Planning Commission Minutes 2016 07 14

Home Browse Search

Planning Commission Meeting Minutes July 14, 2016 Page 12 of 33 landscaping versus not. We agree that we will have a solid proposal prepared before City Council, but I will show you where we are headed at this moment. In addition to the mature trees that Staff has recommended, we are looking at trying to preserve the existing vegetation down at the corner of the site with the collection of cottonwoods. We think if we reconfigure the drainage there a little bit, we can leave a significant area of that corner undisturbed. I'm showing a photo of trees with the leaves more leafed out. You can't really see the existing house behind this screen of existing vegetation. The middle photo shows proposed locations for mature landscaping with a hint of what the building will be. We believe you won't really see it because of the density of this if we are able to preserve the existing trees. The lower photo is more of a winter view where we would see the building ghosted in behind the fairly dense tree cover along with these new trees planted along the edge. We are looking at a combination of evergreen trees, probably Ponderosa pines, along with a deciduous tree our landscape architect can speak to in more detail later. It is a crimson spire oak which works well in our western climate but it has a leaf structure that goes down to the bottom, not just a canopy on top. This particular form of oak tends to hold on to its leaves all winter long. This is an added benefit to using this tree. You can see in this sketch a line of evergreens that we will plant on the north side. There are existing Russian olive trees along that edge and Staff has asked us to remove those because they are considered an invasive species and replace them with these evergreens. SHADOWS ON TRAILS Another comment we've heard about is impact of the sun and shade from the building. We looked at it from the winter solstice, at three times during the day. Even on a long shadow day, the shadows from the building never make it to the trails. It will get better in the spring, summer, and fall. Because of its location near the center of the site and the way the building is articulated, we will not have any shade or shadow problems on the trails in the open space. LANDSCAPING We are trying to work through the drainage scheme to get to the detention pond and not disturb any of the area that is green. Anything from the line to the property line, we will leave alone with the exception of hand -carting in and planting a couple of evergreens and oaks. In addition to where the evergreens are on the north side where Staff asked us to plant, we are suggesting some very tall perennial grasses that will stay in place throughout the winter. The scheme for the site itself is that we are trying to play up the notion of this being a lavender farm, which has some therapeutic qualities. We are setting it up in such a way that the patterns of the grasses and the lavender will create the appearance that the building and parking lot were inserted into these rows of lavender. We think this will be a terrific amenity, not only for the residents but for anyone surrounding the site. We are available for questions on any topic. Emails and materials board entered into record: Rice makes a motion and Hsu seconds to enter emails and materials board into the record. Motion passes by voice vote. Commission Questions of Applicant: Moline says do you look at designing a building that met all the constraints on site and what that looked like. If you did that, why did you choose to go in the direction you've gone? Williams says we did not explore options that would do that for a couple of reasons. We had a fairly limited area of where we could fit this building based on the constraints we had, especially around the mine itself. There was a character and level of quality precedent with the other communities at Balfour that drove us in that direction. We knew that getting a height exception had occurred with the other three communities. This is the next extension of a fairly successful campus and we felt the qualities that this community would bring forward would be on par with the others, and would receive similar consideration for that height variance.