal instruments to document and disclose conditions of the project approval. (c)Development Standards Table 3 specifies the development standards for new Village Residential developments that provide for individual lots established for sale of one housing unit on a lot. These developments shall be designed and constructed in compliance with the following requirements and the context-based design criteria outlined in Section 18,13.060, provided that more restrictive regulations may be recommended by the architectural review board and approved by the director of planning and community environment, pursuant to Section 18.76.020: 070717 syn 0120245 10 NOT YET APPROVED Table 3: Village Residential,,,,Deyelopment Table Subject’~o Village Residential regulations in: Minimum Site Specifications Site Area (ft2) Site Width (It) Site Depth (ft) Minimum Setbacks Minimum Lot Specifications(1) Lot Area (ft~’), Attached Units Lot Area (ft-~), Detached Units Maximum Lot Area (ft~) Front lot setback (if) Rear lot setback (ft) Side lot setback (ft) Distance between detached units (ft) Maximum House Size (ftz) ’Maximum neigh(,’,",!,ft) ,, , Daylight Planes Maximum Site Coverage Maximum Floor A’rea ~atio (FAR)(3’ Maximum Residential Density (units) ’" Maximum number of units per acre Minimum Site ~pen Space~ai Minimum Usable Open Space (per unit)~3) Minimum common open space (per unit)Minimum private open space,. (,p,~r unit) Performance Criteria Landscape Requirem,ents Parking~s) 6,000 50 100 RM- 15 development standards apply to perimeter of site 1,500 2,500 4,000 5 3 0 3 2,500(,-) 30 RM-15 development standards apply to perimeter of site RM-15 development standards appl~[ .!.(3. site 0.5:! applied to entire site 12 35% of entire site 300 sq. It. No requirement 100 sq. ft. See provisions of Chapter 18.52 18.13.040(e) 18.13.040(e) Ch. !8.23 18.40.130 Ch. 18.52 070717 syn 0120245 11 NOT YET APPROVED ........................ Subject[0 ............... Village Residential~ , regulations in! , ~I~ Individual lots are created by subdividing the development sit~’’ to create one for-sale lot per dwelling unit. Overall development intensity (FAR, site coverage, landscape/open space) shall be calculated across the entire site to comply with RM-15 zone standards, and setbacks and daylight planes at the perimeter of the site shall comply with RM-15 setbacks and daylight planes. For common-ownership developments such as condominiums and apartments, the underlying multiple-family zone district development standards shall apply. (’~ Covered parking that is attached to the residence shall be included in the maximum house size.(3~ Covered parking is not included as floor area in multi-family development, up to a maximum of 230 square feet per required parking space that is covered. Covered parking spaces in excess of required parking spaces count as floor area.~4) Subject to the limitations of Section 18.13.040(e). Usable open space is included as part of the minimum site open space; required usable open space in excess of the minimum required for common and private open space may be used as either common or private usable open space; landscaping may count towards total site open space after usable open space requirements are met.(5) Tandem parking is allowed for any unit requiring two parking spaces, provided that both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit. For projects with more than four (4) units, not more than 25% of the required parkin~ spaces shall be in a tandem configuration. (d)Design for Entire Site The entire development plan for a Village Residential project, including subdivision of the site into individual lots and design of buildings, streets, driveways, parking, and open space shall be submitted and reviewed at one time. Design for individual lots may not be phased for subsequent approval. (e)Post-Construction Modifications (2) Modifications to completed units, such as additions to dwelling units, changes in circulation or parking, exterior building design features, and provisions for open space, must be submitted as an amendment to the Village Residential development, unless an alternate review process is outlined in the initial project approval. The Director may require the submittal of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs) and/or other legal instruments to document and disclose the post- construction approval process. An amendment to the Village Residential approval may only be submitted by the owner of the entire site or by an entity (such as a homeowners association) representing the property owners. The amendment shall be reviewed in the same manner as the original approval and must demonstrate compliance with the applicable standards for the entire site. Minor architectural review may be approved by staff, pursuant to the process outlined in Section 18.76.020 for exterior architectural or site modifications deemed minor by the Director. 070717 syn 0120245 12 NOT YET APPROVED 18.13.060 Multiple Family Context-Based Design Criteria (a)Contextual and Compatibility Criteria Development in a multiple-family residential district shall be responsible to its context and compatible with adjacent development. (1)Context (A)Context as used in this section is intended to indicate relationships between the site’s development to adjacent street types, surrounding land uses, and on-site or nearby natural features, such as creeks or trees. Effective transitions to these adjacent uses and features are strongly reinforced by Comprehensive Plan policies. (B)The word "context" should not be construed as a desire to replicate existing surroundings, but rather to provide appropriate transitions to those surroundings. "Context" is also not specific to architectural style or design, though in some instances relationships may be reinforced by an architectural response. (2)Compatibility (A)Compatibility is achieved when the apparent scale and mass of new buildings share general characteristics and establishes design linkages with the overall pattern of buildings so that the visual unity of the neighborhood or street is maintained. For active streetscapes, compatibility is achieved when the scale and mass of new buildings are consistent with the pattern of achieving a pedestrian oriented design. (B)Compatibility goals may, be accomplished through various means, including but not limited to: (i)the siting, scale, massing, and materials; (ii)the rhythmic pattern of the street established by the general width of the buildings and the spacing between them; (iii) the pattern of roof lines and projections; (iv) the doorways; (v)the (vi)the (vii)the (viii)the sizes, proportions, and orientations of windows, bays and location and treatment of entryways; shadow patterns from massing and decorative features; siting and treatment of parking; and treatment of landscaping. (b)Context-Based Design Considerations and Findings In addition to the findings for Architectural Review contained in Section 18.76.020(d) of the Zoning Ordinance, the following additional findings are applicable in the RM-tS, RM- 30, and RM-40 districts, as further illustrated on the accompanying diagrams: 13 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (1) Massin2 and Buildin2 Facades Massing and building facades shall be designed to create a residential scale in keeping with Palo Alto neighborhoods, and to provide a relationship with street(s) through elements such as: A.Articulation, setbacks, and materials that minimize massing, break down the scale of buildings, and provide visual interest (Figure 1-1); B. Rooflines that emphasize and accentuate significant elements of the building such as entries, bays, and balconies (Figure 1-1); C. Placement and orientation of doorways, windows, and landscape elements to create a relationship with the street (Figure 1-1); D. Facades that include projecting eaves and overhangs, porches, and other architectural elements that provide human scale and help break up building mass (Figure 1-1); E. Entries that are clearly defined features of front facades, and that have a scale that is in proportion to the size and type of the building and number of units being accessed; larger buildings should have a more prominent building entrance, while maintaining a pedestrian scale; F. Residential units that have a presence on the street and are not walled-off or oriented exclusively inward; G. Elements that signal habitation such as entrances, stairs, porches, bays and balconies that are visible to people on the street (Figure 1-2); H. All exposed sides of a building designed with the same level of care and integrity (Figure 1-2); (Figure !-1) (Figure !-2) 070717 syn 0120245 !4 NOT YET APPROVED (2) Low-Density Residential Transitions Where new projects are built abutting existing lower-scale residential development, care shall be taken to respect the scale and privacy, of neighboring properties through: Transitions of development intensity from higher density development building types to building types that are compatible with the lower intensity surrounding uses, such as small-lot units and rowhouses "Figure 2-1); (Figure 2-1) Massing and orientation of buildings that respect and mirror the massing of neighboring structures by stepping back upper stories to transition to smaller scale buildings, including setbacks and daylight planes that match abutting R-1 and R-2 zone requirements (Figure 2- 2); Respecting privacy of neighboring structures, with windows and upper floor balconies positioned so they minimize views into neighboring properties (Figure 2-3); Minimizing sight lines into and from neighboring properties (Figure 2-3); Limiting sun and shade impacts on abutting properties; and Providing pedestrian paseos and mews to create separation between uses. (Figure 2-2) (Figure 2-3) 070717 syn 0120245 15 NOT YET APPROVED (3) p..roject Open Space Private and public open space shal! be provided so that it is usable for the residents and visitors of a site. A.The type and design of the usable private open space shall be appropriate to the character of the building(s), and shall consider dimensions, solar access, wind protection, views, and privacy; B. Open space should be sited and designed to accommodate different activities, groups, active and passive uses, and should be located convenient to the residents. C.Common open spaces should connect to the pedestrian pathways and existing natural amenities of the site and its surroundings (Figure 3-1); D. Usable open space may be any combination of private and common spaces; E.Open space should be located to activate the street fa.cade and increase "eyes on the street" when possible ~-.-);(Figure " 9 F.Usable open space does not need to be located on the ground and may be located in porches, decks, balconies and/or podiums (Figure 3-3); G. Both private and common open space areas should be buffered from noise where feasible through landscaping and building placement; H. Open space situated over a structural slab/podium or on a rooftop shall have a combination of landscaping and high quality paving materials, including elements such as planters, mature trees, and use of textured and/or colored paved surfaces (Figure 3-3); and I.Parking may not be counted as open space. (Figure 3-!) (Figure 3-2) (Figure 3-3) 070717 syn 0120245 16 NOT YET APPROVED (4) Parkin~ Design Parking needs shall be accommodated but shall not be allowed to overwhelm the character of the project or detract from the pedestrian environment, such that: A.Parking is located behind buildings, below grade or, where those options are not feasible, screened by landscaping, low walls, garages and carports, etc.; B. Structured parking is fronted or wrapped with habitable uses when possible (Figure 4-1); C. Parking that is semi-depressed is screened with architectural elements that enhance the streetscape such as stoops, balcony overhangs, and/or art (Figure 4-2); D. Landscaping such as trees, shrubs, vines, or groundcover is incorporated into surface parking lots (Figure 4-2); E. For properties with parking access from the rear of the site (such as a rear alley or driveway) landscaping shall provide a visual buffer between vehicle circulation areas and abutting properties (Figure 4-3); F. Street parking is utilized for visitor or customer parking and is designed in a manner to enhance traffic calming; G.Parking is accessed from side streets or alleys when possible. Parking Stuctured parking fronted or wrapped with habitable uses (El gure 4-1) Semi-depressed parking screened with architectural elemen’~s that enhance the streetscape such as stoops, balcony overhangs, and/or art (Figure 4-2) (Fi gure 4-3) 070717 svn 01)0~45 17 NOT YET APPROVED (5) Large (multi-acre) Sites Large (in excess of one acre) sites shall be designed so that street, block, and building patterns are consistent with those of the surrounding neighborhood, and such that: A.New development of large sites maintains and enhances connectivity with a hierarchy of public streets, private streets, walks and bike paths (integrated with Palo Alto’s Bicycle Master Plan, when applicable); B. The diversity of building types increases with increased lot size (e.g., <1 acre = minimum 1 building type; 1- 2 acres = minimum 2 housing types; greater than 2 acres = minimum 3 housing types) (Figures 5-1 through 5- 3); and C. Where a site includes more than one housing type, each building type should respond to its immediate context in terms of scale, massing, and design (e.g., small lot units or rowhouse building types facing or abutting existing single-family residences) (Figures 5-2 and 5-3). (Figure 5-1) (Figure 5-2) (Figmle 5-3) 070717 syn 0120245 18 NOT YET APPROVED (6) Housin~ Variety and Units on Individual Lots Multifamily projects may include a variety of unit types such as small-lot detached units (Figure 6-1), attached rowhouses/townhouses (Figure 6-2), and cottage clusters in order to achieve variety and create transitions to adjacent existing development, provided that: A.Setbacks and daylight planes along the perimeter of the site shall conform to RM- 15 zone standards; B.Overall development intensity (FAR, landscape coverage, open space) shall be calculated across the entire site to comply with the RM-15 zone standards; C. Individual detached units shall be spaced a minimum of 3 feet apart; D. For units on individual "fee simple" lots, units may be situated along the property line of the individual parcel (i.e., zero-lot line) to allow usable open space in the opposite side setback; E. Each detached unit shall have at least one usable side yard between the house and fence to provide outdoor passage between the front and rear yards; F. Spaces between buildings shall be landscaped and/or shall provide for usable hardscape (patios, decks, etc.); G. Sidewall windows should be designed with privacy features such as obscure glass or glass block; H. Windows on sidewalls opposite each other should be above eye level or should be offset to prevent views into adjacent units; and I.Architectural treatment shal! be carried along the sidewalls of detached units, particularly sidewalls facing streets and pathways. Sma!PLot units on individual lots (Figure 6-1 ) Rowhouses on individua! Io~s (Figure 6-2) 070717 syn 0120245 !9 NOT YET APPROVED (7)Sustainabilitv and Green Building Design Project design and materials to achieve sustainability and green building design shall be incorporated into the project. Green building design considers the environment during design and construction. Green building design aims for compatibility with the local environment: to protect, respect and benefit from it. In general, sustainable buildings are energy efficient, water conserving, durable and nontoxic, with high-quality spaces and high recycled content materials. The following considerations should be included in site and building design: Do Optimize building orientation for heat gain, shading, daylighting, and natural ventilation (Figure 7-!); Design landscaping to create comfortable micro-climates and reduce heat island effects (Figure 7-2); Design for easy pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access; Maximize onsite stormwater management through landscaping and perrneable pavement (Figure 7-3); Use sustainable building materials. Design lighting, plumbing and equipment for efficient energy use; Create healthy indoor environments; Use creativity and innovation to build more sustainable environments. One example is establishing gardens with edible fruits, vegetables or other plants to satisfy a portion of project open space requirements (Figure 7-2); and Use of Shading Devices to Control Solar loads in Summer and gain Passive heat in Winter (Figure 7-1) ’Urban Agricul[ure’ and rooftop!balcony gardens (Figure 7-2) 070717 syn 0120245 20 NOT YET APPROVED Provide protection for creeks and riparian vegetation and integrate stormwater management measures and open space to minimize water quality and erosion impacts to the creek environment. Minimize Stormwater Runoff to Impermeable areas (Figure 7-3) 18.13.1)70 Grandfathered Uses (a)Grandfathered Uses The following uses may remain as grandfathered uses and shall not be subject to the provisions of Chapter !8.94: (1) RM-15 district: (A) (B) (c) Professiona! and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawfu! conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, !ocated in an RM-1 or RM-2 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-I or RM-2 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming pmJnitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit. (2) RM-30 district: (A) 070717 syn 0120245 Professional and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 21 NOT YET APPROVED 20, 1978, located in an RM-3 or RM-4 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit (B)Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-3 or RM-4 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. (c)Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit (3) RM-40 district: Professional and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-5 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit (B)Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-5 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. (c)Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit (c) 070717 syn 0120245 Permitted Changes The following regulations shall apply to the grandfathered uses specified in subsection (a): (1)Such uses shall be permitted to remodel, improve, or replace site improvements on the same site, for continual use and occupancy by the same use, provided that such remodeling, improvement or replacement: (A) shall not result in increased floor area; (B)shall not result in an increase in the number of offices, in the case of professional or medical office uses, or dwelling units, in the case of residential or motel uses; shall not result in shifting of building footprint; 22 NOT YET APPROVED (2) (3) (4) (D) (E) (F) shall not increase the height, length, building envelope, o1" size of the improvement, shall not increase the existing degree of noncompliance, except through the granting of a design enhancement exception pursuant to Chapter 18.76, with respect to multiple-family, professional and medical office, and motel uses, or a home improvement exception pursuant to Chapter 18.76, with respect to two- family use. in the RM-15 district, such remodeling, improvement, or replacement shall be for continual use and occupancy by the same use. If a grandfathered use ceases and thereafter remains discontinued for twelve consecutive months, it shall be considered abandoned and may be replaced only by a conforming use. A grandfathered use which is changed to oi" replaced by a conforming use shall not be reestablished, and any portion of a site or any portion of a building, the use of which changes from a grandfathered use to a conforming use, shall not thereafter be used except to accommodate a conforming use. The following additional regulations shall apply to grandfathered professional or medical office uses: (A) (B) Any remodeling, improvement, or replacement of any, building designed and constructed for residential use shall be subject to the issuance of a conditional use permit in accord with Chapter 18.76. In the event of redevelopment of all or a portion of the site for permitted residential uses, professional and medical office uses may not be incorporated in the redevelopment, except that this provision shall not apply to permanent conversion to residential use of space within an existing structure now used for professional and medical office uses. SECTION 3. Chapter ! 8.83 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code is hereby, deleted and Chapter 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations ) and Chapter 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards) are hereby added to read as follows: 070717 syn 0120245 23 NOT YET APPROVED Sections: 18.52.010 18.52.020 18.52.030 18.52.040 18.52.050 18.52.060 t8.52.070 18.52.080 Chapter 18.52 PARKING AND LOADING REQUIREMENTS Purpose Definitions Basic Parking Regulations Off-Street Parking, Loading, and Bicycle Facility Requirements Adjustments by the Director Parking Assessment Districts and Areas - General Assessment Districts - CD District Parking Assessment District Adjustments by the Director 18.52.01(t Purpose Off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities are required for new uses and enlargements of existing uses, proportional to the need created by each use, in order to alleviate traffic congestion. Development regulations and design standards are intended to ensure the usefulness of parking, loading, and bicycle facilities, protect the public safety, and, where appropriate, to mitigate potential adverse impacts on adjacent land uses. The City establishes parking criteria to approximate an average peak demand condition. 18.52.020 Definitions For purposes of this chapter: (a)"Accessible" "Accessible" means the ability to be used by persons with disabilities as defined in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. (b)"Construction of Floor Area" "Construction of floor area" means the construction or building of "floor area" except for new floor area added to an existing, restored, or partially reconstructed building to meet the minimum requirements of federal, state or local laws relating to fire prevention and safety, handicapped access, and building and seismic safety; (c)"Design Approval" "Design approval" means approval pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 & 18.77.070 by the Director of Planning and Community Environment (Director) upon recommendation of the architectural review board. (d)"Parking Assessment Areas" "Parking assessment areas" means either: 070717 syn 0120245 24 NOT YET APPROVED (1)The "downtown parking assessment mea," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries of University Avenue Off-Street Parking Project No. 75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk; or (2)The "California Avenue area parking assessment district," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the California Avenue area parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries, California Avenue Area Parking Maintenance District" dated December 16, t976, and on file with the city clerk; (e)"Shared (Joint Use) Parking" "Shared (joint use) parking" means parking intended to accommodate multiple uses, whether residential or non-residential or both, and to minimize the number of parking spaces needed by allowing some spaces to be used for different uses at different times of the day or night. Definitions for other parking-related terms can be found in section 18.04.030(a) (Definitions), including "Parking as a principal use," "Parking facility," and "Parking space." 18.52.030 Basic Parking Regulations (a)Applicability. The regulations of this chapter apply to all parking areas in all districts established by this title. (b)Parking Required Off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities shall be provided for any new building constructed and for any new use established, for any addition or enlargement of an existing building or use, and for any change in the occupancy of any building or the manner in which any use is conducted that would result in additional spaces being required, subject to the provisions of this chapter. (c) Non-Conformance Due to Parking Requirements No use of land lawfully existing on July 20, 1978 is nonconforming solely because of the lack of off-street parking, loading, or bicycle facilities prescribed in this chapter; provided, that facilities being used for off-street parking on July 20, 1978, shall not be reduced in capacity to less than the number of spaces prescribed in this chapter or altered in design or function to less than the minimum standards prescribed in this chapter. (d)Additions or Changes of Use For additions or enlargements of any existing building or use, or any change of occupancy or manner of operation that would increase the number of parking, loading or bicycle spaces required, the additional parking shall be required only for such addition, enlargement, or change and not for the entire building or use. 25 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (e)Parking Spaces Exclusive Parking, loading or bicycle spaces required by this chapter for any building or use shall not be considered to meet the requirement for any other building or use, except where a joint facility serving more than one building or use contains the total number of spaces required for each building or use separately, or where adjusted parking requirements for joint use parking facilities are specifically authorized pursuant to Section 18.52.050. (f)Design of Parking Spaces Parking, loading or bicycle facilities required by this chapter, or provided optionally in addition to the minimum requirements prescribed by this chapter, shall conform to the design standards set forth in Chapter 18.54. (g)Term of Parking Requirement Parking, loading and bicycle facilities required by this chapter shall be maintained for the duration of the use requiring such facilities, except as authorized pursuant to Section 18.52.050. (g)Location of Parking Spaces All off-street parking facilities required by this chapter shall be located on the same site as the use for which such facilities are required, except as authorized pursuant to Section 18.52.050. (h)Parking Provided in Excess of Requirement No use shall be required to provide more spaces than prescribed by this chapter, or prescribed by the Director in accord with this chapter, or prescribed by any conditional use permit, variance, or planned community district. Where additional spaces are provided, such spaces may be considered as meeting the requirements for another use, subject to Sections !8.52.050 and 18.52.080. 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility Requirements. (a)Parking Requirements In each district, off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities for each use shall be provided in accordance with Tables t and 2, shown in subsection (c) of this Section 18.52.040. The requirement for any use not specifically listed shall be determined by the Director on the basis of requirements for similar uses, and on the basis of evidence of actual demand created by similar uses in Palo Alto and elsewhere, and such other traffic engineering or planning data as may be available and appropriate to the establishment of a minimum requirement. (b)Calculation of Required Parking Off-street parking, loading and bicycle facility requirements established by subsection (a) shall be applied as follows: 070717 syn 0120245 26 NOT YET APPROVED (2) (3) (6) Where the application of the schedule results in a fractional requirement, a fraction of 0.5 or greater shall be resolved to the next higher whole number. For purposes of this chapter, gross floor area shall not include enclosed or covered areas used for off-street parking or loading, or bicycle facilities. Where uses or activities subject to differing requirements are located in the same structure or on the same site, or are intended to be served by a common facility, the total requirement shall be the sum of the requirements for each use or activity computed separately, except as adjusted by the Director under the provisions of Table 1 or Section18.52.050. The Director, when issuing a permit(s) for multiple uses on a site, may restrict the hours of operation or place other conditions on the multiple uses so that parking needs do not overlap and may then modify the total parking requirement to be based on the most intense combination of uses at any one time.(4) Where requirements are established on the basis of seats or person capacity, the building regulations provisions applicable at the time of determination shall be used to define capacity. Where residential use is conducted together with or accessory to other permitted uses, applicable residential requirements shall apply in addition to other nonresidential requirements, except as provided by Sections 18.52.050 and 18.52.080. In addition to the parking requirements outlined in Tables 1 and 2, parking for handicapped persons shall be provided pursuant to the requirements of Section 18.54.030 (Accessible Parking) and consistent with criteria outlined in Title 16 (Building Code) of the Municipal Code. 070717 syn 0120245 27 NOT YET APPROVED (c)Tables 1, 2 and 3: Parking, Bicycle, and Loading Requirements Tables 1 and 2 below outline vehicle and bicycle parking requirements in general and for Parking Assessment Districts, respectively. Table 3 outlines loading requirements for each land use. Use Table 1: Minimum Off-Street Parking Requirements (Excludes Parking Assessment Districts - See Table 2) RESIDENTIAL USES Single-Family Residential (Primary Unit) (a) In the OS district .....(bi’ In all other districts Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces) Tandem Parking Allowed 4 spaces, of which at least one space must be covered 2 spaces, of which at least one space must be covered (c) Underground parking for g~inglefamily uses is prohibited, except pursuant to a variance granted in accordance with the provisions of Chapter 18.76 (Permits and Approvals) of this title, in which case the area of the underground garage shall be counted toward the gross floor area. Second Dwelling Unit (in addition to main dwelling unit requirements) >450 st" in size <450 sf in size Two-Family Residential (R-2 & RMD Districts) 2 spaces, of which at least one must be covered 1 space, covered or uncovered .... i.5 spaces per unit, of which at least one space per unit must be covered Tandem Parking Allowed, with one tandem space per unit, associated directly with another parking space for the same unit Bicycle Parking Requirement Spaces 1 space per unit Class~ Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) None None 100%- LT 070717 syn 0120245 28 NOT YET APPROVED Use Multiple-Family Residential (a) Guest Parking EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS, AND ASSEMBLY USES "Business and Trade s~’hools ..... Religious Institutions Mortuaries Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces)Spaces !.25 per studio unit 1 per unit 1.5 per 1-bedroom unit 2 per 2-bedroom or larger unit At least one space per unit must be covered Tandem parking allowed for any unit requiring two spaces (one tandem space per unit, associated directly with another parking space for the same unit, up to a maximum of 25% of total required spaces for any project with more than four (4) units) For projects exceeding 3 units;I space for 1 space plus 10% of total each 10 units number of units, provided that if more than one space per unit is assigned or secured parking, then guest spaces equal to 33% of aI1 units is required. 1 space per 4-person capacity,1 per 40- or 1 per 250 sf of gross floor person area, whichever is greater capacity, or 1 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity, based on maximum use of all facilities at the same time, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit. 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity, plus funeral procession queue capacity of 5 cars Private Schools and Educational Facilities: Bicycle Parking Requirement Class1 Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) 100% - LT 100% ST 40% LT 60% Covered STper 2,500 sf, whichever is greater 1 space per 40 seats or 40 person capacity, based on maximum use of all facilities at the same time 2 spaces 20% - LT 80% - ST, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit 100% -ST 070717 syn 0120245 29 NOT YET APPROVED Use Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces) (a) Elementary (K25) (b) Grades 6-8 (c) Grades %12 Private Clubs, Lodges, and Fraternal Organizations RECREATION USES Commercial Recreation, including health and fitness clubs Community Facilities, including swim club, tennis club, golf course, community centers, neighborhood centers, and similar activities HEALTH CARE SERVICES Convalescent Facilities Hospitals SERVICE USES Bicycle Parking Requirement ...........Class~ Spaces Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) 2 spaces per teaching station 1 space for 2 spaces per teaching station 4 spaces per teaching_ station 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity based on maximum use of all space at one time, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit 1 space for each 4-person capacity, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit, not to exceed a 30% reduction. 1 per 2.5 patient beds 1 space for each 1.5 patient beds every 5 students 1 space for every 5 students 1 space for ever}, 5 students 1 space for each 40 seats or 40-person capacity based on maximum use of all space at one time 1 space per 16-person capacity, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit 1 per 25 patient beds 1 per 1"3 patient beds 1 per 3,500 sf (1 space minimum) Animal Care Facilities 1 per 350 sq. ft. of gross enclosed floor area 100% - ST, enclosed 20% - LT 80% - ST 20% - LT 80% - ST or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit 2 LT spaces, remainder ST 60% LT 40% ST 80% - LT 20% - ST 070717 syn 0120245 3O NOT YET APPROVED Use Automobile"~i~rships Automotive Services & Service Stations: (a) Service Station (by Services, Enclosed Day Care Centers Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces) 1 per 400 sq. ft. of sales, service and office administration area, and 1 per 500 sq. ft. of exterior sales or display area, excluding automobile storage (not on display). Bicycle Parking Requirement Class1 Spaces Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) 1 per 10 employees 1 per 10 employees 1 per 10 employees ! per 6 employees 1 per 350 sq. ft. of gross enclosed floor area, plus queue capacity equivalent to the service capacity, of gasoline pumps 1 per 350 sq. ft. of enclosed space; and 1 per 500 sq. ft. of exterior sales, display or storage site area (open lot area) 1 per 1.5 employees Day Care Homes, Adult (Small)None Day Care Homes, Adult (Large) 2 per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered 2 per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered, plus any additional spaces required by conditional use permit to serve visitors and employees not residing at the home. 2 per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered Day Care Homes, Family (Small) Day Care Homes, Family (Large) Financial Services: Financial services including: banks and savings and loan offices General Business Services: (a) Enclosed (by Open lot 2’ per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered, plus one for each employee not residing at the home. 1 per 250 sq. ft.1 per 2,500 sf 1 per 2,500 sf t per 5,000 sf 1 per 250 sq. ft. 1 per 500 sq. ft. of sales, display, or storage site area None None None 100% ST 100% ST 100% ST 100% - ST 40% - LT 60% - ST 80%- LT 20%- ST 100%- ST 070717 syn 0120245 31 NOT YET APPROVED Use Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces) Bicycle Parking Requirement Classa Spaces Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) Personal Services 1 per 200 sq. ft. of gross floor area Re~’idential Care Homes 2 spaces (for the residential owners or tenants), one of which shall be covered RecvclingC~nt~r .................1 space for each’"~’ttendant ’" Non~ ........ RETAIL USES Intensive (retail not defined as extensive) Retail: (a) (b)Extensive (retail with more than 75% of gross floor area used for display, sales and related storage, with demonstrably low parking demand generation per square foot o~. gross floqr a[.ea) ............ (c) Open lot Drive-up windows providing services to occupants in vehicles 1 per 2,000 sf 20% - LT 80% - ST No~’~ .... i per 200 sq. ft. of gross ’flO’~r .......i’ per 2,000’ sf area 1 per 350 sq. ft. of gross floor area i’ per 3,500 sf 20% - LT 80% - ST 1 space for each 500 square feet of sales, display, or storage site area. Queue line for 5 cars, not blocking any parking spaces, in addition to other applicable requirements ....... 20% - LT 4080% - ST 1 per 5,000 sf 100% - ST None additional 3 per 100 sq. ft. Of gr~ss ’fl0;r " area 1 space for each 60 gross sq. ft. of public service area, plus I space for each 200 gross sq. ft. for all other areas. Eating and Drinking Services: (a) With drive-in or take-out facilities"3 per 400 sf (b) All others 1 per 6’00 sf of public service area, plus 1 per 2,000 sf for other areas i space per guestroom; plus the applicable requirement for eating and drinking, banquet, assembly, commercial or other as required for such uses, less up to 75% of the spaces required for guestrooms, upon approval by the Director based on a parking study of parking generated by the mix of uses. Ho[el~lotel/Inn 1 space per 10 guestrooms, plus requirements for accessory USeS (drinking, banquet, assembly, commercial or other). 40% - LT 60% - ST 100% ST 070717 syn 0120245 32 NOT YET APPROVED Use Shopping Center Vehicle Parking Requirement (# of spaces) 1 per 275 sq. ft. of ~ross floor area Bicycle Parking Requirement Spaces 1 per 2,750 sf Class1 Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) 40% - LT 60% - ST OFFICE USES Administrative Offices (a) In the RP and ROLM districts 1 per 300 sq. ft. of gross floor 1 per 3,000 sf 80% LTarea20% ST(b) In all other districts 1 per 250 sq. ft. of gross floor 1 per 2,500 sf area Medical, professional, and general business offices (a) In the RP and ROLM districts 1 per 300 sq. ft. of gross floor 60% - LTarea ’40% - ST (b) In all other districts 1 per 250 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 per 300 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 per 500 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 per 300 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 per 250 sq. ft. of gross floor area MANq_JFACTURING AND PROCESSING USES i per 3,000 sf 1 per 2,500 sf 1 per 3,000 sf 1 per 5,000 sf Manufacturing (a) In the G-M~, RP, and ROLM districts (b) In all other districts Research and Development (a) In the ROLM and RP districts (b) In all other districts 80% - LT 20% - ST 80% - LT 20% - ST1...per 3.000 sf .... 1..per 2,500 sf Warehousing and Distribution (a) In the RP and ROLM districts I per 300 sq. ft. of gross fl’~or 1 per 3,000 sf 80% - LTarea.20% - ST(b) In all other districts 1 per 1,000 sq. ft. of gross 1 per 10,000 floor area sq. ft. OTHER USES To be determined by’ the DirectorAny use not spec.!fi.ed ............................... 1Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) bicycle spaces as described in Section 18.54.060. 070717 syn 0120245 33 NOT YET APPROVED Table 2: Minimum Off-Street Parking Requirements for Parking Assessment Districts (If Use is not Listed, Refer to Table i for Re~ Vehicle Parking Use Requirement (# of spaces) For Downtown University Avenue Parking Assessment District: All uses (except residential) For California Avenue Parking Assessment District: Automobile Service Stations Automotive Services ,,,Eating and Drinking Services: (a) With drive-in or take-out facilities ib) An others " Financial services: (a) Bank, ;avin~s and loan offices With 7,500 square feet of floor area or less: (b)Banks, savings and loan offices with more than 7,500 square feet of floor area: (c) O{hers ~eneral Business Services: (a) Enclosed (b) Open lot Medicali’ professional, and general business offices Personal Services Retail: (a) Intensive (b) Extensive (c) Open lot 1 per 250 square feet 1 per 310 square feet of gross enclosed floor area, plus queue capacity equivalent to the service capacity of gasoline pumps 1 per 150 square feet of gross floor area, display, or storage on site 3 per 100 sf of gross floor area 1 per 155 sf of gross floor area i per 180 sf of gross floor area 1 per 310 sf of gross floor area 1 per 180 sf of gross floor area per 360 sf of gross floor area 1 per 500 sf of sales, display or storage site area per 3 !0 sf of gross floor area per 450 sf of gross floor area Any use not specified , ~Long Term (LT) and Short Term (ST) bicycle spaces as described in Section 18.54.060. 1 per 240 sf of gross floor area 1 p.er 350 sf of gross floor area 1 for each 500 square feet of sales, display, or storage site area. uirements) Bicycle Parking Requirement I Class1Spaces 1 per 2,500 40% - LT square ,feet .....60% - ST 1 per 10 employees 1 per 10 employees 3 per 400 sf 1 per 1,550 sf per 1,800 sf " 1 per 1,800 ~’f 1 per 3,600 sf 1 per 5,000 sf 1 per 3,100 sf 1 per 4,500 sf 1 per 2,400 sf ! per 3,500 sf 1 per 5,000 sf See Table 1 100% ST 100% ST 40% - LT 60% - ST 40% - LT 60% - ST 80%- LT 20%- ST 100%- ST 60% - LT 40% - ST 20% - LT 80% - ST 20% - LT 80% - ST 100% - ST 070717 syn 0120245 34 NOT YET APPROVED Table 3: Minimum Off-Street Loading Requirements Loading SpacesUseGross Floor Area Required RESIDENTIAL USES ,Single-family residential use "Two-family residential use ,Multiple-family residential use []Dormitory, Fraternity/Sorority, or group housing where meals are provided in common dining facilities Housing for the elderly or other community facility, where meals are provided in common dining facilities HEALTH CARE SERVICES No requirement established 0-9,999 sq. ft. .... i0,000-99,999 sq. ft. 100,000 sq. ft. or greater Hospitals 0-9,999 sq. ft. Convalescent facilities SERVICE USES Automotive Uses Financial services Personal services Administrative office services RETAIL USES ~ HotelflVIotel/Inn 070717 syn 0120245 0 0 1 2 10,000-99,999 sq. ft.1 ...... i 00,000-199,999 sq. ft.2 ’200,000 sq. ft. or greater 3 10-29.999 sq. ft. 30,000-69,999 sq. ft. 70,000-120,000 sq. ft. Each additional 50,000 sq. ft. over 120,000 sq. ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. 2 3 1 additional space 10,000-99,999 sq. ft.1 100,000-199,999 sq. ft.2 ......9.200,000 sq.’ ft. or greater 0-9,999 sq. ft. 3 0 35 NOT YET APPROVED Use Gross Floor Area Loading Spaces Required 1 Retail Services Eating and Drinking Services OFFICE USES Medical offices Professional offices General business offices MANqJFACTU~NG AND PROCESSING USES o Warehousing and distribution ~Manufacturing Research and developmen’i OTHER USES All uses not specifically listed 10,000-99,99} sq. 100,000 sq. ft. or greater 200,000 sq. ft. or greater 0-4,999 sq. ft. 30,000-69.999 sq. 70,000-120,000 sq. ft. For each additional 50,000 sq. ft. over 120,000 sq. ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,9’99 sq. ft’i .... .... 100,000-199,99~ sq. ft. 200’000 sq. ft. or greater 2 3 additional space 0 2 3 0-4,999 sq. ft. 30,000-69,999 sq. ft.2 70,000-120,000 sq. ft.3 For"each additional 50,000 sq. ft.1 addi{i"~nal space over 120,000 sq:...ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,999 sq. ft.1 100,000-199,999 sq. ft. 200’000 Sq. ft. or greater 2 To be determined bv the Director 18.52.05t)Adjustments by the Director Automobile parking requirements prescribed by this chapter may be adjusted by the Director in the following instances and in accord with the prescribed limitations in Table 4, when in his/her 36 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED opinion such adjustment will be consistent with the purposes of this chapter, will not create undue impact on existing or potential uses adjoining the site or in the general vicinity, and wil! be commensurate with the reduced parking demand created by the development, including for visitors and accessory facilities where appropriate. No reductions may be granted that would result in provision of less than ten (10) spaces on a site. The following are adjustments that apply to developments not located within a parking assessment district. Adjustments within the parking assessment districts are contained in Section 18.52.080. The decision of the regarding parking adjustments may be appealed as set forth in Chapter 18.78 (Appeals). Table 4: Allowable Parking Adjustments Purpose of Adjustment On-Site Employee Amenities Amount of Adjustment Square footage of commercial or industrial uses to be used for an on-site cafeteria, recreational facility, and/or day care facility, to be provided to employees or their children and not open to the general public, may be exempted from the parking requirements Maximum Reduction~ 100% of requirement for on-site employee amenities Joint Use (Shared) Parking Facilities Housing for Seniors 070717 syn 0120245 application of this chapter requires a total of or more than ten (10) spaces, the total number of spaces otherwise required by application of Table 1 may be reduced when the joint facility will serve all existing, proposed, and potential uses as effectively, and conveniently, as would separate parking facilities for each use or site. In making such a determination, the Director shall consider a parking analysis using criteria developed by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) or similar methodology to estimate the shared parking characteristics of the proposed land uses. The analysis shall employ the City’s parking ratios as the basis for the calculation of the base parking requirement and for the determination of parking requirements for individual land uses. The Director may also require submittal and approval of a TDM program~ to further assure parking reductions are achieved. For any site or sites with multiple uses where the 20% of total spaces required for the site 50% of the total spaces required for the site 37 The total number of spaces required may be reduced for housing facilities for seniors, commensurate with the reduced parking demand created by the housing facility, including for visitors and accessory facilities, and subject to submittal and approval of a parking analysis justifying the reduction Erop~ed. NOT YET APPROVED ~’~ffordable Housing Units and Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Units Amount of Adjustment The total number of spaces required may, be reduced for affordable housing and single room occupancy (SRO) units, commensurate with the reduced parking demand created by the housing facility, including for visitors and accessory facilities. The reduction shall consider proximity to transit and support services and the Director may, require traffic demand management measures1 in conjunction with any approval. Housing Near Transit The total number of spaces required may’ be Facilities reduced for housing located within a designated Transportation and Parking Alternatives Pedestrian/Transit Oriented area or elsewhere in immediate proximity to public transportation facilities serving a significant portion of residents, employees, or customers, when such reduction will be commensurate with the reduced parking demand created by the housing facility, including for visitors and accessory facilities, and subject to ....... submi~!al and app, ro,,i.al of a TDM program, i . Where effective alternatives to automobile access are provided, other than those listed above, parking requirements may be reduced to an extent commensurate with the permanence, effectiveness, and the demonstrated reduction of off-street parking demand effectuated by such alternative programs. Examples of such programs may include, but are not limited to, transportation demand management (TDM) programs or innovative parking pricing or design sol utions. ~ (note: landscape reserve.requirement is ddeted.!; .... Maximum ReductiOnZ a.40% for Extremely, Low Income and SRO Units b.30% for Very Low Income Units c.20% for Low Income Units 20% of the total spaces required for the site. 20% of the total spaces required for the site 070717 syn 0120245 38 NOT YET APPROVED Purpose of Adjustment Combined Parking Adjustments Amount of Adjustment Parking reductions may be 2ranted for any, combination of the above circumstances as prescribed by this chapter, subject to limitations on the combined total reduction allowed. Maximum Reduction2 a. 30% reduction of the total parking demand otherwise required b. 4O% reduction for affordable housing projects c. 50% reduction for senior housing projects ~See Section 18.52.050(d) below regarding requirements for TDM programsYNo reductions may be granted that would result in provision of less than ten (10) spaces on a site. (a)Combining Parking Adjustments Parking reductions may be granted for any combination of circumstances, prescribed by this chapter, so long as in total no more than a 30% reduction of the total parking demand otherwise required occurs, or no less than a 40% reduction for affordable housing projects (including Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units), or no less than 50% reduction for senior housing projects. (b)Deferral of Meeting Full Requirement by Landscape Reserve Where the expected need for off-street parking or bicycle facilities for a particular use is uncertain, due to unknown or unusual operating characteristics of the use and unavailability of comparable data to establish need, the Director, upon recommendation of the architectural review board, may authorize that construction and provision of not more than fifty percent of the required off-street parking stalls and not more than twenty- five percent of the bicycle parking spaces be deferred. The number of bicycle parking spaces deferred shall be apportioned by construction type (long term or short term) in the same percentages as indicated in Table 1 of Section 18.52.040. The Director may set such conditions as necessary to guarantee provision of such deferred spaces whenever the Director determines the need to exist. Land area required for provision of deferred parking or bicycle spaces shall be maintained in reserve and shall be landscaped pursuant to a plan approved by the architectural review board demonstrating that ultimate provision of the deferred spaces will meet all requirements of this chapter. Upon use of the parking area at near buildout (at least 90% occupancy) over a period of at least ten ),ears, the Director may allow the reserve mea to be used for other uses that do not generate parking demand, subject to restrictions and conditions to prevent conversion to a more intense use unless sufficient additional on-site parking is provided. 070717 syn 0120245 39 NOT YET APPROVED (c)Off-Site Parking Except in parking assessment areas, the Director may authorize all or a portion of the required parking for a use to be located on the site not more than 500 feet from the site of the use for which such parking is required, where in the Director’s judgment, such authorization will be in accord with the purposes of this chapter. The distance to the off- site parking shal! be measured from the nearest corner of the parking facility to the nearest public entrance to the building via the shortest pedestrian route. (d)Transportation Demand Management (TDM) (1)A Transportation Demand Management (TDM) program may be proposed by an applicant, or may be required by the Director for any project requesting a reduction in parking, or may be required as CEQA mitigation for identified potential significant parking impacts. (2) Where a Transportation Demand Management (TDM) program is proposed or required, the TDM program shall outline parking and/or traffic demand measures to be implemented to reduce parking need and trip generation. Measures may include, but are not limited to: limiting "assig-ned" parking to one space per residential unit, providing for transit passes, parking cash-out, enhanced shuttle service (or contributions to extend or enhance existing shuttle service or to create new shared or public shuttle service), car-sharing, traffic-reducing housing, providing priority parking spaces for carpools/vanpools or "green" vehicles (zero emission vehicles, inherently low emission vehicles, or plug-in hybrids, etc.), vehicle charging stations, additional bicycle parking facilities, or other measures to encourage transit use or to reduce parking needs. The program shall be proposed to the satisfaction of the Director, shall include proposed performance targets for parking and/or trip reduction and indicate the basis for such estimates, and shall designate a single entity (property owner, homeowners association, etc.) to implement the proposed measures. (3) Monitoring reports shall be submitted to the Director two years after building occupancy and again five years after building occupancy, noting the effectiveness of the proposed measures as compared to the initial performance targets, and suggestions for modifications if necessary to enhance parking and!or trip reductions. (4)Where the monitoring reports indicate that performance measures are not met, the Director may require further program modifications. 18.52.060 Parking Assessment Districts and Areas - General (a)Definitions (1)"Parking Assessment Areas" "Parking assessment areas" means either: The "downtown parking assessment area," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries of University, Avenue Off-Street Parking Project No. 75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk; or 070717 syn 0120245 4O NOT YET APPROVED The "California Avenue area parking assessment district," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the California Avenue area parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries, California Avenue Area Parking Maintenance District" dated December 16, 1976, and on file with the city clerk; (2)"Exempt Floor Area" Within the downtown parking assessment area, "exempt floor area" means all or a portion of that floor area of a building which is located at or nearest grade and which does not exceed a floor area ratio of 1.0 to 1.0; Within the California Avenue area parking assessment district, "exempt floor mea" means either: (A) All or a portion of that floor area of a building which is located at or nearest grade and which does not exceed a floor area ratio of 0.5 to 1.0 or (B) The amount of floor area shown on the 1983-84 California Avenue area assessment district rolls in the ene.lneer s report for bonds issued pursuant to Title 13 of the municipal code, whichever is greater. (b)In-lieu fees Except as provided in subsection (c) below, within any parking assessment district established by the city for the purpose of providing off-street parking facilities, all or a portion of the off-street parking requirement for a use may be satisfied by payment of assessments or fees levied by such district on the basis of parking spaces required but not provided. (c)Exempt Floor Area (1)Unless a project for the construction of floor area has received design approval prior to December 19, 1983, or has undergone preliminary review pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 and 18.77.070 on December 1st or 15th, 1983, the only portion of off-street parking required for construction of floor area in a parking assessment area which may be satisfied by payment of assessments or levies made within such area on the basis of parking spaces required but not provided, is that portion of the parking requirements associated with the uses proposed to be conducted in that area of the floor equal to the exempt floor area for the site. Where only a portion of floor area constitutes exempt floor area, and uses with more than one parking standard as required by this chapter are proposed for said floor, the use on that portion of the floor which generates the highest parking requirement will be designated as the exempt floor area. (2)All other required off-street parking that is not satisfied by such payment of assessments shall be provided in accordance with this chapter. (3)This subsection shall be interpreted to allow changes in the use of all exempt floor area and nonexempt floor area existing as of February 16, 1984 without requiring additional parking; provided, that the change in use does not consist of a change from residential to nonresidential, or an increase in actual floor area which does not constitute exempt floor area. 070717 syn 0120245 41 NOT YET APPROVED (4)No project which has received design approval prior to December 19, 1983, or which has undergone preliminary review on December 1st or 15th, 1983, shall increase the amount of floor area approved or reviewed or decrease the area designed or intended for parking without meeting the requirements of this chapter. 18.52.070 Parking Regulations for CD Assessment District With respect to on-site and off-site parking space requirements for nonresidential uses within an assessment district wherein properties are assessed under a Bond Plan G financing pursuant to Title !3, the requirements of this Section 18.52.040 shall apply in the CD district in lieu of comparable requirements in this Chapter 18.52. Requirements for the size and other design criteria for parking spaces shall continue to be governed by the provisions of Chapter 18.54. (a) On Site Parking. Any new development, any addition or enlargement of existing development, or any use of any floor area that has never been assessed under any Bond Plan G financing pursuant to Title 13, shall provide one parking space for each two hundred fifty gross square feet of floor area, with the following exceptions: (1)Square footage for: (A) Handicapped access which does not increase the usable floor area, pursuant to Section 18.18.070 (CD District Floor Area Bonuses) (B) An increase in square footage granted for seismic rehabilitation, pursuant to Section 18.18.070 (CD District Floor Area Bonuses). (c)Category I or II Historic Structures may take advantage of the following exceptions during the life of the historic building: (i) An increase in square footage pursuant to CD FAR Exceptions for Historic Structures as contained in Section 18.49.060 (b)(3), and (ii) A conversion to commercial use that is 50 feet or less in height and that has most recently been in residential use, if such conversion is done in conjunction with exterior historic rehabilitation approved by the Director upon recommendation by the Architectural Review Board and in consultation with the Historic Resource Board. Such conversion must not eliminate any existing on-site parking. (D) A minor increase of two hundred square feet or less, pursuant to CD district FAR Exceptions for Historic Structures as contained in Section 18.49.060(b)(4). (E) At or above grade parking, though included in the site FAR calculations (pursuant to CD district FAR Exceptions for non-historical/non-seismic buildings in Section 18.49.060(a)) shall not be included in the on-site parking regulations of this section. (2)Vacant parcels subject to redevelopment shall be exempt at the time when development occurs from the on-site parking requirements of one parking space for each two hundred fifty gross square feet of floor area to the extent of 0.3 parking spaces for every one thousand square feet of site area, provided that such parcels were 42 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (3) at some time assessed for parking under a Bond Plan E financing pursuant to Chapter 13.16 or were subject to other ad valorem assessments for parking. No new parking spaces will be required for a site in conjunction with the development or replacement of the amount of floor area used for nonresidential use equal to the amount of adjusted square footage for the site shown on the engineer’s report for fisc!l year 1986-87 for the latest Bond Plan G financing for parking acquisition or improvements in that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled, "Proposed Boundaries of University Avenue Off-Street Parking Project #75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk. However, square footage which was developed for nonresidential purposes or which has been used for nonresidential purposes but which is not used for such purposes due to vacancy at the time of the engineer’s report shall be included in the amount of floor area qualifying for this exemption. No exemption parking requirements shall be available where a residential use changes to a nonresidential use, except pursuant to subdivision (1)(C) of this subsection. (b)Off-Site Parking Parking required by this Section 18.52.070 may be provided by off-site parking, provided that such off-site parking is within a reasonable distance of the site using it or, if the site is within an assessment district, within a reasonable distance of the assessment district boundary and approved in writing by the Director. The Director shall assure that sufficient covenants and guarantees are provided to ensure use and maintenance of such parking facilities, including an enforceable agreement that any development occurring on the site where parking is provided sha!l not result in a net reduction of parking spaces provided, considering both the parking previously provided and the parking required by the proposed use. (c)In-Lieu Parking Provisions. In connection with any expansion of the supply of public parking spaces within the CD commercial downtown district, the city shall allocate a number of spaces for use as "in-lieu parking" spaces to allow development to occur on sites which would otherwise be precluded from development due to parking constraints imposed by this chapter. Off-site parking on such sites may be provided by payment of an in-lieu monetary contribution to the city to defray the cost of providing such parking. Contributions for each required parking space shall equal the incremental cost of providing a net new parking space in an assessment district project plus cost for the administration of the program, all as determined pursuant to Chapter 16.57 of Title 16 of this code, by the Director, whose decision shall be final. Only sites satisfying one or more of the following criteria, as determined by the Director, shall be eligible to participate in the in-lieu parking program: (t) Construction of on-site parking would necessitate destruction or substantial demolition of a designated historic structure; (2)The site area is less than ten thousand square feet and it would not be physically feasible to provide the required on-site parking; 070717 syn 0120245 43 NOT YET APPROVED (4) (5) The site is ~’eater than ten thousand square feet, but of such an unusual configuration that it would not be physically feasible to provide the required on-site parking; The site is located in an area where city policy precludes curb cuts or otherwise prevents use of the site for on-site parking; The site has other physical constraints, such as a high groundwater table, which preclude provision of on-site parking without extraordinary expense. (d) Underground Parking Underground parking deeper than two levels below grade shall be prohibited unless a soils report or engineering analysis demonstrates that regular pumping of subsurface water will not be required. 18.52.080 Adjustments to Parking Assessment Area Requirements by the Director Automobile parking requirements prescribed in this chapter may be adjusted by the Director for properties within parking assessment areas in the following instances and in accord with the prescribed limitations where, in his/her opinion, such adjustment will be in accord with purposes of this chapter and will not create undue impact on existing or potential uses adjoining the site or in the general vicinity. Adjustments shall be made in accordance with the procedures set forth in Chapter 18.78. (a) Tandem Parking Tandem par-king (a multiple parking configuration locating one stall behind another) may be allowed where in the judgment of the Director the parking will serve all proposed uses conveniently. The Director shall require such covenants and guarantees as deemed necessary to ensure use and maintenance of such parking facilities. (b)Percentage of Compact Parking Stalls For parking facilities exceeding five stalls and with architectural review approval prior to June 1, 2007, a maximum of fifty percent compact parking stalls may be allowed. For any project approved subsequent to June 1, 2007, compact parking is not allowed. (c)Shared Parking Facilities For any site or sites with multiple uses where joint use of on-site private or nearby public parking facilities can occur without conflict, and the use is exempt from parking assessment, the total number of spaces otherwise required by application of the schedule may be reduced when the joint facility will serve al! existing, proposed, and potential uses as effectively and conveniently as would separate parking facilities for each use or site. In making such a determination, the Director shall consider a parking analysis using criteria developed by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) or similar methodology to estimate the shared parking characteristics of the proposed land uses. The analysis shall employ the City’s parking ratios as the basis for the calculation of the base parking requirement and for the determination of parking requirements for individual land uses. The number of parking stalls required for any new development or addition may be reduced by no 070717 syn 0120245 44 NOT YET APPROVED (d) more than twenty percent (20%) of the total number of spaces otherwise required for the site or sites. Off-Site Parking Within parking assessment areas, the Director may authorize all or a portion of the required parking for a use to be located on a site within the parking assessment area or not more than 500 feet from the boundaries of the parking assessment area, where the zoning of such site pm-mits parking as a use. The Director shall require such covenants and guarantees as deemed necessary to ensure use and maintenance of such parking facilities. 070717 syn 0120245 45 NOT YET APPROVED Chapter 18.54 PARKING FACILITY DESIGN STANDARDS Sections: 18.54.010 18.54.020 18.54.030 t8.54.040 18.54.050 18.54.060 18.54.070 Purposes Vehicle Parking Facilities Accessible Parking Facilities Landscaping of Parking Areas Miscellaneous Design Standards Bicycle Parking Facilities Parking Tables and Figures 18.54.010 Purpose Design standards are established to ensure safe and accessible parking facilities for vehicle parking, bicycle parking, accessible parking and loading facilities. Such standards shall be used by the building official, the Director of Planning and Community Environment (Director), the planning commission, the architectural review board, and any other authorities, departments, boards or commissions responsible for application and administration of parking, bicycle, and loading requirements established by Chapter 18.52. 18.54.020 Vehicle Parking Facilities (a)Parking Facility Design Parking facilities shall be designed in accordance with the following regulations: (1)Requirements for dimensions of parking facilities at, above, and below grade are contained in this section and in Figures i-6 and Tables 5-8 of section 18.54.070. (2)Stalls and aisles shall be designed such that columns, walls, or other obstructions do not interfere with normal vehicle parking maneuvers. All required stall and aisle widths shall be designed to be clear of such obstructions, (3)The required stall widths shown in Table 5 of section 18.54.070 shall be increased by 0.5 foot for any stall located immediately adjacent to a wall, whether on one or both sides. The Director may require that the required stall widths be increased by 0.5 foot for any stall located immediately adjacent to a post, where such post limits turning movements into or out of the stall. (4)Dead-end aisles shall be avoided to the greatest extent feasible. (5)Except for at-grade parking facilities serving a maximum of two dwelling units, all parking facilities shall be set back a sufficient distance from the street so that vehicles need not back out into or over a public street (not including an alley) or sidewalk. 070717 syn 0120245 46 NOT YET APPROVED (b)Off-Street Parking Stalls (1) (2) (~) Each off-street parking stall shall consist of a rectangular area not less than eight and one-half (8.5) feet wide by seventeen and one-half (17.5) feet long (uni-class stall), or as otherwise prescribed for angled parking by Table i in Section 18.54.070. Garages and carports for single-family and two-family development shall be a minimum of ten (10) feet wide by twenty (20) feet long for a single car and a minimum of twenty (20) feet wide by twenty, (20) feet long for two cars to allow sufficient clearance. Dimensions of parking stalls for pm’allel parking shall be as follows. The minimum dimensions of such a stall located adjacent to a wall shall be ten feet wide and twenty feet long. The minimum dimensions of such a stall located adjacent to a curb with a minimum two-foot clearance to a wall shall be eight feet wide and twenty feet long. These required stall widths are in addition to the required width of the access driveway or aisle. Off-Street Loading Spaces (1)Each off-street loading space shall consist of a rectangular area not less than twelve (12) feet wide and forty-five (45) feet long, with a vertical clearance of not less than fifteen (15) feet. (2)Each parking and loading space shall have adequate drives, aisles, and turning and maneuvering areas for access and usability, and shall at all times have access to a public street or alley. (d)Tandem Parking (e) (f) Tandem parking shall be allowed in the R-1 and other low density residence districts and in parking assessment areas as specified in Section 18.52.080. Tandem parking shall be allowed in multiple family residence districts for any unit requiring two parking spaces, provided that both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit. For projects with more than four (4) units, not more than 25% of the required parking spaces shall be in a tandem configuration. Slope of Driveways in the Hazardous Fire Area The slope of driveways shall not exceed fifteen percent in the hazardous fire area (i.e., that area west of Interstate 280). Figures 1-6 and Tables 3-6 are located at the end of this chapter in section !8.54.070 and depict design requirements for parking stalls, aisles, driveways, accessibility, and parking lots. 070717 syn 0120245 47 NOT YET APPROVED 18.54.030 Accessible Parking Facilities (a)Compliance with Other Laws. The requirements for accessible parking facilities as described in this section are in conformance with the California Code of Regulations, Title 24, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended. (b)Requirements for Residential Facilities. In addition to parking for non-residential facilities, the requirements set forth in this section shall apply to common parking in residential facilities of four (4) or more units. These requirements shall not apply to parking which is restricted by design for the exclusive use of a single unit. (c) Number of Stalls Required The following table establishes the number of accessible parking stalls required. Table 1: Accessible Parking Requirements Total Number of Stalls in ....Number of Accessible Stalls Lot or Structure,,,Required 1-25 1 26-50 2 51-75 3 76-100 4 101-150 5 151-200 6 201-300 7 301-400 8 401-500 9 50 !- 1,000 ’ 2% of total ........ More {hart 1,000 .....20 spaces + 1 space for each 100 spaces over !,000. (d)Van-Accessible Stalls (1) (2) When at least five (5) total parking spaces are provided at buildings and facilities subject to these regulations, one in every eight accessible stalls, but not tess than one, shall be "van accessible," and shall be specially signed as such .When fewer than five total parking spaces are provided at buildings and facilities subject to these regulations, one accessible parking space shall be provided and shall be a minimum of fourteen (14) feet wide and be lined to provide a minimum nine-foot (9’) parking area and a five-foot (5’) loading and unloading area, as illustrated in Figure i of section 18.54.070. However, there is no requirement that this stall be van-accessible and no requirement that it be reserved exclusively or identified for use only by persons with disabilities. All "van accessible" parking stalls may be grouped on one level of a parking structure. 070717 syn 0120245 48 NOT YET APPROVED (3)Van-Accessible Parking Stall Size. If only one van-accessible stall is provided, it shall be seventeen (17) feet wide and lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area and an eight (8) foot loading and unloading area on the passenger side of the vehicle. When more than one van-accessible stall is provided, in lieu of providing a seventeen (17) foot wide space for each parking stall, two stalls may be provided within a twenty-six (26) foot wide area lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area on each side of an eight (8) foot loading and unloading area in the center. The minimum length of each parking stall shall be eighteen (18)feet. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070 (e)Required Number of Stalls for Medical Facilities At facilities providing medical care and other services for persons with mobility impairments, accessible parking stalls shall be provided in accordance with the table in subsection (c) above, except as follows: (1)Ten percent (10%) of the total number of parking stalls provided serving each outpatient unit or facility shall be accessible. (2)For units and facilities that specialize in treatment or services for persons with mobility impairments, twenty percent (20%) of the total number of parking stalls provided serving each such unit or facility shall be accessible. Non-Van Accessible Parking Stall Sizes If only one non-van-accessible stall is provided, it shall be fourteen (14) feet wide and lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area and a five (5) foot loading and unloading area on the passenger side of the vehicle. When more than one stall is provided, in lieu of providing a fourteen (14) foot wide space for each parking sta!l, two stalls can be provided within a twenty-three (23) foot wide area lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area on each side of a five (5) foot loading and unloading area in the center. The minimum length of each parking stall shall be eighteen (18) feet. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. (g)Parking Stall Location Accessible parking stalls serving a particular building shall be located on the shortest accessible route of travel from adjacent parking to an accessible entrance. In parking facilities that do not serve a particular building, accessible parking shall be located on the shortest accessible route of travel to an accessible pedestrian entrance of the parking facility. In buildings with multiple accessible entrances with adjacent parking, accessible parking stalls shall be dispersed and located closest to the accessible entrances. (h)Arrangement of Parking Stalls In each parking area, a bumper or curb shall be provided and located to prevent encroachment of cars over the required width of walkways. The stalls shall also be located so that a person with a disability is not compelled to wheel or walk behind parked cars other than his/her own. Accessible pedestrian ways shall be provided from each such parking stall to related facilities, including curb cuts or ramps as needed. Ramps shall not encroach into any parking stall. The following exceptions apply: 070717 syn0120245 49 NOT YET APPROVED (i) (2) (3) Ramps located at the front of accessible parking stalls may encroach into the length of such stalls when such encroachment does not limit the capability of a person with a disability to leave or enter his/her vehicle, thus providing equivalent facilitation. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. Where the City’s accessibility coordinator determines that compliance with any regulation of this subsection (h) would create an unreasonable hardship, an exception or waiver may be granted, when equivalent facilitation is provided. Parking stalls may be provided which would require a person with a disability to wheel or walk behind other than accessible parking stalls when the City’s accessibility coordinator determines that compliance with these regulations or providing equivalent facilitation would create an unreasonable hardship. (i)Slope of Parking Stall Surface slopes of accessible parking stalls and passenger loading zones shall be a minimum of 1:100 (one percent, for drainage purposes) and shall not exceed 1:50 (two percent) gradient in any direction. (j)Identification Each accessible parking stall shall be identified by a permanently affixed reflectorized sign constructed of porcelain on steel, beaded text, or its equivalent, displaying the international symbol of accessibility. The sign shall not be smaller than seventy (70) square inches in area and shall be centered at the interior end of the parking space at a minimum height of eighty (80) inches from the bottom of the sign to the finished grade of the parking space, or centered on the wall at the interior end of the parking space at a minimum height of thirty-six (36) inches from the finished grade of the parking space, ground, or sidewalk. Van-accessible parking stalls as described in subsection (d)(3) above shall have an additional sign "Van-accessible" mounted below the symbol of accessibility. A sign shall also be posted, in a conspicuous place, at each entrance to the off-street parking facility. The sign shall be no less than seventeen (17) inches by twenty-two (22) inches in size with lettering no less than one inch in height, clearly and conspicuously stating the following: "Unauthorized vehicles parked in designated accessible spaces not displaying distinguishing placards or license plates issued for disabled persons may be towed away at owner’s expense. Towed vehicles may be reclaimed at or by telephoning " Blank spaces are to be filled in with appropriate information as a permanent part of the sign. In addition to the above requirements, the surface of each accessible parking stall shall have a surface identification duplicating either of the following schemes: by outlining or painting the stall in blue and painting on the ground in the stall, in white or suitable contrasting color, the international symbol of accessibility (a profile view depicting a wheelchair with occupant); or by painting the international symbol of accessibility on the ground in the stall in white on a blue background. The symbol shall be at least three feet by three feet square and be located so that it is visible to a traffic enforcement officer when a vehicle is properly parked in the space, as illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. 070717 syn 0120245 5O NOT YET APPROVED (k)Vertical Clearance Entrances to and areas within parking structures shall have a minimum vertical clearance of eight feet two inches (8’2") where required for access to accessible parking stalls. The minimum vertical clearance at accessible passenger loading zones and along at least one vehicle access route to such areas from site entrance(s) and exit(s) shall be nine feet six inches (9’6"). The following exceptions apply: (1) (2) Where the City’s accessibility coordinator determines that compliance with this subsection would create an unreasonable hardship, an exception may be granted, when equivalent facilitation is provided. This section shall not apply to existing buildings where the City’s accessibility coordinator determines that, due to legal or physical constraints, compliance with these regulations or equivalent facilitation would create an unreasonable hardship. (1)Accessible Passenger Loading Zones If passenger loading zones are provided, then at least one passenger loading zone shall be accessible. Accessible passenger loading zones shall provide an access aisle at least five feet wide and twenty feet long adjacent and parallel to the vehicle pull-up space (refer to Figure 2 of section t8.54.070). If there are curbs between the access aisle and the vehicle pull-up space, then a curb ramp shall be provided. (m)Valet Parking Valet parking facilities shall provide a passenger loading zone complying with subsection (1) above, located on an accessible route to the entrance of the facility. The requirements of this section apply to facilities with valet parking. 18.54.040 Landscaping of Parking Areas The following minimum standards shall be observed; however, additional landscaping may be recommended by the architectural review board and required by the Director of Planning and Community Environment pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 and 18.77.070 of the Palo Alto Municipal Code. Landscape requirements of Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) shall also be considered in the design of parking lot landscaping. (a)Perimeter Landscaping Each unenclosed parking facility shall provide a perimeter landscaped strip at least five feet wide between and adjacent to a line defining the exterior boundary of the parking area and the nearest adjacent property line, not separated by a building. The perimeter landscaped strip may include any landscaped yard or landscaped area otherwise required, and shall be continuous except for required access to the site or to the parking facility. Where the landscaped strip adjoins a public street or pedestrian walkway, the landscaped strip may be required to include a fence, wall, berm, or equivalent feature. Where the parking facility adjoins another site, a fence, wall, or other equivalent screening feature may be required. 070717 syn 0120245 51 NOT YET APPROVED (b)Interior Landscaping- Amount Required (c) Interior landscaping is required within the parking facility between the perimeter landscaped area and the edge of pavement adjacent to any building on the site. Each unenclosed parking facility shall provide a minimum of interior landscaping in accord with Table 2. Where the total parking provided is located in more than one location on a site separated by differences in grade or by at least ten feet of unpaved area, each such area shall be considered a separate facility for the purpose of this requirement. Table 2" Minimum Interior Landsca,Ping,,,,,Requirements for Parkin Facilities .........Size 0f Facility (Square Feet) Under 14,999 15,000-29,999 Minimum Required Interior Landscaping (Percentage of Total Parking Facility Area) 5% 7.5% 30,000 1 10% (1) (2) (3) Interior Landscaping - Layout Interior landscaped islands within a parking area shall have a minimum dimension of five feet by five feet, excluding curbing. Landscaped islands shall exist for every ten spaces in a single row. Parking lot trees shall be planted or exist for each six parking stalls. Only fifty percent of the trees located along the perimeter of the parking area may count toward the required number of trees. (d)Tree Canopy and Sizes (e) (f) Landscaping within surface parking areas shall include tree plantings designed to result in 50 percent shading of parking lot surface areas within 15 years. Trees required to meet any section of this title shall be a minimum fifteen gallon size, and at least twenty-five percent (25%) shall be twenty-four-inch box or larger. Fifty percent (50%) of shrubs shall be a minimum of five-gallon size. Provided, in the Site and Design Review (D) combining district, the minimum plant size requirements set forth in this section may be decreased, as set forth in Chapter 18.82. Impervious Surfaces Areas required to be landscaped may contain no more than twenty-five percent impervious surface, exclusive of driveways and walkways needed for access to the site. Landscape Screens Where this title requires a landscaped screen or buffer, a combination of trees and shrubs shall be used and the following minimum standards shall apply: (1)On sites abutting or located opposite a residential site, a dense visual buffer shall be provided. In addition, trees shall be planted or shall exist at a ratio of not less than 070717 syn 0120245 52 NOT YET APPROVED (g) (2) one tree per three hundred square feet of the landscape screen or fraction thereof, and supplemented with shrubs and groundcover. Landscape screens required by Chapter 18.16 (CN, CS, and CC Districts) and areas subject to Chapter 18.70 (Landscape Combining District) shall provide a dense visual buffer. In addition, trees shall be planted or in existence at a ratio of not less than one tree per six hundred square feet of the landscape screen area or fraction thereof, and supplemented with shrubs and groundcover. Irrigation and Landscape Maintenance (1) Provision shall be made for automatically irrigating all planted areas, unless the Director determines that irrigation is not necessary (e.g., for xeriscape plantings). (2) All landscaping shall be continuously maintained. (h)Wheel Stops A permanent curb, bumper wheel stop or similar devices shall be installed which shall be adequate to protect the required sidewalks, planters, landscaped areas and structures from vehicular damage. If such protection is provided by means of a method designed to stop the wheel, rather than the bumper of the vehicle, the stopping edge shall be placed no closer than two feet from the edges of the required sidewalks or any building. The innermost two feet of each parking space (between the curb and any planter or sidewalk) may remain unpaved, be planted with low groundcover, and added to landscaping, to allow for bumper overhang. Planters Architectural planters built on top of a deck covering a below-grade parking structure, and proposed to meet minimum requirements for landscaped areas, shall have a soil depth dimension of at least eighteen inches for shrubs and thirty-six inches for trees, and have drainage outlet(s) connected to a storm drain system. (k)Requirements for Temporary Parking Facilities The landscaping standards set forth above shall not apply to temporary parking facilities; however, the architectural review board, through its review, may, require minimum landscaping for such facilities. (1)Sight Lines Landscaping height must meet the requirements of Section 18.54.050(b) (sight distance) within a parking lot and at the intersection of a parking facility driveway or ramp and a public street. 18.54.1)50 Miscellaneous Design Standards (a)Vertical Clearance All parking stalls shall have a vertical clearance of not less than seven and one-half feet, except in the R-E and R-1 single-family residence districts, where the vertical clearance 070717 syn 0120245 53 NOT YET APPROVED shall be seven feet or greater. Accessible parking stalls and access to such stalls, must meet the requirements for vertical clearance of Section 18.54.030. (b)Sight Distance (i)For residential uses of three or more units, and for all nonresidential uses, including public facilities, clear sight distance triangles for exiting driveways shall be provided as shown in Figure 6 of this section 18.54.070. In the non-zero setback zone only, if a stop sign is provided at the driveway exit, the Director may decrease the required dimensions of the sight distance triangles. For cases not covered by Figure 6, sight distance triangles shall be provided as required by the Director. Neither the sight distance triangles nor any portion of the public right of way shall contain any wall, sign, berm, or other obstruction that is greater than three feet high above driveway grade, unless its width (measured in any direction or diameter) is eighteen inches or less. Nor shall the sight distance triangles or any portion of the public right of way contain any landscaping, except trees, that is greater than two feet in height above top of curb grade (refer also to Sections 8.04.050(a)(8) and 9.56.030(a)(10)). The height of landscaping shall be its maximum untrimmed natural growth height. (2)In a parking lot, within the twenty-foot triangle of public or private property, measured from the projected curb or edge lines, at the intersection of a parking lot aisle with another aisle, driveway, or pedestrian walkway, there sha!l be no wall, sign, berrn, landscaping (except trees), or other obstruction that is greater than three feet high above parking tot grade, unless its width is eighteen inches or less. The height of landscaping shall be its maximum untrimmed natural growth height. (c)Additional Parking Facility Design Requirements Additional requirements for parking facility design, internal layout, acceptab]e turning radii and pavement slope, vehicular and pedestrian circulation, and other design features may be adopted by the Director when deemed appropriate. (d)Paving and Drainage The following basic standards shall be observed: In all districts, parking and loading facilities shall be surfaced and maintained with permanent pervious or impervious surfacing material sufficient to prevent mud, dust, loose material, and other nuisances, subject to approval by the city engineer. (2) In the OS and AC districts, and for temporary parking facilities in any district, gravel surfacing shall be permitted as approved by the city engineer. All parking and loading facilities shal! be graded and provided with permanent storm drainage facilities, meeting the construction specifications set by the city engineer. Surfacing, curbing, and drainage improvements shall be sufficient to preclude free flow of water onto adjacent properties or public streets or alleys, and to preclude standing pools of water within the parking facility. (4)Paving and drainage approaches for parking facilities shall be integrated with storm water protection approaches, consistent with Section 18.40.150 (Storm Water Quality Protection) of this title. 070717 syn 0120245 54 NOT YET APPROVED (e) Safety Features (f) Parking and loading facilities shall meet the following standards: (1)Safety barriers, protective bumpers or curbing, and directional markers shall be provided to assure safety, efficient utilization, protection to landscaping, and to prevent encroachment onto adjoining public or private property. (2)Visibility of and between pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists sha!l be assured when entering individual parking spaces, when circulating within a parking facility, and when entering and exiting a parking facility. (3)Internal circulation patterns, and the location and traffic direction of all access drives shall be designed and maintained in accord with accepted principles of traffic engineering and traffic safety. Lighting Lights provided to illuminate any parking facility, or paved area shall, to the maximum extent feasible, be designed to reflect away from any residential use or any riparian corridor. (g)Noise Areas used for primary circulation, for frequent idling of vehicle engines, or for loading activities shall be designed and located to minimize impacts on adjoining properties, including provisions for screening or sound baffling. (h)Maintenance (i) All parking and loading facilities shall be maintained to assure desirability and usefulness of the facility. Such facilities shall be maintained free of refuse, debris, or other accumulated matter and shall at all times be available for the intended off-street parking or loading use for which they, are required or intended. Application of Design Standards to Other Paved Areas The standards of this section apply to all paved areas used for outdoor display, storage, sales, or other purposes associated with permitted and conditional office, commercial, or industrial uses. 18.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities Bicycle parking facilities shall be provided for new buildings, addition or enlargement of an existing building, or for any change in the use that results in the need for additional vehicle parking facilities consistent with the parking requirements contained within Section18.52.040. Bicycle parking facilities required by Section 18.52.040 may contain bicycle parking elements of the types described in Section (a) below, and arranged according to the layout requirements described in (by below. The Department of Planning and Community Environment maintains a list of Approved, Conditionally Approvable, and Prohibited types of bicycle racks and bicycle lockers. Bicycle racks and lockers not on the "Approved" list must be approved by the Director. Likewise layout diagram examples specifying clearances and other aspects of bicycle parking areas are also available from the Department of Planning and Community Environment. 55 070717 syn 0120245 NOT YET APPROVED (a) Types of Facilities Bicycle parking is designed for two types of uses: long-term and short-term. Depending on use, a bicycle parking facility may be a bicycle rack, a bicycle locker, or a multifamily dwelling unit storage locker, a restricted access enclosure, or a school bicycle enclosure as described below. (1) Short-Term Bicycle Parking (Bicycle Racks) Short-troTh bicycle parking is intended for shoppers, customers, and visitors who require bicycle storage for up to several hours. (A) Bicycle Rack An acceptable bicycle rack is a stationary object to which the bicycle user can lock the frame and one or both wheels of a bicycle with a user-provided high-security U-shaped lock ("U-lock") or cable, and which is either anchored to an immovable surface or is heavy enough that it cannot be easily moved. (i) hztended use Bicycle racks located in publicly accessible areas are intended for short-term parking, to encourage shoppers, customers, and visitors to use bicycles. (ii) Pe~fo~vnance All bicycle racks provided pursuant to this ordinance shall support a bicycle by its frame in a stable upright position with both tires on the gound or floor, without damage to the bicycle or its finish. The parts of the rack that secure the bicycIe shall resist disassembly and cutting with manual tools. Bicycle racks should provide independent access to parked bicycles without the need for awkward movements even when the rack is fully loaded. (2) Long-Term Bicycle Parking Long-term bicycle facilities are intended for bicyclists who need to park a bicycle and its components and accessories for extended periods during the day, overnight or for a longer duration. Long-term bicycle storage is typically for employees, students, residents and commuters. The facility frequently protects the bicycle from inclement weather. Four design alternatives for these facilities are as follows: (A) Bicycle Locker A bicycle locker is a fully enclosed space for one bicycle, accessible only to the owner or operator of the bicycle. It protects the entire bicycle, its components and accessories from theft and inclement weather, including wind-driven rain. Bicycle lockers may be pre- manufactured or may be designed for individual sites. (i) Intended Use Bicycle lockers are the preferred long-term storage option for employees or residents. (ii) Locking device Internal Lock. A bicycle locker must be equipped with an internally mounted key-actuated or electronic locking mechanism, and not lockable with a user- provided !ock. Groups of internal-lock bicycle lockers may share a common 070717 syn 0120245 56 NOT YET APPROVED electronic access mechanism provided that each locker is accessible only to its assigned user. External Lock: An extel-nal-lock such as padlock hasps are not acceptable for most uses. External lock bike lockers may be permitted in shopping centers with the approval of the Director on a case-by-case basis. (B) Restricted-Access Bicycle Enclosure A restricted-access bicycle enclosure is a locked area containing within it one bicycle rack space for each bicycle to be accommodated, and accessible only to the owners or operators of the bicycles parked within it. The maximum capacity of each restricted- access bicycle enclosure shall be 20 bicycles unless approved by Transportation Division staff. The doors of such enclosures must be fitted with key or electronic locking mechanisms that admit only users and managers of the facility. The enclosure doors must close and lock automatically if released. In multiple-family residential developments, a common locked garage area incorporating bicycle racks shall be deemed a restricted-access bicycle enclosure provided that the garage is accessible only to the residents of the units for whom the garage is provided. In such cases it is preferable that the bicycle storage area within the garage be separately enclosed and secured to enable access only by bicycle owners. hztended Use A restricted access enclosure is an alternative long term bicycle storage option for commercial and multifamily residential projects. (C) Multifamily Dwelling Unit Storage Locker A multifamily dwelling unit storage locker is a locked area separate from the dwelling unit, secured by a lock that can be opened only by the occupants of the respective dwelling unit. bztended use A multifamily dwelling unit storage locker is intended for long-term storage of household possessions that are not kept in the dwelling unit, including bicycles. Configuration In multiple-family developments, the required bicycle storage and household storage areas for each dwelling unit may be combined into a multifamily dwelling unit storage locker assigned to that unit, provided that the total space requirement shall be the sum of the household storage and bicycle storage requirements computed separately. A usable space 2’ wide by 6’ long shall be provided for each stored bicycle. (D) School Bicycle Enclosure A school bicycle enclosure is a locked area at a primary, middle or secondary school, containing within it one bicycle rack space for each bicycle to be accommodated. The doors of such enclosures must be fitted with locking mechanisms that admit only school and maintenance staff, and must close and lock automatically if released. School bicycle enclosures should be kept locked except during student arrival and departure periods. 070717 syn 0120245 57 NOT YET APPROVED (b) The student bicycle parking requirement for a school may be provided by two or more enclosures where students arrive on bicycles from two or more points along the school perimeter. Bicycle Facility Design Standards (1)Location (B) Neither short-term nor long-term bicycle parking areas shall be located inside occupied buildings. All bicycle parking areas shall be located at street floor level, or equivalent in a parking garage. In underground garages, only long-term bicycle parking is allowed and such bicycle parking facilities must be located near employee elevators or stairwells. (2) (c) (D) Short-term bicycle parking shall be located within 50 feet of a main visitor entrance(s). Where there is more than one building on a site or where a building has more than one main entrance, the short-term bicycle parking must be distributed to serve all buildings or main entrance(s). Long-term bicycle parking shall be situated at least as conveniently as the nearest convenient vehicle parking area. Layout (A)Convenient access to bicycle parking areas shall be provided. Where access is via a sidewalk or pathway, or where the bicycle parking area is next to a street, curb ramps shall be installed where appropriate. A twenty-four-inch side clearance shall be provided between walls or other obstructions and the centerline of the bicycles parked on the nearest bicycle rack. (B) Bicycle facilities shall be separated from vehicle parking and circulation areas by a physical barrier or by a distance sufficient to protect parked bicycles from damage by vehicles, including front and rear overhangs of parked or moving vehicles. (C)If more than 10 short-term spaces are required, at least fifty percent (50%) must be covered, (D) (E) (F) A four foot (4’) wide aisle shall be provided to allow bicycles to maneuver in and out of the bike parking areas and between rows of bicycle parking facilities. An aisle into which the door of a bicycle locker opens shall be at least 5’ wide. Aisle width shall be measured between the rectangular areas that bicycles will occupy when parked on bicycle racks and!or the surface area occupied by bicycle lockers Where a public sidewalk or walkway serves as an aisle of a bicycle parking area and bicycles are parked perpendicular to that sidewalk or walkway, an additional 12" of paved area shall be provided between the sidewalk and the area occupied by adjacent parked bicycles. Where a public sidewalk or walkway serves as an aisle of a bicycle parking area and the doors of bicycle lockers open toward that sidewalk or walkway, the 070717 syn 0120245 58 NOT YET APPROVED lockers shall be set back so an open door does not encroach onto the main travel width of the sidewalk or walkway. (3) Paving Bicycle parking areas shall be paved. Aisles and primary access areas shall be paved with asphalt or concrete. Bicycle parking areas may be surfaced with alternate paving materials as approved by the Director. (4) Lighting Lighting of not less than one foot-candle of illumination at ground level shall be provided in both exterior and interior bicycle parking areas. (5) Signage (A)Where bicycle parking areas are not clearly visible to approaching bicyclists, signs shall be posted at the building entrance to direct cyclists to the facilities. (MUTCD sign D4-3 for bicycle parking). For bicycle parking areas intended for visitors, that entrance shall be the building’s main entrance. For bicycle parking areas intended for employees, that entrance shall be the employee entrance served by the bicycle parking area. (B)Long-term bicycle parking areas that incorporate bicycle lockers shall be identified by a sign at least 12"x12" in size that lists the name or title, and the phone number or electronic contact information, of the person in charge of the facility. (C) Signs for restricted-access bicycle enclosures shall state that the enclosure shall be kept locked at all times. Approval (A)The Director shall have the authority to review the design of all bicycle parking facilities required by this chapter with respect to safety, security, and convenience. (B)Where bicycle lockers or restricted access bicycle enclosures are required for a use, the Director may approve secure bicycle storage facilities providing the same level of security. The Transportation Division must approve bicycle parking areas located in parking garages. 18.54.071) Parking Design Tables and Figures Parking design tables and figures referred to elsewhere in this chapter are provided on the following pages. 070717 syn 0120245 59 NOT YET APPROVED Figure 1 Accessible Stalls, Double and Single SYMBOL OF ACCESSIBILITY DIFFERENt LEVEL ]HAN PAPa3NG ELEVATION DIAC-,ONAL LINES SPACED 36"TYP 5YMBC’L OF ACCESSI[qLI]Y ON GROUND- 108~ MIN ACCESSIBLE STALLS, DOUBLE TYPE 216" WALK OR PLANTING ACCESSIBLE STALL, SINGLE TYPE NEXT TO NON-ACCESSIBLE STALL 07071 ? syn 0120245 6O NOT YET APPROVED Figure 2 Accessible Stalls, Double Diagonal and Access Aisles MIN 48" MdN ON 6ROUND-TYR ACCESSIBLE STALLS, DOUBLE DIAGONAL TYPE NOIES: t ) ACCESSIBLE STALL MUST PERMIT USE OF EITHER OF CAP, DOORS. 2.) BUMPER RE©tJlREDWHEN NO CURB OR BARRIER IS PROVIDED WHICH WILL PREVENT ENCROACHMENT OF CARS OVER WALKWAYS. 3) WHEEL CHAIR USERS MUST NOT BE FORCEDTO GO BEHIND PARKED CARS OTHERTklAN THEIR OWN, 4~ LENG’I’H OF STALL VARIES WITH ANGLE. REFER TO SECTtOIq i 6.83.090, TABLES 4A, 4B. 60~ ACCESS AISLE AT PASSENGER LOADING ZONES 070717 syn 0120245 61 NOT YET APPROVED Figure 3 Parking Lot Layout WALL C H WALk TO WALL MODULE WALL BUMPER OVERHANG F WALL TO It,IT[ RLOCKII’#S INT~’;:LOC K MODULE MODULE (TYPICAL) CURB , "’"< "I -.~ ): - .STALL NOT ACCESSIBLE IN CE~RTAIN LA~’OUTS PARKING LOT LAYOUT 070717 syn 0120245 62 NOT YET APPROVED Table 3. Parking Lot Layout Dimensions for Uni-Class Parking Stallsa for Various Stall Widths (feet) Dimension On Diagram (Figure 3) .... A I B C Parking. Stall StallAngleWidthWidth and Parallel Vehicle to Aislesize .... 45 PARKING DID E F Parking Dimensions (Feetb) Stall Stall StallLength Depth to Depth to Wall Interlock Aisle Width Between Stall lines H =!d Module Module Module, Wall to Wall to Interlock Wall Interlock to Interlock 8.5 9.0 9.5 60 PARKING 8.5 9.0 9.5 12.0 24.4/21.2 17.25 15.00 13.0 48 46 43 12.7 24.4/21,2 17,25 15.00 12.0 47 45 42 13.4 24.4/21,2 17.25 i5.00 11.0 46 44 41 9.8 21.4/19,7 18.50 17.00 18.0 55 54 52 10.4 21.4/19.7 18.50 17.00 16.0 53 52 50 11.0 21.4/1917 18.50 17.00 15.0 52 51 49 75 PARKING 8.5 8.8 20.9/20,2 18.50 18.00 23.0 60 59 58 9.0 9.3 20.9/20,2 18.50 18.00 22.0 59 58 57 9.5 9.8 20.9/20,2 18.50 18.00 21.0 58 57 56 90 PARKING 8.5 8.5 17.5/17,5 17.50 17.50 25.0 60 60 60 9,0 g.O 17.5/17,5 17.50 17,50 24.0 59 59 59 9.5 9.5 17,5/17,5 17.50 17.50 23.0 58 58 58 a.The required stall widths shall be increased by 0.5 foot if a stall is immediately, adjacent to a wall on one or both sides. If there are walls on both sides of a stall, the increase shall still be 0.5 foot. b.Module widths rounded to whole foot. 070717 syn 0120245 63 NOT YET APPROVED Table 4. Driveway Dimensions For Multiple-Family Residential Uses of 3 to 10 Units ....... Dirnens!on (Feet) -Width, excluding flares or curb radiusa’b Urban Rural Minimum (one-way) paved width 8 12 total width=10 12 Minimum (two-way) paved width total wiclthc 14 24 16 24 Maximum (one-way)20 Maximum (two-way)33 Right turn radiusd Minimum 10 Maximum 30 Minimum Spacinge’~ From side property line 5 From street corner 10 Angleg 75° t5 0 15 75° a.Two-way ramps for above or below ground parking facilities must meet the requirements of Figure 5 except that the minimum width may be 16 feet instead of 18 feet. b.In special cases, the Uniform Fire Code, Section I0.207, may require two-way driveways to be a minimum of 20 feet wide. c.The total width shall be free of obstacles to vehicular and pedestrian use. d.On the side of driveway exposed to entry or exit by right-turning vehicles. Applicable only to driveways with curb radius. e.Minimum spacing is measured along the front property line from the driveway throat to the side property line, or to a line passing through the intersection curb return (see Figure 5). For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same property, refer to Section I2.08.060(9). f.For driveways on collector or arterial streets, the chief transportation official may require increased spacing from the street comer. g.Minimum acute angle measured from edge of pavement. 070717 syn 0120245 64 NOT YET APPROVED Table 5. Driveway Dimensions For Multiple-Family Residential Uses of 11 Units or More and For All Nonresidential Uses Dimension (Feet)Urban Rural Width, excluding flares or curb radius Minimum (one-way)12 15 Minimum (two-way)a 20 30 Maximum (one-way)20 30 Maximum (two-way)33 35 Right turn radiusb Minimum 10 15 Maximum 30 50 Minimum Spacing<d From side property line 5 0 From street corner 10 15 Anglee 75°75° a.For ramp width for above or below ground parking facilities, please refer to Figure 5. b.On the side of driveway exposed to entU or exit by right-turning vehicles. Applicable only to driveways with curb radius. c.Minimum spacing is measured along the front property line from the driveway throat to the side property line, or to a line passing through the intersection curb return (see Figure 5). For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same property, refer to Section 12.08.060(9). d. For driveways on collector or arterial streets, the chief transportation official may require increased spacing from the street comer. e. Minimum acute angle measured from edge of pavement. Table 6. Driveway Dimensions For Single Family and Two-Family Residential Uses Dimension (Feet)Urban Rural Width, excluding flares~ Minimum width I 8 8paved total width~10 10 Maximum 20 30 Angte~75°75° a.Minimum driveway widths for flag lots in "Urban" and in "Rural" area shall be 15 feet. b.The total width shall be free of obstructions to vehicular and pedestrian use. c.Minimum acute angle measured form edge of pavement. Not_.__ge: For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same property,, refer to Section 12.08.060(9). 070717 syn 0120245 65 NOT YET APPROVED Figure 4 Measurement of Minimum Spacing "N’ STRE ET FLARE ~k~" CURB/ INTERSECTION CURB ..... RETURN i IO’MINIMUM SPACINGSTREET PROPERTY LINE i i MIN. } SPACING DRIVEWAY THROAT STREET MEASUREMENT OF MINIMUM SPACING 070717 syn 0120245 66 NOT YET APPROVED Figure 5 Driveway Ramp Design BACK EDGE OF SIDEWALK STARTING POINT OF RAIVlP BREAKOVER " ANGLE k,2,~’ BREAKOVER RAMP SHALL NOT ANGLE EXCEED 22% SLOPE.,.._.~,._~-- 10’10’ 5’ MIN. I2~TRANSITION LENGTH SLOPE - 1/2 RAMP SLOPE (NOT TO EXCEED ] 1%) (~_.)TRANSITION LENGTH SLOPE - 1/2 RAMP SLOPE (NOTTO EXCEED 11%) DRIVEWAY RAMP DESIGN 1.A distance of 5 feet shall be maintained at the same slope as the sidewalk from the back edge of the sidewalk to the starting point of the ramp. 2.The first and last 10 feet of the slope grade (transition length) shall not exceed 11 percent. 3.The remaining portion of the ramp shall not have a slope greater than 22 percent and the breakover angle (see Figure 5) shall not exceed ten degrees (10°). 4. Minimum ramp width (two-way) for above or below ground parking facilities shall be 18 feet. 5. The slope of all parking areas shall not exceed seven percent. 0707 t 7 syn 0120245 67 NOT YET APPROVED Figure 6 Driveway Ramp Setback Zones ZERO SETBACK ZONES NON-ZERO SETBACK ZONES DRIVEWAY RAMP SETBACK ZONES 070717 syn 0120245 68 NOT YET APPROVED SECTION 4. Chapters 18.32 (PF Public Facilities District Regulations), 18.71 (OS Open Space District Regulations), and 18.72 (AC Agricultural Conservation District Regulations) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code are hereby deleted and Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) is hereby added to read as follows: 070717 syn 0120245 69 NOT YET APPROVED Chapter 18.28 SPECIAL PURPOSE DISTRICTS (PF~ OS~ AC) Sections: 18.28.010 18.28.020 18.28.030 18.28.040 !8.28.050 18.28.060 18.28.070 18.28.080 18.28.090 18.28.!00 Purposes Definitions Applicable Regulations Land Uses Site Development Standards Additional PF District Regulations Additional OS District Regulations Additional AC District Regulations Parking and Loading Grandfathered Uses 18.28.010 Purposes (a)Public Facilities District [PF] The PF public facilities district is designed to accommodate governmental, public utility, educational, and community service or recreational facilities. (b) Open Space District lOS] The purpose and intent of this district is to: (!)protect the public health, safety, and welfare; (2)protect and preserve open space land as a limited and valuable resource; (3)permit the reasonable use of open space land, while at the same time preserving and protecting its inherent open space characteristics to assure its continued availability for the following: as agricultural land, scenic land, recreation land, conservation or natural resource land; for the containment of urban sprawl and the structuring of urban development; and for the retention of land in its natural or near-naturaI state, and to protect life and property in the community from the hazards of fire, flood, and seismic activity; and (4)coordinate with and can’y out federal, state, regional, county, and city open space plans. (c)Agricultural Conservation [AC] The AC agricultural conservation district is intended to permit agricultural and compatible uses on property intended for preservation and retention essentially in its natural, farmed, or landscaped state. 070717 syn 0120245 7O NOT YET APPROVED 18.28.020 Definitions As used in this chapter, unless otherwise apparent from the context, the following definitions shall apply: (a) "Conservation or natural resource land" means land which possesses or encompasses conservation or natural resources. (b) "Conservation or natural resource" includes, but is not necessarily limited to, streams, watersheds, groundwater recharge, soils, wildlife habitat, as defined in this section, special land forms, and natural vegetation. (c) "Open space land" means any parcel or area of land essentially unimproved or in its natural state, and devoted to an open space use as defined in this section, and which is designated in the open space element for an open space use. (d)"Open space district" means any area of land or water designated "OS" and subject to all of the terms and regulations of this chapter. (e)"Open space use" means the use of land for: (1)Public recreation; (2)Enjoyment of scenic beauty; (3)Conservation or use of natural resources; (4)Production of food or fiber; (5)Protection of persons and their artifacts (buildings, proper~y, etc.); (6)Containment and structuring of urban development. (f)"Recreation land" means any area of land or water susceptible to recreational USES. (g)"Scenic land" means any area of land or water that possesses scenic qualities worthy of preservation. (h) The "Stanford Hoover Pavilion" site is defined as that property designated as Assessor’s Parcel numbers 142-04-011 and 142-04-012. (i) "Wildlife habitat" means any area of land or water valuable or necessary to the preservation or enhancement of wildlife resources. 18.28.031)Applicable Regulations The specific regulations of this chapter and the additional regulations and procedures established by this Title shall apply to all Special Purpose Districts. 070717 syn 0120245 71 NOT YET APPROVED 18.28.040 Land Uses Table 1 shows the permitted (P) and conditionally permitted (CUP) land uses for the Special Purpose Districts. ACCESSORY AND SUPPORT USES Accessory, facilities and accessory uses Eating and drinking services in conjunction with a Cb~P(~i permitted use Retail services as an accessory use to the administrative offices of a non-profit organization, provided that such retail services do not exceed CUP~I~ 25% of the gross floor area of the combined administrative office services and retail service USeS Retail services in conjunction with a permitted use C~(~) Sale of a_~ricuitural products produced on the .......... premises; provided, that no permanent commercial structure for the sale or processing of agricultural products shall be permitted. Second dwelling units, subject to regulations in Section 18.28.070 AGRICULTURAL AND OPEN SPACE USES Agricultural Uses, including animal h~sbandry, crops, dairying, horticulture, nurseries, livestock farming, tree farming, viticulture, and similar uses not inconsistent with the intent and purpose of this chapter ............ Botanical conservatories, outdoor nature laboratories, and similar facilities Native wildlife sanctuaries Pa~k uses and uses incidental to parkoperatiop P EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS, AND ASSEMBLY USES Business or trade schools CUP(~) Churches and religious institutions cup~ Educational, charitable, research, and ph!lanthropic institutions Private educational facilities Public or private colleges and universities and Table 1: Land Uses Subject toevos AC ................................................., in Chfip!er: p p p cup facilities appurtenant thereto Special educa{.ion classes .............................CUP~> OFFI CE USES P P Current Code Section 18.88 18.28.070 070717 syn 0120245 72 NOT YET APPROVED PF Administrative office services for non-profit organizations CUP~’) OTHER USES Other uses which, in the opinion of the zoning administrator, are similar to those listed as permitted or conditionally permitted uses PUBLIC/QUASI-PUBLIC FACILITY USES All facilities owned or leased, and operated or used, by the City of Palo Alto, the County of Santa Clara, the State of California, the government of the United States, the Palo Alto Unified School District, or any other governmental agency Communication Facilities Community Centers Utility Facilities RECREATIONAL USES Neighborhood recreation centers Outdoor recreation services Recreational uses including riding academies, clubs, stables, country clubs, and golf courses Youth clubs RESIDENTIAL USES .......... Single-family dwellings Manufactured housing (including mobile homes on permanent foundations) Guest ranches Residential care facilities, when utilizing existing structures on the site Residential Care Homes Residential use, and accessory, buildings and uses customarily incidental to permitted dwellings; provided, however, that such permitted dwellings shall be for the exclusive use of the owner or owners, or lessee or lessor of land upon which the permitted agricultural use is conducted, and the residence of other members of the same family and bona fide employees of the aforementioned SERVICE USES Animal care, including boarding and kennels Cemeteries Cemeteries, not including mausolea, crematoria, or columbaria Small day, care homes Large day care homes Day care centers CUP<) P CUP CUP cup CUP CUre P P P 18.40. CUP Ct~(~) P CUP CUP CUP CUP(1) CUP 070717 syn 0120245 73 NOT YET APPROVED Art, dance, gymnastic, exercise oi" music studios or classes Medical Services: H0spit~is Outpatient medical facilities with associated medical research TEMPORARY USES Temporary, parking }acilities, provided thai such facilities shall remain no more than five years TRANSPORTATION USES CUP~ cL P cup Airports and airport-related uses CU1:’~) (1) provided such use is conducted on property owned by, the City of Palo Alto, the County of Santa Clara, the State of California, the government of the United States, the Palo Alto Unified School District. or an,/other ~overnmental a~enc,,*, and leased for said uses. 18.~,8.0~0 Site Development Standards (a) Development Standards The development standards for the special purpose districts are specified in Table 2, provided that more restrictive regulations may be recommended by, the Architectural Review Board, pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 of the Palo Alto Municipal Code. 070717 syn 0120245 74 NOT YET APPROVED Table 2: Special Purpose District Site Development Standards ..................PF .........0’"S AC -’- ....... Subject to .... Regulations ..................................... in Chapter: MinimUmsiteAyeaSite(acres)Specificati°ns 10 5 Site Width (ft)l 250Site Depth (ft)! 250 Setback lines imposed by a special Minimum Setbacks (ft)setback map pursuant to Chapter 20.08 of this code shall apply(2)30 30 _(2)30 30 (~’)30 I 15 20.08_{2.,I 30 .........! .......24 i:1(3)1 .................. I I 10% 10%(~ [3.5%(4)18.28.070(1) 15025 35 35 18.28.060(a) 2 . ,0 1:2 !. . Resid,entia,!,,,,D~nsitv " [ [ 11 unit/acre 1 (1) For cemetery uses, all marke~s of graves shall be flush with grade level, and shall be considered impervious area under this requirement. (2) The minimum front, side, and rear yards in the PF public facilities district shall be equal to the respective front, side, and rear yards required in the most restrictive abutting district; provided, that no yard adjoining a street shall be less than 20 feet and that no interior yard shall be less than 10 feet. (3) Provided that, for parking facilities the maximum floor area ratio and site coverage shall be equal to the floor area ratio and site coverage established by the most restrictive adjacent district, and provided, further, that the maximum floor area ratio for the Stanford Hoover Pavilion site shall be .25:1. (4) Including buildings and all impervious ground surfaces, and provided that where a portion of a subdivision with clustered lots of less than ten acres in size contains an area rendered undevelopable by an open space restriction, the impervious coverage which would otherwise be allotted to this undevelopable area shall be transferred to those lots within the subdivision on which development will be permitted in a proportional manner based on lot size. Front Setback Rear Setback Interior Side Setback Street Side Setback Maximum Floor Area Ratio Site Coverage and Impervious Coverage Maximum Site Coverage Additional Site Area permitted covered by impervious ground surfaces Maximum Impervious Coverage Height Restrictions Maximum Height (ft) Maximum Height within 150 feet of a residential district (ft) Maximum Number of Stories Daylight Plane for site lines abutting a residential district Initial height (ft) Slope 070717 syn 0120245 75 NOT YET APPROVED 18.28.060 Additional PF District Design Requirements The following additional regulations shall apply in the PF district: (a) Recycling Storage All new development, including approved modifications that add thirty percent or more floor area to existing uses, shall provide adequate and accessible interior areas or exterior enclosures for the storage of recyclable materials in appropriate containers. The design, construction and accessibility, of recycling areas and enclosures shall be subject to approval by the architectural review board, in accordance with design guidelines adopted by that board and approved by the city, council pursuant to Section 16.48.070. (b) Employee Shower Facilities Employee shower facilities shall be provided for any new building constructed or for any addition to or enlargement of any existing building as specified in Table 3. Uses All government or special district facilities designed for employee occupancy, colIeges and universities, private educational facilities, business and trade schools and similar uses Require.~ Gross Floor Area of New Showers Required Coostruction ,(ft2) , 0-9,999 No requirement 1i0,000-19,999 20,000-49,999 2 50,000 and up ..4 (c) Landscaping of Yards (1) All required interior yards (setbacks) abutting or opposite a residential district shall be planted and maintained as a landscaped screen. (2)For sites abutting a residential district, a solid wall or fence between 5 and 8 ft in height shall be shall be constructed and maintained along the common site line. 18.28.070 Additional OS District Regulations The following additional regulations shall apply in the OS district: (a)Second Dwelling Units Not more than one attached or detached second dwelling units shall be allowed on a lot in the OS district, and shall be subject to the following regulations: (!)Second dwelling units shall be subject to the following development requirements: 070717 syn 0120245 76 NOT YET APPROVED (b) (2) (A)Second dwelling units shall only be permitted on sites with a minimum actual site area of t0 acres (B)Maximum size of living area: 900 square feet (C)Maximum size of covered proking area: 200 square feet (D)Maximum height, as measured to the highest point of the building: 17 feet (E) Maximum number of habitable floors: 1 The second dwelling unit shall have street access from a driveway in common with the main residence. Separate driveway access may be permitted upon a determination that separate access will result in fewer environmental impacts such as excessive paving, unnecessary grading or unnecessary tree removal, and that such separate access will not create the appearance, from the street, of a lot division The second dwelling shall be architecturally compatible with the main residence with respect to style, roof pitch, color and materials. Site and Design Approval All sites in the OS district shall be subject to the Site Design and Review Combining District (D) as provided in Chapter 18.82 of the Zoning Ordinance. (c)Geological Soils Investigation and Report (1)All applications for site and design approval shall be accompanied by a combined in-depth geologic and soils investigation and report prepared by a registered geologist certified by the state of California as an engineering geologist, and by a licensed civil engineer qualified in soil mechanics. Such report shall be based on surface, subsurface, and laboratory investigations and examinations and shall fully and clearly present: (A)Al! pertinent data, interpretations, and evaluations; (B)The significance of the data, interpretations, and evaluations with respect to the actual development or implementation of the intended land uses, and with respect to the effect upon future geological processes both on and off the site; (c)Recommendations for any additional investigations that should be made. All costs and expenses incurred as a result of the requirements of this section, including the costs and expense of an independent review of the material submitted under this chapter by qualified persons retained by the city, shall be borne by the applicant. (2)The requirement of subsection (1) may be waived by the city engineer for accessory facilities and landscaping where such improvements, in his opinion, would pose no potential hazard to life or property on the subject or surrounding properties. 070717 syn 0120245 77 NOT YET APPROVED (d)Landscaping The existing natural vegetation and land formations shall remain in a natural state unless modification is found to be necessary for a specific use allowed in this chapter through the site and design approval procedure. Reduction or elimination of fire hazards will be required where heavy concentrations of flammable vegetation occur. Landscaping as may be necessary and required shall be consistent with the purpose of this chapter. (e) (~) (2) Landscaping shall be designed and installed consistent with the requirements and guidelines of Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) of the Zoning Ordinance, and in particular with subsection 18.40.130(c) regarding landscaping in Natural Areas, as well as with the relevant Comprehensive Plan policies outlined in subsection (o) below. Exceptions to tree removal restrictions may be made for invasive species such as eucalyptus trees. The property owner shall ensure the survival of tree plantings for a period of a minimum of five years. The owner shall install any replacement trees and monitor their survival. A certified arborist shall prepare a report at the end of the five-year period documenting the condition of the trees and said report shall be forwarded to the Department of Planning and Community Environment for review. Any subsequent owner(s) shall also be obligated to replace any trees that die with trees of the same size and species stated on the approved building permit plans. Fencing Restriction No barbed wire, or similar fencing having a cutting edge, may be installed except: (1) To protect a vegetative community or wildlife habitat until it is fully established, subject to the imposition of reasonable time limits through site and design review pursuant to Chapter 18.30; and (2)To enclose utility facilities, including, but not limited to, water or sewage pumps, storage tanks, and wells. Tree Removal Removal of live trees shall be permitted only as provided in Title 8. (g)Access to Remote Areas Roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways for automobiles, trucks, buses, or motorcycles or other wheeled vehicles shall not be developed except upon the securing of site and design approval. No such approval shall be granted except upon finding that the purpose for which the roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways are proposed is essential for the establishment or maintenance of a use which is expressly permitted in this chapter and that the design and location of the proposed roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways will be compatible with the terrain. The use of all roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways existing at the 070717 syn 0120245 78 NOT YET APPROVED (h) time of the adoption of this chapter which are nonconforming or have been established without proper approvals shall be terminated and shall be returned to natural terrain unless given approval in accordance with the regulations set forth in this chapter. Grading No grading for which a grading permit is required shall be authorized except upon the securing of site and design approval. No such approval shall be granted except upon a finding that the purpose for which the grading is proposed is essential for the establishment or maintenance of a use which is expressly permitted in this chapter and that the design, scope, and location of the grading proposed will be compatible with adjacent areas and will result in the least disturbance of the terrain and natural land features. All grading for which no permits or approvals are required shall be subject to the provisions set forth in this chapter. (i)Soil Erosion and Land Management O) (k) (l) No site and design plan shall be approved unless it includes soil erosion and sediment control measures in accordance with any adopted procedures, technical standards, and specifications of the planning commission. No approval will be granted unless all needed erosion control measures have been completed or substantially provided for in accordance with said standards and specifications. The applicant shall bear the final responsibility for the installation and construction of all required erosion control measures according to the provisions of said standards and specifications. Subdivision All divisions of land into four or more parcels shall be designed on the cluster principle and shall be designed to minimize roads; to minimize cut, fill, and grading operations; to locate development in less rather than more conspicuous areas; and to achieve the purpose of this chapter. Substandard Lots Any parcel of land not meeting the area or dimension requirements of this chapter is a lawful building site if such parcel was a lawful building site on July 5, t972. All other requirements of this chapter shall apply to any such parcel. Impervious Coverage Impervious coverage shall be limited to 3.5% of the site, and shall be calculated to include all building coverage, plus paved surfaces including but not limited to driveways, parking areas, sports or tennis courts, swimming pools, patios or decks, subject to exceptions and provisions as follows: (1)Portions of primary driveways located in scenic setbacks shall not be counted as impervious if predominantly constructed of pervious paving materials up to a width of 20 feet. 070717 syn 0120245 79 NOT YET APPROVED (m) (2)Primary driveways composed of a gravel surface shall not be counted as impervious up to a width of 20 feet, and subject to staff determination that gravel is a functional surface material. (3)Primary driveways are those that extend from the nearest access road to the garage or carport providing required parking for the main residence. (4)Proposed pervious paving materials for driveways shall only be permitted if acceptable to the Palo Alto Fire Department. (5)Areas excluded from impervious coverage pursuant to approvals granted prior to July 1, 2007 shall remain excluded from impervious coverage calculations, unless the surfacing material is altered to a less permeable material." Light and Glare Exterior lighting should be low-intensity and shielded from view so it is not directly visible from off-site. Skylights shall not use clear or white glass and shall not be illuminated from directly below the skylight, to avoid glare at night. All new windows and glass doors shall be of a non-reflective material. (n)Story Poles and Other Visual Review Aids Story poles (with associated taping or flagging) shall be erected for projects involving new residences or other structures, or for substantial additions to new residences, for the purpose of providing a better understanding of the visual impacts of a proposal in the OS district. Story poles shall accurately outline the perimeter and key and highest rooflines of the proposed structure(s) and shall be durable and sturdy enough to be visible from distant views. Story poles shall be constructed to the satisfaction of the director prior to notice of a hearing and shall remain in place through the public hearing date. Erection of story poles prior to public hearing notice may be required by the director to allow for staff and neighbors to view the project. Other aids, such as taping the perimeter of other development (structures, pools, sport courts, etc.) on the site and identifying trees to be removed, may also be required by the director. Story poles shall be removed upon final action on a project or upon the direction of the director." (o)Open Space Review Criteria In addition to the above provisions and development standards in Table 2, the following criteria shall be considered in the Site and Design review of all development of land in the OS district, as outlined in the Conservation Element of the Comprehensive Plan: (1) The development should not be visually intrusive from public roadways and public parklands. As much as possible, development should be sited so it is hidden from view. (2)Development should be located away from hilltops and designed to not extend above the nearest ridge line. 070717 syn 0120245 8O NOT YET APPROVED (3) (4) (5) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) Site and structure design should take into consideration impacts on privacy and views of neighboring property. Development should be clustered, or closely grouped, in relation to the area surrounding it to make it less conspicuous, minimize access roads, and reduce fragmentation of natural habitats. Built forms and landscape forms should mimic the natural topography. Building lines should follow the lines of the terrain, and trees and bushes should appear natural from a distance. Existing trees with a circumference of 37.5 inches, measured 4.5 feet above the ground level, should be preserved and integrated into the site design. Existing vegetation should be retained as much as possible. Cut is encouraged when it is necessary for geotechnical stability and to enable the development to blend into the natural topography. Fill is generally discouraged and should never be distributed within the driplines of existing trees. Locate development to minimize the need for grading. To reduce the need for cut and fill and to reduce potential runoff, large, flat expanses of impervious surfaces should be avoided. Buildings should use natural materials and earthtone or subdued colors. Landscaping should be native species that require little or no i~Tigation. Immediately adjacent to structures, fire retardant plants should be used as a fire prevention technique. Exterior lighting should be low-intensity and shielded from view so it is not directly visible from off-site. Access roads should be of a rural rather than urban character. (Standard curb, gutter, and concrete sidewalk are usually, inconsistent with the foothills environment.) (p)Standard Conditions of Approval The director shall maintain a list of standard project conditions for projects in the OS district that reflect the intent of the OS criteria. Conditions may address, but are not limited to, landscaping, tree protection, planting, and maintenance, lighting, roofing materials, grading, construction staging, and fire protection. 18.28.080 Additional AC District Design Requirements The following additional regulations shall apply in the AC district: (a)Site and Design Approval All sites in the AC district shall be subject to the Site Design and Review Combining District (D) as provided in Chapter 18.xx. 070717 syn 0120245 81 NOT YET APPROVED (b)Location of Agricultural Facilities Barns, stables, sheds, chicken houses, and other similar facilities for the shelter and feeding of animals, exclusive of domestic household pets, shall be located a minimum of 40 feet from any site line. 18.28.09{)Parking and Loading Off-street parking and loading facilities shall be required for all permitted and conditional uses in accord with Chapter t8.40. All parking and loading facilities on any site, whether required as minimums or optionally provided in addition to minimum requirements, shall comply with the regulations and the design standards established by Chapter 18.42. In addition, parking facilities shall be subject to the following regulations: (a)PF District In the PF district, no required parking space shall be located in the first 10 feet adjoining the street property line of any required yard. (b)OS District In the OS district, no parking space shall be located in a required front or side yard or in a special setback. (c)AC District In the AC district, no required parking space shall be located in a required front yard or required street side yard. 18.28.100 Grandfathered Uses In the OS district, accessory dwellings and guest cottages existing on April 28, 1986, and which prior to that date were lawful, conforming permitted uses may remain as legal nonconforming uses. Such uses shall be permitted to remodel, improve or replace site improvements on the same site, without necessity to comply with site development regulations for continual use and occupancy by the same use; provided that any such remodeling, improvement or replacement shall not add a kitchen nor result in increased floor area, number of dwelling units, height, length or any other increase in the size of the improvement without complying with the standards set forth in Section 18.28.070(a) and without applying for and receiving a conditional use permit. SECTION 5. Chapter 18.04 (Definitions) is hereby amended to revise or add definitions to read as follows: (14) "Automotive services" means a use p~ima,-i Iv engaged in sa4e-~ ~ rental, service, or major repair of new or used automobiles, trucks, trailers, boats, motorcycles, recreational vehicles, or other similar vehicles, including tire recapping, painting, body and fender repair, 070717 syn 0120245 82 ,,:,,:’~ ~a ~-~d dc~aiii- and engine, transmission, air conditioning, and glass repair and replacement, and similar services. (16) "Below market rate (BMR) housing unit" means an3, housing unit sold or rented to ,, cm -i~,~,,~. low or moderate income persons i~,,~ seho ds .pursuant to the ÷.~ity of Palo Alto’s below market rate program administered by the Palo Alto hEousing eCorporation, or a successor organization. (33) "Commercial recreation" means a use providing recreation, amusement, exercise or entertainment services, including theaters, bowling lanes, billiard parlors, skating arenas, gymnasiums, exercise studios or facilities, fitness centers, Eealth c!ubs or spas, martial arts studios, group movement instruction, and similar services, operated on a private or for-profit basis, but excluding uses defined as ~ :~<~’..~.~ <e~", ce< ,’/outdoor recreation services defined (45) "Drive-in service" means a feature or characteristic of a use involving sales of products or provision of services to occupants in vehicles, including drive-in or drive-up windows and drive-through services such as mechanical automobile washin~ (47) "Eating and drinking service" means a use providing preparation and retail sale of food and beverages, including restaurants, fountains, cafes, coffee shops, sandwich shops, ice cream parlors, taverns, cocktail lounges and similar uses. ’ " " definitions are provided in subsections (45) and (136). (61) "General business office" means a use principally providing services to individuals, firrns, or other entities, including but not limited to real estate, insurance, property management, title companies, investment, personnel, travel, and similar services,-a~ (65B) "Grade" in the R-E and R-1 residence districts, means, for each building or structure, the lowest point of adjacent gound elevation prior to grading or fill, if the site has a natural slope of 10% or less. For R-E and R-1 sites with a natural slope of more than 10% (calculated using the lowest and highest elevations on the site), "grade" shall mean the adjacent ground elevation of the finished or existing grade, whichever is lower. The calculation of "average grade" for the purpose of determining the daylight plane is described in the definition of "~Da\.ii £hi Piar~c." (65) "Gross Floor Area" .... (A)Non-residential & Multifamily Inclusions: For all zoning districts other than the R-E, R-I, R-2 and RMI) residence districts, "gross floor area" means the total area of all floors 070717 syn 0120245 83 (S) of a building measured to the outside surfaces of exterior walls, and including all of the following: (i)Halls; (ii)Stairways; (iii)Elevator shafts; (iv)Service and mechanical equipment rooms; (v)Basement, cellar or attic areas deemed usable by the director of planning and community environment; (vi) Open or roofed porches, arcades, plazas, balconies, courts, walkways, breezeways or porticos if located above the ground floor and used for required access; (vii) Permanently roofed, but either partially enclosed or unenclosed, building features used for sales, service, display, storage or similar uses; and (viii) In residential districts other than the R-E, R-l, R-2 and RMD residence districts, atI roofed porches, arcades, balconies, porticos, breezeways or similar features when located above the ground floor ~md ~-~’ - Non-residential & Multifamily Exclusions: For all zoning districts other than the R-E, R-l, R-2 and RMI) residence districts, "gross floor area" shall not include the fol!owing: (i) Parking facilities accessory to a permitted or conditional use and located on the same site; (ii) Roofed arcades, plazas, walkways, porches, breezeways, porticos, and similar features not substantially enclosed by exterior walls, and courts, at or near street level, when accessible to the general public and not devoted to sales, service, display, storage or similar uses. (.i{) !n ~csidenti~l dislricts other ~han the R-E. R-I. R-2 and RMD residence ~ocmcc above the ~ ok nd Floor and nol qub~tantiallv enclosed bx exterior walls. (iv) Except in the CD District and in areas designated as special study areas, minor additions of floor area approved by the director of planning and community environment for pu~oses of resource conservation or code compliance, upon the dete~ination that such minor additions will increase compliance with environmental health, safety or other federal, state or local standards. Such additions may include, but not be limited to, the following: a. Areas designed for resource conservation, such as trash compactors, recycling: and ,a~ ~, ..... ~;~;,; ............ b. Areas designed and required for hazardous materials storage facilities, handicapped access or seismic upgrades; (v) In commercial and industrial districts except in the CD District and in ~eas designated as special study areas, additions of floor area designed and used solely for on-site employee amenities for employees of the facility, approved by the director of planning and community environment, upon the dete~ination that such additions will facilitate the reduction of employee vehicle use. Such additions may include, but are not limited to, recreational facilities, credit unions, cafetmJas ~day care centers. ’ te~lc~. ,,,~c,,incs. convenience s[ores, m?cl &x cieaners. 070717 syn 0120245 84 (84B) "Flag lot" means an interior (114) "Personal service" means a use providing services of a personal convenience nature, and cleaning, repair or sales incidental thereto, including: (A) Beauty shops, r~:~ ..~ ~s. c,:~\ s~.,. ~;d barbershops; Self-service laundry and cleaning services; laundry and cleaning pick-up stations where alt cleaning or servicing for the particular station is done elsewhere; and laundry and cleaning stations where the cleaning or servicing for the particular station is done on site, utilizing equipment meeting any applicable Bay Area Air Quality Management District requirements, so long as no cleaning for any other station is done on the same site, provided that the amount of hazardous materials stored does not at any time exceed the threshold which would require a permit under Title 17 (Hazardous Materials Storage) of this code; (t)C) Repair and fitting of clothes, sr ;o.,. and personal accessories; (~)Quick printing :~c~ coi:,~ ~ services where printing or c<’m ~ for the particular service is done on site, so long as no quick printing ~r c,:~.-,~ ~a for any printing ~!r co!~\ ~r,e service is done on the same site; (t:~) Co~"in-~’a ~. serviceslnternet a~d o~iqer consu~qer eiectronics at,\., ic,~<’ Film. d~ia and video processing shops, including shops where processing for the particular shop is done on site, so long as no processing for any other shop is done on the same site; ~nd (H)Art, dance or music studios intended ior an indiviciuai or s~qqaii ~roup of ~)crsons ip, ~ ci~ss ~scc ’c,~n’.,mcrc~a! recreation" for o~hcr acti\ ~tics). (142) "Usable open space" means outdoor or unenclosed area on the ground, or on a roof, balcony, deck, porch, patio or ten’ace, designed and accessible for outdoor living, recreation, pedestrian access,__or landscaping or any ......,,,,~ .............. ;"~’~ ~"~ ,,,~ ~’ ..... o,~;~ ..... ~ .... ~ but excluding parking facilities, driveways, utility or service areas. L sable ~>pc~) space s~a~i b~~ <~cd ~d 070717 syn 0120245 85 SECTION 6. Chapter 18.04 (Definitions) is hereby amended to delete the illustrations and diagrams at the end of the chapter and references thereto, and Section 18.04.010 (Purpose and Applicability) is hereby amended to add the following: 18.04.010 Purpose and Applicability. The purpose of this chapter is to promote consistency and precision in the interpretation of the zoning regulations. The meaning and construction of words and phrases defined in this chapter shall apply throughout the zoning regulations, except where the contest of such words or phrases clearly indicates a different meaning or construction. SECTION 7. Subsection 18.04.65(D)(ii) of Section 18.04.030 (Definitions) is hereby amended to read as follows: ~ ;,,= ~=~, ~ ~; ~, shall be excluded from the calculation of gross floor area.’~ SECTION 8. Chapter 18.08 (Designation and Establishment of Districts) and all sections of Title 18 (Zoning) shall be reformatted and renumbered to reflect the revised Table of Contents. SECTION 9. Subsection (i) of Section 18.10.040 (Development Standards) of Chapter 18.10 (Low Density Residential Districts) is hereby added to read as follows: (i)Individual Review "The individuzd Re\ie\v pvo\’isiop, s of Section !8.12. t !0 (H ihc Zoning Ordinance shal~ he applied ~o a~x sinMc-fami}v ov ~x~ o-Famiiv residence those sides of a site tha! shave an imcrior side lot line ~ith oF a proposer} zoned For ov used for Avchiieciui’at Rcxicx~ Bo~vd vcxic,,a is required for a second daei!ine on an R>qD-zoned SECTION 10. Subsection (b) (Inclusion as Gross Floor Area) of Section 18.10.090 (Basements) of Chapter 18.10 (Low Density Residential Districts) is hereby amended to read as follows: 070717 syn 0120245 86 (b)Inclusion as Gross Floor Area "Basements shall not be included in the calculation of gross floor area, provided that: (1) (2) basement area is not deemed to be habitable space, such as a crawlspace; or basement area is deemed to be habitable space but the finished level of the first floor is no more than three feet above the grade around the perimeter of the building foundation, c .,.,- ~ ¯ ’ SECTION 11. Subsection 18.12.040(a) (Table 2:R-1 Residential Development Standards) of Chapter 18.12 (R-1 Residential Districts) is hereby amended to revise the rear daylight plane angle to 60 degrees. SECTION 12. Subsection 18.12.040(b), 7th row of Table 3 (Gross Floor Area Summary), is amended to read as follows: "Entry feature <12’ in height. SECTION 13. Subsection 18.t2.040(b), Table 3 (Gross Floor Area Summary) is hereby amended to delete the 14th row and revise the 15th row to read as follows: SECTION 14. The section title to Subsection 18.12.050(a)(3)C) (Detached Storage Structures) is hereby amended to read: "Detached Storage Structures" and the first sentence is amended to read: "Detached sStorage structures not over six feet in height or twenty-five square feet in floor area may be located in interior side yards and rear yards according to the provisions of Section 18.12.080(b) for accessory structures." SECTION 15. The second paragraph of subsection 18.18.070(e) (Certification of FAR Bonuses), is hereby amended to read as follows: "As a condition precedent to being credited with a historic rehabilitation floor area bonus whether for use on-site or for transfer, the owner of the site shall enter into an unsubordinated protective covenant running with the land in favor of the city (or, if the city is the owner, in favor of a qualified and disinterested third party i i ~c ~~ms@r o1 dcvc!opmc~{ h d>:s), in a form satisfactory to the city attorney, to assure that the property will be rehabilitated and maintained in accordance with the Secretary of Interior’s "Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings", together with the accompanying 070717 syn 0120245 87 interpretive "Guidelines for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings," as they may be amended from time to time. SECTION 16. Section 18.32.090(e) (Transfer of Development Rights) is hereby amended to read as follows: "(e) The city manager shall establish and maintain a special fund into which all proceeds of the sale of transferable rights, and any interest thereon, shall be deposited. Upon receipt and entry into the accounting records for the fund such monies shall be considered committed to the rehabilitation of the city-owned building from which the development rights were sold, or 4~ .~,a ,~,~,~t ~c,~-mr.lr. .... ~;~ ~11~..,;~ ~1.~ o~1~ ~t~ ~ ....... ,~M .-~l;*q~ ................ ~to the rehabilitation of other city-owned buildings in the Historic Category 1 or 2 or Seismic H~ard Categories I, II, or III." SECTION 17. Section 18.42.120 (Resource Conservation Energy Facilities) of Chapter 18.42 (Standards for special Uses) is hereby added to read as follows: ENERGY FACILITIES d) P,.rchiicc!urai rc’,ic~ s rcqLired pursu~m~ ~o rise pro\isio,..qs of Section i 8.76,020: Floor aca ~a~io (FCR) cxemmions shai~ no’~ cxceed 3.000 squarc ~ee~ or 2% (.02 FAR} o~- 2) 6} 070717 syn 0120245 88 SECTION 18. Section 18.48.040 (Site Development Regulations) of Chapter 18.48 (Hotel (H) Combining District Regulations) is amended to read as follows: 18.48.040 Site Development Regulations "The site development regulations of Chapter i,,,.; io CN~r i: ~ ’{ ~’-’~ ..... , ) and "~,M,~, ~r,r,~ ,,~ r,~,o,,t=,- I ~ a < ~r’~ whichever is applicable, shall apply except for the following: (a) Floor Area Ratio: (1)The maximum floor area ratio (FAR;. io~ .......,;~c ~se shall be-g~ .i ,,,~’, to 1 SECTION 19. Chapter 18.74 (F Floodplain District Regulations) is hereby deleted in its entirety. SECTION 20. Subsection (g) (Phased Projects and Enforcement of Approval Conditions) to Section 18.76.020 (Architectural Review) is hereby added to read as follows: accordance SECTION 21. Subsection (h) (Architectural Review Approval Prior to Demolition) to Section 18.76.020 (Architectural Review) is hereby, added to read as follows: rcquirin£ archi~cciural rc~icw approval, until such architectural rcvic> approval is £ramed by line director, includine rex Jew of subsequent conditions bx the architectural rex iexv board, where required." 0707 t 7 syn 0120245 89 SECTION 22. Chapter 18.87 (Tranferable Development Rights) is hereby deleted in its entirety. SECTION 23. Subsection (a)(2) of Section 18.98.060 (Notice of Public Hearing) of Chapter 18.98 (Amendments to Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations) is hereby amended to read as follows: (2)"Additionally, excepting a city-wide change in the zoning map, the city shall mail written notice of such hearing at least twelve days prior to the date of the hearing to each owner of ..... ’~ of real property ~md to e~cn .~:~ c:~,n~,d occummt within 91.4 meters ~ feet) of the exterior boundary of the propeKy for which classification is sought. No~cc sh~l~ he pr~ ~cc, t~s spcc~ ~ec ~ See:ion file Compliance with the procedures set fo~h in this section shall constitute a good faith effort to provide notice, and the failure of any owner or occupant to receive notice shall not prevent the city from proceeding with the headng or from taking any action nor affect the validity of any action." SECTION 24. Section 18.98.080 (Changes in Regulations) of Chapter !8.98 (Amendments to Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations) is hereby amended to read as follows: 18.98.80 Changes in Regulations Chan=es in the provision of this title other than the boundaries of districts may be initiated from time to time, by one of the following actions: "Chan,~es= in the provision of this title other than the boundaries of districts may be initiated from time to time, by one of the following actions: (1)(-a-)By motion of the city council on its own initiative; By motion of the planning commission on its own initiative; or ~\ am,~tic~ ti~, ~ of ~hc- ~,:- :~ no: ¯ (,i ~ ~c ~ ~ ~i ’,~ <;tHd he ~ui;icc~ ~o }-: proposed ~cxt __Changes initiated by motion of the council shall be forwarded to the commission, and may be supplemented by such explanatory material as the council may deem appropriate to facilitate review and recommendation by the commission. A rczonin~ rcclucs{ grad public hcmina. II ~he commission so directs, he rc~icx~cd pursu~m~ to the proxisions o1 Section 18.98.090 070717 syn 0120245 9O SECTION 25. All references to metric measurements throughout Title t8 (Zoning) are hereby deleted. SECTION 26. All references to "Zoning Administrator" are hereby replaced with the term "Director" throughout Title 18 (Zoning). SECTION 27. All references to sections in Title 18 shall be revised where necessary to match the new numbering sequence throughout Title t 8 (Zoning). SECTION 28. The City Council finds that the changes effected by this ordinance are consistent with the impacts addressed by the Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report, and that no further environmental review is required pursuant to the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). SECTION 29. This ordinance shall be effective on the 31st day after the date of its adoption. INTRODUCED: PASSED: AYES: NOES: ABSENT: AB STENTIONS: NOT PARTICIPATING: ATTEST: City Clerk APPROVED AS TO FORM: Mayor APPROVED: Assistant City Attorney,City Manager Director of Planning & Community Environment 070717 syn 0120245 91 ATTACHMENT B Chapter 18.13 MULTIPLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS {RM-15, RM-30, AND RM-40) Sections: 18.13.010 18.13.020 18.13.030 18.13.040 18.13.050 ! 8. I 3.060 18.13.070 Purposes Applicable Regulations Land Uses Development Standards Village Residential Development Multiple Family Convext-Based Desien Criteria Grandfathered Uses 18.13.010 Purposes This section specifies ;eauia;ic,-ns for three multiple family residential districts. (a)RM-15 Low Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-15] The RM-15 low-density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance areas for a mixture of single-family and multiple-family housing which is compatible with lower density and residential districts nearby, including single-family residence districts. The RM-15 residence district also serves as a transition to moderate density multiple-family districts or districts with nonresidential uses. Permitted densities in the RM-15 residence district range from ~ei~h____Lt to fifteen dwelling units per acre. (b)RM-30 Medium Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-30] The RM-30 medium density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance neighborhoods for multiple-family housing with site development standards and visual characteristics intended to mitigate impacts on nearby lower density residential districts. Projects at this density are intended for larger parcels that will enable developments to provide their own parking spaces and to meet their open space needs in the form of garden apartments or cluster developments. Permitted densities in the RM-30 residence district range from sixteen to thirty dwelling units per acre. (c)RM-40 High Density Multiple-Family Residence District [RM-40] The RM-40 high density multiple-family residence district is intended to create, preserve and enhance locations for apartment living at the highest density deemed appropriate for Palo Alto. The most suitable locations for this district are in the downtown area, in select sites in the California Avenue area and along major transportation corridors which are close to mass transportation facilities and major emplo~vrnent and service centers. Permitted densities in the RM-40 residence district range from thirty-one to forty dwelling units per acre. Draft Redline: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 2 18.13.020 Applicable Regulations The specific regulations of this chapter and the additional regulations and procedures established by other pertinent chapters in Title 18 shall apply to all multiple-family residence districts. 18.13.030 Land Uses Table 1 specifies the permitted and conditionally permitted land uses in the multiple- family residence districts. Table 1: Multi Residential Uses Accessory Facilities and uses customarily pincidental to permitted uses Home Occupations, when accessory to Ppermitted residential uses Horticulture, Gardening, and Growing of food products for consumption by P o~cuPants of a..site Surface Parking Facilities located on P P P P P P cup cup Chapter 18.40 Chapter 18.42 abandoned railroad rights-of-way !EDUCATIONALi RELIGIdUs ~; ....... Churches and Religious Institutions CUP CUP CUP Private Clubs, Lodges, or Fraternal Organizations, excluding any such facility CUP operated as a business for profit ...... Private Educational Facilities CUP CUP ~UP ~ Community Centers CUP CUP CUP Utility Facilities essential to provision of utility services but excluding construction or storage yards, maintenance facilities, or corporation yards. cup cup CUP CUP CUP CUP p~p~ Neighborhood Recreational Centers lingle-Family wo-Fami!y Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 3 Multiple-Family Mobile Homes Residential Care Homes P P P Convalescent Facilities Day Care Centers ,i ~a2,’ Care Small Family Day Care Homes Large Family Day Care Homes Small Adult Day Care Homes ,arge Adult Day Care Homes ,a~in~ a~d Drinkin~ Services. exce~v~ ~i~e-i~n and take-out services ei~hborhood-servi~]a nature CUP I CUP P !P I P P I PcupIcv~ CUP P P P P CUP c ~ P C L; P CUP CUP CUP 18.42.050Temporary Uses, subject to regulations in Current Code 18.42.050 Permitted Use CUP = Conditional Use Permit Required ~5::~it~;e:~ use_~,,.q!’, p~c4s le~,s t~Bi~ ~.5’0~ sc!uare fee~ in size_.: ~widfi?,the of a site in of one where used transition low-densi>,of perimeter excess acre as a Dsidential area. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 4 18.13.040 Development Standards (a)Site specifications, building size and bulk, and residential density The site development regulations in Table 2 shall apply in the multiple-family residence districts, provided that more restrictive regulations may be recommended by the Architectura! Review Board and approved by the Director of Planning and Community Environment, pursuant to the regulations set forth in Chapter 18.76._ performance criteria set forth in Chapter 18.23, and the multiple famil?’ residential av-~>ae~,,oI,t~.,,t-based criteria set forth in Section ! 8.13.060. Table 2: Multi Minimum Site Specifications Residential Develo ~ment Table Site Area (ft2) Site Width (ft) .Site Depth (ft) . ~ubsta~maro Lot S~ecifications Site Area .SKe...Width (ft) ............. Minimum Setbacks Front Yard (ft) On arterial .... .. ,_ loog,] ,,+,..~,,, Interior Side s~e~Yards (~) ,.,~c~,~ oi 70 l%et or ~reater For lots with width of less than 70 feet Imer~or Rear Yards Street Side and Street Rear Yards_(~) gide and Rear Yards de:asK)’ residentia! zone 8,5007o lO0 Less ~ba~ 8.500 ~uare fee~ and/or Less than 70 fb~.!...in wid*k~ , ~ r,i setback map pursuant to Chapter 20. 08 q~this code m~, apply i0 18. ! 3.040(b) Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 5 HeightCs:’ (ft) tMaximum height for those portions of a site within 4-50 feet of a more restrictive residential 35district or a site containin~ a residential use in a nonresidentia! district Daylight Plane for side and rear lot lines for sites abuttin~ any R-1. R-2. RMD, or RM-15 district or abuttin~ a site containin,~, a single- family or two-family residential use in a nonresidential district: Initial Heiaht (rE) An~le (de.arees)4_~5 sites ’abt ’aip,~ a RM-30. RM-40. Planned Community, ov nonves__identia! district that does not contain a single-family or two-family residential use: For lots with width of 70 feet or ~reater None For lots with width of less than 70 feet. limited to the first 10 feet from the properrZ line (no daylight plane beyond !0 t~et): Initial Height (ft)l0 . An~le (de~rees)!45 tj/laximum Site Coverage: Base [35°/o140°/o145% Additional area permitted to be covered by covered pati% or overhangs otherwise in 5%5%5% compliance with all applicable laws tj/Iaximum Floor Ar"ea Ratio’~AR)~ ...................0.5:1 ’ 0.6:1 i 1.0:1 ~aximum Residential Density (units) 6,000 ~.~!99 Maximum number of units per acre~ i 4 3O ! + ercem)I 3S I 30 i 20 / I~. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 6 ;~n;~ ~,, Usable Open Space (~f ,oe,r uait)m ~ci0 t 150....... ] ~n~ ....t O0 _ ~ace (sfl}er unit}I00 I 75 5"_2 !g.i3.E.40(e) ~ ~~rivate 50 50 50 I’erformance Criteria ~See ~’ovisions of Chapter I8.23 ( Ch. 18.23 ~,,~,.dscape Requirements .......,J ......} 18.40.136 _=’a£Mna{’’~]SeeDrovisions of Chal)ter i8.52~ .......Ch.. 18.52 ~ ~ Minimm~ 1)ont setbacks shall be determined bs" vhe Architectural Review Board ~on review ~ ursuant to criteria se, t~rth in Chm)ter !g.76 and the comex>based criteria omlined in Sec~ion 8. i 3.060. ~qa,,at street side setbacks in the RM-40 zone may be from 0 ~o 16 %et and shall be determined {,v ~l~e Architectural Revie~x Board upon ..... ~~ ( ontexi-based criteria outlined in Section ! S. 13.060. _~’> Provided that. t~r any lot of 5.000 square t}et or mreater, two units are allowed, subiect (~mpl~ance with all other dexfelopmem regulations. ~ ’ Covered parking is not included as floor area in mulIi-f~mitv deve!opmem, up i~uare feet 1)er required parking ~pace that is covered. Coxered parkin~ spaces in excess of recquired ~,arkMa~paces count as floor area. ’~ect to the limitations of Section 18.13.040(e). Usable open s~ce is included as pm~ of the ~inimum site open space: required usable open space in excess of~he minimum requi~:ed Ibr common ~~n suace may be used as ekher common or private usable open s~ace: landscaping may ount towards total site open space aRer u~able open space requirements are met. ~’~ Tandem parking is allowed for any unit requiring B~,o parking spaces, provided ~hat both spaces in !a~dem are intended for use by the same residential unii. For pm}ect~ with more ~!)an l~ur (4) units, not ~ore than 25% ofihe required parking spaces shal! be in a tandem configuration, _~ ~ Each daylight plane applies specifically and separately to eacB~roper~y line according to the ~aceni use. ( ! ) Setbacks Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 7 (A) (13) (c) Setbacks for lot lines adjacent to an arterial street, expressway or freeway, as designated in the Palo Alto Comprehensive Plan, shall be a minimum of twenty-five feet (25’), except, that lesser setbacks ma\ be aibwed or reouired by fi~e Plannin~ Dh-ector. uigon ~ecommendadon by the Archkecmra! Review Board. where prescribed by the comext-based criteria outlined in Section i8. i3.060 i?, the CD .Dirm-ic< Special setbacks of £reater than 25 feet may not be reduced except upon approval of a design enhancement exception or variance. Required parking spaces shall not be located in a required front yard, nor in the first ten feet (10’) adjoining the street property- line of a required street side yard. Projections into yards are permitted only to the extent allowed by Section 18.40.070 of this code. (2) Height and Daylight Planes (A) Exceptions to maximum height limitations are permitted only to the extent allowed by Section 18.40.090 of this code. The fo!lowing features may extend beyond the daylight plane established by the applicable district, provided that such features do not exceed the height limit for the district unless permitted to by Section 18.40.090 of this code: Television and radio antennas; Chimneys and flues that do not exceed 5 feet in width, provided that chimneys do not extend past the required daylight plane a distance exceeding the minimum allowed pursuant to Chapter 16.04 of this code. 111. ~_ wO-Pa~r~h% Uses(c)Single-Family and ~" ~ "~ " (1)The regulations in Chapter 18.12 that apply to the R-1 district shall apply to sites in single-family use in the multiple-family residence districts. The reeuiations in Chap~e~: !8.10 that aD’~slv to the R-2 districl may be applied, at the applicant’s discretion, to sites in tv, o-family use in the mukble-tEmih’ residence disl-ricts, in lieu of the multi-family standards. The Individual Review provisions of Section 18.12.110 of the Zonin~ Ordinance shall be applied to any sinale-famitv or two-family residence in the lnulti-familv districts, to those sides of a site that share an interior side lot line with the interior side or rear lot line of a property zoned for or used for single-family or two-famih’ dwellino~s. The Individual Review shall not be applied to adjacent uses other than single-family and two-family uses. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 8 (d)....~ " ~ ~ Substandard lots in :h,e multiple famih’ zonh:a disn-icts are those that are: 1 } less lots may be developed pursuam to the reau!ations outlined in Table 2 or max be developed accord~na to 0~e reaulafions provided %r Viliaae Residential deve!opment, as outlined in Section ig.13.050. Sir~aie%qmih’ and two-t%ni!v development on these lots shall be developed as outlined ;q <,4.<.~..~cu.~,~.~~ ..... ~ ~’~, above. (e)Usable Open Space The following usable open space regulations shall apply: Re@fired r\,~;,,h,~,m~ Site O~en Space. Each ~’~:-a~’:’ shall, at a minimum. have ~c ~’!cwh~a= _portion of the ~s~te." " as prescrmea~ ’ .in Table 2. developed into pendently maintained u~N+open other tmcovered ~re~q not, ~ I (2) minm~um, have a ponbn office site. as prescribed in TuNe 2. deveioped into ~ermanemiv maintained usab!e £~ace. includina private and common usabie open s~ace areas. Usable open space shali be locaied pro~ected from ~he activities of commercia! areas and adiacent pubi~c s~ree~s and sba}! provide noise bufi)ri::a from surroundi::e uses where feasible. Parki::a, d:h, ea avs and :equired pa:-kin~ :ot la::dscapi::~ shall not be counted as usable o::en space. (A)Privae Usable Open Space. Each dwelling unit shall have at least one private usable open space area contiguous to the unit ":.~ch :hat allows the occupants of the unit the personal use of the outdoor space. The minimum size of such areas shall be as follows~:~ :.L..a4 (i)Balconies (above ground level)._~,~.~’-~’°~: :"~,¢ 50 square feet. !eas: din:ension of which shall is 6 +>’-’t (ii)Patios or yards -Hn the R_M-15 and RM-30 districtsrpe~-~r.-: ::’~. ~:aa square feet, the least dimension ofwhich is 8 feet ~br at least 75% of the a:ea. (iii)r~÷i -o yards gin the RM-40 district:: ~*;~’~ or va~ ~:-a44c~’-~%%~80 square feet, the least dimension of which is 6 feet %r at least v<< ~, _,, o or the area. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 9 (B)Common Usable Oi.~en Space. The miniinum designated open space ..... n,ea on the sf~e shall ’oe 10 ~ee~° ~ wide arid each such designated area shail comprise a minimum of 200 s<uare ~et. In the RM-30 and ~-40 districts, pa~ c4or all of the required private usable open space areas may be added to the required common usable open space in a development, for pu~oses of improved desi~, privacy, protection and increased play area for children, upon a recommendation of the aArchitecmral ~Review bBoard and approval of the dDirector+~:k~g (0 Personal Services, a~Retail Sen’ices. aria -,-+" ~~%’" .....~’~ the P~+ +a_~.v.-~ and RM-40 district~ Within a single residential development containing not less than ~.%40 dwelling¯~+ ~ 4 4,q<-;,.,- +~mice+ solelyunits, personal services_, a+~retail services, and eatm~ ~:~i~u of a ~:~ ..............-,+c,a,,~,,~ .....~-..~ ......nature to residents i~ +may be allowed~ a~roval,,,,-~a condffionai use ,_ ~.,~,~.,>+-m ;, subject to the followin~ limitations and to such additional conditions as may be established by the conditional use pe~it: (1)Total gross floor area of all such uses shall not exceed ~5.000 square feet or ÷~~ethree percent of the gross residential floor area within ~*.. ¯_the development, whichever is smaller. ~nd may no~ occupy an~ accordance .~,i+- ~his section q~ail not be " ~ ....=~oor The Cop, ditiona! Use Permil for ~he proiect may preclude cermip: uses and shall include conditions that are appropriae ~o i imff impacts of nohe. li~htina, odors. Darkin~ and trash disposal fl’om fi~e operation of d~e commercial estab!ishmen~. The hours of operation shah be iimffed to assu;c, comDatibiiitv with the residentia! use and surroundina residendaI uses. t 5 }Allowable Nei~hborhood-Servina Uses. A nei@.borhood-servin~ use mimariiv selwes individual consumers and households, not businesses, is aeneral y pedes~Man oriented in desien, and does no~ eenerate noise. %rues customer base. A neighborhood-servina use is also one ~o which a sianificant number of local customers and clients can x~ aik. bicvcie or :ravd short distances, rmher than reivina primarih on automobile access or the provider office aoods or sere:ices traveiina oft:site. Ailowabie neiahborhood-servina personal services, remii services and easna and drinkina services may include, but are not limited to. ~’aaent" dry cleaners. flower shops, convenience arocerv s~ores (exciudin~ !iauor stores}. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 10 deiica~essens, cafes, f’imess l\aci!ides, day care t~aciiities, and simiiar uses fbund by the P!annine Director ~o be compafibie with fl~e inzen~ offi~is. ?lTOv~SiO~. shall be .~e~c+e-Opermitted only -isi~e~q~:~as specified in the co::dMo:ml use per:nit and by Direc:or upon recommendation of the Archi:ectural Review Board: (2)Off-street parking, and bicvcie facilities, in addition to facilities required for residentia! uses, shall be provided as may be specified by the conditional use permit. However, there shall not be less than one parking space for each employee working or expected to be working at the same time. For any project containin~ forty (40) or ~reater units and located more than 500 feet from neighborhood commercial services, as detennined by the Director. a mininmm of 1.500 square feet of neighborhood serving retail. personal service, and/or eatin~ or drinkin~ uses shall be provided, sub_iect to the above limitations. No conditional use permit is required, but the commercial use shall be reviewed by the Architectural Review Board as of the architectural review approval. A minimum of one parkin~ space for each employee workin~ or expected to be workina at the same time shall be provided. Below (2) Market Rate Units and Renta~ Housing Protection In developments of 4g-five or more units on sites of less than five acres, not less than -1-0-%fifteen percent (15%) of the units shall be provided at below- market rates (BMR) to very-low, low and moderate income households in accordance with Program 4~2 H-36 of the Pale Alto Comprehensive Plan Housina Element. In developments of five or more units on sites of five acres or more, not less than twenty percent (20%) of the units shall be provided at below-market rates (BMR). Specified percentages are applied to all proposed units in a project, includin~ those desio~nated as BMR units. Further details of the BM R program requirements, includina their applicability to subdivisions and for density bonus pro-poses, are found in the discussion of Programs H-36 and H-38 of the Pale Alto Comprehensive Plan Housin_~ Element. For anv multi-family zoned site on which three (3) or more units exist, where at least two (2) of the units are rentals, the units max: not be demolished or replaced unless: (A) Replaced by an identical or areater number of rental units: or (B)Replaced by the maximum number of rental units allowed on the site under the maximum zonin~ density permitted. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 11 (h)Performance Criteria In addition to all other provisions of this Chapter. all multi-family development shall comply with applicable provisions of Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria Multit~le Familv, Commercial, Industrial and Planned Community Districts). 18.13.050 Village Residentiai Devetogment (a}Purpose Villaae Residential multiple-family development is intended to create, preserve and enhance areas for a mixture of sinale-familv and multiple-family housin~ that is compatible with lower density and residential districts nearby, includino_ sino~te- family residence districts. Housin~ types may include but are not limited to single family houses on small lots, attached rowhouseitownhouse, and cottaae clusters. Villaae Residential development also se~wes as a transition to moderate density multiple-family districts or districts with nonresidential uses. Permitted densities range from eiaht to twelve dwelling units per acre. Village Residential housin~ also provides a means to accommodate home ownership options in multiple-family zones. (b}Applicability of Regulations Villaae Residential development standards may be applied to RM-I 5 multiple- family residence district sites, as well as to substandard RM-30 and RM-40 multiple-family residence sites. It may also be applied to the perimeter of RM-30 and RM-40 sites laro~er than one acre in size where a transition to a lower-density adiacent use is desired. The Director may require the submittal of Covenants. Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs), maintenance a~reements, easements, and/or other legal instru.n~.ems to document and disclose conditions of the pr0iect approval. (c)Development Standards Table 3 specifies the development standards for new Vitiate Residential developments that provide for individua! lots established for sale of one housina unit on a lot. These developments shall be desio_ned and constructed in compliance with the followin~ requirements and the context-based desian criteria outlined in Section ! 8.1,3.060, provided that more restrictive reaulations may be recommended by the architectural review board and approved by the director of plannin~ and community environment, pursuant to Section 18.76.020: Table 3: Village Residential Develo ,ment Table Site Site Area (ft-") Site Width (ft) Site Depth ~ecifications 6.000 50 t00 Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 12 um Setbacks ~[~inimum Lot Specifications°~,: Lot Area (ft?). Attached Units Lot Area (if:). Detached Units ~4aximum Lo~ Area :font lot setback (fl) ~ear lot setback (fi) ~ide lot setback 3istance between detached units RM-I 5 development standards perimeter of site ! .500 2.500 4.000 RM- 15 development 0a~qight Planes standards apply to . .~ ......................................................perim..eter of site RM-1 s development ............ i ...............3~aximum Site Coverage I - , Z , " ¯I"t stanoaros apply to s~te ]]a-oplied to entire site 5laximum Residential Densi~’ (unitst i Maximum number of units per acre [12 ~linimum Site Open Spacet~)I 35% of entire site I 18.13.040(e) ~inhnum Usable Open Space (per unit)(~300 sq. , Mi.simum common open space (per unit)No requirement 18.13.040(e) ~ Mi:~imum Priva~ PReP spa~e (P,~r unit~ ~,~:;~0 S~- ft:,,, . ~and{.ca.Pe Req.uirement~ ....................................] #~ ~ See provision~ of Chapter Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 13 :’ Individual tots are created by subdividing the development, site io create one for-sale lot per dwe!lin.~nit. Overall developmem intensily (FAR. site coverage, lanoscapeiopen space) shall be c~]culated cross the emire site to comt~ly wffh RM-I 5 zone standards, and setbacks and daylight planes at the erimeter of the site shall comply with RM-15 setbacks and dayligh~ planes. For common-ownershit~ evelopmems such as condominiums and apartments, the underlying multipb-fam ly. zone district evelopment standards shall app y, ~ Covered parkin~ that is a~mched to the residence shall be included in the maximum house size. ~ Covered parkin~ is not included as floor area i!] multi-family development, up io a maximum of 230 ~tiMng sp~ces count as floor area. * Sukject to the limitations of Section 18. t3.040(e). Usable open space is included as pan of the ~mmmm site open space: required usable open space in excess of t!~e minimum required for commo~ nd private open space may be used as effher common or private usable open space: landscaping may ount towards total site open space after usable open space requirements are met.5 Tandem parkins is a!lowed for an(, unit requirins two parkina spaces, provided that both spaces in andem are intended for use b~ the same residential unit. For protects with more than tbur (4) units, not ~ore than 25% of flue required l?arking spaces shall be in a tandem contSauralion. (d)Desiffn for Entire Site The entire development plan for a Viltaae Residential proiect, includin~a subdivision of the site into individua! lots and desian ofbuildinas, streets. driveways, parkina, and open space shall be submitted and reviewed at one time, Design for individual tots may not be phased for subsequent approval. (e) Pos~-Cons~rnctmn Modifications (2 ] Modifications to completed units, such as additions to dwe!lina units, chanaes in circulation or parkina, exterior buildin~ desim~ features, and provisions for open space, must be submitted as an amendment to the Vitlaae Residential development, unless an alternate review process is outlined in the initial project approval. The Director may require the submit-tal of Covenants. Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs) and/or other leaal instruments to documem and disclose the post-construction approval process, An amendment to the Villaae Residential approval may on N be submitted bv the owner of the entire site or bv an entity ,(such as a homeowners association) representing the property owners. The amendment shall be reviewed in the same manner as the oriainal approval and must demonstrate compliance with the applicable standards for the entire site. Minor architectural review max. be approved by staff, pursuant to the process outlined in Section 18.76.020 for exterior architectural or site modifications deemed minor by the Director. 18.13.060 Multil~le Family Context-Based Desio.n Criteria (a) Contextual and Compatibi|itv Criteria Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 14 Development in a multiple-family residential district shall be responsible to its context and compatible with adjacent development. ( 1 )Context (A)Context as used in this section is intended to indicate relationships between the site’s development to adjacent street tTpes, surroundins land uses. and on-site or nearby natural features, such as creeks or trees. Effective transitions to these adjacent uses and features are stronsly reinforced bv Comprehensive Plan policies. (B)The word "context" should not be construed as a desire to replicate existina SmToundin~s. but rather to provide appropriate transitions to those surroundings. "Context" is also not specific to architectural style or desian, though in some instances relationships may be reinforced by an ardqtectural response. (2)Compatibility Compatibility is achieved when the apparent scale and mass of new buildinas share o~eneral characteristics and establishes design linkaaes with the overall pattern of buildinas so that the visual unity of the neighborhood or street is maintained, For active streetscapes, compatibiliW is achieved when the scale and mass of new buildino_s are consistent with the pattern of achievina a pedestrian oriented desian. Compatibiliw ~oats mav be accomplished through various means. includina but not limited to: (i)the sitina, scale, massina, and materials: (ii)the rhythmic pattern of the street established by the o<eneral width of the buildings and the spacin~ between them: (iii) the pattern of roof lines and projections: (iv) the sizes, proportions, and orientations of windows, bays and doorways: (v)the location and treatment of entr~vavs: (vi)the shadow patterns from massin~ and decorative features: (vii)the sitina and treatment of parking; and (viii)the treatment of landscaping. (b)Context-Based Desian Considerations and Findings In addition to the findinas for Architectural Review contained in Section 18.76.020(d) of the Zonina Ordinance. the followina additional findings are applicable in the RM-15. RM-30. and RM-40 districts, as further illustrated on the accompanying diagrams: Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 15 (_1) Massin~ and Buildina Facades Massina and buildina facades shall be designed to create a residential scale in keep, ina with Palo Alto neio_hborhoods, and to provide a relationship with street(s) throuah elements such as: A.Articulation. setbacks, and materials that minimize massing~ break down the scale of buitdinas, and provide visual interest (Figure 1-1): B. Rooflines that emphasize and accentuate sianificant elements of the buildina such as entries, bays. and balconies (Figure 1-i]: C, Placement and orientation ofdoora.vavs. windows, and landscape elements to create a relationship with the street (Fioaure 1-1): D. Facades that include projectin~ eaves and overhan~s, porches, and other architectural elements that provide human scale and help break, up buildina mass (Fi~_ure 1 - t ): E. Entries that are clearly defined features of#ont facades, and that have a scale that is in proportion to the size and type of the buildin~ and number of units beina accessed: laraer buildinas should have a more prominent buildin~ entrance, while maintainina a laedestrian scale: F. Residential units that have a presence on the street and are not walled-oft’or oriented exclusively inward: G.Elements that signal habitation such as entrances, stairs, porches, bays and balconies that are visible to people on the street (Figure 1-2): H. All exposed sides ofa buildin~ designed with the same level of cm’e and integrity (Figure 1-2}: (Figure 1-I) (Fi ~ure 1-2 ) Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 16 (2)Low-Density Residential Transitions Where new proiects are built abuttina existina lower-scale residential development, care shall be taken to respect the scale and privacy of nei~hborin~ properties throuah: Transitions of development intensity flom hio~her density development building types to buildina types that are compatible with the lower intensity.. surroundina uses. such as small-!ot units and rowhouses ~Fi~ure 2-!1: (Figure~ "~- Co Massina and orientauon of buildings that respect and mirror the massina of neiahborina structures by steppin~ back upper stories to transition to smaller scale buildinas, includina setbacks and day.!igl!t planes that match abuttina R-1 and R-2 zone requirements (Figure 2- 2): Respecting privacy of neighborina structures, with windows and upper floor balconies positioned so they m inimize views into neiahborina properties (Fi ~ure ~-~): D. Minimizina si~,h.t lines into and fi’om neiahborin~ properties (Fiaure 2-3): E. Limitino. sun and shade impacts on abuttin~ properties: and F.Providing pedestrian paseos and mews to create separation beta,,~een uses. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 17 (3) Pro_iect Ope~. Space Private and public open space shall be provided so that it is usable for the residents and visitors of a site. A. The type and design of the usable private open space shall be appropriate to the character of the buildina(s), and shalI consider dimensions, solar access. wind protection, views, and privacy: B. Open space should be sited and designed to accommodate different activities. ~,,-out~s. active and passive uses. and should be located convenient to the residents. C.Common open spaces should connect to the pedestrian pathways and existina natural amenities of the site and its sunoundin~s (Figure: 3- !.): D. Usable open space may be any combination of private and common s~aces: E.Open space should be located to activate the street facade and increase %yes on the street" when possible (Fiaure F.Usable qpen space does not need to be located on the ~round and may be located in porches, decks, balconies and/or podiums (Figure 3-3): G. Both private and common o~en space areas should be buffered from noise where feasible through landscapin~ and buildin~ placement: (Yiaure 3-1 ) (FEzure 3-2"/ Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 18 H.Open space situated over a structural slab/podium or on a rooftop shall have a combination of landscapin~ and hio_h quality paving materials, includina elements such as planters, mature trees. and use of textured and/or colored paved surfaces (Figure 3-3): and Pa~kin~ may not be counted as open ~ace. Parking Design Parkina needs shall be accommodated but shal! not be allowed to overwhelm the character of the project or detract from the pedestTian environment, such that: A.Parkin~ is located behind buildings. below ~rade or. where those options are not feasible, screened bv landscaping. low walls. ~araaes and carports, etc.: B. Structured parkin~ is fronted or wrapped with habitable uses when possible (Figure 4-!): C. Parkin~ that is semi-depressed is screened with architectural elements that enhance the streetscape such as stoops, balcony overhanas, and/or art (Figure 4-2): D. Landscapina such as trees, shrubs. vines, or aroundcover is incorporated into surface parking_ lots (Figure 4-2): Stuctured parking fronted or wrapped with habitable uses (Fi~:ure 4- I ) Semi-depressed parking screened with architectural elements that enhance the streetscape such as stoops, balcony overhangs, and/or art (Figure Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 19 E.For propel-ties with parkina access the rear of the site (such as a rear alle’,, or driveway) tandscapina shall provide a visua! buffer between vehicle circulation areas and abusing properties (Figure 4-3): F. Street parki~.a is utilized for visitor or customer parkina and is desianed in a manner to enhance traffic ca!min~: G.Parkina is accessed flom side streets or alleys when possible. (Figure 4-3) Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 20 (5) Larae (multi-acre) Sites Large (in excess of one acre) sites shaIt be desianed so that street, block, and buildina patterns are consistent with those of the surroundino_ neiahborhood, and such that: A.New development of large sites maintains and enhances connectivity witl~ a hierarchy of public streets. private streets, walks and bike patios (inte~’ated with Palo Alto’s Bicvcte Master Plan, when applicable): B. The diversity ofbuildina types increases with increased lot size (e.~= <1 acre = minimum ! building Wpe: 1- 2 acres = minimum 2 housing types; areater than ~=~ acres minimum 3 housina types) (Fi~mes 5-1 through 5- 3): and C. Where a site includes more than one housing type. each buitdin~ type should ~espond to its immediate context in terms of scale, massina, and desian (e.~.. small tot units or rowhouse buildina types facina or aburtin~ existin~ sin~le-t~milv residences) (Fiaures 5-2 and 5-3). (Figure (Figure 5-2) (Figure 5-3") Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 21 (6) Housino~ Variety and Units on Individua! Lots Multifamilv projects may include a variety of unit t~,/l)es such as small-lot detached units (Figure 6-1). attached rowhousesitownhouses (Figure 6-2). and cottaae clusters in order to achieve variety and create transitions to adjacent existin~ development, provided that: A.Setbacks and daylight planes a!on~ the perimeter of the site shall conform to RM-! 5 zone standards: B.Overall development intensity (FAR. landscape coverage, open space) shal! be calculated across the entire site to comply with the RM- 15 zone standards: C.lndividuai detached units shall be spaced a minimum of 3 feet apart: D. For units on individual "fee simpte’’ lots. units may be situated aloha the property line of the individual parcel (i.e.. zero-lot line) to allow usable open space in the opposite side setback: E. Each detached unit shall have at least one usable side yard between the house and fence to provide outdoor passaae between the front and rear ,~’ards: F.Spaces between buildings shall be landscaped and/or shall provide for usable hardscape (patios. decks, etc.); G.Sidewall windows should be designed with privacy features such as obscure alass or alass block: H.Windows on sidewalls opposite each other should be above eve level or should be offset to l~revent views into adjacent units: and I.Architectural treatment shall be carried aloha the sidewalls of detached units. pm"dcularlv sidewalls facino~ streets and pathways. Smal!-Lot units on individual lots Kiaure 6-1 Rowhouses on individual Iol:s Figure 6-2 Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 22 (7)Sustainabilitv and Green Buitdina Design Pr_~ect design and materials to achieve sustainabilitv and areen buildins desian shall be incorporated into the project. Green buildina desian considers the environment durin~ desian and construction. Green buildin~ desian aims for compatibitit-v with the local environment: to protect, respect and benefit fl’om it. In aeneral, sustainable buiIdings are enerav efficient, water conservino~, durable and nontoxic, with hish-qua!ib.’.~paces and hiah recycled conten[ materials. The followina considerations should be included in site and buitdina desim~: Optimize buildina orientation for heat ~ain. shading, daylighting, and natural ventilation (Figure 7-1 Desian landscaping to create comfortable micro-climates and reduce heat island effects (Fiaure 7-2); Design for easy pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access: Maximize onsite stormwater manaaement through landscaping and permeable pavement (Fi sure 7-3): Use sustainable buildin~ materials. Desiam lighting, plumbina and 9quipment for efficient enerav use: G. Create healthy indoor environments: through $ou~ Use M Shading Davices to Contro! Solar loadsin Summer and gain Passive heat in Winter (Fiaure 7-1 ) ’Urban Agriculture’ and rooftop!balcony gardens (Fiaure 7-2) Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 23 Use creativity and innovation to build more sustainable environments. One example is establishin~ ~ardens v~ith edible fbuits, vegetables or other plants to satisr% a po~ion of pro_iect open space requirements (Figure 7-2): a~d Provide protection for creeks and riparian veaetation and integrate stormwater management measures and open space to minimize water quality and erosion impacts to the creek environment. Minimize Stormwater Runoff to Impermeable areas Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 24 d "D Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 25 18.13.070 Grandfathered Uses (a)Grandfathered Uses The following uses may remain as grandfathered uses and shall not be subject to the provisions of Chapter 18.94: (1) RM-15 district: (A) (B) (c) Professional and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-1 or RM-2 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit ofprezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-1 or RM-2 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit. (2) RM-30 district: (A)Professional and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditiona! use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-3 or RM-4 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit (B)Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-3 or RM-4 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city, without benefit ofprezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 26 (c)Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit (3) RM-40 district: (A) (B) (c) Professional and medical office uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-5 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property to the city without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit Two-family uses and multiple-family uses existing on July 20, 1978 and which, prior to that date, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating pursuant to a conditional use permit, or which uses were, prior to July 20, 1978, located in an RM-5 district, which was imposed by reason of annexation of the property" to the ciD, without benefit of prezoning and which, prior to the date of annexation, were lawful conforming permitted uses or conditional uses operating subject to a conditional use permit. Motel uses existing on July 20, 1978, and which, prior to that date, were lawfu! conforming permitted uses or conditional uses subject to a conditional use permit (b)Permitted Changes The following regulations shall apply to the ~andfathered uses specified in subsection (a): (1)Such uses shall be permitted to remodel, improve, or replace site improvements on the same site, for continual use and occupancy by the same use, provided that such remodeling, improvement or replacement: (A)shall not result in increased floor area; (B)shal! not result in an increase in the number of offices, in the case of professional or medical office uses, or dwelling units, in the case of residential or motel uses; (C) shall not result in shifting of building footprint; (D)shall not increase the height, len~h, building envelope, or size of the improvement, (E)shall not increase the existing de~ee of noncompliance, except through the ganting of a design enhancement exception pursuant to Chapter 18.76, with respect to multiple-family, professional and medical office, and motel uses, or a home improvement exception pursuant to Chapter 18.76, with respect to two-family use: Draft: July 30, 2007 Multi-Family Districts Page 27 (2) (4) (F)in the RM-15 district, such remodeling, improvement, or replacement shall be for continual use and occupancy by the same use. If a ~andfathered use ceases and thereafter remains discontinued for ~,elve consecutive months, it shall be considered abandoned and may be replaced only by a conforming use. A grandfathered use which is changed to or replaced by a conforming use shall not be reestablished, and any portion of a site or any portion of a building, the use of which changes from a grandfathered use to a conforming use, shall not thereafter be used except to accommodate a conforming use. The following additional regulations shall apply to grandfathered professional or medical office uses: (A)Any remodeling, improvement, or replacement of any building desig-ned and constructed for residential use shall be subject to the issuance of a conditional use permit in accord with Chapter 18.76. (B)In the event ofredeveloprnent of all or a portion of the site for permitted residential uses, professional and medical office uses may not be incorporated in the redevelopment, except that this provision shall not apply to permanent conversion to residential use of space within an existing structure now used for professional and medical office uses. Draft: July 30, 2007 ATTACHMENT C Chapter 18.52 PARKING AND LOADING REQUIREMENTS Sections: 18.52.010 18.52.020 18.52.030 18.52.040 18.52.050 18.52.060 18.52.070 18.52.080 Purpose Definitions Basic Parking Regulations Off-Street Parking, Loading, and Bicycle Facility Requirements Adjustments by the Director Parking Assessment Districts and Areas - General Assessment Districts - CD District Parking Assessment District Adjustments by the Director 18.52.01!)Purpose Off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities are required for new uses and enlargements of existing uses, proportional to the need created by each use, in order to alleviate traffic congestion. Development regulations and design standards are intended to ensure the usefulness of parking, loading, and bicycle facilities, protect the public safety, and, where appropriate, to mitigate potential adverse impacts on adjacent land uses. The Citv establishes ~arki~ criteria to N~proximate an average peak demand conditio~. 18.52.t)20 Definitions For purposes of this chapter: (b) "Construction of Floor Area" "Construction of floor area" means the construction or building of "floor area" as~a~ ~~~fi~~cc-~except for new floor area added to an existing, restored, or partially reconstructed building to meet the minimum requirements of federal, state or local laws relating to fire prevention and safety, handicapped access, and building and seismic safety; (c)"Desig-n Approval" "DesigT~ approval" means approval pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 & 18.77.070-1-6~ by the Director of Planning and Community Environment (Director) upon recommendation of the architectural review board, of ~’~ 4~;~,, ~,~ ...... ;~,~, o.- ~,; ...... ;~,,,~ ~ ..... ;,~ ..... ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18.52.030 Basic Parking Regulations (d)"Parking Assessment Areas" "Parking assessment areas" means either: (!)The "downtown parking assessment area," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries of University Avenue Off-Street Parking Project No. 75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk; or (2)The "California Avenue area parking assessment district," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the California Avenue area parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries, California Avenue Area Parking Maintenance District" dated December 16, 1976, and on file with the city.- clerk; Use} "S!~ared (ioint rise) parkh~a" mea:~s narkina intended to accommodate muttiDle uses. x,,~he~Her residential or non-residential or both. and to mMM~ize the ~umber of parkM~ ~paces ~eeded bv al~owi~?a so~?e s~>aces to be used for dif*)rent uses at ditTerent tinges the dav or hi,tat. Defi~.~itio.~s %r oti~e.~ park ina-re!ated te,"ms cap, be %und i~ section 18.04.030(a) (Definition, s i.’-.~cik~di~-~a ~Parki.n~ as a principal use/’ ~Parkina facility." a~d I8.52.030 Basic Parking Regulations (a)Applicability. The regulations of this chapter apply to all parking areas in all districts established by this title. (b)Parking Required Off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities shall be provided for any new building constructed and for any new use established, for any addition or enlargement of an existing building or use, and for any change in the occupancy of any building or the manner in which any use is conducted that would result in additional spaces being required, subject to the provisions of this chapter. (c)Non-Conformance Due to Parking Requirements No use of land lawfully existing on July 20, 1978 is nonconforming solely because of the lack of off-street parking, loading, or bicycle facilities prescribed in this chapter; provided, that facilities being used for off-street parking on July 20, ! 978, shall not be reduced in capacity, to less than the number of spaces prescribed in this chapter or altered in design or function to less than the minimum standards prescribed in this chapter. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - RedIine 2 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility Requirements. (d)Additions or Changes of Use For additions or enlargements of any existing building or use, or any change of occupancy or manner of operation that would increase the number of parking, loading or bicycle spaces required, the additional parking shall be required only for such addition, enlargement, or change and not for the entire building or use. (e)Parking Spaces Exclusive Parking, loading or bicycle spaces required by this chapter for any building or use shall not be considered to meet the requirement for any other building or use, except where a joint facility serving more than one building or use contains the total number of spaces required for each building or use separately, or where adjusted parking requirements for joint use parking facilities are specifically authorized pursuant to Section 18.52.050. (f)Design of Parking Spaces Parking, loading or bicycle facilities required by this chapter, or provided optionally in addition to the minimum requirements prescribed by this chapter, shall conform to the design standards set forth in Chapter 18.54. (g)Term of Parking Requirement Parking, loading and bicycle facilities required by this chapter shall be maintained for the duration of the use requiring such facilities, except as authorized pursuant to Section !8.52.050. (g)Location of Parking Spaces All off-street parking facilities required by this chapter shall be located on the same site as the use for which such facilities are required, except as authorized pursuant to Section 18.52.050. (h)Parking Provided in Excess of Requirement No use shall be required to provide more spaces than prescribed by this chapter, or prescribed by the Director cf Planning ant: C~mmuni~: En’:ir~nment in accord with this chapter, or prescribed by any conditional use permit, variance, or planned community district. Where additional spaces are provided, such spaces may be considered as meeting the requirements for another use, subject to Sections 18.52.050 and 18.52.080. 18.52.!)40 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facili~ Requirements. In each district, off-street parking, loading and bicycle facilities for each use shall be provided in accordai~.ce with Tables 1 and 2, shown in subsection (c) of this Section 18.52.040. The requirement for any use not specifically listed shall be determined by the Director of r~ .... ; .... ~ r- ........ ;*" ~ .... ; ......... ~ on the basis of~-requirement~ for similar uses, and on the basis of evidence of actual demand created by similar uses in ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facilib~ Requirements. Palo Alto and elsewhere, and such other traffic engineering or planning data as may be available and appropriate to the establishment of a minimum requirement. ~-:~-~-~-u~>...,~.,;-~e,..~ff-street parking, loading and bicycle facility requirements established by subsection (a) shall be applied as follows: (1) Where the application of the schedule results in a fractional requirement, a fraction of 0.5 or geater shall be resolved to the next higher whole number. (2)For purposes of this chapter, ~oss floor area shall not include enclosed or covered areas used for off-street parking or loading, or bicycle facilities. (3) (4) (5) Where uses or activities subject to differing requirements are located in the same structure or on the same site, or are intended to be served by a common facility, the total requirement shall be the sum of the requirements for each use or activity computed separately, except as p~.~+a,: usted b’~ the Dhector under the ...... ~<ic,;-..< of bv-Table 1 ~~%~4~.~or Section 18 "~? 0<r~ The ~ administratorDirector, when issuing a ~~~pe~it(s) for multiple ~~~uses on a site, may res~ict the hours of operation or place other conditions on the multiple uses so that parking needs do not overlap and may then modi~, the total parking requirement to be based on the most intense combination ofuse~ at any one time. Where requirements are established on the basis of seats or person capacity, the building regulations provisions applicable at the time of determination shall be used to define capacity. Where residential use is conducted together with or accessory- to other permitted uses, applicable residential requirements shall apply in addition to other nonresidential requirements, except as provided by Sections 18.52.050 and 18.52.080. in addition to the oarkina reeuirements outlined in Tables ! and 2. parkina ~q,~. handicapped persons shai! be provided pursuant to the requirements o1" Section t8.~4.,,~0 {Accessible ~-a~t,m~ " ~,~.~na consis~em ~ith c]i~eria out!ined m Title ~ 4 (Buildin£ Code} offlse Municipal Code. (c)Tables 1, 2 and 3: Parking, Bicycle, and Loading Requirements Tables I a~c! ~ ~-~c-~, ,~-,,- ; ....~.,~;!l,t~.~ reOtlti’et~eDta il! aenera! and ~" ¯~ oc~vw ~,,tl~,,~ vehicle and bicvc!e .....’~o ’~oI Parkma Assessment Districts. respectively. Table ~ out~mes )oadin£~quhe ,,~_,~ for each ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 4 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facili~ Requirements. Table 1: Minimum Off-Street Parking Requirements (Excludes Parking Assessment Districts - See Table 2) Single-Family Residential (Primary (a) In the OS dis~ict (b) In all other districts 4 spaces, of which a~ !east one space must be covered 2 spaces,~= of which at least one ~...4~cq~space must be covered (c) Underground parking for Single family uses is prohibited, except pursuant to a variance granted in accordance with the provisions of Chapter 18.76 (Permits and Approvals) of this title, in which case the area of the underground garage shall be counted toward the goss floor area. Second Dwelling Unit (in addition to main dwelling unit requirements) Two-Family Residential (R-2 & RMD Districts) 2 spaces, ~of which at least one must be covered: I space, covered or uncovered 1.5 spaces per unit, of which m least one space per unit must be covered Tandem Parkina Allowed. with one tandem space per unit. associated directly with another parking space for the same unit 1 space per unit None None 100% - LT ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facilit3~ Requirements. Multiple-Family Residential (a) Guest Parking Business and Trade Schools Religious Institutions Mortuaries Pri~te Schools and Educational Facilities: 1.25 per studio unit 1.5 per 1-bedroom unit 2 per 2-bedroom or larger unit At least one space per unit must be covered Tandem ~:~a.."i.tina aiio~-d for Onv unit requirina tv,,o spaces ~0ne tandem space ~?er ~. same uni~. up to a maximum of 25% of total required fpaces for an~ect with Note than four {4) units) For projects exceeding 3 units; 1 space plus 10% of total number of units, provided that if more th~ one space per unit is assigned or secured p~king, then guest spaces equal to 33% of all units is required. 1 ~ace per 4-person capacity.,, or 1 per 250 sf of goss floor area, whichever is geater 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity., based on maximum use of all facilities at the same time. or as adius~ed bv the Director as part of a conditional use permit. 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity, plus funeral procession queue capacity of 5 cars 1 per unit 100% - LT 1 space for each 10 units 1 per 40- person capacity, or I per 2,500 sf, whichever is greater 1 space per 40 seats or 40 person capacity, based on maximum use of all facilities at the same time 2 spaces 100% - ST 40% LT 60% Covered ST 20% - LT 80% - ST, or as adjusted by the Director as part of a conditional use permit 100% - ST ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 6 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility Requirements. 2 spaces per teaching station Grades (:44-8 (~i~) Grades 9-12 Private Clubs, Lodges, and Fraternal Organizations Commercial Recreation. includiu2 health and fitness clubs Community Facilities, including swim club, tennis club, golf course, community centers, neighborhood centers, and similar activities Convalescent Facilities Hospitals Animal Care Facilities 2 spaces per teaching station 4 spaces per teaching station 1 space for each 4 seats or 4- person capacity based on maximum use of all space at one time,_!t!_:2 i!_:; a~d" u st ed Director as pari of a 1 space for each 4-person capacity, or as adjusted by the ~::ing Adnqnistra’,or as part of a conditional use permit, not to exceed a 30% reduction. 1 per 2.5 patient beds ! space for each 1.5 patient beds 1 per 350 sq: ft, of~oss enclosed floor area ! space for every g~ students 1 space for every F5 students 1 space for every ~5 students 1 space for each 40 seats or 40-person capacity based on maximum use of all space at one time 1 per 25 patient beds i pert5 p s~_ie~ beds 1 per 3,500 sf (1 space minimum) 100% - ST, enclosed 20% - LT 80% - ST 20% ,r ~-: _2%- or as adjusted by the Director as part conditional use permit 2 LT spaces, remainder ST 60% g~ 40% ST 80% - LT 20% - ST ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facili~ Requirements. Automobile Dealerships Automotive Services & Service Stations: (a) Service Station (b) Services, Enclosed Day Care Centers Day Care Homes, Adult (Larc~ei Day Care Homes, Family (La tee__.___! Financial Services: bga~s and =savings and 1o~ 1 per 400 sq. ft. of sales, service and office administration area, and 1 per 500 sq. ft. of exterior sales or display area, excluding automobile storage lnot on disr31a3). 1 per 350 sq: ft_. ofgoss enclosed floor area, plus queue capacity equivalent to the service capacity of gasoline pumps 1 per 350 sq. ft. of enclosed space; and 1 per 500 sq. ft. of exterior sales, display, or storage site area (open lot area) 1 per 1.5 employees per dweilin,a umt. one of covered 2 per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered.~2!~u~ an__5 additic, p, aI Sp~iire~d b’, conditional use ~)ermi~ to serx~e visitors and empk:,vees nol ies}~l ff~d~ [~e ]~onae. 2 r~er d~e!iine unit. one of which shall be covered 2 per dwelling unit, one of which shall be covered.A~lus one for each employee not residing m the i~ome. 1 per 250 so.. It____= 1 per 6 employees 1 per 2,500 sf 100% - ST 40% - LT 60% - ST None ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility. Requirements. General Business Services: (a) Enclosed (b) Open lot Personal Services Residential Care Homes Recycling Center Retail: (a) (b)’Extensive (retail with more than 75% of tross floor area used for display, sales and related storaee, with demonstrably low parking demand generation per square foo~ of aross floor area) (c)’ Open lot Drive-up windows providing services {’~ occupants in vehicles Eating and Drinking Services: (a) With drive-in or take-out faciliti’~s (b) All others ! per 250~ 1 per 500 s~. R. of sales. display or storage site area ! per 200 sq. ft. of goss floor area 2 spaces (for the residential owners or tenants), one of which shall be covered 1 space for each attendant 1 per 200 sq. ft. ofgoss floor are a 1 per 350 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 space for each 500 square feet of sales, display, or storage site area. Queue line for 5 cars, not blocking any parking spaces, in addition to other applicable requirement} 3 per 100 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 space for each 60 gross sq. ft. of public service area, plus 1 space for each 200 ~oss sq. ft. for all other areas. I per 2,500 s~__ 1 per 5,000 1 per 2,000 sf None 1 per 21000 sf 1 per 3,500 1 per 5,000 sf None additional 3 per 400 sf 1 per 600 sf of public service area, plus 1 per 2,000 sf for other areas None 80%- LT 20%- ST t00% - ST 20%- {.J 20% - LT 4080% - ST 100% - <~ 40% - LT 60% - ST ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 9 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility Requirements. Hotel/Motel/Inn ’Shopping Center 1 space per guestroom; plus the applicable requirement for eating and drinking, banquet, assembly, commercial or other as required for such uses_, less ~75% of the spaces required for guestrooms. ~_~on _approval bv the Director based Qn a parking study of parking aenerated bv the mix of uses. 1 per 275 sq. ~. ofgoss floor area Administrative Offices (a) In the RP and ROLM districts_1 per 300 sq. ft. ofgoss floo’~ area (b) In all other districts 1 per 250 sq. ft. of~oss floor area Medical, professional,,: and general business ..... offices (a) In the RP and ROLM district_s 1 per 300 sq. ft. of~oss floor area (b) In all other districts "’1 per 250 sq. ft. ofgoss floo~ area I space per l0 guestrooms, plus requirements for accessory uses (drinking, banquet, assembly, commercial or other) 1 per 2,750 sf 1 per 3,000 sf t per 2’,50Qsf 1 per 3,000 sf 1 per 2,500 sf 100% ST 40% - LT 60% - ST 80% LT 20% ST 60% - LT 40% - ST Manufacturing (a) In the RP and ROLM districts (b) In ~11 other districts .... Research and Development(a) In the R__QOLM and RP district~ (b) In all other districts Warehousing and Distribution (a) In the RP and ROLM districts- i per area 1 per area 300 sq. ft._of ~’oss floor 500 sq. ft. ofgoss floor 1 per area 1 per area 300 sq. ft. of god’s floor 250 sq. ft. of gross floor 1 per 300 sq. ft. of ~oss floor area 1 per 3,000 sf !. per 5,000 }f 1 per 3,000 sf 1 per 2,500 sf 1 per 3,000 sf 80% - LT 20% - ST 80% - LT 20% - ST 80% - LT 20% - ST ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 10 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility Requirements. (b) In all other districts 1 per 1,000 sq. ft. of gross floor area 1 per 10,000 sq. ft. Any use not specified To be determined by the Director ~Lo:~.e [Yer~ {i_.-F) and S,~,,o- -ce,’~.~ (STi bit’,:~,= ~aces as, described in Secti~.>n t8.54.060. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 11 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facility. Requirements. Table 2: Minimum Off-Street Parking Requirements for Parking Assessment Districts (If Use is not Listed, Refer to Table 1 for Rec uirements) All uses (except residential) Automobile Service Stations Automotive Services Eating and Drinking Services: . (a) With drive-in or take-out facilities (b) All others ’ Financial services: (a) Bank, savings and loan offices with 7,500 square feet of ftoor area or less: (b)Banks, savings and loan ~ffices with more than 7,500 square feet of floor area: (c) Others General Business Service~’: (a) Enclosed (b) Open lot Medical, professional, and general business offices Personal Services 1 per 250 square feet 1 per 310 square feet of goss enclosed floor area, plus queue capacity equivalent to the service capaci~, of gasoline pumps 1 per 150 square feet of gross floor area, display, or storage on site 3 per 100 sfofgross floor area 1 per 155 sfof~oss floor area I per 180 sfofgross floor area 1 per’310 sfofgross floor area 1 per 180’~’~of~oss floor area 1per 360 sfofgross floor area 1 per 500 sfofsales, display or storage site area 1 per 310 sfofgoss floor area I per 450 sfofgoss floor area 1 per 2,500 40% - LT . square feet 60% - ST 1 per 10 employees 1 per t0 employees 3 per 400 sf per 1,550 sf 1 per 1,800 sf 1 per 1,800"Sf’" 1 per 3,600 sf 1 per 5,000 sf 1 per 3,100 sf 1 per 4,500 sf Retail: (a) Intensive (b) Extensive (c) Open lot , Any ~se not specified ~Lon~ Tem~ (LT) and Short Term (ST) bicycle ’1 per.240 sf of m-oss floor area 1 pe}’~,400 sf 1 per 350 sfofgross floor area 1 per 3,500 sf 1 for each 500 square feet of 1 per 5,000 sf sales, display, or storage site area. See Table 1 spaces as described in Section 18’.’~’).060, t 00% ST 100% ST 40% - LT 60% - ST 40% - LT 60% - ST soon- .... 20%- ST t00% - ST 60%- LT’ 40%- ST 20%- LT 80%- ST 20% - LT 80% - ST 00% - ST ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 12 18.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facilit3~ Requirements. Table 3: Minimum Off-Street Loading Requirements Single-family residential use Two-family residential use Multiple-family residential use Dormitory.’, Fraternity/Sorority, or group housing where meals are provided in common dining facilities Housing for the elderly or other community facility, where meals are provided in common dining facilities 100,000 sq. ft. or greater Hospitals Convalescent facilities Automotive Uses Financial services Personal services Administrative office services No requirement established 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,999 sq. ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,999 sq. ft. !00,000-199,999 sq. ft. 200,000 sq. ft. or greater 0-29,999 sq. ft. 30,000-69,999 sq. ft. 70,000-120,000 sq. ft. Each additional 50,000 sq. ft. over 120,000 sq. ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,999 sq. ft. 100,000-199,999 sq. ft. 200,000 sq. ft. or greater 0 0 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 I additional space 1 ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 13 ! 8.52.040 Off-Street Parking, Loading and Bicycle Facili~~ Requirements. Retail Services Eating and Drinking Services Medical of~ces Professional offices General business offices 0-9,999 sq. ft. ’i0,000299,999 sq. ft. 100,000 sq. ft. or geater 200,000 sq. ft. or greater . ..p-4,999 sq. ft.30,000-69,999 sq. ft. 70,000-120,000 sq. ft. For each additional 50,000 sq. ft. over 120,000 sq. ft. 0 1 1 2 3 ! additional space 0-9,999 sq. ft. 10,000-99,’~99 sq. ft. ’100,000-199,999 sq. ft. 200,000 sq. ft. or geater Warehousing and distribution Manufacturing Research and development 0-4,999 sq. ft. 30.000-69.999 sq. ft. 70,000-120,000 sq. ft. For each additional 50,000 ~. ft. 1 2 1 additiona! space over 120,000 sq. ft. 0-9,999 sq. ft. .... i0,000299,999 sq. ft. 100,000-199,999 sq. ft. 200,000 sq. ft. or geater 0 1 2 3 ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 14 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director Automobile and bic’:’cle parking requirements prescribed by this chapter may be adjusted by the Director of planning and cc;nmu:’..iW e.n;qrcnment in the following instances and in accord with the prescribed limitations in Table 4. when in hisser opinion such adjustment will be co~-~i ~ ~fi~4 with the pu~oses of this chapter: ~wil! not create undue impact on existing or potential uses adjoining the site or in the general vicini~~.z~- ~ wi!! be commens~ra~e ~"~’:!ifies where a~?ropriate. No reductions may be aranted that would result in provision of Jess than ten (10) spaces on a site. ~c Xbik~x:i~a are adiustments may be appealed as set forth in Chapter 18.78 (Appeaisk Table 4: Allowable Parking Adjustments On-Site Employee Amenities Square footage of commercial or industrial uses to be used for an on- site cafeteria, recreational facilib;, and!or day care facilib,, to be provided to employees or their children and not open to the general public, may be exempted from the parking requirements 100% of requirement for on-site employee amenities ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 15 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director Joint Use (Shared) Parking Facilities Housing for the .......Semors 20% of total spaces required for the site For any site or sites with multiple uses where the application of this chapter requires a total of~~. or more than ten (105 spaces, the total number of spaces other~vise required by application i ¢.:~c : ~i~:= may be reduced when the joint facility, wil! serve all existing, proposed, and potential uses as effectively and conveniently as would separate parking facilities for each use or site. In makina such a determination, the Director shall consider a parking a~alvsis usin~ criteria developed by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) or similar methodoloav to estimate the shared parkina characteristics of the proposed land uses. The a~)gtys~ shall employ the City’s partdng ratios as the basis ]~r the calculation of the base parking requiremeni and t~r the determination of parkinR requirements f~r individual land uses. The Director may als0 rectuir~ submi~al and approval of a TDM program~ to R~rther assure parkina reductions are achieved. The total number of spaces requked 50% of the total spaces ma~ be reduced for housing required for the site Ncilities for seniors, commensurate with the reduced parking dem~d created by the housing Ncili~, including for visitors and accessov Ncilities. and subiect to submi~al and approval of a parking ~nalys~ iusti~’in~ th~ reduction proposed.. ...... ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 16 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director Affordable Housin~ Units and Single Room Occupancy (SROt Units .The to’~al .number of spaces :eauired may be reduced Ik~r af]’ordable housine and sinele room occupanc’.,{ reduced parkina demand created by visiiors a~d ~ccessors, ~ciii~ies. The geduction shall consider proximity to transit and support se~wices and the Director may require trat25c demand manaaement measures~ in ~oniunction with any a~proval. Housing Near Transit Facilities Transportation and Parking Alternatives The total number of spaces required may be reduced for housing located within a designated Pedestriarv~Transit Oriented area o~__2 elsewhere in immediate proximitT’ to public transportation facilities ~erving a significant portion of residems, employees, or customers, when such reduction will be commensurate with the reduced parking demand created by the housing facility, including for visitors and accessory facilities, and sub ect to submittal and approval of a TDM proaram. Where effective alternatives to automobile access are provided, other than those listed above, parking requirements may be reduced to an extent commensurate with the permanence, effectiveness, and the demonstrated reduction of off-street parking demand effectuated by such alternative progams. Examples of such progams may include, but are not limited to, transportation demand management (TDM) progams or innovative parking pricing or design solutions.~ (note: landscape reserve requirement is deleted). 20% of the total spaces required for the site. 20% of the total spaces required for the site ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 17 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director Corn bined ParMn~ ,~d~t, sm~en~s Parkine reductions maw be ~ranted for any combh~afion of~.i~e circumstances as ~?resc~ibed by chapter, subject to limitations combined iolai reduction alic~wed. a. 30% :,.educiion ofihe ~ n~_, demand other~ ise required i, 40c:; ~educfion %r p]’olec~s c. 50% reduciion %r senior housine proiects See Section 18.52.050(d) below re~ardina requirements for TDM t)rograms. -"No reductions may be aranted that would result in provision of less than ten ( ! 0) spaces on a site. Pa~kin~ reduczior~s may be ~anted riot any combination of otherwise required occurs, or no less than a 40% ~educfion t~-oiects (~?chidina Si~?a~e Room Occtt~)anc~ (SRO ~t:?}ts). or no less than 50% reduction %r senior housina projects. (b_b_)Deferral of Meetins Full Requirement_[::v Where the expected need for off-street parking or bicycle facilities for a particular use is uncertain, due to unknown or unusual operating characteristics of the use and ~cqrector o~ Ppl .........a andunavailabilit37 of comparable data to establish need, the ~ -~"~" .....~ ...... Ccomm~:nip,~ E~nvironment, upon recommendation of the architectural review board. may authorize that construction and provision of not more than fifty percent of the required off-street parking stalls and not more than twenty-five percent of the bicycle parking spaces be deferred. The number of bicycle parking spaces deferred shall be apportioned by ~construction~1",. ..... ::~ [tone term o,," si-~,.)~’t te.,"m ~, in the same percentages as indicated in Table 1 of Section 18.52.0~g0. The ~.-~’~. ~-arector of Ccommunip,~ Eenviron;nen,~ may set such conditions as necessary to guarantee provision of such deferred spaces whenever the Ddirector of "’-~ .... ; .... Eenvironment determines the need to exist. Land area required for provision of deferred parking or bicycle spaces shall be maintained in reserve and shall be landscaped pursuant to a plan approved by the architectural review board demonstrating that ultimate provision of the deferred spaces will meet all requirements of this chapter.;L pon ~,se of the parki,.~a area at near buildout (at least 90% occupancy) over a pe’ciod of at least ten years the Director may allo,~: the reserve area to be, ’....~secl for ~enerate t)alk .... oemand, subject to ,.estrictions and cn~aditln~< more imense use unless sufficient additiona! on-site ~k,n~ is provided. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 18 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director (c)Off-Site Parking Except in parking assessment areas, the_~?~iirector ,~,~÷" ~-i~,-,-:-,~°"~ .....; .......,,.~ c..~.,.,.~.~.,;., ~cnvironmcnt may authorize all or a potion of the required parking for a use to be located on the site not more than 500 feet fiom the site of the use for which such parking is required, where in ~t~e Directors jud~ent, such authorization will be in accord with the pu~oses of this chapter. ~ Lc cusm~ce m ~l~e of’~site oarkina shali be mea~rec~ from tt~ ,~a~.t .... - ..... ofti~e ’ -- ’2 ~i~~, ~., Transportation Demand Management ( 1] A Transportation Demand Manaaement (TDM) program may be proposed by an applicant or ma~~ be required by the Director for any project requestin~ a reduction in parking, or may be required as CEOA mitiaation for identified potential sianificant parkin~ impacts. (2) Where a Transportation Demand Manaaement (TDM) program is proposed or required, the TDM program shall outline parkina and/or traffic demand measures to be implemented to reduce parkina need and trip generation. Measures may include. but are not limited to: limitin~ "assigned’~ parkin~ to one space per residential unit. providin~ for transit passes, parking cash-out, enhanced shuttle service (or contributions to extend or enhance existin~ shuttle service or to create new shared or public shuttle service), car-sharing, traffic-reducin~ housing, providin~ priority parkin~ spaces for carpoolsivanpools or "meen" vehicles (zero emission vehicles. inherently low emission vehicles, or plu~-in hybrids, etc.), vehicle charging stations. additional bicycle parkin~ facilities, or other measures to encourage transit use or to reduce parkina needs. The program shall be proposed to the satisfaction of the Director. shall include proposed performance targets for parkin~ and/or trip reduction and indicate the basis for such estimates, and shall designate a sin~te entity (property owner, homeowners associatiom etc.) to implement the proposed measures. ,~, Monitoring ~cports shall be submitted to the Director taro years after buitdina occupancy and again five years after buildina occupancy, notina the effectiveness of the proposed measures as compared to the initial performance taraets, and suaaestions for modifications ifnecessan~ to enhance parkina and/or trip reductions. (4)Where the monitoring reports indicate that performance measures are not met. the Director may require fu<d~er proaram modifications. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redtine 19 18.52.050 Adjustments by the Director ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 2O 18.52.060 Parking Assessment Districts and Areas - General !8.52.060 Parking Assessment Districts and Areas - General (a)Definitions (1)"Parking AssessmentAreas" "Parking assessment areas" means either: The "downtown parking assessment area," which is that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries of University Avenue Off-Street Parking Project No. 75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk; or The "California Avenue area parking assessment district," which is that certain area of the city- delineated on the map of the California Avenue area parking assessment district entitled "Proposed Boundaries, California Avenue Area Parking Maintenance District" dated December 16, 1976, and on file with the city clerk; (2)"Exempt Floor Area" Within the downtown parking assessment area, "exempt floor area" means all or a portion of that floor area of a building which is located at or nearest grade and which does not exceed a floor area ratio of 1.0 to 1.0; Within the California Avenue area parking assessment district, "exempt floor area" means either: (A) All or a portion of that floor area of a building which is located at or nearest grade and which does not exceed a floor area ratio of 0.5 to 1.0 or (B) The amount of floor area shown on the 1983-84 California Avenue area assessment district rolls in the engineer’s report for bonds issued pursuant to Title 13 of the municipal code, whichever is geater. (b)In-lieu fees Except as provided in subsection (c) below, within any parking assessment district established by the city for the purpose of providing off-street parking facilities, all or a portion of the off-street parking requirement for a use may be satisfied by payment of assessments or fees levied by such district on the basis of parking spaces required but not provided. (c)Exempt FloorArea (1)Unless a project for the construction of floor area has received desig-n approval prior to December 19, t983, or has undergone preliminary review pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 and 18.77.070 on December 1 st or ! 5th, t 983, the only portion of off-street parking required for construction of floor area in a parking assessment area which may be satisfied by pa?qnent of assessments or levies made within such area on the basis of parking spaces required but not provided, is that portion of the parking requirements associated with the uses proposed to be conducted in that area of the ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 21 18.52.070 Parking Regulations for CD Assessment District (2) (3) (4) floor equal to the exempt floor area for the site. Where only a portion of floor area constitutes exempt floor area, and uses with more than one parking standard as required by this chapter are proposed for said floor, the use on that portion of the floor which generates the highest parking requirement will be designated as the exempt floor area. All other required off-street parking that is not satisfied by such pa?~nent of assessments shall be provided in accordance with this chapter. This subsection shall be interpreted to allow changes in the use of all exempt floor area and nonexempt floor area existing as of February 16, 1984 without requiring additional parking; provided, that the change in use does not consist of a change from residential to nonresidential, or an increase in actual floor area which does not constitute exempt floor area. No project which has received desig-n approval prior to December 19, 1983, or which has undergone preliminary review on December 1 st or 15th, 1983, shall increase the amount of floor area approved or reviewed or decrease the area desig-ned or intended for parking without meeting the requirements of this chapter. 18.52.070 Parking Regulations for CD Assessment District With respect to on-site and off-site parking space requirements for nonresidential uses within an assessment district wherein properties are assessed under a Bond Plan G financing pursuant to Title 13, the requirements of this Section 18.52.040 shall apply in the CD district in lieu of comparable requirements in this Chapter 18.52. Requirements for the size and other design criteria for parking spaces shall continue to be governed by the provisions of Chapter t 8.54. (a)On Site Parking. Any new development, any addition or enlargement of existing development, or any use of any floor area that has never been assessed under any Bond Plan G financing pursuant to Title 13, shall provide one parking space for each two hundred fifty ~oss square feet of floor area, with the following exceptions: (1)Square footage for: (A) Handicapped access which does not increase the usable floor area, pursuant to Section 18.18.070 (CD District Floor Area Bonuses) (B) An increase in square footage ~anted for seismic rehabilitation, pursuant to Section 18.18.070 (CD District Floor Area Bonuses). (C) Category I or II Historic Structures may take advantage of the following exceptions during the life of the historic building: (i) An increase in square footage pursuant to CD FAR Exceptions for Historic Structures as contained in Section 18.49.060 (b)(3), and (ii)A conversion to commercial use that is 50 feet or less in height and that has most recently been in residential use, if such conversion is done in conjunction with exterior historic rehabilitation approved by the Director Planning an~ Communi~: En~’irc, nment upon recommendation by the ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 22 18.52.070 Parking Regulations for CD Assessment District Architectural Review Board and in consultation with the Historic Resource Board. Such conversion must not eliminate any existing on-site parking. (D)A minor increase of two hundred square feet or less, pursuant to CD district FAR Exceptions for Historic Structures as contained in Section 18.49.060(b)(4). (E) At or above gade parking, though included in the site FAR calculations (pursuant to CD district FAR Exceptions for non-historical/non-seismic buildings in Section 18.49.060(a)) shall not be included in the on-site parking regulations of this section. (2) (3) Vacant parcels subject to redevelopment shall be exempt at the time when development occurs from the on-site parking requirements of one parking space for each two hundred fifty goss square feet of floor area to the extent of 0.3 parking spaces for every one thousand square feet of site area, provided that such parcels were at some time assessed for parking under a Bond Plan E financing pursuant to Chapter 13.16 or were subject to other ad valorem assessments for parking. No new parking spaces will be required for a site in conjunction with the development or replacement of the amount of floor area used for nonresidential use equal to the amount of adjusted square footage for the site shown on the engineer’s report for fiscal year 1986-87 for the latest Bond Plan G financing for parking acquisition or improvements in that certain area of the city delineated on the map of the University Avenue parking assessment district entitled, "Proposed Boundaries of University Avenue Off-Street Parking Project #75-63 Assessment District, City of Palo Alto, County of Santa Clara, State of California," dated October 30, 1978, and on file with the city clerk. However, square footage which was developed for nonresidential purposes or which has been used for nonresidential purposes but which is not used for such purposes due to vacancy at the time of the engineer’s report shall be included in the amount of floor area qualifying for this exemption. No exemption parking requirements sha!l be available where a residential use changes to a nonresidentia! use, except pursuant to subdivision (1)(C) of this subsection. (b)Off-Site Parking Parking required by this Section 18.52.070 may be provided by off-site parking, provided that such off-site parking is within a reasonable distance of the site using it or, if the site is within an assessment district, within a reasonable distance of the assessment district boundary and approved in writing by the Director.of Planning and Com-m~ Environment. The Director shall assure that sufficient covenants and guarantees are provided to ensure use and maintenance of such parking facilities, including an enforceable agreement that any development occurring on the site where parking is provided shall not result in a net reduction of parking spaces provided, considering both the parking previously provided and the parking required by the proposed use. (c)In-Lieu Parking Provisions. In connection with any expansion of the supply of public parking spaces within the CD commercial downtown district, the city shall allocate a number of spaces for use as "in-lieu parking" spaces to allow development to occur on sites which would otherwise be ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 23 18.52.080 Adjustments to Parking Assessment Area Requirements by the Planning Director precluded from development due to parking constraints imposed by this chapter. Off-site parking on such sites may be provided by payment of an in-lieu monetary contribution to the city to defray the cost of providing such parking. Contributions for each required parking space shall equal the incremental cost of providing a net new parking space in an assessment district project plus cost for the administration of the program, all as determined pursuant to Chapter 16.57 of Title 16 of this code, by the Director-el Planning a~:~ r~.~,~,,,,,,~,,,,~,~,,~ ~.,, ¯ ,, ,~,,,,,,-,,~,;"~’-~-~-t whose decision shall be final. Only sites satisfying one or more of the following criteria, as determined by the Director of ~=nvironn’~ent, shall be eligible to participate in the in-lieu parking program: (1)Construction of on-site parking would necessitate destruction or substantial demolition of a designated historic structure; (2)The site area is less than ten thousand square feet and it would not be physically feasible to provide the required on-site parking; (3)The site is greater than ten thousand square feet, but of such an unusual configuration treat it would not be physically feasible to provide the required on-site parking; (4) The site is located in an area where city policy precludes curb cuts or otherwise prevents use of the site for on-site parking; (5)The site has other physical constraints, such as a high goundwater table, which preclude provision of on-site parking without extraordinary expense. (d)Underground Parking Underground parking deeper than ~o levels below grade shall be prohibited unless a soils report or engineering analysis demonstrates that regular pumping of subsurface water will not be required. 18.52.080 Adjustments the P4a~Director Automobile parking requirements prescribed in this chapter may be adjusted by the Planning Director for properties within parking assessment areas in the following instances and in accord with the prescribed limitations where, in his/her opinion, such adjustment will be in accord with purposes of this chapter and will not create undue impact on existing or potential uses adjoining the site or in the genera! vicinity. Adjustments shall be made in accordance with the procedures set forth in Chapter 18.78. (a)Tandem Parking Tandem parking (a multiple parking configuration locating one stall behind another) may be allowed where in the jud~ent of the Planning Director the parking will serve all proposed uses conveniently. The Planning Director shall require such covenants and guarantees as deemed necessary to ensure use and maintenance of such parking facilities. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 24 18.52.080 Adjustments to Parking Assessment Area Requirements by the Planning Director (b)Percentage of Compact Parking Stalls For parking facilities exceeding five stalls and with architectural review approva! prior to June l. 2007. a maximum of rift?,, percent compact parking stalls may be allowed. For any project approved subseauent to June !. 2007. compact parkina is not allowed. (c)Shared Parking Facilities (d) ~a,. occur ,.~ mB~)u~ conflict, and the use is exempt iiom maldna such a cteterminatk:,n. ~’me~ ~:~.~rcct.~, ..........shali consider ,~ parkina anaix sis Mno criteria t?arkina characteristics of the proposed land uses. The a;-,alx <is shall employ 1he City’s a~q~he number of parking stalls required for any new development or addition may be reduced by no more than twenty percent ~(~o.-~ ~t~u .o. O~ L~C total !lkHllbeF ofs~aces Off-Site Parking Within parking assessment areas. ....the Ddirector ~÷’,,, ._u,~,~,,,,,~r~ .....;,-~ and Ccommunit’,’ Eenvironmen*: may authorize all or a portion of the required parking for a use to be located on ~Ksite within the p~king assessment area or not more than 500 feet ~om the bound~ies of the parkin~ assessment area. where the zoning of such site pewits parking as a use. The Ddirector ~~ ..... ; ...... ~ ~ ............ ;~v ~ ..... ; ......... ~ shall require such covenants and guarantees as deemed necessaw to ensure use and maintenance of such p~king facilities. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 25 18.54.010 Purpose Chapter 18.54 PARKING FACILITY DESIGN STANDARDS Sections: 18.54.010 18.54.020 18.54.030 18.54.040 18.54.050 18.54.060 18.54.070 Purposes Vei-~ic ieG<,~:~÷:.~ Parking Facilities Accessible Parking Facilities Landscaping of Parking Areas Miscellaneous Design Standards Bicycle Parking Facilities Parkin~ Tables and Figures 18.54.010 Purpose Design standards are established to ~c,~s~.~.~e .<.af) :~d accessibi~- ~;:.ri.:i_~:e ~:ciiities :o~ ~, e}~icle~ parking, bicycle ~½. accessibie ;_-,a~kii~a and loading facilities. Such standards shall be used by the building official, chief’~ranq~-oaa~ion cfgeia!,-the Director of Planning and Community Environment (Director), ~ zoning administrator, the planning commission, the architectura! review board, and any other authorities, departments, boards or commissions responsible for application and administration of parking, bicycle, and loading requirements established by Chapter 18.52. 18.54.020 a4-Vehic e Parking Facilities (a)Parking Facility Design Parking facilities shall be designed in accordance with the following regulations: (2) (3) Requirements for dimensions of parking facilities at, above, and below grade are contained in this section and in Figures 1-6 and Tables 5-8 of section 18.54.070. Stalls and aisles m-u~shall be designed such that columns, walls, or other obstructions do not interfere with normal vehicle parking maneuvers. All required stall and aisle widths m~+-shall be designed to be clear of such obstructions. The required stall widths shown in Table 5 of section 18.54.070 shall be increased by 0.5 foot for any stall located immediately adjacent to a wall, whether on one or both sides. The Director may require that the required stall widths be increased by 0.5 foot for any stall located immediately adiacent to a post. where such post limits turnina movements into o1" out of the stall. (4) (5) Dead-end aisles shall be avoided to the greatest extent feasible. Except for at-grade parking facilities serving a maximum of two dwelling units, all parking facilities shall be set back a sufficient distance from the street so that vehicles need not back out into or over a public street (not including an alley) or sidewalk. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 26 18.54.020 General Vehicle Parking Facilities (b) Off-Street Parking Stalls (1)Each standard off-street parking stall; e.xe.e r~-,,:u-,<,,-~’ ,,, ’""~,,,, ,~ .... ~ ........ ~. ........ shall consist of a rectangular area not less than eight and one-half (8 5 } feet wide by seventeen and one-half (17.5) ~-~_-s~feet long (uni-class stall), or as othe~avise prescribed for anated parkino, by Table 1 in Section ! 8.54.070. Garaaes and ca]T~OrtS for single-family and two-family development shall be a minimum of ten (10) feet wide bv twenty (20") feet lona for a sinale car and a minimum oftwenB~ (20) feet wide bv twen~’ (20) feet lona for two cars to a~a~ _(2 ) (3)Dimensions ,,+" ~+o’~/o"~ .... + o,,/,,-; o~o~,,,,-1.-ino stalls for parallel parkin2 shall be as follows. The minimum dimensions of such a stall located adjacent to a wall shall be ten feet wide and twenty feet long. The minimum dimensions of such a stall located adjacent to a curb with a minimum two-foot clearance to a wall shall be eight feet wide and twenty feet long. These required stall widths are in addition to the required width of the access driveway or aisle. (c)Off-Street Loading Spaces (1)Each off-street loading space shall consist of a rectangular area not less than twelve (12) feet wide and fortT-five (45) feet long, with a vertica! clearance of not less than fifteen (15) feet. (2)Each parking and loading space shall have adequate drives, aisles, and turning and maneuvering areas for access and usabilit3~, and shall at all times have access to a public street or alley. (d)Tandem Parking (e) Tandem parking shall be allowed ÷~in the ~~¢R- ] and other o> de >:~ir’,’ residence districts and in parking assessment areas as specified in Section 18.52.080. Tandem parkin~ shall be allowed in multiple family residence districts for any malt requirin2 two parking spaces, provided that both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit. For projects with more than four (4) units, not more than 25% of the required parkin~ spaces shall be in a tandem configuration. Slope of Driveways in the Hazardous Fire Area The slope of driveways shal! not exceed fifteen percent in the hazardous fire area (i.e., that area west of Interstate 280). ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 27 18.54.030 Accessible Parking Facilities (f)Figures 1-6 and Tables 3-6 are located at the end of this chapter in section 18.54.070 and depict desian requirements for parking stalls, aisles, driveways, accessibilitv, and parkina lots. 18.54.030 Accessible Parking Facilities (a)Compliance with Other Laws. The requirements for accessible parking facilities as described in this section are in conformance with the California Code of Regulations, Title 24, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. as amended. (b)Requirements for Residential Facilities. (c) i~s acidi~io~ ~_o :-~ari:.i~s£ ic,r :}o~-~-csicie;~.ial i~cii}:ies. ~_z:--he requirements set forth in this section shall apply to common parking in residential facilities of four (4} or more units. These requirements shall not apply to parking which is restricted by design for the exclusive use of a single unit. Number of Stalls Required The following table establishes the number of accessible parking stalls required. Table 1: Accessible Parking Requirements 3 76-100 4 101-150 5 151-200 6 201-300 7 3012400 8 4012500 9 501’1,000 ....2% of totai More than 1,000 20 spaces + 1 space for each 100 spaces over 1,000. (d)Van-Accessible Stalls (1)When at least five (5) total parking spaces are provided at buildings and facilities subject to these regulations, one in every eight accessible stalls, but not less than one, shall be "van accessible," and shall be specially signed as such .When fewer than five total parking spaces are provided at buildings and facilities subject to these regulations, one accessible parking space shall be provided and shall be a minimum of fourteen (I4) feet wide and be lined to provide a minimum nine-foot (9’) parking area and a five-foot (5’) loading and unloading area, as illustrated in Figure 1 of ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 28 18.54.030 Accessible Parking Facilities (e) section 18.54.070. However, there is no requirement that this stall be van-accessible and no requirement that it be reserved exclusively or identified for use only by persons with disabilities. stalls may be grouped on one level of a parking Van-Accessible Parking Stall Size. If only one van-accessible stall is provided, it shall be seventeen (17) feet wide and lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area and an eight (8) foot loading and un!oading area on the passenger side of the vehicle. When more than one van-accessible stall is provided, in lieu of providing a seventeen (17) foot wide space for each parking stall, two stalls may be provided within a Va, enty-six (26) foot wide area lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area on each side of an eight (8) foot loading and unloading area in the center. The minimum len~h of each parking stall shall be eighteen (18) feet. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070 Required Number of Stalls for Medical Facilities At facilities providing medical care and other services for persons with mobility impairments, accessible parking stalls shall be provided in accordance with the table in subsection (c) above, except as follows: (1)Ten percent (10%) of the total number of parking stalls provided serving each outpatient unit or facility shall be accessible. (2)For units and facilities that specialize in treatment or services for persons with mobility impairments, twenty percent (20%) of the total number of parking stalls provided selwing each such unit or facility shall be accessible. If only one non-van-accessible stall is provided, it shall be fourteen (14) feet wide and lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area and a five (5) foot loading and un!oading area on the passenger side of the vehicle. When more than one stall is provided, in lieu of providing a fourteen (14) foot wide space for each parking stall, two stalls can be provided within a ~enty-three (23) foot wide area lined to provide a nine (9) foot parking area on each side of a five (5) foot !oading and unloading area in the center. The minimum len~h of each parking stall shal! be eighteen (18) feet. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. (g)Parking Stall Location Accessible parking stalls serving a particular building shall be located on the shortest accessible route oftrave! from adjacent parking to an accessible entrance. In parking facilities that do not serve a particular building, accessible parking shall be located on the shortest accessible route of travel to an accessible pedestrian entrance of the parking facility. In buildings with multiple accessible entrances with adjacent parking, accessible parking stalls shall be dispersed and located closest to the accessible entrances. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 29 18.54.030 Accessible Parking Facilities (h)Arrangement of Parking Stalls In each parking area, a bumper or curb shall be provided and located to prevent encroachment of cars over the required width ofwalkways. The stalls shall also be located so that a person with a disability is not compelled to wheel or walk behind parked cars other than his/her own. Accessible pedestrian ways shall be provided from each such parking stall to related facilities, including curb cuts or ramps as needed. Ramps shall not encroach into any parking stall. The following exceptions apply: (1)Ramps located at the front of accessible parking stalls may encroach into the length of such stalls when such encroachment does not limit the capability of a person with a disability to leave or enter his!her vehicle, thus providing equivalent facilitation. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. (2)Where the City’s accessibiliW coordinator ~-~," ~ o,.am o ~1,,; .............;"~" determines that compliance with any regulation of this subsection (h) would create an unreasonable hardship, a~-~ e>:ce~>:ior,-’.~ or waiver may be ganted, when equivalent facilitation is provided. (3)Parking stalls may be provided which would require a person with a disability to wheel or walk behind other than accessible parking stalls when the Citv’,_ks ibility " "~’o’-a " ~pliaccesscoordinator ......md~ o~"; ..............;~+~’~ determines that corn ance with these regulations or providing equivalent facilitation would create an unreasonable hardship. (i)Slope of Parking Stall Surface slopes of accessible parking stalls and passenger loading zones shall be a minimum of 1"100 (one percent, for drainage purposes) and shall not exceed 1:50 (two percent) gadient in any direction. (j)Identification Each accessible parking stall shall be identified by a permanently affixed reflectorized sign constructed of porcelain on steel, beaded text, or its equivalent, displaying the international s?q-nbol of accessibility. The sign shall not be smaller than seventy (70) square inches in area and shall be centered at the interior end of the parking space at a minimum height of eighty (80) inches from the bottom of the sign to the finished grade of the parking space, or centered on the wall at the interior end of the parking space at a minimum height of thirty- six (36) inches from the finished grade of the parking space, ground, or sidewalk. Van- accessible parking stalls as described in subsection (d)(3) above shall have an additional sign "Van-accessible" mounted below the symbol of accessibility. A sign shall also be posted, in a conspicuous place, at each entrance to the off-street parking facility. The sign shall be no less than seventeen (17) inches by twenty-two (22) inches in size with lettering no less than one inch in height, clearly and conspicuously stating the following: "Unauthorized vehicles parked in designated accessible spaces not displaying distinguishing placards or license plates issued for disabled persons may be towed away at owner’s expense. Towed vehicles may be reclaimed at or by telephoning. "Blank spaces are to be filled in with appropriate information as a permanent part of the sign. ZOU DraIt Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 30 18.54.040 Landscaping of Parking Areas In addition to the above requirements, the surface of each accessible parking stall shall have a surface identification duplicating either of the following schemes: by outlining or painting the stall in blue and painting on the ground in the stall, in white or suitable contrasting color, the international symbol of accessibility (a profile view depicting a wheelchair with occupant); or by painting the international syTnbol of accessibility on the wound in the stall in white on a blue back~ound. The symbol shall be at least three feet by three feet square and be located so that it is visible to a traffic enforcement officer when a vehicle is properly parked in the space, as illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 of section 18.54.070. (k)Vertical Clearance Entrances to and areas within parking structures shall have a minimum vertical clearance of eight feet two inches (8 ’2") where required for access to accessible parking stalls. The minimum vertical clearance at accessible passenger loading zones and along at least one vehicle access route to such areas from site entrance(s) and exit(s) shall be nine feet six inches (9’6"). The following exceptions apply: (1) (2) ~., ...................: c ............determinesWhere the City’s accessibility coordinator o*o’-.’~ that compliance with this subsection would create an unreasonable hardship, an exception may be granted, when equivalent facilitation is provided. This section shall not apply to existing buildings where the City accessibility coo~ dlnator determines that, due to legal or physical constraints, compliance with these regulations or equivalent facilitation would create an unreasonable hardship. (1)Accessible Passenger Loading Zones (m) If passenger loading zones are provided, then at least one passenger loading zone shall be accessible. Accessible passenger loading zones shall provide an access aisle at least five feet wide and twenty feet long adjacent and parallel to the vehicle pull-up space (refer to Figure 2 of section 18.54.070). If there are curbs between the access aisle and the vehicle pull-up space, then a curb ramp shall be provided. Valet Parking Valet parking facilities shall provide a passenger loading zone complying with subsection (I) above, located on an accessible route to the entrance of the facility. The requirements of this section apply to facilities with valet parking. 18.54.040 Landscaping of Parking Areas The following minimum standards shall be observed; however, additional landscaping may be recommended by the architectural review board and required by the Director of Planning and Community Environment pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 and 18.77.070 of the Palo Alto Municipal Code. Landscape requirements of Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) shall also be considered in the design of parkina lot landscaping. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline .31 18.54.040 Landscaping of Parking Areas (a)Perimeter Landscaping Each unenclosed parking facility shall provide a perimeter landscaped strip at least five feet wide between and adjacent to a line defining the exterior boundary of the parking area and the nearest adjacent property line, not separated by a building. The perimeter landscaped strip may include any landscaped yard or landscaped area otherwise required, and shall be continuous except for required access to the site or to the parking facility. Where the landscaped strip adjoins a public street or pedestrian walk~Tay, the landscaped strip may be required to include a fence, wall, berm, or equivalent feature. Where the parking facility adjoins another site, a fence, wall, or other equivalent screening feature may be required. (b)Interior Landscaping - Amount Required Interior landscaping is required within the parking facility between the perimeter landscaped area and the edge of pavement adjacent to any building on the site. Each unenclosed parking facility shall provide a minimum of interior landscaping in accord with Table 2. Where the total parking provided is located in more than one location on a site separated by differences in ~ade or by at least ten feet of unpaved area, each such area shall be considered a separate facility for the purpose of this requirement. Table 2" Minimum [£~erier La~dsca~i~?c~ Requirements r~r v,~,-~..;-e ~- ,:~.,.,_ Minimum Required Interior Landscaping Size of Facility (Square Feet),,, (Percentag_e of Total ............Parking Facility, ....Area) Under 14,999 15,000-29,999 30,000 5% 7.5% 10% (c)Interior Landscaping - Layout (1)Interior landscaped islands within a parking area shall have a minimum dimension of five feet by five feet, excluding curbing. (2) Landscaped islands shall exist for every ten spaces in a single row. (3)Parking lot trees shall be planted or exist for each six parking stalls. Only fifty percent of the trees located along the perimeter of the parking area may count toward the required number of trees. (d)Tree Canopy and sSizes Landscapin~ within surface parkin~ areas shal! include t3"ee plantings designed to result in _50 percent shadina ofparkin~ lot surface areas within 15 vears. Trees required to meet any section of this title shall be a minimum fifteen gallon size, and at least twenty-five percent ~shall be twenty-four-inch box or larger. Fifty percent (50%) of shrubs shall be a minimum of five-gallon size. Provided, in the Site and Design Review (D) combining district, the minimum plant size requirements set forth in this section may be decreased, as set forth in Chapter 18.82. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 32 18.54.040 Landscaping of Parking Areas Impervious Surfaces Areas required to be landscaped may contain no more than twenty-five percent impervious surface, exclusive of driveways and wallea, ays needed ".by-:for access to the site. (f)Landscape Screens (g) Where this title requires a landscaped screen or buffer, a combination of trees and shrubs shall be used and the following minimum standards shall apply: (1) (2) On sites abutting or located opposite a residential site, a dense visual buffer shall be provided. In addition, trees shall be planted or shal! exist at a ratio of not less than one tree per three hundred square feet of the landscape screen or fraction thereog and supplemented with shrubs and groundcover. Landscape screens required by Chapter 18.16 (CN, CS, and CC Districts) and areas subject to Chapter 18.70 (Landscape Combining District) shall provide a dense visual buffer. In addition, trees shall be planted or in existence at a ratio of not less than one tree per six hundred square feet of the landscape screen area or fraction thereof, and supplemented with shrubs and groundcover. Irrigation and Landscape Maintenance (1)Provision shall be made for automatically irrigating all planted areas, unless the Director determines that i~Tio_ation is not necessa~w (e.a.. for xeriscape plantings). (2)All landscaping shall be continuously maintained. (h)Wheel Stops (J) A permanent curb, bumper wheel stop or similar devices shall be installed which shall be adequate to protect the required sidewalks, planters, landscaped areas and structures from vehicular damage. If such protection is provided by means of a method designed to stop the wheel, rather than the bumper of the vehicle, the stopping edge shall be placed no closer than two feet from the edges of the required sidewalks or any building. The innermost two feet of each parking space (between the curb and any planter or sidewalk) may remain unpaved, be planted with low ~oundcover, and added to landscaping, to allow for bumper overhang. Planters Architectural planters built on top of a deck covering a below-gade parking structure, and proposed to meet minimum requirements for landscaped areas, shall have a soil depth dimension of at least eighteen inches for shrubs and thirty-six inches for trees, and have drainage outlet(s) connected to a storm drain system. (k)Requirements for Temporaw Parking Facilities The landscaping standards set forth above shall not apply to temporar.. parking facilities; however, the architectural review board, through its review, may require minimum landscaping for such facilities. ZOU Draft Parkin~ 7.30.07 - Redline oo" " 18.54.050 Miscellaneous Design Standards (1)Sight Lines Landscaping height must meet the requirements of Section 18.54.050(b) (sight distance) within a parking lot and at the intersection of a parking facility driveway or ramp and a public street. 18.54.050 Miscellaneous Design Standards (a)Vertical Clearance All ~anda:’d, compact, and uni c!aas-parking sta!ls shall have a vertical clearance of not less than seven and one-half feet, except in the R-E and R-I single-family residence districts, where the vertical clearance shall be seven feet or greater. Accessible parking stalls and access to such stalls, must meet the requirements for vertical clearance of Section 18.54.030. (b)Sight (1) (2) Distance For residential uses of three or more units, and for all nonresidential uses, including public facilities, clear sight distance triangles for exiting driveways shall be provided as shown in Figure 6 of this section 18.54.070. In the non-zero setback zone only, if a stop sign is provided at the driveway exit, the ~’~" may decrease the required dimensions of the sight distance triangles. For cases not covered by Figure 6, sight distance triangles shall be provided as required by the-~o~;~,~, ~.~#,o; o~ r~,.o~.,~,~ Neither the sight distance triangles nor any portion of the public right of way shall contain any wail, sign, herin, or other obstruction that is greater than three feet high above driveway grade, unless its width (measured in any direction or diameter) is eighteen inches or less. Nor shall the sight distance triangles or any portion of the public right of way contain any landscaping, except trees, that is greater than two feet in height above top of curb grade (refer also to Sections 8.04.050(a)(8) and 9.56.030(a)(10)). The height of landscaping shall be its maximum untrimmed natural growth height. In a parking lot, within the twenty-foot triangle of public or private propert3,, measured from the projected curb or edge lines, at the intersection of a parking lot aisle with another aisle, driveway, or pedestrian walkwv’ay, there shall be no wall, sign, berm, landscaping (except trees), or other obstruction that is greater than three feet high above parking lot ~ade, unless its width is eighteen inches or less. The height of landscaping shall be its maximum untrimmed natural growth height. (c)Additional Parking Facility Design Requirements (d) Additional requirements for parking facility design, internal layout, acceptable turning radii and pavement slope, vehicular and pedestrian circulation, and other desig-n features may be adopted by the D~rector ~ ~, .........s and c ..............en’**:ronmep,~when deemed appropriate. Paving and Drainage The following basic standards shall be observed: ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 34 18.54.050 Miscellaneous Desig-n Standards (2) In all districts .... " districts, parking and loading facilities shall be surfaced and maintained with e~anent= elw ous or m e~ ous sur c ng mater a sufficient to prevent mud, dust, loose material, and other nuisances, subiect to approval by the city engineer. In the OS and AC districts, and for temporary, parking facilities in any district, gravel surfacing shall be permitted as approved by the city engineer. All parking and loading facilities shall be graded and provided with permanent storm drainage facilities, meeting the construction specifications set by the city engineer. Surfacing, curbing, and drainage improvements shall be sufficient to preclude free flow of water onto adjacent properties or public streets or alleys, and to preclude standing pools of water within the parking facility. Pavina and drainage approaches for parkina facilities shall be inteo_rated with storm water protection approaches, consistent with Section t 8.40.150 (Storm Water Quality Protection) of this title. (e)Safety Features (f) Parking and loading facilities shall meet the following standards: (1)Safety barriers, protective bumpers or curbing, and directional markers shall be provided to assure safety’, efficient utilization, protection to landscaping, and to prevent encroachment onto adjoining public or private property. (2)Visibility of and between pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists shall be assured when entering individual parking spaces, when circulating within a parking facility, and when entering and exiting a parking facility. (3)Internal circulation patterns, and the location and traffic direction of all access drives shall be designed and maintained in accord with accepted principles of traffic engineering and traffic safety. Lighting Lights provided to illuminate any parking facility or paved area shall, to the maximum extent feasible, be desig-ned to reflect away from any residential use or any riparian conidor. (g)Noise Areas used for primary circulation, for frequent idling of vehicle engines, or for loading activities shall be desired and located to minimize impacts on adjoining properties, including provisions for screening or sound baffling. (h)Maintenance All parking and loading facilities shall be maintained to assure desirability and usefulness of the facility. Such facilities shal! be maintained free of refuse, debris, or other accumulated matter and shall at all times be available for the intended off-street parking or loading use for which they are required or intended. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 3 5 18.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities (i)Application of Design Standards to Other Paved Areas The standards of this section apply to all paved areas used for outdoor display, storage, sales, or other purposes associated with permitted and conditional office, commercial, or 18.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities descr::bed ~n (b’} beiov~. TI~e Department of Plannin~ and Communim’ Environment {,eas a¢ a~so avai~£~@ from the Depamnent of Plannin~ and Community Environment. Bicvcte parkina is desi~oned for two b’pes of uses: lon?_-term and short-ternq. Dependino~ on use. a bicycle parkin~ facility may be a bicycle rack. a bicycle locker, or a multifamilv dwellino, unit stora_~e locker, a restricted access enclosure, or a school bicycle enclosure as described below. ( ! ~ Short-Term Bicycle Parkina (Bicycle Racks) Short-term bicycle parking is intended for shoppers, customers, and visitors who require bicycle storaae for up to several hours. Rack h)ck ~t-lock’~} or cable, and which is effher a~schored t-o an immovabie surfbce or ~s heavv enouah ~ha~ k cam~ot be easib movsd. ~o e~?co wa~e sho~,pers, customers, a~?d visKors to use bicvc]es. Aii bicvcl¢ racks pros idod i_---ursuam :,.o this o-;dinance sha]i su~Dorl a b;c~c!e by Ks damaae to the bicvc!e or ffs i]rflsh. The parts of the rack that secure the bicycle shaii ind<)ende ~t access to parked bicycles wKhou! d-~e need ~br ax,, kward movements when fi’~e rack is A~iIv loaded, ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 36 18.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities each i,;,-.::. ~, ~] hi ....................~ .....="’ ............ ..................... o~ s,~f£L! .......................................................................... : .......... shall ~’’ ............... ~ .... " secured ~o enaNe access o v ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 37 8.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities locker ass]£~3ed to that unh. provided that @:e ~:~tal space reqc~iremqx shsil be schooibcvccencR?scwsisaiockedareaataDN~-:ar,, middieorsecondars school. loCRiN~ ....’ - 4 ....":---:" ():l!T ..... (: (B) All...,~"- ,~,." ....:,~, ,. ,:,~;’,.-d‘-~:~,:,-,,".:v,,,~ ’+:n,-,, :eve:. ....o:’- " .....’ ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 38 18.54.060 Bicycle Parking Facilities ~2’ of sas.ed ares sha~ be xovided bchsecr~ d~s s~dewa]k a~sd dse area occu }ied asd the doe’s of b~cvc e bcke~s opens ~owsrd t~a~ s~dcwa~k o ws!kwsv, the (A) \h.’h.ere bic\,de pa’:kin£ a:."e~s are not ciea; ’, \4sibie ~o api?roack.’ is£ bkvc isis {PiLTCD sian D4-3 for bicycle parkhs£). For b~cscie parkine areas ~n~er~ded R->~ ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 39 (B) 18.54.070 ParMng Design Tables and Figures Parking design tables and figures referred to elsewhere in this chapter are provided on the following pages. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 40 18.54.070 Park Figure 1 Accessible Stalls, Double and Single ~Y.M,~OL OF ~ GROUND - TY~. ACCESSIB~ STALLS, DOUBLE TYPE iK / t IO~~60" ACCESSIBLE STALL SINGLETYPE NFXI" TO NON-ACCESSIBLE STALL ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 41 18.54.070 Park Figure 2 Accessible Stalls, Double Diagonal and Access Aisles MtN ............... ON GROUND -TYP+ ACCESSIBLE STALLS, DOUBI~ DIAGONAL TYPE NOTES: i} ACCESSIBLE STA~ MUST PERMIT USE OF EITHER OF C/’~R DOORS. 2} BUMP~ZR REQUIRED WHEN NO CURB OR ~ARRIER IS PROVIDED WHICH WIU. PRPVEN~ ENCROACHMENT OF CARS OVER WALKWAY5 3} WH~L CHAIR USERS MU~ NOT BE FORCED TO GO BEHIND PARKED CARS OTHE~ THAN THEIR OWN. 4} LEN~H OF STALL VARIES WITH ANGL~ REFER TO SE~ION I 6.Sg.090~TABLE5 4A, 4B. ACCESS AISLE AT PASSENGER LOADING ZONES ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 42 18.54.070 Park Figure 3 Parking Lot Layout WALL WALL TO WALL MODULE WALL~INTERLOCKII’g.S II~._RLOCK MODULE MODULE K X - STALL NOT ACC~Sf8~ IN C___~,TAIN LAYOU]’S PARKING LOT LAYOUT ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 43 18.54.070 Park Table 3. Parking Lot Layout Dimensions for Uni-Class Parking Stallsa for Various Stall Widths (feet) Parking Dimensions (Feetb) 45 PARKING ! 8.5 12.0 124.4’21.2I 17.25 60 PARKING ! 8.5 I 9.8 i 21.~{19.7 I 18.50 15.00 I 11.0 I 46 44 I 41 9.0 10.4 i 21.4/19.7I 18.50 t 17.00 16,0 I 53 54 i 9.5 75 PARKING 8.5 9.5 90 PARKING i 8.5 l !,1.0 i 21.4/19.7 } 18.50 17.00 ! 15.0 52 I 8.8 i20.;)20.2 18.50! 18.00 i 2a.O { 60 ! 59 ! 58 19.8 ! 20.9120,2 ! 18.50 !18.00 [,, 21.0 i 58 i 57 !56 i 9.0 i 17.5/17.5 ! 17.50 i 17.50i 24.0 t 59 { 59 I 59 19.5 ! 17.5/17.5i 17.50 !17.50 i 23.0 !58 !58 .... !58 a.The required stall widths shall be increased by 0.5 foot if a stall is immediately adjacent to a wall on one or both sides. If there are walls on both sides of a stall, the increase shall still be 0.5 foot. b.Module widths rounded to whole foot. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 44 18.54.070 Park Table 4. Driveway Dimensions For Multiple-Family Residential Uses of 3 to 10 Units Width, excluding flares or curb radius~’b Minimum (one-way) paved width total width= 8 12 !0 12 Minimum (two-way) paved width 14 ! 24 total widthc 16 I 24 Maximum (one-way)20 30 I Maximum (two-way)33 35 Right turn radiusd I Minimum 10 15 i Maximum 30 t 50 Minimum Spacinge’f I From side property line 5 0 ! From street corner 10 15 Angleg I 75°75° a.Two-way ramps for above or below ground parking facilities must meet the requirements of Figure 5 except that the minimum width may be 16 feet instead of 18 feet. b.In special cases, the Uniform Fire Code, Section 10.207, may require two-way driveways to be a minimum of 20 feet wide. c.The total width shall be free of obstacles to vehicular and pedestrian use. d.On the side of driveway exposed to entr)j or exit by right-turning vehicles. Applicable only to driveways with curb radius. e.Minimum spacing is measured along the front propert)~ line from the driveway throat to the side property line, or to a line passing through the intersection curb return (see Figure 5). For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same properb,, refer to Section 12.08.060(9). f.For driveways on collector or arterial streets, the chief transportation official may require increased spacing from the street comer. o Minimum acute ano~le measured from edae of pavement. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 45 18.54.070 Park Table 5. Driveway Dimensions For Multiple-Family Residential Uses of 11 Units or More and For All Nonresidential Uses Width, excluding flares or curb radius { Minimum (one-way) i Minimum (two-way)a t Maximum (one-way) { Maximum (two-way) Right turn radiusb I Minimum Maximum Minimum SpacingC’d iFrom side property line I From street corner Anglee 12 } 15 20 I 30 20 t 30 33 I 35 110 I15 30 f 50 5 10 I 15 75°I 75° a. For ramp width for above or below ground parking facilities, please refer to Figure 5. On the side of driveway exposed to entry or exit by right-turning vehicles. Applicable only to driveways with curb radius. c. Minimum spacing is measured along the front proper~j line from the driveway throat to the side property line, or to a line passing through the intersection curb return (see Figure 5). For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same properb’, refer to Section 12.08.060(9). d. For driveways on collector or arterial streets, the chief transportation oNcial may require increased spacing from the street corner. e. Minimum acute angle measured from edge of pavement. Table 6. Driveway Dimensions For Single Family and Two-Family Residential Uses 18 8 10 10 20 30 Angleg ! 75°75° Width, excluding flaresa Minimum paved width total width~ Maximum a.Minimum driveway widths for flag lots in "Urban" and in "RuraF’ area shall be t 5 feet. b.The total width shall be free of obstructions to vehicular and pedestrian use. c.Minimum acute angle measured form edge of pavement. Note: For additional requirements regarding driveway location, including spacing between two driveways on the same property.’, refer to Section 12.08.060(9). ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 46 18.54.070 Park Figure 4 Measurement of Minimum Spacing ¯,< ............"A" STREET ...................P FLARE CURB i O’ MINIMUM~ ..................... STREET PROPERTY LINE i SPACING s’ I SPACING ..............DRIVEWAY .........................~ ~ROAT ~ INTERSECTION CURB RETURN \ STREET MEASUREMENT OF MINIMUM SPACING ZOU Draf~ Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 47 18.54.070 Park Figure 5 Driveway Ramp Design BACK EDGE OF SIDEWALK STARTING POl[~ OF RAMP /--%~ 3 :, BREAKOVER ANGLE BREAKOVER ANGLE M~N. TRANSITION LENGTH SLOPE - I/2 RAMP SLOPE {NOT TO [×CEED 1 ] %) RAMP SHALL NOT ~_~.- EXCEED 22% SLOPE TRANSITION LENGTH SLOPE - I/2 RAMP SLOPE (NOTTO EXCEED 1 !%) DRIVEWAY RAMP DESIGN 1.A distance of 5 feet shall be maintained at the same slope as the sidewalk from the back edge of the sidewalk to the starting point of the ramp. 2.The first and last 10 feet of the slope grade (transition length) shall not exceed 11 percent. 3.The remaining portion of the ramp shall not have a slope ~eater than 22 percent and the breakover angle (see Figure 5) shall not exceed ten degrees (!0°). 4. Minimum ramp width (two-way) for above or below ground parking facilities shall be 18 feet. 5. The slope of all parking areas shall not exceed seven percent. ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 48 18.>4.070 Park Figure 6 Driveway Ramp Setback Zones ZERO SETBACK ZONES NON-ZERO SEBACK ZONES DRIVEWAY RAMP SETBACK ZONES ZOU Draft Parking 7.30.07 - Redline 49 ATTACHMENT D Chapter 18.28 SPECIAL PURPOSE DISTRICTS Sections: 18.28.010 18.28.020 18.28.030 18.28.040 18.28.050 18.28.060 18.28.070 18.28.080 18.28.090 18.28.100 Purposes Definitions Applicable Regulations Land Uses Site Development Standards Additional PF District Regulations Additional OS District Regulations Additional AC District Regulations Pro’king and Loading Grandfathered Uses 18.28.010 Purposes (a)Public Facilities District [PF] The PF public facilities district is designed to accommodate governmental, public utility, educational, and community service or recreational facilities. (b)Open Space District [OS] The purpose and intent of this district is to: (1) protect the public health, safety, and welfare; (2) protect and preserve open space land as a limited and valuable resource; (3)permit the reasonable use of open space land, while at the same time preserving and protecting its inherent open space characteristics to assure its continued availability for the following: as a~icultural land, scenic land, recreation land, conservation or natural resource land; for the containment of urban sprawl and the structuring of urban development; and for the retention of land in its natural or near-natural state, and to protect life and property in the community from the hazards of fire, flood, and seismic activity; and (4)coordinate with and carry, out federal, state, regional, county, and city open space plans. (c)Agricultural Conserwation [AC] The AC agricultural conservation district is intended to permit a~icultural and compatible uses on property intended for preservation and retention essentially in its natural, farmed, or landscaped state. Draft: 7/30/07 Page 1 18.28.020 Definitions As used in this chapter, unless otherwise apparent from the context, the following definitions shall apply: (a)"Conservation o,i?’natural resource land" means land which possesses or encompasses conservation or natural resources. (b)"Conservation or natural resources" includes, but is not necessarily limited to, streams, watersheds, groundwater recharge, soils, wildlife habitat, as defined in this section, special land forms, and natural vegetation. (c)"Open space land" means any parcel or area of land essentially unimproved or in its natural state, and devoted to an open space use as defined in this section, and which is designated in the open space element for an open space use. (d)"Open space district" means any area of land or water designated "OS" and subject to all of the terms and regulations of this chapter. (e)"Open space use" means the use of land for: (1)Public recreation; (2)Enjo~vrnent of scenic beauty; (3)Conservation oruse ofnaturalresources; (4)Production of food or fiber; (5)Protection of persons and their artifacts (buildings, property, etc.); (6)Containment and structuring of urban development. (f)"Recreation land" means any area of land or water susceptible to recreational uses. (g)"Scenic land" means any area of land or water that possesses scenic qualities worthy of preservation. (h)The "Stanford Hoover Pavilion" site is defined as that property designated as Assessor’s Parcel numbers 142-04-01 t and 142-04-012. (i)"Wildlife habitat" means any area of land or water valuable or necessary to the preservation or enhancement of wildlife resources. 18.28.t)30 Applicable Regulations The specific regulations of this chapter and the additional regulations and procedures established by this Title shall apply to all Special Purpose Districts. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 2 18.28.040 Land Uses Table 1 shows the permitted (P) and conditionally permitted (CUP) land uses for the Special Purpose Districts. Table 1: Land Uses P !ating and drinking services in conjunction with a iermitted use as an accessory useservicesto the ministrative offices of a non-profit organization, l~rovided that such retail serv~,ices do not exceed|25% of the gross floor area of the combined administrative office services and retail service uses ~i_l services in conjunction_ with a p_ermitted use ~ale of agricultural products produced on the ~remises; provided, that no permanent ommercial structure for the sale or processing of a~icultural products shall be permitted. ~econd d~"elling unitsl subject to regulations in Section 18.28.070 " ~=riculmral Uses, including anima! husbandry.,, crops, dairying, horticulture, nurseries, livestock Nrmina. tree farming, viticulture, and similar uses not inconsistent with the intent and purpose of this ~apter tanical conservatories, outdoor nature oratories, and similar facilities ~ative wildlife sanctuaries ark uses and uses incidental to P P P P P Current Code Section 18.88 18.28.070 ([;hurches and religious institutions Educational, charitable, research, and philanthropic institutions l~rivate educational facilities l~ublic or private colleges and universities and facilities appurtenant thereto . ~pecial education classes Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 3 ~dministrative office services for non-profit CUP(o uses which, in the opinion of the zoning dministrator, are similar to those listed as ~ermitted or conditionally )ennitted uses facilities owned or leased, and operated or used, by the City of Palo Alto, the County of anta Clara, the State of California, the overnment of the United States, tl£e Palo Alto Unified School District, or any other agency :ommunication Facilities ’~ommunitw Centers kility Facilities CUP eighborho0d recreation centers )utdoor recreation services uses including riding academies, lubs, stables, counto~ clubs, and golf courses "outh clubs CUP ,,, CUP~1) cup iuest ranches :esidential care facilities, when utilizing existing Lructures on the site Care Homes use, and accessoo, buildings and uses customarily incidental to permitted dwellings; provided, however, that such permitted dwellings ~hwall be for the exclusive use of the owner orners, or lessee or lessor of land upon which permitted a~icultural use is conducted, and the residence of other members of the same family and bona fide )Ioyees &the aforementioned !I cup CUP(0 I P P care includim, boarding and kennels I CUP CUP ;emeteries t CUP ;emeteries, not including mausolea, crematoria,CUP day care homes I P ,arge day care homes l CUP care centers CUP<° I Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 4 dance, gymnastic, exercise or music studios classes ~edical Services: Outpatient medical facilities with associated medical research CUP CUP ]~emporars, parking facilities, provided that such{ CUP(l) I i ]ttacilities shall remain no more than five years ! i 1 I ~irports and airport-relateduses t CUP l ~ ~(]li provided such us~"is conducted on pr~p~ owned~ bv the Cits, of Palo Alto. ihe County of Santa Clara, the State of California, the government of the United States, the Palo Alto Unified School District, or any other governmental agency, and leased for said uses. 18.28.t)50 Site Development Standards (a)Development Standards The development standards for the special purpose districts are specified in Table 2, provided that more restrictive regulations may be recommended by the Architectural Review Board, pursuant to Chapter 18.76.020 of the Palo Alto Municipal Code. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 5 Table 2: S ~ecial Pur )ose District Site Develo Standards Minimum Site Specifications Site Area (acres) Site Width (ft) Site Depth (ft) Minimum Setbacks (ft) Front Setback Rear Setback Interior Side Setback Street Side Setback 10 I 5 l 250 ,, {250 ~’~tbac’}’"ii~es i;;~posed by a special setback map pursuant to Chapter 20. 08 of this code shall apply _(2) _(2) _(2) Maximum Floor Area Ratio Site Coverage and Imperwious Coverage Maximum Site Coverage 30%~) Additional Site Area permitted covered by impervious ground surfaces ! Maximum Impervious Coyerage I ! 3.5%~4~ Height Restrictions Maximum Height (ft) Maximum Height within 150 feet of a residential district (ft) Maximum Number of Stories Daylight Plane for site lines abutting a residential district Initial height (ft) 50 25 35 2 10 30 I 30 . 30 t 30 30 1 15 20.08 30 I 24 I ............. 10% 0% 35 8.28.070(I) 18.28.060(a) Residential Density { { I 1 unit/acre I (1) For cemetery, uses, all markers of graves shall be flush with grade level, and shall be considered impervious area under this requirement. (2) The minimum front, side, and rear yards in the PF public facilities district shall be equal to the respective front, side, and rear yards required in the most restrictive abutting district; provided, that no yard adjoining a street shall be less than 20 feet and that no interior yard shall be less than ! 0 feet. (3) Provided that, for parking facilities the maximum floor area ratio and site coverage shall be equal to the floor area ratio and site coverage established by the most restrictive adjacent district, and provided, further, that the maximum floor area ratio for the Stanford Hoover Pavilion site shall be .25:1. (4) Including buildings and all impervious ground surfaces, and provided that where a portion of a subdivision with clustered lots of less than ten acres in size contains an area rendered undevelopable by an open space restriction, the impervious coverage which would otherwise be allotted to this undevelopable area shall be transferred to those lots within the subdivision on which development will be permitted in a proportional manner based on lot size. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 6 18.28.060 Additional PF District Design Requirements The following additional regulations shall apply in the PF district: for the district. If the (a)Recycling Storage All new development, including approved modifications that add thirb, percent or more floor area to existing uses, shall provide adequate and accessible interior areas or exterior enclosures for the storage ofrecyclable materials in appropriate containers. The design, construction and accessibilit7 of recycling areas and enclosures shall be subject to approval by the architectural review board, in accordance with design guidelines adopted by that board and approved by the cib; council pursuant to Section 16.48.070. (b)Employee Shower Facilities Employee shower facilities shall be provided for any new building constructed or for any addition to or enlargement of any existing building as specified in Table 3. Table 3: Em Showers uired All government or special district facilities ’"0-91999 .......................No requirement designed for employee occupancy, colleges and 10,000-19,999 1 universities, private educational facilities,20,000-49,999 2 business and trade schools and similar uses .......50,000 and up .4 Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 7 (c)Landscaping of Yards All required interior yards (setbacks) abutting or opposite a residential district shall be planted and maintained as a landscaped screen. (2)For sites abutting a residential district, a solid wall or fence between 5 and 8 ft in height shal! be shall be constructed and maintained along the common site line. 18.28.t)70 Additional OS District Regulations The following additional regulations shall apply in the OS district: (a)Second Dwelling Units ~Not lnore than one att~:c[:co or detached: ~:"-~’- ~’o,..;,,..~o~,,~,~ dwellin~ units shall be allowed on a lot in the OS district, and shall be subject to the fol!owing regulations: (1)Second dwelling units shall be subject to the following development requirements: (A) Second dwelling units shall only be permitted on sites with a minimum actual site area of 10 acres (c) (D) Maximum size of living area: 900 square feet Maximum size of covered parking area: 200 square feet Maximum height, as measured to the highest point of the building: 17 feet (F) Maximum number of habitable floors: 1 (2) (3) The second dwelling unit shall have street access from a driveway in common with the main residence. Separate driveway access may be permitted upon a determination that separate access will result in fewer environmental impacts such as excessive paving, unnecessary gading or unnecessary tree removal, and that such separate access will not create the appearance, from the street, of a lot division The second dwelling shall be architecturally compatible with the main residence with respect to style, roof pitch, color and materials~ Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 8 Site and Design Approval All sites in the OS district shall be subject to the Site Design and Review Combining District (D) as provided in Chapter 18.82 of the Zoning Ordinance. (c)Geological Soils Investigation and Report All applications for site and design approval shall be accompanied by a combined in-depth geologic and soils investigation and report prepared by a registered geologist certified by the state of California as an engineering geologist, and by a licensed civi! engineer qualified in soil mechanics. Such report shall be based on surface, subsurface, and laboratory investigations and examinations and shall fully and clearly present: (A) All pertinent data, interpretations, and evaluations; (B)The significance of the data, interpretations, and evaluations with respect to the actual development or implementation of the intended land uses, and with respect to the effect upon future geological processes both on and off the site; (c)Recommendations for any additional investigations that should be made. All costs and expenses incurred as a result of the requirements of this section, including the costs and expense of an independent review of the material submitted under this chapter by qualified persons retained by the city, shall be borne by the applicant. (2)The requirement of subsection (1) may be waived by the city, engineer for accessoW facilities ~d landscaping where such improvements, in his opinion, would pose no po, ential hazard to life or propeW on the subject or su~ounding prope~ies. (d)Landscaping The existing natural vegetation and land formations shall remain in a natural state unless modification is found to be necessary for a specific use allowed in this chapter through the site and design approval procedure. Reduction or elimination of fire hazards will be required where heavy concentrations of flammable vegetation occur. Landscaping as may be necessary and required shall be consistent with the purpose of this chapter. "Landscaping shall be desi~ed and insta!led consistent with the requirements and ~uidelines of Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) of the Zonina Ordinance. and in particular with subsection 18.40.130(c) regardin~ landscaping in Natural Areas. as well as with the relevant Comprehensive Plan policies outlined in subsection (o) below. Exceptions to tree removal restrictions may be made for invasive species such as eucalyptus trees. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 9 (e) The property ox~ her shall ensure the survival of tree plantinas for a period of a minimum of five years. The owner shall install any replacement trees and monitor their survival. A certified arborist shall prepare a report at the end of the five-year period documentin~ the condition of the trees and said report shall be rosa.yarded to the Department of Ptannin~ and Communit5~ Environment for review. Any subsequent owner(s) shall also be oblio~ated to Leplace any trees that die with trees of the same size and species stated on the approved building permit plans." Fencing Restriction No barbed wire, or similar fencing having a cutting edge, may be installed except: (1) To protect a vegetative community or wildlife habitat until it is fully established, subject to the imposition of reasonable time limits through site and design review pursuant to Chapter 18.30; and (2)To enclose utility. facilities, including, but not limited to, water or sewage pumps, storage tanks, and wells. Tree Removal Removal of live trees shall be permitted only as provided in Title 8. (g)Access to Remote Areas (h) Roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways for automobiles, trucks, buses, or motorcycles or other wheeled vehicles shall not be deve!oped except upon the securing of site and design approval. No such approval shall be granted except upon finding that the purpose for which the roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways are proposed is essential for the establishment or maintenance of a use which is expressly permitted in this chapter and that the design and location of the proposed roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways will be compatible with the terrain. The use of all roads, tracks, driveways, trails, or runways existing at the time of the adoption of this chapter which are nonconforming or have been established without proper approvals shall be terminated and shall be returned to natural terrain unless given approval in accordance with the regulations set forth in this chapter. Grading No grading for which a grading permit is required shall be authorized except upon the securing of site and design approval. No such approval shall be granted except upon a finding that the purpose for which the ~ading is proposed is essential for the establishment or maintenance of a use which is expressly permitted in this chapter and that the design, scope, and location of the grading proposed will be compatible with adjacent areas and will result in the least disturbance of the terrain and natural land features. All grading for which no permits or approvals are required shal! be subject to the provisions set forth in this chapter. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 10 (i)Soil Erosion and Land Management No site and desig-n plan shall be approved unless it includes soil erosion and sediment control measures in accordance with any adopted procedures, technical standards, and specifications of the planning commission. No approval wilI be ~anted unless al! needed erosion control measures have been completed or substantially provided for in accordance with said standards and specifications. The applicant shall bear the final responsibility for the installation and construction of all required erosion control measures according to the provisions of said standards and specifications. Subdivision All divisions of land into four or more parcels shall be desig-ned on the cluster principle and shall be desig-ned to minimize roads; to minimize cut, fill, and Fading operations; to locate development in less rather than more conspicuous areas; and to achieve the purpose of this chapter. (k)Substandard Lots Any parcel of land not meeting the area or dimension requirements of this chapter is a lawful building site if such parcel was a lawful building site on July 5, 1972. All other requirements of this chapter shall apply to any such parcel. ~mtaervious Coverage In]pervious coverage shall be limited to 3.5% of the site. and shall be calculated to include all buitdino_, coverage, p!us paved surfaces inctudin~ but not limited to driveways, parkin~ areas, sports or tennis courts, swimmina pools, patios or decks. subject to e×ceptions and provisions as follows: (l) Portions of primary driveways located in scenic setbacks shat! not be counted as impervious if predominantly constructed of pervious pavina materials up to a width of 20 feet. (2)Prima~w driveways composed ofa ~ravel surface shall not be counted as impervious up to a width of 20 feet. and subiect to staff determination that arave! is a functional surface material. (3)Primary driveways are those that extend fl-om the nearest access road to the aaraae or cm~?ort providina required parkina for the main residence. Proposed pervious pavin~ materials for driveways shall only be permitted if acceptable to the Palo Alto Fire Department. Areas excluded from impervious coverage pursuant to approvals aranted prior to July 1. 2007 shall remain excluded fiom impervious coveraae calculations. unless the surfacina material is altered to a less permeable material.’" (m) Lio.ht and Glare Exterior liahtina should be low-intensity and shielded from view so it is not directN visible from off-site. Sksqi~hts shall not use clem" or white alass and shall not be Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 11 illuminated from directly below the skvli~ht, to avoid glare at niaht. All new windows and ~Iass doors shall be of a non-reflective material. Story Poles and Other Visual Review Aids Story poles (with associated tapin~ or fla~in~) shall be erected for projects involvin~ new residences or other structures, or for substantial additions to new residences, for the purpose of providin~ a better understandina of the visual impacts of a proposa! in the OS district. Story poles shall accurately outline the perimeter and key and hio~hest rooftines of the proposed structure(s) and shall be durable and sturdy enough to be visible from distant views. Story ~oles shall be constructed to the satisfaction of the director prior to notice of a hearina and shall remain in place throuah the public hearina date. Erection of story pole~ prior to public hearina notice may be required by the director to allow for staffand neighbors to view the project. Other aids. such as tapin~ the perimeter of other development (structures. p~ols, sport courts, etc.) on the site and identifvin~ trees to be removed, may also be required by the directo,. Story poles shall be removed upon final action on a project or. upon the direction of the director." (o)O~en,,,Space Review Criteria I.~ addition to the above prox isions and development standards in Table 2. the %!lowin, oz cciteria shall be considered in the Site and Desian re’~ iex~ of all development of land in the OS district, as outlined in the Conservation Element of the Comprehensive Plan: The development should not be visually intrusive from ~,~ublic roadways and ~arldands. As much as ~ossibie. development shou,d be sited so it i< hidden fiom view. DevetoDment should be located away flom hilltops and desianed to n.ot extend above the ~earest ridae line. S ire and structure desia~ shouid take imo consideration im pacts on l>’-ivacv and views of neiahborina~jLg~2ertv~__~ Development should be ciustered, or c!oseN arouped, in relation to the area surroundina it to make it tess conspicuous, .minimize access roads, a~.d reduce fragmentation of natura! habitats. (5)Built forms and landscape %rms should mimic tile natural topograph’,2 Buildina lines should follow tl~e ma s of the terrain, and trees and bushes should appear natura! from a dista~.ce. (6)Existina trees with a circumference of 37.5 inches, measured 4.5 feet above the ~round level, should be -oreserved and inteo_rated into the site desi~<m. Existina vegetation should be retained as much as t~ossible. (7)Cut is encouraoed_ ’,~v:~cn ~ ~ it i<,.~ ~,,_,.~_,~a~\., ......-~" ~ ~or aeotechnical stability and to enable the development to blend into the natural topography. Fill is aene,,allv Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 12 ~_. Locate ’ - ..... .... Buiidia~s shc, uid rise ,,~,..., .~,~c~’l~:l~- and ea;fi-mme or <ubd ~ed ’- -...... COlOl’5. ,.~t.,~ spec~.es ~,~ reok~ire little or no irriaation. mmeam~eh’ ad]acem ~o b~ ~ctme~. l~re retardam piams should be used prevent ion ~echn ioue. ~xte~:,.,~ liahtina should be .cv,’-ime.~nsit~ and sb. ~]ec.,.1 ,. vi<it-,ie from off-site. . .....,,,,--’urban character. (Standard curb.Access ....k sho~]ct be c~ -’ , .....usually " ......: ......:’autter, and concrete sme,,a k are l,~Conb,st,:m ,,~dn fi~e %othit!s environment.] (p)Standard Conditions of Approva~ The director shall maintain a list of stanciard project conditions for pro ects in the OS district that reflect the intent of the OS criteria. Conditions may address, but are not limited to. landscapina, tree protection, planting, and maintenance, liahtina. roofina materials, gradina, construction staaina, and fire protection. 18.28.080 Additional AC District Design Requirements The following additional regulations shall apply in the AC district: (a)Site and Design Approval All sites in the AC district shall be subject to the Site Design and Review Combining District (D) as provided in Chapter 18.xx. (b)Location of Agricultural Facilities Barns, stables, sheds, chicken houses, and other similar facilities for the shelter and feeding of animals, exclusive of domestic household pets, shall be located a minimum of 40 feet from any site 18.28.090 Parking and Loading Off-street parking and loading facilities shall be required for all permitted and conditional uses in accord with Chapter 18.40. All parking and loading facilities on any site, whether required as minimums or optionally provided in addition to minimum requirements, shall comply with the regulations and the design standards established by Chapter 18.42. In addition, parking facilities shall be subject to the following regulations: Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 13 (a)PF District In the PF district, no required parking space shall be located in the first 10 feet adjoining the street property" line of any required yard (b)OS District In the OS district, no parking space shall be located in a required front or side yard or in a special setback. (c)AC District In the AC district, no required parking space shall be located in a required front yard or required street side yard. 18.28.100 Grand fathered Uses In the OS district, accesso~ dwellings and guest cottages existing on April 28.1986, and which prior to that date were lawful, conforming permitted uses may remain as legal nonconforming uses. Such uses shall be permitted to remodel, improve or replace site improvements on the same site, without necessity to comply with site development regulations for continual use and occupancy by the same use; provided that any such remodeling, improvement or replacement shall not add a kitchen nor result in increased floor area, number of dwelling units, height, length or any other increase in the size of the improvement without complying with the standards set forth in Section 18.28.070(a) and without applying for and receiving a conditional use permit. Draft: 7/30/2007 Page 14 ATTACHMENT E Zoning Ordinance Update Revised Definitions (Chapter 18.04) (14) "Automotive services" means a use i~rm~ant\ engaged in ~u . rental, service, or major repair of new or used automobiles, trucks, trailers, boats, motorcycles, recreational vehicles, or other similar vehicles, including tire recapping, painting, body and fender repair, smo~ inspection, cal wash and detailin,2, and engine, transmission, air conditioning, and gIass repair and replacement, and similar selwices. (16) "Below market rate (BMR) housing unit" means any housing unit sold or rented to verv-!ow, low or moderate income p~househoids pursuant to the ÷City ofPalo Alto’s below market rate program administered by the Palo Alto glqousing ÷Corporation, or a successor organization. (33) "Commercial recreation" means a use providing recreation, amusement, exercise or entertainment services, including theaters, bowling lanes, billiard parlors, skating arenas, gymnasiums.~ exercise studios or facilities., fitness centers, ,,~,~,,~-~*~- ~,~o~"~" ........ ,., ~/~,~, martial arts studios, goup movement instruction, and similar services, operated on a private or for-profit basis, but excluding uses defined as personal services or outdoor recreation services de~?p, ed (44.8) "Director" means the Director of Ptannina and Community EnvironmenL unless indicated other~ ise. (45) "Drive-in service" means a feature or characteristic of a use involving sales of products or provision of services to occupants in vehicles, including drive-in or drive-up windows and drive-through services such as mechanical automobile washing.A~t’,armacv ~ indows, coffee st~.:as, automatic teller machines, etc. (47) "Eating and drinking service" means a use providing preparation and retail sale of food and beverages, including restaurants, fountains, cafes, coffee shops, sandwich shops, ice cream parlors, taverns, cocktail lounges and similar uses. A minimum of 50% of revenues from an "eatino, and drinkina service" must be derived fi’om the sale of food. Related definitions are provided in subsections (45) and (136). (6 I) "General business office" means a use principally providing services to individuals, firms, or other entities, including but not limited to tea! estate, insurance, property management, title companies, investment, personnel, travel, and similar services~ ~t custo:na:~ !3’ associ~~ ~n istrati~e effi ce service~. (65B) "Grade" in the R-E and R-1 residence districts, means, for each building or structure, the lowest point of adjacent ground elevation prior to grading or fill, if the site has a natural slope of 10% or less. For R-E and R-1 sites with a natural slope of more than 10% (calculated using the lowest and highest elevations on the site), "grade" shall mean the adjacent ground elevation of the finished or existing grade, whichever is lower. The calculation of "average grade" for the purpose of determining the daylight plane is described in the definition of "G~deDav!i~lu P !ane." (65) "Gross Floor Area" .... (A) Non-residential & Multifamily Inclusions: For all zoning districts other than the R-E, R-l, R-2 and RMD residence districts, "gross floor area" means the total area of all floors of a building measured to the outside surfaces of exterior walls, and including all of the following: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) Halls; Staipa, ays; Elevator shafts; Service and mechanical equipment rooms; Basement, cellar or attic areas deemed usable by the director of planning and communi~ environment; (vi) Open or roofed porches, arcades, plazas, balconies, courts, walkways, breezeways or porticos if located above the gound floor and used for required access; (vii) Permanently roofed, but either partially enclosed or unenclosed, building features used for sales, service, display, storage or similar uses; and (viii) In residential districts other than the R-E, R-1, R-2 and RMD residence districts, all roofed porches, arcades, balconies, porticos, breezeways or similar features when located above the ground floor and ~bs~antia~l,..~ enc!osed bv ~xterior walis. (B)Non-residential & Multifamily Exclusions: For all zoning districts other than the R-E, R-1, R-2 and RMD residence districts, ’°gross floor area" shall not include the following: (i) Parking facilities accessory to a permitted or conditional use and located on the same site; (ii) Roofed arcades, plazas, walkways, porches, breezeways, porticos, and similar features not substantially enclosed by exterior walls, and courts, at or near street level, when accessible to the general public and not devoted to sales, service, display, storage or similar uses. i iiii .... ~,’~ .residential districts oti~er than the’ R ,~ ....s. all porches.~, ~ot to exceed more than 5% of the site. (iv) Except in the CD Dis~ict and in areas desi~ated as special study areas, minor additions of floor area approved by the director of planning and communib, environment for pu~oses of resource conse~ation or code compliance, upon the dete~ination that such minor additions will increase compliance with enviro~ental health, safety or other federal, state or local st~d~ds. Such additions may include, but not be limited to, the following: a.Areas desired for resource conse~ation, such as trash compactors, recycling: ~,,~ *~ ........~ ~* .....facilities, and other energy t~ci!ities meeting, the c~ ....a outlined in Section 18.42.120 (Resource Conservation Energy Facilities); b.Areas desired and required for hazardous materials storage Revised ZOU Definitions 2 July 30, 2007 facilities, handicapped access or seismic upgrades; (v) In commercial and industrial districts except in the CD District and in areas designated as special study areas, additions of floor area designed and used solely for on-site employee amenities for emp!oyees of the facility, approved by the director of planning and community environment, upon the determination that such additions will facilitate the reduction of employee vehicle use. Such additions may include, but are not limited to, recreational facilities, credit unions, cafeterias and-day care centers, automated teller machines, convenience stores, and dry cleaners. (84B) "Flag lot" means an interior lot ~ .....i~. ’:’~ ..... ..... ......;--:’~ ¯ ......~"’ ’ (114) "Personal service" means a use providing services of a personal convenience nature, and cleaning, repair or sales incidental thereto, including: .. qa,o,~,~ da,. spas. and barbershops:(A) Beauty shops, nail _ .1~;_... ¯ ,,~ Shoe (@~) Self-service laundo~ and cleaning services; laundry and cleaning pick-up stations where all cleaning or servicing for the particular station is done elsewhere; and laundry and cleaning stations where the cleaning or servicing for the particular station is done on site, utilizing equipment meeting any applicable Bay Area Air Quality Management District requirements, so long as no cleaning for any other station is done on the same site, provided that the amount of hazardous materials stored does not at any time exceed the threshold which would require a pernait under Title 17 (Hazardous Materials Storage) of this code; (©C__-) Repair and fitting of clothes, shoes, and personal accessories; (~D)Quick printing and copvina services where printing or cor~vina for the particular service is done on site, so long as no quick printina or copvina for any printing or col?\ in. ~ service is done on the same site; (G)Film. data and video processin:~ shops, including shops where processing for the particular shop is done on site, so long as no processing for any other shop is done on the same site: and (H) A~, dance or music studios ’ a class (see ~’ - ....~, ~con,:,~c, cm recrea::ion’~ for other activities). (142) "Usable open space" means outdoor or unenclosed area on the ground, or on a roof, balcony, deck, porch, patio or terrace, designed and accessible for outdoor living, recreation, pedestrian access, or landscaping~~+~! fro;:: o: s4~, but excluding parking facilities, driveways, utility or service areas. Usable o~?en space shall be sited and desim:ed to accommodate different activities, aroups, active and passive uses. and should be located convenient to the intended users (e.a. residents, employees, or public’). Revised ZOU Definitions 3 July 30, 2007 ATTACHMENTF Zoning Ordinance Update Miscellaneous Revisions Amend Chapter 18.04 (Definitions) to delete the illustrations and diagrams at the end of the chapter and references thereto and amend Section 18.04.010 (Purpose and Applicability) to add the following: ~’lllustrations and ~raphics in the City of Palo Alto’s Zonina Ordinance Technical Manual for Sinate Family Residential Zones or in specific chapters of the Zonina Ordinance provide t\u-ther understandina of the words and phrases defined in this chapter, but where there is a conflict in interpretation, the terms as defined in this chapter shal! prevail." Revise Section 18.04.65(D)(2) to read "Areas on floors above the first floor where ""~> "’ FOLq SLtI }kiCk: iS ~essheiaht iron’., the :!qoor lexe] to the underside of the ra~er or ~m~sheo -~ " >-- ~han 5 ~eet ~g ic floor and shall be excluded from the calculation of gross floor area." Amend Chapter 18.08 (Designation and Establishment of Districts) and reformat and renumber al! sections of Title 18 (Zoning) to reflect the revised Table of Contents (Attachment D). Add new subsection (i) of Section 18.10.040 (Development Standards) of Chapter 18.10 (Low Density- Residential Districts) to read: "The tndividua! Review provisions of Section 18. t2.1 ! 0 of the Zonin~ Ordinance shall be applied to any single-family or two-family residence in the R-2 or RMD districts to those sides of a site that share an interior side lot line with the interior side or rear Iot line ofa prope~%’ zoned for or used for sin~te-famitv or two-family dwellings, except where Architectural Review Board review is required for a second dwellino_, on an RMD-zoned site. The Individual Review criteria shall be applied ontx to the project’s effects on adiacent sinaIe-familv and two-family uses." Revise subsection (b) of Section 18.10.090 (Basements) of Chapter 18.10 (Low DensiD, Residential Districts) and subsection (b) of Section 18.12.090 (Basements) of Chapter 18.12 (R-1 Residential District) to read as follows: "Basements shall not be included in the calculation of ~oss floor area, provided that: (!) basement area is not deemed to be habitable space, such as a crawlspace; or (2) basement area is deemed to be habitable space but the finished level of the first floor is no more than three feet above the gade around the perimeter of the building foundation. Grade is measured at the lowest point of adiacent around elevation prior to arading or fill, or finished arade, whichever is lower." o Amend subsection 18.12.040(a) (Table 2: R-! Residential Development Standards) of Chapter 18.12 (R-1 Residential Districts) to revise the rear daylight plane angle to degrees. Revise Section 18.12.040(b), Table 3 (Gross Floor Area Summary), 7th row, to read: "Entry, feature _<12’ in height, if not substantiaIl\ enclosed and not Revise Section I8.12.040(b), Table 3 (Gross Floor Area Summary), to delete the 14:I~ row and to revise the 15th row to read: ’ " "-" ....... ’:,’here rico,’ ....... +" ~;~=~ ~ ’ .... on floors above the first floor where fi~e heiaht fl’om the floor level to the underside of the ra~er or fir~iahe~ ~ roof su.rface~ is _~ feet or areater." 9.Amend subsection I8 Iz.0~0(a)(~)C) to revise the section title to read: Storage Structures" and to revise the first sentence to read: "~;cacl~--.:cl sS_torage structures not over six feet in height or ~,enty-five square feet in floor area may be located in interior side yards and rear yards according to the provisions of Section 18.12.080(b) for accessory structures." ! 0. Revise Section 18.18.070(e) (Certification of FAR Bonuses), second para~aph, to read as fol!ows: "As a condition precedent to being credited with a historic rehabilitation floor area bonus whether for use on-site or for transfer, the owner of the site shall enter into an unsubordinated protective covenant running with the land in favor of the city, (or, if the city is the owner, in favor of a qualified and disinterested third party if the property is to be rehabilitated after tl~ e sate of fi~e transfer of devetopm ent ri ~hts), in a form satisfactory to the city attorney, to assure that the property will be rehabilitated and maintained in accordance with the Secretary of Interior’s "Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings", together with the accompanying interpretive "Guidelines for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings," as they may be amended from time to time. 11. Revise Section 18.32.090(e) (Transfer of Development Rights) to read as follows: "(e) The city manager shall establish and maintain a special fund into which all proceeds of the sale of transferable rights, and any interest thereon, shall be deposited. Upon receipt and entry into the accounting records for the fund such monies shall be considered committed to the rehabilitation of the city-owned building from which the development rights were sold, or m ~-~ ....... ~- 4:,,.~ ....... ~,..~u .... ;,,,-, ~, ~ c,~,~ ............ L_~. o~,;~;,~,;~,., p,"oj co-t-to the rehabilitation of other city-owned buildings in the Historic Category 1 or 2 or Seismic Hazard Categories I, II, or III. ZOU Miscellaneous Revisions 2 July 30, 2007 12.Amend Chapter 18.40 (Standards for Special Uses) to add a new Section 18.40.120 (Resource Conservation Energy Facilities) to read as follows: ""Resource conservation enerav facilities may be exempted from floor area ratio at?d lot coverao~e requirelnents in commercial, industrial and public facilities zonina districts, subiect to the foltowino,9, reaulations: (b~ Architectural review is required pursuant to the provisions of Section 18.76.020: All facilities shall comply with the performance criteria outlined in Chapter 18.23: Floor area ratio (FAR) exemptions shall not exceed 2,500 square feet or 2°/0 (.02 FAR) of the site, whichever is less: Lot coveraae exemptions shal! not exceed 6.000 square I~et or 5% of the site: and All facilities shall meet the Cit’,: of Palo Alto’s technical etiaibilitv criteria as follows: (I) Eli~ibte techno!oaies include co~eneration, fuel cells, waste heat recovery, or renewable energy conversion: (2) Eliaible fuels include natural aas or renewable fuels: (,3) Coo~eneration facilities must meet and maintain FERC and State efficiency and thermal energy utilization criteria: (4) A!l technoloo_ies must meet ultra-clean distributed ~eneration efficiency and emissions requirements: (5) Sino~le system maximum size is 10 me~awatts (MWi. and no laraer than the ~reater of on-site peak electric toad or on-site peak thermal toad: and (6)Incremental water consumption shal! be fiom reclaimed or decontaminated o~roundwater. 13.Amend Chapter 18.48 (Hotel (H) Combining District Regulations) to delete references to the Community Commercial (CC) and Service Commercial (CS) districts and add references to the Neighborhood Commercial (CN) and Office, Research and Manufacturing Districts (ROLM, RP, and GM) as eligible underlying districts; and revise Section 18.48.040 (Site Development Regulations) to read as follows: "The site development regulations of Chapter 18.16 (CN t or 18.20 .(ROLM. RP. and GM) ~ ~ ’~ ’~ ~rc~ ~_~_~ ~ ~.~ ~ ~c~cd whichever is applicable, shall apply except for the following: (a) Floor Area Ratio: (1) The maximum floor area ratio (FAR) for hotel use shall be 0~1.0 to 1 i~__! the CN district. (2) The maximum floor area ratio for hote! use shall be 2.0 to 1 in the ROLM. RP, and GM districts. (b)Site and Design Review pursuant to Chapter 18.82 shall aDptv to all proposed hotel uses with a FAR in excess of 0.6 to t. 14. Delete Chapter 18.74 (F Floodplain District Regulations) in its entirety. ZOU Miscellaneous Revisions 3 July 30, 2007 15.Add a new subsection (g) (Phased projects and enforcement of approval conditions) to Section 18.76.020 (Architectural Review) to read as follows: review l?:ocess : .,,-,11 be ’ ~ ....." .....~ .....’ ,~: ....... 16.Add a new subsection (h) (Architectural Review Approval Prior to Demolition) to Section 18.76.020 (Architectural Review) to read as follows: Architectiral Review Approval Prior to Demolition No buiidine demolition, except for tenant improveme,u:s or where necessary for health and safe:y p_urposes (as determined bv the director), shall be pem:itted on any site requirina architectural review approval, until such architectural review approva! is eranted bs; the director, includin£ review of subsequent conditions by the architectural review board, where required." 17. Delete Chapter 18.87 (Transferable Development Rights) in its entirety. 18.Revise subsection (a)(2) of Section 18.98.060 (Notice of PubIic Hearing) of Chapter 18.98 (Amendments to Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations) to read as follows: ~=Additionally, excepting a city-wide change in the zoning map, the city shall mail written notice of such hearing at least ~,elve days prior to the date of the hearing to each owner of record of real property- and to each residential occupant within ~ ~-.~A~nn feetI of the exterior boundaw of the prope~ for which classification is sou~t. Notice shall be provided as Speci~ed in Section ] 8.77.080.~ch owner of Compliance with the procedures set foih in this section shall consti~te a good Nith effoi to provide notice, and the Nilure of any owner or occupant to receive notice shall not prevent the city ~om proceeding with the hearing or Iota t~ing any action nor affect the validi~ of any action." 19.Revise Section 18.98.080 of Chapter 18.98 (Amendments to Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations) to read as follows: Chan~es in the provision of this title other than the boundaries of districts may be initiated from time to time, by one of the following actions: (!)By motion of the city council on its own initiative; (2)By motion of the planning commission on its own initiative; or ZOU Miscellaneous Revisions 4 July 30, 2007 {3) B>, application of~he proposed te×t Changes initiated by motion of the council shall be forwarded to the commission, and may be supplemented by such explanatory material as the council may deem appropriate to facilitate review and recommendation by the commission. A ~ prQpertx owner st~a!l be sumplemen~ed b~ an aDa~iica~ion, statement and material as required by d~e director m~der Section 18.98.030. Chanaes initiated by application of a pro~e~v owner shal! require consideration by the planning and transportation commission ~Srst as an initiation request to determine whether to [)~-oceed with the rezonina request and public hearing, if the commissio~ so directs. [}]e text revisions sbali be rev~exa ed pursuant to the prox:isions of Section 1 20. Delete all references to metric measurements throughout Title 18 (Zoning). 21.Amend Title 18 (Zoning) to replace all references to the term "Zoning Administrator" with the term "Director." 22.Revise references to sections to match new numbering sequence throughout Title 18 (Zoning). ZOU Miscellaneous Revisions 5 July 30, 2007 ATTACHMENT G CITY OF PALO ALTO ZONING ORDINANCE TABLE OF CONTENTS - PROPOSEI) Chapters: 18.01 18.04 18.08 18.10 18.12 18.13 18.16 18.18 18.20 18.23 18.28 18.30 18.34 18.38 18.40 18.42 Title 18 ZONING Adoption, Purposes, and Enforcement Definitions Designation and Establishment of Districts Low Density Residential (R-E, R-2, and RMD) Districts R-1 Single-Family Residence District Multiple Family Residential (RM-15, RM-30, and RM-40) Districts Neighborhood, Community, and Service Commercial (CN, CC, and CS) Districts Downtown Commercial (CD) District Office, Research and Manufacturing (MOR, ROLM, RP, and GM) Districts Performance Criteria for Multiple Family, Commercial, Manufacturing, and Planned Community Districts Special Purpose Districts m PF Public Facilities District Regulations m OS Open Space District Regulations °AC A~icultura! Conservation District Regulations Combining Districts ~Retail Shopping (R) Combining District Regulations ~Pedestrian Shopping (P) Combining District Regulations ~Ground Floor (GF) Combining District Regulations m Hotel (H) Combining District Regulations o Landscape (L) Combining District Regulations ~Automobile Dealership (AD) Combining District Regulations ~ Site and Design (D) Review Combining District Regulations o Nonconforming Use Amortization (N) Combining District Regulations Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) Combining District Regulations PC Planned Community District Regulations General Standards and Exceptions Standards for Special Uses Zoning Ordinance Table of Contents - Proposed Page 2 18.52 18.54 18.60 18.62 18.66 18.70 18.76 18.77 18.78 18.79 18.80 Parking and Loading Requirements Parking Facility Design Standards Alternative Development Standards for Stanford Lands Special Regulations for Hazardous Waste Facilities Creation of Easements Through the Execution and Recordation of Covenants Nonconforming Uses and Noncomplying Facilities Permits and Approvals Processing of Permits and Approvals Appeals Development Project Preliminary Review Procedures Amendments to Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations Note: All chapters in bold have already been completed for the Zoning Ordinance Update. ATTACHMENT H Leonard Lei]n]ann 850 Los Trancos Road Palo Alto, CA 94{)28 len & vitetus .co~n 650-851-55811 fax 650-851-3456 AKn: Curtis %Villian]s, Assistant Director P!anp..mg Departn~.ent City of Palo Ako 250 EIamilvon Avenue Pa!o Ako. CA 9430[ Cc: Pato At~:o Cikv Council Proposed revisions to Title ! 8 (Zoning) of the Palo Alto 3Iunicipal Code Open Space District Dear bit. \Vi!!iams: [ am writing to express ,my concerns about the process the Ci% has recently undertaken to re:ise the zoning rules pertaining to the Open Space District and to c~rge staff and the Cite Counci! take reasonab!e and adequate measm-es to in~ke input Rom OS property owners and include within a more open process. Tb.e comn~unications I have received from the CRy to-date ha,.e not conveyed the significant ....ue.~ex ~ many Dro~?eKv ownersimoacts the prooosed rules would nave otn OS oropert,, o~ners. [’~, ~ . in the district are unaware of the nature of the proposed cl~anges, and have no~ yet even considered ~he consequences of d~e proposed changes for their families, inc!uding loss of value or enjo> men~ of tlqeir property. This course of action isn.<n ~,-. ~h~.-~, quite quickt,., without t~.ei~_hborhood~ ~’,,eetH-~s_ or. meanin~t’ui dialog, or even a cleat" stateme~t og\vhat the. - ’ ~ .... ~ am av,are, tbr example, of d~.e interest Mr. £[ark Conroe has in building a modes~ home o~ land ~~.~ca~,~ impact ’the OS District hehas’ - owned for 20 ~ears. Tiae oroposed chan~es would .........~ - t%asibi!ic~ and value o~that projeck I betiewe most o~ ~ne neighbors ’ " support Nit’. Conroe’s oians. %Vhat is the overriding public interest ~,ntcn ,o.’oulo lead CKy to reduce d~e value of C onroe’s properb’7 I ur~e~ the City. Council and sta£f" to defer a,~,.., action on the proposed ~-u~e~,’ - changes unit there has ’~oeen ade<uate discussion v,~,n- :’. OS properQ, o’,x nets a,ad cons~.deration o.’" the’ ~moacts t;nese’ chan~es would have on proposed deveiopmep..~s within d~.e DisNTict. [_.eop,.ard L e h,,i t~.N.!i] Petition made to the Palo Alto Planning Staff and Cib" Council By Property Owners in the OS Dish-let Regarding the Proposed Changes to the OS Zoning and Policies July 23, 2007 "li e, the properO, owners in the Opet~ Space District, strongly rune that the ciO, not adopt atO’ new policies/regulations until the cio, studies the impact of the proposed changes and consul~s with the pro.perO, owt~ers impacted by d,.ese proposed policies. There has not bee~ adequate t~otice or study regarding the policies beb~g discussed, especially given ~he significant impact on the properO’ values of property ow~ers in d~e Space District." Read and a~reed to by the t’oliowin~ owners in the OS District tin alphabetical order/: [this is a partial list since we are continuing to collect lettersiernai!s o~" support t’rom other property owners in the OS District] 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Vernon Airman Pare Carlton, 3 !t 07 Page Mill Road Cathy CartmeIl, 4001 Page Mil! Rd Mark Coruoe, 805 Los Trancos Rd Da~e Ditzel. 4010 Page Mill Road Im-naculada Ditzel Daniel Dulitz Leah Fdliz, 3810 Page Mill Road Richard Geiger, owner since the !950s ! 0.Paul [ngemanson 1.Francoise Kirkman, 38 i0 Page Mill road 12.Len Lehmann, 850 Los Trancos Rd t3.William and Sharon Luciw, 3885 Page Mill Road 14.Ranny and Mau Lyn Moseley t5.Kathteen Roskos, 4020 Page Mil! Road 6. Alice Sheppard .Tony Tam .Jan Terry 19.Win~’ried W. Wilcke. 4022 Page Mill Rd 20.Vince Wood Afly 13,200~ Mark Comoe 1390 Market Street, ~! 12 San Francisco, CA 94102 mark ~i oresidiodo.com 415-431-6506, fax 415-431-6501 Palo Alto City Council City of Palo Aho 250 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94301 Proposed revisions to Title 18 (Zoning) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code Open Space District Honorable Members of the City Councih I am writing to express my strong concerns about the process die City has receut!y undertaken ~o revise ~he zoning rules pertaining to the Open Space District. [ sincerely urge the planning staff and the City Council to take reasonabIe measures to com;nunicate more openly and elearIy about the measures being cmmdered and to allow for input flom OS properw owners. There are many owners, such as m? faro.!!), u. ho ha’,e o\vned properw in this area for decades; it is only fair to provide a few months to allow for any proposed revisions to the planning code to be reviev, ed by those most affected and !o allo,.x ~br input and study. The m6~rmation that I have received from the City to date has not clearly conveyed the significant impacts the proposed rules would have on OS property o,qlers. I believe that many OS property- o,,~>ers are unav, are of the nature of the proposed changes, and have not yet. even considered d~e consequences of the proposed changes for their families. Further, it is unclear ,:.hat the City is trying to accomplish: are you t<.,-ing ~o eliminate ’mio~.ster homes" (homes over i0,000 s.f’./? If so. then a poiicy targeted at this objectbe can be articuhted and communicated to the public. Instead, a ~ reled policy that eliminates certain items (by inc!udmg them as impervious cover, whereas they have always been considered pe~-vious), such as pools, is being advocated. ,vhid~ is diffbrent than ~hat properb o,a~ers imve re!ied on for decades. As it now stands, any OS properU o,xner can o~.iy develop 3.5’!(~ of the total !and area, ,~ hich is very restrictive when compared ~o almost any other city. Simply put, ~ think there may be better :,~aFs to achieve ~he Ciu’s go~fls once the) are clearly articulated to the OS property om nets for revie~ and input. The process is moving too quickly, without neighborhood meetings or meaningRfl dialog, and without a clear ;unmmry o~’what is being considered and why. And what the City is proposing has a vet’, material impact on the value and use or’every OS owner’s properu. I urge the City Council and staff to not rake any action on tile proposed rules changes until there has been adequate discussion v. ith OS property owners and consideration of the impacts these changes ,.~outd have on OS property o;~q~ers. Respectfully, Mark Conroe 805 Los Trancos Road Cc: Mr. Curtis \Vi!liams. Assistant Director, Plam.~.ing Deparuuem Pa~_e ! of 2 Williams, Curtis From:Cathy Cartmeli [cathy@cartmetttam.com] Sent:Wednesday, July 25, 2007 9:06 AM To:Council, City Cc:Williams, Curtis Subject:Open Space Re: Open Space District ZoningOrdinance~ July 30 2007 Honorable, Mayor and Council members, The current Open Space District Zoning Ordinance ~n Pato Alto is already extremely restrictive. The rules for the Open Space District are by far the most restrictive in the region, already much more restrictive than any surrounding city, town or county. ! urge all City Counci! members to vote NO on the proposed changes to the Open Space Zoning Ordinance. Because this issue has been referred to committee for study by the Planning and Transportation Commission. urge all City Council members to vote NO on the proposed changes to the Open Space Zoning Ordinance The changes forwarded to the City Council by the Planning and Transportation Commission were hobbled together. I came out of the meeting not sure of what had been decided. The changes were not discussed with the affected community before being approved. So ! urge the City Council to put any changes aside until a committee which includes the OS Community has been able to properly study this issue I urge aii City Council members to vote NO on the proposed changes to the Open Space Zoning Ordinance. tt may be laudable to clean up the language and include the Open Space Criteria from the Comprehensive Plan. However, I take issue with several specific ’suggested’ revisions. Specifically, I hope the Council wilt consider the following (in order of occurrence in the ordinance): I. 18.28.070(d)(2) Requiring planted trees to be documented by an arborist 5 years iater. 5 Years later? Are there any other ordinances that require action 5 years after completion? I am concerned this could tie up the sale of property in multiple ways. To be fair, if this becomes the rule in the Open Space District it should be the ru!e for all of Palo Alto. Palo Alto proper actually needs trees allot more than the Open Space District. tn fact the some experts argue for thinning the forest in the Open Space District because there are too many trees and create a fire hazard (I wouldn’t go that far but..). Most properties in Palo Alto proper only have a few trees on them but, we already have hundreds and hundreds of trees on our property so to requh-e tree planting on a property with hundreds of trees is already unreasonable. 2. 18.28.070(L) Permeable Materials do not Impervious Surfaces make. Who is the City to redefine impervious surface to include permeable material. Permeable is permeable, impervious is impervious. Clearly this is one of ~.he most important issues addressed. The 3.5% Impervious Coverage is ah-eady extremely restrictive. 3. 18.28.070(p) Incorporating undefined Conditions of Approval would be a large leap of faith. Not knowing what these really are, it is difficuli to endorse them. At the same time if the Planning Commission always attaches the same conditions to approval it helps everyone to know what they are at the very beginning of any planning process. This should be addressed by the committee being formed. 4 18.28.090ib) No parking in the frontyard setback (including scenic setbacks). This Ordinance affects Page Mill Rd. Page Mill Rd is a relatively narrow windy road which goes up a narrow ridge to Skyline. Page Mill Rd has no parking along it. Page Mitl Rd also has a 200 ft scenic setback. This means we would not be able to park in the 7252007 first 200 feet of our property, it is hard enough not to be able to build in this area, but not to be able to park is an unnecessary hardship (ie. some properties become relatively steep even before 200 ft ~rom the road). I am very concerned about this item. I am afraid that the changes being made are a veiled attempt to down zone the district, and I fear for my property values. If the city is considering making changes to the OS District Zoning Ordinance, there are many changes ihat should be considered including: separating the zoning for the parkland from the residential area, make the process less cumbersome, more transparent, less expensive, and simpler especially for modest projects, make the rules less restrictive not more, make reasonable, clear rutes for the majority of properties (most properties are less than 10 acres in the QS District), allow 2nd dwelling units on properties tess than t0 acres, and eliminate all overhead lines in the OS District. These are some of the issues t hope the committee being formed will look at. I urge all City Council members to vote NO on the proposed changes to the Open Space Zoning Ordinance and instead proceed in a studied manner. Cathy Cartmetl Page Mi!l Rd 7/25/2007 July 17. 2007 Paul Ingemanson 26321 Scenic Road Carmel, California 93923 ~in_~em ~,vahoo,com 831.624.1317; tax: 831.624.0447 Mr. Curtis Williams Assistant Director~ Planning Department City.’ of Palo Alto 250 Hamilton Avenue Pa!o Alto, CA 94301 Proposed revisions to Title 18 (Zoning) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code Open Space District Dear Mr. Williams: I am concerned about the process the CiU has recently tmdertaken to revise the zoning rules pertaining to the Open Space District, I sincerely urge the planning staffand the Ciu Counci! to take reasonable measures to commtmicate more openl? and clearly about the measures being considered and to allow for input ~om OS property owners. I strongly recommend that a few months be provided to allow for any proposed revisions to the planning code to be reviewed by those most affected and to allow for input and study. It appears that the measures being proposed would m~fairty limit the abiliD of homeowners to build on their property by reducing the square footage allowable for a structure by deducting any coverage of pools or driveways. Because of the nature of property in this area, tong driveways are oRen essential to access a property and should not be used as an articifical means to limit the size of homes. The process is moving too quickly, without neighborhood meetings or meaningful dialog, and ~ithout a clear summau of what is being considered and why. And what the City. is proposing has a veu material impact on the value and use of eveU OS owner’s property., ! urge the CiD Council and staff to not take any action on the proposed rules changes until there has been adequate discussion with OS propels. owners and consideration of the impacts these changes would have on OS propert3 owners. Respectfully. Paul Ingemanson Bunker Trust Trustee 6 !0 Los Trancos STAFF REPORT TO:PLANNING & TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION FROM:Whitney McNair, Contract Planner DEPARTMENT: Planning & Community Environment DATE:January 31, 2007 SUBJECT:Zoning Ordinance Update - Study Session to Discuss Revisions to 1) Multifamily Residential (RAM-15, RM-30 and RM-40) Zoning Districts and 2) Parking and Loading Requirements. RECOMMENDATION Staff recommends that the Planning and Transportation Commission (PTC) review and provide input to staff on the proposed changes to Multi-Family Residential (RM-15, RM:30 and RM-40) Districts (new Chapter 18.13) and to Parking and Loading Requirements (new Chapter 18.52). Subsequent to PTC comments and direction, staffwill prepare a draft ordinance for PTC review and recommendation to the City Council. BACKGROUND Current regulations for multi-thmily residential zoning districts are comained within Chapters 18.22 (RM-15), 18.24 (RM-30), and 18.26 (RM-40) of the Zoning Ordinance. Additionally, Chapter 18.28 (Multi-Family Residence District Guidelines) now contains performance standards that are supplanted by the recently approved Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria). Staff proposes to consolidate the three multi-family zone districts into a new Chapter t 8.13, similar to the approach for the low-density residential, cornmercial and industrial districts. The Commission reviewed and made suggestions related to the proposed Chapter 18.13 at the February 23, 2005 and April 27, 2005 meetings, and directed staff to conduct further research on substandard lots and single-family residential uses in the RM zones. On March 17 and April 7, 2005, the Architectural Review Board (ARB) reviewed the proposed changes, along with the Commission’s comments, and made additional recommendations and comments. Staff held community meetings regarding these zones on March 9 and April 7, 2005. On January ! 1, 2007 staff presented a brief overview of the proposed changes to the Multi-Family Residential and Parking Chapters to the Palo Alto Neighborhood Group (PAN). The April 27, 2005 PTC staff report and attachments, Milch includes minutes from previous meetings, is Cffy of Palo Alto Page 1 enclosed as Attachment A. The minutes of the April 27, 2005 PTC meeting are included as Attachment B. Parking requirements are currently embodied in Chapter 18.83 of the Zoning Ordinance. The PTC as a whole has not reviewed revisions to the Parking chapter, but a subcommittee of the Commission did meet several times in 2003 and 2004 to provide direction to that effort. The key objective of that group was to use the existing provisions allowing the Director to provide for adjustments to parking standards, rather than adjusting base parking rates (number of parking spaces) for various uses and/or establishing new parking rates for mixed use, transit-oriented, or village residential uses. DISCtISSION This study session includes review of proposed substantive changes to the Multi-Family Residential (RM) Districts and Parking and Loading Requirements of the Zoning Ordinaa~ce. The proposed changes respond to the previous PTC and AR_B reviews and recommendations and are outlined below. Multi-Family Zgning Districts Chapter (! 8.13) The most recent version of the multi-family chapter (18.13) was included in the PTC’s April 27, 2005 staff report. Staffhas responded to the concerns expressed at prior Coimnission meetings to further limit the changes to the multi-family zoning criteria. Included in the expected changes from the prior version are 1) elimination of minimum density requirements, 2) deletion of special criteria for nonconfomaing size lots, and 3) application of daylight planes to all parcels adjacent to ~ residential zoned parcel or any parcel in a no~zresidential zone but developed with a residential use. Also, staff proposes to incorporate a small lot Village Residential option in the multi-family districts, rather than more fully developing a Village Residential chapter of the Zoning Ordinance. The remaining changes would be limited to: An updated format to be consistent with the newly adopted Chapters within the Zoning Ordinance, including the use of tables to outline allowable uses and required development standards for each zone district. Deletion of the daylight plane requirement next to’sites zoned and used for non- residential development. Daylight plane requirements would still apply where a building is adjacent to an existing residential (R-l, R-2, RM) zone or residential use. A small-tot/tow~fl~ome/rowhouse option would be permitted ( a separate chapter for RaM Village Residential would not be prepared). A minimum lot size of 2,500 square feet would be established, but the site would still be limited to all of the other RM-15 standards, i.e., maximum density of 15 units per acre, FAR, setbacks at the perimeter of the site, height, coverage, open space, etc. This will allow an ownership option within the multi-family districts while providing for more of a single-family appearance as a transition near single-family zones. consistent density limit (units/acre) for all lot sizes rather than a sliding scale. City of Palo Alto Page 2 Allowance of tandem spaces for parking in multi-family zones, subject to the tandem space being located behind a space designated for the same dwelling unit, and subject to not more than 25% of the spaces on a site being tandem. A more modest allowance for retail and service uses within large residential complexes. Clarification for all zones (and gross floor area, GFA, definitions) that enclosed parking is not counted in the allowed floor area ratio (FAR). Removal of the performance measure section that was superseded with the adoption by City Council of Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria for Multiple Family, Commercial, and Industrial Districts. Addition of a Context-Based Design Criteria section (similar to that developed for other chapters) to illustrate desired design and compatibility concepts. The Commission should comment on the changes suggested above and others that may not be included but are desirable. Staff will then update the draft ordinance for further PTC review. Parking Chapter (18.52) Staff anticipates proposing only very minor changes to parking rates (numbers of spaces per unit or square foot, etc.), and only where necessary to clarify a complex or inconsistent rate. The other limited changes to be proposed in the revised ordinance (current Chapter 18.83) include: Changing the bicycle parking ratios to be independent of the vehicle parking rates, and to base the requirements instead on square footage, number of units, or number of employees. Also, outdated references to Type I and Type II bike racks wiI1 be updated to Bike Racks (short term) and Lockers (long term), respectively. Outdated references to Type III requirements would be deleted. Limiting multiple parking reductions and establishing a maximum cumulative percent reduction and requiring a parking analysis in most cases to justify the reductions. A draft Section ! 8.52.050 is attached (Attachment C) along with a redlined version of the revisions (Attactmaent D). Addition of TDM requirements in most cases in most cases when parking adjustments are requested. Deletion of the Emdscape reserve for transit-oriented parking reductions. Revision of the threshold to request a mixed use parking reduction to 10 spaces (rather than 30 spaces). City of Palo Alto Page 3 Minor adjustments to vehicle parking rates for clarification and consistency. Clarification of minimmn residential parking garage dimensions. Residential garage sizes would be at least 10’ x 20’ (1-car) or 20’ x 20’ (2-car). Simplification of multi-family residential guest parking requirements by requiring a flat percentage based on the number of parking spaces, not the number of units. Allowance for tandem parldng in multi-family zones, subject to the limitations noted above in the multi-family discussion. Staff seeks Commission input on these changes and/or others that may not be included but are desirable. Staff will then devetop a revised Parking chapter for further PTC review. NEXT STEPS Based on the Commission’s input, staff will prepare a draft Ordinance for review by the Commission in February or March. This ordinance will then be forwarded to the City Council for its consideration. The final section of the Zoning Ordinance Update will be a clean up and refor~natting of the remainder of the document, with a few miscellaneous substantive revisions, tentatively scheduled for Apcil/May 2007. ATTACHMENTS A.April 27, 2005 PTC Staff Report and Attachments B.April 27, 2005 PTC Mim~tes C.Draft Section 18.52.050 (Parking Adjustments by Director) D.Draft Section 18.52.050 (Parking Adjustments by Director) - Redline COURTESY COPIES City Council Architectural Review Board Doug Moran, Barron Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen White Natalie Cardenas, Silicon Valley Association of Realtors PREPAtLED BY:Whimey McNair, Contract Planner REVIEWED BY: Julie Caporgno, Chief Pla~ming and Transportation Official DEPARTMENT/DIVISION HEaD APPROVAL:~.~ ~ Curtis Williams Assistant Director City of Palo Alto Page 4 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 i3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 2t 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 34 35 36 37 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Planning and Transportation Commission Verbatim Mimttes JanuaO, 31, 2007 EXCERPT Zoning Ordinance Update: Study Session to Discuss Potential Changes to 1) Multi Family Zone Districts and 2) ParMng Regulations. Mr. Williams: Okay. One of the main reasons we wanted to put this on the agenda even though we knew it was going to be a busy agenda tot you was that there are several Commissioners who have not been part of the discussions we had a couple of years ago about the multi-family zone districts. There was quite a bit of discussion, we got pretty far along in terms of actually having a draft before the Commission and then had a bit of homework to do and put things aside and PTOD sort ofoverwhehned us and we sort of moved on with other things. I know that some of you aren’t familiar with that. There was also a committee of the Commission that was dealing with parking and I think we had one session with the full Commission where we brought up some of the parking concepts that came out of the committee, I think all three members of the committee are not on the Coinmission an3qnore. So it will be fresh to some of you as well. So we wanted to at least get this in front of you and update you a little bit on what has happened bef.ore and what our current thinking is on the changes to the multi-family and parking chapters which we are going to bring forward to you as one package on March 14. What we anticipate doing after that is coming to you with one last package on the ZOU that has all the other things that we laaveia’t dealt with in the ZOU, refonnatted, there are probably a half dozen or so issues in amongst those chapters that we will list for you, and then we will be done and move onto the Comp Plan. So with that said, we are looking for you tonight as Chair Lippert mentioned to provide some initial thoughts on these items. We will i-un through some of" the key revisions on naulti-family and parking for you. If.there are items that you think we should address that aren’t on this list that is what we would like to hear either if there is something that really stands out and is of particular concern on the list or something we have left offthat you want us to bring back to you. We will do that then on the March 14 agenda. The multi-t:amily chapter changes do not affect generally the overall uses and standards of the chapter. As we have done in some of the other recent chapters we have probably ratcheted back a bit from how ambitious we were two years ago in terms of the changes that we might have made to the multi-family chapter. The allowable uses are generally the same residential uses with some accessory types of. uses that are currently allowed in there. I think the only exception to that a little bit is that we did provide some more opportunity for neighborhood serving retail services that might be incorporated into a larger residential complex. We won’t go into the details of that tonight but that is something you can see in some of the background material that we gave you. We gave you the Staff’Reports fiom a couple of years ago and there is quite a bit more detail in there about that. Maximum densities are staying the same and maximum height of the districts, and the maximum floor areas are the same. Page 1 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 9 30 31 32 DD 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 So what we are looking at recommending as changes are the forrnat as we have done with the other chapters taking the existing KM-15, RM-30, and RM-40 and putting it in one chapter and having table that distinguish the uses and the standards there. One of the issues before us last time and continues to be is our Village Residential concept. I think at this point in terms of the scaled back version here what we would still like to do and we had some discussions about pulling that out altogether but we would still like to create probably a fourth coluinn in the table that deals with some basic standards for row house and small lot type of development that would be more of the transitional type of somewhat lower density than the 15 units per acre for the RM and that would make the transition from single family to multi-family areas. So we have shown the Commission some of that over time. It would not probably be as broad based or as detailed as we were getting into before but we don’t want to lose that concept because we have done a lot of work to try to get there and create that transitional product. Setbacks and daylight planes one of the slides I will show you in a minute explain that we think it is appropriate to provide some relief on those setbacks and daylight planes when the multi- family is adjacent to nonresidential uses. So if it is next to residential you essentially mirror the residential daylight plane and setback next to you but if you were next to nonresidential there would be less of that constraint. You wilt find that many, many of these, more than half of the existing multi-family lots are substandard in size. So we have a lot of small lots that are very constrained fro multi-family and as a result a number of them get developed as single family or duplex but there are some that could potentially be maybe three units or that are three and maybe could be four units if they are next to nonresidential. Uniform density calculation is kind of a clarification. We have a little bit of a complex fOl~nula t’or how many units you get up to certain square feet and then a ratio beyond that. We are just saying let’s just say 15 units per acre and whatever percentage of an acre you have you just divide 15 by that and get the number of units on the site. So it is simplifying that a little bit. Allowing for tandem parking up to 25 percent of the total parking spaces for a site and the tandem spaces belonging to the same unit so the owner has control over that second space and being able to move it. Tandem parking has been approved in several multi-family projects as Design Enhancement Exceptions. So we think it is appropriate to provide some parameters under which those can be approved without the DEE. Again, support personal services and retail and trying to define how much is enough and reasonable and really serves the local it may be the building oi it may be in the vicinity. That is something we will have criteria on. Single family and two family uses currently the multi-family zones say that if you are building a single family home in a multi-family district that you go under the R-1 guidelines and we want to add to that that if you are doing a duplex that you go under the R-2 regulations for two lots. An issue that came up and you have received a letter from a resident on Emerson who I talked to at length yesterday and another issue came up separately in an R-2 which is not covered by the RM and the ultimate question is, and we heard this tonight too, should there be Individual Review for second stories on single family homes and duplexes that are in these zones? It is the same Page 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I3 t4 15 10 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 32 DD 34 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 49 44 45 46 concept as in tile R-1. We have never gone beyond R-1 xvith that. This was not part of the discussion as of last Thursday or so but since then it has been brought up and it is something we want to discuss with you all whether you think that is appropriate or not. So we will probably put some language in there and then we can discuss whether that makes sense. Some clarifications on enclosed parking and FAR. Right now the ordinance is a little confusing. In RM-30 you can actually have a higher FAR if you don’t count parking if it is detached or semi-depressed or something like that and then you get a lesser FAR if it is other types of parking. Well, that doesn’t apply in RM-15 and RM-40 so we want to standardize that process one way or the other. Defining usable open space. Tiffs is very similar to what we have already done in the mixed use and PTOD zoning but having a better definition of usable open space not just total open space that may or may not be really usable by the residents. We will add a context-based section. It will be a little different than the commercial and PTOD you saw because it is focusing on residential more so than commercial but a lot o[’the concepts will be still the same but we will have somewhat different approaches in some circumstances. Then there is currently a chapter, well I guess I shouldn’t say there is currently but i guess for another month or so there is still a Chapter 18.28 which is performance standards essentially for multi-family. That was one of the chapters that we deleted when the performance criteria new chapter was adopted. So that is a quick bulleted overview of changes that we are looking at in the multi-family. Then I will full through the parking and show you just a few graphics and then we can take your questions. The parking revisions, the thrust of the committee discussion when the Commission had a committee looking at this was that we should not do a wholesale revision of the parking rates and ratios that we have particularly in response to transit oriented and mixed use and those new types of development types. That rather than trying to come up with a lesser parking ratio because you are near a transit station we should retain tile system that we have now which allows for the Director to approve parking adjustments on a case-by-case basis up to certain maximums for being close to transit or for mixed use or for senior housing. So we have a number of categories like that. So we are trying to clean that up but what we are doing that i think is significant there is number one, we are suggesting a cap on how much you can sort of accumulate these reductions. We have bad people argue that I can get 20 percent for being mixed use and 20 percent for being near transit and 50 percent for senior house so that is 90 percent and I only have to provide ten percent of my parking. That hasn’t played and been approved that way to this point but we think we should put something in the ordinance that keeps that fi-om happening, Right now it is pretty discretionary as to the Director approving these things and we would like to specify that it is only approved upon submitting a parking analysis that shows that you can achieve these reductions. So there is some further technical basis for approving these that in certain instances we can require TDM measures in addition to help assure that those reductions Page 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22., 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 are met. We would recommend deleting, we have a landscape reserve requireinent, and we would continue to have the sort of general one where in unusual cases not these typical reductions but in unusual cases the Director could allmv less parking as long as the remaining parking was set aside in the landscape reserve. We would like to remove that landscape reserve provision from the transit oriented reduction because it really completely defeats the purpose of the transit orientation and setting land aside in a more highly urbanized area doesn’t work. So we would suggest deleting it for that provision. Then we will also suggest a category in terms of those reductions for affordable housing and specifically tied to the low and very low state requirements as to different categories and how much that reduction might be for that. We also had some clean up even though we are not changing the ratios generally. Bicycle parMng requirements are kind of outdated and so we are tying them more like automobile parking rates to square footages and numbers of units and such. Then also there are only really two different types of bicycle parking facilities, racks and lockers, and so instead of having three categories there are two. So that will be cleaned up and come to you. We will suggest reducing the threshold for mixed use. The mixed use reduction right now you get I.~p to a 20 percent reduction in mixed use you have to have a total of 30 parking spaces required in the first place. We are going to suggest a lesser number and probably at least suggest ten as the threshold at which point you can make that request. It still would be a maximum of 20 percent so we are talking about one space or two spaces perhaps being adjusted rather than the 30 spaces that we have now. Cunent Planning Staffhas suggested adding specific minimum residential garage sizes. This is more of an internal thing to make sure that our nine by, 18 or 19 or whatever the size space is has room to open the doors in a garage and just specify, that it is ten by 20 for a single car garage and 20 by 20 for a two car garage. We don’t have that right now. The guest parking requirements in some of the parking rates are kind of convoluted right now and so we are going to suggest language to sort of clarify, them and clean them tip without substantively kind of changing what those numbers would result in. I think that is it. These are some of the slides from prior meetings. The other one which we will need to talk about is one we thought about maybe dropping out but it is probably still worth talking about is whether to have reduced side setbacks in particular on lots that are like 70 feet or less, again probably only when they are next to nonresidential. Those lots are so constrained and I think I have a couple of diagrams. First here is a chart that shows the high percentage of lots that are smaller than the minimum lot size required in the RM zones. Overall it is 56 percent of the parcels in the RiM zones are less than the 8,500 square foot minilnum lot size. So we are dealing with a lot of small lots. We are suggesting again if you are next to any residential that you are kind of matching the daylight plane for that residential use on your side of the property. This says when abutting multi-family or nonresidential one of the changes we will make is take out the multi-family it is just going to be when it is abutting nonresidential that we wouldn’t have that daylight plane applying next to the nonresidential. Single family and two family we talked about. Support services probably, with a conditional use pen-nit and having some threshold size for accommodating that. One of the things that we have pulled out that was controversial two years ago was minimum densities. The Comp Plan does Page 4 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I3 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 call for that. The Zoning Ordinance right now specifies certain range for densities and Housing Element policy calls for that but it ran into a buzz sa~v and it was about the time the Hyatt Rickey’s property was being developed and it wouldn’t have complied with the minimum densities. So I think at this point in time we are not going to push that point. Usable open space, performance criteria we mentioned, and then as we said we will come back to you in March with some revised ordinance language to look at. I should mention that particularly on the multi-family part, not on the parking so much but on the multi-family, the multi-family section has been through ARB several times. We also did severa! community workshops back in 2005 and the biggest issues at that point were the minimum density, and the setbacks adjacent to residential use so we changed to encompass all residential use in that. I think Village Residential some of the concepts were of concern too. So hopefully we will try to address all of those. We recently visited with a Palo Alto neighborhood group at their monthly meeting and presented some of these. There were some concerns still about these adjacency issues but overall I don’t think we got suggestion that there is a need to go out and have a lot more meetings on those issues. Most of the remaining changes are relatively minor to discuss. So unless we hear otherwise and we will be checking back in with them again we will probably just keep them in the loop and then come back to you on March 14. The parking they haven’t seen quite so much. I am done. Perfect. Vice-Chair Lippert: Thank you very nauch. What we will do very briefly is open the public hearing if there are any inembers of the public that wish to speak to this they may do so and they have three minutes. I have a card fi-om Bob Moss. Mr. Bob Moss, Palo Alto: Thank you. Actually my comments are pretty brief. There were a couple of items and a suggestion 17 am confused about. One of them is the 25 percent tandem parking. I am not convinced that that much tandem really is going to work in a lot of contexts. So I would like to have you take a look at reducing that to say ten or 15 percent. I looked at the draft ordinance several times and I really couldn’t make sense of this comment that covered parking didn’t count in tile FAR and then there is a reference to one parking space often by 20 and 20 by 20. What would prevent somebody who has a relatively small lot, let’s say a 9,000 square foot lot from putting in a three car garage which would then not count against tile FAR and building a multi-family developlnent and then quietly slipping in and using that so- called parking area as living space? it has been done before quite extensively in Palo Alto. Unless it is pretty obvious as you drive by you cannot always tell that the garage has been converted to living use. So there has to be some kind of limit whether it is we don’t count the first 200 square feet or if you put more in then we are going to start counting additional toward your FAR but there has to be some way of regulating the amount of covered parking space that is allowed without counting toward the FAR. My personal feeling is if you set 200 to 250 square feet that would be reasonable. Anything larger than that you start counting against the FAR because people only have to have one covered space and they can have one uncovered space for the usual two cars people need for a family. So keep those things in mind when you come back and discuss this again. Page 5 1 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 "~9 3O 32 34 35 36 3"7 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Vice-Chair Lip_pert: Thank you. If there are any other members of the public that wish to speak? Seeing none I will close the public hearing. What I think I would like to do is return to the Commission and we will just go down the line again. Each of you will, and I am going to limit it to three minutes, to get out your questions and comments before we go back for a second round if there are others that have questions and comments. So we will begin with Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: I have several questions so set tile timer on me. I was just wondering out of curiosity how would consolidating the three multi-family zone districts into one new chapter improve the Zoning Ordinance? Mr. Williams: We have done that ill all these other zones too and it just makes it much more readable and avoids repetition. You go now flom one chapter to another and then you amend one chapter later on. C’oinmissioner Sandas: And then you have to go amending all the others. Mr. Williams: Yes and they get inconsistent. It is just cleaner. Commissioner Sandas: Yes, I got it. It was just a curiosity question. Another question I had was the reason for incorporating small lot Village Residential into tile multi-family districts as opposed to giving it its own chapter. Is that pretty much for the same reason that described or does it help to incorporate the notion of Village Residential into .... ? Mr. Williams: Well, Village Residential has been envisioned as pretty much being in RM-15 zones, a product that would be allowed because that is essentially the transition between higher density and single-f’amily housing. So it does sort of t?t there. We thought there was enough complexity and variety in the housing ty-pes in Village Residential, which included cluster cottages and row houses and courtyard apartments and things like that, that it would need its own chapter and that it would be too complex to do it otherwise. But what we are talking about now is simplifying that down and minimizing those varieties and probably having in the context- based design things some examples of different types but still having tile overall development standards being maybe it is 12 units per acre maximum and you still have the same FAR. Nothing could ever exceed any of the RM-15 numbers and then allowing a lot of flexibility design-wise internally to those properties at the ARB to determine some of the internal relationships of the lots to each other. Commissioner Sandas: I have another question just sort of piggybacking what Mr. Moss was asking about. I am wondering about tandem parking at all. That is front to back much like the first house that we owned in Palo Alto had a very long skinny driveway and we did tandem parking. It was somewhat of a nuisance and I am just wondering what are your professional thoughts on that and why are we doing it at all. Mr. Williams: My thoughts are I think it generally can work. I fiankly lived in an apartment in Belmont for five years that had tandem spaces mad it worked out fine. I don’t think it is something we should rely on for all of the parking so I do think it should be a limited amount of Page 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 32 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 the spaces being dealt with that way and of course tandem space would be limited to where it was under control somebody else. If you only had one space for that apartment then you couldn’t put it in tandem with somebody else. The other thing is that it saves space, it saves paving, it is a more efficient, greener approach than putting another isle in there that adds another 100 square feet per parking space. Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Burr you have three minutes. Commissioner Burt: I think Mr. Moss raised the question about whether extra parking spaces should also not be counted against FAR. I certainly have seen in R-1 neighborhoods where we have so-called garages that never had any intention of being garage space. We all know that many of us don’t park our cars in our garages but then there are other extremes. I have seen where it was glass wall structures and from the get-go paneled and it is just additional living or office space. So if we then give an even greater allowance there is some problem there so I think that was a point well taken. Then there was also a reference to guest parking being based on the number of parking spaces versus the number of units. I don’t necessarily have a preconceived preference on that but I was struggling with what is the better way to do that and I didn’t quite understand the rationale as to why it would be based on spaces rather than units. It seems to me that you need a certain number of guest parking spots for however guests a unit may generate regardless of how many other parking spaces there are. Then finally there is a reference for a more modest allowance for retail and services and I wasn’t sure what was meant there. Was that actually a greater allowance? Is that the intention that language was intended to convey’? Mr. Williams: I think so. What it does is right now we have some language that says I think that if you have 200 units or more that then you can have a certain amount of retail or personal service. So i guess what it really should say is for a more modest project maybe providing sornething else. i think our suggestion was for 50 units or more that you might entertain that as a conditional use pem~it but have the opportunity to do that. Commissioner Burr: I would reword it. Literally as it is written it might mean the opposite of what you intended. Other than that i will say that I found the StaffReport to be quite clear and succinct. Vice-Chair Lippert: Thanl,: you very much. Commissioner Tuma you have three minutes. Commissioner Tuma: I will be under that. I want to make a pitch for, I don’t know if there is a compromise here, personally I would like to see it go all the way back to a full blown discussion on Village Residential with a f’ull section on that. Maybe there is something in between. We are going to face some real challenges in the coming years. We all have heard tidbits about the new ABAG numbers and we are going to have to get creative and find ways to put more housing in Palo Alto. I remember reading a lot of the materials that were generated when you guys first went through that and I thought there were some fantastic ideas in there. I think they are doable. Page 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 35 36 37 38 39 40 4l 42 43 44 45 46 I think they are attractive to the kind of people that live in Palo Alto. People want some flexibility so I would, I know there is a lot on the plate, but I think there was a lot of good work done there and I would hate to see that lost because we just kind of try to cram it down into a short period of time. So I think it would avail the development community and us of some good tools for sort of doing our fair share under some of the concepts that we have agreed to as a city. So I think we could achieve some good things in the coming years. If we let it go at this point we probably won’t come back to revisit it for quite some time so I would make a pitch for really trying to put some effort into, maybe it is not all the way what I want, maybe it is not just to have a small section, maybe there is something in between. I think it could do some good if we would spend some time expanding that. Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Keller you have three minutes. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. I am pleased with tile issue of the adjacency with respect to multi-family residential matching the daylight planes and having setbacks based on adjacency to R-1 and R-2. I think that is good. I think also in concert with that the issue is allowing R-1 and R-2 when adjacent to an R-I or R-2 as the case may be. So if you have an RM-30 that is next to an R-1 allowing a single family residence next to the R-1 is a good adjacency thing to do and prohibiting it just because it is RM-30 doesn’t make any sense. So the context should be based oi1 what it is next to, the allowance of R-1 or tile allowance of a two family unit should be based on what it is next to not on what the zoning of that property is, is my thought. I agree with the idea of following the rules for R-1 or R-2 or whatever the right zoning is when you are building something that is essentially single family or two family and applying the IR to that when you are adjacent to the R-1 or R-2 does make some sense. I am assuming, and correct me if I am wrong, that rental offices are okay if you have a rental property. If you have an RM-30 or RM-15 and they can have an office there that is a rental office that you can come there. Mr. Williams: Yes, that is an accessory part of the apartment, sure. Commissioner Keller: Okay. I will reserve my comments for parking until the next go around. Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Oarber give yourself three minutes. Commissioner Oarber: I haven’t heard a lot that I don’t like. I will align myself with other comments that have been made, which I think hit all tile things. I will emphasize my interest in Village Residential as Commissioner Tuma did. I don’t know whether it is appropriate to separate out this to a separate chapter or whether it can be combined. I don’t know what the appropriate form is however I do have an avid interest in that and tile function that it can play in the city for any number of reasons. I would also like to highlight the Individual Review process for R-2 zones. Again, I am not exactly sure what the context for its application is. If it occurs without immediate adjacency to other R-1 zones maybe it is not appropriate, if it is not about duplexes, I don’t knoxv what the issues are. I suspect you have a better handle on that than I. The only other item that comes to Page 8 1 2 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 t5 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 24 25 26 27 29 31 32 34 35 36 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 mind in the discussion where you are proposing to allow the Director to have greater impact over some of the parking decisions particularly around some of the transit oriented design I like having that a less prescriptive approach to that. The only caution I will raise is one that has been raised before that obviously that should not short-circuit the opportunity for public input onto those sorts of decisions that are made. That is it for the moment. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have a couple of comments. I want to focus on parking first. I think I mentioned this to Staff earlier. I am really struggling with the whole notion of compact parking spaces. I think it is from an era gone by when we thought of compact cars as being more energy efficient and thereby being able to allocate less space. But the truth is as we become a green city what we should really be looking at is putting the emphasis on zero emission vehicles. So what I propose is that we go back to the unistall standard completely and we create a new category of parking space called green spaces. Green spaces would be striped with green stripes of course and green curbs. The idea is that we would allow these parking spaces or we would insist that a certain percentage of parking spaces for a commercial project be allocated green spaces, that they be located near the building entrances, they would be preferential parking spaces, and they would be for low emission vehicles, hybrids, sanctioned corporate carpool vehicles, and they would be given City-issued placards. They could be bio-diesel vehicles, they could be electric vehicles, but the whole idea is to try and reward people for beginning to do something about pollution. So it is a way of rethinking this and by the same token also eliminating the whole mess of people in their SUVs parking in an undersized spot and dinging the car next door and making it impossible to get in. In fact I came here this evening and an SUV was parked in a compact space next to my little Civic wagon. So the idea is to rethink those spaces. I liked what Commissioner Tuma had to say about Village Residential. I think we worked long and hard on the whole Village Residential concept. I think we fish or cut bait. We finish this chapter, we get it done, and we move it on to the City Council and let them make the big decision here but I think we have worked long and hard on it and it should not be abandoned. [ have only 24 seconds left and I will cede to any other Commissioner that has some follow tip comments. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I would agree with the Vice-Chair’s conllnents regarding parking although I would question the use of the color green. From some of the electric car lists that I am on people think that green is a place to park and therefore a lot of non-green vehicles park there because they think green is good. I think with respect to tandem parking there is a question of how much actually was allowed in the current projects. I think that is an interesting question to raise. One thing it means to me is because of the difficulty of tandem parking in terms of the people I wonder whether people who have tandem parMng would tie it up using the shared parking spaces or the guest parking spaces. Therefore perhaps sonle way of balancing this is saying that for example for every two pairs of tandem parking spaces you create you add one more guest space or something like that because some of those people who are tandem parkers will actually park guest to avoid tandem parking and use up the guest parking. Page 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I0 11 12 13 t4 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2,~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 I am s3anpathetic with Commissioner Burt’s comments about units versus spaces particularly since we have a reduction of spaces for senior housing. I should sure hope that we don’t limit spaces for people to park to visit our seniors because I know that seniors like having visitors. With respect to the mixed use reduction I think that there should be some enforcement mechanism in case they are actually not meeting that and there is parking on the street. The issue is a principle of multiplicative as compared to additive. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you have a ten percent reduction and another ten percent reduction that is not 20 percent reduction it is actually a 19 percent reduction because it is .9 times .9, xvhich is .81. So there is an issue that it is multiplicative not additive and that is an important issue. The last issue that i have here was in terms of Transportation Demand Management programs. The consideration is that Transportation Demand Management programs are all well and good in terms of saying you have to have one but as far as I can tell there is no enforcement that the Transportation Demand Management program actually works. Therefore, my principle should be you either meet your Transportation Demand Management program or you pay to get other people to get their cars off the road by paying into a Pale Alto Shuttle or something like that so that we have an overall management of traffic. Unless we have an enforcement mechanism that requires fees of some sort that is self-reinforcing in a natural way so if people violate it it doesn’t go unnoticed and actually does wind up in reducing traffic. Thank you. Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Bin-t: Yes, I would like to support comments made a couple of Commissioners just so you will get a sense that they are not speaking alone. One, you already have a sense of that on the Village Residential. I am glad these other Commissioners spoke up. I was disappointed but kind of ready to rollover to expediency to get the Village Residential through. If a separate chapter is likely to have a long term outcome of promoting Village Residential more than the way we were going to do then I think we ought to go ahead and put it in a separate chapter. I don’t know whether it does but if it would help it, we did a lot of work on it, and I am glad that the other Commissioners inspired me to go back after that again. Then there is the point that Commissioner Keller just brought up about the TDM issue. It has been several years since the Commission last talked about those kinds of concepts and I am glad he has brought them back up. We need to look at how we can have really effective TDM tools and this notion of essentially if they don’t achieve outcomes then they pay a form of in lieu TDM fees toward the general trip reduction is very possibly a concept that we need to pursue. It is consistent with what we were just talking with Stanford about and t think it may be one of the most effective ways to have the outcomes that we are seeking. Vice-Chair Li~: Any other Commissioners? Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: I really like Vice-Chair Lippert’s suggestion about the green stalls, which is cool. I don’t know if there are other precedents for that or if that can happen. Can we get them lined up right next the handicapped spaces? I will vote in support of that thought. Page 10 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 3l 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: The reason I asked the initial question about the Village Residential was for the reasons that everyone had articulated. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have one follow up in terms of the green spaces again. One thing I forgot to mention is it really should be tied to a TDM program as well and that will make them enforceable in terms of people that are driving low emission vehicles park there and that there be an ability to then sanction whoever is monitoring those spaces and they should be appropriately marked that people who park there could be towed if they are a zero-emission vehicle. Then one other comn?ent with regard to the RM zones, with what is going on recently on Welch Road we are going to be seeing, 1 think, a mass exodus of some of our professional offices namely in the medical area. Perhaps it might be appropriate to allow limited professional medical offices, small dental offices, or doctors to also be located within the RaM zones. So that is just something to think about. Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Butt: Just one quick thing on the green spaces, i think it is a good concept the one thing that I want to add is that we see a lot of times where we have a lot of empty spaces. Driving up here tonight I saw all these reserved spaces that sit empty as people drive around in circles looking for a parking space and some of those are electric car spaces. So the concept that we might want to mold with it, there was mention of hybrid, so until the point in time where the demand for those green spaces exceeds the supply we may have to open up the qualification. So if we have the same sort of vehicles that qualify as hybrids that are high-mileage hybrids that qualify for the carpool lane, if they have that sticker perhaps or something like that, not all hybrids because not all of them are that high of mileage but something that doesn’t cause these spaces to sit empty. It is not very progressive either to pave places over and have them sit empty and it is not very efficient either. Vice-Chair Lippert: Well, following up on that the idea here is that eventually it might even be extended to our own public garages in which the ground floor might be allocated for green spaces and people that are driving more pollution causing vehicles would have to park on the upper floor. Another thing might be that we create green spaces where in our public garages the people who are driving green vehicles can park all day whereas everybody else would be time- limited to the two or three hours. Commissioner Butt: I admire the concept just think about some of the ramifications. So what we want to do is have those polluting vehicles driving around in circles or have to move their car during the day. My only point is I think it is an admirable goal and there maybe an effective way to be able to do it but we have think through all the unintended consequences bet~ore we just go forward. Mr. Williams: Not to mention having all the heavy vehicles on the top deck. Page 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 1"7 18 Vice-Chair Lippert: Go ahead. Coinmissioner Keller: A couple of things. First of all with respect to enclosed parking not being a part of the FAR I think that enclosed parking should be part of the FAR unless it is below grade. I think that the principle of’just like any enclosed space if it is enclosed it counts, if it is not enclosed it doesn’t, and if it is below grade it doesn’t count like basements. I think that is a consistent formula that we have used for other things, i think that should apply. With respect to green parking you should be aware that the State of California issues zero- emission vehicles a parking sticker that you can get that actually several of my cars have because they are zero-emission vehicles. It is a little parking sticker that you can get from the state. In terms of SUVs it is hard for a parking enforcement agent to know whether a vehicle qualifies or not. So I think relying on state certification is probably the way to go unless you want to have some sort of Palo Alto registry of vehicles that might qualify. Vice-Chair Lippei-t: Great. I think we have said enough here. I think we will close this item and finish up the hearing. Page 12 PLANNING DIVISION STAFF REPORT 3 TO: FROM: DATE: SUBJECT: PLAN~NING & TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION Kevin Gardiner, Contract Plarmer DEPARTMENT: Planning & Community Environment March 14, 2007 Zoning Ordinance Update - Recommendations to City Council Regarding Amendments to Title 18 (Zoning Ordinance), including: A)An Ordinance Revising and Consolidating Chapters 18.22, 18.24, and 18.26 into a new Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts: RM-15, RM-30, and R2vl-40); and An Ordinance Revising and Renumbering Chapter 18.83 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) to New Chapters 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards). RECOMMENDATION Staff recommends that the Plamfing and Transportation Commission (PTC) review and recommend to the City Council adoption of a new Chapter 18.13 for Multi-Family Residential (RM-15, RM-30 and RM-40) Districts (Attachment A) and new Chapters 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards), both included in Attachment C. BACKGROUND Current regulations for multi-family residential zoning districts are contained within Chapters 18.22 (RM-! 5), 18.24 (~’v~[-30), and 18.26 (RM-40) of the Zoning Ordinance. Chapter 18.28 (Multi-Family Residence District Guidelines) has recently been deleted and supplanted by the new Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria), adopted by Council on February 5, 2007, Staff proposes to consolidate the tl-nee multi-family zone districts into a new Chapter ! 8. I3, similar to the approach for the low-density residential, commercial and industrial districts. City of Palo Alto Page l Parking requirements are currently embodied in Chapter 18.83 of the Zoning Ordinance. A subcommittee of the Commission met several times in 2003 and 2004 t° provide direction to the effort, and draft parking mad loading requirements were reviewed and discussed by the Commission at the January 31, 2007 study session. The staff report from the Commission’s meeting is included as Attachment F. The extensive attachments to that staff report are available online at: http://www.citvo:~aloatto.or~/cityagenda/pubtish/p!.anning-transpor[ation- meetingsh) lanning-trans~oortation-meetings.html. The Commission’s primary RIVI concerns at the January 31st study session were 1) the omission of the Village Residential land use type from the ZOU, and 2) assuring adequate transitions from homes when inulti-family is built next to a home in an. RaM zone. Key parking concerns included 1) the extent of tandem parking allowed in multi-family districts, 2) providing priority parking for "green" parking spaces, and 3) allowing for improved enforcement of TDM programs. The Commission’s minutes are included as Attachment G. DISCUSSION Attachments A and B are clean and redlined versions, respectively, of the proposed new Chapter 18.13 related to Multiple Family Residential Districts. Attachments C and D are clean and redlined versions, respectively, of the new Chapters 18.52/18/54 related to parking regulations and design. The redlined versions reflect "substantive" revisions to the regulations, not verbatim changes, since the chapters have been consolidated, rearranged, and reformatted. Thediscussion below outlines key changes to 1) multi-family regulations, 2) village residential (included in the multi-family chapter), and 3) parking regulations. Multi-Family Zoning Districts Chapter (18.13) Staffhas responded to earlier concerns expressed at prior Commission meetings to modify the changes to the multi-family zoning criteria. A redlined version of the code (Attachment B) outlines the changes to existing provisions. Revisions to current multi-family residence regulations include: o An updated format to be consistent with the newly adopted chapters within the Zoning Ordinance, including the use of tables to outline allowable uses and required development standards for each zone district. Deletion of the daylight plane requirement next to sites zoned and used for non- residential development. Daylight plane requirements would still apply where a building is adjacent to an existing residential (R-l, R-2, RM) zone or residential use. Daylight planes adjacent to low density zones or uses would match the low density daylight plane, while daylight planes adjacent to multi-family zones with multi- family uses would match specified multi-family daylight planes similar to those in effect today. consistent density limit (units/acre) for all lot sizes rather than a sliding scale. City of Palo Alto Page 2 Flexibility for front setbacks in the RM-40 zone or along arterial roadways to be determined by the ARB, based on contextual situations, allowing buildings to be located closer than 20-25 feet fi-om the roadway in pedestrian-oriented areas. Allowance for substandard lots of less than 70 feet in width to reduce the side setback to 6 feet, but not closer than the required setback on an adjacent lot, in order to provide flexibility in development of these lots while also providing articulation to avoid a taller wall at the standard 10 foot setback. Revision to the BMR section to reflect current BM-R and Comprehensive Plan policy. Allowance of tandeln spaces for parking in multi-family zones, subject to the tandem space being located behind a space designated for the same dwelling unit, and subject to not more than 25% of the spaces on a site being tandem. The 25% limitation is proposed only on sites with greater than four units, as triplexes and fourplexes tend to be parked more like single-fanily or duplexes. A more modest allowance for neighborhood retail and service uses within large residentia! complexes (with a CUP), amounting to a maximum of 3% of the total floor area or 2,500 square feet of con:unercial space, whichever is less. This provision would only apply to sites with 50 or more units, m~d the commercial square footage is proposed to be exempt from FAR limits to encourage such support uses. A list of allowable uses is included in the ordinance to limit the potential for more regional uses or uses likely to impact residents. Clarification that the R-2 regulations apply to any lot proposed for 2 units, similar to the current requirement that R-1 regulations apply to any lot proposed for a single home. Clarification for all zones (as specified in the definition of"gross floor area") that enclosed parking is not counted in the allowed floor area ratio (FAR). Removal of the t)erformance measure section that was superseded with the adoption by City Council of Chapter 18.23 (Performance Criteria for Multiple Family, Conm’~ercial, and Industrial Districts). Addition of a Context-Based Design Criteria section (similar to that developed for other chapters) to illustrate desired design and compatibility concepts. Village Residential Devetot?ment Criteria (18.13.050) At its April 6, 2006 study session the ARB recommended that Village Residential development regulations be incorporated into the revised RAM-15 standards. This recommendation was largely based on the interest in streamlining the ZOU process, and recognizing that most of the components of the Village Residential land use as defined in the Comprehensive Plan (i.e., single family houses on small lots, second units, cottage clusters, courtyard housing, and duplexes) City of Palo Alto Page 3 could be accommodated within the proposed revised RM-15 standards. The RM requirements would still not, however, allow subdivision of an RM site so that each unit is situated on its own small "fee" lot (as opposed to a condominium). At the January 31, 2007 study session, the PTC expressed a strong interest in providing a means for Village Residentia! development, either within Chapter 18.13 or within a separate chapter, rather than deferring Village Residential provisions to a later date (likely after the update of the Comprehensive Plan). Staffproposes to incorporate a simple but practical Village Residential option in the multi-family districts, rather than more fully developing a Village Residential chapter of the Zoning Ordinance. "Village Residential" would be listed as a permitted use in the Pdvi-I 5 zone and for substandard size lots in the RM-30 and RM-40 zones, as well as for the perimeter of large lots as transition to lower density housing. Village Residential Development Criteria is proposed in Section 18.13.050 of Chapter 18.13 and focuses on fee ownership of individual lots with conmaon ownership of internal streets, driveways and common areas. Key elements of the Village Residential standards would include: Requirement that the perimeter setbacks and daylight planes, overall FAR, coverage, open space and height meet RM-15 requirements. Parking would need to meet parking requirements for multi-family development, including required guest spaces. A minimum lot size of 1,500 square feet for attached units and 2,500 square feet for detached units. Maximmn density of 12 units per acre, recognizing that Village Residential represents transition between multi-family and single-family zones. Higher usable open space requirements than RM-15.(300 square feet per unit vs. 200 square feet for RM-15), but no specified requirement that usable open space be devoted to common usable open space. This will not prevent developments from having usable common open space, but would allow usable open space to be provided mostly in private yards if desired. Requirement that the entire development plan, including subdivision of the site into individual lots and design of buildings, must be submitted and reviewed at one time, rather than piecemeal or subdividing a multi-family site and selling off the lots to be developed independently. Requirement that post-construction modifications to completed units such as additions be submitted by the entire development entity such as the homeowners association, and that continued compliance with overall site development standards be demonstrated. This would prevent an individual owner from "using up" any remaining development potential for the site or exceeding the allowed deve!opment capacity of the site to the un,Maown disadvantage of other owners. City of Palo Alto Page 4 Context-Based Design Criteria particular to units on individual lots (small lot detached or rowhouse/tow~home), and for developments with a variety of housing types. Village Residential use and development standmds may be applied to standard RM-15 multiple- family residence district sites, as well as substandard RM-15, RM-30, and RM-40 multiple- family residence sites. It may also be applied to edges of larger RM-30 and RM-40 sites where a transition to a lower~density adjacent use is desired. The intent is to allow an ownership option within the RM-15 zone, or on substandard lots, and/or at the edges of large sites, while providing for more of a single-family appearance as a transition near single-family zones. Parking Regulations and Design (Ch.~pters 18.52 and 18.54) Staff proposes a number of relatively minor changes to parking regulations and design criteria. Parking rates (numbers ot’ spaces per unit or square foot, etc.) are only modified where necessary to clarify a complex or inconsistent rate. A redlined version of the code (Attachment D) outlines the changes to existing provisions. Revisions to cmrent parking regulations include: Splitting the cttnent Chapter 18.83 into two chapters: Parking and Loading Regulations (Chapter 18.52) and Parking Facility DesiN~ Standards (Chapter 18.54). This allows for easier reading of the regulations and a more logicaI organizat!on of the requirements. Changing the bicycle parking ratios to be independent of the vehicle parking rates, and to base the requirements instead on square footage, nmnber ofm~its, or number of employees. Also, outdated references to Type I and Type II bike racks will be updated to Bike Racks (short term) and Lockers (long term), respectively. Outdated references to Type III requirements are deleted. These changes were prepared by the City’s bicycle consultant and were recon~nended by the Bicycle Committee. Limiting mnltiple parking reductions, establishing a maximum cumulative percent reduction, and requiring a parking analysis in most cases to justify the reductions. Automatic parking reductions for providing additional bike parking would be eliminated, but added bicycle facilities may support a TDM program reduction. A potential parking reduction for affordable housing and SROs is added. Addition of TDM requirements in most cases when parking adjustments are requested, as well as for threshold projects (minimum ! 0 am or pm peak hour trips) and for CEQA mitigation. Extensive details of development, monitoring and enforcement of TDM programs, including a list of potential TDM measures, two and five year monitoring reports, and requirements for fl~ture modifications or in-lieu payments if performance targets are not achieved. City of Pa[o A[to Page 5 Introduction of "traffic-reducing housing," "green" parking priorities, and "parking cashout" as prospective TDM approaches. Deletion of the landscape reserve for transit-oriented parking reductions. Revision of the threshold to request a mixed use parking reduction to 10 spaces (rather than 30 spaces). Minor adjustments to vehicle parking rates for clarification and consistency. Deletion of allowances for "compact" parking spaces, instead requiring all spaces to be ofa "uni-class" size (8.5’ x 17.5’). Clarification of minimum residential parking garage dimensions. Residential garage sizes would be at least 10’ x 20’ (1-car) or 20’ x 20’ (2-car). Allowance for tandem parking in multi-family zones, subject to the limitations noted above in the multi-family discussion. o Incorporation of the 50% tree canopy (in 15 years) standard in the landscape section, as well as reference to the newly adopted landscape requirements of Section 18.40.130. o Deletion of all references to metric system measurements, as well as other standard format changes, such as replacing "zoning administrator" and "chief transportation official" with "director." Attachment E includes tables and figures now included at the end of Chapter 18.83, related to design standards, such as stall sizes and accessibility requirements. Staff proposes to eliminate Table 3 (standards size parking stalls),. Tables 4a and 4b (standard and compact stalls), Table 5a (metric requirements), and Table 6 (number of compact stalls). All figures would be retained. Table 5b (layout dimensions for uni-class stalls) and Tables 7, 8 and 9 (driveways dimensions) would be retained. The Commission’s action should include these modifications. ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW The revisions proposed are responsive to Comprehensive Plan policies, are minor in nature and would not substantially increase the density or intensity of development in the city. The multiple- family changes comprise minor modifications to allow added flexibility for development on small lots, particularly adj acent to nonresidential uses. The addition of a Village Residential section allows for better transition uses adjacent to single-family areas, but does not result in any increased density. The parking amendments are minor and balance flexibility for parking adjustments with more stringent methodologies for allowing parking reductions and TDM programs. The amendments are therefore consistent with the analysis provided in the Comprehensive Plan and further enviromnental review is not required. Environmental review will be required, however, for subsequent projects that are proposed subject to these regulations. City of Palo Alto Page 6 NEXT STEPS Based on the Commission’s recommendation, staff will prepare the draft Ordinances to be forwarded to the City Council for its consideration. The final section of the Zoning Ordinance Update will be a clean up and refolxmatting of the remainder of the document, with a few miscellaneous substantive revisions, tentatively scheduled for April/May 2007. ATTACHMENTS E. F. G. Draft Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts) Draft Redlined Chapter 18.13 Draft Chapters 18.52 (Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standm-ds) Draft Redlined Chapters 18.52 and 18.54 Parking Design Tables and Figures January 3 !, 2007 Planning and Transportation Commission Staff Report January 31, 2007 Plalming and Transportation Commission Minutes COURTESY COPIES City Council Architectural Review Board Doug Moran, Ban-on Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen White Natalie Cardenas, Silicon Valley Association of Realtors PREPARED BY:Kevin Gardiner, Contract Planner REVIEWED BY:Julie Caporgno, Chief Planning and Transportation Official DEPARTMENT/DIVISION HEAD APPROVAL:M.~(,~,....~.__ Curtis Williams Assistant Director City of Palo Alto Page 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 t4 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 D 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 ~8 39 4O 41 42 4~ 44 45 Planning and Transportation Commission Verbatim Minutes March 14, 2007 EXCERPT Zoning Ordinance Update - Review and recommendations to City Council for: A) An Ordinance Revising and Consolidating Chapters 18.22, 18.24, ai-td 18.26 into a new Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts: RM-15, RM-30, and RM-40), and Deleting Chapter ! 8.28 (Multiple-Family Residence District Guidelines); and B) An Ordinance Revising and Renulnbering Chapter 18.83 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) to New Chapters ! 8.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards). Environmental Review: Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report. Mr. Williams: Yes. I am assuming that we should do this one at a time, do the multi family and then go on and do the parking later to keep it a little bit better organized. Chair Holman: Yes. Mr. Williams: First of all on the multi family we have proposed combining/consolidating all three of the multi family chapters into one. The other chapter related to perf’onnance criteria that existed before has already been deleted when our new perfommnce criteria were adopted a couple of" months ago. We have provided a list of most all of the changes other than very minor technica! changes to the ordinances on pages two, three and four because that is the Village Residential part. Just to hit a couple of the real key changes that we have talked about. One is, and 1 will come back to this in a minute, the deletion of" the daylight plane requirement next to sites zoned and used for nonresidential development also actually for RM-30 and RM-40 development, so high-dei~sity residential as well. We emailed you yesterday i think a memo suggesting a few changes to what is in here so I will come back to that in a minute. We have also tried to address, and this is something we really didn’t get to talk about at your January 31 Study Session, tried to address substandard lots, lots that don’t meet the minimum lot size or lot width in the multi family zones. More than half of the lots in the RM zones do not meet those requirements so it is very important. What we have done is essentially said that if lots are less than 70 feet in width, which is the minin~um width, then rather than having a ten foot setback we would have a six foot setback but we would still have adjacent to low density residential or R.M-15 we would still have the daylight plane that helps capture then how high the building can go next door to those uses. Page 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 1-4 15 16 I7 18 t9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 "3/ 36 37 38 39 -40 41 -42 -43 44 45 46 I don’t think we mentioned to you last time but we did change the BMR section para~aph of the ordinance. It was completely outdated as far as the percentages. It still had the ten percent BMR requirement in there so we put the 15 and 20 percent in there and otherwise just referred to the City’s BMR Comprehensive Plan and City policy. We talked about tandem spaces with you previously. We have essentially said that for any developinent that has more than four units in it that we would limit the tandem spaces to not more than 25 percent of the total rmmber of spaces. So we don’t wan to get carried away with using tandem on a big project. An allowance for neighborhood retail and se~wice uses I think we talked to you about that a bit on the 31‘< about limiting 2,500 square feet of support commercial uses that may be oriented toward the building users but may also be for the neighborhood in general. Addition o~" a context based design criteria section analogues to what we did for the commercial zones. Then the other big change fiom when we talked to you on the 31 st was that we did go back in and expand the scope of what we propose to do as far as Village Residential because we heard you had a concern about us losing that entirely. So what we have provided you with is a new section in the ordinance essentially what it specifically discusses is single homes on single lots and fee lots as opposed to condominiums. Right now under the RM-15 you can do condominiums, you can attach them, you can detach them, and under the RM standards you just have to meet the overall site criteria. What you can’t do is you can’t subdivide the land so that they are essentially tee lots to the owners of those homes. You can’t do that because we have an 8,500 square foot minimum lot size in the RM zones. So what we have provided is an allowance that you could subdivide those however we have provided some basic criteria. First of all the site in total has to meet the RM-15 criteria as far as the total FAR, the height, the coverage, the perimeter setbacks and daylight planes have to meet the RM-I 5. What happens inside that is much more flexible on the individual lots. We have suggested a minimum lot size of 1,500 square feet if units are essentially zero lot line attached units and 2,500 square feet if they are detached units with a bit of a front yard required but generally leaving the design and layout to the Architectural Review Board’s review of the project. So we think that is again some incentive to do this kind of development which again serves as kind of a buffer. We have also specified that instead of 15 units per acre it would be 12 units per acre maxirnum. So it is a little less than that although you could do a similar type development at 15 under a condo map if someone wanted to do that. So we have tried to provide this as some incentive to create this transitional housing and we have provided in the context based design some sketches of both like a row house/townhouse type of approach as well as something that is more detached. It is not the courtyard cluster type concept like we have talked about in R-1 so we haven’t gotten to get to that in R-1 zones, we hope we will at some point in time but that is not part of this. This is what you can do in RM-15 zones. So I think that pretty much covers the main requirements relative to those Village Residential types. We did suggest a couple of modifications to the multi family zoning, One of them is that currently the RM zones require that if you do a single-family home on an RM lot that you abide by the R-1 regulations not the RM regulations. That is not the case for R-2. R-2 can go under the RM and is subject to the RM-15 or RM-30 whatever the regulations are for that district. We Page 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 40 41 42 43 44 45 had initially put ii’~ here that the same kind of requirement that you must comply with the R-2 regulations. When we looked at that again that is really kind of punitive to the R-2. It really is sort of a down-zoning of their FAR and some of the other requirements. The only real benefit to a property owner to use the R-2 in the RM zone is that the side setbacks are less. They are six feet instead of being ten feet. So what we would prefer to do is say that the R-2 in the RM zones, if you are doing a two-family development, that you may use the R-2 if you feel like the side setbacks and some of the other provisions are helpful that you may use those but otherwise you could continue to use the RM regulations. The other provision that the Commission did talk about on the 31~t was Individual Review for single family or two i~mily development on RM lots. So if you are situated next to a single family home you are going to build a single family home on an RM lot because it is that small that you can’t really do a whole lot more than that and if you are going to put a second story on that then we have added some language that would require that you go through the Individual Review process for either one family or two family when you are abutting a single Pamily or two family dwelling. So if you are not, if it is commercial or multi family then you don’t have to go through the Individual Review process, but if you are immediately adjacent to that use then you would be required to go through the Individual Review process. We have talked about putting that in the R-2 as well which we will come back with as one of our final cleanup items. For now we have the ~’vl zones in front of us so we have added that language that would require timt. Then as far as the substandard size lots, the lots that are less than 70 feet in width, the language was kind of confusing. It said basically for lots that have less than 70 feet of width that the side setback would be six feet and then it says but not less than required side yard setback on the abutting lot. Well, what that ended up being is that you had more of a setback when you were adjacent to an RM lot than an R-1 tot and I don’t think that is what we wanted to have as kind of the reverse of what we would want. So we have just left it at the six feet and then allowed the daylight plane to provide the remaining separation. Again the daylight plane will, when it is next to R-l, R-2, RMD, or RM-15 will be ten feet up and 45 degree angle which is essentially the R-I daylight plane. Then for lots that are less than 70 feet in width where they are abutting an RM-30, RM-40, PC, or nonresidential district then if the six foot setback exists then there would be a daylight plane only to the ten toot setback line and then there wouldn’t be a daylight plane past that point. We provided you tonight with a handout that has a number of diagrams on there. There are some diagrams showing how that works. We also have one that didn’t quite make it in the packet. Would you pass that out, Julie? These two supplement the group that you have. Commissioner Garber: Are there two or just one diagram? Mr. Williams: There are two additional diagrams that are handed out tonight. One shows existing R-1 on the right side and one does not. Page 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 This is the initial packet and it sort of summarizes on the first page what those requirements are and then it goes through a series of scenarios. The first diagram shows that if an R-1 single- family residence is next to a proposed RM building that the multi family building would essentially mirror the R-1 as far as the daylight plane goes. This is from an older presentation, so the RM-15 would be treated pretty much like R-1 but for RM-30 the daylight plane would stop at that ten foot setback line so there wouldn’t be a cutback in that if it was adjacent to another RM or commercial building. Chair Hohnan: You mean this is an old one so it would RM-30? Mr. Williams: RM-30 and 40 not RM-15. RM-15 would continue to have the R-1 daylight plane all the way through. Chair Holman: One more thing. It is not just the zoning bttt it also the use. Mr. Williams: It is the use and we have specified it is either the use or the zoning. So it may be zoned for RM-30 but it has a honae on the site and it would be treated as R-1 with the same kind of daylight plane situation. Vice-Chair Lippert: There is something wrong with this diagram. Mr. Williams: I am not there yet. Chair Holman: He is not to that one yet. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay. Mr. Williams: The third one shows on the left side that right now under current standards applying daylight planes in a second story setback that you get this odd looking shape even when you are next to an existing commercial building and there is no residential next to you. Under the revisions the next one shows R-l, actually it would be two figures past that. It shows that as long as you had that ten-foot setback that you wouldn’t have the daylight plane affecting you if you were adjacent to commercial or RM-30 or RM-40. Then the one after that with this really funny looking buildirlg to the left side of it is on a substandard lot currently what the regulations would allow. Because of the second story setback and the daylight plane and the ten-foot setback you get pretty much a one-story building and probably can’t build even that second story that is shown there unless that is a church steeple. That is even if you are next to an existing commercial building. So we have tried to look at the situation and the next one is a situation where you are building say an RM building next to an existing commercial on a substandard lot, reduce the setback to six feet, you go up to the daylight plane and cut in and then at ten feet you can go straight up. There are a couple of advantages. One is obviously it provides a lot more flexibility for the building on that lot but it also provides a breaking up of that wall adjacent to the site next door. So if it were at ten feet back you might just get a vertical 25-foot high wall. In this case you are getting that broken up part of the way up there which helps mix it up. Page 4 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 ~4 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Then what we have handed out tonight, the one that says exlstm~ commercial or RM’ on the right side of it, don’t pay any attention to that one. That is not correct an3qnore because we are not having the daylight planes on the adjacent lots. So just the one with the existing R-1 is the one that I want to use. So if you are next to an existing R-1 on a substandard lot you would come in the six feet and then you would be subject to the R-1 daylight plane up to your maximum or where those intersect, which on this thing I think would probably be a 35 foot height. So it looks like Lee is going to tell us that it looks like it is more than five feet higher than the adjacent 30-foot height. Vice-Chair Lippert: Yes, there is something wrong. Mr. Williams: Kevin says it is not to scale. Vice-Chair Lip_.pert: The six feet on the right and the six feet on the left don’t match. Mr. Williams: That is true. You are right. I think what and Kevin is taking a hit for this and he shouldn’t because they got this to him late today and told him to try to get this to match up. He took something from m~ old slide and tried to meld it in with the new stuff. So the concept is as was shown on the very first one is that you have essentially the same setback and the same daylight plane when you are next to R-1 so that you replicate that level of protection for the residential that is next door. Chair Hohnan: So basically we can ignore this one too then almost. Mr. Williams: Almost, but at least it gets the concept that you will have where as on R-1 you M "~have a 30-foot height limit. The Ri -.~0 does have 30 feet so it could be a little bi~her and I think under the daylight plane you could get there right at that peak just like it shows. So I think what is really off here is the scale for the R-1 portion of it. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Did you say RM-30 was 30 feet’? I think you meant 35 feet. Mr. Williams: Yes, 35. Commissioner Keller: And if you calculate this 50 feet wide the midpoint of that 45-degree angle means that it is 25 feet above the daylight plane plus ten gives you 35. Mr. Williams: Exactly. Commissioner Keller: So even though it is not to scale the height calculated is 35 feet. Mr. Williams: Right, that would be the maximum. So that is an explanation of where we would like to go with substandard lots. I know that was a concern before but I think the concern you had when we visited xvith you a year plus ago was primarily related to the use on the lot and the Page 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22., 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 34 35 36 37 38 3~9 40 41 42 44 45 46 concenl that a lot of these substandard lots have R-1 or have homes or two family on there and what we are telling you now is that we will include those and treat them the same way as an R-1 or R-2 zoned lot and have that same daylight plane in there for those regardless of the zoning on them. So in the memo then in addition to the issues about the nonconforming size lots we have suggested one other change. Currently generally in RM-15, RM-30, and RM-40 parking covered, enclosed parking is not counted in the floor area. There hasn’t been a distinction whether the units are detached, attached, stacked or whatever. So we have seen projects like 3270 West Baysbore and East Meadow projects and those that those garages did not count as square footage. We have also seen a few and they have been generally smaller sites where we have seen some pretty large garages come through that were doing more than just housing two cars. So we wanted to be sure that that provision wasn’t abused. So we would like to put a limit on how much floor area per garage space you could exclude. We had suggested in the ordinance 200 square feet and we went back and that is just enough to hold the car. We thought it would be more reasonable to have a little bit of room for a water heater and maybe some utilities and storage in there. So we have changed that recommendation to 250 square feet. We went back and looked at some of those other sites that I just mentioned, also the Hyatt was in there tile Arbor Real, and their two car garages generally range from 450 to 500 square feet, 490 to 500 square feet something like that. So we think this is reasonable. Maybe it could be a little less but I think that is a reasonable approach to it. So we are revising our recommendation to suggest plugging that number in rather than the 200 square foot. Then tile last thing I wanted to mention was Commissioner Keller gave us a few questions and comments today,. Most of them were of a technical nature in terms of conections to the ordinance. Did the Commissioners get copies of that? Chair Holman: No. Mr. Williams: I have told Mr. Keller that virtually all of those are fine we will make those changes. I would be glad to go through them with you if you like but they are really conections to font sizes and things like that as well as consistent language in a couple of spots where there is some inconsistent language, clarifications. I think you and I answered number one before that. There is a footnote in Table 2 and a couple of the tables about that 200 square foot or 250 square foot exemption and his question was basically when it says 250 square foot per required parking space does that mean tile required covered one space per unit or any spaces that are covered? The answer and I think it is worded correctly is that any parking that is required it can be two spaces per unit say that is covered are not included in there. So if you are providing more parking than you are required to and you enclose it then you are not going to get to deduct that from your floor area but it is not just the one space per unit either. If you cover one space and you leave one uncovered you get tile 250 square feet for the one, you won’t get any credit for the other one. If you cover both of them, both of them are required spaces, they are not necessarily both required to be covered but if they are both covered then you will get credit for both of those spaces. If you provide a third you are not going to get credit for covering that one. So if that is not sufficiently confusing I will try to explain it some more. Page 6 l 2 3 4 5 6 "7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 1"7 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4~ 44 45 So with that I xvill turn it back to you. David Solnick is here. As you know we have gone to the ARB several times on this and some of the changes that we are suggesting that came about in the last few days are because I went back and looked at what the ARB had discussed before and realized that we hadn’t caught a couple of their suggestion in here particularly on the substandard lots. So David is here both representing ARB as well as someone who is very familiar with multi family development in the community. That’s it. Chair Holman: So Board Member Solnick, did you have COlnments you wanted to inake or are you here to answer? I’m smxy, Chair Solnick. Congratulations. Did you want to respond to questions or make statements? Mr. David Solnick. Chair. Architectural Review Board: There were a couple of things that I wanted to comment on if I could. One of them is related to the design review in R-2, which Curtis said would be coming back to yot.l later. Regarding the carports the easier one, the 200 versus 250 was the issue, and I think it comes down to tv,,o inches. At 200 square feet, that is an outside dimension, the car space is actually nine feet, four inches by 19 feet, and that is when you even count the fact that the garage door is inboard of the wall. That is just enough space for a car and nothing else. The 250 provides a dimension that would allow some shelving on one side, only one side, and say water heater or furnace at the end of the carport and a step or two. Generally a garage is very often lower than the dwelling so you need steps. None of those would work in the 200 square feet. I think the effect of using 200 square feet ~vould be kind of like the effect of prohibition which increased drinking, tf you have a car space that is too small people won’t use it and I think the result of that will be that actually instead of minimizing the impact of a car, in this case car storage, it will actually maximizing the impact of the car because the car will come out in fl-ont of the garage or onto the street. At the 250 square foot that difference of the 50 square feet actually I think is very important. The only other comments about the substandard lot issue, as Curtis said there are quite a few of them, a little more than half. I don’t think their importance should be underestimated. They really have been used to do sort of small, low-impact, generally high-density areas Downtown especially. Most of them are Downtown or in the California Avenue area and a few of them are sort of strung along Alma. They are generally being developed now as single-family homes, small single-family homes, two or three per lot. They are relatively low impact, they haven’t been controversial, and they are sort of providing this sort of increased housing in areas where it is minimally impactful. There is public transit and lots of ser~,ices. So I think they are very important assets. They tend to be in areas where they are 50-foot wide lots or most of them are 50 feet wide. The ten-foot wide setback doesn’t work for a lot of reasons that Curtis mentioned. Another one is that they look odd with a ten-foot wide setback because the neighborhood patterns in those areas are actually in the three to five foot wide setback range because they are older, it is generally Downtown. The couple that have been done at the ten-foot setback look kind of like somebody at a party who needs extra personal space. They really sort of set themselves apart and out of the ordinary. Page 7 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 t2 13 14 15 t6 17 18 t9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 The concept of the six foot setback and then the daylight plane up to the ten foot line, the concept there is that you are really confining the area - from zero to ten feet you are making sure that it is only one story and that I think is very important to recognize the importance of that that the two- story can only come past the ten-foot setback line on the side. As Curtis said that helps breakup the massing but also a one-story piece in that portion is pretty low impact. That’s it if you have any questions let me know. Chair Holman: Vice-Chair Lippert has been waiting. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have a couple of questions on both parking and also on the multi-family development. Along the Alma corridor there are a lot of substandard lots, I think we have identified that now for a couple of years that those are substandard in size. How does the rental housing element fit into those lots because they are really not redevelopable as single family lots per se because it really is part of our rental housing stock and if somebody were to go in and redevelop it they are basically evicting maybe three apartment to build something that would be like one unit of housing? Ms. Caporgn~: We have a program in place in the Comprehensive Plan regarding removal of rental housing but if it is on multi-family removal of three or more units that are considered rental housing and so one of those units is considered owner-occupied and the other two are rental and you have to replace them. However, if it is on multi-family parcels we don’t consider that to be the requirement or we don’t require those to be replaced if they don’t meet the current multi-family requirements. We obviously if the property is zoned for rnulti-family use and it is not currently being used for multi-family purposes well then the zoning takes precedence. I’m sorry it is the density requirements. So if the three units on the property were at the requirements or R-1 if they are three single family units on a parcel or two duplexes then we would consider those to be - they don’t meet the RM-15, or 40, or 30 density requirements then we wouldn’t require those to comply with program H-36 which is the program t just mentioned. Mr. Williams: Let me try. If the existing density is greater than what is allowed on the parcel and you reduce it and build what is allowed. So if you are allowed two units only on parcel, on a small lot but y’ou have four rentals there then you could reduce it from four to two because that is conforming. But if four is the allowable maximum density on the parcel then you can’t take those away and build a single family home. This policy essentially says that the only way you could do that is if you rebuild an equivalent amount of rentals or if you add a whole lot of BMR, it is something that pretty much nobody can cornply with. Ms. Caporm~o: There is one other condition. What triggers this is a map. So if you have just put a single family home on the property you could do it but if there were a map involved, a condo map or a parcel map, then that triggers the policy implementation. So then what Curtis just described would take place. The density would have to cont’orm to the zoning district and if it were below that then we would not require replacement of those. If, again, depending upon how many units were there if they didn’t meet the density requirement then we would consider it to be legal nonconforming and you wouldn’t have to comply with H-36. Page 8 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Vice-Chair Lippert: The reason I raise that question is there are substandard lots and the majority of those are maybe studio apartments, I haven’t been in any of those buildings but they might be studio or one-bedroom apartments, they are very tiny. So if you took three units and put them together you get what would be a single-family house. So it doesn’t fall into that housing requirement therefore we could see the fabric of that neighborhood changing along Alma Street very quickly. Mr. Williams: I understand what you are saying but I think that is the situation that exists today. I think what is being done here is going to make it more feasible to rebuild an extra unit or something like that than you could do today because of all these other constraints come together and all you can do today is build a single family home. I think here, xve are not talking about large increases in numbers of units, but we are looking at these smaller lots maybe could have one more unit and maintain that number of units on the lot. Whereas today they couldn’t. Vice-Chair Lippert: Then with regard to the setback and reducing it down to six feet did you look at allowing two parcels owners to get together using the six-foot setback on either side and creating a shared driveway with an easement therefore decreasing that street frontage? It would be similar to what they have on the east coast. Mr. Williams: We didn’t look at that level of detail, no. If it were something that involved more than two homes then they would have to go to ARB and I think as part of the ARB process they could look at that option. If it were just two units then I don’t think we would have the discretion to do that under any of this. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. I’m sorry,. Board Member Solnick: It is actually a different topic but I just realized that it does come under RM and related to design review. Right now there is a hole in the system. The two units are not under any design review either Individual Review or ARB. The ARB has pointed that out too and I think it is good that you guys are addressing that. One thing I thought might be a sensible way to handle that would be to have the ARB handle it if it is a two-family proposal in an RM zone and have the IR handle it if it is a two-family proposal in the R-2 zone. That would be a separate discussion because that is R-2 but the RM part would be tonight’s discussion. The rationale there is that the R-2 zones tend to be in more R-l-like areas, more single-family type neighborhoods. Whereas the RM zones tend to be in a little bit more urban ty-pe areas inixed in with apartments, mixed in sometimes with commercial, they are just more of an urban mix and they are in more urban locations. So that might be a place to draw the line on the two family dwellings. So if that was considered to be a reasonable thing to do tonight would be the time to discuss it because the RM part would be part of this zoning. Chair Holman: Maybe we will want to come back tot hat because we talked about it yesterday in pre-Commission and there was a question of Staff involvement. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: A follow up on that. One of the things we have been talking about is not only what the zoning is but also what the adjacent uses are. So if you wanted in the R-2 zone to have ARB look at it, that is what I think you said, right? Page 9 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 ~7 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Board Member Solnick: I said in the RM zone if it was a two home or two dwelling proposal. There are many RM lots that are only large enough to allow two homes. That would be under ARB. If it were in an R-2 zone it would be an IR. Commissioner Keller: So R-2 would be IR and RM would be ARB. Board Member Solnick: Right. Commissioner Keller: Okay, thanks. Earlier you said that a one cat- garage at 250 square feet would be reasonable and what I am wondering is in a two car garage do we need 500 square feet or is it reasonable to have a smaller number for a two car garage7 Board Member Solnick: It is a good point. It might be splitting hairs. I think you could argue for doing 250 and say 475 if you wanted to get it down to that level I think you could make that argument. It is true that you wouldn’t need a furnace or a hot water heater on both sides of the garage so you are right in that regard. Commissioner Keller: I live in an R-I zone and I have a two car garage that is 440 square feet just as a point of information and there is a water heater in there and a washer and dryer. Board Member Solnick: So maybe it is 250 and 450 or something. Maybe that is where you are headed. Commissioner Keller: That seems to me a little more comfortable. Do you have any comments about that, Curtis? Mr. Williams: No, I think if that’s comfortable for the Commission that is fine. I agree. On the one hand it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily have to double the one space. On the other hand like David said, it is a little bit splitting hairs too to have a different or to have to say in here 250 for one car and 500 for two-car garage or carports. Commissioner Keller: Okay. In terms of my questions, which were numbered one through 17, we have dispensed with question one. I think you accepted questions four through 17 all my suggested comments on there, is that correct? Mr. Williams: Most of them had to do with the parking so i was going to wait until we go to the parking ordinance. Are there any others related to multi-family? Commissioner Keller: I think they mostly have to do with parking. Mr. Williams: Yes, I think they are all parking so we can talk about those when we get to parking. There were I think maybe two of the rest of them that I had a follow up question or comment on when we get to parking. Commissioner Keller: Okay. Page 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: A couple of questions. First let me ask about the Village Residential. The way that you have structured it compels the persons that are participating, presumably purchasing, the units to associate in order to care for the shared portions of the lot, the common drives, etc. That is a conect statement? Mr. Williams: Generally, yes. Commissioner Garber: It focuses on ownership of individual lots with common ownership of internal streets, driveways, and common areas. Mr. Williams" I guess maybe that is a little broad because I don’t think maybe it necessarily has to do that. Although, theoretically t can envision an instance where there are three lots and an easement for a driveway or something like that. Commissioner Garber: Which is the other common way of doing that where you don’t have an association but you have outright ownership but then you have agreements for use of that property. Mr. Williams: Right. So we could be a little more flexible on that language probably. Commissioner Garber: I don’t really have a preference one-way or the other. I am pointing out that there are different ways of doing it and there may be for any number of reasons why an owner would want to do it one way versus the other. The other piece I wanted to get at though is in the first case where you are associating with each other because you have to care for common area I think you have recognized the subtlety in that in that you will have somebody who is going to want to build more than somebody else does there so how do you do that? I suspect that in a case where you have an association or co-op or something of that sort that will become significantly more difficult or problematic to manage on an ongoing basis for those owners than in the case where you have ownership. Let me try that again. It will become more problematic if an individual lot does not have a property unto itself. meaning that it has a speci tic amount of space that can be built within its subdivided portion. The only reason I say that is that I suspect or I wonder- let me ask this as a question. How will the City, manage an argument that occurs between two co-owners one of which is asking for more than the other? It seems to me there needs to be some guidelines around that or else we need to create some sort of characteristic about the sub-lot that guides that inevitable discussion. Mr. Williams: The only two ways that I see to do it are one is that when you submit the original plans that there is something as part of those plans that might allow for build-out on some of those lots to a very small extent beyond the original layout, Page 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 t9 2o 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Garber: I will let you get to the second one but let me just ask you about that concept. What you would then require is for all of the space to be presented in the plan as opposed to allowing there to be less space and any questions about additions, etc., to come later. Mr. Williams: Absolutely. Parts D and E of the Village Residential section where D is design for an entire site which means you come in and you present your entire plan at one time. We are not cutting these lots up and then coming in one at a time for a proposal. We have to know everything that is happening there. It may be that it allows for another 100 square feet on each of these lots to provide some flexibility for the owners to do something down the road. Commissioner Garber: That’s fine. I guess the subtle distinction I want to make is provide for the entire plan doesn’t explicitly call out ’use up all the area that is available.’ Mr. Williams: Right. So now the second part is post-construction modifications and what we have said essentially is that if someone wants to make a change that is outside of those original parameters then they need to either come in as an association if there is an association that represents the property owners or I would see it being probably all of them would have to agree otherwise to make a change and come back to the City for an amendment to do that. So they could not come back individually and be requesting these if there were not some mechanism upfiont to allow them to do that. Commissioner Garber: So the mechanism or the tool that would be used in the case where there is not an association but the individuals it seems to me the City might want to either create or maybe there is some legal tool that is already in place that says here is the agreement that the applicant in this case presents to you and says here is the agreement of the other property owners that I am abutting or are part of this parcel or whatever that allows the City to move fotavard with this without having to get into the morass of who said what to whom when and what agreements were in place. I just am concerned about the management of that activity in an ongoing way. What happens after 30 years and somebody wants to take theirs down and rebuild it? Mr. Williams: Yes, and t think it ends up being almost like a PC that if you want to change something in here you have to come back. tt is not the same process of going to every Board and Commission and Council necessarily but you need to come back with all those changes and it needs to be looked at in total to be sure that the total amount of floor area is not exceeding the total site allowance and total coverage, etc., etc., and that you are not taking something away from another property owner who might want to do something on their property. So you are going to need to have their buy-in. Commissioner Garber: Don’t take my comments the wrong way I an very excited about the concept. All I am concerned about is let’s take the circumstance in _30 years when somebody recognizes that their house needs to be redone and perhaps their other three neighbors also need to be redone but cannot get an a~:eement to redo their house or something of that sort and the property as a whole starts to degrade because one person somehow can’t act individually. Mr. Williams: Would it help to perhaps put something in here that essentially allows Director discretion to allow rebuilding, remodeling, etc. so long as it does not increase any of those magic Page 12 l 2 3 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 numbers as far as the floor are and the lot is the same, setbacks from other properties are the same, etc., etc.? Commissioner Garber: Yes, I think that would be great or something along those lines or something else. Mr. Williams: I understand what you are saying. Commissioner Garber: Great. Mr. Williams: Okay. Commissioner Garber: I have another question but it is oi3. a different topic so I will pass. Chair Holman: Yes, there are several follow up questions to that. Commissioner Tuma and then Commissioner Sandas and then Commissioner Keller all have follow up. Commissioner Tuma: So the .5 FAR is to the pre-subdivided total lot? Mr. Williams: Right. Commissioner Tuma: Have you done any calculations as to what size of units we are likely to wind up with? Mr. Williams: Yes. Comn~issioner Tuma: The concern here is in my view we are sort of- as you know all along I have had a preference for breaking this out and doing it separately m~d kind of giving a full view. I understand why we are doing it this way and I am fine with that. I just want to make sure what we are coming up xvith here is something that is buildable, something that will actually get built if there are the right incentives, and that we are not winding up with specifications that are so restrictive that it is just not going to get built. Chair Holman: Can I suggest something? Since there is a train of thought here do the follow up questions but maybe we should discuss Village Residential separately and the other multi-family. I think it might be a way that we can kind of track our infon~ation better if that is agreeable to the Commission. Go ahead and do these follow ups though. Mr. Williams: Well the answer to your question as far as if someone builds 12 units on an acre or proportionate to whatever the size of the lot is then if they are all the same size then the maximum or maximum average would be about 1,800 to 1,850 square feet not including the garage. So then if we have another 400 or 500 square feet for a two-car garage then you are up to 2,200 or 2,300 square feet including the garage. Now if they did less than 12 units then they could have potentially larger homes. So it depends on that mix but at the 12 units per acre that is what the math plays out to. Page 13 2 3 4 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Tuma: I am sure I could figure this out if I thought through it but I will ask you the question. Does it make any difference whether those are attached or detached in terms of what the size of the units are? I know the lot size is specified as being different but would that impact the size of the unit? I guess it wouldn’t impact the size of the unit would it? Mr. Williams: I wouldn’t theoretically it would probably practically. On a 1,500 square foot lot you could get a 2,300 square foot including garage house but it would be more constrained than doing it on a 2,500 square foot. Commissioner Tuma: And there is no constrain on basements here? Mr. Williams: No, there isn’t. That’s right it is only in R-1 and R-2 that we have no ..... Commissioner Tuma: So we are not intending this to be any different than ...... Mr. Williams It is going by the same rules as the other multi-family for how you count floor area and those types of criteria, parMng requirements and such. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Sandas I believe you were next. Commissioner Sandas: Thanks. Actually, you may have answered my question but I just want to ask it any~vay. In terms of Village Residential some of what I see described in writing and I hear you describe reminds me a lot of condominiuln not that they are attached but the relationship of one owner to another owner and owning common area reminds me a lot of condominium. I just wondering if referring to condominium CC&Rs that describe the rules for remodeling, etc., etc., throughout time and the question is would that be a good way to go or something that we could refer to create rules for Village Residential as far as what Dan was talking about? Mr. Williams: I suspect there is a good likelihood that is exactly what would happen. It is not condominiums in that it is not the building that is owned in some kind of common but the reality I think is that each one of these parcels is probably going to have to have some kind of CC&Rs or some kind of restrictions that lets a future owner know that what is there now is basically what is approved on the site and that if they want to make any changes that they have to come back through a process to do that and then whatever else the homeowners out there would need to have in tenns of maintaining the street, or driveways, or open areas, common open space, etc. So I think it would and we can specify that although it gets back somewhat to Dan’s question about it may be there are some instances where that isn’t necessary. Although it stil! probably would be necessary to have some kind of restriction on the individual lots but it may not be necessary to have a homeowner’s association and it may be just a maintenance agreement for the common driveway that comes in or something like that. Commissioner Sandas: That is why I asked the question. I see a similarity, it is not the same, but it is similar and I think we can draw flom that. Page 14 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 t5 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 DD 34 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Williams: Right and it wouldn’t hurt probably to say something in here about any CC&Rs, maintenance agreements, etc. may be required by the City to assure that proper disclosures are made as well as that we are assured that the maintenance will cany forth throughout time. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Yes, this is a follow up and in some sense some sort of symthesis of what I am hearing people say. One issue is that this sounds to me more like townhouses than condos precisely because in townhouses you own your building and your roof and in condos you own the interior and that is why it seems to be more appropriate to that. I have a couple of suggestions. One is that in the absence of an agreement you might allow for the pro rata share of feasible build out to be allocated to a unit. So if you don’t have an agreement then it is based on your pro rata share. What 1 mean by that is if your unit is smaller than the other units then the amount of extra space you get is proportionate to how much is allowed and how much you have already. So the small units can develop less and the bigger units can develop more. I think that makes more sense. The other thing is I would allow in tenns of that transfer of development rights. So if somebody says that they have a smaller unit or a bigger unit and they don’t want to gro~v and somebody wants to grow let them buy the extra rights from the other neighbors. If you explicitly allow that it seems to be reasonable as long as you give up your share, it is recorded in the deed then that is what is going on. The final thing is that these things are likely to be rather close to each other and therefore they undoubtedly should go through Individual Review for somebody who is going to add-on to their property. So this way there is a process for analyzing that in an appropriate way and understanding the impact of those changes on the neighbors. And finally, it is not only an issue of what is going to happen in 30 years when the property needs to be remodeled or somebody adds on a kid or something like that but also in the event of disasters or fires and things like that. Fires do happen, one of the units will bum down, somebody will want to rebuild it, and somebody will want to rebuild it bigger. So that is the scenario that I think is the most likely scenario in which something would have to happen. Somebody will have to rebuild it, they get insurance money, they do it and they might have to build it bigger or they might want to build it bigger as long as they are at it. Mr. Williams: If I could just respond on that last points. The disaster situation is already covered by our nonconforming chapter of the code. If you have a fire or earthquake or that you are allowed to rebuild to the prior envelope basically of the building. ¯Commissioner Keller: But not bigger, Mr. Williams: But not bigger, right. Then your comment about IR, these will initially have to go through ARB anyway. I would tend to suggest that that would be the appropriate place. If there were substantive changes that ARB would then be the appropriate mechanism as well. Page 15 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2.~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Three or more units anywhere have to go through ARB and if it is just one unit that is changing but it is part of that overall package I would say that ARB would continue to be the appropriate Inecbanism for that. Board Member Solnick: Regarding the discussion of extra square footage available, I am now putting on a developer’s hat. I think it is extremely unlikely that there will be any square footage left to negotiate. It is hard to picture a developer building this many units and leaving some square footage out. So it may not be worth won-ying about. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burr, was yours a follow up to this or a different topic? Is it Village Residential? Commissioner Butt: It is Village Residential. Chair Hohnan: I would like Staff’s input on this and what your preference is. I have also a number of questions that have been long lived for me about Village Residential and the benefits and cons both. I have a feeling that we could spend an awful lot of time on Village Residential and not get anything else done. So I guess I am asking for your guidance. Do you want us to continue along this line or do you want us to go back to the basic multi-family and leave Village Residential to last or maybe until later? Mr. Williams: I think that is probably a good idea. It is probably a good idea to go back to big picture multi-family and try to address that and then maybe focus on Village Residential. Chair Hohnan: Since I am seeing that I am not the only one that has these questions. So, okay. Is that agreeable to Commissioners? Commissioner Lippert, did you have a question? Vice-Chair Lippert: It is on multi-family. Chair Holmai-~: Okay, Vice-Chair Lippert go ahead. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay. Again with regard to the multi-family the parking situation, the 250 square feet versus the 200 square feet. I think Comlnissioner Keller raised a very important point, which is when you get 250 and 250 it begins to add up, and you wind up with salvage that represents a fairly substantial chunk of leftover area. So maybe there is some merit to the 250 for the first parking space and then 200 for every space thereafter. Then again with regard to the n:ulti-family- I lost my train of thought. You are~oolno,.~ to have to come back to me. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Butt: Yes, I have one I think I like some of the changes that have been proposed for the parking in the multi-family. I will be interested in other Commissioners’ comments on that. On page three the fifth bullet has to do with the modest allowance for neighborhood retail and services within large residential complexes and the proposal is a maximum of three percent Page 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 1"7 18 I9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 3O _~1 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 of the total floor area or 2,500 square feet ~vhichever is less among those two options. The example that i am thinking back on is the Sand Hill Road development. Does anyone recall how many hundreds of apartments we had in there? It was multiple hundreds, 450? It was a great disappointment to me that i lost out on a recommendation that there be some small retail and service component to that that would serve both those 450 apartments and the immediately adjacent Oak Creek apartments. All of those, I guess that is a couple thousand residents, have to cross a major thoroughfare to get any service at all. So it is very auto-trip-centric even though they are not very far from a shopping center at Adronico’s. I never see people walking to do their grocery shopping or anything. It was a perfect location in my mind for having a small morn and pop/card and some other minimal services serving 2,000 people. I mean there are some good small services that could have been aggregated there that not only would have drastically reduced car trips but build community. They would be service community gathering spots. So I think this is an important thing for us to try to accomplish in large developments. This says a large development and one of my questions is, pardon me? Mr. Williams: It is more thau 50 units. Currently we have a provision for more than 200 units can have something that is completely imernal to the building. Commissioner Burr: Yes, and in the Comp Plan we retained a provision for encouraging morn and pop stores. A lot of people in the community don’t realize that we zoned them out of existence in a lot of our neighborhoods. Twenty to 30 years ago we had a sprinkling of morn and pops throughout the city and there in the kind of this residentialist movement of the 1970s said oh, that is a terrible thing. Once they are gone everybody wants one nearby and nobody wants one next door. So when you are building that development it is the one opportunity or one of’the few opportunities to put it in because anybody that buys next door to it is buying into that. It certainly could be built into the design of the complex so that it is more integrated in the common area than the private areas. So I just want to say those things in context that we should look and try to make sure that we are doing whatever we can to create and facilitate that kind of minimal retail and service, tt wouldn’t just serve that complex. Just like at the Sand Hill it would have se~wed a very large complex right next door if it were located on kind of the west end of the Sand Hill development. Then it would have served both complexes right there and I think that is probably the case in many of the circumstances where we have nmlti-family development like the developments on East Meadow. if there were some little thing it would serve all those developments on East Meadow. So is 2,500 square feet enough if we wanted to encourage that? That is not a micro store, it is modest, it could accomplish something, but I just want to toss that out. I am struggling with it. Chair Holman: Does Staff want to respond? Mr. Williams: Yes. First of all, we don’t have any problem with more than that. I think we limited it because last discussion we had with the Commission there was concern about not letting this go too high or too much. We said three percent or 2,500 and three percent is about 2,500 when you have 50 units. So if we want to just say the three percent. We also have a limit on the size of any one establishment of 2,500 square feet so maybe that is enough to cover and be sure that we are not getting some big store or something like that that starts to attract more than just the local neighborhood folks. I think we are comfortable with just saying three percent or Page 17 l 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 1t 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 DD 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 two and a half percent or something like that and living with the 2,500 square foot per individual establishment and see where that takes us. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert. Mr. Williams: Excuse me I’m sorry. The other thing I wanted to point out is this is with a conditional use permit. So despite all that we still have review authority to look at an individual request, neighbors would get notice if there seemed to be a problem with it that could surface in the public arena. So there is that extra layer of review associated with it as well. Vice-Chair Lippert: Commissioner Burr I think makes a very good point. A 2,500 square foot footprint would be something about the size of the Parlor building over on Homer Street. So it is viable to have a building there that could have retail purposes. Just adding to that thought might be that the threshold in terms of the size of that might be limited to parking. So you exempt maybe the first 2,000 square feet t’rom having to be parked because you already have a critical mass of people there so you don’t put an additional burden on that. Then over that square footage, of course they would have to begin to provide parking for all the additional square footage. My original question, which I forgot, which was about the Staffreview that Chair Solnick raised with regard to two units on an RM lot coining before ARB. One thought I had is that it might be a minor ARB review and done at Staff level rather than coming before the full Board thereby applying the regulations or standards that ARB uses but not having to go forward before the Board unless somebody appealed it say. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller, you had a follow up I think to Commissioner Burt’s questions. Commissioner Keller: Yes, I am syq-npathetic with what Commissioner Burr said in terms of that because after all we want to promote walkable neighborhoods. So I think that the idea of allowing something more reasonable there makes more sense. A little bit larger based on a larger complex. I am just wondering what would be a good overall limit if you have something of the scale of several hundred units because if 50 units is 2,500 square feet if you have 200 units that would be 10,000 square feet. Is that too much? Is that too little? I am just wondering if figuring out where the cap should be is a wortl~while consideration. You said that there is a convenience grocery store you said excluding liquor stores, does that mean that you are not allowing a convenience grocery store to sell liquor or are just not allowing a store that is primarily a liquor store? Mr. Williams: Primarily a liquor store, that is the way our code defines liquor stores as more than, I am not sure if it is 50 percent or whatever, of the sales is liquor. So convenience stores generally do not fall over that threshold and so stores could theoretically sell liquor but not be a liquor store. Page 18 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1.3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 O- DD 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Keller: So one model like this is if we think about the Driftwood Market. I am not sure how big that is but that market which is part of the motel has some eating, some food, and a couple of other uses there. I don’t know how big that is, i an not a good judge of that, is that something that is reasonable? Chair Hohnan: I would guess it is about 5,000 square feet. Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Butt: Just as I am hearing other Commissioners and thinking more about this. First I always have a hard time merely staying in the abstract I kind of have to look at some examples of what we have going on. One where we had some of this discussion was the Center for Jewish Life and then we have had subsequent discussions on the East Meadow development, we have had a lot of development out in that area, and there is no local serving retail to speak of. I know that Director Emslie had talked about as other development goes on in that area Staff is going to be looking for opportunities to try to find ways to create some local se~dng retail and reduce the auto trips and iinprove the service of a walkable community to those residents. So having said that I am thinking about that area and say we have another application for a 50-unit development. Why would that developer want to sacrifice or even build that retail if it is not a great revenue source? It is valuable to the tenants, it is valuable to the community, but is there adequate incentive? We can all say it is a great outcome but unless there is something that will trigger the developer to either want to or in some way be incentivized or obliged to do it we may not get the outcome that we are seeking. We nmy all agree it is the outcome that we want and it still n-my not happen even though we allow for it. So I am struggling with whether allowing for it will be enough to create the outcome, i am open to suggestions from Commissioners on how we might address that issue. Is this likely to occur? Maybe David would have some thoughts on it but I would like to achieve it rather than just make it allowable. So that is my question. Chair Holman: I would like to jump in here on that because when I am looking at this I think it ought to be a requirement. If you have 50 units that you require a 2,500 square foot minimum, or three percent - same language, but it be a requirement of the development. If Staff can come up with any reason why it shouldn’t be a requirement, if there is any situation where it couldn’t be accommodated please let us know but I would like to see it as a requirement. Then as far as size you said that the Parlor was 2,500 square feet and the City of Paris is 5,000 square feet. You start getting 5,000 square feet you could be a pretty good attraction to people beyond that neighborhood so I am a little nervous about going much bigger than that at least for the 50 unit range. However, I have been pondering whether 50 units is the trigger or maybe, you can split hairs all day and all night and I don’t want to do that but 50 units is a lot of units and I am wondering if it should be 40 or something like that to go along with the 40 units to the acre. I don’t have the answer to that and I don’t want to split hairs but there is a reason you came up with 50 units probably. Coinmissioner Sandas, you had a follow up? Commissioner Sandas: Yes, to ours. Can we identify any sites at the present i-Fioment that, aside from Alma Plaza, which could be developed with 50 units within the boundaries of Palo Alto at this moment? Page 19 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 "9 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 Mr. VVilliams: Yes, it won’t be quite 50 but the Summerhill site for the Elk’s residential portion. In fact adding the single family residential on the Wilkie Way part of it wil! be over 50 units. Commissioner Sandas: Right but that has already been - not submitted yet. Mr. Williams: Not fbrmally. It has a preliminary ARB. They are about to come in a preliminary ARB. The Toll Brothers property is 34 units so it is not quite 50. There are ones 0_70...Classic.that have been through recently like "~’2 . I think there are a lot of potentials for redevelopment. Commissioner Sandas: That is my question. Not projects that are already on deck but ones for which this recommendation would apply. Commissioner Burr: Future Stanford development. Commissioner Sandas: Okay. Mr. Williams: Definitely. Commissioner Sandas: I am asking the question out of curiosity and trying to visualize what we might expect. I am Ftot asking it to say this can’t possibly happen because that is not where lny question is coming from. Mr. Williams: To respond to the question about 50, 50 is somewhat arbitrary but we started with 200 and have come down to 50. So that seemed like a pretty good jump right there. I don’t have a real strong feeling about 40 versus 50 versus 75 kind of thing. Chair Holman: I guess where I was coming from is it is an interesting topic and I absolutely concur. Commissioner Burr and I since we both have been on the Commission since God was a pup it seems like had conversations about neighborhood markets. I agree absolutely with what he said that everybody wants one nearby and nobody wants one next door. The reason I was thinking about fewer units is there are some opportunities for 50 units. I don’t know if40 is a magic number or not. There are some opportunities for 50, some opportunities for 40, but it is more likely that we are going to have more development with fewer units than we are requiring. So you are going to have a fair amount of development in an area of larger or less range in a vicinity with no service as we have on South E1 Camino right now and we aren’t quickly moving towards developing another neighborhood center there. It is in the Comp Plan but we haven’t gone there yet and I don’t think we are about to any time soon. So I guess it is all about the walkability and the greenhouse gas thing and the traffic thing. Mr. Williams: I understand that. I think the dilemma with your suggestion to require it is that it is very site specific. Suppose this is going up next to Ahna Plaza. There is an approval of something at Alma Plaza and this development is going up next door to it so why do you need to have that when you have a shopping center right next door? I can think of a number of other locations where it seems like that really isn’t necessary. It xvould be nice to have a way to decide Page 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 I5 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O _~1 DD 35 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 that maybe it is on some and have some authority to be able to require it but to require it across the board I think would not work in many situations. I also wanted to respond to Commissioner Burt’s question about incentives or comment about incentives. I just wanted to point out that ~ve have indicated in here that we would exclude that floor area from the maximuin floor area limitations on the site. So it is not dinging them and in a way kind of bonus floor area. Also, the same thing essentially with parking with the exception I think we said there had to be a space for each employee that worked there. I certainly a~-ee with Commissioner Lippert’s concern about at such and such a point especially if you get large ones it might be good to put a cap on how much of that is exempted for such and such a point. You do need to park it as well. Chair Holman: So just to follow up ot-i nay own %llow up if I might. You make a good point about if they are next to Alma Plaza why would you require this? But we require other things like if you are within X number of feet from - we could do that here too. MI-. Williams: So like if you are within a certain distance of a neighborhood shopping center or CN or something like that then you don’t have to do it but other-wise you need to do some threshold minimum amount of. Chair Hohnan: That was the thinking. Board Member Solnick: I am totally in agreement about the importance of neighborhood retail and the ARB has very frequently said can we get some here? We have no way to make that happen but we always try. The hazard is let’s say you require it and then it fails and then the next one fails. Say there are three in a sequence that just don’t make it then what? Then it can j ust sit empty. You can’t force a business into this space so it is a little bit of a slippery slope to force retail when it may not be a viable business. The only one that is going to know that is the developer. The cause is the very best one I agree but I am not sure that is the way to get to it. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: What I was going to say is where we are going to get that 2,500 square feet is in that parking space reduction. If you took 50 units and they are going to put in covered parking spaces rather than doing them at 250 square feet per parking space they are going to do it at 200 square feet because it is the economy of parking. So the idea is you take 50 times 50 and you wind up with 2,500 and so now we have taken that and given that square footage and it is exempt from the inaximum allowable FAR. It is basically free space. We are saying we really want you to do this and it is going to be an asset to you to be able to take that space and condominiumize it just like the other residential spaces and sell it off to somebody. Maybe they will rent it or maybe they use it themselves. What ~vould be ideal is if we have the one site which is the Elk’s Club and it is right adjacent to the Hyatt Rickey’s site well a dry cleaners can go in there and everybody can take their dry cleaning there and they don’t have to drive to the dry cleaners. Putting it next to a place like Alma Plaza we required it on that is you could never have enough small retail space because there are services that need this space. We don’t have a copy shop in the Downtown. I forgot about Jungle Copy. But the idea is that even Starbuck’s Page 21 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 builds Starbuc" s across the street fiom each other as long as you have critical mass of people that will use that space. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: A couple of things. First of all I am very s3qnpathetic with the idea of saying if it is within 500 feet of a neighborhood shopping center that might be an exclusion or it might not based on the comments of Vice-Chair Lippert which are very good comments on why you might still want it. I think 40 units is a good threshold from my point of view if you consider the fact that we have had recently two 40-unit developments namely the ones at East Meadow Circle were 45 units approximately. Therefore those are certainly reasonable for placing something like this. You want to make it 35? So maybe we should say 35. The other thing is that what I am wondering is the difference between what is allowed and what is required. Now I wouldn’t make those be exactly the same. So you might say that a certain amount is allowed which is say three percent and you might say something like if there are at least 40 units then something is required, whatever the number of units is then something is required, and then there is a threshold and a ceiling of what is required but you can have up to three percent of that. Othei-wise I could just imagine somebody trying to figure out exactly how many square feet they are going to fit and working real hard to get it within a nanow boundary. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Burt: I think these are good comments and what Comlnissioner Keller just talked about having a minimum required and a maximum allowed seems like a good concept. As I was thinking about where the needs lie I am thinking that if your development is at least a quarter- mile from other neighborhood serving retail services that is when the need becomes greater. Maybe that is the point at which we, you know I am an advocate of this i want to be fair and I want these to be successful, I don’t know whether there is some other mechanism where this can be some kind Director’s discretion and whether Curtis may have some recommendations on language. Two other points. We don’t get much rental apartment development any longer because it just doesn’t pencil xvell enough but when we have rental we have retail services almost invariably and that is the common Laundromat. So we need to make sure that we are looking at are we intending to include that? Is that fair game that that is part of this? Maybe it is and we include it provided perhaps that maybe we need to make sure that if it is a Laundromat that it is available to nonresidents. Often those are residents only. Our concept here is that this is not restricted to residents. Finally I just want to share one other concept on this morn and pop thing. This goes back to when the Planning Commission, ten years ago right before I came on, they were struggling with this issue and they were ready to exclude the morn and pop policy from the Comp Plan not because they disa~-eed with it but because they just didn’t see it as feasible. As a neighborhood representative at the time I made txvo pitches. I think one was the Sand Hill development example which they didn’t include as a development requirement but the other is we do have Page 22 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 ")9 30 31 32 _~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 some other opportunities where we can them in residential neighborhoods and not next door to anyone and that is within our parks. We at Rinconada Park up until about six or eight years ago had a morn and pop. It was a morn and pop that had been there for 40 years or so. I went there as a kid and bought junk food at the pool. When those people finally retired, the owners had run the same thing for 40 years they finally retired, there was no one that came fo~vard apparently as a replacement. It was a little bit on the small side and it got taken over as a storage locker and we lost that. In that neighborhood there has been some infon-nal survey, that neighborhood association asked how would you feel about having some other kind of morn and pop in that area and there was a very positive response, t will just also state that University South when the SOFA plan was getting ready to go through did a neighborhood survey and it was a very comprehensive one. One of the questions was would you want a morn and pop and if so, what would be in it? What we got back was a description of a 1990s morn and pop. Maybe this decade it has even evolved a little bit further. But the morn and pops we have today which don’t necessarily thrive are based on 1950s models they sell candy, and soda pop, and beer, and that kind of stuff. What the neighbors said is what I want to buy there is milk, and a loaf of bread, and a Nev,, Fork Times, and a cappuccino and a deli sandwich. It was a different model. Chair Hohnan: And ifI could to make copies. Commissioner Butt: They want to make copies and a floppy disk, which nobody needs anymore. Yes, they wanted a roll of fax paper i think it was at the time and floppies. What it pointed to is that one of the reasons that we don’t have them is because ...... so for the small, almost micro business owners there is no mechanism to facilitate them getting started. Then there is not a business model. So if we really think that they are an important community service then our Economic Development Departinent might want to really look at what are some rnodels and how do we help some of these folks. There are people in this community, our neighboring communities, who are coming out of some training programs who would love an opportunity to have a real morn and pop. Then we look at what services are needed. How can help identify \vhat aggregation ofse~wices might fit in a 1,500 square foot building that would provide a whole variety of services for the 500 people who live nearby? It might be a viable business model. Whereas if we just let them fend on their own and let the developer come up with it they are not going to be creative and we will end up with failed efforts that we maybe mandated in and they didn’t work. So I think that there needs to be, we talked about incentives, I think there is another component to success here and that is to bring in guidance on what would help define the need and help facilitate success. That is not a mandated kind of thing that is a facilitated assistance from our Econolnic Development Deparlment that is now part of the Planning Department. We have a maniage there, they have been restructured and maybe that is a way that we can provide assistance to make this happen not just ordering developers to make it happen. Chair Holman: Follow up to this? Commissioner Keller: Yes. It seems to me that Commissioner Burt’s comment about what should go there is actually very important. I think that there are two important factors we need to think about and the developer has control over whether the retail will be feasible. One of those is the positioning of that space, where that space is within the property, its accessibility to the outside, the nature of its signage, and things like that are certainly important factors. Another Page 23 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1I 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_, 44 45 important factor is the rental rate. Rental rates can make properties feasible or infeasible. On the other hand I do understand the idea of some properties having if you will, bad feng shui. For example there is a restaurant that is on I think California and Park, Palo Alto Central, it is a restaurant du jour because every so often I find a new restaurant located there. There must be something wrong about that space that makes it hard to put a restaurant. Commissioner Butt: IfI might add it is what you mentioned before. Actually when we had a zoning issue on that the problem is it is not as you just mentioned at the front. The location within that development is poor for retail. So that point you were making before is exactly what the problem is at California Central. It is recessed back in that courtyard and that is why they have always said it fails. So the point I think you were making before I think is very important. it is one thing for us to say, they must have a certain amount of space but somehow we should include somettaing where Staff is reviewing that space and it is a good space for success. Chair Holman: Two things. One is really quickly I wanted to respond to Chair Solnick’s comment. It is true and you have heard Commissioners comment about the importance of the success and some ways to maybe achieve that. The other thing is, I won’t go on about this but I had a conversation with somebody recently about this or that that once it goes away whoever would have supposed back when they were ripping up train tracks and trolley tracks that we would ever need them again? So whoever would have guessed that when we were tearing down the neighborhood markets that they really were the thing that had always worked and always will work maybe with some gaps but if you eliminate them they are just gone. So I guess nay preference is to include them because if we don’t we sure as heck won’t get them. And some might fail and that is just the way it is. Commissioners, do we have enough that we can - i hate to piecemeal this but also there have been a lot of comments about this - do we have enough information that we have talked about to make some kind of a motion about the retail portion of this? And then I think we should take a break and look at how we are going to accomplish all we have to do tonight. We have already split out Village Residential. Yes, Coinmissioner Garber. Conamissioner Garber: This is a question because I am not sure if it is or if it is for someplace else. It has to do with single family homes that are in the RM districts and how... Chair Holman: If i might. Rather than broaching another topic .... Commissioner Garber: I just don’t know if it is a part of this. Chair Holman: Does it have to do with the retail service commercial aspect of multi-family? Commissioner Garber: No. Chair Holman: Okay, is yours about that? Okay,, Commissioiaer Tuma. Page 24 1 2 3 4 5 6 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Tuma: The question would be if there is a requirement for a minimum amount would there still be a CUP required? Mr. Williams: Probably not. I guess there could be but .... Commissioner Tuma: I am just thinking about things that tend to disincentivize developers. If there is a relatively small amount and it is something that we want thein to do and this is on the required not the maximum, I don’t know how you divide this, but when we take away the CUP requirement so that it is not an additional bahlet to getting that done to me that makes sense. Mr. Williams: If you are requiring it is sort of antithetical to then ask for a CUP for them to ask to do it when you have already told them they need to do. Commissioner Tuma: Right. So I think somehoxv we need, if we are going to have a requirement but then a ceiling, somehow we need to say in one circumstance you are required and the other there isn’t. So 1 think we need to differentiate that. Mr. Williams: My comment was going to be, if you don’t inind my making it, is this a great discussion but if we are going to get through the Zoning Ordinance Update we can’t keep having this level of discussion on it. Frankly, things like this were what we were thinking of not bringing back to you and Village Residential is another example and that is why it wasn’t kind of on the table. We know, and rightly so, that they deserve a lot of discussion and so I guess I am sort of- I don’t have a big problem with coming back one more time to you on these items Village Residential, Parking and this and maybe getting your issues out there. I have heard enough on the retail thing. We could come back with a recornmendation. I have probably heard enough on the Village Residential we could come back but there are other issues too that you get out there and we could come back on. I would sure hate to get through this evening without getting to everything that is on your agenda so that we could come back in one package to you with some thing for recommendation sometime soon. Chair Hohnan: Let me ask you this, would that include Village Residential because I anticipate that there are going to be comments about that and we are not going to get necessarily to that and through the rest of the multi-family. It is possible but I am not sure. Commissioner Burr: I promise not to say anything more tonight on the morn and pops. Mr. Williams: it includes Village Residential if you can do Village Residential and Parking tonight. Give us your direction, have some discussion around those, and we can try to get a sense of that and come back to you like we did on the other chapters before and hopefully s~thesize a solution. Chair Holman: I don’t kllow if we have all the comments on the table about multi-family development standards or not. Mr. Williams: I don’t know that we do either. Page 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 93 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: We don’t. Mr. Williams: That is what I am anticipating. You focused on one section of multi-family and on the Village Residential so far and there are others as well. Chair Holman: Thank you for your patience, as they have been in the past and they continue to be important items. Mr. Williams: They are and I don’t disagree at all. It was our dilemma in sort of how much to pack in here and bring to you. Chair Holman: Okay, so it is nine o’clock. Why don’t we take about an eight-minute break? You have plenty to come back on the retail/commercial? Mr. Williams: Yes. Chair Holman: Okay. Thank you. Let’s take an eight-minute break. Commissioners, so if we cam be controlling of our enthusiasm for all these different topics we talked about before. I think the when we werejust about to leave Commissioner Garber you had a question about sometMng else single falnily or multi-family I think is where you were going. Also, again about rustling papers.just a reminder I think you guys have been terrific about that and also if you would wait until you are recognized so we don’t have Commissioners talking over each other because that really makes transcription difficult. So if we can honor that. I know it is hard in this room but please do that. Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: My question is also a perhaps a detail but maybe I just missed it someplace. Single-family homes in RM zones, garages for them, are the garages then calculated as though they were an R-1 ? So there is no incentive for someone to look to build a residential home inside an RM because they get to build essentially the extra 400 or 500 square feet? Mr, Williams: They are required to use the R-1 regulations. Commissioner Garber: Thank you. Chair Holman: Next? Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: Once again I am trying to visualize the circumstances. Are we just on the multi-taamily? Chair Hohnan: Yes, not Village Residential and not Parking. Commissioner Butt: Let me wait a minute and see if I want to reflame my question. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller. Page 26 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 Commissioner Keller: In a follow up to Commissioner Garber’s comments or question actually. What I am wondering is what do you mean by a single-family residential development in RM zone? For example if you build detached housing how is that distinguished from single family residential? Mr. Williams: Unless it is rezoned to R-1 then it is still all one lot with however many units on it and it is considered multi-family. So it is not divided into separate land parcels so if there are three or more units on it then it is considered multi-family. Board Member Solnick: If the proposed development is only one dwelling unit it comes under R-1 period. Commissioner Keller: Suppose somebody develops a bunch of dispersed individual things, detached dwelling units, and they are disbursed in some way. If they are basically townhouse... Board Member Solnick: It doesn’t matter what they are. Commissioner Keller: But if they are on separate lots and they are single family residences, that is what i am trying to understand the distinction because essentially you could build what you want and if the only difference is exactly how the lots are aligned then I am having trouble understanding what the distinction is. Board Member Solnick: You are talking about a subdivision it sounds like. I will let Curtis answer that. Mr. Williams: That is what I am coming back to, unless you subdivide them so that each one of them is on its own individual lot they are multi-family. Commissioner Keller: And if you create a townhouse development in which townhouses - don’t townhouses individual lots of some sort? They are only one lot but - what do townhouses have? Mr. Williams: Townhouses can have individual lots if they are allowed to do that and they can’t under our code because a lot has to be at least 8,500 square feet and that’s too big for a townhouse. So they can be condominiums but we don’t consider condominiums as dividing a lot from a subdivision standpoint into individual lots and that is what the Village Residential distinction is here that it would allow that kind of thing. Townhomes in many case, you are right, are. I mean they are basically even attached you have a lot line that goes some distance to the fl-ont of the unit and some distance to the back of it perhaps, and it may be common zero lot line with the neighboring townhouse there or it may be a detached configuration. But yes, many times they are. They also can be done in a condominium way and that is what you are seeing now under some of the projects that have come through is sometimes detached, sometimes attached town home appearing units but they are condos and they aren’t on separate lots. So that is the distinction we make. Page 27 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 t4 15 t6 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 _~7 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Keller: So we have things that look like town homes but they are technically considered condos. Mr, Williams: Right. Commissioner Keller: We don’t have anything that we used to technically consider townhouses in the sense that they are on their own lots and all of that? Mr. Williams: Well, I guess that gets into semantics about town homes. That is not necessarily the definition of town home is that it is on its own separate lot. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert had a follow up to that and I think Commissioner Burr and Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: A townhouse is a type of structure. A condominium is a form of ownership and that is the distinction. So you can have a townhouse that is a condominium because a condominium is a tyqoe of ownership. So the difference is the type of structure versus the type of ownership. Chair Holman: Well stated. Commissioner Keller: The thing that is interesting to me about that is what I understand is a condo is a type of ownership in which you own the interior space and a townhouse is a structure that you own the building and the things ..... Chair Hohnan: I understand fl~at that isn’t always the case. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: Again regarding single family on multi-family parcels. If you were to have a single-family house on that and they wanted to build an in-law suit that would actually technically be considered two units. How would the development standards apply? Mr. Williams: Today under the standards it would become two dwelling units on a multi-family lot and would be subject to the multi-family regulations as opposed to an R-1 zone where it would become subject to the second unit regulations. So the second dwelling you are talking about isn’t liinited to 900 square feet or any of those things. It is packaged inside the multi- family regulations. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay, the upside of it is that they could build the second dwelling unit larger than the 900 square feet. The downside of it is that they would have to comply with the other setback regulations. Can we just simply say that if you limit the second dwelling unit to 900 square feet that you could still apply R-1 regulations? Mr. Williams: I don’t know. You could say that but that hasn’t been an issue for us. So I don’t know why we would need to go. Page 28 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Vice-Chair Lippert: I am just trying to think of where it might become problematic. So the idea is that if you stay within what would be considered for a single-family residence, which would be the 900 square foot limitation, thel~ everything in terms of the setbacks and everything are all. Mr. Williams: We could say that, yes. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay, great. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: I think I figured out how to flame my issue/question. Taking a step back on kind of one of the oveniding objectives of the ZOU is to create zones that reflected the Comprehensive Plan and in doing so creating things like mixed use and others so that we wouldn’t be having a whole bunch of sma!l PC because we hadn’t created zones that reflect what we wanted to build out in the community. So last week is a good example. We had a project coming before us as a PC and what I am trying to think through is if that were not a PC how would it fit in our codes? We had really two aspects of it. We had a vertical mixed use on about one-quarter of the land and about three- quarters of it, the three-quarters that I wanted to ask about in this context is we had I think 39 single family homes on about 1,850 square foot lots. It was stated early on that the plan was to split that after the PC and then my understanding was each of those would be sold off as individual parcels and homes. Is that correct, and if so, how would that proposal fit within our different zones here in multi-family? How would we take that if it weren’t a PC? Mr. Williams: There are a couple of different ways to probably take it. One is, and I am still not sure whether they were proposing condos or fee lots on those, they were going PC so they were proposing to make those fee lots, separate parcels for each one. So that is something that under a mixed use scenario if it were zoned CN for instance and they were just doing the residential as part of mixed use they couldn’t do because you would go back to sort of an RM type of situation and couldn’t breakup the lots like that. You could still have them physically where they are but again it gets back to the ownership situation would be different. It would be condos or rentals. If you look at it in terms of they are selling off, it is not an integrated development that they are selling off residential and that, then probably the most logical way to look at that is that you have part of it that is commercial and part of it that should be zoned residential. Commissioner Burr: So if it were multi-family and they were that size lot and the housing sizes that were proposed which I tMnk was an FAR of about 1.4 on substandard lot single family residential how would that fit within our proposed zoning? Mr. Williams: There is no zoning category right now that fits that. Commissioner Butt: What is the closest that we have? Mr. Williams: The closest that we have is multi-family but it doesn’t allow cutting up the lots. Page 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Hohnan: DHS. Mr. Williams: DHS probably is pretty close in SOFA. Commissioner Burt: And DHS is what FAR’? Mr. Williams: I don’t recall. I had a sheet on that. i think the minimum lot size is 1,800 square feet. Chair Holman: I could be wrong but memory tells me that the lots are either 2,750 or 2,800 square feet and some of them are 3,500 square feet. I can’t swear to this but I think its right. And the FAR was .5 maybe and then to .7 if brought in a granny unit, something like that. Commissioner Butt: Okay. So this is something two to three times density of anything we have in zoning. Mr. Williams: Yes, and it is somewhat analogous to what we are talking about with Village Residential in that for those lots that were proposed they would have to be 2,500 square foot minimum to accommodate what they were proposing not 1,800. Commissioner Burr: Okay. Chair Holman: There were problems with the DHS zoning too. No one has a hand in the air. I have a couple of things. One is that Policy H-29 or is it H-36? Ms. Caporgno_: I’m SOiTy H-36 is the BMR program and i was just talking with somebody about it today and it is H-29. Chair Hohnan: So H-29, I am curious as to the interpretation that Staffdescribed earlier and here is why I am concerned about it and also not sure where that interpretation comes from or what the genesis of it is. Not to challenge you but just as the question. The reason is because in the multi-family zones and actually fl-ankly in single family zones, the R-I, we have situations where and Commissioner Lippert sort of touched on this earlier, there are situations in the Downtown North where you could have a single family type physical development but it could have four units in it. So it could be one owner-occupied and three rentals. What I am understanding is if the lot is of such a size that it is nonconforming we could actually end up with fewer units because nothing protects those units given the interpretation of the H-29 that is pertinent to how to implement it. Ms. Caporgno: There is a policy in the Comprehensive Plan that talks about preservation of multi-family units. I think actually it is Policy H-29 too and Program H-29 there are two programs that are implementing that policy. One is the condo conversion ordinance and then kind of the corollary is this Program H-29, which talks about preservation of units that are going to be removed. So it is for multi-family properties and when you are going to subdivide a property then H-29 protects those rental properties. Rental property is considered an3¢hing over Page 30 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 39 4O 41 42 43 44 the first unit. So the first unit is considered owner-occupied and it is triggered by three or more units. So if you have one or two units on a property then H-29 doesn’t come into play but if you have three or more then H-29 is triggered but it has to be on a multi-family property that is zoned for multi-family uses so KM-15 or above. Then it has to meet the density requirement too. So if you had a parcel that was zoned RM-15 but it had units for RM-40 let’s say and it is a legal nonconfom~ing use we wouldn’t penalize the developer if they came in and they wanted to redevelop it at the RAM-15 density we wouldn’t say you had to provide rental units to meet that existing RM-40 zoning density. Chair Hohnan: So the question is, why? We talk so much in this community about not having enough housing and if we have housing that is albeit nonconfonning in terms of density it has been there for a good while, it works, it is already integrated into the community, why would we allow those units to go away? Ms. Capor~no: I guess the question and we should rezone it. If we want that density on the property then we should rezone those properties to that density. There was some decision made that if you come in to develop your property, look at your zoning, and it is RM-! 5 but the density is RM-40 we are penalizing a property owner for complying with the existing zoning if we say you have to provide all of these additional units. Mr. Williams: I know we have had some discussion with the City Attorney and I don’t think we feel that it is legal for us to tell someone they can’t build to the maximuln allowable confomdng density on their property and by the same token I don’t think it is legal for us to permit somebody to build more than that. If they have more than that now and they tear it down because it is obsolete then we can’t say fine, we will let you build more units than what you are allowed on your site. That would require rezoning to do that. We can say for instance if the site allows five units on it and there are ten currently on it I think we could say that you have to build to the five, you have to build to the maximum, you have to get as close as you cm~ under that con forming zoning to what was there before. Chair Hohnan: Where is that stated? Mr. Williams: I think that is what we are saying here is that you can reduce it but you can only reduce it to the minimal extent that you still are preserving as many rental units as are pemaitted legally on the property. We can’t tell you you have to rebuild more than you are legally allowed to build on a property. That is violating the zoning to do that. Chair Hohnan: Just for clarification for me, why is one unit considered owner-occupied because that is certainly not always the case? Ms, Caporgno: It actually says that in the Comprehensive Plan. Chair Hohnan: I didn’t remember that, I’m sorry. Page 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Ms. Caporgno: It is actually stated in the Con-~prehensive Plan and we have the definition of multi-fainily is three or more so that is v,,hy when three or more units are on the property that is why that is triggered too. Chair Holman: There is surely a religious basis in that where three or more are gathered together, right? There was one more question. About the City Attorney’s recommendation that you can’t require an owner to retain more than what the zoning allows. I can see that that would be a zoning conformance but we also, they are not the sarne thing but it is a "property rights" thing, we have the condominium law too. The state has one so that you can’t convert rentals to condominiums. They are not the same thing but they are akin for me in trying to retain existing housing units. Are they so different that there could be no relationship about trying to retain the rental units? Mr. Williams: I don’t want to put Melissa too much on the spot because Don Larkin is the one we had this discussion with. Chair Holman: i guess in one way we are allowing the loss of rental units through demolition and having the property owner have the right to conform to existing zoning but on the other hand we are not allowing the property owner to convert to condominiums and thus retain the rental units. Like I say they are akin but not the same thing. Either one is a property rights issue. Ms, Melissa Tronquet: Deputy Assistant City Attorney: Right. I am not sure that I fully understand your question but .... Chair Holman: It just goes to loss of rental units or housing units in general. Ms, Tronctuet: Well, I think for the loss of rental units that sort of gets back to Julie’s point that if they are in a zone and they are proposing to build and sort of reduce their number of rental units to the maximum number allowed in that area then that gets back to the question of why didn’t we rezone that property to make it ten units instead of five? That was the City’s decision. The condo conversion ordinance only applies for conversion of three or four units an3avay so we do have a threshold for that, Three or more? Three or more, so we do have a threshold for that as well. Chair Hohnan: To answer the question, maybe, about why not rezone the property then is because a lot of the neighborhoods, Downtown North is the classic example, is the neighborhoods are so diverse that it is impossible to zone to a nonn that satisfies what is on the ground because the neighborhoods are so diverse. I think Commissioner Keller had a question and then I think Commissioner Lippert. Commissioner Keller: Follow up to what Chair Holman said there is another reason for not rezoning and that is rezoning not only affects number of units but also affects the maximum FAR. If one of the reasons that could happen here is you could have a lot of units and they are relatively small. If you rezone it and the building is tom down you make the new building the same number of units but they will be much larger and that also affects the diversity of the Page 32 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 housing stock. So one thing you might consider thinking about at some point is the idea that there is some sort - you have the notion of a legal nonconforming use and that says what stays there can stay. I assume it also means that if it gets burnt down in a fire you can build the same exact thing without changing one inch of footprint. In some sense what you might say is think about the idea that you can retain the right for that number of units or that number of square feet to be reconfigured in some ways but you can’t exceed that. That is one thing, in other words, that is grandfathered in but maybe a little bit more than grandfathered in than just the existing structure or the exact existing footprint. Mr. Williams: Yes, I think there are ways to do that in our nonconfom~ing provisions or something like that. I just want to say I know Chair Holman has had this concern for a long time and it is a very valid concern. We have talked before about we need to come back but it is not going to happen during the ZOU to address that and come back with a policy, how H-29 should be implemented, what components of that could go into an ordinance format and what components should remain policy oriented. So we are aware of that I just don’t think that it is going to get addressed in this multi-family chapter. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: Sort of a follow up to that we have all sorts of transferable offsite rights. Why couldn’t we simply apply sornething like that to multi-family development in which a person could come in and redevelop a nonconforming lot and just take that number and say apply it to a new housing development that might be going up and saying well, we are going to buy into this housing development and part of that might become rental housing to make up for the deficit that you are losing on that site? We do that with parking. We have offsite parking agreements. We also have the idea of transferable development rights. With transferable development rights what we do is incentivize people to redevelop or work with their property and be able to apply that bonus FAR to m~other site. In this case what we are saying is you have a obligation to provide this rental housing but it doesn’t need to be on this site thereby making that much more appealing for redevelopment. Mr. Williams: I don’t disagree with that at all but there are a lot of complications to it. The receiver sites, the neighbors around there aren’t any, happier than the ones that are being rezoned next to. So it is certainly possible to come up with something like that but it is complex and takes a lot of time to do that. Chair Holman: I have one more question. Can you clarify for me or confirm for me that if let’s say there are four units on a parcel and what code allows us to, just as an example, are you required then to build two or could you develop a single family? Ms. Caporgno: Actually you could develop a single family any time because you are not subdividing or there is not a subdivision involved. In this particular case you are not required to provide two because it doesn’t meet the three threshold. Remember the threshold is three for this program to be triggered. Page 33 6 7 8 9 10 tl 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 3O 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Yes. It seems to me like that might be an easy thing that we could incorporate into this code as we go forward if Commissioners were interested in that such that if you are eliminating more units than what the zoning allows that you are required to provide the maximum units that the code allows. That seems like it would be an easy thing to do here. Am I wrong? It at least minimizes the number of housing units that we are losing in those cases. Mr. Williams: I think it probably would I am not sure that that isn’t better to be in nonconfonning but it could be here. Ms. Caporgno: We may want to wait until we do the Comprehensive Plan Update because the Comprehensive Plan program states three or more. So if you are changing the zoning to say we are going to require if it is let’s say two then it really doesn’t comply with - it exceed what the requirement is in the Comprehensive Plan. So it is kind of one of those things you might want to wait, the Council might want to wait to discuss this through that process. Mr. Williams: l am willing to go back and look at that and see if we can bring that back to you, what you have said. We will talk about it and then see because there is some nonconforming section at the end of this chapter. So it may be that we can fit something like that in there. Chair Holman: The reason I would like if we could to do it sooner, and I don’t hear any objections but I don’t hear support from Commissioners either but no one is objecting, the reason is because bigger units sell for more money and it is more profitable. So if you teardown four and build two you stand to make a very good profit and when the zoning allows, those aren’t good numbers for an example. If you teardown three and one is presumed to be owner-occupied and build two and three are allowed on the property you get the drift. Mr. Williams: Yes and I think that is consistent with the Comp Plan intent. Chair Holman: Yes. So okay. Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: Just in response to your question to the Commission I am in complete agreement to try and find ways to maximize the housing that is developed in these zones. I am a little concerned about prescribing that every landowner produce the exact amount that can be produced. Chair Holman: Only where they are eliminating, I am only talking about where they are eliminating, Commissioner Garber: Okay. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I think that where you are doing new development that there is not housing there I would agree with Commissioner Garber that the current zoning regulations for that or whatever we are proposing makes sense that we are not changing that. So that is okay. Where you currently have housing and you are the developer is proposing something that has Page 34 1 2 6 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 30 31 32 _~4 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 fewer units than there are now then it makes sense to me to have the greater of the number of units currently there or the current number of units allowed. The minimum should be the lesser of those two, the lesser of the number of units currently there or the number of units that you could build and that would be a reasonable requirement from nay perspective. Mr. Williams: Got it. Ms, Caporgno: One of the major components of this project and a policy that the program is derived from is the removal of rental housing. So what Commissioner Keller was getting at is often times developers could come back and build the same number of units on the property but they just may not be rental units. So they could be like a condominium project. So if there would be some clarification as to are you talking about rental units or are you just talking about provision of units period2 If it was allowed by the zoning the number of units is probably not that hard to achieve. It is the fact that they are rental projects. As Commissioner Butt pointed out earlier we are getting very Few if any rental projects. So the rental units in Palo Alto are the ones that are pretty vulnerable. Chair Holman: That is frankly why I want to discourage as best we can through this zoning process to disincent the demolition because then we get more for sale and less rental. Commissioner Keller: That brings up the question certainly the number of units should not decrease to less than you could build. The issue is that - my understanding is that from what Melissa said, that you could limit the conversion of existing structures to condominiums. Can you limit the replacement of existing structures when they are torn down to the replacement structures to be condominiums if the prior structures were rental housing? ts that allowed or is that not allowed? Ms. Tronquet: We have an ordinance that limits conversion from rental to condominium, So what we are really talking about right now is whether and the extent to which we would want to limit construction when we are talking about tearing down a project. That is something I don’t think Curtis has looked at yet. I think that we will do that in response to the discussion tonight. Commissioner Keller: So that wouldn’t go in this ordinance I assume it would go in the conversion ordinance oi" where would that go? Ms. Tronquet: I am trying to figure out where it would fit. Chair Holman: When you come back to us wtay don’t you bring that? Commissioner Lippert and then Commissioner Butt. Was yours follow up? Okay. Vice-Chair Lippert: I am having a hard time getting nay hands around the three units. If it is four units and if an owner occupies one of those units it is still considered three units, correct? Ms. Caporgno: The three units triggers the program. One of those units is considered owner- occupies so you would have to provide two rental units. If you have to provide units, if the three threshold is met then you are obligated to provide two rental units if you redevelop the site. Page 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay. What I am thinking of is in Downtown North and Chair Solnick is probably aware of this is that there are a number of parcels which are maybe 50 by 100 which is a standard size lot in Downtown North and on it is a double duplex, two apartments one right on top of the each other and then there is a little parking garage which is just four cars that are covered and then there are tandem spaces in front of that so you have eight parking spaces. You have parking but there is very little else on that lot. It is all built out ahnost to the lot line. In something like that if somebody decided they wanted to redevelop that site they could just demo the four units and redevelop it as an R-1 lot and just put on house on it, conect? Chair Hoh-nan: That is what we are talking about. Vice-Chair Lippert: That is exactly right and that is what made it affordable to me coming to Palo Alto _.~ years ago. I couldn’t buy a house here then. I bad to get established. I rented an apartment like that for a ridiculous sum of like $700.00. Ms. Caporgno: If there were ten units on the property and a subdivision didn’t trigger this then somebody could go in and build a single family. The program doesn’t apply unless there is a map involved, a condo map or a parcel map of some sort. So somebody is going to subdivide the property either with condos or single-family units somehow then that triggers the program. And it has to be again the second trigger is there have to be existing on the parcel three or more units. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt, Commissioner Butt: Does the Staffhave a list of prospective issues that they are accumulating to be addressed in the Conlp Plan Update? Ms. Caporgno: Yes we do and this is one of them. Commissioner Burr: Okay. So the other part of it that we are dancing around here is that if i understand it correctly we have an ordinance that prohibits conversion of rental units to condos but if there is a dernolition that occurs then there is no such restriction. Is that conect? Ms. Caporgno: Unless as I said, there is a map involved and well it is the same thing with a condo conversion o f three or more units because the condo conversion has that same threshold of if it is three or more units. Mr. Williams: So as soon as you come back you couldn’t just knock them down and come back with condos then if it is three or more. Commissioner Burr: Okay. Mr. Williams: Kit is two then that’s different. Commissioner Burt: If it is three or rnore then they can’t knock down the rental units and come back with condos. Page 36 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 D~ 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Williams: Right. Commissioner Butt: Okay. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Cominissioner Tuma: But they could knock down and come back and just build it and sell it as tenants in common because it would not trigger a map. Ms. Caporgno: If it doesn’t trigger a map then yes they could. Commissioner Tuma: So they could effectively do that. Ms. Caporvno: Yes. Commissioner Butt: I am glad Commissioner Tuma brought it up because it seems like it is a loophole in our regulations that would cause a smart developer to be incentivized to come and demolish our rental units, Board Member Solnick: This has been discussed. One thing you should realize - it would have been done more frequently if they could. It is very difficult to fund multiple tenants in common. If you were a bank, you have one loan. Let’s say it is three, not only do you have to have to have one creditworthy borrower now you have to have three. That has happened in New York that is what co-ops are, It has happened a little bit in San Francisco. tt hasn’t happened in the suburbs and that is the reason. The banks inhibit it and for pretty good reason because it is increasing their risk substantially. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I would just add to that from some of the dealings I have had it is on its way. It is going to happen. It is happening more and more. There are a lot more instruments out there to do that so I would venture to say that it is happening more and more I think it will begin to happen here. Commissioner Butt: So ifI might request as we put this on the Comp Plan list can we get some follow up on this trend because we tend to react to what has already happened and it is harder to anticipate but we may have the ingredients here to be able to anticipate something that is very important. A lot of times something happens to us for two years and though we never want it nor expect it before we start getting around to identifying the problem and figuring out a fix. I think that we bare here identified a prospective problem on the horizon and it would be great if we could be proactive. Chair Holman: Agreed. So I had two other points and I don’t think they are going to take as long as this one. This one is a really important one and it is certainly one I am very passionate about. The garages when it comes to multi-fainily. I just realized that maybe I misread this too. Page 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 46 Setbacks for garages if you have a map that is involved or not garages cannot be abutting one another, can they? Let me put it this xvay .... Mr. Williams: You mean on the next lot over? Chair Holman: Yes. Mr. Williams: No. Chair Holman: Okay,, question as to why? The reason I ask is because in College Terrace in particular ...... Board Member Solnick: If it is an accessory structure and it is more than 75 feet back and it doesn’t have any openings on the side and meets it daylight plane and there are all these different things, then it can go to the lot line, yes. Chair Hohnan: Yes. Board Member Solnick: That does happen. Chair Holman: Okay, that is a little bit different situation than what I was thinking of. I am familiar with that. I was thinking about if you had two parcels it isn’t going to create a map, it would create a map but it would just go to Staff level. I guess the question is -- I can draw it so much easier than try to explain it. If you have two parcels that are a subdivision or a condo map that happens and you have two parcels then, can the garages on those parcels abut each other? The example I am thinking of is like several in College Terrace, some in Downtown North where two parcels the garages abut and what happens in that situation is that you have no open space. I know you can build firewalls between them but is that something that would be discourage, okay, or we just haven’t thought of it, should be discouraged like it is now? Board Member Solnick: If it is a property line it is different than if it is a condo separation line. If it is a condo separation line there are no setback requirements. If it is a parcel line then the usual setbacks apply. The accessory buildings have these separate sets of rules. I am not sure you are distinguishing between the two. A condo subdivision those subdivisions do not create setbacks. Chair Holman: If’it is lots though. Board Member Solnick: If it is fee lots they do. Chair Holman: There are the setbacks. Is that a good thing or a bad thing in your perspective that they have those setbacks? Wouldn’t it create more house or would we actually create more open space? Board Member Solnick: You are basically asking a sort of zero lot line kind of question. Page 38 1 2 3 4 5 6 ? 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 t9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 _~9 40 4t 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Just for garages. Board Member Solnick: Just for garages. I think that is a very good idea. You can already do that with accessory buildings if you are in the back half of the lot but it might be a good idea to be able to do it. Chair Hohnan: So maybe you can take a look .... Board Member Solnick: At the front and the back of the lot and maybe only on one side. Chair Hohnan: Yes, one side. So is that something you would have tiine to take a look at or do you think it is just getting into too much other stuff? Mr. Williams: We will look at it and see but I just think it is a little bit astray. Chair Holman: The purpose of it is to get more open space. Mr. Williams: I understand. I think it would be more likely to be a usefu! thing where it is an accessory structure like David is saying. It is back towards the back and then the next lot over has the same situation and they are adjacent to each other like that and create more open space. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Burr: Maybe this is something that once again rolls into the future but as long as we are on the subject and we had discussed it a little bit in R-1 with a different Planning Commission. The pattern in my neighborhood we have R-1 and then we have substandard lots, and alleys, and there are a lot of accessory structures with vi~lually no setback from the alley and no setback from the neighbors, these are garages. It is the traditional pattern and there is nothing wrong with it and yet we don’t allow it today. I would sure like to see us revisit those things. I think they actually add to the character of the neighborhood and we prohibit it. So the way we have it is that today we make this somewhat unusable setback where your garage can’t be your fence. My neighbor’s garage is fence with me and I don’t care. Instead today he would have to have a six-foot setback and what does he do with those six feet? It is just dead space. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: i am in agreement with Chair Holman and Commissioner Burr. Just to add to that whole idea of shared driveways if we are looking at multi-family and allowing for that reduced side yard setback it makes sense to take two neighbor’s six foot side yard setbacks, it is wide enough for a shared driveway and allow for some sort of an easement there and then again it would branch off into two separate garages that maybe are shared on a property line. Thereby allowing for a little bit more open space. Chair Hohnan: The last question I have and you can respond to this later but I want to get the question on the record. This is a clarification of the revision that was provided for revising Table 2 having to do with daylight planes, changing it from matching the daylight plane that Page 39 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 abuts. The language I think is difficult that is in the Table 2 as it is now but I am not quite sure why it was recommended for change. So that is all. Mr. Williams: Do you mean where it said match abutting and nov,, it says basically ten feet and 45 degrees? Chair Holman: Yes. Mr. Williams: Because that is the most restrictive. All those cases with the abutting already have ten feet and 45 degrees. So I thought rather than somebody having to go back and look at it it turned out that it was all the same anyway so we just put it there, ten feet and 45 degrees. Chair Hohnan: Okay, thank you for that clarification. Great. So if we are through with this portion can we go with Parking? Mr. Williams: Can i just ask is it okay on the square footage of parking exclusion kind of thing to do what might have been Commissioner Lippert’s suggestion of 250 square feet for the first space, any attached sort of space is an additional 200 square feet? We will come back with that. Chair Hohnan: It seems reasonable. Mr. Williams: We will work with that then. Chair Hohnan: So would you care to go to Parking? Ms. Tronquet: Are you going to ask for any public comment on that? Chair Hohnan: t think I did earlier, didn’t I? Commissioner Butt: We have different audience members. Chair Hohnan: That is right we do have a different audience member. Are there any comments from the public on this? I think we opened and closed it earlier. Commissioner Burr: Yes, we did. Chair Holmai~: Okay. Staff. Mr. Williams: Okay. The current parking regulations in Chapter 18.83 are divided up into several sections and what we wm~ted to do was to split the chapter into two chapters. One 18.52 contains all the standards for parking, number of parking spaces, adjustments by the Director in terlns of the number of spaces. Then the other chapter, 18.54, embodies the design criteria as far as parking space sizes and landscaping parking lots and those kinds of things. That seems to be a cleaner way to go. We may ultimately we kind of hope that maybe we can create a parking technical manual that that second chapter will become a part of and that we can then amend more readily than ttzrough the Zoning Ordinance but for now just put it in a separate chapter. Page 40 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 So as we have pointed out we have slightly changed the bicycle parking ratios, we have changed instead of three different types of bike parking facilities we have two now. Those recommendations came from the City’s Bicycle Consultant and run through the Bicycle Committee some time ago before making their way into the ordinance. The main area of changes relates to the reductions in parking. The Director currently is allowed to make certain reductions up to certain percentage reductions for ~vhen a property is close to transit, or when there is mixed use, or when there is senior housing, and a variety of circumstances. We made a few changes in that area mostly I think with one exception kind of tightening that up. The one exception being that we have added some provisions to allow for air’fordable housing to receive a parking reduction as well depending on the housing income level at different percentage reductions. The other flipside of all of that is that we are requiring more stringent methodology for most of these reductions. Right now there is no requirement that you prepare a parking study or something like that and we have required for most of these that you provide an analysis that if it is shared parking provide time of day, parking demands, and demonstrate that it in fact can work. So most of them come along with that. Then the other thing is most of them also are tied to providing a Transportation Demand Management program. Then we have a fairly significant section on Transportation Demand Management where we have tried to layout sort of number one, kind of a laundry list of potentially TDM measures that could be addressed, traffic reducing housing, transit passes, one that is not in here that we would like to add is parking cash-out which is something that has been prevalent recently in some discussions. We did incorporate here very briefly here but a mention of green parking priorities and Commissioner Keller provided some language that rather than what is in the parenthesis there on that page that would speak specifically to zero emission vehicles and a variety of other types of vehicles that might be considered as green to meet that green parking criteria. The secondly that the TDM program should specify certain performance measures in terms of reductions, and the t3qaes of programs, that there would be monitoring reports required at the end of two years and five years for those programs. Then lastly that the City would have the ability at those points if it looked like performance measures were not being met to require either additional or different or stepped up measures to be instituted or if upon an adoption of such a fee if there is a fee adopted that is used as kind of an in lieu for a shuttle system or something like that. Then another possibility is the City could require pa3qnent into that fee or into that system or fund to be able to achieve those purposes. So we have added quite a bit here. We have pretty much nothing in code right now about TDM and we are trying to get a start on it and get a system in place whereby we suggest some things to people, we monitor it, and we have some mechanism for going back later and reviewing it and requiring upgrades, and maybe in the I’uture at some point some funding. So that is a pretty major part of the changes in here. We talked last time about revising the threshold for mixed use parking to ten spaces being required on the site as opposed to 30 currently to better accommodate some of the smaller mixed-use projects that we have. One other thing that we have suggested is doing away with compact parking spaces and going to what is called uni-class. Right now you have your choice Page 41 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 of either combining standard size parking spaces with compact at a certain percentage or doing all uni-class, which is eight and a half by 17.5-foot spaces. We have suggested doing away entirely with tile compact and standard spaces and going entirely with uni-class spaces and that will require deleting some of the tables that are attached at the end of the chapter and we noted in the last paragraph there which tables those are, and then making some modifications to some of tile remaining ones. Some of the remaining ones already talk about uni-class but some of them also in there mention compact too so we will have to strike those sections of those tables. We will make those changes. We deleted all references to metric measurements. Half of those table we have in there are there because they are in metrics. Then also as we mentioned with the multi-family chapter the tandem parking subject to those limitations that we had. Let me quickly look here, Commissioner Keller did have a couple that wanted to mention. As I said before most all of yours were fine to add. I did want to note this add, it wasn’t Commissioner Keller’s suggestion, that we got to a point dealing with the TDM measures adding the parking cash-out programs into that list. You had mentioned vehicle-charging stations being part of that list as well which we will add. He also suggested contributions to extend or enhance existing or create new shared or public shuttle service. So we will reword some of that to reflect that language. There were a couple of questions that you had about right now tile code has design requirement provisions that you have to add an extra halfa foot away from a wall in a garage situation and your question was should that also say post in addition to wall. We don’t think it needs to say that. I asked both Gayle Likens, Transportation Manager, as well as Amy who sees this in Cunent Planning all the time and generally in the situation with a post there is room, you can locate the post in a way that you can open our door and get in and out of the carport generally. So there really isn’t a need to add that for the post. Let’s see. Commissioner Keller: Can I talk about that? Mr. Williams: I am almost finished and then maybe we can go back. You asked if Table 6 should be deleted. Table 6 is already shown to be deleted in our paragraph there discussing that. You had a question about should there be a provision for - we had some language that dead end isles are discouraged or something and you asked if there should be a turnaround area there. I would just as soon stay away from revising the design aspect of it now. It doesn’t seem to be a problem mad so we suggest just leaving that alone unless our Staff had identified that as a problem. Then number 14 on your list, which is the only other one I think I need to conlmellt on, is ill Table 4 should the wording for Transportation Demand Management measures match the language of the other entries? Yes, we should be consistent with the language mad I just wanted to clarify that we were not suggesting requiring a TDM progrmn every time there was a mixed- use development though. So if that is the one where you thought it was different that would still Page 42 1 be more of a Director ’may’ require that not ’rnust’ as in all the other cases because the whole 2 theory behind the mixed use is that you provide or are demonstrating that the overlapping uses 3 justify the reduction not the TDM program. I think that’s it. Everything else on your list we will 4 make the change and these were again minor wording changes and consistency changes and 5 punctuation changes. 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 _~1 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Holman: Chair Solnick, do you have any comments or anything to add to this? I really appreciate, i am sure we all do, really, really appreciate your coming tonight and being available for questions. I don’t want to hold you up if there is anything you want to say. Okay. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Let me speak to the most substantive issue there, which was the post versus wall issue. There are two factors to consider with respect to the wall or a post. One factor with respect to a wall is the ability to open a door. The other factor is the ability to drive your car in and out of the spot. If you have perpendicular parking it is much harder to remove your car fi-om the spot if there is an adjacent wall or if there is an adjacent post near the edge of the spot. It limits your ability to turn in a way that the absence of a post there does not. So the issue is that if you cars next to each other the natural space between cars gives you maneuvering room that a post doesn’t. I can tell you that I personally have had trouble parking in the garage for Packard Children’s Hospital. I don’t know if those were compact spaces but parking a mini van in there and trying to pull out of a space next to a post is quite difficult because the aisles are narrow and I at one point in time munched the little comer of my car, fortunately I just scraped it, but it was not easy. I am thinking that that is one of the issues why for the issue of access of getting in and out of the spot that a post needs an extra little bit of room. Mr. Williams: Okay. For the most part Stafflooks at turning radiuses and to make sure that those things do work. What I would suggest is that why don’t we go in here and put essentially a ’may’ in here that that extra half foot may be required for posts as well where identified to be inhibit safe turning or safe backing movements or something along those lines. We can craft some language and bring that back. Commissioner Keller: I appreciate that especially since it depends on the width of the aisles. Where you have wider aisles that halfa foot is not needed but where you have narrow aisles that is a problem. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Burr: On page six, the second to last bullet refers to the 50 percent tree canopy within 15 },ears. I was trying to recall in the Comprehensive Plan is it 15 years or ten? Mr. Williams: It is 15 and that is what we put in the Landscape Criteria recently as well. So this language mimics exactly the language from the Landscape Criteria and also provides reference to that Landscape Criteria. So if you are looking through the section you will see that we also have that section in the performance standards. Page 43 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Butt: I do want to say that I think a lot of excellent things have been done on the TDM program category and it fulfills a lot of the sustainability objectives that were both in the Comprehensive Plan and in recent years have been adopted by the Council. This is really where the rubber meets the road. One other aspect that I want to bring up and it was prompted by something in the Daily a few days ago about pen-neable or semi-pemaeable driveways. We know that we had a problem - we thought we had a great solution up in the Open Space area where pemaeable concretes were brought in mad we don’t know how permeable they were but they were categorized that way. We said, this is great, paving over paradise with permeable materials. What we ended up realizing is that because all of our development had footprints that were constraining development we j ust allowed bigger development in the Foothills by letting them come in with permeable driveways. So on one hand it is a good thing and we want to find ways to either encourage it or require it but we don’t want unintended consequences at the same time. So that is one area that I didn’t see us addressing and I would like to see if the Colnmission would also be interested in Staff trying to come back with some kind of recommendations on how xve could move in that direction of utilizing either, I forget what they are called but he was mentioning it earlier, but essentially the strip driveways. Chair Holman: Hollywood strips. Commissioner Burr: Hollywood strips which are now allowed. Should we go further then? Should we virtually either have some incentive or some offset, should we go further in allowing those kinds of things? I think that the article in the Dai@ talked about the benefit of pem~eability on creek runoff, it also has C02 impacts, and fiankly for me it has aesthetic impacts as well. So it has three benefits mad I would like to see us go further in that direction. Chair Holman: Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: Just to follow on to that and go a little further with it instead of incentivizing why not make it a requirement for new development? Would there be a reason not to, I guess I should ask, not to require it? Mr. Williams: I am not sure that I am qualified to answer that. I would think the Public Works people would say yes there are reasons not to require that. That there are circumstances where that is not a good idea because of the stability of the soil beneath surface oi the slope or any number of reasons where there may be cases where they would prefer to have that or where there are other solutions besides that are maybe less maintenance problems. Leave it at concrete and take that runoff and put it into a nice landscaped area that that’s a better solution than trying to have it permeate through material that may end up eroding because of that. So there are tradeoffs in that. We did add to this language all of the provisions basically that we talked about with the storm water discussions and the paving and drainage where on page 34 of the redline version of the ordinance it say, previously allowed Open Space and Agricultural Conservation Districts could have permeable surfaces. We have now extended that to all districts so that you can request that Page 44 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 unless Public Works has some particular problem. Then also a tie back to paving and drainage approaches at parking facilities shall be integrated with storm water protection approaches consistent with the storm water quality section that we had. So I wouldn’t say that any of these provide incentive to do it but they do make it clear that this is something that the City does allow whereas the language before was kind of discouraging about using these kinds of approaches. As far as the Open Space District itself, one of the i think few remaining areas that we are going to come back to you with is addressing specifically that permeability in the Open Space District requirements. Chair Hohr~an: Commissioner Lippert, then Commissioner Garber, and Commissioner Tunla. Vice-Chair Lippert: I am embarrassed to say that I culled over this report and the mention of green parking spaces is so brief I can’t find it. Can you please tell me where to look? Mr. Williams: It is this section. Vice-Chair Lippert: It is in the TDM section, I will read that. Next, the flipside of parking is the access to sites. Right now generally the Fire Department has the majority of the authority on that and they say well, we want out fire access to be 2I feet so we can get a truck in there. The truth of the matter is that a lot of Fire Departments they ~vant it but they are not going to use it. It is not realistic because what happens in you pull a truck in and they say well we will have to back the truck out and we don’t want to back our truck out. What we really want to do is be able to come in and drive around to get the truck out. So what I think really needs to be looked at here is really the direction of traffic and maybe it might be able to be some sort of compromise found with the Fire Departinent in terms of the real necessity for fire access. An example that comes to mind just simply is that you would never pull a fire truck in next to a burning building. So it is not necessary that the road be 21 feet wide adjacent to a building it is only when you have space between the road, the access, and the building. So I think that they need to sort of weigh in on this and say what is realistic otherwise we are winding kip with a lot more paving than we really need. Again, the paving competes with the landscape. So I just want to be realistic in tenns of what we are doing here and how we are approaching it. Again, access is the flipside to the parking. So again if you have a development say out at Hewlett Packard, or one of the others, the Research Park, and you have an ocean of parking and it row after row after row of parking one consideration might be to simply make them one way aisles, you could reduce the width of that access through the parking. It is really the access to the building that they are looking for not the access through the parking lot. So that is just something to look at. Chair Holman: Did you have a response? Mr. Williams: Yes, I will just say those are good points. I think ARB looks at that quite a bit. They obviously can’t overrule the Fire Department but the Fire Department in our latest discussions with them I think has been very willing to look at things like that as well as when they go into a residential development that is going to have eight homes in it or something like Page 45 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1I 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 _~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 that, looking at being sure they can get in to the point where they are 150 feet from any point on the building but not necessarily requiring that they have to be able to turnaround and do a full turn. They can pull in to !50 feet and then back out. So they have been, I think, a lot more receptive to those ideas lately. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: Just two thoughts on some of the topics that have already been brought up. The most recent topic, which is pem~eable drives, which we have talked enough about but the concern here, the topic, is trying to create as much green space as we can. I think for most of the zones with the possible exception of the Open Space having the zoning in a state purpose such that the review of projects can deal with the specifics and look at different solutions and opportunities as they come up is the way in my mind that I would structure that rather than trying to find a minimum or maximum that you have to work within. I think there are enough opportunities either through the Planning Commission or the ARB or simply the Planning Staff themselves to address a lot of those issues. With respect to Commissioner Keller’s concern about columns in parking lots having designed a few parking lots that occasionally and occasionally don’t have other things on top of them I am a little concerned about entering language that asks for or that may have additional feet added to columns, etc. only because - I suppose I can accept the word ’may’ here. My caution is that even adding as little space as this can have a huge impact on how you design something. There are circumstances where you can’t/don’t want or you cannot afford, or the shape of the site does not allow you to have long spans to sort of mitigate the impact of that and where you may have many columns right beside each other which would otherwise meet the criteria, it is very difficult to anticipate a lot of that. It is good design to give as much space as you can. So again I think this is an issue where a project that is going to have a parking lot is going to go through review either ARB, Staff, etc. and a lot of those issues can be pulled out that. I think what is important is creating the forum for it to be reviewed as opposed to legislating a specific outcome. Commissioner Keller: Can I respond to that? Chair Holman: I don’t want to spend a lot of time on columns and posts I don’t think it is probably the most essentially. If you absolutely have to if not, Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Just a very, very brief comment that has to do with Commissioner Burt’s issue on permeable surfaces. Learning from what was done in the Open Space without requiring couldn’t we incentivize by doing it instead of as a 1:1 do it as some sort of fraction? I don’t know what the right number would be but you get a 25 percent bonus instead of 100 percent, just something that incentivizes it without the unintended consequence that we are now acutely aware of where you get the same result. Chair Holman: Commissiol~er Butt. Commissioner Burt: Yes, that is one way and I was struggling with xvhere to do that. The other thought that was brought up was maybe it was in another context but do we put language in Page 46 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 where basically we say that wherever possible we want to have one of these fom~s of driveways that is more progressive than a slab of concrete or asphalt and that it would allow for those circumstances that Curtis came back with and said there may be some places where it is not appropriate and language that we flip the other way around as a soft requirement basically. So I don’t know which is the better approach those are two alternatives. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert, follow up? Vice-Chair Lippert: Yes. The best way to do what we are describing here is rather than having 90 degree parking which you have to sxveep to turn into the parking space is to actually have all the parking on a diagonal going in the same direction by having a single car width aisle so that people pull into the space and then they can back out into the aisle and it continues forward. Commissioner Butt: Are we talking about two di fferent things? Vice-Chair Lippert: No, we are talking about the same thing. We are talking about pem~eable surt;aces reducing the amount of paving and being able to condense this so that you wind up with more landscaping. So if you wind up with a double loaded aisle, in other words traffic coming in both directions, you have 16 feet is it? Right? And you wind up with two parking spaces on either side so you wind up with something that is 60 feet, is that what it is? If you go with diagonals you can reduce that aisle because everything is moving in one direction, you have already reduced it by eight feet and then you bare reduced it again because everything is on a diagonal going in the same direction and the other aisle coming back it is the other direction. So you reduce the amount of paving there. That is the point that I was trying to make with the fire lanes and everything. So if it is not coordinated with the Fire Department it is just an exercise in frustration. Chair Hohnan: So, it sounds like something that maybe Staff could consider. Mr. Williams: We will look at something, i think looking at some language, some soft language, about permeability. The other things were good points but again I think the ARB review is the appropriate place to look at that and we are having those discussions also. So we are getting there on that. I don’t think we can be legislating that in our Parking Regulations. It is just too site specific. I think it is a good idea and that is the direction we are going and certainly the direction I hear ARB going when they are reviewing projects. Chair Holman: I am going to plug two things in here and then I think Commissioner Keller has another comment. Two things for me. One is and I had this concern when it came up before reducing the parking reduction to being considered at ten spaces instead of 30. I am still not comfortable with that because that means you could have a requirement of seven spaces instead often and for that small a developlnent it seems like ..... Mr. Williams: Twenty percent is the maximum reduction. Chair Holman: Okay,. For that small a development though it seems .... Page 47 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 I6 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Williams: Then we are requiring a parking study that shows the time of day analysis and I don’t know. Chair Holman: I am uncomfortable with it but so, okay. The other thing is the TDM program, I had mentioned to Staff some time ago about instead of TDM in all occasions that we actually look at funding of shuttle. So instead of just out and out going to a TDM program and there is a cash-out to look at especially in situations around school routes. TDMs require monitoring, reporting isn’t even here, you go t~vo years without one, if you are on a school corridor the shuttles get used. They are packed. You are going to take cars off the road without a doubt. Often times single occupancy cars that are really four trips because you have somebody taking a kid to school and going home and going to the school and picking a kid up and coming home. So I would like to see some incorporation of that. Mr. Williams: I think Commissioner Keller gave some additional language in the TDM that can be a TDM measure is help contributing to additional shuttle service. He provided some language to elaborate a little bit on that in terms of contributions to additional shuttle se~wice to put in that list of potential TDM measures. So I think that is where at this point the flipside of that is to really come down and say you need to do that or whatever it is going to take, a nexus study, and it is going to take a lot of analysis to sort of require that in any way. So leaving it in there as one option and one-way to do it is good. It is a possible approach and if that option is available to people to get around the whole issue then that’s fine. I don’t think we have any guarantee contributing to shuttle ser~dce is necessarily going to reduce the 20 percent that they might get another way either. So I still think we need monitoring and we need to be sure these things are working regardless unless there is some study done that incontrovertibly shows the contributing a certain dollar to shuttle takes a certain amount of trips off the road and compensates tSr the additional trips being generated. Chair Holman: And certainly Palo Alto doesn’t have one. Mr. Williams: Certainly not to an extent of saying it is five percent or 15 percent and what it is. Is it shuttles? Is it taking trips off of San Antonio for projects on Sand Hill Road? Is that an equitable tradeoff? There are a lot of things to consider in looking at that. Chair Holman: We haven’t typically done that in the past have we? We haven’t funded an expansion of the shuttle as a part ofa TDM program in the past have we? Not that I know of. Ms. Caporgno: With the Mayfield Agreement we did. That is part of the mitigation measures and that was part of their overall TDM program was an expansion of the existing Marguerite Shuttle Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I have my own things plus comments on other people’s stuff. The first thing is in tenns of encouraging pervious driveways and things like that we might think about whether we want a limit on the amount of impervious coverage on a site. So I am just throwing that out to think about. I am not suggesting it. We do have just one mechanism to provide that. Page 48 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 The second thing is in terms of a ten-space minimum for a TDM program I am xvondering if rather than saying that the ten spaces are a minimum for a TDM program how about saying the minimum reduction is no more than to ten spaces. So for example some of the things actually have more reductions for seniors or whatever. So one thing you might think about is you can reduce as long as the minimum you reduce to is ten. Mr. Williams: That is fine. I think we are confusing TDM programs here with reductions. So Karen’s suggestion or concent was mixed use allows a parking reduction that currently you can’t even ask for it unless you require it for at least 30 spaces. We are saying ten spaces instead. What it sounds like you are saying is maybe it is 12 so that you come down to ten but you don’t go below ten spaces. Commissioner Keller: And mixed use is one example, TDM is another example that you would get there, senior housing is another example that you can get there, and basically say that this way ten is the minimum that you can get to. I think we are both agreeing on that, Mr. Williams: Well, the issue with mixed use was how many spaces. The provision in the TDM section talks about us being able to apply TDM to any project that generates ten or more peak hour trips. So those are apples and oranges. Commissioner Keller: Let rne just say that having it so that you could do reductions to no less than ten may solve the problem that Chair Holman mentioned. Also, one of the interesting things in terms of reduction in parking is if there is some way of monitoring to make sure that people aren’t parking on the street at nearby properties and burdening street parking with that. It seems to me that if you supply insufficient parking onsite that street parking is where the overflow goes. I have seen iu the little time I have been on the Commission comments about we can just add more street parking by putting in angle parking to deal with the shortfall and I don’t think that is an acceptable solution. I will say one more thing about columns, or posts if you will, and that is perpendicular ones require more space than diagonal ones. The diagonal parking that Vice-Chair Lippert is suggesting doesn’t have as much need for extra space because it is a lot easier to get in and out of them. Now I will go to the points that I wanted to bring up which is in terms of floodplains when you have development in floodplains there are two issues that are interesting to me about this. One is the fact that storm water front a property, which has been bermed in some way, has the potential for inundating other neighbors in the event of some flooding episode. So the issue is making sure that the berming is done in such a way that there is sufficient percolation and sufficient - it is more of a burden to treat onsite when you are higher than your neighbors than there is when you are at grade with your neighbors because your runoff doesn’t naturally go onto their properties. I am not sure that that goes here or where that goes but I ant just throwing that into you. Page 49 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 DD 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 The next issue. Chair Hoh-nan: That wouldn’t be a zoning question though. Mr. Williams: That wouldlYt be a parking chapter question. Commissioner Keller: I understand that. I realize this might go in the other section but the issue is also with the height. So going back to the earlier stuff with height because I realize I didn’t bring this up earlier. When you have a floodplain and somebody berms their property up four feet and their 35 foot limit and they are noxv actually 39 feet above the neighbors. So there should be some consideration of the measurement with respect to existing grade or with respect to berming. I think some clarification of that needs to be dealt with because otherwise you wind up with more height because of this artificial raising. In some sense there is a height there and I am not sure how to deal with it but it something that we will need to think about. Mr. Williams: In our last grouping of changes one on the list there is to address that benning and getting more height. It may or may not have to do with floodplain specifically but that has been used to get more height and it shouldn’t be used that way. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. Chair Holman: Any other questions or comments? Commissioner Garber: I would like to talk about posts. Chair Holman: It looks like we are complete. Then there is the Village Residential. Do we want to go there? Mr. Williams: I would like maybe each of you to say what you think about this so that we can take it back and come back to you with something that hopefully will carry the day. Chair Holman: Let me ask you this then if there is no consensus or the comments are quite disparate from what you propose you will still come back with it next time or do you think we ought to just punt on this for awhile? Mr. Williams: Well, I think we will take that into consideration. If they are very disparate then I will talk to Steve and we will see where he thinks we should go l’rom here. Chair Holman: I just want the Commission to know when they are making their comments not to try to get anybody to change their comments. If they have concerns they have concerns or if agreement then agreement but I just wanted to know what might or might not be the outcome of what we do. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: Being one of the people that have I guess championed Village Residential for many years it is done and time to take it out of the oven. I think that what we really need to do here is to go with a section on Village Residential. It looks perfectly fine, there are going to Page 50 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 be mistakes in it, and there are going to be problems with it. I think what we need to do is give it a try, see what it is like maybe a year from now, and fine-tune it maybe a little bit then. I don’t see any problem with taking some risks with this section. It has been discussed in committee. I think at some point Commissioner Burt was involved many years ago in commenting in that committee, and Phyllis Cassel has, and I think you have. I think everybody has had their say and it is what we expect at this point. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Butt: I was trying to remember where the conversation left off earlier and there were some things that other Commissioners had brought up to prompt me to have some other questions. One is that is the Cottage Cluster subset of Village Residential intended to be within the R-1 or within this group? Mr. Williams: Within the R-1. You could do Cottage Cluster currently under RM-15 regulations the only thing you couldn’t do is sell off the parcels individually. We have actually with this Village Residential it would allow that potential to happen too. I think if we are thinking of Cottage Cluster as a relatively smaller unit in the RM-15 you are just going to be penalized so much to try to do that product versus the allowable FAR that is just not likely to happen as 900 square foot units or something like that. Commissioner Butt: The other thing within the Cottage Clusters too whether we will have them this way in the future, historically I think most of them have tended to be rental units. I don’t know as we create Cottage Cluster incentives in the R-1 going forward I would hope but I am not counting on them being rentals. Then I think it was Commissioner Garber who had brought up the issue of using easements as opposed to some of the other alternatives and I would just lend support to that. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: So what does this mean with respect to Cottage Clusters in the R-1 you referred to? Are we going to revisit that? Mr. Williams: Probably not until we get into the Comp Plan. Where we left this, we went through quite a few discussions on the Cottage Cluster in the R-1 and we were getting a lot of resistance to new Cottage Cluster. We were getting a lot of support for let’s find ways to protect the Cottage Cluster that exists now by allowing remodeling and maybe some very minor additions and upgrades to those so that people could hang on to them and maybe even looking at for sale possibilities for some of the ones that are rented because that would keep them there better than leaving them as rentals. But as far as new ones we weren’t hearing a lot of support t’rom the community on it. It was just another way to increase density and they didn’t know where they would go, and you can’t really say because all of R-1 is potentially out there. So the image kind of was everybody’s lot was going to turnover and it was going to become ...... Page 51 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Commissioner Burt: IfI might offer a suggestion in that regard whenever it comes back up. I just want to get this on the table because I think it was the same dilemma that we had when we had the second units. Other cities have done something - I was very disappointed in the Council on the second units instead of bouncing it back to Staff and the Commission to say we have these problems ~ve need you to address them they threw the baby out with the bathwater. What I have seen other communities do is they cap annual numbers per year. We had members of the community who said, well, hypothetically there could be 6,000 of these second units and we get about eight a year or something like that or if that. It is a very, very small number that are applied for. So all we would have had to do was put a reasonable small cap on it and eliminated this hypothetical absurdity. The same thing I think with Cottage Clusters. So when we look at it let’s look at getting rid of this phobia by placing a cap and then it is a very limited amount. If at some time in the future the community wants to revisit the cap let them do it but it can be a small cap that allows some of them to occur at appropriate places. I think if we are going to come back with Comp Plan i think we should revisit the second unit issue as well. It wasn’t resolved. In my opinion and I will say it on record, a bad decision by Council, a Council who claims they want to standup for what was right and it was a bad move. I think we should revisit it it is the right thing to do. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Shifting gears a little bit here. The Village Residential is applicable for RM-15 but also RM-30 and 40 on substandard lots, right? But when we have the maximum FAR it mirrors only RM-15 at .5. Why not take that up to .6 and 1.0 where we are on 30 and 40’? Mr. Williams: Because this is supposed to be more of a single family product so we are trying to at least in some ways keep the - if your choice is that you have a substandard RM-30 or RM-40 lot and you w°ant to put three detached homes on it then this can allow that but they need to be reasonably sized. If we start going up to .6 or 1.0 on the FAR then it sort of gets out of control. I think the .5 is more than adequate to accommodate this type of product on those lots. I should also point out the other potential use of this as we noted there is for large parcels that are RM-30 or RM-40 to provide this around the perimeter or adjacencies to low density residential and then have higher density on the rest of the site too. So there is that potential as well. That would be something the applicant would propose, the ARB would look at or ARB could even on a particular project say it would be better to be doing this type of Village Residential over here than bringing the high density all the way to the property edge. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I am wondering whether there are existing properties that have developments on them that would fit the Village Residential for which we may or may not want to rezone them to that designation. If we do rezone them what effect would that have on the rental housing? Page 52 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 t5 16 17 18 19 20 2t 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 3~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 Mr. Williams: First of all the Village Residential is not a different zoning. It is a land use type that is allowed within the RM-! 5 and to some extent within the RM-30 and RM-40 zoning categories. So we wouldn’t be rezoning other sites that have this type of use. I would like to take a - and we have looked at some of the other developments that have come through lately and seen if you had those on fee lots how would they relate to some of these. Some of them are fairly close and some of them are like we have talked about with last xveek’s product wouldn’t comply with this. I want to do that a little bit more so I think that is a good idea. We wil! probably bring you back a list of half dozen or so projects you can identify with and look at to see what this might look like. I want to also caution you that they can already do that as long as they don’t create fee lots they can already do it as condos. So it is not necessarily going to prohibit that but by the same token I think there is some benefit to the owner/applicant to be able to sell these offthis way. So t think there is some quid pro quo here for being able to say that with 12 units per acre maybe there is a cap on the house size and maybe there are a couple of other things that otherwise wouldn’t apply to your standard RM-15 property if you want to do it this way but we have to be carefu! to balance that so that it is not a disincentive to do this either. Commissioner Keller: A follow up to what Commissioner Burr said with respect to Cottage Cluster one way to do it is by thinking about caps and the other way is by thinking about overlay zones that allow it and zones that don’t allow it. If there is a cap of five such things and it goes in next to you it doesn’t matter whether there are five or 100 it is next to you. In sorne areas that may be more compatible because of the mix of uses there than other areas. So that is one thing to think about. And similarly with the existence of second units, putting second units in some neighborhoods it may be more compatible because there is already a mixture of things than some other neighborhoods where there is a lot more unifonnity. So that is a way to deal with that. Chair Holman: Vice-Chair Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: In temps of the cap issue I think rather than look at it on a timeline just look at it as a cap and then at that point we would re-look at the whole thing again. That would then expose any flaws in the ZOU. The second comment I wanted to make with regard to easements is one aspect is the use easement on the adjacent property allows for housing to be actually a lot closer. What I am thinkir~g of is in Klorida they have these zero lot line conditions where they built the house right on the edge of the condo line and that has to be a firewall therefore it doesn’t get any openings. To eliminate that what you can do is actually center the unit on a condominium parcel within the entire zone and then assign the side yard to the neighbor so they get emire use of the neighbor’s property and thereby eliminating that firewall issue. Chair Holman: Anyone else? t have a couple of things. One is I certainly like the Cottage Cluster and the Village Residential in theory and actually in practice the way it is on the ground. I have the same sort of concerns that I did about the multi-family zoning in general about unit loss. I am just hoping that in trying to retain units or create units that we are not incentivizing Page 53 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 19 20 2I 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 actually the erosion of the number of units and the erosion of our rental stock. So that continues for me. The 6,000 square foot lot I am not sure if that is the right place to start. Supposing that was a 10,000 square foot lot? I didn’t hear the initiation of the question I think Commissioner Garber asked. The 2,500 square foot lots and your response of what size house that would be is like a 1,800 or 1,850 square foot house plus the garage. It speaks to my concern about losing these often times smaller, more affordable units that are rental or even if one of the units is resided in by the owner. I just see our community getting more and more unattainable. So maybe we ought to have a maximum house size that is allowed. I think that is one direction to go. Separate from an email that we got regarding a project that recently came to us houses in this size range, and i don’t know about lot size how that might affect it, they sell basically for about $700.00 a square foot is my understanding from talking to a couple of realtors in the last months. That is expensive, really, really expensive. So where is our community headed? in the Comp Plan we talk about a diverse housing stock and I see our housing stock getting more and more and more expensive so I am seriously concerned about that. So that is one comment. Another is neighborhood character and we are not going to solve this here but be careful what we do too. We talk about new construction having to fit in with the existing neighborhood character but a lot of times what we are doing is tearing doxvn things that are so well integrated into the neighborhoods and are not necessarily buildings that need to be replaced but we are in some ways incentivizing redevelopment. So we are actually eroding the existing neighborhood character and updating it but not enhancing it. So that is another concern. Then the last comment I will make is one that goes back to multi-family which I overlooked raising. I am not looking for any response on this. I remembered that I had forgotten to seek out the edible landscaping portion of" the multi-family if there is accommodation for that and I couldn’t remember when I got here if there was or wasn’t. So you can respond to that later. I know other Commissioners have interest in that too as we have discussed it in the past. Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: Thanks. I have just a quick comment to piggyback on your comment of attainability and affordability in our community. Being that I live in College Terrace I don’t know if we have Village Residential or Cottage Clusters in our neighborhood but they do .... Commissioner Burt: Cottage Clusters. Commissioner Sandas: Thank you. They lend a lot of character to the neighbofl~ood and also allow for a lot of rental units. I am acutely aware that many of those rental properties are owned by very aging people. So it concerns me as to when those properties turnover and what will happen there and what it is possible to lose, I guess. You were talking about affordability. There is a house on Overland Street that is for sale right now. It is a one-bedroom house and a comparable house to that sold and it was tom down about three or four years ago and it sold for $500,000. Well this house is on the market for $750,000. To me if that would be a house for a single person or a young mantled couple that is not exactly affordable or attainable. Page 54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 92) 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Holman: To follow up on that for just a second, and then go back to Commissioner Lippert, is the Cottage Clusters that I see around town be it College Terrace or for that matter Old Palo Alto or Downtown North most of those are developed in units that are 500 to probably the biggest is about 1,000 square feet. So what are we doing? I guess we al! really need to think about that, what the upshot is. Commissioner Lippert and then Commissioner Keller. Vice-Chair Lippert: Downtown North does have a number of Cottage Cluster developments. We live right around the corner from one. Maybe it is worth considering for those properties that are zoned R-2 that are larger than the minimmn lot size, not the minimum lot size, but larger than that allowing those to also consider applying the Cottage Cluster development standards so that we can have rather than a large house and a small little granny units two units that are of equal parody. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: t keep on feeling like returning to this issue of what we can do in terms of enhancing lega! nonconforming uses in order to enhance the retention of these small units like Cottage Clusters and whatever. So I think there is some creative work that can be done there to allow those to stay and yet be enhanced in appropriate ways. One other thing is that to the extent that a developer takes one of these environments where there are multiple units and then replaces them with fewer units, one way to think about this is if you can’t build as many units as were there before because it is no longer allowed by zoning because of the limitation of density you can make up for that by providing appropriate pa3qnents to in lieu BMR fees that allow those units to be replaced elsewhere as part of a development. Now that is not a complete solution to the problem but it does in some way make up in some way for the reduction of rental units. Similarly, I am not sure the extent to which this exists aheady, but when you teardown a small one little house of one or two bedrooms you replace it with a maximum built to lot size house to the extent - I am not sure whether there are BMR fees for that that allow for or take into account that you now have less affordable housing or whether that is reasonable or not. Those are some things that might be considered. Chair Holman: Quick case in point, I won’t belabor this, there is a house between Downtown and Embarcadero let’s say that is a 10,000 square foot lot that had two houses on it and both of those houses were tom down. The quite large house that replaced it is a gorgeous house but sold for $5.5 million. I dare say each of those houses independently would have been much more affordable than that. Last comment I will make is that as part of the Village Residential and Cottage Cluster, part of that Zoning Ordinance Update was that we were going to look at incentives and some kind of tools to be able to retain that kind of development that we have currently in the city. So I don’t know if you have had a chance to look at that or if you have come up with ways to incentivize Page 55 l 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 I7 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 _~1 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 that but I would look forward to hearing that next time - the retention of existing Cottage Courts and Clusters. Mr. Williams: We are not going to be doing it as part of the ZOU at this point but we would be coming back with that as part of the housing programs in the Comp Plan. Chair Holman: I thought we were doing it now too. Commissioner Burt: A quick question, Curtis. I have forgotten. Are we getting the Landscape back? Mr. Williams: The Landscape has been adopted by the Council. Everything you have done so far has been adopted. Commissioner Burt: We had talked about landscaping within the Research Park and native plant landscaping incorporation and agricultural landscaping. Did any of that get folded in? Mr. Williams: Yes, the landscaping section that you recommended and the Council adopted unchanged pretty much, and again it is soft language I guess you would call it, but it is basically identifying special areas like hillside, riparian areas and called out the Open Space for preser~,ing native vegetation and compatible vegetation. Commissioner Burt: For a couple of years we have been talking about the prospect of in the Research Park incorporating upon major redevelopment a conversion to native plant or agricultural landscaping. Mr. Williams: There was some language in there about transitions to the area around, so to the extent that is part of that, yes but not specifically the Research Park should incorporate. Commissioner Burt: We have talked about that for a couple of years. It was something that was really important to me and I think other Commissioners as well as a really important opportunity. Mr. Williams: I will have to go back and look but i think we put language in there that is pretty strong for Commission if you are reviewing a Site and Design out there or the ARB on Site and Design or just any major ARB review to use this. Chair Hohnan: Okay. So Commissioners it seems that we are through with this item. Chair Solnick, did you have something you wanted to say? Thank you very much for coming, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Page 56 PLANN NG AND STAFF REPORT TO: FROM: DATE: SUBJECT: PLANNING & TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION Kevin Gardiner, Contract Planner DEPARTMENT: Plarming & Community Environment April 11, 2007 Zoning Ordinance Update - Recommendations to City Council Regarding Amendments to Title 1.8 (Zoning Ordinance), including: A)An Ordinm~ce Revising and Consolidating Chapters 18.22, 18.24, and 18.26 into a new Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts: RM-15, RM-30, and t~M-40); and B)An Ordinance Revising and Renumbering Chapter 18.83 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) to New Chapters 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards). RECOMMENDATION Staff recommends that the Planning and Transportation Commission (PTC) review and recommend to the City Council adoption of a new Chapter 18.13 for Multi-Family Residential (RM-15, RM-30 and RM-40) Districts (Attachment A) and new Chapters 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards), both included in Attachment C. BACKGROUND Current regulations for multi-family residential zoning districts are contained within Chapters ! 8.22 (RM-15), 18.24 (RM-30), and 18.26 (RM-40) of the Zoning Ordinance. Staff proposes to consolidate the three multi-family zone districts into a new Chapter 18.13, similar to the approach for the low-density residential, commercial and industrial districts. City of Palo Alto Page ] Parking requirements are currently embodied in Chapter 18.83 of the Zoning Ordinance. Staff proposes to relocate the Chapter and divide it into two chapters: Chapter 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and Chapter 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards). The COnllnission has discussed the multi-family and parking chapters at a study session on January 31, 2007, and again at a public hearing on March 14, 2007. The Commission’s primary RM concerns at the March 14th meeting were 1) how much parking should be excluded from floor area calculations, 2) the size and extent of support commercial development within large multi-family developments, 3) the preservation of renta! units, 4) Individual Review for single- family and duplex developments, 5) assuring flexibility for easements to be used in lieu of a homeowners association for Village residential development, 6) how to allow future modifications to Village Residential projects, and 7) establishment of maximum lot and house sizes for Village Residential projects. Key pro’king concerns included 1) limiting parking reductions to sites providing a minimum of 10 spaces, 2) clarifying separation of parking spaces from walls and posts, and 3) encouraging permeable materials for parking and driveways. The Commission’s March 14th minutes are included as Attachment G. DISCUSSION Attachments A and B are clean and redlined versions, respectively, of the proposed new Chapter 18.13 related to Multiple Family Residential Districts. Attactunents C and D are clean and redlined versions, respectively, of the new Chapters 18.52/18.54 related to parking regulations and design. The redlined versions reflect "substantive" revisions to the regulations, not verbatim changes, since the chapters have been consolidated, rearranged, and reformatted. Revisions made since the March 14th meeting are outlined below. Multi-Family Zoning Districts Chapter (18.13) A redlined version of the code (Attactm~ent B) outlines the changes to existing provisions. The most recent revisions to current multi-family residence regulations include: Tables 2 and 3 were revised to exclude a maxinmm of 230 square feet per covered parking space from floor area calculations. The Commission had discussed a!lowing 250 square feet for the first space and 200 space for each space thereafter, but staff is concerned that the implementation would be complicated by the variety of par-king configurations possible, e.g., a two-car garage vs. a string of carport spaces. 230 square feet allows for a 3-foot added depth (stairs to house, storage, utilities, etc.) to the rear within the garage (10-foot width for one car), so is much simpler to administer and does not appear to create serious potential for abuse. Section 18.13.040(0 has been revised to a!low retail and personal services for multi- family development of 40 or more units (rather than 50 units). The maximum size of such facilities is raised to 5,000 square feet (but not to exceed 3 percent of the residential floor area), but the maximum size of a single establislm~ent remains at 2,500 square feet. A new subsection (8) has been added to ~ a minimum of 1,500 square feet of neighborhood retail or services where the Director detenllines that neighborhood conm~ercial services are not available within 500 feet of the site. No conditional use pemait would be required for those facilities, but architectural City of Palo Alto Page 2 review would still apply. A new subsection (3) is added to Section 18.13.040(g) to require that, where 3 or more m~its exist (at least 2 of which are rentals), those units may not be demolished or replaced m~less replaced by an equal number of rentals or the maximum number of rental units allowed by zoning density. This provision is intended to preclude the loss of rental housing pursuant to Comprehensive Plan program H-29, or at least only to the extent that the site density is reduced to conform with density requirements. Individual Review is required by Section 18.13.040(c) for single-family or two- family residences in multi-family zone districts, where the interior side lot line of the site abuts the interior side or rear lot line of a single-family or two-family zone or use. The purview of the Individual Review process would be to evaluate the relationship between the ad.iacent low density residential uses and, to a lesser extent, streetscape compatibility. David Solnick, Chair of the ARB, indicated at the last P&TC meeting that perhaps ARB should review two-unit projects in the RM zones, but staff feels it would be more consistent to use the IR process, since IR criteria (privacy and streetscape) would be the primary intent of the review. A summary of the other key changes to the multi-family regulations was included in the March 14, 2007 P&TC staff report (Attacl~nent F). Village Residential Development Criteria (18.13.050~ Staff proposes to incorporate a simple but practical Village Residential option in the multi-family districts, rather than more fully developing a Village Residential chapter of the Zoning Ordinance. "Village Residential" would be listed as a permitted use in the RM-15 zone and for substandard size tots in the RM-30 and RM-40 zones, as well as for the perimeter of large lots as transition to lower density housing. Village Residential Development Criteria is proposed in Section 18.13.050 of Chapter 18.13 and focuses on fee ownership of individual lots with common ownership of (or easements over) internal streets, driveways and coat, non areas. The most recent revisions to the Village Residential regulations include the following: Changes were not necessary regarding the development of Village Residential through the use of easements (for streets, driveways, open space, etc.), rather than through the formation of a homeowners’ association. However, subsection (b) is revised to allow ~he Director to require appropriate CC&Rs, easements, maintenance agreements, and/or other legal instruments to document and disclose conditions of the project approval. Provisions ia subsection (e)(1) are revised so that potential modifications to a site or residential units subsequent to initial Village Residential approval may be made either 1) as specifically outlined in the initial approval, or 2) as an amendment to the initial approval, where submitted by the property owner (if there is only one) or a homeowners’ association or similar legal entity representing the group of individual owners. This will allow for incorporation into the initial approval of a process for City of Palo Alto .Page subsequent revisions (e.g., "a detached accessory building of up to 200 square feet may be added for each lot, to be used for storage or as an additional garage space") as an alternate to subsequent amendment requests. Staff believes it is likely that in most cases no additional square footage will remain to be allocated to future development. The Director will retain discretion to allow minor architectural or site changes pursuant to the architectural review provisions of the Zoning Ordinance (18.76.020). A maximum lot size of 4,000 square feet and a maximum house size of 2,500 square feet are prescribed in Table 3. The maximum lot size requirement will assure that housing types do not replicate R-! single-family homes, but provide for a variety of housing types in a higher density and/or clustered configuration. A maximum house size assures that square footage is not accumulated to construct one or two very large homes on a Village Residential site. A summary of the other key changes to the Village Residential regulations was included in the March 14, 2007 P&TC staff rep6rt (Attactvnent F). Parking_Regulations and Design (Chapters 18.52 and I8.54) Staff proposes a number of relatively minor changes to parking regulations and design criteria (see March 14, 2007 P&TC staff report). Further revisions made since the March 14th Commission meeting include: The list of potential TDM measures in subsection 18.52.050(d) has been expanded and clarified per Commissioner Keller’s suggestions. Section t8.52.050 has been revised and a footnote has been added to Table 4 requiring that a project on any site to be granted a parking reduction must not result in less than 10 spaces being provided on the site. Section 18.54.020(a)(3) has been revised to allow the Director to require additional width (6 inches) for a parking space adjacent to a post where such a post limits turning movements into or out of the stall. Section 18.54.050(d) specifies that paving materials may be permeable. Staffhas not included any further incentives for the use of permeable paving as the only area where impervious cover is limited is in the Open Space (OS) zoning district. Staff will evaluate the impervious limitations and permeable paving option with the upcoming revisions to the OS zone. The tables and figures at the end of Chapter 18.54 have been modified to eliminate those that dealt with ~nett-ic measurements, standard size spaces, and compact spaces. Remaining tables and figures are only those pertinent to uni-class spaces and handicapped accessible spaces. City of Palo Alto Page 4 A summary of the other key changes to the parking regulations was included in the March 14, 2007 P&TC staffreport (Attact~nent F). ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW The revisions proposed are responsive to Comprehensive Plan policies, are minor in nature and would not substantially increase the density or intensity of development in the city. The multiple- family changes comprise minor modifications to allow added flexibility for development on smal! lots, particularly adjacent to nom’esidential uses. The addition of a Village Residential section allows for better transition uses adjacent to single-family areas, but does not result in any increased density. The parking amendments are minor and balance flexibility for parking adjustments with more stringent methodologies for allowing parking reductions and TDM programs. The amendments are therefore consistent with the analysis provided in the Comprehensive Plan and further enviro~mental review is not required. Environmental review will be required, however, for subsequent projects that are proposed subject to these regulations. NEXT STEPS Based on the Commission’s reconm~endation, staffwitl prepare the draft Ordinances to be forwarded to the City Counci! for its consideration. The final section of the Zoning Ordinance Update will be a clean up and reformatting of the remainder of the docmnent, with a few miscellaneous substantive revisions, tentatively scheduled for May 2007. ATTACHMENTS E. F. G. Draft Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Fmnily Residential Districts) Draft Redlined Chapter 18.13 Draft Chapters 18.52 (Parking m~d Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Desigm Standards) Draft Redlined Chapters 18.52 and 18.54 Multi-Family Setback and Daylight Plane Diagrams March 14, 2007 Planning and Transportation Corm-nission Staff Report March 14, 2007 Planning and Transportation Commission Minutes COURTESY COPIES City Council Architectural Review Board Doug Moran, Ban-on Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen White Natalie Cardenas, Silicon Valley Association of Realtors PREPARED BY:Kevin Gardiner, Contract Planner REVIEWED BY:Julie Caporgno, Chief Planning and Transportation Official DEPARTMENT/DIVISION HEAD APPROVAL: Curtis Williams Assistant Director City of Palo Alto Page 5 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 3t 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Planning and Transportation Commission Verbatim Minutes April 11, 2007 EXCERPT Zoning Ordinance Update - Review and recommendations to City Council for: A) An Ordinance Revising and Consolidating Chapters 18.22, 18.24, and 18.26 into a new Chapter 18.13 (Multiple Family Residential Districts: RM-15, P~M-30, and RAM-40); and B) An Ordinance Revising and Renumbering Chapter 18.83 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) to New Chapters 18.52 (Off-Street Parking and Loading Regulations) and 18.54 (Parking Facility Design Standards). Environmental Review: Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report. Mr. Williams: Yes, thank you. What I would like to do is briefly touch on the changes that we have made in response to comments the Commission provided at the last meeting and then talk about a couple of additional suggested changes that are reflected in a memo that you should have received today. I think it was emailed to you this morning and left at places tonight. Then respond also to some questions or suggestions that Commissioner Keller had on the rezonings. There were a few key changes to tile multi-family zoning section. We talked last time about the fact that parking is excluded from the floor area calculations. The Commissioners are looking like they don’t have the memo. CommissioI~er Butt: I printed the email but I didn’t bring it. Mr. Williams: Okay, she is going to get copies for you. It will be awhile before I get to talk about that email. That’s it, one page, two bullet paragraphs to it. So it will be a little while before I get to that any~vay. You have yours. Okay, great. So we talked about the fact that the parking square footage is not included in gross floor area for multi-family but wanting to limit that. The Commission last time talked about a 250 square foot maximum exclusion for the first space and then 200 square feet after that. We went back and looked at that and felt like that was not so workable mainly because you tend to have two spaces that are essentially the same size. If you have a two car garage and you say the last three feet of it or so for utilities and that kind of thing it is three feet times 20, which is about 60 square feet plus the 20 by 20 that you need for the vehicles themselves. So it worked out to about 460 square feet of area for a two-car garage. If you have another garage space that is for another unit then you are still going to want to have probably those three feet at the back. So our preference is and suggestion is that we just use a 2.30 square foot per space. It is a lot easier to calculate. There is also some difficulty with trying to define in words sort of what the additional 200 square feet is. If it is a row often spaces in carports or if it is two garage spaces and trying to make that Page 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 _~4 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 distinction. So it is a lot easier adlninistratively to just say 230 square feet. We don’t think it is abusive in any way in terms of allowing square footage. So our suggestion is to use 230 square feet per space as the maximum that you could exclude. Remember that these are for required parking spaces. So if you are required two spaces per unit and you want to have a third one enclosed then that is going to count as floor area. Secondly, we talked about providing retail and personal services within larger apartment or multi-family complexes. The Commission suggested reducing from 50 units down to 40 units as the tlv-eshold at which that could occur. So we have done that. Also suggested that 2,500 square feet might be too low, we have suggested 5,000 square feet. It could be more than that but we are concerned that once you get more than that it starts to serve a larger area, and potentially has some parking implications and that that maybe we don’t want to get to. It still also would be limited by three percent of the square footage of the residential portion of the proj ect. So the 40 or 50 units, three percent of that roughly comes out to be about 2,500 square feet. If you have 100 units then you might be up to that 5,000 square foot maxilnum. We have also suggested as the Commission had suggested perhaps there is a threshold of size or combination of size and proximity or lack of proximity to neighborhood services at which point we want to require some ser~,ices within the complex. We have suggested a minimum of 1,500 square feet of neighborhood retail or se~wices be provided where any of these projects in excess of 40 units is not located within 500 feet of some kind of neighborhood service. The Director would determine whether there appears to be neighborhood services available within 500 feet and if not then we could require that to be incorporated into the project. We would still maintain the sections as far as it not being subject to the floor area limitations so it doesn’t count against that, and generally the only parking that is required is for employees that work there. Thirdly, the Commission had suggested that we provide some language that prohibits the loss of rental units at least not lower than the maximum number of units that could be built on the site if you are already exceeding that. So we have provided language that says that essentially where three or more units exist at least two of those are rentals that those may not be demolished or replaced unless there are an equal number of rental units provided or if that existing number exceeds the current maximum that you at least provide for the maximum number of units allowable on that site under zoning as rentals. We believe that is consistent with Program H-29 of the Comprehensive Plan and are comfortable with moving forward with that. Fourth, Individual Review, we discussed Individual Review last time being required for single family and two family residences that are in multi-family zone districts. So if you have a second story and if it is immediately adjacent to another single family or two fainily home then you would need to go through the individual Review process. We tried to structure the language, and this is one of the changes that is not in your memo but one of the changes that we would recommend, we have tried to structure the language so that it is clear that the Individual Review process applies between those single family homes and it doesn’t apply between the single family and an adjacent multi-family or commercial development. The language is found on page six of the clean version of the multi-family code in C-2. There is language in the last sentence of it that is kind of confusing the way it reads in looking at it again yesterday. We would prefer that it essentially say, "The Individual Review shall not be applied to adjacent uses other than single Page 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 "9 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 family and two family uses." So right now it say, ’shall be limited to evaluation of the relationship with the adjacent single family or two family dwelling and streetscape compatibility, etc., etc. tn looking at it is kind of hard to interpret so what we really want to say is it is not applying if it is next to - you don’t look at Individual Review as it affects a neighboring apartment or commercial it is just between the single family and two family residences just as if it were in the R-1 zone. Chair Holman: Curtis, could you repeat that language, please? Mr. Williams: Sure. That is page six of the ordinance, item C-2. Chair Holman: Page seven of the redline if that is the one you are looking at. Mr. Williams: Page seven of the redline, yes. The language, the first full sentence there stays the same. It is ’provisions are required where a site shares an interior side lot line, etc., etc. Then the second sentence would be replaced by language that says, ’the Individual Review shall not be applied to adjacent uses other than single family or two family uses.’ So we would suggest that modification. So that is a summary of the key changes that we have made. We also made most of, maybe not all of, I think not all of Mr. Keller’s changes or corrections that he had to the chapter as well as to the Parking Chapter. The second area of discussion was the Village Residential Development Criteria we made a few modifications there. There was language about, I don’t know if there was actually a suggestion to make any changes to it, but language about the fact that this Village Residential type wouldn’t necessarily require a homeowner’s association. That is true, it could be done through the use of easements and that kind of thing. So going back to it it didn’t really need any change to the ordinance language to allow that to happen. But what we did do was added a subsection that allows the Director to require appropriate CC&Rs, easements, maintenance agreements, and/or other legal instruments to document and disclose the conditions of project approval as well as if there are easements established that we are sure that we have looked at those and that those satisfy us, particularly from a maintenance standpoint and being sure that access is maintained in some lega! fashion. Secondly, the provisions in another subsection, so we discussed how after a project is approved and built, our changes subsequently made, and I think the language previously basically said that you would have to go through the process again, amend the original approval at the request of homeowner’s association or some equivalent representative group for all the property owners. So we have broadened that to say that that methodology could be specified in the original approval so there wouldn’t need to be a subsequent amendment if the original approval said certain lots could add x, y, or z square footage or add sheds or something like that, then that could be dealt with that way. Or it could be as an amendment to the initial approval by either the property owner or horneowner’s association or any similar legal entity that represented that group of owners. So that seems to be a more expeditious option as far as doing something up front with the original approval that might identify the way that could be done. Also, the Page 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 DD 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 language allows the Director the discretion to just do a minor architectural review, allow very minor changes to exterior elevations or something like that, if they weren’t conflicting in some way with the original approval. Then thirdly and there wasn’t a lot of discussion about this but there was a little and in thinking about it more it seemed that it was appropriate not only to have the minimum lot size requirement that we have but to also have a maximum lot size and house size so that we don’t create essentially R-1 zones. This Village Residential is intended to be a transition zone, a bit higher density, but not a multi-family apartment type project. So we have suggested that while the nainimuna lot sizes may be 1,500 square feet for attached and 2,500 square foot for detached homes that there should be a maxinaum of 4,000 square foot on the lot sizes and a maximum house size of 2,500 square feet, which is still a big home but we think that is necessary or we have basically undone the incentive of even using this. That is frankly what we have seen on some of these projects coming through recently. So we believe that that at least prohibits kind of an R-1 approach to developing the site which is not the intent of this section. Thirdly the Parking Regulations and Design we made several minor changes. The list of TDM measures has incorporated some of Commissioner Keller’s suggestions for some additional types of measures, we also added, I don’t l, mow if he had suggested parking cash-out but that is one the Bicycle Committee had actually suggested so we have included that. It is just a laundry list of TDM measures. Also added a footnote to Table 4 so that any parking reduction rather than saying you start with ten spaces and you can ask for parking reduction I think your direction at the last meeting was that after the reduction you have at least ten parking spaces on the site. So we have worded it that way. We have added that the Director has discretion to require an additional six-inch separation for parking adjacent to where there are posts that might impede turning radius. Many times they won’t so it isn’t necessary to require it but we did add that that discretion is there in case it is necessary from a turn radius and safety standpoint. We have added that on the paving there was some suggestion and we had added some language specifying that paving materials do not need to be impermeable which is what it said before, that they may be permeable. We haven’t provided any further incentives for permeable paving given that right now at least fiOln a permeability standpoint there aren’t any limitations on impervious surface other than in the OS district and we are going to come back to you and try to address that through that OS district. That will be in the final set of miscellaneous changes that we will be bringing to you next. So we ~vill definitely be looking at that. Then after your study session with the Council on Monday my thought at this point is that after we get this last group of kind of cleanup changes together and we can say we have an updated Zoning Ordinance that then we prioritize for you what you want us to corne back to and revisit or visit that we haven’t gotten to. One of the first things I think is going to be sustainability issues. So I think we will look again across the board kind of at permeability and paving not just in parking but in other sections of the code at that time as well. Then the tables and figures at the end of the parking design chapter we modified, we deleted the ones that had to do with compact spaces and old standard space and all that. We did not have Page 4 1 2 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 2-/ 28 29 30 31 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 those tables and figures electronically so Kevin Gardner has recreated the figures. He did not get to recreate the tables but we will do that and they are not numbered correctly right now but the material or information in them is correct. So we will be renumbering those and cleaning that up as part of this but we have included the ones that do apply here at the end of 18.54 so that you can see those. Then there are two other changes in the memo that we sent to you today related to the Parking Chapter, 18.52 that deal with the TDM section. The main concern we had in looking at this again and talking about it in the office was that these are all good ideas and I think it goes as a great start towards getting us into a sort of common methodology for looking at TDM. However, this is the Parking Chapter of the ordinance so it really isn’t applicable to trip generation and traffic. We can’t kind of apply this because we have trip generation that we think is significant on a project. So our suggestion is to modify this one section so that we say that the TDM program, the applicable programs, may be proposed by the applicant, maybe required by Staff in response to a request for a parking reduction, that was already in there before, or could be required for CEQA mitigation for parking impacts. So all those things draw you to the parking ordinance and section so we can do that but the language that we had in there for traffic impacts under CEQA really are not applicable in a parking section. So I think the reality is that we probably in a CEQA document will look at if there are traffic impacts and we feel that a TDM measure is an appropriate, a TDM program is appropriate, we wi!l probably look to this section to get some guidance as to how to write that mitigation measure and a lot of this language may end up kind of there but we don’t think this language about trip generation should be in here. So we have suggested striking that. Then the second change is that we had in here at the suggestion with the Commission last time that when monitoring reports are submitted that the Director may require further program mitigations or contributions to in lieu traffic mitigation fees upon the Council’s resolution in enacting such a fee. Well, in discussing that we don’t have a fee. We at this point there may be other ways that we come up with as well in terms of providing for landscape reserves, providing for the additional parking you would have needed otherwise. There are a lot of different ways to address this and we are concerned that sticking in a fee here that even though it doesn’t exist right now is we think going to be kind of a red flag that isn’t appropriate. If and when such a fee is adopted and it would apply in these circumstances we can add that but right now it doesn’t exist and that it doesn’t belong in the ordinance if it doesn’t exist now. So we would suggest striking that portion of that line as well. Then finally, Commissioner Keller had some comments and changes and t won’t go through some of the corrections that he has suggested here but there a couple of substantive points that I did want to bring to the Commission’s attention and respond to. On the multi-family section he had a question and comment about the section that we added - no, it was on the BMR section, which is page seven, I think. Commissioner Keller: Page eight and nine. Mr. Williams: Page eight and nine of the clean version. Page 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: It is 18.13. Mr. Williams: Right, 18.13. The one comment was clarifying that the percentage is a percentage of all the units including the BMR units it is not the non-BMR units and then you add the BMR units. So that is fine we will do that. That is the intent. That is the way it works. The second part is to try to put some language in here that essentially says that this satisfies SB1818 and concessions and incentives and we don’t think we can go there at this point. Cara and I haven’t had a chance to discuss this even but I know I was recently at a conference where there was a discussion of SB 1818 and they made it pretty clear that you can’t just sort of say that in your ordinance. You really need to create a BMR ordinance that says what you as a City have as incentives and concessions before you go to the point of saying that satisfies SB1818. So that would take a lot of discussion and working through that kind of language. I think we need to do that but this isn’t the place where we think that should happen. On the parking section there was a suggestion, and this was kind of a small issue, not that one was okay. There was a question about how do we encourage use by the general public during off hours of onsite off-street parking spaces within the Parking Assessment Districts and how that would help Downtown parking that is scarce on the weekends and evenings. I am not sure what the answer is to that but I don’t think the Parking Ordinance is going to resolve it. The other thing, which I mentioned to Mr. Keller before the meeting, is that we have really been hands off on the Parking Assessment Districts in this ordinance. They are very complicated, they are confusing, and it would be nice to be able to try to sort through the language. There are formulas for how people pay into it and all this is long established. To start inonkeying with any of that is sort of asking for a lot of concern and involvement on the part of the merchants that participate in that. So a few of the Commissioner’s questions had to do with changes to the Parking Assessment District and there were a couple that had to do with just a word here or there and that is fine, we will get to that, but overall did not want to modify any of the substance of the districts at all or get into that. There is a question as far as onsite employee amenities which is Table 4 which is pages 14, 15, and 16 of the Parking Ordinance, on 14 Onsite Employee Amenities, and this is a can-yover from the cun-ent language basically that the square footage of onsite employee amenities like cafeterias and g~-ns and that kind of thing is not included in and does not need to be parked basically. So you don’t have to account, the theory being that is serving the area and it is reducing trips and parking that otherwise might be necessary. So the question essentially was shouldn’t one spot per employee providing the amenity be required, except that it may be reduced based on shared use or TDM considerations? We could do that but I don’t think it is really worth getting to that level of detail. I think the theory here is that that’s a good thing and we want to encourage it and if there are a couple of employees that work in there then we are essentially assuming that that still overall is a benefit in terms of traffic and parking. So we wouldn’t suggest making a change to that section. There is language in a couple of different sections that has to do with off-site parking that it be within 500 feet generally of a site. I think there is one of these sections where it says of the Page 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 boundaries of the area and I think it is supposed to be the parking assessment area. So we will make that change. Then another place where it says ’site’ and it says ’area’ somewhere else and we will use ’site.’ So we will just make the language consistent so that it works in all of those situations. Then on 18.54, which is the Desi~ chapter, updating the tables, which I said we will do. A good suggestion to at the end of 18.54.020 which talks about some of the basic design requirements where the last part F refers to the tables and the figures and it just kind of refers to them and we will add some language that sort of says that those tables and figures outline additional required design for, I think I actually have some language here. Something to the effect that Figures 1 through 6 and Tables 3 through 6 are located at the end of this chapter and depict site specific design requirements for parking stalls, aisles, driveways, accessibility in parking lots. So we will add that just to make that link between those tables and figures and these other requirernents here. Let’s see if there was on more. This was a little bit of detective work. Table 6, which is attached, which actually will be renumbered Table 4, has a reference at the bottom, a footnote that refers to Table 10. There not only is not a Table 10 in our ordinance there is not a Table 10 in the existing ordinance either. So we went back and found out that Table 10 actually, looking in an ordinance about ten years ago is what Figure 5 is now. So we will refer to Figure 5, which shows parking ramps and braids and that kind of thing. So I appreciate Commissioner Keller’s bringing that up. Gayle Likens and I had a fun time today finding that and looking al! over for Table 10 that didn’t exist. Then there are some categories for driveway widths and such that deal with urban and rural. Gayle wasn’t quite sure and will try to find out exactly what the distinction is but our thinking is that we would apply the rural standards in the OS and RE zones and urban elsewhere. She is going to try to verify that with the Public Works Staff. She said she never deals with anything but the urban really so it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue but it is in there. It says ’urban’ and ’rural’ so we should know what those mean. [ think that’s it. I am sorry for the longwinded explanations and changes and whatever but I think we are about there. I would be glad to answer questions. Chair Holman: Thank you very much. I hate to bring this up but just following your changes I may have discovered something else. I believe we two Chapters 18.54.050. I am happy to be wrong on that. Mr. Williams: I think I just saw that too. Chair Holman: 18.54.050, one is Landscaping of Parking Areas and the other is Miscellaneous Design Standards. Mr. Williams: Okay, Landscaping of Parking Areas is shown in the Table of Contents as 040, so does that work or is there another 040 in here? Okay, so it should be 040. Landscaping should be 040. Thank you. Page 7 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: At least that should be an easy fix. Commissioners, do we have clarifying questions for Staff?. We have I think two members of the public who wish to speak. Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I have a series of clarifying questions relating to Table 3 on the Village Residential. The first one is the .5 FAR, does that refer to the project as a whole, I assume7 Mr. Williams: Yes. Commissioner Tuma: Okay, we are not talking about .... Mr. Williams: It is the same as the RM-15. Commissioner Tuma: Okay, we are not talking about separate lots here that that .5 wouldn’t make sense. Mr. Williams: Right. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. So I don’t know if that needs to be clarified or if that is. Mr. Williams: it probably does. It would probably be good as on these other ones we say apply to the site or apply to the perimeter of the site. it probably should say applies to the site as a whole or something like that. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. Another somewhat picky issue but this is something that has been a topic of debate, i recognize that the 230 square feet per garage space does not count towards the total FAR. My question is now that we have broken out a maximum house size is the 230 square feet contained within the 2,500 square feet or are we talking about 2,730 square foot structures? Mr. Williams: Or even more because it could be a two-car garage. Commissioner Tuma: Would the second car garage also not count towards the 2,500 square feet? Mr. Williams: It wouldn’t as long as it is a required parking space. I know we just say one space is required to be covered but we require two spaces. So if you cover both spaces then both of those would be exempt. If you had a third one that would not be exempt. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. Now we are getting up to 2,900 square foot structures on 2,500 square foot lots. Okay, we will get into it in cornrnents I just wanted to clarify that. Mr. Williams: Most likely those would larger lots than 2,500 square feet but theoretically you are right it could happen. Commissioner Tuma: Okay that is it on the Table for now. Page 8 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: Follow up the question. The minimum and maxin~ums then that are listed on the Table are those FAR numbers meaning that, I am trying to ten, ember what our discussion was last time about basements, etc. Mr. Williams: Basements still are not counted. Commissioner Garber: So these numbers do not include basements? Mr. Williams: tn fact let rne double-check something here. Chair Holman: I believe last time it was stated that basements are not allowed in the multi- family. Mr. Williams: Yes, let me double check because this is not single family so they are not automatically excluded. I don’t think that it was that they weren’t allowed just that they count as square footage. Commissioner Garber: As FAR square footage. Mr. Williams: Right. Let me look at the definition here. Yes, so in multi-family zones basement, cellar, attic areas deemed usable by the Director of Planning and Community Environment, so any livable area of a basement, unless a basement was just six feet high and storage or something like that. Generally once it meets building code requirements like seven and a half feet we consider it to be habitable and would count. Commissioner Garber: So in this case the numbers would include a basement. Mr. Williams: They would. Commissioner Garber: Designed it that way. Mr. Williams: Yes. Chair Holman: Vice-Chair Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have a question with regard to the IR process applied to the RM for the smaller number of units. Why not just apply ARB standards but do it at Staff level as a minor as opposed to the IR standards, which really has to do more with two story structures? They might not be two story structures they might be one story. Mr. Williams: If it were one story it would be a building pemait. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay. Page 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,,‘2 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 .2.2 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Williams: It refers to the Individual Review section in the R-1 code and that specifically then says it only applies when it is a two-story structure. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay, so it would have no design review whatsoever except for meeting development regulations. Mr. Williams: For a one story structure, yes. Vice-Chair LiRpert: Okay. Then on the parking issue and the exemption of the FAR. We are very specific when we come to parking lots and saying that a space that is nine feet wide by 18 feet long defines a parking space. Well, if you took 10 by 20, take out six inches for a wall on each side and you basically end up with 200 square feet. Why not use that as our raw number? We use that for all vehicles in terms of being able to have a vehicle plus a little extra room to be able to get out of the car. Whereas if you allow for the 230 square feet for ever eight spaces you are really allowing another whole 200 square feet of floor area that is exempt basically. Mr. Williams: i understand that point but I think we are trying to go from right now xve exempt all garage space and we have been seeing garages, two car garages essentially from 450 to 500 square feet. So we are trying to put some realistic limitation. I think you can say 20 by 20 is a two-car garage but it is really a one-car garage with a lot of storage or maybe none. We are trying to define some reasonable limit that we think will allow parking cars and have some, as most garages do, some additional area for utilities as David Solnick said last time just for steps up into the house and that kind of thing takes a couple extra feet at the rear. Which isn’t to say you catYt do it at 200 square feet per space but it is tight and in today’s market I don’t think it is realistic. So yes, we could do that in which case I think we are probablyjust binging everybody for 60 to 80 square feet pet two-car garage. If you want to go that way t guess we can do that but we thought it was better to just be realistic about xvhat we are seeing as garage size and be sure that it is reasonable but be sure that we are prohibiting them from - we did see some on some three or four unit project or something like that where I think they were 600 square feet and got it approved. They made their argument that it was a two-car garage but we want to be sure that doesn’t happen again. So I think we are taking care of that case which is what we really wmat to have tiffs number in here for. Vice-Chair Lippe11: I guess my line of questioning is one of if you build a larger garage will people put a larger car in it why not limit the amount of space and maybe they will buy a smaller car. Then the flip side of that is t guess if people are putting storage, washer/dryer, things like that in their garages. Well, it doesn’t make a difference whether it is in the garage or it is part of the house shouldn’t that really count towards the floor area of whole development, technically? So the idea is that what you are saying is that if you put storage in the garage we won’t count it but if you put storage in the house we will. If you are going to give them that square footage why not let them put in the house where it is more usable? Mr. Williams: I understand. Page 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller, did you have a clarifying question? We are only after clarifying questions because we do have two members of the public who would care to speak. Commissioner Keller: Yes, thank you. You earlier stated in response to Commissioner Tuma’s questions regarding Village Residential and attached garages and the comment was that it was 2,500 square feet to which there would be additional garage space and the garage space would not count. What I am wondering is even if garage space doesn’t count for FAR is it possible for garage space to count in the limit of 2,500 square feet? Mr. Willimns: You could define it anyway you want to. I think it is probably preferable to try to be consistent with the way we are doing it for the site as a xvhole but it doesn’t have to be that way. So it is up to the Commission. Commissioner Keller: Okay, thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma, do you have a clarifying question? Commissioner Tuma: I do. It has to do with the language again on the Village Residential applicability of the regulations. I just wanted to clarify. It talks about it is applicable to substandard RM-30 and RM-40 but also the perimeter of larger RM-30 and RAM-40. What do we mean by ’larger?’ Do we need to define that a little bit better because I am not sure what that means? Mr. Williams: If we can define it a little better it would be nice probably to do so but it is really pretty site specific and kind of depends on what the adjacent use is. So I would guess that larger is at least an acre but in most cases it would probably be something more than that. But it could be an acre and say one side of it is adjacent to single family and we want to have this Village Residential product there and something more intense farther away flom the single family. Cominissioner Tuma: Okay, I just want to make sure that when you were saying larger you meaning larger than a substandard. Mr. Williams: Oh, no. Commissioner Tuma: It wasn’t meant to modify the word substandard. Mr. Williams: Very good point. Commissioner Tuma: As I recall there is a very clear definition in R-1 as to what substandard is, is there also likewise definitions about 15 and 30 and what substandard is? Mr. Williams: Yes, we have defined it in here as being basically anything that is less than 8,500 square feet or less than 70 Feet in width, which are the basic minimum lot size requirements. Commissioner Tuma: Okay that clears it up, thanks. Page 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 !5 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: We have two members of the public who would like to speak. Commissioner Keller has one more clarifying question. Commissioner Keller: With respect to 18.52.050. Chair Hohnan: How about a page number? I am sorry. Commissioner Keller: A page number is 16 and 17, 18.52 on the clean not the redline. It says that transportation and parking alternatives the landscape reserve requirement is deleted but for B, Deferral of Meeting Full Requirement by Landscape Resei-ve, that is a situation in which you do have landscape reserve. So the question is does that landscape reserve that is because of deferral of meeting ful! requirement does that count as usable open space? Mr. Williams: I wouldn’t think it would and I don’t think we have counted it that way unless we have some absolute assurance that if at some point in time it is released and it is determined that there is not a need for it then it could be counted that way but they should have already satisfied the open space requirement. I don’t know that we need to say that here but if you think we do we could specify that. Commissioner Keller: Un-ambiguity or disambiguation is a good thing. Chair Holman: To be dis-ambiguous we are going to go to the public. Bob Moss is our first speaker to be followed by Jean Snider and you will each have five minutes. Thank you for coming. Mr. Robert Moss. Palo Alto: Thank you Chainnan Holman and Commissioners. There is a lot of paper here so I may have trouble translating where I am finding things but I am going to try. One of the things that I found a little inconsistent and a little bit disturbing is the discussion of tandem parking. It is talked about differently in different places. For example, there is a general statement that tandem parking is only allowed when both of the parking spaces for a single use, a single apartment, but then we talk about parking were we require one and a quarter or one and a halfor two parking spaces per unit depending on the size or the number of bedrooms. Then it also says you can have a 25 percent tandem parking which could be interpreted as being for the entire site not limiting the tandem parking only to those units which are required to have two or more parking spaces. So for example you could have a requirement for say 100 parking spaces of which 60 of them are for studio and one bedroom units which wouldn’t have two parking spaces but then the developer could come in and say allow a 25 percent reduction taking the total number of tandem parking spaces. So it has to be worded in such a way that the number of tandem parking spaces relates only to the units that have a two or more requirement not for the entire site. Then there are some inconsistencies. There was a discussion in one Table of parking spaces for units in projects that have four or more units. I think you should talk about for developments that have four or more units not units that have four or more units. For example in 18.52.040 there is a Table that talks about the parking spaces and the tandem parking relaxation. Then there was an inconsistency when you get back to 18.54.020 where it talks about tandem parking, Page 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 .~) _~1 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 this is in Section D, tandem parking should be allowed in multiple family residence districts but not to exceed 25 percent of all spaces required. Here it doesn’t have the limitation that tandem parking is only permitted where both the tandem and the underlying parking space are assigned to the same unit. So that should be clarified because this would tell you something different than the other sections. Mr. Williams: What second is that again, Bob? Mr. Moss: This is 18.54.020 (d), Tandem parking shall be allowed in multiple family residence units but not to exceed 25 percent of all spaces required, instead of saying tandem parking is limited only to the duplicate units. Then there was something else that was kind of odd. In the section on having - here we are, where you can have eating or drinking uses and you are allowed two ty-pes of- for any project 40 or more units you can have 1,500 square feet of neighborhood ser~dng retail, personal service, eating and drinking. Well, drinking could be a bar. Now farther down it talks about neighborhood serving uses and it says liquor is explicitly excluded. So if you are going to be excluding liquor you should say the drinking should not include liquor to drink so you are consistent throughout. I had a little problem with the off-site parking. This is in 18.52.050 (c). We are allowing off-site parking 500 feet from the use. I can’t imagine your doing that in a residential zone. I think it is kind of dicey in a commercial zone so I would suggest that you say off-site parking only in nonresidential uses. You shouldn’t be allowing off-site parking in a residential zone. Thank you. Chair Holman: Are there any questions for Mr. Moss? Ms. Snider, thank you for coming. Dis. Jean Snider. Menlo Park: Good evening Commissioners. I am here on behalf of Stanford and the Research Park in particular. My comments tonight are limited to the proposed new parking chapter and more specifically the TDM measures drafted as part of that chapter. We support the introduction of an alternative to landscape reserve to accommodate requests for reduced parking. Alternatives such as these provide the flexibility to adapt a project’s design to the unique characteristics and requirements of a site or a user and the result we believe will be a more site specific project and overall smarter design. Where we got concerned was the in lieu fee because it tended to setup a burden that might disincentivize and applicant from proposing reduced parking and even proposing TDM. So we were concerned about that. Regarding traffic, Curtis is proposing some changes and just for the record we want to state that we do support TDM as an alternative to other tyqpes of mitigation because today really an applicant has no other option but to pay a traffic impact fee at least in the Research Park or to pay for roadway improvements. What we were worried about the way the original language was written is that there could be TDM imposed on top of those fees as well as perhaps an in lieu fee at the end. We believe that any kind of TDM with relation to traffic should be considered comprehensively with aIl the development impact fees to make sure that they are fair and Page 13 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 appropriate. That is really it. If you have any questions for me about the Research Park and TDM I would be happy to answer them. Chair Holman: Commissioners, do you have any questions for Ms, Snider? Seeing none we will close the public comment and come back to Commissioners for questions. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: With respect to tandem parking I think we had a discussion about that I am not sure if the discussion directly reflected it but I wi!l tell you what makes sense to me and see if this matches your model of the universe. Let’s just take for example two units that have requirement for one and a half parking spaces per unit. Now, this might not be reflected properly in the language but this is what makes sense to me. If you have two units that require one and a half spaces per unit you have a choice. You can either put three spaces that are shared use or you can create two pairs of tandem spaces each of which is assigned to one unit and thereby provide actually four spaces. Because two spaces are dedicated to one unit and then two spaces are dedicated to another unit so therefore in some sense you round up the fractions of parking if you provide tandem spaces. If there were a requirement for two and a half spaces, which there isn’t but if there were a requirement for two and a half spaces, then you could provide two of them as tandem and the other half could be some sort of shared. I am thinking that where you are providing tandem spaces that that is a round up and dedicated to that unit. Does that match your model of the universe7 Mr. Williams: That is what we intended. Essentially these fractional ones the only way you could get to do tandem parking is to provide essentially an additional full space. So you could do that subject again to overall for the entire spaces on the site being no more than 25 percent of that as wel!, It also doesn’t disturb me to write it more like Mr. Moss was saying and make it real clear that tandem spaces are only available where you have two spaces required or two spaces provided for a specific unit. Commissioner Keller: Perhaps the way to put this is that if you provide tandem spaces then may flactional space that is used to round up to create the tandem spaces doesn’t count toward your parking requirement. So therefore you effectively have provided three spaces and the other halves assigned to each unit don’t count. That might be a way of handling it that satisfies what Mr. Moss is referring to and also means that the 25 percent doesn’t include the extra half space, if that makes any sense. So that might be a way of handling that problem and still having them dedicated to each unit. Chair Holman: I think if I might, I think what you are saying is that fractional requirements don’t get accumulated, that might be another way of considering it. Commissioner Keller: Fractional requirements are accumulated when they are shared but dedicated fi’actional requirements are not acculnulated. That is my point. Mr. Williams: A fractional currently is accumulated. If you have all one bedrooms that require one and a half spaces and you have ten units you provide 15 spaces for that. You don’t round up Page 14 ] 2 3 4 5 6 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 for each one and do two instead. But like you said, essentially only ten of those can be designated to the individual apartments and five of them are going to need to be shared spaces that could be used by any of those. Commissioner Keller: So what you couldn’t do, and I think that this makes sense that you shouldn’t be able to do it, is if you have ten units each of which is supposed to provide one and a half spaces you say five of them will get two car garages and five of them will get one car garages and that provides 15 spaces but it is kind of cheap to the people who get the one car garages. So the idea that if you create dedicated spaces for a particular unit or tandem spaces, which is a form of dedicated space in a two-car garage, then essentially the extra half space doesn’t count. Mr. Williams: To me it is a lot easier to just say it only applies where you have requirements for two spaces for a unit or where you are providing two spaces and that is in excess of your requirement. I don’t want to get into saying rounding up and creating more a formula kind of approach. That just gets too complicated and it is not really that complicated an issue and it is something that we already look at. We are making sure that the overall number of spaces for each unit are available and the overall number of tandem spaces are not excessive so that we are not relying too heavily on tandem parking space. Chair Hoh-nan: Vice-Chair Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: Continuing along the lines of the parking spaces again I am beginning to get buyer’s remorse on this thing. What it is is I think Vice-Mayor Klein said something very telling in the Joint Meeting that we had which was are we really looking at parking in reIationship to the environment? What I am beginning to think is maybe the parking should count towards floor area with the goal in mind of trying to reduce the carbon footprint. My thought here is that maybe it should be tied to some sort of offset which would be the area of parking is exempt from FAR when an equivalent area of maybe solar cells are provided to generate electricity thereby offsetting the fossil fuel and carbon emissions. So I am just thinking out loud with regard to this and I know this is the eleventh hour but we did only just have that Joint Meeting with Council and I am just looking at another way of us to try to enhance green parking spaces. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Burr: I am interested in exploring ways in which we can incentivize the favorable environmental outcome but I am not sure that that proposal would work unless we could somehow have a solar powered laser to vaporize the vehicle that would be there. We would still have the vehicle, right, xvhether we have the solar panel or not. So the parking is there to accommodate the vehicle. I think we need to look at it in a different way if there are incentives or disincentives that could reduce the number of vehicles or change the type of vehicles to ones that are more environmentally benign then those would be interesting things to look at. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber. Page 15 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 .3- 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 Commissioner Garber: I find this train of thought an interesting one and worth pursuing however, I think relative to what we are trying to accomplish this evening the topic is significantly larger. We do have a study session coming up that may allow us to pursue some of these ideas in more generality and get into them in terms of initiating some of these thoughts. I think for this evening I am not sure I am equipped to evaluate one way or another if it is a good idea or not or if it should be included or not. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Butt: I agree that that would be the better context to look at it in greater depth. I just don’t think at this point in time that we can incorporate those kinds of fundamental changes in what is before us especially given that we had asked Staffto give us this additional session and make these changes in response to our last meeting. I think that these are things that we are going to want to explore in greater depth in the future and we should strive to create opportunities to really pursue those options at a later time. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert, you bad a comment? Vice-Chair Lippert: Yes..All that I am really doing here - this is not meant to derail the discussion or make it go off in another direction but here we are we have an opportunity, we are looking at what not counting FAR towards parking means and it is just another way of looking at it is all that I am saying. So I am getting a little cold feet in terms of the direction that we are going so I would want the tightest restriction on the parking possible in terms of FAR until we were able to get our hands around what it meant in terms o sustainability and footprint. This is exactly what the direction that Vice-Mayor Klein had given us in that session. Chair Holman: Other comments or questions? Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Changing the subject a little bit it seems to me that the idea of reducing parking through shared uses makes sense only when the parking spaces are shared. When you have dedicated parking spaces those should be excluded from consideration for the reductions for shared use. So dedicated parking spaces could be dedicated to one of the housing units, they could be dedicated to one of the commercial or retail or office or whatever establishments. In that case you don’t have the benefit of shared use so you don’t get the benefit of reducing parking. I think that is different from green spaces because green spaces could be shared among any people who use the entire facility but when dedicated to a unit that doesn’t make sense to me. Mr. Williams: That is the way it is done currently. We just reviewed Mr. Hobach’s 195 Page Mill where there is a mixed use scenario and the numbers created. There were some areas that were set aside as assigned spaces and we segregated those out and made sure that there were adequate shared spaces available to meet the demand and they could not be dedicated to one use or the other if they were being counted that way in the calculation. Commissioner Keller: So would it make sense to add some language to make that explicit? Page !6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 ,.3,2 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Williams: I don’t think we need to. We have referred to some methodologies that can be used for that and that is part of the methodologies that ULI and others create for calculating how mixed use parking works. Commissioner Keller: Great. I notice that you said you were discouraging dead end aisles in parking. What I am wondering is if there should be a requirement like is provided at the Bird garage where there are dead end aisles for turnaround space at the end of the aisle. Otherwise I am not sure how people would get back out of there. Mr. Williams: Well, we look at that on a site-by-site basis. The Fire Department and Public Works Department and there are some cases where even the Fire Department has said we don’t need a turnaround, it is a short enough distance that we can back out. We have tried to push that in fact in many cases because you create a little sea of asphalt in a big turnaround in a small project and that is not a desirable design feature but as long as the Fire Department feels like they can make their hoses reach where they need to go then it is sufficient. So we have the discretion to determine whether that is necessary or not. Commissioner Keller: What I am refeMng to in the Bird garage is there isn’t a place for a fire truck to make a complete U-turn around there but there are two parking spaces on the end that are not allocated as parking spaces so somebody in an ordinary car who ventures down that aisle doesn’t have to back out but it can basically pull into the blank space that is not used for parking and then turnaround to exit fo~avard. That is the kind of thing t am referring to. Mr. Williams: Okay, and that is something that again is a site design issue that is looked at by Staff. Commissioner Keller: Okay, thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, you had another question? Commissioner Garber: I was just curious ifStaffhad any thoughts regarding the comments by Ms. Snider and Stanford’s concerns about the TDM program and the in lieu fees in particular. Mr. Williams: Well, that is one of the main reasons that we suggested the language that we did because it really does kind of confuse the issue. We have places like the Research Park, which are already required to have TDM programs and other areas that have other traffic mitigation fees. They may or may not be sort of addressing the same issues as TDM. So right now putting this language in here is very confusing about what the intent is, how it is going to be interpreted. I hate to say it but I can easily see somebody down the road saying that that means that you have to make some contribution even though there isn’t a fee that has necessarily been adopted but the word ’contribution’ is in there. So it is just really I think confuses the whole issue at this point to put that language in. If there is at some point a fee specific to TDM that is say for instance contribution to a shuttle, the kind of thing we have talked about before, then that can go in there and it is specific about what the intent is and what the fee is and we all know what that means at that point. Page 17 ] 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Oarber: So Staff’s intent here is to modify that to address those conflicts. Mr. Williams: Right, we suggested striking that language about the in lieu fee at this point. Commissioner Oarber: Has Stanford seen tbat language and does that address some of your concerns? Chair Holman: Okay, I had just three or four questions. One of them is a follow up to Commissioner Tuma’s earlier question having to do with the maximum house size in Village Residential. A maximum house size, in the redline version this is on page 12, a maximum house size of 2,500 square feet is sizable and one of the visions that I had although it is not stated in the purpose of Village Residential Development on the previous is to provide a variety of housing types per the Comprehensive Plan. With these smaller lots I would hope that we would have smaller development of residences. So 2,500 square feet is pretty sizable. Then to follow up on Commissioner Tuma’s comment again if you have an attached 400 square foot garage which doesn’t count you have a 2,900 square foot house, certainly you have a 2,900 square foot structure on let’s say a 4,000 square foot lot. That is pretty jammed in there. And, since people often times anymore don’t use their garages as garages we have essentially created almost a 3,000 square foot house potentially. So it is certainly not among the more attainable homes. So would Staff care to comment on that? Mr. Williams: i guess my comment is that we have seen first of all we have seen some that have been like that but more importantly 17 think it needs to be balanced against if it were a lower number and within these density allowances that we are talking about would it restrict the overall FAR to less than what RM-15 allows? Because if it does then they are just going to blow this off and do RM-15 and make them condos which is what they are doing now. So I think it could be that including the garage and the house size square footage is an option or that lowering the house size some is an option but I would be pretty careful about that. I could probably do a quick calculation to sort of see based on these densities what are ~ve looking at in terms of if you play that out over an RM-15 one-acre lot for instance and see what that looks like. Chair Holman: So a question I would have too is especially on some of the larger lots what would you feel about or I guess I would like your feedback on if we counted attached garages as EAR but did not count detached garages. The reason is just to keep the mass of these buildings down. They still aren’t necessarily that much more affordable except it is less likely that the garage becomes really part of the house and the mass stays down. So I think I would like your response to that. Mr. Williams: That is an interesting thought, l think that has some merit if we separate out the mass of the main structure. Chair Holman: I think Commissioner Burt has a follow up to that. Commissioner Burt: Yes. Can you remind us of the FAR allowance on RM-15? Mr. Williams: It is .5. Page 18 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 3t 32 34 93 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Butt: And in the RM-I 5 we don’t count garages against FAR though, right? Mr. Williams: Right. So we are talking about 22,000 square feet excluding garages on a one- acre site. If we are saying a maximum of 12 units per acre, let’s say eight to ten is what we are shooting for, ten units per acre would be 2,200 square feet and 12 units per acre would be something under 2,000 square feet, eight units on that acre would be 2,750 or something like that all excluding the garage. Commissioner Butt: So the irony here though is that where these are in a Village Residential and they are detached units we are allowing a 2,800 square foot structure including the garage whereas in an R-1 on a 6,000 square foot lot we are allowing about a 2,600 square foot? Mr. Williams: I think it is 2,550 including the garage. Commissioner Burr: So 2,550 including the garage. So 250 more square feet than we are on a R-I. Now maybe that is what we want in an RM-15 community. Maybe we are accepting that density. I guess I am interested in whether we can have it in a way or is there some formula that would incentivize tile Village Residential but there would be more smaller units in a Village Residential than the way we have it here. What it seems like is we are going to have what we used to think of as small cottage-like units and instead they are ahnost 3,000 square foot homes on the largest lot size I should say, on the 4,000 square foot lot. Mr. Williams: I think the tradeoffhere is that the Village Residential is an option that allows again for ownership of the lot. Is that valuable enough to be somewhat more restrictive because again they could do this or just do a condo inap for these units and do these sizes right now and people are doing that? So is it appropriate to be a little more restrictive? Do you want to have that ownership option? Then we are going to say 2,000 square feet and then you have the garage or however you say it like that or we have talked before about maximum average home size. We could work it around that orjust have a maximum size that is something less than the 2,500 square feet. So I think there may be some justification for being somewhat more restrictive than RM-15 and we are to some extent in that the density in a couple of these things are a little tighter than the RM-15 but the square footage is still there and so maybe the quid pro quo is a somewhat smaller home than you otherxvise could get. I don’t have any objection to that philosophically. It is just kind of where do you draw that line. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Oarber and then Commissioner Tuma. Okay, Cominissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Maybe one way to address this is we are looking at FAR and then we are also defining maximum house size and they are different obviously. One possible way to address the parking issue would be that the first space would not count towards the maximun~ house size but the second space would. Split the baby on that one. I have some concern. You begin to get these massive houses on smaller lots and it sort of looks funny. I agree quite strongly with your comment that you just made about having it be okay that there is a slightly different allo~vance for total size because it is a fee simple lot or a singly owned and there is Page 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4~ 44 45 extra value to that. Maybe ~ve can deal with the massing by counting anything beyond the first space towards maximum house size as distinguished between the FAR. I don’t know what Commissioners think o1 are we getting to fine, I don’t know. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: in thinking about Commissioner Burt’s comments here on smaller lots would applying the RMD standards get us closer to what he has just described? So in other words, when you get down to a smaller size lot RMD standards could very well apply. Mr. Williams: But if you applied those it is like a .45 FAR on that lot and that would be a 3,000 square foot. Vice-Chair Lippert: Isn’t it a .5 I thought on an RMD? Mr. Williams: Well then what is the difference? You have .5 here. If you are using .5 on a 3,000 square foot lot you can have 1,500 square feet of floor area, is that what you are saying? Vice-Chair Lippert: Right, but what it does allow for is two rental units under - you could have two units and one unit would become a rental unit under that. So at least you are beginning to move into that direction of ownership and possibly rental with equivalency. Where you couldn’t do that in an R-1 or R-2 where you are restricted to 900 square feet for that second unit. Mr. Williams: I think with these size lots it is going to be difficult to do that. On an RaMD you have minimum 5,000 square foot lots to start with so you are really packing it in to now put another unit here too and then you have the parking to account for as well. We have the overall 12 unit per acre maximum so that second unit is going to count towards that. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: So in the Village Residential the maximum lot area is 4,000 square feet. Would you envision that if there were some parcel, let’s just for discussion sake say an acre because that is an easy number to deal with. I am going to round an acre up to 44,000 square feet just because I don’t want to do the math with 43,560 if you don’t mind. So at 44,000 square feet if you have 11 parcels of 4,000 square feet that would fit to about an acre. What i am wondering is would you expect that the entire acre would be parcelized shoulder to shoulder with these 4,000 square foot pieces and there would be easements to provide access to the internal units oi would you expect that there would be a separate driveway that would not be part of the lots that would have so other kind of feature or other kind of ownership, maybe shared ownership or whatever? What would you expect would happen? Mr. Williams: It could be either scenario. There obviously needs to be a street of some kind to serve it. If you have 11 lots you are going to need some kind of street access and private access to those and that could be in the form of an easement which then cuts into the realistic usable lot area or it could be a separate commonly owned street which then reduced, which means you Page 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 don’t get 4,000, you can’t have 11 4,000 square foot lots because you have some area devoted to street as well which is a likely scenario. So you probably could not do 11 4,000 square foot lots. Commissioner Keller: Right. So the reason I am considering these two scenarios is because I have a scenario that there is an easement then essentially with an easement there is no extra space to be allocated. As a result of that if you gave all the units their maximum floor area each of them would get half of their lot size’s floor area and therefore be 2,000 square feet each plus the garage, assuming that the garage doesn’t count, h~ the situation where there is extra space that is not allocated to any individual unit that is a separate driveway then that space could be effectively allocated to each of the units and thereby make them bigger. Effectively what you are doing is you are making the parcels larger because they don’t include this driveway. So this is what I am dealing with in trying to understand what happens when and what different scenarios are and the effect of that on what is a realistic maximum building size on that property. If there is a separate driveway 2,500 square feet makes more sense. If there are easements then 2,000 makes more sense. So that is what I am dealing with. Chair Holman: Curtis. Mr. Williams: I would like to make two comments. First of all I just wanted to clarify that as laid out here on the table the .5 FAR is for the entire site not for each individual lot. So we are not talking about a 4,000 square foot lot with a 2,000 square foot house although that is what I think Commissioner Lippert’s direction was maybe go that way instead. The second comment I had was now you know why we thought about not including Village Residential with this package. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Let me try something here. I sort of had a thought here and want to get Commissioners’ appetite for this. I think we all want some form of Village Residential in this thing and we kind of agreed to shoehorn this in at the last minute, in sort of an expedited fashion. I wonder whether it makes more sense j ust to take this out altogether for now and put it in the next round as we are going to interleaf ZOU items with the Comprehensive Plan and maybe look at this in the context of Cottage Cluster. Then really look at scenarios like have been done on other projects. I wonder whether there is just too much - we don’t want to do this wrong. We don’t want to come up with something that the developers aren’t going to build and just becomes sort of out there. So I just want to throw that out there as maybe a way to cut-through on some of these issues. Chair Holman: So what you are saying is that you are highlighting Cuffs Williams’ wisdom yet again. Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: So Curtis, that was your original recommendation and you have made a stab at this. I am interested in what you think of the merits of what xve have here and the issues we have been raising versus the alternative that you and Samir now is suggesting. What do you think about which would be the better way to go at this point? I know we wanted to make a stab Page 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1t 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~.) 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 at it. You put some real effort in it, would it be best to go forward? Do we think it has enough merit that it is better to go forward or would it be wiser to take a step back even though you have invested this time and try to do it more comprehensively7 Mr. Williams: At this point I think it would be better to go forward. We suggested that initially because we wanted to expedite getting through this but now we have spent time. I think it is thoughtful. I don’t feel like it is too rushed. I think there are other things that we could have done and looked at but I think this is a narrower focus for Village Residential that we talked about but for what it is I think it is good to do it. The only thing from ~vhat I have heard you talk about the one area that I would think that we could and probably should modify is this maximum house size thing and clarify whether this idea like Commissioner Holman said maybe excluding parking from floor area and including it with Village Residential if it is attached. That kind of tweaking with resolution to that I think I am very comfortable with this providing an option out there for something that is attractive. From what I have heard from developers I think would be built and it would also at the same time provide a good transition and something to point to and say this is what we want at the edge of this property before you hit the R-1 neighborhood next door. Commissioner Burt: So then as a follow on to your comments, first on the timing you were talking about responding these suggestions that have been made tonight that you think are valid. What would be the sequence? I thought we were going to try to put this to bed tonight. Do you think you would be able to incorporate those back for us in real time? Mr. Williams: My suggestion would be to decide them now and decide on what that square footage maximuna is and how we want the partdng to be done and move it on. Commissioner Burr: Okay,, and then one final follow up. If we do have at a later time the opportunity to review Cottage Clusters would that then be a time to reflect on this, see how it was working, and see if we need to tweak it? Mr. Williams: Absolutely. Yes, and maybe some other varieties of Village Residential we haven’t talked about. I think one is like Commissioner Lippert brought up a good point about the second units. There are some things we had talked about before that might be smaller homes and second unit combinations or something like that that we ought to entertain as well. That would be a good time to visit about that too. Commissioner Burt: Okay, so as long as it is understood that we will have an opportunity to revisit Village Residential when we look at Cottage Clusters in the future and see if there are any other tweaks then I am fine with going forward. Chair Holman: What timeline might that be? Mr. Williams: I think when we get thought the ’°cleanup" section coming to you next then I think what we will do is bring with that a list of these items that have been put off from the ZOU to this point and ask you to set some priorities on what you would like to see us come back with first. We would come back with whatever the highest priority is say within probably a three to Page 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 3~4 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 six month timeframe at that point in time and then schedule things as we could on down the line for the other topics. Chair Hohnan: I appreciate all the work that has gone into this. I am a little concerned about us on the fly tonight coming up with maximum house size and whether we are counting attached parking or not. I don’t think if we put this off it means that Staff’s work is lost. It is still existent. Remembering some of the things that are in the parking lot I think there are some things that are fairly much burning issues. While this is desirable to go forward xvith this I don’t think it is one of the burning issues and I am not sure that Cottage Clusters is going to come to the forefront as a burning issue that needs to be addressed. So I am a little concerned about when we might be able to review this if there do need to be changes. ! aln kind of inclined to go with Commissioner Tuma’s recommendation to maybe pull this out and look at it with Cottage Clusters and see what floats to the top. Commissioner Keller, did you have a comment or question? Commissioner Keller: Yes. Iain willing to go either way with respect to either addressing this and trying it out and see what we actually get and then revisit it at some point although I don’t know xvhen we will revisit it. For example, revisiting CN based on the minimum FAR of ground floor retail is one of the things that we have set for ourselves. So the amount of things that we are putting on our future agenda list particularly with the Comp Plan process coming along at some point in time and particularly needing to deal with the Housing Element when the ABAG numbers come out that is going to require a lot of work. So I am wondering how much we can actually insert into that process. I personally would be more interested in spending time on two issues that came up from today’s discussion which are dealing with traffic and understanding whatever the traffic impacts and that kind of work. I would be interested in addressing that. I think that considering that the City Council originally addressed SB1818 [ believe it was in February- I pulled off of the net a CMR dated February 7, 2005 with respect to SB 1818. Chair Hohnan: Could I ask you to relate that to the discussion of Village Residential? Commissioner Keller: Well, my sense of it is that flom my point of view addressing SB1818 is higher priority from an overall City zoning perspective than solving the Village Residential problem at least from my point of view. Chair Hohnan: Okay. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I am inclined to side with Commissioner t3urt. I think that Staff has worked on this and it is worth taking a test drive on it, see how it works. Not that it is a perfect solution but there aren’t enough parcels in Palo Alto to really make a significant difference. So in other words, this is the prototype, it is a test drive, we are going to see what it is like, we are going to see how it works, and then we are going to make refinements to it. So I think it is worth giving it a try with the Village Residential and seeing how it flies. Page 23 1 2 .3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~.9 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 I have one other brief question, which is, Village Residential really represents an economy type housing. Is there any reason why we need to have covered parking associated with that at all? All of the parking might be accomplished through surface parking and thereby eliminating the whole massing issue all together. Mr. Williams: Well, I think to the extent that it is smaller that might be the case and we talked about that a lot with the Cottage Cluster type of development. With these this is a different ownership type and more attached and town homes and that kind of thing. It is not necessarily small and we have pointed out in some cases is close to or could theoretically be bigger than a single family home. So if you were to do that it might be that if a unit was smaller than such and such a size that you don’t have to have covered parking. But that is an issue that is probably broader than just the Village Residential thing too and something we might want to visit with a sustainability issue again is do we need to be having all covered parking every~vhere or one space for every unit we have. I just want to add one more thing, which I and Staff will not be offended regardless of which way you go. tf you want to put it off I would just as soon not discuss another half hour about whether to put it off or not. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma, did you have a comment or question? Commissioner Tuma: I will only say that after listening to Cutis’s explanation the comments from Commissioner Lippert and Commissioner Burt I would tend to go that way. Let’s take a stab at these numbers and move this thing forward and put it in place. If we need to revisit it let’s do that. Chair Holman: Okay. I had a couple of other comments that weren’t about Village Residential. What I am going to ask is if Staff would be agreeable if we voted on everything but Village Residential, and pull it out and vote on it separately? So if we made changes we could go ahead with everything else. Commissioiaer Keller: Are you suooestin~=~ ~ that we deal with the multi-family housing first and then later deal with the parking and such? Chair Holman: I think we can probably deal with it all together but just pull out Village Residential, Commissioner Keller: Okay. Mr. Williams: You probably should make separate motions an3avay on the 18.13 versus the two parking chapters. Chair Holman: Okay. So I had potentially maybe a simpler clarification of the Individual Review on page seven of the redline version. If Staffmight try this out. My concern with the language that Staff proposed and this is on page seven of the redline version, it is C-2. If I wrote it down right Staff is proposing the IR shall not be applied to the adjacent uses other than single Page 24 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 family and two family uses. So to me that reads like the adjacent parcels, the adjacent. So I was thinking that maybe a simplification yet might be that if you start with the language on C-2, go down to the third line, maybe it is easier just to read it and it is probably clearer. "The Individual Review provisions of Section 18.12.110 of the Zoning Ordinance should be applied to any single family or two family residence in the multi-family districts to those sides of the site that share an interior side lot line with the interior," and then carry on with that sentence. Does that simplify and clarify at the same time? Mr. Williams: I think it works just as well. Chair Hohnan: I was still having difficulty with the other language. So would Staffbe aueeable to that language? Mr. Williams: So that is single family or two family in the multi-family to ....? Chair Holman: To those sides of a site that share an interior side lot line, and then finish out the sentence. Mr. Williams: I think that is fine. Chair Holman: Okay. Then did Staffhave language on how to incorporate Mr. Moss’ recommendation about tandem parking? Did you want to suggest language that might be incorporated into a motion? Mr. Williams: Let me find it. Chair Hohnan: While you are looking for that I had one other issue, which I suggested to Curtis earlier. Julie, I think will probably remember some of the DHS challenges. DHS is a zoning that is in SOFA I. It is detached houses on small lots and briefly what the intention was was to create smaller lots, smaller single family homes that also had secondary units that would be rental units. What happened was the language in the code was not written such that there was a minimum size required for the second unit so we ended tip with very small second units, which of course didn’t get used as second units. The main houses bloated and so those secondary units just became au pair quarters or workout rooms or home studios, and that sort of thing. The reason I am bringing that up is because I very, very much appreciate Staff’s incorporation of language about elimination of- let’s see it is Section 18.13.040 (g), and in a second I can find the page number. Maybe I can’t. At any rate what I was concerned about was the minimuin size, looking at a minimum size ttnit, because I can just see some clever person coming along and saying okay, I have three units here, the zoning allows three units. I am going to teardown what is here and I am going to build one big unit and two little postage stamp units and I am going to have three units on the parcel but we really haven’t retained living units. So I was wondering if we might consider some standard to determine what is a living unit, what is likely to be rented out, or if we could set a minimum size for the other units or what constitutes a living unit. Page 25 1 2 3 4 5 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 "9 DD 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Ms. Julie Caporgno, ChiefPlannin~ and Transportation Official: I think this is a little bit different than the DHS because the DHS required that second unit. In this case, what you described is somebody if they wanted to build a big unit they could just ignore building these two postage stamp units and just go in and build it because they wouldn’t have to comply with H-29 or the ordinance because we are not subdividing. Now, I don’t know, this doesn’t include anything about subdivision right now. Then it is inconsistent. We are doing it a little bit different than what H-29 requires. H-29 is only for subdivisions or condo map revisions. So if we are adding this in then that would be, if you are requiring any type of development even for a single family unit on the property then you would have the possibility of somebody being required to build those two units. I don’t know how you would actuaIIy fit two units it just seems like it would be inappropriate to have two rental units on a site with a large house. With the DHS you can have an in-law unit in the back and if it were small it would make more sense. Curtis, you might want to respond to it. Mr. Williams: I think it is overcomplicating the issue. I understand the potential is out there but number one I am not sure that potential is necessarily always negative. You get a tiny unit here and there and so it is cheaper and it provides a variety of housing. So it could be positive in some way. t just don’t know where to draw the line as far as is 300 square feet or 600 square feet or what would be a minimun~ unit size. I think we have taken a large step forward by putting this language in here. It would just take a lot more thought I think to try to put some kind of a mii~imum unit size on those as long as we know - and this is a question for Julie to some extent, how do we verify that those are rental units? How would we do that and how would we do that now under H-29 or other policies where they are required to provide as many rental units as they had? I think one of the concerns is you do 300 square feet and then people just use it as a studio and don’t rent it anyway. Ms. Caporgn0: Right now I don’t think there is any mechanism in place that would require us to go out and ensure that they are being rented out. If you build these units it is assumed just like the assumption is that anything over one they are rental units and then you need to replace them. So there is nothing now that if you have three units on your property that you are renting all three of them out. You could be using theln for storage too. Chair Holman: Understood. What we discovered in DHS, and then Commissioner Keller has a question, what we discovered in DHS is if one building can become larger the incentive to rent other things out that are smaller is quite miniscule because if you can afford the larger there is really no incentive to rent out something that is i~airly small. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: First of all we are on page ten of the redline for those people who don’t know where it is. It is G, it is 18.13.040 (g)(3) is what I think we are talking about. Secondly, I don’t feel comfortable - it doesn’t make sense to me to basically come in and say what we are going to do is come up with a minimum size of one of these units but I do have a creative solution that may address this which is that the ratio between the biggest unit and the smaller, the floor area of the biggest unit and the smallest unit cannot be greater than a factor of three. That basically means that if you create a bigger unit then the smaller units have to become Page 26 1 2 6 ? 9 10 1l 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 bigger. It basically allows for some degree of diversity but it limits the amount of diversity that you can have so that the smaller unit can’t be too tiny because you just can’t get it with that ratio. Chair Hohnan: Does Staff want to respond to that? Mr. Williams: Yes, I just think we should stick to the numbers of units and not get into the size, ratios, or otherxvise at this point. I just don’t see a rationale for it. It just starts to create complexity that I don’t think is wananted for this. Again, I think we are making a big leap to get to this point and if down the road there seems to be some problem with that we can try to address it but I wouldn’t just assume that that problem is there. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Another suggestion that you can think about is that the smallest new unit cannot be smaller than the smallest old unit. Chair Holman: Okay. So did you want to propose some language to address? Mr. Williams: Tandem parking spaces, yes. The language is in a few different places and we will make it all the same each place it appears. The one I am looking at is the last footnote on Table 2, which is page five of the clean version of the ordinance, probably page six on the redline version. Cunently it says, "Tandem parking is allowed as long as both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit." This one actually says for ’units’ which is a mistake. It should say, "For sites with more than four units not more than 25 percent of required parking spaces shall be in a tandem configuration." Suggest the first line be essentially the same and say, "Tandem parking is allowed as long as both spaces in tandem are intended for use by the same residential unit, for any unit requiring two parking spaces." Then it should say for projects as Mr. Moss said, for projects with more than four units not more than 25 percent of the required parking spaces shall be in a tandem configuration. That still has the 25 percent for the overall but I think the cleanest way to deal with it is if it is not a two bedroom or more unit, if it requires one and a half spaces you don’t get tandem parking credit for that. Let’s just leave it at that. I think the cases xve have had where we have had tandem parking approved generally through a DEE have al! been two bedroom units so I think that is what we are dealing with and we can just say that here. It is clean. Chair Holman: So you will just incolporate that language throughout for consistency. Mr. Williams: Yes we will replace the tandem parking language. Chair Holman: Okay, very good. Thank you for that. So Commissioners do we have a motion for Chapter 18.13 for the Multi-Family and then we are going to hold out Village Residential as a separate. So do we have a motion? Commissioner Butt, you are the pro would you care to make the motion? Someone must. Commissioner Keller: I will try. Page 27 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 I2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 _~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Okay, Commissioner Keller. MOTION Commissioner Keller: Yes. I move that the Planning and Transportation Commission recommend that the City Council adopt new Chapter 18.13 for Multi-Family residential districts and delete Chapters 18.22, 18.24, and 18.26 of the Zoning Ordinance with tile following amendments. The first amendment is with respect to tandem parking and the change that was suggested by Curtis. The second amendment is with respect to Individual Review of tile Zoning Ordinance with respect to Section 18.13.040 (c), paragaph two, the wording change that Chair Holnlall suggested to that paragraph. And, we are excluding fronl this amendment the Village Residential development, which is 18.13.050 with the appropriate renumbering of the subsequent sections. Mr. Williams: Well, it is not renumbered if you come back to it later and act on it. Chair Holman: Right. Commissioner Keller: Well let me say that that section be reserved for future use. Mr. Williams: Also, I assume that incorporates any of the technica! corrections that Commissioner Keller has provided to me that I will make. Commissioner Keller: Yes, that includes all the technical corrections that I have given you in term of wording conections and things like that. Thank you. Chair Holman: Before we have too much more discussion we should have a second. SECOND Vice-Chair Lippert: ! will second that. Chair Holman: Okay. Second by Commissioner Lippert. Clarification of the motion. Does Staff" intend that that include the corrections that you have indicated to us too on the submission today.’? Mr. Williams: Those are for parking. Chair Holman" I apologize, yes they are, both of them are. Okay, Commissioner Keller, do you need to speak to your motion? Commissioner Keller: Well, I appreciate the wonderful job by Staff in putting all this together and putting up with three iterations of Planning Commissioner kibitzing. I think that we have come up with something that I think we can live with and that we are defenTing Village Residential to a subsequent time precisely because it requires more work. Page 28 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1I 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert, do you care to speak to your second? Vice-Chair Lip ep_~: I think we have discussed this much, much, much too long and we should just get on and vote with it because have resolved I think just about every issue. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Coinmissioner Tuma: I have a question, a clarification on the motion from the maker and the seconder. Is it your intent that we are pulling Village Residential out a!l together or there is going to be a separate motion as to whether that goes for~vard? In other words, are pulling that out of your motion or is that motion to pul! it out of consideration? Chair Holman: If I Inight, I think the intention was and certainly my intention in requesting that was that it would just be pulled out for separate consideration not to eliminate it. Commissioner Keller: To clarify why I am expressing adoption of all of the section that we talked about with the amendments other than the Village Residential and that will subsequently be either adopted or defened based on a subsequent motion. Commissioner Tuma: Tonight? Commissioner Keller: Tonight. Commissioner Turna: Okay, great. Vice-Chair Lippert: And I agree with Commissioner Keller’s comment there. I think we are pretty much in agreement on everything but the Village Residential and so to not hold everything up we would just discuss Vi!lage Residential separately. MOTION PASSED (7-0-0-0) Chair Holman: Okay, seeing no other comments or questions can we vote on the motion then by Commissioner Keller, second by Commissioner Lippert? I think the motion is stated clearly enough. So all those in favor say aye. (ayes) That passes on a unanimous vote with everyone participating. Now we need a motion to address the parking chapters. Who would care to make that motion? We have motion shy Commissioners the last couple of meetings. Cominissioner Keller: I will see what I can put together here. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. MOTION Page 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: With respect to the motion to adopt new Chapter 18.52, Ofi~Street Parking and Loading Regulations, and 18.54, Parking Facility Standards, am I correct that we are not deleting anything? Mr. Williams: All the sections are included there but this where we had the couple of corrections that went out in the memo today, suggested changes. Commissioner Keller: Right, but I mean are not deleting any sections. Mr. Williams: We are not pulling out anything, right. Commissioner Keller: We are also adding the amendment that was handed out today, the corrections from Cuffs Williams with respect to Sections 18.52.050 (d)(1) and 18.52.050 (d)(4), as well as the technical corrections that I have provided to Curtis this morning that we have accepted. I believe that is it. Chair Holman: So we are looking for a second. Commissioner Keller: One other amendment. The other amendment is that the correction for tandem to parallel the correction that we referred to in 18.13 for tandem parking. Chair Hohnan: Need a second? Commissioner Tuma. SECOND Commissioner Turna: Second. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller, I bet you don’t need to speak to your motion, do you? Commissioner Keller: Not this time. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Tuma? Commissioner Tuma: Nope. MOTION PASSED (7-0-0-0) Chair Holman: Okay,. Any other questions, clarifications, if not we will vote on the motion by Commissioner Keller, second by Commissioner Turna. All those in favor say aye. (ayes) That also passes unanimously with everyone participating. Now we will go to Village Residential. Let’s go to Village Residential and finish that up if we could. It is a quarter to ten but I think we can probably do this pretty expeditiously. Anyone care to make a motion regarding Village Residential? MOTION Page 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 2.~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 ~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: I am not clear exactly what it is we created as a consensus for this. So that is xvhy I am hesitant to make a motion. But if you want me to try I will try. Okay. So I move that we adopt Section 18. ! 3.050 Village Residential Development with the proviso that attached covered parking or enclosed garages count towards the maximum house size. Chair Holman: Do we have a second? SECOND Commissioner Butt: Second. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Keller, do you wish to speak to your motion? Commissioner Keller: Well I am glad that we have achieved some consensus at least I hope so. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Burr. Mr. Williams: Madam Chair, could I just add a couple of things that I think were changed in here to be sure that we have everything? I think you had some consensus on a couple of other points as well. One is on Table 3 that the 0.51 FAR we clarified was for the site as a whole. Also we didn’t specify it but on the applicability of regulations where we talk about the perimeter of larger sites, ca11 we say minimum one-acre in parenthesis or something like that7 Commissioner Keller: Those two corrections are acceptable to me. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burr? Commissioner Butt: Yes. Mr. Williams: Then the tandem parking language is in here as well at the footnote of Table 3. Commissioner Keller: Yes, the same change should be made to tandem parking in Village Residential Development. Mr. Williams: Okay, thank you. Chair Holman: Any questions or comments? I am going to suggest one friendly amendment. If you will accept it or i can make it separately I will explain why. That the maximum house size be reduced to 2,000 square feet. If the maker of the motion would accept that. Commissioner Keller: Would you care to explain more why you want to make that change? Page 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O _~1 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Holman: Well I willjust say that the reason is because ~vhen I look at Village Residential and the same with Cottage Cluster what we have in Palo Alto is not a lack of market rate housing. What we really are lacking is entry-level market rate housing. I don’t view a 2,500 square foot house as entry-level market rate housing. So perhaps we won’t get these. Curtis said that maybe the development community wouldn’t develop this kind of model however, if there was a little change in the market some people might prefer to have a little bit more open space than a bigger house. Things do go in trends. Lifestyles go in trends. It used to be and I am wondering when it is going to happen again that people cherished large backyards rather than huge houses. I am just not in favor of creating these large houses. They are not huge but they are large. They are certainly not entry level. The other reason is because we talk an awful lot about sustainability and sustainability encompasses an awful lot of areas. One of them is to provide more affordable housing and diverse housing stock in a community, which is in our Comprehensive Plan. Larger houses consume more materials, consume more energy, and so for many reasons I would support this if it was a 2,000 square foot maximum house size. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. i will accept that amendment. Chair Holman: Commissioner t3urt. Commissioner Burr: I agree ~vith all of the objectives that Chair Hohnan has stated. I am concerned that the fallback will be RM-15 so this motion wouldn’t achieve the intended objectives. I ~vould hope that we could in the future come up with ways to achieve those but I think maybe the most that we can do on the tweaking is the inclusion of the garages in the calculation so I think I will decline to accept that. Chair Holman: Okay. My amendment hasn’t been accepted so technically can Commissioner Tuma COlnment if the inotion amendment has not been accepted? Is it a clarification? Okay. AMENDMENT I will try it as a separate amendment just to see. So with Village Residential I propose an amendment that the maximum house size be 2,000 square feet. Is there a second to that? SECOND Commissioner Keller: I will second it. Chair Holman: Probably we don’t need any other discussion. Commissioner Garber? Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: If I understand the main motion stands and the additional motion comes into place what we are now talking about is effectively 1,800 square feet of living space because Commissioner Keller’s original motion said that we would include the garage space in the maximum. Now if the maximum is 2,000 and there is one covered space we are down to 1,800 Page 32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1I 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 DO 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 square feet of living space. That I think probably gets to the point of being uneconomic for a developer to build. So I have a problem with that. Chair Holnaan: Comnaissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I believe we talked about the space is counted only if it is attached. So if it is not attached it doesn’t count. So it is basically a massing issue. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: I don’t know at what point the numbers make sense economically or not. The couple of numbers I have been playing with this evening suggest that it is a challenge for someone to purchase the land at current market prices and build something of the amount of area that we have been discussing at either its higher or lower point and be able to make money on it. So in my mind whether it is 2,000 square feet or 2,500 square feet is really academic. The real issue is I think one of where it bumps into the next zone. I am very sensitive and I share the Chair’s concerns about trying to find a way to create the opportunity to make more affordable homes but somehow it seems to me we need to - I don’t know if it works in tiffs particular spot. This may not be the right spot to get it. it may be Cottage Cluster, it rnay be another way of addressing some other zone, I just don’t know. So I guess nay feeling is I would not vote for your substitute motion really out of a lack of knowledge and go fo~vard with the Staffs current recommendation is with the expectation that it would be reviewed as was previously suggest on a more global basis for us to find the opportunities to make these opportunities fit more correctly into the right zoning. Chair Holman: Vice-Chair Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I am inclined to go with Cornmissioner Butt as well as Commissioner Garber in terms of their line of thinking. I think that we give this a try, we see how it goes, and we tweak it and adjust it eventually. I don’t think it is going to make a big difference whether we go for it one way or the other but I prefer trying it the way Staff recommends initially. AMENDMENT FAILS (3-4-0-0) Chair Holman: So let’s vote on the amendment to limit the maximum house size to 2,000 square feet. All those in favor say aye. (ayes) All those opposed? (nays) That amendment fails on a three to four vote with Commissioners Keller, Sandas, and Hohnan voting aye and Commissioner Tuma, Garber, Lippert, and Butt voting nay. MOTION PASSED (6-1-0-0) So we are back to the main motion. I don’t think we need any further discussion. All those in favor of that motion say aye. (ayes) Opposed? (nay) So that motion passes on a six to one vote with Conamissioners Tuma, Garber, Keller, Lippert, Sandas, Burt voting aye and Chair Holman voting nay. Page 33 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 With that we finish this item. Unless Staff, do you have any follow up comments or anything to this item? Mr. Williams: No, I just want to thank you all very much for sticking with us on that one and moving forward with it. I think not just Village Residential but i think these two chapters are important steps forward for us. Page 34 PLANNING AND T ANSP OR TA TION DIVISION STAFF REPORT TO:PLANNING & TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION FROM:Cm’tis Williams, Assistant Director DEPARTMENT: Planning & Conmaunity Environment DATE:May 30, 2007 SUB3ECT:Zoning Ordinance Update - Ordinance Amending Title 18 (Zoning Ordinance) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code, including 1) Consolidating Public Facilities, Open Space, m~d Agricultural Conservation Districts into a New Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts), 2) Revising Criteria Related to the Open Space District Provisions, 3) Amending and Adding Definitions to Chapter 18.04, 4) Miscellaneous Revisions to Clarify Zoning Criteria and Procedures, and 5) Reformatting and Renumbering the Remainder of the Zoning Ordinance. RECOMMENDATION Staff recommends that the Plmming mad Transportation Commission (P&TC) review and recommend to the City Council adoption of the proposed revisions, as outlined in Attachment A (Chapter 18.28), Attachment B (Revised Definitions), Attachment C (Miscellaneous Revisions), and Attachment D (Title 18 Proposed Table of Contents). BACKGROUND The Plamfing and Transportation Commission (P&TC) has previously reviewed and updated zoning districts related to single-family (R-l) districts, low density residential districts, multi- family residential districts, commercial districts, and office/researcbJindustrial districts. The Commission has also reviewed and recommended adoption of new zoning chapters related to Performance Criteria, General Standards (including updated criteria for landscaping, storm water management, and creek protection), Standards for Special Uses (including new criteria for Wireless Communications Facilities), and for Parking Requirements and Parking Design Criteria. The City Conncil has adopted revisions for all of these chapters, with the exception of the Multi-Family districts and Parking, which will be forwarded to the Council in July with the present amendments. City of Palo Alto Page 1 The City Council has directed that the Comprehensive Plan Update begin by mid-2007, and that the Zoning Ordinance Update (ZOU) be completed prior to then so that Planning staffcan redirect its efforts to the Comp Plan. Other ZOU tasks originally envisioned to be addressed (e.g., cottage cluster, PC zoning, sustainability issues, the Design Enhancement Exception (DEE) process, native landscaping, retention of existing rental housing units, and several others) will be addressed as staff resources are available during the course of the Comp Plan Update. DISCUSSION The proposed amendments are intended to address severa! miscellaneous provisions in the Zoning Ordinance, related to Open Space (OS) zoning, definitions, Individual Review in R-2 and RMD districts, provisions for cogeneration and other resource conserving energy facilities, deletion of the F!oodplain (F) combining district, and specification of.grade related to basements. Other changes include clarifications of definitions and some procedural requirements. The final set of revisions involve relbrmatting and renumbering the code to provide consistency with the chapters already adopted and to correct section references to reflect the final chapter and section numbering. Attachment A provides a new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) that consolidates the current Public Facilities, Open Space, and Agricultural Conservation districts into a single chapter, and adds criteria to the Open Space district regarding impervious cover and Comprehensive Plan Open Space policies. Attactunent B provides for a number 0frevised definitions to clarify terms that are now sometimes difficult to interpret for staff and the public. Attachment C lists more than a dozen miscellaneous revisions to the code, some substantive, but most procedural or formatting chmages. Attacl~nent D lists the proposed Table of Contents for the Zoning Ordinance after updating, to reflect the new numbering scheme. Special Purpose Districts and Open Space District Revisions A new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) has been prepared (Attachment A), consolidating the Public Facilities (PF), Open Space (OS), and Agricultural Conservation (AC) districts from the cunent code. The format for the chapter is similar to that provided for other chapters reviewed by the Commission, including tables outlining allowable uses and required development standards. No substantive changes are suggested for the Public Facilities or Agricultural Conservation districts. Two key revisions are made to the Open Space (OS) zone, however: A new section 18.28.070(1) is added to clarify that, with respect to impervious cover limitations in the OS zone, permeable surfaces (grasscrete, paver stones, permeable concrete, etc.) are only exempted from impervious surface limitations if they provide a minimum of 50% permeability, as determined by the Director. The section further requires that all surfacing for the primary driveway and any required parking areas on a site will be counted as impervious regardless of the surface, given the expected high degree of compaction of those surfaces. A "grandfather" exception is provided to allow for areas previously not counted as impervious to remain as such for future development, unless those surfaces are converted to less permeable materials. This will not penalize those who have operated under prior rules. City of Palo Alto Page 2 A new section 18.28.070(m) is added to require that projects in the OS zone comply with the Open Space criteria outlined in the Comprehensive Plan. These 13 criteria emphasize integration of the development with the natural environment with respect to vegetation and landscaping, grading and topography, views, materials, lighting and access. Inclusion of the Open Space criteria in the Zooming Ordinance will assure that they are more readily apparent to applicants, staff and the public. Revised Definitions Staff proposes approximately a dozen revisions (Attachment B) to current definitions in Chapter 18.04 of the Zoning Ordinance. Most of the changes provide clarifications or updates to definition that will assist staff and the public to interpret these telrns. Key revisions and one additional definition include the following: ’°Automotive services" is revised to exclude auto sales, since the automobile dealership definition was added when the (AD) overlay was adopted. "Commercial recreation" is revised to excIude health clubs and spas, as "fitness clubs" includes health clubs and spas, and are considered as personal services. A definition of"director" is added (Director of Plam~ing and Community Environment), because the term "zoning administrator" has been replaced by "director" throughout the code. "Eating and drinking services" is revised to clari~ that a minimum of 50% of revenues must come from food service. This has long been the City’s practice when conditional use permits are required for alcohol service, but the definition does not currently state the 50% rule. "Flag lot" is revised to clarify that it is either a landlocked parcel which has a driveway easement across another lot abutting a street, or a lot having limited frontage providing only enough width for a driveway to reach the buildable area of the lot which is located behind another lot abutting a street. "Gross floor area" for multi-family residential uses is modified to clarify that roofed balconies, porches, breezeways, etc. above the first floor are not counted as floor area unless they are substantially enclosed. This is consistent with the way such features are counted in low density residential zones. "Gross floor area" is also revised to reflect exemptions for resource conserving energy facilities, such as small cogeneration facilities, subject to the limitations outlined in a new section 18.42.120 (see Miscellaneous Revisions below). "Personal services" is revised to reflect updated types of uses and to clarify that art, dance and music studios are limited to individual or small class instruction to distinguish them from commercial recreation. City of Palo Alto Page 3 "Usable open space" is revised to more closely reflect the definition applied in the context- based design sections of the updated commercial, multi-family, and PTOD district regulations. Miscellaneous Revisions Staffproposes a number of relatively minor changes (Attachment C) to a variety of regulations throughout the code, again primarily oriented to clarify or correct existing language, but with a few more substantive changes. The key revisions include: Deleting the graphics and illustrations from the Definitions chapter (18.04) of the Zoning Ordinance. Improved illustrations are provided in the recently completed Zoning Ordinance Technical Manual for Single Family Residential Zones and it is staff’s intention to provide links from the definitions to those graphics. Clarifying that the measurement of basement walls above grade should be from the existing or finished grade, whichever is lower. This change would prevent someone from backfilling against a basement wall to discount the basement, having the effect of increasing the apparent height and floor area of the structure. Requiring Individual Review for second story development in the R-2 and RMD districts, except where ARB review is already required (for second dwellings on RMD lots). Allowing zoning text amendments to be initiated by a property owner, in addition to the Commission or Council. A property owner can already initiate a map change, and this would allow for a text change as well. Providing a new section 18.42.120 to specify criteria for "resource conserving energy facilities" that would be exempt from floor area and coverage requirements of the code. These facilities, such as cogeneration or fuel cell generation, would be limited in size, would require architectural review, and would be subject to all provisions of the recently adopted Performance Criteria (Chapter 18.23), particularly those related to noise and visual impacts. These provisions would help accolm-nodate alternative energy approaches consistent with the City’s sustainability goals. Deleting the Floodplain (F) District Regulations (current Chapter 18.74) of the ordinance. This zoning desi~ation has never been applied to any site mad would only be applicable in the Baylands area, where other protective zoning for public or open space lands already exists. Staff does not believe that it is purposeful to retain this district. Revising the Hotel (H) Combining District to allow it to be applied to the CN and the research/manufacturing zones (ROLM, RP, and GM), and deleting its applicability in the CS and CC zones. The current district only has the effect of applying the overlay in the CS and CC zone and the only change it provides is to allow an FAR of 0.6:1 in those zones. Hotels are now permitted uses in the CS and CC zones and have specific FARs that are applicable in each, so the FAR provision is now in’elevant. The CN, ROLM, RP, and GM zones, however, do not currently allow hotels or application of the (H) overlay, but there may be limited City of Palo Alto Page 4 circumstances where the City deems hotels to be appropriate in those zones. The revised standards would allow for a maximum FAR of 1.0:1 in the CN zone and 2.0:1 in the other zones, but would also require rezoning to apply the (H) overlay and Site and Design Review for each site that is rezoned. Revising the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) regulations pertaining to City-owned historic properties to allow "banldng" of bonus square footage from an eligible City-owned historic structure for later sale as TDR for use on other eligible City-owned properties. Recovering text in two sections of the old Chapter 16.48 (Architectural Review) that had been obscured, and combining them into a more explicit new subsection (h)" Phased Projects and Enforcement of Approval Conditions." One section had been used to allow enforcement of conditions and project pIans approved through the architectura! review process, and the other section had allowed for phased architectural review applications. Adding a new subsection (g) to the Architectural Review provisions to preclude demolition of structures subject to ,4achitectural Review prior to approval of the entitlement application. This has been a long-standing practice, but is not currently codified. Adding a maximum number of garage spaces (4) allowed as an accessory use for a single family residence in the R-1 district, under section t 8. !2.080 (a). Assuring that public notice requirements for rezoning and Comprehensive Plan amendments is consistent with hearing requirements for other discretionary reviews. Deleting all references to metric measurements. Replacing all references to "zoning administrator" with "director." Reformatting all of the remaining chapters of the Zoning Ordinance to a format similar to that used for the ZOU to date, and renumbe~-ing the chapters and sections to follow the Table of Contents proposed as Attachment D. The chapters that have already been updated by the Commission and Council are shown in bold in the proposed Table of Contents. Revising all section references to reflect the renmnbering of the code chapters and sections. Future "Parking Lot" Issues for Evaluation Staff recognizes that there are a number of zoning-related issues that have not been addressed in the Zoning Ordinance Update, but are intended for future review or at least deserve discussion. Some of these items may need to be defened until after the Comprehensive Plan is updated, but staff expects to bring high priority revisions forward as time and resources pe~rnit. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, and the Conmaission may wish to add to the list to assure it is more inclusive. The items are listed approximately in what staff believes is priority order based on Council and Comanission direction: City of Palo Alto Page 5 Establishing green building criteria (compliance with green building checklists) to implement the Council’s recent policy direction. Revising the Plamaed Conm~unity (PC) zone to clarify the review procedure and to outline the role and scope of "public benefits" in PC requests. Better defining m~d limiting Design Enhancement Exceptions (DEEs), similar to the approach used to refine criteria for Home Improvement Exceptions (HIEs). Providing additional criteria for landscape treatments in or near natural areas and transitions from open space to developed sites, such as in the Research Park. Revisiting "cottage cluster" housing options and criteria in the R-1 and multi-family districts, including incentives to retain existing cottage cluster development. Developing additional incentives or requirements for retaining existing rental housing. Evaluating potential for a University Avenue Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) Zoning District. Providing for im~ovative parking strategies or progams to reduce the need for parking. Evaluating the feasibility of conservation districts to outline specific standards for neighborhoods or areas of the city. Identifying potential zoning map changes where existing zone districts may no longer be appropriate, such as using ROLM instead of GM for some sites. Staff welcomes Commission input regarding the priorities of these revisions or additional topics to add to the list. Staff notes that items outside the scope of the Zoning Ordinance (noise ordinance, signs, etc.) are not included in the list. ENVIRONNIENTAL REVIEW The revisions proposed are responsive to Comprehensive Plan policies, are minor in nature and would not substantially increase the density or intensity of development in the city. Most of the changes relate to revised procedures, reformatting and clean-up of the code. The Open Space district modifications would directly incorporate Comprehensive PIan policies within zoning review, and !a~dividual Review requirements will further protect the character of existing residential neighborhoods, also embodied in Comp Plan policies. The amendments are therefore consistent with the analysis provided in the Comprehensive Plan EIR and further environmental review is not required, ti.nviro~m~ental review will be required, however, for subsequent projects that are proposed subject to these regulations. NEXT STEPS Based on the Conm~ission’s reconm~endation, staff will prepare a draft Ordinance to be forwarded to the City Council for its consideration, along with the Multi-Family and Parking City of Palo Alto Page 6 chapters of the code. The Council is tentatively scheduled to hear the ZOU items on July 9, 2007. Staffwil! then initiate work on the Comprehensive Plan Update, and will bring back various "parking lot" zoning revisions as priorities dictate and resources allow. ATTACHMENTS A.Draft Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) B.Draft Revised Definitions C.Draft Miscellaneous Revisions D.Draft Zoning Ordinance Table of Contents COURTESY COPIES Architectural Review Board Doug Moran, Barron Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen ~Vhit e REVIEWED BY: Julie Caporgno, Chief Plmming and Transportation Official DEPARTMENT/DIVISION HEAD APPROVAL: Curtis Williams, AICP Assistant Director City of Palo Alto Page 7 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Planning and Transportation Commission Verbatim Minutes May 30, 2007 EXCERPT Consideration of an Ordinance Amending Title 18 (Zoning) of the Palo Alto Municipal Code to Reorder and Reformat Various Zoning Chapters; Amending Provisions of the Open Space (OS)District and Definitions; and Providing for Miscellaneous Clarifications and Correction. Environmental Review: Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report. Chair Hohnan: Thank you and that item has been continued so it will be on our agenda on June 13 as I am sure you know. Thank you very much. As it turns out, Mr. Geiger, you are wanting to speak to Item No. 2 as I understand it? Okay, thank you. So Item No. 1 has been continued and so Item No. 2 which is before us this evening is Zoning Ordinance Update of an Ordinance anaending Title 18 and a variety of ways and would staff care to make the presentation? Curtis Williams, Assistant Director: Yes, thank you Chair Holman and Commissioners. The revisions before you tonight to the Zoning Ordinance are kind of all over the place. This is an opportunity sort of for us to catch up on some clean up items that we were not able to get to before or in some cases have actually created from the refomaatting of some sections of the Ordinance. Also in a substantive vein there are some changes to the open space district which we have combined with a couple of other zones to create a special purpose district chapter and there are a couple of other revisions that I will speak to in a minute that are somewhat substantive. We have divided up the changes really into Attachments A, B and C and Attachment A is the combined special purpose chapter that includes open space as well as m~ agricultural conservation district and the public facilities district with the table format that we have used for other chapters and then some special requirements for each of the zones. Attachment B is a set or’revised definitions that we are proposing, most of which we believe are clarifications of the definitions to assist staffwith interpreting and providing information to the public. Attachment C is a listing of various miscellaneous revisions. We’ve got 16 numbered items there that relate to several different chapters and sections of the code as well as towards the end of it of reformatting and renumbering to sort of revise the scheme so that it reflects what is Attachment D, the proposed renumbering of the sections and chapters of the Code so that its all consistent and we will land up with one consistent looking code. So, I think from our standpoint the open space district we’ve understood in the past and more recently substantively the major issues here and I’ll briefly go through the changes there but I think it might be most beneficial if maybe we focus on the other two parts of it first because we think that there are some issues there that need clarification and are maybe of some concern but they are much more minor than the open space and maybe we take the open space district at the end after the other two sections. So that is up to you if you’re comfortable doing that. I will just run through a couple of open space changes and then a few of the other revisions, although I am not going to touch on all of them because like I Page 1 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 said a lot of them are just corrections and clarifications and such that we feel that need to be made at this point. I also want to point out that you have two additional items before you tonight. One of them from Julie Caporgno is essentially taking the language that’s already in Attactm~ent C as Item No. 9 regarding transfer of development rights and on the backside of that page it restates that the wording is exactly the same but it just highlights, underlines and strikes through the changes from the existing wording. The language that was in Attachment C all was underlined so it looked like it all was new and that’s not the case, very little of it is new, most of it is existing so this will give you a better feel for to the actual change to that section that is happening. The other memo is from Amy French and in discussing some of these changes with Current Planning staff, they came up with a few more what are really minor clarifications to some of the provisions of the Code and for the most part they’re reconciliations of things that appear one way in one section and another way in another which is part of the overall process and the codifications so clearing those up. They essentially would be added to Attaclmaents B and C, a couple are definitions and a couple are miscelI.aneous changes to the R-1 section of the code. So both Julie mad Amy are here if you have specific questions on those particular items. In the special purpose districts, there are no changes to the PF and AC zones. There are 3 changes to the open space district from what exists currently. One has to do with just clarifying second dwelling units making that language consistent with the changes that we made in either zones based on State law in needing to make accommodations to attached units in particular. The more substantive section is on Page 11 of Attachment A. Items L and K have been added. L is titled impervious coverage - there is a requirement currently in the open space district. That impervious coverage that the coverage meaning building and other impervious materials and this is the only district that we have that talks about impe~wious surfaces in addition to building coverage and that the impe~°ious coverage is limited to 3.5% of the site. This provision would specify that pervious or semi pervious paving materials would not be counted as pervious if its determined that they are at least 50% permeable. In other words at least 50% of the surface area allowed is for drainage through them. We need to be sure we are including even if that area was used for a primary driveway or the required parking spaces that we would still consider that to be entirely impervious material with the rational that those areas get compacted to an extent that they really don’t serve well as impervious whereas permeable areas so you end up still with runoffs just about like its with concrete. That was kind of our rationale there and it also have provided that there have been projects approved where permeable materials have been used and if its been excluded flom impervious coverage calculations and this would essentially grandfathered those in and so that if somebody comes back we are not suddenly going to hit them with new requirements unless they suggest changing it to something that’s less permeable than what they have. So we put that out, we know that’s been an issue, we are certainly flexible about percentages and particularly how you treat the driveways and parking areas and that if you still think that there’s some merit in providing soine credit for that to provide some incentives to use those kinds of materials. The second major change is Item K and that’s open space review criteria that is currently in the Comprehensive Plan and when we have an open space project come before you we’re charged with evaluating and you’re charged with evaluating that project against those criteria but since Page 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 I7 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 they’re in the Comp. Plan there’s some kind of disconnect there sometimes and we thought it better to be sort of upfront that these things apply and to go ahead and embody them into the zoning ordinance for the open space district. So we have taken them and put them in verbatim from the Comp. Plan in here and essentially they’re not absolute per se, they say that the following criteria shall be considered in a site and desi~a review of all the development that are planned in the OS district and references conservation element of the Comp. Plan. So those are really the two main changes, the impervious cover and the open space review criteria that are proposed in the open space zoning category. As far as the definitions~-o, one that relates sort of to one of the miscellaneous revisions to, we have replaced Zoning Administrator, wherever it occurs in the ordinance with Director, we do not have references an3anore to Zoning Administrator in our processing and we don’t have a person with that title so what used to be done by a Zoning Administrator is now done at a Director’s Hearing or the Director’s designee which is typically one of the Planning Managers or myself. We did not have a definition of Director in the code so we added this definition of Director to be sure that its Planning and Community Environment unless specified otherwise. There are a couple of places where I think we say Director of Public Works as some input on some issues. Eating and drinking service we wanted to, that one may not be entirely obvious but it has long been a practice that if alcohol is served than a Conditional Use Pem~it is required and that the City has required that a minimum of 50% of the revenue be derived from food sales so that we do not allow 100% bars in Palo Alto. We thought it was useful to actually put that into the definition of eating and drinking services and make that clarification there. Gross floor area we’ve modified the multi-family... Chair Hoh-nan: Curtis, I think you skipped 61.. Mr. Williams: I wasn’t going through all of them. I skipped several of them there but if you want me to I could go through all of them. Chair Hohnan: Yes, I thinl< that it might be helpful if you go through that one. Mr. Williams: I think that one we excluded that because its very confusing, it doesn’t really add anything to business offices or public utilities or other activities and services customarily associated with administrative office services. The general business office itself we think, basically allows that already, administrative office services, if you are not familiar with that definition, essentially is headquarters office for a firm so this just kind of confuses the two. I don’t think we have had a lot of experience where its been a problem but Current Planning staff don’t like that was a general business office which is essentially more often providing smaller offices and that kind of thing. If its just the business office within the administrative office services, that’s an accessory use to the adlninistrative office services and so it kind of confuses it too added in here as general business office which is generally more restrictive than administrative office services is. Amy might be able to elaborate more on that when she gets back. The gross floor area section, we just added language related to porches, balconies, arcades and the RM zone is similar to the language that we have in the other zones that allows that ira roofed Page 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4~ 44 45 46 features like that are not enclosed 4) is one of the more substantive changes and this is similar to what you had just did with the multi-family chapter of requiring individua! review when there’s a two-story single family home on a multi-family zoned lot, this would require individual review if there’s a single family home ~vith 2 stories on an R-2 or RMD lot so its analogous to that type of situation but we want to be sure that if those homes are adjacent to other single family home that they receive the same type of protection as it would if they were in R-1 district. Number 5 specifically would allow an application of a property owner to initiate a text amendment. Cunently property owners may initiate a zoning map amendment change so they could request rezoning their property from RM to CS for example but what they cannot do right now is to suggest that, for instance, the FAR in the R-1 zone be changed from .30 to .40. Under this scenario, they could submit an application to do that. That application still has to go through the full processes and that if they didn’t have this than they would generally come to staff and we’d have to put something on an agenda and try to initiate this anyway so in one way or another it tends to come forward. This has been brought to us and identified primarily through the Stanford Projects and they are going to need some text amendments and we would prefer that they apply for those rather than the City initiating them because 1) we don’t want to look like we’re the ones initiating the anaendment; 2) if they do that there’s a cost issue, they pay fees, they pay the cost of the review of those things. Still has all your full discretion and Council’s full discretion to determine whether those are appropriate or not. Number 6 is the one that I was mentioning about the resource conservation energy facilities. These types of facilities, if they need this type of criteria may be exempt from FAR up to a maximum of 6,000 square feet or 2 percent EAR whichever is less and they have to meet the various criteria that the Utilities Department has provided which I probably can’t explain to you too well, but again, I think it mostly stems from the desire to accommodate co-generation facilities and we know there’s a couple of research park that folks are looking at that. Some of the restrictions do include that they will be required to go through architectural review, the full design review of these facilities and they are also subject to the full performance criteria and they are also subject to the zoning criteria as far as setbacks and all those kinds of things go as well but they’ll be subject to noise and lighting and visual impacts and the perfom~ance criteria that the Commission recommended sometime ago which is now in the Section Chapter 18.23. We would also suggest deleting the F floodplain district regulations. These are regulations that have never been used. They’ve been in the zoning ordinance but they’ve never been used, it says regulations but they’re through the map overlay district that had never been applied anywhere and it really sounds like it would be most applicable probably in the Baylands because I think it talks about oyster dredging and things like that and its just not relevm~t at this point. The hotel combining district currently has, as you recall you made some changes to better accommodate hotels in the CS and CC zones. Those are the two zones the hotel combining district applied to and not in as effective way so in some ways its moot entirely and our thought initially was maybe take it out and not have a hotel overlay but there’s still maybe cases where in a CN zone or particularly in the industrial ROLM, RP and GM zones that it may be appropriate in some cases to entertain that possibility so it would allow a request to have that overlay placed on a specific property and it would limit the EARs to 1.0 for the CN districts and 2.0 for the other districts but it would be entirely discretionary in terms of whether to apply the overlay or not and more stringent limits could be set as part of that process if desired. I will come back in a minute Page 4 ! 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 44 45 46 and let Julie talk about the TDR and I think I can do Number !0 which is architectural review. This is the section that was basically left out when we did all of our 18.76 and 18.77. Updates of the review process is part of our permit streamlining effort. This provision as far as enforcement of ARB conditions was left out so it really is just putting it back into the Ordinance and being sure that we have that enforceinent mechanism in there. We’ve also, in terms of somewhat related to enforcement, we’ve added language that architectural review requires that demolition not occur until the architectural review is approved and we’ve been operating with that policy but its not been codified so we would like to codify it here and be sure that we can have the force of law behind us when we tell the applicant about that. Number 12 is the revised notice procedure for amendments to zoning issues to be sure its consistent with the revisions we’ve made in all those other sections’ notice so we wanted to be sure that this reflects that the same language that we used for that. They didn’t catch this at the time when we made those changes. The other ones are more generalized, deleting all, if there are reinaining metric measurements left in the code after we’ve done with these chapters we -~ e been dealing with, we would get rid of those. Replacing Zoning Administrator with Director throughout and then just generally reformatting and renmnbering the rest of the code without any revisions to it but putting it so that it will all look the same as the Sections that we have already done and setting up a numbering sequence that matches Attachment B for the Table of Contents and then going back to the final step which is basically going back to all the references that we have ever~vhere in the Code that refers to Section 18.xx.yyy and making sure that that’s the appropriate number now because most of those have changed through the course of things so we’ve been catching those as we go but there’s still a lot out there that’s still referring to the old Sections. Its basically a cleanup. [Julie Caporgno’s comments missing from both audio and video tapes] Amy French: We also talked about there are other types of space that are not actually attic, it could be non-accessible, etc. so we wanted to include that. On the flipside of that page it has the suggested wordings rather than referring to attic space and it would be applicable to upper stores of residential. Then as far as revisions to the R-1 Chapter, Chapter 18.12, there are several revisions there. The first one is to delete the word detached when it refers to the storage structures. That was inadvertently added when it was just meant to be any storage structure with regards to setback encroachments. There is a couple for Table 3 in the R-1 Chapter and one of them pertains to the entry features and we wanted to add the word substantially enclosed and non recessed because we currently exempt recessed porches or recessed entry features but there is some confusion there from that table. The other part of that table that was a bit confusing, again this is the same one that talks about the attic space, counting one way and not another way and we wanted to make that more generic rather than attic, to go ahead and talk about area of the upper floors a little bit as a terrace. It happens when we look at plans. The final two bullets regarding second dwelling unitsequals to 450 square feet, we only require one parking space in the table and the Parking Chapter 18.83 xvhere we do not state whether that should be covered or uncovered, than in Chapter 18.12 there is no qualifier when you are doing a small 450 square- foot or less second unit - its just generic, you have to have two parking spaces for any second units so we are going to put that qualifier in there to be consistent with our table and that’s my item. Thank you. Page 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Holman: Thank you. We have one speaker from the public at this point in time. Might we let that speaker go first. I should see whether there is a card and it looks like, maybe we can hear from the public and then ask our clarifying questions? The first speaker would be Richard Geiger and you have 5 minutes. Mr. Richard Gei~er, Palo Alto: I am a long time property owner in the upper Foothill. i bought in 1958 and it was in the County and it was zoned 1 acre. I came down here after graduating college and bought this property because I came from Oregon and I liked the country outside the cities. Anyway, the city annexed the area in the late 1960’s I believe and they installed above my property a million and a half gallon water tank with a 14 inch water line in the street, 11 inch sewer line in the street, a power line that crosses nay property, a city power line that crosses my property. We build a house in one of the comers of the property expecting to divide it into maybe three pieces. The property is over 10 acres. Then I guess organizations like Green Foothills and the Open Space District the people that decided that housing wasn’t appropriate up there, these people are mainly from Portola Valley and Los Altos Hills, the original people that started Green Foothills. So the City downzoned us to 10 acres even though these people live in Los Altos Hills with one acre, in Portola Valley with less than an acre. So the City down zoned it in the Open Space District while buying from the big property owners who because of circumstances couldn’t hm~g onto the property. I am probably the only one in the area now that owns land from back in the 1950’s or the original before the City came along. So obviously I get upset about the Open Space District and all the regulations that are designed to prevent it from being used and possibly making it impossible to use it except for a house and a small second house. So obviously I get upset. When I submitted my plans to the City I had a drawing with the plot plan showing three parcels, which would be over four acres each average. Actually, the housing in that area, for every house now it is about 40 acres counting the thousands of acres of open space that each house there now has an average of 40 acres that go along with it. So it is upsetting to me. We lived up there for a long until our kids got old enough. One of the disappointing things was when we moved there and built a house we expected neighbors with kids. We had kids. Of course there were none when they disallowed housing. So I am not sure what this - this probably isn’t the place to go through the entire ordinance, I don’t know. I went through this. I just got it last Friday on the Intemet and I marked up a lot of places in here. I could probably go one for an hour talking about it. I don’t know if this is the place where you appear to be making some probably minor modifications and some more major like this grading, counting gravel as impervious. This was done I think because one of the neighbors with a one acre lot next door because of the size of his lot he was getting in trouble. You probably remember this issue. There are a lot of issues. I was hoping when I read about this zoning change or got this notice that they would be increasing the density because of the shortage of housing in Palo Alto. The City easily needs 10,000 more houses. Chair Holman: Sir, I need to ask you to wrap up, please. Page 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Geiger: We have 60,000 people driving to Pa!o Alto every day bringing 200,000 to 300,000 gallons of gas every day commuting, spending hours commuting. The City employees can’t live in Pa!o Alto because of the shortage of housing. Chair Holman: Thank you very much. Mr. Geiver: Well, I am not really done. I don’t know how to deal with this. I didn’t expect to have a five-minute limit. I am the only person here speaking. Chair Hohnan: We actually have another speaker coming behind you and our standard practice is five minutes for speakers. Mr. Geige_£: Who do I address then? How do I deal with these issues? Do I come to the City Council every week and in Oral Communications bring up all of these issues? Chair Holman: I think one of the best things you can do is write up your concerns and your issues and it is likely this issue will certainly go before the City Council at a date to be determined, I think sometime in July. We will be having further conversation about this. We probably won’t finish this item tonight but we may. Certainly you could write up your comments and submit them to City Council. Mr. Gei~e.______~r: Also I want to throw out maybe what is a positive aspect. One thing I saw in this is they are eliminating the flood zone. Since the City is capable of down zoning land we need to establish a flood zone in Palo Alto in the areas that are susceptible to flooding. Chair Holman: Sir, sir, I really need to ask you to ..... Mr. Geiger: We really need to down zone that so us tax payers won’t be subjected to maybe $100 million lawsuit as suggested by homeowners associations in the flood zone. Chair Holman: Thank you for your comments. The second speaker is Cathy Cartmell. Welcome, and you will have five minutes. Ms. Cathy Cartmell. Los Altos Hills: Good evening Commissioners. I also live in OS District and would like to comment on particularly Section 18.28.070, the section (1) Imper~dous Coverage. My comment is in particular to I live on Page Mill Road and Page Mil! Road is subject to a 200-foot scenic con-idor. So that is a 200-foot front yard setback whereas most other properties in the district are subject to a 30-foot front yard setback. So you can see having to go an additional 170 feet back on your property really covers a lot more area and driveway. So I would be interested in the Commission considering like Los Altos Hills does where they count only the 100 feet of the driveway closest to the house toward impervious area because the additional area is burden because of the 200-foot front yard setback. So that is just something I would like the Commission to consider as some town in the area have also considered the additional burden of that scenic corridor there. Thank you. Page 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Hohnan: Thaak you very much. With that we xvill close the public comment period and come back to the Commission. Do Commissioners have questions for Staffofa clarifying nature? Commissioner Garber you had wanted to ask one about TDRs I believe earlier on. Commissioner Garber: I was simply going to ask Julie if she could pick and example and walk us through it of how it was done and how it is being proposed to be done. Ms. Julie Capor~o, ChiefPlannina and Transportation Official: An example of how this would work. Let n-~e give you an example of how currently it works. The Children’s Library used the TDR process. Prior to renovation of the Children’s Library the City sold the development rights. Chair Holman: Excuse me Julie, could I ask members of the public please to either take the conversation out to the lobby or to curtail their volume? I appreciate that. Thank you very nluch. I arn sorry Julie. Ms. Caporgno: So prior to the rehabilitation of the Children’s Library the City sold the development rights, I believe there were 2,500 square feet of development rights that we sold. Then we used that money to rehabilitate the building. At the time prior to the sale of the development rights we also entered into a separate covenant with Past Heritage to oversee the rehabilitation as a third party kind of peer review to ensure that the rehabilitation met the Secretary’s Standards. What we are proposing with this amendment is that that could still proceed if in fact the City elects to use the sale of the square footage on the building itself. However, it would also give the City the flexibility that let’s say we have received grants or we have sufficient funds to rehabilitate a building and the building qualifies for the bonus square footage we could bank that transfer of development rights and then sell it at a later date maybe when the market was better for use on another building. So let’s say we hadn’t used that square footage on the Children’s Library we retained the 2,500 square feet and two years from now we decided to sell them and we were in the process of rehabilitating the Roth Building or the Sea Scout Building or another City building that is listed oi1 the inventory for rehabilitation we could use the proceeds From the sale of the development rights on that building. So the thing that we wouldn’t have to do if we did it that way is we wouldn’t have to enter the covenant with the third party to ensure the rehabilitation by the Secretary’s Standards because the rehabilitation would have ah-eady been accomplished. So that would be the process we would undertake. We would still have the flexibility in either case. We aren’t precluding the way it is currently structured we are just adding the flexibility to enable this other process. Chair Holman: You look like you have another question. Any other clarifying questions? Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I have a question about the provision that allows property owners to apply fox-changes under 18.98.080. It is one of a concern which you nlust have thought about but it is Page 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 45 46 sort of floodgates concern, which is I understand the context in which this is being thought of, in particular Stanford and wanting them to be able to apply, but are we in danger of opening up the floodgates for any property owner to inundate the City and in particular Staff in the beginning and eventually Commission and Council with proposed changes? Mr. Curtis Williams, Assistant Director: Yes, we did think about that. There is such a presumption against doing it. To make that kind of change is suggesting on your particular piece of property that you want to change the standards for an entire zoning district or something to that effect. I think there is such a presumption against that that it is very unlikely that we would have many folks try to do that. We don’t have a lot of people come in today and ask if they can request that the zoning standard for this zone be changed to do something. We actually did it once. I don’t know if some of the Commissioners were on the Commission, I think the Chair and Vice-Chair were here at the time that Hohbach Property came forward with a request. I am not sure exactly how it happened because it is not consistent with the way it is written right now but they essentially initiated a request to change the FAR from mixed use in the GM(B) to 1.0 from 0.5. There were some other parts of that request as well, It was strictly a text amendment request. Maybe this is the way it needs to be worded is that they can request, maybe what we need to say is they can request initiation from the Commission because that is really what I think they did at that time and the Commission said no there was no merit to proceeding with that rather than it being a formal amendment in and of itself. So I would have to look to the City Attorney as to whether that may be a better way to word this. Something to the effect that it allows them to request initiation from the Planning Commission rather than that they can initiate a zone change or something to that effect. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. This is out of context, the quote here, but I am assuming that maybe it is the provision itself or maybe we need to make the language specific but that it is the property can only request it of the property that they own. That is not the way it is written here. Mr. Williams: No, they would be requesting a zoning text amendment - if they requested a zone change that was for the CS Zone the text amendment would apply to all of the CS Zones. Commissioner Tuma: But they wouldn’t have to own property in the CS Zone to do that. So in other words any property owner in Palo Alto under this provision could request changes for any property? Mr. Williams: That is tree and that is a good point. It probably should be a property owner affected for that provision or in that zone or whatever if they are going to make a request. That certainly is the intent. Commissioner Tuma: Again I understand the context in which this came up, under certain circumstances you want the conscientious property owner to be able to initiate these things but 1 just don’t want to get into a situation where maybe people haven’t done it in the past but we open the process for abuse and then I don’t know how you close that door. Maybe the City Attorney could address that. I just don’t think we want to get into that situation. Page 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 33 _~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Mr. Don Larkin, Senior Assistant City Attorney: One advantage of allowing a property owner to make that application is that we could then charge the property owner fees to recover Staff’s cost in preparing the text amendment and doing al! of the work that goes behind the text amendment. The way the policy currently is the property owner requests it and Staff does all the work. It is really Staff’s initiation so there are no fees collected. I think there is enough work that goes into these that the fees would be substantial enough, the cost recovery would be substantial enough, that that would discourage people from really abusing the process. Cornmissioner Tuma: Okay. That is great. That helps. Chair Holman: Vice-Chair Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have a couple of questions on Attachment B, the very first page, Item number 33, Commercia! Recreation, that definition there. I just want to make sure of something here. In there you have listed a variety of uses there and included in there is theaters but also included in that is exercise studios, g3qnnasiums, fitness centers, etc. Are we opening a Pandora’s Box here with regard to say something like Palo Alto Square where they have a theater and somebody could convert that into a fitness facility and we could lose another theater in Palo Alto? Or somebody could take something like the Aquarius and convert that into a fitness studio. Mr. Williams: Well, there are a couple of responses. Palo Alto Square is a PC and specifically calls for a theater. In a more generic sense this language has existed for a long time so we are not changing anything about that. Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay, I just want to make sure we are not .... Mr. Williams: The only thing that is changed in here is the exclusion of anything if it is defined as personal services and then we took out heath clubs or spas because health clubs and fitness centers are essentially the same thing. If it is a day spa we have included that as a personal service. So those are the only changes here. Otherwise that has been the Commercial Recreation definition since I think 1978. Vice-Chair Lip2pert: Okay, I just want to make sure we are not opening a Pandora’s box here. Then under number 47, Eating and Drinking Services, how do you monitor or gauge the sales from alcoho! versus food? Ms. Amy French. Current Plannin~ Manager: We require conditional use permits for restaurants with bars or alcohol. A typical condition is to require it to be a bona fide restaurant is as much as they have to sell real food not just cheese and crackers. We have been doing that through the condition use permit process. So I guess this addition kind of clarifies that we are expecting it to be a bona fide restaurant. Page 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 The method of monitoring this is a good question. The CUP allows us to revoke the CUP at any time. If we should get a complaint on an establishment we could ask them to produce evidence that they are operating a bona fide restaurant. So I think that is the answer to that. Mr. Williams: The use peru-fit is our tool for enforcement. We doil’t go out running around inspecting places but if it is appears that some place has turned into a bar and we are hearing about that then we will check. We have through the use permit a handle to be able to restrict that. Mr. Larkin: The only time I have ever encountered this is when you get a complaint that the restaurant isn’t serving any food and it is open at six o’clock in the morning. That is usually when you will get a complaint from the neighbors about that. It is usually fairly apparent that the restaurant isn’t serving food. I don’t think if they derive 49 percent of their sales from food and 51 percent flom alcohol it would be a difficult thing to prove. It is a tool to use when you have an obvious violation. The City can in those cases either get an inspection warrant to inspect the books or ask for an audit or do something else to have the restaurant demonstrate that they actually are functioning as a restaurant. Vice-Chair Li ~.t2p__9~: That raises a very important point here, which I think is wouldn’t it make more sense to base it on the use of the establishment? I am thinking out loud, therefore what you might consider is that during hours of operation it must have an operating kitchen. So if it is really a legitimate place for selling food and alcohol or food it really needs to have space dedicated to kitchen, and the kitchen needs to be in operation during the hours that the establishment is open. Mr. Larkin: I can tell you that not in this jurisdiction but in a jurisdiction where I used to work there was an establishment that had the same CUP requirement. They had an operating kitchen, they ser~,ed hot dogs, and I am guessing that the same hot dogs were spinning on the spinning thing every day for months. It was a bar and they showed themselves as a restaurant by having an operating kitchen with hot dogs. So I think it would take a little bit more ingenuity to come up with something based on that. I think the definition based on revenue is kind of the industry standard because it is something where you can show not only are we making food but we are selling food and we are in business to sell food. Ms. French: I would also add that we have had interest and applications for a wine bar that would for instance have wine tasting and that kind of thing. We recently just approved one right down here. They are going to have some food but it is not going to be the bulk of what they are doing. It is wine tasting and they are not going to have any other alcohol there. So that would just be an example of where you wouldn’t want to say they have to have a kitchen when they are doing wine tasting. They have some kind of array of food but it doesn’t necessarily have to be hot entr6es. Vice-Chair Li~pert: But your definition here, I don’t want to mince words, but it means providing preparation and retail sales of food. So preparation has the implication that there is a kitchen associated with that. Page 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Ms. French: Sure and kitchens can have ovens and they can have toaster ovens. The idea is what is a kitchen and we are not defining that. We are just saying they need to be able to prepare food onsite. Vice-Chair Lippert: I don’t want to get into a protracted discussion here but point of fact is it has to be inspected by the County Health Department. So that might also be something. Mr, Williams: IfI could clarify. This is not a big enough issue to have us try to draw up an enforcement language to do this. We think if and when it arises that the use permit gives us a handle to deal with it. I agree there are ways to specify better how food preparation is done in a place but in this context we just wanted to be consistent between the way we do CUPs for alcohol sales and our definition of eating and drinking services, which doesn’t really match that right now. So that is really the purpose of doing this and we don’t think it is really necessary to go beyond this as far as enforcement. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller and also a reminder that as Staff had mentioned when we first started that we are taking Open Space last. So questions not involving Open Space at this time. Commissioner Keller: Great, thank you. I hesitate to weigh in on the eating and drinking. I am just going to ask a quick question on that first. Is it necessary to rule out sale of alcohol for off premises consumption or is that already excluded? Mr. Larkin: That is covered by state licensing requirements so it is out of our jurisdiction in terms o f restricting sales o f off premises alcohol. Commissioner Keller: Well, my question is if an establishment sells alcohol for off premises use can we categorically exclude that from being an eating and drinking establishment or should we? Ms. French: It could be a retail sales operation. A grocery store sells. When you say for offsite consumption I am assuming they are leaving with a bottle closed. Commissioner Keller: Yes, and not resealed. Obviously some people go to a restaurant, drink a glass of wine or a couple, have a bottle, and bring the rest of the bottle home hopefully in their trunk so they don’t get an open container of alcohol law violation. If they obtain a bottle of alcohol which has not been opened it seems to me that that isn’t an eating and drinking establishment and therefore the provision that says that any establishment that sells alcoholic beverages for offsite consumption is not an eating and drinking establishment might be an additional provision that you want to add. Ms. French: I would also add that there may be a place like i think [Neibaum Copula] may be one of those places where it is a restaurant and they also maybe sell bottles of wine. I am thinking there are places like that that sell bottles of wine for offsite consumption where they actually do both. So retail is either an accessory or a primary use in that case. Page 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 32 34 36 _~7 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: Okay. Well it may have to do with what makes sense in terms of where eating and drinking establishments are and where you might cite that if they have that accessory use of selling for offsite consumption. You don’t want to talk about Open Space. Can I talk about PF? We are going to do PF and that kind of stuff all at once? Mr. Williams: Why don’t xve do that chapter all at once since it is all part of one chapter? What I would like to hopefully get to tonight is motions on everything but that chapter. Commissioner Keller: Okay, great. Thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, did you have a Follow up while Commissioner Keller is lookino9 Did you have a follow up to one of the previous questions? Commissioner Garber: No. i have additional ones. Chair Hohnan: Okay, Commissioner Keller, continue then. Comlnissioner Keller: Thank you. With respect to personal service you have a definition (D), which is quick printing and copying service. You have in there a phrase, which is also parallel, with (G) for film, data and video processing service. There is a notion of an ’other’ printing service or other shop. It seems to me that maybe that should be offsite printing, tn other words, instead of the word ’other’ you might want the word oft’site indicating that it is some service that is located elsewhere. You would want to, in my opinion, allow an Intemet printing service so that if somebody is at home and they go to a service and they say, I am going to submit ajob to be printed by a copy, shop or by a film processing shop that that would be considered an offsite use. On the other hand if you have a bunch of satellite locations, which are establishments, which are offsite and are collecting copying jobs or collecting printing jobs and SOlnehow bringing them to this location to be printed that that’s the kind of thing you want to exclude. So I am just twing to provide a little clarity to that and I arn wondering what your thoughts are about that consideration. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, did you have another question? I am so sorry. Mr. Williams: I guess we just don’t see that as being a concern. I think it fits within this now. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to say that but I don’t think it is necessary to either. It seems like every time we add words it brings up something else. If we did put something in I guess what you are saying is except for individuals or offsite if it is an individual printing or something like that. Commissioner Keller: I can’t give you wording because I haven’t gotten around to that but perhaps if the word ’other’ were referring to offsite and you were saying except from individual customers located off site and that would work. Mr. Williams: Okay, that’s fine. Is that okay? Page 13 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 "9 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: On Attachment B, page 2, the definitions of Gross Floor Area, (vi) the first two pieces here. The first one is required access. Is that refetTing to these spaces being used either for exit ways or for required outside spaces or what is the intent or meaning there? Ms, French: This is used elsewhere in the code t believe. I am not sure where this vestige came from but I have seen this before. It is typically when we are talking about what is included in gross floor area would include those areas that would be used to access the space. So if it is not required access I guess it wouldn’t be counted. Commissioner Garber: So the suggestion there is that if it is required for fire access or it is an exit way that allows for fire egress or exit then that is required and in other circumstances would not count. Now, my second part of the question is does this correspond to BOMAA Definitions of gross square footage? BOMAA is the Building Operation Management Association of America. No idea? Mr. Williams: I doubt that it does. I know there are differences between tile way gross square footage is counted for building purposes and tile way it is counted for planning. Commissioner Garber: The way that it is stated here though is the COl’IllliOn practice for Palo Alto to date. Ms. French: This has been out operating practice, yes. I have seen this exact language before so it comes from somexvhere. Commissioner Garber: Okay. If others have other questions go ahead and I can come back. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I would like to go back to the previous page to number 61, General Business Offices. Would something like advertising agencies be included in that list of general business offices? Ms. French: If insurance is permitted advertising is providing se~wice to other entities, other finns, and other individuals. Vice-Chair Lippert: I was going to make a minor suggestion here which is that maybe as a catchall any office that has an occupant load of say less than say 10 might be permitted and defined as a general office. The reason being that you have a lot of what might be what you alluded to previously as corporate office but it is a small startup company of some kind. It allows them to be defined as a general office to get their foot in the door and as they grow then they would be sort of granfathered out. Mr, Williams: What may not be clear here is this is not an exhaustive list of our definitions. These are just the ones being changed. So we already have a professional office that allows for a Page 14 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 30 31 32 DD 36 37 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 lot of those kinds of things. Most offices that are engineering or architects offices or attorney’s 2 offices can be professional offices. We have inedical office and other kinds of offices so we 3 have those different kinds. So general, professional, and medical tend to be lumped together 4 where they are permitted, or permitted uses, or conditional uses are usually grouped together in 5 administrative offices. The one that is pulled off and like in the GM zone only allows 6 administrative and doesn’t allow the other kinds. Sometimes it is the reverse. I think we are already covered by the professional office and other uses catching those if it is a smaller finn and it is something other than headquarters. Vice-Chair Lippert: I guess what I am thinking of is ..... Mr. Williams: We wouldn’t call it a headquarters office if it xvere 10 people. Vice-Chair Lippert: Right but what I am thinking of is when Google got started they were in Downtown Palo Alto. I think they had maybe 10 people, maybe fewer than that, and that was their worldwide headquarters so to speak. Can you define them as professional? Can you define them as being ...they are not medical. Where do they fit? So what I am saying is that because this area is known for startups you don’t know what those businesses generally will grow up to become and it is just a way to define a small general office use as being ambiguous as long as it is under a certain square footage as a general office. Ms. French: I would just want to caution against putting an occupant load period just because we do get spaces of different sizes and different circumstances. So it really helps to have flexibility. We are looking at the uses as they come in and it helps to not have that stated occupant load, I think. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, back to you. Commissioner Garber: I am forgetting where it is here exactly but dealing with the upper floors having a height of less than five feet to the rafter t believe is the latest recommendation there, is that right? I am only bringing this up for clarity. Is it to the rafter or would it be if someone were to finish that space out would it be to the surface of the drywall that was attached to the rafter given that there may also be other structural elements in the space that might in fact be lower than the rafter and the five feet would not be to those. So I am just sort of wondering where the thinking was on this? Ms. French: Confession: we kind of hastily threw this together today so I would welcome any architects or anyone else who would have a better way of phrasing this. The intent was we could say to the ceiling. If it is an unoccupied space that is not a closet, that is nothing, it is just space then what is it up there? Sometimes it will havejust the rafter and no gy-psum up there and sometimes it will have that. Commissioner Garber: I haven’t thought about text for this however it seems to me that it should be to either a rafter as a structural element or to the surface that is applied to that, the finished surface that is applied to that rafter, but not to other primary structural members that may be going through that space that may in fact be lower. Page 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22., 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Ms. French: I don’t think I got that exactly but I welcome that. I will listen to the tape. Chair Holman: If you have a suggestion of language I think Commissioner Lippert has a follow up to that. Vice-Chair Lippert: I think that also incumbent in that is it might also be access to that space and space actually being usable. If you are going to have space over five feet and it happens in a space and there is no staircase to get there for instance it is not really usable square footage. There is no way to get there. It may add to the bulk or massing of the house and you find that in more traditional sort of Queen Anne or Victorian type houses. There is no there there so to speak because you can’t access that space except through some sort of an access hatch to store things there. Another way to look at it might be the Uniform Building Code and the State Building Code both have definitions of minimum ceiling heights and five feet is not a realistic ceiling height. You really can’t stand in a space like that. I think that also goes for basements as well but we will talk about that separately. So maybe the five feet is rather arbitrary number so maybe six and a half feet makes it a little more useable. So anything over six feet would be considered floor area. I know a foot doesn’t seem like a lot but it really is a lot in terms of something being usable or not. Ms. French: Sure. We have been using as you note on page 1, we have been using what we call the ’five foot rule’ for as long as I have been here. So this is codified right now the whole five- foot rule. This is just taking that and saying rather than just doing it for attics, because we see applications of this in other ways, that when it is not an attic well, what is it? So it is kind of saying other areas would have that same five-foot rule. Mr. Williams: Madam Chair, if I can just ask for your indulgence because what we have tried to do here is not look at five feet versus six feet versus all that kind of things. These were put together primarily by Current Planning Staffthat deals with the day in and day out. They are not things that you are frankly that involved with. They think that some of this language would help to clarify this for them. If we go through and start playing with the wording of all these things that we haven’t even suggested changing my suggestion would be to take all the stuffout and leave it alone because we can deal with it better. It is just going to be very frustrating and we will be here until two o’clock in the morning wordsmithing these changes and that is not what we are trying to do. These are truly minor changes that are helping us clarify, some things. Now there may be a few that you have concerns about and I understand that and we can talk about the changes that we are making. But I really would ask you not to get into parts of these that we aren’t changing. Chair Holman: Much appreciate. Commissioner Lippert, did you have something else? Vice-Chair Lippert: I guess my response is that as a practicing architect, and I think Commissioner Garber is also a practicing architect, we do get bogged down in the minutia of this Page 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 or the details here because we use this on a regular basis. It would be really great to hone in and really focus in on what and define those definitions well because it really helps architects and the public understand what they can and can’t do. Whether it is six feet or five feet, I a~ee with you, that is not the issue here. We want to have clarity in those definitions. I think that’s what is important here. Mr. Larkin: If I could make a suggestion for working more efficiently, if there are policy issues that Commissioners are concerned about I think this is the appropriate time to bring them up. If there are technical language issues the Staff is always willing to look at those and ultimately Curtis is going to draft the ordinance and we are going to review it and at any point in that process we would welcome suggestions particularly from people who are practicing in the area for how to make that language more clear. Tonight should probably be primarily about the policy itself and not necessarily about the technical language. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: Let me just sum up by saying that if ! have any suggestions regarding the text I will email them to Zariah and forward them on to you. I don’t think that my questions have any intent or impact on the policy that the City is trying to get at here, which I think is perfectly appropriate. Chair Holman: If you have a clarification of language I am sure it is appreciated tonight too when other Commissioners can hear it, if not, then it could be follow up. I think we don’t want to get into debating the language. Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I would like to point out that there is an alternative approach to this issue. The alternative approach is as I understand embodied in the R-1 ordinance. That refers to the height above the occupiable, the finished floor of occupied space as opposed to the attic. It talks about the height of attic space above measured to floor that people are in. The total space of that ! believe it refers to that as a measurement. So if you have a high ceiling and a low attic that counts differently than if you have a low ceiling and a high attic. That may be one way of dealing xvith the massing issue and I would encourage you to consider that. Mr. Williams: Again, I appreciate that and that is just one of the reasons that this is a perfect example of the whole R-1 group that met initially several years ago and came up with changes, and debated these issues over and over again. I think if there is concern about this kind of thing and how it is done that we should have a committee of the Commission setup to look tt~rough those and meet with Staff and see if there are some things that you would like changed. I think that the approach is the same all we are talking about is being sure that some of these areas that add to the massjust the same whether they have a floor on them or don’t how do we count them? We are just making sure that we are clarifying how we do that. Ms. French: Just capping off, again, this is for upper floor so the 17 foot rule that we have for first floors that is getting at what you are saying, Arthur but we are talking about upper floor, second or third floor, that this where this would kick in. Page 17 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 1~4 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Chair Holman: Okay. I have just a couple or three questions. On Attactmaent B, page 2, it is talking about substantially enclosed. I think the intention here was to pick up the same language as is used in the low density. I was thinking that in the low density there was something like ’enclosed on a number of sides’ or ’enclosed by a certain percentage.’ To be consistent I think it might need to be that way but maybe I remember incorrectly. Ms. French: So you are talking about page 2 of my memo tonight? Mr. Williams: No, she is talking about right here in the changes here for these porches and stuff. It applies to yours as well but yours is in R-1. The technical manual does diagram out what ’substantially enclosed’ is and that has been a long standing, essentially 50 percent or more enclosed. So that has been our definition. We have under item -- it is not reprinted here because we didn’t make any changes to the R-1 and other zoning districts there. But there are other provisions in this definition of gross floor area that deal with R-1 and that says the same thing it doesn’t clarify it any more than this does right here. Chair Hohnan: Okay, thank you. So this language would refer to the technical manual for this multi-family as well as the low density? Mr. Williams: Yes. Chair Holman: Okay, Then one other clarification which is on that same page, (vi) that is shaded, open or roofed porches and that is above the ground floor and that is what intended, above the ground floor not at the ground floor? Just above the ground floor? Mr. Williams: It is the provision that Commissioner Garber mentioned before and that is differentiated from the other ones as being the area that are required for fire and building access purposes that they would be counted as floor area. Chair Holman: Okay. A policy thing, you might recall that I was not fully supportive of the exemption in the low density either of so much of the exceptions. So from a policy standpoint if we are looking at multi-family I am seeing that this could add up to a substantial amount of bulk to a building. You could have a large building, let’s say a parcel the size of the Sunrise development. It could add a substantial amount of bulk to a building to exclude the balconies, arcades, roof porches that aren’t substantially enclosed. So is there may limitation that Staff might consider or had they considered a limitation on the amount of space that would be excluded? Mr. Williams: Could consider one. We didn’t consider a limitation. I think our feeling was that generally it is not an enclosed area. It is not living area that would benefit the applicant in the case of applying for something. Then if it was somehow creating additional bulk or something like that the ARB is going to review all multi-family development so there would be a level of design review involved with it instead or as well. I don’t know quite how we would put a limitation on it. Page 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Let me ask this. Roof porches m~d balconies for instance, those might also be part of the required private open space in a project, correct? Mr. Williams: Definitely could be. Chair Hohnan: So I am actually interested in if they are part of the required private open space that they be counted as FAR. I don’t know if other Commissioners feel that way. Mr. Williams: Shouldn’t it be the reverse? Chair Holman: If they are required? What were you saying, Amy? Ms. French: I am thinking normally what we see is an unroofed balcony that serves as the required private open space. We require 50 square feet minimum balcony for each apartment unit, let’s say as their private open space. So we wouldn’t count that as floor area. Mr. Williams: In this case it is roofed. Ms. French: This says open or roofed. Mr. Williams: We are not looking at that one now. I was looking at this one, item (viii) and (iii) below. Ms. French: Okay. Chair Hohnan: My point is item B(iii) the reason is because if it is not roofed it is not counted as floor area ratio but if it is not counted if it has a roof on it either then you could really add to the mass of a building by roofing them and it wouldn’t be counted either. It is a policy thing because it has to do with the mass and bulk of buildings and how they are perceived. So that is my question about that. Mr. Williams: Then just thinking about limitations, the other possibility is I know we have provision that in soine cases a five percent additional like porch area can be covered on your site in addition to your overall site coverage. It allows for some additional porches. So maybe like a five percent figure. This could not exceed five percent of the site or something like that is a way that would be consistent with other kinds of site coverage issues. It is not FAR specifically but it would be kind of analogous to that. So it would allow for it to an extent but not allow you to cover a whole lot of the site with this kind of- so anything above that would be counted as floor are a. Chair Hohnan: I would appreciate some application of that and we will see what other Commissioners have to say. Commissioner Garber you have follow up to that? Commissioner Garber: So right now does the Planning Department read the code and apply the code - how does the Planning Department currently apply the code versus what is here versus what has been suggested? Page 19 1 2 Ms. French: The two above it for inulti-family roofed arcades, plazas, porches, it doesn’t say 3 balconies so these are at or near street level, we don’t count those. It is item (ii) right above this 4 one we are talking about. So when it is at the street level, at or near street level, and it is 5 accessible to the general public we don’t count it. 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 Commissioner Garber: Don’t count it as part of FAR. Ms. French: As a part of FAR we do not count it. Mr. Williams: When it is on the second floor... Ms. French: When it is on the second floor, well this is an add, we do count it currently since it is not excluded. Mr. Williams: That is the whole intent here. My understanding is currently if it is a multi-family project and it is above the first floor and it is roofed arcade, balcony, whatever no matter if it is completely open we count it as floor area whereas if it is a second story of a home we don’t count it as floor area. Ms. French: You just have to look up to item (viii) of the previous section mad read it without the underline. The underline on item (viii) above adds substantially enclosed by exterior walls. That is a proposal to add that. If we didn’t add that it would apply to everything on the second floor counting for gross floor area. So that is how we currently do it. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. I don’t want to beat this to death but there is a mass and scale issue to this. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: Maybe the way to look at it is similar to how we looked at carports. With regard to carports we talked about multiple parking spaces, have a minimum square footage that counts as the open space, the balcony open space, and then anything beyond that might count as floor area. So you can’t make these exorbitantly large balconies but you can make at least the minimum for what you need to provide to meet the requirement. Chair Holman: I had one other question, which has to do with the special uses, the Resource Consetwation Energy Facilities. Could those actually reach as much as 6,000 square feet? I know this says 6,000 square feet or two percent whichever is less. It is Attachment C, page 2. Mr. Williams: That is the figure that Karl Kmapp provided. I can revisit that with him if you so direct we could make that as small as feasibly possible kind of thing or something like that and try to see if we can ~vhittle that down to a smaller number. Chair Holman: Yes, I don’t know. I am sure he had some reason for coming up with the number 6,000 but it is a pretty big number too. I am not quite sure how we are going to deal with this in the motion because I don’t want to try to determine what that number is but if it could be a Page 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 !9 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 smaller number or as small as practically feasible or something of that nature that would be helpful. Mr. Williams: tfyou wanted to and I said as small as practically feasible I didn’t mean to put that language in here. I meant to go to Kar! and basically say let’s make that a smaller number and how small can we get with it and then we will report back to you what that number is if it is 4,000 or 3,000 or 2,500 or whatever and really sort of back him up into giving us what he thinks is the minimum number that can work. Chair Hohnan: That would be really ~eat. Commissioner Keller and then Commissioner Garber have questions. Commissioner Keller: One of those questions is on Attachment B, number 142. I am wondering whether you want to say should be located convenient to the intended users. Mr. Williams: That is fine. Chair Holrnart: Could you repeat where that is? Commissioner Keller: Yes. On Attachment B, number 142 should be located convenient to the intended users, inserting the word ’intended.’ Page 3. On Attachment C, number 4, this is one of these things where double negatives kind of get you in trouble. I think what you want to say is IR should be applied only when adjacent to single- family residences or two family uses as opposed to what it says now which is, ’The Individual Review shall not be applied to adjacent uses other than single-family or two family uses,’ which gets you into a situation where if there are some two family use and some non-two family use somebody might interpret this as not being applied. So I think you want to word it in the affirmative rather than the double negative. Mr. Williams: I understand that however, I think first of all that is the language that was specifically recommended with the multi-family and I think there is a reason. If you turn that around and basically say it shall be applied to use adjacent to single-family and two family uses or something like that. Commissioner Keller: Alternatively you could say the Individual Review shall not be applied when there are no single-family or two family uses adjacent or something like that. Mr. Williams: The affect of it is that there can be single-family say on two sides and a commercial building on the other side. The Individual Review would apply in that situation but it would apply to the interfaces between those residential uses. We are saying it doesn’t apply on that side with interface with the commercial. That is not something that Individual Review looks at. Commissioner Keller: I understand that. Page 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Larkin: I think the Commission needs to take a very quick break because you don’t have a q UO Fl.l ITI, Mr. Williams: You don’t have a quorum because it is five and it is a .....and a quorum is five? Vice-Chair Lippert: Can I take a break too? Mr. Williams: Yes, you are okay. Chair Holman: However I would like to get us to move along and get conclusion to this. Commissioner Keller: Can I finish the point? Chair Holman: Okay,, Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: If you have a situation in which orl that adjacent side there is a single- t~amily residence or two family use as well as a multi-family use it is not clear to me whether this would apply and that is the situation. Mr. Williams: Okay, so we can son~ething like Individual Review shall only be applied to adjacent single-family and two family uses. We will come up with some language that does that better than that. Commissioner Keller: Thmzk you. And the last thing is you have in here changes in terms of number 5, if you are allowing this by application by a property owner to the property owner’s own property I think that you may wish also to apply it to people who own property adjacent to such a site precisely because the nature of the adjacency should give them as much standing as the people who own the property to ask for zoning changes. Mr. Williams: tf someone were to request a text amendment to the zoning code it could not apply only to their property. A map amendment would apply only to your property. A text amendment would apply to everything in that zone. Commissioner Keller: I understand that but if somebody has property adjacent, let’s just for discussions sake say that a residential neighborhood group wished to request a zoning text amendment to adjacent zoned property. For example if Barton Park wished to apply a zoning text amendment to the adjacent comlnercial property that is across the way from them that if they want to pay for it and do all of the fees involved in that I am not sure why they should be prohibited from so while the property owners are allowed to. Mr. Larkin: I think Commissioner Tuma’s suggested language would take care of that because I think he suggested any person affected by the zoning and that would include people adjacent and near to that zoning. Mr. Williams: Well, I think we better think about this because we do not allow that for a map amendment. I don’t think we would for a text amendment either if they are in different zoning Page 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 I7 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 districts. If they are in the same zoning district I think that would be fine if it is all R-1. So in other words you can’t come in and initiate a map amendment to chm~ge your neighbor’s property from commercial to residential or something like that. By the same token I wouldn’t think you could come in for a text amendment and request that the CS zone which happens to exist next to you be modified to reduce the FAR in half or something like that. I think if it is your property and all your neighbors, for instance if a neighborhood wanted to request an amendment that like a single story overlay does with other types of criteria for a zone district then multiple property owners getting together to do that could do that as well as an individual owner. But I think it seems to me that what we are trying to do is provide some equivalency with the map amendment process and that is not doing it here. VVhat I think we were suggesting with Commissioner Tuma’s suggestion was that first that the property owner had to be affected by that, had to own a property that was within the zone of what was being amended firstly. Secondly that they could not themselves initiate the request. They could request the Commission to initiate a zoning, which would be more like a two-step process. I understand what you are saying but I would very reluctant to go to the point of allowing a property owner to request a text amendment or a map change on a neighboring property owner. They could certainly come to you and say we think this should be appropriate to do something and you guys could initiate it if you felt that was in the community interest to do that. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Believe me I am s3q~pathetic to your comments. I think at the same time there is nothing in here that prevents the process that someone would go through today. All we are doing is adding the ability- there is nothing that would prevent either coming here, going to Staff, going to Council, essentially lobbying for a change. That is what you are talking about. The way we talked about it before is that someone could request that we initiate but we could always simply say no. So maybe it just fon~alizes it a little bit more but there is nothing that prohibits somebody from doing this today, coming and requesting. It is a little bit less formal. Mr. Williams: Right, you are exactly right. It formalizes that process from what they could do today. Commissioner Tuma: I am in agreement with your comment about sort of getting into a situation where you have others, neighbors, and battles boy I think that is dangerous. So I think if there is enough reason to do it the process seems to work now and what you are intending here is to try to get people to absorb cost and be able to initiate in other circumstances. So I am comfortable with that. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert, Commissioner Garber, and then let’s go for a motion. Vice-Chair Lippert: I want to also make sure we are not opening up again another Pandora’s box here. We do have something very similar that does move forward this way, which is when people come in and ask for an overlay zone for like a single story overlay. I wouldn’t want to Page 23 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 negate or prevent that from happening where somebody in a neighborhood says I really feel the pain of these second story houses so I want to initiate a single story overlay zone and that affects my neighbors’ property. So if we adopt this language would it prevent somebody from doing that? Mr. Williams: No, and I think the distinction being that as long as you are in the same zoning district as your neighbor. If you are both R-1 properties and you want to initiate a single story overlay district or some other text amendment that affects that zone then you could do that here. You could initiate that request to the Commission. Vice-Chair Lippert: That is the point that I am trying to make. We do have areas of town, which are R-1 next to R-2 immediately adjacent. They are two different zonings. Mr. Williams: Right. Vice-Chair Lippert: But again somebody might want an overlay zone. I am going to use the example of Barton Park where they want to keep the rural character of that area. Can that be done? Mr. Williams: That can be done under the current zoning for the single story overlay. Vice-Chair Lippert: But if your property is R-1 and your neighbor s property is R-1 can those two properties have the same overlay zone applied to them? Mr. Williams: They can’t today. I think the single story overlay applies only to R-1 so they can’t today. Under this provision someone could come to you in the R-2 zone and ask you to adopt, well it is not a single story overlay that would be a different process because that is not for the whole R-2 zone. What this is for is text amendments. They could ask you to create an overlay zone for R-2 if they wanted to do that through this process but you would have to hear that and determine that there is merit to that and initiate that request. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, you had a last question or comment? Commissioner Garber: Question. On Attachment B, page 4, at the top of the page, Architectural Review Prior to Demolition. Is this applicable to any zone and could you describe just a little bit the intent here? Or what the circumstances are that has caused this to become an issue? Chair Holman: I think that is Attachment C, I believe. Ms. French: It is Attachment C. Commissioner Garber: I am sorry, you are right I was looking at D. Ms. French: This has been a matter of practice for quite some time. We don’t want to see vacant lots out there. These are project sites that are subject to Architectural Review tl~ough the ARB process not for anything else like IR or something else that is not subject to the Architectural Page 24 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Review process as codified. So it isjust a matter of codifying what has been a long time practice that in our opinion makes sense to have it that way. We don’t want to see people demolishing buildings and then years later have a vacant site and we are still waiting to approve the ARB application. Mr. Williams: Yes, so I think it is protecting in light of some of the discussions we have had about trying to reuse buildings and that kind of thing it also helps further that in terms of let’s not knock it down unless there was some health and safety reason to demolish it, in which case I am sure, and we could add that exception, except in those circumstances we wouldn’t want to take that building out of potential productive use. We have also had cases, one recently, where a number of existing businesses operate in those buildings and they would be gone if they were knocked down without knowing necessarily that there was a project to replace it. So I think in the interest of helping protect those businesses to remain for some time it is also aimed in that direction. Commissioner Garber: So because it is projects that have ARB oversight or have to be reviewed by ARB it essentially excludes R-1 ? Mr. Williams: Right, yes. It is multi-family and commercial and industrial projects. Commissioner Garber: Okay, thank you. Chair Holman: If I might add here in SOFA I there were buildings that were demolished that were subject to combined ARB/HRB review and buildings were deinolished that still have not been replaced. It really leaves a situation or condition of blight. I think you all probably know where they are but they are in the SOFA I neighborhood and buildings have been down for four or five years and still not been replaced. Now one is starting to be reconstructed. Commissioner Lippert you had a coi-mnei-~t? Vice-Chair Lippert: Yes. When you say demolition you are talking about demolition with a big ’D’ as in the entire building not demolition as in the internal gutting of a building in terms of tenant improvements getting started on a project that might require ARB review but it is nominal with regard to the internal workings of the building. Ms. French: Big ’D,’ yes. Tenant improvements some of which do require Staff level ARB for window and fagade changes but the bulk of that is building pem~it. Vice-Chair Litxpert: Co~Tect. Mr. Williams: I think it is useful I think to add in here to say no building demolition other than for tenant improvements and for health and safety purposes shall be demolished or something like that so we leave those out and don’t get caught in a situation where we have to say no or someone reads it the wrong way. It is a good point. Page 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Chair Hohnan: Okay. I think we are ready for a motion and I have made note of six comments or amendments to the Staff recommendation. Would someone care to make a motion? Commissioner Lippert you are drafted and we can amend as need be. MOTION Vice-Chair Lippert: Okay. I will move that we adopt the Staff recommendations as drafted with the amendments. Mr. Williams: I can read them if you like. Oh, she has them. I should clarify this is specifically for Attachments B and C, not for Attachment A which you are going to get to in a minute. Chair Holman: It would be B, C, and D. Mr. Williams: Yes, B, C, and D and as amended by the additional materials provided to you tonight by Julie and Amy. SECOND Commissioner Tuma: Second. Chair Holman: Motion made by Commissioner Lippert and seconded by Commissioner Tuma. Would you care to speak to your motion first or after your amendments? Vice-Chair Lippert: I don’t think it really needs to be addressed. I think that Curtis is right that a lot of these are cleaning up some very basic language so that Staffhas some clearly defined direction and it really is housekeeping more than anything here. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: No comment now I will make it a little later. Chair Holman: Okay, so the changes that I noted and Staffifthese are inaccurate or you have to add to them please do. So Commissioner Lippert for your motion I would add the comments that the Commission has made as I have captured them are Attachment C, page 2 and 3 at the top of the page that would be amended to indicate that the property owner would need to own in the affected zone. The five percent comment having to do with ... MI’. Williams: I will clarify that also we were going to say that that is by request of a resident or property owner within a district for a request for initiation by the Planning and Transportation Commission. Page 26 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 2"7 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: Thank you for that clarification it is greatly improved. Attachment B, page 2, (B)(iii) Staffwas going to amend that to include the five percent standard that is otherwise or elsewhere applied as a maximum. Mr. Williams: Yes. Chair Hohnan: Attachment C, page 2, 6 (c) having to do with the Resource Conservation Energy Facilities, the Staff was going to get clarification on what the FAR could be rather than the 6,000 square feet. It might be detennined to be a smaller FAR. Mr. Williams: Right. Chair Holman: Attachment B, page 3, 142 that the bottom line would be changed to be ’located convenient to the intended users’ I think that was the intended change. Attachment C, number 4, Staff was going to apply language that would clarify that last sentence so that it applied to sites adjacent to single-family and two family uses rather than commercial. Attachment C, page 4 (g) at the top, Staffwas going to add language so that it did not sweep tenant improvements .... Mr. Williams: And health and safety. Chair Hohnan: And health and safety issues into that. Thank you. Are those all acceptable to the maker? Vice-Chair Lip_pert: Yes, they are not really amendments they are comments that we made and I think you captured them pretty well. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Tuma are you okay with all of those? Commissioner Tuma: Yes. Chair Holman: So are there any other comments? Mr. Williams: We also had down Commissioner Keller’s suggestion on page 3 of Attachment B, the definitions of personal services to indicate that for both printing and copying, both (D) and (G) where it says for other printing services that other offsite printing services done on the same site except for individuals. Was that the way you wanted it worded? Commissioner Keller: Perhaps the word ’other’ should be placed by ’offsite’ and perhaps except for services provided to individual entities or whatever you want, something like that, as contrasted with .... or another way of thinking about this is no quick printing for any offsite printing establishment. That may be another way of handling it or any offsite film, data, or video processing establishment, in other words, not offsite entity but if it is done without a separate collection point that would work. Is that okay? Page 27 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 D- 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Williams: So just using the ter~n °establishment.’ Mr. Larkin: Perhaps I think Staff understands the direction and I think those latter definitions may be a little better but I think we understand the direction and we can develop some language. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: Forgive me. It is still not quite clear in my head on B, (iii) the impact of the FAR. Chair Holman: Which attachment? Commissioner Garber: That is Attachment B, page 2, itern B (iii) that had been amended. Could you help me on that? Mr. Williams: B (iii), what it says there is that when located above the ground and not substantially enclosed by exterior walls limit it to no more than five percent of the site or .05 FAR I guess may be a better way to say it because five percent of the site implies two dimensional and this could be something on the second story and something on the third story and we want to capture all that. So it is essentially limiting that we are not going to include those kinds of porches and arcades and such if they are substantially open. We are not going to include them in FAR but only up to .05 FAR maximum for the site. If you have more than that then it is going to start to count. MOTION PASSED (5-0-2-0, Commissioners Butt and Sandas absent) Chair Holman: Okay, are we ready for a vote? All those in favor of the motion with all the clarifications added, all those in favor say aye. (ayes) No oD.e opposed so that passes unanimously on five to zero vote, Commissioners Tuma, Garber, Keller, Lippert, and Holman voting aye and Commissioners Sandas and Butt absent. Commissioners, why don’t we take about a seven minute break and come back to tackle the Open Space? Commissioners, we will reconvene the meeting and we will undertake the Open Space District. Commissioners, questions for Staff?. Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I have a procedural question that is for Staff or whoever. There seems to be some discussion or consensus that xve are not going to conclude this item tonight. If that is the case that is fine. We should maybe define what we want to get done tonight, how far we want to go, so we don’t simply just go on and on. Page 28 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: I think that is a fair question and I can either comment what I know or Staff you can comment. Mr. Williams: I know that Commissioner Butt was very interested in the Open Space District and has been for a very long time. I am a little concerned about not having him weigh in on it. So I think our suggestion would probably be to go as far as you feel like you can go on it in terms of your questions and such and then on the 13tt~ we will be having a carryover of the 195 Page Mill Road and we could conclude this item and he will be there. On the other hand Commissioner Lippert won’t be there then and some of you may know Commissioner Burt’s issues. He didn’t request that it be held over or anything so we should just probably go ahead and see where we land on that. We are comfortable if it is your preference to hold it over to the 13th to actually conclude this chapter, this Special Purpose District’s Chapter. It is ultimately up to you. We are ready to proceed with it to its conclusion but again I do know that Commissioner Butt has been really very concerned about some of the issues in the Open Space District before. Chair Holman: I concur with that completely and it is not something typically we would do but I know much of the time that I have been on the Commission and he has been here longer than I but we have had concerns about trends that have gone on in the Open Space District. So that an inclusive process it might be good as Cutis said to take it as far as we can tonight and then allow him and Commissioner Sandas to view the videotape and then conclude the item when especially Commissioner Butt can participate. So if that is agreeable to other Commissioners? Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Pat in particular does have a lot to add on this particular topic and Paula will as well I am sure. I am only looking for some consensus maybe among the group here what the logical conclusion of our discussions are tonight. Normally the conclusion would be a motion and we would vote on it. I think the tendency will be to talk about it, and we should talk about it a lot, but we will come back and are we, the five of us, going to not talk about it again on the 13th when Pat does? Are we going to rehash the issues? I just want to try to be efficient with the time. Chair Holman: I appreciate that and maybe ifI could then we will come to you. Maybe Curtis might want to weigh in here too. It would seem to me that what would be a prudent course of action would be for us to ask all our questions of Staft‘, and raise issues and suggestions or recommendations that we might have, and we can discuss those, but we would certainly not make motions and go that far. Then it will happen that when Commissioner Burr comes back and participates after he and Commissioner Sandas have viewed the tape they will have impressions and comments to add to our comments most likely. So we will pick up where we left off but we will also have already gotten a lot of the groundwork laid at least where the rest of the Commission is standing. Curtis, would you care to weigh in on that? Mr. Williams: That is fine. I think again Commissioner Lippert isn’t~ooin~ to be here on the 13~. It would be my hope that he could at least make comments as to very specifically what it" anything he would like to see changed in here so that is on the record for consideration by the Commission on the 13th if that is when you vote. Page 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 04 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 Chair Holman: Absolutely. Commissioner Garber you were next and then Commissioner Keller. Okay, Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I think it would be nice if Staff has the time if there were based on our comments that we make tonight if there are things that made sense to you that you agree with that you would like to adopt either to give us a sort of brief en-ata if you will, type of changes that we agree to to facilitate adoption at the next meeting or if you would amend this which probably would be more paper than it is worth. So some way of capturing that and presenting it back to us to simplify and summarize I think would be very helpful from my perspective. Chair Holman: Comlnissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I think that is a great idea. Something more than minutes, I think something if you can to distill it do~vn so we don’t wind up going back and rehashing and we can sort of pick up where we left off. It is two week’s time. Vice-Chair Lip_p__g~: What about public notification? Chair Holman: Well the meeting will be continued. Commissioner Garber: Would the public need to be notified of that document? Mr. Williams: Not separately from the fact that it is continued until then and we produce such a document that would go up on the website and it would go out in your packets. Commissioner Garber: Okay. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lip ~et?_g_~: If the item were continued would the public hearing for this be left open? Chair Holman: Actually I closed the public comment period but we have the discretion to reopen it. Vice-Chair Lip ep_gj2: The reason I ask that is because of two Commissioners not being here. Mr. Larkin: In order to vote on the item the two Commissioners would review the public comment that was made at this meeting but my recommendation would be that if there were substantial changes made to what is being proposed tonight that the public coinment be opened again so that the public could comment on those changes. Vice-Chair Lippert: If I might, there was some technical difficulty earlier this evening and those comments were not necessarily picked up by the tape, they would only be picked up by the transcribed minutes. Page 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 I2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Larkin: And because it is a legislative action that is not fatal to both Commissioner Sandas and Commissioner Butt being able to participate. It is recommended that they listen to the comments so that they are fully prepared but it is actually not an absolute requirement. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I think that the two people who spoke on this issue had very detailed and important comments and t would encourage them to place their comments in ~vriting and submit them to the Commission for our reasoned and giving us sufficient time to analyze them for the next meeting. I think that that would also help the other Commissioners who aren’t here to gather that information. I know that Mr. Geiger had mentioned that he had a whole list of comments that he wanted to make that he had in writing and continuing that should give Mr. Geiger the opportunity to submit those in writing so that we can consider those for the next meeting. Chair Hoh-nan: Good comments, all. So Commissioners, questions for Staff’? Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I would like to go to page 11, item (1) Impervious Coverage. Being an architect and Commissioner Garber also being an architect we work with a lot of this stuff in other communities. Why not do lot coverage as many communities like Portola Valley or Los Altos Hills with low-density ratio? Basically what you would do if you had a site that is steeper you get more runoff of the site, the site can’t absorb as much water as say a flat site. So why not go to something like that as opposed to just a fixed number or a fixed percentage? Mr. Williams: The three and a half percent that is certainly an option. I am intimately familiar wit those calculations having worked in three communities now that use exactly that kind of thing. This percentage is low to start with so my thinking is probably it is established because you have a variety of different types. If you had a fiat lot it might be higher than this and if you had a steeper lot it might be lower in some instances, although this is pretty stringent. So I think it is just a matter of that is a very different approach. It has a lot of administrative components to it in terms of how that is all calculated and providing the topo and calculation forms mad who checks those and be sure the slopes are all calculated correctly and formula is used properly and all that. It can be done, there is a lot of logic to it but given the amount of area we are talking about potentially to be developed I am not sure that at this point in the game it is worthwhile changing 90 degrees from where we are right now in tenns of the review process. I guess that is the negative side to it. Again, it is a logical approach. Amy, I don’t know if you know how much of the OS zone or how many total lots we have and how many are left to be developed but that is something that we probably should check and see to know really at this point is the marginal benefit worthwhile to go to a completely different analytical approach to impervious surfaces. Vice-Chair Lippert: As a follow up to that FAR is one thing, lot coverage is really looking at something completely different. What we are talking about here really is when we talk about impelwious surface we are talking about recapturing of runoff is really what we are talking about here. We are not saying reduce the amount of FAR that can be built on these sites. In a point of Page 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 !0 11 I2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 fact they have to put together topo maps for sites in the Open Space anyway for engineering and they have to do certain analysis in terms of geo-technical work that needs to be done out there. It is very, technical to put together a slope density calculation but it is within the realm of possibility and we in the community see the Open Space as being far more valuable today than we have in the past. So that would be a reason to change the way we go about doing that. If somebody had a fiat lot there is no question they have some good surface area there and they can absorb a lot of water. If you build on a hillside like the project we saw earlier in the year where a person wanted to build the house right on the ridge there that was a pretty steep slope. I think that possibly the design would have benefited from some slope density calculations in temps of the amount of impervious surface. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: I will just follow onto Commissioner Lippert’s comments. I don’t disagree with his comments at all. It is not clear to me where three percent is better than something more or less percent. If there are other calculations that may be more appropriate frankly for what we are dealing with why we shouldn’t consider them. Doing the reality check of just how many are left to be built is probably worthwhile doing. That doesn’t discount things being redone in the future either. I guess what I would be interested in is more discussion about what the impacts are now relative to changing it one way or the other. Mr. Williams: Just to interject because I would like to try to respond to questions now if we can, although we don’t know the number that are left out there. My sense in having worked with slope density calculations a lot versus something like this is that overall I don’t think the numbers are going to change that much. I think the things that t have seen the Commission focus on most in Open Space are lots of the things in the Comprehensive Plan policies that call for design issues a lot more than they are the percentage of impervious coverage. The percentage is stringent. You could have a lot that has 75 percent fiat land out there that gives you a high impervious coverage and depending on where that land is on the site it may create an extremely negative situation visually for you to allow that kind of thing. So my impression is this number is probably a good, fairly stringent number that is simply to apply and that the real key then is that you apply it in a way that the design minimizes the visual impact. To me there are a lot, especially if you have 96.5 percent of the site that is not paved, that there are lots of ways to deal with the runoff and storm water issues associated with that. So I don’t see that there is sort of this incremental or some incremental benefit in going to the slope density type approach. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuina and then Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Turna: I will show my ignorance on some of this stuff. How easy is it to determine the permeability of particular surface that is trying to be used? Do they come rated? Is it easy? Mr. Williams: Well, it is not real simple. The Bay Area Storm Water Management Association, which tends to provide the sort of basic, a lot of diagrams and information about materials and Page 32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 t4 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 such to all Bay Area cities through the various storm water pollution prevention programs. They have diagrams of all kinds of paving materials, their permeability, what slopes they work best on, how they need to be drained, how thick the various rock material is versus the sand versus whatever else is in there. So there are some variables. So if you want to put a certain type of material on a slope then it might be less permeable than if that same material is on flat. So it takes looking at generally by Planning and Engineering together to make those determinations. So it is not real simple. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. That is something that you need to do anyway. Here is where I am going with this. Why choose 50 percent as kind of the cutoff point? Why not have a sliding scale and give them a proportionate amount of latitude if it is more permeable and less if it is less permeable? Mr. Williams: I think that is fine too. I know there was concern about this and this is maybe a starting point for discussion. It is a little more complex if you want to get into essentially each material that comes in and we make a determination on it as to if it is 28 percent permeable then they get 28 percent credit for that or something like that. That is fine to do that too. Commissioner Tuma: That is why I asked the preface question. We don’t want to get into a situation where it just becomes so burdensome to make those detenninations but if it is something that is relatively easy to do then having a sliding scale to me makes a lot of sense here. We can still go to the underlying policy which is try to encourage the use of these types of materials in the Open Space so that you don’t get the runoff but not penalize people. Mr. Williams: That is fine. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Firstly a piece of data. For 10 acres three and a half percent of that winds up to be !5,246 square feet. I just figured it would be helpful for people to know that number. That is an idea of what we are talking about. The second thing is the idea of calculating the amount of permeability of a surface reminds me of the low tar cigarette tests. It turns out that some cigarette manufacturers decided that one of the ways to deal with low tar cigarette tests is to put holes in the filter. When the machine that inhaled the smoke from the cigarette measured the amount of tar and nicotine and whatever it was inhaling air through the filter and therefore the amount of tar was very low. However, people’s lips are shaped differently than machine’s lips or the equivalent and therefore people naturally when they put the cigarette in their mouths they covered the holes and therefore actually inhale a lot more tar and nicotine. I just point that out because it indicates the difficulty of such measurements even if you have a scientific basis for them. That being said let me get to the more substantive issues that I would like to talk about. The first thing is for Section 18.28.060, which is page 7, the PF District, Additional Height and Daylight Plane Requirements. The first question is at the end of this, number (2), the maximum height within 150 feet of an RM-30 or RM-40 district shall be 50 feet. Again, I think what you mean is Page 33 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 _~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 if there is no RM-15 or R-2 or R-1 or RMD and whatever those zones are then it should be 50 feet. In other words, if there is an RM-30 and there is an R-1 I think you still want to limit it to the lower height. So it is my standard comment about exclusions and negations and such. On the other hand, what I am wondering is the issue of this has to do with if the use is at least 60 percent residential and because this consideration is an adjacency issue why does it matter what the use of the PF parcel is? Why does it matter if it is a residential use? Shouldn’t it have the same height limits regardless of the use of the site? What matters is the adjacency rather than the use. Mr. Williams: I would say generally yes. I think what has happened here basically is that we have not had any difficulty dealing with the PF District regulations so we didn’t make any suggested changes. You are right. One of the reasons why this hasn’t been a problem is we don’t have residential use going into a PF zone. PF zone is Public Facilities it is not residences. So you probably don’t even ever come up against this issue. On the one hand that argues for why have it and make that distinction? On the other hand again we are trying to focus on problems and in the interest of being able to move forward with changes, identify, problems, and take care of those. We would be glad to look at that and it may be that we talk about that and suggest that either like you said not make that distinction or just take this out. Commissioner Keller: What seems to be interesting about this is when I am given a document I actually read the whole thing rather than just reading the changes and maybe that is a mistake but maybe not. Mr. Williams: No, that there is sorne good to come out of that. Commissioner Keller: Then if you turn to page 8 where we have section (d) under the same thing. This is something that perhaps I am confused but perhaps I am not. It says (2) Landscaping of Yards, "For sites abutting a residential districts, a solid wall or fence between five and eight feet in height shall be constructed and maintained along the common site line." What if in between this site and the residential district is a street? Now my understanding is abutting includes a street. In which case you have to put a five or eight-foot wall down the middle of the street and that doesn’t make any sense. So I would suggest that you say ’except on the street side.’ Mr. Williams: That is fine. We have the same language in the commercial and industrial districts as well and we didn’t make that change. We obviously don’t put them on the street it is when it is between properties. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. In terms of 18.28.070 where it says (A) Second Dwelling Units because under number (1) it says, "Second dwelling units shall be subject to the following development requirements." Considering the fact that we have people who call under the same ownership meaning condominium ownership, so people twist these in all sorts of ways. I want to understand how many second dwelling units are allowed on a parcel. Is it one second dwelling unit? Three second dwelling units? So if there is only one second dwelling unit allowed I think Page 34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 1l 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 that you want to reword this so that the second dwelling unit is in the singular rather than the plural. It is on page 8. Mr. Williams: That is fine we will clarify that. It is only one and it would be a third dwelling unit if there were another one not a second second dwelling unit. Commissioner Keller: I understand, t haven’t been on this Commission very long but I have seen some interesting creative use of language. In terms of(E), Maximum height, as measured to the highest point in the building: 17 feet. It is not clear to me flom where you measure it. In other words, measure it to the highest point what is the 17 feet above? So it might be helpful to clarify 17 feet from what. Mr. Williams: We will make sure this language matches whatever we have in the other- I am sure this is the same as what is in the R-1 and R-2 now. So I don’t think there is a reason to make a distinction there. Commissioner Keller: Okay, thank you. It would be helpful to know in term of page 9, item (C) (2) i don’t know what Group M occupancy is and I am not sure that anybody here M~ows what Group M occupancy is but I am wondering why it is excluded from or why it would be waived by the City Engineer. Mr. Williams: I will check that with the Building Official and City, Engineer. Commissioner Keller: In terms of (d) Landscaping, it seems to me that we would want to allow for removal of invasive species and replacement with native species. I think that it might be worthwhile making that explicit. Okay? Similarly, on page 11 where you have (k) Open Space Review Criteria, which I think you mean is (m). it is the (k) that follows the (1). It says, "Existing trees with a circumference, etc." I am wondering if you want to allow removal of eucalyptus trees provided that they are replaced by something suitable. Some people consider eucalyptus trees to be an invasive species. Mr. Williams: I would not do that. If you wanted to do that I would go back to landscaping or something like that and do that. These are the verbatim policy criteria from the Comprehensive Plan and I x~ ouldn t want to change any wording. Commissioner Keller: That is fine. If you want to put that comment under landscaping indicating that ..... Mr. Williams: Also we have a tree reinoval section too which is on the page before under item (f) and that says ’shall be permitted as provided in Title 8’ and it does allow tree removal of eucalygtus but it is not necessarily a policy to remove them. So it probably should be discussed in the landscaping section. Page 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: I don’t thii~ that they should be removed but allowing them to be removed is certainly something that we should continence. Mr. Williams: Yes. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I believe I figured out what Group M occupancies are and why none of us could figure out what they are. I think they are agricultural buildings. A comment or question I have on second dwelling unit is why would we limit the square footage of the second dwelling unit to something that would be in an urban context? Why not limit the second dwelling unit to say 20 percent of the maximum allowable FAR that you could build in the Open Space? So in other words, you would put 80 percent say into the main house and put 20 percent into a second unit for instance. Mr. Williams: We are not changing that. That has been in effect for however long the 900 square feet for OS. I would assume that it is the same as some other areas that you could then start to get a 2,000 square foot second unit and you end up essentially having two homes on the site and it is no longer really a single-family with an accessory second dwelling unit, it becomes two homes. Granted it is a minimum ! 0-acre lot but it still is two homes and it gets more difficult to hide a 2,000 square foot unit than a 900 square foot unit. That is purely a policy detem~ination but I am just sort of speculating on what the rationale would have originally been in trying to retain one main dwelling and a relatively small second dwelling regardless of whether it is in an urbm~ or rural landscape. Vice-Chair Lippert: What I am thinking of is for instance the Goldman Estate, which I think came before ARB many years ago. What they did was built a main house and a secondary house. The secondary house was smaller but what they basically did was they had two separate lots. It was a very appropriate solution for the sites in that area in that what you actually did was you had a house and you built a smaller house that functioned pretty much as a main house and a guest house. What you would call a guesthouse is the size of a standard house say in Downtown Palo Alto. In Downtown Palo Alto when you look at it by a percentage of lot coverage and FAR you are looking at a much, much smaller site going on a postage stamp size - you are taking a much larger house and putting it on a postage stamp size lot per se. Whereas in the Open Space it might in fact be a better approach in terms of responding to geography and some of the issues that we are talking about here regardless of whether it is two families out there or one family and the in-laws living in another house. Then one last question is I don’t see this in here and I think it is an appropriate add which is the prohibition of white and clear skylights in the Open Space. Basically what I am responding to is light pollution. If you have people that are living on hills and ridges and things you are looking down into somebody’s skylight at night. If it is white it is almost like having a light fixture pointing up. If it is clear it is the same sort of thing as having a bare bulb. Whereas if you Page 36 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 -,? 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 encourage people to use tinted or grayed glass in their skylight you don’t get quite as much light pollution. It is probably something worth considering at this point. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: One of the speakers earlier this evening made a suggestion having to do with applying a different standard for permeable surfaces along the scenic con-idor. I just wanted to hear what Staff’s response was to that suggestion. I do have one other question. Mr. Williams: Well, I think there is certainly some merit to that suggestion particularly if the reason for the length of the driveway, and what we are talking about is backed up farther way and your driveway gets longer so you have more impera, ious surface that counts against you. You don’t have so much choice as to where you put the house. That is because we want to have the house pushed back. So I think that it would be very reasonable to say something to the effect that the driveway portion through a scenic setback area doesn’t count against impervious surface or something Iike that or maybe only the first 50 feet does or something like that. I will conoborate that what she said was also true about other cities. Woodside and Los Altos Hills both of which I worked for both had provisions that essentially for the main driveway only counted the last 50 or 100 feet to the house as impervious surface. The rest of it was not counted because the philosophy was we want it pushed back away from the road, less visible from the roadway, and to do that you had to have a longer driveway. So don’t penalize them for doing that. So in a generic sense there is some reason to do that certainly if the reason is that you have a scenic easement there that is dictating sort of where you put the home that would seem to argue in that vein. Commissioner Tuma: Okay, I would be very supportive of some language that essentially allowed a one-to-one correspondence to the distance that we require them to set it back. The other question I had was in the memo. You identified two main issues from your perspective, two key revisions, the first being the pervious surface that you have talked about the other being essentially incorporating the Comprehensive Plan provisions into this section. So with respect to the second one and the issue of trying to put that issue to bed I just can’t imagine any reason why that is not ! 00 percent appropriate. Is there any dispute? Mr. Williams: No, we have to consider that already and it is just a matter of bringing that into the Zoning Ordinance so it is front and center. I think one of the goals we have in terms of the Open Space District at this point because of some of the past cases is being sure that all the information is there as much as we can in the Zoning Ordinance because that is where somebody looks first to see where the criteria are. The only thing I would add is I did notice later it is probably fine to leave it in but it could be taken out is item 13 under that says, "For development in unincorporated are, ground coverage should be in general conformance with Palo Alto’s Open Space District regulations." So you wouldn’t be reviewing it if it were in the unincorporated area so it is not going to apply either way. So I think that is a Comp Plan policy that might be guidance elsewhere but it is not going to apply to a zoning issue before you. Page 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 lO 11 I2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 DO 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I have a follow up on Commissioner Tuma’s question with regard to driveways. That is probably true if the area there is pretty fiat but as you get on the uphill side of sites if what Commissioner Tuma’s comment was you are actually rewarding people for building their houses higher up on a hillside by not penalizing the driveway in that setback. They would probably have to do a number of switchbacks in order to get up there and more driveway within that setback area and as they get further away they get higher up. So you basically would be building that house up out of the 200-foot setback but there might be more non-permeable driveway in that 200-foot setback because of the geography. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Cominissioner Keller: Since I am relatively new to this Open Space stuff I have a couple of questions. The first one is what are, if any, the FAR rules for primary dwellings in an Open Space? Ms. French: We don’t regulate FAR it is all be pervious. Commissioner Keller: So you don’t regulate FAR, you don’t regulate lot coverage, it is all by impervious coverage and by height I guess, height over the adjacent ground? Ms. French: Yes, adjacent ground and sometimes we have segmented stepping down the hill and we take it directly below each point. Commissioner Keller: Okay. Thank you. The next question is with respect to Page Mill Road. What seems to make sense to me particularly with respect to Vice-Chair Lippert’s comments that you might want to exclude a certain number of square footage of driveway in the event that somebody had property that was along Page Mill Road for which the 200 foot co~xidor would apply. So for example if you exclude all the driveway not only would you have this issue of switchbacks but you also have the issue of how wide they might want to build the driveway. I guess a driveway that is 20 or 30 feet might be one thing, somebody might want to put a wider one, I don’t know why, but the issue is that you nfight come up with a number like say 600 square feet or 800 square feet or whatever and whatever driveway was within the 200 feet of the property line and anything above that exclusion would count and anything before that exclusion would not count. I think whatever the right number is that xvould handle a lot of the issue of dealing with the switchback issue, dealing with the fairness of the setback, and dealing with the vagaries of how wide a driveway might be. Chair Holman: Okay. I have a question about the impervious aspect too. What we have had for many years is a three and a half percent impervious limitation on sites. What we have come up against is that as permeable materials have been used for paving then buildings are getting bigger and the things that used to count as impervious have no longer been counting as impetwious. Page 38 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 So it would seem to me that a simple way to deal with this would be to require pem~eable materials for all the vehicular access and count it as impem~eable. It is sort of counter-intuitive in one regard but actually it is not different than what the language is that Staff is recommending because it says, ’except that primary driveway is a required parking area should be considered impervious due to the compaction from driving over the surface.’ So Staff in their recommendation is saying that no matter whether it is permeable or not they are going to count it as impervious because of the compaction. So why not require that all vehicular access is permeable but count it as impervious? Mr. Williams: There are probably a couple of reasons why. One is like you said it is counter~ intuitive and I think it is counter to if you at all buy into the argument that they don’t function as permeable materials if they are compacted and driven over why require them to penneable? They are not doing anything unless it is just a matter of visually you are not seeing asphalt or concrete you are seeing something different. The other that I think is more a practical issue is that what you typically would use like gravel or unless you are talking about some of the materials they do have some pervious asphalt and some pervious concrete now but other types of materials when you get in this kind of environment and particularly with any kind of slope to it are not good road or driveway surfaces. So they fail and often times fire departments don’t want to use them either. So that is one of the main reasons why in these hillside environments you do end up with as much, I have even seen property owners who very much want to do permeable materials with paving blocks or something like that but itjust doesn’t work in that environment a lot of times and still provide the stability you need to have for a driveway. So it is sort of site specific. There are some sites that you certainly could do that on and perhaps the argument is overstated as far as the compaction part of it if it is not a steep or pretty good slope to it, if it is pretty fiat, if it is single-family homes you have ten trips a day over it and it is just the standard vehicle and you have parking spaces and you are in the garage for the most part but the other parking areas are not heavily used then they would provide some benefit from a permeability standpoint. But to just sort of require it outright I am not sure. Why would you not then allow any credit for it? It seems kind of penalizing to say why would that not get any credit but you would get credit for I assume for a patio that was a permeable material or something like that? Or are you saying you are just requiring permeable materials for certain things and everything counts as impervious? Chair Holman: The Staff recommendation is that other paving materials if they are considered at least 50 percent permeable then they wouldn’t be counted as impervious. So no. What I was trying to get at was to go back to what the intention of the rule was. You could call it impervious or you could just call it lot coverage basically and just what is counted as lot coverage. So driveways and vehicular access are counted as lot coverage. Essentially it is another way of looking at it and it gets rid of the counter-intuitive aspect ofpem~eable and impervious. I have questions too. You have follow up to that? Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: I don’t know if it would be helpful or not to be able to distinguish between impervious materials and pervious materials versus impervious assemblies and pervious assemblies which may help some of the definition here. Page 39 1 2 .3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2o 21 22 2~.o 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O _~1 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 To Chair Hohnan’s point I would look to find ways to be flexible on the materials that are used by a particular homeowner to meet whatever their issues are so long as they fell within the general rules of imperviousness and permeability that we define. I don’t think I would look to force a homeowner to use a pervious material in an impervious assembly um~ecessarily, if that makes sense. Chair Holman: What do you mean by impe~wious assembly? Commissioner Garber: The Plmming Department wording here if I am understanding correctly is that you may use a pervious material be it concrete or any number of the different materials that are used but in order to support it within a driveway bed you have to create that material in addition to gravel, sand, and compaction requirements that makes the assembly of al! those materials essentially impervious. So the only reason then that you would have a pervious material over an impervious assembly would be for some presumably aesthetic reason because it is not really doing anything else to support the impe~wious assembly at that point. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller and the Commissioner Lippert. Comn~issioner Keller: I am confused there are two different issues here. One issue is whether or not a driveway, whether it is the primary driveway or not, if it is used for cars should it be considered pervious or impervious? That is one question. The second question is whether we want to encourage people to use pervious material when it is not counted as pervious because it is a driveway? I would like to separate those two questions because I think we are focusing on the second when I think that the real issue is the first. Chair Holman: Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I think I understand where Staffwas going with this. If you used a material like Turf Block for your driveway it is the Turf Block that xvould support the vehicle going up the hill. All the holes in the donuts so to speak would allow the water to penetrate therefore it is really a pervious surface. Again, another way of looking at it is if somebody decided that they wanted to use a Hollywood strip but I wouldn’t recommend it. It is two strips of concrete for their driveway and use some gravel or grass in between. Again, you have reduced the amount of paved surface there by more than 50 percent. You would count the drivexvay as being pervious. So that is my guess as where you basically going with this, correct? Mr. Williams: Not really but I think that is a reasonable way to go with it. I am hearing a good discussion of different ways to do it and maybe there is a way that we can provide some incentive to do driveway and parking areas in permeable materials but not give them the full credit that someone would get if you were using it for a patio or something else and at the same time not give them full discount to be able to put that square footage into a house but recognize that there is some diminished permeability to it when it is mn over by cars all the time. With your situation of Turf Block that is a great permeable material when it is on a fiat surface and when the grass can grow. But when cars start running back and forth over it and you don’t have Page 40 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 I7 18 19 2O 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 ~4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 any grass, dirt gets in there and it packs down, and it ends up being just basically a pervious 2 surface it doesn’t work. Holly~vood strip type things probably would work better because you 3 have treads there for cars to go up and you are probably not compacting that area there in the 4 middle. So some of those options are worthwhile and it may be that there is something in the 5 middle that provides some incentive for someone to do a permeable surface for a driveway but doesn’t give the same level of benefit or credit as for when it is not used for a driveway or parking purposes. We can look at that. Chair Holman: I was actually trying to simplify not complicate. Commissioner Tuma brought up earlier the speaker who spoke about the Page Mill landscape setback, I think that is a reasonable consideration. I have another question about the grandfathering here. Areas excluded fl;om impe~wious coverage pursuant to approvals granted prior to July !, 2007 shall however remain excluded from imperadous coverage calculations unless the surfacing materials are altered to a less pem~eable material. How would that apply? That is one piece of the picture but what if the property was redeveloped? Totally redeveloped? Would then the new rules kick in or would they still be subject to the old rules? Mr. Williams: I think the new rules should kick in. That was the intent. This is situation where you are essentially working from what is existing out there now and if someone wants to put a swimming pool in for example and they have the square footage to do that based on the calculations they had ten years ago when they built that house then we are not prohibiting that. But if they are coming in and demolishing the existing house and doing a ~vhole new project then we should be starting over. It should be like most other grandfathering provisions so that it applies when you are doing additions or changes or that kind of thing but once you start getting to an entirely new project then you are starting with today’s regulations. We can clarify that if you like. Chair Holman: Okay. That would be great. Temporary structures, some Staffmembers will remember that we had a situation with a temporary structure that caused quite a bit of harangue at the Commission and the Council both. Temporary structures aren’t addressed here so I think they ought to be included. The issue was that someone had a greenhouse that was on Page Mill Road and inside the landscape setback. It was a temporary frame you could say but it was covered with a white or off-white tarp or canvas. It was really quite an issue. So I think we could clean that up by addressing that in this cleanup I would think. Conditions of approval are not code however is there a way that we can sweep up the conditions of approval that the Commission generally uses for application to Site and Design Review? ts there someway we can do that? We added several, and I would have to go back and look at ~vhich project, but we added several to our conditions of approval for one of our projects. Sometimes they get picked up and sometimes they don’t. We are not, any of us, real good at making sure we are consistent and inclusive with those. So what would Staff suggest for that? Page 41 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 36 3"7 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Williams: What we might need to do is look at one of those, whatever one we think is most complete. If the conditions need to be consistent they need to be consistent but if there are some of those conditions that should be requirements in the code that we wouldn’t then have to make conditions because they are in here, then we could do that. So we should look and see if there is anything that falls in that category. Ms. French: IfI can read your mind for a moment, I think possibly the landscaping section I know that there have been conditions that you have enjoyed that Dave Dockter has included in his section of the review of the projects. So if there was something that we wanted to make sure was in that landscaping section, for instance we could do something like that. You also could have an opportunity to see what are standard conditions of approval at some point if you would like for Open Space homes and review those and give us suggestions as a matter of policy. Chair Holman: There was one other one that might be codified as a part of the review was the siting of the construction or the staging area. That was a condition of approval that we have used quite a bit and it might ought to be in here. A clarification on (m) (5). I was a little bit confused by how that second sentence reads. Building lines should follow the lines of the tenain, we are fine to there. And then, and trees and bushes should appear natural from a distance, i was not following what that intention was. I know this is pickup. Mr. Williams: That comes right out of the Comprehensive Plan. Chair Holman: I know. Mr. Williams: I guess maybe the point is that they should appear natural tip close as well. That is probably well taken. What it is probably looking at is you don’t want to create a line of artificial looking plantings that you want to mix them up in groupings and clusters that look natural. So we could play with this. I would rather not because it comes from the Comprehensive Plan. Again, maybe it is something that we pick up in the landscape area instead and incorporate it over there and not worry about it here. Chair Holman: Okay. Actually I have two more but I am going to stop and give somebody else a shot. Commissioner Lippert and then Commissioner Ke!ler. Vice-Chair Lippei-t: I arn going to make some comments here. I think that this is a really great opportunity for us to re-look at the Open Space. By that what I mean is that we look at the Open Space and it is really a resource of this community whether people own property out there or not. We all look at it as an asset. We look from our Downtown and we look to the Open Space and we see the hills. What is real important here is that a home in the Open Space has the ability to either blend in with the landscape or be an eyesore. There is certain value to having that natural surround in the foothills. What I believe here is that there is a way of having development in the foothills, in the Open Space, and yet be compatible with the Open Space. Page 42 ! 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 _,4 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46 Right now the rules that we have are one size fits all. It has to do with the amount of square footage that you have in terms of lot and you are allowed a certain amount of lot coverage there and it needs to be so far from the roadway. What it doesn’t take into account really is the geology and the topography of the site. All of those properties that are out there are actually at risk and can disappear tomorrow. All we need to have is a wildfire go through there, it is close enough to the San Andreas Fault that we could have a major earthquake and those houses could be gone, and we could be starting with a clean slate all over again. So I think it is worthwhile looking at a couple of new tools here in terms of how developInent proceeds from here on out in the Open Space, I think one of them that we could look at is slope density ratio. I think slope density ratio is probably one of the most significant pieces of criteria that we can look at in terms of impervious/pervious surface area. What it does is basically say if you are on the flat, if you are in an area that has some good penetration you can build a little more development there. If you are on a slope site however, that really needs to be protected and dealt with differently. Some of that would be that we don’t want meandering winding roads going up, the house really should be massed, yes it is going to be a little bit taller but it will be within reasonable expectations, but you will be able to get a reasonable size house in a much tighter footprint. So I think that there are some ways of looking at this that are a little bit different than we might be looking at it now in our cunent regulations but it really ~vitl I think make the Open Space a much better quality environment in the long run. It is not going to happen tomorrow it is going to happen over a period of time. I won’t be here unfortunately at the next hearing but I think that that’s a point of discussion and maybe Staffwould want to come back with some comments, some thoughts about it, and with Curtis’ experience with working with some other communities might want to bring some of those examples from Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos Hills ~vhere they do use those rules. Just in closing I want to say that by no means are these rules or the rules that I am suggesting draconian in any way. If you look at the Costal Commission and what they do they are far more scrutinizing of the areas that are along California’s coast. That is just my point of view. I think there are some really great opportunities here to look at this. Chair Holman: Cominissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: A couple of things. One of the speakers mentioned that there is a need for housing and therefore further subdivision in the foothills is one way to accommodate that housing particularly if it accommodated housing for employees of the City of Palo Alto or the like. I am not sure if such housing were built in the foothills how many emp!oyees of the City of Palo Alto would be able to afford such housing. I also am not convinced that the people of the City of Palo Alto would be in favor of increasing that density. That is my concern with Vice- Chair Lippert’s comment about slope density. Those formulas seem to have been developed in areas for which the minimum lot size is considerably smaller than the lot size that we allow in Palo Alto in the Open Space. As a result of that if you think about what a developable area would be for a minimum lot size of one acre and multiply that by 10 for a minimum lot size of 10 acres nay gut reaction is that is a lot bigger than what we are currently envisioning as what makes sense for the foothills. So I think it would Page 43 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 1"7 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 93 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 be worthwhile really understanding what a minimum developable area and maximum developable area kind of calculation as would be for Los Altos Hills, etc., would be to apply to a 10 acre parcel and exactly what that means. I think that would be worthwhile considering. I am not sure exactly xvhere it is in this but I am sure it is somewhere that there is some discussion about fire buffers particularly in this area and what should exist in temas of fire buffers. That certainly speaks to something that Vice-Chair Lippert referred to. With respect to permeable driveways I am wondering how the fire department roles for the fact that they have to be able to bring a fire engine close enough to the property, how that affects the ability to put Hollywood strips. I am not sure that fire depamnents like Hollywood strips for long driveways or these other kinds of things that were mentioned. So those may or may not be feasible if the fire department has one of their big trucks that have to go within a certain distance of a house. The next thing that I want to mention is the issue of second dwellings. To the extent that we have a conservative, restricted kind of like we have now, of maximum impervious area lot coverage. Then in that circumstance if you are strictly limited by that it doesn’t much matter to me if you take that buildable area and build one huge building that uses up as much of that maximum impervious coverage within heights and whatever limitations you have or whether you create two smaller buildings that take up the space in some other way. That works if you don’t do slope density type calculations that allow things to be huge. So if you are limited for a 10 acre site of 15,246 square feet of impervious coverage then one building or two buildings the amount of impact in that isn’t really much if the second dwelling is 2,000 square feet rather than 900 square feet. On the other hand if you go to a calculation that says well, the maximum developable area could be 40,000 square feet then the question is how big do you make these multiple dwellings and make that into much more of an impact. So it is a trade offthere in that calculation as to whether you allow more flexibility it1 fiat parcels versus whether you allow that flexibility in terms of multiple dwellings. I think that is an interesting question for us to explore. Chair Holman: I had just a couple of other things. One of them is kind of a large one that might generate comment. The hilltop language that is again the pickup fi-om the Comprehensive Plan. It is the new (m)(2), Development should be located away from hilltops and designed to not extend above the nearest ridgeline. This has been in the Comprehensive Plan and should have been used as guidance for Site and Design Review and now it is codified. So i am kind of curious how something happened, I don’t want to rehash old things but I just want to see if Staff thinks this would solve the situation. We had a project that was approved that Commissioner Lippert mentioned earlier that is viewable from the Foothill Park lookout point. Would Staff think that this would preclude something like that from happening in the future? If so, how did it happen before? Mr. Williams: I don’t know the history and maybe Amy does. I do want to indicate that this again is not an absolute so I am not sure that it absolutely prohibits it from happening in the future. It says that these criteria shal! be considered in the Site and Desi~ Review but I would Page 44 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 DO 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 think that it would make it much less likely that it could happen because it is right there in the Zoning Ordinance and looking at it unless there was no other place to locate a house on a site. Ms. French: Which pretty much was the case in that one, the Goldman residence that Mr. Lippert had referred to. Clearly this was a policy that was in place at that time. That was one of those parcels xvhere it was much less than 10 acres because they had involved the dedication of land to the Open Space District. So both those sites together were quite a bit smaller than 10 acres but they got to use the same iinpel-vious coverage as part of a Development Agreement as if they were 10-acre parcels. So yes, there was really a lot of area that wasn’t on the hilltop in that case and they followed the other guideline, this is going too far into detail, but they were trying to follow the topography by having the house step down. That particular house was messed from the begim~ing because basically you couldn’t build on that site and have it not visible from Foothills Park Vista Point. It was just a matter of mitigations and trying to get trees that would be naturally placed to grow up and get them started to be planted but it was basically you are not going to hide that house. You can’t no matter where it was placed on the site. I think what this does is there was another example that came back in 2006 you may remember, I won’t say the name of it, but it kind of went down in flames. That one had a policy that was revealed early on in the pre-application stage, but not being in the code perhaps it wasn’t heeded as carefully as if it were law and could have avoided perhaps that project going as far as it did. Chair Holman: Thank you for that and I don’t want to rehash an old project but it is a quite impactful project. So on page 8, 18.28.070, (a)(1)(B) and (G) have been deleted and could Staff indicate wily? Mr. Williams: Yes, just to be consistent with what we did in the second dwelling units and other zoning districts. The usable open space one is just pointless frankly, on a 10 acre site to have a second unit and say let’s find 200 square feet of open space is I don’t think going to be problematic with 96.5 percent of the site required to be unpaved. Tile separation between dwelling units we deleted because by state law we have to allow attached dwelling units. There does not have to be a separation. Chair Holman: So could it say then that detached second dwelling units shall be separated by a minimun~ of ! 2 feet? Mr. Williams: It could say that sure, if you would prefer that. I don’t have a strong feeling one way oi another. Chair Holman: Maybe 12 is not the magic number but that is what is there. The reason is because I have seen second dwelling units that are quite close to the main house and it doesn’t seem to work very well. The other thing which is I am sure~ooiI"~o~ to ~enerate some conversation is the City talks a lot about sustainability and we have probably an Environmental Commission that is going to be Page 45 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 formed and such. I think Commissioner Keller mentioned earlier that we don’t have FAR limits. 2 I am actually interested in considering some FAR limits for the Open Space District. I think to 3 do that when Staffcomes back it would be very helpfu! to know how many parcels are in the 4 Open Space District, and Cuffs you already mentioned this. It also would be helpful to know if it 5 is not terribly much trouble what size those are because 10 acres is the minimum site requirement 6 but we have a tot ofnonconfom~ing parcels out there. So is that information that you could come up with pretty readily? Mr. Williams: Yes, we can. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: With respect to the parcel sizes it might be helpful to indicate where a parcel size has a Development Agreement on it in which that parcel size is deemed to be considered ! 0 acres. It is worthwhile making that distinction. Chair Holman: You are indicating that there is more than one. Okay. Commissioner Lippert. Vice-Chair Lippert: I will raise a topic that just should be considered when this comes back, whicta is sod roofs and whether that is considered pemaeable or impermeable. Chair Hohnan: No other Commissioners seem to have questions or comments so Commissioner Lippert since you are not here next time is there anything else that you want to say or comments you want to make or recommendations you want to make, information you would like the Staff to come back with? Vice-Chair Lip_pert: No, just the slope density issue that I brought up as a point of discussion. Not to get into a debate with Commissioner Keller slope density can either be a positive thing or a negative thing. It is neutral really. You set what the percentage should be and that is done through the slope density calculation. So the point that t am trying to make is that a site that yes, a steep would have less lot coverage on it, one that is flat would have the ability to do more lot coverage but you can actually determine what you think is ai1 appropriate baseline so to speak. I don’t by any means suggest that we take something from another community that is meant for smaller parcels and apply it to large parcels in any way. All that I am saying is that the lot coverage really needs to be responsive to the geography and topography of the site not necessarilyjust the size of the lot. Chair Holman Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: i would be amenable to that concept provided that it didn’t dramatically increase the a!lowable developable area for parcels that were relatively fiat because that I think would not be the intent of a lot of people in the community when this was put into effect. Chair Holman: Perhaps something that might be of assistance in discussing this at the next meeting would be to come up xvith a couple of different scenarios to detem~ine what the Page 46 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 difference would be between if we were using slope density or using the impervious surface percentage that is prescribed now. Mr. Williams: We can make a couple of assumptions. I will suggest that what we will try to do is I think there are several items in here that we have agreed we could make some changes and so we will itemize those for you where we suggest changes be made. I don’t know if we will actually revise the ordinance or not, probably again just like an en-ata type sheet of the changes that we would make. Then try to provide some of this analysis and comparison on the slope density and get the information on the number of lots that are out there and status of how many are still vacant and lot sizes and some of the other information that you have requested from us. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Often the interaction of two different things causes weird results. So I would be curious how a slope density calculation would be affected by a lot that is say four acres, which is deemed to be 10 acres. The interaction of those two I am curious how that would be done. Chair Holman: Just one last comment. I think overall Palo Alto does a pretty good job of its Open Space review process compared to other hillside communities. So I am looking forward to this making even improvements upon that and maybe setting an even higher standard. So with that we continue this item to the Regular Meeting of Wednesday, June 13, 2007. Is that right, Staff’? Page 47 PLANNING AND TgANSPOR TA TION DIVISION STAFF REPORT TO:PLANNING & TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION FROM:Curtis Williams, Assistant Director DEPARTMENT: Planning & Community Environment DATE:June 13,2007 SUBJECT:Zoning Ordinance Update - Ordinance Amending Title 18 (Zoning Ordinance) of the Palo Alto Mmficipal Code, including 1) Consolidating Public Facilities, Open Space, and Agricultural Conservation Districts into a New Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts) and 2) Revising Criteria Related to the Open Space District Provisions. RECOMMENDATION Staff recommends that the Plmming and Transportation Conmfission (P&TC) review and recommend to the City Council adoption of the proposed revisions, as outlined in Attachment A (Chapter 18.28) and the modifications suggested in this staff report (pages 2 and 4). BACKGROUND On May 30, 2007, the Platming and Transportation Commission (P&TC) reviewed and recommended approval of miscellaneous revisions to the Zoning Ordinance (Title 18), including modifications of definitions outlined in Chapter 18.04 of the code. The Cormnission also considered changes to consolidate the Open Space (OS), Public Facilities (PF), and Agricultural Conservation (AC) zones into a new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts). While no changes were made to the PF and AC districts, the Conmaission extensively discussed potential changes to the OS district. The Commission continued its discussion and action regarding Chapter 18.28 to the Jtme 13, 2007 meeting, directing staff to return with additional information and allowing Cormnissioners Burr and Sandas to be present for the fornmlation of a recommendation. DISCUSSION The two key Open Space district changes outlined in the May 30 2007 staff report involved 1) specific criteria to determine the extent of permeable mea to be excluded from impervious cover calculations, and 2) incorporation into the code of Comprehensive Plm~ Open Space criteria. City of Palo Alto Page The list below outlines suggested changes to the new Chapter 18.28 (Special Purpose Districts), based on comments of the Conmaission members fiom the prior meeting. Attachment A is the entire Chapter as it was presented on May 30, 2007. The suggested changes include: Delete subsection 18.28.060(a) for the PF zone related to daylight plane and height requirements for mixed use development, as the PF zone doesn’t allow residential uses. In subsection t8.28.070(a) regarding second units in the OS district, clarify in the first sentence that "Not more than one attached or detached second dwelling unit shall be al!owed on a lot in the OS district, and shal! be subject to the following regulations:" 3.Add the following subsections to section t8.28.070(d) regarding landscaping in the OS district: (1)"Landscaping shall be designed and installed consistent with the requirements and guidelines of Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) of the Zoning Ordinance, and in t~articular with subsection 18.40. ! 30(c) regarding landscaping in Natural Areas, as well as with the relevant Comprehensive Plan policies outlined in subsection (m) below. Exceptions to tree removal restrictions may be made for invasive species such as eucalyptus trees. (2)The property owner shall ensure the surviva! of tree plantings for a period of a minilnum of five years. The owner shall install any replacement trees and monitor their smwivat. A certified arborist shall prepare report at the end of the five-year period documenting the condition of the trees and said report shall be forwarded to the Department of Planning and Community Environment for review. Any subsequent owner(s) shall also be obligated to replace any trees that die with trees of the same size and species stated on the approved building permit plans." 4.Add a new section 18.28.070(n) for Lighting and Glare to read: "Exterior !ighting should be !ow-intensitv and shielded from view so it is not directly visible from off-site. Skylights shall not use clear or white glass and shall not be illuminated from directly below the skylight, to avoid glare at night. All new windows and glass doors shall be of a non-reflective materia!." 5.Revise subsection 18.28.070(c)(2) to read: "The requirement of subsection (1) may be waived by the city engineer for str4aem~p-gg-ec-eupm~c~~~nifc~n Building Ccd~ accessory facilities and landscaping where such improvements, in his opinion, would pose no potential hazard to life or property on the subject or surrotmding properties." 6.Renumber the Open Space Review Criteria section to (m). City of Palo Alto Page 2 Items 3 and 4 respond to concerns and questions about landscaping and lighting requirements. The recently adopted Landscaping provisions of Section 18.40.130 are included as Attachment B, and include an extensive section on landscaping in natural areas. The other items are considered clarifications or corrections, as suggested or inferred by the Commission. Potential changes to the impervious cover requirements (s~tbsection 1) are discussed below. Property Information for the OS Zone The Commission asked for information related to the number of parcels in the OS zone, how many are developed, and which are subject to a Development Agreement allowing for smaller (than 10 acres) lots. The table below outlines the current status of parcels in the OS zone: Number of OS Parcels I 114 Total OS Acreage 4,258 acres Number of Parcels Owned by 29 ’ Public* and Country Club Acreage of Publicly Owned*2,966 acres and Country Club Parcels Number of Private Parcels 85 Acreage of Private Parcels 1,292 acres Developed Private Parcels 52 *City of Palo Alto and Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District Staff did not research how many of the 52 developed privately-owned parcels are likely to be redeveloped or how many of the remaining privately-owned parcels could be subdivided to create additional lots. A settlement agreement was approved by the City in 1978 resulting in the 1979 approval of Tract 6723, comprising 9 residential lots on 25 acres and 1 open space lot on 10 acres (dedicated to the City) along Alexis Drive. Additional acreage had been transferred to the City, so that the total acreage originally involved was 91 acres. Each lot was allowed to constn~ct according to the OS regulations, but with site coverage based on the allowable for a 10-acre parcel (15,246 square feet). Staff is also checking into the t-Iewlett and Arriaga subdivisions to determine if those were subject to similar agreements, and will report findings to the Convnission at or prior to the meeting. Conditions of Approval for Prior OS Projects Commission members also suggested that prior conditions imposed on OS projects might merit incorporation into the code as standard provisions. Staff has reviewed two recent OS zone approvals at 6 ! 0 Los Trancos and 3220/3230 Alexis Drive (Plmming conditions are included as Attachment C) and believes that only the landscape/tree condition (see item #3 in the proposed changes above) and lightingireflectivity condition (see item #4 in the proposed changes above) are appropriate as ordinance requirements. Others could still be suggested as conditions where relevant. City of Palo Alto Page 3 hnpervious Coverage Calculation The Commission has expressed concern that allowing permeable materials to be excluded from impervious cover limitations allows for more development and larger houses in the OS zone. Staffproposed initial language in the May 30, 2007 staff report for Commission consideration. Comments from the public and fiom the Commission directed staff to consider other approaches to provide greater incentive to allow for permeable surfaces while minimizing the potential for larger structures. Staff believes that, to encourage impervious materials while recognizing that some materials function better than others, the following revised language may be preferred: "0)Impervious Coverage Impervious coverage shall be calculated to include all building coverage !.~__!_!_!_!_!_!_!~aved surfaces includin~ but not limited to driveways, parking areas, walkways, ~ports or teamis courts, swinmain_k~ pools, patios or decks, and shall be subject to the following provisions: (1)Pervious or semi-pervious payin~g materials shall not be counted as impervious cover according to the extent (percentage) to which the proposed materials are determined by the director to be pervious. Criteria used to make this determination may include the manufacturer’s ~pgci~cation~, storm.water protection manuals prepared for Bay Area agencies, and{0r specific engineering reports, mad shall be adjusted to reflect variations in proposed construction techniques (e.g., subsurfacg permeability)and terrain (’e.g., slope and soils): Primary dri’~eways through required scenic setbacks shall not be counted as ilnpervious if predominantly constructed of pervious paving materials and with a width of less than 20 feet. (5) (6) Primary driveways other than those specified in (3) shall be considered no less than 50% impervious, due to compaction from driving over the surface. Primary driveways are those that extend from the nearest access road to the garage or ca~ort__px~uired parking for the main residence. proposed pervious paving materials for driveways shall only be permitted if acceptable to the Palo Alto Fire Department. Areas excluded from impetwious coverage pursuant to approvals granted prior to ,July 1, 2007 shall remain excluded from impervious coverag~ calculations, unless the surfacing material is altered to a less permeable material." The Commission may wish to instead consider exempting portions of driveways in excess of 50 feet from the main residence/garage, which encourages longer driveways and setting homes farther from the road. S10pe-Density, FAR,. and Maximum House Size Some Commission members suggested imposing slope-density requirements, floor area ratio limits, ancVor maximum house size restrictions to further reduce development potential on Open Space district lots. Each of these is addressed below. Slope-Density: Slope-density requirements are imposed in some hillside communities in the Bay Area, such as Woodside and Los Altos Hills. The provisions require a City of Palo Alto Page 4 detailed topographic map, generally divided into 3 or 4 categories of slopes, such as 0-15%, 15-25%, 25-35%, and over 35%. The slope-density formula may then be applied to aIlowable total development, total paved area, or total floor area, or a combination thereof. The following table outlines estimated impervious surface and other development potential for a 10-acre lot in Palo Alto, Woodside, and Los Altos Hills for four assumed "average slopes," using the most restrictive zoning category in those communities and with some basic assumptions regarding area devoted to floor area versus paved areas. Note that Woodside does not vary development on a site by average slope, but uses slope-density to establish the allowable number of lots in a subdivision. Impervious Cover and Floor Area Examples Palo Alto 10% Average Slope Impervious Area-15,246 sf Floor Area I !7,844 sf~ 20% Average Slop_~e Impervious Area~ Floor Area 25% Average Slope Impervious Area2 Floor Axea 15,246 sf 17,844 sf~ 15,246 sf 17,844 sf~ Woodside~ 16,187 st4 11,979 sf 16,187 sa~ 11,979 sf .... i6,i87 sf 11,979 sf 30% Average Slope Impervious Area2 I !5,246 sf I 16,187 s# Floor Area I 17,~44 sf~11,979 sf Los Altos Hills 150,000 sf ...... 60,000 sf 117,855 sf 47,142 sf 1,~1,783 sf 4,0,713 sf 69,638, sf 27,855 sf Only applies slope-density formula to subdivisions to determine allmvable number of lots. Includes paved areas plus buitding footprints (assumes 60% of total floor area) Assumes minimum 2,500 sfpaved surtlaces mad second story floor area at 40% of total floor area. Assumes 40% second story floor area at 40% of total floor area. Staffdoes not believe that applying slope-density limitations in the OS zone in Palo Alto would be productive, given 1) more than half the lots existing have been developed under only impervious cover criteria, 2) a complex process is required to accurately calculate and review slope-density calculations, and 3) the extent of development a!lowed currently is highly restrictive at 3.5% of the site. A new approach to limiting impervious cover would also cause significant problems with lots that have been subdivided with specific allowances for impervious cover. Adequate protection is provided in the site and desi~a review process to address OS criteria such as site visibility and protection of native vegetation. City of Palo Alto Page 5 Floor Area Ratio (FAR): The OS district does not directly limit floor area of buildings on a site, but restricts such development indirectly tln’ough impervious cover requirements. A second story of a home would typica!ly not be included in impervious coverage, except for any portion cantilevered to extend beyond the first floor footprint. Staff believes that for sites as large and diverse as exist in the OS district, FAR is not as meaningful as design review that provides for appropriate siting and house design. An FAR limit resulting in an allowable 8,000 square feet for a 10-acre site, for example, could be fine on one site but be problematic on another site. Site and design review, in combination with the numerous design criteria in the OS zone, would continue to provide flexibility to look at each site on its own merits. Application of FAR limits could also provide inconsistencies with prior approvals and possible non-conforming situations for existing development. Maximu~z 2Iouse Size: Maximum house sizes are provided in all low-density residential districts except for the OS zone. Similar to the FAR discussion, the appropriate maximum house size is highly site-specific. Future "Parking Lot" Issues for Evaluation Staffrecognizes that there are a number of zoning-related issues that have not been addressed in the Zoning Ordinance Update, but are intended for future review or at least deserve discussion. Some of these items may need to be deferred until after the Comprehensive Plan is updated, but staff expects to bring high priority revisions forward as time and resources permit. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, and the Commission may wish to add to the list to assure it is more inclusive. Establishing green building criteria (compliance with green building checklists) to implement the Council’s recent policy direction. Revising the Planned Commmaity (PC) zone to clarify the review procedure and to outIine the role and scope of "public benefits" in PC requests. Better defining and limiting Design Enhancement Exceptions (DEEs), simitar to the approach used to refine criteria for Home Improvement Exceptions (HIEs). Providing additional criteria for landscape treatments in or near natural areas and transitions from open space to developed sites, such as in the Research Park. Revisiting "cottage cluster" housing options and criteria in the R-1 and multi-family districts, including incentives to retain existing cottage cIuster deve!opment. ~Developing additional incentives or requirements for retaining existing rental housing. Evaluating potential for a University Avenue Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Development (PTOD) Zoning District. Providing for im~ovative parking strategies or progrm~ns to reduce the need for parking. City of Palo Alto Page 5 Evaluating the feasibility of conservation districts to outline specific standards for neighborhoods or areas of the city. Identifying potential zoning map changes where existing zone districts may no longer be appropriate, such as using ROLM instead of GM for some sites. Staff weicomes Colmnission input regarding the priorities of these revisions or additional topics to add to the list. Staffnotes that items outside the scope of the Zoning Ordinance (noise ordinance, signs, etc.) are not included in the list. ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW The revisions proposed are responsive to Comprehensive Plan policies and would not increase the density or intensity of development in the city. The Open Space district modifications would directly incorporate Comprehensive Plan policies within zoning review. The amendments are therefore consistent with the a~alysis provided in the Comprehensive Plan EIR and further environmental review is not required. Enviromnental review will be required, however, for subsequent projects that are proposed subject to these regulations. NEXT STEPS Based on the Cormnission’s recommendation, staff will prepare a draft Ordinance to be - forwarded to the City Council for its consideration, along with the Multi-Family and Parking chapters of the code, and the miscellaneous revisions recommended by the P&TC on May 30, 2007. The Council is tentatively scheduled to hear the ZOU items on July 9, 2007. Staff will then initiate work on the Comprehensive Plan Update, and will bring back various "parking lot" zoning revisions as priorities dictate and resources allow, ATTACHMENTS A.Draft Chapter 18.28 (Special Propose Districts) B.Section 18.40.130 (Landscaping) of the Zoning Ordinance C.Planning Conditions of Approval for 6!0 Los Trancos Road and 3220/3230 Alexis Drive COURTESY COPIES Architectural Review Board Doug Moran, Ban-on Park Association Sheri Furman, Midtown Residents Association Karen White REVIEWED BY:Julie CaporN~o, Chief Planning and Transportation Official Curtis Willian~s, AICP Assistant Director City of Palo Alto Page 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 .34 .33 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 Planning and Transportation Commission Verbatim Minutes June 13, 2007 EXCERPT Consideration of an Ordinance Amending Provisions of the Open Space (OS) District and Definitions; and Providing for Miscellaneous Clarifications and Corrections. Environmental Review: Comprehensive Plan Environmental Impact Report. Mr. Cutis Williams, Assistant Director: Yes, thank you. At your meeting on June 13 the reviewed a number of miscellaneous revisions to various sections of the Zoning Ordinance as well as some changes to Definitions and recommended moving those forward to the City Council. At that meeting you also had fairly extensive discussion of what we are calling a Special Purpose Districts Chapter, which includes Open Space and Public Facilities and Agriculture and Conservation districts. Your comments focused primarily on the Open Space District. You asked us to look at some things, made some specific suggestions for potential changes, and come back at this meeting. Based on that discussion we included in the Staff Report on page 2 some suggested changes to that chapter most of which have to do with Open Space but not all of them. Those changes include deleting the reference to mixed use in the PF zone because the PF zone doesn’t allow residential, clarifying that only one second unit is allowed on a lot in the OS District, adding some landscape and lighting language that is all in standard conditions of approval for the OS District, and deleting reference to Group M occupancies in the OS District, which is actually a commercial category. There was some requirelnent about doing a geo-technical reports and not doing them for that type of occupancy and in discussion with the Building Official there doesn’t seem to be any reason why we would exempt those from geo-technical analysis, plus generally those aren’t allowed in the Open Space District anyway. So those are what we consider to be minor changes to the ordinance for that. The topic that consumed most of your time related to the Open Space District impetwious cover limitations and language that we had proposed at that time as well as then potential to look at floor area ratios, maximum house size and slope density approaches to the district rather than or in addition to the impe~-vious coverage limitations. So our initial take on that, and we have provided some information in the Staff Report particularly about slope density, is that we think in particular the slope density part of it would be very problematic and quite a shift in gears as far as an approach to a district that about half the lots have already been built on. The floor area ratio and maximum house size are certainly not nearly so complex. Our initial thought has been that we have design criteria in the ordinance that would help address the size issues but it may be that the Commission would still like to explore those options as well. On impervious cover we did make an alternate suggestion but I also had some conversations with Staff members and Commissioners and got a little better understanding of some of the history of this. I think I want to make a couple of comments about impervious coverage limitations. First of all it is my understanding that the move that we have had to have semi- Page 1 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 pervious materials which are starting to become more m~d more commonplace in planning and development is relatively recent, within the last 10 years or so. Prior to that all surfaces essentially were impervious that related to driveways or parking areas and decks and such. I do understand that swimming pools have been historically excluded flom impervious cover. The net result of that was that all the driveway areas and those other areas were excluded from impervious cover and that indirectly kind of limited how much coverage was left for a building or buildings on the site. So as these impervious coverage limitations morphed with the introduction of more and more semi-pervious materials what has happened is that the area that is not counted as impervious any longer has tended to go into the buildings in particular the main house and allowed for larger house sizes which maybe is an unintended consequence of that movement towards less impermeability. So I think understand that the Commission’s desire is to try to get back to something that more approximates that but also looking at encouraging the semi-pervious materials because that does number one reduce storm water runoff and number two is more consistent with the character of an open space than concrete or asphalt driveways or parking areas. So with that I think the other part of this relative to floor area ratio, house size, and those types of things those are I think are potentially significant changes, and impervious cover could be as well. We have heard from a number of people, I think you probably have received six or eight en-mils or letters from Open Space property owners. We have received a fexv more phone calls as well from people that didn’t send in letters expressing mostly concern about the direction this might go. So in the interest of our being able to move forward with the Zoning Ordinance Update to the Council in July and your still having an opportunity to explore some of those key issues our suggestion would be that tonight you try to look at the impervious cover section and determine how at least on an interim basis you would like to address that to meet your objectives. Then essentially work with the property owners, the various architects that might have done work in the Open Space District, and open space advocates that are interested in the area over a period that we suggest may be 90 days to advise the Commission on whm changes if any are appropriate relative to these other more substantive issues. Our thought is that we can in that manner take what we have from tonight and go forxvard to the Council essentially package everything that the Commission has done before into the Zoning Ordinance Update and have that adopted and then this would become the first of our subsequent - the zoning changes are never going to end, so there is always going to be something out there. This would come after that and we would like to commit to trying to do that within a 90-day timeframe. That way we can involve the property owners and others who are interested in those changes and those discussions. I also wanted to briefly comment that Commissioner Keller did have some questions and suggestions for changes. Some of those related to the impervious coverage section and to the extent you change that tonight that may change. The ones he had were wordsmithing that I think made sense on all three of these. If we stay with what it is or something close to that later on we car~ read those into the record. Another one was on the PF District and it related to the section that we suggested deleting so it wouldn’t be necessary relative to the daylight plane for these mixed use projects, So we wouldn’t have that section any inore. Page 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 The other had to do with second dwelling units and essentially clarifying that the 10 acres is actual parcel size as opposed to what might have been deemed to be the impervious limitation. think we indicated in our report for at least one subdivision smaller lots were allowed but they had been assigned impervious coverage equivalent to 10 acre lots and clarifying that the second units however, that is not the case, and I don’t think it is the case already but we could clarify that it is an actual 10 acre site that is required for the second dwelling unit. His other suggestions were to specify that the second dwelling units counted against the limits on impervious coverage. Then also that adding a second dwelling unit gets around the issue of grandfatbering ofimpe~wious coverage that you have to comply at that point in time with any new regulations. I don’t think either of those are necessary to make here. I think if you would like we could add where we say what is included in impervious coverage we could add to that list to include second dwellings if you would like for us to do that to clarify that. i think you will have to have the discussion about whether we retain any grandfathering. It sounds like it may not be necessary to retain that provision. If we do i think it already basically would be triggered by adding a second unit or making those kinds of changes. Then he had one correction to a typo that we will fix as well. As usual thank you. Let’s see if I had anything else. I just wanted to say that also apart from the Open Space issues we did include in your Staff Report last and this time a list of parking lot issues to be revisited as priority and resources allow. We would like if not tonight sometime in the near future for you to go through that list and tell us number one what your priorities might be in terms of that list and number two what else we haven’t captured there that you would like to be on that list so we have kind of a master list to work from in terms of coming back with other potential changes. Amy put together at the Chair’s request. Did you get a copy of this Open Space? Okay. Amy put together kind of Open Space District Standard Conditions of Approval that she drew from a few projects. I will go ahead and get those distributed. Chair Holman: I apologize Curtis, if there were two attached to our Staff Report or if there are more or perhaps the other one that I had indicated .... Mr. Williams: The ones that were attached to your Staff Report were taken directly from projects. I think she has sort of cut and pasted here some including some others and the one that you had mentioned that we didn’t have. So I will distribute those to you. t think our suggestion would be that we perhaps add language to the code that doesn’t embody these but indicates that the Planning Director shall maintain a list of standard conditions of approval that provide for implementation of the Open Space criteria to all projects as applicable. That would let someone know that they should be looking at those and Staff members know that they should be looking at those and we will maintain this on a template on our fom~s and templates that we have in the office and update it as necessary. Then on individual project we will select from it if there are some that aren’t applicable to a particular project then we can go ahead and not apply that one on that particular proj ect. Page 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: So ifI could clarify one thing because I think it is an important point. Without our zoning code changing due to the development of the pervious materials there has been a de facto change in code that allows more building development in the Open Space District. I want to make sure that that’s clear because there seems to be some misunderstanding that the code without us making a change actually has changed in kind of a de facto manner. Mr. Williams: Right. I think that is what our original proposal kind of would take you back to where you were originally where driveways and these other surfaces counted against the impervious surface. I don’t know exactly how long that has been in terms of that process of transition to where impervious materials begin to count. I think certainly by the late 1990s it appears there was some credit being given for those. I don’t M~ow how long before that it was but the Open Space District regulations came into effect in 1978. Chair Holman: Thank you for that. Commissioners, are there clarifying questions? Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: Thanks. Curtis I just have one question for you. Because there were several letters from residents in the Open Space District I just wanted to know in a nutshell, I haven’t had a chance to read them all so I can’t pull from all of them what the main thought is, but what about the revisions that are being proposed are problematic or of concern, if there is a single threat? Mr. Williams: Well, the single most common thread in them is a concern not about necessarily what has been proposed although I will talk in a minute about impervious cover but about what they heard the Commission talk about last time in terms of potentially proposing floor area limitations, going to a slope density formula instead of the imper~dous cover, the house size limitations, the things that don’t exist right now. They are feeling that would potentially be more restrictive in certain ways than what exists now. The impervious cover limitation is kind of a mixed bag because there are different options sort of floating out there. There are some of those options that work well for some property owners and some don’t for others. There are some owners that have three and a half acre parcels or whatever that have pretty limited impervious coverage and then they have long driveways. If you count the long driveway then they are not left with much to do as far as any kind of house goes. Some of them may not have submitted plans yet but they have been talking to Staff over the past year or two about what they can do and they have been anticipating being able to use permeable materials and not having those driveways count and then being able to use it more for the house. I should point out too that one of the concerns I think I have heard about the, not from the neighbors but from looking back at prior Commission meetings and talking to Staff about the idea of taking that impervious surface and then adding it to the house is kind of in some ways a double bonus because it is impervious, it is footprint area. So if you build you can build two stories. So if you get another 1,000 square feet of impervious area that becomes 2,000 square feet of additional house size. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Page 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 !8 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Tuma: Curtis, I have a question about what you are proposing here procedurally. Are you saying that you would like us to move forward with some sort of interim measure with respect to pervious surface and then come back within 90 days and have something more permanent? If so, why? Could we not just pass up to Council without dealing with that issue and vet it fully and come back in 90 days instead of essentially having two different laws on the books for 90 days? Mr. Williams: That is what we are proposing is essentially interim and then come back in 90 days. Our concern is that if we wait 90 days to sort of wrap this chapter we are waiting 90 days to wrap up the formalized kind of the end of the Zoning Ordinance Update. We have a Council date of July 16 to hopefully do that. We really want to do that before Council goes on its summer recess and we really want to do it so we can have Julie start devoting Staff to the Comprehensive Plan Update. So while the work is still there to be done if we can do that we can be having - there is a lot of work associated with the ZOU that is just taking, based on the changes you made last time, just taking and reformatting chapters that we haven’t actually changed and then going through and making sure that the section number references are connect and all that. We really would like to get that work done and through and we can do that if we get this package adopted by the Council and then come back in terms of these substantive issues on the Open Space and deal with those on their own lnerit in 90 days or whatever the timeframe is. Commissioner Tul-na: Couldn’t we accomplish that by not doing anything on the pervious surface issue right now and just leaving it as is? Mr. Williams: You could. Commissioner Tuma: And then come back in 90 day, s? Mr. Williams: Sure, absolutely. Commissioner Tuma: Obviously we will talk about this but unless there is some urgent concern about a flood applications filed or something like that it just seems odd to me. Mr. Williams: That is certainly one of the options available to you is just basically leave the impervious surface language the way it is now and revisit it as part of this overall thing. That is up to the Commission as to whether that would be an adequate approach. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Burt: First I would like to state that because I was away during the last meeting I did not attend it but I was provided with a full copy of the minutes and the Staff Reports and read them all very thoroughly. Second, I would like to ask the Chair’s permission. Ordinarily at this time this section is for asking clarifying questions and both because I was absent last and because I think I may be able to help [tame this issue so that the public is aware of the direction that the Commission may be Page 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 likely to go tonight that they understand that and as well as for the Commission to begin thinking about some possible concepts that are aligned with what Curtis has just proposed. Chair Hohnan: I don’t see any objections from other Commissioners and that is fine with me especially since you were not participating last time. Commissioner Butt: Great, thanks. So part of it is in reading the minutes there were a lot of different suggestions and what became apparent to me is that we were looking to solutions without having really done a good enough job of defining the issues. So I think Curtis has done a good job of looking at separating those two things. Certain issues we may be able to deal with tonight that are more clear and clean and may have a greater immediacy and a greater appropriateness to be included in the ZOU changes that go to Council tonight and then others that really would benefit from a more thorough, thoughtfu! consideration including the residents of that area and other interested parties who may have significant contributions to make on the ideas. Hopefully we can have some good thoughtful discussion. Curtis has proven his abilities in the past to really bring people together and workout some good solutions that are far more thoughtful than we might be able to do on the fly in this kind of circumstance. Just to revisit the reason why this issue of the semi-permeable materials has come up. It may be that it goes back further than I am recalling but the first occasion that I was aware of was about three years ago where we had a property that was a wedge-shaped parcel that by the nature of its design required a long driveway. The developers said there emerged these new semi-permeable materials and if we are allowed to not count them as impervious surface then we are willing to put them in. The first reaction of the Commission and the Staffis this is great, this is an innovative new material. It is an appropriate material for the Open Space areas because we want to have less runoff from impe~wious surfaces and gee, what a neat idea. It wasn’t until after that project had gone through and we started examining and understanding what had really happened and I will ballpark it here, it was a long driveway about ! 0 feet wide and maybe 600 feet long or call it 400 feet long, so 4,000 square feet of what would have otherwise have been historically counted as impervious surface was then suddenly allowed to be put onto a house footprint, which in fact became three stories. Two stories above ground and one story below with 12,000 additional square feet approximately of house was being built because we had said gee, this is a great thing. We will count these as permeable surfaces. That in itself was a somewhat arbitrary decision because they are neither fully permeable nor fully impervious. They are not like soil and they are not like normal asphalt either. So that was part of what your discussion last week was do you put some percentage permeability as a factor? So clearly it was never the intention of Staff, the Commission, the Council, or the community through a new innovative technology to allow much larger homes to be built on these parcels. We also had a crude tool for a long while which was we controlled the house size and the impermeable surfaces by a ratio of impemaeable area. It really is not a very good one size fits all. As members of the public have brought up there is an inequity that exists for many of the parcels up there are parcels that are adjacent to Page Mill Road and are required to have a 200 foot setback, it penalizes those parcels. Also our present formula penalizes parcels that are wedge-shaped as opposed to something where the house could be near the front of the parcel. So we aren’t having any kind of a uniformity for different owners up there of a given parcel size Page 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 I2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 even that they can build a given house and have a given amount of patio. It is a tool that is not very good. On the other hand attempting to come up with a better tool between this meeting and last meeting that is really well thought through that solves this problem is tough to do. I have seen some excellent outcomes from public participation in these kinds of things and we welcome the participation of some of the residents there as well as other interested parties because that goes to this other broader issue. We, as this Commission and the Council and Staff, have a number of different members of the community and perspectives that we are responsible to including the interests of individual property owners and their rights to build on their parcels. The interests of the neighborhood and the impacts of a neighbor and what they might build next door. We just had a proposal for a development that one of the reasons it was denied was because the neighbors surrounding it said this is really bad and pointed out a lot of reasons in the Open Space District. Then we have the broader neighborhood and broader community issues and we have citywide issues and we have regional issues that are all valid. It is not one or the other we have to look at all of those and try to come up with some thoughtful solutions that address how we can balance those different interests. So that is another reason why trying to do it on the fly is not necessarily going to have the best outcome. So as I understand it Curtis, what you are currently proposing is that we go back to counting driveways as part of the impervious area for a placeholder period of 90 days or so. That would go to the Council. Also, I don’t know if you mentioned it but it would be my recommendation that we now require these senai-permeable materials to be used according to Staff consideration of what are inost appropriate materials for a given site. In some places you might be able to have gravel even on a fiat and in other places it may be others. Our understanding is that the cost of these materials is in the same ballpark as traditional materials and there is not a si~dficant cost impact. So the reason why I think it is reasonable to mandate their use.., Chair Holman: Commissioner Burt? Commissioner Burt: Yes. Chair Holman: I think you framed the issue very, very well. I think you are getting to conclusions now. Commissioner Burt: What I want to do is make sure that the public when they speak has an opportunity to respond to where we are going to head. If they don’t have any idea where we are headed then they are going to speak on things that are perhaps disjointed from where we end up and say, "That is what you were going to do? I didn’t even have a chance to talk on that." Chair Holman: Understood, except we don’t know where the whole Commission is going to go. So thank you for framing the issues. Commissioner Keller, you had a question? Commissioner Keller: Yes. Since there are only five of us who are here today I know that constitutes a quorum but I am wondering how many votes are needed in order to pass a motion. Page 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Don Larkin, Senior Assistant City Attorney: There is nothing in the Charter about how many votes are needed by the Planning Commission so it is a majority of voting members. Commissioner Keller: Majority of voting members or majority of those present? Is it four or three that need to vote? Mr. Larkin: It is the majority of those voting so that is those present. I assume the ones that are not present will not be voting. Chair Holman: Okay. Seeing no other clarifying questions we do have I think it was seven members of the public who have filled out cards for this item, now eight. Five minutes is fine. If you can keep your comments to less than that then we can shorten everybody’s participation as far as the length of the item is concerned not wanting to limit your public participation certainly. So our first speaker is Herb Borock to be followed by Tony Tam. Thank you all for coming. Mr. Herb Borock, Palo Alto: Thank you Chair Holman. I believe the Staff Report to the Council should have reduced maps and zoning code to show the Council where these parcels in the OS and AC districts are located. The uses that are proposed, permitted uses, for viticulture appears to remove the exclusion for hog fanning and it also appears to add it as a permitted use to the Agriculture Conservation District. The only place that I know the AC district exists in Palo Alto is Coyote Hill and the land sunounding Coyote Hill. So I was wondering if the purpose of this is if someone wanted to do pig farming on Coyote Hill? The requirement for an open space element goes back 40 years to 1966 and state law in 1970. Palo Alto was one of the first with an open space element and downzoned the properties in the foothills. The properties above Montebello Road had five-acre minimums but all the way from Montebello Road, which is above Foothills Park down to the bottom of the Open Space District used to be one-acre parcel minimums. So there are parcels along Page Mill and elsewhere that are unable to develop as much as they are compared to the parcels that have been created since. The Open Space District in 1972 is the same time that special setbacks were put in. So anybody who has bought parcels since then have paid a price for them that was based upon the fact that there was a 200 foot scenic setback and the fact that there are some parcels that are too small now to be created as Open Space parcels of 10 acres because they are much smaller. So I don’t see why we need to make changes for those, I do believe that we need a formula for a maximum house size because there is a different issue there than the issue of impervious coverage. In impervious coverage you calculate it on the basis of 10 acres per lot including for clustered subdivisions where a portion of the 10 acres is in common open space. However, for house size you should calculate a maximum house size based upon just the developable portion of the lot. I also believe in clusters that you should place restrictions on how big each of those clustered lots should be. I would suggest a maximum of three acres and for lots that are singly developed as 10 acres you should limit the developable portion to say three acres. Within that I think there should be a floor area ratio. I suggest 0.15 FAR for a maximuln of 6,000 square foot floor area for the first acre of developable area, an Page 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 46 additional 6,000 for the second developable acre, and an additional 3,000 for the next, last and third acre. So you can have a 15,000 square foot house if you had three acres out of the 10 acres. It is important to consider this because in addition to some 1,200 acres of privately owned land there is an additional approximately 1,200 acres in the planning area owned by Stanford which is alienable land which means it can be sold because it was acquired after the founding grant. That is between the ridgeline, the dishes, and Arastradero Road. So it is important to get that type of regulation in there now. I notice that the existing language in the Open Space District regulations special setbacks and automobile parking appears nowhere in the draft or at least I cannot find it that is in 18.71.115 and. 120. The only other thing that I can talk about is in terms of the history on impervious coverage is often development would say we are going to have’a dirt driveway or a pervious surface such at 810, 820, and 830 Los Trancos Road and then was able to build more. Then came back and say we have such a steep driveway that that doesn’t work we now want to pave it. They came in and got a variance and put more pavement. The final thing I think may be a limit on lot size otherwise if you are familiar with Mr. Arillaga’s development you form a quarry property which may be 40 or 50 acres for a single lot. You may want to limit the size of lots in the Open Space District. Thank you. Chair Hohnan: Thank you very nauch. Tony Tain is our next speaker to be followed by Cathy Cartinell. Mr. Tony Tam, Los Altos Hills: Thank you Planning Commissioners. I live in the upper Page Mill Road area, which is part of that 200-foot co~Tidor setback. I read the Staff Report and suggestions. I urge the Commissioners to accept that. I think what they came up with is just and sensitive to what we are trying to do in the Open Space District. Tonight I want to talk about two things. One is what everybody wants to do and that is to try to regulate sensible development up there. Secondly I want to do a little bit of my own calculations since the last meeting Commissioner Keller did a 10-acre calculation. I want to do a one-acre calculation this time because there are a good number of properties that are one acre. I want to kind of play on that and build on the thinking process of that. One is I graduated from architecture school in 1982 and has been practicing architecture for 25 years here in Palo Alto. A few years back my firm had an opportunity to develop a house remodel addition in the OS district. I want to say that having gone through the experience of developing in the OS district the City of Palo Alto has the oversights that would safeguard us from bad design or insensitive design. I want to go through a little bit about what we did. To start the project we worked with the Planning Staff extensively to come up with the design, our proposal, and their suggestions. After reaching a conclusion and their acceptance to a project it goes through Planning Commission and Page 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Planning Commission has the voice and then it goes to City Council. So there is plenty of oversight that happens along the way in which rules and regulations and hoping that those alone will safeguard us from bad design or insensitive development is kind of ove~Teaching. I want to applaud Commissioner Burr suggesting that and I do think a dialogue should be encouraged with property owners in the OS district, Planning Staff, and Planning Commission to come up with a revision if you will that would work best for all of us. As a professional I want to say that there is really a saying that you can never govern bad design or you can never regulate bad design. You just need the oversight that the City of Palo Alto has already and trust those oversights to do the job. Finally, let’s do a little calculation on a one-acre lot. Currently we have three and a half percent of impervious coverage. On a one acre lot three and a half percent will allow me to have 1,525 square feet of developable area. Up on Page Mill Road we have a 200-foot setback. The Fire Department wants a 14-foot wide driveway but they will accept a 12-foot, ~vhich then gives us the 2,400 square feet. Let’s say we will count half of that which then gives us the developable area of 325 square fbot of house. Up there on Page Mill Road we are required to have four parking structures. Four of nine foot by 18 foot is 648 square feet, which by the time we put in the cars we don’t have any house to build. So I think that looking at 10 acres is fine but you also have to look at the fact that there are a lot of one acre or very close to one acre properties up there also. Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you, Mr. Tam. The next speaker is Cathy Cartmell to be followed by Daniel Dulitz. Ms. Cathy Cartmell, Los Altos Hills: Good evening Commissioners. What I am most concerned about is actually the direction the Commission was going in on May 30. I really am not wanting to see slope density or an FAR applied to the Open Space District. I do not want the regulations to become more restrictive, more complicated, or more expensive, or to reduce my property values because part of my property value is what is allowed on the property as far as density. If a slope density formula is calculated it will cost me upward of $10,000 just to figure out how that applies to my property and how it affects me at that time. So I think that is a bit of a burden to place on property owners up there who already have a very expensive process to do an34hing going through the City. I am concerned about if the Planning and Transportation Commission does pursue this course of action that fundamentally changes the way the development envelope is calculated that you do need to notify the owners up there. When I talked to my neighbors and they look at the Staff Report they really don’t have any idea of the fundamental change that you are discussing here. Just a note about I notice this time the Staff Report, Section 18.28.070 (d) was talking about the planting of trees and they are wanting to verify that the tree is still there after five years and have to have an arborist certify that and all that. Well, I own hundreds and hundreds of trees on my property. Property owners in the R-1 district might have a couple of trees. So if that regulation is good for us I think it should be applied to all properties in Palo Alto that trees have to be verified by an arborist five years later because five years later is a cumbersome process. I don’t Page 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I0 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 32 35 36 37 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 know how they are going to enforce it, if they are just going to hold the final for five years or something. That is a little complicated I think. Just to do a little calculation of my own if you apply the three and a half percent impervious coverage to a standard lot down here in Palo Alto which is 50 by 120 or so that on a 6,000 square foot lot you would be able to have 210 square feet for impervious coverage. That would include their driveway, their patio, their house, and I know there are a lot of properties down here that the whole property is basically paved. So if we are restricted by imper~dous surface that maybe all properties should also be restricted by impervious surface. Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you. Daniel Dulitz to be followed by Vernon Altman. Mr. Daniel Dulitz, Palo Alto: Thank you Commissioners and Staff for the opportunity to address you this evening. I appreciate in particular Commissioner Burt’s roadmap for his views of how things might proceed in the Commission as a whole. My main thrust for the evening is to note that impervious cover is indeed a rough measure but that it is a good one for measuring the environmental impact and the visual impact that a particular development might have on the character of the Open Space District, which I think is indeed a public good, a real benefit to this community. As we consider, as the Commission considers changing to some other formula I think the Commission should keep in mind that the existing three and a half percent limit on impervious cover was defined as a very conservative number in order to makeup for the fact that indeed impervious cover is a rough measure. So maybe popping up a level to address our concerns about what is inappropriate development and what is appropriate development it is notable that the Staff recommends incorporating the Open Space review criteria directly into the Zoning Ordinance. I would note that K-l, subparagraph 1, the development should not be visually intrusive from public roadways and public parklands, and as much as possible development should be sited so it is hidden from view. I read those words as giving license for creativity to architects and landowners to make good use of their land even with relatively high square footages of floor area assuming they can meet these existing, very stringent limitations on both environmental impact and visual impact on the community, So speaking as a bicyclist, as a hiker, as a frequent user of open space, and user of Page Mill Road those are some public good that I actually have been very thrilled with how that has been working in the past years. I think Palo Alto and the landowners paid a big price with the very significant zoning restrictions that have been imposed in the past and now to try to pick at the edges of that and hope for a little bit more, try to squeeze a little bit rnore blood out of the turnip so to speak. I think that the benefits to the public in ten-ns of further protecting the character of the environment from unfortunate intrusions I think those are marginal because the existing process does that pretty well but then the cost on landowners, as some of the other landowners have indicated, go up dramatically. So I will Finish with I appreciate the opportunity for dialogue but I would like us to do a little bit more comparison of the restrictions that are placed on the Palo Alto Open Space District versus other comlnunities, noting particularly Los Altos Hills, the neighboring community, the square Page 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 footage, the degree of development that would be allowed in Los Altos Hills as opposed to Palo Alto. t think some context there is worthwhile and would recommend it. Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you very much. Vernon Altman to be followed by Vincent Wood. Mr. Vernon Altman, Palo Alto: First I want to thank Cathy because I am a resident of the Open Space and didn’t know about this and had I not gotten the letter from her I wouldn’t have known this was going on at all. So I don’t know how or why we were failed to be notified about this hearing. i sent an email today to the Commission and what I would like to do is simply read it because I didn’t see it out there and I am not sure you got it. tt is fairly brief so let me just read that and then make a couple of comments. This is to the Planning Commission of the City of Palo Alto. This email relates to considerations you are giving to changes to the impervious surface coverage requirements for the Open Space District of Palo Alto. We understand that you are discussing this tonight and unfortunately I am not able to attend. Well, I have changed that. We own a home in the Open Space District on Laurel Glenn Drive, Palo Alto. We completed construction of our home and assumed occupancy in 1993 and because of the impermeable surface coverage restrictions enforce at that time and our elongated two and a half acre site we elected to put in a gravel driveway which was considered a permeable surface. It was approved by various City groups, the Planning Department, the Planning Commission, Architectural Review Board, City departments, and the City Council, and by the Fire Department. It has been a very effective service with little or no maintenance only occasional raking. It has been a great service m~d is very cheap actually. Frankly, its appearance fits in most naturally with the setting of our home as well amongst the many oaks on our property and our home’s wood construction and beige color. Most importantly it has proven to be very effective as an absorber of rain and that was my interpretation of why it was done this way to begin with, to prevent runoff and so forth. Even in the heaviest rain since 1993 we have never had any pooling or runoff. The rain in the driveway has been quickly and fully absorbed into the gravel and by the earth below. We understand that part of your motivation for considering changes to existing impermeable surface requirements has to do with limiting the size of homes in the Open Space. Here I think the issue is more complicated. Now in our opinion it is not the size of the house that matters but its style, its configuration, its color, the use ofmaterials, and very importantly the landscaping. Of course there is the issue of the three and a half percent coverage. Now that was for our house figured three and a half percent on 10 acres and I thought that was the standard ruling that was certainly what we had at the time. Assuming this requirement is met the aforementioned design issues are paramount to the design of the home that is tasteful and in harmony with the Open Space. Size per se should not be the issue. In our case we have a quite large home and I guess I’m out of time. Chair Hohnan: You have more time. Page 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Altman: Okay, I will just finish up quickly there is just a little bit more. In our case we have a quite large home and accommodated concerns of the City by locating the house far from the road, preserving the many oaks on our property, planting over 25 more oaks, and more importantly working the house carefully into the contours of the property. Our home is two floors with much of the lower floor underground. We think the best option for the City is to work with property owners to desigm and configure proposed housing and landscape in a thoughtful and tasteful way just as you did with us. Based on impermeable surface restrictions in place at the time of original approvals we have some additional ability to build on our property and would like to do that at some point, a guest cottage or SOl-nething for example. Naturally we are not in favor of any changes to the Open Space impermeable surface requirements that would lessen our ability to do so relative to the requirements that existed in 1990 ~vhen we obtained our original Site and Design approval. Again, we would work with the City and be thoughtful with any new structure and landscape design just as we did for our home years ago. We invite any and all members of the Commission to visit us at our home and see what and the City accomplished together in 1990. We think you will find it in keeping with what you are trying to accomplish. In conclusion, we would like to see no changes to the existing impen-neable surface regulations and would like to see you deal with your objectives by dealing with design and landscaping, something all neighbors want well done in the Open Space. I have to say we got enorrnous help from the Planning Department members that were here then. I doubt that any of them are here now but it was a very good organization. We worked with our neighbors. We abut normal R-2 zoning I think it is so we were being given even though we couldn’t give prior input into their homes. We are done. Our house is there. We have a little more we would like to do at some point but I think as a couple of the previous speakers have said, I think you have a great set of checks and balances through the department and the Commission and the City Council to deal with the items xvithout any further change. Thank you. Chair Holman: Mr. Altman I believe there is a question for you. If you could come back to the microphone, please. Commissioner Butt: Hi. If you don’t mind me asking, do you recall approximately how many square feet above ground you were able to build on your parcel? Mr. Altman: The house itself?. Commissioner Butt: Yes. Mr. Altman: The footprint of the house is about 7,000 feet. There is another sort of lanai by the pool, which is 1,500 feet. It is sort of an open structure and doesn’t have walls and so forth. Commissioner Burt: As you describe it sounds like the footprint is essentially what is above ground and then you have some additional space below. Page 13 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Mr. Altman: Right, right, and then the garage and everything is below. It straddles a sloped hill on each side. So when you drive into the house you see a one-story house, and when you are looking at it from a distance you see a one-story house, and then on either side, which was pretty heavily landscaped, it is two stories there. Most of it or a lot of it is underground. Commissioner Butt: Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you. Our next speaker is Vincent Wood to be followed by Richard Geiger. Welcome, Mr. Wood. Mr. Vincent Wood, Palo Alto: I want to say that I agree with what Cathy mentioned about proper notification being used to notify the property owners that will be affected with Open Space. I don’t think the City was diligent enough in terms of notifying in terms of proposed changes. I want to voice my comment in terms ofi don’t agree with the changes you want to make regarding FAR and iinpervious areas. I don’t think it is fair to property owners. You are placing an undue burden on them. However, I would like to point out as far as I also have a property elsewhere which is under the Williamson Act. The restrictions you are placing are fairly similar to what the Williamson Act restrictions are. Those people that own Williamson Acts they accept the burden of those restrictions because they get a tax benefit for that, they get a tax break. The restrictions that you are proposing are almost the equivalent of making those kind of changes where you are reducing property owner’s ability to build so you might as reduce their property tax if that is something that you want to do then go ahead. That is an option but as far as what I have as far as a Williamson Act property you get a good tax break. So it is just an option to consider. The last thing that I would like to mention is that I think that second dwellings should be allowed. I actually on my property have a second dwelling, which was grandfathered, on my property. I think with the amount of space that most people have if you have a large enough space, two, three, or four acres I think that having a second cottage that is 900 square feet is not going to impact the living space as far as usable space that people have. I think that should be acceptable for people to have a second dwelling. Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you. I do believe second dwelling units are allowed. Mr. Williams: I think his point goes to the size or acreage. Currently they are not allowed if you are under 10 acres. So I think he is suggesting that they should be allowed if they are three or four acres. Chair Holman: I see. Okay, thank you. Richard Geiger to be followed by Christine Losq. Mr. Richard Geiger, Palo Alto: Good evening. I just have a few comments to make. I think there is a great deal of confusion about this impervious/pe~wious, is impervious really pelwious or Page 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I3 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 91 9~ 34 35 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 pervious really impeiwious. I don’t recall any changes to the zoning code that defined this years ago. Maybe it applied to the one parcel but I have never been aware of it or notified of changes. This 200 foot setback I think it should be much more flexible depending on the site. What you are doing is requiring houses to be setback, requiring long driveways, and I am sure there are conditions where that would make the houses more visible or force them not to be in the forested area and so forth, and penalizing people if they do have to go 400 or 500 feet back by calling a driveway impervious. That is penalizing somebody that might have a house in a forest that isn’t visible it would force them to build a house or it would encourage them to build a house closer to the road by calling the driveway impervious when it actually would be a gravel driveway and there are lots of ways to make pervious surfaces. In a 10-acre larger parcel there are plenty of places to divert the water. The water could be stored, mn into a pond for firefighting, or stored in tanks. The water is a big issue and we should save the water. Also, last meeting it was mentioned that maybe this three and a half percent could apply to a total of more than one house. Instead of baying big houses, one big house and one tiny house, you could divide it up into several houses because it would encourage t~amilies that wanted their own house and maybe still on the same property. I have thought of a lot of new issues about this and I think in my written memo to the Commission I brought up what limitations are you going to put on solar panels, solar heating, energy conservation devices? Also water storage, are you going to penalize it because it is an impervious surface? The fire protection issue of having access roads that are essentially fire breaks. Let’s see, I think that pretty much covers it. So thank you. Chair Hohnan: Thank you very much. Our final speaker is Christine Losq. Ms. Christine Losq: Thank you very much for addressing this issue. I am a little blasted away by 7,000 square feet footprints and 50 or 40 acres or so. Our house is 1,000 square feet and we have just started an initial process of thinking about that we could add a room since we now have a married son and might eventually have grandchildren. Right now at family reunions we all camp in the living room, the house has two rooms. I just felt it was important to speak up for those of us who live in the Open Space District who live in modest houses, 600 feet setback from the road. I would be very happy ifI could add 1,000 square feet to my house. What would make me really thrilled is if the cost of doing it would be modest as well. Thank you. Chair Holman: Thank you. Commissioner, do you have any questions for any speakers from the public? Seeing none we will close the public comment and would Staff care to respond to any comments or questions that they heard from the public? Mr. Williams: Not much for them. I think that is the sense of what we have been hearing in terms of concerns about revisions to the sort of basic regulations of the district. I did want to note I think Mr. Borock made a mention of parking and special setbacks. It may not be as clear as it was previously but it is in there, There is a provision in the development table that note the Page 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 special setbacks are applicable, where they apply, and then the parking section specifically did not allow parking in the OS district in the front and side yards. So that would be there. If you like we can specifically say including special setbacks or something like that. I think from our standpoint the key issue at this point considering that we would have subsequent discussion about FAR and that is what we do currently with the impervious surface. That has been an issue that Staffneeds some guidance on too because we as this has evolved there have not been any specific guidelines for us to work from in terms of what counts, or how much, or how to treat those. I think it has been treated pretty much as you are 100 percent one or either 100 percent impe~wious or you are zero and it doesn’t really matter what materials you are using, if there is any permeability to them then it is not counted as pervious. So some of those things and there are things that we could also discuss at a later date. I think if the Commission would like to give us some guidance now to work from until then that is fine too but I do think we need to know whether you want to just leave this sort of in place for the time being or whether we need to have some impervious language like what we have suggested here for the interim while we deliberate for the next 90 days on the bigger issues. Chair Hohnan: Comlnissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: My preference is not to cover the issues of FAR or slope density or things like that but to come up with something reasonable that works in the interim and deals with the impervious coverage in a reasonable way. Then we can revisit it in 90 days with the appropriate interaction of the Planning Commission, Planning Staff, and the neighbors, and the people who live in the Open Space District, and interested parties who are interested in open space presetwation, aild anybody else in the public who wishes to weigh in. I think I feel comfortable with that. There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this and I think that Curtis has seen some of them and I am going to go over them ifI may. One is I actually prefer that things be written in the affim-mtive rather than in the negative. So I have a comment about that. Chair Holman: Comnaissioner Keller, if we could stay to questions just for the moment. You stated an opinion about which direction we should go and fiom your opinion I think that is valid but otherwise if we could stick to questions just for the time being. Commissioner Keller: Sure. I think that a comment that I had about second dwellings that Curtis refetTed to earlier, the issue there is -- actually it wasn’t clear from my suggestion but the thing I was talking about was not having an FAR limit for second dwellings but having that covered within the impervious cover rules. With that understanding of what I wrote do you have any comments or questions about that description? Mr. Williams: Well it is already covered by impervious cover. Second dwellings count as impe~wious coverage if that was part of your question. There isn’t a floor area limitation now so if you were suggesting it be included or not included as floor area I assume that would be something we would take up with the discussion of floor area ratio in the future. Page 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 !8 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 Commissioner Keller: I think what I was referring to is just making things a little clearer. I was suggesting the idea is that there are some things about driveways and how will be counted and how tile exclusion of driveways works. I appreciate your comments on that suggestion. Mr. Williams: As far as driveways to second dwellings, specifically? I think that driveways to second dwellings if they are permeable - semi-pervious materials have not been counted. I see them different than primary driveways because you are not supposed to have a second long driveway coming off the road to your second dwelling. So you shouldn’t be going through the scenic setback again kind of thing. You should be coming off the main driveway to serve the second dxvelling. So it shouldn’t be as critical an issue. I see it more as the same as parking areas or decks or whatever if we are going to exclude those if they are semi-pervious then we would probably exclude those secondary type driveways whether they be to second dwellings or to a barn or something like that. They just are not trafficked the same way as a primary driveway. Commissioner Keller: The other part of what I had mentioned was the idea that if we have this notion of a impervious coverage for driveways which is an exclusion and if we hypothetically were to remove the 900 square loot FAR limitation on second dwellings then obviously the kind of concern that Commissioner Butt referred to that suddenly those can be quite big, I am wondering what you think about in that particular case where somebody creates a new second dwelling or expands a second dwelling whether that triggers the remova! of the exclusion of that grand fathering. Mr. Williams: I don’t know I would have to think about that more. I think if it is just constructing a new second dwelling and it is not affecting the primary driveway issue I don’t think that would then trigger the primary driveway to count when it didn’t before. If you are suggesting that the second dwelling be larger than 900 square feet or it could be if you lifted that limitation on it I think that could be a problem not just by the fact that this additional imper~,ious coverage could then be used for a larger second dwelling but I would be concerned generally about larger second dwellings in the open space area and the potential to look like two houses instead of one and a cottage. Chair Holman: Let tile record show that Commissioner Garber has joined us. Questions from Commissioner Sandas and then Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Sandas: Curtis, this is actuallyjust a point of process question. It is not going to help move us any further in the impervious category. I did hear several speakers tonight say that they were not notified. They weren’t properly notified. So I would assume that the City notified people in the usual way and if you could just articulate that for people who are here and for the record that would be great. Mr. Williams: We did our usual newspaper notice and our list of folks that are on our mailing list for zoning updates. Then in addition we did send notice of the meeting to all of the Open Space District property owners. We did that for the last meeting i don’t think we did that this time in that it was continued specifically to this date. So we don’t generally do that the second Page 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 time. Last time were very specific about being sure that we sent notice for the May 30 meeting to all of the property owners of Open Space District properties. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Butt: There were two issues that were raised by speakers that I wanted to try and get clarification on. One was a concern over the tree maintenance. If I understood the question I think the questioner maybe was believing that the program would apply to all trees on the property and my understanding is that it only applies to the trees that are part of the mandated landscaping to mitigate the visual impacts of the development. Is that correct? Mr. Williams: That is correct. Thank you for clarifying that. I did mean to respond to that. Commissioner Butt: Thank you. Then second, another one of the speakers spoke about a requirement for four covered parking spaces in the open space district and I have to admit I wasn’t aware of that. Is that correct? Mr. Williams: We require four spaces let me check real quickly here and see if they are required to be covered. No. One is required to be covered and the other three don’t have to be covered. Commissioner Butt: Thank you. Mr. Williams: There are four spaces as opposed to two in most single-family districts, Commissioner Bun: That requirement applies to any house in the Open Space regardless of its size? Mr. Williams: Yes. Commissioner Butt: Okay, thanks. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Commissioner Butt just covered the issue that I had that had to do with the trees. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, do you have questions at this point? I have one that was brought up by Herb Borock that involved excluding the hog fanning language. Can you say why that was done? Mr. Williams: Because we don’t anticipate hog farms and they are not generally real compatible with our Open Space environment. Chair Hohnan: Okay, thank you very much. I don’t see any other questions. I’m sorry, Commissioner Keller you had a question. Page 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 _~4 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Keller: Yes, thmzk you. We had a discussion a couple of months ago regarding a particular open space project in which the placement of story poles made the nature of the project much more apparent than it would have been without them. I am wondering the extent to which Staff thinks it would be appropriate when there is development in the Open Space District to require that story poles be placed as a condition for the application to be considered to be deemed complete. Mr. Williams’ I think that is a very good idea. In fact we forgot about that. We did intend to put that in here. I think that is necessary in this day and age for a new resident or a significant addition to a residence. Chair Holman: Actually I might add to that it is story poles but it is also taping that sometimes or a cord, I don’t know what you call it, the perimeter of the structures are outlined and that also is very, very helpful in reviewing projects. Mr. Williams: We can word it generally enough to indicate that what we are looking for is an outline of the boundaries of the site development as well as visually the height and massing of the development. That has been very helpful not just to the Commission but particularly I think to neighbors in the Open Space area who can get a good sense of what the project will look like from their properties. Chair Hohnan: Thank you. Commissioners, do we have comments at this point? Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Burr: First a broad comment for the benefit of the public. Several members of the public were asking why are we going through this process.’? For those of us who have been in the middle of this Zoning Ordinance Update for several years we sleep with this, we don’t have to answer, but for all the other members of the public who aren’t following it it needs to be explained. So Curds feel free to correct me ifI misstate anything. The purpose of this Zoning Ordinance Update, which is nearly complete after an arduous task of several years, is to update our zoning code to make it more consistent with what we call our new Comprehensive Plan, which was adopted in 1997. We are just now completing the process of updating the Zoning Ordinance to make it consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. At the same time we look for any other necessary updates or changes to reflect circumstances that have changed over the 15 or 20 years since the City had done a comprehensive review of its Zoning Ordinance. So that is the reason why we are doing this in a general sense. Then I guess I would like to toss out for purposes of framing how we might go forward to ask whether we should get a sense of the Commission on whether we want to tonight break up this project between two segments. One essentially as Curtis had said at the beginning is to do perhaps certain limited changes to the ordinance that we think are appropriate at this time as placeholders, and then whether we agree that a 90 day advisory committee of stakeholders to Council would be an appropriate thing to do, and if we think that that is appropriate to separately provide our input on topics for consideration by that stakeholders group. Page 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: I think it is a reasonable way to proceed. Commissioner Keller has already stated his position on that. Commissioner Tuma, do you have a comment to make on that? Whether we address this as going forward with something as placeholder that might or might not be permanent in the future as opposed to waiting the 90 days or so until we can come back with something perhaps more complete. Commissioner Tuma: Yes. I am open to heating something that would make sense to do that but I still haven’t heard anything that makes me want to put something in place for 90 days. My concern is that if we put something in place for 90 days, we haven’t thought it through, we don’t what all the consequences are, an application gets put in during that time, those are the rules we have to play by, is that better than leaving it the way it is now? It seems like we are trying to get to something quick. Maybe you have something in mind that sort of mitigates that cor~cern but that is my concern at this point. I am not a big fan of just putting something in place for 90 days and then coming back and revisiting it. It just seems like we have a set of rules let’s live by them but I am open to hearing some other idea on that. Otherwise I would just be inclined to just put it through as is without addressing that issue and come back and address it after 90 days of discussion with the community and that sort of thing. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt, you had a follow up? Commissioner Butt: Yes. So the primary item that I think a few of us would like to see put in place as a placeholder is the one that we have now for a year or two been discussing on the Commission of we have a problem that occuned as a result of a reinterpretation of what constitutes impervious or pervious materials. So to address that issue which would be to essentially return to our old method of counting driveways if they have any sort of something other than gravel as counting against the impervious material limitation but at the same time we didn’t want to encourage that we do more building tip there without utilizing these new materials. So we would give Staff the ministerial review authority to determine the most appropriate semi-penneable material. So part of it is really that when the decision was made three years or so ago to consider these materials as permeable it didn’t go through a formal process. It was just somewhat made at a Staff level and it had far-reaching consequences that we didn’t anticipate. We had potentially doubling of the biggest of houses in these areas. We heard from the public about very modest houses but what we are talking about here is in some cases houses that went from being 10,000 square feet to 18,000 square feet. That is the kind of thing that we are trying to address. We are not trying to address moderate size homes up there. So right i*!ow if we don’t take an action or if Staff on their own doesn’t just take a change in their interpretation then we have a de facto change that occurred in the last three years or so that is significant. This would be an easy thing to do. We could simply say you count it the way we used to count it but Staff requires the best use of materials just basically as a best practice for construction in an open space area just like using native vegetation and things like that. The other thing I think we might want to consider tonight and not necessarily is we have some parcels I believe that are larger than 10 acres. I should say this hasn’t really been an issue Page 20 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 36 37 38 39 4O 41 42 43 44 45 46 because frankly we haven’t had until recently many of these 20,000 and 30,000 square foot homes considered in this area. Under our code if somebody had a 20-acre parcel then they could build txvice as large of a home as on the 10-acre parcel. They could build a 30,000 square foot home. So depending on how many of those kinds of parcels there are, and I don’t know the answer to that, we may want to place a placeholder limit that says the biggest house you can build or the most impe~dous area that you can have is what you can have on a 10 acre parce!. If you are bigger than that you are still limited to what you could build on a 10-acre parcel. So for me it would be just those changes. That may not be the consensus of the Commission but two clean ones that could have potentially significant impacts, we have already seen in recent years on the first one some very significant impacts and all we are trying to do is go back essentially to the size of the houses and the amount of impervious surface that we used to limit the development to. Chair Holman: Commissiorler Keller. Commissioner Keller: I am s3qnpathetic with the position of Commissioner Bun. I would suggest that we separate out the issues of open space from the issues of the Public Facility and Agriculture. I do have some comments about Public Facility that I would like to treat separately. With respect to the open space I think that it is possible to achieve something that would be a reasonable placeholder. I think that the kind of things that Vice-Chair Lippert was refening to last time are proper items for a larger discussion that can happen in the 90 day period but are much too broad to happen now. He was referring to slope density or FAR limits or things like that or the comment that I mentioned earlier with respect to second dwellings. I think those things should really be in the 90-day issue rather than in the current ordinance that we are considering tonight. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Is my understanding correct that what you are proposing, Commissioner Burt would be that in this 90-day period that we would require the use of the semi-pervious materials in the open space for driveways? Commissioner Burr: Yes, as a ministerial review by Staff. So they would have the discretion of determining what is the most appropriate material for a site, if there was some site that for some reason those materials didn’t work that is within their discretion, but it would be a best practices approach just as along the lines of- the concept being that if we are going to build in the open space areas we should use whatever practices are there to minimize the impact on the natural environment. Now we have a new technology that addresses an improvement without a significant hardship to the developer. Commissioner Tuma: If I could just respond to that. Do we have any definitive data on the relative costs of the types of materials that we are talking about? Mr. Williams: Not that I am aware of maybe the Public Works people have a better sense of that. I believe that most of these materials until you start getting up into more elaborate pavers and then if you try to put some of these things on steep slopes where you have to do a lot of Page 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 "9 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4.~ 44 45 46 construction to get the proper sub-grade and all that that most of these materials are comparable to putting in a concrete driveway. I don’t thi~ if we were looking at this sort of situation that we would be trying to dictate something that is more expensive. I think for the most part we are looking at things like we said gravel or grass strips with gravel between or things like that that are probably less expensive than a standard driveway is. There are some kinds of materials that are more expensive than standard construction. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, did you have something to add to that? Do you have information about relative costs? Colnmissioner Garber: I had made some queries but I did not get any answers back in time to share them with us this evening. Chair Holman: Thank you. Commissioner Keller, you had another question? Commissioner Keller: Yes. i would actually like to ask a question of my fellow Commissioner Burr. What I am wondering is are you proposing that the driveways be considered as 100 percent impervious coverage or are you suggesting that we go with the Staff recommendation that the driveways be whatever percentage is calculated as the actual impervious coverage proportionately for a driveway with a minimum of 50 percent counting? Commissioner Burt: I am suggesting that we essentially go back to our old methods on an interim basis, which would be to count them as 100 percent impervious with the exception I think historically gravet was counted as pervious. Staff would have to make sure that those circumstances where gravel is permitted as a driveway it is an appropriate driveway function and they are not going to come back later because we allowed them to put gravel on a steep slope and seek a variance. So that is why it would be ministerial. Chair Holman: I have a couple of clarifications I guess of Staff. TeInporary structures, how are those dealt with or counted or not? Mr. Williams: She is asking how are temporary structures counted and I think there are two parts maybe to this question. One is iinpervious cover, which I assume they are included as impervious cover. The second which I heard before was relative to them being in scenic setback area and I think typically we would not allow them in there although I understand there was one approved by the Council in that situation. But there is nothing in the code that would lead us to approve that if we needed to say that specifically I assume we could. Chair Hohnan: Temporary structures have a way of becoming perinanent so I would actually welcome language that addressed that situation. A question has come up previously also about basements and whether they are counted in open space or not, and what would constitute a baseinent in open space because sometimes they are - we discourage cut and fill but sometimes a basement might be SOlnething that is partly below grade because it is only on a slope. So how does Staff address basements? Page 22 ! 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Mr. Williams: I think it is very different from the other zoning districts because we don’t have floor area requirements. So it is just the footprint of the building that is counting as impervious coverage. If you have a basement that is under that footprint it doesn’t add anything in terms of the impervious coverage so it doesn’t count. If the basement extended somewhat beyond it then it might count but typically it is going to be within the footprint of the first floor of the building so it wouldn’t count as additional impervious cover and we don’t have a floor area limitation so it doesn’t really even enter into the calculation as far as that goes. Chair Hohnan: So does Staff feel comfortable or not that because cut and fill is discouraged that we can limit that kind of development to have a minimum impact? Mr. Williams: Yes. I think there are pretty specific criteria about cut and fill and working with the topography. So if you felt that was inappropriate and particularly if it created certain visible aspects of the building or the cut itself that would be visible then you would certainly be able to say that wasn’t appropriate but it is really a case-by-case basis in looking at what is being projected. Chair Hohnan: Actually to follow tip with that tile naaximum height is 25 feet in open space. In R-1 for instance the height is based on the measurement within a certain number of feet of the proposed building and at the lowest point. Is it calculated the same way in open space and if not, why not, and is that problematic or not? Ms. Amy French, Cun-ent Plannin~ Manager: Ill open space we have calculated directly below at each segment of the building because we often have stepped buildings following the contours, as it should down the hill. So we will measure up at each point and it can’t exceed 25 feet from plumb line basically. Chair Holman: Is that clear enough in code that Staff can well implenaent that? Ms. French: Those who have processed the open space homes through the process have been trained to understand that that is how we do it. There is always language that could be finessed to be even more clear I suppose. Chair Holman: Okay, thank you. I guess I would add to Commissioner Burt’s comments and the comments earlier of Staff as well, and nay own comments for that matter that we have had kind of a de facto change to the zoning because of this issue of permeability. Tile reason that the topic came up although it looks like we are not going to address it tonight I think the reason that the potential for FAR limitations has come up is because the City has adopted a sustainability program. Buildings that get to be the size of some of the ones that we have seen in the last handful of years, the last few years, are not what a lot of people would consider as sustainable design no matter how aesthetically well they blend into the environment. If you have a 30,000 square foot house I am not sure that is very sustainable. So that is the other reason that this has come up. The other side of that is if you have an incredibly large single home structure that it may not exceed the permeable calculations but if it has a large footprint it does make a large area impervious. So that is the other piece of this for me. Commissioner Tuma. Page 23 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Tuma: So a couple of questions about applicability. I think in one of the letters that we received I believe someone raised the issue of a pending application and until we make a change that any applications that ~vere currently pending would not be impacted by this change. Is that correct? Mr. Williams: Typically that is the way we have handled it and I would assume that that would be tile case here as well. I should point out in that particular case there is actually a pending application. I think the person has been talking to Staff over the past year-plus about what they might do but I don’t believe there is actually a pending application for that site. Commissioner Tuma: Okay. tf we were to put something in place temporarily and then come up with something quite different, who knows, 90 days down the road if someone makes an application during this period of time, the time between when Council would adopt it and the change 90 days, would that person have the option of going xvith the new rules or the rules that were put in place when they applied in this 90-day period or would they be stuck with what happens during this 90-day period, or would they have to withdraw their application and reapply? Mr. Williams: We would probably allow them the option of either one because they could do exactly what you said, so it is kind of purposeless to say no, you can’t use the new regulations because you were in under the old ones when they could just withdraw it and reapply under the new ones anyway. Commissioner Tuma: Okay, just one last thing. So there is at least one application that you think is out there and possibly may come in sometime in the next 90 days, or are there more than that? What is your sense of- are we trying to close a door here that doesn’t really need to be closed or? Mr. Williams: I am not aware and I am not even aware that that one is ooin~ to be ready in the next 90 days either. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller, you had one more thing to say? Commissioner Keller: Yes. It was mentioned earlier I believe by Chair Hohnan tile comment about basements. It is clear to me that a basement that does not protrude beyond the footprint of the building doesn’t matter in terms of impe~wious cover. To the extent to which a basement protrudes beyond the footprint of the building I would expect that the full amount of that protrusion would be counted as impervious cover. Is that correct? Mr. Williams: I don’t know that we have encountered that but I would expect that that would be the case, yes. Commissioner Keller: Thank you. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Garber. Page 24 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Garber: I have been struggling whether to join the conversation given that I had missed the public testimony but understanding that most of the testimony pertained to the letters that we received I xvill ask a few questions and determine whether I will abstain or not from the vote a bit later in the conversation. I just wanted to ask the Planning Department’s first principle relative to the suggestions that it has made. In a very general way it has not found that the process of review is necessarily broken but the changes that they are making are to formalize policy that has essentially been unsaid or handed doxvn but has not been written. Are there specific things that the Plmming Department was attempting to fix that were broken in the process and/or the actual review of a submittal? Mr. Williams: Well, there were a couple of things that we wanted to address. One was to get the open space criteria from the Comprehensive Plan into the ordinance because we do feel like that, maybe we wouldn’t call it broken but that that would be helpful to everyone involved to actually see it in the ordinance instead of worrying about whether they caught it in the Comprehensive Plan as well. Then the second one is impelwious cover and needing to try to at a minimum develop a criteria for what counts and what doesn’t count because we really have not had - we do have I think some written interpretations in the office as far as that goes that do talk about pools not counting and that kind of thing. But we have never had that discussion with the Commission and it has obviously been a concern as to how things are counted. So I think we wanted to at a minimum bring that issue foi-ward and have that discussion so that we do get some clarification on what does count and what doesn’t. Commissioner Garber: And Commissioner Burt’s recommendation which I came in in the middle of and I apologize is to have a 90-day essentially phase-in of the recommendations? Mr. Williams: I don’t want to speak for hiin but I think the recommendation is to have some modification to the language related to impervious cover to give some certainty to that in the interim period while we discuss the bigger picture of FAR, house size, whether those types of requirements are appropriate and if so what they might be and working with the property owners that are affected and other interested community members that that would happen over a 90-day period, but for now that we would give some certainty and that certainty that has been suggested is that essentially we count driveways as they initially were back when the district was created with the exception of gravel driveways which have been pretty much always exempted. Commissioner Garber: Thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: Maybe just briefly, I appreciate Commissioner Tuma’s question on if there aren’t a bunch of pending applications is it somewhat moot. I guess my point would be if we were making a number of changes then the big loophole that emerged in the last couple of years we ought to go ahead and close it while we then go through a more thoughtful process of whether any other changes should occur. Page 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 The other reason I would like to support Staff’s recommendation and what I read from the minutes a number of Commissioners had advocated on folding the Comprehensive Plan language into the criteria. This goes back a bit in history but we have had a variety of different projects come to us in the open space and they run the gamut from modest projects to very large ones and also projects that were small and insensitive, large and sensitive, and also large and very insensitive to the open space environment. When I first came on in the very first year there was a project. If you go up to the overlook at Foothills Park there is hardly anything else you can see except that project right now. It dominates the landscape. That project was approved under the same criteria as we have in the code right now. The Comprehensive Plan had just been adopted and incredibly that was still approved. From the experience of the last half dozen years a project like that I don’t think would get a Staff recommendation for approval, would pass a Plmming Commission or a City Council. it pointed out to me as I reflected on that that gee, there is a lot of latitude that is still there even though the bodies interpret things differently today the same language was twisted to allow approval of something that I think most people would look at and say, holy smokes, that is not what we meant to have in our open space areas, that is not what the general public wants and probably not what most of the people who live in that area want, something that is a mansion on a hilltop almost. So for that reason I think it is important that this Comprehensive Plan language be embodied because it gives greater strength to those subjective interpretations that still have quite a bit of latitude but I am hopeful that will be enough along with the list of kind of approval considerations that Staff will be making that Commissioner Holman had brought up some time ago and which Curtis had cited, they are not before us but there are SOlne other criteria that Staff now looks at in consideration of those projects. I think those two elements go a long ways toward making sure we just have good quality, sensitive development in the Foothills. Then we have some other much more complex issues but maybe later in the meeting if we look at considerations for this advisory group we can have a little more discussion on that. Chair Holman: Thank you. I have one quick one. My understanding is if you look at the table on page 5 of the Staff Report that if you are looking at 10 percent average slope and you look at impervious area that that 15,246 is essentially the same thing as three and a half percent impervious. Mr. Williams: Con-ect. Chair Holman: Thank you very, much. So Commissionel" Keller. Comnfissioner Keller: I would like to take a digression for a moment from our wonderful discussion about open space to just deal with an issue that hasn’t been completely resolved that I raised earlier with respect to Public Facilities. Mr. Larkin: I would just caution, Public Facilities actually isn’t on the agenda for tonight’s meeting. The only thing that is on the agenda for Public Facilities is consolidating into the same chapter with Open Space. So if it is in regard to the consolidation that is fair game for tonight Page 26 1 2 3 4 5 6 9 10 11 12 I3 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 but if it is in regards to the policy of Public Facilities that will have to wait for a future meeting where it is noticed. The notice says consideration of an ordinance amending provisions of the Open Space District and making clarifications. Mr. Williams: Well this has an Ordinance amending Title 18. Commissioner Keller: Let me tell you the issue and you will see. There is already a proposed deletion of 18.28.060(a) and I am suggesting a change to that. This says it is supposed to apply to mixed residential and nonresidential uses. We have in general said that what we are really talking about in terms of adjacency for daylight plane is adjacent to residential. Therefore I was suggesting that this particular section, which doesn’t really apply and Curtis was talking about replacing it, I was suggesting that it be replaced with the following text, and you can tel1 me if this makes sense. When a Public Facility District adjoins a residential district daylight plane of the Public Facility District shall mirror the daylight plane of the residential district along the portions of the boundary line where they adjoin. So that basically is a clarification of this. If that is acceptable I would like to include that in an amendment, if not then I would like to consider that at some point in the future. Mr. Larkin: If it is a clarification that is fine but it doesn’t need to go into the motion, if it is a clarification of the policy that is described. Mr. Williams: If I can just claril3, the clarification. The Table 2, which lists the development standards for these zones already has daylight plane for site lines abutting a residential district and for PF it already has one in there that actually is not exactly the same but very similar to the R-1 zoning. It is a 1:2 instead of a 45 degrees but it starts at the 10 foot height and goes up from there. So it actually already did and what that other section did was provide some relief adjacent to higher density residential. If the PF district had this mixed use with a lot of residential in it so I think we are already covered. MOTION Commissioner Keller: Okay, thank you. In that case if the Chair will allow I would be interested in making a motion. So my motion is as follows. First to accept the Staff recommendation with the following changes, and I am going to be very careful here. So the first change is with respect to Section 18.28.090(b), which is on page 13 of the proposed ordinance, deleting the word ’required’ from that. In other words, we don’t want parking in the required front or side yards. Secondly, the Staff to come up with appropriate language for requiring story poles and perimeter outlines or whatever the appropriate language for that in order for an application to be deemed complete in the Open Space District. The third thing is with respect to the proposed section (!) of Open Space, I am not sure where it goes but it goes somewhere, for impe~wious coverage these changes will be rnade to that section. Page 27 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 _~1 "9 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: The page, please? Commissioner Keller: It is page 4 of the Staff Report. Mr. Williams Page 11 in the ordinance, item (1). Commissioner Keller: Right, that would be replaced as per the proposa! in the Staff Report with the following changes in the Staff Report. Firstly with respect to para~aph !, where it says ’pervious or semi-pervious paving materials shall not be counted,’ that is replaced by ’shall be counted.’ Then it says ’as impervious cover according to the extent,’ the word ’percentage’ is replaced by ’proportion.’ Then it says ’the proposed materials are determined by the Director to be impervious,’ so I am making that a positive statement as opposed to a negative statement. Saying that it is counted to the extent it is impervious. The next change is 011 paragraph 2, ’the portion of primary driveways located in required scenic setbacks shall not be counted as impervious if predominantly constructed of pervious inaterials and up to a width of 20 feet.’ So if it is a driveway of 20 feet or less and it is located in the required scenic setback it is not to be counted, tfit is a driveway of 30 feet then the first 20 feet will not be counted. Thirdly, in paragraph 3, ’the primary driveways other than those specific in number 3,’ should be ’number 2,’ ’shall be considered impervious due to compaction from driving over the surface.’ So we are deleting for now the 50 percent thing and that I think takes care of the main issue that Pat wanted. The next issue is in terms of Section 18.28.070(a) paragraph number one (A) which is on page 8 of the proposed ordinance where it says ’second dwelling units shall only be permitted on sites with a minimum site area of 10 acres,’ that should say, ’a minimum actual site area of 10 acres,’ because that is a distinction we talked about earlier in contrast with a minimum deemed site area of 10 acres. So it is a mininaum actual site area of 10 acres. Finally, the last issue is on page 13 of the proposed ordinance, Section 18.28.100 on line five, the word ’us’ should be the word ’use.’ Chair Holman: Do I hear a second to this motion? SECOND Commissioner Burt: I’ll second. Chair Holman: Motion made by Commissioner Keller, seconded by Commissioner Burt. Commissioner Keller, do you wish to speak to your motion? Commissioner Keller: I think that this is a reasonable way of dealing with the immediate issues. I think it inakes improvements in clarifying what the intent was of the Zoning Ordinance as it has traditionally been in particular by clarifying that the conditions that were in the Comprehensive Page 28 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4~ 44 45 Plan have now been incorporated into the Zoning Ordinance. I think that is very important and the process that we went through several months ago with respect to a particular project indicated that the fact that that was in the Comprehensive Plan and not the Zoning Ordinance led to some confusion. Furthermore, it is my intent and I am not sure we should make this part of the motion that we will visit this in the next 90 days and that we will work with the community, with the owners of the this property, with the people interested in open space so that we can refine this further but at least this indicates where the baseline should be for future revision. It also allows us to clarify what the intent was in a way that allows us to not have to make these further changes next time to the extent that these things make sense. So for example, they are things that we should be doing anyway and that gets them through the process for clarity. Thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burt, do you care to speak to your second? Commissioner Butt: No, not at this time. Chair Holman: Commissioner Sandas. Commissioner Sandas: I don’t krlow if it is appropriate to ask once again another process question but in temas of this motion I am not sure either if this needs to be added in but what will the process be over the next 90-day period for including input from the community? Mr. \,Villiams: We will convene a meeting, put together an initial meeting and try to notify all of the property owners, try to identify architects who have worked in the area or are interested in working in the area and various groups or organizations if they are interested in the open space area and basically plan out a series of meetings. I don’t know if the Commission is interested in having a subcommittee or something like that that we report to, that would be useful as wel! I think. So we can work that in and get some feedback along the way as far as that process goes. Then ultimately come to you with a recommendation at the end of that time period. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt before you do I think what we might be looking at here are two and maybe three separate motions. I think just to keep things simple let’s address the 90-day period separately with a separate motion. If we could do that I think there might be a third motion that could pursue this as well. Any more comments on the motion? Commissioner Tuma and then Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Tuma: I was just going to ask the maker of the motion for my benefit, and maybe others I don’t know, if you could just repeat what you are proposing with respect to impervious coverage? The rest of it I am completely on board with, I support, but I do want to go back over this make sure I understand exactly what is being proposed. Commissioner Butt: We can do it in the strict code language but if you could explain what you understand to be the impact of that language that might also help. Page 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Keller: Certainly, I would be happy to do that. So what happens is that we are counting driveways as impervious as 100 percent in this motion. The second thing is there is an exclusion for up to 20 feet wide driveways where there is a scenic setback area that is excluded. The third thing is that in areas that are not driveways the paving materials are counted as pervious or impervious to the percentage that they actually pervious or impervious. Those are the three things that are in the impervious coverage section. Mr. Williams: Can I ask a question about that? Chair Holman: That is not what I understand either. Curtis. Mr, Williams: No, that is what I understand and read it that way but I guess I thought somehow you had intended initially to have gravel driveways not included as impervious but maybe I am wrong. That isn’t part of this motion so I just wanted to clarify whether that was the intent or not. Commissioner Keller: That was not the intent but I would be happy to entertain an amendment if SOlnebody wanted to do that. Chair Holman: Commissioner Burr. Commissioner Burr: Yes, and that was nay intent to exclude gravel driveways when Staff agrees that they are an appropriate driveway surface for the terrain from being counted against impervious area. Commissioner Keller: I would be happy to accept that as an appropriate amendment to Section (1) paragraph 3. Chair Holman: Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: So just to clarify,. One issue that was discussed before was the issue of requiring semi-pervious materials during this time period and as I understand your motion that is not required by the motion, correct? Commissioner Keller: tt is not required by the motion it is something that I understood could occur as part of the Staff review with the applicant. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber, I believe you had a question did you not? Commissioner Garber: Yes, actually Commissioner Tuma asked my question. Then the second question has been answered with the latest amendment. Let me just clarify the third point which is that issues of FAR and the percentages that influence the amount of allowable buildable area are going to be part of this 90-day period and are not a part of this motion at the moment. Commissioner Keller: That is conect. Page 30 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2. 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 "9 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Garber: Thank you. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. So on this issue of Staff requiring use of semi-permeable driveways would you need language fiom us in this motion to be able to implement that? Mr. Williams: I don’t think we need language in here to be able to implement it. Obviously if there is language in there then that wil! be right there and we will have to come forward with it but I think we have enough language in terms of the criteria for open space and other direction in here that we should be looking at materials that are used on driveways in any event. Commissioner Burr: So if I understand it then on one hand you could include it in this list of Staffcriteria that is not part of the ordinance. Would you prefer it to be part of the motion or not? Mr. Williams: I don’t think so. I don’t think it needs to be. Commissioner Butt: Okay. Chair Holman: Commissioner Sandas are you okay? So you doil’t have any more questions? Okay. Commissioner Sandas: t am fine except I am wondering what we are going to be voting on. Chair Holman: The clarification for me in terms of where I thought the conversation was going and where the motion is and that is on page 4 of the Staff Report (1) Impervious Coverage, number one. The way this reads as amended by or changed by Commissioner Keller in his motion this means that secondary driveways, walkways, those sorts of things those would be counted as impermeable only to the degree to which they are impermeable. My understanding was where I thought the language was going from other comments was that we would count everything as impervious, which would take us back to where we had been and what the intention of the code had been so Iong ago when it was put in in 1976 or 1978. So I arn asking the maker of the motion if they would consider accepting a fiiendly amendment so that all secondary pavings will be considered as impervious which would take us back to where we were before. Commissioner Keller: Well, I think that what I am proposing is a compromise between where we were and where we are. I think that by providing driveways as counting 100 percent except within the scenic setbacks we are basically getting most of what we are dealing with. I do think that right now it is not clear whether that other stuff is counted or not. So I am basically moving somewhat towards the idea of considering pem~eability of other surfaces that are not part of the driveway. Chair Holman: Well, for me it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue because depending on what the development is xve could have a considerable amount of paving that is senfi-permeable that allows for more development than ever was the intention for the Open Space District. So for me this doesn’t satisfy that. Commissioner Burt did you want to comment? Page 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 -4o 41 42 -43 44 45 -46 Commissioner Butt: Yes. It was such a complex motion I didn’t pick up on all the nuances. Part of my comment on that would be that as an outcome from this advisow group we may see that a more complex definition of partial credit for semi-permeable materials would be appropriate but in that case it seems like you would want to reduce the allo~vable pen~eable area so that you aren’t having a change to the zoning that essentially allows larger structures and more paving that what we ever used to allow. So based on that notion I would prefer that we have in this motion something that returns us to what we have had for 20 years with the exception of kind of this loophole that emerged in the last three years that we are trying to correct. Chair Holman: Are you asking to amend the motion? Commissioner Butt: Yes, I would like to see that amendment open to hearing any reasons why that wouldn’t be right. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller, as maker of the motion do you accept that amendment? Commissioner Keller: If you can suggest how we would word that I would be interested in considering it. Commissioner Butt: I think we would fold in the same language that we just did on the driveways that all of the semi-pem~eable materials be counted as impervious as historically was the case. Commissioner Keller: So what we are suggesting is that for number one, pervious or semi- pervious paving materials shall be counted as impervious cover, period, and then delete the rest of that paragraph. Is that what you are suggesting? Commissioner Butt: Yes. Mr. Williams: O1- you might say except as provided below and then you get down to a couple of exceptions. Chair Holman: Because if you look at the language on page 11 of the ordinance, I am sony this is complicated we will try to get this clarified a little bit as we move further into it and get some of the stuck things worked out. If you look at page I I of the ordinance under (1) it say impervious coverage shall be limited to three and a half percent of the site and shall be calculated to include all building coverage plus paved surfaces including but not limited to driveways, parking areas, sport and tennis courts, swimming pools, patios or decks, and then it could if Staff would agree with this or concur with this then it could say ’except as noted in two,’ the new two that is being added. Mr. Williams: Yes, it could just say except for the following circumstances and then it could become and one and a two, primary driveways through scenic setbacks, etc., and then primary driveways gravel and those would be pretty much the two exceptions. Page 32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Can I suggest the following way of dealing with it? We are on page 11 of the ordinance and what we say is that ..... Chair Holman: IfI might, is what Staff recommended not adequate? Commissioner Keller: So we are deleting the ’at least 50 percent’ from this, is that correct? Chair Hohnan: That is correct. Commissioner Keller: And we are also putting in - so what we are saying is .... Chair Holman: Actually, and Staff keep me in line here if I get off track, and I am sorry to interrupt you just trying to get clarity to this. What we are doing is we are keeping the first three lines of imperadous coverage on the existing proposed ordinance. We are deleting everything after the first three lines and adding the following exception, which would be the primary driveways and the primary driveways through scenic setbacks, as were changed by Commissioner Keller on page 4 of the Staff Report. Commissioner Keller: Chair Holman: Yes. Commissioner Keller: So item two. In other words, paragraph two that is there? And therefore we also need paragraph three to define what a primary driveway - para~aph four which defines what a primary driveway is. Mr. Williams: Right. basically. I think it should probably just have the rest of it, two through six Commissioner Keller: Two through six, that is correct. Chair Holman: That makes sense, yes. Does evewone follow that? Commissioner Keller: So in other words, the first three lines of the page 11 become paragraph one. Chair Holman: Yes. Commissioner Keller: Okay, I will accept that. Commissioner Burr: If it is needed for the record the seconder accepts that. Chair Holman: Great, thank you. Then I had just a couple of other things. I appreciate the story poles and the taped off development being added. I think it would be helpful to clarify that the Page 33 l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 D~ 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 4_~ 44 45 46 language about parking that parking would not be allowed in the special setbacks. It is just a minor clarification if the maker and seconder would accept that. Commissioner Keller: What is your suggestion? Chair HoIman: Clarifying that parking would not be allowed in the special setbacks. It is just a clarification of existing language. Commissioner Keller: Perhaps what we should say is in the OS district, we are on page 13, 18.28.090(b) OS district is now amended to read ’in the OS district no parking space shall be located in the required fi-ont or side yard or special setback,’ is what you are suggesting. Chair Holman: You already caught that and I overlooked that. So that is okay. Commissioner Keller: Is a special setback considered a required fi-ont yard? Mr. Williams: it is but we will put special setback in there just to be sure. Commissioner Keller: So I will amend if it is okay with the seconder to add the phrase, ’o1 special setback.’ Commissioner Burt: That is fine. C?hair Holman: Then one other point that Staff brought up earlier which is that the Director shall maintain a standard list of conditions of approval, that that list of conditions of approval be added to the ordinance. That list of conditions of approval we are not certainly accepting tonight but that language be added if that language is agreeable to the maker and seconder. Commissioner Keller: That is fine with me. Where would you suggest putting it? Chair Holman: I think we should leave that to Staff on where best to put that. Is that agreeable to the seconder as well? Commissioner Butt: Yes. Chair Holman: Thank you. Then also that temporary structures be addressed such that temporary structures also coullt as impervious coverage if that is agreeable to the maker and seconder. Commissioner Keller: Yes. Commissioner Butt: I am sympathetic in principle to that. I think there may be nuances that we would want to defer to his advisory group because we had a whole bunch of complex issues the one time when we had the temporary structure. I certainly was with you in the voting on how that should be treated but I am hesitant to getting into now trying to refine this too much with some of the things that we were going to defer to the advisory group for. Page 34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2O 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3O 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Hohnan: If I might, do you have one example of why it might be problematic and we couldn’t include it? Commissioner Burr: These may not hold weight but if I recall the different issues of whether a temporary structure what time frame constitutes it being temporary, how much it is used out of a year, and whether it has a paved floor or not a paved floor. So I think there may be some things that just need to be more fully vetted. Chair Holman: Okay, we will wait on that one then. It looks like we are ready for a vote on the motion. Cominissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I am going to make a plea here and see where this goes if anywhere, probably nowhere, but that’s all right. I remain uncomfortable ~vith what we are doing here with this pervious coverage section. I think it is extremely convoluted at this point. We are putting a new starting point in which the discussions the next 90 days will go. While there has been a lot of thoughtful discussion it bothers me. So if the motion stands as it is right now I am not going to be able to support it. I would be supportive of a motion that covered all the issues that were raised before and leaves the impervious coverage as is during the 90-day period. So I would throw that out there as one last thought before we go to the vote. I can even with the discussion we were having and all this do we add this, do we add that, I think rea!ly this 90-day period of time ought to be spent figuring this out and putting it in place and we ought not to do this tonight on the impervious coverage. Thanks. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: Wel!, I may not change Commissioner Tuma’s outlook but just to clarify. Part of the difference in perspective I think is that for Commissioners who have been on the Commission for several years what we had three years or so ago was a sudden loophole that you could drive a Mac truck through. It is not a little subtle thing. It fundmnentally changed on how a clever developer could have a major increase in the house size that could be built in the Open Space District. It was a very fundamental change that was never intended. If we didn’t do that tonight I would say all this other stuff is inconsequential. That is the thing that we should do the very fundamental and yet clean change. It is straightforward, it is clean, but it is very, very crucial. The impact of it when it is applied and it is certainly not applied in all circumstances is huge. This is not some little nuance and yet it is not really ambiguous. I don’t understand what is the issue that is problematic with returning to the interpretation that we had for 15 or 20 years and that is all we are doing. Chair Holman: Commissioner Garber. Commissioner Garber: I thought I had it but I am not sure I do. I was under the impression, and granted I am one of the newer Commissioners and I don’t have some of the background that other Commissioners do, but I was under the impression that the modifications to the impervious coverage section that were being moved here were in fact returning the section to its previous intent. I am getting nod both ways here. Page 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22,, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Commissioner Butt: The motion that is on the floor? Yes, that is conect. The motion on the floor is to return to what we had until the last couple of years of the new material coming that got interpreted in a way that allowed much larger houses to be constructed. Commissioner Garber: That is because they could increase ...... Commissioner Butt: The reason was that originally the impervious constraint, the three and a half percent, was the only tool that limited not only impervious coverage but house size indirectly. Then by exempting a driveway that might be a quarter-mile long suddenly all of that pervious area could then be added to essentially a three-story structure, two stories above and one story below ground. That is the change that occurred and that is what we are trying to go back to the old formula. Commissioner Garber: I apologize for continuing the conversation but then the two primary tasks of this 90-day period is one, again, to put together a methodology of calculating pervious material relative to the size of the building that can be created. Commissioner Butt: That might be one of them. We probably have a number of different things that the Commission when we get to that part of this evemn~ s discussion of which things would be considerations for this group. I have some ideas but I wouldn’t want to attempt to prescribe different outcomes. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: Yes, I just want to clarify for Commissioner Garber’s benefit that one of the other changes we are making is we heard the public with respect to people in the special setbacks and agreed not to count the special setback driveway up to 20 feet wide toward the impervious coverage. So that is the other change and then we made other changes for example the parking issue and the story poles issue, and clarified a wording issue with respect to second dwelling and made clear that the actual parcel size as opposed to deemed parcel size because that has come up before us. Commissioner Garber: Thank you. Chair Hoh-nan: So it occurs to me that there were also additions that Staffhad recommended including that are on page 2 of the Staff Report that have not so far been included in the motion. Mr. Larkin: The motion was to move the Staff recornmendation so they are included. Chair Holman: Okay, so that would include those then. Okay, very good. Thank you. Curtis and I were on the Salne page on that one. So would City Attorney care to repeat the motion? Mr. Larkin: I wouldn’t have a clue. Page 36 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2~ 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Chair Holman: I can probably do it. Would Staff like me to or do you think you are clear on the motion? Mr. Williams: I think we are clear on the motion. I think this was the only thing the impervious thing and I think we clearly laid that out in the last iteration. Chair Holman: Okay. We will see this an}~vay before it goes to Council in the minutes. Mr. Williams: Right. Chair Holman: Okay. Commissioner Keller: I would be happy to review as I often offer tMngs. Commissioner Sandas: No. Commissioner Tuma: No thanks. Commissioner Keller: No, not now when Curtis sends this for .... Mr. Williams: What I will do is shoot him a copy before we put it in the Council packet. Arthur is great at making sure that we caught everything. MOTION PASSED (5-1-1-0, Commissioner Tuma voted no with Commissioner Lippert absent) Chair Hoh-nan: Me too if you would since I have all the notes it too. All those in favor of the motion then say aye. (ayes) Opposed? (nay) Thank you very much. So that motion passes on a five to one vote with Commissioner Tuma voting nay. Now we have the issue also of the 90-day period and if we want to forward that on as a recommendation. So comments, questions or recomlnendations on that orjust a motion? Who would like to start that? Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Butt: First let me ask one question of Curtis. Curtis, one possibility would be to include a couple of Planning Commission members on the advisory committee as opposed to a separate subcommittee, what do you think about that? Mr. Williams: I think that probably would be a good idea. Commissioner Burt: Don? Mr. Larkin: I would just make that as a general recommendation but probably not part of the motion. I think you can give that as a direction to Staff to include those members. Commissioner Butt: Sounds good. Curtis, one other clarification in your suggestion, you bad said that Commission direct Staff but I am sensitive to the guideline that Commission cannot Page 37 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3o 31 34 36 37 38 39 4o 41 42 43 44 45 46 direct Staff to do things that are going to have a si~itScant expenditure of resources. So I want to make sure that we make a motion that doesn’t step on those boundaries. If we were to move to support the Staff proposal to do this is a more appropriate way to make the motion? Mr. Larkin: I think that is fine. The other thing you can do is recommend that Staff return in 90 days with a revision based on community input and then leave it to Staff as to how to get that community input but understanding that they are going to take your recommendations. MOTION Commissioi~er Butt: Okay. I think I would prefer to make the motion in the follow fom~ that I move that we support the Staff proposal to create an ad hoc advisory committee of stakeholders including property owners residing in the OS district, architects familiar with the OS district, and other stakeholder groups representing OS district or open space preservation along with allowing up to two Planning Commissioners to participate in this group as well. Chair Hohnan: I think the City Attorney had suggested that that part not be included in the motion. Mr. Larkin: It is not necessary but it is okay as long as it is clear that the committee is mal,:ing recommendations to Staff. Commissioner Burt: Right, and it is allowance for Curtis to appoint that rather than an obligation. Then the purpose of this group would be to review in greater depth means to address some of the more complex remaining issues involved in the open space area and that Commissioners will provide suggestions of issues that the advisory group may want to consider. Chair Holman: Motion by Commissioner Burr. Do we have a second? SECOND Commissioner Keller: Second. Chair Holman: Commissioner Keller seconds. Commissioner Butt, do you need to speak to your motion? Commissioner Burr: No. Chair Hoh-nan: Commissioner Keller? Commissioner Keller: No, thank you. MOTION PASSED (6-0-1-0, Commissioner Lippert absent) Chair Holman: Okay. Seeing no other questions or coinments we will vote on the motion. All those in favor say aye. (ayes) Opposed? That passes unanimously on a six to zero vote. Page 38 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 I6 17 18 19 20 21 22.,.) 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Then I had suggested that there might be two or three motions here. I am not sure if I want to make a motion t just want to float this out there. Commissioner Butt had mentioned something previously which had been a topic of conversation and that was to lilnit the amount of developability in parcels larger than ! 0 acres so that we have some control over the mansionization of the hillsides if you will. I am not going to make a motion at this point to do that but I would like to hear other Commissioner’s comments on that. I understand this might be a topic of conversation for this ad hoc group and I do understand that. I also have a thought that if the ad hoe ~oup comes back and there is no recommendation on anything that this might be our only shot at making such a recommendation. So that is the one thing that might compel me to want to do that one action tonight, I look forward to other Commissioner’s comments. Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: I think it is good to throw out ideas or thoughts that would go into this group. I would not be at all supportive of trying to put yet another restriction in place without it being part of an overall comprehensive view coming from this ad hoc committee. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller. Commissioner Keller: I would suggest that we go down the line and each of us give lists of things that we would like the ad hoc group to consider as a laundry list. That might allow the ad hoc group to have things that we would like. Chair Holman: Commissioner Butt. Commissioner Burr: The only thing that might concern me is if the creation of this ad hoc ~moup were to suddenly motivate an acceleration of applications before these recornlnendations come through, How would that work if we had after 90 days certain changes and there was an application put in but the application had not been approved? Mr. Williams: I think first ofa!l we could assess at that point what was in process and how complete applications were. The City has tyq?ically taken the position that something that has been submitted as an application is not subject to new regulations but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. That has been a standard practice but it doesn’t have to be the case. The other thing I would say to this is you just did include the restrictions on imper~4ous cover. So the likelihood of somebody being able to do that and take that impervious coverage now and put it into the house you just severely restricted that potential. Commissioner Burr: Now, the other question are there many parcels that are over 10 acres? Mr. Williams: There are like 30 parcels in the Open Space that are over 10 acres, Some of those are the Mid-Pen lands and City lands. I don’t know how many of the rest of them are developed already. We will look into that but I am not sure how many, there aren’t a lot but there are some. Page 39 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Commissioner Burr: You are not aware of any pending applications to develop any of those parcels over 10 acres7 Mr. Williams: No. The only one I mentioned that we had discussions ~vith is a tl~ee and a half acre. Chair Hohnan: Okay. Regarding Commissioner Keller’s question, does Staffbelieve that we have already raised the issues? I am not trying to preclude I am just trying to move the topic along. Does Staff believe that they have already heard what our issues are that would be addressed by this ad hoc committee? Mr. Williams’ I think so unless there is something that the Commission didn’t bring up tonight but we know the FAR, and maximum house size, and the relationship to impervious cover and to revisit that, and then the slope density issues have all been brought up. Chair Hohnan: I think Commissioner Keller has something he needs to add to that. Commissioner Keller: Yes, I would just encourage you to contact Vice-Chair Lippert as see if there are other things that he would like considered in this since he did weigh in last time but is not here to xveigh in today. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Butt and then Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Burr: Well there are just a few others that I just would like to make sure are part of it and maybe we have discussed it enough that you have captured them. One is this question of whether we should do anything further to address the issue of any other allowances for those who are in the 200 foot scenic corridor and we will need to look at this issue if people bought parcels with that understanding. Maybe there may or may not be any appropriate accommodations but I think that should be part of it. Also, one of the members of the public talked about very modest structures there and we have setup a number of significant hurdles to make sure that development in the Open Space District is compatible. It seems like if we have very modest developments then we ought to look at lowering the hurdles for those modest developments. We had one applicant about two or three years ago who was taking one of the parcels and all he was going to do was put a short wave radio shack in along with an ante~ma. So it seems like ~ve certainly don’t want to make those people go through all the protections that we have when there is a much larger development. I don’t know what accommodations are possible to look at that. Then one of the members of the public who wasn’t here tonight said that he thought the primary issue wasn’t so much the size it is really the aesthetic compatibility. We may have hit that adequately through all of the Comprehensive Plan issues but just to make sure that is covered adequately. I think that covers, yes, that covers everything I had. Page 40 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Mr. Williams: We also had the temporary structures. Chair Holman: Yes. Commissioner Tuma. Commissioner Tuma: Question for the City Attorney. Is there anything that precludes Commissioners from submitting additional questions to the ad hoc committee? Mr. Larkin: Commissioners can submit questions to Staff and they can be passed on. Chair Hohnan: Commissioner Keller, did you have something else? Commissioner Keller: Yes. Two other things were brought up. One is second dwellings and the size limitations thereto. The second issue that was brought up is xvhether the three and a half percent should be a fixed linear percentage or whether it should be non-linear, larger for smaller parcels and smaller for larger parcels. Chair Hohnan: Okay, Commissioners, it looks like we have finished this item. So we will take a seven-minute break before we undertake item number two. Thank you for everyone in the public for coming, appreciate very much your input, and perhaps some of you will be involved in the 90-day ad hoc committee. Thank you very much. Page 41