November 2, 2026 — Meeting Transcript

Good evening and welcome to the Planning Commission ARB for November 2nd. If you have any electronic gadgets, please silence them now. Obie?

I got you. Steve Lichtenfeld? Here. Helen DiFate?

I got you. Steve Lichtenfeld? Here. Ellen DeFate?

Here.

Jim Arsenault? Here. Chris Brennan? Here. Claire Queskin?

Here.

Jeff Morrisey? Here. Susan Buse?

Jeff Morsey? Here. Susan Buse?

Here.

We have minutes from the previous meeting on October 19th. Are there any changes? Seeing none, do we have a motion?

I move to approve. Submitted.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, we're done. If there's anyone in the audience who'd like to speak, and has already signed up on anything that is not on the agenda, raise your hand. Okay. We will move on to old business. First item is 7471 Cromwell. The applicant is here. We'll start with the staff report.

This project was presented at the last meeting on the 19th and was continued. The revisions include the following. Stone was added to the proposed wall on the west side of the deck. Stone proposed on the east side of the deck was extended to reach the ground. And then the report notes that there were three roof colors that were considered. However, the applicant has settled on Sherwood Forest, which is an additional one that was provided in the packet. Given that there were multiple roof colors that were provided in the official resubmission as well as the new color, the staff recommendation for your reporter is going to stay the same. Staff recommend approval with the condition that a single roof material be selected. The Architecture Reward should specify the single approved color as their condition of approval.

Okay, thank you. The applicant?

Hello, members of the board. DJ Gellner. I'm the homeowner at 7471 Cromwell for myself and my wife. Thank you for your feedback last time. Really appreciate it. Sean can speak to some of the issues that we had since last time, specifically with the roof issue. We had a couple of roofers come out, and they both said that the original roof is not in great shape. It's actually quite in disrepair. Sean can talk a little bit more to the clay tile situation and whatnot, but overall, I mean, I think it's fair to say that the cost is prohibitive to replace a clay tile roof, and there are other concerns where We did look significantly. And again, you can get close with matching clay tile, but it's not going to be an exact match with the color and the weathering and whatnot. We do have a letter from one of the roofers here. I don't know if... Can I hand these out or not? Or do we have like a way to display it or something? Okay.

Thank you.

So we did want to keep in character with the neighborhood and whatnot. The roofer presented a number of options for very high-end asphalt shingles. We decided the carriage house pattern looked really nice, I think, given what we want to do in the area and whatnot. It was really one of the only colors that worked with our existing brick and the dark Tudor trim that we're looking at. You know, there are examples of other colors and whatnot in the neighborhood and over in Claverack. But none of them work with dark colored Tudor trim like the type that we want on our house here. And I think it pulls together very nicely. My wife and I, you know, love the color scheme. And yeah, you know, I think we tried to, you know, address all of your guys' concerns and Welcome. Any questions? But if you don't mind, I can yield the floor to Sean to talk a little bit more about the clay tile. So I

did exhaust everything I could locally with some of the roofing companies. Donovan, which is probably one of the bigger companies that I heard in the area with asphalt and clay tile shingles are not asphalt clay tile shingals. And the tile, he came on, he looked at it. He went up on the roof or looked at the roof with a drone. Basically there's quite a few tile missing, cracked, damaged. There is some sign of leaking on the inside of the house. It's made by a company called Mound City that used to be local. Now it's, I guess their forms are in Chicago, but they're about a 52 week lead time to get something that is similar, not exact. Obviously the color would be a little different too. So what he recommended and with the carriage house, it was actually the whole reason it was made was to emulate historic clay tile type shingles. Plus this is a class four. So it's the highest, it's four levels of shingle versus two with like an accurate architectural. Plus it gives you a higher impact rating. So whether or not this is true or not, it can go up to a baseball size hail. This is what it's technically classified at. I think, you know, for the cost, it was roughly $150,000 to just remove and replace the existing structure, not including the two additional, the outdoor space as well as the carport. So, and I think even if we say left, try to repair with somewhat matching signals to the existing and then put on clay tile on the two new structures, I feel within Clayton, I think this would give you a much more elegant look with the carriage house. There's actually houses on Cromwell as well as Glenridge that have just regular architectural shingles. There's actually one on Cromwell that has a three tab, which is kind of your builder grade type shingle. I just felt with all the research and the cost, plus if we did go with the, tried to go with the clay tile, somebody had mentioned this, obviously we're going to have to beef up the roof load, the framing, the supports, the piers. So the cost just gets, you know, absorbent to try to stay with the clay tile. You know, we appreciate the board's thought on that to try to keep it aesthetic, but the contractor, I feel this is a beautiful look and hopefully you guys do as well.

Anything

else?

I think that's it for the initial statement or whatever, but we welcome your question.

I think the details that you've changed compared to a couple weeks ago really look good. They anchor the outdoor room. It looks good, but I'd rather go right to the roof. We have the three colors. Is that correct, Obie? Yeah, there's the red sort of blue gray. But you're recommending the carriage house,

correct? It's called Sherwood Forest. Yeah, it's the green tinted one. It's that one there. Yes.

Yeah. Sherwood Forest is the drawing to actual size.

no this was done with chat gpt so it hit uh yeah i mean the actual size is right here so

yeah yeah because it looks huge on the uh rendering okay um to me i did not like how it looks i like the color but um Is there some way we can equate what size that is in the rendering compared to the actual?

So this is one thing that obviously Ed, the architect, had also brought up to me that we noticed that the shingles in the AI rendering are larger proportionately how much I would just be guessing, but they are substantially larger in the image.

I mean, I can re-render it with smaller size shingles if you guys want. I can do it right now from my phone.

Oh, sounds good. To me, the rendering, the roof overwhelms the rest of the building. But the other comment is, I hate to lose the clay tile roof, but I think we understand where you have to go today. Yeah. While you're doing that, let's get other comments. Helen?

Okay, I am wondering on the color rendering that we see on the screen now. The carport seems to hang the roof hangs over an equal distance front and back. Did you change that? Oh, so the rendering is incorrect.

Yes, the original, I guess AI, and I apologize, AI did. It improved. It does. And sometimes you ask AI to do something and it doesn't, and then you try to ask it, I want you to do this. And then it's not a perfect science yet. So yes, we still are doing the candle lever so they can have ease of access in and out of their car. So good catch. But yes, that is.

If you could go to page six.

Yeah.

Are they okay? There we are.

Yeah.

Yes.

So it'll be like that. Yes. Okay. Now, that was my question. I like it better when it's equal, but I understand that you can't get in. It may look great, but it's not useful. So my other concern was the size of the roof shingle of the individual tabs looks too big, big. And I think we're all finding that AI, chat, GPT, and everything, and even those who use it on a regular basis for rendering are not overly fond of its listening to your command. So I understand with the roof shingle going from the tile to a shingled roof, The old roofs are difficult to... match and even the maintenance of them having had a slate roof I know exactly what you're going through and even looking on google maps going in close to the roof on the house it has discoloration and things I couldn't see cracks obviously on that but It looked like it had served its life. And at 97 years, yeah, it has. So I think switching is fine. It'll all be the same. It's just what you're switching to.

Sure. And it's 95% generated. Is there somewhere I can send this when I'm done?

It does here.

Okay, so now it gave me the right size, but the wrong color.

Just curious on this elevation, would you say that this size here on this elevation is an accurate representation?

Yeah, it is quite a bit. The file should be on its way, so it is quite a big smaller.

Well, if what we're seeing on the screen is accurate, that's much more comfortable than what we saw on the rendering. While we're waiting, were you finished, Helen? Yeah. Jim?

Yeah, I largely agree with the comments so far. Just, I guess, to talk about something I talked about last time on the Glen Ridge elevation. I think the addition to the stone, for me, at the base of that makes a really big difference. And I think visually... the stucco board and everything i even that let's just say three foot of stone or something i think grounds that really well um so i feel much more comfortable with that going forward and um yeah i'm obviously just looking at the roof here for the first time so um Yeah, my own house has a red roof. I'm personally a red roof guy, so I kind of hate to see a red roof just disappear. And I think, I don't know, I always worry a little bit when drastically changing the colors of roofs. Sometimes it can really cut down on the vibrancy of... But not enough that I'm going to get in the way of anything on that, so...

We did take that into consideration. The problem is the red. I think you can see it. Yeah, you don't have to move it. Sorry. The red is super red on this. It's way different than our current roof. And with the dark Tudor, we just thought it didn't look so great. Yeah, I mean... Yeah, we did take that into account. For what it's worth, my wife is a green roof person. She grew up in Brown Country Club Court and both of her houses growing up had green roofs. So she also really likes the move back to a green roof here.

Well, thank you.

Thank you.

Bruce? This is what I was afraid was going to happen. Helen and I said, don't suggest replacing the existing roof, and that's what we've got here. I have a real problem with taking away the clay tile roof just because you're adding on a carport. And my concern is a couple, it's a couple, just Rotini Roofing, I'm not familiar with them. I just looked up them online. They don't claim to do clay and slate tile roofing. There's numerous things in here referring to it as Spanish color book tiles. It's not Spanish tile. Donovan Roofing does do clay and tile. It's not what they're known for. But they, I mean, these are both two certainty certified installers. If you weren't building this addition, would you be looking to replace the whole roof of your existing house? I mean, prior to all of this.

Since it's been inspected and yeah, now it's damaged. Like, yes, obviously we want a working roof. And in the interest of honesty, yes, we would replace it with asphalt shingles. So, I mean, just the cost that Sean mentioned is... pretty astronomical just to replace the current roof with clay tile again.

I just wonder if there's another... It doesn't have to be clay tile, but it doesn't have to shingles either. There's other options for standing seam. There's other things that can complement the existing clay tile so that you don't have to remove the clay tile. If you get someone up on that roof, the clay tile or or sending a drone up there, they're going to see moss. It's a 97-year-old roof. But that does not mean that that roof is failing. And so I disagree with this idea that, well, yeah, it's cracking here, so we need to take off that whole roof. I think you're getting sold a bag of goods by a shingle supplier that wants to put a new roof on for you. So I'd keep that in mind. I don't see how these ones here bear any resemblance to the clay tile. The clay tile that you have on has a straight bookend on it. These ones have scalloped edges. They've got this dark shadow line. You don't have the same color. It just is. It's very different than what's on the existing. So my preference would be that you find either something that complements the existing roof and leave the existing roof alone. or have the parts repaired, or go in a different direction entirely. I'm not a fan of this type of asphalt shingle on here. So I think the stone is nice. Replacing the roof is a no-go for me.

Okay, even if the cost is prohibitive and... Well, I understand that my children need to have a safe, dry space to live. And the water damage in our attic from the current roof would stand to say otherwise, that this roof could just be repaired. I mean, it's pretty significant.

Well, it's the first time that we're hearing that there was one. I mean, that wasn't a consideration at all when you were here a couple of weeks ago. There was no talk about the current roof failing or any sort of existing sort of problems. And now all of a sudden it's, well, the roof is failing. It's leaking. We're getting water in. We've got to replace the whole roof. So, no, I mean, if it was a choice between do you fix the roof and not build this carport, I would say you fix the roof, and you don't do the carport because that's your primary need if you need to put a – a roof that doesn't leak over your kids. For the sake of aesthetics and the sake of preserving the character of the neighborhood, I believe that there are some houses in the neighborhood that have three-tab shingles. That's before I was on the architectural review board. And that's, I mean, I don't know if they got approval, how that all worked right there. But it really is a It's very easy to just say, we'll take the clay tile roof off. But it's much harder to put that clay tile roof back on. So I just want to encourage looking at other options than just going with an architectural style shingle.

I mean, once again, we did examine all the alternatives. I know last time the board was very adamant about mismatched materials and whatnot, and there is going to be some level of mismatch here, no matter what we do, if we would do clay tile. I think it would look personally shabby to have mismatched tile or some sort of synthetic tile that we tried to match. They do have shingles like this that match more of the... I guess, straight line aesthetic. But the texture looked off to us. Believe me, we looked at every alternative here, I think, that was reasonable. Yeah, I mean, you know, to be honest, the roofer did point out some areas in the attic that we had not noticed before when he did his inspection. So hence, you know, but like, again, I don't think this will change the character of the neighborhood necessarily. We do have plenty of folks with asphalt shingles on the street. And yeah, these that we're doing, you know, are significantly less for lack of a better term, better, you know, higher, higher grade than, than those. So,

yeah, I mean, it's, it's your money to do with, you know, and we're just the review board. So, I mean, It's your choice at the end of the day. Um, and there's more than just me on the, on this committee here too.

Thank you.

Hi.

Um,

The only thing that I would add to everybody's conversation is in looking at the elevation up here, I actually prefer the red. So I... I'm not as opposed to, you know, removing the tile. I do wish that we could keep it, but I do understand, you know, that there are cost restrictions to that. I would prefer to see it in a similar color and in looking at, you know, this rendering for, you know, take it as it is. I prefer the red. So thanks. That's all. Okay. Thanks.

Jeff.

Hi. Yeah, it's interesting. Per Chris's comments, when I originally looked at this, I didn't quite understand they were trying to redo the whole roofing situation. If I was trying to keep the the clay tile, and I understand there are issues with that. I had a similar thought about could the addition in the carport be totally different roofs, like a standing seam metal roof, you know, that wouldn't try to match anything. If you believe the clay tile is not savable now, again, I agree, I'm kind of not sure of that, then I understand going through this sort of an approach. I'm ambivalent about the color. I'm not a fan of the chamfered corners because it sort of starts to make it look like something it isn't. It's not a tile roof, so I don't think we should make it look like a tile roof. I wish it was something straighter, but it's not a deal breaker to me. So I know I'm talking a little out of both sides of my mouth here, so... i would um i'd probably accept what you're proposing and i do appreciate the additional looking at stone and uh dealing with the side street elevation i think it's i think it's much better thank you thanks susan

i don't have much to add from that it is sad to see the original roof going away um And my comment would really be on the roof would be, I think that we're moving more toward an awareness and a preference on lighter colored roofs for a lot of the sustainability and comfort levels of the homeowner, as well as the heat island effect of the neighborhoods. And everyone has their color preferences. That's a pretty dark roof. But we're adding that to preferences, looking at it more carefully, and just be aware of the cost of having a dark tile roof, which I think transfers the heat into the house even more than your clay or slate, which will hold the heat on the roof itself. So the darker you go, the more of that kind of an effect you might have without anticipating that. The other question I had, I think last time we talked about for your neighbors that putting landscape screening between The carport and the neighboring yards are you still says something you're still planning on doing.

yeah we will come to an arrangement separately, I think that if that's okay with them

okay yeah that sounds good everyone's comfortable with that okay thanks.

Any comments from the audience.

I don't have chat GPT here to help out. But I just wanted to say, so we're the name. Bob Mecham. So we're the neighbors to the east of the property we're talking about. And we would be most affected by the carport. And we had some questions about the carport when we first heard about it. But I must say that after looking at the drawings, the architectural drawings and hearing the discussion here, we really have no objections to that. and we just wanted to let you know that um we're behind the project and the the renovation so they've talked about really have no uh idea about what roof color we would want that we're going to be looking at but i'll leave that up to you guys thanks thank you

any one online no Well, from our discussion, from what Blair and Susan said, now I think I would agree that the red would be more consistent with what you have right now. And it is a lighter color than the Sherwood Forest, a little bit. I'm not sure how much. You may want to take that into consideration.

Yeah, that's fair. One thing to note is that we are going with the dark Tudor trim. Right now, the house has sort of a weird teal Tudor trim that came from the previous owner. So we're trying to make it look more classic. And I think that's one of our biggest concerns. For example, in this picture on the back of this thing, I don't know. I don't want to mess everything up again, but it is sort of a bluish trim that goes along with this picture that they're showing here. And You know, I think the red with the sort of bluish trim kind of works. But I think we would prefer the more classic dark brown Tudor trim. And my wife and I do think that the green does go better with that look. I guess it's a matter of personal preference and taste. And again, she's a green roof person since the time she was little. Yeah.

I would recommend have your contractor build a mock-up board and put it up on your roof. So have the green or have the red, have that color there with some of the trim, put it up at roof height, and then look at it and see which one you actually like with that. Because the rendering makes it look very different, I think, than what it will look in person. And you want to make sure that that is actually the way that you like it.

Okay. Yeah, no, that's a great idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

I think that also applies just to that picture as well. As a designer who picks out colors and does this a lot, I don't really have much faith in those pictures. So like I said, I like the red.

Okay. Well, from our discussion, I think we need to decide what to recommend on the roof color. or should we leave it up to them? Is there anything?

I guess I'll chime in. I don't want to disagree too much. Unfortunately, I think red shingle roofs are used by people that are trying to make a roof look like an old tile roof. And it's clearly not an old tile roof anymore if the existing roof is being removed. So I would prefer a darker, grayer color than red. That's just

Jeff talking. I don't know how you all... That would also go along with the change in the trim color you were talking about. Yeah.

I'll say this, even though I profess my own love for Red Roof. In these situations, I just look and I'm like, is the choice going to be disruptive? Is it going to really cause a problem? Even if it wouldn't be my number one option, is it something that's still relatively going to flow with the neighborhood? I feel like the green is not going to massively disrupt anything, so... even if it wouldn't necessarily be my first choice, I don't see enough personally to step in the way of that decision. I

was actually going to say the same thing. I agree. I mean, I think if you want to go with the green, we gave our color choices, what have you, but I would agree.

Let me throw out one other thing that Susan brought up and that was about the heat retention of the dark colors. I replaced my roof. It was damaged in the tornado a year ago. But my house is relatively new, so I always had an asphalt shingle. But we went from a very, very dark roof to a much lighter roof. And even though we had a very hot summer, we had a lower air conditioning cost. And it was terrible. It was really surprising. I didn't realize how much different it would be. So I'm glad you brought that up.

You can look at it online, and I agree it should be your choice on this, but you're going to see a temperature change if you look at what the difference is in the types of roofs.

I certainly appreciate the point. And yeah, I mean, you know, electric bills only seem to go up every year. So it is certainly a consideration that we'll take under advisement for sure. Thank you guys so much.

Okay, we do have a staff recommendation that we all know about the shingle roof material. And it's being recommended that we approve a specific color. And what I think I'm hearing is that the color we're looking at right here, which is Sherwood Forest, is what you're recommending. I think we're in agreement. Okay. Do we have a motion? Or, I'm sorry, do we need to talk about any of the other minor details, which were mainly the stone base? Where is everyone comfortable?

Did chat GPT go through? Oh, okay.

It changed the color, but the size is more in line.

Yeah. I was going to say, while we're talking about things, let's just say that this one isn't accurate either. So it's just a different type of inaccurate than what we had before.

Yeah. I would say next time, if you can get a sample where they show several rows of the shingle, And then, you know, ask for the color that you want. Because what they gave you isn't really doesn't show us enough of the pattern. But if you don't ask, that's a cheaper board to produce. So that's what they tried to convince you will work. I'm

hoping there's not a next time, right? Well,

yeah.

Is there any consideration that you would give to repairing the clay tile roof and doing a complimentary material on the carriage house like a standing C metal

roof? Based on the quote that we got, I don't think so. I think repairing the roof would still be prohibitive. Prohibitive. Yeah. Okay. And again, like it still wouldn't be an exact match. And if you'd see, you know, if it would be on the side of the house or anything like that, I mean,

well, no, by complimentary. I mean, if you were doing a standing seam, like a dark bronze.

No, I, I, I get that. I'm saying with regard to the repaired sections, if any were visible from the street, they might stand

up. Yeah. There. Yeah. Mountain city is one. Yeah.

Any further comments? Go to a motion.

Okay, I move to approve as submitted with the roofing material being carriage house Sherwood forest as shown to us.

Second all in favor. Opposed. Okay. Thank you. Good luck with it.

Thank you so much.

We'll appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you guys.

Okay, we've come to our discussion session early in the meeting.

All righty. So we're going to do a little update on landscape regulation, just kind of give you an idea of where we're at in the timeline and going forward where we're at with this project. So in this, I tried to keep it pretty concise, probably got like eight slides here, but we'll run through the timeline. What are our comp plan findings? What does our landscape review process look like right now? We'll again touch on that report from Brad Goss, and then I'll kind of give you a summary list of changes that we're looking at. If I can get this out of the way. There we go. All righty, so our complaint was adopted in about Q2 of 2024. This is calendar year quarters whenever I reference this, not the city's fiscal year. But then around Q4 of 25 was whenever Brad Goss presented his work to the Planning Commission and to the City Council, which kind of started to kick off this process. It was related and tangential, but it was... It wasn't his work was not through our comprehensive planning process, but had enough overlap that it was kind of a nice kickoff to this work that we were doing here. And so around Q2 of this year, staff started to look at the work that he did, took a look at our existing procedures and started to kind of put together what that evolution of landscape regulations was going to look like. Got to Q3 of this year is whenever we actually started to draft what those new regulations are going to look like. So the first draft of that is ready. We're not going to go over that tonight because right now the process there are two in this Q4 is we're going to start working with our consultant to sort of refine what that looks like so we make sure we have a good product to come back in Q1 of 2027 with you guys.

Ryan, for those that may not know who Brad Goss is,

Susan, you probably give a better description than I can. I

say that. Yeah, of

course.

So Brad was a prominent attorney in town. In his retirement, he's taken up horticulture and landscaping. I'm sure there's a better name for it and gotten different degrees and now has a company where he does this full time. He, as his internship in getting his degrees, was the intern for the city's sustainability advisory committee and did a lot of research and advised us a lot on cornerstone species and the diversity that we need in our tree line to keep, not only bring back, especially with the tornado, to bring back habitat and to keep the health of all the trees and the undergrowth and everything else. So he then shared that all with the city as we continued to move forward. that type of long-term tree replacement and tree plants and habitat life.

And I also understand that during retirement, he volunteers for the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Quite an active guy and making quite an impact. So pretty impressive. Thanks.

Thank you.

And so getting into our comp plan findings here related towards landscape, a lot of the landscape findings focused mostly on trees. There's a little bit in our current regulations that kind of touch on understory plantings, but most of the feedback that we got was tree related. Our current policies tend to be more progressive or tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve than a lot of peer communities. The example I always love to give is whenever I was lucky enough to go to Detroit this year for the National Planting Conference. I went to a session on what New Jeffery Yorg City is doing, hoping to learn something new. They were doing a lot of the stuff that Clayton's been doing since about 2016. So that was really cool to see for this community. Other feedback, residents highly value their canopy coverage and support planting more trees. When we did an analysis of where canopy coverage was, we found that most properties don't actually meet the canopy coverage goals. Canopy coverage is decentralized, so it's not like there's trends in where you're going to find it and where you're not going to find it. There were concerns about, you know, the impact of new construction on trees. And then during the comp plan process, the consultants that we worked with, they would often ask residents about trade-offs. You know, would you support, you know, fewer trees if it meant getting X? Would you support more trees if it meant losing something over here? And the consistent feedback from residents was that for sustainable practices like our landscape regulations, there shouldn't have to be trade-offs in these aspects. It should just be standard whenever it comes to the development process. And so that yielded these goals and key results under our housing and neighborhood objectives. Our neighborhood development patterns embody sustainable principles and seek to minimize impacts on the natural environment and plan for future resilience. They got these two key results, prioritizing green space trees and sustainability in residential neighborhoods to retain existing character, and then reviewing the tree and landscape regulations to further protect and enhance the existing neighborhood tree canopy, especially during construction activities. So right now, our landscape review process is triggered by site plan review, special development districts or planned unit developments. So that's largely going to be your new construction or your larger additions. And that kind of yields these two things that you see on the right here. They have to provide us a landscape plan showing, you know, what are they removing in terms of tree and landscape? What are they adding? What kind of tree protection are they putting in? And then what that's going to do whenever they give us all that information, we give them an Excel chart that is automated. And so they put on all that information and it automatically kicks out whether or not they're meeting all of their minimum requirements for this landscape plan. If they are, you see that little green box down on the right there. It shows how much over the canopy coverage the goal they're going to be at. If they don't meet their goals, it's going to show under it's going to highlight red. And then something that we've started to integrate more and more into our reviews is viability of these proposals. As these sites get tighter, as houses get bigger, as coverage has increased over time, there's sort of been a pattern that's been observed of just trying to fill the site with plantings so that way they meet their goals. We're constantly running into this issue of is that viable? So now we really have to think about, yes, we have these canopy coverage goals. Are they just trying to meet the requirement or is this project actually viable?

And so getting into our comp plan findings here related towards landscape, a lot of the landscape findings focused mostly on trees. There's a little bit in our current regulations that kind of touch on understory plantings, but most of the feedback that we got was tree related. Our current policies tend to be more progressive or tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve than a lot of peer communities. The example I always love to give is whenever I was lucky enough to go to Detroit this year for the National Planting Conference. I went to a session on what New York City is doing, hoping to learn something new. They were doing a lot of the stuff that Clayton's been doing since about 2016. So that was really cool to see for this community. Other feedback, residents highly value their canopy coverage and support planting more trees. When we did an analysis of where canopy coverage was, we found that most properties don't actually meet the canopy coverage goals. Canopy coverage is decentralized, so it's not like there's trends in where you're going to find it and where you're not going to find it. There were concerns about, you know, the impact of new construction on trees. And then during the comp plan process, the consultants that we worked with, they would often ask residents about trade-offs. You know, would you support, you know, fewer trees if it meant getting X? Would you support more trees if it meant losing something over here? And the consistent feedback from residents was that for sustainable practices like our landscape regulations, there shouldn't have to be trade-offs in these aspects. It should just be standard whenever it comes to the development process. And so that yielded these goals and key results under our housing and neighborhood objectives. Our neighborhood development patterns embody sustainable principles and seek to minimize impacts on the natural environment and plan for future resilience. They got these two key results, prioritizing green space trees and sustainability in residential neighborhoods to retain existing character, and then reviewing the tree and landscape regulations to further protect and enhance the existing neighborhood tree canopy, especially during construction activities. So right now, our landscape review process is triggered by site plan review, special development districts or planned unit developments. So that's largely going to be your new construction or your larger additions. And that kind of yields these two things that you see on the right here. They have to provide us a landscape plan showing, you know, what are they removing in terms of tree and landscape? What are they adding? What kind of tree protection are they putting in? And then what that's going to do whenever they give us all that information, we give them an Excel chart that is automated. And so they put on all that information and it automatically kicks out whether or not they're meeting all of their minimum requirements for this landscape plan. If they are, you see that little green box down on the right there. It shows how much over the canopy coverage the goal they're going to be at. If they don't meet their goals, it's going to show under it's going to highlight red. And then something that we've started to integrate more and more into our reviews is viability of these proposals. As these sites get tighter, as houses get bigger, as coverage has increased over time, there's sort of been a pattern that's been observed of just trying to fill the site with plantings so that way they meet their goals. We're constantly running into this issue of is that viable? So now we really have to think about, yes, we have these canopy coverage goals. Are they just trying to meet the requirement or is this project actually viable?

Hey, Ryan, when you say viable, do you mean like long-term viability in the sense of like, I mean, I'm speaking, I guess on like our house and Clayton gardens, the builders knew exactly what to put in to get through. And then it like all died within five years. And is that kind of what you're talking about? The viability of it?

Yeah. So something I've kind of run into more and more on newer developments is all, you know, I'll have a conversation with the developer's landscape architect and say, okay, I understand that you're meeting these candidate coverage goals. You're trying to put a large deciduous tree in the five-foot setback of a house. is this going to work out? And, you know, they'll be honest with me. They'll be like, you know, no, this probably isn't the most viable proposal. Okay. You know, I'm inclined to support maybe something that doesn't meet the canopy coverage. If it means that these proposals are viable, ideally we get something that meets our goals and is viable to begin with, but our regulations as they currently are, do not always support that process or incentivize that process.

Hey, Ryan. I don't have an answer or know how to deal with what I'm going to say, but I think that one of the things in putting these regulations in and or the management that you are – the oversight that you're seeing in terms of the plans coming in – I find over time with houses that people are doing, you know, as Chris said, yes, but also not necessarily taking into consideration their neighbors. And so I think that this... For me, I feel like this is a problem that we have and that we're sort of looking at our lot as a single lot versus the landscaping that's next door. I mean, I feel that exact same way with the water retention and with the issues that we have with water right now and that a lot of these engineers are coming in and literally just looking at the site without taking into consideration the sites around them. And so I don't really know how to... manage that situation. But I do think it is really important that we are taking into consideration when you are putting trees in, how that applies to the lots next to it.

Absolutely. And that's a challenge that we see pretty consistently where, you know, the first round of a landscape plan doesn't show any neighboring trees. And then we're like, hey, we can look on Google Maps and see that, you know, there's a giant tree next door. They put that tree in and you see that the critical structural root zones go, you know, half of it's on the subject property. So that's definitely a challenge that we run into and have to manage sometimes. We already touched a little bit on this with a report from Brad Goss, but he did a lot of really important legwork that was very, very helpful to this process. And he evaluated Clayton's existing regulations, compared it to some of our peer communities, looked at the Morton Arboretum, which is kind of like the gold standard for trees out there. identified a lot of inconsistencies and gaps and strengths in those peer communities. And then he provided us a series of recommendations. The biggest point to kind of take away from his recommendations is that he pivoted towards keystone species. I am not a landscape expert. Brad knows this significantly better than me, but the general idea being that not all trees are created equally. There are going to be some trees that support the sort of life cycle and food chain ecosystems better than others. You might have a tree that supports, you know, five insects. You might have a three that supports 100 insects. Those insects, you know, feed into the bird populations and feeds into pollinators. There's things that, you know, there's trees that you can put into a community that are going to have a greater impact on the broader ecosystem. And so this is just a quick bullet point of proposed changes that we've kind of gotten our first draft that we're going to start going over with our landscape consultants. First, as we're sort of revising our broader intent with this section, because right now the intent is good. It's to preserve the canopy coverage, but we're making a slight pivot. We're not losing that canopy coverage element, but we're having a little bit more of that ecological focus into those keystone species. we're kind of consolidating and moving around some sections. Right now in our regulations, our definitions and our calculations are kind of scattered about. If you remember from some of the recent residential or commercial rezoning that we did, we might've been able to get those sections down to like you know, 3000 words or something. And it comes out to five pages and is really nice. This is a really long and dense section. So we're trying to find ways to sort of streamline it a little bit, but that is proving to be a little bit of a challenge. There's just so much in there. We're also making some updates to our definitions to reflect the direction of the code. We're updating our ANSI references. Those are the references for the standards for plantings, doing some consolidations. We're moving our native minimum from 33% to 66%, so going from a third to two thirds native required. The big one's going to be a requirement that 75% of the trees be keystone species. We have drafted a revised approved tree list, and I assure you there is an abundance of keystone species. I don't think that's going to limit a homeowner's choice whatsoever. And it's probably going to have, you could probably leave the native requirement as what it was, and just the keystone requirement alone is going to add in so many great native options.

Does the state of Missouri list the keystone trees or is it different?

There's a couple of different references. I'd have to go back and look through the draft regulations of the specific reference, but Brad Goss made the reference and our landscape consultant will double check that. But Missouri Department of Conservation or you know, other authorities on this topic that have that knowledge that we will need. We're adding a minimum requirement for native plantings. So we're not going to go into sort of the same in-depth requirements that we do for trees, because for trees we're tracking the location of everything. But we don't really address those understory plantings. You can kind of just do whatever. And so right now our regulation just says you should have native plantings. It doesn't have any teeth to it. It doesn't So we're just saying that, hey, a third of those plants that you put on your property that are not the trees, that are not the grass, we would like a third of those to be native. I think the biggest one that is going to really have an impact is the canopy deficit fee being revised. Right now, we're looking at a jump to $2 per square foot. Right now, it's about $0.60. To kind of explain how we got there, at first, I was just looking at inflation adjusted. Inflation adjusted, so that $0.60 was set at 2016. If we did inflation adjusted, it would be about $0.84. My observation that that was probably not going to be significant enough. A couple of examples would be 121 Topton. That is a great example of a property in which they reduced the amount of plantings on their property because it was getting too crowded and it was not going to be viable. They had an 804 square foot deficit. Their fee at the time of approval for their deficit was $482. If inflation adjusted, that would be $675. If you bump it up to $2 per square foot deficit, it goes up to about $1,600. Another example was 515 South Central. That was a property where the the builders, the homeowners just said, we just don't want any trees on the property. Their fee was nine hundred seventy one dollars inflation adjusted. That's about thirteen hundred. If you pump it up to two bucks per square foot of canopy coverage, that comes out to about thirty two hundred dollars. What we're observing right now is that whenever you're building a, we don't have to be naive about it. A one point something, a two point something million dollar house, the 500 to thousand dollar fee is not really gonna move the needle much. Couldn't tell you whether or not, you know, a $3,000 fee is going to move the needle much, but it's going to have more of an impact and it's going to be invested well with the city to make sure that there's plantings that occur in other places.

Ryan, excuse me. Um, I'm late to the game here, so obviously this already happened. Why do we have such a thing? Basically, you're saying for a small fee, you can ignore the requirements. I hate to put it that way, but yeah. Why would our new... regulations even include such a thing. Why wouldn't we just make people do what we're asking them to do?

There's a lot of nuance to these sites. I think it would probably be a little bit impractical to say that you have to meet 100% all the time the canopy coverage goals. Now, I will say that there's plenty of sites. I would say the vast majority of sites where they do meet that goal. I would say that our trends with folks who are not meeting that goal, it tends to be specific developers or maybe the one-off homeowner that's doing their own project that maybe what they want to do on the site is a little bit more personalized. We would navigate both of those processes very differently. We're a little bit more... accommodating to the taste of a personal homeowner when it's a you know a spec build we're probably a little bit less accommodating to that but there's just so much nuance on these sites uh that it's probably not viable every time to make sure we're always meeting canopy coverage but if they're not going to be canopy coverage we want to make sure that the city is getting properly compensated so that way new plantings can occur in other places

That also goes into, I think that what was mentioned earlier, the focus should be on the neighborhood feel. Like I asked you to pull, not too long ago, the Claverack Park canopy and what's happened. It's continued to decline over time. We're not meeting the city goals and it's continuing to come down how much canopy that we still have. Yet we still call ourselves Claverack Park. So if we look at the whole area, and there's got to be a true disincentive. Those numbers have to be higher, and the circumstances where it's allowed have to be pretty, a little harder to me to keep the neighborhood feels that we all want. We talk about character and everything else, so.

Ryan, two questions here. The canopy, is that fee annually or just when you're going through this approval process?

That's just when you go through site plan review. So if this board approves a site plan review application that has a canopy deficit, when they go to apply for their building permit, I add an extra fee that is labeled forestry fund. So that way they have to pay that extra fee and that gets allocated to a forestry fund for the city to go plant trees and other places.

Okay, that sort of negates my second question. But is that something that we could evaluate, you know, annually until they change? I mean, to Jeff's point, is that something that just charge extra fees so that, you know, manually to those people? And then I would also, my next part of the question was, you know, so this only applies to people going through this process. So nobody is... I can't, I've literally just lost that word. Retroactive, thank you. You know, properties aren't retroactively billed or anything.

So there's a little bit of retroactive. So within the past year, like if somebody clear cuts a site within 12 months of development, that has to be accounted for. Otherwise, they're just essentially assessed as having to start from scratch on this canopy coverage calculation. And that's a little bit more difficult from developers. So they're usually pretty accommodating about if they do clear cut sites before development starts. that they be sure to calculate and document everything properly as to what they're going to need. I think it would be pretty challenging to have an annual or recurring fee because you would need some kind of mechanism to essentially process that and track that, and we just unfortunately don't have the staff capacity to do something like that.

I can say too, and I definitely agree with you guys as far as if we're talking about just like, is this fee alone a disincentive enough to not go in that direction? And no, it's probably not, as we said. But I feel like in a lot of what we have seen, it's... I think a lot of times there is nuance to it. It's not necessarily someone saying, oh, we just want to clear cut the lot and we don't want trees. And I think that's where we come in on site plan review, where we don't have to approve that site plan. You know, if someone just says, oh, you know, we're willing to let's give an inflated, we're willing pay $10,000 into the fund. We just don't want trees on this lot. And that's what we're going to do. You know, we don't have lack of canopy coverage is not good for the neighborhood or not good for Clayton. So you know, is this deficit fee going to have teeth on its own? No, probably not. But then that also gives us the wiggle room to, you know, have those situations where, you know, we just have to be the bad guy rather than the fee in those cases.

Is $2 realistic in the sense of, I mean, I think it's definitely not a disincentive to do it. And I just wonder if there's, if it was $20, would it be a disincentve with, or something where like, it's so much that they really have to think, do we really want to do this? And then it comes for site plan and we can wave that, you know, and say, well, it seems like in this situation, we understand why you're taking down that tree and you're trying to do your best there. But I think at $1,000, $1,300, just what you're saying, if you're building a million-dollar house, it's not even a slap on the wrist. It's like a sting of a mosquito.

I mean, we can investigate a variety of options. What we always want to make sure that we're doing is we're kind of balancing the rational nexus of the fee that we are charging. We don't want to go, I would say, too far off the deep end to such a degree that... there's not a clear relationship between that deficit charge and where that funding is going. I do think it's going to have an impact. We're probably going to see examples where somebody says, I don't care, I'll pay the $3,000 fee. But given the situation of the city, especially post-tornado, I think that an increase of that fee beyond inflation adjusted is justified.

And I think the fee should also match the city priority of canopy. It's not just what will cost us to go out and plant another tree somewhere else. If we want it to be a disincentive, that's a city priority that we should be enforcing.

Absolutely. At the same time, on the opposite side of that, if we have a fee that's too high and we're constantly waiving that, we're creating more work for ourselves in the sense of that a lot of how this is being structured for these new regulations is to allow stuff to kind of... This sounds negative, but sail through a little more cleanly rather than litigate each individual thing. So it's... I feel for you, Ryan, because I know that these things are very difficult. And when you're adjusting something like that, it's an art, not a science. Definitely.

I don't think the actual dollar value of the deficit fee really makes that much difference due to the cost of construction. But had you considered maybe a rising fee depending on the percentage of canopy removed? In other words, if someone takes out 10% of the existing canopy as opposed to a 80%. Maybe there should be a differential in the cost there.

That's an interesting idea. We can definitely take a look at that. Absolutely. We can definitely keep talking about this if you guys want to. I just want to make sure that we get through our last couple of slides here and our last couple of points. Something I think that folks are going to be very interested in is that we're looking at the addition of a lawn slash turf alternative section. And so that's going to be what if somebody proposes something alternative to just your standard grass planting? There's a lot of benefits to lawn alternatives. I think we kind of saw some examples of this during the tornado. I remember walking some of those streets and you would see, gosh, when a tree came out of the ground, it pulled grass up like a rug. Why is that? Well, when you have grass planted that is not originally native to Missouri, which most of our grass that you see in a traditional neighborhood is not actually, it's probably going to have a root depth. It's definitely going to be less than six inches or less than a foot. Absolutely. Some native Missouri grasses get very, very deep. It is very sturdy. It does a good job of holding that ground down and it does a very, very good job of breaking up clay soil like is commonly found in Clayton and bringing water down into the soil. So there's a lot of benefit to that. Now, we're not going to go off the deep end with this. Just kind of want to be frank that we're not going see an overnight change of everybody getting rid of their grass in favor of something else. But we want to start to provide those mechanisms to introduce it into the community in a way that is tasteful and appropriate in Clayton to kind of, you know, sort of baby step that change in, in a way that's going to be appropriate.

When you say turf, is that a man-made product?

Not astroturf. So turf can refer to any, it can refer to a variety of ground cover. I like to use the example of Blair's Buffalo grass as a great alternative to your maybe standard Kentucky bluegrass kind of planting. So next steps that we're looking at is I actually have a meeting tomorrow with our landscape consultant. We're going to kick off that review. I also want to check in with our sustainability committee because they have some ideas about turf alternatives and stuff that I think are going to be very, very helpful. We just want to make sure we have a refined product whenever I talk to them. There's probably going to be one to two months of that consultant feedback on the staff revisions. And then I hope to present you guys a final product in Q1 of 2027. Now there is one more thing, one slide just to share with you guys. Shortly in the next little bit, we're gonna be kicking off what I'd like to call residential part two. There were a lot of great things we got to look at with the new residential unified development code, which was approved last week by the city council, but it didn't tackle everything. We want to look at our overlay districts because there were a lot of, a lot of our infill design guidelines were modeled on successful aspects of those overlay and urban design districts. So now we need to look at Are there aspects of those existing urban design districts that need to be updated since we have that reinforced-based zoning? Are they still serving their function? Is there an urban design district that maybe needs to go away or to be added somewhere else? That's something we want to look at. We want to look at our residential density and maximums. That kind of encompasses two points. There's been a lot of discussion about... concern for consolidating lots and maybe unnecessarily tearing down your neighbor's property to build a larger estate. I've seen at least three examples of that in the four years that I've been with Clayton, and I can't say that every time we saw that it was the most loved by this board here. So that's something we're going to take a look at. Townhouses and villas, that's one that we need to refine a little bit. But the comprehensive plan talked about, is there a way that we can start to introduce into the zoning code ways to do like zero lot line? But I mean, like no side setback townhome style developments to maybe provide a little bit more dense option that is still within maybe like an appropriate single family character of a lot of neighborhoods. We're not talking about introducing that in all the zoning districts, but just evaluating is there a space where that might be appropriate. And then we want to look at the preservation of our affordable residential structures. I think we saw, whenever we had our conversations about R5 not too long ago, what are the incentives that might cause somebody to think about redeveloping their property? And is that something that we always want to see, especially in a neighborhood like maybe High Point to Munn or the Morelands? How do we create mechanisms where we're reinforcing the preservation of those historic and maybe more affordable structures? All right, that's all I have.

Quite a lot.

Yeah.

And we aren't even into the details yet. Well, that was a quick sort of introduction, let's call it. I think we'll all look forward to seeing where we go with all the details. Good work. Nice graphics.

Appreciate it.

Steve, could I throw in one other thing? Back to residential. I'm glad you checked in with the Sustainability Committee. Are the updated regulations looking at climate change in a proactive way, whether that be water usage of the landscapes that are being approved and or when you get into native plants and or keystone species they're probably going to move but geographically because of what's going on there are do can these updated regulations deal with that help with that

Yeah, so the goal of the updated landscape regulations is that the references like NSI or Missouri Department of Conservation is that we're referencing you know, something that has longevity or that has the ability to change to some degree. There's a little bit of language right now in our current landscape regulations that if somebody proposes an alternative or, you know, we can take a look at that and see if, you know, maybe there's something that was added to our reference lists that, or something, sorry, something that we need to add to our reference list that maybe was approved by Missouri Department of Conservation or something. I think naturally over time, there's, there's just going to be some things that change and we'll need to make updates. But the goal of the, of the comprehensive plan was to sort of accommodate for those climate aspects that you're talking about. And sort of, this is sort of the, um, the, the, the second order consequence of that, of that examination of maybe some of the climate impacts is now we're taking a look at those specific goals that we can enact.

I can add a little bit to that. Um, with sustainability committees looking at, um, lot of these things and working with the city on that um it's it's interesting too even with the canopy we were just talking about if you go to areas that don't have shade i mean we we're all given this big book on shade you don't have shade the temperature differences the you can go to life expectancy is all this and just the importance of that one of the things that we're looking at as well with the um the lot consolidation is something that's come up because that's raised a lot of eyebrows around our our city um The other one is we sit here and we regulate the trees and everything that are planted with any type of construction. That's coming for this board, but what about my neighbor who's taking down the 125-year-old tree? What do we do about that? What do we with existing properties? And so I know that Deb Grossman and some other people on the committee have identified cities that have ordinances to control these same types of issues on existing properties and whether they're fit for us or not, I don't know yet, but that's one of the things that's being looked at as well.

Hi, a question about the native plants, and I'm drawing like bar models and graphs and stuff on here. One thing maybe to, you say that 66% is native and then 75% of of the natives has to be keystone

is that correct it doesn't have to be that 75 percent of the native plantings are keystones that you've got two requirements right there one is that at least for all the trees that you're planting at least two-thirds of them need to be native to missouri and then at least you know three-fourths of them have to be a keystone species

Are keystone species in Missouri all native?

Not always. I would say most of them are, but there are some examples of some trees that fit into that keystone category, but maybe don't fit into the Missouri native category.

Okay. So you can have a native and that's not a keystone. You can have a keystone that's not native. And then how do I know if I was building, how would I know how many that I have to plant?

So whenever somebody starts the development process, we provide them that Excel chart I discussed earlier. And their landscape architect or certified arborist is going to document all of the trees that they have on site. They're going to put in the size of those trees, the condition that they're in. They're going to mark if those trees are being removed, and it's going to calculate their deficit. From there, they go and they say, okay, I'm proposing X type of tree. Now, we have an approved tree list that categorizes trees based on small, medium, and large, and whether they're deciduous or evergreen. And so we kind of give a sort of a flat rate canopy coverage based on which of those categories they fall into, because that's the estimated canopy that they would provide at their maturity. I think it's maybe like 750 square feet for a large deciduous tree or something like that. And so then they put in all the trees that they're going to plant and it automatically calculates for them. Are they meeting their native requirement? Are they meeting their canopy coverage requirement?

A wealth of knowledge, my man. Thank you.

I've had to spend a lot of

time looking

at these regulations

lately. By the way, do we know, or you may not know this, with what Concordia is proposing on their site, would it meet these updated

regulations or not? It's a little bit of a different thing with Concordia because they are a non-residential use. Oh, this is the only one. I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah. And so we're not actually proposing any changes to their requirements. So if somebody is a non-residentiary use in a residential zoning district like our universities or other institutions that we have in town, they are based on caliper inches, not canopy coverage, which is the actual, forget it, maybe it's like the diameter of the tree or the circumference or something like that. If you remove a caliper inch, you have to replace a caliper inch. And that's not at maturity of the tree. And so if you take out one tree that has a ton of caliper inches, you're going to have to plant a bunch of tiny trees. That's a really big disincentive to do that. And so what we've seen before for properties like whether it's WashU or Concordia, when they take out trees, they have to plant a ton more or they're paying a really, really big fee. That model seems to be working for those properties. We're not really looking at changing that at this time.

And this is single-family residential then? Is that what you're saying? Because isn't the Concordia site still quote-unquote residential?

It's zoned for residential, but it's technically a non-residential use in a residential zoning district. Okay. Okay. Thanks.

bringing

this up they're replacing everything that's coming out but in the one two three stages of their development right so but they are hopefully putting everything caliper back so

other comments great work ryan appreciate it keep going

i'll do my best

Okay. Jeff, any further comments? Nope, I'm good. Thanks. Claire?

Nothing for me, thanks.

Chris?

No, thank you.

Tim? I'll try and be quick. I think we're to the point that we need to start addressing AI renderings because every single submission we're having problems with. And I personally don't like... the excuses that we're getting of, well, this is just the limitations of the software. Maybe I'm just being a fuddy-duddy, but I think back to design school and if I would have stood up there in front of the class and said, well, just the limitations of SketchUp and Enscape prevent me from presenting a realistic project, I would have been absolutely eviscerated. And I think in a lot of these cases, it's just the cheap, easy way to go about it. And we're sacrificing like what a project actually looks like. So I don't think that we necessarily need to put like huge teeth into this, but like today when basically they did a rendering and then they said, well, you know, it doesn't look like it, but they asked for a rendering, you know, and in the time he was standing up there, he was able to Yeah, it's going to take a little more time. If we go backwards in time a year and a half before people were doing these type of renderings, it took someone on SketchUp a long time to do this. And they're saving a lot of money in that process. So at least they can revise a couple times. I think we need to just up that standard a little bit since we're seeing it being a reoccurring problem.

To go along with that, I think we should require that we get the actual material to see the color, the texture, the size of it.

Because yes, like today that size was fixed, but if you saw there was the color range, you know, varied like a few, like, you know, three different shades across the roof, which is going to look dramatically different than a straight green roof. So just some food for thought.

Totally agree, by the way. I mean, yeah, as you said, multiple projects, including the restaurant across the street, they're showing us renderings that are not in reality what the project was going to look like. Renderings need to be realistic

well and the problem that it's not just that we're being presented it's it's we're being told well it's impossible to have a rendering exactly like our project's going to look and we all know that it's not impossible it's it's not impossible to do it exactly the way you want to do it with the software that you're doing it with but that doesn't mean that that should be the standard that we accept

i agree nothing further to add

there's some

A lot of sense. Nothing more. Thanks.

Obi?

Nothing for me.

Brian? Two things really quick. One is Ana and I have actually started to have some of those conversations about we probably need some guidelines around AI submissions for the exact reasons that you all have talked about. We're seeing that so much more and more. The thing is, we've got two meetings left this year. One's going to be on the 16th of this month and then another one December 14th. We've only got one in December. I've got physical copies of next year's schedule. If anybody would like them, I'll also make sure to email them to you whenever we do our next agenda packet. That's all I got.

Stephanie, thanks for joining us. Okay. Well, we will see everyone on the 19th and we're adjourned.