Planning Commission Minutes 2022 04 14

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Planning Commission Meeting Minutes April 14, 2022 Page 2 of 8 requiring land use applicants to mail public notice of public hearings and of certain land use applications under review. (Resolution No. 6, Series 2022) • Applicant: City of Louisville • Case Planner: Elizabeth Kay Marchetti, Senior Planner All notice was met as required and there is no commissioner conflict of interest. Staff Presentation: Kay Marchetti begins her presentation with discussing the background. Since 1975, Louisville has adopted and then amended the standards for mailed notices of public hearings and of two land use application types six times. The people historically responsible for accomplishing all aspects of public notification efforts have been city planning staff. The 2021 Marshall Fire has forced planning staff to re-evaluate workload and priorities in order to respond appropriately to the community's needs in order to maintain a high level of customer service to fire survivors and to land use applicants. It has recently been estimated that planning staff needs anywhere from 8 to 24 hours of time per week to accomplish the mailed notice efforts. The work is so labor intensive and time consuming that current staff have needed to come to the office on weekends just to handle the mailed notification workload. When an underestimate of the cost of staff's time is used, this comes out to approximately $9,600 to $28,800 annually in labor costs for the City. Staff have questioned whether Louisville would be breaking new ground in the city planning and land entitlement industry and discovered that the answer is no. Already the counties of Boulder and Douglas and the cities of Broomfield, Wheat Ridge, Westminster, Arvada, Aurora, and Englewood are requiring the same mailed notification standard that staff is proposing. She then discusses the specifics of the proposed amendments. There are two case types that require mailed notice to surrounding neighbors when a complete application has been submitted and reviewed by City staff: Administrative Special Review Use and Administrative Variance. In both instances, staff will create the content of the notice along with the mailing list and give both to the applicant for their use. The mailing list will be generated using the Boulder County Assessor's database. The land use applicant will be required to provide proof to staff that they accomplished the mailed notice. The land use applicant will certify that the mailing occurred by using a simple form that staff will create. The applicant will execute the form and give it to staff along with a copy of the original mailing list, which will be added to the project file. There are also twelve case types that require mailed notice to surrounding neighbors in preparation for a public hearing. For properties considered historic, the case types are as follows: Landmark, Alteration Certificate, and Demolition Permit. These are the other case types: Plat, Minor Plat, Zoning/Rezoning, Planned Unit Development, Special Review Use, Administrative Special Review Use, Variance, and Floodplain Development Permit. Again, in all instances, staff will create the content of the notice along with the mailing list and give both to the applicant for their use. The applicant will follow the same process as mentioned in the paragraph above.