A bill for an ordinance changing the zoning classification for 2099 and 2101 31st Street. Rezones property located at 2099 and 2101 31st Street from I-B, UO-2 to I-MX-8 (from industrial to industrial mixed-use) in Council District 9. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 12-6-16.
On the presentation monitor. On the wall you will see your time counting down. Speakers must stay on topic of the hearing and must direct their comments to council members. Please refrain from any profane or obscene speech and direct your comments to City Council as a whole and refrain from individual or personal attacks. Councilwoman Ortega, will you please put Council Bill 1193 on the floor. To do so? Mr. President, I move that council bill 1193 be placed upon final consideration and do pass. All right. It has been moved. And second it the public hearing for Council Bill 1193 is now open. May we have the staff report? And Lisa Hart from Committee Planning and development. All right. Good evening, members of council. My name is only Annalise Hook. I am a senior city planner. Excuse me. I'm here to present the application at 2101 and 2099 31st Street. The application is to rezone the property from ibe you oh two to I am X8. Moving on to Slide two. The subject property is located within Council District nine and more specifically, the Globeville neighborhood. On Slide three, you can see that the subject property is located within the global neighborhood. The specific subject property is located at 31st Street and Rings B Street, which is the nearest intersection. It is the former rodeo site and it is currently located across from the RTD maintenance facility. Familiar with that area and once again located in the Globeville neighborhood. Moving along to slide number five, the request itself is to rezone the property, which is somewhat over four acres, to redevelop the site. As such, the rezoning request is to rezone from IP use overlay to to IMX eight. The request is for an industrial context mixed use zone district with a maximum building height of eight storeys. The existing zoning context in the area is where the rail tracks are to the north. That is ibibio to as well with the surrounding zoning of I a and that industrial context use overlay to I being Yalta. And then to the Northeast we have CMCs 12, but the use overlay one. The existing context for the land use is industrial at this time, with surrounding land uses of industrial transportation, community utility as well as surface parking lot. As you can see in the top right corner, a photo of the site from Google Street View showing that it was the former ready ice site. And on the bottom right side of the page, you can see a photo of the RTD bus maintenance facility. The process that has gone through the rezoning has been typical in nature with the rezoning going to planning board November 16th of this past year, with Planning Board making a recommendation of approval, the Land Use Transportation and Infrastructure Committee reviewed this application in December of last year, as well as city council here tonight. The public outreach provided notice to all the listed renos. A notification of signs have been listed on the property property accordingly. As such, the review criteria is consistency with adopted plans, uniformity of district regulations, furthering the public health, safety and welfare. Just find circumstances and consistency with the neighborhood context, districts purpose and intent. Moving along to Slide 12 for review the applicable plans for the subject site. Starting with Comp Plan 2000, which provides a variety of applicable strategies related to environmental sustainability land use, which really encourages quality infill development that is consistent with the character of the surrounding neighborhood and offers opportunities for increased density, more amenities and broadens a variety of compatible uses. We also see encouragement for a variety of mixed use transit oriented developments, as well as continuing to promote mixed use development, which enables people to live, work near retail services and rail provided. Blueprint. Denver has the land use concept of this area as industrial as well as area of change with industrial having more opportunities for diverse employment areas and areas of change. Look areas within the city that we want to channel our growth where it is beneficial to improve access to jobs, housing and services. Additionally Blueprint Denver provides street classification as such 31st Street as well as Perkins and Rings b r excuse me, the schools where Perkins is actually a residential collector. However, as you can see, that's much further along. Specifically, we have a small area plan of the Globeville neighborhood plan, which was adopted in 2014, and that provides some specific land use concepts located within the industrial edge. Specifically, it's recommended as industrial mixed use. Some of those recommendations from the Globeville Neighborhood Plan are to improve compatibility between the industrial and residential uses of the area and to utilize industrial mixed use zone district as a buffer where we can improve the transition for the industrial mixed use area . Additional strategies recommend revitalization through mixed use development with retaining light industrial uses that are compatible to the residential uses in the area, as well as transitioning to the industrial mixed use area on 31st Avenue and Rings B Court, which is a specific location of the site. Moving on to Slide 18, we have our most recently adopted plan, which is a 38 than Blake Hyde Amendments plan, which is an amendment of all the different plans in this area, but only specifically pertaining to building heights. As such, the plan recommends a base maximum building height of eight storeys on the subject site. As such, the request is consistent with the plans. Moving along. CPD finds that there is consistency with the adopted plans of Plan 2000 Blueprint, Denver, the Globeville Neighborhood Plan and the 38 the Blake Station Area Amendments Plan. We also find the uniformity of district regulations being applied consistently across the city that this application furthers the public health, safety and welfare through the adoption and furthering of the area and citywide plans. We find that the justifying circumstances in this area are the recently opened 38, the Blake Station area plan, as well as a transition to more residential and mixed uses in this area. We also find consistency with the neighborhood zone, context, district purpose and intent as the industrial context is where we see some of this irregular street grid building setback and a wider variety of uses to support employment as well as housing. As such, CPD recommends approval based on the findings. All of the review criteria have been met. All right. Thank you, Annalise. All right. We have no speakers for this specific item, so we'll go straight into questions by members of council. Are there any questions? Councilwoman Sussman. Thank you, Mr. President. Just a little note. You've spelled Globeville. Globeville. In each of your things. Let me. Before we put it officially, you might wanna. Cause I don't know if we have Globeville. We do have Globeville. Thank you. Dr. Sussman? Yes. Dr. Sussman. Here at work. Councilwoman Ortega. I have a couple of questions. Is the applicant here that's requesting the zone change? So if you maybe noticed, I was looking over my shoulder as they weren't expecting for the public hearing to start quite as soon as I've been messaging them and was hoping that they would walk in in the door if I saw me. Let me ask you a couple of questions, then, in a least. So you all know that we did a six month process that looked at any of our rail corridors where we are. Potentially seeing development happening. And the focus was particularly along corridors that carry hazardous materials. And so my first question for you and Elise is. To ask whether or not all of the training with the planning staff has occurred. Evelyn I'm forgetting her last name. Baker. Say that again. Evelyn Baker. Yes. Evelyn was going to be doing the training with the planning managers and the staff and and number one, wanting to ask , has that transpired? If it has, it's possible. However, I have not personally attended that training. Okay. I've been asking. So one of the recommendations that came out of this report, and I want to request that we have an update of the report to the committee so that you all are privy to the details of what came out of that effort. But there is supposed to be a checkbox now on the application form for anybody that's requesting a zoning or that is moving to do design review, asking if their project is within a close proximity to rail. And then it allows us to do a better job in looking at some of the life safety issues related to ensuring that, you know, the development is thinking about or the developer thinking about and looking at some of those issues. So, for example, I'm going to pick on Mr. Zeppelin, who's in the audience. They have a development that has roll up windows that overlook the railroad tracks. And as we look forward, is that something we want to continue to do if we have an incident that happens on the tracks, that that poses a serious risk and threat to the people either living or working in a development that may have roll up windows that overlook some of these very train cars that potentially could be a harm. You know, as a city, we are required to have a hazardous mitigation plan. And if any of you have attended the LPC meetings, as a matter of fact, there was one going on this evening. This is one of the things they're working towards is creating the the the details in the basis for a hazard mitigation plan. This is required by the Federal Office of Homeland Security. And, you know, the work that we did for this six months that was spearheaded by Chief Tade was to help us look at how do we now address some of these life safety issues. And I'm wanting to ask a second question, and that is, did this issue even come up as part of this particular application looking at proximity to rail? And and was there even a discussion about that? This rezoning application did go through the standard course of notification. So adjoining property owners as well as all the required agencies were referred. There was not any specific comments received throughout the application and in relation to the proximity of the rail corridor. And what that says to me is we we have had a request in to Evelyn Baker for almost two weeks now asking if the check off box form has been changed or the form that now has the check off box so that this issue can begin to be looked at. And I've not had a response yet, but so that's why I'm asking these questions, because there were some very thoughtful recommendations that came out of the plan, out of the plan, out of the study session that had a report that that spoke to some of these issues. And so to learn that, number one, it's not clear that everybody's been trained, which was what I was told where we were at. And number two, that we're not even having that conversation is is really kind of concerning because it says to me as a city, we're not serious about addressing life safety issues as it pertains to development. This isn't to say, no, you can't do a development. That is not what our effort was all about. It was to look at how do we address human life and property and safety access. Egress, you know, to the tracks was a whole separate part of our conversation. But I'm raising this because I think it's important for my colleagues to know what came out of that effort and to learn that I'm not sure we're even utilizing any of that work that we spent six months doing. So thank you for answering my questions. And I'll follow up with our agency. I will just note that this application was submitted in July of last year, so I don't know when those changes took effect, but it's important to maybe note when that application came in, it will also know. It was within that timeframe. That the applicant has arrived, if any questions would like to be directed to them. If you don't mind. Mr.. President. Yeah, go ahead. Just ask the applicant if this topic of proximity to rail ever came up as part of this development. Yeah. So my name is Cale Zeppelin from Zeppelin Development. I reside at the same site which is 34, 57 rings record. The site is 28 acres and it follows the tracks, as you pointed out. And absolutely, it's constantly coming up. The what created this possibility was really the expansion of the North Line. So there's actually a 60 foot buffer, which includes the commuter line, which is electrified between the tracks and and the building parcel. So that effectively serves as a buffer. And the specific project that we're talking about building on that site includes tax credit financing. So there's actually a higher level of scrutiny. It's a deed restricted, affordable called Logitech program that looks at the tracks. And we've been able to kind of address the issues that came up so that that is a consideration for HUD and a requirement. And and we've been able to kind of get through that. It doesn't directly relate to the zoning or it has been an issue with the zoning. But to go forward with this specific project, we have had to address the proximity to the tracks and confirm that it's safe. Thank you. I appreciate that detail and the fact that that was, in fact, part of the conversation. Thank you, Miss. Thank you, Councilwoman. All right. Any other questions for this public hearing for council? Bill 1193 is now closed. Any comments by members of council? All right. I see none. And it has been moved and seconded. Madam Secretary Rocha. Sorry. One moment. Black Eye Clark by Espinosa I. Flynn. I. Gilmore, i. Herndon. I. Cashman. Kennedy. Lopez. I knew. Ortega. Sussman. Mr. President, I. Close voting as a result. We just need a few more to vote. We got some folks hanging fire here. Oh, shoot. All right. Right. Someone accidentally voted nay. On 13.