Dan DeGeest's Council Review

Hello Friends,

I hope everyone was outside enjoying the lovely spring weather and the Pink Moon last Tuesday while City Council convened for another four hours.  Please see below for comments and as always thanks for reading.

Dan DeGeest>>

The Ames City Council for April 11, 2017. The agenda included:

• 40. Hearing on zoning text amendment relating to solar energy systems in General Industrial zoned areas. (Video)
  ​At a recent Council meeting, we directed staff to draft a text amendment to change rules for solar arrays in areas zoned General Industrial. The existing standard only allows for solar installations of a maximum of 6 feet tall in side and rear yards, and 4 ft tall installations w/ receipt of special use permit in front yards. If approved, the new standard will be 20 ft. for all areas, and will no longer require a special use permit for front installations. P&Z reviewed and voted 4-0 to recommend approval.
  
  No major concerns here and motion approving the amendment passed 6-0.

• 45. Staff Report regarding Lincoln Corridor Plan. (Video)
  ​The Lincoln Way Corridor Study has been underway for over a year now, and Tuesday's meeting will involve a presentation by consultants Houseal & Lavigne. Council will then be asked to provide direction on finalizing the plan and priorities for implementation. If you remember from the April 2016 workshop, the consultants have worked on recommendations for five key areas:
  -Downtown Gateway
  ​-Lincoln Way and Grand Ave.
  ​-Oak to Riverside
  ​-Campustown Transition (West of Campus)
  -West Hy-Vee Retail Area
  ​The consultants are back with this draft plan, which has recommendations for traffic improvements, appearance/landscaping, signage, housing density, and land use. Council will not yet be asked to approve the final plan, rather, the draft will be sent back for any modifications and then will return to us at a future meeting for final approval. As always, I welcome any input on this plan draft. Note: Public input will be taken at a future meeting, the purpose of this presentation is to bring everyone up to speed on the draft plan.
  
  Whoever worked in the marketing department and came up with the name "road diet" should be fired.  It is a terrible name for a well tested and proven transportation planning technique.  But just the mention of those two words gets people all up in arms, bringing folks out to the council meeting that I have never seen there before, who are incredulous that the solution to a problem might be to make something smarter, not bigger.  One concerned citizen talking against the lane reduction recommendation commented on how it took him "7 minutes" to make a left turn in this area - the exact problem this change would improve! As a long time advocate for multi-modal improvements and complete streets, I found this discussion incredibly frustrating.
  
  Road rechannelization (lane reductions, diets) have been shown to be very effective in certain situations and the consultant on the LWC project appropriately applied it to one section of the corridor.  In the Oak to Riverside area they noted that frequent left turns from the inner lanes effectively already reduce the 4 lane road to a 2-way road with long queues of traffic backed up behind the cars in the inner lanes trying to turn. Reconfiguring to 2 lanes with a center turn lane (4 to 3 lanes) mitigates this condition and the leftover space makes it possible to add dedicated bike lanes.  This sounds very appropriate for the one section of the study that has had the most public input and is adamant about maintaining its residential character and taking measures to not significantly increase density.  A road diet would calm traffic, increase bike and pedestrian mobility, and afford opportunity for landscaping and other visual interest.
  
  Invariably someone says something along the lines of "I'm concerned about game day".  Please, can we stop trying to do traffic planning based on a handful of home sports games each year.  Let's plan our transportation system for the other 361 days of the year and the people that live here and use it everyday.  Despite a lot of "concern" the City Traffic engineer, Damion Pregitzer, spoke in favor of the diet recommendation.  He mentioned that road diets are routinely prescribed for roads with up to 18,000 cars per day.  In fact the number is higher, 20-25K cars per day, a number not projected for this section of LW until 2040 or later (current load is well under 15,000 cars per day).  It is worth noting that in other sections of the corridor recommendations widening, adding lanes, changing intersections, and other treatments are suggested based on the unique circumstances in those locations.
  
  There were few other parts of the presentation that generated much discussion and overall it was generally agreed that the study was beneficial and well done.  However in the end no firm direction or action was taken to pursue any of the recommendations and the City Council chose to simply label it an "advisory document" 14 months in the making with a 6-0 vote.

• 46. Staff Report regarding Landscape Standards. (Video)
  After much work and consultation with developers, staff are presenting their recommendations for new landscaping standards. (Prior work to develop a points-based system was scrapped by Council in November of 2016, and staff were sent back to the drawing board.) The goal of these new standards is higher quality landscaping and greater sustainability, as opposed to the current standards which focus more on screening than aesthetics or quality.
  
  Here's the straight talk - our current ordinance exists to provide standards for hiding (the ordinance prefers "screening") all the parking lots the other building codes require.  It results in what you see on Duff - buildings set way back from the street with some evenly spaced, sad looking trees and shrubs that would make Bob Ross cringe, vainly trying to hide the ocean of asphalt. Staff spent huge amounts of time developing a totally new, point based landscape standards ordinance that emphasized overall site landscaping, resource conservation, and visual interest.  The points system for meeting compliance gave developers a lot flexibility on how and which items they pursued to get an approved site plan.  They balked and that plan got scrapped and now City Staff was back with a watered down version hoping to find consensus.
  
  Here is an idea.  Let's just embrace that some parts of our City are, well, a City.  They are urban, they have roads, concrete, brick - they are not parks, gardens, or playgrounds.  You know that strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk?  It's always a mess and honestly a waste of time and gas to maintain.  We might be better served by changes that would require parking to go behind or under buildings.  Bring the buildings back to the front of the lot, create some design standards that result in the buildings being the visual interest, not some pathetic shrub struggling to even survive.

• 47. Staff Report regarding text amendment for definition of pre-existing two-family homes. (Video)
  ​Council directed Planning staff to better define "pre-existing" as it relates to two-family homes, as the current interpretation is not clear enough. Apparently, staff are often asked if a potential home buyer could convert a single-family house to a two-family dwelling, for rental purposes. If the house was a "pre-existing" two-family unit, this is allowable, but there was a time when some houses were allowed to be converted even if they didn't meet certain code requirements for two-unit properties. Staff wants to clarify that only those properties meeting code requirements for two-family units are convertible.
  
  Motion approving text amendment passed 6-0.