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PC 2012 12 04 CHANHASSEN PLANNING COMMISSION REGULAR MEETING DECEMBER 4, 2012 Chairman Aller called the meeting to order at 7:00 p.m. MEMBERS PRESENT: Andrew Aller, Mark Undestad, Kathleen Thomas, Lisa Hokkanen, and Kim Tennyson MEMBERS ABSENT: Bill Colopoulos STAFF PRESENT: Kate Aanenson, Community Development Director; Paul Oehme, City Engineer/Public Works Director; Bob Generous, Senior Planner; Sharmeen Al-Jaff, Senior Planner; and Alyson Fauske; Assistant City Engineer PUBLIC PRESENT: Diane & Lance Erickson 7735 Vasserman Trail Larry & Michaele Martin 7725 Vasserman Trail Bob Webber 7608 Ridgeview Way Cathy Meyer 7662 Ridgeview Way Ron Schuster 8001 Acorn Lane Gerald Wolfe 7755 Vasserman Trail Steve Sheldon 7711 Ridgeview Way Michael Wagner 17749 George Moran Drive, Eden Prairie Paul & Vera Brady 2028 Clover Court Charles Engh 7642 Prairie Flower Deborah Zorn 7574 Ridgeview Point Roger VanHaaften 2102 Clover Court David Windschitl 7620 Ridgeview Way Dan Beno 7563 Ridgeview Point Brad & Tamara Hodgins 7633 Ridgeview Way Andy Maus 7656 Ridgeview Way Charles Peterson 7496 Crocus Court Ron & Linda Solheim 7717 Vasserman Place James Denton 2305 Lukewood Drive Bob Schwartz 2507 Bridle Creek Trail Jim Boettcher 7476 Crocus Court Mary Olson 7461 Windmill Drive Norma May 2050 Clover Court Roger Remaley, President Walnut Grove Villas 2198 Baneberry Way West Del & Barb Vanderploeg 7706 Vasserman Kathryn Peterson 7713 Vasserman Place Carrie Webber 7608 Ridgeview Way Melissa Crow 7663 Ridgeview Way Don Dahlquist 7634 Prairie Flower Blvd Kathie Price 7569 Ridgeview Point Chuck & Loretta Goetzinger 7521 Windmill Drive Kevin Kemptgen 7662 Vasserman Trail Tim Pass 7650 Ridgeview Way Mary K. & Art Roberts 7762 Vasserman Place Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 Chris Hentges 7500 Windmill Drive Mike Benkovich 2352 Fawn Hill Court Mike Shields 7759 Vasserman Trail Larry Donlin 8038 Autumn Ridge Sarah Thomas 2555 Longacres Drive Chris & Julie Sibley 7683 Vasserman Trail Mike & Molly Aker 2131 Brinker Street Julie McGaughey 7175 Gunflint Trail Mary & Stan Valensky 7752 Vasserman Place Debby Tysdad 7661 Arboretum Village Lane Bill Guggemos 2165 Majestic Way Nora Stacey 7699 Ridgeview Way Josh Kimber 2060 Majestic Way Suzannah Armentrout 2420 Bridle Creek Trail Blake Gottschalk 2197 Majestic Way Mike Muffenbier 7675 Ridgeview Way Allen Bergren 7680 Ridgeview Way Dan Bock 7677 Vasserman Trail Joe & Eileen Kieffer 7602 Ridgeview Way Khai Train Chanhassen Lisa & Kreg Levine 1850 Lake Lucy Road Mike Hodges 8101 Pinewood Circle Mike Ryan 6835 Lake Harrison Circle Mark & Maureen Magnuson 7715 Vasserman Trail Brian & Patty Hugh 7441 Windmill Drive Sue & Jim Cantlin 7674 Ridgeview Way Abby Ellis 7284 Bent Bow Trail Steve & Debbie Ledbetter 7756 Vasserman Place Regina & E. Keith Deanes 7651 Ridgeview Way Scott Yager 2351 Hunter Drive Michael Hjermstad 2056 Waterleaf Lane West Elizabeth Kressler 1750 Valley Ridge Trail North Kate McGuire 7973 Autumn Ridge Lane Robert Ahrens 2351 Lukewood Drive PUBLIC HEARING: CHANHASSEN APARTMENTS: REQUEST FOR CONCEPT PLANNED UNIT DEVELOPMENT (PUD) FOR A 224-UNIT APARTMENT BUILDING ON 8.08 ACRES OF PROPERTY ZONED AGRICULTURAL ESTATE (A2) AND LOCATED AT 7750 GALPIN BOULEVARD (NORTHWEST CORNER OF HIGHWAY 4 AND GALPIN BOULEVARD). APPLICANT: OPPIDAN, INC. OWNER: AMERICANA COMMUNITY BANK- CHANHASSEN, PLANNING CASE 2012-18. Aanenson: Thank you Commissioner Aller, members of the Planning Commission. Again just another little introduction. I’m Kate Aanenson. I’m the Community Development Director. I’ve been here over 20 years. Also in attendance tonight is Paul Oehme, the City Engineer/Public Works Director. He will be addressing some of the technical engineering, traffic, utility section. Again just some formalities. This will be, the verbatim will be put out on You Tube. That should be available sometime tomorrow. If you want to find that site. It’s You Tube, City of Chanhassen, Minnesota. All one word. CityofChanhassenMinnesota so if you can’t find that you can contact the City. We’ll help you find that so you can watch the replay. Also we do do verbatim Minutes to go with the council packet but they will 2 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 not be done until Friday. We’ll have summary minutes. This item is scheduled to go to the City Council on Monday night so I also did receive additional comments, emails that were not included in your packet. I did, those were put out on the table and the Planning Commission did also receive those. They will be included in the packet. That packet will go out tomorrow. Also we did receive the petition. The full printout of the petition which was presented to the Planning Commission and I’m confident that that will be discussed tonight. A lot of my comments based on the presentation will also focus on some of the points that were in the petition too. Again the goal tonight is to give comments to the City Council. It’s a little bit less formalized than a regular project but to give direction to the council on how you would like to see this proceed. So with that, as you stated Chairman, this application is for a concept plan. If this project was to go forward the development plan, the application would also include a land use amendment from office to residential low density to residential high density and a rezoning to PUD, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we move through the slides. So the land use, the subject site again in black here. This is currently how it is guided. This was changed in the 2008 comprehensive plan. It is guided office on the southern 8 acres and low density residential on the northern 6 acres. As you can see surrounding it, the Vasserman area is guided low density. Then across the street we have the commercial piece with the gas station and the pharmacy and then the City Rec Center so the zoning on this property, it is zoned A2. It’s typically considered a holding zone for tax purposes. State law requires that when we rezone a piece of property it is consistent with the land use designation. Therefore for this project to proceed a land use designation needs to happen so before that all occurs the goal tonight and with the City Council is to give direction whether or not that would be something the applicant would pursue. So again the zoning, and there’s a lot of different land. A few different uses under the low density. For example on the Vasserman area it’s R-4 which allows for twins and singles and you’ve got medium density on some of the other surrounding projects around there so there’s a mix within there. The existing location th and subject site, again this road, West 78 Street splits the parcels and again we talked about the th neighborhood commercial in this area. There is a trail here to get underneath the frontage road, West 78 and then also to get underneath Highway 5 where there’s an elementary school and city park. I just wanted to just talk a couple minutes on the PUD concept and why we’re doing the PUD concept. Again the PUD concept is intended to gather information without a lot of expense on behalf of the developer because we are looking at a land use amendment, which the city does have a lot of discretion in doing a land use, and if you look at the level of discretion, the most discretion would be with the land use amendment. The least amount of discretion is when you have a building permit for something that’s entitled so with this project the PUD is intended to, without incurring a lot of expense, to review the project. Identify areas that may be of concern or give the developer direction so they would decide whether it’s a go or no go in this process. So I did include in your staff report the details of how the PUD process works. I also want to point out that we did amend the PUD process after a large PUD hearing that we had last year at this time because our PUD ordinance was set up in such a way that it required more legalistic recommendations, Findings of Fact which is not the direction we wanted to go. Certainly all these recommendations are forwarded on to the City Council and then it’s up to the developer, based on those comments, whether or not they choose to go forward or not without the binding of the city and of the legal implications of the Findings of Fact. So with that. Aller: And Kate when you say go forward it means, make a formal application to finalize the process. Aanenson: Correct. Based on the comments that are given, then it’s at their choosing to I think I’ve got some good feedback. I can make those changes. Or I’ve got good support or I don’t have enough support and make that, that would be up to the developer to choose what direction they want to go. So the challenge then, the staff did put some comments in, would be for the Planning Commission based on your comments, public input, and then the City Council input to direct this project. So the history of the site, I put that in the staff report. A quite lengthy history of the site. Of how it’s been used over the years. Most recently as I stated in 2008 we had a developer that wanted to put commercial. Worked really hard over probably over a year’s time to try to get commercial on the site. We, in the City of Chanhassen 3 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 really try hard to keep the, there is neighborhood support commercial which is a component of being able to get gas and convenience in the neighborhoods. If you look on the north side of the street, that’s how that’s set up to service those neighborhoods. The staff did not want to see commercial at this corner and recommended that it be kind of, as either a higher density or an office. The developer proposed a project that the City Council then did recommend, as we went through the comprehensive plan, to give it the office zoning on that north side. Excuse me, on that south side of the 8 acres. So in 2006 there was a concept plan that included 10 acres. There was a comment in that that project was denied. I just want to clarify for that. There was a project that came in as a PUD that did get conceptual approval and I can talk about that in a little bit more detail. This project here did come in for conceptual approval. It was denied. The residential came in by itself. The PUD was given conceptual. Again conceptual does not have legal standing. They still have to come back through the process. The project did come in on the north side for 12 units. That was denied, and it wasn’t denied for the density, and I have the Findings of Fact. This was a point in the petition. I just wanted to point out for the fact that the staff’s opinion is that we wanted to see it developed as an entire PUD. It was always our position, the staff position, similar to what we did on the gas station, Kwik Trip on the other side. We preserved that narrow strip on that north side. It was always our position to maximize development on the south side and preserve the north side, and that’s still our guiding principle today so that’s the reason why, and those Findings of Fact are of record but I wanted to clarify that so the reason why that project was denied, just for the residential, wasn’t because of density. There were some other reasons regarding the access of driveways, the width of the driveways, but they wanted to see the entire project come in and not just the residential. So the PUD concept itself, again the reason for the PUD concept as we’re going forward now, the PUD does allow some of that transfer of density. The hard surface coverage so if you go to the other side where the Kwik Trip convenience store and the CVS, it does allow them to maximize that side and then preserve that area where the trees are on the north side and that would be this area in here, and I’ll show that on another slide in a minute but that was the intent of doing the PUD. Wanted to use that same application on this side, whether it be an office use or become some other use. That was always the intent is to try, any ponding or improvements would be made over here and take that density or that hard cover and place it on the other side. So that’s the purpose of the application of the PUD. It allows you to use that as a tool. So I just wanted to point out what’s permitted in the office zoning district. I did include it as an attachment so and this again is where that discretion comes in. Because if something came in that met the standards of the office zoning district, the City would have less discretion to deny that if it met all the standards. All the parking ratios. The height. And yes the height is different in this zoning district. It’s two stories for office, but I just wanted to give you kind of a comparison because I think it’s hard to understand always the scale of projects so we looked at Family of Christ which will have two additional additions on their property. They’re on 5.7 acres of property and they have the ability to expand. If we look at Park Nicollet, they’re at 56,000. If we go back to the other project, they’re at 66,000 square feet for office use, or if we go back to this project right here, their total and the number of parking stalls so these buildings were spread out. They actually had a bank on this property so I just want to be clear that the office zoning is a broad zoning district and depending on how they wanted to put a building on there, it could be so. The goal that we undertook in looking at this and considering this application is similar to what we did on the Park Nicollet site. That zoning district only allowed one story and meeting with those neighbors they wanted to go to the two stories because they thought the noise attenuation from Highway 5 would be a benefit so they have two stories with the ability to go to three. They’ve already put the footings in place to go to three and that was a successful project in the neighbors eyes because it did provide that buffer from Highway 5 so we kind of took the same approach in looking at this, to give some consideration to those kind of benefits of having something a little bit taller. Architecturally nice that might provide some noise and light attenuation from Highway 5. In addition just showing the square footage of the Ridgeview clinic so if you look at some of the uses there would be community center. Certainly churches could go on there. We looked at churches. Recommended a lot of people to look at that site for churches. Didn’t happen so kind of put some of the other uses that would go in there, just to give you a comparison. I’ll let the City Engineer maybe address this. 4 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 Oehme: Thanks Ms. Aanenson. Planning Chair Aller and Planning Commission members. Just wanted to just review the utilities that are available. City utilities available for the development site. There is an th 18 inch watermain along 78 Street that the developer could connect to and there also is a trunk 28 inch watermain along Galpin that’s also available. The sanitary sewer connection would come off of trunk sewer line that’s just on the north edge of the property. An 18 inch trunk sanitary sewer. Appropriate depth so and has enough capacity to handle the proposed development so all the connection charges would be paid for by the developer plus the construction as well so current and, like with all other developments so. Aanenson: So next we’ll kind of move into this particular site plan then. We went through the intent of the PUD and measured this project up against what would be the standards, assuming that the land use was in place. You know preservation of the features to the north which we talked about was our goal. Again transferring the density, whether it was commercial or not that’s always been our goal as it was on the property with the commercial. High quality design. Again we thought the articulation of the buildings, the balconies, the pitched roof, again the PUD standards on that would be put into a contract, PUD design standards which we’ve done on other projects. Again it does need to be re-guided to be consistent with that but those are all found on the staff report on pages 8 and 9. Again I also want to point out that the City, the developer would have to pay stormwater fees and park and trail fees. This isn’t a plat but the developer is agreeing to paying 50% of those fees at the rate in force at the time when this project would go forward. Typically fees are extracted with the subdivision so that cost would be, and I think that was one of the, on the original petition, one of the concerns was whether or not there would be enough utility service in place. That’s what you know the development fees cover that. That portion of it so I believe that that would be addressed with that. Aller: Can I interrupt real quick? We just went through utilities. Do they meet the requirements for a project of this size or do we expect to have to increase or do any work? Oehme: No. There is, there’s adequate capacity out there for water and sewer service. Aller: Thank you. Aanenson: So with that I want to point out that this project has underground parking. The only use in this city that requires underground parking is actually apartment units over 20. Some of the projects that have done underground recently is some of the banks in Villages on the Pond, which is over by St. Hubert’s and then also Park Nicollet has underground parking but by requiring one of the spaces to be around for each unit, that frees up some of that space on the outside so if you look at what they’ve got underneath and then the additional parking, the majority of it being underneath, it lessens the impact visually. If you were to compare these two, which I have a slide later trying to look at that visual comparison, those are all the things that we’re trying to look at. Long term visual comparison of the two. The two uses. So the elevations. Again the underlying zoning district, which we pointed out in the staff report, the R-16 allows 3 stories, 35 feet. This exceed that. We take from the midpoint of the roof. It’s higher than that. The PUD ordinance would allow you to set a different height standard. Like I say we’ve done that in other projects so that would be something that you would want to have some discussion on. The staff certainly feels that a pitched roof adds a lot of architectural value to the city long term wise and definitely wouldn’t want to see that as something that we would want to deviate from. Again as I mentioned earlier we believe that this is highly articulated building. Very nice design and with the balconies, the cement board, the brick, all those sort of things that we think make a good quality project. Again for the long term what we believe, not just the density but it’s the look of the building. The articulation. I didn’t spend a lot of time talking about this. I’m sorry, I want to go back and just mention a little bit about this. There is a clubhouse on the site besides the 224 units and then also a pool 5 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 so I know it’s been brought up that there’s not some other amenities. There is access to a park. We have other parts of 16 units an acre apartments that are at 16 units an acre that do not have amenities on site. We have some that do and some that don’t so I guess it would be the rentee’s position on whether they wanted those amenities close at hand or not. So with that I’ll let a few of the traffic questions go to the City Engineer. Oehme: So I just have a few slides here to talk about traffic and current traffic volumes. The proposed development site is currently right here. It is on a collector roadway designated by the city. Collector roadways you know carry higher capacity traffic than say your local streets. It’s our estimation that the road currently as it is designed can service this development. We did ask the developer to generate traffic volumes that are anticipated for this development and we also did compare them to the Galpin Crossing project that was approved conceptually a few years ago as well so, here are some of the numbers and the traffic generation information is in your packet if you have additional questions that I’ll just quickly go through that so. The apartment complex is anticipated to generate about right around 1,500 trips per day. What really traffic engineers focus on is the peak a.m. and p.m. trip generation. That’s typically where we see the most congestion and the most issues during the a.m. and p.m. peak hours so these are the estimated numbers for that, say 7:00 to 8:00 hour period that would be generated through this development. We compared those to the Galpin Crossing development as well shown right here. What’s interesting we think is the Galpin Crossing generates less a.m., or actually more a.m. peak hour traffic volumes than the proposed family development currently before you today but the multi family development does generate more daily trips so just information that we will, you know if this project moves forward we will look at through a traffic study and see how that compares and how that works into the current traffic generation. That’s currently out there and looking out into the future as well. So this is just a quick slide showing what the current traffic in the area is. In 2011. Again the current proposed site is down here so there’s approximately 1,750 trips per day in front of the development. About 5,000 trips th per day between West 78 Street and Galpin as well. As we look farther north, again Galpin’s up here. This is just for comparison sake. Lake Lucy Road we’re seeing about 2,100 trips per day on Lake Lucy Road over by Highway 41 and then east of Galpin it’s about 1,950 trips per day. Again fairly similar to th what we’re seeing right now on 78 Street. 1,700. Little over 1,700 trips per day so. In the future we are, you know as this area develops we are anticipating more traffic along Galpin but you know as traffic increases you know Galpin eventually will have to be upgraded. Aanenson: Okay, that’s me. I’ll take it from here. So again just in summary we, if this project were to proceed we would do a more detailed analysis. I just think antidotally we’re trying to compare an office use with the apartment use just to give you some a.m. peak and obviously we would do, ask the developer to do a more detailed study if this project were to proceed. So I know there was a lot of comments on the Bluff Creek Overlay District and density transfer. We want to talk about that because we’ve done a lot of that up in this area. The City was one of the first ones to do this type of overlay district and when we first put it in place there was a lot of discussion of trying to buy all the property in the overlay district which starts up at Lake Minnewashta and goes all the way down to the Minnesota River valley and at that time, because not all of the property was in urban service area, which means there’s not sewer and water available, there was a big price differential and the council at that time chose to say let’s look at each project on an incremental basis and decide whether or not, how you want to transfer that density. How that works and how that looks. So within this project you can see the overlay district, there is a wetland in there. In this primary district which you can see in pink here. And then that wetland, we have asked the developer to give us more detail on the size of that so that size of that wetland would be taken out of the density calculation because it’s in the overlay district but if some of this area here, because it’s not encumbered by a wetland could be, while you can’t build in it. You can use it for density transfer. That’s how it works. That’s how we preserve that corridor and that’s been used throughout the entire corridor so we’re being consistent on that. So certainly the acreage or the number of units would come down based on the size of that wetland. We don’t have that information. We can make a guess on that but I think it’s 6 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 important that we look at that so that would definitely impact the amount of development so you can see what we’re trying to accomplish here through that preservation area. So this is the area that we preserved. I don’t know if you can see that on that Kwik Trip site across the street. That was a preservation area so again our goal would be not only to preserve what’s in the overlay district but this area here and that might be something too that we would look at if this project was to proceed, is to look at some enhancements or things to do to improve the quality and the function of the creek as it goes through there and the wetlands. So I did want to show how density transfer works because we have done this in the city. I think there’s some thinking that we’ve never done this before and actually one of the first applications was when we did the senior housing project right up here behind City Hall. This townhouse project came in and we actually converted this to 30 units an acre. 65 units of senior housing. Got the community gardens here across the street but that project was done via a density transfer so that’s what, using the PUD. It wasn’t necessarily for preservation of open space but it was taking some of the density that was allocated across that whole site and compressing it to one side so just another use of how that can be done. The Arboretum Village which would be just to the west of this site was an application of the Bluff Creek Overlay District. Within there’s actually two developments. You have the Arboretum Village itself and then you have the Highlands on Bluff Creek in this area here so this project here, Arboretum Village, they actually owned this property over here so there’s nothing built in front of Westwood Church. That was preserved. That area that was available was transferred over to here so it compressed the density as we did with this piece of property here. Some of this is owned by the HOA. The homeowner’s association so, and not all of it is part of the density transfer but I want to show you the area that were preserved. This one is owned by the HOA but the City is named on these parcels here so what happened with that is actually the City then became the owner of that property so that was a density transfer. So that was done quite a few years ago. Lake Susan Apartments is located south on 101 across from Presbyterian Homes. Lake Susan Apartments includes 3 buildings. It’s 162 units. 9 acres and it’s 16 units an acre. This is part of a larger PUD that was put together for Villages on the Pond. This is a project that is also adjacent to single family across the street. Down the road and across the street. There is no public park within that area. They do have access to trails as this project would too. Connect a sidewalk, the Chanhassen Apartments would connect a sidewalk to get to the trails so that’s what this project also employs is using the trails and the sidewalks to get to other amenities. Powers Ridge Apartments. This one is not completely built out. We do not have that many high density. I think there might be some, you know there is some high density to the east of this. The property owner there has requested that we take him off of, we do have available land on a listing that someone could look at. He’s asked to not be on that register. Has no intention to develop so we have limited high density development. This project here, Powers Ridge which is located just south of the industrial park south of Highway 5, off of Powers Boulevard actually has 344 units. It was part of a larger PUD. If you look in there’s twin homes along Powers Boulevard. There’s also townhouses across the street. It’s immediately adjacent to single family. Two of the buildings, or 3 of the buildings, these two buildings are connected underground with underground parking so of that all but the 88 units and the senior units so the senior units has a different parking standard so those two buildings have not been built yet. But they do have the entitlements to proceed. Again that was part of a PUD. There was no density transfer but as part of a larger PUD and that PUD actually ran a series of approximately, probably 20 years we’re at now on that whole project. Just tried to superimpose this project on here just so you get an idea of the scale and what we were trying to accomplish. The City staff in looking at this project as it compared to some other, certainly understand the issues regarding the height, density and traffic and those sort of things. We would comment on trying to look at that wetland, the total number of units and but again we were looking at the noise attenuation, the buffering, the use there, compressing that and preserving on the, putting everything on the south side. This PUD I’ve outlined in the staff report that it meets all the standards of the PUD as far as the setbacks, hard surface coverage and all that. While it’s not on top of Highway 5, it’d be similar setback if you would go along some of these buildings further on the east side along Highway 5. For example Park Nicollet. These are all set back 50 feet, plus there’s additional right-of- way to Highway 5 so it’s actually about 110-120 feet from actual edge of asphalt on Highway 5. Also 7 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 been asked regarding tree preservation. There isn’t any oaks or any significant trees on that site. It’s also outside of the power line easement so that wouldn’t be an issue. I know that was a point of discussion too in the petition. So with that I did have another slide, just kind of illustratively showing the two so I think the challenge that we are looking at is to say you know looking at some empirical information to say does it make sense to change and certainly there’s a lot of discretion to change the land use or leave it how it is in place today. Again there is value on that north side. You can put something there. The question that the City had at the time is they didn’t want to see that developed ahead of the other without combining those two because our goal was not to just have the residential there and then not provide that opportunity to increase the density on the south side so really the challenge would we say under what circumstances would this make sense or would we just say, we’d like to leave it and we’ll see what comes in in the future so just for illustrative purposes we tried to kind of compare and contrast the parking lot and the amount of green space on the apartments as opposed to the parking lots with all the office building. Again this project may, we may never see anything close to that. It may be one big building. Again we talked about it could be 2 or 3 buildings. We have no idea what the market would bring so we thought it would make sense to evaluate this. Give it a critical view again under that concept so with that we have a motion that you just forward your comments on after you open the public hearing and again I think based on what the staff has received as far as comments, we certainly understand…we’ve included all of those and the comments that we had in the staff report for recommendations including the traffic report, the payment of fees, working through some of the wetland delineations. Taking that acreage out so those are all part of our conditions so with that Chairman Aller I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Aller: Anyone? Do we know what the occupancy rate is of the projects that we’ve looked at where we actually have high density apartments? Aanenson: Sure. What we’ve been told in the market study is Chanhassen’s at the lowest right now. We’re under 2% so we’re on the radar screen right now which is why you’re seeing projects for the need for additional apartments, and we haven’t done one. The Powers Ridge we did, actually went condo. Then it went back. There’s a large group that went in there and bought 75 units. An investment group so there’s renters back in there so there is some pent up demand for market rate apartments. I didn’t touch on that too much. The market rate. Maybe I’ll just address that really quickly because I know that will probably come up later. We have two other projects 16 units an acre that were built since 2000. The Powers Ridge and the Lake Susan Apartments. They’ve been in place for a number of years. We haven’t seen a big decrease in values in the areas nor have we seen a large increase in crime in either of those projects. Again both those projects are well designed and that’s the goal. Undestad: I have a quick question Kate. The two other apartments you showed, the Lake Susan and Powers Ridge. Lake Susan had density transfers and Powers Ridge did not, is that right? Aanenson: No. Both of them were part of a PUD. PUD for the Villages on the Pond was actually a mixed use so it did provide for commercial. It provided for office so you included the church. It has an institutional use. Church. It has the Foss Swim School. It has retail so this is actually part of the original Ward family property so this piece they wanted to do apartments on there so it was given the 16 units an acre under that mixed use. That’s what is allowed. Undestad: Okay, that’s for the Lake Susan across the street. Across 101. Aanenson: Correct. And Powers Ridge was just a larger PUD that Joe Miller way, way back when he did, that was the last component to be developed so all the single family, and they did smaller lots in there for single family. When I say smaller they’re not the standard 15,000 square feet. They’re a little bit smaller than that and then some of the other product came along in the 90’s. The twin homes. The townhouses and then finally the apartments. 8 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 Undestad: And the apartments were at 16 units… Aanenson: Correct. Undestad: Okay. And a quick question for Paul. The sewer connections, is it the intent would be to connect up there by Galpin? Right up, so we’re not cutting through the wetland down on that side. Oehme: Yeah, I would anticipate the connection would be closer to Galpin Boulevard and I would also estimate or anticipate that a lot of that pipe would be directionally bored underneath the highway or th underneath 78 Street just to reduce the impacts to traffic in that area. Undestad: Okay. Aller: A lot to digest. Any questions at this point? Is the developer present? Would like to make a presentation. Please state your name and address for the record. Paul Tucci: Mr. Chairman, members of the Planning Commission, Paul Tucci. I’m with Oppidan, Inc., 5125 County Road 101 in Minnetonka. Aller: Welcome sir. Paul Tucci: Tried to do the same thing here that Kate did. First off, thank you for having us here tonight. We, last week had a lot of the faces I see in this crowd at a neighborhood meeting and we talked about a lot of things. I’m going to try not to duplicate what Kate said. I want to fill in some of the blanks and we can talk about some of the other things. We’re proposing 224 units in two detached buildings. There is a club house in the middle, a pool in the back. As Kate said no building on the north lot. It’s a 3 story design. The height, we are over the 35 feet. We’re I think at about 48 feet, if I remember. 47. And for those who asked that question last week, that’s where we’re at. I was telling you I thought it was less than 50. Got the number. Cement board siding, masonry, glass. That’s what we’re talking about here. As I said there’s a pool. These are market rate apartments. We’re going to have a community room inside. You know TV, sitting area so you can have a party in there. We will have a workout facility inside. We’re also contemplating somewhere in there having a mini-business office so if you’re a resident, work out of your home, you want to have a meeting, you’ll have a spot to go down. It’s something we’ve talked to the analyst in the area, that’s becoming more and more prevalent. People working out of their homes. Working in a scenario like this rather than I used the reference to Kinko’s. Rather than having to go to Kinko’s to do everything, you might be able to go plug in. Have a meeting. Have somebody over. You don’t have to use Kinko’s, Caribou, and Starbuck’s as your office anymore. We did talk about trail connections. One thing I will point out that we said, and I know it’s going to come up later and Paul can jump in is, we have two entry points here and we did talk, we realize that the entry furthest east is going to have to be a right-in/right-out access. I did see a letter from one of the residents that was passed onto me earlier tonight and they talked about U turns, you know a pork chop will go in there. I’m not going to debate whether people will continue to take U turns and go in. I know that I’ve been to this CVS and I’ve seen people take U turns at that intersection. Short of building a wall anywhere you’re never going to prevent people from taking U turns. I’ve seen them do it in the middle of highways. I’m sure we all have. Zoning, I do want to touch on that. Kate did talk about where we’re at today. The north lot is 6, a little over 6 acres and it’s zoned low density which allows up to 4 units per acre. Simple math says, and we can debate what’s buildable and what’s not but there’s potentially 24 units available on there. Obviously there was discussion about the wetland up there and we will get that delineated, mitigated where we can but the old plan showed 10. Could be 24, up to 24 depending on the 9 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 size. On the south side it’s zoned office and just to point out, and could you throw that plan that you had, throw the old plan up? Aanenson: Sure. Paul Tucci: That would be awesome. Thanks Kate. When we did, as this is getting put up, when we did our traffic analysis, this is the plan that we used that was previously presented. It has, as was referenced, 66,000 feet on the south lot which includes a 5,000 bank in there. You know when we did our traffic analysis, that’s what we used because we had no other point of reference but I will tell you as was pointed out earlier, the zoning district here we can cover up to 70%, and please jump in if I say something wrong here. Two stories on the office building and you can do a one story parking deck and you can do underground parking. I’m throwing that out because this is a plan that we made our traffic study. We had to have something to compare it to. We compared it to what was presented before. Point of all of that discussion is that this could be much denser. I think as was pointed out with the Park Nicollet building you have 56,000 feet on roughly half the size of that south lot. 3 1/2 acres. That south lot is just about 8 acres so there could be you know 100,000 feet on that site with two story with some underground parking, with some decks. We didn’t run our traffic study at that. We ran it against something that was there. Point is we’re going to talk about the traffic information we ran shows more trips on our development versus this but if this got denser, that whole dynamic may change and I, Paul you can chime in when this is all done so I just wanted to get that. You know we’re aware that traffic was an issue. It was brought up and we’ve talked about it already with city staff and as said, we are going to have to do a full blown traffic study when we come in with the project but you know I will point which was pointed out earlier that this is zoned today for, or I’m sorry, it’s guided today for low density on the north and office on the south. Something is going to be developed there. The question is what makes the most sense and that’s what we’re here tonight to talk about. I’m not going to get into the overlay. I think that other than to say we understand it’s there and we know that water quality, you know runoff, we have to make sure that we meet all the guidelines of the watershed district, the City and anyone else who has jurisdiction in there. We know that we have no chance of getting a building permit until we do that so I’m not going to debate into that because we know there’s city standards and we’ll deal with it. We talked quickly about services and availability. One thing that I will mention that I mentioned at the neighborhood meeting is, we’re going to be paying over $2 million dollars in fees and those fees include sewer connection, water connection, park dedication. That does not, I don’t even think we calculated in building permit at that so you know we’re paying a lot in fees for services that are there so, you know it’s not like we’re getting this for free. It’s there. It’s sized correctly. We’re accessing what’s there and we’re paying to access it just like any development would pay to access it. There was a concern at the meeting about a strain on services and again I tried to in the best way I could just say that the City is always planning ahead and growth is going to happen. Your city has grown remarkably. I commented at the neighborhood meeting, my wife and I have been 25 year residents over in Eden Prairie and we watched this whole, she grew up out west of here and I for 30 years have watched this whole area grow and you know the people you have here don’t get into these positions without having the ability to think forward and plan. That’s what makes all cities good and Chanhassen has been rated in the top 5, I think you were 1 once weren’t you? Close to it. And Eden Prairie, you know cities like that they have the foresight to plan and think and that’s what all of the services are there. The roadways are there. One of the other things I want to touch on briefly and I was asked a question at the meeting about home values and was there any empirical data about putting an apartment building in and home values and it was mentioned earlier, I got a copy of a report that was done in September of 2000 by Maxfield who also did our study. This is not a report that we had anything to do with. This was done for the Family Housing Fund in Minneapolis and this was for affordable housing development going in next to residential and the conclusions that are in here, and I did forward this onto the City, were that there was no impact with affordable housing going in next to housing so somebody had asked that so the City does have that. I forget who asked. You can call me. I think everyone got my number and information or you can get it 10 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 from the City and I’d be happy to forward that onto you to look at. You know I guess with that, I know there’s a lot of questions and a lot of comments coming. I will answer any questions I can so we can get everybody who came here up and talk. Aller: While it’s fresh, we talk about affordable housing. How does that compare in your mind to what you’re presenting here? Paul Tucci: This, we are not presenting affordable housing. We are market rate housing. You know our rental rates are over $1,000 for the studios and they go up to almost $1,500. Is what we’re going to propose depending on the units you have, and we’re going to have a variety of units. We’re going to have studios. We’re going to have one’s. One’s with den. Two’s. Two’s with den. The mix is still kind of being determined and we have to lock that in because it impacts what we need for parking and how we want to do everything. Some of the units we’re actually looking at, are we going to do fireplaces inside the units so you know our goal and the market study has point it out that the primary market area that we’re targeting is kind of mid point from 5 and 212 north. Runs out to Victoria. Runs up to the southern side of Minnetonka and runs to the very, to the western side of Eden Prairie, probably getting into County Road 4, Eden Prairie Road area and Kate put out 1.7% is what it shows in Chanhassen in the primary market area which I just kind of described if you can picture that circle. There’s about 2.2% vacancy so this area is an area that is, based on the information we have, in need of a project like this. Aller: Thank you. Oehme: Can I just comment on the developer’s comments. The developer just, they have not done a traffic analysis or report yet. Basically all they did right now is traffic generation and what potentially the traffic would, for this development would generate. You know there’s a long ways to go yet in terms of traffic analysis. If the project were to go forward we would ask the developer again to complete a significant detailed traffic analysis for the development, and especially for the intersection of Galpin and th 78 Street. You know look at the cuing and the back-up potentials and the U turn issues that we know that’s out there right now so you know if any, we need a level of service for this area and for this intersection so you know if we need to we’re going to put in a signal. Maybe a round about or something like that. We’re going to look at all those options. Galpin Boulevard is a county road so they have to also look at the traffic and potential improvements along the corridor along with MnDOT as well too so there’s several agencies who will have to take a look at this development and potential traffic impacts to this area. Just not the City too so we’re going to be looking at what the developer would look at. We’ll probably be actually hiring or looking at the traffic analysis they have. Hiring a consultant to give a second opinion as well too so there’s just, just wanted to reiterate there’s a long, long way to go in terms of traffic analysis and how this development would potentially come in and impact the transportation system in this area. Aanenson: And if I can Commissioner Aller, also no matter what went there, if it was an office building, we would employ the same thing to look at that. We understand that, that while it is a collector function between two state highways, 101 and 41 going through downtown, that’s intended to carry local trips, we recognize that that’s increasing as more development comes along the corridor so whether this project went forward or an office project came forward, we would still look at a traffic study when the next project, whatever project comes forward. Aller: Okay. Yeah, thank you for reminding us all that this is a concept plan so what we’re doing is talking about potentials and that a lot of work would still have to be done if we consider the potential. But secondly my follow up question was going to be, when you start mentioning round about’s and things like that I kind of have the hair stand up on my neck saying what are we talking about here and I don’t necessarily want to change our major infrastructure for one project so hearing that we’re going to need 11 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 some improvements in the future and that we’re looking in that forward direction helps a little bit. I’m sure that that’s one of the answers we’re going to be wanting to take a look at if this thing moves forward is just what are we doing with the traffic. Aanenson: Right. Aller: And it’s been a major concern. Aanenson: If I may. Sometimes it will say within a certain timeframe. When you get to a certain number you need to make improvements which we’ve, whether it’s a signal, which we’ve done on other roads in the city so it might not be with this project or another project but at a certain point it will give us information on what improvements need to be made today and then when volumes get to a certain level what additional improvements may need to be made. So it’s a planning document. Paul Tucci: And we’re very aware. We’ve had the discussion with staff that that is going to have to happen. A number of things have to happen. We have to get a utility plan out and get it to the city engineer to make sure that works but we’re aware that there’s more steps. One thing I also wanted to say is that you know this is designed to keep costs down but I will tell you that we’ve spent a lot of money and time at this point. We have done a traffic analysis. It’s not a full analysis. It’s a trip generation analysis. We have done a wetland report that the City has. We have done a market research on the site. We’ve hired our architect to design. We’ve hired our engineers so we have spent a fair amount to date. I think the point of staff is that it helps us not spend even more than that and we’re grateful that we can come through this process. Gather information to make sure that we have all of the issues addressed when we come in with a full presentation. Aller: Thank you. Any questions at this point? Okay. Alright, well what we’re going to do now is we’re going to open up the public hearing portion of this meeting. Again what we would like to do is in an orderly fashion those of you who wish to speak either for or against a proposition, they would please come forward. State your name and address for the record. If you’re in another room, please take your time and come around and get in line and we’ll do this in an orderly fashion. We would like to hear from anyone and everyone who wishes to speak again either for or against and with that I’ll open the public hearing portion of the meeting. Larry Martin: Good. Mr. Chairman, commissioners, city officials, my name is Larry Martin. I live at th 7725 Vasserman Trail. That’s in the twin homes which are right inside Vasserman Trail there off of 78 Street. I thank the staff for their report. Very complete report. We have had a number of neighborhood meetings where the neighbors have of course voiced a lot of opinions on here and what we’d like to do and what you’re doing tonight is setting some of the opinions straight. We appreciate that and we’d like to go forward. We know that these parcels will be developed. The Chairman asked to state whether you’re for or against this. I’m for it and I’m against it. We want good development here and that’s what we all want to work together to get. Many of the people in Vasserman Ridge bought their homes knowing that the adjacent land was planned A2 with the possibility of office and R-4 across the street. The 2008 submission changed all that so obviously there’s a lot of people that are looking at the value of their property. I was going to give a little history here on this back through 2006 and whether things were approved or not approved in concept and everything. Suffice it to say that it did not go forward for a number of reasons. The proposed apartment complex here surfaced just a month ago and we noted that there are a number of sites along Highway 5 that are available for building and it turns out there’s 1,900 sites that are available there and we’re wondering gee, why this site because it is so difficult to develop. One of the things that the people have really questioned is this density transfer thing and we say gee there’s, across the street we could do that. Well maybe we could buy 5 acres from the farm there and using high density that would allow 80 more units. I mean we could really pack this thing up. Our 12 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 understanding is that high density is normally used for senior housing. It isn’t used a lot for market rate housing. A report in 2007 by a person, and this was sent to Kate, his name was William Theibold. He was a professional planner who looked at this site. Some of his findings were sound planning principles support use of this site for shopping and non-residential. He had a section there on noise. Under noise he said, traffic volumes and speeds on Highway 5 support commercial use and rule against residential use given the size and location of the site. This, as I mentioned before this plan to combine parcels A and B and create this on something that’s zoned A2 seems to be moving a lot of things around. The conclusion from the meetings that we’ve had is that there is no benefit in doing this to the neighborhood so it’s upset the people. This development, you can see on the maps here, is adjacent to Vasserman Ridge here. This building would be about 200 feet from the homes on Vasserman Trail. The building at this point, as Paul stated, 48 feet tall. That’s a pretty imposing edifice that’s right across from there. We don’t think it would be prudent development to have or wouldn’t you think it would be prudent to have a graduated development between low density, medium high density and not go right from low density right to high density in 200 feet. In 2006 only a little over 1 acre was developed and that was just the land earlier. The reason was the wetland was there and they couldn’t go back. Along the front here is a large sewer easement so that is not developable. I don’t think you want to build homes on top of the sewer easement so it is limited over there. We don’t think it’s right to include that entire site when you’re doing the transfer of densities there. It’s not unheard of as Kate said to do that but I think we have to be prudent when we’re doing that. Some of the draw backs we see to this site are one, it’s adjacency to Highway 5. The noise on Highway 5 as the consultant says there. Another is the proximity to electrical distribution lines. If you look here there’s a transmission line across here and it turns and it goes down here. Presently those are 69 KV lines. They’re being upgraded to 115,000 volt lines. I don’t know if you’ll be able to hold your iPhone out the window and track, and charge it but there are some things that can cause some problems in those areas and those are controversial in the studies there but the one thing is, if you’re on the third floor of this apartment building, if you look straight out you’re going to be looking at a transmission line. I don’t know that that would be desirable and the market studies I’m sure will have to look at that. We couldn’t conclude what’s going to happen there. There’s no public transportation in this area. I think with 224 units there’s a high probability that some of the people who are going to live there are going to need public transportation. I can see single parent families moving there with their children th and stuff and the road issues we’ve talked about before are significant. The Galpin and 78 has been a problematic corner because of the U turns. It isn’t just an occasional U turn there. I bet there’s a U turn probably every 30 to 40 seconds. Coming out of there so some of our people have gotten the accident rates at that thing and I know the council and the Planning Commission have said gee, we’ve got to do something about that but they don’t know exactly what to do about it. The right-in/right-out there is th going to require that they do put in a merge lane on 78. That’s going to redo that intersection which is probably going to have to redo Galpin. When we start getting into these things upgrading and that intersection and that, and Paul you can, can be a $2 million dollar thing and so we need that traffic study. Another thing I’d like to say on the traffic study, rather than have the developer do the traffic study, I would much rather the City commission the traffic study and bill the developer back. I think that gives us more objectivity in the study as it’s done. So the one thing we also see here is that this whole transfer and the rezoning, because this was guided and sent to the Metropolitan Council, and I’m not a legal guy here, could require this whole development to go for permission to the Metropolitan Council before it goes forward so we’d like to see that a market study be done, a traffic study and that this, we have as much information as possible before we launch into this so with that I’ll sit down. Thank you. Aller: Thank you for your comments. Aanenson: Mr. Chair, can I just make a couple points of clarification? Just I think. Aller: Sure. 13 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 Aanenson: Mr. Theibold and I disagreed strongly about the commercial on this site. If there’s a desire for noise attenuation we’ve got plenty of people that would like to put commercial on that site. We have fought, myself, this planning staff has fought vehemently against that. Having said that, you know we, the council compromised on the office zoning there so I just want to make sure that we did not support commercial. If it wanted to go commercial we have plenty of people that would develop it right away. Again we try to push that to the downtown. It is our practice to have the city do the traffic study. We just wanted to do this without a lot of expense to just give you a comparison between the two. That is our practice. I also just want to point one other thing, the twin homes on the north side, if it’s low density it’s 1 to 4 units. There’s a lot of ways to do slab on grade to get more units there. You could do an attached project so to say it’s only going to be 10 or 12, I’m not sure there is value across there. You can include the easement area for your sewer as part of your lot line so I didn’t want anybody to think that there’s no value on that side of the street. So I just wanted to clarify those points there. Aller: Thank you and I think the prior plan which was already approved allowed for structures over there. Aanenson: That’s correct. Aller: 10 structures. And Paul if you want to chip in any time. I would like to make this more of a conversation than just a list of either complaints or kudos so if at any time either of you want to step in and have a comment. Same rules apply for everyone in the room. We’re Minnesota Nice here. We want to be respectful. We want to make sure that everyone’s heard. Aanenson: Just one more thing I wanted to add too. It does require a land use amendment. We said it does go to the Met Council. That’s part of the process. They’ve already sent the original thing that we are looking at that so. Aller: Thank you. Art Roberts: My name is Art Roberts, 7762 Vasserman Place, which is the cul-de-sac in the middle of Vasserman Ridge. I’d like to raise one basic issue that hasn’t been talked about at all and that, the point of that is, is I think this is a tremendously dangerous location for high density residential. What makes it so is 3 things. Number one, the high speed, high traffic Highway 5 right there in front of it. Number two, the school across the street and number two the park across the street. In Vasserman Ridge, back in the single family area. Not the twin homes up front but there are, I think there are 50 single family homes and at one point we counted we had 85 kids there. More than 1 per house. Audience: 100. Art Roberts: Is it 100 now? Audience: 105. Art Roberts: 105 kids. Audience: And growing. Art Roberts: Let me take a real conservative number like in those 225, suppose we had 50 elementary kids that needed to go back and forth to school and because it’s less than a mile and they’re so darn close, why would their parents pay for a school bus so they’re going to walk across Highway 5. Now if you take those 50 kids over and back, that’s 100 times 180 school days, that’s 18,000 trips across the street. Point number two, after school there are almost no play facilities for the kids right there on the property 14 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 so what would they do? They’d go back across the street because there is tennis, hockey, softball, baseball, whatever. Okay. What if that were 25 kids that went over and back 360 days a year. That’s another 18,000 trips across that highway. Well 18,000, that’s 36,000 trips across that highway. Holy cow. So high density residential is going to generate a tremendous amount of traffic and you know what that sucker’s like. I mean Highway 5 is just you know 60 miles an hour and I don’t know what to think. In addition or no fences across there so kids could kick balls onto the street and chase them onto Highway 5 or throw baseballs out but that would be pretty minimal I think. But more important I’m talking about the 36,000 trips and say I’m not an insurance guy. My dad was but if we’ve got 36,000 kids, 36,000 times a year, what does that mean? How many accidents per year? Any of those going to be fatalities. It seems to me we have no business putting high density residential across the street from a school and a park that is such a magnet for the kids. Now that hasn’t been brought up by anybody else here. You know you’re talking about the buildings and the. Aanenson: Chair, I would just say that we do have that project. Art Roberts: This is a critical reason not to put high residential. Vera Brady: Wouldn’t you also have to cross. Aller: Ma’am, what we’re going to do is, if you’d like to come forward. Vera Brady: It’s just a question. Aller: We want to make sure that there’s a clean record and everybody can hear your opinion so that. Vera Brady: Well I think… Art Roberts: Okay, that’s the end of my point. Is it seems to be an incredibly dangerous situation. Vera Brady: I just want to say you can’t cross. Aller: Ma’am, if you could state. Vera Brady: Vera Brady and I live in, on Clover Court in Chanhassen. Aller: Great, thank you. Vera Brady: I just want to say that you cannot cross directly across to, across Highway 5 without first crossing Galpin which would double all the trips he’s talking about because a crossing is adjacent to Galpin there and that’s where the crosswalk is so you would have to cross Galpin, then you would have to cross over Highway 5. Aller: Thank you. Vera Brady: So you’d have to double everything. Aanenson: Yeah, again we did point out there are tunnels there. I think just so we have knowledge base, we do have apartment building adjacent to State Highway 101 which has a school across the street which also has a park across the street. There are trails similar to this so we have some experience with an apartment building against a state highway so. And I think we have to separate the trip generation 15 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 because there’s going to be trips no matter what the use is from, I mean I understand the school children question but I think that would be similar to the other project that we have. Aller: Thank you. Steve Smith: I’m Steve Smith. I live at 2536 Bridle Creek Trail which is just off of Galpin. First of all I’d like to thank the City of Chanhassen for opening this up. I just drove from the north Dallas border down to Dallas and you can see the results of cities and communities that don’t plan. It was just pure sprawl. It was horrible. You’d never stop for gas if you had to make a left turn so I commend you for having this meeting. I’m already, I’m going to beat a dead horse on traffic but it won’t be long. I think we already have a lot of traffic. I think we’re starting to see sprawl in the Eden Prairie area of Highway 5. I heard about traffic U turns at that corner and it seemed to be the answer was live with it. There was talk of upgrading Galpin. That sounds rather nightmarish to me from where I live and so the big point I would like to make is why there when there are so many locations available and someone mentioned further up Highway 5 which still has a traffic problem, but there’s also 212 which is pretty wide open territory. There’s a lot of room on 212. Just a lot of vacant area so that’s my two cents. Aller: Thank you sir. David Windschitl: Good evening. My name is David Windschitl, 7620 Ridgeview Way. Vasserman Ridge neighborhood. I’m not going to talk about traffic. I’ll let the rest of you approach you on that but I will mention that in 2008, as you are all aware, 30 year comp plan was revised. The land use, we all know what those were designated for. I’m concerned that 4 years into this we’re already looking to revamp that. You know significant time, resources went into this plan. But I also do understand and realize that we need to have the latitude and discretion to change if something that benefits and is better than what could be there. I’m struggling to find anything that’s better about this potential plan. Chanhassen’s been a desirable place to live. As Paul had mentioned he’s grown up in neighboring community. I’ve grown up in this community for 39 years. I’ve seen this. My grandparents used to live on the Byerly’s farm, where Byerly’s is now located so I’m familiar with this community. We’ve gotten to where we are today because we followed the plan. We had a vision for what we wanted and you know it’s something that we followed and we’ve had, a lot of success with that. One of the things that Kate has mentioned, she’s brought up in phone conversations with plenty of people, including myself, the Park Nicollet office building, medical facility and how that’s a sound mitigate and how the residents actually asked that that would be a helpful thing. Well I’m here to tell you that we’re not asking for that. Okay. I think the neighbors are here and coming to you to say we do not want that. We’re not looking for the sound mitigation. We’re not looking for 3 stories. We’re looking for a good product there that we can be proud of that we can be a part of. That we can help support and I hope you guys understand and feel the same way. The other thing that’s of particular trouble for me on this particular development is the land density swap. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. And I understand why he’s asking for it. Why the developer’s asking for it. I absolutely understand why it’s a time of giving. It’s Christmastime. I get that. And this is nothing more than a gift to the developer. I go back to 2006 when there was another development plan in place for this. What Kate has said it was not denied to do, tonight she has said it’s not denied due to the density. It was clearly noted in the May 22, 2006 notes, in the development for the 12 units on that northern parcel. At the time current city councilor Bethany Tjornhom. Forgive me if I do not pronounce it correctly. Stated, I quote, I think there is too many. I think they’re kind of crammed in there. I have to agree with the Planning Commission on that. So my struggle is if 12 units was too much at that time for those 6 acres, why in the world would we allow a land transfer, or the land use needs to change to high density residential. Right now the developer is asking for 96 units. 96 units to be transferred into the southern parcel. I have an objection to that. That’s too much. That’s too much of a gift, okay. So from that, that is a part that I am really struggling with and not only is the 96 number that they’re trying to transfer over, and I understand this concept plan. I also understand 16 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 that we have to decide how much of those is buildable but there’s no way, as in the neighborhood meeting, you said well if we can’t build all of this on the southern we’ll just put the 96 units over on the northern part. I would appeal to the better judgment of this Planning Commission and the City Council that we never, ever put 96 units on the northern parcel. So in short I guess with that I’ll conclude that I view that there’s some significant shortcomings in this particular development. I have no issue whatsoever that this is a quality developer. That he can provide a quality product. All I ask is that he finds a right spot for it. I’d love it to be in Chanhassen. Just find the right spot. This is not it. With that I thank you for your time. Aller: Thank you. Tamara Hodgins: Hi, Tamara Hodgins, 7633 Ridgeview Way. Planning Commission, thank you very much for letting us all speak. Unlike the gentleman before me I have three cents instead of two and I one of them is about traffic. The first one is I’m asking you to reconsider, to consider denying the density transfer. I was reading in the Planning Commission report where it said that some development of Parcel A is possible but the shallow water table and poor soils make this parcel a difficult site for development so the recommendation is to transfer that density to Parcel B. Again it doesn’t make sense to me, as well as a lot of other people, if the entire 6 acres, 6.8. I can’t quite see it from here. If the entire site isn’t able to be developed, how can you take the developable capacity from that site and transfer it if you never would be able to put that many on that site. Parcel B, with the foresight from the commission and from the City years ago, they decided how much would be developable on that land. Stick with that. I don’t think it’s reasonable, if that couldn’t have gone on Parcel A anyway and originally it shouldn’t have gone on Parcel B, don’t let all of it go to Parcel B so my first request is please consider denying the density transfer. The density transfer. The second thing is the size of the unit. It seems as though it would be a monstrosity. From what I understand at the last meeting that we had with the communities, they would have to get a variance on the size because it’s already been determined that that’s too big. I understand that there are a lot of other very big things in the community. The Park Nicollet, Target, Lifetime Fitness, the Ridgeview Medical Clinic, the one right on Highway 5. The doctors offices. Not the big 212 medical center. They’re all rather big. The ones that are very close to the road are much closer to the city center. I kind of see this area as outside of the city center. Getting to the exurban or the suburban of Chanhassen, if that makes any sense. Some of the ones that are quite big, such as Lifetime Fitness that are out in that direction are quite set back. They’re not right there next to any roads. Maybe Lifetime is close to Highway 41 but it’s down a big berm and it’s kind of set down. It’s not this big monstrosity as you’re driving by Highway 5 through parklands and you start to feel a good sense of community. Some nice neighborhoods on either side. The parkland on either side and then all of a sudden boom, a monstrosity right there on Highway 5. I don’t think that that’s the feeling that a lot of people want for the outskirts of Chanhassen. And then the third thing is, I’m very concerned about traffic. The traffic patterns. The traffic safety for a lot of different corners, many of which have already been mentioned. I, myself have eye witnessed 3 accidents in the last maybe year and a half, two years right here on this corner. That is a very dangerous corner. I don’t think many people have mentioned this turn off from Highway 5. That’s a very high speed turn. If you add the hundreds or thousands of people, a lot of people have talked about crossing roads. I’m just talking about that turn. Your 55, 50-55 miles an hour, whatever the speed limit is, turning onto Galpin with a much slower speed limit. Many people will have to make a very sudden change over. It’s very hazardous, busy as it is. The other thing that many people have mentioned is the U turns. We have lived in Chanhassen, not nearly as long as Mr. Windschitl but we’ve been here for 9 years and very soon after we moved in I called the City wondering about that. Asking when a crosswalk was going to be put in. When a stop sign would be put in. No crosswalk. No stop signs have been put in. Those U turns make a very unsafe traffic pattern. Crossing highway, or crossing Galpin right here is treacherous in a car. It’s time consuming in a car. We have 5 kids living in Vasserman Ridge right now. There are 105 in the neighborhood. Crossing to get to the trail that goes under Highway 5. They still have to cross here. There are many people in the neighborhood who will not let their kids make that 17 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 journey. Now they’re starting to get to be old enough. They’re starting to get to be into their mid teen years. We’re just now allowing them to do it. With that many hundreds, maybe even thousands of trips that corner is really going to need to be addressed. I understand that there is crossing under Highway 5. It’s not Highway 5 that’s treacherous to me. It’s Galpin. The other thing that nobody has mentioned is this corner right now coming, it’s the east entrance of Vasserman Ridge. There’s a big berm right here. This is a pretty high speed. It’s about 40 miles an hour. Many people don’t travel the speed limit. They’re going faster. That is a dangerous corner. I don’t know of any accidents that have happened. I know of many, many near misses. Of 105 kids living in this neighborhood right now, how many are driving age? Maybe 5. Soon 105 are going to be driving. That corner is treacherous. If you have cars, the added volume that will be turning in and turning out in every which direction, I just ask, I like the foresight of how the original parcels were arranged. Please have the foresight to consider those traffic patterns, and especially the ones, people have mentioned crossing Highway 5 and Galpin. I’m asking you to consider the turnoff and the entrance to this community if you add whatever traffic pattern entrances and exits and that volume of cars. Thank you very much. Paul Moniker: Paul Moniker. Aller: If I could just take a second. If we can keep the applause down to a minimum. What we want to do is just make sure that everybody’s heard and we understand that you support certain positions and that’s why you’re here. We’d like to hear the next person as quickly as possible so. Paul Moniker: Paul Moniker, Chanhassen. My wife and I built here. We moved from Eden Prairie and the reason we built here is because there were other homes the size of our’s and the like minded people that wanted to build that type of homes in these types of neighborhoods. We lived in an apartment, or we lived in a house in Eden Prairie and down the street from our house was an apartment complex and we were broken into twice in one year and when I asked the police what happened, why this is happening and he just pointed down the street. I’m not saying that this is what’s going to happen, but I’m saying that, you mentioned that when you built the apartment complexes there wasn’t a huge decrease in property value or wasn’t a huge increase in crime but I think any decrease in property value or any decrease, or increase in crime is something to be considered. One of the reasons we’re voted second in the nation for Chanhassen is because we’re smart. We’re, you know we build what we want. We are like minded people. I don’t think this is what Chanhassen wants. Thanks. Aller: Thank you. Deborah Zorn: Chair, commissioners, hello. My name is Deborah Zorn. I live at 7574 Ridgeview Point in the Vasserman Ridge neighborhood. You have before you a handout that I brought to the meeting this evening. I will be brief as I know several have addressed some of these issues as well or already but I do want to highlight the petition that we have online for the, opposing the Galpin Apartments. We’re at currently 575 signatures. You have a list of those individuals as well as 129 of those individuals did leave personal comments. Please take some time to look through those if you haven’t already. I believe that this speaks volumes having a petition with less than a month timeframe is pretty critical. I mean if you recall our recent local election, our City Council individuals who were voted in were voted with a margin much smaller than that so please thank you for having us here this evening and strongly hold these petition signers as well. I think that it’s pretty obvious, we feel this is a pretty large structure for this site. Stepping back I think over arching is the zoning issue. It’s currently zoned as something other than this proposal. Stay with the 2030 comp plan. Simply put. Let the marketplace determine what type of office space will go there. In addition the density transfer. Yes, in 2006 that north parcel, I believe that Kate said that there was a part of that proposal that did pass through Planning Commission but that north parcel did not and as Dave Windschitl mentioned there are, if you go back to the May 26, 2006 minutes there are City Council members indicated hey, that spot is too crammed for 12 units. If it’s too crammed for 12 18 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 units, why is 96 even remotely considered? And on election day, if we have double the car trips in this intersection, and if I digress for just a minute, I think it is inaccurate to compare the projected traffic for this complex with the 2006 Galpin Crossing because those are projections. Those are 5 years old at this point and much different traffic patterns with all of the growth that is further west. That’s something that we haven’t also mentioned. All of the growth that has happened. The new 212 that’s in. All of that growth down there and all the available land that is appropriately zoned for a complex like this. But back to the traffic. On election day I voted. I was there at 7:30. Came back. I was hearing northbound on th Galpin over Highway 5. There were 15 cars deep. I could not turn left onto West 78 hearing west because there were cars, if I may, lined up. This is a little bit of a dip which you cannot see. There’s a little bit of a dip and so there were cars lined all the way up to just about the top of the ridge. I believe that is a representation of what this, it would be like with this complex. What does upgrading Galpin th mean? What does upgrading Galpin mean? Can a traffic light even go at West 78 and Galpin? Is a turn about appropriate? Will there be some type of tunneling system? All of that is, as Larry mentioned, beginning price tag $2 million dollars. Add more and more, should it be something more complex? Paul, I would like to hear what you, when you commented on oh Galpin would be upgraded. What does that mean? Oehme: Well this area is still as, we’ll see some development in the future so you know traffic is bound to go up in the future. The road is getting old. It’s deteriorated. The County overlaid it maybe 4-5 years ago. It’s due to… Deborah Zorn: So they’re basic upgrades. They’re not a complete overhaul which a project like this would warrant. Oehme: Well if the County would come in and do an improvement project I think an appropriate measure would be to look at what the future forecast for the trips along Galpin would be and plan for those, for that traffic in the future so you know it’s something that we still have to look at. I mean we haven’t put together a traffic plan or a traffic report yet so all of those things have to be considered as we look forward, not just for this development but into the future as areas along the Galpin Boulevard do develop. Deborah Zorn: Okay, okay. Well along those lines what makes me a little nervous when we were at the neighborhood meeting last week the developer was very kind and open to answering all of our questions. Thank you Paul. But where I have concern is when I asked, I mean they’ve been in, he and his partner have been in the development business for 20 some years. I asked him, a complex this size, what typically would be a traffic situation? You know what would be on the corner of something like this and he could not speak to that. I understand every you know jurisdiction is different. It’s a county highway but this is where I think it’s a signal that they’re just saying this box fits. Let’s put it here and let’s see if we can make a go irrelevant of what the environment is, how it will enhance our neighborhoods or make potentially much more dangerous. That’s all I have to say. Thank you. Aanenson: Can I just make one clarification? Those trips that we showed were 2011 ADT’s. I just want to make sure that was clear. That is current information. The goal of comparing the project that was advanced in 2006 with conceptual approval was just to give you a threshold between what the trip generation could be under a typical office on that site and that’s all it was intended to do but the trip numbers you saw in there were 2011. They’re not old data. And just to go back to one of the points, and maybe Paul wants to comment on this, there will be additional development in this area. There are vacant parcels so when we look at that traffic study you have to kind of, as we talked about here, think ahead because there will be additional traffic on this road. Whether or not this property develops but property to the west or as the city as a whole develops so that we have to think ahead not just on this piece but looking at all the parcels so while the city would be the primary person reviewing that, based on this development, we’d also look at background data as we do with any other project. Take similar vacant 19 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 properties because you don’t want to come back in 3 years and say we didn’t appropriately size it. Whether it’s this project or something else, we would have to look at that so I just want to make that clarification. Aller: Thank you and Kate just for clarification on the documents that were provided with the list of names and comments. That will be put on the website, the City website as well along with the package. Aanenson: Yep. Yes. Aller: So that anybody that wishes to take a look at those comments and see them, whether you’re listening in or you’re here, that will be made available on the website so that you can follow this along. Aanenson: Yeah, yeah. I did note that some of the comments that we got were people outside of Chanhassen. I’m not sure that’s reflected in here but they will all be included in the packet that goes to council and they will also be scanned into the file so anybody that wants to read it can certainly go look at this project file. Hopefully you all know how to do that. Go to find it on the City’s website and click on the things that are public information and that will all be posted on there. Aller: Alright, thank you. Would anyone else like to come forward and speak either for or against? Roger Remaley: Good evening Planning Commission and city staff. Roger Remaley, President of Walnut Grove Villas Townhouse Association. 2198 Baneberry Ridge, Baneberry Way West, sorry. I think I’ve got a few details to hit that some have been hit before. Maybe not from quite the same angle but I think the one thing that we can all agree on residents here, whether it be Longacres, Walnut Curve, Walnut Grove Villas, Vasserman Ridge, is that we innately know that this is not a good idea. And we’re the ones that live there. A few things to talk about. The only way kids can access the school other than th crossing Highway 5 directly is to cross Galpin at 78 Street and then use the trail to access the tunnel. I don’t know if you guys have been down there but that tunnel is often 12 inches deep in mud. And in the winter it’s even worst. It’s an ice mess so it’s not a very viable way to get over there, really and truly. The creek runs right next to it and that’s why so the creek overflows all the time. Galpin, as you probably th know is a really dangerous street as has been stated at 78 Street. It’s also pretty bad up where you can come into Walnut Grove Villas. There’s often more than one accident there a week. My wife and I were rear ended there I think it was in early September. Our car was totaled while we were waiting to turn left into the development. The very next day there was an accident when we left in the morning at the same place, and there has been a fatality one block up where the stop signs are. Actually I think there have been two fatalities so it is a serious issue already. A few other things, I think everybody has touched on. I think the size of this is part of what people don’t feel is right. The height and just the massiveness of it. It doesn’t feel right with the surrounding communities. Obviously children’s safety I kind of touched on that. The transfer of 96 units when we were taking about, to go from 10 units to a 96 does seem extreme, especially considering the wetland that’s over there in the spring. That thing is like 4 feet deep in water. One other thing I’d like to touch on. I don’t know why this was brought up but the developer cited a study about low income housing not having an effect on property values and crime and this isn’t low density housing so I don’t know why it was even brought up but I can guarantee you I can go find a bunch of studies that will say exactly the opposite and I could do it on a computer in probably 5 minutes. So I would just ask that you take some of these things into consideration. Another issue is pretty minor but it’s something to think about. With the lack of green area in this development I can foresee most of our neighborhoods becoming the place to take your dog to relieve himself. And we already have a big issue in our neighborhood with, our grounds crew has to pick up tons of dog waste every week. And some of that may be our own residents but we know a lot of it isn’t. It’s other people. And nobody wants to be sitting down to dinner and look out their front dining room window and have somebody’s dog going 20 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 to the bathroom in their front yard. And that’s going to put some pressure on these neighborhoods too. So with that I thank you for your time and have a good evening. Aller: Thank you. Bob Webber: Hi, my name is Bob Webber. I live at 7608 Ridgeview Way. I really want to thank you for just doing this public service and being on the Planning Commission. I find it hard to believe people volunteer their time to listen to us rant and rave. I kind of want to approach it a little bit differently than maybe some other people, although I am opposed to this project. I think that Chanhassen needs to encourage development. I think that development is good for the city. We have a lot of open space in the city. I think based on my research and a lot of antidotal information that developer that has come to work on this project is a very good developer and has a great reputation. So I think being pro development, particularly on market rate apartments I mean but one of the things I’m thinking is that if you guys on the Planning Commission, if somebody comes to you and they’re a developer and they say yeah, I think there’s a real need for market rate apartments in Chanhassen. I want to build 225 units. Where should I go? How many guesses would you have before you got to 5 and Galpin? I mean there’s so many other places that would be a natural fit for this and I think that the Planning Commission does, as I understand it, have a sort of a wide latitude in terms of discretion. It’s sort of a reasonableness type standard and I think that you’d actually be doing a favor to the developer to say we want developers like you in our city but we don’t want you screwing up the comp plan which is part of our long term vision of the city and it’s actually a lot more beneficial to the developer in my view to tell them right now that it’s sort of a non starter to be working on this project because basically if you give a mixed message this meeting in the development stage, they’re going to spend a lot of money working on it and we’re going to keep coming to these meetings and complaining and ranting and telling you about these things and if you just at the beginning just say look, we have a city plan. You guys are the Planning Commission and you know this just isn’t the place for this project but there are places a little bit east and certainly south off of 212 and we want you to come. If you want to build 400 market rate apartments I think we should encourage that. You know it just seems like such a strange place. I was sort of envisioning you know like a young couple that he described to us in the neighbors meeting that you know this might be a place where young couples, professionals would live and you’re sort of thinking okay well you’ll have sort of a romantic evening with those red lights of CVS shining in your apartment. It’s just a strange, it’s a strange place between the power lines and the Highway 5 and to pay $1,500 a month. Now of course he’s the expert on development and in terms of you know what will sell so I’m not, you know if he wants to do that but it just seems so strange that we ended up at this particular place and I feel that the commission is actually doing everyone a service to just tell the developer hey, we want you to build in Chanhassen but this is not the parcel for this project and don’t, you know don’t waste your money because you’re just going to end up spending a lot of money and it’s not going to end up being what you want. So that’s kind of my main point is to stick with the plan. You’re the Planning Commission. We sort of rely on you to put up with all of us ranting but also to be the sort of the defenders of the plan. I mean that’s kind of your I think spot in the process that somebody spent a lot of time building the plan. I think the plan was clearly the basis or at least one of the reasons why the City is a great place. Even the developer has acknowledged that Chanhassen is a planning city. Has made a good plan so we should stick with the plan and just tell the developer hey, down on 212 there’s a new park and ride. There’s big space there. Put 400 units there. Great for taxes. Great for development and we are open for business for development, I think that’s an important part of this city, what the city should be. Thanks. Aanenson: Can I just comment on that because…planning staff. We do not have this size parcel available for development. As I mentioned earlier the piece to the east has asked to not be approached. Wants to maintain that property in a rural. We do have a piece next to the park and ride. The neighborhood over there also there’s a lot of concern about that type of development. There’s only 40 units an acre. The only other piece we have is the piece that we talked about on the Powers Ridge that 21 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 has two vacant parcels. One of them is entitled for senior housing. Would take a complete re-application of that so if there was another site to provide for this developer he certainly would have been directed to that. That is his choice to pursue. When someone files an application we’re obligated to process it. Whether we tell them what their chances are or not so here we are trying to give clear direction under the concept review. Aller: Thank you. I see the line has dwindled. Anyone else wishing to come forward? Cathy Meyer: Hi. My name is Cathy Meyer. I live at 7662 Ridgeview Way in Chanhassen. Also part of Vasserman community. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Mine is, I’m just struggling with this development and I may be dense, no pun intended but I’ve lived in apartments in Boston and Chicago for years. As recent as last year my family lived in Lake Susan during a remodel and so we paid less money for more space, significantly less money for more space. The underpass was 20 feet from outside the building to go under to go to the parks. There was access to public transportation by walking down the street. And there were no power lines out my window and I also had a park out the other side that I could walk to the lake so I just struggle with who is going to really fill up this apartment. Who’s going to pay for less space and more money and I’m not saying it’s affordable housing or he’s been clear that we’re not going down that path but I just don’t get it. Like I’d love to see the study that says we’re going to fill up this apartment at this kind of size and dollar proportion so that’s my first point. And then the only second point is as a mother who has a 4 1/2 year old son getting ready to go to Bluff Creek, my understanding and I’m not totally in on this so others in the room probably know is that there is a, the district is considering a 2 mile no busing zone so you would have to pay for the bus so that’s just a consideration for those that are in the apartment as well as those of us who aren’t in the apartment and it speaks to the traffic issues. Those are my comments. Aller: Thank you. Cathy Meyer: Thank you. Aller: Yes sir. Lance Erickson: Good evening, thank you. My name is Lance Erickson and I live at 7735 Vasserman Trail which is right about here on the map. Just overlooking that northeast property right there. I had gosh a piece of paper I was going to bring up with about 9 or 10 bullets on it and really was going to talk about a lot of things but everybody that’s preceded me has covered all the points that I thought were so unique that I had prepared to discuss this, and in addition Kate gave a nice presentation. The developer did a nice job when he talked about the project and so all of the things that I was going to mention, somebody else has already talked about so, and the Chair said tonight we shouldn’t duplicate so I’m trying not to do that. One last point I would make though, and the developer brought it up and that is that Chanhassen wasn’t all that long ago was named the number one city in the United States of America and gosh guys that didn’t happen because of luck or just by chance. That happened because of you guys on the council here. It happened because of the mayor. It happened because of the city council and your plan for the future of this city in which you’ve put down with the Metropolitan Council and the long goals of how you wanted things done, and that plan says this particular site should be office and retail. It doesn’t say anything about high density apartments. So I’m just saying I think you’ve got a beautiful plan for this city and I think you ought to stay with it. Thank you. Steve Sheldon: Hi, my name is Steve Sheldon and I live at 7711 Ridgeview Way, which is kind of on the west side of Vasserman, about the third house in. One comment that I would make. Our house, it’s third house. We’re up on the hill overlooking kind of our, the houses to the south of us so we get a substantial amount of noise from Highway 5. We’re not really buffered. There isn’t a big berm there. Not a lot of 22 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 trees. No other houses so much. You know it’s, we knew that buying the place in 2010. You know we’re comfortable with it and everything but you know the location of where our house is relative to Highway 5 would be kind of up along this top part of this parcel and this project and I just don’t see how these units down here on the south side, the noise is going to be tremendous. Highway 5 you know is a major kind of state highway here. There’s a lot of semi traffic on there. A lot of other trucks and stuff. We get jake braking occasionally. You know people coming and stop at the stop light there and stuff. You know I would really question if anybody’s going to want to live there just because of that. My wife, when I first met her you know 8 years ago lived in apartments. Chanhassen Village, kind of on the east side of 101 on the north side of 5 there. Right next to the train tracks. Not a real desirable location you know and you know the train goes off at 5:00 a.m. and I don’t know so that’s my only comment. I just, I don’t know about the location suitability just because of noise. Thank you. Aller: Thank you sir. Mike Aker: My name is Mike Aker. I’m from 2131 Brinker Street. Just moved in about a year ago. I’m part of the quaky voiced passionate crowd that is really looking probably not to have this apartment complex there. A couple of things that came to mind when I was listening to the developer speak, a couple of the things that he brought up that I found interesting was how he was going to put $2 million dollars into the City coffers through all of the permitting and so forth. Wouldn’t it be true that any development that came into that would put a large amount of money into city coffers so for him to say that his specific development is going to do that is somewhat skewed. The second thing that he said, that he and his ownership group has invested a lot of money already into this and I would counter that with, I can’t speak for everybody but there’s a lot of people who have put a good portion of their life savings into their houses and don’t want to see them devalued. We talked a little bit about the traffic. If you ever see me on the corner of Brinker Street and Galpin with my daughter, you’ll see me with my hand on the collar of her coat. She’s almost been ran over twice already. I can’t imagine 400 more people traveling up and down just out of this complex or the amount of traffic so I guess I would be on the against side of this development. And the last thing I would say is, why not develop that area to create a resource for the citizens that we have here already rather than develop it to create more citizens that are going to tax all of that area right there. It just seems that there’s a lot of different things that we could do there as opposed to adding that much more so that’s all I have to say. Aller: Thank you. Yes ma’am. Kathryn Peterson: Kathryn Peterson, 7713 Vasserman Place. My point is trust. If this high density is such a wonderful idea, why was it not zoned high density from the very beginning? We put our trust in you people and our City Council to carry out this plan and to on a whim, well it’s probably not a whim but for various reasons all of a sudden we’re changing from the zoning plan that was in place to a new zoning plan just to fulfill this plan. Thank you. Aller: Thank you. Any other individuals wishing to come forward? Anyone from the another room wishing to come forward? Seeing no one come forward I’m going to close the public portion of the hearing and at this point we’ll have some discussion and comments. Anyone? Undestad: I’ll start off with my two cents here. Everything that was brought up by the residents here, I mean these are all great, valid points. Everything that the developer needs to consider in his own mind to know if he even wants to try to push this thing or do anything with it. All those would have to be resolved and dealt with. The traffic. The safety. The kids. The school. You know locations. Other locations was brought up south and I think part of what we’re looking at here, and again I won’t say that I don’t agree with the high density. The number of units. I think there’s a blend. There’s something we can do in there but to take a project like that and move it south to the 212 corridor or something, two 23 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 reasons. Number one, I don’t think we have infrastructure down there in place to handle something like that but more than that is, again what we’ve created for families. For kids. For everybody around here. You put the apartment down there on 212, the kids still want to be able to get to town. And again this works for that but I don’t think that the densities, I don’t think the number of units on there is something that, you know that’s something that has to be looked at hard. I think the land to the north, if anything I’d like to see that stay just the way it is. The neighbors can take their dogs over there and take care of the grass. But again you know there is, there’s a lot of concerns. A lot of things that have to be worked out on there to even, even at you know in my mind as a less dense apartment complex in there. The location, it’s close to town. I think that’s a good thing. 225 units right there, that’s what I kind of struggle with there too so, but again you know the comments, the list and what’s going to be on the public record, it’s a lot of work. A lot of thought to go through that process so, that’s my two cents. Tennyson: I agree with a lot of what the commissioner just said. Conceptually I don’t really have a problem with it knowing that the developer is going to have a whole lot of obstacles and other hoops to go through in order to even get to 221 units. They’re going to have to address all of these concerns which were, as was said, everybody did a really good explaining their concerns. Everyone was really articulate with it. I didn’t know I was going to hear anything new and I did but to me it didn’t really lead me away from thinking that the concept in general is okay as long as we know that there are so many other things that the developer needs to go through. Thomas: I’ll go. I’m also in agreement with the other commissioners as well. I believe that the concept of the idea of what would go on this parcel of land is a benefit to being able to be close to downtown and have an apartment complex for people to be able to live at which is something that we definitely need in Chanhassen. We don’t have this capacity any place else within Chanhassen. I mean you heard from other people that counts we’re at like 2% which is considerably quite low for apartment complexes within Chanhassen and livable spaces for other people besides single family or twin homes and things like that. I also, I mean I like to kind of see the back part of the property stay the way it is and just focus on the front. I understand, I live close to the property as well. I understand that there are U turns there at the CVS. I’d like to see that intersection changed regardless of what happens. Regardless of what happens with this project I’d like to see that intersection worked upon. Whether, stop light. Maybe a round about. I don’t know, something needs to be done there so we can create a better, safer turning pattern because I’m not a fan of it by any means and I go by there enough and long enough and often so I’d like to see it updated regardless of what happens and moves forward but general of the process if we can work through some of the issues and we can move forward I would be alright with it. Hokkanen: Okay, I’m going to give my ten cents worth because full disclosure I live in Longacres. I work at Edina Realty so I go that corner. I travel there. I understand everybody’s concerns. Everybody did articulate all their concerns. I think the project in general, we do have a need in Chanhassen for market rate apartments. We just, the occupancy, I mean there’s just a demand for it. Whether this particular project is the right fit, I have great concern about the density of this project at this location. You know what we can do something with it, and I agree about the intersection. Even if this project does not go through we need to work on that project. I drive there. I’m one of those people that has many trips a day back and forth on all those roads. Concerned with the kids. The tunnel. I just, the overall density of the project. I think it will be a nice project. I don’t know if at this, I want that land to develop. I don’t know that I would be in favor of rezoning it for the higher density so that’s my ten cents worth. Any questions? Aller: I got the packet and I started thinking about the things that we need to look for and the issues that are facing Chanhassen and us as we move forward as a commission and there are two. One, how do we provide economic development to Chanhassen and how do we balance that with providing a broader range of housing. There are two things that are coming about nationally. They’re news all over and 24 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 they’re impacting us as well and that’s that there typically has been a decreasing in the size of housing and the aging population. We’re starting to look at more seniors here in Chanhassen. We’re looking at less single family residences and more mobility in the youth and in young couples and people that are just changing lifestyles, changing jobs and the economy so I tried to balance that when I looked at the project and I feel a real need for this type of project here in Chanhassen to give us the broadest range of housing and to make it available to our residents and to our neighbors. I have a problem with the density as well based on just the numbers and the size because it’s tough to wrap your head around a building of that size when it sits on a corner but I do know, and I’ve experienced here on the commission where we have the same zoning for two different projects and you have so many houses per acre and one project feels like it’s bigger, better and more closely related to the neighborhood than the other and it all comes down to the quality of the construction. It comes down to the landscaping and it comes down to the neighborhood and the facilities themselves so I’m hearing that there’s not a problem with the quality of the developer. The quality of the construction that’s been proposed and so that’s a good thing. I still worry about the traffic. The traffic patterns because it’s going to be something that again we have to face regardless. And the safety, the public safety issues so it will be interesting to see whether or not, if this is undertaken that maybe public safety agencies provide a report indicating what their view on this would be and the impact of that on our schools and on our parks and on our traffic. General crime rates statistics perhaps. And I would thank the members of the public that appeared today as well as those who made phone calls, left messages, emails, signed petitions because what we’re doing is we’re looking at the conscience power of our neighbors and the wisdom of the crowd so to speak and so we’ve heard from different neighbors with different backgrounds. Different ages. Different areas and I think we need to listen to them as we move forward and I think the developer so far has done a good job of that and I see no reason why that would stop in the future. So I would say I don’t have a problem with the matter moving forward, looking at the conditions that were in the report. That were requested to be reviewed in the report. Knowing that the watershed, water, state other agencies are going to come down and take a look at this and they’re going to have to jump through all those hurdles, and they’re well aware of that as the developer stated so I think if they follow through with this and they heed, and it sounds like they will, that that wisdom of our flash mob of planning neighbors, that it would be a good project to move forward with the concern, the primary concern being the density. Any other comments to go forward? Undestad: No. Yeah, I’d like just one more. I mean there was comments made about you know we just arbitrarily change zoning and things on here and over the years that we’ve all been involved around here, I mean it’s just a matter of projects that are presented. Back then. Now. In the future and it’s not a matter of you know okay we’re just going to change because he came in and wants apartments. Oh that must be what it needs. We do look at these overall in the entire city and I think again that’s what everybody’s been doing for quite a few years out here so we’re not just jumping ship saying oh well, it’s the only thing going on. Let’s give it to him. Again he’s got some decisions to make. If the densities aren’t there, then he’s got the economics to think about. I think that’s kind of the biggest ticket right there is how many units realistically would go on there. Aller: I agree and in looking at our plan I think there’s a difference between having a strong neighborhood and a strong community and in order to have that strong community there has to be something that keeps us from being isolated so as much as we would like to be the single family home on a 3,000 acre parcel where everybody leaves us alone and there’s no cell phone, we’re not in that kind of world and so I think it builds community and builds neighbors if we allow for, and again the density is I think the primary issue that I’m thinking of with, call it a buffer but call it a change of housing so that you have single family. You have multi use facilities next to each other and the question is how much and how close. Aanenson: Mr. Chair if I may. If you wanted to, I was taking notes of your comments. They’re also, like I said, there will be verbatim minutes but if you would make a recommendation to pass your comments 25 Chanhassen Planning Commission – December 4, 2012 onto the City Council with the ones that were in the staff report and the ones you just enumerated, then we would make that recommendation to the City Council. If that’s your desire. Aller: So I’ll ask for a motion. It’s not an up or down motion. It’s a motion to pass these comments along. Aanenson: Correct. Undestad: I’ll make a motion. Aller: Okay. Undestad: We pass along the comments. Aller: I have a motion. Do I have a second? Thomas: Second. Aller: I have a motion and a second. Any further conversation regarding that discussion? Thomas: No. Undestad moved, Thomas seconded that the Planning Commission recommend their comments be forwarded to the City Council. All voted in favor and the motion carried unanimously with a vote of 5 to 0. Aller: Motion carries. Comments will be passed along to the City Council for their review and action. Thank you again to the members of the public who contacted us with their opinions. We’re going to take a 2 minute recess while the rooms clear and then we have another item to come before the committee. Thank you. APPROVAL OF MINUTES: Commissioner Thomas noted the verbatim and summary minutes of the Planning Commission meeting dated November 20, 2012 as presented. Thomas moved, Hokkanen seconded to adjourn the meeting. All voted in favor and the motion carried unanimously with a vote of 5 to 0. The Planning Commission meeting was adjourned at 9:05 p.m. Submitted by Kate Aanenson Community Development Director Prepared by Nann Opheim 26