Sean Morgan and Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
With just four members present, the Planning Commission held off taking action on proposed zoning code revisions Monday night during its regular meeting to allow more input from additional commissioners at its Sept. 3 meeting.
Chairman Lance Gatchell, Thomas Herb and Greg Korn were not present Monday. The remaining four, Vice Chair Henry Wolthuis, Eva Jurney, Jeff Parker and Greg Stephens, decided they weren’t ready to act. They voted unanimously to table the issue until their next meeting, which they agreed would be Sept. 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the new City Hall.
Jurney said she wanted to hear from City Manager Ray Towry regarding the proposed changes.
“I’m not in opposition to it,” she said. “I just would have liked to have had some dialogue.”
Commissioners and staff members agreed that issues addressed in the proposed changes may have impacted two variance requests they heard – and denied – earlier in the evening.
“Maybe we should wait will more bodies are here,” Parker suggested.
Stephens noted that he recalled commissioners having problems with some of the changes.
“I thought we talked before about this issue and we didn’t like it,” he said.
Associate Planner Angela Clegg told them that was the point: “ You can vote on what you want to keep, and deny the parts you don’t.”
City of Sweet Home officials are looking at major revisions to the zoning code, but because the process is long, they’re looking at some immediate revisions to address some ongoing issues in implementing the code.
The items under consideration are a “long-awaited Band-Aid,” Community and Economic Development Director Blair Larsen told The New Era. They are things in the code that need to be addressed immediately rather than as part of the longer term revision process.
The city is working with planning consultant John Morgan, who also is working with Millersburg, Larsen said. Millersburg is further along in the process, and Sweet Home is in kind of a holding pattern, waiting for a draft of the Millersburg ordinance that could inform the revision process for Sweet Home.
City officials, along with the City Council and Planning Commission, will need to decide whether to begin with Sweet Home’s existing code and work in changes or start fresh with a model code, with changes made based on elements of the existing code, Larsen said. He sees the benefit of either way, but he prefers to begin with a model code and adjust it to fit Sweet Home based on existing code.
“There’s some structural problems,” Larsen said of Sweet Home’s code, some “silos,” where codes pertinent to various zoning questions are isolated from each other in the code.
They relate, but they aren’t interacting the way they should.
“Some rules make it difficult to do anything,” Larsen said. The zoning code has a requirement for at least 80 feet of street frontage for a residential property. A number of properties are deep enough to build additional homes, but at 100 feet wide, they cannot be split through a flag lot process. The 20-feet of access to the back part of the property is not enough under the code.
New subdivisions are platted to avoid flag lot situations, Larsen said, but for some of the larger parcels, “it just makes sense.”
To solve it, a property owner must get a variance.
That wastes time and aggravates the applicant, Larsen said. “We can avoid all that if we have rules in place to handle these kinds of situations. We should have these difficult decisions once at the council and the Planning Commission then let the staff deal with it.
“You want a reliable rule that people can trust. Everybody when they come in should feel like my request is normal – if it is normal.”
Ideally, the staff would have little discretion to approve or deny, Larsen said. If the project fits within the ordinance, then staff can approve a project.
“We have some strange zones,” he said. One is an industrial-residential transition zone, which is in place along the northern end of Clark Mill Road. The ordinance doesn’t spell out which way it’s transitioning, toward industrial use or residential use.
It’s not clear to staff, and the ordinance doesn’t actually say what it’s intended to do, he said.
“You shouldn’t have to search for everything,” Larsen said. With rules in different places, it’s not clear which zones a rule applies to.
The flag lot issue is one of the more pressing issues, he said, and that’s why it’s among revisions included in the Planning Commission agenda on Monday. Meanwhile city staff members are continuing to review the code.
The Community and Economic Development Department requested to initiate the legislative process to revise the codes in November. The process requires hearings and the approval of the Planning Commission and City Council.
The commission had a public hearing scheduled on codes covering the appeals process in two different chapters, procedures, public hearings on amendments, notice of land use decisions, definitions, access and driveways, variance criteria, considerations and
Among the revisions, the appeal period would be reduced from 21 days to 12 days because the longer appeal period makes it more difficult to achieve a final planning decision within the 120 days required by the state.
The proposal would clarify who receives notices of decisions.
The revisions would add to the list of conditionally permitted uses in all zones any other use compatible with the purpose and intent of a zone rather than a comprehensive list of all possible conditional uses.
The proposal would define and regulate joint-use driveways. At this time, the code is unclear what road standards apply to joint use driveways and private access easements, according to a November memo by previous Community and Economic Development Director Jerry Sorte.
The revisions would reduce the number of criteria for a variance to six. The variance would need to meet all of them. Among them, the applicant must show the variance is necessary because the code does not account for special or unique circumstances on a property and other factors based on surrounding development. It must be the minimum necessary to address the circumstances, and the circumstances must not have been caused by the owner or applicant. It may not harm surrounding property owners or the public, and it must meet all applicable building codes and city requirements.
The proposal outlines a process fora the city manager to call for review by the City Council of a Planning Commission decision regarding variances, conditional use permits and other land use applications.
For further information or copies of the proposed language, visit the city planning office or call (541) 367-8113.
In other action Monday, commissioners:
–– Deadlocked 2-2 on a request from James Metzger to partition a 42,235-square-foot property at 2463 Harding Street into three parcels measuring 10,890 square feet, 10,890 square feet and 16,331 square feet (not including a flag pole running north to Harding).
Metzger wanted a variance to reduce the minimum lot width at front building line from 80 feet to 72½ feet on the proposed 10,890 square-foot parcel and 72.61 feet on the proposed 10,890-square-foot parcel to have a minimum 25-foot frontage width for the third parcel.
Staff noted that city code for approval of a variance required conditions such as lot size or shape, topography or other circumstances over which property owners have no control. A staff report stated that those criteria were not met.
Commissioners agreed that Metzger’s request would allow all three lots to have individual driveways fronting on Harding and two homes would face the street.
Clegg said that the variance would be necessary to have the houses face the street, under the current code, due to the 80-foot rule.
After Jurney and Parker said they didn’t see the proposal meeting variance requirements, Wolthuis agreed that it didn’t, but argued that the neighborhood has a lot of older homes and lots that may require similar actions to those requested by Metzger.
“It’s been done many times before,” he said. “We have the power to do the variance. It would make the neighborhood look nicer to have two homes with fronts facing the street.”
Jurney said she agreed that it would look better, but “that’s not relevant to this application.”
Parker agreed.
“It doesn’t met the requirements for a variance,” he said. “The lot is very plain, so there is no reason to do the variance. As much as I like the neighborhood looking good, that’s not an issue for us.”
Jurney moved to deny the request, she and Parker voting for denial and Stephens and Wolthuis voting to approve the variance.
After the deadlock, Wolthuis asked Metzger if he was willing to make changes to address the commissioners’ concerns.
Metzger told commissioners he was willing to change his plans to comply with whatever the city decided.
–– Approved a request by Scott Rice to partition a 78,750-square-foot lot at the corner of Clark Mill and Zykova streets, zoned Recreation/Commercial, into two parcels, one 46,349 square feet and containing an existing home, and the other 32,401 square feet with a pole barn.
Rice also requested a conditional use permit to build a home on the second parcel, which was required by city code for residential uses not related to or in conjunction with a recreational development in the RC Zone.
He told commissioners that the property, at 1410 Clark Mill, belonged to his late parents, Clinton and Barbara Rice since 1960, and that he was born there and wanted to live there.
Commissioners agreed it met “all criteria,” as Jurney put it, and voted 4-0 to approve the permit.
–– Denied a request by David Staup of Lebanon to allow him to partition a 20,812-square-foot property at 1088 38th Ave. into two parcels on the west side of the street in a low-density residential (R-1) zone. One lot would be a 9,212-square-foot flag lot (not including the flag pole), while the other would be 8,625 square feet. A variance was requested to reduce the width for the second lot from the code-required 80 feet to 75 feet.
Staup told commissioners he’d purchased the property two years ago as an investment. At that time, he said, it contained two houses, one fire-damaged and the other collapsing into itself after he bought the land. He said he’s demolished the burned house and cleared the land.
Commissioners agreed that there was nothing “unique” about the property, to warrant a variance, and they voted 3-1, with Wolthuis dissenting, to deny the request.