May 5, 2025 — Meeting Transcript

Good evening everyone and welcome to the Plain Command ARB for May 5th. If you have any electronic gadgets, please turn them off at this time. And Obie will begin with the roll call. Here.

Steve Lichtenfeld, Bob Denlow. Here.

Steve Lichtenfeld, Bob Denlo. Here.

Susan Buse.

Here.

Helen DeFede.

Here. Here.

Kami Waldman?

Here.

Jim Arsenault? Here. David Gipson? Here.

Jim Marcino? Here. David Gibson? Here.

Do we have minutes from the previous meeting on April 21st? Are there any changes? Seeing none, do we have a motion? I move that we approve the minutes.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. We'll move right on to new business. The first one is 190 Carondelet Plaza. Is the applicant here or online? I think it's Richard

Tepp.

Hello, this is Richard Tepp.

All right. The subject property is located on the south side of Crandall at Plaza and has a zoning designation of planned unit development. The site is currently developed with the mixed use commercial and office structure. The applicant is seeking to install a blade sign at the entry to the office tower. Blade signs are limited to one square foot. The blade sign would measure 20.4 square feet. The applicant is taking approval via sign modification. The plaza tower uses traditional materials, mainly brick with stone accents and detailed design that limits typical signage placement. For this site, this is managed with awnings, blade signs, and suspended signs. Staff are of the opinion that the materials and form of the structure both create architectural appeal and would require more creative sign placement than other nearby office towers. Although the blade sign would be larger than permitted, the total primary signage for the office tower facade would be less than the maximum permitted. Staff are of the opinion that the total square footage of signage would not be excessive, and staff recommend approval as submitted. Okay, thank you. Mr.

Tepp, do you hear us?

Yes, I do. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

Sorry, there's something wrong with the auto. All right, Mr. Tepp, can you, do you hear us now?

I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes. Sorry about that.

Are we hearing a reverberation?

Can you hear me? Hello?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay.

Testing 123.

I can hear you.

Test? Nope. Just a moment, sir. We're working on the audio on our end.

Sure. Thank you.

We may have fixed it somehow. It's not echoing now. And you can hear us okay?

Yes, I can hear you fine. Thank you.

All right. We can hear you. Let's go ahead and go then. All right. Here we go.

All right. So do I show my design? Yeah. Hello. Did

you hear the staff report?

Yes, I did.

Okay. Then anything you'd like to add to it? Please go ahead.

No, I think we submitted our documentation to the planning group, the zoning group. There it is. Now I can see it. And basically we wanted the building owners wanted to acknowledge a new tenant in the building. So that is what the blade sign is for. is for a major new tenant that signed a lease in the building that's currently under construction. The signage matches all the other signage that's already on the building. And as the report stated, the total signage allowed in the building were way below that throughout the whole, all the way around all four sides of the building.

Do you see any potential further additional signs if another major tenant were to move in?

Not at this time. I believe that this was the requirement that whoever had the largest lease would receive that blade sign.

Okay. Well, anything else, Mr. Tapp?

No, that was

it. I like the sign. At first, I thought it was too large. But when I went over there, the building is very large. All the detailing is large. I think it fits just fine. It replicates the style of the other signs on the building. And I really have no problem with it. But let's see what everyone else says.

Bob? It looks pretty tasteful to me. I understand why you're doing it at this time, and considering that the building is a few stories high, I think it works okay.

Susan?

Okay, am I first catching up here? The sign is tasteful. It is 20 times larger than our requirements, which takes me back, and And I think that the question that I had was asked immediately is that if one of the factors in proposing this is that it's under the signage allotted for the building as a whole, is there any guarantee that additional signage won't be put up over time? That would be the concern.

Dave Kuntz, Mr tip do you have any answer to that

whatever signage that would get put in if the owner decided to add more signage that would go back to the zoning board for approval. Dave Kuntz , Just like this one is.

Dave KuntZ ,

As far as I know from all the discussions we've had with the building owner they're not planning on anymore.

And if they are planning more, it would have to be within the maximum signage allowed. Correct. Understood.

Okay. And I'm just curious what the rest of the board considers given that it's such a large variance from the requirements.

Ellen?

I think the sign looks good. It's in scale with the building. A one foot by one foot sign would be lost. It would look puny and out of place. So I like it and I can handle the 20 times size.

Thank you. Jamie? Jamie?

i'm in agreement with helen i think that the the scale of the sign does work with the building um with all the architectural features especially kind of on those first i don't know three floors or so i don't think it seems out of place

jim i think it looks good and i don't have any problems with it

david i don't have

We have a recommendation to approve as submitted. Do we have a motion?

I move that we approve the staff recommendation to approve the applicant's plans.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, thank you, Mr. Tepp.

Thank you, everybody. Appreciate your time and review.

Steve, before we move on, or at least while we're moving on, can we get the projector? So it's by individual monitors not working. So if I can see the projects up there, that'd be great.

While we're waiting for that, I'd like to introduce Susan Buse. She is now our new director Aldermanic representative. She's been on the Board of Aldermen for almost six years, I believe. And I know she'll add a lot to our plan commission and ARB. So welcome tonight.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Okay, we'll move on to item number two, 63 Arundel Place. And do we have the person either here or online?

I am here. Can you hear me?

Yes. Could you give us your name?

Sure. This is Clarissa Hayward. I'm also sitting next to me is my husband, Chris. And our architect is also on the call in case there's a technical question that I'm not able to answer.

Okay. We will begin with the staff report and then we'll get back to you.

Okay. So the subject property is located on the north side of Arundel Place between University Lane and DeMond Avenue. The property has a zoning designation of R2 and is developed with a single family home. The applicant is seeking approval for the use of cedar shake siding on a new detached garage. Cedar shake is an uncommon siding material in Clayton. Brick is the most common nearby, with stucco and lap siding as common secondary materials. Although less common, it doesn't resemble prohibited materials such as vinyl or PVC. Since the new garage is in the rear with limited street visibility, staff believe that the material will have minimal visual impact and won't alter the area's character. And staff recommend approval as submitted. Okay, thank you.

Okay, Clarissa or Chris, do you have any other comments?

Yeah, I'll just speak very briefly. We had previously planned to do something that a number of our neighbors have done, which is to keep two of our brick walls and put two new walls in. We actually really love the brick. We think it's pretty. But when we went to do that, the contractor found that the brick walls were not structurally sound. It's a very old structure. So unfortunately, we have to bring the whole thing down. So one option would be for us to use and I might use the wrong term here, but essentially a brick like facade or there's another term for it. I might get it wrong. The reason we we want to ask to do the cedar shingles. Well, there's really two reasons. They're very beautiful. We have been very natural looking. We've found like particular online providers. They're actually a little bit more expensive than the brick, so it's not a cost cutting issue. And it's very natural. And even though most of the garages and structures in the area are brick, we actually think it's really compatible with and enhances the look of the area because this is also an older part of Clayton with a lot of trees and foliage. And so we think it's beautiful and very compatible with the look of the alley. And our architect, Tom, is on. I don't know if I used any wrong terminology, but that's sort of the gist of what we're thinking.

Okay. Any further comments?

Tom, is there anything you would add?

This is Tom McGraw, the architect from Link Architecture. No, that covers it very well.

Okay. Well, thank you. I will certainly agree that the cedar shake is a beautiful material. And it looks good, especially on the coastline in the northeast. Here, I'm a little concerned that it really doesn't fit in the context of the neighborhood. And Clarissa, you mentioned a brick fence. facade. I imagine you mean a brick veneer, which would be a wood frame with brick surrounding on all four sides. Is that correct?

I think that's what I mean. That's why I was worried that I was using the wrong word. Yes, that's what I meant.

Tom, am I describing it correctly or not? Yeah, no, you're correct.

That is correct.

Okay. Given the neighborhood, the age of the neighborhood, and the materials that we see there, I would think that brick would fit in much better than a full cedar shake facade. I'll leave it at that, and we'll move on to Bob.

Tom, are you aware of any other building in the area that has cedar shake?

Oh, boy. Clarissa's. Clarissa, did you know the area

best? Chris, do you know of one that has cedar shake in the area?

Some of them have artificial exteriors on them. Yeah, some of them

have artificial wood.

Our two next-door neighbors sequentially both have artificial wood on their garages, which I don't think looks anywhere near as good as cedar shake, but that's what they have. They're partial... brick, but there's also a significant part of their garages are synthetic wood. And I think this is actually a significant upgrade over that, but obviously it's in your hands.

If I have it right, if you had replaced it with another brick structure, it would have probably been more expensive than cedar shake and that the brick facade, if that's what you want to use, would have been cheaper. That's our

understanding. Yes, that's correct.

Okay. You know, just because I have a hard time envisioning it doesn't mean it isn't the right way to go. Reading the report from the staff, the fact that it's in the alley is a significant consideration for letting a go forward because I think it's not gonna be bad. It'll probably be very attractive in and of itself. I think the question simply is, does it fit in to the neighborhood? The staff seems to think it's okay to go forward. And maybe I'm inclined a little bit to go forward because of that. But I do have a bit of a concern.

May I add one more thing I forgot to mention, which is I did run it by our homeowners association and they approved it. So for what it's worth, they thought it was a good idea.

I'm glad to hear that. Okay. I have nothing further, Steve. Susan?

I think you just addressed my concern, which was The reliance on limited street visibility didn't impact the neighbor's visibility of the garage. And not really knowing what this will look like, that did concern me. But if the Homeowners Association has given their thumbs up to it, I don't have a problem with it.

Ellen? I have a concern about it. Not... fitting in with the existing house. The existing house is brick, and this is totally different. Usually with brick, if you have a secondary material, it'll be siding, elapsed siding. And the drawings do on sheet A2, there's two details that reference cement board siding. While I think the shake is beautiful, it doesn't relate to the existing house. Did you look at doing some brick and then some of the shake more as an accent, maybe in the gables?

So I think we have, just looking at the project in general, the reason we want to do this, we think it would improve the beauty of the neighborhood and would improve the beauty And I think that compared with a brick exterior on it, which would be certainly an option, I think that this actually is more beautiful. And I think the very back of our house, so if you look at the back of our house from the alley, there are significant parts of it that are not brick because before we moved in here, an addition had been done and there's actually just some siding back there. So if you're looking at, you can't see this garage from the street, from the front of the house. It's not visible. We have a fence and it's kind of positioned behind the house. If you go into the alley and look at our house next to this structure, the thing you're going to see is the siding on the back of the house and this structure next to each other. And I don't think they are disjointed or they don't give an abrupt discontinuity of the feel of it. And as I said, our two next-door neighbors both have fake wood on their garages interspersed with brick. In fact, the majority of those structures are not brick. The majority of them are the fake wood. And I think this is actually an improvement on that. And it's actually more similar to the houses next to us. They have fake wood. At least we'll have real wood. And I actually has more continuity with the other garages that sit right next to us.

You mentioned siding on the existing house. Right. Will the cedar shake be the same color as the siding?

No, the stuff on the house, which actually I think at some point in the future we're planning on redoing, is we don't like it very much. It was there when we moved in 10 or 15 years ago and it's white. and doesn't really jive, I don't think, with the rest of the entire area very well.

I'd also add, so here's one more thing I'd say. I think your question is a really important one about the continuity with the house. The other thing I would add is I'm an avid gardener and our yard has a very sort of natural look with a lot of trees and a lot of green foliage. And so I think the natural, and we have a cedar fence, and I think the natural quality of the cedar shake will blend nicely with the look of the yard.

And the fence.

And the fence, yeah.

Okay, no further questions.

Kami?

Yeah, I was concerned also with just, you know, your brick home and just how the, you know, the cedar shake related to it. And then hearing kind of, you know, now that I only saw the front of your home, so now knowing kind of the back side you know, the materials on the back of your house and then like hearing about the, you know, your fence and everything. I'm kind of seeing like why you guys chose this. I am curious as like what color you're thinking. For the cedar siding?

Yeah, we actually have samples. They're very natural. How would you describe

it? We're hoping to use red cedar and it's a darker brown color. It's dark. It's like a brown color. It is a darker brown color and we also think in terms of the flow of the space in general because we have a six foot cedar fence around the entire yard that it would actually blend very nicely with that. So that's another aspect of it.

So it'll be a natural cedar and as I think, you know, they kind of like weather in a really pretty way so that they kind of blend into the natural environment.

Okay. Which does make me feel better. So it's almost similar to like a brick tone a little bit.

Right. Right. Yeah.

Okay. And so what about your garage doors? What were those going to be?

So we have actually not yet selected them. But if you look at the drawings, I guess that... We haven't yet gotten to the point where we select them. So

we currently have one door, and it's kind of like a forest green because we're trying to keep the natural look.

Well, I think she might mean

those doors. You mean the

big doors that the cars go through? Right. Yeah. Oh,

we don't know yet.

That is currently – the one we currently have is white.

I don't want that.

It's ugly. We'll pick something that's not – Wait, I think

something. And the reason I'm asking is just, you know, again, kind of getting like that cohesive feel for like your house and the garage and just like the surrounding buildings. But I mean, I'm happy to hear that the HOA did approve it. I think that is important because I do think it will stand out. And I'm not in a bad way or a good way, but I do think make a different statement. But I think I'm OK with that.

Jim. Well, I think my first thought is I would disagree as far as the compatibility with the neighborhood. I think it might vibe well with the natural... blow of what's going on in the yard but as far as like what's seen on a larger neighborhood level it's definitely not um i know one thing as a board that we've kind of been harping on as far as over the last month or two is presentation of materials and i think especially in a situation like this where you're talking about a very non-compatible material with the neighborhood um having to rely on a verbal description of a cedar shake uh to try and conjure up a mental image along with now hearing that a color of a garage door hasn't been we weren't provided with any sort of color renderings or anything so i think we should proceed very carefully when something that is presented so far outside the norm in the neighborhood just going ahead and say, I think it's a very position that we're in because usually a non-compatible material or a larger percentage than what's normally seen in the neighborhood, it's usually a lower cost material or something. So to see something like Cedar Shake is obviously new and novel, but I think I personally would feel better if it was continued to a future meeting where we could see The full presentation is kind of what this structure will look like, what those colors are, what those materials are. So we can make a more informed decision, especially if we're choosing something, like I said, that's not seen in the neighborhood already.

Again, not to beat on the point, but we have, like our two adjacent neighbors have garages that have substantial exteriors, which are fake wood. And I don't know that, I mean, it's not like you go down our alley and everybody's got a brick garage. It's not like that.

Well, certainly. As part of this presentation, a lot of times what we see is a context drawing or context pictures of what's on either side of it. So the house to the left and the house to the right so we can make those. We don't have anything like that in our packet. So it's tough. You know, we once again have to just go off words in that case.

Okay, can I ask two follow up questions to that comment before you all vote? So one is, I do have a piece of the cedar here. Is there any way for me to show that? Or is that not part of the Zoom system?

No, we, as you just heard, we will be looking to see the material, the colors, the textures. Sorry, Steve, we

can promote her to a panelist and she should be able to turn her video on if you would like to see what it looks like.

If you'd like to show it to us, we'll certainly look at

it. And then the second question would be, if you don't approve this, is it possible for us to... Okay, let's see now what's going on. Oh, maybe I have to

you're a panelist now. So if you want to turn your video on my video.

Okay, sorry. Give me one sec. Yeah. Okay, and let me unblur my background. I think I have my black background blurred. Okay, hello everybody. Okay, so I do have, oh, it doesn't, you can't see it very, sorry about that. You can't really see it very well, so maybe this isn't helpful.

Well, Clarissa, we do see the cedar plank. I'm sorry about all the

noise. You can't see it very well, so it's not terribly helpful, I don't

think. Right. It is not helpful because we're not talking about a plank material. We are talking about a shake material.

Right, so they get layered. Yeah,

right. Okay.

My second question is, can we just get approval to do the brick veneer? Because we really don't want to wait another month. Like, we love this cedar shingle, but I think we'd rather just do the brick than wait another month.

If you would like to make that change, we would still like to see the color of the brick, the color of the doors that you're going to do it. So we would ask that you bring it all in for the next meeting.

Okay, so can we bring for the next meeting both the cedar and the brick so that we don't end up having to wait two months?

Is that possible? If you'd like to do that, we'll certainly look at it. Okay. Any other comments? No? We still have one panel member

for comments. David? I agree with that approach. I think it would be helpful to see both materials along with the garage doors.

Okay. Well, Clarissa and Chris and Tom, I think we will make a recommendation to extend it to a future meeting. Are you comfortable with

that? It's not ideal because we don't have a functioning garage right now. We've been in a holding pattern for a while.

We have, yeah, it's chaotic back there because the garage is non-functional. And we started to tear it down to do the original project and it was found to be structurally unsound.

Yeah, so we had

approval and then, yeah. So it's been, we're now going, it's going to be months without a functioning garage and it's unsightly back there and non-functional

Yeah. Well, we are recommending so that we can adequately and appropriately look at the materials that you would bring in at hopefully the next meeting, that the two-week delay would not add months to your schedule.

Oh, it's only two weeks. Okay. We thought it was once a month that you met.

Okay. I would assume we could make it. The

next meeting is May 19th. Yeah.

If May 19th works, we're open for it. Sure. Is that when we're at that wedding, though? Tom, do you agree? Meaning,

yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's fine.

So we have to have samples of brick?

We need to see samples of all the finished material so that we can see the color, how it relates to the other materials building your house, uh, as well as colors you're proposing for the doors and, um, the roof material also.

And in terms of the doors, you don't want a verbal description. You want like us to get like a paint sample or,

uh, a paint sample would be fine. Um, would recommend not orange uh but a more neutral color that you were talking about but that's why we would like to see it

the style of door as well

okay

are there any more comments from the commission no Any more comments from you, Clarissa or Chris or Tom?

No.

Okay. I think we're ready for a motion.

I move that we continue this hearing to a future date to the next schedule.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? Okay. Thank you. Mark the 19th on your calendar.

Okay.

Okay. Now we'll move on to item three, which is 8021 Venetian Drive. And I see the applicant is here. We'll start with the staff report.

The subject property is located on the north side of Venetian drive between South Brentwood and South Merrimack. The property is zoned R2 and is developed with a single family home and detached garage. Permits were issued in January 2024 for the construction of a pool and patio. An as-built survey found that the completed work did not match the approved permits and exceeded the maximum allowed 55% impervious coverage. The post-construction conditions measure 58.4% impervious. The applicant is seeking approval via Section 405.1890.B, which allows the Plan Commission to grant an additional 5% of impervious coverage when just cause is demonstrated. The impervious coverage regulation has historically served a dual purpose of reducing stormwater runoff and preserving green space. The proposal seeks to mitigate the increase in stormwater runoff by collecting water from an existing deck drain and piping it to a new dry well in the front yard. The proposal would result in less green space but would mitigate stormwater runoff to the full extent of the new impervious coverage, a greater extent than if the applicant were to remove coverage to meet the coverage maximum. Staff are of the opinion that the applicant has demonstrated just cause given that the dry well captures runoff from the area of increased coverage has more capacity than would be required for a 15-year, 20-minute storm event and would result in greater stormwater mitigation than if the applicant were to remove the impervious coverage. For additional clarification, staff are of the opinion that just cause, as demonstrated per this application, is unique to the circumstances of this property and that the use of a dry well is not sufficient to compensate for the loss of impervious coverage. Applications requesting approval via Section 405.1890.B are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and the recommendations made by staff to applicants and the Planning Commission are unique to the conditions of each application and property. Staff recommend approval with the following conditions. One, the applicant shall provide a percolation test report conducted by a qualified geotechnical engineer. The report must assess the performance of the proposed dry well based on the anticipated impact of a 15-year 20-minute storm event. Should the results indicate that the proposed dry well is insufficient to accommodate the stormwater runoff generated by this event, the applicant shall be required to upsize the dry well accordingly to ensure adequate performance and compliance with applicable stormwater management standards. Two, to ensure the future maintenance operation of the drywall, the applicant shall record a deed restriction noting the location and maintenance requirements of the drywall system and shall submit proof of the recording prior to issuance of a building permit.

Okay, thank you. Good evening. If you could introduce yourself and then add any comments.

Permitting engineering and as-built survey, because we didn't have one. We had one that we had worked off that was years old. So as the project got to what I'm going to call the backside, the end, the tail end of this, when we had to get a new as-built survey that we're not too familiar with, when it came back and it was 3.5% off, Obviously, we don't want to go out and tear out concrete. OK, homeowners really don't want to do that. We don't really want to do that if you do that. It's just going to be a very odd shaped pool deck here. It's hard to deal with. There's a small yard as it is. So we're trying to mitigate that with this drywall. OK, whether you guys are going to approve that or not, that's on you guys. We're just doing what we can to make it right without removing half the pool deck, of course. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm just a contractor. I'm here to kind of plead their case and explain what we're going to do. But yeah.

Okay, thank you. It's an interesting solution. It certainly can mitigate the water problems, potentially, but we've also been seeing much greater rainfall lately than in previous years. I am concerned about a couple things. One, even though the staff takes every application on its own merits, I see that when we potentially allow going over the 55% and add 3.5% onto it, that in a way it does set a precedent. And someone next meeting could come in and say, well, it's been done, even though we say we take each item on its own merit. I see that as a problem. Secondly, I worry about the maintenance and not only the maintenance from the owner's point of view, but from the city getting the required information on a periodic basis to make sure that that dry well is functioning correctly. So I do have concerns. I'll move it on to Bob's.

Three and a half percent doesn't sound like it's the end of the world. Second thing, I don't think this was your mic. Shows you how little I have to say. Three and a half doesn't seem an unusual overreach. Steve's points are well taken. I think in terms of This wasn't intended to end up this way. And I think from what I can gather, I think the parties were trying to deal in good faith. So the question then becomes to me is, is there a reasonable solution to worry to protect against water runoff, which is the chief concern? And the planning commission seems to have found their way of splitting the baby in such a way that they felt comfortable. The reporting and the staff recommendations seem to be, under the circumstances, pretty reasonable. The idea of tearing out the concrete and stuff You know, I hate to see that done too. Under the circumstances, I think I can approve the recommendation by the staff. Susan?

The concerns, probably two of the most common things that I hear from neighbors in Clayton, overbuilding lots and losing green space and water runoff that may meet MSD, may meet Clayton, but we're still feeling it more and more. In the ideal world, maybe in drawing plans, people would give the cushion for a 3% variance. That's not intentional. So I do struggle with this because those are the two of the most common things that I hear sitting on the Board of Aldermen, that we overbuild our lots and this water is becoming a huge problem. We better do something about it yesterday. So I'm hesitant on this one. One of the things with the dry well is sustainability-wise with the soils that we have here, You know, good luck. The same reason our soils don't absorb really well is the same reason that a drywall can sound really great and not do well, especially if it's not maintained. And I don't know how the deed restriction really gives ongoing maintenance. That may be that I just have never run into that, but it's better than nothing. But if the drywall is not maintained, then we do have this additional water. So, yeah, so I struggle proving this one.

Ellen?

Yeah, I add to the kind of the struggle and 3.5%, then the next is 3.75%. And, you know, it's a slippery slope. And you may not have done it intentionally, but there may be the one that does it intentionally and gets caught. They're a little bit too greedy with the overage. Believing that you didn't do it intentionally because ripping out concrete is... A mess, you may not have a joint line where you can cut it and even cutting it to have rebars in it or mesh or fabric. There's a lot of issues. Given that I would be inclined to say okay. This was a mistake. I'm sure you will get good surveys at the start from now on. I would be inclined to say okay.

Kami?

I'm worried about this setting a precedent as well. I know that we have... said no to many projects where they've gone 1% over or we've had them remove stepping stones just so that they get under that 55%. And the fact that you're maxed out already is a cause for concern. I'm also worried because, you know, to Sue's point, you know, this is a thing we hear a lot about is water and impervious coverage and the problems that it is causing. In fact, I think we're hopefully will be lowering the impervious coverage soon to maybe 50%. And I understand that it's a mistake. I can appreciate that. But again, we've had to have people like rip out pads because of this, because it is such an issue. So yeah, the concern, sorry.

Jim.

Well, first of all, I think

it's unfortunate for you that you're here on a day when I guess after this we're going to be doing discussions on possibly changing our stormwater management to a much more stringent policy than what we currently have. I'm curious if you can walk me through again. I assume this went through the site plan review process the first time. So Being that you were basically right on that 55% threshold the first time, so when this went through civil planning the first time with your civil engineer where they planned out the drainage for all this stuff, they didn't survey the land at that point. They just took a previous survey that an owner had.

Yeah. So the owner just moved in recently. So we use the survey that they had gotten when they purchased the house, you know? So when we actually calculated off of that survey, the exact footprint of what was there and what we had designed, everything's good. Okay. And then when we came back just to get that as-built survey to close all of this out, there's one part of concrete that exceeds that. Well, that one part of concrete isn't 3.5%. That strung a whole thing along, being honest with you, going through the whole thing to find 3.5%. So it was purely the survey that we worked off that went to the engineer that came back. That gave us what we needed to be at. But when we had that as-built done, what was installed and what that as-built stated compared to what went off from the beginning were different. You know, it's two spec, it's measured out, it's scaled out. But from the original survey to this survey, the house, the whole structure was just miscalculated. Not on our end, not on my engineer's end, but on the actual survey. So, I mean, we really couldn't do anything about this. You know, at this point, I'm just, I want to make you guys happy. If we have to take concrete out, we have to take it out. It is what it is. But we're trying to avoid making a mess. So that's kind of the goal.

Yeah, I think I echo the concerns of some of the, The other people on the panel here, as far as precedent only because I know you know we've had several situations of people come. it's a very common theme as far as how can we stretch this. impervious coverage further. And I would hate to kind of highlight a loophole that maybe you guys aren't trying to take advantage of, but someone else, developers and stuff like that said, oh, that's a way I can get this house 5% bigger and up my returns. So I have a lot of concerns about that. And I have concerns that being right at that 55%, that it wasn't maybe... I guess I will disagree with Bob here when he says 3.5% doesn't sound like a lot. 3.5% sounds like a lot to me, and to know to be right on that 55% line, to know that maybe beforehand every T wasn't crossed and I dotted, it gives me pause to grant a workaround afterwards.

David? What does that 0.5% look like if you actually look at that? Hundreds of square feet. Okay, I wasn't sure if it was hundreds or if it was 50 square feet or what that looks

like. No,

260. 260? Yeah. So you haven't looked at plans to see how you would even carve that

up? Unfortunately, they're going to lose their pool deck. It's just going to be house, grass, pool. It is what it is. We've tried going every route we can to avoid doing this. By no means are we trying to stretch whatever restrictions is what it is, we're just trying to get past it.

That was the only question.

Do we have any comments from the audience? Yes, we do. Mr. Gary Feder, if you would come up.

Do we have any comments from the audience? Yes, we do. Mr. Fader, if you would come up.

I'm Gary Feder. I reside at 623 South Central in Davis Place. My only comment is I am, I guess, currently the only alderman from Ward 3 and live in Davis Place, and I'm not here to speak either for or against the application. I would simply note that I was contacted by the homeowner when they realized they had a problem, I guess in part because I'm from the ward and also because I live in Davis Place. and was asked for a suggestion. And my suggestion was to simply go talk to the planning staff, see if there was some other remedy that essentially would address the stormwater issue It was made clear that they were concerned. They were going to have to tear up the concrete. I would simply say, I guess, as to Mr. Denlo's point, I think they have attempted in good faith to try to address a situation that was unfortunate. That doesn't make it dispositive of what you do. But I particularly since the homeowner is not part of this discussion this evening, I do want to let you know that I, I did talk to the homeowner a couple of times. I think they met with Ryan and, I encouraged, I think, the applicant to attend the meeting as well, which I think they did. And this is what they came up with. So again, I'm not speaking either for or against, but I certainly would indicate that I think they've made a genuine effort to try to address what is a difficult situation. And I'd simply want to share that with the commission. Thanks.

I'm Gary Fader. I reside at 623 South Central in Davis Place. My only comment is I am, I guess, currently the only alderman from Ward 3 and live in Davis Place, and I'm not here to speak either for or against the application. I would simply note that I was contacted by the homeowner when they realized they had a problem, I guess in part because I'm from the ward and also because I live in Davis Place. and was asked for a suggestion. And my suggestion was to simply go talk to the planning staff, see if there was some other remedy that essentially would address the stormwater issue It was made clear that they were concerned. They were going to have to tear up the concrete. I would simply say, I guess, as to Mr. Denlo's point, I think they have attempted in good faith to try to address a situation that was unfortunate. That doesn't make it dispositive of what you do. But I particularly since the homeowner is not part of this discussion this evening, I do want to let you know that I, I did talk to the homeowner a couple of times. I think they met with Ryan and, I encouraged, I think, the applicant to attend the meeting as well, which I think they did. And this is what they came up with. So again, I'm not speaking either for or against, but I certainly would indicate that I think they've made a genuine effort to try to address what is a difficult situation. And I'd simply want to share that with the commission. Thanks.

Thank you. Were there any... Oh, we have another one.

Hi, my name is Kathleen Gunded. I didn't come here related to this project, but my question is, this project was done with the pool at 50% impervious coverage?

The pool water area?

Yeah.

Yes, the water area counts at 50%.

Okay, and we're looking now potentially at pool coverage being not considered impervious at all. I mean, it sounds like this is just, I just feel sorry for the neighbors. That's all I have to say. Thank you.

We have for the record,

she was referencing a recommendation that will be discussed on our stormwater agenda to change how impervious calculations are done in the future, so that was

the. The reference. Do we have any other hands up. No okay um Thank you Kathleen for your comments. As Ana said, we will be discussing that. But of course, we have to go with what the rules and guidelines are today. Any further comments? No? Surprised. Okay. Well, we do have two staff recommendations. I won't read them again, but one is about the percolation test report and the other is about ensuring the future maintenance and operation of the dry well. And do we have a motion including those and any other

item? I move that we approve the staff recommendation to approve the plans together with the two conditions pertaining to the percolation and the future maintenance, which I think have already been made available to the owners and that they are aware of them as is the construction person who is before us today.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? No. Obie, did you get that? Or do you want to run through it?

I'll do a roll call. Okay. Steve Lichtenfeld? Aye. Bob Denlow? Aye. Susan Buse?

I'll do a roll call. Okay. Steve Lichtenfeld? Aye. Bob Denlo? Aye. Susan Buse?

No.

Helen DiFate?

Helen DeFate?

Aye.

Kami Waldman?

No.

Jim Arsenault? No. David Gipson? Aye. Passes.

Jim Arsenault? No. David Gibson? Aye. Passes.

Leave it passed. Okay. Okay. Mr. McKay, thank you for coming tonight. And how soon will that be remedied? Really? We've

been waiting for this. Yeah,

we're going to get it done.

We like that answer. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, guys.

Good luck to you. Okay. Now we'll move on to the discussion session. And Ana, I believe you're leading it out. We'll start with the downtown short-term rentals.

All right, so today we're going to go over some potential regulations for your consideration for downtown short-term rentals. This is going to be a recap for Alderman Buse, who's gone through two of the discussion sessions, but to catch this board up, we were approached by the property owner of 2 North Merrimack, which is the building shown here at the corner of of Forsyth and Merrimack across from Forsyth Point. This building has previously held some various office tenants, but the second floor of the building is currently vacant and they're struggling to find a new office occupant. The property doesn't have any off-street parking. It's smaller. So they approached us with the idea of converting the second floor from office to residential for the purpose of using a short-term rental such as Airbnb to manage that property. looking through the comprehensive plan process one of the items that we were kind of tasked with looking at in the city is how to be a little bit more creative about supporting reuse of some of our smaller vacant office buildings and our older office buildings to prevent the only option in the future being to amass multiple properties tear down the buildings and build a larger one in its place So after discussions with this property owner, we kind of evaluated the larger city and downtown scape and have held two discussion sessions with the Board of Aldermen to consider short term rentals. It's you know, there's a lot of aspects that come along with short term rentals, we've all heard of stories that various cities have had to deal with the impacts to surrounding neighborhoods and monitoring them and other things that have come along. But there's also a lot of ways that short-term rentals have been a boost to other elements of local economies. So it's kind of an idea that we want to balance if we want to move forward. So I'm going to take you through a couple of items that would be related to if we were to pursue short-term rental regulations. future the biggest one for the first part of it is how are we prohibiting them now and that's through an ordinance that was adopted in 2017 which identifies short-term rentals with a definition and says that they are prohibited so there it's pretty straightforward we prohibit short-term rentables there are also a few existing regulations within our code that would apply to the residential rental so we have occupancy permit requirements for all of our residential properties that are tied to a tenant Each occupancy permit is issued with a tenant's name, and then that permit expires when either the occupant, that tenant vacates the property or after five years, and then there's a reinspection process. Even if we were to identify short-term rental the same way that we do other residential properties and allow the less than 30 days for a time period, we would still have an incredible process in terms of inspecting and issuing licenses and occupancy permits for that. So how do people look at short-term rental and regulate those? There are most regulations fall essentially into seven categories that I'll walk us through kind of some of the best practices and how they could be applied to the city of Clayton. The first one is the definition. So this really allows us to determine the specifics of the use so that we can be intentional with our regulations. Looking at a lot of the best practices, many communities identify the types of rental in three different ways. So we have hosted, and this is where the primary resident maintains their occupancy. So it could be either that they live in a house and they're renting out a guest house on their same property for a short term, a period of less than three 30 days or they're renting a bedroom while they occupy the other bedroom. The unhosted is where that dwelling unit is the actual primary residence for a person. In our case, it'd be issued an occupancy permit, but they vacate that site and then sublease it essentially to somebody else for that short-term period. Then there's the dedicated category and this is where there are no primary residents of the dwelling unit. Its sole purpose is to be rented for short-term leases. So our recommendation, we have a definition of short-term rental already that identifies less than 30 days as the rental time frame. We'd recommend adding that minimum of 24 hours so that guests would be renting for at least one day and then limiting it to only the dedicated short-term rental types. And the reason for doing that is because, again, it allows us to be much more intentional with the licensing inspection, other requirements that we might want to apply to that type of a use. So when we look at the location, there are a lot of ways, just like other uses that we've had discussions about previously, such as our entertainment uses. So there's a lot of ways to address the location requirements within the zoning code. The best practices are to identify where these would be allowed or where they would be prohibited, typically by zoning districts. And then you can also add buffer requirements between the location of the uses or limit the overall density of those or limit how many licenses you might issue. So on the map here, you can see highlighted the downtown area. The parcels themselves, the shades of blue, identify the year that building was constructed. So the darker the shade of blue, the more recently the building on that property was constructed. And then the orange dots are the locations of office buildings that have some vacancies. So there are some vacancies within our darkest parcels that there's always going to be some level of vacancy and turnover, but I didn't identify those because the target here, if we look into implementing the comprehensive plan is to again, identify where there are buildings that might be kind of less desirable for office tenants to reoccupy them. And so we can start to narrow down what buildings might be applicable to these codes. So our recommendation from a staff perspective would be to focus it into the high density commercial district and specifically downtown. And then again, focus in with the properties that would qualify to limit them to properties with a maximum of four per property. Also cutting out all of our property, for property of the actual short-term rental or just any rental in general. So this would cut out any of our existing residential buildings. So for an example, Clayton on the Park has over four residential units in the building right now. So that property would not be eligible for short-term rentals. So we're lowering that density of what buildings would be eligible to just buildings that have four units or less. And then limiting the overall number of licenses that we would issue to this use to a total of four. So the reason that we're really restricting it, one is to really focus on the eligible properties that could easily be converted to allow this residential use. And then two, to also make sure that we have potential density that it's easily managed by the city in terms of identifying where we need to have inspections, handling that load, any impacts it might have on our public safety or other items that are associated with monitoring these uses in other areas. Permits and registration. So this is how we would review the applications, manage the compliance and the tracking, et cetera. Many people use a form of a conditional use permit as the way that you would review the business plan, so to speak, the zoning, same way we look at restaurants with conditional use permits. And then there would be some sort of license or permit specifically for the occupancy of a unit that would allow for annual inspections and compliance checks. So we would recommend using our conditional use permit process is that first step, and then establishing a short-term occupancy permit that would have specific occupancy requirements and inspection requirements for this type of a use separate from how we do our traditional occupancy for our long-term tenants. And then there's an example from New Orleans of the type of information that they actually require for short-term rentals to have posted on site. We don't do this as much anymore where we actually, well at all in our department where we issue a paper copy of a permit. But one thing that we do issue for our traditional occupancy permits is an electronic one. Usually it's a property manager or a property owner that is the applicant of the occupancy permits. And then part of what they're required to do is to provide a copy of that to their tenant. Through this process, a lot of the best practices are to actually require that that is posted in the site. So another way of conveying information to whoever might be the short-term tenant of the property with the rules. For occupancy, this is where we look at the density and the impacts that might be associated with how many people would be visiting. So first, we need to understand our occupancy code. So for Clayton, under our property management code, there's a minimum of 70 square feet required for a bedroom. And then if there are going to be more than one multiple occupants of that unit itself, then there needs to be 50 square feet per occupant. And there are many codes that we found that either address the maximum occupancy of a short-term rental by the number of bedrooms or by a total limit on occupancy. And what we're recommending is that we would follow code or have a maximum cap of 8%. per unit total, whichever one is less. So we could do the calculation per our code and then we could decide if that would exceed or be less than eight. The reason to do this is that many owners of short-term rentals are trying to maximize the number of occupants that they can list that unit for that tends to directly relate to their profits. So we want to make sure that one, we're following the safety reasons that we have occupancy code requirements. And then two, that again, we're also managing the potential density of the users. For parking, a lot of the parking, the really more intensive and restrictive parking regulations for short-term rentals are in areas where they allow these within their residential zoning districts. A lot of the impacts related to parking are from short-term rental visitors who do not abide by other parking restrictions or who are located in residential areas that already have kind of a tapped out street parking system. So one of the benefits of having these uses potentially just within downtown is that we don't have those same parking issues because of how downtown parking is already managed. We would recommend just a general starting point of one per dwelling unit, but then the ability to address that parking specifically for the location through the conditional use permit process. So in those cases, the Board of Aldermen could evaluate maybe reducing the parking or exceeding it depending on the circumstances and what is around. For operations and reviews, we would recommend additional regulations within a short-term rental section of the code. So right now, the short-term rental session just says it's prohibited. We would expand that. The real reason that we saw a lot of additional operational requirements in other codes is to address this information sharing. A lot of times, the knowledge of what the rules, the do's and the don'ts are for the actual guest, the city isn't involved in that transaction the same way of the guests entering the dwelling unit and then leaving. So by these requirements, we would have notice requirements, information sharing, posting requirements, etc., That would make sure that important information is conveyed into that, to that short-term tenant. So this covers everything from having them need liability insurance, POC is posting evacuation plans or things that you would see in a hotel requirement that we might not necessarily require through our occupancy codes. Having a contact person that's available 24 hours to address issues that are either found by their tenant or, or by the city in terms of compliance and making sure that garbage recycling information is provided. prohibiting specific events that tend to be the cause of some of the noise complaints or other issues that communities have experienced, making sure that there's adjacent properties aware of this use, maintaining registration information and then also making sure that the booking service providers such as Vrbo or Airbnb are aware of regulations as well. For penalties, this is an area that we would want to make sure that we have outlined within our code to know what the fine escalations might be for different offenses. But then also to establish a process where the city manager could either withdraw the approval or suspend it and call for a hearing for the Board of Aldermen for that to be revoked. So we do have a process under a conditional use permit where the Board of Alderman could revoke that CUP. or we might want to kind of extend those powers to make sure that if there's certain level of violations occurring, we could suspend the license while that hearing takes place. So the next step's really to get some feedback from all of you on all this. I realize I went through a lot for the first time for you to hear it, so feel free to ask any more questions. But if we wanted to pursue, then we would have a text amendment that actually took all of those recommendations and outlined them within a code and ordinance that you would then consider at your upcoming meeting.

All

right. Thank you, Ana, for that. There's a lot of information there, but I think basically having it in the HDC downtown district makes a lot of sense for the diversity and the activity that can be brought. One question, having looked at that building, there are very few windows on the second floor. Do we require a window in a bedroom?

I don't know the specifics of that, but all of our code requirements for the residential use, they would have to meet those. And because there would be a change of use from office to residential, anything that comes along with that would be triggered. I know this building in particular already has an elevator. So that's another element that, you know, depending on how many units or other items they would have to be addressed, but that would all be under our building code.

So everything under the best practices that we saw on a previous sheet, would have to follow all of our code requirements for residential, even though this is in the HDC district.

Right. Based on that use. So that's a good point. The building code requirements are based on the use type as the building code sees it. So it's a little bit different. Everything that we've just discussed, our best practices related to zoning parameters and licensing parameters, but we are not proposing to change anything in terms of our adopted building codes except for adding the short-term occupancy, which instead of having an inspection for every tenant name, we would issue them an annual permit that would be re-inspected on an annual basis. But that would be the only local amendment to our adopted building codes.

On the staff report, under background in the third paragraph, It says the dwelling units created, however, would only be permitted to be leased for terms of more than 30 days.

Right, so that might be, I haven't read it, but that would be for our existing regulations. So right now, let me make sure. Right, so right now under our zoning code, if we eliminated the prohibition of short-term rentals that's currently in our Chapter 600, I believe, we could allow a residential use, but it would be subject to the occupancy permit regulations as we have them right now, and it would be subject more than 30 days to be eligible.

So then we're creating a one-day to 30-day limit Right. As opposed to the over 30 day. Right. Okay. Does that get closer to the hotel regulation?

So that, yeah, that's a different question. use the way that we are approaching that here. So, that's why looking at the way that we issue occupancy permits, this would not be considered a hotel. Part of the provisions that we do have for the definition of a hotel, it talks about having people on site. So, there isn't a lobby or any sort of management that would be occurring here. This would be a completely... Well, for this specific building based on the conversations with that property owner their idea was to create for essentially apartments, so they would lease those out on an individual basis.

um. the orange dots on the map that we're looking at, many of those buildings could potentially hold many more than four units. If someone were to come in and request that, could they be allowed up to four units and the rest of the building could not have any more residential units?

The way the recommendations are outlined right now, yes. So we would recommend limiting it to just four properties overall. So there would only be essentially if the orange dots... represented where a short-term rental unit was, there would only be allowed to be four orange dots. But then each orange dot could represent up to four individual dwelling units that were rented on a short-term basis. So right now the orange dots identify some of the buildings that have different levels of vacancy. This doesn't represent whether or not those buildings could be realistically converted to a residential use because, as you're aware, that will trigger a lot of code upgrades just going from an older office occupancy to a residential occupancy. So that orange would quickly be reduced for a matter of reasons, but those are the buildings that we've, on the quick scope, identified as potential properties. And then to answer the other part, if it was a larger office building that was maybe 10 stories or so, they could take one floor of that and create four short-term residential dwelling units. On that one floor, the rest of the building, however, could not be residential because there's only allowed to be a maximum of four residential units. So they would have to have other mix of uses, office, retail, etc.,

Well, we do certainly have several buildings that are probably in the three-floor range, maybe plus or minus three, that could house these. But they would only have to be limited to four units. Let's see.

Bob? If I understand, Anna, we're creating an Airbnb in downtown Clayton. Is that correct?

So we won't specify that it has to be Airbnb, but yes.

That's how I'm looking at it. That's really what we're doing. The second thing is we're basically talking about the older three-story buildings in Clayton downtown.

Right. We don't have recommended right now any story limit. We could update that to say that the building square footage is capped to be eligible. But right now, the goal is to provide some other options for the owners of our older office buildings to continue investing in them and continue making them occupied as opposed to them sitting vacant and deteriorating.

So we would solve the problem of the owners who can't rent out for commercial purposes. And we know the market has trended that way for some time, and it's not going to change. Especially with AI now coming, it's going to continue to shrink the market. I personally think this is a great idea, and I'll tell you why. I have a niece that's getting married in two weeks. She wanted a walkable wedding. She set up shop all over Clayton. And there's always, you know how there's always families or young people that want to B&B because they can't afford the hotels? And if these are like two or three or more bedrooms, uh, these young people or families of more modest means can stay in the heart of Clayton and put on their walking shoes. And they could just walk from one venue to the next. Whereas right now they would have to go farther out. We would bring more foot traffic on the sidewalks. We would be more accommodating and we would be meeting the goal of downtown Clayton, which is one stop parking. You could walk. play, work, eat, do everything you want. And it could accommodate everyone. So I don't have a problem with that idea. I think it reaches out to maybe people who would otherwise have a greater difficulty of being in Clayton downtown.

Susan?

And I'll add to that, I think that it fits. I appreciate all the work you've done on this because a lot of people have a fear of Airbnbs because we've heard the horror stories, but it's developed and there's a lot of best practices out there now. And I think you've caught a lot of them for us. And it does take that vacant building, which isn't a problem, not only for the property owner, but for downtown Clayton and gets more people on the street, the vibrancy that we talk about in all our planning. The other issue that it can help solve is parking. You're suggesting that we require one parking spot, but even that may be hard to come by with some of these buildings, and they may be located closer to transit, and if it's a venue in Clayton, it certainly encourages that. So proceeding along this line I think is exactly what a lot of people look for when they're traveling is the Airbnb option for many reasons. So I think it's very positive for us to pursue this.

Ellen?

Ditto everything that was said. I think you've done an excellent job of pulling all of this together and covered everything Everything that I would think of to say, well, you know, maybe it's not a good idea here or this might be a problem. I think you've got it. A solution and, you know, with anything time will tell, but I think you've done an excellent job.

Amy.

Just a couple quick questions. It's very interesting, the Airbnb idea. I'm just curious, I'm not quite understanding like how, you know, like the orange dots were selected and like, you know, why couldn't like someone that, you know, one of these newer apartment buildings rent, you know, or Airbnb one of their units out? Can you explain that?

Yes, so one of the some of the discussions that we have with the Board of Alderman was to try and intentionally separate those. And part of the issues that we saw more common issues in other communities when looking through their regulations and reaching out to them as to why they've made updates in recent years. Where you start to find those conflicts is when you blend the short-term visitor with the long-term resident in a short proximity to each other. And so that's where you start to see those issues. So within our larger apartment residential buildings, the uses sound compatible for a lot of reasons, but if you have that one person there for just a weekend... They don't really mind making their neighbors upset with how they act during that time period. So we wanted to separate them. We also wanted to have a smaller cap on the size of a building, so limiting it to four units because we don't want to completely infringe on or directly compete with our hotels that offer a different amenity service. So that's where we started. So

in one building, there can only be four units total, no matter how... big the building is, but the unit sizes can be.

However big, however big, but they could only have a maximum of eight occupants. So that's where our code might allow per code that one dwelling unit could maybe support 15 people. Through the short term, we would limit it to only eight to, again, just keep a cap on that density

level. For example, the orange dots that you've shown here, are those really the only buildings in downtown that are capable?

No, what we tried to do was to start to get an idea of where the buildings that have had some longer-term vacancies. Now, some of these orange dots represent a vacancy of a couple hundred square feet, and some of the orange dots represent vacancies of entire floors or entire buildings. So we just pulled some high-level data to try and see how many properties we might – be looking at from the first surface of just making eligible buildings, and then we'll pare it down with the four. But the goal here in looking at the use as it was proposed to us from the one property owner and then looking at our comprehensive plan, the idea is really to provide, I guess, almost an advantage or something That would be applicable to our older office buildings that might not be eligible for our newer ones. Now, we don't have a blatant hard requirement of your building must be at least 15 years old. We could add something like that if that was important to reinforce. But the idea is to try and provide some option to our smaller, older office building owners for continued occupancy.

And so like the building owners would come here for CUP to get... The Airbnb qualifications.

Correct. So, yeah, first they would have to get a CUP through the Planning Commission and then approved by the Board of Aldermen. That would be issued to one of the things in the draft that we were working on is that we would require that the property owner is involved because it wouldn't be a sublease, essentially. Right. Through that process, but they could have some sort of property management company that was running the Airbnb. And then they would have, if they got approval of that conditional use permit, then they would have to go through the process of getting a building permits to bring that up to code for residential use. And then they which is where we would look for some of those operational restrictions. So we would inspect to make sure they have everything posted that we were required, that they provided us with all the information, contact information, liability insurance, et cetera, that we need on an annual basis. and then just our general code occupancy inspections would occur, and then that permit would only be valid for a year. So instead of being tied to a specific occupant, it would be tied to that dwelling unit and then re-inspected on an annual basis. Oh, okay.

And the CUP, is that per year? No, the

CUP would then run for the life that that business was operating. Okay.

I think that's my question. Okay.

Thank you, first of all, for the thorough presentation. I also appreciate how I feel like this is very narrowly tailored that avoids a lot of problems. Overall, I don't see any major issues. A couple questions. One of the things that was mentioned is one off street spot for every unit, but I know specifically this building that brought this before us specifically mentioned that they have no off street parking. So I don't know how they would handle that requirement. I also want to check just in zoning and how Clayton sees it, I assume that office is separated from like street level commercial, correct?

Yeah, so in some areas we have separated those out in our use tables. We have retail, office, we have personal care, and then we have even some more specific office types. And in certain overlay districts, we have that requirement for the first floor to have staff. retail or personal care service and cannot be office. In other areas, we allow office on the first floor. Right now, the high-density commercial for a residential use is required to be a mixed use, so it would have to have some other commercial component, but we don't go so far as to say the commercial has to be retail or office. Okay,

I just, I look at this and if our goal is more vibrancy. If we take, say, I'm just going to throw an example of the centene garages that obviously have been empty since some of the half of it has been empty since is built and they decide okay we're going to make this into an Airbnb. Having that street level, if occupied by Airbnb would certainly make the city less vibrant than if that was commercial. That would just be a concern of mine I don't think that those situation I mean, I would think most building owners would be able to make more money commercially than an Airbnb in those situations. Yes, I maybe don't have quite the same sympathy for some of the building owners in Clayton with the rents that they're asking, saying that they can't fill their buildings with, I guess, the product that they're offering. But I agree with the spirit of all this and what it's trying to achieve. And as long as it wasn't taking up a street level commercial space with all the other restrictions that are in place, I think I'd be good with everything. Sure.

David?

I

don't have any

questions.

I think Jim raised the question of parking. I think these older buildings really struggle with parking. Would it not be more fair if we just made the requirement that they shall provide one off-street parking or make arrangements with another parking garage? where they would make available to the occupants a parking space. That way it's a win-win. I'm afraid if we make the requirement to be an on-site parking, we're putting handcuffs behind them and they may not be able to do it. That's one of my concerns. So give the owners an alternative. Make an arrangement or provide it on site. That's number one. Number two, I just want to say this. Having an Airbnb is great, but if you start providing too many, the hotels will be sitting in all the chairs in the front here saying, wait, we've invested millions and millions of dollars here. And they're under easier regulations. And we don't want to be significantly undercut. Restricting it maybe to four units of building, okay. The flip side is this. If I'm a developer, there's a good chance economically I'm going to want to make the whole building one or the other, commercial or residential, to get the economy a scale. If it's just a three-story building or a two-story building, I want to rip out all the plumbing, all the electrical, you know, and make it accommodating to put in washer and dryers and all that kind of thing. That's all I want to say, but I could live with a four per building to find a balance between preserving the hotel industry here in Clayton and providing variety to consumers.

PB, John Gerstle:" Any other comments. PB, John Gerстle:" Susan I think the staff has done a great job. PB, John gerstle:" On the. PB, Johngerstle:" parking. I wonder if these units would be used by some of our large businesses in the city, where if they were to bring someone in for say a two or three week period, they might fly in and use Uber or other car services and not have a car to park. there might be something to watch. I'm not saying we should get rid of the parking, but in the long run, if we see more of them, we may not have to have such a stringent parking requirement.

Sure. I think that's one of the pieces we went back and forth on that recommendation. So in our parking requirements right now, you are allowed to meet them by providing an off-site parking space that's within 500 feet walking distance. So for this property, there's garages within walking distance they could try and work with to get. They said they have been unsuccessful in that endeavor to provide that for an office tenant. So I'm not sure that they would necessarily be more successful in doing that for a residential tenant. I think it is an important piece for us to consider parking overall, and our downtown is something that's on the list that we will need to address. Most of the other codes we looked through had parking requirements tied to the most similar use. So in most cases, it was the same parking requirement that they would have for multifamily residential or such. But a lot of Areas that have seen an explosion of this type of unit have been in the real dense areas of cities, New Jeffery Yorg City or places where the parking enforcement is a little bit different. We couldn't really get a handle on whether or not they actually see if Airbnb has parking or not, or in areas that have a lot of parking accessible within their downtown, but didn't have a lot of tourism traffic. So we looked at like Bentonville and Fayetteville there and be because those are communities that have seen a huge growth in the use of those um so parking is interesting it's one of those things that say it seemed like it was a little bit easier to recommend a requirement in right now and allow on a case-by-case basis for them to kind of show why a modified parking for that location made sense especially given capping it for it's We won't have somebody knocking on the door of the planning commission every week asking for a parking analysis. So we can look at it moving forward. And through this UB process, we'll be able to omit it without doing a whole code, right?

Sure. I think that's one of the pieces we went back and forth on that recommendation. So in our parking requirements right now, you are allowed to meet them by providing an off-site parking space that's within 500 feet walking distance. So for this property, there's garages within walking distance they could try and work with to get. They said they have been unsuccessful in that endeavor to provide that for an office tenant. So I'm not sure that they would necessarily be more successful in doing that for a residential tenant. I think it is an important piece for us to consider parking overall, and our downtown is something that's on the list that we will need to address. Most of the other codes we looked through had parking requirements tied to the most similar use. So in most cases, it was the same parking requirement that they would have for multifamily residential or such. But a lot of Areas that have seen an explosion of this type of unit have been in the real dense areas of cities, New York City or places where the parking enforcement is a little bit different. We couldn't really get a handle on whether or not they actually see if Airbnb has parking or not, or in areas that have a lot of parking accessible within their downtown, but didn't have a lot of tourism traffic. So we looked at like Bentonville and Fayetteville there and be because those are communities that have seen a huge growth in the use of those um so parking is interesting it's one of those things that say it seemed like it was a little bit easier to recommend a requirement in right now and allow on a case-by-case basis for them to kind of show why a modified parking for that location made sense especially given capping it for it's We won't have somebody knocking on the door of the planning commission every week asking for a parking analysis. So we can look at it moving forward. And through this UB process, we'll be able to omit it without doing a whole code, right?

The other thing you mentioned, Bentonville, some other cities allow B&Bs, airports. In residential areas. And I would hope this would not be a precedent for someone coming forth asking for residential.

Right. That's why we're only recommending allowing it within a very small area of the community, because that is something that other communities still, even with the most strict regulations, are still finding a struggle to balance the enforcement of those two things. parts of residential living together. So we are not recommending any changes to allow a short-term rental within any of our residential districts or any commercial districts other than within the high-density commercial downtown.

I just have another quick question. That's okay. So what are some benefits of having Airbnbs in this area? Yeah.

Yep, it's a good question. I think one of the biggest benefits potentially is, as Bob mentioned, that diversity of rental options. So right now we have the Residence Inn, which has slightly larger hotel units that are our business. better suited for people who are going to stay for longer than a weekend, but less than 30 days. However, those are still geared more towards higher, you know, people with a little bit more money to spend. So this would provide a few bedrooms that we hear a lot about wanting those types of units. I hear a lot about people who come to St. Louis and to work or i i know of a good enough people who've come in for medical procedures to go to our hospitals and they don't want to stay in a hotel while they're here for those procedures we don't have this option for them in clayton even though it would be really convenient for them so and other comforts of Clayton would be nice. So I think that's the biggest benefit. And then to try and build off of that, as I said, to provide kind of an alternative for some of the buildings that we want to see saved or reinvested in in a new way. I'm not going to say that this is going to be the perfect solve and that all of the older buildings we can see are going to run to us for air room views. I'm not sure that that will happen, but hopefully a couple of them will. Yeah.

Any other comments? Any hands up? Well, I think it's a great forward-looking change that hopefully will go ahead. What is the process? What will we see next?

Sure. So I have almost completed the actual text amendment language that you guys are used to that will have a section in all the codes. So we'll send that over to Stephanie and Kevin for review. And then that will be included for you guys to consider under the text amendment procedures moving forward. We did pre-advertise for a public hearing to begin. So the next meeting, you'll open a public hearing for consideration to see what you want. But that's pretty much the next step is just that text amendment process.

Well, I thank you for the work. It certainly sounds well thought through. I think it could help some of the issues we've been dealing with in downtown and hopefully we'll see it go forward.

Yeah, great.

And shall we move on to the next item?

Sure.

Okay, so the next item is another implementation step of our comprehensive plan process. So for lot coverage, as you might remember, we had a couple of discussions here and we've also recently had a discussion session with the Board of Aldermen where our consultant from Intuition Logic, Tim, came to just talk about stormwater, generally speaking, and some of the ways that you would approach it. Within the comprehensive plan, we have a specific key result develop a coverage reduction program that identifies innovative ways to reduce the amount of impervious coverage and promotes green infrastructure. And tied to that are a number of other items as multiple you've mentioned for earlier in this meeting, stormwater was probably one of the most popular discussion items that we had during our comprehensive plan process. And I think it's because it's tied to a lot of elements of what we've seen. There's a lot of changes in storm patterns There's changes in development patterns and the way people are constructing on their lots. And then there's what we see in the end result of water patterns changing. And some of that is potentially directly tied to how somebody developed their property, and some of it's just natural. Water's always going to flow downhill. We're never going to stop that within the process. But at the same time, we're seeing a large transition in the increase of sustainability measures and the technology that's used to make green infrastructure. And it's become a lot more accessible to people on a personal residential level. So balancing all of these items, we know that we need to do something to reduce stormwater and the nuisance impacts that it's having on properties. But we also know that green infrastructure and sustainability is another really important important piece to our residents. So we're going to try and balance those two in stormwater moving forward. So I'm just going to walk you through a couple of things we've talked about before, and then we'll do a summary of the memo that was provided by our consultants. So right now we have one lot coverage provision within all of our residential districts that caps the percentage of impervious coverage. We have looked through the history of how those provisions were developed and how they were changed through different overlays and urban design districts for different neighborhoods and found that lot coverage really tries to address three different items. One, preservation of open space and yards and contributing to that neighborhood character, the overall health and well-being of the neighborhoods. It's managing stormwater runoff with greater opportunities for water actually permeate into the soil. So naturally managing the water runoff through the natural ecosystem. And then also reducing an urban heat island effect by by reducing the concentration of hard surfaces and building materials that hold the sun's heat and actually raises the temperature around it. So there are three things that kind of work together, but in some cases can also work against each other as the regulations are applied. So to start this, we did a lot of staff review of all the information and conversations gathered through our comprehensive plan, looking at some of our raw data that's available to us. to do a little bit of an analysis and speaking with our consultants, you all on the board of Alderman, we really came to a few initial conclusions. Number one being the success of maximum coverage, the single maximum impervious coverage regulation to address both stormwater and green space ratios. It varies across the city. In some neighborhoods, it's very successful, and in other neighborhoods, it's not quite able to help both of those intentions. The new technologies and materials that allow stormwater to be addressed without natural vegetation, and this is limiting our ability to use one regulation to address green space and water. The size of houses has been increasing over time, and this results in a larger percentage of block coverage being attributed to the actual structure footprints, as opposed to some of our patterns in neighborhoods that have older homes. There's a lot more coverage that's actually more evenly distributed between driveways, patios, and the house footprints. Now we're seeing those house footprints are taking up most of it, and it's resulting in a reduction in the patio driveway space. Existing lot sizes, structure sizes, and lengths are varying across the city, resulting in some neighborhoods being more vulnerable to the impacts of change under the existing regulations. So that stormwater flow and the patterns of the larger home footprints are going to impact different neighborhoods. And then the character and frequency of storms has shifted in recent years to more high-intensity, short-duration events. And the time between some of these high-intensity events is also decreasing. So what we have in recent times, we'll experience in a matter of weeks a few very high-intensity storms, which doesn't allow some of the infrastructure to recover from those intensities the way that it has previously. Intuition and Logic made a series of recommendations in the memo. Those recommendations will ultimately happen as we'll want to translate those into actual code changes. Some of the recommendations cover elements that we kind of do as a practice right now, and other recommendations are really hard code changes. An important part of the recommendations that came from Intuition Logic, this came from them evaluating, again, some of our comprehensive plan data, multiple conversations with staff to kind of have a good conversation, a back and forth of what we're seeing, how we're able to evaluate on a staff level the projects, and then also what they see. The recommendation here on the screen from Intuition Logic really focused on the technical aspect of addressing the stormwater runoff. part of the issue, as opposed to the green space, which staff is doing most of the analysis of. So summary of the recommendations, we have increasing our differential detention requirement from a 15-year 20-minute storm event to a 100-year 60-minute event. And what this would do is do a better job of us actually predicting and capturing the runoff volume related to those higher duration or the higher intensity storm events that we're seeing more of. So the way that those events are, the 15 year 20 minute is essentially a storm that you would expect to see on a frequency of every few years or so. And that intensity level lasting for a 20-minute event. Well, what we see maybe were 15-minute events, we're seeing on an annual basis now. What was a 100-year event, we're seeing every few years event now. So by upping that, we're going to capture the calculation and then also capture any detention requirements for those events. Increasing the differential detention requirement for sites disturbing over five acres from the MSD standard of impervious condition on January 1st, 2000 to using a pre-development all grass condition. So this would really only apply to some of the larger development projects. MSD has done it for a few of us already. So an example is the Clarendale, that site. Previously, it was a grocery store, so it was almost 100%. There were a lot of downstream impacts in that area. And so MSD actually required them to calculate stormwater if that was a green space site. So there's a very large tension that's under, under the Clarendale to help with that impact. So MSD is already doing a lot of it, but we, it was also a good idea for us to just have that in the code. So if anybody were to develop more than five acres, we asked them to do the analysis using that all grass condition. We decided not to apply the all grass condition to our typical new house size site because it's been a long time since most of our single individual lots were ever green space that every once in a while we probably have a couple of lots left that are grass right now that could be developed, but we don't see it often. So in those instances, we would rather compare to the existing impervious coverage with that newer event level. So as you are well aware, we've been recently requiring deed restrictions for dry wells and other BMPs. But IntuitionLogic has provided us with some guidance to enhance the requirement and also include inspector reporting, which will help on the follow through. I know that was mentioned earlier. So right now, we just require them to record data. maintenance recommendations for dry well, but the city isn't actually involved in whether or not that's happening. So a recommendation from Intuition and Logic is for us to create a standardized reporting form that they would complete every two years or so, and then return those back to the city so that we could track. And if there were issues where they are not, then that would be available for us to enforce through the process of our regulations. So that would be something that we would want to set up in a way that is manageable for the city, which is why walking in tuition and logic and other routes for the city to actually do this, be granted easement rights to go and do our own inspections. However, we're seeing dry wells and other elements on so many properties now. At this point, I don't think it would really be feasible for us as staff to be performing annual inspections of every BMP that we have in the city. But that is something that we could look into the future if the direction went that way. And then is enhancing and developing our site design guidelines. And this is really the way of taking a lot of the small recommendations that MSD has for how you actually design the stormwater collection or stormwater management for individual sites and kind of the best practices that have come from the reviews of our consultants and actually putting them in the code as requirements. So everybody starts off designing that way. So requirements such as the infiltration and percolation tests, and how we would actually evaluate the results of those, where pop-up emitters might be located. And then also some standards for sump pumps, which we are seeing more and more of. And many of the kind of anecdotal nuisance complaints that we see are maybe not aside from the large events of my basement got flooded. it's other areas where the sidewalk seems to always have that trickle that's resulted in either some algae during the summer that people slip on or it's always iced over during the winter that people are slipping on a lot of that is actually We don't know for sure, but our estimate or their estimate based on their technical expertise is that it's probably connected to a sump pump that might actually be pulling from groundwater. So even when there's not a storm event that's been happening, there's still water coming from that pop-up emitter because it's connected to a sunk pump. So there would be recommendations here on how we could address those issues moving forward. And then our next steps. So as I mentioned, impervious coverage, those technical recommendations came from our consultant. Then we have the green space ratio. So we really are at that point where we need to identify how those two, the green space and impervious coverage, are connected to each other, but also identify them separately as goals to really enhance the accountability of our residents and our development patterns moving forward to achieving goals for both of those areas. With green space, our primary goal is preserving and enhancing the character. And it's in our residential neighborhoods where we see this most. So staff's recommendation is going to be to set a minimum or define green space and then set a minimum green space percentage. So right now we have a maximum impervious coverage. We think turning that around and setting our minimum green space and finding what green space is, is a good starting point. And we would set that for the total lot and for the front yard. And this would be an evaluation that we're doing to different neighborhoods and zoning districts to determine what that percentage is, which we'll come back to you with shortly. And then on the impervious coverage side, our primary goal when we think about coverage analysis is really mitigating and minimizing that stormwater. So this is where more of those technical recommendations would come into play. So an important part here is making very clear how we're calculating stormwater runoff and how that's different from how we're going to calculate green space ratios. So those two items would be separated within our code. And then we would also need to address the various materials that you all experienced and seen come before you from pavements and pool areas and driveway prints, etc., And then we're recommending that we establish that sustainability bonus that allows for a reduction in the minimum green space when you utilize a BMP under certain conditions. So this is where we're going to recommend that we lower right now so we have a 55% maximum lot coverage for our single family residential districts. With the green space ratio, it would essentially then be reversed. So we're going to lower that maximum impervious because we're going to raise how much green space you have to have. But then we're going to get back to neutral by adding a bonus. And then we'll outline how those bonuses would work. So right now you evaluate just cause. And so it's sometimes hard for us to... pinpoint exactly what we're doing with that regulation. But moving forward with a sustainability bonus, we found other communities is that it's helpful to have a specific percentage. So if you have a drywall system, you're eligible for X percentage additional coverage so you can lower your green space. The piece that we would recommend holding off on, though, is modifying the green space in the front yard. Because as we mentioned, the green ratio's primary goal is that neighborhood character element. And in most of our neighborhood analysis, that's from the street. So we would keep the percentage of the front yard maintained, but we would allow a little bit more flexibility within the rear yard. I know that it takes, I'll let you guys think about that switch for a minute from maximums and minimums of those two. But that's the biggest element that we will be proposing to you in the text amendment. Okay. Any questions?

Yeah, you were mentioning about going from impervious to green space. Right. Will that be set at percentages? Right. Both of them?

Yes. So the ratio, the percentage ratio will be based on the green space. And the impervious coverage will be a calculation of your runoff. So right now, as we see on... I can actually probably pull it up. That might be helpful to see. I think Kobe had the... Yeah, so on this sheet... You can see it here. This is the calculation of runoff. So they've identified the square footage of their different surface types, the percentage of coverage or the acre. And then this PI, this is actually the factor that they use to generate the CFS, which is the cubic feet per second. So based on the surface type, the factor that we've identified for roof is that over that 15 minute or 15 year, 20 minute storm event, it would generate point, 103 cubic feet per second of water running off from the roof. So this is where the impervious coverage of the water runoff calculations comes into play, which can differ slightly from how we would actually calculate green space. So the factors of your runoff generation from your service type, that's all engineered. There's standards that are set based on MSD. So we wouldn't impact this. So we would have them do their stormwater runoff calculations based on the event type that we would require, which is recommended to be the 100-year event, 60 minutes. Okay. However, we would have our impervious, what we do now is impervious coverage. Instead, we'd separate those out to make it very clear here that our calculations of coverage is based on us wanting more green space rather than impervious. So we would allow them to complete this differential runoff calculation and then also provide us a green space. The only difference being is that we would allow that runoff to be upped a little bit in exchange for the BMP, which is why it would be tied to the runoff generated. So if we allow a dry well, we could tie that to the amount of runoff that they're capturing because it can be quantified.

So do you perceive this will make it easier for the engineers or more difficult?

So it will make it more difficult to add more coverage because we're going to have the green space ratio, but it will be easier for staff and for this board to evaluate people's requests for the one-off increases of coverage because we'll have that outline specifically. Right now it's difficult because we use one standard to try and address two elements, and that's becoming hard because in one case you can say, I understand they're treating stormwater, they're capturing that, but they're still impacting our green space ratio. So if we make it clear where those overlaps occur by saying, here's your green space maximum, but for certain type of use of a sustainable feature, which we want to promote in exchange for you being more sustainable, we're going to give you this slight bump. And then on the opposite end of that, by adding in requirements as to how those BMPs are actually designed, and then adding requirements that increase the accountability of how they're maintained, it becomes something that not every resident will want to choose because they're going to have to go through the process of actually maintaining it. Whereas right now, it's a little bit easier for somebody to say, yeah, I'm going to ask for these permeable pavers with no intention of making sure that they remain permeable because they want that patio. So that's where we're trying to give the residents that want us to promote sustainability a little bit of a bump while also protecting against the stormwater.

So it may be easier for us in here to review it, but it may be more difficult for the owner to understand it and for the project engineer to put it together. Is that right?

It shouldn't be harder for the project engineer to put it together because these calculations are pretty straightforward. So that's just continues to be the same numbers game as it is right now for the engineers. It's just more clear because we have an actual cap of what that means. So the goal is to become more transparent for people that are struggling to apply an impervious coverage line in the code to green space and to stormwater. We're making it very clear how those two are separate but related. So I think the goal is to be more transparent, but also to increase the ability for staff and this board to say yes or no, a project meets their requirements. So that's kind of the reason for separating them. Now, it could be that you all think differently. the green space ratio is more important and you struggle with the bump for the sustainability efforts, in which case we would say just remove that sustainability bonus item when that comes before you and just have the green space ratio requirement.

Conceptually, I think I follow where you're going. Yeah. But I'm not sure about the implementation of

Yeah, I think for right now – so I put those in there to give you an idea of where we're heading. But for today, I think the important piece to focus on is feedback from the recommendations that came from the consultants related to the actual technical side of the implementation. I think it will be a lot easier to wrap our heads around the – The sustainability bump when I can show you exactly what that number would be right now it's kind of just a nebulous idea of sustainability being promoted within the code, so I would focus on the recommendations that were in the intuition and logic memo for your feedback right now.

Okay. let's go around and get other comments where we are right now bob anna

i'm always impressed how easily you go from one technical field to another amazing i'm still trying to spell the word impervious correctly so um your goal is right you know uh We can't tell you how many times we're dealing with water runoff here. And it's the bugaboo in this community for sure. So when you go from fifth, I want to just ask something about the cost. To go from 15 year to 100 year, 15 year, 20 minutes, 100 years, 60 minutes, are we asking the owner to excavate an underground swimming pool?

No. So the way that we have everything written right now, in a lot of our calculations, they provide both event types to us. They'll provide a 100-year calculation and they'll provide a 15-year. So in terms of that effort by the engineers, they're usually already doing it, especially with the new homes for single family. The biggest piece will be in how people are actually capturing events. So if their runoff is actually increasing and then they need to capture that differential runoff, then the drywalls, if they're using a drywall system, the drywall will need to be bigger than it would be today. However, as you guys know, we've been upsizing most of our drywalls. The other element that will be different that the developer or the homeowner or whoever's doing the project will experience is the percolation element of it. So recently that's been a recommendation that we've started including with drywalls but it doesn't come till the end this will be a requirement that they'll know of so the idea is that hopefully they do some test percolation tests before they go through the site plan review process to properly size the dry well and then they could change that moving forward and then because we would have the standards depending on the result they would automatically be upsizing it instead of this board just saying we think you should add another x you know cubic feet to your drywall system But the biggest piece is that it will only cost more for the people who want to generate more runoff, which I think is part of what we're trying to do is decrease the amount of runoff. So if somebody isn't really increasing runoff, then this won't impact the cost for them to design or complete their project.

And remember when we had the paper issue, you know, it was impervious versus pervious. Are we equipped now as, you know, I've read over the years roads are now more expensive if you want to make it pervious. You can do that now, have pervious roads. Right. Are we equipped if we pass something, if somebody wants to do a driveway that is pervious, that we will halt it on their behalf?

So the recommendation that came from Intuition Logic is not to allow permeable pavement on small site development and single family development because they've found that it's just not being maintained. The cost to maintain that small amount of pavement, the single family homeowner is not doing it. They do say that there are paver systems, which are different paver systems that can be successfully maintained by a homeowner if they want to. So the idea there would be To count in terms of the green space ratio, we would still count those pavements, those surfaces as not green space. So again, getting back to that green space ratio, those would not be green space, but there would be a certain paver system based on the design guidelines that we would include, that would allow them potentially, the way we're thinking, to get that sustainability bonus because it would treat the water runoff. So that's where those two elements would... But the big piece there would be, again, to have certain design standards for the paver systems and then have the reporting requirement of... them actually maintaining the paver systems so that will be a big piece like i said for the next step for you guys to evaluate is whether or not you want to go that route of recognizing pavers but we know for sure that we don't want to recognize the pavement like it looks like asphalt essentially um the perme the pervious pavement looks like asphalt but it's actually porous um so we don't want recommend that that's the recommendation from intuition logic um so that's where we're going to have that green space ratio coming to play

for sure we want to give incentives to create forest pavements or whatever however you count it because uh Homes are pretty small. You know, the lots are relatively small.

Susan.

Is there, you know, I followed all this. We heard the report before, but something that seems I don't know how you would count it because, again, it goes with the homeowner maintaining it. But the native planting, the longer root systems and all that, are there any credits or any way that that ties into this type of regulation? Okay.

So that's another side of that we haven't really gone into. We've had some discussions with Intuition Lodge about rain gardens. Those are another one where it's a little harder to quantify the actual stormwater that they manage, depending on how people design their rain gardens. So again, that becomes a hard piece of what our trade off is. moving forward but it would be potentially something that you could include in the sustainability bonus but we would need to decide how we're quantifying it since it isn't as easy as it is to quantify it dry well

and measuring over time right okay

thanks

do you have any preliminary thoughts on how you'll define green space

Yeah, so we'll build off of the way that we've been defining impervious coverage, but we'll just make it more clear about the green space side of that. So the vegetation area and then impervious coverage will be defined with the hardscapes. So that's essentially what will be hardscape versus vegetation area. But we have heard, and I think what it comes down to is at the end of the day, the most important piece is managing the stormwater. That's the biggest complaint that we've heard. But we have heard from plenty of people that they want to make sure that there isn't a lot of stormwater, but they also are not green thumbs and they just don't want grass in their little backyard that is just dirt all the time. And that's a hard one because grass that's really just dirt is also not really treating water. It's typically going to act pretty impervious as well. So that's where we're trying to balance the front yard character in terms of green space versus the rest of the yard to allow that balance. And that's where the specific number for the sustainability bump will come into play. So if somebody just really doesn't want to maintain yard space, then we'll give them options to maintain less yard space while still managing the stormwater under the the stricter conditions of how they'll have to actually maintain that yard moving forward.

Okay. No, I was thinking that developers, homeowners could game the system by, you know, cantilevering over and you're creating shadow.

Right.

Not helping stormwater. So yeah, nothing else.

Amy.

So the defining the green space, that'll kind of come later where we can really- It will.

Yeah. These recommendations are the ones we really want feedback on right now. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So one was like the five acre one. Are there any projects? Because like the Clarindale really wasn't five acres, was

it? It was a little bit less. So the five acres came from evaluating kind of land that potentially larger areas of land that would potentially be redeveloped into the future. So that five acres could be reduced if you wanted that to be the factor for other areas. However, increasing, and this is I think the last page of the memo that you guys had, there was a table that Intuition and Logic did that actually I think Hobie already brought that up here. I can share it.

Okay, so this sheet was

what intuition and logic created to show a comparison of the different types of events that we might see. There we go. So when we look at the precondition of the differential increase, which is where we've kind of highlighted right here, the actual difference for a lot of lots really wasn't significant on a volume level when we were looking at the smaller lot sizes that we see on a typical basis so that's where we went with the increasing the event type for just our standard projects but what we wanted to make sure is depending on that larger scenario the larger lot scenarios we wanted to make for those that we use the pre-development condition a lot of the larger areas that are potentially up for redevelopment are either 100 impervious If we talk about some of our commercial areas that have large parking lots or other elements, they're almost a hundred percent in conditions today and probably were in January 1st of 2000. So that's where the grass comes into play or it's areas that are pretty much all grass right now. That would be combined with adjacent lots that are impervious. So that's parking lot or whatever you're talking about. Are those larger than five acres though? No, but the potential combination of them is where we were looking. So one area that like, for example, the redevelopment under the overlay areas that we went through. So part of Concordia, that would probably hit the five acres. Part of Wash U's campus would probably hit five acres. And depending on how the land was divided with the centene areas that haven't been developed, they could potentially hit the five acres, right?

But also the Brown Shoe Calaris property could fit into that.

Yeah, depending on how it was developed. So we can, Ryan's been tracking a lot of this in GIS. So when we come back to you, we can identify some of those areas on a map if that would be helpful.

Right. Just like the Calaris point, like the one that slept over is two acres, right? If they do the seven and the two, so that would be treated differently?

Right. It would be treated differently unless they did the project together. So in the overall disturbance area. So if they came to us and it was two lots, but it was one connected project, that would trigger it. If they separated it, it wouldn't.

Is it like a huge deal just to make that two acres versus five?

We can certainly run the analysis to let you guys know.

Okay. I don't know. Maybe a thought. And then my other question was, back to your list, the pop-up emitter 10 foot off the property line, right now it's five feet. Is that right? Yeah.

It's 10 per MSD regulations, but that's one area that we will, in speaking with industrial object again, a lot of what MSD is focused on are those larger disturbance areas. So we have continued to apply their regulations to the smaller sites, but they have, we've been finding that they have been more lenient than they used to be on that. And so a few times we've had engineers or whoever it might be come to us and say, here's a letter from MSD saying that they wouldn't enforce that regulation on your small site. And that's where we don't want that. Our best practice is elevating what MSD is requiring in our small lots. So there are a few items that we are going to more formally hard code within our own regulations to make sure that the enforcement of it by the city is clear moving forward.

I'm just curious. I know sometimes like when we're looking at these, you know, pop-up emitters or, you know, maybe 10 foot off their property line, but they might be like right next to like the driveway, which kind of like ruins the whole purpose of it.

Right.

Is there something we can say like 10 foot off property line and hard surface? You know what I mean? Because if it's supposed to spread it so it like actually penetrates the ground, it's It's

true. So that's something that we've talked a lot about with intuition logic. And so that's where the requirement about downslope impervious. There's also the requirement that they talked about in the memo of allowing some increase when it goes towards the street, because we know there's going to be elements. So in an ideal world, pop-up emitters would be in the front yard. So if they are working more over time, it's not as likely to go onto their neighbor's property. We have a lot of naturally sloped land that's the opposite of that. So we couldn't just, it would be really tough for us to say that's the only place you can have your pop-up emitter. So we talked a lot about that or should pop ups always be have gravel around them, all of these things. So by having the guidelines, what we can do is more explicitly talk about the nuisances that we're trying to prevent and the recommended locations or standards for those and then allow for a one off design might be a little bit different because they might treat it differently. The other element, though, to attach with the pop-up emitters that I think will help is right-sizing what the pop-up is attached to. So we do have pop-ups, like I mentioned, that are attached to sump pumps or attached to downspout extenders that don't have that dry well element. in the middle of them and they aren't located in a rain garden or an intentional landscaped area to hold the water. That creates what a lot of us see with the perpetual flow of water. With the guidelines, we're able to identify that. There's going to be a balance of the elements that are in our code And then the guidelines kind of like we do right now for our architecture review with materials and other elements that will allow us to direct more of the actual design. And hopefully that would result in pop-up emitters that aren't actually popping up water most of the time because of the other elements combined. So yes, those are very good points. Thank you.

Jim? I think what would be just a suggestion for when we do this again, what would be helpful for someone like me? I, you know, we can talk about 20 year, a hundred year, you know, obviously the durations we understand more, but I'd be curious. And I was thinking on the way it's like, man, what a day for Eric Vietmeyer to actually not be here because he could weigh in on something like this. I would love to see the example of like a project that we have in the city or like one that's come before us. And yeah, we've seen what the civil solution is with the current requirements, and then what that would look like with a 100-year, 60-minute storm. Because I think... unequivocally we can all agree that stormwater probably needs to be managed more. But what I would hate to do is, at least me personally, vote for something where we're saying 100 years, 60 minutes, and then unintentionally we're creating the underground swimming pool, Bob, that you... So if this is a situation like you very much, very rightly mentioned, we have been upsizing a lot of these dry wells and stuff like that. So... If these requirements add an extra couple inches of gravel or maybe a dry well that's like another foot larger, I think that's fantastic. And I think that's a great thing. What I would hate to do is just by throwing numbers that I don't know that we can fully wrap our minds around without seeing what those solutions look like on like a real world basis, that we'd be attaching it to something and it would have consequences that maybe we don't fully understand.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. We've been, we've been talking internally with like cubic feet and stuff in our head, but I, I like the idea of giving you an actual real world project example of the different sides so we can do that.

Also, I know you want us to focus on recommendations, so you don't want us talking about green space or anything, but, uh, I just something, I guess if we, if we get there with green space, I know something that, uh, I perked up a little bit. I saw something about front yard green space not being able to be modified and everything. And I just know there's some situations. partially because i'd be in this situation uh in clayton when you live on a corner basically both you do not have a side yard anymore you have what's considered two front yards and uh you have there's higher barriers and setbacks and stuff like that and then at least i don't know how many other homes are in the situation but on top of it i do not live at like a 90 degree corner i live at basically the apex of like a hairpin turn so it's actually somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 degrees. So I have this pie shaped and you could be standing in between what you would call my, what you would probably colloquial called my side yard and my neighbor's side yard. And that's considered my front yard. So I'd be worried about situations like that as far as if we're I would say for the vast majority of properties in Clayton, front yard is very easily understood. And I understand a lot of these properties, we're talking quarter acre properties where we're trying to reduce what's there, but just maybe in defining front yard versus other yards, as far as stuff, there could be some unintended consequences if there's no wiggle room there. So when I saw like, cannot be modified, I was just a little concerned with that.

Yeah, we do address primary and secondary front yards in setback establishments, so we could address it there. We're not going to remove any ability for this board to evaluate the way you can right now with percentages, so that's a good point. We'll make sure that we don't accidentally make it too strict of a code, but we can tie it to that kind of primary and secondary way that we calculated.

I also, I understand the direction that you guys are trying to take this. And I think it is in a good direction. What my only concern would be is complicating it to where it's tougher for us to understand. Whereas as far as like... 55 impervious, 45 pervious is pretty clear to understand. And there was some talk of gaming the system. Clearly people are gaming the system now with how they do it or attempting to game the system. No matter what, there's going to be some gaming of the system. But yeah, I would like to see a solution where we are reducing the runoff, but we're not hopefully... overcomplicating what we're putting in place, making this process more difficult. Sure.

David? I thought Jim made a great point as far as being able to visualize what kind of improvements might need to be made. And when we talk about 15-year storms versus 100-year storms, The best way to think about it is not, it's going to happen once every 100 years or it's going to happened once every 15 years that that confuses people and they're like well why did we just get three storms in a row that we're all supposed to happen every 100 years. You're better off thinking about this in terms of the percent chance that it will happen in any given year. So when you hear 100 year storm or 100 year flood what that means there's a 1% chance in any given year that that will happen. 15 year event, there's a 6.6% chance that that's going to happen within any given year. So when you look at the swing from a 15 year standard to a 100 year standard, just looking at 15 to 100, you think, wow, this is going to be much more intense than what we already had when really, in actuality, it's a 5.6% difference in any given year that it will occur. So percent chance is always a better way to think about it. And you're just when you're rolling those dice, it's just coming up and hitting more often than it would in a typical year. But I think another thing that would be interesting if intuition and logic could provide it is kind of looking at that trend, especially over the last five or 10 years, how many times have we exceeded the 15-year event? And how many times have exceeded the 100-year event over that period? So we can kind of see that trajectory over time. I think that's important as well because as they put those standards together, that's what we found is we're hitting that 15-year mark really frequently um so that 6.6 chance keeps coming up really over and over again we've seen it it seems like three to four times a year now at this point um so i think it'd be helpful to look at the actual storm numbers but i just wanted to put that out there as well about percent chance it's just a better way to to think about it and visualize it that's all

PB John Gerstle, On under for be where possible discharge shall be directed to the street or Jason collection system, what is an adjacent collection system.

Yeah, so this is another area that, interestingly enough, MSD has gone back to where they used to be years ago and have started allowing more direct connections to their storm sewers. So that was something we talked a lot about with Intuition and Logic. They kind of went one extreme of... not allowing any connections to the storm sewers and making everything daylight on properties. And now they're starting to swing back and allowing some direct connections. So that's an area where it's their storm sewer. So if they are going to allow those connections, then we're going to, but we're going to write our regulations as if they're not going to allow it. But allow it if it happens. So that's where those recommendations are. There are some areas where I think that there's existing water problems, a lot of the kind of downhill areas that are within watersheds that have significant uphill issues that might even start outside of Clayton and then hit in areas in Clayton. they're probably, MSC is more likely to approve a direct connection to just try and get more of that water into their system faster than it landing downhill and then getting into their sewer locations. So that's what we want to do. And ultimately, we also want to, if there's increases in runoff, We would rather them hit our street and go into a sewer inlet than go into the neighbor's basement. So that's kind of what we're addressing here. Ideally, we decrease runoff everywhere. But if there are some instances where they're able to get some more water onto the street, and that means less water through their rear as we look at the drainage area maps, then we'll support them.

Putting more water onto the streets quite often brings icing conditions on our sidewalks.

In winter,

right? Only in winter. Yep. Okay. But going back to the MSD item, a substantial number of residents have taken their downspouts off the stormwater system and have them daylighted. Does that mean that MSD would allow them to put it back on if we were to allow that?

So we only allow it in instances where MSD has already granted them approval. So if they've gone through a process and MSD has said, yes, ideally, we want you to connect. It's typically areas where homeowners are trying to address significant issues that are already occurring. Usually, again, on lots where they are the collection point of all their neighbor's water collection. So we've seen a few of those recently where MSD is approved. And so then they've come to the city for permits and already had in hand the MSD approval for that sewer connection. So we don't block that in those cases, but I don't think MSD has gotten to the point where they're going to allow that every project like they used to at a certain point. Yeah. And

then the other thing was where MSD was forcing people to sever that connection and daylight those, that's where it was feeding into a combined sanitary storm system. So there aren't as many instances where it was going directly into a pure storm system. They had combined systems everywhere, and that's what they needed to do because it was overrunning their wastewater treatment plants. So it shouldn't affect that many people here. I don't think we have too many dedicated storm sewers in the city that people... directly connect to, but if they did and it was existing, MSD probably wouldn't have an issue with that the way they do with those combined sanitary systems. Thank you.

Well, I find this still somewhat confusing, but if we get back to just the guidelines here, I think conceptually they're going in the right direction. Anyone can jump in if you don't agree or if you do agree. So what will we do next?

Sure, so next we're going to actually draft some regulation changes and you'll be able to see where those changes would occur. We'll do another presentation of it to show you kind of before and after we provide those other calculations that both of you brought up that were good. And then we'll go through this again and we'll be able to evaluate. This is an important one for us to really try and address. We have all of this information available on the website. There's been a couple of people who have read it and contacted me with some comments, questions, feedback. But there hasn't really been a lot of feedback from the public in terms of this. I would anticipate more coming once we actually publish what the proposed changes are for people because then we'll start to hear whether or not they think it's going to address it or if it's going to create other issues for how they want to use their land. So that will be the next step is to draft those. publish them for you to consider, for the public to consider, and then decide which ones to move forward with.

Well, the two discussion items I think are great. I think they're forward-looking, they're addressing issues that we have, and hopefully we'll see a positive outcome.

Yes. Steve, do we have any comments from the crowd, or do we take comments from the crowd on this part? I just want to make sure. Sure. You've been sitting here so patiently this whole time. I just wanted to make sure you didn't have something to say.

Oh, yes, that's a good one to bring up because we kind of glanced over that recommendation. So currently in our impervious coverage calculation, the water area of the pool is counted at 50%, the idea being that when a pool is full of water, some of the rain doesn't run off anywhere else. However, we have pools covered for large portions of the year. We also have more people that under our codes now you can get a retractable pool cover as opposed to using some of the pool fence requirements. So your pool code fence, an alternative to the alarms and other things is the retractable pool cover, which means that all likelihood a pool might be covered even more percentage time of the year. So the recommendation from intuition logic is to no longer provide the break for pool water area and just calculate pools as impervious.

You mentioned, uh, that you might be able to get by without a fence. I thought that was a county requirement.

A

fence? The pool had to be fenced.

So those are under our locally adopted building codes. So the county isn't involved in permitting or inspecting pools.

Good. Any other comments? Private pools, yeah. Oh, sure. Good point.

Right. So I think the biggest piece is that we will regulate the coverage based on the percentage of the lot. So the way that corner lots or pie lots or everything else are established, you would still have the same percentage allowance as your neighbor. So you would just choose how to use that coverage, so to speak. So if you have the same square footage of lot as your neighbor, but your lot is pie and they're rectangular, you would still get the same square footage coverage as your neighbor. It just becomes how that coverage is distributed across your lot that would be impacted. So I think that's where we can make sure to address the front and total coverage as Jim was speaking about, but the overall square footage of coverage that you're granted should be close to the same. Majority of people try. I think it's our neighborhood character, personal preference, the privacy effect. Most people try and put the majority of these uses in the backyard. We don't get a lot of requests for the use of secondary front yards except up to five to 10 feet. So sometimes that boundary is pushed a little bit on those secondary front yards, but not... as much as I probably would have expected, honestly. But I think that's because of how the neighborhoods are naturally established with that character element and the privacy effect of it. But we'll make sure to evaluate it. I don't even know off the top of my head how many irregularly shaped lots we have, but Ryan could probably tell me in a matter of minutes using GIS. So we'll get a lot of data for you guys to consider when we come back.

Okay. Did that answer your concern?

Right.

Right. It's established based on the average of the block. So sometimes it's 10 feet, sometimes it's 20, depending on the lot. So I think a good place for us to start, that's why I said I wonder how many lots like that we have, would be to kind of evaluate within our R2 district area. You know, what do we have that's a pie-shaped? What do we have that is a standard corner? What do we that's a standard rectangle? And then we can start to see how many people would be impacted in different ways by these regulations. And then we can just start to evaluate the need for addressing them differently within the code or is it just a need to provide that flexibility option for this board to evaluate them as they move forward. So that's kind of where my head starts is first, let's see how many people are impacted by those and then depending on that outcome, we'll know how to address it.

Well, thank you. We appreciate citizen input. Yep. Well, I think we've probably come to the end for tonight. Jim, you have any further comments? I'd just like to welcome Susan to

the board and Between the two of us and our crowd today, we have some great Collaborac representation today. Amy?

Yes, welcome. And

nothing else?

Ellen?

Welcome, Susan.

Yeah, so kind. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. Very good meeting.

Bob? It's nice to have a new face here, and it's nice to be back with everybody. I enjoy this very much.

David? Hi, Susan. Nothing else tonight? Toby, anything coming up?

I think next meeting will be a pretty busy one. I think it might be.

Yeah, we have a few of our previously continued items potentially returning along with a few others. So we won't have any comp plan updates. It will stick to the individual projects for that one. Anything else, Ana? No, thank you all for your feedback. It's always exciting to get into these implementation elements that are big deals. So I think it's great to know that you guys are actually taking the time to read through the stuff and consider the conditions and evaluate it because a lot of these changes are going to have, you know, you don't redo these sections of the codes every year. So these changes are something that we want to make sure we get right because they're going to impact development, you know, for the next 10 years or so. So I appreciate the work you guys are doing for this.

Stephanie?

Welcome, Susan. And I have nothing further this evening.

Well, thank you, everyone. Thanks for hanging in, Susan. I'll see you on June 2nd. I won't be here the next week. Thank you, everyone. We are adjourned.