05 Public Record Pages 824-1020 - Laserfiche WebLink

PDF Page 52 Not all of the values can be maximized, unless, of course, the PUD has only one dwelling unit- The second dwelling unit approved in South Hills PUD comes at the expense of some value that the PUD standards intend to be preserved or maximized. Put differently, if one starts with a PUD proposed at the five du/ac cap, and then reduces the unit count, one then must decide what values to boost in exchange for the lower dwelling count. For example, the Staff Report suggests a lower multi-family unit count. If the multi-family unit count were reduced by half, the number of those units would be 266; the total number of units in the project would be 342; the du/account would be 2.81. That would pose a choice: Would it be better to keep the multi- family building height the same, thus having a smaller footprint on the ground and saving vegetation? Or would it be better to keep the footprint the same, lower the building height, and improve the view (for some neighbor looking from somewhere)? At the hearing the applicant posed the allegory of the gathering of the footballs. With a football field strewn with 100 numbered footballs, the applicant's task is to'continuously move downfield gathering 10 footballs. At the other goal line the Staff Report reviews the applicant's choice to determine if she has the right collection. Five applicants picking up footballs each will have a different collection of footballs. Each armful reflects a collection of value choices. In this instance the Applicant walked the field six times, picking up a different collection of footballs each time. None was deemed to be correct by the Staff Report. But, as the Applicant's representative at the hearing, Ralph Nauman, explained, the Staff Report never explains why the footballs selected were the wrong ones. - The PUD application requirements ensure that the applicant has a comprehensive design team of professionals - landscape architect, civil engineer, stormwater engineer, geotechnical expert, arborist, biologist, and so on. This is the only professional design team that examines all the facts about the site in. light of the approval standards and settles upon a design for the entire site. The result is bound to make everyone unhappy about something. Anyone can point to a football left on the field that should have been collected. But only the Applicant has applied professional expertise to propose a comprehensive design. The Applicant here has proposed a development scheme for the entire site. That reflects value judgments that result in trade-offs between a conflicting set of values that can't all be maximized. The question for the Hearing Official is not whether the Staff or the neighbors believe the Applicant has selected a wrong football or two. The question should be whether the Applicant has selected a design that is within the legal parameters set by the implementing regulations. Inside those legal parameters there is room for many different designs. With respect to one of the values that is subject to trade-offs with other values, there cannot be only one right answer. In summary, there should be healthy degree of deference to the Applicant's design choices, as the one comprehensive proposal done by professionals looking at all the standards. There remains room for the staff to recommend changes through conditioning. The staff regularly tweeks projects with conditions to reflect a slightly different set of trade-offs. The LaurelRidge Applicant Final Argument - Page 18 101' Laurel Ridge Record (Z 15-5) Page 856