A bill for an ordinance changing the zoning classification for 4201 East Arkansas Avenue in Virginia Village. Approves an official map amendment to rezone property located at 4201 East Arkansas Avenue, 4040 East Louisiana Avenue and 1380 South Birch Street from CMP-EI2 and S-MX-5 UO-1 UO-2 to S-MX-8 UO-2, S-MX-8, S-MX-5, S-MX-3, and S-MU-3 (campus, various districts, to suburban, mixed-use various heights), in Council District 6. The Committee approved filing this item at its meeting on 10-9-18.
No items have been called out under pending. No items have been called out. Miss anything? All right. Looks good. Secretary, will you please put the first item on our screens and councilman new, will you please put Council Bill 1075 on the floor for publication a move the council bill 18 1075 be ordered published. It has been moved and seconded. Councilor. Councilman Cashman, your motion to postpone. Thank you, Mr. President. I move that first reading or publication of Council Bill 18 1075 be postponed to Monday, November five, 2018. That has been moved. Can I get a second? Thank you. It has been moved in second questions or comments by members of Council or Councilman Cashman. Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate my colleague's consideration of this request to delay first reading for Council Bill 1075. I want to explain that my request for a delay is not intended to be a slam on anybody. There have been a whole lot of folks working hard to move this proposal to a place where it can be fairly evaluated by this council. City staff has been engaged in productive negotiation with control group for four months on a critical development agreement that the Planning Board noted was so important to this process. That agreement, still awaiting city signatures hit my desk this morning. Neighbors are negotiating a collateral neighborhood agreement with the developer. And I have been working with all sides to craft the project team structure that will provide ongoing dialog between all parties council, the city, the developer and the community at regular intervals should this rezoning ultimately be approved? Once a development, the scope of which can grow is proposing is re zoned. The real hard work for a community begins. We need a formal structure in place to see that work gets done in an appropriate manner. All of these elements are moving toward completion, but none are yet finalized. Those those dotted i's and cross t's are critical, and I believe council and the community deserve adequate time to study those documents before we consider the proposal. Pros and Cons. A smart chef does not serve dinner until it's fully cooked. I want to take a minute to explain why I'm taking such a cautious approach to this rezoning request. I believe it is unique that such a large piece of property, 13 acres, goes from a sleepy, decades long use to a high density mixed use development. Councilwoman Sussman is project up at ninth and Colorado was historically a hospital zone that was active seven days a week, 24 hours a day for decades, generating some 30,000 car trips a day. The new use under construction will actually cut the hours of operation on the site and the daily car trips approximately in half. The growth in Cherry Creek, breathtaking as it may seem, has been incremental over decades in an already existing commercial district, the Lowry and Stapleton commercial districts have been born of a comprehensive planning that intentionally fit retail and office uses into the overall residential context. The scene on site historically generated some 670 auto trips a day, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, basically 835 trips going in in the morning rush and another 835 going home in the late afternoon. By the developer's own estimates. Should the request be approved, traffic will increase somewhere in the neighborhood of 800% to something like 11,000 trips a day, seven days a week. This equates to that same morning rush hour every hour from morning to the middle of the night, depending on how the final site plan and uses come together. I live eight blocks from that site. I'm intimately familiar with the infrastructure by which it is served. To say that there are challenges to get pedestrians, cyclists and automobiles safely and conveniently to and from 4201 East Arkansas is an understatement. I'm committed to doing everything within my power to mitigate impact proactively. I want to thank Cantrell, the Community Planning and Development and Denver Public Works Department, as well as community representatives for participating in unprecedented preemptive discussions on traffic concerns. I want to thank all the city agencies for working so hard with Kantor on the development agreement, and I want to thank all the neighbors who have participated thus far in expressing their thoughts on what is being suggested in trying to craft a neighborhood agreement to further guide work on that site. In spite of all this hard work. There's a bit more to be done before this cake is ready for council to taste. I asked my colleagues to join me in voting for this postponement. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Cashman. Councilman Brooks? Yeah. Just got a question to Councilman Cashman. Obviously, we just had this in committee. Councilman, and I know that we said some of the items. I hear what you're saying, but the substantive work of why we're postponing was not really laid out. So, I mean, this is the first time I'm hearing about this, a little more information. When this year, Speaker Quinn, this issue was before the Land Use Committee. There was considerable discussion about whether or not it should be postponed at that time, awaiting development agreement, which, as I said, planning board has recommended an important part of this discussion. At that point, our attorney said that the development agreement would be done within a couple of days, and it's taken longer than that. We're now almost two weeks down the road, and I just saw it today. And it while it looks like it's final, it's still awaiting final signatures. I'm not comfortable with trying to predict when things might be finalized as a lot of things in the mix. And as I say, I think this discussion deserves a completed product. Okay, Councilman. And I just let me add, I made the developers aware of my intended request this morning, and they're not objecting to the delay. Okay. Councilman, I was just curious, because this is this is before us and four weeks. It'll be delayed two weeks to I don't know. But I'm saying to as of today without delay it's before us in four weeks. And you don't think that the development agreement will be buttoned up in four weeks? I'm I'm not in the position to mind, Reed. I'm taken, as I said, a conservative approach to give the city plenty of time to finish the development agreement, the neighbors and the developer to work on the neighborhood agreement. And as I said, I'm working with public works and planning and development for for several weeks now on trying to craft some sort of a structure. So this is an extremely impactful development on my district, and I just think it deserves the time to be for us to all have plenty of time to consider it completely and carefully. Mm hmm. Thank you. Councilman Brooks, Councilwoman Black. Thank you, Mr. President. Unfortunately, I was not here for the committee meeting, so. I'm sorry I missed that. I, I thought. I didn't realize there were issues with it. And so I guess I'm curious about the development agreement. I thought it was done. And the good neighbor agreement is we we don't weigh in on that. So but I guess I have a question for Nate Lucero. My question is. Just from moving city business along. Is it is it better to postpone publishing it or is it better to publish it tonight and then postpone it for date certain two weeks later than we already had planned? I mean, is there a way that. Thank you, Councilwoman Black. That decision is purely within your discretion, whether you postpone it now or postpone the public hearing. That being said, this is a quasi judicial reasoning that has been applied for by a private party. And at some point they have a right to come to this council's decision up or down on the matter. But again, the decision is yours. Whether you postpone now or if, if, if at the public hearing, which which currently is scheduled in four weeks, the decision is to delay that public hearing, then obviously you would be able to do that within your discretion as well. So from. Your perspective. Does it matter if it's done one way or the other, or is it one way better than the other? Doesn't matter from a legal perspective. And what I would tell you, Councilwoman, as far as the neighbors, the development agreement was put on my desk this morning. I haven't had a chance to look at it. It's a critical part of this. And while we don't vote on the neighborhood agreement, it was my understanding that in the negotiations over the development agreement, there were elements that I believe the developer had hoped to get into the neighborhood agreement that the city decided were not appropriate to be in that agreement. And so trying to incorporate that into part of the neighborhood agreement. So I think there's a lot of work to do. I mean, I'm confident it's moving in the right direction. I think all parties are working in good conscience and good faith and very hard to get it done. Thank you, Councilman Black, Councilman Flynn. Thank you, Mr. President. In response to the council members questions and in support of. Counseling cash and I'll answer the. Question that was put to the lawyer since he indicated it was a political rather than a legal question. It is much. More convenient. For the public to postpone on first reading rather than to. Wait and see if the development agreement is finally approved. And if it were not to be approved, to have to cancel an already announced public hearing on the eve of it or the or the Friday before. It's much friendlier to all parties. To start the process. With the clock. Ticking at the first reading, politically speaking rather than legally, to do it the way Councilman Cashman suggests. And I would remind the Council that when this came through Land Use Committee, that we were told that the planning board had approved this, not with the condition, because they don't do a conditional approval, of course, but the observation that their their approval was based on the development agreement being in place at the time of public hearing. And since we're not sure right now that it will be for the sake of the public, I think it's only prudent that we that we honor the four week calendar and do an official notice once. We've published it on first reading. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Flynn, Councilman Espinosa. And Councilman Flynn took the words out of my mouth. I just sort of wanted to. To inform my colleagues who weren't able to attend that. Yes, there was that planning board recommendation for for this agreement to be established, and that our our discussion at the committee table was about postponing to a date certain that committee. And it was a decision of the of the committee that actually this was the appropriate time to to suggest that delay. Thanks. Thank you, Councilman Espinosa. I think two other questions I'll just ask quickly if somebody from the development team could just come up and speak to the delay on the thing. Any estimated timeline for the development agreement, anything else? I know Councilman Cashman has had a chance to chat with you, it sounds like, but I don't know if everybody else did. I didn't. So just let us know a little bit on timelines and the delay on your end. Are there also some deadlines? We're working with Wassenaar and the city purchasing. I'm off the top. My head. I can't. Remember. Yes. Thank you, Councilman Clarke, and thank you. Good evening. Council and Councilman Jimmie Boyle, office Kraft, Arkansas applicant representing tonight. And ideally, you know, the delay is not ideal, but I think we're willing to accept Councilman Cashman's request. We do have some timelines in the contract that we've signed with the city and county of Denver. Currently, the contract, as it reads today, we're supposed to close our due diligence expires November 17th, which would have been a day before our zoning contingencies. So now we're kind of locked in a period where it will be naked, we won't have our zoning and our due diligence has been expired. We are working to amend the the the dates of the closing, but that has not been done yet. So right now we're going to be going into a naked a naked period where if this gets postponed to December 3rd, we're you know, we basically have gone hard on our earnest money with the city. And and now we don't know if we have our zoning in place. So what we're asking for, if possible, is is to set a public hearing for final consideration on December 3rd, which is two weeks out from the November 19th date that is currently slated. And I don't know if council can approve that tonight. I know there's sound it like from the city attorney Nate Lucero that you can do. You can have it either way. So I don't know if that's possible, but that's that be our request. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That's. That's my intention. The first meeting in December. And is that within our notification deadlines if we postpone till. November 5th is the. I've been assured by the city attorney that we're in good shape. Kirsten Crawford legislative counsel Nate Lucero can speak more specifically to the requirements, but we have the 15 day notice in the charter and then 21 days in the zoning code. And I do believe that December 3rd fits within that time frame. Thank you very much. Mr. President, one last comment. I fully appreciate Cointreau's position that as Mr. Bill office states being in that kind of unprotected realm, I can't emphasize enough the potential impacts of this development on my community and the communities in a similar space of what's going on here. So I just think this I appreciate Castro's willingness to to assume that position and give the neighborhood the time that they need. All right. Thank you, Councilman Cashman. Seeing nobody else. Madam Secretary. Raquel. Cashman I. Black. Eye. Brooks Clark. Sorry. Espinosa. I. Flynn I. Gillmor, i. Herndon. Kinney. Lopez. I knew Ortega. Right. Desmond. I. You, Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please close the voting, announce the results. 1339 As publication of Council Bill 1075 has been postponed until Monday, November 5th. Excuse me. I believe it's the third, sir. November 3rd. But not correct. The fifth is a monday and I killed her. So we're good on November 5th. Okay. Madam Secretary, if you please put the next item on our screens and Councilman, will you please put Council Bill 1134 on the floor? A move against the bill 1018 1134 be ordered published. It has been waiting for the screen to catch up. Yeah. There we go. It's fun. Moved and seconded. Councilwoman Sussman your motion to amend.