Planning Commission Minutes 2015 08 13

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Planning Commission Meeting Minutes August 13, 2015 Page 14 of 22 curated garden that residents and visitors can visit. If you put up a fence that blocks access to people during daylight hours, I have an issue to the point I might vote against it. Russell says if this was a developer or private sector developer, we could extract benefit public benefit. We can't do that here. I want to communicate forcefully that this garden association needs to work very hard to prove public benefit. There are, at best, going to be 40-45 people with families who will get to garden. This is a community of 20,000. You have to work and have a plan and then be ready to talk about the community benefit. It has to be there for the community and more specifically for the neighborhood. You have some neighbors who are not going to be happy seeing you showing up. The same kind of pressure that creates good behavior within the garden ought to drive that kind of behavior outside of the garden. Moline remembers over a decade ago when I worked for the City of Louisville and we were within a hair's breadth of letting people with backyard gardens and allow them on open space. That was a problem for me. It felt like here was an opportunity for someone, who by virtue of having access to public land because of their back yard, would have the benefit not available to other people. An opportunity like this does it differently, and allows/spreads the opportunity among other people in the community. Tengler's suggestion about term limits is a helpful suggestion as well. I am sensitive to the privatization of public land. I think these two pieces of land will look better than they do now as extra public land that is neglected. Tengler asks the PC if they see a differentiation between trash and compost. Compost seems like it should be there as opposed to trash. I am in agreement that it could be an eyesore to have trash cans and dumpsters. My sense is a compost bin is part and parcel of a garden. It seems to make more sense to try and accommodate that with an attractive container for a compost bin. Moline asks if the community garden people might speak with the Lydia Morgan managers and find a way for some of the waste generated on this site to be disposed of at Lydia Morgan. Russell says I think we are putting a layer a complexity onto this. It is one thing to say, you got to have a compost bin. If they have to start negotiating agreements around waste disposal with neighbors, there may not be an urgency for it. Russ says the SRU will set up the conditions of how the use will be operated. The City will be entering into a license agreement for the use of the property. I think these conditions are great because it gives Staff clarity on how to negotiate the license agreement. We can hold the applicant to the uses described as conditions and further clarify if you so choose to add additional conditions through the license agreement. I agree with what Russell just mentioned. There will be a subsequent license agreement. If you want conditions added to the SRU, it helps Staff be aware of the license agreement negotiation. The purpose of this public hearing is to give Staff guidance on the SRU which will ultimately influence the license agreement. Russell says we need to be focused on the outcome we are trying to achieve. The condition needs to be about outcome and not about how they get there. We are no better at managing a community garden than we are being developers. We should focus on the issues we are trying to avoid and conditions that get us there. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about some facility for composting on site. I'd like to know if other Commissioners think it is adequate that there will not be music on Saturdays in the evenings. O'Connell says, along these lines, we should leave it to the garden association. They have done their research on community gardens all around the area and across the country. Discussing conditions, I think we should consider the crosswalk requirements because that speaks to an