Rezones 3268 West 32nd Avenue from U-SU-A to U-MS-2x in Council District 1. (NEIGHBORHOODS AND PLANNING) Rezones 3268 West 32nd Avenue from U-SU-A (Urban, Single Unit, 3,000 sq. ft. minimum lot size) to U-MS-2x (Urban, Main Street, 2 stories less intense use) in Council District 1. IF ORDERED PUBLISHED, A PUBLIC HEARING WILL BE HELD ON THIS ITEM.  REFER TO THE "PENDING" SECTION OF THE FUTURE COUNCIL MEETING AGENDAS FOR THE DATE. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 9-16-15.
Connects east west across the site. A few more vantage points were looking northwest from spear, close to Spear and 32nd Avenue intersection. We see an office building. Along Speer Boulevard. And here we're looking at the site in the foreground or bordering east of the site is this commercial car wash. And then the actual site is this small. Formerly Medical Use Office Building, which is now vacant. These images. Reflect the longstanding commercial use uses that have been a really long 32nd Avenue. In particular. At this corner, we're looking here at 1933 aerial imagery with superimposed Sanborn maps. We can see the uses highlighted here in red that were commercial whether it be filling station where the carwash is today. The little office building on the site. The Denver bred company was in operation in 1910. So very much a commercial node for many decades now. Compared to the residential nature of 31st Avenue. You see in contrast that looking. East along 31st Avenue, we see the residential streets next to the existing mayor's church. And also looking north along Irving towards 32nd Avenue, we see residential character of that street. Rezoning process to president has included public outreach to these registered neighborhood organizations, including West Highland Neighborhoods Association, Federal Boulevard, Corridor Improvement Partnership, Denver Neighborhood Association, Inc. and Inner Neighborhood Cooperation, as well as other outreach efforts by the applicant. The African outreach is focused on both the rezoning as well as a proposed project, and really started back in August of 2013 when community meetings were were held and organized to try to engage residents and representatives in the neighborhood, including to community meetings, as well as two meetings focused on property owners within 200 feet of the surrounding site. In February 2015, a website describing the proposed rezoning and intended project was set up to provide current information as well as background and. Background related to this effort. Then in April and June of 2015, there were two site design workshops that were coordinated between the applicant in West Highland neighborhood. At these meetings, neighborhood representatives were selected to explore building form and materials that might be appropriate. They applied to the site under the UM's two zone district, and this resulted in a vision document produced by the applicant intended to guide the design and potential development of medical office project. The applicant has been seeking to regularly attend and participate in West Highland neighborhood meetings since October 2014. The original application was submitted on March 3rd, 2015, and it consisted of Lot six through ten. These are surveyor lots, the green lines and you see the numbers here within the parcel which is outlined as yellow. The parcel or the actual area proposed for rezoning to um, is to ex. And so initially this was just over 39,000 or about a 39,000 square foot proposal. The feedback received in West Highland neighborhood at this time was that a traffic and parking study was requested of the applicant and that this would be needed before forming an official position. On July six, CPD received a revised application revising the area proposed to be rezone to Lot six through nine, thus reducing the proposed area to just over 31,000 square feet or just under three quarters of an acre. Also to the same zone district. And then about a month later, written and posted notice of an August 19 planning planning board hearing was provided three days prior to that hearing was titled Neighborhood Provided a letter of opposition to the application. And just to get us oriented, the application under consideration this evening is this modified application request, which counsel and I should say accepted the modified application rather than approved it. Tonight you'll vote whether to approve or not the modified application. But you've proved that. This is now an application consisting of surveyor lots, six through eight. Just under 23,000 square feet or just over a half acre is still at the proposed you me two zoning. So back to summer 2015 when the revised application went before planning board. Public testimony was offered in both opposition and support of the proposed rezoning. And Opposition has expressed concerns over some negative traffic impacts and parking impacts. There were concerns expressed about the unknown scale and character of the building in the project. There was disagreement with staff's interpretation of Blueprint Denver, which I'll cover in just a moment. And there was also quite a bit of interest in a pod over ums two x, although details of what that might become were not provided. And then there was quite also some opposition to rezoning from the current U.S. district. The official West Highland neighborhood position was that single family residential development was unlikely and that a planned unit development was preferred. Public testimony in support of the application, expressed support for a more productive and vibrant use of a vacant parking area small office building that was in decline and at the time some of the former school buildings that were also vacant. That were part of that larger site and the earlier application. There was support expressed for mixed use services in the neighborhood, such as medical office. It was recognition that of the existing commercial character along 32nd Avenue, in particular at this Speer, Irving and 32nd node and then planning board recommended approval with a vote, five three vote. Two of the opposing votes were based on the context and scale, in particular, the depth. And the total area of the proposed area for rezoning was of concern to two planning board members and one planning board member expressed opposition. Based on her expressed disagreement with staff's interpretation of Blueprint Denver. Has provided plant support for the application. This is planning board. This is the process that we've been through to present and to state initially that all of the written and posting requirements have been met for all of these public meetings, including neighborhood and planning committee meeting on September 16th, after which there was an initial council hearing date scheduled for October 26. But this was postponed to November 2nd to allow more time for mediation between the applicant and representatives from the neighborhood. And this concluded on October 23rd without the two parties reaching a resolution, after which there was a protest petition submitted by property owners within 200 feet of the proposed area for rezoning on October 26th. And about that time a submittal by the applicant a request to modify the application which. Council voted to accept the modified application and reschedule the hearing on November 22nd to tonight. And here we are at the rescheduled or postponed January 25th hearing. Since Planning Board CPD has received numerous public comment letters or emails, including letters of support, supporting mixed use development, supporting medical office as a neighborhood service and amenity, and expressing support or a view that the church is compatible as a nonresidential use next to the site that the proposed commercial site or mixed use site. Letters of opposition continue to focus on assumed traffic impacts, potential impacts to nearby residential uses. Stating disagreement that blueprint Denver's single family concept land use would support the requested commercial mixed use zoned district. There's continued has been expression of continued interest in a planned unit development to reflect neighborhood input and to protect character. Neighborhood character. Opposition by some to even changing the current single unit zoning. And then there's quite a lengthy letter packet from a West Highland resident that provides multiple opinion statements, as well as a lengthy summary of an analysis of an online petition. So I think you've got all of that in your 270 page staff report. And on January 15th, we did receive another protest petition for the modified area that was you can see here on this map, the 200 foot area surrounding the proposed. Map Amendment area and after review and verification of the signatures, CPD found that signatures represented 24% of the property ownership in this area, which exceeds the 20% minimum required for a ten council vote for application approval. I'd like to now go through the review criteria as spelled out in Section 1247 of the Denver Zoning Code. The first review criteria is consistency with adopted plans, beginning with Plan 2000, which encourages infill development near existing services and infrastructure intended to establish mixed use neighborhoods consistent with existing neighborhood character and quality. These could provide convenient access to work and neighborhood services, strengthen sense of place, and even activate neighborhood based facilities. Including places of worship blueprint. Denver provides a land use concept recommendation of single family residential, and that's this yellow area that you see. And this reflects the predominant residential character and composition of this neighborhood. But it is important to read the definition of what this yellow area represents. And as we look at the text of Blueprint Denver single family residential lies under the general residential area neighborhood definition, which is primarily residential, but also providing for a variety of housing types as well as some complementary land uses, including stores, apartments and schools, and then specific to single family. That the definition of single family homes. Are they predominant development type? But there's still a significantly smaller employment base, thus suggesting that there is some variety to the land use and it's not 100% residential single family uses. So the question becomes where? Where could these? Complimentary land use stores, parks, even smaller apartments and townhomes. Where could those be located? Within single family residential. And that's part of the analysis that CPD has conducted and that I'll continue to share with you this evening. Blueprint Denver also calls this area as an area of stability. And we read the definitions of areas of stability, and we see that there is a committed area of stability where neighborhood and neighborhood may benefit from minor infill development and reinvestment areas of stability or of stability where reinvestment could actually help to stabilize an area or a site such as an underutilized parking area and a vacant building. The UMC two zone district could implement some of the strategies that are spelled out for areas of stability, including addressing incompatible zoning and land use issues. Improving compatibility between existing and new development through design standards and potentially even increasing housing diversity as UMC two X allows for commercial as well as residential uses. We also look at the street classifications in blueprint Denver to help answer the question where. Other uses besides single family residential might be appropriate in single family residential concept areas. Irving Street is an undesignated local street. These streets provide access and circulation to homes and services throughout the neighborhood. And then key here is this green label or depiction of 32nd Avenue as a main street collector. Collector streets provide access between neighborhoods. They promote walking and bicycling in addition to vehicle trips. With features such as tree lawn's amenities on sidewalks, on street parking and buildings located close to the street. This street classification reflects historic. Land use and transportation patterns and past uses along 32nd Avenue that we see here in this historic map of the Denver Tramway Corporation Service Network. And two used to be streetcars that went along 32nd Avenue connecting downtown up to the Lakeside Park and Berkeley Park area. And the star that you see here is actually the site of 32nd and Irving. And so 32nd Avenue was a very important segment along this tramway service that we also see in the previous zoning code, which was originally adopted in 1925 and revised here in 1944, the dark area that you see lining the north and south sides of 32nd Avenue. And here again, you see the star indicating this. The subject property. This was commercial zoning and had a direct correlation with the type of transportation, the multi modality that was provided along 32nd Avenue , connecting folks throughout the entire city along and through this corridor to access services and of course, serving this neighborhood. And here's the result of that, that land use and transportation dynamic and relationship. And we see this continuous main street street wall of buildings that have. High level of transparency, which encourages pedestrians to walk and look through windows and enjoy parking along the street and walking and shopping and accessing other services that are provided in this mixed use environment and also serves to buffer the intensity and the vibrancy along 32nd Avenue from the adjacent residential uses on either side of the these buildings to the rear. So that could be described as a complete main street, whereas here we're looking at what could be described as an incomplete main street, looking at 32nd and Irving, this segment where we see no buildings other than the small office building, but a fairly significant gap in terms of this main street fabric along a main street corridor. Another important ST classification to consider is Spire Boulevard, which is a mixed use. Arterial arterial streets connect neighborhoods to employment and commercial centers. They can accommodate 10,000 or more vehicle trips daily and still can provide a variety of travel choices in addition to vehicle trips, including bike and pet. This is significant in that although the site does not front Speer Boulevard, it certainly is serviced by Spear Boulevard in the provides access to the site not necessarily frontage, but certainly access from the north and from the southeast. And really is quite visible as we saw in the earlier existing conditions. Photos from Spirit Boulevard. And here's an image of Sphere Boulevard not far from the site, but looking south towards downtown or he's southeast towards downtown. So the UMS two exon district is consistent with O plan 2000 and Blueprint Denver and that this is a zone district that provides some of the highest. Level of design standards as well as the most restrictive use limitations. Than any other mixed use or commercial zone district intended to support this Main Street Corridor experience and a successful transition from Main Street to predominantly residential or single family residential neighborhood. Again you miss two X is intended to promote consistent neighborhood scale and character, as we see elsewhere in West Highland, particularly along 32nd Avenue, and does help to address the need to transition from Main Street Corridor to the residential surrounding areas. Want to mention that the applicant and CPD explored a few different zone districts as the uh, we're going through the pre application period, including a ums three as a, as well as a ums two. And through discussion we landed on ums to X and encourage the applicant to seriously consider this as it provided the additional use, restrictions and limitations that would be considered of the surrounding residential area. But looking east or west in particular along 32nd Avenue. And I could show other slides later of the current zoning, which is max two and three along that corridor. The second review criteria is that there should be uniformity of district regulations, including uniform application of the building form and design standards which could be achieved or would be achieved with UMC two X and that public health, safety and welfare would be further advanced through implementing the recommendations from these adopted plans to meet the third criteria. The fourth criteria is a justifying circumstance that the land or its surrounding area has changed or is changing to such a degree that it is in the public interest to encourage redevelopment of the area or to recognize the changed character of the area, specifically commercial mixed use. There was a commercial mixed use building built just to the west of Erving fronting 32nd Avenue in 2012 after it was zoned in 2010. There is a vacant school building adjacent to the proposed rezoning area, as well as a small vacant office building on the site and an underutilized surface parking area. The immense church has divided its property into two parcels, anticipating potential redevelopment or beneficial use of the area, fronting 32nd Avenue and has obtained a recent Certificate of nine historic status for the small commercial building on the site. And just a look going back to 2010 and these aerial images, you see a vacant lot on the site across the street, West Irving, and you see what appears to be freshly painted parking and even playground indicating active private school use of some of the church property buildings. And go to 2012. We see the commercial building under construction and possibly some of these lines fading just a little bit. But in 2014, the school had. No. Was no longer in operation on the site. And we see a fully operational mixed use commercial building. So this progression of images reflects the change or changing condition that we just. Went over in this list the fifth and final review criterias consistency with neighborhood context and zone district purpose and intent. So the urban neighborhood context can be characterized as single unit, primarily single unit two unit residential uses. There can be embedded small scale multi unit residential and commercial uses. And this is typically within a regular orthogonal grid of streets and blocks, usually served by alleys to provide vehicle access interior to the blocks. The U. M's two acts are urban neighborhood main street. Two storey maximum with youths and. U.S. limitations and other restrictions. Is intended to advance neighborhood quality and define neighborhood character. It provides for a mix of uses, including accessible neighborhood services. It is intended to give prominence to the pedestrian realm and prevent more pedestrian activity, especially along the fronting the main street corridor. And it is intended to establish a sense of security and community and provide for a successful transition from Main Street to the nearby residential uses. And again, MZ two X is intended primarily for embedded commercial and mixed use. And in this case, we have it as a key component of a main street corridor, but again intended to limit the potential impacts on surrounding residents. CBD is finding is that. The review criteria has been met and we recommend approval of this application. And as I mentioned earlier in a presentation, planning board also recommends approval of the application. Thank you, Sam. All right. We have 58 speakers signed up, 39 in favor, 19 in opposition way. This is going to work. I'm going to call the first five speakers and I would ask that you can make your way up to the front pew to go ahead and get started. And the first five names I will be calling out have 6 minutes each. So and apologies for any mispronunciations. Neal Lindorff, David Hagan, Bradley Zweig, Sonari Craft and Keith Bush Dyker. So you five can go ahead and make your way up to the front pew. And Neal, you can go ahead and begin your remarks. And each of you have 6 minutes. Thank you, Mr. President, and members of Council. My name is Neil New Dorf and I live on West 71st place in Arvada. I've been the volunteer president of the mayor's church congregation since 2012. You may have put a lot of thought and prayer into the decision to propose a neighborhood medical office building project. It was very important to us that we use this valuable church resource, the underutilized land north of the church on the 32nd Avenue Main Street, in a way that would serve the community and be consistent with the church's mission. Over 2012 and 2013, we heard a wide variety of proposals with everything ranging from single family development to mixed use to commercial projects such as the sprouts. After a significant amount of decision, discussion, deliberation and prayer, the May the mayor's church community decided that a neighborhood medical office building would be the most consistent with our mission. We believe that when Jesus was here, he healed bodies as well as souls. In our sanctuary, we share the gospel with our congregation and with the Medical Office Building. We would love to provide health care and physical wellness to our neighbors. We've been talking about this project with the community for two and a half years, and for most of that time there were as many opinions about what should be built on our land as there were neighbors. However, recently, a few neighbors have joined together to raise their voices in favor of leaving the current zoning in place and building single family houses. Even though the land is along a main street corridor and is surrounded by commercial uses and has always been nonresidential. The immense community did consider building single family houses, but we decided against it for a variety of reasons. It is very important to us to utilize the land in a way that provides a needed service to the community and the increasing neighborhood population and need for more medical care options, particularly doctors that can take Medicare, Medicaid and CHP plus fits that requirement. We were also very conscious of parking issues in the neighborhood, and we wanted to make sure that there were no conflicts between the parking needs of the church, which is busy on Sundays and occasional evening activities and whatever was built on the land. Again, doctor's offices that were open only during business weekday hours are a great fit as an added bonus. We plan to offer space to our parking lot, to neighboring businesses on evenings and weekends, which would help relieve the parking situation in the neighborhood. And even though we love the residential area to the south of the church, providing a few more houses or townhouses didn't seem to fill a need the same way that medical care does. The reality is that Hamas has been working on this project for years. If a rezoning is denied, we would not be able to even submit a different rezoning request for one year. The church cannot afford that kind of a delay, especially since we started. We'd be starting over from the beginning. If he mayor's is not able to utilize this land in an ongoing, financially sustainable way, it is possible that the Church will have to leave all of the land mass owned 63,000 square feet from 32nd to 31st would be sold to a developer. If the developer knocks down the 100 year old church and redeveloped the entire property as a large block of residential. I'm not sure that the neighbors would be happy with what they got, particularly given the amount of vitriol that exists around other modern residential lots in the neighborhood. We brought Centuri into our team a year ago in part to help with some of the technical things, like building a website and answering questions in social media. However, we did a lot of outreach before community outreach before soon to be joined us. Our initial outreach was to the West Highland Neighborhood Association back in August of 2013, including a meeting with their zoning committee members. And in early 2014, we went door to door to speak with all of the neighbors living within 200 feet of the project. During those conversations, we were honest about what we hope to build. We also talked about the potential outcome if the land wasn't zoned, which is that a developer might try to put as high density single family housing on that land as he could. During those conversations in early 2014, we secured support of over 50% of the people living within 200 feet of the project. We also held two meetings in the spring of 2014 that were specifically for people living within 200 feet of the project. When members of the West Highlands Neighborhood Association learned of these meetings and asked if they could attend, we welcome them. During those meetings, we listened to our neighbors thoughts about the project, talked with them about why we felt that the medical office building fit with the church's mission and our potential concerns about other kinds of development, such as residential housing, creating competition for church parking on weekends as an issue that wouldn't happen with a medical office building. I lived in the church parsonage for three years while I was getting back on my feet. You see, I was convicted of a drug offense back in 2007. I was released to a halfway house in 2010 and then returned to the community fully. One year later, I have been sober for nine years. Parties participating in Narcotics Anonymous and work as a volunteer capacity at the church because I believe in serving my community. During the time I lived at the parsonage, I was sober and working and there was no reason for anyone to know about my past. However, I believe in connecting with my neighbors, and I also believe in being honest about my past. I am the one who told neighbors about my past, criminal conviction and the spirit of honesty and supporting my commitment to my rehabilitation and reintroduction to the community. It saddens me that a few of these neighbors have not only chosen to use my past criminal conviction as a way to attack the church and the project, but they have gone beyond that, distorting my record and telling unconscionable lies about me in order to convince those that previously supported our project to instead oppose it. This kind of fear based attack creates an environment in which distrust takes over and attempts to tell the truth aren't heard. It is truly unfortunate. Thank you for your time and God. Bless you and your families. Thank you, David Hagan. Thank you. Mr. President, member of the Council. My name is Dave Hagan. I live on Little Raven Street in Denver. I'm the developer and a partner with the Mayor's Lutheran Church on the Neighborhood Medical Office Building Project that we're talking about tonight. Our partnership plans called for an initial 5050 partnership with the church, whereby the church can take full control and ownership of the project over probably about a ten year period. Depending upon how it leases and cash flow. So I just wanted to give you that by background so you understand that the church is a participant and long term holder and owner. Tim laid out all the ways in which the application meets the legal criteria for rezoning, but I wanted to highlight the concept of context and what it to the important role it plays. As we look at the designation of area of stability for this parcel. It's not to correct and it's not correct to assert that an area of stability means that no change can ever happen. Instead, Blueprint Denver clearly states that areas of stability are meant to maintain the character of an area. While accommodating some new development and redevelopment. As has been established. The character area along this Main Street quarter on 32nd Avenue was clearly commercial. Tonight, you're going to hear a lot of testimony about things like building size, design, traffic. And we understand that these are important aspects of development and probably need to be addressed for any new development. And that's why we engaged with the community and neighborhood to the extent that we did and we provided the information about the project during the course of the last two plus years. However, we also think it's important to note that these things are actually not part of the legal criteria for rezoning. We'd like to keep that in mind as you hear all these speakers tonight. Both CPD and Planning Board have found the rezoning proposal does meet the necessary criteria laid out in the city code and blueprint. Denver and I agree that that assessment would I agree with that assessment and do not believe that the area that they are legally just file grounds for denying this rezoning. Our traffic engineer was planning on being here tonight, but unfortunately he's ill. So I'm going to step in and explain a little bit about the traffic study that we conducted. And it's in a handout. It's in tab three, I believe. The handout. Each of the council members has, and I'm available for questions about the traffic study, although I'm not a traffic engineer. But there are a few things that I want to highlight. First, the study area was for a larger building for I believe it was a 25,000 square foot building. What was the original intent? The traffic study is comparing potential potential traffic to the most recent use of land, which was a school building. The traffic study focuses on the morning and afternoon peak hours. If you look at your packet and look at the traffic study, you'll see that there's a decrease in traffic projected for the morning peak hour and only a slight increase for the afternoon peak hour. The peak hour traffic cannot be reasonably extrapolated to all hours of the day. The nature of doctor's offices is that there will be an evenly spaced flow of cars. And as you'll look at the traffic study trips as a defined term on the traffic study, represent a trip in or a trip out. So ten trips equals five cars. Even though the building size and traffic are not part of the legal criteria for rezoning. I'd like to present some facts about the building and how we we came to the conclusion what size building we're going to be looking to build. And we're not exactly sure what the city will approval ultimately, but we've got some limitations that we want to talk about, and that is that we we have a letter of intent signed with a hospital system to be a major tenant in the building. Their criteria calls for a parking ratio of three spaces per 1000 square feet of building area. So in order to meet the criteria, we work backward into building sizes. At a minimum, code requires two spaces per 1000 square feet of building area. If you look at a 22,000 foot lot and we have a two storey building under UMC two X, we can build a building of about 17,500 square feet and that's an exhibit in your packet as well. If we were without then that's all onsite parking at a 2 to 1 ratio. If we're able to get the 3 to 1 ratio by utilizing some offsite parking, we can build a building of about 22,000 square feet. Once again, a two storey building, each floor plate being about 11,000 square feet. So as you can see, we don't really understand what we can build yet because we haven't been through that process . But we do have some limitations on building size. And I think it's important, as you hear some additional speakers come up in terms of context for the neighborhood. So some of the other things you might hear tonight are some claims by the neighbors that we're going to build a gigantic building by either providing underground parking or try to sneak in a third story by building a garden level to the office building and just addressing the underground parking. It's not a financially feasible model to look at underground parking on this project. The project is too small to support that at a cost of approximately 30 to $35000 per parking spot to try to fit, you know , 60 spots or 70 spots on that would be not feasible for us and and or tenants. And in terms of fitting in a three story building by building a garden level or basement level, if you will, the same limitation on parking applies with the tenants that we have in place. So therefore, our range. Mr.. Hanging your 6 minutes is up. Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Bradley Zweig. Good evening, cast members. My name is Bradley Zig and I live at 1285 Dexter Street in Denver, as retained as the commercial real estate broker for this project in 2014. There are currently good doctors practicing in order to Denver area. However, the population in that part of the city is drawing including families, young children and older people who are aging in place. There is a need for additional medical care within a neighborhood friendly context. We're not going to be building a hospital or a big fancy medical facility. This building will not be accepting ambulances and overnight stays will not be allowed as per the zoning code. Our hope is to offer a family practice that keeps long, extended hours, as well as a handful of other doctor's offices. The building has not yet been designed and we don't have any leases signed, so we can't speak to specifics about exactly what will be offered. However, we do have a letter of intent from Lutheran Hospital to provide the doctors for the family practice. We feel that a partnership with Lutheran hospitals, a natural fit for the American Lutheran Church, and we feel fortunate to have the opportunity to provide such high quality health care in the neighborhood. Despite what some may think, there's still economic diversity in that part of the city, and good quality doctors who can accept Medicaid are an important part of providing real health care services in their community. Jennifer Rona is here this evening from Lewiston Hospital. She will able to testify to provide more information about health care, questions that you might have. I want to speak about one aspect of care that has been frequently misrepresented in neighbor discussions. It's important to recognize there are probably thousands of medical procedures. There won't be providers in the medical office building simply due to its size and the limitations of family practice. Doctors, all patients who need a procedure is not done by doctors in the building will be referred elsewhere by their physicians because the land and building will continue to be owned by Lutheran Church. They may ask Lutheran Church. They have stated that abortions will not be performed at the building. This is something that is deeply held belief in the church, and it's not an unusual practice whether medical facilities are owned by religious organizations. Just as with any procedure not performed in the building, patients needing an abortion will be referred to a where they can provide that service. This facility will not diminish the number of medical services available to women in the community. They will serve the same number of legal options they are currently have. The medical office building will just be adding more options for things like pediatricians, pediatric care and primary care for the residents of the neighborhood, including internal medicine for seniors. There are some members of the community that are especially passionate and knowledgeable about walkability, and all of them do most of the speaking about that, I just want to state that an important part of creating vibrant walking communities is integrating land. Usually people can be closer to the services that they need. Please see Tab two of the handout for an infographic from Walk Denver. By the way, you guys just approved applying for the Dot Smart City Grant, and I think that fits nicely into the kind of thing we're trying to do here within this embedded neighborhood business. When we talk about the need for mixed use that can refer to mixed use communities, not just a mixed use of sort of mixed views within a single building, insisting on segregating residential and commercial areas as a way to guarantee to business on cars what this project is proposing to put medical care along a main street corridor surrounded by other commercial uses with residential nearby. This strikes an ideal balance. In addition to and walkability, the site has a bus stop right in front of it and B cycle station one block away. There are numerous active, active transportation options. There are a lot of big statements about negative impacts of this project that have been made by a few neighborhood opponents. However, it's easy to use rhetoric. Our focus should instead be on what is actually supported by facts. Traffic, for example, even though traffic isn't a part of the legal criteria for rezoning and traffic, studies typically are not prepared until later in the process. When the neighborhood organization ask us to do a traffic study, we're happy to oblige. In short, the studies show the driving impact will be minimal compared to the most recent use. In addition, Development Services Transportation Department reviewed our concept and so the traffic actually was not needed this stage, which means they determined there were no negative impacts to mitigate those. Were attacking this project based on fears about traffic or misguided concerns about parking are similarly unfounded, particularly since we're providing 150% of the parking in corporate code. In fact, the typical business time, busy time from parking prospective for the neighborhood is evenings and weekends when residents are home and local restaurants are at capacity. Our medical office building won't all be needing all of the spaces during those times, so our plan has always been to partner with neighborhood businesses to offer some sort of shared or valet parking. Our project with this large parking lot will actually serve to decrease overall parking pressures in the neighborhood. It's also important to acknowledge all of the intervention use limitations are written into the code. Our request is not for you and asked to, but for you and to x that indicates a less intensive zoning and carries with it additional restrictions, including design guidelines. One last note lands. The Medical Office Building will be held by a for profit LLC, which means all the taxes will be paid both on the land itself and with the income promises from the building. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Sun Craft. Thank you. Mr. President, members of council. My name is Elizabeth Craft. I live one block outside the boundary of West Highland on Elm Street in Wheat Ridge. A year ago, I was hired by the mayor's team to help provide help with communications. So often, community members feel that developers don't communicate enough, provide information about their project, or respond to their questions. And so I was brought on to help with that. We've provided you with a timeline of all our community outreach and communications and tab four of your packet, and I promise I will not go through all of it . I just wanted to note that since the Church first reached out to the neighborhood organization back in August of 2013, since that time, the mayor's team has attended nine wina meetings, held four additional community meetings, including two specifically for those that live within 200 feet of the project, hosted two community design workshops and participated in an extensive mediation with neighbors who had publicly stated opposition to the project. This has been, in addition to our online outreach, the website and other things like hosting a booth at the Highland Street Fair. We've interacted with the community in a lot of different forums and there have been some interactions we've had that have been primarily about providing information and other interactions that were purely collaborative. But in every interaction we have heard and paid attention to community feedback and as a result of that community feedback, our project has changed in some significant ways over time and there's initially planned a three story building. However, there was a concern from a business to the north about a three story building, casting a shadow on their property. So we commissioner architects do a shadow study and when it was determined that it would create a shadow on their property and amassed, then agreed to lower our desired building height to two stories. The original size of the north parcel to be zoned as as Tim went over it was 39,000 square feet. People were concerned that that was just too big. So we revised our application to reduce the size to 31,000 square feet. There was continued discussion about lot size, and that discussion specifically focused on the location of that southern boundary and community meetings and many other discussions. We heard the neighbors clearly express a wish for that southern boundary to be brought up so that it matched the U.S. UMass two X Pincher Taco's development to the West. This was also something that our council person said that he would like to see during our committee hearing to bring that lot line up to that place. So after our mediation was unsuccessful, as you know, we came to you to ask to revise our application specifically to bring that line up to where people had said they wanted it that area reducing our to 22,000 and change the initial vision called for the family practice in the building to be open 24 hours a day. However, again, after hearing concerns from neighbors, we agreed to limit the hours of operation for the family practice to 77 P and the rest of the doctors would have regular business hours , 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the mediation process. We initiated mediation on September 16th and our mediation process was closed on October 23rd. Confidentiality was a condition of mediation, and therefore none of the participants can share what was discussed during the meeting, during the meetings. But the facilitators report stated that mediation was done in good faith. We had engaged in conversation with the community leader as early as May 2015 about our willingness to codify the project concessions that were important to neighbors. But we were told at that time that there was not an acceptable tool available to codify those concessions except to Pudi, which CPD had already told us they would not support. It wasn't until our council committee hearing on September 16th that we were told that there was in fact an acceptable tool available to capture and codify any outcome of mediation. And I contacted the mediator that same afternoon. I think it's very important to emphasize that even after all of the outreach and discussions over the course of this project, Mayor's entered into a professionally facilitated mediation process. The mediator was someone who was contracted by the city with extensive experience in these types of situations. And again, the confidentiality prohibits us from sharing things that were discussed during mediation. But this was a thoughtful and thorough process, entered into in good faith and it was unsuccessful. I encourage you to listen closely to the testimony tonight, to look at the changes and concessions Mayes has voluntarily made to the project and understand that throughout this entire process, unfortunately, every single effort to reach a compromise acceptable to the project's opponents has been unsuccessful. We have really tried, and now we ask you to consider this rezoning request based on the legal criteria and to allow the church community to move forward with its project. It is a significant thing, as I know, you know, to come down here and testify at a public hearing. And obviously, the people here, as wonderful as they are and as many as they are, represent only a minor fraction of the number community. Some of the citizens have chosen to participate. Sending in letters or emails. We had 34 people send direct emails to planning board in support of our project. Around 40 people have sent emails to all of you in support of the project with about 20 additional hard copy letters. Some of the people here tonight are very active in local government issues, which is also commendable. However, it can be problematic when they present their position as being the voice of the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is incredibly diverse, and the truth is that those who hold different opinions about issues like development sometimes don't feel welcome at neighborhood meetings . They are also uncomfortable with the idea of coming to a public hearing like this, particularly when they know about the passion with which some of the neighbors disagree with them. We're grateful to the many community members who have showed up tonight in support of our project, some of whom have been members of the mayor's church. As you'll hear, it's amazing for 60 or 70 years or even more. They're looking forward to sharing their stories with you and their reasons for supporting the project. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Keith Bushtucker. And as Keith comes forward, I'm going to call the next five names. You can make your way up to the front pew. Paul Hack, Eric Wills, Cara Cara Fitzpatrick, Sean O'Connell and Donald Grimm now. So you five, please make your way up to the front pew and so you can begin remarks. Thank you, Mr. President, and members of council. My name is Keith Stecker. I live on West 95th Avenue in Arvada. I've been a member of the Mayor's Lutheran Church for about 20 years and continued to come back to my church home even though I don't live in Denver anymore. Currently service volunteer chairman of the Church's Property Board, as well as a member of the Development Committee for the Church. As you know, as. Tim pointed out, the planning board. Considered our application vote in favor of our project, found that it does meet legal criteria for rezoning. There were three dissenting votes of planning board members who subsequently addressed those concerns to the planning board. Members who voted no stated that they felt the lot line at the time when the parcel was bigger should be moved more so . It was in line. With the new impacts to X property. Immediately to the West in November. As has been discussed, we revised our application and moved the lot line to where those planning board members wanted it. The third planning board member who voted no made a statement saying that he wished the development team and neighbors could sit down and figure things out. We did, as you've heard, engage in comprehensive, facilitated mediation with our neighbors. Unfortunately, that was unsuccessful. So even though I'm already playing board member support our application back in August, we want to be sure. Council is aware that we've heard the concerns and address those as we move forward. I'm one of the smartest members that went to door to door to speak to nearby neighbors. We started this back in 2014, I believe, and then did again once we realized neighbors had previously signed letters of support, had somehow been convinced to sign a protest petition opposing our project. The turnaround didn't make sense to us, and we thought it was important to reach out and learn why. As you may know. The city's forum for protest petitions does not provide any actual information about the rezoning request. Just a complicated legal description of the property in light of the city, then hands petition to the people who most want the project fail. And there's absolutely no oversight. Or what they. Say about the project when they go around to gather signatures. Several neighbors we spoke to reported being told that Neal is a drug dealer and a felon. So he's discussed how. It was stated that he. As a criminal would personally profit from this project. Which is which is untrue. Most disturbing of all, Neil's previous success recharge of charm, deodorant. Because of his child was in the home when he was using drugs, was present at least to one neighbor that we heard from, has charge of child abuse and molestation, which is very disturbing to me. In addition, neighbors told me it would use eminent domain to condemn nearby properties, knock them down and build something huge. Neighbors are told by petition canvassers that project was part of a plan for May is to take over neighborhood, kitchen and leave, which is just the opposite of our goal. Our goal our goal is to stay in the neighborhood by developing a portion of our property. We did have one neighbor sign a protest withdrawal form once we learned more about the project. Other neighbors reported being told. Other exaggerations either did not sign the protest petition in the first place or just wanted to be left alone. Even if we were to set aside methods used to collect signatures for the protest petition, there are basic legal grounds for concern with protest petition. We an Afghan team, not a lawyer. So we showed the protest petition to an attorney without numerous issue who found numerous issues with the legal validity of many of the signatures and found that remaining valid signatures did not meet the 20% threshold. Therefore, we believe that a determination of adequacy of the protest petition was improper. We do not know if City Council has an authority to override CPD's determination on the protest petition, but if you do, we'd ask you to take a close look at the legal issue file issues filed by our attorney. We frequently heard neighbors posing as projects that we could build something gigantic, perhaps covering the entire lot with the building and constructing an underground parking to meet our parking needs, as they've described earlier. They've discussed our parking needs, along with the prohibitive cost of underground or structured parking. They create a real limit on the potential size of the building. However, because the church recognized that this is such concern, while a few of our neighbors, the church membership, voted in support of a formal resolution, please refer to to have someone on your handouts. The resolution states a clear limit of 23,500 square feet. Other for the size of the building is a maximum. The resolution also prevents underground or structured aboveground structured parking restricting parking to surface lot only. This resolution was passed unanimously by the church membership, some of whom are here tonight. Tonight, we're asking council to also delay the final vote on a rezoning until February eight, when the full council is scheduled to be present. We recognize that council frequently votes on items without everyone in attendance. However, we have significant concerns regarding the legal validity of the protest petition. We would also like time to learn about our options for challenging it prior to City Council voting voting. We also feel that the extremely high requirement of ten votes for approval create a unique, uniquely extraordinary circumstance. As you know, typically Democratic decisions are made with a simple majority vote, even Congress's supermajority of 60%. The requirement of ten votes out of 13 represents 77%. And with or without 13 councilmembers. Tonight, that's an even higher standard to reach. We understand that everyone here wants to see a resolution to this issue. However, last time we appeared before council to revise our application, the mayor's team was willing to come back in five weeks to complete the process. Our opponents requested and received a delay of almost three months so they could collect their protest sections. EUR six months is up. All right. Thank you for your time. Next, we have Paul Haake. And Madam Secretary. Thank you. And you say you have 6 minutes as well. Now you can go ahead and begin. We'll get to that. You can go ahead and begin your march, please. Good evening. My name is Paul Haake. I live at 2935 Grove Street, two blocks from the proposed development. I'm also principal at Anderson Mason Dale Architects. We have the building directly across from the site. And many of the people that work in our firm live in the neighborhood and walk to work and walk down Main Street to many of the different establishments. We took this commission only because we had the commitment that we would be able to do a good urban building. And that's why I'm here. I won't. If you turn to the first page of the handout, you can see the context of the site. It really is a commercial context on Main Street. The site is bordered on either side by a car wash. And as you've already heard, the pinched taco building as well as the Denver Bread Company across the street, our building, which is an office building and the frame shop. And when we look at this site as architects and urban planners, we believe that the role of the building is really to tie these disparate pieces together into a cohesive image for West Highlands and actually as a gateway site into the West Highlands and Highland Square. The next illustrations, the next to demonstrate the two floorplans are footprints and massing studies that David already alluded to. So I won't spend a lot of time on those. Only to point out that the massing studies and the footprint studies are almost identical to the pancaked taco development across the street from Irving. So we believe that it's very much in the character of Main Street and is very compatible with the existing building that's going on. Page four of your handout. I thought this is interesting. It really demonstrates where demolishing that existing office building out on 32nd as well as a piece of the as well as the school and office building. And if you superimpose those demolitions on the proposed site, you'll see that the amount of square footage or the footprint that we're proposing closely mimics what we're taking down. But essentially we're building it back on Main Street. I think that's what's really important here. We're trying to fill in the missing tooth and there is a neighborhood precedent for this. If you look on the illustration on page five, the floorplan underneath is the floor plan of the proposed development, and superimposed over that is the Mondo Vino building, which Tim had a photograph of earlier. And what you can see in both in terms of building square footage and street frontage, they're almost identical. So the kind of development that already exists on Main Street is identical to the kind of development that we're proposing for this project. And if you turn the page and look at illustration number six, that shows the kind of character and massing of Main Street on 32nd. The top image, of course, is the Mondo Vino building. And Tim already alluded to the quality of that building about the transparency and the rhythm of Baz that are very human scale to the pedestrian level, as well as having some simple brick masonry openings above the drawing below. That is one of the sketches from our neighborhood workshops where we explored what we might propose for this site. And you can see that the same character exists in that building at that very comparable, compatible, excuse me, to the precedents that are already in the neighborhood. We're also hoping to integrate the bus stop as well. If you look. At illustration. Seven, we've taken that elevation and superimposed that and dropped it in on the south side of the proposed site. And I think you can see in this illustration the compatibility between the pinched taco development and the proposed building. The arcade level continues across the street. There's an active pedestrian edge. Some of the comments that the neighbors made about reinforcing the corner are integrated into that. And I think this really shows what a great. Main Street. Building could be on that side, and this is the basis of our proposal. The next several sketches, I'm not going to go into them in great detail, but Sundari had indicated that we had. Two workshops in our office. The first one, we explored the implications of M.S. to zoning, and we went around the neighborhood looking at different precedents. And we shared those with the neighbors, and they shared with us their preferences and their concerns about certain aspects that we showed them. And based on that discussion, we developed a series of sketches which if you go through the next several pages, you can see and we asked the neighbors to participate and to mark upon the drawings, the things they liked, the things they didn't like. And we summarized all of these things into a vision document that we are going to use, hopefully when we start design to guide us and how we develop and develop the project, because I think that is a project that both the neighbors can support as well as the mayor's development. And we think this is a good and appropriate use for mass zoning this site. So thank you. Thank you. Eric Wills. We not have Eric Wills. These are what is unfortunately, the name is Eric Will. So that's who I have to call. So. Madam Secretary, that's the correct name, right? Eric Wills. So if Eric Wills is not here, we will go to the next speaker. Kyra care excuse me, Fitzpatrick, and you have 6 minutes as well. Carrie. My name is Cara Fitzpatrick, and my husband is the pastor of a mass Lutheran church in the West Highlands. I live in the church parsonage at 3245 West 31st Avenue. The church proposal to build a neighborhood medical office building in our empty lot at 32nd in Irving has brought about a lot of discussion in the community . We are sometimes asked about the work of Masters and what we plan to do if our project is successful and the church is able to remain in the neighborhood. I wanted to share a little bit about a miss and we hope and what we hope for and the future for our church and serving the North Denver community . Growing up in Saint Louis, I learned a lot from my parents, especially my mom, about helping those in need. Working with Catholic Charities, I saw my mom strive to improve the lives of the poor and the needy, as well as those suffering from substance abuse and other challenges. We were blessed with much in life and so learned to share with others who weren't as fortunate was part of my upbringing and in part is what drew me to my husband. He has a caring heart, especially for those who are hurting and suffering. Throughout our nine and a half years of marriage and ministry together. We work to ease the suffering of many in different areas of life. Moving to Denver from Garden City, Kansas was in some ways like coming home. A big city was all the joys and sorrows that big cities have. Since we came here 13 months ago, we've begun integrating into the community, especially among those in need, by using a major amasses resources to connect to ministries such as Bienvenidos Foodbank, the pet food pantry of Colorado, Habitat for Humanity, and countless ministries, just to name a few. The Neighborhood Office Building Project would help not only to stabilize the church financially, but would also allow us to grow our ministries, lifting up those who are suffering in need. Here's just a few of those hopes that we are the mayor's have for our future as part of the North Denver community. A community garden on our South Green face was classes teaching how to grow and use fresh produce for your family and Chris Archer Port for the Neighborhood Foodbank more organized community events to feed those in need. Like our recent Christmas Eve outreach to feed people experiencing homelessness, provide outreach to the elderly, drive them to appointments, shovel snow , take them grocery shopping, etc.. Offer us space and supervision for our youth and teen activities for the neighborhood. Faith based marriage classes, community social activities like cooking classes, music classes, or summer music programs for kids. These are just a few of the things we hope to do as a mayor's ministers to others within the North Denver area for the next 100 years. We truly believe that rezoning just the north portion of our unused space for a medical office building is appropriate. And the resulting building will serve the neighborhood in a way that's consistent with the mission of the church. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms.. Fitzpatrick. Next, we have Sean O'Connell. Hi. My name's Sean O'Connell. I'm a resident of the neighborhood. I live at 3010 Irving Street. And I'd like to speak a little bit about some of the concerns that the and some of the neighbors have about this project. You know, the. The large office building that's coming in just doesn't seem to be viable traffic wise, in line with the neighborhood or in line with the zoning that we currently have. And there's a reason that we have that zoning. It's because the area is majority residential. I think the staff report showing the nature of Speer Boulevard, showing the nature of some areas of 32nd was completely incomplete and didn't show the entire nature of the area. First off, this property isn't accessed off of Speer Boulevard, meaning that when people are coming to this building, they have to go past bear to another light in the residential district and turn their past to other residences, creating new traffic issues for the neighbors. Also Irving Street at 32nd dead ends. It's not a through street now. But the blocks to the south of the proposed property will become very much a through street, with traffic coming off of 26 , 29th, all the way from Colfax using Irving Street, which is now mainly just a residential street as a thoroughfare to get to this business. It's not something that we need. It's not something that we want. The Church seems to. You know has has said that the process. The the the. Development will meet their mission as a church. We've heard this before. When they last sold property. It was to meet their mission of providing school service. That money is all gone. That school closed three years later. What is our guarantee that after they spend this money, the next thing isn't going to be to redevelop the church, building, the current school, building, other areas that they own, and that they'll be back here to ask for a new zoning for those areas that also doesn't meet the the neighborhood in focus, in size or in feel. The church membership. And you heard from some folks so far who basically work for the church and don't live in the neighborhood. But the church membership appears to be dwindling, which is why they're willing to give up their last parking lot after selling the last two parking lots that used to be needed to support this church. By selling their admitting that this church is a dying thing and that it no longer is viable as a church, we can only expect so long before the entire thing goes away. Mr. O'Connell, your. Your 3 minutes are up. Thank you. Thank you. Donald Graeber Now and as Donald comes forward, I will call the next five names. You can make your way up to the front pew. Jenny DAVIES, Daniel Gribbin, Randy Mast, Dalton Grima Now and Connor Farley. So now you begin your remarks, sir. Thank you, Mr. President. And thank you, Carl. It's an honor to be in front of you. As I said, as you said earlier, my name is Donald Gravina, and I grew up in North Denver. I married my wife and I didn't. Move from too far from where I. Grew up. And I was in northwest Denver and I'm in West Highlands and we haven't moved. I've also been a member of MRA. Since I was in my baby in arms. I went to this school for nine years and. Was married in the church as well. So I have a long history with the church and still live in northwest Denver. Not too many blocks from it. I just started give you that as a little bit of background. I was one of the members who volunteered to go out and talk with the neighbors again after we learned that there had been a successful protest against our old zoning application. I was really surprised at some of the comments that were made personally. One of them was. That our church president, the one who was accused of many different things and had served his time and is a committed Christian at this point and a very successful and contributing member of our community. He would personally profit from that. And I, I can attest that there is no money to profit from that. We did sell property in 2009. As gentleman that just spoke said, we did use it to try to continue with the school. We found that we could not support the school we are. My wife will probably talk about why we couldn't, but we didn't squander it. We paid our our teachers as we released them and kept the health insurance going until they could get their new positions. And we paid off debts that we had incurred, but we found that we had not made a good decision in selling the property and decided at that point we would rather keep control of our property rather than let it go to whatever it was. That property was actually sold and what amounted to a fire sale. We needed the money. We sold it as residential. One of the things that really bothered me was the Assocation or the the statement that our church president at the time was a child molester. There is no record of any child molestation. And he did take care of his daughter. So that one was sent to a number of people in the community and that it is patently false. There was a statement that we would use eminent domain. We're not allowed to use that domain to buy any additional property. We have no desire to. It's also that there's what we as this project is a way to cash in and leave the neighborhood. We've been there for 125 years. I've been there not all of that time, obviously, but I really have no intention of leaving this building or my neighborhood. And I think it's important to have churches within a community. And we've lost way too many. There's no there's nothing that says a petitioner cannot say whatever they want. There is actually for the neighborhood organizations, there are things that they have to should really to be legitimate. Follow that for a petitioner. Petitioners saying, you know, we don't want this because of this, this or this. There's nothing that says they can't say anything that I know of. But it's it's a lot easier to make hesitations than it is to try to correct exaggerations or misrepresentations. I guess I could say against that. And I guess I would say one more thing. We went out to try to get people to rescind their signatures. I better check that. I can understand why neighbors would not wish to rescind their their signatures. They've got to live next to these people within 200 feet. And the petition people are in that area and you owe a lot to your neighbors. I do, too. I guess I. Could go on, but I want one. I. I did want to say is. That I have been involved in politics and in neighborhood organizations, including Weiner and Sloan's. Like citizens. My wife and I are members of Wild West or the West Highland Neighborhood Association. But well, I'll leave it at that. I enjoy good relations with my neighbors in my own neighborhood, and I do support many of the functions. Of the neighborhood. Organization, and I'm very pleased with it. But I am disappointed in the way this project's opponents have misrepresented why. West Highland Neighborhood Association's formal vote on the rezoning. I've heard it said more than once that West Highland neighbors voted to oppose our project. Actually, that was one of four options, and it was not the one that got the most votes. The vote of the West Highland Neighborhood Association. Was how we got time. The members of West Highland Neighbor Association, having listened to the arguments and discussions over the past many months on this issue, are under the conclusion that the redevelopment of the site and then this is a task other than for a single family is unlikely. And we believe is the best. Way to move forward as we have something that we would be able to live with, which is a 50 year plan. Mr.. Mr.. FREEMAN, we. Cannot. Your 6 minutes. Thank you. Thank you much. My apologies for saying that you had you had 6 minutes. I didn't say that. Next, we have Jenny DAVIES. Good evening and thank you for the opportunity for me to speak with you tonight. My name is Jenny DAVIES. I'm one of the 200 footers. I live directly catty corner from the property. Before I even say anything, I want to say that I've heard a lot of stuff about rumors and innuendos. I, for one, have not heard any of these things before, so I just kind of want to put that out there. Anyway, I live right catty corner. I am. I consider myself a very reasonable person. I would love to see some kind of development on this corner because it is very underused at the moment. But this is just not the project. It is vitally important that we make well-reasoned decisions about development in this city. Every proposal can't be approved simply because growth is happening and we have to accommodate it. We must ask questions like, Is the infrastructure in place to support this? And if the answer is no or if we can't build it, we've really got to look at different options. In this case, we have narrow streets. And nonlinear intersections surrounding the parcel. These are already dangerous for pedestrians and motorists. I know that in my letters to all of you, I've. Encouraged you to really. Actually come and visit it because it's really hard to describe it if you actually haven't been there and seen it right now before we have a medical center and. Before we have a huge don't forget, we have a huge, large apartment complex going on two blocks west at 32nd and Lowell. Before these two. Projects. These intersections are frequently backed up and difficult to negotiate safely. I have a daughter. She walks to North High School every day. She has to cross both 32nd and Irving and 32nd and Speer. And I am telling you right now, before these. Projects. Are built, I am concerned for her safety twice a day. This jog in. Irving, it's not. Not only is it closed a one block thing, there is a dramatic jog. So any time somebody wants to make a left onto 32nd. It is a. Very stressful situation. Just this weekend, I saw two cars come this close to getting into a crash. The odd angle was Speer in 32nd and the volume, because it really is a commuter way from North Denver, but also Wheat Ridge and Arvada. And there are already tons of commuters. And in November, a mother and child were hit by a car. I'm trying to. To cross that intersection. So continuing to act like our infrastructure. Is enough for what we have now. Let alone continuing. To build and build and build without really taking this into consideration and and mitigating it, if that's possible. I don't think it is 32nd because of of how narrow everything is. I've heard about this traffic study that concludes that there'll be. Somehow less traffic based on a something that, you know, is not have anything on it right now. I'm pretty. Skeptical. And honestly, I just want to say it's time to go back to the drawing board and project. That could be a win win. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Daniel. Agreement now. Council President Council members. My name is Dan Grosvenor. I live at 2967 Okello Street in Council District number one. I live in West Highlands or Northwest Denver as I grew up knowing it. I purposely purchased my own home just so I could stay in this neighborhood. I've been attending services at Amherst Lutheran all my life. It's my home church. It's been a historic part of the neighborhood. It's within walking distance of my home. I've been a member of and a board member of many of the recent successes and challenges at Amherst and in the neighborhood as it's gone through. Historically, back in. 2008, Amos basically had to think about and eventually did sell a parcel of land owned at the southwest corner of 32nd and Irving. Now, that's where sits a taco shop, a gym, even an orthodontist. We use that money from the land sale to help fund our school. Our mission at that time. But that money ran out. We did what we could to keep the school running. We updated equipment. We did outreach. We did tuition help. But eventually it just wasn't financially possible. The funds from the sale were used to help keep the school going so that we could close with a minimal of hardship to both our workers and our students. We now have land that's in a wonderful Main Street location, but it's currently just a parking lot with a big chain link fence around. It's not enhancing to the neighborhood. It's not contributing anything dynamic to our community. Now we've been criticized by a lot of people for in the neighborhood for how we handled that last land sale. We basically, you know, stuck up a sign and put it up for sale. It was within it without any restrictions. It was basically sold to the new owners who resumed it and redeveloped it. Now. We learned a lot from that experience, and that's why we want to do things differently this time. We don't want to just sell our land and abandon it to whomever. Not only is that just not a financially sustainable solution, but we want to stay connected. We want to be a part. We want to. Put something into what becomes part of our neighborhood. We're now proposing to keep ownership of the land and partner with a respected local architecture firm to create a beautiful building. Will allow us to stay involved in the property, stay in our community, as opposed to losing control of what's built there, how it looks, how it's used, what our nearest neighbor to us becomes. We really want to create something that's a benefit to the neighborhood. A mission for our church, not just another business or a building. The land along the Main Street corridor, surrounded by commercial uses should be redeveloped. We think the way that we could zone it right is for it to become UMC to X, which is really the most appropriate zoning. So I hope that we can all look forward to seeing how this building will be incorporated into our wonderful existing neighborhood and city. Thank you so much. Please vote in favor. Thank you. Randy Mast. Good evening, Mr. President. Council Members, thank you for your opportunity for this opportunity to speak to you this evening. My name is Randy Mast. I am a neighbor to the mayor's church. I live at 32, 33, West 31st Avenue. I have no ill will towards this church. In fact, I have been a neighbor to this church and in good standing for more than 19 years. I am opposed to the business that this church has chosen to partner in, and I am against this rezoning application. This church has made the decision to become business partners in a development process, a project that I oppose. That does not mean I am against the church. I am also not against development. I understand for Denver to continue to thrive and continue to grow, we as a city need to develop our underutilized properties within our city. But bad development is bad not just for immediate neighbors. It is bad for Denver development that fails to recognize the unique character of Denver's communities and focus only on what will create the most income for developers is a failure for us all. This proposed development is just such a project. It is too large and out of scale and out of character for our community. We have repeatedly asked to be included in the important aspects of this process. We have been repeatedly been ignored and dismissed our views and thoughts on how this development could benefit. Both the development team and the neighborhood have been told they are neither pertinent nor desired. The unyielding reply from this development team has been that they will not discuss lot size, building size, building usage and a desired zoning designation. The Mayor's Development Team repeatedly told us that they have decided what is best for our community. The mayor's team has given us only two choices either support their development or oppose it. They offer no middle ground. This neighborhood is designated as an area of stability stability for small scale infill projects. The proposed project seeks to develop single family home lots into a single, huge commercial lot that is not small scale. This rezoning is outside of our neighborhood commercial center, encroaching into what the 2010 rezoning designated this area as single family homes only five years ago. Families and mortgages and communities rely on the consistency and predictability of stable zoning. This application is asking you to throw all of that away in favor of one development. This has been a long process with arguably no winners. The last thing I want to be spending my time doing is fighting with my neighbors, the mayor's church, about zoning. But I do not think that the proposed zoning is good for our neighborhood or community or Denver. The neighborhood. The community. The city deserves a voice and a seat at the table. And until that occurs, I respectfully ask that you vote no on this rezoning application. Thank you. Thank you. Dalton Green now. Thank you, president and council members. I'm Doyle and Gribbin. I live at 2944 Osceola Street, which was my grandmother's home. My husband and I are both members of West Highland Neighborhood. Association and have been involved in our community for many years. My husband served the Denver Planning Board under. Mayor Pena's administration. I have been a member of a. Mayor since I was a child. My parents were married at a mass. And my husband and I were married at a mayor's. The church has a long and wonderful history in North Denver. My husband attended the Amos. Lutheran School. Through eighth grade. The architecture of the church is special, and the church's place in the community is special. The request to zone change for the north section of the property would fit with the city's plan and would be less invasive to the community than what is happening. At 33rd and lower. 38th at Lowell and. 33rd and Vendrell at Federal. Many people think of me as could have kept the school open. But the Denver. Public Schools Choice Program and the Colorado Charter Law has enabled parents to make numerous choices for their children and not have to pay tuition, as has been done in the past when they wanted. Different options. It was not economically feasible for Amyas to continue to operate the school because people had choices and didn't have to pay tuition. The zone change would enable a mars to continue to be a viable part of the North Denver. Community. Without dangerously impacting the community life of the surrounding neighborhood. The church could continue to operate as a church and provide. Spiritual guidance. To the area as well as community activities. A mars has been a good neighbor in the past and the congregation congregation plans to continue. This request for rezoning is not an effort to destroy the neighborhood, make buckets of money off of a project, or ruin the quality of life in the immediate area. The rezoning will enable Mars to continue as a viable part of the. Neighborhood. And hopefully be embraced by the neighbors as friends and fellow North Denver ites. Please vote in favor of the rezoning. Thank you for your time and patience. Thank you. Next, we have Connor Farley. Mr. Farley, you have 6 minutes, and I'm a call up the next five names Colleen McGowan, Cindy L-A, Ronald Leach, Ray Defer and Judy Labs. So you five can make your way to the front pew is the Farley. You can begin your remarks. Thank you. Council president and council members, thank you for the opportunity to address you tonight. My name is Connor Farley, and I live on 31st Avenue near to a mass Lutheran church. Like the others who oppose this rezoning. I have no ill will towards my neighbor and the Lutheran Church. I am also not against development. However, I am against the proposed rezoning here for several reasons. But given time limitations, I will address only two. First, the application does not satisfy the legal requirements for a rezoning. Specifically, it is not consistent with Blueprint Denver, which is the first factor that you have to consider under the Denver zoning code. Blueprint. Denver lists our neighborhood as an area of stability, yet the mayor is seeking significant change. They propose to go from one of the strictest residential zoning categories to a much less restrictive commercial zoning category. Such significant change is incompatible with an area of stability. For this reason, the proposed rezoning is inconsistent with Blueprint Denver and should be rejected. The proposal is also inconsistent with the public health, safety and general welfare, which is another factor that you have to consider under the Denver zoning code. Irving in 32nd, which found the amass property, are both heavily used by pedestrians, including children. Children, including mine, use Irving and 32nd every day to walk to and from the Skinner Middle School to and from Highland Park, where Westbury, the Westbury branch of the Denver Public Library is, and to and from Norris High School. In addition, as you heard previously, the intersections at 32nd and Irving and 32nd and Speer are high risk because the streets are offset and do not intersect at 90 degree angles. The proposed rezoning will lead to more traffic and vehicles driving at higher speeds along these very roads and through these very intersections, given our already high levels of traffic and congestion. The proposed rezoning and project will inevitably lead to more accidents involving injuries and fatalities. Such an outcome does not serve the public health, safety and general welfare welfare of our neighborhood or this city. The proposed rezoning. There's also no circumstance justifying the rezoning, which is yet another factor that you have two legal factors that you have to consider. The primary factor cited as evidence of a significant change circumstance is that the school on the Imus property is no longer operating. But this, I would respectfully submit, cannot serve as a changed circumstance. If it is, it gives every landowner the incentive to allow their properties to fall into disrepair to create a justification for the rezoning. Such an incentive is contrary to the public interest. In short, there is no circumstance justifying this dramatic rezoning. And finally, on the legal criteria, the proposed rezoning is inconsistent with a neighborhood context. If approved, a mayor's would be permitted to build only the second 100% commercial building in our neighborhood. But it would be more than twice the size of the only other 100% commercial building in our neighborhood. In conclusion, the application does not satisfy at least four of the legal criteria that you have to consider in ruling on whether the rezoning application should be approved. Now, let me just touch on briefly the the outreach that you've heard about. What's important to note here is that there hasn't been genuine outreach, as Mr. Marsh just told you. We have been eager from day one to discuss our major concerns with the mayor's team, the dramatic ups, zoning and the size and 100% commercial use of the building it proposes to build. But the only issues they have been willing to discuss with us are relatively inconsequential things like the exterior finish and landscaping. Everything else we have been told from day one is off the table. Now you've already heard amassed asked how to alleged compromises that they have made in the neighborhood. The first involves scaling back the project from 3 to 2 stories. Yet it was readily apparent that the city would never allow a three storey building on this property from the start. As a result, AMASS is opening position that it would build a three storey building was designed for one thing to allow a mass to make a fair concession up front and thereby create the appearance of reasonableness. Amass has also pointed to its most recent amendments reduce the size of the part of the parcel subject to rezoning as evidence of their outreach. Like its earlier concession, this one was also made for the sake of appearance because a mass will allow cars visiting the new building to park on their property. This alleged concession has no impact on the size of the building that amassed plans to build. In some analysis, outreach has been superficial at best. I would respectfully submit and designed to create the false appearance of reasonableness and willingness to engage with the neighborhood. In conclusion, I would respectfully request you to vote no on this dramatic upskirting, and I would also add that I concur with the points made by those who preceded me who oppose the rezoning. Thank you very much. Thank you, Farley. Next, we have Colleen McGowan. Thank you. My name is Colleen McGowan. I live at 1915 Grace Street in Adubato. I first began attending a mass in 1991. I found them in the Yellow Pages and chose them because they had a Spanish speaking congregation sharing the building. Now, I appreciate a mayor's four more important almost reasons the scriptural teaching and the loyal church community. In 1995, I adopted a ten year old special needs child found through the Rocky Mountain Adoption Exchange. Initially, and for all the past 20 years, emails members have supported me in this very challenging adoption. Sorry. Today my daughter is independent. She's married and a mom she homeschools. I'm a Kaiser. R.N. officially retired, but I still work on call in part time in neurology at three different locations. We very much need additional medical care options. There are some private physicians in this area, but not nearly enough providers to serve the neighborhood's population. Also, it's important to have care close to where we live. This not only reduces the travel time, but it makes timely care more likely because of being convenient and accessible. Any financial benefit from the medical office proposed would go toward sustaining the nonprofit work of the church, which in turn would inevitably benefit the immediate community. We hope to build on the support we've been giving Bienvenidos Food Bank and we also hope to expand services for the homeless. For example, on Christmas Eve, we help provide homeless individuals with warm, fresh burritos, hot chocolate treat bags filled with fruit, nuts, candy plus clothing and blankets. We believe doing these things is part of what we're here for. We believe caring for the poor, the fatherless, the widow and the stranger among us is part of our mission. We hope to continue. Please vote in favor of this rezoning request. Thank you. Thank you, Cindy Ely. Good evening and thanks for the opportunity to talk with you tonight. My name is Cindy Eby and I live at 32, 33, West 31st Avenue, which is one house away from and from the mayor's church. And I've lived there for 19 years. Tonight, I want to speak to you against this rezoning. I do want to say, as others have said, that I am actually for development of this parcel. I just think this rezoning and proposed development is the wrong zoning. It is too high intensity of use. I was going to talk to you about traffic. You've heard a lot about that. So I'm not going to say too much. While some have painted the picture of it being misguided to be concerned about traffic, I do have two children who walk to Skinner Middle School also. One will start to walk to North High School next year. I'm very concerned about their safety as they walk on the streets in this area. As my son's friend was hit by a car just blocks from this area and hospitalized. So I would challenge anyone to cross the intersection at 32nd and Speer and not. Fear for your life. It is frightening. And I would like to also talk about my concern for the changing residential character. Should this commercial building be built, it would increase intensity of use. Would I live there? It would change how it feels every day, day to day. And that is a concern for me mostly. I do want to talk to you about the process and the high level of neighborhood opposition to this. So you've heard some today about these rogue neighbors who are scaring other neighbors into into opposition. And that has not been my experience. Apparently, I'm one of those rogue neighbors because I'm in opposition. But there's clear disagreement with this rezoning and clear opposition from neighbors. And I want to point out a few different ways. The West Highlands Neighborhood Association did vote against this rezoning. There was some reinterpretation of that from another speaker, but it was clear that West Highlands Neighborhood Association voted against the rezoning. There have been also two successful protests petitions within those who own property within 200 foot of the parcel, not one, but two. We had to do it twice and we did it twice and we were successful. And also we had a petition where we have over 270 signatures from those from citizens, largely a huge percentage right around the area in opposition to this rezoning. And the underlying theme there is that it's in opposition to the rezoning, but interested in having conversation about different use of the parcel that engages community input. And that just has not been allowed, as you've heard others say. So I just want to say I request that you vote no on this and I agree with others points that have been made in opposition to this tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Ronald Leach. Do not have one. Oh. I will make mine short. My name is Ronald Leach. My residence is 351 Milwaukee Street, Cherry Creek North. I'm glad to say tonight I'm one of the many people in that area that voted for this gentleman when we knew. I've known the staff from two years. This may have hurt for over 40 years, everyone. And tonight we've been talking about the challenges that face us. And in this great nation, this great city, this great community that we have. I'm proud and very grateful in my heart to see that this congregation is going to step up and and do what they can do to become a part of the solution and not part of the problem. And I will be very pleased to see you pass this motion tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Leach. Next, we have Ray Devore. And you have 6 minutes. My name's Ray Depay. I live at 30th and Rollin. I'm a member of the West Highland Neighborhood Association and served on the Joint Committee of the West Valley Neighborhood Association that worked with the St Dominic's to create a rezoning application was that was acceptable to and supported by all of the parties. City Council approved the same Dominick's rezoning application on December 7th with the City Council vote of 11 to 0, Saint Dominic's request for neighborhood involvement in the rezoning process and willingness to engage in respect for dialog and compromise to each to reach an acceptable resolution for all parties stands in sharp contrast to the approach of the Mayor's Development Team. St Dominic's came to the West Highland Neighborhood Association meeting last winter to inform us of its general plan to expand and invited our input. After a joint committee was formed, the committee met on a monthly basis with several members of Saint Dominic's for about ten months. Both sides got to know each other and made compromises to reach a consensus. As noted, this process was successful within a ten month period in the West, Highland Neighborhood Association supported the rezoning application of Saint Dominic's. Amos's approach has been completely different. The mayor's development team made it clear from the start that it would not discuss with the West Highland Neighborhood Association, nor the neighbors, immediate neighbors, legitimate concerns about his proposed rezoning or the size and scope of the proposed project. In essence, the mayor's development team came to the West Highland Neighborhood Association and its immediate neighbors declared its plans and said, Take it or leave it. Given the dramatic changes that the mayor's development team proposed, it is hardly surprising that its neighbors were and are concerned. Yet Imus has remained unwilling to even discuss its neighbors legitimate concerns. It is very important for you to keep in mind the successful sealing Dominick's rezoning application. As you consider the mayor's application, the mayor's development team will seek to proprietary the West Highland Neighborhood Association and neighbors as unreasonable and unwilling to consider any development in our neighborhood . Saint Dominic's successfully. Successful community outreach and resulting successful rezoning application proves the focus of the portrayal and reveals that Imus is the only unreasonable party in this situation. I ask that you do not support the mayor's rezoning application. Thank you. Next, we have Judy Labs. And as Judy comes forward, I want to call the next five names Jackie Youngblood, Don Mueller, Marilyn Quinn, Danny Wise and Pat de Fe. So you five can go ahead and make your way up to the front pew and you can begin your remarks. Thank you, President and council members. Thank you, each one of you. Thank you. Is that better? Well, yeah. I just didn't want to echo. My name is Judy Loves, and I live on West 112th Avenue. And I've been a member of Imus for says almost 50 years. 1967. The part I think I love most about Emerson's community is that we are relentless in our giving and our commitment to our helping people in the neighborhood and showing them God's love and caring and hope. And we've done that for over 100 years. So we are doing something right. Lord bless us and we bless the community and they bless us. There's been some talk during the public discussion about the masses supposed greed and the idea of that. We're designing a project in order to make the most money that we possibly can. First of all, I think any sensible person could realize that a building of neighborhood doctors and an extra large parking lot is not the most profitable commercial use in the world. Secondly, all the acquisitions or acquisitions, I should say, of Greed by Amos make no logical sense that the church is a nonprofit. Obviously, the money we make will make by renting the rental, the building, the spaces to the doctors will also pay off the costs and construction of the maintenance of the building. But any money's left over will go to the church's ministries. All our church councils and committee members are volunteers. So nobody's going to realize any money off of this project. We pay, of course, our pastor, like any church, we pay the accountant and our part time secretary. That's it. The project will enrich no individual, but will only serve as we have in the past and can hope to continue in the future. Our wonderful community. One of our groups is our UMass quilters and they just celebrated their 50th anniversary. And some of the ministries and missions that they give money to are the Tennis Center for Children Rescue Mission, the Elsie M EST Disaster Response and Meals on Wheels, just to name a few of their that they do. I belong to the S Little Lutheran Ladies Guild, and we do various projects like selling greeting cards, bake sales, my collection boxes, things on that order. All of the money or of the offerings and the residuals that we get from these projects are donated to good causes, both religious and secular. Some examples of those groups that we give are excuse me, Concordia Technical Seminary. Glory Reborn Motherhouse China. Hearts for Jesus. Lutheran Family Services. Lutheran Bible Translators. Lutheran Prison Ministries. Email Social Ministry. Miss Labs. Your 3 minutes is up. I'm sorry. Your 3 minutes are up, ma'am. Your time is up. Oh, I'm sorry. I know. Thank you very. Much to you. It goes by fast. Next, we have Jacqui Youngblood. My name is Jackie Underwood. I live at 2975 Irving Street. I'm the current president of the West Highlands Neighborhood Association. WEINER The property is within Weiner boundaries. You may, as has appeared many. Times before, the neighborhood association while Weiner was on summer break, he may have requested a special meeting. The special meeting was held on August 4th, 2015. After their presentation and discussion, the following was decided Weiner would not support the redevelopment of the site other than single family homes or a negotiated site plan. There were 40 eligible voting. Members in attendance. 34 in favor. One opposed and five abstaining. You may as. Proposed. Use of the site is not a good fit for the area. The site is zoned. You eschew a single family homes. It is located across the street from the Ghost Historic District. I respectfully request that the zoning application be denied. There is a very large crowd here tonight and I would like to ask those who live at our current residents. Of West Highlands to. Please stand. Current current residents. If you are opposed to the rezoning, remain standing. Most of you do not live in West Highlands. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Ms.. Youngblood. Next up is Don Miller. 3 minutes. Thank you, Mr. President, and members of the council. My name is John Miller, and I live at. 81 West 10th Street. I have been attending services. At events for all of my 69 years. It's been my home church. My parents were married at a mass 1943. And I went to grades one through nine. At the Mayo School. I find this new development exciting. I am also a fan of church history, and since. The church has been at this location. In West Highland since 1907, a lot of history to know. For example, there's a building that sits in this section of the land that we wish to rezone. Now we call it the ARC Building because it's. Used to hold the church's archives. Unfortunately, the building was ruined when some pipes burst and it is. No longer usable. Back in the thirties and forties. The ARC Building. Used to be a. Doctor's office right on the UMass land. So you see, this is not a new use for this location. In fact, we're honoring our history by returning this land to its previous use. Now, just a final thought. We know the city's rezoning process is set up to be extensive and thorough. We understand that. However, we in the UMass community have really gone through a lot in our efforts to redevelop our land so we can better serve the neighborhood. We would just like to ask that are rezoning requests received fair consideration by council? We hope the Council will agree that part of having a fair hearing is allowing all 13 members of the Council to vote on our rezoning. We know that we need ten. Votes to pass and we want a fair consideration. This hearing was delayed for almost three months so that the opponents could gather protest petition signatures. And now that they have done that, we think asking for two weeks so that we can have a full vote of council is only fair. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mueller. And that's an incredible radio voice. Nothing. Right next to Morgan Freeman. I want you talking about, you know, they also invite you back. Next up is Marilyn Quinn. Tough act. Tough act to follow. My name is Marilyn Quinn. I live on Fairview Place about a block and a half from a mass church. I've lived there within a block and a half of a mass for 15 years. And I'm one of the West Highland neighbors who oppose this application for rezoning. I'd like to mention two specific reasons for my opposition and to suggest a broader policy recommendation for you to consider in the future. First, the mayor's proposal is inconsistent with a blueprint Denver. It would take the property from. One of the most restrictive residential zoning. Categories to create the. Largest single use commercial. Building in West Highland. A development of this size outside our commercial center in an area of stability as designated by Blueprint, Denver is completely unreasonable. A project that was truly. Transitional between this residential area and the commercial area that begins a block west of our area would be much more appropriate. And I think that that sentiment is reflected in the vote that was taken up, y'know, that you've just heard about. Secondly, it is the proposal is inconsistent with the neighborhood context described in the zoning code. Thousands of hours of public participation and hundreds of thousands of dollars of. Consultant fees. And staff hours were spent to describe neighborhood, character and function. This request ignores the huge amount of work that has been done. Both blueprint Denver. And the zoning code should offer. Residents stability and predictability in their neighborhoods. But this. Proposal completely. Overrides those assurances. I'd like to. Contrast the quality of neighborhood outreach in two recent rezoning requests in West Highland, both by churches located two blocks apart. The pastor of St Dominic's Church came to the West Highland Neighborhood Association shortly after they began internal development discussions. Although they were not required to do so, they invited neighborhood participation at every stage in their decision making. I was one of the, y'know reps. We attended their pre application meeting with the City Planning Department and were involved in every step along the way for about ten months. Their proposal passed council unanimously on December 7th with great neighborhood support. By contrast, the Mayor's Development team brought its neighbors an almost finished product and has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion or to consider alternatives with the neighbors, except for inconsequential features such as building, exterior and landscaping. While I have seen the Mayor's Development Team at Neighborhood Association meetings and I don't attend all of them, they don't seem to interact with neighbors and are often clustered at the periphery of the discussion. Because of the development team's unwillingness to engage in constructive discussion. After nearly two years, their proposal is not only completely unwelcome in the neighborhood, but is only just now arriving for your attention. The church has been part of our community for a century, which makes their inflexibility especially disappointing. The contrast between Saint Dominic and the mayor's projects illustrates a flawed public participation process in which the city only includes neighborhood outreach as a box to be checked off after the developer has spent many months of negotiation with the city planning department. It sets up an adversarial situation between neighborhood neighbors and developers. This is where policy changes could make a difference. There has to be a better way. But that does not excuse a dismissive attitude toward residents of the stable Denver neighborhood, who themselves have invested many hundreds and even thousands of volunteer hours to craft a vision for their neighborhoods future. Regardless of the timing and openness to public participation about this request, the AMA's proposal is a poor fit at this location, as demonstrated by a lack of consensus among the Denver Planning Board, which only narrowly supported the proposal. I urge you to vote no on this rezoning application and ask that you in the future, you strongly encourage rezoning applicants to begin discussions with neighborhoods well in advance of present city requirements. This will help minimize friction between those looking for change and those who are most affected by it. I am not opposed to development, but I do oppose this rezoning proposal. As neighbors, we welcome an opportunity to work with the mayor's church as they plan for their future. Your no vote on this proposal will support our efforts. Thank you. Thank you, Ms.. Quinn. Danny Wise. Thank you, Mr. President, and members of the council. My name is Danny Leece. I live at 4415 West Hayward Place. I am one of many people here. Tonight in support of the project who lives in Council District one. I just want to say that I am in support of this rezoning. I believe that the medical. Office building we hope to build will serve the people in the neighborhood. We understand that there are residential areas on either side of the Main Street district. However, there are no residential. Right next to where we are. Will build the building, the residential areas to the south along 31st Avenue. Our building would be along the 32nd Avenue. Main Street. South of the building would be a large parking lot. Then the. Church building, the DNR lawn. Then there's also. The parsonage and the closest neighbor who lives across the alley from the parsonage. There are commercial developments all along Main Street on both sides of 32nd Avenue. We're glad that the commercial Main Street is enabled in the resident area because this means more people can walk and bike to the commercial business. It's a great thing. Please vote in favor of rezoning. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Pat Defang. And as Pat come forward and Pat, you have 6 minutes as Pat comes forward. I'll call all the next five speakers Jerry Meline, Scott, Nemours, Marie Benedict, Ling Lee and Bertram Sanchez. And begin your remarks. You got it right this time. I'm Pat Duffy. Good evening, council members. I reside at 30th and Raleigh Street, less than a mile from this proposed rezoning in northwest Denver. I have lived and volunteered in our community for over 36 years and have lived in my second home in the area for the past 30 years. The entire city was resigned in 2010 after months of community meetings throughout the city to make sure the entire city was zoned properly for many years into the future. One of the outcomes of the rezoning in 2010 stated by then CPD director Peter Park was to show developers where they could go to build the developments they chose to do. It is all spelled out in those binders that you all have in your council offices, direct to direct you as developers approach you on projects in your districts. Please note council members that almost all of the church facilities in the city and county of Denver were zoned single family. That is what the mayor's property is currently zone. Please note another document that all of your city council offices should have on your bookshelf and its blueprint. Denver, Page five and Blueprint Denver. Areas of stability include the vast majority of Denver and are primarily the fairly stable residential neighborhoods where minimal change is expected during the next 20 years. Meanwhile, the vast majority of new development will be funneled to areas that will benefit from and thrive on an infusion of population, economic activity and investment. These places are areas of change. Page 120 and Blueprint Denver Areas of stability shaping Denver's future involves more than deciding where and how new development will occur. It is equally important to enhance what has drawn people to live in and be loyal to Denver over the years. In recognition of how strongly Denver's citizens feel about their neighborhoods. Blueprint, Denver includes tools that focus on keeping valued community characteristics in many of Denver's older and stable neighborhoods. These new measures provide tools that help shape where and how development occurs. Page 122 In Blueprint, Denver shows a picture in the upper right hand corner, and it is of West Highlands. It's very small. It's up here in the corner and it says. You can find it here. West Highlands is a neighborhood that illustrates the characteristics that draw people to Denver. Chapter seven Areas of Stability and Areas of Change. So the map is here and you'll see. Its area of stability. I would like to thank our Northwest Denver community and once again coming together to supply testimony that this proposed rezoning of the property at 32nd and Irving Streets, which is currently zoned residential, should remain that way. A stable neighborhood. On a side note, there are many residents and homeowners that prefer to stay in northwest Denver, but they're not able to find affordable and suitable housing as we age. There is a lack of so-called patio homes with no stairs in our neighborhood. This property could be a perfect location for that type of homes, with the central location and access to downtown, the freeways and to local bus service. Thank you for your time and please vote no on this rezoning. We do not need a huge medical building or whatever. They end up wanting to build on that very busy corner, an intersection our gateway to the 32nd and lower business district in the West Highlands neighborhood. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Jerry Moline. My name is Jerry Moline and I live at 30th and Irving Street, one and a half blocks from this site. The Highland Square area is a favorite destination for people all over the city. One of the reasons they come is the historic commercial buildings and homes in the Highland Square area. This creates the old small town atmosphere that contributes to the area's value. People get a warm, comfortable feeling when visiting the local shops and restaurants. It's like the goose that lays the golden eggs. You can't create it or design it, but you can preserve it and nurture it. Our neighborhood is an area of stability which calls for small scale development. If new buildings that are non contributing to the local character are built, it can spoil the charm of the area and decrease the draw to the current businesses, causing business closure and property devaluation. This leads to the urban blight that other areas have suffered. So now across from the Ghost Historic District, we're faced with the proposal of construction of the largest single use commercial building in the neighborhood, which is blocks from the neighborhood center. I hope it does not become the ghost of Christmas future. If a modern steel and glass building is planned for the site, the appropriate structure would be a phone booth and nothing larger. If a properly sized, small scale mixed use brick building consistent with the context of other buildings along 32nd Avenue were constructed. It could contribute to the character of the approach to Highland Square. A mixed use building would be acceptable if its size were small, small scale similar to the building across the street southwest corner. And it contained the architectural features of the period buildings at Highland Square and contributes to the character of the area. Please help protect the goose that lays the golden eggs by sending this turkey back to complete the Medich mediation process. Maybe we can turn it into a quail which should be smaller, look better, and will not foul the neighborhood. Please deny this application until the applicant is willing to meet with the neighborhood and work through a site plan that works for everyone. Our neighborhood is an area of stability. Let's keep it that way. Thank you. Thank you. Scott Nemours. Mr. President, members of the council, my name is Scott Demers. I live in Lakewood, just south of Sloan's Lake. I am not a member of a mass Lutheran church, but I do get benefit from its membership in the community. I am a member of the North Denver Board Gamer's Group that meets there on a weekly basis. If you're ever in the neighborhood on a monday, come get your geek on 32nd. I've frequented the area for over 18 years with both my time and, as importantly, my money. 32nd Avenue is undeniably the main street of West Highland. I find it interesting that Mr. Mast referred to the commercial this as being an extension of the commercial district. The commercial district already goes. All the way down to Speer Boulevard. Adjacent to this lot is pinto tacos, Denver Bread Company, a car wash, 211 photography and a framing studio. The thing that doesn't fit. If you're familiar with Sesame Street, the thing, you know, one of these things is not like the other is the parking lot with a chain link fence around it that doesn't fit. Frankly, what does fit would be the two story doctor's office, which, as facts say, from an impartial presenter. The first one to go tonight said that there were there were rules on what it could look like and how big it could be. And it fits in with the things around it. Additionally, there was reference to the traffic study or at least reference to traffic being increased. I think Mr. Farley and others have spoken about that. The reality is, again, the traffic study presented in partially said no impact. So I please encourage you to consider facts and not just doomsday. Speak when thinking about how to vote on this. I love this neighborhood. As I said, I've been coming here for 18 years. And I find it really sad, these attacks on the church, this project and frankly, the people whom I know from a personal basis, you know, are worthy of affection, not the vitriol that we're hearing here. There's really no factual evidence to support the things that people have said except from one side. And that would be the side of a mass Lutheran church. I think it's really important to meet the needs of all people and not just some people in the community. And that's what a doctor's office does, is it brings a service to this neighborhood. I think putting a two story doctor's office in that commercial location is the smart thing to do, and I encourage you to vote yes . Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Next year, I'm Marie Benedict. It must be an ex. You have 6 minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. My name is Marie Benedict's. I live on 3284 Osceola streets here in Denver. I have no ill will towards the famous Lutheran Church, and I'm not opposed to developments in our neighborhood. But I do I do not support this rezoning application. It is not appropriate development for our neighborhood. Contrary to what you've heard from some here today, this proposed up zoning is not supported by Denver's zoning code. This property is located in an area of stability, which is overwhelmingly residential, in character and in zoning. Therefore, it is not correct that an up zoning would be a fit with the existing surrounding environment. In addition, this lot is not located adjacent to the existing embedded business district. The Neighborhood Center for Blueprint Denver, which ends at Julian Street, a long block of residential property along 32nd Avenue, separates the embedded business district from this property , which is located at Irving Street. And even if this property were located right next to the existing neighborhood center, it would be incorrect to state that we're dealing with a small property and that rezoning it would in any way fit the existing character of that district. Here's why. The embedded business district on 32nd Avenue between Julian and Perry is characterized by small, unique businesses, each occupying a typical life size of 3780 square feet. That's the median size to 5960 square feet. That's the average site size. The proposed zoning before you is for a lot of approximately to 22,700 square foot. That is 4 to 5 times larger than the typical lot size in the embedded business district. In fact, a 22,000 square foot size, the proposed up zoned lot would be larger than every property but two in the area. Those two are the Eden Manor formal old folks home and the strip mall at 32nd and Lowell. If you know the area, we can intuitively agree that neither of those two is really representative for the character of the area. In fact, you'd more be more likely to hear the opposite that those two stick out and do not fit the area's character. In summary, this is not a small lot. It is located in a residential area and not next to the embedded business district. And even if it were, its rezoning would not fit the existing character of that business district. If approved, the proposed up zoning would allow the construction of a large 26 to 28000 square foot two story, character altering building. It would be the largest commercial building by far anywhere along the business district at twice the square footage of any other commercial building. This large new development would attract several hundreds of new daily car trips added by doctors, nurses, assistants, administrators, patients, service providers and others. This would adversely impact the quality of life of the neighborhood, and especially for the residents immediately surrounding this lot in a residential area. Specifically, the small residential streets like 31st Avenue, 30th Avenue and Irving Street would be treated to an increase of up to 86 car trips per hour at peak hours. I read the traffic study according to fact from that traffic study, which misrepresents current conditions in order to present a false conclusion. And because both the city and current development plans for the site call for fewer parking stalls than are needed. In reality, 20 to 40 overflow cars attracted by this development would be parked on neighborhood streets at peak hours. This estimate was made by civil engineers and traffic engineers who volunteered their time to wina. The applicant has not provided any such data, despite being asked by the Neighborhood Association for about two years ago. In conclusion, this development is not supported by Denver's zoning code. It is not a small lot and its up. Zoning would in no way fit existing character or the built condition. It would negatively affect families, neighbors, property owners who bought properties on these residential streets to raise families in a safe and quiet neighborhood. They have the right to expect stability and predictability. That was why the 2010 rezoning, big rezoning, was put in place. I heard some interesting things from CPD here today. I heard that infill should be consistent with existing context. This one is not. I heard that suitable components, aside from residential properties for neighborhoods are stores, parks and schools. Don't those sound wonderfully small scale and like they serve the local community? It doesn't sound like a 26000 to 28000 square foot single use commercial building that attracts several hundred additional car trips onto small neighborhood streets. I also heard the CPD characterized 32nd and Irving as an incomplete main street. Yes, indeed. That's because there's a long block of residential properties along 32nd between Julian and Irving. It's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have bowling alley. Thank you. Members of the city council. My name is Lee Ang Lee. I actually don't live nearby. I live on 854 Pearl Street in Denver. Resident of a council term right now. I've actually only been in Denver two years. I'm a summer. I'm from upstate New York, so I'm sort of an outsider and I really appreciate the chance to have my voice heard regardless how highly you take my opinion. I'm a member of the board game as well and the church and really generously allows us to use their space for the weekly community. For me, the church has been a gateway for not only not only the community, but given me with opportunities for engagement and holiday events, but also many of the local businesses that would otherwise not visit. Just down the street, there's bookstores there, bars, restaurants that I would not know of if I'd didn't go to the church. I feel, furthermore, that the character of the church is really more than the board game club as well. And I feel that the the code of the church will continue to more than the medical center that they are proposing. I think it's easy right now for some people to stand for the council and claim that they know what the neighborhood wants in the neighborhood once what they want. But I think they don't acknowledge how diverse our neighborhoods are. There's many people of all ages, me included, from all walks of life, and that we want many different things and many people would agree with me and that the medical center would be a great idea. I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to come out and actually see the place. I think that if you stood in the corner and looked around, it would be very clear it's a main street. There's a it's already a commercial area, as far as I know. I really have no idea why it's zone residential to begin with. And, you know, there's business around it and businesses down the street. I think the church is already a great gateway for me as a foreign traveler who from New York can plan on staying in Denver. And it's a great gateway to the neighborhood. The story, the building would fit nicely and the parking lot tucked behind the building would be much better than with the chain link fence parking lot that's there right now. And please vote in favor. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Bertram Sanchez. And as Mr. Sanchez comes up, I will call the next five speakers Virginia Rier, Brad Balsam, Dennis Fitzpatrick, Harry Brick and Greg Pratt. Mr. Sanchez. Thank you, Mr. President. Council members. My name is Bertram Sanchez. I live at 3225, West 31st Avenue. I'm one of the 200 footers that opposed this. I've lived there for 29 years and 29 years. I have seen traffic. Exponentially increase. I have my kids went to north. I bought that house, raised my son and daughter there. My kids went to North, went to Skinner. They had to dodge cars in the eighties. It's worse now. I have my grandson that lives in my house. He's 16 and goes to north. I went to North. I'm a native of northwest Denver. I grew up on 38th and Teal. I'm 67 years old and have seen a lot of changes in North Denver. And this is not a good change. There are so many things wrong with this. Not just the traffic. The church itself. I didn't want to speak about religion. I have my own religion. I have nothing against anyone else's religion. There was a there's a church on the other corner of 31st Avenue on Grove. It was the fourth Church of Christ when I moved in. And that church didn't have the congregation and had the courtesy to sell it and get out of the neighborhood. They sold it to a Zen Buddhist, which didn't didn't get the congregation they needed. So they sold it to another church last summer. That church is doing great. They build two parking lots up all the street up on Sunday Mass. I have never seen a mayor's church in 29 years try to increase their congregation. As a matter of fact, 29 years ago, when I moved in, one of the members told me that there were other Lutheran church for people of my color. And I. Didn't like it then. I don't like it now. I don't like prejudice. Like I said, I've lived there for 29 years, have not seen anything. With any future in that church. They've never, ever been part of the neighborhood. And to put in a medical center there, there's 29,000 square feet is absurd. I'm against this. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Virginia. We're. Good evening, Mr. President. Members of the Council. My name is Virginia Rear. I live at 891 14th Street Council District nine, and I'm retired now after practicing law for 24 years. I'm here tonight to speak in favor of the rezoning application. As such, I would like to speak about the importance of legal predictability. Denver Zoning laws clearly lay out the criteria for rezoning. This has to mean something. Without predictability and consistency. In the way our zoning laws are applied. The law and the code. The zoning code becomes meaningless and capricious. Subject to political whims. Thus, if a citizen or an. Elected official takes issue with an element of the zoning law, the solution is not to ignore the law. The solution is to go through the proper process to change the law. But the zoning code, as currently written, must be adhered to. I am very grateful for our representative. Democracy. And for the fact that it is. A group of. Elected officials representing the entire. City. With that is charged. With determining whether a rezoning request. Meets the legal criteria. As provided in the code. And in this regard, I'd like to point out a recent Boulder initiative, ballot initiative that would have. Allowed a micro community approximately 166. Of the population of Boulder to determine the fate of nearby rezonings. The ballot that ballot initiative failed by a large percentage, and I believe this reflects a good policy reason behind the fact that we don't put redevelopment decisions solely in the hands of adjacent neighbors. Instead, a code is relied upon, which takes a. Broader view based. On the guiding principles of smart city growth. In closing, I want to thank you for your time and service to the city and to strongly urge you to join. The community planning and Development and the Planning Board in. Recognizing that this present rezoning. Proposal meets the legal. Criteria for rezoning as defined by the code and is consistent with Blueprint Denver. Thank you, Mr. Bolton. President Council people, thank you for allowing me to speak. And my name is Brett Bortz and I live at 32, 39 West. 31st Avenue with my wife and two daughters. We are a taxpaying homeowners in the Highlands. We have another property in Berkley. We've experienced a ton of growth. We've watched the growth. We moved in 2009 to Highlands, to a bigger house. I am 100%. Opposed to the redevelopment request by the mayor's church. I'm I'm also. A little bit sick of it. This has been going on now for three years. A church that's truly embracing the community and working with the community wouldn't have. To hire a PR person. To push an agenda. That, in my opinion, is based off of, quite frankly, their own agenda. It's not representative of the neighborhood. I think it was extremely telling to see how many homeowners we have here that are paying taxes that are opposing this project. I would like you as council people to. At least consider the fact that you have so many people opposing this project. You have the board. Gamers from all around Denver speaking tonight on behalf. Of the church. My heart goes out to the members of the church. I actually have no ill will towards those people, but this project has gotten so ridiculously out of control that I strongly encourage you to think about. What the people that live in the community are trying to tell you, and that is that it doesn't fit in the neighborhood. We're passionate group of people. My neighbors are. Incredible. This whole process has brought us together even more. And we'll continue to fight this as long as we need to. Having said that, I would I would like you to. Reject the notion to have a vote when. Assessment is here, because there's no telling what's going to happen when they want to have the vote. There could be two of you missing. And then what? We just want to. You know, move on and keep doing what we're doing. So thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Dennis Fitzpatrick. Mr. Fitzpatrick, I believe you have 6 minutes. Thank you. Good evening and thank you for hearing me. My name is Reverend Dennis Fitzpatrick. I live in the parsonage at 30 to 45, West 31st Avenue, just south of he Mass Lutheran Church. When my wife and I moved here 16 months ago to serve in Ministry Mass, we were very excited. Both because of the creative thinking of the people you see here gathered and how they want to use their property and the warm community that they're part of. I was impressed by the determination and commitment that they offered me that they wanted to stay in the neighborhood and not just simply give up, sell and leave like others had done. The doctor's offices seemed like a perfect opportunity to both give something back and stabilize the church and be useful, not just another bar. No, it isn't. The most profitable use for this land. But it is useful to many in the community. The diversity of which can be seen on our side of the table. In my short time at Mars, I've been working hard to fashion our church as an outpost to help those who are needy and in need of a hand up. And I intend to continue to push an agenda of mercy and caring to those who are suffering. And while I have enjoyed working with these wonderful people, they asked me after my first year here how it was going. I said they were great. They laughed because they know what we've been going through. I said, it's okay. All the misery is coming from the outside. I have to say, I was very disappointed in how we were treated. I have compassion for the fact that zoning issues can be heated. I get it. All of us get angry at times. The harassment my wife and I have endured goes far beyond. What any of us would consider rational. Or reasonable, as I've heard, words like that used tonight. Our nearby neighbors have repeatedly shouted, used profanity, abused and threatened us. They've come out of it. Come over to our homes multiple times, sometimes pounding on the front door. I've gone out to speak with them at length on the porch while being shouted at called. All manner of kind of things. Things that aren't proper for this venue. While my wife sat inside. Afraid. A member of the development team who is familiar with the history of harassment in West Highland encouraged me to call the police. Well, I believed respect and understanding could prevail. I was mistaken. The harassment and verbal abuse by the nearby neighbors continued, and I had to call the police and later a report against them. We asked that the neighbors stop harassing us and refrain from coming on our property in the future. There is a persistent assumption of bad faith among the opposing neighbors. That's troubling to see. It has no basis in rationality. At all. A social media discussion about our development included the following comment about myself. The pastor is a hatchet man. The Lutherans have sent here from out of state to get rid of the property. The church is next, mark my words. And if you think those comments are odd or out of place, it's all too common with our opposition. We have tried over and over to explain. In fact, the opposite is true. We want to stay. I was called to a mass in order to expand and deepen the church's work. The doctor's offices being proposed are being proposed in order to allow the church to stay in the neighborhood. We want it to stay for the next 100 years. And there's one more issue I'd like to address briefly. You're hearing repeatedly that the AMA's team has not been willing to engage in substantive discussion or offer any real compromises. If we were not bound by the confidentiality requirements of the mediation process, he may ask would be more than happy to share what we were willing to put on the table. However, since we can't share that, I simply say that the claims you are hearing about our lack of willingness to meaningful compromise are deplorable and untrue. In the extreme. It is unfortunate that people are taking advantage of the mediation confidentiality in this way. It's despicable. And repeatedly making inaccurate statements that ignore what really happened in mediation. Good neighbors. It's part of what this is about. We're trying to be good neighbors. We're trying to find our way. Find a new mission. Find a new way to continue to serve. This medical building will allow us to stabilize the congregation and continue to work on outreach and do good things for Denver. Denver deserves better. And what this R.A. is presenting before you today. And I ask you to seriously consider accepting our rezoning application and allowing UMass to remain serving the community for the next 100 years. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Harry Brick. Hi. My name is Harry Breck. I live about a block and a half from the church and I'd like to thank the City Council for letting me speak, even though I'm not wearing a Denver Bronco jersey. But thank you very much for that. I am strongly in agreement with the others who have spoken in opposition to this rezoning request because it is grossly out of scale with the neighborhood. I was going to make a lot of the same points that my neighbor Marie Bendix made. I just like to remind you that I agree with all the point she made. The only thing I would add is that I would been a health care provider for over 40 years. And when you consider the number of doctors, the number of nurses, the number of lab technicians, the number of receptionists that would be in a building this size and serving people for 15 to 30 minutes a visit. How this wouldn't grossly impact the traffic in the neighborhood is beyond me because those roads are already quite busy. Also, a lot of the points that were made by some of the people who are for the zoning as well as Mr. Watkins, are incorrect in saying that the pinch taco building or the Mondo Vino building are good comparators because those buildings have several different small scale establishments in them rather than one built one commercial establishment that's going to be bigger all by itself. I suspect that if the church had been amenable to discussing other things than just the plantings and the sides of the building, and that's all that was allowed to be discussed by them. Perhaps a mix of stores and apartments. The community response might have been different, but we are where we are. I would like to ask the County City Council to respect the many developmental democratic steps that have been taken in the development of the Denver zoning. It was only five years ago that there was an extensive citywide planning effort to update our current zoning system with a great deal of community input. West Highland was designated an area of stability. Furthermore, churches throughout the city have been zoned in accordance with the houses that are immediately around them. But at the planning board meeting, which considered this proposal, Mr. Tim Watkins stated that he had gone to the site and while he recognized it was an area of stability, it just looked like an obvious entry point for commercial district. You can check the records to see if that's correct. So we have the substitution of a democratic process for Mr. Watkins view about how the city should develop. At the last election, our neighborhood spoke clearly replacing a city councilor who favored a large scale development with a candidate who was supportive of thoughtful development, compatible with existing. Communities. To break here, 3 minutes are up. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next, we have Greg Pratt. Do we not have Mr. Pratt? All right. I will call the next five speakers in Trevor Grieco, Ryan Wright, M Jensen, Ken Random and Karla Jones. So, Mr. Greco, you can begin your remarks. Thank you, Mr. President, and other council members. My name is Trevor Greco, and. I reside at 33rd in Ocala. I am in opposition to this proposed rezoning and in the interest of time of your time tonight. I just want to say that I do support the other issues that were brought forward by the other opposition. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Right. Hmm. Well. Thank you. My name is Ryan Wright. And I live at 2770 California Street in what I believe. Is known as Fine District nine. That's right. I have only been attending. Services at a miss. For three years, but in that. Time I've come to care. Deeply about this church. I want to see the church. Continue to grow, to share the grace of God through practical ways. Such as food, shelter and a place for broken and hurting families to find. Hope and truth. As someone who. Cares deeply about his church and its future, I'm aware. Of the tone. Of the community discussions about this project. What I've seen is truly unsettling. For months and months, this project's. Opponents have demonstrated outright hostility against Hamas in public discussions, horrible and unfounded personal attacks against our pastor and other church leaders in support of the project. Antagonistic behavior and community beatings. And harassment of our pastors family in the neighborhood and at his home. I understand that this kind of outrageous neighborhood behavior shouldn't have anything to do with the legal criteria for rezoning. But unfortunately. I think it does. It does because we're at a public hearing and council is weighing public comment before making its decision. I think it's. Worthwhile to look at how. This public comment has been influenced. For example, in a recent. Letter to the editor of our. Local paper, the opposition's leaders made multiple misleading statements about the project and then encouraged readers to join them in opposing. They stated that. We were planning a 26 to 28000 square foot building, which is untrue. They grossly misrepresented the findings of our traffic study and said it wasn't worth the paper. It's written on and they outright lied. About a mayor's outreach and willingness to compromise by omitting the fact that we had engaged in prolonged good faith mediation with the neighbors. There is another tangible, extremely serious consequence of these kinds of misleading statements, the protest petition. Other church members who went door to door. And learned what. Neighbors were told in order to. Convince them to sign. The petition will. Speak directly about what they learned. But I would just like to point one thing out. The individual neighbor who was quoted in Westword is saying The congregation has done. There are more funerals there than there are new. Cars in the parking lot. And who completely lied in. Westford about the medical services we would be offering? The same neighbor. Who shouted at used profanity. And verbally harassed our pastor and his family multiple. Times until pastor eventually had to call the police. This is the same neighbor who circulated the majority of the protest petitions. This is the person who went door to door. To his very nearby neighbors and convince them to oppose this horrible project. I hope the spirit of bullying doesn't prevail. Mr. Wright. Thank you. Your 3 minutes are up. Thank you. Next, it's M Jensen. Hi. I'll try to be brief. I know you're tired, and God knows I am too. My name is Mary Jensen. I live in West Highlands in in Denver at. 37th and Raleigh. I'm a homeowner. And an active community member. And a registered voter. Please forgive me. I have a terrible cold and I am a really lousy public speaker normally and the combo is just not good. I am a nurse. My husband is works. In the construction industry and as you may have guessed from my very Danish sounding name. I was raised in the Lutheran religion. As a result, we are generally pro-development. Pro medical and pro Lutheran. However, we. Are strongly against this ill conceived up zoning and huge commercial development in a largely residential area. And I urge you to please vote no on this rezoning application. It is simply out of place and out of scale. As we strive to make our neighborhood more pedestrian friendly and. Bicycle friendly. Does it really made sense to add commercial scale traffic to narrow residential streets? Trust me when I tell you sick people do not walk to medical appointments. This can only make our busy roads busier and our hazardous off kilter intersections even more dangerous. This residential area is an inappropriate site for a massive commercial development. Currently the is zoned single family residential and as luck would have it, the neighborhood needs, wants and is willing to pay handsomely for single family homes. There is enormous profit to be made in single family homes in our area and the AMAZE team will not lose money if the current zoning stands, but the existing residential neighbors and homeowners will suffer greatly if this up zoning is approved. Please don't be fooled by this slick PR. Please vote no. Thank you. Thank you. Can random. My name is Ken Random. And welcome to the president and the people that are involved here. Appreciate your staying late to. My mother has gone to that church. She's 93. I'm 73. I still take her every Sunday. I went to the school through Charlie Brown is through the basketball hoop and I promised myself I wouldn't demean the other side and I'll try not to. Years ago, we had the Spanish ministry there. We started the Spanish church. We had Alcoholics Anonymous there now. So government thing. We taught Spanish English to immigrants for a year. I did that. We had quite a bit of effort by a lot of people who are gone and a lot of people who really care about the corners. The people and I grew up in the neighborhood, so that's my comment on the, you know, the interracial thing and all that kind of bothers me. It's the same thing. It's getting mad at somebody. You know, we have to make these decisions over like any council. The Forest Service has to make decisions for both sides for that. That is not a good thing to do because, you know, there's three things to the truth mine, yours. And the truth is pretty tough sometimes. And I. Recognize that. And I think. They've done enough to make the world work. And I I'm really feeling guilty because I helped bring the pastor here. I'm a little worried about up above because Pastor Dennis and his wife got shot down the first time. And I, I read their real they were kind of small town owners and and Garden City Council and I, I kind of pulled that off. So that's my comments. Thank you. Fingers. Traynham Next, we have Carla Jones. And as Miss Jones comes up, I'll call the next five names. Larry. Excuse me, Dyson Sharman Safer. Pamela Beck told Dwight Helmers and Sue Pop. So you five can make your way in, Ms.. Jones. You can begin your remarks. Okay. Thank you. My name is Karla Jones, and I live at 3206 North Sphere Boulevard. I am directly catty corner from the parcel. And so I wanted to speak because I am a neighbor of a mass Lutheran church. My oldest son went to a mass for early childhood education prior to the closure of the school and we loved it. So I have no issue with a mass, but I do oppose the rezoning. And additionally, I am frustrated with the the claim that they reached out to every neighbor within the 200 foot radius because. I live across Spira Boulevard and I. Wasn't contacted until after I signed the petition opposing the first time, and I've signed it twice. So additionally, there are plenty of doctors offices in their neighborhood, so I don't think it's a legitimate argument that we need an additional doctor's office. In the area. There are plenty. I take my kids there and traffic would be an additional issue. So thank you. Amos Jones. Larry Dyson. Thank you. My name is Larry Diaz Land and I live in Wheat Ridge. My wife and I have been members of the Mayor's Lutheran Church since the mid 1960s. My wife was a teacher when we had a school. She is currently the church organist and I am an elder and we are both active in the church. As someone who has been part of this church for half a century, it deeply saddens me to observe the recurring pattern of distrust and suspicion with which this project's opponents have treated us. Regardless of what we say, how many discussions we participated in, or how many changes we make to the project, there is a consistent assumption of bad faith related to everything we do. For example. The opponents have posted on the public Facebook page a long message ahead of our preceding appearances. City Council accusing him as of only pretending to want to delay the public hearing. To dissuade opponents from showing up. The opposition group also stated that he mass was revising the application as a dishonest trick to postpone the hearing. In reality, the AMA, his team did want to revise the application and risk edge of the hearing. Even the concrete changes that he makes to the project are not met or met with distrust. Our initial plan called for a three story building. However, after listening to concerns expressed by neighbors and paying. Our Architect for shadow study. We agreed to lower the building to two stories. This was not a trick, as so we could pretend to negotiate the size down. As our opponents claim. If it was a trick, we would not have paid the architect fresh out of study. Emails has been sincere and open throughout this process. However, it is impossible to constructively work with people if they believe that everything you do is dishonest and in bad faith. The church has been part of the neighborhood for 109 years, and we want to build an attractive medical building on our property that will be an asset to North Denver for years to come. Please support this zoning request. Thank you. Thank you. Shaman say through. Hi. My name is Sharman Slater. I live at 3317 West 30th Avenue. As far as the church goes and location, the access to the alley where I parked my car is kitty corner from the church. I am in favor of the zoning. One of the few neighbors here that is. But. I have reservations. I'm not 100% in favor. I've stood back. And every once in a while, of course, I had to say something, but. There has been contentious comments. On both sides. Of this whole story. And I didn't want to get involved. So I pretty much I haven't. I won't say good or bad about either side. But it has been bad at times. And like I say, from both sides now my reservations are. Traffic will increase. And 32nd. And Speer. 32nd. And Irving. Are going to be bad. What I want to be. See. Is that city government? Do something. Sit up and take notice of what the problem is and don't just sit back and say, okay, this zoning has passed. Now it's their problem. We're telling you now that if you pass this, which I want you to do. We will have traffic problems. Let's see. As far as the church goes. Yes, I do not think that they were 100% honest with us. They told us what they wanted to say. And one person in particular who I won't name. I think that's where from the very beginning, they didn't know how to hold meetings, didn't know how to answer questions, kind of. Spun the. Whole thing. I still and I've been to almost all the meetings, including the design process. Don't know where the hell we are. I didn't know. They weren't talking about an urgent care anymore. And we just had a1a meeting a few weeks ago. Why didn't they come and tell us that sort of stuff? I didn't hear it. But you're 3 minutes are out. Thank you. Thank you. Pam. Pamela Beck told me. Thank you, Mr. President, and members of the council. My name is Pamela Berchtold, and I live at 15 to 78 West LaSalle Avenue in Lakewood. I currently work as the secretary of the Mayor's Lutheran Church, a position I have held for more than 25 years. During my time at Mass, I have seen the dedication of its members, some of whom who have been a part of the church for decades. I have also witnessed the arrival of new people to the church where they were existing, accepted by the existing community. As someone who works for me, as I am very familiar with the roads leading to the church. I am aware that a few opposing neighbors tell horror stories of back up and congestion along our Main Street corridor in West Highland. But that has not been my experience. In fact, it seems to me that the patient traffic for the medical office building would naturally trickle in and out throughout the day. There is no natural rush time for doctors appointments and I doubt that a few people coming and going here and there would be noticeable on our streets. The only conceivable time there might be a small rush is when the officers staff is arriving in the morning and leaving in the afternoon. However, what's interesting to notice is that those people will likely be moving against the flow of traffic. In the morning Highlands residents are heading out of the neighborhood toward downtown and the highway and commuting doctors and patients would be driving in. The opposite is true in the afternoons. This is a clear reverse traffic pattern and I don't see how it will burden the traffic, as our opponents say. Also, during many of the years of my stay at UMass, we had a school, we had like 58 parents coming in the morning to drop their student, their children off for school, and then again they would pick up their children after school, causing a rush. And I never. Heard. These opposing people oppose our school and the traffic that the school presented and. I would like to say that if the Council does not approve this zoning change, there is a good possibility the Church will not be able to continue to exist and therefore the property would have to be sold to a developer who in most probability would not listen to what these people want or what they need, but more what their interests are, which is money. Aspect of. Youth remains. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Dwight Helmers. Mr. President and members of the council, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak this evening. I would recommend you people get paid overtime for staying so long here. I live not in Denver, but at 1079 South Johnson Way in Lakewood, Colorado. My connection here is that I presently serve as a vice president of the Rocky Mountain District of the Alchemist, the in the central area. This is the church body to which the AMA means congregation belongs. And I've had the opportunity to work with them for a little bit of time here, particularly in the calling of their pastor . I would suggest to you that the stability of the church is an advantage to this neighborhood and that accepting this particular rezoning would be indeed a help to that stabilization. I think the congregation has attempted to some degree to to develop a win win situation, even though it doesn't always look that way. They were looking for a way to serve the community while providing for a continuing source of revenue for their own ministry of Outreach. Serving the community here meant developing the opportunity, so to speak, of a of a health care facility where people could come and receive care. I wanted to say just a little bit about the calling of Pastor Dennis Fitzpatrick, because I was quite involved in that about a year and a half ago. One of the prime criteria for calling Pastor Fitzpatrick was that he would be involved in outreach. I heard one of the other speakers say I may have never tried to outreach. I'm amazed at the things that Pastor Fitzpatrick has done and continues to do. I attended one of his sessions, for example, his Memorial Day picnic, and I met more nonmembers at that than than members. I think he does a very good job. My wife and I attended church there. And here's Pastor Fitzpatrick, not inside the church waiting for people to come, but standing out on the sidewalk, welcoming those who were coming into the church and welcoming those who are going by. I see a man who wants to outreach for the sake of serving the community. Denver is a great city. It is one of the reasons is because it has many historic neighborhoods, often defined by a house of worship. A mass defines the neighborhood for 109 years with with this rezoning, it will continue to define the neighborhood with service to the community for many years to come. In Christ's name. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Could you say your name for the record? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't. My name is Dwight Ellmers. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Sue Pop. And as Sue comes forward, I'm going to read off the next five names James Foreman, Jane Bustamante, Mary Williams, Amelia Miers and Elliott Sawyer. You five can make your way to the front pew. This part, you can begin. Mr. Chairman and the Council. Thank you for allowing me to testify. My name is Sue Pop. My husband and I live at 4557 Wyandotte Street in Council District number one. We have been members of Remains Lutheran Church for 24 years. We like attending services there because we enjoy pastors, sermons and his wonderful Bible studies. The people are very friendly and we enjoy this community. We support this project because we think that having a medical office building in this location will be very handy for the neighborhood. Also, it may as well make the parking lot available to other businesses on evenings and weekends. So we think that will be helpful. We've heard a lot of people talk about how they don't want to see any changes in our neighborhood. We've lived here a long time and things are always changing. Our neighborhood isn't meant to be dipped in amber and preserved in one way forever. This should not be about a few people wanting things to stay exactly the same for them. But we should be looking at the whole community and the types of services that are necessary. People like mixed use buildings, which I understand. I don't understand why our two storey building is being criticized for only having doctors offices and not adding a bunch of other things. Mixed use doesn't only have to happen within one building. Mixed use can be a mix of nearby uses within a neighborhood. We need primary care doctors and this building will provide that mixed in with the restaurants, shops and the residents nearby. Please vote in favor of this rezoning application. Thank you. Thank you. James Foreman. Hello. My name is James Farmer. And although I'm from Broomfield, Colorado, I do a lot of work in this particular area and I'm usually down here around 2 to 3 times a week. First of all, I just want to say this is the last time I go to a rezoning meeting and skip dinner. Bad move. The lot of land that we're talking about is in a very interesting position. It's surrounded on the north side by commercial property and on the south side by residential. 32nd Street is a main street. It's where all of your businesses are located, converting that one parcel, the northern portion of it. Too commercial would bring it back into alignment with the rest of that street. It seems to me that the church is trying to find a use for that particular spot of land that meets both their beliefs. As well as their mission. I just asked the Council to review that particular partial. And reason the. Land is commercial. So that way it can fit back into and blend in with the rest of that street. Thank you. Thank you, Jane Bustamante. Mr. President. Council members. Good evening. My name is Jane Bustamante. And I live at 11387 Lawson Lane. I have been a part of the mayor's community for 52 years, and although I haven't lived in the Highlands area since I was a little girl, I continue to be important to me as continues to be an important part of my life. My mom and stepdad were married in the church. I went to school at UMass and so did some of my granddaughters. All of my children. Granddaughters, and now a great granddaughter have grown up and belong to Mass and most are still members of the church. I have two granddaughters who work in the Highlands area. I support the Medical Office Building Project because I feel it is a way for us to give back, to contribute to the community, and it would also allow us to continue as a church. In the future. My main hope is for us to expand the work that we do with the homeless. For many years now, my granddaughters and I have spent Christmas Eve making sack lunches for the homeless throughout the years. Throughout the year, we collect coats and blankets, and on Christmas Eve, we make breakfast burritos, fill lunch bags with snacks and toiletries , make a huge container of hot chocolate. And then we go to a spot near the shelters downtown and spend time handing out all that we've collected. This year, we were joined. By over 25. Of our highlands neighbor neighbors who came to help us make the burritos, fill the sacks and give to those in need. My granddaughters and I are hoping to be able to add other giving days throughout the year, not just Christmas Eve with the help of our neighbors. Thank you for listening to me. Describe the charitable work that I so enjoyed doing with the. I know that the church is good. Works are not part of the legal criteria for rezoning, but they do fit with this project's goal of serving the community. The legal criteria for rezoning has been clearly demonstrated by the presentation from the gentleman from the City Planning Department. The Planning Board agreed with the CPD's position, and others familiar with Denver's code have stated that the rezoning is appropriate. I would like to make a plea for fairness and say that in light of this ten vote requirement that I hope the city council will agree to delay the final vote on our project for two weeks. We agreed to wait almost three months to come back to council after revising our application and surely waiting two weeks for the final vote isn't too much to ask. Please vote yes on the delay and on the rezoning. Thank you. Thank you. Mary Williams. Do not have Mary Williams. Amelia Miers. Good evening and thank you. My name is Amelia Miers, and I live at 1550 Platt Street in Fine and number nine. I'm a transportation policy consultant and Denver native, and I came to speak about this project because it is bigger than the Highlands. It's about Denver itself and how we need to be treating our population. Our elderly population is growing. Could I get a show of hands of who is over 60 in this room right now? All of these people are going to be needing medical care and as they age, hopefully longer into their eighties and nineties, eighties and nineties , I'm talking about hopefully when they age into their eighties and nineties, they're going to need reliable transit and walkable. Places to get their medical care. And this is an issue that needs to be addressed in the community. This is a great place to have a medical facility that's walkable. It's right by a bicycle. It's right on a transit stop. And having the bus line go to this medical facility is much better than having to spend our money on non-emergency medical transportation that would have to pick people up individually to transport them to a medical facility. This will save the community money and the city money overall. This vibrant and walkable community that will be created is integral. To having a smart city. And I'm really proud of you guys for passing the Smart City. Grant this or accepting that. The Department of Transportation can go along with the Smart City grant because this fits right in. And if a Smart City Grant is awarded, this is the type of community that will thrive with connective transit and walkability. And I urge you to support this for the greater good of Denver. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Elliott Sawyer. No. Elliott Sawyer. Then the next five, we have Charlie Johnson, Chad Johnson, Brian Kowalski, April Vermillion and Jennifer Salvatore. So the first one up should be Charlie Johnson. Sure. Madam Secretary, could you grab. Thank you. Q My name is Charlie Johnson. My address is 1415 Park Avenue West. I belong to a Lutheran church that is a sister church to a mass. I also own a business nearby. Because of these things, I have followed the issues closely. I've often heard opposing neighbors broadcast numbers from a Change.org petition. They started considering that this translated into actual inform community supporters for their position. To begin with, the basic language of the petition is incredibly incendiary and inaccurate. This day they may as well be building something much larger than what it sounds like Hamas has committed to do . They also characterizing mass as refusing to engage in mediating dialog, meaningful dialog. Despite the workshops, the mediation sessions and other kinds of outreach. However, the most troubling aspect of their position is the public publicly viewable comments that go along with these online signatures and provide you with some of the screenshots of comments on the petition demonstrating that many of the people signed for reasons totally unrelated to this rezoning request. For example, I'm sick and tired of the gentrification that is happening in North Denver. High low can explicit off. Obviously this project is in West Highlands, not low, high or high low. I'm worried about my daughter being run over by speeding ambulances when of course, we know that the metal office building will not accept ambulances. I don't believe that we have coherent discussion at the last meeting at the Methodist Church was a farce. This is not worth it because the meeting at the nearby Methodist Church was for the development project at 30th and Lowell of the Mace Project. And last say, I'm sick of seeing all the tasteless new houses in the Highlands neighborhood going up, stopped destroying us, saying this position. There are many, many additional examples. It seems very clear that these folks are upset about use by right development that are using small rezoning as a way to funnel their anger. Lastly, there's an issue with the anonymous nature of Change.org and how valid and supporting signatures actually are. I did a little experiment. I went to change that. Oregon created my own petition, and I created five separate email addresses in Gmail and sign me on petition five times. This whole exercise took less than a half an hour. There was no reason to believe that the 270 some supposes signatures represent the 270. Some actual people hope that City Council will decide this issue based on the legal criteria for rezoning. That's a smoke and mirrors that those would claim some sort of community mandate based on the petition and is demonstratively unreliable. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Next, we have Chad Johnson. Chad Johnson. Brian Kowalski. Good evening, and thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is Brian Kowalski. I am connected to AMS only through their hosting of the gaming group that I go to and I'm connected here, helping represent them just because of the ongoing, continuous generosity we've experienced from EMS Church. As for in the nature of the lot and quest and it. Sounds like it will event. Based on this decision it either becomes the medical building or eventually becomes residential again. But it's really hard to imagine that site as a residential as residential buildings, their front windows will look into businesses and their backyards will look on to the carwash. It will be a very. It will stick out considerably from what it already exists there. And leaving it as is would just be a continuing dilapidated parking lot. The. The Church is focused mostly, as I understand it, on helping the least served of individuals. And most of the complaints that I have heard have been focused on protecting property values. Which strikes me as two very different populations being served here. And just based on what I met of the people I met and connected to the church, it it seems almost impossible for me to believe that they were not forthright and earnest in their efforts to connect with the community, because that is the nature of what they intend to do. Thank you. Thank you. April Vermillion. Good evening, President and council members and congratulations. You are almost done with the testimonies. My name is April Vermillion and I live on Decatur Street in Potter Highlands. I lived in West Highlands for seven years. The Highlands have been my home going on 12 years. Also, I own a real estate marketing business. I spend hours a month learning and understanding the Highlands, growth changes and culture. I know the. Church's location intimately and I support the rezoning and would like to see the site offer medical. Services. As a longtime resident who has not. Attended a mass, I'm shocked by my neighbors rude behavior and lies in public. And even today, as the pastor shared his and his church's pain from harassment. I believe this historic church is doing their due diligence. So on behalf of the Highlands. I'd like to apologize to the Amos for our community's behavior. They do not reflect all neighbors opinions. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Jennifer Salvatore. Jennifer. Right next to and last because Jennifer Rona. And Jamie Chester after Jennifer. Good evening. My name is Jennifer Arona and I am the Vice President Business Development Strategy at Lutheran Medical Center. And I am really. Glad to be here this. Evening and hear all of the diverse opinions and the passion about this community. That Lutheran Medical Center has actually served over the last 100 years. And I think that this community here. This evening, in addition to community members that are not here this evening, really represent the community and the diversity of the population that Lutheran Medical Center serves. There are. Only just a few things. That I really want to speak to this evening. The primary purpose of Lutheran Medical Center's involvement with this development is to make sure that health care stays local and is available to all members of the community. It is intended to be a family practice to serve the immediate community of the West Highlands neighborhood. The other piece that I'll speak briefly about, I don't have an expertize on traffic patterns, but I do know in health care facilities we typically have a 2 to 1 ratio for parking that accommodates our communities. And in this particular development, one of the. Reasons why we've been interested in participating in it is that the parking development. Actually is a 3 to 1 ratio, which is higher than what the standard is. I know that there have been a number of questions about the scale and scope of services that are provided. I think I've mentioned that it would solely be to the community immediately in that neighborhood. So it would be a reflection of members who are commercially insured, who are Medicaid patients, who are chip patients, and that is the community that we intend to represent and that we see we've represented over the years. And then lastly, the one last point that I wanted to make is that our real interest in supporting this effort is to continue to preserve the health and the wellness of the community. Thank you very much. Thank you. Last speaker, Jamie Chesser. Good evening. Guess I'm wrapping things up. President and City Council Members. My name is Jamie Chesser. I reside at 32nd AV and Osceola Street. With my husband and two young children. We've been there for about ten years. Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts. I just want you to know that I have no ill will to the amazed church and its members, and I'm not. Opposed to thoughtful development in West Highland. Or the city. I agree with the. Points. That were made by the others. My neighbors who've spoken before me in opposition to this proposed up zoning. Connor. Randy Mast, Marie Benedict, Marilyn Quinn, Pat Duffy. And I respectfully request your consideration. On this matter and do hope you will vote no on this up zoning proposal. Thanks very much for your time and your service. Thank you. All right. That concludes our speakers. Thank you all so much for being efficient and thoughtful and colleagues. As we move to the question period, I would ask that we just make sure we stick with the questions and then we'll go to comments afterwards. Councilman Cashman. Thank you, Mr. President. Let's see here. CPD. Thank you. Could you repeat for me first the change in condition that you see that would justify the rezoning? Certainly. So I'm pulling up the slide presentation and I'm on slide 40. And the list here. Includes the commercial mixed use building that is on the west side of Irving fronting 32nd Avenue, which was built in 2012. Was the rezoning leading up to that's very much part of the analysis of the changing condition right. To further characterization and. Completion of that Main Street character, then the disused school building, the vacancy of that and the underutilized parking area on the site, and the small commercial office building, which is. Um. Seems to be in disrepair from what I've heard. We also look at changes in entitlement and or. Not just excuse me, not so much entitlement, but actual. Creation of parcels anticipating development that's included here see me as church having divided church property into two parcels and the certificate of non historic status for the small commercial building. Thank you for the four that we listed. As far as I assume this is the usual deal where we're not approving a particular plan, we're approving zoning for the site, correct? That's correct. Okay. In terms of the rezoning. Criteria, right. So the size of the building, we're not determining and the use on the property we're not determining. That's correct. Okay. Thank you. I don't know whether it's sundry or the developer. I'm wondering the packet that we were given on the front page has a picture yellow rectangle. It says two storey, 17,500 feet, total square feet. And then last page, the resolution from the church and condition number two says restrict the building size to be constructed on the property to no greater than 23,500 feet. Hi. I'm Keith. Bush, decorated to me as a Lutheran church. Could you repeat the question? Yeah. Yeah. So this packet that appears on the front page, the rectangle representing the building to be built, says two storey 17,500 total square feet. But the letter on the back page, which shows a mass Lutheran Church resolution, says restrict the building size to be constructed on the property to no greater than 23,500. So I'm just wondering if you can clarify. Yeah. The the smaller size is we we did an evaluation. If we. Have to provide all the required parking of 2 to 2 parking spots per 1000 square feet on the zone lot the size of a building, we conclude we could have a 17,500 square feet. If we. Are allowed to use offsite. Parking and share some of the parking with the church to get 3 to 1 parking. Then we could have a building is approximately as big as 23,000, 23,500 square feet. So the church itself wanted to restrict itself because there was criticism that we were going to build a much larger building. So we sort of limited ourselves to the maximum size we felt. We wanted to. We would build on the on. The property and that maximum is 23,000. 23,500 on two storey. So. Okay, about 11, 1200, 12,000 square feet. And I believe it's the second drawing in the packet. You were given. Thank you. Thank you for that. And the last question that I have is for Mr. New Dore. So you you had mentioned that you had considered town homes at one point, but decided against that use. I was wondering why what. Your thought is that also would require a zoning change. And in early discussions with our neighbors and our congregation, there was no, you know, desire to do that. We got no positive response from anybody regarding those. And they also required a zoning change from single family. Okay. Thank you very much. Mr. President. Thank you. Councilwoman Cashman. Just one. The I was in on those discussions, too. And the other reason we didn't proceed with with townhomes or multifamily is because it would have taken the parking away from the church. What we've come up with is something that doesn't we don't compete with ourselves for parking. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa. I'm going to have questions for Tim. Tim, Dave and Keith. Keith, Dave. Hey, Hagan and Keith, the D.A.. Is still here. Oh, great. You changed your jacket. So can you go to the slide that actually shows the the noncommercial I mean, the commercial thing that you're justifying using to sort of justify the change in condition. Not just the slide that has the text. It's a progression of three slides showing, well, 2010, 12 and 14. Is that correct? I don't know. And I apologize. Everyone asked system, my system and Councilwoman Gilmore's art system seems to lag really far behind. So. You've included areas on this plan that actually haven't changed condition physically. So can you go, too? So you've got you've got the P.J. Taco site, and I don't know if I should even be saying that on TV, but, um, you got the taco site which got zoned legislatively in 2010, and that definitely has gotten a building constructed. But you still have the same parking lot, you still have the same car wash, you still have the same two nonconforming uses across the street. I mean, exceptions across the street, one in a residential form, the other one in a in a building structure. I mean, a commercial building that's got an exception. So go to the zoning slide that you had previously. The. It's like existing. Zoning. Oh, sure. Existing slide. Might be faster to scroll. Right? So I just want it to be very clear that the only thing that's changed is the addition of these of this new small, small building, a 10,000 square foot. Commercial structure caddy corner. I mean I mean, it's just across the street from this vacant lot and that all the zoning surrounding it is, in fact, residential. So in the case of the USA a the least, the, the least, the most restrictive, it is the most restrictive residential use that we have. So yeah, so it's U.S.A. one across the street. We have the pad. That hasn't changed. We have the U.S.A. on the subject parcel and surrounding it. And then that one exception, that one carve out for the Peachtree taco. So. When you're doing justifying circumstances, it's nice that you go and color in a bunch of things that sort of optically render a certain way. But this is very much the heart and these are sort of going into comment. So I won't. But this is what I want eventually. I want my colleagues to understand is that this is in the very core. This is the map that one of the members I'm going to I'll comment later. The question is, have you performed so have you performed a planned review of this design? Are these proposals compliant with the zoning? That's a question for the applicant. No, that's for CPD. So with development services, I can't answer that. I'd have to defer to the client to. Respond to that question. How about that? Sort of. One is based on the prior. To my knowledge, these are not approved by development services. So can you can you the question came up earlier from the audience. Can you create your own change of condition? So if you leave your building, if you if you abandon your pride in your building from its prior use and you let your product, your parking lot deteriorate or turn it into a parking lot, does that can you create that and self create your own change of use? Because the only change of change of condition. I'm sorry, I'm using the wrong time. The only change in condition is the adjacent site across Irving. That's the change in physical form condition. But the change in use and activity is another condition, changing condition. Okay. So the bread company hasn't changed since 1994. The the the car wash is probably longer. So. You mentioned the parceling of the property as a change of condition. My concern is, is this second. The sequence here shows a 17,500 square foot and 35 space lot. And then this option two, which shows the obliteration of a school building in a US Hughes owned district that is now a parking lot. So are we now? Is that prelude to that becoming another area of change in an area of stability? I mean, can you do that? Per our analysis of blueprint Denver which. Debs states that the street classification is main street collector and the properties fronting that. That st are appropriate for. Converting to mixed mainstream land uses and mixed uses, then that would not support blueprint Denver, as it's written today would not support. Zoning rezoning further south, embedded further south where the church is. So I'm sort of trying to struggle with the healthy amount of parking that supports both the existing church structure, which is significant in size and a total build out of the to the agreed to 23,500 is a massive block sized redevelopment. That is a significant difference than what we're even talking about. But that's you know, we're getting to that. But I just if we're using the fact that a change of a parking lot can be a change of create, this sort of change of condition in an area of stability that that is concerning. So and I'll get these are much more brief. So I listened to the planning board again prior to entering chambers, and I'm concerned that your portrayal of the planning board, a statement of concern about the depth of the lot, when the concerns were about scale, intensity of use and lack of design standards, was the depth of the lot mentioned in the deliberation, and if so, by whom? I recall it being. Her name will come to me. Renee Martinez. Stone. That's my recollection. And that she. Okay. I will. I that's one that I paid particularly close attention to because she had very cogent comments on the scale issue. I believe Christopher Smith as well. They both. Both of them spoke to this. That was my understanding. Chris. Chris. His comments comments were particularly. I'll get into that as well. You stated that no details were provided by the opposition at the Planning Board testimony. Is it customary for the opposition group to come armed with APD, with Puti language? I don't know. But there were no ideas or concepts or. Direction, even in concept that we could understand what was encouraging rather than. Welcoming than at when and at what point in the development process. Would you welcome outside PD recommendations? It's primarily for the applicant to consider, but they were not provided specific details as to what a party might entail. So at that testimony, at that hearing, they testified that CPD advised them that it did not meet the criteria of uniqueness. For a unique and extraordinary circumstance. Okay. To. War and peace. And then a member of the Planning Board lamented that two questions for CPD had remain unanswered. And actually, this is in Renee Stones testimony. I mean, in her deliberations. And I suspect you're prepared today what is considered a small site for the U. U. M's to access own district. There is not a definition in the Denver zoning code of a small site, of a medium site of a large site. And that's where looking at the existing context becomes very important and in this case, looking along. The 32nd Avenue corridor and the alley alignment of the depth became very important consideration during and after planning. But we look at the 32nd Avenue corridor. Passed. Julian then, because if you look between Irving and Julian you have a very different characteristic mean the depiction in your photographs of 32nd at Lowell. Looked primarily west of Irving. Which is where should I pull the map up? Yeah, west of Irving is the picture Tycho. And then there's probably about eight or nine single family and duplex homes. Then you get to the the three dogs and then you get to you get into mix of commercial. So it was a look at the adjacent or. The the corner building west of Irving Street and then a look. At the general development pattern along the corridor. I mean, because if you look north, south, east and west, I mean, north, south, northwest and south. I've got it all screwed up. But if you look just about anywhere where you took pictures, you're going to find residential construction. And in some cases, you have businesses operating with exceptions in residential construction. And indeed, we found this area to be in particular at Irving and Speer, 32nd, the main street commercial node. At this location and then corridor wide. There's a recurring pattern of stretches of commercial Main Street. Then there's some residential than others. But we didn't recognize that at the blueprint. Denver. On Slide five, I just want to have for clarification, you have Irving Street dashed. Continuous North-South. I want my colleagues to understand that that is not a through street. It is blocked from through traffic. It is cut off as well as it indicating 32nd Avenue is some sort of really viable route, east, west. But even the traffic study that was provided shows that there's almost no through traffic there because it's it's a glorified alley. So I just want you to understand that the depiction sort of belies the actual way you navigate the system in a car. So my question for David, the excerpts from the parking study that were provided lacked the total car trips for the school if it were in use today. How many total car trips did that? Was that number? You also have to apologize. I don't have the study in front of me. So on these two. So the two sheets that are what do they do over here? So you've got this sheet here that is missing the same information down below, which is the weekday. So there's a total car trip here that's not here. So you just give me the peak hour for both. But in only one case. Did you give me the total car trips? Excuse me. Would you mind just turning your pager on that? It is. They weren't numbered. Sorry. It is these two that looked like that. You need. So. Excuse me, would you repeat the question? I'm just trying to find out what the total car trips that are, because in certain areas I've heard people testify to the sort of delta, the difference between how continuously used a medical facility, which we're not doing. You know, we're not talking about a project, we're talking about zoning, but we are talking about something that is a significantly different in scale than anything that has been constructed there other than the apartment building. The which. So there's that in the use that has been described, there is a continuous use, not just a peak there both have peak hours, but with a school you have a big rush, you know, at drop off. And another big rush to pick up a little bit of rush when the teachers are arriving and then sort of a very, very low amount of traffic throughout the day with the medical facility. You know, they the way they tend to operate, at least the one that is right across the street from me is a very full parking lot. And they try to keep people moving in and out of there. So we've got 808 car trips a day for the medical facility, but no depiction of how many car trips the school was. And just Connor. Do you have that information? Is Connor here? Mr. Farley, if you want to respond, we need you to come to the microphone. Anyone have that information? Oh, I think you mentioned it. I specifically do not have that information, but perhaps my neighbor Mary does. I don't. But I did hear the secretary of the church say that when the school was running, there were 58 students. And if I recall correctly, from the traffic study, not parking study, it assumes 125 students. And I suspect it wasn't an overly used parking lot considering the amount of play area that was painted on the floor. And then the last question is for Keith. And I don't know. I hope that you can speak to these. You should be able to. Because the way they are written. Can you. What are what were the key concerns for the neighbor in the. In the mediation process. I'm sorry, what was the question? What are the key concerns for the neighbors in the mediation process? Well, I'd be happy to answer that question, but we can't because the mediation was confidential. The entirety of the mediation or. Yes, that was a major conversation was that this is all. Confidential. So did you hear anything there that you hadn't heard before? Did I hear anything in mediation? Because you've heard things. You've heard. Don't tell me about what? The mediation. What you discussed in mediation. Tell me what the key concerns are for the neighbors now. That would. You know, we we agreed to. Confidentiality, you know, on the issue. And if I discuss it now, Councilman, I feel like I'd be disclosing what was discussed in mediation because of the way you phrased your question. Because that's what you're trying to ask, I believe. No, actually. So let me let me scratch the mediation thing. And actually, I won't even ask you. I send Ari because she's very good at answering these questions. And Councilman Espinosa, you're at 16 minutes now. I was just hoping that we could if the four other council members behind you, I want to afford them the opportunity to ask them questions, too. So if you could if you have several more, we could just defer and come back to you. I just have four here, but I can I can defer. I'd be glad to do that. All right. Thank you. Councilman Brooks. Thank you, Mr. President. My questions get to the crux of kind of what everybody's talking about here in this blueprint Denver area, stability and kind of our consistency with adaptive plan. So to answer this question for me and if if you can maybe Nate Lucero can give me the kind of the legal definition of what this means . But the first point is committed neighborhood may benefit from minor infill development. That's not what I really want to go into. But reinvestment stabilize or underutilized site through reinvestment. What does that exactly mean from a legal definition? You know, I get the idea. I get what we're going for, but. How do you decide what's. Appropriate for an area of stability, since that's one of our. Sure. I if there is a legal definition of it, I'll leave that to Mr. Fitzgerald. But I can describe to you what the language and blueprint Denver is and how it describes or defines what could be pictured as a continuum between very stable to going all the way up to full areas of change. And so we have area of stability. We have area of. Let's let's keep let's stay in area stability. Let's stay in our context right here. What does reinvestment mean? Reinvestment. Encourages. The. Redevelopment or re-use of a site that could actually bring stability to a neighborhood. That reinvesting or redeveloping or bringing property to more beneficial use could actually have a stabilizing effect on a neighborhood. And it lists examples including and not so applicable to this neighborhood. But if there's a neighborhood that has housing stock that is in a decayed condition, okay, that's appropriate reinvestment. That's helpful area of stability. Nate, let me ask you a question. From a legal standpoint, does reinvestment in a area of stability, is there any can you quantify that at all? Is there is there a size or I mean, or is this just the the vision and the value that we're looking for? Thank you, Councilman Brooks, Nate Russo on behalf of CPD and. So reinvestment, I think, is, is a term that's going to be. Defined by the by CPD or the manager of CPD, and in that term will somehow be defined through the comprehensive plan. And so the definition that Mr. Watkins gave is the only definition that that we have to base that opinion on. And and so I don't think that there's necessarily a legal definition to sort of quantify what that means. Okay. Not sure if that helps. Even if I could just refer to as does. He. But go ahead. Page 13 of the staff report describes according to Blueprint Denver areas of stability are intended to maintain the character of an area while accommodating some new development and redevelopment. So that's text from Blueprint Denver. Areas of stability are defined on page 122 as belonging to one of two categories. And so jumping to reinvestment areas where neighborhoods character is desirable to maintain but would benefit from reinvestment through modest infill or major projects in a small area. Okay. So it really is flexible and kind of nuanced and applicable to unique circumstances in a neighborhood. Reinvestment areas are intended to encourage investment, but in a more limited and targeted way than areas of change. Reinvestment. Challenges. Such as lack of services and improvement opportunities, such as redeveloping underutilized land to provide needed neighborhood services can be addressed through infill development. But those are two examples. Yeah. Thank you. And then one last question. We get this a lot, I think, in planning what percentage of applications are denied? You know, I think the the idea is that we see, you know, everything that that comes out here is, you know, just makes it all the way through the process. But there's been many times when you talk about the number and percentage of applications that get denied. The percentage I don't have on hand, but I believe the majority do not get past that initial pre-application stage. And advanced to full application. Majority 660 about. 50 plus 1%. I don't dare guess, but okay. If a number magically appears on my phone, I'll share that with you. Okay, great. Thank you. That's impressive. Thank you. Councilman Brooks. Councilman Clark. Thank you, Mr. President. I have a few questions, so I'll try and get through them quickly. My first one is for Jenny DAVIES, Cindy Lee or Marie Benedicts, whoever still in the building here. Looks like you're up again. Cindy. Okay. You all to my best recollection and keeping notes all mentioned that you are not against redevelopment of this corner, just not this kind of development. Can. Can you speak, I guess, for yourself? Maybe not the other people. What is is is your concern from a is this consistent with the neighborhood? Are you are you it should only be residential. It should only be redevelopment as within its current zoning. Or do you think is there a scale and massing issue? I'm trying to get at, you know, what what did that mean? Because a lot of you said that but didn't expand upon what that meant. That's a great question. And I think it's a great question for the neighborhood. And I think what the neighborhood would love to see is a collaborative process where neighbors have really input and especially those who live really close to the site as to what they would feel comfortable with, what would be perhaps enough zoning, but not too massive. And maybe I don't have myself a specific opinion on whether there should be enough zoning or not of some kind. I know some people would like to see none. Others would be open to some. What I have heard mentioned by people who are open to some is some form of perhaps commercial downstairs, residential upstairs right at 32nd, and then with perhaps more residential as you go further south away from 32nd Avenue. But I by no means pretend to speak for all close neighbors. And I think the main takeaway would be to perhaps send this back to a drawing board where neighbors and the applicant work collaboratively together and come up with a solution that neighbors will support here. Okay. Thank you. Is that okay? Yes, thank you. A couple of things. And Tim, maybe you can take a stab at these. First, somebody had said that this is the only the second 100% commercial building in the area and it's twice the size. Do you have any statistics? I'm trying to look at these maps like how does this compare to me? What I struggle I'm struggling with here is lining up with the criteria for rezoning is the scale of this. I'm trying to get a feel for what is the scale of this compared to what is existing? Sure, I know the applicant has studied the surrounding buildings in greater detail. I have looked more at parcel sizes. Okay. Not as much of actual square footage. So before you leave, then, from a personal standpoint, the the parcel that's proposed, is it how does it line up in comparison? I mean, on the map that I'm looking at here on slide eight, it looks considerably bigger than the adjacent, um, x2x is it is that two times is that a one point? How much bigger is that than the directly adjacent you x2x. So there are a variety of parcels and some of the buildings fronting 32nd Avenue are comprised of many small parcels, and then some are on larger sized parcels. But I don't know if you see this graphic on your screen. Now, this is just a actually a supplemental slide, as I anticipated some questions related to parcel size. I've labeled select parcels at the corner of Lowell and 32nd Avenue all the way to Speer. You can see a range of 0.29, all the way up to .95 acres. But some of these parcels, which are even smaller, have wall to wall building on the sides. And so it's hard to gauge. Collectively what the ratio of. Building to and that's 0.95 is the strip mall. Is that correct? That. Yes, the part shop it whatever it may be. Sorry, strip mall. Not the appropriate terminology. I apologize. I didn't mean to offend. Okay. And then somebody from the applicants I'd want to talk to square for the square footage versus the person size. I'm sorry, what was the question? So from a personal standpoint, I'm trying to get the scale of this as as it fits into or doesn't fit into the neighborhood. So have you looked at the scale of other 100% commercial buildings or other buildings built in the X to X that are nearby? We have looked at the buildings, not at the parcels. Right. So Tim answered my partial questions. Now you're on for building. Yeah. So I think in your packet, or at least in the one that I handed out comparing the the 22,000 square foot, 23,000 square foot building to the building adjacent, the depth of the building and the height of the building are, it seems to me, relatively close. The square footage of this building is bigger compared to that. To what scale? Bigger. It's 10%. Bigger, it's 20%. I don't I haven't done that calculation. It'd be hard for me to answer that, but I could you could compare it to the Mondo Venus site, which is at 32nd. And Lowell, I did do that. And you have that information in front of you where those both in terms of square footage and street frontage, they're almost identical . Those two. Buildings. Okay. Okay. Back to Tim for a second. So, you know, we've seen lots of maps and they know that we're considering zoning and not a specific development plan. So without getting into the specifics of, I guess, what this will be. Can you explain to me because we've seen lots of different drawings on this parcel as. You know, Councilman Espinosa asked a question and it is confusing to me to see additional parking lots attributed in some of these images to it, because it looks like we're looking at this parcel. But then is it this parcel plus? So just this parcel in this zoning, what kind of massing could be achieved? Because the truth of the matter is we rezoning a property as possible that the church, whatever happens, life happens. They can't do it now. It's zoned. Somebody can come in. What scale of building could be built on that size lot in that with that zoning. Can you can you can you draw a picture for me of that? I'll attempt to describe in relative terms what the scale could be. Mm hmm. And it could be a building built right up to the property line on the front and the sides to maximize the. The width and the configuration of that parcel, but then the depth and then of course, the maximum height. Two stories. But the depth of that building would be a formula based on the proposed use, whether it be restaurant office, residential, that there are specific parking standards in the um's two zone district that would. State the required minimum parking, which would then have to be provided on that site or and I'll just acknowledge that with an adjacent church parking lot, there is potential for offsite or shared parking in the Denver zoning code. So right now, it's it's a formula that development services would have to approve that is not known for certainty at this time. So so I'm unfamiliar with the offsite parking and how it plays in, let's say, offsite parking with the church parking lot. But then whatever is developed here is, is a separate ownership, separate parcel. It is now has a different owner from the church. The church leaves and says No more shared parking. What happens then? Then they would lose that parking and title. They would have a building that isn't parked because there was an agreement between two property owners. Yeah. That's correct. It's based on agreement between property owners. Again, outside of these applicants, this zone district, this lot size, could you build subterranean parking and build literally a building over the entire mass of the of the parcel at two stories. The that allowed. Would not prevent or disallow underground so. The biggest but building size then could you go edge to edge on the parcel if you manage to park it to use but either offsite or underneath. I suppose hypothetically you could build underground parking if it were cost feasible and. Right. Not seen that with a two storey product. So here, I don't know. Again, it's hard because we keep being told, hey, we're not looking at a development thing. So I'm trying to look at what could be built here because it's not part of a development plan. Yeah. And so juggling that. So I'm just trying to get a feel for what could be done most probable. And I think what development services would encourage would be. The. Some onsite parking to meet parking requirement minimums, and then any supplemental parking or extra parking desired above the parking minimum might be explored off site that that could be part of what's explored through development services. I would expect building and surface parking in a two story development, but that's just a possibility. Okay, sorry. I'll try and wrap up here. Last question. Paul Haake again. So again, what I'm trying to get at is, is what what is the scale of this? And does that scale is that fit with the neighborhood and with with with the criteria? Again, there are lots of drawings showing, you know, hey, if we tear down this building and a building that's not on this parcel, then it adds up. It shows extra parking spots. So now I know we're not talking specifically about it, but we're talking specifically about it. So what what. What is the it feels a little bit like we've there's been a lot of concern, it sounds like, along the way, I think the applicant side has said with the parcel size in the parcel size has shrunk in terms of what's being resolved. But I also look at page three and it looks like it hasn't shrunk because the two adjacent parcels are both owned by the same person. So can you talk to me a little bit about what what is being designed? And is it really being designed to fit on the parcel that's being resolved? Or is it really still being thought of as a contiguous piece of property that is co-owned and under two parcels? It's being thought of as one parcel, a main street development, two stories with full frontage on 32nd Avenue. The only change when you add the other parcel is to get the parking count up to three parking spaces per thousand. That's the only real difference with the. Except I should correct myself. It goes from 17 five to the 23,000 because that's how you balance out the three parking spaces per thousand and the building. So I guess maybe to be more succinct, if you take out anything that is not on the parcel that is zoned, the rest gets bought by somebody else. Could you build this 17 five and park it according to use, or is the only way that you can do that's what you can do on this parcel. But if to get to 22,000, you need the additional parking. In my understanding, not correct. I think you're interesting that correct. The first. The 17 five is what by right self-parking you could do on that site. That's what would make in my estimation. That's the point of departure for a really good urban building. The additional parking is to the additional site is to provide additional parking to get the count up to 3 to 1000. And also allows for. A lot. It allows you to build an add on about 12 feet to the building in order to get to balance out the parking and the square footage. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman. Clerk, Councilwoman Ortega. This is along the same lines of questioning that I had. And I've got a couple of questions. First for so for the folks from the church. So is it your intention to own the medical building? If someone can address that? So you will continue the church will continue to own all of the land, regardless of the fact that we're being asked to rezone the parcel where the new building would be built. Yes, the church will be. A partner with the developer. Because a developer knows how to build buildings. We don't know how to build buildings. But we will continue to own the property. And the plan is to ultimately buy the developer out after about a ten year period. Okay. And the parking would be between the new building and the church or the school. Right. Essentially where the school playground is today. Yes. And the school would be take school would be taken down. We have no need for it now, since we have no school. So we're we have a high heating bill right now is what we have. So that adds to where you're able to do more parking by taking the school down, is that correct? Yes. And that's part of the parking that would be shared between the two. If we had shared parking, we would, as Paul is just talking about, with the 17,500 square foot building they required, parking per zoning would be on the zone lot and any supplemental parking would be on the adjacent. A call to school lot. So, Tim, I need your help here for a minute in understanding when we have. Parking requirements for the church. I'm assuming the taking down in the school gets factored in to what the current requirements are for parking for the church in the school. Correct. I mean, there have to be certain parking requirements for that site today. You know, that. Church, the standard, I believe, for parking for the church, for a religious assembly would be two spaces per thousand. And I think it's an 8000 square foot church. I believe so. There could be excess parking that is on the immense parcel after the church, after the the unused school buildings are demolished that if they have excess parking , then that could be devoted to another off site project. So I guess what I'm. Struggling with is we have parking requirements for an existing structure, which is the church and the school. The building has not yet been demolished. The school building. So. How do we. Factory and parking for a new building when the current structure, regardless of whether it's fully occupied or not, it has these requirements . So how do we then blend those two? It's a good question because currently there cannot be approval of a site plan until steps are taken to further establish what the end use is on the main site and their parking and meeting their parking requirements. Then development services would look to see if they have excess parking or what a proposed shared parking agreement. So it's subject entirely to their review and approval. And this is just conceptual at this point as to what could take place under the provisions of the code, the parking chapter in particular. So I see one of the challenges that we're experiencing with more and more of these earnings that are coming forward is the fact that we this body don't have anything to do with the the set criteria on how many parking spaces will be required, what the total square footage size of the footprint of the building will be on the site. We disapprove the zoning and then CPD goes and works through the details. And so residents are looking for a little bit more security or detail in the zone application, but those are details that we no longer see after the 2010 zoning changes occurred. And so it makes it a little more I don't know if people are looking for us to to insert more details, but that's not what we do under the current zoning code as it as it currently reads. And so that is a a tough place that that puts us in trying to address and and speak to the the point that residents want to see addressed in these projects, where you're looking for some balance to the developments that are being brought before this body. So I want to ask David Broadwell a question about. Where it is in the zoning code that we. Split. A site where we can then change the zoning. I mean, is this just available to any property owner where they can split the site? Is it isolated to certain sized parcels where that can be done so that you can look at more than one development on a site? I know we started this conversation about accessory dwelling units on on residential properties. So help me understand just that piece. David Broadwell, assistant city attorney there. There is no limitation in the zoning code for taking a larger parcel and dividing into two and zoning only a portion of the parcel. There are certain limitations on the size of the Rees owned area that apply very in very detailed ways to very specific kinds of zoning. But essentially you're creating a separately defined zone lot with a different zoning category and that that's basically doable. I mean, it wouldn't have gotten this far unless it were doable. And there's nothing in the zoning code that prevents it. And thus thus you end up with common ownership. But on one end of the block it's its own one thing, on the other end of the block, it's on something else. Yeah, but they're not always under the same ownership in some of these cases where we're splitting. So I'm just saying there's no rule against adjacent differently zoned properties being in common ownership. I think the issue is ensuring that where we are allowing shared parking, that we're ensuring that each you know, the existing. Building structure and the new are not competing for the exact same spaces that there's adequate parking to address the needs for both both uses. It's for me. I would just further address your question. Go ahead. Okay. So I have not been in a position to provide a hypothetical build out of what I think the range of square footage might be. But the applicant has chosen to bring that information, although it's outside the review criteria, to at least provide a range of potential of what they're interested in exploring with development services. And so I think they've been as transparent and forthright as possible with that information that we have a sense in this room, despite it being outside the rezoning criteria, what the potential yield is in a low to high range. Subject to development services review and approval. Right. Right. And I've heard those figures talked about and, you know, it has been sort of within a range. So it's not it won't be clear until they go before CPD and have a clear, um, site development plan that's approved that defines what those exact square footage and parking requirements are. Okay. I think that's it with my question. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilwoman Canete. Thank you, Mr. President. Tim, I was wondering if you have any familiarity of the history of the zoning north of 32nd Avenue in terms of the Denver bred company. I can tell you that although it is currently zoned. Let's look at the zoning U.S. way. A one. In one. There is a provision in the code which allows for recognizes the historic nonresidential buildings in Denver as. The UMC or UMC to ex uses would apply to those buildings. And so that's certainly the case for that property. Even more specifically than that. Do you have any knowledge of a conversation in the department over the last five years about the fact that that property was owned in error to usou that in fact it was just an oversight in the city by zoning? I do not familiar with OC. Been asked to rezone that as a sponsor at one point because it was zoned an error. It has continuously been the bread company, as Councilman Espinosa said for 20 years. So. So there is some history there with that site. And Usou is. Was. Probably not an accurate zoning at the time that it was applied. So anyway, the second question I have, a number of folks have mentioned the St Dominic's rezoning. I don't know if any of those folks are still here, but are any of any of the folks or any of you familiar with the parcel size that was involved in that discussion? Okay. No worries. I can look it up. Thank you. I'll reserve the rest for comments. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. Councilman Keys. Councilman, you. Just had a quick question about the mediation and the confidentiality agreement. Which party did did one particular party insist on a confidentiality agreement? The truth is, is that I feel like I can't answer that question because that would probably be breaking the confidentiality and. Sorry. No, I don't think you could get away with it. I think I want to go asking. Details about what was discussed or anything. But I'm just I find it so unusual, especially with say no breaks, how successful that was and how excited we were and approved it unanimously. And I was so excited to hear that you all had a mediation and all of a sudden I heard that there was this confidentiality agreement. Then it all fell apart. But I just wanted to know, was there one party that insisted on that? Part. Maybe you could answer the question. Maybe I just. Yeah. Once you get it. You want to tell him, like. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah, I mean. I also am hesitant to say I mean, we we we entered into the confidentiality to allow the parties, the freedom to say anything to each other and not feel like anybody was going to be spun afterwards based on what was said in that room. Okay. So. So you can say yes to a legitimate exercise? Well, I think the confidentiality agreement was important because it did allow us to have a full and frank discussion. Okay. Thank you very much. I apologize. Thank you, Councilman. Councilman Brooks just passed me now. So in 2015, 16% of the submissions, rezoning submissions were approved, 84% were denied. So Councilman Brooks asked and I would say that. So I did. Councilman Kenny Tribeca. Yeah, I just wanted to chime in and my colleagues should have used Steve Charbonneau in the past, should correct me. But in my experience, Steve Charbonneau as the mediator, insists on the confidentiality. It's usually his idea. So it's my experience that generally comes from our mediator. I don't know if any other council members have had different experiences, but that has been my experience when I have asked for his services. All right, thanks for the clarification. Thank you. Counsel National's Rebecca. All right. Personally. So I'll take Councilman Brooks this question and it was on your slide committed areas. This was sort of I think you said it was a reinvestment area in a committed area, but committed area are committed areas are stable neighborhoods that may benefit from stabilizing the effects of minor infill development rather than large scale large redevelopment. Major redevelopment, for example, reinvestment in the Wash Park neighborhood is not necessarily necessary to improve its character. And then so in reinvestment areas, examples of challenges include concern about deteriorated or poorly maintained housing stock, inappropriate land uses or inadequate buffering between uses, lack of services such as grocery stores, lack of curbs and gutters and other infrastructure , and maintaining affordable housing opportunities for improvement can also vary widely. Examples include redeeming vacant land for a neighborhood park or redeveloping underutilized land to provide needed neighborhood services. So and I'm saying that because Blueprint Denver defines these two types of areas of stability, the committed areas and the area, the reinvestment areas. And just so you know, this is the map of Denver. So the yellow is the area of stability. It's huge. And so it does capture a lot of a lot of our stable neighborhoods. But some of our stable neighborhoods are in decline and some of them are not. This is not one that is in decline. We have a vacant parcel that could be a lot of things in a use by right as use zone district. And if you don't think it can get developed, I got one in my district right now. It's a block. It's six houses. You know that. And. And this is happening. So. But my questions to send now. So this is not about. Whatever you guys talked about, because this has been a three year long process. And to correct the record, it was stated that Cinder has been on for a year. She was at the first meeting that I witnessed, which was in May of 2014. No, Councilman, I was I was went under contract on December 29th, 2014 and began work January. Yeah. Okay. So you might have been in a contract, but you were. As I said. Councilman, I wasn't there. Okay. So obviously I really wasn't. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Yeah. But I do want to say that you did take my comment out of context with regard to where the where the appropriate break is, because there were several other recommendations at that time. And I also was not the councilman at the time. It was councilman elect. Oh, you're talking may and May of 2015. Yes. Yes. That meeting I was that. So. So what? In all the research that you've done, what are the key concerns for the neighbors? Well, in my experience, because we have gone through a lot, it's sort of been this evolving situation. So give me five. I'm going to answer your question. So our experience has been that a concern will come up and we'll do our best to address it first. What is the. Key? Give me five. We've done this before and are in this room. I just want five words. Give me the five key. I would like to speak to our experience of continuously addressing concerns and then having something new evolve. And so I thank you. No further questions. Councilman Flynn, you're up. Thank you, Mr. President. Gentleman from the church grieving. All who went to the school. Is he still here? Oh, hi. There you are, right in front of me. Has in your experience, has the lot there, the parking lot on Thursday. I'm over here to your right. Oh. Right. Has the lot there? Always, always been vacant. I'm looking at the Sanborn map from 1933. Has that always been a vacant lot other than that office, little office building? As far back. As I can remember, it has been a vacant lot ever since I was there. Okay, so there's never a prior to that though. I do know there was housing in that area. On this property. I think you are on this property across the street. It was. I know for sure. Okay. Okay. And. The. Let me ask somebody, I don't know, maybe from and from the neighborhood or is Randy here still? I. The school building that is on there is about 16,300 square feet. And if that is demolished and replaced with this medical building, it'd be about 23,000 square feet on a lot that's been vacant at least since the Sanborn map here in 1933. I'm really struggling with this. I've been up to the site three times. And I want to understand from the West Highland perspective, why do you consider this to be so out of character when it's been a vacant lot for probably about 100 years and a 16,000 square foot building will be replaced with a 23,000 square foot building . Why is that such a radical change in character? Are you asking me why the developing this lot is a change of character? Yes. The school is on the same lot. It's just farther south. The school is on the lot defined by the church and defined by the city. Right. And that is, as far as the neighborhood was concerned, was part of the church. What you're asking is about the portion that fronts 32nd Avenue, which potentially would be twice the size of the nearest closest precedent building that they're citing, which is the taco building next door. And this, if you notice, the one slide where it showed this island here is significantly to the east of the neighborhood city center. And which one are you looking at? I'm sorry. Tim. Where's the slide that shows? The. The whole neighborhood. Is this a good one? No, I want to see 30 seconds also. Oh. And clicking and arriving. Here we go. Thank you. So this this is an anomaly. This island is an anomaly that we're adding to by adding this US USB max two to it. Whereas the center of our neighborhood commercial area is is not here, it is to the west at 32nd and low. And so by adding to what has been an anomaly, we are reinforcing that anomaly, which then over time will give precedent for other building along 32nd Avenue. Who knows? Maybe down spear. Who knows? Maybe down Irving. In other words, to close the gap between Julianne and Irving and with commercial rather than the current resident. That's right. That's right. Okay. I was just trying to understand. Sure. That's all, Mr. President. Thank you. Councilor Flynn, Council National's Rebecca. Try one more time, but I'm going to go with more of a straight shooter. Neal, can you answer that question? Can somebody. What is the question? What are the key concerns for the neighbors? Like, you know, if if we were just talking about, hey, you want two things, the key. Concerns of the neighbors is change. No. I mean, what were they asked? Like, what were they going saying? Hey, how can we make this work? I wasn't part of the mediation? No. Just in two. Years, we had several meetings for 200 footers. We went to, I think a dozen, y'know, meetings at least. And it was a, it was a moving target. They would bring up an issue and we'd say or get you some answers and we would have our development team meeting and we'd try and address that. And they'd say, That's nice. You know, we have a new issue for you. It was it was a shell game that we that we struggled with. And and no matter what answer we gave in, no matter how much and how much we conceded. We couldn't we couldn't find common ground to make them happy. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Flynn, Europe. Thank you, Mr. President. Maybe this would make it easier. Maybe one of the neighbors come up and answer that question. What are your five key concerns about this? Thanks. So am I obliged to come up with five? Only if there are five. The key concerns with this are the fact that it's a dramatic zoning from very restrictive residential that was just put in place five years ago by this body. After a lot of consideration and a lot of input from the neighborhood. And we're going to a much more significant up zoning commercial, less restrictive zoning. The size of the building that they're going to build on there or our capable building on there. Under the proposed up zoning. And by the way, I just would like everybody to know that the two numbers you've heard tonight, 17,000 523,500 square feet. That is the first time that we have heard that. Prior to tonight, we'd only heard 26 to 28000 square feet. So that speaks to their outreach as well. But so I would say dramatic up zoning going from restrictive residential zoning to much less restrictive commercial. A two storey building that will be. At 23,500 square feet. I've done the math. I've looked at the pinch tacos building, and I apologize for saying that incorrectly, but it's approximately twice the size at 23,500. So it's only the second 100% commercial building in our neighborhood. And it doubles the size of the only existing 100% commercial building that we have in our neighborhood. Parking and traffic are huge issues. You heard me talk about it. You heard many people talk about it. You've heard about their traffic study, which somehow concluded that the building of a 23,500 square foot building in a place where there is no current building, is not going to have any impact on on on the traffic in our neighborhood or maybe even decrease it. That's obviously incorrect. And that's another very major concern of the neighborhood. Let me just turn to my neighbors and see if I missed anything. I think that was four. So if there's one. So I get one more. Now. Mr.. Mr.. Brady, if you to speak, you can feel free to. Harry Brick I live about a block and a half. All the comparative buildings that were mentioned by the architect. I have multiple small stores in them. You know, Pincher Taco has at least three or four organizations in it. Mondo Vino has several. So it's not only larger, but it's out of character with the other kind of smaller commercial establishments. Okay. Thank you. All right. Any other comment on some of the statements. On that question? I would I would prefer we. Do you think question period just took an hour probably longer for comments. Oh, Councilman Clark, you got a question? Just a quick follow up to that. You said you'd never seen the 17,500. Again, I'm really struggling with the scale here. So is that a scale that had you seen before is more palatable? At what level does the scale fit? So what I what I tried to convey was that's the first time that we ever heard that number here tonight. Yes, I know. Part of it I'm less concerned about the process. I think we've heard complaints on both sides. What I'm trying to get at is, does this fit with the neighborhood, the character of the neighborhood? What is the scale that does fit? Well, to give you a comparator, looking at the Denver real property records, my understanding is that the taco's building is in the neighborhood. It's approximately 11,000 square feet. So this would be a very significant increase over that. I, I, I personally still think it's 17,000 square feet. It's still way out of context. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Councilman Espinosa. Well, you in a way. All right. Any other questions? Thank you. Public hearing is now closed. We'll move into comment and it's midnight. So, colleagues, if you each talk for 5 minutes, we'll be here for over an hour. All right, Councilman Espinosa, you're up. So I wanted to be the example that I use because you were talking about scale building is that and I don't know that everyone has this reference point, but we created this, um, ask to zone district for a very particular need. When we were remapping the city, we had these little small embedded business districts like the lush parks and similar little coffee shops where you had a business use. Not unlike the bread company, actually, where you go, okay, I've got a commercial use in a neighbor in a predominately sub zone district. So we created this little, this little carve out to X and that's key and that's a big difference between two. And so that's sort of why they're sort of articulating and finessing this in a way that says, well, it is the least intensive commercial zone district that we have, but it also is the most restrictive residential zone district that we have that's surrounding what is being proposed. But this is not a wash. It is not a you don't get a 20 to 17000, 22,000, 26,000 square foot coffee shop. That is a different that's a different thing. And so I get what you're saying now, and I wish somebody had sort of articulated all along, because in my own sense, you know, when we show pictures of 32nd and law, we see that granularity, that pattern, that cadence. And while you can do it architecturally is a single use. I mean, it's going to be alive at a certain time and it's going to be not alive at a certain time. And yeah, you're capturing that for the church. Maybe we didn't answer the question about whether and I forgot to ask that question is can you do surface parking in a useful way? Pretty sure you can't. Maybe there's a carve out for churches because there's a lot of little nuances there. But then can you do it in the church? That's a whole ball of wax, but it comes down to the scale, scale, scale, scale. And that's where the that's where the concern lied in planning board because our blueprint Denver is we don't have a small area plan for Walsh Park I mean for I'm sorry sorry West Highland so we don't have a small area plan for West Highlands. So we have to rely on the on conformity with Blueprint Denver and Blueprint Denver is very, very clear that this is in an area stability when you that the idea is that you're trying to redirect growth. The reason why we have there is stability in areas of change. You're trying to direct area growth to the areas of change so that areas that will benefit from the infusion in activity, we're sort of going and stretching the truth. I mean, not the truth is sort of stretching reality to say that this is an area that exhibiting change when the only thing that's new besides some new housing is the taco building. If you look at there's a lot of new businesses, no doubt, but they're utilizing existing strip malls. You know, there's a lot of new 20 year leases on that sucker. What can go there is even bigger than this. And we're dealing with the car wash up on 38. That is that same zone district. Can you imagine? That's what that's it. But that sort of illustrates the disconnect when we're talking about zoning versus intent, because there's really great intent statements in the front of each chapter of the zoning code, but it doesn't tell you that on 38th Avenue you can if you have an MZ three, it's acceptable to have a single storey long one car, mean garage, mean tunnel carwash that's going to service 350 to 800 cars day. We're not talking about that here, but we are talking about entitlement that can capture what we've shown, probably can capture something bigger, probably can capture a lot of things smaller. Absolutely. But we don't have a project. And when you're interjecting this scale of development in an area of stability in this one, I didn't I spoke to on that map. Is the largest single contiguous area of stability in District one. My district is this is right smack in the middle of it, you know, and and it's what makes that area desirable. And so one of the concerns that we have when we're talking about character is your form base code might map the right sort of volume, but what everyone's distressed and it's part of why I'm sitting here today is because. Are you spy, right? I mean, what was allowed in the U.S. spy right in our zone districts is very, very different in material durability. And a lot of the things that Blueprint Denver talks about as desirable in our areas of stability. And so one way to capture that and we have it in our zoning code, we have the way to do it in our zoning code is any of the customized zoning. And I understand that the applicant was turned away when they requested that, and that's unfortunate. But to go to a blanket zone district of this size and scale a US-EU A is a 3000 square foot parcel. That is that is a fraction, a tiny fraction of the size of this parcel, even in the reduced form. And we won't know what planning board even says about this reduced form because because it didn't go back to planning board. That said, I've always maintained that there's probably a way to to to insert something of this scale, but it's got to be done right. You're right next to the most historic district in a blanket rezoning. As much as we'd love to say as members of council that mean as a as a city, that it's a lot easier for us to just give you a blanket rezoning. There are conditions. You've got the historic structure across the street that we know is a nonconforming mean a an allowance. Maybe we should be looking at a legislative zone, not unlike Saint Dominic's, which was a campus. And I believe there is an acreage requirement. You may know what the campus rezoning requirement was, but it was I think it was I mean, it was clearly bigger than this. But we look at doing the entire church and and we and we capture the spot across the street. And you know what, Neal, you know, you commented that if this doesn't go through tonight, that you guys are going to be blacked out and you can't do anything for a year. And that's true. But I want to work with you. And I don't have any I don't harbor any of the animus that you may feel that that's out there. And as a as a as the representative of that district, I can legislative resolve this and I would be happy to go that. So if this doesn't pass, I'll be the first one to say, let's talk about how we can make something work, work for you and work for me because you have been there for 109 years and the next hundred and nine years can be even better. But we have to start from a better place than we did this time. And I believe we can do it because that's what happened on Saint Dominic's. It was contentious at Planning Board and I went out in that corridor and it brought both sides together and said, I think we're closer than we are further apart. And while it seems like we're really far apart because I've observed this and I've gotten all the emails, I see a lot of of where we can overlap and mesh. And, and so I'm committed to doing that if it doesn't go through. But I also don't know where it's going to go. So thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa, Councilwoman Canete. Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to mention a couple of factors that I think are important in making my decision tonight. The first is I really do think that input is is important and can can help projects make make a better outcome. I do think the St Dominic's is an important comparison. However, the bigger the site, the more room there is to come up with new and creative ideas just for my colleagues on council. This site is 0.5 acres. The Dominic St Dominic site that was resolved in December was 1.7 acres is more than three times as large as the site. 25 acres is, to give you a sense, is the size of a single family residential lot in Douglas County. All right. So we are not talking about a gigantic parcel of land and it's one third. So when you think about how many scenarios could the neighborhood have come up with with this developer, it's significantly fewer than might have occurred on a site that was three times larger. So I just wanted to give that perspective. The second thing that I think is really important is regardless of, you know, the and and I and I will I asserted earlier, but in the question periods, I was cheating. But it is it is very clear that the Denver Bread Company was was erroneously zoned usou. It had been a commercial property. It should have been zoned commercial predecessors and CPD acknowledged it and, you know, put it on a list of errors. And so regardless of that error, every direction that you look from this property is commercial, left, forward, right, it's commercial. And so that is a significant context point to the criteria. The next thing that I think is really important is this criteria about when we had this discussion about sort of stability. This is, you know, my experience with West Highland is that there's an important respect for historic properties and for character. And I think one of the things that I have engaged with the community successfully on previously with this sort of properties is the idea that if you don't allow a historic property to evolve, you, sometimes you can kill it, right? So if Union Station, for example, if we had insisted that Union Station must only continue to be a train station. Right. That wouldn't have been an economically viable use. And so one of the things that I'm very proud of, this community, the city of Denver, is we acknowledge that to for the train station to live on, we had to allow it to evolve. I have seen so many churches lost in Denver. Right. I voted to preserve Beth Eden. Right. And that was the one that we've saved. But we have a rezoning with a church happening. And I believe it's the hilltop neighborhood. A changing circumstance your side didn't mention is declining church membership. That is a justifying circumstance in this city. If we do not allow some adaptation around these churches, they will die. They are dying. And that is something that I don't want to see happen. And so facing that idea and Tim, you said this, that sometimes allowing a small amount of change is actually necessary for maintaining the greater stability. Absolutely applies in this case. And I just don't think anyone can argue with me that this is a citywide phenomenon. And if I say no to any change around churches and then say I will be in, I know exactly the scripture in which is the church goes out of business. They put it on this, you know, historic status application for the church. The neighborhood will file an application for historic designation. Right. I mean, it's a script we've seen play out in this council. So that for me is an important criteria for the zoning justifying circumstance in addition to those that you stated. Lastly, and this is kind of just for us as a body. I have heard us many times, including the prior council, not just this council, but especially in the last six months, say that we want to hear more about projects when we see zoning. We don't want to just hear, Hey, here's the land use. We want to hear what a project is. We have an applicant before us who has a signed resolution telling us the maximum building size they're going to do. They've shared with us publicly their letter of intent and who it's with and what that Lutheran Medical Services does. Medical care. They have shared more with us than any other applicant. And these are the kinds of things I have heard my colleagues ask for week after week after week. So now we have an applicant who's sharing with us. And for me, the only premise to then vote against the project is the assumption that the church is lying to us, that in fact they will build a building bigger than 23,000 square feet in spite, or that they won't really do medical service, that they'll do some other thing. It stretches my credulity to believe that a church would lie in that way. Now does everything, you know, they have admitted they don't know about the shared parking and they've been honest about that. But I just we if we can't have it both ways, we cannot say, I don't like this generalized land use. I want to hear more about projects and then have applicants come in and tell us exactly the parameters of their project and say, not good enough. We don't like that. We can't trust that. We really, as a body need to decide either we are comfortable with generalized land use or if we ask about projects and people tell us about it, that that matters to us. And so I don't know how this vote will turn out today, but I hope that regardless, we will really ponder our expectations because I think we are sending mixed messages. If we penalize applicants who have shared very detailed parameters of what they want to do, and then we say that's not good enough because it's not binding, because there's not a PWD that guarantees that. I mean, to me, that is a real serious concern about the kind of expectations were placing on the people who come before us. With that, I want to thank everyone for their testimony, both sides. I hope that if you succeed, you will consult this neighborhood on design, as painful as it may be. And clearly some healing may need to occur. But I hope you will do that. And if this zoning fails, I hope that, you know that the collaboration that Councilman Espinosa believes is so possible will occur. I don't have any confidence in that. But but I, I think that regardless of how this turns out tonight, there's work to do. So I hope folks will keep doing it. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman, can each councilman, you have more? Yeah, actually, thanks for the vote of no confidence there. Now, I am. I'm committed because I've I've seen further parties, parties further apart than what I've seen here. And there's some weirdness here. But get come together and there's a real, real, real there's an undeniable good opportunity here. And and that was reflected in the Weiner vote, right. They had those four votes and it really didn't even come up here. But the overwhelming support was one that was a redevelopment proposal with input. That's what's missing here is this. And nothing illustrated it more than talking to two members of the of the team that's doing this not be able to answer what the what what the community wants most. You know somebody is not listening in this in this dialog and that's key. That's key. But I shouldn't be telling that to a church because you guys, you know, you know all about that. But it would the there is parallel to the St Dominic's and because this is a half acre, but it's a third of the site. So what happened at St Dominic's is we were doing a priory, a very, very small project on a portion of the property. But in order to justify the zoning, we had to capture a whole bunch of area that we didn't that weren't even part of the project. So we could do that here because then it forces us to think about the entirety of it. And so but the thing there is, again, where what's missing here is we have that what was the what was the tool that it's not a proclamation that the thing that your board voted on. The. Resolution we have the resolution that sets the resolution of your members. And there's a huge disconnect because it's not with your neighbors. And that's that's exactly the point where we were with Saint Dominic's. The opposition came from those people that were directly impacted by the development in the compromise was reached with those people that were directly impacted by the development. They didn't just get insular and say, we're going to focus on what we will agree to, but let's come up with a solution that we both agree to. And so so those two things matter, which is it was a smaller project in a bigger context. This is a small portion of. Things that we're talking about, different bits and pieces to move here, there and everywhere. But. And. So I mean, so that's I've sort of talk that way to death, but I want to acknowledge the community's effort to get the two to get to the protest twice. You know, getting there once is very difficult doing it twice. And this sort of speaks to the neighborliness, right? When people put their names down on a piece of paper. I don't want you challenging them for a dot. You know, these are people. They have. They have. This is impacting their livelihood for for a long time. And gestures like that don't help. You know, the choking symbol, I mean, if that's the tenor, we're never going to get there. And that's what I heard about. And where do I see it? I don't see it from the community. I see it from the developer. And so that and that was reflected in the legal challenge to those signatures. And that's just that's not how you treat your neighbors. Love thy neighbor. If you're going to pull out the biblical verses, I'll do it, too, and do unto others. I mean, this is you guys are the big, big property in the room. This is an activity, a redevelopment of a portion. This was all open area here and across the street for years. And now it's getting redeveloped. Why can't you make some have some dialog, make some concessions? What I heard at Planning Board, even among those that voted to move it on to council, were concerned about the lack of design guidelines and standards. And we're going to work on it as a community. But we have that. You can make the concessions. We can work on design guidelines and standards and adopt those for your project moving forward. So I just I'm saying all that because I want my colleagues to know that. That this is this does fail to provide consistency with adopted plans per the criteria because it is in an intense up zoning and in an area of stability that is not intended for this intensity. And you can sort of overlook the fact that the zone map doesn't comport with what's there. But what which is it? We are we doing this on a legal basis and what the context is or are we doing it sometimes? You know, we develop and we ignore the built environment. Now all we're doing is focusing on the built environment and going and ignoring the map, the context, the zone maps. You know, we're trying to to weigh it both ways so that we can just push push along development. And people have been fearful fearing that citywide and and to to ignore the efforts of of the the residents within the 200 feet gathering those signatures and making enforcing this vote would be a severe disservice to the democratic process in an effort to sort of expedite you the additional property rights that really should merit some compromise. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa, Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President. Let me just start out by thanking the folks that come to testify. Again, we have another late night. I'll just say right off the bat that I'm pretty conflicted here. And I'm also very turned off. In all my. I've seen some pretty bad public hearings. But I haven't been at a public hearing where there's been this much snickering back and forth and also on council. And it. You know, I think that when we look at an application, we got to look at look at it objectively as we can. And to really take a look at it on its merits. This has been in the queue since about September, since we knew about it. But coming up to the microphone and saying, oh, they're lying. They're lying. He she said she said it just. I feel like I'm channeling Councilman Brown here. It just it just feels like there's a lot of hair pulling going on. I don't like it. I don't like it in the chambers. I don't like it on the dais. And it's turning me off to the point where I don't know where I want to vote. I know that for a fact. This church isn't going to go away. Right? It's not going to go away. You can shrug your shoulders. I've seen this church my whole life. It's sat next to an empty lot. And it hasn't gone away. Develop or not. I believe the church is going to be there. This this hearing is not about whether the church is leaving or not. Right. The other thing is that I don't know if residential is the right fit here. I think you look at it. And all around U.S. commercial. On the strip. It's on 32nd Avenue in between a car wash across from a taco shop and across from a bread company. And down the way what used to be American Apparel, which was a little bit more of an industrial use before. So I don't know about that argument. The matter of fact, was in this room, a lot of the folks who testified in favor of it were not residents. Yes. They are congregation members. Not very many residents. So that that's that that's a that's a big one for me. Finally, I, you know, I, I know that there's been them going back and talk about developer this and developer that, but this, this applicant as a member of the community. It's not like some, you know, big corporation or LLC is coming in and saying, We want to do this in the middle of your pretty little neighborhood. Right. And, you know, I so I'm conflicted. And I could tell you what, you know, looking at the facts, there's a conflict here. But the one thing I could I could say is that and colleagues and forgive me, I'm not trying to point fingers or anything or suggesting it's just I don't like the snickering back and forth and I especially don't like it on the dais. That. You know, I think we have some work to do in terms of how we handle the quorum in our chambers, because this is a matter of respect. These walls have been here for a very long time. And you know, I'm not staying up till 230 at night to hear to hear that or to see hair pulling. So. Anyway. I am absolutely conflicted with this application. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Councilwoman Ortega. Thank you, Mr. President. I also want to thank everyone for your emails and letters and those of you who have sat through the long evening now into the morning hours and sharing your input on all sides. I've looked at this very carefully and listened to the input from everyone. And. I think that the proposal that is on the table. For the building that has been identified and articulated by the applicant is a reasonable request. I understand the concern that neighbors would like to see residential there, but I think the scale of what you can get as residential on this site could be far more impactful to the adjacent residential property owners than would be what this this site would do. This is not a 24 seven operation where you're going to have traffic coming and going all night like some of the other commercial uses that do exist on 32nd Avenue. And I, I appreciate the fact that the church has struggled trying to figure out how to. You know how to do something that keeps the church in the presence there, that allows them to continue to serve the community in many different ways. But at the same time looks at something that could benefit the community and this type of use. We're seeing some of these these clinics in other parts of the city because of the need and the demand for addressing health care for for folks all over. And again, I think this is a reasonable request and I will be supporting it tonight. Thank you, Councilman Ortega. Councilman Espinosa, back up. Yeah, just as a point of clarification, I hope I didn't confuse any of my colleagues when I waived the residential stuff here that has that no one was talking about. I don't think residential use on the site. And in fact, the white vote was particularly towards a mixed use sort of development that did not preclude even the proposed use that is being discussed. I mean, mentioned even though so where the emphasis was was sort of having some guiding principles and in codifying as much as possible the sort of character how we're going to sort of maintain character. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Espinosa. All right. You know the comments. 625. Seeing none. Councilmember is just a reminder that since a successful legal protest was submitted, signatures of the owners of at least 20% of the property within 200 feet of the site has been met with the petition signatures, therefore requiring ten affirmative votes instead of the standard seven to pass this bill. Madam Secretary, roll call 625. Espinosa. No. Flynn. Hi. Gilmore. Cashman. No. In each Lopez. I knew. No. Ortega, I. Black eye. Brooks. Clark. No. LOPEZ Oh, already hit it. ORTEGA Sir. Clarke. Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please, first of any announced results. Eight eyes. Four days. Eight eyes. 26. 25 has been defeated. Seen of the business before this body. This meeting is adjourned.