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HomeMy WebLinkAboutAgenda - Planning Commission - 08/27/2024South Burlington Planning Commission 180 Market Street South Burlington, VT 05403 (802) 846-4106 www.southburlingtonvt.gov Meeting Tuesday, August 27, 2024 City Hall, 180 Market Street, Auditorium 7:00 pm Members of the public may attend in person or digitally via Zoom. Participation Options: In Person: City Hall, 180 Market Street, Auditorium Interactive Online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9960639517 Phone: 1 929 205 6099; Meeting ID: 996 063 9517 AGENDA: 1) Welcome, instructions on exiting the building in the event of an emergency (7:00 pm) 2) Agenda: Additions, deletions, or changes in order of agenda items (7:02 pm) 3) Open to the public for items not related to the agenda (7:03 pm) 4) Announcements and staff report (7:05 pm) 5) Planning Commission Organizational Meeting and Officer Election (7:10 pm) 6) Street Name – New road east of City Hall north of Market Street (7:30 pm) 7) LDR Amendments: Potential Recommendations to City Council on Minimum Density and Master Plan Requirements (8:00 pm) 8) Form-Based Code Update Project and Update on City Center Green Project from Ilona Blanchard (8:20 pm) 9) Other Business (8:40 pm) 10) Adjourn (8:45 pm) Respectfully submitted, Kelsey Peterson, Senior City Planner * item has attachments South Burlington Planning Commission Virtual Meeting Public Participation Guidelines 1. The Planning Commission Chair presents these guidelines for the public attending Planning Commission meetings to ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and that meetings proceed smoothly. 2. In general, keep your video off and microphone on mute. Commission members, staff, and visitors currently presenting / commenting will have their video on. 3. Initial discussion on an agenda item will generally be conducted by the Commission. As this is our opportunity to engage with the subject, we would like to hear from all commissioners first. After the Commission has discussed an item, the Chair will ask for public comment. 4. Please raise your hand identify yourself to be recognized to speak and the Chair will try to call on each participant in sequence. To identify yourself, turn on your video and raise your hand, if participating by phone you may unmute yourself and verbally state your interest in commenting, or type a message in the chat. 5. Once recognized by the Chair, please identify yourself to the Commission. 6. If the Commission suggests time limits, please respect them. Time limits will be used when they can aid in making sure everyone is heard and sufficient time is available for Commission to complete the agenda. 7. Please address the Chair. Please do not address other participants or staff or presenters and please do not interrupt others when they are speaking. 8. Make every effort not to repeat the points made by others. You may indicate that you support a similar viewpoint. Indications of support are most efficiently added to the chat. 9. The Chair will make reasonable efforts to allow all participants who are interested in speaking to speak once to allow other participants to address the Commission before addressing the Commission for a second time. 10. The Planning Commission desires to be as open and informal as possible within the construct that the Planning Commission meeting is an opportunity for commissioners to discuss, debate and decide upon policy matters. Regular Planning Commission meetings are not “town meetings”. A warned public hearing is a fuller opportunity to explore an issue, provide input and influence public opinion on the matter. 11. Comments may be submitted before, during or after the meeting to the Planning and Zoning Department. All written comments will be circulated to the Planning Commission and kept as part of the City Planner's official records of meetings. Comments must include your first and last name and a contact (e-mail, phone, address) to be included in the record. Email submissions are most efficient and should be addressed to the Director of Planning and Zoning at pconner@sburl.com and Chair at jlouisos@sburl.com. 12. The Chat message feature is new to the virtual meeting platform. The chat should only be used for items specifically related to the agenda item under discussion. The chat should not be used to private message Commissioners or staff on policy items, as this pulls people away from the main conversation underway. Messages on technical issues are welcome at any time. The Vice-Chair will monitor the chat and bring to the attention of Commissioners comments or questions relevant to the discussion. Chat messages will be part of the official meeting minutes. 13. In general discussions will follow the order presented in the agenda or as modified by the Commission. 14. The Chair, with assistance from staff, will give verbal cues as to where in the packet the discussion is currently focused to help guide participants. 15. The Commission will try to keep items within the suggested timing published on the agenda, although published timing is a guideline only. The Commission will make an effort to identify partway through a meeting if agenda items scheduled later in the meeting are likely not be covered and communicate with meeting participants any expected change in the extent of the agenda. There are times when meeting agendas include items at the end that will be covered “if time allows”. 180 Market Street South Burlington, VT 05403 tel 802.846.4106 fax 802.846.4101 www.sbvt.gov MEMORANDUM TO: South Burlington Planning Commission FROM: Kelsey Peterson, Senior City Planner SUBJECT: Planning Commission Meeting Memo DATE: For August 27, 2024 Planning Commission meeting 1. Welcome, instructions on exiting the building in the event of an emergency 2. Agenda: Additions, deletions, or changes in order of agenda items 3. Open to the public for items not related to the agenda 4. Announcements and staff report 5. Planning Commission Organizational Meeting and Officer Election The Planning Commission is scheduled to hold its Organizational Meeting. This includes election of officers: Chair, Vice Chair, and Clerk for the Planning Commission. It also requires selecting the meeting schedule for the upcoming year. For officers, the current Chair Jessica Louisos can open the nominations for Chair, Vice Chair, and Clerk. These votes can take place one office at a time if there is more than one nomination for any of the positions, or as a slate of nominations if there is only one nomination per position. Recommended Motion(s): I nominate [NAME] for the position of [Chair/Vice Chair/Clerk]. Recommended Motion(s) (if needed): I move to vote on the slate of nominees of [NAME] for the position of Chair, [NAME] for the position of Vice Chair, and [NAME] for the position of Clerk of the Planning Commission. For the meeting schedule, Staff recommends the Planning Commission adopt the same schedule as has been the norm for the Planning Commission over the past many years. This is the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. It is opposite the DRB (who meet on the first and third Tuesdays) and avoids Mondays when City Council meets. It also avoids Wednesdays that are a more popular day for advisory committees. 2 Recommended Motion: I move to set the Planning Commission schedule for the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month for FY 2025. 6. Street Name – New road east of City Hall north of Market Street The Planning Commission has the opportunity to officially name the street to the east of City Hall running to the Rick Marcotte Central School with recommendation from the students! The students met in the spring before the end of the school year to propose different potential names and went through a process learning about street naming and civic process (including naming the different school hallways) before selecting a name for the street. They have selected Dattilio Drive to honor the longtime school Administrative Assistant, Susan Dattilio. As always, the Planning Commission must officially decide on a street name for a new street. Staff fully recommends the Commission adopt the name Dattilio Drive. There are no other Dattilio or similar streets in Vermont. Recommended Motion: I move to accept the recommendation of the students of the Rick Marcotte Central School and adopt the name “Dattilio Drive” for the road accessing the school property from the north side of Market Street. 7. LDR Amendments: Potential Recommendations to City Council on Minimum Density and Master Plan Requirements The City Council accepted the draft amendments to the Land Development Regulations that the Planning Commission advanced on July 30, 2024 and set a public hearing for September 16, 2024. The Council also requested that when Jessica Louisos presents to City Council on September 16, she presents further explanation of the interaction between Master Plan requirements, minimum density demonstration requirements, and the one-time exemption from Master Plan for up to two (2) acres. 8. Form-Based Code Update Project and Update on City Center Green Project Form-Based Code Please see attached memo about the current status of the Form-Based Code Update project. City Center Green Ilona Blanchard, Community Development Director, has provided the following update on the City Center Green project. 3 The City has hired Wagner Hodgeson, a landscape architecture consultant to develop a concept for what a City Green for South Burlington's City Center could be and to use this information to provide a recommendation on where such a new City park could be located. This recommendation will be provided to the City Council for their consideration on whether to fund a land acquisition process that would be required to move the project forward. A public workshop on the City Green was hosted in May to solicit preferences for activities in this potential downtown park. A follow-up meeting to present draft findings and recommendations was then held in August. Approximately 20 members of the community attended each event. Six potential locations owned by the private sector were screened as potential locations based on the preferred activities. The consultants draft recommendation is for an open green lawn space, flexible performance ready space, seating area, play space and trees/benches/walkways and food kiosk with the potential for a splash pad and skating rink. Using this park program, the consultants narrowed the choices down to two sites. The two sites recommended as desirable locations are 1) the parcel across from City Hall and 2) a part of the University Mall incorporated into a future site redevelopment. Neither of these sites are owned by the City. Prior to the presentation of the site recommendation choices to the Council, comments will be collected online from members of the public unable to attend the workshop and interested in the City Green project. Stay tuned for an invitation to provide your thoughts! For the project to proceed, the City Council will need to fund the acquisition of land. The Council at some point would also need to fund the design and construction to realize the project. The Council has discussed but not decided to use surplus funding to partially fund the purchase of land. A ballpark cost estimate for a basic, no-frills park would be 4.5 million dollars excluding external infrastructure such as roadways and walkways, a fountain or a skating rink. 9. Other Business 10. Adjourn To: South Burlington Planning Commission Members, From: Nick Atherton, City Planner Paul Conner, Director of Planning & Zoning Date: August 21, 2024 Re: Updates to the Form-Based Code in City Center In early 2024, staff engaged Greg Rabideau, a local architect with a deep well of knowledge of design and construction of larger residential, mixed use, and commercial buildings in Chittenden County, to perform a review of the Form Based Code (FBC) transects with the goals of supporting and enhancing design, addressing known deflciencies in the Code, and recommending potential opportunities for innovation. This effort is latest stage in the ongoing effort to foster a thriving City Center in downtown South Burlington and is step one of a series of potential regulatory improvements to support the continued buildout of City Center. Staff undertook this project after receiving a request in the fall of 2023 from City Council and the Planning Commission to review the FBC language with the goal of identifying opportunities for improvement, now that a signiflcant portion of the City Center area has been either developed or permitted for future development. Council and the Commission were primarily interested in means by which the City could encourage greater variation in architectural stylings and building forms. They also directed staff to investigate how the FBC language may impact construction costs, as well as to investigate solutions to some known technical deflciencies within the Code. Since roughly 2008, the City has undertaken a series of planning projects with the overall goal of fostering a compact, walkable, mixed-use downtown centered on Market and Garden Streets. This ongoing effort has yielded results that can be observed today in the form of 19 new buildings and signiflcant infrastructure improvements along Market and Garden Streets. Some of the projects that led to today’s streetscape include: • Tax Increment Financing District: this infrastructure flnancing tool was established in 2010 and allows the City to borrow against increased future tax revenue that will be generated by increased development to fund one-time capital investments in infrastructure. • New Town Center and Neighborhood Development Area: City Center and parts of its surrounding neighborhoods are enrolled in state designation programs that confer tax beneflts, streamline permitting, and establish grant eligibility for many of the properties located in these areas. 180 MARKET STREET, SOUTH BURLINGTON, VERMONT | (802) 846-4106 | WWW.SOUTHBURLINGTONVT.GOV • Capital Improvement Plan projects: a variety of sources (including, notably, the TIF district funds) have funded the construction of Market & Garden Street infrastructure improvements, City Center Park and its planned boardwalk connection, and soon will partially fund a bike-ped bridge that will connect South Burlington residents and visitors on both sides of the highway and complete multimodal connections across the entire Form-Based Code district. • The Form-Based Code district itself. In contrast with South Burlington’s other zoning districts, the Form-Based Code requires new buildings to incorporate urban-speciflc architectural designs and functions. It is designed to promote rapid inflll development that still echoes the architectural details that South Burlington residents have come to expect in Vermont’s unique urban areas. 19 buildings have been constructed in the FBC’s transect zones, including the City Hall complex and Cathedral Square’s Market Street residence. Several mixed-use buildings featuring apartments above ground-level retail are set to open or have already opened this year, and when flnished will yield an additional 600 dwelling units in the City’s newest neighborhood. In pursuit of the Council and Commission’s goals of improving the FBC, staff approached consulting architect Greg Rabideau with a list of goals and suggested areas of improvement. Some of these included: • Explore tools to instill greater variety in the building scale and type. • Improve outcomes for the street/building interface resulting in a more pedestrian-oriented environment, including the possibility of non-vehicular streets that meet frontage and emergency access requirements. • Review of balconies and public space options. • Phased building scales within the same structure, to allow an intimate street-level façade that transitions to a larger, denser building volumes concentrated farther back from the street. • Design access and facades for lots with streets on 3 sides. • Incorporate parking entries / porte- cocheres. • Encourage more “grand entries”. • Increase variety in how stories above the flrst are built out. • Suggest fiexible tools for measuring height of certain pitched rooves (not speciflc to FBC districts) The consultant has been working on a literature review and will be developing a flnal report addressing these items, as well as other ideas and concerns that have emerged during the process. Staff have been supporting the consultant by supplying him with necessary planning documents and have also undertaken a pair of outreach events to engage local architects, designers, and developers in the development of this report. One of these events was held at City Hall in late June and was attended by designers and architects from flrms including Weimann-Lamphere, VHB, TCE, and others. Staff are planning another, similar event in September that will bring together project managers and developers from the same sector and will focus on the economics and flnancial aspects of designing projects within the FBC district. 180 MARKET STREET, SOUTH BURLINGTON, VERMONT | (802) 846-4106 | WWW.SOUTHBURLINGTONVT.GOV As this project moves through its later stages of research and analysis towards a flnal report, staff would like to invite feedback and questions from Planning Commission members. • Does the scope of the project capture the questions with FBC-regulated buildings that Commissioners have previously identifled? • Since the beginning of this project, several buildings have opened and others are nearing completion, giving a better sense of the streetscape. Have any of the original concerns or issues shifted or been addressed? Have any new concerns or opportunities emerged? • Do Commissioners have any speciflc questions for Greg Rabideau or Staff?