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Eugene Hearing Official November 23, 2015 Page 19 the perimeter adjacent to "surrounding properties." That would include private property, such as adjacent private lots, and public property, such as streets. Surrounding is surrounding. The dictionary definition of "surrounding" also does not allow the exception that the Director read into it. See Webster's Third New Int'l Dictionary (unabridged ed 2002) at 2302. "Surrounding * * * the circumstances, conditions, or objects by which one is surrounded." Applying this standard as it is written would not allow any development of the property. The standard would require the 30-foot buffer along West Amazon Drive, and that would preclude the private driveways needed for access. The fact that the Director pretends that the standard does not apply adjacent to any street does mean it is OK to apply the standard elsewhere around the property, as the Director would do here. Staff responded to this issue in their two-page hearing memorandum. The major pitch they make is that reading the standard as suggested by the applicant would lead to absurd results, and the Hearing Official should not put an absurd meaning on the standard. The Hearing Official should reject the invitation to treat the provision as absurd. That would then require the Hearing Official to interpret it in a way that is not absurd, and there is no guidance in the code context or in the legislative history as to how to trim it down to a correct reading. There is certainly no basis to endorse the meaning that the Director gave it in 2004. The simple alternative is to dispose of the standard the way the LUBA disposed of the storm water standard in 2002 - reject it as a development prohibition in the guise of a standard. Staff also suggest that it is too late in the life of the code provision to raise this issue. It should have been raised by the Home Builders in 2001; it should have been raised by the Deerbrook applicant; now the Planning Commission has spoken as to how to apply the standard. The Hearing Official gets a fresh crack at this standard, here and now, under the Needed Housing Statute, which applies directly. LUBA did not look at this standard among the 100 code standards that it did review in Home Builders. The Planning Commission in Deerbrook did not address the question of whether the standard can be applied at all. In summary, the landscape standard has two fatal shortcomings. First, the plain language does not allow access roads to penetrate the buffer; hence the standard prevents development; the statute requires that development be allowed under clear and objective standards, not prohibited. When this code standard was last interpreted in 2004, the Director opened a crack in it by saying that "surrounding properties" does not include adjacent city streets. The Hearing Official gets a fresh look at the standard here. Second, because the City concedes that the standard must be interpreted in order to its not leading to absurd results, the standard therefore is too ambiguous to be applied at all. See discussion of the 19 Lot Rule above and Group B. Any interpretation will either allow or disallow development, or dictate the scope of the limitation or conditioning to be applied under the standard. This discretion should be fatal to applying the standard at all. Furthermore, how